Tag: downtheTBRhole

This meme was created by Lia at Lost in a Story as a way to tackle the gargantuan To-Read shelves a lot of us have on Goodreads.  Like other people, I’ve long ago forgotten what prompted me to add some of the books I have shelved.  This meme is the perfect excuse to start taking back control…

The rules are simple:

1. Go to your Goodreads To-Read shelf.
2. Order on ascending date added.
3. Take the first 5 (or 10 if you’re feeling adventurous) books
4. Read the synopses of the books
5. Decide: keep it or should it go?
6. Repeat every week until the entire list has been filtered (hmm, quite a few weeks then!)

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The ten who need to demonstrate their worth this time are:

Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson (added 11^th September 2013)

Ruby Lennox begins narrating her life at the moment of conception, and from there takes us on a whirlwind tour of the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of an English girl determined to learn about her family and its secrets.

Verdict: Keep – I loved the author’s Life After Life and I have A God in Ruins on my wishlist.  This sounds like a similarly inventive premise.

Case Histories (Jackson Brodie #1) by Kate Atkinson

Case one: A little girl goes missing in the night.
Case two: A beautiful young office worker falls victim to a maniac’s apparently random attack.
Case three: A new mother finds herself trapped in a hell of her own making – with a very needy baby and a very demanding husband – until a fit of rage creates a grisly, bloody escape.

Thirty years after the first incident, as private investigator Jackson Brodie begins investigating all three cases, startling connections and discoveries emerge . . .

Verdict: Keep – I wasn’t sure about keeping another book by the same author but this just sounds so intriguing.

Tiefland by Calvin Glover (added 20^th September 2013)

Swing era Germany. A young Leni Riefenstahl is acclaimed as the greatest female filmmaker of the 20th century. Dancer, actor, screenwriter, and director, she is renowned as a consummate artist. Then come the atrocities of the Third Reich and suddenly she is dismissed and despised as a Nazi whore. Tiefland is a fictionalized account of her struggle to restore her reputation and her desperate attempt to regain the adoration she once enjoyed.

Verdict: Remove – This is one of those occasions where you become convinced Goodreads is randomly adding books to your To-Read shelf. OK, it’s historical fiction and set in the 1930s but it just doesn’t appeal for some reason and has average reviews.

Monsieur Le Commandant by Romain Slocombe (added 20^th September 2013)

French Academician and Nazi sympathizer Paul-Jean Husson writes a letter to his local SS officer in the autumn of 1942.  Tormented by an illicit passion for Ilse, his German daughter-in-law, Husson has made a decision that will devastate several lives, including his own.  The letter is intended to explain his actions. It is a dramatic, sometimes harrowing story that begins in the years leading up to the war, when following the accidental drowning of his daughter, Husson’s previously gilded life begins to unravel.  And through Husson’s confession, Romain Slocombe gives the reader a startling picture of a man’s journey: from pillar of the French Establishment and World War One hero to outspoken supporter of Nazi ideology and the Vichy government.

Verdict: Remove – Some reviews has described this as ‘harrowing’ or ‘disturbing’ and I’m just not sure I want to put myself through that.

The Hurlyburly’s Husband by Jean Tuele (added 20^th September 2013)

The Marquis de Montespan and his new wife, Athénaïs, are that very rare thing: a true love-match. But love is not enough to maintain their hedonistic lifestyle, and the couple soon face huge debts. Then Madame de Montespan is offered the chance to turn their fortunes round, by becoming lady-in-waiting to the Queen at Versailles. Too late, Montespan discovers that his ravishing wife has caught the eye of King Louis XIV. Everyone congratulates him on his new status of cuckold by royal appointment, but the Marquis is broken-hearted. He vows to wreak revenge on the King and win back his adored Marquise. At once comic and poignant, Jean Teulé’s extraordinary novel restores a ridiculed figure from history to his rightful position of hero: a man who loved his wife and dared challenge the absolute power of the Sun King himself.

Verdict: Remove – I was slightly tempted to keep this as it’s a period I haven’t read much about but I’ve been deterred by the low average rating of 3.2 with quite a few DNFs.

The City of Shadows (Stefan Gillespie #1) by Michael Russell (added 20^th September 2013)

Dublin 1934: Detective Stefan Gillespie arrests a German doctor and encounters Hannah Rosen desperate to find her friend Susan, a Jewish woman who had become involved with a priest, and has now disappeared.  When the bodies of a man and woman are found buried in the Dublin mountains, it becomes clear that this case is about more than a missing person. Stefan and Hannah trace the evidence all the way across Europe to Danzig.  In a strange city where the Nazi Party is gaining power, Stefan and Hannah are inching closer to the truth and soon find themselves in grave danger…

Verdict: Keep – This was longlisted for the CWA John Creasy New Blood Dagger Award in 2013 and has had some positive reviews.  I like the sound of the period and the setting.

The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin (added 20^th September 2013)

In the ancient town of Ephesus, Mary lives alone, years after her son’s crucifixion. She has no interest in collaborating with the authors of the Gospel—her keepers, who provide her with food and shelter and visit her regularly. She does not agree that her son is the Son of God; nor that his death was “worth it;” nor that the “group of misfits he gathered around him, men who could not look a woman in the eye,” were holy disciples. Mary judges herself ruthlessly (she did not stay at the foot of the Cross until her son died—she fled, to save herself), and is equally harsh on her judgment of others. This woman who we know from centuries of paintings and scripture as the docile, loving, silent, long-suffering, obedient, worshipful mother of Christ becomes, in Toibin’s searing evocation, a tragic heroine with the relentless eloquence of Electra or Medea or Antigone. This tour de force of imagination and language is a portrait so vivid and convincing that our image of Mary will be forever transformed.

Verdict: Keep – This was nominated for the Man Booker Prize in 2013 and, although I can imagine its subject matter provoking strong opinions, I have high regard for Toibin as an author.

SPQR 1: The King’s Gambit by John Maddox Roberts (added 20^th September 2013)

In this Edgar Award nominated mystery, John Maddox Roberts takes readers back to a Rome filled with violence and evil. Vicious gangs ruled the streets of Crassus and Pompey, routinely preying on plebeian and patrician alike. So the garroting of a lowly ex-slave and the disembowelment of a foreign merchant in the dangerous Subura district seemed of little consequence to the Roman hierarchy. But Decius Caecilius Metellus the Younger, high-born commander of the local vigiles, was determined to investigate. Despite official apathy, brazen bribes and sinister threats, Decius uncovers a world of corruption at the highest levels of his government that threatens to destroy him and the government he serves. Set in 70 B.C.

Verdict: Remove – I love novels set in Ancient Rome but I do have quite a few on my To-Read shelf already so I’m going to pass on this one.

The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl (added 20^th September 2013)

In 1865 Boston, the literary geniuses of the Dante Club—poets and Harvard professors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, along with publisher J. T. Fields—are finishing America’s first translation of The Divine Comedy and preparing to unveil Dante’s remarkable visions to the New World. The powerful Boston Brahmins at Harvard College are fighting to keep Dante in obscurity, believing that the infiltration of foreign superstitions into American minds will prove as corrupting as the immigrants arriving at Boston Harbor.

The members of the Dante Club fight to keep a sacred literary cause alive, but their plans fall apart when a series of murders erupts through Boston and Cambridge. Only this small group of scholars realizes that the gruesome killings are modeled on the descriptions of Hell’s punishments from Dante’s Inferno. With the lives of the Boston elite and Dante’s literary future in America at stake, the Dante Club members must find the killer before the authorities discover their secret.

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and an outcast police officer named Nicholas Rey, the first black member of the Boston police department, must place their careers on the line to end the terror. Together, they discover that the source of the murders lies closer to home than they ever could have imagined.

Verdict: Keep – Well, if you read the reviews on Goodreads, this one really divides opinions.  Some love it, others hate it.  I’ll give it a chance.

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (added 20^th September 2013)

Kurt Vonnegut’s absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut’s) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden.

Verdict: Remove – This is one of those books that you feel you ‘should’ read.  But I’m going to be honest and say I really don’t feel any strong inclination to do so.

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The Result:  5 kept, 5 dumped.  Do you agree with my choices?  Have I dumped any books you would have kept or vice versa?

This meme was created by Lia at Lost in a Story as a way to tackle the gargantuan To-Read shelves a lot of us have on Goodreads.  Like other people, I’ve long ago forgotten what prompted me to add some of the books I have shelved.  This meme is the perfect excuse to start taking back control…

The rules are simple:

1. Go to your Goodreads To-Read shelf.
2. Order on ascending date added.
3. Take the first 5 (or 10 if you’re feeling adventurous) books
4. Read the synopses of the books
5. Decide: keep it or should it go?
6. Repeat every week until the entire list has been filtered (hmm, quite a few weeks then!)

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The ten who need to demonstrate their worth this time are:

Bellman & Black by Diane Setterfield (added 31^st August 2013)

Bellman & Black is a heart-thumpingly perfect ghost story, beautifully and irresistibly written, its ratcheting tension exquisitely calibrated line by line. Its hero is William Bellman, who, as a boy of 10, killed a shiny black rook with a catapult, and who grew up to be someone, his neighbours think, who “could go to the good or the bad.” And indeed, although William Bellman’s life at first seems blessed—he has a happy marriage to a beautiful woman, becomes father to a brood of bright, strong children, and thrives in business—one by one, people around him die. And at each funeral, he is startled to see a strange man in black, smiling at him. At first, the dead are distant relatives, but eventually his own children die, and then his wife, leaving behind only one child, his favourite, Dora. Unhinged by grief, William gets drunk and stumbles to his wife’s fresh grave—and who should be there waiting, but the smiling stranger in black. The stranger has a proposition for William—a mysterious business called “Bellman & Black” . . . (less)

Verdict: Remove – I already have The Thirteenth Tale by the same author on my To Read shelf and this one has less positive reviews.  

Augustus: Son of Rome (Augustus #1) by Richard Foreman (added 31^st August 2013)

Augustus: Son of Rome tells the story of the assassination of Julius Caesar and the rise of his heir, Gaius Octavius, as he journeys to Rome from Apollonia. We see a boy grow into a man as Octavius develops the moral courage, intelligence and ruthlessness that will finally see him become Augustus, Emperor of Rome.

The pen and sword will be employed to defeat his enemies and Octavius will earn the name of “Caesar”. Yet Rome will exact its price – and triumph will be accompanied by tragedy. Julius Caesar, Cicero, Cleopatra, Mark Antony, Brutus and Marcus Agrippa all feature in this epic adventure, which will appeal to fans of Shakespeare, Plutarch and Conn Iggulden alike.

Verdict: Remove – I already have another book about Augustus on my To Read shelf and I don’t think I need another, particularly one with an average rating of only 3.5.

King Hereafter by Dorothy Dunnett (added 2^nd September 2013)

In King Hereafter, Dorothy Dunnett’s stage is the wild, half-pagan country of eleventh-century Scotland. Her hero is an ungainly young earl with a lowering brow and a taste for intrigue. He calls himself Thorfinn but his Christian name is Macbeth.  Dunnett depicts Macbeth’s transformation from an angry boy who refuses to accept his meager share of the Orkney Islands to a suavely accomplished warrior who seizes an empire with the help of a wife as shrewd and valiant as himself.

Verdict: Remove – I’m drawn to this because of the subject matter and I’m aware of the reputation of the author.  However it is over 700 pages long and I can’t see myself investing the time to read it any time soon.

The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton (added 6^th September 2013)

England in the middle of World War II, a war that seems fated to go on forever, a war that has become a way of life. Heroic resistance is old hat. Everything is in short supply, and tempers are even shorter.

Overwhelmed by the terrors and rigors of the Blitz, middle-aged Miss Roach has retreated to the relative safety and stupefying boredom of the suburban town of Thames Lockdon, where she rents a room in a boarding house run by Mrs. Payne. There the savvy, sensible, decent, but all-too-meek Miss Roach endures the dinner-table interrogations of Mr. Thwaites and seeks to relieve her solitude by going out drinking and necking with a wayward American lieutenant. Life is almost bearable until Vicki Kugelmann, a seeming friend, moves into the adjacent room. That’s when Miss Roach’s troubles really begin.

Verdict: Keep – I’m intrigued by the description of this one and the wartime setting appeals so I’m going to give it a chance.

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (added 7^th September 2013)

It is 1866, and young Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On the stormy night of his arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of twelve local men who have met in secret to discuss a series of unexplained events: A wealthy man has vanished, a prostitute has tried to end her life, and an enormous fortune has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into the mystery: a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely ornate as the night sky. Richly evoking a mid-nineteenth-century world of shipping, banking, and gold rush boom and bust, The Luminaries is a brilliantly constructed, fiendishly clever ghost story and a gripping page-turner.

Verdict: Remove – This was garlanded with prizes and prize nominations but it’s over 800 pages long and has an average rating of only 3.7.  In addition, some reviews describe it as ‘slow’ or ‘dense’.  I think I can only retain books that really grab me and this one doesn’t.

The Kills by Richard House (added 7^th September 2013)

This is The Kills: Sutler, The Massive, The Kill, The Hit. The Kills is an epic novel of crime and conspiracy told in four books. It begins with a man on the run and ends with a burned body. Moving across continents, characters and genres, there will be no more ambitious or exciting novel in 2013. In a ground-breaking collaboration between author and publisher, Richard House has also created multimedia content that takes you beyond the boundaries of the book and into the characters’ lives outside its pages.

Verdict: Remove – I was clearly in an adventurous frame of mind when I added this one but reading the description now it doesn’t appeal at all and once more its size – over 1,000 pages – puts me off.

The Master by Colm Toibin (added 7^th September 2013)

Beautiful and profoundly moving, The Master tells the story of Henry James, a man born into one of America’s first intellectual families who leaves his country in the late nineteenth century to live in Paris, Rome, Venice, and London among privileged artists and writers.

Verdict: Keep – I’m always drawn to fiction based around the lives of writers or artists and I really like the sound of this one.

 

City of Women by David R. Gillham (added 8^th September 2013)

It is 1943 – the height of the Second World War – and Berlin has essentially become a city of women.  Sigrid Schröder is, for all intents and purposes, the model German soldier’s wife: She goes to work every day, does as much with her rations as she can, and dutifully cares for her meddling mother-in-law, all the while ignoring the horrific immoralities of the regime. But behind this façade is an entirely different Sigrid, a woman who dreams of her former lover, now lost in the chaos of the war. Her lover is a Jew.  But Sigrid is not the only one with secrets.

A high ranking SS officer and his family move down the hall and Sigrid finds herself pulled into their orbit. A young woman doing her duty-year is out of excuses before Sigrid can even ask her any questions. And then there’s the blind man selling pencils on the corner, whose eyes Sigrid can feel following her from behind the darkness of his goggles.   Soon Sigrid is embroiled in a world she knew nothing about, and as her eyes open to the reality around her, the carefully constructed fortress of solitude she has built over the years begins to collapse. She must choose to act on what is right and what is wrong, and what falls somewhere in the shadows between the two.

Verdict: Keep – Fiction based in World War II is another interest of mine and this sounds like an intriguing story.

One Night in Winter by Simon Sebag Montefiore (added 9^th September 2013)

If your children were forced to testify against you, what terrible secrets would they reveal?

Moscow 1945. As Stalin and his courtiers celebrate victory over Hitler, shots ring out. On a nearby bridge, a teenage boy and girl lie dead.  But this is no ordinary tragedy and these are no ordinary teenagers, but the children of Russia’s most important leaders who attend the most exclusive school in Moscow.  Is it murder? A suicide pact? Or a conspiracy against the state?  Directed by Stalin himself, an investigation begins as children are arrested and forced to testify against their friends – and their parents. This terrifying witch-hunt soon unveils illicit love affairs and family secrets in a hidden world where the smallest mistakes will be punished with death.

Verdict: Keep – Again, the period in which the book is set appeals and the story line sounds intriguing.

Sashenka by Simon Sebag Montefiore (added 9^th September 2013)

Winter, 1916. In St Petersburg, snow is falling in a country on the brink of revolution. Beautiful and headstrong, Sashenka Zeitlin is just sixteen. As her mother parties with Rasputin and her dissolute friends, Sashenka slips into the frozen night to play her role in a dangerous game of conspiracy and seduction.  Twenty years on, Sashenka has a powerful husband and two children. Around her people are disappearing but her own family is safe. But she’s about to embark on a forbidden love affair which will have devastating consequences. Sashenka’s story lies hidden for half a century, until a young historian goes deep into Stalin’s private archives and uncovers a heart-breaking story of passion and betrayal, savage cruelty and unexpected heroism – and one woman forced to make an unbearable choice…

Verdict: Remove – I was sorely tempted to keep this one but I think I’d like to experience the author’s writing (see above) before committing to another book by him.  However, I can see it getting added back to the shelf if I enjoy One Night in Winter.

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The Result:  4 kept, 6 dumped.  Do you agree with my choices?  Have I dumped any books you would have kept or vice versa?