My 5th on the International #Booker2024. Quilombos history - communities of free black escapes slaves in Brazil - is central to contemporary Brazilian politics. Here we get a story of black tenants farmers living in mud huts and their history with their landlords. What makes this book special to me was the look into the mythologies - African-originated encantados mixed into Catholic mythology and martyrs. This is worth a read.

Japan medieval history is very confusing and Clements makes it more confusing by giving the reader too many compressed details and not enough clear analysis. Still, lots of interesting stuff here. I was entertained to learn the origins of sushi and kabuki theater.

Read this mystery for the setting - Kyiv, Ukraine in 1919 during a brief Bolshevik occupation. The book opens as Cossacks randomly attack citizens on their way out of town, completing a white army retreat. Samson, our young orphan hero, has to manage this chaos having lost an ear and his entire family. He joins a nascent Bolshevik police force with no veterans or experience, and gets a firearm.

I enjoyed this curiosity, found it wonderfully done, found the writing, which focuses so much on the sound, always interesting and terrific, with its own rhythm and life. And I say this even I didn't really get it. (I missed a lot, as I discovered afterwards reading online reviews) This maybe should have won the Booker (and I loved the winner, Prophet Song)

My 3rd from the International #Booker2024 longlist, now on the shortlist. 1980‘s East Berlin. A young woman, 19, falls for a married man, age 53. It starts out somehow romantic before getting darker. What‘s interesting, and what i thought about while listening, was how this relationship reflects the state of the dying GDR. It‘s, if you like, a romantic look at a lost, stifled but stable East Berlin. It makes for interesting read.

Started today. And after reading a couple notes…looks like I‘ll need to read that part over again.

Looking for audiobooks and indecisive, I found this free on audible. I‘m fascinated, all of 20 minutes in.

This finally comes across as a playful satire on 1920‘s NY moneyed culture, mocking supposed progress and 1920‘s shallowness, spiritual fads, bad parenting and human frailties. But there are real weighty elements here. The youthful 1920‘s are represented in Lita and Nona. Clear-sighted Lita wants to be admired, maybe a movie star, disowning responsibility for consequences. Nona quietly sacrifices herself to manage her family‘s failures.

A little tough to photograph the super-reflective public library cover. But my model did good. I peaked into this yesterday and seems I‘m reading it. Easy reading. (Reminds me of Gogol‘s The Nose in tone) #booker2024

Twilight Sleep was originally released in a series in Pictorial Review with this cover, before the book was released and temporarily became a bestseller.

So, what did you think? Did you understand the end? (If not, Wikipedia has it laid out in the plot summary.) Like The Glimpses of the Moon, I think this was a Wharton having a little fun with satire, but here also playing with perspectives. #whartonbuddread

Offbeat 1990‘s Stockholm. This reads a lot like Rachel Cusk, but it‘s a study of relationships, lovers, friendships and mom. It has a lovely tolerance of personal oddities and failures, and a warmth in appreciating the whole person. I enjoyed it. (And it‘s short. Took this slow reader 3.5 hours to read these 137 pages) #Booker2024

I really like Kadare. He‘s playful and serious and very critical of the Albanian Stalinist state he lived most of his life in. Here he looks at one phone call, when Stalin called Boris Pasternak without warning and asked him about the recent arrest of fellow Jewish poet Osip Mandelstam, Pasternak basically failing this impossible call. Around this is Kadare‘s experience under the rule of this kind of tyrant. It‘s an odd, curious, readable book.

She‘s like, “yeah, right” 🙄 But it‘s my next read and I‘m looking forward to it. #booker2023

The image is from a 1916 documentary of the Twilight Sleep birth process (women only)

Book II - #whartonbuddyread

Characters develop. Mostly the Pauline satire (and the Alvah Loft frustration cure), but also a lot more on Lita, Dexter, Nona, and Stanley. We meet masked Aggie Heuston and Kitty Landish. And learn of Cleo Merrick.

Does Lita have issues, or Pauline offended by the lack of appreciation? Any thoughts on this transitional section?

Started this, a library loan. Getting Rachel Cusk vibes. #booker2024

A treasure highlighted by the Women‘s Nonfiction Prize longlist. This is a memoir of a difficult impoverished childhood in Jamaica with a domineering Rastafarian father who becomes abusive. It‘s, first, gorgeous, with a poetic prose throughout (brought out especially on audio), but also intense and fascinating. Recommended!

I seem to be reading this. Library loan that is taking this slow reader about a minute a page. #Booker2024

Twilight Sleep : Book one
#whartonbuddyread

Flapper shocker? 🤷🏻‍♂️ What are your thoughts on Nona, Lita, Pauline and her men?

We are in Wharton‘s later books. She‘s experimenting, and she‘s bringing middle aged women to life. So as we sigh at her Pauline satire, also take a moment to think why Wharton spends so much time on her.

#whartonbuddyread 🙂

Just downloaded this morning. It may the only international booker longlist book i will read on audio. It‘s also the first from the list that I‘ve started. #booker2024

Getting going #whartonbuddyread

Faulkner‘s 1st book set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha county MS. It sets the backdrop most of his other work going forward. His postage stamp. It was rejected by publishers for having no plot or character development.

And yet I enjoyed it. I took in these characters and I closed it with real affection - the myth of Colonel John Sartoris, his brother, son, great grandsons all a short paths to glamorous bad ends, or haunted by the prospect.

A young adult biography that serves as an excellent introduction into who Wharton was. It‘s a library book that I picked up to scan through and found myself wanting to keep reading. I liked that it's a nice efficient take that covers the essentials of Wharton's very complicated life. It explained a lot of stuff I was only loosely aware of or didn't know at all. #whartonbuddyread

#whartonbuddyread

A little prep for our next #whartonbuddyread - Twilight Sleep. We discuss Book One on March 23.

These are all library books I checked out today

My past week. I finished Ammonites, started Faulkner‘s Flags in the Dust - which will take me most of March. Chaucer and How to Say Babylon continue. (I finished Sir Tropas in Canterbury Tales)

Started Faulkner‘s 3rd novel yesterday. The publisher felt it was too long, and only published it in a cut form in 1929. The full version wasn‘t released until 1973. There were corrections made in 2006.

I know it‘s on me, but this just wasn‘t what I was looking for. I was hoping for a memoir, but this is a collection of five personal essays on somewhat random topics. It's all written with her sharp intelligent prose, and reads beautifully. And, reading her essay on being 80, you can't help but be struck by how mentally sharp she is as a writer. And she does have some lovely quotes. See comments.

I just didn‘t expect this to be so charming and funny. I mean the events aren‘t funny, but the text is, constantly.

Smith addressed serious hot-button cultural issues with a freedom and freshness that is unusual, and insightful. She gets into serious extreme Islam (on the eve of Sep 11), and also into English-Bengali and English-Jamaican racial issues. It's smart, and unexpectedly charming, and works wonderfully.

A collection of quotes from contemporaries. It‘s a messy production, but still, I found it interesting. The editors chose who they thought was of interest and then gave an intro for each writer or editor or critic. It ends up as an overview of an era (1920‘s to 1950‘s)

My week in reading. I finished Pearl, Edith Wharton‘s The Mother‘s Recompense (1925), Hemingway and Faulkner in Their Time (2005), and, yesterday, the terrific White Teeth by Zadie Smith (2000). Chaucer continues (on The Pardoner‘s Tale), and I‘ve started Penelope Lively‘s memoir at 80, Ammonites and Leaping Fish (2013), an intriguing and poetic memoir, How to Say Babylon (2023) by Jamaican-born Safiya Sinclair 👇

Kay Boyle (1902-1992):
Asked whether something special characterized the 1920s:

There was indeed. It was the revolt against all literary pretentiousness, against weary, dreary rhetoric, against all the outworn literary and academic conventions. Our slogans were Down with Henry James, down with Edith Wharton, down with the sterility of "The Waste Land"… ?

#whartonbuddyread ?

Edith Wharton, for example, the grande dame of American letters nearing the end of her career, wrote to a friend in 1934: "What a country! With Faulkner and Hemingway acclaimed as the greatest American novelists, & magazine editors still taking the view they did when I began to write! Brains & culture seem nonexistent from one end of the social scale to the other, & half the morons yell for filth, ?

I‘ve been really scattered brained. So I decided to find the most boring book on my shelves, from my 1994 undergraduate class on the Roman Empire. (Yeah, I was supposed to read it then. Oops) Well, i‘ve been reading it. Not sure how far i will get.

Trying to get into this. I am infinitely more excited about it than my pup. (Well, her interest is zero) So far a lovely look at being 80.

My 11th from the #booker2023 longlist is surprisingly humble. This search for a lost mother, who stepped out and was never seen again, is a life‘s work. Hughes has been reworking this story since she was a teenager, and it‘s her 1st and only novel. It reads like a memoir, and it feels real. It‘s just that deeply thought through. It seems to do everything Hughes wanted it to do. Recommended.

Finally, baseball is back. Also I‘m trying to read this collection of contemporary responses to Hemingway and Faulkner. It‘s a little bit of info overload. So reading in nibbles (and hoping the library is patient with me)

Well, I still haven‘t figured this one out. Kate Clephane comes home 20 years after running away from her husband and her daughter. The lost mother is found, and a brief perfect happiness ensues. But who is this Kate, now returning to a different New York of different landscapes, speeds and values, but with some things preserved perfectly? I still don‘t know. EW is messing with her reader, while providing masterful prose. #whartonbuddyread

Wharton takes on the Jazz Age. It was apparently a best seller in 1927. This will be our next #whartonbuddyread

Getting started on this

A ship of fools goes aground in a lake near New Orleans, and the yacht‘s widowed mistress is not too happy. This book, Faulkner‘s 2nd (1927), has so many issues, including a sputtering narrative and Lolita-ish eroticism. And yet, so, I enjoyed it. It‘s funny. The characters stick and hang around. They can humorously romantic, and then suddenly full of deep drunken thoughts on the arts. One character reads poetry aloud. So…well…flawed but…

My current audiobook. I‘m about 5 hours in, and it‘s about 18 hours long. And so far, constant humor…which I‘m charmed by and didn‘t expect

This one was rough up front. Advertised as Korean magical realism, instead it‘s satirical weird disturbing stuff, told with a humorous tone. But…if you can hang in there, it gives a scope of 20th-century Korean history, and a scathing view on South Korean capitalism and autocracy. This was published in 2004, translated only in 2023, and made the International #Booker2023 shortlist.

The book is a gem. The reader, who waited years to read this, was not so great. Arturo roams an island in the Bay of Naples freely with his dog. He never knew his mother, and imagines his largely absent father off on important adventures. Then his father brings home a wife from Naples two years older than Arturo. And Arturo‘s romantic thoughts and puberty clash, bringing an end to his Eden. Language is gorgeous. Too bad I couldn‘t settle in.

Medieval imposture? Arnault Du Tihl learned and remembered every aspect of the missing Martin Guerre and lived as him for 3 yrs, having two children with his wife before he found himself accused of imposture. Then he almost won his case. Fun stuff - a 1980 history book that‘s still quite fascinating, and short. (3.5 hrs on audio, and free on audible)

My 10th from the Booker longlist was wonderful! I came in with no expectations and was rewarded with an inspiring story. A novel about an autistic boy who misses the mother he never knew, working out a device for perpetual motion; and a school teacher in a bad marriage exhausted by her dysfunctional all-boys school, yet fully committed to it. A novel of the children of missing parents, some grown, stumbling through life. Recommended! #booker2023

Ann Patchett‘s second is ok. She brings two semi-orphans from the far east Tennessee mountains to Memphis in far west TN, where they mix with a black not-quite deadbeat-dad who runs a bar on Beale Street. So she mixed black and white, rural conservative and inner city, youth and innocence with middle age, etc. And she stirs with something like meth. What comes out is entertaining but also has some stereotypes. Nothing particularly rewarding.

Getting started #whartonbuddyread

This was my first book i read this year, finished a month ago but haven‘t been posting on Litsy. Sorry all. Faulkner‘s 1st, from 1926. American soldiers returning home to small town Georgia, to wives, fiancés, hopes and consequence. It‘s an odd book, faulkner putting in impressionists touches, toying a little with the rules of prose. Maybe inconsequential, maybe romantic, sex charged or thoughtful. I liked this problem piece, anyway.

Took me a while, but here it is. My #bookerdozen (The order was chosen by pic-collage. 😁)

Thank @Liz_M for the prompt and @vivastory for the inspirational. I‘ll list the titles in comments