Chatterbox's 1010 Challenge

Hi all -- I'm new to this challenge, but looking forward to giving it a shot!
I've tried to really challenge myself -- since I've been a fast but thorough reader for decades, I've focused on books that, for the most part, are ones I wouldn't automatically read. (There are some exceptions, but...) I'm also limiting myself to no more than 10 re-reads across the whole spectrum. (As of now there are nine, including the bonus books.) I'm adding a bonus book to each category, just for a bit more oomph. If one of the books I pick is unreadable, I'll move on to the bonus book; if it happens twice, I'll pick something fresh.

Plan to start reading Dec. 25, 2009...







At any rate, here are my categories:

1. New New Things
(Authors who are new to me, and relatively new to the market as well. No Updikes or Doctorows here.)

2. The World We Live In
Current Affairs; major issues that shape our lives.

3. The Great War
Books about World War 1 and its immediate aftermath.

4. Thrills and Chills around the World.
Drawn from the Soho Constable crime series, ten mysteries. Each is set in a different corner of the world.

5. Who Were You?
Biographies. These must be of dead people; not of live ex-presidents or celebrities, and definitely not memoirs.

6. I Can't Believe You Haven't Read That!
Kinda self-explanatory. Both classics and recent books.

7. En francais...
My second language; I need to get back to reading it as easily and often as I once did.

8. Dystopias
Why not? We have so many people trying to create a perfect world; I feel like looking at what happens when their best-laid plans run amok.

9. Novel History
Literally novel on two fronts -- fiction, but also newly-released fiction. Specifically, brand-new historical fiction to be released in 2010.

10. English Escapism
Other than historical fiction, my two favorite forms of purely recreational reading are mysteries and chick lit. Some of each, by English writers only.

Top books from this challenge: The books I've enjoyed the most, or that I've found most fascinating:

Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty by Roger Thurow & Scott Kilman
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson.
William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man by Duncan Wu
Autobiography of an Execution by David Dow
Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde
The King's Touch by Jude Morgan
The Serpent Pool by Martin Edwards
The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway
The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
Death of a Red Heroine by Qiu Xiaolong

Category One: New New Things
Books that are new to me, or books by authors who are new to me. I've never read anything else by an author on this list.




1. Day After Night by Anita Diamant *** STARTED 2/7/10, FINISHED 2/8/10
2. The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry *** 1/2 STARTED 3/5/10, FINISHED 3/7/10
3. The Song Is You by Arthur Phillips **** STARTED 3/22/10, FINISHED 3/24/10
4. The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway ***** STARTED 2/24/10, FINISHED 2/25/10
5. The Calligrapher's Daughter by Eugenia Kim ****1/2 STARTED 3/1/10, FINISHED 3/2/10
6. Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok *** STARTED 7/18/10, FINISHED 7/19/10
7. How to Read the Air by Dinaw Mengestu **** 1/2, STARTED 10/19/10, FINISHED 10/21/10
8. The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry **** STARTED 6/9/10, FINISHED 6/10/10
9. The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova ****1/2 STARTED 6/7/10, FINISHED 6/9/10
10. Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga **** STARTED 6/25/10, FINISHED 6/27/10
Bonus book: The Help by Kathryn Stockett **** 1/2, STARTED 7/26/10, FINISHED 7/27/10

Category Two: The World We Live In
The political, economic and social trends and controversies that affect our lives. An emphasis on new/recent books




1. Dining with al-Qaeda:Three Decades Exploring the Many Worlds of the Middle East by Hugh Pope **** STARTED 3/18/10,, FINISHED 3/20/10
2. China Safari by Serge Michel & Michel Beuret **** READ 11/17/10
3. Seeds of Terror by Gretchen Peters *** STARTED 12/29/09, FINISHED 1/2/10
4. Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof & Sheryl Wudunn **** STARTED 1/3/10, FINISHED 1/410
5. Cyber War by Richard Clarke, ****, STARTED 11/19/10, FINISHED 11/30/10
6. The End of Wall Street by Roger Lowenstein **** STARTED 4/18/10, FINISHED 4/19/10
7. Kabul Beauty School by Deborah Rodriguez **1/2 STARTED 2/13/10, FINISHED 2/15/10
8. In the Land of Believers by Gina Welch ***1/2 STARTED 1/13/10, FINISHED 1/16/10
9. The Autobiography of an Execution by David Dow ***** STARTED 1/27/10, FINISHED 1/29/10
10. Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty by Roger Thurow & Scott Kilman ***** STARTED 3/2/10, FINISHED 3/7/10
Bonus book: The Ayatollah Begs to Differ by Hooman Majd

Edited: Changed to remove the Fareed Zakaria book & replace it with the analysis of global food politics by Thurow & Kilman, which is more of an 'issue' than a philosophical debate. (Besides, I have an allergy to insta-pundits...)

Category Three: The Great War
World War 1 set the stage for everything that followed in the 20th century. A selection of books giving insight into the war itself and its aftermath.




1. Fighting France by Edith Wharton ****, STARTED 7/18/10, FINISHED 7/19/10
2. Tapestry of War by Sandra Gwyn
3. The Roses of No Man's Land by Lyn Macdonald
4. Vimy by Pierre Berton
5. The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman **** STARTED 12/15/10, FINISHED 12/31/10
6. Four Weeks in the Trenches by Fritz Kreisler *** READ 12/22/10
7. The Living Unknown Soldier by Jean-Yves Le Naour ***1/2, STARTED 11/1/10, FINISHED 11/15/10
8. The Great Silence by Juliet Nicolson
9. The Englishman's Daughter by Ben Macintyre ****, STARTED 12/8/10, FINISHED 12/9/10
10. Back to the Front by Stephen O'Shea ***** STARTED 8/10/10, FINISHED 8/14/10
Bonus book: Paris 1919 by Margaret Macmillan

*edited to remove the Regeneration trilogy & replace it with Stephen O'Shea's book. The rest of the books in this category are all non-fiction. I may add the Regeneration trilogy to my 75-book challenge, or add it to this if I make it all the way through the 1010 plus 10 challenge...

Category Four: Thrills and Chills Around the World
Mystery and suspense novels set in various places worldwide. Many are Soho Crime series titles, but not all. The single criteria is that each book must be set in a different country.




1. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest by Stieg Larrson (Sweden) ***** STARTED 12/25/09, FINISHED 12/27/09
2. Death of a Red Heroine by Qiu Xialong (China) **** 1/2 STARTED 3/27/10, FINISHED 3/30/10
3. Murder in the Marais by Cara Black (France) *** STARTED 5/23/10, FINISHED 5/25/10
4. The Watcher in the Pine by Rebecca Pawel (Spain) ***1/2 STARTED 1/22/10, FINISHED 1/25/10
5. The Collaborator of Bethlehem by Matt Beynon Rees (Israel/Palestine) ****1/2 STARTED 2/1/10, FINISHED 2/4/10
6. Death of an Englishman by Magdalen Nabb (Italy) **** READ 3/6/10
7. Still Life by Louise Penny (Canada) *** 1/2 STARTED 5/30/10, FINISHED 5/31/10
8. The Serpent Pool by Martin Edwards (England) ****1/2 STARTED 2/9/10, FINISHED 2/10/10
9. Love Songs from a Shallow Grave by Colin Cotterill (Laos) ****1/2, STARTED 7/10/10, FINISHED 7/11/10
10. The Case of the Missing Servant by Tarquin Hall (India) *** STARTED 7/25/10, FINISHED 7/26/10
Bonus book: Random Violence: A Jade de Jong Investigation by Jassy Mackenzie (South Africa) ***1/2, READ 10/17/10

Category Five: Who Were You?
Biographies of long-dead people




1. William Hazlitt: The First Modern Man by Duncan Wu ****1/2 STARTED 12/25/09, FINISHED 12/30/09
2. The Lady in the Tower by Alison Weir **** STARTED 1/5/10, FINISHED 1/8/10
3. Giant of the French Revolution by David Lawday **** STARTED 11/28/10, FINISHED 12/5/10
4. The Peasant Prince by Alex Storozynski *** STARTED 1/2/10, FINISHED 1/10/10
5. Strange Blooms by Jennifer Potter *** 1/2, STARTED 11/8/10, FINISHED 11/16/10
6. Samuel Johnson by David Nokes **** 1/2 STARTED 3/17/10, FINISHED 4/8/10
7. Magnifico by Miles Unger **** 1/2 STARTED 7/20/10, FINISHED 7/26/10
8. Pauline Bonaparte: Venus of Empire by Flora Fraser, ***, STARTED 12/6/10, FINISHED 12/12/10
9. Caesar: Life of a Colossus by Adrian Goldsworthy **** STARTED 10/19/10, FINISHED 11/7/10
10. Machiavelli: Philosopher of Power by Ross King **** STARTED 3/31/10, FINISHED 4/4/10
Bonus book: Charlemagne by Derek Wilson

Category Six: I can't believe you haven't read that!
We've all heard it from friends and reading buddies. Well, here's my list of shamefully-unread books, both classics and much-recommended recent books.




1. The Time-Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger: ***1/2 STARTED 12/27/09, FINISHED 12/28/09
2. Persuasion by Jane Austen, ****, READ 10/21/10
3. The Dumas Club by Arturo Perez-Reverte **** STARTED 5/26/10, FINISHED 5/29/10
4. Fathers and Sons by Turgenev **** 1/2, STARTED 6/21/10, FINISHED 6/22/10
5. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold **** STARTED 1/30/10, FINISHED 2/1/10
6. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte ***** STARTED 12/31/09, FINISHED 1/1/10
7. The Reader by Bernhard Schlink **** 1/2 STARTED 3/26/10, FINISHED 3/27/10
8. The American by Henry James **** STARTED 3/13/10, FINISHED 3/15/10
9. The Secret History by Donna Tartt **** STARTED 8/1/10, FINISHED 8/3/10
10. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, *****, STARTED 9/10/10, FINISHED 9/30/10
Bonus book: Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

edit note: changed to remove the Byatt novel (which really doesn't fit the category) and add The Lovely Bones, which definitely does, especially now that the movie is out. People can't believe I haven't read it... And to replace Brick Lane with The Club Dumas.

Category Seven: En francais...
Feeling somewhat sheepish since I can't make my keyboard produce the proper accents, but here's a list anyway. Nothing absurdly ambitious like Proust or Victor Hugo, natch.

(When I updated this, ALL the touchstones appear to have gone wonky...)




1. Le lys de Florence by Sarah Frydman **** 1/2 STARTED 1/10/10, FINISHED 1/14/10
2. Le Saga des Medicis: Lorenzo by Sarah Frydman *** 1/2, STARTED 7/3/10, FINISHED 7/17/10
3. Erevan by Gilbert Sinoue, ****, STARTED 12/11/10, FINISHED 12/14/10
4. L'échappée by Valentine Groby **** 1/2 STARTED 2/3/10, FINISHED 2/5/10
5. Les âmes grises by Philippe Claudel ****1/2 STARTED 4/11/10, FINISHED 4/13/10
6. La mémoire des flammes by Armand Cabasson ****1/2, STARTED 6/11/10, FINISHED 6/16/10
7. Moka by Tatiana de Rosnay **** 1/2 STARTED 2/27/10, FINISHED 3/1/10
8. Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d'éléphants by Mathias Enard, ****, STARTED 12/15/10, FINISHED 12/17/10
9. Les derniers jours de Stefan Zweig by Laurent Seksik ***** STARTED 12/6/10, FINISHED 12/8/10
10. Mon vieux et moi by Pierre Gagnon ****1/2, STARTED 12/23/10, FINISHED 12/24/10
Bonus book: Papa est au Panthéon by Alix de Saint-Andre

Category Eight: Dystopias/Post-Apocalyptic Life
I have a sneaking admiration for people brave enough to conjure up visions of what can go wrong with the best-laid plans of idealists. Fiction only.




1. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury ***** READ 12/25/09
2. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro ***** STARTED 4/14/10, FINISHED 4/16/10
3. Jennifer Government by Max Barry ****, STARTED 11/14/10, FINISHED 11/15/10
4. Shades of Gray by Jasper Fforde ****1/2 STARTED 1/11/10, FINISHED 1/13/10
5. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley ***1/2 READ 1/3/10
6. 1984 by George Orwell ***** READ 6/26/10
7. White Noise by Don DeLillo *** 1/2, STARTED 9/15/10, FINISHED 9/29/10
8. The Children of Men by P.D. James ***** READ 1/24/10
9. The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist STARTED ***** STARTED 1/30/10, FINISHED 2/2/10
10. Salvation City by Sigrid Nunez **** STARTED 9/16/10, FINISHED 9/17/10
Bonus book: The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

Category Nine: Novel History 2010
Novels that are novel, or new, about history. In other words, new works of historical fiction by authors I've read that will be published in 2010 or by authors I haven't read before that has already been published.




1. The Confessions of Catherine de Medici by **** C.W. Gortner STARTED 4/4/10, FINISHED 4/6/10
2. The Creation of Eve by Lynn Cullen **** STARTED 2/25/10, FINISHED 2/28/10
3. The Master of Bruges by Terence Morgan **** STARTED 1/5/10, FINISHED 1/6/10
4. Heartstone by C.J. Sansom, *****, STARTED 9/17/10, FINISHED 9/20/10
5. The Stolen Crown by Susan Higginbotham **** STARTED 2/19/10, FINISHED 2/21/10
6. The King's Touch by Jude Morgan ***** STARTED 1/17/10, FINISHED 1/21/10
7. Captive Queen: A Novel of Eleanor of Aquitaine by Alison Weir **** STARTED 4/11/10, FINISHED 4/13/10
8. Rebels and Traitors by Lindsey Davis *** STARTED 1/21/10, FINISHED 1/30/10
9. Shadow Princess by Indu Sundaresan **** STARTED 3/24/10, FINISHED 3/25/10
10. The Sheen on the Silk by Anne Perry **1/2 STARTED 2/8/10, FINISHED 2/17/10
Bonus book: Heresy by S.J. Parris **** STARTED 6/9/10, FINISHED 6/10/10

Category Ten: English Escapism
Beyond historical fiction, my light recreational reading tends to tilt toward mysteries and chick lit. Here's a random selection of upcoming books in both categories, by English/British authors only (just for an extra challenge!)




1. Death of a Wine Merchant by David Dickinson **** READ 2/2/10
2. The Queen of New Beginnings by Erica James *** 1/2 STARTED 3/13/10, FINISHED 3/14/10
3. Long Time Coming by Robert Goddard **** STARTED 3/31/10, FINISHED 4/1/10
4. Lovers and Newcomers by Rosie Thomas ***1/2, STARTED 4/23/10, FINISHED 4/25/10
5. Angel with Two Faces by Nicola Upson ****1/2 STARTED 12/28/09, FINISHED 1/5/10
6. One Day in May by Catherine Alliott **** STARTED 5/7/10, FINISHED 5/8/10
7. Shadows in the Street by Susan Hill ****1/2 STARTED 4/29/10, FINISHED 4/30/10
8. Midnight Girls by Lulu Taylor *** STARTED 5/18/10, FINISHED 5/20/10
9. A Murderous Procession by Ariana Franklin **** 1/2 STARTED 4/7/10, FINISHED 4/9/10
10. Chocolate Wishes by Trisha Ashley ***1/2, STARTED 3/16/10, FINISHED 3/19/10
Bonus book: Complicit by Nicci French **** STARTED 5/29/10, FINISHED 5/30/10

Edited/changed to reflect major delay in publishing Kate Morton's new book (it won't be out until late November...) and an unexpected duplicate with another list. Inserted Nicci French's new book & replaced Kate Morton with Catherine Alliott, who occupies a similar point in the 'Aga saga' sphere...

Welcome. You have an interesting selection of books across all your categories and a good solution to the "I really cannot stand this book" problem. I have starred your thread in hopes you will be reporting out on what you read. I just checked to see if there was a category or two that really stood out for me but no, they all look good and I want to know about a good many of the books you listed.

Welcome! It looks like we have similar tastes so I will be interested in seeing what you have to say about some of your choices. I would definitely recommend bumping The Help up the list because it is a great read. :)

Bucketyell, I'm definitely going to try to read the bonus books in every category; the only ones where that might be a problem are the weightier ones (like the Malraux) or where I'm not all that nuts about the author (Fareed Zakaria) but feel I should be reading him anyway...
Yes, what I'm thinking of doing is posting mini-reviews (a sentence or two) here, and then linking (if I can figure out the HTML thing) to a longer one on my profile page.
I'm also doing the 75-book challenge, and the goal there is to try and read books that are NOT in this one. So I'm setting myself a rather high hurdle... At least I know there are a lot of books here that I really am eager to read. Not sure about Henry James -- everyone seems to love his books and every time I've tried, I've bogged down... Maybe having it as part of the challenge will get me over the hump??

I like the Current Events category. I'll check in to see your postings on those. I'm hoping to get Half the Sky read fairly soon. Good luck with your challenges.

Yay! Another Soho Crime fan! I look forward to reading what you think of the ones you have chosen.

I don't know if you ever read teen books, but 2 really good dystopian teen books I read this year were The Hunger Games, which is a series of 3, and Unwind, which was just haunting. Unwind is probably the standout book of the year for me.

Two of your books are also on my list -- The Song is You and The Children's Book. It's always fun (for me) to see that.

I have Never Let Me Go laying about unread but it doesn't fit any of my challenge categories.

You have some great categories and I too am starring your thread so I can check in and see what you think of all the great books you are planning on reading.

Welcome!! You've got some great categories here and I'll be interested in hearing what you've got to say. The World War 1 category looks especially interesting, though most of the others do, too.

The World War 1 category is in there because I once worked as a tour guide at a battlefield from that era (Vimy Ridge), during summers at high school and after my first year of college. It's a period that continues to fascinate me, and some of the books on this list will be re-reads of things I read a decade or more ago. I keep recommending some of them (the Eckstein book, for instance) to others, so I thought it was time to revisit them for myself!

I have an (unread) book on WWI called The Great War and Modern Memory. I originally typed out that it's supposed to be quite good but now I see you've already given it five stars. Good news for me!

I had the Regeneration trilogy in an omnibus but loaned it out before I'd had a chance to read it myself and never got it back.

World War 1 is something I hope to start reading more about. One of the Santa Thing books I received is about the Christmas truce. Silent Night by Stanley Weintraub. I've also got some WW1 fiction planned, including the Anne Perry mystery series on that subject.

Who knows? Maybe I'll make it a category for 2011, or, if I finish 1010 early next year, add a mini-challenge.

Kristenn, the Fussell book is absolutely brilliant. It's one of those books which, while reading, I could almost feel my brain expand, as it helped me make sense of things I had half-thought or wondered about -- I had to stop every few pages to think about and digest while I was reading. There is a bit of a backlash now (or at least an alternate approach) on the part of some historians, such as Jay Winter, who do see more links between the pre-1914 period and the interwar years, but I don't find Winter's arguments on that score as compelling as those of Fussell & Eksteins. I'm not re-reading Fussell for this because I know the book well by now and I would never get passed it; I'm looking to some other stuff that has either been partially read or read long, long ago and partially forgotten.

Finished the first book on my list, Fahrenheit 451. I am very familiar with the movie, so reading the book was fascinating, both enabling me to compare it to the movie and evaluate Bradbury's writing and plotting (I'd never read anything of his before...)

Inevitably, I found the book more intriguing still than the movie, although I found the ending both apocalyptic and overly 'resolved' (vs Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, which left open so many more possibilities for the narrator.) In the book, Montag reads "Dover Beach" to some of his wife's friends, to try to awaken them to real feelings; he succeeds in making one of the women cry hysterically. That's a favorite poem of mine, and the scene is one of the most powerful in the book.

I'll try and post a short review in the next few days. Hmm, wonder if it's ironic at all that I chose to begin with a book from the 'dystopia' group??

I think that I read years ago in an interview with Bradbury that he had intended this book more of an indictment of television than of the decline of reading.

Yes; that comes across clearly. The defense of book burning as being in society's interest -- that books were divisive and made people unhappy -- seems like an ex-post facto rationalization. In Bradbury's imagined/extreme world, people like Mildred, Montag's wife, were content with/addicted to their screens. What was fascinating to me was reading this today and thinking about the implications re our latest "screens" -- the Internet.

Finished The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest today. A great conclusion to the trilogy, but not as fast-paced as either of its two predecessors as the action shifts to the investigative/legal front. Still lots of suspense, however. I'm glad I went ahead and ordered this from Amazon in the UK; still, even though it has only been a few months since I read The Girl Who Played with Fire, it was sometimes hard to keep track of the various personalities and events. I'd recommend reading the two final books in quick succession.

Good to know! I just finished the first and am on hold for the second at the library. I will have to see about the third right away. I quite enjoyed the first one so it will be interesting to see how it goes.

Now to go rent Fahrenheit 451... I finally read the book this year but have never seen the movie.

Bucketyell, the first two are more closely related to each other than they were to the first, which was more of a 'classic' thriller. The move of Fahrenheit 451 -- you'll see several differences, in the role of Clarisse, in the (absence of) the Hound, in the ending -- but it's still excellent, IMO.

Meanwhile -- I've finished The Time Traveler's Wife. I've posted a review. Generally, I wasn't in love with it (although I am in love with Niffenegger's writing, which is beautiful.) I was always conscious of the 'gimmick', and that interfered with my ability to immerse myself in the story. In contrast, her second book, Her Fearful Symmetry, which most readers liked less, I found more engrossing because she moved more gradually into weird and wacky territory. I didn't feel as if I was being asked to believe a dozen impossible things before breakfast, as I was with Time Traveler's Wife. I know it's heresy to say this, given the almost-universal love for this book, but I have this phrase buzzing around in my brain -- "stunt fiction". Still... Will add the movie to my Netflix queue for whenever it comes out.

Interesting categories and choices - I've read both The Children of Men and The Time Travelers Wife - I did like Time Travelers Wife, but your comments about the about of disbelief necessary to appreciate the narrative is well taken. I read Children of Men after seeing the movie -and I thought that they were an interesting pair. The movie is more evocative of the book than a straight retell -- if you like it, you should add it to your Netflix queue too!

Half the Sky's on my list too -- I'll be checking back to see how you like it!

I finished my first biography -- Duncan Wu's new bio of William Hazlitt -- yesterday. It's a doorstop of a book, but was a Christmas gift and one I very much wanted to read as Hazlitt is one of my favorite writers. He was a near-contemporary of Wordsworth, Coleridge, et. al. (although they later became fierce enemies, as the poets deserted their early radical beliefs and bought into the 'establishment' in their later lives), and an early mentor of Keats. His closest friends included Charles Lamb, although I think Hazlitt is an even better stylist. Wu is a shameless advocate for his subject (Hazlitt can do no wrong; his critics were always misguided...) which becomes wearing after a while, and the rather plain vanilla biographical approach (it's primarily a scholarly bio) will probably limit its appeal to anyone who isn't, like myself, already a Hazlitt fan yearning to know more. But Wu succeeds triumphantly in getting the reader immersed in the atmosphere of London in the first few decades of the 19th century, its politics, its theater, its society; I ended up so hypnotized by the book that when I woke up slightly worried one morning, I realized that it was because I'd been subconsciously thinking about Hazlitt's struggles as a "jobbing writer" and equating them to my own as a freelance journalist!

I'm now reading Gretchen Peters' book about the financing of al-Qaeda through the sale of poppy base -- opium/heroin, etc. It's an important subject, but a dreary book that reads like a newswire story stretched passed the breaking point to fit into a book. A real plod. I'm also moving on to Wuthering Heights...

Finished Wuthering Heights today. I don't know why I hadn't read it before -- I loved it! I was especially intrigued by the character of the narrator, Nelly Dean, and her role: she presents herself as an unbiased observer, and yet plays an active role at crucial junctures. On the other hand, I struggle to accept that Heathcliff is a romantic hero. His actions vis-a-vis others fly in the face of that role -- he is not punishing himself, but making others, such as Isabella, Cathy and Linton, bear the brunt of his pain and anger. It's not like Mr. Rochester, who, will he was behaving in a very unheroic manner by concealing the madwoman, wasn't deliberately trying to destroy the lives of others. Raises some interesting questions about what a Romantic hero is?? Self-destructive? Destructive of others? Tortured? His own worst enemy? No plans to review this book, but it's definitely a 5-star read. In contrast to the Gretchen Peters tome, which remains tedious...

Finally finished Seeds of Terror. An important subject, but a dreary and tedious book, drowning in detail, poorly structured and written. Glad I finally got through it, at least.

I'm so glad you enjoyed Wuthering Heights - it is one of my favourite books ever! Interesting comments about Heathcliff as a Romantic hero - he tends to follow the idea of the "Byronic Hero", created by Lord Byron in his poetry, especially Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. The Byronic Hero is all those things you mentioned: self-destructive, tortured, his own worst enemy. Sort of the historical equivalent of a bad-boy, James Dean type, I guess.

Took a detour and picked up another book from my 'dystopia' group late last night, Brave New World. I had first read it 20 years or more ago (after reading 1984) and had remembered it as very good. Going back to it today, it wasn't as good as I remembered. It's very strong as a portrait of a dystopic civilization dressed up as a utopian society in which conflict is banned and pleasure is the only principle (they could reduce the number of hours worked, but that would actually leave people with too much leisure, the 'controllers' realized...) But while it raises some very interesting and thoughtful topics for discussion, as a novel, it doesn't click. The characters are too symbolic to do more than stand for whatever perspective Huxley chooses; they aren't individuals. (Of course, that could be a comment on the nature of the society from which they spring.) Even John, the 'Savage', who hasn't been conditioned since he was in a faux-womb, isn't convincing as a character. He is a person as we would recognize him, but one whose function (with the help of Shakespeare) is to point out what is lacking from the conditioning of the 'civilized' world's proto-humans. Reading this in the era of the Internet, reality television and the the explosion in genetic engineering, means that the ideas it contains are probably more intriguing than ever before. (The book was first published in the 1930s.) I've rated it 3.5 stars; it's a 3-star novel, but a 4.5 polemic, making it a fascinating basis for discussion. I'd rather have a debate about the ills of modern society with this book as a starting point than some of the nonfiction tomes like Empire of Illusion by Chris Hedges, however powerful. Framing the issues this way makes the debate less emotional -- oddly, the same things I don't like about it as a novel make it a good book to read anyway. Paradoxical...

Finished Half the Sky this evening. It's an interesting but sometimes frustrating book; reading it felt like reading a lot of newspaper stories focusing on important and troubling issues involving women, from sexual slavery to rape and genital mutilation. To anyone who follows the news of these issues, few of these stories or issues will be new -- sadly enough -- and their broader argument, that educating women and ensuring that they are healthy, encouraged to control their lives, their fertility, etc. will pay rich dividends, shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who has followed the news and the results of studies and developments in countries like Sri Lanka and Rwanda. So, is the book necessary? Yes. When I recently wrote a story about effective philanthropy, one of the comments on the publication's website was along the lines that improving maternal mortality rates and ensuring that both mother and newborn children survived just aggravated problems in countries like those in sub-Saharan Africa. (Scary and Malthusian...) But our attitudes may be just the tip of the iceberg. The big question is how to change attitudes among those in countries like Cambodia and India who will never read this book. This book showcases some very worthwhile models, and gives examples of how individuals in the West have assisted them or developed others, but IMO, Kristof and WuDunn put too much emphasis on what philanthropy does for the giver -- the warm fuzzy feelings, personal growth, etc. -- and less on whether it's effective. Even some of their examples illustrate this -- a Cambodian girl whose bicycle is stolen can't continue middle school and drops out. Those who helped her by getting her the bike still feel good about what they did; the girl is now working in the fields...
For those unfamiliar with the issue, this book should be a big wakeup call. For others who track the philanthropic world, this is a reminder of the vital issues, but there is little new or innovative or surprising in the problems or the solutions.

Wrapped up Angel with Two Faces, the second in Nicola Upson's series of mysteries featuring a (fictionalized) Josephine Tey in the role of detective's friend and assistant. Will review it in the next day or two; really like this series, which is faithful to the spirit of Tey's own writing. (I actually had to break off and read one of her own books for my off-the-shelf challenge, to remind myself!)

My copy of Alison Weir's history of the last days of Anne Boleyn arrived today; I may have to put aside the bio of Kosciusko, which I started a day or two ago, and read Weir instead... It's just too tantalizing!! I'll also start The Master of Bruges; have heard good things about it, and I need an antidote to too many mysteries.

I "did" dystopias for the challenge last year so I'm interested to see your comments on this category. I loved Brave New World - having never read it before I was surprised how accessible it was and I liked the touches of humour in it, but I can see your point about the characters being "types" rather than fully formed.

I'm looking forward to reading Shades of Grey this year too.

Sanddancer, yes, I was a bit disconcerted to find that I didn't enjoy Brave New World this time around nearly as much as I had the first time. I don't know whether my tastes have changed, or perhaps I'm seeing things in it this time that I didn't 20 plus years ago?

Anyway -- have now finished Master of Bruges, the first of my historical fiction books. Really enjoyed it; the chapters focusing on the plot are interspersed with short chapters ('chapterlets'?) about painting, linking color and technique to narrative devices, and all told as if the main character is speaking directly to the reader. It's a lively book, revolving around Bruges in the 15th century. I did find that it was so speedy & brisk in tone that it glossed over things that would have been fascinating to explore more deeply, and the author's solution to the Princes in the Tower mystery is downright quirky, which is why it's a 4-star book. Still, it was a fun book, and one I'm glad I bought & will keep in my library. Review TK.

Finished Alison Weir's new bio of Anne Boleyn. More interesting from the POV she has taken -- studying Anne's downfall and the issues and personalities around that -- than any new information in it. There are some really surprising and interesting tidbits for those who haven't read any of the other work (less generalist, more scholarly) by folks like Eric Ives, whose theories form the basis for Weir's book (whether she acknowledges it as fully as she should.) Review to follow shortly.

Going back to read another bio, of an intriguing figure who gets little attention but was a player in the American revolution and in the Napoleonic era in Europe, a Polish prince who was a crusader for the 'rights of man' and Polish independence. Will need to pick out a novel to read to kind of balance that!

Read a bio of a fascinating guy, whose biographer made him appear dull as ditchwater -- Thaddeus Kosciusko. The three stars are for Kosciusko, who fought in the American revolution and then appeared in the 'age of revolution' fighting for the rights of man across Europe and in his home country of Poland. There are several problems with the writing that make this a dull, plodding read: It's staccato and expositional (in this month, he did this, and wrote a letter to so and so, saying this). He never even begins to give the reader a feel for the time or place -- which is horrifying, considering what was going on. When he does depart from his tedious recitations, he gets overly florid -- one woman is referred to as 'sexy' (which is jarring in a book about the 18th century); he refers to the souls of Kosciusko and his first love meeting each other (at that point I felt as if I were reading some kind of Victorian-era romantic fiction!) Add to that, the fact that he is in love with his subject, and keeps digressing to remind us that everyone he met loved him, that he was unusual for his era, etc. etc. Bah. I've finished it, but it was a struggle. Now on to read some French historical fiction...

You're reading books faster than I'm reading your thoughts on them. Keep 'em coming. I'm enjoying this thread.

LOL, VisibleGhost. I don't think I am reading any more rapidly than usual (my mother used to have to ration my books when we'd go on car trips/holidays as a child, so that they'd last the duration of the trip), but my reading is more focused, and I'm probably finishing more books immediately. There are two, like that by Gretchen Peters, that I would probably have just put down unfinished, and a couple of more that might have taken longer to read.

Instead of that -- I stayed up until 3 a.m. to finish Jasper Fforde's new novel, for my dystopia category. It's not, strictly speaking, dystopic, at least in my view of the word. To me, a dystopia is something that we would recognize as a world akin to our own, but with something flawed at its core and that poses questions about our priorities and the competing interests of the individual and society. Instead, Fforde has invented an entirely new world that happens to have something wrong going on at its core, that is unraveled only towards the end.

I started off slowly, and had some initial difficulty in both understanding and accepting Fforde's vision of these new universe, with a host of new terminology. It's a world where "Leapbacks" actually remove technologies from use -- for instance, its inhabitants have long since relinquished motorbikes and the hero of the book, Eddie Russett, can remember when a Leapback removed bicycles with multiple gears; these days, racing on 19th century Penny-farthings is back in vogue. It's a world that is dominated by the needs of the collective (as in most dystopic fiction) and one where your place in the collective is determined by your ability to see a particular color, and in what intensity. There's a hierarchy, with the Purples at the top and the Greys -- who can only see color when it's artificial -- at the bottom and every child, on their 20th birthday, is tested to see where their color perception puts them. Russett, born into a Red family, travels to the "Outer Fringes" with his father, a swatchman (a doctor who uses swatches of colors to treat the kind of maladies that people succumb to in this new world) on the eve of his "Ishigara" color test. He knows he sees a lot of Red, which leaves him in a great position in the marriage market, but then he meets Jane, a Grey, and his latent curiosity about his world, the big events in the distant past that produced it, and an instinctive anger at some of the chromatic injustices, lead him into danger.

In many ways this is a classic mystery dressed up in dystopian/sci-fi-ish garb, and it's both inventive and fascinating. Which is why I'll be getting by today on less than four hours of sleep!! (Edited to add: I'm going to have to read more slowly, as I have to go through my own book MS, which has just been copy-edited, and get it back to the publishers in only six days... So don't worry, VisibleGhost, I'll be slowing down to manage that. After you've read and re-read your own writing scores of times in a few months, however, it's a lot less appealing than books like Fforde's, especially since it's non-fiction!)

Interesting review, makes me want to start reading Fforde again. I had series fatigue with his other books (especially the Thursdays series) but the colour ploy sounds intriguing.

I had never read the other series, despite my bibliomania, so I came to his style 'fresh'. At first, the detail was overwhelming, and I started to feel irritated. As he gave the reader a bit more background, it became easy enough to follow that I could focus on plot and characters and then it just -- took off! I really do recommend it.

Enjoying your thread and comments about the books very much. I look forward to hearing your take on the ones on my list also; The Secret History, The Thirteenth Tale.

Cool... I just got that one out of the library but was hesitant when I realised it wasn't a Next book. I have read everything else Fforde has written and love his writing style so I wil bump this one up the pile a bit.

Well, a few days after I finished Shades of Grey it's still resonating in my mind, which is the sign of a good book. I've downloaded the first Thursday Next book onto my Kindle and will tackle that sometime soon.

Meanwhile, finished another very good novel, this time the first offering on my list of books in French. It's the second of three volumes about the Medici family -- review has been posted. Very, very good writing -- anyone who enjoys historical fiction and can read French will certainly enjoy it. The third & final one is also on this list. It revolves around the character of Lucrezia Turnabuoni, with whom the heir to the Medici empire falls madly in love; Lucrezia is one of eight formidable women of the Italian Renaissance who will be the focus of a non-fiction group bio coming out in about a year in the UK, The Deadly Sisterhood.

I'm really enjoying reading your thread, though I'm having a bit of trouble keeping up!

I read Brave New World for the first time last year, and was also a bit conflicted about how much I liked it based on how it functioned as a story vs. how thought-provoking the ideas were. I ended up giving it 4 stars at the time, but at the end of the year I decided it was actually one of my top 10 reads, since the ideas really stayed with me. This was one of the books that almost made me give up on ratings entirely--how is it possible to compare an entertaining and gripping story on the one hand with fascinating ideas on the other?

Also, I think your comments have convinced me to read both Half the Sky and Shades of Grey. Eventually, once I've made some more progress on the books I already own....

Zoe, yes, I'm a rapid and intensive reader, and I spend most hours a day reading that I don't spend working (which also involves reading & writing!!) It's almost as if we need a two-tier rating system, with one set of stars for how important a book it is and another for how good a read it is. If I think about it, I had the opposite problem with the Alison Weir bio of Anne Boleyn's last days. It was a good read, but there were small errors and a lot of reliance on other secondary sources. So -- does that make it a good book or a bad book?? I'm conflicted...

After reading vol. 2 of Frydman's Medici saga, I'm going to have to tackle the bio of Lorenzo de Medici that's on my "Who were You" list sooner rather than later.

I'm sorry to hear that the bio of Thaddeus Kosciusko was so dull. I'm a Polish-American and would love to read more about him.

Which bio did you read? I don't see the title mentioned anywhere.

lindapanzo, yes, it was a bummer for me, even without being of Polish descent. There are so many fascinating Polish figures from this era, and the Napoleonic wars were a unique opportunity for Poland to try and grab its independence from Russia and the Austrian Empire. And yet... geopolitics again. It would be very interesting if someone were to write a kind of group biography/history of the major leaders of Polish independence movements through the 18th and 19th centuries, showing how Polish identity was maintained. It's interesting to visit Vilnius these days and see the home of Adam Mickiewicz -- even though it's now in a Lithuanian city!!

On to an update (a quick one this time). Finished In the Land of Believers, in which writer Gina Welch decides to go undercover at Jerry Falwell's Thomas Road Church to really understand the world of evangelical Christians. Alas, the reader gets far more of her dithering about being undercover (her discomfort about presenting herself as one thing to those around her, while believing something completely different) than of insight into the world of the evangelicals (other than their basic conviction that reciting the sinner's prayer is the fast track to salvation). This is an Amazon Vine book, so I owe them my first review -- I'll just say that a far better and more focused/less rambling book on almost the same topic is one I read last spring by a young student, Kevin Roose, who decided to transfer to Falwell's Liberty University for a "semester abroad". I found that book, The Unlikely Disciple more illuminating, better structured and just a more focused approach to precisely the same topic. It's a shame, as I think Welch is a very good writer. On another sidenote, I recall reading V.S. Naipaul's very similarly-titled Among the Believers about his voyages through Muslim nations, written in the early 1980s. That also is excellent, and I may have to go back and re-read it to see if it stands the test of time in terms of his analysis of the countries he visited.

I think I need to read some fiction next before moving on to the Medici biography.

Just finished The King's Touch by Jude Morgan -- excellent historical novel, a model for what these books could/should be. (Vs. some of the bodice-rippers that cavort under this category!) It's the story of James, Duke of Monmouth, the eldest illegitimate son of Charles II, and the ways in which his father's personality and policies mold a naive and foolish young man. In addition to the writing -- which is excellent, very polished and not excessively modern in tone -- what is particularly intriguing is the way Morgan lets the reader know how Jemmy is really seen by others, even though the story is told in his own words. We see Charles's disappointment in him; the inarticulate fury of James, Duke of York at his presumption, and the exasperation of statesmen hoping that Jemmy can make a viable candidate as heir to the throne, despite his lack of judgment. Anyone interested in Stuart England and historical fiction would love this book; it's my new favorite for the period, displacing even Royal Flush by Margaret Irwin.

Now I need to decide what to read next...

I've always preferred the Stuarts over the Tudors. I will be adding this one to my wishlist. Thanks Chatterbox.

I think I might give it a try. Thanks for the review!

I will be adding that one as well! I have been wanting to try Jude Morgan for a while now and I have one of her books Passion: A Novel of the Romantic Poets coming from bookmooch now.

Belladonna, I just scored that from Paperbackswap! It's over on my 75-book challenge... while a third one, which has been on Mt. TBR for nearly a year unread, is on my off-the-shelf challenge! So I have plenty more Jude Morgan to look forward to. I just ordered the newest book, about the Brontes.

I just looked up Jude Morgan after reading this thread and saw the Bronte book on Amazon and couldn't help but order it too! It sounds great.

I recently picked up a second-hand copy of Passion, too - mostly because I started reading the first couple of pages in the shop and got hooked. I haven't read it yet, but in the meantime it sounds like I need to add The King's Touch to the wishlist.

Thanks for the review Chatterbox particuarly since I wasn't familiar with Jude Morgan. I think I'll try The King's Touch or The Taste of Sorrow, which also sounds very good.

The same author has also written a short series of excellent historical mysteries, set in Georgian England, under the name Hannah March. That's how I found these; someone had told me it was the same person (and apparently a man, despite the 'Hannah' and the rather ambiguous 'Jude').

I love when people have pseudonyms. I have a category on my 1010 for Eleanor Hibbert/Jean Plaidy/Philippa Carr/Victoria Holt. I think it is so interesting how they can have different genres or subgenres for each incarnation. I did a bit of digging on Hannah March/Jude Morgan and it looks like the guy's name is Tim Wilson and was a student of Angela Carter's in college. That earns him extra special brownie points in my mind, as I think Angela Carter's writing is just lovely.

Bella, what always interested me with Jean Plaidy were the variations (sometimes large, sometimes not) between the books. The focus was obviously quite different -- classic gothic vs plain vanilla HF, for instance -- and the first person narration that was characteristic of her non-HF, but then you had stylistic similarities in the very straightforward sentence structure. The only book that crossed those lines was The Queen's Confession, written as Victoria Holt, but that overlapped a lot with her Jean Plaidy novel, Flaunting, Extravagant Queen. (I went through a big Plaidy phase as a pre-teen and teenager... am less enamored now, mostly because of the writing, but these are still v. good straightforward HF books.)

Finished the second book in the 'global mysteries' section, The Watcher in the Pine. I confess that part of my problem with this book turned out to be that it's not the first in the series, which I discovered about halfway through. (Bookstore clerk slipped up there...) So that's my first point: Find the first book, if you want to read this series, because it's going to be pretty much impossible to follow this if you haven't unless you've read a lot about the Spanish Civil War. I'd consider myself reasonably well informed about that time period, but even so I spent the first third of the book trying to establish a time frame and context for the characters. Read them in order; the mysteries are self-contained, but not the characters or setting.

As for those characters and this book in particular, the author bases her novels around a member of Spain's Guardia -- Franco's domestic home guard, of sorts. He's married to a left-leaning former teacher, and the underlying tension in the community is mirrored in their relationship: Franco's supporters have won a bitter civil war and now they must hunt down the remaining resistants, those within the society and those who've taken to the hills. Carlos Tejada, the Guardia lieutenant, has taken up a command in a small and remote community in part because he's told his wife's leftist sympathies will prevent him from getting promoted in any of the big cities. When they arrive at their new home in the midst of a blinding snowstorm, Elena is pregnant and struggling to adjust to the new realities of marriage to a man she loves but most fear because of his job. Almost immediately, the couple are caught up, in different ways, in the ongoing struggle between loyalties and prudence in the small town.

Ultimately I felt this was a book that was more intriguing in premise than in execution. Pawel doesn't deliver enough clues to help the reader track the action and some revelations at the end are just devices to wrap up the plot. Similarly, some of the events are simply transparent devices to move it forward. I can't imagine that Tejada really climbed a tree to see where he was going, for instance. Pawel could have made that scene and others more compelling with more detailed writing, but that isn't there either. As it stands, this was an interesting enough novel. I don't plan to buy other books in the series, but might pick them up in a library, simply because I'm interested to see how she handles the setting and theme. But the writing and plot structure were a bit too heavy-handed for me to be enthusiastic about. Normally this would be a 3-star read -- a 'meh' book with nothing really inherently bad about it. I've given it a 1/2 star bonus because I may be missing elements due to my picking up a series midway and because the backdrop is interesting.

I'm wending my way through Lindsey Davis's Rebels and Traitors, which is a doorstop of a book, and probably will start either Matthew Bishop's book about capitalism (we share a publisher, so I got a freebie!!) or the bio of Lorenzo de Medici next. That would be tomorrow -- after I get rid of the final changes and footnotes to my MS, which has driven me insane and caused me to pull all-nighters over the weekend!

... and so I picked up Children of Men by P.D. James instead. This was a re-read for me; I read it when it first came out, in the late 80s or early 90s. This time I was even more fascinated by the story of a world in which no children have been born for more than two decades. England is now a totalitarian society ruled over by the guardian, who happens to be the cousin of Theo Farron, an Oxford don whose own child is dead and who has no young men or women to teach any more. Suddenly, humankind has grown to appreciate the sense of a future that the presence of young people implied -- without them, minds are fraying (they baptize kittens in place of children) and even the most sane have a sense of pointlessness. So -- why resist the totalitarian state? Especially when the only people it oppresses are the minorities; the resident aliens and refugees? But one of these suddenly becomes pregnant...

This is an intriguing kind of dystopia, because it's one in which the rulers are taking the cares of the world off the shoulders of the troubled population. It's a dictatorial world, yes, where organized suicide teeters on the brink of being mandatory and forced, but also one in which the vast majority of the population have sunk into apathy -- in a way, the guardians are protecting the apathetic population. On the surface, this is a very different book from James's mysteries, but on another level it deals with the same kind of social disruptions that occur when humans have to confront their deepest secrets. I did wonder if there are some religious overtones that I'm not getting here -- a major female character is named Julian, as in St. Julian; another is a truly religious Anglican priest; the plot revolves around the birth of a child, who may, indeed, prove the literal salvation of the world. Or not -- because the narrative ends with a fascinating choice by Theo that opens up all kinds of possibilities.

I did see the film of this book a few years ago, and while I enjoyed that in its own right, I did think this was much, much stronger (no surprise there!) and more nuanced. There's still a lot of action and drama, but there's also time (even in a novel that reads very rapidly) to explore Theo's relationship with his cousin Xan. It remains an utterly fascinating book, very thought-provoking and highly recommended.

I read Children of Men last year for one of my challenges and I loved it. I also thought the movie was well done too. They were the same but yet different enough that I didn't constantly compare them.

I loved The Children of Men when I read it last year. I also perceived some religious overtones especially in the chapter with the birth of the child. I saw the movie first, but ended up liking the book better. Now I want to read it again!

The most interesting difference between the film and the book, to me, was what happens to Theo. In both versions, his fate could be described as a sacrifice of sorts, but the nature of the sacrifice is very different in each. (Sorry, trying not to give spoilers here!)

I surprised myself by really enjoying Children of Men. Now I do need to see the movie, especially if there are differences. Also, Clive Owen.

Omigod yes -- the Clive Owen factor should never be forgotten or discounted.... (excuse me while I remove the drool...)

Apparently I need to read Children of Men!

Am I the only person who tried to read Children of Men, but found it uninteresting? I read the first couple of pages, and then realized that it wasn't that interesting to me.

That was my reaction the first time I tried to read it. Then, a few months later, I found myself short of reading material and told myself that since I loved PD James's detective novels so much, I should give it another try. And this time, it clicked. But then, it would be a dull world if we all enjoyed the same books... and I doubt you're alone, Miela!

I am waiting for a copy from bookmooch so I am sure I will read it some time this year.....or next year..... LOL

Just finished Autobiography of an Execution by death penalty lawyer David Dow. It's a powerful book, the chronicle of Dow's efforts to save his clients -- not because he likes them or believes that they are just misunderstood individuals who committed one evil act -- but because the legal process surrounding death penalty cases is so deeply flawed. Indeed, of the 100 or so clients he has had, Dow says he has had perhaps seven who he believed were innocent -- and the case at the heart of this book is one of those seven. I'll post a review when I've had some time to process the thoughts and arguments at the heart of the book, but I will say now that I think it is one that anyone who thinks about the criminal justice system should read, regardless of their views about the death penalty. Dow has become a fierce opponent, but is ruthlessly honest with himself about what that means -- and about the limitations on his ability to ever do anything for even that rarest of individuals, an innocent client. There's a lot here to ponder, and an elegantly written book as well.

Not making much headway with Rebels and Traitors. I'm beginning to suspect it's a history book disguised as a novel; one where the characters are incidental to the events. Doesn't make for a compelling narrative. Still, I'm halfway through, and I'm stubborn, so not ready to give up on it yet.

Well, I finished Rebels and Traitors. It's not a bad book, but as I said, it's a history book disguised as a novel. There are soooo many books that have the opposite problem -- characters who are too contemporary, grafted onto a tidied-up historical setting, doing improbable things like eating potatoes in the 14th century. So it's rare for a book to drown in it's historical setting, but this one does. I found myself so exhausted by the level of granular detail (75% of which doesn't move the plot forward) that by the time the two lead characters finally meet -- which isn't until the final third of the book! -- I was already mentally shrugging my shoulders. And although by then we've learned a lot about Gideon, a merchant's son and printer and Parliamentary loyalist turned soldier, and Juliana, wife of a Cavalier and struggling to bring up two young sons in the absence of her feckless and reckless husband, I didn't see anything in the novel to convince me that these two actually fell in love. Lindsey Davis's last stand-alone novel, Course of Honour set in the Roman Empire's heyday, was excellent; very focused and fascinating, so I had high hopes for this one, set in the English Civil War.

But while not a bad book, it was disappointing. I may be comparing it to much to The King's Touch, which overlaps slightly in time, and which was very, very good indeed. Another book about the Stuarts that is far more interesting read (although set decades before the war) is The King's Daughter by Christie Dickason, which focuses on the early life of the sister of Charles I, the king whose execution is at the start of this book. And if you're looking for a book set in the English Civil War, there's also The King's General by Daphne du Maurier. I couldn't really recommend this one...

Autobiography of an Execution would be a great fit for my law and lawyers category. I think I'll look for it.

It is interesting that he believes that so few of his clients are innocent. I'd like to read more about it.

What is also intriguing is that he knows this is a Sisyphean task -- he will never win, even on those rare occasions when he should. It's kind of soul-destroying work, and the book deals with that dimension, especially in reference to his relationship with his son. It's particularly interesting to contrast the way he and his wife raise their son, and the upbringing of his clients. Dow is conscious of it, although he's also highly aware that that doesn't excuse what it is they do. Altogether a more nuanced view of the issue; I had expected something more along the lines of the books that Helen Prejean has written, which are powerful/moving, but in a different way.

Finished The Lovely Bones late tonight. Why I didn't read this when it first came out, I'm not sure -- perhaps for the same reason I didn't read The Time-Traveler's Wife, because it felt too much like a novel that relied on a 'stunt' of some kind to get the plot moving.

I enjoyed Sebold's book more than I had expected to, and despite occasional banal observations about life and death, and occasional phrases that seemed to me utterly meaningless. (Eg: "Nurse Eliot thought that if loss could be used as a measure of beauty in a woman, my mother had grown even more beautiful." Hunh???) Still, the imagination in this case *clicks* and the resolution isn't too pat, in the case of Susie's murderer. (I had sort of feared it would collapse into being a conventional thriller at some point.) Indeed, some of the most intriguing scenes were those involving Susie's surveillance of her murderer and her insight into his behavior before and after her death. The least convincing, and an example of why I think this will endure more as a popular triumph than as a truly distinctive novel (vs one that has truly original elements) is the final family scene. I'm sure many of you will have read it and know what I mean.

It's not a classic, but it was a fascinating read, and one I regret not having tackled earlier. I definitely preferred it to Niffenegger's debut, where the mechanics of time travel were just soooo distracting to me, and ultimately irritating. The dead-teenager-as-narrator was just another and very creative way of providing an omniscient narrator, but one who has a stake in the characters' lives and the outcome.

I also haven't read The Lovely Bones yet, but I have it on my wish list and your comments will probably make me move it up closer to the top.

I enjoyed Lovely Bones but not her other stuff. I am curious about the movie. I know I am going to be disappointed but I am still curious.

HI. I am very late in replying to your post on my 1010 thread about the history of Central Asia. Thanks so much for your recommendations! I think I will start with the Hopkirk book, The Great Game, which I was lucky to mooch and is on the way to me. The Carpet Wars sounds interesting also and would continue, I think, from where Hopkirk leaves off. As a somewhat unsophisticated reader, I find myself learning from and enjoying your insights and eclectic reading style, so thanks again. Kasey

#86, Yes, I don't think I can face reading Lucky. (Even if I happened to be a memoir afficionado, which I'm not...) In some ways, I think The Lovely Bones focuses on a similar theme -- the idea of what victimhood is, and the varying nature of what constitutes a victim -- but in a more creative way. And her second novel got very mixed reviews. I may still read it, but it's not a priority.

#87 -- enjoy them! Yes, I'm a very eclectic reader (the teachers' view in high school focused on the less diplomatic term -- 'undisciplined'). One book always leads me to another, which in turn piques my curiosity about something different and... Which is why my brother refers to my apartment as a branch of the Brooklyn public library. Perhaps not as comprehensive (no complete Dewey decimal system here), but there's something for everyone except the hard-core romance nuts, those addicted to technical or self-help books.

It was chilling to re-read The Unit by Ninni Holmquist on my birthday, as I approach the age in which -- in Holmquist's vision of a utility-driven society -- I, as neither a super achiever, a married person or a parent -- would be sent off to a reserve bank unit for biological material, to be used for all kinds of tests as a human guinea pig until I make my 'final donation'. As Dorrit Weger, the central character in this fascinating and well-written book discovers, life in 'the unit' isn't all bad. She has no worries, and life is comfortable, even enjoyable, with state of the art sports and entertainment facilities, including animation studios, a library, a theater and a cinema. She can't go outside, and the loss of her dog is like an ache in her her heart, but she discovers something she never had in the outer world -- companionship and fellowship among her fellow 'unneeded' citizens. Indeed, it sometimes feels that this group of 50-plus women and 60-plus men are the only ones with real, organic relationships in a dystopic outer society which we never actually see. (The novel begins when Dorrit travels to the Unit.) To ensure that they are deemed 'needed' by the state, women are going to dramatic lengths to have children -- even stealing them. The Unit, for a while, seems almost like a refuge and a place where people can forge what has eluded them until that moment -- truly human relationships and friendships. It's almost a kind of utopia, making the administrators and nurses who run it appear even more artificial as the weeks and months pass, and the reader becomes more immersed in Dorrit's life.

The novel raises similar questions to Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go about the value of an individual human life, but Holmquist's protagonists are ordinary human beings who have only gradually come to realize that this will be their fate -- a fate that they can't find a way to escape by becoming 'needed'. Reading this in my late 40s -- unmarried and childless -- is almost painful, as it reminds me of all the offhand remarks and casual assumptions I hear from people about the 'value' of my life (or what they perceive as a lack of one.) If the key ingredient of a good dystopic novel is the ability to persuade the reader that there is only a very, very thin line between what is and the 'what if?' in the narrative, then Holmquist succeeds.

I see in some of the reviews posted on LT that there is a lot of discomfort with Dorrit's choices late in the book. I don't have the same trouble with this, as I feel her ultimate choice was, in fact, the only one that would be possible, both for her as a character and for the world Holmquist has created. Yes, it's an uncomfortable one for us to accept, because we are addicted to hope, and because we've been weaned on Dylan Thomas's injunction to 'rage, rage' against the inevitability of death. Dorrit, in an early scene where she discusses her experiences at the Unit with a psychologist, insists on finding meaning in a plight that at heart she rejects utterly.

Highly recommended, but it's powerful stuff. I'm going to keep my eyes open for more by this author. (The touchstone doesn't give me a correct option, for some reason; the book has just been released in paperback.)

excellent Chatterbox! Your comments here and in the thread yesterday have given me much to think about.

As I first started reading your comments on The Unit, I was thinking it didn't sound like a book for me. But the more I read, the more intrigued I was. I may need to go put this on my wishlist, although I won't be able to read it this year. Maybe I'll stick it in the TBR pile for this challenge next year.

Just came back from BM - only 55 other people and me

Some tidbits from "The Unit":

The encounter between Dorrit & her psychologist:

'“I suppose I used to believe that my life belonged to me,” I rambled. “Something that was entirely at my disposal, something no one else had any claim on, or the right to have an opinion on. But I’ve changed my mind. I don’t own my life at all, it’s other people who own it. And the best I can do with this fact is to like the situation. To believe it’s meaningful. Otherwise I can’t believe it’s meaningful to die for it.” “Is it important to you to feel it’s meaningful to die for what you call ‘the capital’?” “Yes. If I didn’t regard that as meaningful, then my existence here would be unbearable.” “And you want to have a bearable existence?” “Doesn’t everyone?” I asked.'

The comments of Elsa, who becomes Dorrit's closest friend, on how she became 'dispensable', despite a talent for diving that could have made her an Olympic medalist:

'"It was the experience of beauty and the slight sense of danger I wanted, not a load of trophies and medals and fuss. . . I would have become a great, positive role model for many young women, and would have been protected for the rest of my life. But I have to tell you, Dorrit, that I don’t regret getting out of that particular rat race for one single second. It’s not my thing, I’ve never understood the point of winning just for the sake of winning. What’s the point in putting all your energy into being better than other people at just one thing, which is in fact completely irrelevant?" '

In the wake the 'final donation' of a friend:

"My newly awakened hatred was now under control. It was lying beneath the surface, awake but resting. It had woken like a cat and it was resting like a cat: with its eyes half closed and its ears acting like periscopes, picking up the slightest movement, the slightest hiss, whisper or sigh."

Read Death of a Wine Merchant yesterday. It's a lively mystery, a return to good form by this author, whose last two mysteries in this series have been a bit too predictable, with some improbable twists. In this one, while the solution to who killed Randolph Colville, the wine merchant in question, is indeed a twist, it's not an improbable one, and Dickinson takes the reader on a suspenseful and intriguing enough journey to reach that destination -- through warehouses in London where shadowy figures concoct fake wines to the vineyards of France where the dead man may have had some mysterious secrets. There are a few ends left dangling, and the key piece of evidence comes too much out of the blue at just the right moment for me not to roll my eyes with incredulity, but this series is driven as much by character as by plot, and this time around, it all seems to 'click'. A solid four stars. If you're thinking of reading this series, however, you'll want to start right at the beginning, with Goodnight Sweet Prince. The earlier books are better. The first few are set in late Victorian days; this one in 1907. I'm wondering how Dickinson will handle the onset of WW1, which, judging by the pace, we're on track to reach in about five or six books' time.

Now I've moved on to a Soho Crime novel, The Collaborator of Bethlehem by an author who is new to me, a journalist who worked in the Middle East, Matt Beynon Rees. It's promising enough that I'm tempted to download the next three books in the series even though I'm only about a third of the way through the first one!

I enjoyed The Collaborator of Bethlehem, more for the look into a culture I really know too little about, as for the mystery itself.

The Ninni Holmqvist sounds good. I'm not sure when I'd get to it though. Not exactly related- Frozen: My Journey Into the World of Cryonics, Deception, and Death and Eternity Soup: Inside the Quest to End Aging have popped up on my radar screen. I enjoy tripping through these weird worlds more than I probably should.

> 95 -I know - I have Stiff: The Story of Human Cadavers in my TBR pile. Also one about obituaries (or maybe that's on my wishlist).

*touchstone didn't work - must not have the title exactly right - but you get the idea*

Yup, I'm starting to worry a bit about myself -- dystopias, crime... Anyone taking a look at my reading habits would probably start to hunt for a strait jacket and padded cell PDQ...

Finished The Collaborator of Bethlehem today. Absolutely outstanding, both as a novel and as a mystery (and the two don't always go together...)

Omar Youssef is in his mid-50s, a teacher at a UN school in Palestine's West Bank. He struggles every day with his conviction that the cult of violence is no way to combat historic injustices, even as he realizes that even in hopes of unmasking a murderer, he can't approach the Israeli authorities for assistance. Indeed, for a novel set in the West Bank, the Israelis are noticeably absent from the drama, which revolves around the tensions within the Palestinian community, all of which Rees does a superb job of delineating and distinguishing. When a young man -- a rebel and 'martyr' is gunned down outside his home -- all assume that he was betrayed, and that the culprit is a Palestinian Christian, a former student and close friend of Omar's. Omar can't bring himself to believe it, and the plot unfolds from there. Rees is obviously very familiar with life in the Arab West Bank, and does a tremendous job of portraying it from the nuances -- the mannerisms, the phrases -- to the bigger themes, such as the importance of tribe and relationships (the fact that fathers, on the birth of their eldest son, become known as Abu (name of son) as an honorific becomes an important turning point in the narrative). Rees doesn't shy away from violence or even tragedy, all of which are too much part of the real backdrop in which his fictional characters. Omar Yussef, however, even as he deplores what his students are learning outside the classroom ("there was such violence even in his girls that it shocked him. No matter how he tried to liberate the minds of Dehaisha's children, there were always many others working still more diligently to enslave them") has found himself a mission: being a voice of reason, no matter the cost.

I'll definitely be looking for the other three books in this series, and would recommend them very highly to anyone who likes a gritty mystery full of detail and compelling characters. (Not for anyone who is a cozy mystery addict, however...)

#98 oo sold! Are you going to add the review to LT (i.e. attached to the book)?

Done; thanks for the prod! I had meant to do so and then got distracted. I also downloaded the three other books overnight; they're now reposing tantalizingly on my Kindle, along with Rees's non-fiction book that seems to be drawn on his years reporting from the Middle East. Great to find a really informed writer who can actually make the leap to fiction so convincingly. *Memo to self: add to favorite writers category*

Just finished my second book in my reading in French category, and it blew me away -- it was one of those books that, even as you're reading them, you literally feel your brain expand with new ideas, new thoughts about how the author writes, the themes (s)he explores, their characters, etc.

In this case, L'échappée revolves around the story of a young Breton girl who, during the early 1940s when the Germans occupied France, finds herself working in a hotel in the town of Rennes. There she encounters a German military man who is also a professional pianist -- Joseph Schimmer -- and falls in love. Is it with the music that she discovers through him? with the idea of something new and different from her narrow existence? (Madeleine has never even seen the sea, after all...) Or is it with Joseph, himself? The first part of the book deals with their relationship; the second with its consequences, both for Madeleine and their daughter Anne, in the aftermath of the war when they must make their way in a world that despises the fact of her 'collaboration' with Schimmer, made visible in the very blonde Anne. In turn, Anne, far from concealing her parentage, parades it publicly...

This is a novel of ideas and characters, not events or external drama, dealing with the idea of escape and demarcation lines; addressing the relationships between mothers and daughters; exploring the issue of identity, of how life's experiences can leave you scarred in myriad ways. Goby concludes by presenting three different scenarios for the way Anne's later life plays out -- each of which is equally plausible to the reader.

There's a certain emotional distance between the characters and the events and the reader, which can become frustrating; at the same time, the story and characters are remarkably vivid. This is a beautiful novel -- almost an elegy -- that really deserves translation into English and a wider audience...

I may pick up on the post-war theme going forward from here, and read Anita Diamant's new novel. Or should I read The Kabul Beauty School? Or the ARC of Anne Perry's new book? Decisions, decisions...

Finished another novel revolving around postwar issues -- Day After Night by Anita Diamant. Essentially, it's a feel-good novel disguised as somewhat literary fiction. It's very predictable, from its opening scenes to its conclusion; a rehash of the ground covered by Leon Uris's Exodus, albeit from a different perspective. It's certainly fascinating narrative material, and there was room here to really delve deeply into how the four women who feature as Diamant's main characters might try to forge entirely new lives in a fledgling country, particularly given their traumatic pasts. (Only one was a concentration camp survivor, but all bear the scars of having survived, against the odds, the Nazi Holocaust.)

Instead, what I found were rather perfunctory character sketches; bit by bit, the full details of each woman's life is revealed. The writing was good, but the characters and situations were two dimensional and ultimately this is a book that did justice neither to its characters nor to the historic events. "Exodus" isn't a great novel either -- too much of a potboiler -- but there's more meat there than you'll find here. Even the parts that should be full of dramatic tension (is a woman with a Jewish child Jewish herself? Has a former camp guard smuggled herself into the midst of the victims to hide herself?) turn out to be too easily and patly resolved. There's nothing here to engage my attention, my emotions or, ultimately, my interest. The stars are for the writing and the structure; if it was for the characters and the plot, it would be 1 to 1.5.

Read an excellent mystery -- picked it up as soon as it arrived (just published) and devoured it in 24 hours or so. It's The Serpent Pool by Martin Edwards, the fourth book in a series of mysteries set in the Lake District of England, once home to Wordsworth, Coleridge and (less well known, but important for the story contained in this book), Thomas de Quincey.

I've not been able to get into his other series, but the Lake District books are models of what makes English mysteries excellent. They involve police procedure, but they aren't purely procedurals. They are suspenseful, but not suspense novels. In brief, they are character-driven novels revolving around a crime, but whose plots help advance a broader story involving the lives of the main characters. In this case, the cast includes DCI Hannah Scarlett and her boyfriend (or 'partner'), rare book dealer Marc Amos, as well as Daniel Kind, son of Hannah's former boss and a historian who has come to make a home for himself in the Lake District. The two share an attraction to each other that circumstances have tended to foil; nonetheless, each mystery brings them together in one way or another. In this case, it's because one of the victims turns out to have a close connection to Daniel's sister, while others have a tie to Marc: two are rare book collectors and one an aspiring writer, all of whom are found dead in ways that reflect their worst fears and nightmares. There's an underlying theme about de Quincey, a late 18th/early 19th century figure best known for his book Confessions of an English opium-eater, but who also wrote a much-anthologized essay about murder as the perfect art -- an essay that forms the heart of Daniel's latest project. Could the murderer be simply trying to perfect his or her art???

There are several English mystery novelists who are producing excellent and overlooked work right now. Edwards is one; a second is Ann Cleeves, whose Shetland Islands series I'm reading for my 75-book series, and the third is Susan Hill, whose series of novels (the fifth is due out this summer) features detective Ian Serailler, and which I'll be reading for this challenge. All of them deserve a lot more attention. Perhaps none are as polished as P.D. James or as dense as Elizabeth George, but they are gems of their kind. Highly recommended...

>103 Chatterbox: Since character development seems to be a series feature, do you recommend reading the books in order? The Arsenic Labyrinth has been on my TBR shelf for a while. It's the third book in the series. Should I locate books 1 & 2 and read them first?

It's helpful, but not necessary to read them in order. Like the Cleeves series, the mysteries are self-contained and while you'd miss out on a few nuances, you'd quickly pick up on the main strands -- unacknowledged attraction between Daniel & Hannah, the backstory involving Daniel's father, who left his mother for the woman who was the love of his life, creating a rift with his children. (No spoilers here; that's in the first pages of the first book.) If you can find the first book affordably -- I see it's about $5 used via Amazon -- I would read it first, just because there are one or two things that happen there that will be spoiled for you if you try and read it later. That one is The Coffin Trail. But there are no life-changing character development issues that force you to read in order after that. Sorry, long answer to a short question!!

I read The Coffin Trail last year and thought it was very good. I have the next two on my shelves, and now will have to track down The Serpent Pool. I have also read the first of Ann Cleeves's Shetland Island Series, and I agree that both these authors deserve more recognition. From your comments, I will also plan on searching for Susan Hill books, who is an author unfamiliar to me. Thanks Chatterbox, I always get such good info here on LT.

Whoops, my face is red - I just checked my massive wish list and I have all four of Susan Hill's books listed - I guess I just need to order them.

>105 Chatterbox: Thanks for such a thorough answer to my questions. I'm going to take you up on your advice and get hold of and read the first book before reading the one I already own. This sounds like a series I'll enjoy!

I hadn't heard of Martin Edwards. Thanks for the recommendation.

DeltaQueen, you might also really enjoy Howard's End is on the Landing by Susan Hill, a gem of a book about books and reading. You may have to order it from England, but hopefully Aphrohead or Book Depository has it to hand. (Touchstone doesn't seem to be working...) I reviewed it late last year, before the challenges started.

Finished The Kabul Beauty School by Deborah Rodriguez. What a disappointment. I was hoping this would be another Stones into Schools. Instead, as I just wrote in my review, this book shows the best intentions of Americans towards those in need of assistance; it also shows just how ill-conceived those are in practice and how foolishly and recklessly they behave in situations where they don't understand the rules. It's hard to believe that Rodriguez has any self-knowledge at all, or that her time in Afghanistan transformed her in any way (which you would expect to happen, and kind of the point of writing a memoir in the first place...) She is very blithe and glib about extremely serious matters, from her cheerful admission early on about the fact that she had no useful skills to bring to an aid mission to Afghanistan (other than an overwhelming desire to escape an abusive husband) to her apparently whimsical decision to marry an Afghan man with whom she can't communicate, after two failed marriages.

The story is about setting up a beauty school to train Afghan women to become economically self-sufficient. Rodriguez tells some fun stories about their training, but there's little follow up -- one offhand mention of how well her graduates are doing, but nothing more about their lives when they no longer intersect with hers on a daily basis. She lauds the women she is helping, their strength, etc., she seems to behave in ways that at best are culturally insensitive and at worst jeopardize the lives of those around her. At times, she seems to recognize her foolishness, and giggle at it. But for the Afghans around her, I can't imagine that flippancy was terribly helpful. It's hard to imagine that spending five years in Kabul didn't make her more culturally attuned to what was going on around her, or more fluent in one or more of the languages used in Afghanistan.

This is no Bookseller of Kabul, Asne Seierstad's thoughtful look at real life in Kabul; nor is it Stones into Schools, Greg Mortenson's chronicle of building schools for youngsters in the poorest parts of Pakistan, Kashmir and Afghanistan. Some describe it as heartwarming; I see a lot of self-congratulation. But then, when we give of our time and efforts, it's just as often out of our own needs and limited by our own perception of what is required, rather than listening to what the needs of the people we claim to be helping may be. Perhaps the women of Kabul did need a beauty school, but based on the evidence in this book, I'm far from sure that they needed someone like Rodriguez running it. This doesn't work as a book about current affairs, as I had hoped on adding it to my categories on a friend's recommendation -- it's too narrow. Nor does it work as a memoir, a genre in which the narrator should grow or undergo a transformative experience for the book to be compelling. It's like the worst of travel journalism: foreigner goes to 'exotic' place; 'helps' out; talks to 'real local' people and then makes money writing about it. 2.5 stars, mostly for the intriguing anecdotes that are stuck in around the sides of Rodriguez's misadventures.

As you can tell, this book annoyed me deeply. Rodriguez claims to be trying to help these women, but her attitude throughout the book is at once sentimental and patronizing. Learning lessons like 'it's hard to transform someone else's culture' shouldn't be done as an experiment in countries like Afghanistan, where civil society is precarious or non-existent and where every cultural misstep simply reconfirms all the worst impressions of foreigners.

Did she Learn Important Life Lessons from the Natives? That seems to be an ever-present element in these types of books. I am beginning to think that this type of book has killed off the adventure travel type book of the kind written by Rory Nugent or Eric Hansen (among many others). People who went to interesting places on an absolute shoestring and didn't try to change the culture in which they found themselves, but appreciated what they saw and continuously put themselves into iffy situations, not out of a kind of stunt-journalism, but out of curiousity.

The Bookseller of Kabul was excellent, in large part because Seierstad removed herself from the story. It wasn't a "look at me doing good deeds" but real journalism. I'm hoping to read The Angel of Grozny soon.

I haven't read a bad book by Seierstad yet... The Angel of Grozny is excellent.

I think Rodriguez's book would be better if she HAD learned Important Life Lessons from the Natives. As it was, she came, benignly bestowed hair care products and lessons in perming, and went. Without, it seems, conquering any of her own personality flaws. She seems more bothered by bad perms than (other people's) bad housing or sanitation... I'm sure I'm doing her a disservice (at least I hope I am), but this book was all about "me and my emotional reaction". Maybe that's part of the new reality TV/confessional writing trend and perhaps she was told her audience would only care if they saw the situation through American eyes. Well, not this part of the audience...

Yes, it does seem that "stunt non-fiction/memoir/travel" books have taken over the real adventure travel genre. I blame Bill Bryson, who put the "me" into travel stories. Even Paul Theroux doesn't get that carried away with himself in his books. His experiences are the window for us. It's like the difference between a documentary that is narrated and has someone like Michael Moore as part of the action, shaping the narrative and our reaction to it vs. one that simply shows what is. (Saw a great HBO documentary about life in Iran, revolving around Ahmedinejad's suggestion that ordinary Iranians should write to him about their problems -- it was FAR more revelatory than anything else I've read or seen about the country in the last four or five years and it was NOT narrated...)

Another disappointing book -- actually, a bigger disappointment, because I expected so much more from this author. I had an ARC of Anne Perry's new novel, The Sheen on the Silk, and it just... floundered. Too many subplots, too much confusion in focus, and too much purple prose. I've posted my review, findable via my reviews page. I should have loved this book, because I'm fascinated by the place and the era that she chose (13th century Byzantium), but anyone who isn't a devotee is going to struggle with either the downright Byzantine plot (using it the sense of complex & twisting) and the language. I found myself rating it 2.5 stars; rounding it up to 3 on Amazon.

Finished reading The Stolen Crown by Susan Higginbotham today. It was an impeccably-researched book, but otherwise not overwhelming. It reminded me a lot of a longer version of a Jean Plaidy novel -- everything there and accounted for, but I never really became engaged in the story as much as I had hoped it would. There are certainly better accounts of the Wars of the Roses -- indeed, historical fiction mavens have a host of them to choose from. I'd suggest Emma Darwin's book, A Secret Alchemy, although it frames the historical chronicle within a contemporary story. There is also Figures in Silk, which, for all its occasional faults, did a better job convincing me of the fact that these characters lived. Or Jan Westcott's book, The White Rose.

Read The Cellist of Sarajevo last night & this morning. I'm sure most people who might be reading this have already read it -- I found it wonderful. I know there is some controversy over the fact that the author didn't live in Sarajevo during the siege, isn't Bosnian, didn't talk to the cellist, etc., but I ended up not worrying about or even thinking about any of those issues as I read -- it was that strong a novel. The cellist's playing is really just the hub around which the lives of three other characters turn, to varying degrees -- three ordinary lives during the hell of a four-year-long siege. This is the kind of book that should be required reading in middle school, and then every two or three years after that, to remind future warmongers dictating the fate of others that real lives are involved, and to force themselves to address honestly the issue of whether the ends really do justify the means. Although I suppose if people were prone to listen to that kind of argument, I wouldn't need to come up with this as a proposed remedy in the first place...

Anyway, an excellent novel that does justice to its very weighty theme. I particularly enjoyed Galloway's ability to limit his focus to a few people, and a limited time frame. It has the same effect as looking at a Renaissance drawing by Holbein. Not distracted by the colors of the paint, you end up with a far better sense of the portrait subject's character and personality. The same with Galloway's characters.

>110 Chatterbox: Kabul Beauty School

oh, dear, I have this book too, but haven't read it yet. An ex was born in Kabul, so of course I had to get it . . .hopefully it has some redeeming qualities. . .

DS
(Bruce's evil twin :-))

Hi evil twin -- I'm sure there are some redeeming qualities... somewhere. But I'm also pretty sure there are better alternatives.

Meanwhile have finished Lynn Cullen's The Creation of Eve; got an advance copy from a friend. At times, this story really grabbed me -- the characters, the tone and the approach were very fresh and compelling. Unfortunately, the story, toward the end, just kind of collapsed and was rather unpersuasive. I'll still look out for more by this writer, who could easily address some of the structural problems and produce more consistent novels.

A quick summary: it's the story of Sofonisba, a young woman from Cremona who, after studying briefly with Michaelangelo, is dispatched to serve the new French-born queen of Spain. Elisabeth de Valois, at only 14, must find a way to navigate the cross-currents of an unfriendly court and a complex family (a family tree would have helped a LOT, but wasn't included in the ARC.) The story is told through the eyes of Sofi, who teaches the young queen to paint and who watches as her relationship with her husband and her brother-in-law change and evolve.

Cullen doesn't do enough to draw out what's at stake in the marriage -- the European balance of power -- although she's good at some of the smaller stuff, creating an excellent sense of the claustrophobic Spanish court. Nor, for all the emphasis placed on Sofi's role as an artist, is enough attention given in the narrative to the art which, theoretically, is at the heart of her life. I kept mentally comparing it with Alexandra Lapierre's novel (in French), Artemisia or even the wonderful evocation of an artist at work that formed part of Vanora Bennett's Portrait of an Unknown Woman. I was also a bit annoyed by something in the author's note: Cullen mentions that Phillip II has gotten a raw deal from historians (probably true) and that death tolls of Catholics were higher under the Protestant rule in England than those of Protestants in Catholic Spain. That ignores the fact that in Spain, the Inquisition persecuted for people for no reason other than their religion; and the fact that any Catholics executed in England suffered the penalty for treason -- it wasn't because of their religion, but because their religion had caused them to rebel against their sovereign. A big distinction.

I've rated this 4 stars; I'm feeling generous.

... and one more finished, Moka by Tatiana de Rosnay. The author made a big splash with Sarah's Key in the US; that was her first novel written in English. Her others are only available in French, although this one should easily find an audience anywhere -- it's an excellent drama. (Would also make a great film...)

It's not literature, but rather a poignant and reflective story that revolves around what happens after a 13-year-old boy, Malcolm, is knocked down by a car running a red light at a major Paris intersection. The story is told through the eyes of his mother, Justine, as she tries to understand what his being in a coma means, literally, and what it means for their peaceful family life. Her English husband, an architect, deals with his grief and fear one way; Justine, however, convinces herself that she can only help Malcolm emerge from his coma by confronting the person who struck him and who then fled the scene. And when she discovers that the culprit is another woman, her curiosity and anger becomes still more intense...

The title -- "moka" -- refers to the color of the car that hit Malcolm, but there are layers and shades of meaning throughout. It's one of the best narratives relying on the strength of maternal love that I've ever read, but de Rosnay is adept at combining that with observations of many other dimensions of Justine's life -- her work, her friendships, her marriage. By the end, the reader has a vivid impression of the main character and understands why she is convinced that the only path to follow is to confront the driver who has put her son into a coma herself -- and we follow as she sets off to do just that.

It's a gripping novel -- I've given it 4.5 stars. For anyone who is reasonably adept at reading French and looking for a book to read to improve their reading skills, this would be a good option -- it's a gripping story, and the style is straightforward and fluid enough to be readily followed. I'm hoping that some of her earlier books are translated and plan to pick up the newest one, that I haven't already read, Boomerang, after reading this.

No idea what I'll read next. Perhaps a mystery, or a biography...

I picked up The Calligrapher's Daughter and couldn't put it down again. It's a remarkable novel, based on the life of the author's mother, but a vivid chronicle of life in an aristocratic Korean family in the first half of the 20th century, as the Japanese tightened their grip on their new colony. Born as the Japanese overthrew the Korean monarchy, the narrator's father neglects to name her -- she eventually acquires, by default, the name of her mother's home town as her own. Najin must navigate between the old and the new worlds -- both in terms of the political pressures and the tug of war between new worlds now open to women and her father's ideas of what is correct. Kim's characterizations can't be faulted; she walks that delicate line between showing and telling the reader about the world she sets her tale, and deftly balances the story between what is happening in the bigger world and Najin's personal story.

Very highly recommended indeed. Najin's family are Christian converts to Methodism, so there are a lot of references to trusting in Jesus, faith in God, etc., but I found that to be in line with the time, place and characters. In other words, this is a great debut novel that happens to have characters whose religious faith is a part of their world (in much the same way that it would have been for characters in a novel set in medieval Europe), and Kim does an excellent job of portraying that, as well as Najin's occasional struggles with many of the most problematic elements of Christian faith. It's not a novel that only exists to drive home a Christian message, in case any readers feel concerned about that. On the other hand, for a Christian reader looking for an antidote to bland 'Christian fiction', this would probably be a welcome surprise.

All in all, an excellent novel, and one I'm delighted to discover. I hope that Kim can sustain this in her next book; it's sometimes hard to muster the same level of commitment, power and precision of style under a deadline pressure and when the book is perhaps the 'second-best' idea rather than the story an author has been living with and yearning to tell for years. I've got my fingers crossed, and this is a 4.5 star book for me.

I really liked your review. Will you put it up on the book's page?

Alison, tks for the kind words about the review, but probably will just keep it here. There are lots of reviews up for the book that give people a good sense of what it's about. I'm thinking about launching a book review blog, however, that would pull together all the reviews from here & from Amazon and more in one place...

Reading a great non-fiction book now...

Today's book: Read Death of an Englishman, which appears to be the debut of a series by the late Magdalen Nabb, set in Florence. This turned out to be very good, although it was slow going at first and it was a bit odd to have the Marshal Guarnaccia, evidently the main protagonist, sidelined by the flu in the first half of the book. Intriguingly, that turns out to be related to the solution of the death of the mysterious Englishman. It's a very straightforward mystery story, and a mystery that has a very straightforward solution, despite all the racing around done by the young student cop, Carabiniere Baci (who it would be fun to see more of in future books.) Ultimately, it's the Marshal's knowledge of human nature that solves the case.

The highlights of this short book are really the author's amazing skill in conveying a sense of place -- Florence, in the dark & wintry days leading up to Christmas -- and in conveying personality without giving readers too much insight into what the detectives or other characters are thinking. If most mystery novels of today -- think P.D. James -- are ornate oil paintings, this would be a pencil sketch.

I'll definitely read more of these, although Nabb's style is distinctive enough that I'll probably pace myself. Recommended to anyone looking for a new mystery series, or with an interest in the 'real' Florence (vs the tourist Florence, or the Florence of history.) 4 stars.

>122 Chatterbox: Added to my wishlist. I've been fortunate enough to spend a week in Florence with a relative who lived there for several years, so I've seen both tourist sites and places the locals hang out. I'm always on the lookout for books set there.

Finished two books for this list today!

The first was The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry. This was one of those books that made a big splash on publication, but on being read I discover to be intriguing but nothing more, really, than a classic plot dressed up in all kinds of fancy clothing, There are all kinds of fictional stunts -- an (extremely) unreliable narrator, shifting points of view, shifting time frames, a vague element of the supernatural and paranormal (albeit dressed up in literary garb; heaven forfend that anyone should see this as a mere supernatural novel...) All the characters are larger-than-life; so, too are the situations and plot twists. There are murders, suicides, wife-beating, smuggling of battered women and children in a modern-day Underground Railway, mysterious tunnels, witches, herbs, mind-reading, love, illness, twisted fundamentalists, mental hospitals... Someone needs to remind Barry that "less is more". Still, it was a decent enough novel; one that I think has been over-hyped. I'm glad to have read it -- it was intriguing enough in its own way -- but I won't be re-reading it. Essentially, it is really a version of the classic "woman in peril" novel, only far better written and dressed up with lots of fancy narrative elements and a walloping great plot twist at the end that, if this were a mystery, would have afficionados of the genre hollering "foul". This is a 3.5 star book.

In contrast, Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty was definitely a five-star book, both for its writing and the content. It's a fascinating and chilling indictment of our food aid policies and other well-intended efforts to help the 'developing world', that spells out in grim detail the irony of our policies. The bottom line: we would rather spend more to ship our surplus grain (produced to keep farmers well-off) at enormous cost to countries like Ethiopia and keep those populations dependent on those shipments than funnel cash to develop markets, irrigation techniques and new seeds that would make them independent and feed themselves. It's simply not in the U.S. national interest for that to happen... That's just one element of the story, of course, but it's at the heart of the problem that the authors identify: that to date, the only successful progress in reducing hunger and famine on a long-term basis has come from individual or grass-roots endeavors, and that government programs most often work against this goal even while paying lip-service to it. The book is stuffed so full of evidence, both anecdotes and data, that it strikes me as pretty much bullet-proof. It should be mandatory reading. I'll take some time to write a complete review and will link to it here when it's done, or cross post.

I've just starting reading the David Nokes bio of Samuel Johnson. It promises to be a very good book, based on the introduction and first chapter or two; it's sad to think that this good writer & scholar died last fall.

Chatterbox, did Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty discuss the ongoing genetically modified crops issues Africa is discussing and debating? It sounds like an interesting book. I've dipped into a few of the 'food is the new oil' books and some of the geopolitical patterns playing out. Like Saudi Arabia getting involved in Cambodian agriculture.

I always enjoy and learn from your discussions, Chatterbox. I certainly won't be reading The Kabul Beauty School;

*Learning lessons like 'it's hard to transform someone else's culture' shouldn't be done as an experiment in countries like Afghanistan, where civil society is precarious or non-existent and where every cultural misstep simply reconfirms all the worst impressions of foreigners.*

Just starting from the premise of transforming someone's (non-American) culture seems so ignorant and self-indulgent, as if American culture is the only one of value. And of course it is just such a narrow world view held by many Americans that helps to create so much anger and antagonism in the world.

On another subject, "The Unit" is on my WL and I look forward to comparing it to Never Let Me Go.

VisibleGhost, no, there is nothing specifically on GM crops per se, although there is a discussion about the ways that hybrid seeds were developed to optimize crop yields. Not GM per se, more selective breeding (the old-fashioned way...) There is an interesting discussion about the need to combine new irrigation techniques with other, environmentally benign farming methods. For instance, in their desperation to boost yields, some countries turn to slash and burn to clear land (which of course makes it hard to raise crops for more than a year out of every seven). So there's discussion about no-till farming (which allows for the organic material to die down and fertilize the soil naturally) and also how to use supplemental fertilizers as sparingly as possible, rather than just figuring that if a bit is good, more must be better.

There are so many fascinating elements to this book -- such as the way that scientists in Europe developed a new product for supplemental feeding in hunger-stricken areas called the "plumpy nut". It's like Nutella, but peanut-butter flavored and squeezed out of a container like ketchup or mustard individual packs (but bigger). That means that undernourished people can live in their own homes and be fed, that supplemental feeding isn't dependent on a clinic and on a ready supply of clean water. It's really amazing what is possible with ingenuity applied to the real problems.

One of the guys profiled in this book, Howard Buffett, steered my attention to it when I interviewed him for a philanthropy story last year. Interestingly, his brother, Peter, referred to the conventional top-down approach to solving these problems as 'philanthropic colonialism'. I still can't come up with a better word myself...

Kasey, yes, assuming that it is a good thing to transform a culture because it's not like ours is horribly narrow minded. I do, however, take note of when there are some things that are some kind of universal value -- child abuse, torture, etc. Having lived in Japan, it would always irk me to hear Westerners there say complacently that of course, feminism is a Western import, when at the same time I'd hear Japanese women upset at being fired from their jobs because they were "too old" at 25 or 26, or simply because they got married. A friend who topped the list of all men and women taking the foreign service exam in Japan was told she couldn't join the department because she was a woman. That's not me trying to transform anyone else's culture; that was them, part of that culture, saying they were unhappy with it. It's hard to know when to draw the line.

On a related note, I read a book about Pitcairn Island, home to the descendents of the Bounty mutineers. Current population is about 50; it takes days of travel by boat from anywhere (Tahiti; it's two weeks by boat from New Zealand). There was a big court case a few years ago, in which several men were accused of systematically having sex with the girls on the island as young as 10 or 12. Finally, some outsiders listened (this after decades of girls having their first child before they turned 14, a lot of rapes that led to sterility, etc.) and there was a prosecution. While reading the book, I came across a reference to author Colleen McCullough who is married to a descendant of a mutineer on 'neighboring' Norfolk Island (more than a thousand miles away) that it's the Polynesian custom to "break your girls in at 12." Leaving aside the fact that the Pitcairners don't see themselves as Polynesians, emphasize their British origins (and the fact that traditions of this kind, like female circumcision, are rarely denied in the places where they are the norm, much less kept secret, but treated more as normal), I was stunned by the comment that it's somehow routine, normal and completely acceptable for men of 30 or 40 to "break in" girls of 10 to 12. Heck, doesn't even happen in most parts of Polynesia (you're more likely to find girls of 12 experimenting with boys their own age or slightly older, not being treated as property.) I've worked as a volunteer with rape victims, and even with 12 year olds who have been abused -- they may not know enough to call it rape, but I've never encountered one who sought out this experience, especially from someone their father's age. Again, in this case, it was the girls themselves who were desperately looking for help, not the outside world just deciding it would intervene for no reason.

Sorry, long post!

Well, after all that dire stuff and after spending the last few days scrutinizing each word in my own book galleys, I needed some escapism. So turned to The Queen of New Beginnings by Erica James, an English chick lit writer. No big surprises here, this is formula fiction, pure and simple. But that's fine: it doesn't pretend to be anything else, no delusions of grandeur or literary merit. Plus, it's about relatively straightforward folks, rather than impossibly glamorous and impossibly wealthy types that seem to make up the world of American chick lit (eg Bergdorf Blondes by Plum Sykes.) James's characters are real people, with slightly larger-than-life or more dramatic personal crises, and while they achieve an implausible degree of contentment and resolution by the final pages, they are still people you can believe might exist somewhere out there and there's enough wit to make the bigger plot twists go down smoothly. So, a decent 3.5 star read for this book, which involves two characters coming to grips with their past traumas and learning how to start afresh.

Aha -- a triumph. After decades of trying, I have read, from cover to cover, another Henry James novel, The American. That would be the first by him I've managed to complete since reading Washington Square circa 1984...

I'm not sure why the Jamesophobia struck; perhaps it was his overly ornate prose, which sometimes gets in the way of the story for me, and often strikes me as far too mannered, even for his era. It's like watching a minuet when you could be watching a waltz: it just doesn't flow and I end up getting impatient.

That said, this turned out to be a fascinating enough novel that I was able to suspend my irritation with the style and read it all the way through. I don't know that there is really a likeable character in it, at least IMO. The ostensible hero, Christopher Newman, breezes through life expecting all around him to adapt to him and his world view, looking at everything around him with a degree of incomprehension and benignly irritating goodwill. He decides that he wants a wife, and that only a 'pearl' will do; someone unique, who will be the right ornament to his life; someone out of the ordinary. Quickly, at the suggestion of a friend's wife, he sets his heart on the unattainable, a member of the French aristocracy, for little apparent reason other than that he is assured she is a nonpareil, and he sees in her characteristics that he can view through his own lens. Frankly, had I been Claire de Cintre, I would have sent him packing, pronto. On the other hand, the de Bellegarde family -- especially Claire's mother and elder brother, the Marquis, the real villains of the piece -- are almost caricatures of the snobs of the ancien regime, rattling around in their old and musty hotel particulier in St. Germain. When they have put paid to Newman's pretensions, they point out to him -- in a statement both jeerworthy and yet piercingly true -- that he sought out their acquaintanceship, not vice versa. A very fine point, and one that leaves Newman bewildered and hostile, and the reader with a great "aha" moment.

There are a lot of points in this novel where I felt there were gaps -- elements that weren't convincing. I could, at a stretch, understand why Claire accepted Newman; why she later rejects him and her subsequent decisions made sense intellectually, but not emotionally. This is an artfully constructed plot -- James has several points to make -- and sometimes the characters and there actions are there as much to make the point as to tell a tale.

I enjoyed this enough to make me try to go back to some of James's earlier novels, at least -- but not quite yet. 4 stars.

Finished another escapist book, Chocolate Wishes by Trisha Ashley. What I like about this author is that her heroines are typically in their late 30s or even early 40s; aren't hunting for a man; are independent in spirit, etc., and their adventures, while told whimsically, are reasonably down to earth. This one isn't quite as good as some of her others, but it's still an amusing tale. Our heroine makes chocolate (her warlock grandfather, an odd touch, has given her Mayan spell that apparently makes them wonderful -- this was the part of the book that didn't work for me, although it makes for an amusing character, I suppose); her old flame arrives in her village unexpectedly and shakes up her comfortable existence. Not Ashley's best; if you're thinking of checking out her books, try Singled Out or Every Woman for Herself, which are real gems. This one gets 3.5 stars.

Finished Hugh Pope's new book, Dining with al-Qaeda. (There appears to be no Touchstone at all for this book, even when I tweak the spelling to something different or include the subtitle...) I had expected it to be solid reporting from his decades living in and writing about the Middle East, a bit like his last book about the Turkic peoples of Central Asia, the excellent Sons of the Conquerors, but this is a bit of a hybrid book, part the memoir of a journalist and part a book about the people and the issues he encounters.

Unlike Robert Fisk's massive The Great War for Civilization, which is a similar combination, this book doesn't benefit from an overarching theme that sets what has been happening in the Middle East in a broader, historical context. (On the other hand, Pope's revelations about Fisk's reporting, based on a story that he knew about personally and that almost got him expelled from Turkey, are rather eye-opening; Pope may share Fisk's affection for the region outside Israel, but their similarities seem to stop there.) It's well written, but the prose doesn't leap out as excellent. In other words, it's a solid, well-crafted but not immensely memorable, and Pope did better with his last book.

That said, some of the anecdotes and observations are fascinating and eye-opening. Pope talks an al-Qaeda recruiter out of murdering him in Saudi Arabia, and recounts spending five or six weeks trapped in a besieged town in southern Sudan; his first experiences living in Damascus, where he ended up in a rented room above a brothel, and his quest for the truth of the Persian/Iranian character by investigating a poet dead for centuries, the famous Hafez. While jumping back and forth in time too much, that is the best part of the book.

The journalistic memoir element doesn't work as well, since it's really endless variations on the same theme: the difficulty of publishing what Pope sees as the real stories about the Middle Eastern in European/US newspapers. Having worked for the paper that Pope discusses most often, and his final assignment (for longer than Pope did), I know that while its editorial pages have no interest in dissenting viewpoints, the news editors were looking for contrarian stories, and that if he couldn't get his articles the play they wanted on the front page, it was probably because they didn't pass muster on that front, not because the editors didn't want a story sympathetic to the Middle East outside of Israel or felt they weren't pro-American enough. Even to someone who shares many of Pope's beliefs about the deep foolishness of American policies in the region (as I do), this series of comments about foolish editors or people who didn't understand the region ultimately became wearing. On the other hand, I wouldn't rule out the fact that those outside the world of journalism might find it an interesting glimpse into the sometimes-ugly process of making the sausage (the news) that the rest of the world consumes.

This is a valuable book, despite its flaws, and I hope it won't sink without a trace as books that tell uncomfortable truths and don't cloak them in dramatic derring-do or splashy revelations have a habit of doing, far too often. A solid 4 stars. For anyone curious at all about Central Asia, I can unreservedly recommend Pope's previous book as the best/most approachable I've read, even though by now it's dated.

One more read. Finished The Song is You by Arthur Phillips. Despite a bumpy beginning and a plot that admittedly strains the bounds of credulity (sorry, but I don't think any 20-something singer is going to actively encourage the obsession of a 40-something guy to the extent imagined here -- perhaps a bit of wish fulfillment??) I ended up enjoying this. It's a combination of wit and whimsy, as Julian goes through his own version of a midlife crisis following the death of his young son and the breakup of his marriage. Encountering Cait, an Irish singer on the verge of making it big, suddenly jolts him back to life in a way -- his revival is mirrored by the seasons, by his relationship to music. While I enjoyed the description of someone's visceral connections to music and how we develop a soundtrack to our lives, I'm sure I didn't get all the many clever (and sometimes coy) side references and winks to the rock/pop/indie cognoscenti in here, but that's OK. It is possible to be too self-consciously witty and clever for one's own good, and that is this novel's biggest weakness. Nevertheless, despite being about the ways we become obsessed and the fact that only Julian really emerges as a 'real' character, I ended up enjoying this book. I don't think Phillips is brilliant, merely witty and observant, but sometimes that's the recipe for an entertaining novel. 4 stars.

The book du jour was Shadow Princess, a new release by Indu Sundaresan. This follows after her two other novels set in the Moghul Empire, Feast of Roses and The Twentieth Wife. It covers the same ground as Beneath a Marble Sky by John Shors, but I think it's much better. It's the story of what happened to the family of Shah Jahan and his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal, after the latter's death in childbirth -- the construction of the Taj Mahal or luminous tomb, is in the background, but this is really the story of Jahanara, the princess and favorite child of Shah Jahan. This is an Amazon Vine book, so I owe them a review first; my early comments are that this is a mixed success. There is a rivalry between Jahanara and Roshanara that could have been developed but isn't and then the ending of the book feels very rushed. I enjoyed this, but it felt a bit skeletal, in terms of plot, and some of the supporting characters aren't well developed. I'm feeling generous, so I'll give it 4 stars, because Jahanara herself is a great character and because of the period detail, which is amazing. Read the first two books first, I'd suggest, although this can stand on its own.

131- The Great War for Civilization (1,300 pages!) sounds like it might be worth tackling. Like I really need another 1,000 page book sitting around. Still, there's something about wordiness I find appealing sometimes.

Oh, I absolutely loved The Twentieth Wife and Feast of Roses! I will be on the lookout for Shadow Princess - thanks for the heads up.

DeltaQueen; I may have an extra copy of Shadow Princess -- I'll figure that out & if so would ship it to you for a PaperbackSwap credit. (I was going to post it on there; there are already a dozen or so folks looking for it.) Send me a PM if you're interested.

Have just added Sons of the Conquerors to my wishlist but will skip his latest one. Hope his talk is good! (I'm guessing it's for this book.)

Yup, it is! It will be interesting, anyway.

Just finished The Reader by Bernhard Schlink. I had downloaded the book in the movie theater, during the discussion that followed a premiere of the film in NY -- one of my examples of how Kindle ownership provokes impulse book buying... -- but then had never read it, I suspect because the movie was so powerful and so.... comprehensive. The story line was clear, and it was hard to imagine a book that could feel different, vs. just like reading the raw material for a screen treatment.

I finally picked this up over the weekend. While I'm glad I waited, it reminded me yet again why no film can ever live up to a very, very good book (vs making a so-so book or a bad one look better than it is.) There were all kinds of nuances to this book that I expect to find myself thinking about in odd moments for months to come. Since I don't know how many people have seen the film, I'll try to deliver a spoiler-free summary/review, although the major plot twist is also the spoiler...

The first third of the book is set in an anonymous German town/city, and the setting could almost be any time in the three decades that followed the end of World War II, barring one or two tiny references. Essentially, you wouldn't know this was the 1950s, when the country was still struggling with its past. All Michael Berg, aged 15, is struggling with is recovering from hepatitis, his schoolwork and his popularity among his friends. Hanna Schmitz, a 36-year-old tramdriver, ends up contributing to all of these: he falls in love with the older woman who helps him home after he's sick in her vestibule; as well as discovering sex (and confidence) with her, he reads to her, helping him prepare for his crucial exams. Then one day, Hanna vanishes and Michael assumes that it's because he has been drifting away from her; that he has betrayed her somehow by his wish to spend uncomplicated time with his new friends. The second third of the book is about discovery -- discovery of the truth of Hanna's past, and of the reason for her sudden departure from his life, which turns out to be less than he had melodramatically associated with him than he had self-indulgently believed -- but more dramatic. If the second third of the book is associated with Michael coming to terms with the past -- both his own and that of his country, because it's in this section that the narrative is firmly located in the 1960s, the era of the first war crimes trials held by the Germans themselves of their own citizens -- then the final one revolves around coming to terms with it. Ultimately, I found myself revising my views of both Hanna and Michael and what their limitations and real crimes actually were, in ways that surprised me.

This is an excellent novel, and goes straight into my memorable reads of the year category. The only missing element for me was some kind of explanation or clue as to Michael's character. Why was it that he remained so obsessed with Hanna (to the point that his later relationships, well into adulthood, foundered because the women weren't like Hanna)? Why was he, as he describes himself, numb and emotionless; even cold? Perhaps this is intended as a reflection of Germany's 'next generation', those who grew up and into an awareness of the crimes of the Nazi regime in which their parents must have participated, wittingly or unwittingly. But that's just a hypothesis; Schlink didn't give me, at least, enough to work with to understand that. Hence I've given this 4.5 stars rather than 5. But it's still highly recommended; a haunting novel, if not a warm and fuzzy one.

Wow, I'm two for two here. I simply loved Death of a Red Heroine; so much so that I went out and bought all of the other books in the series I didn't already own. The book is set in Shanghai of 1990, a city that is still uneasily juggling its Communist Party existence with the new realities of the market economy. That's the conflict at the heart of the (dead) title character, a model worker at a major department store. What will her role be as a model worker becomes less someone to emulate than someone to mock? I loved the way the Qiu blends details on daily life in China at the time, from restaurants to poetry, into the narrative. There's also a lot about the political situation, in how it affects Chen and his sidekick, Yu, as well as the outcome of their investigation. This is a very intriguing and different kind of mystery that I adored, but that some who prefer their police procedurals to be straightforward may find frustrating. The solution may be obvious halfway through the book, but it's how Chen and Yu achieve a resolution that is surprising, fascinating and ultimately chilling. This is a novel that is as much a look inside a changing China through fiction, as it is a straightforward detective story. Highly recommended, 4.5 stars.

>139 Chatterbox: I love this series! I've read the first three so far, and plan to read the fourth one soon. I have an Asian category in my challenge partly because of this series.

I too loved Death of A Red Heroine. I plan on reading the rest of the series one of these days ...

>139 Chatterbox:, 140 & 141 - With such glowing reviews how could I not add Xiaolong Qiu's books to our wish list! We really loved Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang and Xiaolong Qiu's books sound like a good way to introduce ourselves to a little more culture of modern China. And really who doesn't lkove a good mystery or 6!

Thanks!

DS

(Bruce's evil twin :-))

It's an excellent, wonderful series, and I'm going to have a hard time resisting the siren call of book #2...

Finished Long Time Coming today, one of my escapist reads. This is by a long-time favorite author, Robert Goddard, who specializes in incredibly complex suspense plots that blend a past crime or mishap and with more recent events -- often the characters find themselves having to delve back into the past to solve a contemporary crime or puzzle that threatens them, in a very Hitchockian "ordinary guy in extraordinary circumstances" way. Not all the 20 or so novels (each of which is a stand-alone book) are topnotch -- I'd single out his first book, Past Caring, Hand in Glove and Into the Blue as his best -- but this is excellent, far better than the last one. In this case, Stephen Swan returns home to southern England from a stint working in the United States in the spring of 1976, only to find an unexpected guest at his mother's B&B: an uncle that his parents had told him had been killed in 1940, during the Blitz. It turns out instead that the improbably-named Eldritch Swan had been imprisoned for life in Ireland for a crime that he can't or won't disclose to anyone, but of which he insists he was not guilty. Not that Swan was an innocent man -- but what was he guilty of, and for what was he set up? That question becomes more pressing as Stephen helps his uncle with what seems to be a simple task (except that nothing in Goddardland is ever what it seems) that will put him on his feet financially, only to awake sleeping plotters and schemers. There's a mixture of World War 2 skulduggery and missing/forged Picassos at the heart of this thriller, and some intriguing characters. Reading this is a bit like peeling an onion -- every time you remove one layer, there's another one there. It requires a bit of patience; it's more like playing chess than a quick game of checkers or a video game. But I found it rewarding. 4 stars.

I am also a big fan of Robert Goddard, I think I liked In Pale Battalions best, but perhaps that is because it was the first Robert Goddard I read. I have noticed that his last few books weren't quite up to par so I am glad to hear Long Time Coming is good.

143, 144> Count me as liking Goddard, too, on the basis of the single book of his I've read (In Pale Battalions).

One day at the bookstore where I work I was putting the mystery section back in order when I came across it and, on impulse, bought it right away. I also read it right away -- and I have books I bought in the '90s that I haven't read yet -- and put it on staff recommendation at the store right away.

I plan to read more; it's exactly the twisty plots and the blend of past and present he uses that I enjoyed.

I've only read one of his works also, Dying to Tell, and liked it enough to want to read more but just haven't gotten around to it yet. Maybe I'll pick this one as the next one to try. Thanks for your review.

The only beef I have with any of Goddard's books is that the complexity of their plots makes them very hard to re-read! I just managed to re-read Past Caring for only the second time in 20 years. Next up for a re-read is In Pale Battalions.

Finished Ross King's biography of Machiavelli: Philosopher of Power last night. It's a very straightforward and accessible bio, one that emphasizes chronology and his life experiences with only occasional forays into his work. Anyone looking for more context on The Prince will find relatively little here (although some of the earlier chapters and the conclusion are interesting), but it's a vivid portrayal of the Italy that he inhabited, a place we now tend to see as fascinating, think of the art/architecture it produced, but too often forget was lawless, violent, and often terrifying as wars and disease (notably the newest arrival, syphilis) swept across it at frequent intervals. King also clearly identifies Machiavelli as the first humanist to write this kind of manual for rulers (we tend to forget this was a tradition going back to Thomas Aquinas, but good old Niccolo took a completely different perspective...) An excellent read for newcomers to Machiavelli, as it makes him human and not just the quasi-conspiratorial and sly manipulator he is perceived to be. I'm glad I read this; it will help me get back to Paul Strathern's The Artist, the Philosopher and the Warrior, which is about the ways that the lives of Machiavelli, Cesare Borgia and Leonardo da Vinci overlapped and affected each other. The latter was good, but dense, and I bogged down in it, so plan to give it another try later this year. Meanwhile, this relatively thin bio is 4 stars.

Hmm, Goddard sounds very interesting ... added to the wishlist!

I've just been over on BookCloseouts.com, where they are having a $1.99 book sale, and there is a Goddard title available there -- Name to a Face -- for $1.99.

Finished The Confessions of Catherine de Medici by C.W. Gortner today. It's an LT Early Reviewers book, so I'll have to pull together a review and post it, but probably not tonight as I've got a deadline for a column tomorrow and an early morning start. I'll link to the review when I post it, but briefly: a solid 4-star read. This is a compassionate/revisionist view of Catherine, who essentially reigned/ruled in 16th C. France at the time of the St. Bartholemew's Day Massacre of Paris's Protestant population. Many books about her, like The Devil's Queen by Jeanne Kalogridis focus on her early years, when she was trapped in a menage a trois with her husband's mistress, and is alleged to have dabbled in poisons and black magic. Gortner, in contrast, emphasizes the way in which her difficult upbringing shaped her, and her later de facto rulership of France at the time that Elizabeth Tudor ruled England, as Catherine attempts to steer an even course between the competing religious factions and keep the pernicious Guise clan out of power. It's an intriguing view of Catherine, but probably only of interest to those who are historical fiction afficionados.

I am so jealous! I just got Moda a Firenze 1540-1580: Lo stile di Eleonora di Toledo e la sua influenza (English and Italian Edition) last month. And I think Cahterine de Medici would be a facinating subject.

DS

(Bruce's evil twin :-))

Finally finished the biography of Samuel Johnson by David Nokes, one of a few volumes that were published on the tercentenary of his birth last year. It's an excellent bio, although very dense; a few times I had to put it down for a couple of days. Still, Nokes doesn't get bogged down in trivia, like Johnson's myriad health problems or the witticisms painstakingly chronicled by Boswell; rather, he moves in a straightforward, chronological fashion through Johnson's life, examining from every possible angle the major events of his life, his almost perennial struggles to escape poverty and pursue his literary projects, including the great Dictionary for which he is known. But there's also an extensive discussion of his many other works, from the Rambler essays to the lives of the poets, his final major work, as well as the literary exchanges with figures like Hester Thrale. Nokes, who died last year, does an excellent job. Recommended to anyone who is curious about Johnson and his circle, which included actor David Garrick and writer Oliver Goldsmith, as well as Frank Barber, the freed slave who ended up as the major heir of this conservative thinker's estate. A great picture of 18th century London here as well. 4.5 stars.

And the halfway point is marked with an escapist read, A Murderous Procession. This is the fourth in a series of 12th century mysteries by veteran author Ariana Franklin (who also has written under the name of Diana Norman). Her main character is Sicilian-born Adelia Aguilar, a trained physician who is sent to Henry II's England in response to the latter's request for someone with the skills to cure illness and investigate mysterious deaths. Over the eight or so years covered in the previous books, Adelia has built a new life for herself and her young daughter, when Henry announces he wants her to travel back to Sicily, this time in the train of his daughter, Princess Joanna, who is going to marry the king. The problem is that an enemy from Adelia's past, now playing a new role, will be among the large party of nobles and clergy -- and he won't stop at anything to exact his revenge on her. This is a historically fascinating read, as the journey and Adelia's adventures take her through not only Norman France but south to Aquitaine and then to the Languedoc, just as the Cathars are beginning to be persecuted for heresy, before reaching its climax in Palermo. This is a thumping good read, and easily the best in this series of mysteries, although I wouldn't recommend reading it without having read previous books, as too many plot and character details will be obscure. 4.5 stars.

OK, I have got to add that series at last - I've seen so many raves on here. I got Mistress of the Art of Death out of the library just before we moved here and didn't get time to raed it.

A hex on you!!!! (Hmmm, not sure if hex is the right period. Maybe fie on you?)

>154 Chatterbox: I'm glad to hear that the latest Ariana Franklin is a good one. I think I've progressively liked each one better, and wondered if she could keep it up.

Have you read any of her Diana Norman books? I looked them up a while ago, and thought some of them sounded interesting, but I haven't read any -- or even added them to my wishlist (yet).

>156 ivyd:, I've read as many of the Diana Norman ones as I can get my hands on -- a few of her older ones are out of print and extremely expensive, when they are available. I'd try the trilogy that begins with A Catch of Consequence. Makepeace is like Adelia, an outspoken and independent-minded woman in a world that doesn't always appreciate that -- late 17th Century colonial America and England. Tehe series goes right up to the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution. The Vizard Mask is an interesting take on the Restoration era; there's another one, Blood Royal, which involves a Jacobite conspiracy and the South Sea Bubble and isn't quite as good, IMO.

Cushla, if you hex me, you will be burned at the stake... (we are talking about the 12th Century here...)

Oh yeah, I forgot about that. OK, no hex!

>157 Chatterbox: Thanks for the information and recommendation. I've now added them to my wishlist.

I didn't know Diana Norman and Ariana Franklin were one and the same! I loved Diana Norman's The Pirate Queen and Daughter of Lir when I read them quite some years ago. I must make a note to move Ariana Franklins' books up on my wishlist!

And, continuing with the Henry II theme, I went on to read The Captive Queen by Alison Weir, a historical novel focusing on Eleanor of Aquitaine. I admit I had hoped for great things, which is why I ordered this from the UK rather than waiting for its US publication date later this year. After all, Weir has written two rather good historical novels as well as some lively biographies (most recently The Lady in the Tower, about Anne Boleyn's fall from power). Those bios included one about Eleanor, a fascinating 12th C. queen of both France and England, mother to Richard (the Lionheart) and the evil King John. But while this novel grew on me as it progressed, it didn't grab me from the outset, perhaps because it opened very abruptly with Eleanor meeting her future second husband at the French court, alongside her husband, instantly falling in lust and then into bed with him. It felt almost like a one-night stand with a novel's character -- what am I doing with this character who I hardly know at all, following her into her fantasies and bedroom romps?? Ultimately, the book evolved into an intriguing look at the marriage of Henry II and Eleanor (it begins with their meeting and ends with his death) in which Eleanor is first a captive in a rhetorical sense (limited by the mores of her time and by her passion for Henry) and then literally, after their sons rebel against their father. But ultimately, having read a lot about Eleanor over the years, there was little that was new or to make this novel feel fresh in the same way that Weir's previous fictional outings shed new light on their well-known subjects (Lady Jane Grey and the young Elizabeth Tudor). Weir says in her author's note that she hoped to expand on the themes in "The Lion in Winter" to cover the couple's entire marriage, but ended up reminding me what a good film that was rather than making me think what a good book this was. Perhaps it would have worked had Weir taken the same approach that she did in Innocent Traitor and used the perspective of many of those around the couple to comment on their marriage?

Despite all these caveats (and I admit there are a lot of them), the second half of the book was strong enough for this to be a four-star book; I think the disappointment is partly because my expectations were very high. Weir can write fiction better than most historical novelists, but compared to a 5-star bravura performance in Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, which immerses the reader in the time and place, this falls short. Recommended to historical fiction afficionados only; this would be a reasonably good introduction to Eleanor, although I'd still suggest reading the Angevin series by Sharon Penman, staring with When Christ and his Saints Slept in preference. That series starts with Henry II's mother, Matilda, and the English civil war that was the backdrop to Ellis Peters's famous Cadfael mysteries.

Finished Les âmes grises, by Philippe Claudel, for my French book challenge. I think it kept the original title in translation in the UK, but in the US it appears to be published as By a Slow River. It's a rambling novel, a first-person rumination by a former criminal investigator, thinking back to the events of February 1917, in the town of "V". From a ridge above the town, it's possible to look out toward the trenches where the First World War is being bloodily fought, but the novel's focus is on the tragedies that occur behind the front lines. The town's residents can hear the guns, see the puffs of smoke, see the soldiers tramping to and from the front lines, but the deaths they must deal with prove still less easy to accomodate. Ostensibly, the novel revolves around the murder of a young girl, Belle; but who is the real culprit? And who is the real victim? The final pages pack an astonishing punch. It's a bleak little book, in its own way a tribute to the bleakness that was left by WW1 itself -- the sense of emptiness and numbness replacing hope and other active emotions. Claudel captures that brilliantly. His prose is opaque and repays careful scrutiny in French; I'd suggest tackling this in English to get the full flavor of his ideas and the impeccable character sketches which recur throughout. The original title refers to the comment by one character to the narrator that souls are neither black nor white, but always grey; to me, it also conveys the sense of a winter of the soul. This is book #52 for my 1010 Challenge (which is separate from this 75-Book Challenge.) 4.5 stars.

If anyone is interested in reading other stuff about the fallout from WW1 in France, specifically, I can recommend either The Englishman's Daughter by Ben Macintyre (whose Operation Mincemeat I read and reviewed for this challenge), a non-fiction book to which I'd give 4 stars, and the 5-star Un long dimanche de fiancailles by Sebastien Japrisot, aka A very Long Engagement. The book is MUCH better than the film.

>161 Chatterbox: I loved The Lion in Winter! Timothy Dalton, so young! And I really loved the line where one son says something along the lines of but he has a knife and his mothers response is something like - it's the 12th century, we're barbarian's we all have knives!

I just read Duchess of Aquitaine that a friend recommended (it's a novel though it doesn't make any historical claims - good thing too.) She loved it, me not so much.

I could swear that I had at leset one book on Eleanor but I can't seem to find any, so if I do have one it is in the mass of books not yet entered in LT. I will have to put the Sharon Penman books on my ever expanding wish list!

Thanks!

DS
(Bruce's evil twin :-))

Yes, Duchess of Aquitaine was a not so great one, IMO. There's a very slim book by Norah Lofts that has just been reissued, at least in England -- Eleanor the Queen. A better one is Beloved Enemy by Ellen Jones, although it ends before Henry locks Eleanor up for a decade. (There was supposed to be a sequel, but it has never materialized.) The great Cecilia Holland has a book about Eleanor coming out later this year, which I'm hoping will be better than Weir's. Christy English has a new book, The Queen's Pawn, but it's sounding as if it's more romance than real historical fiction. (Wolf Hall is my new gold standard for the latter!)

I just added The Englishman's Daughter to my wishlist. It does look interesting and the LT oracle is pretty sure I'd love it.

For WWI, I'd add Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks and Pat Barker's excellent Regeneration trilogy.

>165 RidgewayGirl:, yes both of those are great stories of life in the trenches. The others I suggested are more about the impact of the war on those who live behind the front lines, and most cope as civilians with the war. It's a POV that I haven't seen that much, although there is excellent writing about life in the trenches or on the home front in England (like Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth).

One of a tiny handful of re-reads on this list (all are concentrated in the dystopias/World War I categories) is Never Let Me Go. It's one of those rare books that is even better the second time when, knowing what happens, I could rediscover all of Ishiguro's careful writing and the elegant way in which he unfolds the prosaic horror of his imagined universe, one in which the narrator, Kathy H., and her friends are literally cloned in order to produce organs for "normal" people who need them. Their lives will be artificially curtailed by this -- they will go from their special schools, isolated from the rest of society, into working as carers for their elders and peers, and then beginning making donations before they 'complete'. What makes this both more and less chilling simultaneously, and a touch of genius on Ishiguro's part, is the first person narration (a feature of many of his novels, which rarely works better than it does here.) We see/hear the story of Kathy's life through her own eyes, as she looks back over its course, and for the first third or half of the book, the fact that her fate is to be a donor is only slowly and obliquely revealed -- at once accepted as normal and yet not discussed. She is looking back at her formative years at Hailsham; at first, the reader might see it as simply a kind of boarding school until realizing, through Kathy's offhand comments, that the students have lived there their entire lives; that they have no contact with the outside world, and that their "guardians" appear to play the role of parents, encouraging them to form a tight-knit unit and training them to hold themselves apart. Ultimately, it's a love story, but I defy anyone to read this and not stop to think afterward about the meaning of their own life.
It's a disturbing vision and a brilliant book; an impeccable novel. 5 stars.

Finished The End of Wall Street by Roger Lowenstein. Not as good as I was expecting, given the author's amazing book about the Long-Term Capital Mgt crisis and the fact that his brain is literally three sizes that of any other financial journalist I know. Still, it's a more thorough look at the chronology of the crisis than Sorkin's book, with a broader focus/context, and more analysis. I'd say this would be the best "one stop shopping" book about the crisis, although it's less lively/entertaining than Michael Lewis's. Roger does, however, provide notes on his sources and an index... A good, solid book that covers all the bases, from CDOs to bailouts. I may be jaundiced by the fact that I've now read so many crisis books, but I'm giving it 4 stars.

Now in Salt Lake City to do some work, but before leaving I finished another escapist read, Lovers and Newcomers by Rosie Thomas. This is an escapist chick lit read by an author whose books I've fallen into the habit of buying. Some are better than others; this one intrigued me at first due to the fact that its main characters are sixty or so, and facing the reality that their lives never lived up to their dreams. It's a group of university friends who decide to pool their resources -- of course, this being dramatic chick lit, relationship conflicts ensue. It's good, but not great; sometimes too repetitive. 3.5 stars.

Another escapist read -- but hey, I am on a work-related/reporting trip! The latest book by Susan Hill, and fifth in her Simon Serailler series, The Shadows in the Street is another very good book in which the characters and personalities are given as much attention as the mystery itself. You'll get the most out of this book if you've read its predecessors, for that reason alone. Simon Serailler is a cerebral detective, a bit of a loner, with a close bond with his newly-widowed sister, Cat (a physician), but a more distant relationship with his aging father thanks to some family issues developed in the early books. The family is at the heart of this story -- in different ways they are caught up with the disappearances and murders of several women, at first, prostitutes and later on, 'ordinary' women. While I did suspect who the culprit was, that didn't bother me, as I was curious about the people who inhabit the book and wanted to learn more about them. There are some loose ends involving some of them -- why does Les, the librarian, want to take tea and sandwiches to the prostitutes out on the stroll? Hill hints, but doesn't explain as clearly to readers as she should -- but nothing that interfered with my enjoyment of this book & series, which I'd definitely recommend to fans of P.D. James. 4.5 stars.

If you are still in Salt Lake, I recommend you make time to visit Sam Weller's bookstore in downtown SLC. But take plenty of money with you! It is a fabulous place to visit. Lots of books by local authors, lots of Utah history and LDS stuff, but lots of great used books of all genres. Seriously one of my favorite places in the city.

CM, thanks for the tip -- I wish I had had time... However, I don't think I could have squeezed another book into my bag on the trip back. As it was, the plane was so full that they confiscated my carry-on at the gate, and I ended up carrying my laptop, camera and all kinds of dangling power cords on to the aircraft... I did find a good day spa for a massage that zapped my migraine, and a great steakhouse, on my last evening, so that made me happy. 10 days here, then off to St Croix for my only vacation this year, then back to deal with my book launch. gulp.

Maybe next trip!

The next trip will probably be in the fall, assuming I find a publisher for the genealogy book and survive the launch of book one in, gulp, only five weeks.

One more to add to the escapist category (which I suspect is going to include a lot of my reading in the coming weeks, based on my addle-pated state this week...) Finished One Day in May by Catherine Alliott. which is a rather good chick lit book (or else I was just in the mood for this book.) Hattie is a single mother with a teenage son, an interior design business and a secret in her past. Usual chick lit fare, questions about men, etc. etc. A few improbable dei ex machinae, including an exploding shotgun, but still a quite good book that I'd label a 'thumping good read' and the author's best since her first book. 4 stars. Recommended as fluff.

Finished Midnight Girls, another escapist read by Lulu Taylor. I thought Taylor's first chick lit book was a fun romp; this one was just silly. Three schoolfriends, followed for a decade as they grow up, go shopping, seek husbands, blah blah blah. 3 stars. Mindless entertainment for a holiday, but that's it.

Murder in the Marais by Cara Black. This ended up being a big disappointment. A potentially intriguing plot, involving the Jewish community in the Marais area of Paris, the events of 1942 and 1943, and a private investigator probing those and the resurgence of a neo-Nazi movement 50 years later. But the choppy writing and lackluster characterization (we get very spotty details of what Aimee Leduc wears or what she does and doesn't like, in lieu of real character development) makes this a not very enjoyable first book. Who is the dwarf that she works with and why does she work with him? The very peripheral love interest is downright bizarre. Basically, an annoying book. 2.8 stars, because there were points when it all clicked together and worked -- perhaps 20% of the time; the core plot, once revealed, was also intriguing (even though I instantly realized who the culprit was...) Don't think this is a series that I'll be following.

I continue to enjoy reading your reviews (and adding to my wishlist) and wish you the best of luck and joy with your upcoming book launch. I'd love to hear more of the preparations as you continue along on this thread.

Yeah, that Aimee Leduc series is perfect in theory, but disappointing in reality. I will confess that after the first few chapters I only kept reading for the descriptions of Paris. It's perhaps the only book where I skimmed the action sequences and lingered over the descriptive paragraphs. Do you think that the series improves with time?

#177 -- Thanks, Kasey! Only three weeks to go; went through 'media training' (so I can survive TV interviews) on Tuesday. Saw an advance of the Booklist review, which is (sigh of relief) a rave; awaiting something that is supposed to be in BusinessWeek this week (Friday is newstand day). So it's all very tense right now.

#178 -- I dunno about this series improving. I would like it to, and I do have one more that I downloaded onto my Kindle before reading the first (won't make that mistake again). I agree with you about the Paris scenes, but that wasn't enough to do it for me. I know the Marais (though I'm more of a Left Bank afficionado) and love the area where Aimee Leduc lives on the ile Saint Louis, but she didn't really capture the atmosphere of either as well as I had hoped. Even Diane Johnson did much better in Le Divorce and Le Mariage. There are lots of other books I'll read before I pick up another Cara Black novel, alas. Including the one I just started, The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman, which is a brilliant debut novel.

#179 I remember taking media training. My favorite tip was: answer the question you want to answer, not necessarily the one asked.

Will it be reviewed in Publishers Weekly?

Can we get advance knowledge of any tv interviews you might do? It would be so cool to watch you! Congrats on the rave review. Please continue with more updates; when I buy your book it will be especially meaningful for having followed even a small part of the process.

Thanks, Kasey

I know that I'll be doing Morning Joe, the MSNBC morning show, on the day of publication (June 15). Other than that, stuff is up in the air -- the publicist is doing the juggling, happily for me!

Linda -- exactly. I have to practice my bullet points and messages this weekend, and bolster them with the right anecdotes. So you know how I'll be spending the Memorial Day weekend... :-)

Well, I'll watch and cheer you on. Best of luck! I'm sure you'll do fine, the fit between writing and appearing on television being such a natural one!

#183 -- actually, I think writing is a solitary pursuit -- sitting and staring at a piece of paper or the computer screen and beating up my own brain until some kind of idea pops to the forefront. While television means having to be articulate orally instead of in writing. I can cope with the latter, but the former terrifies me.

Anyway...

Finished The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte. I remain ambivalent about it, although at least I can now tell the Spanish friend who has been nagging me to read Perez-Reverte's books that I've started. (She waxes rhapsodic about his ability to capture the essence of Seville, where she now lives.) Parts of this book blew me away, including the sheer imaginative power it took to create the plot(s) and the descriptions of Paris, which while not extensive are v.v. evocative. If most mystery novel plots resemble a game of checkers, this is chess at a world-class level. Perez-Reverte plays with the line between 'fact' and 'fiction', multiple plots that may or may not be linked, characters who are (or may not be) what they seem. I wish I'd thought of reading The Three Musketeers before this; still, that wouldn't have addressed my only gripe about the book, the same occult elements that I found annoying when I tried to read The Da Vinci Code. This is a much more erudite book by a far more accomplished novelist, needless to say, but I tend to get exasperated by people trying to summon devils. It always feels like a bit of a cop-out, when there are plenty of real-life demons surrounding us. A cover blurb describes this as "a beach book for intellectuals", and I'd have to agree. Anyone who isn't a bibliomaniac and reasonably familiar with the authors and ideas Perez-Reverte describes may well be frustrated by the book; I nearly gave up as it takes so long for the plot to really get moving. So, a mixed response; 4.2 stars.
(ETA touchstones)

I felt the same way about wishing that I had read The Three Musketeers before reading this book! Have you watched the movie? I have it but haven't watched it yet.

DS
(Bruce's evil twin :-))

#185 -- I believe I have seen the film, but ages ago; I can't really remember v. many details. I may have to Netflix it, if possible.

Two more books for this challenge, including my first "bonus" book, now read:

The first was Complicit by Nicci French, a suspense/thriller, the dozenth (if that isn't a word, it should be) by this husband/wife writing duo. It's one of the better ones of late, opening with Bonnie Graham at the scene of a violent death. Whose violent death, what Bonnie does and the mystery that precedes and follows it is spelled out in alternate segments entitled "before" and "after" (and helpfully provided in a different typeface...) I enjoyed this rather chilling mystery, which revolves (as always with this 'author') around the hidden dysfunctions in apparently ordinary groups of people. In this case, it's the members of a band that Bonnie assembles to play at a friend's wedding. Kept me reading until the last page, late at night. 4 stars.

Then I finally read Still Life by Louise Penny. I have to say, I didn't fall in love with the book or the characters; I thought the plot was excellent, but spoiled by uneven characterizations and writing, including some bits that had me rolling my eyes bemusedly. For instance, I was surprised that Gamache would use a community meeting as a way to show his own thinking about the method of the murder, and the young policewoman was utterly unconvincing as a character (as was the way Gamache dealt with her; I kept comparing their relationship to the Lynley/Barbara Havers relationship in Elizabeth George's books, and thinking to myself how the latter showed what Penny could have done.) Part of the problem I had with this was choppy writing; another part was the rapidly shifting point of view among characters; part was the way I felt I had been dumped into a story already underway, i.e. the way Penny introduced the characters (or rather, failed to do so in a gradual way.) Nothing major, but enough minor irritations that this isn't a book I could love or really immerse myself in. It did get better in the final half or third, and the plot was v. good, complex but convincing. 3.8 stars; I got the second in the series from Paperback Swap, so I'll check that out to see if I like it more, but as of now, at least, I'm not hooked, sadly.

"...around the hidden dysfunctions in apparently ordinary groups of people."

That's enough to peak my interest - might have to check this author out.

Can't spell too well

Finished The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova today. How much did I like this book? So much that I downloaded it onto my Kindle so that I could keep a copy and re-read it in the future... OK, it's not great literature, but it's a compelling tale. Yes, it's long, at 550 pages, but it's well enough paced that I never even felt tempted to peek at what happens next -- I was just following the narrative, which deals with the mental breakdown of an artist who attempts to assassinate (so to speak) a painting in the National Gallery in Washington, DC. The story is told primarily through the eyes of his psychiatrist, Andrew Marlow, but also in flashbacks via his ex-wife and his girlfriend, and the reasons for his actions are gradually revealed through Marlow's explorations into the artist's background and a series of letters written in 19th century Paris. A few thematic elements are handled clumsily, and there are some really eye-rolling coincidences (the hero in the 19th century is named Olivier; the painter is Robert Oliver -- duh, yes, I've got it...) but this is a thumping good read. Recommended as a good summer book for those who want meatier fare than the brainless fluff that passes as beach books these days. 4.4 stars. (Now I'll definitely read The Historian, which everyone else seems to prefer to this -- I wonder if it will be a repeat of Audrey Niffenegger, when I ended up preferring her new book to The Time-Traveler's Wife?)

I loved The Historian and will have to try The Swan Thieves. I generally like books set in the art world, but 'assassinating a painting' sounds a little disturbing.

#192 -- not to worry. The catalyst for Oliver ending up in the mental institution is the fact that he walks into the museum to attack a painting with a knife. It's what lies behind that -- esp. since he himself is an artist -- that is very interesting. If you like books that delve into the world of art and creativity, I think you may enjoy this. I found it fascinating.

I enojyed The Swan Thieves but liked The Historian better. It was one of those situations where The Swan Thieves would have better had I not read The Historian first. It just didn't live up to it.

With Niffenegger, I acutally enjoyed both books equally well. I was afraid the same thing would happen but was pleasantly surprised.

Glad I may have something to look forward to in the shape of The Historian!

Finished Heresy by S.J. Parris (aka Stephanie Merritt). This is a mystery set in Elizabethan England, with a former monk named Giordano Bruno at the center of the puzzle, trying to find his way through it. I admit that I'd hoped for more from this novel, although it was mostly well written. Bruno is a fascinating historical figure; he ran afoul of the Inquisition and went on the run until they caught up with him eventually. The title was also promising; I was hoping for a novel that was as much about the ideas of what various religious groups considered to be heresy as it was about murder and mayhem. Parris instead focused only on the latter, and what resulted was a good enough historical mystery that never transcended the genre. Bruno is a de facto agent for Walsingham, who ends up in the middle of a nest of Catholics at Oxford, who may or may not be responsible for the deaths of two of the college fellows. Good, but not utterly gripping. 3.9 stars, recommended to fans of the genre. This is the 'bonus book' for the historical fiction category.

Finished The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry. Beautiful writing, but the plot was too over-the-top for me, capped off by an improbable final twist. Set in Ireland (partly in Roscommon, next door to where my ancestors came from and an area I know), it's twin narratives, of Roseanne, aged 100, who has been immured in an asylum for most of her life, and the doctor who, after decades, finally bestirs himself to discover why, as the building is about to be destroyed and a decision must be made about Roseanne's future. A damning indictment of the religious establishment of Ireland throughout most of the 20th century, and it offers some interesting food for thought about what makes a narrator "reliable". A decent read, but not stunning or startlingly good, IMO. 3.9 stars.

"While television means having to be articulate orally instead of in writing. I can cope with the latter, but the former terrifies me."

I just saw your interview on Morning Joe, and there was not a shred of evidence that you were terrified. You looked calm, collected and totally prepared. In a couple of instances, I wanted to bop the commentators over the head as they talked over you and drowned out what you were saying. Then the woman and her silly comment about how it wouldn't have happened if women were in charge. But overall, the interview made me want to read the book.

I thought the "Long term greed vs short term greed' segment was great.

Well done and congratulations, Suzanne!!!

#197, Wow, thanks so much for the comments! I'm a good actress, then, or perhaps the media training really worked well... :-) Because I was shaking inside... The cool part was that I got to meet David Remnick in the Green Room beforehand...

The latest read for this challenge:
I had fun reading La memoire des flammes by Armand Cabasson. It's the third of a series of mysteries featuring the redoubtable Quentin Margont, an officer in Napoleon's army. (It's also available in English.) This was a particularly good one as Margont is in Paris in 1814, commanded to infiltrate a group of royalist conspirators who may be attempting to stab Napoleon's regime in the back even as the Emperor makes a last-ditch attempt to fight off the invaders from every other European nation, and save the capital. The tension is incredible; the danger from within and without moves closer by the minute, as the Allies encircle Paris and a conspirator seeks personal revenge on Napoleon himself. Great twists. Recommended to historical mystery buffs; I see it's available from Amazon in English under the title of Memory of Flames, although there appears to be no Touchstone listing for it. 4.5 stars.

Finished Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev. This is a deceptively slim and straightforward book about two fathers and two sons; the two fathers doting on their radical sons in 19th century Russia; the two sons uncomfortable with the weight of parental expectations and trying to find their own paths. It's also the tale of a rapidly-changing Russia. I found this a fascinating novel and one in which I expect to find fresh layers of meaning and fresh food for thought whenever I re-read it. While I think of novelists like Tolstoy and Dostoevski as unique and very Russian, Turgenev, in this novel, strikes me almost as being a Russian version of a French novelist -- say, a Russian Balzac or Flaubert, someone taking very plain plot elements and yet dealing with very fundamental human issues. An impressive novel; I read the updated Garnett translation published by the Modern Library. 4.7 stars. Recommended to anyone looking for a 'realistic' novel set in the 1850s/1860s in Russia.

Re-read 1984 by Orwell for my dystopia category. The last time I read this was, well, 1984 -- I was living in Japan and remember reading it while traveling around the coast of southern Honshu -- also in the heat of summer. Curiously, the last time I read this and Brave New World, I ended up preferring the latter; this time around, I found myself preferring Orwell. Not entirely sure whether the world, my perceptions of the world, or I myself are responsible for the change. In any event, I was blown away by Orwell's bleak warning of the results of a top-down ruling system, originally written in the aftermath of WW2. "In our world," one of its designers tells Winston, "there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph and self-abasement." Orwell paints a terrifying picture of a world without hope; utterly bleak and pointless, where the "proles" simply focus on drinking and gambling (eerie parallels to our own world?) while the intellectual elite wilfully blind themselves to the absurdities of the ruling powers. A must-read. 5 stars.

Finished Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga. I found this a fascinating look at India in the years between the assassinations of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, before the economic miracle really took hold. Set in the imagined town of Kittur, it's really a series of short stories revolving around various individuals in the town, linked by imaginary guidebook descriptions. The disconnect between the guidebook view and the characters and stories becomes more jarring with each chapter as it becomes clear just how distant the characters' hopes and dreams are from being fulfilled. It should have been depressing, but really ended up as an intriguing and worthwhile book, IMO. 4.2 stars.

Read the latest book in the wonderful Dr. Siri series by Colin Cotterill, Love Songs from a Shallow Grave. For all those already feeling oppressed because of my enthusiasm for Inspector Chen, prepare to become even more irritable as I wax rhapsodic about this series, which revolves around the quirky character of the national coroner of Laos, Dr. Siri Paiboun, in the years immediately following the Communist victories in Indochina. Siri is also Laos's ONLY coroner -- and he has to struggle to do his job in a country without access to such basic tools as microscopes. This is really a series that revolves around Siri and his constellation of friends -- Civilai, the communist politician-turned-fancy baker, Crazy Rajid, Nurse Dtui, Inspector Phosy and Mr. Geung, his assistant, who has Down Syndrome. Outspoken to a fault, Siri, despite his revolutionary credentials, has few fans among the country's new leadership, so it's a surprise when the book opens with him being considered as a candidate for "national hero"; less of one to read the segments that break up the main mystery narrative, in which Siri lies in prison, being tortured, apparently by the Khmer Rouge. As Siri moves toward solving the mysterious deaths of three young women who have recently returned from studying overseas, the reader moves closer to realizing how his curiosity may have led him into a fatal situation this time... I'm not going to spoil the book by disclosing anything about the outcome, and will just urge anyone who enjoys mysteries and hasn't tripped over this series to hasten off to read the first book The Coroner's Lunch, pronto. There's a bit of mysticism in the books -- Siri has encounters with mysterious spirits -- but that just enhances the overall whimsical nature of these unpredictable and enticing books. Cotterill has created characters that truly live, and shed light on a little-known part of the world. (He also gives a chunk of his royalties to victims of the land mines that still litter Laos, and to education of Hmong youths; I'm going to be sponsoring a Hmong girl through 4 years of post-secondary education starting this year.) Highly recommended, 4.7 stars.

Finished another book for my 'reading in French' category. the final volume in Sarah Frydman's historical fiction trilogy about the Medici family in the 15th century, Le Saga des Medicis: Lorenzo (I'm not sure the Touchstone exists or will work.) I definitely preferred the first two books; perhaps because I was more familiar with the history behind this third volume (which follows Lorenzo the Magnificent's relatively short life), I found myself a bit frustrated. Firstly, Frydman focuses almost exclusively on Lorenzo's youth and his early 20s, and on his love affair with Lucrezia Donati. That's fine, but it comes at the expense of the dramatic events of his years as de facto ruler of Florence, which featured the Pazzi conspiracy and conflict with the Vatican. All of that is squeezed into less than 150 pages of a 600 page novel, making me glad I'll be reading Miles Unger's newish bio of Lorenzo for the same challenge later this year. I'd rate the first volume in this series, Contessina, 4.8 stars -- it is the best at combining the political and mercenary achievements of the Medici with the classic historical romance elements of a novel -- but this gets 3.7 stars from me. Still, all three are good historical novels that deserve to be translated into English.

Finished Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok. This fits into the category for newish books and authors who are new to me (whose work I haven't read before); Kwok's book, in fact, is a debut novel, one that is getting a lot of buzz. It was well written and interesting, but it didn't resonate with me; certainly it's not one I'll remember clearly or have any interest in picking up to re-read. At its heart, it's a banal and sometimes bathetic tale of an immigrant girl who struggles against poverty and sacrifices for love. There's little original here, other than, perhaps the fact that the girl is Chinese. But even then, the characters are legal immigrants, so the author loses the ability to at least make a point about the dead-end lives of many of our immigrants, to compensate for the lack of originality in either writing or plot. I feel like a bit of a curmudgeon, beating up on a kitten or something, because the story is so "worthwhile" and ultimately heartwarming, but I ended up irritated by it and found many of the characters cardboard-like, stiff and two-dimensional. (There's little subtlety here...) 2.8 stars, as I at least finished it and found some descriptive parts (like life in the garment factory) worthwhile. But it borrows heavily in theme (and even sometimes in general plot lines!!) from better books like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and at every turn in the narrative I invariably guessed what was coming next. A disappointment, and the reason I don't often read books with "buzz".

Finished Fighting France by Edith Wharton. This is a slim little book, which left me intrigued, fascinated and slightly depressed and puzzled. I read it on my Kindle, which left me without the introduction that Colm Toibin provided for the new Hesperus edition -- I set off in search of more info about the book and discovered that all the articles collected here were originally published in 1915 in Scribners, which helps explain the tone. What I found most intriguing about the book is that tone and the fact that it reflects the view of someone who, while well-informed, is not intimately familiar with the daily horrors of trench warfare; these days, our views of the war are invariably shaped by the fact that we know those horrors would continue until 1918, and change the world the survivors returned to. Wharton is writing in the earliest days and months of this war, and she still finds something glamorous or at least faintly awe-inspiring about the spirit of self-sacrifice, the wilingness to fight, etc., which would probably sound absurdly propagandistic to anyone after the Somme (in 1916). Wharton is almost jingoistic in her support for the French and hostile to the evil enemy -- writing "we felt that on the far side of that dividing line were the men who had made the war, and on the near side the men who had been made by it." (These days, we tend to view the inhabitants of the trenches, vs. their superiors who foolishly launched the carnage, as equal-opportunity victims, in contrast to WW2.) Still, she has a keen eye for detail. She writes of Ypres that it is a city without a profile; she notes the impact of a shell on a house, with its front stripped away and exposing the daily life of its inhabitants; she tells of soldiers who spend their idle hours crafting mementos out of the scraps of aluminum from enemy shells that had landed near their trenches. I kept mentally comparing this reportage to what someone might write of war in Iraq and Afghanistan today (there are lots of similar memoirs by observers, of course) and found myself concluding that hers is a more partisan and yet less personal account. In nature, perhaps it more reflects the prewar zeitgeist and style than that which would emerge after the conflict was over. Recommended to anyone interested in the period, as a historical document rather than as history. 4.2 stars

Two books to add, with two different verdicts...

1. Magnifico, the biography of Lorenzo de Medici by Miles Unger which lives up to its name (it's magnificent) and whets my appetite for the author's upcoming bio of Machiavelli. Unger does what only the best biographers manage to do -- combine the details of a life with the events of a time, highlight those that are significant and let the irrelevant stuff serve as background color and really convey the portrait of a man and an age in lively and vivid prose. That the individual in question is Lorenzo de Medici, and the place and time Renaissance Florence, makes this an even more interesting and more important a book. I was broadly familiar with the Medicis, having been reading about them (including Christopher Hibbert's books) for years, as well as more broadly about Florence in the quattrocento and cinquecento for many years, but Unger's book ties it all together. I'd still recommend a different book for someone looking for a quick overview -- Tim Parks's excellent Medici Money -- since this is a longish read, but it's so well written someone interested in the period will find it fascinating. Recommended, 4.6 stars.

2. Less overwhelmingly compelling was The Case of the Missing Servant by Tarquin Hall. Vish Puri is a private investigator in Delhi who prides himself on his overwhelming competence and discretion. Ultimately, the puzzles he solves here (a matrimonial investigation, and the disappearance of a servant girl) are more interesting than Hall's characters or settings, all of which are two-dimensional. At times, it almost felt as if Hall was writing something that would live up to our preconceptions about today's India, from call centers to bureaucratic red tape. But what really irritated me was his insistence on precisely replicating the admittedly odd and amusing ways that Indians can use the English language throughout his book. It's distracting, helps turn a character into a caricature, and is heavy handed. I'm still looking for an interesting mystery series set in India that I can enjoy, therefore; I won't be reading any more in this series, I think. Certainly, I won't be buying any. Recommended only to the very curious and uncritical. 2.9 stars, since the puzzles are quite well structured.

Read The Help by Kathryn Stockett. This will go onto my list of "thumping good reads" for the year, if not onto one of great literary discoveries. The author is eloquent, very adept at both plotting and characterization, and does a great job of weaving disparate tales together. That said, there are some flaws: characters are two one-dimensional in some cases -- such as Hilly and the idiotic Marilyn Monroe-like character for whom Minny ends up working -- to be convincing and real. Still, I read it beginning to end with barely a pause, which makes it a good read, in my terms. 4.3 stars.

206> Wow. Do you know what you've done? The only place and time I dislike reading about as much as Tudor England is Renaissance Italy. And yet I may just have to read the Unger book now. Grrrr.

>206 Chatterbox: & 207 Tudor England & Renaissance Italy are my two favorites! I can't wait to get my hands on a copy!

DS
(Bruce's evil twin :-))

Just got notice of a new vampire romance series set in Tudor England.

#208 -- Sorry about that, Renee Marie... I admit to being Tudored-out, myself!

Finished The Secret History by Donna Tartt. It was fascinating and compelling reading -- the story of college students running amok, think Patricia Highsmith's Ripley and that movie, Dead Poets Society, kind of combined, but not really. It's not a classic, it's not literature, but it's a thumping good read. Some of the characters are wonderfully portrayed; others, like the classics professor who allegedly inspires them to run amok, aren't convincing enough -- I never got the sense of what it was about him that would cause the students to behave the way they did, or even how the group's weird dynamics ended up becoming so toxic. Still, I really enjoyed it, and would recommend it to anyone looking for a compelling and fascinating read that is several notches above a conventional thriller. 4.2 stars.

>210 kristenn: & 211 I'm 'vamped' out myself. I can't be Tudored-out yet I have at least 2 more books on Elizabeth I next to my bed. They concentrate on the two most important men of her reign. :-) I'm on a roll!

DS
(Bruce's evil twin :-))

#211 - I have her The Little Friend on the shelf and it by far is the biggest book on my shelves. So I'm thinking I'll pull it out and get it read, even if it has to go into my miscellaneous category, just so I can make some more room.

I've been wondering about The Little Friend, now that I've read The Secret History. May have to investigate...

Re-read Back to the Front by Stephen O'Shea. I hadn't read this in well over a decade, since it first appeared, and it has held up well. It's the tale of O'Shea, a Canadian of Irish descent living in Paris, who decides to walk the length of the Western Front of World War 1, where several of his relatives, including both grandfathers and some great-uncles, fought. Most of this is being done in the 1980s, although the book itself wasn't published until the mid-1990s, so anyone trying to do the same thing today is going to encounter a different experience, but it's a fascinating and moving book, full of O'Shea's obvious empathy for the ordinary soldiers and disgust for leaders like Haig and Nivelle that led them into disastrous campaigns like the Somme, Passchendaele and Chemin des Dames. For anyone looking for a short overview of the war in a lively, accessible context, this is a great book. Having spent part of two summers working at a WW1 battlefield as a tour guide, this puts that experience in context. Recommended, as are O'Shea's two other books (both medieval history, one about the Cathars, the other about the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages.) 4.8 stars.

>215 Chatterbox: That sounds like an interesting twist on a travel narrative. It's going on the wishlist!

hello all...can anyone tell me how to find someone that would know about a collection of leo tolstoy books in russian?
I cannot find any of these books anywhere...they are very old.
thank you all and have a Blessed evening

Just thought I'd stop in to say that I finished The Little Friend by Donna Tartt (message 213). I think she is an excellent writer. I'm glad I moved this up on my reading list. I might have to try The Secret History sometime.

Whoops, I'm slowing down here... I'll have to pick up the pace if I'm to finish all of these by year-end!

Finished Salvation City by Sigrid Nunez. Nunez has a beautiful, spare but evocative writing style, and she does a great job with this book, which manages to view all its characters through a sympathetic prism. Still, while it's presented as a post-apocalyptic novel, that's not really what is going on -- a flu pandemic is simply the reason why 12/13-year-old Cole Vining ends up in the religious community of Salvation City, and the backdrop to his coming of age story, in which he has to find his way to the point where he can make his own decisions about his own future. Cole wrestles with the odd contradictions of hard-line, old-school fundamentalist Christianity that is the lifestyle of all around him, including his new parents, Tracy and PW (aka Pastor Wyatt) and what his (now dead) parents tried to teach him about life. Is this his new life? If so, what does that mean about how he can remember and think about his past? There are some intriguing issues, thoughtfully presented, in this book, although it didn't have quite the impact on me that I thought it could have. One of the best elements is Nunez's awareness that life has no easy answers, whether you're 14 or 48. 4 stars, recommended. This was an early reviewer book, and belongs in my dystopia/post-apocalyptic category.

Heartstone, the latest episode in the ongoing Tudor mystery series by C.J. Sansom. It again features Shardlake, the hunchback lawyer who has found himself at odds with powerful figures ranging from Henry VIII to fellow lawyers, despite being a relatively mild-mannered individual. The problem? Shardlake has a sense of justice, and tenacity. The two combine to lead him into peril again when Queen Catherine Parr asks him to investigate the fate of two young people, whose tutor had been the son of one of her loyal servants. As if one impossible and unpopular quest wasn't enough, Shardlake decides to combine his research trip with a side trip to probe the reasons that Ellen (you need to read the books in order...) is confined to Bedlam as a lunatic. As if two mysteries weren't enough, there's also a threatened invasion by the French to contend with -- and a sea battle in which Shardlake risks being caught up. These books are historically impeccable, intricately plotted and compelling reads -- the best of what historical mysteries have to offer, IMO. Start with the first in the series, however, Dissolution. That way you'll have five books to read before being forced to wait for the next offering, as I now will have to do... *sulk sulk sulk* 4.8 stars, and highly recommended! (Anyone who enjoyed Wolf Hall will love this; it's just as intelligent, but less literary fiction and more easily read.)

Just got myself a copy of Dissolution - having heard on the radio reviews of Heartstone and wondering how I've managed to miss this series so far. I'm glad it sounds as if there is lots of good stuff to look forward to - and I haven't got round to Wolf Hall yet either, so perhaps it will be a Tudor autumn...

And a GOOD Tudor autumn, too, Genny, not just reading books that try to capitalize on the popularity of the Tudors on TV. There are some Tudor-era historical novels that I consider downright unreadable; the waste of too many good trees. If you like C.J. Sansom, it's worth looking at Rory Clements's two books, starting with Martyr. They are more straightforward mysteries, but good nonetheless. Set in late Elizabethan England.

Two more books finished for this challenge, both of which I have been dipping into over the course of several weeks:

1. White Noise by Don DeLillo. If it hadn't been for this challenge, I may have finally given up in irritation and flung the book out the window. Not because it's not well-written -- DeLillo's style is fascinating and creative. The ideas are intriguing; thought-provoking. The problem is that the book and the characters don't "breathe" -- they are all a device for DeLillo to explore his overall aesthetic. And that just isn't enough for me. This is a case where I'd like to split the vote -- so many stars for enjoyability and so many for accomplishment (in the same way that teachers would divide grades into effort and accomplishment.) In this case, it would be 2.5 stars and 4.5 stars. So I've split the difference, and called it 3.5 stars. It wasn't a book that made me want to read more DeLillo. Sure, I laughed at the appropriate spots, such as Jack Gladney's glum acceptance of the fact that he will die, perhaps in 40 years, from his exposure to the toxic airborne event; his belief that his father in law, spotted sitting in the garden at night, is Death; the fact that he's taking German lessons only now, years after founding a department of Hitler Studies (!) I relished the Greek chorus-style commentary from the radio and the television. But it all felt heavy handed, since it was all too cerebral. It's as annoying a book as a romance novel to me, for completely different reasons: a romance novel has all the attention focused on some pre-scripted, utterly implausible plot to make people feel at the expense of think; in this case, DeLillo doesn't care whether or not we feel his characters are real as long as we think about them. 3.5 stars. Try it if you want, but don't say I didn't warn you... (I'm not altogether sure why so many people in various places pointed me toward this book as dystopic/post-apocalyptic. Despite the airborne toxic event, it reads more like a dark satire of contemporary life.)

2. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. What De Lillo couldn't do for me, Woolf does. Her ideas about life creep up on the reader through the prose and the characters and Woolf's distinctive style. I first read this 23 years ago (according to the slip of paper I found stuck inside it), and what I recalled then was the plot. This time, what grabbed me most was the structure, and the descriptive power. The second brief section alone makes the book for me -- the passage of time is described through the eyes of the Hebridean holiday house, and the war is conveyed as much through the ravages of insects in the house as by the dramatic events in the trenches of France and Flanders. The fate of the people is parenthetical. Not much else to say about the novel, which is really about relationships and the passage of time, focused on two separate sojurns in the Hebrides and two proposed trips to a lighthouse whose rays can be seen from the house. 5 stars, and I expect I'll re-read this yet again. (Incidentally, I'm glad I read Hermione Lee's bio of Virginia Woolf a few years back -- it shed a lot of light on her style, and I'm re-reading her novels through different eyes.)

Love your comments about White Noise! You explained what I had been unable to express clearly after my (then college-age) daughter pushed the book as one of the best she had ever read, and couldn't understand why I didn't think so too. The best I could do was say that I found it dark and depressing.

#222 'The Tudors' being popular on TV must have passed me by! But the period seems to constantly fascinate - there is always plenty of fiction (high-brow and less high-brow!) and non fiction emerging, as well as films & drama. I've already read Clements' Martyr - a spur of the moment supermarket buy earlier this year which I enjoyed more than I thought I would, so hope to enjoy C J Sansom even more!

I've never read any DeLillo, but have Falling Man out from the library at present. Didn't know what to expect from him - sounds as if he is more satisfying for style than content?

Have also never read To the Lighthouse - which I must rectify soon!

Genny, not sure what to think about DeLillo. Others are now suggesting I try Underworld or Libra. I do know that I'll have to wait a while before trying anything else by him! He is satisfying on both style and content, but not when it comes to story. And for me, the story has to be there. It is with Woolf, despite her own very strong aesthetic. Her characters have lives of their own, and the reader feels that he or she is only peering in on them for a brief spell, with the help of the author. To me, that's what makes a novel great -- its ability to convince you that these people, warts and all, could/did/might in the future exist and do what the author describes.

Ivy, I know, the hardest thing to do is wrestle with a novel you know has some merit -- but that you simply can't throw yourself into. It's the third or fourth time I've done that this year, and it makes me more frustrated than anything else does!!

Finished Random Violence by Jassy Mackenzie, the bonus book for the category devoted to mysteries set in different parts of the world. This is the first in what promises to be a series of mysteries featuring South African private investigator Jade de Jong in South Africa; her sidekick is half-Indian, half-white police inspector Patel. It's an intriguing look at the seamy side of modern day South Africa, where car jackings are common and living in a heavily guarded, fortress-like compound of homes is the only way to feel safe in a city like Johannesburg. But is the murder of Annette Botha just another carjacking gone wrong? This being a mystery novel, of course not. The plot is fairly predictable, the violence level a bit on the high side (we get to see the feelings of murder victims as they are about to die in gruesome ways, for instance, and hear details of horrifying past murders.) Still, the background was interesting, and Jade was a lively main character. I'd probably read the second book in the series (due out in the UK in April) but only if it were in paperback and didn't require hefty delivery charges... In other words, while this was good, I've read better mystery series lately so I'm a bit lukewarm. 3.7 stars.

Wrapped up How to Read the Air by Dinaw Mengestu. I was blown away by the writing and characters of this book; less impressed by the overall plot and pacing. Ultimately, it was a bleak read -- it's the story of the child of Ethiopian emigrants, at a turning point in his life, looking back at a possible turning point in their lives, months before his own birth. Both he and they turn out to prefer narratives to reality; spinning imaginary tales, whether uttered or left unspoken. In a way, they live so as to leave as little mark on the world around them as possible -- in Jonas's case, that has been learned literally in response to growing up between warring parents, and means that he is adrift and unable to connect. I found Mengestu's depictions of hapless alienation chillingly good, but a novel with that at its core is scary and ultimate enervating, in the same way it is to listen to a piece of music that is just the same chord repeated at different intervals and volumes. I relished the book, but found it disturbing in many ways, and certainly would never read it again if I were even remotely glum as it's the kind of book that is weighty enough to alter moods. All that said, I think it's brilliantly written. Again, those who need to like/admire/identify with the main characters are likely to struggle with it. 4.3 stars, recommended. I think I'll give myself a few weeks before delving into Mengestu's debut novel!

Finished Persuasion, the only Jane Austen novel I had never read! Reading Austen convinced me that were she writing today, she would be writing a superior kind of chick lit -- this all about the shifting tides of relationships, complete with a disdainful elder sister and dismissive papa, etc. Curiously, I found that having seen a film version and a TV version of this, I found the book different -- Lady Russell is a more appealing character in Austen's eyes (she is well-meaning and not a meddler for the sake of it), for instance. I found the book engaging, but oddly never really fell in love with Anne Elliott, perhaps because of her willingness to take a back seat and suffer for love until Captain Wentworth is able to speak out. And had Austen used the word "bloom" once more, I would have flung the book at the wall. That said, I found the novel grew on me tremendously, and I began wondering to what extent Austen herself identified with Anne Elliott -- the constant wallflower and acute, ironic observer of all the foibles of her nearest and dearest. Or what would have happened had Anne Elliott decided to write a book... 4.2 stars.

See 'Jane's Marriage' by Rudyard Kipling...

  In a private limbo
   Where none had thought to look,
  Sat a Hampshire gentleman
   Reading of a book.
  It was called Persuasion
   And it told the plain
  Story of the love between
   Him and Jane.

(extract)

I see the speculation about Jane Austen's love life or lack of same goes back a lot further than I had imagined -- and suspect that it won't ever end!

>227 Chatterbox: Very interested to read your review of How to Read the Air. I picked up an ARC at a book sale and my 10-year old niece has picked it for my next book to read. (She chooses by cover and title.) I think now I'll look forward to it.

#231 - I'm hearing thru the grapevine that Mengestu's first book is better -- I'll be reading this later in the month, I hope, although not for this challenge, but will try and post an update here.

Meanwhile, finished Caesar by Adrian Goldsworthy. Started this in September, resumed in mid-October and now finally have finished. It's a very very very straightforward bio, nothing intriguing here in either style or substance, and probably ideal reading as a solid and worthy introduction to Caesar (who was NOT Rome's first emperor, for the record). Knowing a bit more about him, and having read his commentaries as well as a lot of Cicero's letters, I ended up wishing I'd chosen the new bio of Hadrian or even the one about Augustus, where I would have encountered less well-trodden territory. (And it makes me worry about Stacey Schiff's new bio of Cleopatra, which I hope to read this winter.) It took me this long to read because Goldsworthy's style isn't really lively -- his characters exist in time and place, but don't come alive on the pages -- and I kept falling asleep during the details of the military campaigns (legion deployments, strategies, etc.) A worthwhile book rather than a fascinating one, for me, at any rate. 3.9 stars, recommended to anyone venturing into the history of Ancient Rome at a particularly compelling point in its history -- the transition from a crumbling republic to a corrupt empire, under the leadership of someone whom many people liked as a person even as they deplored his actions or what those actions said about the state of Rome. Interesting food for thought here for anyone who enjoys drawing comparisons between the Roman empire and the American 'empire'...

Time is ticking by, and I'm not reading rapidly enough! Still, I have finished two more books for this challenge:

1. The Living Unknown Soldier by Jean-Yves le Naour. This was an intriguing book, if not one that was good enough that it was easy to just read right through it from one end to the other -- I kept putting it to one side and turning to something else. It's the story of a man found stumbling around near a railyard in early 1918, just after a convoy of released French prisoners has passed through the town. The man can't seem to remember who he is or how he got there -- and for the remaining 24 years of his life, that's nearly how things stayed, even as scores of families try to claim him as their missing son, husband, brother, etc. They persist in their claims even when it's shown that he can't be the man who vanished in the horror of WW1 -- he's taller than their loved one, doesn't have scars that they did, etc. Eventually, the legal toing and froing over who the man is palls; the best part of this book is the middle section, where le Naour delivers a powerful description of postwar trauma and mourning and its impact on society as a whole. There is a resolution of sorts, but no happy ever after for either the hapless veteran or the families and no real catharsis for readers. This was probably a 3.5 star book for me; for others, it might be closer to 3 stars. I should add that I'm intrigued by WW1, partly because I spent two summers working at a WW1 battlefield/war memorial in northern France as a teenager, and partly because when I look for root causes of so much of the insanity of the 20th century, bang, I can trace it back to that bullet that was fired in Sarajevo in 1914.

2. Jennifer Government by Max Barry. Just when you can't imagine any more weird dystopic visions of society... This was published back in 2003, but it's an eerie prediction of "rationality" taken to irrational extremes only instead of a near-collapse of the financial system, we have a world in which the government exists only as a vestige of itself, and the world is ruled by corporations. Kids go to Mattel schools (and carry the surname Mattel); their parents work for IBM or Nike and carry their company's name as a surname. Unemployed? You're essentially a societal castoff. There are no taxes -- hence the Mattel-branded schools that let kids play only with Mattel toys -- and government agents like Jennifer have to raise funds from victims families in order to pursue criminals. The Police and the NRA (both now publicly-traded) taken on the role of mercenaries for hire for rival affiliations of big corporations, that sound like two blocs in the Cold War, only with nothing dividing them beyond whether they prefer McDonald's or Burger King. This is fast-paced and chilling, if you stop to think about it -- opening with a macabre plan for boosting sales of high-priced sneakers, in which Hack Nike is told he's got to shoot buyers of the Mercurys to make them exotic and risque in the eyes of consumers... I remember this book when it came out, and given all the anti-corporate stuff and anti-capitalist push in the last few years, I'm surprised it hasn't had a new surge of life. Recommended -- it's not Orwell or Huxley in terms of intellectual complexity, but the world Barry imagines is the same kind of dystopia, without a doubt! 4.2 stars.

Oooohhhhh .... you have intrigued me with your review of Jennifer Government. I love this type of book!

...and partly because when I look for root causes of so much of the insanity of the 20th century, bang, I can trace it back to that bullet that was fired in Sarajevo in 1914.

Well put.

Finally read Strange Blooms by Jennifer Potter! I grabbed this volume when I saw it in the window of a London bookstore a few years ago, despite its size & weight, because it is a biography of two little-known (today) gardeners of the early Stuart years (1590-1650), father and son named John Tradescant. The site of their home in Lambeth, where they assembled a famous "Ark" of curiosities natural and mythical that they'd display to all comers for a fee in the 1620s and 1630s, is now a museum of garden history, and I wanted to learn more. Alas, Jennifer Potter has researched assiduously, but about 2/3 of this book is made up of "maybe", "it could well have been" or "it seems likely" because the documentation just doesn't exist to tell a bigger picture. So, the kinds of Dutch gardens that the senior Tradescant would have visited to obtain rarities for his early patrons, Elizabeth I's counselor Robert Cecil, and the infamous Duke of Buckingham, the favorite of James I, are explained through the eyes of a much later visitor, diarist John Evelyn. The more interested someone is in gardens, the more they'll enjoy this; I'm interested in the historical elements, so the lists of things that sometimes hijacked the book occasionally annoyed me. Still, it was interesting when Potter moved on to the broader picture -- how gardening became botany, and collecting rarities shifted to studying them and trying to draw lessons from them. Cautiously recommended, 3.4 stars.

I bought Jennifer Government and totally forgot about it! Maybe becuase I let Bruce read it first and he has a habit of putting books in odd places, and well, you know out of sight out of mind as they say!

I will have to see if I can figure out where he put it.

DS
(Bruce's evil twin :-))

Time for the evil twin to reclaim it, methinks...

I'd been overlooking the harsh reality that the year is drawing to an end... so I'm trying to speed up my reading in order to finish at least the books on the list, if not all the bonus books!

Read China Safari, a recent translation of a 2008 book by two French journalists. It's an adequately written book about a very important subject: the increasing engagement on the part of China with African nations, and the impact that may have not just on the balance of power but on the future of our global institutions. The material is all here; it's just not always presented to best advantage. For instance the authors include some hilarious examples of meaningless conference-speak very sarcastically, but sarcasm isn't always effective. Their perspective is very clear -- they are trying to ring the alarm about the importance of China, a country with an utter lack of interest in such irrelevant issues as good governance and human rights not only at home but abroad, becoming the dominant force in Africa, which happens to be home to a host of dismal regimes (dismal for their own people) -- so bad that even a foundation dedicated to giving a prize to the African leader that has done most for their own country and handed off power democratically to a successor hasn't been able to identify a recipient for the last two years. China doesn't care about any of that, as the authors make clear. They care about Africa as a source of resources and a market for their goods -- even if that undercuts and damages local industries -- and (this was new and interesting to me) a safety valve for some of their excess population that even China's hectic growth can't sustain at home. They are, in turn, exporting not only a degree of prosperity -- albeit very narrowly -- but also some of their problems, such as poor/dangerous working conditions and environmental degradation. But neither the African leaders nor the Chinese care. I thought the contents of this book are important and intriguing, but presented in a discursive style and without some of the context that someone coming to the subject fresh needs -- ranging from the colonial involvement of the West and decolonialization to a more detailed/organized look at what has happened to Africa since and the experience of those others who have tried to get hold of resources like oil and bauxite. There's also a bit too much of "look at us, the intrepid reporters, trying to get access to a Chinese work site in Zambia" going on. The point is already made. Still, this highlights some important issues, so I'll overlook some of that and give it 4.1 stars. Falls more on the "dragon slaying" than "panda hugging" side of the Sinophobe/Sinophile continuum, but they do make their bias very transparent and support it, if not always as rigorously as I'd like if this weren't a work of journalism vs a research/scholarly publication. Recommended to anyone with an interest in China, geopolitical issues, what's up with commodities, etc. There are some fascinating bits in there about Chinese "settlers" in parts of Africa -- something I wasn't even aware was going on.

Jennifer Government sounds terrific.

>238 Chatterbox: Sounds interesting. There seems to be so much written about China, you would think that we would all be more knowledgeable about it. I think my eyes glaze over whenever I see an article about it in the Economist though. . .

I will have to add China Safari to my wish list. I just got How to Cook a Dragon - China with recipes. . . :-)

Though I really need to get back to my 101010 too! Especially since I have finished my 75 book challenge and have no excuses!

DS
(Bruce's evil twin :-))

And more about China, in Cyber War by Richard Clarke, an alarming and compelling book focusing on the security threat that we seem to be systematically ignoring/overlooking, that we are overly reliant as a society/economy on the Internet and yet underprepared for cyber-war. Clarke delivers some chilling examples of salvos fired in this kind of conflict already, and an alarming analysis of what could happen. It's a must-read book, despite the occasionally turgid style and the necessary use of a lot of technical terms that occasionally had me crossing my eyes. As a former geopolitics junkie, I found Clarke's look at decision-making in this new environment fascinating. 4 stars, recommended.

Am I going to finish this challenge???

One more book to add today:

Finished Giant of the French Revolution by David Lawday. This is a very good bio of Danton, one of the foremost figures of the Revolution, who presciently warned Robespierre that if they couldn't contain the Terror, it would consume them both. Sure enough, Robespierre would dispatch Danton to the guillotine, and then find himself in the same place only months later. This is a solid look at some of the parts of the revolution that go overlooked amid all the "Scarlet Pimpernel" melodrama, ranging from the gradual shift from hopes for a constitutional monarchy to Robespierre's lunatic passion for public virtue (reading about him reminded me of Stalin, in many ways) and encompassing a wide panoply of characters, including Manon Roland and the enigmatic and fascinating Talleyrand, who would survive not only this era but also Napoleon and retain power into the restored monarchy. Lawday has an eye for who the most interesting characters are in a story -- they aren't always the Napoleons, the Robespierres or the kings -- and he tells it well. I may seek out his Talleyrand bio -- or just go back and re-read/complete the Duff Gordon bio of him that I started last year. Recommended to anyone with an interest in the period; it helps to have some basic knowledge of the causes of the revolution, because while Lawday doesn't assume that on the part of his readers, he does tend to move briskly through events. 4.1 stars.

That's one for my wishlist! Robespierre and Danton (along with Marat) are the most fascinating characters of the French Revolution for me. Robespierre was a true believer and Danton was so much larger than life. If ever a revolution were justified, it was that one, and yet it so quickly descended into the Terror.

Marat probably comes out of that as the most despicable -- I've never read anything that turns him into a human being, and while the cause he espoused may have been justified, he argued in favor of it, it seems, solely for the pleasure of seeing violence and blood. Robespierre did it for this oddly pure goal of "virtue", something impossibly intangible and incomprehensible, while for Danton, you get the sense from this book that it was a grand adventure, in some ways, that became deadly serious.

Finished Les derniers jours de Stefan Zweig by Laurent Seksik. I feel like I've been on an emotional roller-coaster reading this novel; it's a brilliant evocation of the way in which Zweig, even as he escaped physically the shadows of war in Europe by fleeing first to New York and then to Brazil, actually ended up moving closer to the shadows of death. The novel draws on his letters and other writings, as well as recollections of friends, to document his final months in Brazil, from his arrival with his much-younger asthmatic wife Lotte, until the day the couple commit suicide in February 1942. It's a very bleak and despairing vision, and I'm going to have read something light to banish it from my mind or I will have nightmares. On the other end, the author captures with eloquence and tremendous poignancy, the sense of being an expatriate. Zweig removes his books from their suitcase and smells in their pages his old library; he recaptures what it was like to write his first book, back in 1900; he tastes in his mind the coffee of Vienna. And yet he is a an author whose books are no longer published in their native language. If he can't be read in German, he muses, is he really an author? The American entry into the war and the fall of Singapore are the last straws for Zweig, who, in this telling, pulls his young wife (insecure in his love) after him into death -- not by force but simply by force of personality. He cannot live without his life the way it was; he feels emptied by his constant movements from one place to another. And Lotte cannot live without him. It's deeply moving, despite the despair. I thought this was a brilliant novel, and recommend it highly to anyone who can read French (it hasn't been translated, as far as I know.) I would urge anyone who has had a suicide among their family or close friends to steer clear, however, as it will be a difficult book to read. Oddly, I ended by feeling their deaths were both a rational and irrational response to the irrational times and circumstances. 5 stars, hands down.

@244, ajouté à ma liste!

#245 -- Merveilleux!

Finished The Englishman's Daughter by Ben Macintyre this evening. I've had this book sitting on my shelf since I bought it, and decided to pick it up and read it after really enjoying Macintyre's Operation Mincemeat earlier this year. The author has a knack for ferreting out quirky stories from history that shed a broader light on the events and personalities of the time about which he is writing. In this case, that is World War I -- not the war that people tend to be familiar with, life in the trenches, etc., but rather in the occupied zone of France. Again, when people think about "the German occupation of France", the mind flies to 1940-44, not 1914-18, when big chunks of Belgium and France were behind enemy lines. And those lines were lines of steel -- while in the second great war, escaping soldiers or downed airmen had at least a fighting chance of reaching neutral territory, the trenches made that virtually impossible in WW1. And yet the penalties for concealing enemy soldiers were nearly as draconian as they would be under the Nazis. The story is that of a motley group of British and Irish soldiers left behind by their regiments in the chaotic retreat of the opening months of the war, and left stranded behind enemy lines. Taken in and made virtual members of a tiny village in Picardy, they survived two years -- until they were betrayed. Macintyre tells the story through the tale of one of the soldiers, Robert Digby, who fell in love with a local girl and fathered a child with her. It's a tragic story, and Macintyre tries to make sense of the betrayal, doing a wonderful job of bringing an isolated community of nearly a century ago to life, with all its characters and petty feuds, while setting the tale within the broader sweep of the truly horrific first world war. Recommended; 4.2 stars.

Although not a big history buff, I have to say your review has interested me in this book enough to add it to my wishlist. Great review!

Your review made me glad that I have a number of Ben Macintyre books on my wishlist, including The Englishman's Daughter. I plan on reading it for next year's challenge.

#248 -- I'm glad!

Somewhere in my vast stacks of books I have one of Macintyre's books, still unread -- it's about Adam Worth, the famous fin de siecle jewel thief. Really want to read that in the new year. I'm now reading a good-enough bio of Pauline Bonaparte, and that has made me realize how deft a writer Macintyre is -- every bit of info is delivered almost effortlessly, it's like eating gourmet food that happens to be good for you. Flora Fraser is good, but she's not that good, when it comes to delivering info. The reader is always aware they are being informed... A subtle thing, but it's odd what you pick up on when reading one book closely after another, even when they appear to have little in common.

A deeply disappointing book: Pauline Bonaparte: Venus of Empire by Flora Fraser. Sadly, Fraser doesn't appear to have inherited the biographical writing gene of her mother (Antonia Fraser) or grandmother (Elizabeth Longford). This is a brisk recounting of the life of Napoleon's favorite sister, but it's only marginally interesting. Fraser's interest in Pauline was piqued by the famous Canova sculpture of her nearly-nude torso (Pauline was a famous beauty), and much of this biography is limited to recounting details of her lovers, her clothes, her travels, her medical travails and her caprices, such as requiring her ladies in waiting to lie prone on the ground so that she could rest her feet on them. Pauline never emerges from these pages as a real person or an interesting person; I was left wondering why on earth she was chosen as a subject at all if this was to be the result. The squabbling, larger-than-life Bonapartes might be an interesting group subject, but perhaps any of Napoleon's siblings (individually selfish, grasping and poorly-educated) would probably not make for much more compelling biography. The worst is that it's hard to discern all the massive events that were going on in the background. I'm not a big fan of military history, and certainly Pauline played little or no role in that arena, but it certainly would have been possible to flesh this out by setting it in a broader context. Readable, but only in a desultory way. Not really recommended unless, like Fraser, you became fascinated by Pauline, Princess Borghese, in some other context. 2.8 stars; it's adequate, historically accurate and reasonably well-written, but I couldn't stop wondering why Fraser had bothered.

I like your comment in >250 Chatterbox: -" the reader is always aware they are being informed". I've been trying and trying to finish Reading Lolita in Tehran and as much as I try, I just am not liking this book. And I think your comment is appropriate - I always feel like I'm being informed. Plus, although there's a lot of good information about life in Tehran, it's not what I expected the book to be about based on the description. I need to decide whether to abandon the book or press on.

241- "Am I going to finish this challenge???"

With ease. I'm almost afraid to ask this- but not quite. How many books are you up to for 2010? I hereby dub you and Stasia Shock And Awe readers.

The Wikileaks brouhaha is an interesting situation as it pertains to cyberwar. I have a feeling that not all such battles will be between countries. Civil cyberwars might pop up also.

#253 -- I'm at 488 books so far, VG... I've been reading like a maniac most of my life and get horrible withdrawal symptoms if I don't have at least two books with me at any given time. That said, this is the first year that I've made any kind of deliberate/conscious effort to track my reading, and I'm taken aback. I think unconsciously I may be reading more intensively -- I do know that I'm doing less re-reading of books than I have in prior years, perhaps because I'm always running across interesting books suggested by other LTers. Anyway, I'm still behind Stasia!

Re Wikileaks -- I'm a professional journalist and a staunch defender of the first amendment AND shield laws for journalists (i.e. the ability to refuse to name sources without facing punishment and even imprisonment.) BUT I'm also a pragmatist. Some of the WikiLeaks revelations are the equivalent of People magazine journalism. Do we care about the latest celebrity breakup -- or what the Obama administration thinks of Sarkozy? I worry that there are some things, like the subtext of diplomacy, that when exposed with no filter to the public eye, are bound to be misinterpreted and create a chain of events that produces strained political relationships, which in turn create problems for us all. Look at the way we manage our personal relationships -- few of us feel impelled to say everything we think about our friends -- you are gaining weight, you have bad dress sense, we're all so tired of hearing your favorite story, etc. We censor ourselves, and decide when it's important to speak out. And when we do, we put it in the context of our friendship. WikiLeaks just tosses the info out there for people to react emotionally to, and I think that can be dangerous. There is no one there to serve as a filter re the public interest. In the case of the diplomatic cables, I'm deeply concerned. What public interest was served? Very little. Had some of the WikiLeaks material contained the revelations of a few years ago about military torture or rendition, that would have been clearly a different matter, just as a WikiLeaks revelation about a bank on the brink of failing is obviously material that should be public. But it is causing me to think more deeply about media & the Internet, and to revise my thinking on First Amendment issues on the margins.

Commercial cyberwars -- absolutely, the potential is there. At a very low level, you could even argue that phishing, or false flag advertising, or battles for domain names, are part of that. I could see Bank of America being eager to direct potential new customers onto its site. The difference, though, is that the bank wouldn't have an interest in bringing down the entire banking network, only their rival's ability to function. I suppose the same argument could be made re national cyber conflicts, but the reality is that a civil cyberwar is likely to involve less "collateral damage" than the kind of cyberwar that Clarke talks about. And he is right that if we talk about what could happen, we are forced to start thinking about it; when it becomes part of the public discourse, then we will be aware of what is at stake. As was the case with nuclear weapons. The bad news might be that we would survive a cyberwar -- and die in the anarchy that follows.

Will I finish this challenge? 10 books to go here; about a dozen others for my off-the-shelf challenge. Sigh. It'll be tough, as several of them are "chunksters".

Very well said!

488?!?! That's only about six or seven years reading at my pace.

So far the hactivists involved in the WikiLeaks support campaigns to shut down web sites like Visa and Amazon appear to be partaking in a cyber-riot as opposed to cyberwar. Some are joining in just to break windows. Authorities in several countries are playing whack-a-mole with mirror sites and financial support for WikiLeaks. There have always been crime hacks happening all over the web, usually for financial crimes. The WikiLeaks battle seems to be an ideological outbreak within cyberspace that feels a little different from what has come before in scale. There are a lot of people on both sides doing mischief that has the potential to escalate.

Fringe groups of all stripes are watching this and making plans for future (h)actions. Israel was caught by surprise with Hezbollah's ability to infiltrate their military networks in 2006. Google and China spats are ongoing. Remember old Poindexter? John, not Buster. He was one of the first to call attention to the possibilities of the times we find ourselves in. My sister retired from SIGINT (Army) and keeps up with some of stuff going on.

I think I heard part of Richard Clarke's appearance on Fresh Air some time back. It was an interesting interview.

The whole WikiLeaks phenomenon does a tremendous disservice to responsible investigative journalism; it makes it possible for authorities trying to protect information that we "should" know to paint all leakers and anyone reporting uncomfortable truths as irresponsible people.

What is going under-reported right now is that the Obama White House is even more closed-mouthed than Bush 2 was. We're supposed to take a lot on trust. Then this lunatic fringe emerges as the only alternative? This is what happens when you starve journalism of resources -- those resources flock to the radical fringes, or the National Enquirer, or other places that put a premium on profits and pizzazz over substance.

Okay, rant over... *smiling weakly*

Free speech and more of it. I think that the Wikileaks thing has worked because journalists are no longer doing investigative reporting on anything more substantial than Escalators that kill; how you can protect your family while becoming more fearful of ordinary objects. When people running for public office can decide to only speak to certain sympathetic members of the media and no one calls them on it and they still get elected, and when corporations operate with impunity, we need more free speech rather than getting angry with it. Have you noticed how difficult it is to find anything substantial in the media? My local paper provides less information than the local newscast with less in-depth reporting. No wonder newspapers are failing. And what's with the op-ed pieces becoming partisanal rants devoid of actual argument?

That's my rant. Who's next?

A big problem is that newspapers have no resources -- it's a vicious circle. They cut back on foreign news, they cut back on investigative reporting. They say they do this because the demand isn't there among readers. Which then leaves everything from the Drudge Report to WikiLeaks to "fill" the gap.

One of the most interesting new models out there is ProPublica. It's a nonprofit investigative reporting group, run by a former editor of mine, and it teams with media organizations to collaborate on investigative projects. They have done some amazing projects on everything from Gitmo to the oil spill -- check out www.propublic.org. I don't know if this heralds a new model of investigative reporting, but at least it helps cash-starved media organizations do some of this work.

I have lived and worked in newspaperland all my adult life -- 25 plus years. There are perhaps a dozen investigative reporting jobs left in that industry, and a lot of it is because the cost per story is exorbitant. And because advertising revenues have evaporated (the Internet...) there is no money to pay wages. Even the NY Times is struggling to stay afloat.

Still not sure I'm going to finish this challenge on time... Nonetheless, did manage to wrap up one more book today, Erevan by Gilbert Sinoue. I've known about the Armenian genocide for about the same length of time I've known about the Holocaust; my parents told me about it a few months after we had visited Anne Frank's house (I was 7) because two sisters on my school bus route in London were Armenian. And yet, this novel, hewing very closely to what is known to have happened, brought me to tears. Sinoue, who was born in Egypt and now lives in France, is obviously passionate about shedding more light on this still under-recognized crime (dating to 1915, and which most Turks still refuse to acknowledge today), and this novel does an excellent job. It's the chilling story of a fictional family, the Tomassians, whom Sinoue ties to other major characters and events. Like reading about a Jewish family in the 1930s, there's a feeling of disaster looming ever-closer, and yet remaining something amorphous; like the Holocaust, although it had been preceded by countless pogroms, the Armenians had survived more minor atrocities and believed they could ride out the storm again. They were wrong. This book is not for the squeamish, but it's high time that the story was told in a way that is accessible to the general public, whether a novel or a film. Sinoue adeptly draws some parallels (subtly) between the way the Young Turks running the remnants of the Ottoman Empire viewed their own "enemy within" and Hitler's Germany. As a novel, it isn't Sinoue's best, but as a book about these events, it's excellent and deserves to be translated into English. 4.1 stars.

I'm not trying to pressure you or anything. But You Only Have Two Weeks To Finish Your Challenge!!!!! };->~

Then again, you're probably used to living in a deadline world.

ARGHHHH. Yes, I am used to deadlines, but... I actually cannot FIND two of the books for my World War I challenge. I know they were around here earlier, because I pulled them out of the bookcase. I'm just not sure where they moved to. If I can't find them, I won't make it....

One more down, however:

Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d'éléphants by Mathias Enard. This novel won the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens this year; it's like the junior cousin or baby brother of the Prix Goncourt -- a longlist of candidates is developed by the same panel who vote on the big prize, and then about 2,000 high school students read them and decide on the winner. Past winners include Dreams of My Russian Summers by Andrei Makine and The Elegance of the Hedgehog, as well as Brodeck's Report by Philippe Claudel. (Sorry the touchstones appear to be on strike.) This is a "what if" historical novel -- what if, in the interval between the time that Michelangelo fled Rome in 1506, after another spat with Pope Julius, and his reconciliation some six months later, he had accepted the invitation of the Ottoman Sultan Bayazid to go to Constantinople and design a bridge across the Golden Horn? Enard imagines an entire voyage, the creative process Michelangelo follows -- and more intriguingly, his unwitting immersion in the world of Ottoman politics, as he becomes the pawn of the sultan, the vizier and their critics. Michelangelo, in Enard's imagination, is even, hundreds of miles away, conscious of the Byzantine plotting in the Vatican and his rivals' machinations, but is unable to penetrate the different Ottoman world that confronts him, most importantly in the characters of the poet Mersihi and a beautiful and androgynous young singer, a refugee from Granada and the world of al-Andalus. It's an intriguing "culture clash", yet Enard deals with the theme gracefully and indirectly -- indeed, the novel itself is written in an almost dreamlike manner, with a contemporary omniscient narrator recounting, as if in a fairytale, Michelangelo's experiences. That may drive some readers nuts, but I liked it. The title (Tell them stories of battles, of kings, of elephants) is drawn from Kipling, and refers to the idea that it's possible to distract the public through the art of story and spectacle. Recommended to anyone looking for a book in French; to get the full impact of the language and style may require some time & patience. 4 stars.

(Sorry, the touchstone on this book simply does not want to work!)

Hope you find those books, that happens to me all the time, I know I have the book but finding it is another story.
I'm down to the last 100 pages of my 1010 challenge, but taking it slowly as I'm enjoying Grossman's writing so much (reading To the end of the land).

Glad your last book is such a winner!

Happily, the AWOL books were located underneath a stack of DVDs. I think this is one case where a "don't ask, don't tell" policy may come in handy. So now I have no excuse... *gulp*

One nice thing about the Kindle. If I can't find the Kindle book I want, I flip over to alphabetical by author or title.

So many times, I've either read the same book more than once, inadvertently, or else bought the same book more than once. Thanks to LT, I rarely do that anymore. But I still do misplace my regular books.

Glad you found them, Suz.

Mon vieux et moi is by Pierre Gagnon, a Quebecois author. It's more of a novella than a novel, and in some ways really captures some of the essence of the Christmas spirit without all the ersatz warm and fuzziness cheap feel-good stuff. The narrator, a middle-aged retiree, "adopts" a 99-year-old man named Leo who had lived in the same retirement home as his aunt. Life with Leo is a bit like life with a child -- full of unexpected rewards and challenges. And yet Leo's life is closing in, and the narrator has to deal with that, both existentially and practically. It's poignant and so moving in parts that I had tears in my eyes; the writing is spare and punchy; very vivid and sounding almost as if the author were dictating his words rather than writing them. Should be translated... *sigh* 4.6 stars.

Mon vieux et moi sounds great - so sad to learn that it hasn't been translated.....

There is a chance that I'll finish one more book by midnight -- just a chance! If not, well, at least I will have read 100 books, even if some of them are "bonus books" and not all the "core" books got read? Bad planning on my part...
But I'll see you next year...

1. Four Weeks in the Trenches by Fritz Kreisler. I thought this might be an intriguingly different look at the Great War, given Kreisler's status as a marvellous violinist. Instead, it's just a different but still predictable first-person account of warfare. I preferred Max Arthur's oral history compendiums, such as Forgotten Voices of the Great War. Not much to say as it's a short book, 3 stars.

2. The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. Here's the conundrum: I love Tuchman's ability to take history and make it fascinating. I dislike military history. Tuchman almost made this book interesting from cover to cover, as the story of just how World War I ended up as a massive quagmire to end all stalemates, so to speak. (Hence the title: she's focusing on the manoeuvering that produced the stalemate, before the trenches were dug, and telling us how that happened.) I found the beginning part fascinating; her exploration and explanation of the shifting alliances and military strategy and thought; I could care less how many divisions attacked Namur. So I got as bogged down as the troops in the mud midway through, and so it took longer to read than I hoped or expected. 3.5 stars, worth pursuing & finishing as she has an interesting thesis, if you have a greater tolerance than I for the military history stuff.