2022 Reading Challenge

Book 13 - Great Circle - Maggie Shipstead

great.jpg
This was great, I've loved every page of it. It's 600pp so quite hefty and in the acknowledgments at the end, Shipstead thanks her editor for helping her rein this in from 1000pp which I think was for the better, the story felt complete and I never felt like there was any fat needed trimming at this length.
The story is of a fictional aviator trying against all odds to blaze a trail and circumnavigate the globe taking in both poles. Her story and the people's closest to her unfold throughout the 20th century and we witness the amazing advances that century saw in spite of or perhaps because of two major wars.
Our protagonist struggles against near infant death, sexism, gender expectations, spousal abuse and rape but never loses focus of her desire to fly. She's a wonderful, complete character including many of her own flaws.
Interspersed throughout the main narrative is a second story set in contemporary L.A. of an actor set to play our historical aviatrix in a biopic. She too struggles against the male dominated world showing us how little has changed in the past century for professional women.
Beautifully written and seemingly rigorously researched it reads at a clip, and although it's taken me a little longer to get through than I expected due to being a bit busier than usual this last fortnight, I've always looked forward to picking it up again.
 
Last edited:
Book 14: The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

Remains.jpg
Interesting read, not something I think I'll ever feel the impetus to reread though.
A tale of a butler, Stevens, the head of the staff at a grand English house, formerly of a disgraced old money gentleman, now a wealthy American owner. Stevens travels to Cornwall to meet a former housekeeper hearing that her marriage is ending in an effort to entice her back to the staff, some 20 years after her departure. Along the way he regales nostalgic flashbacks of life under the household's previous owner.
There's definitely something interesting about how the other half live as it were and equally interesting to see the shift in culture occurring around the middle of the 20th century in this country as the old aristocracy made way for new money to take over many of these stately homes and what that meant for a shift in priorities (28 staff down to 4 for example).
There's also some interesting history about how the aristocracy had/has an influence on (inter)national policy making and some thought-provoking philosophising about whether a country's common people have the intellectual capacity to be involved in the western democratic process as we know it when they simply aren't smart enough to make big decisions.
There's some complicated, contradictory characterisations here. On the one hand, I found myself sympathising with Stevens, born into the life of servitude as his father was a butler before him, it seems to be a life where one rarely even leaves the premises at which one works and in his aim to be one of the greats, Stevens admits that this means giving everything to his master and that this will be how he achieves true 'dignity'. It is apparent that he has romantic feelings for his housekeeper colleague and she him but, he seems incapable of expressing himself romantically and indeed in other social situations. On the other hand, he comes across as a self-righteous snob with a severe superiority complex who bullies his colleagues at times and comes across as the boy pulling the girl's pigtails in the schoolyard because of his emotional incapacity.
I've only read this and Never Let Me Go by Ishiguro and in both it seems to me his writing is of a very bare bones, matter-of-fact, almost emotionless style that allows the reader to infer plenty about the characters. I think it worked better here than NLMG and I did indeed prefer this book of the two.
 
Mr Moore said:
Book 14: The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

View attachment 133198
Interesting read, not something I think I'll ever feel the impetus to reread though.
A tale of a butler, Stevens, the head of the staff at a grand English house, formerly of a disgraced old money gentleman, now a wealthy American owner. Stevens travels to Cornwall to meet a former housekeeper hearing that her marriage is ending in an effort to entice her back to the staff, some 20 years after her departure. Along the way he regales nostalgic flashbacks of life under the household's previous owner.
There's definitely something interesting about how the other half live as it were and equally interesting to see the shift in culture occurring around the middle of the 20th century in this country as the old aristocracy made way for new money to take over many of these stately homes and what that meant for a shift in priorities (28 staff down to 4 for example).
There's also some interesting history about how the aristocracy had/has an influence on (inter)national policy making and some thought-provoking philosophising about whether a country's common people have the intellectual capacity to be involved in the western democratic process as we know it when they simply aren't smart enough to make big decisions.
There's some complicated, contradictory characterisations here. On the one hand, I found myself sympathising with Stevens, born into the life of servitude as his father was a butler before him, it seems to be a life where one rarely even leaves the premises at which one works and in his aim to be one of the greats, Stevens admits that this means giving everything to his master and that this will be how he achieves true 'dignity'. It is apparent that he has romantic feelings for his housekeeper colleague and she him but, he seems incapable of expressing himself romantically and indeed in other social situations. On the other hand, he comes across as a self-righteous snob with a severe superiority complex who bullies his colleagues at times and comes across as the boy pulling the girl's pigtails in the schoolyard because of his emotional incapacity.
I've only read this and Never Let Me Go by Ishiguro and in both it seems to me his writing is of a very bare bones, matter-of-fact, almost emotionless style that allows the reader to infer plenty about the characters. I think it worked better here than NLMG and I did indeed prefer this book of the two.
Click to expand...
I have these on my list. I read Klara and the Sun last summer and loved it. The Remains of the Day sounds especially appealing after watching The Guilded Age.
 
Book 5

Star Wars: The High Republic - Light of the Jedi by Charles Soule
20220323_221408.jpg


At @DJSJ's recommendation over in the Star Wars thread I decided to check this one out. The High Republic books and comics take place around 200 years before the events in the movies and this is the first book of the series. Very enjoyable visiting a familiar universe with mostly unfamiliar characters which allows for more freedoms in storytelling than further stories during the familiar era - which only leave so much room for the stakes. I very much enjoyed this and am glad my local bookseller just got copies of the next book back in stock today!
 
I finished Murakami's Norwegian Wood yesterday. I read about the book after I finished, and read some reviews. Apparently this was a break from his usual style? I'm sure I'll read another of his; I thoroughly enjoyed NW. At times it did remind me of Karl Ove's My Struggle. It had an auto-fiction feel about it, with the way he'd describe eating lunch or what he decided to wear that day. But maybe that's because I only have one more volume of Knuasgaard to go, and that series is always lurking in my head somewhere.

So, on to this one.
Book 5: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee - Dee Brown
I've had this copy for a few months and have been stalling on starting it because I've heard it's a tough but compelling read. I don't really know if I'll devour this or have to take breaks from it. There's only one way to find out....

IMG_0331.JPG
 
Book 15: Piranesi - Susanna Clarke
106F5623-741F-4578-A6C9-FF6281DA3009.jpeg
I came very close to dropping this after the first couple of chapters, it was only the fact that the novel was relatively short at 250pp that I chose to push on and it proved to be a good decision.
Totally my fault, I don’t like fantasy fiction particularly and I didn’t do my research on this. I have plenty of time for the fantastic occurring within an otherwise normal world like Clarke’s mesmerising Strange & Norrell, but pure fantasy has just never appealed to me so I did struggle with this initially.
Without giving away any spoilers, Clarke manages in her short book to push past the realms of fantasy fiction and delivers something that defies traditional genre definitions, encompassing psychological thriller, detective fiction and adventure all wrapped up with tips of the hat to high art and literary history.
Ultimately good stuff and I think I’d enjoy this more on a repeat read with the hindsight of this first sitting.
 
Book 5: The Silentiary by Antonio Di Benedetto
IMG_0725.jpg

This was a NY Review Books Classics Club selection, and I loved it. The story concerns an unnamed young man living in an unnamed latin american city in the mid-1900s. A mechanic opens business near his home and he becomes obsessed with the sounds made by their constant work. The writing is simple, yet the descriptions of sounds are surprisingly potent. The book is also really funny; as the narrator's quest for peace intensifies, there's a deep irony in how harmless/workaday the noise is vs. how seriously he takes it. He moves several times, finding new noises to irritate him and alienating various enemies and allies. The pettiness of his complaints is very human and relatable. He also fancies himself a writer, but never puts pen to page; as an idle creative I felt embarrassingly seen.

Great book, very quick read; I picked it for my book club, so I had to squeeze it in while on the home stretch of this behemoth:

Book 6: A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
IMG_0724.jpg

What a flippin' ride. This has been on my to-read list for a while, and I picked it up a month or two back in a random bookstore on a trip. I've read a couple Marlon James books before, and while I had mixed experiences with them I think he's one of the contemporary greats (I highly recommend his podcast Marlon and Jake Read Dead People if you like people talking about books).

I knew this book had a reputation for being difficult; the perspective shifts between a large handful of characters, and much of it is written in Jamaican dialect. That said, the first half or so was immensely readable; the story propels, the characters intrigue, and the shifting narrative keeps you moving. Then the story jumps ahead a couple years, and you get several 30-50-page chapters from single perspectives, catching you up on what people have done in the intervening time. Thing is, he writes these passages in such Faulknerian stream-of-consciousness, relating these stories like memory would come up, that is nonlinearly and free-associatively. This was where the book got tough to hang with, and around this section I got Elden Ring so all my reading time got sucked up into the Lands Between.

I need to do some reading on the themes and story, because especially in the second half James keeps things rather murky. There's also a lot of political context to Jamaica's history, as well as the CIA's involvement/meddling in its politics. It certainly feels like he wants you to make connections more than he wants to spell them out explicitly.

Great book; I imagine I'll have more frequent updates now that it's out of the way. For a while I've been on a reading cadence of a book taking 1 or 2 weeks to read at most, and while I got impatient at times, it was nice to live with a book for a couple months in a row.
 
Bull Shannon said:
Book 5: The Silentiary by Antonio Di Benedetto
View attachment 133441

This was a NY Review Books Classics Club selection, and I loved it. The story concerns an unnamed young man living in an unnamed latin american city in the mid-1900s. A mechanic opens business near his home and he becomes obsessed with the sounds made by their constant work. The writing is simple, yet the descriptions of sounds are surprisingly potent. The book is also really funny; as the narrator's quest for peace intensifies, there's a deep irony in how harmless/workaday the noise is vs. how seriously he takes it. He moves several times, finding new noises to irritate him and alienating various enemies and allies. The pettiness of his complaints is very human and relatable. He also fancies himself a writer, but never puts pen to page; as an idle creative I felt embarrassingly seen.

Great book, very quick read; I picked it for my book club, so I had to squeeze it in while on the home stretch of this behemoth:

Book 6: A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
View attachment 133442

What a flippin' ride. This has been on my to-read list for a while, and I picked it up a month or two back in a random bookstore on a trip. I've read a couple Marlon James books before, and while I had mixed experiences with them I think he's one of the contemporary greats (I highly recommend his podcast Marlon and Jake Read Dead People if you like people talking about books).

I knew this book had a reputation for being difficult; the perspective shifts between a large handful of characters, and much of it is written in Jamaican dialect. That said, the first half or so was immensely readable; the story propels, the characters intrigue, and the shifting narrative keeps you moving. Then the story jumps ahead a couple years, and you get several 30-50-page chapters from single perspectives, catching you up on what people have done in the intervening time. Thing is, he writes these passages in such Faulknerian stream-of-consciousness, relating these stories like memory would come up, that is nonlinearly and free-associatively. This was where the book got tough to hang with, and around this section I got Elden Ring so all my reading time got sucked up into the Lands Between.

I need to do some reading on the themes and story, because especially in the second half James keeps things rather murky. There's also a lot of political context to Jamaica's history, as well as the CIA's involvement/meddling in its politics. It certainly feels like he wants you to make connections more than he wants to spell them out explicitly.

Great book; I imagine I'll have more frequent updates now that it's out of the way. For a while I've been on a reading cadence of a book taking 1 or 2 weeks to read at most, and while I got impatient at times, it was nice to live with a book for a couple months in a row.
Click to expand...
I loved Seven Killings, definitely one of, if not the best book I read last year. So many voices, but not to the detriment of being able to keep track of the plot lines, more to giving a fuller picture. I loved it and it was refreshing to see the treatment of gay characters that I found contrasting to Jamaican stereotypes I’ve heard in music.
 
Mr Moore said:
Book 15: Piranesi - Susanna Clarke
View attachment 133416
I came very close to dropping this after the first couple of chapters, it was only the fact that the novel was relatively short at 250pp that I chose to push on and it proved to be a good decision.
Totally my fault, I don’t like fantasy fiction particularly and I didn’t do my research on this. I have plenty of time for the fantastic occurring within an otherwise normal world like Clarke’s mesmerising Strange & Norrell, but pure fantasy has just never appealed to me so I did struggle with this initially.
Without giving away any spoilers, Clarke manages in her short book to push past the realms of fantasy fiction and delivers something that defies traditional genre definitions, encompassing psychological thriller, detective fiction and adventure all wrapped up with tips of the hat to high art and literary history.
Ultimately good stuff and I think I’d enjoy this more on a repeat read with the hindsight of this first sitting.
Click to expand...
This was one of my favorite books I read last year!
 
Book #6

Michael Connelly "Trunk Music (Harry Bosch #5)" (1997 Grand Central Publishing; 2013 paperback edition)

Impressions: What I've liked about Connelly's Bosch series is that each novel in the series so far has a completely different flavor to it, so they don't feel same-old-same-old. The first of the series centered around a caper, the second featured drug trafficking in Mexico, the third a more standard serial killer and court room procedural and the fourth a cold case investigation. This one is a more classic whodunit with some Las Vegas mob elements. Several story lines of this were used in the 2nd season of the TV series, but everything is remixed so the read remains fresh. This is also the novel where one of my favorite characters from the series gets introduced, Lt. Grace Billets. It's interesting to see that her character is not changed all that much across the two formats. Overall, the story is tight and the characters well developed as usual. Fun read.

IMG_2342.JPG

Up next: Jonathan Ames "A Man Named Doll"

1648249078951.png
 
Last edited:
Book 8: The Carrying - Ada Limon

This is a collection of poetry from Limon. I really liked it. She's very connected with herself and with the world she lives in. She's able to talk about being face to face with a crow like it's the most normal, beautiful thing in the world. If you like poetry, this is a good one.

Book 9: The Book Thief - Marcus Zusak

HOLY SHIT THIS WAS SO GOOD. I don't know how I had never heard of it before. Basically this book is about a little German girl growing up during WW2, and the story is told from the perspective of death. It's incredibly interesting. I couldn't put it down.
 
Book 6

Do What You Want - The Story of Bad Religion by Bad Religion with Jim Ruland
20220327_093217.jpg

Blasted through this one in two and a half days, which I guess is somewhat like the reading equivalent of a two and a half minute punk song. This is a very well-paced breeze through the 40 years of twists and turns seen by these icons of melodic hardcore. Great read!
 
Indymisanthrope said:
So this book is great. I read that Krueger considers To Kill a Mockingbird to be a big influence, and it shows.

I was not previously familiar, but apparently Krueger made his name on a series of mysteries about a PI named Cork O'Connor. I definitely enjoyed this enough to give one of those a go. @Turbo seems like something that could be up your alley, as well?
Click to expand...

I didn't know this series but they indeed look like they're up my alley. I think I'll grab the first of the series "Iron Lake" to give it a shot. Thanks for the recommendation!
 
Book 16: A Wild Sheep Chase - Haruki Murakami

sheep.jpg
My first attempt at Murakami was last year with the omnibus featuring his first two novellas from the Rat Trilogy, Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973. They were OK but just OK and left me wondering what the hype was about to be honest. I figured I'd at least complete the trilogy and fortunately, I found this to be a hundred times better.
At first it reads like a classic Chandler but quickly U-turns in the direction of the surreal and never really slows down to that destination as we're introduced to a girlfriend whose ears are bewitching to the point of near hypnosis, a quest for a sheep with a star on its back that can enter the body of humans and a shady corporation led by a comatose boss called, "The Boss". Oh, and conversations with a man in a sheep outfit. A Wild Sheep Chase indeed, I loved it.
 
Book 10:

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari

For a while now I felt like I had got into a routine of reading mainly jazz-related books or fiction, so I decided to spice it up with something different. I read Yuval Noah Harari's book, "Sapiens", a couple of years back and really enjoyed it so I decided to read his follow-up. As with "Sapiens", "Homo Deus" certainly isn't an easy read but this is mainly down to the amount of interesting information that is packed in. With every single page read I felt like I had learnt something really interesting. Harari highlights historic evolutionary traits, proven science, human behaviour, and technological breakthroughs to essentially highlight what COULD shape the future of mankind. Interestingly, this was written pre-pandemic and a few points are actually disproven. One statement he makes is that a modern pandemic is unlikely due to the advancement in science and the speed at which vaccines can be created and quarantines set up and that if it did happen it would be down to human error. Maybe this is particularly true in a way, but it was fascinating to read knowing what we now know.
IMG_6868.JPG
 
Book 10: Stamped - Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi

This was required reading for one of my classes. It's a 'remix' of one of Kendi's books, intended for YA audiences. It basically addresses the history of racism in the US in a way that's interesting for teenagers. I actually learned a lot from this book that I had no idea about. Turns out, the people who are championed and heralded as being antiracist in our history were actually pretty awful.

Book 11: The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller

I CANNOT SPEAK HIGHLY ENOUGH OF THIS BOOK OH MY GOD JUST GO READ IT. And read her book Circe as well. Just read it. Trust me.

Book 12: A Wreath for Emmett Till - Marilyn Nelson

This is very short. It's a wreath of sonnets in honor of Emmett Till. Each poem begins with the last line of the previous poem, creating the wreath. It's very lovely.
 
Also, I'm not sure if I've thrown this out here before, but I was thinking it could be fun to do a book swap, a la the t-shirt swap we did a few years ago or the annual N&G secret santa. Would anyone be interested in doing something like that this summer, maybe June-ish? I can try to organize it, but help would be appreciated.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top