QUESTIONS FOR THE AVID READER, Part 8, end of 2020

QUESTION 45: Where's the poetry in your reading life?
QUESTION 46: Books About Books & More
QUESTION 47: LibraryThing and You(added note: Yipes! a duplicate question, please disregard)
QUESTION 48: Libraries and You
QUESTION 49: Crime/Mystery Novels
QUESTION 50: INITIAL THOUGHTS ON 2021 READING

Note: SassyLassy will return to do the 2021 Questions for the Avid Reader.

Thanks go to spiralsheep, who graciously wrote this question up for us. The question arises out the talk on the previous thread.

QUESTION 45: Where's the poetry in your reading life?

Whether it's a book of lyrics by your favourite songwriter, the collected works of a Nobel Prize winner, nonsense verse you read with children, classic literature you learned at school, or those special words remembered from weddings and funerals, Bob Dylan, Wisława Szymborska, Lewis Carroll, Shakespeare, or Christina Rossetti, who do you read? What types of verse: narrative, dramatic, lyrical? Poems that make you think or poems that make you feel? Do you have preferred forms? Lengthy ballads or minimalist haiku? Do you savour single poems or plough through whole volumes? Do you care how your reading is presented: concrete poems, song lyrics, or an obsession with typography? Were you put off poetry for life at school and shook its dust from your feet without a backwards glance (or do you secretly still need those nuggets to complete the crossword)? Tell us where the poetry is in your reading life.

Poetry, unfortunately, has always been something I should read. So, other than Shel Silverstein's books as a kid and an anthology from schoolwork, I haven't read much poetry. I wish there were more books like Break, Blow, Burn, where there is a short (2-3 page) discussion of each poem.

The best thing I have found recently is the Poetry Unbound podcast. Pádraig Ó Tuama has such a lovely voice.

Q 45

Yes. All of the above, with the possible exception of Bob Dylan... :-)

Of course, like everyone else, I feel I should read more poetry than I actually do. I read quite a bit, but don't tend to follow new publications very energetically unless something happens to cross my path. I gave up subscribing to poetry magazines some years ago when I found I couldn't see over the piles of unread issues any more. :-(

The last new collections I read were about a year ago, Hannah Sullivan's Three poems and Soho by Richard Scott. Both of them I enjoyed a lot. Other current poets whose work I've enjoyed include George Szirtes and Mimi Khalvati. (Khalvati is a friend of a friend, whom I've met once or twice, but to my shame I still haven't got around to her most recent collection.)

Actual poetry books I've read this year are: a collection of early lyrics by P G Wodehouse The parrot and other poems; the collected verse of Thomas Bernhard; an anthology of Scottish love poems compiled by Lady Antonia Fraser; and the weird Flemish typographic poetry of Paul Van Ostaijen from the early 1920s. I've got the "poetry" volume of Schiller's complete works on the go, as well. Make of that what you will, I don't see any obvious pattern in it!

What the list doesn't show is random dippings into the books on my poetry shelf or googlings of half-remembered lines, which are fairly frequent events.

Poems (and occasionally actual real live poets) were very present at home when I was a child, we were always being sent off to chase up references in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and the Oxford Book of English Verse. And time-hallowed pedantic puns: We could never cross the river Weaver in Cheshire without reference to the Pied Piper, for instance. Maybe that's why I still enjoy the Brownings and Tennyson and W S Gilbert, and have a deep ingrained affection for Donne and George Herbert, and even a less-than-prickly relationship with Milton.

The trouble with poetry is that you have to give it a degree of attention that we're not used to giving to prose novels we tear through in ordinary life. On the other hand, there are a lot of poems where the pay-off is already with you in a couple of minutes: that's the beauty of projects like Poems on the Underground. And it's one reason why reading a poetry book from cover to cover feels a bit strange. There are always things you want to spend more time with and other things you "just glance at for now".

>4 thorold: Touchstone for the excellent Poems on the Underground.

I have always struggled with poetry although i’ve had some success along the way. The classics are all missing for me.

I went through a stage of reading old literary magazines including from various universities and from Poetry magazine itself and the like. It was really rewarding. So I started reading current ones - and it was NOT rewarding. I don’t know why. One of my favorites was Poetry Magazine’s 75 year edition. I thought it was magnificent and changed my view of poetry. But I could find nothing I had liked there when i looked in the current magazines. I have sort if imagined the rhythms and balances from 1940’ 50’s 60’s 70’s and 80’s have either a different style from the 2010’s or just aren’t in style at all. Breaking boundaries being the thing now. Breaking boundaries doesn’t always jive with aesthetics.

Anyway this has all been put on hold. I’m not reading any of that.

I have been working through the classic epics (Homer, Argonautica, Virgil, Dante, Spenser) and i’ve read the bibles and I’m reading Shakespeare. Very different feel in all that than in contemporary poetry (for that last ?00 years).

>4 thorold: admiring you as a reader, Mark.

At this point it probably goes without saying that there's a lot of poetry in my life. My friends who go for walks with me regularly can all quote lines from the beginning of Piers Plowman by William Langland, Now welcome summer with thy sunne soft by Geoffrey Chaucer, Willow Song by Anne Stevenson, and when things go a bit wrong then How I Brought the Good News from Aix to Ghent (or Vice Versa) by W C Sellar & R J Yeatman.

I have many favourite authors but the list of living poets whose new books (for adults) I buy automatically, because I know I'll re-read them, is surprisingly short:
Gillian Clarke,
Merle Collins,
Ted Kooser,
Grace Nichols,
Sean O'Brien,
And Benjamin Zephaniah (if there's ever another adult volume of poems after Too Black, Too Strong in 2001 ).

The books I recommend for people who want to read more poetry but don't know where to begin are fitted to individuals but if I had to make general recommendations then I'd say there are good reasons why Staying Alive is a long-term best-selling anthology, and if anyone wants to read more poetry in translation but doesn't know where to start then My Voice: A Decade of Poems from the Poetry Translation Centre is an excellent selection and also one of the most typographically beautiful books I own.

My advice for reading a whole book of poems, if you're not accustomed to doing that, is to be prepared to skim over anything that doesn't appeal to you at the time and read anything you like twice. It's also entirely normal for some people to read a few pages between other books.

>6 dchaikin: "I have been working through the classic epics (Homer, Argonautica, Virgil, Dante, Spenser) and i’ve read the bibles and I’m reading Shakespeare. Very different feel in all that than in contemporary poetry (for that last ?00 years)."

Most of what you've listed there is narrative (storytelling) poetry, while most contemporary poetry isn't, so you could try asking your favourite bookseller or librarian if they have anything to suit your (apparent) preference. Although there's plenty of classic narrative poetry in print and no compulsion to read more recent work. :-)

I definitely prefer poetry of the heart to that of the head. By heart I mean the wisdom of the heart, as many have written of in many cultures. I really enjoyed Red Pine/Bill Porter identifying this difference in Finding them Gone a superb book.

But I have a broad range of interests. I am much worse than Dan at filling the gaps I have (I can watch his progress jealously) but am also fine with following my heart as I do -- and find I am finding more space for it with a change in what I do. I definitely believe that as you connect with it it may become easier to read, open up for you. Someone said to me recently they find it hard to read with all that space around words and I agreed, which I think they found intersting as they see me as a poet. i know at times I could and still can sometimes find it hard to slow down and just take it in apart from in bits.

David Whyte when he reads poems often goes back and repeats and I think this is entirely normal in reading poetry, even in reading it aloud/performing it. clarity emerges, I often read segments that are just words but having done so another time it is clearer.

I do try to fill in my gaps -- I am bad at quoting sometimes, though I can a little. I don't have much by heart (I must try again to get better at that). Something i have loved doing - a friend gave me a small notebook and I gave it back to him with me having copied out favourite poems for him, and am doing that again now for others. Copying poems out can be such a joy - despite my handwriting (says I, he struggled).

My threads trace a lot of my interests. Currently I am reading some Pasternak (am on pause with Dr Z). I finished A portable Paradise today which I like a lot, to see some things said and in poems but maybe most with a poem called Grace that was very personal for him it seems. Before that i read a pamphlet called Supergrooviness by a late poet from LA called Christopher Mulrooney that the leader of my group introduced me to and I liked.

Sometimes I think there is no instruction book to life, but can find poems a sort of attempt at this and a companion and guide. I'll always be badly read in some ways -- the menu is larger now than anyone can digest in all -- but I'm following all those i can and their love helps. If I can drop into poetry it is a godo thing, partly related to how i am living or able to.

I'm glad Dylan could win the Nobel and was not discounted due to some border enforcement. When Emerson met Wordsworth he almost laughed at Wordsworth I think sort of chanting his poems to him and stopped himself and came to realise that Wordsworth was in the right. Many poets have had a sort of song to their written words.

I have got to know a number of poets or am doing so and realise they are quite a list now. I'll always see myself as playing catch up. But we can only be where we are. I still don't relish how so many editors must have to be of moving from book to book, I prefer to follow a sort of aliveness of my own, which often is damped down or lost. I could work harder at it and do so a bit. Yhere is no right answer, just lots of possible ones and the big thing is how I connect and what I get from what I do . . . finding feeling for me and maybe making sense of much that I'm lost in, I search for feeling it as I have to.

I'm not sure it'd help listing my likes or favourites -- a lot are in my threads. I do read a fair few isolated, other writers in groups, anthologies, selecteds, collecteds. Some poets are important to me though i have not read a lot of their work (Blake I fear), some I have read more of and are less important. In recent years I've loved Rilke, Rimbaud, Rumi Edward Thomas, Dylan Thomas I've read all Heaney's collections now, Sylvia Plath was someone I connected to early in reading more seriously. But there are so many and so many i have yet to, I hope. It all also informs so much else, for reading life read 'life'.

edit - I missed so many, but two that came to mind on review, R. S Thomas and this year Emily Dickinson whom i made a lot more progress with and is in my thoughts a lot. Andof current poets am a huge fan of Alice Oswald also John Burnside and the aforementioned David Whyte. I haven't got to O'brien yet.

>8 spiralsheep: or vice-versa

So I sprang to a taxi and shouted “To Aix!”
And he blew on his horn and he threw off his brakes.

(Can’t remember any more, there was a lot of galloping, wasn’t there?)

I don't read a lot of poetry; I usually grab one or two books off the new book shelf at the library during a year. This year it was Joy Harjo's An American Sunrise, which I purchased because I needed more time with it.

I have Louise Gluck's Faithful and virtuous night on hold at the library - I've seen her quoted so many places, and she won a Pulitzer this year.

>8 spiralsheep: I purchased Staying Alive a few years ago, need to see if some of the poetry in translation is available in English.

Poetry figures quite a lot in my current reading life, but it will not surprise some people on these threads that not much of it is modern poetry. In fact looking back over the last year at books completed they are all Elizabethan poets Shakespeare of course then Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, Henry Constable, Samuel Daniel, Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, George Peel.

Currently I am reading Nones by W H Auden which for me highlights the reasons why some people in my opinion do not read much poetry: Many of his poems are not easy to understand; they perhaps need to be read several times; even if you do understand all of the words and phrases often the meaning is elusive. They rarely tell a story and the temptation if you cannot get to grips with the poem on a first reading is to move on. So why bother? especially if doing crosswords does not really appeal.

I think poetry can frighten people, in that if you don't understand the poem you can think that you are not intelligent or skilled enough to be able to read it. How many readers I wonder find themselves defeated by poems. I find that W H Auden continually defeats me. There are plenty of books on the market that are aimed at teaching people how to read poetry and so there must be a skill set that enables you to appreciate more poetry and this is certainly true. However there is much poetry around that is accessible to many people and they may find themselves enjoying the more technical aspects of it without even realising it.

Lets look at the bright side of reading poetry. They are generally shorter; much shorter than novels. They say what they have to say in fewer words. You can therefore read more of them. They will generally sound much better in the head when reading them to yourself and if you have the courage to read them aloud as many of them should be read you may find yourself enjoying the way the words sound. This may be enough to enjoy them. Perhaps you do not need to worry too much about 'the meaning' poems notoriously mean several things for different readers. Enjoy the reading experience perhaps an odd line will stick in the memory or give you a way in? Anything is possible.

Getting back to the question of how poetry figures in my life, then I have to admit to a book case full of poetry My favourite poets are D H Lawrence, Keats and Wordsworth, Ted Hughes, Adrian Henri, Allen Ginsburg, but there are many more........................I do not read much contemporary poetry only really those that I find in the London Review of Books. However there is of course Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen whom I love. Poetry to Music; perhaps the best of both worlds.

>11 thorold: There is, indeed, a lot of galloping and ungalloping a bit. I've managed to induce giggle-fits in various friends and acquaintances with all the following phrases out of context. It's a gift.

Neck to neck, back to front, ear to ear, face to face:
----
“Would you kindly oblige us, is that the right time?”
----
Then I cast off my buff coat, let my bowler hat fall,
Took off both my boots and my trousers and all –
Drank off my stirrup-cup, felt a bit tight,
And unbridled the saddle: it still wasn’t right.
----
And I had to confess that I’d been, gone and went
----
We rattled and rattled and rattled and rattled and rattled and rattled and rattled –
----
And eventually sent a telegram.

I read a lot of poems in high school and college. A lot of it was fun, and I still like the Romantics. I enjoy writing haiku.

But, like a lot of English teachers, I draw would-be poets like flies: "I wrote some poems, and I'd love to have your input (as long as you tell me that my gloopy adolescent maunderings about my dead friend or perfidious boyfriend are the most life-changing things you have ever read)."

When you don't gush all over these productions, the writers get downright pissed and start arguing with you.

I know that all sounds unkind, and I understand and encourage the restorative nature of self-expression, but having people's "therapy poetry" thrust at me has left me with little inclination to read poetry at all, though I do enjoy the two or three poetry submissions that appear in Commonweal once a month.

I signed up for the "poem a day" service from The Poetry Foundation when I saw this topic in hopes of getting back into the poetry reading habit.

>10 tonikat: "Some poets are important to me though i have not read a lot of their work (Blake I fear)"

I've read most of William Blake's poetry and can confirm his general reputation: he's a genius and poems such as The Tyger are justifiably famous, but not everything he wrote is genius, and there are good reasons why very few people read the Four Zoas or the prophetic books - for most readers the reward wouldn't be worth the required effort.

>13 baswood: Poetry to Music; perhaps the best of both worlds.

It can be — on the other hand, music can also turn mediocre poetry into something beautiful. Schubert did that all the time.
But there are plenty of examples of good poetry, good music, like Butterworth's Shropshire Lad settings.

>14 spiralsheep: Oh yes, it's all coming back! As is Browning's original, which (you won't be surprised to hear) tended to get recited in the family car during those long drives down the motorways from the Belgian ferry ports to the German border.

Wodehouse invariably talked about taking the good news from Aix to Ghent — I never worked out whether he had genuinely muddled it, or it was meant to be a running (galloping) joke...

>16 spiralsheep: I'd not make such assumptions of anyone, nor, I think, would Blake. Though I can see that many may not have the interest.

I may be being harder on myself than I should be. I have also read around Blake quite a bit.

But those are the works I had in mind. But my idea of him is already well formed. The genius label can be such an odd one -- I feel if I were to be sharp I might ask you your framework for decision. But I'm not interested really by that.

edit -- that may sound ruder than it was meant, I did not mean not interested in your judgement in particular, but instead meant not very interested in judgements of genius in general and the use of the label. At least at the moment and after so much use of it all over the place.

>17 thorold: I can easily imagine the hero of (or Vice Versa) being a member of the Drones Club.

>9 spiralsheep: oops, this post is far back now. I’m interested in modern epic poetry. Have something on Hawaii by WS Merwin and maybe some other random things. The draw is different - learning classics vs not. The getting long lost in these books can work for me, but my momentum is some historical skipping stones. Petrarch is coming up. And Boccaccio and Chaucer. I’m interested in Piers Plowman.

When my sis went off to college, I snuck into her room and started reading every book on the shelf (well I was 9, so most made no sense), until I got to Nortons Anthology. I still remember reading Robert Burns To A Mouse, and I couldn't help memorizing most of it, dispite the dialetic issues

Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi' bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi' murd'ring pattle!

I'm truly sorry man's dominion,
Has broken nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An' fellow-mortal!

I doubt na, whiles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen icker in a thrave
'S a sma' request;
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,
An' never miss't!

Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin!
It's silly wa's the win's are strewin!
An' naething, now, to big a new ane,
O' foggage green!
An' bleak December's winds ensuin,
Baith snell an' keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste,
An' weary winter comin fast,
An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell-
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro' thy cell.

That wee bit heap o' leaves an' stibble,
Has cost thee mony a weary nibble!
Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the winter's sleety dribble,
An' cranreuch cauld!

But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o' mice an 'men
Gang aft agley,
An'lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Still thou art blest, compar'd wi' me
The present only toucheth thee:
But, Och! I backward cast my e'e.
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!

and in the same volumn Blakes Tyger


Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?



Later I was reading Alice, and can still recite Jabborwoky and Walrus and the Carpenter at the drop of a hat. Loved reading John Ciardi and others of his time. And about that time I was writing my own poems but was much more interested in novels

In school I learned the usual poets. I know I didn't like the victorieans (even when reading Byatts Possession, I skipped through most of the poetry sections) I much preferred ee cummings,
Mason Williams (not just a great classical guitarist, poet as well) Kahil Gibran, and others from the 70s. Loved Poe and Frost. Song lyrics meant a lot to me then, still do, but song writers like Cat Stevens, Jim Croce Paul Simon,Carol King, Janis Ian were the poets I needed at that time.

Oh when I was in Girl Scouts (late 60s) there was a poem in our guide book that was so powerful that I memorized it and still know it. Never could find it again, but its still powerful

'Loneliness'
Loneliness is small and cold diamonds hard and eons old
Loneliness is sharp and chill like a cold gray rain on a cold dark hill, like a tall black rock and an eagles cry, like the emply land and sea and sky
like a weed grown track and a worn torn fence
long since left to the elememnts
Loneliness

As a teacher, loved reading Shel Silverstein to my students, and laughed and cried over the little boy who hated poems and becomes a poet in Love That Dog by Sharon Creech

Most of my poetry now comes from those publised in magazines like the NYer, Or NYT Magazine, and from song lyrics that continue to move and inspire me, Love hearing the new young voices that are coming out now

Q 45

Seriously? We're on question 45 at the same time as a US election w/POTUS 45? Odd yet meaningless coincidence.

Anyway, I earned a BA in English literature in my early 40s. I avoided poetry, but I did run across some that I liked. I like novels written by poets better than poetry written by poets.

I do love the lines by Sir Thomas Wyatt,

They flee from me that sometime did me seek
With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild and do not remember

Most of the other poems are of the more humorous type.

Apologies for introducing a topical note, but somehow this morning, looking at the news, I couldn't help thinking of Cavafy's famous poem about the god leaving/forsaking/abandoning Antony (every translation has a different title).

When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who proved worthy of this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen—your final delectation—to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.
(Keeley translation)

Or perhaps comparing him to a lecherous Roman general is doing him too much honour?

>23 thorold: a little ode to Shakespeare in there.

>23 thorold: actually I have been comparing him Don Ameche's character in Trading Places "turn those machines back on !!!!!" in a near empty wall street. But I like that better

Cavafy's famous poem Is that where he came up with cofefe?

>24 dchaikin: Possibly. Or they both read the same bit of Plutarch.

>25 cindydavid4: Probably :-)

>26 thorold: 🙂

Leonard Cohen

Suddenly the night has grown colder
The god of love preparing to depart
Alexandra hoisted on his shoulder
They slip between the sentries of the heart

Upheld by the simplicities of pleasure
They gain the light, they formlessly entwine
And radiant beyond your widest measure
They fall among the voices and the wine

It’s not a trick, your senses all deceiving
A fitful dream, the morning will exhaust –
Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving
Then say goodbye to Alexandra lost

Even though she sleeps upon your satin
Even though she wakes you with a kiss
Do not say the moment was imagined
Do not stoop to strategies like this

As someone long prepared for this to happen
Go firmly to the window. Drink it in
Exquisite music. Alexandra laughing
Your first commitments tangible again

And you who had the honor of her evening
And by that honor had your own restored –
Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving
Alexandra leaving with her lord

Even though she sleeps upon your satin
Even though she wakes you with a kiss
Do not say the moment was imagined
Do not stoop to strategies like this

As someone long prepared for the occasion
In full command of every plan you wrecked –
Do not choose a coward’s explanation
that hides behind the cause and the effect

And you who were bewildered by a meaning
Whose code was broken, crucifix uncrossed –
Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving
Then say goodbye to Alexandra lost

Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving
Then say goodbye to Alexandra lost

>21 cindydavid4: A 2004 post on a francophone website says Loneliness is by Lucy Horton:

"Loneliness
by Lucy Horton

Loneliness is small and cold,
Diamond hard and eons old.
Loneliness is sharp and chill,
Like cold gray rain on a cold gray hill,
Like a tall black rock and a seagull’s cry,
Like an empty land and a sea and a sky,
Like a weed-grown track and a broken fence
Long since left to the elements
Loneliness..."

The only authorial Lucy Horton revealed by a casual search published "Country Commune Cooking" in 1972 but I'm not convinced the girl scouts would approve of recipes such as "Ron's Motherfucker Beans", lol.

ETA: and there's a 14 August 1971 newspaper reference to the poem in New Castle News, Pennsylvania, but I can't access the archive.

>18 tonikat: i'm not nasty, really, but wasn't helping myself -- poetry sometimes brings many judgements of worthiness, overall i am against them, whilst as vulnerable as anyone to them and making my own in finding my space . . . but for me good poetry unites and speaks of commonality (even in individuality), how many good poets do we read as speaking just to us. Cohen and Cavafy I love both.

>20 dchaikin: Piers Plowman is a trip, and I can recommend it to anyone willing to tackle it.

There's a podcast of a recent theatrical version (I saw this performed on the Malvern Hills and at the Ledbury Poetry Festival):

https://www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2017/jun/21/fair-field-piers-plowmans-dr...

As I'm sure you know, if you want a third Middle English epic then after Chaucer (usually Canterbury Tales but other poems are available) most people would read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as their second choice.

And again, as you probably know, one of the most famous contemporary epic poems is Omeros by yet another Nobel Prize winning poet but, of course, it's partly a retelling of Ancient Greek stories you've already read.

>Question 45: Poetry in my reading.

Speaking of my current LT reading era, I read a fair bit of poetry; I often dip in to this or that volume or anthology, but of course 'dipping in' isn't conducive to reportage in groups like this one. I thought that a shame, as poetry is always been a part of my reading life from the age of 10 on; so my list of books read is only that, books read cover to cover, and doesn't accurately reflect my overall reading life. Thus, fairly recently in my LT life, I have made an effort to read entire collections or anthologies so that I could report on them here.

I fell in love with poetry by way of Longfellow when I was 10, after we studied "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere". I would memorize great bits of his work and walk around the yard or in the woods reciting it (I lived in Maine and the field trip for 4th grade was to Longfellow's birthplace in Portland). Poetry (both reading and writing it) and I have had a long relationship in the intervening fifty-five years. That’s a lot of poetry to cover here, so I won’t attempt to cover it all.

Back in ’98, in my early months of getting to know the man who became my current husband (known here as dukedom_enough), I emailed him Dickinson one day and he responded with Wordsworth. I think the match might have been made then :-)

As one might expect, I have had flirtations with everyone from Ferlinghetti to Christina Rossetti, Seamus Heaney to Denise Levertov, Adrianne Rich to Langston Hughes. Sharon Olds to Carol Ann Duffy. I enjoy exploring the poetry of the authors whose novels I enjoy—Helen Dunmore, Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Julianna Baggott, Thomas Hardy, the Bronte Sisters…to name a few. I have made efforts in the past to read poetry in translation and was enamored in the 1990s of some of the Russian poets (Akhmatova, Pasternak and others of that era) But, after learning that Pasternak’s poetry rhymed in Russian, I remember thinking t how much I would have liked to hear their poetry read in Russian, not that I understand Russian, mind you, Rhyming or not, there is music in poetry that a translation often can’t reproduce. I had a more recent jag of reading women’s poetry from Arab and African countries. The same thing here, I wondered what music I might be missing out on.

These days I have drifted back to US, Canada and UK poets, a variety of voices ranging from the obscure to the popular, much more women than men these days, perhaps a more older set of poets (or dead ones), although I do try to read the younger poets (younger than me). I also try to keep up with my favorite local New England poets. I prefer shorter poems with plenty of white space on the page, and more heart than head (since you asked). I read single collections and anthologies. I like to pull a chair up to the bookstore's poetry section and go through the books one by one and see who I might connect to.

I also like to read books about poetry i.e. the David Orr book on Frost’s poem or, my fave from the late 80s Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America by Alicia Ostriker.

(I'm going to have to go back and re-read some of the posts here when I have time. I have been understandable preoccupied by current events).

>3 ELiz_M: If you are interested, you might also try How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry by Edward Hirsch, or How to Read a Poem by Molly Peacock.

>31 spiralsheep: thanks. janeajones led me to Omeros and I loved it, although I only got so much if it. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is on the list next to Piers Plowman. I think Heaney has a translation.

>29 spiralsheep: Oh wow, ok makes sense it wasn't in the english google search. Thanks for finding it. I know that name, or at least it sounds familar. Nice to finially know who the poet was!

>28 baswood: I love his stuff, didn't realize he did one on Alexandra. Need to listen to that

>29 spiralsheep: I found her contact info, it will be fun to tell her how much that poem meant to me over the years

>37 cindydavid4: The poem was definitely written in English but it might not be by Lucy Horton. I don't know where the person who posted it in 2004 got that attribution. If anyone has access to an online newspaper archive then they could check the 1971 reference and find out if the author attribution is the same. Or you could contact a Lucy Horton and ask. Good luck! :-)

I've read, learned, and recited poetry all my life - most of it story-poems rather than lyrical stuff. I really don't like blank verse, especially the modern stuff I see in newspapers and the like - it reads, all too often, like a paragraph of sentence fragments with a return after each period. No rhythm, let alone rhyme.

Kipling is always at the top of my list. Frost, Stephen Vincent Benet, Masefield, ...argh, drawing a blank! Rhymes of a Red Cross Man - Service, of course. I've read Gawain and the Green Knight, many many years ago; I found the story annoying enough that I don't even remember the poetry (or more likely, I read a prose translation). I have both The Canterbury Tales and Piers Plowman on my list...someday I'll get to them (maybe this will be the nudge that gets me moving).

I just read The Voyage of the Arctic Tern, a...not wonderful, not bad ghost story/pirate story in verse. It's a little too sweet - despite terrible villains and dastardly plots, there's no real tension to the whole thing - a YA or younger style. I'd rather read The Ballad of East and West, or recite it - that's one I learned young and am still reciting at odd intervals when I want a good quick story. Everyone knows the epigram ("East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet...") but there's a heck of a lot more to it. Great border-war story.

I have collections of all my favorites, but seldom read through them (the Collected Kipling is several inches thick...). I'm more likely to recite a favorite poem, and look it up either on paper or more likely on the internet if my memory fails. But if I were stranded on a desert island, I'd want the Collected Kipling with me - the largest collection of stories in the smallest volume possible.

>39 jjmcgaffey: Many of my students over the years picked Kipling out of the anthology, especially "If." A couple guys memorized it.

"Dulce et Decorum Est" by Wilfrid Owen also has had tremendous lasting appeal. A good read for Veterans Day coming up Nov. 11.

I read and appreciated poetry in high school, being a dutiful student, but I might not have ended up ever reading poetry afterwards. Don't think I did in college. In graduate school, though, I hung out with some of the grad students in English and Classics, and that got me started on reading it again. I picked up the 1975 edition of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, which has resided at bedside since.

Single-author volumes: Housman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Auden, Larkin, Kipling, the blue-and-red little Robinson Jeffers book. Very retro, mostly. I have a small Vikram Seth collection I like, and loved his The Golden Gate, a novel composed as a series of sonnets. As a science fiction fan, I am of course required to have a couple of Albert Goldbarth books, although I don't generally like so-called SF poetry. Ursula K. LeGuin. Like many here, I dip in and out of poetry books, mostly do not read straight through. I follow Poets.org on twitter, which publishes many excellent works.

The Wordsworth poem Lois references was "Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room" - on his love of the sonnet form, but I was thinking of the spare, work-centered life I was living when we met. Which was very soon to change.

>39 jjmcgaffey: "But if I were stranded on a desert island, I'd want the Collected Kipling with me -"

Tough choice: Shakespeare would provide more kindling, but Kipling's jokes are funnier.

>40 nohrt4me2: Kipling's If has been voted the UK's favourite poem in national polls several times.

>32 avaland: Re: Longfellow school trips - In my part of the world the Longfellow poem is Evangeline and school trips are to Grand Pré, NS, one of the expulsion sites.

>45 lisapeet: Thinking about poetry in general, I wonder if this is a something that has to be started really young, pre reading, so we think of it as natural, and not something to be approached with fear. My childhood poets included Robert Burns, Walter Scott, Walter de la Mare, Edward Lear and lots of others, mostly introduced by my grandmother. I think old ballads are also a great way to introduce poetry. I'm not sure it matters at that stage whether or not the poem is fully understood, just the magic of the words and the pacing are enough to start, sort of like music.

>43 SassyLassy: Oh, yes, we did "Evangeline" in high school! "This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, bearded with moss, and in garments of green, indistinct in the twilight".... (I've forgotten where the lines break) I'm not sure how many more years they used Evangeline in the curriculum after the early 70s.

I'm another one who got started on poetry super early by aspirational parents (Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle and others—I think kids who like reading naturally love poetry if it's presented without pressure), and it really stuck. I've always read poetry on a pretty regular basis, mostly randomly—in magazines/journals, on blogs, and daily poem sites like Poetry Daily and the late, very lamented (they're calling it a hiatus, so maybe it'll be back) The Slowdown. I'm also lucky to have certain friends who will send me poems in email or letters, because they know what I like.

What do I like? Good question. (Omitting tired simile here) I just know it when I see it. Usually non-rhyming, though I do love rhyme when it's done well—I used to memorize rhyming poems when I was little just for fun (I can still recite most of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan")—and I guess I'd say usually accessible at some level. I don't gravitate toward creative typography or big chunks of text with no line breaks or super experimental stuff. I like poems about the natural world, but not only those. Mostly I'm always open to surprise and I love discovering new poets and following their trails.

I'm happy to consume poems at the individual level, but every so often I read something that inspires me to try a full collection and I rarely find them draggy—either I pick well or I'm just a collection person, since I like short fiction also. Authors I like, just off the top of my head: Mary Oliver, Eileen Myles, Natalie Diaz, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Sylvia Plath, Philip Larkin, Walt Whitman, Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Glück, Eleanor Lerman. But really, too random and too many to list. When I see something I like I tend to write it down in a notebook, which is good because some of what I've liked online tends to get taken down after awhile.

>45 lisapeet: (I mostly know this Coleridge through Rush’s Xanadu ☺️)

>46 dchaikin: Not the Olivia Newton-John movie with the roller skates?

QUESTION 46: Books about Books and More (nonfiction).

Do you read books about other books, books in general, or perhaps about reading? How about criticism or discussion of literature or poetry (generally or specifically)? Or perhaps you read books about authors and their writing? (or their readings of other authors’ books?) Maybe you have explored compilations of reviews or shorter essays on these same subjects? Below, please find some examples of the aforementioned subjects (just to get you thinking).

Please share with us your reading history in this area, and any related books you have read and enjoyed, or particularly wish to recommend.

A few examples:
Britain by the Book: A Curious Tour of Our Literary Landscape by Oliver Tearle
Redeeming Time: T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets by Kenneth Paul Kramer
The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories by Christopher Booker
Must Read: Rediscovering American Bestsellers: From Charlotte Temple to The Da Vinci Code by Sarah Churchill &Thomas Ruys Smith
Book Traces: Nineteenth-Century Readers and the Future of the Library by Andrew M. Stauffer
Bibliophile: An Illustrated Miscellany by Jane Mount
How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines by Thomas C. Foster
How Fiction Works by James Wood
The Dreams Our Stuff is Made of by Thomas Disch (about SF)
The Literature Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained by James Catton
The Rise of the African Novel by Mukoma Wa Ngugi
Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing by Margaret Atwood
Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry by David Orr
Reading the Book: Making the Bible by Burton L. Visotzky
Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman
Book by Book by Michael Dirda
The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book by James Raven
How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry by Edward Hirsch
Conversations with Joan Didion by Scott Parker
Books that Changed the World by Robert B. Downs

Hmm. I read some books about books; I'm more likely to read books about words (The Professor and the Madman, I Always Look Up the Word Egregious, etc). And etymology, and languages, and dialects, and...

Some, not much, criticism of other works; I either agree with it and learn nothing or disagree and end up grumpy (especially if the author manages to convince me to change my mind). Some books about the history of books - I know I read one about Gutenberg relatively recently, but can't locate it. Oh, right, a kid's book - Who in The World Was the Secretive Printer?. That one's tagged History, though, not Books. I don't have a Books tag (though I do have a Words one).

Not really a subject I focus on.

Q 46 Books about Books:

I don't read many books about books as physical objects — I suppose there's Shaun Bythell's Diary of a bookseller, which I read earlier this year (which of course feeds off things like 84 Charing Cross Road and George Orwell's bookshop essay), and peripherally Type : the secret history of letters five years ago. And the inimitable The book on the bookshelf, of course!

I've got something like 150 books tagged "literature" — textbooks from my student days, author biographies, monographs, essay collections, etc. Difficult to pick out favourites from that, but I'll try to sort out a few things I've enjoyed recently. I may well come back to this in another post...

Russian thinkers, Isaiah Berlin — goes to the essence of the nineteenth century Russian classics, but of course the essays are as much about political philosophy as about literature
Emile Zola : an introductory study of his novels, Angus Wilson — Zola in a nutshell!
Invisible Author : Last Essays, Christine Brook-Rose — a brilliant study of CBR's novels, by CBR (only interesting for CBR fans, though)
The common reader first series & The common reader second series, Virginia Woolf — compete with George Orwell for the status of most-quoted essays on English lit, still very much worth reading today, despite occasional snobbery
Mimesis, Erich Auerbach — literary high-wire dancing in about nine languages at once, without a safety net (or a library to refer to)
The intellectuals and the masses, John Carey — classic takedown of literary elitism

I love reading poets' memoirs (e.g. Mackay Brown) and autobiographies and bios (e.g. all roads lead to France or Blake ) too, in fact authors on authors or film/plays -- in fact i now realise i have quite a collection to read, but in recent years i resist them a bit sometimes to try and read more of the literature itself, when maybe they'd just feed each other. Not read diaries so much, a little (Sylvia Plath) oh and also Ted Hughes' letters. Lots of stuff on writing I don't seem to finish but dip into. I like Mary Oliver's books on writing poetry, amongst a few others. I did enjoy Henry James' book on Hawthorne. I think my experience of studying literature, letting it go early and having underperformed in some ways puts me off some secondary literature, though I have some, the one I always mean to make more progress with is Tolstoy or dostoyevsky, though there are others, as ever must just let it happen . . . there is a bit of me resents people telling me what stuff means, at least it depends on how they do that, their tone and attitude to their reader.

Q46: Books about books

I'm a little torn in my feelings about them. On the one side, as someone who reads critically, even professionally, and reviews, and generally works in and around books, I've never taken a literature course, or had any instruction on how to look at literature critically—so I have a love-hate relationship with those kinds of books on books. I own a few—John Gardner's The Art of Fiction and On Moral Fiction, Jane Smiley's Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel—but haven't read them. What I really want, deep down, is some instruction, to take a course on literary criticism, have someone hold my hand through the process. I have a friend who took an online course like that, which is probably my best bet. But I really mourn, a bit, not having done that in college or just after, when I was still young and impressionable.

Although I take that last bit back—I do really like Graywolf's The Art of... series, which is as much about writing as reading in my opinion. I've read a few of those and would gladly read the whole series.

Books about being a book-lover... I have a few, and I can relate, but I'm also really resistant to that narrative that reading is this intrinsically superior activity that makes you a better person. I think a lot of people probably imagine that I would relate because I don't really like TV, but I don't—that whole capital-B Bibliophile attitude rubs me the wrong way a lot of the time, and just because you love books doesn't mean you're of my tribe... eh, I know, I'm a big bucket of cheer.

Still, as above, I'm drawn to a few titles—looking at my shelves, I see I have Sven Birkerts's Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age, which is one of those "how the internet is wrecking our brains" books, but I like him; David Ulin's The Lost Art of Reading: Books and Resistance in a Troubled Time; Henry Hitchings's Browse: The World in Bookshops; and Alberto Manguel's Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions. And of course my friend James Mustich's 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die, which is just fun dipping.

I went through a fascination with the idea of book collecting in my 30s and read a bunch of Nicholas Basbanes books, but now that I know a few folks who do that it's about the last thing I'd ever want to get involved in.
And of course I read a lot about libraries :).

Stephen King's On Writing is very enjoyable. Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy still sticks with me. There are bits in Fr. Andrew Greeley's The Catholic Imagination about literature that are interesting.

Dorothy Parker's collected "Constant Reader" essays are entertaining. I used to enjoy he NYT book section on Sundays until they stated having authors review other authors.

I recently re-read all my college papers from graduate lit crit classes as I was burning life's detritus. It was very Euro-centric, and it would be interesting to learn about literary aesthetics in other human societies.

A Fabulous Opera By Tropic of Ideas - book reviews by Librarything people

I like books about books. Among the Gently Mad and others by Basbanes, which we read in library school. Also the beautiful and colorful Bibliophile: An Illustrated Miscellany and any mystery novels that have to do with libraries, rare books, bookshops, etc. I guess I am just crazy about books. Try to take away my books, and I would have to hurt you.

Q 46 - Books about books

I answered this, but then accidentally erased it before posting, so I'll try to remember what I said . . .

Yes, yes, yes. I have several bookshelves full of books that would fit this description. I hold these distinct from books about writing or writers --those are several other shelves.

I like fiction about books, but mostly I read non-fiction. Works such as the previously mentioned How to Read Literature Like a Professor and the like. I own a pile of books by John Sutherland and probably my favourites of his are the discussion of literary puzzles like Can Jane Eyre Be Happy? and Is Heathcliff a Murderer?. For my favourite classics, I like to pick up a Norton Classics Edition with all the extra essays. And I have shelves full of books about Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, the Brontes, and fairy tales.

I also like books about the physical aspect of books, for example Classic Penguin Cover to Cover.

Q46 Books about books....

I wouldn't usually read non-fiction about books for rest and relaxation, and I tend to be sceptical on the general quality of fiction about books because so much of it relies on bookish people wanting to buy stories about bookishness rather than any other merit.

However, because life enjoys producing ironies, the book currently on top of my To Read pile is The Other Bennet Sister, which is a retelling of the life of Mary Bennet from Pride and Prejudice, lol.

The last non-fiction about literature that I read was A Selection of Early Welsh Saga Poems (warning that there's no Modern Welsh or English translation of the poem texts, although the critical notes are in English).

Q42 Literary Travelling + Q46

Bonus quote from my recent reading of Sovietistan, on the author visiting a museum in Dostoyevsky's home in Semey, Kazakhstan, where he spent his political exile in Russian Imperial military service, 1854–1859:

"The art of recreating writers' homes is a Russian speciality. There are hundreds of such ghost homes throughout the empire, with furniture appropriate to the time, sometimes the writer's own. These hallowed shrines are generally guarded by stern women who rush to turn off the lights as soon as the literary pilgrims have left the room. The guide who showed me around the museum in Semipalatinsk was a large lady. She was so unfit that she had to stop and catch her breath between the displays, but she knew the writer's life and work inside out, minute by minute, sentence by sentence. She followed me, with contempt in her eyes, feeding me with details about Dostoyevsky's time in the town."

HELP: There is a book by someone who wrote about reading Emma when her mother was sick and saw the whole thing as a meditation on elder care. It's been a couple of years now since my mother died and I want to read it, but have forgotten the title. Anyone?

Books on books - I thoroughly enjoyed Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer. It's an excellent read - hugely enlightening. In fact, that reminds me that I need to buy a copy as I don't own it. It's a book you could re-read countless times and take something new from it each time.

>59 AlisonY:

100% agree on that one. Read it years ago and I think I'm due for a reread

>59 AlisonY: I've actually been wanting to read that one. I was going to say my library has it, but maybe I ought to get a copy (as in, twist my arm).

>61 lisapeet: Trust me - you need your own copy.

Just about to start A Pound of Paper by John Baxter

I also enjoyed The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee.

>58 nohrt4me2: Is that LT group "What's That Book?" still operating? They might have the answer.

>65 avaland: Thanks. The group is "Name that book," and I posted over there. I will also try a couple of Austen groups off LT. Thanks for the suggestion.

nvm

Didn't realize how many I have! I'll spread them out, some of these are very cool anthologies from the 20s

books of favorite reads

Readers Delight

a Lifetime Reading Plan by Clifton Fadiman has interesting synopsis and essays on what he considers the best to read. The Jury is out of course but I did find it interesting

Read With Me: a personal anthology selected by Thomas B Costain

Much Loved Books: Best Sellers of the Ages 1927 Jamrd Oonnel Bennet

edited for touchstones

memoirs of book selling

Sixpence House: Lost in a Town of Books about Hay on Wye in Wales

Kings English about the wonderful bookstore in salt lake city that saved my life while I was living there!

Yellow Lighted Bookshop famous san fransisco bookstore

Forty-add years in the literary shop James L Ford 1921

about book selling and collecting,

Used and Rare: travels in the book world Nancy and Lawrence Goldstone

Slightly Chipped: footnotes in Booklore

Book Row: an anecdotal and pictorial history of the antiquarian book trade

>57 spiralsheep: Loved Mary B, tho folks in my book group were Not Happy that the author dared fiddle with Janes character. I thought it fantastic take on the book

nvm

Do you read books about other books, books in general, or perhaps about reading?

YES!!I never thought about reading about reading till 88 Charing Cross rd and A Readers Delight

(the latter discusses his favorite books that were out of print or little known at the time. Was thrilled by Fine and Private Place, my first Peter Beagle, had me tagging several of these books I'd never heard of before. I made it my hobby to find and read as many as I could. THis was before the net; actually did ok, tho missed many that sounded fascinating)

Then I started noticing more books listing favorite reads and memoirs of childhood reading, and essays of reading by fav authors (Michael Dirda, EB White), and then the Basbanes books and the Goldstones and well I was off. I find reading these adds to my enjoyment of reading. I esp love some books I found from the 20s by owners of bookstores, Thomas Costain Read With Me was fascinating.

I am not big on criticism or discussion of lit or poetry, I find those rather dry. I much rather read compilations of reviews or essays. Im not big on books about authors and writing, but I do enjoy biographies of authos.

>66 nohrt4me2: Yeah, the hubby likes that group. I tried some creative searches on the web with no luck.

Q46 Books about books...etc

I love reading books about all the things mentioned in this question. Books about other books, groups of books, and authors.

I have read books on the literary themes of tragedy, the Gothic, but also generally on the art of translation, or subsets of books i.e. fairy tales, crime novels, science fiction, especially feminist SF. I like books about where books and reading fit into our culture, thus I've read books about bestsellers, and books in high/low culture.

I have read books about women's literary history (various eras),regional literature, and other studies on African lit, American lit, Russian lit, English lit, and Canadian lit (some general, others specific to a period). I also read books about specific poems, books, or authors. Sometimes short biographies of favorite or otherwise interesting authors. ...The list seems endless. Anyone is welcome to peruse my library under the tag 'literature.'

A sampling of some of my favorites:

The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination by Sandra M. Gilbert & Susan Gubar
A Literature of Their Own: From Charlotte Bronte to Doris Lessing by Elaine Showalter
How to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ
Literature in America: An Illustrated History by Peter Conn (from the 80s but interesting because he included art from the same periods he is discussing)
From Gorky to Pasternak: Six Writers in Soviet Russia by Helen Muchnic (from the 60s and read so long ago...probably somewhat dated now)
Deconstructing the Starships: Essays and Review by Gwyneth Jones
Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America by Alicia Ostriker
The popular American novel, 1865-1920 by Herbert Smith (from the 80s)
Survival: a thematic guide to Canadian literature by Margaret Atwood
Conversations with Octavia Butler (Literary Conversations Series) by Conseula Francis
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison
My life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead
Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction by Keith Oatley
History of the Gothic: American Gothic by Charles L Crow

So many of these were read before my LT era. If asked tomorrow for a list, I would probably give a very different list.

>70 cindydavid4: I was once sitting at a bus stop in Hereford waiting to go to Hay-on-Wye and was so bored that I was idly flipping a coin. An elderly lady sitting next to me began quoting the beginning of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead at me, which made us both laugh and was an excellent introduction, although I suggested that the H to H-o-W bus experience is more like Waiting for Godot.

>71 cindydavid4: Mary B seems to be a love it or hate it book, whereas even the rabid Janeites seem to approve of The Other Bennet Sister. I don't think I'm enough of a Pride and Prejudice fan to read both Mary fanfictions, and I've got Mansfield Park on my To (re-)Read pile for 2020 so I'll have read all Austen's published novels in quick enough succession to compare them (I'm especially interested in aspects of MP versus Persuasion).

>73 cindydavid4: I agree, the books about books/reading/writing/authors that I read do indeed enhance my reading of the books themselves.

>75 spiralsheep: I read both Mary B and The Other Bennet Sister and enjoyed them both. I think The Other Bennet Sister was my fave of the two. If anyone is interested in reading more about Jane Austen fans, Among the Janeites might be of interest. I also have read some graphic novel versions of Austen's work, although the print is really small. It is still fun to see how the artists have conceptualized the characters.

>77 LadyoftheLodge: Thank you for the recs for Mary B and Among the Janeites. While I might not immediately read another Austen fanfiction, I might enjoy reading about her fans. Books about people are more my speed than books about books. :-)

Hee so I spent several hours perusing through some of these older books and found myself struck by Much Loved Books :best sellers of the ages (1927) Essays of 60 books covering authors such as Stevensn, Burns, Irving, Austen, Bronte's, Shakespear, Moliere, Dumas, Chaucher, Hans Anderson are breifly described in essays that are informative and quite lovely to read and remarkably modern in thinking; he sees woman characters and women authors as equals, or at least with similiar minds and spirits that the men have. He talks lovingly and admirably about Jane Erye and Charlotte in her desperation to get her work recognized, how life changed after that book was published

It was a curious kind of success, partly grounded in revolution partly in sensation. In short while the book fired the hearts it also chilled the blood of our grandparents, The diffident woman from the moors ha been very deft-one wonders if she knew how much. She had written a social document, she had brougt a new heroine into English letters - a heroine little and plain like herself- but also had written a thriller. The test of the thrill is easy and decisive. I defy anybody to read in a lonely house at night certain passages of Jane Eyre and not heartily wish the family were home

Its been a while since I read through this and think I need to return to it.

>75 spiralsheep: Ill have to try The Other Bennet Sister. And btw I also went to Hay on Wye (which my yiddeshe mind keeps saying hay on rye). Loved it, esp the open shelves where you pay for the books with a piggy bank of sorts. Hope people are as trustworthy as they should be.

BTW the author of that book also wrote a book called Not even wrong about his young son who was diagnosed with autism during the writing of the first. Its rare to read a father's experience with a child with special needs, but he is so wonderful in his relationship with his mother and teachers and his child, doing whatever he can. I frequently recommend it to parents with autistic children as a support. off topic.

>74 avaland: Ive read The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination which led me to read The Wide Saragasso Sea as well as the yellow wallpaper

Also A Literature of Their Own: From Charlotte Bronte to Doris Lessing by Elaine Showalter way back when.

I've read lots of books about books, but thought I would mention the "puzzle" books of John Sutherland:

--Is Heathcliff a Murderer? Great Puzzles in Nineteenth-Century Fiction
--Can Jane Eyre Be Happy?
--So You Think you Know Jane Austen?
--So You Think you Know Thomas Hardy?
--Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet?
and more such titles from literary critic John Sutherland

Very entertaining and enlightening. Each book contains 15-20 "puzzles" or problems in various classic works. I sometimes disagree with his solutions/conclusions, but he's never dull. For Middlemarch fans, there's an awesome "genealogy chart" of the townspeople of Middlemarch in Is Heathcliff a Murderer?. He shows that every major character is related to at least one other character in the book, either by blood or marriage. I wish I had this chart when I first read Middlemarch.

books about the love of reading

Ex Libris

Book by Book

Readings Essays and Literary Entertainments

ruined by reading: a life in books

For the love of books

Where books fall open: a readers anthology of wit and passion

Passion for books: a book lover's treasury of stories, essays, humor, lore and lists on collecting reading borrowing lending caring for and appreciating books

88 Charing Cross Road

Books about Children's books

Journeys Through Bookland :a new and original plan for reading applied to the world's best literature for children Charles H Sylvester 10 volumes! I only have the first one. 1922

Don't tell the grownups: subversive children's literature

Boys and Girls forever: Children's classics from Cinderella to Harry Potter

Children's Literature A reader's history from Aesop to Harry Potter I detect a theme here! Actually this book is really dry which is a pity; good for researching I suppose

The child that books built

How to be a heroine: or what Ive learned from reading too much

>49 jjmcgaffey: Oh I loved Professor and the Madman, about the writing of the oxford dictionary. The start of reading Winchester that hasn't stopped

edited for touchstones

>52 lisapeet: Books about being a book-lover... I have a few, and I can relate, but I'm also really resistant to that narrative that reading is this intrinsically superior activity that makes you a better person.

Huh never thought of that. Read lots of these and always saw them as this one's experience with books and how they effected their lives; never really saw the superior attitude. but ymmv :)

>63 baswood: I have that book and started to read it, and it just didn't take. Let me know how you like it, might give it another try

Just heard about The Book Collectors, about a secret library in war-torn Syria. How the Irish Saved Civilization, Thomas Cahill's entertaining but somewhat fantastical account of Irish book making in the so-called Dark Ages, was mentioned in the review. Both would qualify for inclusion in this thread.

>52 lisapeet: just saw this and thought of you "shelf-right-eous adj The feeling if superiority about ones' bookself.

>80 cindydavid4: I can recommend The Other Bennet Sister for meshing well with Austen's written world without trying too hard to imitate to imitate the original author's style - Mary is given her own voice. I also, however, recommend waiting for the paperback as I know avid readers often read while wandering about and the 660 page hardback is like carrying gym weights around!

I would add a recommendation of Pride and Prometheus by John Kessel. He brings together Mary Bennett and Victor Frankenstein (& the Creature). Here's a review in Vox https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/2/28/17054144/pride-and-prometheus-john-kessel-....

>91 avaland: oh my - Im not big on the Jane vampire/zombie books, but this looks interesting! Thx

um didn't we do this a few weeks back?

>94 cindydavid4: That was August (Q36), so much has happened since then... :-)

Back to Q46 for a moment:

Alison’s mention of Francine Prose in >59 AlisonY: caught my eye — I don’t think I’ve read any of her books, but I had her name lodged in my mind for some other reason (I think I must have read a magazine article or a review by her recently). So I read Reading like a writer, which I enjoyed and which comes with a fantastic reading-list — the 20 or 30% I’ve read make me want to go and dig out the rest. I even re-read one of the stories she discusses (Kleist’s Marquise von O) there and then.

But it made me reflect on something else not mentioned above: why do so many books-about-books have minor variations on the same cover design? Rather ironic in the case of Prose, given that so much of the book is about how to detect and avoid clichés...

I have come and gone a bit more from my thread this last year or so in dialogue with this. I tend to just come here these days. I tend ot only put books up when I have read them now. I do feel with the emerging writerness a bit more cautious of what I may say, yet, again try and nay say that but take care, maybe it is too late and I was too naive. But I believe more in love. There are reasons to take care - but to try and do so with love and positivity.

Sometimes I look for certain groups and threads on here, but tend to miss ones that I might be intersted in. I don't do it as much now. I liked having my books listed, but it is a bit of a mess on last few years of books now. It was my homepage for years. I was on a certain other catalguing site but don't use it, I like LTs more low key approach somehow.

I miss some, quite a few, people who have moved on in various ways, but I have learned fromn them and their threads and enthusiasms and some recommendations. I go hot and cold on keeping up with others, but I do try and it struck me recently when someone was recommending a book to someone that I knew all about how they'd already read it, I am in the conversation. It must be a place that I get something from to make some of the poste I make.

I like the treasure hunts of recent years and that as a prmpt to explore the site in ways I may be letting go of. I like reading others' opinions on books, and the reviews (it's just myself I don't like so much for that) and the many threads out there now. I do a bit of other social media, not as relevant to this. Somehow this place has felt respectful in some ways, I've dared to express my feelings for books more here and it has usually been helpful, though sometimes it is muddled getting there (Housman even now maybe). I like that I squirrel my comments away here that a few people seem to follow and some come and go, no big deal as it shouldn't be.

edited 21st nov as we have a new question and no one else seems ot be saying much to this one.

Q46

for what it’s worth I’ve spent the last ten years pursuing the list of books in Beowulf on the Beach : What to Love and What to Skip in Literature's 50 Greatest Hits by Jack Murnighan. My Dante, Shakespeare and Nabokov reading this year are all part of my pursuit of this list. (I ignored the “what to skip” comments)

>94 cindydavid4: Oops! You are correct as Mark notes. Apologies to all. Too many distractions lately. I failed to delete the notes from my work document (and clearly also failed to check the list of past questions). Will post another....

>100 avaland: No, admit it, you were just checking to see how many of us were awake, weren't you?
I'm sure we all appreciate you taking the time to collate and post these questions, Lois — Thank you!

Q 48 Libraries:

In my case it's been intermittent: I've always used libraries for study- and work-related reading, of course, but for private recreational reading I mostly went over to book-buying during the years when I was working full-time. Because I could, and because there was a lot of competition for those few hours when the library was open and I wasn't working. Since retirement I've cut down book-buying and used our city library a lot more, although that has fallen off in 2020, for obvious reasons.

I really enjoy the sense of endless possibility you get in a library, the idea that you could just pick a book off the shelf and find out all about hovercraft, or Heidegger, or hypnotism, or something else you weren't even thinking about when you came in. That still makes me feel the same way I felt when I was seven years old in our little local branch library in the former Victorian schoolroom.

I have fond memories of the library at my secondary school, a very messy accretion of stuff from different periods and various bequests where you could always be sure of finding things that had no business to be in a modern school library. And for actual reading, one of the younger English teachers had got away with ordering what seemed like pretty much the whole Penguin Modern Classics catalogue to create a "senior fiction library" full of sex, drugs, and more sex.

I've used both the Bodleian and the Dutch KB, which are fabulous libraries, of course, but as an ordinary user you feel very intimidated by them, and I never dared to ask for anything except the references I had on my little list.

There are plenty of libraries I've visited as a tourist and would love to go back to with full climbing and browsing rights, including several Oxford colleges, Trinity College Cambridge, Mafra, the John Rylands in Manchester, St Gallen Abbey, ...

Not visited (yet): Abbotsford, the London Library, the new British Library, the Library of Congress, ...

Fiction featuring libraries: https://www.librarything.com/tag/fiction,+libraries
That's so easy to get wrong, so many authors have been seduced by Borges into horrid clichés of the Harry Potter/Ruiz Zafón/Jasper fforde variety. Ugh! Even Terry Pratchett's library doesn't entirely get away from that. (Obviously I don't count Borges among the clichés)

Examples I've enjoyed would include Possession (much of which is set in the basement of the old British Library), The British Museum is falling down, Auto-da-fé (a private library, but an unforgettable one), Less than angels (Pym's sardonic look at the anthropology library where she worked), Ali Smith's Public library and other stories (obviously...)! And no doubt many more.

Question 48:

Libraries have always played a huge role in my reading life. Growing up in a rural community miles and miles away from anything that could remotely be characterized as a town the only thing we had was our small (less than 100 kids) school library. Every bit of it was donated, we didn't even have a complete set of encyclopedias. All our papers had multiple sources not because of some great effort on our part but simply a case of our reality.

Our little Library was our link to the rest of the world, that and a fuzzy pop radio station we sometimes got. And Mrs. White did her absolute best to expand our library beyond its tiny collection with a liberal use of the inter-library loan system. It was slow and mostly unreliable but it meant everything we heard about or picked up on was within a theoretical possibility of being read. It was were we learned to love the written word, something we could never get from the bookstores that looked down on dusty kids with old and out dated lists of books. I think this were my ambivalence to bookstores in general comes from. They're necessary and part of the ecosystem but honestly I couldn't care less about their plight. For us country bumpkins Amazon opened a whole new world of possibilities without the hassle of 8-hour bike ride down dirt roads just to find disdain for outdated list and asile mathematics.

After college going to the library was next to impossible, the I have requires a lot of travel so I drifted away and for a time bought a lot of books. Now that I read almost exclusively on a Kobo ereader I borrow almost everything I read. I still buy the books that I think I'll love or have had an impact, but a large majority comes the library system I love.

As for visiting libraries I want to visit them all! Big ones and small ones! I make it a habit to visit local libraries on my travels and I'm always impressed with the care and local flare that librarians put into their institutions. There are great cathedrals to reading for sure but I think I appreciate the small ones more.

Q48

I thought that other question sounded familiar but I was busy a while ago.

Anyway, libraries - always used them, but on and off at times. In the early days we'd go around my area's local libraries. An early memory was trying to read books about Pooky Rabbit, of which i saw several in a library once and only took one. However, I have never seen the other books since, and still quite wish i could bump into them as I think I liked Pooky rabbit (I think his name was).

I have an image of librarians as homely people, sometimes in their clark kent or wonder woman disguise from glamour and hotness, who should recognise an avid reader and become a firm friend. However that has never really happened to me. These days they often seem to need to lose an air of bureaucracy -- or maybe just ahve to work so hard (like us all) conversation is difficult (though recent, hmm since I was more Kat, experiences in a uni library have been better). Somehow whilst in classes I was known as a good reader in libraries I was poften treated as not. It had undoubtedly been complicated by gender - there ws a guy at a local library who seemed impressed by a book I loaned on interlibrary loan but we somehow never really got talking and that felt a bit odd, his interest came over as a bit teacherly and I was in my 30s and having just got my MA wasn't thinking it unusual for me to be getting that book. At other times when I wasn't working that seemed to bring judgements in some ways, when I was in my 20s. I did spend a lot of time trying to be invisible too.

I like working in libraries, I like(d) to revise in them - I'm not sure I ever have but I could see myself writing a poem in a library, maybe. As a trans person I like being in a library, should be a safe space amongst a sort of silent inclusion that can be there, but I don't lurk in them. Maybe they will open up to me more now . . . should we ever get back in.

As an undergraduate the annoying thing about libraries was how social it was - often I'd go an sit in some strange subject area where people knew me less. In part that was as I read half a shelf of books on gender topics without taking them out (librarians being interested in what you take out can be a bad thing in certain situations), and people often seemed to want to know what I was reading (not just nosiness, but an entire year group of historians with the same reading list you sometimes had to know what was available and when). I enjoyed that gender reading. Though there were things in short loan i did not dare take out and have on my record. One day someone surprised me and definitely thought i was behaving suspiciously.

I'm reading van Gogh's Ear and noticed a comment by Bernadette Murphy thanking her parents for things and her father for teachign her how to use a library properly. I still feel I don't, but have a hodge podge knowledge - research scares me, I avoided using the old British Museum reading room for my undergrad dissertation as I didn't feel up to it (and my project did not excite me, a bad choice). I once tried to do a bit of research from not so old newspapers and was given such a grilling in a local library as to why I should want to do this I never went back, very uninclusive - and in a strange tone, I was a young man and he seemed to treat it as strange I could read nevermind the idea I might be quite good at it. Being on meds sometimes does not help how you seem to others, nor help break barriers sometimes in conversations. Or being a fit young man, clearly not a reader type then. I don't judge people's reading on their appearance (I think), nor expect anything less than what I can do. Maybe it was a gender thing, I don't know. I'm full of admiration for Murphy's amateur research (so called).

I like university libraries. I don't like so much the way libraries now seem to target certain things, have to be modern somehow, or like some version of a book shop. Give me an old library, silent, motes of dust in the sunlight and the smell of books and study - and a place with respect happening, friendly yet also able to leave me alone (and not expectign me to need help I don't need), maybe a green nearby with a good cafe for breaks and reading there or conversation. But trying less to be their version of what they think you need them to be and more just themselves to which your reading and social skills can adapt to, no fuss, oh and actually have proper books and not just best sellers, not a view of havign to fit everyoen to the average reading age) not a classics section tucked away or available from some store off site.

I took a leaf from Eco's view of your own library and now have laods of books I've not read. I do like The Name of the Rose, which is a bit beyodn those others in Borges shade, in fact in a way it includes his shade. I saw a fairly recent film about a librarian that I liked, in London, about her as a writer i think, forgot its name, struck me as a London Amelie in a way.

I used to travel a lot with my ex, and while he was negotiating or arguing a case in court, I would wander the downtown area of various cities until I found a library to hang out in. Hours of fun!

I was quite overcome when I donated all my mother's books to our old hometown library. I got my first library card there at age 6, and when I told the librarian, she gave me a tour because it wasn't busy that day. So many nice renovations, but still the old things I remembered from 60 years ago--the doll collection, the art on the mezzanine, the quiet room with the beautiful window.

If I manage to live through the current political crisis and the pandemic, I might drive back up there for a day or two every month.

Book that includes a library: Zafon's Shadow of the Wind

>101 avaland: Q48 Libraries

If libraries didn't exist when I was a child I wouldn't have had any access to books outside school (and even then not much because we often shared copies in class). Luckily, I've always lived near excellent libraries and my parents spent some of their rare non-working time making sure I could visit our local library once every couple of weeks. These multiple loans plus schoolbooks satisfied even my avid reading.

I use my local library less for books now, although I regularly use several other facilities there, but am still a regular borrower and vocal supporter of good community-focused libraries.

My most recent loans: The Gran Tour, and Sovietistan.

My current loan: The Other Bennet Sister.

My reserved books: One Day I Will Write About This Place, and Changes: A Love Story, and The Border - A Journey Around Russia.

#48 Libraries

When I was in school, I used the libraries a lot. I was buying some books but most of my reading was either from the city library (my school did not have a library) or later a mix between it and the English-language library in my high school (Peace Corps donation - mostly old books but great for one's English).

Then I moved to a much bigger city for school (and then work) and things got a bit complicated. It is not that that there are no libraries in Sofia but they had weird opening hours and were way too far away from where I lived and went to school (my faculty was away from the main campus and the city center where all the libraries were). Plus with Bulgaria in the middle of a really bad economic crisis, the libraries were not getting new books and everyone who could was selling their old ones so it was easier to buy (and exchange with friends). We had a special technical library in the faculty which had the older books one needed... but none of the new stuff.

Which is why when I moved to the States, I did not think of the library for a long time - it never crossed my mind. Plus I like owing books -- so I just bought what I wanted to read (and then some). Until some time in 2015 I decided to explore the local libraries (don't even remember why but possibly visited with a friend who needed something) -- and I realized that I have access not to one but to two different library systems -- and I started using them a lot. I still buy a lot of books but it seems that I read mostly library books (772 of them as of this morning (https://www.librarything.com/catalog/AnnieMod&tag=library&collection=-1 apparently). So these days I am there every Saturday -- or almost every Saturday anyway -- even in these crazy days, my local branch never closed the drive-through.

I have always used public libraries. It was a weekly family ritual to visit the library for new books, then spend some time in the park across the street or stop at "Grandma" Topliff's house to deliver her new books, where I was introduced to Star Trek and Big Valley reruns.

I'd say over half of my reading comes from the library, but I do buy books I think I'll reread and books that I can't get at my library. It also helps that I work in a public library, so I have access to the stacks and see what's new coming into the building.

My most recent purchase is Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi. My library owns copies, but I'm planning on participating in a group read in January and February and don't want to worry about due dates.

I have always used libraries. I can remember as a kid, maybe 11 or 12, walking home from the library with my nose stuck in a book, but somehow always knowing when it was time to look up to cross a street.

And I can remember a librarian "tsk-tsk"-ing me in about 6th grade because I was reading books from the "adult" room.

During college I probably only used the library for study or research. I think after college I used the library less and purchased books more. But as soon as my kids were born, we brought home piles and piles of kids' books all the time. And with a tighter family budget, library books just made sense for everyone.

My biggest library "drought" was probably this year when our libraries here were closed between March and June. I had to resort to my TBR of mostly used books bought at (where else?) library book sales. I do buy a few new books each year, mostly from independent booksellers. I have never bought from Amazon, and as long as libraries and independent stores remain, I hope I never have to.

Q 48: Have you always used libraries? Have there been times when you didn’t have access to a library? Do you get your reading now exclusively from libraries these days or do you sometimes buy books? Do you have specific memories around libraries or a favorite library? Are there libraries you would like to visit? Tell us about your relationship with libraries.

Bonus: And while you are thinking about this, have you read fiction that features a library?

I adore libraries. But I'm at a stage in my life when I don't use them much. This is because I also love buying books, and I've collected massive TBR piles, so I'm always trying to read my own books now. At some stage I'm sure I'll go back to being a frequent library user.

I also like to visit libraries when I travel, although I prefer the museum-type ones over the more functional ones. I mean, we did visit the public library in Shaftesbury, England, but it was 2009 and we needed to use the internet. But if I'm travelling somewhere near a noted library-museum, I make a point of visiting. My favourites are the Morgan Library in New York City, the new British Library in London, and the St Gallen Abbey Library in Switzerland.

My favourite library novels are The Librarian (Beinhart) and The Incident Report (Baillie).

Q47: How long have you been on LT and what brought you here? What is your history of usage/participation on the site? How might you describe yourself here on LT: activist? enthusiast? a lurker?…something else? Are you well-traveled on the site or do you just have a few places you call "home" here? What are the things you like best about LT? are there any negatives?

Are you on other social media sites? What do you feel you personally get from being on LT?

My home page tells me that I first became a member of LT on June 8, 2006. I must have read about it from somewhere, as no one I knew personally at the time told me about it, but I wasn't active until I read a NYT article, A Cozy Book Club, in a Virtual Reading Room, about LT the following March. I first joined the "What Are You Reading Now?" group, and made friends with Akeela (akeela) and DB (deebee1), who encouraged me to join the 75 Books group in 2009, and I joined Club Read later that year.

Until early this year I was far more active in the 75 Books group than in Club Read, but the former group has become too large and, sadly, hostile, so I'll make this group my home for the foreseeable future.

Being a member of LT has greatly expanded my reading horizons, thanks especially to at least a dozen Club Read members, past and present. More than that, I've met roughly 60 LTers in person in eight different countries (US, England, Scotland, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Portugal and Germany), several of whom have become amongst my closest personal friends, including Rachael (FlossieT), the first LTer I met, while I was on holiday in London in 2009.

As an African American, the biggest negative about LT is its striking lack of racial diversity. Of its over two million members I've only met a dozen fellow AfrAms, none of whom seem to be active anymore, and no members of the Latinx community. This lack of fellow minority voices became an issue for me in the 75 Books group earlier this year, and it was a direct cause of me deciding to leave that group for good. I've decided to explore other online reading groups with a greater Black presence, namely Black Men Read and the Literary Fiction by People of Color group in Goodreads, to supplement my activity in this group. However, I still find more stimulation in Club Read than in any online format, and I'll gladly stay active here, as its smaller size, thoughtful and open minded reviews and comments, and less chatter makes it an ideal group for me to focus my participation in.

ETA: I'm also very active on Facebook, as it allows me to keep up with old classmates from undergraduate school, medical school and residency, and stay in touch with childhood friends and former LT friends who are no longer active here.

>111 kidzdoc: Is there something about LT or some groups here that discourage participation by people of color? You mentioned hostility in one group.

>112 nohrt4me2: I wouldn't say that LT discourages participation by people of color, but the fact remains that there are essentially no active people of color in this forum. The hostility I mentioned is a different issue altogether, and not necessarily related to race.

>111 kidzdoc: I'm sorry to hear that could happen on LT and as to inclusion. I usually have a view that it is quite a small number of people on LT in 'net terms, I have sometimes seen people from my region but very few and no one really near me in my varying locations, when I was there. But two million still percentage-wise should be inclusive. Long may CR be as it is and a positive place for inclusion.

>114 tonikat: Yes! I feel very comfortable in this group, and will continue to make Club Read my primary LT home.

>111 kidzdoc: I don't have any answer for that, not that you were asking for one. Readerville was also seriously majority white, though there were a few folks of color trickling in toward the end. I don't know if that's a leftover function of older/legacy online groups, the general tenor, or what. I find that to be a detriment too, though I don't know how that would be addressed... this place runs on word of mouth, I guess, and I don't think I've ever suggested to anyone I know other than ex-Readerville folks that they come by. I'm not very rah-rah that way, much as I enjoy my own time here.

Q 48 — I just came across a reference to Casanova, which made me wonder if his memoirs might be counted as the most famous autobiography written by a librarian? Admittedly, he was only a librarian at the time he wrote them, not during most of the experiences he describes...

>116 lisapeet: Thanks, Lisa. I do want to make it clear that I am extremely happy to be a member of LibraryThing, my good experiences overall have vastly outweighed the negative ones, and I have not had any problems with anyone in Club Read. My reading and personal lives have been indescribably and permanently enriched by joining LT in 2006, and this group is literally one of the best things that has ever happened to me, and it represents the best of what the Internet should be, IMO.

I also don't blame LT or its creators one bit for the lack of diversity here. As you said, word of mouth and the occasional article about online groups like LT and Goodreads are essential to recruiting new members. I've talked up LT repeatedly to my non-LT book loving friends and colleagues at work, including African American mates, but only one of my friends, a Chinese-American physician assistant, has joined, to my knowlege, whereas several of these friends are members of Goodreads. I would also say that the members of Club Read and 75 Books read far more broadly than my non-LT book loving friends, and I am vastly more likely to get good book recommendations here than elsewhere.

Coming in late to this one, I fear. I really have been terrible about keeping up with anything here on CR other than my own thread.

But! Libraries! I have thoughts about libraries!

Libraries were a huge part of my childhood. I sometimes like to say that I basically grew up in libraries, and it's not all that much of an exaggeration. My mother would regularly take my sister and me to check out picture books when we were small, and as soon as I was able to go on my own -- something that was considered acceptable at a much younger age in those days than it would be now -- it became my favorite place to go. I'd regularly check out the maximum number of books they would let me, as often as they'd let me.

(A possibly amusing story: When I was in the first grade, I lived in a very small town. Well, that probably gives the wrong impression. It was a very small municipality in the middle of a great sprawling suburban landscape. But the town itself was so small that the school library and the public library were the same library. When we were taken into the library during school hours, we were told that, for reasons which were never explained to me, first graders were only allowed to check out a small number of books. I want to say three. I think the maximum for everyone else was ten. Well, one day after school I went up to the checkout desk with a big armful of books. The librarian asked me what grade I was in, and when I told her, predictably, she reminded me that first graders weren't allowed to check out that many. But I was prepared for this! Aha, I told her, but I wasn't here as a first grader, using the library in my classroom time. I was here as a member of the general public using the public library, and as such I was entitled to the same number of books as anyone else! I got a very bemused look at that, as I recall. But they let me check out all my books, and never gave me a hard time about it after that.)

I loved libraries so much as a kid that I volunteered to work in the school library for a while in middle school, which was really nice. (If nothing else, it let me hang around with adults for a while during the day instead of with middle schoolers, which was something of a relief. Also, the librarian actually asked my opinions about which books to order!) And my first job, in college, was working on the campus library, which might also have been very nice if it weren't for my jerk of a boss. Alas, that one didn't exactly end well. But it didn't put me off enjoying the campus library.

These days, I don't really use public libraries. When the subject comes up my not-really-joking comment is always that I don't need them because I have my own. The truth is, I have so many unread books that I think I can't possibly justify going to the library instead of reading the books I already own... so, because I'm not using the library, when I want a book, I inevitably buy it instead... which means I have even more owned books to read... which means I feel even less like I can justify going to the library. Yes, I am aware that this is completely insane, but I have gotten a really awesome home library out of it all, so it could be worse!

Even though I don't use public libraries any more, I still feel a deep-seated fondness for them, and believe in supporting them. So I regularly frequent the Friends of the Library sales (for a while I was even a member of the Friends of the Library just so I could get early access to the sales) and always vote for the bond issues asking for funding for libraries. And I still have incredibly fond memories of the libraries of my youth. All I have to do is to imagine the way they smelled, and I'm transported back there, and it's wonderful.

>148 nohrt4me2: libraries & me

Back in the day, our town was a collection of little villages. We were in one, the public library was in another ten miles away. My mother did not drive, my father often had to work weekends when the factory was closed. I never saw the inside of this library. I read whatever was in the house. When I was in 3rd grade I attended a brand new school which had no library...yet. They set up one on the back wall of the kindergarten and my mother volunteered to do all the typing of the card catalog (three cards each) and I came along to "help" (I read and shelved books). Over a few years I read every book on that back wall.

Ah, but once I hit high school....we gals (3 of us) met before the first bell in the library every morning and I made much use of the books there. And I was allowed to take the public bus into Portland to the big library to do research. I still can hear my footsteps echoing in the cavernous room where the card catalog was.

As a bit older teen, I also used this library as the excuse to do other things. Most notable was the 'trip to the library' where we actually visited my boyfriend's brother & his roommate, both art students and drug users (they turned out the lights to have us 'feel" their rubber cement sculptures).

I left home at 19 and there have been many libraries since that time in many towns and a few small cities. I made sure my children did not suffer a lack of books nor access to a library (yay for library book sales and yard sales!) When I went to work for the bookstore in '97 I had five library cards in my purse, and was also a prolific user of the interlibrary loan service.

But, like Bragan, I don't use public libraries anymore for my pleasure reading, but support them otherwise. Years of advanced reader copies, and access to 'shopping' through publisher catalogs in the bookstore changed my habits...a kid in the candy store, so to speak. I think those early years of not having enough books -- book insecure, I call it---has stayed with me as I like to have lots of books physically around me.

I still use libraries for historical research related to ancestry so I have been in many cool, mostly smallish libraries. And I was slated to oversee an ancestry-related help group at one of the local libraries to begin in March of this year, and well, you can guess what happened to that.

>120 avaland: I enjoyed your story! And, yes, girls who frequented libraries could always use a "trip to the library" as cover for, um, side tracks to more hands-on forms of education. Fond memories!

QUESTION 48: LIBRARIES AND YOU

I love everyone's library stories!

As for me... oy, where to start on this one. I write about libraries for a living, so I pretty much eat, sleep, and breathe libraries as a subject. I'm always thinking of things through a library lens—how does this or that relate to libraries, how could it potentially be repurposed as a library program, do I know the director or someone who works in the library where other news is happening to get a comment, etc. etc. I believe fiercely in the power of libraries for the good (though I cover a surprising lot of negative library news)—they're the last truly socialist entities in this country and they need to be propped up with all our might.

I grew up in a very bookish household, and both my parents were big believers in the value of libraries. We lived overseas when I was first learning to read and I don't think there were the equivalents of public libraries I could use, but as soon as we got back to the States, when I was six, I got my own library card and one of my folks would take me every week to the wonderful Princeton Public Library, where I would check out my allowed stack of books—ten? I remember being asked by the librarian to put some back every so often because I'd exceed my limit. It was a great library with excellent collections, and I was able to dive down into the subjects that interested me. At age six that was probably dogs, horses, and fantasy stories, but as I got older my interests branched out and I never outgrew my love of digging into a topic, researching, triangulating information—as well as getting good at picking unknown novels off the shelves based on covers and blurbs that I would like.

I've always had a library card, everywhere I lived. Once my son could read I got him one too, and have lots of happy memories of hanging out with him while he did homework in one NYPL branch or another, as well as picking him out books for a long time—often he'd read them and then I would, and we'd have our own little dinnertime book club of two.

My library usage fell off for a while when I began doing editorial work and suddenly had all the books I could read, but it ramped up when I was working in Butler Library at Columbia University and the quickest way to the elevator to my office was through the fiction stacks—browsing was just too easy. And their interlibrary loan program was so slick that I could get any book I wanted really quickly, so it lit that fire again.

After the Columbia job contract ran out, I was a bit at loose ends—it was 2010, not the greatest time to find editorial work—so I did what I'd half-heartedly dreamed of ever since an epiphany in the wonderful old library in Hoboken, NJ, where I lived for a while (the town, not the library)—that maybe I should go to library school. So I did, and though I never ended up actually working in a library afterward, it led to my current job and I couldn't be happier about that.

Working at Library Journal and reading so many book reviews also sparked my need to read outside my own collection, so I began using the library again for books I didn't manage to get hold of through work. And once NYPL debuted its SimplyE ereader interface I was hooked—it's really intuitive, easy to browse, and great for instant gratification (or the fun kind of delayed gratification, where I'd put a hold on something and it would pop up a few weeks later, surprise!). I'm fortunate that the system has deep pockets as far as its e-collection goes, so I haven't been wanting for anything I've been craving during the lockout (not that I don't have shelves and shelves of unread books here at home, but there's something nice about being able to scratch an itch guilt-free and leave Amazon out of the mix entirely).

>121 nohrt4me2: Indeed! I think we probably did not appreciate the rubber cement sculpture as it might have been appreciated when it was being made (sniff, sniff; if you catch my drift). My boyfriend's brother crashed out of art school tripping on mescaline not long after.

>122 lisapeet: I love that your quickest route was through the fiction stacks!

>122 lisapeet: A good public library is one reason to move to a town. I am yearning to get back to the university library to wander he stacks!

I share the common attitude toward libraries as wonderful places where one discovers books. My Mom would take me to the library with her when I was a child. I could get her to take out grown-up science fiction books for me, so I wasn't confined to the kids' section. Until junior high school, most of my reading came from libraries, both school and public. When I switched to buying paperbacks, I still went to the library quite often. Even though I now buy most of what I read, I always try to frequent the local town library and check books out, to help justify their budget, or so I imagine.

Library memories: in the summer between high school and college, I had a job in the town library - junior library page, staffing the circulation desk and shelving books. That was 1969, and July 20th, the day of the first Moon landing, was a Sunday. The senior library page pulled rank so he could stay home and watch, making me work that day. I brought in a radio, and the reference librarian and I heard "...the Eagle has landed" through its tinny speaker. Had to turn it way down so that the old lady in the genealogy section wouldn't glare at us. I think we had only one other patron that afternoon; everyone else was home watching TV.

NOTE: I'm only planning to post two more questions. One now and one in early December. We will have a bit of a break before SassyLassy resumes come first of the year. If you have suggestions for future questions you can direct them to her.

?48 Libraries

Im sure Ive told this story a few times on LT so bear with me. When I was a little girl my parents owned a deli across the street from the main library and the city museum. They couldn't get a sitter for me on Saturdays so I was send off to cross the street (! I was 5!) to spend my day at the library. Priscilla McCloud was the children's librarian and she took me under her wing. I was just starting to read and she'd encourage me to learsn more by handing me books that were just a tad hard for me. She let me check out as many books as I wanted, and was always there when I had questions. I remember one day I was chasing a boy around tables (or he was chasing me) and she unceremoniously lead us both out the door. I was soooo upset and ashamed, and cried all the way back to the store. Later went to her and apoligized. (I really do suspect my dad giving her free pastrami sandwiches on the side, for caring for me.)When we lost the store I lost track of her.

When I went to HS she transferred to the branch library about a mile from my house. Again she gave me suggestions, helped learn how to research, and helped expand my reading, When I went off to college I made it a point to visit on breaks. Lost track of her after I moved out of the state. Someone told me that she knew her, and that she had dementia. Always hoped she knew how much she meant to me, coz Ill never forget her.

I continued using libraries wherever I lived but discovered bookstores with my dad, and soon I was hooked with my own books. Still am actually tho I do enjoy browsing our city branch, and always go to their sales.

When the pandemic hit, the libraries were the first to shut down. I was horrified - libraries were a god send to me in those hot summers when we had nothing to do. Cant imagine not having them. But I guess kids are going online more so its not a big idea. Whats funny, or sad, is that the libraries are still closed curbside only, but the bars and beauty salons are open. ah mia

Q 49 I do not like crime novels at all. I prefer mysteries (tho don't even care for those that much), Anything by Ruth Wendell or McGrath, who both write more psycological thrillers, are more my taste. Kate Atkinson has moved from gen lit to adding more crime; they aren't bad but I still prefer her early books. Ian Pears wrote what I thought one of the best crime/mystery/hf books in Stones Fall which I have reread several times. I don't like things that are formulatic or with gory details. Life is scary enough without adding more in my reading

>128 avaland: QUESTION 49: CRIME FICTION

My initial reaction was that I don't read crime fiction but, of course, that's not wholly true. Back when Lindsey Davis' Falco series, set in the Roman Empire under Vespasian, was new and pioneering a distinctive form of cross-genre historical mystery fiction I read the first few of those, but I stopped when they became less realistic and more formulaic and stooped to the serial killer targeting women trope.

I've also read science fiction novels that cross genre into detective fiction, with my favourite being the occasional Lois Bujold Vorkosigan saga novel in which Miles turns detective, although Bujold is best at more psychological thrillers/adventures in my experience.

Recently during my project of reading at least one book from every European Union member country before the UK officially pressed the self-destruct button, I read a true crime book, Ballad of the Whiskey Robber which turned out to be an excellent introduction to disastrous post-Communist economics in Hungary and also surprisingly funny, albeit written in bad pastiche crime fiction style prose.

49 - I've only read The Oxford Murders since I read Hannibal which really put me off (though may be more horror than crime?). But recently been thinkiong of trying some of the several I have that have been recommended and accumulated in those years and that it may be a good way to vary my diet (better than how Hannibal varied his). What are they you say? There is the first Montalbano, maybe Simenon. Also the next Wallander (yes I read one of them, I forgot) and Kirstin Ekman's Blackwater having enjoyed the very different The Forest of Hours. And a friend's recommendation Evil Crimes by Michael Hambling. All of which should vary my usual diet and may help that sometime stuckness. There is SF too on that.

I have edited the question title so as to make clear 'crime fiction' includes mysteries.

I admit that my interest switch turns to "off" when I see the words "police procedural."

But I probably read more crime stories than I think. To wit:

There's usually crime in the Stephen King books I've read. Mr. Mercedes comes to mind, but he was such a repellent character that I didn't want to read the rest of the trilogy.

Alias Grace is about an unsolved crime, and there was a really good series made from Atwood's novel.

I really enjoyed Caleb Carr's The Alienist and Angel of Darkness, and I see he has another Kreizler book out, Surrender, New York.

I read all the Brother Cadfael books hoping there would be more Cadfael backstory. They were kind of disappointing. I probably would have liked The Name of the Rose, which is pretty much a crime drama when all is said and done, had it not received so much hype as a Great Work of Literature by an Absolutely Brilliant Writer.

Libraries
I grew up overseas, so library access was minimal to non-existent - but my parents were/are readers and kept me well-supplied with books. One school did have a real library - one of my few memories from there is when the teacher blocked me from going to the library with the class because I (having finished my work) was over in the book corner reading and didn't get up to get into line with the others fast enough. Hmph. Not a great school - fortunately I was only there for a year and a bit.

When we got back to the States...I'm sure there was a library where we first landed, but I don't remember it - nor the school library. Once we settled into our proper house, the library (the biggest branch - not as big as the main library, but huge compared to most of the branches) was literally a block away. I spent a lot of time there, and in my high school library (also large and well-stocked). Like others, I ran into book limits. I also read so many books for a summer reading program that they didn't believe me, and questioned me about each book - since I had in fact read all of them (that summer), I could prove I knew them. Hmph again.

I have cards for...I think it's eight libraries, at the moment. I seldom check out paper books these days; partly because most of the libraries are quite a distance from me (one in my town, the next nearest is a half-hour drive each way) so returning the books is a pain, partly because I'm reading more ebooks anyway. Though there are books that only exist on paper, so I still get some.

I have a _lot_ of owned-but-unread books in the house; it's a perennial project for me, trying to reduce the volume. The library book sale doesn't help - three-day sale, on Sunday it's $5 for a banker's box of books. I usually came home with 80 or so books that had looked mildly interesting, then they sit... This year, without the sale, I haven't added as many books as usual, though I haven't read a huge number either. Working on it.

Crime novels
As far as there's a distinction, I prefer mysteries to crime novels. I read quite a few, though I dislike a lot of the classics - Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Poirot, many others are too much know-it-alls. By which I mean we get told what's going on, then at the end the detective astonishes everyone with the answer, based on some esoteric knowledge that was not (all too frequently) given in the story. Badly seeded, my author sister would say. I love Lord Peter Wimsey, I like The Saint (that's not crime, it's adventure!), Lord Darcy is a fantastic (in both senses) mystery series - detective in a world with magic, very well developed.

I don't care about setting; I very much dislike the noir/hardboiled style, it's _boring_, but most others work for me. I'm in it (like every other story I read) for the characters. If it's well-written about interesting people, solving interesting mysteries, I'll like it. I read everything from accidental detectives to police procedurals, cozys to...well, not gories, not usually. Though a really good author can make me enjoy even stuff like that. Kay Hooper's Bishop Files are weird, I can't read many of them at one go, but they're good.

I'm a completest in all my reading. This can backfire in mystery (and other) series that get formulaic - I read the first few and really enjoy them, and then am torn between reading yet another (that I can't tell from all the others) or leaving the series unfinished. I usually end up reading all the series at least once, then focusing on my favorites for rereading - and one marker of a book that I think is really good is that even though it's a mystery and I remember who and may remember what and why and how, it's still worth rereading.

I do read romance, though not very much of the monthly stuff. Romantic suspense very seldom succeeds, for me - the author usually just throws together two sets of formulae and calls it a book. And I particularly dislike some of the really common tropes - distracted bodyguard, for instance. If you're protecting your principal from harm, you should _not_ be focusing on his/her body instead... Incompetence of that sort bothers me in any book. There are some romance novels that incorporate a mystery and work - but again, they're the ones that are about solidly-written characters, not cardboard puppets.

I read mysteries much like I read all other books; I need good writing, solid characters, and a well-fleshed-out setting/situation. The only thing, I think, that's distinct for mysteries is my dislike of know-it-all detectives - it doesn't really apply to most other types of plot.

Q49: Crime

Crime fiction of one sort or another seems to make up about 10% of what I’ve classified on LT, and that’s probably only the tip of the iceberg. I used to read enormous amounts of it, but I’ve slowed down a bit lately.

I tend to have one or two particular authors on the go at once, and carry on until I’ve worn them out then switch to someone new, rather than following particular styles or sub-genres, but on balance I probably tend to prefer more or less realistic teamwork-based police stories (the Sjöwall & Wahlöö tradition) over cozy mysteries and amateur detectives. I also have a weakness for French writers, but I don’t rule out other parts of Europe, including Scandinavia and the British Isles. I love the old American noir mysteries of the thirties and forties, of course, but I haven’t really been grabbed very much by more recent Americans.

I’ve not had very good experiences with “expat” writers (Donna Leon, Elizabeth George), but I’d have to make an exception for Nicholas Freeling, an English cook who managed to write a successful Dutch crime series and follow it up with quite a decent French one.

Things I look for in a crime story: wit, social and political engagement, psychological depth, good dialogue, teamwork, cultural breadth, being taken into new territory in some way.

Things that soon get tedious: booze, gore, guns, cars, detectives with broken marriages, serial killers who kidnap the detective’s daughter, “you’re off the case”, going alone into abandoned buildings, crossword clues, investigations that turn out to be all about forensic or computer evidence. (What did I forget?)

Favourites over my past few decades of reading have included Simenon, Reginald Hill, Ian Rankin, Izzo, Fred Vargas, Andrea Camilleri, Val McDermid, and no doubt all sorts of others I’ve forgotten. I’ve never quite made my mind up about Wallander, but in general I’ve usually liked the Swedish crime I’ve tried.

This year so far I’ve read one Maigret, one Nestor Burma, two Montalbano stories, all four of Sarah Caudwell’s Hilary Tamar stories, and a Mexican Tour de France mystery, Muerte contrarreloj.

>136 jjmcgaffey: "There are some romance novels that incorporate a mystery and work - but again, they're the ones that are about solidly-written characters, not cardboard puppets."

Quoted for truth.

Which has reminded me that I've read a handful of other mysteries this year, but only a handful out of over 150 books. The two I enjoyed more than average were Consider the Lilies by prolific old school romance author Elizabeth Cadell, whose characterisations make up for any other deficiencies, and She Done Him Wrong by Mae West which is purest pulp fiction and an excellent example of a genre I wouldn't usually find so entertaining.

>137 thorold: How do you think the Sjöwall & Wahlöö books would read today? I've been tempted since they have been reprinted, but fear they will come across as very dated. Quite a bit of attention was given to that series in the Scandinavian Crime Fiction book I read.

>139 avaland: I think they stand up fairly well. Obviously everyone everywhere has borrowed from them, so there are things that you’ve seen done better more recently — the left-wing political disgust, for instance, comes over as rather solemn and predictable compared to someone like Rankin — but they are very readable stories, and they play with the form in interesting ways. Try one from somewhere in the middle of the series, like The man on the balcony or The laughing policeman.

>135 nohrt4me2: Didnt get into the Caedfael books until I finished the series. That really does give him more backgroung, and how can one not love Derik Jacobi....and the guy who played the sheriff...Our visit to Shrewsbury was interesting, the church had a small medieval garden that was fun to explore

Loved Alias Grace Trying to remember if Byatts possession was a crime or mystery, remeber loving it tho

>141 cindydavid4: Possession has stuck with me for years. I don't remember any crimes other than those of the heart. I might want to read it again soon.

Jane Smiley was interviewed on the radio today. I liked A Thousand Acres which has past crimes in it.

I didn't see much of the Cadfael TV series. Maybe it improved on the books.

>140 thorold: Thanks for the recommendation. Wasn't The Laughing Policeman made into a movie ....

>142 nohrt4me2: Wasn't A Thousand Acres a re-telling of King Lear? That was my understanding. So long ago read...

>140 thorold: >141 cindydavid4: I re-read Possession and most of Byatt's other fiction recently: highly recommended! It's a sort of literary detective story, but what they are detecting is a past romance, not a crime.

>143 avaland: I didn't know about the movie — transposed to San Francisco and with Walter Matthau, apparently. Sounds interesting.
It was also the title of a peculiarly irritating music-hall song, but that doesn't have anything to do with the book...

There's also a Swedish TV series that updates the Martin Beck stories to a contemporary Swedish setting and adds a few new ones. I've only seen one or two, which didn't seem to have all that much to do with the books.

>143 avaland: Yes, King Lear. With crime. The youngest daughter is a lawyer.

People either love or hate this book. I ran across some younger feminist critics at a conference who branded it as triggering and regressive. They were so sure of themselves that I reread the book. Just didn't see it that way.

>145 nohrt4me2: Im one that really hated it. I got that it was King Lear, but in this case Id rather read the original, kwim?

>144 thorold: Oh yes, I've seen the Martin Beck series, and I did note the credits to the authors. And thanks for mentioning Rebus, as I popped off and checked on the latest. Did you like the character of Malcolm Fox; I wouldn't mind a spin-off....

>145 nohrt4me2: So long ago...so many books ago

>146 cindydavid4: Feel free to hate away. I expect that as an elderly rural Midwesterner my sensibilities and experiences are different to yours. Cheers!

>147 avaland: I haven't looked at the most recent Rankins either: I lost interest a bit when he switched to Malcolm Fox. I should probably give him another chance!

>149 thorold: Malcolm Fox is certainly no Rebus, but he has his ways, I hink of him as more cerebral, and different times demand different approaches, me thinks? Rankin is probably tired of the whole thing, so perhaps it's a no go. I'll be interested in the direction of this latest book.

nvm

Apologies in advance for the following long post. This topic is terribly familiar; I thought we had done it during the year but I couldn’t find any evidence for that. Perhaps SassyLassy did it in a previous year….

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>49 jjmcgaffey: Mysteries/Crime Novels

I love mysteries and crime novels, and I've tried all kinds. They are my 'light' reading (although some are decidedly NOT light), or often a literary palate cleanser. I like series but I also will read standalones. Sometimes I read two or three in a series before deciding to move on, other times I stay the course. Sadly, this year has been a difficult one for me & crime novels.

My true love is a good, detailed, cerebral police procedural preferably without excessive thriller elements or graphic violence (getting harder and harder to find. I suppose most authors these days write with television in mind) and, of course, very human characters who are interesting. I also like crime novels that overtly or subtly comment on society and social issues of the day.

I’d like to say I’m a completest when it comes to series, but I can get disappointed/pissed off/bored by something an author has done and stop reading at any point. While I will read (or have read) relatively widely, it seems that over the last 15 to 20 years, geographically at least, I gravitate to the Northerners (and Antartica). I also, over previous decades, have been attracted to mysteries/crime novels which offer different perspectives, or that teach me something interesting about a place, culture, people. I’m certainly willing to talk about these, if someone is interested, there's just too many to list :-)

If I had to pick my favorite police detective, it would be a tough choice, but I think it would be Kurt Wallander (thankfully, I read the books well before I saw any of the three—now, sort-of-four— television adaptations).

I’m not fond of most Agatha Christie-style “locked room” mysteries, although Anne Holt’s novel in homage to Christie was very good. It was set in a hotel on the top of a mountain....
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Favorite authors, now deceased: P.D. James, Reginald Hill, Henning Mankell, Colin Dexter, Dorothy Sayers, Isaac Asimov .
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Favorites still living:
Ian Rankin (Scottish) Rebus, of course

Peter Robinson (English/Canadian), Inspector Banks (although I was miffed at something and skipped a recent book)

Garry Disher (Australian), Hal Challis/Ellen Destry. He has another series that focuses on a bank robber; it wasn’t really my thing. Disher is one of those “Renaissance” authors who can write any kind of literature; it’s excellent. I will read anything he writes (ok, almost everything)

Val McDermid (Scotltish) (everything but the Tony Hill/Carol Jordan series)

Arnulder Indridason (Icelandic), Erlunder series (he may be the most depressed detective), Not impressed with his new historical series.

Anne Holt (Norwegian), Her Vik & Stubo series, the Hanne Wilhelmsen series (both series have ended. I will read anything she writes even if it is a crime novel about skiing.

Jorn Lier Holst (Norwegian), William Wisting series (there’s a new television adaptation out)
Ake Edwardson (Swedish), Chief Inspector Erik Winter series
Denise Mina (Scottish) Alex Morrow series.

2nd tier favorites at this moment:, *Kjell Ericksson (Sweden), *Ragnar Jonasson (Iceland)

Notable Abandonments:
*Susan Hill: (UK) While I will still read Hill’s other books, I no longer read the detective series. I tired of the constant family drama and in the last book I read he didn’t solve the case. Too many other books to read….
*Alex Gray (UK/Scotland) Detective Lorimer. Abandoned at book #15. Nice guy detective, very good stories, recommended, but I guess I just tired of them..
*Elizabeth George (US author writing UK mysteries): Lynley & Havers. Abandoned somewhere around book 14 or 15. I was in it really for Havers. I used to think that George disliked her own character.
*Deborah Crombie. (US author writing UK mysteries) I found the twosome less interesting when married.
*Peter Temple (Australian). His first book was fabulous, his second book excellent on most fronts but it was sooooo bleak and it lacked any female characters of significance. Despite my glowing review, I have not been tempted to continue. Too many other choices.
*Jørgen Brekke. Three books, very creative and interesting on one level, but so violent (the last one was full of what I call “torture porn”); I’m done. Maybe I should write him a note and see if I can turn him from the dark side. LOL.

To list all the other authors and books would take pages and pages....

>139 avaland: How do you think the Sjöwall & Wahlöö books would read today?

Better than I expected actually - I am up to the 7th (I think) and if you account for some of the technology in them, they sound less dated than some novels from 10 years ago.

>153 AnnieMod: Go to know! I may need them for the winter :-)

>128 avaland: 49. MYSTERIES & CRIME FICTION

Anyone that had ever been to my threads knows that these (together with thrillers - sometimes it is hard to draw the line between them...) make up a big chunk of my reading.

I tend to be equal opportunity reader but detective (amateur and private eyes) and police detectives novels seem to catch my eye easier than anything else. I like both the old style ones (almost no change in the detective between novels) and the newer (well relatively new) style where the detective changes with time. Legal and courtroom thrillers are close by but not sure where they cross between thrillers and crime novels so I just ignore the distinction.

Historical crime novels when done well (Alex Grecian's Murder Squad for example) are a treat. When these are done badly, they annoy me more than a pure historical novel can. Same applies to novels using existing known detectives (Holmes for example) - they can be done well but when they are not, it feels like the character was used because there was nothing in the story itself.

A huge chunk of the urban fantasy genre revolves around crime/detectives in a fantasy setting. It is not surprising that some of my favorite series come from that genre: The Dresden Files, Rivers of London, Cornell's Shadow Police , Alex Verus, Eric Carter (you do not need to actually BE a detective...) (to name just a few).

And when you merge detectives and science fiction, you don't even need to be that great - as long as it is readable, I will read it. :) But there are some gems in there - Alex Benedict is a particular favorite (even if it is not a straight detective series, it actually is...)

Even though I tend to look for the detective stories, I like unusual ones as well (weird viewpoints, interesting structure, a story of a precinct and so on). The criminal viewpoint had been done so often lately that it needs to be done well to actually work - Disher does it with Wyatt and I grew up reading Leblanc's Arsène Lupin so the bar is fairly high.

I am always in the search for a great new author and thankfully, unlike the SF awards, the awards in the genre seem to holding up and highlighting good novels and authors. The Shamus Award and The Ned Kelly Award (US/UK cross publish a lot; Australia is usually left off so the Ned Kelly gives me these usually overlooked novels) are usually my first check when I need a new author but I will check all of the year's nominees. When I am in the mood for it, I will get all nominated First Novels -- nothing beats the feeling of finding a new author just when they are starting).

I oscillate between following authors and following series - in both cases I tend to be a completist. For example I started reading Robert B. Parker's Spenser novels (and finished them) before I even looked at the other Boston series and now that I am finishing the other 2, I wish I had read them in parallel - while Spencer is not in these, the supporting cast is and knowing what happens to some of them downstream makes it hard to remember where we are with them. So I am a lot more likely to go by author and just read in publishing order for modern authors. On the other hand Erle Stanley Gardner's series are self-contained and unless one wants to read them in order because of the pure timing of them, either order works.

I used to like cosy mysteries a lot more -- all these series with recipes and libraries and what's not. These days they are a nice palate cleanser but I find them a bit too formulaic for my taste - if I am going to read the style, I would rather go with the novels and stories from the 40s-70s. I still pick up an occasional one from them but...

Other favorite series these days (not listed already): the SF/Crime/Romance mix in In Death works surprisingly well for me, Nero Wolfe (I did mention I like the classics - I can list probably 20 more of these that I am slowly working through or had finished already), Alex Delaware (not for the faint of heart), Tom Thorne (ditto), Alex McKnight (snow, snow and more snow... and a really good series), Commissario Brunetti (this one is a weird one for me - I started watching the German series before I found the books), Decker/Lazarus (a milder approach to the genre), Roy Grace (bloody and hard to stomach sometimes), Joe Pickett - if you liked Longmire, check this one, Hugo Marston (the second series from the same author is a reverse crime one - not as strong as this one but still readable), Samuel Craddock Mysteries (how to write small town mysteries and make it work without falling into cosy), Sueño and Bascom (set in Korea and US army compounds there), Hal Challis (Disher at his best), Inspector Rebus, Jack Irish, Dark Iceland (and anything else from the author and from any other Icelandic author I had read) and so on and so on and so on... I can continue until next week I think.

In case someone had not figured that one out yet, I like series of novels. Which does not mean that I do not read standalones (check Peter Temple's (Broken Shore is technically a series but the novels can be read on their own and contain some of the best crime writing I had seen) or Steve Hamilton's non-series books (The Lock Artist and Night Work) for example).

I could never answer the inevitable question - why crime novels. I don't like contemporary novels much - some work, most leave me cold. Crime novels (and SF and Fantasy) tend to work a lot better - they are a safe way to explore a topic that otherwise you cannot. Or something... Genre writing usually gets dismissed as the poor cousin of literature but... the days when genre meant formulaic plots and not much more are long gone. There are some writers like that but there are also a LOT of good ones out there.

>155 AnnieMod: One thing I really like about mysteries, most (though not all) SF, and a good many romance stories - there's a point, a...well, call it a quest. The characters have something to do and are doing it - and by the end of the book (the good ones, anyway) they've done it, or part of it at least. Slice of life, if done really well, is excellent - 99% of what I've come across, though, is people going around in circles and ending up where they began, with nothing much having happened. That's why I prefer genre to what's marketed as literature.

>156 jjmcgaffey:

That's a very good way to explain it I think - I am not married to the "conflict - things happen - conflict is resolved" plots (I am just fine with a deconstruction in any way or form ) but navel-gazing for a full novel is boring for me. SF without a quest can work for me simply based on world-building or something like that (your main character can be a world or a country... or a horse)... contemporary novels don't even have that. I spent some time in the past trying to read the "modern" and "great" novels and then decided that I don't care about what people think and if they believe that genre readers are somehow less of readers, so be it.

On the other hand I love Victorian (and earlier novels) - but then even the most boring of them have a plot that leads somewhere and does not just loop back on itself 20 times. In ways it seem to tie to modernism and newer literary movements -- once we get into them, things start getting weird for me - until the pulps start converting into the modern SF and crime novels (oh, I love pulps as well - don't get me wrong) :)

Now that makes me wonder if I should explore some more English literature from the first few decades of the 20th century - the bridge between the Victorian novels and the crime/SF golden ages (and their contemporaries ...

>155 AnnieMod: Did you know that Ragnar Jonasson has a new series out? I've read the first, and have the 2nd in the pile (I figure I'd give him two books before I decide). I did realize the other day that I hadn't caught up on his Dark Iceland series, so ordered the last two. I was a bit bummed that he has decided to end it.

My SF mystery reading has followed my SF reading in general, in that I'm reading very little of it now. The last I remember was Adam Roberts' Jack Glass, a blend of Golden Age SF and Golden Age detective. It was fun.

>158 avaland:

The one about Hulda or a third one (I saw a book coming next year that is not from either of the two)? The Hulda one works as a trilogy - the reverse time thingie messes up the first book a bit (so there is something left for the other two) but the last in the trilogy closes it nicely. So if you read the first two, grab also the third - the twist towards the middle of the book may be worth reading the whole series quite honestly :)

>159 AnnieMod: Yes, that's the one. I'm not fond of police procedurals set in earlier decades, but I may tough it out on your recommendation. (I hope I remember who I sent the first book to, so I'll send the others when I'm done!)

>160 avaland: I'm not fond of police procedurals set in earlier decades

A lot of these seem to be set a decade or 3 back only so that the writer does not need to learn about new technology (and science). And the especially annoying ones have detectives and supporting cast who think and behave like someone from the 21st century had been thrown back in the 80s. Or something.

So yeah - I was a bit worried about that with the whole series but between being set in Iceland and having "met" Hulda in the present (plus the ability of the author to draw you into a story), it worked better than I expected. Hope you like them! :)

Q48 - libraries:

Reading everyone’s answers on libraries I started to realize how my use of libraries has changed through time. As a kid, i knew they existed, but I wasn’t a reader. As a college undergrad I loved studying in the library and wandering through titles (especially medieval history) but didn’t check them out. As a grad student libraries were practical, a necessity and later their online support was life support. As a young adult I experimented with hiding in obscure libraries branches during my lunch break. Got me through Dostoyevsky’s short story collection and a few other random finds. As a parent of young children I checked out hundreds of kids books and tried to always have something new. (Although sometimes retuning them was an issue). As a theme reader, I would check out any book I could find on the subject of interest just to see if I might want to read it. As an audiobook listener I began, for a couple years, exclusively listening to library audiobooks, resulting is some very off the wall books and some terrific finds. As a causal Shakespeare reader I would check out different publications to see which formats and notes I liked the best (Signet Classic). My last library book was checked out in February, i think.

Bonus: And while you are thinking about this, have you read fiction that features a library?

nonfiction. The Cleopatra biography I read notes the famous library of Alexandria may have burned down during Julius Caesar’s first visit to Egypt where he met Cleopatra - because of some stuff Caesar provoked.

Q 49 mystery and crime

Although my early influential reading included In Cold Blood and an accidental stumble into The Name of the Rose, and although I’ve enjoyed all the reviews here, I haven’t been drawn to these novels. Occasionally I pick one up, but then I feel guilty not reading something I think I know I really want to read instead. I have bought a couple mentioned in CR.

>164 dchaikin: The Umberto Eco was excellent!

>161 AnnieMod: I'll give the 2nd a try.

>164 dchaikin: >165 avaland:

One of the books I point to when people try to argue that crime writing is not much better than the pulps of yesteryear...

Hi, I've been away from this thread for a while. I'll jump in here on the crime novels merry-go-round. I enjoy crime novels and mysteries of all sorts, from noir to cozies, though my needle tends to bend more toward the noir side. I have a tendency to jump around, but I'll also get involved in series that I'll gradually make my way through. Here are the current series I'm working on:

Philip Kerr's "Bernie Gunther" series of Berlin Noir. These are fascinating and well-written stories of our man Bernie, who has the difficult task of being an honest, Hitler-hating homicide detective in Nazi-era Berlin. As the series goes on, however, Bernie does not remain unscathed or wholly innocent. I'm on book seven, which has taken us well beyond the war, but with frequent flashbacks. I can't recommend this compelling series highly enough.

Oh, how much do I love Richard Stark's "Parker" series! Parker is a psychopathic anti-hero criminal who doesn't want to kill you but will if you make the slightest bit of trouble for him. He is also always the smartest and toughest guy in the room. Evil fun. Richard Stark is a pseudonym for Donald Westlake. I've so far read the first six of series' 24 entries!

I'm slowly working my way through John D. McDonald's classic, excellent Travis McGee series. Cynical, world-weary, ultra-competent and with a heart-of-gold. McGee's got it all! I've read the first five.

Here's an obscure one for you. I've read the first two books in a 9-book pulp series by Don Tracy about the exploits of military investigator Giff Speer. I think I had one of these books on my pulp novels shelf that I picked up and started reading more or less at random. The series was written in the early 1960s. Next up for me will be Fun and Deadly Games.

Want a crime-solving trip to middle-ages Japan? A while back I read the first novel in I.J. Parker's "Sugawara Akitada Mysteries." Not a great deal of depth, but fun enough for me to put the next few books in the set into my reading plans.

Finally, I read The Quiet Game, the first book in Greg Iles' "Penn Cage" series several years ago and enjoyed it quite a bit. I haven't gotten back to the series yet, but have the second book, Turning Angel, on my short list.

By the way, I just finished and wrote about Derek's Raymond's semi-classic London noir novel, The Crust on Its Uppers on my own CR thread.

Cheers!

>167 rocketjk: Greg Iles' "Penn Cage" series

If you liked that first book, grab the whole series - it goes from strong to stronger with each installment. Which reminds me that I have the 6th somewhere around the house :)

>167 rocketjk: I had a bet with myself that Donald Westlake's name would crop up.

>167 rocketjk:
A woman I met while out cycling one day kindly gave me her Travis McGee paperbacks after learning I was temporarily living on a boat. She felt it just wouldn’t do to be afloat and not know about Travis. This was nearly 40 years ago so my memory is sketchy, but I think the ones I read had Blue, Purple, Turquoise, Lemon, Copper, and Crimson in the titles. Fun reading.

QUESTION 49:

Although I haven't really gotten seriously into mystery novels as a genre I have dabbled and enjoyed many of the books I've read. The only thing is I don't seem to have created the habit yet to actively reach out for them. I have to either really be into the premise of the book to buy it or have to have had it highly recommended to me. Considering how much I loved Nancy Drew as a kid I'm actually surprised I haven't become more of a mystery reader as an adult.

I think all the mystery books I've read have been written by a Japanese author. (I'll check in a bit if I've read non-Japan ones.) That allows me to have the fun crime part, but also hopefully learn something about Japan and see how they interpret this genre. I've actually read quite a few and really have responded well to most of them.

- R. Murakami really knows how to pull you into a story. They are thrilling, frightening, a little grotesque, introspective, and always have something to say about Japanese social culture. I'm always happy to read him (the better Murakami).
Ryu Murakami : Audition
Ryu Murakami : In the Miso Soup

- these are classic style mysteries (the French ones are also available in English) where a suspect has a high motive to kill but their alibi is so perfect; what is it the detective needs to spot to solve the case; Yokomizo is the classic in this genre and my favorite; unfortunate he hasn't been translated more so some day I'll have to read his books in Japanese however he was recently been translated into English (The Inugami Clan, and The Inugami Curse) and I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THEM!
Shizuko Natsuki : La promesse de l'ombre
Shizuko Natsuki : Hara-Kiri, mon amour
Seishi Yokomizo : La hache, le koto et le chrysanthème
Seishi Yokomizo : Le village aux huit tombes
Seicho Matsumoto : Vase de sable
Seicho Matsumoto : Tokyo express
Akimitsu Takagi : The Tattoo Murder Case

- this one is quite famous in English and is worth the fame
Natsuo Kirino : Out: A Novel

- the most famous crime fiction writer in Japan; classic detective stories where you have to figure out how the murder was done; I liked one of these but not the other
Keigo Higashino : The Devotion of Suspect X
Keigo Higashino : Salvation of a Saint

- a book not in translation (I'd like to try translating it) but I was so caught up in it; a surprise pick up that I loved
理香子 秋吉 : 聖母

So I've checked and indeed all the crime fiction I've read has been about Japan. That's not surprising really. However, I do have Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke on my TBR which is a new series about a black Texas detective and since I'm from Texas, the locale is what intrigues me about this new book. It's a book getting lots of praise and it's waiting for me at my parent's house, although who knows when I'll be able to put my hands on it.

I have discovered an interest in true crime. Having realized that In Cold Blood is true crime, and I LOVED that one, I took a chance with a Japan-based true crime called People who eat Darkness about the murder of a 21 year old English woman in Tokyo. I also recently read A Serial Killer's Daughter, a memoir by the daughter of the BTK killer, which was an interesting perspective. I can see myself picking up more of these type of books in the future. They really just grab your attention.

>171 lilisin: nothing by Miyuki Miyabe? One of my favorite mysteries, due to the depiction of a different culture, is her All She Was Worth.

>171 lilisin: Well, "grotesque and introspective"! I am going right over to Amazon and download me some Murakami! Thanks!

>171 lilisin: Having realized that In Cold Blood is true crime, and I LOVED that one,

wow! sorry just showing my age, I well remember the crime and avoiding Capotes Helter Skelter. Heard good things about it tho

>172 ELiz_M:
I know right? Surprisingly, not yet! Definitely on my want to read list but this goes back to me not having the habit of reaching for mystery books.

>173 nohrt4me2:
I hope you enjoy the books you choose!

>174 cindydavid4:
It’s the only Capote I’ve read.

This will be the last "question for the avid reader" of this year.

QUESTION 50: INITIAL THOUGHTS ON 2021 READING

Here it is December and we have several weeks before the calendar flips to 2021. Have you been thinking of what you might read in the new year (and do you have the books all lined up?) or are you making plans to study X or finally complete Y? Regarding your reading this year, do you have any regrets around your reading, or are there things you’d like to do differently in the new year? Are you thinking about goals…or will you just free-range read? Of course, maybe you haven’t thought that far ahead.

We aren’t looking for your definitive 2021 plan which we can assume will be announced on one’s individual thread at the beginning of 2021, as is the tradition; but, we would like to know what nifty resolutions you are thinking about and what unpolished ideas are percolating in your head which you MIGHT (or might not) go forward with.

I wish I had spent more time reading books and knitting instead of reading the news obsessively. I became very well informed about things over which I had no control.

I have a couple of ideas for a reading plan for next year:

Re-reading the favorite books of my youth and reassessing them.

Reading all of Patricia Highsmith or Axsel Sandemose.

Reading Asian or Spanish-language classics.

Engaging in more group reads.

Reading plays by Brecht and Albee.

Reading nothing but books already on hand.

Q50: 2021 Plans

I seem to remember someone at the last party I went to — which was, of course, a Burns Night party, not much having happened since then in my social life — saying something to the effect that the best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley. These eighteenth-century poets certainly knew what they were talking about: 2020 was just about as a-gley as it gets.

I’ve got a few vague ideas of things it might be interesting to explore in the next year, and I’m looking forward to following some of the Reading Globally themes we’re about to pick (depending on what they are...). But I’m still a bit reluctant to say “this is my plan!”

— I finished the Zolathon this year, so I feel I ought to be getting to grips with another long series. Not Balzac, though! The obvious candidate is probably the Dutch saga of working life, Het bureau, where I got to the end of part one this year. But I want to have another proper go at Proust sometime, and there are a few others I’ve been thinking about...

— My “big poet projects” on Schiller and Petrarch still have a few loose ends dangling, and are asking to be resumed. But I also want to have a proper go at Coleridge some time.

— I read a ridiculous amount in 2020, but my TBR pile hardly got any smaller at all, so I’m going to stop pretending I want to eliminate it, and concentrate instead on polishing off a few oldies and keeping the overall number of books on the pile somewhere below about 120, which seems to be a healthy sort of stock.

— At least three or four of the topics nominated for Reading Globally theme reads next year look very enticing: depending on what we pick, I’m sure there will be at least one that gives me a lot of exciting new rabbit holes to go down. And I still have a few authors from this year’s Southern Africa thread I want to spend more time with.

— I’ve got sucked into watching bookbinding videos on YouTube lately: I have a feeling that I’m going to be doing some more reading soon about the history of books as physical objects.

— Otherwise, I’m hoping for more of the same as always: authors I didn’t know about, genres and subjects I’ve never explored properly, looking over the shoulders of people in other cultures and other professions.

Question 50: 2021

I'm not a planner when it comes to my reading but I do always have hopes based on the previous year's reading.

This year I read a lot more than I ever had but I have no new favorites and no truly remarkable standouts so I would hope that I'll get better quality next year even if the quantity dwindles.

This year I read primarily in English. I'm trying to make up for that a bit by having a Japanese December but I would hope to get through some of my Japanese language and French language TBR pile. What's the point of having the entire Rougon-Macquart cycle on my shelves if I don't read them?

This year I stopped reviewing my books back in September. Maybe because of the meh factor but although many books weren't favorites, I still have some valuable opinions on them and they should get written down. So my hope is to get back to regularly posting reviews/opinions on what I read which means maintaining my thread properly.

This year I didn't read much manga which is okay because I was properly focused on reading novels but again, with 300+ unread manga volumes on my shelves, it's not acceptable to only read 30 in a year. So my hope is to find joy in reading the manga I own.

I'll jump in here! As usual, I have no "plan" per se, but have made a few commitments.

What I think of as my main thread will be here at Club Read, where I post about most of my reading, often with a slump of posting in the summer. The genres I focus on for fun are mystery, science fiction, fantasy, literary fiction and non fiction.

I also participate sporadically in some other groups.

Goodreads

I'm doing a buddy read in January of C.J. Cherryh's Pride of Chanur with folks on Women of the Future on Goodreads.

In March I'm participating in a group read with MENA on Goodreads.

And I'm hoping for a group read or buddy read of Kintu with - can't remember now if it's Great African Reads or Literary fiction by people of color.

Category Challenge 2021 on LT

I'm also starting a year-long read of The complete stories: Clarice Lispector with a buddy at Category Challenge 2021.

I'll soon be setting up the January thread for the mystery kit (our theme for the month is mysteries that feature water.)

I'm trying not to commit to anything else early in the year :), and looking forward to a year of good reading.

Edited to add links.

I'm not good at sticking to my plans. But what seems to be helping is allowing myself to follow my heart, what attracts me in the moment, that my heart responds to (often a lead from or an idea whilst reading another book) and within that, having worked out here several times where my heart most lies in my reading, with some particular authors and areas.

At the moment I'm trying to focus on completing some books I've been diverted from -- and within that also trying to focus on female authors to help my author gender balance, and maybe my own a bit. I think these will continue into the New Year.

I seem to have started on reading Muriel Spark through - and also think I'd like to read more Bohumil Hrabal and also having read True Grit the other year I bought some of his (Charles Portis') others I think and would like to read them. All of them being very approachable and brief. Overall I think I'll be reading more of my already owned books at the mo.

I may also put more effort in to reading contemporary poets and some of the collections I've amassed. I'd also like to get further with some of the canonical poets -- and maybe get back to Emily Dickinson's loose sheets of poems so I'll have read through her before her letters. And reading more of poets lives, memoirs, biographies, their own prose. And definitely letting myself get back to books that I have left but have good feelings for, as not completing them, for no good reason really as things are, is somewhat silly, c'est la vie.

>178 thorold: Any recommendations on books about Petrarch?

My themes are some skipping through some classics after Dante, Nabokov, Shakespeare, Willa Cather and the Booker long list. My thoughts on each below. They're skippable : )
---
Post-Dante, my next stepping stones are Petrarch, Boccaccio and Chaucer. First I need to find a book, or some books about Petrarch to help build some motivation.
---
I'm three books behind on my Nabokov reading, and The Gift is slow slow reading. (up to now, unusual for him) I think I'll just plow through as it goes.
---
I read Shakespeare with a Litsy group. We expect to hit Henry VI parts 1, II and III in the near-ish future.
---
I will finish Willa Cather. : ( Reading her last novel now, but I still have her first novel, her short story collections, her letters (?) and I probably should add a biography in there at this point.
---
The Booker Longlist hasn't done much for me this year, but I'll continue to pursue it, mostly on audio. Two books are the last of different kinds of trilogies, and I plan to read them too - so need get a re-read of Wolf Hall in my plans somehow ...

>176 avaland: My plans for next year are SECRET.

(Note: this is a fib but it's the only way I can make them sound more interesting, lol. I'll be back with a proper answer later. :D )

>182 dchaikin: Any recommendations on books about Petrarch?
- The main thing I've learnt is that it doesn't pay to order a whole stack of Petrarchery in one go and leave it on the TBR shelf!

I enjoyed Morris Bishop's lively if rather dated Petrarch and his world, which I posted about a couple of years ago. That might be a good entry point, if you can find a copy. I got on quite well with Mark Musa's parallel text edition of the Canzoniere as well. The rest is all still waiting for me to get to it. The Cambridge companion to Petrarch will probably be next.

I usually make detailed reading plans before the start of each year; it gets me through Christmas. I probably will not need to this year because last years plans were over ambitious and I still have some way to go to complete them

My first target was to read all available literature (within my price range) from 1591.
I can claim brilliant success here because I have gone on to read literature from 1592 as well and am well on the way to completing 1593. I have one more Shakespeare play to read before the closure of the theatres in 1593 and I hope to read Titus Andronicus before the end of the year. Therefore 1594 looks doable next year.

My second target of science fiction books from 1951 is over half way towards completion. As I get further down the list the books are getting worse and so although I will continue with the project next year it will probably run into the sand ..................

A target of reading as much literature as possible published in 1951 has resulted in 17 books read this year. The list of books is expanding as I keep finding new ones and as the quality is still of a high standard I will continue next year.

The masterwork science fiction series published in the 1950's looked a doable target at the start of the year with 25 books on the list. I have read 18 and could conceivably finish them if I read nothing else until December 31, but I am not going to do that and so this should be finished next year.

There were 38 unread books on my shelf whose authors started with the letter B. I will have read 20 of them by the end of the year and so these will also continue next year.

A new project for next year may be the letters of D H Lawrence in the Cambridge edition. It runs to seven large volumes and as I have read nearly everything else by Lawrence this will be a good preparation to reading the whole oeuvre again.

My only plans include . . .

* Continuing my gradual progress through my friend Kim's list of 18 crucial books about African American history and race relations in the U.S. I actually added a 19th book of my own, and of those 19 I'm now almost finished reading the fifth.

* In 2021 I'll be reading Joseph Conrad's final novel, The Rover. This will conclude my project of beginning each calendar year with a Conrad novel and thereby reading (or rereading) through all of them in chronological order of their publishing. I'm not sure whether in 2022 I will begin the Conrad cycle over again or whether I will pick a new author. Philip Roth is a might could.

* Continue working on the several series I've been working my way through gradually. Many of those are mystery/crime series, which I listed last week. The others are E.F. Benson's hilarious Mapp and Lucia novels (I've only read two of the six entries); Walter Jon Williams' cyberpunk Hardwired series (I've read two of the four books in this set) and C.P. Snow's brilliant Strangers and Brothers series (I've read six of the eleven novels here).

Otherwise, I'll just continue working my way through the (at current count) 3,142 books in my own library, only about a third of which (just a wild guess) I've already read.

I didn't expect such an immediate flurry of answers. You can't all be sitting at home in a snowstorm baking bread and occasionally picking up the laptop, can you? :-)

I plan to participate in the 2021 Category Challenges again, so that will guide my reading for 2021 quite a bit. The categories I will read within are BingoDOG, RandomCAT, GenreCAT, AlphaKIT, and MysteryKIT.

I also have my own personal challenges set up, which will feature some of my fave reading categories. Here are my personal challenges:

Amish at Heart, The Children's Corner, Christmas All Year Long, Nancy Drew--Girl Sleuth, Reading "Miss Read," School's Out, and Jar of Fate.

I try not to plan what I'm going to read because my reading muse is stubborn and hates being told what to do. I'll focus (as I have for the past several years) on reading more of my BOMBs (Books Off My Bookshelves); I may possibly be able to hit my goal of 60 this year, but it'll be a push (I'm at 50 at the moment, with two in progress...actually three, one I started when I got it but it's now over a year old in my house. I should read it and get rid of it...). The partner to that goal is discarding books I don't want to own (or don't want to own in paper) - that's actually the main goal, reduce the (huge!) number of books I have in the house.

There's some good books coming out next year - I have three on pre-order hold at the library, and I'll read those when I get them. But other than that, no solid plans, just reading lots (as usual!).

Q50: 2021 Plans

I never have a a hard and fast plan. This year I had my disincentive rules to help steer my unguided reading to include more women. I plan to continue this program with some slight changes to read more diversely than ever.

Due to some update to my data collection I have a few more soft goals as well. They're not super specific or important. Just something to chase.

That's about it for the upcoming year. Still need to think about how I cominng to track reading on my thread. No big changes but drop the first post I never remember to update.

Question 50: thoughts on 2021 Reading.

Reading seemed more difficult this year, we had distractions. Things were not as they had been and will likely not settle back into "old normal" next year. This year I was more distracted and also had some trouble concentrating. I have been thinking about next year's reading, but nothing has gelled yet.

I recently read part of a book about women coming-of-age novels, but stopped because I thought I would like to read the three of the seven novels discussed that I haven't already read (Sparks, Murdoch, Richardson). I'd read the Austen, Bronte, Elliot and Atwood. I also have two other books about women coming-of-age literature, so there is all of that.

A couple of years ago I amassed two big anthologies of American Gothic stories, plus what I imagine is a companion textbook on the literature for one of the anthologies. So, there is a siren call there.

I also have several very intriguing nonfiction books on a variety of topics in the TBR I'd love to squeeze in. Topics from: capitalism & slavery, the year 1774 in the American Revolution, secularism, genetics, fashion & clothing...etc (honestly, a kid in the candy shop)

I picked up over a dozen poetry books (mostly individual collections) during this year and there are a fair number which are still unread. I'm hoping winter, in particular, will be a good time for this.

But, to be honest, I'm going to be taking it all a week at a time. But, hey, like the weather it, all that could change.

>189 jjmcgaffey: "my reading muse is stubborn and hates being told what to do...

ha! I have one of those, too!

Je ne regrette rien 2020. I achieved my goal of reading a book from every state in the European Union and, more importantly, I enjoyed it enough to keep going. I've now read every country in Europe (and most of their internal minority cultures too) and am well on my way to reading the world with only 65 states remaining which will probably be around 60 by the end of this year.

As it appears I'll have time to read over 150 books again next year I've decided to continue reading my way around the world. I'm planning to participate in the GeoKIT over in Category Challenge 2021, and the quarterly threads on Reading Globally. I've also signed up for BingoDOG and might join in the monthly SFFKIT to clear a dozen older To Read books from my shelves, which I hope will bring my number of unread books down to under 99 again (under 50 would be even better but unlikely).

My personal 2021 Category Challenge thread is here:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/326880

But I avoid making grand plans as I've earned my freedom to be flexible. :-)

>187 avaland: ☺️ Lazy Saturday...?

>176 avaland: Q 50 INITIAL THOUGHTS ON 2021 READING

Have you been thinking of what you might read in the new year (and do you have the books all lined up?)

Yes! I've been obsessively setting up my reading bullet journal for 2021. I think I started early because I want to put a bit more into it than I usually do, and mainly because I'm ready to put 2020 behind me -- not that a new calendar means anything will improve :-(

Anyway, I love lists, so in addition to keeping track of the books I read, this book journal has places to track books read from my TBR pile, books that others have put in my hands and said "read this!", two book bingo games (I made my own squares based on my interests), my book club reads, books read by genre, a world map to colour in books from countries around the world, books by POC, translated books, I tend to read a lot of books from the UK so I printed out a map of Britain and Ireland to colour in as I read books set in various places, lists of DNFs, Booker & Giller prize nominees, Europa Editions & NYRB, Virago & Women's Prize books, 1001 list & Guardian 1000, books set in the Alps and in all 7 Alpine countries (if anyone knows a book set in Liechtenstein, please let me know), my category challenge books - I have 10 categories this year, ideas for seasonal reads, Spooktober ideas, non-fiction TBR, history TBR (fiction and non-fiction), 52 books a year, memoir tbr, books ordered in 2021, books into my house in 2021, upcoming releases, list of publishers . . . yes, like I said, obsessed. I love my Leuchtturm1917 journals. 2021 is their colour "Pacific," 2020 was "Nordic Blue."

And yes, I have books lined up. But writing that down is a great way for me to change my mind and read something else.

or are you making plans to study X or finally complete Y?

I will continue to focus on Italy and Switzerland, because my daughter moved to Switzerland and I am working toward Italian citizenship.

Are you thinking about goals…or will you just free-range read?

Mostly I just free-range read, but I am going to aim for a book-a-week (52 books a year)

You also had a question about reading regrets. I hadn't planned on reading very much in 2020 due to other projects I had going on that were more imporatant. But then 2 out of my 3 big projects were Covid-cancelled, so I could have read so many books this year. Instead, I doomscrolled way too much. Less doomscrolling in 2021!

As I said before, I rarely plan out my reads, except for book groups and more recently through the themes in Reading through time and Global reading. Otherwise I grab the first shiny cover that suits my mood.

The one good thing about this is that I have had so much time to read, that this year is the first year in a long time I managed to read over 50 books.

BTW will there be a thread for top books of the year?

>193 spiralsheep: wow I am very impressed! Thats something I'd like to try; How did you choose your books? My choices would be limited because I only read English - Ill go check out your thread

>195 Nickelini: I'm sure you know this but the folktale style children's novella Ludmila by Paul Gallico is set in Liechtenstein. It was so sweet it gave me instant literary diabetes. I found a cheap edition of Ludmila / The Lonely, which went to the charity shop as soon as I'd finished with it, lol.

>197 cindydavid4: On reading around the world. I didn't plan it. I've always tried to read a wide variety of literature (book form and other), have zero snobbish tendencies, and have mostly lived in Europe with access to good libraries and bookshops. Even my local charity shops stock secondhand books from many countries because people here buy and read them. Reading in English isn't much of a restriction because the British Empire spread our language, British style education, and publishing links over most of the globe!

To anyone beginning from scratch, I'd recommend setting a more realistic initial goal, such as the well-known Around the World in 80 Books, and try to include diverse continents and populations, or conversely to pick an area of interest (such as my European Union or your home continent or somewhere you have links) and focus there.

The internet has made it much easier to find recs and buy books.

My advice is to have flexible guidelines and make reading fun for yourself. So while, for example, I'm aiming to read books by local authors I also read other interesting books I encounter while searching (I'm allowed to read two or more books from one country!). I also often read additional books by minorities within UN defined countries because I'm more interested in culture than politics. I don't have possible books for a few countries yet because by the time I've read my stack and search again there might be something new available.

I'm aiming to read contemporary fiction but I know that although literary fiction is more likely to be translated it's often popular fiction that gives me more of a feel for local people and cultures. I also enjoy reading poetry, which is often much easier to find from traditionally oral cultures. I've read a few non-fiction books, and even travelogues, e.g. Ma Thanegi's tourism within her own country.

My one rule is that I only choose books I believe I'll enjoy reading. I'm not on a mission to feel worthy or righteous. I'm enjoying myself! :D

>195 Nickelini: I thought Italy let everyone become a citizen easily. But perhaps it was if you descended from Italian immigrants...I remember my former sisters-in-laws doing this (grandparents on their mother's side were the immigrants).

>196 cindydavid4: There usually is.

>199 spiralsheep: I like that last sentence!

>200 avaland: Honestly, some challenge readers seem to be determined to no-pain-no-gain themselves into unnecessary toil. It's leisure reading not grad school. Relax, set realistic flexible guidelines, and have fun!

Q50
I'm thinking of rereading a few favorites, perhaps while feeling less stressed than during the last 4 years. Also may read some of the unread, older books I have.

>198 spiralsheep:
I'm sure you know this but the folktale style children's novella Ludmila by Paul Gallico is set in Liechtenstein. It was so sweet it gave me instant literary diabetes. I found a cheap edition of Ludmila / The Lonely, which went to the charity shop as soon as I'd finished with it, lol.

I did NOT know about that, so thank you very much! Sounds like one to get from the library though

>199 spiralsheep:
I'm aiming to read contemporary fiction but I know that although literary fiction is more likely to be translated it's often popular fiction that gives me more of a feel for local people and cultures.

I never thought about that but that's an excellent point. I struggle to find Swiss literature that is somewhat recent and written by a woman. Lots of old dead white men though. But my European reads do tend to be somewhat literary and I'd like something a little more current and fun.


My one rule is that I only choose books I believe I'll enjoy reading. I'm not on a mission to feel worthy or righteous. I'm enjoying myself! :D

Yes, I do sometimes have to remind myself of that.

>200 avaland:
I thought Italy let everyone become a citizen easily. But perhaps it was if you descended from Italian immigrants...I remember my former sisters-in-laws doing this (grandparents on their mother's side were the immigrants).

I think it's still fairly easy if you have Italian parents or grandparents. It was fairly painless for my husband and our daughters 10 or 15 years ago. At the time, I got the paperwork and instructions for me but the bureaucracy was daunting. For example, for our kids, we had to present our marriage certificate, and the Italian consulate here in Vancouver copied it and sent it to Rome. For me, we had to request a copy of that copy in Rome -- not just a copy of our original. There were pages of things I had to do but I think it was mostly a paperwork process. I wasn't particularly motivated since we were super busy with our lives here and we've spent enough time in Italy to think it's great to visit but not somewhere we wanted to live.

Now life has changed, and we would like to keep our options open. A few years ago they simplified the paperwork somewhat, but put in a language requirement. I need a B2 level of Italian*, which I was making good progress on until my Italian class was Covid-cancelled and I just completely lost heart. Yes, I could have continued my studies (my husband is fluent after all and online resources are fabulous), but Covid just took the wind out of my sails.

*B2 is a reading, listening and speaking exam. It looks do-able and is about the level one would need to comfortably live in a country and function in that language. In contrast, my daughter's Swiss-German boyfriend was studying for a C1, which would allow him to attend university in English and tackle all the academic language req'd

>203 Nickelini: I feel I should mention that I enjoyed the illustrations to Ludmila more than the text. Children's book illustrators can't be praised highly enough when they do a good job with whatever they're given.

>204 Nickelini: It’s tough when you’re focussing on a country where even the detective stories are written by (dead, white, male) philosophers... :-)

Talking about plans with the book-clubbers the other day, I realised that something else I ought to be thinking about for next year, not mentioned in the already unrealistic list in >178 thorold:, is a follow-up to this year’s AS Byatt readthrough, which itself was a follow-up to reading through Muriel Spark’s novels in previous years. Should I pick another Major Female Novelist? And if so, whom?

Obvious choice would be Byatt’s younger sister: I’ve read most of her books, but few recently, and I’ve got copies of the majority of them on the shelf. But maybe that’s a bit too obvious...?

I don’t think I want to do Iris Murdoch — I’ve still got quite a few of her novels to read, but they aren’t the sort of books you can read lots of all at once, they need time to sink in.

Hmmm. Any ideas? Important woman writer, born before about 1945, and with a reasonable output that you can read in a year or so without undue discomfort. And someone I’ve not been reading much lately...

(Don’t all say “Margaret Atwood”!)

>207 thorold: "Any ideas?"

I'd say Toni Morrison, but you're probably not going to get through her books in a year.

How about Elizabeth Berg or Pat Barker?

Agatha Christie?

>204 Nickelini: Your best bet for finding new fiction by Swiss women in English translation is probably to look at the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation's eligibility list for 2021 when it's published:

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/womenintranslation/

It only covers publishers in UK and Ireland but they're probably the most likely sources.

>208 rocketjk: Hmmmm. Thanks, I think :-)

I suppose I could get through all of Christie in a year if I read a bit more than one a week — but I'm not sure it would profit me much. I find it very difficult to remember which of her books I've read, they all seem to merge into one another except for the two or three really famous ones, and I've seen so many TV and stage versions (nothing says "seaside rep" like an Agatha Christie play with wobbly scenery and a fidgety corpse). Probably better to carry on reading them haphazardly as they happen to come up.

Toni Morrison might be a good choice. The eleven novels probably wouldn't take much more than a year, and I've only read about four of them before, none recently. They also stretch over a 45-year period, which would make a chronological read through interesting.

Elizabeth Berg I know nothing about, and Pat Barker I've heard of but not read, I'd want to test the water there before committing to a read-through. But both sound like writers I ought at least to have tried, so I don't rule them out...

>210 thorold: I'd also suggest Toni Morrison. She's one of few prose writers whose work I can quote like poetry.

Drabble's the obvious choice, of course. The two Penelopes, Fitzgerald and Lively, are both interesting in different ways and they both wrote many shorter novels, which might fit well between other plans.

If you were a poetry fan then I'd push UA Fanthorpe. Her sly commentaries on the state of the national psyche have aged well imo.

>211 spiralsheep: Yes, the Penelopes seem to come up a lot in recommendations for Byatt and Drabble — I've read and liked most of Penelope F's books, but haven't got very far with Penelope L. Of course, there's also Penelope Mortimer and the poet Penelope Shuttle, things could rapidly get out of hand going down the Penelopiad route...

I like what I've read of U A Fanthorpe, but I haven't gone very deep — I've got one collection from the 80s on my shelf and another from about 15 years later. That's a thought, too.

>212 thorold: There's a good Collected Poems of UA Fanthorpe. Her partner Rosie Bailey has rightly pushed for further minor publications but iirc there's only one essential poem outside the Collected and that's probably online (and I give you unofficial permission to skip the Christmas poems in the Collected if you prefer as they're mostly occasional pieces).

>210 thorold: Well the Christie suggestion was essentially a joke, but I'm thinking you got that.

As for Elizabeth Berg, I've only read Durable Goods, which was relatively short and I thought very good.

Regarding Penelope Lively, I read and enjoyed Moon Tiger a few years back. Also not that long so an OK toe-dip. That's all I've read of hers, however.

I've read a lot of Morrison. One of my very favorite writers.

#50

Well, by now it should be clear to anyone that me and planning go as well as Superman and kryptonite...

So just a few... directions

- My "Read through history" project which had been going on since 2014? earlier? and I am still stuck in pre-history. Which is fun... but with this speed, today will be officially history before I get to the Middle Ages :) At least I stopped taking left turns and ending up into stars formation and geological eras and what's not (and I can hear Dan laughing at me about that - who am I kidding - if I find a book that looks interesting, I probably will get there again).

- Make a dent at my own books

- Read more poetry and get back to reading plays and comics. I tend to like some of the former and I really like the latter two and somehow I end up forgetting about them.

- More stories and proper magazine articles and less news when I am not reading books (between the election and the pandemic, news had been a huge chunk of my reading).

- Discover some new writers through "First novels" awards nominations (crime/mystery and SF) - this had been an on/off project for years so maybe it is time to get a bit more organized (but then see the first sentence above). I am rarely disappointed in authors I meet this way so I may just pick a year and go for it.

- Back to the classics rereads - I had read a lot of the English language classics in another language. So revisiting them in their original language and 2 decades (or more) after I read them initially had been a pleasure. And I really like pre-20th century novels.

I hope the world gets a lot less crazy quick(~ish) and libraries open completely - a lot of my interesting reads came from me just seeing a book on the "new" shelves there. Now I can order what I want (which had been great for my series catchup) but...

And I really hope I won't have these 3 months that I never read a thing -- it's been annoying and absolutely weird and I still cannot explain how it happened.

>215 AnnieMod: Directions is a good word. I've just taken the major categories I normally read and said I'll read more of them. Though I have overcommitted at bit in January to specific reads . . .

>210 thorold: Toni Morrison is a terrific writer, but I can't imagine reading everything she wrote in one year! Good luck.

>210 thorold: is Nadine Gordimer too prolific?
You could go down a Margaret black hole - Drabble, Laurence, Atwood....
Alice Munroe is too many short stories, Barbara Pym too same-same. Joan Didion and Clarice Lispector aren't on your radar at all, and I think you've recently gone through Doris Lessing, Elizabeth Taylor, and Christa Wolf.
Angela Carter?

Hmmm, Looks like Morrison is the best bet.

>207 thorold: does it have to be crimne oreinted fiction? Has anyone suggested Ruth Rendell?

If not crime then what about Rose Macauley?

or, if not fiction what about Mary Midgley?

>217 ELiz_M: Yes, I think I agree with most of that. Would love to do Gordimer sometime, but 2020 was already a South Africa year. And yes, she was very prolific.
Angela Carter is the only strong candidate out of the others you mention: she’s worth doing, definitely, but probably wouldn’t fill a year. I saw the stage version of Wise children on TV a few months ago, really good!

>218 tonikat: No, crime is optional! But I’ve never got on with Ruth Rendell.
Rose Macaulay would certainly be a challenge — I think she wrote about thirty novels, and I’ve read the two that everyone’s heard of, one of them quite recently. I’d be more interested in Rebecca West, from that generation. (Which reminds me, I’ve still got her bio by Victoria Glendinning on the TBR)
Mary Midgley is someone I should read sometime, as I’m quite a fan of Dawkins and they were such good pals (not!). But I don’t see myself tackling her complete works...

Still looking like Toni Morrison.
...Or I might end up not making it a project and simply dipping into all the above. Thanks, all!

>218 tonikat: I love Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine. She writes my kind of mystery - we know why and who, but no one else does. She/they are masterful at keeping the readers attention and her stories open up.

>209 spiralsheep:
Thanks for the link to the Warwick prize!

>219 thorold:

You could try translated fiction with Amelie Nothomb. There are many but they are short and easy to read.
Or maybe Banana Yoshimoto from Japan? She has had quite a bit translated into English and would be easy to do in a year.
Or Colette from France?
Ursula K LeGuin?
Isabel Allende?
Daphne du Maurier?

>220 cindydavid4: >218 tonikat: To be fair, I have liked the “Barbara Vine” novels better than the straight crime stories. I think Wexford rubs me up the wrong way, somehow.

>222 lilisin: The ideas just keep coming! :-)

I think I reached my overflow line on Amélie Nothomb about ten years ago. Will probably have to wait a bit before trying her again. And she’s far too young to be ready for a “retrospective”, as is Banana Yoshimoto.
If I were advising someone else on a French writer to explore in depth, it would be Annie Ernaux, but I’ve read most of her books in the last few years.

I read The left hand of darkness earlier this year, and it confirmed my idea that I’m not built for science-fiction, however well-written it is.

Colette, Daphne du Maurier and Isabel Allende are all writers I barely know, they would be interesting to explore in depth. I’m putting them on the virtual list, perhaps not for 2021, though.

>223 thorold: I've never read her, just thought she'd nto been mentioned. I'm glad you mentioned Colette as I keep meanign to read her.

>224 tonikat: Saw the most excellent movie Collette a few years back and knew i had to look her up. Started with the complete claudine are her first, and what started her huge popularity (once she got out from under her teacher/husband's thumb0 and are quite fun to read. My other favorite is My Mother's House Sido a memoir of her life and a beautiful tribute to her own mother. Need to read others, just haven't gotten around to it. But thats a good start

>222 lilisin: I realise this is probably an unpopular opinion but, while I love The Lathe of Heaven and The Dispossessed as much as anyone could, I think Le Guin is at her best in short fiction, especially the more recent collections such as The Birthday of the World and A Fisherman of the Inland Sea.

FWIW, anyone who wants to read LeGuin but isn't high on sci-fi or her novels might might enjoy No Time to Spare, essays on aging and life. I think she was in her 80s when she wrote most of these. I enjoyed them a lot.

>207 thorold: Doris Lessing? - it would also get you reading science fiction.
Also Colette who has been mentioned before.

>207 thorold: Toni Morrison was the first name that came to my mind as well. I read through her novels and it was a terrific experience (especially the first five novels). I think Morrison is the only female author on the list I use after Woolf. ?? One I’ve personally thought about pursuing is Hillary Mantel.

>226 spiralsheep: I agree re Le Guin. New Dimensions includes probably her best known story the ones who walk from the omelas Ive also read Birthday of the World and her memoir No Time to Spare. I find her novels just too...much of something but regardless shes an amazing author

>225 cindydavid4: I saw the film too and liked it a lot, it brought old memories of what I'd learned of her bnack and took me back to watch Gigi again, which I'd not seen since I was a kid (when I liked it a lot), though there is that song which does bother me.

>229 dchaikin: I read Fludd in 1989, which was my first and last Mantel. Never again. It reminded me of T. F. Powys and that's not a compliment, lol.

>230 cindydavid4: Le Guin can effectively conjure up a whole alien world in a few pages. It's a gift. She doesn't need a whole novel. In fact one of her most effective "novels" Four Ways to Forgiveness is a suite of novellas.

At the opposite extreme I also love Barbara Pym, who uses scene-setting techniques obsessively to the very last chapters of her relentlessly ordinary realist novels.

>228 baswood: Yes, Doris Lessing would be a good one, but probably not for a big project, rather a bit of gap-filling. I’ve read all her early fiction fairly recently, and a couple of non-fiction books as well. So probably more someone I’m going to go on picking away at.

>232 spiralsheep: I love Barbara Pym — that would be a strong temptation...

>233 thorold: I've read all Pym's fiction in chronological order of writing, except Civil to Strangers which I read last, and it took me much less than a year due to not being strong willed enough to space them. I can't understand people who claim her work is all the same. Crampton Hodnet is a farce while Sweet Dove Died and Quartet in Autumn are clearly tragedies. The one point against this scheme is that I don't think chronological order makes much difference in Pym's case.

>234 spiralsheep: Oh yes, there’s the extra challenge of working out the order in which she wrote them, as so many were published much later. I’d forgotten about that. But no-one would be likely to imagine that Crampton Hodnet was written by someone of the same age-group as the author of Quartet in autumn and the two other “post-gap” novels.

>235 thorold: Crampton Hodnet is definitive madcap authorial youthfulness and A Few Green Leaves is the closest Pym got to an authorial persona of disapproving old lady, yes, and maybe An Academic Question is somewhat of its time in relation to other literature, but apart from that I honestly don't think authorial or publication chronologies make much difference for readers.

>207 thorold: Simone de Beauvoir

>231 tonikat: oh you mean thank heavens for little girls? Yeah ....not good.

Had the same trouble with the musical The Fantastics. We did it in HS and there is a song in there about staging a kidnapping that I didn't think much about at that age, but man, listening to it now? I don't think its done much any more probably for that reasin (tho the song 'try to remember' is in it, which I love) anyway

>232 spiralsheep: I'll have to get that collection, sounds good!

I am not a huge fan of Pym but there is another author at the same time period that is near and dear to my heart. A friend gave me Bless This House knowing how much I enjoyed reading British history. This is the start of her House trilogy, and also has a Suffolk trilogy. But my favs are her histories - King's Pleasure is probably the best story ever told about Katherine of Aragon. Changed a lot of my thinking about her (which was born out in the Wolf Hall books) All of her others are similar in getting passed the rumors and getting to the real stories (as much as can be done anyway) She also wrote How Far to Bethlehem about the journey of the Magi. Even for this Jewish kid, it really moved me. Anyway she's written lots of others, have most of them

How about Angela Thirkel I sorta inherited a collection of her work, with the original covers. The stories were eh to me, but I keep them coz they are pretty...

>229 dchaikin: Hillary Mantel is an amazing author. Along with the Wolf Hall Trilogy she also has one about the French Revolution a place of greater safety which is well written, tho a bit hard to get started. Shes also written many short stories.

Another is Maggie O'Farrell her most recent novel Hamnet is blowing everyone away and is on many top ten lists. But she has a slew of good stuff .

Quick stop me before I think of more!!!!!

>235 thorold: I did that with Sharon Kay Penman books: read them in order of publication, but then reread them in order of the events from that time period. Really interesting way to look at an authors work!

>240 cindydavid4: It was Beyond Black that really got my attention with Mantel. It's not a historical novel. It's dark, enough that it's difficult to read, getting at that emptiness of contemporary life. But it's also terrific.

>239 cindydavid4: Thirkell is definitely upper-middle class, middle-brow, satire that punches down more than it punches up. But, with that context understood, I do find some of her earlier work amusing, although it does tend to seem samey to me. I've read through the Barsetshire series in chronological order (minus Demon in the House) from the first, High Rising, to after the war in Peace Breaks Out, but I wouldn't especially recommend it. I think she's better as occasional brain candy, and if I was going to reread then I'd probably casually dip into Summer Half or Pomfret Towers.

Norah Lofts is definitely not for me as I have a personal preference for my history being high-brow and non-fiction, which is a pity because there's a lot of very good middle-brow historical fiction about and I do generally like middle-brow fiction. I'm more high-brow in my poetry and non-fiction reading.

I like a lot of 20th century middle-brow "women's fiction" but I've found it pays to read an author's best works and ignore the others. The saying that "everyone has a novel in them" might not be true but it does seem that many authors only have one really good novel in them. However, as I always add, there's nothing wrong with reading for pleasure rather than education or edification. (As long as one's reading doesn't intensify one's pre-existing ignorances, lol.)

>227 nohrt4me2: Thanks for the note on the LeGuin. That is one I have not read, maybe I'll get to it over the long winter. (sooooo many books, eh?) btw, Jean, did you see that Lethem has a dystopia out? (or coming out). I'm not terribly tempted as I feel as if I have been living in a dystopia this last few years.

>239 cindydavid4: >243 spiralsheep: I got stuck at about the same point with Thirkell. After the 1945 election she seems to have been taken over by Attlee-induced political revulsion, and her novels become 200-page Torygraph editorials. It's not much fun wading through them any more, especially if you don't share her views.

>243 spiralsheep: Whats interesting is that a lot of my non fiction history reads led directly from historic fiction reads. Lofts lead me to much reading about the civil war, medieval life that I wouldn't have known about otherwise. So if shes not high brow, I guess Im not either. Just love reading history 'fiction' or non.

I do have my limits however. phillipa gregory being one of them. Her books do such a disservice to the characters and time, but then to each his own

>246 cindydavid4: Hmm, I was assuming I must've read a Phillipa Gregory but a quick search doesn't reveal anything familiar. I must've flicked through while browsing in the library and then put them back on the shelf.

I see her wikipedia page currently has this unfortunate but entertaining punctuation failure: "a story about the love of land and incest".

QUESTION 50: INITIAL THOUGHTS ON 2021 READING
I'm not a big reading goal person, but a few things I have on my radar, whether I get to them or not:

* I want to read more deeply into some of my mythology-based books—Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles, Stephen Fry's Mythos, Edith Hamilton's Mythology, and Emily Wilson's Odyssey translation (which I don't own but am an impulse-twitch away from acquiring).

* Last spring I got my hands on a copy of the third of Hilary Mantel's Cromwell series early and was SO STOKED. Reread Wolf Hall in an effort to get up to speed and... stopped there, for one reason or another. In 2021 I want to reread Bring Up the Bodies and then finally move on to The Mirror and the Light, after all that excited buildup.

* I want to at least try the first of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels. The folks I know who love them REALLY loved them, so I think I should at least dip my toe in the water.

* I still want to try my chapter-ever-Sunday-night idea of reading Simon Schama's Citizens. If ever there were a good time to get into the nitty-gritty of the French Revolution, it would be now.

Mostly I'll just free-range read, though, with a few work-related paths—I usually moderate a panel of nonfiction authors in the late spring, and there's always LJ's Best Books short stories category to read for in the fall.

Regrets? I have a few, but then again, too few to mention. Well, no, not really—I can mention them. Mostly I feel like I have less reading time mid-pandemic than I did beforehand because I've lost my two-hour commute. I don't miss the commute ONE LITTLE BIT, thank you, but the dedicated reading time was nice—even if it was usually done standing up, holding onto a firm object with one hand and balancing a book or iPad with the other, often squashed on all sides by my fellow commuters. I'm kind of amazed I didn't get COVID in early March, before I started working from home full-time. Work is super busy and eats up my entire day, and the extra hour in the morning I now use for walking, so I don't go stir-crazy or gain unhealthy amounts of weight. So I try to get in an hour of reading before bed, which sometimes gets pushed aside by other things—good stuff, for the most part, since I've started keeping a half-assed little sketchbook, writing a lot of pen and ink letters, keeping up with my journal better, and I've turned into more of a constantly puttering housekeeper, rather than the binge variety. So I guess if my reading has suffered for that it's not the end of the world, but I'd like to find more little corners of my time to read some of the really good ridiculous amounts of stuff I've stockpiled.

>231 tonikat: When I was little, my parents had a bunch of musical cast recording LPs, as people did then, and I loved listening to them. We're talking really young, five or so—just old enough to be trusted to play albums on my little hi-fi. One of them was the Gigi soundtrack, and my favorite song on it was "Thank Heaven for Little Girls." Because... I thought it was about little girls, like my age, and I was so happy that someone wrote a song about them. If you look at the lyrics through the eyes of a completely nonsexual five-year-old, it makes sense. "For little girls get bigger every day... They grow up in the most delightful way." Yes! I was going to be in first grade soon! It seemed perfectly reasonable to me that that was something worth celebrating in song.

Not that it doesn't give me the creeps now, but always a little overlaid with the pleasure I once took in it as an innocent little sprout.

>248 lisapeet: i own a good chunk of those. Mantel’s trilogy will be an early 2021 goal for me. I just bought the second two books (but then I couldn’t find my copy of Wolf Hall which I read in 2010 and want to reread. Oops). Eyed Citizens yesterday when looking for Wolf Hall...

>249 lisapeet: & >238 cindydavid4: it's sad I almost feel we have to nod to that seedy reading and I do so hope it was all just innocent, but then it's also the story it is, lovely as that may be, i must read it soon

Anybody a Dorothy Whipple fan? A friend sent me one of her books years ago. I enjoyed The Priory during a period of convalescence and keep thinking I should go back to her. She wrote from the 1930s-1950s. I see Persephone has published a bunch of hers, but I will try the li-berry first.

>249 lisapeet: Lisa I still have some of those albums - Oliver, Camelot, My Fair Lady - had them memorized. I don't remember seeing Gigi, but I do remember that song and had the same feeling you did, oh a song about me. THen I heard it on the radio several decades later and had a totally different reaction

Does anyone else notice a good potential title hidden in the prose of their current reading and then check to see if it's been used by an author for another book?

I'm reading Mansfield Park and when Sir Thomas used the phrase "fanciful impediments" I immediately googled and am enormously disappointed to discover it hasn't been recycled as a title.

>252 nohrt4me2: I read Someone at a distance not long ago, and liked it, I think I got it mostly because it was Persephone. Whipple was one of the two writers from Blackburn I read this year. (Ethel Carnie Holdsworth was the other)

>253 cindydavid4: etc. — Somehow the bit of our brains that reacts to catchy tunes doesn’t seem to be within our voluntary control anyway. As Mel Brooks pointed out in The Producers, you can get an audience to leave the theatre with the tune of “Springtime for Hitler” humming along in their brains.

>255 thorold: The Producers

Of course, I mentioned that to displace the earworm “Zenk ‘Evan four leetle gerrrls” with an even more insidious one :-)

>253 cindydavid4: I also have tons of those CDs from musical theater. I think one should keep in mind the time and context in which they were written. Anyone seem as grossed out as I am by Sweeney Todd??? There are a lot of creepy themes in popular musical theater even today, if a person takes the time to dig around and think deeply about them (Phantom of the Opera, for example, or Avenue Q, or Wicked). I prefer to just enjoy the music for what it is.

Q50. Have you been thinking of what you might read in the new year (and do you have the books all lined up?)

Somewhere in Heaven, Rebecca (rebeccanyc) will get a good laugh out of this post.

As usual, my lofty plans for 2020 were largely unmet, but even more so this year, the worst year for reading I've had since 2001, my first full year working as an attending physician, even though I've had more time off this year than in any year since...wow, since I was in diapers. Being the stubborn person I am I've decided to stick with the lists and the goals that I had set for 2020, and hope for a much better result in 2021:

1. 21 Classic Works of Fiction by Authors from the African Diaspora from My Shelves in 2021
2. 21 Non-Fiction Books from My Shelves in 2021
3. Books Written by The New York Times's Black Male Writers for Our Time
4. Black Women Authors Recommended by the Black Male Writers for Our Time
5. Dignidad Literaria: Literature and nonfiction by contemporary Latinx authors
6. Books longlisted for the Booker Prize and the Booker International Prize
7. Books from Professor Ibram X. Kendi's Antiracist Reading List

Two additional lists for 2021:
8. Medicine, Science and Public Health Books from My Shelves (including unread books longlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize from 2009-2018)
9. The Lusophone World: writing from countries where Portuguese is or was an important language (assuming that the members of Reading Globally choose it as a quarterly theme read in 2021).

>249 lisapeet:, >253 cindydavid4: et. al. We were also a Broadway cast album household. Camelot and My Fair Lady are two that I remember listening to a lot, and West Side Story as well. My mother also loved a rather obscure musical called New Girl in Town, based on Eugene O'Neill's play "Anna Christie." There are actually some catchy songs and some lovely songs as well in that score that I still remember quite well. My wife and I are both partial to Guys and Dolls. Our microwave makes a three-note trill when it is finished doing its work. Those three notes are the exact same as the first three notes of title song of Camelot. My wife is getting tired, I'm afraid, of hearing me answer our microwave by singing, "From far off France I heard your call."

My mother was also a rabid Gilbert and Sullivan fan and, as we lived in suburban New Jersey, several times took family excursions into Manhattan to see G&S productions. For many years my mom was secretary for an architect. Among a zillion other tasks (she was really the office manager but in those days, the title for a woman was "secretary," but I digress), when her boss completed the plans for a project, it was her job to "type up the specs." This was usually a monster job that she would bring home, banging away on our old manual Royal with The Mikado blasting away on the stereo. It is still my favorite G&S and, happily for our marriage, also a huge favorite of my wife's.

Talk about your ear worms, this one is capable of sticking with me for days (of course it only works if you know the music) . . .

Three little maids who, all unwary,
Come from a ladies' seminary,
Freed from its genius tutelary--
Three little maids from school!

>207 thorold: Nadine Gordimer was my first thought too. Then there is Janette Turner Hospital whom I love. Each of her novels is quite different than the others, but all have an edginess that takes her out of the ordinary. Moving ahead about 20 years, there is A L Kennedy who has a good body of work.

>104 tonikat: It is Pookie the Rabbit with Wings by Ivy Wallace. He lives in a toadstool in the woods and is friends with Belinda the woodcutter's daughter. They (the books) have been reissued and even made it to The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2020/apr/22/my-favourite-book-as-a-k...

>167 rocketjk: I'm surprised no one else mentioned Bernie Gunther, so glad to see him here.

>254 spiralsheep: "O Joy O Rapture Unforeseen." rocketjk mentioned G&S, and I often use that line when sh*t happens.

>258 kidzdoc: If you do #5 (Latinx lit), we can compare lists. I am looking at Mexican lit, but may expand to Spanish language lit as I find interesting things.

>258 kidzdoc: Go for it, Darryl!

>259 rocketjk: >261 nohrt4me2: “Dear me! Let’s see! Yes, yes; With yours my figures do agree!”

...Might have known that Club Read was really a nest of secret savoyards!

I grew up through a string of school, college and am-dram G&S productions (and a few Rodgers & Hammerstein in between — I was most disappointed the first time I travelled to Surrey and found it didn’t have a fringe on top). I even went to see the D’Oyly Carte pros a few times when they were touring, but G&S is really most fun when it’s people you know making a slight mess of it. I still have a shelf of those two-LP sets, all with Owen Brannigan as the Sergeant of Police or whatever.

>260 SassyLassy: thank you so much for that -- it's all come flooding back, but I am sure I only read one book, and had all sorts of suspiscions as to how I couldn;t read the rest, or simply unanswered questions . . . i will have to see if i can read the series now. Very glad to have read that, thanks :)

>260 SassyLassy: Yes, I was surprised by that as well. I love that series.

>262 thorold: "G&S is really most fun when it’s people you know making a slight mess of it."

Watch Groucho Marx as Koko in the television production of The Mikado sometime. He was enthusiastic, but did not have the singing chops, I'm afraid, at least by that point in his career.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T83W3rgQuXQ

(To the subject that you mention
I have given some attention
and I think I am sufficiently decayed).

>262 thorold: >265 rocketjk: Groucho loved G&S, and he was a master at patter songs. Thank you for the link!

Musicals and opera all devolve into comedy for me, I'm afraid. A few Christmases ago I corresponded with some ladies in Chester about some historical points in the cathedral. They were lovely and helpful and told me all about a bus trip to Wales to see a community theater production of "Guys and Dolls." I could only imagine Nathan Detroit with a Welsh accent.

>255 thorold: hee you are so right

>257 LadyoftheLodge: Oh I agree totally. I just cringe when I hear it and think some shows (like Fantastic) mignt be a bit upset that the song is in there.

>265 rocketjk: Never been big on opera, but I do appreciate some songs when I hear them. Always loved 'I am the very model of a modern Major-General,' and laughed when I heard Washington sing it in Hamilton

>269 cindydavid4: Yeah, I'm not much of an opera fan, either, although I can appreciate why some many folks adore it. I wouldn't really classify G&S as opera, but the distinction is I guess not that crucial.

"and laughed when I heard Washington sing it in Hamilton"

Ah, yes, that was a great moment. The biggest laugh for me in Hamilton was, of course, King George's appearances. But I did keep expecting him to break out into, ". . . Prove to me that you're so cool. Walk across my swimming pool" from JC Superstar.

>266 nohrt4me2: "Groucho loved G&S, and he was a master at patter songs. Thank you for the link!"

You're welcome. I recently read a fine biography of Groucho and know of his love for G&S. Groucho was great at being Groucho. Even in the short clip I provided, you can kind of see (or at least that's how it seems to me) that he was basically performing Groucho schtick rather than trying to portray the character of Koko. Not that a) Groucho schtick wasn't great and/or b) the character of Koko is particularly deep, anyway, but Groucho is still being Groucho there, not Koko. Anyway, my wife and I bought a copy of the DVD of the whole broadcast (only an hour long; songs were cut out to fit the time format: c'est la vie!). It is entertaining, and I do recommend a viewing, but mostly as a vehicle for watching Groucho in a different setting rather than as a way to enjoy the operetta. That's my two cents and worth every penny.

I remember watching the Marx Brothers on tv with my parents, and just about died laughing at Night at the Opera. And as I got older, a rewatch was always a treat because I suddenly got somethign I totally missed before

BTW if you never watched Harpo and Lucille Ball together, you absolutly must do so. Two gifted performers, a wonderful skit

>259 rocketjk: Hah, I do that too - though now I have a microwave that sings something else, so I only reply "Camelot!" when I'm at my parents' house.

My dad is an ardent amateur actor - not so many musicals though (he was the Pooh-Bah in the Mikado once - and Mom was Yum Yum). We also had tapes/records/etc of various musicals - Finian's Rainbow and Brigadoon were the perennials, a good many others were occasional repeats.

I just (a year ago, I think...) went to see a G&S, Pinafore. And found that I don't really like G&S - even when it's well done by people who can both sing and act and have a good set. There are so many books full of people rhapsodizing over G&S, I always thought I had just seen a bad version, or it wasn't something to be read but needed to be seen, or... but apparently they just don't work for me. I have a skewed sense of humor, anyway - things I enjoy are not usually seen as funny (too dry, or something, for most), and I don't enjoy a lot of very popular humorous stuff.

>272 jjmcgaffey: Ah, yes, Finian's Rainbow. That's one I forgot. I think we had the Brigadoon soundtrack, as well, though it wasn't the family favorite the others were.

Have all the Marx Bros on DVD. My kid liked them when he was little, especially Harpo, who wrote a very entertaining bio, Harpo Speaks.

I remember watching You Bet Your Life on TV as a kid. He did a sketch of the show on Jack Benny's program that's a classic: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_OS7nANRJTw

>270 rocketjk: I think G&S could be better described as comic opera or operetta. We saw a fun opera a few years ago titled Daughter of the Regiment, which reminded me a lot of G&S.

"I cleaned the windows and I swept the floors and I polished up the handles on the big front door" is the line from Pinafore that sticks with me.

Just mention JC Superstar and my brain starts singing the entire score for me!

Hmm. Me thinks it might be a good idea to add a "break out" room when I create the 2021 page. A place for miscellaneous conversations that might start on someone's thread but could then move to the break out room. Is that a good idea for 2021 or should we leave it to those in the conversation to create one and move their conversation if desired?

I also did not make in January a common thread where we usually start with introductions; I suppose I thought we all pretty much were familiar with each other and we tend to introduce ourselves on our own thread (assuming there may be new visitors). That old traditional thread also was used for announcements...etc. How about I create a general thread for announcements, general questions to the group..whatever?

I'll put the group page up on a quiet day after the holiday.

>276 avaland: I was thinking about something along the break out thread! There's such a vast amoun of knowledge and interests within this group. Even if the contervsations are above and beyond my own, there is so much to be learned. I was thinking about adding a very specific kind of recommendations thread, to be a catch all for all our reading past and present that can't always be contianed within our individual threads. I think a break out thread would perfect!

>275 LadyoftheLodge: yep, me too! Loved the musicals; wish I could have seen it on Broadway tho did see the movie

>276 avaland: I like our digressions and would like to keep them here. Don't think anyone here would take over with their own thread, we have a good give n take.

wouldn't mind a common thread for intros. and such

>279 cindydavid4: I agree. To me, the digressions (I prefer to think of them as "side trips.") add to the charm of the thread.

>276 avaland: Side tracks aren't really distracting to me personally because my tablet automatically jumps to the last post read. If two or three people are engaged in a digression I am not interested in, it's easy to scroll through. My sense is that the more you break up conversations into smaller threads, the fewer engagements you get.

>276 avaland: >278 cindydavid4: >280 rocketjk: >281 nohrt4me2: I also enjoy the digressions and especially the "good give n take" and I agree that "the more you break up conversations into smaller threads, the fewer engagements you get."

In fact, after the people, the asides and tangents sparked by the Questions are probably what keep me coming back to this thread.

To be clearer, I was not thinking about the moving conversations and digressions that occur on this Questions thread(because it is mostly expected here), as I was thinking of when it happens elsewhere. Say, you and one or two others start having a conversation about contemporary Russian authors because you just read and reviewed a Viktor Pelevin novel on your thread. If you wanted to open the conversation to the whole group you could move the conversation to the 'break out' thread, thus inviting anyone to respond. Members, knowing that particular thread would be used in such a way may regularly check it and contribute, when perhaps they don't follow the individual's reading thread.

I note: hubby sitting across the room from me seems dubious we would all think to use it.

Stretch's idea in #277 can fit right into this. Although, personally, I'd run a question by SassyLassy in case she might want to use it in the Questions for the Avid Reader thread.

>277 stretch: That sounds good, too

>279 cindydavid4: So noted. re: the first part of your comment see my explanation above.

>280 rocketjk:, >281 nohrt4me2:, >282 spiralsheep: See explanation at the top of this post :-) Did I make it clearer at all?

>283 avaland: Sounds sensible, but it will probably take a bit of trial and error before we work out when to use it and when not to.

>283 avaland:> "Say, you and one or two others start having a conversation about contemporary Russian authors because you just read and reviewed a Viktor Pelevin novel on your thread."

So, this would be, then, if I'm understanding the concept, a conversation that cropped up about Russian authors on my own CR thread, and I would then choose to send anyone who wanted to talk about Russian authors away from my own thread to a generic Breakout Thread, where all such breakout conversations from all over Club Read were simultaneously taking place? So I would have to wade through all the posts from all the other CR breakout conversations before I found the Russian authors posts?

Or am I missing something (as seems likely)?

Personally, not only do I have no aversion to such breakout conversations on my CR thread, I welcome them.

I must admit I enjoy these digressing conversations just taking place in the thread they started in, but hey - happy to go with the flow. Digressers still welcome on my thread.

On 2021 reading, I have no plans beyond hoping for a bit of a jolt back into my reading again. I feel like I'm in a reading slump at the moment, which is reflected in the paltry number of books I've got through this year compared to others. I think it is a COVID thing in terms of the changes it's made to general life. It's harder to turn off the laptop when I'm working at home, and then I feel too tired to concentrate on reading by the time everyone's cleared off to bed at 10pm. I'm also distracted by the new guilty pleasure of TV watching. I've not watched much TV for years, but this year have rediscovered it in the form of some really good BBC drama series.

We've been keeping away from shops as much as possible because of my Dad's health, and so I think I'm also missing the joy of new book finds from the second hand bookshop near my office.

Ah well. So long as I keep on reading something in 2021 I don't mind too much what it is.

>284 thorold: Perhaps it might do to just have a general thread where a member could post a note saying there is a impromptu discussion of X on their thread and invite any one else to stop by?

>285 rocketjk: That was the idea, and you are right, there possibly could be more than one conversation going, although I'm inclined to think that less likely as some would not think to, or just not want to, move the topic.
--------------------

Of course, anyone here could start a topic thread on Club Read if they liked, but the problem there is that the way some members follow only certain threads (i.e. "starred threads", they would not necessarily see a newly created thread of any topic (I'm terribly old-fashioned and go to the group page where I see both my starred threads and the entire list of threads). But then, everyone seemed to find the first Covid thread okay so perhaps I'm overthinking.

--------------------
OK, thanks for all the input. I'm going to nix that idea but will create a general thread where members can post messages to the whole group. Examples: questions (i.e. does anyone know of a good book for X? Anyone else having a problem with Y?), invitations (i.e. We're having a bit of conversation on modern Russian authors on my thread if you would like to join us), offers (I have nine books by Trollope if someone wants them, willing to post in continental US), announcements/notices ...

There will also be a thread for introductions again this year. And the other traditional threads will be created by those who have been doing so (thanks go out to them for doing so!)

>287 avaland: Sounds good. Thanks for putting in all the effort on this - much appreciated.

I thought there was a general thread on LT about new threads but apparently not. So it would be helpful here (or can LT set up a notification on new threads?) As for intros there is one on LT but it doesn't seem to be used so one here on CR would be useful for us.

Also wondering since its been ages since this thread started; can we redo some of the earlier questions from that time? Think it might be interesting to revisit our thoughts on them, plus I think we have enough new folk that it will be new for them

and yes, thank you sooo much for all the work, thought, energy and time you've put in CR. Hope to keep seeing you around!

I've been thinking about this suggestion. I took it to be a break out thread from the questions thread, not from personal threads, where most people welcome digressions. I'm of two minds here (not helpful) as the digressions in questions often spark more discussion, but on the other hand, sometimes the idea of the question under discussion gets buried.

I do like the idea of a general message exchange thread, but it still leaves the digression matter unresolved.

Perhaps we could start with the general message thread, and see how that goes. We would also keep the idea of a breakout questions thread in mind, depending on how the main thread goes over the next few months.

>287 avaland: I agree with the thought that it's difficult to see newly created threads if you only follow starred threads. One other disadvantage is that new members who may have lots to say and consider, are often left out of the discussions that way, left to post their own thoughts in a one sided monologue.

I too use the group page. I think the Covid thread took off because of its topic, but apart from that newer threads would have to really catchy titles to catch any attention from the star system.

>290 SassyLassy: I didn't mind the digressions. More than a few times I thought the digressions were better than the original questions, and I was okay with that. I'll leave the Questions thread in your very capable hands.

>289 cindydavid4: Cindy, we can post announcements of new threads on the general thread that will be created. Someone here who has kept up with all the LT advancements could perhaps answer your question re: what LT generally can do.

If you look at previous years of Club Read we often had an introductions thread of our own. Here is last year's: https://www.librarything.com/topic/300639 We create a new Club Read every year (or every year since it was created in 2009) and we will once again have one there.

>287 avaland: "OK, thanks for all the input. I'm going to nix that idea but will create a general thread where members can post messages to the whole group. Examples: questions (i.e. does anyone know of a good book for X? Anyone else having a problem with Y?), invitations (i.e. We're having a bit of conversation on modern Russian authors on my thread if you would like to join us), offers (I have nine books by Trollope if someone wants them, willing to post in continental US), announcements/notices ... "

This seems like a better idea to me, kind of a grab-bag of ideas & questions area.

>292 rocketjk: Ok. Fab!

I just want to add that Club Read 2021 will be our "lucky" 13th year! (...and more than a few of us have been here all those years).

CLUB READ 2021 is LIVE.

>291 avaland: ok, thanks!

>294 avaland: link?

Thanks Lois!

>296 cindydavid4:

Club 2021: https://www.librarything.com/groups/clubread2021workinpr

Renaming a group does not get rid of the previous name in the URL so we will have an interesting URL this year :)

>298 AnnieMod: Weird that the URL still retains a bit of the "working in progress" I briefly had in the group name while copied over the page contents...etc. Had I known....

>299 avaland:

Once a group is created, you can rename it as many times as you want but the URL is set in stone. :) not a big deal - I just noticed because I did not find it under the short name and had to look for it in your groups :)