Like @TheAromaofBooks said, I've read this multiple times but I'm always surprised anew by the outcome. I'm not sure what this means—but for me it's super fun to find that the Christie books tend to be mysteries that keep on giving. Great period detail about an English village & how it views women/spinsters/elderly ladies, which means certain troubling elements, as well. I appreciate the sharp wit & the vicar's POV. #GoldenAgeCrimeClub @Mitch

Maybe I've read one too many thrillers, but I saw the ending (twist?) coming, just now the how of it. I'm surprised by my reaction; I've seen only good reviews by readers & in the media, but this left me cold. It says something about careerism, male-centric success, & the way money transforms a person once you get a taste of it. But there's Muriel Spark's Loitering with Intent that did megalomania, narcissism & deceptiveness way better. #ToB2023

An old-school newsroom drama based on the JAL123 air tragedy, full of details of the workings of a newspaper in the 1980s & how news gets produced. It's also a psychological drama that follows the protagonist, a reporter, through career & personal struggles in the aftermath of the event. It was both suspenseful & boring in parts, much like life, & I could leave it & pick it up any time & be drawn back into the story. A compelling read. #TBRtarot

Thank you so much @CarolynM for passing on your extra copy for our upcoming #furrowedmiddlebrowclub and the lovely extras. Your beautiful card and message ❤️ I love the pin and bookmark! You're so thoughtful and it was a treat to get this in the mail 😘

It feels a bit wrong to rate or review something like this, which is best described as a therapy memoir. It's essentially transcripts of the author's therapy sessions, & each chapter ends with a summary of the author's reflections. I liked reading it; everyone has different problems but also many problems in common, so it was enlightening in parts & it made me think. I just wasn't a fan of the structure, because it had the sense of a textbook.

I'll be reading from my ancient edition of Murder at the Vicarage for #GoldenAgeCrimeClub but I spotted these pretty covers at the bookstore yesterday. They're new to me and much restraint was needed on my part not to get one after reminding myself of my bank balance 🙃

I can't review this with any sort of authority (thinking about those GR reviews that were all, "THIS IS THE WORST TRANSLATION EVER") but I deeply enjoyed this glimpse into Heraclitus's mind. This translation produced fluid, elegant lines. There's not much context & a lot of it is left up to interpretation, like poems. "Fools seek counsel from the ones they doubt". "One's bearing shapes one's fate." "Things keep their secrets." Highly recommended.

A plotless narrative about a 14th-century convent in Norfolk that is a genuine masterpiece. There are no protagonists; we live with an assortment of characters over the years, through plagues, rivalries, & murder. I found almost every sentence a revelation of the author's incredible artistry. It's a social realist novel of a convent, where the enchantment of holy life is dissolved to reveal flawed people & their material concerns. #NunLitQuarterly

This is what I'll be reading for this month's #TBRtarot! I also have Six Four but that's an even bigger book, so it went back on the shelf 😂

@CBee

A dark fable about the beauty & brutality of nature. It's not at all what I was expecting; Disneyfied-Bambi has a lot to answer for! This is bittersweet, strange, & exerts a bewitching power. I think it's pretty unique because Salten depicts how all life on earth is subject to the forces outside of its control; but there's also a lesson there in not to exalt human ability (i.e. capacity to use technology for violence). #ChildrensClassicRead2023

Enjoying these cryptic and aphoristic fragments by Heraclitus—and on occasion you'll come across a sick burn, as the kids say 😎

This picture book has the most beautiful & lush oil paintings that show the polar bears in their fearsome & (yes) cuddly beauty. It incorporates gorgeous colours to depict the silent, icy landscape of the Hudson Bay. The narrative is simple but lyrical, relating the journey of a mother polar bear & her cubs as they search for food & "cope" with habitat loss & climate change. It's evocative & lovely with detailed back matter to explain the science.

Although this is shorter than The Passenger, I found it more challenging. Passenger is loose, warm, & welcoming; Stella Maris is somewhat dense & impenetrable, but deeply rewarding in its own way. I feel like there's a lot of 89-year-old Cormac in young mathematics prodigy Alicia. It feels like a writer who's spent a lot of time contemplating the void & now knows that his time will soon be up. I had to stop & pause a lot while reading this.

"Since the pestilence it is impossible to find a spare priest at a reasonable price. People think of nothing but money." #EternalPlagueProblems from the Middle Ages to current times...

Only 2 chapters in but I'm loving the utter sumptuousness of the writing. And the humour! Every page a feast of delights. #nunlit #nunlitquarterly

The introduction by Elizabeth Crawford to this sweet, feel-good book by Noel Streatfeild writing as Susan Scarlett correctly says that it offers "daydreams to her readers". These are mid-century romances & like Streatfeild's books for children, are suffused with warmth & brimming with charming details of everyday life. I loved being with the Brown family, especially as they made their way through their delicious Sunday tea! #FurrowedMiddlebrowClub

Adam Phillips is a British psychoanalyst I've been meaning to read for awhile. The ideal moment cropped up, because what's better to ring in the new year than a book about change? Except psychoanalysis, that maddening, enthralling, bewitching field of study, is here to scramble your brain & upend all of your accepted beliefs & ideas about change being a necessarily good or productive thing. I especially loved the bits on DW Winnicott & Socrates.

A mystery novel slash Künstlerroman about a Black violinist dealing with racism in his quest for artistic & professional fulfillment, plus a missing Stradivarius. Heavy theme, but fun & propulsive. Slocumb explains that the racist incidents in the book came from personal experience. I just found the writing weak & TED-talky at times, & while I didn't mind guessing the twist, I thought the ending was abrupt for a book that was rather long. #TOB2023

I tried to make this last, but I swallowed this picture book biography of Arthur Conan Doyle in one big gulp. The art by Isabelle Follath is truly a feast for the eyes, with delicious details on every page. But I also found Linda Bailey's narrative super cute without talking down to the young reader. It didn't hide some of the darker aspects of Arthur's childhood & poverty, but it was very witty. I think kids of all ages will delight in this.

I can't lie, the last few years since the onset of the current plague have been difficult. But I hope it's made me better able to appreciate the small, beautiful things that add pleasure to a mundane or challenging day. Even something as trivial as this lovely new planner with fresh pages to start off 2023, with a poem a day 💜

Happy New Year, everyone. Here's to love, good health, peace of mind, and as much reading time as we need 🙂🥂

I should have bailed; I was irritated from the beginning with the writing & characterisation. It felt mechanical & uninspired. I found the author's note at the end about Johnstown & racism more interesting than anything that went on in the novel. There's a recent trend in contemporary American (?) novels of [a serious social issue] overlaid with [genre formula from horror/speculative scifi/myth] that's easily-marketable, but fast becoming stale.

A smart, perfectly-structured book of domestic terror, & a perfect way to cap off #CloakAndDaggerChristmas. I never wanted to leave Louise's sleep-deprived mind. The writing is superb & shot through with mordant humour. I love the ironic references to the psychological trends that were part of the 1950s discourse. With gender roles clearly demarcated in this era, the real monster in the house is the husband, imo. Hit him with a frying pan, Louise!

Thanks to the #TBRtarot challenge again for making me pick up a book I own and have been meaning to read for awhile! @CBee

It's also (sadly) the last book I can squeeze in for #CloakAndDaggerChristmas for the wild card prompt 🎄🗡️

This was a fun, madcap festive mystery for #CloakAndDaggerChristmas. I enjoyed the writing, which is sharp & witty, & appreciated the over-the-top zaniness of the cast of characters. The only thing is that it does get pretty convoluted, & now that I've finished I'm still not entirely sure what happened? 😂 I do agree with @quietjenn ; because it's so layered it's worth revisiting & I enjoyed how it gently but gleefully lampoons the mystery plot.

Thank you dear Jessie for this lovely #jolabokaflodswap present! My fave chocolate and an author I've been dying to read 😘 Wishing you and your family a Merry Christmas and a lovely holiday season, my friend ❤️ @erzascarletbookgasm

Thank you @MaleficentBookDragon for organising this lovely swap! Wishing you and all Littens who celebrate a Merry Christmas, and happy holidays to all 🎄✨

I thought this was a lot of fun. We know the identity of the murderer early on, but the book is a tightly-wound plot about how they get prove the murderer's guilt. It's a little bit melodramatic, a little bit gothic, but also somewhat noir at times. The setting is an artist's house & the bittersweet ending that was firmly on the side of the youth had me smiling like a fond Papa Poirot. Would love to read more of Armstrong! #CloakAndDaggerChristmas

Nothing but 5 stars for the genius that is Snoopy.

Figures that Snoopy is a Litten 😂

A kind of a crappy day was greatly improved by finding this in the mailbox. I think this is from you @LeahBergen ? 😊

I found this book clever enough, with bits of stellar writing & whip-smart dialogue. It was too long, but my main problem is with the emptiness of its politics. Maybe I'm biased because my family is Jaffna Tamil, though we are Malaysian. I've not experienced any of this first hand, but have heard about it & lost close & extended family members to SL state violence. Maali's glib nihilism as a photographer who has seen it all felt aimless. #TOB2023

Thanks so much, Jessie! Apparently the package arrived yesterday but it was collected and I didn't realise it 🙂 So looking forward 🖤

#jolabokaflodswap @erzascarletbookgasm @MaleficentBookDragon

Sent my #jolabokaflodswap package out today. Forgot to take a pic, so here's a festive gnome I spotted at a restaurant 🙂

@MaleficentBookDragon

I don't mean to be rude, or maybe I do, but this was interminably silly. I would have bailed as soon as the 18-year-old "feminist" protagonist & her maid encountered the obeah servant of the sugar magnate & described him as the largest & blackest man they ever did see. I mean? But this fulfilled the nobility prompt for #CloakAndDaggerChristmas so I kept on. A much better book would have had the entire cast of characters pushed off a cliff.

Somehow this is one of those fairy tales that I never read in its entirety. It's a perfect December read for those living in the Northern Hemisphere; the chilly, snowy vibes are immaculate. I loved how the devil in the form of a troll creates an enchanted mirror that distorts everything it reflects. That's a bit of sophisticated philosophy/theology for young readers to think about. So glad to have read it! #ChildrensClassicRead2022 @TheBookHippie

The general consensus is that if you're new to Cormac McCarthy, you should ease into his works & The Passenger is not the place to start. But I started here, & I'm entranced. It's a love letter to mathematics that's an interrogation about God, theology, spirituality, & the essence of being. I found it odd & bewildering, & also very welcoming, like I belonged in its pages despite not having my bearings most of the time. #ToB #ToB2023

What an unexpected delight this was. James Spooner, one of the co-founders of the Afropunk Festival, details his coming-of-age as a biracial punk kid in the desert town of Apple Valley, California. It's gritty, honest, & tender, with Spooner wading into all the tough bits, like his white mother trying her best to understand his alienation, & befriending skinheads with white supremacist family ties. A complex love letter to music, friends, & punk.

Books tentatively planned for #CloakAndDaggerChristmas 🎄🗡️

Alliterative: The Chocolate Cobweb, Charlotte Armstrong
Buddy read: Tagged, with @merelybookish and @quietjenn 🎉
Translated: Murder in the Crooked House, Soji Shimada
Foil cover: Unsure, might skip?
Wild card: The Hours Before Dawn, Celia Fremlin
Nobility: A Gilded Grave, Shelley Freydont
Listen: Not so great with audio books, will likely skip 🙃

Please join in for a murder-y Xmas! 😅

This cast a spell on me, as it might do to anyone deeply in love with books & writing. The singular thing about it is that it blows open the genre of autofiction. It does some beautiful things with language. It seamlessly melds experience & artifice & tries to give form to the act of creation & the process of writing. The physical world is made vivid, but it soars above it into transcendent imagination. Distinctive & special. #TOB2023 #TOBlonglist

Joan, the Chinese-American ICU doctor in her thirties, wonders if the quest for wellness is something like Loch Ness, "a seemingly placid lake with an unknowable monster hiding inside". That astute psychological insight also sums up this novel: an even-tempered narration by its introverted, thoughtful protagonist—probably seen as eccentric by others—that has so much more brewing underneath: identity, gender norms, race relations, work & leisure,

I finished this ahead of schedule, because this edition is obviously the shorter one. It's weird to rate a writer's personal correspondence, but it did make me feel like I had Jane near. There is a singular voice & character throughout these letters, which also made me a touch sad: I felt the *realest* Jane, though expressed to her sister, was still very much under wraps. Very bittersweet as the letters bring us closer to her death. #pemberlittens

"What was wellness anyway? Was it anything like Loch Ness, like a seemingly placid lake with an unknowable monster hiding inside?"

I love how Wang weaves in the most unexpected images into her seemingly placid prose with an unknowable narrator hiding inside.

The Girl from Samos, or Samia, is one of the few "most complete" plays available from Menander's oeuvre. In saying that, it's still very much incomplete. But it's one I grew to like, because the sophistication & cleverness that critics talk about is on display here. I loved the little inter-textual elements, like characters referring to their own personal drama in relation to the Oedipus myth. This is a fitting end to my Greek classics journey.

Read this for the first time! I found this charming and quirky enough without being overly twee. Paddington has his eccentricities, and having watched the movie, I'm glad to learn that "the Paddingston stare" is a thing. I loved Peggy Fortnum's illustrations as seen above; they gave me such joy. #ChildrensClassicRead2022 @TheBookHippie

It doesn't seem right to rate a play that doesn't have its text fully intact/available, but Menander's sophisticated and supposedly more nuanced New Comedy made me miss Aristophanes's buffoonish, rambunctious, and wildly imaginative Old Comedy. Aristophanes's dad jokes had a sting to them. I read the translation by Norma Miller, titled Old Cantankerous, and it's basically like if Frasier's dad was the lead character in an ancient Greek play.

I found this book compelling from the start, but the pace of it made me stop & start. But by the time I got to the end, I was really taken with the story! Affecting, emotionally-charged. It's a coming of age story of a young woman & painter & the deeply troubled family she's with for a year in Brittany. I was reminded of Du Maurier in how the sense of place is woven into the psychological drama. You could almost taste the salty air by the sea.

A superbly engaging first half that descends into a "I gotta get this finished & move on with my life"-type second half, hence the so-so. I thought the skewering of the ideals of the rich was spot on & eternally relevant. Aristophanes goes all in on the gods, who emerge looking like the children of Logan Roy. Assemblywomen & Wealth are supposedly where Old Comedy morphs into Middle Comedy? Thus the awkward growing pains apparent in the structure.

Once again the #TBRtarot helped me get a book off my shelf that's been unread for too long. This is a remarkable piece of scholarship on Black women's lives during slavery in the plantation South. White synthesises a lot of primary resources & archival material to undercut the Jezebel vs. Mammy dichotomy that even popular culture continues to evoke. I appreciate that she restores agency to these women's lives without erasing the horrific reality.

I just started this—about 3 chapters in—and I can't lie, friends. I'm not vibing with the lil demon, Claude 👦🏼 #furrowedmiddlebrowclub

@CarolynM @catebutler@Cathythoughts @elkeOriginal @erzascarletbookgasm @Jess_Read_This @jlhammar @kimzey @LeahBergen @MrsK @quietjenn @Sparklemn @Ruthiella @rubyslippersreads @Tamra

Something that sounds great in theory—a matriarchal commune with private wealth & property banished—becomes a toxic, sexist mess in the hands of Aristophanes in this "comedy". Written towards the latter part of his life, this has all the signs of "old man yells at cloud" (i.e. mocks Plato's ideas). The bit about sexual egalitarianism & sex freed from desire for beauty ran into some ugly problems in his depiction. Barmy in a patriarchal way.

Me every time I put my book down and step out into the world.

#pemberlittens @sprainedbrain

I am easily scared, so there's that, but this is a short & very well-constructed ghost story with a keen sense of atmosphere. Because of how it builds up & how it ends, it kind of worms its way into your mind & stays there. Less overt horror & more psychological accumulation of dread & terror; a "classic" ghost story, in a sense. Big shout-out to Spider, the dog, without whom I might have also passed out during some of the more intense moments.