reading avidly dot com: a casual and very random ordinary reader's journal, by a casual, very random ordinary reader.
0811201872 New Directions, 1963 translated by Ivan Morris 402 pp paperback There are several different works encompassed in this volume, and the main reason I picked up this book was because I had decided one day not too long ago that I wanted to watch a movie on the Criterion Channel called The Life of Oharu (1952), and as I started doing a bit of pre-viewing research, I discovered that it was…
9781803093666 Seagull Books, 2024 originally published as L'Empereur , 2021 translated by Nathan H. Dize hardcover read earlier 145 pp I can't for the life of me remember where I first came across this book, but I'm definitely happy that I did. I liked it so much that I recently bought this author's The Immortals, also translated by Nathan Dize, published in 2020. At this point I'd read anything…
9781739298937 Corylus Books, 2024 originally written as El último caso de Rodolfo Walsh, 2010 translated by Slava Faybysh 180 pp paperback (read earlier this month) Not all that long ago I got a news feed about the 2024 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, and immediately downloaded the entire list of 148 eligible titles in thirty-five languages. Some of these I've read, so I went through and…
9781956763508 Arcade Publishing, 2023 originally published 2012 as Seojjok supeuro gatda translated by Sora Kim-Russell 299 pp hardcover (read in April) I first came across the author when I read her novel The Hole a few years ago and I've been buying her books ever since. That novel was absolutely chilling, not only in the telling but also in its implications once that last page had been turned.…
9781913867652 Charco Press, 2023 originally published as Confesión , 2020 translated by Daniel Hahn 162 pp paperback (read in March) Confession is not a long novel, coming in at less than two hundred pages, but its short length disguises the complexity within. It also has a shocker of an ending that completely rattled me for days after finishing this book. Related in three interconnected parts,…
9781945492655 Transit Books, 2023 originally published 2020 as Histoires de la nuit translated by Daniel Levin Becker 439 pp I've described this book to friends as a demanding novel due to its style, but once you get used to the way it is written, it becomes unputdownable. It's also a story that eventually began to fry my nerves until the last page, and I have to admit that more than once I was…
9780307961440 Knopf/Everyman's Library, 2012 originally published 1989 230 pp hardcover The Remains of the Day was the reading choice for my IRL book group for January 2024. We'd read a couple of Ishiguro's novels prior to this one, starting with Never Let Me Go and more recently, Klara and the Sun , but of the three, The Remains of the Day is one that that most fully captured my heart, although a…
9780861546459 Oneworld, 2023 308 pp hardcover As with more than a few books I've read recently, Prophet Song drew my attention by way of this year's Booker Prize longlist, from which it has now moved on to the shortlist. This book was such a powerful read that it made me cry at the end, and that does not happen every day. With no back story to explain how it happened (and really, in my opinion,…
9781039009066 Knopf Canada 193 pp hardcover I meant to get this post done much sooner, but sadly another death has darkened our doorway so it's been a few rough weeks around here for the two of us. But it's time to move forward. The narrative in Study for Obedience is related by an unnamed narrator (whom we find out later is Jewish, which has more than a small amount of bearing on her story), who,…
9781324036296 W.W. Norton, 2023 210 pp hardcover " Terrible how terribly good intentions turn out every time." I love finding novels that are based on, or in this case "inspired by," real events, especially when I am completely ignorant of the facts behind the fiction. The story found in Paul Harding's This Other Eden , now longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize , is one of these, with the action…
" Moths see light and fly to it... Always searching for the border between deep darkness and the billows of the moon. The moonlight to them is hope. But to a moth, there are many things that resemble moonlight. It is that hope that turns on them and gets them killed. " 9780063213388 Ecco, 2023 327 pp hardcover Trinidad is one of our favorite Caribbean island destinations so when I heard about this…
" We are so often wrong about the ones we love, slowly debasing ourselves, so gradually we barely notice we're doing it . " 9780385548304 Doubleday, 2023 190 pp hardcover The truth is that after the first thirty pages or so of reading this novel, I stopped and added to my goodreads status something to the effect that I hoped that it got better because I wasn't really enjoying it to that point.…
9780525561132 Viking, 2022 403 pp hardcover " Even the sticks and stones will tell you that an animal can't just preach change without embodying it themselves, and that that change has to begin at the top and then trickle down to the rest of the masses." The setting of this novel is the fictional country of Jidada, which is actually a stand-in for Zimbabwe, the home country of author NoViolet…
9781908745903 Sort of Books, 2022 385 pp hardcover Not too far into the first chapter I realized that this book and I were going to get along just fine, and I was right. To put it bluntly, I effing loved this book and have been telling everyone about it. The author sets his story in 1990, and as it opens, the main character Maali Almeida wakes up (as he believes) "hungover" to find himself in an…
9780593318935 Knopf, 2022 271 pp hardcover Nightcrawling is author Leila Mottley's novel debut, a book she started writing in her teens, set in Oakland, California. At seventeen, she says in the Author's Note at the end of the novel, she was contemplating what it meant to be "vulnerable, unprotected, and unseen," and that she wanted to write a story that "would reflect the fear and danger that…
9781958094020 EastOver Press, 2022 197 pp paperback It is always such a pleasure to read Khanh Ha's work, and his latest, All The Rivers Flow Into the Sea is no exception. It is a collection of short stories which, as the back-cover blurb notes, "brings to readers a unique sense of love and passion alongside tragedy and darker themes of peril." Here the author examines a cast of various characters…
" History is a motherfucker." 9781644450642 Graywolf Press, 2021 308 pp paperback Another novel from this year's Booker Prize longlist, but I first read it a year ago during my nothing-good-is-happening-in-my-life funk so once again, because of its inclusion on the longlist, it was a reminder that I owed it to myself to do a second read. Hell of a great book, for sure. The novel begins in "what…
9781913393199 Saraband, 2021 278 pp hardcover I bought Case Study long before the announcement that it had been selected for this year's Booker Prize longlist, and like the vast majority of books that come into this house, I shelved it and promptly moved on to something else. That was October of last year; last week's above-mentioned announcement reminded me that it has just been sitting there and…
" A border, gentlemen, is for crossing." 9781911284611 Tilted Axis Press, 2021; originally published as Ret Samadhi (2018) translated by Daisy Rockwell 739 pp paperback It was the first paragraph that sold me on this story, which is highly unusual but it's what happened. Here the author reveals that "this particular tale has a border and women who come and go as they please," but even more to the…
9781999368432 Charco Press, 2021 originally published as Elena sabe translated by Frances Riddle 152 pp paperback (read earlier, in March) I bought Elena Knows last July, set it aside, and just recently took it off its shelf when I learned it is one of the books on this year's International Booker longlist. The fact that it went on to make the shortlist was no surprise to me -- I'm a huge fan of…
9780143136590 Penguin, 2022 originally published 1996 376 pp paperback "Blues done saved as many lives as church songs." I'm not exactly sure where I first heard about Dirty Bird Blues, but I think it was this year's inclusion in the long-established collection of Penguin Classics that sold me. According to Penguin's website , their classics collections "represents a global bookshelf of the best…
9781949540239 C&R Press, 2021 141 pp paperback (from the author, thank you!!) Some time ago I stopped becoming active in book tours because of my own still-unread, Library of Congress-sized tbr pile, but for this author, whose books I've read before, I made an exception. Given that we're still in the midst of downstairs remodel hell where my day often lasts from 6:30 a.m. to like 7 pm, that's a…
9780525656975 Knopf, 2021 593 pp hardcover I bought this book back in May and since then it was awarded a spot on the Booker Prize longlist; recently it moved on ahead to the shortlist. I had originally picked it up due to the dustjacket blurb, which promised an "unforgettable, mesmerizing new novel," along with the story of "an epic tale of two extraordinary women whose fates collide across…
9780241468940 Viking, 2021 372 pp hardcover (read twice) The Fortune Men focuses on a Somali immigrant, Mahmood Mattan, who in 1952 was accused of the murder of a shopkeeper in Tiger Bay, Cardiff. I had absolutely no idea going into this book that it was based on a true story , one I'd never heard about but one which the author obviously believed needed retelling; in this interview she notes that…
9781910668922 Holland House Books, 2019 179 pp paperback "... he would not leave; he would never leave. The land was his always." The first time I read about this book after its placement on this year's Booker Prize longlist, I knew I had to have it, and I absolutely knew within the first few pages of reading it that this was a book that I was going to love, given its subject matter. The surprise…