Books Read in June, July, August, September, October & November

Um, I've been busy?

June
Charlaine Harris: Shakespeare's Landlord
Sally Gardner: I, Coriander
John Le Carre: Single & Single
Libba Bray: The Sweet Far Thing
John Sedden: Mudlark
David Almond: Skellig
Eva Ibbotson: The Secret of Platform 13

July
Barbara Nadel: Belshazzar's Daughter
Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Tracey Chevalier: The Virgin Blue
Charlaine Harris: Living Dead in Dallas
Paulo Coelho: The Devil and Miss Prym
Sam Savage: Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife
Graham Joyce: Do the Creepy Thing

August
Manuel Puig: Kiss of the Spider Woman
Jacqueline Winspear: Maisie Dobbs
Georgette Heyer: Charity Girl
Isabel Allende: The House of Spirits
Kate Atkinson: Emotionally Weird
Charlaine Harris: Club Dead

September
Joseph O'Neill: Netherland
James Patterson: Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment
Wangari Maathai: Unbowed
Paulo Coelho: The Zahir
Dorothy L. Sayers: The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club
Sara Gruen: Water for Elephants
Ian Rankin: Knots & Crosses
Sharyn McCrumb: If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him . . .

October
Patrick Rothfuss: The Name of the Wind
Charlaine Harris: Dead to the World
Dorothy L. Sayers: Murder Must Advertise
Philip Pullman: The Tin Princess
Sebastian Faulks: Engleby
Daniel & Dina Nayeri: Another Faust
Margery Allingham: Police at the Funeral
Mary Doria Russell: The Sparrow

November
Georgette Heyer: These Old Shades
Charlaine Harris: Dead as a Doornail
David Clement-Davies: The Telling Pool
Stieg Larsson: The Girl Who Played With Fire
Terry Pratchett: Truckers: The First Books of the Nomes
Herbie Brennan: Faerie Wars
Jodi Picoult: The Tenth Circle
Stephenie Meyer: New Moon*
Eoin Cofler: The Wish List

*I will NOT be reading any other books in this series. Blech!

Books Read in May

A short list of mostly long books:

Joyce Carol Oates: The Gravedigger's Daughter

• Excellent, of course. The protagonist, Rebecca Schwart, is a tough, ruthless version of Faulkner's Lena Grove.

Eva Ibbotson: The Dragonfly Pool

• Set mostly at an English boarding school during WWII, this is a wonderful YA novel that -- without having a bit of magic, sorcery, or wizardry in it -- seems magical.

Libba Bray: Rebel Angels

• The second novel in the Gemma Doyle trilogy. I'm looking forward to the film version of A Great and Terrible Beauty in 2010, and am reading the third novel, The Sweet Far Thing, right now.

Karen Maitland: Company of Liars

• An easy-to-read thriller set in 1348 England during the Black Plague.

Matthew Skelton: Endymion Spring

• A YA fantasy novel that alternates between present-day Oxford and 15th-century Germany. With the Gutenberg Press and dragons!

Reading List for March & April with Bonus Snaps from the Keukenhof

March
Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler's Wife -- Excellent! Not at all what I expected.

Kate Atkinson: Behind the Scenes at the Museum -- My love affair with Kate Atkinson's books continues.

Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird -- I reread this because it had been assigned to one of my students. I had forgotten why this book is a classic. I worry, though, that it's wasted on 9th graders.

Tana French: In the Woods -- A compelling mystery with a disappointing ending.

Gregory Maguire: What the Dickens: the Story of a Rogue Tooth Fairy -- Disappointing -- a great premise, but the book read like a rough draft.

Charlaine Harris: Dead Until Dark -- Southern-fried, raunchy vampire fun!

Sonya Hartnett: Thursday's Child -- An excellent YA novel that is probably better appreciated by adults.



April
Steig Larrson: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo -- The first in a series of Swedish mysteries. I'm definitely reading the second and third books.

Norma Fox Mazer: When She Was Good -- Another excellent YA novel.

Tobias Hill: The Cryptographer -- Boringly oblique? Obliquely boring?

MT Anderson: The Game of Sunken Places -- Really disappointing -- another work from a prominent YA author that reads like an early draft.

Sarah Addison Allen: Garden Spells -- Fun chick-lit set in the NC mountains!

Joanne Harris: Gentlemen and Players -- A creepy and well-written thriller.

John Le Carre: Call for the Dead -- An early mystery from one of my faves.

Robin McKinley: Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast -- A sweet YA novel that I somehow missed when I was a YA.

Jaclyn Moriarty: Feeling Sorry for Celia -- A great epistolary YA novel from Australia!

February's Reading List

With only 28 days, how was February so read-y?

Bray, Libba: A Great and Terrible Beauty

• This is an engaging Gothic novel set in a girls' boarding school in Victorian England. I just discovered that A Great and Terrible Beauty is the first novel in a trilogy -- I'll definitely read the next two -- and that there seems to be a film version in the works.

Chevalier, Tracy: Falling Angels

• Wow. Tracy Chevalier's first novel is the story of two girls growing up in early 20th-century London. I'm a reluctant reader of first person narrators, but I found Chevalier's use of the first-person -- she gives every character a chance to speak in his or her own chapters -- very effective.

Stevenson, Robert Louis: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

• Umm. I thought that I had read this before, but now that I've "re-read" it, I'm thinking that I had only read the Great Illustrated Classic version. Anyway, I re-re-read it because one of my students was assigned it. I'm pretty such I enjoyed Jekyll and Hyde more than my student did.
  

Le Carré, John: Our Game

• Well, I liked this one by Le Carré, but I wouldn't recommend it for a first-time Le Carré reader. I think that the author was struggling to write about the early-post Cold War.

Pratchett, Terry: Wyrd Sisters

• Terry Pratchett's books are so enjoyable that I have to keep myself from reading lots of them in succession. For me, it's better to read one every few months. Wyrd Sisters was especially fun because of all the allusions to Shakespeare, especially to Hamlet and Macbeth.

Atkinson, Kate: When Will There Be Good News?

• Okay. So now I've read all three of the Jackson Brodie mysteries, and since it's now March, I can read one of the other Atkinson novels I have in my bookcase. Yippee!

Vickers, Salley: Instances of the Number 3

• This is the third novel I've read by Salley Vickers, and I can't say which one I liked most. Instances of the Number 3 centers on two women, one a recent widow and the other the mistress of the deceased husband, and how they develop a friendship and move on with their lives after the death of their husband/lover. If that's not enough for you, what if I say there are also ghosts?

Davidson, Andrew: The Gargoyle

• Though this is definitely a post-Da Vinci Code novel, it doesn't suck. It is, however, a challenging novel for the squeamish. I didn't really need to know so much about the treatment of burn victims. But I was thoroughly absorbed by this (supposedly) supernatural story. And in the spirit of full disclosure, I have to admit that I chose it, in part, because of its spooky black-edged pages. By the way, this is NOT reading for young adults! (Mom, you're not old enough to read it either.)
  

Shaffer, Mary Ann & Annie Barrows: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

• No, I don't like the title either, and -- though this novel threatens to turn cutesy -- somehow it doesn't. I read this short book in about two days, even putting off eating dinner to finish it. For me, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society also redeems the epistolary novel. (I hadn't quite recovered from reading -- well, being assigned --Richardson's Pamela in college.)

Heyer, Georgette: No Wind of Blame

• I had read a couple of Heyer's historical novels, so when I saw one of her mysteries at a used book sale in Liverpool, I decided to give it a go. Though I giggled at Heyer's witty prose and mostly enjoyed the plot, I prefer the historical novels which have a bit more depth.

January's Reading List

So far, 2009 is super readalicious. I got loads of books for Christmas and accidentally bought ten more when Simon and I went to Liverpool last weekend. The charity shops there, including those in Huyton, have a surprisingly good selection of fiction, and the prices make it almost impossible to avoid buying, um, 10 books.

Here's what I read in January.

Georgette Heyer: False Colours

• Good Jane Austenesque fun!

Terry Goodkind: Wizard's First Rule

• Ugh. (Sorry, Todd!) I wish that I hadn't Googled Terry Goodkind. Then I wouldn't have discovered that he is an Objectivist (or follower of Ayn Rand). That's the kind of thinking that people really should get over by, say, the sophomore year of college. Wizard's First Rule is a mostly engaging fantasy novel. It's the first of a bajillion-part series, and I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that ultimately good triumphs over evil -- even though evil is clad in white! Gasp.

Kate Atkinson: Case Histories

• I am completely addicted to Kate Atkinson. Last week, I finished reading her third Jackson Brodie mystery, When Will There Be Good News? And I have on hand two of her other novels, Emotionally Weird and Behind the Scenes at the Museum. I'm going to have to ration myself to one a month.

Jeffrey Ford: The Girl in the Glass

• A clever mystery set among con artists and carnival freaks in the 1930s.

Catherine O'Flynn: What Was Lost

• I finished this book in two days. The parallel stories -- a little girl who disappears in the 1980s and a pair of underemployed people who, twenty years later, are affected by the girl's disappearance -- are not in themselves funny at all, but O'Flynn's darkly comic style is.

Kjell Eriksson: The Princess of Burundi

• A compelling and slightly claustrophobic (all that snow!) mystery from Sweden.

On the knitting front -- about two months too late, I'm knitting myself a wimple as I'm sick of having hat-head from wearing a watch cap (or toboggan -- pron. TOE-boggin -- as we say in the South). I'll post the pattern and pictures soon.

Books Read This Past, Um, Quarter

I hope this post is more enjoyable reading than your most recent quarterly statements!

But first, the Netherlands froze over! And the whole population converged on our little village.


December
John Le Carré: The Russia House
Dai Sijie: Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Margaret Atwood: Cat’s Eye
Marilynne Robinson: Housekeeping
Maggie O’Farrell: After You’d Gone

November
Susanna Jones: The Earthquake Bird
Richard Powers: The Echo Maker
John Le Carré: The Mission Song
Haruki Murakami: Kafka on the Shore

October
Kate Atkinson: One Good Turn
Lois Duncan: Gallows Hill
Beryl Bainbridge: Watson’s Apology
Jacqueline Winspear: Birds of a Feather
Jostein Gaarder: The Solitaire Mystery
Nicole Krauss: The History of Love
Ruth Rendell: The Veiled One
James Meek: The People’s Act of Love
Ursula Hegi: Intrusions
Marjorie Reynolds: The Starlite Drive-in

Books Read in September

J.D. Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye
John Le Carré: The Honourable Schoolboy
Stephenie Meyer: Twilight
Sergei Lukyanenko: The Night Watch
Georgette Heyer: The Convenient Marriage
Salley Vickers: Mr. Golightly's Holiday

Yes, of course, I have read The Catcher in the Rye before -- probably when I was about 12. Having reread the novel to prepare for tutoring two students, I realize that, at 12, I did not understand it. And unlike most Americans born after 1950, I wasn't assigned Catcher in high school. I'm rather glad of that. My currents students could not empathize with Holden Caulfield, most likely because his attitude is an amplification of their own.

I LOOOOVED Heyer's The Convenient Marriage. It was sweet, hilarious, and just fun. I had read or heard somewhere that reading Georgette Heyer is one of Stephen Fry's guilty pleasures. Well, if it's good enough for Stephen Fry, it's good enough for me.

I also LOOOOVED Vickers' Mr. Golightly's Holiday. (I'm not a pushover. I simply choose my reading carefully.) I also enjoyed the three other novels. September proved to be a good reading month for me.

Just for giggles, here are a few snaps from our trip to Wales and England last month.

This is Del. She "works" at Byrdir,
the B&B where Simon and I stayed for two nights.
Del, who seems to have some compulsive behavior issues
when it comes to playing fetch,
brought these scraps of sticks to the door of our cottage.

Another "working" animal,
Kit lives in Cheshire with her peeps, Elaine & Simon.

Slightly less cuddly than Del or Kit,
La Princesse was featured in
Liverpool, European Capital of Culture 2008,
over the weekend of 5-7 September 08.

Books Read in August

Pearl, Matthew: The Poe Shadow
Oats, Joyce Carol: American Appetites
Kessel, John: Good News from Outer Space
Atwood, Margaret: The Robber Bride
Taylor, G.P.: Shadowmancer

Shadowmancer stinks on ice! Taylor has been compared to J.K. Rowling and C.S. Lewis. Well, I hope Lewis' ghost is haunting this writer for churning out such a heavy-handed, didactic load of nonsense.

The novels by Oats, Kessel, and Atwood are all excellent. Pearl's The Poe Shadow, though, is a bit of a dud. If I wanted to read about obsessive characters in 19th century American, then I would read Poe -- not someone writing a la Poe.

Coming soon . . . snaps from our trip to north Wales and England!

Books Read in July

Umm . . . I was a rather lazy reader in July. In about two weeks, I'll be back to my full tutoring schedule. That means lots of reading time on the bus and the train.

Joyce Holms: Hidden Depths
P.D. James: Death in Holy Orders
Carolyn Parkhust: The Dogs of Babel
Ruth Rendell: Simisola
Barbara Vine: Grasshopper

Books Read in May and June 2008

I can offer two reasons for having such short reading lists in May and June: 1) the bus strike really cut into my reading time and 2) some of these books are quite long and/or dense*.

May
Jane Hamilton: The Short History of a Prince
Joe Hill: Heart-Shaped Box
Joyce Carol Oats: We Were the Mulvaneys*
Peter Ackroyd: Dan Leno & The Limehouse Golem
Sebastian Faulks: On Green Dolphin Street*

June
Sarah Dunant: In the Company of the Courtesan
Margaret Atwood: Bodily Harm
John Le Carré: The Perfect Spy*
Siri Hustvedt: What I Loved* -- This book is incredible -- great plot and character development and amazing diction. She has three other novels, and I intend to read them too. And she's married to Paul Auster, so that's just too much writing talent in one household.

Books Read in April -- just a smidge late posting

April was just go-go-go, so my reading list for the month is pretty short.

Ruth Rendell (writing as Barbara Vine): King Solomon’s Carpet
Barry Unsworth: The Ruby in her Navel
John Le Carré: The Night Manager

I cannot recommend the Unsworth novel. Usually I love his books, but this one was a dud. The setting was promising: 12th-century Sicily, conflict between Christians and Muslims, east and west. But the narrator was sooooo dull and unappealing. I recommend reading Unsworth, just not this book. Instead I would suggest Sacred Hunger, Stone Virgin, or Losing Nelson.

Le Carré, as always, rocks.

Books Read in March

A shorter list this month

Ian Rankin (writing as Jack Harvey): Witch Hunt
Alan Hollinghurst: The Line of Beauty
George Orwell: 1984*
Markus Zusak: The Book Thief
Nick Hornby: Slam
Anne Perry: Half Moon Street

The Line of Beauty was excellent but intensely sad. As it is, in essence, a contemporary Henry James novel, this book also took forever to read.

And I loved The Book Thief. Read it before the movie comes out!!!

*No, this wasn't my first reading of 1984. I read it back in 1984 when I was way to young to understand the novel. I reread it because one of my students was assigned it for senior English. Now I need to dig up all the other books I read in my tweens (just think, back then I didn't even know I was a tween) and didn't understand.

Books Read in February 2008

Happy Leap Day!

The extra 24 hours played a crucial role in my getting all this reading done.

Arundhati Roy: The God of Small Things
Ali Smith: The Accidental
Jed Rubenfeld: The Interpretation of Murder
Ngaio Marsh: Last Ditch
Tim O'Brien: Going After Cacciato
Paulo Coelho: The Witch of Portobello
Michael Jecks: The Outlaws of Ennor
Ian McEwan: On Chesil Beach

Books Read in January

The length of this list may cause you to wonder whether I spend all my time reading and eating bon-bons (why it is always bon-bons? why not pork rinds?). However, much of my reading occurs during the nearly two hours I spend every weekday enjoying the sights, sounds, and smells of public transportation. No, I'm not on the bus for two hours. I spend most of that time waiting for the bus. It's fun.

Marisha Pessl: Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Mark Haddon: A Spot of Bother
Lois Lowry: The Giver
Laurie Perry: Crazy Aunt Purl’s Drunk, Divorced & Covered in Cat Hair
Sébastien Japrisot: The Sleeping-car Murders
Diane Setterfield: The Thirteenth Tale
Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love
M.T. Anderson: Feed
Philippe Claudel: By a Slow River
Susan Runholt: The Mystery of the Third Lucretia
Anthony Trollope: Rachel Ray

And finally a couple of snaps from our November trip to Boston:

The squirrels in Boston are fat and fearless.

I always travel to Boston for Belgian beer.

Books Read in December 2007

This list is late and short, but it's here. And it's short because two of the books, Alias Grace and Bellefleur, are quite long -- and maybe also because I was home for three weeks and a bit distracted what with all the shopping; general racing around; hanging out with Mom & Dad; crashing monster trucks with my nephew, Michael; being crafty with my niece, Elaine; and driving a car and NOT riding in a bus.

Anyhoooo, here's what I read in December:

Margaret Atwood: Alias Grace
David Henry Hwang: M. Butterfly
John Le Carré: The Looking Glass War
Joyce Carol Oates: Bellefleur

January preview: I've just finished Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl, lent to me by my super-awesome friend Kim (formerly known as Hut Girl). I didn't love every minute of this book. Sometimes the narrator got on my nerves, particularly with her excessive use of similes, and though her precocity at times swerved towards nauseating, it never actually turned my stomach. In all, this novel rocks.

Books Read in November 2007

Michelle Lovric: The Floating Book
John Le Carré: The Constant Gardener
Walter Mosley: Little Scarlet
Michael Dibdin: Dead Lagoon
Thomas Berger: Best Friends
Dorothy Allison: Bastard Out of Carolina
Suzanne Berne: A Crime in the Neighborhood

Boston photos coming soon. I promise!

Books Read in October 2007

Yeah, yeah. I know I need to post more often.

Margaret Atwood: The Blind Assassin
E.L. Konigsburg: Up From Jericho Tel
Ian Rankin: Mortal Causes
John Irving: The Fourth Hand
Lilian Jackson Braun: The Cat Who Wasn’t There
Harry Mulisch: The Assault
Iain Pears: The Portrait
David Liss: A Conspiracy of Paper

Books Read in September

No, I didn't spend all of September reading, but I did put in a good bit of time waiting for and riding in buses. That's where most of the reading happened.

John Le Carré: The Tailor of Panama
Clive Barker:The Thief of Always
Tracy Chevalier: The Lady and the Unicorn
Agatha Christie: A Pocketful of Rye
Chaz Brenchley: Shelter
Michael Hoeye: Time Stops for No Mouse
Morag Joss: Fearful Symmetry
Sarah Waters: The Night Watch
Jonathan Franzen: The Corrections
Åsa Larsson: Sun Storm
Boris Akunin: Turkish Gambit

Books Read in August

Sarah Waters: Fingersmith
Steve Martin: The Pleasure of My Company
John Le Carré: A Murder of Quality
Caleb Carr: The Angel of Darkness
Tom Perrotta: Little Children
Ruth Rendell: One Across, Two Down
Ben Sherwood: The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud
Alexander McCall Smith: The Sunday Philosophy Club
Salley Vickers: Miss Garnet’s Angel

Books Read in July

Dr. Michael F. Roizen & Dr. Mehmet C. Oz: You On a Diet*
Michel Faber: The Crimson Petal and the White
Terry Pratchett: The Color of Magic
Khaled Hosseini: A Thousand Splendid Suns
Peter Abrahams: Down the Rabbit Hole
Dorothy L. Sayers: Clouds of Witness
Terry Pratchett: The Light Fantastic
J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Nicci French: The Memory Game

*I won't apologize for having read this book. It's informative and amusing.