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| The stack that has been sitting around for half a year now . . . |
It was a year when I was tired of reality, apparently, and also a year when I admitted early on that I wasn’t going to fill a number of the squares on my book bingo card so mostly I read the novels I felt like reading and/or that I’d bought on bookstore day. As it happens, those remained stacked up and I see that Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubus, Travels with Charley, and The Mysterious Correspondent are the only bookstore-day purchases I’ve not read yet. I started Posthumous Memoirs and quickly became bogged down so I did that which I nearly never do and put it aside.
Instead, I read half a dozen Anthony Trollope novels and four Louise Penny mysteries. I heard Elif Shafak on the radio plugging 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World and was moved to buy a copy. It was truly excellent in surprising ways, but her earlier The Architect's Apprentice was a bit more standard fare and thus something of a disappointment. Still, I’m reminded that I should look for more books by the “most famous woman writing novels in Turkey today” according to a 2015 review in The Guardian.
New books from once-reliable authors, Ian McEwan, Graham Swift, and Jasper Fforde were all a bit “meh” while Elizabeth Taylor’s The Soul of Kindness was every bit as fine as I remembered it and The Plague of Doves (Louise Erdrich) and Lolly Willowes (Sylva Townsend Warner) were unexpected delights. For some reason I’ve always shied away from Ms Erdrich; I should see about getting more of her books to read in 2022. It goes without saying that Scott’s current-work-in-progress, Islands, is probably the best fiction written in North America in 2022 and that it’s a fucking shame that it will likely never find a publisher.
My reading list, in reverse order for posterity:
The
Soul of Kindness
Mediocre
National
Provincial
The Plague of
Doves
Always, Rachel
The Fox's Tower
and Other Tales
The
Five Wounds
Christmas
at High Rising
The
Summer Book
Sea
of Poppies
The
Man Who Lived Underground
Echo
Mountain
Tortilla
Flat
Marion Fay
Lawn
Boy
Here
We Are
Our
Time is Now
Before
the Coffee Gets Cold
All
the Devils Are Here
Legends of the
North Cascades
Where
Stands A Winged Sentry
Lolly
Willowes
Scrapbook
of a Year and a Day
Islands
Black
from the Future
The Belton
Estate
The
Shortest Way to Hades
If
Beale Street Could Talk
The
Glass Magician
Excellent Women
Bird
Cottage
Whereabouts
The
Constant Rabbit
Simon
the Fiddler
Howl's
Moving Castle
The
Western Wind
The
Architect's Apprentice
This
is How You Lose the Time War
Mr
Scarborough's Family
Parable of the Sower
The Belly of Paris
A
Better Man
The
MacDermots of Ballycloran
Kindred
Klara
and the Sun
Ophelia's Ghost
The
Song of Achilles
Shuggie
Bain
Marling
Hall
Machines
Like Me
Lady
Anna
The
Mystery of the Blue Train
10
Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World
Kingdom
of the Blind
Abigail
Nightbirds
on Nantucket
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