Light and Momentary

Still reading fat books by men

You might remember that I decided to read a string of hefty books by men, kicking it off with Trollope novel #25. The Claverings tells the story of a woman who marries for money and immediately regrets it. There are lots of people in Trollope novels who are busy weighing up the financial assets of prospective spouses, but Trollope goes all in on the heartlessness of Julia Brabazon's choice to marry Lord Ongar. The book is mostly about the subsequent choices of her spurned lover, Harry Clavering, in an era when breaking an engagement was a much bigger deal than it is these days.

We spend part of our time with Harry's family; his father is a Barsetshire clergyman whose elder nephew is the current Lord Clavering. This elder nephew is distressingly boorish, and his younger brother is comically inept. I've read a lot of Victorian proposals in which a fellow tells his sweetheart that she will make him the happiest man alive if she says yes, or at least the happiest man in all England. Cousin Archie says he'll be the happiest man in London, which seems to say, "I mean, yeah, I like you, but let's be real." (His would-be fiancee declines.)

This book seemed a little unpolished. There are some veiled allusions to the circumstances of Lord Ongar's death and his relationship with a Polish count, and perhaps I was supposed to know more about how to read between the lines. Instead it just felt murky, as if maybe Trollope hadn't wanted to bother with fleshing out that facet of the plot. There's a deus ex machina episode that felt a leetle too tidy. The Kindle edition is full of typos, with a bunch of weird differences in chapter divisions vs. the Project Gutenberg version. But Julia Brabazon is a memorable character, as is her Polish-French friend, and overall the book is a satisfying blend of funny and serious.

***

Now I'm reading Wellness, and I like it. I haven't been completely sucked in, like I was with this author's first novel, The Nix. I was surprised to find that Gladlyville makes a brief and unflattering appearance. So far it's the story of a couple who fell in love as young adults and hit a rough patch twenty years later. Hill's writing voice is engaging and the story is the same kind of mix of funny and sad that I enjoyed in The Nix. I'll keep plugging and tell you more as I get further in.

TBR

Of the novels I read that were written more recently than 1875, the large majority are written by women. The list of authors whose books I pre-order is almost exclusively female; the books I recommend to others are generally written by women. Publishing has been a boys' club for long enough; the guys don't need me to amplify their voices any further.

Obviously, there are occasional exceptions to this trend. My current TBR list has a cluster of fat novels written by men, and I think I might just jump in and read them all in a row. First up is The Claverings. I want to read one more Trollope novel before the end of the year, and this one is next in the queue. 

Years ago now, Jennifer Fulwiler posted that she loved Shantaram so much that she was sad when it ended. I bought the book on the strength of her recommendation (she is the reason I read The Long Ships, which I would probably never have read otherwise; it is fantastic). I have started it a couple of times without getting to the riveting part, but I'm going to give it another shot.

My mother told me I should read Covenant of Water, and I didn't finish it before the library's copy was due. I decided to buy the Kindle version instead of getting back in the library queue, and then I lost momentum. This was last October (alas), so I'm going to need to start over.

The last one on my list is Wellness, which I bought last November because I loved The Nix so much. It's another doorstop-sized book, but I loved The Nix so much that I compared it to a Dickens novel, which is high praise in these parts.

I bet it's been 30 years since I read four novels by men in a row, though maybe it's only been 25. WILL I wind up needing a little palate cleanser at some point in this project? WILL we know who the next president is before I finish them? WILL a pile of fat novels diminish my election stress? Stay tuned and we'll see.

Queen of Crime

I'd never heard of Margery Allingham before I signed up for this summer knitting community, but I've read 8.5 of her books since May. If you enjoy Dorothy Sayers or Agatha Christie, you'll like these too.

I read a boatload of Agatha Christie as a kid. I enjoyed the tidiness of her books -- the way the loose ends were squared away in the final chapters -- and the glimpses of a different world. They haven't aged very well, I don't think. (The last time I flipped through one at the library I said to myself, "Hercule Poirot is totally on the spectrum and I wonder if he's also gay." This made me think that Sherlock Holmes and his brother are probably also on the spectrum, which led me down a rabbit hole. I am not the only person to think these thoughts, apparently!)

I didn't read any Dorothy Sayers until I was in my 40s, and then I binge-read all of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries within a few months. I enjoyed them; I might reread them at some point. But he's not my favorite fictional detective. Sometimes I want to give him a brisk shake and say, "Lord Peter, put that in plain English with no obscure quotations, please." (You know, that relentless propensity for literary allusions makes me think about echolalia in movie-quoting kids on the spectrum...)

Margery Allingham was writing detective fiction in the 1920s and 1930s and she's considered one of the Queens of Crime from the golden age of the genre. But she kept writing detective fiction long after the 1930s, and her detective character, Albert Campion, ages across her novels. I don't know why she's so much less familiar to US audiences, but I like her books better than either of her more famous counterparts'. She creates an atmosphere without overdoing it; her characters are enjoyable enough that it's fun to see them reappear in later novels. The plots are paced well, and the conclusions are satisfying. 

They are available inexpensively in Kindle format, though some of them seem to have been shoved out into the Kindle market with dubious production values. I bought an edition of The Beckoning Lady with a conspicuous typo on the cover: the title is rendered The Becokning Lady. My edition of Hide My Eyes has the wrong author's name and photo on the cover! You have to wonder who oversaw those decisions, don't you? 

But the content is pleasingly diverting despite the bungled details. I'm going to keep reading them, even though the summer discussion group is winding down. 

Just a little more Trollope blogging

My husband used to trot out the name Trollope as a metonym for overrated Victorian fiction: dull, overlong, irrelevant, generally unpleasant. In consequence I had very low expectations of Barchester Towers: I did not have any idea that I would love that book. Yesterday I was telling Stella about the Kindle Unlimited report on my most popular and most obscure reading choices. "Let me guess," she said. "Trollope is the most obscure?" (Trollope is indeed the most obscure. Is He Popenjoy? is not getting a lot of love from Kindle Unlimited users.)

It is true that Trollope revisits a lot of the same ideas across his books, but who among us could write 47 entirely distinct novels in the early morning hours before we went off to our real jobs? I am going to make a list of what I've read so far to minimize the memory blur.

1. Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite. Short, sad, just blogged about it yesterday.
2. The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson. A haberdasher goes out of business, as told from the perspective of the partner in charge of publicity. Wince-inducing, with some zingy and still-relevant thoughts on advertising. I was glad it was short.
3. Is He Popenjoy? My favorite of the six I've read in 2024. The second son of a noble family has a title and land but no money. He marries a young woman with money but no title. Will she be faithful? Will he be faithful? The older brother is a memorably ignoble noble, a recurring Trollope trope.
4. Lady Anna. A wicked old nobleman leaves his widow and daughter in penury. The daughter wants to marry her first love; her mother has higher aims. Like Marion Fay, it illustrates the toll parental ambition can take on parental character.
5. Orley Farm. A second wife desperately wants her son to inherit a place to call his own. A deeply unlikable eldest son and a slimy solicitor are in the right under the law. If we hope they lose, are we in the wrong? One of my favorites. 
6. Cousin Henry. A squire with no son faces hard decisions when he writes his will. Like Sir Harry, he has a winsome daughter and a clever solicitor.
7. Marion Fay. A tale of two engagements that cross class boundaries; feels like an overly sentimental rehash of familiar characters and ideas. Reminiscent of The Duke's Children but we have less investment in the characters.
8. The Fixed Period. Very strange dystopian fiction; predicting the future is hard.
9. The Three Clerks. Early and autobiographical, funny and perspicacious. Infighting and moral dilemmas in the Victorian civil service, plus hopeful love stories.
10. Dr. Wortle's School. Like Orley Farm, this one looks at the question of well-intentioned people doing illegal things. Do they deserve opprobrium, sympathy, assistance? Does our perspective shift if the people who are technically in the right are icky and unpleasant?
11. Miss Mackenzie. What happens when a poor spinster inherits some money and becomes marriageable? 
12. The Way We Live Now. Justly famous, but painfully long and crammed full of unlikable characters.

I started my Trollope adventure in 2014 with the Barsetshire Chronicles, which I will reread someday. There are six of them, and I finished #6 in 2017. They are probably the best point of entry for the Trollope-curious. They can stand alone; I read #2 before #1 and it wasn't a problem at all. I read the six Palliser chronicles between the beginning of 2020 and the middle of 2022, and then resolved to head off into the depths of the back catalog.

Wish me luck! Only 23 novels to go!

In which I cross the halfway point

Today I finished Trollope novel #24, which means I have read more than half of the 47 novels he wrote. It feels like a bit of an accomplishment.

This was a small novel, less than 160 pages long, but I will remember it. Trollope writes a lot about marriage: what's it for, and what happens when people have competing ideas about it? How much should you marry for financial stability vs. companionship vs. capital-L Love vs. political or logistical reasons, in a culture where marriage and biological children determined the future of titles and estates? 

We're still chewing on some of these questions 150 years later, right? If you marry somebody from a wildly different background, is heartache inevitable? If someone's engagement seems to be a colossal mistake, what's the best response? 

Novel #24 was Sir Harry Hotspur of Humblethwaite. It follows the trials of Sir Harry, "a mighty person in Cumberland," as his daughter bestows her affections unwisely. In some ways it is very much a Victorian relic. These days a parent would say, "No, you cannot marry your second cousin, because consanguinity is a terrible idea," rather than wondering if it might be a good idea to invite the second cousin for consideration as a marriage prospect. The unspeakably shameful acts that put the second cousin beyond the pale are lying and card-sharping, neither of which would be viewed as absolute dealbreakers in the 21st century. (In fact, James Bond plays the Duke of Cumberland bridge hand in one of the Ian Fleming books, and in my memory it's presented as proof of his versatility and ability to keep a cool head.)

The parts that I'll remember are the timeless bits, though: who can decide when a person is irredeemable? What happens when we pray for a person who appears irredeemable? Why do some people choose alcohol over the ones they love, and how should we respond to them? 

Trollope is much funnier than I expected him to be. He is said to have laughed himself to death, by reading a book he found so funny that he laughed until he had a stroke. This is a sad book, though. Sometimes you appear to have it all, and you wind up losing what's most important. Sometimes you do the best you can, and it's still not enough.

Adventuring with Allingham

Part of the Kate Davies summer knitting community involves reading novels by Margery Allingham, ranked alongside Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers as one of the UK's Queens of Crime. I've read all of the Lord Peter Wimsey books and short stories, and I devoured Agatha Christie as a kid. So it seemed likely that I'd enjoy the Allingham books as well. I finished the third one today. 

I'm enjoying them enough to keep going. Our hero Albert Campion reminds me in some ways of Lord Peter Wimsey. The books are pleasantly diverting and they do not overwhelm a sensitive reader* with gore or tautly suspenseful plot lines.

*(It's me; I'm the sensitive reader. When I was a preschooler I found Scooby-Doo too frightening to watch, and so I would cover my eyes until the scary parts were over. That probably gives you a sense of my capacity for gore and suspense. I can only tolerate murder mysteries written for the delicate flower.)

It's interesting to be reading Allingham at the same time as my Trollope novel, though. In Trollope's world we can know that a person is inexcusably vulgar if he wears yellow gloves, a sartorial mishap that occurs in both Miss Mackenzie and Marion Fay. In Allingham's novel Flowers for the Judge, I lingered over the description of a natty dresser who disappeared mysteriously. His elegant ensemble included -- can you guess? -- yellow gloves. Were yellow gloves still vulgar, and their presence was supposed to tell us something about either the disappearing man or the tobacconist describing his disappearance? Or had yellow gloves been plucked from the Trash Heap of Bad Fashion Choices and placed in the Catalog of Snazzy Choices by the 1930s? Who can say? 

In Trollope's novels, "making love" means "wooing." Obviously it acquired a very different meaning at some point between the 1870s and the 1970s, but when? When an unhappily married Allingham character tells a rival to go ahead and make love to his wife, is he inviting the rival to flirt with her or to pursue carnal knowledge of her? The internet tells me that the current meaning took hold in the 1920s, beginning in the US. So had it traveled across the Atlantic by the 1930s? Who can say? 

I'm a little behind the reading schedule for the Kate Davies group (perhaps because I'm trying to finish another fat Trollope novel at the same time), but I am going to keep plugging along. Next up: Dancers in Mourning.

The Bad Place

I'm reading Trollope novel #22, which has the improbable title Is He Popenjoy?, and we are just about to meet two characters whose advent has been the subject of exclamation-point-filled dread for many chapters. These characters come from the Bad Place: Italy.

Perhaps you have never thought of Italy as a bad place. Perhaps you even like Italy; perhaps you plan to visit Italy someday. But Trollope would like you to re-evaluate. Any time you encounter the label "Italian," know that it actually means "under a permanent cloud of suspicion." 

It took me a while to figure this out. In Marion Fay, a character is discovered to be an Italian nobleman, and I failed to grasp the full implications of this discovery at the time. Would you want to be a nobleman under a permanent cloud of suspicion? I thought not. You'd probably renounce your title too.

I didn't tell you about Lady Anna aside from my introduction to it via the Trollope Society (I figure there are probably limits on the number of Trollope posts you are willing to read), but Lady Anna's father was a nasty piece of work. We know this in part because of his romantic involvement -- in Italy. (Parenthetically, to the few of you who are intrigued by Trollope, Trollope's treatment of Lady Anna reminds me of the ending he wrote for John Eames. Both of them surprised me.)

Oh! Also! I'd never thought about this before, but there's a character in Barchester Towers whom we're supposed to regard as indolent -- a sketchy guy with a sketchy family -- and guess where he just spent twelve years? Italy, that's where!

Italy seems like a strange place to vilify, but Trollope apparently had very firm ideas about it. I guess I'll have to wait and see what these characters get up to. It seems unlikely to bring happiness to our heroine.

The funniest book I've read this year

Catherine Newman's new book, Sandwich, came out last week, and you should probably read it. If you're a woman in the 45-55 age range, it will make you laugh until you weep with its devastatingly hilarious takes on the indignities of midlife. If you're married to a woman in that age range, it will make you say, "Weeeellllll, things could definitely be worse around here." If you are outside those age ranges, it will give you some insight into the goings-on inside the aging brains of your middle-aged loved ones.

It is uproariously funny. I was reading it in public over my lunchtime sandwich and I snort-laughed helplessly. I thought maybe I would just get a quick coffee and squeeze in another chapter (or two) before I went back to my office, and I laughed until I had actual tears running down my face right there in the coffeehouse.

It reminds me very much of her first novel, We All Want Impossible Things, which I blogged about in early 2023. It intertwines heartbreakingly sad parts with the laugh-so-hard-you-inhale-your-beverage parts in a way that I find memorable and effective. This one is more about marriage than the earlier book, and it combines the moments of "I don't know who I would be without you" and the moments of "I might kill you in your sleep" in a way that might -- just possibly -- resonate with some of the folks I know navigating marriage at midlife.

Although the main character's kids are grown, the book talks a lot about pregnancy and miscarriage and abortion. It does so in ways that left me pretty uncomfortable, but maybe that's the point. I am guessing that even if your views on abortion diverge from mine, parts of the book will make you squirm.

Across both books there are things that struck me as implausible, but not in a way that torpedoed my enjoyment of the book. (Although, just in case the magic of Google alerts ever brings this post to the author's attention: next time you're writing about early speech development, shoot me an email. I'll happily volunteer as your subject matter expert.) Mostly what I will remember is the distinctive voice: smart, aching, acerbic, riotously funny.

A meringue book

I pre-ordered Katherine Center's new book because I've read and enjoyed a few of her others. i read it in a day and laughed out loud a double-digit number of times. If you're looking for something sweet and fluffy and funny, this might be your book.

Her books are a little formulaic: improbable heroes falling for heroines who have faced down some flavor of struggle or tragedy. This one is about writing a screenplay for a romantic comedy, so she spends time talking appreciatively about the conventions of the genre.

Thomas Pynchon writes Mustard Green Books-- probably good for your brain but not especially easy or delightful to consume. Katherine Center writes Meringue Books: light, sweet, fluffy, easy to gobble up.

Hard Times, come again no more

I finished Hard Times today. I'm glad I reread it; I'd still put it in the bottom tier of Dickens novels. 

I think my favorite thing about Dickens is his ability to spin up a complicated plot and tie up the loose ends in improbable but generally agreeable ways. Do I find the plot of Our Mutual Friend plausible? Absolutely not. Do I love it anyway? Yes, I do.

Hard Times offers a smaller canvas, and the ending feels hasty and forced to me. Dickens is the king of the useful coincidence, but the discovery of the missing person is just a leetle too much for me. I might be more tolerant if it contained more likable or amusing characters.

We have now AMDRAL-ed our way through 11 of the 14 completed Dickens novels. The three remaining are all doorstop-sized: Barnaby Rudge, Dombey & Son, and The Old Curiosity Shop. If you have a vote for next May, let me know.

Deceivers, the deceived, agency, helplessness

As I've been reading Hard Times I've been observing the relationship between Louisa and James Harthouse with some dissatisfaction. Dashing deceivers are a thing for Dickens (and in plenty of other 19th-century fiction), but I was musing to myself about the contrast between Louisa and Lydia Bennet. Lydia seems to me to have more agency. Is it a terrible idea to elope with Wickham? Obviously. Is it a freely chosen terrible idea? I think so. Louisa, though, seems to be on a descending escalator rather than a staircase -- not so much choosing her own path as being pulled along it.

So I was already grumbling to myself about female Dickens characters at the moment of crisis for Louisa. You should skip the last sentence in this paragraph if you haven't finished Part Two yet, but what does she do? (Here, I will turn the text yellow because it is an unexpected development. Just highlight it with your mouse if you want to read it.) She throws herself helplessly at the feet of a different man, that's what.

Harrumph, I say. Harrumph!

It's the Eleventh Annual May Dickens Read-Along!

Welcome to EAMDRAL, the Eleventh Annual May Dickens Read-ALong. AMDRALing is a spring tradition in these parts, and this will be the quickest one we've ever had. So far we are a small but mighty crew of 3 or 4, but this is the easiest-ever AMDRAL to catch up on if you need a little more Dickens in your life.

In the book's early chapters we meet Mr. Gradgrind, the fact-loving fancy-fearing father of offspring whose numbers include Adam Smith Gradgrind and Malthus Gradgrind. We are more focused on his daughter Louisa, though, whose first appearance in the story makes it clear to the reader that she finds her day-in-day-out diet of just-the-facts-ma'am to be a wearying existence.

We also meet Mr. Bounderby, who reminds me of my most difficult relative. He boasts the most and infers the worst, and he seems determined to keep it that way. When Mr. Gradgrind asks Sissy Jupe, "What's in the bottle you are carrying?" Mr. Bounderby answers immediately and falsely: gin. (Sissy is actually bringing a blend of soothing oils to her father, about whom more soon.)

Jump in and join us! 

It's AMDRAL season again

Finals week starts tomorrow, which means it's the time of year when a middle-aged mom's fancy lightly turns to nice fat Dickens novels. The first AMDRAL was in 2014, believe it or not. That means this year is the Eleventh Annual May Dickens Read-ALong, and we are going to read Hard Times.

Hard Times is the shortest Dickens novel, clocking in at just over 100K words. If you want a nice little snacklet of a Dickens novel, this is your year. I haven't read it since 2009, but in my recollection he has a lot of Emphatic Thoughts about education. As I wind down a semester I'll remember for its student submissions bristling with AI-generated text, I am also having some Emphatic Thoughts about education. I guess I'll see how well our thoughts align.

I am going to dive in on May 15, which will give me time to get all the grades submitted and respond to the inevitable emails complaining about the grades. I'll aim to read two or three chapters a day and finish up in early June. Join me for the quickest-ever AMDRAL!

The Trollope Project Continues

You might remember that I am working my way through the 47 novels of Anthony Trollope, with the goal of reading them all by the time I'm 60. I had planned to read one per season, but I'm on Trollope novel #4 for 2024 and it's only March. Today I attended a virtual meeting of the Trollope Society, and my husband laughed out loud when I told him about it afterward. So maybe I'll tell you all a little bit about it too.

After I read Marion Fay, I turned right around and started reading Cousin Henry. It's about an old man who is torn about where to leave his property, and it has a deeply unlikeable title character. It seems like a pretty bold authorial choice, actually, to name your book after the character whose downfall your readers will all be hoping to see -- as if Dickens had gone with "The Adventures of Fagin" instead of "Oliver Twist." It's only about 200 pages long, which is practically a short story in Trollope's world, and as soon as I finished it I plunged right into Orley Farm.

I loved Orley Farm. It might be the book I'd recommend to someone who wanted to read a standalone Trollope novel. It's much heftier than either Cousin Henry or Marion Fay, but I found that it moved briskly. At one point I texted my family to tell them about an exciting plot development. (They found it less riveting than I did; go figure.) It asks a bunch of interesting questions: how do we balance justice and mercy? What's our reaction when an extraordinarily unsympathetic character demands justice? How much of a court case is about truth, and how much is about lawyerly skill? 

When I finished I thought to myself, "I wish I could talk to a pal about Trollope." And LO, the Trollope Society exists specifically for people who want to talk about Trollope. Their spring book is Lady Anna, and I decided to jump in and read the first chunk of it in preparation for their initial online discussion.

A retired American chemistry teacher spoke for about 25 minutes to a surprising number of attendees (5 screens of them! 5! for a conversation about this totally obscure novel!). She had clearly put a lot of effort into investigating this book's background, and she had also prepped discussion questions for people to chat about in breakout rooms.

This is the part that made my husband burst out laughing: I told him that she said, "Now I know that this book is quite a page-turner, and many of you will have already read ahead. Be sure you don't share any spoilers in your breakout room!"

"A page-turner," he repeated to himself, chortling helplessly. "A page-turner!" 

I had started to think I was being a little nutty about Trollope, as I embarked on novel #21. But after this meeting today it's clear to me that I know nothing -- nothing -- about real Trollope fandom. 

The Readers Have Spoken

Well, okay, one reader has spoken. Probably she does not represent an eager horde of Trollope lovers, jostling each other impatiently as they await my thoughts on Marion Fay. But let's talk about Marion Fay anyway.

It's a late Trollope novel, published in the year he died. Some of its elements are memorably thoughtful and mature. He does a marvelous job showing us how an ordinarily ambitious stepmother might become a wicked stepmother, at least temporarily. He builds on questions he first raised at the end of the Palliser Chronicles; here, too, two children of a widowed nobleman want to marry outside their class. But for the most part the young people are more skillfully drawn here, and we understand more of what they are thinking. 

I say "for the most part" because I'm not sold on the characterization of Marion Fay herself. She's like a refugee from a Dickens novel -- a little too perfect for plausibility. And her strand of the plot is a little too Old-Curiosity-Shop for me; I thought it veered into mawkishness, which is not a flaw I have observed in other Trollope novels. 

Another flaw I'd never noticed in Trollope's other books: I wasn't a fan of the pacing. It seemed to me that perhaps he decided in advance to write it in three parts, but when he got to part 3 he realized he'd painted himself into a corner, with too many chapters and not enough plot remaining. Chapter 45: Lord Hampstead Experiences Angst. Chapter 47: Lord Hampstead Writes Letters About His Angst. Chapter 49: Lord Hampstead, Now With More Angst. It's not as if each one of the 900+ pages in The Last Chronicle of Barset is awash in richly plotted excitement, but at least the reader never has to pause and think very hard about whether she already read this chapter because it's so much like the one that came before.

Despite its shortcomings, I'm glad I read Marion Fay. Lots of interesting contrasts: the post office clerk's strength of character versus the nobleman's weakness, the machinations of the loathsome and lazy CoE clergyman versus the straight shooting of the dutiful Quaker characters. Trollope sends up the nobility, showing us their enthusiastic reactions to a newly conferred title; he sends up civil service workers in his snapshots of office life. It wouldn't be at the top of my list of favorite Trollope novels, but overall I enjoyed the time I spent with Lady Amaldina Persiflage's friends and relations.

The Trollope Project

Anthony Trollope wrote a staggering 47 novels, and I am going to take a crack at reading all of them. I started with the six Barsetshire Chronicles, and then read the six Palliser Chronicles followed by The Way We Live Now. Last year I took a deep breath and plunged into the obscurer corners of his oeuvre.

I kicked it off with Miss Mackenzie (spinster begins anew; contemplates marriage proposals), followed it up with Dr. Wortle's School (how should we assess the moral weight of making an unacceptable decision for a compelling reason?), moved on to The Three Clerks (don't judge your books by their covers, and don't underestimate the Department of Internal Navigation), and then read The Fixed Period (a comically weird book set in a dystopian future). Last month I also read one of his pieces of short Christmas fiction, Christmas Day at Kirkby Cottage.

For those of you counting along at home, this means I have 30 Trollope novels to go. If I aim for one per season, I'll be done when I'm 60 (pushing 61, but let's go with the round number). I do love a good long-haul reading project. 

This year I am going to begin with Marion Fay, a book chosen randomly from my Kindle version of the complete works. (Parenthetically, isn't it astonishing that I can fit the complete works of Trollope in my pocket? Let's hear it for living in the future!) Later this year I will probably read The American Senator and Orley Farm, but we'll see which way my fickle impulses steer me. I also think I'll read one more Christmas story before the Christmas season ends, even though Christmas Day at Kirkby Cottage was a little disappointing.

The trouble with an obscure hobby is that it doesn't usually make for very compelling blogging. If I tell you that the first chapter of Marion Fay reminds me of the beginning of The Duke's Children, it's unlikely to make you say "oooh! tell us more!" But perhaps we'll hear again from the hypothetical Aspasia. In any event, I continue to find that a daily Trollope chapter is a pleasant peaceful way to end the day. And if a person reads enough chapters for enough nights, eventually she will read all of Trollope.

Eighth time is the charm, maybe

I am determined to finish The Game of Kings. I keep hearing that it's amazing. Just give it time, people say. It's worth it, they tell me.

I am almost 200 pages in, feeling impatient.

There are spots where I can tell it's supposed to be funny, but I am not invested enough in the characters to be amused. It seems willfully esoteric in a way I find irritating.

I keep telling myself that it's probably like Master and Commander, which I also found a little irritating. I didn't even pick up the second book until a few years later. But then I galloped through the whole series, cheering and chortling.

Let's hope I'm enjoying it more a hundred pages from now.

Yet another book recommendation

I just finished Happiness Falls, and I need some friends to discuss it with me. There's a non-speaking teen at the center of the story, which is narrated by his young adult sister. She has her own neurodivergent stuff going on. The story is driven by the disappearance of their father.

It is right up a couple of my alleys, so perhaps it's not surprising that I found it memorable and thought-provoking. Read it and tell me what you think, please.

Also reading

I bought a copy of Happiness Falls when I read the NYT review earlier this fall, but it has just been sitting on my Kindle. I started it last night and I am enjoying it so far. I like the narrator's distinctive voice, and I'm intrigued by the portrayal of the disabled sibling. I'm only a half-dozen chapters in, but I'm looking forward to reading more.

Last week I finished Tom Lake, another book set in the summer of 2020. I went right down to the wire, scrambling to finish it before the library retrieved the Kindle version from my phone. The 2020 sections of the book take place on a Michigan cherry farm, and I enjoyed the sense of place. This one also features a female narrator with a distinctive voice, talking about memory and loss and the strange paths that lead us to the places where we wind up.

Not my usual genre

I don't read a lot of thrillers but I finished a good one today, called Just Another Missing Person. (Oh, hey, I think the Kindle edition is on sale!) It raises a bunch of interesting questions about moral ambiguity: who's a good guy and who's not, what happens when loyalty takes a person too far into dangerous territory. She set up the big twist in the middle skillfully, and then -- bam! -- nailed it with another big twist at the end. I didn't see either one coming but they both made sense. It's tough for an author to nail both the setup and the surprise, but I thought they both worked well.

The reason I don't read many thrillers is that I have kind of a delicate flower brain and disturbing imagery tends to stick, but I didn't find it overwhelming.

P.S. Don't read this spoiler-y question if you think you might enjoy the book. But if you have read it, I have one niggling quibble: why would the storage space show up in the location data? Seems unlikely to be a frequent destination.