No Book Left Behind

Tags

A Long Way Gone, Aristophanes, books, Days of Dreams and Laughter, Girl in Translation, I am Legend, Jurassic Park, recommendations, Richard Bachman, Richard III, Sashenka, Searching for God Knows What, The Bartender's Tale, The Firebugs, The Long Walk, The Year of Living Biblically, Thornton Wilder, Three Cups of Tea, To Hope or Die, War and Peace, William Faulker

After finishing The Harshbarger List and The Dusty List, I set about to make a new list for what I believe will be an impossible task: to have a bookshelf where every single one of my books has been read.

No Book Left Behind takes up the 19 books still left on my shelves after finally reading everything that had been languishing and dusty for more than three years.  They are listed here in order of preference.  Plays and short stories made up almost half of my remaining titles.

The Bartender’s Tale, by Ivan Doig

This was the first book I read under the No Book Left Behind banner, and it stayed firmly as the favorite through the 13 months that it took me to complete the list.  It was a wonderful book, with great character development and story-line.  I’ve also read English Creek by the same author, and of the two I preferred this one.  Mr. Doig has such a wonderful way with words.

War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy is an expert plot and character developer.  His battle descriptions are so honest and unlike what I’ve read in any other war novel.  It’s obvious that he spent time with the army.  I wish that the translator/publisher had included a map of the battles, and I wish the Russian names would have been kept instead of the English (Nicholas, Mary, Natalie, Andrew were used instead of Nikolei, Maria, Natalija, and Andrei)  I enjoyed the novel, although I preferred the ‘peace’ to the ‘war’ sections.  Tolstoy occasionally waxes philosophical, which I didn’t mind until the second epilogue, which was 30 pages of it.  Surely one epilogue is enough for everyone?

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, by Ishmael Beah

A compelling memoir of a boy who survived the civil war in his country, losing everything, including his own soul.  His candid story-telling made the book read very quickly, and my heart ached for him.

The Long Walk, by Slovomir Rawicz

Wow, what a story.  Mr. Rawicz was a Polish man who was captured by the Russians, shipped to Siberia, made to walk to the camp for hundreds of miles in the winter, and then later escaped with six other inmates all the way to India.  The story was well-told and jaw-dropping.  Against incredible odds, four of the original seven men arrived at their destination a year later.  The author has a pleasing, candid style of writing.  The movie version titled this story “The Way Back.”  (If nothing else, watch the trailer to get an idea of the terrain these men traversed.)

The  Year of Living Biblically, by A.J. Jacobs

I enjoyed this book immensely.  The author made it his mission to take the Bible as literally as possible for a year.  He devoted his first eight months to the Old Testament, and the last four to the New.  I feel he gave better weight to the Old Testament, as he had grown up in a secular Jewish family.  He didn’t have the mind dilemma of going through the motions, even as the rules were pretty strict in modern day New York City.  His biggest set-back for the New Testament is that you actually have to accept Christ as your savior to really get the full experience, which he wasn’t willing to do.  The author is a secular liberal, so he was at odds with a lot of things in the Bible, but I also thought he did a great job of being fair and presenting both sides.  Both atheist and religious alike thanked him for his honesty and transparency.  It’s a momentous task.  I used to be much better about reading my Bible daily, but I’ve fallen off in recent years.  This book was an inspiration to start that up again.

Richard III, by William Shakespeare

There were a couple of things that didn’t add up for me in the actual historical timeline, but on the whole I enjoyed this play very much, and I tried to stage and direct it the way it would have been done in my high school’s theater, The Black Box.  The part I would have wanted for myself was Anne.  I’d love to see this performed.

I am Legend, and Other Stories, by Richard Matheson

Richard Matheson was a writer that Stephen King described as influential to his own work.  I could easily see the connection.  This was a collection of short stories:  I am  Legend was the longest and most developed, and while this doesn’t happen often, I preferred the movie to the book.  I loved the visual from the movie of an abandoned New York instead of an abandoned suburban neighborhood. I also liked it set in the modern day.  I never quite caught on to the difference between a dead and living vampire.  The rest of the stories were much shorter, in some cases only one or two pages.  All of the stories were macabre or involved an element of the supernatural.  My favorite was Mad House.

The Bachman Books: Four Early Novels, by Stephen King

Four short novels made up this collection under Stephen King’s alias, Richard Bachman.  Rage:  It’s a weird thing to say, but this story about a school shooting and hostage situation was a little slow for me.  Part of  it was the language.  I start to tune out when the language is so course. The other issue was that this story about a school shooting written in the 1970s has so little in common with the horrible reality of what my generation knows school shootings are actually like.   The Long Walk:  It started out pretty interesting, and I made comparisons to The Hunger Games.  A group of boys compete against each other in a walk to the death.  After five days of walking, the action was a bit tedious.  They start out walking, and two hundred pages later they’re still walking.  Since you know who’s going to ‘win’ (or at least finish close to the top, otherwise the story ends) you’re just waiting for these boys to die so that Garraty can finally go home.    Roadwork:  This was my second favorite, although it flagged for me through the middle.  I thought it did the best of the short stories towards building up to the finale, and what an explosive finale.  I guess I also have a better association with the characters and the sense of hopelessness one feels as the landscape around your home clears to make way for construction and buildings you don’t want.  The Running Man: This one was easily my favorite of the four novels.  I do love a future dystopian society with a clever and defiant protagonist.  Even more than The Long Walk, this novel reminded me of The Hunger Games.  Suzanne Collins must have read it and been inspired.  A televised fight to the death, only this time every citizen in the world is fighting for the death of one person.  Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in the movie.  Reflecting back on all of the books, it was strange to read about a school shooting that was written pre-Columbine, and strange to read about a plane hitting a tower that was written pre-September 11.

Days of Dreams and Laughter: The Story Girl and Other Tales, by L.M. Montgomery

This book actually should have belonged in my Dusty Book List.  A collection of short stories: The Story Girl, The Golden Road and Kilmeny of the Orchard.  This would have been given to me in elementary school, because I enjoyed Anne of Green Gables by the same author.  The vein of the stories was the same, and it was fun to revisit the world of Prince Edward Island in that time period.  I was pleased that the personalities were completely different.  Anne would remain my literary favorite.  The first story dragged a bit for me, but the other two passed swiftly.

Three Plays, by Thornton Wilder

Our Town:  I remember discussing the play in high school.   It was a study in miming absolutely every activity and making it look believable.  The final act gave me chills.  The Skin of Our Teeth:  This was a strange play.  The plot takes one family through the epochs of humanity, starting as cavemen with a pet dinosaur.  There’s hunger, disaster, infidelity, jealousy, and just plain weirdness.  My thought upon concluding?  “Huh.” The Matchmaker:  This one was very amusing and entertaining – easily my favorite of the three plays.  Once it dawned on me that it was the basis for the musical Hello, Dolly! I had the music playing through my head every time I opened the book.  I imagined with pleasure how it would be performed in the Black Box.

Jurassic Park, by Michael Crichton

It started out with a lot of excitement, and I was reading it with a child-like thrill, but even as the action picked up the story started dragging for me.  The first introduction to the dinosaurs was anti-climatic – they get out of the helicopter, and there they are – no suspense, footprints, strange smells, goosebumps…  I also thought there was no character development.  There were just people with different skills who got killed off.  The two kids were especially annoying, and acted in ways to me completely uncharacteristic for their age and comprehension.  8-12 year old kids who have just witnessed a t-Rex attack are not going to be bickering and whining about how hungry they are with the Rex still in the vicinity.

To Hope or Die, by Edmund Szybicki

A memoir of the Warsaw uprising and and Sachsenhausen concentration camp, this book dealt more heavily in the aftermath of the war and what life was like as a refugee in Sweden.  It was very interesting to read, especially now with so many refugees fleeing the current Syrian war and flooding into Europe.  Mr. Syzbicki wasn’t a religious, rather a political refugee, but even he still experienced discrimination.  I wondered why he only made one trip back to his native country after being liberated from the camps.  Poland was still under communist rule for a long time, but the wall in Berlin came down in 1989, and he never mentioned Poland again after his one visit  20 years later.  He never tried to get his family to join him as asylum seekers.

Girl in Translation, by Jean Kwok

This book was a good introduction to learning about the sweat shops within the United States in the 20th century, but I didn’t find it particularly well-written.  The ending did surprise me.  I’m so used to the Americana novel where the hero chooses true love at all costs, and it’s a surprise to see it from another culture where money and filial duty are more important.

Sashenka, by Simon Montefiore

The first section was tedious, the second section finally started to show a little bit of the ‘increasingly compelling’ promise as printed on the cover of the book, and then the third section dove completely into the unrealistic.  Sashenka is the story of an early and passionate recruit to the Communist Party in St. Petersburg and how that played out over her life.  The method of interrogation and documentation were well researched and presented, but I found that the author had an annoying habit of “name and place dropping” – mentioning places and people in passing just to show off how well he knows the city instead of it having any real relevance to the story.  All of the women were sexy and beautiful, and all of the men who met them were consumed by lust.  The descriptions of the children and their antics were more annoying than endearing.  I’d fire the editor of this book: there were a lot of typos where two words were smashed together likethis, words that had hyphens added for no rea-son, and then large spatial gaps in between words                              for the sole purpose of driving me crazy.

Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

I knew ahead of time that the author was later blasted for the inaccuracies portrayed in the book, so as I was reading it I was trying to decide which events were made up for the sake of the story.  I was frankly astonished that a travel and humanitarian story of this magnitude could be so boring to read.  I didn’t connect with the people.  The descriptions of crazy cultural misunderstandings read dry for me, and any of my friends could tell you that I love stories about crazy cultural misunderstandings.  I was exasperated with Dr.  Greg on his wife’s behalf for never being around.

 

Lysistrata and Other Plays, by Aristophanes

The only reason this book scored so low on the list is that so many of the references and symbolism described events and people that had no meaning for me.  It would be like a satirical play about our current politicians, but performed 5000 years from now.  For all of that, there was still a lot of hilarious wit, with situations and morals that can apply to any age. The Acharnians:  One sensible man argues for peace, while everyone else says it can’t be done.  Meanwhile, the government pays ambassadors a huge salary for years to accomplish that peace, but they come back empty-handed.  The Clouds:  A man has incurred a lot of debt because of his lazy, gambling son, so he sends him to to the philosophers to learn how to argue his way out of his obligations.  Predictably, this leads to the son being able to argue his way out of any obligations to his own father.  Lysistrata: The women of Athens and Sparta, sick of the wars that take their husbands away from them at months at a time, withhold their sexual favor until the men can reach a peace agreement.  This was my favorite of the three plays – gender stereotypes are still funny.  All three of the plays had rather bawdy hints and lewd behavior, but this one was the most crass.

Searching for God Knows What, by Donald Miller

 

I’ve also read Blue Like Jazz by the same author, and preferred it to this book.  He always seems so apologetic for his opinions, and after dozens of disclaimers it started to annoy me.  He’s really got a bone to pick with Republicans.  Still, there were some good thoughts and deep ideas.

The Firebugs, by Max Frisch (also known as Biedermann and the Arsonists, or The Arsonists)

What a strange play.  Usually when I read plays I imagine my fellow high-schoolers as the characters, but I had a hard time casting this one.  Mr. Biedermann knows that there are arsonists running rampant, yet he invites a stranger to stay in his home because he’s a ‘humane’ man.   The stranger invites more and more people over, and their blatant connection to arson grows stronger.  I kept wondering what the underlying symbolism was supposed to be.  The evil that we ourselves let into our lives is what destroys us, was my final conclusion.  I can’t say I enjoyed it.  Too artsy-fartsy.

 

Three Famous Short Novels, by William Faulkner

Three ‘short’ stories made up this collection, but Faulkner can pack a lot of sloth and molasses into a short story.  His books drag by for me, and he has an annoying habit of not making it clear who’s speaking.  His women are colorless and meek with nothing much to say.  Of Spotted Horses, Old Man, and The Bear, the latter was my favorite.  I even read bits out loud to my husband.  A boy goes on his first hunting trip, and the camp tries to subdue the infamous bear who’s been terrorizing them for years.  If Faulkner had ended it in one place, it would have been fantastic.  Instead, he saw the need to carry on with a 55 page chapter with a flow completely unlike the rest of the story, very incoherent, and back to his tricks of making sure his reader can’t tell who’s who.  It was a very complicated family history, and I could see notes on the back where some previous reader had made a family tree to try to make sense of it.  I took the book hiking with me, and when I needed a place to stop I decided to wait for the next sentence break.  That break didn’t come for three pages.  The final chapter went back to the original style, to my immense relief, but I still thought it was superfluous.

 

 

The Borrowers

Tags

A Thousand Splendid Suns, books, Flyboys, Little House on the Prairie, recommendations, The Christian Atheist, The Madonnas of Leningrad, The Road

It’s a risky thing to pass a book you love into the hands of someone else.  Can you trust them not to bend down the pages, break the spine or write in the margins?  Can you trust them not to crush the cover?  Can you trust them not to put the book in a backpack next to a leaking juice box?  Can you trust them not to lose it completely?  I’m still missing Catch 22 (oh, well…didn’t like it anyway) and The Poisonwood Bible (gave up and bought another copy.  It had been over ten years and it was time to face facts.)

On the other hand, there’s a joy in sharing the stories that have touched your life, and there’s a joy in knowing that a friend would give you a book because they thought of you while reading it.

This list had me collecting the six books on my shelves that don’t actually belong to me so that I could read them and get them back to their rightful owners.  I’ll try to do a better job at returning them promptly (aka, within weeks or months instead of years) in the future.

 

A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini

Borrowed from Mom:  My mom and I don’t have a long history of enjoying the same books, but there are a couple (mostly historical fiction) that speak to both of us.  I enjoyed The Kite Runner many years ago, and I borrowed A Thousand Splendid Suns when I moved to Missoula in 2013.  I couldn’t put this novel down, and I thought about the characters continually.  I was so close to finishing one evening, and I set the book down with regret because it was nearing midnight.  After lying sleepless in the dark for a while I reasoned it was better to just finish the book and find out what happened rather than lie awake and wondering the rest of the night.

 

Flyboys, by James Bradley

Borrowed from Dad: My grandfather served in the US Marine Corps during World War II.  He died of cancer before I was old enough to be curious about his experiences, but even with his own sons he never talked about it much.  Because of that family history, my father has an especial interest in the Pacific battles and can recommend several good books on the subject.  Flyboys discusses the recently de-classified fates of eight young men who crashed near the island of Chichi Jima and never made it back home, and two who survived, one of whom was President George Bush.  (I’m now quite keen to read his new autobiography.)  The book also discusses the military history of Japan and the introduction of aviation into modern warfare.  There was so much information that was completely new to me, and the author did a fantastic job of presenting the point of view from both sides of the war.

 

The Madonnas of Leningrad, by Debra Dean

Borrowed from Mom:  Mom came to visit me when I lived in St. Petersburg, Russia, and we did a lot of traveling around the city and soaking up the history.   I enjoy so much that we shared that experience.  Mom recommended this book about the staff of the Hermitage during the Siege of Leningrad and their efforts to preserve the priceless paintings and treasures.  The main character describes paintings that are hidden in caves across Europe as if they were hanging on the walls before her.  It really brought back those happy hours in the Hermitage, and I was grateful for the legacy the staff had preserved.

 

 

The Christian Atheist: Believing in God but Living as if He Doesn’t Exist, by Craig Groeschel

Borrowed from my mother-in-law:  (I don’t think she actually knows that I have it.)  I espied the book on her shelf and picked it up, as author Craig Groescchel is a frequent and beloved guest pastor in my own church, Fresh Life.  Mr. Groeschel is the pastor of Life Church, the biggest church in America with twenty-five locations in seven states.  Fresh Life follows their example of a live sermon in one location, with video broadcasts being sent out to many other locations.  The book went over the habits of what many Christians have become: a lukewarm believer who is OK with God as long as they’re not inconvenienced.  Groeschel used a lot of great examples, and I was occasionally laughing out loud and interrupting my husband to share a funny story.  His own faith journey was filled with doubts and failures, and it was encouraging to read a pastor’s humble admission about the times when he too lived as if God didn’t really exist.  The book left me with a lot to think about and a desire to re-examine my faith life and see where it’s going.

 

Little House on the Prairie, by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Borrowed from Book Club friend Alisha:  It’s the second book in the Little House series, but I enjoyed it more than the first book.  My emotions were more tied to this one.  I felt their sorrow as their beautiful home in the woods became increasingly encroached upon by new neighbors that kept arriving every day.  I felt their uncertainty as they packed their belongings and took off for the unknown.  I felt and understood their fear of the Native Americans who lived where they eventually settled, and then with the gift of hindsight felt a lot for the Native Americans who were also being pushed out of their homes.

 

Little House in the Big Woods, by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Borrowed from Book Club friend Alisha:  I know I read this in elementary school, but the only scene I remembered was the children pouring maple syrup into fresh snow to make candy.  I also seem to recall a class project where we “churned butter” in baby food jars with Popsicle sticks and spread the result over not-so-authentically pioneer Saltine crackers.  In addition to being a story about a family, it also seemed to be a How To guide for hunting, growing and preparing your own food.  I found myself increasingly grateful for the grocery store down the road.

 

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

Borrowed from my youngest sister Haley:  Haley knows I enjoy dystopias, so this was an obvious book to recommend.  It takes place years after whatever cataclysmic event threw the world upside down.  The details were incredibly vague, and I was never allowed to connect with the characters in the story.  I understood WHY the author wrote it as he did, but I was so frustrated because I wanted more information.

 

 

 

 

 

The Dusty Book List

Tags

After the Fall, All the Shah's Men, books, Death in Venice & Other Stories, Empress, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, Guns Germs & Steel, Kim, Mao: The Unknown Story, Marie Antoinette: The Journey, Miracle in the Andes, Moloka'i, Nicholas and Alexandra, Poland, recommendations, The Bridge Across Forever, The Green Mile, The Pilgrim's Progress, True Women, Twilight in the Forbidden City, Utopia, We the Living

After completing The Harshbarger List I set about on a new reading task.  I decided to compile all of the books that had been sitting unread on my shelves for three or more years.  Several had been there more than ten years. Their pages longed to be perused, their knowledge longed to be imparted, their jackets longed to be dusted off.

Twenty-one books had the depressing honor of going so long without a reader.  I’ve given  brief descriptions and an opinion for all and listed them as best I could in order of preference.  There’s always a bit of wiggle room depending on how I enjoyed the writer’s style vs the subject matter.  The majority of the titles were non-fiction, and it was a pleasure to see world events play out side-by-side from different countries and perspectives. 

Mao: The Unknown Story, by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday

5 Years Dusty: Accurately described as ‘an atom bomb of a book,’  Mao is a feat of monumental dedication and research.  The authors pored through thousands of archives and interviewed hundreds of people who knew Mao personally or who had a family member personally connected to him.  The information was riveting, jaw-dropping, and outrageous.  I continually interrupted my husband in his own reading to share a new piece of information or atrocity.  I purchased the book after having lived in China for a year, and the only reason it got dusty is because it was too big to easily carry around with me on my travels.

Miracle in the Andes, by Nando Parrado

7 Years Dusty:  I don’t remember why or when I acquired this book, although I’m pretty sure it was from a book fair in my hometown.  I’d never heard about the rugby team that crashed in the Andes and their incredible survival story.  I couldn’t put the book down, and while snowshoeing in Montana I evaluated my own chance of survival if I was left in the mountains without food, appropriate clothing or water.  The story had me captivated, and even though I read it towards the beginning of 2015 it’s stuck out at the end of the year as an enduring favorite on The Dusty List.

Nicholas and Alexandra, by Robert K. Massie

10+ Years Dusty:  I don’t know why I never got around to reading this book.  I’m pretty sure I’ve had it at least since the 1997 Anastasia cartoon film came out.  On the other hand, living in Russia for a year gave me perceptions and associations I wouldn’t have had before, and I’m glad I waited until now to read it.  The Romanov family has always been of especial interest to me, and it was wonderful to picture their world as I went deeper into their histories and downfall.  It was also interesting to learn more about the origins of World War I.

Poland, by James Michener

 10 Years Dusty:  This book was given to me as a Christmas gift by my husband when we were in college together.  I tried reading it at the time but couldn’t get into it, even though I went to Poland shortly after receiving the book.  When we started dating a decade later, I started it up again as we planned our honeymoon in Poland, finishing it while we were there.  Michener has long been a favorite of my father’s, so I’ve heard praise for his books my entire life and it was about time that I finally read one.  It was so much fun to read about these places while seeing them in person.

The Green Mile, by Stephen King

10 + Years Dusty:  It’s taken me a lifetime to finally start reading Stephen King books, and I was completely and pleasantly surprised.  I generally avoid serial authors for their habit of churning out books that all sound alike.  I stopped reading Mary Higgins Clark books in Jr. High when I could pick out the bad guy in the first few pages.  The Green Mile is my fourth out of five books by Mr. King, and he hasn’t disappointed me yet.  I was so distracted at work for the duration of the book, because all I wanted to do was go home and keep reading.

Marie Antoinette: The Journey, by Antonia Fraser

5+ Years Dusty:  The film by Sofia Coppola is one of my favorites, and I was pleased to see how well the movie followed the actual events.  I was surprised that one big event was left out of the film completely, although there was a hint of it.  I’d had one opinion of the ill-fated Dauphine going into the novel, and I was left with a more positive feeling towards her at the end.

Moloka’i, by Alan Brennert

4 Years Dusty:  I don’t know where this book came from or when it appeared on my shelves, but four years is a good guess.  I made the mistake of judging the book by the cover and assumed it was sentimental nonsense (I never read the backs of books.  They give away too much information).  I read the book with a keen interest and pleasure, and I enjoyed learning about a piece of Hawaiian history that I’d never heard about.

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, by Jack Weatherford

5+ Years Dusty:  I think this was also purchased from a book fair in my hometown, but I don’t know if it was before or after I visited Inner Mongolia.  In any case, a year in China and a visit to the Mongolian grasslands paved the way for a very interesting read about one of the most influential men in history and how his rule shaped the modern world.

All the Shah’s Men, by Stephen Kinzer

5+ Years Dusty:  I think this also came from a book fair.  The fair is an annual event, and the corridors of the shopping mall are lined with tables bearing thousands of books which can be purchased by the inch.  I’m not sure what led me to select this particular book, as the subject matter wasn’t something I’ve been interested in until very recently.  The history and politics in the Middle East is important to know, and it bears such a huge relevance to what’s going on in the world today.  The novel itself was very exciting to read, and it begins with such suspense that you have to keep reading.

The Pilgrim’s Progress, by John Bunyan

10 + Years Dusty:  I know exactly why this book was on my shelf in the first place and why it took so long to read.  It was referenced in another book I read in late Jr. High or early Sr. High, The Horse Whisperer.  This book was put aside because it looked ‘boring’ and ‘hard to read.’  The pages of verse turned me away, and when selecting from a list of books I’d avoided reading for years, this one was still picked up with reluctance.  It was with great relief that the book moved along quickly and agreeably.  Christian’s journey inspired a lot of deep thought, and was another book where I interrupted my husband to share passages with him.  The book was in two parts, and I preferred the second of the two.  The first has a lot of repetitive action.

Empress, by Shan Sa

5 + Years Dusty:  I’m sure this book was picked up after living in China, but I’m not sure where or when I got it.  I’d never known that China had had a female Emperor, and I appreciated the familiarity of what it may have been like to live in the Forbidden City over the dry description of what it was actually like.  (See: Twilight in the Forbidden City below.)

True Women, by Janice Woods Windle

3 Years Dusty:  I found this book in the clearance pile at Hastings when I moved to Missoula, and I picked it up because I like the TV movie of the same name from 1997, starring a 22 year old Angelina Jolie.  I was impressed that not only did the film closely follow the book, but that it was all true.  Even though I enjoyed the stories, I had a hard time getting into the book.  It could have been that I was trying too hard to finish The Dusty List by the end of 2015 and that I was burning myself out.

The Other Queen, by Philippa Gregory

3+ Years Dusty:   I’ve read a couple of Ms. Gregory’s books over the years, starting with The Other Boleyn Girl in 2008.  They’ve followed the paths of other serial authors where the first book I’ve read is my favorite and the rest tend to fall into predictable patterns.  What I enjoy about her books is that it gives me a nice fleshed-out view of a chunk of history, which helps me remember the events in greater detail.  I don’t find the writing itself to be brilliant, and the way she establishes her character traits by repeating key phrases over and over tends to get on my nerves about halfway through.  This is the first book I’ve read about Mary, Queen of Scots, and I’m now interested enough in her history to seek out a more in-depth biography.

After the Fall, by Arthur Miller

10 + Years Dusty:  In high school I was in a couple of  Advanced Acting classes.  The students selected their own play and director, and all casting, lighting, costumes etc was entirely student produced.  Part of the curriculum was researching and presenting a play, and then the class selected a play from those options.  I chose another Arthur Miller piece, Playing for Time, which is still among my favorites and which I’d love to see performed some day.  I’m confident that I would have acquired this other Miller play around the same time.  It’s a strange one, for sure.  Everything takes place inside the protagonist’s head with a lot of erratic movement from one memory to the next.  It helped me to read the play as if I was watching it, and I tried to imagine how I would have directed and cast it in our high school theater and with my long-ago theater friends.  (Has it really been 13 years since graduation??!!)  The plot was more satisfying after it dawned on me that Miller’s characters represented himself and wife Marilyn Monroe.

Twilight in the Forbidden City, by Reginald F. Johnston

3 Years Dusty:  I opened this book with great anticipation and closed it in great disappointment.  While living in China I read Emperor Aisin Gioro Pu-Yi’s autobiography about life in the Forbidden City, the fall of the monarchy, the rise of communism, and how a man went from emperor of China to gardener citizen.  Pu-Yi’s remembrances of his early years at court were not very descriptive, and I was hoping that this book, written by his English tutor, would fill in some of the missing details.  I found the account to be very dry, with more effort given to the political situation in the country than what it was like to live alongside the last member of a dynasty.  It was filled with so many names and places that had nothing to do with my interests.  After finishing Johnston’s book I re-read Pu-Yi’s story (also dry) but was intrigued to see where Pu-Yi discredited or disagreed with what his tutor had to say.  Johnston’s book was used against Pu-Yi after he was arrested.  (Watch the movie.  It’s amazing.)

Kim, by Rudyard Kipling

10+ Years Dusty:  I know this book was mentioned in a re-telling of Beauty and the Beast that I would have read in elementary school, so that’s probably why I had it on my shelf.  I’ve been ambivalent about other stories by Kipling, and this one followed the same path.  British Imperialism plays a key part in the story, but unfortunately I was more interested in what the Indians were doing.  A big problem with my copy is that it had pictures showing scenes from the movie, which varied greatly from what actually happened in the book.

Utopia, Thomas More

10 + Years Dusty:  I know this book was on my shelf because it was the favorite of the heroine in the 1998 film Ever After.  Danielle praised it for elevating the case of the everyday peasant.  The prince scorned it for being sentimental and dull.  I’m afraid I sided more with the prince on this one.  The ideas were intriguing, and it did made me wonder which freedoms I’d sacrifice for pure equality and pure peace.

Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond

6 Years Dusty:  It’s with some surprise that I’m realizing a good number of my Dusty Books came from that book fair.  It must have even been the same year.  If I’ve got the timing right, all of those books would have been acquired around 2008, meaning the travel bug was well and truly caught with three trips to Europe under my belt.  I had a strong desire to learn about world culture.  This book was put off until the Dusties had diminished to only a few options. I was so excited to learn about how some societies were able to dominate while others remained third world nations.  Unfortunately, it’s never good to start a 500 page novel with a complaint about how boring the first paragraph is.  I had to drag myself through the whole thing.  Too much information was smashed into one missive, and I felt I’d be better off with a week’s lecture to cover the information in a single chapter.   For all of that, it could also have been shortened because the same conclusion was repeated over and over again.  Mr. Diamond has an annoying habit of presenting facts and then declaring that he believes something else in spite of them.  It WAS interesting to speculate about what the world would look like today if any of these ancient events had worked out differently.

We the Living, by Ayn Rand

6 + Years Dusty:  I would have purchased this book because another of Rand’s books, The Fountainhead, was a member of my Top Ten List.  (Don’t tell Rand, but she’s been bumped from the list.)  I was pleased that this book takes place in St. Petersburg, where I lived for a year, but annoyed that the characters sounded just like the figures in The Fountainhead.  I became so impatient with their actions and ideals that by the end of it I was fed up with Objectivism, fed up with the glory of suffering for stupid reasons, and fed up with Ayn Rand.

The Bridge Across Forever, by Richard Bach

10 + Years Dusty:  Another book by the same author, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, has been one of my favorites since early high school.  I remember reading it on a camping trip with my father.  I looked forward to reading this love story, which boasted the honor of being on the NYT Bestseller list for over a year.  I’ve been keeping notes on all of the books I’ve read for the last couple of years, and my comments for this one were, “Awful, sentimental drivel.”

Death in Venice and other Stories, by Thomas Mann

8 Years Dusty:  I purchased this book from a used book store in Colorado.  As a German major, I’d read one short story by Mann in my German literature class.  I don’t remember enjoying it, so I’m not sure why I’d pick up more of his work.  Honestly, I was probably showing off, and it took me eight years to follow up on that.  The book was a collection of short stories: Death in Venice, Tonio Kroger, A Man and His Dog, The Blood of the Walsungs, Tristan, Mario and the Magician, Felix Krull, and  Disorder and Early Sorrow.  I’d hesitate to say that any of them were my ‘favorite.’  I disliked The Blood of the Walsungs the least.  I hated A Man and His Dog with a passion.  A man takes his dog for a walk (as predicted by the title) and 70 pages later he’s still walking the dog.  I wouldn’t have bothered finishing the book at all if it hadn’t been on a binding list.  My husband and I take books along on our hiking trips so that we can enjoy our literature alongside a brook or in a sunny mountain meadow.  I brought only this book with me so I would have no choice but to read it – miles away from the nearest shelf with more tantalizing options.

The Book Artist Club 2016

Tags

Bel Canto, books, Mirror Mirror, People of the Book, recommendations, Still Alice, The 19th Wife, The Fig Eater, The Lacuna, The Moor's Last Sigh, The Remains of the Day, The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

Alisha, Lauren and I continue to meet every week, alternating between our three homes as we discuss literature over a beverage and a snack.  We used to stick to tea and cookies, but in the interest of staying on theme with the book of the week, we’ve expanded to include rose wine and Scottish fudge (Outlander, by Diana Gabaldon), gin and tonics (The Girl on the Train, by Paula Hawkins), crepes with jam and nutella (All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr) and hot chocolate with Irish cream liqueur. (OK, so there wasn’t a book for that one, but we were cold.) The criteria for choosing a book remains the same: it has to be a novel that none of us has read before.  This list is a continuation of the books we read in late 2014 and 2015.

The 19th Wife, by David Ebershoff

Our 23rd novel, selected from The Book Exchange.  The store had just restocked a lot of fiction titles, so we had a more difficult time than usual picking a new book to read.  We purchased three books, so we’re all set for a while.  We noticed that there are a lot of books these days with ‘wife’ in the title: The Time Traveler’s Wife, The Zookeepers Wife, The Pilot’s Wife,  The Upstairs Wife, The Silent Wife, The Paris Wife (which we read last year) The Tiger’s Wife, The Aviator’s Wife, The Doctor’s Wife…and it goes on.  It made us wonder when we’d start seeing titles like “The Accountant’s Husband” or The “Astronaut’s Husband.”  The 19th Wife had two running plots: a history of Mormonism following the famous ex-wife of Brigham Young (one wife of around 50), and a modern representation of a Mormon branch called ‘the Firsts’ who still adhere to polygamy.  Of the two, we very much preferred the historical plot, which was intriguing and well laid-out.  We found the characters and motives in the modern story unrealistic, and decided that the (significant) character Tom was only put in there as a safe place for the main character to leave his dog in the desert heat.

The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing, by Mira Jacob 

Our 22nd novel, chosen with the aid of our good friend, Mr. Google.  It’s the first time this year that we’ve found a new book by browsing online, and we all said, “Good title.”  When I called a local bookstore to see if they had it in stock, the comment from the employee was, “Good title.”  A good title paved the way to a great book.  We all loved it, and I’d put it in my Top Two out of all the books we’ve read together.  In a nutshell it’s the story of a family who has moved from India to New Mexico.  The plot is of course much more interesting and intricate, but whenever we tried to explain the plot in more detail to anyone, it came out all muddled and complicated.  A fantastic read, highly recommend.

People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks

Our 21st novel, picked out from my own bookshelf.  We wanted to go with a book immediately at hand rather than wait a week to meet at the Book Exchange.  I’d found this book in a Free Little Library in town and thought it looked interesting.  And I know you shouldn’t judge books by the cover, but this one was lovely.  The appearance of books actually had a huge part to play in our novel:  It started in Sarajevo in the midst of the conflict in 1996, as a book restorer entered the war-torn country to preserve an especially rare and beautiful Jewish Haggadah (a book of scriptures).   Her findings lead the reader through Europe in a journey across time, tracing the book back to its origins.  As book lovers, we enjoyed learning about the techniques for creating and preserving books through the centuries, remarking ruefully that it’s unlikely that any conservationist would ever restore a book belonging to one of us in two hundred years.

The Fig Eater, by Jody Shields

Our 20th novel, picked out from the Book Exchange.  This is the first time we’ll be reading a book in its entirety and then discussing it as a whole rather than meeting every week.  I was in China for a month, so the plan was to select a book to read during that duration and then go over it when I returned home.  I missed our weekly discussions.  This is the second mystery we’ve read, and with our first mystery, The Girl on the Train, it was so much fun to exchange theories as the plot unfolded.  I kept wanting to exchange theories.  When we finally met, we’d all noticed similar things in the story, and I’m not sure whether it was the book itself that made those points obvious or if it’s because we’ve now read so many books together.  There were a lot of unresolved issues.  The author carefully and deliberately laid out several pieces of evidence to aid the reader in finding the killer, but then that evidence had nothing to do with the final outcome.  On the whole, we enjoyed the book, especially the descriptions of  how a detective would handle forensic evidence in 1910.

Still Alice, by Lisa Genova

Our 19th novel, picked out from the Book Exchange.  We had very specific needs for this book: it had to be quick reading, have almost exactly 300 pages, and the store needed to have three copies in stock.  Bingo.  None of us have seen the recent Oscar nominated film, but we thought it sounded like a good story and then we’ll watch the movie when we finish.  Watching the film seems to be a recent trend, but out of our previous 18 novels, we only watched the film for two of them.  (The Fault in Our Stars and The Remains of the Day)  It could be argued that this was the most terrifying of the books we’ve read.  Alzheimer’s is a terrible disease, and it was too easy to put ourselves or our loved ones into that role.  While reading the book, I couldn’t understand why I’d written ‘peppermint’ on my grocery list.  I didn’t need peppermint, and I racked my brains trying to think of what it was that I meant.  I panicked and thought maybe I had early-onset Alzheimer’s, too…All of us disliked the husband in the book.  It should come as no surprise that we preferred the book over the film.

The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro

Our 18th novel, picked out from the Book Exchange.  I’ve seen this book pop up on a lot of ‘most influential lists,’ so I’ve been wanting to read it for a while.  For me, this book’s main fault is that it had a tough act to follow.  Bel Canto was such an impressionable book that its successor paled in comparison.  The Remains of the Day is well written, with believable, flawed characters.  Mr. Stevens digressed to a wide variety of topics in a way that was both charming and exasperating.  Alisha and I are both avid Downton Abbey fans, and we thought the title character was very much like the butler in the show, Mr. Carson.  If I were to use one word to describe the book, it would be ‘subtle.’  For our final meeting we watched the 1993 film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.  For the most part, we thought the movie stayed true to the book, but we agreed that without reading the book first we might have found the film difficult to follow.  It’s that subtlety, you see.

Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett

Our 17th novel, picked out from the Book Exchange.  Wow.  What a book.  I read the first line and announced that I loved it, already.  We typically read about 100 pages per week, so we finished this book in three segments.  While I’ve been tempted to go beyond the assigned pages for several of our other novels, this was the first time I seriously considered breaking our ‘no reading ahead’ agreement.  It wasn’t even that I wanted to find out what happened, but that I didn’t want to leave the characters behind.  I wasn’t even a third of the way through before I declared that it was unquestionably my favorite of the 17 books we’ve read so far.  My husband watched in amusement as I paced the apartment in restless desperation, grieving that the book had ended.  The characters will stay with me for a long time – indeed I haven’t been able to think of much else.  One of the first things I did after finishing was go out and buy an opera CD.  Bel Canto is lush, melodic, passionate, breathtaking, gorgeous and inspiring.  You can’t help but feel the music soaring within and around you.

Mirror Mirror, by Gregory Maguire 

Our 16th novel, picked out from the Book Exchange.  It’s such a convenient way to make a decision that I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes our method for choosing all future books.  I haven’t read any of Mr. Maguire’s novels, but we’re familiar with his famous book-turned-musical, Wicked, which I very much enjoyed.  I wasn’t five pages in before I was already laughing and reading bits out loud to my husband.  Mirror Mirror is a re-telling of the Snow White fairy tale, and it was a fun mixture of humor, surrealism, and the truly bizarre.  One scene in particular made us raise our eyebrows and make a face.  “Whyyyyy?? we moaned.  Lauren said that there were so many times when she wanted to argue with the gaping holes in the plot and point out that nothing made any sense, but that she had to make peace with it and just accept the story for what it was:  a fairy tale.  On the whole, it was a fun book to read as a group, and the more plot holes we found, the more enjoyment we got in discussing them.

The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver

Our 15th novel, chosen from The Book Exchange along with The Moor’s Last Sigh.  It was too difficult to choose just one book, and it did make it easier to have the next book ready to go even though I always enjoy the discussion that accompanies our search for the next novel.  The Lacuna brought us to a new country, with a whirlwind of famous faces and events.  We watched Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Leon Trotsky in their daily lives, while the hybrid American-Mexican protagonist found his place between two very different worlds.  The structure of the book was quite unique and very well-written.  There were a few sections that lulled for all of us, but we finished with great interest and enthusiasm.  I brought in some art books with Frida Kahlo’s work for our last meeting, and it was fascinating to see how Ms. Kingsolver wove Kahlo’s paintings into the heart of the story.

The Moor’s Last Sigh, by Salman Rushdie

Our 14th novel, chosen as we browsed the shelves of The Book Exchange.  We weren’t too overwhelmed with choices, as we were restricted to choosing a book with at least three copies, and to my surprise we only made one pass-through in the literature section before making our selection.   Our new book takes place in post-imperialist India.  At our first meeting, all of us said that this book reminded us of One Hundred Years of Solitude:  1. It’s a family saga with fantastical realism, and 2. everyone’s crazy.  Of the two we did prefer this one.  Mr. Rushdie has a brilliant knack for word play, and he threw in subtle references from all kinds of literature and culture, including: The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Looney Tunes, Madame Butterfly and The Bible.  The book was a whirlwind of exotic characters, dancing language, religious and political strife, family curses, elephants, power struggles, betrayal, love and art.

The Book Artist Club

Tags

A Christmas Carol, All the Light We Cannot See, book club, books, English Creek, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Outlander, Persuasion, recommendations, The Beautiful and Damned, The Fault in Our Stars, The Girl on the Train, The Handmaid's Tale, The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency, The Paris Wife

Since moving back to my college town, it’s been wonderful to get back in touch with friends from the good ‘ole university days.  Lauren, Alisha and I all lived together in a Christian fellowship house (along with all three of our husbands) and shared a common love of reading.  It’s been a decade since we lived together, but now we meet once a week to discuss literature over a pot of tea and plate of cookies.  Lauren and I started by meeting in the Starving Artist cafe, but now it rotates between our three homes.  The only criteria for selecting our novels is that it must be a book that none of us has read before.

A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens

Our 13th novel, chosen as an easy and festive read for the Christmas season.  It was with some surprise that we realized it qualified as a Book Artist novel, as not one of us had ever read it.   Unfortunately, we didn’t realize at the time we picked it that it was so short, so we’ll have finished it before we even hit December.  Bah, humbug.  Growing up, it was a family tradition to watch The Muppet Christmas Carol every year.  I called up my parents to tell them that I couldn’t read this book without picturing the characters as their Muppet equivalents.  Our discussion drew comparisons from the many film versions, and we giggled as we admitted that all of us had pictured the ghost of Jacob Marley as Goofy falling down the stairs.

The Beautiful and Damned, by F. Scott Fitzgerald 

Our 12th novel, chosen because the Fitzgeralds were important figures in our previous book, The Paris Wife.  It’s been a while since I’ve been so aggravated and so impatient with a character in a book.  We continually wanted to shake them and snap them out of their selfishness, arrogance and superficial lifestyle.  Mr. Fitzgerald has a true gift for creating a believable, flawed character.

The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain

Our 11th novel, both recommended by Lauren’s sister and the first available title on our top picks under the public library’s Book Chat Bags service.  I was alerted to this service by another friend:  the library has a list of book options for clubs with 10 copies of the book and discussion guides.  The options are more limited, but there were still plenty of books that we wanted to read, and now we won’t have to scurry all over the city to borrow or pay for a copy.  The Paris Wife is about Ernest Hemingway’s first of four wives.  It was interesting to get a little deeper into the lives of famous authors and their own exclusive clubs overseas.  Name after familiar name popped up in their inner circle: Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald…  Our original idea upon completing the novel was to choose one of Hemingway’s books for our next titles.  Our thoughts leaned towards The Sun Also Rises, which was written during the time span of the The Paris Wife.  However, when we finished, none of us were feeling inclined to read any of his works.  “Hemingway was a jerk!”

The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood

Our tenth novel, selected from several lists of books voted to be the most influential in readers’ lives.  We wanted to step away from a book that was currently popular and go back to a classic.  Unbeknownst to us, it was currently VERY popular, and every used book store and library in two cities was out of copies.  All three of us enjoyed the novel, and we could see why it was listed as influential.  I’ve always loved dystopias, but this was the first one I’ve read with a female as the protagonist.  A caste system with a heavily enforced patriarchy is a terrifying thought, but we pointed out soberly that it still exists.  The ending took me completely by surprise, and I even looked it up online to make sure that it was correct.

The Girl on the Train, by Paula Hopkins 

Our ninth novel, chosen from the same list as our previous book.  I’ve misplaced my book list, and Lauren forgot hers, so we jumped back to a list that had given us a successful good novel.  I gather it’s currently a Big Deal with a movie, so we may have to watch that when we’re done.  Book Club has been keeping me more in touch with current best-sellers than I’m used to.  It was so much fun to read a mystery as a group.  Many theories were tossed around, and each character’s activities and personalities were scrutinized.  I read the remaining section in an evening after returning from Book Club, as I couldn’t wait to find out what happened.  Our last meeting was filled with exuberance and self-congratulation when our final theory was proven correct.

All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr 

Our eighth novel, chosen from a list of “Books You Can’t Set Down” discovered by Alisha.  This book jumped out at all three of us, and is a Pulitzer Prize winner.  It’s been our quickest decision for a new book to date.  The book moved back and forth from an event in 1945 to earlier years, so we read with bated breath as those dates moved closer together, keeping us in suspense.  We became very attached to the two main characters.

Outlander, by Diana Gabaldon

Our seventh novel, chosen because the wife of one of Lauren’s patients recommended it.  The book was fast-paced and exciting, and we enjoyed speculating about the nuances of time travel and wondering how we’d fare if we were dropped into 18th century Scotland.  We exchanged many theories and predictions, but we’ll have to wait and see if we’re right.  Alisha’s already started the second book in the series, and Lauren and I have both purchased it.  We’re all anxious to find out what happens next.  All of us agreed that the situational knowledge was just a little too convenient:  every time a crisis erupted, someone was on hand with the exact knowledge or skill needed to get out of it.  One scene in particular was quite graphic and disturbing, and we thought the book could have done without the detailed descriptions.

 

English Creek, by Ivan Doig

Our sixth novel, chosen because Montana native Ivan Doig recently died, and we wanted to experience his works as well as read some fiction about our home state.  All of us struggled to get into the flow of his writing in the beginning, but once we got used to his cadence we found his descriptions and expressions both insightful, colorful and witty.

The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, by Brady Udall

Our fifth novel, chosen because we needed something more humorous and light in the wake of One Hundred Years of Solitude.  I recommended this book as I had very much enjoyed another book by the same author, The Lonely Polygamist.  The book was a welcome reprieve, although the material was heavier than we would have picked at the time.  All of us liked the writing, but we had a problem with the ending.

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Our fourth novel, chosen because it gave us another new continent and is a Nobel Prize winner.  Marquez has a beautiful knack for circular histories coming back to the present story-line, but he needs to learn new names for his characters.  Many discussions started with, “Now which Aureliano was that?”

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, by Alexander McCall Smith

Our third novel, and the first with Alisha joining the group.  We all have book lists that get passed around when a new book is being chosen, and we wanted to choose a book from another continent.  It was an enjoyable, quick read, but we would have liked more of an ongoing plot rather than the chapter-long episodes that were (efficiently and neatly) resolved by the unforgettable Mma Precious Ramotswe.  It was fun to see how an African lady responded to situations in ways that we American ladies never would have considered.  But then again, crocodiles aren’t a part of our daily lives.

The Fault in our Stars, by John Green

Our second novel, chosen during the Christmas season because it was short, easy (the reading, not the subject matter) and currently very popular.  It was an informative glimpse in the life of a child living with terminal cancer and the effect it had on her family and friends.  Lauren and I remarked that it was the first time we’d ever read a novel in which the main characters communicate via text message.

Persuasion, by Jane Austen

Our first novel, chosen because a.) it was free on Kindle, b.) I was trying to overcome my Austen aversion (I didn’t care for Pride and Prejudice) and c.) because Lauren also had a copy.  We enjoyed the story, characters and the lively discussions that ensued.