November 2021: Readers Choice

This month is Readers Choice so you can read whatever you want. Anything you have been planning to finish or something you just decided to read today.

Sorry for posting this so late, I forgot about it until LibrayCin mentioned it today and it popped up on my talk page.

Thanks for posting (I guess it was an easy one to do! LOL!).

I'm going to stick with a historical theme, but maybe I'll count anything history.

I already plan to read
On Desperate Ground / Hampton Sides

It's about the Korean War.

so Im confused; is it readers choice, or history? either is fine for me :)

>4 cindydavid4: As the Reading-Through-Time Group intro says here

https://www.librarything.com/ngroups/8853/Reading-Through-Time

this group is for those who love to read about history, in any format, fiction or non-fiction. So *every* month we're reading history.

Most months have a specific theme; this month is Reader's Choice, so YOU get to choose the historical book you want to read, rather than a planned theme! Yes!

I'm hoping to get to George Eliot's Romola, which is historical fiction set in Renaissance Florence, and includes some real characters from history.

>5 kac522: Perfect explaination about this group. :)

I have set aside two books that take place in the years of 1917 & 1918. I will be reading about the 1918 Flu Epidemic with As Bright As Heaven by Susan Meissner and about a woman con-artist in 1917 with Parlor Games by Maryka Biaggio.

I'm going to resuscitate the April theme of The Sun Never Sets and go, I think, with Gandhi's An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth. I have the critical edition published in hardcover by Yale University Press, so it's substantially lengthier than the paperback edition. If I don't finish it (and this critical edition is 800+ pages), then I'll continue on it in the "Eastern Philosophies and Religions" theme that I'm setting up for January of next year.

Or I may come up with something else involving the Raj. The Raj Quartet. A reread of Kim using the Norton Critical. And I really want to get around to Amitav Ghosh's River of Smoke and Flood of Fire, the second and third volumes of his Ibis Trilogy.

I've got loads on the Raj.

I will probably read a historical fiction, The Man from Berlin, book 1 in a series by Luke McCallin. I requested it from the library today.

ETA I finished it 10-24

>5 kac522: sorry for the late reply, thanks for the clarification.

Oh my, looking at my TBR shelves, this popped out at me The Emperor's Babe that someone hereabouts recommended. Its about Londonium circa 211 ce. and a certain lady who catches the eye of Emperor Septima Severis. Love ancient history, love britain, love feisty characters, this looks like just the thing!

Forgot I read another of hers girl woman others which I just loved. And just realized this is written in verse, which is not my fav. But I'll try it anyway

>6 DeltaQueen50: I loved As Bright as Heaven; read it about the same time I read Pull of the Stars about the same subject but so much more focused on just a few characters in a few days.

I plan to read Oral History: A Novel by Lee Smith and maybe also Guests on Earth, a novel set in Highland Hospital, the mental institution where Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald died in a fire. Zelda is one of the characters in the book. Lee Smith has been on my list for awhile, so I’m glad for a good opportunity to get started.

>10 cindydavid4: In an effort to lower my TBR I am going to read two books by author Susan Meissner next month - As Bright As Heaven and Stars Over Sunset Boulevard.

Well Babes is a bust, just not a verse girl. However i totally forgot a new book I have that would be perfect Cloud Cuckoo Land by the author of all the light we cannot see This tades place in Constantinople, a place thats always fascinted me One of the four time lines is in 1453 when the Byzantine Empire's capital was captured by the Ottoman Empire. And it involves a missing book from the anciet greeks. Think this will be just the ticket

>13 cindydavid4: I loved Cloud Cuckoo Land…I really thought it brilliant. And a must read for all of us who value books!

>14 dianelouise100: cool! He came to our bookstore to talk a few weeks ago (the stores first in person author!)He was so interesting and very funny. I wanted to ask him if he was involved in the disability community at all because he does such a good job of making a character with special needs complex in her own right. Regardless looking forward to the read!

I just finished The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett. The volume contains other stories as well and I hope to get to them by the end of the month. The language, the people, the place. Just loved this classic. The book has pen and ink illustrations by Shirley Burke. Big puffed sleeves were the style, so desired by Anne Shirley in Anne of Green Gables.

sorry, wrong thred

I have completed Parlor Games by Maryka Biaggio and I was totally blown away by this story. Covering the years from the late 1880s to 1917, we follow the life of beautiful con-woman, May Dugas, as she lives a live of excitement and glamour - all paid for by her admirers. A fun and interesting read.

On Desperate Ground / Hampton Sides
4 stars

This is about the Korean War. The Marines were ordered to come in to North Korea from the water, then over mountains during the coldest time of the year (in what turned out to be one of the coldest winters). There were a lot of stupid decisions made by two people higher up in the chain of command (sorry, I don’t know the military well enough to remember titles and who outranks whom), though the next in that chain knew they were stupid decisions and he did his best to follow orders, but to find ways to keep damage to a minimum.

I really liked this; it was really interesting. I know very little about the Korean War, and not only did this tell the stories of these Marines and how they (most? some? of them) got out of a bad situation, but I got a bit of insight into how the war started.

>18 DeltaQueen50: wow I want to read this!

>20 cindydavid4: This is a book that had been on my library list for years. It was originally published in 2013 and it is based on a real person. I hope you can find a copy as I loved it!

yay for bookfinders!

I'm reading Rainwater by Sandra Brown, set in the 1930s dust bowl/Great Depression era.

I read A Christmas Legacy by Anne Perry, set in London in the 1900s.

Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene. A heart-breaking YA novel set in a small town in Arkansas in WWII. Patty is a lonely 12-year-old girl unloved by her cruel, abusive parents. She befriends a German POW from the nearby POW camp. Her innate intelligence and the love and care given to her by the family housekeeper, see her through these testing times. It’s a wonderful book.

>25 marell: oh i loved that book when I was a kid!

>26 cindydavid4: I couldn’t stop reading it. Read it in a day.

>25 marell: I love it too! In fact, I still have my copy from years ago and pulled it off the shelf a few weeks ago and thought about rereading it. I really must do that!

>28 clue: I read it as a library ebook. There was an affidavit by the author included in which she says she is actually Patty and this was her life. Makes the story even more special.

>19 LibraryCin: I’m a fan of Mr. Sides and hope to read more of his books in the near future. Ghost Soldiers and In the Kingdom of Ice are fantastic, as well as On Desperate Ground.

I'm reading The War that Saved My Life by Kimberley Bradley, historical fiction, England WWII era.

The Sun Never Sets . . . on RTT!

Following on from this year's April theme, I just finished River of Smoke 4**** by Amitav Ghosh, the second book in The Ibis Trilogy set in India and China in the period of the Opium Wars. I gave five stars to the first volume, Sea of Poppies, but I found this second volume a slow start with the first part (ch 1-6) rather slow and a bit dull. It picked up in the second (ch 7-12) and third (ch 13-18) parts, though.

I have quite a bit of other books on the Raj, including Gandhi and Churchill and Gandhi's own An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (in the "deluxe" Yale Univ Press critical edition), but I think I'm going to go on for now with my reread of the novels of Charles Williams that I began in last month's Supernatural/Superstition.

I enjoy reading/rereading Christmas stories (and movies) each November/December and just finished these two.

"Can This Be Christmas" by Debbie Macomber (don't usually read anything by her) "December 24th. A shabby train depot in a small New Hampshire town. A group of people is stranded there on this still snowy night, their beautifully wrapped gifts piled uselessly around them."

"Christmas in Georgia" by Celestine Sibley. A series of short stories celebrating the Spirit of Christmas during difficult times. Simple and poignant.

I have completed As Bright As Heaven by Susan Meissner, a historical fiction novel set in Philadelphia during the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic. Some aspects of the book reminded me of what we are experiencing with Covid, but as this flu epidemic eventually ended, so too, I have hope we will see the end of our pandemic.

I read Spring Magic by D. E. Stevenson. Published in 1942, it is set in Spring 1941 and follows a young woman who leaves her London home to live in a small seaside village in northwestern Scotland. The book has many contemporary references to the war, as the small village becomes home to a campful of soldiers.

D. E. Stevenson herself was an officer's wife, and our heroine Frances becomes acquainted with several officers' wives and their families. Residents are constantly on the lookout for "Jerries" and one scene toward the end provides a detailed description of our heroine caught in a bombing. Another scene describes a taxi ride through London, going from placid untouched streets to bombed out squares. Stevenson's books vary for me, but for the most part, I enjoyed this one.

Following up on last month's Supernatural/Superstition, Charles Williams, Many Dimensions 4****, which could also fit with September's Time Travel / Prehistoric / Sideways. A reductionist {Wikipedia} scientist, Giles Tumulty, gets hold of an ancient treasure from Persia, the stone from the crown of Suleiman ben Daood (as Williams calls the Biblical Solomon). For Tumulty the "evil scientist," think of Professor Weston from the "space trilogy" of William's fellow Inkling C.S. Lewis. Probably my favorite of Williams's novels, at least after Descent into Hell (almost universally considered Williams's best, though it's perhaps less "supernatural" than his other novels). I think it's Williams's speculation on time travel that's always caught my attention.

I also gave a first-reading to "Et in Sempiternum Pereant" (2** at best), a short story by Williams that appeared in the December 1935 edition of the London Mercury and is related to Many Dimensions.

On to a reread of The Place of the Lion, the third-published of Williams's novels.

ETA: I read that Williams short story on the Australian Project Gutenberg. That issue of the London Mercury is available on ABE, though for a price (including high shipping from UK) that I'm not comfortable paying. It's tempting, though, for the sake of completeness.

I’ve just read The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, a classic as powerful and relevant today as ever. The story takes place in 1885 in Nevada cattle country. With scant information, vigilantes set out to obtain justice their way.

>37 marell: I read The Ox-Bow Incident a number of years ago but I still remember it vividly. It certainly is a powerful read!

>36 CurrerBell: ....and so on to The Place of the Lion 1½*, the third-published of Charles Williams's novels, this one involving neo-Platonic archetypes that for some reason or another have invaded and are taking over an English town and need to be sent back where they came from by being "named" just like Adam named the original beasts of the earth. It makes no sense whatsoever if you don't adhere to neo-Platonism, and I doubt it would make much sense even to a devout neo-Platonist.

Next on to Williams's The Greater Trumps.

>23 nrmay: One of the best books I have ever read about the dust bowl is Karen Hesse's Out of the Dust. read it awhile back for a Children's literature class and loved it.

I just finished "Take a Look at the Five and Ten" by Connie Willis. No time travel, no woowoo, just good solid writing. It blends Christmas, family, romance and memory--the 'clinical' side of how we store and access memories.

I’ve finished No. 16 in the Billy Boyle WWII mystery series Road of Bones by James R. Benn. This is one of my favorite series; they are all consistently so good. It is September 1944, and this time around Billy and his side-kicks have been assigned to the Allied air base at Poltava, Ukraine, to find out who murdered two men, one Russian, one American. It is fast-paced, a bit of a nail-biter, and the appearance of the Night Witches, the Soviet all-female air force pilots, so feared by the Germans, really livens things up. This book, like the others, ends with a Historical Note section, which I always appreciate.

I read A Play of Knaves by Margaret Frazer, a medieval mystery.

"An Officer and A Spy," by Robert Harris, begins in the 18th Century with the court martial and punishment of Alfred Dreyfus, concluding in the 19th Century. Following Dreyfus' conviction and transport to Devil's Island, Colonel Georges Picquart was promoted and transfered to the secretive and well hidden counterespionage section of the French military, where he stumbles upon information hidden from the public which will challenge Picquart's faith in France's military leadership. Picquart puts his career and life on the line in the pursuit of justice in this well written historical novel.

The January 2022 theme page is posted: https://www.librarything.com/topic/337020

I finished Now in November by Josephine Johnson. Published in 1934, this won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1935 for Johnson, who was only age 24.

Now in November tells the story of a family farm in an unnamed place in the American heartland, during the Depression and Dust Bowl years. Told as first person narrative by the middle girl of 3 daughters, this is the story of the love/hate relationship with the farm and the land and each other. The father is harsh, the mother is often silent, the eldest daughter is difficult and the youngest daughter is ever the optimist. Our narrator Marget describes the landscape and animals with a fierce love, even as her father sees it only as his livelihood, and a struggling one at that, for the farm is highly mortgaged and the drought years are taking their toll. This is a sad and desperate little book, but is brilliantly written and relays the harsh reality about farming life during the Depression years.

I generally try to read books from my shelves for these challenges and I had one all picked out for November, The Fallen Architect but it will be a while until I finish it. That’s not to say that I didn’t read anything else historic in November. There was The Silence of the Girls, Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy and The Fade Out, Act Two but the one that I’ll count for November for RTT is Into the Blue: Family Secrets and the Search for a Great Lakes Shipwreck. In this book the author wrote about her family and the shipwreck that changed their lives when her great grandfather went down with his ship and everyone else on board. It was an interesting look at how this tragedy changed the family forever afterwards.

>13 cindydavid4: took me a while but I did finish Cloud Cuckoo Land. I think while it was incredibly well written, it could have been two books. I really loved everything that connected to february 20 2000 and liked the way he worked that. The more ancient time for some reason didn't grab me as much, perhaps because the saga of Seymour kinda pulled me in quickly. But its well written, and I'd recommend it with caveas

I have read The Ides of April by Lindsey Davis, the first book in the Flavia Albia series. It is a mystery set in Rome in 89 AD. The author wrote a previous series featuring Flavia's father, Marcus Didius Falco and I plan to read the first in that series to see how I like it. In this book Flavia, a young widow, has taken up her father's profession of investigator. My only problem with the book is that I didn't like the Flavia character. She is a determind investigator who takes reckless chances and I grew rather tired of her.