BOOKS READ IN FEBRUARY

Here I am for my Saturday post. Also Happy Leap Day! Today's post is about the books I read in February. I had a great month with 11 books read.

I have not just been goofing off and reading though. I am about to wrap up a semi-final draft of a chapter for my book. The book is autobiography mixed with a survey of the literature I have chosen to read from the years I have lived, the Big Fat Reading Project I am often talking about. The chapter I have all but finished covers 1961 when I finished junior high (as it was called then) and started high school. The working title for my book is Reading For My Life and the chapter title is Teenage Wasteland. 

I appreciate your comments about missing my longer reviews, so in March I will try to serve up at least one, maybe two of those, featuring books I especially enjoyed reading in February. 

Stats: 11 books read. 10 fiction. 5 by women. 3 historical novels. 1 children's picture book. 1 nonfiction. 2 thrillers. 1 mystery. 1 translated. 2 for My Big Fat Reading Project (epic fail because I had planned to read 4 for that.)

Authors new to me: Bel Kaufman and William Gibson

Countries I visited: USA, France, Great Britain, Korea, Norway, Japan.

Favorites: The Water Dancer and Interior Chinatown

Least favorite (only because it was hard to read for me): The Hills Reply

I hope your February reading went well and would love to know what your favorite reads were.

SONG OF SOLOMON, THE ISLAND OF SEA WOMEN AND THE WATER DANCER

Today I have some actual reviews for you. I hope you still like my new method of mini-reviews. These are three of the best novels I have read lately.

I reread this for one of my reading groups. It is Toni Morrison's third novel and her first time writing from a male point of view.

Milkman, the main character, takes a long time to come of age. His parents had a marriage of deep conflicts and his mother nursed him for many years. Hence his nickname. When his parents each tell him their separate sides of the story, he goes off to find out the truth of his family roots. He is looking for reasons and he finds plenty.

In addition to getting a deeper understanding of the novel from my second reading, I got a renewed purpose to tell my own story. If someday my sons read it, at least they will know how it was for me and how their childhoods became so crazy. At the end, Milkman flies! 

In another reading group pick, Lisa See sets her latest novel on a Korean island and reveals the lives of women divers, called haenyeo, from 1938 to 2008. These women supported their families by reaping from the sea the marine creatures that fed them and brought in income.

She explores her favorite topic: friendship between women. She also gives a history lesson about Korea from the days of Japanese colonization through the Korean War and up to the 21st century.

The women lived a matrifocal life: they worked in the sea and in their own fields, having numerous children who were cared for by their husbands while they dived. They also suffered great loss as political changes on the island led to mass killings that included many of their children, husbands and friends.

Through her meticulous and voluminous research Lisa See does her usual excellent job of making a foreign culture come to life while delving into the deep griefs and guilt that left her main character almost psychologically destroyed. Yet this woman had strengths beyond anything I could even imagine.

My reading groups brought me the best books this month. The Water Dancer is truly amazing! I already knew Ta-Nehisi Coates to be a perceptive writer who can expose hard truths with equal parts fact and emotion. In his first work of fiction he tells the story of the early Abolition movement, the Underground Railroad, and Harriet Tubman, all through the eyes and voice of a slave in Virginia.

It, like Song of Solomon, is a coming of age tale as well as a treatise on how lost memories being recovered can change a man, a woman, a child, an entire people. The parallels between this novel, Toni Morrison's book and Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, are of course many. 

Hiram Walker, son of his enslaved mother and his plantation master father, falls into a special power called Conduction. Harriet Tubman also had that power and helped Hiram develop his own. In doing so, he finds his history, his purpose and his strengths.

I had to pay close attention as I read. Hard to do because the story is so gripping and the writing so vivid that all I wanted to do was turn the pages as fast as I could. 

Have you read any great books lately? I can recommend each of the above if you have not already read them.

 

READING LIST FOR 1964

I finally finished my reading list for 1964. As most of you know, in 2005 I began what I call My Big Fat Reading List. It entails reading the top 10 bestsellers, the award winning novels, and a selection of authors I chose to follow through the years. It is a huge, possibly impossible to complete, project which is the major part of my research for writing a book about my life as it relates to the literature of the years I have lived.

This list is one of the longest so far and it took me from April 2018 to January 2020 to get through it. I post the list for you here because I know some of my followers are interested in my project. In 1964 I finished my junior year of high school and began my senior year. It was a momentous year in the United States as well as around the world, but fiction tends to lag behind the news because it takes longer to write. So, no books about the Beatles yet!

BESTSELLERS

1.    The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John le Carre

2.    Candy, Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg

3.    Herzog, Saul Bellow

4.    Armageddon, Leon Uris

5.    The Man, Irving Wallace

6.    The Rector of Justin, Louis Auchincloss

7.    The Martyred, Richard E Kim

8.    You Only Live Twice, Ian Fleming

9.    This Rough Magic, Mary Stewart

10.                  Convention, Fletcher Knebel and Charles W Bailey II

OTHERS

1.                 PULITZER: No award

2.                 NEWBERY: It’s Like This, Cat, Emily Cheney Neville

3.                 CALDECOTT: Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak

4.                 NBA: The Centaur, John Updike

5.                 HUGO: Way Station, Clifford Simak 

6.                 EDGAR: The Light of Day, Eric Ambler

7.                 Arrow of God, Chinua Achebe-Nigeria

8.                 Black Hearts in Battersea, Joan Aiken

9.                 The Bloody Sun, Marion Zimmer Bradley

10.             The Book of Three, Lloyd Alexander

11.             Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl

12.             Clans of the Alphane Moon, Philip K Dick

13.             The Drought, J G Ballard

14.             Encyclopedia Brown Boy Detective, Donald J Sobol

15.             Farnham’s Freehold, Robert A Heinlein

16.             Flight of a Witch, Ellis Peters

17.             Flood, Robert Penn Warren

18.             For the Good of the Cause, A Solzhenitsyn

19.             The Garrick Year, Margaret Drabble

20.             Girls in Their Married Bliss, Edna O’Brien

21.             The Glass Cell, Patricia Highsmith

22.             Harriet the Spy, Louise Fitzhugh

23.             If Morning Ever Comes, Anne Tyler

24.             The Italian Girl, Iris Murdoch

25.             Julian, Gore Vidal

26.             A Kind of Anger, Eric Ambler

27.             Last Exit to Brooklyn, Hubert Selby, Jr

28.             Little Big Man, Thomas Berger

29.             The Little Girls, Elizabeth Bowen

30.             A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway

31.             The Old Boys, William Trevor

32.             The Old Man and Me, Elaine Dundy

33.             A Personal Matter, Oe Kenzaburo

34.             Queen’s Play, Dorothy Dunnett 

35.             The Ravishing of Lol Stein, Marguerite Duras

36.             Ribsy, Beverly Cleary

37.             The Shadow of the Sun, A S Byatt

38.             Shepherds of the Night, Jorge Amado

39.             The Silence of Herondale, Joan Aiken

40.             Sometimes A Great Notion, Ken Kesey

41.             The Spire, William Golding

42.             Star Watchman, Ben Bova

43.             The Two Faces of January, Patricia Highsmith

44.             A Very Easy Death, Simone de Beauvoir

45.             The Wapshot Scandal, John Cheever

46.             Web of the Witch World, Andre Norton

47.             With Shuddering Fall, Joyce Carol Oates

48.             The Woman in the Dunes, Kobo Abe

What were you doing in 1964? Were you even born yet? Have you read any of these books? 

FEBRUARY READING GROUP UPDATE

February is another busy reading group month for me. Even though I have read three of the books before I decided to reread both The Night Circus and Song of Solomon. In fact, I am so happy with that decision that I might also reread An American Marriage. 

Tina's Group:

 

Tiny Book Club:

 

One Book At A Time:

 

Carol's Group:

 

Bookie Babes:

 

What are your groups reading? Have you discussed or read any of these books? 

BOOKS READ IN JANUARY

I had a great month reading long books (two were over 900 pages) as well as reading books I wanted to read without worrying about how many. I got back to my writing as planned and have written most of the rough draft of my next chapter. I also finished reading the books for my 1964 list and got to the first bestseller of the 1965 list. Can you guess which one that was? For some reason I read mostly historical fiction. Was the present too much to deal with in January? You bet!

Stats: 8 books read. 8 fiction. 6 by women. 6 historical fiction. 1 magic. 2 rereads: Quicksilver and The Night Circus

Countries I visited: USA, Great Britain, France, Israel.

I have read all of these authors before so no new ones. 

Favorites: The Source and The Night Circus

Least favorite: The Great Alone

I have not been much of a rereader in my adult years but I had never finished Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle trilogy so I went back to the beginning with Quicksilver. Perhaps reading two long historical novels by Dorothy Dunnett had an influence because I got much more from Quicksilver than I did on the first read. 

I was sure I would not reread The Night Circus (it was for a reading group) but wow, I loved it even more than I did the first time!

Have you read any of the books I did? What were your best reads last month?