New reads: 149

Number of books read in 2010: 150
Number of books read in 2009: 103
Number of books read in 2008: 99
Number of books read in 2007: 85
Number of books read in 2006: 64
Number of books read in 2005: 56

Average read per month: 13.16
Average read per week: 3.03

Number read in worst month: July (3)
Number read in best month: January (31!)

Female authors: 26
Male authors: 25

Fiction: 152
non-fiction: 6 (marked *; 2010: 12, 2009: 16, 2008: 12, 2007: 10, 2006: 4, 2005: 2)

Scifi/fantasy: 12
Mystery/crime: 108
Literature/fiction: 25
Graphic novels: 0
Horror: 0
YA: 7
Poetry: 0 (As in 2010, few individual poems read but no complete collections/works. Perhaps I ought to start making a note of poems read.)

January
Doctored evidence by Donna Leon
Blood from a stone by Donna Leon
Through a glass, darkly by Donna Leon
The story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski
The curse of the Pharaohs by Elizabeth Peters
The uncommon reader by Alan Bennett
Suffer the little children by Donna Leon
The kill artist by Daniel Silva
The girl of his dreams by Donna Leon
The English assassin by Daniel Silva
About face by Donna Leon
Snow Flower and the secret fan by Lisa See
A question of belief by Donna Leon
The confessor by Daniel Silva
The voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis
The redbreast by Jo Nesbø
Freaks and revelations by Davida Wills Hurwin
The silver chair by C.S. Lewis
Brother Cadfael’s penance by Ellis Peters
Death of a gossip by M.C. Beaton
Death of a cad by M.C. Beaton
Niubi! The real Chinese you were never taught in school by Eveline Chao*
The cat who ate Danish modern by Lilian Jackson Braun
Death of an outsider by M.C. Beaton
Death of a perfect wife by M.C. Beaton
Death of a hussy by M.C. Beaton
Death of a snob by M.C. Beaton
Death of a prankster by M.C. Beaton
Death of a glutton by M.C. Beaton
Death of a travelling man by M.C. Beaton
Death of a charming man by M.C. Beaton

February
Death of a nag by M.C. Beaton
Death of a macho man by M.C. Beaton
The princess of Burundi by Kjell Eriksson; trans. Ebba Segerberg
Death of a dentist by M.C. Beaton
Major Pettigrew’s last stand by Helen Simonson
The cruel stars of the night by Kjell Eriksson; trans. Ebba Segerberg
Bereft by Chris Womersley
I am Number Four by Pittacus Lore
Foundation by Isaac Asimov

March
Death of a scriptwriter by M.C. Beaton
Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
Anne of Avonlea by L.M. Montgomery
Anne of the Island by L.M. Montgomery
Death of an addict by M.C. Beaton
A cold day for murder by Dana Stabenow
A fatal thaw by Dana Stabenow
Dead in the water by Dana Stabenow
A cold-blooded business by Dana Stabenow
Play with fire by Dana Stabenow
Blood will tell by Dana Stabenow
Breakup by Dana Stabenow
Killing grounds by Dana Stabenow

April
Minding Frankie by Maeve Binchy
The troubled man by Henning Mankell
Hunter’s moon by Dana Stabenow
Midnight come again by Dana Stabenow
The singing of the dead by Dana Stabenow
A fine and bitter snow by Dana Stabenow
A grave denied by Dana Stabenow
A taint in the blood by Dana Stabenow
A deeper sleep by Dana Stabenow
Whisper to the blood by Dana Stabenow
A night too dark by Dana Stabenow
Though not dead by Dana Stabenow
Mystery by Jonathan Kellerman
A loyal character dancer by Qiu Xiaolong
China Witness by Xinran*
A game of thrones by George R.R. Martin
A clash of kings by George R.R. Martin

May
Do the work! by Steven Pressfield*
A storm of swords by George R.R. Martin
Dead reckoning by Charlaine Harris
The transcendental murder by Jane Langton
Excellent women by Barbara Pym
A jest of God by Margaret Laurence
A highland Christmas by M.C. Beaton

June
Death of a dustman by M.C. Beaton
Death of a celebrity by M.C. Beaton
Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
A feast for crows by George R.R. Martin

July
Can you forgive her? by Anthony Trollope
Phineas Finn by Anthony Trollope
The Blessing Way by Tony Hillerman

August
Dance hall of the dead by Tony Hillerman
Listening woman by Tony Hillerman
People of darkness by Tony Hillerman
The dark wind by Tony Hillerman
The ghost way by Tony Hillerman
Raney by Clyde Edgerton
Skinwalkers by Tony Hillerman
Missing by Karin Alvtegen
A thief of time by Tony Hillerman
Talking god by Tony Hillerman
Coyote waits by Tony Hillerman
Sacred clowns by Tony Hillerman
The fallen man by Tony Hillerman
The first eagle by Tony Hillerman
Hunting badger by Tony Hillerman
The wailing wind by Tony Hillerman
The sinister pig by Tony Hillerman

September
Skeleton man by Tony Hillerman
The shape shifter by Tony Hillerman
Earth abides by George R. Stewart
Medicus by Ruth Downie
Terra incognita by Ruth Downie
Persona non grata by Ruth Downie

October
Winter in Thrush Green by Miss Read
Thrush Green by Miss Read
Return to Thrush Green by Miss Read
Affairs at Thrush Green by Miss Read
News from Thrush Green by Miss Read
Gossip from Thrush Green by Miss Read
Battles at Thrush Green by Miss Read
At home in Thrush Green by Miss Read
A tiger in the kitchen: Memoirs of food and family by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan*
The Ayatollah begs to differ: The paradox of modern Iran by Hooman Majd*
Caveat emptor by Ruth Downie
Reamde by Neal Stephenson
A fire upon the deep by Vernor Vinge
A deepness in the sky by Vernor Vinge

November
The children of the sky by Vernor Vinge
Bootlegger’s daughter by Margaret Maron
Southern Discomfort by Margaret Maron
Shooting at loons by Margaret Maron
Up jumps the devil by Margaret Maron
Death’s half acre by Margaret Maron
Killer market by Margaret Maron
Home fires by Margaret Maron
Storm track by Margaret Maron
Slow dollar by Margaret Maron
High country fall by Margaret Maron
Rituals of the season by Margaret Maron
Winter’s child by Margaret Maron
Hard row by Margaret Maron
Sand sharks by Margaret Maron
Christmas mourning by Margaret Maron
One coffee with by Margaret Maron

December
Crossing to safety by Wallace Stegner
Death of a butterfly by Margaret Maron
Drawing conclusions by Donna Leon
Death in blue folders by Margaret Maron
The Easter parade by Richard Yates
The right jack by Margaret Maron
My father’s paradise: A son’s search for his Jewish past in Kurdish Iraq by Ariel Sabar*
Mockingbird by Walter Tevis
Baby doll games by Margaret Maron
Three Junes by Julia Glass
The whole world over by Julia Glass
The vault by Ruth Rendell
A free life by Ha Jin
Still life by Louise Penny
A fatal grace by Louise Penny
The cruellest month by Louise Penny
A rule against murder by Louise Penny
The brutal telling by Louise Penny
Bury your dead by Louise Penny
A trick of the light by Louise Penny

Highlights of 2011? The wonderful women crime novelists: Dana Stabenow (Kate Shugak series), Margaret Maron (Deborah Knott and Sigrid Harald), and Louise Penny (Armand Gamache), in particular. I loved the development of the characters and their life stories. I love books that introduce me to parts of the world I am unfamiliar with – the Navajo country in Tony Hillerman’s Leaphorn and Chee series, and the Venice of Donna Leon’s Commissario Guido Brunetti (and the food!). Along the same lines, that of depicting an unfamiliar culture, Ariel Sabar’s biography of his father and his family history and culture, My father’s paradise: A son’s search for his Jewish past in Kurdish Iraq, also rates very highly. Ha Jin’s A free life  for its depiction of the immigrant (and poet’s) experience. Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety and Richard Yates’ The Easter Parade both for their depictions of relationships. Crossing to safety is my book of the year, I think, for the sheer beauty of his writing.

Sheer fun: The uncommon reader by Alan Bennett. Also, Reamde by Neal Stephenson (I predict this one will be made into a movie).

Most disappointing (because most anticipated): Vernor Vinge’s Children of the sky. Too long and rambly and didn’t tie up any of the loose ends introduced in A deepness in the sky. The best thing about this book was the fact that its anticipation caused me to re-read A fire upon the deep and A deepness in the sky!

In 2011 most of what I read was for sheer pleasure. Nothing wrong with that, I guess. I do always have the vague aim of reading to improve myself though…

I also really started using GoodReads regularly in 2011. All these books were tracked on that site. I joined it in 2007, but it hadn’t really grabbed me, possibly because I didn’t really have (m)any friends there. This has gradually improved over the years, so it’s rather more interesting on the site now. The social aspect really shouldn’t be underestimated, in my opinion.

In 2011 I set myself a challenge of reading 150 books and managed to exceed it, thus, for 2012, the target is 160 books. I’m not certain if I will reach it, but we’ll see…

I’ve joined the group on GoodReads, where I can post details of my progress, and chat with other participants, but I think it might be worth keeping a record here too. In any case, I will definitely be posting any reviews I manage to write here.

There’s more detail about the challenge at GoodReads or at the Australian Women Writers blog, but I need to summarise for myself what I hope to do, so the gist:

Goal: Read and review books written by Australian women writers – hard copies, ebooks and audiobooks, new, borrowed or stumbled upon by book-crossing. [I suspect most of my reads will be ebooks. I am not an audiobook fan.]

Genre challenges: 
Purist: one genre only
Dabbler: more than one genre [I'll try to dabble. I do read fantasy, although have to be in the mood to read fantasy. And I have never read a romance I've enjoyed. Granted, the last time I tried a romance was decades ago. Maybe time to try again?]
Devoted eclectic: as many genres as you can find
  
Challenge levels: 
Casual:
Stella (read 3 and review at least 2 books) [I suspect I can read at least six but am not confident in my ability to review, therefore will set a target of two reviews. If I exceed this, great.]
Miles (read 6 and review at least 3)*
Franklin-fantastic (read 10 and review at least 4 books)*
* The higher levels should include at least one substantial length review

I’m still in holiday mode and utterly enjoying myself. Started Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career this morning, and began Ros Moriarty’s Listening to Country: A Journey to the Heart of What It Means to Belong yesterday.

Still working on my 2011 reading roundup, will post this soon.

The chihuahuas had a special treat this morning – organic chicken neck. Peppi enjoyed hers.

As did Paco!

A beautiful sunny day in Perth, with a forecast maximum of 32ºC (89.6ºF).

Merry Christmas!

100. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge. The bridge was being repaired: she went right through the Danger sign. The car feel a hundred feet into the ravine, smashing through the treetops feathery with new leaves, then burst into flames and rolled down into the shallow creek at the bottom. Chunks of bridge fell on top of it. Nothing much was left of her but charred smithereens.

99. The Moon and the Bonfires by Cesare Pavese

I had a reason for coming back to this town, here instead of to Canelli, Barbaresco or Alba. I’m almost sure I wasn’t born here.

98. The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

Grant lay on his high white cot and stared at the ceiling. Stared at it with loathing. He knew by heart every last minute crack on its nice clean surface. He had made maps of the ceiling and gone exploring on them.

97. The Northern Lights by Howard Norman

My father brought home a radio. “It’s got a sender and a receiver,” he said. “Now you can talk to people other than yourselves.” He fit the earphones over my head. And the first news I heard was that my friend Pelly Bay had drowned. Pelly had fallen through the ice while riding his unicycle. That was April 1959.

96. A Violent Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini

95. Stoner by John Williams

William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year 1910, at the age of nineteen.

94. The Waves by Virginia Woolf

The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the dea form the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.

93. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God. This was the beginning with God and the duty of every faithful monk would be to repeat every day with chanting humility the one never-changing event whose incontrovertible truth can be asserted.

92. The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq

This book is principally the story of a man who lived out the greater part of his life in Western Europe, in the latter half of the twentieth century. Though alone for much of his life, he was nonetheless occasionally in touch with other men.

91. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie, and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool sock with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

90. Distant Star by Roberto Bolaño

I saw Carlos Wieder for the first time in 1971, or perhaps in 1972, when Salvador Allende was President of Chile. At that stage Wieder was calling himself Alberto Ruize-Tagle and occasionally attended Juan Stein’s poetry workshop in Concepcion, the so-called capital of the South. I can’t say I knew him well. I saw him once or twice a week at the workshop. He wasn’t particularly talkative. I was.

89. Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderly again.

88. Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

My name is Ruth. I grew up with my younger sister, Lucille, under the care of my grandmother, Mrs. Sylvia Foster, and when she died, of her sisters-in-law Misses Lily and Nona Foster, and when they fled, of her daughters, Mrs. Sylvia Fisher.

87. Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet

Weidmann appeared before you in a five o’clock edition, his head swathed in white bands, a nun and yet a wounded aviator fallen into the rye, one September day like the one when there came to be known the name of Our Lady of the Flowers.

86. I, Tituba by Maryse Condé

Abena, my mother, was raped by an English sailor on the deck of Christ the King one day in the year 16** while the ship was sailing for Barbados. I was born from this act of aggression. From this act of hatred and contempt.

85. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days.

84. Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy

At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell.

83. The Ballad of the Sad Cafe by Carson McCullers

The town itself is dreary; not much is there except the cotton mill, the two-room houses where the workers live, a few peach trees, a church with two colored windows, and a miserable main street only a hundred yards long.

82. Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor

Hazel Motes sat at a forward angle on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car. The train was racing through tree tops that fell away at intervals and showed the sun standing, very red, on the edge of the farthest woods.

81. The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis

My name is Charles Highway, though you wouldn’t think it to look at me. It’s such a rangy, well-traveled big-cocked name and to look at, I am none of these.

80. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

Selden paused in surprise. In the afternoon rush of the Grand Central Station his eyes had been refreshed by the sight of Miss Lily Bart.

79. My Life by Lyn Hejinian

A moment yellow, just as four years later, when my father returned home from the war, the moment of greeting him, as he stood at the bottom of the stairs, younger, thinner than when he had left, was purple – though moments are no longer so colored. Somewhere, in the background, rooms share a pattern of small roses. Pretty is as pretty does. In certain families, the meaning of necessity is at one with the sentiment of prenecessity.

78. Life & Times of Michael K by J.M. Coetzee

The first thing the midwife noticed about Michael K when she helped him out of his mother into the world was that he had a hare lip. The lip curled like a snail’s foot, the left nostril gaped. Obscuring the child for a moment form its mother, she prodded open the tiny budy of a mouth and was thankful to find the palate whole.

77. Cities of the Red Night by William Burroughs

The liberal principles embodied in the French and American revolutions and later in the liberal revolutions of 1848 had already been codified and put into practice by pirate communes a hundred years earlier.

76. Suttree by Cormac McCarthy

Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunk and the homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth highshouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in the sootblacked brick or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall walk save you.

75. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee

It is late in a summer night, in a room of a house set deep and solitary in the country; all in this house save myself are sleeping; I sit at a table, facing a partition wall, and I am looking at a lighted coal-oil lamp which stands on the table close to the wall, and just beyond the sleeping of my relaxed left hand; with my right hand I am from time to time writing, with a soft pencil, into a school-child’s composition book; but just now, I am entirely focused on the lamp, and light.

74. An Accidental Man by Iris Murdoch

“Gracie darling, will you marry me?”

73. The Heather Blazing by Colm Tóibín [This was the first work of his that I read. Now I am happy to read anything by him.]

Eamon Redmond stood at the window looking down at the river which was deep brown after days of rain. He watched the colour, the mixture of mud and water, and the small currents and pockets of movements within the flow. It was a Friday morning at the end of July; the traffic was heavy on the quays. Later, when the court had finished its sitting he would come back and look out once more at the watery grey light over the houses across the river and wait for the stillness, when the cars and lorries had disappeared and Dublin was quiet.

72. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein

I see in Lunaya Pravda that Luna City Council has passed on first reading a bill to examine, license, inspect – and tax – public food vendors operating inside municipal pressure. I see also is to be mass meeting tonight to organize “Sons of the Revolution” talk-talk.

71. Amongst Women by John McGahern

As he weakened, Moran became afraid of his daughters. This once powerful man was so implanted in their lives that they had never really left Great Meadow, in spite of jobs and marriages and children and houses of their own in Dublin and London. Now they could not let him slip away.

70. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent promised to fly from Mercy to the other side of Lake Superior at three o’clock. Two days before the event was to take place he tacked a note on the door of his little yellow house.

69. Amerika by Franz Kafka

As the seventeen year old Karl Rossmann, who had been sent to America by his unfortunate parents because a maid had seduced him and had a child by him, sailed slowly into New York harbour, he suddenly saw the Statue of Liberty, which had already been in view for some time, as though in an intenser sunlight.

68. A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes

One of the fruits of Emancipation in the West Indian islands is the number of ruins, either attached to the houses that remain or within a stone’s throw of them: ruined slaves’ quarters, ruined sugar-grinding houses, ruined boiling houses; often ruined mansion that were too expensive to maintain. Earthquake, fire, rain, and deadlier vegetation, did their work quickly. One scene is very clear in my mind, in Jamaica.

67. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie [Not read this, nor any of his other works. Must remedy.]

I was born in the city of Bombay…once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1946.

66. Froth on the Daydream by Boris Vian

Colin finished dressing. Getting out of his bath, he had wrapped himself in an ample towel of fine fabric from which only his legs and torso were exposed. He took the vaporizer from the glass shelf and sprayed the perfumed liquid oil in his light-colored hair.

65. Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich

The morning before Easter Sunday, June Kashpaw was walking down the clogged main street of oil boomtown Williston, North Dakota, killing time before the noon bus arrived that would take her home. She was a long-legged Chippewa woman, aged hard in every way except how she moved.

64. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin [LOVE]

I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is the matter of the imagination. The soundest face may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows bright as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round and real than pearls are. But both are sensitive.

63. The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak

Whatever falls from the sky above, thou shall not curse it. That includes the rain.

62. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner [I am not sure I have the strength to read Faulkner. Everyone says how difficult his work is.]

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence. Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass.

61. The Devil to Pay In The Backlands by João Guimarães Rosa

It’s nothing. Those shots you heard were not men fighting, God be praised.

60. Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar

Today I went to see my physician Hermogenes, who has just returned to the Villa from a rather long journey in Asia. No food could be taken before the examination, so we had made the appointment for the early morning hours. I took off my cloak and tunic and lay down on a couch.

59. J R by William Gaddis

-Money…? in a voice that rustled.

58. A New Life by Bernard Malamud

S. Levin, formerly a drunkard, after a long and tiring transcontinental journey, got off the train at Marathon, Cascadia, toward evening of the last Sunday in August, 1950.

57. Moravagine by Blaise Cendrars

In 1900 I completed my medical studies. I left Paris in August to go to the Waldensee Sanatorium, near Berne in Switzerland. My master and friend, Professor d’Entraigues, famous for his publications on syphilis, had given me a warm recommendation to Dr Stein, the director, to whom I was to be chief assistant.

56. Among Women Only by Cesare Pavese

I arrived in Turin with the last January snow, like a street acrobat or a candy seller. I remember it was carnival time when I saw the booths and bright points of acetylene lamps under the porticos, but it was not dark yet and I walked from the station to the hotel, peering out from under the arches and over the heads of the people.

55. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh [I have read this novel twice. Each time it seemed like a completely different book, one I had never read before.]

“I have been here before,” I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were white with fool’s parsley and meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, such as our climate affords once or twice a year, when leaf and flower and bird and sun-lit stone and shadow seem all to proclaim the glory of God; and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.

54. The Ambassadors by Henry James [never read any of his work either!]

Strether’s first question, when he reached the hotel, was about his friend; yet on his learning that Waymarsh was apparently not to arrive till evening he was not wholly disconcerted. A telegram from him bespeaking a room “only if not noisy,” reply paid, was produced for the enquirer at the office, so that the understanding they should meet at Chester rather than at Liverpool remained to that extent sound.

53. The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald

At the end of september 1970, shortly before I took up my position in Norwich, I drove out to Hingham with Clara in search of somewhere to live. For some 25 kilometres the road runs amidst fields and hedgerows, beneath spreading oak trees, past a few scattered hamlets, till at length Hingham appears, its asymmetrical gables, church tower and treetops barely rising above the flatland.

52. Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth

The first time I saw Brenda she asked me to hold her glasses. Then she stepped out to the edge of the diving board and looked foggily into the pool, her head of short-clipped auburn hair held up, straight ahead of her, as though it were a rose on a long stem.

51. The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector

Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I do not know why, but I do know that the universe began.

50. Correction by Thomas Bernhard

After a mild pulmonary infection, tended too little and too late, had suddenly turned into a severe pneumonia that took its toll of my entire body and laid me up for at least three months at nearby Wels, which has a hospital renowned in the field of so-called internal medicine, I accepted an invitation from Hoeller, a so-called taxidermist in the Aurach valley, not for the end of October, as the doctors urged, but for early in October, as I insisted, and then went on my own so-called responsibility straight to the Aurach valley and to Hoeller’s house, without even a detour to visit my parents in Stocket, straight into the so-called Hoeller garret, to begin sifting and perhaps even arranging the literary remains of my friend, who was also a friend of the taxidermist Hoeller, Roithamer, after Roithamer’s suicide, I went to work sifting and sorting the papers he had willed to me, consisting of thousands of slips covered with Roithamer’s handwriting plus a bulky manuscript entitled “About Altensam and everything connected with Altensam, with special attention to the Cone.”

49. The Castle by Franz Kafka

48. Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson

In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.

47. The Master and the Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

At the hour of the hot spring sunset two citizens appeared at the Patriarch’s Ponds. One of them, approximately forty years old, dressed in a grey summer suit, was short, dark-haired, plump, bald, and carried his respectable fedora hat in his hand. His neatly shaven face was adorned with black horn-rimmed glasses of a supernatural size. The other, a broad-shouldered young man with tousled reddish hair, his checkered cap cocked back on his head, was wearing a cowboy, shirt, wrinkled white trousers, and black sneakers.

46. Augustus by John Williams

Send the boy to Apollonia. I begin abruptly, my dear niece, so that you will at once be disarmed, and so that whatever resistance you might raise will be too quick and flimsy for the force of my persuasion.

45. The Dying Earth by Jack Vance

Turjan sat in his workroom, legs sprawled out from the stool, back and elbows on the bench. Across the room was a cage; into this Turjan gazed with rueful vexation. The creature in the cage returned the scrutiny with emotions beyond conjecture. It was a thing to arouse pity – a great head on a small spindly body, with weak rheumy eyes and a flabby button of a nose. The mouth hung slackly wet, the skin glistened waxy pink. In spite of its manifest imperfection, it was to date the most successful product of Turjan’s vats.

44. Murphy by Samuel Beckett

The sun shone, having no alternative, on nothing new. Murphy sat out of it, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton. Here for what might have been six months he had eaten, drunk, slept, and put his clothes on and off, in a medium-sized cage of north-western aspect commanding an unbroken view of medium-sized cages of south-eastern aspect. Soon he would have to make other arrangements, for the mew had been condemned. Soon he would have to buckle to and start eating, drinking, sleeping, and putting his clothes on and off, in quite alien surroundings.

43. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

I am an invisible man. No, I am not like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind.

42. The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa

Installed on the upper floors of certain respectable taverns in Lisbon can be found a small number of restaurants or eating places, which have the stolid, homely look of those restaurants you see in towns that lack even a train station. Amongst the clientele of such places, which are rarely busy except on Sundays, one is likely to encounter the eccentric as the nondescript, to find people who are but a series of parentheses in the book life.

41. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima

Ever since my childhood, Father had often spoken to me about the Golden Temple. My birthplace was a lonely cape that projects into the Sea of Japan north-east of Maizuru. Father, however, was not born there, but at Shiraku in the eastern suburbs of Maizuru. He was urged to join the clergy and became the priest of a temple on a remote cape; in this place he married and begot a child, who was myself.

40. The Fixer by Bernard Malamud

From the small crossed window of his room above the stable in the brickyard, Yakov Bok saw people in their long overcoats running somewhere early that morning, everybody in the same direction. Vey is mir, he thought uneasily, something bad has happened.

39. 2666 by Roberto Bolaño

The first time that Jean-Claude Pelletier read Benno von Archimboldi was Christmas 1980, in Paris, when he was nineteen years old and studying German literature. The book in question was D’Asronval.

38. The Rainbow/Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence

Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen sat one morning in the window-bay of their father’s house in Beldover, working and talking. Ursula was stitching a piece of brightly-coloured embroidery, and Gudrun was drawing upon a board.

37. Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz

Tuesday morning I awoke at that pale and lifeless hour when night is almost gone but dawn has not yet come into its own. Awakened suddenly, I wanted to take a taxi and dash to the railroad station, thinking I was due to leave, when, in the next minute, I realized to my chagrin that no train was waiting for me at the station, that no hour had struck.

36. Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar

Would I find La Maga? Most of the time it was just a case of my putting in an appearance, going along the Rue de Seine to the arch leading into the Quai de Conti, and I would see her slender form against the olive-ashen light which floats along the river as she crossed back and forth on the Pont des Arts, or leaned over the iron rail looking at the water.

35. Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker

Never having known a mother, her mother had died when Janey was a year old, Janey depended on her father for everything and regarded her father as boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement, and father.

34. The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass

Granted: I’m an inmate in a mental institution; my keeper watches me, scarcely lets me out of sight, for there’s a peephole in the door, and my keeper’s eye is the shade of brown that can’t see through blue-eyed types like me.

33. East of Eden by John Steinbeck

The Salinas Valley is in Northern California. It is a long narrow swale between two ranges of mountains, and the Salinas River winds and twists up the center until it falls at last into Monterey Bay.

32. My Life by Anton Chekhov

The director told me: “I only keep you out of respect for your esteemed father, otherwise you would have been sent flying out of here long ago.” I answered him: “You flatter me, your Excellency, assuming I know how to fly.” And then I heard him say, “Take this gentleman away, he gets on my nerves.”

31. Beloved by Toni Morrison

124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims.

30. Mating by Norman Rush

In Africa, you want more, I think. People get avid. This takes different forms in different people, but it shows up in some form in everybody who stays there any length of time. It can be sudden. I include myself.

29. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Towards the end of November, during a thaw, at nine o’clock one morning, a train on the Warsaw and Petersburg railway was approaching the latter city at full speed. The morning was so damp and misty that it was only with great difficulty that the day succeeded in breaking; and ten paces or so from the carriage windows it was almost impossible to distinguish anything.

28. Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley

I was surprised to see a white man walk into Joppy’s bar. It’s not just that he was white but he wore an off-white linen suit and shirt with a Panama straw hat and bone shoes over flashing white silk socks. His skin was smooth and pale with just a few freckles. One lick of strawberry-blond hair escaped the band of his hat. He stopped in the doorway, filling it with his large frame, and surveyed the room with pale eyes; not a color I’d ever seen in a man’s eyes. When he looked at me I felt a thrill of fear, but that went away quickly because I was used to white people by 1948.

27. At-Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien

Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. I reflected on the subject of my spare-time literary activities. One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and interrelated only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.

26. V. by Thomas Pynchon

Christmas Eve, 1955, Benny Profane, wearing black levis, suede jacket, sneakers and big cowboy hat, happened to pass through Norfolk, Virginia. Given to sentimental impulses, he thought he’d look in on the Sailor’s Grave, his old tin can’s tavern on East Main Street.

25. Light in August by William Faulkner

Sitting beside the road, watching the wagon mount the hill towards her, Lena thinks, ‘I have come from Alabama: a fur piece. All the way from Alabama a-walking. A fur piece.’ Thinking although I have not quite been month on the road I am already in Mississippi, further from home than I have ever been before. I am now further from Doane’s Mill than I have been since I was twelve years old.

24. Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry

Two mountain chains traverse the republic roughly from north to south, forming between them a number of valleys and plateaus. Overlooking of these valleys, which is dominated by two volcanoes, lies, six thousand feet above sea level, the town of Quauhnahuac.

23. Europe Central by William Vollmann

A squat black telephone, I mean an octopus, the god of our Signal Corps, owns a recess in Berlin (more probably Moscow, which one German general has named the core of the enemy’s whole being).

22. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

21. Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well. On Thursday afternoons he drives to Green Point. Punctually at two p.m. he presses the buzzer at the entrance to Windsor Mansions, speaks his name, and enters. Waiting for him at the door of No. 113 is Soraya. He goes straight through to the bedroom, which is pleasant-smelling and softly lit, and undresses. Sonraya emerges from the bathroom, drops her robe, slides into bed beside him. “Have you missed me?” she asks, “I miss you all the time,” he replies. He strokes her honey-brown body, unmarked by the sun; kisses her breasts; they make love.

20. The Horse’s Mouth by Joyce Cary

I was walking by the Thames. Half-past morning on an autumn day. Sun in a mist. Like oranges in a fried-fish shop. All bright below. Low tide, dusty water and a crooked bar of straw, chicken-boxes, dirt and oil from mud to mud. Like a viper swimming in skim milk.

19. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo….

18. The Book of The New Sun by Gene Wolfe

It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future. The locked and rusted gate that stood before us, with wisps of river fog threading its spikes like the mountain paths, remains in my mind now as the symbol of my exile. That is why I have begun this account of it with the aftermath of our swim, in which I, the torturer’s apprentice Severian, had so nearly drowned.

17. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

From a little after twooclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that – a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.

16. Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin

Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father. It had been said so often that John, without ever thinking about it, had come to believe it himself. Not until the morning of his fourteenth birthday did he really begin to think about it, and by then it was already too late.

15. Woodcutters by Thomas Bernhard

While everyone was waiting for the actor, who had promised to join the dinner party in the Gentzgasse after the premiere of The Wild Duck, I observed the Auersbergers carefully from the same wing chair I had sat in nearly every day during the fifties, reflecting that it had been a grave mistake to accept their invitation.

14. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

Pale Fire, a poem in heroic couplets, of nine hundred ninety-nine lines, divided into four cantos, was composed by John Francis Shade (born July 5, 1898, died July 21, 1959) during the last twenty days of his life, at his resident in New Wye, Appalachia, U.S.A.

13. Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald

In the second half of the 1960s I traveled repeatedly from England to Belgium, parly for study purposes, partly for other erasons which were never entirely clear to me, staying sometimes for just one or two days, sometimes for several weeks. On one of these Belgian excursions which, as it seemed to me, always took me further and further abroad, I cam on a glorious early summer’s day to the city of Antwerp, known to me previously only by name.

12. Ulysses by James Joyce

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air.

11. Demons by Fyodor Doestoevsky

In undertaking to describe the recent and strange incidents in our town, till lately wrapped in uneventful obscurity, I find myself forced in absence of literary skill to begin my story rather far back, that is to say, with certain biographical details concerning that talented and highly-esteemed gentleman, Stepan Trofimovitch Verhovensky. I trust these details may at least serve as an introduction, while my projected story itself will come later.

10. The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton

The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset. It was built of a bright brick throughout; its sky-line was fantastic, and even its ground plan was wild. It had been the outburst of a speculative builder, faintly tinged with art, who called its architecture sometimes Elizabethan and sometimes Queen Anne, apparently under the impression that the two sovereigns were identical.

9. The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

He awoke, opened his eyes. The room meant very little to him; he was too deeply immersed in the non-being from which he had just come.

8. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

‘Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,’ said Mrs Ramsay. ‘But you’ll have to be up with the lark,’ she added.

7. Molloy by Samuel Beckett

I am in my mother’s room. It’s I who live there now. I don’t know how I got there. Perhaps in an ambulance, certainly a vehicle of some kind. I was helped.

6. I, Claudius by Robert Graves [Love this book. Time to reread?]

I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives as “Claudius the Idiot”, or “That Cladius”, or “Claudius the Stammerer”, or “Clau-Clau-Claudius” or at best as “Poor Uncle Claudius”, am now about to write this strange history of my life.

5. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein

I was born in San Francisco, California. I have in consequence always preferred living in a temperate climate but it is difficult, on the continent of Europe or even in America, to find a temperate climate and live in it. My mother’s fazther was a pioneer, he came to California in ’49, he married my grandmother who was very fond of music. She was a pupil of Clara Schumann’s father. My mother was a quiet charming woman named Emilie.

4. The Chaneysville Incident by David Bradley

Sometimes you can hear the wire, hear it reaching out across the miles; whining with its own weight, crying from the cold, panting at the distance, humming with the phantom sounds of someone else’s conversation. You cannot always hear it – only sometimes; when the night is deep and the room is dark and the sound of the phone’s ringing has come slicing through uneasy sleep; when you are lying there, shivering, with the cold plastic of the receiver pressed tight against your ear.

3. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust [I have read this line numerous times. Now that I have an ebook version, I may just read past it. Sometime.]

For a long time, I used to go to bed early. Sometimes, when I had put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even the time to say, “I’m going to sleep.”

2. The Trial by Franz Kafka

Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.

1. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

Omigawd, so many novels I haven’t read. Authors I haven’t even heard of. Bolded are the ones I have.

I ponder my love of such lists. Even lists where I haven’t heard of many of the books. Do I hope to read them all? I don’t think it’s humanly possible, unless I do nothing else, and even then I suspect my eyes would wear out. (No, don’t suggest audiobooks, I want to read not listen. For me, listening is J.S. Bach.) And if I think of this love of lists as some sort of metaphor for my life, what does it say? That I’d rather collect, even if there’s no hope of ever doing it all? Or is it some librarian trait of just wanting to know about it, keeping up in some meagre way, even if not deeply?

LOST

When we are overwhelmed and confused, our brains barely function. We reach for the old maps, the routine responses, what worked in the past. This is a predictable response, yet also suicidal.

If we keep grasping for things to look familiar, if we frantically try and fit new problems and situations into old ways of thinking, we will continue to wander lost and eventually collapse from our confusion. There is no way to get out of this wilderness except to acknowledge that we’re lost.

Recognizing our situation usually leads at first to even wilder grasping after old solutions. Yet there’s nothing we can learn about this strange new world until we stop grasping, pause, calm down, and look around. The first thing we could notice is the most essential: we’re still here. This in and of itself makes our situation workable. We don’t have to panic about our situation—we need to acknowledge it. Yes, we’re lost. But in truth we’re not. We’re right here.

As we relax enough to tune in, we’ll be able to notice the information and signals that are everywhere around us. There’s sufficient information right here to help us find our way out. But we have to be willing to stop, to listen, to admit we don’t know.

To navigate life today, we definitely need new maps. Our old ones confuse us unendingly. These new maps are waiting for us. They’ll appear as soon as we quiet down and, with other lost companions, relax into the unfamiliarity of this new place, senses open, curious rather than afraid.

The maps we need are in us, but not in only one of us. If we read the currents and signs together, we’ll find our way through.

From Perseverance by Margaret Wheatley, 2010

The challenge: when you’re working with people who can’t see that they’re lost. Or who know it, but have let the fear paralyse them and then are too fearful to try to move out of the paralysis. You need infinite patience, and huge reserves of courage and ingenuity to build the level of trust needed.

He is exceedingly difficult to photograph, as he hates the camera and usually shies away when he sees it. This shot was sneakily taken when he was standing next to me. I happened to be holding the camera, so I carefully took some shots. He didn’t notice the camera at first, and then when he did, he frowned (yes, dogs can frown) at me and ran off.

Paco has the whitest and softest chest. A very sweet, friendly little dog.

1. Write and post cards
2. Look at the list of presents to buy, and despair. Big families = list-crossing.
3. Make many bowls of trifle
4. Spend Christmas day driving around in 40ºC heat (I wonder if it will get that hot this year)
5. Eat too much
6. Miss certain people

Doesn’t it sound like fun?

…Despite being surrounded on all sides—as if held hostage—by books, the last thing I’ve wanted to do for the past weeks (months, even, if I’m honest) is read. This is not a confession, just a fact: I can’t read. Or read, at least, with any pretense of endurance.

As much as I may want (or have wanted) it to be so, books haven’t been a sufficient comfort or diversion as I prepared to lose my boobs, then lost them, and began trying to adjust to their absence from my body. If I pick a book up, I’ll read a few pages before setting it aside because the end just seems too far away, the time and attention it requires, too exhausting. I don’t have the energy or patience for any of it. In the months before surgery, my attention span was shot through by relentless bullets of anxiety, the salve for which—it soon became clear—was not being left alone with my own head, a pile of paper, and a bunch of words written by some stranger; since the surgery, my attention span seems to have vanished under a haze of painkillers, muscle relaxers, and exhaustion.

Two weeks gone from Brooklyn and I’m no longer sure what “literary type” means, nor am I sure whether I care, but I do know that I—the person I am—am supposed to love books. Books have thus often been what the people who love me and who want to cheer me up in this time of need have been suggesting to me, giving to me, or handing me gift certificates to help me buy. Reread Pride and Prejudice, they say, offering over an elegant new edition. Or, here’s The BFG, or try this new novel by this new wunderkind, or these brilliant essays about war and devastation. But logic does not always hold. Just as the possibility of doing what you love for a job risks turning that love into a chore, doing what you love during a difficult time risks illuminating the shortcomings of that thing you love because it cannot solve all—if any—of your problems.

Those trying to help me be proactive about the BRCA situation [this is the BRCA1 genetic mutation that predisposes the author to early-onset reproductive cancers] are the ones who touch and trouble me most. They tell me to read Masha Gessen’s book about her journey with the gene, Blood Matters: From Inherited Illness to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene. I tell them I will, that I plan on it, but the truth is I tried to read the book but couldn’t. It was too much: too much information, too much of another person, too many pages. For each individual and each situation, what one needs to know is different and varies as the days, months, and years pass. There are those things one needs to know in order to make an informed decision and then there is the information that is too much to bear in the moment. …

…It’s not easy or appropriate to tell people who love you and who are trying to help you that what they are doing is not helping, that books are not what you want or need, that what you want and need right now are flowers, letters—notes, even—stupid movies, something that might help you feel pretty, emails that contain funny anecdotes from the outside world. That what you want is quiet company, conversation, to talk about you or him or her or whatever, who cares, that the last thing you want is to be left alone either with your thoughts or with a book chock full of someone else’s thoughts and into which your own encroach all too easily. Minds can become Frankensteins, and you’ve gotten gun-shy of yours and the noises it makes in the night. Of course, I don’t say any of this to those who hand me a book they say is lovely and that they hope I’ll enjoy. Instead, I say, “Thank you. I can’t wait to read it,” because that’s closer to what I hope I’ll mean in the end.

I read this as someone who has a loved one who is suffering from cancer at the moment. You wish there is something you can do, but there isn’t all that much really. Just small things. But small things are fine.

This article has really helped – Now that Books Mean Nothing by Nell Boeschenstein.

Yes, it is fine to just sit with the person.

Oh, thank you.

Therefore, in lieu of a well-thought out post, I leave you with…

The Caramel Banana Cake of Doom!

I made it on Sunday for afternoon tea. It was enjoyed by all, but my not-quite-one-year-old nephew particularly loved it – he grabbed the pieces he was offered with both hands and crammed them into his mouth (we were laughing too much to remember to take a photo). Mom, who is not normally a fan of sweet things, loved it too.

Recipe is here, should you be so inclined.