Cushla reads in 2022

Kia ora koutou,

I live in Wellington, New Zealand and have been on LT since 2009, but in the 75 Books group till now. I've thought about moving over to Club Read for a few years and am finally doing it. My posting on LT was almost non-existent last year and my reading has been way down at around 20 books a year for the last few years. I follow tons of you over here already, love seeing what you're reading, and look forward to keeping up with at least some threads!

I teach maths at high school and have two teenage kids, a husband, and (as of last year) a dog. During the school year I am flat out with school activities, but at the moment we're in the middle of our summer holidays so for the next few weeks I have tons of reading time, mixed in with my Duolingo and podcast addictions. Last year was a very mixed bag - my Dad died of prostate cancer in May - and I'm hoping that this year will be better.

I read a weird mixture of books. My non-fiction reading is usually history, politics or economics, and in the last few years it's often come from hearing authors on podcasts (that's how I ended up reading 800 pages on the Plantagenets) or from recommendations on here. My fiction reading is all over the place but when work gets busy I often end up reading crime or spy novels (David Downing and John Lawton are two of my favourites).

And now for some lists:

Currently reading: The Light Years by Sebastian Falk

Best books of 2021:
Fiction: Loop Tracks by Sue Orr
Fiction runner-up: Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
Biography: Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century by George Packer
History: The Plantagenets by Dan Jones
Crime/spy/thriller: A Death in Summer by Benjamin Black

Edited to add:
Books read in 2022
1. The King's Painter by Franny Moyle - 4 stars



2. Wildland by Evan Osnos - 4 stars


3. Imperium by Robert Harris - 4 stars (finished March 31....yeeeeesssss real life has been getting in the way!)

4. Rome: A History in Seven Sackings by Matthew Kneale - 4 stars (finished 25 April... real life continues to intervene.)

5. Birds of a Feather by Jacqueline Winspear - 3 1/2 stars - Maisie Dobbs book 2 (finished 4/28)

6. The Girl of His Dreams by Donna Leon - 3 1/2 stars (finished 5/7)

7. Pardonable Lies by Jacqueline Winspear - 3 1/2 stars (finished 5/8)

8. Messenger of Truth by Jacqueline Winspear - 3 1/2 stars (finished 5/15)

9. The Collaborator by Diane Armstrong - 31/2 stars (finished in June some time)

10. About Face by Donna Leon - 4 stars (finished 7/5)

11. We Don't Know Ourselves by Fintan O'Toole - 5 stars (finished 7/12)

12. Powers and Thrones by Dan Jones - 5 stars

13. The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson - 4 1/2 stars - finished 4/9

14. The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes - 4 1/2 stars - finished 9/10

15. The Ways of the World by Robert Goddard - 3 1/2 stars - finished 10/10

16. The Courier by Kjell Ola Dahl - 4 stars - finished 15/10

17. Aftermath by Harald Jähner - 5 stars finished 30/10

18. The Escape Artist: the Man Who Broke out of Auschwitz to Warn the World by Jonathan Freedland - 5 stars - finished 26/11

19. The Hitler Years: Triumph 1933-1939 by Frank McDonough - finished 9/12 - 4 stars

20. Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe - 5 stars - finished 14/12

21. The Age of Treachery by Gavin Scott - 3 1/2 stars - finished 24/12

22. An Incomplete Revenge (Maisie Dobbs) - Jacqueline Winspear - 3 1/2 stars - finished 27/12

Hi Cushla, Glad to see you here. It's so hard to keep up on the 75 group. This is much more manageable, so I hope you will keep us advised re your reading.
What is Loop Tracks about.? Is it from NZ or Australia? I went to the book page on Amazon, and it's available on Kindle, but no reviews or description.

Hurrah! Cushla's on Club Read! And reading two of my favorite books, one of all time, Garden of Evening Mists, and one of last year, The Mountains Sing. I also enjoyed Pachinko and am looking forward to the tv mini-series that should be coming out soon.

Welcome to Club Read, Cushla! I'm glad to see you here.

The Garden of Evening Mists is easily one of my favorite novels of the 21st century, and The Gift of Rain isn't far behind. The Mountains Sing sounds interesting, so I look forward to your review of it.

I'm sorry to hear about your father's passing.

Welcome to CR. There are lots of people I would like to follow on the 75ers, but I can't keep up. But I will follow you here. Wish you a great break and a great year.

Kia ora from a fellow antipodean.

Hi Cushla!

Great to see you over here, Cushla! What language are you learning on DuoLingo?

Welcome, and looking forward to following your thread.

Hi everyone - thanks for the warm welcome. I am already not keeping up but that's ok.

>2 arubabookwoman: Deborah, Loop Tracks is by Sue Orr, a New Zealand author. She's written a couple of other novels and some really good short stories. Here's a good review.

Loop Tracks is mainly set in Wellington and that definitely made me love it more. A fair bit of it takes place in 2020 during Covid, and tells the story of Charlie, a primary school teacher in her 50s. But the book starts back in 1978 when she is sitting at Auckland Airport waiting to get a flight to Australia because she's 16 and pregnant - and the only NZ abortion clinic had closed in 1977. I won't say too much about the jump from 1978 to 2020 but avoid reading too many reviews if you think you'll buy it. I got it at Vic Books, one of my favourite independent bookshops, when I was meant to be Christmas shopping - I thought I'd take it home and put it into the shockingly big pile of unread books, but I started it in the bookshop cafe and was still sitting there half an hour later. I don't know if it'll resonate as much for overseas readers - there was also tons in it about our lockdown last year, and the general election, but it was a wonderful end to my reading year.

>3 labfs39: Lisa, both of those two books are out of the library because of you! Although I've been meaning to read The Garden of Evening Mists for years, since I loved The Gift of Rain.

>4 kidzdoc: Darryl, I remember your great love for The Garden of Evening Mists - and so many other LTers. And I can't remember what made me read The Gift of Rain instead of it - it was while we were living in Basel and I spent so much time at Bider and Tanner, the bookshops with the floor of English language books. I've been following your updates on FB and hope you're getting some time to yourself to think about your Dad and relax. It's 7 months now since Dad died and the numb feeling (and honestly, relief that his suffering was over) has taken a long time to go.

>5 dchaikin: Daniel I used to follow your reading and am looking forward to seeing what you find in 2022. Thank you for visiting.

>6 rhian_of_oz: Rhian, it is so nice to see an Australian on here! I will go find you.

>7 SandDune: Rhian, since I last was regularly on here we got a dog, so I'm looking forward to your dog AND book updates. Hope you are well.

>8 Nickelini: Joyce, I just saw on your thread that your daughter is in Luzern - lovely city. I miss our Swiss days. We had a few great trips down there from Basel, one with Mum and Dad and one with just me and Teresa when she was 4. We did the paddle boats, saw the lion rock, and had an enormous icecream. We've been home 11 years now...

On Duolingo I'm doing German to keep it up (plus I am teaching a junior German class so get my students on there), have started Japanese because we were planning a trip there when Covid hit and would like to get there eventually, and am gradually getting my Chinese a bit better as well. Plus Latin, French, and Italian when I want some easy points.

9> Allison, thanks for visiting - I will come and find your thread now!

Happy New Year, Cushla.

Thanks, Cushla. I'm staying busy, but also building in time in each day to read and relax. I've accepted my father's death, but it still seems surreal, and I'm still numbed by his absence. My mother is handling her loss remarkably well, and despite her dementia she is acutely aware of his death and is not confused about it.

Loop Tracks sounds really good, but it's a bit more expensive than I want to pay right now, and my library doesn't have it, so I have added it to the wishlist. I've really enjoyed a lot of Australia/New zeal and literature which I began reading before our trip there, and which I continue to enjoy.

Greetings! And I will add my "welcome to Club Read" and "Happy Reading in 2022" to all the others.

>11 PaulCranswick: Love that list. When I was much younger and in what I call the Dark Before Days (i.e. the years before I met my wife), one of my rules for meeting women I might potentially be interested in dating, and who might potentially want to date me, was "Walk Softly and Carry a Good Book."

Welcome to the Club. Hope to pop in from time to time to see what you are reading and read what you think about lt.

Kia ora koutou,

I've been missing in action for the last 6 months but am (optimistically and perhaps naively) thinking that I'm back. Real life has been hammering at my concentration ability and reading time quite badly but I've managed to chug through a few books. For a while I went onto an Inspector Brunetti and Maisie Dobbs diet (and am still reading both those series) but I've managed to read a bit of great non-fiction in the last month of so.

It's the second week of school holidays, which is when I always get my best stints of uninterrupted reading done - and I'm well into Dan Jones's excellent Powers and Thrones, which covers Western Europe from 400-1400. He's filling in so many gaping holes in my knowledge - I read his book on the Plantagenets last year and it too was great. I'm somewhere around 1000 AD at the moment and am hoping to get the next 400 pages read before school goes back next week!

I will catch up on a few threads and try to get back to posting...well even start posting...before the 2023 threads are up!

Yay, Cushla is in the house! I read a bunch of Maisie Dobbs lately too. Unfortunately I've now read them all. RL can be a drag

OK I think I'm back, four months later. Real life is a bit better and the school year is coming to an end. I have 100 report comments to write this weekend, so am going to break it up a bit with some LT time.

My last 4 books have all been set around World War 2 and the one I just finished is probably the best non-fiction so far this year, followed closely by the book before it.



https://www.librarything.com/work/28045132/book/229743573

Book 18: The Escape Artist by Jonathan Freedland is the story of Rudolf Vrba, one of the first two Jewish prisoners to break out of Auschwitz. I bought it last weekend at Unity and haven't been able to put it down for long since then. It helps that Freedland hosts one of my favourite Podcasts, Politics Weekly America from the Guardian. Vrba grew up in Slovakia and was deported to Auschwitz in 1942. He escaped in April 1944, with his friend Fred Wetzler, with the goal of getting the message out to the Jewish communities and the world that they were destined to be killed as soon as they got off the "resettlement trains". Vrba had an excellent memory and was focused on establishing a full record in his head of the camp, which meant that he could report in detail once he escaped. His theory was that once the Jews knew what was happening, at least some would resist, and that this would be enough to dramatically slow down the killings.

About half of the book focuses on his time inside Auschwitz and it presents more detail than I've picked up from numerous books about the Holocaust over the last 30ish years. The rest focuses on the escape itself, the process of writing and distributing the facts, and the next 60 years of Vrba's life. All of it was deeply affecting. Here's a link to the New York Times review .

>18 cushlareads: Welcome back, Cushla. You hit me with a book bullet right away. I'm especially intrigued since you said there is so much detail. Did you read Story of a Secret State? I found it incredibly frustrating how few people in the British or US governments would believe Karski's reports about the camps. I also read The Volunteer about a Polish resistance fighter who volunteered to get sent to Auschwitz in order to get information (his reports were smuggled out) and to organize resistance. Although it was interesting, I didn't think it was written particularly well.

I'm sure when you read Story of a Secret State I looked at it and it was in the stacks at Wellington library - but I didn't reserve it. Maybe it was when we were still in Basel. Since my WW2 kick seems to be persisting, I might have another look. Coincidentally Karski has just come up this morning in the book I'm reading on my phone at the moment - Frank McDonough's The Hitler Years: Triumph 1933-1939.

I didn't write a full review above, but the parts about the Allied governments - and the Pope - doing so very little in the face of detailed knowledge is just terrible to read about. And there's a lot in the book about Rezso Kasztner, one of the Jewish leaders in Hungary who was later accused (and reading Freedland's book you can see why) of deliberately misleading the Jewish community about their fate and saving a small group instead of telling the much larger one. It took me a while to realise that one of the books I read earlier this year, The Collaborator, is a fictional account of Kasztner's story, in which he's portrayed much more favourably. But one of the things you're left feeling at the end of Freedland's book is how impossible many of the choices were for the Jewish leaders, without full knowledge or hindsight. (Not so much the allied governments though - the antisemitism in some of their responses and their lack of action is pretty upsetting to read.)

Hope I have not just hit you with another two books...

I have read very few books about WWII this year, so it feels good to line some up in the queue. What prompted your streak of WWII reading? Did one lead to the next, or are you just in the mood?

I am currently reading Song of Survival a memoir by a Dutch woman who was interned with her sisters and father on Sumatra by the Japanese. So far it is fantastic. A documentary was later made with the same name, and a movie, Paradise Road. I have not read as much about the Pacific theatre, but when I do, I amazed at this whole other aspect. It hardly feels like the same war.

>20 cushlareads: I have Story of a Secret State on my bookshelf. I might have to get to it this coming year.

Lisa and Jerry, I've just reserved Story of a Secret State now and it should come through in a couple of days. Song of Survival is in the catalogue but as a reference book only, which is really weird and a bit annoying because it sounds good. I am hopeless on the Asia Pacific war, which is interesting because obviously New Zealand was far closer to that theatre than the European one.

And I was talking to our school librarian on Friday about buying The Escape Artist, and she showed me The Volunteer - at the time I didn't click that it was the same book you'd mentioned. She'd enjoyed it - I will get it out next year. I think the run of Germany/WW2 books is what you said - one leads to the next, and bumps other worthy candidates from the enormous piles.

Plus I have been teaching German this year, as well as maths, so I'm talking about Germany more than usual. I've got 30+ kids in my Year 9 (Grade 8?) class, and I was so impressed when tons of them could tell me loads about Germany between the two wars. I was expecting a few sentences and there were hands up everywhere with them keen to tell me about inflation, the Paris Peace Conference, reparations and the Ruhr district. Turns out they had studied it earlier in the year in Social Studies but even so, it made me a happy teacher to see how much they'd retained.

I'm nearly finished The Hitler Years: Triumph 1933-1939 by Frank Mc Donough, which has filled in so many gaps in my knowledge. I need to stop saying "I'm going to read my Hitler book" though - sounds terrible.

The end of year book lists are hitting me hard. Haven't bought anything yet off them, but I was so pleased to see We Don't Know Ourselves by Fintan O'Toole on a couple of lists - the New Zealand Listener one, and the NYT Top 10 list that I heard in their podcast yesterday. I didn't write a review because it was in the middle of the year when real life was hitting hard. But if you are remotely interested in Ireland, or like the Benjamin Black crime novels or Colm Toibin or any other Irish author, it was a wonderful read. And it made me very grateful to have grown up with the gentle New Zealand version of Catholicism instead of the Irish version with its intertwining of church and state.

Back later on after a dog walk.