2013: It's Still Orange to Lizzie/Peggy

It may be the twilight of Orange, but that's how it is in my heart and mind!

These are my unread nominees:
Fault Lines ; Girl with a Pearl Earring ; The Housekeeper ; Accordion Crimes
Ahab's Wife ; The Gathering ; The Household Guide to Dying
Lullabies for Little Criminals ; The Ghost Road; Ruby
A Spell of Winter ; Ladder of Years; The Mistress of Spices;
The Namesake ;Fugitive Pieces; The Flood; ;
The Invention of Everything Else ; Lives of the Monster Dogs;
The Magician's Assistant; The Light Between Oceans
What the Body Remembers ; The Lovely Bones ; Black and Blue
The Time Traveler's Wife; Eveless Eden
Burnt Shadows ; The Accidental ; The Weight of Water
The Book of Fires ; On Beauty ; Remote Sympathy;
The Inheritance of Loss ; Small Wars ; The Last Samurai; Middle Age
The Short History of a Prince ; The Tenderness of Wolves ; Swamplandia!
A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian; The Aguero Sisters;
The Hero's Walk; Unless; The Monsters of Templeton
Homestead; The Help; The Glorious Heresies
The Pink Hotel; When I Lived in Modern Times; The White Woman on the Green Bicycle
Hen's Teeth;; Half Blood Blues; The Great Circle;
Do Not Say We Have Nothing; Outline; The Mirror and the Light;

I know that's quite a list, but I must tell you that I found most of them at Paper Back Swap. I recommend it highly! I'll mark these read with a ✔ as I go, but today I took time to get rid of a number of years' reading.

First up is Island of Wings. I am much taken with the setting a very short way into it, but I don't much like the writing. I understand from somewhere that Altenberg's first language is not English, and it sort of shows in what I find to be rather leaden sentences. I hope that I grow more tolerant as I get farther along.

Wow.....that is quite a list!!!

Love your list Peggy. There are so many on it that I have read and loved and many that I want to read yet. I plan to read Island of Wings in March for Darryl's AN ORANGE A MONTH challenge so I hope you love it girlfriend!

Well, I wish I were loving it too, Belva. I find I can stay away from it very easily, which makes it not a great choice for Orange January. I think the thing to do is just to get on with it. I still haven't read but 70 pages, so maybe it will eventually snag me. O.K. I'll take it to bed and see what happens. *snork*
Hi, Tina. As I say, most of them I got through PBS, so it's not as though I made a great monetary investment in each one. I must say that most of them are in good shape too; I've been lucky!

I meant to tell you how much I love your photo up top. It is truly beautiful. No matter what the title of the prize, it will always and forever be the Orange in my heart and mind. And I feel okay about that. I don't feel the need to be politically correct all the time.
hugs,

edited: to add that I just flat set Tides of War aside for a bit or forever. I just couldn't get into it whether it was the book, my head at the moment or what and I may or may not go back to it. Half Blood Blues has my heart & my head. I am not finding all kinds of thoughts about what I should be doing or jumping up for this or that while I am reading it. When that happens I know the book at hand is not the right book for me at the moment at least.

Belva, you convince me not to read Tides of War. I believe I had already thought I didn't like the sound of it.
I'm sorry to say that I never warmed to Island of Wings either. Here are the few thoughts I posted over on my 75 thread. I know that some of the Orange Sisterhood loved it, and I'm glad. I really, really wanted to.

I so wanted to like it and I so disliked most of it. You've already read my displeasure if you read my maunderings. It's very much a first book with some good points - description and.....well, description - outweighed for me by unforgivable points. The worst thing for me is that the wife of the missionary, for whom Gaelic is the first language, never learns Gaelic although they live on St. Kilda for 13 years. She apparently understands his sermons and makes close friends of the women, but the author tells us very near the end that she never learns the language. She is, however, so remarkably intuitive that she magically understands some basic motivations that the author is then never forced to explain or otherwise account for to her less sensitive reader. For example, when her husband finds a mutilated bird which he considers evidence of pagan sorcery, his wife knows that it was done by a pregnant woman to protect her unborn child from the eight-day sickness. Wow. She also knows that her husband's coldness stems from guilt over something that happened before they met. In fact, it does, but how the wife hit on this from the evidence given is way beyond me.
Then too, the writing is pedestrian at best although she has flashes of something more. A middle section of romance of a sort puts this book into the romance category for me, and I guess that's where it stays in quality. It could have been very good. It wasn't.

I think I may try Hotel World next. It will certainly be completely different!

Peggy;
Island of Wings is that last Orange listed TBR for my January and I may not get to it. IDK...... I have a Pym to be read, an ARC, a Murdoch, perhaps A Question of Upbringing, (if the book arrives in time), and at least one for fun. ;-) I am hoping to read 2 more Oranges after the one I am on now: The Birth of Love and The Passion of Alice.

Be sure to review The Passion of Alice for us, Belva. There's not one review on the page!

Will do Peggy. Thank you for the head's up.

Read & reviewed, Peg O My Heart.
So..........which 3 Sarah Waters books have you read?
Thus far I have read and loved both The Night Watch and The Little Stranger. I plan to read Fingersmith as one of my Orange reads this year and still waiting on my shelves are Affinity and Tipping the Velvet. The later looks to be excitingly quirky to me. **wink, wink**

Oops. I guess I've read only 2 Sarah Waters - Fingersmith and The Night Watch. I really enjoyed both of them. I started Tipping the Velvet and then got pulled away to something else. I guess that was what I was thinking about.
Now, I'm off to see what you had to say about The Passion of Alice.
Meanwhile, I have Hotel World out on the currently reading pile, but I haven't gotten to it yet because I can't finish anything. Today. I'm going to finish one something today. So there.

Was that a neener, neener Peggy? lol!~!

#1 What a treasure trove of Oranges!

#7 I like the idea of there being an Orange sisterhood (although given there are some male members I suppose we ought to think of a gender neutral term but I can't). I agree with your summary of Island of Wings but the negatives bothered me less I think - I thought the descriptions of the islands were very evocative.

I too, love the 'Orange Sisterhood'. And I think the caliber of male members here could come to grips with that without feeling emasculated.
Then too, the 'Orange Brotherhood' feels to me that it includes both the male & female. At any rate, loving them and feeling as though I now belong to a rather elite 'hood'. lol!~!

Thirding the 'sisterhood' idea :)

I think the Orange Sisterhood already exists and our male members are Orange Sister-Brothers. (I am reading The Sisters Brothers right now and loving it.) I have also started Hotel World. Talk about something completely different!
Heather, I'm glad that you enjoyed Island of Wings in spite of. Absolutely, the descriptions of the islands and the natives' lives were totally fascinating. Did you google St. Kilda or Hirta? Maybe you didn't need to, but the pictures I found were equally as fascinating as her descriptions.
Oh! I added an Orange for January from PBS again - Ursula Under. It looks really good. (FINISH SOMETHING ELSE FIRST!!!)

Amazing! I now have two novels that I hope will be nominated for Orange (or whatever): Arcadia by Lauren Groff and Above All Things by Tanis Rideout. I just finished the latter, and it is award-worthy.

#17 I did google St Kilda Peggy and the pictures were fascinating.

I have Ursula, Under! It's one of the books that has been in my TBR pile the longest - I picked it up in a charity shop randomly before I'd heard if LT or the Orange Prize. One day I'll read it...

I thought about reading it next, Heather, but I think that I'm more likely to try that other Smith, Zadie. She's been on Mt. Bookpile for way too long. Meanwhile, I did read and love Hotel World. I'll be interested to see what Ali Smith has tried since then.

So I still haven't read that other Smith, but I did just finish The Observations. I enjoyed it more than Gillespie & I, but it may not be as strong a book.
Now I will soon feel free to start something from this year's Long List.

LAMB by Bonnie Nadzam (Copied from my 75 thread)

I believe that this is a first novel; if so, it's a heck 'uv a polished work for a first-timer.
David Lamb is handsome, smart, charming, self-absorbed, self-justifying, seductive, manipulative....in short, David Lamb is a mess. His wife has left him, his father has died, and his business partner is suggesting that he take some time off before the business suffers. In his own mind Dave is basically a good person, loved and sought-after, yet always an outsider.
By chance he meets 11 year-old Tommie, who is the butt of her girl-friends' meanness, but otherwise is unremarkable. Dave decides that he will be able to change Tommie's life and return a smarter, better version of her to her mother. So he offers and Tommie accepts a trip to his cabin in the Rockies for just a few days.
This is just creepy, but Dave is attractive enough in his vulnerabilities and Tommie is attractive enough in her innate generosity to keep the reader turning pages to see how it plays out. I didn't think I'd like it at all before I started. I put it on my Kindle because it was cheap and nominated. I'm glad I did.

Ignorance
Other people have done a really good job reviewing it. I liked it O.K. - thought it was a bit better than the average literary fiction that I read (and truly, I don't read much that's bad anymore, so it's probably really very good). I see how it got on the long list, and I see why it didn't make the short list.

Bonnie was right. I did LOVE Life After Life. I don't think that it should take the WPfF from Bring Up the Bodies, but it would easily have beaten Song of Achilles or The Tiger's Wife had it showed up a bit earlier. That's what I think!

O.K. I just finished When We Were Bad and enjoyed it a whole great lot! I see that it's from the 2008 short list, and I have to say that that is my over-all favorite year so far. It was also the year that I discovered Orange.

Just wondering what you are planning to read in Orange July? It's almost upon us.

Belva, I see that you are the official Orange cheerleader. I think that I'm going to start with Flight Behavior. If I have time after that, I'll bite the bullet and download the winner to my Kindle. Meanwhile, I am curiously drawn to The Last Samurai from 2001's LL.

Flight Behavior is in my plan too Peggy. We can be so 'psycho' together. lol!~!

How psycho are you still, Belva? I just finished. I liked it a lot, but I didn't love it - at least not like I love The Poisonwood Bible and The Lacuna.
I'm going to see if there's a thread for it, and if there's not, I'll come back here and post my few musings from my 75 thread for what they're worth. (I must think they're worth something since I'm scattering them around so.)

FLIGHT BEHAVIOR by Barbara Kingsolver

I don't think that Kingsolver can write a bad book, but I rank this one with Prodigal Summer, which is down a bit on my list of favorites. Dellarobia Turnbow is a rather harrassed mother of two small children, trapped in an inappropriate marriage. She and her husband Cub, who is nowhere near as smart or as ambitious as she is, are largely dependent on his parents for their livelihood. (His father is "Bear" while at 28, he is still "Cub.") As the novel opens, she is in a flight pattern, about to commit adultery with a hot younger player, when she comes upon a huge population of monarch butterflies, disturbed by climate changes, and settled to over-winter in the Tennessee mountains. So besides being the story of a woman's coming of age, this is also a didactic novel about the effects of catastrophic climate change.
I suppose that the two work together well enough, but I don't think that this one is going to weather well. I'm guessing that most of Kingsolver's readers don't really need the sermonizing about global warming of the entomologist who comes to study the monarchs, and most of the people who could use a good sermon on the topic won't read this book.
That said, Kingsolver has a lot of good stuff going on: characters with depth, graceful writing, and plenty of thematic material to chew on.

Not very Peggy. I keep putting it off. But I really enjoyed reading your thoughts on it. I loved The Lacuna and The Bean Trees but everything else by her, and I know Kingsolver is brilliant, that I have begun I have ended up setting aside. IDK...........
Anyway will be interested to see what you pick up next. ♥

Oh dear. I don't think anyone has really liked Flight Behavior. I was so hoping it would another Poisonwood Bible. I guess not. :/

I did! It's not her best by any means but I gave it a 4*. It was about climate change but wasn't too preachy (hate that). And I rather liked the strong female character who realises that she isn't where she wants to be in life. I divorced and basically started life over again a few years ago so that part resonated with me.

I had visitors and didn't realize!
Glad to see you, Belva, Your R Orangeness, and Ms. Yell. I gave it 4 stars too, but *PB* and *Lacuna* were 5 stars or more for me.
To my chagrin, I haven't been reading orange since. Need to get back on track!

Peggy, I just saw your post from like June that said you finished and enjoyed When We Were Bad. It is sitting on one of my shelves waiting patiently... I do NOT need a downer book right now; is it a downer at all?

Hmmm, Tina. It is awfully funny, but it also has its sad moments. It's a lot like life, so I don't know what to tell you. Have you read the reviews?

I think I'll just keep this old thread going.
I've started - barely - May We Be Forgiven. I have to say that I would have put it down forever a good 20 times in the first 25 pages if I hadn't looked at reviews that say that it does eventually get "hilarious," "moving," etc. So far, I'm pretty completely disgusted.

(Copied from my 75 thread)
I'm plugging along slowly with May We Be Forgiven. I don't absolutely hate it now - the main character is turning out to have some concern for his nephew and niece, and that makes him a bit more human. It's just that I don't think Homes is quite enough writer to pull off the blend of reality and spoof that she seems to be going for. It's almost magical realism without the magic - in any sense of the word. I will finish it because it won the Orange, and I'm a bit fanatical about reading their choices. That may have to change. Now that I think about it, I've disagreed about their their winner for the past three years. Nothing since The Lacuna seems to have been worthy to me.

(Copied from my 75 thread)

MAY WE BE FORGIVEN by A.M. Homes

I loathed the first third of the book. It is satire, and the norm is the narrator, Harold Silver, who was in bed with his sister-in-law when his brother came in and killed her. Homes takes on every nuance of 21st century American cultural insanity, but I never found her tropes particularly funny. The one time I possibly gave a wry grin was when Harold's contract with the college where he had been teaching American History was not renewed because "We've got this fellow who has a new way of teaching history, it's future-forward....Instead of studying the past, the students will be exploring the future - a world of possibility. We think it will be less depressing than watching reruns of the Zapruder films."
Harold turns out to be a decent guy struggling to do the right thing while he writes his book about Nixon, the embodiment of cultural change, and edits Nixon's short stories at the bidding of Julie N. Eisenhower, who is distantly related to the woman whom he picks up online............ It's a wild ride.
I guess I would have short-listed it for the Orange-that-was, but with Life After Life and even Flight Behavior in the mix, I would never have picked it as the winner.

So --- I'm going to read a little in both The Goldfinch and Ursula Under to see which is my next OJ book. I know that *Goldfinch* doesn't really qualify, but I'll be gobsmacked if it's not nominated in March.

I have totally forgotten about this prize / challenge. :(

Does the group still exist, Peggy?

Tina, it's a bit hard to define. Jill was our spark, the one who organized book-give -aways and ed the group. She is only just now getting back into reading. On the other hand, it seems too good a thing to give up, so a few of us are posting on here anyway. If we come, the group exists!
And I think I've decided to read Ursula Under!

'If we come, the group exists!'

I like this!

Yay, Elizabeth!!! We are FOUR!!!!
I've also read a few pages of Ursula Under, and that will definitely be my next Orange for 2014. I doubt that I'll finish it in January though.

I like that too! And Peggy, you are here & raider.......you too! I am so excited now. I was beginning to think that I was the only one continuing on. So happy to see you ladies!

So who all is still here?

avatiakh, the one who started it all this year....THANK YOU!
ram
HelenLiz
raidergirl3
Nickelini
kidzdoc
LizzieD
bucketyell
rainpebble
AnneDC
TinaV95

So that's eleven of us at least. WOOT, WOOT!~!~!

I'm sort of loitering with intent to read the oranges - only i blinking well signed up to read bleak house and it's taking a complete age.
Permission to hang about and read some when i get that far?

>44 Helenliz::
Lurk, linger, & loiter to your heart's content HelenLiz. Enjoy Bleak House and definitely hang around & join us when you can. ♥

Helen, I love, LOVE, LOVE Bleak House, so as far as I'm concerned, you are absolved of any guilt you may feel at not turning Orange this January.
Meanwhile, I'm really liking - maybe even loving - Ursula Under. I'm amazed that this good book didn't make the short list. Of course, it was up against We Need to Talk About Kevin and Old Filth, but it's at least as good as The Mammoth Cheese, which was short-listed and which I love. Go figure. And it looks as though I will finish *Ursula* this month after all. Yay!

My second and last Orange for the month was Ursula Under, and I enjoyed it tremendously. I think that maybe she tried to do more or suggest more thematically than the book could support, but that didn't stop me from loving it. I needed a good one, and this filled my need.

Hi Peggy. I am happy that you loved Ursula Under. This one is a challenge for me to even decide if I want to read it. On the one hand it sounds like a fascinating concept for a novel and yet on the other it appears that it may not be quite the comfortable read one might expect from the descriptions. IDK.....
I may attempt to tackle it. At least I have a very dependable reck in you. :-)

Ah - the current long list is out, and I'm reading an old one - Prep. It's not great literature; it's not even very good literature, but it's entertaining and I'm enjoying it.
Hi, Belva. I'm not sure how uncomfortable *Ursula* would be for you .... I hope you will try it at some point.
And I see that I don't have to be gobsmacked. The Goldfinch is securely on the long list.
Off to see what the others are about!

I did enjoy Prep and ended up giving it 4 stars instead of the 3½ I originally intended. Hmm. I guess I'll copy my so-called review from my 75 thread over here...

PREP by Curtis Sittenfeld

I rated this at ***½ because that's how I feel. It may actually be better than that.
It's the story of Lee Fiore's experience for four years at the Ault School, a very up-scale Massachusetts boarding school. Lee is from an LMC family in South Bend, Indiana (that would be Lower Middle Class) who let her go on a scholarship because she applies and is accepted when she is 13. Lee is obsessed with Ault to the point of memorizing whole yearbooks of information about the other students, but her strategy is to fit in by never drawing attention to herself. She tells her story when she is 24, but that's so close in time that she remembers in great detail just how it was and what she felt.
What a journey into teen angst! Yet Lee is never boring. She denies herself most of the experiences that she might have enjoyed had she been a little less self-absorbed and frightened, but that self-absorption and fright ring through as genuine, at least for me. She never understands that other people - her classmates and the teachers - see her as a person whom they'd like to know. She is too intent on not appearing needy or awkward to risk making connections except for her roommate. She's not always likable; in fact, I wanted to slap her almost as often for being a little bitch as for being so blind. The miracle is that Sittenfeld makes all of this easily readable and fascinating, so maybe I'll upgrade to ****!

Good assessment of Prep - read it a few years ago and found it very readable, but overall a bit fluffy. Sittenfeld is a good writer, but I was a bit disappointed in Sisterland, after enjoying American Wife and Prep so much.

I'm always happy to have a second for my view, E. I haven't been able to generate much enthusiasm for the subjects of her other books, and it's not as though I'm hurting for reading material.

I read Prep and liked it... not loved... I think I remember being irritated with the main character a lot. :)

Just to keep up here, I read The Goldfinch and enjoyed it. I didn't love it, nor do I think that it's prize-worthy, so that's just another woman's opinion.

First up for July is Americanah. I started it last night, and I certainly like the first 2%!

Oh well. I didn't love Americanah, but I finished it. I really liked checking it off my list up there.

I am really happy with both the Oranges I have going at the moment!
How To Be Both is delightful so far. I chose to read the "Eye" section first. I'm a sucker for the life and ruminations of a visual artist. Can't wait to see where Smith is going with this.
Black Water Rising is a super mystery/thriller, set in a black community of Houston in the 70s. I love the fact that the Orange juries have traditionally put superior genre writers on the long list. I can't think of a better way of getting into a culture than reading a good mystery, unless it's having lived it.
Count me a happy reader.
------ and gee..... I remember Americanah more fondly than message 56 indicates.

I truly didn't expect to finish both my Oranges in the same day, but that's what happened. It's hard to think of two books that have less in common than these. Black Water Rising is a straight mystery, very well written with lots and lots of attention to setting. How To Be Both is simply a marvel. I loved it, and I'm tempted to reread it right now, but I won't.
I think what I will do is pull something else from the shelf! YAY!

I pulled and eventually read The White Family. I'm harrowed, but it is quite worth reading, and I see why it was short-listed in 2002.

I did read The White Family and liked it.
For January 2016 I'm committing to The History of Love. If I get to a second one, it will be The Mysteries of Glass. That's one I don't think I've ever heard anybody else comment on. Has anybody read it?

I read The history of Love for Orange last January, I loved it. I'm not sure if I can squeeze in an Orange read this Jan as I'm still finishing off my December reading.

I have both The History of Love and The Mysteries of Glass on my shelves unread. So I can't comment but will be very interested to see how you get on with them! Like you, I have read and appreciated other novels by each author.

Hi, Kerry and Dee. Glad you dropped by!
I did read The Mysteries of Glass, and I didn't love it, but I didn't hate it either. I thought that the descriptions of the country were lovely, but I couldn't give my heart to the young curate nor to his beloved. I can see how it might strike somebody differently, but at this point in my life, it wasn't my cup of tea.
On the other hand, I really enjoyed The History of Love. That makes two of Nicole Krauss that I've read and appreciated, so I'll surely try her again.

I just finished Station Eleven --- LOVED it!
How The Bees could make it to the short list and this one not is more than my little brain can comprehend.

Good point. I get that The Bees as a concept was neat, but it went on and on! I was so tired of the bees and all their jobs by the end.
I liked the somewhat optimistic future portrayed in Station Eleven

Hi, Elizabeth! I don't disagree with what you say about the bees, but I objected to the fact that she couldn't keep to actual biology. It's one thing to mix fact with fiction; it's another to warp the fact to support the fiction without giving the reader a heads-up. At least, that's how I felt about it!

Wooo Hooo! July is coming up, and I have The Glorious Heresies on its way to my very own mailbox.
Anybody else going to be reading Orange/Bailey this summer?

Well, I haven't managed The Glorious Heresies yet although I'm not going to give up on it. I did read The Sealed Letter, and I'm afraid that I damn it with faint praise. It's my first Emma Donoghue, and I see that she can write. I understand that this is about her least good book...... It wasn't bad; just not very good.

>68 LizzieD: I read The Sealed Letter when it was first published and found it a real joy to read until the last pages when it went rather over the top. I must have been in the right mood for it at the time as it doesn't seem popular with anyone else!

Hi, Dee from long ago! I can see how you might have loved *Sealed Letter*. I just didn't.
I never read *Heresies* either.
On the other hand, I am reading Orange in the form of Home, which I'm loving. I guess I was hoarding it. When that's done, maybe I can get back to my 2 from the 2017 long list!

Hi Lizzie. Thanks for replying to Dee from the past! I was thinking of trying Heresies when I've read the ones I have or can borrow from the 2017 list.

Heresies didn't particularly appeal initially but it was a Kindle deal, and then it won last year and I am curious. I suspect it is a very good book, but I'll probably need to be in the right mood.

I've read a couple of chapters of The Mare and so far it's keeping me interested.

Whoa! This thread has been inactive for two years????
Bless Dee for speaking back then!
Anyhow, this July I intend to read The Night Circus because it's one I've had for quite awhile unread and because Morphy chose it for me in her TOLI challenge for the month. I've been told both that it's magical and that it's not. I'm curious to see what I think.

I have Zadie Smith's On Beauty which is about to be released from its hostage period in the library, so that, completely co-incidentally, it will arrive in July.

I've been trying to work my way through the Orange back list, reading 1 every other month. that's not always worked (obviously, this is me here!) But as they add more in a longlist than I can read in a year, my percentage completion drops every year! At this rate I'll never catch up!! I've read a bit over 1/3rd of all winners.

Wow! Hi, Helen!!! I'm glad to see you here (or anywhere). I know what you mean about the Orange back/long list. The thing is that I often have disliked the winners but loved some of the others. As you see from my topper, I have a long way to go to read even what I own. I apparently don't own On Beauty. I did read and enjoy White Teeth 3 stars-worth, but that's not quite enough to move me on to another. Let us know what you think!

I did finally read The Night Circus. I wasn't either bored or enchanted although I did enjoy the circus itself very much. I think that most people react to it more passionately one way or another.
That's my only Orange for the month, and I'm glad I did it!