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Polka's Chunky Choices


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I've decided that any book around 450+ pages qualifys as a Doorstep for me, so here are the chunky monkeys in my TBR list (in descending order of 'weightiness'!):

 

David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (1024 pages)

Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes (trans. Edith Grossmann) (960 pages)

Anna Karenina - L.N. Tolstoy (864 pages)

An Instance of the Fingerpost - Iain Pears (704 pages)

Villette - Charlotte Bronte (672 pages)

No Name - Wilkie Collins (656 pages)

The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood (641 pages)

The Mill on the Floss - George Eliot (640 pages)

Alias Grace - Margaret Atwood (545 pages)

Small Island - Andrea Levy (544 pages)

Special Topics in Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl (528 pages)

Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (448 pages)

 

January

Vanity Fair - W.M Thackeray (912 pages)

 

February

The Night Watch - Sarah Waters (480 pages)

 

March

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Michael Chabon (656 pages)

 

April

The Tenderness of Wolves - Stef Penney (466 pages)

(+ A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens, 544 pages)

 

May

The Crimson Petal and The White - Michel Faber (894 pages)

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I'm a big fan of Wilkie Collins and have read and enjoyed No Name - it was a particularly good one of his. The Woman in White being my favourite.

 

Thank you Judy! It was a present from my mum at Christmas, and I'd never heard of it 'til then. So I was wondering if anyone had read it. That's encouraging :blush: I haven't read any Wilkie Collins before (and I thought he was a she for ages, lol!).

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The Woman in White is on my top five list of all-time favourites. I haven't read No Name, or anything else by Wilkie Collins, which is very remiss of me, but its the old time thing, as usual. I would really like to read WiW again first. But thanks for the tip, Judy. Might just hop to No Name.:blush:

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Aimz asked...

Btw, Susie and Judy: are you planning on undertaking 'the chunk challenge'?

The simple and very short answer to that is 'No'! I am a slow reader, and with writing as well, I'm struggling to read anything, let alone something with more than ten pages! Have a heart girl!:blush:

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The simple and very short answer to that is 'No'! I am a slow reader, and with writing as well, I'm struggling to read anything, let alone something with more than ten pages! Have a heart girl!:)

 

:blush::):roll::cry:

 

...

 

Only joking! :D The only reason I'm even considering it is the fact there are soooo many huge books in my TBR list. It wasn't intentional but it's a huge mountain to climb!

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:blush:

 

Btw, Susie and Judy: are you planning on undertaking 'the chunk challenge'?

 

Well I entered it by default by reading The Interpretation of Murder which I whipped through because it was so compulsive. I've just started Shadow of the Wind - picked it up while I was working at the library today - I don't think it qualifies though as it's only 400 pages long (I think?). Maybe my next doorstep could be a Dickens or a Wilkie Collins - will have to see what I've got in my bookcase.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Well, here I (officially) go:

 

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon (656 pages)

 

Started 21/03/2007 - Finished 30/03/2007

 

One night in 1939, Josef Kavalier shuffles into his cousin Sam Clay's cramped New York bedroom, his arduous and nerve-wracking escape from Prague finally achieved - with the help of his mentor, the master illusionist Kornblum. But little does he realise that this uneasy first meeting is the start of an extraordinary friendship and even more fruitful business partnership. For Sam, Joe's formidable artistic skills are a chance to liberate them both from lives as inventory clerks at the Empire Novelties Incorporated Company. Together, they create a comic strip called The Escapist, its superhero a Nazi-busting saviour who liberates the oppressed around the world with his Golden Key. The Escapist makes them their fortune and their name, but, as the situation worsens in Europe, Joe can only think of one thing. How can he effect a real-life escape, and free his family from the tyranny of Hitler? Michael Chabon's exceptional new novel is a thrilling tight-rope walk between high comedy and bitter tragedy, and confirms his position as one of the most inventive and daring of contemporary American writers. In Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay, he has created two unforgettable characters bound together by love, family and cartoons. Their story, which ranges from the heady heights of the American Dream to the desperation and grief of the Second World War, and which journeys from New York and Czechoslovakia to the Arctic Circle, will live on in the mind of every reader long after the final page is turned.

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Update

 

I'm on page 257 and I'm really enjoying it. Definitely one of those doorsteps that doesn't feel like a lot to wade through. I polished off a hundred pages yesterday alone!

 

The characterisation of Joe and Sam is wonderful, and that's one aspect that's guaranteed to get my interest :friends0:

 

But can I finish it by the end of the month...?

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Update

 

I've decided that this novel is evil: it makes me stay up late to read it! I'm so tired! Just when I think I'm going to finish a chapter and go to sleep, I look for the end of the next and think 'Oh. It's not that long. I'll read another chapter'. Then I repeat the previous behaviour at least five times :friends0:

 

It's a brilliant book to properly start the Doorstep Challenge - you just fly through it, yet absorb everything. It reminds me of Middlesex although they are quite different from one another (although both won the Pulitzer prize!).

 

Like The Night Watch, it's a different prespective of WWII which I really enjoy reading about: this time, it looks at how Jewish-Americans reacted to what was going on in Europe... although that's only a small (but significant) part of a novel that's thematically rich. Plus it's also about comics (ahem, graphic novels), so that's doubly interesting for me!

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Update

 

I've decided that this novel is evil: it makes me stay up late to read it!

Don't ya just hate it when that happens :)

You have to watch these books they're little devils :friends0:

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Update

 

Now up to page 470: I squeezed in a hundred pages in an hour last night! Firstly, I reached a very tense part of the book (

regarding Thomas', Joe's brother, passage to New York. I was too stunned and numb by it all to even consider crying!

). Then - I have to say - I found the next part ('Radioman') quite boring, so I employed my champion 'skimming' abilities! It was just a bit cliched, I felt (

'Radioman' is the part where Joe has been deployed to Syberia- I think? - after enlisting in the US Army. I'm not a fan of War Lit, so I found this part quite tedious. Despite this, I thought the letter scene at the end was heartbreaking :lol:)

.

 

However, I'm still really enjoying this novel :blush: Can't wait to get back to it!

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I finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay on Friday (30th March), so I did manage to make it to the end of the month!

 

A really considered, powerful book that beautifully uses a few characters and the space of a few years to really capture and explore New York during WWII. I thought the characters were beautiful, especially Sammy, and Joe's realisation at his cousin's 'sacrifice' towards the end of the novel made me cry!

 

I was impressed by the ending, as Chabon clearly decided to take his time so that what happened wasn't rushed, and drew a sense of the inevitable about it.

 

The 'fantastical' elements of the story that bookended the novel, such as Joe's escape from Prague and

his eventual return

, actually heightened the sense of humanity and 'down-to-earthiness' of the characters and situations.

 

The contextual backdrop of the burgeoning comic book industry was also highly involving and clearly a labour of love on Chabon's part, that never appeared superfluous to the actual narrative of Joe and Sam.

The description of comic strips and their stories were lovingly detailed, so much so that I could visualise the panels myself. When Chabon 'blurred' the two styles (

e.g. when the hotel Joe is performing is bombed by his white-supremacist nemesis

), I could actually feel the morphing of the graphic story into the actual reality of what was going on. Brilliant!

 

I really enjoyed it, and will probably return to it again, as I feel I could get even more out of it with re-reading.

 

If you're considering undertaking your own doorstep challenge and are stuck for books, then I highly recommend this as you won't even remember how chunky it is as you fly through it! :blush:

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  • 2 weeks later...

Since decided to change the perimeters of my Doorstep Challenge a bit, so The Tenderness of Wolves now qualifies as a chunky monkey :tong:

 

The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney

 

Started 10/04/2007 - Finshed 22/04/2007

 

Paperback: 466 pages

Publisher: Quercus; New Ed edition (8 Feb 2007)

Language English

ISBN-10: 1847240674

ISBN-13: 978-1847240675

 

1867, Canada - As winter tightens its grip on the isolated settlement of Dove River, a man is brutally murdered and a 17-year old boy disappears. Tracks leaving the dead man's cabin head north towards the forest and the tundra beyond. In the wake of such violence, people are drawn to the township - journalists, Hudson's Bay Company men, trappers, traders - but do they want to solve the crime, or exploit it? One-by-one the assembled searchers set out from Dove River, pursuing the tracks across a desolate landscape home only to wild animals, madmen and fugitives, variously seeking a murderer, a son, two sisters missing for 17 years, a forgotten Native American culture, and a fortune in stolen furs before the snows settle and cover the tracks of the past for good. In an astonishingly assured debut, Stef Penney deftly weaves adventure, suspense, revelation and humour into a panoramic historical romance, an exhilarating thriller, a keen murder mystery and ultimately, with the sheer scope and quality of her storytelling, one of the books of the year.

 

Wonderfully powerful beginning: In fact, I can't remember the last time I was so impressed by the opening pages of a novel! However, that means it has to continue to impress :blush: Very promising start though!

 

I'm only about 70+ pages in but I'm loving it thus far: it's extremely atmospheric and very readable. It's establishing a lot of characters, who are all so interesting that I want to know more. I really like how Penney switches narrative point-of-view between third person for the majority of the time, then uses first-person narration for Mrs Ross (who's a very intriguing lady...).

 

Really enjoying it, just wish I had chance to read more this week! Still, it's the weekend very soon, so some quality 'sit down and tell the world to shut up' time is ahead!

 

* * * * *

 

The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney was an absolute joy to read: I throughly enjoyed it and it well deserves it's award winning status ("Boo!" to the Orange Prize for not shortlisting it: "Boo!" again, in fact).

 

I will review it properly as I'd like more people to hear about it. Beautiful characterisation, wonderful plotting, AMAZING atmosphere (I can't think of anything I've read that captures a mood and landscape so completely)... A beautiful and compulsive novel, and I can scarcely believe it's only Penney's first! She is also a screenwriter, and although the dialogue is pitch-perfect, I can't imagine this particular story as anything other than a written narrative.

 

It's one of the few books where I've got to the end and felt a huge need to read more. I demand a sequel! I can't be left without knowing more... :D:blush:

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  • 1 month later...

The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber

 

Started 17/05/2007 - Finished __/__/2007

 

Paperback: 894 pages

Publisher: Canongate Books Ltd; New Ed edition (30 Sep 2003)

Language English

ISBN-10: 1841954314

ISBN-13: 978-1841954318

 

Although it's billed as "the first great 19th-century novel of the 21st century," The Crimson Petal and the White is anything but Victorian. It's the story of a well-read London prostitute named Sugar, who spends her free hours composing a violent, pornographic screed against men. Michel Faber's dazzling second novel dares to go where George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss and the works of Charles Dickens could not. We learn about the positions and orifices that Sugar and her clients favour, about her lingering skin condition, and about the suspect ingredients of her prophylactic douches. Still, Sugar believes she can make a better life for herself.

When she is taken up by a wealthy man, the perfumer William Rackham, her wings are clipped and she must balance financial security against the obvious servitude of her position. The physical risks and hardships of Sugar's life (and the even harder "honest" life she would have led as a factory worker) contrast--yet not entirely--with the medical mistreatment of her benefactor's wife, Agnes, and beautifully underscore Faber's emphasis on class and sexual politics. In theme and treatment, this is a novel that Virginia Woolf might have written, had she been born 70 years later. The language, however, is Faber's own--brisk and elastic--and, after an awkward opening, the plethora of detail he offers (costume, food, manners, cheap stage performances, the London streets) slides effortlessly into his forward-moving sentences.

Despite its 800-plus pages, The Crimson Petal and the White turns out to be a quick read, since it is truly impossible to put down.

 

* * *

 

Gripping from the first page, this immense novel is an intoxicating and deeply satisfying read. Faber's most ambitious fictional creation yet, it is sure to affirm his position as one of the most talented and brilliant writers working in the UK. Sugar, an alluring, nineteen-year-old 'lady of the night' in the brothel of the terrifying Mrs Castaway, yearns for a better life. Her ascent through the strata of 1870's London society offers us intimacy with a host of loveable, maddening and superbly realised characters. At the heart of this panoramic, multi-layered narrative is the compelling struggle of a young woman to lift her body and soul out of the gutter. The Crimson Petal and the White is a big, juicy, must-read of a novel that will delight, enthral, provoke and entertain young and old, male and female.

 

Well I'm only 250 pages through but WOW. Seriously, WOW.

 

Where to begin? For starters I can't remember reading an opening quite as striking as Crimson Petal's is, and this hugh performing beginning has, thus far, been maintained throughout.

 

It's like all the Victorian-era literature we love but with all the manky/scandalous/sweary bits left in :roll: Plus all beautifully written!

 

I'm really enjoying it so far - it's incredibly readable, beautifully written (the details are exquisite!) yet very, very funny and bawdy. Actually, it's incredibly graphic in parts (as part of it is set in a brothel) - my eyes nearly popped out a couple of times towards the end of the first part! (Like this: B), lol!) But it's all part of the narrative and the sense of the novel being what Victorian writers couldn't actually write, yet must have known went on, at the time. Faber takes on a bit of a Thackeray narrative persona too, which I just love.

 

I can't wait to get back to reading it!

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