The Book Stops Here

Tags

Challenges, Goodreads, War and Peace

On the heels of a couple rough deadlines, I’m popping in briefly to deliver the grim news that the TBR Triple Dog Dare was a complete bust for me this year. Not only did I not finish the multitude of books in my TBR pile, but I’ve only finished four books so far in 2014! Bad reader no biscuit.

Of course, I saw far more movies than I usually do in March, but still, I am way behind on my New Year’s resolutions, which mostly had to do with reading. I think I’ve turned the corner in terms of my schedule, but one never knows. However, I am on the verge of finishing a bunch of titles and am bound and determined to complete my Goodreads reading challenge (66 books) this year. And, of course, there is War and Peace looming in the distance as well.

Here’s hoping that by the time “The (Half) Year in Books” rolls around, I’ll actually have something to say!

Sly Wit 2014

Tags

Challenges, Goodreads, Opera, War and Peace

We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.

—E. L. Pierce

Happy New Year!

As always, I welcome the New Year with open arms and lots of plans and projects—here’s what you can expect to see at Sly Wit in 2014.

Books: The mantra for books this year is “Keep it simple, stupid!” with the general goal of getting back some focus and limiting my tendency to multi-read. Therefore, my annual book challenge for this year consists of one book: War and Peace. I first began this classic as part of my first book challenge in 2010 and got about 300 pages into it during my 2012 challenge, but then I quit my crazy job and my life in general got a bit derailed. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it both times so I figure the third time’s the charm.

Part of this new focus means keeping up with my Goodreads reviews. As I mentioned in my year-end round-up post yesterday, I was particularly bad at doing that this past year, mostly because I did a lot of multi-reading and endlessly renewed books at the library. To try to break out of that habit, I am accepting the TBR Triple Dog Dare and pledging to read only books in my TBR pile until April Fools Day. This includes the aforementioned War and Peace, as well as any remaining books from last year’s TBR challenge that strike my fancy.

Film and Television: With a new cinéphile in my life, I anticipate many more film write-ups in the months to come. The posts in my Film 101 series consistently seem to be among the most popular, so I hope to continue them with a closer look at Japanese cinema in the spring and horror films in the fall. I’d like to do westerns too, but I have a feeling that might be a bit too ambitious.

Of course, January and February are usually chock full of movies anyway with my annual Oscar blitz taking up most of my spare “culture” time. For once, I have actually already seen a number of contenders in the acting categories and am looking forward to the nominations announcement more than usual.

In television, I am most looking forward to the return of Sherlock. As Comcast recently encrypted all channels here, and I no longer get any broadcast TV, I’m hoping Hulu’s deal with the BBC means we’re getting it at the same time as the PBS airings. In the meantime, I’ve been re-reading the stories and watching the incredible Russian series from the 1980s, which is available on DVD from my local library (I highly recommend these 11 episodes if you can get your hands on them). You can also catch the “Many Happy Returns” teaser below:

Later in the spring, Orphan Black will premiere its second season. And I’m hoping that we’ll see the return of The Bletchley Circle sometime in the fall, if not earlier. As for blogging all this television, I’d say it’s highly unlikely unless some new reality show appears on the horizon.

Performing Arts: The spring will be fairly light on performing arts as my first full year as a freelancer meant I needed to tap into my savings more than usual and therefore did not get subscriptions to either the San Francisco Ballet or the Lamplighters (although I hope to snag last-minute tickets to see Die Fledermaus in February) this year.

Of course, I still have Showboat and La traviata at the San Francisco Opera this summer and eagerly await the official 2014-2015 season announcement. I very much hope that The Opera Tattler is right and that the fall will bring us La Cenerentola.

Regardless of what other random musings 2014 may bring, there are sure to be cocktails aplenty!

The (Half) Year in Books

Tags

Awards, Book Salon, Goodreads

Between my annual Oscar blitz and my surveys of screwballs and Spielbergs, the first half of this year has definitely been more about the visual than the literal. Still, in surveying the books I have managed to read so far, I have quite a few to recommend.

Best in Biography: The Black Count by Tom Reiss. This biography of Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie, father of Alexandre Dumas père and the first black general in French history, was absolutely riveting. Using the lens of this incredible life story, Reiss mixes personal narrative and historical context to provide a unique perspective on the period and helped me see events that I felt I knew in a completely different light. It also supplies tremendous insight to the novels written by Dumas as well as coverage of subjects as diverse as race relations in eighteenth-century France, major military campaigns of the Revolution, and the creation of the Italian state. My one quibble was that the author injected himself into the story a bit too much (saying things like “when I read the letter in the archives…” instead of simply “the letter in the archives reveals…”), but I imagine many readers would like that kind of personal touch. Be prepared for a lot of history and a less-than-kind depiction of Napoléon.

Best in Booker: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. Even though this Booker Prize winner took multiple attempts (because it reads slow and always seemed to come due at the library before I was finished), it was well worth it. This is a book to make you fall in love with Thomas Cromwell. The first part chronicles the fall of Cardinal Wolsey, of whom Cromwell is a protégé, and then the bulk of the story details Cromwell’s rise, along with that of Anne Boleyn. Court politics are made personal by the unique viewpoint of the novel, told in the third-person present tense but from Cromwell’s distinct point of view. This narrative conceit forces the reader to slow down, often to simply figure out if “he” is referring to Cromwell, or another person in the room, and therefore one gets fully immersed in the setting. I loved how it made the political personal and that I felt I was a witness to the action.

Best in Britain: The Observations by Jane Harris. For the second year in a row, I’m bestowing the Best in Britain classification on Jane Harris, this time for her debut novel, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in 2007. I read an inordinate number of books set in the UK [Note to self: I really need to follow more American book blogs], but it’s not a part of the world I know very well, especially outside of London. Therefore, I appreciate the strong sense of place Harris’s novels provide. Like last year’s Gillespie and I, once again we are in Scotland, although this time near Edinburgh, with a story told through the eyes of a teenage maid on a country estate in the nineteenth century. I loved Bessy’s voice and her relationship with her mysterious employer, Arabella. Incredibly, the large amount of Irish/Scottish slang used throughout didn’t impede my understanding or appreciation of the narrative.

Best in Book Salon: The Color Purple by Alice Walker. The beginning of this novel is rough. Well, a lot of it is hard to read (literally and figuratively), and so it took me some time before I realized I was going to love this book in the end. Let’s just say, if you had difficulty with Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire, you will have difficulty with this. However, it is an incredible tale of a woman breaking the cycle of sexism and violence in her own family and gaining independence for herself. I picked it up for my Song of the South book salon thinking it would be mostly about racism, but it was much more about women and the subversion of traditional gender roles than I expected. It is a short novel with a great impact; I see why it has won so many accolades.

Best in Bohemia: HHhH by Laurent Binet. The title of this novel stands for the phrase Himmler Hirn heißt Heydrich or “Himmler’s brain is named Heydrich” and it tells the story of the rise of Reinhard Heydrich and the assassination plot that brought him down in Prague in 1942. The incredible true story of Operation Anthropoid is interwoven with the tale of the author himself researching and writing the book. While it could be pretentious at times, as a former historian, I found the combination of story telling and the writer’s perspective on telling the story fascinating; however, if you don’t enjoy meta-commentary this might not be for you. HHhH won the Prix Goncourt for best debut novel in 2010, which is how it got on my radar (since I’m trying to read more novels in French this year). Although I read this in French, the English translation by Sam Taylor was a finalist for the French-American Foundation’s Translation Prize this year, so I imagine it’s quite solid.

Best in Bunnies: Lucky Bunny by Jill Dawson. I learned of Lucky Bunny from the 2012 Fiction Uncovered list and it made me want to seek more of these books out. I’m sure there are many people who could just pick this book apart, but it really appealed to me. I loved Queenie’s voice from the opening pages and was eager to see where it would go. I felt it conveyed the flavor of the East End (which, granted, I know nothing about) and I could imagine myself there quite easily. It could have used more “caper” elements, but I loved how the connections to actual events during the Blitz and in the postwar had me running to Wikipedia afterward.

Best in Babies: This Is Life by Dan Rhodes. I also found This is Life on the 2012 Fiction Uncovered list. It is the rare book about Paris that doesn’t drive me crazy somehow, but I really enjoyed this one. The plot is utterly ridiculous, but the novel is much more than what it appears to be on the surface. In a way, it reminded me of Skios, but the farce works much better and the whole take on modern art/intellectual life is far more interesting. The book reflects on the impressions you form based on brief interactions and scenes you witness—what might be going on with the people you see throughout the day, but don’t necessarily talk to at length, or even at all—in short, all the little instances that might lead to twists and turns in your life. In fact, like the characters, readers themselves might form impressions of the story and characters without realizing how wrong they are. The construction of this novel is quite fascinating that way and makes you want to reread the early passages to see how easily you were led astray. Very fun.

For more on what I’ve read recently, you can find me here on Goodreads.

What is the best thing you’ve read so far this year?

TBR Challenge: Part the Second

Tags

Challenges, Dickens, French Literature, Goodreads

With all the movie watching I did this past month for my annual Oscar Blitz, I didn’t make as much progress as I would have liked on my TBR pile. However, it is quite clear that the TBR/Double Dog Dare challenge has really helped me limit my reading distractions, primarily by reducing the number of books I have out of the library at any one time (which is currently two or three, a vast improvement over last year’s dizzying heights). This is a very positive step for me and my attempts to curb multi-reading.

I spent most of the first half of February reading non-fiction, including the TBR book I started last month (Passionate Minds by David Bodanis) as well as The Kitchen Counter Cooking School: How a Few Simple Lessons Transformed Nine Culinary Novices into Fearless Home Cooks by Kathleen Flinn and The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss. I enjoyed all three studies for very different reasons, but I found The Black Count absolutely riveting and can’t recommend it enough. Not quite non-fiction, but “based on a true story” as they say, was HHhH by Laurent Binet, part of my desire to read more in French this year. You can see my reviews of these library books at Goodreads.

As for Passionate Minds: The Great Love Affair of the Enlightenment, Featuring the Scientist Emilie du Châtelet, the Poet Voltaire, Sword Fights, Book Burnings, Assorted Kings, Seditious Verse, and the Birth of the Modern World, it was a definite improvement on last month’s The Swerve, which I thought was too ambitious in its scope. Instead, Bodanis goes to the other extreme and keeps a fairly tight focus on the personal story of his main leads, Emilie du Châtelet and Voltaire. The story of their relationship is incredibly interesting and reveals a tremendous amount about private and public life in eighteenth-century France, particularly the limited opportunities for women. However, if you don’t know anything about Voltaire, this study is not going to provide much about him beyond his time with Emilie. And it doesn’t present him in a very good light. It does a little bit better with Emilie and her work, especially by providing easy to understand explanations of some of her experiments and discoveries. But again, I could have used more information about that work and its historical significance, though there is a good list of references and follow-up at the back. Despite these weaknesses, I’m certainly happy to have read it, but also happy to pass it along when finished.

Since the book salon theme for February was Hard-Knock Lives, or works about orphans, I figured it was about time I read Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. I’ve only read two Dickens novels (A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations) and that was back in school, so I had put this one on my original Readers’ Choice Voting List. While it didn’t get chosen, since I actually own a copy, it is technically another TBR selection. I haven’t quite finished it because, when I picked it up, I realized it had markings indicating each serial installment, so I decided to read one installment each night. I don’t know if it’s the cliffhangers or what, but I have really been looking forward to this reading every night, which was a pleasant surprise. However, since I want to devote most of my reading time this coming month to Middlemarch, I will break with this pattern and try to finish as much as I can this weekend.

I did finish The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti, which was a great companion read to Oliver Twist. Both tell the tale of orphans of mysterious birth who find themselves having to make their way in the world outside the orphanage and quickly find themselves mixed up with thieves at a young age. Ren’s world is an indistinct 19th-century New England that was a bit hard to get a solid grasp on—I was never quite sure of the time period or the size and layout of the cities they were in. However, the story was an interesting one with sympathetic characters. It did get a bit gruesome in places, which was hard for me to read, but overall I enjoyed it. This was one of those books that I snagged off the work bookshelf ages ago because I had heard about it on an early episode of Books on the Nightstand.

Finally, since I was reading about orphans anyway, I also reread the second Harry Potter in an attempt to catch up with La Javanaise, who, as I mentioned last month, is reading the whole series for the first time. While Harry Potter is now perhaps the most famous orphan in literature (or maybe second after Oliver Twist), I realized that he doesn’t really have an “orphan trajectory,” as he lives with family from the beginning and also finds his magical “family” in the first book. In that sense, it seems much more of a narrative device than in Dickens. I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on this subject.

MAJOR-GENERAL:  Stop! I think I see where we are getting confused. When you said “orphan,” did you mean “orphan,” a person who has lost his parents, or “often,” frequently?
PIRATE KING:  Ah! I beg pardon—I see what you mean—frequently.
MAJOR-GENERAL:  Ah! you said “often,” frequently.
PIRATE KING:  No, only once.
MAJOR-GENERAL:  Exactly—you said “often,” frequently, only once.

—W.S. Gilbert, The Pirates of Penzance

Note: If you want to join me for a Middlemarch read-along, or discuss one or more of the other books on the list below, or any other book that focuses on marriage, please join us in the salon group at Goodreads.

The Marriage Plots
Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
Brazzaville Beach (William Boyd)
Breathing Lessons (Anne Tyler)
Crossing to Safety (Wallace Stegner)
Emma (Jane Austen)
Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn)
Happenstance (Carol Shields)
The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton)
Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë)
Macbeth (William Shakespeare)
Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert)
The Marriage Plot (Jeffrey Eugenides)
Middlemarch (George Eliot)
Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (Evan S. Connell)
Mr. Peanut (Adam Ross)
The 19th Wife (David Ebershoff)
On Beauty (Zadie Smith)
On Chesil Beach (Ian McEwan)
The Paris Wife (Paula McLain)
Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates)
The Sheltering Sky (Paul Bowles)
Tender Is the Night (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
The Thin Man (Dashiell Hammett)

TBR Challenge: Part the First

Tags

Challenges, Goodreads

As I gear up for the next round of the Oscar Blitz, it seems a good time to report on my January reading and the TBR/Double Dog Dare challenge. So far, I have mostly stuck to my pledge to only read books in the TBR pile. The only exception came from not being able to resist rereading the first Harry Potter along with La Javanaise, who is reading the whole series for the first time—lucky woman! I’ve been able to rationalize this since it is something from my own shelves and quickly finished. Of course, I can generally rationalize anything.

Other than that small detour, I managed to finish 1 challenge book remaining from last year (The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield), read 1 book salon book (The Observations by Jane Harris), and start 3 TBR books (Passionate Minds, The Shadow of the Wind, and The Swerve). I also finished up a few languishing library books (Christmas Pudding and Lucky Bunny). You can see my reviews of non-challenge books at Goodreads.

The month started with The Thirteenth Tale, which was a library book that I had checked out for last year’s challenge but hadn’t yet gotten around to reading. This novel reminded me a great deal of A.S. Byatt’s Possession, although perhaps less academically oriented. I liked the story and writing overall, but had a few problems with the narrator’s role and her constant comparison of her own childhood trauma (which I felt was ridiculously overblown) to the central mystery. Yet, unsurprisingly, I totally coveted the bookstore caretaker/dabbling biographer life she had carved out for herself.

The Thirteenth Tale paired up nicely with the first challenge book I happened to pick up from the pile, Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s Shadow of the Wind, which I brought along for extra plane reading over the holidays. Like The Thirteenth Tale, this story is also a mystery about an author; however, while it starts off in a fairly dramatic fashion, it moves at a much more languid pace and at times I found it very, very slow. But the writing was beautiful, and I was charmed by the portrait of Barcelona and various characters Daniel encounters, so I would certainly recommend it. And, again, why can’t I have an antiquarian bookstore? Fictional characters get all the nice things.

Speaking of antiquities, I also read The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt, which I nabbed from my brother-in-law over Christmas. This Pulitzer Prize-winning book takes as its point of departure the discovery in the 1400s of the last surviving manuscript of On the Nature of Things, the classic Roman epic by Lucretius. Although non-fiction, The Swerve reminded me of The Name of the Rose, and that is what I kept imagining whenever it went back to Poggio on his monastery treasure hunt. This book is extremely interesting, and an easy read, but it tries to cover too much. In the end, I just don’t think Greenblatt makes his case and I wish he had focused solely on the story of Poggio and On the Nature of Things itself, rather than everything else he seems to be trying to prove.

As a side note, maybe it’s all the mysteries I’ve been reading, but the oddest thing happened when I started reading The Swerve: I started to encounter On the Nature of Things (which I had never heard of before) everywhere, including my third challenge book, Passionate Minds, and even The West Wing, which I recently began rewatching. It’s so strange how that happens.

Finally, I figured since I was already steeped in stories about books and the bookish, I would go through my TBR pile and see what else was in that vein. I came up with Passionate Minds by David Bodanis and Au Bon Roman (A Novel Bookstore) by Laurence Cossé. I’ve just begun the former and it seems quite interesting and well written. The ridiculously long subtitle tells you pretty much all you need to know about the subject matter: The Great Love Affair of the Enlightenment, Featuring the Scientist Emilie du Châtelet, the Poet Voltaire, Sword Fights, Book Burnings, Assorted Kings, Seditious Verse, and the Birth of the Modern World. Not too shabby, and probably a good follow-up to The Swerve (as previously mentioned, I’ve already come across On the Nature of Things in its pages).

While I still have a few lingering library books to get through this coming month, I feel I am making at least some progress on the pile I was too embarrassed to photograph for this week’s guest spot at Savidge Reads: Other People’s Bookshelves. Forgive me, Simon!