What I've been reading lately

There's been so much real life in 2013. Unless the froth of craziness whipped up by a particular family member (see: six-word memoir) extends even further in the coming weeks or months, and I am hoping it cannot, the worst coming from that direction is at an ebb. At least for now.

As is my husband's cancer. Hurray for negative surgical margins!

This is what I've been reading when I've been able to read:

Breakfast of Champions. Kurt Vonnegut. Since I reread this on the heels of my reread of The French Lieutenant's Woman in late December, I couldn't keep from wishing that Kilgore Trout someone would write a story where Vonnegut and Fowles are observed discussing how they are going to put themselves into their own stories to observe their characters. Perhaps they could pop into each other's books to further their discussion and spy upon one another's characters as well. C. says I should write this story, but I don't have the wherewithal for such at the moment. Someone else do it and then let me read it, okay?

The Eustace Diamonds. Anthony Trollope. What fun. And parts were set in Scotland, too.

Small Island. Andrea Levy. My choice for book club. Turnout was small, but the book was well-received, even by those who were unable to attend, because real life happens to them, too. I had trouble focusing at the beginning, but became totally absorbed in the second half. I've passed the book on to CP, who is taking it slow, because of Hortense's tendency to be a pill.

The Uninvited. Liz Jensen. Whoa. Now I have to read more Liz Jensen as soon as the TBR Double Dog Dare is through. Why have I never heard of Jensen before now?

The Judge. Rebecca West. A second read for a discussion at Goodreads.

Life After Life. Kate Atkinson. Loved this and look forward to reading it again once my physical copy arrives. Is it ultimately a book about the transmigration of souls within parallel universes? It seemed very appropriate to spend my time with Ursula, looping through her lives, reliving the same scenes and conversations, while I was sitting in L.'s hospital room as he was coming off anesthesia, asking me the same questions over and over again.

Brazzaville Beach. William Boyd. Books do wait on us, but if we allow them to attain mythic proportions in our minds in the meantime, we may find ourselves a tad disappointed when we finally get around to them.

May We Be Forgiven. A.M. Homes. I've been reading about, but not reading A.M. Homes for a good 15 years or so, sure that she would prove to be too dark or too extreme for me. Either this is Homes' All the Pretty Horses or my tastes run even darker than I thought, but I enjoyed the hell out of this book.

Toby's Room. Pat Barker. Now my appetite is set for reading Robert Graves' Good-Bye to All That.

Ragtime. E.L. Doctorow. I guess it had been 34 years since I'd last read this. I remembered some of the people in it, but had totally forgotten the plot. How typical of me.

And I'm reading William Gaddis' The Recognitions with Wendy. At the pace we're taking, we should finish around the end of April.

The Ten, Make That Nine Habits of Very Organized People. Make That Ten: the tweets of Steve Martin by Steve Martin

by Wendy

Subtitle should read: the funny tweets of Steve’s followers or guess U had 2 B there. (Sorry, Steve, I'm still a fan, just not attwicted.)

The TBR Double Dog Dare

I am committed, folks, to making it all the way to April this time round. Of course, last year I found The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction on the New Books Shelves at the library in late January and mentally said the hell with any silly dares that might require me not to start such a book immediately, but this year, this year I have a strategy: I will not take casual strolls through the New Book Shelves, or at least not on a daily basis, and particularly not when I'm bored.

Plus, I have caveats: Book club choices, anything to do with Iceland and Scotland that I might need to absorb before traveling there midyear, anything already preordered from a library or a store that has yet to make its way into my hands. That means I get to read the new George Saunders, the new Liz Jensen, and possibly, the new Kate Atkinson, if the universe decides to play nice for a change and send my autographed copy early, which I doubt it will, knowing the universe like I do.

Otherwise, all reading between now and April falls under the dictates of the TBR Double Dog Dare and my Eschew the New! guiding principles. I'm reading what's already in the stockpile and ignoring the rest.

I spent New Year's Day rereading Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions (a high school favorite) and started Anthony Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds over the weekend. (I should have read Phineas Finn first, I know, but I'll have to loop back for it.)

I have some book club commitments after that, but then its on to Brazzaville Beach, a book I've wanted to read ever since I read a local review for it back in 1990. Back in those days, I was too poor to buy but a scant few of the books desired and online library holds didn't exist; this book and I never crossed paths. And now I've had a stockpiled copy for eight years. Time to read it.

You say you want a resolution

On New Year's Day I was still trying a psychic mind trick on the universe that would grant me a mulligan for the entire month of November, which I'm still harboring a few issues over missing, but now that that's obviously failed, I'm willing to move on. Forward!

2013! Nothing against you personally, but I'm going to do my best to ignore most of what you have to offer me until 2014, because I really need a catch-up year where my reading is concerned. It's going to be Eschew the New until the cows come home on December 31, 2013.

I'm going to read heavily from my Fill in the Gaps list and my Classic Club Challenge list and I'd like to mark the three Wilkes County titles off my Some Dark Holler list.

I'm also horrified by how little nonfiction I read last year and would love to read at least 15 from the list below:

Payback. Margaret Atwood
The Way the World Works. Nicholson Baker
How to Live, or A Life of Montaigne. Sarah Bakewell
The Passage of Power. Robert A. Caro
At Day's Close: Night in Times Past. A. Roger Ekirch
Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber 
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. Stephen Greenblatt
Why Orwell Matters. Christopher Hitchens
Votes for Women. The Virago Book of Suffragettes. Joyce Marlow, ed.
Destiny of the Republic. Candice Millard
The Return of the Chaos Monsters - And Other Backstories of the Bible. Gregory Mobley
The Map of My Dead Pilots. Colleen Mondor
A Collection of Essays. George Orwell
Nixonland. Rick Perlstein
Monster of God. David Quammen
The Song of the Dodo. David Quammen
Spillover. David Quammen
Iceland: Land of the Sagas. David Roberts
Hallucinations. Oliver Sacks
The Braindead Megaphone. George Saunders
Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded. John Scalzi
The Life of Elizabeth I. Alison Weir
The Essential Rebecca West.
The New Meaning of Treason. Rebecca West
A Train of Powder. Rebecca West
The Essays of Virginia Woolf, v. 6

2012 reading stats and favorites

Right after the election in November I had an allergic reaction to either the high-dose antibiotic the doctor had me on for a sinus infection or to the few measly shrimp I'd had for a late supper the night before (the doctor is betting on the shrimp, because that way he's not responsible). Whatever I reacted to, the end results were a long-lasting case of severe joint inflammation and arthritic pain that lingered past the midway point of December, a compromised immune system, and a skewing of my usual allergies.

It also messed me up readingwise. New books that were just my thing before I got sick just weren't after; my eyes would fall right off their first or second page. The ones I did manage to make it through I either didn't get much out of or else hated much more intensely than the poor book probably warranted.

I'd've gone on a reading fast for a few weeks to get myself straightened out if it hadn't been for the fact that I was so close to reaching 100 books for the year.

So I switched to rereading old favorites, reaching 100 this morning with Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye, one of my all-time favorites, a book I hadn't read in its entirety in more than 20 years. The ending still kicked me in the gut and brought me to tears; can't think of a better way to end the reading year than with that.



My reading stats for the last eight years (this year's in bold):

Books Total  100 / 82 / 101 / 101 / 78 / 81 / 74 / 77
Nonfiction 5 / 12 / 16 / 15 / 13 / 8 / 14 / 13
Novels  80 / 66 / 78 / 79 / 62 / 62 / 50 / 47
Short Story Collections  4 / 2 /7 / 7  / 3 / 4 / 1 / 8
Library Books 29 / 39 /26 / 48 / 27 / 14  / 31
Newly Acquired/Read 21 / 12 / 23 / 32  /32  / 31 / 24
Newly Acquired/Stockpiled 78 / 120+ / 113 / 140 / 88  /141+  / 75+
E-texts Read 20 / 12 /17 / 10 / 12
Free E-texts Read 10 / 6 / 9 / 5  /  7
Just-published books 30 / 21 / 36 / 55 / 41 /34  / 33
Classics   22  / 23 / 21 / 10  / 8 / 23 / 12
Pre-20th Century 8 / 10 / 9 / 7  / 4  / 12 / 11
Written by women 49 / 38 / 46 / 55 / 42 / 33 / 28

Others:
Graphic novels: 1
Books of the Bible: 3
Mythology: 3
Science fiction: 12
Young adult or children's: 7
Western: 1


13 authors with multiple books read:  Gillian Flynn (3); George Gissing (3); Olivia Manning (3); Patrick O'Brian (3); David Brin (2); Margaret Drabble (2); Louise Fitzhugh (2); Jonathan Lethem (2); Hilary Mantel (2); Anthony Powell (2); Kim Stanley Robinson (2); Anthony Trollope (2); Anne Tyler (2). 

16 rereads (in order read): A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine L'Engle); Searching for Caleb (Anne Tyler); The Middle Ground (Margaret Drabble); My Mortal Enemy (Willa Cather); The Last Gentleman (Walker Percy); The Long Secret and Harriet the Spy (Louise Fitzhugh); Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret (Judy Blume); A Candle in Her Room (Ruth M. Arthur); The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger); Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell); Heart of the Matter (Graham Greene); The Realms of Gold (Margaret Drabble); The Long Winter (Laura Ingalls Wilder); The French Lieutenant's Woman (John Fowles); Cat's Eye (Margaret Atwood).

My top three favorite new books of the year were (in order read):

The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction, ed. by Arthur B. Evans et al.

Three Weeks in December by Audrey Shulman

April Witch by Majgull Axelsson

Other books I can see myself rereading:

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

What Happened to Sophie Wilder by Christopher R. Beha

See you in the new year!

The right deep swimming in a book

Here the lane grew so narrow that they were obliged to walk in file, Jack, Stephen, Lalla and the goat, and conversation languished. When at length they reached plough on the right hand and open pasture on the left Stephen said, 'One of the advantages of life at sea, for men of our condition, is freedom of speech. In the cabin or on the balcony behind, we can say what we wish, when we wish. And if you come to reflect, this is a very rare state of affairs in ordinary circumstances, by land. There are almost always reasons for discretion -- servants, loved ones, visitors, innocent but receptive ears or the possibility of their presence. In much the same way good sullen reading is rare in a house, unless one is blessed with an impregnable and soundproof room of one's own: interruptions, restless unnecessary movements, doors opening and closing, apologies, even whisperings, god forbid, and meal-times. For the right deep swimming in a book, give me the sea: I read Josephus through between Freetown and the Fastnet rock last voyage: the howling of the mariners, the motion of the sea and the elements (except perhaps in their utmost extremity) are nothing, compared with domestic incursions. Since then, mere newspapers, gazettes, periodical publications, all light frothy fare apart from the Proceedings, have imperceptibly drunk the whole of my time and energy. Now, Jack, pray tell me about this Admiral Lord Stranraer, whom you have mentioned so often.'

--Patrick O'Brian, The Yellow Admiral

I was unaware of that second definition of sullen used by Stephen; I like it. I need more good sullen reading in my own life.

Robot Housewife

there are more of us than you know. . .