RidgewayGirl Reads Some Books in 2020 -- Fourth Quarter

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RidgewayGirl Reads Some Books in 2020 -- Fourth Quarter

1RidgewayGirl
Modificato: Ott 1, 2020, 9:29 pm

We're in the final stretch of The Year That Lasted Forever, so that's good. This year's theme is the artist Kelly Reemtsen and most of my categories are ones that have worked well in past years, but I've added a few new ones.

Let's get this party started! And by "party" I mean "reading quietly in a comfortable chair."



The pictures in my challenge are all by Kelly Reemtsen. If you're interested in finding out more about this amazing artist, here's an article: https://artmazemag.com/kelly-reemtsen/


2RidgewayGirl
Modificato: Dic 31, 2020, 6:26 pm

Currently Reading



Recently Read



Books Acquired



Reading miscellany:

Owned Books Read: 49 -- Look at me, reading off of the tbr shelves!

Library Books Read: 51 -- Well, now that the library has reopened, it's back to normal here.

Netgalley: 19

Books Acquired: 93 -- I blame the pandemic.

Rereads: 2

Abandoned with Great Joy: 1

3RidgewayGirl
Modificato: Dic 25, 2020, 1:48 pm

Category One.



A Map of the World

Books by authors from different countries.


Create Your Own Visited Countries Map


1. Optic Nerve by Maria Gainza, translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead (Argentina)
2. A Girl Returned by Donatella Di Pietrantonio, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (Italy)
3. Unmarriageable by Soniah Kamal (Pakistan)
4. In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami, translated by Ralph McCarthy (Japan)
5. The Missing American by Kwei Quartey (Ghana)
6. The Margot Affair by Sanaë Lemoine (France)
7. Empire of Wild by Cherie Dimaline (Canada)
8. Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan (Ireland)
9. Earthlings by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tabley Takemori (Japan)
10. Sisters by Daisy Johnson (Britain)

6RidgewayGirl
Modificato: Dic 1, 2020, 10:54 am

Category Four.

The Rooster



Every year I follow The Morning News Tournament of Books, also known as The Rooster because of the grand prize - a live rooster. This year's competitors can be found here: https://themorningnews.org/article/the-2020-tournament-of-books-shortlist-and-ju...

1. Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory by Raphael Bob-Waksberg (2020 longlist)
2. Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (2020 Competitor)
3. Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen by Dexter Palmer (2020 Competitor)
4. Saudade by Suneeta Peres da Costa (2020 Competitor)
5. We Cast a Shadow by Maurice Carlos Ruffin (2020 Competitor)
6. Overthrow by Caleb Crain (2020 Competitor)
7. Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson (2020 Competitor)
8. Loner by Teddy Wayne (2017 Longlist)
9. Warlight by Michael Ondaatje (2019 Competitor)
10. The Cold Millions by Jess Walter (2020 Longlist)

7RidgewayGirl
Modificato: Dic 9, 2020, 8:55 am

Category Five.

Expats, Immigrants, Works in Translation



1. The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende, translated from the Spanish by Magda Bogin
2. Dominicana by Angie Cruz
3. My Mother's House by Francesca Momplaisir
4. Sovietistan by Erika Fatland, translated from the Norwegian by Kari Dickson
5. You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat
6. Herkunft by Saša Stanišic
7. Tell Me How it Ends by Valeria Luiselli
8. A Burning by Megha Majumdar
9. Autopsy of a Boring Wife by Marie-Renée Lavoie, translated from the French by Arielle Aaronson
10. The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Daré

11NinieB
Ott 1, 2020, 9:43 pm

Happy new thread!

I just noticed you also read The House of the Spirits this year. I found your review, which is great, and while I gave it 4.5 stars rather than 5, I agree with everything you said.

12RidgewayGirl
Modificato: Dic 15, 2020, 11:23 am

Category Nine.

CATs and Book Clubs



1. The Hummingbird's Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea (February book club)
2. Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston (March book club)
3. The Whispering Wall by Patricia Carlon (April GeoCAT)
4. The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, translated from the Spanish by Ruth L. C. Sims (April book club)
5. Sharks in the Time of Saviors by Kawai Strong Washburn (June RandomCAT)
6. Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell (August RandomCAT)
7. The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish (September Book Club)
8. The Party Upstairs by Lee Conell (October GeoCAT)
9. Lake Life by David James Poissant (October GeoCAT)
10. Sweet Sorrow by David Nicholls (December Book Club)

13RidgewayGirl
Modificato: Dic 9, 2020, 8:56 am

14RidgewayGirl
Modificato: Nov 8, 2020, 1:22 pm

Category Eleven.

The Ebook and Nothing But



While I generally prefer to read a physical copy, I tend to have a book or two going on my iPad.

1. Saint X by Alexis Schaitkin
2. Precious You by Helen Monks Takhar
3. Weather by Jenny Offill
4. The Hating Game by Sally Thorne
5. The Lives of Edie Pritchard by Larry Watson
6. Writers and Lovers by Lily King
7. Final Girls by Riley Sager
8. Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams
9. The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
10. The Art of Falling by Danielle McLaughlin

18RidgewayGirl
Modificato: Dic 1, 2020, 10:59 am

And the Pop Sugar Reading Challenge!



1. A book published in 2020. -- The Body Double by Emily Beyda

2. A book by a trans or non-binary author.

3. A book with a great first line. -- Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

4. A book about a book club.

5. A book set in a city that has hosted the Olympics. -- Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha

6. A bildungsroman.

7. The first book you touch on a shelf with your eyes closed.

8. A book with an upside-down image on the cover. -- Sharks in the Time of Saviors by Kawai Strong Washburn

9. A book with a map. -- The Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston

10. A book recommended on a podcast. -- Apartment by Teddy Wayne

11. An anthology. -- Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime by Women Writers edited by Joyce Carol Oates

12. A book that passes the Bechdel test. -- A Girl Returned by Donatella Di Pietrantonio

13. A book with the same title as a movie or tv show. -- Restoration by Olaf Olafsson

14. A book by an author with flora or fauna in their name. -- Visitation Street by Ivy Pochoda

15. A book published in July. -- You Again by Debra Jo Immergut

16. A book by or about a woman in STEM.

17. A book that won an award in 2019. -- Herkunft by Saša Stanišic

18. A book on a subject you know nothing about. -- Stateway's Garden by Jasmon Drain

19. A book with only words on the cover, no images or graphics. -- Optic Nerve by Maria Gainza

20. A book with a pun in the title.

21. A book featuring one of the seven deadly sins. -- Looker by Laura Sims

22. A book with a robot, AI or cyborg character.

23. A book with a bird on the cover. -- Apeirogon by Colum McCann

24. A fiction or non-fiction book about a world leader.

25. A book with "gold," "silver" or "bronze" in the title.

26. A book by a WoC. -- Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

27. A book with at least a four star rating on LT. -- The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

28. A book you meant to read in 2019. -- The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead

29. A book about or involving social media. -- The Missing American by Kwei Quartey

30. A book with a book on its cover. -- I Will Judge You by Your Bookshelf by Grant Snider

31. A medical thriller. -- Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen by Dexter Palmer

32. A book with a made up language.

33. A book set in a country beginning with "C." -- Empire of Wild by Cherie Dimaline

34. A book you picked up because of the title. -- All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost by Lan Samantha Chang

35. A book with a three word title. -- Her Daughter's Mother by Daniela Petrova

36. A book with a pink cover. -- Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory by Raphael Bob-Waksberg

37. A western. -- The Cold Millions by Jess Walter

38. A book by or about a journalist. -- Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Diáz

39. A banned book.

40. Your favorite prompt from a past PopSugar challenge.

19RidgewayGirl
Ott 1, 2020, 9:56 pm

And my last thread of the year is now open. Come on in!

20rabbitprincess
Ott 1, 2020, 10:25 pm

Happy new thread! This year really has lasted forever.

21Tess_W
Ott 1, 2020, 11:11 pm

Happy new thread!

22Jackie_K
Ott 2, 2020, 1:55 pm

Happy new thread from me too. Like everyone, I'll be glad to see the back of 2020! (although I have managed to read some good books, so there is that...).

23RidgewayGirl
Ott 2, 2020, 2:12 pm

Welcome all! Here's to a boring and calm final quarter to the year (as if!).

24dudes22
Ott 3, 2020, 6:06 am

Happy New Thread! You've had some interesting reading so far.

25Helenliz
Ott 3, 2020, 9:26 am

Happy new thread!
I do like looking at the pictures you chose this year, there's something really powerful about then, something in the inherrent contradictions. I wasn't aware of the artist before.

26RidgewayGirl
Modificato: Ott 3, 2020, 5:46 pm



The Glass Hotel is a getaway for the wealthy, accessible only by boat. It's where Vincent works briefly as a bartender, having grown up in the nearby village. It's where her brother also works as a janitor, until he is asked to leave by the night manager. The hotel is frequented by Leon, a shipping executive, and owned by Jonathan Alkaitis, who visits the hotel a few times a year, in part to recruit new investors. Emily St. John Mandel has written a novel, not about a pandemic or apocalypse, but about a Bernie Madoff-type character and all the people affected when his fragile and fraudulent empire collapses.

This novel involves a large cast of characters, with some getting a careful look into what their pasts were like before they met Alkaitis, others we meet mid-plot as they scramble to make sense of what happened. Throughout, the central character isn't Alkaitis, but his companion, Vincent, a woman willing to live an artificial life of opulence without looking too closely at what was bringing in all that money. Mandel has created a seamlessly woven plot and several gorgeous character studies in this novel. It lacks the imaginative world-building of Station Eleven, but with The Glass Hotel, Mandel shows that she is a master of her craft.

27RidgewayGirl
Ott 3, 2020, 5:48 pm

>24 dudes22: Thanks, Betty. It's been a very good reading year so far.

>25 Helenliz: I really like Kelly Reemtsen's work. I've been changing out a few of the pictures as each thread continues for my own satisfaction.

28RidgewayGirl
Ott 4, 2020, 4:43 pm



A Burning by Megha Majumdar follows the story of two young women who transgress on societal norms in India, with vastly different outcomes. Jivan is Muslim and trying to build a better life than she's had. She's living with her parents in a crowded slum, but she has a solid job. Bored one evening, she makes some careless comments on Facebook and ends up arrested. Lovely lives her life openly as a woman, regardless of the abuse she receives for doing so. She's taking acting classes and she knows she's good and just needs an opportunity.

There was a lot to like in this novel. Lovely is a wonderful character, determined to be optimistic regardless. And Majumdar allows the characters to be more than just good or bad; Jivan is living through injustice and has had a hard life and yet she is, at heart, a frivolous person. A former teacher of Jivan's is led into some morally questionable actions, yet he isn't a bad man. And the setting and Majumdar's descriptions of life in India are well done. But the novel remains simplistic when nuance and complexity are called for. The writing feels like it is aimed at YA or middle grades readers, while the contents are very adult and often difficult to read. I was sometimes frustrated with how the writing didn't quite seem up to what the contents demanded. Every character's understanding of the world was shallow. Still, the story and the setting were interesting and I'm interested in seeing what the author does next.

29MissWatson
Ott 6, 2020, 4:03 am

Happy new thread, Kay. Here's to reading!

30RidgewayGirl
Ott 7, 2020, 7:24 pm

>29 MissWatson: Thank you!

31RidgewayGirl
Modificato: Ott 8, 2020, 2:56 pm



Ruby grew up between worlds. Her father is the super for a Manhattan apartment building, one that started out full of rent-controlled apartments lived in by middle class tenants, but over time the building has become the residence of the wealthy and privileged. She and her parents have always lived in the basement apartment, but her best friend lives in the penthouse. Growing up with Caroline has meant art lessons and now an expensive degree she may never pay off. Her dream is to work on the dioramas in the Natural History Museum and her best friend has gotten her an interview. Caroline is also throwing a party that night in her father's penthouse.

Taking place over a single day, The Party Upstairs follows Ruby and her father as they go through a day that will change everything. Lee Conell examines the often uncomfortable interchanges that take place between people when there's a significant financial disparity and in the spaces between employee/boss and friend. There's lots to be uncomfortable and sometimes angry about and Conell is willing to take the characters into awkward situations where no one emerges without fault.

32lkernagh
Ott 9, 2020, 10:47 am

Happy new thread!

>26 RidgewayGirl: - A lovely review of a book already on my to read list!

33RidgewayGirl
Ott 9, 2020, 5:16 pm

>32 lkernagh: Hi, Lori! The big surprise for me with The Glass Hotel was that it was set around 2008 and wasn't at all apocalyptic. I kept waiting for a pandemic to hit. This was clearly my issue and not the book's though.

34RidgewayGirl
Ott 13, 2020, 5:34 pm



The Starlings are retiring and moving to Florida, but first there's a last week a the lake house they've just sold. Joined by their adult children and their partners, they have high hopes of a perfect week to cap off the years' of vacations spent there. Their first afternoon out in their boat, a catastrophe strikes, setting the mood for the rest of their time together. Each couple is at a stress point in their relationship, and simmering tensions are not calmed by proximity to one another.

Lake Life by David James Poissant is not a vacation novel. You're not going to fall in love with any of the characters, or want to join them on future gatherings. Instead, this is a compassionate look as some very flawed characters who often behave badly and fail to communicate with the people they love the most. It's exhausting at times, just being with them. The writing is beautiful and never gets in the way of the story. I liked Lake Life, but I do like flawed, difficult characters, of which this book has an abundance.

35RidgewayGirl
Ott 19, 2020, 1:16 pm



Truman Capote is being haunted by the Clutter family. Aging and isolated in Florida after losing his New York society friends once they saw that he would use their own histories in his stories, he's spiraling downward in a haze of pills and booze. He does have two friends, his housekeeper, Myrtle and the ac repairman. He begins to send his childhood friend, Harper Lee, tiny coffins in decorated boxes. Nelle is also living isolated and not writing, but for different reasons. Now estranged, they were once so close that they worked together in Kansas to research Capote's masterpiece.

Capote in Kansas by Kim Powers is an atmospheric look at the lives of both Harper Lee and Truman Capote. Moving back and forth between their shared childhood, to their time in New York and Kansas, to their self-imposed exiles where they no longer write, Powers digs into their motivations and fears and into the reason they stopped being friends.

This was a lot of fun. I enjoy the exercise of imagining the lives of authors and Powers handled these two Great American Novelists with empathy and humor.

36RidgewayGirl
Ott 21, 2020, 11:36 am



Zero Zone by Scott O'Connor is set in 1970s Los Angeles, and follows the story of Jess, a artist who creates installations, rooms that visitors can enter. There was a death at one of her installations, a room in the desert along a hiking trail that cuts through an old atomic testing site. She's slowly easing back into art, with a new project, but her past needs to be addressed if she's to move on.

This was a fascinating book, full of the feel of the time and place, touching on identity, art, belonging and the appeal of annihilation. O'Connor moves the story back and forth through time in a way that enhances the story he's telling, as it moves from art galleries in Los Angeles to the dusty edges of Twentynine Palms to a smoky casino floor. I enjoyed the way O'Connor wrote his settings, integrated into the story he was telling and making the story richer with it, without bogging down in detail. I'm happy to have discovered this author and will certainly be hunting down his other books. I'd say more, but this is a book that deserves to be discovered without knowing much about it.

37VivienneR
Ott 21, 2020, 1:38 pm

You've had lots of great reading recently. I was going to add The Glass Hotel to my list but found I already own it! A case of too many books!

38RidgewayGirl
Ott 21, 2020, 6:02 pm

Vivienne, there is no such thing as "too many books."

39Tess_W
Ott 21, 2020, 7:54 pm

>28 RidgewayGirl: A BB for me!

40RidgewayGirl
Ott 21, 2020, 8:29 pm

Tess, I'd be very interested in finding out what you think of it when you do read it.

41RidgewayGirl
Ott 22, 2020, 11:27 am



Diane is 48, living in a nice house in a Montreal suburb, her children have all been successfully launched into adulthood, when her husband tells her that he's been having a long-term affair and is now moving in with his girlfriend. Autopsy of a Boring Wife by Marie-Reneé Lavoie is about Diane's life as she deals with her husband's betrayal, her own anger and as she works out how to shape this new life. The book is marketed as a French Canadian Bridget Jones, which does this lovely, honest book a disservice and is wildly inaccurate as well. This isn't an escapist romp, but a serious look at how one woman copes (and doesn't cope) in a situation that is fairly common, but not written about often enough.

Diane is a lovely narrator and companion through this book. She's wry and self-deprecating, without being full of self-pity. She claims to be boring, but while her life is ordinary enough, she's witty, loving, resilient and so game to tackle the challenges of life that I'd like to know her in real life. She's also got a great support system, her kids rally round and she's got a great best friend.

I really enjoyed this novel and how Lavoie managed to write a light and serious and funny novel about the aftermath of a marriage.

42VivienneR
Modificato: Ott 23, 2020, 7:32 pm

>41 RidgewayGirl: Autopsy of a Boring Wife is a bullet for me! I really enjoyed Mister Roger and Me by the same author.

43RidgewayGirl
Ott 25, 2020, 11:37 am

>42 VivienneR: And you got me with Mister Roger and Me!

44RidgewayGirl
Ott 26, 2020, 12:02 pm



In Mercy: A Memoir of Medical Trauma and True Crime Obsession, Marcia Trahan looks at both the health scares and subsequent surgeries that defined her adult life, and her childhood as a shy, uncertain adolescent being raised in an insecure household, and how both those elements factored into her own growing fascination with true crime shows.

This memoir was what I had thought Alice Bolin's Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession would be - an attempt to examine why women are so drawn to stories of the violent deaths of other women. Trahan keeps the lens focused tightly on herself and it's in her willingness to look honestly at herself, she answers broader questions, or at least gets closer to an answer.

Trahan is a very different person than I am, although we share that same weird fascination for crime, and I was at first annoyed by what I saw as a needless paranoia on her part, but this changed into an appreciation that she would so honestly share the reasons behind her cautiousness. There's a lot packed into this slim memoir. It's published by a very small press, Barrelhouse Books, and I'm glad small presses exist to give us unusual and off-beat stories that might not be published by the big guys.

45RidgewayGirl
Ott 27, 2020, 4:49 pm



In this collection of short stories, Joyce Carol Oates looks at aging, grief and the idea of the other lives we might have lived had we chosen differently or had different things happen to us. The (Other) You begins with the author imagining her life had she never left her hometown, remaining to get married, run a bookstore and maintain and deepen her ties to that community. It's a different life, but not necessarily a worse one. That story sets the tone of the book, where widows grieve in complicated ways, men chase possibilities lost in the past and aging is confronted in a dozen different ways.

The same place shows up in a few of the stories; the patio dining area of a California restaurant at lunchtime, and Oates uses this setting to play with ideas about time and self. In one, a woman sits at a table thinking about a tragic event that occurred there, until she realizes that the event may not yet have happened. In another, a man is annoyed that the person joining him for lunch is late, then notices a man sitting at a nearby table who resembles him and as they talk they discover they share a name and are waiting for the same man.

This is only a collection that an author familiar with grief and contemplating the end of her life could write, and these stories are as sharp, imaginative and well-crafted as any she's written.

46RidgewayGirl
Nov 5, 2020, 12:27 pm



A shy Ohio woman lives her life. She cares for her four children, her chickens and her husband. She bakes pies and cinnamon rolls for local businesses. And she thinks about things, her family, her past, random thoughts about Ohio history or bridges or how to gracefully turn away the man who delivers her chicken feed. Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann follows her suburban woman’s thoughts as they scatter and swing back around, but only when she’s busy with the mindless tasks of housekeeping, pie baking and childcare. So events are not lived through, but thought about after, in a disjointed, non-linear way. This narrative is broken up — it’s not just one long sentence — with an account the life of a lioness, functioning as a sort of palate cleanser along the way.

This was a novel that grew on me as I read. It’s an intense experiment in stream-of-consciousness that was not entirely successful for me. I’ve read other deeply interior novels that more effectively put me into a character’s head, but there was something to this one, something that, when my mood was right and I wasn’t tired or distracted, made me savor every single word. It’s also a novel that grew on me over time so that by the end I was sorry to see it finished.

The style that this novel is written in seems simple, but given that I read more than a few reviews in which the author chose to ape Ellman’s style, I can say that what Ellmann pulled off was impressive. Badly done stream-of-consciousness is impossible to read without a great deal of eye-rolling.

47RidgewayGirl
Modificato: Nov 5, 2020, 1:52 pm



My book group chose Warlight by Michael Ondaatje to read and as I’d read it just last year for the Tournament of Books, I was going to skip a reread. But read it again, I did and I’m glad I did. I enjoyed it far more the second time. In keeping with the title, Ondaatje writies cloudily and obliquely, so that events are not understood until much later, if at all, so a reread allowed me to just enjoy what Ondaatje was doing instead of trying to figure out where the novel was going. That said, Warlight did remind me that I’m not a fan of novels told from the POV of the least interesting character.

48pamelad
Nov 6, 2020, 6:12 pm

>47 RidgewayGirl: It sounds promising, so I bought it on impulse.

49RidgewayGirl
Nov 6, 2020, 7:03 pm

>48 pamelad: I look forward to finding out what you think of it. It is superbly well-written.

50LittleTaiko
Nov 6, 2020, 7:09 pm

>45 RidgewayGirl: I’m always interested in the “what if” factor. Sounds like an interesting collection.

51Tess_W
Nov 9, 2020, 5:16 am

>45 RidgewayGirl: added to my wish list

52RidgewayGirl
Nov 9, 2020, 9:23 am

>50 LittleTaiko: I found the looking at the lives we might have lived aspect fascinating and JCO approaches it from several directions.

>51 Tess_W: I'm pleased that JCO hasn't lost her curiosity or writing skills and there's a great value in having one of the US's greatest authors looking at aging like this. Too often, authors who keep writing retreat into what has worked for them before or, in the case of male authors, there's a fixation on remaining sexually active, which is not what I want to read about!

53S.O.Lessey
Nov 10, 2020, 3:56 am

>26 RidgewayGirl: I loved this book, a real page turner :)

54RidgewayGirl
Modificato: Nov 10, 2020, 10:50 am



Imperfect Women tells the story of three women who became close friends at university and who remained close, even when they often went stretches without seeing each other. Eleanor is single, living happily in her small flat, just upstairs from an elderly neighbor she adores, running the small non-profit she founded. She does carry a torch for her best friend's husband, but she's fine with how things have turned out, most of the time. Mary fell for her married professor, but now that they're married and she's home with their three kids, he's dismissive and certainly sleeping with other women, until he comes down with a mysterious illness, so that now Mary carries the burden of caring for her children and her husband. And Nancy is the one who gets murdered.

This is the second novel of domestic suspense from Araminta Hall, who wrote the excellent Our Kind of Cruelty. Imperfect Women lacks the originality of that debut novel, but it's solid and well-written, if predictable, and manages to celebrate women's friendships rather that pitting them against each other.

55dudes22
Modificato: Nov 10, 2020, 4:59 pm

>45 RidgewayGirl: - I'm going to take a BB for this. I like stories like that - one of the reasons I liked Life After Life so much.

ETA: I was just looking at her body of work on fantasticfiction.com and I'm not sure I ever realized just how prolific she was. I knew she had written a lot, but - wow.

56RidgewayGirl
Nov 10, 2020, 7:49 pm

>55 dudes22: It's a lot! She has the productivity of Barbara Cartland while maintaining an output that is tremendously varied and on a par with any of our greatest authors. It's nuts.

The (Other) You is a good introduction to her, I think. It's so characteristically JCO.

57RidgewayGirl
Nov 11, 2020, 11:13 am



Deesha Philyaw's debut, a collection of short stories called The Secret Lives of Church Ladies is a delight. Focusing on the lives of Black women, often queer, often financially precarious, this collection illuminates lives that are seldom written about. While there are commonalities, the lives Philyaw is writing about are varied and the stories never felt repetitive.

In my favorite of the bunch, Snowfall, a woman has moved north with her partner, forging a new life together after her family rejected her. She misses her extended family and the South, never more so than when she and her partner shovel out the driveway early in the morning. In How to Make Love to a Physicist, an art teacher is wary of the interest of the science teacher she meets at a conference. And Peach Cobbler, about a girl growing up with a single mother who bakes for and carries on with the married minister every week, has a companion story later on.

The writing isn't the focus, and neither are the plots; what makes this collection noteworthy lays in how Philyaw establishes a sense of place and in the remarkable characters in her stories. This is a great beginning for a young writer and I'm eager to read what she writes next.

58RidgewayGirl
Nov 12, 2020, 2:15 pm



Nessa is preparing the studio of a famous local artist and its artworks to be moved to an art museum, with the help and opposition of the artist's widow and mother. She’s also dealing with the aftermath of her husband’s infidelity with the mother of one of her teenage daughter’s friends, as well as the visit of the son of her best friend, who committed suicide years earlier. It’s a lot.

In The Art of Falling by Irish author Danielle McLaughlin, Nessa scrambles to keep all the complicated parts of her life functioning, and managing to do none of it well. She’s exhausted, confused, angry and unable to think on her feet. Worse, she can’t really see how any of this is going to become less stressful in the future.

McLaughlin writes well, beautifully at times, and the circumstances of this novel are interesting, especially the story of the dead artist and the women who survive him. But Nessa never comes fully into focus. She is always left reacting to things, never acting decisively. I did love how easy it was for others to distract or derail her in conversation, which is a very human trait, but she was never quite convincing as being someone in a position of authority, whether that was as the person in charge of an important work project or as a mother. While I have a few quibbles with how tidily everything was resolved, the writing in this novel was just lovely and I’ll happily read more by her.

59RidgewayGirl
Modificato: Nov 12, 2020, 3:43 pm



Ollie, the feral kitten my son convinced us to tame, is now a part of the family. And he fits the description of the breed Turkish Van, which leaves me with so many questions as to his heritage. He's also huge - already our largest cat and he's only ten months old.

60dudes22
Nov 12, 2020, 6:42 pm

>57 RidgewayGirl: - I must have forgot to hit "post" earlier, but I'll be taking a BB for this - sounds interesting.

>59 RidgewayGirl: - Look at his tail. What great coloring. SO handsome.

61rabbitprincess
Nov 12, 2020, 6:56 pm

>59 RidgewayGirl: Oh wow what a fluffy tail! He is a handsome boy.

62NinieB
Nov 12, 2020, 10:01 pm

>59 RidgewayGirl: Does Ollie open cupboard doors? My mother has a cat she thinks is a Turkish Van--Mittsy is very good at opening cupboards.

63MissWatson
Nov 13, 2020, 6:07 am

>59 RidgewayGirl: He looks like royalty. What an amazing transformation.

64RidgewayGirl
Nov 13, 2020, 12:29 pm

>60 dudes22: The Secret Lives of Church Ladies was a finalist for the National Book Awards. It's worth reading.

>62 NinieB: No, he doesn't open cupboard doors, but he does get to go outside, which means he has less energy for finding trouble. He does like playing in water and he has a toy - a piece of neon green fake fur that once belonged to a larger toy - that he carries around and sucks on loudly when we're trying to sleep.

Thank you all for complimenting Ollie. I will pass your comments on to him.

65NinieB
Nov 13, 2020, 3:18 pm

>64 RidgewayGirl: Going outside is probably better than cupboard doors!

66RidgewayGirl
Nov 13, 2020, 4:13 pm

>65 NinieB: We live on a cul-de-sac and, through no fault of our own*, we have six cats living with us. It was a pragmatic decision based on our own survival.

* We went to the Humane Society and purposefully brought home one cat. The rest either showed up or neighbors brought them over.

67DeltaQueen50
Nov 13, 2020, 5:14 pm

>59 RidgewayGirl: He's a real beauty!

68RidgewayGirl
Nov 13, 2020, 6:34 pm

>67 DeltaQueen50: He really is! I can't imagine that that fur would do well if he'd stayed feral.

69VivienneR
Nov 13, 2020, 8:28 pm

Ollie is so handsome and sounds like a real character. But then, all cats have their eccentricities.

Your thread is so dangerous to visit. As I read, I have another window open to search library holdings for all the books I want.

70charl08
Nov 14, 2020, 6:21 pm

>59 RidgewayGirl: I love his ears! I'd never heard of this breed so trotted off to google, and found references to swimming. Mind boggles.

(Great books too btw - trying to resist but it's probably futile.)

71RidgewayGirl
Nov 15, 2020, 12:45 pm

>69 VivienneR: Ha! I think at this point that a large portion of my reading is down to a few people here.

>70 charl08: Charlotte, a large list of promising books is never a bad thing. I had never heard of Turkish Vans either and it was so interesting reading about them while nodding my head. He's not some random weirdo, but from an illustrious line of weirdos.

72RidgewayGirl
Nov 15, 2020, 12:59 pm

I'm reading Lady Clementine by Marie Benedict for my book club and I hate it so much. It's just so bad. I'm tempted to take this one to my local used bookstore for the trade-in value and skip out on the (zoom) meeting.

73clue
Modificato: Nov 16, 2020, 5:45 pm

>72 RidgewayGirl: I had the same reaction to The Other Einstein.

74charl08
Nov 16, 2020, 5:14 am

>72 RidgewayGirl: Nah, the sessions where someone hates the book are always the most fun! (Or maybe that's just me...)

75Helenliz
Nov 16, 2020, 5:29 am

>72 RidgewayGirl: I say finish it and give it a really searing review.

Whispers>74 charl08: no, not just you...

76RidgewayGirl
Nov 16, 2020, 10:21 am

clue, I'm glad it's not just me. It reads like a wikipedia article was sentimentalized. It's treacle with facts scattered on top.

Charlotte and Helen, I can't finish it. I have, so often, read terrible books because of the promise of writing a review and I've gone to my book club and ripped a book to shreds before, but I can't get past page 43 and I can't really enjoy complaining about a book I haven't read. I looked at a few paragraphs later in, and it doesn't seem to improve. Gah.

I feel so much freer having set this one down.

77DeltaQueen50
Nov 16, 2020, 2:01 pm

I've just removed Lady Clementine from my wishlist. Life's too short for bad books. I have a couple of other Marie Benedict books on my wishlist - The Only Woman in the Room and Carnegie's Maid - I should probably be removing them as well.

78RidgewayGirl
Nov 16, 2020, 2:55 pm

>77 DeltaQueen50: Glad they were only on your wishlist and not your shelves. Usually I try to keep to the line that we-all-like-different-books-and-that's-great, but holy moly this one drove me nuts.

79pammab
Nov 17, 2020, 3:46 am

I had to go read a bit more about Lady Clementine. When I got to a reviewer quoting "I walked down the steps in my celadon green dress", I have to admit, I stumbled a bit. I can't decide whether that's the sort of language I'd be able to get past or whether it'd hang over me and detract the whole time even if the rest was brilliant. I'm suspecting the second, given that other choices like using the present tense often irritate me for an entire novel....

Yes, life's short. Hope your next read is a better fit!

80RidgewayGirl
Nov 17, 2020, 10:13 am

>79 pammab: Yeah, the choice of present tense was inexplicable. It's a historical novel where she's not trying to get into the protagonist's head and she's not being innovative in any way. It's just intrusive. The author seems to have written down every fact she could find and painstakingly included it in the novel, whether or not it fit the first person present tense form she was using.

This book will probably find a lot of fans. I'm sure there's a market for that sort of hagiography with readers who don't mind the connect-the-facts writing style.

81RidgewayGirl
Modificato: Nov 18, 2020, 4:56 pm



Detective-Adjutant Gripstra, cynical and unhappily married, and Sergeant de Gier, a stylish ladies' man, are detectives working together in the Amsterdam police. When they are sent to investigate a report of a dead body, they encounter an apparent suicide that might also be murder of an idealistic spiritual leader who might also be a grifter.

Outsider in Amsterdam is the first in Janwillem van de Wetering's series of police procedurals and is an excellent introduction to this oddly charming series. Van de Wetering translated his novels into English himself and the books are written in a distinctive and witty style. The setting of Amsterdam in the seventies is another reason to give this series a try.

82rabbitprincess
Nov 18, 2020, 10:47 pm

>81 RidgewayGirl: Curses, my library doesn't have this! I'll mention it to my mum so that she buys it and I can borrow it. I'm reaching critical mass on my shelves so need to get her to buy things I want to read.

83RidgewayGirl
Nov 19, 2020, 11:44 am

>82 rabbitprincess: I've been reading them out of order for years now, so keep an eye out for them in used book stores and at book sales (when those happen again). That's where I've found most of mine.

IT'S BOOK SEASON, PEOPLE! Last night was the National Book Awards, which was available to stream and it was just so lovely. The fiction winner, Charles Yu, considered himself such a long-shot that he didn't prepare comments and in every case, the reactions were just wonderful. In the year that 2020 has been, it was nice to rejoice with people for good things.

This afternoon, at 2 pm EST, is the Booker Prize Ceremony and tomorrow morning The Morning News Tournament of Books Long Longlist will be revealed.

84charl08
Nov 20, 2020, 7:24 am

>83 RidgewayGirl: Oh, that's lovely. How modest of Mr Yu. I missed the Booker completely until a notice on my phone popped out. Look forward to hearing what you think of the ToB longlist, I'm sure there will be many (all?) new books to discover.

85RidgewayGirl
Nov 20, 2020, 9:21 am

>84 charl08: The Booker ceremony was nice, a little less charming than the one for the National Book Award because it was more polished, but it was fun to see Bernardine Evaristo being uttering happy to be there. There was a theme of "Look how multi-cultural we are now, no need to worry, we're super inclusive," which was funny when juxtaposed with them giving the prize to the one white guy. But Douglas Stuart's joy and his acceptance speech were lovely and now I have to read that depressing book.

I will report back as soon as I get my eyeballs on the ToB longlist. It really does form the backbone of my reading each winter.

86Jackie_K
Nov 20, 2020, 1:49 pm

>85 RidgewayGirl: I heard Douglas Stuart being interviewed on the radio this morning, and he was utterly lovely and so genuinely generous towards his fellow nominees. He's already writing his next book which also sounds good. Nicola Sturgeon has raved about Shuggie Bain already.

87RidgewayGirl
Nov 20, 2020, 3:02 pm

https://themorningnews.org/article/the-year-in-fiction-2020

It's here, the Tournament of Books Long Longlist - 77 books to thrill and amaze you!

88DeltaQueen50
Nov 20, 2020, 5:03 pm

>87 RidgewayGirl: Wow, there's a lot of books there that I haven't heard of! I either have or have wishlisted 10 of them, but probably won't get to any of them until 2021.

89dudes22
Nov 20, 2020, 5:21 pm

I'm going to sit down later and go through them all but at a quick look I see a few that were already on my radar. I hear you about Douglas Stuart's book. There are already a ton of holds on it at the library.

90lsh63
Nov 20, 2020, 7:22 pm

>87 RidgewayGirl: That's some long list Kay, thank you! I've downloaded three of them already. I've got a lot of reading to do, I've only read 11 books on the list!

91RidgewayGirl
Nov 21, 2020, 11:53 am

>88 DeltaQueen50: Judy, one of my favorite things about this list is that there are always a few I'd never heard of and I do pay pretty close attention to what new fiction is being published.

>89 dudes22: Betty, my local library system is restricting us to only seven books on hold at a time, so I have to choose wisely. Someone over on the goodreads Tournament of Books forums was saying that she gets 50 holds at a time and I am jealous of that!

>90 lsh63: I'm not sure how many I'll have read before the shortlist is announced.

92dudes22
Nov 21, 2020, 12:19 pm

>91 RidgewayGirl: - Our library is now at 15. It was 5 for a long time. There was only one book on the list that I've read so far. It was a book club read earlier in the spring (Valentine). But there are some that were already on my radar so hopefully I can get to some of them. I may wait for the short list.

93RidgewayGirl
Modificato: Nov 21, 2020, 4:19 pm



A Chicago police officer, newly divorced and recently retired, decides he wants a quiet life and so he buys a run-down cottage in rural Ireland. Cal's doing pretty well, slowly renovating his house and getting to know the neighbors - mostly older farmers - when a young member of the infamous Reddy family shows up. Trey has heard that Cal's a police officer and needs his help finding someone. As Cal looks into the disappearance and gets to know his young neighbor, his plans for a quiet retirement start to fall apart.

The Searcher is another stand-alone mystery by Tana French. It's well-plotted and the characters are achingly real, as they always are in her novels. Because the main character is American, this has a bit of an Ireland for Foreigners feel to it, but not so much as to be overly intrusive. This is an enjoyable book for a rainy evening or two. The crime itself is secondary to the story of a stranger to a community making connections and learning about himself, but Cal's an interesting enough character to spend time with.

94RidgewayGirl
Nov 27, 2020, 4:45 pm



When Francie is eight, her mother has a psychotic break and is hospitalized. Now twenty-four, Francie decides to revisit her memories of the week surrounding that event. So The Butterfly Lampshade by Aimee Bender toggles back and forth between Francie's past and her present, as she comes to terms with the results of having a mother who is too mentally ill to care for her and her own fears of becoming mentally ill herself.

Bender is wonderful at writing from the perspective of a child and with a child's understanding. Francie is a necessarily cautious, watchful child, but she never seems precocious, or too old for her age. This was a thoughtful look at how a parent's mental illness impacted the life of her daughter and how that daughter came to terms with her memories and of her fears of following in her mother's footsteps.

95RidgewayGirl
Modificato: Nov 29, 2020, 1:29 pm



This was our script, and it soon spiraled into familiar territory, which ended in his sleeping on the couch and my staring at the ceiling alone in our bedroom. My first instinct was usually to fix, to make him happy, to take it back, and also to berate myself quietly for being a broken person who could not be a productive part of a unit. But this time I didn't do any of those things.

in Life Events by Karolina Waclawiak, Evelyn is newly unemployed and her marriage is dying. She spends her free time on-line, reading articles and message boards about grief. She also trains to be a grief counselor, helping people and their loved ones through assisted suicide. She's not sure why she feels compelled to pre-grieve when she's never had a family member die. As she drives around greater Los Angeles, learning to help people die and remembering events from her marriage and her childhood, she feels like she's just drifting, but really she's moving forward.

This is a thoughtful, quiet novel that seems to be spinning its wheels for much of the novel, until all the pieces fall into place. Evelyn seems like she's going to start careening from disaster to disaster, when what's happening is that she's figuring out how to live. Life Events snuck up on me, taking its time before pulling me entirely into Evelyn's world.

96RidgewayGirl
Modificato: Dic 2, 2020, 5:44 pm

The reason that I owned this next book is that I've been collecting certain imprints when I find them, among them Europa Editions. While some of the novels they publish lean hard into whimsy, they do publish a lot of translations and bring back into print some old treasures. I don't remember buying this one, but it does look nice in among the other Europa Editions on their shelf.



Lewis graduates from Colombia University and goes home to Wichita, Kansas. He's been dumped by his long-time girlfriend and he doesn't want to continue on and join his father and grandfather in becoming English professors, so he goes to stay with his mother, hoping to save a little money for travel as he decides what to do with his life. He may have an Ivy League degree, but a degree in English is not a valuable resource in finding a job.

Arriving in Wichita, Lewis finds not the sanctuary he'd been seeking, but utter chaos. His mother is starting a new business, taking tourists out to chase storms. She's also got two men in her life, one living in the house, the other camping in a tent in the backyard and creating designer drugs in the basement. There are the usual assortment of oddballs and misfits coming and going and, most chaotic of all, his brother Seth is at home.

Wichita by Thad Ziolkowski may be set in a place not often represented in literature, but at heart this is that kind of novel written by men with MFAs living in Brooklyn. That's not a criticism of that, but this isn't quite as specifically midwestern as I had expected and that colored my reaction to the novel. There are several drug-fueled misadventures and descriptions of the dynamics of a well-heeled academic family, as well as descriptions of life in suburban Kansas. Which is to say, the fault lies in the expectations of this reader and not in the novel, which was doing its own thing successfully enough.

97mathgirl40
Dic 3, 2020, 11:05 pm

>81 RidgewayGirl: >82 rabbitprincess: I've only read Tumbleweed, the 2nd in van de Wetering's series, but enjoyed it and hope to read more. Our family was vacationing in Amsterdam when I was reading it, and all the references to genever prompted my daughter to purchase a bottle to bring home to Canada!

By the way, I would be happy to mail my copy to either of you. It was sent to me by a fellow BookCrosser so it's meant to be passed on. Just send me a PM if you would like to read it. (The book is really small, so it would hardly cost anything to send.)

>87 RidgewayGirl: I'm excited about next year's ToB too. I also follow the Hugo awards every year, and there seem to be a good number of science-fiction and fantasy books on the ToB longlist. Maybe there will be some overlap this year.

98RidgewayGirl
Dic 4, 2020, 2:14 pm

>97 mathgirl40: Paulina, I was very surprised to see a Murderbot book included in the longlist! But genre fiction is being included in best of lists to a much greater extent this year than ever before - did you see that a romance novel made it into the NYT notable books list?

And there's nothing like reading a book in exactly the right place!

In related news, the twice yearly library booksale isn't exactly on again, but they are opening up the location once a week to a limited number of shoppers. I'll have to renew my Friends of the Library membership and see if I can snag a time slot, but it's almost like a regular booksale and hopefully I'll be able to bring in the box of donations at the same time.

99dudes22
Dic 4, 2020, 2:37 pm

>98 RidgewayGirl: - Lucky you if you get a spot, Kay. I just keep telling myself that at least my TBR isn't getting any bigger. Our FOL has had a cart outside the library that you can take a book for free while all this has been going on. I've gotten a couple but I miss the library sales.

100RidgewayGirl
Dic 4, 2020, 9:08 pm



Well, The Cold Millions was fantastic. There's nothing fancy here, Jess Walter has written a straight-forward historical novel about labor unrest in Spokane, Washington in the early twentieth century, and it's so well-constructed and wears its research so effortlessly, that it's pretty much a perfect novel. I mean, the subject matter sounds both worthy and boring, but it is not. Walter uses a pair of brothers who, after riding the rails and picking up work here and there, end up in Spokane, sleeping on their Italian landlady's porch because it's a little cheaper than renting a room, getting meals at the Salvation Army. Gig, the charismatic older brother, falls for an actress in a variety show and joins the board of the local IWW, a labor union. His sixteen-year-old brother, Rye, just wants regular meals and some stability. As the police come down hard on the strikers, both Gig and Rye's lives are permanently altered.

No plot synopsis can show just how compelling a story Walter has crafted, or how well he has woven in real people and events with his fictional characters. I was sorry to reach the end of this wonderful novel.

101dudes22
Dic 5, 2020, 6:54 am

>100 RidgewayGirl: - This really sounds interesting - BB for me. I have the first book in the series he wrote (only 2 books) on my TBR also.

102RidgewayGirl
Dic 5, 2020, 11:08 am

>101 dudes22: I read Beautiful Ruins which I liked, but this one I love.

103RidgewayGirl
Dic 10, 2020, 2:18 pm



Mayflies by Andrew O'Hagan is two very different novels put together, although the second half could not exist without the first. In the mid-eighties, a time of miners' strikes, Margaret Thatcher and the peak of indie rock, a group of young Scottish men plan a weekend trip to Manchester for a music festival headlined by The Smiths. James, called Noodles by his friends, is the first of his family and neighborhood to be accepted into university. Tully is his best friend, a charismatic, easy-going, always in the center of things guy, whose playful exterior hides anxiety about his future.

This is a joy-filled romp of a perfect weekend and I loved every single paragraph. O'Hagan perfectly captures that moment of young adulthood when the world opens up and music is the most important thing. I'm not that much younger than the boys in this story and their adventures brought back so many memories of small clubs and perfect nights out.

The second half of the book concerns Tully and James, now three decades older. Tully is diagnosed with cancer and he's determined to go out on his own terms and his best friend, James, is the person he most trusts to stand by him. This half has a much more serious tone, despite the unemployed workers and casual racism of the first half. But the fun of the beginning gives an earned emotional depth to this story of a man supporting his best friend.

104Jackie_K
Dic 10, 2020, 3:02 pm

>103 RidgewayGirl: I've added that to my library wishlist.

105RidgewayGirl
Dic 10, 2020, 4:10 pm

>104 Jackie_K: I think you may love it, despite it being fiction! I would have rated it higher, but there was an extended rant about Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark that hurt my feelings. This was one of the soundtracks of my teenage years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPmTGFg06zA

106Helenliz
Dic 10, 2020, 4:26 pm

>105 RidgewayGirl: hmm. Reconsidering adding that to the wishlist. Despite it being at least 25 years ago, OMD remain the best gig I ever went to.

107RidgewayGirl
Dic 10, 2020, 4:48 pm

>106 Helenliz: I bet that was a great experience! If you love that music, you'll love the sheer passion they have for it.

108RidgewayGirl
Dic 11, 2020, 10:32 am



A series of murders take place in south Los Angeles. A serial killer should take up more space in the media, but the victims were all either sex workers or living risky lives, the forgettable. The murders stop suddenly and Dorian is sure it's because the final victim was her daughter, who never made it home after a babysitting job, a good girl. Now, years later, the murders start up again and the only cop willing to see what's happening is a disgraced detective, sent down from homicide to vice, someone the other cops won't listen to.

These Women by Ivy Pochoda is about those women that are deemed disposable. The party girls, cocktail waitresses in strip clubs, women working their corner of a gritty part of Los Angeles that's cut in two by the I-10, a mix of residential neighborhoods, bars, liquor stores, fast food, art galleries and car lots, and equally mixed in who lives there, from the home owners with their security gates and barred windows to the drug addicts and people barely scraping by. Each section is told from the point of view of a woman living there, each section slowly getting closer to discovering who the killer is and who has been protecting him.

Pochoda has made a specific neighborhood in Los Angeles an integral part of the story, while doing something more than just writing a well-plotted crime novel. She's interested in the women who go unnoticed, especially after they've gone. This is a good one and one that deserved more attention than it got.

109RidgewayGirl
Dic 15, 2020, 3:34 pm



Charles Yu's reaction to winning the National Book Award was so heart-felt and charming that I started reading Interior Chinatown immediately. More zoom awards ceremonies from people's living rooms, please. The entire event was delightful.

Also delightful was this novel. Set on a Hollywood soundstage, it manages to be funny and tragic, uplifting and a stark look at the many ways that racism plays out in the United States, with an emphasis on the lives of Asian immigrants and their children. It's fast-paced and feels simultaneously weighty and effervescent. It's a short novel that makes every single word count, using a variety of ways to tell a compelling story. I hope this novel is widely read and I'm eager to read Charles Yu's other books.

110mathgirl40
Dic 15, 2020, 9:59 pm

>109 RidgewayGirl: Glad to hear you liked this book so much. It's on my wishlist and I think it has a good chance of being on the Tournament of Books shortlist.

111RidgewayGirl
Dic 16, 2020, 9:55 am

>110 mathgirl40: I'd bet on Interior Chinatown being in the ToB. It's exactly the kind of book they love, and it won the National Book Award.

112dudes22
Dic 17, 2020, 5:51 pm

>109 RidgewayGirl: - I requested this from the library almost as soon as he won, but I'm still on a waiting list.

113charl08
Dic 18, 2020, 1:07 am

>109 RidgewayGirl: Waiting for this one from the library. I have so enjoyed the zoom book events I've tuned into. Partly just the sense of things carrying on somehow.

114RidgewayGirl
Modificato: Dic 20, 2020, 1:58 pm



July and September, sisters born less than a year apart, have been taken by their mother to an isolated house on the Yorkshire coast. There was an incident at school back in Oxford, and their mother isn't doing very well, spending long hours in her room with the door closed as July and her older sister figure out how to pass the time.

Sisters by Daisy Johnson is told from the close point-of-view of July, as she avoids thinking about the incident at school. She and her sister have always been so close, moving in tandem and insisting on sharing a birthday. But isolated and without any adult guidance, July is beginning to realize that she doesn't always want to do what September wants.

I love deeply interior novels like this one, where all we see is what a character sees and thinks and experiences. It can be claustrophobic, but also intimate. Here, July is a teenager whose feelings are confused and contradictory and Johnson has given her such a distinctive, uncertain voice. Hiding a crucial event can seem like authorial manipulation, but Johnson is an assured enough writer to pull it off beautifully. I very much enjoyed this one.

115thornton37814
Dic 20, 2020, 10:07 pm

>114 RidgewayGirl: I saw that one mentioned on several "best of" lists.

116RidgewayGirl
Dic 23, 2020, 12:00 pm

I recently read two very different books that centered on Shakespeare in some way, so I thought I'd review them together, sort of.



In Sweet Sorrow, David Nicholls tells the story of the summer after Charlie finished school, when he becomes involved with an amateur theater group preparing to put on Romeo and Juliet. His entire reason is to get a girl to notice him. As he gets roped into playing Benvolio, he looks back at his disastrous exam results and falls in love with a girl from the posh private school, as he struggles to take care of his father.

Nicholls writes with such lightness and humor about some darker topics. Even as the reader watches Charlie race toward disaster, it's done with such assurance that he will survive (the novel is told from the point of view of a much older Charlie) and even thrive in the end, that it's somehow more effective. This is very well-done chick-lit, where the main character is a young man. It'a a shame that since the genre is so woman-oriented that it's seen more as trashy escapism for the ladies, than as a genre with wide appeal, because novels that are written with a lightness of tone about serious events and issues require more talent and skill than a more heavy-handed approach to the same situations.

Of Nicholls's novels, this one most resembles Starter for Ten, being a coming-of-age novel about leaving home and finding oneself in unfamiliar surroundings. Charlie describes himself someone who never stands out, but he has a self-deprecating charm and a resilience that makes him very good company.

117RidgewayGirl
Dic 23, 2020, 12:24 pm



Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell is about a family and mostly about a woman who marries the young Latin tutor and moves from her stepmother's farm to the town to live in the tutor's father's house. She bears him three children. The tutor is finding his vocation in London with a group of traveling players when he is summoned back. The plague, which has be raging through England, has reached his family.

This novel centers on grief, on being a parent who has lost a child and what that loss and grief does to a family, and to each of the members of that family. O'Farrell does such a brilliant job in bringing to life the world that Shakespeare and his family inhabited, as well as writing a tender and stark account of grief. This is a hugely impressive book that is both beautifully written and impressive in how lightly it wears its research.

118Tess_W
Dic 23, 2020, 2:11 pm

>117 RidgewayGirl: I just purchased this book about 2 weeks ago as part of my Thingaversary. Hopefully I will read it in the next week or so.

119Helenliz
Dic 23, 2020, 3:07 pm

>117 RidgewayGirl: I thought it was exceptionally well done and entirely convincing.

120VivienneR
Dic 23, 2020, 3:45 pm

>116 RidgewayGirl: Sounds like a fun read, I've added this to my wishlist.

>117 RidgewayGirl: My favourite book this year.

121LittleTaiko
Dic 23, 2020, 5:09 pm

>109 RidgewayGirl: - I have the on hold at the library - really looking forward to reading it when it comes in.

122rabbitprincess
Dic 23, 2020, 10:43 pm

>116 RidgewayGirl: I'm going to have to buy a copy of this. I have Nicholls's other novels, and Starter for Ten is my favourite of those!

123RidgewayGirl
Dic 24, 2020, 1:14 pm

>118 Tess_W: Good choice, Tess. This is a book to keep.

>119 Helenliz: Helen, O'Farrell did such a good job of creating an entire world without the research showing or it feeling too Ye Olde Englandy.

>120 VivienneR: Vivienne, I think you'll like Sweet Sorrow.

>121 LittleTaiko: It took a long time for my turn to come with Hamnet. COVID is slowing the entire holds system as my library system is holding all returns for six days before checking them back in.

>122 rabbitprincess: I thought of you when I was writing my review. I think you were the person who got me to read Starter for Ten.

124RidgewayGirl
Modificato: Dic 25, 2020, 11:11 am



Behold! The books of Christmas! Yes, I've read The Searcher already, but my husband assures me that he has the receipt around somewhere.

Happy Holidays to all, however you choose to celebrate.

125DeltaQueen50
Dic 25, 2020, 3:10 pm

Merry Christmas, Kay. Books for Christmas are the best!

126PaulCranswick
Dic 25, 2020, 8:08 pm



I hope you get some of those at least, Kay, as we all look forward to a better 2021.

127Tess_W
Modificato: Dic 25, 2020, 8:59 pm

128dudes22
Dic 26, 2020, 5:45 am

Merry Christmas, Kay.

129RidgewayGirl
Dic 26, 2020, 1:54 pm

Thank you, Judy, Paul, Tess and Betty! I hope your days have been merry and bright!

I'm thinking that it's time to set up next year's thread, or maybe it's time to make a cup of tea and do some reading.

130RidgewayGirl
Dic 30, 2020, 2:17 pm



Magnus is a comedian who grew up in the Orkney islands and is now in London, where he's just gotten a big break opening for a much more famous comedian. The first night goes well, but on his way home he sees a man attempting to rape a drunk woman and intervenes. When the police show up, they arrest him; an unfortunate mistake, but one Magnus thinks can be quickly resolved, except that a pandemic hits while he's in a jail cell, which is not a great place to be when the people around you are dying. If he survives the virus and manages to get out, his plan is to make his way home, where he hopes his family is alive and waiting for him.

The second in Louise Welsh's trilogy about life during and after a deadly pandemic, Death is a Welcome Guest is really a stand-alone set in the same world as the first novel, A Lovely Way to Burn. Like the first novel, this one also centers on a mystery along with the struggle simply to survive. People are not necessarily who they say they are and sometimes they are a lot worse. And actions taken for the good of everyone sometimes do a great deal of harm. In the final pages, this novel ties to the first one and I'm very much looking forward to reading the final installation of this excellent series.

131DeltaQueen50
Dic 30, 2020, 2:22 pm

>130 RidgewayGirl: I have this one and the final book in the trilogy on my stack - and I am looking forward to them!

132RidgewayGirl
Dic 30, 2020, 2:26 pm

>131 DeltaQueen50: Judy, as soon as I finished Death is a Welcome Guest, I ordered the final book. I'm eager to see what happens! The opening of this one featured a cruise ship stranded outside a harbor, denied permission to dock because of the sudden illness on board. Eerie to see the parallels with this pandemic, but I suppose that cruise ships are floating petrie dishes.

133DeltaQueen50
Dic 30, 2020, 3:03 pm

>132 RidgewayGirl: I have certainly had second thoughts on cruising in the future. Of course I am one of the unlucky ones who gets seasick the minute we leave harbour so there is that at well!

134thornton37814
Dic 30, 2020, 4:30 pm

>130 RidgewayGirl: I found I sometimes enjoy post-apocalyptic fiction so I just downloaded the first in the series. I added it to a list to read this year.

135RidgewayGirl
Dic 30, 2020, 4:37 pm

>133 DeltaQueen50: I always thought a cruise sounded fun until a boss I had returned from a seven day cruise having gained seven pounds and that is not something I want to deal with.

>134 thornton37814: I'm interested to find out what you think of it. I really like the author's work.

136RidgewayGirl
Dic 30, 2020, 8:22 pm



When No One is Watching by Alyssa Cole is a thriller about gentrification. A small Brooklyn neighborhood is changing. Almost every day it seems that a long-time resident sells up and a white family moves in, or a local shop is replaced with an upscale boutique. At first, Sydney barely notices, she's wrapped up in her own financial difficulties and still reeling from the collapse of her marriage. But as the offers on her mother's brownstone become more numerous and insistent, she notices that the changes to the neighborhood seem malevolent and centered on a new medical research company headquarters.

As a book about how gentrification harms long-established communities and as a history of how that has played out in Brooklyn, this novel is a success. There's also a rising sense of being powerless in the face of injustice that was very effective. As a thriller, the big reveal felt abrupt, although the violent Tarantino-style final scenes certainly made an impact.

137VivienneR
Dic 30, 2020, 9:21 pm

>124 RidgewayGirl: Nice haul! I hope that This time next year we'll be laughing comes true.

Happy New Year of reading.

138RidgewayGirl
Dic 30, 2020, 10:41 pm

>137 VivienneR: Oh, I do, too. See you over in the 2021 challenge threads!

139Kristelh
Dic 31, 2020, 10:12 pm

Happy New Year, see you in 2021.

140RidgewayGirl
Dic 31, 2020, 10:23 pm

>139 Kristelh: Happy New Year! See you next year!

141pammab
Gen 1, 2021, 4:05 pm

>135 RidgewayGirl: Seven pounds in seven days! Oh dear.

Happy new year! Hope you have many excellent tidings.