Gotten started on Bill Bryson's I'm a Stranger Here Myself.

After living in England for 20 years, marrying a Brit and having a couple of kids, they moved to Hanover, NH. This is a collection of columns he wrote at the time about living in the States after so long away.

Usual Bryson fare, witty, easy reading.

Someone suggested Caste in the coup role playing thread and US slavery was a lot worse than I imagined.

I wonder how much of this feeling for or against Amis derives from his heritage? This idea of excessive (and wasted) “pure writing talent” suggests as much. Does such a thing really exist? Has there ever been a son/daughter of a famous writer who has effectively made the grade? I can’t think of one apart from Amis.

I hardly remember London Fields, but do know I liked it. His choice of names, as well as focus on entropy would seem to be in a direct line from Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow

The characteristic character names (sorry, I'm stir crazy) go back *at least* to John Bunyan, as does the entropy (if we generously regard entropy as a moral failure). I like them. Tons of writers use them, but they may be a little sneakier about it.

My Bold.

Kudos to the wayward and slapdash way you use the word entropy, equating it with some form of morality. Even John Cole wouldn't attempt that sky high limit; but Rousseau might.

I think of it as social dissolution, or a lowering of the information in the system tending/bending to an energy-less mean

I was intrigued by this invitation. What follows is probably TL;DR for most. Venture as you will. For the impatient, bolded titles are the greatest hits

I looked back over my last two years to see what among my recent reading had remained memorable to me. In that period I read about 140 books, mostly fiction and most often contemporary fiction. (I started and abandoned another dozen.) Of those, about 30 titles seemed to me worth recommending. Here's a list, with comments:

Jan. 2020-Jan 2021 (140 books)

Richard Osman, The Thursday Murder Club (2020). I don’t read straight mysteries much these days, but this got such great reviews that I couldn't pass it up. Not groundbreaking but very well written and constructed—and very good in character development. The real attraction is the premise, a group of smart retirees in a retirement village who get together to solve mysteries. I quite enjoyed this.

Sebastian Barry, Days without End (2016) and A Thousand Moons (2020). I love Sebastian Barry’s fiction and have been working my way through his books over the last few years. These two are his most recent. The writing in Days without End confirms again that Barry is a master stylist, but the subject matter is much darker than anything else of his I've read; the first two chapters are rather comical accounts of two young Irishmen making their living as female impersonators to serve as dancehall girls in a woman-deprived American West, but the novel shifts gears and the third chapter describes a massacre of Indian women and children that is comparable to—or bloodier than—scenes from Blood Meridian and that sets the tone for what follows, slaughter after slaughter in the Civil War and after. The New York Times published a rave for the book, calling it “a bravura journey into America’s past.” It is powerful throughout and it ends well. I wound up very impressed with it.

A Thousand Moons is a sequel to Days without End, and a comparatively minor work in Barry’s canon, but still well worth reading. It features more of his finely-crafted prose and solid story-telling. I recently recommended Barry’s fiction to someone by suggesting he start with The Secret Scripture (2008) or On Canaan's Side (2011), to get a taste of his more typical Irish narratives of individuals working out their fates through their relationships with kin and countrymen.

Mary Robison, Subtraction (1991; reissued 2018). A short novel that intrigued me partly because of its academic angle, and partly because of its setting in a seedy Houston bar. (I spent my years from 16-21 in a seedy Houston bar.) I found the first-third compelling in its tour of Houston’s seamy side—very like reading a well-paced noir. The middle dragged a bit, but the narrative at the end, with the protagonist having to choose between the two men in her life, offered an interesting critique of the randomness and loss of self-identity that the novel elsewhere seemed to celebrate. …

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012). I greatly enjoyed the first two volumes of the Wolf Hall trilogy. (But I'm also a lover of Renaissance poetry, so seeing Wyatt and Surrey as characters in Tudor history was especial fun.) I'm planning on reading the third volume in the next few weeks.

Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half (2013) and Solutions and Other Problems (2020). I didn't know anything about Brosh before a friend recommended this second book of her mixture of prose storytelling and cartooning—but for those of my (generation-younger) friend she's apparently a cult figure. Although it’s possible to find the whimsey overwhelming, this work is both funny and in its own way compelling.

Téa Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife (2011). A very accomplished work, I liked the way it was made up of several stories that drew on folk traditions.

I don’t read much fantasy but, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I found Naomi Novik's Uprooted (2015) and Spinning Silver (2018) quite engaging -- immersive in the best sense. Novik's ability to draw together fairy-tale and folkloric motifs and great myths is striking. (The friend who recommended these to me says to give her earlier dragon stuff a pass, but also likes the trilogy Novik has recently begun.)

Jim Shepard, You Think That's Bad (2011). If you're looking for neglected writers who will blow your socks off, Shepard’s your man. He’s an astonishing writer who specializes in people who have put themselves in extreme, self-destructive conditions. He couches the short stories in this book in precise and well-researched detail about each situation (mountain climbing, life in a far north scientific outpost, an early 20c trip in the Arabian deserts, etc.) Real tour-de-force performances, these are harrowing but well worth reading. However, since having discovered him I haven't yet gone back for more because I'm not sure how many utter wipe-outs I can take. The NY Times review of his 2017 short story collection, The World to Come, makes me think that will be the next of his books when I return …

Lily King, Writers & Lovers (2020). As many reviewers observed, this feels like such familiar territory (blocked writer trying to sort out her love life) that it shouldn't work -- but it does. Ron Charles, who reviewed it for The Washington Post, concluded that the book was “an absolute delight, the kind of happiness that sometimes slingshots out of despair with such force you can’t help but cheer, amazed.” One of the strengths of the book is how well it captures the experience of the protagonist’s day job: working as a restaurant server.

Anne Enright, Actress (2020). The first book I've read by Enright -- a lovely, poignant novel. Not very dependent on plot the book carried by the voice of the I-narrator — and it's a real tour-de-force. (There is a plot of sorts, which mostly has to be read out of the gaps in the monologue, the self-denials—it lies in what's not said or even confronted by the narrator about her relationship with her mother and role in her mother’s breakdown.)

Daniel Kehlmann, Tyll (2020). The Guardian called this “a romp through the thirty years’ war”; I quite enjoyed it and now wonder about his earlier novel.

James McBride, Deacon King Kong (2020). Even better than his earlier The Good Lord Bird. I agree with Junot Diaz who says, “Deacon King Kong reads like McBride’s tapped a whole fresh seam of inspiration and verve.” The novel had a surprisingly religious dimension but McBride handled it in a way that moved me rather than put me off.

Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story (2019). I've been mixed on Winterson in the past, but this send-up of the Frankenstein story is great.

Ben Lerner, The Topeka School (2019). On Time magazine’s list of the best fiction of 2019 and The New York Times top ten of the year, Lerner’s third novel is as interesting as his second. Drawing on Lerner’s experience of having grown up with two practicing psychologists and on his experiences as a college debater, Lerner suggests that the development of a debating technique called “the spread” (which he points out is contemporary with the development of rap) is not only a corruption of the form of debate but also a metonym for contemporary ills associated with today's information overload and with the desire to dominate others by the use of overwhelming language. In the closing pages he makes an explicit connection with the rise of Trump and all he is associated with. Because of its didactic side, I found myself resisting the novel at times, but I wound up admiring it.

Michael Crummey, The Innocents (2019). The newest book from Canada’s best living novelist. Like Crummey’s other books, it is memorable, well-written and powerful. Crummey’s use of the Newfoundland setting and dialect are (as in his earlier work) very powerful elements in the whole. Part of what this novel is about is “story”—how it gets made and unmade, their competing views and versions of their parents’ marriage and their own story. At the end of the book one of them reflects: Don DeLillo, The Angel Esmeralda (2011). I’ve grown impatient with the later DeLillo but I thought this gathering of DeLillo short stories was mostly very strong.

Lauren Groff, Florida (2018). Very artful short stories about the contemporary moment. Also (mostly) about Florida as a state of being. The last story (novella length), about the loneliness of a mother in Italy with two daughters who seems on the verge of a breakdown left me quite affected.

Madeline Miller, Circe (2018). I liked this book retelling the myth of Circe very much Circe describes the power relationships between the gods as a “hierarchy of fear” and one way to understand this book is as the story of overcoming fear. The first half leads up to the coming of Odysseus, the second half is based on he (previously unknown to me) story of Odysseus’s son by Circe and his killing of his father. This is a doubly Oedipal narrative in that Circe then takes Telemachus as her final lover.

Michael Chabon, Moonglow (2016). Part of the fun of this fictionalized memoir is the glimpses of the original sources of old comic book ads. An interesting balance of humour and pathos.

An admirer of Kate Atkinson’s straight novels, I decided to read right through her five Matthew Brody mystery novels. It was a good decision.

I also knocked a few classics off of my “Humiliations” list. (See David Lodge’s Changing Places.) Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre; Lampedusa's The Leopard; Murakami's Kafka on the Shore; Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter; Dickens's Bleak House. Books I'd been meaning to get to and now I have. And I'm glad. Moby-Dick, here I come!

I was intrigued by this invitation. What follows is probably TL;DR for most. Venture as you will. (Bolded titles are greatest hits.)

I looked back over my last two years to see what among my recent reading had stood out. In that period I read about 140 books, mostly fiction and most often contemporary fiction. (I started and abandoned another dozen.) Of those, about 30 titles seemed to me worth recommending. Here's a list, with comments:

Jan. 2020-Jan 2021 (140 books)

Richard Osman, The Thursday Murder Club (2020). I don’t read straight mysteries much these days, but this got such great reviews that I couldn't pass it up. Not groundbreaking but very well written and constructed—and very good in character development. The real attraction is the premise, a group of smart retirees in a retirement village who get together to solve mysteries. I quite enjoyed this.

Sebastian Barry, Days without End (2016) and A Thousand Moons (2020). I love Sebastian Barry’s fiction and have been working my way through his books over the last few years. These two are his most recent. The writing in Days without End confirms again that Barry is a master stylist, but the subject matter is much darker than anything else of his I've read; the first two chapters are rather comical accounts of two young Irishmen making their living as female impersonators to serve as dancehall girls in a woman-deprived American West, but the novel shifts gears and the third chapter describes a massacre of Indian women and children that is comparable to—or bloodier than—scenes from Blood Meridian and sets the tone for what follows, slaughter after slaughter in the Civil War and after. The New York Times published a rave for the book, calling it “a bravura journey into America’s past.” It is indeed powerful throughout and it ends well. I wound up very impressed with it.

A Thousand Moons is a sequel to Days without End, and a comparatively minor work in Barry’s canon, but features more of his finely-crafted prose and solid story-telling. I recently recommended Barry’s fiction to someone by suggesting they start with The Secret Scripture (2008) or On Canaan's Side (2011), to get a taste of his more typical Irish narratives of individuals working out their fates through their relationships with kin and countrymen.

Mary Robison, Subtraction (1991; reissued 2018). A short novel that intrigued me partly because of its academic angle, and partly because of its setting in a seedy Houston bar. (I spent my years from 16-21 in a seedy Houston bar.) I found the first-third compelling in its tour of Houston’s seamy side—very like reading a well-paced noir. The middle dragged a bit, but the narrative at the end with the protagonist having to choose between the two men in her life offered an interesting critique of the randomness and loss of self-identity that the novel elsewhere seems to celebrate. …

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012). I greatly enjoyed the first two volumes of the Wolf Hall trilogy. I'm planning on reading the third in the next few weeks.

Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half (2013) and Solutions and Other Problems (2020). I didn't know anything about Brosh before a friend recommended this second book of her mixture of prose storytelling and cartooning—but for those of my generation-younger friend she's apparently a cult figure. Although it’s possible to find the whimsey overwhelming, this work is both funny and compelling.

Téa Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife (2011). A very accomplished work, I liked the way it was made up of several stories that drew on folk traditions.

I don’t read much fantasy but (as I said in an earlier post) I found Naomi Novik, Uprooted (2015) and Spinning Silver (2018) immersive in the best sense. Novik's ability to draw together fairy-tale and folkloric motifs and great myths is striking. (The friend who recommended these to me says to give her earlier dragon stuff a pass, but also likes the new trilogy Novik has recently begun.)

Jim Shepard, You Think That's Bad (2011). If you're looking for neglected writers who will blow your socks off, Shepard’s your man. He’s an astonishing writer who specializes in people who have put themselves in extreme, self-destructive conditions. He couches the short stories in this book in precise and well-researched detail about each situation (mountain climbing, life in a far north scientific outpost, an early 20c trip in the Arabian deserts, etc.) These are real tour-de-force performances and well worth reading. However, since having discovered him I haven't gone back for more because I'm not sure how many utter wipe-outs I can take. The NY Times review of his 2017 short story collection, The World to Come, makes me think it will be the next of his books when I return …

Lily King, Writers & Lovers (2020). As many reviewers observed, this feels like such familiar territory (blocked writer trying to sort out her love life) that it shouldn't work -- but it does. Ron Charles, who reviewed it for The Washington Post, concluded that the book was “an absolute delight, the kind of happiness that sometimes slingshots out of despair with such force you can’t help but cheer, amazed.” One of the strengths of the book is how well it captures the experience of the protagonist’s day job: working as a restaurant server.

Anne Enright, Actress (2020). The first book I've read by Enright -- a lovely, poignant novel. Not very dependent on plot, the book is carried by the voice of the I-narrator — and it's a real tour-de-force. (There is a plot of sorts, which mostly has to be read out of the gaps in the monologue, the self-denials—it lies in what's not said or even confronted by the narrator about her relationship with her mother and role in her mother’s breakdown.)

Daniel Kehlmann, Tyll (2020). The Guardian called this “a romp through the thirty years’ war”; I quite enjoyed it and now wonder about his earlier novel.

James McBride, Deacon King Kong (2020). Even better than his earlier The Good Lord Bird. I agree with Junot Diaz who says, “Deacon King Kong reads like McBride’s tapped a whole fresh seam of inspiration and verve.” The novel had a surprisingly religious dimension but McBride handled it in a way that moved me rather than put me off.

Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story (2019). I've been mixed on Winterson in the past, but this send-up of the Frankenstein story is great.

Ben Lerner, The Topeka School (2019). On Time magazine’s list of the best fiction of 2019 and The New York Times top ten of the year, Lerner’s third novel is as interesting as his second. Drawing on his experience of having grown up with two practicing psychologists and on his experiences as a college debater, Lerner suggests that the development of a debating technique called “the spread” (which he points out is contemporary with the development of rap) is not only a corruption of the form of debate but also a metonym for contemporary ills associated with today's information overload and with the desire to dominate others by the use of overwhelming language. In the closing pages he makes an explicit connection with the rise of Trump and all he is associated with. Because of its didactic side, I found myself resisting the novel at times, but I wound up admiring it.

Michael Crummey, The Innocents (2019). The newest book from Canada’s best living novelist. Like Crummey’s other books, it is memorable, well-written and powerful. Crummey’s use of the Newfoundland setting and dialect are (again) very powerful elements in the whole. Part of what this novel is about is “story”—how it gets made and unmade, how the protagonists' competing views and versions (in particular, the story of their parents’ marriage; but also their own story) conflict and conflate. At the end of the book one of them reflects: Don DeLillo, The Angel Esmeralda (2011). I’ve grown impatient with the later DeLillo but I thought this gathering of DeLillo short stories was mostly very strong.

Lauren Groff, Florida (2018). Very artful short stories about the contemporary moment. Also (mostly) about Florida as a state of being. The last story (novella length), about the loneliness of a mother in Italy who seems on the verge of a breakdown left me quite affected.

Madeline Miller, Circe (2018). I liked this retelling of the myth of Circe very much. In it Circe describes the power relationships between the gods as a “hierarchy of fear” and one way to understand this novel is as the story of overcoming fear. The first half leads up to the coming of Odysseus, the second half is based on he (previously unknown to me) story of Odysseus’s son by Circe and his killing of his father. This is a doubly Oedipal narrative in that Circe then takes Telemachus as her final lover.

Michael Chabon, Moonglow (2016). Part of the fun of this fictionalized memoir is the glimpses of the original sources of old comic book ads. An interesting balance of humour and pathos.

As an admirer of Kate Atkinson’s straight novels, I decided to read right through her five Matthew Brody mystery novels. It was a good decision.

I also knocked a few classics off of my “Humiliations” list. (See David Lodge’s Changing Places.) Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre; Lampedusa's The Leopard; Murakami's Kafka on the Shore; Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter; Dickens's Bleak House. Books I'd been meaning to get to and now I have. And I'm glad I did. Moby-Dick, here I come!

Apologies for the doubled posting, which somehow came about in editing the first of these. Mods, can you delete the earlier version? (And then this note about the need to delete? Thanks!)

Thanks for the detailed poast, Russell! Haven't read anything on this list aside from The Tiger's Wife, which I enjoyed a lot.

You mentioned that you enjoy fiction about the academy; any 1 or 2 books stand out?

How do you read 140 books in a year. I got to 50 and was tired


Wolf hall 1 and 2 were great.

"my last two years" ...

Being retired helps.

Osman is a gameshow host in the UK (a little in the Stephen Fry mould), and an all around good egg.

I've just read Native, by Patrick Laurie about farming cows in Scotland, and [I]Sea Peo ple[/] by someone, about the Polynesians and the history of trying to discover their history. Best non fiction I've read in a while, both.

My favourite line from Wolf Hall was: “who would hold up his head, if people judged us by what we were like at twenty?”

+1

I shoot for 12 a year lol. Im in awe of people who can read multiple books a week.

Funny about Wolf Hall. I've had this on the DVR to watch and had no idea it was a book. Just the topic and actors in it sounded interesting

I loved the first two Wolf Hall books. I got halfway through #3, put it down and haven't picked it up again. Nothing really wrong with it -- maybe it's because I know how it ends.

I've heard a few people say that by the third book their sense of urgency had gone. It's been floating around our house for ages and neither me nor my wife has gotten around to reading it.

Most books should be burn anyway. It is possible I’m not sober; but I doubt it.

Before you get the matches, what's the best introductory book on Taoism/Lao Tsu? I read some really dry stuff in college, but don't remember any of it.

I just finished A Man Called Ove.
I might’ve got teary towards the end. It was an easy charming little book.

When I'm in a reading mood I can go through 2-3 a week, easy. More if they're shorter or straightforward genre fiction. Amazon says I've ordered 64 books to my kindle in 6 months, probably read at least 59 of them so far.

London Fields is truly amazing, a great novel, hilarious, re-read it quite recently.

As is Money by same. Top recommendation, characters in the 1980s instead of the 90s. Enjoy the surfeit of drugs, sex and fast food.

...............

Charles Bukowski - a derelict - a drunk - a compulsive gambler (horses) and not a very likeable guy
but wow - he could write
this is my favorite - he worked as a mailman for a while
he really torches the USPS - hilarious





free to read on internetarchive.com with thousands of others

I finished all three of Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn books. I liked some things about them, but they ultimately weren't that satisfying. I liked the structured magic, but I just didn't like the characters that much. Worth reading but not spectacular.

I'm about 1/3 of the way through Robert Caro's Master of the Senate, which is of course about LBJ's senate years. I've previously read Means of Ascent, which dealt mostly with LBJ's viciously corrupt 1948 senate campaign against Coke Stephenson. They're both vintage Caro -- well-researched, detailed and readable.

I'm also listening to Bitcoin Billionares, which is Ben Mezrich's bio of Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss.

HT - nice work! I’m bogged down in the mist of the third Sanderson volume.

I have read all of Caro’s LBJ volumes and power broker and consider Master of the Senate to be the best -and was obsessed with them at the time - so many amazing stories. Last I read the Covid travel restrictions were impacting Caro’s research on volume 5 since he needs to go to Vietnam - I really really hope he is able to finish it. Good article a couple of weeks ago in the NYT about his research archive being donated to a museum in the city.