The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag will be out in March. It's true... I've got the manuscript on my e-reader, but haven't had a chance to read it yet!

Ooo! That's exciting news -- I can't wait to read the second Flavia book either. This is going to sound terrible, but when I read that the author planned to write more books in this series, I thought, "He better get crackin'. Otherwise, this won't be a very lengthy series (he's a more "mature" author)." Awful, I know. Any idea on when average-Joe reader will see the next book?

I'm so jealous! I can't wait for the 2nd book!

Hi Susan!
Welcome -- you will find a lot of "Sweetness at the bottom of the Pie" love around here, no worries. Michael has the 2nd book in the series on his e-reader, I think, but I'm not sure he's read it yet.

Thanks for joining us!

I just joined this group and have to mention Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. What a delight.

Oh, Tanya, you just made my day! Waiting for Columbus is one of the best books I've read this year, and I can't wait to talk about it (the rest of you will have to wait til August!).

There are only two books that have made my "A-list" so far this year:


1) "1984" (by George Orwell; narrated by Simon Prebble) This first title, an audiobook, was an amazing experience. I've read the book before, but SP really shaped the text and there were moments that I had to remind myself that the novel was fiction. At one point, I even gasped aloud and my heart skipped a beat...


2) "Waiting for Columbus" (by Thomas Trofimuk)
As for this title, I don't know what it was about the title or the book description, but I became obsessed with acquiring an ARC, and I did. Nothing I write about it will seem adequate or not a cliche, but it (and ergo the author) is brilliant, stunning, smart, funny, dazzling and intense... I've re-read sections of it and still felt like I've been hit by a Mac truck. The title was listed a few weeks ago in a blog about upcoming summer releases (This will be released Aug 25, 2009) and; I understand Ann & Michael may be talking about it more closer to publication, so I won't spoil the fun, but, really, truly, an amazing book. Can't wait to really talk about it!

I wish! I'm a teacher, so reading and rereading classics is part of my job. I'm so glad I found your podcast to help me find new books and authors.

Wow Melissa! I hope you haven't read all of those classics just since I announced the BotB reading challenge.... It makes the fact that I'm only 1/2 through Moby Dick!

You must be one of those annoying "fast readers." ;)

One of the best things about reading Mr. Pip was that it compelled me to reread Great Expections. I can't believe that I had forgotten how wonderful it is. I also read Oscar Wao this year, and it was very good. Some of my other favorite books that I read (or reread) this year:

The Elegance of the Hedgehog -Muriel Barbery
Into the Wild - Jon Krakauer
The Killing Floor - Lee Child
Maps and Legends - Michael Chabon
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie - Alan Bradley
Beowulf on the Beach - Jack Murnighan
Beowulf - Seamus Heaney translation
Farenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
Jane Eyre- Charlotte Bronte
Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello - Shakespeare
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
Agent Zizag - Ben Macintyre
Into the Woods - Tana French

I am looking forward to reading A Fraction of the Whole, Shadow of the Wind, Tears in the Darkness, and Fragment.

If you love it, recommend it to a bunch of friends. I'm sure THAT will make the author happy!

Blind Man is still in print and I can say it's worth the purchase!"

I found a copy on betterworldbooks.com. I'm trying to go the used route as often as possible. I figure it's a savings all around, though I guess it doesn't support the author very well. I suppose my conscience and I will have to figure that out.

It's funny, I always loved her short stories and wasn't a huge fan of her first novel, so I really approached Away with hesitation. I was so glad to be wrong!

Blind Man is still in print and I can say it's worth the purchase!

Michael wrote: "It's such a great book Summer, I hope you love it all the way through!"

Indeed, I did. Unfortunately, my cooperative library system doesn't have A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You Stories. I think her style would shine even more in the short story format. Away felt episodic, like a bunch of short stories strung together.

It's such a great book Summer, I hope you love it all the way through!

Michael, in this podcast, you mentioned Away by Amy Bloom. I'm reading it now and I'm loving it thus far. Thank you!

Good Lord, I had to edit in order to get Junot Díaz' name spelled correctly!

I did wish to add that I have not liked everything that I have read or attempted to read this year. Far from it. But let's keep it all positive here in this topic.

There is a tweener that is mentioned above though. That is My Name is Red. I am in a death struggle with this book. It's either this book or me. That's how grim I am. By that I mean that I am dogged. . . . .dogged as in little lines in my forehead. . . . .in my quest to determine whether the shortcomings are in this book or in me. Nobel Prize or no, Orhan Pamuk has either created a modern masterpiece here or one of the great phoney faux fables of all time. I have not been keeping any numerical score, but I can say that both the book and I are currently bloodied.

[Note alliteration above]

Steve, you probably have hit on the reason for the occasional negative reaction to McEwan. I'm always amazed at the intensity of it. God forbid you should be a literary genius and sell books. Personally, I'm a fan. If you get a chance, pick up the Recorded Books production of On Chesil Beach. It has an outstanding interview with McEwan on the last disc.

I also loved Mr. Pip. Would never have found it without the recommendation here.

Steve, wonderful to see you here! We've missed you.

Stunning list of books. And I appreciate your commentary very much, so please do not ever apologize for the length of a post.

Hope that things have calmed down for you, and that you stick around.

Ann

I return after an absence of some weeks and am glad to be back. This has been an absolutely brutal summer for me what with this and that. However, I return unbowed. . . . . .okay, I return only a tiny bit bowed.

In no particular order:

I listened to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao on disk front to rear during a marathon drive to and from North Carolina. I believe this may have served to heighten the impact of this book. It is quite an original in my opinion. Although liking an author personally is not necessary for an appreciation of his or her work obviously, I find myself warming more and more to Junot Díaz as I hear him interviewed repeatedly.

My fondness for Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris puts me in a distinct minority among my closer online reading acquaintances. This was one of The New York Times' five best fiction works of 2007. I know this first novel has some problems, but I found it roundly entertaining. It is about an ad agency in the winter of its discontent and is written in a kind of Catch-22 tone of voice with characters who have a Catch-22 outrageousness about them, too.

And Mr. Pip. Wow! A really wonderful book, Summer. I got my recommendation here from Michael and Jon, and a great recommendation it was.

In the non-fiction category I list one of the amazing works of history that I have read in a while. It is an older book by Barbara Tuchman (The Guns of August) called A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century. The 14th Century in Europe boasted the Hundred Year’s War, the Crusades, and the Black Death, just to name a few of the attractions. Incredible book. Great historian.

Count me as one of the admirers of On Chesil Beach. This was my 2008 Ian McEwan. I read Atonement way back sometime. I cannot imagine how McEwan conceived the idea for this book. But then to have pulled it off was an amazing performance. I think some of the criticism of McEwan has arisen from literary jealousies hither and yon, comparable to what Martin Amis faced a few years ago. As far as I am concerned, Ian McEwan has earned every cent of that vast fortune that is pouring in on him.

Lastly, I thoroughly enjoyed Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby's 1992 account of his own lifelong fascination with the Arsenal soccer team. This most certainly is not for everyone. It was a recommendation from my son, who is a soccer fanatic. I tried it and liked it.

Sorry about the length of this. I wanted to say a little bit about each of these rather than just throwing up the list.

I am reading Oscar Wao now,as an e-book on my iphone, and I have wished the same thing- especially since there is no copy/paste on the stupid iphone and I always paste words into google, wikipedia, dictionary.com, urban dictionary as I read, normally- and there are heaps of unfamiliar terms and argot in Oscar Wao! Hyperlinks would be so awesome.

Thanks to you all who reco'd Oscar Wao. Loved it, and not just because I was a comic book reader.

That book should have hyper-links.

Thanks Robin! The Curious Incident... was such a wonderful book to me because the perspective was so unusual. I really enjoy books written like that.

Hi, LYnnea (what a lovely name) - i really enjoyed The Curios Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime.

Ruby Dee is just incredible in Their Eyes Were Watching God, Ann. It is truly a performance, not just a reading. It was one of the first audiobooks I listened to and it hooked me forever. Recently, I went back and listened to it again wondering if it was really as good as I remembered and it definitely was.

Ron Rash is from the Appalachian area of N. Carolina and Misty from Constant Reader initially introduced me to his short stories. I love his writing.

Enchanted April is a treat you should not miss.

Barbara, Enchanted April is so very high on my TBR pile! I can't wait to read it.

I've never read Ron Rash, I don't think. Hmmm.

Thank you, too, for the audiobook list. I am far, far behind on my audio listening. The Zora Neale Hurston looks like something I should look for.

Well, in that case, my favorites that I've read thus far this year are:

Chemistry and Other Stories by Ron Rash
The Country Girls Trilogy by Edna O'Brien
The Enchanted April by Elizabeth Von Arnim
Blly Bathgate by E.L. Doctorow

And, my favorite audiobooks were:
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zoral Neal Hurston, read by Ruby Dee
Mr. Pip by Lloyd Jones, read by Susan Lyons
Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem, read by Frank Muller
Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson and read by Bryson

Definitely does not have to be books written this year -- just books you've read this year, though even that's not a hard and fast rule. We're casual around here :)

Since I see others are posting books not written this year I'll get brave and put my favs out too.

Some of my favorites I took in this year include:

American Gods by Neil Gaiman
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
Honeymoon in Purdah by Alison Wearing

Indeed! So nice to be validated by others!

I hope the requirement is not books that were written this year, since I am still working on the American canon. The American canon changes, of course, depending on who you talk to which makes it more difficult. So here are books I enjoyed this year, even though I read more than those:

Adeline Yen Mah: Chinese Cinderella; Thousand Pieces of Gold
Gene Luen Yang: American Born Chinese
Kate Atkinson: Case Histories
Kamala Markandaya: Nectar in a Sieve
Sandra Dallas: The Diary of Mattie Spenser

My German favorites:
Volker Weidermann: Lichtjahre (history of German literature after 1945)
Rebecca Gable: Das zweite Königreich (historical fiction)
Arno Surminski: Jokehnen oder wie weit ist es von Ostpreußen nach Deutschland (memoir about the end of World War II)

Hey Robin-

I loved Black Swan Green, The Shadow of the Wind and Away and loved all three!

I agree. The Abstinence Teacher had such potential and just never reached it....

Hi Robin,
Nice list!! I still haven't read Black Swan Green, though it on the never-ending TBR list.

Welcome to the group, and thanks for posting!

Ann

Greetings! I am new here, and I love lists. So far this year, in no particular order:
Black Swan Green, David Mitchell
The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Highest Tide, Jim Lynch
Away, Amy Bloom
The Thin Place, Kathryn Davis
Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer

mellymel-

Isn't it great to discover a book before anyone else does?

thanks for sharing your list with us!

Tomato Girl came out this past week and was a surprise favorite. I love it when that happens, I'm not usually ahead of the curve...

Ooh, mellymel, nice list!
I don't know Tomato Girl, but all of the other books are either books that I've read, or they are on my TBR list.

Oh how I love lists!!

Here we go:
Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith
What is the What by Dave Eggers
The Commoner by John Burnham Scwartz
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
Run by Ann Patchett
Tomato Girl by Jayne Pupek
So Brave, Young and Handsome by Leif Enger
The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
The God of Animals by Aryn Kyle

I've had a good run this year, I think my discernment is improving, or it's the goodreads effect. ;)

Though some of these books were not published in 2008, these are my favorite books that I have read this year (so far)...

- Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
- A Supremely Bad Idea: Three Mad Birders and Their Quest to See It All by Luke Dempsey (absolutely hilarious!)
- And Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
- An Imperfect Offering: Humanitarian Action for the 21st Century by James Orbinski
- The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson
- Guernica by Dave Boling

Yeah, that was my main motivation for initially reading the book (to get it done before the film came out). It has so many layers of depth and I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. The miniseries is absolutely spectacular. So far, it's one of the best literary adaptations I've ever seen. I hope the movie lives up to its source material.

Just saw the trailer for the new Bridehead film -- lush, lush, lush and it looks very interesting indeed -- the book may have to go camping with me. I need a stop at the used bookstore for paperbacks to lighten the book bag though!

Thanks, JT. I have a copy of Brideshead on my shelf. Have never seen the miniseries, and need to read it before I see the new movie.

ok, I have to add a new book to my 2008 list. I finished Brideshead Revisited this past weekend and absolutely loved it. I think it may be one of those that I definitely return to. I'm currently making my way through the classic miniseries adaptation from the early '80's and it is so well done!

Just picked up Edgar Sawtelle today and can't wait to start it!

I second the motion for Summer to read Mister Pip. I would definitely put it on the top of my First Half of 2008 list. This is a book that had me in tears on an airplane. (Why do they always come by with soda at these crucial moments?) And I have to give credit to Michael and Ann for turning me on to it. Thanks guys!

Other favorite books on my list so far this year would be:
We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver,
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant (which finally made it to the top of the pile), and The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

Building off of Stephen's comments above what about disappointments for the year? Mine would be The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta. I expected a much better ending to a great story set up.

Ah, that cupcake on the cover of Sweet Love is just irresistable!

Thanks for letting us know about the giveaway, S.

Driving Sideways by Jess Riley. It was fun, quirky, and taught me new things about the disease PRK.

Also Sweet Love by Sarah Strohmeyer. This one was just simple and sweet.

I've reviewed them both (plus many, many, many more) at my blog, http://skrishnasbooks.blogspot.com if you're interested!

And speaking of piles of books, I'm doing a giveaway on my blog right now because my fiance tripped over one of the many piles of books I have in my living room and gently suggested that I give away some books!

re: bumping Mister Pip to the top of your pile, Summer... please do! It was definitely one of my top 2 or 3 books of 2007... let me know what you think of it!

Mister Pip seems fairly well recommended. I may have to bump it up in my TBR queue.