Friday, December 29, 2023

Reading Year at a Glance 2023

2023 on Goodreads2023 on Goodreads by Various
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A fruitful reading year of 72 titles, 17,475 pages, and ratings averaged 3.8. Most of my collection was from the U.S. but 26 titles were translations and 9 were poetry collections. Apparently, twenty of my authors were men. Authors new to me numbered 25 and included Sophie Divry, Elissa Bassist, and Tan Twan Eng. Old favorites continued to be favored, i.e. Ian McEwan's Lessons, Diane JohnsonThe true history of the first Mrs. Meredith and other lesser lives and Muriel Spark The Abbess of Crewe. My non-fiction selections were 18, anchored by Nabokov's memoir (Speak, Memory).
Books published in 2023 came to 25. The oldest was Nabokov's. The stories that excited me the most were The English Understand Wool and The Wren, the Wren(Irish)and Foster(Irish), although I was quite taken with Australian author Helen Armstrong (The Children's Bach). I thought The true history of the first Mrs. Meredith and other lesser lives was a delight and an ingenious history and Mary Ruefle'sThe Book pleased me with its discussions of friendships, of plums. Authors new to me were Sophie Divry, Elissa Bassist, Tan Twan Eng and Marie NDiaye.
***
Just read Val's valiant effort to reduce her number of TBRs to 195. My 1164 TBR's are really books I want to read so the longer the list, the more curious and interested in variety I appear, no? Such a didact! My shame would be the number of books on my shelves which I have yet to read, and still I buy more. These two categories conflate in my records. I read Susan Hill's Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home and aspired to do as she did, stop buying books and curtail library usage, until the landings were cleared. In fact, one of my categories toward this end is "Howard's End is On the Landing" (HEIOTL). I also chuckle familiarly over Nick Hornby's The Believer columns where he reviews books bought and books read and sometimes there is no overlap. I understand. I now must catalog the HEIOTLs with new vigor and make next year's 70-book goal to read my own books.

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Saturday, December 16, 2023

The Lunatic

The Lunatic: PoemsThe Lunatic: Poems by Charles Simic
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Some of these short poems delight me with the poet's everyday metaphors and his sardonic wit: "Looking for a Soul Mate," a sort of dating app description "Recovering puff pastry and almond cookie addict,,,Now seeks a comfortable brownstone free of cats/..And where he'll be free to mingle with bankers and lawyers/And sit in their wives' laps like a much-pampered pet." Or "Meet Eddie" "Whose life is as merry as a beer can/Hurling down a mountain stream...Are you ready to meet your Maker?"
Others didn't work as well for me: "Dark Night," his soulful verse about God and Satan, each playing Solitaire or "Passing Through," but I like his dogs, his cats, his fish, his fleas and birds and poems of winter. My favorite was this one (perhaps emblematic-of-the book?) with lines "About life being both cruel and beautiful" and "the sight of a dog free from his chain."

"So Early in the Morning"
It pains me to see an old woman fret over
A few small coins outside a grocery store -
How swiftly I forget her as my own grief
Finds me again - a friend at death's door
And the memory of the night we spent together.

I had so much love in my heart afterward,
I could have run into the street naked
Confident anyone I met would understand
My madness and my need to tell them
About life being both cruel and beautiful,

But I did not - despite the overwhelming evidence:
A crow bent over a dead squirrel in the road,
The lilac bushes flowering in some yard,
And the sight of a dog free from his chain
Searching through a neighbor's trash can.

If you want to read the best review of this book, see s.penkevich on Goodreads

Thursday, December 14, 2023

Lessons

LessonsLessons by Ian McEwan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ian McEwan's Lessons is an old-fashioned, compassionate, multi-generational tale of a literary figure, this time a mother who leaves her baby son and her husband to become a novelist, and the father who stays home and raises the child. I couldn't put it down.

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The Wren, The Wren

The Wren, the WrenThe Wren, the Wren by Anne Enright
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I was impressed with Anne Enright's The Wren, the Wren about three generations in a Dublin family and their interactions interspersed by samples from the poet father. While there are some difficult moments in this story, and I don't recommend it to my sister who prefers happy tales, the writing is sheer joy.

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Tom Lake

Tom LakeTom Lake by Ann Patchett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Tom Lake was a braided story (then and now) of a mother relating her glamorous past life as an actor to her clamoring daughters. Having a story run in two parts can be frustrating to the eager reader. It is like looking for the sexy parts or the who done it section. In this story, you're curious as to what happened to him, to them, and how she ended up with a cherry farmer. The characters are all beautiful, compatible and sympathetic; the dogs are sweet; the cherries are relentless in their need for harvest. The story has good forward motion riffing off the play, Our Town. But I wanted a bit more of an edge. I wanted to have at least one character who does not defies the odds and I guess that was "the golden boy, Duke." But there is a lot of happy family story before Duke's failings become evident, and I would have liked more reflection from the once-smitten mother to hold my interest. It's still Ann Patchett and that's worth a lot, but not my favorite of her titles. Take me back to Bel Canto.

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The Children's Bach

The Children's BachThe Children's Bach by Helen Garner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My new favorite author is Helen Garner. The Children's Bach is an antipodean (a chance to use that word!) domestic novel of parents and children, friends and lovers, siblings and spouses, beautifully written, loosely structured, not long but an honest examination of the social freedoms of the eighties with musical references. Effort is required to keep track of the eight major characters. It's a good companion read to The Spare Room which covers friendship and concerns about mortality at a later stage in life.

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Monday, December 11, 2023

Abbess of Crewe

Abbess of Crewe (Panther Books)Abbess of Crewe by Muriel Spark
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Sisters, be sober. Sisters, be vigilant" A slim, comic satire harkening back to Watergate isThe Abbess of Crewe by Muriel Spark in which a renegade nun named Felicity dallies with a Jesuit in the garden of the Abbey, is excommunicated and seeks revenge by exposing her order to sabotage, blackmail and undo publicity. Delightfully wry, the Abbess remarks: "Sisters, let me tell you a secret. I would rather sink fleshless to my death into the dry soil of some African or Indian plain, than go, as I hear Felicity (the randy nun) is now doing, to a psychiatrist for an anxiety-cure." Given to quoting poetry, the Abbess is a success on television but one worries when she is called to Rome with the offending tapes recorded in the Abbey.
Perfect holiday fare.

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Friday, December 8, 2023

The House of Doors

The House of DoorsThe House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The House of Doors touched all my buttons in a good way: beautiful writing, literary references which had me looking up bios and movies and stories of W. Somerset Maugham who is fictionalized in this novel. There was romance, murder, and an exotic locale. Tan Twan Eng keeps us moving along at a fine pace using the alternate chapter structure of Maugham, then Lesley, the storyteller. Does anyone read Maugham now? Other than his colonial racism, he's a master of description, place and people. I read The Letter and Other Stories and want to see the Bette Davis movie.

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Saturday, November 25, 2023

If I Survive You

If I Survive YouIf I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read this as a novel and was completely involved in its first chapter, but it's chapters seem to meander away in short stories while I wanted the narrative force of a novel. Writing was admirable, often funny.

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The Sarah Book

The Sarah BookThe Sarah Book by Scott McClanahan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One critic called Scott McClanahan the Appalachian Charles Bukowski which is fitting. Described as a semi-autobiographical novel, there is much about getting drunk (with a water bottle filled with gin and two forgotten babies in the back seat as he sails along the highway), bodily fluids, camping out at Walmart, hospital tales from his estranged wife, a nurse, yet his story is engaging and very sad. There are snippets of humor but mostly it is an unflinching description of divorce, tragedy and resilience, told in beautiful melodic writing. "In one life we are dead. In one we are rich. In one we are poor. In one we are parents. But always we belong to others."

Thanks to Backlisted.fm for pointing me toward this story and to so many other books.

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The Book

The Book (Wave Books, 110)The Book by Mary Ruefle
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I think of [Mary Ruefle|282933]'s brain scan and can't believe it's anything like mine or anyone I know. Unique and thought provoking vignettes about every imaginable subject from cashews to Jung to haikus to Dear Friends: "Then one day I picked up a magazine and read an interview with the COO (chief operating officer) of Facebook, perhaps she still is, I don't know, but she was asked how many friends she had and she said, "Over three thousand. I don't know all of them but I have met them in one shape or form." I would rather be antiquated--I would rather die--than make a statement like that. I know my friends..."and she goes on with a precise, knowing descriptions of her various friends: "I had a friend who loved apple trees and apple blossoms and apple orchards, he loved swimming in ponds and lake, and making current jam and jam from mulberries and playing the harmonica, but when he read, he loved books, he read heavy German tomes."
Or "I have a friend who believes that birds have souls but humans do not."
As Poetry Foundation's Janina Ambikapathy wrote "If this book is about recollection, and a meditation on the inevitable passing of all things, it is also about errors, cracks in our recall that switch the familiar world for one that is slightly strange. [Mary Ruefle|282933] writes about the fluctuating intensity of friendships, missed connections, and affections sent out into the world that bounce right back: “She kept calling, I didn’t pick up, and finally she stopped. I think she understood I was somehow not the same.” "The plum sat in the sun for three hours, its skin split apart and its syrup began to ooze out. When I bit into it, I thought of William Carlos Williams..."
"I am a tall person who is small and mean inside. For instance, I wake Christmas morning and begin to pack away all of my Christmas decorations."
Wave Books is a publisher to treasure as is this volume.

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Tripas

Tripas: Poems (Georgia Review Books Ser.)Tripas: Poems by Brandon Som
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Christopher Spaide in Poetry Foundation's review https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harr... writes of this book: "
Aristotle, Li Po, Ezra Pound: these are among the cited sources of Brandon Som's The Tribute Horse (2014), whose textual collages map the arduous passage of Chinese migrants and poetry to North America. With Tripas: PoemsTripas (2023), Brandon Som turns his attention to histories, plural: toxic dumping in Phoenix, Arizona; a father’s “nine-year fight with cancer”; a Chicana grandmother’s work inspecting circuits for the earliest Motorola cellphones. Those latter devices are forerunners to Brandon Som’s poetic instrument, his “Teléfono Roto”—literally, a broken telephone; idiomatically, the children’s game telephone. Both are ways of communicating through mishearing, translating signal and noise into surprises of sense and sound..."cries Llorona from those little phones inside our pockets" and Motorola moved to Guadalajara after the manufacturer was fined and their Phoenix location was declared a Superfund site.
Very moving and powerful verse.


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Saturday, October 14, 2023

All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami

All the Lovers in the NightAll the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A poignant and beautiful tale about a lonely young woman attempting connection in her workaday world.

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Once Upon a Tome: The Misadventures of a Rare Bookseller by Oliver Darkshire

Once Upon a Tome: The Misadventures of a Rare BooksellerOnce Upon a Tome: The Misadventures of a Rare Bookseller by Oliver Darkshire
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Funny fellow reveals all about the London rare book trade , its staff, customs, and book hunts.

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Self-Portrait in Green by Marie NDiaye

Self-Portrait in GreenSelf-Portrait in Green by Marie NDiaye
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Remarkable, confusing and gorgeous prose in a translation by Jordan Stump, I floated through this slim memoir and finished with questions about which of the women in green was the narrator/author, and what it all meant including the photos reminiscent of W.G. Sebald. I want to read more of her work. "Marie NDiaye is so intelligent, so composed, so good, that any description of her work feels like an understatement," blurbs The New York Review of Books.

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Tuesday, September 12, 2023

The Vet's Daughter

A classic I've had on the shelf for years, rose like cream to the top of my favorites for this year. Bleak but well done and absorbing story of the ill-used daughter of a veterinarian and her too-brief sojourn into a happy, hopeful life. I want to read more of Barbara Comyns' work.

The Librarianist

The LibrarianistThe Librarianist by Patrick deWitt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Delightful treat, funny, propulsive, entertaining, story of a solitary librarian, his too-brief marriage, his tidy years into retirement and volunteer efforts in an old folks home. My first from Patrick deWitt, but there'll be others. He has an easy amusing authorial tone, writes well, and presents a cavalcade of unique characters who cross in and out of Bob Comet's life.
"And I suppose you're a fiend for books?"
"I suppose I am."
"I keep meaning to get to books but life distracts me."
"See, for me it's just the opposite."

During a hospital stay, Bob decides:
"After decades of rejecting the television medium he experienced a period of not just watching TV, but watching with enthusiastic interest. All his life he had believed the real world was the world of books; it was here that mankind's finest inclinations were represented. And this must have been true at some point in history, but now he understood the species had devolved and that this shrill, base, banal potpourri of humanity's worst and weakest and laziest desires and behaviors was the document of the time. It was about volume and visual overload and it pinned Bob to his bed like a cat before a strobe light. "



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The Library of Unrequited Love

The Library of Unrequited LoveThe Library of Unrequited Love by Sophie Divry


Clever little book with stream of consciousness thoughts from a librarian who's stationed in the history section of a basement library in a small town in France.
"As for men, I've given upon them. It's just impossible in a place like this, impossible. It's not exactly the sticks, but if you're a sensitive, cultivated soul like me, it's...well, it's very provincial. I need wider horizon. So, men, no, that's all over. Love, for me, is something I find in books. I read a lot, it's comforting. You've never alone if you live surrounded by books. They lift my spirit. The main thing is to be uplifted."
Who can argue with her? "When I'm reading, I'm never alone, I have a conversation with the book. It can be very intimate. Perhaps you know this feeling yourself? The sense that you're having an intellectual exchange with the author, following his or her train of thought, and you can accompany each other for weeks on end. When I'm reading, I can forget everything, sometimes I don't even hear the phone."

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Wednesday, August 23, 2023

The Guest

The GuestThe Guest by Emma Cline
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The Guest by Emma Cline was a disappointing book with an unresolved ending after following the disaffected main character through the seductive Long Island landscape and many pages. Mesmerizing enough to keep me plodding on to see how she finagles yet another man and maintains her optimism that her lover will take her back, but not satisfying, in the end, despite the effort of the author. What happened? Cline's other book, The Girls, was much more appealing to me in plot and writing.

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I Am Homeless if This is Not My Home

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My HomeI Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Lorrie Moore's new novel, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, was a wistful tale of two brothers, one in hospice, and the other's peculiar road trip with the ghost of a lover interspersed with epistemological entries from a nineteenth century murderess. The writing is excellent and witty. The pacing is fine. But what did it all mean and why the letters? If that sort of structural ambiguity troubles you, I can't recommend this book. I read mainly for good writing yet I was confused. Check out Ron Charles: https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/...

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The Rabbit Hutch

The Rabbit HutchThe Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Rabbit Hutch is a brilliant piece of writing, almost too rich. Various stories and characters residing in a decrepit low-rent housing complex in the Rust Belt compete for the reader's attention and each is about quirky, self-involved, precariously sane individuals, all interesting, but none in which I became invested. The pacing chugged forward nicely until about two-thirds in when I was anxious for resolution for the young Blandine who has suffered so much damage. Animals are hurt, too. But what do I know? This book was on eligibility lists for the Booker Prize, the Women's Fiction Prize, the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2022, and the National Book Awards Longlist. I also read this book at an emotionally fraught time over spousal illness so my impressions may be skewed. The author has an amazing imagination and the writing is excellent.

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Wednesday, July 12, 2023

Moon of the Crusted Snow

Moon of the Crusted SnowMoon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A humdinger! Both my partner & I each read it in two sittings. Interesting to learn about the culture and to read a snowy tale on a hot summer eve. Made us plan canning ventures for the apocalypse!

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Stubborn Archivist

Stubborn ArchivistStubborn Archivist by Yara Rodrigues Fowler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This novel took me to a Brazil I’ve never visited: from cold London winter to the yellow house on the Brazilian beach with family hugs & kisses, musical language, sandy bikinis, tropical food and icy beers. Appealing characters though the narrator’s voice, the stubborn archivist, might confuse as she shifts between you, she and the baby. Boldly for a debut author, she combines the confusion of being of dual heritage (“But where are you really from?”) with stories of coming of age as a woman. Some of the writing is poetry, fragmentary and artful in use of blank space and two languages.
Child of a Brazilian mother and British father, this suggests auto fiction and the author knows what it is to straddle two cultures. The section on Mr. Darcy at the end is hilarious. Highly recommended.

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August Blue

August BlueAugust Blue by Deborah Levy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There is a lilting pace to Levy's books that is familiar and appealing. Favorite tropes surface: green gemstones, wooden horses, shoes, flowers, insects, weather, birds, cocktails and unique characters like her friends Marie and Rajesh. As always, she writes of swimming, often in exotic locales. And as always, she has me wrapped around her elegant finger, happy to explore the mystery of doppelgangers and her origins.

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Saturday, June 3, 2023

Look at the Lights, My Love (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

Look at the Lights, My Love (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)Look at the Lights, My Love by Annie Ernaux
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Nobelist Ernaux has written an initially compelling study of a superstore in France called Auchan (think, Walmart) and every aspect from the standpoint of an observer on marketing strategies, product placement, pricing, sociological implications, customers, staff, departments (i.e. fish, pharmacy, bakery, bookstore, etc.) and the satellite stores such as McDonalds, a bowling alley, a news and tobacco shop along side. She kept a journal of her observations for many months and ends this eighty-page journal with
"As the months went by, I was able to measure the controlling force exerted by mass production spaces in real and imaginary ways. By provoking desires at dictated times, its violence equally present in the colorful profusion of yogurt flavors as in the gray everyday deals aisles, and by reinforcing social stigmas through the accommodation of individuals with low incomes. The items purchased whether in a little heap or a toppling mountain on the conveyor belt, are nearly always among the cheapest. Upon leaving the superstore, I was often overwhelmed by a sense of helplessness and injustice. But for all that, I have not ceased to feel the appeal of the place and the community life, subtle and specific, that exists there."
Alas, I ceased to feel the appeal of her book midway and put it down.

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Thursday, June 1, 2023

The Guest Lecture

The Guest LectureThe Guest Lecture by Martin Riker
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Guest Lecture was mildly interesting when the narrator talked about and with John Maynard Keynes or mentioned Rhetorician Aspasia, "portrayed as both a sexualised and sexually liberated woman and as a feminist role model fighting for women's rights in ancient Athens." Or even economics or philosophy, all wrapped in heavy musing, almost all musing on the narrator's part in preparing her lecture and pondering her failure to get tenure. I read half the book carefully, then skimmed wearily. Enough. Perhaps if it was the only book on my stack, but the competition is heavy. The writing, by the way, is very fine and I am impressed that the author, Martin Riker, is the publisher of feminist press Dorothy with its stunning list of titles in handsome wraps.https://dorothyproject.com/books-gallery/

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Sunday, May 21, 2023

Birnham Wood

Birnam WoodBirnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Skilled writing in this elaborate story of an earnest guerilla gardening collective beguiled by donations from an American billionaire doing his own guerilla work in rare earth mining in New Zealand. The book is heavy with introspection and exposition and I grew weary of much of it wanting to get on with this "literary thriller". Not for me.

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Monday, May 1, 2023

Poet in Spain

Poet in SpainPoet in Spain by Federico García Lorca
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Stunning to explore Spain's explicator of poetic duende in this new translation from Sarah Arvio reviewed by Dwight Garner in The New York Times:
"Lorca’s poems from Spain are a poetry of dreams and journeys and glimpses from balconies, of sunbaked meadows and realms of erotic yearning. He went to the well often for the same elemental imagery: the sea, the wind, the moon, flowers and trees. His mind worked feverishly enough to induce hallucinations."

Having a rudimentary knowledge of Spanish, I was troubled by some of Translator Sarah Arvio's decisions to drop punctuation. Garner offers samples:
Lorca has been tamped down. His poem “Cazador” (“Hunter”), for example, begins with these words: “¡Alto pinar!” Arvio translates this, with a vast diminution in energy, as “High grove of pines.”

Lorca wrote in an exclamatory style that gave his work a flamenco brashness missing from some of these translations. García Lorca uses exclamatory sequences to mimic the effect of a chorus singing and beating their palms to the music of a flamenco performance.
Look at the first stanza of “Árboles” (“Trees”) from 1919:

¡Árboles!
¿Habéis sido flechas
Caídas del azul?
¿Qué terribles guerreros os lanzaron?
¿Han sido las estrellas?

Per Garner, "Arvio renders this in telegraphic yet somewhat lobotomized fashion:"

Were you once arrows
falling from the sky
What terrible warriors shot you
Were they the stars

Lorca's fascination with 14th-century Persian poetry in The Tamarit Divan to his idealization of Andalusia’s Romani history in Gypsy Ballads may be questioned nowadays, but overall these English translations stand up and render the book invaluable to any English-speaker smitten by Lorca’s work.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/30/bo... and https://yalereview.org/article/poetry...



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The Dog of the North

The Dog of the NorthThe Dog of the North by Elizabeth Mckenzie
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The Dog of the North had some fine reviews and a Women's Prize nomination, but I found the writing and dialog clunky, although the story buzzed right along and the humor and certainly the Santa Barbara setting reminded me of early Sue Grafton. At the mercy of every character in the book, the protagonist bounces back and forth in her efforts to help everyone and avoid her soon-to-be ex-husband, her cantankerous, creepy father and her erratic mentally challenged grandmother while trying to find her missing parents who disappeared years ago in Australia. Age is well represented in this story with Arlo, the 93-year-old grandpa game to scour the outback with her and avoid his first wife and his shrewish second wife. There is also a cardiac event and a sinkhole and a mysterious corpse and a piñata to keep you turning pages, pages which for me were a bit ho hum.

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The English Understand Wool

The English Understand Wool (Storybook ND Series)The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The English Understand Wool's take on the writing/publishing game is easily one of my top books for this year for writing, topic, size (67pp), plot and wit "like a dry cork," as a blurb pointed out. Dewitt is at her best.

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My Phantoms

My PhantomsMy Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not my favorite book this year due to the poisonous relationship between mother and daughter which made me want to look away, it was painful to be there for their infrequent meetings, but the writing is stellar. It is a slim, spare novel which moves right along.

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Tuesday, January 24, 2023

2022 Reading in Review

2022 on Goodreads2022 on Goodreads by Various
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A satisfying year meeting my goal and reading a few extra volumes (69 total) mostly due to pandemic quarantining. My most generous reviews were of my husband's book Southern Voices: Biet Dong and the National Liberation Front (about the Vietnam War), several poetry volumes (discovered Robert Wrigley and Larry Levis, revisited Octavio Paz), and fiction: Still Life, Fight Night, The All of It, The Fell, Recitatif,Burntcoat, Trust, The Lovers, Companion Piece, The Passenger, and Small Things Like These; and non-fiction include Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, Deborah Levy's memoir trilogy, Aurelia, Aurélia: A Memoir, Suppose a Sentence (on favorite sentences), In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss(on death with dignity), The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings (on endings), Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me, and A House of My Own: Stories from My Life, both memoir hybrids and Figure It Out (on art and life). A satisfactory collection but this year I would like to strive for more classics, read more books in translation and finish Ducks, Newburyport. Certainly, something can be found in my TBR pile of 1,093 titles the oldest and highest rated of which is The Invention of Hugo Cabret. I am already looking at a maxed out library holds list and an ample in-house collection.

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Thursday, January 19, 2023

Vertigo & Ghosts: Poems

Vertigo & GhostVertigo & Ghost by Fiona Benson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The first half of the book addresses Zeus and his rapist ways and it blew me away, captivated and chilled me. The second half deals with motherhood and nature and was less interesting, but her gifts of word choice made every poem worthwhile. Recommended by Andy Miller from Backlisted.fm where I hear about the best books.

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