Rebecccanyc Reads in 2010, Part 2

In honor of my 50th book and the impending start of the second half of the year, I'm starting a second thread. My first thread is here.

This post #1 lists the books I've read starting today, with the most recent first (the first 49 are on the first thread). More detailed comments are in the posts below. An asterisk means it's one of my favorite books of the year. (I'm not using touchstones in this post because I'd have to correct them every time I add a new book and I'm too lazy to do that.)

101. The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford by Jean Stafford
*100. Great Plains by Ian Frazier
99. A Country Doctor's Notebook by Mikhail Bulgakov
98. The Haunted Looking Glass: Ghost Stories Chosen by Edward Gorey edited by Edward Gorey
*97. Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier
96. Pereira Declares by Antonio Tabucchi
*95. School for Love by Olivia Manning
*94. Captain Pantoja and the Special Service by Mario Vargas Llosa
93. A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cossé
*92. Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder
*91. Job by Joseph Roth
90. Who Killed Palomino Molero? by Mario Vargas Llosa
89. The Princess, The King and the Anarchist by Robert Pagani
88. Your Republic Is Calling You by Young-ha Kim
87. After Claude by Iris Owens
86. Our Kind of Traitor by John le Carré
*85. Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon
84. The Green House by Mario Vargas Llosa
83. The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson
*82. Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives by Alan Bullock
*81. Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick
80. Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love, and Language by Deborah Fallows
*79. Great House by Nicole Krauss
78. Salvation City by Sigrid Nunez
*77. The Whites of Their Eyes by Jill Lepore
76. Room by Emma Donoghue
*75. The Road by Vassily Groosman
74. The Queue by Victor Sorokin
73. Life Is a Dream by Gyula Krúdy
72. Blue Trout and Black Truffles by Joseph Wechsberg
*71. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
70. Wigs on the Green by Nancy Mitford
69. Death in the Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa
*68. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
67. The Three Fates by Linda Lê
66. Powering the Future: A Scientist's Guide to Energy Independence by Daniel B. Botkin
*65. The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford
64. The Thieves of Manhattan by Adam Langer
*63. The Long Ships by Frans Bengtsson
62. Purge by Sofi Oksanen
61. Comedy in a Minor Key by Hans Keilson
*60. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
*59. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer
*58 The Betrayal by Helen Dunmore
57. Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm
56. A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You by Amy Bloom
55. The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
*54. Wolf among Wolves by Hans Fallada
53. Women and Other Animals by Bonnie Jo Campbell
*52. Q Road by Bonnie Jo Campbell
51. Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas by Alberto Gerchunoff
50. Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes

#50. Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes

This massive, 778-page novel is unlike anything else I have ever read. Over the past six weeks or so, there were times when I despaired of understanding what was going on, but I persevered because of my admiration for Fuentes' ambition. I started it originally for the May Reading Globally theme read on Mexico, as it is considered one of the masterpieces of modern Mexican fiction.

Terra Nostra translates as Our Earth. In this book, Fuentes creates a world -- or worlds -- that he peoples with characters based on historical and literary figures, characters derived from mythical and mystical traditions, and characters that spring forth from his own remarkable imagination. Then some of these characters seem to be other characters, or reincarnated in some way in other characters, and the timeline of history is fluid, to say the least. It is often unclear, even within a chapter or section, who is who and who is talking. And mixed in with all of this is symbolism galore, much of which probably went right by me, at least as far as understanding what it was about: numbers, especially the power of the number 3, but also 33 1/2, 5, and 20; crosses on the back and six toes on each feet; pyramids that go up and stairs that go down, Catholic beliefs in contrast to "heretical" Christian beliefs, dreams vs. reality etc., etc.

So what is the book about? The first part (The Old World) nominally tells the tale of Felipe, the Senor, based on Phillip II of Spain, the builder of the Escorial, his increasing fanaticism and longing for death, and his interactions with his bizarre family and the schemers of the court -- with the action set in motion by the mysterious arrival of three identical strangers with the said crosses on their backs and six toes on each foot. The second part (The New World) takes us to pre-European contact Mexico, but still involves some of the same characters. The third part (The Next World, which the NY Times review said should have been The Other World) mixes all of this together, along with trips to an even earlier past as well. The end takes us to a vision of the end of the world at the end of the 20th century (the book was written in 1975.)

But that's just the plot. As far as I can tell, what the book is really about is the circularity of history, the repetition of events and people, and the way the church, meaning the rigid Catholic church of 16th century Spain, imprisons us. The writing is lyrical, at times hallucinatory. And in the end, we wonder, was it all a dream?

51. Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas by Alberto Gerchunoff

This charming little book, which I learned about from the Reading Globally theme read on Argentina, looks at a group of Jewish immigrants from Russia to Argentina in the late 19th century. The individual chapters focus on the members of the farming community and their interactions with each other and with the local gauchos. Sponsored by the Baron de Hirsch, this and other similar communities were looked at as a kind of Promised Land, after the pogroms of Europe. I found the stories subtle, moving, and a look at an unusual and little-known page of Jewish history.

Rebecca - excellent review of Terra Nostra.

>2 rebeccanyc: yes, great review. And so honest about your experience with it. I like that.

52. Q Road by Bonnie Jo Campbell
53. Women and Other Animals by Bonnie Jo Campbell

What a pleasure to see a writer grow and improve! Bonnie Jo Campbell's most recent collection of stories, American Salvage, was one of my favorite books last year (thanks, Lois/avaland, for recommending it). But silly me, I didn't think to look for other books by Campbell until Richard/richardderus did so himself. So now I have read her first book of stories, Women and Other Animals, collected in 1999 but published earlier in magazines, and her novel Q Road, published in 2002.

Q Road was a delight, with compelling and interesting main characters confronting personal and social issues in an old farming community that is being developed as farmers sell off their land. Campbell interleaves the story of one particular day (when something dramatic happens) with the backstories of these characters and insight into a host of minor characters, as well as beautiful portraits of the woods and the land and people's connections to the land and the animals on it. Although I loved this novel, and it grew on me as I read it, in places I could still see the author at work, something which was completely absent in American Salvage where all the memorable characters seemed completely themselves.

I also enjoyed some of the stories in Women and Other Animals, especially "The Fishing Dog" and "Sleeping Sickness," but they were very mixed and some definitely worked better than others. It felt like Campbell was still exploring what would make a "good story." In the best, there is a real sense of place and character; the less good are still interesting, but not as compelling.

But oh, I can't wait for her next book, after the wonderful American Salvage.

Thanks for these reviews of Campbell's earlier works, Rebecca. Sounds like they'd be good books to take out of the library. I also loved American Salvage and have LT to thank for even knowing about it. I'm looking forward to her next book too.

>6 rebeccanyc: thanks, rebeccanyc, for the reviews.

Thank you for introducing me to Bonnie Jo Campbell.

54. Wolf among Wolves by Hans Fallada

In this lengthy novel, Fallada looks at how ordinary people respond to crisis: the catastrophic inflation in Germany in 1923 that reduced the value of the mark from something like 60 marks to the dollar to hundreds of billions to a dollar, with changes often happening from day to day. Salaries became worthless; people wanted to be be paid with food; people starved.

The long first part of the book takes place on a single hot summer's day, mostly in Berlin. Fallada introduces us to a dozen or so characters, and we follow them through the streets of Berlin, from illegal gambling dens and other night-time haunts to well-kept homes in leafy sections of the city to hiring agents for agricultural workers to a respectable hotel with a bizarre guest and more. As Fallada jumps from character to character -- none of whom is completely likable -- throughout the day and into the night, the reader becomes enmeshed in their stories, their efforts, and their weaknesses.

The second half of the book finds several of the major characters from Berlin on a farm estate in the eastern part of Germany, near the Polish border. Here the reader sees poverty of this still, in the 20th century, somewhat feudal agricultural system, and how the diverse cast of characters, including the farmer and his family, the landlord (who is the farmer's father-in-law), and many of the farm workers and other local people, including a work gang from a nearby prison, react not only to the ever-increasing inflation but also to the efforts of a mysterious "lieutenant" to start a putsch. The tension in this section builds, and the action becomes almost melodramatic; for me, the ending was a llttle unsatisfactory.

What is most remarkable about this book is Fallada's ability to create memorable characters, both major and minor, and through their actions depict so vividly the turmoil of the times.

Rebecca, what a great review. I love books that do what you say in your last sentence--create memorable characters, both major and minor, and through their actions depict so vividly the turmoil of the times. I find this time in history very interesting and I'll have to look for this book. Thanks for the recommendation.

Thanks, Pat, for stopping by and for the compliment. Have you read Fallada's Every Man Dies Alone? That was one of my favorite books of last year.

Hi Rebecca. I haven't read anything by Fallada but I have heard of Every Man Dies Alone so will look for that one also. I'll be going to the library today or tomorrow and see what they have of his.

(I hope I haven't screwed something up--I wasn't paying attention and hit "flag abuse" instead of "Post a message" when I first tried to write this post. Now I can't seem to get it off the screen.)

ETA: Looks like everything's OK. Not a fatal error after all!

Wolf Among Wolves sounds like a great read. Thanks for your review.

>2 rebeccanyc:, wow, sounds like a fascinating book. I've added it to my wishlist with a big *may make my head hurt* next to it!

I've added Wolf Among Wolves to my wishlist having earlier today added When Money Dies: The Nightmare of the Weimar Hyper-inflation to my wishlist.

Robert

CURSE THE TOUCHSTONES

I've been waiting since 7 this morning to post that today is my four-year "Thingaversary." When I joined LT (the first time I ever joined a web site), it was just to catalog my books and see other people's libraries -- Talk didn't exist. I had no idea that, four years later, I would have enjoyed so many interesting conversations about books and other topics, learned about so many books and writers I hadn't known about, and "met" so many other fascinating booklovers. Thank you all for being part of my Library Thing life.

Wow, Happy Thingaversary, Rebecca! Four years, I think I've been on for 4 months. I agree that the conversations on LT add alot to the experience. Love your posts and look forward to many more years of following you on LT.

Happy anniversary!

Happy Thingaverisary!

#55 The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

The best thing I can say about this book is that I am still thinking about it, hours after I finished it. The building suspense and especially the ambiguous ending, as well as Waters' compelling writing, are to thank for that.

Much has been written about this book, but to briefly summarize it is the story of a possibly haunted house, class, a family in economic and psychological distress, and the social changes taking place in postwar (1947) England, told by a very unreliable (in my opinion) narrator, a doctor with working class origins who befriends the family living in the local manor house, a family which, like the house they live in, is decaying and crumbling before our eyes.

Is the house haunted, and if so by whom? Are the family members psychologically disturbed? Are their own obsessions and repressions revealing themselves physically? Is the friendly doctor not, in fact, so friendly? Waters is a master of suspense and reversal, taking us through a long eventless beginning and ratcheting up the creepiness a little bit at a time. We know something bad will happen, but what will it be and why is it happening?

All in all, while I could barely put this book down, it is not up to the remarkable surprises of Fingersmith.

Edited to change "horror" to the more accurate "creepiness."

Great review, Rebecca. I haven't read anything by Sarah Waters yet but after Bonnie's (brenzi's) recent review of Fingersmith I bought a copy. I think I'll try that one first based on your review of The Little Stranger.

Nice review, Rebecca. I will read this by the end of the year.

56. A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You by Amy Bloom

In this early collection of short stories, Amy Bloom demonstrates once again her psychological perceptiveness, her humanity, and her ability to say a lot with just a few words but, with a few exceptions, the stories are not as rich and the characters not as fully developed as in her most recent collection, Where the God of Love Hangs Out. Among the best are the title story and the two Lionel and Julia stories, which were also included in the current collection as part of a group of four interconnected stories. Amy Bloom is a psychotherapist who became a writer, and in this book we occasionally see too much of the psychotherapist and not enough of the writer; in her later work, this is not a problem.

Rebecca, my daughter recently told me that she was interested in historical novels that took place during the Victorian era. I was looking on Library Thing for some good ones for her, and ran into Fingersmith. Are there any others that you know of and would particularly recommend?

Thanks for asking, Solla. I would not characterize myself as a big reader of historical novels (Wolf Hall and then A Place of Greater Safety were a departure for me), although I do often read novels by writers from different historical periods. If I think about books I've read in the past few years, I can't really think of any from Victorian England, although Buddenbrooks spans a similar period in Germany. Sorry not to be of more help. Maybe someone else in this group knows more about historical novels/the Victoria period than I do.

The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt is set in the Victorian period; I and several other LTers loved it.

I gave up on A. S. Byatt years ago when I couldn't make it through Possession. Maybe I'll have to give her another try.

57. Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm

The latest read in my ongoing effort to learn more about our troubled economic times, this book takes the approach that financial crises are the rule, rather than the exception, and that it is useful to look at "crisis economics" as well as more standard economics that, to oversimplify, look at how things are supposed to happen.

The authors, one of whom famously predicted that the housing bubble would burst dramatatically (but who nicely resists saying "I told you so"), provide an overview of the history of financial crises, insights into the causes of our current situation and the impact of the efforts to relieve it, recommendations (both "first steps" and "radical remedies") for alleviating problems in the future, and an outlook for the coming years. While the book goes into some detail about complex topics and covers a lot of ground, it is written in a very readable and almost lively (for a book about finance) style.

The authors emphasize underlying problems, such as compensation based on short-term rather than long-term results, the risks of bubbles and leverage, the interconnectedness of "too big to fail" firms, and the slippery slope of moral hazard. I can't say I will remember all the details, but I certainly get what they called in grade school "the main idea," and it is a scary one indeed.

Interesting review of the Amy Bloom, Rebecca. I didn't realize she had been a psychotherapist.

Nice review of Crisis Economics, Rebecca; I'll add this to my wish list.

58. The Betrayal by Helen Dunmore

I could barely put this book down. A sequel to Dunmore's spectacular The Siege, The Betrayal continues the story of Anna, her young brother Kolya (now a teenager), and her now-husband Andrei, nearly 10 years after the horrific Siege of Leningrad and the deaths of her father and his friend Marina (among 1 1/2 million others in the city alone). Now it is the early 50s, and an aging Stalin still controls the Soviet Union.

The story unfolds with an ever-present sense of foreboding as Andrei, a doctor in a children hospital, agrees reluctantly to examine the very ill son of a very powerful and dangerous man. We see how well-placed fear affects different people and their actions and we watch Anna cope with the inanity of bureaucratic demands in her job working with toddlers in a day-care center and with the demands of memory in the apartment she grew up in, where her father, a writer, suffered from an earlier round of purges. At the same time, we see how the powers-that-be have tried to erase the memory of what Leningraders experienced during the siege and we see the differences between the lives of ordinary people and those who have found favor with the Soviet hierarchy. But throughout this all, we are propelled forward by the characters and their lives. The book puts a human face on the horrors of life in Soviet Russia.

The story takes place at the time of the infamous "Doctor's plot." As with The Siege, Dunmore provides a bibliography at the end of works she read to learn about the era and the people. Her research is admirable, but her writing more so. With Andrei, we lie in bed, awake, at two in the morning and hear the car slow down and stop in front of the apartment building.

Edited to fix typos.

Great review of The Betrayal, Rebecca. I've put it on my wishlist but see my library doesn't have it at the moment. Hopefully they'll get it by the time I read The Seige (which for some reason I can't find the touchstone for).

I want to read The Betrayal as part of my Booker Longlist reading, but I haven't read The Siege. Some reviews I've read mention that you don't need to read The Siege before The Betrayal. Do you agree, Rebecca, or would I be at a disadvantage jumping into the second book?

Cait, you could certainly read The Betrayal without having read The Siege, but I think you would have a richer experience reading The Betrayal if you read The Siege first. Also, if you decide you want to read The Siege after you finish The Betrayal, I think you will not enjoy it as much as if you read it first.

Thanks Rebecca. My local library has The Siege, so I'll try and get ahold of it before reading The Betrayal.

Thanks for that answer to Cait's question, Rebecca; I think I'll do the same, and read The Siege before I start The Betrayal.

Thanks for letting me know about this - I loved The Siege and didn't know there was a sequel out.

wandering star, The Betrayal is only available in England now. I ordered it from the Book Depository.

59. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William. L. Shirer

As a reporter, Shirer lived in Berlin for much of the Nazi era and met many of its leaders. As a researcher, he spent years combing through the massive captured Nazi archives, as well as the transcripts of the Nuremberg trials and other western documents (as the book was written in 1960, he didn't have access to much more recently released Soviet documents). The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a lengthy but extremely readable book, reflects both these journalistic and investigative talents. Both its sweep and its detail are remarkable.

Shirer briefly introduces Hitler as a child and young man, then swings into more detail when Hitler begins his political activities. He discusses at length how Hitler successfully plotted to come to power and derailed his potential competitors and enemies, and covers in detail the "diplomatic" efforts that preceded and followed Hitler's invasions of Austria, Czechoslovakia, and the Baltic countries, all with barely a peep from the west. He also devotes a lot of time to pre-war discussions with the west, including Chamberlain, and the notorious nonaggression pact with Stalin. He talks about the anemic resistance within Germany and Hitler's relationship with Mussolini. Up to this point, his total craziness and evil aside, Hitler seems relatively in control, correctly predicting the responses of various countries to his aggression.

Once the war starts in earnest, and the Germans start losing, Hitler's craziness takes over; for example, he forbade his generals to retreat or surrender at Stalingrad and thus condemned virtually all the German soldiers there to death by freezing or starvation or Russian bullets. Shirer also discusses what Hitler's "new order," including the extermination camps and the complicity of German industry, was like. Shirer spends less time on the fall than on the rise, but it is just as compelling. And what a relief when it is all over.

Throughout the book, I was extremely impressed by Shirer's ability to juggle all the evidence from different sources, and tease out what might really have happened when they differ. It is a remarkable accomplishment. I also was impressed by his insight into the characters and personalities of the key figures of the era. Perhaps later writers on the Third Reich have more perspective than Shirer, but his direct contact with both the events and the people gives the book an immediacy that would be hard to match.

I do have two quibbles, one major, one relatively minor. The lack of maps was a real loss. Although I have a good sense of European geography and could figure out what was going on in a general way, once the war started I really would have loved to be able to visualize what was happening with maps. The more minor point is that, probably, and unfortunately, reflecting the times, at one early point in the book Shirer makes comments about homosexuality that would be completely offensive today.

But, quibbles aside, I'm glad I took this book off the shelf after 30 years and read it.

60. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

In this stunning and moving novel, Jennifer Egan meditates on the passage of time and how human beings connect or fail to connect with each other by interweaving, in a nonlinear way, the stories of a varied group of people over the course of some 40 years, beginning somewhere in the early 80s and ending somewhere in the future in the 2020s. Many of the key characters are involved in the music industry in some way and music and visual art are threads woven throughout the book.

The chapters jump back and forth in time, and are written in varied styles, depending on who is the focus of or the narrator or the chapter. Although each chapter takes something in a previous chapter as a point of departure, it can sometimes take a little while to figure out who the chapter is about and when it is taking place.

One of the things I find so remarkable about Egan's writing is how she captures the voice and tone of each character and how, as the novel builds, she creates increasing understanding of and compassion for even the somewhat unlikeable characters. Life can be banal, but they are struggling to survive and make some meaning out of their lives; time is the "goon" that gets us all, but maybe our children will keep us young or at least have a better life.

I also admire Egan's humor, her interest in exploring issues of technology and how it affects us while still telling a real story with real characters, her ability to say a lot with a little, her insight into her characters, whether they are alienated teenagers, troubled adults, or seemingly well adjusted, and the apparently effortless way in which she links the stories and the people across continents and over time. I will be looking for her next book.

#26, #27 I've only just read your responses from the 4th. Thanks, and I'll pass on the suggestion to my daughter.

61. Comedy in a Minor Key by Hans Keilson

This haunting novella, originally published in 1947 but only just translated into English, takes place in Nazi-occupied Holland. With allied bombers nightly flying in from the coast towards Germany, an ordinary Dutch couple, Wim and Marie, without much forethought, take in and hide a Jewish man, Nico. The novella jumps back and forth in time, starting with the evening Nico dies of a fever and the couple have to figure out what to do with the body, and then moving backwards to their life with their hidden guest. The "comedy," such as it is, comes from the tentative way Marie, especially, learns to live with the situation -- who to tell, who not to tell, what to do when the milkman comes, or the cleaning lady -- and her efforts to try to understand Nico. Needless to say, complications ensue after Wim and a doctor leave the body in a park. For me, the most interesting aspects of the book were the insight into the underground in Holland and, even more, the way Keilson is able to capture the claustrophobic feel of being cooped up in a blacked-out room.

I read this book for the "Adventurous Reader" challange -- a book I'd never heard of by an author I'd never heard of -- and then discovered a front-page review of it in last week's New York Times Book Review section. Now, at last, I can read that review!

interesting about Shirer. What does he say about homosexuality and the nazis then? It's well known now that during the night of the long knives, many of the murdered brown shirts were homosexuals, including Rohm.

He doesn't go into detail, but he basically refers to them as "perverts" -- this is in the early days, don't remember if he specifically mentioned Roehm.

Interesting about the Keilson book. I first ran across his name just yesterday, with a book called Death of the Adversary. I now have both books on my list of books to grab when I run across them.

I think both Keilson books were released at the same time; they were reviewed together in the Times Book Review last week, but Comedy in a Minor Key was the only one I saw when I was browsing in a bookstore.

62. Purge by Sofi Aksanen

This is an ambitions, at times compelling, but ultimately flawed and frustrating book. It attempts to connect early 90s post-Soviet Estonia with the horrors of the wartime and early post-war years, when Estonia was first invaded by the Nazis and then by the Soviets, by bringing together a young Russian escapee from sex slavery with an aging Estonian woman living in a country village, and letting her memories unfold. Surprise: they both have things to hide and there is a connection between them!

There were things I really liked about this book, especially the beautiful depictions of the Estonian landscape and rural activities such as milking, canning, pickling, and making herbal mixtures, as well as the way Oksanen focuses on women's experiences under totalitarianism even though it is the men who are in charge. I also enjoyed learning more about Estonian history, and for the most part Oksanen is great at keeping the story moving along, even as she mixes up times and characters.

But, in the end, I was disappointed. The chapters about the escaped sex slave are incredibly graphic, and stand in too stark contrast to the tone of the rest of the book. In places, I just got tired of listening to the characters' endless thoughts and worries; a little more restraint would have been a good thing, and Oksanen could have benefited from a good editor. Some of the plot was either a little obvious, or a little contrived, and the motivations of at least one of the characters were a little hard to fully believe; other than the two protagonists, the characters were a little one-dimensional. And, at the end, Oksanen includes some "documents" that either should have been worked into the story or left out. The ingredients are all there for a great book, but Purge isn't it.

Great review, Rebecca; I'm sorry that it was a disappointing read (hmm, similar to the book that I just read and reviewed).

Hi Rebecca, good review. I actually bought Purge a couple of months ago after reading a favorable review because it fits into a Scandinavian book challenge I'm doing this year. Afterwards, I read a mixed review making some of the same points you did so I haven't gotten around to reading it yet. I think I'll let it languish a little longer.

If it makes you feel any better, Pat, it's really Estonian, and hence Baltic rather than Scandinavian!

>40 rebeccanyc: I enjoyed your review on The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I read it a generation ago and have just started listening to an audio book edition. I have finished the first two volumes of Richard J. Evans three volume history of the same era. Evans has the advantage of access to the latest sources and his books are excellent.

Thanks for the recommendation of the Evans books. I've seen them in the bookstore and wondered about them. Probably will have to work my way up to them, after reading a lot of other books on the TBR.

63. The Long Ships by Frans Bengtsson

What a delightful and wonderful book! The Long Ships, a saga of Viking adventures that takes place in the years before and after 1000, is filled with exploration, plunder, treasure-seeking, fighting, drinking, eating, tale-telling, romance, manly exploits, strong women, determined foes -- and wonderful writing that seems to just roll off the pen of the author (and the admirable translator). Bengtsson takes a broad geographical, historical, and temporal perspective, and yet paints his characters and his depictions of place with fine detail. In fact, the characters jump off the page, both the good, the conflicted, and the bad. He also has a wicked sense of humor and skewers the pretensions and foibles of men (and women) with a few well-placed words.

One of the interesting aspects of the book is that it takes place at the time that Christianity is spreading to the northern regions of Europe (and one of the voyages takes the protagonist to Spain, then ruled by the Muslims, and also introduces him to a Jewish merchant). Thus, through the book, we see a time when the northern world is changing and we see how different people react to the newcomers, and how varied the priests and other Christian leaders are.

But don't get me wrong. This is first and foremost a rollicking good read!

#64 The Thieves of Manhattan by Adam Langer

I was inspired to read this book because I heard the author interviewed on our local public radio station, and for the first 100 pages or so I was amused by its clever satire of the New York City book publishing world and, in particular, the "genre" of fake memoirs. Then, and I can't go into details because I don't want to spoil the book for anyone else, it takes another turn and, while it continued to be clever, it may have been too clever, at least for me. The author (or, I should say, the narrator of the story) also has a (to me) irritating gimmick of using author or character names as code for particular items, e.g., a "gatsby" is a stylish jacket, a "faulkner" is whiskey). So, in the end, I admired what Langer was trying to do, but I didn't particularly enjoy it.

oh that Bengtsson sounds wonderful! I"m going to order it!

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did, Murr. It was a great break from the grim books I usually read, and I hope it is a break for you from all your serious Russian reading.

65. The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford

This extremely disturbing novel interweaves the perceptions of a brother and sister, Ralph and Molly, living partly with their mother and older sisters in a Los Angeles suburb and partly on their uncle's Colorado ranch, apparently during the 1920s. Aged 10 and 8 when the story begins, the two are inseparable, bored and alienated by the obsessive gentility and control of their vacuous suburban family and neighbors, living under the gaze of a portrait of their mother's idolized "intellectual" and "refined" father. The reader feels the oppressive claustrophobia of this environment -- and an undefinable sense of menace.

Then the children begin to spend summers, and finally a year (when they seem to be 16 and 14), on the working ranch, high in the Colorado mountains, where nature is wild and opportunities for adventure and danger abound. Eager to get close to his uncle, the first real man in his life, Ralph begins to turn away from Molly, an unhappy but brilliant girl who is always writing (much of her character was apparently based on Stafford herself). The tension builds throughout the second half of the book, as Molly becomes both more troubled and more committed to her writing, while still trying to cling to the "innocence" of childhood, even as Ralph begins to identify and be confused by his sexual feelings. The ending is shocking, but not completely unexpected.

Stafford paints a brilliant portrait not only of the children but also of the beauty of the Colorado wilderness and of the farmland around their California home, the hard life of the ranchers, and the stunted lives of the children's immediate family. Beneath the surface, a little bit of religion runs through the book, as do white attitudes towards Mexicans and black people. All in all, Stafford packs a great deal to think about into The Mountain Lion.

66. Powering the Future: A Scientist's Guide to Energy Independence by Daniel B. Botkin

In this book, noted ecologist Daniel Botkin first surveys conventional and alternative fuels, examining how much of each we use today, what they cost, how long (in the case of fossil fuels) they are likely to last, and how they affect the environment. He then analyzes several scenarios for how the US can meet its energy needs in the future, concluding that as we move away from fossil fuels, we will have to rely on a mixture of energy sources, principally wind and solar, and that we also need to take steps to reduce energy use, modernize our electricity grid, invest in our railroads, and save petroleum for its uses in manufacturing products.

The strong point of this book is that Botkin uses numbers to document and back up his points, both those related to supply and those related to cost. I can't say that I took the time to think through each of this quantitative analyses, but I appreciated them. For a relatively technical book, this is also relatively readable.

67. The Three Fates by Linda Lê

It is difficult for me to know what to say about this intense, angry, bitter, sad, language-obsessed, and brief novel by Linda Lê, a Vietnamese writer who moved to France in 1977, at the age of 14. It is the intertwined stories of three young Vietnamese women who were brought to France as children by their grandmother, known as "the Jackal": two sisters and a cousin. In fact, none of the major characters has a name: the main narrator, the cousin, is called "Southpaw" because she has had one hand amputated (we never find out how), and the two sisters are known by such names as Potbelly (for the elder, who is pregnant) and Cutie (for the younger, who is most recognized for her beautiful legs). The sisters, against the advice of the cousin, are arranging to bring their father, known as King Lear, from Saigon for a visit so he can see how successful they have been since they were stolen from him and brought to the west.

This is about as straightforward as I can be, because the novel itself is convoluted, full of multilingual wordplay (amazingly, as far as I can tell, translated into English), mythological and literary references, words I never heard of, witches and other supernatural beings, and coded language. To add to the intensity, there are no paragraph breaks, although it is broken into sections. As far as I can tell, it is not just about the razor-sharp depictions of the characters, but also about the intersection of cultures and the aftermath of the war and the takeover of the south by the north.

Not only did a lot of The Three Fates go right by me, but there were many times when I was reading it that I wondered why I kept on going. It is a very impressive work, and Lê is a remarkably talented writer, but I'm not entirely sure I enjoyed it.

68. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

I like to reread this every few years and it was just as delightful as ever.

Rebecca, I'm way behind, but wanted to thank you for the excellent review of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (post #40). My copy has only been sitting on my shelf six years, since I inherited it.

69. Death in the Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa

High up in the Andes, in and around the little village of Naccos, traditional life has been disrupted in many ways. Workers from outside the region are building a highway. A strange bartender and his mysterious wife ply the workers with drink. The Shining Path revolutionaries are running rampant, killing and inducing others to kill. The government, when it can find them is responding in kind. Many villagers in the region have simply slipped away. Into this mix come Lituma, a corporal of the Civil Guard (a lowly rank in a lowly force) and his deputy, Carreno, who is pining away for the love a of a beautiful prostitute whom he "rescued" from a drug lord.

Moving back and forth in time and from character to character, in typical Vargas Llosa style, as Lituma becomes obsessed with the disappearance of three men, the novel essentially investigates the clash of civilizations: between people from the coast, like Lituma, and the serrenos from the mountains; between people with some "education," again like Lituma, and those who believe in the spirits of the mountains; between the Shining Path and ordinary people; between the innocence and naivete of Carreno and the worldliness of Lituma; and, above all, between those spirits of the mountains, some of them quite terrifying (for example, the pishtacos, who drain people of their fat), and the people who disrupt them.

This is not my favorite of Vargas Llosa's work, but it is still haunting me now that I've finished it.

Wigs on the Green by Nancy Mitford

Wigs on the Green could have been a sprightly romantic comedy mixed with a lighthearted satire of the foibles of the English ruling class, enjoyable if not up to Mitford's best, were it not for its gently amused take on fascism in general and the Nazis in particular. Originally published in 1935, it includes thinly disguised portraits of one of Mitford's sisters, the one who ran off to Germany to meet Hitler and ultimately tried to kill herself, and other family members and friends.

But it is just too difficult for me to fathom how relatively educated people in 1935 didn't perceive the evils of Hitler and Nazism. Mitford is quoted, in the introduction by the daughter of her sister Diana who married a famous British fascist, as saying "we were young and high-spirited then, and didn't know about Buchenwald." But they did know, or could easily have known, about Hitler seizing dictatorial power, about the Reichstag fire, about the creation of Dachau and other concentration camps, and about what Mein Kampf said. To joke about Nazis just seems, to me anyway, too tasteless. To her credit, Mitford refused to allow Wigs on the Green to be republished in her lifetime.

71. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

I loved this book, but am having trouble figuring out what to say about it because it exists on so many levels: the literal, the fantastic, the satirical, the metaphysical, the humorous, the chilling, the theatrical, and the romantic.

The story begins when the devil, known as Woland, along with some of his entourage, comes to Moscow, presumably in the 1930s, and engages a poet and an editor in conversation about the existence of Christ (religion was completely forbidden in Stalinist Russia). From this beginning, the devil, in a not entirely unpleasant way, wreaks havoc in Moscow, mostly among the literary and theatrical establishments, and notably when he conducts a theatrical event of his own. The second part of the book focuses on the master, a writer, and his lover Margarita, and the pact she makes with the devil, which leads among other things to her acting as the hostess at the devil's ball. Interwoven through both parts is the somewhat distorted story of the crucifixion, from the perspective of Pontius Pilate, told first by the devil to the poet and editor and then from the book that the master is writing about that very subject.

But this book is so much more than the plot and another version of the Faust legend. Without ever mentioning Stalin or what daily life had become in 1930s Russia, Bulgakov depicts the horror and terror of the times through Woland's actions and people's responses. We see several of the other issues of the time -- housing, foreign currency, and of course bureaucracy -- through the lens of the story, as Bulgakov explores themes of guilt, love, betrayal, and, especially, courage and cowardice. His use of language - as translated by the admirable Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky in my edition -- is wonderful, especially in some of the great dramatic scenes of storms, Woland's theatrical event and ball, and characters turning into witches. The story of Pontius Pilate both reinforces the Moscow story and comments on it: as Richard Pevear points out in his insightful introduction, terror is not a 20th century invention.

I could go on and on, but I will just note that my edition included very helpful end notes that identified many of the literary and other references in the book.

Awesome review of The Master and the Margarita, Rebecca. That one is shooting up the wishlist!

No offense to anyone else who reviewed The Master and Margarita, but your review is the first to make me eager to read it. Thanks for that!

Wow! Thanks!

and, you have THE hot review, #1.

Going back to #64 - How strange that whole story is. I'm glad you reviewed Wigs on the Green, because now I know I do not want to read it.

M&M is an old fav. Haven't read the Pevear/Volokhonsky trans. Sounds interesting. Maybe it's time to reread it? The Mirra Ginsburg trans. is excellent. Also I've heard there's an east euro. film of it, which I've never seen.

Hmmm, I read part of The Master and Margarita a few years ago, put it down for some reason and never picked it up again. I think I need to.

#67 of course, I am not offended, but I don't know about PekoeTheCat - http://www.librarything.com/profile_reviews.php?view=PekoeTheCat - and her claws are very sharp. Perhaps you'd better watch out for black cats, just for awhile. Nothing stays in her brain that long.

Seriously, the Master and Margarita was one of the best books I read last year. It builds in richness the further you get into it.

72. Blue Trout and Black Truffles: The Peregrinations of an Epicure by Joesph Wechsberg

I read this book, published in 1953, for the "read a hardback book with a dust cover in an edition that was published before 1960" challenge. It was a lively and entertaining look at two worlds that no longer exist, from the perspective of food and gourmet meals.

The first part, which I found more enjoyable, shows Wechsberg's childhood in Moravia (a Czech-speaking part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) before and in the years after the first world war, and his life as a young man in Prague, Paris, and Vienna and as a traveling musician on ocean liners in the 1920s. This part was both inherently more interesting for me, partly because I've read a lot of central European fiction more or less from this time period or slightly earlier and also because it told more of a story. Also, there were lots of fascinating g tidbits, like the 20 or so different cuts of boiled beef in Vienna, and the exploits of the women who frequented Maxim's in Paris in the 1890s.

The second part, which reads more like a collection of magazine articles (and probably was, since some of the chapters were published in a variety of US magazines) takes the reader on trips to French restaurants, truffle-gathering communities, and wine chateaus in the early 1950s. I found this moderately interesting in itself and as a portrait of a a way of life that, 50+ years later, seems almost as remote to us as the last days of the Austro-Hungarian empire must have seemed to Wechsberg when he wrote this book in 1953.

One of the most remarkable things about this book is Wechsberg's wonderful, lively, and humorous writing, because English is at least his fourth language (after Czech, German, and French) and he only learned it on coming to the US in 1938.

M&M is a favourite of mine also - and reading your review makes me want to re-read it!

73. Life Is a Dream by Gyula Krúdy

I was a big fan of the extremely strange Sunflower by Gyula Krúdy and so I was eager to read this collection of short stories. They turn out to also be strange, but in a very different way. Most of them involve the frequenters of taverns in 1920s Hungary, and while the characters and plots are different, all of the stories feature a lot of detail about food, almost too much (both food and detail), and also mostly involve love and death. I liked the longish "The Green Ace" the best,but didn't find any of the stories truly compelling, although they certainly paint a picture of a time and a place.

74. The Queue by Vladimir Sorokin

For me, the most interesting thing about this book was its form: entirely unattributed dialogue, mostly extremely short comments by a variety of people waiting over the course of two days in one of the Soviet Union's iconic queues. Sorokin is trying to create the whole feeling of waiting in the queue: the boredom, the conversations, the woman annoyed with her child, groups of people leaving the queue for drinks or food, couples flirting, monitors urging the people waiting to line up more neatly or counting off their names and numbers for pages and pages. There are even blank pages where one of the characters (for characters do emerge from the seemingly random talk) passes out or goes to sleep, and at the end there is a scene, still in dialogue, that takes place outside the queue. What are they queuing for? We never find out, and in fact, the descriptions of the item changes as the novel proceeds.

I found this book fascinating for its look at the queue phenomenon and for its experimental style, but otherwise it didn't really grab me.

On a quick trip to Boston (Cambridge, really), I managed to read a lot of books on the train and buy a whole bunch that I had to lug back on the train (as if we didn't have perfectly good bookstores in New York). So here's my haul -- reports on books read later.

Two old but until now difficult to find Hilary Mantels:

Every Day Is Mother's Day
Vacant Possession

A newly translated edition of Backlands: The Canudos Campaign by Euclides da Cunha, which was recommended to me here on LT after I read The War of the End of the World because it is the true story of that war. I did buy an earlier edition some time ago, but haven't read it yet, and this one seemed appealing because it has an introduction that may help me understand it.

Partner to the Poor, a collection of essays and articles by farmerpaul::Paul Farmer -- thanks to Darryl for introducing me to him.

The Future History of the Arctic by emmersoncharles::Charles Emmerson -- because of interest in the polar regions.

Memories of Eden: A Journey through Jewish Baghdad by Violette Shamash -- because of my interest in the lives of Jews around the world.

75. The Road by Vasily Grossman
Here is the link, since it doesn't touchstone yet.

This is a wonderful collection of short stories, essays, and letters by Vasily Grossman that spans his writing career and that truly expanded my view of his writing talent, but . . . There is one essay which, in its diamond-sharp clarity, its acid but humane eye, its lack of any wasted words, so far outshines everything else in the volume that they almost seem weaker than they are. I speak of "The Hell of Treblinka," an essay Grossman wrote just a month after he, a journalist traveling with the Red Army ("embedded," we would say today, would that our journalists were of Grossman's caliber), entered the recently liberated death camp in 1944. It would take away from the impact of his writing for me to attempt to describe it, but despite all that I have read over the years about the Holocaust, this essay took my breath away with its portrayal of the people entering the camp and the processes that destroyed them, as they traveled through the circles of hell. Grossman got some details wrong, because he was writing in the heat of the moment, and insightful notes and commentary by Robert Chandler, the editor (and one of the translators) of this volume, point out what we have learned from more recent research.

The one quibble I have about this book is that the very helpful end notes for all the material in the book are referenced only by page numbers, so there is no way for the reader, as he or she is reading, to know what material has an explanatory note. This is atypical of other NYRB editions I have read, including Grossman's Everything Flows, in which the endnotes were referenced numerically.

76. Room by Emma Donoghue
78. Salvation City by Sigrid Nunez

I am reviewing these two books together (even though I read one book in between them) because I was struck by how they both tell the story of a boy who finds himself in traumatic circumstances. Different circumstances, different ages, different countries, but both boys are forced to deal with dramatic changes not of their own making.

Room, as is well known, tells the story of five-year-old Jack, who lives with his mother in an 11 foot X 11 foot room, imprisoned (although he doesn't know it) by his father, who kidnapped his mother when she was 19. Donoghue masterfully builds the sense of claustrophobia and danger, but for me the most important part of the story was what happened after the mother (who is never named) and Jack escape, and must re-enter the real world, a world Jack never thought existed. It is an interesting idea, and I was impressed by Donoghue's skill in creating and maintaining Jack's voice and imagining both the world of the Room and the prisoners' reactions to the world outside, and the book haunted me after I finished it, but I felt a little bit manipulated and didn't appreciate Room as much as some other readers.

In Salvation City, 13-year-old Cole is orphaned after both his parents and hundreds of thousands of others die in a pandemic flu; after recovering from the illness himself, he is first placed in an orphanage and is then taken in by an evangelical preacher and his young wife. The reader sees Cole's life with his parents through flashbacks. Just at that awkward young teenager stage where he can identify all the irritating things about his parents (who were not at a happy stage of their marriage), he struggles with his confused feelings of grief after they die, his feelings for his new "family," and his own sense of identity. The story takes place slightly in the future, a dystopic one to be sure, but the strength of the novel is its psychological insight and its meditations on love, loyalty, reality, and teenage discomfort, especially about sex. I found this novel considerably deeper and more intriguing than Room, which was limited, I feel, by the age of Jack and the shock value of the situation.

77. The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History by Jill Lepore.

Oh, how I loved this book! In a mere 165 pages, in a style that is both witty and authoritative, Lepore takes apart the obsession with "the founders" by interviewing contemporary tea-partiers, reviewing and quoting 18th century writers, and discussing what history is -- and what is anti-history. One important theme of the book is the tangled issue of people agitating for freedom (to not be the "slaves" of England) while they themselves enslave (or profit from the enslavement of) African Americans and while the British offer to free African-Americans if they fight for them; another is the idea that the "founding" took place over a span of decades -- decades of arguments, evolving ideas, and compromise. I was particularly impressed by the way Lepore weaves together the voices of the writers of the past with the speakers of the present, and how she presents history as a living, changing enterprise.

Lepore makes many points in this delightful, illuminating, and highly informative book, and is so eminently quotable that I can't resist including a few here.

"The telling of history is, by its very nature, controversial, contentious, and contested; it advances by debate. This doesn't make history squishy, vague, and irrelevant. It makes it picky, demanding, and vital." (p. 47)

"The founders were not prophets. Nor did they hope to be worshiped. They believed that to defer without examination to what your forefathers believed is to become a slave to the tyranny of the past." (p.113)

"Set loose in the culture, and tangled together with fanaticism, originalism* looks like history but it's not; it's historical fundamentalism, which is to history what astrology is to astronomy, what alchemy is to chemistry, what creationism is to evolution." (pp. 123-124)

*The idea that the what the original writers of the Constitution meant should stand for all time.

Fascinating Grossman review. Thank you.

Let's all sing the praises of NYRB, anyway, though, for making some wonderful books available to us again.

Great review of The Whites of Their Eyes, Rebecca; I'll add this to my wish list, too.

It is very readable and a lot of fun, Darryl, although serious and informative too.

And yes, Murr, I can barely begin to count the wonderful authors and books I have been introduced to thanks to NYRB.

>81 rebeccanyc: yes, nice review.

79. Great House by Nicole Krauss

So much suffering. So much death. So many secrets. So many tormented souls. If it were not for Krauss's beautiful and diamond-sharp writing, this stunning novel about loss, deception, grief, and memory would be just too sad to read.

Four different characters narrate the different sections of this novel; each is damaged in some way, either through the traumas of his or her own life or psychology or through loving another character, a character who has turned inward, hiding his or her true self from the world. There are connections among them, largely through a massive pre-World War II desk, but Krauss leaves it to the reader to figure everything out; we do not know more than the characters themselves most of the time.

It is really impossible to describe the plot, such as it is, of this novel, without giving too much away, but it is notable that so many of the characters are writers, or aspiring writers, people who for the most part find this alternative world more welcoming than the real one. The Holocaust's savage separation of the past from the present slices through the heart of Great House, but so does the sense of loss inherent in Jewish history going back 2000 years. The novel is intense and convoluted, and gives up its secrets slowly.

There are many, many beautiful examples of Krauss's ability to capture the emotional heart of the moment in her writing, but one that stands out for me, and perhaps says a lot about Great House itself, occurs when an Israeli father thinks about what to say to his wife who fears she cannot go on if one (or both) of their two sons, soldiers, are killed in the 1973 war. "Either I could have said, You will go on, or I could have said, We will not lose them." We lose everyone, but we go on.

That sounds intriguing, Rebecca.

Nice review, Rebecca; I'll probably pick this up later this week.

It is a very "intriguing" book, Laura -- I've been thinking about it since I finished it. But it is also relentlessly sad and at times claustrophobic, so that even I, the habitual reader of grim books, feel the need of something lighter now!

The NYT Book Review loved Great House, but your review is the one that is having me put it on my wishlist.

>90 RidgewayGirl:: RidgewayGirl, I just made the exact same comment over on Rebecca's 75 Books Thread !!

oops, posted twice.

Actually, it was the NY Times Book Review that led me to buy and read Great House!

Over the past week or so, I've read two very different books about two very different contemporary East Asian countries, and I decided to wait until I finished the second and comment on them together.

#80. Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love, and Literature by Deborah Fallows

In this delightful, slim volume, Deborah Fallows uses the Mandarin language, and her difficulties in learning it, as aw a window for exploring the contemporary China she encountered during several years in the country -- its people, culture, and nonstop busy-ness. Largely impressionistic, the book provides insight into some of the differences between both the Chinese and English languages and the Chinese and the Americans: for example, the Chinese at first seem abrupt and even rude to Fallows because they don't use words like "please" and "thank you;" they rarely use pronouns, making it difficult for them to distinguish "he" and "she" when they learn English and lessening the importance of the self ("I"); and they create compound words like "open-close" to mean "switch on or off" or "father-mother" to mean "parent" because they are working with a limited number of words and syllables since each has its own symbol. Although the book is light in tone, I learned a lot about contemporary Chinese life, at least as seen by a westerner, and found the language descriptions and insights especially interesting.

81. Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by demickbarbara::Barbara Demick

This is a fascinating, if chilling, look at the horror of life in contemporary North Korea and the ingenuity of at least some of its citizens in feeding themselves and their families at barely survivable levels and even escaping. Through interviews with six people who escaped from North Korea, most from the harsh northern city of Chonjin, as well as considerable research, Demick (a reporter for the Los Angeles Times) weaves a story that touches on multiple aspects of North Korean life over the past 20 years, including the cult of the leaders (every family had to have pictures of them and dust them daily -- there were inspections!); the method of organizing people to watch and report on other people; the "class" system in which people who had any connections to South Korea or other "enemies" in the past find that their families' blood is "tainted" for three generations, affecting their children's ability to get good educations or marry well; the system of organizing workplaces and living quarters so the government not only knows where everyone is but also provides food through the workplace. Then the economy breaks down and famine comes, and people struggle to find even edible grasses. With the breakdown of the system, some people manage to set up very small businesses, making "cookies," for example, even though they have been indoctrinated that private business is evil. They learn to ignore the dead bodies of those who have starved to death and focus on their own survival. Horrifying and illuminating as all this was, one of the most compelling parts of the book for me was the stories of how the different people Demick had interviewed ended up escaping: finding the will to defect and then finding the way to do it, all different, none of them easy.

Demick writes the book not as interviews but as the interwoven stories of the people as they progress from a harsh, totalitarian, and brainwashed, but nonetheless livable, lifestyle to a time of chaos and starvation to the decision to leave even though they have little idea of what they are moving to since all news from outside North Korea is banned (radios and TVs are preset to receive only the official channel) and their new life in South Korea (and how South Korea deals with the North Korean defectors). As she tells their stories, she adds in historical information that she has gleaned from other sources. She is a lively writer, and it was hard to put this book down. "Nothing to envy" is part of a song all young North Koreans learned that taught them that everything was best in their country and they had nothing to envy in others; needless to say, it is a supremely ironic title for a book about a lifestyle and a hell that we surely do not envy.

Edited to fix typos.

Thanks for these reviews. I have been thinking about both books, and I think you've confirmed me in my intentions to get hold of Nothing To Envy and to cross Dreaming In Chinese off my "potential" list.

I have learnt Chinese myself so I was interested in the subject - and it's true that the way that characters are put together to make words is fascinating (and one of the things I love about the language).

But I think there can be a tendency by learners to over-interpret what some of this means, particularly for words like 'parent' which developed such a long time ago. For example, the thing about 'crisis' being a combination of the words for 'danger' and 'opportunity'. Hmmm.... sort of.

(Incidentally, am I right in thinking that there is no Spanish for 'parent'? I know that 'parents' is 'padres', because the plural male includes the female, as my teacher explained...)

I am also not sure that I would agree that Chinese speakers 'rarely use pronouns' - Chinese native speakers do often have difficulty between 'he' and 'she' but that is because the words sound the same in Mandarin (and originally were the same word).

I have read some very positive and interesting things about this book but I think I personally might find myself wanting to argue with it a lot!

What an excellent review. I'm now desperate to read this book!

And Dreaming in Chinese is already on my wishlist. It sounds fascinating.

It would be very interesting if you did read it, wandering_star, because of your knowledge of Mandarin. I am not at home, so I can't check the book, but Fallows does point out that he and she sound similar in Mandarin, but she also puts this in the context of a much less frequent use of pronouns in Mandarin than in English. Also, when she gives examples of combination words, she includes several groups of words, some that were created long ago and others that are more recent; for me it was interesting because of the idea that a language made up of ideograms can make it harder to create new words than one that uses an alphabet.

I didn't do justice to Fallows' thoughts, but I would love to know how you react and what you would argue with her about!

I have just put Dreaming in Chinese on my waiting-for-the-paperback wishlist, and I would like wandering_star to read it so that I could read the review.

Robert

Great reviews of Dreaming in Chinese and Nothing to Envy, Rebecca. I bought Dreaming in Chinese last month, and I'll definitely read it soon. Four of my dearest friends are Chinese, two of whom speak Mandarin fluently (one was born in Shanghai, the other in Taipei). I'll almost certainly ask them about the topics you mentioned, and anything else I have questions about after I read the book. Nothing to Envy is at the top of my wish list, and I almost bought it at City Lights last month.

Incidentally, am I right in thinking that there is no Spanish for 'parent'? I know that 'parents' is 'padres', because the plural male includes the female, as my teacher explained...

I think that's right, wandering_star. 'Parents' in Spanish is 'padres', and I use 'madre' and 'padre' for 'mother' and 'father', respectively.

Rebecca, thanks for the clarifications. It seems to be nosing its way back onto my wishlist! It may in fact be easier to read it than to spend ages dithering over whether I want to read it. I'll also be very interested in kidzdoc's review and especially the responses you get from your friends as they will be native speakers rather than not-very-fluent learners like me...

82. Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives by Alan Bullock

Two and a half months and 997 pages (plus appendices) later, I have completed an absorbing and sobering tour of many of the evils of the first half of the 20th century. After the fall of the Berlin wall and the Soviet Union, Bullock, an historian, chose to use a dual biography of Hitler and Stalin (having previously written Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, which I read years ago in college) as a means of exploring what he calls the Berlin-East axis (that's axis as in direction, not Axis as in the powers), which he considered less familiar to English and American readers than the Berlin West axis.

Combining meticulous research with an admirable ability to tell a story, Bullock pairs sections discussing Hitler and Stalin at the same ages (initially, to account for Stalin's birth 10 years before Hitler's) and then, after they reach adulthood, by years. This allows the reader to learn broadly about what was going on in Russia and Germany at the same time, as well as to compare the societies and what Hitler and Stalin were doing. Because I know more about Hitler and the Nazis, having read the wonderful The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich earlier this year, I found the material about Stalin more interesting because it was new to me; I also found Bullock's telling of the war years fascinating and happily aided by good maps. Bullock also spends time comparing and contrasting Hitler and Stalin, something the reader inevitably does as well, and provides insight into the development of the cold war from the ashes of World War II.

At the end, Bullock sums up the devastation of the Nazi/Soviet era and World War II in Europe alone. In World War II, in Europe, some 40 million Europeans were killed: 21.3 million Russians (including 7.7 million civilians), or 11% of the population; 6.85 million Germans (including 3.6 million civilians), or 9.5% of the population; 6.123 million Poles (of whom 6 million were civilians and 2.5 million of these Jewish), or 17.2% of the population; 1.7 million Yugoslavs (of who 1.4 million were civilians), or 10.9% of the population; and hundreds of thousands of British, French, Hungarians, Greeks, Rumanians, Austrians, Italians, and Czechs. If the First World War, Spanish Civil War, and Russian Civil war are added in, the total rises to 58.3 million, and if the deaths attributable to the Russian famine of 1921-1922, Stalin's forced collectivization program, and Stalin's purges and the Gulag are also added, "it takes the total loss of life in Europe from the effects of violence in the period 1914-53 to ca. seventy-five million." My life has been lived in the aftermath of this horror, and it is illuminating to learn more about the world I inherited.

ETA For comparison's sake, US war-related deaths from 1941-1945 totaled 295,000 or 0.4% of the population including the war in the Pacific, i.e., not in Europe alone.

Excellent review of Hitler and Stalin, Rebecca. Those death figures are sobering and staggering. I probably won't read this, but I will read Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar in 2011 or 2012.

After a short break, I am planning to read Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin which came out recently and which I've wanted to read since I read an article by its author, Timothy Snyder, in the New York Review of Books. The basic thesis of the article was that the vast majority of the killing before and during World War II took place in Eastern Europe and has not been adequately studied or publicized in the west, although it had such a monumental effect on the areas and countries and people involved. Then I also want to read Gulag by Anne Applebaum and then I think I will be done with this segment of 20th century history, at least for a while.

83. The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson

I wouldn't have finished this book if it hadn't been recommended to me by people whose opinions I respect (not to mention the Booker Prize judges). Why didn't I like it?

First of all, I found the characters almost universally unappealing. While I am by no means a reader who needs to like the characters or feel connected to them, the three main characters just left me cold: Julian is a pathetic jerk, Sam a self-satisfied ass, and Libor, the most sympathetic of the group, a sentimental widower. The only character I warmed to at all was Hephzibah, a great-niece of Libor who ends up living with Julian.

Secondly, the Finkler question is the Jewish question and I found the portrayal of many of the Jewish characters, and Julian's views of them, all too often stereotypical and bordering on caricature. The issue of Israel and the connection between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is without doubt important, but the way it was handled in this book irritated me (and not in the good way, where irritation makes you think more deeply) and at times almost offended me.

Finally, I just didn't get Jacobson's sense of humor at all. I have this problem sometimes with British humor, so it may not just be him. And some of the situations in which the characters, especially Julian, find themselves are so preposterous it was difficult for me to believe them -- and I didn't think Jacobson always meant them as jokes.

>101 rebeccanyc:: those stats are horrible, absolutely horrible. I'm still reeling from reading Testament of Youth which was about WW I and while there were no stats, the impact was evident. The US educational system really left a lot to be desired in covering the horrors of war.

>104 rebeccanyc:: seems we had similar reactions to that book, Rebecca ! Love your descriptions of the characters.

I've added the Hitler-Stalin book to my wishlist, based on your excellent review. I'm not sure when I'm going to get brave enough to actually track it down, though!

I've had no interest in answering the Finkler Question, and even less now. Thanks for saving my time and effort.

For Suzanne, Darryl, and others who are interested, I e-mailed Archipelago about why I haven't gotten any books since Eline Vere and this is the response I got.

" Thanks for asking. We had a bit of a hiatus. We'll be sending out our new Darwish, our Bengali novel (My Kind of Girl by Buddhadeva Bose), and Joseph Roth's Job on Thursday or Friday. I apologize for the lengthy gap... Thanks so much"

Back to Dreaming in Chinese: 'he' and 'she' have exactly the same pronunciation, but are written differently.
When you are gossiping in Chinese about two people, one female and one male, it gets terribly confusing. (Hence the name Chinese whispers)

Other pronouns, such as 'I' and 'you' are also frequently dropped and understood from context (or not as the case may be.)

There is no distinction between subject and object pronouns.
It's helpful and necesary when discussing Chinese to be very clear about whether you are discussing spoken Chinese, or the writing system, as the two are completely divergent.

Great review of the Bullock, Rebecca. Have you read Ian Kershaw's bio of Hitler? Two volumes, Grim, but fascinating reading.

Thanks for the info about Chinese, Murr. Fallows actually discusses the difference between written and spoken Chinese a little, but the bulk of the book is about spoken Chinese as she spent more time learning that than the written version. She says that even Chinese people have difficulty writing all the words if they don't keep in practice -- do you find that to be true?

After Hitler and Stalin and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and my current reading of Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, I don't think I will have the stomach for more about Hitler for quite a while, but I will keep the Kershaw bio in mind, as well as the newer three-volume history of the Nazi era by Evans. As I said in my review, I found the Stalin material more interesting because it was less familiar, and I am more drawn now to learning more about him and the Gulag, etc.

the newer three-volume history of the Nazi era by Evans

OMG! really? where?

Even Chinese people have difficulty writing all the words if they don't keep in practice -- do you find that to be true?

Oh absolutely. My friends and students are always asking each other how to 'draw' certain characters. It's totally inefficient as a writing system.

Murr --This is a link to the series page for the Evans history. I have heard it is excellent.

Edited to fix link.

oh wow, looks great! Thanks!

#110 - what a sad thing to say! I suppose it may be inefficient, but it's also so brilliant. I love the way you can see why the characters are made up of the different elements - as well as the way that the characters fit together to make words. But then I guess I am extremely nerdy about languages.... I remember getting very excited when learning Sinhalese (long story) when I worked out for myself the rule for vowel changes in irregular verbs. Yep, really extremely nerdy. I'll go now.

I love the way you can see why the characters are made up of the different elements - as well as the way that the characters fit together to make words.

Oh yes, I love that too, but that's a different set of criteria. If your criterion is aesthetics and neatness, then it's fabulous for that. But if your criterion is the efficient preservation and exchange of ideas and information - which to my mind is the purpose of any writing system- the Chinese writing system is hopelessly inefficient.

And as for language nerds, honey, you can't get much more nerdy about it than me! I would love to hear about your Sinhalese experience.

How I admire and envy you two for learning such difficult languages. If I only had enough time, I would love to learn just one new one, or even try to relearn all I used to know of French and remember some of my self-taught Spanish.

#114 - interesting. I suspect I am too tired to formulate a coherent view, and I should also really be packing for a work trip which starts tomorrow. But maybe just a couple of points.

Firstly, Chinese grammar is extremely simple - it's basically all syntax. No horrible verb endings or noun declensions to learn. I suppose you could argue that German/Russian/Latin/similar languages gain tremendous precision from the amount of grammar, but perhaps they also lose flexibility and creativity.

Secondly, having a language based on phonemes rather than letters does make it harder to incorporate words from other languages, but on the other hand, it means that neologisms and technical words are much more likely to be comprehensible to a layperson - they are not Latinated (Greeked?) as in English, or simply imported as in Japanese, but made up of elements which most speakers would be able to make sense of. And I think you would lose that if you did not have the characters.

Actually, Japanese, now there is a really inefficient writing system! But thinking about this I realise that I don't really mind inefficiency, at least not if it is allied to something I like otherwise, so I'm not really the best person to judge...

Rebecca, apologies for the thread hijack! I just find this stuff very interesting (see nerdy, above).

PS, I realise that my first point about Chinese grammar is clearly a lazy language learner speaking!

116, Nothing to apologize for. I find languages fascinating.

84. The Green House by Mario Vargas Llosa

Like several of my favorite novels by Vargas Llosa, this one mixes characters, past and present, and conversations and actions not only within the same chapter, but even in the same sentence. I thought I had gotten the hang of reading these books, but I was confused throughout much of The Green House, one of Vargas LLosa's earliest works, and still, having finished it, feel I would have to go back to the beginning and reread it to grasp it more fully.

As far as I can tell, there are several major plots and themes: the exploitation of the environment and the varied indigenous peoples of the Peruvian jungle by white people, including rubber traders and the Catholic church; the exploitation of women by men, including in the Green House, the first and legendary brothel in a desert town; the contrast between the desert and the jungle; the lushness and power of nature in the jungle; corruption and innocence; and the power of music. How all this fits together, in the end, eluded me, although I enjoyed a great deal of the writing and wish I understood this book better.

85. Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon

Indian Mound Downs is the last stop for aging racehorses -- and for its human denizens and hangers-on, including elderly African-American groom Medicine Ed, cynical Deucey with one horse, and "financier" Two-Tie, who has been banned from the track. Into this mix comes a 20-something couple: would-be trainer Tommy, and his somewhat slumming girlfriend Maggie. It is the late 60s or early 70s in northwestern West Virginia, just over the Ohio border, and everyone is trying to make or find some luck.

Jaimy Gordon uses language beautifully, and often poetically: to capture the feeling of nature, from the red dust to the singing birds; to bring individual horses to life; to give each of the major characters his or her own distinctive (and sometimes initially hard to figure out) voice and lingo; and to convey the sensuality of the human connection to horses (and occasionally to each other). The novel follows the characters and horses over the course of a year, leading through three races to the fourth, featuring a horse named Lord of Misrule, that brings all the forces that have been building up to this point together.

I really loved most of this book, for the feel of the characters, the life of the racetrack, the "personality" of the horses, and the sense of place, but I found it flawed in a couple of ways. First of all, about two-thirds of the way through the book, a somewhat melodramatic gangster element develops. Although this advances the plot, I found it jarring. Second, and related to this, I found the ending also melodramatic and not entirely in keeping with the rest of the novel which portrays a world in which the more things change, the more they stay the same.

According to Wikipedia, the Lord of Misrule was appointed in medieval Britain and other places in Europe to oversee riotous festivities around Christmas time, in a custom derived from the ancient Roman Saturnalia, in which"the ordinary rules of life were turned topsy-turvy." In this novel, the horse Lord of Misrule sets in motion the overturning of some of the status quo at the racetrack and in people's lives.

Finally, do I think this deserved the National Book Award? The only other finalist I've read is Nicole Krauss's Great House, which was one of my favorite recent reads, and which I think equally deserving. Both books are complex, beautifully written, moving, and technically accomplished: Krauss's "works" better, I think, while Gordon's is more ambitious and takes more risks.

Thanks for that review, Rebecca. Sounds like a good read to me.

Superb review, Rebecca!

86. Our Kind of Traitor by John le Carré

Alas, this book once again shows that try as he does, in my opinion anyway, le Carré just can't match the brilliance of his Cold War thrillers, especially A Perfect Spy and the Karla trilogy. There are hints of his brilliant characterization in the this tale of dirty money, Russian criminals, and their western coconspirators, but only hints; le Carré still can build tension, but by the end I didn't care that much.

shame. 'A perfect spy' is incredibly good. I keep looking for Le Carre to recreate that, but he never quite does.

I'm sorry to say that it feels like le Carré is just churning them out to make money, but of course he's entitled to do that if he wants to. I did like last year's A Most Wanted Man, although it too wasn't up to his best.

87. After Claude by Iris Owens

Harriet is a darkly witty, self-centered and self-hating, man-obsessed, and seriously delusional young woman who, as an extremely unreliable narrator, tells the story of how she met and broke up with Claude, "the French rat," and then puts her hooks into Roger, the hilariously creepy sidekick to an off-scene cult leader. I found Harriet unpleasant and the book claustrophobic, redeemed only by the brilliance of Owens's writing and characterization, and to some extent by the depiction/satirization of the early 1970s in New York. I would also warn that some of the satire and the language seem more offensive now than they would have in 1973 when the book was written: the constant use of the word "fag" for instance, but also some of the characters' comments about African-Americans and Jews. Finally, the cover blurb says Harriet is an "unblinkered, unbuttoned, unrelenting, and above all bitingly funny prophetess of all that is wrong with women's minds and hearts" -- I'm afraid I just didn't read her that way.

88. Your Republic Is Calling You by Young-ha Kim

With the saber-rattling on the Korean peninsula, this seemed like a good time to read this book. I have mixed feelings about it, though. On the one hand, it was an interesting look at contemporary South Korea, South Korea 25 years ago, and North Korea, especially at some of the ways that North Korea trains its spies to become moles inside South Korea, and the idea of a long-term mole, with a South Korean life and family, being called back north is intriguing. However, I feel the author was trying to do to much and it didn't all work. Along with the spy story, he mixes in the stories of the protagonist's wife and daughter, as well as a variety of other characters. I believe this is designed to give a fuller picture of contemporary South Korean life (as well as develop the idea that we all have secrets), but it didn't completely work. Also, the author occasionally lapses into almost journalistic sections to inform the reader about different parts of Korea and Korean life. These were jarring.

Nonetheless, I read the book in almost one sitting because I wanted to find out what happened, and I learned a lot about South Korea and a little about North Korea. It was interesting to read this book so soon after Barbara Demick's wonderful Nothing to Envy, a journalistic look at the lives of North Koreans. It had a completely different approach, and for me was a far more compelling work.

89. The Princess, the King, and the Anarchist by Robert Pagani

I picked up this novella in a bookstore because I couldn't resist the title, and what a strange little book it is. The fictionalized account of an anarchist's failed attempt to bomb the 1906 wedding procession of the young king of Spain and a younger British princess, it looks inside the minds of the couple as they proceed in a carriage from the church to palace, as well as during the aftermath of the bombing, and for most of the time they are thinking about sex (she as a very naive virgin, he as quite the ladies man) and other physical urges (her need to find a bathroom). Clearly, we are meant to contrast these bodily functions with the absurd pomp and snobbery and idiocy of the whole idea of royalty; in the end, the king's power is undermined, but not by the bomb. I can't say I really enjoyed this book, but it is certainly making me think about what to write about it.

90. Who Killed Palomino Molero? by Mario Vargas Llosa

Fairly lightweight (in length, style, and complexity) for a Vargas Llosa novel, this book reintroduces the character of Lituma, who first appeared in The Green House and later appears in Death in the Andes.* Here, he is the sidekick to a police (Guardia Civil) lieutenant as the two of them investigate the brutal murder of a young air force recruit. As they, but mostly the lieutenant in his own inimitable way, interview potential witnesses, Vargas Llosa portrays a cross-section of Peruvian society in a remote coastal area in the 1950s, illustrating the class and racial tensions that pervade it. And, it wouldn't be a Vargas Llosa novel without a sex angle, this time the lieutenant's obsession with a married woman. I found this novel enjoyable, if surprisingly straightforward for Vargas Llosa, but certainly not up to his best.

*I am a little unclear about the chronological aspects of this, since Palomino Molero explicitly takes place in the 1950s, Green House implicitly during World War II, and Death in the Andes at an unnamed time, but apparently during the era of the Shining Path, which Wikipedia says was formed in 1980. However, this gap of 25+ years is incompatible with Lituma being sent from the coast to the mountains at the end of Palomino Molero. Artistic license? Or am I missing some aspect of Peruvian history?

91. Job: The Story of a Simple Man by Joseph Roth

This deceptively simple story of a "simple man," a retelling of the Job story set in an early 20th century Russian shtetl and in New York City, grew on me as I read it. At first, it seemed as though Roth, surprisingly, was writing a version of a typical Yiddish shtetl tale, but gradually his usual themes of lost worlds, borders, interactions with officials and the people who always spring up to help with dealing with officials, and longing for what is lost begin to appear, this time in the dying days of Tsarist Russia, as opposed to those of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As in some other works I have read, Roth demonstrates his talent for portraying the beauty and grandeur of the natural environment.

Mendel Singer is the "simple man" of the title, a Torah teacher and pious Jew in a small town on the western edge of Russia. But, oh the troubles he has. As the translator's afterword (in the new Archipelago edition that I read) puts it, "his youngest son is born with what seem to be incurable disabilities, one of his older sons joins the Russian army, the other deserts to America, and his daughter is running around with a Cossack" (actually, with several Cossacks). When Mendel and his wife and daughter move to join the son in New York, who has been quite financially successful, at first life improves a little, although both parents are distraught about leaving the disabled son behind. Then, even worse troubles develop, Mendel questions his faith and grows old, and then . . . the not so unexpected miracle.

Both realistic and a fable, the story is compelling because of Roth's lyric writing, the palpable sense of loss, and the portrayal of life in both the pastoral shtetl in Russia and the urban version of the shtetl in New York City.

Just catching up. As always Rebecca, your reading has added to the tremendous pile of things I HAVE TO READ NOW. :)

Also, the language discussion is fascinating. Anyone up for a Club Read 2011 mini-thread on language/linguistics? Seems like we have so many speakers and learners of different languages here that we could do quite nicely.

Sorry (?) about that, fannyprice! Thanks for stopping by. And good idea for the Club Read 2011 thread -- since you suggested it, I leave it to you to start the conversation once the 2011 group is up and running!

:D

I started reading Death in the Andes but had to put it down due to other responsibilities clouding over my head. I have yet to get back to it but sometime soon. I also have Palomino Molero on my TBR but that one is in one of my moving boxes. I'm thinking next year I might get back to those books.

As for the mini-thread idea, I like it! I definitely think you should set that up.

92. Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder

In this stunning and chilling book, Timothy Snyder, a Yale history professor, illuminates the darkest side of the years 1933 to 1945 in Europe by exploring the mass murders of conservatively (conservatively!) 14 million people in what he calls the "bloodlands," the countries from Poland in the west to western Russia in the east. This already shocking total includes civilians and prisoners of war but not soldiers killed directly in the war as Snyder is covering "deliberate mass murder." The countries of the bloodlands, as he defines them, are what are now eastern Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus, Ukraine, and western Russia.

Bloodlands takes the reader from the forced Ukrainian famines and collectivization of the early 1930s and the purges and great terror of the late 1930s in the Soviet Union through the early days of World War II when the Nazis and Soviets collaborated to take over Poland and "give" the Baltics to the Soviet Union, through the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, which opened up the east for the Nazi death camps, to the Nazi retreat and the bitter partisan fighting in many countries, at times encouraged by Stalin knowing it would lead the Germans to kill leaders who would otherwise live to make trouble for the Soviets, and winding up with post-1945 ethnic removals to make the countries that emerged from the war "pure" and the final Soviet purges, including the anti-Semitic "doctors plot." Throughout, in addition to the horrific details and statistics, Synder tries to emphasize that everyone who was killed -- by starvation, bullets, or gas -- was an individual human being, and includes quotes from people who left written records (sometimes on the walls of the buildings in which they were imprisoned prior to being killed).

Snyder makes several points. First, we as westerners have a distorted view of the bloodshed of these years partly because all the sites in the bloodlands where people were killed were liberated by Soviet troops and ended up behind the iron curtain; when we think of camps being liberated, we think of the skeletal survivors of the work camp at Dachau and when we read of the holocaust we read the stories of survivors. Second, almost all the countries in the bloodlands suffered from being occupied first by the Soviets, then by the Nazis, and then by the Soviets again. Not only was each occupation brutal in its own way, but people had complicated calculations to make about their degree of collaboration or resistance. Third, both the Soviets and the Nazis, but especially the Soviets, put a big priority on killing leaders, both military and intellectual, thereby not only reducing the ability to fight and resist but also impoverishing the population for years to come. Fourth, although we think of Jews being killed in the death camps by gas, and millions were, more were killed by bullets, millions of people killed one by one and thrown into pits.

This was not an easy book to read, because the horrors are so overwhelming. But I learned a lot, especially about the partisan fighting in Belarus and about the uprising first by Jews and then by the Polish Home Army in Warsaw, and much much more. This is an important book.

>135 rebeccanyc:, Great review rebecca. I can't wait to read this one, despite the depressing nature of the subject.

It is well worth reading: an eye-opener, with great intellectual and moral clarity.

Fabulous review of Bloodlands, Rebecca. I'll add this to my wish list.

93. A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cossé

I liked a lot of this book, but in the end I was disappointed and I wish I liked it better. The idea of two people setting up a bookstore that only sells the best novels is wonderful, and the satire of French publishing (what I understood of it; I know I missed a lot of the jokes) is fun. But . . . the mystery plot that begins with attacks on the members of the bookstore's selection committee and the difficult romance of one of the founders and the characters of the founders didn't really come to life for me. The introduction of a mysterious first-person narrator part of the way through the book also seemed jarring to me, and when the narrator's identity is finally revealed (not a total surprise) the narrator's voice doesn't seem consistent with what else we know of the character. And at times the book seems a little didactic.

You might think from the above that I didn't like this book at all, but that's not true. I loved the parts about the bookstore and the authors and the readers and the novels the store stocks. That part was really a fable, and a novel of ideas and, to my mind, anyway, very French. The surrounding plots . . . I don't know. As I said at the beginning, I wanted to like this book more.

#139 - I am in total agreement - Cosse tried to do to much with this novel. If she had just stuck with the bookstore and the wonderful passages on reading, she would have had a much stronger product. Even the love stories could have been further develpoed to form more of a conflict, but the mystery plot was out-of-place.

This book made me want to read more French novelists though!

94. Captain Pantoja and the Special Service by Mario Vargas Llosa

I had so much fun reading this book, and I'm quite sure Vargas Llosa had a lot of fun writing it! Pantaleon Pantoya has just been promoted to captain in the Peruvian army's Quartermaster Corps, and despite his steadfast devotion to the army and his genius at organizing, systematizing, and making anything run efficiently, he is horrified to learn that his new assignment will be to start a prostitution operation to serve soldiers in remote Amazon posts who have been creating problems for the army by raping the local women. Of course, to carry out this order he must appear to have nothing whatever to do with army itself, which is a source of great sorrow to him. At the same time, Brother Francisco is gathering supporters for his religious movement, crucifying insects, small animals, and the occasional person in the belief that this will bring good to his band of "brothers" and "sisters."

A satire of both the military and religion (and implicitly of the similarities between them), this novel includes narrative sections (with Vargas Llosa's typical mixture of various speakers and situations within the course of several paragraphs), army memoranda, radio programs, and newspaper reports. Needless to say, Pantoja becomes totally absorbed in his assignment, always wanting to build the best, most efficient, and largest possible "special service," but with his success come problems of various sorts -- lack of support from his army superiors even as he calculates the need for a larger and larger operation, blackmailing by the local radio commentator, obsession with his star "specialist," an unhappy wife and mother, etc.

All in all, it is a rollicking read, with memorable characters, both broad and subtle humor, and some interesting ideas underneath the fun.

141 - Great review. Thumbed and wishlisted.

I really needed a pick-me-up book after all my grim reads and this completely hit the spot.

141 -
This was one of my favorite reads in the past few years so I'm glad to see someone else read it. It's always on the the top of my "read this" list when I give recommendations to people. The dialogue is just fantastic!

It might have been your recommendation that spurred me to buy it, although I don't need a lot of encouragement to buy or read a Vargas Llosa. I thought the military memos were priceless, but I really loved all of it.

95. School for Love by Olivia Manning

"Felix" means "happy" in Latin, but Felix is not a happy boy, nor are any of the characters in this coming-of-age novel happy; each is alone, if not actually lonely. At the beginning of 1945, Felix is sent from Baghdad, after the deaths of his father and mother, to live in Jerusalem with Miss Bohun, a quasi-relative and a schemer of the first order, who is often mean and occasionally downright cruel, but always convinced that everything she does is to help others. Over the course of the year, Felix meets various equally sharply drawn characters, pours his love into his relationship with Faro, Miss Bohun's cat, and gradually learns to observe and understand people on his own and even take action on his own.

There is very little plot in this book, but the characterizations are brilliant, the insights into psychology subtle but penetrating, the natural and human setting of Jerusalem on the edge of World War II and on the eve of the departure of the British and its own war between the Arabs and the Jews fascinating and haunting, the depiction of British colonial behavior sharp, and Manning's writing as wonderful as ever. Her larger works, especially The Balkan Trilogy have a broader scope than this short novel, but it is a gem.

Nice review of School for Love, Rebecca.

sounds fantastic. I love OM.

Sounds good to me too! Love your reviews, Rebecca.

Thanks, everybody, for your compliments!

96. Pereira Declares by Antonio Tabucchi

The feeling of tension builds in this novel, subtitled "a testimony," because the phrase "Pereira declares" is repeated frequently as Dr. Pereira, a 50-ish journalist who is still living in the past, slowly, oh so slowly, opens his mind and psyche up to the increasing dictatorship in Portugal in 1938. In the end, the reader doesn't know why Pereira is declaring: Has he been arrested and is he testifying to the police? Or has he fled and is testifying about Portugal to anti-fascists?

This novel beautifully creates not only this sense of tension but a portrait of life in Lisbon and surrounding areas in the late 1930s, with some aspects of earlier times along with the growth of a police state in which shocking attacks are never mentioned in the press, the only source of news is a café waiter whose friend gets the BBC from London, and a doctor in a seaside health clinic offers insight into some psychological concepts.

I understand there is a more recent translation than the one I read by Patrick Creagh which was published in 1995 (a year (?) after Tabucchi published the novel in Italian). I was occasionally jarred by some slang terms which I didn't understand, and therefore couldn't tell if they were English slang that dated to the time of the novel, in the late 1930s, or were just awkward, I would be interested in knowing if readers of the more recent translation encountered this same issue.

Rebecca, I'm glad you also liked Pereira Declares. I see I wishlisted it after Darryl's review. I don't know anything about politics in Portugal so this sounds like an interesting way to learn something about it.

97. Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier

I could hardly put this book down because Ian Frazier is such a wonderful writer. On the surface the story of his five trips to Siberia -- with a cross-Siberia drive the centerpiece -- it encompasses a great deal more: the history of Siberia (and Russia) from the Mongol tribes to the gulag and beyond, including a compelling chapter on the Decembrists; natural history from mosquitoes to ravens to reindeer to sables (with fascinating information about the historic fur trade) and geology from permafrost to oil wells; Russian literature and culture; Russian technology, especially cars and roads; and of course people of all sorts.

Despite the seriousness of some of these topics, Frazier's writing is so deceptively easy that the reader (or this one, anyway) learns a tremendous amount while feeling entertained. Frazier has a remarkable ability to talk to all sorts of people and convey their information in their own voices, a lively sense of humor, and an unobtrusive way of bringing his own thoughts and feelings into the story. He can be funny, horrified, worried, admiring, and appalled, and everything in between. He fell in love with Russia, and especially Siberia (which occupies 1/12 of the earth's surface), and by the end of the book the reader has too.

I first read excerpts of this book in the New Yorker; somehow, I'd missed Ian Frazier until then. Now I will look for his other work

Intriguing review, Rebecca -- I'm just not sure I'm that interested in Siberia -- even if does cover 1/12 of the globe.

You would be, if you read this book, Jane!

>153 rebeccanyc:-155, This book is getting incredible buzz and I think one reviewer even referred to it as something along the lines of "The Best Book About a Place You Never Knew You Cared About" or something. Anyway, I am interested in Siberia, and once I polish off the 15 or so books that I bought myself for Xmas, I definitely plan on picking this one up. Glad to know you loved it Rebecca.

98. The Haunted Looking Glass: Ghost Stories Chosen by Edward Gorey edited by Edward Gorey

I have only myself to blame for buying this collection yesterday after seeing its lovely Edward Gorey cover on display at my favorite bookstore, because I know perfectly well that ghost stories don't do anything for me. And indeed, they didn't, despite the equally lovely Edward Gorey illustrations that act as frontispieces for each story and the illustrious authors who include Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker and, more surprisingly (to me, anyway), L.P. Hartley. Some were ingenious, most were well written, nearly all were utterly predictable -- well, as I said, I have only myself to blame.

Rebecca, Your review got my attention. I'm adding Travels in Siberia to the wishlist.

I wanted to add Travels in Siberia to my waiting-for-the-paperback wishlist, but BN.COM wouldn't let me.

Robert

99. A Country Doctor's Notebook by Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhail Bulgakov, most famous as the author of The Master and Margarita, originally trained as a doctor and was sent, in 1916, just of medical school, to be the sole doctor at a remote hospital way off in the country because Russia was short of doctors as most had been drafted into the military. In this semi-autobiographical collection of stories, he vividly portrays the wildness of the country (the snow, the wind, the wolves), the abject ignorance and superstition of the local people, and most movingly the fears of a doctor who knows he doesn't know enough for the job into which he has been thrust. This book is lightweight compared to Bulgakov's later work, some of the medical scenes were a little too realistic for me, and the last story was a little politically self-serving, but all in all I enjoyed the collection and the insight into a young doctor's psyche.

Adding Travels in Siberia to the wishlist as well.

> 153 looks like something i would be picking up without hesitation. Have you read Colin Thubron's In Siberia? I wonder how it compares.

I didn't know about the Thubron book, but it sounds interesting. Have you read it?

I've only read excerpts of it although I own the book. The excerpts were published in Granta magazine no. 64 (1998) with the theme Russia, The Wild East. I found this particular volume the best among Granta back issues I've read until now. You might want to get hold of a copy of this old volume since this is a region which I think you like to read about. Quite some names in this volume too: Andrei Platonov, Thubron, Orlando Figes among others.

100. Great Plains by Ian Frazier

Had I not read Travels in Siberia first, I would have loved this book even more. As I noted in my review of that book, Frazier has a wonderful ability to talk to all sorts of people, tell their stories, and weave history, the natural world, and tales of the road together. In this book, he takes the reader to the least inhabited part of the North American continent and, as he travels from Montana in the north to Texas in the south, and from New Mexico in the west to Kansas in the east, the reader learns about the history of the Native Americans of the area (including the life and death of Crazy Horse), the stories of immigrants lured to the plains, the challenges of farming in such a dry region, the nuclear missile silos buried beneath concrete platforms in the middle of nowhere, and much more. What makes this so fascinating is Frazier's lively curiosity, readable style, and humanity.

Rebecca, great review of Great Plains. I'll probably read that before Travels in Siberia because I'm trying to read more about the American West. And, congratulations on reading 100 books!

Well, at an even 100, that probably wraps it up for 2010, since I won't finish the other book I'm reading, The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford tomorrow. So, after much thought, here are my favorite books of 2010. I struggled mightily to reduce this list even more, but this is the best I can do. What can I say? It was a great reading year!

New and Recent Fiction

The Best
Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon
Great House by Nicole Krauss
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
The Siege by Helen Dunmore
Where the God of Love Hangs Out by Amy Bloom

Runners Up
Q Road by Bonnie Jo Campbell
The Last Brother by Nathacha Appanah
The Betrayal by Helen Dunmore

Classics and Older Fiction

The Best
Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen
Conversation in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning
The Long Ships by Frans Bengtsson
The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford
Captain Pantoja and the Special Service by Mario Vargas Llosa

Runners Up
School for Love by Olivia Manning
Wolf among Wolves by Hans Fallada
Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes
The Green House by Mario Vargas Llosa
Hotel Savoy by Joseph Roth
Wish Her Safe at Home by Stephen Benatar
The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa

Honorable Mention
Burning Secret by Stefan Zweig
Doctor Glas by Hjalmar Soderberg

Nonfiction

The Best
Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder
Murder City by Charles Bowden
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich byWilliam Shirer
Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick
The Road by Vassily Grossman (this collection includes both fiction and nonfiction, but the essay "The Hell of Treblinka" is the brilliant, horrifying heart of the book)
Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier
Hitler and Stalin by Alan Bullock

Runners Up
The Whites of Their Eyes by Jill Lepore
The Eitingons by Mary-Kay Wilmers
Dreams in a Time of War by Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Great Plains by Ian Frazier
In Search of a Lost Ladino by Marcel Cohen
Operation Mincemeat by Ben Macintyre

A great list for a great year. I've been thinking about making Florida a planned theme for me in 2011, Shadow Country would be included.

You had a great reading year!---Almost 40% of the books you read are on your best of list.

And thank you for the many great recommendations I've gotten from you over the past two years!

Thanks, Dan and Deborah. And I enjoyed Shadow Country so much that I'm thinking of also reading the original three novels that Matthiessen condensed and edited to make the recent version.

Please visit my Club Read 2011 thread.

Well, I made it to 101!

101. The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford by Jean Stafford

I discovered Jean Stafford this year with the NYRB reissue of The Mountain Lion, an extremely disturbing novel which became one of my favorites of the year. So I immediately bought this collection of her stories, and at first was very disappointed in it. The first groups of stories -- they're arranged roughly by locale, with the first set in Europe, then Boston, then the west, and then (partly) New York -- didn't interest me; they seemed dated, overwritten, over-explained. Finally, most of the ones set in the west grabbed me, and the final New York store (which actually takes place in Maine) is stunning.

In a collection this size, it is not surprising that some stories are better than others. At the same time, the size makes Stafford's themes clear: unhappy children and women/wives, children without their families, children with monstrous parents, children who are alienated from their families, the hypocrisy and smallness of many people's lives and interests, the desire if not always the opportunity to escape, illness as an escape, drinking to escape, loneliness, and psychological suffering. Clearly, Stafford was not happy herself, especially in her marriage to Robert Lowell, as the introduction by Joyce Carol Oates makes clear.

So that's it for 2010! Come on over to my Club Read 2011 thread! Happy new year!