Trying to kill two challenges with one book here 😅 Mysteries & thrillers tend to be my #guiltypleasure reads so I'm going with Malice Aforethought this month, which is conveniently also the #GoldenAgeCrimeClub pick! Lol.

Debbie Gibson's Out of the Blue album was my obsession when I was 7 or 8. I never grew out of bopping along to some of her songs 😁 'Only In My Dreams' remains a fave 🍭🎶 #TitlesAndTunes @BarbaraBB @Cinfhen

I enjoyed this quite a bit & it reminded me of Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night: the same cloistered environment of women & girls in close quarters & the same kind of simmering psychological motivations for the murder. Bowers' writing is quite delightful; it might seem over-written at first as the pace is slow, but it picks up nicely & provides so many interesting insights into the social & material conditions of the time. #GoldenAgeCrimeClub @Mitch

This was beautiful & sad, with an undercurrent of violence that comes with the territory of "taming" a wild animal. I found it moving in a lot of aspects, & appreciated the biographical aspects of White's life as integral to Macdonald's attempt to work things out within herself. The saddest thing was contemplating these hawks & falcons; do humans have to mess with nature in order to heal themselves? All throughout I just wanted Mabel to be free.

I'm not sure what's up with me these past few weeks; I'm super grumpy & now find myself annoyed with a children's book 😆 I'm blaming it on this awful heatwave. I enjoyed the scenes involving the excellent dog Sancho, but not much else, & I find myself dreading reading even a chapter each night. I think that defeats the purpose of kid's lit so I'm chalking it up to a case of the grumps & bailing. #ChildrensClassicRead2023 @TheBookHippie

Kind of lovely when book serendipity happens. Randomly picked H is for Hawk for the #TBRtarot this month, but as I see now it will feature T.H. White quite heavily because he wrote The Goshawk. It's something I didn't consciously register when I picked this up. Super illuminating to read this though, after reading The Once and Future King for the first time with the #OAFKingalong group!

The damage to my bank balance felt a lot more significant when I was ordering the books, but apparently these are the last of my final Book Depository haul *sob*

Decided on my May pick for #TBRtarot and am very much looking forward to it! @CBee

This is my first Emma Cline, & I'm quite sad that it ends up as a low pick for a book that was so alluring. A Sofia Coppola film in a book, but with a short story ending that felt too easy & didn't pay off for all that went on before. Alex is a sex worker slash grifter, jaded & worn out at 22; self-sabotaging & troubled. Cline builds the sense of dread & anxiety throughout, interspersed with set-pieces simmering with an undercurrent of cruelty.

A carnivalesque children‘s adventure story of trauma; Freud meets Rabelais. Rebecca West‘s blurb sums it up best: “A hot draught of mad, primal fantasy and poetry”. In tone, reminds me of Unica Zurn‘s Dark Spring. This is gallows humour with a complexity that can‘t be ignored; a grim parody of Victorian adventure stories & the anti-Famous Five. Full review here https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5547619162 Absolutely odd, a surreal fever dream.

I liked this, though it improved as the story got going. I agree with others that presenting Lucy as somehow the cause of her husband's infidelity was hard to overlook, while her husband got away with an intact Nice Guy rep. He's so meh. I thought Kate a delightful character, but the narrative was pitting Kate vs. Lucy in terms of women men like to be around, & that was also tiresome. Mrs. Anstruther & Virginia for the win! #FurrowedMiddlebrowClub

I've had Sarah Bakewell's At the Existentialist Cafe on my TBR for some time but got to this one first. I have to agree with the words of one GR review in that it reads like a "standard issue Western civilization college textbook"; the scope of humanism is broad, & Bakewell just goes through the eras & the familiar thinkers of liberalism. There are some great anecdotes, quotes, & nuggets of information, but it felt like a mere recounting of facts.

Three books in & these are proving to be reliably fun & clever middle-grade/YA mysteries. I enjoy being in Hazel's head & this is an homage to Christie's Murder on the Orient Express that hits all of the right notes. I just found the cast of characters excessively annoying in this version; it really shouldn't matter, but it got to the point where I was hoping that all of them would perish in some unfortunate way (except for the Junior Pinkerton).

One of the earliest examples of literary and aesthetic theory. Short and accessible and lucidly translated by Anthony Kenny. This edition also has some supplementary material at the end, of which Dorothy Sayers' "Aristotle on Detective Fiction" is the most fun: "But what, in his heart of hearts, he desired was a good detective story" she says of Aristotle, and it's hard to disagree with her, reading his theories on plot and action and catharsis.

An interesting crime story with a modern feminist twist about a real-life 17th-century murder in Scotland. I found the first half to be quite gripping & it made me grateful to be living at a time after the hard-fought gains of feminism, no matter how small, in contrast to the kind of anguish & physical harm that came women's way in matters of sex & reproduction. Yet I found the "whydunnit" aspect here somewhat strange & not fully developed.

A compassionate & lucid book that will speak to caregivers of elderly people suffering from cognitive decline. It's not self-help or a solutions-based book, but it's based on the writer's experiences with dementia care as a trained clinical psychologist. The two things I found most helpful was the exploration of how the early stages of cognitive decline can often bring on an *excess* of personality.

#TitlesAndTunes This my song+book pick for #IslandVibes A bit of a broad definition of island for the book, which has been on my shelves for some years & that I've been meaning to read! The song is pure Sade bliss. When it starts I am instantly transported to a secluded island, soft wind blowing through the palm trees, a cool drink in my hand & sand under my feet, listening to the waves... 🏝️ https://youtu.be/9WxczfQgMgk

@BarbaraBB @Cinfhen

A brilliant book that I won't forget easily. I went into it knowing as little as possible about it and I think that's the best way to experience it. Probably one of the best texts around in terms of defining one's humanity as the world ends, so to speak, in relation to kinship with animals. What a feat that Haushofer and translator Shaun Whiteside have pulled off: a book about a woman alone with her family of animals that has tremendous power.

I first read this many years ago & upon this re-read I'm happy to find that the mystery remains excellent. Tey has a great sense of plot & also knows how to unfold the story at a good pace. Her writing is crisp & precise. There is something almost gothic about the "two women in a great, big lonely house out in the country" plot; it's definitely my kind of thing. It's a shame that there are right-wing views about working-class people & women.

And this one, which was a surprise, so I'm pretty sure is from you @BarbaraBB ! Thank you so much, friend. You're so thoughtful and I'm so happy to finally have this ❤️

Two more books from the Book Depository final haul. The #TwoSeriousDudes edition 😆

Apologies to @Graywacke & the #whartonbuddyread gang: I couldn't stick to the schedule & found myself unable to stop going once I'd started. Although this seems to have gotten mixed reviews for being a light novel, I was utterly charmed by Wharton's turn towards a screwball romcom. In fact, I found the ending quite delightful & envisioned it in my head as a George Cukor movie (sadly, it never happened). There's plenty of the Wharton cynicism

Books from my final Book Depository orders are coming in 😢 This was a bit of a splurge but it's been something I've wanted for years.

Not the sentence I expected to write, but this book would have been a solid 5 stars for its extraordinariness, peculiarity, & postmodern pastiche (before postmodernism was even a thing), but the last book in this edition, The Book of Merlyn, misrepresents Karl Marx's arguments & that stuck in my craw. So yes, one star knocked off for an incorrect representation of Marxism. But otherwise, a book that held me under its strange spell. #OAFKingalong

I found this book, set in late 19th-century NY, to be mostly a delight. During a year when her parents are away in Italy, Lucinda's looked after by two ladies & roller skates her way through the city experiencing new things & people. I loved the details of her love for beauty, tabletop theatre performances, & falling in love with Shakespeare. There's quite a tragic turn towards the end as Lucinda learns about the hardships of life.

I have to admit I struggled with this at the start, & had I been reading on my own would have probably bailed. I'm not why I struggled; I just felt stuck & unable to get close to the book, if that makes sense. But others who read it said it gets better in the second part, & they were right. It was at turns deeply moving & reflective, a glimpse into the inner landscape of spiritual life, & somehow also quietly feminist. #nunlitquarterly @jlhammar

These are my nominations for #camplitsy2023 There's so many that others picked that I would love to read and tried not to nominate again (the new Han Kang, RF Kuang, Emma Cline & Deepti Kapoor, among some!) but I think there's some overlap here and there 🙂

Thanks again for organising @BarbaraBB @Megabooks @squirrelbrain !

Here we go! My Kindle Fire is coming along! Why? Because apocalyptic miracles can happen and my friend is a genius who can figure things out 😆 @RaeLovesToRead #ihavequestions #belovedbooks

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
The Owl Service - Alan Garner
Howl's Moving Castle - Diana Wynne Jones
Villette - Charlotte Bronte
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
Crime and Punishment - Dostoevsky
To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf

Oh, man. I'm so JEALOUS of how Jen Beagin writes such clever lines that are consistently snort-out-loud funny without it becoming a flippant kind of farce. This is deranged, sexy, weird, & tender. I love Greta so much; I've never related more to a character. I saw someone describe Beagin as having a soft spot for the wayward soul. And oh my god, the dog & the mini donkeys were so beautifully brought to life. Top-notch #spinsterlit , I must say.

What happens when a working wife and mother finds a room of her own in the pages of a notebook and starts writing for the first time? This post-war Italian novel, translated by Ann Goldstein, is brilliant. The style is raw and intimate but expressed with such clarity of thought. The facts of a woman's life laid bare is one aspect, but the thing that disturbs and haunts me is what happens when someone starts writing and thinking about their life.

"Marguerite Duras writes somewhere that every mother in every childhood represents madness. That your mother is and always will be the strangest person you will ever meet, I think she's right." I'll be thinking about this book for a long time. It feels so personal and is filled with disconcerting insights about the protagonist's estranged, disturbed "relationship" with her mother. Another person's mind is always the most chilling mystery.

I'm about to lose my mind. I can't get books by Furrowed Middebrow or the British Library Crime Classics and from various other publishers and imprints locally, and Amazon is crazy expensive once shipping to Malaysia is factored in. This is so bad 😭 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/apr/04/amazon-to-close-book-depository-on...

This delightful picture book tells the tale of a medieval-era owlet who dreams of becoming a knight. He is accepted into knight school, is an outstanding student (of course), and begins to serve in the Knight Night Watch. But one night the biggest test in the little owl's life arrives. Can this adorable lil guy prevail with ingenuity and an instinctive sense of fellowship? Oh god, this was so cute. Sweet, heartwarming, and beautifully illustrated.

"It was nice for the dogs to have their god with them, in visible form." Some lovely, unexpected images, ideas, and turns of phrase so far and I've only just started! #OAFKingalong

@AvidReader25 @BkClubCare

I finished this yesterday & have been thinking about it since. It's my first encounter with Catton & she comes off as a brilliant writer & assured novelist. As I mentioned before there's something Austen-esque about the way she comfortably & skillfully adopts the 3rd person POV to give us insight into multiple characters. It sounds weird but there's something old-fashioned, in the best way, about the intersection of plot & character in this book.

This is a little gem of a book. Magical and strange. It leaves a lot to the imagination and I think children need that; to not have everything explained to them, and to be left with lingering questions and a sense of enchantment & wonder. The illustrations are beautiful and the biographical note tells us that Pearce and the illustrator Helen Craig shared two grandsons, and that the main character is an anagram of the names of the grandsons 💚

Birnam Wood is my first novel by Eleanor Catton and I just started it yesterday. I keep thinking wow, so far so Austen. I wondered if I was a bit nutty in feeling a bit of an Austen vibe in the style of the prose, so I did a bit of googling. And lo! I learned that Austen was indeed an influence and that Catton adapted Emma for the 2020 film! Which I adored! So that's very cool 🤩

Here's the little interview clip https://youtu.be/67gJuSi_3OI

This has four dialogues that take us through, as the title reveals, Socrates's trial & final days. Euthyphro is a debate on the nature of piety as Socrates waits outside the courthouse, while Apology is a one-man monologue where a feisty Socrates argues against the charges brought upon him. Crito sees him in prison arguing with his rich pal on the nature of justice, while Phaedo is the longest, densest dialogue here, on the nature of the soul.

This feels like the essence of 21st-century labour distilled into a novel. It's about the absurdity of work & the grim, tedious Sisyphean nature of repetition & lack of meaning. The mood is like if you were laughing while screaming on the inside. It's like if The Office met The X-Files with a dash of Authority, the 2nd book from Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy. The slow ennui of psychosis & alienation. Full of dread! And so damn funny.

I really enjoyed this sharp, darkly funny novel of one woman's interior life. Dorothy is an adjunct professor of literature who has recently had an incomplete miscarriage. There's a bleak, grimy feel to it that brings into relief the state of precarious labour & deromanticises academia & the "life of the mind", as well as being uncompromising about what it is to have a body. It's a novel for our time, I think; disillusionment & static despair.

This was my first Christianna Brand & I thoroughly enjoyed it. Snarky humour, lots of witticisms, unlikeable characters losing their shit—all of this combined is apparently my cup of tea. I didn't quite see the solution coming, although I was feeling pretty smug with myself for thinking I had it figured out with one of the false solutions 😂 The depiction of the pageant & the nuttiness on display were very entertaining. #GoldenAgeCrimeClub @Mitch

I was interested to learn that Brand was born in colonial Malaya. And I appreciate the gentle skewering of Isabel of someone who's so narcissistic and provincial and so keeps saying "out there in the Malay or wherever it was" because "in the Malay" is genuinely too funny.

#GoldenAgeCrimeClub

The negative reviews had me anticipating a bananapants book. Like a less literary, locked room Bunny crossed with the wackiness of Behind Her Eyes. Sadly, while I did find this entertaining & I kept turning the pages saying, "She did WHAT now", I wish the author had taken it a notch higher & gone wild. I got a kick out of the skewering of the publishing industry & writerly egos though. Silly yet entertaining. Leave your little grey cells behind ?

I was afraid that this was going to be a novel of millennial reticence, where a grieving, disenchanted 20-something Turkish-American goes to Turkey for the summer with her American boyfriend & tries to feel things. But it unspools into something weirder & more tender, & I loved the wry, irreverent tone. There's a cast of troubled, wayward women, old & young, & compelling asides into Turkish politics & classical theories about the body. Enjoyed it!

This was an interesting look at the post-war upheavals & effects on a cast of characters in a British village. It is ironic how something so disruptive to life & wellbeing—war—was the one way for most middle & upper class British women to imagine different possibilities beyond their role at home. Although the writing here didn't quite sparkle, I enjoyed how the book gently looked into all these altered lives. #FurrowedMiddlebrowClub

Here I go again... 😅 #InternationalBookerPrize2023 #InternationalBooker

I can't deny it, this was a deliciously wicked popcorn read. I wanted something propulsive & page-turning & it delivered. The narrator Bea is utterly bitchy but is also depicted in a way that makes her a singularly likeable unlikeable narrator. Moreover it's undeniably dark, raising questions about class, cishet alpha femininity (for lack of a better term) or toxic femininity, & abusive mothers. This darkness makes for an uncomfortable read.

There's much that I found useful in this book. The more I read bits of classical philosophy, the more it seems that the ethical questions raised in the past have bearing on the present. I deeply appreciated how Setiya thinks through the meaning of a good life vs. "the meaning of life", or concepts like atelic & telic activities in terms of living a meaningful life. The text is sprinkled liberally with quotes that inspire you to go to the source.

This book is a sad, beautiful masterpiece. Newland‘s life! May‘s life! It looks like something from the outside, but what was it like from the inside? Wharton‘s gorgeous prose, as clear as crystal, sees right through the hypocrisies of moneyed society. It‘s an incredible feat to create an ironic character in Newland who nonetheless appears as a tragic figure, along with May, because of the value of appearing to have lived well. #whartonbuddyread

"... the book was published by instalments in the Pictorial Review amid advertisements for soap flakes and lavatory cleaners and is generally regarded as one of her best." How masterpieces come to exist will never not be fascinating.

This is from Penelope Lively's intro to the Virago edition. #whartonbuddyread @Graywacke

A lighthouse keeper living alone on an island finds a body washed ashore. The body is that of a younger man still alive. Set over four days, the book tackles heavy themes: xenophobia, postcolonial politics, & poverty, yet at no point did I see or expect what was coming next. Up to the last page, I felt unmoored & unsettled, sad & filled with dread. Jennings' language is clean & precise. It's a short, taut book that feels so much larger. #ToB2023