Monday, October 29, 2018

Best Read of 2018?

What was your favorite read of 2018?

It's time to compile the best of 2018! If you want your favorite book of 2018 included on the last Reading Envy Episode of the year, please send me an email at reading envy at gmail.

Please include:
1. Your name as you'd like it included
2. Your location (optional)
3. Your favorite read from 2018. Like all Reading Envy episodes, it does not need to be published in 2018, just something you enjoyed this year.

You may also record this, in fact I prefer it so that episode is not all my voice! It should be less than 5 minutes, and saved as an MP3, and include the same info as above.

Deadline: December 15, 2018. But please do send earlier than that.

Tuesday, October 23, 2018

Reading Envy 132: Whimsy and Density with Anna Baillie-Karas

Anna Baillie-Karas is a reader and podcaster from Adelaide, Australia. She joins Jenny in the Reading Envy pub to talk about book award lists, expanding our range, organizing our home libraries, and books we've read lately!

Download or listen via this link: Reading Envy 132: Whimsy and Density.

Subscribe to the podcast via this link: Feedburner
Or subscribe via Apple Podcasts by clicking: Subscribe
Or listen through TuneIn
Or listen on Google Play
Listen via Stitcher
NEW! Listen through Spotify


Books Discussed:



Milkman by Anna Burns
Our Homesick Songs by Emma Hooper
The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson
A Coffin for Dimitrios by Eric Ambler
Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton
There There by Tommy Orange

Other Mentions:

Books on the Go (podcast)
The First Tuesday Book Club (Australian tv show)
Man Booker Prize
Clock Dance by Anne Tyler
Circe by Madeleine Miller
Book Riot Read Harder Challenge
National Book Award (now includes translated literature award)
Disoriental by Negar Djavadi
Tricks by Domenico Starnoni
The Romanovs: 1613-1918 by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Simon Winchester
Shawn Mooney (Booktube)
Kendra Winchester (Booktube)
Simon Savidge from the Readers (Booktube)
What Kamil Reads (Booktube)
No Bones by Anna Burns
Women's Prize for Fiction
The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh
ScotiaBank Giller Prize
Get Booked (podcast)
Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper
The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Mythos by Stephen Fry
Heroes by Stephen Fry
Ulysses by James Joyce
Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky
The Winter Queen (Erast Fandorin #1) by Boris Akunin
Before Sunrise (film)
Before Sunset (film)
Before Midnight (film)
Lost Connections by Johann Hari
21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari
Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World by Tom Wright and Bradley Hope
Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty
Annie Muktuk & Other Stories by Norma Dunning


Related Episodes:
Episode 002 - Return of the Euthanized Book with guest Bryan Alexander
Episode 006Bailey's Women's Prize 2014
Episode 074 - The Books We Didn't Love in High School with Blaine DeSantis
Episode 086 - The Queen of Bailing with Shawn Mooney 
Episode 098 - Just a Bunch of Stuff that Happened with Bryan Bibb 
Episode 123 - Godlets and Forests with Lauren Weinhold

Stalk us online:

Books on the Go Podcast
Anna is @abailliekaras on Instagram
Anna on Twitter
Anna at Goodreads
Jenny at Goodreads
Jenny on Twitter
Jenny is @readingenvy on Instagram and Litsy


Thursday, October 11, 2018

Review: In the Night Wood

In the Night Wood In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Now that the weather is finally turning gloomy, you might be looking for an atmospheric read. Look no further! This book blends folklore, English countryside, mysterious books, missing children, and a wood that beckons....

I enjoyed Bailey's short stories that I also read this year, and I may have a slight preference for those because they were more along the lines of dark fantasy and sometimes humorous, always full of humanity. Sometimes I felt trapped in this book because it gets a bit circular, and you know that the characters are doing dangerous things and the author is just going to make you watch it happen! But that's part of the overall tone of the novel that is so effective. Some of the characters feel more like archetypes than individuals, but again, that suits the book too since there is a layer in it of another book, also called In the Night Wood.

At the heart of the story is a damaged marriage, with both people destroyed by grief with an added undercurrent of infidelity that hasn't even started to be dealt with. That may be the greater horror in the end.

(I marked this little part:)
"They were silent then, listening to the sound of their marriage calve around them, like a glacier, like sea ice, as fragile and as cold.
'Pass the salt, please,' he said."

View all my reviews

Tuesday, October 9, 2018

Reading Envy 131: Tartan Noir and More with Claire Duffy

Claire Duffy is a crime writer in Glasgow, and overall interesting person who came on the Reading Envy podcast to chat books. We talk about how tartan noir has very little to do with tartans, the crime community in Scotland, and how classics change as we get older.

Download or listen via this link: Reading Envy 131: Tartan Noir and More.

Subscribe to the podcast via this link: Feedburner
Or subscribe via Apple Podcasts by clicking: Subscribe
Or listen through TuneIn
Or listen on Google Play
Listen via Stitcher
NEW! Listen through Spotify


Books Discussed:



Garnethill by Denise Mina
The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo
Finding Peggy by Meg Henderson
Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell


Other Mentions: 

Dark of Night, Episode One by C.S. Duffy
The Bridge (tv show)
Mary Higgins Clark
Bloody Scotland Festival
Mark Billingham
Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
Trainspotting (film)
Ian Rankin
Val McDermid
Noir at the Bar, Edinburgh
Noir at the Bar: An Oral History
National Book Award (USA)
Man Booker Prize
Not the Booker Prize
I See You by Clare Mackintosh
Let Me Lie by Clare Mackintosh
Weird Things Customers Say in Bookstores by Jen Campbell
Downton Abbey (tv series)
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (film)
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
A Coffin for Dimitrios by Eric Ambler

Related Episodes (those with crime):
Episode 058 - Wishing for a Sequel with Scott D. Danielson
Episode 060 - A Good Era for Communists with Rose Davis
Episode 062 - Olfactory Stimuli with David Galloway
Episode 072 - Books Are My Bag with Sarah K
Episode 074 - The Books We Didn't Love in High School with Blaine DeSantis
Episode 108 - Venn Diagram with Yanira Ramirez 
Episode 110 - The Accidental Love Episode with Casey Stepaniuk
Episode 114 - Raised by Wolves with Karen Acosta
Episode 115 - Quote, Unquote with Scott Eaton 

Stalk us online:

Claire is @csduffywriter on Instagram
Claire is also @writer.on.the.go on Instagram if you want to check out her dictating while exercising project
Claire on Twitter
Claire on Facebook
Claire on the internet
Jenny at Goodreads
Jenny on Twitter
Jenny is @readingenvy on Instagram and Litsy