Hey!! Let's get some action going! What are we reading?

[gmw]

Speaking of editorial problems, I just finished:

Tomorrow, When the War Began by John Marsden. A young-adult, dystopian? romance? fiction tale set in Australia. It seems the editor failed to notice the many missing quotes in the text, which led to a lot of hiccups in my reading as I tried to work out what was dialogue vs what was part of the incessant and hugely excessive first-person inner monologue full of amateur psychology (and not so subtle suggestions about how women might like brainless thugs better when the world falls apart). I actually found the first part of this strangely compelling, despite the lack of actual plot progress, but that wore off and the story started to drag and left me lots of time to notice the many flaws. I skimmed the last third and definitely won't be continuing the series: 2/5.

[Tarana]

Currently reading The Smiler With a Knife by Nicholas Blake. Nigel Strangeways historical mystery (period is just after WW2 England).

[astrangerhere]

Finished:

• The Ghosts of Eden Park: The Bootleg King, the Women Who Pursued Him, and the Murder That Shocked Jazz-Age America by Karen Abbott

Still Reading

• Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace on my chapter-a-day to finish in a year pace.
• Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (Wood translation) - I really wish I had read this during the pandemic. It would have been absolutely perfect to read during the long isolation periods. As it is, I am really, really enjoying it now - much more than I enjoyed is masterwork A Death in Venice.

New Reads:

• Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune by Bill Deadman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr.
• Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World by French comic artist Pénélope Bagieu and translated by Montana Kane

[Uncle Robin]

I was about to start Ellis Peters' The House of Green Turf, my "something green" prompt for the MobileRead TBR Challenge at StoryGraph, when I realised it's book 8 in the Felse series and that I hadn't re-read book 7 yet. So I'm reading book 7 first, which could also have qualified as it turns out - The Grass Widow

[Luffy]

My 2 star review of Up to No Gouda, by Linda Reilly :-

Spoiler:

Fiction hurts. This is a book that would have, in the past, earned rave reviews from me, along with a 4 star rating. I felt like I have been teleported from the frying pan into the fire. Up to No Gouda has a cat loving author feed mice to a snake, and feed cheese to a dog, who was thence named after that cheese; Havarti. Talk about mixed messages. The mystery is kind of clever because it lets you solve itself. I have seen a few of the details of the book in other and better ones. All of the imperfections in this cozy make Jack a very dull boy.

The book simply was almost always lacking when it came to actually reading it. Those readers who are also of a mature age and who are fans of the author will undoubtedly tell a different story. There are all the ingredients, those familiar ones, the same tired old ones, that will be a type of Bat signal to the regulars of the genre. The clever part of the book is making two different storylines run into a single book. Christie used to do several of them in one go, Kate Collins has done it, another favourite in Livia J. Washburn has done it. Heck, even Linda Reilly has done it many times before. However good the idea though, it loses impact gradually depending on how servilely it has been used. And how often too. Remember those knock knock jokes? Some of them are very good and the best ones are the latest ones. The writer here has not written something that has impact.

The groaningly sordid romance element was so lame. I think Reilly left the romance bits (and they are bits) to be written last of all. It seemed such a chore to read and this aspect was the laziest in the book. What was increasingly worrying is that how two tropes of the romance genre seemed to have become a hybrid in this tale. First the MC was very much an introvert. Secondly, there was a love interest that seemed decently friendly, with nary a message aimed at the MC. Ari, the guy in question, seemed to fancy the MC and he does nothing of note. He was too old to be playing both the jock and the shy guy. Not only that, but Carly obviously fancies the hunk. It is also insta love. She flushes whenever she interacts with Ari. So they both like each other and they know that. Why aren't they being bedfellows?

There is more. Carly so far does not have guilt from losing the love of her life, Daniel. The latter was a guy who makes it a mystery of its own as to how special this union was. From what Carly was feeling, you have the impression that this is a match of soulmates. But nope, there is no hint, and neither a case of show nor tell in the flashbacks. The character Becca, who is another stock character, is barely in this book. Also was this not part of the premise of The Inn at Holiday Bay series?

This book was always going to be full of clichés. All it requires to engage the type of reader that is no longer a fan of the genre is, to seem human and not like the output of an automat. We know why books like this exist. They exist because many - not all - readers have tried and failed to read Dickens, Watts, Camus, and have felt their comfort zone settle in drivel like this and other 'guilty' pleasures. If cozies are not bringing home the bacon then there are other alternatives without breaking open the spine of the In The Search of Lost Time series. I wanted to write more but I'd rather read more, not of the same. Stay away from the ironically named Up to No Gouda.

[Uncle Robin]

Back in to RLS' collected works for this year's onboarding challenge at The Storygraph after 10 days off to recover from all the Scots in Kidnapped & Catriona. If Scotland does make its own language a core subject, those works should be required reading.

When writing in English, RLS is at his most droll when he gets meta, as here. As a reader, I suspect many writers might feel his pain:

[rainerm]

I just picked up Joyce's Ulysses; I'd read about 200 pages in college and couldn't find enough time to persist, what with assignments and a heavy reading list. I also feel like I'm slightly better equipped to read this now, especially since I've developed strategies to deal with dense, difficult-to-comprehend sections. Other than that, I've ordered Martha Nussbaum's Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility. Really looking forward to this one, especially to read her arguments for animals' participation in political community. As the planet's keystone specie, we really cannot avoid including non-human animals in our discussions of justice.

[gmw]

A few days ago I finished...

The Rabbit Factor by Antti Tuomainen, translator David Hackston. I enjoyed this very much. The characters are quirky and many situations seem ridiculous while also feeling quite real, producing quiet humour even from dark or intimate scenes. It's an odd combination but the author does it very well. A comfortable 4/5.


I'm currently reading Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr. It strangely put together but fascinating. My only complaint is that life is getting in the way of finding more time to read.

[Paperbackstash]

I've gotten back into some Urban Fantasy binging from my KU List - Reading the Supernatural Criminal investigation series now and want to re-read the first few books of Laken Cane's Rue series and then continue it - has 11 books, see if can stay into it as much this time.

[Luffy]

My 5 star review of Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott :-

Spoiler:

Little Women is a puzzling and interesting book to read and to think about afterwards. This book was very good. Paradoxically, I rated it more on this reread upon noticing flaws that my adoring eyes had not upon the first read. The book has power. It has the power to enchant us. E.g. I began and completed reading it during the month of March. That cannot be a coincidence. There is an untarnished sweetness in the book that is not nauseating for most. For those who dislike the book, I cannot disagree with them. But this book is very special.

The first volume is above reproach, to me. It is so lifelike, it takes your breath away. The book format works much better with this material than any adaptations onscreen, including the latest one (2019). There is a certain voyeurism in the first book which is the only sinful thing about it. The March family has been captured perfectly and regurgitated with pen on paper. You feel the chirpy voices in your ears. You see the knotted fingers and the weary shoulders of the girls, who are poor and happy. Marmee, the mother, is like a bookend, with the other piece of the bookend, Mr March, a distant trifle that does not and should not intrude in his own home when he returns from war.

The March little women are a collective force of eruption of colour, whether in their decent language or their untidiness. They toil under the yoke of boredom so much that you feel you are cheating them by having modern amenities that they will never have. Yet they are lucky enough. They have each other. They have their youth, which they retain up till the last page of volume two. Jo, the ringleader and amateur poet, playwright, and writer of the family, goes down on one knee under the force of time, at the early age of 30 years, yet it feels as titanic an act as Thor's feat. Jo is my favourite character in the book.

There is a failing in health from Beth, the penultimate child. And one feels sadness for her and solace for oneself. Who is to say how long a lifetime should be. Beth is the kindest of the four girls. She takes care of her dolls with happiness and patience. One of her dolls is disabled, which perhaps foreshadows her own fate in a grim and sanguine way. Meg, the eldest, and Amy, the youngest, have upbeat and delightful fates, and perhaps these are what prevents them from making their mark in the book. Meg is the most mature and the silliest, being precocious without the gift of experience. Amy, well, she shines most in volume two.

The unlikely neighbours in the form of the two Lawrences, rich, honest duo of grandfather and grandson, are plot movers in name and in game. Laurie, like a certain Mr Darcy, has always been played by actors far older than what the books tell you. Laurie is very young, and, in the hands of Louisa May Alcott, becomes the type of character that shows all that women write men better than the opposite. Laurie lives his late teens in a state of paradisiac bliss. Having made best friends with Jo, he is flushed with the naivety of youth, which is also his innocence.

The book cannot escape the merriment infused in its characters by the authoress. The fixation on education and culture is unmistakably feminine. This could have been a blemish, but here is not. In their conversations the March girls display a longing for the future, which they will not reach till after the first part. It is hinted that they know French, and that they are steeped in the type of customs that seem stuffy to most people now. The book is clever in its depiction of the various short and pertinent adventures of the girls. If only things could remain the same forever. It was not to be.

Alcott should have been more in tune with her own creation when writing further adventures of her fictional family. She commits the mistake of believing that her work is an example of morality selling fast. In fact, it sold despite the moralising, not because of it. There is a strange power play that occurs in the book. The author saddles her women with back breaking moral rigmaroles. And we see that the life of the characters begin to feel independent of the author's meddling. The latter cannot comprehend the minds of her creatures. They rebel in a way, then accept with fake joy their fates that Alcott prefers for them.

The constant pontification made me laugh rather than groan. This was quite true of Professor Bhaer's defence of Christianity in the face of a couple of heathen zealots. Never mind that Bhaer has a zealotry of his own to keep his dull mind busy. It is proper for a book of this type to be rooted in a sort of vulgar realism by marrying its lively girls to older and crusty, pompous nonentities. But in trying to stay true, Alcott forgoes verisimilitude. It is the classic case of overcompensation. None of the male characters do things that come even close to the female ones' acts. This is okay, except that, seeing her little women maturing, the authoress abandons herself to a matchmaking mood.

Alcott tries to be daring in her own small ways. She longs for her characters to be colourful and carefree, yet she herself probably bought into the patriarchy 'wisdom'. This is displayed in the unflattering presentation of two women discussing female emancipation. It is displayed in the stated dependence of the woman on the father-like husband. The sheep with its shepherd if you will. Alcott is also daring in one glaring way. She creates a quadroon child for the purpose of fleshing out the future of Jo March. That was as far as she could reasonably have gone.

Little Women is not the most popular of classics. It is also not the most revealing. Not the most clever, neither the funniest. But her characters not only are more than the sum of themselves. The characters are autonomous, and cannot be controlled. They will speak to the reader in their own voices and authorship be damned. The writer had captured something in this book that not only she could never replicate in sequels, but also that no author I have read could or would replicate. This is why I will pick up this book next year, probably during March, if I'm not being careful.

[issybird]

Since I last posted, I've read:

• With Nails, Richard E. Grant's movie diaries which was a great read. Witty, dishy and delicious, for all that he has (mostly) nice things to say about people.

Currently reading:

• The Sabbath World by Judith Shulavitz, an inquiry into the origins and observance of the Sabbath as Jewish tradition. Interesting and thought provoking, despite one major howler I've posted about elsewhere.
• Felix Holt, the Radical by George Eliot. I like Victorian novels and Eliot's one of the greats, but this is at the ho-hum end of the spectrum.
• Bad News by Edward St. Aubyn, the second of his Patrick Melrose novels and a huge letdown after the first. But they're short and perhaps the next will be a return to form.

[Tarana]

The Smiler With a Knife by Nicholas Blake was excellent. I did find that I had to look up a fair number of words because darn it, I forgot what they meant! Good book!

Currently reading Ivory by Mike Resnick. I had posted it in the discount thread and someone recommended it. I'm halfway through and loving it. Scifi - more of a mystery.

[Bookstooge]

Currently reading Galahad at Blandings. Wodehouse sure knows how to make me laugh...

[Fbone]

Next, The Year When Stardust Fell by Raymond F. Jones.

Old school (1950s) apocalypse story that's a cross between Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver. It's underlining message eerily holds up well. Nice read. Rated C [3 stars].

Next TBD

[Bookstooge]

Reading another Hitchcock anthology, Tales to Take Your Breath Away. Sadly, many of the stories are in later anthologies that I've already read, so I'm doing a lot of skipping.