oh and I forgot to add, that after The Offing, I am reading The Golem and the Jinni.

Curiously enough, I know what a Golem is but I did not connect Jinni I think because of the spelling. Once the character was introduced, I was like duh.......

Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, itsnotrecent but the writing is charming and the story is diverting. i think there are themes for a bookclub to discuss.

Favorite quote: ”This time of year is depressing. New Year’s Eve is a bigger thug than any mugger.” Im just 50% thru so not ready to give a numerical rating.

There is nothing Christian about The Offing, as Salonva mentioned.

Thanks for the info about The Offing, Salonva and Olychick. It is interesting to me that there is a connection between Third Man Books and Jack White. I'm a closet fan of his.

For all those who love watching Jeopardy do check out Alex Trebek The Answer Is. An easy read and a lot of insight into our favorite game show host. It ends within a few months before he passed. I found the book at half price already in a book store. So glad I came across it there. I probably would have not bought it otherwise.

Still reading through a two year pile of National Geographic magazines I had. I told myself I would finish them all before I bought another book. I have about 7 or 8 left.

For those who have already finished The Offing, check out the author's Wikipedia. He is Benjamin Myers, punk rocker, poet, essayist. It makes perfect sense regarding the cadences and imagery in the book.

4 Stars for The Family, Naomi Krupitsky. This is 'inside the mob' as I've never seen it before, through the eyes of two little girls born into it and enmeshed -- willing and not -- into their thirties. What do you do when there's no escape?

Who can help me understand The Prime of Miss Jean Brody? We've read two Muriel Spark novels now. I 'got' A Far Cry from Kensington, but I'm confused by this one. I know it was made into a movie -- didn't see it. There's a similar theme in each about women relegated to spinsterhood after wars have decimated the 'elegibles'. Religions were skewered. What's the rest of it? A little help?

Now we have The Marriage Plot on the shelf, largely because we confused our enjoyment of Middle England (Coe) with Eugenides' Middlesex -- not read after all!

While I was browsing the "W" shelf at the library, I came across P.G. Wodehouse, someone whom I have never read. My loss, apparently. I took out a book of short stories, The Man Upstairs and Other Stories, and the tales are absolutely delightfully clever, witty, and funny. Just the thing for in-between more demanding books, and perfect for busy times, when you don't want to commit.

Nuts, I read The People We Keep a few months ago... so maybe I mentioned it. I enjoyed it but I do think it skews towards a younger reader-- not so much "young adult" but an adult who is younger than I am. I gave it a 3.5 (rounded up on Good Reads) and bought it for a 32 yo niece for her Birthday.

Most recently read Ring Shout by P. D'jeli Clark. I do not normally read horror-- but I'd call it "horror lite". There's definitely a supernatural edge (is that typical of horror?) and not terribly gruesome. I thought it was an excellent book and I look forward to reading others by P.D'jeli Clark.

I am currently reading Silverview, John le Carre's final book that was finished posthumously by his son -- it was already on my TBR list but Outside, I was so glad to see that you enjoyed it and rated it so highly (I think we have very similar tastes-- at least in the spy/thriller genres). I also have started Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead started but I took a break when I had minor surgery in October and have not yet returned to it. I will..

A few I am eager to get to .. Butter Honey Pig Bread by Francesca Ekwuyasi, Tuesday Nights in 1980 by Molly Prentiss, The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles

Who can help me understand The Prime of Miss Jean Brody?

Jean Brodie lives in a sort of fantastical world of her own, admiring, among other things, Italian painting, passionate love, and fascism, and trying to mold her girls into miniature versions of herself. The book paints a portrait of a completely self-involved woman, determined to be a nonconformist, and one whose obsessions warp and destroy those around her.

The movie, which takes many liberties with the plot of the book is, IMO, a small masterpiece. Maggie Smith is genius in the role.

Funky, yes i think it was you. thank you!

faftris, not sure if it’s a colonial thing, but PG Woodhouse is and has always been wildly popular in India, with ”thank you, my man, Jeeves” and other such expressions routinely peppering conversations.

Re Jean Brodie....here's one guy's take...you can also check out sparknotes and other sites like that.

https://kenyonreview.org/2020/09/on-the-power-of-moral-ambiguity-in-muriel-sparks-the-prime-of-miss-jean-brodie/

Re Jean Brodie- I did not read the book but I so remember seeing the movie. and just googled to see the year. I graduated high school in 70 and the movie was out in 1969. I have a very vivid memory of seeing it with a high school friend. We both loved the movie but agreed it reminded us of a very popular teacher we had. for creative writing. It made a very deep impression on me regarding the power or "strong influence" a teacher can have.

Finished Peril by Woodward amd Costa. Almost all of the history covered is publicly kniwn, with behind-the-scene perspectives from insiders. Would be valuable to future readers, say 40 years from now, who aren’t fully aware of the events.

Also read Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout. Didn’t find it interesting or insightful, but it got great reviews from NYT, WaPo and their ilk. I didn’t care for it at all.

Faftris - P.G. Wodehouse is one of my favorite writers! I have read almost all of his books and can't read them any more because I've almost memorized them. They are, as you might know, very light and fluffy. Very good quality escapist reading, though, with many of his lines being truly hilarious and original. He is in a world all to himself in that particular genre (English life-lite) imho. Someone had recommended the Mapp and Lucia books as being similar, but they didn't fit the bill for me.

Thank you, nuts. Oh William! has been removed from my cart. The missing comma was driving me cuckoo.

• Thanks to Bookwoman, Annie and salonva for taking time to give me background on The Prime of Miss Jean Brody. I've only read two of Muriel Sparks novels, and I am beginning to think she's writing about her own forceful persona.

• I didn't like Jean Brody. (What parent wants her young daughter groomed to fall into bed with old male teachers?) Only towards the very end of the book did I discover a 'why' for Brody's rebelliousness. Did I misunderstand, or does Ms. Brody reference becoming tough as befits the bastard daughter of "a man who had five children by two mistresses". Ah-hah! The outsider takes on the social mores of her time. I admire Brody's gumption, but I'm with the headmistress, whose (failed) duty it was to protect the students from such a self-serving and fatuous 'prime'.

Sorry, I can't erase these bullet points!

I am reading another Melody Carlson book "Under a Summer sky"

Stacey, have you read any of the Uncle Fred stories? A few years ago, I saw John Lithgow in a one-person Broadway show, doing a recitation of short stories that his father read to his family. He was just marvelous. One of the stories was an Uncle Fred story by Wodehouse.

Yes, I have read the Uncle Fred stories. I very much enjoyed them and you were very fortunate to have heard a stage reading. I may have an Uncle Fred book in my own collection that I purchased from a library sale. This reminds me that maybe it's time to give these another try. Certainly these are times when humor is badly needed!

Speaking of humor, I'm re-reading Jean Shepherd's A Fistful of Fig Newtons. His writing is also very funny, even down to his titles - In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash and Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories and Other Disasters.

Zalco, I didn’t mean to steer anyone away from Oh William! with my comments. I personally didn’t find anything in the book to recommend it. Usually there is at least some aspect that’s done well, be it the writing, the plot, the characters, the feel… This one, not a one, nada. Sample it before you take my word for it, though though. It’s quite possible I’m missing something.

Finished Shelter by Jung Yun and Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng.

My reading these two books back to back was purely coincidental, the books having been selected based on bestyears’ and faftris’s recommendations, respectively.

Interestingly, they both happened to delve into very similar themes — the immigrants’ desire to blend in at the expense of self-worth; the relatively minor but constant assaults (intentional or otherwise) on one’s human dignity; the daily reminders of one’s otherness; the weight of parental expectations and dreams; inter-racial relationships; the experience of multi-racial children …

I enjoyed both books. Shelter was slightly better, IMHO. 3 to 3.25 for Everything I Never Told You and 3.5 stars for Shelter. Thank you, Bestyears and Faftris for the recommendations.

A resounding five stars for No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood. She is a gifted poet and this brilliant piece of work is her debut novel. It was a finalist for this year’s Booker prize. It is stunningly original and the style reminds me a bit of Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart even though that was set in a dystopian future and Lockwood’s novel is set, painfully, in the present. No One is Talking About This is a short book and i read it in one day as i could not put it down.

It was universal at book group last night...I don't think we all ever agreed more on a book. Luster was awful. We spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out who would like it as it did get reasonable reviews. And we spent time trying to figure out what we were missing if anything...but no, we didn't like it, didn't see any humor in it, and were all glad it was short.

Annie, that reminds me of when one book club read Normal People. I think it won various awards and got good reviews. I struggled to finish it and learned that no one liked it either.

Hah! Salonva, that book was mentioned at club last night as being of similar style and unreadable as well...

But I recommended The Offing as a good antidote.

I'm reading Oh William now and finding it to be an interesting, somewhat challenging reading experience. Having LOVED My Name is Lucy Barton and Anything is Possible I was very eager to spend more time inside Lucy's head.

But (spoiler alert) this book is perhaps a bit too much inside her head, and simultaneously not far enough in there if that makes sense. The book, like the previous two, consists of the narrator either telling a story about a memory of her life as an adult or about her evidently nightmarish childhood. For the adult memory snippets the last sentence or two simply blurts our a negative emotional reaction to whoever or whatever she is describing 'I hate her' 'I hated every visit'. For the childhood memories, there is a creepy partial sentence then an abrupt 'And that is all I will say about the man' or 'I can't talk about it more'. And Lucy strongly reminds me of my MIL; every single story about someone makes them out to be an awful person. Even stories that ostensibly are loving or upbeat end up making the subject seem horrible. My MIL used to tell stories such as how when she was a child her parents would have parties, get drunk then go to bed and she would be expected to stay up till 2-3 am cleaning up. The stories always started out with a variation of 'oh my parents were wonderful' then proceeded to describe some type of nasty or unpleasant behavior. This whole book is a series of stories like that.

Then too, the eponymous William is written as such an a**hole, a horrible husband and unpleasant person. I don't mind an unlikeable character but the author needs to make me feel there's something worth knowing about him/her and some reason the author feels he/she was worth creating and writing about. Not sure Elizabeth Strout met that standard here.

And last but not least in this one the authorial tics are maddening. I'm starting to count the sentences that start with Oh! then continue with some kind of simple declaratory sentence. I'm dreading the semicolon that connects two sentences with NO relationship to each other. Both of these are literally on almost every single page, as is, weirdly, the constant use of 'Oh God' or 'Jesus' by both characters as an exclamatory marker in the dialogue.

Eventually I will probably go back and read this book as part of the trilogy that the Lucy Barton books have become. I might then be more able to appreciate the threads of the character and the world she is describing.

Thanks runninginplace. You put it so precisely and elegantly. As for ”authorial tics” — love that expression — how about every other sentence beginning with ”and then there us this …” and ending eith ”… is i guess what I’m trying to say.”

I returned The Lost Gutenberg after reading about half of it. It wasn't a bad book, it just wasn't very compelling or engaging. It felt somewhere between a long magazine article and a textbook. I enjoyed Gutenberg's Apprentice far more.

Happily, as I returned it, there was The Lincoln Highway waiting on the shelf for me.

Thanks to so many mentions on here for The Golem and the Jinni , ( I think it was Bunny whose recommendation got me )- I just finished it.

I really loved most of it. I appreciated how much research had to go into it and how well done it was with respect to NYC historically and the little mentions of immigration in that period. I thought the story was beautiful and just so detailed and I was really caught up in it.

My only criticism was that I did find it a bit confusing with all the story lines and time periods and location, but some of that I know is me. sometimes not being as focused as I should be but that's what it is. I did think some of the parts near the ending were a bit too convoluted but the absolute ending was great.

salonva, I'm so glad you enjoyed The Golem and the Jinni. Aside from the unique title characters, it was a fascinating time, a pleasant break from WWII, kwim? When I've recommended it to some people, they say, oh no, don't like fantasy stuff. Actually, neither do I, but these characters were such a part of normal life in NYC at the turn of the century, that they just became part of the community.

I recommend you consider The Hidden Palace. Yes, there's more to their story. :)

I have been reading Elizabeth Berg books and enjoying them. The Year of Pleasures: A Novel and The Story of Arthur Truluv were both good. I like books about how people form a connection in certain ways.

I have also finished The Tea Chest by Heidi Chiavaroli which tells a current story and how it connects with a story in the 1700's due to a tea chest found in an antiques shop.

PattiG, I enjoyed The Story of Arthur Truluv. I think it got mixed reviews here.

Bunny, I also want to thank you for The Golem and The Jinni recommendation. You nailed it too--I'm not generally a fantasy fan and hadn't picked up the book when it originally appeared in this topic but based on your enthusiastic comments I did.

But I"m so glad I did! As you say, the historical period details were so interesting and well researched. And with such beautifully drawn characters--what a winner!

I enjoyed The Hidden Palace too because it was a lovely chance to stay in that world with those characters for awhile.

36 years after it was written, I finally read (listened to) The Handmaid's Tale. Especially since it is such an old book, part of me considers it a prescient warning.

I am now on a dystopian future novel kick and am listening to High Rise by JG Ballard, a 1975 novel also recently adapted as a movie.

I finished Oh William last night and have a sense this book will be one I like better in retrospect than I did while reading it.

Stand by my comments earlier, however part of the genius of the author with this series is, I suppose, that she does NOT explicitly reveal the grim details of Lucy Barton's upbringing. So it becomes up to the reader to imagine what isn't conveyed and thus to hopefully weave one's own sense of who the character is, how she lives her life after a horrendously difficult start and of course how she relates to the people in her world.

And nuts, totally agree the 'is what I am saying' at the end of some elliptical explanation was VERY annoying after the umpteenth repetition!

I really enjoyed The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides, although one more word from self-centered, globe-trotting, Ivy League collegians seeking to *find* themselves will put me over the edge! I guess I'm too old to properly empathize with their total lack of concern for their families, but the author has them right down to the cellular level. 5 Stars for capturing the age and the times. (And it was enlightening about bipolar, to boot.)

I am enjoying People We Meet On Vacation. I am pretty sure it was mentioned in a previous month's what are you reading thread. It's a very chatty, easy read so far. It's definitely a welcome light read ( at least so far -) and a nice balance to what I have been reading lately. It does get very good ratings on goodreads, which is I find a very good measure.

edited because there is no THE in the title. :)

Last night I finished The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles. 3.5 stars.

I'm crazy about A Gentleman in Moscow, love love love it. So I wanted to love Lincoln Highway too. I liked the first half or so but then it got to be just too much.

It's a long book (576 pages) and I'm not a particularly fast reader, but it's a fast-reading long book. It flew in 5 days and I did other things besides reading. It just galloped along.

The characters were all engaging, if annoying at times, but I had to suspend disbelief many times. It takes place over 10 days in 1954, starting in Nebraska. No cell phones or address books, and yet they were able to find one another in NYC, on multiple occasions.

There's a scene in a circus/brothel that lost me on relevance. Two chapters ended mid-sentence with a black box, similar to redacted text. I had to google it after I finished the book (so I didn't see any spoilers) and it was meant to signify a break in thought. Honestly, I didn't need the black box to figure it out.

There were some sweet moments, like giving hope to a modern day Ulysses with the story of the ancient Ulysses.

This is a scattershot review, but I wanted to get it out before I start prepping for dinner.

Bunny, I just started reading The Lincoln Highway last night. After working in the yard and Thanksgiving prep, I didnt get very far but I thought I would enjoy it. Thanks for your review. It follows another similar review I read, but I will stick with it. Have to say, the last 3-4 books I have read were only around 300 pages. Not by design, it just worked out that way, and I was really grateful for some shorter stories.

I finished John Grisham’s The Judge’s List a couple of days ago and rate it 3.5-4 stars. I am a Grisham fan and liked most of his books. This one follows a character from a previous book, lawyer Lacy Stoltz, who is asked to investigate a serial killer who has not been recognized as such. An interesting crime solving story without a lot of gory detail. It was a fairly short book too which was good for me at the moment.

Outside, I'll be interested to hear what you think of it. There was just so much going on. I had the physical book and many times I wished it was an e-book so I could easily find a reference to an earlier character or scene. Once I start a book I try to stay away from all summaries and reviews. I was honestly baffled by the black boxes at the end of two chapters. I did try to find an answer online as I was reading, but it's too easy to stumble on a spoiler so I left it till the book was finished.

I like to know what authors look like and a bonus if I can see a video of them speaking. I found this appearance of Towles with Seth Meyers, and found him nothing like I'd imagined, but in a good way.

@bunny, I finished reading The Lincoln Highway a few days before you posted here that you were just starting it. I did not want to influence your thoughts so was reserving comment until you finished. I felt exactly the same as you! In fact, my notes/review state the same thing - I had to suspend belief way too many times for me to really enjoy the book. Like it just got ridiculous once they arrived in NY. There were some passages with the beautiful writing I so enjoyed in A Gentleman in Moscow, but the plot was just too over the top. Though I too felt it was a quick read for a 500+ page book, unfortunately, it was just not engrossing enough for me to want to pick it up and read. So it took me probably 10 days to actually finish. I gave it 3 stars.

Finished The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. Agree with chisue about the self-absorbed nature of the characters, but that’s precisely the essence of teens and 20+ year year-olds in the throngs of self-doubt and self-discovery, right?

Loved — simply loved — the authenticity of grad students and post-grads doing pure research (i.e. anything remotely readily applicable to real life), their life of intellectualism, poverty and blissful impracticality.

Before I went into law, I did my doctorate in what was the beginnings of AI at a time when AI wasn’t a household word. With those street--creds (for what they’re worth), I can tell you the book felt like a capsule of those impossibly heady years of high-octane interdisciplinary discussions and debates that lasted all night. Evolutionary biology, yes! Stephen Gould, yes! Theory of meaning, yes, yes, yes!! Anyway, you get the point, the author gets it, it’s the real deal.

As chisue points out, the book also bears witness to the sad, slow and painful unraveling of the mind of a manic-depressive. (I recall Katherine Graham’s account of her brilliant husband’s descent into bipolar disorder in her memoir from the late 1990s, with uncannily similar details of a manic-depressive’s behavior.)

The writing was quite good too. Overall, a great read if you’re into subjects of this kind. 3.5 to 4 stars.

I finished People We Meet on Vacation yesterday, and liked it a lot. It was a good and very easy read. I don't think it's anything too special though even though I did enjoy the ride.

It struck me that although the subject ( finding one's purpose and person) is universal , the book was so very current. It kept going back and forth between the present and past, and each one was pretty much a vacation so it was at times confusing.

I would give it 3 stars. I do think it could make for interesting discussion, but it's a lighter book.

I've finished grim, gory Moriarty, Anthony Horowitz. I'd just enjoyed two of his Hawthorne detective mysteries, but wasn't prepared for this Victorian bloodbath. I don't think I'll go back further to his other 'Sherlockian' mystery, The House of Silk. Obviously, I prefer the lighter tone he has taken more recently -- and with his TV work, Midsummer Murders and Foyle's War. Guess I'm a 'cozy mystery' kind of gal. This was very *good*, so 3 stars, just too grim for me.

Now to start Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides' Pulitzer Prize winner. Only 500+ pages.

Oh, Chisue, Middlesex is SUCH a good book! I hope you enjoy it.

Thanks Oly. Good to know. After Marriage Plot, I read a collection of Eugenides’s short stories. Liked some a little better than others. Them started Reading Middlesex.

Adding a link to October 2021 reading:

What are you reading October 2021