Nickelini Reads in 2021, part 3

It's October, and my last thread was getting long, so here's my last thread of 2021

BOOKS READ IN 2021


Having a melancholy season here. See my post below for my reasons.

December

83. The Wolf's Secret, Dahman, Digard & Sarda
82. A Castle in the Clouds, Kerstin Gier
81. Murder Most Festive, Ada Moncrieff
80. Dreaming of Christmas, TA Williams
79. Sanatorium, Sarah Pearse
78. The Baby Is Mine, Oyinkan Braithwaite

November

77. Portobello, Ruth Rendell
76. Foe, JM Coetzee
75. Un Giorno Diverso, Marco Dominici
74. The Devil's Cloth: a History of Stripes, Michel Pastoureau
73. Eight Ghosts, Various
72. The Chrysalids, John Wyndham

October

71. Haunted, Barbara Haworth-Attard
70. Unsettled Ground, Claire Fuller
69. Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia
68. Six Stories, Matt Wesolowski

September

67. Life on the Refrigerator Door, Alice Kuipers
66. Fluent Forever, Gabriel Wyner
65. On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf
64. All My Puny Sorrows, Miriam Toews
63. The Last September, Elizabeth Bowen
62. Wave, Eric Walter

August

61. Wildlives, Monique Proulx
60. The Emissary, Yoko Tawada
59. The Italian Matchmaker, Santa Montefiore
58. In Other Words, Jhumpa Lahari
57. The Garden of Monsters, Lorenza Pieri
56. After Hannibal, Barry Unsworth

July

55. Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie
54. Breath, Tim Winton
53. Bitter Orange, Claire Fuller
52. Bridget Jones's Diary (And Other Writing): 25th Anniversary Edition, Helen Fielding
51. Feminist City, Leslie Kern

June

50. The Godmother, Hannelore Cayre
49. Machiavelli, Ross King
48. Dreaming of Italy, TA Williams
47. Why Should I Learn to Speak Italian: The Strugglers' Guide to "le Bella Lingua", Gerry Dubbin
46. Spring, Ali Smith
45. We All Fall Down, Daniel Kalla

May

44. One More Croissant for the Road, Felicity Cloake
43. The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, Stuart Turton
42. On the Edge, Markus Werner
41. A Girl Returned, Donetella Di Pietrantonio
40. The Likeness, Tana French
39. Volatile Texts: Us Two, Zsuzsanna Gahse
38. Food Floor: My Woodward's Days, Margaret Cadwaladr
37. Hansel & Greta: a Fairy Tale Revolution, Jeanette Winterson

April

36. Beyond the Pale, Emily Urquhart
35. Anxious People, Fredrik Backman
34. The Housekeeper & the Professor, Yoko Ogawa
33. A Fairy Tale, Jonas T Bengtsson
32. Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
31. Bride of New France, Suzanne Desrochers
30. Tales From The Inner City, Shaun Tan
29. The Cockroach, Ian McEwan

March

28. The Wanderer, Peter Van Den Ende
27. How To Build A Girl, Caitlin Moran
26. Here Is the Beehive, Sarah Crossan
25. Whatever, Michel Houellebecq
24. Tiny Book of Tiny Stories, Winnow
23. Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett
22. Passing, Nella Larson
21. Mothering Sunday, Graham Swift
20. Venice Rising: Aqua Granda, Pandemic, Rebirth; various
19. Down By the River, Edna O'Brien
18. There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
17. The Chalet, Catherine Cooper

February

16. The Better Mother, Jen Sookfong Lee
15. The Weather Detective, Peter Wohlleben
14. Theft By Finding, David Sedaris
13. Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
12. Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill, Dimitri Verhulst
11. The Hunting Party, Lucy Foley
10. Peace Talks, Tim Finch

January

9. Alpine Cooking: recipes and stories from Europe's grand mountaintops, Mereditth Erickson
8. Moon of the Crusted Snow, Waubgeshig Rice
7. The End of Her, Shari Lapena
6. The Gilded Cage, Camilla Lackberg
5. Fantasviss, C.H. Roserens
4. Happisland, C.H. Roserens
3. Dunger, Joy Cowley
2. The Essex Serpent, Sarah Perry
1. The Lost Spells, Robert MacFarlane

Earlier header pictures, changed each season:


This might be my favourite bridge in the world: The Ponte Della Madelina, aka The Devil's Bridge. We make sure we visit this spot just north Lucca, in Tuscany, whenever we visit my husband's family in Italy. It is a crossing on the Via Francigena-- the medieval pilgrimage route from Canterbury through France and Switzerland, on the way to Rome, and then on to the Holy Land.


Summer in Ticino, Switzerland


Magnolia blooms in Ticino, Switzerland

READING STATS 2021 (updated monthly)

Total books read: 83
Different authors: 80
New to me authors: 60
Fiction - 69 (83%)
non-fiction - 7 (8%)
memoir - 7 (8%)

Nationality of author:

UK - 29 (34%)

Canada - 15 (18%)

Italy - 5 (6%)

Switzerland - 4 (5%)
Ireland - 4
USA - 4

Australia - 3 (4%)
France - 3

Nigeria - 2 (2%)
Germany - 2
Sweden - 2
Belgium - 2
Japan - 2

New Zealand - 1 (1%)
Russia - 1
Denmark - 1
South Africa - 1

It's complicated - 2 (2%)

Female/male authors:

Female - 46 (55%)
Male - 33 (40%)
Mixed - 4 (5%)

Original language:

English - 62 (75%)
Italian - 5 (6%)
German - 4 (5%)
French - 4
Swedish - 2 (2%)
Japanese - 2
Dutch - 1 (1%)
Russian - 1
Danish - 1
No words - 1

Year published:

1929 x 2
1930
1955
1972
1986
1991 x 2
1994
1996
1997
2003
2004 x 2
2006
2007 x 2
2008 x 4
2009 x 3
2010
2011 x 3
2012 x 2
2013 x 2
2014 x 4
2015 x 2
2016 x 6
2017 x 4
2018 x 5
2019 x 14
2020 x 11
2021 x 5

Travels in reading (where my books took me) :

Victorian-era Essex / Marlborough Sound, New Zealand 2013 / Iceland 2012 / Switzerland 2017 / Stockholm 2018 / fictional upstate New York town 2018 / foodie places in the Alps 2018 / dystopian Northwestern Ontario 2018 / Austrian Alps 2018 / Scottish Highlands over New Year's 2018 / village in Belgium / Nigeria 1980s / Sedaris's world 1977-2002 / Vancouver 1948 - 1982 / French Alps 1998 & 2020 / Soviet Russia & Post-Soviet Russia 1972 - 2002 / Ireland 1992 / Venice, Italy 2019 & 2020 / Berkshire March 30, 1924 / Chicago & NYC 1929 / Louisiana & SoCal 1958 - 1986 /France 1990s / London & Cork 2020 / Wolverhampton & London 1990s / oceans of the world / UK 2019 / Paris & Quebec 1600s / Invisible Cities / Denmark 1986-1999 / Japan 1992 / Sweden 2019 / Canada & Tanzania 2010-2015 / Vancouver 1890s - 1990s / Switzerland 2015 / Ireland 2005 / Italy 1976 / Lugano, Switzerland, 2003 / France 2018 / Genoa, Italy 2018 / England & Scotland 2018 / Pretty places in Italy 2019 / Renaissance Italy / Paris, 2017 / Hampshire 1969 / SW Ausralia 1970s / Umbria Italy, 1995 / Maremma, Tuscany, Italy 1980s / Amalfi Coast, Italy 2008 / Japan The Future / Laurentians, Quebec 2008 / Thailand, 2004 / Cork, Ireland, 1920 / Winnipeg & Toronto, 1974 - 2014 / Northumberland, UK 1990s & 2017 / Hidalgo, Mexico 1950 / Wiltshire 2018 / Bruce Peninsula, Ontario 1920 / Labrador, the future / Eight English Heritage Properties, various times / Rome, 2008 / South Atlantic & England, 1700 / Portobello Road, London, summer & autumn 2007 / Lagos, Nigeria, spring 2020 / Crans-Montana, Switzerland, January 2020 / Austrian Alps 2018 / Sussex, Christmas 1938 / Swiss Alps, Christmas 2019 - New Years 2020 / Fairytale northern forest

Author's nationality 2021


Create Your Own Visited Countries Map

DNF -- abandoned books

The Gift of the Game - Tom Allen
Sarah's Key - Tatiana de Rosnay
Jane Austen's Erotic Advice - Sarah Raff

I finished all the books I was juggling at the end of September, so October is a clean slate. I have two fiction books going, and I'm about 1/4 in on both and so far they are both so very good:

Six Stories by Matt Wesolowski - was supposed to be my book to keep at work, but I was so into it on Friday that I brought it home for the weekend


Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia - many mixed reviews on this one, but so far I'm loving it


I also need to find a non-fiction book to start . . .

So I followed Steve Kaufman's advice, and chose the language I am most interested in and motivated to study. And that is... Korean! My daughter loves k-pop and got me hooked on k-dramas, so I have some daily exposure to the language already. Although I had picked up some vocabulary and basic honorifics, I had not learned to read anything. I am now learning hangeul on Duolingo which should work okay for that purpose while I explore more options. I was looking up words I already know in Google translate to get the correct spellings, and discovered that not only does GT have the Korean keyboard right there, but it also allows you to handwrite in Korean. How fun is that!

love these photos.

>3 Nickelini: Wow! Korean! That's awesome. I hope you have lots of fun with that. There are lots of polyglots on YouTube doing Korean, so I think there are lots of resources online for you

>5 dchaikin:
Thanks. I try to curate the pictures that best fit my seasonal mood.

Re your Possession conversation in the previous thread:

My favorite Possession story is from my friend Meridith, who hated the book fiercely. At some point in the early aughts she was at a party with a bunch of older relatives, aunties and such, and walked into a conversation where she thought they were talking about the film version of the book, so she offered her two cents: "The film was OK, but I loathed the book it was based on! What a piece of lousy writing!" After a round of surprised looks, they finally established that they had been discussing The Passion, as in "of the Christ"—the Mel Gibson film based, of course, on the New Testament.

>7 lisapeet: LOL, that's quite the mix up. Also a terrible film, so all her sentiments were quite right in the end

Gorgeous photos. I had a pang of wanderlust there.

Going back to the languages topic, I am learning two languages at the moment. The first is French, which I’ve been studying for the past year at an intermediate level. And the second is Welsh, where I started a beginners course online a couple of weeks ago. Strictly speaking, I’m not a complete beginner, having studied it at school and done a further class about 25 years ago. But the bits I can remember are so random that it seemed better to start completely from scratch.

I wanted to do a second language this year and thought about Italian, which I could also have done at an intermediate level but thought Italian and French together might be confusing, whereas Welsh and French are quite different. And I was tempted by a very good deal in the Welsh course: £45 for the whole year with 2 1/2 hours of lesson a week via Teams plus interactive website for self-study.

>10 SandDune: That sounds like fun! Good luck with your language adventures

>2 Nickelini: I admire your reading/book 'stats'. I try to do it once in a while. Do you use it to monitor your variety of reading? Or to see trends (good or 'bad') in your reading you might not be aware of? Or do you find it just fun :-)

>12 avaland:

Thanks! The answer is "all of the above," but mostly I do it for fun. I just like lists and stats. I do somewhat monitor my reading variety -- I'm trying to read more books in translation. I don't really care about M-F variety -- I always read more women authors and I'm fine with that. I also enjoy looking at trends over the years.

I loved the video of the celebrities speaking Spanish in your previous thread, Joyce! I learned quite a bit from it as well. My Spanish is definitely better than Tyra Banks', but also definitely not as good as Freddie Highmore's; from that short clip he sounds like someone whose primary language is castellano, with the (not really) "lisps", or ceceos, that are characteristic of Iberian Spanish. (The oft told story that the pronunciation of classic Castilian Spanish is due to the lisp of a medieval King of Spain is an urban myth.) The most interesting parts to me were Olly Richards's discussions of set phrases that can be easily recalled from memory, and the ability to communicate with the listener by creating a phrase to replace a word that is not in one's dictionary or available for immediate recall. I realize that I do both of those things on a regular basis, especially the former, and I describe the latter to others (residents, medical students, nurses) by saying that "there are multiple ways to get from point A to point B."

I've probably said this multiple times previously, but I'm most comfortable and essentially fluent in speaking "Medical Spanish," something I've done multiple times a day when I'm on service for nearly a quarter of a century. My biggest weaknesses are in non-medical vocabulary, and verb conjugation, and I need to "unlearn" a good portion of the Spanish I've spoken for over two decades and relearn it the correct way before I'll consider myself to be truly fluent.

Darryl, what accent of Spanish do you have?

My "accent" comes from a mixture of influences, and is not unique to any particular country or region. I learned proper Castilian Spanish as a high school and undergraduate student, and I speak with some of the ceceos used in that language; for example, I pronounce adios as "ah-THEE-os" rather than "ah-DEE-os", but I don't say "ah-THOO-car" to pronounce azucar (sugar), rather "ah-SOO-car". It's rare that I encounter Spaniards in the United States, although one of my partners was born in Madrid (un madrileño), and the vast majority of the people I meet are from México or other countries in Central America. Many people have told me that I don't sound like an American when I speak Spanish, as a number of the politicians in the second video, and it's common that Latinx parents who meet me for the first time commend me for how good my Spanish is, and ask where I'm from, as they think that I'm not originally from the United States, but they can't tell where I grew up. I haven't completely figured out why, but the residents and medical students sometimes tell me that they can understand my Spanish when we see patients on rounds, but not the Spanish spoken by families, which confirms that I speak the language differently than they do.

I'm loving this topic; ¡Gracias, señora!

>14 kidzdoc:
I'm glad you liked the video too. I find those super interesting. I also find all your language details interesting. I'm quite fascinated by adults who learn other languages in general -- why, how, etc.

68. Six Stories, Matt Wesolowski, 2016


cover comments: overall I like this, but I do have mixed feedback on it. I'm always a fool for a forest on a book cover, and the reflected image is lovely. The colours are a bit . . . weird. The forest itself, to me, looks like forests I've been to in Northern Canada (BC, Yukon, Saskatchewan). Looking at the latitude, I guess they would have skinny tree forests like that in Northumberland, where the book is set, but that's not what I think of when I think of NE England. Anyway, at the same time, the forest shape mimics the shape of sound waves, which is very clever indeed. I don't love it, but it's a solid cover for sure.

Comments: The novel Six Stories is structured around the transcripts for six episodes of a "true crime" podcast, broken up by 1997 and 2017 text by one of the characters, Harry Saint Clement-Ramsay, adult son of Lord Ramsay, the owner of Scarclaw Fell, where all the action is set.

In 1996, a teenage boy disappeared from the outdoor centre at Scarclaw Fell, and his body didn’t surface until a year later. With little evidence to go on, the police deem it a death by misfortune. Over six episodes, podcaster Scott King interviews people who were closest to the event. Each episode deepens the mystery, while also providing clues to the boy’s death. There are two twists in the final episode. One didn’t make much sense to me, but I think was minor, and the big twist made everything fall into place and wrap up the story. A satisfying ending to the novel.

After the success of Six Stories, Wesolowski wrote several other novels using the same format. The podcaster Scott King has minimal personality, he’s more of a featureless narrator than a character, so I imagine these books could be read in any order. I’m not one to read series, but if I come across any other the other books, I’ll scoop them up.

Rating: 4 stars. A good, solid read. My biggest complaint about it was that the various voices and time periods were represented with different fonts, and some were difficult to see (for example, very fine print, in Italics. Egads).

Recommended for: If you're still here after reading all this, maybe you. Trigger warnings for bullying. A lot of bullying.

I don't see many of my LT people reading this one, so I wondered who pointed it out to me and I think it must have been Simon Savidge. I have to say, although I'm not interested in every one his recommendations, over the years, when he mentions something that sounds good, I almost always like it.

Why I Read This Now: It was on my Spooktober list, and the format looked like a suitable book to read on my breaks at work.

I’ve seen this cover online but this is the first time I realized they were trees.

Enjoyed your review.

>16 Nickelini: This sounds intriguing, although the trees on the cover do make me assume the book is set in Canada or Russia.

>18 RidgewayGirl: Indeed! And from playing GeoGuesser, also Finland and Sweden

69. Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, 2019


cover comments: Absolutely gorgeous. I loved this from when it was published, even though I assumed the book itself wasn't for me.

Comments: Socialite Noemi is sent from 1950s Mexico City to rescue her cousin who married an Englishman, disappeared to a mansion on a remote mountaintop northeast of the city, and then wrote a bizarre letter crying for help. Once at the rotting, dilapidated High House, Noemi struggles to makes sense of the strange world and the family who live there. Mexican Gothic drips with creepy atmosphere, and hits all the major Gothic tropes, and uses them to critique colonialism, misogyny and racism. And lots of mushrooms. Powerful, magical mushrooms.

There have been long lists of Moreno-Garcia's influences here. The one that stands out most for me is The Yellow Wallpaper. I've also heard this described aptly as "Jane Eyre meets Pan's Labyrinth."

Initially, I was a bit confused by the foggy, chilly English world that was physically in Mexico, but the author explains that she was inspired to write this after visiting silver mining ghost towns high in the mountains of Hidalgo. Mexico isn't all deserts and jungles, I learned.

It took me a year of ignoring all the hype around Mexican Gothic before I realized I wanted to read it. I decided to give it a try after hearing more about it, and then I found out that the author is Canadian and lives here in Vancouver and has a MA in Science and Technology Studies from the University of British Columbia (yes, was born in Mexico and is Latina). So I thought I'd give it a try and support a local writer.

Why I Read This Now: I didn't have this on my Spooktober TBR list, but then one of my favourite podcasts, Overdue, is reading it this month, so I did too so I can listen without spoilers.

Rating: 4 stars. Mexican Gothic gets a lot of 5 star reviews, and a fair number of 2 stars.

Recommended for: It's not for everyone, but if you like a Gothic novel that has more to it, give it a try. It appears that readers who are expecting a real horror novel find this one slow.

Also: Mexican Gothic is being made into a TV series for Hulu by Mark Consuelos and Kelly Ripa. I expect this will be beautiful on film.

I’ve visited a silver mine tourist town outside Mexico City. It was entertaining but I don’t remember dilapidated mansions. Anyway, this sounds really enjoyable.

>20 Nickelini: Definitely looking forward to that one.

>20 Nickelini: I also enjoyed that one quite a lot! I agree that it should be gorgeous on film.

>1 Nickelini: Happy New Thread. Bridges really do evoke a range of feelings depending on our associations with them. I've never seen this one, but it is truly beautiful.

>16 Nickelini: >17 dchaikin: Looking quickly, I didn't realize they were trees either, and trees are a big part of my life.

>20 Nickelini: She almost has a full head!
Like you, the cover was a "maybe not" for me, but I'm a fan of gothic, so who knows?

>24 SassyLassy: but I'm a fan of gothic, so who knows?

The thing that's great about Mexican Gothic is if you just want to read a horror-ish suspense novel, you can read it that way. But if you're interested, there are layers of added meaning and clever use of tropes that the author plays with. And it's a book about a Mexican woman written by an own voice rather than some random white author, if that means anything to you.

70. Unsettled Ground, Claire Fuller, 2021


cover comments: well how gorgeous is this?

Rating: 4.5 stars. Unsettled Ground was short listed for this year's Women's Prize. I know this is a new book, but I'm surprised there are only 186 LT members with this book. This author is on my radar for sure!

Comments: My subtitle for Unsettled Ground is "Thomas Hardy Meets Brexit" (or Thomas Hardy in modern Britain).

Unsettled Ground opens with the final minutes of 70 year old Dot in her cottage in Wiltshire. She leaves behind her 51 year old twin children, Jeannie and Julius, who have always lived with her. Due to a serious childhood illness, Jeannie has always stayed close by her mother, and is functionally illiterate, but can handle money and is talented with tending chickens, growing a vegetable garden, and basic sustenance home life. Julius can read, and has a pay-as-you-go mobile phone, but is unable to travel in any motorized vehicle, so gets around by foot and bike. He also has an entrepreneurial spirit, but no follow through (or ability to follow through). This has limited his career to casual labour near their little patch of farm. After their mother's death, J & J discover they have even less money than they thought and things go seriously downhill. If you can roll lower than treading water at sea level, that is (does that metaphor work? Probably not, but I'll carry on. . . ). Things go from proverbial bad to proverbial worse, but the ending has some threads of hope. Anyway, it's a satisfying and interesting read. There are family secrets that are revealed, but the reader becomes one of the townspeople who can figure out most of the secrets, and it's Jeannie and Julius who are in the dark. It's sad, but not make-you-cry sad, and sometimes it's beautiful.

Also: I know it's 50 min long, but I really like this conversation that Eric Karl Anderson had with the author, Claire Fuller about this book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV4URc6FtBU

One of the lovely threads in the book was how Jeannie and Julius loved to play music. Illiterate, and without TV, they played instruments and sang. In the interview (above), the author talks about how her folk musician son helped her with all the musical bits.

She also talks about how she had to figure out how to navigate the world being functionally illiterate. How do you get a job in 2018 if you have never touched a computer? How do you shop for groceries with 5 pounds 35, cover the necessities, make a meal and also feed the dog? (I can relate to that . . . my first grocery shopping trip on my own when I was 18, I came home with two bags full of stuff and realized I'd bought . . . milk, chocolate milk, orange juice, pop, and soup. Basically, I'd put myself on a liquid diet. Jeannie was MUCH smarter than I was!).

Maybe the most interesting thing she talks about is what inspired her to write this: her son took her to this abandoned, wrecked caravan in the middle of the English countryside. There was no drive going up to the caravan, it was stuck in some bushy area, and someone had obviously made it a home for a while, and it had since been wrecked by vandals. She wondered what would have to happen in someone's life for them to end up living in such a trailer. In Unsettled Ground, she describes this trailer to perfection-- at a visceral level-- and I was IN that trailer. I mentioned this at book club last night and got a mixture of responses . . . one friend turned to me and asked if I had some past trauma to share, and at the moment I couldn't say where I'd been in that same trailer before, but now I remember, that when I was a child and spent summers in the far, far north of British Columbia and the Yukon, these trailers were common on the outskirts of the little settlement I was at. Nothing bad ever happened to me in them, but they were pretty sad and sometimes a bit creepy, and mostly disgusting. And that was in the 1970s, and not 2018 when this book is firmly set (Clair Fuller says this is set pre-Covid).

The last interesting thing I remember from this interview is that Clair Fuller says that she couldn't find any books about rural poverty in England set in current times. She says there is a wealth of rural poverty set in the US, but not the Uk. (If you know of any, she wants you to contact her). So "rural English poverty" is a theme.

Why I Read This Now: I suggested Unsettled Ground for my book club this year, which runs October - June. Having read and loved the author's Bitter Orange this summer, I thought this sounded like a good selection. I didn't expect to be reading another Claire Fuller book so soon, but everyone wanted to read this, and they wanted to read it now.

Anyway, we had a great discussion (I think some of that was fueled by the excitement actually meeting in person), and of the 8 book club members, 6 of us finished the book. One member got confused and read a random book that we aren't even reading, and the woman who is the de facto leader of our book discussions read the November book by mistake. Much hilarity was had at their expense, and then our discussion centred around the six of us telling them about the book. It was a different format, but turned out to be quite fun. The de facto leader took someone's copy home because she still wanted to read it even though we told her pretty much everything.

It's not a bad format -- my favourite book podcast, Overdue, is two guys discussing a book. One reads the book, the other does some background research and then the reader explains the book to the other. They swap back and forth and have a discussion. They read widely, so if I'm not familiar with their selection, I don't listen, but when they read books I know it's always a lot of fun. Sometimes they team up with various female readers (I somehow discovered them via their Are You There God, It's Me Margaret episode.) Anyway, they're two geeky white straight American 30-something guys, so I sometimes yell at them, but they mean well. And that was a big tangent that had nothing to do with Unsettled Ground.

Recommended for: it's a bit sad for some readers, but the writing is gorgeous and the story is interesting. If that sounds like the kind of thing you like, this may be the book for you.

>26 Nickelini: I loved this review. The book, English rural poverty, your book club, the podcast. All interesting stuff. I'm off to search for Overdue.

>20 Nickelini: I picked this one up in my first post-lockdown trip to a bookstore and then it has sat on my shelf. I'm definitely going to pull this down and read it soon. Excellent review!

>26 Nickelini: This book was so very good.

And now I'll have to check out that podcast.

I've got my first Claire Fuller on order from the library (Bitter Orange). Looking forward to trying her writing.

Fun review, cool about the book club. I might be more interested in the Overdue podcast than the book, but the book sounds good too.

>26 Nickelini: Enjoyed your review. I am sure there is much rural poverty in the UK. I wonder if there is a government report about it.

>26 Nickelini: Agree, great review. Now I want to read it!

>27 labfs39:, >28 RidgewayGirl:, >29 AlisonY:, >30 dchaikin:, >31 baswood:, >32 mdoris:
Thanks, everyone! I hope if you do check out the Overdue Podcast that you enjoy it too. They have a pretty deep catalogue, so you should be able to find a book you're interesting in hearing them discuss.

>31 baswood: I am sure there is much rural poverty in the UK. I wonder if there is a government report about it.

I can't imagine they don't, but then the UK gov't has been a bit of a disaster the last bunch of years so who knows. Last time I was in England, which was a few years before Brexit, I remember seeing a series of newspaper articles about how former seaside holiday towns (I can't remember some of the names they listed, maybe Blackpool?) had become centres for welfare recipients and single mothers because the hotels and other accomodation was the only affordable place they could find. Certainly London had grown outside of their budget. The seaside holiday towns in Britain were in decline because cheap flights were taking Brits to Spain and other, warmer places. It made sense, but what do I know? The only seaside town I've been to in England was Brighton, which appeared to be doing well, thank you very much. Anyway, that's not exactly rural either. I just thought it was interesting.

Love your reviews, Joyce. I will eventually get to Unsettled Ground. I had borrowed it from the library, but let it go back before reading it. I didn’t think I could handle a depressing book right now.

Thanks! Well, file it on the "someday" shelf for now. I hope you don't forget it, because Unsettled Ground is an excellent read. I didn't find it depressing because I felt there was hope . . . a lot of their problems came from pride and not taking the help that was offered. But yeah, they go through some bad stuff for sure. If you don't want depressing, make sure you stay away from A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry. Now THAT's a seriously depressing novel.

Fabulous review of and very interesting comments about Unsettled Ground, Joyce. You've made me want to read it.

my first grocery shopping trip on my own when I was 18, I came home with two bags full of stuff and realized I'd bought . . . milk, chocolate milk, orange juice, pop, and soup. Basically, I'd put myself on a liquid diet.

Thanks also for this chuckle. I suspect that most if not all of us did something similar during freshman year of college.

My husband has been in the Bahamas this week for "work" and me having to go to the office Monday to Friday just seemed cruel and unfair, so I took two vacation days and went to Victoria Thursday and Friday night. I booked a waterfront hotel and got upgraded to a large suite with fabulous views. My daughter, who is going to university there, came and stayed with me and we went out for many meals, did a bunch of necessary shopping, had fancy cocktails at the Empress Hotel, and also spent quite a bit of time and money at Munro's bookstore and another bookstore, Bolen Books. Munro's is right in the heart of Victoria and I always go there, but even though Bolen Books has been around for 45 years, I've never made it there because it's outside of downtown and anytime I've happened to drive past, I could only gaze at it wistfully. So I finally got to stop in and it was spectacular! Different from Munros, but large and intelligently organized. Then I came home to find 2 book deliveries waiting on my front porch.

Munro's bargain tables were rich with treasures, and I found 4 of these there. Here's my total haul:

The Tenant, Katrine Engberg (Danish thriller)
Happiness, Aminatta Forna
Women Talking, Miriam Toews
Two Trees Make a Forest, Jessica J Lee - this is one of my book club's picks for this year, and my daughter and I both picked this up independently. Meant to be. Of course I bought it instead of making the student pay for it
Central Park, Guillaume Musso (French thriller)
Murder Most Festive: a Christmas Mystery, Ada Moncrieff
The Snow Ball, Bridgid Brophy
The Centaur's Wife, Amanda Leduc
No Touching, Ketty Rouf (a recent French Europa Editions)
The Adventures of Pinocchio, Carlo Collodi (Penguin recently released this new translation by John Hooper and Anna Kraczyna - my husband's Italian family lives very close to Collodi, so I've always thought I should read this. But the copy I have is one I bought at Collodi and I've always assumed to be a stilted, dated translation. When I saw there was a new translation from Penguin, I thought maybe this was the time)
Menno-Nightcaps: Cocktails Inspired By That Odd Ethno-Religious Group You Keep Mistaking for the Amish, Quakers or Mormons, SL Klassen (funny, years ago one of my best friends was an SL Klassen). A book of cocktail recipes mixed with Mennonite history (a group known for not drinking alcohol). How entertaining is that?

****
Help! I wanted to bring in some of my photos of Victoria from my phone but the one I took in portrait comes into LT sideways. The edit button doesn't have a flipping option. So I tried one of my landscape photos, and that one came in upside down. Who knows how to successfully post pictures from an iPhone into LT? Many thanks.

>37 Nickelini: What a lovely mini-vacation, Joyce! I'm so envious. When I lived in Seattle, I used to go up to Victoria (and Vancouver) and have many fond memories of the city (and bookstores). You brought home lots of good titles too.

ETA: I too can never get photos into LT correctly. Grrr.

Wonderful haul! I read The Snow Ball with my book club this past summer—it's delightfully strange and so intensely atmospheric it's really stayed with me.

Nice haul! For the photos, have you tried this--open them in a photo app first, like Picasa. Then change the orientation, if needed, and save the "edited" files into LT.

>40 kac522: Yep, that's what you need to do.

A somewhat of an explanation: Image formats had become complicated and one of the newish features is the orientation tag - aka which side is up. The phone honors the orientation tags of images. So it took the photo in whatever mode it wanted to and then when showing it to you, it honors the tag telling it which side is up. Modern systems will do something similar (FB for example). LT is an old-ish system for images (where old is not THAT old but the industry moves fast) When you upload on LT, the orientation tag is ignored so you get the image as is. Which was never a problem until the new phones and cameras decided that they WILL use the orientation tags and not even tell you how they save the image when you take a photo.

The easiest way to clear these is to save them somewhere where you have a picture editing software that can rotate and just re-save the pictures (you may need to rotate wrongly once to make it want to save a change, then rotate back to how it needs to be) based on what you see. That saves them with the proper orientation.

>40 kac522:, >41 AnnieMod:

Oh, great explanation. I'm not sure I'm up for that. I don't know anything about picture editing software. If I want to go there, should I just download Picasa?

I did have a nice photo of our view, and another lovely photo of my daughter and me on the deck at 4 in the afternoon, sorting through all our book purchases, full on sun and it was HOT, even tho the temps dipped to 2 degrees over night (that's about 35 for the fahrenheit crowd). Glorious.

>42 Nickelini: You can. If you have a Windows desktop, the default image editing tools also can do rotate and save (that's what I use when I need to). Or even the phone editing tool can do that in my experience - you do not need fancy software - you need one that does not do your thinking for you (which is why the phone cameras do what they do - they are "helping" you...)

2 degrees? And here I was complaining that early mornings here are a bit chilly these days at 15 Celsius (high 50s for the F crowd).

71, Haunted, by Barbara Haworth-Attard, 2009


cover comments: the ghost image is some pretty clumsy photoshop, but I love the idea of a haunted forest, so this is a "yes" for me

Comments: Here I sit on a Sunday Halloween night, listening to It's The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown soundtrack ("The Great Pumpkin Waltz" is a masterpiece, ah, when the flute comes in my heart melts every time, and the little piano thrill. And I also adore the haunting background of Snoopy crawling through WWI France) ,,, and I'm occasionally opening the door for Trick or Treaters (I live on a hill, so the smart kids go to the flat neighbourhoods to make better time). I have the window open and can hear a constant barrage of firecrackers.

It's a lovely, crisp evening, and a perfect time to talk about Haunted, a book I recently finished. I picked this up a decade ago when I volunteered at a huge book sale that my daughters' school held. I'd come home with a car full of books every time. None of the books were sorted, and no one there had to knowledge to do it other than me, and I couldn't sort 10,000 books in 7 hours so . . . I didn't realize this book was YA. Which is okay, I don't mind reading YA once in a while.

What The Book Is About: It's 1920 in a village on the Bruce Peninsula, an area that juts into Lake Huron in Ontario, and 14 year old Dee lives with her grandmother, who is a local midwife and sometimes healer. There are men who have returned from the war, and families who lost men, and families who lost people to the flu pandemic. Everyone had experienced loss, and most were poor. Bones of Dee's friend, who had disappeared four years earlier, were discovered on a hilly forest nearby. Everyone had assumed she had run away. Then there's another murder in the same area, and a history of dead teen girls, and it's clear there's a serial killer at work. Dee also sees dead people, so using that gift, she solves the murder mysteries.

A nice blend of historical fiction, paranormal, and murder mystery. I did guess one of the twists immediately, and figured out who the serial killer was, but that was fine. A bit predictable, but probably not so much for the target age group.

Why I Read This Now: Spooktober

Rating: for a book of it's type, a solid 4 stars

Recommended for: a great book for middle school readers. Although, from their reviews I read, some of them think it was set in the olden days when no one had a phone and had only been in an automobile twice . . . like the 1990s or even the 1960s (said one articulate reviewer who was otherwise spot on)

AND ON THAT NOTE: I just realized we are out of milk, and my husband needs it for his coffee in the morning and he comes home from the Bahamas late tonight. And even though he went to the Bahamas without me, he did leave me his car with a full tank of gas so I guess I'll go for a walk on a Halloween night. The trick or treat traffic has been slow . . .

>71 Nickelini: some of them think it was set in the olden days when no one had a phone and had only been in an automobile twice . . . like the 1990s or even the 1960s (said one articulate reviewer who was otherwise spot on)

That made me smile :-) I keep forgetting that the nineties are "the past".

72. The Chrysalids, John Wyndham, 1955


cover comments: I like this whole Penguin Wyndham series, and this is very nice

Comments: Clearly John Wyndham is reacting here to the nuclear fears of the 1950s. Hundreds of years in the future, people are living in a world that seems vaguely somewhere between the 1600 and 1800s, and is strictly religious. Every religious age has its focus, and theirs is on genetic purity. They don't know what brought on the "tribulation" generations earlier, but they know that man was made in god's image, and they've defined exactly what this means. Any deviation is intolerable and needs to be removed. Clearly the radiation fallout has caused not just humans, but also plants and animals to mutate. None of it is acceptable.

David Storm lives in a farming community with his family in Labrador. One day he befriends a girl, and it's soon found out that she has six toes, and so her family flees to the Fringes to live with all the other deviants. David realizes that he too is a deviant because he can communicate with a few other children through mental telepathy. They lay low through their teens, but then things bubble up when his much younger sister is revealed to have much stronger powers, and can communicate with another group in Seeland (New Zealand) where this deviation is looked at as superior to regular humans.

It took me a bit to get into The Chrysalids, but then it took off. I think this was a clever novel that stands up in 2021. There are some parts about religious fundamentalism and genetic purity that are as spot on today as they were almost 70 years ago (can we never learn?). The acceptance of others who are different is still good, and there are several strong female characters.

The Chrysalids has been on my mental-TBR for at least 40 years. One year, a bunch of the other English classes in my grade read The Chrysalids and some of my friends made it sound interesting, and an unusually high number of kids actually liked it. I don't know if this is still read in high school English class, but it sure should be! (I guess the fundies and racists wouldn't like that)

Why I Read This Now: I bought almost all of these Penguin editions of the John Wyndham books, and I try to read one each year. It seemed like a good October book, although it didn't fit into Spooktober

Rating: 4 stars . . . I liked it about the same as Day of the Triffids, maybe a bit more. But I liked Chocky the best, and I gave that one 4.5 stars. I liked it better than The Midwich Cuckoos, and I gave that 3.5. So maybe 4.25. Every time I read a Wyndham I think about how I would have been obsessed with his books if I'd read them when I was 19.

Recommended for: If you're even vaguely interested, I think you should give it a try.

Great review of The Chrysalids, Joyce!

>46 Nickelini: The Chrysalids was one of my favourite books as a teenager.

>72 Nickelini: yes it got four stars from me too.

>46 Nickelini: Another four stars here. It's the only Wyndham I've read. I'm making a note of Chocky.

>47 kidzdoc: Thanks!

>48 SandDune:, >49 baswood:, >50 labfs39:

Great to see some Wyndham fans . . . it's funny to me how I knew of him because The Chrysalids has been on my TBR list since high school, but he otherwise never came up again until I started following the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, now about 15 years ago (I think there are 3 of his on the list). I'm enjoying reading his books now, but I would have loved them 40 years ago, when I was really into things that I described as "like the Twilight Zone". They always get tagged "science fiction," which is a genre that I can never click with, but THIS kind of SciFi I can.

73. Eight Ghosts:The English Heritage Book of New Ghost Stories, various, 2017


cover comments: great cover for a book of ghost stories (sorry for the grainy picture)

Comments: English Heritage commissioned these ghost stories, each set at one of their 400 properties.

"They Flee From Me That Sometime Did Me Seek", Sarah Perry - inspired by Audley End, Essex
An inventive retelling of Sir Thomas Wyatt's 1535 poem, and probably my favourite poem from my university studies. Good and creepy.

"Mr Lanyard's Last Case", Andrew Michael Hurley - set at Carlisle Castle, Cumbria
The only story set in a historical period

"The Bunker", Mark Haddon - set at York Cold War Bunker
More SciFi-time travel than ghost story, this was interesting but too confusing for me

"Foreboding", Kamila Shamsie, set at Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire
Khalid, a new night security guard at the castle, is warned about the ghosts but it's the ghosts from his wartorn past that haunt him

"Never Departed More", Stuart Evers, set at Dover Castle, Kent
An American actress prepares for her role in an upcoming film, "Ophelia," by staying alone at Dover Castle. Things don't go as hoped.

"The Wall," Kate Clancy - set at Housesteads Roman Fort, Northumberland
A mother worried about her troubled teen plans a family outing at Hawesteads. Some readers found this predictable, but I was swept up in the emotion of the story and didn't predict anything. My personal favourite in the bunch

"As Strong As Death," Jeanette Winterson - inspired by Pendennis Castle, Cornwall
Tamara and Jamie's wedding at the castle is joined by ghosts

"Mrs Charbury at Eltham", Max Porter - set at Eltham Palace and Gardens, London
An elderly woman returns to Eltham in search of her sister who she left there 70 years earlier

I enjoyed each of these stories in its own way. They are all different from each other, as are the locations. The stories are followed by "Within These Walls," by Andrew Martin where he outlines the conventions of the classic English ghost story, and then "A Gazetteer of English Heritage Hauntings," which details a slew of English Heritage properties that have reported hauntings. The only one I've visited is Old Wardour Castle, Wiltshire. I have photos of the staircase where a ghost has been seen, but no misty apparition showed on my summer's day pictures.

Rating: 4.5 stars. Not a literary masterpiece or anything, but I loved everything about this

Recommendations: readers who like ghost stories set in England. None of them were scary, but there were a few creepy moments

Why I Read This Now: I started this for my Spooktober read, and didn't finish it before Halloween.

74. The Devil's Cloth: A History of Stripes, Michel Pastoureau, 1991; translated from French by Jody Gladding 2001


cover comments: it's okay I suppose, but I don't particularly like the colours, and if I was designing a cover based on "stripes," I'd come up with something more interesting and aesthetically pleasing

Rating: 2 stars. I considered not finishing this several times, but it's such a small book that I made it to the end.

Comments: In this small, short book, Pastoureau argues that stripes, particularly in clothing, but also in decorating and nature, were originally considered transgressive and this "dark side" carries forward into current times. Basically this long essay is his view on stripes through history, starting in the medieval era.

I had two major problems with this book. The first is that I just don't buy his premises. He references his claims, but I remained unconvinced of his conclusions. The second is that this text demands lots of clear illustrations to explain what he's attempting to say, and this only had a few grainy black and white photos. However, if this book was made into a documentary, I think it could be fascinating. Showing what he's trying to describe would make so much more sense than this sad little book.

Why I Read This Now: it ticks off lots of boxes for me including Non-fiction November. I have a slew of books by Michel Pastoureau and I hadn't read any of them yet. This was the shortest. I hope his longer works are better!

Recommended for: textile historians, documentary filmmakers

>53 Nickelini: Interesting about the devil. There are many women who believe one shouldn't wear stripes, not for any aesthetic reason (they make me look fat, thin...), but because their mothers told them not to, and probably their mothers before them and back into time. I wonder if this is the genesis of it.

Does he address the gender difference, since for men, striped ties, shirts (minimal stripes though), sports jerseys, and other clothing items seem to be okay?

It is a book that would definitely need illustrations.

It just occurred to me that you sometimes see stripes in wallpaper and drapes, but almost always vertical, not horizontal. I'm sure there's a reason for that too.

Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm also wondering if diagonal stripes, say in a tie, always go in one direction, and if so, why.

I'll stop now!

If i had thought about it, I would have suggested striped were 1st a shaping or directional aesthetic, and second artistically providing a sense of detail or precision. Not subversive. But if so, that adds an element to pin striped suits and uniforms. Fun review, but unfortunately I’ll pass on the book.

>54 SassyLassy: He does address all of that. The vertical wallpaper has to do with optical illusion, ceiling heights and coziness, but he doesn't really explain why we rarely see horizontal striped wallpaper (horizontals are more often found with bringing down the ceiling paint colour, or wainscoting or crown moulding)

>55 dchaikin: your thesis is as good as his :-)

75. Un Giorno Diverso, Matteo Dominici, 2008


cover comments: oh how do I even comment on a book of this genre. This is what Italian language learning material looks like in 2008

Comments: At the end of last year, I made myself a personal reading Bingo card, and one of my squares was "read a book in Italian." There was no doubt in my mind that this would be the most difficult square to complete, since on Jan 1 2021, I read Italian at (??) seven year old's level? But all year I've kept in mind a certain Italian fairy tale book that I own and planned to read in December (and still plan to read in December). However, in September, I did actually start studying Italian again with a private teacher and a couple of weeks ago she gave me this book to try. And I read it! And understood it. All 24 pages.

BTW: I have 2 personal Bingo cards for 2021. I now have 8 out of 48 empty squares. So "read a book in Italian" was not my last square! Good job, me.

Most people on LT, okay, absolutely everyone else on LT, would not include this in their "books read", because it's so short and so basic. But to me, this was an accomplishment. I realize that other LTers in this group read Proust in Russian, or Shakespeare in Mandarin, or Nabokov in Arabic, and many of my LT friends can comfortably read in multiple languages. But I'm in my 50s, and I'm monolingual (maybe not anymore?), and I've struggled for 40 years on and off to learn French and then Italian. This is the most progress I've ever made, so even though it's small and rather pathetic, I'm proud of myself. Dismiss me, or scorn me, I don't care.

Anyway, the story . . . . and yes, it wasn't "Dick and Jane. Jane sees Dick. Dick looks at the dog." Someone (Matteo Dominici), put his name on this. It was a cute story about a guy who had a sorry life (if you know Italian culture, he sounded like a mammoni, or as my husband likes to call them, bambocchioni . . . mama's boys or big babies . . . always men, your choice of the two descriptions) and then he changed his life in one day and everything is happy. I laughed, I learned. Two thumbs up.

Why I Read This Now: my Italian teacher handed it to me, and she rarely speaks English to me, but she said "don't kill me, ecco" It was a good challenge for me. The level was A2-B1 and I forget what I need to qualify for Italian citizenship, but it's either B1 or B2, and my teacher tells me they've taken the writing out of the test (I don't know that this helps me . . . I'm okay with writing I think . . . I struggle most with understanding spoken Italian). Anyway, I feel like I'm making progress.

Rating: OMG how do you rate a language learning book? I think it was great, I was interested. Best Italian book I've ever read! Obviously 5 stars.

Recommended for: a must read for Italian learners at the A2 - B1 level

>58 Nickelini: It’s a book. It counts. :) and it is your first book in a language you are learning - only a monolingual person that never tried to learn a language would consider this a trivial thing. Congrats! :)

7 years old read more than you because they know the vocabulary and they know grammar because they use it even if they don’t formally know it. Language as a foreign language is different from children reading generally. So don’t try to find that comparison - using the levels is good enough. Low B1 is a nice place to start reading and these days there are books at this level for most major languages. :)

>14 kidzdoc: Darryl, I just reread your post as I was scanning up my thread (although I commented on it previously) but I'm picking up the conversation again.

So the last book I posted I read in was a learners Italian book, and here is a thing I figured out while going through it . . . I was using google translate to figure out the parts I wasn't getting (and some conjugations were beyond what I'd covered in my text), but it dawned on me that there is a speaking feature on google translate . . . so I'd just read the text . . . and if the feedback didn't match, I'd said it wrong. So I'd try again. And listen. And try. It also works in reverse . . . I can just speak English and click! It comes out in Italian. I showed this to my Italian teacher and my mother-in-law tonight, and they were both delighted. Although going through this, my husband and I have noted when the translation is 1. wrong, or 2. the stress is wrong.

So it's not perfect. But it's pretty damn good. And at my elementary level of Italian, I can identify when it's off. And my teacher and italian speaking husband have confirmed. I think it helps and I'm on the right track. If you use only google translate, you will speak like a robot. So don't rely on it.

Any language teacher or people with experience please jump in!

>60 Nickelini: If I can offer a small advice - try to understand without Google first. Part of getting fluent in a language is getting used to parsing and guessing even phrases you never heard before. And you start on that level. I am not saying to ignore Google but see if you can figure out what the text says based on context and what you do know first. :) You will often be wrong at first but the process of trying to figure it out trains your brain for it and it will start recognizing patterns on its own as well.

>61 AnnieMod: oh, yes, I didn't say that . . . it's only when I was not understanding that I did that. I realize the the sooner you can stop translating, the better. The example I use for myself: I learned the word "pollo" for "chicken" in the 80s. For the last 40 years, if I see "pollo" I just think "chicken" without translating it. So yes, I use this device when I don't already understand. And I know it's not perfect. And oddities do stick out . . . as I've discussed with my teacher, and also my husband (who only knows Italian from birth, but not from schooling).

But, Hello! there are so many tools available to learn language that weren't available when I tried to learn French and Italian in the 80s. I mean, kudos to all of you who did it, but it is getting easier, and I think that's a great thing. The more of us speaking to each other, the better, I say. Whatever means we use to get there.

>61 AnnieMod: and your English is amazing and you are an inspiration!

edited to say: I really find watching Italian shows on Netflix and listening to Italian music helps

>58 Nickelini: That looks about my level of Italian. I have been trying to find some reading books that are about my level (I would say I’m about B1 when it comes to reading). I’ve found that a good approach is to read children’s books that you know very very well in English.

>57 Nickelini: ...to me, this was an accomplishment Absolutely! As one who is working her way through Alice au pays des merveilles, I "feel your pain" and applaud your determination!

One of the best parts of it for me was reading out loud a childhood favourite "You are old Father William" in French. I love the sounds and rhythm of it as much as I did in English.

>61 AnnieMod: Everything you have said here has been helpful.

I find my biggest problem is finding the confidence to just jump in and join a conversation which I have been following with ease, but am terrified that I will get hung up somewhere, and everyone will be polite and switch to English.

This is a great conversation! I hadn't thought to use Google Translate, but I can see where it would be helpful in my two weakest areas, conjugating verbs and expanding my vocabulary. I haven't tried to read books written in Spanish yet, but I hope to soon, probably starting next summer. If I'm able to visit Portugal and take a course in Intensive Portuguese this year I'll do the same thing with Portuguese literature down the road.

One minor problem I'll face is the different words in Castilian Spanish, spoken in Europe and in the higher classes in the Americas, versus Central American Spanish spoken by the working class families who I encounter in the hospital on rounds. There have been times when I held conversations with locals during my visits to Spain when they didn't understand certain words I said, because I used ones I had learned from Spanish speaking people in the US, rather than their equivalent words spoken there. In 2016 I met my LT friend Bianca in the airport in Barcelona, and we decided to take a taxi to our hotel, rather than take the train. En route the driver and I had a long conversation in Spanish (the cabbies there supposedly speak little or no English), and at one point he asked me to speak more slowly, as he couldn't understand what I was saying, which was quite surprising to me.

I need to get started on the Canopy Medical Spanish online course that I registered for, so I thank you for bringing up this topic and reminding me to do so.

>58 Nickelini: Congrats! And thanks for the tip about using the audio feature on google translate. I haven't tried that, although I love the handwriting feature. I'm still learning hangul and am practicing by transliterating song lyrics.

>65 kidzdoc: I had a similar problem when I would try and speak French with my Québécois grandfather. His heavy accent combined with the differences from the Parisian French I was learning in school made it very difficult. He passed before I learned enough to really communicate with him in French.

>62 Nickelini: Thanks :)

And yes - it seems to be getting easier now - unless you brain just cannot work properly with the "new" ways. I had been trying to pick up some new languages the new way and... it goes nowhere. The only time I make any progress is when I go back to the way I learned Russian and English (and German before I forgot almost all I knew). Although admittedly it is a LOT easier to find things to listen to these days - and books like the one you read - they were not really a thing in the 90s when I was getting the bulk of my languages (or at least not in Bulgaria anyway).

One thing I miss when I work with online dictionaries is the random expressions you see while looking for the one you need in a paper dictionary. I've learned a lot of set expressions and idioms that way (a good dictionary always has examples for each as well as an explanation). But then I love dictionaries :)

>67 AnnieMod: That's good point about the dictionary. I inherited a Italian study dictionary (not an Italian-English dictionary), and it's a wealth of information

Well done to read a book in another language.

Be careful of Google Translate! A couple of years ago in my role as secretary of the committee de Fêtes for the village, at the AGM I do a rough translation from the French to English for English speakers who turn up to the meeting. The chairperson is tasked with giving a formal resumé of what has been happening over the last year and before she started speaking she handed me a couple of sheets of paper and said it was an English translation - great I could relax and didn't bother to follow too closely what she was saying. It started off OK she would read out a couple of sentences and I read from the paper the translation. However when we got to the second paragraph I found myself telling people that there was a problem with the heavy traffic circulation in the village. There is no traffic in our village - its off the main road which also has no traffic to speak of. I realised as the translation became even more weird that someone had just put the french into Google Translate and now I was scrambling to keep up.

>69 baswood: OH that's embarrassing! Probably should have had that proof read before the meeting ;-)

I use Google Translate as a part of my language tools--it's not the main one. So far I've found that the errors do stand out -- my husband is a fluent Italian speaker, but I also have others I can check with. What I like the best about it though is the audio for pronunciation . . . again, it's not always totally correct, but it's very helpful with practicing both listening and speaking. But words like poi, puo', and puoi just slay me. There are a lot of these types of words in Italian. Vowels are very important.

>63 SandDune: I’ve found that a good approach is to read children’s books that you know very very well in English.

Hmmmm, I'll have to look into that. James and the Giant Peach in Italian? Giacomo e la Pesca Gigante ?

>64 SassyLassy: find my biggest problem is finding the confidence to just jump in and join a conversation which I have been following with ease, but am terrified that I will get hung up somewhere, and everyone will be polite and switch to English.


I've seen this problem addressed in the language learning community. Often people traveling in Europe will try to speak the local language but ticket sellers, shop assistants, servers will want to practice their English, or in my experience, they want to help you out . . . so the advice I've heard is to say "I'd really like to practice my French (Italian, Spanish, etc.) if that's okay with you."

On our 2019 trip, we stayed in 5 different hotels in Italian speaking areas, and since I booked everything under my name, I would always check in, and ask if they speak English. . . . of course they all speak excellent English. But through the check in, my husband would start speaking Italian with them and then that would be it. One receptionist said "oh, you speak excellent Italian! Why are you speaking English to me?" LOL I was wondering the same thing.

>65 kidzdoc: This is a great conversation! I hadn't thought to use Google Translate, but I can see where it would be helpful in my two weakest areas, conjugating verbs and expanding my vocabulary. I haven't tried to read books written in Spanish yet, but I hope to soon, probably starting next summer. If I'm able to visit Portugal and take a course in Intensive Portuguese this year I'll do the same thing with Portuguese literature down the road.

It is a great conversation, I agree. I'm sure there are amazing resources available in Spanish . . . I have more than enough resources in Italian -- more resources than time. And Italian has at the max, 85 million speakers, while Spanish has 550 million. You just have to decide if you want to go with a book designed for learners (I think these are great actually. Limited, but serve a purpose . . . https://www.amazon.com/Short-Stories-Spanish-Intermediate-Learners/dp/1529361818... for example. Or just to go to regular Spanish books at your level. My husband doesn't read much in Italian even though he speaks fluently, and he tried a children's book and really struggled. However, it wasn't one that he knew "very very well", as SandDune intelligently recommends in >63 SandDune:

>64 SassyLassy: One of the best parts of it for me was reading out loud a childhood favourite "You are old Father William" in French. I love the sounds and rhythm of it as much as I did in English.


Oh, that's interesting! I don't know if I know a piece that works equally in English and Italian, although I'm sure there are. One of my favourite Italian songs is "Le Tasche Piene di Sassi" (a pocket full of rocks) . . . my favourite version (actor Filippo Nigro always makes my heart flutter . . . ) is Giorgia's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flKOcLbqWwo

It begins: Dragonflies fly above the ponds of the city . . . which is a pretty awesome image, but I absolutely love the sound of "sono solo stasera senza di te" (I'm alone one night without you). I pointed this line out to my husband one night when we were listening to this in the car and I said it was the most beautiful words I could imagine, and he was extremely puzzled (hearing them as just Italian words), and I had to explain, "No, not the MEANING of the words, just the SOUND of the words". I'm so happy I married a guy who speaks a beautiful language.

If children books work for you, go for it. I’d found them a bad starting point for reading - they are designed for a different type of learner (one who speaks the language) and tend to contain too many complex (for a language learner) expressions. :)

>75 AnnieMod: That's what I found too . . . we had some baby books around our house sent from Italian relatives, and I went through them with my husband and the language was ODD. Very fairy tale specific. But if it's a book you're super familiar with, I think it would be fine. Like I think it has to be an author-specific book (like James and the Giant Peach) and not something generic like "the three bears"

>76 Nickelini: I know you have a teacher so not sure if you are looking for readers on your own but I like this publisher’s German books (I am trying to recover mine) and they also have Italian ones so thought I’d share: https://www.blackcat-cideb.com/en/catalogue/italian/

They are not the only ones of course. But they have interesting titles and most of them have comprehension exercises.

>75 AnnieMod: >76 Nickelini: I was once an au pair in an Italian household and several expressions which are not that useful for daily life are ingrained on my brain from the reading I did to the little girl I was looking after.
C'era una volta .... una strega cattiva .... una spada magica ....

>60 Nickelini: Other tools I like to use: wordreference.com for looking up words in either direction. It tends to give more/better options for translation. Also forvo.com for listening to how native speakers say a word. If it's not there (rare for Italian), you can request it.

Also, congratulations on reading your first book in Italian!

Mine was Se questo è un uomo, which honestly was not a terribly hard book because it's told in pretty simple language. But I did need a dictionary by my side and learned a lot of words for mud, rocks, starvation, etc. Not incredibly useful for making conversation on the street!

(Wait no, first I read a book for 9-year-olds that was a sort of adventure story. Then I jumped into the Levi.)

>79 ursula: I'll have to look into wordreference.com.

I think Forvo.com is very cool -- so far I've always found lots of Italian options. But I find the interface really clunky, and I can't get it to work at all on my phone. I like that it's real Italian, and not computer generated like google translate and Quizlet (although those computer voices have improved so much over the past years)

>79 ursula: I have bookmarked both sites for further investigation. Such great info being shared. Thank you

>79 ursula:, >80 Nickelini:

Oh, I do know Wordreference.com -- they have the best verb conjugation tables! Thanks for reminding me tho -- I need to go there more often

I love Forvo.com. I'll have to look at WordReference.com.

76. Foe, JM Coetzee, 1986


cover comments: ugh

Rating: ugh 2 stars

Comments: This is a post-modern retelling of Robinson Crusoe, with an added female character, Susan Barton, washing up on Cruso's desert island where she finds him and Friday. After a boring section of their boring lives on the island, they are rescued and Barton and Friday are taken to England (Cruso dies on the voyage). Themes of who owns a story, silencing, and slavery.

Recommended for: many people find this masterful. I was bored throughout. Thankfully it was short, and the pages were small.

Why I Read This Now: Novella November and I had "a retelling" as a square on my bingo card

This is the third book I've read by Coetzee and they were all quite different from each other. I understand why Disgrace is considered a fabulous book, but it repulsed me. The Life and Times of Michael K was definitely my favourite of the 3, and I gave it 4 stars, but it's not a book I'd reread or that I think of often. I'm going to say I'm done with this author.

>84 Nickelini: I've read 2 by Coetzee (Disgrace plus Slow Man) and I've pretty much reached the same conclusion.

>84 Nickelini: Giving an author three books to win you over is entirely fair and it's my rule of thumb with important authors (whatever that means).

>86 RidgewayGirl: Yes it's the rule I follow. With "lesser" authors (whatever that means), I stop after one (I'm looking at you Ami McKay and The Virgin Cure). There are just too many books out there. But then if I hear about a totally different and amazing book, I might consider giving them a second chance.

>85 AlisonY: So many good books that we haven't read yet, so no point reading authors who don't do it for us

>82 Nickelini: "... they have the best verb conjugation tables!"

cries in Turkish

>84 Nickelini: I waited something like 10 years after reading Disgrace to try another Coetzee. I hated that book with a white-hot heat. My second one was Waiting for the Barbarians and I liked it more. I am less apprehensive about reading more by him, but I will be surprised if I find something I love. Definitely important to decide when you're just done with an author.

>82 Nickelini: >89 ursula:

I'd take a complicated set of conjugation tables any day compared to the mess that are the perfect and continuous/progressive (and perfect continuous) tenses in English! :)

>90 AnnieMod: I'm saying that unfortunately they don't have conjugation tables for Turkish. :)

>91 ursula: Ah. Had you tried Verbix: https://www.verbix.com/languages/turkish ? Or Wiki's dictionary: i.e. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/abanmak ?

>92 AnnieMod: Thanks for verbix, I didn't know about that one. Honestly, there are only a handful of verbs that conjugations are really useful for because they are irregular in a couple of tenses. But Turkish is otherwise very regular and it's just a matter of not getting lost in the suffixes. When I was starting out I really felt the lack of a conjugation site - now it's okay.

77. Portobello, Ruth Rendell, 2010


cover comments: not ugly, but wow, how boring

Comments: I wasn't exactly sure what to expect here, but I thought maybe a moody thriller. It wasn't that. There were crimes, but no mysteries to solve. Instead this novel was about a assorted group of people who all live in the Portobello Road area of London in the rainy summer and then autumn of 2007. The connections start out loosely and then slowly tighten toward the ending that ties everything up neatly. Some are criminals, some are struggling with mental health, and the others are just trying to live their lives. An art and antique dealer develops an addiction that borders on the ridiculous, and some of the connections near the end stretched credibility, but it was a novel and I just went with it.

I found the middle bogged down a bit, but around the 60% mark, this started coming together nicely. Also, for most of the book, the characters were not very likeable except the doctor, Ella. By the end of the book, most of them showed change, or even growth, which I wasn't expecting. What kept me reading, and probably the best part of this is the author's subtle and wise humour that she peppered throughout.

Although Ruth Rendell has written something like 50,000 books, this is the first one I've read. I will look for her in the future.

Recommended for: LT recommendations on Portobello's page include Kate Atkinson novels, and I agree with that. However, what this reminded me of more strongly were A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks and Capital by John Lanchester, because all three of these are about a disparate group of people living in a specific area of London. Definitely recommend this for people who like to read novels with a prominent London setting.

Rating: 4 stars

Why I Read This Now: I thought this might be a moody autumn read, and although most of it was set in summer, it was raining most of the time, so that was almost autumnal, and then it ended in November, so . . . I wasn't entirely wrong.

78. The Baby Is Mine, Oyinkan Braithwaite, 2021


cover comments: sure, fits the book just fine

Comments: This novella opens with the first person narrator, Bambi, being thrown out of his girlfriend's luxury apartment in Lagos, Nigeria because she discovered he had been cheating on her. Unfortunately for our lothario, COVID lockdowns are in place. He ends up at his recently deceased uncle's house, expecting it to be empty, but finds his uncle's widow and his uncle's younger mistress, and a baby that both are claiming to be theirs. Pointing out that it's not 1000 AD, he suggests the drama will stop with a DNA test. Unfortunately for him, he's told that this will be put to the bottom of the pile under the COVID tests. Also, he oddly seems to know his uncle's girlfriend. So we have three liars and a baby locked in together. Drama, growth, it moves quickly, and has a fun end.

Why I Read This Now: Simon Savadge recommended this, I like novellas, and I loved the author's My Sister the Serial Killer. It was under $5 Canadian from the Book Depository UK (but only one pound in Britain). When it arrived, it was so small I just had to start it immediately.

What Even Is This One Pound Book?: This novella was published by The Reading Agency - Quick Reads. The front page says:

"Thanks to your help, we're getting the nation reading!

1 in 6 adults in the UK struggles with reading. Buying this Quick Read could change someone's life. For every Quick Read sold, a copy will be donated to someone who finds reading difficult. From mental health to social mobility, reading has a proven positive impact on life's big challenges. Find out more: readingagency.org.uk"

**

These books are designed to appeal to both reluctant readers, and book lovers. I would say it succeeded. The format was a small book with larger print and lots of chapter breaks, but the story and language were not simplistic. Braithwaite just told her crazy story. Other books in this series are written by Caitlin Moran, Louise Candlish, and many others.

Rating: 4 stars

Recommended for: see everything above. COVID novella, Nigeria, crazy people, readers who liked My Sister the Serial Killer, reluctant readers

I just switched out my thread topper from my favourite bridge in the world, which is in Italy, with damp Christmas boughs. We are having a melancholy Christmas here . . . we've had a bananas amount of rain the past month here in western Canada and it doesn't look to be stopping. Flooding and all the highways and rail have cut us off from the rest of Canada (and cut the rest of Canada off from our very important port). Too many bad things about this to list here.

And personally, 2 weeks ago my husband and I decided that I should go to Switzerland before Christmas and visit our daughter who has lived there since 2018, and who has recently broken up with her boyfriend who we all loved. Also, the reason I was going wasn't for fun, but because she's struggling (not just the break up but lots of other stuff too) . A week ago I booked a good flight on Lufthansa for me and her younger sister, and then applied for our Swiss COVID travel certificates which we need for all public places, hotels, restaurants, etc., and then Swiss train passes, and 3 hotels. Got the COVID passes . . . and then later the same day, Switzerland closed down due for us due to Omicron, and we aren't allowed to enter (there is a website . . .we were good to go in the morning, but big NO in the evening). So yesterday I cancelled everything so that's big disappointment. She can't come home for Christmas because of work, but there's a small chance she can come home before. Anyway, it's been very stressful. It probably seems pretty minor, but having an adult child that I can't get to when she needs family, well that's pretty tough.

I find reading books helps right now. Sitting and being stressed doesn't help at all. I choose to escape into a book.

>96 Nickelini: I'm sorry, Joyce, what a disappointment and frustration. I hope your daughter can squeeze in a visit home.

Oh I'm sorry, and I totally get it—when your adult children need you it's a whole other kind of worry. I hope something works out.

>96 Nickelini: Definitely tough. I hope you can work out a visit one way or the other very soon.

>96 Nickelini: It really is hard when you can't be with a child (and they will always be our children, regardless) who needs you. Sorry you can't get there.

Wow! This pandemic changes so quickly- we think that we are done and then......not

>97 labfs39:, >98 lisapeet:, >99 japaul22:, >100 RidgewayGirl:, >101 torontoc:

As I said on another post, Thanks so much for your compassion and understanding. Guess what? Had I not been responsible and cancelled everything, I'd be good to go as planned tomorrow! The ban has been lifted. So now I'm looking at booking the trip over again, leaving next week. So many mixed feelings, but I need to do this. But I don't really want to be out there travelling right now ..... so happy that my younger daughter is coming along to buoy me up

Oh, that's really annoying. I traveled over Thanksgiving to be at a family event (domestically, but I hadn't been on a plane since pre-covid) and it was a little stressful but worth it. It's weird to be in close contact with so many strangers, but it will be completely worth it to have some time with your daughter and be there to support her. Good luck!

>102 Nickelini: Ugh. Isn't that the way? Good luck, hopefully things will go smoothly this time.

Well I was going to post a picture to show that after jumping through a thousand hoops, I’ve made it to Switzerland after all.

For some reason I thought I knew how to post a picture here but I can’t do it and can’t find any instructions. For future reference, does anyone know where the instructions are? I can get the pic into my profile gallery only.

>105 Nickelini: If you have it online, use the img tag: https://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_img.asp

If you don't have it online, add it to your Junk drawer https://www.librarything.com/gallery/member/Nickelini/junkdrawer and then link it from there with the img tag :)

>105 Nickelini: Yay! I'm glad you made it, and I hope you have an enjoyable visit with your daughter.

I'm glad you made it after all that! I hope your visit is a really good one.

Ugh - making travel arrangements at the moment seems so stressful, but glad that you're able to go after all.

My sister's partner from South Africa was due to arrive here 5 days after Omicron broke out as big news. He paid through the nose and managed to get a seat on a very long non-direct flight to Dublin (the last flight out of there), and when he arrived he discovered that Ireland had just brought in a new visa requirement for South Africans which he had no idea about as he was at Jo'burg airport when they introduced it. Immigration threatened to send him back (can you imagine how he felt after 24 hours flying and paying a fortune), and then (probably because there were no flights to send him back on) allowed him in but told him he'd have to self-isolate in Ireland for 10 days (which wasn't even a thing under Irish legislation at that point). So he and my sister had to spend another small fortune renting a place in Dublin so if the Garda showed up they could prove they'd self-isolated. He's now got some 'entered illegally' stamp on his passport, and they're fining the airline for allowing him (and another guy) to fly without a visa.

I hope your flight is a much smoother experience than his was. Enjoy your time with your daughter. I totally get the need to be with her.

I've had a long catch-up here with your reading, Joyce (I can't believe I was that far behind).

>96 Nickelini: How frustrating and disappointing, Joyce. It probably seems pretty minor, but having an adult child that I can't get to when she needs family, well that's pretty tough... I've been there a few times in my life. I hope she can make it home even for a short stay.

>105 Nickelini: Oh, that's good news!

Glad you were able to make it to Switzerland. I also have an adult daughter going through a breakup/move-out situation back in the US. Unfortunately going there is not in the cards. Good that you were able to jump through all the required hoops and still have flights moving after all.

79. Sanatorium, Sarah Pearse, 2021



Edited: I wrote my comments on this book after being up for 24 hours and taking a 10 hour flight. When I woke up this morning and reread it, all I saw was gibberish, so I'll try again.

cover comments: This has all the signs to tell a reader that it’s a thriller, but especially well done and intriguing. Unfortunately, the hotel in the book does not resemble this picture (it's all glass and flat roofs), so not accurate. Still, it drew me in. There were lovely hardcover editions where the same yellow is on the page edges. I have the paperback, so no yellow sides for me.

Why I Read This Now: I adore a book set in the Alps, especially Switzerland. When I picked this up, I thought I could get it read before my trip to Switzerland, but then Switzerland wouldn't let me in, so I had to cancel everything, and then they said "never mind" so then I rebooked, and in all that hubbub, I didn't have time to read it, and so lugged this huge book along with me and left it there.

One of the reasons I wanted to read Sanatorium was I learned a few years ago that many of the grand historic hotels in the Swiss Alps were originally built as TB treatment centres for the wealth. A thriller set in one of these turned into a high-end hotel sounded like a great setting. There are viewers who say "sanatorium-turned-hotel-is-a-fail!", but they have no idea what they are talking about. Maybe they think a sanatorium is a mental institute, and the author indeed blurs this line and doesn't explain that sanatorium-turned-resort is a thing in Switzerland.

Comments: I call this point "comments" and not "review" because sometimes what I have to say is more about me than about the book. In this case, I finished this book about 5 days ago while I was traveling, so here are my foggy thoughts on this book:

Elin is a British police detective on leave due to PTSD from a case gone wrong. She travels to an exclusive high Alpine hotel with her boyfriend to meet up with her estranged brother and his fiancé for their engagement party. Not sure why no one else was invited to this party. Anyway, there is an avalanche, and people disappear, and show up murdered. The murders are too gruesome for my tastes. The Swiss police can't get to the resort due to the weather, so Elin attempts to control the serial killer and investigate the murders. She's hapless, but I don't think she's meant to be.

Sanatorium was published in early 2021 with a bang. It was picked for "Reece Weatherspoon's Book Club". I knew I needed to read this, because “Switzerland.” After it was published, so many 2-star reader reviews flooded in . . . and most of them are 100% right. By the time it came out in trade paper, my expectations were low but, I still wanted to read it. And it started out fairly okay . . . but then just collapsed. This is book one can endlessly pick apart.

Recommended for: writing instructors teaching how NOT to write thrillers. (If a thriller in the Alps is your thing - look for The Chalet by Catherine Cooper).

Rating: 2.5 stars. One of those stars is for the setting.

Question: Why do lousy books get published and promoted, and other quality books get no mention, anywhere?

I learned about 4 thrillers set in the Alps all published early winter 2021: Sanatorium; One By One, by Ruth Ware; Shiver, by Ally Reynolds, and The Chalet by Catherine Ciioer. . . okay, Ruth Ware is an established thriller writer, so knock her off the list. Shiver, by Reynolds has been slow to get to paperback, but I did see an English edition in a Swiss bookstore this week (not in Canada yet). I haven't read those two. But I've read The Chalet (which I can't currently find the touchstone for because Elinor M. Brent-Dyer's touchstones bully all the others) It was sooooo much tighter and more interesting and better written than Sanatorium. And yet, no one has heard of the Cooper, and Sanatorium, a book with uncountable flaws, makes the bestseller list? Baffling.

The only explanation I can find is that before Sarah Pearse wrote Sanatorium, she worked in PR. All aspiring authors: get a job in PR first, only then do you try to publish your book.

Edited to fix Catherine Cooper's name

>106 AnnieMod: - >113 ursula:
Thank you for your kind comments, I will say morre, but I've now been awake 26 hours so I best get to my bed

Okay, I've had a bit of sleep now, so I've redone my post on Sanatorium. Sorry to anyone who tried to read the original

Sorry the book was a clunker, but yay that you made it to Switzerland. I hope all is well. How long are you staying? Enjoy!

80. Dreaming of Christmas, TA Williams, 2018


cover comments: This cover says "light" and "happy," so the reader knows exactly what to expect. I have to say that the woman's outfit is on point for 2018 (and wouldn't look wrong now in 2021)

Comments: On Christmas Eve, Zoe's boyfriend for the past decade announces he's leaving her for another woman. Fast forward to the next Christmas, and Zoe is invited to an all-expenses paid Christmas in the Austrian Alps for a 10-year reunion of a group of friends who shared a house during university. The host is one of the flatmates who has become fabulously wealthy. Unfortunately, the cad ex-boyfriend is also included.

As expected, this was a breezy, fun read with just a bit of drama. I was expecting a little romance, and in the end, there was a bit. But half-way through the book, the only choices for Zoe are the jerk ex-boyfriend or any one of several happily married men. The author does bring it around in a satisfying way, but it took too long for me.

My other criticism is the amount of repetition. Zoe goes skiing, Zoe has the cute puppy sleep on her feet, Zoe talks to the cute child. Replay.

Why I Read This Now: I needed a light wintery book and I knew this would be a stress-free fantasy

Rating: 3.5 stars. This is the second book I've read by this author, and I preferred the first.

Recommended for: someone looking for a Hallmark Christmas movie in a book

>109 AlisonY: OMG that's a terrible situation your sister's partner is in! How stressful. Our travel all went pretty well, and I was almost throwing up from stress. I can't even imagine how he feels.

>103 japaul22:, >104 labfs39:, >107 labfs39:, >108 lisapeet:, >112 RidgewayGirl:, >113 ursula:

Thanks for your well wishes, everyone. I found my daughter in Switzerland to be doing okay, and things weren't nearly as bad as my husband and her grandmother imagined (he's not one to catastrophize usually). As I said, my younger daughter came along with me, and the three of us had some fun together. And of course, the Alps are a lovely place to visit during Christmas season.

>111 avaland: - she got a promotion at work, so wasn't able to come home. I was able to rebook our trip

>117 labfs39: - We were in Switzerland for 9 nights

Now that I'm home, I have to look back and say that the COVID part of travel is a lot of extra work. Definitely not the time to travel for fun

My best friend's brother lives in Singapore with his family and they'd planned a winter trip to Italy, which had to be changed at the last minute to Zurich, given that Italy was no longer allowing visitors from Singapore into the country.

>121 RidgewayGirl:

Wow. I thought Singapore was doing better than anywhere in Europe

>59 AnnieMod:, >63 SandDune:, >64 SassyLassy:, >65 kidzdoc:, >66 labfs39:, >69 baswood:, >79 ursula:
I hope I've included everyone who was in the conversation about language learning, above

I have a little language story from my trip to Switzerland last week that I want to share that you might find amusing.

Usually I have been very shy and embarrassed to speak in the regional language. On my first trip to Europe, I quickly learned that my Canadian high school French "ou est le metro?" wasn't at all useful when I didn't understand the 4 sentence answer. It made me stop trying.

But over the years, I think I've picked up a lot of random foreign language. And I've broken through my inhabitation of speaking (and embarrassing myself) from taking Italian classes where I'm forced to speak. Also, since the last time I visited my daughter in Switzerland, she has gone from being able to shyly speak a little German to now walking into any store or restaurant and being able to converse with the people working there. I found that inspiring.

Last Wednesday, the daughter who lives in Luzern had to work, so my other daughter and I went to Montreux since we had Swiss train passes and I'd never been to the French part of Switzerland. On the train I listened to the woman on the seat behind me yak on the phone for an hour, and without context, I had no idea what she was talking about, but I realized I understood a ton of the individual words she was saying. So when we got off the train, and service workers spoke French to us, I understood pretty much everything (simple, expected situations, and context help). However, I sometimes responded in Italian. My 21 year old daughter was mortified, but I didn't care. Hey, I wasn't just freezing and speaking English. I texted my husband and he said it was all good because Switzerland is known for being multilingual (even though not in the way we were taught in elementary school). No one seemed to mind, and if they thought I was a moron, oh well, I'll never see them again.

Now I just have to get a little German under my belt, because every time I'm in Europe, people assume I'm German. And my parents spoke German at home, so it sounds so familiar. I really need to learn how to respond better than assuming the person will speak English when I stare at them like a deer caught in headlights. Every time this happens, I feel like I'm Marlin from this scene in Finding Nemo, and the German speaker is Squirt (go to 0:29):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4HdaGzUKPI

German speaker: ein kleines aljfalsdjfals djfaslfja;slfjdasdflk
Me: (blank mind . . . . "I think he's trying to speak to me! I know it! ")
German speaker: . . .( starts speaking English ) . . .

Ah, Albert Brooks. He narrates way too much of my life.

Nice review of The Chrysalids. It is on my TBR.

>123 Nickelini: spoke French to us, I understood pretty much everything (simple, expected situations, and context help). However, I sometimes responded in Italian

That happens with me as well. When confronted with a foreign language I don't speak well, my brain seems to think: Ok, not English, what have we got, and I come out with French. I'm not sure what the scientific reason for it is, but it's an interesting phenomena (and sometimes helpful).

>120 Nickelini: That's very good news - and meant that you were able to enjoy the holiday! (apart from the covid admin, of course)

>125 labfs39: Oh good, it's not just me
>126 wandering_star: waving!

In a foreign country any foreign language will do

>128 baswood: LOL - great! Thanks

>125 labfs39: That used to happen a lot in the first couple of years of German classes - randomly someone would switch to English out of nowhere. The better we got with German, the less frequent it became. :)

These days I am fully capable of switching languages in mid sentence if I hear another language nearby although it seems to happen only when I am really tired. It is a form of code-switching - a well known process.

>125 labfs39: This definitely happens to me too. When I am searching for a Turkish word I can't quite remember, I have to throw out the Italian words that bubble to the surface.

Hey, Joyce, We are watching a Swiss crime drama called "Wilder" and thought of you (your daughter being there and all). It's on streaming channel Mhz.

>131 ursula: I'm learning that this is a common thing with language learners. Fun with embarrassing ourselves

>132 avaland: - I've never heard of Mhz, but my younger daughter can find anything online, so I'll have her find it for me. Thanks!

81. Murder Most Festive, Ada Moncrieff, 2021


cover comments: these vintage poster covers continue to be popular, and I continue to love them

Comments: Murder Most Festive is a recently published take on the type of English mysteries written between WWI and WWII. The author has a lot of fun with the plumy conversations and a slightly 21 century take on an old trope.

Fairly typical set up - a group of upper crust and not-so-upper crust friends and family meet for Christmas at Lord and Lady Westbury's manor house in Sussex. One of the guests is murdered, and one of the guests acts as amateur sleuth and solves the mystery.

Rating: not amazing, but fun. 4 stars. Some readers who rated this poorly missed the humour or had pet peeves that are irrelevant to me.

Recommended for: you know who you are

Why I Read This Now: something fun to read over Christmas

How I Discovered This: browsing the shelves at Munro's Books

82. A Castle In The Clouds, Kerstin Gier, 2020; translated from German by Romy Fursland


cover comments: meh. It looks very middle school, which this novel is not

Rating: 4.25 stars for this utterly charming novel

Comments: Set over Christmas and New Years at a faded luxury hotel in the Swiss Alps, A Castle in the Clouds is about seventeen-year old school dropout Sophie Spark who has been working as an intern at the hotel. This novel has a little bit of everything - mystery, adventure, a love triangle, and many winks and nods to Cinderella.

I loved the atmosphere of this aging hotel over a snowy Christmas, and there were some lovely characters; on the downside, the irrational hotel owner and bullying coworkers were cartoon villains. But overall this was a cozy, escapist Christmas read.

How I Discovered This: I've been looking for non-literary books in translation, and earlier in 2021 I was deep down some internet rabbit hole and came across this German YA novel. I ordered it and set it aside for this time of year.

Why I Read This Now: I've never read Christmas books much in the past, but this year I was full on for the light wintery reads. Also, I'm always up for a book set at a hotel, and also anything set in the Alps

Recommended for: most people who read my threads would never read YA, so I probably wouldn't recommend it to you ;-) - But if you don't mind the occasional YA, and it sounds like your kind of thing, track down a copy. I can see myself rereading this next year.

>135 Nickelini: I'm interested in following your reading of non-literary (genre reading?) books in translation. I don't mind the occasional YA, so that doesn't bother me.

>136 labfs39: I'm certainly looking for suggestions too! It's hard to find books that are popular in X-country, but are translated into English. Lots of Scandi-crime, which I haven't read much of, but other than that, it's hard to find

83. The Wolf's Secret, Myriam Dahman & Nicolas Digard; illustrated by Ju'lia Sarda' (touchstone fail)


cover comments: gorgeous

Comments: Stunningly illustrated picture book about a lonely young woman who lives deep in a forest, and a wolf.

Rating: 4.5 stars

Recommended for: readers of all ages who enjoy fairy tales and beautiful art

Why I Read This Now: I keep a stack of short reads for when the mood strikes. This one was a lovely note to top off my year of reading.

Where I Discovered This: Jen Campbell - she knows all the best picture books

I had an excellent reading year. My list is made up of the books I remember most fondly, in chronological order:

Happisland and Fantasviss, by Roserens
Moon of the Crusted Snow, Rice
Peace Talks, Finch
The Chalet, Cooper
Down By the River, O'Brien
Mothering Sunday, Swift
Passing, Larson
Here is the Beehive, Crossan
One More Croissant For the Road, Felicity Clarke
A Fairy Tale, Jonas T Bengtsson
Anxious People, Fredrik Backman
A Girl Returned, Donatella Di Pietrantonio
Dreaming of Italy, TA Williams
All My Puny Sorrows, Miriam Toews
The Garden of Monsters, Lorenza Pieri
Bitter Orange and Unsettle Ground, Claire Fuller
Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia
The Chrysalids, Wyndham
Castle in the Clouds, Kirsten Gier

Stand out worst books:
Foe, JM Coetzee
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
Sanatorium, Sarah Pearce

Up next: year end stats

READING STATS 2021

Total books read: 83
Different authors: 80
New to me authors: 60
Fiction - 69 (83%)
non-fiction - 7 (8%)
memoir - 7 (8%)

Nationality of author:

UK - 29 (34%)

Canada - 15 (18%)

Italy - 5 (6%)

Switzerland - 4 (5%)
Ireland - 4
USA - 4

Australia - 3 (4%)
France - 3

Nigeria - 2 (2%)
Germany - 2
Sweden - 2
Belgium - 2
Japan - 2

New Zealand - 1 (1%)
Russia - 1
Denmark - 1
South Africa - 1

It's complicated - 2 (2%)

Female/male authors:

Female - 46 (55%)
Male - 33 (40%)
Mixed - 4 (5%)

Original language:

English - 62 (75%)
Italian - 5 (6%)
German - 4 (5%)
French - 4
Swedish - 2 (2%)
Japanese - 2
Dutch - 1 (1%)
Russian - 1
Danish - 1
No words - 1

Year published:

1929 x 2
1930
1955
1972
1986
1991 x 2
1994
1996
1997
2003
2004 x 2
2006
2007 x 2
2008 x 4
2009 x 3
2010
2011 x 3
2012 x 2
2013 x 2
2014 x 4
2015 x 2
2016 x 6
2017 x 4
2018 x 5
2019 x 14
2020 x 11
2021 x 5

Travels in reading (where my books took me) :

Victorian-era Essex / Marlborough Sound, New Zealand 2013 / Iceland 2012 / Switzerland 2017 / Stockholm 2018 / fictional upstate New York town 2018 / foodie places in the Alps 2018 / dystopian Northwestern Ontario 2018 / Austrian Alps 2018 / Scottish Highlands over New Year's 2018 / village in Belgium / Nigeria 1980s / Sedaris's world 1977-2002 / Vancouver 1948 - 1982 / French Alps 1998 & 2020 / Soviet Russia & Post-Soviet Russia 1972 - 2002 / Ireland 1992 / Venice, Italy 2019 & 2020 / Berkshire March 30, 1924 / Chicago & NYC 1929 / Louisiana & SoCal 1958 - 1986 /France 1990s / London & Cork 2020 / Wolverhampton & London 1990s / oceans of the world / UK 2019 / Paris & Quebec 1600s / Invisible Cities / Denmark 1986-1999 / Japan 1992 / Sweden 2019 / Canada & Tanzania 2010-2015 / Vancouver 1890s - 1990s / Switzerland 2015 / Ireland 2005 / Italy 1976 / Lugano, Switzerland, 2003 / France 2018 / Genoa, Italy 2018 / England & Scotland 2018 / Pretty places in Italy 2019 / Renaissance Italy / Paris, 2017 / Hampshire 1969 / SW Ausralia 1970s / Umbria Italy, 1995 / Maremma, Tuscany, Italy 1980s / Amalfi Coast, Italy 2008 / Japan The Future / Laurentians, Quebec 2008 / Thailand, 2004 / Cork, Ireland, 1920 / Winnipeg & Toronto, 1974 - 2014 / Northumberland, UK 1990s & 2017 / Hidalgo, Mexico 1950 / Wiltshire 2018 / Bruce Peninsula, Ontario 1920 / Labrador, the future / Eight English Heritage Properties, various times / Rome, 2008 / South Atlantic & England, 1700 / Portobello Road, London, summer & autumn 2007 / Lagos, Nigeria, spring 2020 / Crans-Montana, Switzerland, January 2020 / Austrian Alps 2018 / Sussex, Christmas 1938 / Swiss Alps, Christmas 2019 - New Years 2020 / Fairytale northern forest

Author's nationality 2021


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DNF -- abandoned books: 3