I'll Never be Young Again by Daphne du Maurier -- BOOK BEGINNINGS

BOOK BEGINNINGS ON FRIDAYS

Thank you for joining me for Book Beginnings on Fridays. Please share the opening sentence (or so) of the book you are reading this week. You can also share from a book that caught your fancy, even if you are not reading it right now.

MY BOOK BEGINNING

When the sun had gone, I saw that the water was streaked with great patches of crimson and gold.

-- from I'll Never be Young Again by Daphne du Maurier.

This is du Maurier's second novel. I'm reading it as part of a  group read on Instagram. We've been reading through her books for the last year and a half. I greatly enjoy this deep dive into the work of an author I had dabbled with before (Rebecca and Jamaica Inn) but had not explored extensively.

I'll Never be Young Again tells the story of a 21-year-old man estranged from his father and trying to find himself. I'm about a third of the way through. I enjoy it, because she can really spin a yarn, but it is not my favorite. The protagonist is extremely irritating.

YOUR BOOK BEGINNINGS

Please add the link to your Book Beginnings post in the box below. If you share on social media, please use the #bookbeginnings hashtag.

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THE FRIDAY 56

The Friday 56 is a natural tie-in with Book Beginnings. The idea is to share a two-sentence teaser from page 56 of your featured book. If you are reading an ebook or audiobook, find your teaser from the 56% mark.

Freda at Freda's Voice started and hosted The Friday 56 for a long, long time. She is taking a break and Anne at My Head is Full of Books has taken on hosting duties in her absence. Please visit Anne's blog and link to your Friday 56 post.

MY FRIDAY 56

From I'll Never be Young Again:

There was something terrible in the way Jake talked about the man he had murdered. Seemed impossible and unreal.

Like I said, she knows how to tell a good story! If only the main character wasn't such a sap.

It's My Blogiversary! 16 years of Rose City Reader

IT'S MY BLOGIVERSARY!

Rose City Reader turns sweet 16 today. I started this blog 16 years ago and it is hard for me to think it has been around for so long. I celebrated my blogiversary by taping an episode of the Rare Book Cafe, a book vlog you can find on Facebook here or Instagram here. Give them a follow!

I started Rose City Reader to keep track of all the book lists I was working on. I had finished the Modern Library's list of Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century. While working on that project, I found that there were many other book lists that appealed to me and I started to gather them up. Some were admitted knock offs of the Modern Library list, like the Radcliffe list. Some were prize winners, like the Pulitzer and Booker Prizes. Some were "must read" lists, like those compiled by Erica Jong or Anthony Burgess. I needed a place to keep the lists and track my progress in reading the books. 

As I went along, I added some lists of my own, like bibliographies of favorite authors and theme lists. I now have my own lists of Campus Novels, books with a French twist, books set in Venice, and others. You can find a list of all the lists I'm working on at the tab at the top of the page or here. I also started reviewing books in addition to listing them; participating in annual reading challenges; and playing along with a few weekly events, like Book Beginnings on Fridays, hosted by me here on Rose City Reader. 

Over these past 16 years, book blogging seems to have waxed and waned in popularity. Other social media platforms have lured away bloggers and potential bloggers with shiny new options, some which faded away themselves and some which are going strong like Instagram. I like both "bookstagramming" on Instagram and traditional blogging. Instagram is fast and short, but with pretty pictures. Blogging is less visual, but offers the opportunity for longer, hopefully more thoughtful, posts.  

My own blogging activity changes over time, depending on what else is going on in my life. Since I started my own law firm, I have had less time to blog. No kidding! But I plug along with Rose City Reader because I love it. As I spend less time in the office and my law partner takes on more responsibility, I look forward to spending more time reading and blogging.

The Curmudgeon's Guide to Getting Ahead by Charles Murray -- BOOK BEGINNINGS

BOOK BEGINNINGS ON FRIDAYS

Thank you for joining me for Book Beginnings on Fridays. Please share the opening sentence (or so) of the book you are reading this week. You can also share from a book that caught your fancy, even if you are not reading it right now.

MY BOOK BEGINNING

The first thing you need to understand is that most large organizations in the private sector are run by curmudgeons like me.

-- from The Curmudgeon's Guide to Getting Ahead: Dos and Don'ts of Right Behavior, Tough Thinking, Clear Writing, and Living a Good Life by Charles Murray. 

This little book of wisdom is short and quick, so only took me a couple of hours to read this week. Murray offers common sense advice, and plenty of home truths, to young people starting independent lives as adults. His target audience is college graduates from privileged backgrounds, but it is good advice for all young people. 

The Curmudgeon's Guide is the kind of book I wish someone had handed to me when I was a college senior. It would have provided much needed guidance and saved me some of the embarrassment, annoyance, and grief of my 20s. I plan to give it to the young people in my life, if I think they will read it. 

He offers plenty of serious advice, but ends with the recommendation to watch the movie Groundhog Day over and over. He says you could, instead, study Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, but you can get the same lessons from Groundhog Day and it's a lot more fun. 

YOUR BOOK BEGINNINGS

Please add the link to your Book Beginnings post in the box below. If you share on social media, please use the #bookbeginnings hashtag.

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THE FRIDAY 56

The Friday 56 is a natural tie-in with Book Beginnings. The idea is to share a two-sentence teaser from page 56 of your featured book. If you are reading an ebook or audiobook, find your teaser from the 56% mark.

Freda at Freda's Voice started and hosted The Friday 56 for a long, long time. She is taking a break and Anne at My Head is Full of Books has taken on hosting duties in her absence. Please visit Anne's blog and link to your Friday 56 post.

MY FRIDAY 56

From The Curmudgeon's Guide:

But in all cases when you have problems in your interactions with your boss, there’s one more question you have to ask yourself: To what extent is your boss at fault, and to what extent are you a neophyte about supervisor-subordinate relationships? Some of you have reached your twenties without ever having been treated as a subordinate and you are not used to it.

Now that I am in my 50s, I also wish I had read this book earlier so I would have been better prepared to be a boss! I would have had a better understanding of the younger people I supervised. 

Women Authors -- BOOK THOUGHTS

BOOK THOUGHTS

Women Authors

March is Women's History Month, so I thought I'd highlight some of the women authors sitting on my TBR shelves. My reading is split pretty evenly between male and female authors and this is reflected in the books on my TBR shelves. 

Who are some of your favorite women writers? Or those you want to try?

Here’s are two stacks of books by women. In the stack on the left are ten books by women writers whose books I’ve already tried. Some of these, like Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark, are favorites and I've read most of their books. Others, like Margaret Atwood and Elizabeth Strout, are those I've only dipped into but want to read more of their work. In the right stack are ten book by women writers whose work is new to me. There are many other women authors I love, but I limited myself to ten of each. 

FAVORITE AUTHORS

Kate Atkinson, Transcription. I love everything by Atkinson. I really like her Jackson Brodie mystery series, but I also like her historical fiction. 

Margaret Atwood, Hag-Seed. This is Atwood's retelling of William Shakespeare's last play, The Tempest. I've read and enjoyed a few other books from the Hogarth Shakespeare series so am really looking forward to this one. 

Joanne Harris, Five Quarters of the Orange. I've only read one Joanne Harris book and can't remember which one, other than it wasn't Chocolat. I need to remedy this situation. 

Patricia Highsmith, Ripley Under Ground and Ripley’s Game. My book club read her first Ripley book a few years ago and I intended to read the others straight through, but I got off track.

Iris Murdoch, Nuns and Soldiers. I love Murdoch's books but she was so prolific! I feel like I must have read them all but I'm only halfway through. 

Ann Patchett, State of Wonder. I read Bel Canto right when it came out and didn't like it so never read any more books by Anne Patchett. Then my book club read The Dutch House and I loved it, so I read Tom Lake when it came out. Now I want to go back and read her earlier books. 

Annie Proulx, Bad Dirt. The Shipping News is one of my very favorite books. I think I've read almost everything Proulx has written. I don't gravitate to short stories, so what is left on my TBR shelf are a coup of sort story collections, like this one.

Barbara Pym, An Academic Question. Pym is another author I love but have not read as many of her books as I think I have. Time to catch up!

Muriel Spark, The Comforters. I love Spark's snarky, dark humor but have never read this, her first novel. 

Elizabeth Strout, Oh William! I'm not wild about the two other Strout books I've read, but I found this one in a little free library so want to give her another chance. 

NEW-TO-ME 

Ann Beattie, Chilly Scenes of Winter. This one is on Erica Jong's list of Top 20th Century Novels by Women, one of my favorite sources of women authors. 

Suzanne Berne, A Crime in the Neighborhood. This one won the 1999 Women's Prize for Fiction (then the Orange Prize), my other favorite source for finding women writers.

Gina Berriault, Women in Their Beds. Again, I am not drawn to short stories. But this one won both the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and I am working my way through both those lists. 

Harriet Doerr, Stones for Ibarra. Another Erica Jong listed book.

Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus. This has been on my TBR shelf for years, even though it sounds like a wonderful ovel about two sisters. 

Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of Pointed Firs. It isn't easy to find classic books by women so I don't know why I haven't read this before now. 

Hiromi Kawakami, The Nakano Thrift Shop. I don't know anything about this, but bought it on a whim because I liked the cover and title. 

Molly Keane, Good Behaviour. This one gets a lot of love on Instagram so I am excited to read it. 

Olivia Manning, The Balkan Trilogy. Anthony Burgess included this trilogy on his list of the Best 99 Novels in English Since 1939 (to 1984), another list I'm working on.

Jody Picoult, Keeping Faith. Despite Picoult's enormous popularity, I have yet to read any of her books. 

Do any of these look good to you? Where would you start?

Phineas Finn by Anthony Trollope -- BOOK BEGINNINGS

 

BOOK BEGINNINGS ON FRIDAYS

Thank you for joining me for Book Beginnings on Fridays. Please share the opening sentence (or so) of the book you are reading this week. You can also share from a book that caught your fancy, even if you are not reading it right now.

MY BOOK BEGINNING

Dr. Finn, of Killaloe, in county Clare, was as well known in those parts,—the confines, that is, of the counties Clare, Limerick, Tipperary, and Galway,—as was the bishop himself who lived in the same town, and was as much respected.

-- from Phineas Finn by Anthony Trollope. This is the second book in Anthony Trollope's "Palliser Series" of six novels also known as the "Parliamentary Novels." 

This one involves the rising political career of Phineas Finn, only son of the Dr. Finn in the opening sentence. Phineas was studying to be a lawyer when he had the opportunity to be elected as a Member of the House of Commons. The only problem is that the job doesn't pay -- anything. Phineas takes the risk, hoping that being elected to the House will let him reach the "first rung of the ladder" to success as a paid government official. 

If this sounds dry, it isn't! All the politics is balanced by soap-opera level romantic intrigues. Phineas falls in love with at least three women who marry and dally with others. There are plenty of proposals, broken hearts, and even a duel. The female characters are as prominent in the story as the male. Although the women are limited in their options (career, political, financial), they feel contemporary in their thinking and emotions. 

I love this book. I'm reading the Palliser series as a group read on Instagram and know the experience will be a highlight of this reading year. 

YOUR BOOK BEGINNINGS

Please add the link to your Book Beginnings post in the box below. If you share on social media, please use the #bookbeginnings hashtag.

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This preview will disappear when the widget is displayed on your site.
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THE FRIDAY 56

The Friday 56 is a natural tie-in with Book Beginnings. The idea is to share a two-sentence teaser from page 56 of your featured book. If you are reading an ebook or audiobook, find your teaser from the 56% mark.

Freda at Freda's Voice started and hosted The Friday 56 for a long, long time. She is taking a break and Anne at My Head is Full of Books has taken on hosting duties in her absence. Please visit Anne's blog and link to your Friday 56 post.

MY FRIDAY 56

-- from Phineas Finn:

"Wait a moment, you impetuous Irish boy, and hear me out." Phineas liked being called an impetuous Irish boy, and came close to her, sitting where he could look up into her face; and there came a smile upon his own, and he was very handsome.

Towering Tsundoku -- BOOK THOUGHTS

 

BOOK THOUGHTS

Towering Tsundoku

"To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life."
– W. Somerset Maugham in Books and You.

After a sort through the other day, my unread nonfiction books are newly organized. Of course, my shelf space did not grow, so they are still stacked on the floor of my home library. But at least they are stacked in a more orderly way, not teetering and toppling when anyone goes near and not blocking the overflowing shelves.

I love nonfiction, including travel writing, books about food, books about books, general memoir, expatriate memoir, biography, house and home books, popular history, and general nonfiction. Some of my favorite nonfiction authors are Simon Winchester, Susan Orlean, Nora Ephron, Peter Mayle, and M.F.K. Fisher. The nonfiction authors most represented in my TBR stacks and on my TBR shelves are William F. Buckey (from my dad), Elizabeth David, Nancy Mitford, Mark Twain, and John Updike. I do not have as many matching sets as I do with fiction books, but I am a sucker for NYRB Classics, especially the nonfiction ones. 

But two things keep my TBR nonfiction stacked on the floor instead of arranged in alphabetical order (by author) on my shelves, like I do with my TBR fiction. First, when we build our home library, I had way more fiction than nonfiction. So I dedicated one whole wall to my unread fiction books and only one bank of shelves along the opposite wall for unread nonfiction. I had no room for any more nonfiction books, but of course acquired more faster than I could read them and make space. Second, as much as I enjoy nonfiction, I always end up reading more fiction than nonfiction, resulting in tsundoku towers wherever I find space.

I daydream about a time in my life when I can start reading at the top of one of these stacks and read straight down the stack, right to the bottom. 

My current nonfiction read is An Omelette and a Glass of Wine by Elizabeth David. I had hoped to finish it last weekend, but am savoring it slowly. Next up is Menagerie Manor by Gerald Durrell.