Ursula Challenges Herself in 2016 ... Maybe (Part 5)

Here we go again ... heading toward the end of the year.



The photo was taken here in Sault Ste Marie in mid October.

Hi, I'm Ursula, and I've been a member of this group before, but I skipped it in 2015. If you remember me from 2013 and 2014, you may recall that at the time I was living in Belgium and then California, and most recently Italy, but now I live in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Pretty much everything else is still the same - still married to a mathematician, still an artist and photographer, still have 2 kids in college (although my daughter is now a graduate student in a new state - Georgia).

Currently reading:

  

Dear Mr. M by Herman Koch, Letters of Note: Volume 2 edited by Shaun Usher

Currently reading in Italian:



Storia del nuovo cognome by Elena Ferrante

Currently listening to:

Also listening to:

Books Read in 2016

▓▓▓▒▒▒▒░░░January░░░▒▒▒▒▓▓▓

The Secret History of Wonder Woman - finished Jan 7 (audio, 9h 5m) ☼☼☼☼
White Teeth - finished Jan 16 (464 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
Breathing Lessons - finished Jan 22 (327 pages) ☼☼☼☼
After Hannibal - finished Jan 23 (250 pages) ☼☼☼☼
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - finished Jan 25 (311 pages) ☼☼☼☼
The Woman in Black - finished Jan 28 (164 pages) ☼☼☼☼
The Family Romanov - finished Jan 28 (audio, 9h 23m) ☼☼☼
Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant? - finished Jan 29 (228 pages) ☼☼☼☼1/2

Total Read in January: 8
January Stats

▓▓▓▒▒▒▒░░░February░░░▒▒▒▒▓▓▓

The Human Stain - finished Feb 6 (361 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
Operation Paperclip - finished Feb 11 (audio, 19h 25m) ☼☼☼☼
The Surgeon's Mate - finished Feb 14 (382 pages) ☼☼☼☼
Between the World and Me - finished Feb 14 (audio, 3h 35m) ☼☼☼☼☼
Bridge of Sighs - finished Feb 18 (527 pages) ☼☼
The Help - finished Feb 21 (526 pages) ☼☼☼
I Remember You: A Ghost Story - finished Feb 24 (370 pages) ☼☼☼
1968: The Year That Rocked the World - finished Feb 28 (audio, 16h 16m) ☼☼☼☼
The Pure Gold Baby - abandoned (186 pages)

Total Read in February: 8
February Stats

░░░▒▒▒▒▓▓▓March▓▓▓▒▒▒▒░░░

The Art of Fielding - finished Mar 3 (512 pages) ☼☼☼☼
My Life on the Road - finished Mar 6 (audio, 9h 18m) ☼☼☼1/2
Sally Heathcote, Suffragette - finished Mar 8 (163 pages) ☼☼☼
Il Piccolo Principe - finished Mar 12 (143 pages) ☼☼☼
My Friend Dahmer - finished Mar 15 (221 pages) ☼☼☼☼
A Thousand Acres - finished Mar 15 (371 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
Stoner - finished Mar 18 (278 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
The Girl on the Train - finished Mar 19 (323 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
Nothing to Envy - finished Mar 23 (audio, 12h 30m) ☼☼☼☼1/2
Annapurna - finished Mar 27 (257 pages) ☼☼☼☼

Total Read in March: 10

░░░▒▒▒▒▓▓▓April▓▓▓▒▒▒▒░░░

The Art of Crash Landing - finished Apr 1 (405 pages) ☼☼☼
Far from the Madding Crowd - finished Apr 9 (362 pages) ☼☼☼☼1/2
The End of Your Life Book Club - finished Apr 13 (audio, 9h 37m) ☼☼1/2
Modern Romance - finished Apr 22 (audio, 6h 14m) ☼☼☼1/2
Silas Marner - finished Apr 22 (240 pages) ☼☼☼☼
My Struggle Book Two: A Man in Love - finished Apr 25 (592 pages) ☼☼☼☼☼
La ragazza di Bube - finished Apr 26 (259 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage - finished Apr 30 (315 pages) ☼☼☼

Total Read in April: 8
April Stats

▓▓▓▒▒▒▒░░░May░░░▒▒▒▒▓▓▓

Old Filth - *abandoned* May 6 (122 pages)
A Little Life - finished May 9 (720 pages) ☼☼☼☼☼
It Ended Badly - finished May 10 (audio, 8h 8m) ☼☼
Negroland: A Memoir - finished May 14 (audio, 7h 51m) ☼☼☼☼
World and Town - finished May 17 (386 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
An Officer and a Spy - finished May 22 (429 pages) ☼☼☼☼1/2
Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl - finished May 24 (audio, 6h 55m) ☼☼☼☼
The Narrow Road to the Deep North - finished May 29 (352 pages) ☼☼☼☼1/2

Total Read in May: 7
May Stats

▓▓▓▒▒▒▒░░░June░░░▒▒▒▒▓▓▓

My Antonia - finished Jun 10 (289 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
The Ugly Renaissance - finished Jun 14 (audio, 15h 51m) ☼☼☼
Finders Keepers - finished Jun 19 (448 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
David Copperfield - finished Jun 20 (960 pages) ☼☼☼☼1/2
The Whistling Season - finished Jun 23 (345 pages) ☼☼☼
The Dog Stars - finished Jun 27 (319 pages) ☼☼☼☼1/2
The World Without Us - finished Jun 30 (audio, 12h 4m) ☼☼☼☼

Total read in June: 7
June Stats

░░░▒▒▒▒▓▓▓July▓▓▓▒▒▒▒░░░

The Well of Loneliness - finished Jul 9 (447 pages) ☼☼☼☼☼
Anywhere But Here - finished Jul 14 (535 pages) ☼☼
Soldier Girls - finished Jul 19 (audio, 15h 55m) ☼☼☼
The Sympathizer - finished Jul 20 (371 pages) ☼☼☼☼
The Log from the Sea of Cortez - finished Jul 29 (324 pages) ☼☼☼☼
Fingersmith - finished Jul 30 (511 pages) ☼☼☼☼
L'amica geniale - finished Jul 31 (400 pages) ☼☼☼☼

Total read in July: 7
July Stats

░░░▒▒▒▒▓▓▓August▓▓▓▒▒▒▒░░░

Salt - finished Aug 10 (audio, 14h 3m) ☼☼☼1/2
How to Build a Girl - *abandoned* (89 pages)
Inherent Vice - finished Aug 12 (369 pages) ☼☼1/2
The Blazing World - finished Aug 15 (357 pages) ☼☼☼☼1/2
Boxers - finished Aug 19 (328 pages) ☼☼☼
The Drowned World - finished Aug 27 (198 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
The Falls - finished Aug 28 (481 pages) ☼☼☼1/2

Total read in August: 6
August Stats

▓▓▓▒▒▒▒░░░September░░░▒▒▒▒▓▓▓

When the Emperor Was Divine - finished Sep 3 (141 pages) ☼☼☼☼
The Little Red Chairs - finished Sep 10 (256 pages) ☼☼☼☼
The Boys in the Boat - finished Sep 12 (404 pages) ☼☼☼☼
State of Wonder - finished Sep 15 (368 pages) ☼☼☼☼
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum - finished Sep 20 (140 pages) ☼☼☼☼
The Cement Garden - finished Sep 24 (160 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
Homegoing - finished Sep 25 (305 pages) ☼☼☼☼
The Girl with All the Gifts - finished Sep 25 (407 pages) ☼☼☼☼
July's People - finished Sep 29 (160 pages) ☼☼☼☼

Total read in September: 9
September Stats

▓▓▓▒▒▒▒░░░October░░░▒▒▒▒▓▓▓

The Honeymoon - *abandoned* (127 pages)
The Dead Father - finished Oct 4 (177 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
Things Fall Apart - finished Oct 10 (209 pages) ☼☼☼☼
The Worst Journey in the World - finished Oct 16 (audio, 20h 6m) ☼☼☼☼1/2
Blue Highways - finished Oct 16 (429 pages) ☼☼☼☼
In Other Words - finished Oct 17 (233 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
The Brothers Karamazov - finished Oct 20 (701 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
The Honorary Consul - finished Oct 24 (315 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
Nights at the Circus - finished Oct 25 (295 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
The Ghost Map - finished Oct 27 (audio, 8h 38m) ☼☼

Total read in October: 9

░░░▒▒▒▒▓▓▓November▓▓▓▒▒▒▒░░░

Reckless - *abandoned* (audio, 1h 5m)
The Radetzky March - finished Nov 1 (319 pages) ☼☼☼☼☼
The Mortifications - finished Nov 3 (309 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
Clarissa Or the History of a Young Lady - finished Nov 6 (1534 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
Telegraph Avenue - finished Nov 8 (465 pages) ☼☼1/2
Missoula - finished Nov 11 (audio, 11h 51m) ☼☼☼☼1/2
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage - finished Nov 14 (323 pages) ☼☼☼☼1/2
Our Endless Numbered Days - finished Nov 19 (386 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
Love Medicine - finished Nov 20 (367 pages) ☼☼☼
Dreams from Bunker Hill - finished Nov 22 (164 pages) ☼☼☼☼☼
Ghettoside - finished Nov 22 (audio, 13h 24m) ☼☼☼☼
The Switch - finished Nov 26 (216 pages) ☼☼☼☼
The Adventures of Augie March - finished Nov 28 (536 pages) ☼☼☼

Total read in November: 12
November Stats

░░░▒▒▒▒▓▓▓December▓▓▓▒▒▒▒░░░

Nightwood - finished Dec 4 (170 pages) ☼☼☼
City of Thieves - finished Dec 4 (258 pages) ☼☼☼☼1/2
The Sense of an Ending - finished Dec 8 (163 pages) ☼☼☼☼
Blaming - finished Dec 12 (190 pages) ☼☼☼☼
The Floating Opera - finished Dec 14 (252 pages) ☼☼☼1/2
March, Book One - finished Dec 15 (121 pages) ☼☼☼☼
Walk through Walls - finished Dec 16 (audio, 14h 56m) ☼☼☼☼

Total pages read: 27799
Total time listened: 246h 10m

Fiction: 69
Nonfiction: 29

Male Authors: 54
Female Authors: 44

1001 Books List:

The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The Human Stain
The Art of Fielding
Il Piccolo Principe
Far from the Madding Crowd
Silas Marner
La ragazza di Bube
David Copperfield
The Well of Loneliness
Fingersmith
The Drowned World
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum
The Cement Garden
July's People
The Dead Father
Things Fall Apart
The Brothers Karamazov
Nights at the Circus
The Honorary Consul
The Radetzky March
Clarissa or the History of a Young Lady
Love Medicine
The Adventures of Augie March
Nightwood
The Sense of an Ending
Blaming
The Floating Opera

Group Challenges

Nonfiction Challenge:
January (Biography): The Secret History of Wonder Woman
February (History): Operation Paperclip, 1968: The Year That Rocked the World
March (Travel): My Life on the Road, Nothing to Envy, Annapurna
May (the Arts): Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, The Ugly Renaissance
June (Natural History/the Environment): The World Without Us
July (Current Events): Soldier Girls

American Author Challenge:
January (Anne Tyler): Breathing Lessons
February (Richard Russo): Bridge of Sighs
March (Jane Smiley): A Thousand Acres
May (Ivan Doig): The Whistling Season
July (John Steinbeck): The Log from the Sea of Cortez
August (Joyce Carol Oates): The Falls
October (Michael Chabon): Telegraph Avenue

British Author Challenge:
January (Barry Unsworth): After Hannibal
January (Susan Hill): The Woman in Black
March (Thomas Hardy): Far from the Madding Crowd
April (George Eliot): Silas Marner
May (Jane Gardam): Old Filth*
August (Ian McEwan): The Cement Garden

*abandoned

Pulitzer Prize Winners:
Breathing Lessons (1989)
A Thousand Acres (1992)
The Sympathizer (2016)

Ursula has read about: Afghanistan, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Democratic Republic of the Congo, People's Republic of China, Colombia, Czech Republic, Germany, Egypt, Spain, Ethiopia, France, United Kingdom, Greece, Haiti, Ireland, India, Iran, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Latvia, Mexico, Nigeria, Netherlands, Norway, Nepal, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey, United States, Vietnam, South Africa, Zimbabwe.

2016
Nepal
Iceland
Thailand
Ireland
Brazil
Ghana
Nigeria
Austria
Cuba

Covered in 2015:
Czech Republic
India
Portugal
North Korea
Turkey
Zimbabwe

Published dates:

1700-1799
1748 (Clarissa)

1800-1899
1850 (David Copperfield)
1861 (Silas Marner)
1874 (Far from the Madding Crowd)
1880 (The Brothers Karamazov)

1900-1999
1918 (My Antonia)
1922 (The Worst Journey in the World)
1928 (The Well of Loneliness)
1932 (The Radetzky March)
1936 (Nightwood)
1940 (The Log from the Sea of Cortez)
1943 (Il Piccolo Principe)
1951 (Annapurna)
1953 (The Adventures of Augie March)
1956 (The Floating Opera)
1958 (Things Fall Apart)
1960 (La ragazza di Bube)
1962 (The Drowned World)
1965 (Stoner)
1973 (The Honorary Consul)
1974 (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum)
1975 (The Dead Father)
1976 (Blaming)
1978 (The Cement Garden)
1980 (The Surgeon's Mate)
1981 (July's People)
1982 (Blue Highways)
         (Dreams from Bunker Hill)
1983 (The Woman in Black)
1984 (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)
         (Nights at the Circus)
         (Love Medicine)
1986 (Anywhere But Here)
1988 (Breathing Lessons)
1991 (A Thousand Acres)
1997 (After Hannibal)

2000-2016
2000 (White Teeth)
         (The Human Stain)
2001 (Hateship, Friendship, Loveship, Courtship, Marriage)
2002 (Fingersmith)
         (Salt: A World History)
         (When the Emperor Was Divine)
2004 (The Falls)
2005 (1968: The Year That Rocked the World)
2006 (The Whistling Season)
         (The Ghost Map)
2007 (Bridge of Sighs)
2008 (City of Thieves)
2009 (The Help)
         (Nothing to Envy)
         (My Struggle, Book 2)
         (Inherent Vice)
2010 (I Remember You: A Ghost Story)
         (World and Town)
2011 (The Art of Fielding)
         (L'amica geniale)
         (State of Wonder)
         (The Sense of an Ending)
2012 (My Friend Dahmer)
         (The End of Your Life Book Club)
         (The Dog Stars)
         (Telegraph Avenue)
2013 (An Officer and a Spy)
         (Boxers)
         (The Boys in the Boat)
         (March, Book One)
2014 (The Secret History of Wonder Woman)
         (The Family Romanov)
         (Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?)
         (Operation Paperclip)
         (Sally Heathcote, Suffragette)
         (The Narrow Road to the Deep North)
         (The Ugly Renaissance)
         (Soldier Girls)
         (The Blazing World)
         (The Girl with All the Gifts)
2015 (Between the World and Me)
         (My Life on the Road)
         (The Art of Crash Landing)
         (The Girl on the Train)
         (Modern Romance)
         (The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage)
         (A Little Life)
         (It Ended Badly)
         (Negroland)
         (Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl)
         (Finders Keepers)
         (The Sympathizer)
         (In Other Words)
         (Missoula)
         (Our Endless Numbered Days)
         (Ghettoside)
2016 (The Little Red Chairs)
         (Homegoing)
         (The Mortifications)
         (Walk through Walls)

Happy new one, Ursula! Your topper is gorgeous... If nothing else, your new location does at least have some pretty scenery :)

>6 katiekrug: Thanks! It does ... I posted that one on FB and said that I guess this makes up for the fact that our highs are now in the mid-40s. I'm not sure it's a fair trade. ;)

Happy new thread Ursula. Love that topper picture.

>8 charl08: Thanks! I used it as background for a quote over on Litsy too. :)

I also hit book number 75 a few days ago when I finished In Other Words. I'm on my phone at the moment so I'll be back to post my thoughts about it a little later.

Congrats on 75!

Happy new thread, Ursula -love the photo. Congrats on hitting 75.

In Other Words

Jhumpa Lahiri has always felt a little detached from her "native" languages, thanks to being raised speaking Bengali with her immigrant parents, and speaking English in the rest of her daily life in the US. She never felt as if she fully had a place in either. And from there, she found a love for the Italian language and decided to do something totally crazy - immerse herself in it. She read exclusively in Italian to prep herself for a (temporary) move to Italy, and started writing exclusively in it as well.

The book talks about her journey in learning Italian, her thoughts about her own sense of displacement, her struggles with fame that came from winning the Pulitzer. The book also contains a couple of stories she wrote in Italian. The English edition features the Italian and English versions of the book on facing pages, which is an interesting choice, and fortuitous for me because it meant it was a rare case where I was able to find a book in Italian in the US. :) I enjoyed most of the book, although I think that her sense of searching comes through clearly and because it doesn't seem like something she has resolved, the book doesn't end with any sort of conclusion either. It's the log of an experiment, perhaps an ongoing one. But wow, could I relate to a lot of her thoughts on learning a language and the importance of abandoning the feeling of safety to just throw yourself into it.

She didn't translate the book herself, and her Italian is not terribly literary, so I'm not sure how it is reading the translation.

>11 drneutron:, >12 BLBera: Thank you both! There was a stretch there when I felt like I might never arrive at 75. :)

The Brothers Karamazov

After two and a half months and an international move I've finished this one. Sometimes I really liked it. Sometimes I wondered why we were still talking about the ins and outs of religion. Sometimes it got sort of exciting but then I was disappointed to realize there wasn't enough book left for that to really turn into anything.

Basically, Russian philosophical novels are not exactly my genre, so I'll say I appreciate its value and interest but I'm glad to be done with it.

From Nights at the Circus:

"The only sounds drifting from the menagerie, the continuous murmuring purr of the great cats, like a distant sea, and the faint jingling of Colonel Kearney's elephants of flesh and blood as they rattled the chains on their legs as they did continually, all their waking hours, since in their millennial and long-lived patience they knew quite well how, in a hundred years, or a thousand years' time, or else, perhaps, tomorrow, in an hour's time, for it was all a gamble, a million to one chance, but all the same there was a chance that if they kept on shaking their chains, one day, some day, the clasps upon the shackles would part."

A little Virginia Woolf-esque.

Happy new thread, Ursula! That is one gorgeous topper. A lovely and thoughtful review of the Lahiri book, which I have almost finished. If you posted that, I will thumb. My thoughts coincide with yours, and I agree that she is far from finished with her musings and her quest. The English translation is probably very faithful to her Italian - very sparse and simple, but still, her thoughts come across and I can relate to her wanting something that is all her own. That is chosen. She is very tenacious, and although I prefer her stories written in English, I admire and appreciate what she has done with this small volume.

Happy new thread! What a pretty topper.

Nicely autumnal opener Ursula.

Have a lovely weekend.

Oh wow, I have been distracted for the last day or so I guess!

>17 Crazymamie: Thanks! I am interested to know what she will do now that she is back in the US. I like what you said about her wanting something that she herself has chosen. I guess we can all relate to that on one level or another. Thanks also for the comments on the translation. I'll be able to check it out at my leisure now because my husband actually bought me a copy of the book. I realized about halfway through it that I could learn a lot of phrases and the like from it, and also there aren't many opportunities where the translation is both faithful and right next to the original for purposes of study.

>18 banjo123: Thanks on both counts! Most of the leaves are now gone, sadly. Although the streets are now very festive-looking!

>19 PaulCranswick: Thanks, Paul. It was in fact a pretty good weekend.

This past week has been Restaurant Week in the Soo. The participating restaurants and menus weren't anything terribly exotic or thrilling, but it gave us the opportunity to visit a couple of new restaurants and one that we already knew we liked. The first one we visited was the local Irish pub. We were there on the 2nd night of the week at about 7:15 or 7:30 and they informed us they were out of one of the entree items, the fish, and that the beef tenderloin was now a pork tenderloin. *rolls eyes* But we just ordered off the regular menu and found out that they make a mean burger. Seriously delicious.

The second restaurant had a smoked whitefish croissant sandwich, and that was so good. I love smoked fish. (This was at our already-known-to-be-reliable restaurant.) And finally, last night we went to another place and had a super good pizza and cheesecake. And the salad they offered was a real salad, with veggies and green lettuce. All too often in small towns you get iceberg and some sad carrots if you're lucky.

All in all, it was a success. There are a few places worth eating out at, which is encouraging.

Glad you found some places you don't mind - must be tricky after living in such a famously foodie part of the world.

I do want to read the Lahiri. How lovely to have the book bought for you by your SO. Hope the Italian practice goes well. I've been trying to find a good football article to teach the past tense in English. I had no idea sports writers used such complex grammar forms...

>22 charl08: It's not hard after living in Italy, it's hard after living in the bay area of California (and to a lesser extent, Denver). Italy is great for Italian food but not for anything else - they're pretty suspicious of foreign food.

Yeah, it was nice that Morgan bought me the book. He thought he was being sneaky, but I knew what he was up to. :)

I guess the sports grammar thing kind of makes sense, there are a lot of different time periods to talk about and interruptions in the past, etc. But I wouldn't have thought of it on my own!

Nights at the Circus

Our story centers around a woman, Fevvers, (Sophie by birth but Fevvers for reasons I'm about to reveal) who is the darling of the circus - an aerialist who has wings. Jack Walser, a reporter, has come to interview her and get to the bottom of this whole "wings" thing. Is she a scammer? A freak? They sit up late one night; really late, because there seems to be something wrong with time all of a sudden, with Big Ben seeming to lose track. Fevvers provides much explanation, but Walser isn't sure how to take it all. After the interview, their paths cross again and things get seriously weird. And since it's already been made clear we're dealing with magical realism, there's a lot of leeway in how weird seriously weird can be.

I have previously read The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter, which I would characterize as mind-blowingly weird, so this was actually a pleasant step back from that. It was also a less overtly political book (although there are definitely aspects to be read politically). I enjoyed it quite a bit.

The Honorary Consul

Our main character is Dr. Plarr, who is living in a provincial town in northern Argentina. He is half British, half Paraguayan, but has been living in Argentina since some time in his childhood, when he and his mother left Paraguay after his father is detained as a political prisoner. Plarr has never heard from his father since and has no idea of his fate. Meanwhile, the Consul of the title is Charlie Fortnum, sort-of friend of Dr. Plarr and a functional alcoholic who has made a problematic marriage to a former prostitute. He is kidnapped by Paraguayan rebels by accident (they were trying for the American Ambassador). The rebels are known to Plarr and thus, he has some moral deliberations to do regarding Fortnum's fate. It's actually quite a bit morally murkier than that, but I won't get into it to avoid spoiling too much of the plot.

This was a good book overall - it's got a lot of meat to chew on regarding hard choices, getting yourself in over your head, and whether the ends justifies the means. Based just on that, I would definitely recommend it. However, the portrayal of women was limited and what was there was flat. There are only 3 women in the book - the aforementioned prostitute-turned-wife, Plarr's mother, who he does not like at all and is depicted as being strangely addicted to eating sweets at Buenos Aires tea rooms, and the wife of one of the Paraguayan kidnappers, who doesn't have enough of a personality of her own to mention, except that she does a fair amount of talking in some of the scenes. She just doesn't reveal any discernible character in those scenes.

Recommended with a grain or two of salt.

>24 ursula: Love that cover!

>26 banjo123: I liked that one too! Especially out of the other options I've seen for that book.

The Ghost Map

The subject here is the cholera outbreak that hit London in the mid-1800s and the science that eventually discovered its cause. The subtitle is "The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic -- and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World", which is both overblown and ridiculous. But it explains a little bit about what went wrong here.

I can imagine that you're an author and you have a pretty good and interesting idea for a book - the aforementioned cholera outbreak - and the way that investigative science won out over superstitious theories about the spread of diseases. And your publisher says "hmm, that's good ... let's see, what will the subtitle be?" *spouts out the nonsense about the most terrifying epidemic*

You start, "Well, I don't know about that ... I mean, there's that whole 1666 thing... That was 100,000 people vs. 127 people. If I had to guess, that was maybe more terrifying?"

The publisher shushes you. "Okay, now maybe we could add something more to it? That's not going to make enough of a book." *finishes off the rest of the above subtitle*

"Er, well. I can cover how it changed science, since it marks a win over the people who thought disease was spread by miasma, so that's good. And then since there was a map that helped show how the disease radiated out from a contaminated water supply in a neighborhood, maybe I can talk about modern maps that are being used today on a neighborhood level. Like Yelp, or school rating sites. I mean, it's not exactly related to poop in a water supply, but ...."

Publisher: "Oh, good idea. Start out talking a lot about poop and how much of it there was in Victorian England and how they got rid of it. Or didn't. And occasionally among all the "excretions", "waste," and other euphemisms, be sure to throw in "dog shit" here and there."

"..."

Publisher: "Anyway, what have you got for changing cities and the modern world?"

"Hm. You might think that epidemics like this would keep us out of cities, but we still live in them? And they're actually really green? And people in cities have fewer children? I don't know where I'm going with this, but ...."

Publisher: "Perfect."

"And the modern world, well, I guess that the modern world makes me think of nuclear weapons and terrorism..."

Publisher: "What the holy hell does that have to do with a 19th century cholera outbreak?"

"I can talk about it for a good 20 pages and it'll probably take me another 10 to make any sort of tenuous connection at all."

Publisher: "Go for it."

SNORK!

Wonderful - thanks for the comments, Ursula.

I aim to please. :)

I seem to be collecting books at the moment - not in the sense of buying/acquiring them, but in the sense of ending up with a long list of "currently reading" books. I am just super close to finishing a few (including my read of Clarissa, which started in January!) and I guess I have started a couple of books in anticipation of that, except I haven't quite made it there yet.

In the meantime, have a photo.



This is the Upper Tahquamenon Falls. I found out on Wikipedia that the water is that color because of tannins that leach into the water from cedars and other trees that are in swamps feeding into the river.

Gorgeous.

I enjoyed The Ghost Map when I read it. Too bad you weren't a huge fan of Brothers Karamozov I found it fascinating when I was a teenager.

>33 BLBera: Thanks!

>34 The_Hibernator: The parts of The Ghost Map that were actually about the cholera outbreak were pretty good. But when the "Conclusion" chapter (followed by the "Epilogue" chapter) starts with 3 hours remaining in a 8.5 hour audio book, and it all has pretty much zero to do with the topic of the book, it's a bad sign.

As for The Brothers Karamazov, I understand why it would be up some people's (maybe many people's) alleys, but philosophy and religion are my two least favorite topics, so they have to be surrounded by some pretty compelling storytelling for me to really get into it. And this one had some compelling storytelling, but in fits and starts.

Great picture. I love the different colours of the trees.

I haven't read either Kazamarov or the cholera book, but don't think I'll be rushing to get them either.

Great photo, Ursula!

Reckless by Chrissie Hynde

What a freaking mess.

This is a memoir by Chrissie Hynde, the frontwoman for the Pretenders. It's written in short vignettes, in short sentences, sometimes in short sentence fragments. The stories stop and start without any logic or impact. Every story just ends abruptly and she moves on to the next one without any segue. She devotes pages to her "memories" of being 3 years old, including what her deep thoughts were on the type of houses typical for her neighborhood and eminent domain (no, not her current thoughts, but her 3-year-old thoughts). I was already thoroughly annoyed with and bored by her by the time she got to being 8, but I decided to give it one full section of the audio book (about an hour) before giving up. She had made it to her mid-teens by then and she's still just as boring and pointless. The only things she wants to go into with any depth are the evils of car culture, war, eating meat, and the Pill making women try to be like men. Yeah.

Also, the audio was atrocious. It's read by Rosanna Arquette (who says her name like Rose-onna, which I was like "wow, really? I had no idea", except ....) who gets downright histrionic at points trying to inject some sort of excitement into the narrative, and mispronounces absolutely everything she touches. A few that I made note of (there were more!):

Akron was "Ack-ron" about 50% of the time. The rest of the time she pronounced it the way I've always heard it, which is something along the lines of Ack-rin or Ack-run (probably really needs a schwa). This is jarring since Hynde is from Akron - you'd think Arquette could get it right.

There was a reference to "molting lava", which is an interesting mental image.

Something was of "paramont" importance.

People were of "Germonic" origin.

And then there's the dreaded "acadimmia".

So I abandoned it, shuddering.

And then I looked around to see if it was really as awful as I thought, and found out it just might be worse, as evidenced by this interview with Hynde about an incident of sexual assault that I didn't make it to. She doesn't consider the event rape because she was out of her mind on drugs and chose to be there.

Her comments on meat-eaters were also just beauties - saying that she learned to coexist with them but she's gotten used to just looking down on 97% of the population.

Blargh. I often suffer through mediocre audio books but this one is beyond the pale.

>38 ursula: - Erm, no, thank you.

Oh I read that. Was hoping it would be better! The audio does sound like it made it worse.

>36 charl08: Yeah, when we were there it was the weekend everyone expected the colors to be fully out, but instead it was a little early there. There hadn't been a hard frost so the trees didn't all start turning. In fact, it's still only frozen a couple of times overnight so some of the trees in town are just dropping mostly green/light yellow leaves.

I could recommend The Ghost Map if you stop reading when you get to the Conclusion part. The story of the outbreak and how it was handled and how ridiculous people thought the idea of a water-borne disease was, was pretty interesting.

>37 kidzdoc: Thanks!

>39 katiekrug: Indeed.

>40 charl08: I think maybe the extreme choppiness of the mini-stories wouldn't have gotten to me as much in print. With audio, I kept going "wait, that's it? That's your whole story? You and some neighborhood boy would pee in the corner of his basement and then you got caught, and now you're going to talk about how you used to pretend you were a horse on the playground at school? Like, what? But yeah, I looked up what other people said about the book and they said that the drugs/alcohol stuff got super boring and repetitive and I was only starting to get into that and already thought she was boring (and condescending) so I figured it was best to quit while I was ahead.

Well, I'm a little surprised there haven't been any rumbles about the lack of a priest, and here it is already almost the end of the 3rd! Nevertheless, I present to you: Fr. November.

I was just headed over here because I realized I hadn't seen the monthly beefcake priest....

Fr. November isn't bad. At least he's not wearing a stupid hat!

Ha! I love the casual pose! Very artsy!

Okay, Fr. November is reminding me of someone, and I can't think who. This is going to drive me crazy...well, crazier.

>43 katiekrug: Yay for no stupid hats!

>44 scaifea: I am distracted by the bottle of booze. I know they're allowed to drink, it just always sort of weirds me out to see it.

>45 Crazymamie: Oh no, not crazier! He reminds me a little of Nathan Fillion.

But when the "Conclusion" chapter (followed by the "Epilogue" chapter) starts with 3 hours remaining in a 8.5 hour audio book, and it all has pretty much zero to do with the topic of the book, it's a bad sign.

Oofda!

>47 The_Hibernator: Yeah. I mean, even if they were 100% related, that's a whole lot of concluding and epiloguing to be doing. Most of that should have fit in somewhere else, and if it didn't ... well, maybe it doesn't exactly fit into the book!

I'm making all sorts of assumptions based on that bottle.
(This calendar makes me realise just how much I seem to jump to priestly stereotypes. Ouch)

The Radetzky March

The story is about three male generations of a family, the Trottas. They see their fortunes rise in Austria-Hungary, but by the third generation, their lives and the lives of everyone around them are on the cusp of changing as World War I and the end of the Habsburg Empire looms. The tone is melancholy, but I'm not sure that it's really so sad about the end of the empire as for the end of the empire that it seemed to be - everything was obviously not rosy for the many different peoples subsumed by Austria-Hungary, and the Trottas are of Slovenian origin although they consider themselves thoroughly Austrian.

The writing is just terrific, managing to be straightforward, evocative, wise and slyly humorous at various times. I really enjoyed this book. It took me a bit to get into it, probably 30-40 pages, but then I was hooked.

>49 charl08: I remember going to a friend's father's funeral in a Catholic church, and the priest coming to the house afterward. I was really surprised to see him drinking with everyone. I've only been in a Catholic church for services about 3 times in my life. In Italy I saw a lot of nuns, a few monks, and not very many priests at all so I guess they're still sort of mysterious to me.

I was amused that this priest was not Italian, since he's reading El País.

I finished the Early Reviewer book I won from September's batch, but I'm putting off writing the review. I've gotten out of the habit of writing "real" reviews and so I feel a little bit of pressure, even though I know it's not like there are quality requirements for ER reviews. :)

We used our extra hour going to the gym today. Well, actually, we used it sleeping and it would have been a gym day anyway but it feels much more virtuous to say that we used it like that. Still in our warm(ish) trend here, in the low 50s. It's weird to have gone back up after I thought we were never going to see these sorts of temps again. No snow yet. It gives me a feeling of trepidation though, like it's going to come all of a sudden and enough to make us sorry we ever wondered about it.

Last night we went to see The Martian in the little former theater in town. The only movie theater closed down a year or so ago and is now being used for children's theater or something but occasionally they show older movies there for $5. We figured we might as well check it out. The screen has seen better days and I think there were 13 people there, but hey, we hadn't seen a movie in any kind of theater for probably 4 years or so. I thought it was a pretty good adaptation of the book, although both Morgan and I kept thinking of things that were left out (and of course they had to leave out about 1,266 disasters that happened in the book or it would have been 6 hours long).

Today's forecast is gloom again and I guess I'm probably going to write out some postcards for Postcrossing, and decorate them with my new stickers from the sticker subscription service I signed up for. Which sounds totally bizarre when I write it out like that but it's actually pretty cool.

Uh, books.... I'm in the home stretch on the last volume of Clarissa (yay!). I'm close to finishing Telegraph Avenue (yay! Chabon is not for me). I'm listening to Missoula (can't say "yay" here but it's a good book).

Hi Ursula - What excellent use of the extra hour.

I thought, as you did, that they did a good adaptation of "The Martian." It would have been a drag to have to watch all of the thousands of disasters that happened in the book. I love little theaters. It's great that they have one.

It's been mild here as well. I love it. No complaints.

>4 ursula: that ticker reminds me of walking on the railway track all day long to save the US$25 train fare from Aguas Caliente (the town at the end of the Inca Trail in Peru) to the nearest bus station to get back to Cusco. To this day, it remains my greatest achievement :)

>42 ursula: very cerebral!

>54 LovingLit: Haha, that sounds like something my husband and I would do. Hope you spent that $25 on something amazing! :)

Isn't he though!

The Mortifications

I got this through LT Early Reviewers. It's about a family torn apart when the mother takes the two children and heads to the US, leaving her husband behind with his dreams of revolution. The children are now grown - Ulises and Isabel, twins - and living with their mother in Hartford, Connecticut. Ulises is a bit at loose ends, while Isabel thinks she has found her calling in the church and helping people die (not in the Kevorkian sense, but in the comforting sense). The mother, Soledad, has moved on with a Dutch immigrant, Willem ... or has she?

There are a lot of interesting ideas at play here, about escaping vs. fleeing, settling vs. making the best of things and other such fine distinctions. But the story is told in a way that makes it hard to really connect with the characters. And the names are so on-the-nose: yes, the names are relatively common ones but seriously - Soledad (solitude/loneliness), Ulises (he does in fact go on a sort of odyssey), their last name is Encarnación (incarnation/personification). This book was okay, and it had its moments, but I really wanted to read the other book, the one that could have been written from these ideas.

Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady

Free at last, free at last!

I did it, I read all 35464987654654 pages of this thing! Kind of, I know my eyes just went over words in a few parts. But luckily since in an epistolary novel you can usually expect to have the same events talked about for weeks or months and told from varying points of view, you don't need to get it the first time and you can catch up! (I might be a little loopy after reading this thing for the whole year.)

Clarissa is a young lady. Lovelace is a rake who wants to marry her. Solmes is a big old bore who also wants to marry her. Clarissa doesn't want to marry anyone but her family is not having any of it and assumes she must be turning down Solmes because she's got the hots for Lovelace and his devilish charms. Clarissa insists she just wants permission to "live single" (she would have been a riot on the tv show "Living Single", let me tell you) but no one is going to give in and her family locks her up until she agrees to marry Solmes. Lovelace employs some trickery to spirit her out of the house against her will and the next mumblemumble pages are all about what happens to her once she's under his power.

Spoiler: mostly what happens is that she finds the time, paper, ink, and wrist strength to write absolute reams of letters.

When she's not writing, her best friend Miss Howe is, or Lovelace is, or his friend Belford is, or a variety of other tangentially related people are. There is a veritable flurry of letters exchanged over the 9 months of real time in the book which took me 11 months to read.

And then after everything, there's a whole wrap-up of what happened to all the characters you've forgotten and never cared about in the first place, just to make sure there isn't anyone out their going "yes but what ever happened to Clarissa's sister's maid, who we haven't heard anything from since April?" And after that, there's a whole justification from the author replying to letters from people who were reading it as it was released serially and got seriously involved in the story (entertainment being hard to come by in the 1740s). He explains in fine detail his reasons for every end of every character for any idiot who might have missed his moralizing lessons. I will say I skimmed this, although what I really did was read a little, skim a little more, and then flip Kindle pages until I gave up and called it done. It's not part of the book, I don't have to read it!

How do I feel now? Better than all the people out there who haven't read Clarissa? I'm not sure. Maybe. Maybe worse, because I could have read a summary on Wikipedia and a few excerpts and probably been just as edified without having to read about the "dear creature" and "charming creature" and "most virtuous of her sex" for nearly an entire year of my life.

I also feel like it might be a good thing that letter-writing has died out?

I kid.

I enjoyed a decent amount of it, and felt like a volume or two (out of nine) were really exciting. For a while I wondered if leopards were going to change their spots, so to speak, but Richardson had never seen a leopard so you can draw your own conclusions on that front. I think that if your main character is going to die after spending 3 volumes talking about how she's going to die, then your book should end pretty shortly thereafter, but obviously Richardson didn't agree.

Also, if you have read it or know the plot or are never going to read it and don't care if you know the plot or are a masochist and intend to read it even if you know the plot, here's an interesting article about the book and its place in women's cultural history.

>57 ursula: Congrats on finishing Clarissa.

"How do I feel now? Better than all the people out there who haven't read Clarissa? I'm not sure. Maybe.."

There must be a badge you could wear. 'I completed Clarissa and..."

My copy of Clarissa did not survive the pre-move book purge....

You do deserve a badge for finishing Clarissa.

Great comments on the Palacio - very timely - I was eying it on the ER list. I'll pass now.

>57 ursula: Thanks! I feel accomplished.

>58 thornton37814: "I completed Clarissa and still have my sanity. At least the parts I had before I started it." Might be a little long for a badge.

>59 charl08: I cannot imagine having a physical copy of it. I read it on Kindle. Although I do think that the older the book, the better it is to read a physical copy. For me, it just helps me process it better for some reason.

>60 katiekrug: Thanks! As for the Palacio, I don't know ... I felt like I might have done it a disservice by reading it piecemeal along with a lot of other books, and that might have contributed to my lack of connection with it. On the other hand, because of that I focused on it for the last 2/3 to half and it didn't really change my mind. Either it was too late, or it was just hard to connect with.

Well, I'm still trying to pick myself up and put myself together after the election results. All I'm going to say is that we are hoping more than ever that one of the jobs that comes through will be outside the US.

Telegraph Avenue

Barf.

I didn't like this at all. It's like Chabon channeling Pynchon channeling Tarantino channeling Elmore Leonard. Aren't we so very clever?

Two guys own a record store in Berkeley - one is black, one is Jewish. Their wives are also partners as midwives. The black guy, Archy, has a dad he doesn't talk to who was in blaxploitation movies in the 70s and a son he sort of knew about who appears in his life suddenly. There's a huge cast of characters, all of whom have nicknames and quirks. I get it, Berkeley is quirky - trust me, I lived near there and spent enough time there, I know it's true to an extent - but it's just exhausting to read. Everyone makes constant cultural references, which again, I used to work in a record store, I know it's a job hazard to a certain extent. There are plots within plots within subplots. There's a parrot, a blimp, a white lawyer who likes to talk like a black guy from the hood, a gay teenager in a sexual relationship with a straight teenager, a funeral director/city councilman whose character is straight out of some comic book .... It's all so wacky! And zany! And snappy!

It all just fell totally flat for me. I wasn't crazy about The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay but I thought it was okay. This was not okay.

PS. The record store I worked for was based in Berkeley and owned by a guy who I'm sure had an influence on the character of the Jewish owner of the store in the book. There is no way you can live in Berkeley and not be familiar with the guy, and calling him a character is putting it mildly. I worked more closely with him than probably anyone else who wasn't in the main inner circle and I definitely saw echoes of him in Nat Jaffe.

"And it isn't only she but a class of people who trust they will be justified, that their thoughts will be as substantial as the seven hills to build on, and by spreading their power they will have an eternal city for vindication on the day when other founders have gone down, bricks and planks, whose thoughts were not real and who built on soft swamp."

- The Adventures of Augie March

Last night was a weird one around here. I woke up to the sound of a bark, but it was too far away to be from our room or even from downstairs. At the same time, I became aware that the dog was not on the bed. And if she's not in the bed or right next to it staring at us to get us to take her out, she's not in the house. I woke Morgan up and asked, "Where's the dog?" He went downstairs and opened the front door, where she rushed past him into the house and ran upstairs. Then, I went into the bathroom and realized that the spindle and toilet paper were missing - the spindle was on the back of the toilet and the toilet paper was in the sink, of all places.

Morgan had no memory of even letting the dog out, let alone what on earth he had done in the bathroom. I guess he was sleepwalking. Weird and creepy, but I'm just glad the dog was okay (it wasn't super cold out, luckily).

Missoula

This account of the handling of sexual assaults at the University of Montana will make you angry. Even if so much of it is what you already know - turning cases around on the victim, sports talent meaning perpetrators get a lot more leeway, the invasive nature of rape investigations, the difficulty of prosecuting a rape case - it will still make you angry. Why is it that if you say you've been mugged, no one will question the reality of it, but if you say you've been raped, you get nothing but questions and challenges?

Here it all ended up in investigations by the Department of Justice, though. On the other hand, Missoula was far from alone - I think it said that more than 90 universities ended up under investigation for their handling of rape cases. Which just makes it all the worse, of course. It was good to hear Krakauer's reason for taking on this tough subject: he found out that a friend of the family had been raped years previously and it started him down the path of discovery of how often the crime goes unreported and how terribly victims are often treated. Good for him for following that line of inquiry and bringing one microcosm out into the open so that hopefully others will learn something from it.

Hateship, Friendship, Loveship, Courtship, Marriage

Short stories are not my thing. I often find them unsatisfying. So I picked up this collection by Alice Munro with a little trepidation, but I didn't need to worry. I feel like most of these stories were a little longer than I normally think of short stories, which is maybe part of the reason they felt fully developed to me. The other reason is probably due to Munro's skill. As the title implies, they're stories about relationships of all kinds. In the title story, two young girls get involved in the correspondence between a couple of adults with surprising results. One of my other favorites was about a man whose wife has Alzheimer's, and he has to protect her interests in an unexpected way. These are quiet but compelling stories and I enjoyed them a lot.

I keep meaning to give Munro a try, and she keeps sliding off the radar... Maybe next year....?

Hope you have a good weekend, Ursula!

What Katie said.

>65 ursula: Like your review of Telegraph Avenue, this was what I felt after only a couple of pages and I've enjoyed his other work. My favourite is Gentlemen of the Road.

>67 ursula: That is weird.

Enjoyed catching up with your recent reviews, Ursula.

my own reading prejudices were confirmed too. Chabon when good is great when not at peak is lousy. Munro writes satifying stories, period. Krakauer always makes a splash with his books and you can write a review to outshine tedious epistolary 18th century novels.

Have a great weekend.

>70 katiekrug:, >71 Crazymamie: I finally bit the bullet since like I said, I don't really connect with short stories all that often. But I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to get my teeth into these.

>72 avatiakh: Good to know I'm not alone on it. I will hold out hope for Gentlemen of the Road one day.

>73 PaulCranswick: Thanks, Paul. Always happy to provide confirmation of your suspicions. :) And thanks re: the Clarissa review, I decided to go stream-of-consciousness with it. Hope you have a great weekend as well.

It's snowing today, for the first time. And of course it can't be just some soft flakes drifting down; instead we're under a winter storm warning with wind gusts up to 50 mph. But before the weather turned too terrible, we walked down to the library book sale, and I spent $2 for these titles:

Oh I loved the Mistry. If that lot only cost $2 I think you were very restrained.

Hope your weather improves. We've got weather warnings but hoping that this doesn't mean a repeat of last year's floods.

Nice haul, Ursula. And welcome to winter!

I enjoyed your comments on Chabon; I love his writing. I admire the fact that he is willing to try various genres. That being said, I asked a cousin of mine about Telegraph Avenue, and she said, "Well, you know, it is Chabon being Chabon in parts. He just can't stop himself from telling everything he knows about a topic." I found that in parts of in Kavalier & Clay.

Alice Munro is a genius. I love her stories. I'm happy that I still have a few volumes to read.

I want to read Missoula, but I keep putting it off. I need to just do it.

Weird episode of the dog in the nighttime!

Books that make you cry: http://lithub.com/sad-books-that-will-rip-your-soul-to-pieces/

Like the writer there, I have lots of books I love that I would at least hesitate to recommend to people, and more that I definitely would not recommend. I read a lot of depressing books.

I love books that make me cry :)

ETA: As long as I don't feel like I was manipulated into crying...

Today's high: 29. Although it's currently 22 feels like 11, so I don't think it's likely it'll end up feeling like 29.

>76 charl08: Yeah, that one's on the 1001 Books list. I kind of like reading bigger books in print rather than on the Kindle (Clarissa notwithstanding). I get a more tactile feeling of making progress. The books were 50 cents each or 3 for a dollar, but I didn't have to restrain myself. I live in a tiny town and the book sale was in one small room. The fiction books took up two tables.

Hoping you don't have any floods in your future either. I was just a tad worried because there were comments about potential power outages and we haven't gotten around to a flashlight or candles or anything yet. Of course, we do know our neighbors so I'm sure they'd lend us something.

>77 BLBera: Thanks! "Chabon being Chabon", exactly. I mean, the Tarantino comparison is totally there - when he's on top of his game, it all works. But sometimes he just wants to go down the rabbit hole and show off his esoteric knowledge and influences and it just stops being fun and starts being try-hard.

I didn't find Missoula hard to read, really. I found myself mostly making a wry face and nodding to myself. It's stuff we all know, it's just even uglier all laid out together like that.

And yeah, totally weird episode. But hopefully no repeats!

>79 katiekrug: In fiction, it's all manipulation, really. But I agree it has to feel organic so that you can ignore that fact. There are only a couple of books that have made me cry. I remember crying while reading The Kite Runner, and there was something I read relatively recently that had me crying while trying to tell Morgan about something that had happened in it. I can't remember what it was - it might have been A Little Life, but I feel like it was actually a different book. Hm. It happens rarely enough that you'd think I'd remember.

I suddenly have 4 books I've finished and haven't written anything about yet. I'll get to those soon. But meanwhile, how about a picture from the old days?

I just went out for a walk with the dog. It is 30F feels like 23. (-1C feels like -5) So I guess maybe I'd like to think of warmer times. Here's a photo from the last week we were in Italy. I had mentioned this on my last thread, but never posted a picture from it. I set my alarm for 4:25 AM, got on a 5:05 train to Venice, and power-walked to the other side of the city to take photos of the sunrise. I liked this one best:

And after some conversation about assigned reading in high school, I'm going to try to remember what I read in school. I thought I remembered a lot of them but apparently not so much

9th grade/freshman year: My teacher was Mrs. Houser and she was a great teacher. I don't remember much from that year, though. I know we read:

The Outsiders
some Faulkner short stories, "A Rose for Emily" and "That Evening Sun" (these obviously made an impression on me)
Romeo & Juliet

I have no recollection of anything else we read, although I do remember doing debates in that class, writing letters to authors, and watching the Challenger disaster.

---------

10th grade/sophomore year

Mr. Griest. Man, he was a mess. I remember essentially nothing we read. My most vivid memory of this class is him getting mad at a student and throwing a desk across the room.

Macbeth
Lord of the Flies

----------

11th grade/junior year

Half the year I was in Honors English and half the year in regular (I had a clash of personalities with the Honors teacher and demoted myself). Mr. Davis for Honors, Mrs. McNeese for regular.

In Honors we read:

Huckleberry Finn
The Scarlet Letter
Moby Dick
King Lear

In regular English we read:

The Grapes of Wrath
The Great Gatsby
Death of a Salesman
To Kill a Mockingbird

---------

12th grade/senior year

I was in AP English. Mr. Johnson. He was fun but we also had a slight clash of personalities.

We read:

The Inferno
Canterbury Tales
The Odyssey
Beowulf
Grendel
Candide
Hamlet
Heart of Darkness
The Stranger
Brave New World

We also had to memorize and recite a Shakespearean sonnet and another poem (mine was by John Donne).

Wow! A thrown desk? Such excitement!

That AP list is quite impressive. Love Heart of Darkness. Other than that and Hamlet, I've not read any of them!

>83 katiekrug: Yeah, he was ... not terribly stable, let's say. And I'm realizing that maybe I actually mixed up junior and sophomore years? I debated about that for bit, but I now I'm sure I did. So the teachers and reading lists should be reversed there.

The main reason I wasn't sure was because Mr. Davis took our class to see a production of King Lear in San Francisco and as I recall, we had no chaperones, just a map of the area near the theater with some streets marked off as "do not enter" (the streets with the porno theaters/shops) and were let loose for a couple of hours to get lunch and shop on our own. I couldn't quite believe that happened to a bunch of sophomores (juniors would be only marginally better), but it definitely did.

I also have to confess that I haven't read the epic poetry portion of that list of AP titles either. I made a good run at The Inferno, but I couldn't deal with Canterbury Tales or Beowulf. I think I read some of the Odyssey, but I certainly did not complete it.

I knew I forgot one. I did Death of a Salesman as well. Hated It.

According to my English syllabus no woman wrote anything worth studying. Sheesh.

>85 charl08: I didn't hate Death of a Salesman. I don't remember being in love with it either, though. :)

Yeah, I thought for a minute to try to recall some woman author I was just totally forgetting, but I don't think there was one.

ETA: Oh right, Harper Lee was a woman. Oops.

Oh! To Kill a Mockingbird! We read that one! Thanks for helping me remember one!

Hi Ursala! So now that you are back in the states, I can officially wish you a



Way behind on threads. But belated congrats on passing 75. Love your trip down memory lane and your high school reads, and I LOVE your sunrise shot in Italy. Hope winter back in the states treats you well. Big hugs!!

I am thankful for your presence in the group, Ursula and especially to have seen you so busy on the threads this year. xx

>86 ursula: Lol re Harper Lee. Happy hols.

>75 ursula: Oooh, A Distant Mirror - I really liked that book. Hope you do to.

>81 ursula: Lovely sunrise shot, showing the morning activity. Love the guy sweeping the stones.

>87 scaifea: I admit I got some of my list from other people's lists too! I really thought I'd be able to remember everything, but ... not so much.

>88 The_Hibernator: Thank you for the holiday wishes! I hope you had a lovely day.

>89 Berly: Indeed. We didn't do Thanksgiving last year. I've missed a couple now - I think we tried to do some Thanksgiving-like cooking while we were in Belgium but our kitchen was so tiny that it wasn't really possible, and of course a lot of the typical things weren't available. Thanks for the good wishes, and I hope yours was great too.

>90 PaulCranswick: Thanks, Paul! I've almost managed an entire year here, which is crazy because I usually drop out entirely at some point. It's been a fun year. Maybe one day when you get to the States you could experience Thanksgiving here. It's the best holiday, meant to be low-stress and high-calorie. :)

>91 charl08: Yeah, I had to laugh at myself too! Thank you. :)

>92 ffortsa: I thought A Distant Mirror was supposed to be a good one. I bought it just on that vague idea, and that I haven't read any Tuchman.

Thank you re: the photo. I was pleased the guy was in the shot, it's so typical. Those brooms that are essentially a bundle of sticks are good for Venetian streets, I guess.

Our Endless Numbered Days

I'm never sure whether it's better for a book to be mediocre all the way through, or intriguing and then disappointing in the end.

This one was the latter for me. It's about Peggy, whose father is a survivalist in England. When she's 8 years old, he takes her off to a remote location to presumably wait for the end of the world. We know she comes back because some chapters are told by her at age 17, and she's back home with her mother. There are a lot of terrifically described locations and events, but I felt like the end just didn't live up to the promise of the beginning and instead relied on a rather hackneyed storyline that disappointed after an original premise. It wasn't enough for me to dislike the book, but I do feel a little sad for the amazing novel it could have been. Maybe her next one will live up to the promise shown here.

That's exactly how I felt about that one! Well put. I would also be willing to chance another one of hers because parts of the book were excellent.

Beautiful photo of the sunrise, Ursula! You wouldn't have to get up so early to get a photo of the sunrise these days. :) Silver lining?

Great comments on Our Endless Numbered Days; it sounds like one I don't have to rush to read. It also sounds like one that my students might like...

>95 Berly: I had looked her up to see if there was another one yet, just so I'd know how to word that, and I see that she has one coming out in 2017. It feels sort of wrong to pan a first novel that had a lot going for it, but on the other hand, I don't like to grade on a curve!

>96 BLBera: Thank you! Silver lining ... except I'm a few thousand miles away now. ;) I did wait as long as I possibly could to go in for the sunrise because otherwise I would have had to run across the city (and even then probably miss it) in July.

The Fuller book had some strong positives - it wasn't one of those books that you wonder how they got published in the first place. But it was unfortunate that the weaknesses really came at the end.

>94 ursula: I won't be rushing to read this. It seemed to get a lot of attention here but the idea just didn't appeal.

>98 charl08: It was better than the premise might suggest, particularly with such a young narrator. But I definitely wouldn't recommend someone read it against their own inclinations.

Love Medicine

I thought I was really going to enjoy this one. I had an old coworker who loved Erdrich's books, and I believe she really liked this one. It's also on the 1001 Books list. Anyway, it's a family saga about Chippewa Native Americans living in North Dakota. The chapters go through the generations, skipping between families which are interconnected. I found it hard to keep track of who was who and how they were connected to each other. And even once I got it mostly down (embarrassingly late in the book), I only connected to a few of the characters so I was sorry when the book moved on to others.

It's hard to judge this book because it was originally published in 1984, then Erdrich expanded and "resequenced" it in 1993 (this is the version I read), and then apparently revised it yet again in 2009. I feel like maybe I would have liked the earlier version better because this one felt overly long. So, although I'm giving it three stars and consider it "okay", I'm disappointed.

Sorry you didn't like that one more. I read it last year for the AAC and enjoyed it very much. The style reminded me a bit of the oral story-telling tradition. I'm not sure which version I read, but I think it might have been the originally published one.

Hi Ursula! I just read our endless numbered days and liked it better than you did, though it definitely wasn't perfect.

I love Erdrich! So sorry Love Medicine didn't really work for you.

>101 katiekrug: I can definitely see where it's similar to oral histories.

>102 banjo123: I'll check out your comments about it. I liked it overall, but I felt like the end was supposed to have more impact than it did because although it was held out as a secret, it was predictable.

>103 BLBera: I'm still interested in reading other books by her, but I'm pretty sure this won't be my favorite one.

Dreams from Bunker Hill

I loved this one. John Fante wrote four books featuring the character Arturo Bandini, who was essentially his alter ego. Bandini is from Colorado, living in LA in the '30s trying to be a writer. He is a great, lovable character, and unintentionally, tragically hilarious. He drinks too much, doesn't understand women, is convinced he is a literary genius but has a hard time getting anything published. He falls into situations and then ruins them somehow, picks himself back up and falls into the next thing. He is that friend of yours with the great stories that you just shake your head about.

This is actually the last of the stories, and I've previously read Ask the Dust, which is the third. I'll go back and read the first two one day when I can find them. I doubt it matters all that much if you read them in order since they're pretty episodic. And even if it does, they're all slim books (this one was 164 pages), so they could be re-read together in the proper order easily.

I've never heard of Fante, Ursula. I'll have to check him out.

You might try The Round House by Erdrich; it seems to be a favorite among people who are not fans. The narrative is much more traditional. My students love it, which is always surprising to me.

>105 ursula: I haven't heard of him either Ursula, but sounds intriguing.

>106 BLBera:, >107 charl08: The books are just terrific. He's maybe a gentler Bukowski? (I haven't read any Bukowski yet.)

And in fact after a quick Google, it appears that Fante was an influence on Bukowski, so there you go.

Ghettoside

This non-fiction book follows homicide detectives in South Central LA (which no longer exists, by the way - the city renamed it South Los Angeles to try to distance it from the violence that had become synonymous with that name). This is after "the big years", when murders hit all-time highs in the area, but death is still all too commonplace. The main case on which the book focuses is the murder of a boy, Bryant Tonelle, whose father happens to be a police officer. This is an unusual case for the simple reason that unlike most officers, Tonelle actually lived in one of the districts in which he worked. Mostly they live outside of the area, in Orange County or other suburbs.

For a while I debated how I felt about the book being centered on the cops, who are often not black, and usually only visitors to the neighborhoods they police. It seemed like it could really veer into "great white savior" territory, especially because one of the main officers involved is John Skaggs, described as a typical blond California surfer type. However, great care is taken to give real lives to the people who live in South LA, to the victims, to the perpetrators. And in a lot of ways, it's as important to show that it's possible to do the job of law enforcement effectively in a neighborhood when you're not the same as its inhabitants. Or maybe it's better to say that it's possible to care enough to do the job effectively.

One of the interesting points that was repeated a lot in the book is that gang violence isn't the problem, it's the result of a problem which can be stated as "this is what happens when the State doesn't have a monopoly on violence". Which sounds awful, but makes a lot of sense. The vacuum created by infrequent enforcement for violent acts leads to the people attempting to police themselves, which leads to gangs, which leads to more violence. And maybe you're thinking, "but wait, blacks are in prison in much larger numbers than whites, and I thought that was due to overzealous enforcement against them, so how can it be lax here?" I thought that too, but it seems to be the case that the skin color of the victim matters more than the skin color of the assailant as far as prosecution goes. So black-on-black violence in places like this is under-investigated. And as you find out in the book, it takes a lot of investigation even though often when the officers ask who killed someone, the answer is "everybody knows." Everybody knows, but getting them to talk requires that the witness trust the justice system more than they trust the Wild West system of the gangs.

I loved Ghettoside, Ursula, and felt it brought up a lot of issues that need to be discussed. I liked that you commented on the fact that John Skaggs could be effective even though he was white.

You are cranking out the reviews!! I am tempted by the last two--wishlisted!!

The Dinner. Wow. I wasn't expecting that...

Ghettoside lloks good. I'll think about adding it to Mt Social Issues TBR.

>110 BLBera: I agree that it discussed a lot of things that needed to be talked about. There are so many angles to these issues, and it's good to get as many of them out there to look at as possible.

>111 Berly: I am! And I've still got two more to do. The last two are good ones to wishlist. :)

>112 charl08: Hee hee. This is why I love it when people don't know much/anything about it. I have no idea where you are in the book, but I love that it has that power to surprise.

>113 The_Hibernator: It's a good addition, I think. I've looked at your list of 6 books and I have wishlisted some of them at the library. I doubt it'll line up with your reading, or even that I'll read all 6, but I'll definitely read some of them.

I'm going to go ahead and wrap up November even though I haven't finished reviewing the books I read this month. I'll get to those soon.

November Reading Roundup:

This month, I read 8 physical books, 2 Kindle/ebooks, and listened to 2 audio books.
I read 4619 pages (that total is super high, because this finally includes my Clarissa reading - all of it!) and listened to 26 hours, 20 minutes of audio.
My reading was 83% fiction and 17% nonfiction.
I read books by 8 men and 4 women.
The earliest publication date was 1748 (Clarissa), and the most recent was 2016 (The Mortifications).

The male-female author ratio took a hit over the last couple of months; I'm at 50 men to 41 women. On the other hand, my current library percentages: 66.87% male/33.13% female. (The first time I've gotten over 33% so far.)

I read way less on Kindle this month thanks to having a ton of books in rotation from the library, but I'm going to try to work some of the Kindle ones into the rotation for next month and maybe slow down on checking out library books. I was just so excited.

Best of the month: Definitely Dreams from Bunker Hill. Everyone should read some Fante. Worst: Telegraph Avenue.

Congrats on the page count.

I was impressed by The Dinner. I suspect it would be a great one to get the discussion going at a book group. Maybe reading alongside something on genetics?

>116 charl08: I think it would be a great one for a book group, but you might find out more about your fellow participants than you bargained for. Just after moving here, there was actually a book club meeting at the library and they were discussing The Dinner. I wanted to go, but I didn't want to discuss it, I just wanted to listen in. :) The weather ended up being miserable that day and I didn't make it, but I'm kind of sorry about it.

I bet there are all kinds of great parallel reads that could be done, with a little creativity!

The Switch

Here's a funny story about this book:

I started reading it, and after a very short while, I felt like I knew what was going to happen. And then after a little bit longer, I was sure I knew what was going to happen. And not big plot points, but small moments like "he's going to be holding the tennis racket and they're going to meet each other in the doorway". So I looked up the book to see if it had been published under another title. Nope. I kept reading, and had more moments like that. I looked it up again, to see if it had been made into a movie. Yep, Life of Crime, with Tim Robbins and Jennifer Aniston. Didn't look familiar. I went on, and I seriously knew where every plot point was going. So I watched the trailer for the movie. Now it looked a little familiar, but I wasn't sure so I called Morgan in and asked him, "Did we watch this movie?" Answer: yep.

The moral of the story is that in spite of only seeing at most 10 movies a year, I still can't remember what I've seen. And another note? Elmore Leonard books require very little adaptation to the screen (also true reading Out of Sight, in which I think the ending was the only thing really changed, and that only slightly).

The book is a caper comedy (dark comedy though, which Elmore Leonard excels at), and features characters from Rum Punch (made into Jackie Brown by Tarantino), Ordell Robbie and Louis Gara. Ordell and Louis decide to kidnap a rich man's wife, but as it turns out, he's not all that interested in getting her back. Because this is a Leonard book, twists and turns and odd moments ensue. Lots of fun, like all of his books.

Nice review, Ursula! I have that one in the stacks. You are so right about Elmore Leonard's books not needing much adaptation - he really excels at writing dialogue, I think, and creating great characters.

>114 ursula: Yeah, some of them look very promising. I'm looking forward to next year, even if the reading will be a bit on the heavy side. At least I'm not in school anymore, so I don't have a constantly fried brain.

>119 Crazymamie: His characters always feel quirky in an authentic way, never in a try-hard way. And he makes that seem deceptively easy!

>120 The_Hibernator: I can imagine that any sort of heavy reading would be difficult to deal with when you're in school. I know it's slowed down my daughter's reading a lot, heavy or otherwise. One day she'll be back to her old voracious self, I'm sure!

>65 ursula: ha ha ha. Oh my sides, I am actually cracking up at your first sentence of the review of Chabon's book. You have articulated exactl what it is that I dislike about some of his writing. The whole, aren't I clever aspect of it is just so try-hard to me.
Now I'll go back to read the whole review ;)

>122 LovingLit: Glad to make you laugh! It's one reason I have a hard time putting down certain books even if I'm not really enjoying them. Some are just too boring to even make for a good roasting review, but some are perfect for them. :)

Great comments on The Switch; I've never read Leonard, but it sounds like I would like him. I'll check to see what my library has.

>118 ursula: Did this with a book recently. Had forgotten I'd read it before.

Kind of good that the original story wasn't changed so much for the film though that you recognised it. Did you have the actors in your mind for the characters before you realised?

>124 BLBera: His books are lots of fun, and the movies are as well, usually.

>125 charl08: I've never actually accidentally started/read a book I've previously read.

I couldn't picture the actors at all when I was reading originally. It was part of the reason why even after seeing the cast list and watching the trailer I still wasn't sure I'd seen it! I could picture the scenes to a T, but I couldn't put those actors into it. I don't know if that's good or bad for the movie. :)

The Adventures of Augie March

Like David Copperfield, Augie March tells the reader the detailed story of much of his life. So much in a story like this depends on the writing, since you know that while there will be events, it's not really going to be a plot-driven novel. For me, I just didn't connect to Bellow's writing and therefore also didn't connect to Augie. Or it could have been the other way around - Augie wasn't compelling enough for me to get past the writing. It was just dense and tangled and used odd words in odd ways, and it was slow going at times. And this was written in the 1950s, not the 1700s!

Augie grows up in Chicago, and he seems to always find himself falling into someone's plot or scheme, or kicking around at loose ends left to his own devices. Near the end, things got moderately interesting in his life and I enjoyed the last third a lot more than the rest, but I suppose that's faint praise since the first two-thirds exist.

I'm not saying it might not appeal to certain readers, it just didn't to me.

>127 ursula: I am fascinated by Chicago. It is a city which houses many of our number and I wanted so much to love Bellow and his book.

Like you I found it very heavy going and abandoned it a number of years ago about 100 pages ago in days before LT and knowing anything about Pearl Rules etc.

It is still on my shelves and I often catch it looking askance at me from its never moving niche in my favourite bookcase. I do plan to try it again in the future but you have not filled me with optimism.

Have a lovely weekend, Ursula.

I slogged through Augie a few years ago. I recognize that Bellow is an amazing writer, but yeah, the story didn't do much for me.

>128 PaulCranswick: Chicago is a great city. Honestly, I would say you could just start somewhere in the middle and you'd get the good parts without so many of the tedious ones. I can't imagine what you'd really be missing, especially that couldn't be filled in by a wikipedia article. There were definitely long interludes I liked toward the end, but it doesn't negate the difficulty of the reading experience overall unfortunately.

>129 scaifea: "slogged through" is so appropriate. I'm not entirely sure Bellow is an amazing writer. He is certainly an encyclopedic writer, but I don't know that that's the same thing. I haven't read anything else by him, though there are several more on the 1001 list so I will be. (Lucky me.)

>130 ursula: Ha! Well, yeah, I do think he is excellent with the words; I just don't have a taste for the genre in which he tends to write.

Great comments on Augie March, Ursula. It has been years since I picked up anything by Bellow; I think because I had a similar reaction to yours. I have a few of his on my shelves -- maybe next year I'll give one a try and if it doesn't work, pass them on. Life is too short to slog through an author, no matter how critically acclaimed.

>131 scaifea: Whining white males? Yeah, I'm losing my taste for that one too.

>132 BLBera: I don't know, I feel like life is too short to read terrible books that don't have any acclaim, but I have my reasons for slogging through things that do.

>133 ursula: *snork!*

The beginning of December has gone unremarked, but that doesn't stop me.



I really don't know what on earth I'm going to do next year without my odd priest calendar.

Surely he's too young to be a priest?! (Just putting that makes me feel old).

>135 ursula: - Me likey!

>136 charl08:, >137 katiekrug: He's my type. When I showed him to Morgan, he said "oh, he's trouble" at the same time as I said "this one, I like."

Nightwood

The introduction is by TS Eliot, and he says in it that only those who appreciate poetry will appreciate the book. As a sample size of one, I think he's right. I don't much like poetry, and I didn't really enjoy this book. And that was a huge disappointment to me because I'd been looking forward to reading it for some reason (maybe vague statements from others reading the 1001 list (since I don't read reviews)? Maybe some vague idea that it was subversive and interestingly written? I have no real idea.

Anyway, a woman named Robin is sort of the main character, although I think we really only see her speak once - she's always described by the other people in her life. She marries a man who is pretending to be a baron, has a child with him, and then leaves him for a woman. But she doesn't really settle down, and in fact she seems incapable of settling down or caring what unhappiness she brings to everyone she gets involved with. But like I said, we don't really hear from her directly and in fact much of the book is a certain Dr. O'Connor monologuing about her, his own issues, the problems with society, and general randomness. I thought the writing was melodramatic and sometimes just downright weird.

I appreciate that it's probably a landmark book in queer literature (it was published in 1936), and I appreciate that, but I didn't much enjoy reading it. I imagine it would be a good book to read in a class though, to help one penetrate the labyrinthine dialogue.

>135 ursula: Oh, hello...

>140 scaifea: Right? I might come up with a few things to confess.

This was Monday morning, looking out toward the International Bridge. Unfortunately it's been warm and rained since then, so the wintry wonderland-ness has turned into slush and muck (and ice this morning). We should get more snow soon though.

Things are sort of in disarray around here again because I got a new laptop. I am a laptop-killer, I haven't had one that lasted more than 2 years in I don't remember how long. Anyway, I don't have things (photos/art files) migrated over to the new one yet, but I don't want to continue to work on the old one and keep having to do new backups, so I'm in a bit of limbo. That should end today when I get the new giganto external hard drive to keep my billions of files on. *fingers crossed*

Oh, and in the migration and confusion, my audio book expired. *sigh* So I have a new request in, but I have to wait to finish the last hour or two. Grr.

>141 ursula: Definitely. He could help me commit a few, too...

>142 ursula: That's what it looks like here, too. Finally! Love snow.

>142 ursula: Winter wonderland, Ursula. I love your photos.

Good luck with the new laptop.

>143 scaifea: ;)

We are under a lake effect snow advisory at the moment. I much prefer snow to winter rain. We'll see how I feel about it after December. And January. Over half of the 100 inches of average snowfall comes in those two months.

>144 BLBera: It was indeed! And thanks, I've got my files moved to their new home (which is not on the laptop itself), so I think tomorrow I should be able to use it like normal, which will be a big relief.

City of Thieves

A long time ago, I watched the movie The 25th Hour, directed by Spike Lee and starring Edward Norton. I really liked it, and later ran across the book, which was written by David Benioff. I didn't read it, but I made a note of his name to look for something else by him. Then he put out When the Nines Roll Over, but it was short stories, which are just not my thing. So I didn't read that one either. Then came City of Thieves and I told myself that one, I would read.

It was published in 2008, and here it is 2016, and now he's probably best known for being the showrunner of Game of Thrones, but I finally fulfilled my desire to read something he's written.

It's a good one. The story takes place during the Siege of Leningrad in World War II. Two teenage boys are picked up by the Russian army for infractions that should mean their deaths, but they are taken in to see a colonel and he has a deal for them. The deal is: find him a dozen eggs and they can live. Fail, and well, they will either die at the hands of the army or by starvation or cold, or in a German bombing raid, or ... there are a thousand ways to die in Leningrad.

Benioff expertly steers between the comedic, the banal, the universal and the tragic. It's not quite "I laughed, I cried," but it's pretty close. My only (minor) complaint is that I felt like everything came together a bit too neatly, but on the other hand, that fact is also very satisfying.

I loved that novel! Great comments, Ursula. You hit it exactly. I wish he would write another one.

I love the snowy picture. It's so mild here now I can't imagine snow again.

Hope that your laptop progress is going well. I've just managed to work out how to get music from three separate applications onto one central place. So nice to rediscover old stuff I'd not been able to use so easily. Next up, photos!

>146 ursula: This sounds great. Will have a look for it.

>146 ursula: I have that one somewhere in the house so I should go and rescue it really based on your review, Ursula.

Lovely snowscene up there too. Not likely to be able to reciprocate with one from here.

>145 ursula: I completely agree that snow is so much better than winter rain, which is just sad-making. But yeah, by March even the snow is a little tedious...

Well, now...nice. Very nice. And lovely to end on a good note with the calendar, but whatever are we going to do next year?

I love that photo of the snow - so wonderfully framed, and it makes me remember the cold of Indiana, which I am missing. Not the state, just the cold. Yesterday we were shopping, and the store had a huge display of mittens and gloves that looked worthy of the arctic. It made me laugh. What are those doing in Georgia?!

I really liked City of Thieves when I read it several years ago - I wouldn't mind reading it again, actually. I think I will add that to my reread list for next year and Ellen's project.

>147 BLBera: It was definitely one of the most enjoyable of the year for me. I'm sure the characters and events will stick with me for a long time. I wish he'd do more writing not for tv shows.

>148 charl08: "Mild" is not the word for things around here at the moment, that's for sure! We aren't expected to get over freezing (these are the highs) in the foreseeable future. In the 10-day forecast our highest high is -2C, and a week from now they're forecasting -11C (that's 12F for fellow Americans).

The laptop is progressing. There are always the usual growing pains and new things to get used to. And I had to do a lot of that consolidating work on the old laptop before moving anything to this one. I'd been very sloppy with the way I catalogued things and I'm resolved not to do that in the future after the total nightmare of tedium I had renaming and fixing all of that. Congrats on getting your music together! I know what you mean about the rediscovery that happens when you can finally access things easily.

City of Thieves is a super-fast read, but not in a bad way. (I guess I sometimes think that if I race through a book, there's not much there to really think about or sink your teeth into.)

>149 PaulCranswick: You should! It's really well put-together. I won't expect any snowy scenes from Malaysia, but I did see the one you posted of Scotland!

>150 scaifea: I hate being cold and wet. At least most of the time with snow you're not wet! I'm curious how it will be for me this winter since I'm used to the snow disappearing and returning over the course of the winter, and I understand that at some point here, the ground will just stay gone. My main issue is that apparently unlike in Denver, there is no law here about clearing the sidewalks, so at least half of them don't get shoveled.

>151 Crazymamie: Right? Totally my type. And I don't know, I've been kind of trying to think of something for next year but I guess you can't force it, this was just such a strange thing to have happened upon.

I love the idea of Arctic mittens in Georgia! I guess I would say for traveling? But even then, I remember that it was essentially impossible to get that sort of thing in California unless you went to somewhere like REI where they would outfit you for skiing or other outings like that. Oddly enough, I was at one of the stores here in November and asked about women's gloves - she said they didn't have them yet and that she had been wondering what was wrong with the main office - "hello? You know this is Michigan, right?" - when they still didn't have any.

>153 ursula: Yeah, here in WI it's generally the case that once we get that first significant snowfall, we don't see grass again until April. I'm okay with that, honestly.

>133 ursula: Whining white males
:)
I usually like the heavy thoughts of these types of writers....but have always noted that in the characters' lives, their children seem to have no relevance to them. It always irritates me. And then I read The Women's Room which gave what I would call a more accurate picture of the lives of husbands and wives in the 1960s, and 1970s semi-affluent USA. So now I am left wondering if I can go back to the whining white males ;)

I've had City of Thieves on my shelf for a while; maybe next year?

>154 scaifea: I think we're about there. We had a couple of inches yesterday, and there are just snow showers in the immediate forecast, but the temperature will not rise above the mid-20s for a long time, maybe ever. ;) In fact, we have one day in the near future that says the high will be 10. So, I don't see the snow going anywhere.

>155 LovingLit: I often enjoy the subject matter, really. Like most people, I've read a lot of these guys' books. I think that I've just become more aware of the shortcomings of those stories and therefore more critical of them when I notice them. And it varies, anyway - I read the first Updike "Rabbit" book and really loved it, although Updike is one of the poster children for the Whining White Male. But the book worked for me.

>156 katiekrug: Yes, next year! (Don't we all always say that?)

On the topic of the cold: before coming here, I figured the people of the UP were made of tough stuff, and they'd be laughing at my California-native self for being cold all the time or not wanting to go out when it was sub-zero, or wearing a coat or something (hey, I could only begin to guess how hardcore they might be). But instead, I think they're a bunch of babies about the cold. Wednesday we walked to the weekly bar gathering. It's a kilometer to get there from our house. There was a bit of wind, although we were often sheltered from it by the buildings, and it was about 28 degrees. You would have thought we'd crawled across the Antarctic in swimsuits - "you walked?! All the way from your house?! Oh my goodness, you must be freezing!" And when we left "walk fast! Keep your arms moving!"

I'm disappointed in them.

The Sense of an Ending

This is an interesting, simple and yet intricate book. It's told by Tony when he's in his 60's, looking back on a period in his life, mostly when he was in college. I don't want to give away anything about the plot (although the first sentence gave me a feeling about what one topic was going to be), and it's hard to talk about much of it without doing that, so I'll just say that the themes are interesting. Present-day Tony has moved on from the events in his past, but maybe that's due mostly to a combination of misunderstanding and forgetting. It's an interesting idea, getting a chance so many years later to really try to remember and then to have those memories re-framed and gaps filled in by knowledge you either couldn't have had or missed out on. The novel ends on an unresolved note, like life - where does Tony go from here? We're left to guess. I enjoyed it, and have spent some time thinking about it since I finished, which I consider a good sign.

Yeah, people from cold climates can be babies. 🙂 But the UP isn't the coldest place around. Mostly their issue is snow, right? At least that's what it was like when I lived in Houghton.

>160 The_Hibernator: Well, I know it's not the coldest place around, but you'd think it was the way some of these people talk. And no, it's specifically the cold that they're constantly freaking out about. I haven't actually heard anyone talk much about snow.

So here's just a complaining message about the annoyances of dealing with BS leftovers from another country. When we moved, we cancelled our home internet service (obviously), which was through Vodafone. We cancelled online and because this is Italy, it's not like you can schedule a day - you cancel it and within 24 hours your internet is gone. So we did it the day before we left. Fast-forward to a couple of months ago, when I get a charge on my credit card from Vodafone for our monthly service. So I disputed it. And eventually the credit card company came back and said that the charge was going to stand, "see attached response" from the vendor. Well, the electronic version had nothing attached. So I just got the mailed version of it and there is a bill from Vodafone attached, with helpful notations in English like "dispute date past billing date" etc. That is all fine, except: IT'S NOT MY BILL! I'm not some woman named Stefania, it's not my last 4 digits of my credit card, I didn't live in Naples, etc.

And in the meantime, Vodafone has charged another $229 for another month and ... early cancellation? When we had a contract that ended in June and we cancelled in August. So that's another dispute. They are making me crazy.

Looking toward next year ...

Over on Litsy, there is an A-Z challenge for 2017 I think I"m going to make an attempt at. You can choose all authors, all titles or mixed. For maximum options, I of course chose mixed. Of course, I have the problem of limited availability since I'm relying on libraries; plus, I don't like to read things just to fill a slot. So after putting in things I intend to read next year, I have openings for Q, X and Z of course. Does anyone happen to know some good (not too obscure) books whose titles or authors' last names start with those letters that I might want to check out?

How frustrating about the billing - I hate dealing with stuff like that. Hoping you get it fixed quickly, wishing is kind of like wishing for the moon, but still...

The A-Z challenge sounds like fun. Let's see:

The Quiet American by Graham Greene - do articles count?
Zoo Station by David Downing
Zero World by Jason Hough
Z: A novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler

authors:
Stefan Zweig - I liked Chess Story
Nell Zink - I loved Mislaid
Marcus Zusac - I loved the Book Thief
Matthew Quick - I liked Silver Linings Playbook
Julia Quinn - can't remember if you ever read romance, but hers are clever and fun

>164 Crazymamie: Especially dealing with Italy. *sigh* Unraveling this sort of thing is not my strength because I go from zero to "I'll kill you all" really quick.

Excellent suggestions about the alphabetical challenge! The Quiet American is on the 1001 list, and so is Stefan Zweig. I tried to look over the list but my eyes started crossing. :) I'll have to check out availability, but I imagine I can turn up the Greene somewhere at least. And if I can't find any Zweig, I know I can do The Book Thief. And I've seen the one about Zelda Fitzgerald floating around too, hmm...

Thanks so much, that was super helpful.

Anyone else out there: I'm still open to anything else you have for those letters, and also X!

Something by Malcolm X? The Zelda book was pretty good, also Nancy Milford has a bio of her called Zelda, but I haven't read that one.

Sorted back through my books today, Ursula and managed to find City of Thieves so I duly rescued it from my culled list and stuck it on the shelves with its TBR compadres.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X is really good.

Authors: Alejandro Zambra - very experimental
Carlos RUiz Zafon - The Shadow of the Wind is my favorite
Zo by Xander Miller
Malcolm X
X-Men graphic novels?
Q's Legacy

>166 Crazymamie:, >168 katiekrug: Unfortunately I lacked foresight and read The Autobiography of Malcolm X in high school. :)

>167 PaulCranswick: Yay for rescues! I know it has lots and lots of good company!

>169 BLBera: Hm. It's good to know that X-Men would be there for me if I get really desperate, thanks for pointing that out! Also, I like the sound of "very experimental" ... maybe for early in the year. By the end of it I tend to be less thrilled with it. :)

>164 Crazymamie: You know, it took me entirely too long to understand your question about articles. No, articles don't count.

I can grammar, occasionally. (The cold froze my brain?)

How about the bio of Malcolm X by Manning Marable? I thought that was a good read. Lots of commentary about how the autobio was, er 'creative' with the facts.

The crime series about 'Department Q' might fit - depending how you feel about scandi-crime?

>172 charl08: Either the title's name has to start with it, or the author's last name does. So that leaves out a lot of possibilities!

>171 ursula: Too funny. Yes, let's say it was the cold - of course, I can't use that one in Georgia. *pouts a bit*

>173 ursula: Ah. I would definitely break those rules.
Sorry for not reading the post properly... (Wonder if there are any books titled X marks the spot?!!)

Sue Grafton has a murder mystery in her series titled X. I mean, if you don't mind reading out of order, which of course, I would never do. *blinks*

Gao Xingjian Nobel Laureate

Quiet by Susan Cain

>174 Crazymamie: The heat? The unseasonable weather? There's *always* an excuse. I mean, a reason.

>175 charl08: I'm attempting to follow rules for once in my life. It'll all fall apart in about 3-4 months anyway, but let's pretend.

>176 Crazymamie: Ooh! Now you're onto something! I am absolutely not going to start at A just to get to X, so out of order it would be!

>177 The_Hibernator: Xingjian is his first name, though. It did occur to me to investigate some Chinese authors, because the X is relatively common.

I read a book by Ruiyan Xu a few years ago, but she apparently hasn't written any others. Of course.

His first name isn't Gao? Hugh

>180 The_Hibernator: No, Chinese names are (should be) presented last name first, and also the last name is 99.9999% of the time a single syllable. So if the name has 2 syllables like Xingjian, that's the first name.

>181 The_Hibernator: That's a good one ... I'd have to see if he wrote anything not philosophical, or failing that, at least very, very short. Philosophy is so not my bag.

Well, at least I have some things to look up at the libraries now! Thanks guys!

I think Xenophon wrote mainly military history, not philosophy.

Q & A by Vikas Swarup - different enough from the film to make it worth reading
X Isle by Steve Augarde - dystopian YA

second the suggestion of Marcus Zusac - I am the Messenger is also good

>183 The_Hibernator: Ah okay. Wikipedia described him as a "philosopher, historian, soldier and mercenary, and a student of Socrates" so I drew my own conclusions without poking into it further.

>184 avatiakh: Thanks for those! I've never seen (or heard of) the movie Q & A, so I'm safe on that front.

Dystopian YA might be reasonably find-able, I'll look into it.

I've meant to read Zusak but like with many others, just haven't gotten around to it yet.

Q & A is better known as the movie Slumdog Millionaire, and the books is really good.

>186 Crazymamie: Oh! Of course. I knew that, I guess, somewhere in the dark recesses of my mind. But when I googled "q & a movie" there was something with Nick Nolte. I didn't account for a change in title. :)

Morgan called the dentists in town to try to get appointments for us. One was not accepting new patients. One said they could schedule us sometime in March or April. One said they book appointments 6 months out, so how does May sound?

...

The 6-month place said they get a lot of cancellations, so maybe we could get in sooner. Why the cancellations? Well, often when the appointment time finally approaches, people no longer have insurance. *sigh*

We're investigating if a plan D and E exist.

I wouldn't normally say this, but hope you get to see a dentist soonish. I'm quite lucky here to be able to see a dentist pretty easily - elsewhere in the country it's hard to find an NHS one.

Ugh - good luck with the dentist. I have to find one up here soon-ish as my old one told me I needed to get a crown replaced. Oh, joy.

Also need to find a new doctor and a new hair do-er. I expect the latter will be the most traumatic, as in Dallas, I went to the same woman as my aunt and cousin, and my aunt has been going forever, so we all got the uber deep discount! I used to gloat when I heard what other people paid their stylists... *sigh*

>189 charl08: I love that you wouldn't normally say that. :) We've gone so long without dental insurance ... as in, the entire time we've been together. We've gone without any kind of insurance, actually. We're trying to take advantage of having it for this academic year, but that certainly doesn't make it easy.

>190 katiekrug: Thanks. I'm sure I have a bunch of stuff that needs to be redone, in addition to whatever else has cropped up.

I agree though that one of the worst parts of moving is having to find someone to do your hair. I went to a place here and it was just awful. The girl totally butchered my hair. And it's a bummer when you lose the "in" that gets you a good price! In Denver, we lived next door to a salon and Morgan and the stylist were friends so we got deals too. The good old days! :)

Blaming

The plot is simple: A British couple are on vacation on a cruise when the husband dies in Istanbul. The wife, Amy, has to death with arrangements in a foreign country. She is assisted by Martha, an American that Amy and her husband met on board the ship. Amy has no idea why Martha is so insistent on helping her - they barely know each other, and if she's being honest, Amy doesn't much like Martha. Their relationship, such as it is, continues once both of them are back in England (Martha is a writer who loves all things English).

The people in this book have no idea how to interact with others. Sometimes it's funny, sometimes it's cringe-worthy, at least once it's downright tragic, and I doubt you'll really warm up to any of them entirely. But there is something compelling anyway.

Not our house. We had a winter storm warning, snow squall warning, and gale warning yesterday. Then around 8 pm the wind settled down and snow was able to start accumulating. It's been snowing continuously for close to 24 hours now. We're only under a snow squall warning today until 8 PM I think.

Oh, I love that photo, Ursula! I am going to picture you there even though it is not your house. Stay safe. And warm.

Wow! That's a lot of snow. Hope you've got a toasty blanket or similar. I've just been sorely tempted by a dressing gown with such a soft fleecy lining. It looked so warm...

>194 Crazymamie: Sounds good! :) We're doing fine, and warm even when we've gone out walking with the dog. To be clear, it's not warm out there, but our coats and boots are warm!

>195 charl08: It's been continuing to come down steadily in the 5 hours since I took that photo, too. Fleecy lining is always a win!

Last night they sent out messages that the university would be closed today (on the next-to-last-day of finals, no less). The library is closed for weather. City and county snowplowing was suspended. There is some weather out there!

Even so, we're good, no need to go anywhere except walking the dog, and even if we did have to go somewhere, we don't have a car so the road conditions are not an issue for us. :)

>193 ursula: Lovely picture! I like snow if I don't have to drive in it.

>159 ursula: After one of my f2f book groups read The Sense of an Ending by Barnes, I was looking on line for reviews and discovered that Frank Kermode, decades before, had written, or compiled, a series of lectures he had given using the exact same title. It's lit crit, of course, and I was moved to get the book. And it's all about how endings reflect back on stories. There is a lot of biblical, religious and historical analysis, and it's clear Barnes used the title because the story exemplifies, in a very specific way, the observations Kermode is discussing. Evidently the lectures made a big splash back in the day, and I'm embarrassed as a lit major that I never heard of them. The first one or two are quite dense, especially since I don't have a background in history of Christian philosophy, but definitely worth reading.

Yay! That means you get a stay-at-home-and-read day!

>198 banjo123: I saw someone last night walking where the sidewalk should be, in snowshoes. Driving unplowed roads may be better than walking on sidewalks where the plows have previously thrown the snow from the roads and which don't get shoveled/plowed!

>199 ffortsa: Interesting, thanks for the information! I read the Wikipedia on that, but that's about as far as I'm likely to go. Even as a lit major, there's only so much you can read and know! :)

>200 The_Hibernator: Not much changes for me, really. It wasn't my library day, and other than that every day is about as much of a stay-home-and-read day as every other one. Which is not to say that's what they are - they're mostly stay-at-home-and-work days, with some reading thrown in. :)