WndyJW's bookshelf: all en-US Mon, 07 Apr 2025 18:14:01 -0700 60 WndyJW's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[The Three Christs of Ypsilanti (New York Review Classics)]]> 8596595
The men had one thing in each believed himself to be Jesus Christ. Their extraordinary meeting and the two years they spent in one another’s company serves as the basis for an investigation into the nature of human identity, belief, and delusion that is poignant, amusing, and at times disturbing. Displaying the sympathy and subtlety of a gifted novelist, Rokeach draws us into the lives of three troubled and profoundly different men who find themselves “confronted with the ultimate contradiction conceivable for human beings: more than one person claiming the same identity.”]]> 368 Milton Rokeach 1590173848 WndyJW 0 3.73 1964 The Three Christs of Ypsilanti (New York Review Classics)
author: Milton Rokeach
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1964
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/07
shelves: to-read, psychological, mental-illness, africa-north, ethical-religious-philosophical, indie-press, nyrb
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Germinal (Les Rougon-Macquart, #13)]]> 3128376
While it is a dramatic novel of working life and everyday relationships, Germinal is also a complex novel of ideas, given fresh vigor and power in this new translation. It is also the thirteenth book in the Rougon-Macquart cycle, which celebrates its centenary in October 1993 with a new film version of Germinal starring Gerard Depardieu.
About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
]]> 538 Émile Zola 0199536899 WndyJW 0 4.40 1885 Germinal (Les Rougon-Macquart, #13)
author: Émile Zola
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.40
book published: 1885
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: to-read, france-french-lit, class-differences, translated, historical-fiction, classics, poverty, family-epic, generational, social-justice
review:

]]> Heart Lamp: Selected Stories 205544315 192 Banu Mushtaq 1916751164 WndyJW 0 3.50 Heart Lamp: Selected Stories
author: Banu Mushtaq
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.50
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: to-read, india-southern, translated, short-story-collections, indie-press, and-other-stories, livesofwomen, islam, patriarchy, feminism, international-booker
review:

]]> Hard Times 1921200
Without a moral compass to guide them, the children sink into lives of desperation and despair, played out against the grim background of Coketown, a wretched community shadowed by an industrial behemoth. Louisa falls into a loveless marriage with Josiah Bouderby, a vulgar banker, while the unscrupulous Tom, totally lacking in principle, becomes a thief who frames an innocent man for his crime. Witnessing the degradation and downfall of his children, Gradgrind realizes that his own misguided principles have ruined their lives.

Considered Dickens' harshest indictment of mid-19th-century industrial practices and their dehumanizing effects, this novel offers a fascinating tapestry of Victorian life, filled with the richness of detail, brilliant characterization, and passionate social concern that typify the novelist's finest creations.

Of Dickens' work, the eminent Victorian critic John Ruskin had this to say: "He is entirely right in his main drift and purpose in every book he has written; and all of them, but especially Hard Times, should be studied with close and earnest care by persons interested in social questions."]]> 368 Charles Dickens 0140433988 WndyJW 0 3.54 1854 Hard Times
author: Charles Dickens
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.54
book published: 1854
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves:
review:

]]> The Frog in the Throat 214274181 A bracing and darkly comic novel about a disgraced priest who finds himself haunted by his dead and disapproving father, this little-known classic of Swiss literature is impossible to forget.

In a small town in Switzerland, a man named Franz—ex-clergyman, ex-husband, current counselor of locals at loose ends—is being haunted, or harried is more like it, by his father, Klement, recently deceased. In life, after Franz was caught cheating on his wife and forthwith defrocked, Klement called him a disgrace and never spoke to him again; in death, Klement comes to visit him once a month in the form of a frog in the throat.

Part of Franz is urbane and self-aware (unfazed to find himself unfaithful in every sense), but another is inhabited by the voice of this father, a socialist dairy farmer devoted to the old ways, forever railing against his son and the whole modern mess he represents. The same goes for this novel, in which these two voices clash, harmonize, and ultimately offer up all the mutual recognition and incomprehension that is family life.

A stylish masterpiece of tragicomic compression, Markus Werner’s second novel is as bursting with life as a Dickens Not only Franz’s high-strung shenanigans and the father’s settled life among the cattle, but the lives of his sister and brother and the land all around.

As in all of Werner’s work, the world looks grim (“I sit around, I drink, I brood, I pat myself down for flaws and find many, and each evening I Starting tomorrow I’m going to get a grip on myself�) but never less than comic—a view captured marvelously in Michael Hofmann’s fresh translation.]]> 144 Markus Werner 1681379120 WndyJW 0 4.10 1985 The Frog in the Throat
author: Markus Werner
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1985
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: to-read, indie-press, nyrb, classics, father-son, switzerland-swiss-lit, germany-german-lit, translated-by-author
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Troy (Stephen Fry's Great Mythology, #3)]]> 53443339
In Troy you will find heroism and hatred, love and loss, revenge and regret, desire and despair. It is these human passions, written bloodily in the sands of a distant shore, that still speak to us today.]]> 414 Stephen Fry 0241424585 WndyJW 4
I read Homer’s epics and most of the Greek plays before I read Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold, Heroes: Mortals and Monsters, Quests and Adventures, or this book, and I think Fry’s books are an engaging and easy introduction to the Ancient Greek world and for someone like me, an amateur who loves the Greeks, these books are excellent refreshers.

Fry knows well and clearly loves the ancient classics, and his light hearted, narrative approach to the many names and events brings it all to life in a way that makes it easy to remember. Just be sure to then read Homer and Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides, Sophocles, etc.!

Highly recommended!

]]> 4.36 2020 Troy (Stephen Fry's Great Mythology, #3)
author: Stephen Fry
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/01
date added: 2025/03/30
shelves: greek-mythology, war-post-war, classics, historical-fiction, myths-mythology, ancient-greece
review:
I didn’t plan on reading this, having read The Iliad and The Odyssey, but I’m glad I did. This is not a retelling of Homer’s epic, which is what I thought it was, nor is it an academic study, instead Fry tells us the stories of the Greeks and Trojans, the god, goddesses, demigods, heroes, and heroines of The Iliad and The Odyssey as if he knew them personally and was there to witness it all.

I read Homer’s epics and most of the Greek plays before I read Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold, Heroes: Mortals and Monsters, Quests and Adventures, or this book, and I think Fry’s books are an engaging and easy introduction to the Ancient Greek world and for someone like me, an amateur who loves the Greeks, these books are excellent refreshers.

Fry knows well and clearly loves the ancient classics, and his light hearted, narrative approach to the many names and events brings it all to life in a way that makes it easy to remember. Just be sure to then read Homer and Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides, Sophocles, etc.!

Highly recommended!


]]> The Silmarillion 60705690 For the first time ever, a very special edition of the forerunner to The Lord of the Rings, illustrated throughout in color by J.R.R. Tolkien himself and with the complete text printed in two colors. The Silmarillion fills in the background which lies behind the more popular work, and gives the earlier history of Middle-earth, introducing some of the key characters.

The Silmarilli were three perfect jewels, fashioned by Fëanor, most gifted of the Elves, and within them was imprisoned the last Light of the Two Trees of Valinor. But the first Dark Lord, Morgoth, stole the jewels and set them within his iron crown, guarded in the impenetrable fortress of Angband in the north of Middle-earth.

The Silmarillion is the history of the rebellion of Fëanor and his kindred against the gods, their exile from Valinor and return to Middle-earth, and their war, hopeless despite all the heroism, against the great Enemy. It is the ancient drama to which the characters in The Lord of the Rings look back, and in whose events some of them such as Elrond and Galadriel took part.

The book also includes several shorter works: the ԳܱԻ岹�, a myth of the Creation, and the Valaquenta, in which the nature and powers of each of the gods is described. The 첹�t recounts the downfall of the great island kingdom of N�menor at the end of the Second Age, and Of the Rings of Power tells of the great events at the end of the Third Age, as narrated in The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien could not publish The Silmarillion in his lifetime, as it grew with him, so he would leave it to his son, Christopher Tolkien, to edit the work from many manuscripts and bring his father's great vision to publishable form, so completing the literary achievement of a lifetime. This special edition presents anew this seminal first step towards mapping out the posthumous publishing of Middle-earth, and the beginning of an illustrious forty years and more than twenty books celebrating his father's legacy.

This definitive new edition includes, by way of an introduction, a letter written by Tolkien in 1951 which provides a brilliant exposition of the earlier Ages, and for the first time in its history is presented with Tolkien's own paintings and drawings, which reveal the breathtaking grandeur and beauty of his vision of the First Age of Middle-earth.]]> 358 J.R.R. Tolkien 0063280779 WndyJW 0 4.52 1977 The Silmarillion
author: J.R.R. Tolkien
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.52
book published: 1977
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/29
shelves: to-read, beautiful-copy, tolkien, fantasy, classics, adventure-quest, myths-mythology
review:

]]> A Horse at the Door 228070954 169 Wadih Saadeh 1917304021 WndyJW 0 4.00 A Horse at the Door
author: Wadih Saadeh
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/28
shelves: to-read, indie-press, rofc-book-club, poetry, arabic, translated, lebanon
review:

]]> Eurotrash 220396538
Eurotrash is a bitterly funny, vertiginous mirror-cabinet of familial and historical reckoning. The pair's tragicomic quest is punctuated by the tenderness and spite meted out between two people who cannot escape one another. Intensely personal and unsparingly critical, Eurotrash is a disorientingly brilliant novel by a writer at the pinnacle of his powers.]]> 190 Christian Kracht 1805223046 WndyJW 3 3.41 2021 Eurotrash
author: Christian Kracht
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.41
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/28
date added: 2025/03/28
shelves: international-booker, germany-german-lit, modern-life, indie-press, translated, women-in-translation, mother-sons, nazis, memory, dysfunctional-family, europe, europe-northern, family, holocaust, humor-dark-humor, mental-illness
review:

]]> Old Filth (Old Filth, #1) 37060
Borrowing from biography and history, Jane Gardam has written a literary masterpiece reminiscent of Rudyard Kipling's Baa Baa, Black Sheep that retraces much of the twentieth century's torrid and momentous history. Feathers' childhood in Malaya during the British Empire's heyday, his schooling in pre-war England, his professional success in Southeast Asia and his return to England toward the end of the millennium, are vantage points from which the reader can observe the march forward of an eventful era and the steady progress of that man, Sir Edward Feathers, Old Filth himself, who embodies the century's fate.

Old Filth was nominated for the 2005 Orange Prize.

]]> 290 Jane Gardam 1933372133 WndyJW 5 I plan on reading the story told from Betty's point of view soon.]]> 3.94 2004 Old Filth (Old Filth, #1)
author: Jane Gardam
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2004
rating: 5
read at: 2012/08/05
date added: 2025/03/28
shelves: europa-editions, favorites, sun-lit, united-kingdom, women-authors, contemplating-mortality, aging, british-empire, british-raj, 20th-century-british-women-authors, character-driven, love-family, marriage, lives-of-children, womens-orange-bailey-prize, trauma-loss, historical-fiction, asia-southern, colonialism-post-colonialism
review:
Old Filth (Failed in London Try Hong Kong) was a very engaging story. It felt like Dickens met Forrest Gump. Eddy Feathers is born in Malay and becomes one of the "Raj orphans" sent back to England where, as he tells someone over 70 years later, he was never loved again. Feathers has a minor roles in most the major events in the British Empire in the 20th century. He has a faithful wife, Betty, and many admirers, but something haunts Eddy. Eddy Feathers is a fully realized character and I found him very likeable. This book would appeal to readers who love a good story, readers who enjoy great characters, readers of Historical Fiction, and of course, Anglophiles.
I plan on reading the story told from Betty's point of view soon.
]]> Lysistrata 1586 98 Aristophanes 0451616227 WndyJW 0 3.89 -423 Lysistrata
author: Aristophanes
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.89
book published: -423
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: greek-mythology, ancient-greece, classics, translated, livesofwomen, humor-dark-humor, war-post-war, feminism, drama, to-read
review:

]]> Moby-Dick or, The Whale 153747 "It is the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it."

So Melville wrote of his masterpiece, one of the greatest works of imagination in literary history. In part, Moby-Dick is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself. But more than just a novel of adventure, more than an encyclopaedia of whaling lore and legend, the book can be seen as part of its author's lifelong meditation on America. Written with wonderfully redemptive humour, Moby-Dick is also a profound inquiry into character, faith, and the nature of perception.

This edition of Moby-Dick, which reproduces the definitive text of the novel, includes invaluable explanatory notes, along with maps, illustrations, and a glossary of nautical terms.]]> 720 Herman Melville 0142437247 WndyJW 0 3.53 1851 Moby-Dick or, The Whale
author: Herman Melville
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.53
book published: 1851
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: classics, adventure-quest, philosophical, animal, natural-world, historical-fiction, to-read
review:

]]> Under the Eye of the Big Bird 224550310 From one of Japan's most brilliant and sensitive contemporary novelists, this speculative fiction masterpiece envisions an Earth where humans are nearing extinction, and rewrites our understanding of reproduction, ecology, evolution, artificial intelligence, communal life, creation, love, and the future of humanity.

In the distant future, humans are on the verge of extinction and have settled in small tribes across the planet under the observation and care of "Mothers." Some children are made in factories, from cells of rabbits and dolphins; some live by getting nutrients from water and light, like plants. The survival of the race depends on the interbreeding of these and other alien beings--but it is far from certain that connection, love, reproduction, and evolution will persist among the inhabitants of this faltering new world.

Unfolding over fourteen interconnected episodes spanning geological eons, at once technical and pastoral, mournful and utopic, Under the Eye of the Big Bird presents an astonishing vision of the end of our species as we know it.]]> 256 Hiromi Kawakami 1593768079 WndyJW 0 4.00 2016 Under the Eye of the Big Bird
author: Hiromi Kawakami
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves: to-read, international-booker, japan-japanese-lit, women-authors, women-in-translation, translated, indie-press, speculative-scifi, dystopian, environment, climate-crisis
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Father May Be An Elephant and Mother a Small Basket, But…]]> 60548459
A young girl is sent away to school to save her from being declared the sexual property of the village’s upper-caste men. The village water tank laments to a passing child. A Brahmin boy is considered ‘polluted� by the touch of a Dalit girl � the same action that saved his life.

Rendered with idiomatic vitality, humour and lightness, these stories revel in rural childhood without nostalgia or romanticism, forcing the reader to question their expectation of violence in the representation of certain lives, and of what the short story can be and do.

Shifts in tone and perspective reveal relationships � between the different castes that make up a village, between an individual and the wider community, between identities and the seasonal rhythms of the land. Imbued throughout with a Dalit feminist philosophy that is above all a philosophy of life, to be lived with wit, ingenuity, and defiance.]]> 219 Gogu Shyamala 1911284746 WndyJW 0 3.57 2012 Father May Be An Elephant and Mother a Small Basket, But…
author: Gogu Shyamala
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/24
shelves: to-read, indie-press, tilted-axis, feminism, india-southern, caste, translated, short-story-collections, lives-of-children, livesofwomen
review:

]]> The Pilgrimage 220237870 224 John Broderick 1946022950 WndyJW 0 4.00 1961 The Pilgrimage
author: John Broderick
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1961
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves: to-read, indie-press, mcnally-editions, lgbtq, ireland-irish-lit, classics, religion
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Unusual Fragments: Japanese Stories (Calico Series)]]> 210038566 200 Inagaki Taruho 1949641759 WndyJW 0 3.93 2025 Unusual Fragments: Japanese Stories (Calico Series)
author: Inagaki Taruho
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves: to-read, calico-series, indie-press, two-lines-press, short-story-collections, japan-japanese-lit, translated, lgbtq
review:

]]> Satyricon 168217 208 Petronius 087220510X WndyJW 0 3.75 60 Satyricon
author: Petronius
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.75
book published: 60
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/21
shelves: to-read, ancient-classics, ancient-roman-classics, poetry, classics, translated
review:

]]> Solenoid 60582780
Based on Cărtărescu's own role as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. One character asks another: when you rush into the burning building, will you save the newborn or the artwork? On a broad scale, the novel’s investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms of life and art.

The novel is grounded in the reality of late 1970s/early 1980s Communist Romania, including long lines for groceries, the absurdities of the education system, and the misery of family life. The text includes sequences in a tuberculosis sanatorium, an encounter with an anti-death protest movement, a society of dream investigators, and an extended visit to the minuscule world of dust mites living on a microscope slide.

Combining fiction with autobiography and history� the scientists Nicolae Tesla and George Boole, for example, appear alongside the Voynich manuscript―Solenoid ruminates on the exchanges possible between the alternate dimensions of life and art, as various, monstrous dimensions erupt within the Communist present.]]> 639 Mircea Cărtărescu 1646052021 WndyJW 0 4.31 2015 Solenoid
author: Mircea Cărtărescu
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/20
shelves: to-read, philosophical, ethical-religious-philosophical, translated, magic-realism, international-booker
review:

]]> Lysistrata 1591 Lysistrata a bawdy comedy without peer in the history of theatre.]]> 132 Aristophanes 0872206033 WndyJW 0 3.87 -423 Lysistrata
author: Aristophanes
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.87
book published: -423
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/17
shelves: to-read, classics, drama, ancient-classics, ancient-greece, humor-dark-humor, war-post-war, livesofwomen, translated
review:

]]> First Love 403642 107 Ivan Turgenev 0140443355 WndyJW 0 3.76 1860 First Love
author: Ivan Turgenev
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1860
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves: to-read, classics, russia-russian-lit, historical-fiction, love-eros, class-differences, translated, novella
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Fortune of the Rougons (Les Rougon-Macquart, #1)]]> 14827593 The Fortune of the Rougons is the first in Zola's famous Rougon-Macquart series of novels. In it we learn how the two branches of the family came about, and the origins of the hereditary weaknesses passed down the generations. Murder, treachery, and greed are the keynotes, and just as the Empire was established through violence, the "fortune" of the Rougons is paid for in blood.

Set in the fictitious Provencal town of Plassans, The Fortune of the Rougons tells the story of Silvere and Miette, two idealistic young supporters of the republican resistance to Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte's coup d'etat of December 1851. They join the woodcutters and peasants of the Var to seize control of Plassans, and are opposed by the Bonapartist loyalists led by Silvere's uncle, Pierre Rougon. Meanwhile, the foundations of the Rougon family and its illegitimate Macquart branch are being laid in the brutal beginnings of the Imperial regime.

Brian Nelson provides an engaging translation as well as a wide-ranging introduction that explains the background to the Rougon-Macquart series as well as the historical setting of the novel and its special qualities. This edition also features a chronology, bibliography, and extensive explanatory notes.

About the Series For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
"]]> 301 Émile Zola 0199560994 WndyJW 0 3.99 1871 The Fortune of the Rougons (Les Rougon-Macquart, #1)
author: Émile Zola
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1871
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves: to-read, classics, class-differences, france-french-lit, family-epic, political, conflict-political, historical-fiction, translated
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Base Notes: The Scents of a Life]]> 216145230 'A fragrant and fabulous episodic memoir' - The Bookseller

'Ingenious' - ★★★★� The Telegraph

'Candid and compelling' - The Guardian

'Wistful, sad and funny' - The Spectator

'Working-class life pinned to the page' - The Herald

'Already your future has been planned out. There is not much choice about what to become in the small town where you live . . .'

A bedroom dreamer with a headful of Warhol, Adelle Stripe's formative years were ones of daytime drinking and religious fervour, frustrated mothers and reckless daughters, desire, ambition and the pursuit of creativity. Told through a prism of vintage perfumes, and played out in vivid detail with startling clarity and colour, Base Notes chronicles an unbridled Northern England of the late 20th century already fading from view.

With a keen eye for the absurd, an ear cocked to eavesdropped conversations and a nose that finds perfume wherever it goes, this tragicomic tale of working-class womanhood is no clichéd story of redemption or escape, but instead a bleakly funny yet unflinching memoir of dead-end jobs, lost weekends, brief encounters and those wild, forgotten characters who slip through the cracks.

Infused with acerbic observations and unexpected poignancy, Base Notes sees Adelle Stripe boldly laying her lived experience on the page, creating literature from a life less ordinary.]]> 275 Adelle Stripe 1399608630 WndyJW 5 Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile, since I wasn’t familiar with Andrea Dunbar before I read her biography, so I was eager to read this memoir. I knew it would be brilliant, but it exceeded my expectations.

This is an intimate and deeply moving coming of age story about a sensitive, bright, observant girl born in 1976 in a working class neighborhood in northern England, a portrait of a mother daughter relationship with all the small hurts and acts of absolute loyalty and love that will be familiar to most women, and one woman’s struggle to live a creative life.

Adelle tells her own story with courageous candor: a strident, fundamentalist grandmother, a bigger-than-life mother who loved her family, but chafed at the expectations of motherhood, a caring father who spent maybe too much time on farm work, and Adele’s own often misguided, sometimes frighteningly misguided, search for her place in the world.

Olfactory memory is closely linked to emotions and are highly evocative of past experiences: each section starts with the name a perfume or cologne, the elements of the scent, and what the scent connotes. For Adelle these scents bring back memories of sneaking out with her sweet grandfather to escape from her domineering and critical Jehovah’s Witness grandmother for an afternoon during dreaded summer visits; Sundays spent in various ballrooms accompanying her mother on her quest to win the British Hairdressing Championship; a few almost disastrous weeks in NYC by herself; the cast of quirky and creative friends, lovers, roommates, bosses and co-workers she in her reckless twenties; pointless jobs, fun jobs, weird jobs; late night shifts; freezing flats; poverty; and finally reconciliations, college, a PhD, and the handsome writer from Durham.

Fans of Hilary Mantel, Jeannette Winterson, and Douglas Stewart will love this. It is funny, sad, heartbreaking and heartwarming, and brutally honest.

This story will resonate with anyone who has yearned for an authentic and creative life and anyone who has struggled to find their place.

I loved this book and cannot recommend it strongly enough.


]]> 4.84 Base Notes: The Scents of a Life
author: Adelle Stripe
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.84
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/09
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: memoir-bio-autobiography, memory, grief, mothers-daughters, mother, livesofwomen, family, women-authors, england-northern, england, love-eros, love-family, signed-copies, first-edition-first-print, indie-press
review:
I am an Adelle Stripe fan, I love her free verse poetry and her memoir/essays, and I was surprised at how much I enjoyed Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile, since I wasn’t familiar with Andrea Dunbar before I read her biography, so I was eager to read this memoir. I knew it would be brilliant, but it exceeded my expectations.

This is an intimate and deeply moving coming of age story about a sensitive, bright, observant girl born in 1976 in a working class neighborhood in northern England, a portrait of a mother daughter relationship with all the small hurts and acts of absolute loyalty and love that will be familiar to most women, and one woman’s struggle to live a creative life.

Adelle tells her own story with courageous candor: a strident, fundamentalist grandmother, a bigger-than-life mother who loved her family, but chafed at the expectations of motherhood, a caring father who spent maybe too much time on farm work, and Adele’s own often misguided, sometimes frighteningly misguided, search for her place in the world.

Olfactory memory is closely linked to emotions and are highly evocative of past experiences: each section starts with the name a perfume or cologne, the elements of the scent, and what the scent connotes. For Adelle these scents bring back memories of sneaking out with her sweet grandfather to escape from her domineering and critical Jehovah’s Witness grandmother for an afternoon during dreaded summer visits; Sundays spent in various ballrooms accompanying her mother on her quest to win the British Hairdressing Championship; a few almost disastrous weeks in NYC by herself; the cast of quirky and creative friends, lovers, roommates, bosses and co-workers she in her reckless twenties; pointless jobs, fun jobs, weird jobs; late night shifts; freezing flats; poverty; and finally reconciliations, college, a PhD, and the handsome writer from Durham.

Fans of Hilary Mantel, Jeannette Winterson, and Douglas Stewart will love this. It is funny, sad, heartbreaking and heartwarming, and brutally honest.

This story will resonate with anyone who has yearned for an authentic and creative life and anyone who has struggled to find their place.

I loved this book and cannot recommend it strongly enough.



]]> House of Names 30753709 * Named a Best Book of 2017 by NPR, The Guardian , The Boston Globe , St. Louis Dispatch

From the thrilling imagination of bestselling, award-winning Colm Tóibín comes a retelling of the story of Clytemnestra—spectacularly audacious, violent, vengeful, lustful, and instantly compelling—and her children.

“I have been acquainted with the smell of death.� So begins Clytemnestra’s tale of her own life in ancient Mycenae, the legendary Greek city from which her husband King Agamemnon left when he set sail with his army for Troy. Clytemnestra rules Mycenae now, along with her new lover Aegisthus, and together they plot the bloody murder of Agamemnon on the day of his return after nine years at war.

Judged, despised, cursed by gods she has long since lost faith in, Clytemnestra reveals the tragic saga that led to these bloody how her husband deceived her eldest daughter Iphigeneia with a promise of marriage to Achilles, only to sacrifice her because that is what he was told would make the winds blow in his favor and take him to Troy; how she seduced and collaborated with the prisoner Aegisthus, who shared her bed in the dark and could kill; how Agamemnon came back with a lover himself; and how Clytemnestra finally achieved her vengeance for his stunning betrayal—his quest for victory, greater than his love for his child.

In House of Names , Colm Tóibín brings a modern sensibility and language to an ancient classic, and gives this extraordinary character new life, so that we not only believe Clytemnestra’s thirst for revenge, but applaud it. He brilliantly inhabits the mind of one of Greek myth’s most powerful villains to reveal the love, lust, and pain she feels. Told in fours parts, this is a fiercely dramatic portrait of a murderess, who will herself be murdered by her own son, Orestes. It is Orestes� story, his capture by the forces of his mother’s lover Aegisthus, his escape and his exile. And it is the story of the vengeful Electra, who watches over her mother and Aegisthus with cold anger and slow calculation, until, on the return of her brother, she has the fates of both of them in her hands.]]> 278 Colm Tóibín 1501140213 WndyJW 5 3.48 2017 House of Names
author: Colm Tóibín
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2017/05/20
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: greek-mythology, greek-retelling
review:
I love Colm Toibin for his storytelling and fully formed, knowable characters. I enjoyed this book and now know the story of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Iphiginia, Electra, and Orestes, but the characters in this book were not well developed and the story wasn't outstanding. I'm sure Aeschylus told it better. Right, Dad?
]]> Two-Step Devil 197239494
It's 2014 in Lookout Mountain, Alabama, where the Prophet—a 70-year-old man who paints his visions—lives off the grid in a cabin near the Georgia border. While scrounging for materials at the local dump, the Prophet sees a car pull up to an abandoned gas station. In the back seat is a teenage girl with zip ties on her wrists, a girl he realizes he must rescue from her current life. Her name is Michael and the Prophet feels certain that she is his Big Fish, a messenger sent by God to take his apocalyptic warnings to the White House. Michael finds herself in the Prophet’s remote, art-filled cabin, and as their uncertain dynamic evolves into tender friendship, she is offered a surprising opportunity to escape her past—and perhaps change her future.

Moving through the worlds of the Prophet, the girl, and a beguiling devil figure who dances in the corner of their lives, Two-Step Devil is a propulsive, philosophical examination of fate and faith that dares to ask what salvation, if any, can be found in our modern world.]]> 269 Jamie Quatro 0802163130 WndyJW 2 After chancing upon a teenage girl in the company of a grown man who punches her, Prophet is convinced this girl, named Michael, has been sent for him to rescue so she can take a message to the US president about impending wars, and rescue her he does.

I was a bit disappointed in this book. Prophet is a fantastic character, but Michael is not a well developed character, Two-Step has only a few lines, and the questions posed about good and evil aren't original. I don't know if it's even an examination of faith since the only person with faith is clearly delusional, unless the author's message is that anyone with faith is delusional and I don't think that's her message.
Still, it's a good story about how kindness can impact a troubled person and meeting someone where they are is a generous, loving act.
]]> 3.76 2024 Two-Step Devil
author: Jamie Quatro
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2024/10/23
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: southern-lit, gothic-southern, american-life, religion, women-authors, mystery, trauma, livesofwomen
review:
I had high hopes for this story of an old man, Prophet, who lives alone in a backwoods cabin in the mountains on the border of Alabama and Georgia. Prophet is a fascinating character, a fire and brimstone Pentecostal believer who sees visions which he then paints on the walls of his cabin, a cabin hevshares with Two-Step, a skinny devil in a cowboy hat and boots.
After chancing upon a teenage girl in the company of a grown man who punches her, Prophet is convinced this girl, named Michael, has been sent for him to rescue so she can take a message to the US president about impending wars, and rescue her he does.

I was a bit disappointed in this book. Prophet is a fantastic character, but Michael is not a well developed character, Two-Step has only a few lines, and the questions posed about good and evil aren't original. I don't know if it's even an examination of faith since the only person with faith is clearly delusional, unless the author's message is that anyone with faith is delusional and I don't think that's her message.
Still, it's a good story about how kindness can impact a troubled person and meeting someone where they are is a generous, loving act.

]]> <![CDATA[Time Regained (In Search of Lost Time, #7)]]> 13299723 Time Regained, the final volume of In Search of Lost Time, begins in the bleak and uncertain years of World War I. Years later, after the war’s end, Proust’s narrator returns to Paris and reflects on time, reality, jealousy, artistic creation, and the raw material of literature—his past life. This Modern Library edition also includes the indispensable Guide to Proust, compiled by Terence Kilmartin and revised by Joanna Kilmartin.

For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin’s acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of Á la recherché du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989).]]> 784 Marcel Proust 0375753125 WndyJW 0 4.58 1927 Time Regained (In Search of Lost Time, #7)
author: Marcel Proust
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.58
book published: 1927
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: to-read, belle-epoque, classics, france-french-lit, memory, paris, translated
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Captive & The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Vol. V (Modern Library Classics) (v. 5) by Marcel Proust(2006-10-26)]]> 137554039 0 Marcel Proust WndyJW 0 4.00 1923 The Captive & The Fugitive: In Search of Lost Time, Vol. V (Modern Library Classics) (v. 5) by Marcel Proust(2006-10-26)
author: Marcel Proust
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1923
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: to-read, belle-epoque, classics, france-french-lit, memory, paris, translated
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Sodom and Gomorrah (In Search of Lost Time, #4)]]> 35750 In Search of Lost Time. While watching the pollination of the Duchess de Guermantes’s orchid, the narrator secretly observes a sexual encounter between two men. “Flower and plant have no conscious will,� Samuel Beckett wrote of Proust’s representation of sexuality. “They are shameless, exposing their genitals. And so in a sense are Proust’s men and women . . . shameless. There is no question of right and wrong.�

For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin’s acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of Á la recherché du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989).]]> 784 Marcel Proust 0375753109 WndyJW 0 4.35 1922 Sodom and Gomorrah (In Search of Lost Time, #4)
author: Marcel Proust
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1922
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: to-read, classics, belle-epoque, paris, france-french-lit, memory, translated
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Guermantes Way (In Search of Lost Time, #3)]]> 18795 In Search of Lost Time, refers to the path that leads to the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes's chateau near Combray. It also represents the narrator's passage into the rarefied "social kaleidoscope" of the Guermantes's Paris salon, an important intellectual playground for Parisian society, where he becomes a party to the wit and manners of the Guermantes's drawing room. Here he encounters nobles, officers, socialites, and assorted consorts, including Robert de Saint Loup and his prostitute mistress Rachel, the Baron de Charlus, and the Prince de Borodino.

For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin's acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of A la recherche du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade in 1989).]]> 819 Marcel Proust 0375752331 WndyJW 0 4.29 1920 The Guermantes Way (In Search of Lost Time, #3)
author: Marcel Proust
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1920
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: to-read, belle-epoque, france-french-lit, paris, classics, translated, memory
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Within a Budding Grove (In Search of Lost Time, #2)]]> 9484 Within a Budding Grove was awarded the Prix Goncourt, bringing the author immediate fame. In this second volume of In Search of Lost Time, the narrator turns from the childhood reminiscences of Swann’s Way to memories of his adolescence. Having gradually become indifferent to Swann’s daughter Gilberte, the narrator visits the seaside resort of Balbec with his grandmother and meets a new object of attention—Albertine, “a girl with brilliant, laughing eyes and plump, matt cheeks.�

For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin’s acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of Á la recherché du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989).]]> 749 Marcel Proust 0375752196 WndyJW 0 4.39 1919 Within a Budding Grove (In Search of Lost Time, #2)
author: Marcel Proust
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.39
book published: 1919
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: to-read, france-french-lit, paris, belle-epoque, classics, translated, memory
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Swann’s Way (In Search of Lost Time, #1)]]> 133539
He claims that people are defined by the objects that surround them and must piece together their identities bit by bit each time they wake up. The young Marcel is so nervous about sleeping alone that he looks forward to his mother's goodnight kisses, but also dreads them as a sign of an impending sleepless night. One night, when Charles Swann, a friend of his grandparents, is visiting, his mother cannot come kiss him goodnight. He stays up until Swann leaves and looks so sad and pitiful that even his disciplinarian father encourages "Mamma" to spend the night in Marcel's room.]]> 615 Marcel Proust 0375751548 WndyJW 4 4.28 1913 Swann’s Way (In Search of Lost Time, #1)
author: Marcel Proust
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1913
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/17
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: coming-of-age-boy, belle-epoque, paris, france-french-lit, translated, classics, memory, love-eros, love-family
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Greatest Goan Stories Ever Told]]> 63242668
The collected stories cover subjects as wide, diverse, and absorbing as the Goan people� from iron ore mining in Epitácio Pais’s ‘A Story about Mines� and Pundalik Naik’s ‘The Palm Tree� and the agrarian village lifestyle in Mahableshwar Sail’s ‘The Yoke� and Prakash S. Parienkar’s ‘The Sacrifice�, to diasporic experiences in Selma Carvalho’s ‘Bed Blocker No. 10� and Roanna Gonsalves’s ‘Curry Muncher�, and patriarchal family structures in Nayana Adarkar’s ‘The Protector�. Goa threads these stories together—its varied characters from various communities and religions, its colourful people, its Portuguese colonial history, its picturesque landscape, and the general aura surrounding the place.

Selected and edited by Manohar Shetty, the twenty-seven stories in this anthology are proof that there’s more to Goa than hats and sunglasses, printed shirts and shorts, cameras, seafood, and holidaymakers frolicking on its beaches.]]> 304 Manohar Shetty WndyJW 0 3.58 The Greatest Goan Stories Ever Told
author: Manohar Shetty
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.58
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2024/12/12
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: to-read, india-southern, india-indian-lit, indie-press, aleph-series, aleph, short-story-collections, translated
review:

]]> The Wood at Midwinter 206101583 'A church is a sort of wood. A wood is a sort of church. They're the same thing really.'

Nineteen-year-old Merowdis Scott is an unusual girl. She can talk to animals and trees—and she is only ever happy when she is walking in the woods.

One snowy afternoon, out with her dogs and Apple the pig, Merowdis encounters a blackbird and a fox. As darkness falls, a strange figure enters in their midst—and the path of her life is changed forever.

From the internationally bestselling and prize-winning author of Piranesi and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, an enchanting, beautifully illustrated short story set in the Strange universe. Featuring an introduction by Susanna Clarke and gorgeous illustrations from Victoria Sawdon truly worthy of the magic of this story, this is a mesmerising, must-have addition to any fantasy reader's bookshelf.]]> 64 Susanna Clarke 1639734481 WndyJW 3 3.47 2024 The Wood at Midwinter
author: Susanna Clarke
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: fantasy, beautiful-copy, magic-realism, christmas, novella, short-story-collections, women-authors, natural-world, magic, lives-of-children, livesofwomen
review:

]]> Remarkably Bright Creatures 58733693 Remarkably Bright Creatures, an exploration of friendship, reckoning, and hope, tracing a widow's unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus.

After Tova Sullivan's husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she's been doing since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat in Puget Sound over thirty years ago.

Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but wouldn't dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors--until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova.

Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova's son disappeared. And now Marcellus must use every trick his old invertebrate body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it's too late.

Shelby Van Pelt's debut novel is a gentle reminder that sometimes taking a hard look at the past can help uncover a future that once felt impossible.]]> 368 Shelby Van Pelt 0063204150 WndyJW 2 4.35 2022 Remarkably Bright Creatures
author: Shelby Van Pelt
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2025/03/02
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: animal, magic-realism, mystery, women-authors, grief
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to In Search of Lost Time]]> 34445330 A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust is one of the most profoundly visual works in Western literature. Not only are there frequent references to specific works of art, but certain characters are also evoked by comparison to particular paintings. Bloch’s appearance as a boy is likened to the portrait of Mehmet II by Gentile Bellini; Odette de Crécy strikes Swann by her resemblance to a figure in a Botticelli fresco. Even the lesser figure of a certain Mme. Blattin becomes the subject of Proustian mischief by being described as “exactly the portrait of Savonarola by Fra Bartolomeo.� Eric Karpeles has identified and located the many paintings to which Proust makes reference and sets them alongside the relevant text from the novel; in other cases, where only a painter’s name is mentioned to indicate a certain style or appearance, Karpeles has chosen a representative work to illustrate the impression that Proust sought to evoke.


With some 200 paintings beautifully reproduced in full color and texts drawn from the Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright translation, as well as concise commentaries on the evolving narrative, this book is an essential addition to the libraries of Proustians everywhere. The book also includes an authoritative introduction and a comprehensive index of artists and paintings mentioned in the novel.]]> 352 Eric Karpeles 0500293422 WndyJW 0 4.49 2008 Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to In Search of Lost Time
author: Eric Karpeles
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.49
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: art-music, proust, nonfiction, classics, france-french-lit, to-read
review:

]]> Sun City 205015171 The Summer Book and creator of the Moomins, an off-beat novel about a retirement community in sunny Florida.

In The Summer Book and The True Deceiver, as in her many short stories, Tove Jansson was drawn again and again to the everyday life of the aged. Not as a group apart but as full-blooded people with as many jealousies, urges, and joys as any other group. It’s no wonder that in her travels through America in the 1970s she became fascinated with what was then a particularly American institution, the retirement home, where older people live in their particular tightly knit worlds.

In Sun City, Jansson depicts these worlds in a group portrait of residents and employees at the Berkeley Arms in St. Petersburg, Florida. As the narrative moves from character to character, so the characters move through an America riven by cultural divides, facing the death of its dream. The Berkeley Arms’s newest resident finds a place among the rocking chairs and endless chatter on the veranda, while other residents long for past glories, mourning their losses and killing time. Meanwhile one of their attendants, Bounty Joe, is eagerly awaiting a letter, or even just a postcard, alerting him to the imminent return of Jesus Christ. “Nobody’s normal anymore,� as the bartender says, “not the old geezers and not the newborn kids.”]]> 224 Tove Jansson 1681378655 WndyJW 0 3.73 1974 Sun City
author: Tove Jansson
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.73
book published: 1974
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: to-read, indie-press, nyrb, women-authors, women-in-translation, women-of-a-certain-age, aging, finland-finnish-lit, translated, scandinavian-nordic, american-life, contemplating-mortality
review:

]]> On the Greenwich Line 222372869
Told with a wry cynicism and deadpan wit, On the Greenwich Line traces the absurdities of racism, austerity, and bureaucracy in contemporary England. This is a story about systemic failure and human courage, and about London and its many lost souls.]]> 176 شادي لويس 1908670959 WndyJW 0 4.09 2019 On the Greenwich Line
author: شادي لويس
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/22
shelves: to-read, immigration-emigration, indie-press, peirene-press, translated, race-issues, england, syria-syrian-lit, london
review:

]]> The Peregrine 1071726
It is this extraordinary metamorphosis, magical and terrifying, that these beautifully written pages record.]]> 191 J.A. Baker 1590171330 WndyJW 0 4.15 1967 The Peregrine
author: J.A. Baker
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1967
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves: to-read, nonfiction, memoir-bio-autobiography, animal, natural-world, classics, indie-press, nyrb
review:

]]> Stone Yard Devotional 201157167
She does not believe in God, doesn't know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive life almost by accident. As she gradually adjusts to the rhythms of monastic life, she ruminates on her childhood in the nearby town. She finds herself turning again and again to thoughts of her mother, whose early death she can't forget.

Disquiet interrupts this secluded life with three visitations. First comes a terrible mouse plague, each day signalling a new battle against the rising infestation.

Second is the return of the skeletal remains of a sister who left the community decades before to minister to deprived women in Thailand - then disappeared, presumed murdered.

Finally, a troubling visitor to the monastery pulls the narrator further back into her past.

With each of these disturbing arrivals, the woman faces some deep questions. Can a person be truly good? What is forgiveness? Is loss of hope a moral failure? And can the business of grief ever really be finished?

A meditative and deeply moving novel from the Stella Prize-winning author of The Natural Way of Things and The Weekend.]]> Charlotte Wood WndyJW 4 3.77 2023 Stone Yard Devotional
author: Charlotte Wood
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/21
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves: audio-book, aud, australia-new-zealand-tasmania, loneliness, grief, ruminative, rural-life, women-authors, women-of-a-certain-age, women, booker, memory
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation]]> 5206073 Beowulf, Sir Gawain is the strange tale of a green knight on a green horse, who rudely interrupts King Arthur's Round Table festivities one Yuletide, challenging the knights to a wager. Simon Armitrage, one of Britain's leading poets, has produced an inventive and groundbreaking translation that "[helps] liberate Gawain from academia" (Sunday Telegraph).]]> 208 Simon Armitage 0393334155 WndyJW 4
This is my first time reading the poem and I plan on reading Tolkien’s and Ted Hughes� translations. I’m guessing I might like the Tolkien version better, but for a first time reader this was probably a good start because of the ease of the language.

I can’t yet say if I recommend this version as I haven’t another transaction to which I can compare it.]]> 4.05 1375 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A New Verse Translation
author: Simon Armitage
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1375
rating: 4
read at: 2024/06/26
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: classics, medieval, england, translated, poetry, myths-mythology, arthurian
review:
I enjoyed this narrative poem of the test of good Sir Gawain. This translation by Simon Armitage is easy to read and the original old English in which the poem was written is on the left side page, which is an added treat.

This is my first time reading the poem and I plan on reading Tolkien’s and Ted Hughes� translations. I’m guessing I might like the Tolkien version better, but for a first time reader this was probably a good start because of the ease of the language.

I can’t yet say if I recommend this version as I haven’t another transaction to which I can compare it.
]]> <![CDATA[Waterblack (Cities of the Weft, #3)]]> 211004116 The monumental conclusion to Alex Pheby's Cities of the Weft trilogy.

One thousand million infants are dead, and Nathan Treeves is back. He’s become the Master of Waterblack, the City of the Dead.

And Sharli, once a sacrifice, then an assassin, is now a trained God-Killer. She has killed many—but failed in killing Nathan Treeves years ago.

Soon she, and the Women’s Vanguard, will have another chance, even as The Master, The Mistress and the Atheistic Crusade hurtle toward their final confrontation.

The world of Mordew returns in the epic conclusion to the Cities of the Weft trilogy. Welcome to Waterblack.]]> 640 Alex Pheby 1250817293 WndyJW 0 4.02 Waterblack (Cities of the Weft, #3)
author: Alex Pheby
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.02
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: to-read, fantasy, indie-press, galley-beggar-press, horror
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Radio Treason: The Trials of Lord Haw-Haw, the British Voice of Nazi Germany]]> 220237601 The gripping courtroom drama of a Brooklyn-born Englishman who became the voice of Nazi Germany, by “one of the most brilliant and erudite journalists of the century� (The New York Times).


In 1945, The New Yorker commissioned star reporter Rebecca West to cover the London trial of William Joyce, who stood accused by the British government of aiding the Third Reich. Captured by British forces in Germany, Joyce was alleged to have hosted a radio program, Germany Calling, devoted to Nazi propaganda and calls for a British surrender.


The legal case against Joyce (known as “Lord Haw-Haw� for his supposedly posh accent) proved to be tenuous and full of uncertainties. Yet each new piece of evidence added to West’s timeless portrait of a social reject who turned to the far right, who rose through the ranks without ever being liked, and who sought validation through a set of shared hatreds—of elites, of communists, and especially of Jews.


As a work of psychological suspense, Rebecca West’s Radio Treason anticipates Truman Capote, Janet Malcolm, and Joan Didion at their best. As a study in political extremism, as Katie Roiphe writes in her foreword, “It is as if Lord Haw-Haw has been transported from her time into ours.”]]> 192 Rebecca West 1946022802 WndyJW 0 3.57 Radio Treason: The Trials of Lord Haw-Haw, the British Voice of Nazi Germany
author: Rebecca West
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.57
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: to-read, nonfiction, indie-press, mcnally-editions, women-authors, war-post-war, nazis, england, germany-german-lit, suspense-tension, psycho-thriller, journalism
review:

]]> My Stupid Intentions 119023489
Even as Archy’s life is transformed by his discovery of the written word and his grappling with the entity called God, he longs for an existence guided by instinct. He longs to be “a real animal.� But there is no way of unlearning what he has learned. Caught between his natural urges and his acquired knowledge, he seeks the meaning of his story by writing it.

This debut novel by the young Italian author Bernardo Zannoni is set in a primordial landscape where animals talk and tend their hearths but are never free from the struggle for survival. A picaresque fable, it has drawn comparisons to Pinocchio and Watership Down, The Wind in the Willows and The Stranger.]]> 224 Bernardo Zannoni 1681377284 WndyJW 0 4.00 2021 My Stupid Intentions
author: Bernardo Zannoni
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/08
shelves: to-read, indie-press, nyrb, italy-italian-lit, animal, fantasy, fable, loneliness
review:

]]> The Suicides 200208412 A reporter embarks on an investigation of a string of unconnected suicides—which then leads into an exploration of the phenomenon of suicide itself—in this elegant existential novel, the third and final volume of Antonio Di Benedetto’s Trilogy of Expectation.

A reporter’s boss assigns him to cover three unconnected suicides. The news agency wants to syndicate the story to color magazines, “For the blood, so the red is visible.� All he’s given to go on are photos of the faces of the dead.

As he starts to investigate, other suicides happen. An archivist colleague, a woman, supplies factoids from history, anthropology, biology, and philosophy: suicide by men, women, families, animals; thoughts on suicide from Diogenes, the Tosafists, Hume, Schopenhauer, Durkheim, Mead.

A photographer assigned to work with him—also a woman—snaps pictures of the bodies and the family members of the dead, who speak of subterfuge, hypochondria, madness, a secret society, a body exhumed to be mutilated. During one of the interviews, in a widow’s tiny apartment, a huge dog hurls himself against a plate glass window again and again, lunging at the birds beyond.

The Suicides is the third volume of Antonio Di Benedetto’s Trilogy of Expectation, called “one of the culminating moments of twentieth-century narrative fiction in Spanish� by Juan José Saer. Following Zama (set during the final decade of the 18th century) and The Silentiary (set during the 1950s), the trilogy’s final work takes place in a provincial city at the end of the 1960s, which is also when it was written and published, as Argentina plummeted towards the Dirty War. Its protagonist, once again, is a man in his early thirties, stymied and in search of an elsewhere.]]> 176 Antonio di Benedetto 1681378868 WndyJW 0 3.64 1969 The Suicides
author: Antonio di Benedetto
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1969
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/08
shelves: to-read, classics, indie-press, nyrb, translated, argentinia, latin-america, contemplating-mortality, philosophical, spain-spanish-lit
review:

]]> My Death 125537549
The narrator of Lisa Tuttle’s uncanny novella is a recent widow, a writer adrift. Not only has she lost her husband, but her muse seems to have deserted her altogether. Her agent summons her to Edinburgh to discuss her next book. What will she tell him? At once the answer comes to she will write the biography of Helen Ralston, best known, if at all, as the subject of W.E. Logan’s much-reproduced painting Circe , and the inspiration for his classic children’s book.

But Ralston was a novelist and artist in her own right, though her writing is no longer in print and her most storied painting too shocking, too powerful—malevolent even—to be shown in public. Over the months that follow, Ralston proves a reluctantly cooperative subject, even as her biographer uncovers eerie resonances between the older woman’s life and her own. Whose biography is she writing, really?]]> 144 Lisa Tuttle WndyJW 0 4.14 2004 My Death
author: Lisa Tuttle
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/08
shelves: to-read, indie-press, nyrb, classics, horror, women-authors, about-books-reading-writing, folk-fairy-tales
review:

]]> Zama 18490870 Zama is now universally recognized as one of the masterpieces of modern Argentinean and Spanish-language literature.

Written in a style that is both precise and sumptuous, Zama takes place in the last decade of the eighteenth century and describes the solitary, suspended existence of Don Diego de Zama, a highly placed servant of the Spanish crown who has been posted to Asunción, in remote Paraguay. Eaten up by pride, lust, petty grudges, and paranoid fantasies, Don Diego does as little as he possibly can while plotting an eventual transfer to Beunos Aires, where everything about his hopeless existence will, he is confident, be miraculously transformed and made good.

Don Diego's slow, nightmarish slide into the abyss is not just a tale of one man's perdition but an exploration of existential, and very American, loneliness. Zama's stark, dreamlike prose and spare imagery make every word appear to emerge from an ocean of things left unsaid.]]> 201 Antonio di Benedetto 1590177177 WndyJW 0 3.91 1956 Zama
author: Antonio di Benedetto
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1956
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/08
shelves: to-read, indie-press, nyrb, spain-spanish-lit, btba-best-translated-fiction, translated, latin-america, classics, character-driven, historical-fiction
review:

]]> The Rupture Files 197690610 Supernatural stories of life in the fissures of disaster.

Across multiple worlds in upheaval, a curious cast of Black queer characters must choose between what they already know themselves to be and what they might yet become in the cataclysm. A shapeshifter learns to embrace their body as it changes through a lunar cycle. A stranger’s visit disturbs three sisters sheltering from monsters that stalk the land. An archivist hears an irresistible call to the rising ocean as she uncovers a surprising history. A mysterious fire sparks whispers of revolution in the mind of a vampire’s captive consort.

At once tender and audacious, Nathan Alexander Moore’s debut collection tells the stories of extraordinary creatures making impossible but human decisions. Traversing apocalypses both big and small, these captivating tales vibrate with the tensions between loss and growth; self and community; precarity and possibility.]]> 152 Nathan Alexander Moore 1914221303 WndyJW 0 3.47 2024 The Rupture Files
author: Nathan Alexander Moore
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/07
shelves: to-read, rofc-book-club, short-story-collections, african-american, dystopian, speculative-scifi, indie-press
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Greatest Indian Stories Ever Told]]> 183468421 524 Arunava Sinha 9393852871 WndyJW 0 4.67 The Greatest Indian Stories Ever Told
author: Arunava Sinha
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.67
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/03
shelves: to-read, short-story-collections, india-indian-lit, translated, aleph, aleph-series
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Greatest Hindi Stories Ever Told]]> 56018528
In Premchand’s ‘The Thakur’s Well�, ‘low-caste� Gangi struggles to find drinking water for her ill husband; in ‘The Times Have Changed� by Krishna Sobti, the matriarch Shahni bids a heart-breaking farewell to her village during Partition; Krishna Baldev Vaid’s ‘Escape� is a telling story about women’s yearning for freedom; Yashpal’s ‘Phoolo’s Kurta� is a sharp commentary on child marriage and notions of female modesty; in Bhisham Sahni’s ‘A Feast for the Boss� and Usha Priyamvada’s ‘The Homecoming�, ageing parents find themselves tragically out of sync with their family; Amarkant’s ‘City of Death� looks at the fragile thread that holds together communal peace; Phanishwarnath Renu’s ‘The Third Vow� features the lovable bullock-cart driver Hiraman; Bhagwaticharan Varma’s ‘Atonement� and Harishankar Parsai’s ‘The Soul of Bholaram� are scathing satires; and ‘Tirich� by contemporary writer Uday Prakash is a surreal tale—these and other stories in the collection are compelling, evocative, and showcase an unforgettable range of brilliant styles, forms, and themes.]]> 314 Poonam Saxena WndyJW 0 3.84 The Greatest Hindi Stories Ever Told
author: Poonam Saxena
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.84
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rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/03
shelves: to-read, india-indian-lit, aleph-series, aleph, translated, short-story-collections, india-northern
review:

]]> Paradise 1399975 Librarian's note: An alternate cover edition can be found here

Toni Morrison's Paradise takes place in the tiny farming community of Ruby, Oklahoma, which its residents proudly proclaim "the one all-black town worth the pain." Settled by nine African American clans during the 1940s, the town represents a small miracle of self-reliance and community spirit. Readers might be forgiven, in fact, for assuming that Morrison's title refers to Ruby itself, which even during the 1970s retains an atmosphere of neighborliness and small-town virtue. Yet Paradises are not so easily gained. As we soon discover, Ruby is fissured by ancestral feuds and financial squabbles, not to mention the political ferment of the era, which has managed to pierce the town's pious isolation. In the view of its leading citizens, these troubles call for a scapegoat. And one readily exists: the Convent, an abandoned mansion not far from town--or, more precisely, the four women who occupy it, and whose unattached and unconventional status makes them the perfect targets for patriarchal ire. ("Before those heifers came to town," the men complain, "this was a peaceable kingdom.") One July morning, then, an armed posse sets out from Ruby for a round of ethical cleansing.

Paradise actually begins with the arrival of these vigilantes, only to launch into an intricate series of flashbacks and interlaced stories. The cast is large--indeed, it seems as though we must have met all 360 members of Ruby's populace--and Morrison knows how to imprint even the minor players on our brains. Even more amazing, though, are the full-length portraits she draws of the four Convent dwellers and their executioners: rich, rounded, and almost painful in their intimacy. This richness--of language and, ultimately, of human understanding--combats the aura of saintliness that can occasionally mar Morrison's fiction. It also makes for a spectacular piece of storytelling, in which such biblical concepts as redemption and divine love are no postmodern playthings but matters of life and (in the very first sentence, alas) death.

]]> 575 Toni Morrison 0679433740 WndyJW 0 3.61 1997 Paradise
author: Toni Morrison
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.61
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: to-read, african-american, nobel-winner, womens-orange-bailey-prize, women-authors, women, race-issues, american-life, historical-fiction
review:

]]> Marble 55847773
Amalie Smith ignites everyday encounters into sites of revelation and metamorphosis. Sensuous and electric, yet admirably forensic in its approach to mineral life, Marble is a galvanizing novel about the materials life is made of, about korai and sponge diving, about looking and looking again, written in a spare and pellucid style.]]> 160 Amalie Smith 1999992873 WndyJW 0 3.83 2014 Marble
author: Amalie Smith
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/27
shelves: to-read, denmark, indie-press, lolli-editions, women-authors, women-in-translation, experimental, history
review:

]]> Monsieur Proust 379255 In Search of Lost Time. She could imitate his voice to perfection, and Proust himself said to her, "You know everything about me." Her reminiscences of her employer present an intimate picture of the daily life of a great writer, who was also a deeply peculiar man, while Madame Albaret herself proves to be a shrewd and engaging companion.]]> 456 Céleste Albaret 1590170598 WndyJW 0 3.97 1973 Monsieur Proust
author: Céleste Albaret
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1973
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/24
shelves: to-read, classics, nyrb, biography, france-french-lit, memoir-bio-autobiography, translated, women-authors, proust, nonfiction
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Greatest Malayalam Stories Ever Told]]> 200737356 464 A.J. Thomas 9390652766 WndyJW 0 3.00 The Greatest Malayalam Stories Ever Told
author: A.J. Thomas
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.00
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/22
shelves: to-read, translated, short-story-collections, india-indian-lit, india-eastern, aleph, aleph-series
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Greatest Marathi Stories Ever Told]]> 122752595 In ‘Divine Intervention�, Chintaman Vinayak Joshi uses a touch of magic to transform the pain of the common man; ‘King Maruti� by Vyankatesh Madgulkar and ‘Hari’s Laughter� by Jayant Pawar underline the cruelty and carelessness of humans towards other life forms; Anna Bhau Sathe’s ‘Gold From the Graves� tells the story of a desperate migrant worker who is forced to rob graves to make ends meet; Bhaskar Chandanshiv’s ‘Red Muck� depicts the struggles of rural poverty; Yogiraj Waghmare takes an interesting look at superstitions in ‘Crows�; ‘Relationships� by Asha Bage and ‘And then it Poured� by Gauri Deshpande are telling and poignant explorations of human relationships; and Vilas Sarang explores complex truths about nations and borders in ‘Kalluri’s Radio�.
The stories in this collection are melancholic, sarcastic, humorous, elegant, and experimental—together, they showcase the range, variety, and vibrancy of the Marathi short story and famed Marathi literary tradition.]]> 312 Ashutosh Potdar 9393852065 WndyJW 0 3.64 The Greatest Marathi Stories Ever Told
author: Ashutosh Potdar
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.64
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/22
shelves: to-read, aleph, aleph-series, translated, india-indian-lit, india-western, short-story-collections
review:

]]> Aerth 222051713 180 Deborah Tomkins 1739570782 WndyJW 0 4.04 Aerth
author: Deborah Tomkins
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.04
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/22
shelves: to-read, indie-press, weatherglass-books, science-fiction, women-authors, climate-crisis, dystopian, modern-life, novella
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Rock Crystal (Pushkin Collection)]]> 16057432 80 Adalbert Stifter 1908968311 WndyJW 0 3.81 1853 Rock Crystal (Pushkin Collection)
author: Adalbert Stifter
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1853
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/14
shelves: to-read, christmas, indie-press, germany-german-lit, translated, lives-of-children, short-story, adventure-quest, natural-world, suspense-tension, pushkin-press
review:

]]> The National Telepathy 205125812 161 Roque Larraquy 1913867900 WndyJW 4 3.41 2020 The National Telepathy
author: Roque Larraquy
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.41
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/12
date added: 2025/01/12
shelves: charco-press, indie-press, peru, class-differences, race-issues, latin-america, translated, south-america, aboriginal-people, argentinia, capitalism, indigenous-people, origin-myths
review:

]]> The Signalman 220325447
His misgivings turn out to be justified, for the signalman who lives there has a secret, a ghostly visitor who has twice warned him of impending disaster, and now appears again, foretelling a coming catastrophe that neither man can predict or understand.

This volume also contains Dickens' comic gem 'The Boy at Mugby', a rollicking satire on customer service which rings as true today as it did in the author's own time.]]> 42 Charles Dickens 1913111644 WndyJW 0 3.61 1866 The Signalman
author: Charles Dickens
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.61
book published: 1866
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/12
shelves: to-read, indie-press, galley-beggar-pocket-ghosts, galley-beggar-press, classics, ghosts-the-dead, england, short-story, gothic
review:

]]> The Old Nurse's Story 220331676 42 Elizabeth Gaskell 1913111636 WndyJW 0 3.83 1852 The Old Nurse's Story
author: Elizabeth Gaskell
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1852
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/12
shelves: to-read, ghosts-the-dead, women-authors, galley-beggar-press, indie-press, galley-beggar-pocket-ghosts, england, classics, short-story
review:

]]> Lexicon of Affinities 205125799
With entries as varied as ‘elbow�, ‘Ophelia�, ‘progress�, the painter Giorgio Morandi, ‘chess�, ‘Eulalia� (a friend of the author’s aunt), and ‘unicorn�, this lexicon constructs a voice and a worldview that takes the reader by the arm, inviting us to become a confidant in Vitale’s memories and what she calls ‘the juicy life of language�. Like every dictionary, Lexicon of Affinities seeks to impose order on chaos, even if in its joyful, whimsical profusion it lays bare the unstable character of the cosmos.]]> 233 Ida Vitale 1913867595 WndyJW 0 3.10 1994 Lexicon of Affinities
author: Ida Vitale
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.10
book published: 1994
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/12
shelves: to-read, indie-press, charco-press, books-and-writing, memoir-bio-autobiography, women-authors, women-in-translation, translated, latin-america
review:

]]> The Rest Is Silence 209457749
Presented in the form of a festschrift for the aging writer, this rollicking metafiction offers up a bouquet of highly unreliable reminiscences by Torres’s friends, relations, and servants (their accounts skewed by envy, ignorance, and sheer malice), along with a generous selection of the savant’s own comically botched attempts at “criticism.�

Monterroso’s narrative is a ludicrous dissection of literary self-conceit, a (Groucho) Marxian skewering of the Mexican literary landscape, and perhaps a wry self-portrait by an author who is profoundly sensible of just how high the stakes of the art of criticism really are—and, consequently, of just how far it has to fall.]]> 176 Augusto Monterroso 1681378825 WndyJW 0 3.49 1978 The Rest Is Silence
author: Augusto Monterroso
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.49
book published: 1978
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/11
shelves: to-read, nyrb, indie-press, latin-america, humor-dark-humor, classics, guatemala, satire, translated, books-and-writing
review:

]]> Lies and Sorcery 62001844
A heavily abridged English translation of Lies and Sorcery came out in the 1950s under the title of House of Lies. Jenny McPhee’s new translation is the first complete English rendering of the book that Georg Lukács considered the greatest of modern Italian novels.]]> 800 Elsa Morante 1681376849 WndyJW 0 4.03 1948 Lies and Sorcery
author: Elsa Morante
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1948
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/11
shelves: to-read, indie-press, nyrb, classics, women-authors, women-in-translation, italy-italian-lit, historical-fiction, family-epic, livesofwomen, lives-of-children, trauma-loss, character-driven
review:

]]> Death in Spring 6405181 Death in Spring is one of Mercè Rodoreda's most complex and beautifully constructed works. The novel tells the story of the bizarre and destructive customs of a nameless town—burying the dead in trees after filling their mouths with cement to prevent their soul from escaping, or sending a man to swim in the river that courses underneath the town to discover if they will be washed away by a flood—through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old boy who must come to terms with the rhyme and reason of this ritual violence, and with his wild, child-like, and teenaged stepmother, who becomes his playmate. It is through these rituals, and the developing relationships between the boy and the townspeople, that Rodoreda portrays a fully-articulated, though quite disturbing, society.

The horrific rituals, however, stand in stark contrast to the novel’s stunningly poetic language and lush descriptions. Written over a period of twenty years—after Rodoreda was forced into exile following the Spanish Civi War�Death in Spring is musical and rhythmic, and truly the work of a writer at the height of her powers.]]> 150 Mercè Rodoreda 1934824119 WndyJW 0 3.75 1986 Death in Spring
author: Mercè Rodoreda
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1986
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/08
shelves: to-read, btba-best-translated-fiction, indie-press, open-letter, horror, novella, women-authors, women-in-translation, translated, spain-spanish-lit
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Real Life of Sebastian Knight]]> 262118
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is a perversely magical literary detective story -- subtle, intricate, leading to a tantalizing climax -- about the mysterious life of a famous writer. Many people knew things about Sebastian Knight as a distinguished novelist, but probably fewer than a dozen knew of the two love affairs that so profoundly influenced his career, the second one in such a disastrous way. After Knight's death, his half brother sets out to penetrate the enigma of his life, starting with a few scanty clues in the novelist's private papers. His search proves to be a story as intriguing as any of his subject's own novels, as baffling, and, in the end, as uniquely rewarding.]]> 203 Vladimir Nabokov 0679727264 WndyJW 0 3.95 1941 The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
author: Vladimir Nabokov
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1941
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/07
shelves: to-read, classics, russia-russian-lit, france-french-lit, england, love-eros, mystery, character-driven
review:

]]> Some Trick: Thirteen Stories 36327047
For sheer unpredictable brilliance, Gogol may come to mind, but no author alive today takes a reader as far as Helen DeWitt into the funniest, most yonder dimensions of possibility. Her jumping-off points might be statistics, romance, the art world’s piranha tank, games of chance and games of skill, the travails of publishing, or success. “Look,� a character begins to explain, laying out some gambit reasonably enough, even if facing a world of boomeranging counterfactuals, situations spinning out to their utmost logical extremes, and Rube Goldberg-like moving parts, where things prove “more complicated than they had first appeared� and “at 3 a.m. the circumstances seem to attenuate.� In various ways, each tale carries DeWitt’s signature poker-face lament regarding the near-impossibility of the life of the mind when one is made to pay to have the time for it, in a world so sadly “taken up with all sorts of paraphernalia superfluous, not to say impedimental, to ratiocination.�

Machine generated contents note: Brutto
My Heart Belongs to Bertie
On the Town
Remember Me
Climbers
Improvisation Is the Heart of Music
Famous Last Words
The French Style of Mile Matsumoto
Stolen Luck
In Which Nick Buys a Harley
Trevor
Plantinga
Entourage]]> 224 Helen DeWitt 0811227820 WndyJW 0 3.40 2018 Some Trick: Thirteen Stories
author: Helen DeWitt
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/05
shelves: to-read, women-authors, short-story-collections, american-life, satire, humor-dark-humor, indie-press, new-directions
review:

]]> The Iliad 77265004 848 Homer 1324001801 WndyJW 0 4.09 -800 The Iliad
author: Homer
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.09
book published: -800
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: to-read, classics, ancient-classics, ancient-greece, war-post-war, translated, poetry
review:

]]> War and the Iliad 32781
Simone Weil’s The Iliad, or the Poem of Force is one of her most celebrated works—an inspired analysis of Homer’s epic that presents a nightmare vision of combat as a machine in which all humanity is lost. First published on the eve of war in 1939, the essay has often been read as a pacifist manifesto. Rachel Bespaloff was a French contemporary of Weil’s whose work similarly explored the complex relations between literature, religion, and philosophy. She composed her own distinctive discussion of the Iliad in the midst of World War II—calling it “her method of facing the war”—and, as Christopher Benfey argues in his introduction, the essay was very probably written in response to Weil. Bespaloff’s account of the Iliad brings out Homer’s novelistic approach to character and the existential drama of his characters� choices; it is marked, too, by a tragic awareness of how the Iliad speaks to times and places where there is no hope apart from war.

This edition brings together these two influential essays for the first time, accompanied by Benfey’s scholarly introduction and an afterword by the great Austrian novelist Hermann Broch.]]> 121 Simone Weil 1590171454 WndyJW 0 4.08 1940 War and the Iliad
author: Simone Weil
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1940
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: indie-press, nonfiction, essays, nyrb, history, war-post-war, greek-mythology, women-authors, to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing]]> 173956475
In addition to her celebrated career as a novelist, Hilary Mantel contributed for years to newspapers and journals, unspooling stories from her own life and illuminating the world as she found it. “Ink is a generative fluid,� she explains. “If you don’t mean your words to breed consequences, don’t write at all.� A Memoir of My Former Self collects the finest of this writing over four decades.

Her subjects are wide-ranging, sharply observed, and beautifully rendered. She discusses nationalism and her own sense of belonging; our dream life popping into our conscious life; the mythic legacy of Princess Diana; the many themes that feed into her novels—revolutionary France, psychics, Tudor England; and other novelists, from Jane Austen to V.S. Naipaul. She writes about her father and the man who replaced him; she writes fiercely and heartbreakingly about the battles with her health that she endured as a young woman, and the stifling years she found herself living in Saudi Arabia. Here, too, is her legendary essay “Royal Bodies,� on our endless fascination with the current royal family.

From her unusual childhood to her all-consuming interest in Thomas Cromwell that grew into the Wolf Hall trilogy, A Memoir of My Former Self reveals the shape of Hilary Mantel’s life in her own luminous words, through “messages from people I used to be.� Filled with her singular wit and wisdom, it is essential reading from one of our greatest writers.]]> 432 Hilary Mantel 1443472573 WndyJW 0 4.29 2023 A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing
author: Hilary Mantel
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: memoir-bio-autobiography, women-authors, women-of-a-certain-age, nonfiction, about-books-reading-writing, livesofwomen, to-read
review:

]]> The Pastor 56630615 A major work of contemporary fiction from Norway by a National Book Award-nominated author, translated by a PEN Translation Prize-winner.

Liv is fascinated by words and their edges and echoes. As a student of theology in Germany, she researches how the language of the Bible was wielded against the indigenous Sami people of northern Scandinavia during the 1800s. Liv excavates their past and her own, searching for meaning in a scene of Sami children gathering cloudberries and figs, from the memory of the magical weaver woman from an Astrid Lindgren fairytale she read as a child, or in how misstep and misunderstandings can lead to isolation and pain.

After the death of a dear friend - a puppeteer with bright eyes hiding her inner turbulence - Liv leaves Germany to become a pastor in a small town in the far north of Norway. Driving through the pine forests of Finland, Liv arrives at the village of her new parish. An introvert, Liv struggles with her many roles: counselor, leader, confidant, friend. Searching for the right words to describe home, she delivers a meandering sermon that sends many of her congregation to sleep (or to the door).

Soon she is drawn into the lives of the villagers: She must find a way to comfort the parents of an adolescent who takes her own life. With each new experience and confrontation, fresh questions about scripture and empathy and who she is arise. She wonders how language, in all its plasticity, became so stiff and unbending, and slowly, she bends it back toward her, building her own vocabulary of healing.]]> 280 Hanne Ørstavik 1953861083 WndyJW 0 3.59 2004 The Pastor
author: Hanne Ørstavik
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: to-read, archipelago-books, scandinavian-nordic, women-authors, women-in-translation, sami, religion, livesofwomen, memory, words-writing-language, indie-press, classics
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Golden Pot: and other tales of the uncanny]]> 125078408
Whether a surrealist exploration of the anxieties surrounding automation, or a mystery concerning a goldsmith, missing jewels, and a spate of murders, each tale in this collection reveals the complexities of human desire and fear.

Hoffman, whose most famous work is “The Nutcracker,� is often compared to Edgar Allan Poe. Hoffman’s massive influence qualifies him as the godfather of the German Romantic Movement which led to the horror genre.

The macabre, fantastical nature of his subject matter inspired a broad swath of culture, with two of the longer stories in this collection “The Sandman� and “The Automaton� influencing Philip K. Dick’s original inspiration for Blade Runner. The murder mystery “Mademoiselle de Scudéry� is perhaps one of the earliest prototypes of the detective genre story.

Music and madness flow through E.T.A. Hoffmann’s phantasmagoric stories. The ringing of crystal bells heralds the arrival of a beguiling snake, and a student’s descent into lunacy; a young man abandons his betrothed for a woman who plays the piano skillfully but seems worryingly wooden; a counselor’s daughter must choose between singing and her life.

Peter Wortsman’s masterful new translation allows Hoffmann’s distinct and influential style to shine, while breathing new life into stories that seem both familiar and uncanny.]]> 425 E.T.A. Hoffmann 1953861709 WndyJW 0 3.95 The Golden Pot: and other tales of the uncanny
author: E.T.A. Hoffmann
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.95
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: to-read, archipelago-books, fantasy, horror, short-story-collections, germany-german-lit, translated, folk-fairy-tales, dark, identity, classics
review:

]]> The Brush: Poems 204952203
The Brush is an incantatory, fearless exploration of collective trauma � and its horrific relevance in today’s Colombia, where mass killings continue. Told from the voices Pablo, Ester, and the Brush itself, Hernández-Pachón’s poem is an astounding response to a traumatic event in recent Colombian the massacre in the village of El Salado between February 16 and 21, 2000. Paramilitary forces tortured and killed sixty people, interspersing their devastating violence with music in the town square.

Pablo Rodríguez steps thirteen paces out into the night and buries a wooden box. Its a chain, a medallion, a few overexposed photographs, and finally, a deed. He burrows into the ground without knowing quite why, but with the certainty of a heavy change pressing through the air, of fear settling “like a cat in his throat.� Meanwhile, his wife Ester � a sharpshooter and keeper of all village secrets � slips into her fifth dream of the night. As Ester tosses and Pablo pats his fresh mound of earth, another character emerges in Eliana Hernández-Pachón’s vivid and prophetic triptych.

The Brush is a tangled grove, a thicket of vines, an orchid pummeled with rain. It is also an extraordinary depiction of ecological resistance, of the natural world that both endures human cruelty and lives on in spite of it.]]> 72 Eliana Hernández-Pachón WndyJW 0 4.22 The Brush: Poems
author: Eliana Hernández-Pachón
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.22
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: to-read, archipelago-books, indie-press, poetry, women-authors, women-in-translation, political, trauma, trauma-loss, conflict-political, latin-america, south-america
review:

]]> Troll: A Love Story 100485
Angel begins researching frantically. Angel searches the Internet, folklore, nature journals, and newspaper clippings, but his research doesn't tell him that trolls exude pheromones that have a profound aphrodisiac effect on all those around him. As Angel's life changes beyond recognition, it becomes clear that the troll is familiar with the man's most forbidden feelings, and that it may take him across lines he never thought he'd cross. A novel of sparkling originality, Troll is a wry, peculiar, and beguiling story of nature and man's relationship to wild things, and of the dark power of the wildness in ourselves.]]> 278 Johanna Sinisalo 0802141293 WndyJW 0 3.53 2000 Troll: A Love Story
author: Johanna Sinisalo
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/02
shelves: to-read, finland-finnish-lit, fantasy, women-authors, women-in-translation, translated
review:

]]> The Village of Ben Suc 202470542 Jonathan Schell accompanied the operation from its beginning to its successful but dismal end, and reports it in depth as he saw it. This time no one slipped away. The story of the bewildering task of separating the V.C. from ordinary villagers is the dramatic core of the first part of this book.
The 3,500 villagers were moved to a refugee camp in Phu Loi, a barren, treeless “safe� area, with only what possessions they could carry. The bulldozers went to work and flattened every building. For security reasons no advance preparations had been made, and the move became a human and administrative nightmare. The people of Ben Suc were farmers, and there was nothing for them to do at Phu Loi, Mr. Schell offers vivid portraits of one individual after another—women, children, old men—as they are pacified and sink into apathy and despair.
Here is an overwhelmingly affective narrative of American skill and good intentions squandered in a cause made hopeless by misunderstanding, by resistant traditions, and by cultural gaps not only between ourselves and the villagers, but between them and the Saigon government. Mr. Schell’s report is devastating.]]> 160 Jonathan Schell 1681378493 WndyJW 0 4.08 1967 The Village of Ben Suc
author: Jonathan Schell
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1967
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/02
shelves: to-read, nonfiction, history, journalism, vietnam-vietnamese-lit, war-post-war, asia, political, indie-press, nyrb
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp]]> 38485762 In Search of Lost Time to life for an audience of prison inmates. In a series of lectures, Czapski described the arc and import of Proust’s masterpiece, sketched major and minor characters in striking detail, and movingly evoked the work’s originality, depth, and beauty. Eric Karpeles has translated this brilliant and ­altogether unparalleled feat of the critical imagination into English for the first time, and in a thoughtful introduction he brings out how, in reckoning with Proust’s great meditation on memory, Czapski helped his fellow officers to remember that there was a world apart from the world of the camp. Proust had staked the art of the novelist against the losses of a lifetime and the imminence of death. Recalling that triumphant wager, unfolding, like Sheherazade, the intricacies of Proust’s world night after night, Czapski showed to men at the end of their tether that the past remained present and there was a future in which to hope.

Includes an 8-page color insert of Czapski’s lecture notes.]]> 128 Józef Czapski 1681372584 WndyJW 0 4.02 1948 Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp
author: Józef Czapski
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1948
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/02
shelves: to-read, indie-press, nyrb, proust, nonfiction, history, poland-polish-lit, about-books-reading-writing, translated
review:

]]> A Thousand Ships 42595255 This is the women’s war, just as much as it is the men’s. They have waited long enough for their turn . . .

This was never the story of one woman, or two. It was the story of them all . . .

In the middle of the night, a woman wakes to find her beloved city engulfed in flames. Ten seemingly endless years of conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans are over. Troy has fallen.

From the Trojan women whose fates now lie in the hands of the Greeks, to the Amazon princess who fought Achilles on their behalf, to Penelope awaiting the return of Odysseus, to the three goddesses whose feud started it all, these are the stories of the women whose lives, loves, and rivalries were forever altered by this long and tragic war.

A woman’s epic, powerfully imbued with new life, A Thousand Ships puts the women, girls and goddesses at the center of the Western world’s great tale ever told.]]> 348 Natalie Haynes 1509836195 WndyJW 4 4.14 2019 A Thousand Ships
author: Natalie Haynes
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/05
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: to-read, myths-mythology, greek-mythology, historical-fiction, women-authors, womens-orange-bailey-prize, ancient-greece, audio-book
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths]]> 51135393
Stories of gods and monsters are the mainstay of epic poetry and Greek tragedy, from Homer to Virgil to from Aeschylus to Sophocles and Euripides. And still, today, a wealth of novels, plays and films draw their inspiration from stories first told almost three thousand years ago. But modern tellers of Greek myth have usually been men, and have routinely shown little interest in telling women’s stories.

Now, in Pandora’s Jar, Natalie Haynes � broadcaster, writer and passionate classicist � redresses this imbalance. Taking Greek creation myths as her starting point and then retelling the four great mythic sagas: the Trojan War, the Royal House of Thebes, Jason and the Argonauts, Heracles, she puts the female characters on equal footing with their menfolk. The result is a vivid and powerful account of the deeds � and misdeeds - of Hera, Aphrodite, Athene and Circe. And away from the goddesses of Mount Olympus it is Helen, Clytemnestra, Jocasta, Antigone and Medea who sing from these pages, not Paris, Agamemnon, Orestes or Jason.]]> 320 Natalie Haynes 1509873112 WndyJW 5 4.24 2020 Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths
author: Natalie Haynes
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: to-read, greek-mythology, livesofwomen, myths-mythology, women-authors, ancient-greece
review:

]]> Seesaw 58638751 When life gets hard, what will you do to the Other to protect yourself?

Boats are sinking in the Mediterranean, and Siobhan begins work at a night shelter for asylum seekers. At the same time she is coping with the fallout of her relationships with an identical twin sister, an ex-girlfriend, and a boyfriend with whom she can no longer have sex. As political conflicts escalate she begins to recognise the destructive, zero-sum dynamic she learned in childhood and is forced to acknowledge her own violent logic of self-preservation.

Drawing on cinematic montage, the narrative renders fragments of memory, experience and observation in a pattern of shifting analogies that work to illuminate the possibility of a less binary world.

‘In its intimate and dazzling constellation of anecdote and memory, Seesaw’s form seems to be exquisitely composed by the very alliances of correspondence, analogy and sympathetic magic that its narrator dare not believe in. Siobhan’s struggles speak to an existential and political urgency: how does anyone keep balance while seesawing between the personal and the collective, past and present, brutality and hope, the authentic and the algorithm? Seesaw’s brilliance is its refusal to settle easily on either side, all the while reminding us that the middle ground should be more than just an idea � it should be capable of sustaining life.]]> 180 Carmel Doohan 1909585424 WndyJW 0 3.92 2021 Seesaw
author: Carmel Doohan
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: to-read, indie-press, modern-life, love-eros, love-family, livesofwomen, women-authors, experimental, rofc-book-club, cb-editions
review:

]]> Broken Consort 54871043
Broken Consort is a chronicle of close attention (to books, films, plays, paintings, music, notebooks and car-boot sales) which will confound anyone who thinks rigour and generosity are contradictory. It includes an account of the evolution of the author’s prize-winning novel Murmur, an essay on Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, and practical reflections on the business of writing.

‘“At the heart of writing is curiosity,� writes Will Eaves in his essay on “Making Books�. Curiosity may fuel every writers heart, but very often it’s coffee that powers the writer’s mind. When all the coffee runs out, we will be even more grateful for Will Eaves and his essays � each one a shot of artisistic adrenalin and a euphoric psychostimulant.�
� Nancy Campbell, author of The Library of Ice]]> 208 Will Eaves 1909585351 WndyJW 0 4.18 2020 Broken Consort
author: Will Eaves
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: to-read, essays, rofc-book-club, cb-editions
review:

]]> Murmur 37812760 177 Will Eaves 1909585262 WndyJW 4 3.40 2018 Murmur
author: Will Eaves
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.40
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2018/11/01
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: experimental, goldsmith-prize, ethical-religious-philosophical, republic-of-consciousness-prize, cb-editions
review:

]]> Invisible Dogs 218378250 'They ran wild in packs. They spread disease. They fouled the pavements. They kept us awake and then infected our dreams. They bred faster than rabbits. They laughed at the police. Whole districts became no-go areas. Finally the government took action: they were rounded up and slaughtered and buried in pits and now there are no dogs.�

Invisible Dogs is the travel diary of an English writer invited to a country in which there are no dogs � but he keeps seeing them, vanishing around corners. There are rumours of dogs gathering in the mountains, preparing for an assault on the city.

‘Invisible Dogs is such a direct, lucid text that the reader might mistake it for a simple record of a visit to an authoritarian country. But Boyle’s wry and wiry prose, an invisible dog in itself, makes an eye contact you can’t break and produces thereafter a quietly deadly picture of the viewed and the viewer, the destination and the traveller.�
� M. John Harrison

‘Funny, sinister, thought-moving like light, subtly then increasingly terrifying. Its intelligence reads like relief. Its determination not to language- or life-launder leaves it and the experience of reading it clean and cleansing re the shining and the very dark and the strangeness of us.�
� Ali Smith]]> 126 Charles Boyle 1909585580 WndyJW 0 3.86 Invisible Dogs
author: Charles Boyle
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.86
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/31
shelves: to-read, indie-press, cb-editions, rofc-book-club, humor-dark-humor, animal, dystopian, fable, political
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Greatest Punjabi Stories Ever Told]]> 197432336 The Greatest Punjabi Stories Ever Told features some of the best short fiction to emerge from Punjab over the last century. Covering four generations of Punjabi writers, the anthology includes celebrated storytellers such as Gurbaksh Singh, Balwant Gargi, Sant Singh Sekhon, and Amrita Pritam as well as accomplished contemporary writers like Ajmer Sidhu, Sarghi, and Jatinder Singh Hans.
The themes covered in these stories are diverse and wide-ranging. Ajeet Cour’s ‘Green Sparrows� and Ram Sarup Ankhi’s ‘That Woman!� plunge into the breakdown of family relationships. Kartar Singh Duggal’s ‘Majha Is Not Dead�, Sukhwant Kaur Mann’s ‘The Survivors�, and Gulzar Singh Sandhu’s ‘Hopes Shattered� probe urban and rural lives in the region. Mohinder Singh Sarna’s ‘Savage Harvest�, Sujaan Singh’s ‘Sunrise at Last�, and Gurdev Singh Rupana’s ‘The Wind� explore the Partition and its violent aftermath—events that shaped modern Punjab. Stories such as Nanak Singh’s ‘Bowl of Milk�, Gurbachan Singh Bhullar’s ‘I Am Not Ghaznavi�, Bachint Kaur’s ‘Eradicator of Suffering�, and Sukirat’s ‘Home� probe the human psyche in times of crisis. Patriotism, martyrdom, and state repression are also Gurmukh Singh Musafir’s ‘Daughter of the Rebel� is the story of an ailing girl who fights for the freedom of the country in her own way; Kulwant Singh Virk’s ‘The Proverbial Bullock� shows how martyrdom is always around the corner for our soldiers; and Kesra Ram’s ‘Whither My Native Land� brings to the fore the brutality encountered by migrant workers during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Taken together, the thirty stories in this anthology capture the essence of Punjabiyat—what it means to be Punjabi—and present a unique portrait of the land and its people.]]> 337 Renuka Singh 9393852863 WndyJW 0 3.75 The Greatest Punjabi Stories Ever Told
author: Renuka Singh
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.75
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/30
shelves: to-read, india-indian-lit, india-northern, translated, short-story-collections, indie-press, aleph-series, aleph
review:

]]> Melvill 192632248 From the Winner of the 2018 Best Translated Book Award

A dying father in the grip of fever and delirium recounts his youth, hisGrand Tour, the Venetian palaces populated by fascinating and evil figures, his ruin,and his most beautiful journey—the crossing on foot of the frozen Hudson River.Hisson,still a child,sitsat the foot of the bed, attentively collectingthesefinal,hallucinated words.

Could the work of Herman Melville—masterful author, misunderstood, far too ahead of his time,and considered crazy and dangerous by some critics—haveasits source this ultimate paternal legacy?

Questioning the intricacies of fiction, which constantly oscillatatesbetween reality and imagination, Rodrigo Fresán’sapproaches the enigma of the literary vocation in a new light.An invented biography, a gothic novel populated by ghosts,and an evocation of a filial love,Melvillcontains all the talent, humor, and immense culture found in the other great works from one of Spanish literature's most ambitious writers.]]> 360 Rodrigo Fresán 196038516X WndyJW 0 4.00 2022 Melvill
author: Rodrigo Fresán
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/30
shelves: to-read, open-letter, indie-press, historical-fiction, latin-america
review:

]]> Quarterlife 198972148
From identity politics to corporate avarice to the limits of idealism, each of these characters embodies a hypothesis. As they come to grips with the new India, they also become aware of a deeply fraught and complex milieu. The result is an ever-widening story that builds up to a festive night when all of Mumbai is on the streets, and the simmering unrest erupts.

Devika Rege's Quarterlife is as much a social and philosophical inquiry as a political bildungsroman. It is also a brilliantly innovative and ambitious work that tests the limits of what the novel can achieve.]]> 403 Devika Rege 9356990867 WndyJW 0 3.50 Quarterlife
author: Devika Rege
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.50
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/28
shelves: to-read, india-indian-lit, modern-life, political, religion, conflict-political, women-authors
review:

]]> Cuddy 61324049 Cuddy is a bold and experimental retelling of the story of the hermit St. Cuthbert, unofficial patron saint of the North of England. Incorporating poetry, prose, play, diary and real historical accounts to create a novel like no other, Cuddy straddles historical eras - from the first Christian-slaying Viking invaders of the holy island of Lindisfarne in the 8th century to a contemporary England defined by class and austerity. Along the way we meet brewers and masons, archers and academics, monks and labourers, their visionary voices and stories echoing through their ancestors and down the ages. And all the while at the centre sits Durham Cathedral and the lives of those who live and work around this place of pilgrimage - their dreams, desires, connections and communities.]]> 447 Benjamin Myers 1526631504 WndyJW 5
There are many wonderful reviews that are better than I could write so I’ll say simply that using prose poetry, historical and fictional accounts, nature writing, and a pastiche, all in lyrical prose, Myers takes us on a journey through history that begins with the death of Cuthbert in AD 687 and ends in Durham in 2016. He tells us the story of the 10th century journey; a medieval love story; the tragic deaths of young Scottish soldiers, prisoners of war in 1650; a Victorian ghost story, and ends with a contemporary story of the struggles of modern life. All the stories are told in the shadow of the stunning Durham Cathedral built 1094-1133 and called by the World Heritage Convention “the largest and finest example of Norman architecture in England,� and all told with contributions from Cuddy himself and from the Cathedral.

What makes this book special are the characters and their first person accounts, the names and things that repeat, linking the stories from period to period which creates a sense of continuity through the centuries-the story begins and ends with a Cuthbert, and, as always, the landscape of Northern England, especially Durham and environs, play a central role. Few writers create the strong sense of place like Ben Myers.

I wanted to read this slowly, to make it last, but alas I finished it. I could have read this book nightly and never tired of it. I expect to see it on many literary prize lists and I highly recommend it.]]> 4.33 2023 Cuddy
author: Benjamin Myers
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2023/04/27
date added: 2024/12/27
shelves: historical-fiction, england, middle-ages, signed-copies, first-edition-first-print, favorites
review:
I loved this book! It’s not hyperbole to call it a masterpiece (his masterpiece so far, Ben Myers is still a young man with more to write.) Perhaps Saint Cuthbert spoke to Benjamin Myers while he was writing this because it feels inspired, showcasing all of its author’s talents without feeling contrived or gimmicky.

There are many wonderful reviews that are better than I could write so I’ll say simply that using prose poetry, historical and fictional accounts, nature writing, and a pastiche, all in lyrical prose, Myers takes us on a journey through history that begins with the death of Cuthbert in AD 687 and ends in Durham in 2016. He tells us the story of the 10th century journey; a medieval love story; the tragic deaths of young Scottish soldiers, prisoners of war in 1650; a Victorian ghost story, and ends with a contemporary story of the struggles of modern life. All the stories are told in the shadow of the stunning Durham Cathedral built 1094-1133 and called by the World Heritage Convention “the largest and finest example of Norman architecture in England,� and all told with contributions from Cuddy himself and from the Cathedral.

What makes this book special are the characters and their first person accounts, the names and things that repeat, linking the stories from period to period which creates a sense of continuity through the centuries-the story begins and ends with a Cuthbert, and, as always, the landscape of Northern England, especially Durham and environs, play a central role. Few writers create the strong sense of place like Ben Myers.

I wanted to read this slowly, to make it last, but alas I finished it. I could have read this book nightly and never tired of it. I expect to see it on many literary prize lists and I highly recommend it.
]]> Great Expectations 2623
Pip must discover his true self, and his own set of values and priorities. Whether such values allow one to prosper in the complex world of early Victorian England is the major question posed by Great Expectations, one of Dickens's most fascinating, and disturbing, novels.

This edition includes the original, discarded ending, Dickens's brief working notes, and the serial instalments and chapter divisions in different editions. It also uses the definitive Clarendon text.]]> 544 Charles Dickens 0192833596 WndyJW 5 3.78 1861 Great Expectations
author: Charles Dickens
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1861
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/13
date added: 2024/12/26
shelves: audio-book, classics, victorian-era, coming-of-age-boy, comin, coming-of-age-girl, class-differences, historical-fiction
review:

]]> The Axeman's Carnival 206303750
Tama is just a helpless chick when he is rescued by Marnie, and this is where his story might have ended. ‘If it keeps me awake,� says Marnie’s husband Rob, a farmer, ‘I’ll have to wring its neck.� But with Tama come new possibilities for the couple’s future. Tama can speak, and his fame is growing. Outside, in the pines, his father warns him of the wickedness wrought by humans. Indoors, Marnie confides in him about her violent marriage. The more Tama sees, the more the animal and the human worlds � and all of the precarity, darkness and hope within them � bleed into one another. Like a stock truck filled with live cargo, the story moves inexorably towards its dramatic conclusion: the annual Axeman’s Carnival.

Part trickster, part surrogate child, part witness, Tama the magpie is the star of this story. Though what he says aloud to humans is often nonsensical (and hilarious with it), the tale he tells us weaves a disturbingly human sense. The Axeman’s Carnival is Catherine Chidgey at her finest � comic, profound, poetic and true.]]> 336 Catherine Chidgey WndyJW 4 4.19 2022 The Axeman's Carnival
author: Catherine Chidgey
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/25
date added: 2024/12/26
shelves: animal, magic-realism, livesofwomen, humor-dark-humor, indie-press, europa-editions, women-authors, marriage, australia-new-zealand-tasmania
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Greatest Telugu Stories Ever Told]]> 60565860
BOOK DESCRIPTION

The Greatest Telugu Stories Ever Told spans almost a century of work by some of the finest writers of short fiction in the language. The storytellers included in the anthology range from literary masters such as Chalam, Kanuparthi Varalakshmamma, and Kodavatiganti Kutumba Rao to contemporary writers like Mohammed Khadeer Babu, Jajula Gowri, and Vempalle Shareef.

The tales found in this collection weave a rich tapestry of Telugu experiences. Illindala Saraswati Devi’s ‘Bad Times� discusses the downturn in Muslim fortunes after the integration of the nizam’s state with the Indian union. Boya Jangaiah’s ‘The Eclipse� chronicles the aching memories that besiege a Dalit poet when he makes a brief stop at his village. Bandi Narayanaswami’s ‘Water� dramatizes the acute shortage of water in the Rayalaseema region and its exacerbation by political rivalries. Kavana Sarma’s ‘House Number� gently mocks a self-proclaimed math genius and his attempts at memorizing a simple house number. A heartbreaking love story, Vempalli Gangadhar’s ‘Festival of Love� is a romance imbued with the fragrance of jasmine fields.

Selected and deftly translated by Dasu Krishnamoorty and Tamraparni Dasu, these and the other stories in this collection offer a window into how the Telugu people see the world and their place in it]]> 200 Tamraparni Das 9391047300 WndyJW 0 4.08 The Greatest Telugu Stories Ever Told
author: Tamraparni Das
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.08
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/24
shelves: to-read, indie-press, india-indian-lit, india-southern, aleph, aleph-series, short-story-collections, translated
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Greatest Assamese Stories Ever Told]]> 59936781
Among the gems to be found in this selection are Lakhminath Bezbaroa’s ‘Patmugi� which is a searing portrayal of the injustices of society, especially towards women; Mamoni Raisom Goswami’s ‘Values�, an unforgettable depiction of a destitute woman, for whom her Brahmin ancestry is the only thing that she can take pride in; Harekrishna Deka’s ‘The Captive�, a poignant account of the relationship between a kidnapper and his victim; Homen Borgohain’s well-known story ‘Looking for Ismael Sheikh�, which deals with the effects of religious violence on a community; and Sheelabhadra’s ‘Sweet Acacia�, a romance as evocative as the delicate fragrance of the flower that permeates it.

Selected and edited by Mitra Phukan, these and the other stories in this volume offer a fascinating glimpse of a culture and a people that will resonate with readers everywhere.]]> 325 Mitra Phukan 9390652049 WndyJW 0 3.97 The Greatest Assamese Stories Ever Told
author: Mitra Phukan
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.97
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/24
shelves: to-read, india-indian-lit, india-northern, short-story-collections, translated, aleph-series, aleph, indie-press
review:

]]> The Vortex 207991131
A classic of twentieth-century Latin American literature, José Eustasio Rivera'sThe Vortexfollows the young poet Arturo Cova and his lover Alicia as they elope from Bogotá and embark on an adventure through Colombia's varied and magical landscapes, with their rich biodiversity. After becoming separated from Alicia in the rainforest, Arturo witnesses the appalling conditions of the workers forced or tricked into tapping rubber trees. Newly translated for its 100th anniversary, The Vortex is both a denunciation of the horrific human-rights abuses that took place during the Amazonian rubber boom, and one of most enduring renderings of the natural environment in Latin American literature.]]> 331 José Eustasio Rivera 1913867986 WndyJW 0 3.60 1924 The Vortex
author: José Eustasio Rivera
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.60
book published: 1924
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/17
shelves: to-read, classics, charco-press, indie-press, translated, latin-america, spain-spanish-lit, capitalism, environment, natural-world
review:

]]> The Bay of Angels 667567 208 Anita Brookner 0375727604 WndyJW 0 3.15 2001 The Bay of Angels
author: Anita Brookner
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.15
book published: 2001
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/14
shelves: to-read, women-authors, livesofwomen, coming-of-age-girl, france-french-lit, england, 20th-century-british-women-authors, character-driven
review:

]]> Clear 176443690
Against the rugged backdrop of this faraway spot beyond Shetland, Carys Davies's intimate drama unfolds with tension and tenderness: a touching and crystalline study of ordinary people buffeted by history and a powerful exploration of the distances and connections between us. Perfectly structured and surprising at every turn, Clear is a marvel of storytelling, an exquisite short novel by a master of the form.]]> 196 Carys Davies 1668030667 WndyJW 4 3.85 Clear
author: Carys Davies
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.85
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/12
date added: 2024/12/12
shelves: historical-fiction, natural-world, class-differences, scotland-scottish-lit, arc-uncorrected-proof, religion
review:

]]> Ghost Mountain 200331592
It looks at the uncertain fragile sense of self we hold inside ourselves, and our human compulsion to project it into the uncertain word around us, whether we’re ready or not. It is also about the presence of absence, and how it shadows us in our lives. Mountains are at once unmistakably present yet never truly fathomable.]]> 280 Ronan Hession 1915693136 WndyJW 0 3.86 2024 Ghost Mountain
author: Ronan Hession
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/11
shelves: to-read, indie-press, bluemoose-books, ireland-irish-lit, magic-realism
review:

]]> <![CDATA[New York Sketches (McNally Editions)]]> 207298548 E. B. White’s greatest stories, asides, essays, jokes, and tall tales about the city he arguably saw clearest, loved best, and skewered most mercilessly.Over more than fifty years at the New Yorker, E. B. White came to define a kind of ideal American clear, casual, democratic, and urbane. He also did more than any writer to define his favorite city. His classic Here Is New York captured a moment in the life of Manhattan with precision and love—but his was no fleeting infatuation. In New York Sketches, the first collection of his casual pieces about the city, White ranges at whim from the nesting habits of pigeons to the aisles of a calculator trade-show on Eighth Avenue, from the behavior of snails in aquariums to the ghosts of old romance that haunt a flower shop or a fire escape or an old hotel. These sketches, some less than a page long, many written for a laugh, or in response to the news of the day, show us White at his most playful and inventive. New York Sketches is a welcome diversion for every New Yorker—native, adoptive, or far from home—and a perfect introduction, not only to what White called “the inscrutable and lovely town,� but to the everyday enchantments of one of her fondest reporters.]]> 152 E.B. White 194602273X WndyJW 0 4.17 New York Sketches (McNally Editions)
author: E.B. White
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.17
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/07
shelves: to-read, indie-press, mcnally-editions, nyc, nonfiction, essays
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor]]> 31742 El Espectador, a newspaper in Bogota, when in February of that year eight crew members of the Caldas, a Colombian destroyer, were washed overboard and disappeared. Ten days later one of them turned up, barely alive, on a deserted beach in northern Colombia. This book, which originally appeared as a series of newspaper articles, is Garcia Marquez's account of that sailor's ordeal.]]> 117 Gabriel García Márquez 067972205X WndyJW 0 3.78 1955 The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor
author: Gabriel García Márquez
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1955
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/07
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Greatest Gujarati Stories Ever Told]]> 60158417 260 Rita Kothari 9391047483 WndyJW 0 3.66 The Greatest Gujarati Stories Ever Told
author: Rita Kothari
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.66
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/02
shelves: to-read, indie-press, aleph-series, aleph, india-indian-lit, india-western, short-story-collections, translated
review:

]]> Djinns 220676013 346 Fatma Aydemir 1916806031 WndyJW 0 4.38 2022 Djinns
author: Fatma Aydemir
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/28
shelves: to-read, indie, indie-press, peirene-press, translated, women-in-translation, germany-german-lit, love-family, immigration-emigration
review:

]]> Season of the Swamp 221790156
Accompanied by a small group of fellow exiles who plot their return and hoped-for victory over the Mexican dictatorship, Juárez immerses himself in the city, which absorbs him like a sponge. He and his compatriots work odd jobs, fall victim to the cons and confusions of a strange young nation, succumb to the hallucinations of yellow fever, and fall in love with the music and food all around them. But unavoidable, too, is the stark trade in human beings.

With the extraordinary linguistic play and love of popular forms that have characterized all of Herrera’s fiction, Season of the Swamp is a magnificent work of speculative history, a love letter to the city of New Orleans and its polyglot culture, and a cautionary statement that informs our understanding of the world we live in.]]> 163 Yuri Herrera 1916751105 WndyJW 0 3.68 2022 Season of the Swamp
author: Yuri Herrera
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/27
shelves: to-read, indie-press, and-other-stories, america, new-orleans, historical-fiction, latin-america, mexico-mexican-lit, translated
review:

]]> A House for Mr Biswas 394633
His birth ill-omened, his life dominated by fitful, comic struggles and resentful truces with those to whom he is obligated, Mr. Mohun Biswas of Trinidad, toward the end of his forty-sixth year on earth, triumphantly purchases his own house and becomes his own man. Around this supremely simple story, V. S. Naipaul builds one of the few virtually perfect novels in our language, a book that is—in the balance struck between its small incidents and its large, overarching patterns, in the ironic beauty of its prose—at once compelling, mysterious, and classical. It is also one of the few novels in any language that transcend their own genre. By the end of A House for Mr. Biswas we are reading a tremendous parable about the individual self in its enslavement to time and change, and in its search for freedom.]]> 564 V.S. Naipaul 0679444580 WndyJW 5 3.90 1961 A House for Mr Biswas
author: V.S. Naipaul
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1961
rating: 5
read at: 2003/01/01
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves: classics, everymans-library, india-indian-lit, trinidad-and-tobago, nobel-winner, caribbean, favorites
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Siege of Krishnapur / Troubles]]> 12420326
Inspired by historical events, The Siege of Krishnapur is the mesmerizing tale of a British outpost, under siege during the Indian Mutiny of 1857, whose residents find their smug assumptions of moral and military superiority and their rigid class barriers under fire—literally and figuratively.

The hero of Troubles, having survived the battles of World War I, makes his way to Ireland in 1919, in search of his once-wealthy fiancée. What he finds is her family's enormous seaside hotel in a spectacular state of decline, overgrown and overrun by herds of cats and pigs and the few remaining guests. From this strange perch, moving from room to room as the hotel falls down around him, he witnesses the distant tottering of the Empire in the East and the rise of the violent "Troubles" in Ireland.]]> 728 J.G. Farrell 0307957845 WndyJW 5 3.97 1973 The Siege of Krishnapur / Troubles
author: J.G. Farrell
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1973
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves: war-post-war, india-indian-lit, booker, booker-winner, everymans-library, classics, living-under-occupation, revolution, british-raj
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Mangan Inheritance (New York Review Books Classics)]]> 11523246 and shivers in the shadow of his glamorous movie-star wife. And now she has left him for her lover. Adrift and depressed, Jamie takes refuge with his father, in whose house he turns up a 19th-century daguerreotype bearing the initials “J.M.� and depicting a man who, as it happens, is Jamie’s spitting image. Could this be the only existing photograph of his purported ancestor, the legendarily dissolute Irish poet James Clarence Mangan? Obsessed by this strange resemblance—and aided by an unexpected financial windfall—Jamie heads to Ireland thinking at last to discover that elusive himself. Instead, in the dreary coastal village of Drishane, he meets the derelict Eileen, sullen Dinny, drunken (and shrunken) Conor, and the sexy and very available Kathleen. They know something, for sure—something to do with Jamie, and something they don’t want him to find out.
The Mangan Inheritance is melodrama at its most inventive and suggestive, an inquiry into the problem of identity and the nature of ancestry that beguiles the reader with dark deeds, wild humor, and weird goings-on, on its way towards a shocking and terrifying—and utterly satisfying—conclusion.]]> 368 Brian Moore 1590174488 WndyJW 1 3.72 1979 The Mangan Inheritance (New York Review Books Classics)
author: Brian Moore
name: WndyJW
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1979
rating: 1
read at:
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves: indie-press, nyrb, to-read, ireland-irish-lit, mystery, classics, about-books-reading-writing, poetry, love-family, couldnt-finish
review:

]]> Morning and Evening 221326443 Morning and Evening is a novel concerning the beautiful dream that our lives have meaning.]]> 104 Jon Fosse 1804271217 WndyJW 0 4.24 2000 Morning and Evening
author: Jon Fosse
name: WndyJW
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2000
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/23
shelves: to-read, indie-press, fitzcarraldo, nobel-winner, translated, scandinavian-nordic, novella, existential, ruminative
review:

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