Q3 Favourite Reads

Where does time go? It's already the end of the third quarter. What stood out for you in your reading?

Q3 was a great reading quarter for me. I finally read Moby Dick after promising myself and everyone else for years past that I would do so.

Best reads:

Silas Marner (reread) by George Eliot
The Confidential Agent by Graham Green this one was a surprise best
All the Names by José Saramago
The Seventh Cross by Anna Seghers

All of these with the exception of the Saramago are still to be reviewed - yikes!

>2 SassyLassy: I've just started Silas Marner (this is my first time reading it), but I doubt I'll finish it before the end of the month.

This quarter, I particularly enjoyed:
The Secret to Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel - I think it's the first time a graphic novel made it to my Top 3
The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years by Chingiz Aitmatov
and Le dernier livre de Madrigaux, Philippe Jaccottet's last and posthumous poetry collection

I really disliked Monasphère by Catherine Redelsperger and Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

And I found both Querelle by Kevin Lambert and Epictetus's Enchiridion unratable, although for different reasons.

>2 SassyLassy: Congratulations on reading Moby Dick! I put The Confidential Agent on my list.

Enjoyed Agatha of Little Neon over the weekend laid up in bed. Awaiting results of covid test from this morning. Doubt it that's what it was because I have had both Modernas, but having covid would rule out a lot of other weirder things that will require a boat load of diagnostic tests that I am SO not in the mood for now that the weather is nice again.

Figure Matrix and Tylenol will get me through another couple of days.

Q3 was a good reading quarter for me as well (or at least August and September were, anyway).

My most enjoyed titles were:

This Game of Ghosts by Joe Simpson - sequel / prequel to Touching the Void
More Than a Woman by Caitlin Moran - probably only of interest to middle-aged mothers
84 Charing Cross Road / The Duchess of Bloomsbury by Helen Hanff - just joyous old-fashioned wit
Childhood, Youth, Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen - 2 out of 3 of these volumes were gold star reading
The Maiden Dinosaur by Janet McNeill - echoes of Anita Brookner and Barbara Pym.

I've read many great books this quarter! Here are my highlights.

Book of Ebenezer le Page by GB Edwards - Guernsey Island fictional memoir of a life spanning the 1900s, surprisingly wonderful
Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller - excellent characters and a look at both poverty and the consequences of family secrets
Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy - the migration of the last group of Arctic terns; destruction of the environment and the main character's troubled life
The Life and Death of the Great Lakes - excellent and readable look at the environmental chaos we've caused in the Great Lakes
Damnation Spring by Ash Davidson - another work of fiction centered around our destruction of the environment; not a perfect book, but memorable and an impressive debut
The Land Breakers by John Ehle - settlers in the 1700s trying to carve out a home in the mountains of North Carolina

I hope to add one or two more books to my list this week, but three of the books from this year's Booker Prize shortlist were my favorites of this quarter:

A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam (5 stars)
The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed (4½ stars)
The Promise by Damon Galgut (4½ stars)

>2 SassyLassy: congrats on Moby Dick...although it seems to be missing on your favorites list : )

I read a lot of good books this quarter, but only two that really struck enough to post them here. Both were audiobooks and both on Booker lists. Moon Tiger made the Golden Booker Prize shortlist as the 1980's selection. Who They Was was on the 2020 longlist.

Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively - easily one of my favorite audiobooks ever. It's a sort of a book of intellectual joy... plus a good plot.

Who They Was by Gabriel Krauze - a giant rung down and a problem book because the author probably belongs in prison for past crimes and shows no remorse. (he claims, when his fictional self was being sentenced, he was never caught for his worst stuff.) So, it maybe doesn't deserve being here. But ... it gripped me while and listening and still has me thinking about it. So here it is. On audio Krauze reads it himself, with his natural accent.

Didn't read as much this quarter but my favorites were:

FICTION:
Lucca by Jens Christian Grøndahl (1998, trans. 2002, Danish author).

The Idea of Perfection by Kate Grenville (2001, Australian, re-read!)

NONFICTION:
The Archaeology of American Cemeteries and Gravemarkers by Sherene Baugher and Richard Viet (2016, Archaeology/Anthropology)

POETRY
Judgment Day: poems by Sandra M. Gilbert (2019)

The best of Q3 for me:

Nonfiction:

Helium by Rudy Fransisco Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man by Eammanuel Acho
Football Hackers by Christopher Biermann

Fiction:

Real World by Natsuo Kirino
This is Pleasure by Mary Gaitskell
Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsumjimura
Bullet Train by Kotara Isaka

So far it looks as if everyone had a good reading quarter. If only they were all like that!

>8 dchaikin: congrats on Moby Dick...although it seems to be missing on your favorites list : )
You noticed! It wasn't bad, it just wasn't one of the best. Now I have to review it!

>3 Dilara86: Interested to see how you find it. I felt it was a really worthwhile reread.

>4 nohrt4me2: I think you'll like it.

>2 SassyLassy: Graham Greene sneaks on you that way, doesn't he? :) And congrats on finally getting the whale :)

>3 Dilara86: Welcome to the dark side. Uhm, I mean the "we read everything side" ;) Too bad for Algernon :( It is one of my favorite books.

I've never done this, but I'll jump in. Lists are chronological.

Fiction:
These two titles look at the refugee and immigrant experience in recent decades.
Shyam Selvadurai – The hungry ghosts. Linked, like his other books, to the civil war in Sri Lanka, this novel deals with the burden of continuing to carry the responsibilities of the old culture while trying to pick up and balance those of the new.

Omar El Akkad – What strange paradise. The photo of the tiny body of Alan Kurdi, washed up on a beach on Kos in 2015, haunted the world. Inspired by that image, El Akkad has invented Amir, five years older than Alan, whose apparently lifeless body is also found on a beach on Kos. Amir, however, revives, escapes the police, and makes his way with difficulty to what strange paradise? Beautifully written and enigmatic, the novel demands that its readers, especially its comfortable, white, European or North American readers, wrestle with some hard questions.

Non-fiction:
Mohamed Abdulkarim Ali – Angry queer Somali boy. Uprooted by civil war in his homeland, Ali became, essentially, a throw-away child, tossed around from one unloving adult to another, until he landed in Toronto. The similarities between his experience there and the experience of Selvadurai's narrator strongly suggest that Canada is far from welcoming and supportive of its refugee immigrants. Fierce and eloquent.

Hans Blumenberg – Lions. The German philosopher has collected a series of essays, most less than three pages, all dealing in some way with lions, a particular fascination of his. In its whimsy and allusiveness, it reminds me of William H. Gass's On being blue and provides similar pleasures.

Giorgio Agamben – What is real?. Agamben's essay is less than fifty pages long, but it's a challenging read. Nonetheless, I am pleased to have been introduced through it to Ettore Majorana, the Italian atomic physicist whom Enrico Fermi judged to be a genius in the same rank as Galileo and Newton. In 1938 at the age of thirty-one, and on the threshold of a brilliant career, Majorana simply disappeared. No firm trace of him has ever been found, although suicide has been pretty much ruled out. Working with a posthumously published essay by Majorana and Simone Weil's contemporary essay "Reflections on quantum theory", Agamben proposes that the decision to disappear may have expressed Majorana's understanding of the nature of reality. Of course, I may have seriously missed the point.

I've had another excellent quarter of reading. No duds, just lots of good to great books. I attribute this at least in part to the sheer number of buddy reads I've been participating in, and the fact that I actually have a list to dedicating space in my book journal to record my favorites on a monthly basis. I'm still catching up on the record of my thoughts in my personal thread. My favorites for the quarter, more or less chronologically:

Fiction
Framley Parsonage by Anthony Trollope
Pocket Apocalypse by Seanan McGuire
Frederica by Georgette Heyer
The Last Enchantment by Mary Stewart
Sweet Talk by Cara Bastone
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson (reread)
Sorcery of Thorns by Margaret Rogerson
The Mystery of the Clockwork Sparrow by Katherine Woodfine
Waiting for Spring by Anashin (the whole series, partial reread)
The Small House at Allington by Anthony Trollope
Touch Not the Cat by Mary Stewart
The Paper Magician by Charlie N. Holmberg
Destroyer of Worlds by Larry Correia
Thornyhold by Mary Stewart

Nonfiction
C. S. Lewis' Letters to Children by C. S. Lewis
The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage

>11 SassyLassy: Interested to see how you find it. I felt it was a really worthwhile reread.
I'm liking it so far, but it's a slow read because the writing is quite dense and I'd rather take my time and not miss anything.

>12 AnnieMod: Welcome to the dark side. Uhm, I mean the "we read everything side" ;) Too bad for Algernon :( It is one of my favorite books.
Thank you! I feel that I am not a real graphic novel aficionada because I clearly prefer it when they read like non-graphic novels, if it makes sense?
Algernon is really polarising: a member of my book group suggested we read it because it was one of his favourite novels. Everybody else found it moving and beautiful and all the rest of it, but I felt manipulated.

>11 SassyLassy: Not liking it, but fascinated by the lack of modern imagination that cannot conceive how anybody but a gigantic, scary, smart lesbian with heretical ideas about the BVM as co-redemptrix could possibly pull a failing abbey together. It defies what we know about English abbesses and the English monastic tradition.

>15 Dilara86: And how is a graphic novel supposed to read? :) I know what you mean but part of it that you expect the medium to be something specific. It had changed a lot in the last decades and there are as many different styles and types as you will find in prose. Some work for some people, some don’t. Just like any book :)

My reading has slowed down, but I still read 17 books this quarter. Mostly they were all very good. Three that stand out above the others:

All My Puny Sorrows, Miriam Toews
The Garden of Monsters, Lorenza Pieri
Bitter Orange, Claire Fuller

Despite spending much more time out and about in Q3 than in previous months, I seem to have finished quite a lot of books. Probably there were more short ones than usual. Most of the highlights were fairly predictable, from authors I knew already, but there were a number of books that took me by surprise in a good way:

- Bergkristall : und andere Meistererzählungen by Adalbert Stifter — fabulous writing about people and landscapes.
- Le banquet annuel de la confrérie des fossoyeurs by Mathias Enard‬ — a writer I already knew about, but unlike any of his other books that I've read, a very enjoyable novel about rural life in 21st century France
- Some kids I taught and what they taught me by Kate Clanchy — a blisteringly clear view of what education is supposed to be about and the things that frustrate it
- Beyond the blue horizon : how the earliest mariners unlocked the secrets of the oceans by Brian M Fagan — seafaring before the "age of discoveries"
- Afterwardness by Mimi Khalvati — the sonnet is alive and well!

After getting out from my reading slump in the last days of Q2, I somehow managed to finish 94 books this quarter (which is more than Q1+Q2 combined and what I would usually read in half a year). I blame it on the Arizona summer...

Favorite reads:

Poetry and drama:
Black Girl, Call Home by Jasmine Mans - a poetry collection which is deceptively easy but stays with you. I am The Rage by Martina McGowan would have made this list if not for Mans' volume - they are very very different but come from the same place and I just find Mans' lyrical style better than McGowan's much more fiery one.
Beethoven Variations: Poems on a Life by Ruth Padel - another poetry collection which can server as a biography if one is so inclined
The Wild Fox of Yemen: Poems by Threa Almontaser - when two cultures collide
Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry and its website companion
Gloria by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins - the publishing industry and its short memory in a play that somewhere between tragic and comical.

Novels (excluding series - it is complicated there - they work inside of their series):
At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop - dark and crazy in places and it stays with you long after you read it
Kindred by Octavia E. Butler - time travel and a historical novel rolled into one and done properly on both ends.
Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler - even if you are tired of vampire tales, you need to read this one.
A Town Called Solace by Mary Lawson - melancholy and slow novel which does not seem to go anywhere but somehow works. I think I am checking some of her other books.

Short stories:
Prefecture D by Hideo Yokoyama - very Japanese, very proper. Probably not everyone's style but it fits mine. Plus seeing some of the people from 64 is a bonus.
Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda - deceptively simple while reading but building up towards a unity. I've seen novels which are connected less at the end than this short story collection was. And the glimpses into the Japanese supernatural legends and plays and what's not was interesting
Songs for the Flames: Stories by Juan Gabriel Vásquez - Columbia at its awful glory (with a side dish of European travel). Sad and good
Born Into This by Adam Thompson - stories about and of Aboriginal Tasmania.

Non-fiction
Before the Revolution: America's Ancient Pasts by Daniel K. Richter - American history up to 1763 without crazy notions. It is a hard read but it actually works.
This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth - I dare you to read this book and then talk to Siri ;)
Diné: A History of the Navajos by Peter Iverson and its companion volume of primary documents - may not be the easiest reading but it was what I was looking for.

And despite my "no new series" attempt, 2 new series managed to grab me because their first books work very well:
Jane Whitefield: Vanishing Act by Thomas Perry - this should have sounded cliched abut Perry somehow pulls off the plot twists without spoiling them and without feeling like a cheat
Ruth Galloway: The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths

A few honorable mentions which grew on me although did not really make my "best of" list:

Silent Winds, Dry Seas by Vinod Busjeet - the boy from Mauritius who went back home and told us the story of the island through his memories.

Late City by Robert Olen Butler - the history of the first part of the 20th century through the eyes of a man that saw it all and needs to make peace with it on the election night in 2016. That novel was annoying at parts but at the end it ended up working a lot better than I expected at the middle of it.

Notes from the Field by Anna Deavere Smith - thought provoking and important but I wish it had some analysis (yes, blaming a book for what it is not supposed to be...)

The Nebraska Dispatches by Christopher Cartmill - an exploration on the question "who has the right to tell someone's story?" among other things.

The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji - homage to the Golden Age of mystery in the West. Not the perfect novel but still...

It may actually be easier to list the books that did not work for me this quarter than the ones I liked - it was a good quarter.

PS: And I need to write my reviews on a lot of those books

>20 AnnieMod: A Town Called Solace by Mary Lawson - melancholy and slow novel which does not seem to go anywhere but somehow works. I think I am checking some of her other books.

I can recommend Crow Lake.

Chiming in a bit late with my best reads of Q3, using my usual lazy criterion of including anything I gave 4.5 or 5 stars to:

The Burning Blue: The Untold Story of Christa McAuliffe and Nasa's Challenger Disaster by Kevin Cook
Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory by Raphael Bob-Waksberg
Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Which is not a very long list, but then, I did have a lot of four-star books trailing in behind those, so I'd hardly say it was a subpar three months of reading.

Super late with my list, but these are the ones that (months later) I recall enjoying. Three of them are BBs from CR.

The War That Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley
The Rose Code by Kate Quinn
The Grandest Bookshop in the World by Amelia Mellor
An Easy Death by Charlaine Harris
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
The Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice
The Institute by Stephen King
Meet Me In Another Life by Catriona Silvey

>23 rhian_of_oz: If you can recall them now, they were the definitely the ones that stood out.

_______________________

Q4 thread will be posted next week - there's still time to get in more books!

Squeaking under the deadline with my Q3 favorites:

1. Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
2. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
3. Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov

>25 labfs39: A list that makes me smile. I read, and loved, all three of those books this year.

>25 labfs39: I've read the first two Mantel books and loved them. I will do a reread in 2022 so I can finally read the third. And I really should get to Pnin as you two keep harkening its praises :)

I didn't read much in Q3 and I didn't like those books that much anyway, except for one:
How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue.

>27 Yells: as you two keep harkening its praises

Lol. Yes, Dan and I tend to egg each other on with our enthusiasms.

Oh, but it’s fun. And I like “harkening” in this context.

>30 dchaikin: Doh! I meant it in a festive way but now that I look up the meaning, I see that it can mean annoying. Oops! Once I upgrade my computer hacking skills, I'll just change 'annoying' to 'festively championing' and we will all be good. :)

>31 Yells: Oh, I really like the word and didn’t see that definitive. I saw “To have origin in or be reminiscent of a past event or condition; recall or evoke” (although it’s a little tricky because “harken” is a sort of contemporary adjustment to “hark back”, and it not the same as “hearkin” - which has the same origin but means to listen attentively)

I read a lot during the third quarter, especially during the summer holiday.

Four books with a five star rating and one 4.5.

Diesseits
A complete collection of tales
Der Sandmann
The portrait of a lady
The woman in white