Rasdhar's Reading: Fourth Quarter

New quarter, new thread! I'm so impressed by how organised some of you are, in documenting and keeping track of your reading. I decided to give it a shot myself, but I'm not very good at this, so please bear with me. In the spirit of all the books I have piled up, here's Tom Gauld's comic, 'Fall Library', which was used for a cover of the New Yorker. In an edit they mentioned that one version of the comic had the woman holding an e-reader.



Past threads:

First Quarter: https://www.librarything.com/topic/357082
Second Quarter: https://www.librarything.com/topic/359708
Third Quarter: https://www.librarything.com/topic/361759

Currently Reading:



The Penguin Book of Bengali Short Stories edited by Arunava Sinha
Writers as Readers: A Celebration of Virago Modern Classics (2018)
Jing Tsu - Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern (Penguin, 2022)
Vanessa Chan - The Storm We Made (Hodder & Stoughton, 2024)

First Quarter

January:
1. Patricia Highsmith - The Cry of the Owl
2. Ben Aaronovitch - Whispers Under Ground Review here .
3. Magdalena Zyzak - The Ballad of Barnabas Pierkiel Review here.
4. R. F. Kuang - Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution Review here.
5. Christopher Moore - Noir and Razzmatazz Review here.
6. Emily Henry - Beach Read
7. Sebastian Sim - Let’s Give It Up For Gimme Lao! Review here.
8. Richard Osman - The Bullet that Missed Review here.
9. Kate Collins - A Good House for Children Review here.
10. Ronojoy Sen - House of the People: Parliament and the Making of Indian Democracy (reviewed on the book page).
11. Paul D. Halliday - Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire
12. Richard Osman - The Last Devil to Die Review here.
12. Eileen Chang - The Rouge of the North Review here.

February:

13. V. V. Ganeshanathan - Brotherless Night Review here
14. Black Coffee in a Coconut Shell (edited by Perumal Murugan) Review here
15. Chen Zijin - Bad Kids Review here
16. Anthony Berkeley - The Wintringham Mystery Review here
17. Cristina Campo - The Unforgivable, and other Writings Review here
18. Maryla Szymiczkowa - Mrs. Mohr Goes Missing Review here
19. The Penguin Book of Murder Mysteries (edited by Michael Sims) Review here
20. Supriya Gandhi- The Emperor Who Never Was Review here
21. José Maria de Eça de Queirós - The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers Review here
22. Isaac Asimov - Gold: The Final Science Fiction Collection Review here
23. The Forward Book of Poetry 2018 - by various poets Review here
24. Tiitu Takalo - Me, Mikko and Anikki (Minä, Mikko ja Annikki) Review here

March

25. W. H. Auden - A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (Faber and Faber, 1971) - reviewed here
26. Alex Michaelides - The Fury reviewed here
27 and 28. Keigo Higashino - Malice and Newcomer reviewed here
29. Sebastian Sim - The Riot Act reviewed here
30. Robert Thorogood - The Marlow Murder Club here
31. Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Velvet Was the Night reviewed reviewed here
32. Iris Yamashita - City under one Roof reviewed here
33. Elisa Shua Dusapin - Vladivostok Circus reviewed here
34. Yulia Yakovleva - Death of the Red Rider reviewed here
35. Laura Lippman - Sunburn

Second Quarter

April:
36. Emily Henry - Book Lovers (Berkley, 2022) reviewed here
37. Lyudmila Petrushevskaya - The New Adventures of Helen (Deep Vellum, 2022) translated from the Russian by Jane Bugaeva reviewed here
38. Tana French - The Hunter (Viking 2024) reviewed here
39. Karrie Fransman - The House that Groaned (Square Peg 2014) reviewed here
40. Terry Pratchett - Making Money (Doubleday 2007) reviewed here
41. Marina Tsvetaeva - Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917–1922 (Yale University Press, 2002), translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell reviewed here
42. Mary Roberts Rineheart - Miss Pinkerton (American Mystery Classics, 2019) reviewed here
43. Agatha Christie - Murder on the Orient Express (narrated by Dan Stevens)
44. Balli Kaur Jaswal - Inheritance (Sleepers Publishing, 2013) reviewed here
45. Ann Leckie - Ancillary Justice (Orbit 2013) reviewed here
46. Butter by Asako Yuzuki (Ecco Books, 2024, translated by Polly Barton) reviewed here
47. Graeme Macrae Burnet - Case Study (Saraband 2022) here
48. Percival Everett - The Trees (Graywolf Press, 2021) reviewed here
49. Hilary Mantel - Mantel Pieces (London Review of Books/Fourth Estate, 2020) reviewed here
50. Susan Casey - The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean (Vintage, 2024) reviewed here
51. Kalpana Mohan - An English made in India

MAY
52. Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley (John Murray 2019) reviewed here
53. A Man Lay Dead by Ngaio Marsh (1934)reviewed here
54. Ministry of Moral Panic by Amanda Lee Koe (Epigram Books, 2013)reviewed here
55. Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See - Bianca Bosker (Viking 2024)reviewed here
56. Jeremy Tiang - State of Emergency (Epigram Books, 2017) reviewed here
57. Joanne Harris - Broken Light reviewed here
58. Ambedkar in London (Hurst and Co, 2022) edited by William Gould, Christophe Jaffrelot, and Santosh Dassreviewed here
59. Elena Ferrante - Frantumaglia reviewed here
60. Magda Szabo - The Door reviewed here
61. John Scalzi - The Kaiju Preservation Society reviewed here
62. Shubhangi Swarup - Latitudes of Longing reviewed here

JUNE
63. Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Silver Nitrate (Del Rey 2023) reviewed here
64. Ana María Matute - The Island (Penguin Classics, 2020, translated from the Spanish by Laura Lonsdale)reviewed here
65. Sharlene Teo - Ponti (Picador, 2018) reviewed here
66. Martha Wells - All Systems Red (2017) reviewed here
67. Donatella di Pietrantonio - A Girl Returned (Europa Editions 2019, translated by Ann Goldstein) reviewed here
68. Mari Ahokoivu - Oksi (Levine Querido, 2021, translated from the Finnish by Silja-Maaria Aronpuro) reviewed here
69. Reine Arcache Melvin - The Betrayed (Europa Editions, 2018) reviewed here
70. John Banville - Snow reviewed here
71. Doreen Cunningham - Soundings: Journeys in the Company of Whales: A Memoir (Scribner 2022) reviewed here
72. Fabulous Machinery for the Curious: The Garden of Urdu Classical Literature - edited by Musharraf Ali Farooqi (World Literature in Translation) reviewed here

Third Quarter

JULY
73. Magdalena Zyzak - The Lady Waiting (Riverhead, 2024) reviewed here
74. Lucy Foley - The Hunting Party (Harper Collins, 2019) reviewed here
75. Lucy Foley - The Midnight Feast (William Morrow, 2024) reviewed here
76. Judith Flanders - Rites of Passage: Death & Mourning in Victorian Britain (Pan Macmillan, 2024) reviewed here
77. Lee Geum-yi - Can't I Go Instead? (translated from the Korean by An Seonjae, Tor Publishing Group, 2023) reviewed here
78. Danielle Arceneaux - Glory Be (Pegasus 2023) reviewed here
79. Elizabeth Macneal - The Burial Plot (Picador 2024) reviewed here
80. Helen Oyeyemi - Parasol Against the Axe (Riverhead, 2024) reviewed here
81. Shari Lapena - Everyone Here is Lying (Books on Tape, narrated by January LaVoy, 2023)
82. Andrey Kurkov - The Silver Bone (Harper Via, 2024, translated from the Ukrainian by Boris Dralyuk) reviewed here
83. Peter Swanson - A Talent for Murder (Harper Collins, 2024. Audiobook, narrated by several people). reviewed here
84. Sarah Perry - The Essex Serpent (Serpent's Tail, 2016) reviewed here

AUGUST
85. Zhang Yue Ran - Cocoon, translated by Jeremy Tiang (World Editions, 2022) reviewed here
86. The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2023, edited by Steph Cha and Lisa Unger (Mariner Books, 2023) reviewed here
87. Amélie Nothomb - First Blood (translated from the French by Alison Anderson, Europa Editions, 2021, 2023) reviewed here
88. Anjum Hasan - A Day in the Life (Penguin 2018) reviewed here
89. Francesca Manfredi - The Empire of Dirt (translated from the Italian by Ekin Oklap, Norton, 2022) reviewed here
90. Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Untamed Shore reviewed here
91. The Haunted Lady by Mary Roberts Rinehart (1942, re-released by American Mystery Classics in 1998) reviewed here

SEPTEMBER
92. Barbara Ehrenreich - Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer (Hachette, 2019) reviewed here
93. Riku Onda - The Aosawa Murders (translated from the Japanese by Alison Watts, Bitter Lemon Press 2020) reviewed here
94. Tara Isabella Burton - Here in Avalon (Simon and Schuster 2024) reviewed here
95. Bae Suah - A Greater Music (Open Letter 2016, translated from the Korean by Deborah K. Smith)
96. The Best American Mystery Stories 2020, edited by C.J. Box (Mariner Books, 2020) reviewed here
97. Kotaro Isaka - The Mantis (Harvill Secker 2023, translated from the Japanese by Sam Malissa) reviewed here

Fourth Quarter

OCTOBER
98. Rachel Heng - The Great Reclamation (Riverhead 2024) reviewed here
99. Anne Michaels - Held (Bloomsbury, 2023) reviewed here
100. Ann Cleeves - The Dark Wives (Pan Macmillan, narrated by Janine Birkett, 2024) reviewed here
101. Ha Jin - The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai (Pantheon, 2019) reviewed here
102. Oskar Jensen - Helle and Death (Profile, 2024) reviewed here
103. Tan Twan Eng - The House of Doors (Bloomsbury 2023) reviewed here
104. Somerset Maugham - The Casuarina Tree (William Heinemann, 1926) reviewed here
105. Michelle T. King - Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food (W. W. Norton, 2024) reviewed here
106. Pratinav Anil - Another India: the making of the world’s largest minority 1947–77 (Hurst 2023) here

NOVEMBER
107. Natalie Sue - I Hope This Finds You Well (William Morrow 2024) here
108. Taffy Brodesser-Akner - Fleishman is in Trouble (Random House 2019) here
109. Bob Mortimer - The Hotel Avocado here
110. Susie Dent - Guilty by Definition (Zaffre 2024)
111. Susie Dent - Word Perfect: Etymological Entertainment For Every Day of the Year (John Murray, 2021) reviewed here
112. Colin Barrett - Wild Houses (Jonathan Cape 2024) reviewed here
113. Jing Tsu - Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution that Made China Modern (Riverhead Books 2022) reviewed here
114. Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman - Spycraft: Tricks and Tools of the Dangerous Trade from Elizabeth I to the Restoration (Yale University Press 2024) reviewed here
115. Writers as Readers: A Celebration of Virago Modern Classics reviewed here
116. Sarah Yarwood-Lovett - A Murder of Crows reviewed here
117. David Nicholls - You Are Here (Harper Audio, 2024, narrated by Lee Ingleby and Lydia Leonard) reviewed here

DECEMBER
118. Claire Messud - This Strange, Eventful History (W.W. Norton 2024)
119. Peter Carey - Oscar and Lucinda (University of Queensland Press, 1988)
120. Candice Fox - Hades (Kensington 2015)
121. Hisham Matar - My Friends (Viking)
122. Benjamin Stevenson - Everyone On This Train is a Suspect (Penguin, 2024)
123. Robert Jackson Bennett - The Tainted Cup (Del Rey 2024) reviewed here
124. Vanessa Chan - The Storm We Made (Simon & Schuster, 2024)
125. Robert Caro - The Power Broker (Knopf 1974)
126. Daniel Aubrey - Dark Island (Harper 2024)

OCTOBER



This month's comic is by the wonderful Sarah Andersen, and reflects the fact that I currently have three shelves of unread books, a stack of twelve-odd borrowed volumes from two different libraries, a huge quantity of unread books on my e-reader, and somehow still ended up in a secondhand bookshop, buying more, last week.

I didn't do much reading for pleasure in September. Work has been exceptionally busy. I'm going to be even busier to the end of this year, with some travelling (for work and fun) planned, so updates might be slow. Still, I hope to get more uninterrupted reading done on trains and planes.

Here's what I've got on my plate. I don't think I'll get around to all of them, but it's good to have goals. I'm halfway through about half of these!


Titles:

Vanessa Chan - The Storm We Made (Hodder & Stoughton, 2024)
Tan Twan Eng - The House of Doors (Bloomsbury, 2024)
Pratinav Anil - Another India: The Making of the World's Largest Muslim Minority, 1947-77 (Oxford University Press, 2024)
Jing Tsu - Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern (Penguin, 2022)
David van Reybrouck - Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World (WW Norton, 2024)
The Penguin Book of Bengali Short Stories - edited by Arunava Sinha (Penguin, 2024)
Writers as Readers: A Celebration of Virago Modern Classics - (Virago, 2018)
Lessons in Crime: Academic Mysteries - edited by Martin Edwards (British Library Publishing, 2024)
Elizabeth Spencer - The Southern Woman: Selected Fiction (Modern Library, 2021)
Zoë Schlanger - The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth (Harper, 2024)
Rapture and Melancholy: The Diaries of Edna St. Vincent Millay - edited by Daniel Mark Epstein (Yale University Press, 2022)
Andrew Caldecott - Rotherweird (Fletcher, 2019)
Ha Jin - The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai (Pantheon, 2019)
Oskar Jensen - Helle and Death (Viper, 2024)
Ann Cleeves - The Dark Wives (Minotaur, 2024)
Elaine Chiew - The Light Between Us (Neem Tree Press, 2024)

(I'm reposting this October read from the old thread for organisational reasons).

98. Rachel Heng - The Great Reclamation (Riverhead 2024)



This is such a great read, I already know it's going to be one of my best books of this quarter, if not the year. Rachel Heng's The Great Reclamation is a sweeping historical novel, tracing the life of one fishing family in Singapore between the decades that are bookmarked by Japanese occupation in World War II, and Singapore's short-lived merger with Malaysia in the 1960s. The story centers around Lee Ah Boon, a young boy growing up in a fishing village, or Kampung, on the outer reaches of Singapore, with his father, mother, brother, and uncle. Although his mother is determined that her shy, quiet, youngest child will be educated, he shows a preternatural gift for navigating to places where the fish are richest: to small outer islands, untouched by people. So Ah Boon divides his time in a village school, where he meets his best friend, a determined young woman, Siok Mei, and going out on the boats with his father, into the ocean.

This idyllic childhood is cut short by the brutal Japanese occupation of Singapore: like many young men who really did die in this fashion, Ah Boon's father is rounded up and shot by Japanese occupying forces. Some weeks ago I went out to Punggol beach, in the north-eastern part of Singapore. The beach is narrow, covered with rounded black rocks. The tide was in when I walked by on the promenade, leaving only a sliver. I saw a monument there, erected in memory of the four hundred Chinese men shot dead by Japanese forces who occupied the island, in a massacre known as 'Sook Ching'. To date, fishermen will still find bones in the sand or washing up. It was sobering to stand there, looking at those rocks and imaging the horrors that took place. Although Heng does not go into graphic detail, her writing is vivid and atmospheric: the narrative so gripping that I was up late several nights in a row, reading.

After the death of his father, Ah Boon briefly becomes a student radical, led by his friend Siok Mei, a revolutionary. As time passes, and as Siok Mei falls in love with someone else, Ah Boon turns away from her, joining the fledgling Singapore government. The rest of the book is about competing visions of the country that Singapore will become. To Ah Boon, being a part of the government represents progress, stability, and safety: so that if someday, a member of his family is taken again, he could perhaps prevent the same fate that befell his father. To Siok Mei, the repressive new government isn't much better than the British colonists or the Japanese: they are one in a series of successors who will trample over the freedoms of the people to achieve their own visions of progress. Ah Boon becomes the director of a project that aims at reclaiming parts of the sea to build affordable flats; the price of this development is the loss of his childhood village, and the mining of the little islands for sand. The fish that they used to catch slowly disappear, and even as Ah Boon builds the life he wants: a home for his mother, a wife, a child: he knows it has come with a price.

Despite these heavy subjects, Heng has, for the most part, a light and deft hand. Aside from a few clunky bits of backstory in the beginning chapters, her narrative style, and empathetic portrayal of the complex moral, political, and personal quandaries that her characters face, makes this an eminently readable and interesting book. I enjoyed it.

(I'm reposting this October read from the old thread for organisational reasons).

99. Anne Michaels - Held (Bloomsbury, 2023)



Held is the first book that I have read from this year's Booker longlist. This is such a complex, intelligent book, but I'm not sure it will enjoy wider appeal. It appears, on the surface, to be almost dreamlike, a series of vignettes tracing four generations of families, and the way in which war, violence, love, and grief touch their lives. Yet, as you read, you see under the surface a rage, an anger at the injustice and the pity of war, the loneliness and agony of grief and love, and the inexorable death that awaits us. That is not to say this is a bleak, nihilistic book: it's the opposite, because each part contains a seed of small hope and love, but Michaels is writing with her eyes absolutely open to the way the world is today, and the way we are going.

In 1910, in Sceaux, France, a young woman, Lia, meets a photographer. Her husband is dead, passing away in his sleep in her arms one night; she is grieving, and she encounters a man, sitting in a field. They speak briefly, feeling an instant, deep connection, but part soon after, the connection broken. Alone in her room, she reflects on her husband, her life, and her future, in a passage that gives us the title:

"She knew that she and her husband had had more time at the end than most; she knew it was everything not to die alone, to be taken brutally, by force. She could never explain, she could never imagine a time when she would be able to explain all he was to her. Lia had drawn a blanket over him. She had dressed. She had made room for herself and lain down next to him. What could she give him now? She knew what he would want for her: that stillness might grow to peace. Not still: held."

Michaels is writing in a way that is poetic, deeply stylized. Her characters speak to each other in aphorisms: deep declarations, philosophical queries, agonised claims. It is a little jarring at first, but as I read on, I fell within the narrative, and the greater story she is telling. This is a book that you have to allow yourself to be led by; give yourself to it and you'll be rewarded, but resist and you will likely find it a bit irritating. I enjoyed it greatly, and I think I'll re-read it, if only to savour it.

100. Ann Cleeves - The Dark Wives (Pan Macmillan, narrated by Janine Birkett)



This is the latest volume in Ann Cleeves' long-running mystery/police procedural novels, with a character named Vera Stanhope as lead detective. I hear there's a TV adaptation as well, but I haven't seen it. Cleeves produces a vast number of these novels, with a reliable level of quality and writing. I like the main character, Vera Stanhope, because she's a very effective mirror to all the standard detective tropes: for once, she's the unmarried, childless, older woman, but instead of boozing around and letching at young men, she instead calls people 'pet,' drinks tea (and often, whisky, but only off-duty), and solves crime. She's resourceful, intelligent, has great people skills, is deeply kind, and also very stubborn and a bit of a control freak. All in all, a complex character, who is fun to read.

In this book, the 'Dark Wives' are three standing stones, which are the subject of a local legend involving witches. Right around an annual festival commemorating these myths, a young teenager in a care home goes missing. One of the staff members of the care home also turns up dead. Rather than have this devolve into the usual route of endless violence against women, Cleeves chooses to make the neglect of children in state care the centre of this story, and especially, neglect in the form of a lack of attention, consideration, and parenting. She does manage to keep the hectoring out, but I thought it was nice for a crime writer tackle issues like the privatisation of state care for profit, and its effects, rather than the usual trope of fridging a women for plot development. A solid, decent mystery novel.

edited for spelling

101. Ha Jin - The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai (Pantheon, 2019)



I originally came across Li Bai's work through a translation of his poem by Ezra Pound: The River Merchant's Wife' '. As I dug deeper, it was soon apparent to me that Pound had taken liberties: it was less a translation and more a re-telling - Pound himself did not speak or read Chinese, and worked from notes made by historian Ernest Fenollosa, whose own specialization was Japanese Noh drama. Despite reading more translations, I did understand that I was placing one foot inside a giant river of tradition that is Chinese Tang poetry, and that my appreciation was, at best, shallow, without the necessary context. Accordingly, when I came across a biography of Li Bai written by the novelist Ha Jin, I promptly picked up, motivated by a desire to know more about the poet, but also to perhaps gain a better understanding of his context.

Ha Jin is clearly writing for a novice like myself. His book is clear, accessible, and beautifully written, providing great detail, context, and explanations for those unfamiliar with Chinese literature and history. Li Bai, in his time (701-762) was already born within a well-developed tradition of classical poetry, and his own work, as I discovered through this book, was iconoclastic in many ways, marked by a deliberate turn away from formalist rules of poetic structure, to a more folk-driven, lyrical style. Ha Jin beautifully weaves in this literary context within details of Li Bai's life, with the necessary disclaimer that much of what we know is unverified conjecture. I found it to be even-handed, noting his failures (a notoriously poor husband and family man, unfaithful and prone to wandering off) and his merits (a devoted friend, a hard-working scholar, and a loving, if absent parent). It is a beautifully written, often quite moving account of a troubled man, torn between his desire for a Daoist life of spiritual abnegation, and a deep need to see and effect political change in accordance with his ideals of statehood.

Finally, I should add that the text is scattered with fresh translations of Li Bai's poetry, prepared by Ha Jin himself, for this text. As he provides the poem, Ha Jin goes on to tell us the significance of each one; for instance, how Li Bai's use of imagery went against established convention, or which poems continue to be quoted to date between friends or as goodbyes. I felt like I had been afforded a window into a world that I did not know before, and look forward to exploring further.

I'm including, for reference, one of my favourite poems by Li Bai. I have chosen a translation by William Acker, but this page contains 42 other translations, which should demonstrate how challenging the project must be, even for those who know, or have taken the trouble to learn the original language (unlike Pound). https://clatterymachinery.wordpress.com/2007/01/26/li-bai-drinking-alone-with-th....

Amidst the Flowers a Jug of Wine
by Li Bai

Amidst the flowers a jug of wine–
I pour alone lacking companionship,
So raising the cup I invite the moon,
Then turn to my shadow which makes three of us.
Because the moon does not know how to drink
My shadow merely follows my body.
The moon has brought the shadow to keep me company a while,
The practice of mirth should keep pace with spring.
I start a song and the moon begins to reel,
I rise and dance and the shadow moves grotesquely.
While I’m still conscious let’s rejoice with one another,
After I’m drunk let each one go his way.
Let us bind ourselves for ever for passionless journeyings.
Let us swear to meet again far in the Milky Way.

Happy new thread, and what a wealth of interesting books! I get hit by so many book bullets whenever I visit your thread. Stop writing such intriguing reviews!

>8 rv1988: The Great Reclamation immediately went on my wishlist. Sounds like something I would really enjoy.

>11 rv1988: I want to return to my reading of Chinese history, but this is a tempting rabbit hole. I like Ha Jin, and I like that it's written for a novice. I want to read a bit more about twentieth century history in China first though.

>12 labfs39: Haha, I hope that you enjoy The Great Reclamation, if you get around to reading it. As for the Ha Jin book, it really is very accessible.

Crossword Book Awards 2024

The Crossword Book Awards are presented annually for Indian books in a variety of genres. Crossword is actually a bookstore chain: I spent many birthdays in them, stocking up for the year ahead. I've put a star (★) against anything I want to read.

An overview with descriptions of each book can be found here: https://scroll.in/article/1074033/dnp-the-2024-crossword-book-awards-longlists-o...

This year's longlist is:

Fiction
History’s Angel, Anjum Hasan, Bloomsbury India ★
Never, Never Land, Namita Gokhale, Speaking Tiger Books
The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao, Lindsay Pereira, Penguin India
The East Indian, Brinda Charry, HarperCollins India
The Gallery, Manju Kapur, Penguin India
Quarterlife, Devika Rege, HarperCollins India
Can’t, Shinie Antony
Chronicle of an Hour and a Half, Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari, Westland
Tall Tales By a Small Dog, Omair Ahmad, Speaking Tiger Books ★
Shakchunni, Arnab Ray, Hachette India

Nonfiction
From Phansi Yard: My Year with the Women of Yerawada, Sudha Bhardwaj, Juggernaut ★
The Day I Became a Runner: A Women’s History of India through the Lens of Sport, Sohini Chattopadhyay, HarperCollins India
City on Fire: A Boyhood in Aligarh, Zeyad Masroor Khan, HarperCollins India
Swadeshi Steam, VO Chidambaram Pillai and the Battle against the British Maritime Empire, AR Venkatachalapathy, Penguin India ★
A Part Apart: The Life and Thought of BR Ambedkar, Ashok Gopal, Navayana ★
Mother Cow, Mother India: A Multispecies Politics of Dairy in India, Yamini Narayanan, Navayana
Anger Management: The Troubled Diplomatic Relationship between India and Pakistan, Ajay Bisaria, Aleph Book Company
Being Hindu, Being Indian: Lala Lajpat Rai’s Ideas of Nationhood, Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav, Penguin India
Marginlands: Indian Landscapes on the Brink, Arati Kumar-Rao, Pan Macmillan India ★
Fire on the Ganges: Life Among the Dead in Benares, Radhika Iyengar, HarperCollins India ★

Translations
Beneath the Simolu Tree, Sarmishtha Pritam, translated from the Assamese by Ranjita Biswas, Simon and Schuster India
Boy, Unloved, Damodar Mauzo, translated from the Konkani by Jerry Pinto, Speaking Tiger Books ★
I Named My Sister Silence, Manoj Rupda, translated from the Hindi by Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, Westland ★
Dudiya: In Your Burning Land, Vishwas Patil, translated from the Marathi by Nadeem Khan, Niyogi Books
Mithun Number Two, Jayant Kaikini, translated from the Kannada by Tejaswini Niranjana, Westland
Fire Bird, Perumal Murugan, translated from the Tamil by Janani Kannan, Penguin India ★
Sakina’s Kiss, Vivek Shanbhag, translated from the Kannada by Srinath Perur, Penguin India ★
A Woman Burnt, Imayam, translated from the Tamil by GJV Prasad, Simon and Schuster India ★
Maria Just Maria, Sandhya Mary, translated from the Malayalam by Jayasree Kalathil, HarperCollins India ★
Fruits of the Barren Tree, Lekhnath Chhetri, translated from the Nepali by Anurag Basnet, Penguin India

There are also awards for children's books and business/management, but I have no interest in those.

102. Oskar Jensen - Helle and Death (Profile, 2024)



I was searching our library for a book about Victorian London, titled Vagabonds by an author named Oskar Jensen, when I came across this mystery novel by an author of the same name. It looked interesting enough so I picked it up to read.

The titular character, Torben Helle, is from Denmark, although he studied at Oxford, along with a group of friends who shared one residence in their first year. Over the years, they have had varied fortunes: Helle is an art historian, currently on a prestigious fellowship. Leyla is a successful barrister, Tom a struggling actor, Ruth, an unhappily married cop, and so on. The most successful and least popular of them, Anthony Dodd, has a multimillion dollar app that he has just sold. Anthony invites all his friends to a private retreat at a historical manse: this reunion is the first time they will have seen each other in years. At dinner on the first day, Anthony announces he has a life-threatening illness that will soon take him, and leaves each of his friends a sizable bequest in his will. The next day, Anthony is found dead. With a storm cutting them off from the outside world, Torben teams up with Ruth, the cop, and Leyla the barrister to try and figure out which one of them is the killer.

While the premise is fine enough - a classic locked room mystery - it feels as though the author tries too hard. The narrative is littered with little references to art, history, the classics, and culture, and you are never permitted the luxury of forgetting that everyone in the main cast of characters went to Oxford. Done subtly, this could have been very effective in conveying the cross-sections of class, power, and lineage that lie between them, but it actually comes across as annoying and a bit hectoring. Everything is just a bit too obvious, and that goes for the actual mystery too. I found it the whole thing rather irritating and a waste of a good setup.

>14 rv1988: Thanks for sharing the Crossword Book Awards. I bookmark such lists with good intentions of exploring and reading from them, but now I have dozens and dozens of such lists! Ah, if only I had more time or read faster or didn't sleep or something!

>16 labfs39: There's simply not enough time!

103. Tan Twan Eng - The House of Doors (Bloomsbury 2023)
104. Somerset Maugham - The Casuarina Tree (William Heinemann, 1926)



In 1911, Malaysia was a British 'protectorate', and a woman named Ethel Proudlock, the wife of a local headmaster, shot and killed a friend, William Steward, on the steps of her home. Ethel said she acted in self-defence as William had tried to assault her: she was convicted of murder, ultimately leading Sultan Suleiman Shah to pardon her. The case was hugely controversial, not just in Malaysia, where it occurred, but in Britain, where papers reported on rumours surrounding Ethel and her supposed affair with the man she shot. Maugham fictionalised these true events in his short story, 'The Letter', renaming Ethel as 'Leslie Crosbie', and including it in his collection of stories set in Malaysia, The Casuarina Tree. In 2023, Tan Twan Eng, a writer born in Malaysia and settled in England, published The House of Doors, which is, in turn, a fictionalised account of Maugham's travels in Malaysia, during which he gathered the material for this collection of stories. The House of Doors is the product of some meticulous research, aided by an imaginative interpretation of the events and background to Maugham's publication of this story.

I read both books - Tan's and Maugham's - in parallel, and it was clear that Tan draws not just from Maugham's life, but also his writing style, the way he draws his characters. Either intentionally or otherwise, he echoes some of Maugham's flaws as well: there are many moments of uninspired background building, related in the form of Maugham asking Lesley about local culture. While this allows Tan to interject little lectures about Malay food, Penang culture, and local art, it is not artfully done and a bit tedious to read. Returning to Maugham, I found it jarring to re-read him now. He deliberately places slurs in the mouths of his characters that we would not use today (with good reason) which startled me when I read them, even as I kept in mind that the characters using those slurs were inevitably portrayed negatively. His positive portrayals, though, betray a more insidious, condescending form of characterization: sweeping generalizations of the local people, fulsome praises of colonial rule as a great civilizing influence, and a deeply Orientalist view of Malay culture. Reading them together, it's clear that Tan, by writing from the perspective of British colonists, echoed this patronising fondness for the 'natives' in a way that was meant to be subversive. He points in particular to Lesley dressing up in Malay costume, to the bewilderment of her Malay staff, and the gushing praise of her British friends, and eventually conceding, grudgingly, that she might not be passing as Malay-Chinese (!?) after all, despite the wide-brimmed hat concealing her face.

Despite these shortcomings, The House of Doors is a very pleasant read, and one that does something quite interesting in terms of combining history, biography, literary commentary, and fiction in one novel. I'm not sure, though, that I can read Maugham again - I did at a younger age, but it gets harder to swallow his descriptions of "black Tamils, yellow Chinese, and brown Malays" beyond a point (an actual quote from 'The Letter').

*edited for formatting

>18 rv1988: Interesting and impressive that you could read House of Doors and Casuarina Tree in tandem.

I don’t like Maugham’s style or much of his subject mater, and haven’t read many of his books. I read House of Doors and found the. overbearing cultural racism annoying. Words like “Chinaman” are not just inappropriate, they are unpleasant in a book that is not generally seen as enlightened.

It came across that it was just a tiny class of the English who were condescending and insulting. I didn’t get the feel that it was “meant to be subversive”. Maybe if I read it again I’d see it, but it is not a book I remember with fondness.

Great review as usual.

>18 rv1988: Have you read any of Tan Twan Eng's other books? I loved both Garden of Evening Mists and Gift of Rain. From what I have heard, House of Doors isn't as good, which makes me hesitant to read it, although I imagine I will at some point.

>19 kjuliff: I read it very differently. I personally did not find it offensive when a Malay author of Chinese heritage suggested in a fictionalised account that an English settler-colonist in the 1910s might have used the word 'Chinaman,' especially since the overarching point was to demonstrate the harm of the racist stereotypes behind such words. Tan repeatedly sets up his novel in juxtaposition to Maugham (I'm not just guessing, he says as much in interviews). I understood that the point was, in fact, to make the reader uncomfortable with the "unpleasant" and "overbearing cultural racism" of the characters (which we should be careful not to attribute to the author himself). Tan setting it up especially in stark contrast to Maugham's unironic use of such language, and keeping in mind Maugham's place in literature and criticism generally. Maugham repeatedly draws a distinction in The Casuarina Tree between the 'good' and 'bad' kind of colonist (in one of the stories, 'The Outstation' he Maugham does it so: one calls his servants slurs and stereotypes them but pays them on time; the other whips his servants but does not pay them). Tan's point is to show that this distinction is hypocritical, and both are aspects of the same coin. I did see one review suggesting that Maugham's critique had the flaw of being subtle, but I disagree: I think he could not have been more obvious, or atleast, not within the structure of a novel.

Separately, I think one of the reasons that authors like RF Kuang are so popular is that her entire message is "Does anyone else agree with me that racism is kind of bad?" and the answer of course is yes, but she has nothing more to offer. The people who need to hear the message aren't reading her books. She's putting up billboards inside her own house for the unnecessary edification of the converted. It's a ritualised, performative sort of progressiveness that requires no effort from the reader, only a pleasant affirmation of their own moral worth. What Tan is doing has more ambition and integrity: he's holding up a mirror to the English literary canon, pointing out its flaws without discarding its value, and I can see why many would find that uncomfortable.

>20 labfs39: I have Garden of Evening Mists lined up. I picked up this one because I was mentally making a little collection of books that I think are thematically similar, although I don't know if I can accurately describe the ways in which they line up:

Tan Twan Eng - House of Doors (fictionalised bio, Somerset Maugham in Malaysia) and Maugham's own The Moon and Sixpence about Paul Gauguin in Tahiti
Pico Iyer - The Man Within my Head (about the author's relationship with the writing of Graham Greene and his global travels, esp in Asia, memoir-ish)
Damon Galgut - Arctic Summer (fictionalised account of E.M. Forster in South Africa)
Caryl Phillips - Dancing in the Dark (about the vaudeville entertainer Bert Williams)
J. M. Coetzee - The Master of Petersburg (his reimagining of Dostoevsky's life)
Sabina Murray - Valiant Gentlemen (about Irish revolutionary Roger Casement's friendship with the sculptor Herbert Ward)

>21 rv1988: I personally did not find it offensive when a Malay author of Chinese heritage suggested in a fictionalised account that an English settler-colonist in the 1910s might have used the word 'Chinaman,'

I am not understanding something here. The word “Chinaman” was not written as part of a conversation. Or as the inner thoughts of any of the novel’s characters. It was part of the writer’s narrative. It was the writing himself speaking. I remember going back several times as I was puzzled.

Of course such derogatory words should be written as coming from the people who used them. This doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable. It makes me angry if anything, but I’m used to it. But the meaning for using the word Chinaman was not clear in the book. The subtlety passed me by.

Of course I understand that the writer is Chinese and many ethnic groups choose to use derogatory words that are applied to their own race, for various reasons. I do it myself when talking to Hispanic friends, I’ve referred to myself as gringo. But if I wrote a book I wouldn’t use the word gringo to describe a white person unless it was in satire, or quoting an Hispanic.

There’s something I’m missing.

>22 kjuliff: The book is written from two alternating POVs. One is Somerset Maugham. The other is Lesley. The author's POV isn't presented. So if the word is used, it is used in Maugham or Lesley's internal thinking or words.

>23 rv1988: OK. I didn’t understand that there were two distinct povs. I don’t know how I missed that. I l read it in audio so maybe that was the problem. I completely missed the book.

I know nothing of Maugham or his place in American literature. I haven’t read any of Maughm’s books.. Maybe I should read Eng’s book again. Thanks for your illumination. I feel rather foolish now.

>24 kjuliff: No worries! And there's no reason to feel foolish. I can't imagine how difficult it has been to adapt to an audio-only reading environment. By the way, I don't think it really warrants a re-read. It was a nice book but not that nice!

>25 rv1988: Thank Rasdhar. I’d never used audio till a few years ago. It’s mostly fine, but sometime not. It can be so frustrating as you are being presented the book through the eyes of another.

Yes, it’s not worth me re-reading House of Doors.i wasn’t really impressed with the book when I read it a few years back.

I actually went back to my review of House of Doors as I was very concerned about my lack of understanding. I can see now why I misunderstood. Not having read anything by Maugham when I read the House of Doors, I did understand there were two stories of the same event by two differing perspectives. But I didn’t get the change in writing style. So I thought the book was about the two perspectives rather than by the two people, Maugham and Lesley as perceived by Eng.

105. Michelle T. King - Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food (W. W. Norton, 2024)



This was a random pick from the library, and I really enjoyed it. Fu Pei Mei was born in 1931 mainland China, in Dalian, while it was under Japanese occupation. She married young and moved to Taiwan with her family. Her husband demanded that she cook, but she had never learned, so she spent her entire dowry on hiring chefs from restaurants to give her private lessons. With years of hard work and a great deal of interest in learning different regional styles of cooking, she progressed to teaching local women, eventually landing up with a TV spot. Over the years, Fu Pei Mei wrote a series of immensely popular cookbooks and guides to Chinese cooking, in addition to filming hundreds of TV episodes of cooking shows, demonstrating techniques and recipes. As fast food rose in popularity, the elevated, complex preparations she preferred were less popular to make, but at the same time, people continued watching her show (while eating instant noodles) as a form of comfort and nostalgia. Fu Pei Mei's own adaptations were collaborations with industrial food processes, working to develop sauces, seasonings, and eventually a line of instant noodles. Her material was produced in the four languages that she spoke: Mandarin Chinese, Hokkien, Japanese, and with the assistance of her daughter, in English as well. She died in 2004, of cancer.

I've seen dozens of reviews of this biography online that call her 'the Julia Child of Chinese cooking' which felt, to me, to a bit unnecessary. In the book itself, Michelle T. King talks about the advent of television in Taiwan, noting that when international programming was made accessible to the public, local press referred to Julia Child as the 'Fu Pei Mei of America' (ha!). The book itself is a nuanced and well-written take. King has looked into the *changing role of women in the household, the introduction of technology (gas and electric stoves replacing coal burners) and Fu Pei Mei's own, somewhat belated, acknowledgment of the strengths of Taiwanese cuisine over classical Chinese regional recipes. In a concluding chapter, she talks about the immense influence Fu Pei Mei's work had on so many households, especially for Chinese families living abroad, and the ubiquity of her cookbooks (one in each household). The author's done a great job of locating Fu Pei Mei with context, especially the immense change in society, technology, and culture during Fu Pei Mei's lifestyle.

King is a historian, working on gender. I always like to look at Goodreads reviews after I read something, mostly for the entertainment value. There were quite a few one and two star reviews, complaining about 'too much detail' in the book. I have to wonder at the kind of person who picks up a biography and complains about the detail. In any case, I enjoyed it, and I wish I could speak a bit of Chinese, because most of her shows are available online on youtube even today.

Thank you for your fantastic reviews of The House of Doors and especially Held, Rasdhar. I admittedly struggled with Michaels's novel, probably because I had difficulty setting devoting uninterrupted time to read it; I did purchase the Kindle version of it after I returned the copy I read to my local library, with the intention of reading it again later this year or in 2025.

>27 kjuliff: Understandable, Kate. I appreciate your comments here. I know it must be quite inconvenient for you to go back and check via audio: that's very impressive.

>29 kidzdoc: Thanks! I plan to re-read Held myself, I think it will hold up.

106. Pratinav Anil - Another India: the making of the world’s largest minority 1947–77 (Hurst 2023)



I suspect not many people here might be interested in this, but I was looking forward to this archival history of the involvement of India's large Muslim minority in the post-independent decades of 1947-77, but I'm dropping these notes here anyhow, so I can come back to them later. I will admit to being a bit wary, because I read an unseemly little back and forth between the author and others in LA Review of Books and lost a lot of respect for a person who would engage so publicly in a pointless little spat like that. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/letter-to-the-editor-pratinav-anil-responds-... Having said that, I tried to approach this book with an open mind, and I found good and bad.

The good is that there's a lot of fine archival work here, although the author admits to being limited by his languages (he speaks Hindi and English). So, his archival work is limited to the north of India, and excludes substantial populations in the South and North-East. This is a significant exclusion, because he is claiming to remove focus from histories that focus on a few elite leaders, and center the common person's experiences - provided they lived in North India. With that disclaimer, there is a lot of important research here, collecting political histories, accounts of violence and riots, details of exclusion, and of the range of political views within the Muslim minority - from moderate to extreme. It is all very new and valuable material that has not been published or made accessible so far.

The bad is that his arguments about this research tend to be reductive and contradictory. Anil's main argument is that the current state of religious discrimination and harassment is not new: it ties into decades of such discrimination that have existed from the partition of India and Pakistan and the independence of India. In doing so he is going against some current narratives that previous governments were somehow more tolerant and secular than the present Hindu chauvinist majoritarian rule. While he's not wrong, I think he's overstating his case a bit. He does not provide citations for claims he's making about these narratives, probably because if you read them (as I have) they are not quite as reductive as he's claiming. A similarly reductionist claim that he puts forward is about the 'robbing of agency' of the common Muslim by Muslim elites. Anil argues that elite Muslims bargained away rights in order to amass power: but at the same time, documents how even these elites were given no room for negotiation, and were subject to constant discrimination themselves. It is a fairly absurd, and unfortunately common - claim that minorities are simultaneously too weak and too powerful; that they are completely helpless but also somehow completely responsible for their own situation. As a Frontline review put it, "They had no option but to meekly accept the tradeoff offered by Congress: the protection of Muslims’ cultural and religious rights in lieu of their political rights. Had they pressed for their political rights, they may have ended up losing even their cultural rights." https://frontline.thehindu.com/books/the-muslims-who-stayed-back-book-review-ano.... Similarly much of his sharp critique of identity politics is theorizing in a void: it is a valid argument only if you assume that there are options other than identity politics available to a significantly marginalized population.

In summary, while he provides important and valuable archival research, I'm not sure that his arguments about what this research implies are carefully thought through. This is a useful book to read, although not one that I can recommend.

107. Natalie Sue - I Hope This Finds You Well (William Morrow 2024)



I had to wait for a doctor's appointment recently, and ended up speed-reading the first few chapters of this while sitting in the waiting room, then taking it home and hate-reading over dinner. It was pretty terrible, but I felt like I had to see it through (because I'm a complete sucker for a happy ending, which is largely guaranteed in the pulp romance genre). This is a novel about an Iranian-American woman in a dead-end secretarial job at a paper company. She's poorly socialized, awkward, a little bit of a bully, actively hostile and often outright cruel to most people, including a young neighbour who has the gall to occasionally say hello to her. She gets into the habit of including nasty little messages in hidden text in her work emails to colleagues - they don't see the messages and she apparently finds it cathartic to abuse them for things like decorating their own cubicles for the holidays, enjoying their coffee, and other such horrific offenses. Obviously, one day she forgets to hide the text, and gets put on a performance improvement program and given HR training for harassing her colleagues. The poorly-drawn hero - the blank canvas on which we are meant to project our passions - is the HR employee assigned to train her. His defining trait is that he is nice and quirky - you can tell by the way he enthuses about his nerd hobbies, which our heroine takes great pleasure in alternately mocking and ignoring. This is apparently an irresistibly charming technique to impress your future figurative love interest. Through the novel we are told that her awful behaviour is because of unresolved childhood trauma concerning the death of a friend. Despite being given every opportunity to have this trauma addressed - a supportive if somewhat confused family that she is quite mean to; the offer of therapy that she rejects, and so on, she persists in being consistently horrible to everyone including herself. She takes some steps to be nicer - for instrumental reasons, to get a promotion - and ends up abusing some email access that she's been mistakenly given to manipulate her coworkers. This backfires, but there is still a happy ending. A little epilogue suggests that some steps were taken to address her issues, post-happy ending. I think it would have been a stronger book overall if we had seen any evidence at all of actual emotional growth in the book and were not asked to assume in the epilogue that it had occurred.

There is a trend in romance novels of actively awful people having their actively awful behaviour rewarded with little to no actual accountability, coupled with many excuses and justifications for why that actively awful behaviour is okay. Emily Henry does this too. It reminds me of how the concept of 'self-care' was envisioned by Audre Lorde. As she was battling cancer and also racism and sexism, she wrote "Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” This idea has somehow become the concept that your emotional journey will be completed by a $100 scented candle, a warm bath, and a moisturiser made of orphans' tears - a complete transition from self-care, to self-indulgence. A parallel to this is the trend in romance fiction that extremely flawed characters are too, entitled to happy endings. I do like that we aren't reading about perfect dolls with perfect marriages: we're all flawed and that's what makes the story interesting. At the same time, I do feel that within the genre, the emotional arc, and with it, some emotional journeys, are part of what we seek. If a person is horrid to start with, and then continues to be horrid while falling in love, and is then justified in their horrid-ness (horriditude? horridity?) because of that love, it's difficult to understand why we're reading the book at all. Yes, horrid people are rewarded all the time - but if I wanted to read that story, I'd pick up a newspaper, not a romance novel. It would honestly be more entertaining to see such flawed characters take a full villain arc than have us believe they are the misunderstood victims of a mean conspiracy. Lean into the villainy, you cowards! Seriously, though - romance fiction is built on the idea that you invest yourself in the happiness of the characters you read, and I don't care at all about these nasty little people, their nasty little lives, and their cardboard boyfriends.

>32 rv1988: A friend of mine wrote a Mills and Boon. She told me it took her forever and it’s a very competitive field. She did quite well out of it financially, and when I suggested she write another she said she just couldn’t. That it was as difficult as writing a real novel.

>32 rv1988: I enjoyed reading this review. I don't know much about romance books, and I found your comments instructive as well as entertaining to read.

>33 kjuliff: Romance novels ARE "real" novels.

>35 KeithChaffee: I fully agree. Romance novels are real novels.

>36 rv1988: >35 KeithChaffee: I’m confused. I was referring to Mills and Boon romantic novels with stock plots. Talk dark misunderstood man Mets innocent young girl blah blah. AI is going to take these over- if it hasn’t already.

Are all novels of equal merit?

No, of course not. And I didn't say that I thought Mills & Boon were good novels; in my limited experience with them (or with their American branding as Harlequin), they aren't. I generally find them lazy and formulaic in the extreme.

On the other hand, I've known romance readers -- my mother, for one -- who told me they didn't understand science fiction, that it was all the same to them. And when I look at the differences in style, subject, and technique between (to pick some authors more or less at random) Connie Willis, Ted Chiang, and Wole Talabi, my mind boggles that anyone could find them "all the same." And I imagine that romance readers are equally boggled by my general indifference to romance novels.

But genre novels, even at the lower end of the quality spectrum, are still novels, and even if they don't appeal to me, I imagine they take a fair amount of effort to write, just as "literary" novels do. (And let's not pretend that "literary fiction" isn't a genre with its own rules and formulas; it very much is.) As someone who reads a lot of mystery and SF, I'm not fond of genre snobbery, even when it's not my particular ox being gored.

>38 KeithChaffee: I’m still confused. You use the term “lower end” as if there was some idea of quality. And then talk of snobbery. I was referring to formulaic romance novels.

I wasn’t talking about readers but I think it’s fair enough to believe some novels are better than others. I do not believe difficulty in writing is any kind of yardstick.

In my opinion, Mills and Boon books lack literary merit. I would not even call those novels a genre.

I think there's a difference between saying that some novels are better than others and saying that some aren't even "real" novels. And you don't, and neither of us is likely to change the other's mind, so let's leave it at that.

I agree with both of you: genre novels are novels like any other, and some novels (of any genre) are so bad that one has to wonder why they were published at all. As for formulaic novels (again, of any genre) I think some of the appeal is that the reader knows what they are getting when they crack the cover. There is some comfort in turning to a book that requires little from the reader. I think most readers have a type of "bathtub book" (one that you can relax with as a guilty pleasure without minding if it gets dunked) that provides distraction without effort. I know I do!

>41 labfs39: I do think that part of why I get annoyed by recent romance novels of the type I described. I don't mind cheesy romances when I'm in the mood; in fact, I enjoy them. But I don't like mean-spirited romances, which seem to be the flavour of the season right now. A friend of mine was reading another one, recently, that was very highly-rated among romance readers: Get a Life Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert. In that book, the protagonist pours hot tea into her elderly neighbour's mailbox, intentionally destroying her birthday cards - because the elderly neighbour once accidentally opened her mail, and promptly apologized for it. The caretaker of the building (presumably, the guy who had to clean up the tea) is the love interest. We're supposed to find this funny, per the author's narrative, and wave off the wild overreaction to a simple mistake, because the protagonist has a medical condition that makes her irritable sometimes. This is what I mean when I say that some contemporary romance novels have an layer of spite that I don't find romantic at all. There's no comfort reading to be found in them, and nothing else of value either.

Make Romance Novels Romantic Again is what I say. Strongly considering getting an MRNRA hat made, to wear in the bathtub.

>37 kjuliff: I'm confused too. Certainly all novels don't have equal merit - some are bad and some are good. But I don't understand what it is about romance novels, specifically, that make you think they aren't "real novels" at all. If you thought they were all bad, I'd get it. Not "real" in what sense? Is a bad mystery novel not a "real novel"? Is a bad horror novel not a "real novel" or is just a bad - but very real - novel?

>43 rv1988: But I don't understand what it is about romance novels, specifically

Two points -
1: I was not “singling out” romance novels. They were the subject of the mini thread which followed the >32 rv1988: post. I tried to make this clear several times as in >37 kjuliff: “I was referring to Mills and Boon romantic novels with stock plots.” That what we were al talking about.

2: I was referring to the formulaic aspect of such novels. I am not aware of such aspects in other types of novels. If there are formulaic aspects in other books I would not like them either.

As for my use of the term “not real” - my apologies. For me they do not have the creativity and originality of other books, but that is just in my experience. I should have just said that.

>41 labfs39: I didn’t mean to imply that only romance novels were formulaic. It’s just that is what the discussion was about - romance novels - triggered by Rasdhar's revie (>32 rv1988:). It’s just that was what I was talking about.

My friend who wrote a formulaic novel that was accepted by Mild and Boon, did it out of interest as a joke. She told me it was a lot of hard work - she had thought she’d be able to churn them out.

She made a lot of money out of it. I was not able to read it, and I wanted to. But it was published under a pen-name and she wouldn’t divulge the title. She only wrote the one and went on to write other novels, none of which were accepted by any publisher.

>42 rv1988: I was not referring to you or your post in >41 labfs39:, I should have been clearer. The type of meanness you describe in >32 rv1988: and >42 rv1988: sounds dreadful and pointless. Not reading a lot of romance novels myself, I find the trend you describe interesting, but not appealing. In addition to Make America Kind Again, maybe we need a movement to Make Romance Novels Kind Again.

108. Taffy Brodesser-Akner - Fleishman is in Trouble (Random House 2019)



I went in with low expectations and to be honest, the opening of this book is very off-putting, but it makes a slight recovery towards the end. I read over a flight, so was something of a captive audience. The Fleishman in question is Toby, recently-divorced doctor and father of two, who spends the entire book complaining about his busy, ambitious ex-wife who he routinely accuses of being a bad and neglectful mother. Through the narration of one of Fleishman's friends, we slowly uncover a far more complex account than the spiteful little story he's been nursing. Brodesser-Akner writes in the book about the ways in which women are slowly undermined and held back by social structures, and demonstrates this through the book. It isn't just Fleishman who is in trouble, it's also his wife Rachel, who took his name after having no real family of her own to claim. Unfortunately, to reach this denouement, you have to wade through excruciating and amateurish pages upon pages of Toby Fleishman's post-divorce quasi-adolescent awakenings, directed through various execrable dating apps. I understand this was meant to be a mocking or satirical take but it's honestly just exhausting, unamusing, and unsubtle. This is a book that could have done a lot but has stopped at doing a little, which is unfortunate.

109. The Hotel Avocado - Bob Mortimer


This is a sequel to Mortimer's first novel and follows his cast of characters: Gary, an unambitious lawyer, his girlfriend Emily, Gary's neighbour, the old and irascible Grace, and her little dog, Lassoo. Emily has just inherited an old seaside hotel in Brighton which she intends to make over and run, while Gary continues to footle around dispiritedly in his office at London, going down to Brighton on weekends. Amid uncertainty about their future together, there is also the looming question of an upcoming trial for some corrupt cops and gangsters (the events of the first book, The Satsuma Complex) and various efforts by shady gangsters to prevent Gary from providing evidence.

Mortimer is one of my favourite broadcasters/comedians, and I listened to the audiobook deliberately, because his narration is what makes this book. The plot is no great shakes, and the writing is average, but his delivery is impeccable, and he's joined by a cast of Sally Phillips, Paul Whitehouse, and Juley Maisey. It's a fun listen, but I doubt I would have enjoyed it at all if I read it.

I had no idea Bob Mortimer had written a book. I’ve only ever sen him on the British panel show, “Would I Lie to You?”. But he’s a great raconteur and so I’m interested listening to him. But will it be as good without seeing his cheeky smile.

That man was born funny, and I’ve put the book on my tbr. Thank you for putting me onto it.

>48 rv1988: I've put The Satsuma Complex on my never-ending library wish list.

enjoyed catching up here, admittedly quickly. But I enjoyed your review of Held, and your take on House of Doors along with The Casuarina Tree. And, too bad about Another India. I think I'm not drawn to Fleishman. :)

>49 kjuliff: One of my favourite pieces of media all time - and I don't say this lightly - is Bob Mortimer on Would I Lie to You, explaining his various adventures. I particularly like his little asides (a friend with a large head is "a sniper's dream, we use to call him", a pointless task is like "picking pollen off a mouse's handkerchief" and fading memories are "like trying to locate a rabbit's tear in a petrol spill"). He has such a specifically absurd and surreal style of story telling. A great raconteur as you said. When I need a quick lift I go watch the video of him talking about how he used to play a game called "Theft and Shrubbery" as a child. Never fails to make me laugh.

>50 Ameise1: I hope you enjoy it!

>51 dchaikin: Thanks for stopping by!

>52 rv1988: Ah! “Theft and Shubbery” I just had to find it. It’s always funny. And the one where he and his mates go up north wearing rubber masks to keep out the cold, unintentionally and naively scaring the locals. And the DYI dentist with the mirror. All delightful- especially the names Mortimer makes up. Yes it’s his style. Perfection.
link for Shubbery.

November

I've been so disorganised. I posted two reviews before actually making the header post for this month. Here's November's cartoon via the wonderful Sarah Andersen: one that accurately describes my life.



BOOKS THAT I'VE ALREADY READ AND REVIEWED THIS MONTH



108. Taffy Brodesser-Akner - Fleishman is in Trouble (Random House 2019) here
109. Bob Mortimer - The Hotel Avocado (Simon & Schuster UK 2024) here\

BOOKS THAT I'M IN VARIOUS STAGES OF READING (AND HAVE BEEN FOR MONTHS NOW)



The Penguin Book of Bengali Short Stories edited by Arunava Sinha
Writers as Readers: A Celebration of Virago Modern Classics (2018)
Jing Tsu - Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern (Penguin, 2022)
Vanessa Chan - The Storm We Made (Hodder & Stoughton, 2024)
Colin Barrett - Wild Houses (Penguin 2024)

BOOKS THAT I AM HOPING TO GET AROUND TO READING



Elaine Chiew - The Light Between Us (Neem Tree 2024)
David van Reybrouck - Revolusi: Indonesia and the Birth of the Modern World (WW Norton, 2024)
Claire Messud - This Strange Eventful History (Fleet 2024)
Nandini Das - Courting India: England, Mughal India, and the Origins of Empire (Bloomsbury 2024)
Chris Whitaker - We Begin at the End (Zaffre 2020)
Ethel Lina White - The Wheel Spins/The Lady Vanishes (Collins Crime Club 1936, reissued by the British Library, 2023)

Thank you for bringing Bob Mortimer to my attention. After watching Theft and Shrubbery (thanks for the link, Kate), I've added him to my playlist.

I cracked open Wild Houses yesterday. But I suddenly have a lot of books going at once

110. Susie Dent - Guilty by Definition (Zaffre 2024)
111. Susie Dent - Word Perfect: Etymological Entertainment For Every Day of the Year (John Murray, 2021)



I began Guilty by Definition last month but forgot to review it when I finished - so in November it goes, along with Word Perfect: Etymological Entertainment For Every Day of the Year, which I've been dipping in and out of since January. Susie Dent is a linguist, known for her appearances on British panel shows, where she explains the meanings of words. She's also written about 20 books on the history of words and languages. Word Perfect: Etymological Entertainment For Every Day of the Year is an especially charming one: a word or a phrase for each day of the year, along with some etymology, and a definition. Today (12 November) was the word "powwow" along with an account of other words borrowed from the languages of indigenous Americans during colonization. Other favourites include "tartle" (from Scots, ‘to hesitate, to be uncertain as in recognizing a person or object’ - April 13); "mumpsimus" (ive-hundred-year-old epithet for someone who insists that they are right, despite clear and incontrovertible evidence that they are not" - 20 April); "Zwodder" (‘a drowsy, stupid state of body and mind’ - August 30); "unasinous" (a collective noun for fools - 12 October) and "Respair" (the opposite of despair - hope/recovery - December 9).

Guilty by Definition is her first foray into fiction. I wish it was as entertaining as her nonfiction, but sadly, it's a very plodding, stodgy book, with the prose feeling like its being pulled reluctantly from the author. The book is set inside the offices of the Clarendon English Dictionary. An anonymous letter provides hints to editors about a crime, and they must use linguistic clues to solve it. While the word puzzles and linguistic asides are interesting, it's clear that Dent does not have the fiction chops for the narrative.

I'm looking forward to her next work of nonfiction.

(edited to add the second image).

>56 labfs39: He's very funny! Do look up the other story Kate mentioned - the time he scared locals with a mask. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyFjIg2sWVE

>57 dchaikin: Same here. An embarrassment of riches.

>59 rv1988: Lol, he is very funny. What a storyteller!

112. Colin Barrett - Wild Houses (Jonathan Cape 2024)



Wild Houses is Colin Barrett's debut novel. It was on the Booker longlist - an impressive achievement for a young writer. While I enjoyed the writing and the pace, I don't know if it is among equals - but perhaps I'll revisit this assessment when I've completed more books on the list.

In Mayo County, Ireland, Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, a pair of brothers and small-time crooks abduct a teenager called Doll English. Doll's brother Cillian owes them a sizable amount of money, and they're confident that this will enable them to extort the funds from him. They keep Doll in the house of a local man, Dev. Dev, an introvert and a recluse, prone to depression and anxiety, is mourning the death of his mother. The presence of the Ferdias, unpredictable and violent, along with their captive, disrupts his quiet struggle. As tension inside the house ratches up, outside, Doll's girlfriend Nicky, his brother, Cillian, and his mother, together are trying to track him down.

I've seen this book described in the Guardian as a "proleptic" novel - which is not a word I come across in general. Indeed, Barrett is skipping back and forth between locations and times. Although the events of the novel essentially take course over a weekend, you can feel time stretch - Doll, waiting for something to happen; Nicky, searching unsuccessfully for Doll and Dev, waiting for the present circumstances to pass. Barrett has a nice turn of phrase, the book is well-paced and tense, and there are moments of very dark comedy. It's a quick, good, read and I really enjoyed it - but I wouldn't go as far as the superlatives that I've seen in the press.

>61 rv1988: I used to avoid debut novels but recently have taken a like to them. They often offer a freshness and energy not sen in later works.

I had to look up “proleptic” - so now there’s a word being used to describe this flitting around in space-time. I’m not a fan of this technique.

>61 rv1988: I’m reading it right now. Barrett has been publishing stories for a decade. So there is a lot of experience behind his writing. I agree, the pace is controlled. I’m enjoying it

>63 dchaikin: You're right, I should have said "debut novelist"!

>31 rv1988: I suspect not many people here might be interested in this
I am though! Too bad this book didn't deliver...

>61 rv1988: >62 kjuliff: "Proleptic" is also a new word to me. I like it!

Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Book Prize

I had written previously about the longlist for the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Book Prize, which is awarded for nonfiction writing about India. The winner was just announced: Ashok Gopal's biography of B. R. Ambedkar, titled A Part Apart - The Life And Thought Of B R Ambedkar (Navayana Books).



This is such a significant prize for so many reasons. Ashok Gopal has worked on this book for two decades. B. R. Ambedkar, the subject of his study, was India's leading political theorist, an accomplishment even more remarkable when we note that he was born into a Dalit family, facing caste discrimination from birth, and rising to become the chairman of the Indian Constitution's drafting committee despite grave opposition, casteism, and hate. He converted out of Hinduism, the religion that formalizes caste, to Buddhism, leading many Dalits to follow in his path. This book examines his many careers: as a legislator, an activist, a writer, and his careers in the fields in which he earned postgraduate degrees: economics and law. The publishing house, Navayana, is an independent press that has published accounts from marginalised groups in India for an equal length of time.

https://www.thehindu.com/books/nif-book-prize-2024-ashok-gopal-bags-award-for-hi...

For a great account of the integrity and care with which this book was produced, read this article: https://scroll.in/article/1075675/nif-prize-winner-a-part-apart-a-milestone-on-p...

My own copy of this book has been on order for weeks - I hope it will arrive before the end of the year!

>66 rv1988: Thanks for mentioning A Part Apart, Rasdhar. I believe I had read about Mr Ambedkar in Nehru: A Biography by Shashi Tharoor, so I look forward to your review of this book.

>66 rv1988: Thank you for links to the two articles about A Part Apart. I found the second interesting for the light it shed on the struggles of the independent press that published it. A journey for them as well as the author.

>66 rv1988: whoa. Fascinating. Thanks R!

113. Jing Tsu - Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution that Made China Modern (Riverhead Books 2022)



Jing Tsu's book about the history of the Chinese language has been on my radar since it came out: it was nominated for a lot of major nonfiction prizes, including one from the British Academy, the 2023 Pulitzer, the Cundhill History Prize and the Baillie Gifford History Prize. It really holds up to all that hype: an eminently readable, and accessible account for the complete novice and non-Chinese reader. She begins with the development of the Chinese alphabet, then invention of the typewriter, and how these were closely linked to efforts to standardize and simply the 4000-character Chinese script. Following chapters trace the evolution of the script through the use of telegrams, the role of Mao in reforming and standardising Chinese, and finally, two chapters that address modern Chinese, especially with the rise of social media and the internet.

Chinese is the world's oldest written language (if I'm not wrong) and I'm sure it isn't possible to encapsulate the entire history of the language in one book, but I found this a helpful overview of key developments, presenting a convincing and informative narrative. I particularly enjoyed the little character and biographical sketches she included of each key player in her account, which made it come alive. I will add one quibble, which is that it would have been nice to have some mention of all the other languages prevalent in China. Even though one political narrative is that they are but dialects of Chinese, I am given to understand that there is more linguistic diversity there than is commonly acknowledged. That apart, highly recommended.

114. Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman - Spycraft: Tricks and Tools of the Dangerous Trade from Elizabeth I to the Restoration (Yale University Press 2024)



If you've ever written a letter in lemon juice (invisible ink!) and watched the letters appear when held to heat, then this book has information for you. Spycraft is about the methods of espionage in Elizabethan England and beyond. Once the invisible ink of choice was applied to write the letter, Akkerman and Langman explain how that letter could be hidden, including tales of scribes who bragged about their ability to cram words on to tiny fragments, wrapping notes around the handles of spectacles, stuffing them into lead casings (and the lead casings themselves into wounds!) and so on.

Akkerman and Langman's book is in five chapters that deal respectively with fraud and forgery, ciphers and code, disguise and distraction, inks and invisibility, and finally, the spy's last resort: murder. I learned about letter-locking from this book - fitting together pieces of paper to reveal hidden messages. Akkerman has another book about the role of women in espionage (Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in Seventeenth-Century Britain) but this one too had a significant amount of detail about female spies, and male spies who frequently attempted to pass as women to avoid scrutiny or capture.

I'll be honest and say that this is not going to be one of my top reads, but I enjoyed all of it.

>70 rv1988: sounds fascinating! To clarify - specifically the Chinese character book. 🙂

>70 rv1988: I'm adding Kingdom of Characters to my reading about China. Did the author talk about the influence of Chinese characters on other languages like Japanese and Korean?

>70 rv1988: Great review, and I think I will add this to my wishlist.

>72 dchaikin: It was!

>73 labfs39: She doesn't in any major way - the book is focused on Chinese itself and not the influence of Chinese outside. To be fair it was a fairly large scope even with those limits.

>74 FlorenceArt: I hope you enjoy it!

>75 rv1988: To be fair it was a fairly large scope even with those limits Absolutely. I'm just curious about that aspect too. I've added the book to my wishlist.

115. Writers as Readers: A Celebration of Virago Modern Classics



I've been dipping in and out of this book for several months now, and enjoying every moment. Virago is a publishing house set up in 1973 as a feminist publishing company, and originally focused on publishing lesser-known, or out-of-print authors. This volume brings together forty contemporary authors, who have each written an essay about an older author, and her works. Many of these essays were by or about writers I was familiar with (e.g., Margaret Drabble writing on Jane Austen or Zadie Smith on Zora Neale Hurston) - but I also had the chance to learn more about writers I have not yet had the opportunity to read (e.g., Marina Lewycka on Monica Dickens or Penelope Fitzgerald on Rose Macaulay). Some names were a pleasant surprise - I didn't expect to see an Indian author in the selection, but Anita Desai has written a very nice essay about Rumer Godden, who in turn, wrote a lot about India, and Sandi Toksvig (of Q.I. fame) had an essay on Florence King.

I'll take Angela Carter's really lovely essay on Charlotte Bronte as an example of what I liked about this book. I have read and loved Jane Eyre as a young woman, and equally, enjoyed Angela Carter's own Nights at the Circus. Seeing how Carter reads Jane Eyre, with as much enjoyment as I felt, seems like an extra thread of connection that links us, as readers, with them, as authors. Carter combines a brief biographical take on how Jane Eyre was written, considering how Bronte's own life might have influenced the novel, and particularly, its end, before turning to how it was received in its time, and how it is read now. Carter's generous, sympathetic portrayal of Bronte sees her desire for a grand romantic narrative against the confines of her own life, re-enacted through Jane Eyre's story. Eyre, unlike Bronte, had more agency: "She might have been trapped by her desires, but she is never trapped by her circumstances." The constant balance between transgressive impulses and hard realities create a kind of tension that looking back, I can relate to Carter's own work, although she herself doesn't make the claim.

Authors writing on authors is sometimes a tricky proposition, because a good writer does not necessarily make a good critic. But I do think that to write, you must have a keen eye for the mechanics of literature, the joinery of sentences, and so I did enjoy reading this account of the craft. Highly recommended - although I regret to note that there's no audio version.

116. Sarah Yarwood-Lovett - A Murder of Crows



Absolute garbage, and wildly out of touch. The main character is a poor little rich girl who is lonely because every other woman in the book is a sex-mad shallow manipulative creature, while she wallows alone in her big house, misunderstood, wiping away her tears with bank notes and daydreaming about holding hands with every suitable man she meets. A particularly rancid touch was a younger female character, from a poor background, who had the temerity to point out something about wealth inequality, and was accordingly depicted as being gauche enough to sit on a kitchen counter and *gasp* scuff the cabinets. Straight to jail! Off with her head! Our miserable heiress only succeeds in solving the crime by a fortunate twist (no detection required) and the co-operative stupidity of every single person around her, including the police and the killer.

It takes a certain level of hubris to write a novel about like this at a time when wealth inequality is a subject on everyone's mind, but it takes even more cheek to lean into the unfortunate trope of having to depict every other woman as utterly awful in order to make your thinly veiled self insert even marginally appealing. Fortunately, she fails. And there are five more in the series? Pass.

Edit: I forgot, she's an ecologist who lives in alone in a massive mansion, utilises a fleet of cars, and spends half of one chapter explaining why property developers building on ecologically sensitive areas is actually not a bad thing because people like her can help manage the impact of their work while still padding those wallets.

Yikes. I'm not sure if I would read this if it was the last remaining book on Earth.

Egad! Sounds horrid, but I did enjoy your review.

The Virago sounds wonderful. A Murder of Crows sounds like the kind of book a trump voter might like

>79 kidzdoc: Good call.
>80 labfs39: Thanks!
>81 dchaikin: Do you know, I think it was written to appeal specifically to British conservative interests, but on these points they're probably alike.

117. David Nicholls - You Are Here (Harper Audio, 2024, narrated by Lee Ingleby and Lydia Leonard)



I'm really struggling to concentrate when I listen to books on my walk home, mostly because the traffic noises are quite disruptive. So I pick light books that don't always demand my full attention. I know I've been complaining a lot about how awful contemporary romance novels are, but this was actually quite sweet and well-written, and the characters were pleasant - enough that I was rooting for a happy ending, and not for one or both to be thrown into a volcano.

In David Nicholls' You Are Here, Michael, a geography teacher, in his early 40s, is separated from his wife Natasha. They've struggled with infertility, and a recent mugging attack in which he was badly injured has left him feeling weak and powerless. He's recovering, but the marriage didn't survive. He's been coping by taking long walks across the English countryside, and along the way, enjoying seeing different types of geographical formations. On the other hand, Marnie, around the same age, is long-divorced from an unpleasant ex-husband, and works from home as a copyeditor. Her marriage was not very happy, and she's very solitary, and of late, has started to feel a bit lonely. Their mutual friend, Cleo, decides to matchmake - but can't see Marnie and Michael together. She convinces Michael to plan a route for the Coast to Coast Walk - a 190-mile hiking trail that takes you from the Irish Sea at St Bees to the North Sea at Robin Hood's Bay. She invites Marnie, Conrad (a match for Marnie) and another woman to match with Michael. Inclement weather, constant rain, and the challenge of walking such long distances slowly convince people to drop out - until it's just Michael and Marnie. To their mutual surprise, they get along better than expected.

This is a very sweet little book about people finding love unexpectedly, and it appears to be written for the not-very-young. It's not a fairytale ending, but it is a happy one, and the author writes adults as adults, not as moody teenagers, while avoiding most of the common romance novel tropes. It was an easy, quick read. If you like romance novels, go for it. Edit: I wanted to add that something I liked was that there are no perfect people, but also no villains in this story. The conflict is all internal: the exes aren't depicted as necessarily evil, just as people who are flawed.

sounds fun. I appreciate the aspect in your edit.

>83 rv1988: Noting this one because I often find it hard to find lighter books that are still well-written, and it sounds like this one fits the bill. (I'll pass on A Murder of Crows, but I enjoyed your post on it).

From way up your thread, The Great Reclamation caught my eye here a few days ago, and I'm pleased to see that my library has a copy.

>77 rv1988: That looks fabulous. I have a friend who's a big Virago fan and if she hasn't read this, it would be the perfect gift. If she lived closer I could inspect her bookshelves, but no...

>78 rv1988: Ick.

>85 rachbxl: I hope you enjoy it!

>86 lisapeet: Oh, it would make a great gift!

DECEMBER



This month's cartoon courtesy the wonderful Tom Gauld.

I've been busy travelling: first to India to see family, then to Australia for work. I'm looking forward to catching up on everyone's thread. In the meantime, I did a lot of reading over the end of November and December (plane journeys, train journeys) so there will be a bunch of reviews incoming.

118. Claire Messud - This Strange, Eventful History (W.W. Norton 2024)



Dan wrote an excellent review (as usual) of this book here. I do agree with pretty much all he says, especially his description of the book as 'nice' - "in all the positive and negative connotations of the word "nice".

I was particularly struck, in part, by a bit where one of the grandchildren of the protagonist (?) as such asks him about how he feels regarding French colonialism, considering his nostalgic longing for Algeria, a country brutally colonised by his people, and the independence that exiled him. To him, a member of the grand French colonial project, Algerian independence was "sadly inevitable. I say "sadly" for myself, for our family, rooted there for over a century.We might have wished for a happier ending, one that would have made it possible for everyone to live in harmony, to build a nation together." This sort of thinking in India is called the colonial hangover: a strategically-phrased remembrance that suggests that the oppressed and oppresser might co-exist peacefully with no accountability at all. I read Fanon (one of the foremost thinkers about Algerian independence) at a young age: in the narrative the protagonist, living through Algerian independence and reading the newspapers daily, admits to having never read Fanon at all. The sweet, sentimental longing for a country in which they lived in ease and comfort lies in never acknowledging the backs on whom they stood to get there. In Messud's account of French service in World War II, there is no mention of the segregation of the French army. The brutal Algerian war leaves the family that is Messud's subject entirely untouched: this great, cataclysmic violent event encompassing their 'home' barely skims the surface even as they continue to long for a 'home' in that same land. The only mention of Arab experiences is when Americans call them - white settlers - 'Ay-rabs' - the only mention of Berber experiences is a brush with a character who is, of course, a terrorist.

Perhaps these things stand out to me because I'm not used to postcolonial literature depicting the nostalgia of the colonist, with no mention of the actual effect of colonialism. I also find that I dislike the tendency of authors now to place these thoughts and ideas in characters who are depicted as young and naive: as though they are ill-formed, youthful thoughts, not meriting serious consideration and met with gentle indulgence. I found them jarring, even while the narrative flows smoothly. This is *an easy to read book if you don't interrogate it too deeply.

119. Peter Carey - Oscar and Lucinda (University of Queensland Press, 1988)



I was in Australia for work and I read a whole bunch of Australian fiction. I thought it would be interesting to start with this one, seeing as it collected the 1988 Booker, the 1989 Miles Franklin award, and so on. I haven't seen the film starring Cate Blanchett and Ralph Fiennes yet.

It's easy to see why the book had such a reception: it reads so very easily, drawing you in right from the beginning. Oscar, young, sensitive and emotional, is the son of a preacher, and is fierce in his independence and his faith. Becoming an Anglican priest (against his father's will, as his father broke from the church). He meets Lucinda, an heiress: they share a love of gambling, fall in love, and Lucinda bets him her entire fortune if he can transport and install a glass church in a remote Australian town. Oscar sets upon this mission: a project that takes him into indigenous land in Australia, and in conflict with violent settler-colonists along the way. But, in consonance with the era and Carey's own approach, Oscar equally condemns violent settler-colonialism of indigenous lands even as he sets on a religious 'civilizing' mission. The book is very clearly dated, in that regard, but it was nonetheless interesting to read, and Carey's prose is very technically skilled. Something that stood out in juxtaposition to this was that each academic event I attended began with an acknowledgment of the indigenous owners of the land we stood upon: a remarkable and diametrically opposed attitude to the book.

120. Candice Fox - Hades (Kensington 2015)



Since I was in Sydney, I was looking for a Sydney-based crime novel, and landed on this. Had I not known the author was a woman, I would have assumed that it was written by an especially sleazy middle-aged man. The male protagonist of this book is a detective who has a previous conviction for domestic violence, admits to having treated both his ex-wives poorly, was cautioned for drunk driving, and has a continuous internal monologue of lechery aimed at every female character he comes across, including the female protagonist and later, a victim of crime with whom he not only sets up an illicit relationship but also does cocaine with, and faces no consequences. The female protagonist is pretty much a cardboard cutout Dexter ripoff. The plot is almost too stupid for words. I have got to stop reading these.

I do want to say that I have read and enjoyed Kerry Greenwood's Phryne Fisher books, which are set in Melbourne, and they set a high bar for Australian crime fiction. This author has never seen the bar.

You have been busy. Awaiting more reviews 🙂

>89 rv1988: ah, but you did interrogate deeply. Terrific comments and thanks for the call out.

>90 rv1988: very interesting take. I haven’t read this

>90 rv1988: each academic event I attended began with an acknowledgment of the indigenous owners of the land we stood upon

The performances at our local concert hall/performance venue now start this way as well. An interesting trend.

Fabulous reviews, Rasdhar!

>93 labfs39: >90 rv1988: each academic event I attended began with an acknowledgment of the indigenous owners of the land we stood upon

And not only academic events now, other events such as political and even performing arts. And email signatures for a while though this is fading.

The actual name of the tribe of the said land is named and it’s good in a way, but given almost an aside in another.

Here’s an example in a friend’s email,
I acknowledge the Yaluk-ut Weelam clan of the Boonwurrung – as the Traditional Owners of Port Phillip,
I pay respect to Elders past, present and emerging

121. Hisham Matar - My Friends (Viking)


This was a beautiful read about friendship and exile, and I would say I actually liked it more than The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between which was also excellent. Matar writes about three friends from Libya, living in exile and unable to return to their homeland, amidst political unrest, until the events of the Arab Spring. It is a meditative book, even if it doesn't tell you anything new: what I liked was the gentle narration, the quiet way of reckoning with violent and brutal pain and pasts. One more from the Booker longlist.

>92 dchaikin: Thanks, Dan! I enjoy reading all your reviews.

>93 labfs39: Yes - I did see that it was quite the standard, and even more so for colleagues from New Zealand in their recognition of Maori history.

>94 kidzdoc: Thanks!

>95 kjuliff: That's very interesting - thanks for sharing!

>91 rv1988: If you are looking for good Australian crime books I recommend Garry Disher. My favorite is his Hal Challis crime series. The ensemble caste of characters develop over time so I recommend reading them in order. His stand-alones are very good too.
ETA The first in the Hal Challis series is The Dragon Man.

>98 arubabookwoman: Or Peter Temple - The Broken Shore is probably my favorite of his.

>96 rv1988: i’m so happy you took to My Friends. The gentlest book, and a book about a serious reader

>98 arubabookwoman: Thank you - I'm actually next in line for the first Hal Challis book from our local library and looking forward to trying it out.

>99 AnnieMod: I have heard a bit about Peter Temple but haven't read any - thank you for the recommendation.

>100 dchaikin: Yes, indeed. A lovely book.

>97 rv1988: by the way, back at you. I enjoy reading all your reviews. I love what you contribute here and I’m grateful you joined us this year

>102 dchaikin: This is so nice, Dan. Thank you so much. I'm glad I found this community too. It's been one of the highlights of my whole year.

122. Benjamin Stevenson - Everyone On This Train is a Suspect (Penguin, 2024)



This is a sequel to Stevenson's first book, Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone which I thought was just okay - a bit too nudge-nudge-wink-wink for my taste. Everyone On This Train is a Suspect is far more polished and enjoyable: a classic, well-constructed mystery, with plenty of clues and hints for a sharp-eyed reader to develop some good theories. Stevenson's narrator, Ernest Cunningham, is a writer, who has been invited to a literary convention on a luxury train (The Ghan) which travels across Australia. Cunningham was also the narrator of the first book, and the device is that he's invited because of his success in publishing it. He tells you at the outset that someone will die, and moreover, that the butler (or in this case, the train staff) didn't do it - after that, he introduces the cast of characters (writers, literary agents, fans, passengers) and then, eventually, the murder itself. A cute little device is using Goodreads reviews as a plot point: that was clearly Stevenson working through something - but overall, as slick, meta, and self-aware as this book is, it is a pleasant read.

>102 dchaikin: I love what you contribute here and I’m grateful you joined us this year

Me too!

>102 dchaikin: What Dan and Lisa said.

>104 rv1988: Thanks for this informative review. It’s made me think of giving the book another try.

I’m interested in the Australian books you’ve picked to read while in Australia. I’ve not read the ones you’ve mentioned so far, though I had been intending to read Everyone on this Train is a Suspect . My interest in that book was The Ghan and its history. I’ve always wanted to take that trip through the Top End.

As a child I traveled by train from Sydney to Perth - 2,700 miles, much further than the Adelaide to Darwin ride of 1,851 miles on the Ghan. I can still remember flying through largely uninhabited deserts under cloudless skies and discovering the beauty of my country.

But I discovered there was really nothing in Everyone on this Train about the train or the Afghans and their camels that it replaced. And then there was the narrator whose Australian accent I did not like. So I put the book aside.

I think I’m becoming a bit too fussy in my old age, time having more significance as the years fly by at increasing sped.

>105 labfs39: >106 kidzdoc: Aw, how lovely. I really have enjoyed sharing in your reading and having conversations with you this year!

>107 kjuliff: You're very right - the book does not deal at all with the journey itself (or even the train) which I certainly would have found very interesting, like you. How lovely it would be to take that train journey one day!

123. Robert Jackson Bennett - The Tainted Cup (Del Rey 2024)



The Tainted Cup is absolutely delightful: a fantasy-world mystery, with locked room murders, great worldbuilding, a fun detective dynamic, and good plotting.

Ana Dolabra, an eccentric, reclusive, brilliant investigator sent to a regional outpost of the empire, is assigned to investigate the murder of a high-ranking official, apparently killed in a bath-chamber in the house of one of the empire's most elite families. Her assistant, Dinios Kol, is a trainee who had miserable scores in nearly all his exams except one: he tested highly on memory skills, and has received biological modifications that give him perfect recall. Acting as Ana's eyes and ears in the world, Dinios goes out, notices things, observes things, talks to people, and then reports back to Ana. Ana, in turn, processes all that he tells her, making deductive leaps that enable them to get to the root of the mystery - even as the empire continues to fight against the massive monsters outside the city walls.

I normally don't go in for this kind of fiction, but this was highly recommended to me by someone whose opinion I trust, and I really enjoyed it. I'm definitely going to be reading the sequel, which is scheduled to be out in 2025. I enjoy the Sherlock-Watson dynamic of the two lead characters, and I liked that the dialogue was intelligent, but didn't devolve into the currently fashionable aphoristic banter. It was good clean fun and I enjoyed it.

Sounds fun

I wish you and your loved ones a happy and blessed festive season.

>111 Ameise1: Thank you, and Merry Christmas to you too!

Some quick notes on books I read, to wrap up the year:



124. Vanessa Chan - The Storm We Made (Simon & Schuster, 2024)
Vanessa Chan's novel is set during the Japanese occupation of Malaya, between 1941-45. While her aim, clearly, is to write about the brutality, horrors, and damage of this period, her disaffected writing style and continuous relation of horror after horror produces a numbing effect: after 300-odd pages of explicit accounts of rape, torture, abuse, and discrimination, you are left feeling harrowed. But her characterisation is poor, the plotline so overdramatic that it undermines the very real details that she includes. I wish Chan had instead written a strong nonfiction account that gave these very real tragedies their due. She has some writing chops and this is a debut, so I will be keeping an eye out for her next project.

125. Robert Caro - The Power Broker (Knopf 1974)
This was my big reading project for 2024: 1000-odd pages of very detailed biographical information about Robert Moses, an American urban planner and politician who amassed massive amounts of power, used it to do some good (big infrastructure projects in New York) but also an awful lot of bad (corruption, racist policies, etc). I read it along with the 99% Invisible Podcast commentary, which had several interviews with Caro along the way. It was a fascinating project, probably worthy of its own post, but I'm still processing all the things I read!

126. Daniel Aubrey - Dark Island (Harper 2024)
This is a basic mystery/thriller set in the Orkey Islands. I enjoyed the setting but little else. The protagonist is someone with deep emotional issues and a recent autism diagnosis: many chapters are devoted to her making extremely reckless and stupid decisions and then crying about them. I had sympathy, especially as many women don't receive diagnoses until an adult age: but the author seemed unsure about whether they wanted to write about a woman's emotional journey or about some wild trafficking revenge plot, which made for a weak novel.

127. Lulu Miller - Why Fish Don't Exist
Miller's book is a part-memoir, part-biography of a man she was fascinated with: David Starr Jordan, a taxonomist, ichthyologist and the founding president of Stanford University. He was also a noted eugenicist who proposed, advocated and fought for extremely racist and hateful policies against disabled people and persons of colour. Miller is at her best when she writes about Miller's scientific work, intertwined with her own memories. She's at her absolute worst when she tries to understand and reconcile his hateful beliefs: I tuned out of the book when she tried to suggest his beliefs in eugenics was linked to his almost unreasonable optimism (?) about the human race and his faith in himself. The older I get, the less patience I have with the 'white person confused by the existence of discrimination' genre of books.

As a finishing note to 2024: while looking through my old emails for something else, I found that I had actually been active on Librarything in the early 2010s and had even made a few posts on an old Club Read thread - but that account, and all its details, are lost to me. In any case, here I am again, and it has been wonderful to get to know everyone and read all your threads. I only wish that I had kept up with CR from the beginning but as they say in Urdu (and Persian): dēr āyad durust āyad (I arrived late, I arrived safe). Happy New Year, and I'm looking forward to 2025.

Happy Holidays R. The Caro book and whole experience sounds fantastic. I appreciate your commentary on Lulu Miller. And cool that you had some kind of archival history here. See you in 2025

>113 rv1988: I'm giving some serious thought to reading The Power Broker in 2025. I'm such a slow reader, but I feel like it'd be worth the time investment. And that's cool to know about the 99% Invisible podcast. I used to listen to it and just fell out of the habit a while ago, but I recently bought the book The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design and was thinking it was time to put the podcast back in rotation, so there ya go.

Also thanks for the heads up about Why Fish Don't Exist—I'd had that on my wish list for a while, but I think, like you, that kind of making allowances for bad beliefs in the name of essayism wouldn't sit well with me. Especially not these days. I'll pass.

>114 rv1988: I'm also glad you arrived, and am looking forward to keeping a bit more current on your (and everyone's) reading in 2025.