Pamelad's 2016 Category Challenge

Aiming for achievable categories. Last year I joined late with the aim of reading worthy books and significantly reducing the crime novel intake. So I read lots of crime and kept it secret.

In 2016 I'm going for 16 categories with a minimum of 4 books in each. No maximum. Tentatively, the categories are:

1. Golden age mysteries
2. Other crime
3. From the tbr pile - real books
4. From the tbr pile - Kindle books
5. Books that don't fit in other categories
6. Trollope
7. Book lists
8. Australian
9. European
10. Asia/Africa/South America
11. Non-fiction
12. Recent (current decade)
13. Classics I have missed
14. CATs/Challenges/Book club
15. Prize winners
16. Recommendations

1. Golden Age Mysteries
Knock, Murderer, Knock by Harriet Rutland
Let Him Lie by Ianthe Jerrold
Murder in Stained Glass by Margaret Armstrong
The Witness on the Roof by Annie Haynes
The Astonishing Adventure of Jane Smith by Patricia Wentworth
Who Pays the Piper by Patricia Wentworth
Wax by Ethel Lina White
While She Sleeps by Ethel Lina White
Fear Stalks the Village by Ethel Lina White
The Man Who Loved Lions by Ethel Lina White
Put Out the Light by Ethel Lina White
Touch and Go by Patricia Wentworth

2. Other crime
The Affair of the Mutilated Mink by James Anderson
Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith
The Silent Bullet by Arthur B. Reeve
River of Darkness by Rennie Airth
Above Suspicion by Helen MacInnes
And When She Was Good by Laura Lippman
Out of Range by C. J. Box
In Big Trouble by Laura Lippman
Boar Island by Nevada Barr
Death to the Landlords by Ellis Peters
City of Gold and Shadows by Ellis Peters
The Chalk Circle Man by Fred Vargas
Even the Dead by Benjamin Black
Blood Salt Water by Denise Mina

3. From the tbr pile - real books
The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz
Proust's Overcoat by Lorenza Foschini
Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal
The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunari Kawabata
Nothing by Henry Green
The Child by Jules Vallès

4. From the tbr pile - Kindle books
The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes
Helen Vardon's Confession by R. Austin Freeman
The White Dress by Mignon G Eberhart
The Moorland Cottage by Elizabeth Gaskell
The Indiscreet Letter by Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

5. Books that don't fit in other categories
Vittoria Cottage by D.E. Stevenson
Stamboul Train by Graham Greene
The Trojan Horse by Hammond Innes
Lady Susan by Jane Austen
Miss Bunting by Angela Thirkell
The Road Through the Wall by Shirley Jackson
Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson
The Bird's Nest by Shirley Jackson
The Sundial by Shirley Jackson
Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell
Spy's Honour by Gavin Lyall
Honourable Intentions by Gavin Lyall

6. Trollope
Phineas Redux by Anthony Trollope
The Prime Minister by Anthony Trollope
The Duke's Children by Anthony Trollope
The Warden by Anthony Trollope
Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope
Framley Parsonage by Anthony Trollope
The Small House at Allington by Anthony Trollope
The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope

7. Book lists
The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene Guardian 1000
The Strange Boarders of Palace Crescent by E. Phillips Oppenheim Guardian 1000
Moon Over Africa by Pamela Kent Guardian 1000
Angel by Elizabeth Taylor Guardian 1000
A Gun for Sale by Graham Greene Guardian 1000

8. Australian
The Ladies of Missalonghi by Colleen McCullough
An Anzac's Story by Roy Kyle
The Pea-pickers by Eve Langley
Kickback by Garry Disher
Paydirt by Garry Disher
Barracuda by Christos Tsiolkas
The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood Stella Prize 2016
Deathdeal by Garry Disher
The Importance of Being Eve Langley by Joy L. Thwaite
The Road to Ruin by Niki Savva
Crosskill by Garry Disher
Beat Not the Bones by Charlotte Jay Edgar Award
Everywhere I look by Helen Garner
A Hank of Hair by Charlotte Jay
Coda by Thea Astley
Signal Loss by Garry Disher
Aunts up the Cross by Robin Dalton
Girt by David Hunt
The Dressmaker by Rosalie Ham

9. European
Babette's Feast by Isak Dinesen
The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson
No Going Back to Moldova by Anna Robertson
The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom

10. Asia/Africa/South America
Quicksand by Junichiro Tanizaki Japan
Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh
The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud
The Outsider by Albert Camus
The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino

11. Non-fiction
Confessions of a Comma Queen by Mary Norris
A Night to Remember by Walter Lord
The Last Days of Dorothy Parker by Marion Meade
The 200 Best Novels in English since 1950 by Carmen Callil
How to Get Dressed by Alison Freer
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Solving Cryptic Crosswords for Dummies by Denise Sutherland
For Who the Bell Tolls by David Marsh
Diamonds at Dinner by Hilda Newman
The Lady in the Van by Alan Bennett
Lost in Shangri-La by Mitchell Zuckoff
Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance
Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Hochschild
Stop Walking on Eggshells by Paul T. Mason

12. Recent (current century)
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinski
Sweet Caress by William Boyd
The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Simon Mawer
Tightrope by Simon Mawer
The Tea Planter's Wife by Dinah Jefferies
My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

13. Classics I have missed
Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
The Fall by Albert Camus
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy
Against the Grain by Joris-Karl Huysmanns

14. CATs/Challenges/Book Club
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
Under the Yoke by Ivan Vasov
Alamut by Vladimir Bartol
Peacekeeping by Mischa Berlinski
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
The Transmigration of Bodies by Yuri Herrerra

15. Prize winners
The Pathseeker by Imre Kertesz Nobel
The Outsider by Albert Camus Nobel
Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich Nobel
Early Autumn by Louis Bromfield Pulitzer

16. Recommendations
That's How It Was by Maureen Duffy
The Tortoise and the Hare by Elizabeth Jenkins
The Human Factor by Graham Greene
To Marry an English Lord by Gail MacColl

3. From the tbr pile - real books

Currently reading The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz

4. From the tbr pile - Kindle books

The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes

11. Non-fiction
Confessions of a Comma queen by Mary Norris
A Night to Remember by Walter Lord

The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz

This book was first published, in Polish, in 1934. It began as a series of letters from the reclusive Schulz to a friend, Deborah Vogel. Only two books by Schultz were published before he was murdered by the Gestapo in 1942. His novel, The Messiah, and his unpublished writings were lost.

Schulz's descriptions are like paintings, but more, because the objects are active and sounds, movement and colours all play a part.

The dark second-floor apartment of the house in Market Square was shot through each day by the naked heat of summer: the silence of the shimmering streaks of air, the squares of brightness dreaming their intense dreams on the floor; the sound of a barrel organ rising from the deepest golden vein of a day; two or three bars of a chorus, played on a distant piano over and over again, melting in the sun on the white pavement, lost in the fire of high noon.

It's impossible to classify this book. It is a comic memoir with Schulz as the young narrator and his eccentric father as the main character. It is a fantasy of the end of the world, an elegy to the death of a Galician town and its way of life. In parts it makes no sense, but if you let the words wash over you, there is meaning all the same.

I really enjoyed this book, though it is not at all the sort of thing I usually read. I got lost, and had to re-read many paragraphs and pages, but because the book is so short there is no rush to reach the end.

Confessions of a Comma Queen by Mary Norris

I read this before Street of Crocodiles so was hyper-vigilant about commas; SoC is full of them, not all in the right places, but that's a minor problem. Fortunately, I had read a few New Yorkers beforehand so they took the edge off. I thought I'd like the book more, but I found Norris a bit annoying and obsessive ( I suppose she'd have to be obsessive to do a good job, so that's unfair) and was put off when she used "gotten" in the first few pages. After that I had to refer to the trusty Practical English Usage by Michael Swan to decide whether her rules applied to Australian English (similar to British) as well as American English. I became interestedly sidetracked quite a lot.

Welcome back and happy reading! I'm looking forward to see what you read in your Trollope category!

Welcome back!

>7 pamelad: I read Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen last year and felt the same as you. I found Norris's voice very annoying. It was as though she was trying too hard to be funny. I did like some of what she revealed about the editing and publishing world, though, so it wasn't a total loss.

Glad to see you back!

Welcome back and enjoy your challenge!

I liked your confession - So I read lots of crime and kept it secret.

Looks like lots a good 2016 challenge.

"So I read lots of crime and kept it secret."
Haha!

>7 pamelad:
I have that one on Mt. TBR - it does sound quite intriguing (which is probably how it ended up on my Mt. TBR in the first place...). :)

Great to see you all set up and ready for another year!

So I read lots of crime and kept it secret.

>1 pamelad: Sometimes you've just got to read what you want to read. Good luck with your challenge!

Don't keep your reading secret. We've all been there and done that as far as not meeting lofty goals. We understand. Hope you enjoy your reading in 2016!

1. Golden Age Mysteries
Knock, Murderer, Knock by Harriet Rutland

A lot of writers were pumping out mysteries in the twenties and thirties, and now these books are being rescued from obscurity by digital publishing. Some are more worthy than others. This was one of the others. Do not bother.

>8 MissWatson: Last year I started on The Way We Live Now then went on to The Pallisers, and am up to Phineas Redux. Might go on to The Barchester Chronicles next. I see that you have also started The Pallisers.

Back to re-published golden age mysteries.

Last year I enjoyed books by Ianthe Jerrold, C. St John Sprigg (wonderful names!), Constance Little and Anita Blackmon. Annie Haymes wasn't bad.

Ianthe, Anita and Annie are available in Kindle editions for about a dollar. Be careful looking up Anita on Amazon, though. There's another Anita Blackmon and she doesn't write cosy mysteries!

>18 pamelad: I switched to the Barchester Chronicles because the new paperback editions from OUP have such gorgeous covers. Plus, the Pallisers are so much fatter books! But I will get there.

>19 pamelad: I just read a very delightful mystery by Christopher St. John Sprigg (Death of an Airman). Would love to read more of his books.

15. Prizewinners

The Pathseeker by Imre Kertesz

In 1944, at the age of fifteen, Kertesz, a Hungarian Jew, was deported to Auschwitz, then Buchenwald, then to a labour camp where he worked in a factory dedicated to converting coal into oil. After the war he remained in Hungary, supporting himself with translating. It took him twelve years to write his first novel, Fatelessness, about his experiences in the camps. Kertesz has said that everything he writes is about the Holocaust.

In this novella, an unnamed commissioner stops off with his wife in a European town, on his way to a holiday at the seaside, in order to carry out an investigation. He travels to another town, in search of evidence of something terrible that happened there but nothing remains except a gate. The nearby town is full of tourists "like ants, dilgently carrying off the significance of things, crumb by crumb".

The next day the commissioner ventures further, in search of a factory, Brabag. The factory remains, but the object itself provides no evidence. The commissioner speaks to two workers, who are minding cattle. "They didn't always watch over cattle here."

The workers deny responsibility. "We're only employees around here............We watch over whatever they deliver to us."

It's just as well this was a novella. The meaning is elusive, so I had to keep re-reading, and look up reviews, and read about the life of Keresz. There's an afterword, but it seems that the translator is playing his own game of obfuscation. This review explained a lot.

Welcome back!

The Affair of the Mutilated Mink by James Anderson is a pastiche of thirties country house murder mysteries. It almost comes off. It's a bit too brittle and silly, the humour is a bit too forced, and the classic denouement, where the detective confronts the murderer, goes on for too long. I quite enjoyed it but would much rather read an original, one of Georgette Heyer's, for example.

>23 lkernagh: Thank you!

Now I'm reading Phineas Redux, in Trollope's Palliser series, and Colleen McCullough's The Ladies of Missalonghi.

The Ladies of Missalonghi by Colleen McCullough

The Hurlingford family runs the Blue Mountains town of Byron and owns all the property, until a mysterious stranger, John Smith, buys the valley. Missy Wright, a 33-year-old spinster whose widowed mother is a Hurlingford, meets him in the general store and falls in love at first sight. All the unmarried women of Byron, including Missy and her mother, live in poverty because the Hurlingford men have cheated them. I don't have to tell you how things turn out.

This is a light, simplistic story that requires no concentration at all and is excellent for reading on the bus.

Phineas Redux by Anthony Trollope

It turns out all right in the end, and nearly everyone gets their just deserts, though Phineas gains a bitter new understanding of the hypocrisy of politicians and lawyers. Trollope's observations are still relevant today.

8. Australian
An Anzac's Story by Roy Kyle

Roy Kyle served in Gallipoli, France and Belgium. He enlisted in the AIF in 1914 at only seventeen, lying about his age, and remained a private. At the end of the war in 1918, Kyle was recovering from wounds and expecting to return to the front.

Kyle started writing these memoirs at the age of 89. His memories of his youth in northern and central Victoria were still bright, and the first two years of the war still clear, but the last two years were foggy. Kyle believed that the terror numbed his mind, and he remembered only the rare bright spots of those years. In 1990, Kyle went to Gallipoli with the remaining fifty-eight WWI survivors to commemorate the ANZAC landings, and never completed the final chapter of his memoir. After his death, Kyle's relatives contacted Bryce Courtenay who contributed an introduction and some background material, and helped to get the book published.

My grandparents were Kyle's contemporaries and, like him, lived in country Victoria, so I was fascinated to read about Kyle's early life in Howlong, near Rutherglen. Courtenay's introduction helps to explain how young men, so far from Britain, were prepared to fight and die for the "mother country". I knew, from my grandparents' reminiscences, about the anti-conscription rallies of WWI, and was surprised to read that the servicemen themselves voted against conscription.

In short, I found this book very worthwhile, but I'm not sure whether it would be quite so interesting to anyone outside Australia.

Tweaked some categories.

9. European

Can include anything by a continental European author; no longer has to be translated. I need a category for Isak Dinesen's Babette's Feast!

16. Recommendations

Not just from LT. Can include lists e.g. Guardian 1000 books, books about books e.g. The 200 Best Novels in English Since 1950, and recommendations from anywhere and anyone at all.

Probably more changes on the way. I've joined a book club, so will need somewhere to put those books. Currently reading Les Liaisons Dangereuses which will fit nicely in 13. Classics I've missed, but the next book is On Chesil Beach, which belongs nowhere. Might slot it in Recommendations for now.

Let Him Lie by Ianthe Jerrold

A British mystery, written in the forties, set in a village. Liked the writing style - flowed well. The characters were unmemorable, and too many of them had not a lot to do except have suspicion thrown on them. readable, but nothing special.

Adjusting one's categories as the year goes on is an established and even expected part of the Category Challenge.

Good. I foresee a few more tweaks.

9. European
Babette's Feast by Isak Dinesen

I'm going to have a go at completing the Endless European Challenge, so I read Babette's Feast because the author is Danish. It's a novella, set in Norway in a small, joyless religious community. Babette, who had to escape France in the aftermath of the revolution, finds a home there and becomes indispensable. When she wins money in a lottery, the community assumes that she will leave, but Babette spends her winnings on cooking a feast.

I've just received Samko's Cemetery Book, which is by the Slovakian author Daniela Kapitanova, and have ordered Wave of Terror by Theodore Odrach, because it is set in what is now Belarus.

Just arrived: No Going Back to Moldova for the Endless European Challenge and Solomon Gursky Was Here, which won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

Still going on Les Liaisons Dangereuses and have started The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson, who is Finnish.

Fixed the touchstones.

>32 pamelad: Still going on Les Liaisons Dangereuses and have started The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson, who is Finnish.

I really liked both of these, though The Summer Book by Jansson is an absolute favorite and none of her other books have quite measured up for me. Looking forward to your reviews.

Some of the authors you have recently read (such as Dinesen and Jansson) have been on my radar for quite a while, seems like I should push them a bit closer towards the top of my list. :)

>31 pamelad:
I've not read the book, but the film is one of my favorites. The book is going on my wishlist!

Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

I might never have read this book if I hadn't joined a book club, and I really would have missed out. I'd expected to have to slog my way through, but not at all. I was drawn in right from the beginning.

The aristocratic Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont were once lovers, and have remained friends. They take pride in their heartlessness and amuse themselves by seducing and ruining the vain, the naive and the virtuous. To please the Marquise, who wants revenge on a former lover, Valmont carries out a campaign to seduce the ex-lover's fifteen year-old fiancee, Cecile, who has just left the convent. Normally the daughters of the aristocracy remain cloistered in the convent right up until the last moment, but Cecile is at her mother's house because the wedding has been postponed, so she is at risk. On his own account, Valmont plans to seduce the Presidente Tourval, a virtuous, religious woman.

This is an epistolary novel. Valmont and Merteuil plan their detailed, long-range, intricate campaigns by letter and manage to get hold of their victims' letters as well, so they can measure their progress, plan their next moves, and amuse themselves at their victims' naivete. At the same time, Valmont and Merteuil are trying to manipulate and dominate one another, and this is what leads to their downfall.

I read the Penguin Classic edition, translated by Helen Considine. Very easy to read.

Highly recommended.

>34 Chrischi_HH: I read Dinesen's Out of Africa a year or two ago. It deserves to be moved to the top!

>35 -Eva-: I'm putting the film on my wishlist!

>33 japaul22: Serendipity. The Summer Book appeared as a Kindle book of the month, so I've downloaded it on your recommendation.

The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson

Katri Kling and her brother Mat are outsiders in a small Swedish village. Their mother had been a local, but their father had come from somewhere else. Katri has looked after her brother since he was six, and protects him still. She mistrusts and dislikes everyone else, with the exception of Liljeberg the boat builder. Katri's brutal honesty has offended nearly everyone, but the villagers trust her to look after their financial and legal affairs. She trusts rules, numbers and her own judgement, so she decides to take over the life of an elderly artist and manages to move herself and Mat into the old woman's house.

Anna Aemilin, the artist, draws detailed pictures of the forest floor, which she populates with flowery rabbits. Her publishers turn the pictures into very successful childrens' books. Katri believes the old woman is being cheated by storekeepers, publishers, tradesmen, businesses, and even the small children who write to Anna expecting answers. She takes over the management of Anna's finances and correspondence and reorganises Anna's big old house, which is filled with Anna's dead parents' belongings and letters. As Anna absorbs Katri's misogyny, mistrust and rigidity, she becomes miserable and unable to paint.

Deception permeates the book. Anna really is being cheated, but until Katri's arrival she has chosen to not to think about it, and to give people what they expect. Her happy memories of her parents and her trust in her friend have no basis in fact and do not survive a re-reading of their letters, but these self-deceptions are necessary for her happiness and creativity. Katri uses deception to persuade Anna that she cannot live alone, and deceives herself that her manipulations benefit Anna. Katri's negativity and rigidity have deceived her, because she has been unable to see the good in people, or the value in creativity and independence.

This book is deceptively simple, but there is a lot going on.

A Night to Remember by Walter Lord

This is a gripping account of the sinking of the Titanic, first published in 1956 and re-published many times since. Lord interviewed many of the survivors.

Recommended.

Touchstone problem. Will try again later.

Great review of The True Deceiver!

>36 pamelad: The National Theatre just did a production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, featuring Dominic West as Valmont. If there's an encore screening of the live broadcast near you, it might be worth seeing.

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

McEwan puts himself inside the mind of a young woman on her wedding night in 1962. Hardly!

>40 japaul22: Thank you!

>41 rabbitprincess: Will look out for it, and for the film with Glenn Close and John Malkovich.

16. Recommendations

Recommended in The 200 Best Novels in English Since 1950

That's How It Was by Maureen Duffy

Paddy Mahoney's father was an Irishman who might have been in the IRA, but nothing he said would be trusted. When Paddy was two months old he went, leaving Paddy's young, unmarried, tubercular mother to bring up her child alone. The relationship between Paddy and her brave, gallant mother, Louey, is the heart of this book.

Life was hard for the working classes in England in the thirties and forties. Families were large and houses were small - often a whole family lived in a furnished room. TB was rife - whole families died of it. Education wasn't free - a working-class child had to win a scholarship to a grammar school, and her parents had to find the money for uniforms, books and myriad other expenses. These were the things that kept me interested.

Recommended because it is a slice of the times.

Updated the Recent category from this decade to this century. Still nothing in it!

Changed the Wishlist category to Books that don't fit in other categories.

Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh

Partition resulted in ten million people leaving their homes. A million of them died. In the village of Mano Majra, Sikhs and Muslims have lived together peaceably for hundreds of years. The liveliest place in the village is the railway station, on the line between Delhi and Lahore. People time their days by the whistles of the trains. In 1947, with the sub-continent newly partitioned into India and Pakistan, the trains arrive quietly and are full of corpses, Muslims leaving India are slaughtered by Sikhs and Hindus; Sikhs and Hindus leaving Pakistan are slaughtered by Muslims. Angry Sikh refugees pour into the village from Pakistan, ready to murder every Muslim on the next train to Pakistan. It is the train that will be carrying the Muslims of Mano Majra.

Train to Pakistan was first published in 1956. It was recommended in The 200 Best Novels in English Since 1950 and is an Indian classic. I bought it online from India.

Well worth reading.

Quicksand by Junichiro Tanizaki

Tanizaki wrote The Makioka Sisters, which was so good that whenever I see one of his books, I buy it.

Quicksand was first published in 1947 and is set in the Osaka of the thirties. Sonoko Kakiuchi, a young widow, tells the story to her friend, the author.

Sonoko is a bored young wife, who takes up art classes to amuse herself. At the art school she meets the beautiful Mitsuko, and becomes infatuated. Somoko is not the only person Mitsuko is having an affair with- she is also dallying with the epicene Watanuki, a man notorious in the brothels and dives of Osaka. Mitsuko traps her victims and keeps them bound. Her ultimate victim is Sonoko's upright and well-meaning husband.

Another good read, made even more so by the Japanese setting. Follows on nicely from Dangerous Liaisons.

Fixed the touchstone.

The Last Days of Dorothy Parker by Marion Meade

Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman were close friends for many years. Unfortunately for Parker, she made Hellman her executor, and Hellman not only threw out Parker's remaining papers, she managed to deter potential biographers and anyone else who might prevent Parker sinking into obscurity.

As a Parker biographer, Meade loathes Hellman and really puts the boot into Dashiell Hammett.

I enjoyed this short biography in a nasty sort of way, particularly because I was such a fan of Hellman's memoirs in the days when I was young and trusting and thought she was telling the truth.

Train to Pakistan looks worthwhile. I knew partition didn't go smoothly, but I didn't know it was that bad.

I know hardly anything about Indian history in general and specifically about the partition, so Train to Pakistan goes onto the wishlist.

>46 pamelad: Great to see your review of Train to Pakistan. Nancy Pearl recommended the author in her Book Lust and I purchased a trio of his books for my Kindle. Train to Pakistan is one of them. The other two are Delhi and I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale.

Great comments on Dangerous Liaisons - I didn't realize it was an epistolary novel, I definitely want to read it. The movie you mention also had Michelle Pfeiffer as Cecile. It was painfully good.

The True Deceiver and Quicksand also sound like ones I want top put on my list.

The Tortoise and the Hare, by Elizabeth Jenkins, was recommended in The 200 Best Novels in English since 1950.

The beautiful, artistic Imogen is married to the impatient, demanding Evelyn, fourteen years her senior. He loved her for her gentleness and sensitivity, but now those qualities are less important. He is a busy, successful barrister who wants a useful wife. Imogen is not competent enough to be useful. She is intimidated by her husband and even by her 11-year-old son, who is a clone of his selfish, insensitive father. I've taken sides here, as has Carmen Callil in her entertaining afterword, but the author is more even-handed and shows just how annoying the unreliable Isobel can be.

Despite their difficulties, Imogen and Evelyn are a happy-enough couple until their neighbour, Blanche Silcox, upsets the balance. Blanche is much less attractive than Imogen, and almost as old as Evelyn, so initially Imogen does not see the danger as Blanche insinuates herself into Evelyn's life and makes herself indispensable.

Every character in this book is a gem. I read Jenkins's descriptions and thought, "I've met this person."

Highly recommended.

Under the Yoke by Ivan Vazov is a classic of Bulgarian literature.

For five hundred years Bulgaria was part of the Ottoman empire, subject to Turkish rule. By the nineteenth century Ottoman power was waning and nationalism was growing. Vakov's book depicts the failed April 1876 uprising of the Bulgarians against the Turks.

The book begins with a family celebration, which serves the purpose of introducing Bulgarian religious observance, customs and traditions, and the loathing of the Bulgarians for the Turks. The celebration is interrupted by a noise from outside, which makes the women shriek in fear and sends Marko, the head of the family, out with a loaded gun to investigate. The intruder, Ivan Kralich, a Bulgarian insurgent who has escaped from a Turkish prison, narrowly evades the Turkish policeman who arrives in response to the noise. In only one chapter, Vakov has introduced the main characters and set the scene for the action to follow.

Under the Yoke is the work of a Bulgarian patriot. There are no good Turks. The revolutionaries are brave and noble to the core; the rest are cowards and traitors. Vakov was there in 1876, fighting for Bulgarian independence. In 1878, after world-wide condemnation of Turkish atrocities committed during the Bulgarian uprising, the Russo-Turkish war finally freed Bulgaria from Ottoman rule. Vakov wrote the book in Odessa, in 1893.

I found this book fascinating. Apparently, before Vakov there was no literature written in Bulgarian. Kudos to the person, uncredited in this Kindle edition, who managed to translate this book into English in 1912. Unfortunately the Kindle edition is full of typos, and the footnotes appear without warning in the middle of the text. This book deserves better.

Highly recommended.

The Human Factor by Graham Greene

Maurice Castle was once a British spy in South Africa; now he is in charge of the South African section in the London office. His love for his wife and son has made him vulnerable. No-one can be trusted in the Secret Service, and Castle never knows when the blow might fall.

This isn't a typical spy novel, dominated by machinations and intrigues. Rather, it concerns itself with Castle and the people in his life.

Recommended in The 200 Best Novels Since 1950. I can recommend it too.

>55 pamelad: That sounds like an interesting list. I may explore it this afternoon. I've got to head to the beauty shop soon.

Alamut by Vladimir Bartol was written in Slovenian, and first published in 1938. The first English translation, by Michael Biggins, was not published until 2004.

Alamut is a mountain fortress, controlled by the self-described prophet Siddayuna, in eleventh century Iran. Iran is ruled by the Selcuk Turks, Sunnis, whose leader is the sultan in Baghdad. Siddayuna leads a Shi'ite sect, the Ismailis, loyal to the caliph in Egypt. Siddayuna, vows to defeat the Turks and impose Ismaili rule, first over Iran then over the whole Turkish empire. He trains a team of elite fighters, the fedayeen, who are fanatically loyal and focussed on life after death in Paradise, and sets up a Paradise on earth, populated by beautiful young girls who have been sold into slavery. Siddayuna's Ismaili teachings depend on the audience. For the naive and uncritical there are fairy stories, and Paradise is one of them.

In 1938 Alamut was an allegory of Mussolini's rule. Today it might be a manual for the training of a suicide bomber.

Alamut was a fascinating, if patchy, read. Initially it deals with individuals and describes the characters training of the young fedayeen and slave girls, with Siddayuna a cipher in a tower. Later, as Siddayuna turns into the deeply flawed Hasan, the individuality of the young fedayeen is lost. I found the most interesting facet of the book to be Siddayuna's philosophy, but it is an adventure story too, and a well-researched history of thirteenth century Iran.

The least satisfactory aspect of Alamut is the translation, which is an absolute shocker. I am sure it conveys the meaning of the original text, but the language is banal and full of unnecessarily contemporary Americanisms. I almost gave up when a character described a distant place as "a ways", the fedayeen called one another "guys", and someone apologised because he "mis-spoke", but decided to continue in the hope of seeing someone say "it's complicated". I looked up Michael Biggins and found that he was an academic who had written a paper called Americanizing Slovene Literature, or, Taking the Day-Tripper’s Path to the Summit Instead of the North Face It is a shame that the only available English translation of Alamut was written by a man who appears to propound a theory of translation that I find abhorrent. ( I would like to read his paper, in case I am misjudging him.) In his defence, however, this review on Goodreads by a person who read the book in Slovenian suggests that the writing in the original was quite poor.

Should a translator deliberately translate bad writing in the original language into bad writing in the new language? Tricky. There are so many ways to write badly.

Edited to fix typos. And I forgot "off of"!

>57 pamelad: Should a translator deliberately translate bad writing in the original language into bad writing in the new language? Tricky. There are so many ways to write badly.

This, so much! I haven't done literary translation but have often encountered poor writing in my translation work. For most things I quietly correct the English and leave a note to the client to fix the original... whether they actually DO it is another story. The worst is when you get a bilingual text and you're supposed to make the whole thing English, and the client says "don't touch the existing English", but it's TERRIBLE. I usually fix it anyway because I don't want someone going into our database, finding the translation, and thinking I did the whole thing, even the terrible bits that were already provided by the client.

>57 pamelad:
If we're talking fiction, I'd say you shouldn't change the language, even if it's poor to begin with - the author's intent should override any other choice. In this case, it sounds like the translator may have made that artistic choice to "duplicate" the original's poor language into a version of English. I've read a book in different translations on a few occasions and the result can be so dramatically different that you sometimes think the translators worked from different originals. Like Bialik said, "Reading poetry in translation is like kissing a woman through a handkerchief." :)

Vittoria Cottage by D.E. Stevenson

A domestic story where nothing much happens. Appallingly patronising towards the lower classes. One of the characters actually thought of a village woman as a peasant. Dated, even for 1949.

>58 rabbitprincess: Good on you for trying. What sort of things do you translate? The Biggins translation reads as though the translator has no ear for spoken English. Perhaps, as an academic, he has become accustomed to jargon, and using language to obscure meaning.

>59 -Eva-: I've recently read a new translation of The Outsider. With just a slightly different emphasis, Sandra Smith has shown Meursault as a more sympathetic character than other translators did. I'm now reading The Meursault Investigation and whenever I come across a clumsy expression I wonder, "Is it the author, or is it the translator?"

>60 pamelad: I translate technical documents, mostly: user guides, specifications, contracts, training materials, etc. I also occasionally translate administrative things when the need arises, and those I find dull because they're full of buzzwords, like "leveraging cross-platform synergy for capacity building". Technical documents can also be boring, but they are usually about actual things, like a software program or a piece of scientific equipment. Where possible I try to use plain language, even if the source text is a bit waffly. But sometimes you can get "stuck" in the source text's sentence structure and produce a translation that sounds like a translation, rather than original English. It's a tricky problem and one that requires constant monitoring (and an extra set of eyes always helps).

>61 rabbitprincess: leveraging cross-platform synergy for capacity building

Excellent example of using language to obscure meaning!

>60 pamelad:
My "favorite" example is The Crime of Father Amaro - I tried the 1962 translation (because my library owned a copy of that) and read the first 20 pages before putting it on the "completely incomprehensible" list. Luckily, I checked the 2003 translation in a preview on Amazon and it turned out to be a completely different book. The first translation seems to have been made by someone who lacked skills in both English and Portuguese... Apparently this person was so fond of the book that they figured that a painfully poor translation was better than no translation at all, which, if you were wondering, is incorrect. :)

>63 -Eva-: It's on my shelf, translated by Nan Flanagan in 1962. I started reading it a while ago and couldn't get into it. Is Nan your culprit?

>64 pamelad:
Yes, that's the one!! Fight it with fire!! And then get the one translated by Margaret Jull Costa instead.

>62 pamelad: And then you call the client to ask "What does this mean?" and they don't know either!

>63 -Eva-: they figured that a painfully poor translation was better than no translation at all, which, if you were wondering, is incorrect.
Hahaha!

The Outsider, The Fall by Camus
The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daoud

A few weeks ago I saw Visconti's film, Lo Straniero (The Stranger), with Marcello Mastroianni as Meursault and Ana Karina as Marie. Although the scenes and dialogue were based faithfully on the book, the film seemed wrong, so I re-read The Outsider to find out why. The main problem, I decided, is that the book shows Meursault's perspective on the world, him looking out, whereas the film, by necessity, shows Meursault from the outside, looking in. Mastroianni is too strong and handsome. His Meursault comes across as sullen, rather than detached.

Having failed to check my shelves, I bought a second copy of The Outsider, translated by Sandra Smith. With just a slight change in emphasis, Smith's Meursault becomes a more sympathetic character than Joseph Laredo's. Her translation also flows better that Laredo version: he writes the occasional phrase that is not quite English. Since in two books and a film I had come across three variations on Meursault, I had to read The Meursault Investigation, an Algerian perspective.

The Meursault Investigation is related by Harun, the younger brother of the nameless Arab who died on the beach. Every night Harun drinks at the same bar, and tells the story of his brother to anyone who will listen, this time to a student who is carrying a copy of The Outsider. Harun gives his brother a name, Musa, a history and a family. Musa's body was never released to his family and was buried anonymously; his name was never officially recorded. His grieving mother dragged her young son around Algiers for years, searching for signs of Musa. In the chaos after Independence, the pair of them took revenge on a representative of the Frenchman who killed Musa but, unlike Meursault, were never punished.

Like Meursault, Harun is detached from the society he lives in. He was never part of the independence movement. He is not a religious believer. As the vineyards are torn out and the bars shut down, Harun and his fellow drinkers move on, dreading the day when there is no more wine and the last bar has closed. He reminisces about the freedom that Algerian women had in the days of French rule.

I thought The Meursault Investigation was worth reading, but it didn't live up to its reviews, which compare it far too favourably with The Outsider. Daoud's book is not at all in the same class. Despite being short, it is repetitive, and the writing is clunky, though that could be the translation.

Because The Meursault Investigation followed the format of The Fall, I read that too. Like Harun, Jean-Baptiste Clemence drinks regularly a the same bar, where he finds an audience for a monologue about his life. Once Clemence was a successful lawyer, pleased with himself and sure of other people's good opinions. A few small slips revealed to him the nonsense of his self-regard, and he became the judge-penitent, expounding his philosophy in an Amsterdam bar. It is a short book, with many layers, which I will read again.

Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich

Alexievich, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015, interviewed hundreds of people affected by the Chernobyl explosion. There are the pregnant wives of the firefighters who were sent onto the roof of the reactor and died of radiation poisoning within weeks, or of the soldiers who survived for a year or two, whose children were born dead, or damaged; scientists who tried to tell the truth; refugees from Chechnya so desperate that they moved into the contaminated zone; old people who moved back home to their farms; young women for whom giving birth is a sin; young men and women who will spend their lives alone because noone will marry a survivor of Chernobyl. People went to watch the burning reactor. Their children played outside in earth that will be contaminated with radioactive isotopes for thousands of years. 20% of the land in Belarus is contaminated. Radioactive milk, meat, fruit and vegetables were sold at markets outside the contaminated zone and people bought them because they were cheaper.

This book was agonising to read, but too important to avoid.

Just finished The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene, a superior class of spy story, and am reading The Strange Boarders of Palace Crescent by E. Phillips Oppenheim. Change of pace.

I have got to read Voices from Chernobyl soon. Good review.

Interesting to read about the different translations of L'étranger. Was the Laredo an older translation? Do they have translator's notes that explain the approaches they took?

>68 pamelad:
That one is on my list as well, but I need to brace myself properly first. So heart-breaking.

>71 rabbitprincess: No translator notes, but here is an interesting article about Sandra Smith's translation, comparing it to earlier translations by Ward and Gilbert. By making Meursault's references to his mother less formal, she has made their relationship seem less distant, which is a very important change, considering that Meursault is effectively on trial for showing too little emotion at his mother's funeral.

This article compares four translations, not including Smith's, and makes some interesting points about the Gilbert and Laredo translations.

I read L'Etranger in French, a hundred years ago when I was in year 12, and am planning to have another shot. Taking the brain out for a run.

>70 RidgewayGirl: >71 rabbitprincess: I could only read a chapter at a time because I was so caught up in people's stories, which were so tragic.

>73 pamelad: Very interesting! I'll have to hunt up more works by Sandra Smith. Going by the excerpts from The Outsider, she does fine work. Thanks for the articles!

Interesting info about translations. It's something I've thought a lot about lately while reading more Russian novels. It's astounding how different the various translations are.

>75 japaul22: There seems to be a bit of controversy about the Pevear and Volokhonsky translations. I've read that they are much closer to the original Russian, but do not flow well in English. This is interesting. If the quoted passages are typical of P&V, perhaps Volokhonsky needs a better writer as a collaborator. It looks as though Briggs subtly changed the meaning to make the English flow. I very much agree with P&V's rule that they will not use an English phrase that was not in use at the time the Russian novel was written.

My Russian period was many years ago, when the Constance Barnett translations were probably the only ones available.

Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith

I enjoyed the latest Cormoran Strike book, but not as much as the earlier two. This one contained three of my least favourite crime fiction features: dismembered bodies, a serial killer, and an investigator at risk. Straying too far into Patricia Cornwall territory.

Moon Over Africa by Pamela Kent

What is this Mills and Boon romance doing on the Guardian 1000 list? I had to find out.

This is a fifties period piece. The blonde heroine is girlish and naive. She wears simple dresses in pastel colours, and little white hats. She doesn't drink. The wicked widow has dark hair, wears purple, is sophisticated, and drinks cocktails. She is so evil that her husband, the best shot in South Africa, committed suicide by lion. She tries to separate our heroine and our hero, a dark, sardonic, sophisticated, older man. Sophistication, an asset in a man, is a disaster in a woman!

I have no idea how this book made it onto the Guardian 1000 list. I quite enjoyed it, but it is tripe.

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Coates makes it very clear that black people in America are wise to be afraid. If you're black, a mistake could kill you.

The language read to me like a sermon or an oration, and the writer often meandered around the point, without quite getting there. Even so, the book is well worth reading because the main message is clear and important. More so if you live in America.

How to Get Dressed by Alison Freer

Alison Freer is a costume designer who works in films and television. She's not the Edith Head kind of designer - she seems to seek out existing garments, rather than designing them from scratch. Her book is mainly about buying clothes that fit, or can be altered to fit, and looking after them. I found a lot of useful information: what type of trousers and jeans to buy that will fit you comfortably (depends on whether you're long or short-waisted); what alterations can be done easily and cheaply and what can't; what faults cannot be fixed at all; which dryclean only clothes you can wash, and how to do it; how to make your shoes stop hurting, your shirts stop gaping, and your skirts stop sliding round. She has years of experience making clothes fit actors.

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

This is the first book of Ferrante's four Neapolitan novels about two friends, Lila and Elena. The book starts with the girls as small children, playing with dolls, and ends with them at sixteen. The older they grew, the more interested I became. Life was hard in Naples in the fifties, and most of the people in this book lived harsh, violent, poverty-stricken lives, with little hope of anything better.

I'm going to have to read the other three.

>80 pamelad: Thanks for the review, might check it out...

The Prime Minister by Anthony Trollope

This is the fifth of the six books in the Palliser series. Plantaganet Palliser, now the Duke of Omnium, is, as the leader of the coalition government, the prime minister of Great Britain. His wife, Lady Glencora, aspires to become a great hostess and, by her hospitality, cement her husband's political position. The duke, who has many qualities, including integrity and intelligence, that should make him a good prime minister, lacks the geniality and toughness necessary for inspiring loyalty from all the members of his cabinet. He is worn down by the disloyalty and venality of his self-serving colleagues, and unwarranted criticism by the yellow press. Glencora makes the duke's position even more difficult by attempting to influence the local election.

Glencora's candidate is Ferdinand Lopez, a charming, handsome, gentlemanly man with no known antecedents. Lopez succeeds in marrying Emily, the daughter of a rich barrister who belongs to a respectable land-owning family headed by a baronet. When no money is forthcoming from Emily's father, Lopez makes his wife's life miserable.

I've enjoyed all of the Palliser series so far, and The Prime Minister is no exception. Trollope shows great sympathy for the plight of women, whose lives could be ruined by marrying the wrong man. I was very concerned for Emily, and hoping that Trollope would be able to save her. There's a lot of Lady Glencora in this book, which is a very good thing. Without her humour, energy and enthusiasm, poor Palliser would be a sad old stick indeed.

At times I find the political machinations in the Palliser series a bit confusing, so I was pleased to read the Prime Minister's exposition to Phineas Finn on the differences between the Liberals and the Conservatives.

I've now started the final book in the series, The Duke's Children, and will be sad to reach the end of The Pallisers. Fortunately, Barchester Towers is waiting.

Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinski

This book started well. Mischa is living in Thailand with his girlfriend. He is an underemployed freelance journalist, so when a friend offers him the job of finding an American anthropologist, Martiya van der Leun, who has been jailed in Chiang Mai but lost in the bureaucratic system, Mischa takes it on. Soon after Martiya is located, she kills herself, leaving a mystery that Mischa is compelled to investigate.

Martiya has spent most of her adult life living with the Dyalo, hilltribe people with no written language. Her obsessive interest in the Dyalo leads her to cross paths with a missionary family that has spent decades living in the hills, trying to convert the Dyalo to Christianity. Berlinski initially planned to write a non-fiction book about the Christian missionaries and the hilltribe people, particularly the Lisu, and has written an afterword describing his research and his sources.

The mix of fact and fiction was a problem to me. Berlinski invented the Dyalo and their beliefs, and had fun doing it. I found that cringeworthy because it trivialises the cultures and beliefs of the hilltribe peoples on whom he based the Dyalo. He used them for a plot. And the plot fell apart midway through the book. The ending was an anticlimax because the overall motive was generic we knew why the anthropologist murdered the missionary . We were just missing the details.

Also finished The Duke's Children. Missing the Pallisers already.

Thinking of reading The Brothers Karamazov for my missed classics category. I've read a few articles about the different translations and downloaded the World's Classics Edition, translated by Ignat Avsey. Avsey's titled his translation The Karamazov Brothers because that's the English usage. We don't say the Brothers Warner, or the Brothers Marx.

While I'm thinking, I'm reading The Silent Bullet.

The Best of Rose Elliot was a mistake. I bought it online because it was on special, Rose Elliot got good reviews, and I am planning to cook more vegetarian meals. Disappointing. Too many canned ingredients, too many sweet ingredients (cranberries and honey belong in desserts, hardly ever in vegetable dishes!), too much grated cheddar cheese, too much cream. Not at all to my taste.

Just finished Trollope's The Warden, the first book of the Barsetshire Chronicles.

Renamed the Pre-WWI category back to Trollope because I've now read the planned four books and will almost certainly read more.

Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabel was written in 1976, before the Prague Spring. Intellectuals worked in menial jobs, censorship was oppressive and books were destroyed. Hanta, the main character, has worked for 35 years compacting books and paper into bales. He is a self-taught philosopher who saves books, and lives almost buried under tons of them. He also saves books for others: film criticism for the professor who can no longer read about foreign films; books on aviation for an engineer. He loves his work because he loves books.

>88 pamelad: I have never heard of this book. It sounds intriguing.

>89 mamzel: It's short, only 98 pages, and a monologue by a larger than life character. Hrabel's Closely Watched Trains and I Served the King of England are better known, and have been made into films.

Just read To Marry and English Lord, an entertaining history of the American women who married into the British aristocracy from the 1870's until King Edward VII's death in 1910. Cora from Downton Abbey springs to mind.

Also read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which I have been putting off for too long because I thought it would be sad and bleak. It is bleak, because life in the Stalinist camps is desperately hard and people are imprisoned there for nonsensical reasons, but it's also uplifting. Highly recommended.

I've read fifty books so far this year, which is a much better rate than the last two years. At the beginning of 2014 I bought a TV, after many years without one, so there was a lot to catch up on. I discovered boxed sets of DVD's. Now that I've caught up on the backlog I'm spending more time reading.

The Pea-pickers is biographical fiction, written in the forties by the passionate, uncompromising Australian poet, Eve Langley. The book is set in the twenties, when Eve and her sister June travelled around Victoria dressed as men, using the men's names Steve and Blue, barely supporting themselves by working as itinerant pickers. Women wearing trousers were rare back then, so the police in the wine country of Rutherglen moved the girls on, warning them not to return. In other towns people were more tolerant, so Steve and Blue picked peas in Metung and hops in the Victorian Alps, somewhere between Myrtleford and Porepunkah. They lived in the pickers' huts supplied by the farmers and subsisted on oats, honey and any other food they could scrounge.

I was fascinated by the descriptions of the girls' lives, the people, and how the places I know now were then. Just as well, because while sometimes Langley captures something so idiosyncratically and succinctly that I stopped to re-read and admire, there is a lot of overblown poetic drama that can be a chore to read, even though it is in character.

This is a real oddity of a book. With a few reservations, I enjoyed it. Its impression lingers.

Stamboul Train, published in 1932, was Graham Greene's first successful novel.

The lives of a Jewish businessman (he is English, but his being a Jew is more important to Greene's plot), an English chorus girl, a kept woman, a tough, lesbian journalist, an Austrian murderer and a socialist revolutionary intersect on the Orient Express. The atmosphere is oppressive. Nothing good can happen here. I kept reading because I had to know just how badly everything would turn out.

Not my favourite Greene. Too many intersecting threads. Too much bleakness and cynicism, tempered by too little humanity. Still worth a read, though. It's Graham Greene, after all.

>93 pamelad: I really should get around to reading more of his work. Only read 3 so far and really enjoyed them. I have a couple more sat on the tbr shelves to get to at some point (though not that particular one).

Read The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom, which was uplifting because Corrie and her family were so brave, selfless and GOOD. Initially all that religion put me off, but it was the driving force behind their actions and an integral part of their lives.

Followed up with River of Darkness by Rennie Airth, a police procedural set just after WWI. It was a page turner, but a bit of a fake, borrowing significance from the war and the terrible experiences of the men who served. The main character carries many wounds, both psychological and physical, but it turns out that all he needs is the love of a good woman to turn his life around.

Now reading Cryptic Crosswords for Dummies, which I'd like to fit into an unfilled category, but can't quite manage. Can't really call it a Classic I have Missed.

Also reading The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunari Kawabata and have downloaded two of Garry Disher's Wyatt novels - one for my Australian category and the other for the Geocat.

The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunari Kawabata

Ogata Shingo is ageing. He is becoming forgetful, his hair is turning white by the day, his contemporaries are dieing, and his nightly dreams invade his days. He catches the train each day to an office where his son Shuichi also works. Suichi is having an affair with a war-widow, despite being newly married, and Shingo is worried for his daughter-in-law.

This is a sad and gentle story, a compelling look at a Japanese family in the years just after WWII. Japanese society is changing. With the deaths of so many men, women can choose not to submit to the control of a husband or father, and can live independently. Even so, Shingo's divorced daughter, Fusako, returns to live with her father. Her husband's family could have demanded that her children live with them. Should Fusako remarry, the head of her family, her father or eventually her brother, is responsible for her children and if she chose to remarry she could leave her children with her brother and his wife. Abortion is legal, and freely available. The calendar is new, and even people's official ages have changed.

Suicide is accepted as an honourable way to end one's life, and some of the characters in the novel contemplate death by suicide, as in another Japanese book I read earlier this year, Junichiro Tanazaki's Quicksand. Wives die with their husbands, and Shingo, after reading of a couple's suicide, discusses with his wife whether both the husband and wife should leave a note, or just the husband.

I've mentioned a few snippets that fascinated me, perhaps not the best way to approach a book like this one, which is a minutely observed, beautifully written work of art.

Highly recommended.

>95 pamelad: Glad you enjoyed The Hiding Place. I read it earlier this year and liked it.

Your hidden spoiler for River of Darkness gave me a chuckle, LOL.

>97 VictoriaPL: It was heart-warming to read about such genuine goodness.

Peacekeeping by Mischa Berlinski

Berlinski spent four years in Haiti. His wife worked for the United Nations Peacekeeping Mission in the small town, Jeremie, 125 miles, but 15 hours by road, from the capital, Port-au-Prince. The local farmers cannot send their crops to Port-au-Prince and are living in poverty. The residents of Port-au-Prince have almost no access to fresh food and live on imported tinned goods. In the novel, the local politician, the Senateur, has blocked every attempt to build a new road. An American-educated Haitian lawyer, Johel Celestin, stands for election, promising to build the road.

Berlinski is an acute observer, so his descriptions of Haiti, its people, its history and its politics are compelling. I accept that it would be difficult to live in Haiti without becoming cynical about the political system, but the cynical, sardonic tone was a distraction. Another negative was the character Nadia, a mysterious and magnetic woman whose behaviour makes little sense, but who is an integral part of the plot. Despite these shortcomings, I would recommend Peacekeeping and will be keeping an eye out for his next book.

I hope the plot of next book does not hinge on another mysterious woman. >84 pamelad: Martiya in Fieldwork was one too.

Here is a New Yorker Review of Peacekeeping. I think it's too harsh. Because Berlinski is such a good writer, expectations are high.

Also, the author of the review compares Berlinski to Graham Greene as though writing like Greene is a bad thing!

Miss Bunting by Angela Thirkell

I struggled through this because it was so snobbish and nasty. Thirkell has little sympathy for characters who do not belong to her own class. The book is set towards the end of WWII, and Thirkell is lamenting the England she knew. She sticks the boot into Balkan refugees and sneers at people who do not follow the rules of her own social set. The book is meant to be funny.

Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope

Book 3 of the Barchester chronicles. Trollope is so fair to his characters. Even the unlikeable people have understandable, though misguided, reasons for behaving badly. In this book the women of the aristocratic de Courcy family are pressuring the hero, Frank Gresham, to marry money, and persecuting the woman he loves, the doctor's niece Mary Thorne.

I read this in a hurry because I wanted to watch Julian Fellowe's television series. I recognised parts of the plot and aspects of the characters, but there is no subtlety in the TV series. There is a good deal of smirking, eye-rolling and shouting, and the baddies are caricatures. Loved the book, but thought the TV program was just OK. Trollope's wit is missing.

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Simon Mawer

WWII spy story. The young and beautiful Marian Sutro is parachuted into occupied France. I would have liked her more if she'd been plainer, but the story motored along efficiently and I enjoyed it.

Barracuda by Christos Tsiolkas

A working class boy's swimming talent wins him a scholarship to a snobbish private school. His ambition to swim in the Olympics is the whole point of his life, so when he loses a race he falls apart.

I recognised the people and the places Tsiolkas writes about, and really cared about the main character, Danny, although for most of the book he's a ratbag. The book has a real Melbourne feel. Definitely worth reading.

Christos Tsiolkas's Melbourne is authentic, the antithesis of Peter Temple's.

>101 pamelad: agreed about the book vs. tv show. I liked the tv show because it was a pretty time period piece, but he lost all the subtlety of the characters and especially of Frank and Mary.

>102 pamelad: took a BB for The Girl Who Fell From the Sky.
Thanks!

I've finally finished Solving Cryptic Crosswords for Dummies. I hope it was good for the brain. It's good to take it out for a run occasionally.

Reminds me of Lewis Carroll's Father William:

“You are old, Father William,” the young man said,
“And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head –
Do you think, at your age, it is right?”

“In my youth,” Father William replied to his son,
“I feared it might injure the brain;
But, now that I’m perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again.”

I'm now checking bookshops for other Cryptic Crosswords Guides and maybe even the Chambers Crossword Dictionary.

I enjoy doing cryptic crosswords, but in groups rather than individually. The collaboration is a lot of fun, especially with a group that has different skill sets.

The Astonishing Adventure of Jane Smith by Patricia Wentworth

Patricia Wentworth wrote over thirty mysteries that were not part of her Miss Silver series: Dean Street Press has recently published them and they're available as ebooks. The Astonishing Adventure is the first mystery Wentworth ever published so, as a Miss Silver fan with a Golden Age Mystery category to be filled, I gave it a go. It has everything: identical cousins, secret passages, a formula that could destroy the world, a missing heir, a criminal society whose members are known by numbers, and two romances. I should have read it when I was twelve!

The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood

Eight young women are imprisoned on a remote property in the Australian bush. There is no escape other than death on the electric fence and the warders are just as trapped as the women. All the women committed the same "crime": they were abused by powerful men and condemned by the press. They include a potential Olympic swimmer who was molested by her coach, a woman who was pack-raped by a group of football players, a young woman in love with a popular, married politician, and a naive passenger on a cruise ship who was drugged and raped at an on-board party. I recognise some of these stories from the Australian press. Diane Brimble died after being drugged on a cruise ship, and too many people blamed her for putting herself in a vulnerable position. Then there was the sixteen-year-old girl who destroyed the marriage and career of a respected, middle-aged football coach. Yes, it was her fault. But the most blatant, recent example of misogyny in Australia was the treatment of our first female prime minister, Julia Gillard. Every woman I know was horrified by the contempt with which she was treated by conservative male politicians and members of the press.

So this is an angry book. It starts brilliantly and, even though the ending doesn't fulfil the promise of the beginning, is well-worth reading. I finished the book a couple of weeks' ago, but it has stayed with me.

Won the Stella Prize.

>108 pamelad: The book was reviewed in The Economist recently, which put it on my radar. But there was no mention of it being based on real cases, which makes it even more disturbing. Not a comfortable read, then?

I'll keep an eye out for The Natural Way of Things. It is disturbing how quickly the misogyny surfaces when a woman dares to reach for a position of power, or when one questions a powerful man's actions.

>109 MissWatson: In a way it's comforting that Woods has voiced the anger. I'm sure that when you read The Natural Way of Things you'll be reminded of cases you've read about in your own country. The story of the young woman with the powerful politician reminds me of Monica Lewinsky, whose life was derailed.

>110 RidgewayGirl: It will be interesting to see how the media treats Hillary Clinton. At the moment we're hearing a lot more about Trump than Clinton. He's made some remarkably misogynistic comments, but they're almost lost in his general idiocy.

The Era of the Bitch is Coming

Just found this article in The Atlantic.

>112 pamelad: I think the article is correct. After all, the Obama presidency ushered in a wave of publicly-spoken racism that I'd never seen before. It became mainstream. Aren't we lucky?

Also, why do they insist on mentioning that she wears pantsuits all the time? When men wear them, they're called "suits" and no one bothers to say anything.

>113 RidgewayGirl: And on the subject of Clinton's apparel.... I hate these tunics / long coats they have her in. I don't think they are flattering to her.

>114 VictoriaPL: I just fail to see why how she dresses matters in the slightest. We don't care what male politicians wear.

>115 RidgewayGirl: I agree with you that, in general, Americans don't care what the President wears. I personally find suits boring. But I do want our President to make a good impression when the world is watching and so I think they should look their best.

>114 VictoriaPL: >116 VictoriaPL: I see your point, but maybe Clinton herself prefers that style. Julia Gillard also received criticism for the way she dressed. Being pear-shaped certainly doesn't detract from a politician's competence! Older women just can't win.

>115 RidgewayGirl: In Australia the press were fascinated by Paul Keating's Italian suits and John Howard's eyebrows. Keating's suits got a lot of press because a prime minister shouldn't be so aware of how he looks! Not nearly as much press as Julia Gillard's clothes and hair, though. Then there's Tony Abbott and his budgie smugglers. Perhaps the Australian press is more frivolous than the US press?

The Importance of Being Eve Langley by Joy L. Thwaite

When Eve Langley won the Bulletin's Prior Prize for the The Pea-pickers ( >92 pamelad:), she was only a year away from being committed to an Auckland mental institution, where she was to remain for seven years. In the forties it took only two doctors and a relative (even an ex-husband would do) to commit a person indefinitely. Langley's ability to look after herself and her children had declined with each pregnancy. These days we would hope that a woman in her position, possible suffering from post-natal depression, would get some help that did not involve ECT and indefinite committal, and would allow her creativity to flourish. In the forties, Eve Langley had five pregnancies and three children, and she didn't want any of them. She wanted to write. Her friends described her as child-like, irresponsible and brilliant.

Langley kept writing, but only one more book, White Topee was published. She kept journals and wrote many novels that remained unpublished, and Thwaites quotes from them extensively.

I read this biography because I wanted to know more about Eve Langley, but skimmed a lot of it: great slabs of quotation, followed by Thwaite's interpretations. I was more interested in the excerpts from interviews with Langley's friends and relatives. The interpretations overwhelmed the information, and I thought the book would have been just as interesting and a lot more readable at half the length. Still, I found out more about Eve Langley, so the book was worth reading.

The Road to Ruin by Niki Savva

Since 2007, Australia has had five changes of prime minister: Rudd, Gillard, Rudd again, Abbott, then Turnbull. Rudd's Labor party parliamentary colleagues hated him so much that they ousted him and elected Julia Gillard. Rudd sniped from the back bench, leaked to the press and destabilised the Gillard government. Gillard fell victim to the opinion polls and was replaced by Rudd, who was defeated in the 2010 election by the Liberal-National Party coalition, led by Tony Abbott. The electors had to choose between two nutters, the centre-left Rudd and the far-right Abbott. The Labor party's recent history of internal squabbling delivered government to Abbott, who led the Coalition government until 2015, when he was defeated for the Liberal Party leadership by Malcolm Turnbull. (For those unfamiliar with Australian politics, the Liberal Party is Conservative, and its coalition partner, the National Party, contests mainly rural seats and is further to the right, particularly on social issues. Neither coalition party is as far to the right as the US Republican Party.)

Niki Savva is a Canberra journalist who writes for the Australian, one of Rupert Murdoch's newspapers. She appears to believe that only the Coalition should govern, so is their duty to stay in power to prevent a Labor government from ruining the country. Tony Abbott and his chief of staff, Peta Credlin, make so many mistakes, so soon after the election, that the Labor Party creeps ahead in the opinion polls and Abbott's parliamentary colleagues become increasingly desperate. In The Road to Ruin Savva gleefully puts the boot into Abbot and Credlin (they should have treated her better!) and describes, in enormous detail, the machinations that result in the Liberal Party replacing Abbott with Turnbull. I was sad to see Abbott go because he was the Labor Party's best hope for winning the next election. (The Labor Party picked up a lot of seats, even with Turnbull leading the Coalition, and neither party has a majority in the Senate. Many Independents were elected. The voters are fed up.)

One of Abbott's biggest mistakes, according to Savva, was, on the eve of the election, to tell a television interviewer who asked about cuts to the ABC and SBS (government supported public broadcasters) that there would be no cuts to pensions, education, health, SBS or the ABC. Savva states that he should have said "his most important job was to keep spending under control , so of course the ABC and SBS would have to shoulder a small part of the burden to restore the budget to good health.... and left it at that. The penalty for an outbreak of honesty at that stage would have been minimal." The first Coalition budget broke all of those promises, and Abbott's credibility was destroyed. Good to know that Abbott's mistake was not in lying to the electorate, but lying directly and leaving himself open to attack by the Labor Party. Savva's book provides a fascinating insight into political ethics (is this an oxymoron?), and the relationships between politicians and journalists. Australian voters are quite right to be fed up.

One of the comforting things about Savva's book was its triviality. There is no Brexit, no Trump, no gun lobby, no nuclear weaponry. Even our maddest mainstream politicians don't advocate banning Muslim immigration (though we do have a lunatic fringe, represented by Pauline Hanson). I appreciate living in an unimportant country, a long way from the rest of the world, where politicians who do the wrong thing are voted out. If Trump is elected, I will appreciate these things even more.

Nothing by Henry Green

John Pomfret and Jane Weatherby were once lovers and, now that their spouses are dead, Jane wants to marry John. She is a monstrously selfish and manipulative woman, who schemes to overcome the obstacles of an engagement between her own son, Philip, and Pomfret's daughter, Mary; John's affair with Liz; and her own affair with Richard. Most of the story is told in conversations between pairs of protagonists and is dry, witty and believable, with multiple interpretations of the same observations, depending on the points of view of the characters.

Green's imagery is often original and striking . This is a sophisticated, intelligent, beautifully written book about unpleasant, superficial people. I enjoyed it.

The Road Through the Wall by Shirley Jackson

This is Jackson's first book, and it is as unsettling as her last.

The middle-class residents of Pepper Street know who is acceptable. They are polite to Jews and poor people, but do not include them in the social activities of the street and have no problems coming up with reasons why this is the right thing to do. The smug, selfish, hypocritical adults have taught their children well. The kids are vicious and manipulative, or they are victims. Something terrible is going to happen.

Recommended. I am planning to read more of Jackson's early books.

I've just finished Helen Garner's collection of essays, Everywhere I Look. Patchy. The two essays I enjoyed most were The Insults of Age and How to Marry Your Daughters, which is about reading Pride and Prejudice for the first time. Garner is at her best when she isn't taking herself too seriously.

I also read Beat Not the Bones by Charlotte Jay, which was published in 1952 and is the first Edgar Award winner. Jay was an Australian writer who travelled around the world with her husband, an employee of the UN. The book is set in Papua-New Guinea which, at the time, was administered by Australia. These days Port Moresby is rated by The Economist as the world's third least liveable city - more liveable than Dhaka and Damascus, but less than Tripoli. The independent state of Papua-New Guinea is riven by corruption and violence, and, according to the observations of Charlotte Jay, the seeds were sown by corrupt and clueless Australian administrators.

Beat Not the Bones is a crime novel of psychological suspense. The characters are complex and believable, and the descriptions of life in Papua-New Guinea just after WWII are of great historical interest, particularly if you're Australian. Highly recommended.

The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino

It took me a while to get into this because of the clumsy translation, but the story is so good that I got caught up in it. Yasuko Hanaoka thought she had escaped her violent ex-husband, Togashi, but he turned up at her flat making threats and demanding money. When Togashi is killed, the brilliant mathematician in the adjacent flat, who is secretly devoted to Yasuko, concocts the perfect alibi. Kusanagi, the head of the police investigation, suspects Hanaoka, but can find no evidence against her. He is no match for the mathematical genius, Ishigami, but Kusanagi's friend, the physicist Yukawa, is Ishigawa's equal. Will Yukawa crack the alibi? Does he want to?

This was a best-seller in Japan and I can see why. Recommended.

Out of Range by C. J. Box

Number 5 in the Joe Picket series. A mediocre crime novel with a ridiculous ending. I am giving up on Joe.

And When She Was Good by Laura Lippman

Not part of the Tess Monaghan series. This one is about a madam - how she got there and where she ended up. Interesting enough while I was reading it - I wanted Heloise to make it through to the end of the book - but not memorable. On reflection, the book is about the trials and tribulations of running a small business. Death, danger and drugs are the drawbacks of the brothel business.

>124 pamelad: I haven't read much japanese fiction, but I have the idea that it is difficult to translate to English. I feel the same way about Russian.

>125 pamelad: I admit, I was not able to get into the Joe Pickett series. I wanted to though, in the beginning I was really excited about something vaguely Longmire-esque.

>125 pamelad: >127 VictoriaPL: I really enjoyed the first one, but I think it was a matter of the location being in the Big Horns. My brother lived in Sheridan, and my nephew still lives there. I recognized many of the locations in that first novel which saw a lot of action in the Big Horn Mountains. Most of the ones I read were pre-LT so I really ought to go in and add them. I probably can only give ratings. I wasn't as big of a fan of the rest of the series although I think I liked #5 slightly better than you did.

>126 japaul22: The problem with this one was the bad English - ungrammatical sentences with clumsy word order that introduced unnecessary ambiguity. I kept stopping to rewrite sentences in my head. I know that translations of Japanese and Chinese miss a lot because the pictographs add another layer of meaning, a sort of intellectual punning, but as long as a book reads smoothly in English, I have no idea what I've missed. This year I've read The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunari Kawabata and Quicksand by Junichiro Tanizaki, and was impressed by both of them. Talking of Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters is one of the best books I've read in the last few years. The Sound of the Mountain and The Makioka Sisters were translated by Edward G. Seidensticker, who knew the authors. He's in a completely different class from the translator of The Devotion of Suspect X.

>127 VictoriaPL: >128 thornton37814: In future, when I'm looking for nature and grizzly bears in North America, I'll stick with Nevada Barr. I quite like Anna Pigeon, although I wish she'd cheer up a bit. I borrowed a lot of Anna Pigeon books from the library in the days before LT, so now I'm not sure which ones I've read. Might start with the most recently published and work backwards. I think that in the last one I read Anna had just married, or broken up with her fiance. Does that sound familiar?

Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson is inside the head of seventeen-year-old Natalie Waite, an imaginative, lonely girl who has just finished high school and is about to leave for college. At the beginning of the book Natalie is living at home with her father, mother and older brother. Her father is a writer, pompous, self-satisfied and obtuse, who treats his unhappy wife as an inferior and encourages his daughter to share his contempt. Every day, Natalie's father sets her a writing task and critiques her work, often insultingly, but the narrative in Natalie's mind confuses her. She has committed an unspecified crime, and the police are interviewing her. She leaves for a women's college, where her fellow students are self-absorbed, judgmental conformists. The narrative in her mind continues.

Hangsaman's conclusion is a puzzle. Will Natalie be the victim of the one girl she thought was her friend? Does this friend exist, or is she a figment of Natalie's imagination?

This is the fourth of Jackson's books that I have read. The writing, as usual, is wonderful. She never writes a pedestrian phrase. Jackson just sees the world differently, and describes what she sees clearly and imaginatively. Like the villagers in We Have Always Lived in the Castle and the suburban neighbours in The Road Through the Wall, the people surrounding Natalie, with the exception of her ineffectual mother, are cruel, hypocritical conformists who destroy anyone who is different. Jackson's world is frighteningly real.

>129 pamelad: I like Anna Pigeon too.

A Hank of Hair by Charlotte Jay

I read this because I was so impressed by another of Jay's crime novels, Beat Not the Bones. Unfortunately, A Hank of Hair was an unsuccessful foray into psychological suspense. If it hadn't been so short I wouldn't have managed to finish it.

The Child by Jules Vallès

The Child was first published in France in 1879, but was not until 2005 that the first English translation appeared. Vallès dedicated this autobiographical novel to all those who were bored stiff at school or reduced to tears at home, who in childhood were bullied by their teachers or thrashed by their parents, people like himself and his alter ego Jacques Vingtras. Every day Jacques was beaten by his mother, for trivial infractions or for nothing at all, because she believed the adage spare the rod, spoil the child. His father, an under-qualified school teacher who was demeaned by the insults and mockery he put up with, and the grovelling he had to do, to keep his insecure job, beat Jacques less often, but more violently. It was a parent's right to treat his children as he saw fit, and some of Jacques' friends suffered beatings even worse than he did.

The Vingtras parents both came from peasant families, so by becoming a schoolteacher, M. Vingtras had risen well above his station. His aim in life was to rise higher, and he wanted his son to become a classical scholar and eventually a teacher. Jacques, however, wanted to be a tradesman, perhaps a cobbler like the happy men downstairs, or a farmer like his jovial and generous relatives. The miserly Mme. Vingtras was less successful than her husband in hiding her peasant background, and created public tantrums that embarrassed her son and made her husband's position even more insecure. Jacques, a clever and amenable boy, does his best to respect his parents' rules, and tries to meet their expectations, but he is clumsy, thoughtless and often in trouble. His father's colleagues show their disdain for the family's poverty and peasant background by victimising Jacques.

Jacques is a resilient boy, a pragmatist who is not defeated by the misery his parents and teachers subject him to, but looks forward to the time he will be independent. Perhaps he will run away to sea, establish a colony and become rich; he has no intention of following his father's plans. His observations of his parents and teachers are scathing, accurate and funny.

The Child is a witty, entertaining, thought-provoking book. Highly recommended.

The Bird's Nest by Shirley Jackson

Elizabeth Richmond lives with her aunt, Morgen, and works as a clerk in the local museum. By day she is sad, meek and almost devoid of personality, but at night Elizabeth leads another life, of which the daytime Elizabeth is unaware. As the wild Elizabeth intrudes herself more and more and Elizabeth's behaviour becomes increasingly erratic, Morgen seeks help from her G.P. who refers Elizabeth to his friend, Dr Wright, who dabbles in hypnotism and psychotherapy. Under Wright's care, Elizabeth disintegrates into four warring personalities.

Jackson's writing, as usual, pulls the reader along. Morgen and Wright are both fallible, believable people. Wright's pompous self-centredness is amusing, as is the brandy-swilling Morgen's sardonic wit. Elizabeth is not as successful. I could not immerse myself in the book because multiple personality disorder does not fit well in a work of imagination: it is too clinical, too defined. Jackson has more impact when she subverts our familiar reality and shows the murkiness beneath the surface.

Despite my reservations, I would recommend The Bird's Nest.

Boar Island by Nevada Barr

Anna's goddaughter, Elizabeth, is the victim of a cyberbully. Her paraplegic mother, Heath, and her mother's elderly aunt Gwen, a doctor, move with Elizabeth to Boar Island, in the Acadia National Park where Anna has been temporarily promoted to acting chief ranger. The cyberbully follows Elizabeth to Acadi. Her loving mother aunt and godmother strive to protect her. I like Anna Pigeon for her lack of sentimentality, so this book was far too gooey for me.

The other plot line is also about family, but to say more would be to reveal too much.

There are a few insane people propping up the plot, and Anna is in peril rather too often. She's drugged unconscious with rohypnol, handcuffed, duct-taped (or is that later?) tied up in a plastic garbage bag so she can't breath, and dumped in the ocean. Does she die? What do you think?

At 374 pages this was a bit of a slog. I thought it was the low point of the series.

Coda by Thea Astley

A sad story about a woman, Kathleen, remembering her life as she descends into dementia. It is enlivened by Thea's excellent writing and scathing wit, but I found it depressing.

The Sundial by Shirley Jackson

A family, with assorted hangers on, lives in a mansion on the edge of town. The house is owned by Richard Halloran, a feeble-minded, wheelchair-bound invalid, dominated by his scheming wife Orianna, who may have pushed her only son down the stairs in order to inherit the house. The other inhabitants are Richard's sister, Aunt Fanny, his son's wife, Mary-Jane, his grand-daughter Francy, a secretary, Miss Ogilvie, and a young man, Essex, whose duties are undefined. Later they are joined by others, who seek refuge from the world outside.

The first Mr Halloran, dead father of Fanny and Richard, and the builder of the house, appears to Fanny and warns her that the world is ending and only the people in his house will survive. I do not normally read a lot of science fiction, horror or fantasy, but I have made an exception for Shirley Jackson because she is such a good writer. I was quite caught up in the domestic comedy-drama as the house's inhabitants prepared for the end of the world.

Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance

Vance's family has been poor for generations. In Kentucky the Vances and their neighbours were miners, sharecroppers and labourers; they worked hard in badly paid jobs. They left school early, had children in their teens, and struggled to survive. There was too much booze, too much violence and not enough food. When jobs opened up in Ohio in the manufacturing industries, many people left Kentucky for a better life. Vance's relatives, like many others, maintained their links to their families in Kentucky, visiting regularly. They created a Kentuckian diaspora in the industrial towns of Ohio. These are the people Vance calls hillbillies: working class people of Scots-Irish descent, generations removed from the hills of Appalachia but, as Vance would have it, bound by the hillbilly code of God, family, patriotism and violence.

I read this book hoping for an insight into the results of the presidential election, but I was disappointed. Vance, at the age of thirty-one, wrote a memoir that describes how he escaped the poverty, addiction and despair of his upbringing to graduate from Harvard Law School, find a good job, and marry a good woman. These days he is a Republican who believes that the poor are too dependent on welfare. Yes, he has escaped his upbringing. Is that success?

I enjoyed the first half of this book, but the author's self-congratulation began to annoy me. Then I ran up against a burst of patriotism and had to struggle to finish. (When Americans go about the greatest country in the world I am revolted . I doubt that I am alone.) Vance's book does not live up to its reviews.

I plan to read Strangers in Their Own Land soon, in the hope that Hochschild answers more questions than Vance does.

>138 pamelad: I went to the book page to thumb your review but found you haven't posted it yet. You made some very good points.

>138 pamelad: Thank you, Vivienne. I added it to the book page.

I'm now reading Strangers in Their Own Land. After a slow start, I'm finding it informative, and it's providing some insight into the racist, dog-whistle politics of the Australian right as well. At the last election we saw a resurgence of Pauline Hanson's xenophobic One Nation party, which won four senate seats at the last election. One Nation is not mainstream, fortunately, but it's reappearance is a worry.

Thanks for your review of Hillbilly Elegy. I had that out from the library and eventually returned it unread. I'm glad I didn't read it now, although I will in the future, just because it seems to have become part of the ongoing national conversation.

Regarding that knee-jerk angry kind of patriotism; it confuses me. The people who practice it have rarely, if ever, spent time outside of the US, which would seem to give them little evidence that the US is indeed NUMBER ONE.

>141 RidgewayGirl: Australia Day is on January 26th, known to many aboriginal people as Invasion Day, so Fremantle, a city in Western Australia, has moved the celebrations to January 28th under the name, One Day, in order to include the aboriginal community. http://www.fremantle.wa.gov.au/celebrate-australia-one-day-fremantle

This type of patriotism is a lot less frightening than the other kind.

Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Hochschild

Hochschild is a sociologist, an academic at Berkeley, and a liberal to the core. Alarmed at the increasing hostility between Democrats and Republicans, she immerses herself in a community of Tea Party supporters in Louisiana to try to understand the emotion that underlies their political beliefs, to identify what she calls their "deep story". In order to discover this deep story, Hochschild has to scale "empathy walls", which prevent people from understanding one another and "can make us feel indifferent or even hostile to those who hold different beliefs of whose childhood is rooted in different circumstances." She spend five years visiting and talking to her subjects, who welcome her into their lives and offer honesty and friendship. Even though their political beliefs seem insane to me, they come across as kind, sincere people.

The contempt that the recent presidential campaign has unleashed is shocking, so Hochschild's attempt to understand the beliefs of this particular group of Trump voters is a step in the direction of civility and cooperation. It is an imperfect book: I found the focus on the environmental problems of Louisiana, which is the issue that the author used as a basis for discerning people's values, to be depressing (if you lived in the US I think these disasters would be almost too tragic to read about); at times I almost drowned in the sea of metaphor, but I kept swimming and made it to shore. In the end Hochschild did identify the "deep story". She shared it with her subjects and they recognised themselves.

Definitely worth reading.

Taking the morning to play catch-up on all the threads in the group and enjoyed getting caught up with all of your reading.