A Work in Progress

In Search of a Book...Suggestions Welcome

Typepad has not been playing nicely, so we'll see how this goes.

You may know this about me, or you may find it very relatable anyway.  I am very much a mood reader.  I think that is why I always have a stack of in progress books.  And I hate to admit that while I may be happily in the middle of a read and thoroughly enjoying it, on the outer periphery of my attention there lies a desire to read...some other story.  It can be a difficult choice sometimes on what to grab from the in progress pile to drop into my tote bag for my breaks at work and my bus rides to and from and then my daily gym time (reading a book while walking the track or working out on the elliptical is a great motivator).  The nice thing about an in progress pile of books, I can choose what fits my mood that particular day.

So, lately I have been thinking of a place and then a particular period in time I would like to read about.  Two different kinds of books.  For the place, I am contemplating a proper vacation to Quebec, Canada in the fall and it goes without saying that whether it happens or not, Montreal or Quebec City are fantasy destinations at the moment.  Any recommendations, in particular for Quebec City (I read that it feels 'more French'?) would be welcome.  I do have a few authors and books in mind.  Mavis Gallant's short stories would work.  And I have an epistolary novel from the 18th century by Frances Brooke called The History of Emily Montague on my TBR. I also found a copy of Louis Hemon's Maria Chapdelaine in my library that was written in the 1920s and translated from French.  More about those later, but any other books of any sort would be of interest to me!

The period of time is the Vietnam era.  The story behind this?  I have heard good things about Kristin Hannah's The Women.  And so has everyone else.  I try and avoid buying hardcovers (they take up space, have become very expensive and are not always fun to carry around--especially chunky books).  I am currently something like #144 in line for a library copy, so my wait might be lengthy.  In the interim surely there must be some other novel about women in Vietnam as nurses or reporters or experiences here in the US?  I was looking through my own shelves and found very few about Vietnam in general and if I did come across a book, inevitably it was a story about men's/soldier's experiences (like the wonderful Tim O'Brien).

If you have any ideas on either topic, please do share.  And if not, I am always very happy to hear what your current mood is for stories.

Reading, Watching, Listening, Misc Notes

The women's Prize for Fiction longlist is coming shortly.  I will likely have not read a single book on the list, but I am always curious about what might show up.  I might have some books on my TBR or am waiting for them at the library.  Mostly I am always happy to discover a few new books to add to my wishlist (or buy or borrow now list). 

While I am not one to even guess at what might be listed, I do like seeing what other readers are predicting.  Although I don't subscribe to any Youtube bloggers (vloggers?--I think they are very courageous to put themselves out there, which I could not imagine myself as an introvert doing), there are a handful I will click on if I see a new post.  Sometimes when I am doing some tedious data entry at work it is fun to listen to them share their bookish discoveries, or in this case their predictions.

Mostly I jotted down titles of books that I have not heard of or that are somewhere on the outer edges of my radar that maybe I should take a close look at.  So, whether they will make the cut or not, I am now going to add to my wantlist:

Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy.  I have an earlier book by her and this one, about motherhood, has been getting a lot of attention of late.

Lagos Wife by Vanessa Walters comes out in the US in May in paperback.  I like a good story of suspense, and this one sounds very promising. "Nicole Oruwari has the perfect life: a handsome husband, a palatial house in the heart of Lagos, and a glamorous group of friends. She left gloomy London and a troubled family past behind for sunny Lagos, becoming part of the Nigerwives--a community of foreign women married to Nigerian men.  But when Nicole disappears without a trace after a boat trip, the cracks in her alleged perfect life start to show."

My library has a copy of Nightbloom by Peace Adzo Medie, and I think my request is waiting for me at the library now.  This is a story of women's friendship, which sounds at times fraught but ultimately a strong bond in the end.  I suspect I will have a little stack of new library finds to share at the end of the weekend ...

And I did order two new to me books that I could not resist so have some good book mail coming in the next few weeks from the UK.  Cathy Sweeney's Breakown, is a splurge but I can't easily resist Irish writers these days.  Should I admit that I find this story somewhat relatable in my own way?  "One winter morning on an ordinary day in contemporary Dublin, an ordinary middle-class woman wakes up in her ordinary suburban home. Her husband is next to her in bed, her teenage children sleeping nearby.  Without thinking much about it, she walks out the front door and never comes back. She travels first by car, then train, then ferry. Along the way, she finds herself in service stations and shopping centres, hotel bars and hairdressers - and in the beds of strange men.  Finally, forty-eight hours later, alone in a cottage in Wales, the woman faces up to what she has been ignoring inside herself, her family, modern society: signs of breakdown."

And, although new to me, this book has been getting a lot of hype in the UK it seems.  I am eager to get a copy of Jennie Godfrey's The List of Suspicious Things.  One blurb calls it a " superb look at childhood, at growing up, at starting to see the world around you", and another " A touching paean to lost innocence and the comfort of friendships."  The setting is 1979 Yorkshire.  I am a sucker for a good coming of age story for sure!

*****

This weekend's new release movie is one I have been looking forward to.  Perfect Days, directed by Wim Wenders has gotten very good reviews and the film is one of the International nominees for an Oscar award.  

I think I am very late to the party, but I have started watching the fourth season of True Detective: Night Country.  I am a great fan of Jodie Foster and I have heard lots of good things about--suspense and supernatural.  Going by the first episode, I think this is a show I will need to give all my attention to and not just have it on as background viewing.  I have not watched any of the previous seasons but will have to backtrack as a friend said it was one of the best TV shows they have come across in general.

*****

As for listening, I am a fan of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast.  If you have already watched True Detective you might be interested in listening to this (beware, they share spoilers, so I will go back to it later).

And keeping on theme the newest Read or Dead Book Riot podcast is also about this new True Detective season and they give reading suggestions for after you finish watching.  (This will be weekend listening for me).

*****

I'll be visiting the library for my holds.  

And as I have finished a few books, I get to pick a couple of new ones.  I am trying hard not to continue starting new books pell mell which always gets me into trouble (as in too many books on the nightstand to reasonably think I can read at once, but I still continue to try!).  But more about that later.

Have a wonderful weekend, friends!

February Bookclub Reads

For a long time now I have gotten away from in-person bookclubs, instead I have a few very good virtual friends with whom my reading tastes overlap and we have picked books or short stories to read in tandem, which I thoroughly enjoy.  It's a way to connect with friends and broaden my reading horizons and always it is a very laid back way to read and chat about books.

However there is a local bookstore I frequent and where I buy my books, which is a charming place with lots of personality and a dedicated clientele.  I have become a member of a few bookclubs that the owner organizes.  Often the books chosen are not necessarily books I might generally reach for; this is not a bad thing to read outside my comfort zone.  To be honest, I think the bigger draw for me is to be around a pleasant group of readers whose passion for books matches my own.  So it isn't only about the books but about the social experience, too.  For an introvert, it is like having my own safe space.  

I tend to overextend myself too often when it comes to books, but it is hard not to be drawn into the possibility of a story that will captivate me.  These days, if a book doesn't work for me and I know it early on I will let it go with few qualms, but I still enjoy hearing the discussion.  More often than not, however, I do finish books and have come across some really wonderful new authors and genres.

So my eagerness occasionally gets the better of me (maybe that is true of all the members), so for February, we are tackling (three different groups mind you) several novels!  Sometimes we select a book that is part of a set or series and then we try and read all of them.  This does not always work well for me, being a very slow reader who is constantly grazing when it comes to books ... but I am always willing to try.

Our choices (made last December) that we will be meeting to talk about at the end of the month are: top to bottom:

The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods is a gentle sort of read, a mostly enjoyable bit of escapism, though I found the storytelling maybe a little bit uneven.  It is narrated by three characters in two different timelines.  The story is set in Dublin and opens in the 1920s when the bookshop was established by a woman who fled an arranged marriage first to Paris, where she learned the bookselling trade from non other than Sylvia Beach, and then later to Ireland.  Her own passion was the Bronte family, in particular she hopes to find evidence of a purported manuscript written by Emily.  Fast forward to the present where a young woman flees an abusive marriage for Dublin and finds work as a sort of maid/helper to an eccentric older woman on an unusual street called Ha'Penny Lane.  Just the spot where there is rumored to have been a bookshop (the lost bookshop) that a British grad student is trying to locate.  The author manages to touch upon some difficult subjects in a way that is not too distressing that gets to a happy ending. 

Lyla Sage's Done and Dusted is perhaps not a book I might have gravitated to on my own.  I am more a reader of fiction--mysteries--historical novels that are big on characters and plots with a dash of romance that is more swoony than super spicy.  So I surprise myself in saying I quite enjoyed this cowboy romance.  The story is set in Wyoming where a young woman returns home after a bad fall from a horse.  Her plan is to work her family's ranch and not fall for her brother's best friend she grew up knowing but would not have imagined falling for (since most of the women in town already had).  But you know how that goes.  Sparks fly and some of them are quite sizzling.  I liked Clementine's spunky best friend who is likely to get a book of her own and I might have to pick up if I come across it.

I am now reading and very much enjoying the YA novel Divine Rivals by Rebecca Ross.  Another genre I don't tend to pick up often is fantasy, but I was pulled into this story from the start.  There are gods and goddesses who have reawakened and have gone to war while raining down violence and fear on the humans who are in the way.  The rivals are two journalists who are competing for a position as columnist on a prestigious newspaper.  What I love about this story is the way the magic of the fantasy is quirky and charming and maybe not so otherworldly that it feels entirely foreign.  The rivals are connected to each other through their typewriters that magically send messages back and forth.  One of the rivals does not know who she is talking to and the other has already fallen for her and I fear he is setting himself up for some grief when she discovers his deceptions.  There is a sequel called Ruthless Vows and the idea was to read the pair of books by bookclub night, but I suspect I will be doing good to just finish the first book.  I do want to read the sequel, however.  Eventually.  

Bookclub is always an adventure!

Inaugural Women's Prize Nonfiction Longlist

I've been looking forward to the announcement of the inaugural Women's Prize for Nonfiction longlist.  Every year I eagerly await the fiction list, think I'll tackle reading some of the titles that are listed, buy or borrow more than a few, but then am lucky to read one or two!  Typical of me, I want to read everything but never enough time and my attention all over the place.  

So for this list, I am curious and am happy to discover some new books and maybe I can manage to read one or two ... ?  The thing with nonfiction is I can usually only manage one at a time (as opposed to a whole stack of novels on the go at once).  I always want to read nonfiction slowly to take in as many details as I can.  I do have a couple of nonfiction starts on my nightstand, but they have been woefully neglected for weeks now.

So, here is the list of possibilities:

The Britannias: An Island Quest by Alice Albinia

Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts and the Death of Freedom by Grace Blakely

Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon

Intervals by Marianne Brooker 

Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century by Joya Chatterji 

Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death by Laura Cumming

Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in the Philippines by Patricia Evangelista

Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder

Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood by Lucy Jones

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

A Flat Place by Noreen Masud

All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles

Code-Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI by Madhumita Murgia

The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes who Created the Oxford English Dictionary by Sarah Ogilvie

Young Queens: The Intertwined Lives of Catherine de’ Medici, Elisabeth de Valois and Mary, Queen of Scots by Leah Redmond Chang

How to Say Babylon: A Jamaican Memoir by Safiya Sinclair

I'm familiar with only a few titles, had previously checked out Anna Funder's book from the library (but being slow had to return it unfinished -- it comes out in paperback in the UK in March, however, so easier to tote around and read slowly without due dates).

I follow a couple of Booktubers and they have interesting videos about the longlist, if you want to hear more about the titles:

LouiseSavidgeMuses (along with her son, Simon, also fun to listen to) And the Lonesome Reader.

Any favorites, interesting-looking books or must reads?

The Joy of New Library Books

It's always exciting to find yourself finally at the top of the queue at the library for books you are anxious to get your hands on.  I have been waiting for these three (I generally have my holds maxed out--we can get in line for 40 books and yes, I am in line for that many, though many are not yet published titles).  Top to bottom:

Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan -- "When a 10-year-old child is suspected of a violent crime, her family must face the truth about their past in this haunting, propulsive, psychologically keen story about class, trauma, and family secrets."

The Road to Belhaven by Margot Livesey -- I have wanted to read her for ages and this is my first foray into her writing and I am already completely engrossed in this book.  "Growing up in the care of her grandparents on Belhaven Farm, Lizzie Craig discovers as a small child that she can see into the future. But her gift is selective—she doesn’t, for instance, see that she has an older sister who will come to join the family. As her “pictures” foretell various incidents and accidents, she begins to realize a painful truth: she may glimpse the future, but she can seldom change it.  Nor can Lizzie change the feelings that come when a young man named Louis, visiting Belhaven for the harvest, begins to court her. Why have the adults around her not revealed that the touch of a hand can change everything? After following Louis to Glasgow, though, she learns the limits of his devotion. Faced with a seemingly impossible choice, she makes a terrible mistake. But her second sight may allow her a second chance."

Lunar New Year Love Story by Gene Luen Yang, and Leuyen Pham -- I am a great fan of graphic novels.  I am pretty picky about them, however (much like audio books).  I am particular about the type of illustrations and storytelling, but this one looks quite promising.  "She was destined for heartbreak. Then fate handed her love.Val is ready to give up on love. It's led to nothing but secrets and heartbreak, and she's pretty sure she's cursed--no one in her family, for generations, has ever had any luck with love.But then a chance encounter with a pair of cute lion dancers sparks something in Val. Is it real love? Could this be her chance to break the family curse? Or is she destined to live with a broken heart forever?"  This sounds delightful.

The Livesey is underway and I will be dipping into the graphic novel as soon as tonight!

Weekend Notes: Listening, Reading & Watching

For me weekends mean reading (especially at the gym--where my only focus is walking and reading), catching up on newsletters and other bookishness and especially moviegoing.

Some things that caught my eye this week (I like to listen to podcasts at work when I can or at home when I am cooking or doing busywork).  

Listening:

Otherppl with Brad Listi interviewed Margot Livesey whose new book, The Road from Belhaven, is waiting for me at the library right now.

Two movie-oriented podcast episodes from NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour include highlights from the Sundance film festival (really want to see The Outrun when it comes out as I read the book, and an interesting conversation about The Zone of Interest, which I saw recently and found well done but darkly menacing even as there is nothing violent shown on screen (but you imagine it in your mind!).

Reading:

Joining the Livesey novel is Megan Nolan's Ordinary Human Failings (needless to say a visit to the library is on the list of things to do this weekend) wrote a column over at CrimeReads: "Literary Works in which Crimes are a Means to Understanding Complexity"--complete with more book recommendations.

Watching:

My favorite indie cinema is screening a repertory series called "It's Complicated" with a nod towards Valentine's Day.  If I'm lucky I'll squeeze in all three films: The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Le Bonheur, and Happy Together.  However, first up tonight is one of the Oscar contenders, The Teacher's Lounge.

Reading Sets, Series and Authors

I'm not much of a completionist in any sense of the word.  I chip away at mystery series, but only a very few have I actually kept up with or completed.  Sometimes I begin books and then let them linger on my nightstand and then let them go back to their piles or shelves.  I am a firm believer in not pushing myself to finish something I am not enjoying it or if it is just not the right story at the  moment (which means it happens a lot since I am very much a mood reader).  And there are books that are duos or trilogies or quartets that I look at and mean to read in their entirety.  Oh, and then there are all the many authors who I collect because I read one of their books, fell in love and then wanted to read all of them.  I have lots of collected authors waiting to be revisited.

So in the last couple of years I have been trying to pick up a set of books or an author to try and read (and complete) over the course of the year.

In 2022 I read all of M.M. Kaye's "Death in ..." series.  I had read one or two many years ago and felt like revisiting one of the books.  I had managed to collect the five she had published, so what the heck, I would try and read them all and indeed, I did.  Most I loved and some a little less so, but it was fun reading my way through them.  I have a couple saved on my Audible wishlist for later listening.  And they are keepers for maybe another reread.

Last year I picked up (again ... I had read the first volume at least twice, and the second once, but never the whole set) Elizabeth Jane Howard's Cazalet Chronicles.  I loved what I had read, but somehow just run out of steam each time to continue on.  However, I managed to read the original four volumes by the end of the year save for the fifth volume, All Change, which is currently on my nightstand and I am slowly enjoying chipping away at.  Since she published the last book many, many years after the first four, I have given myself a break and consider it a tying up of the stories.  (By the way, she is an author I have read and would like to read all of her books eventually).

I felt it was an accomplishment I am pleased with still, that I read Elena Ferrante's quartet of books beginning with My Brilliant Friend.  I admit the read was at times challenging, and the politics occasionally seemed over my head, but it was a really wonderful experience and I loved the stories.  There was something very raw and real about them and I was constantly conflicted by what I felt about the characters and their interactions, but there was a complexity in them that felt so real to me and I loved them for that.

In the last few years I feel like I am looking back more and more and appreciating books published earlier in the last century (aside from my ongoing love of interwar year novels) almost more than contemporary fiction (though there is a lot of great books out there and I have a constantly maxed out library queue of forthcoming books).  When I was young, maybe middle school age, I read some of Constance C. Greene's Al books.  I remember saving my allowance and going to the mall where there was a newsstand with many magazines and a variety of mass market books (oh, those were the days!) and I recall buying A Girl Called, Al.  The books are set in 1970s NYC and narrated by Al's best friend.  The series begins when they are in 7th grade and the story has stayed with me.  I decided to revisit the books and read all of them, and they were a delight.  Maybe a little dated for today's middle schoolers, but I loved going back in time.

So, what to choose to work on this year?  I have many sets of books.  Perhaps I will add a tab up top and begin a list of sets and series (though not mystery series, since that is a rabbit hole to dive down into and I dabble in a lot of different mystery series), but groups of related books or authors I collect.

At the moment I am considering reading Martha Grimes's Emma Graham books, which begins with Hotel Paradise (a favorite book of mine that I have read several times and am happy to revisit again).  Grimes manages to present a young girl in a small town just pitch perfect in my opinion.  There are four books.  I have read the first two, but never read the whole set together.

I've also got the Habits of the House trilogy by Fay Weldon, which is her nod towards Downton Abbey (which I thoroughly enjoyed). The first book is Habits of the House, and is an upstairs/downstairs story, which I am fond of and have not read in a while but it might just match my mood.

I think I will likely add other possibilities later, but if you have a favorite set or series, do share!

Moving Forward in 2024 - Books & Blogging

I took this photo at a local botanical garden before the holidays (this was part of the holiday display, though you can't really tell from this angle).  This was before the really awful weather we had.  January, here, like many other places, was pretty dismal weather-wise.  I think we are over that particular hump and are enjoying a nice respite from winter, so I am trying to enjoy it while it lasts.  Seeing the hanging vines and green leaves makes me happy.

I knew that as soon as February arrived, I had to decide what to do about this little place on the web that I, in the past, spent so much time at.  I have been absent for some time--nearly all of last year and a good portion of the year before.  Right before covid and then during, life was pretty awful in a variety of ways, and I just stopped doing things that I enjoyed and never seemed to go back to some of them (here included).  And after that hiatus I find many people have moved on to other places, other social media platforms perhaps, but I haven't felt the pull of them.

I am hoping to track my reading here, once again, in some regular fashion.  I won't make any promises or resolutions.  If I can share my reading adventures here and track my ambitions (of which I have plenty when it comes to reading), it might help with the funk I have fallen into.  If I haven't been here, I have still been reading a lot and am in the middle of several really wonderful books.

I have started a little cleaning and weeding process here.  Eventually I would like to move to a different (maybe free? do such places exist still?) service.  I believe Typepad no longer allows new people to use their service and I feel like they have not, perhaps, moved with the times.  Some things feel clunky to me and I really do not like their partnership with Amazon to provide links/cover images.  I have started to cull links that appear to be dead (and hopefully none that are active were removed accidentally).  Maybe I'll change the template and remove some of the tags and try to keep them tidier.  It'll hopefully be an ongoing process.

For now, however, let me mention a few of the books I have on my reading pile at the moment.

I am rereading Colm Toibin's Brooklyn. I loved it the first time I read it and liked the movie equally as well.  (I am a great fan of Saoirse Ronan).  I picked it up in anticipation of his forthcoming novel, Long Island, which is a sequel to Brooklyn.  I'm very curious about the new novel, but a little wary since I loved Brooklyn so much.

Have you read Nicci French?  She (or they, since I believe this is a wife/husband writing team) is amazing.  I loved (!)  Blue Monday.  I waited a while before picking up Tuesday's Gone (again, would the second book possibly be as good as the first?--this is a set that takes the day so of the week for each book).  I love mystery and crime novels and am a fan in particular of psychological crime, but somewhere along the line in the last few years suspense can almost be too much for me to take.  I want to read, but I don't want bad things to happen, if that makes sense.  The books are so well written and tightly plotted, it is easy to turn the pages.

Someone here, some time ago, recommended this book, Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea, by Morgan Callan Rogers, to me and whoever you were ... thank you!  I Love this story.  It is beautifully written and a little heartbreaking.  It is a coming of age story told from the POV of a thirteen-year-old girl whose mother one day just disappears.  The setting is a small Maine town on the coast in 1963.  I think it might be the author's only book and it came out back in 2012.  I love the setting, the time period, the voice of the girl.  

These three books are just stellar for me right now.  I find that I am attracted to older books lately than newer.  In some cases the writing just feels different to me.  It's really good, really thoughtful.  Maybe the times feel gentler (though they were not, perhaps).  Of course, that is not to say I have been finding very good, very recent novels, too.  But more about those later.

It's been a minute (or a few thousand)

Hello friends.  It's crunch time here as my renewal has just come up and I must decide whether to stay or let the blog go.  Ideally, I would like to migrate somewhere (maybe free) and in a format that is super easy to work with, but I am hesitant to move and lose the content here that might be worth saving.  Some of my lists exist only here and I would be sorry to lose the lists of books I have read.  

I feel very outside the online reading community these days, and I do miss it and am sorry to have lost that connection.  But I have also found I am just not very motivated to post regularly here and am not sure how to fix the issue.  I am not generally on social media these days--occasionally on Instagram and I do track my reading on GoodReads, though I have mixed feelings about that site since it is at times klunky in my experience.  

It's time for some very serious thinking on what to do and where to go.  If I decide to renew here, will I make use of the space and get my money's worth, is the question.  I have the most basic plan.  

On a happier note, I have been very pleased with my reading lately.  I would have a lot of catching up to do here.  Maybe create an entirely different design to make it all much simpler.

Is there still anyone out there who was a visitor in the past?  Or have most people moved on elsewhere in the virtual world?