Mount TBR 2018 Checkpoint #3 (Mt. Ararat)

I've currently read 39 out of the 48 books that are the Mt. Ararat challenge. That puts me a little ahead of the pace I need to be on, though I should be aiming at a much higher mountain, especially as it is now book-buying season in Toronto with two of the four big charity sales on the University of Toronto campus just recently past (and two more to come). But we'll ignore any new volcanic mountain-building activity for now, and just celebrate the nearly 13,700 feet I've gotten up the mountain I'm attacking.

I'm going to go with (A) as a suggested topic: my favorite character so far has to be Don Fabrizio of The Leopard. Sure, it's partly because he's played by Burt Lancaster in the movie. But he's a worldly Italian aristocrat, if, perhaps, a little less rich than he needs to be, with serious scientific interests, and at the same time a sardonic wit. "His family is an old one, I am told, or soon will be." I'd have him to dinner, though look out for your daughters.

Thanks to Bev at My Reader's Block for hosting!

Mount TBR 2018 Checkpoint #2 (Mt. Ararat)

As of today, I've read 26 of my 48 books toward the top of Mt. Ararat, my stated goal in the 2018 Mount TBR Reading Challenge. That's slightly over half my mountain and probably slightly under where I should be at the moment. I could figure it out but it's Sunday afternoon, I'm doing laundry, and I'm just not feeling that mathematical...

And I should be aiming for Mt. Everest (100) or Mt. Olympus on Mars (150) to get the problem here under control. Oh, well.

The most interestingly new-to-me book I read was Matt Cohen's The Bookseller which I read for a read locally challenge as well as for this. He's a new author to me, and while I've read a few other Toronto books, I haven't read anything quite so local as this. The narrator lives in a place clearly identifiable as about six blocks from my house, and I pass by there quite regularly in my usual round of gym and grocery store. I could someday read Katherine Govier's Fables of Brunswick Avenue which would be even closer; Brunswick Avenue is about two blocks from my house. She's a pretty well-known Canadian writer and I've heard good things about it. But even that might not feel as local, because Brunswick Avenue is a residential street and I don't go down it as often. Quite curious to read something so identifiably local.

There were five books on that TBR list that I've owned since before I started recording when I bought a book: The Group, El Cid, Tragic Sense Of Life, The Leopard, and Morte D'Urban. I don't know which I've had the longest, but I suspect it was The Group. Any one of them I could have quite happily read long ago, and were worth toting around all these years. Morte D'Urban and The Leopard I thought were the best.

Thanks again to Bev at My Reader's Block for hosting!

Mount TBR Checkpoint #1 (Mount Ararat)

Yikes.

I have read five books toward my challenge level of 48 books for the year. I am way behind. I was behind on my first checkpoint last year and made it up, but I had read more books toward a lower mountain. There is some work to do. I say to myself, well, I was travelling, or I say, hmmm, February has only 28 days, so it's the shortest quarter of the year. Sigh. I am not convinced.

I haven't got enough letters to make a decent Scrabble word, alas. As for characters, the narrator Amelie of Pétronille is looking for a friend to drink champagne with and is amusing, so she might be a pleasant enough character, but we're not talking Anna Karenina or Nero Wolfe.

None of the book covers was particularly good, however the cover of Martin Amis' Money was memorably bad:

The good folks at Penguin must have decided that Martin Amis' name was enough to sell the book and so it was, I guess, though I got it for $3 used.

Back to the books!

Thanks to Bev at My Reader's Block for hosting this challenge. (Even if I'm not keeping up my end!)

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...