BOOKS READ IN DECEMBER

 Remember December? It ended only 8 days ago. Sorry I have been missing for a few days but we all have our reasons. So, anticlimactic as it is, but for the record, here are the books I read in that far away month.

Stats: 10 books read. 10 fiction. 5 written by women. 1 for My Big Fat Reading Project. 1 speculative.

Places I went: Mexico, United States, Spain, Great Britain, Africa.

Authors new to me: Joseph Di Prisco, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Kevin Barry, Nick Flynn, Amy Shearn, Alex Branson.

Favorites: Night Boat To Tangier, Unseen City, Wild Seed.

I am a bit more caught up on reviews than usual. All but the last four of these have been posted.

Have you read any of these books? What are you reading now that is getting you through?

TOP 25 FAVORITE BOOKS READ IN 2020

 I had a year of great reading. I had set a lower goal than usual to give myself time to read some LONG books and I did do that. 

I read 122 books with an average length of 366 pages.

I read 44674 pages with an average of 122 pages a day. I think this is my most satisfying statistic since I always hope to read 100 pages a day. It looks like I nailed that one!

This year I decided to determine my top favorites by listing out all the books I noted as 5 star books on Goodreads. I got 46! It would seem either I am getting better at choosing books or books are getting better overall. Win-win, I would say.

I narrowed it down to 25 but added a few more at the bottom. For once I managed to get all of these reviewed on the blog and that is perhaps my best achievement. After all my wingeing last January, I figured out how to keep the blog going plus work on my writing. Of course, I was stuck at home for 9 months of the year so I should not brag.

In alphabetical order by title here are my favorites:

August Is A Wicked Month, Edna O'Brien

Barn 8, Deb Olin Unferth

Bellefleur, Joyce Carol Oates

Cantoras, Carolina De Robertis

The Glass Hotel, Emily St John Mandel

Hamnet, Maggie O'Farrell

How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, Alexander Chee

In the Country of Women, Susan Straight

The Keepers of the House, Shirley Anne Grau

Lilith's Brood Trilogy (Dawn, Adulthood Rites, Imago), Octavia E Butler

A Long Petal of the Sea, Isabel Allende

Night Boat to Tangier, Kevin Barry

Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars, Joyce Carol Oates

The Night Watchman, Louise Erdrich

Piranesi, Susannah Clarke

The Reckless Oath We Made, Bryn Greenwood

Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison

The Sweetest Fruits, Monique Truong

Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi

Unseen City, Amy Shearn

Unsheltered, Barbara Kingsolver

The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett

The Water Dancer, Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Women of Copper Country, Mary Doria Russell

Your House Will Pay, Steph Cha

Extras:

One of my goals for the year was to get caught up on all Neal Stephenson books I had not yet read. I still have one to go but I loved the ones I read 5 stars worth.

Quicksilver, The Confusion, System of the World, Anathem, and Reamde.

I cannot leave out The Labyrinth of the Spirits by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. Sadly we lost him this year so I add this one in his honor.

I have enjoyed reading all the year end lists from the bloggers I follow. We are mighty readers!

A huge thank you to all who follow me here with extra thanks for all who comment. Due to my reading groups on Zoom and all of you, I never felt too lonely this year. 

Happy New Year! Happy Reading! Happy Blogging Days Ahead!

UNSEEN CITY

 Unseen City, Amy Shearn, Red Hen Press, 2020, 266 pp

This will be my last review for 2020. I had two more I wanted to post but life got in the way. Next up will be my Top Favorite Reads, my Books Read in December, etc.

The September, 2020 pick of the Nervous Breakdown Book Club was published by an Indie press from my very own city!

I loved Unseen City from the first sentence to the last. Meg Rhys, the main character, is a 40 year old woman who self-identifies as a spinster librarian. She likes men and sex but does not want a husband or to be a wife. All her heroes had resisted wifehood from Jane Austen to Emily Dickinson.

Meg lost her younger sister to a hit and run on the streets of New York but that sister visits her as a ghost in the evenings after work. Besides her cat and books, her passion is contained in the shelves of the Brooklyn Collection, on the second floor of the Brooklyn Central Library where she works; where she has amassed a wealth of understanding about Brooklyn from its 18th century farmlands to it gentrification in the 21st.

However, a man does finally penetrate her spinsterhood. Ellis turns up at the Brooklyn Collection needing a history of the ancient Brooklyn house his family hopes to renovate and sell. This house has a ghost also! Her name is Iris, her story lurks beneath Meg's story and like magic the author ties them together.

Everything I love about novels is encapsulated in Unseen City. The rhythms of the prose, the believability of every character, the layers of history, the accuracy of its present time scenes.

I feel like I will from now on be aware that my house, my property, my town within my city, has all those layers of history beneath it. I think a smart combination of agent, publisher, editor and marketer could have made this novel a bestseller, but that did not happen. So now it is up to readers who tell other readers: READ THIS!!

Thanks to Red Hen Press for putting the book into the world and to TNB for putting it in my hands.

THIS IS THE NIGHT OUR HOUSE WILL CATCH FIRE

 This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire, Nick Flynn, W W Norton & Co, 2020, 275 pp

The other day when I reviewed The Good Family Fitzgerald, I mentioned that I intended to finish reading and reviewing the remaining 2020 selections of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club by the end of the year. I have finished reading the 5 books in this little challenge but with only two days left in December, I may find it even more challenging to fit in all the reviews. 

But first, a bit of a rant. I saw in the news recently that Bertlesmann, the international media conglomerate, who already owns Penguin Random House (itself already a conglomerate of all kinds of formerly independent publishing houses) is now going after Simon & Schuster. While we all realize that publishing is a business and thus must make money/profits, don't you think it feels like all these mergers into one mega corporation presents risks to the diversity of books that reach us? 

So I had the thought that the little indie publishers around the country and the world are going to have to take up the mantle that takes chances on new writers, on experimental writers, even genre writers, that have been choked out of mainstream publishing. I urge you to pay attention to the publishers of the books you read, the books that become bestsellers, have huge marketing budgets, etc, etc. If by chance you feel a sort of stifling sameness about some of these books, I want to point out that my subscription to The Nervous Breakdown Book Club has brought me many novels that are sometimes unusual, sometimes experimental but are almost always excellent reads by little known authors.

This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire is one of those books. It was the August pick, the fourth memoir by Nick Flynn and its publisher, W W Norton, is still privately owned. 

The style is what I would call experimental, short pieces arranged in such a way that brings together the traumatic events of the author's childhood, how he has coped with those events in both self-destructive and constructive ways, how he has figured out his adult relationships and how to live up to his responsibilities. 

The writing is full of contradictions: sadness and humor; insight and unawareness; real and imaginary memories. Because Flynn seems aware of these contradictions, I believed him.

The best parts for me were when he got into how he saw his environment as a kid. Those parts are excellent renditions of how kids try to make sense of what the adults around them are doing.

I also listened to his interview on the Otherppl podcast where I learned about his writing process and found useful ideas and approaches to writing memoir. Flynn teaches writing and it was almost like taking a class from him. If any of you are attempting that tricky descent into your past, I recommend both the book and the interview.

I truly admire people who attempt to raise their consciousness. To me, that is the most important task in life and is the road to developing our potentials as human beings. 

NIGHT BOAT TO TANGIER

 Night Boat To Tangier, Kevin Barry, Doubleday, 2019, 255 pp

Summary From Goodreads: 

In the dark waiting room of the ferry terminal in the sketchy Spanish port of Algeciras, two aging Irishmen — Maurice Hearne and Charlie Redmond, longtime partners in the lucrative and dangerous enterprise of smuggling drugs — sit at night, none too patiently. It is October 23, 2018, and they are expecting Maurice’s estranged daughter (or is she?), Dilly, to either arrive on a boat coming from Tangier or depart on one heading there. This nocturnal vigil will initiate an extraordinary journey back in time to excavate their shared history of violence, romance, mutual betrayals and serial exiles, rendered with the dark humor and the hardboiled Hibernian lyricism that have made Kevin Barry one of the most striking and admired fiction writers at work today.

I read this for a reading group. I had no idea what to expect. The summary above does set the scene. If you look on a map, Algeciras, Spain, and Tangier, Morocco, are separated by the narrow Straight of Gibraltar. It sounds swashbuckling and romantic but the ferry terminal where Maurice and Charlie wait is a study in sinister, haunted decrepitude. Well, so are the two man a study in such adjectives. 

We do also meet Dilly along about halfway through the story. The wait in the terminal happens over the course of one night but through their conversation and some back story about Dilly, the sad tale of the men's long friendship unspools. 

If it weren't for the lyricism, humor and humanity of Kevin Barry's prose, this novel could have put me into a depression. Instead it left me in a state of wonder. 

I am so glad I read it.

MEXICAN GOTHIC

 Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Del Rey, 2020, 254 pp

This was a reading group pick, suggested by me. I was seduced by the gorgeous cover as well as being interested in reading something set in Mexico. Also since I recently read Joyce Carol Oates's gothic novel, Bellefleur, I thought this book would give me another example of the genre.

It is the 1950s and Noemi is something of a Mexico City debutante. Spoiled, enamored of clothes and parties, she chooses the men she dates by their looks and their cars. She is not ready for marriage, in fact would like to attend college and study anthropology.

First though, she is sent by her father to check up on a newly married cousin who is crying for help from her husband's old family mansion high in the mountains. She claims she is being poisoned. If Noemi can bring back a report to her father, he will let her go to University. 

Noemi is full of self-confidence but is innocent as a lamb in most respects. What she finds at the mansion is so creepy, she is soon in as much danger as her cousin. As befits a Gothic heroine her reckless, plucky daring may just get her through.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia is masterful with both description and action. A good dose of horror pervades the story along with an intelligent mystery. Most of the fun of reading Mexican Gothic is following the twists and turns of the plot. For some reason the palpable horror did not turn me off. I just wanted to know what would happen. 

Fans of Bronte, du Maurier and even Mary Stewart will love this look at Gothic horror, Mexican-style and learn some obscure Mexican history at the same time. The author managed to write a story that feels both light and heavy. 

All my reading group members were well pleased.

THE GOOD FAMILY FITZGERALD

 The Good Family Fitzgerald, Joseph Di Prisco, Rare Bird Books, 2020, 404 pp

I have set myself a challenge to read the remaining novels I received this year from my Nervous Breakdown Book Club subscription. The number of books for this challenge is five. The Good Family Fitzgerald, the May selection, was lingering on my shelves because it is long, so I tackled it just after Thanksgiving. All 404 pages of fairly tiny print.

I had not heard of the author, though he has published five previous novels since 2000, as well as 3 poetry collections. He is 70 years old and active in education and literacy projects. In his interview on the Otherppl podcast, he relates the ways in which this novel is based on his own life.

I'll get the negatives out of the way first: the length, the wordiness, the style. Reading the book was like listening to your 70 year old uncle telling tales of the family when you are about 20 yourself. He is a bit out of step with the times though trying to stay relevant. He adds in sentences, whole paragraphs, sometimes pages of anecdotes and details that slow the story down.

The positives: This is a great sprawling family saga about the Irish in late 20th and early 21st century America. The combination of gangsters, lawyers and priests, all in the same family, is provocative and I must say entertaining. Paddy Fitzgerald, the patriarch, has his influence spread across business, real estate and the Catholic Church, all mixed up in a heady if shady stew.

I finally got to the end and was so pleased to find the females saving the day! Mostly I was happy to get to the end though not unhappy to have read it.

AN AMERICAN DREAM

 An American Dream, Norman Mailer, The Dial Press, 1965, 270 pp

Norman Mailer. Was he just a bad man, misogynist, and curmudgeon? Or was he a deep thinker, great writer and possible genius? I think probably both. He was full of himself as a younger man and he liked to antagonize anyone he could. He certainly had trouble with females. Do I read him because it is sensible to know the enemy? No, I think he was so perceptive concerning American society. I aways get insights from his books.

An American Dream was his fourth novel and came ten years after his third. It is a day in the life of Stephen Richards Rojack in which he murders his wife, makes it look like a suicide, faces the cops, starts an affair with another woman, confronts his enormously wealthy father-in-law, while staying drunk the whole time and facing all his demons.

The story is gritty, violent, sexy and psychological in the extreme. I don't particularly recommend it to anyone, but perhaps some men who read it will see themselves and some women will go, umhum, yes, that is what we are up against. In other words, read it at your own risk.

AUGUST IS A WICKED MONTH

 August Is A Wicked Month, Edna O'Brien, Simon and Schuster, 1965, 220 pp

This review is a complete spoiler, so if you have not read the book and plan to, you might want to read it first. If you don't plan to, you can read this as a plot summary. 

I love Edna O'Brien so much. I just get her and I feel she gets me. She turned 90 on December 15, 2020. Just the other day.

This was her next novel after The Country Girls Trilogy. Ellen, formerly of Ireland, lives in London and is divorced. She and her ex share a son who is eight years old. He mostly lives with Ellen but has weekends with his dad. Oh how I remember those times with my boys and my ex. That did not turn out well for us but things went worse for Ellen. 

When the dad takes the boy for a week long summer camping trip, Ellen decides to go on holiday herself. A fling to assuage her sorrows and to celebrate her freedom. Wild parties on the Riviera with wild people.

Then disaster. She gets the news that her son was killed by a truck on the side of a road. She stays on the Riviera for a few more weeks. It is August. She enters into an orgy of sex, eating, drinking and swimming with a mysterious guy. That all ends when he disappears and she develops what she fears may be gonorrhea. Worst nightmare scenario.

She finally goes home and works it all out, lets go of loss and failure and resolves to move on. I remember resolving the same. 

THE ARM OF THE STARFISH

 The Arm of the Starfish, Madeleine L'Engle, Farrar Strasus and Giroux, 1965, 243 pp

I have been following the books of Madeleine L'Engle all through My Big Fat Reading Project. This one is a great tale. Set in the "near future" as of 1965, filed at my library as "children's literature" because as of 1965 there was no such genre as Young Adult. However, Adam is a 17-year-old heading off for a summer job in Portugal before his freshman year at Harvard. 

He intends to become a marine biologist himself. Dr O'Keefe, his prospective employer, is doing groundbreaking research on the regenerative tissues found in the arms of starfish. Adam finds himself in the middle of a battle between pharmaceutical companies for possession of O'Keefe's research.

This is YA like one rarely finds these days. No drugs, no swearing, no sex. There is a sexy girl, the daughter of one of the men who wants to steal the research for his own profit.

Was this eerie to read during the weeks different drug companies were racing to get their COVID vaccines approved? You bet it was.

I love how Madeleine L'Engle always grants her young protagonists so much intelligence and independence. In this one, Adam has to decide all on his own who to trust as well as who to kiss.

HAMNET

 Hamnet, Maggie O'Farrell, Alfred A Knopf, 2020, 261 pp

[Note: I am on a quest to get reviews of all the books I have read in 2020 posted by the end of the year. So you will be seeing one a day and I hope I am not overwhelming you. You could save them all up and read them on Christmas Day when, no doubt we will all be bored out of our minds.]

Maggie O'Farrell has said in several interviews that she wrote Hamnet in an effort to bring for herself and readers some insight into William Shakespeare as a man and husband and father. She admits she pretty much imagined her novel based on very few facts. She is such a brilliant writer that I believed every word.

In Elizabethan England, the names Hamlet and Hamnet were interchangeable. In 1580 the Black Death crept across the country and into Stratford to claim the life of Shakespeare's only son. If you haven't read this book yet, now would be a good time as we stumble through the winter of our own pandemic.

I was blown away by everything in the book. Reading it gave me complete satisfaction on every page. I loved the way she imagined Agnes, the bard's wife and how she drew the many conflicts in the family life of her characters. Agnes could press the flesh between the thumb and first finger of a person and read into their character. She says she married William because he had more in him that anyone she had ever known!

When you read about the horrific grief accompanying the loss of a child and feel as though you have never read about that particular tragedy before, you know you are in the hands of a great writer. Because of course you have read that tragedy many times.

Why is it not too hard to read this story in these times? Because of the startling and blessed ending of the story which celebrates the power of art (in this case playwriting) to heal and bring joy to those left behind.

RBG X 2

 

My Own Words, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Simon & Schuster, 2016, 334 pp

In November, two of my reading groups chose two books on the subject of RBG, to be discussed a week apart from each other. Right in step with Nonfiction November! I always have a nonfiction book going in which I read a little most days. To complete the two RBG books in time though, I had to read more than a little each day. Honestly, I felt like I was in school but once again it was time well spent.

My Own Words is a collection of the Justice's articles, speeches and Supreme Court opinions. Assisting her in collecting, editing as needed, and writing Introductions for five different sections, were Mary Hartnett and Wendy W Williams. Those women are both professors of law who were also authorized by RBG to write her biography. As far as I know the biography is not yet published.

Having read Sisters In Law last year, some of the material in My Own Words covered ground I had been over before. That was fine because I gained a deeper understanding of the woman herself and of her life's work as well as the workings of the Supreme Court.

Her speeches are both charming and instructional. Her articles and court opinions are quite dense with legal speak and court precedent, making them more challenging reading for me since I still have scant knowledge of law, courts, and our justice system. 

Now I have more of that knowledge, making me better at reading and comprehending the news about Supreme Court cases and decisions. I have come to realize the importance of comprehending these matters as a civic duty and as a voter in our difficult and changing times.

Conversations With RBG, Jeffrey Rosen, Henry Holt and Company, 2019, 260 pp

This was the second book. It was a much quicker read. In a series of conversations, Jeffrey Rosen poses questions to Ms Ginsburg about life, love, liberty, and law. Her answers provided even more insight into the woman behind the image.

Jeffrey Rosen is President and CEO of the National Constitution Center. I have enjoyed many of his articles written for the Center's blog. He has been a friend of RBG since 1991 and it shows in their conversations.

They spoke about her landmark cases, her wonderful and happy marriage to Marty Ginsburg, her relationships with other Supreme Court Justices, and her carefully thought out plans for what she wished to accomplish on the Court.

Of course, my favorite chapter was "Margaret Atwood Meets RBG."

By the end of the book I felt I almost knew the woman personally. In the paperback edition I read, Rosen includes an afterword. It recounts his last conversation with the great woman, on December 17, 2019. So you get her own words, including her concerns for the future, just ten months before her death.

I wager that a full biography will appear eventually and I will probably read it. For now I have a fairly complete picture of this towering woman, her heart, her extraordinary intellect, and her unwavering courage.

TRANSCENDENT KINGDOM

 

Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi, Alfred A Knopf, 2020, 265 pp

I loved this book from the first page to the last. I think Yaa Gyasi has a large, expansive mind. She likes to span the spaces between places, the fault lines between people, and the vast contradictions inside individuals. If you read her first novel, Homegoing, you know this.

Gifty is the daughter of Ghanian immigrants to the United States. As a child she lived as one of the few Black children in a small Southern town. Her mother is a devout Pentecostal but her father, never having felt at home in America, left and returned to Ghana. She adores her older brother Nana, but he succumbed to an overdose after becoming addicted to Oxycontin, prescribed by a doctor for a sports injury.

Her mother has twice succumbed to depression. Gifty turns to neuroscience to discover the scientific basis for addiction and depression. As a PhD candidate at Stanford her only friends are her lab mice and her lab partner.

Though she turned away from religion it is embedded deep in her consciousness. Wading through the distances between science and religion, between aloneness and connection, Gifty is a heroine unlike many others I have come across.

Transcendent Kingdom was a perfect read for the times. As an ideological war rages between those who look to science for answers to COVID and those who refuse to face facts, it made me look more deeply into the intersections of faith, science and love.

AWARD WINNERS OF 1965 PART TWO

 

This post covers the award winning novels from genres such as science fiction and mystery as well as the prestigious French literary prize, The Priz Goncourt.

The Hugo Award:

The Wanderer, Fritz Leiber, Tom Doherty Associates, 1964, 311 pp

The Wanderer earned Fritz Leiber his second Hugo Award. He won the first time in 1958 with The Big Time. I liked this one a good deal better.

An eclipse of the moon turns out to include the arrival of a rogue planet, four times the diameter of the moon and giving off a bloody and golden light. Humans name it The Wanderer. Once the planet consumes the moon, tidal surges and massive earthquakes make Earth a terror.

In addition to the apocalyptic horror of it all, I thought Leiber did a great job of showing the effects on various people around our planet as tides roll into cities and submerge the streets, as ships at sea try to navigate, as a group of flying saucer buffs come up against the space program, and as an astronaut on the moon is captured by the alien planet.

It took me a while to get used to all the characters and the shifts between their stories, but overall I enjoyed the book as a wild tale. I am discovering that it pays off to read older sci fi. I always think about how it influenced the sci fi of today. The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu, Anathem by Neal Stephenson, Octavia Butler's work, The Broken Earth Trilogy by N K Jemisin. I bet they all read this one when they were growing up.

The Edgar Award:

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, John le Carre, Coward-McCann Inc, 1963, 256 pp

This was the #1 bestseller in 1964. The Edgar Award is for mysteries and sometimes thrillers. The movie starring Richard Burton came out in 1965 and has since been included in The Criterion Collection, as seen at the top of this page. My review of the book is here. It is sobering to post this today, just one day after the great John le Carre passed away.

The Nebula Award:

Dune, Frank Herbert, Ace Books, 1965, 473 pp

This award was given for the first time in 1965. I read the book for a reading group in 2018. My review is here. I have not read any of the sequels but I might see the movie version coming out in 2021. The book went on to tie for the Hugo Award in 1966.

The Prix Goncourt:

The Bond, Jaques Borel, Doubleday & Company, 1968, 479 pp (originally published by Editions Gallimard, 1965, translated from the French by Norman Denny)

The Prix Goncourt is known as the premier French literary award, probably comparable to the Pulitzer Prize in the US. It has been awarding French novelists since 1867! I decided to add it to My Big Fat Reading Project whenever I can find an English translation of the winner for the year, which one usually can these days but not so much in earlier years. I found a library copy.

The Bond is an autobiographical novel about a man's rather tortured but undeniably close relationship with his mother. Borel includes a vast amount of detail; in fact one reference I found on Britannica.com described the writing style as Proustian or Joycean. For a while I felt I might not made it through such dense and introspective prose but finally I just gave myself over to it. 

The son in the story was perhaps overly attached to his mother. You find out why as you read. Borel had kept a diary since the age of 14 and drew from it to write the book. 

He portrays France from the post WWI years through WWII and the German occupation, his life in Paris as a child and adult through to the death of his mother. Thus he gives a 20th century personal history of French life during years when France was quite different than it is now. I found this fascinating.

I got plenty of insight into what it takes to write about one's own life. Since I am attempting to do that, it was useful. Having read most of Simone de Beauvior's memoirs, which cover the same time period, I could compare the two. Borel studied at the Sorbonne, as did she. In fact Beauvoir won this prize herself for The Mandarins in 1954, a book which I have read.

AWARD WINNERS OF 1965 PART ONE

 

This weekend I will bring you some mini reviews of books that won the big prizes in 1965. Above is a 1965 Mustang, possibly the hottest car of the year, just to give you a bit of lore. For My Big Fat Reading Project, I always read the award winning novels of the year. These days there are over 20 such awards and it is impossible to keep up. In 1965 there were just 8 on the list. Below are the first four.

The Pulitzer Prize:

The Keepers of the House, Shirley Ann Grau, Alfred A Knopf, 1964, 239 pp

The winners are usually published during the year before the prize is awarded. This was a family saga spanning generations of the Howland clan from the days of Andrew Jackson to the 1960s. Abigail Howland is a seventh generation daughter. Her grandfather, also a central character, is an eccentric who still maintains the family's wealth and standing in his Deep South community.

It is extremely well written yet for all its literary quality is a page turner. Civil rights have become law in the nation but as we all know, that law does not penetrate into southern towns much, even to this day.

While William Howland is a fascinating character, his granddaughter Abigail was more interesting because of her increasing awareness as a woman, as a white woman, and ultimately as a fierce warrior for her own rights. How hard it is for people who have viewed life in a certain way for centuries to change those views!

The novel is a look at changing race relations from the white point of view. The entire gambit, from descendants of slavery to the violent men who join the Ku Klux Klan while carrying on with Black women to the "genteel" society white women must navigate is braided together in a gripping tale.

The Newbery Medal:

Shadow of a Bull, Maia Wojciechowska, Atheneum Books, 1964, 155 pp

The first of two major awards for children's books is the Newbery Medal, for books meant for kids aged 8-12. This is a wonderful story about bullfighting. Though it is not a sport I would ever want to attend, bullfighting is an integral part of the culture in Spain. 

Monolo Oliver is the son of the greatest bullfighter in all of Spain, who lost his life in the ring. It is expected that Monolo will repeat his father's success but the boy definitely does not feel any urge to fight bulls.

Still he tries to find his courage. Some of his father's friends teach him the sport and the day comes when he must face his first bull.

In a vibrant coming of age tale, Manolo figures out how to deal with the pressure and find his own way in the world. Wonderful writing and plot. Lots of info on bullfighting, including a glossary. Immersion into the culture surrounding the sport. 

The Caldecott Medal:

May I Bring A Friend?, Beatrice Schenk De Regniers, Atheneum Books, 1964, 48 pp

The Caldecott Medal is an illustrator's award for picture books meant for younger children. 

In this colorful story, a young boy is invited to tea by the King and Queen. He asks if he may bring a friend and they say of course! He brings a giraffe. A lovely time is had by all.

Next he is invited for six more days in a row and brings a different animal, or three, each time. The royal figures love every one.

The illustrations by Beni Montressor, exhibit a color scheme of many shades of purple, yellow, red and orange. A true feast for the eyes!

The National Book Award:

Herzog, Saul Bellow, Viking Press, 1964, 371 pp

Saul Bellow's winning novel was also #3 on the 1964 bestseller list. I reviewed it here and enjoyed it probably the most of the 1965 award winners.

I will be back soon with the remaining awarded books of 1965.

Have you read any of these books? In their own ways each one gives a feel for the mid 1960s.

DECEMBER READING GROUP UPDATE

 I thought I would be a little silly with the Zoom reading group image this month. Hope it gives you a laugh.

Only one holiday title for December but a good variety of books, none of which are too long, in case we have so many plans for the season. Not!

It will be a challenge to get in the spirit this year but each group will vote on what was the best book we discussed. There is talk of singing carols or playing a literary game. Readers do usually have good imaginations!

One Book At A Time:

Carol's Group:

Bookie Babes:

Tiny Book Club:

Are you attending any reading groups this month? What will you discuss?

Have you read any of these books?

PIRANESI

 Piranesi, Susanna Clarke, Bloomsbury, 2020, 264 pp

Summary from Goodreads: Piranesi's house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house.

There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.

Way back in 2005 I read Susanna Clarke's amazing first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. I loved her interweaving of magic and reality as it related to history. It made my top favorite books that year.

Now after a 16 year wait, Ms Clarke has graced us with another example of her wondrous writing. Compared to that first novel of 782 pp, this one is a novella but no less eerie, no less gripping.

The summary from Goodreads is a good one and I use it here because to tell you anymore about the plot would spoil everything.

Highlights for me were:

1. Piranesi himself as the main character. He is named after Giovanni Battista Piranesi, an 18th century Italian archaeologist, architect and artist who wrote about fictitious and atmospheric prisons. In this book, Piranesi is experiencing such things.

It becomes clear that he is an unreliable narrator. I love unreliable narrators because their stories always contain code for another story.

2. In the otherworldly house where Piranesi lives, he is being made insane by the other person there through a unique form of gaslighting. This reminded me of two of my favorite 20th century British novelists: Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch who often feature controlling and ill-intentioned characters.

3. The world building is intricate and compelling.

I was curious about Susanna Clarke's long absence from publishing. I looked her up and learned she had been ill for many years with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I feel sorry she had to experience such suffering but she certainly put the insights she gained to good use.

I recommend this book to anyone and everyone!

PIZZA GIRL

 Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier, Doubleday, 2020, 192 pp

This was the Nervous Breakdown Book Club selection for July, 2020. Jean Kyoung Frazier is a Korean/American woman who lives in Los Angeles and Pizza Girl is her first novel.

Told in first person, the heroine of her own story is not having a good time and is telling us about it as she goes. She and her boyfriend live at her mom's. She is newly pregnant and works delivery for a pizza place. Life is happening to her. 

Her alcoholic father has recently died, her Korean mother is supportive of the boyfriend and the pregnancy but does not understand her daughter's grief and driftless behavior.

When the 18-year-old mother to be delivers a pizza to a stay-at-home mother, she feels a connection. Jenny seems adrift herself, confounded by her young son, who is somewhere on the spectrum. She seems lonely stuck at home. She names our heroine Pizza Girl.

So begins a period of even more delusion for the Pizza Girl. She has an instant crush on Jenny leading her to obsess about being with her emotionally and physically, while she takes even more risks, drinks and smokes.

I have seen some reader reviews expressing being put off by such a level of irresponsibility and I get that. Somehow I was not. I worried for Pizza Girl, probably even more than her mother or boyfriend did, but I understood her because I've gone through similar experiences.

Those young years after finishing high school are in some ways even harder than going through puberty. All of a sudden you are on the cusp of adulthood without a clue.

I enjoyed the story and I even liked the ending!

BOOKS READ IN NOVEMBER

 

I had a good month. For once I can say I did Nonfiction November with two books by and/or about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. A first for me was reading the Prix Goncourt (French) winner from 1965: The Bond. Having read so much Simone de Beauvoir and Camus, it wasn't too strange for me but was a long and challenging read.

Stats: 10 books read. 8 fiction. 7 written by women. 1 sci fi. 2 nonfiction. 4 for My Big Fat Reading Project. 1 YA. 1 fantasy. 2 historical fiction. 1 thriller.

Countries I visited: United States, Great Britain, Russia, France, Portugal.

Authors new to me: Jacques Borel, Jeffrey Rosen, Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Favorites: I liked and mostly loved everything I read but top favorites would have to be Piranesi, Transcendent Kingdom and Hamnet.

I hope your November reading brought you distraction and joy. What did you like the most?

Have you read any of these books?