ethan

Thanks for the kind comment, Marie. I think anyone who enjoyed The Secret History will most likely enjoy The Goldfinch, but it is a very long book.

The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt The adolescent angst, so authentic in The Secret History, struck me as a bit tired in the early sections. Theo, the 13yo hero, loses his mom in a terrorist bombing, he's hauling around a priceless stolen painting, and he's stuck with a charismatic loser of a Dad. So although there is much to be anxious about, the zeitgeist seems more 80s than aughts, and the drug orgies grew depressing. Tartt almost lost me somewhere in the eerie desert outskirts of a nearly abandoned housing project in Vegas. The narrative gave out vibes of having been worked and re-worked, condensed, the prose often paper thin, I occasionally had to resist the temptation to skim. But once Theo returns to NYC, the novel gains its bearings, especially after the jump cut to Theo as grown-up crooked antique furniture dealer. Tartt is adept at refashioning pulpy material into mysterious meditations on existence and fate. She never flinches or becomes self-conscious in her story telling, fully embracing incident, coincidence and plot twists. Even in the bumpy parts one can be swayed along by the mesmerizing quality of her confessional tone. The Theo in Amsterdam chapters are the best thing she has ever written, careening from a thrilling shoot-out, to a powerful and deeply sad depiction of physical and psychic exile, to a final plot twist, both breathtaking and highly satisfying. The overarching themes in all three of her novels - of estrangement, the irresistible urge to isolate oneself from "normal" life, the romantic yearning for transcendence, the damage done by the secrets we carry within ourselves - are here beautifully expressed.

1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War - Charles Emmerson An excellent global snapshot of 20 major cities in the year before the Great War. A relatively placid ante-bellum time compared to the dark years preceding the US Civil War or WWII. Nobody could forsee the dire possibilities that would come to fruition a year later. With the 100 year anniversary, there are and will be a spate of new books dissecting the conflict. This book doesn't cover the causes and I'm searching for a modern interpretation, having read Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August many years ago. The Liberal Imagination - Lionel Trilling His early essay collection from 1950 touching mostly on literature. Some of his assumptions seem dated from the perspective of our more reactionary age. But he is very insightful on Fitzgerald and James, and I enjoyed his defense of the novel from the accusations that the form had died, not much different than some contemporary pronouncements, 60 years on. The Pickwick Papers - Charles Dickens This was simply a lot of fun to read, so rich in comedy and exaggerated yet endearing characterizations, especially Sammy and his old man, Mr. Weller. My favorite chapter was the joyous Christmas Eve celebration at Squire Wardle's, presumably the first instance of Dicken's popularization of the holiday.

Three disappointments last week but I was overdue. Harvest - Jim Crace The setting is a pre-Industrial English farming village far off the beaten track during the period of the Enclosure Acts (1750 - 1860) although no date is specified. These acts, somewhat analagous to modern hostile takeovers, enabled the one percenters to transform (in this novel) a wheat and barley farming community into a sheep farm thereby eliminating the need for local farmers who had been there for generations. Conflict ensues including pillorying and witchcraft accusations. Crace writes very melodious prose and creates a rich convincing atmosphere. But the first person narration grew increasingly oppressive with its downcast, self pitying tone and the story, which held promise, kind of fizzles away. This is the second of the novels on the short list of this years Man Booker Prize I've read. The Luminaries, which won, is up next. Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf Two stories intersect in a stream-of-conciousness flow of impressionistic perceptions. One story concerns preparations by Mrs Dalloway for an aristocratic dinner party; the other the travails of a shell-shocked veteran of the recently concluded Great War. Everything occurs within the framework of a single day with some backstory. The novel is certainly "beautifully written" as they say, but the pieces of the literary puzzle didn't gibe together too well for me, especially the abrupt demise of poor Septimus, the disturbed ex-soldier. I much prefer To the Lighthouse. The Sound of the Mountain - Yasunari Kawabata Dysfunctional family life in post-WWII Japan. This novel struck me as earnest but lifeless, oddly enough, as there were some strands of potential drama within the endless mundane dialogue. Kawabata was the first Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize and I probably should read some more of his stuff which has been compared to haiku. The contemplative mode of story telling is a bit of a struggle for me.

I'm planning on reading a couple of Zweig's novels soon and will include The Post Office Girl. Thanks for the recommendation.

The Lowland - Jhumpa Lahiri The story of two brothers in India, one is executed by the police for his revolutionary activities in the1960s. The rest of the novel concerns how the remaining family members never really recover from the tragedy. I was frustrated at times reading this, there are very few characters while covering over half a century. I kept hoping Lahiri would slow down a bit. At times it seemed like I was reading well-written biographical sketches on wikipedia. Lahiri does provide a very effective ending though, a secret revealed that sheds significant light on what has come before. I also like the way she handled the theme of how the revolutionary impulses of the 1960s have faded into memory. As someone who came of age during that period, I find it quite haunting. The World of Yesterday - Stefan Zweig A beautifully written ground level description and analysis of the times (1890s-1940s) Zweig lived through, and what times they were, as well as an accounting of his prodigious literary career. So there is limited personal information but many indelible portraits of other famous artists he knew. And little clue as to Zweig (and his wife's) suicide, although this memoir was completed right before. He was on the run from the clutches of Hitler, and says in his suicide note that he despaired over the total destruction of culture in his beloved Europe. Zweig was hugely popular in his lifetime, world-wide, mostly for his novels, one of which was adapted into the romantic Hollywood classic Letter From an Unknown Woman. A Time to be Born - Dawn Powell This is set in NYC as WWII is breaking out, and contains a thinly veiled, unflattering and very funny portrait of Clare Booth Luce, called Amanda here, a total narcissist worthy of comparison to Undine in Wharton's Custom of the Country. It has the same brittle, bitchy veneer and even charm of Luce's famous play and movie The Women, so in some way it ironically seems as much homage to Luce as castigation. Powell is mentioned by Rory in an episode of Gilmour Girls in which she bemoans how neglected Powells' novels are. Gore Vidal and Edmund Wilson championed Powell's work and she is definitely worth discovering if you enjoy sharp edged satire, or how it was for young women to make the grade in a big city in a far-off age. The Levant Trilogy - Olivia Manning I found this to be as entertaining (maybe more so) as Manning's The Balkan Trilogy which I read earlier this year. It's the story of a young married couple (he works as a teacher for the British Institute) who barely escape the Nazi Army first in Bucharest, then Athens and, in these volumes, Cairo. Lots of oddball ex-pats keep popping in and out, but at heart it's an examination of a fragile marriage intruded on by terrifying historical events. I confess to falling for the wife, Harriet Pringle, much as I once did for Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady, and often felt like wringing her husband Guy's neck for his obtuseness in neglecting such a treasure. An attitude I think Manning slyly encourages. Many of the same eccentric characters return in the Levant novels for an encore. I groaned when I realized this trilogy would include battle sequences (I liked the way Manning kept the terror always somewhere over the mountains) but surprisingly they turned out to be as well-described as any such scenes I've read. Just a great chronicle of an amazing time.

The Unconsoled - Kazuo Ishiguro I read everything by Ishiguro a few years ago except for this one. I skipped it due to the 'Kafkaesque' label that most reviewers applied to it. After about 50 pages it seemed more Twilight Zone than Kafka and I wondered how Ishiguro could possibly extend this otherworldly conceit to over 500 pages. Gradually, I bought into the dream-like world and by the finish I actually craved for more. It will probably replace Never Let Me Go as my favorite of his novels. So imaginative, sad and very funny. In fact, one of the funniest passages I've ever encountered occurs toward the conclusion, when an orchestra conducter, whose wooden leg has just been amputated by an obtuse surgeon, limps onto the stage for the most important concert of his life, using an ironing board as a crutch, a board that just can't seem to stay latched. Wives and Daughters - Elizabeth Gaskell A Victorian novel very similiar in plot and theme to Trollope's Doctor Thorne which I read earlier this year. Gaskell is quite good with irony and characterization. Molly, the main heroine, is fetching but sometimes too pure and good to be true. Her step-mother, and especially her step-sister Cynthia, steal the show with their finely and humorously delineated human flaws. Although it lacks Trollope's mastery of plot and comic design, it never bored me, and both her Cranford and North and South look like future reads. .

A Portrait of the Artist at a Young Age - James Joyce I read this as a warm-up for Ulysses, one of those mega-bricks of high literature I instinctively look away from whenever encountered in bookstore jaunts. Infinite Jest is another. But mega-bricks aren't as intimidating in e-book form and if I can read Proust, can Joyce be any more difficult? The main character in Artist is Stephen Dedalaus also one of the three main protaganists in Ulysses. We experience his very Catholic upbringing, struggles with his father's financial difficulties, and ultimately his crisis of faith. The centerpiece is a hell-fire-and-brimstone sermon that scares the bejesus out of Stephen causing him to contemplate the priesthood for his life's work. Artistic impulses win out. This novel is an early experiment in the technique of stream-of-conciousness, so aped throughout subsequent literary history it struck me as a bit quaint here in it's infancy. The Samurai - Shusaku Endo An historical novel set in the early 1600's concerning the voyage of a Catholic priest and three Japanese envoys to New Spain, and then Europe, seeking to open up trade routes in exchange for the freedom to prostelytize the Catholic religion in Japan. The culture clash aspects are fascinating (this is based on a true story) and the depiction of the harrowing sea voyage is intense. But the quartet are simply being used by their cynical political and religious institutions for their own selfish ends, and the hapless envoys are being further exploited by the ambitious priest who dreams of becoming Bishop of Japan. Endo suggests that faith is a purely personal matter that exists beyond institutions and zealots, Christ's message meant for the downtrodden and lost. Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Middle Danube to the Iron Gates- Patrick Leigh Fermer The second volume of Fermer's long walk from Holland to Constantinople in 1932-33 when he was but 19 years old. It's a grand and romantic notion, most would say crazy. Hitler has come to power and much of the mitteleuropa he tramps through will be devastated by the coming war. Fermer writes this in the 1980s from his diaries and letters so there is an elegiac tone to the magical moments he spent in the castles and woods of Hungary and Transylvania. Fermer is a beautiful prose stylist in his descriptions of nature and people, colorful adjectives pile up, I had to consult the dictionary for quite a few. The final volume of the journey was never completed but the remaining fragments will be published next March.

Excellent review of Cat's Table, books! I read this earlier in the year and also loved the writing. I did stumble at times over the first person narration, how an old man could remember events in such detail from when he was 11 years old. I kept thinking I wouldn't have stumbled if the novel had been told in third person. But as you point out it is a book about memory. This was my first Ondaatje, a friend recommends Divisadero as his best. Have you read that?

frankie, I've read 3 Spark novels (Loitering With Intent, Symposium the other two) recently and a few more a long time ago. I've not read The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie as I avoided it so far having seen the Maggie Smith movie many times. Ford Madox Ford's real name was Ford Hermann Hueffer and many of his books were originally published under that name. He changed it during WW1 because he thought it sounded too German.

The Rules of Engagement - Anita Brookner I zipped through this in a couple of days and that kind of surprised me. It's a story told in first person of a depressed, alienated woman and her relationship with a schoolgirl friend, who seems to shadow the events of her life in interesting ways. What I think I found spellbinding was the way the narrator analyzes and attempts to make sense of her disappointing life. I'm going to check out Brookner's Booker winner, Hotel du Lac, next. The Thirty Years War - C.V. Wedgwood A comprehensive and very readable history of the calamitous war of the 17th century. Emperors, Kings, Archdukes, Electors, Princes of all sorts duking it out, ostensibly for religious reasons, but ultimately just to protect their own fiefdoms. Average people had no say whatsoever, and the suffering was horrific, if the undisciplined soldiers didn't get you, there was starvation and plague around the corner. Man's inhumanity to Man is always a mind boggler. Bleeding Edge - Thomas Pynchon Not one of Pynchon's major works but still entertaining and often quite moving. If you're not already a fan though, you might want to pass it by. He's definitely the love/hate author of our times.

Danube - Claudio Magris Magris takes a journey from the headwaters to the delta of the famous river. He is a professor of Germanic literature (also a novelist) at the University of Trieste so this is a very learned book. At each significant town or city along the way he gives us ample doses of historical, cultural, and especially literary history of the place. I was familiar with only a small fraction of his topics but he explains them in gorgeous prose and with much philosophical insight, so I was often entranced regardless. The Guermantes Way - Marcel Proust I read much larger segments in each sitting in this, Vol 3 of In Search of Lost Time, than I did in the previous two books. Much of this volume is given to a satirical evocation of the French aristocracy, a long dinner party and then subsequent visits to the salon of the Duchess Guermantes. The narrator had been fascinated by the Duchess from afar, and although somewhat disappointed with her when he finally becomes part of her clique, she is the wit and life of the story. The height of the Dreyfus affair occurs within the time frame of the novel and it's interesting to see how the passions that the controversy induced divided society and families. The narrator was on the side of Dreyfus, his father vehemently opposed. ... I've taken a few courses with coursera.org in the last year and have recently enrolled in a new one on historical fiction called Plagues, Witches, and War: The Worlds of Historical Fiction which begins October 15. This one sounds good as it will include workshop videos with five different practioners of the genre in discussions of one of their novels. I took a literature course earlier this year called The Fiction of Relationship with Arnold Weinstein from Brown University that was extraordinary. And it's all free! Here's a link. https://www.coursera.org/course/hisfiction

Yes, Ooshie, it is indeed Plantegent Palliser who makes an appearance. His quixotic infatuation with the exquisitely named Lady Dumbello is one of the most entertaining of the sub-plots. I think when I finish the Chronicles not much time will pass before I tackle the Palliser series.

The Small House at Allington - Anthony Trollope Book 5 of the Barsetshire Chronicles which I have been greatly enjoying. I would rank this volume as just a tad below only Book 2 (Barchester Towers) in entertainment value. Trollope creates a recognizable world so masterly in each volume, as well as characters to inhabit it that are as finely drawn as any you might find in literature. Small House is the most intimate of the series. It mostly concerns Lily Dale who loves the rascal Crosbie madly and deeply, even after she is cruelly jilted by the cad. One of Trollope's biographers states that Trollope meant to satirize this everlasting love, he felt it was an unhealthy concept too many young Victorian women were afflicted with. Ironically, Lily would become his most popular heroine for her willful adherence to this very concept. The series is basically a comedy of manners, and weddings have supplied harmonic conclusions to the first four books. Although Trollope does indeed give us one here as well, it is surprisingly not the one we were anticipating, leaving his three main protagonists in an interesting, ambiguous limbo. On to the final volume, The Last Chronicle of Barset, 900+ pages! The Spoils of Poynton - Henry James I've also been reading alot of James lately although not by any set design. I so loved my re-reading of Portrait of a Lady earlier this year, that I can't seem to stop myself from reading more. This short novel is considered minor James but I found it very satisfying. The "spoils" are the tapestries, paintings and bric-a-brac lovingly accumulated by a middle-aged widow throughout her life, and proudly displayed at her country mansion, Poynton. Her son has inherited all, and chooses a bride his mother detests. Not wanting to leave her vast, cherished booty to one who will not appreciate it, she steals every last piece, transporting them to the small cottage she has been exiled to. A psychological war develops between mother and son (the bride wants it all back as a condition of marriage). A young female friend of the mothers acts as intermediary, and in the process of negotiating she falls in love with the son. All leading to a stunning ending.

Dissident Gardens - Jonathan Lethem The only previous Lethem novel I'd read was Motherless Brooklyn which was somewhat conventional. Gardens is different. In narrative voice it's a non-stop barrage of words with a very jazzy tone, jumping around from era to era. It's ostensiby about American Communism in the 1930s, the Great Depression days, how it fell apart, and the effects of that belief on the descendents of the believers. The characters unfortunately never transcend their stereotypes. The novel is dominated by the familiar overbearing Jewish mother, Rose, who is thrown out of the Party for having an affair with a black cop, although she has long since lost the faith. And most of what is left of the party soon falls apart after Khruschev famously reveals to the world the bloodcurdling dimensions of Stalin's gangsterism. Rose's daughter Miriam follows her life trajectory, as if in a Hollywood movie, from teen rebel without a cause, to sexually liberated beatnik, to hippy chick with child, finally to Sandista acolyte in the jungles of Nicaragua. That I still found the novel entertaining is a tribute to Lethem's talent as performance artist. He seems to be suggesting that all of us are performers, our role is to fine-tune the performance, and keep up with the craziness around us. Authenticity and meaning may be illusions. The Transit of Venus - Shirley Hazzard Hazzard's depiction of romantic love as ethereal, mystical, able to withstand the ravages of time, runs counter to my hardened heart. But she does so with such absolute conviction, she wins me over, absolutely. It helps that her old-fashioned prose is richly poetic and her plot pleasingly constructed. When I finished, I re-read the first thirty pages or so, they so beautifully blend with the ending, and everything in between. Hazzard is still with us, at 82, ten years since her last novel (twenty years before that to Transit) so there is still a possibility of another. I hope so.

These are some of my favorites... The Sheltering Sky - Paul Bowles The Magus - John Fowles The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson Benito Cereno/Bartleby - Herman Melville Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro The Secret History - Donna Tartt (a new novel next month!) A Dance to the Music of Time - Anthony Powell 2666 - Roberto Bolano Parades End - Ford Madox Ford Portrait of a Lady - Henry James Death Comes for the Archbishop - Willa Cather Barchester Towers - Anthony Trollope Bleak House - Charles Dickens Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov Middlemarch - George Eliot Hadji Murat - Leo Tolstoy Your Face Tomorrow - Javier Marias Endless Love - Scott Spencer The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon Against the Day - Thomas Pynchon The Bay of Noon - Shirley Hazzard Stoner - John Williams

The Yacoubian Building - Alaa Al Aswany Devastating portrait of social decay in Cairo during the time period of the first Gulf War. A huge bestseller in Egypt, surprisingly so considering the critique of the country's endemic corruption (Mubarak appears as a disembodied voice but is called "Mr Big") and the explicit depiction of sex in all its varieties. It was also adapted into an equally successful big-budget movie and tv series. I felt at times I was being sledgehammered by despair, but there are some tender moments as well. Among its multiple strands the one about an optimistic lad who ultimately sees no future for himself, no escape from poverty, succumbs to hopelessness, drifts into religious extremism, jailed and brutally tortured for his new beliefs - the making of a terrorist- is greatly affecting. The Mandelbaum Gate - Muriel Spark The longest and most substantial of the Spark novels I've read. Interesting story lines with lots of dark comedy set in Jerusalem during the Eichman trial. I'm never quite satisfied with Sparks' endings. Here, towards the end, she suddenly indulges in awkward flash forwards that dissipate all semblance of the suspense she had craftily built up. But her prose, characters and ideas are always lively enough to impel me to want to read more. Gate is worth reading if for no other reason than to meet Suzi Abudm, sassy, liberated, conniving, indispensible Arab travel guide to the Christian shrines, and savior even, as it turns out, just an all-around delightful creation.

Frederick the Great - Nancy Mitford Excellent short biography of an interesting and multi-faceted royal. Mitford brings her novelistic skills (Love in a Cold Climate) to bear so the book is rarely dry, except in some of the battle descriptions where if you don't have prior familiarity you might, like me, get a bit lost in the avalanche of names. But at least I finally have a grasp on The Seven Years War, an offshoot of the conflict is known in the US as The French and Indian War. The most enjoyable part of the history is Frederick's long term and tempestous relationship with Voltaire, what an incorrigible scamp he was. Mitford also wrote a bio of Voltaire that should be be highly entertaining. The Good Soldier - Ford Madox Ford Ford must have had some twisted relationships with women given the intensity with which he portrays them in his fiction. To go mad, to die, for love, do people still do this? I liked the technique of giving the bare bones of the fate of the characters in the first few pages, and then filling in the puzzle with a non-linear impressionistic maze of incidents. It reminded me of Toni Morrison's Beloved in this regard. Soldier often pops up on lists as one of the great novels of the 20th Century, and I have no argument with that.

"After the first book, did you find it difficult to decide whether to continue on to the second book?" After I finished Book 1 I wasn't sure I'd go on. The first two thirds is a series of digressions,memories, pages long riffs on such things as a church steeple, a flower, a musical phrase, a country walk. I think this opening section tends to discourage alot of readers. Then the last third is the "Swann in Love" section which is more like a conventional novel and more interesting to me. Of course then there is the "I wonder what happens next" thing to spur one forward. I'm actually tempted to get the more recent Lydia Davis translation of Vol 1, and dipping into some parts, as I don't think I fully appreciated it first time around. "Alain de Botton has written a book on Proust and his books (How Proust Can Change Your Life) , and I found it a compelling reading." Thanks for the link, frankie, it sounds interesting and I'll definitely be reading it sometime along the way. So far I can't say my life has changed, but I'm fully prepared for a transformation just in case. I also fear I am making the experience of reading Proust sound like it's akin to eating one's vegetables or mopping the kitchen floor. Great literature, especially when it is challenging, has a way of burrowing into my imagination and memory, often without me realizing. I have a feeling I'm never going to forget this stuff, and as I mentioned before, will want to re-read portions in years to come. I'm a 4 mile a day walker, usually takes an hour, and yesterday's walk zoomed by in no time as I was completely absorbed in thinking about what I had just read in Vol 3. You can't ask for much more than that from a book.

Thanks frankie for the warm welcome back. I've been lurking, I often read through your always entertaining threads, and I look forward to Books do Furnish's reviews, we seem to have similiarly eclectic tastes. As for Proust, I'm a third of the way through Vol 3 The Guermantes Way. I'm reading it slowly on my Kindle, segmenting it 3% a day or about 40 minutes. So 5 to 6 weeks to finish. I can't absorb much more at a sitting. When I first started Vol 1 I thought there would be no way I'd finish the series. But I'm enjoying Vol 3 much more than the first two. I've either finally gotten used to the style, or Proust slowly added some entertainment value as he went along. It's definitely a literary mountain to climb but one probably every ambitious reader should take at some point in life. I have no doubt now that I'll finish, maybe by the end of next year. I can take my time, but then so did Proust.

Have you read Your Face Tomorrow? I read the Your Face Tomorrow trilogy a couple of years ago. Amazing novels. Marias is a master of the long scene, and I vividly recall all of them still today. You need a lot of time though.

I loved The Infatuations and Marias in general. I get addicted to his long, intricate often beautiful sentences. He is fortunate in his translator, Margaret Jull Costa. I read an interview once with Marias where he stated, perhaps somewhat jokingly, that he prefers her English language versions to his originals.

Something to Answer For - P.H. Newby It's 1956, Port Said, Egypt. Nasser has just seized the Suez Canal from the British. Our hero, a minorleague scoundrel in London, had served in the Army in the Canal Zone after WWII, and is asked to return bythe widow of a recently deceased friend to help her settle his estate. Everything is off-kilter upon hisarrival. He has entered an hallucinatory zone, he can't seem to remember whether he is Irish or English.All the other characters have shifting identities, at times merely odd-ball, other times untrustworthy,even dangerous. The British counter-attack and our hapless hero becomes further entangled in a Kafkaesqueworld. It took me awhile to realize I was reading a comic novel. There's no ha-ha, really, except in the bizarredetails of the extended hallucination. Newby is very good at imagery. Some paragraphs are mesmerizing, but he doesn't stay long in any one place. The story is fast paced, often entertaining, including a quixotic love story. Newby conveys a wonderful sense of time and place. In its most nightmarish moments there is still a kind of twisted reality present, although I sometimes paused to ponder whether there was any point being made. Newby may be worth (re)discovering. I'll certainly be checking out one or two of his other novels in the near future. Answer was the first winner of the Booker in 1969, triumphing over books by the better known Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing and Iris Murdoch. The judges included Frank Kermode, Stephen Spender and Rebecca West. Kermode has written that Dame Rebecca ruled, and the others on the panel were cowed into submission by her imperial aura. Answer turned out to be the novel she disliked least. Newby is virtually unknown in the US,the NY Times didn't even review this novel (although they had reviewed some earlier ones) and there was only a brief mention of Newby winning the award, book prizes not yet a hyped media event. He ran Radio 3 for the BBC for many years and wrote most of his 20 novels on weekends. Grahame Greene was a friend and champion of his writing.

I'm late to the party but I have been on an extended reading binge this year and felt it was time to keep some sort of record. I'll start my comments on recently finished books fresh in my mind. I placed an asterisk beside those titles I was particularly pleased with, but if anyone is interested in my reaction to any book on the list I would be happy to comply. Fiction House of All Nations (Christina Stead) Villette (Charlotte Bronte) * The Bay of Noon (Shirley Hazzard) * Ivanhoe (Walter Scott) Loitering With Intent (Muriel Spark) Portrait of a Lady (Henry James) * A Game of Hide and Seek (Elizabeth Taylor) Swann's Way (Marcel Proust) Mortals (Norman Rush) The Charterhouse of Parma (Stendahl) N.W. (Zadie Smith) The Sacred Fount (Henry James) 1Q84 (Hiruki Murakami) * Fortunes of War: The Balkan Trilogy (Olivia Manning) * Cousin Bette (Balzac) * The Prague Cemetery (Umberto Eco) The Cat's Table (Michael Ondaatje) Telegraph Avenue (Michael Chabon) Doctor Thorne (Anthony Trollope) * A Family and a Fortune (Ivy Compton-Burnett) Mudwoman (Joyce Carol Oates) Your Republic is Calling You (Kim Young-Ha) The Egoist (George Meredith) The Tiger's Wife (Tea Obreht) Within a Budding Grove (Marcel Proust) The Possessed (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) On the Edge (Marcus Werner) Romola (George Eliot) * The Gate (Natsumi Soseki) I Have the Right to Destroy Myself (Kim Young-Ha) South Wind (Norman Douglas) Manon Lescaut (Abbe Prevost) Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte) * Framley Parsonage (Anthony Trollope) * Traveler of the Century (Andre Neuman) To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf) The Wings of the Dove (Henry James) Please Look After Mom (Shin Kyung-Sook) The Darkroom of Damocles (Willem Fredrik Hermans) The Golden Bowl (Henry James) Light in August (William Faulkner) The Ice Palace (Tarjei Vesaas) * Beloved (Toni Morrison) Where Tigers Are at Home (Jean-Marie Blas De Robles) The Wrong Woman (Charles Stewart) * The Infatuations (Javier Marias) * The Custom of the Country (Edith Wharton) What Maisie Knew (Henry James) Transit (Anna Seghers) Ficciones (Jorge Luis Borges) Disgrace (J.M. Coetzee) The House in Paris (Elizabeth Bowen) * Human Voices (Penelope Fitzgerald) The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (David Mitchell) Symposium (Muriel Spark) Cousin Pons (Balzac) * His Family (Charles Poole) Gilead (Marilynne Robinson) * Something To Answer For (P.H.Newby) The Return of the Soldier (Rebecca West) The Good Soldier (Ford Madox Ford) * The Yacoubian Building (Alaa Al Aswany) The Mandelbaum Gate (Muriel Spark) Dissident Gardens (Jonathan Lethem) The Transit of Venus (Shirley Hazzard) * The Small House at Allington (Anthony Trollope) * The Spoils of Poynton (Henry James) The Guermantes Way (Marcel Proust) The Rules of Engagement (Anita Brookner) Bleeding Edge (Thomas Pynchon) * A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce) The Samurai (Shusaku Endo) The Unconsoled (Kazuo Ishiguro) * Wives and Daughters (Elizabeth Gaskell) The Lowland (Jhumpa Lahiri) A Time to Be Born (Dawn Powell) The Levant Trilogy (Olivia Manning) * Harvest ( Jim Crace) Mrs. Dalloway ( Virginia Woolf) The Sound of the Mountain ( Yasunari Kawabata) The Pickwick Papers (Charles Dickens) * The Goldfinch (Donna Tartt) * The Luminaries (Eleanor Catton) The Red and The Black (Stendahl) The Last Chronicle of Barset (Anthony Trollope) * A True Novel (Minae Mizumura) * A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens) Vera (Elizabeth von Arnim) No One Writes Back (Jang Eun-Jin) The Professor's House (Willa Cather) Pitch Dark (Renata Adler) Mr. Darwin's Gardener (Kristina Carlson) The Murder of Hallandale (Pia Juul) Non-fiction The Swerve:How the World Became Modern (Stephen Greenblatt) Restless Empire (Odd Westad) Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (Rebecca West) * Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece (Michael Gorra) * Old Calabria (Norman Douglas) A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube (Patrick Fermer) * Imagining the Balkans (Maria Todorova) Bitter Lemons of Cyprus (Lawrence Durrell) Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall (Thomas Browne) The Crisis of the European Mind: 1680-1715 (Paul Hazard) The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (Simon Leys) * Greene on Capri (Shirley Hazzard) Frederick the Great (Nancy Mitford) Danube (Claudio Magris) The Thirty Years War (C.V. Wedgwood) Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Middle Danube to the Iron Gates (Patrick Fermer) * The World of Yesterday - (Stefan Zweig) * 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War (Charles Emmerson) The Liberal Imagination (Lionel Trilling) The Delighted States (Adam Thirwell)

Great reviews as always. I'm a bit bogged down in Vol 2 of Proust, reading the Moncrieff translation. Are you reading that translation or another?