WHAT I HAVE BEEN READING

I have been reading, but not blogging. Good old blogger had some issues last week. First all the images disappeared from the blog: that was scary! A couple days later they reappeared. Then for a day I couldn't get on to compose a new post. That was annoying. Then I just lost my momentum. But it is a new week, all seems well now, so here I go.

Even though I live in southern California, March was a rainy, cold and cloudy month. I read 17 books. I only have 12 books left on my reading list for 1957 and since I planned to finish the list in April, I will make that goal. 

Here is a rundown of what I read in March:

The Dream of Perpetual Motion, Dexter Palmer

Raising Demons, Shirley Jackson 

Rebel Yell, Alice Randall 

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Evelyn Waugh

Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov

Palace of Desire, Naguib Mahfouz

Native Speaker, Chang-rae Lee

The Sandcastle, Iris Murdoch

Thunder on the Right, Mary Stewart

The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold

A Gesture Life, Chang-rae Lee

The Yiddish Policeman's Union, Michael Chabon

The Tale of Despereaux, Kate DiCamillo

Breath, Eyes, Memory, Edwidge Danticat

The Company She Keeps, Mary McCarthy

Aloft, Chang-rae Lee

The Surrendered, Chang-rae Lee

I am going to be reviewing Chang-rae Lee's new book The Surrendered for BookBrowse this month, so I read every book he has written in the order in which he wrote them. That was a new challenge for me and intensely interesting. Reading four books by the same author in the space of three weeks put me so much into his world, style and ideas. I usually like to read an author's works from first to latest because I enjoy seeing how the author grows and changes as a writer, but this was an even deeper step than that. 

I was looking forward to The Dream of Perpetual Motion because it is steampunk and by a first time author, but I did not like it at all (though plenty of other people seemed to), so there will be no review of it here on the blog. If you read and liked it, let me know and I will give it another chance.

What did you read last month? What did you like?