Opening Sentence of the Day: Basil's Dream

"From the air, through the plastic porthole of a descending plane, Bermuda appears improbable." -- Basil's Dream by Christine Hale. Lucy Langston moves to Bermuda with her husband and 12-year-old son in 2001, when economic troubles and racial tension are threatening the idyllic serenity of the island paradise. I'm 50 pages into it and completely absorbed.

Review of the Day: The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire

C. M. Mayo’s The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire is the historically accurate, fictionalized account of Emperor Maximilian’s short reign over Mexico in the 1860s.

Mayo’s hook is Maximilian’s “adoption” of the half-American grandson of the first Emperor of Mexico, General Agustín de Iturbide. The childless Maximilian makes the toddler his “heir apparent” to help shore up Mexican support for his French-backed regime, bribing the parents with pensions and promises of aristocratic lives in Paris – a bargain the Inturbides soon regret.

But the book is more than simply the story of the Iturbide family. It encompasses Maximilian’s entire, brief reign, from his forced relinquishment of family rights as a Hapsburg and Archduke of Austria when he accepted the Mexican crown from Louis Napoleon, to his wife Charlotte’s crack up, and his ultimate defeat at the hands of Mexican nationalists.

Mayo spent years researching the story of Maximilian and the Inturbides, focusing on obscure primary source materials stashed away in historical archives. The underlying story is fascinating. It is one thing to have a general understanding that the French were meddling around in Mexico the same time America was fighting its Civil War and the Prussians were vying with France for power in Europe. It is another thing to have all those moving parts come together in a coherent, entertaining novel that weaves the personal in with the political.

As Mayo explains in the Epilogue, she chose to write the story as fiction because:

I wanted to tell it true, which means, of course, getting the facts as straight as possible but also, and this was the most interesting to me, telling an emotional truth. Why did Alice, Angel, Pepa, Maximilian, and Charlotte do what they did? Who encouraged and supported them, and who criticized, intimidated, and frustrated them – and for what motives? The answer is not only in historical and political analysis, but in their hearts, and the hearts of others can only be experienced with the imagination, that is, through fiction.

Mayo tells the story from the perspective of several characters, from Maximilian and Charlotte down to illiterate servants and even the toddler Agustín himself. This is an effective technique for layering details and pulling the most out of every aspect of the tale. But the continuous switching around made it difficult to become completely absorbed in the story.

Despite this and a few other minor flaws – the diplomatic maneuvering got a little repetitive and the ending was rushed – The Last Prince deserves attention. It is an ambitious book for tackling such a complicated little sliver of history, and Mayo brings her historic characters to life with a compelling story for a modern audience.

OTHER REVIEWS

Savvy Verse & Wit
Medieval Bookworm

(Please leave a comment with a link if you would like your review posted here.)

Happy Easter!

Review: The Innocent

Ian McEwan may now be the hottest thing going, but his earlier books are hit or miss. The Company of Strangers? Creepy. The Cement Garden? Disturbing. The dexterous elegance of books like Amsterdam and On Chesil Beach were still a long ways off.

His 1990 novel, The Innocent, is a flawed but absorbing transition between McEwan’s earlier works and the later novels.

The book is set in post-war, pre-wall Berlin, where 25-year-old Leonard Marnham is a British post office technician assigned to a secret spy mission (based on an actual Anglo-American joint spy effort). He falls in love with Maria Eckdorf, a German divorcee, five years older than him.

When things go wrong, they go horribly, sickeningly wrong. Yet McEwan deftly shows how each step down the slippery slope was justifiable and even necessary for the two lovers. Despite the violence, this is a love story. McEwen uses violent tragedy to speed up the natural termination of the romantic, passionate phase of the couple’s relationship. Unfortunately, his gruesomely accurate descriptions distract the reader from McEwan’s astute examination of the male/female dynamic.

Still, although moved along by espionage and homicide, it is the bigger themes of romantic love and the nature of intimacy – not the events of the plot – that are the core of the book.

OTHER REVIEWS

(Please leave a comment with a link if you would like your review posted here.)

T.G.I.G.F.

Good Friday! I have always loved Easter weekend, especially when my family gathers to host its traditional "Waifs and Strays" party, which will be at my house this year. But I even loved Easter the years Hubby and I spent it alone in San Francisco (the highlight being the year we opted for Easter jazz service at the Church of St. John Coltrane). Out of nostalgia for my favorite Easter parties -- and blog posts of one year ago -- I think I will make a batch of Silver Palate Toffee Bars. But family, friends, and even toffee bars won't change the fact that it is going to be FREEZING here in the Rose City this weekend. At least the forecast no longer calls for snow like it did yesterday, but the low temperature is supposed to get below freezing. Yikes! My Easter bonnet will have to be a wool ski cap! So when my friend Mike Brown sends me articles like this one about his vacation rental and concierge business in Costa Rica I wonder how one web-footed friend from the Pacific Northwest ends up living in a vacation paradise and I end up bundled in fleece on Easter weekend? The closest I will be to tropical sunshine is cracking the cover on Basil's Dream, set in Bermuda. And maybe the family can start a new tradition of Easter mai tais.

The Well-Stocked Bookcase: BOMC's List of 60 Favorite American Novels

In celebration of its 60th anniversary, The Book of the Month Club compiled a list of 60 American novels, published between 1926 and 1986, whose "impact still endures — novels that have changed how we Americans talk, think, write, feel and see ourselves." The club published its recommendations in a book called The Well-Stocked Bookcase.

(They have since updated the list with a new edition, expanded to 72 books through 1998.  I've stuck with the original.)

The list is in chronological order. Trilogies are listed as one book, by the date of the first volume. Two of the trilogies are available in one-volume editions and are linked as such.

Those I have read are in red. So far, I have read 44 of the 60 – or 50 of the 66, if you count the separate volumes of the two trilogies, U.S.A. and Studs Lonigan. Those currently on my TBR shelf are in blue, although I intend to get to them all some day, mostly as they double up with other lists.

As always, if anyone has adopted this as a "Must Read" list, and would like me to link their progress post, I would be happy to do so. Just leave your link in a comment and I will add it.

Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (reviewed here)

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

U.S.A. by John Dos Passos

Light in August by William Faulkner

Studs Lonigan by James T. Farrell (reviewed here)

Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Postman Always Rings Twice by James Mallahan Cain

Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara

Vein of Iron by Ellen Glasgow

Heaven's My Destination by Thornton Wilder

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

The Late George Apley by John P. Marquand

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson Mccullers

Trees by Conrad Richter

What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg

Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty

All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren

The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford

Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens

The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer (reviewed here)

Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote

The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren

The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

The Wall by John Hersey

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

From Here to Eternity by James Jones

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Lie Down in Darkness by William Styron

The Recognitions by William Gaddis

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne by Brian Moore

The Last Hurrah by Edwin O'Connor

Seize the Day by Saul Bellow

The Assistant by Bernard Malamud (reviewed here)

The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Rabbit, Run by John Updike

The Magic Christian by Terry Southern

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Little Big Man by Thomas Berger

A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley

Them by Joyce Carol Oates

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (reviewed here)

Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

Burr by Gore Vidal

Nickel Mountain by John Gardner

Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

The World According to Garp by John Irving

The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard

A Flag for Sunrise by Robert Stone

The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler


NOTE

Last updated on December 28, 2022.

OTHERS READING THE BOOKS ON THIS LIST
(If you would like to be listed here, please leave a comment with links to your progress reports or reviews and I will add them here.)

More Lists Coming Soon . . . Well, Eventually . . .

J.G. from Hotch Pot Cafe recently commented on the conspicuous absence of The Orange Prize winners from my list of Must Read lists. It's not that I have anything against The Orange Prize (well, actually, I kind of do -- prizes based on gender or race rub me the wrong way because they imply, to me, an inability to compete in an open field -- but that is a discussion for another day), it is just that I have not yet posted all of my lists. Over on Lists of Bests, I am keeping track of 91 book lists -- including Orange Prize Winners -- and have completed nine. These are prize winners, recommended reading, and favorite author bibliographies. So far, I only have 14 lists posted here. Another one will be up tomorrow. My hope is to get them all up eventually, but that will take some time. And I would welcome suggestions. Just leave a comment with your favorite Must Read list. Chances are the list is already on my radar, but you never know. In the meantime, you can track J.G.'s Orange Prize progress here.

Opening Sentence of the Day: The Letter From Death

"To Those It May Concern,

That should leave none of you out." - The Letter From Death by Lillian Moats. According to the forward by Howard Zinn, "Moats uses death not as a threat, but as a prism through which to examine the most profound questions that confront the human race today." We'll see.

The Hot List

There are too many books vying for my immediate attention right now. I do not like it -- I feel pressured. My plan is to work my way through this yammering stack of books so I can turn my attention to whatever strikes my fancy at that very moment. But my immediate reading future includes the following: The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire (I am two-thirds of the way through and am enjoying this book a ton, but I set it aside to read Towers of Gold in time for an April review for The Internet Review of Books); The Letter From Death by Lillian Moats (yikes!); Basil's Dream by Christine Hale (looks like it could be very good) American Rust (another good one) The Stettheimer Dollhouse, edited by Sheila W. Clark (love this one); Joker One by Donovan Campbell (I've read some good reviews); The Tricking of Freya by Christina Sunley (this one showed up in my mailbox today -- why?); and The Italian Lover (I'm saving this for last). These are actually books that I have been looking forward to reading and that I think I will enjoy. They just seem to be ganging up on me right now.

Pulitzer List: Update

I have updated my Pulitzer Prize Winners list by indicating which books I have read and which are currently on my TBR shelf. I am less than half-way through the list of winners. If anyone else is working on reading all the books that have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and would like me to include a link to their progress reports on my Pulitzer page, please leave me a comment with your link and I will add it. So far, I have added the link to Rebecca Reads so we can track her progress. Any others?

Review: Towers of Gold

It beggars the imagination to think of the sprawling megalopolis of Los Angeles as a frontier town of 4,400.  But when Isaias Hellman arrived from Bavaria in 1859, Los Angles was a tiny pueblo, slow to transition from Mexican to American sovereignty. The gold rush – and later silver rush – that enticed thousands of people to Northern California and transformed San Francisco into a glittering modern city had almost no effect on tiny, isolated Los Angeles. Landing in the mudflats of San Pedro, 20 miles from Los Angeles proper, a 16-year-old Hellman set out to make his fortune, free from the religious restrictions that had limited his opportunities back in Germany.

In Towers of Gold, Frances Dinkelspiel explores the history of California, using Hellman – her great-great-grandfather – as a compass.  As the subtitle explains, this is the story of “How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California.”  Hellman soon outgrew his modest storefront, and eventually Los Angeles, going on to become a San Francisco-based banker and financier with his hand in the industries that shaped California.  Dinkelspiel’s summation also provides her outline:

From humble beginnings, Isaias had grown to be a banker with international statute, a man noted for his fiscal sobriety and his canny instincts for a good business deal. By bringing capital to the frontier, Isaias had come to symbolize the opportunities available in the West. He not only had grown enormously wealthy, but had helped create a state that was an economic powerhouse, an engine that drove the national economy. He played a major role in the creation of two cities, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and the development of eight industries – banking, transportation, oil, water, wine, land evelopment, electricity, and education.

The book moves along at a good clip, written in a clear, journalistic style that reflects Dinkelspiel’s decades in the newspaper business.  Although Dinkelspiel is related to Hellman, Towers of Gold is no mere family memoir, of interest only to Hellman’s scattered descendants.  She keeps her eye on the bigger picture, looking first at economically significant events such as bringing the railroad to Los Angeles, starting the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and the University of California in Berkeley, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and the discovery of oil in Southern California, and then explaining Hellman’s significant role in each of these events.

Dinkelspiel knew little of her forefather, other than that he had something to do with Wells Fargo Bank, before she started poking around in the California Historical Society looking for genealogical material on her family.  Over forty cartons of archived materials later, Dinkelspiel understood the scope of Hellman’s involvement in setting the foundations of California’s economy.  She ultimately reviewed more than 50,000 pages of primary source material held in archives and by distant relatives – and even traveled to Hellman’s hometown of Reckendorf, Bavaria – working for almost ten years to distill an enormous amount of information into a cohesive, hugely entertaining story of California’s history. 

Despite the mountains of source material, the book has a few thin spots, mostly concerning Hellman’s family and religious life.  It could be that Dinkelspiel, in her effort to give the book broader appeal, omitted purely personal details; or that the surviving records have more to do with Hellman’s business dealings than his personal life.  But seeing what Dinkelspiel was able to do with dry economic data – making even municipal bond offerings and the standardization of trolley track gauges interesting – it is a shame to miss out on any details, no matter why.

What personal anecdotes Dinkelspiel includes are highlights of the book, such as the story of how Hellman’s family left San Francisco immediately after the earthquake.  Piling grandchildren and a pregnant daughter-in-law into one new-fangled automobile, servants following in a horse drawn carriage, and Isaias and his wife chauffeured in their new Peerless, the family traveled most of a day down the peninsula, across the southern end of San Francisco Bay, and up the shore to their summer house in Oakland.  Details such as these bring new life to the familiar earthquake story.  Which is why a lack of personal details in other areas is noticeable.

Most conspicuous in its absence – although more when pondering the book afterwards than during the reading – is a more definitive explanation of whether and how Hellman’s religion limited his role in California’s development or as a national financier.  Dinkelspiel’s premise is that frontier California was more welcoming and more religiously tolerant than Europe, or even America’s East Coast.  Hellman and other Jews were accepted at the highest levels of Los Angeles and San Francisco business and government.  At least at first. In her Introduction, Dinkelspiel hints at changes in this welcoming attitude:

[F]rom the start, these Jews were accepted an integrated into society. They were elected to public office, built their homes alongside their Christian neighbors, and became the established mercantile elite. In both San Francisco and Los Angeles, Jews were community leaders. It was not until the 1890s that intransigent anti-Semitism gripped California. And while barriers were erected after then, the Jews had already indelibly shaped the state.

Throughout the book, Dinkelspiel provides several examples of anti-Jewish prejudice, including derisive name calling in the press, verbal attacks, and exclusion from private clubs.  But other than a couple of paragraphs suggesting that an influx of white, Protestant Midwesterners “diluted the multicultural population” and that orthodox Jews from Eastern Europe refused to assimilate like earlier German Jews, Dinkelspiel does not examine the “intransigent anti-Semitism” she proclaimed in the opening pages. A thorough discussion of anti-Semitism in early 20th Century California may be beyond the scope of her book; but by raising the specter early on, Dinkelspiel leaves her readers hanging when she fails to bring resolution to the issue.

 But such criticism is merely picking at loose threads. Dinkelspiel’s book is as enjoyable and lively a history of America’s largest state as one can hope to find.  Towers of Gold deserves a top spot on any To Be Read list.  

OTHER REVIEWS

Internet Review of Books (first posting of my review)

If you would like your review to be linked here, please leave a comment with your link and I will add it.

NOTE

This was my "gold" pick for the Colorful Reading Challenge.

Links of Lists

As I find and visit so many wonderful book blogs, I see that many other bibliophiles share my compulsion to follow a "Must Read" book list. I would love to know which of you have adopted any of the lists that I have featured here. Please take a look at the list of lists below (or over in the right-hand column). If you are working on any of these lists and have written about the list or your progress, I am happy to link your post. Just leave a comment here or on my post for the particular list.

The Lists

• All-TIME Top 100
• Anthony Burgess
• Book Club
• College Board's Top 101
• Easton Press - 100 Greatest Ever
• French Connection
• Mann Booker Prize
• MLA's 30
• Modern Library's Top 100 - Fiction
• National Book Award
• Nobel Laureates
• Oregon Books
• Pulitzer Prize
• Radcliffe's Top 100

I know that some of these overlap with challenges, Lists of Bests, etc., but I would still like to know which of my blogging friends follows which list. Happy reading!

New Favorite Bookstore: Ampersand

Thanks to a note on Reading Local yesterday, I visited a wonderful new bookstore in my neighborhood. Actually, the bookstore -- Ampersand -- has been there since last November, but I am new to the neighborhood. So after reading about Reading Local's upcoming interview with Ampersand owner Myles Haslehorst, I walked over there to take a look. Ampersand has a small storefront in the "arts district" of NE Alberta Street, here in Portland. It is as much a gallery as a book store. Or, as Haslehorst describes on his web site:

Ampersand is a gallery, bookshop & retail archive . . . . Committed to cultural preservation, we buy & sell vintage photography, paper ephemera, historic documents & collectible books. Our book inventory, consisting of both new & used volumes, is focused primarily on visual content, with particular emphasis on art, design & photography books. Our monthly gallery shows feature either contemporary artworks or curated selections from our vintage inventory. In both cases, our intent is to investigate the colliding point between now & then, past & present, vintage & contemporary.

It works. Ampersand is peaceful and lovely, with its eclectic wares displayed with the tidy precision of a Japanese garden. It is the kind of shop you would come across in Hayes Valley in San Francisco or Nolita in Manhattan. As for books, Haslehorst definitely concentrates on visually pleasing volumes. He also has a small but impressive selections of used paperback literature in very good condition at reasonable prices. I picked up a pristine copy of Vladimir Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark for $6. But better yet, on my way out I spotted and nabbed a new copy of a Taschen book called Jazz Covers -- a collection of 1,000 classic jazz lp covers -- for my jazz loving hubby's upcoming birthday. I love my new neighborhood.

Review: Bel Canto

The set up for Ann Patchett's Orange Prize winner, Bel Canto, is attention-grabbing -- an international group of businessmen and diplomats, one female opera singer, and a polyglot translator are held captive by a gang of revolutionaries in an unnamed banana republic for several months.

But despite the premise, the story has no zing. It plods along, focusing on the personal relationships among the people involved, particularly the relationships between some of the captives and captors.

The story is written well enough, but the issues it raises about the nature of talent, love, and communication are pretty banal. Not that it had to be an adventure or a thriller -- but it was surprisingly ho-hum given the potential.

OTHER REVIEWS

If you would like your review of this book listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.

ANNOUNCEMENT!

Inspired by Lezlie's articulate and thoughtful mission statement on Books 'N Border Collies, I have re-assessed my priorities and what it most important in my life. After great deliberation, I have decided to revamp my blog -- from here on out, this blog will be devoted entirely to KITTENS. Primarily, I will be posting cute pictures of kittens. Send them in!

List: Nobel Laureates

The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded 107 times to 111 Nobel Laureates between 1901 and 2015. I have a goal of reading at least one book by every recipient of the Prize.

If anyone reading this has a similar goal and would like me to link their progress reports to this post, I am happy to do so. Leave a comment with your link and I will add it. There is a group blog called Read the Nobels where people more actively pursuing this project post reviews and record their progress.

Here is the list of Nobel Laureates, starting with the most recent. If I have read any of the author's books, I listed the titles in red after the name; if I have books on my TBR shelf, they are listed in blue. I plan to eventually read something by everyone of these people, even if I have nothing on my TBR shelf right now. Although some may be hard to find as I look at names that ring no bells for me.

Kazuo Ishiguro

• The Buried Giant
• The Remains of the Day
• Never Let Me Go
• An Artist of the Floating World

Bob Dylan
Svetlana Alexievich
Patrick Modiano

• Missing Person

Alice Munro

• Love of a Good Woman (NBCC Award)
• The View from Castle Rock

Mo Yan
Tomas Tranströmer
Mario Vargas Llosa
Herta Müller
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio
Doris Lessing

• The Golden Notebook (All-TIME 100)
• The Grass is Singing

Orhan Pamuk

• Snow

Harold Pinter
Elfriede Jelinek
J. M. Coetzee

• Disgrace (Booker Prize)
• The Life and Times of Michael K (Booker Prize; reviewed here)

Imre Kertész
V.S. Naipaul

• A Bend in the River (Modern Library's Top 100)
• A House for Mr. Biswas (Modern Library's Top 100)
• In a Free State (Booker Prize)

Gao Xingjian

• One Man's Bible

Günter Grass

• The Tin Drum (reviewed here)

José Saramago

• Journey to Portugal: In Pursuit of Portugal's History and Culture

Dario Fo
Wislawa Szymborska
Seamus Heaney

• Beowulf (Costa award winner)

Kenzaburo Oe
Toni Morrison

• Beloved (Pulitzer Prize; All-TIME 100; College Board's 101; Radcliffe's Top 100)
• The Bluest Eye
• Jazz
• Paradise
• Song of Solomon (Radcliffe's Top 100)

Derek Walcott
Nadine Gordimer

• Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black and Other Stories (reviewed here)
• Jump and Other Short Stories
• A Sport of Nature

Octavio Paz
Camilo José Cela
Naguib Mahfouz

• The Beggar (reviewed here)

Joseph Brodsky
Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka
Claude Simon
Jaroslav Seifert
William Golding

• Lord of the Flies (Modern Library's Top 100)
• Rites of Passage (Booker Prize)
• The Spire (Anthony Burgess Favorite)

Gabriel García Márquez

• The General in his Labyrinth
• Of Love and Other Demons
• Love in the Time of Cholera
• Memories of My Melancholy Whores
• One Hundred years of Solitude (College Board's 101)

Elias Canetti
Czesław Miłosz
Odysseas Elytis
Isaac Singer

• A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw

Vicente Aleixandre
Saul Bellow

• The Adventures of Augie March (All-TIME 100; College Board's 101; Modern Library's Top 100; National Book Award; reviewed here)
• The Dean's December
• Henderson the Rain King (Modern Library's Top 100)
• Herzog (All-TIME 100; National Book Award winner)
• Humbolt's Gift (Anthony Burgess Favorite; Pulitzer Prize; reviewed here)
• Mr. Sammler's Planet (National Book Award; reviewed here)
• Ravelstein
• Sieze the Day
• The Victim (Anthony Burgess Favorite)

Eugenio Montale
Harry Martinson
Eyvind Johnson
Patrick White
Heinrich Böll
Pablo Neruda
Alexsandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn

• August 1914

Samuel Beckett

• Endgame
• Waiting for Godot

Yasunari Kawabata
Miguel Ángel Asturias
Nelly Sachs
Shmuel Agnon
Michail Sholokhov
Jean-Paul Sartre

• The Age of Reason

Giorgos Seferis
John Steinbeck

• Cannery Row
• The Grapes of Wrath (All-TIME 100; College Board's 101; MLA's Top 30; Modern Library's Top 100; Radcliffe's Top 100; Pulitzer Prize)
• Of Mice and Men (Easton Press Top 100; Radcliffe's Top 100)
• Travels with Charley in Search of America
• The Winter of Our Discontent

Ivo Andric
Saint-John Perse
Salvatore Quasimodo
Boris Pasternak

• Doctor Zhivago (College Board's 101; reviewed here)

Albert Camus

• The Plague
• The Stranger (College Board's 101)

Juan Ramón Jiménez
Halldór Laxness

• Independent People

Ernest Hemingway

• The Complete Stories
• Dangerous Summer
• A Farewell to Arms (College Board's 101; Easton Press Top 100; Modern Library's Top 100; Radcliffe's Top 100)
• For Whom the Bell Tolls (Anthony Burgess Favorite; Radcliffe's Top 100)
• In Our Time (Radcliffe's Top 100)
• Islands in the Stream
• A Moveable Feast (French Connections)
• The Old Man and the Sea (Anthony Burgess Favorite; Radcliffe's Top 100; Pulitzer Prize)
• The Sun Also Rises (All-TIME 100; French Connections; Modern Library's Top 100; Radcliffe's Top 100)
• True at First Light

Winston Churchill

• The Second World War (Six Volume Set)

François Mauriac

• Viper's Tangle

Pär Lagerkvist
Bertrand Russell
William Faulkner

• Absolom, Absolom! (Radcliffe's Top 100)
• As I Lay Dying (College Board's 101; Modern Library's Top 100; Radcliffe's Top 100)
• The Hamlet
• Light in August (All-TIME 100; Modern Library's Top 100; Radcliffe's Top 100)
• The Reivers (Pulitzer Prize)
• The Sound and the Fury (All-TIME 100; College Board's 101; Easton Press Top 100; Modern Library's Top 100; Radcliffe's Top 100; reviewed here)
• The Wild Palms

T. S. Eliot*
André Gide

• The Counterfeiters

Hermann Hesse

• Siddhartha (reviewed here)

Gabriela Mistral
Johannes Vilhelm Jensen
Frans Eemil Sillanpää
Pearl S. Buck

• The Good Earth (Pulitzer Prize)

Roger Martin du Gard
Eugene O'Neill

• Long Day's Journey into Night

Luigi Pirandello
Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin
John Galsworthy

• The Forsyte Saga

Erik Axel Karlfeldt
Sinclair Lewis

• Babbitt (College Board's 101; Modern Library's Top 100; Radcliffe's Top 100)
• It Can't Happen Here
• Kingsblood Royal
• Main Street (Modern Library's Top 100)
• Arrowsmith (Pulitzer)
• Dodsworth

Thomas Mann

• Death in Venice

Sigrid Undset

• Kristin Lavransdatter

Henri Bergson
Grazia Deledda
George Bernard Shaw

• Caesar and Cleopatra
• Candida

Władysław Reymont
William Butler Yeats*
Jacinto Benavente
Anatole France

• The Revolt of the Angels

Knut Hamsun
Carl Spitteler
Henrik Pontoppidan
Karl Adolph Gjellerup
Verner von Heidenstam
Romain Rolland
Rabindranath Tagore
Gerhart Hauptmann
Maurice Maeterlinck
Paul Heyse
Selma Lagerlöf
Rudolf Christoph Eucken
Rudyard Kipling

• Kim (Modern Library's Top 100; Radcliffe's Top 100)
• Stalky and Co.

Giosuè Carducci
Henryk Sienkiewicz

• Quo Vadis

José Echegaray y Eizaguirre
Frédéric Mistral
Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
Theodor Mommsen
Sully Prudhomme


NOTE

Updated on January 21, 2018.


OTHERS READING THE WORKS OF NOBEL LAUREATES

Read the Nobels (group blog)
Rebecca Reads

If you would like to be listed here, please leave a comment with links to your progress reports or reviews and I will add them here.

Favorite Author: Richard Ford

I have been smitten with Richard Ford ever since he introduced me to his Everyman hero Frank Bascombe in The Sportswriter. I followed Bascombe through the Pulitzer-winning sequel, Independence Day, and the most recent Lay of the Land. Like John Updike's Rabbit novels, Bascombe's saga offered me a tour inside the male psyche for which I am grateful and on which I often muse.

Ford also is justly acclaimed for his short stories. Those I have read, I appreciated. But I am not good about reading short stories -- always passing up a volume of stories for a novel when picking my next book. But I plan to read Ford's short story collections as well as the novels. Vintage Ford is a collection of previously published stories, but I include it on this list because it also includes a short memoir published for the first time.

Those I have already read are in red. Those currently on my TBR shelf are in blue. I will eventually read them all.

A Piece of My Heart (1976)

The Ultimate Good Luck (1981)

The Sportswriter (1986)

Rock Springs (short stories; 1987)

Wildlife(1990)

Independence Day (1995)

Women with Men (short stories; 1997)

A Multitude of Sins (short stories; 2002)

Vintage Ford (collection; 2004)

The Lay of the Land (2006)

Canada (2012)

NOTES

Last updated on April 19, 2012.

Colorful Reading: Update

I finished the first of my Colorful Reading Challenge books -- Black Cherry Blues by James Lee Burke. This is the third in Burke's Dave Robicheaux series and won the author an Edgar award. Deservedly. It is a particularly good volume of what is probably the best mystery series going. While I can get tired of Burke's ultra-rich language, and Robicheaux's holier-than-thou manner often rubs the wrong way, I always come back for more. Next up is Towers of Gold -- I have 100 pages to go.

Review: Pale Fire

Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire is a literary one-off, so hard to categorize. The first half is a long poem by the fictional poet John Shade; the second is the "Commentary" to the poem by narrator Professor Charles Kinbote. Through his Commentary, Kinbote spins a story of his friendship with Shade and tells the zany tale of the political upheaval in Kinbote's homeland of Zembla. The Commentary annotates lines in the poem, so the idea is to read the poem, then as you read the second half, refer back to the lines of the poem under discussion. Definitely not a standard novel format!

Pale Fire is in my all time Top 10 list. I think it is a wonderful, marvelous, intricately faceted gem. I sat there flipping back and forth between the poem and annotations for days, completely absorbed. I'm not one of the Certified Smart People who understand Nabokov on deep, deep levels, so I took the book for the entertainment it gave me. It struck me as mostly a joke — or at least a romp. Nabokov having fun.

The whole thing is genius. But what tickled my fancy the most was the story of the escape from Zembla in the red suit and, in particular, the Zembla cultural and language references. I barked with laughter - while on a crowded plane - when I came to “a shiver of alfear (uncontrollable fear caused by elves).”

I will read this one again, with the goal of appreciating the deeper complexities. But I will probably just end up laughing more and marveling at the mind that could produce such an intricate word puzzle.

Pale Fire shows up on a lot of Must Read lists, including:

All-TIME 100 Best Novels

Anthony Burgess's 99 Best Novels

Dr. Peter Boxall's 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

Modern Library's Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century

Thanks go to Rebecca at Rebecca Reads for inspiring this post.

Review: Humbolt's Gift

What a wonderful, great, big, shaggy dog of a novel Humbolt's Gift is!

While litigating with his ex-wife, being bullied by a B-team mobster, and fending off the marriage plans of his young "palooka" girlfriend, narrator Charlie Citrine contemplates the life of his recently deceased best friend and meditates on big questions such as the nature of death, man's role in the cosmos, and theories of boredom.

With dozens of remarkable supporting characters and side stories, this long book is entertaining throughout. It is not a quick read, but it is worth the time.

Saul Bellow deserved his Nobel -- he was really the Grand Master of American letters. Anthony Burgess included this one on his list of favorite 99 novels.

Books Read in 2004

This is the list of books I read in 2004, in the order that I read them. For an explanation of my rating system, see here. The highlight of my reading year was reading -- or rereading -- the six Jane Austen novels in order of publication. Hubby gave me a pretty matching set and I enjoyed them all the more for the lovely covers. Other favorites for the year were The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis and Consider the Oyster by M.F.K. Fisher. And Brideshead Revisited definitely deserves its accolades.

Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende (3/5)

The Titans by John Jakes (3/5)

Portrait in Sepia by Isabel Allende (3/5)

Certain Justice by John Lescroart (3/5)

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (5/5)

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (5/5) (College Board's Top 101; Easton Press Top 100; MLA's Top 30)

The New Diet Revolution by Robert Atkins (4/5)

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (4.5/5)

The Pilot's Wife by Annette Shreve (3/5)

The Reader by Bernhard Schlank (3/5)

Lost Light by Michael Conneley (3/5)

Emma by Jane Austen (5/5)

Dirty Work by Stuart Woods (3/5)

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (5/5)

Persuasion by Jane Austen (5/5)

Give Me a Break by John Stossel (3.5/5)

Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt (4/5)

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (3/5) (my French Connection list)

Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (2.5/5) (Modern Library's Top 100)

Atonement by Ian McEwan (4.5/5) (All-TIME 100)

For the Defense by Kate Wilhelm (2.5/5)

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (5/5) (All-TIME 100; Anthony Burgess Top 99; Modern Library's Top 100; Radcliffe's Top 100)

Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley (4.5/5) (Modern Library's Top 100)

An Unlikely Conservative by Linda Chavez (3/5)

Tales of the South Pacific by James Michener (4/5) (Pulitzer Prize winner)

Driving Over Lemons by Chris Stewart (3.5/5)

Guilt by John Lescroart (3/5)

The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever (3.5/5) (Modern Library's Top 100; National Book Award winner)

The Wapshot Scandal by John Cheever (3.5/5)

Kowloon Tong by Paul Theroux (2.5/5)

Herzog by Saul Bellow (5/5) (All-TIME 100; National Book Award winner)

The Warriors by John Jakes (3/5)

Suspicion of Vengeance by Barbara Parker (3.5/5)

Long Time No See by Susan Isaak (3/5)

The Old Devils by Kingsly Amis (4/5) (Booker Prize winner)

God and Man at Yale by William F. Buckley, Jr. (4/5)

Fletch by Gregory McDonald (3/5)

Scarlet Feather by Maeve Binchy (3.5/5)

Disgrace by J.M. Coetze (3.5/5) (Booker Prize winner)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey (4.5/5) (All-TIME 100; Radcliffe's Top 100)

Cleopatra by Michael Grant (3/5)

A Darkness More than Night by Michael Conneley (3/5)

The New Testament (King James)

First Law by John Lescroart (4/5)

From Here to Eternity by James Jones (3/5) (Modern Library's Top 100; National Book Award winner)

Mongoose, R.I.P. by William F. Buckley, Jr. (3/5)

Murder on the Run by Gail White (3/5)

Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier (3.5/5)

The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty (4/5) (Pulitzer Prize winner)

For Women Only by Jennifer Berman (2.5/5)

The Lawless by John Jakes (3/5)

Vinegar Hill by A. Manette Ansay (3/5)

Sharp Shooter by Nadia Gordon (3.5/5)

Consider the Oyster by M.F.K. Fisher (4.5/5) (my French Connection list)

Brokeback Mountain by E. Annie Proulx (3/5)

Kingdom of Shadows by Alan Furst (3.5/5)

Spanish Lessons by Derek Lambert (3/5)

The Little Black Dress by Didier Ludot (3/5)

Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle (3.5/5) (Booker Prize winner)

As They Were by M.F.K. Fisher (3.5/5)

Secret Portland by Ann Carol Burgess (2/5) (reviewed here)

Opening Sentence of the Day: Towers of Gold

"On my thirteenth birthday, my father took me to lunch at the Poodle Dog, one of San Francisco's oldest restaurants, the kind of place with red leather banquettes and smoke-stained walls." From the Introduction to Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California by Frances Dinkelspiel. I forgot to list the opening sentence when I started this book last week, and am now almost halfway through. This is a hugely entertaining history of California centered on one man -- a financier and investor who played a major role in getting Los Angeles off the ground before moving to San Francisco where he . . . . I don't know yet; I have to keep reading! Dinkelspiel is Hellman's great-great-granddaughter and a journalist. The book moves along at a good clip, written in a clear, journalistic style. I am really enjoying it. I am reviewing it for the upcoming issue of The Internet Review of Books. It is also the "gold" book on my Colorful Reading Challenge list.