Category Archives: Booking through Thursday

Booking Through Thursday – Foreign

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Today’s Booking Through Thursday’s question is:

Name a book (or books) that you love from a country other than your own (in my case the UK).

Where to start? There are so many! My choices are books that came to mind today – another day I could choose many other books and other countries.

I think the first one is a book from Switzerland – one  from my childhood. It’s Heidi by Johanna Spyri. I loved this book and the sequels, Heidi Grows Up and Heidi’s Children both written by Charles Tritten. It was first published in 1880. Johanna Spyri was born and lived in Switzterland. In the story Heidi goes to live in the Swiss Alps with her grandfather who lives on his own isolated from the other villagers. At first he doesn’t want Heidi there at all but she gradually softens his heart. I haven’t read it for years and would probably find it terribly dated and sentimental, but it lives in my mind as a beautiful book.

Next, a book from the USA – Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. This book won the Pullitzer Prize for fiction in 1972. It is the story of Lyman Ward, a wheelchair bound retired historian who is writing his grandparents’ life history and also gradually reveals his own story. It’s the story set in the wilderness of the American West – of Oliver Ward’s struggles with various mining and engineering construction jobs, contrasted with Susan Ward’s efforts to support him against great difficulties. This is made more difficult when she compares her life with that of her New York society friend, Augusta.

One of the reasons I chose this book is my fascination with the Wild West.

Margaret Atwood is favourite author who is Canadian. Which book to chose? I’ve decided to highlight the first one that I read – The Blind Assassin.

I think it may have been one of the first books I read that contains a story within a story and it’s about writers and readers as well as about the lives of two sisters, one of whom apparently committed suicide.

Another favourite author is the Australian Colleen McCullough. I’ve loved her books – the Rome series – The First Man in Rome and so on. I first came across her books many years ago with the TV series of The Thorn Birds and then read the book, but my favourite has to be Morgan’s Run. This is an historical novel based on the history of Botany Bay centred on the life of Richard Morgan who was transported from Britain to New South Wales. Again it’s my fascination for history that made me enjoy this book so much.

Finally, a book from China. I read A Loyal Character Dancer by Qiu Xiaolong last year and it’s another favourite. Qiu Xiaolong was born in Shanghai and was a member of the Chinese Writers’ Association, publishing poetry, translations and criticism in China. Since 1989 he has lived in the United States, his work being published in many literary magazines and anthologies. His first crime novel, Death of Red Heroine, won the AnthonyAward for Best First Crime Novel. A Loyal Character Dancer is his second book featuring Chief Inspector Chen Cao, of the Shanghai Police Bureau. Apart from the story which is crime fiction there is a lot about China in it – life, the country and the impact of the Cultural Revolution.

Disaster! – Booking Through Thursday

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Today’s Booking Through Thursday’s question is:

You’ve dropped your favourite out-of-print book in the bath, ruining it completely … what do you do?

I have done this with a library book. My immediate reaction was to panic and fish the book out of the water, abandon the bath and try to dry the book. Of course, it was useless, the book had been completely submerged. I had to take it back to the library and confess what I’d done. This was not the only library book I had to take back ruined. The second was one our dog had chewed. In both cases I had to pay for replacement books.

So after the bath disaster I’ve never read in the bath again.

It’s so difficult to replace a favourite book because even if I could find a second-hand copy it wouldn’t have the same meaning for me. I lost my copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses that I had loved as a child. I have bought a replacement copy, but somehow it doesn’t have the same sentimental value for me, although it is better than not having it at all.

Evolution – Booking Through Thursday

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Have your reading choices changed over the years? Or pretty much stayed the same? (And yes, from childhood to adulthood we usually read different things, but some people stick to basically the same kind of book their entire lives, so…)

Basically my reading choices have pretty much been the same for some time now. I used to have phases in reading, though, when I read as much as I could in one category or another. For example there was my historical fiction phase, an Agatha Christie one, a religious books phase, and a yoga books phase. When I was at college I read mainly books on librarianship and quite a lot of fiction – we were all Lord of the Rings fans (well before the films made it popular again), then years later I did an OU course and read lots of art history and philosophy books. All along I’ve read fiction of most types.

Now I’ll still read all those genres but like to vary it more – so maybe my reading has evolved to be more eclectic.

Disappointment: Booking Through Thursday

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Today’s question from Deb is:

Name a book or author that you truly wanted to love but left you disappointed. (And, of course, explain why.)

One book that came to mind when I read this question is Haweswater by Sarah Hall. I read it in 2006 before I wrote about books on my blog so my notes on it are brief. It’s a novel about what happened when the Haweswater dam was constructed and the valley of Mardale in Cumbria was flooded. I read it because I was interested in the area and on the cover it said that it had won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book in 2003, so I was expecting it to be good.  I think I’m obviously in the minority here because I thought that it was “Disappointing, verbose, overwritten and detached – characters not described with much empathy.”

Booking Through Thursday – Now or Then

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Do you prefer reading current books? Or older ones? Or outright old ones? (As in, yes, there’s a difference between a book from 10 years ago and, say, Charles Dickens or Plato.)

About half the books I’ve read this year are current books – published within the last ten years. The other half date from the 1930s to the 1990s, the oldest being Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? by Agatha Christie. I also like older books by authors such as Jane Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot, Tolstoy, Thackeray and Dickens. I can’t say that I have a preference either way as I like to vary my reading. Sometimes I want to read older books and sometimes modern ones.

As for ’outright old’ books I have read a few, books like the Cloud of Unknowing, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, and Dante’s Divine Comedy, which I haven’t finished yet! Coming forward a bit in time I also like Shakespeare, but prefer to see the plays, rather than read them. Thinking about this post has reminded me that I’ve been meaning to read Don Quixote for ages. My copy was published in the 1920s and I think I’d like a more modern translation, which would be an appropriate combination of old and new. Has anyone any suggestions about which one to choose?

Long and Short of It – Booking Through Thursday

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Which do you prefer? Short stories? Or full-length novels?

Comparing short stories and full-length novels is like comparing a weekend away with a month long holiday. A few days away means that you can only skim the surface of a place, not really getting to know it very well, seeing the highlights and you can come home thinking you wanted to stay longer, wanting more. Short stories can be like that. Or a weekend away can be just right  – you’ve seen and done all there is to see and do, you’ve enjoyed it but don’t hanker after any more. Short stories can be like that too.

A month away means that you can settle into a place, explore it in more detail, get to know people and become immersed in it, so much so that you don’t want to go home. Novels can be like that, you never want a good book to end. On the other hand it can get boring, repetitive and tedious and you can’t wait to get home. Novels can be like that too.

In other words both can be right under the right circumstances, but if I had to choose between an enjoyable short break or a longer one then of course I’d go for the longer one.

Half – Booking Through Thursday

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This week’s topic:

So … you’re halfway through a book and you’re hating it. It’s boring. It’s trite. It’s badly written. But … you’ve invested all this time to reading the first half.

What do you do? Read the second half? Just to finish out the story? Find out what happens?

Or, cut your losses and dump the second half?

If I was hating a book I’d stop reading it, before getting halfway into it. I might skim through it if the story was interesting enough to find out what happens or read the end, but if it was that bad I’d dump it straight away. Life is too short and there are too many good books around to waste time and effort reading a boring, trite and badly written book.

Plotting

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Plots? Or Stream-of-Consciousness? Which would you rather read?

 It all depends on my mood! I like both at different times.

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf springs to mind as a good example of stream-of-consciousness writing and is a book to cogitate over and I could read it again and again. Plot driven books, in contrast, are full of action and are page-turners, making me read quickly to find out what happens next, but once read I usually feel less inclined to re-read them.

April Fool – Booking Through Thursday

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Deb has asked a variety of questions for today.

  • Who’s your favorite “fool” of a character, and why?
  • What authors have fooled you? By a trick plot twist? By making you think their book was any good when it wasn’t?
  • What covers have fooled you into reading books you hated … even though the covers were wonderful?
  • What’s the best April Fool’s Day trick you’ve ever seen/heard about/done?

Choose the one you like best. Or answer all of them! Or make up your own.

I was fooled by Margaret Forster’s book, Diary of an Ordinary Woman, or rather I fooled my self.

Even though it is clear from the front cover that this is a novel I started reading it thinking it really was the diary of Millicent King, a woman born in 1901 who had kept a diary from the age of 13 until she was 94. I think the fact that it has an ‘Introduction’ was partly to blame where the narrator explained how she had come across the diaries and was intrigued enough by them to ‘make something of them’ and how she had met Millicent just before her death. The ‘diary’ records the events of the Great War as it touched her family, on through the 20s and 30s in London and then to the Second World War where Millicent drove an ambulance through the bombed streets of London.

It’s written in diary format with added information from the ‘editor’. It was only when I came to read the later part of Millicent’s ‘life’ that I began to wonder if this woman could possibly be real and have been involved in so many of the great social upheavals and dramas of the times and I began to suspect that this was fiction.  That should teach me to read book titles more closely and look at the front covers properly!

Nevertheless this is very good book and I enjoyed it enormously, although I did feel a little sad that Millicent wasn’t a real person.

As for covers I don’t think I’ve ever been fooled by one – as I don’t really look at them very carefully.

Breaks In Reading?

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Do you take breaks while reading a book? Or read it straight through? (And, by breaks, I don’t mean sleeping, eating and going to work; I mean putting it aside for a time while you read something else.)

I have three books on the go right now. Sometimes I have more. I have tried sticking to one book, but it just doesn’t work like that for me, I seem to need the variety. I’ll be reading one book and find myself wanting to read something different, which is why I often have one book of non-fiction and a variety of fiction at hand to turn to. But there always comes a point in each book where that book takes over and I read it through to the end without interruption from the others. At the moment it’s The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters that is taking precedence, closely followed by Raven Black by Ann Cleeves, with Being Shelley by Ann Wroe trailing behind in third place.

It can become difficult if I have put a book aside for a while and then I have to start reading it again from the beginning! It gets even more difficult when I’ve been to the library and want to start all the books I’ve just borrowed.

And so it goes on …