Erin and Vinay host a Facebook group that sets up two 4-month reading challenges with competitions each year. Participants are required to read ten books in the four months of each challenge. The most recent BCBE has run from July 1st and ends October 31st. I believe the next one will run January to April 2021. I always complete this far too late to win any prizes, so I’d don’t even bother to tally my score. This is really great fun! #bookchallengebyerin

FREEBIE (min 200 pages): The High Rise in Fort Fierce by Paul Carlucci

Paul Carlucci is a Canadian author (who seems to go to great pains to disguise that fact) of mostly, if not completely, short stories.

High Rise is a collection of linked short stories that reveal a novel’s plot by the end of the book. Somewhere, I heard that Fort Fierce is modeled on Fort McMurry in northern Alberta, and home of a lot of Atlantic Canadians – so, of course, I had to read it.

It’s one of those books that you want to read again from the beginning – but I had to return it to the library. It’s rather brilliant, really. 4 stars

 
STARTS WITH “S”: So Big by Edna Ferber

So Big is a modern classic – and the winner of the 1924 Pulitzer Prize. It’s billed as the story of Selina Peake DeJong, but was really about her son Dirk, a nobody from a little truck farm in south Chicago who made it big. Wikipedia says it was modeled on a real-life woman.

I agree with Ferber who said of it: “It had no plot at all, as book plots go”, and further remarked that “it was a story of the triumph of failure.” 4 stars

 
Title has a PREPOSITION: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
4½ stars

 
ODD NUMBER in a series: Shadow Dancing by Julie Mulhern #7 Country Club Murders

This delightful murder mystery series is set in 1971 Kansas City. Despite the fact that I really don’t like romance in my murder mysteries and that Ellison Russel would probably snub me if we ever met, I can’t help but like her and root for her relationship with the handsome homicide detective (whom the author has styled on Steve McQueen).

All of the book titles in the Country Club Murders series are based on songs from the era, and the covers are all of the same design. Especially if you are of a certain age, you just have to try it. 4½ stars

 
SET IN A DIFFERENT COUNTRY: Such a Long Journey by Rohinton Mistry
4 stars

FEMALE POLICE Protagonist: The Birdwatcher by William Shaw #1 DS Alexandra Cupidi

It would take a lot for me to continue in a police procedural series and, even though I thought Cupidi was well-drawn and absolutely believable, this didn’t have it. The plot had just a few too many coincidences. 3½ stars

IMMIGRANT Main Character: Barnacle Love by Anthony de Sa

Five years ago, I found de Sa’s first book Kicking the Sky to be “heartbreaking and very human”, and I really wanted to like Barnacle Love as much. I just didn’t.

Like Carlucci’s Fort Fierce, this is a book of linked short stories, telling in chronological order the story of a Portuguese fisherman washed up in a storm on the shores of rural Newfoundland in the 1950s. Eventually, the family gets to Toronto, where the kids ride their bikes in the alley, as they did in Kicking the Sky.

De Sa, who is second generation Portuguese seems to draw heavily on his own family and their experience. 3½ stars

 
Title contains “THING”: Anything for Billy by Larry McMurtry

3½ stars

 
Book has an OCTOBER CONNECTION: Daisy Jones & the Six by Taylor Jenkins-Reid

(October 13th is National No Bra Day. Really.)
Enough said?
3½ stars

 
CITY, TOWN, VILLAGE etc. in title: The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

Oh – I’ve been wanting to read this for years, and now I can add it to Nonfiction November.

You all probably know that it’s about the 1893 Chicago’s World’s Fair AND about the completely mad serial killer H.H. Holmes and his World’s Fair hotel. It was riveting.

And I was so surprised to learn that the first Ferris wheel was steam-powered (duh) AND had whole rail cars where today we have one seat.

Also: I thought the “White City” was Chicago but it actually was a term applied to the main portion of the World’s Fair. 4½ stars

I may have made a mistake in how I entered this and might not even qualify – but it was fun anyway. Does anything look interesting to you?

P.S. Some of the links are affiliate links so I will receive a small percentage of any purchase you make after clicking through from this blog.

As I mentioned in my last post, Bookish Beck’s variation on Phyllis Rose’s The Shelf: From LEQ to LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading is for any set of four books in a row on my own shelf. I decided to choose from the books on my fiction shelves, filed by author surname. The letter M was my first dip.

The first book I tackled was Such a Long Journey which was Rohinton Mistry’s first book, published in 1991 and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, which was won that year by The Famished Road by Ben Okri. Mistry had published two short story collections prior to this first novel, but it was the magnificent A Fine Balance that catapulted him to fame in 1995.

Such a Long Journey is classic Mistry: straightforward in plot development, but taking the time to build the settings, as well as the characters. Mistry is a genius in drawing us pictures of everyday 20th-century India. We can feel Gustad’s frustrations, his fears – and his loyalties to old friends that embroil him unwittingly in dangerous activities. It was important for us to realize the corner that Gustad was in and that, despite the questionable nature of the deliveries he has to make, we are fully on his side.

I have also read Mistry’s third novel Family Matters, and recommend any of Mistry’s fiction to anyone interested in late twentieth century India. A Fine Balance appears on my list of all-time favourites. His marvelous writing talent is on in display in all of his books, although the circumstances of A Fine Balance (during the Troubles and Indira Gandhi) make it the most powerful of the three.
4 stars

Anything for Billy is the first of author Larry McMurtry’s books that I’ve read. I seldom hear much about it so I assume it wasn’t his best or, at least, his most popular. The book is fiction, based loosely (very loosely) on the last few days of the life of Henry McCarty aka William Bonney aka Billy the Kid. Billy was killed in a shoot-out at the age of 21, and that much remains the same in this book. But everything else is changed and/or imagined. Since we know how the whole mess ends, it’s almost painful to watch Billy swagger toward this death.

The narrator of Anything for Billy is spinning a yarn for us. It’s a yarn that is likely pretty accurate about the Wild West, but it’s just a yarn. 3½ stars

I have more books by McMurtry on my shelves and will definitely read them.

 
I had a choice of three books that W.O. Mitchell wrote and chose Jake and the Kid.

According to Wikipedia:

“An author of novels, short stories, and plays, Mitchell is best known for his 1947 novel, Who Has Seen The Wind, which has sold close to a million copies in North America . . and later a collection of short stories in 1961, Jake and the Kid which subsequently won the Stephen Leacock Award.”

Also, according to Wikipedia, I was really wrong in a previous post when I said ´My bet is that in the prairie provinces, the stories [in the Star Weekly] were by W.O. Mitchell.’ These stories were actually radio broadcasts of a series of the same name, which aired on CBC Radio between 1950 and 1956.

Mitchell grew up in Saskatchewan and most of his stories reflect a boy’s experiences growing up on the prairies. As I said in that earlier post, I’m keeping this book ‘forever’. 5 stars
 

And finally, there was The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell. This novel won the 2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize regional prize (South Asia and Europe); was long listed for the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, was one of Time Magazine’s “Best Books of the Year” (#4 Fiction), was a Globe & Mail best book, and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. It was shortlisted for the 2011 Walter Scott Prize. It’s also my brilliant cousin’s (well, one of my brilliant cousins) favourite book so I approached it with some degree of trepidation, fearing that in my ignorance of the finer points of literature, I wouldn’t properly appreciate it.

The amount of research that had to have gone into The Thousand Autumns is phenomenal. Not only did Mitchell have to authentically create the Dutch East Indies trading post of 1799, and also Japan (not limited to the port of Nagasaki) of that time but, as well, the complicated relationships that the Japanese had with any foreigner to their land.

In the Reading Guide at the end of the book, Mitchell posits that historical fiction endures in popularity because “it delivers a stereo narrative: from one speaker comes the treble of the novel’s own plot while the other plays the bass of history’s plot.” Mitchell seems to have done a masterful job of all of these details and the book is fascinating for the window it opens onto the land and the time. It plays the treble and the bass equally well, and blends them into a harmonious whole.

The only complaint I have is the ending that seemed rushed to me – although at nearly 500 pages the story was probably long enough as it stands. 4½ stars

 
Now I have an empty space on my book shelf that I’m actually quite proud of and, surprisingly, have no urge to fill again. What about you? Would you want to get more books to fill that empty space?

P.S. The links are affiliate links so I will receive a small percentage of any purchase you make after clicking through from this blog.

I’m always looking for a way to attack the unread books on my own shelves, so when Rebecca at Bookish Beck decided to host a new type of challenge, I decided to try it.

Her project is inspired by Phyllis Rose’s The Shelf –from LEQ to LES: Adventures in Extreme Reading for which Rose picked a shelf of the New York Society Library and after some housekeeping, read all the books on it. Rebecca’s is a variation for any set of four books in a row on my own shelf. See Bookish Beck for more details.

It was a lot of fun choosing the books to read and a great satisfaction in having an empty space on my shelf. I think I’ll probably play again with another letter.

I started with Such a Long Journey which was Rohinton Mistry’s first book. I was able to read it because of the Faber Firsts series which celebrated Faber’s 80th birthday and brought to light the first published novels of a variety of acclaimed authors. Some were the book that made their career and reputation; others, like Journey are not so well known. In 2009, there was a faberfirsts.com website but Norton blocked me from visiting today, telling me that it is a “known dangerous webpage”. I’ve never seen that message before, so Norton must have run into something.

I wasn’t able to find the cover that I have on my edition so this will have to do.

For those of you interested in such things, here is the list of Faber Firsts provided on the cover of Such a Long Journey:

William Golding Lord of the Flies
P.D. James Cover Her Face
John McGahern The Barracks
Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar
Peter Carey Bliss
Kazuo Ishiguro A Pale View of the Hills
Paul Auster The New York Trilogy
Orhan Pamuk The White Castle
Hanif Kureishi The Buddha of Suburbia
Rohinton Mistry Such a Long Journey

 
#4BooksinaRow

I’ll cover the other three books in this challenge in my next post. Have you read any of these “first books”? How did it compare to the author’s later works?
 

P.S. The links are affiliate links so I will receive a small percentage of any purchase you make after clicking through from this blog.

I’m not sure if I signed up officially for the very popular What’s In a Name challenge, hosted by Andrea at Carolina Book Nook, but I have been reading in order to finish it. Here are the titles I’ve read.

Title that contains an ampersand: Daisy Jones & the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid. I’ve also used this book for two other challenges this year. That’s probably the greatest satisfaction I’ll get out of it. Lots and lots and lots of hype, but I was disappointed. It just seemed clichéd.  

Title that contains antonyms: I had difficulty finding a title for this category but finally settled on Alice Munro’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. Somewhere in all those ‘ships’ there must be opposites. Munro also gets lots of hype – but it’s well-deserved and her work is enduring. I loved these stories.  

Title of four letters or less: Akin by Emma Donoghue. The problem with having such a phenomenally successful book as Room was, is trying to live up to it ever after. I did enjoy Akin, the story of an 80-year-old man given temporary custody of his eleven-year-old great-nephew just before his scheduled departure to Nice. It was, actually, delightful, if a little predictable.

Title that contains a given/first name: Autumn Laing by Australian author Alex Miller. I’ve had this book on my shelf for years, entranced every time I picked it up while dusting, by its cover. An elderly Autumn tells the story of an affair that she had with a man in her and her husband’s group of friends. These things are always entered into so selfishly, with little regard to the consequences, both short and long-term. The fact that it would happen, though, was evident from nearly the beginning, but Autumn kept us waiting far too long and I expected something much more spectacular by the time she finally got the story out. All in all, not really a very spectacular book.  

Title that has a reference to children: Jake and the Kid by W.O. Mitchell, a collection of short stories about a Canadian prairie farm boy whose dad is overseas in WWII, and the hired hand who’s keeping an eye out for him. Canadians of a certain age will remember the “magazines” that came with the weekend newspaper: Weekend Magazine or the Star Weekly, depending on where you lived. I think I read both over the years and as a teenager fell in love with the stories of Gregory Clarke.

My bet is that in the prairie provinces, the stories were by W.O. Mitchell. These are heartwarming family stories: the kid is loveable and naive about the ways of the world, and Jake is a hero – and not just the kid’s but also the reader’s. This book is going up on my “keep forever” shelf next to Greg Clarke.

Title with the word water, air, fire or earth: The Edge of the Earth by Christina Schwarz. The referenced edge of the earth is an island off the coast of California in 1898. The thing about Schwarz is that she’s enjoyable enough to read at the time, but other than scattered scenes,almost immediately I forgot what happened. I found the same thing when I read her highly acclaimed Drowning Ruth in 2012.

And that, as they say, is a wrap. Have you read any of these? Are you participating in this challenge this year?
 

P.S. The links are affiliate links so I will receive a small percentage of any purchase you make after clicking through from this blog.