Tuesday Thingers: Least Favorite Books

Tuesday Thingers is hosted by Wendi of Wendi's Book Corner. This week, she has a whole handful of questions about least favorite books:

What is your least-favorite book(s)? Is your least-favorite book listed in your LT library? If it is listed, do you have anything special in the tags or comments section? How have others rated your least-favorite book?
This doesn't have to mean a book that you hated, or one that you didn't finish, although it might be.

This is a tough one. I always find it much harder to answer questions about books I dislike than it is to talk about my favorite books. For one thing, as I've probably said many times, I don't generally finish books that don't grab my interest pretty quickly. But it seems unfair to say that a book is your least favorite book if you haven't read the whole thing, right?

I guess if I had to pick one least favorite book, it would probably be The Scarlet Letter. And I don't like to admit that, because I've really loved everything else I've ever read by Nathaniel Hawthorne. He was a great writer, and his works are rightly considered classics. Even The Scarlet Letter is rightly considered a classic – I recognize that. But I just really didn't like it, and if it hadn't been assigned reading, I never would have finished it. I do remember throwing my Signet edition (or was it Penguin?) across the room several times, in sheer frustration. But I think I was in the tenth grade at the time, so that was probably just a hormonal frenzy taking over. I imagine if I tried re-reading it today, my reaction would be a little less extreme.

Or maybe not.

Yes, my LT library includes The Scarlet Letter; in fact, I have a couple of different editions, one in the Modern Library Complete Novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and another in the Library of America edition of Hawthorne's novels. I don't have any special tags or comments attached to either of the editions: just "American literature, fiction."

Looking at the statistics for the book, it seems it's owned by over 10,000 other LT members, and it gets a three-and-a-half star rating! So clearly, a lot of people don't have my reaction to it. However, I also notice that in the discussion group Awful Lit there's a discussion string called "Books to be struck from HS reading lists!" and guess what – The Scarlet Letter is the first book mentioned!

Teaser Tuesdays: Morse and Lewis

My teasers this week are from The Way Through the Woods, one of the Inspector Morse mysteries by Colin Dexter. I'm just getting started on the book, so I'm not sure exactly how this ties in, but I know it's Sergeant Lewis being questioned by the chief inspector, about Morse (from page 59):

'You know Morse better than most.'
'Nobody knows him all that well.'
'You've got a reasonable idea how his mind works though.'
'He's got a strange sort of mind—'
'Not many'd disagree with you.'
'He's good at some things.'
'Such as?'
'He's not bad at catching murderers for a start.'

OK, I know that's more than two lines, but I just had to include the whole exchange. It says a lot about Morse, and about Sergeant Lewis, too. This is the first "Morse" I've read in many years, so I'm looking forward to getting reacquainted with the cranky Inspector and his loyal sidekick Lewis.

Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by MizB 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!

It's Monday! What are you reading this week?

Almost didn't do a "what are you reading" post this week. I'm afraid last week wasn't a great reading week for me. Didn't get much reading done; didn't finish any books. So my list for this week is still the same as it was last week. I'll be reading (and, I hope, finishing up) Angels & Demons by Dan Brown, and The Private Patient by P.D. James. And I'll be starting The Way Through the Woods, by Colin Dexter. Have to finish that last one quickly because it's due at the library later this week.

Which brings me to something I've realized lately. Not a very surprising revelation, I suppose. But I do seem to read books faster when they've been checked out of the library. As I say, not too surprising – that due-date deadline is a great incentive to sit down and get the book read, even though I know I can renew or check it out again, or in most cases could simply buy my own copy. Maybe I should stop buying so many books and just do a little more library browsing. That might be a more efficient way of reducing my TBR list, and better for my budget, too. So I'm sure that strategy would get my husband's vote!

This weekly-reading roundup is hosted by J. Kaye. If you want to participate or just see what everyone is reading this week, head on over to J. Kaye's Book Blog.

Review: The Age of Innocence

Written by Edith Wharton
The Library of America, 1985; 285 pages
Originally published 1920

If I'm going to see a film made from a book, I generally prefer to read the book first. But that being said, I should also say thank goodness for Martin Scorsese. If I hadn't finally seen Scorsese's magnificent 1993 film of The Age of Innocence, I might never have made up my mind to read the book. And that would have been a definite shame because, as I discovered with pleasure, Edith Wharton's novel is one of the finest books of the 20th Century.

The book, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1921, is set in late 19th Century New York society, and tells the story of Newland Archer, a young lawyer and man-about-town. Archer marries a young society woman, May Welland, but is attracted to her cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, who has left her wealthy and abusive Polish husband and fled back to her American family. Ellen Olenska is hoping to divorce the Count, and Archer's firm is handling the Countess's legal affairs. The young attorney is assigned to her "case" and their professional dealings soon lead to a more romantic relationship – mild by today's standards of course, but fairly sizzling by the standards of that time and place.

The Age of Innocence is a satirical look at a recently-bygone age, but also a nostalgic one. And the style of writing so perfectly fits the era of the book's setting, I had to keep reminding myself that Wharton was writing in 1920. The book explores the theme of women's changing roles, as well as the importance of family and personal honor and integrity, and the problems facing a society in the midst of changing times. All themes that are still significant for our own era.

I highly recommend this book to all readers, and I really regret it took me so long to get around to reading it myself. I tried reading Wharton's House of Mirth many years ago and just couldn't really get into it. Well, there's no accounting for adolescence – my high school self found Pride and Prejudice mind-numbingly boring, too. But after falling in love with The Age of Innocence, I'm thinking I should really give Wharton's other works another try.

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Book Awards II Challenge (Pulitzer Prize)
Books Into Movies Challenge
Read Your Own Books Challenge
TBR Lite Challenge
The Guardian 1000 Novels Challenge
Victorian Challenge
Winter Reading Challenge
20 in 2009 Challenge

The Herding Cats II Reading Challenge or Whatever

Renay, over at Let's Get Literate, is hosting the Herding Cats II Challenge (Attack of the Hairballs). Running from April 1 through December 31, 2009, this one is a reading challenge that's "only a reading challenge if you want it to be."

I had a lot of fun with the first Herding Cats Challenge last year. In these challenges, the participants are asked to come up with a list of favorite books (five this year), to add to one big master list of titles. Then you choose your reading for the challenge from that list. However, this year there's no set number of books to read; in fact, reading isn't really required at all. As Renay says: "Browse the new book list. Stay a while. Read a few (eta: if you want; not even reading is required this time around if you don't have time to commit to a new challenge but still want to share your favorites)." But there's a review link for sharing reviews if you choose to write them.

You can sign up and read all about the challenge on the announcement page. I know it sounds like a strange sort of reading challenge, but since I love to make and read lists, I find it hard to resist. This year, your titles are all supposed to come from books you've read in 2007, 2008, or 2009. So, here's my list of five:

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. This is probably Wharton's masterpiece; winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1921. I read it for the first time earlier this year, and it's quickly become one of my all-time favorites. Now I think everyone should read it!

Booked to Die by John Dunning. First book in Dunning's great Cliff Janeway mystery series. Janeway is a former Denver police detective who leaves the force under rather questionable circumstances, and turns to selling rare books. This is a wonderful series for anyone who loves old books and the book trade. But the Janeway books are definitely not "cozies."

The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas. This novel about a young academic who hunts down a secret text with instructions about entering another dimension has been called "chick lit for nerds." Well, I'm a nerdy chick, and I really enjoyed it.

The Ladies' Man by Elinor Lipman. I guess this one could be called "chick lit for old chicks." The three sisters in Lipman's absolutely wonderful novel are all aging Boomers who should be old enough to know better. But when an old boyfriend shows up out of the blue, they just can't help but get involved all over again. This book has gotten very mixed reviews, but I thought it was hilarious.

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. Another book about a book. In 1950s Barcelona, the son of a widowed bookstore owner discovers a rare book by an obscure author, and becomes obsessed with tracking down the writer. This is another one I've added to my all-time favorites list, even though it does have quite a lot of violence. It's a subject I love.

These are five of my favorites from the last few years, and I tried to pick books that didn't seem to be on the master list already (at least, not when I looked at it). I also tried to pick a few books that I thought might not appear on a lot of other lists, to add a little variety to things. Haven't decided yet which books I'll read, but the master list has some really interesting choices.

Friday Finds: 27 March 2009

Friday Finds is a weekly event hosted by MizB at Should Be Reading. Participants are asked to share with other bloggers about the new-to-you books found during the week – books you either want to add to your TBR (to be read) list, or that you just heard about that sounded interesting.

I found most of my Friday Finds for this week while I was scouting books I might want to add to my "possibles" list in the Once Upon a Time III Challenge, so the fantasy genre is heavily represented. I don't believe any of them are very recent books – in fact, Aegypt first appeared sometime in the 1980s – but they're "new finds" for me. The Brookner I picked up a couple of weeks ago in our local library's sale, but since I didn't do a Friday Finds post last week, I'm including it here.

A Closed Eye. Anita Brookner
White Apples. Jonathan Carroll
Aegypt. John Crowley
Endless Things. John Crowley
Bee Season. Myra Goldberg
Song of Kali. Dan Simmons
Endless Things is actually the fourth book in Crowley's four-novel Aegypt series; the first book, Aegypt, is also sometimes called The Solitudes. Here's a description from Wikipedia:

"Aegypt is a sequence of four novels by John Crowley detailing the work and life of Pierce Moffett, who prepares a manuscript for publication even as it prepares him for some as-yet unknown destiny, all set amidst strange and subtle Hermetic manipulations among the Faraway Hills of New York. . . . The four volumes mingle Moffett's real and dream life in America in 1979 and the early 1980s with the narrative of the manuscript he is preparing for publication. The manuscript is a historical fiction that follows the briefly intersecting adventures of Italian heretic Giordano Bruno and of British occultists John Dee and Edward Kelley."

Harold Bloom has praised the books, and my favorite reviewer, Michael Dirda chose the whole series as his favorite book back in 2007. Well, I've never been terribly impressed with Harold Bloom's pronouncements, but if Dirda likes the books, I definitely want to find out more about them.

Booking Through Thursday: Best Bad Book

This week's BTT topic:

The opposite of last week's question: "What's the best 'worst' book you've ever read – the one you like despite some negative reviews or features?"

Another hard-to-answer question. I don't think I could really come up with one single "best worst" book. Over the years, I've read an awful lot of books that probably qualify for this category. When I was much younger, two of my favorite authors were John O'Hara and Louis Auchincloss; so I'm used to reading books that got panned by the critics.

More recently, one book that comes to mind is Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code (I suppose that's probably because I'm reading his Angels & Demons at the moment). I didn't read Da Vinci when it first came out, mainly because of all the negative press it got. But when I did finally read it a year or so later, I enjoyed it. Not the greatest book ever written, and Brown's style is nothing to celebrate. It would never make it to my list of favorites, but I thought it was a decent thriller – kept me turning the pages and held my interest right up to the end. Certainly no worse than many other bestsellers I've read; not really sure why it was singled out for so much criticism.



When it comes to the classics, the book that pops right up is Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables. I loved it when I first read it in high school. And then a couple of years ago, I re-read it and still loved it. But it gets mentioned on "Worst Book Ever Written" lists pretty consistently. Same thing goes for Hardy's The Return of the Native and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. I seem to be on a very short list of readers who actually enjoyed those. Oh, and Eliot's Middlemarch, too. It seems very few people want to admit liking that one. I've got my husband reading it right now and I have to keep cheering him on to the finish line; but I thought it was a pretty good read.