Category: Books

Musing Mondays – Award Winning Books

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

monday-musingToday’s MUSING MONDAYS post is about award winning books€¦

Do you feel compelled to read prize-winning (Giller/Booker/Pulitzer etc) books? Why, or why not? Is there, perhaps, one particular award that you favour? (question courtesy of MizB)

I don’t feel at all compelled to read prize-winning books – interested yes, but not compelled. For years the only prize I followed was the Booker, but I’ve only read a few of the winners and shortlisted authors, so it hasn’t really had much impact on my reading.

Recently I’ve become interested in the Orange Prize for Fiction.  When I saw a list of all the books long-listed between 1996 and 2009 on Kimbofo’s blog Reading Matters I realised that I’ve read 26 of them – not many but more than I would have thought.  

I didn’t read any of them because they were longlisted or prize winners, in fact I was completely unaware of that when I read them. I read them because they attracted me, either because I’d read other books by the authors or because I thought they looked good.

The ones I’ve read are shown in bold and the hyperlinks take you to my reviews. The other books are books I own that I haven’t read yet.

Alice Sebold The Lovely Bones
Anita Shreve The Weight of Water – shortlist
Ann Patchett Bel Canto – winner
Ann Patchett The Magician’s Assistant – shortlist
Anne Enright The Gathering
Anne Tyler Digging to America
Audrey Niffenegger The Time Traveler’s Wife
Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible – shortlist
Beryl Bainbridge Master Georgie
Carol Shields Unless – shortlist
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Half of a Yellow Sun – winner
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Purple Hibiscus – shortlist
Hilary Mantel Beyond Black – shortlist
Jane Gardam Old Filth – shortlist
Jane Harris The Observations – shortlist
Joyce Carol Oates Middle Age
Joyce Carol Oates The Falls
Kate Atkinson Case Histories
Kiran Desai The Inheritance of Loss – shortlist
Lily Prior La Cucina
Linda Grant The Clothes on Their Backs
Louise Welsh The Cutting Room
Margaret Atwood Alias Grace – shortlist
Margaret Atwood Oryx and Crake – shortlist
Margaret Atwood The Blind Assassin – shortlist
Margaret Forster Over
Marilynne Robinson Gilead
Marina Lewycka A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian – shortlist
Pat Barker The Ghost Road
Rachel Cusk Arlington Park – shortlist
Sadie Jones The Outcast
Samantha Harvey The Wilderness
Siri Hustvedt What I Loved
Stef Penney The Tenderness of Wolves
Sue Gee The Mysteries of Glass
Tracy Chevalier Girl with a Pearl Earring
Valerie Martin Property – winner
Zadie Smith On Beauty – winner

Sunday Salon – In which I Ramble on about Books

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

tssbadge1Yesterday I finished reading Jane Austen: a Life by Claire Tomalin. I’m going to write more about it in a separate post because today the sun is shining and soon I’m going out for the morning.

There are many books written about Jane Austen – thousands of volumes and tens of thousands of articles so why a write any more? But Claire Tomalin’s biographies are always excellent and this one is no exception. She writes that Jane Austen

is as elusive as a cloud in the night sky.

jane-austen-tomalinAnd yet she has written such a clear account, quoting from original sources – letters and diaries, that I now know so much more about Jane Austen than I did before. Inevitably it has made me keen to re-read her novels as soon as possible.

But that won’t be today, or tomorrow as I’m still reading those two mammoth books shown in the sidebar – When the Lights Went Out and After the Victorians. I read a little from these most days, and of the two I’m enjoying After the Victorians more. Yesterday I read about the power of the press, in particular of Lord Northcliffe over the Government in the run up to the First World War. He was both loved and loathed. Rudyard Kipling, writing for his cousin Stanley Baldwin when Leader of the opposition, likened the power of the press to “that of a harlot”.

Kipling is a fascinating character and by one of those strange coincidences that often happen his name cropped up again this morning when I was reading Geranium Cat’s post on his story Thy Servant the Dog. This then prompted me to pick up and read a couple of Kipling’s Just So Stories – How the Whale Got His Throat and How The Camel Got His Hump. I like his poem with that one – If we haven’t enough to do-oo-oo We get the hump, although I can’t go along completely with this verse

The cure for this ill is not to sit still,

Or frowst with a book by the fire;

But to take a large hoe and a shovel also,

And dig till you gently perspire.

I did the digging yesterday and much prefer sitting and reading a book!

Finally just a word or two about Angels and Demons by Dan Brown. I’m re-reading this after watching the film last Wednesday. I first read it years ago and had forgotten the detail so I enjoyed the film without that annoying thought “that’s not how it is in the book!”  But my husband had only finished reading it the day before so he knew that’s not how it is in the book!  I’ve given up expecting or even wanting films of the book to be the same as the book.

Sunday Salon

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

tssbadge1Today I started reading The Birthday Present by Barbara Vine. but I’m not sure that I really want to finish it. Maybe I’ve read too much crime fiction recently because this one just seems rather silly.

Ivor Tesham, MP decides to give his married girl friend a birthday present, one with a difference.  He arranges to have her “kidnapped” and delivered to him bound and gagged. Not my idea of fun and I nearly stopped reading at that point, but thought I’d go on a bit longer with it before giving up. I can’t say any of the characters are likeable, in fact they’re rather more stereotypes than real people – a sleazy politician, a plain single woman with no hope of romance, a beautiful young woman with no morals stuck in a boring marriage etc. And despite Ivor’s fears that he’s going to be found out and his name splashed across the newspapers ruining his chances of a dazzling political career it’s sadly lacking in tension.

Much more interesting are my current non-fiction reads:

after-the-victoriansAfter the Victorians by A N Wilson. This is not an academic study of the period 1900 – 1952 and Wilson interjects history with his own opinions and it’s full of references to art and literature as well as being an account of the political events of the times:

 … artists … hold up mirrors to what is going on in societies, they take soundings of a society’s cohesion, moral wellbeing, strength or lack of it. That is why totalitarian regimes persecute poets and composers with just as much rigour as they do to silencing overtly political opposition. Stalin and Hitler both had violently strong views about art and music. (p.156)

When the Lights Went Out by Andy Beckett. I’m enjoying this much more than I expected when-the-lights-went-outand surprising myself by wanting to read about the politics of the 1970s. But again this book is not solely a political history and there are plenty of personal touches. Beckett had interviewed many of the personalities and his accounts are compelling reading. Here he is on meeting Ted Heath:

Heath came slowly into the room, supported by a walking stick and another of his staff. His clothes – a baggy cream short-sleeved shirt with half the buttons undone, and the casual grey chinos – came as a small shock after watching hours of his pinstriped and uncomfortable early seventies political broadcasts. But his face was much the same: small determined eyes, the proud dagger nose, big plump cheeks barely lined despite his lingering yactsman’s tan – a usefully aspirational political signal back in the pre-easy Jet Britain of his premiership. (p. 28)

Part of its attraction is that it reminds me of many things I’d forgotten  – like the three-day week, the Winter of Discontent, and the TV programmes The Good Life and Fawlty Towers.

Library Loot

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

library-loot

I borrowed just three books this week from the library.coastliners For more Library Loot click on the button above.

  • Coastliners by Joanne Harris:  a novel about a hardy island community fighting the encroaching seas. A young woman returns to her home island off the Atlantic coast and tries to stop the decline of her father’s fishing village. I borrowed this book because I loved Chocolat and Gentlemen and Players.

 

  • The Thirteen Problems by Agatha Christie. This is a collection of short stories. A thirteen-problemsgroup of friends, including Miss Marple meet on a Tuesday night and tell sinister stories of unsolved crimes. I’m taking part in the Agatha Christie Reading Challenge and this week this was the only book in the library by AC. I’ve started reading it and am finding it a bit simplistic. So far it’s been Miss Marple much to the surprise of the others (but not to me) who comes up with the solution.

 

  • The Gardens of the Dead by William Brodrick: When Elizabeth Glendinning QC dies of gardens-of-the-deada sudden heart attack while making a desperate phone call to the police, her colleagues and family are devastated and mystified. What was she doing in east London at the time of her death, and what was she trying to tell Inspector Cartwright in her last phone call? I’ve never read anything by William Brodrick, so this is new territory. The quotes on the back cover are promising eg: “Worthy of Le Carre at his best”  from Allan Massie writing in the Scotsman.

Books That Stick – Booking Through Thursday

Published on by Margaret28 Comments

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Today’s question is from Shelley:

‘This can be a quick one. Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.’

  1. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
  2. Heidi by Joanna Spyri
  3. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (& Good Wives, Little Men and Jo’s Boys)
  4. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
  5. Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
  6. What Katy Did and What Katy Did Next by Susan Coolidge
  7. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
  8. Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
  9. The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
  10. Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
  11. One Fine Day by Mollie Panter Downes
  12. Enduring Love by Ian McEwan
  13. Atonement by Ian McEwan
  14. Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
  15. Cider With Rosie by Laurie Lee

I did this is just about 15 minutes and couldn’t actually restrict it to 15 books. Numbers one to nine are all books are ones I read when was a child/teenager, so that means they really have stuck with me. Some of the others are more recent reads and I’m quite surprised by the ones that came to my mind straight away, but yes I think they’ll all stay with me for quite a while – there are more, of course!

Teaser Tuesday and Where Are You?

Published on by Margaret14 Comments

teaser-tuesday

Teaser Tuesday is hosted by MizB at Should Be Reading.

  • Grab your current read.
  • Let the book fall open to a random page.
  • Share with us two (2) ‘teaser’ sentences from that page.
  • You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your ‘teaser’ from €¦ that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given!
  • Please avoid spoilers!

a-judgement-in-stoneMy teasers today are from page 29 of Ruth Rendell’s A Judgement in Stone:

She was the strangest person they were ever likely to meet. And had they known what her past contained, they would have fled from her or barred their doors against her as against the plague – not to mention her future, now inextricably bound up with theirs.

tuesdaywhereareyou

I’m in Suffolk, at Lowfield Hall, a large 1930-ish house on the outskirts of Stanwich, with the Coverdale family and their new housekeeper Eunice Parchman.

This is a chilling tale full of psychological insights into the mind and motives of a killer.

For more Where Are You? answers, visit Raidergirl3 at An Adventure in Reading.