Wrap-Up: Mount TBR Challenge 2013

The Mount TBR Challenge attracted me this year as a way to chip away at my massive TBR list--the books I own but haven't read.  I attempted to read 12 of those books this year, and alas, it looks like I only read eight, while continuing to purchase new books.  So much for whittling the list!  The books I read were:

The Assault by Harry Mulisch
Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

The favorite?  Austerlitz--lovely and wistful and sad, and so very unusual in the way it is told, as a slowly meandering unfolding of memories.  I've just made it sound boring and depressing, and it's anything but.  It actually gets more suspenseful as it goes on, and I couldn't put it down once I saw where the narrative was going.  I read most of it on a train through Germany and the Czech Republic last summer, which adds to the specialness.

Thank you Bev at My Reader's Block for hosting this challenge.

Wrap-Up: Chunkster Challenge 2013

For the Chunkster Challenge, I committed to reading four chunksters (books of 450 pages or longer) this year.  But it turns out I read six!  These were:

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Middlemarch by George Eliot


The favorite (and the biggest surprise) was Les Miserables.  It is so very long, and I had always heard it described as near-torture, that I had some trepidations going in.  But this book hooked me immediately by starting off with the life of the good Bishop of Digne, with whom I am now in love.  

There is no least favorite;  there were no disappointments;  I enjoyed them all.  Actually, in this blog you will rarely read of disappointments, because I rarely continue reading a book I dislike.  I'm not in school, haha.  

Thanks Wendy and Vasilly, for this enjoyable challenge!

2nd Annual Classics Club Readathon

I've been a member of the Classics Club for two years now, and I've been reading away, but I've never participated in a Classics Club event.  I've never joined in on a readathon, because I never seemed to be free all day on the day.  But the stars seem to have aligned, and this year's Classics Club Readathon will be on January 4, 2014, and I have nothing planned!  No travel and no visitors expected--yay!  Now I just have to decide what to read...

Classics Club

The Wine of Solitude

In finishing The Wine of Solitude, I have read all the Nemirovsky in my collection.  I can't overstate how much pleasure this writer gives me.  In this, her most autobiographical book, she evokes the Kiev of her childhood, which she hated, but which with its air full of summer dust and the scent of lime trees sounds lovely to me.  She convincingly recreates a childhood that leaves her unable to trust or to form attachments, and her choice of the high road at the end of the book feels well-earned. 

The Remains of the Day

Add Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day to the long list of books-I-was-exposed-to-in-my-youth-and-failed-to-appreciate.  Not that I read the book back then, but I saw the movie in college and found it rather dull.  I wonder now how this book could ever be filmed without being dull;  it's mainly one man's mental suppressions.  I must see it again and find out.

But I now know, having also read Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World a couple of years ago, that reminiscence is a powerful tool in this author's hands.  In both books, the narrator tells the story of his life in flashback.  The narrator in The Remains of the Day is a butler looking back on his years of service to a disastrously foolish nobleman. The narration starts out in a very self-satisfied tone, and as it goes on, the narrator can't help revealing more and more of the reality of events, which is less and less flattering to himself.  At the end, we feel that we finally understand the the man's life and choices, and we feel him facing it at last.  The revelations are so subtle, so carefully and elegantly revealing, that it's like listening to him mentally unfolding his memories.

I have one more book by Kazuo Ishiguro on my shelves--A Pale View of Hills, which also features a narrator recounting memories.  I'm very interested to see how like these other two it will turn out to be.  Ishiguro is obviously very interested in the phenomenon of memory and how we use it to rewrite our lives.  I'm strongly reminded of W. G. Sebald, another writer obsessed with memory.  I read his Austerlitz last summer and fell heavily for Mr. Sebald, more of whose work I also want to read.

Classics Club
Mount TBR Challenge