Rachbxl's reading for 2017

Happy New Year everyone!

I'm happy to be back for another year in Club Read. The last few years haven't been the greatest reading years for me in terms of numbers (life getting in the way), but I've really enjoyed my reading recently so I'm starting 2017 feeling quite excited about all the books to come. I don't tend to plan my reading, but I'm this year I think I want to set myself some goals, though I don't know what yet, other than that I plan to read at least one book in Italian. I'd also like to get back to my Reading Around the World project. Oh, and it would be good to read off the TBR shelves, but we all know how that one goes...

My big discoveries of last year were Ian Rankin and Denise Mina, so I will certainly be reading more of them. I've been relying quite heavily on police procedurals/crime fiction as fillers when I don't know what else to read, so to discover two prolific writers whose writing I enjoy so much is a joy.

My reading achievement of 2016 was Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong'o, because I'd been avoiding long books for a while.

Books read:

1. The Little Red Chairs by Edna O'Brien (Ireland)
2. Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh (USA)
3. Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi (UK)
4. How to Build a Girl by Caitlin Moran (UK)
5. A Good Fall by Ha Jin (China/USA)
6. Breakfast with the Nikolides by Rumer Godden (UK)
7. The Beautiful Life: Ten New Commandments by Simon Parke (UK, non-fiction)
8. A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson (UK)
9. Noonday by Pat Barker (UK)
10. The Road by Cormac McCarthy (USA)
11. Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty (Australia)
12. Modern Lovers by Emma Straub (USA)
13. Exile by Denise Mina (UK)
14. Resolution by Denise Mina (UK)
15. Summer House with Pool by Hermann Koch (Netherlands, translation)
16.The Polish Officer by Alan Furst (USA)
17. Killing the Shadows by Val McDermid (UK)
18.A Place of Execution by Val McDermid (UK)
19. Notes from an Exhibition by Patrick Gale (UK)
20. The Invisible Ones by Steff Penney (UK)
21. Death of the Demon by Anne Holt (Norway, translation)
22. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (Korea/USA)
23. History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund (USA)
24. The Greatcoat by Helen Dunmore (UK)

Books read in 2016: 35
Non-fiction: 2
Fiction: 33, by authors from 17 different countries (UK, USA, Ireland, Canada, Finland, Sri Lanka, Norway, Spain, Angola, Iceland, Switzerland, Indonesia, Algeria, South Korea, France, China, Kenya)
Translations: 12 fiction (36%), plus 1 non-fiction (total of 37% translations)
Read in Spanish: 1
Read in French: 2
Women writers (fiction): 44% (not bad, but I really thought it was higher than that)

Reading Around the World

I started reading my way around the world soon after I joined LT, about 10 years ago, and I used to track my 'travels' in the Reading Globally group. I don't think I can hope to keep 2 threads going at the moment, but I do want to get back to my journey, so I'm going to use this post to note any progress.

Last year I added Angola and Switzerland, taking me to a total of 72 countries.


visited 72 states (32%)
Create your own visited map of The World

>4 rachbxl: - I'm starring your thread. I look forward to following you on your Reading around the World-challenge. I intend to revive my challenge this year too, so maybe I'll find some inspiration here.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! I am pleased to see you have a 2017 thread -- the books in 2016 may have been few, but so many seemed to be excellent reads that I would not necessarily have known about otherwise.

33 novels from 17 different countries - what an interesting year. I look forward to following you again this year.

Hi Rachel, I'm looking forward to seeing where your reading takes you this year.

I think we own most of the Rebus books. My husband's read all of them, but I've never got round to starting on them. Having seen the praise for them on here, I think this may be the year I give them a try!

Hey, Rach, always interested in what you are reading! I understand your interest in Mina and Rankin (I already have the next Rankin on order at the bookstore...coming out this month!). Just finished the first of three by a Polish author,
Zygmunt Miloszewski, left a short review on my old thread, would recommend it with reservations.

Happy New Year! I am envious of readers like you who can read literature in the original language. Translations are so hard to evaluate. Consider Tim Parks' about the Man Booker Prize winner The Vegetarian.

I've lurked on your threads for the past few years. This year my goal is to try to comment once in a while. Best wishes or a great reading year.

Thanks for your messages, everyone.

>12 labfs39: What an interesting article, thanks. You know I have a professional interest in translation, and on reading The Vegetarian I did actually ponder a couple of those points, the use of 'philtrum', for example (is the Korean equivalent equally rare?), but I told myself I was being churlish. I did think that the husband in particular often sounded clunky, with an odd mixture of registers, but I put that down, perhaps mistakenly, to the translator striving to remain faithful to the original. Who knows (I certainly don't)? Korean might sound like that...

And here we are, the first book of the year (and what a way to start!):

The Little Red Chairs by Edna O'Brien

I feel like I have just emerged from a swim in freezing cold water - bracing, invigorating, shocking, and strangely beautiful, but I'm glad to be warm and dry again.

A mysterious stranger arrives in a very small Irish town, all flowing white locks and long black coat. Saying he is from the Balkans, he calls himself a faith healer and sex therapist, and everyone, local priest and nuns included, falls under his charm. One local woman, Fidelma, lonely in her marriage to a much older man, and desperate for the child she struggles to conceive, is particularly affected, and falls into a strange relationship with him. When the stranger turns out to be a fugitive war criminal, lives unravel. Indeed, one of the most striking things here for me is the sense of just how quickly, how easily, lives can come apart at the seams. We depend on others for our place in society, and if others decide no longer to accord us that place, there is little we can do. So Fidelma suffers appallingly at the hands of her lover's enemies, and also at the hands of her own community, who cast her out as a 'faithless woman' (worse than being a war criminal in this traditional society, perhaps because adultery, unlike genocide, is something people can understand). Then there are the brief accounts scattered through the book from people who were caught up in the war in the Balkans - again, the balance of their lives was shattered when the people around them decided that the rules had changed.

The one thing that bothered me initially was that if I were a war criminal on the run, I'd keep a much lower profile than does Vlad here. Turning up in small town in Ireland and announcing oneself as a sex therapist isn't a great way of slipping between the cracks. But as I read on, I realised that Vlad is based on one particular war criminal who was so breathtakingly arrogant that he behaved in a similar way.

Edna O'Brien has been lurking for a while on my mental TBR list, initially because I kept reading good reviews, and more recently because I very much enjoyed a short story I read in an anthology. Her writing is fabulous, invisible, almost, and she builds up layer after layer until the picture emerges.

Great review of The Little Red Chairs, Rachel. This book has been on my radar screen for awhile, and after reading your comments I'll add it to my wish list.

The Little Red Chairs is on my wishlist, but you would have put it there with your comments. I really enjoyed O'Brien's Wild Decembers, so hope to get to this one fairly soon.

Loved your review. I can really see the appeal of this book.

Great review. This one is on my soon TBR list.

Great review of The Little red chairs one to add to the "to buy" list.

>4 rachbxl: As you know, Rachel, I am trying to read books from basically 82 countries this year in my Around the World in 80 Books Challenge (80 + USA/UK) and so I am interested to see your own progress listed so clearly. I will use the map too I think as the challenge starts to take shape.

Enjoyed your review of The Little Red Chairs. I have that one on the shelves but have found Ms. O'Brien a contrary soul over the years. Some of her work has hit th espot immediately whilst some of it leaves me frankly non-plussed. That one just got closer to my reading table though on account of you!

Darryl, Colleen, Jane, Barry, Paul, thanks for your comments. I'm glad to have nudged The Little Red Chairs up a few TBR piles ;-)

>21 PaulCranswick: What of O'Brien's have you enjoyed, out of curiosity? As I said in my review, i haven't read anything else, other than one short story.

I found the map to be a great incentive in the early days. It can be misleading, though, as from the map it now looks like I'm almost there, whereas in fact I'm not even halfway - I've got dozens of little countries left! It had been a while since I last updated my map, and I'm glad I did, as it highlights Africa as somewhere I need to head; I was surprised by how poorly I've covered Africa so far.

>22 rachbxl: I really enjoyed The Country Girls which I read an age ago. I thought In the Forest was interesting too but a much lesser work than the other.

>15 rachbxl: I'm glad to see you got to the O'Brien, Rachel. It was harrowing, wasn't it? It was my #1 read for 2016. I thought about the book for a long time after finishing it.

>23 PaulCranswick: Thanks, Paul - I was thinking of reading The Country Girls next, and you haven't put me off.

>24 avaland: Hello Lois. I believe you were the person who originally got me interested in The Little Red Chairs, so thank you.

Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh

Eileen (which rather oddly comes up originally as Great Expectations on the touchstones) was shortlisted for the Man Booker last year, as well as for a couple of other prizes, and it won the Hemingway Foundation/Pen Award. It didn't quite work for me, though, although there's a lot about it that I liked.

Eileen is a gloriously unlikeable narrator. Or perhaps the 70-something Eileen doing the narrating is actually likeable, as she is at pains to say how much she has changed. The 24-year old Eileen whose story she tells is a fairly tragic figure, living alone with her alcoholic father, she has no friends and certainly no boyfriend. She is stick thin and proud of it (I found the odd comment from the narrator along the lines of 'it took me years to learn how to feed myself properly' touching; her condition may have morphed into some kind of eating disorder (I don't know), but it started out as nobody ever having set her an example. A piece of white bread and a handful of peanuts is as good a dinner as any other). She dresses from her dead mother's wardrobe, although all at the clothes are slightly too big. She dreams of getting away and starting her life, but it seems unachievable. A few years earlier she had gone away to college, but was brought back to care for her dying mother, and now seems to be stuck. She has a job at the local boys' prison, which is where she meets Rebecca, who turns out to be the catalyst to change in her life.

Eileen is repulsive, but she is a fabulously drawn character. Her alcoholic ex-cop father, too, is brilliantly done, though equally unlikeable. The intriguing Harvard-educated Rebecca, a vision from another world, a world of privilege and self-confidence, is nicely done too, at least in part...and here is my problem with the novel. I feel like my copy was missing about a third of the pages, the ones telling Rebecca's story. I don't want to give anything away, because there is a very surprising turn towards the end, something done by Rebecca - but we only know the minimum about Rebecca, making her actions inexplicable, at worst, and just plain strange at best. Eileen does say at one point (and I think this is Moshfegh's justification for doing it this way), 'I don't know any more about Rebecca, and I don't need to, because this is my story, not hers' (I paraphrase), but for me that's not enough. I understand that the beautiful Rebecca sweeps in to her new job at the prison, representing a whole new life becoming possible for Eileen - a friend! But Eileen takes extraordinary actions to protect Rebecca, and I think we are supposed to understand that this is how desperate she is for a friend - but having known her for 2 days???

I wouldn't write Moshfegh off on the basis of this, but I may wait a while before trying anything else.

Hmm, Little Red Chairs went right on to my wishlist. Eileen sounds intriguing from your description, yet inexplicable and dissatisfying too, and I don't get on well with unlikable characters (hence my extreme distaste for Independent People despite it being so acclaimed).

Nice review of Eileen, Rachel. You liked it far better than I did, probably because I intensely disliked and couldn't identify with the narrator, or her motives. She also seemed to go on and on about her shortcomings and physical flaws, which reminded me of the occasional mother I meet in the hospital who talks ad nauseum about her own health problems, when my main focus is on her sick child.

Last year's Booker Prize longlist was curious at best, and vastly disappointing at worst. Hopefully this year's judges will do a better job in choosing quality novels.

>26 rachbxl: I am with Darryl in not enjoying that one. I don't know but I felt that there was something gauche or even juvenile about the narrative construction that not only confirmed it as a first novel but also one not yet sufficiently ready for publication. That it got Booker nominated was, I think, utterly extraordinary.

Eileen is a gloriously unlikeable narrator. What a wonderful description and review. I shall have to meet Eileen. This is a book I had not heard of before. I also surprisingly have The Little Red Chairs on my TBR. I had thought for some reason it was about the show trials and when I discovered my error, I set it aside, but you and avaland are convincing me to read it sooner rather than later.

I was sure I didn't want to read Eileen after seeing a programme about the Booker shortlist. The author seemed engaging, but I didn't like the idea of a "repulsive" narrator. Unlikeable - fine, but not repulsive. But then, in Waterstones one day, I picked up the book out of curiosity and was really drawn in by the first paragraph. Despite your reservations, I think I'm still interested enough to try it.

How are you getting on with Ghana Must Go? I read it a couple of years ago and ended up really liking it. I think I had the opposite experience to you, in that I never felt the urge to pick it up and continue reading, but once I did I found myself really enjoying the writing. I remember being mystified by some of the characters' behaviour, but everything became clearer as (sometimes harrowing) past events were revealed...

>28 kidzdoc:, >29 PaulCranswick: I didn't know about the Booker nomination when I started it (I haven't paid much attention to the Booker recently, and if this is anything to go by, that's no loss!), and I was very surprised when I found out. I do think that Moshfegh is good at creating characters, and I don't mind unlikeable ones, but characters need a plot, and that's sadly lacking here. I agree, Paul, that it seems unfinished, and I'm surprised it was even published like that, let alone Booker nominated.

>30 SassyLassy: I wholeheartedly recommend The Little Red Chairs, though I suspect you could live without ever meeting Eileen.

>31 Rebeki: That's exactly what happened to me. I was in the UK over Christmas and popped into Waterstones, picked Eileen up, and was enticed by the first paragraph. I just finished Ghana Must Go last night, and I agree that it all falls into place in the end. I don't think I liked it as much as you did, though.

Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi

Mixed feelings about this one, which I'd been looking forward to for a while, and was excited to find in the library. It's the story of 4 siblings, aged 20 - early 30s, for whom news of their estranged father's death back in his native Ghana (they are in the USA, where he left them) triggers a look back at their lives, in an attempt to understand. Their Nigerian mother, too, now also living in Ghana (though not with the father) looks back. So a family saga, and the adjective that often precedes that term is of course 'sprawling' - and that, I think, is my problem with this book. The first third or so is so sprawling that it's all over the place; I found it hard to keep track, and was frustrated by the frequent jumps around, without the story really moving forward. As if the author had a lot of material and was determined to use it.

It looked up after that, though. Once things started happening, I no longer found it so hard to distinguish the characters from each other, although, as Rebeki says above, I did struggle to understand at times why they were behaving as they were, though as she says, it does all become clear, and I forgave them a lot. The twins, for example, Taiwo and Kehinde, I had found quite opaque, and I thought that was a problem with the writing - i just couldn't get near them. Who are they? Why are they doing this? I won't say what is revealed, but it's not pleasant, and it makes the characters make perfect sense. Of course I couldn't get near them; nobody could.

What I didn't end up reconciled with, though, was the writing. I just couldn't shake off the feeling that the author was trying too hard - it's a first novel, after all. Nor could I forget that she was there; compare that to my reading of The Little Red Chairs, when I never even thought about Edna O'Brien, whose writing struck me as invisible. I nearly gave up several times, but I was always pulled back (I would find myself thinking about the book hours later), and I'm glad I persisted. I didn't always enjoy reading it, but looking back I can say that I enjoyed the book as a whole. I'll be interested to see what what Selasi does next.

>33 rachbxl: Hm, I think I'll keep this in mind for borrowing, but not actively seek it out at the moment. Good review

Thank you for the thoughtful review of Ghana Must Go. It's been sort of on my list, but when I don't believe or understand a character that's usually a huge problem for my enjoyment. Like you I'll be curious about Selasi's further writing though.

>33 rachbxl: interesting. I'm curious about the book now, but not interested in lesser writing, if that's the problem here. Great review.

>33 rachbxl: I enjoyed the writing, but I do remember it being somewhat self-conscious.

Nice review of Ghana Must Go, Rachel. I haven't gotten to it yet, but it's on my list of possible books to read this year.

How to Build a Girl by Caitlin Moran

I have long been a fan of Caitlin Moran's column in The Times, and a couple of years ago I enjoyed reading her non-fictional How to Be a Woman. I don't always agree with her, but she always makes me think, stop and question things, and on top of that I like her writing style.

So in theory I should have rushed out and got myself a copy of this novel ages ago, but something stopped me. It had never really made its way to the top of my wishlist, but I saw it in the library last week and thought I may as well. Which just goes to show, I should listen to my instinct. Not that this was bad; just that I could have spent the time reading something else.

First, what I liked. The sparky writing, as lively as ever. The horribly vivid portrayal of growing up in the 1980's in a run-down British town, an experience I share with Moran, who is just a couple of years younger than me. The misery and the joys of being a teenager. All very evocative, and spot-on. A mordant sense of humour (my husband got annoyed by my laughing and being unable to explain why). The way in which Moran challenges the status quo: for example, I was really hating a passage several pages long in which the narrator, Johanna/Dolly relates her sexual conquests in excessive (I felt) detail. I was brought up short by the observation that we are not accustomed to reading/hearing female accounts of sexual adventures.

What I didn't like. It felt like large chunks of this were fictionalised re-workings of How to Be a Woman, only not as good. And despite understanding why Moran makes her narrator go on and on about 'fucking', I still didn't enjoy it.

I read How to Build a Girl towards the end of last year. Like you, I had some instinctive sense that this wasn't a book I would like enough to want to own, so I also borrowed it from the library.

I enjoyed it more than you, but I picked it up at a time when I really needed something fun and it was the perfect book for that time. It's annoying though when you feel your time could have been better spent reading something else.

After reading the blurb, I also managed my expectations, because it did sound like it had a lot in common with How to Be a Woman, as well as Moran's TV series Raised By Wolves. Have you seen that?

That said, I am fascinated by Moran and her fictional personae and, since my dad is from Wolverhampton, by the setting, so if she wrote this same story several times over, I'd probably still end up reading and enjoying it each time!

>40 Rebeki: I haven't seen her TV series (in fact I only heard about from the cover blurb on How to Build a Girl) - is it good? Similar themes, from what you say, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Didn't she co-write it with her sister?

A Good Fall by Ha Jin

I really enjoyed this collection of short stories about the Chinese immigrant experience in the USA, written by someone who left China in 1985 to attend university in the States and is now a professor of English at Boston University. Some of the stories are about 'big' moments, like the arrival in the US of a spouse originally left behind in China, whilst others deal with everyday life (the first one, 'The Bane of the Internet' is a brief reflection upon how the narrator preferred it when his sister in China could only write letters, whereas the internet makes it possible for her to harass him for money on a daily basis), but they are all inconclusive, open-ended, left hanging somehow, and it works really well. I felt that I was witness to a brief episode in each character's life, but it wasn't for me to know what happened next. In the last story, 'A Good Fall', for example, a Buddhist monk attempts suicide when his monastery in Flushing (all these stories are set in Flushing) refuses to pay him the salary he is due and attempts to put him on a plane back to China; we know he survives...but then what? Elsewhere, there's a young Chinese man who falls in love with a Chinese prostitute he happens to share a house with; she has been forced into prostitution to pay her human trafficker back, but he persuades her to run away and start a new life with him. The story ends, tantalisingly, with them leaving the house by night with a suitcase and a bag. Then there's the couple who are reunited after 4 years apart when the husband makes it to the USA, meaning that the wife has to put an end to her happy affair with a follow Chinese man she loves, also waiting for his spouse to join him. The husband reveals he knew about the affair, and intends to use the knowledge to force his unfaithful wife into paying for him to go to business school (which she can ill afford)...but what happens next? Far from being frustrated by the threads left hanging, I keep thinking about the characters and imagining them in different scenarios.

If I have a little quibble it's with the dialogue, which at times reads like a translation, i.e. not very naturally (I didn't find this problem with the rest of the text). But I'm happy to set that minor niggle aside. This is one of those books that makes me wonder what other treasures I have on my TBR shelves - this one had been sitting there for 6 years since I bought it on a trip to New York in 2011.

Hmm. I might be tempted by that one. Thanks for reviewing.

>42 rachbxl: If I have a little quibble it's with the dialogue, which at times reads like a translation,... Interesting remark about Ha Jin's dialogue, which I would agree with, although he actually writes in English. Perhaps it sometimes seems stilted as a result of writing in a second language. He is one of my favourite contemporary writers.

>41 rachbxl: I enjoyed it, yes. It's amusing, rather than laugh-out-loud funny, I would say. However, it's been dropped by Channel 4 after two series, so I'm not sure whether there'll be any more.

Yes, she co-wrote it with her sister Caroline and two of the characters are based on them.

>45 Rebeki: I listened to her on Desert Island Discs this week (found it on the Radio 4 website) - what a character. Talks a million words a minute (she reckons it's the result of growing up in a large family and struggling to get a word in), very bright and very funny. But there are little pools of darkness that she tries to gloss over, which I found really touching - like when Kirsty Young asked her about her self-harming. Quick as a flash, she replied, 'oh, you know, it was the 90s, that's what we did', and prepared to change the subject, but Young said, 'No, I won't accept that, I was there too, and it wasn't 'just what we did'.'

>43 ipsoivan: Hope you enjoy it if you do.

>44 SassyLassy: I've been thinking a lot about this issue with the dialogue (I don't know if you know that I am a conference interpreter (aka simultaneous translator), so this kind of thing I find really interesting). I suspect that although he writes in English (and what English!), the dialogue is in effect translated. I say that because most of the characters are Chinese, so the conversations between them are taking place in Mandarin (not least because we know that many of them, despite their years in the USA, have failed to learn much English) - so in fact Ha Jin is giving us an English version of conversations which were actually in Mandarin (ok, I know they never really took place, but still). If I put myself in his position, I can see the problem clearly. I live much of my life in French, and I could write French the way Ha Jin writes English (from a language point of view solely; sadly I lack his literary flair). If I were writing dialogue between two French speakers, I could do it convincingly, because I would just record what I hear around me. BUT, and this is the point, writing dialogue IN FRENCH between 2 English speakers would be trickier because it would be artificial, in that those conversations would have taken place in English. It would be interesting to know whether Ha Jin's dialogue rings true to someone who knows Mandarin, or if at least they could trace the clunkiness back to Mandarin.

Breakfast with the Nikolides by Rumer Godden

Thanks to wandering star, who recently read something else by Rumer Godden, I was reminded of how much I like her, and have liked her at very different stages of my life. If asked for my favourite authors, I would never think to list her, yet several of Godden's books have meant a lot to me over the years: The Dolls' House and The Diddakoi when I was a child, The Greengage Summer when I was a teenager (my sister and I had it on almost permanent loan from the library). A few years ago I enjoyed Kingfishers Catch Fire, which is written in the same quiet, restrained way as Breakfast with the Nikolides - understated, but magically evocative of a world gone by, and a lifestyle that no longer exists (Godden draws heavily on her many years, including her childhood, spent in colonial India).

Fleeing the second world war in Europe, Emily, her younger sister Binnie and their highly-strung, complicated mother Louise arrive by steamer in the small isolated Indian town of Amorra to join their father Charles (whom 7 year-old Binnie has never met, and whom, we are given to understand, Louise never intended to see again). Louise is appalled to be back in dirty, loud, bright India, but Emily thrives, and her relationship with Louise is increasingly tense. Relations in the family are all strained, with a veneer of respectability which holds good until the death of Emily's beloved dog Don shatters appearances and sends each member of the family hurtling off in a different direction.

I am glad to have inspired such a pleasant read! I will look out for this too.

>47 rachbxl: I like your explanation of Ha Jin's dialogue. Just thinking of the English/French example, it makes perfect sense; one language would come across as "clunky" in the other.

>48 rachbxl: I must read Rumer Godden as an adult. I loved her when I was a child.

>46 rachbxl: I listened to that too! I was glad Kirsty Young picked her up on the reference to self-harm as commonplace, but it also reminded me that I'd described How to Build a Girl here as a fun read, whereas it was also quite dark in places. With Moran's breezy style, it's easy to forget that.

>48 rachbxl: I have a vague memory of a primary school teacher reading our class something by Rumer Godden, but I've no idea what, and I've never read anything by her myself. She seems like an author I would enjoy.

>42 rachbxl: Good to see Ha Jin's work is still good, although some of the stories seem to have left you unsatisfied (and were they supposed to, do you think?). I admit I read his early books, but moved on to other shiny books.... (you know how it is)

>52 avaland: I've been neglecting my thread so have only just seen this. Yes, I do think the stories were meant to be like that. I'm not sure that they left me unsatisfied, exactly, just wondering...

The Beautiful Life: Ten New Commandments: Because Life Could Be Better by Simon Parke

A couple of months ago I wandered into the library at work one lunchtime, feeling frazzled and generally worn down, in search of some escapism in book form, which for me means a great novel (which this isn't). I immediately ran into a lovely, kind, gentle colleague who is coming up to retirement, and he handed me this book with a smile, saying, "Look at this, doesn't it look wonderful?' It was clear that he was showing me the book he was planning to borrow...but to my shame I took it myself. I just knew it was the book I needed, and I'd never have found it myself (it not being a novel, for starters). My poor colleague looked a bit confused.

And it was indeed the book I needed. The title makes it sound like it could be a self-help book, but it isn't at all. It's more of a gentle meditation on life by Parke, sometime priest, former shop steward and journalist who now organises retreats, with suggestions rather instructions for how 'life could be better'. By 'better' he means calmer, a life in which one is really present, and kinder.

Next came this wonderful book, which caused my reading to grind to a halt completely:

A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson

I enjoyed Life after Life so much when I read it last year that I went straight on to A God in Ruins...but that was too much of a good thing, and I put it to one side after about 100 pages, always intending to come back to it. I picked it up again in early February. It's the kind of book I would usually read in a week or so (long, but compulsive reading), but I just couldn't make progress through it, not because I wasn't enjoying it, but because I could only take a little bit at a time. I kept breaking off to think about it, and some of the characters really lived with me (still do, in fact). I found much of it incredibly poignant. I normally have two or three books on the go at any one time, but in this case not only could I not read it quickly, it also prevented me from reading anything else; I just couldn't. I couldn't say whether I enjoyed this more or less than Life after Life, and of course each can be read separately, but taken together they are a huge achievement, and as good as anything I have read in the last few years.

>55 rachbxl: I loved A God in Ruins and Life After Life. I reread Life before reading the second. Teddy was my favorite character in Life, so I was happy to follow him in this one- even with his grumpy flaws.

>56 NanaCC: Ah, you see, Ursula was my favourite in Life after Life, and I didn't think I wanted to carry on without her...but she was there anyway, either in person or in spirit. And in fact I grew to love Teddy just as much. Nancy, though, I couldn't get close to at all. I couldn't get beyond the hearty girl scout-type character (although I know she wasn't a scout - what was the thing their mother put them through instead called?) I know there was more there, but it didn't speak to me.

>54 rachbxl: This sounds good, and probably what I'm in need of. I hope your colleague gets to borrow it next!

>55 rachbxl: I have yet to read anything by Kate Atkinson, but it's very interesting to read about your experience with this book, and wonderful that a book can be so powerful. I hope you've now found something to follow it with.

>58 Rebeki: You haven't read any Kate Atkinson? What a treat you have in store the day you decide to try her (if you decide to, of course). I've rediscovered her in the last couple of years, and as far as I'm concerned she can do no wrong.

After A God in Ruins I felt the need to re-visit WWII, especially in a way that would connect me with Ursula, Teddy and their peers. I happened to have just the book on my TBR shelves:

Noonday by Pat Barker

I have read quite a bit of Pat Barker over the years, in fact everything she has written from the Regeneration Trilogy onwards. At the time of reading I always admire her quiet, controlled style - quite different to Kate Atkinson's more emotional writing, for example. Or to Sebastian Faulks's - I mention him because I (like everyone else) read Birdsong and the Regeneration Trilogy at about the same time, and they cover the same events (WWI) in completely different ways, as Noonday and A God in Ruins/Life After Life do with WW2 in Britain. So, my point was that as I read, I enjoy her understated writing...but it doesn't seem to stay with me for long. It's not apparent from the cover, but Noonday is the final volume of another trilogy (I found this out well into the novel). Oh well, I thought, it doesn't seem to matter that I haven't read the others, and if it had been vital, it would have said on the cover that it was part of a trilogy. So I read on, very much enjoying what I read. Only I eventually realised that I had, after all, read the other two parts (when a character appeared who had undergone pioneering facial reconstruction surgery after suffering catastrophic injuries in WW1, I knew I had read a novel in which pioneering facial reconstruction surgery for WW1 veterans featured prominently, so I looked it up, and was surprised to find it was this same character).

I wonder if this one will stay in my mind for longer. I hope so, because it deserves to. It's set during the blitz, mainly in London, and the main characters, Elinor and Paul, are artists, as well as an ambulance driver and an air-raid warden respectively. The accounts of their experiences in these roles really brought the blitz, as experienced by ordinary people on the ground, alive for me in a way that perhaps no other book ever has (even Life After Life and A God in Ruins, where we are often told about how awful Ursula's war as an air-raid warden in London was, but there is little detail), and the graphic descriptions of painstaking attempts to find survivors in ruined buildings came to mind again today on watching yet more harrowing footage from Syria. And meanwhile, life goes on - the portrayal of Elinor and Paul's crumbling marriage is exquisitely done, restrained yet eloquent.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

This is one sparingly-written one I'm in no danger of forgetting any time soon. What a powerful book; I felt almost physically winded. Strangely enough, it wasn't one I was desperate to read, but when I came across a copy in a second-hand bookshop last year I picked it up just in case I changed my mind. And the other night I did. I wasn't well and couldn't sleep, and this saw me through the night. I wanted to record it here right away, though I need a bit of time to think about what I want to say about it.

I need to get to more Pat Barker soon. I think the best fiction depiction of the Blitz I've read is in Connie Willis' time travel duo Blackout and All Clear. This is partly because of fleshing out the fact that being in a place, knowing an outcome, is very different from the experience of it when you don't know the outcome.

Ooo, you are neglecting your thread. I admit that, until recently, I have not been terribly social hereabouts, but I did try to write short reviews of what I read at the very minimum for my own benefit/reference. Well, we both shall have to reform for next year!

>63 avaland: I am neglecting my thread so badly that I've only just seen your message! I have been reading (not a lot, but still), but I struggle to keep up with LT on my iPad, which is all I've had for the last few months, since my daugther spilt apple juice over my laptop keyboard... On top of that I've had a really busy few months, but I'm not going to leave it till next year to improve; I'm going to start right now!

I'm going to jot down what I can remember having read right away, and I hope to include a few thoughts on a few things. In no particular order:

Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty
Recommended by an old friend who is a great reader and whose tastes I often share. She said it was light but well-written, with some strong female characters, and she was right. It's made me look at the parents at my daughter's school in a different light...

Modern Lovers by Emma Straub
I picked this one up soon after finishing Big Little Lies, simply because the cover blurb included some praise from Liane Moriarty, and I enjoyed this one too. Again, light but well-written, and with some strong female characters, although one of the main characters, Elizabeth, I just didn't get on with (and I think I was supposed to); I thought something was missing so she came across as a bit stuffy and wooden. The novel is the story of Elizabeth and Zoe, originally college friends, now still friends and mothers of almost-adult children; I really enjoyed the story of Zoe and Jane and their daughter Ruby, and Ruby and Zoe, in particular, are still with me now.

Exile by Denise Mina
Resolution by Denise Mina
The second and third (final) in the Garnethill series. I try not to read books from a series back-to-back, but I enjoy Mina's writing so much, and I so wanted to find out what happened to the loveable, if sometimes infuriating, Maureen O'Donnell, that I couldn't help myself. As with everything I've read by Mina, the stories are gripping, but what really makes her books for me is Mina's understanding of what makes people tick. I say that Maureen is infuriating because I find myself shouting at her in my head to stop and think - honestly, woman, why are you going to investigate yourself again rather than leaving it to the police? And yet it's all set up so carefully that whilst I myself certainly wouldn't do what she does, I can understand why damaged, fragile, feisty Maureen feels she has to.

The Polish Officer by Alan Furst
The last book I finished, and the best I have read for a long time. Set during the World War 2, it follows Captain Alexander de Milja, a Polish intelligence officer across Europe as, following orders, he takes on fake identity after fake identity as, deep undercover, he does his best to serve his country. This secret operations aspect of the war fascinates me, and whilst usually if I said that a novel read like a history book I'd mean it as a criticism, here it's a compliment; Furst blends his factual research into his story seamlessly. But what you don't get in a history book is characters like these. Here, too, I was impressed by what Furst does: de Milja is forced to live a shadowy half-life, full of lies and half-truths, cautious who he opens up to, always ready to run - and I got the impression of a man who didn't quite want to open up to me, either. Again, usually that would be a criticism of a novel, but in this case it's not, because it worked; I really, really wanted de Milja to linger a while so I could get to know him, but whenever I thought I was getting close he was off again, under a different identity. What I didn't like about this book was that sometimes it was so sparing that it was elliptical, and several times I leafed back several pages to find a crucial detail I'd missed, only to find that it wasn't there at all; I never did work out if I was just supposed to know, or if it didn't matter that much. A bit frustrating in an otherwise excellent novel.

There are more, but I'll post these for now.

Killing the Shadows by Val McDermid
Several LTers whose opinion I respect speak highly of Val McDermid, so over the summer when I saw that my local library's very, very small collection of English books consists largely of McDermid's novels, I was keen to give her a try. I enjoyed this one so much that I went straight back for another. I was tempted to carry on and read the rest, but so far I've resisted (keeping them for a rainy day, as it were). This one involves a serial killer who targets crime writers, and the main character is a criminal psychologist whose partner just happens to be a top crime writer. The writing is superb, the story utterly gripping - what suspense! What sets McDermid apart, though, is the ability she shares with Denise Mina to understand how people work; her characters are incredibly human...and if we're talking about McDermid's characters, we can't not mention the countryside, so realistically portrayed that it is almost a character in its own right.

A Place of Execution by Val McDermid
A teenage girl disappears in the 1960s from Scardale, a small remote village in the Peak District, the third child to disappear in the Manchester area in recent months. Scardale is an isolated community, accessible by road (with difficulty) only from Buxton, and one in which outsiders are not welcome, and not trusted, which poses a challenge for George Bennett, the newly-promoted young inspector in charge of the investigation. George doggedly goes about his business, anxious to do well on his first major investigation, and aware of the burden he now shoulders not just at work, but at home too, with his first child on the way, while the villagers, a glorious collection of characters, close ranks. This was another gripping (if ultimately harrowing) story, but what I enjoyed most was the atmospheric recreation of 1960s Buxton and the area. One of my best friends lives in Buxton, and it still feels isolated; 50 years ago it was another world (and Buxton, next to Scardale, was the great metropolis).

I am sure I have read things other than crime in the last few months, but for the moment I can't think what. I need to check my bookshelves when I get home.

>65 rachbxl: I have at least one McDermid here to read, I forget the title now. I read her standalone stuff. The book waiting is in the pile with some Peter May and perhaps the most recent Alex Gray paperback (ha! all Scottish authors!)

I do have to say that I did not like and didn't finish the most recent Denise Mina out in hardcover. It was a standalone. It just disagreed with me.

I hope you'll join us in 2018. Life does get in the way sometimes.

>66 avaland: I gave up on a Denise Mina standalone last year; can't remember the title now. It just didn't do anything for me - interesting that you had a similar experience.

Still trying to remember what else I've read this year but not recorded (because I know there was more than crime novels!) Here's one:

Notes from an Exhibition by Patrick Gale

Having not particularly enjoyed the only other Patrick Gale I've read (The Whole Day Through, which I just couldn't engage with), I'm not sure what drew me to this, but I'm glad something did.

Artist Rachel Kelly is found dead in her attic studio, leaving her saintly husband and their grown-up children to attempt to unravel the mystery that was the life of their loving, joyful, impetuous, cold, cruel, remote, infuriating mother, whose bipolar disorder was so entwined with her artistic inspiration. The novel flits between scenes of her life, seen through different characters' eyes (each chapter opens with a note from one of Kelly's exhibitions, hence the title), gradually building up a fuller picture which surprises both the family and the reader. Rachel's death is violent, and there is violence in her outbursts when mentally ill, yet despite this I found the novel gentle and reflective, and it drew me right in in a way that The Whole Day Through didn't.

>68 rachbxl: This seems like a very interesting book. Thanks for the review!

The Invisible Ones by Stef Penney

Finished this morning. I'd been longing for an unputdownable book for a while, and this certainly was that. I read all 500 pages in a couple of days.

Not-terribly-successful private detective Ray Lovell is offered a lot of money to find a Gypsy man's lost daughter, who disappeared 7 years ago, having been married off into another Gypsy family. Lovell understands that he has been chosen for the job because he is half-Gypsy himself, so has ways in that a 'gorijo' (outsider) doesn't. Even so, the family the lost girl married into, the Jankos, close ranks, and hide things from him, sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile.

Ray's narration is interspersed with sections narrated by JJ, a teenage member of the Janko family with a very convincing voice. JJ's narrative blends naive comments on his family life (and therefore on life as a Gypsy) with the usual teenage concerns - school, girls, and so on. The passages where he expresses his concern about what the girl he likes would think about the camp where he lives in a trailer are particularly poignant (but a moment later he turns back into an annoying teenager - he is really well done).

What a stroke of genius to divide the narration between these two particular characters; both are outsiders. Ray, for all that he is half-Gypsy, is still half-gorijo, and as a teenager, JJ spends much of his time shut out of adult conversations and drawing his own conclusions. I love the idea of having two outsiders narrate a story involving what is in itself an outsider community.

Enjoying your recent posts, Rachel.

There are good numbers of us in this group who have read a fair to large number of crime novels this year, so you are in good company. The Invisible Ones sounds interesting. Has your reading been mostly in English this year?

I am definitely guilty of over-indulging in crime novels this year. They seem to be my comfort reads, and that’s what I’ve needed.

Chlorine, Dan, avaland, NanaCC, thanks for stopping by!

>72 avaland: I think you'd like The Invisible Ones, Lois. I enjoyed The Tenderness of Wolves enough to give Stef Penney another try at some point (i.e. I wasn't in a huge rush - The Invisible Ones is from 2011), but on the basis of this I've moved her third novel, Under a Pole Star, right up my wishlist.

>73 NanaCC: Exactly, Colleen, it's my comfort reading too. I don't know another genre which (almost) guarantees a gripping story which is easy to read AND well-written.

Speaking of crime novels, here's another I've remembered:

Death of the Demon by Anne Holt
Translated from the Norwegian by Anne Bruce

The arrival of a 12-year old boy disrupts life in an Oslo children's home, where, on the surface, at least, all had previously been harmony and relative happiness. The boy, Olav, is disturbing - big for his age, belligerent, aggressive, hard to like, and without any of the innocence of a child. When the director of the children's home is found murdered, and Olav has run away, the case, in the hands of recently-promoted Chief Inspector Hanne Wilhelmsen and her team, seems fairly clear-cut.

And yet... This novel constantly reminded me of the old 'everyone is guilty of something', and this cast of wonderfully human characters have their share of guilty secrets. I liked the way Anne Holt did this - enough to make them all into very credible (flawed) human characters (and to keep up the suspense!), but judiciously dosed (it could easily have been too much, but she avoids that).

My overall enjoyment was marred, though, by a clunkiness which I would tend to blame, perhaps unfairly, on the translation.

>24 avaland: I've read most of Anne Holt's crime novels, and read Odd Numbers this year, a recent Hanne Wilhelmsen, I think. I noticed recently also that there has been a television drama made from one of the Vik and Stubo series, although I have not seen it.

>75 avaland: This was the first I'd read. I'll try more, but probably not for a while.

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

An engrossing family saga about Koreans in Japan, spanning just about the whole of the twentieth century. I do like a good family saga, and I like a book that helps me discover a time and/or place I was unfamiliar with, and this one certainly did that. I had no idea about the phenomenon of Korean migration to Japan, or about the discrimination suffered not just by the migrants themselves, but by their Japan-born descendants. In this novel, good jobs are closed to the Koreans (unless, like one of the characters, they hide their heritage and cut off all ties with their family, living a pretend life as a fake Japanese), and the only lucrative avenue open to them is working in, or running, or even owning, pachinko parlours (pachinko is a kind of Korean pinball, on which people gamble). The Korean pachinko industry in Japan, though, is notorious for its links with gangsters ('yakuza'), so even 'clean' Koreans who have made their fortune working in it (like one of the characters here) are looked down on by the Japanese.

There are lots of great characters here, both male and female, Korean and Japanese. There is also a strong sense of place, very evocative. In the final pages, Sunja, now a 73-year old grandmother who has lived in Japan for over 50 years, dreams of her native island near Busan, and wakes up with vivid memories; my memories of her small island were vivid too, because Min Jin Lee had conveyed it so well in the first part of the novel.

However, compelling story and great characters notwithstanding, I got frustrated with the way the story was told. First of all, it's written in quite colloquial American, and I don't just mean the dialogue (lots of colloquial American there too, which didn't rung true for me in the mouths of these very non-American characters), but also the narration. For no story-telling reason that I can think of, the register is too low, and at times i felt I was reading a high school student's secret diary. Had the register been a bit higher, the language would have been less American, more neutral, and it wouldn't have jarred with me so much.

The impression I had of reading a teenager's diary wasn't helped by irritating inconsistencies and bits of sloppy language which really should have been edited out. For example:

'"Just study," Hansu had said to Noa. "Learn everything"'
then two lines later:
'Hansu never told him to study, but rather to learn.'

Or:
'Curiously, he did not drink or go out to clubs'.
No, i don't find it 'curious'; this is completely in keeping with the Noa that I have 'known' since he was born. What Min Jin Lee really means is, 'to the surprise of his colleagues' (because they know him less well), or, 'unlike most of his male colleagues'.

Another gripe I have is with the length. I know it's a family saga, but it didn't have to be 530 pages long; there is a fair amount of padding: scenes that serve neither to advance the narrative, nor set the scene, nor develop characters, and characters who are introduced apparently just for the sake of it, only to disappear again. I also found it quite irritating to be frequently reminded of things I already knew - no need, for example, to tell me, 'Solomon, who had grown up in Yokohama in his father's house, had never rented an apartment before'; I know, I was there! THere's also too much telling and not enough showing.

These are things which would have seen me throwing most books aside in frustration, so it's a testament to this wonderful story that I stuck with it.

Wondering if I should hunt this down. Seems a common thing recently - good story where writer sort of pulls it off, but not really. The book I’m listening to, Miss Burma, has that characteristic - without the “low register”. It’s an excellent story and based on real lives, but the writer has long sections where she is just forcing, sanguine writing with repetitive unoriginal silly characterizations. I find myself interested and annoyed at the same time.

I hadn't seen this book, but until my order today, it had been out of stock at the bookstore, so I assume it has been in demand. It sounds both tempting and yet....

>78 dchaikin: 'interested and annoyed at the same time' - yep, I can identify with that! I know I said low register, but that's maybe a bit misleading; I was trying to get across the idea of a breathless, gushing style, syntactically very simple, using basic words rather than mixing them up with more sophisticated synonyms. A bit like bad chick lit, although I suspect you may not have read much of that ;-)

>79 avaland: I'll be interested to see what you make of it, Lois. I guess the Americanisms will jar less with you, anyway. The story and the characters are still very much with me.

Pachinko has been on my maybe list since it came out. I do love a family epic, but I've seen enough iffy reviews that I'm not sure I want to invest the time.

I mostly really liked Lee's first novel, Free Food for Millionaires, so I'll still read Pachinko, but I'm glad to be prepared for some issues... At least with audiobooks some of the writing issues don't stand out as much (since we're used to speech being looser maybe).

Great review of Pachinko, Rachel. I have far too many books that I would rather read instead, and I couldn't get through Free Food for Millionaires, so I'll pass on this one despite the attention it's received this year.

>81 japaul22:, >83 kidzdoc: I’ve always thought that one of the great things about LT, and in my case CR in particular, is that there are people out there who read things so I don’t have to. Happy to have returned the favour!

>82 mabith: I’ll look forward to seeing what you make of it. Interesting what you say about audiobooks - it doesn’t work that way for me, unfortunately, probably because I listen for a living (conference interpreter). I hear far too much sloppy speech at work to have any tolerance for it in my own time!

Here’s one from earlier in the year that I’d forgotten (I was happy to have done so):

Summer House with Pool by Herman Koch
Translated from the Dutch

I read The Dinner a few years ago, and kind of enjoyed it, whilst feeling a little bit manipulated as a reader. The premise was interesting enough - how far would you go to protect your loved ones? -, and whilst I didn’t love the novel, it was refreshingly original. Summer House with Pool felt like it was the author’s second stab at the same thing. Look! It was a best-seller once, so I’ll do it again. Only where The Dinner was more or less credible, and the characters more or less realistic (not necessarily likeable, but in the way that real people aren’t always), this one tests the limits of credibility. The narrator, a doctor, and the other main male character, are both so unlikeable I found it hard to care what happened to them. I persisted with the book because it was there (I didn’t like The Dinner enough to have bought this; I found it on a swap shelf), and also because I wanted to think there would be some twist that made reading it worthwhile. There wasn’t, and I was left wanting those hours back.

Finishing the year on a high note with two great reads:

History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund

I really enjoyed this sparing, beautiful novel set in the remote backwoods of Northern Minnesota. In my comments about Pachinko I complained about too much telling and not enough showing; the elegant writing here was the perfect antidote.

Lonely teenager Madeline (her real name)/Linda (the name she gives to a new family who move to the area - Linda surely lives a more exciting life than Madeline) is a misfit both at home (a former commune) and at school. When the new family (father, mother and small boy) arrives, they represent a chance for her to fit in somewhere, and she gives up her waitressing job to babysit for them, spending increasing amounts of time at their home in the lake. The reader knows from the start, though, that something is wrong - but what? Most of the novel is set during this one summer, with the narration clearly working towards a climax of some kind - but what? There are also chapters narrated by Linda as an adult, looking back to that fateful summer which shaped her life, and working towards the same climax. So the reader is drawn, slowly, gently, through the beautiful woods and over the sparkling lake, towards the inevitable (unknown) conclusion, and that knowledge throws an eery shadow over everything that takes place. The teenage Linda trots on regardless, innocent of the shadows, while the adult Linda looks back and wonders if she should have known.

This is Emily Fridlund’s first novel, and on the basis of this I’m looking forward to more from her.

The Greatcoat by Helen Dunmore

A delicious ghost story of a novella which deserves to be read by the fire, in one sitting. That’s not quite how I read it, but that’s where I wanted to be.

The Yorkshire moors in 1952, and Isabel Carey, newly married, has just arrived in an inhospitable small town with her husband, a doctor, who is rarely home. Isabel is lonely, and struggling to adapt to her new life. The unfriendly (and rather odd, Isabel finds) landlady of the cold, gloomy flat they were forced to rent for want of anything else refuses to countenance Isabel’s request for extra blankets. Isabel shivers between the cold, damp sheets, until she finds an old RAF greatcoat hidden in the top corner of the cupboard. She spreads the greatcoat over her in bed; it brings her warmth, but it also brings an airman, knocking at the window...

Thanks for your useful review of Summer House with Swimming Pool, Rachel. I mildly enjoyed The Dinner, but I'll pass in this one.

Yours is the second positive review about History of Wolves in the past 10 minutes, so I'll be sure to read it in 2018.

>88 kidzdoc: I think you’d like History of Wolves, Darryl. I’m also fairly confident that you can give Summer House with Pool a miss.

Signing off here on a fairly dismal reading year in 2017; hoping to do better (and be more active) in CR 2018.