#NonFicNov - My year in Non-Fiction

 

The opening week prompt is:

Your year in nonfiction: take a look back at your year of nonfiction and reflect on the following questions - What was your favorite nonfiction read of the year? Do you have a particular topic you've been attracted to more this year? What nonfiction book have you recommended the most? What are you hoping to get out of participating in nonfiction November?

Definitely the two best nonfiction reads for me were books I reread: (so I must like them, right?)

Brian Dillon's Essayism & 

Charles Olson's Call Me Ishmael

Both of those are works of literary criticism, though Essayism has some memoir blended in. Without intending it, this does seem to have been a year reading literary criticism. Part of that was because of the Moby-Dick readalong. I blogged about The Cambridge Introduction to Melville which was also in that category. I read Delbanco's biography of Herman Melville at the very end of last year.

Two other works of literary criticism I didn't blog about but I do recommend: 

James Huneker's Egoists: A Book of Supermen. Huneker was a newspaperman, first in Philadelphia and then in New York, who died in 1921. He covered cultural issues: music, theater, literature. This volume is about writers of the time. The essay about Stendhal, whose diaries were just being published, I thought especially good. He also looks at Baudelaire, Huysmans, Ibsen, others. And, as the title might suggest, Nietzsche.

Vivian Gornick's The End of The Novel of Love. A collection of essays that had previously appeared, I assume, but I hadn't read any of them before. Good on individuals as different as Clover Adams and Grace Paley. She closes her essay on Willa Cather, "Today Jean Rhys seems dated, Virginia Woolf important, and Willa Cather wise." Which, though I'm not sure about Jean Rhys, otherwise struck me. The title essay was also very good.

A related, but not identical, category: author's memoirs. I read and blogged about Isaac Bashevis Singer's book on his early years in Poland, In My Father's Court. I thought it was very good. I also read his memoir of his first years in New York City, Love and Exile. I liked it, but I didn't find it quite as interesting.

I also read Huneker's autobiography, Steeplejack. Definitely read his criticism first. 

Two classic works on women's issues:

Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own

Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women

Not much history this year, which surprised me. I read Daisy Dunn's joint biography of the two Plinys, Shadow of Vesuvius. It was good, but I didn't blog about it. Some other classical history, as well.

I mostly avoided contemporary issues at book length--I couldn't much bear it. I did read Zadie Smith's short book of Covid essays, Intimations,  because I read pretty much everything of hers, but my favorite essay in the collection was the one that had the least to do with what's going on now. I also read Sarah Burns' book The Central Park Five. Not a brilliant book, but a good introduction to the facts. What a miscarriage of justice. Though the man in the White House (as of today, but hopefully not much longer) still doesn't acknowledge it, or his part in it.

The complete collection of my nonfiction posts for this year can be found here.

Sunday Salon: November Challenges

Why are all the fun book challenges in November?! It's not fair!

Of course, this isn't really true, but there are a lot of them. In alphabetical order, there's:

AusReadingMonth

GermanLitMonth

Margaret Atwood Reading Month

Non-Fiction in November

Novellas in November

And we're already in the middle of Witch Week

Now if Margaret Atwood would move to Australia, write a short non-fiction book in German about warlocks and have it translated, and do it by the end of the week, I would be all set!

Short of that...I've got two books that I read in October and should write posts for soon. James Baldwin's novella about homosexual life in Paris, Giovanni's Room, and John Szwed's biography of Sun Ra, Space Is The Place.

Other things I'm thinking about that fit one or more categories:

Susanna Clarke's Piranesi
Les Murray's Dog Fox Field
Ingeborg Bachman's Malina
Jenny Erpenbeck's The End of Days
Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye
Shirley Hazzard's The Transit of Venus

This post is mostly to help organize myself, but maybe it helps you, too...

#1930Club

It's year book club time again and this year it's 1930. This semi-annual club is hosted at Stuck in a Book and Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings; the idea is participants read books set in the given year and blog about them; it gives a fun overall picture of the year in question. Naturally I used this as an excuse to pile up books:

We've got some large, medium, and small choices there. The first volume of The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil and Holbrook Jackson's The Anatomy of Bibliomania count as large; J. B. Priestly's Angel Pavement, which looks bigger than it is, and Not Without Laughter by Langston Hughes are my mediums; and the shorties are Margery Allingham's Mystery Mile and P. G. Wodehouse's story collection Very Good, Jeeves.

The pile is aspirational, of course,... 😉and, in particular, I'm unlikely to read both the larges. I'm tempted by Musil, which was the subject of a series of great blog posts at the Bookbinder's Daughter, but it would be a reread for me. The appeal--to me--of a book titled The Anatomy of Bibliomania is not hard to figure out, and, well, I've already started it.

Also, because I feel like I should deprecate rereads at the moment, Miss Marple, Ellery Queen, Sam Spade, Charlie Chan, and Simon Templar all stayed on their shelves. But I read Enter The Saint recently enough that I do have a blog post for it.

Thanks to Simon and Kaggsy for hosting!

Which look good to you?

#1965Club

The 1965 Club (hosted by Simon and Kaggsy) starts next week and I've pulled a few candidates off the shelf:

(Marguerite Young's Miss MacIntosh, My Darling has quietly returned to the shelf...I would have had to start it already.)

I'm particularly keen to read the James Ngugi (now known by the more authentically Gikuyu version of his name, Ngugi wa Thiong'o.) I read his Wizard of the Crow a couple of years ago and quite liked it.

The bottom volume (a little hard to make out) is The Far Side of the Dollar, a Lew Archer mystery by Ross MacDonald. I think of early to mid 60s as the strongest period of Archer mysteries, and it's one I haven't read in a while.

John Fowles' The Magus is the largest volume in that pile. But it's still much smaller than Marguerite Young!

Christie's At Bertram's Hotel, Lem's The Cyberiad, and Tom Wolfe's The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby round off the pile.

Via Brona's I also realized that Fox in Socks was a 1965 book. Oh, if only I hadn't given away my childhood books...

Or I could (re-)read this:

Thanks to Kaggsy and Simon for hosting!

Links to what I actually did read will (in time) appear here:

1.) John Fowles' The Magus

2.) James Ngugi's The River Between

3.) Agatha Christie's At Bertram's Hotel

Plus I featured an Elizabeth Bishop poem from her book of 1965, 'Manners, for a child of 1918.'

#1944Club

I'm going to try to read something for the 1944 Club; it will be my first time joining in on the year club project. In my usual way for any reading project, I've pulled far more books off the shelf than I will conceivably read:

All the mysteries (to the left, next to the Hubert the Harris Bank lion) I've already read; all the serious books to the right would be first-time reads. (Oops. Should I have admitted that?)

Karl Shapiro's volume of war poetry V-Letter feels like it would be a great fit, or I've had Hersey's A Bell For Adano on a shelf for years; it's set in Sicily as the allied armies are retaking it, and went on to win the Pulitzer.

But maybe the most interesting one would be Quentin Reynolds' The Curtain Rises:

It was around my family's house forever. My dad might have bought it at the time, though he would have been fifteen or sixteen; or it's possible my grandfather or grandmother bought it. I hung on to it, thinking I'll read that someday. And maybe that day comes next week!

I also recognized that corner of Borges in the picture at KaggsysBookishRamblings, but I am not pulling Ficciones off the shelf...really...

Of course, it's possible I'll just reread Rex Stout's Not Quite Dead Enough, which, it just so happens, is the next volume in my slow occasional project to reread all the Nero Wolfe mysteries in order.

Co-hosted at Stuck In A Book and KaggsysBookishRamblings. Thanks!

1944 books read:

1.) John Hersey's A Bell For Adano
2.) Rex Stout's Not Quite Dead Enough
3.) Karl Shapiro's V-Letter

Readers Imbibing Peril Signup

I'm going to do Readers Imbibing Peril challenge and go for Peril the First! (Four books by Halloween.) I'm determined to read Dracula for my Classics Club list, but I suspect my other three books will be considerably less creeptastic and more like my usual mystery novel.

1.) Bram Stoker's Dracula
2.) Georgette Heyer's Footsteps In The Dark
3.) Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca
4.) Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper is on my eReader as well.

12th Annual CanBook Challenge Signup

Another book-reading challenge, because there aren't yet enough of them that I'm behind on...

Melwyk at The Indextrious Reader is currently hosting a challenge to read 13 Canadian books in a year, from Canada Day (July 1st) to Canada Day. I'm in for the new year.

Right now I have no idea what the thirteen books I will read are, though there's a Matt Cohen I just picked up at a Little Free Library on the top of my book pile. In any case here are their placeholders:

1.) Peter Robinson's The Hanging Valley
2.) Carol Shields' Jane Austen
3.) Françcois Blais' Document 1
4.) L. R. Wright's The Suspect
5.) Myrl Coulter's The Left-Handed Dinner Party and other stories
6.) Ewan Whyte's Desire Lines: Essays
7.) Cora Siré's Behold Things Beautiful
8.) Ronald Bates' The Wandering World
9.) Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale
10.) Randy Boyagoda's Original Prin
11.) Gabriella Goliger's Girl Unwrapped
12.) Cora Siré's The Other Oscar
13.) Endre Farkas' Never, Again
14.) Saul Bellow's Dangling Man

2017 Mount TBR Final Checkpoint

The Mount TBR Reading Challenge is a way to get books off one's personal TBR mountain hosted at My Reader's Block. I declared for Mt. Vancouver at the beginning of the year, which is 36 books.

After a slow first quarter start at the climb up my particular mountain, I was on pace at mid-year, and surging by the third checkin. I'm happy to say I'm planting my flag at the top of Mt. Vancouver (4812m) with a few extra books to spare: 42 TBR books in total. The complete list is given at the original post. That, alas, was fewer than the number of books that entered the house this past year, so it's Mt. Ararat for me in 2018.

I didn't write posts for all the books I read over the year, mostly just ones that matched a challenge, so I'm using a few books that didn't get posted on. And then some are from Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt posts only, not TBR posts. I thought about using Rogue Male for all of them, which came pretty close to working, but in the end didn't use it for any...

A Stitch in Time [is] ... Swing Time
Don't Count Your Chickens [before] ... The Claws Of The Cat
A Penny Saved [is] ... Ten Days' Wonder
All Good Things Must Come [to] ... The Big Sleep (True, I suppose, though a little grim.)
When In Rome,...Where Angels Fear To Tread
All That Glitters Is Not ... Twelfth Night (In fact, it's The Merchant of Venice.)
A Picture Is Worth ... A Room With A View
When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get ... Whipped
Two Wrongs Don't Make ... Innocence
The Pen Is Mightier Than ... [the] Boss (Royko would like that one.)
The Squeaky Wheel Gets ... All Shot Up (Someone's feeling a little impatient, are we?)
Hope For The Best, But Prepare For ... The Fire Next Time
Birds Of A Feather Flock ... Where There's A Will

It's been fun (and useful!) Thanks to Bev at My Reader's Block for hosting.

Back To The Classics 2018 Signup

The idea is to read twelve classics over the next year corresponding to categories listed below. It's hosted by Karen at Books and Chocolate (what a lovely combination!) and it sounds like fun, so I'm trying it this year.

I'm sure I'll futz with the selections I've made--probably all year long--but here are the categories and the tentative choices I've matched against them:

A 19th Century Classic: Silas Marner by George Eliot

A 20th Century Classic: The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch

Well, I was going to (still intend to?...) read The Death Of Virgil, but got distracted by:

Yevgeny Zamyatin's We

A Woman Author: Adam Bede by George Eliot

A Classic in Translation: Jean-Christophe by Romain Rolland
--I've been reading some other WWI stuff lately

A Children's Classic: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

A Crime Classic: Trent's Last Case by E. C. Bentley

A Travel Classic: A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain

A Single Word Title: Romola by George Eliot
--Hmmm....I seem to have a yen to read George Eliot this year

A Classic With A Color In The Title: Black Arrow by R. L. Stevenson

A Classic By An Author New To Me: The Leopard by Giuseppe Tommasi di Lampedusa

A Classic That Scares Me: Dracula by Bram Stoker
--A lot of people pick long books for this one; but I'm easily scared by scary things. Hence Dracula!

Reread A Favorite Classic: Tom Jones by Henry Fielding, or Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

Well, both of those still sound good, but I got to this one first:

Charles Dickens' The Mystery of Edwin Drood

European Reading Challenge 2018 Signup

This is a challenge to read and review books as a tour of Europe. It is hosted by Gilion at RoseCityReader. One author, one country, one book with fifty countries to choose from. I'm going to shoot for at least five (Deluxe Entourage). Here's the list of countries to choose from:

Albania, Andorra, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Macedonia, Romania, Russia, San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and Vatican City.

The number of countries I can cover without rereading or acquiring new books (i.e., already on my TBR list) is more than I really care to think about, though, in fact, I have been thinking about just that.

1.) The Odyssey (tr. by Emily Wilson.) Greece
2.) Arthur Schnitzler's Casanova's Return To Venice. Austria
3.) Jorge Carrión's Bookshops: A Reader's History. Spain
4.) Italo Calvino's The Baron In The Trees. Italy
5.) Amélie Nothomb's Pétronille. Belgium
6.) George Eliot's Silas Marner. UK
7.) Duc de la Rochefoucauld's Maxims. France
8.) Olga Tokarczuk's Flights. Poland
9.) Yevgeny Zamyatin's We. Russia
10.) Herta Müller's The Land Of Green Plums. Romania
11.) Ismail Kadare's Broken April. Albania
12.) Dubravka Ugresic' Fox. Croatia
13.) Romain Rolland's Jean-Christophe. Switzerland
14.) Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca. Monaco
15.) Jenny Erpenbeck's Go, Went, Gone. Germany
16.) Antonio Tabucchi's Time Ages In A Hurry. Hungary

Monthly Motif 2018 Signup

I saw this at MyReadersBlock and I thought this challenge from girlxoxo looked like a fun way to add some other categories to my reading list, so here I go with another challenge.

The challenge is to read one book for each of the twelve monthly categories listed below.

I'll pick as I go along because if I tried to decide now I'd change my mind for sure. But Alan Hollinghurst and James Baldwin are floating high in my TBR pile at the moment, so January will likely be one of those two. (James Baldwin would double count in the category!)

JANUARY – Diversify Your Reading
Kick the reading year off right and shake things up. Read a book with a character (or written by an author) of a race, religion, or sexual orientation other than your own.

N. K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season

FEBRUARY – One Word 
Read a book with a one word title.


I'm in the middle of three books with one word titles as I write this, but the shortest one got finished first...

Amélie Nothomb's Pétronille

MARCH – Travel the World
Read a book set in a different country than your own, written by an author from another country than your own, or a book in which the characters travel.

Ben Lerner's Leaving The Atocha Station (Spain)

APRIL – Read Locally
Read a book set in your country, state, town, village (or has a main character from your home town, country, etc)

Matt Cohen's The Bookseller

MAY- Book to Screen
Read a book that’s been made into a movie or a TV show.

Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard

We got this from the local video store a couple of years ago when the Other Reader (cf. Italo Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveler) read it. The DVD was flawed and we got our money back, but from what we could see, it was a great movie. They're doing an Italian retrospective at TIFF Lightbox here in Toronto over the summer, and I'm planning on seeing it properly on the big screen when it appears later this summer. Burt Lancaster as the Prince, and Claudia Cardinale, too!

JUNE- Crack the Case
Mysteries, True Crime, Who Dunnit’s.

E. C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case

Should be an easy category for me; this is the first mystery I read this month.

JULY – Vacation Reads
Read a book you think is a perfect vacation read and tell us why.

Mary McCarthy's The Group

Because I get to read undistracted at the cabin!

AUGUST- Award Winners
Read a book that has won a literary award or a book written by an author who has been recognized in the bookish community.

Muriel Barbery's The Elegance Of The Hedgehog

It won several French prizes on its way to becoming a bestseller.

SEPTEMBER- Don’t Turn Out The Light
Cozy mystery ghost stories, paranormal creeptastic, horror novels.

What better than....
Bram Stoker's Dracula

OCTOBER- New or Old
Choose a new release from 2018 or a book known as a classic.

How 'bout a Nobel Prize winner?

Romain Rolland's Jean-Christophe

NOVEMBER- Family
Books where family dynamics play a big role in the story

Let's restructure the family according to our new dystopian principles!

Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale

DECEMBER- Wrapping It Up
Winter or holiday themed books or books with snow, ice, etc in the title or books set in winter OR read a book with a theme from any of the months in this challenge (could be a theme you didn’t do, or one you want to do again).

Nicholas Blake's The Corpse In The Snowman

The Classics Club Challenge

I recently came across the Classics Club--I'm not even really sure where I saw it anymore--and I thought the idea of selecting a list of classics to read and discuss was exactly what I needed. There are a whole bunch of books that easily qualify for classic status around here that I haven't read and should. And want to, too! But a little motivation, like a publicly announced declaration to do so, never hurts.

So here's my list. I've selected fifty books* and limited myself to books that 1.) I already had, and 2.) I had not yet read (were on my TBR pile). I went through the suggested list of classics at the Classics Club website, those old Modern Library lists of fiction and non-fiction, problematic as they were, plus a few others that seemed pretty clearly classics. (Romain Rolland, Henryk Sienkewicz, Hermann Broch.) I also decided to aim for a mix of fiction and non-fiction, English and works in translation. Some short works, but also some really long ones, just to keep me honest. There were easily more than fifty available by my criteria, but I'll re-up as needed. It is now the 22nd of November, 2017, so that means by this same day in 2022, I'll have finished them all. Really!

English Language Fiction

1.) Margaret Atwood/The Handmaid's Tale
2.) James Baldwin/Giovanni's Room (read)
3.) James Baldwin/Go Tell It On The Mountain
4.) Samuel Butler/The Way Of All Flesh
5.) Willa Cather/A Lost Lady
6.) Willa Cather/One Of Ours
7.) Daphne du Maurier/Rebecca
8.) George Eliot/Adam Bede
9.) George Eliot/Romola
10.) George Eliot/Scenes of Clerical Life
11.) George Eliot/Silas Marner
12.) William Faulkner/Light In August
13.) John Galsworthy/The Forsyte Saga
14.) Oliver Goldsmith/The Vicar of Wakefield
15.) Thomas Hardy/Wessex Tales
16.) Henry James/The American
17.) Henry James/Wings of the Dove
18.) Malcolm Lowry/Under the Volcano
19.) W. Somerset Maugham/The Razor's Edge
20.) Toni Morrison/Song of Solomon
21.) Sylvia Plath/The Bell Jar
22.) J. F. Powers/Morte D'Urban
23.) Sir Walter Scott/Count Robert of Paris
24.) Robert Louis Stevenson/Black Arrow
25.) Bram Stoker/Dracula
26.) Edith Wharton/The Custom of the Country
27.) Edith Wharton/House of Mirth
28.) Virginia Woolf/The Waves

Fiction in Translation

29.) Anon/1001 Nights (Richard F. Burton translation)
30.) Honore de Balzac/Cousin Bette
31.) Giovanni Bocaccio/The Decameron
32.) Hermann Broch/The Death Of Virgil
33.) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe/Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (read)
34.) Yasunari Kawabata/Snow Country
35.) Giuseppe di Lampedusa/The Leopard
36.) Romain Rolland/Jean-Christophe
37.) Henryk Sienkewicz/Quo Vadis
38.) Jules Verne/20000 Leagues Under The Sea
39.) Yevgeny Zamyatin/We

Non-Fiction

40.) James Baldwin/Notes of a Native Son
41.) Frederick Douglass/Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave
42.) Edmund Gibbon/The History of the Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire
43.) Plutarch/Lives (read)
44.) Bertrand Russell/A History of Western Philosophy
45.) Barbara Tuchman/The Guns of August
46.) Mark Twain/A Tramp Abroad
47.) Edmund Wilson/Axel's Castle
48.) Edmund Wilson/Patriotic Gore
49.) Mary Wollstonecraft/The Vindication of the Rights of Women
50.) Virginia Woolf/A Room Of One's Own

Plays

51.) George Bernard Shaw/Major Barbara (read)
52.) George Bernard Shaw/Pygmalion
53.) Richard Brinsley Sheridan/The School for Scandal

Poetry

54.) Thomas Hardy/Complete Poems
55.) Edmund Spenser/The Faerie Queene

*Whoops. I ended up with 55. I could trim it, but they're all such good books...

Vintage Mystery Challenge 2018 Signup

Bev at MyReadersBlock has changed her vintage mystery challenge to a new format this year, titled Just the Facts, Ma'am and it looks like a fun one.

I've been having a good time reading along for this year's Vintage Mystery challenge, and I'm definitely up for another year.

Since I typically read more Golden Age mysteries than Silver Age (or contemporary for that matter) I'm going to go for the Detective Sergeant level, 12 or 2 in each category in  the Golden Age and the Constable level of 6 or 1 in each category for the Silver Age.

Here are the category cards. I'm already enjoying thinking about what mysteries I might slot in against each type.

Gold:

Who

1.) E. R. Punshon's Music Tells All. Crime-solving duo.

2.) Rex Stout's Not Quite Dead Enough. In the armed services.

What

1.) Michael Innes' The Secret Vanguard. Pseudonymous Author.

2.) Erle Stanley Gardner's The Case Of The Haunted Husband. Alliterative Title.

When

1.) Michael Innes' Lament For A Maker. During A Recognized Holiday.

2.) Nicholas Blake's The Corpse In The Snowman. During a Weather Event. (Snowstorm)

Where

1.) Patricia Wentworth's Eternity Ring. In A Small Village.

2.) Michael Innes' Operation Pax. In a hospital/nursing home.

How

1.) Erle Stanley Gardner's The Case of the Velvet Claws. Death by Shooting

2.) Georgette Heyer's Footsteps In The Dark. Death by Strangulation

Why

1.) E. C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case. 'Best of' List.

2.) Charles Dickens' The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Favorite Author.

Silver:

Who

1.) Michael Innes' The New Sonia Wayward. Armed Services.

What

1.) Julian Symons' The Blackheath Poisonings. Means of Murder In The Title.

When

1.) Ellis Peters' Black Is The Colour Of My True Love's Heart. Special Event.

Where

1.) Peter Robinson's The Hanging Valley. Set In A Small Village.

How

1.) Ross Macdonald's The Blue Hammer. At Least Two Deaths By Different Means.

2.) L. R. Wright's The Suspect. Death by Blunt Instrument.

Why

1.) Erle Stanley Gardner's The Case Of The Spurious Spinster. TBR List.

Mount TBR 2018 Signup

I'm on schedule for my 2017 TBR challenge: I'm currently at 32 out of the 36 pledged, so I'm doing OK on that front.

But there's still trouble in those mountains, and book avalanches remain altogether too possible. So far (and the year's not over!) 97 books have entered the house, and I've read only 12 of those new arrivals. The TBR pile grows rather than shrinks. I did some culling earlier in the year, even of unread books, so it's not all bad news, but my personal statistical measure is that the percentage of unread books in the house should go down each year. (The idea that the absolute number of unread books in the house go down is a merely aspirational goal.) Currently even my percentage goal is in danger.

So since I will successfully manage 36 books this year, and still it wasn't enough, it's time to up my game. We're going up from Mount Vancouver to Mount Ararat, and I'm going to read 48 TBR books in the new year. I have more confidence in achieving that than I do in buying fewer, alas...

Again my reading habits are definitely as the spirit moves me. There are a lot (number better left unspecified) of books to choose from.

1.) Arthur Schnitzler's Casanova's Return To Venice
2.) Julian Symons' The Blackheath Poisonings
3.) Amélie Nothomb's Pétronille
4.) Martin Amis' Money
5.) Poem of the Cid
6.) Matt Cohen's The Bookseller
7.) Patricia Wentworth's Eternity Ring
8.) J. F. Powers' Morte D'Urban
9.) Michael Innes' Lament For A Maker
10.) Miguel de Unamuno's Tragic Sense Of Life
11.) Virgil's Aeneid (tr. Robert Fagles)
12.) Michael Innes' The Secret Vanguard
13.) Teju Cole's Open City
14.) Lawrence Durrell's Quinx
15.) Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard
16.) Ellis Peters' Black Is The Colour Of My True Love's Heart
17.) E. C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case
18.) Erle Stanley Gardner's The Case Of The Haunted Husband
19.) Muriel Spark's The Ballad of Peckham Rye
20.) Yevgeny Zemyatin's We
21.) Herta Müller's The Land Of Green Plums
22.) Mary McCarthy's The Group
23.) Elizabeth Taylor's A Game Of Hide And Seek
24.) Peter Robinson's The Hanging Valley
25.) Erle Stanley Gardner's The Case Of The Spurious Spinster
26.) E. M. Cioran's The Temptation To Exist
27.) Michael Innes' Operation Pax
28.) Michael Innes' The New Sonia Wayward
29.) Carol Shields' Jane Austen
30.) Frederick Douglass' Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
31.) Ismail Kadare's Broken April
32.) George Eliot's Adam Bede
33.) Muriel Barbery's The Elegance Of The Hedgehog
34.) Mark Athitakis' The New Midwest
35.) George Eliot's Romola
36.) Jennifer Uglow's George Eliot
37.) L. R. Wright's The Suspect
38.) Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death
39.) Bram Stoker's Dracula
40.) Romain Rolland's Jean-Christophe
41.) John Hersey's A Bell For Adano
42.) Karl Shapiro's V-Letter
43.) Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca
44.) George Seferis' Collected Poems (tr. Keeley and Sherrard)
45.) Hermann Hesse's If The War Goes On...
46.) Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale
47.) Nicholas Blake's The Corpse In The Snowman
48.) Graham Greene's Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party

Bonus!

49.) Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad

Read It Again, Sam 2018 Sign Up

Challenge sign up season has started, and while I'm not going to be getting to the addict level, I think I will try a few additional ones this year. And the first of the additional challenges I'm going to try this year is My Reader's Block's challenge to reread books, Read It Again, Sam.

Part of the reason I hang on to all these books after I've read them (other than sheer pack-rattery) is because I tell myself I'm going to reread them. And sometimes I even do! But this will help keep me honest.

I'm going full on with this one, committing to the Living In The Past, 16+ level. On my list of books read this year, so far I've got 14 rereads so that may not be much of a stretch, but I'm for it. It will definitely be as the spirit moves me for this, and the list is blank for now until it gets filled in:

1.) Ross Macdonald's The Blue Hammer
2.) Italo Calvino's The Baron In The Trees
3.) Duc de la Rochefoucauld's Maxims
4.) Lawrence Durrell's Justine
5.) Lawrence Durrell's Balthazar
6.) Lawrence Durrell's Mountolive
7.) Lawrence Durrell's Clea
8.) David Shields' Reality Hunger
9.) Charles Dickens' The Mystery of Edwin Drood
10.) Shakepeare's Romeo and Juliet
11.) Rex Stout's Not Quite Dead Enough
12.) Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray
13.) George Seferis' A Poet's Journal
14.) Rollo May's The Courage To Create
15.) Ellery Queen's The Greek Coffin Mystery
16.) Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower
17.) George Seferis' Poems (tr. Rex Warner)

Mount TBR Checkin #3

I was aiming for Mount Vancouver for the year, which is 36 books. I'd read 28 off of my TBR pile by the end of September, which puts me ahead of pace (though just slightly). Woo-hoo! I had to pull out the calculator app for the math on this one, but that puts me 3743m up my particular mountain.

Definitely the most memorable character from those books is the title character from the Alice Munro short story "The Albanian Virgin" in Open Secrets. Was Charlotte really captured by bandits in Albania in the 1920s? Did she actually pledge to live as a virgin in order to hang out with the boys? Did she run off with that Franciscan priest? Or was he a Moroccan chef? Or maybe she's just an incredible liar, umm, storyteller? And then where in the end did she go? We will never know, but who cares: she can spin such an awesome yarn...

Mount TBR Checkin Post #2

It's halfway through the year, and I'm exactly halfway up my particular mountain. Woo-hoo! I've read 18 (list here) out of the 36 TBR books I pledged myself to read. It doesn't take any fancy math at all to discover that I'm 2406m up my particular mountain. A quick trip to Wikipedia to look up the height and division by two did the job...

Now that I'm on target is the moment that my boss would start talking about stretch goals. Ha!

Definitely the longest on my TBR list is Boss by Mike Royko. It was sometime in the late 90s I started recording when I bought books, and this was there before that. But the story gets even worse: There was a bookstore in Chicago near where I lived, and the owner would write the date he acquired the book and its initial price. If it didn't sell after some period of time, he marked a second date, cut the price to a quarter, and moved it to the back room. A second demotion was possible; he sometimes cut the price to a dime. My copy of Boss got moved to the back room in September of 1986 (7/86) and was priced at a quarter after being 50 cents for eleven years. I suspect it entered my library not too long after that. My copy of the book has done some traveling, from Chicago to San Francisco, and now here to Toronto, where it finally got read.

Boss is the story of Mayor Richard J. Daley (the first Mayor Daley) of Chicago, the epitome of Machine politicians. It came out in 1971, while Daley was still alive, and while Royko can occasionally admire Daley's hubris and ability to wield power, that's about as far as it goes. It's an attack.

And I kind of knew all that. After carrying it around for probably 30 years, there really weren't any surprises for me, even though I hadn't read it. My dad read it; he must have read it close to when it came out, and there was a copy around the house when I was growing up, identical to the one I bought later. My dad thoroughly endorsed Royko's attack on da Mayor (as everyone called him) and was known to point to the book when needed. In Chicago when I was a kid, you were either a Machine Democrat or a non-Machine Democrat. We lived in one of the so-called Lakefront liberal wards, and we were the latter. Republicans lived in the suburbs.

I read Royko's columns as they came out: my parents switched their regular daily newspaper from the Chicago Daily News to the Chicago Sun Times to the Chicago Tribune as Royko switched from newspaper to newspaper. Not exactly because of Royko, but for the same reasons that Royko switched: the Daily News, the non-Machine, liberal paper, folded, and we moved to the Sun Times. Then the Sun Times was bought by Rupert Murdoch and became very right wing, and so it was time to forgive Colonel McCormick's right-wing imbecilities, and try the Tribune. (McCormick had been dead for 30 years by then. Forgiveness can be slow.)

Even though I read his daily column in the paper, I bought all the collections as they came out and read them, too. A few years ago, after Royko died, both my dad and I read Ciccone's biography of Mike Royko. Ciccone was a fan, but was at least capable of noting Royko's family difficulties and self-destructive drinking. Those things didn't matter in the end to Ciccone and didn't matter to us either.

Anyway, all that's to say why I was unsurprised by the book. But I was reading some other Chicago books recently and thought the time was ripe, or more than ripe, to finally read Boss. As I said in the initial post, I wouldn't actually read this book to learn about Mayor Daley, and I wouldn't select the book as the best introduction to Mike Royko either, even though it's his most famous. But if you're a fan, or it's been on your shelf for 30 years and you're involved in a TBR challenge, well, then, it's a pretty good read.

Mount TBR Checkpoint #1 (Mt. Vancouver)

Uh, oh. Here we are a quarter of the way through the year, and I've only read six of my pledged thirty-six. I've been spending way too much time reading something new and fun that I just saw at the library and not reducing that way too large pile of unread books I already own.

The list is at the original post and though I read the sixth (Where There's Love, There's Hate by Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo) at the end of March, I didn't post about it until this weekend in April.

Definitely the most pleasant surprise was Guy Gavriel Kay's A Song For Arbonne. I'm more a mystery reader than a fantasy reader generally, but I really liked this one. I have another one on the TBR pile, which will have to get read and soon.

How about a CHART of book titles for a Scrabble entry:

The Case of The Deadly Toy
Happy Are The Meek
A Song For Arbonne
Rogue Male
The Rings Of Saturn

I'll need to read some more books that start with vowels, not to mention an X or a K to improve my score...

I'm doing much better on my Vintage Mysteries Cover Scavenger Hunt, especially Golden Age, but hadn't posted the right items. With those Nero Wolfe mysteries, I could have had a flower, too. Durn...

Vintage Mystery Cover Scavenger Hunt Challenge

Since I'm in for a penny...I figure I can also take a stab at My Reader's Block Vintage Mystery Cover Scavenger Hunt. I'll aim for at least six for both Gold and Silver eras, though I expect given my usual reading habits, I'll do better with the Gold era.

Golden Age

Knife. Rex Stout's Over My Dead Body
Skeletal Hand or Skull. Gladys Mitchell's The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop
Hat. Edmund Crispin's The Moving Toyshop
Bloodstains.  Erle Stanley Gardner's The Case Of The Deadly Toy
Bird. Rex Stout's Where There's A Will
Policeman. E. R. Punshon's The Diabolic Candelabra
Shadowy Figure. Bioy Casares and Ocampo's Where There's Love, There's Hate
Flowers. Rex Stout's Black Orchids
Suitcase/Briefcase. John Dickson Carr's The Case Of The Constant Suicides
Glove. Patricia Wentworth's Touch And Go
Jewelry. Winifred Peck's The Warrielaw Jewel
Hand Holding Weapon. Ross MacDonald's The Doomsters
Damsel in Distress. Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep
Cat. S. S. Van Dine's The Gracie Allen Murder Case
Building. Graham Greene's A Gun For Sale
Revolver. John Dickson Carr's The Man Who Could Not Shudder
Moon. Charles Dickens' The Mystery of Edwin Drood
Car/Truck. Leslie Charteris' Enter The Saint
Train. Agatha Christie's Murder On The Orient Express
Any Other Weapon (Bomb). Leslie Charteris' The Last Hero
Tombstone. John Dickson Carr's To Wake The Dead
Blonde. Erle Stanley Gardner's The Case Of The Lonely Heiress
Hangman's Noose. Ellery Queen's Ten Days' Wonder
Brunette. Erle Stanley Gardner's The Case Of The Rolling Bones

Silver Age

Brunette. Andrew Greeley's Happy Are The Meek

Car/Truck. Chester Himes' All Shot Up
Written Document. Simon Brett's Situation Tragedy 
Map or Chart. Carolyn Keene's The Quest Of The Missing Map
Bird. Simon Brett's Murder Unprompted
Any Other Weapon (Pistol). Simon Brett's Murder In The Title
Bottle Of Poison. Simon Brett's Dead Giveaway
Body Of Water. Janwillem van de Wetering's The Mind Murders
Snow/Snowy Scene. Ngaio Marsh's Tied Up In Tinsel