WWW Wednesdays: 11 November 2009

WWW Wednesdays is a new meme hosted by mizb17 over at Should Be Reading. It asks three (3) questions:

• What are you currently reading?
• What did you recently finish reading?
• What do you think you’ll be reading next?

Embarrassingly, my answers for this week are pretty much the same as last week:

Currently reading Stardust by Joseph Kanon.







Currently reading Homer & Langley by E.L. Doctorow (determined to finish this one this week).







Recently finished? Nada!

Reading next? Most likely Ignorance by Milan Kundera, and something for the November Novella Challenge – possibly Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome.







Now, let the world know what's on your reading list. Just click here.

The Awesome Author Challenge 2010

Alyce of At Home With Books is hosting The Awesome Author Challenge in 2010. As she explains:

The idea behind this challenge is to read works by authors who have been recommended to you time and again, yet somehow you haven't managed to read any books by those authors. These are the authors that everyone else tells you are awesome, thus the "Awesome Author Challenge" title.

The challenge runs from January through December, and there are four levels of participation to choose from:

• Easy: Choose three authors and read at least one title from each author.
• Moderate: Choose six authors and read at least one title from each author.
• Challenging: Choose ten authors and read at least one title from each author.
• Over-Achieving: Anything over ten authors.

This is really the kind of challenge I love - there aren't too many rules and regs. Crossovers with other challenges are allowed. You don't have to make a list ahead of time if you don't want to; but if you do, the list can change at any time. And your books can be from any genre or reading level: "the only requirement is that you have heard great things about the author, but haven't yet read any of their works."

I've promised myself to be a little more selective about my reading challenges for next year, but this one is just too tempting to pass up. And since the challenge runs all year, I'm throwing caution to the wind and choosing ten authors to try. The only problem is deciding on exactly which ten authors and which of their books to read; since I've been blogging, I've had so many wonderful authors and books recommended to me. This is my list for now, although it may (verily I say, it definitely will) change over time.

Kate Atkinson: Case Histories, or When Will There Be Good News?
Paul Auster: The Book of Illusions
Julian Barnes: Flaubert's Parrot
Heinrich Boll: The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum
T.C. Boyle: The Women
Geraldine Brooks: People of the Book
Italo Calvino: If on a winter's night a traveler
Angela Carter: Wise Children
Philip K. Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Dean Koontz: Mr. Murder
Haruki Murakami: Norwegian Wood, or The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Audrey Niffenegger: Her Fearful Symmetry
William Trevor: Love and Summer
Sarah Waters: Affinity, or The Little Stranger
Rebecca West: The Fountain Overflows

And yes, I know there are more than ten authors on my list. Well, I've never been accused of over-achieving. I just don't do decisiveness very well.

R.I.P. IV Challenge: The Wrap-Up

I feel like Alice's White Rabbit – I'm late, I'm late, I'm late! Late in getting this posted, that is. The R.I.P. IV Challenge ended October 31, but I'm just now getting around to wrapping everything up. This is always one of my favorite reading challenges – it's become one of those autumn rituals I look forward to every year in September and October.

This year I signed on for Peril the First (four books), but ended up reading six books from several different sub-genres – two ghost stories, one almost-ghost story, two mystery tales, and one horror story wanna-be. So I guess I slipped into Peril the Second, as well.

The books I read (with links to my reviews) were:

The Woman in Black, and The Man in the Picture, both by Susan Hill
New Year's Eve, by Lisa Grunwald
The Friend of Madame Maigret, by Georges Simenon
From Doon with Death, by Ruth Rendell
The Lair of the White Worm, by Bram Stoker

The books were definitely a mixed bag – in general, I'd say I enjoyed most of them. Some more than others, of course. The one real stinker in the lot was The Lair of the White Worm. I suppose another reader might find it easier to get through than I did, but it's really not one of Stoker's best efforts.

I want to thank Carl at Stainless Steel Droppings for hosting, and all the other participants, too – I've added a whole slew (and that's a lot) of new titles to my wish list after reading some of their reviews. And I'm already making my list for next year's challenge.

Review: The Lair of the White Worm

Written by Bram Stoker
Electronic edition by Project Gutenberg, 2005
First published 1911, William Rider and Son, Ltd.

Photo of Bram Stoker (left): Wikipedia's Wikimedia Commons.

The story is set in central England in 1860. Young Adam Salton travels from his native Australia and stays with his granduncle Richard Salton, lord of the family estate in the heart of what was once the old kingdom of Mercia. Uncle Richard wants to make Adam his heir and is eager to show the young man the countryside and introduce him to its residents. But once they arrive at Lesser Hill, the ancestral home of the Saltons, Adam quickly finds himself involved in a series of suspenseful and increasingly horrific goings-on. His neighbors – Edgar Caswall, the new heir to the estate known as Castra Regis, and Arabella March who lives in her own mysterious house in a place called Diana's Grove – begin to seem more and more sinister. The Salton property is overrun with deadly black snakes, and Edgar Caswall's African servant Oolanga is a frightening presence.

Sir Nathaniel de Salis, another neighbor and an old friend of Uncle Richard's, fills Adam in on the local mystery of the White Worm, a large snake-like creature that's supposed to live in a huge pit in (or underneath) Arabella's home in Diana's Grove. This ancient gigantic worm eats anything that's thrown into its pit and occasionally even ventures out and hunts down its prey among the local inhabitants. Both Adam and Sir Nathaniel suspect that Arabella is connected with the White Worm's crimes. They set out to destroy the creature and possibly Arabella along with it.

Alongside the main story, there's another very strange and confusing plot line involving Edgar Caswall's fascination with Mesmerism. And Caswall also has an enormous kite in the shape of a hawk, which he's devised to scare away pigeons that have suddenly appeared in huge numbers all over the country, killing crops and changing weather patterns and generally causing all kinds of chaos.

OK, that's enough of that – you get the idea. I had really expected to like this a lot more than I did. There's the germ of a really good horror story here, but it just doesn't develop into anything. The plot gets sillier and sillier as it goes along. And the racist attitudes toward the "savage" Oolanga become a little too much after a while, even allowing for the historical setting. It's really hard to believe this was written by the same author who brought us Dracula. But by the time he published The Lair of the White Worm in 1911, Stoker was very ill (he died in 1912), and that may well have contributed to the poor writing. Whatever the reason, this is a very bad book. Which was made into a fairly mediocre horror film by Ken Russell back in the 1980s. And after reading the book, my advice would be: just see the movie.

Short Review: From Doon With Death

Written by Ruth Rendell
Ballantine Books, 2007; 214 pages
First published 1964 by J. Long, London

Publisher's synopsis:

There is nothing extraordinary about Margaret Parsons, a timid housewife in the quiet town of Kingsmarkham, a woman devoted to her garden, her kitchen, her husband. Except that Margaret Parsons is dead, brutally strangled, her body abandoned in the nearby woods.

Who would kill someone with nothing to hide? Inspector Wexford, the formidable chief of police, feels baffled – until he discovers Margaret's dark secret: a trove of rare books, each volume breathlessly inscribed by a passionate lover identified only as Doon. As Wexford delves deeper into both Mrs. Parsons' past and the wary community circling round her memory like wolves, the case builds with relentless momentum to a surprise finale as clever as it is blindsiding.

My Thoughts

From Doon With Death is the first book in Ruth Rendell's long-running Inspector Wexford mystery series. I've read several of the later books, so I thought I'd go back and see how it all started. And I was pleased to see that it all started excellently. Everything is here: the intriguing characters and settings, the wry and sometimes macabre humor, and an ingenious and absorbing plot. And the book has aged relatively well – given that, by today's standards, a lot of the more "shocking" aspects of the plot are just a little less so. In spite of the publisher's claim of a "blindsiding" case, I managed to figure out what was going on pretty early in the story. But that didn't lessen my enjoyment. I believe if I'd read this one when it first appeared in 1964, it would definitely have kept me coming back for more.

WWW Wednesdays: 4 November 2009

WWW Wednesdays is a new meme hosted by mizb17 over at Should Be Reading. It asks three (3) questions:

• What are you currently reading?
• What did you recently finish reading?
• What do you think you’ll be reading next?

And my answers are:

Currently reading Stardust by Joseph Kanon.







Currently reading Homer & Langley by E.L. Doctorow.







Recently finished: Embarrassed to admit I have not finished anything in the last week or so. (Must do better.)

Next, I think I'll be reading Ignorance by Milan Kundera.







Now, let the world know what's on your reading list. Just click here.

Teaser Tuesdays: Another Epidemic

This week my Teaser lines come from Edith Wharton's The Old Maid, one of the works I'm reading for the November Novella Challenge. In this quote, Delia Ralston is listening to her unmarried sister Charlotte talking about why she's decided not to marry the man she was engaged to, and finding it hard to understand Charlotte's enthusiasm for looking after the children of the "ignorant and careless" poor [from Chapter I, p.383 of Novellas and Other Writings by Edith Wharton, Library of America edition]:

No one in New York had forgotten the death of the poor Henry van der Luydens' only child, who had caught smallpox at the circus to which an unprincipled nurse had surreptitiously taken him. After such a warning as that, parents felt justified in every precaution against contagion.

Well, maybe not all that tempting a teaser, but it is sort of timely, isn't it? Of course, H1N1 isn't quite as deadly as smallpox was in the 19th century – so far, at least. Just hope it stays that way.

Photo of Edith Wharton: Wikipedia's Wikimedia Commons.

Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by mizB17 at Should Be Reading. If you'd like to read more teasers, or participate yourself, head on over to her blog. And these are the rules: Grab your current read; Let the book fall open to a random page. Share with us two (2) "teaser" sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12. You also need to share the title of the book that you're getting your "teaser" from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given! Please avoid spoilers!

Challenge Review

Well, the month of October has gone bye-bye, and in just a couple of months 2009 will be history, too. So I think it's time to take a brief look at all the reading challenges I'm still trying to finish this year, and admit defeat in a couple of them. It's boring, I know, but I love list-making, so . . . .

• First of all, the R.I.P. IV Challenge ended October 31. I did manage to complete that one, but haven't written my wrap-up post yet. Will try to get that done later tonight, or tomorrow. So at least that's one successful closure.


• I'm just one book away from wrapping up the Lost in Translation Challenge, so I think I'll be able to complete that one – although I still haven't decided on what that last book will be. Milan Kundera's Ignorance is high on my list of possibilities. Or maybe Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler. Both of those are pretty short works – definitely something to consider, this late in the game.
  
  
• And for J. Kaye's 2nds Challenge 2009 (which ends December 31), I just have to finish one of two of the several books I've got going at the moment – either Homer & Langley by E.L. Doctorow, or The Inn at Lake Devine by Elinor Lipman. That will give me my twelve books. I don't really expect any problems there.
  



• Another of J. Kaye's challenges, the two-year-long Suspense-Thriller Challenge, also ends in December, and I've managed to read all twelve of the books I needed. (Although I had to cheat just a bit – didn't actually read six in 2008 and six in 2009, as planned.) Haven't written the wrap-up for that one either, but it's in the works.



• The 42 (Sci-Fi) Challenge, hosted by Becky's Book Reviews, also ends in December. And although I haven't been keeping really close track of all the books/films/TV shows I've read/watched during the year, I'm pretty sure I'll have my list of 42 by December.

But now the bad news.

• It looks pretty obvious that I'm not going to finish the Romance Reading Challenge. Actually, when I signed up for that one, I had doubts about whether I'd ever make it to the end. So far, I've only read one book that really qualifies as romance – Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence. I suppose it's still possible I might get another romance novel read before year's end, but certainly not the four I'd need to complete the challenge. I'm not declaring defeat just yet, but it's probably coming soon.


• And then there's the Herding Cats II Challenge (or non-challenge, since the rules state "read or not"!) – another one that I'm clearly not going to finish because I haven't even begun it yet. Not the fault of the challenge itself – it's a great idea. Just sloth and forgetfulness on my part. (Shame on me!)

So, besides the November Novella Challenge (which only runs through this month), I think that's just about it. I do still have two other challenges going, but they both continue on into the new year, and I'll report on those a little later. But at the moment, I'm afraid it doesn't look good, folks. Still, I love reading challenges – even the ones I don't manage to complete. Even the ones I don't manage to start! So I'll undoubtedly be signing up for more in 2010.

Happy Halloween!

It's time for trick-or-treating and masquerade parties again. Got any plans? And what are you "going as" this year?

If I were going to be dressing up (and I'm not, darn it!), I think I'd like the costume this lady is wearing. Love the fan and the hat.

But I don't think I'd ever get the hubby in a suit like this. Especially those shoes!

Have a happy, safe Halloween, everyone.

The November Novella Challenge

This one is just too good to pass up. The November Novella Challenge, hosted by Bibliofreak, runs (oddly enough) just through the month of November, and sounds very do-able. There are four levels of participation, so you can read just one novella or as many as you can squeeze in. And there really aren't any other rules – I love challenges like that! But you can read all about the challenge and its non-rules over at the challenge announcement page.

I've already got a "bucket list" of novellas and short fiction that I'd like to read before I shuffle off this mortal coil (ah, the famous someday), so it should be easy to find likely titles. Right now, I'm just going to commit to one novella – but I'm hoping to do a little better than that. So I'm considering a few of these possibilities:

A Simple Heart, by Gustave Flaubert
Animal Farm, by George Orwell
Black Water, by Joyce Carol Oates
Cranford, by Elizabeth Gaskell
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, by H.P. Lovecraft
The Kreutzer Sonata, by Leo Tolstoy
The Ladies from St. Petersburg, by Nina Berbova
The Lesson of the Master, by Henry James
The Lifted Veil, by George Eliot
The Lover, by Marguerite Duras
The Uncommon Reader, by Alan Bennett
Van Gogh's Room at Arles: Three Novellas, by Stanley Elkin

Hard to believe I've managed to avoid reading Animal Farm all these years, so I probably should start with that one. But I'm thinking of taking on the Henry James title first – I'm pretty sure I've already got a copy of that one. So now I guess I just need to get back to my reading – believe it or not, November's almost here.