Reading Envy 220: Pronunciations with Scott

Scott returns from a coastal vacation and three recent reads. We also discuss group reads via BookTube, the appeal of series, and more.

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Books discussed:

 
Njal's Saga by Anonymous
True Story by Kate Reed Perry
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, translated by Thomas Teal
Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 edited by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha Blaine
Every Dead Thing by John Connolly

Other mentions:

The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany
The Thrall's Tale by Judith Lindbergh
The Sagas of the Icelanders by Various
Sagalong on Youtube, episode 1
Tournament of Books - Yu
Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones
The Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns Goodwin
How to Be An Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi
Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi
Freedom is a Constant Struggle  by Angela Y. Davis
The Galaxy and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers
Children of Ash & Elm: A History of the Vikings by Neil Price
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross
Even as we Breathe by Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle
Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin

Related episodes:

Episode 055 - Too Late for an Autopsy with Julie Davis
Episode 087 - Going Native with Bookclub Social with Amanda and Grace
Episode 088 - Author Head Space with Sara Moore
Episode 126 - Bernice Bobs her Hair with Jon Laubinger
Episode 157 - Joint Readalong of Gone with the Wind with Book Cougars
Episode 198 - Mood Reading with Robin

Stalk us online:

Scott on A Good Story is Hard to Find (podcast)
Scott on Shelf Wear (blog and podcast)
Jenny at Goodreads
Jenny on Twitter
Jenny is @readingenvy on Instagram and Litsy

All links to books are through Bookshop.org, where I am an affiliate. I wanted more money to go to the actual publishers and authors. I link to Amazon when a book is not listed with Bookshop.

Summer Reading TBR

In the most recent episode of the podcast, I revealed this year's summer reading challenge - to finish incomplete series you might have lingering on your "always meant to read" list. Already some people in the Goodreads group have been talking about different takes on the challenge - reading multiple books by an author that may not be in a series, or starting and reading an entire series despite not having previously read any of the volumes. I want to be clear that all interpretations are solid! The goal, as always, is to inject some inspiration and energy into our reading. Please use #readingenvysummerreading if you post about this in social media so I can find you. Or leave a comment on this post!

I have aspirations for this challenge for sure. But as of right now, all of my libraries remain closed. So I will start with the books I already have and make an aspirational TBR for that time I decide to either fill in from bookstores or regain access to libraries. Of course starting with the books I already own is always preferable, I'm just a little more limited to that this time around.

Books I own

There has been a series of podcast guests who have talked about Haruf, including me. I loved Plainsong, which I read in 2017, and I found copies of Benediction and Eventide but have yet to read them. I have the feeling they are a good match to my current reading mood.

The Alexandria Quartet is near and dear to my heart, except - - I've never finished it. I first read Justine in 2009, followed by reading Balthazar that same year. I reread Justine by listening to a new audio edition in 2015, intending to finish all of them that way, but I got distracted. So I've still never read Mountolive or Clea, but I own both of them. Time to remedy that, I think.

I own three physical books from the Dublin Murder Squad series by Tana French, based on the belief I would some day return to the series. It's incomplete but I bet this one is easy to find used books in.  In the Woods is book 1, and I also read that in 2014. Someone alerted me to the Book Riot recommended order of reading the series so I'm going to start there.

I own The Last Policeman series by Ben H. Winters on Kindle thanks to some daily deal a few yaers ago.  The Last Policeman is book 1, and I read it in June 2014.

I still haven't finished the Time Quintet by Madeleine L'Engle either. I must!

Books I would need to buy or borrow

The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante are well-known. My Brilliant Friend is book 1, and I first read it in 2015.  I really loved it, so much that I had this sense of wanting to spread the following novels out. I didn't read The Story of a New Name (book 2) until 2016. Well, now it's 2020 and I have yet to read book 3 or 4!

Now I will list series I've started but would like to finish, or at least read farther than book 1! I'm sure this is incomplete, and there's no way I'll get to even half of this list (but I certainly won't run out.) I'm not a frequent series reader, honestly, as I don't read a lot of crime or mystery novels but there are some literary series of sorts, and some genre fiction sprinkled in too.

Seasonal Quartet by Ali Smith (I've read Autumn and Winter)
Seasons Quartet by Karl Ove Knausgard (I've read Autumn and Winter, hmm)
My Life by Karl Ove Knausgard (I've only read book #1 - likelihood of me tackling this collection this year? Pretty low.)
The Thomas Cromwell Trilogy (I've only read Bring Up the Bodies, which is book 2 - I have started the audio of book 3. Should I read Wolf Hall? I mean it did win the Booker Prize...)
The Winston Brothers by Penny Reid (it could be fun to finish this romance series and the other series it connects to)
Dr. Siri Paiboun series by Colin Cotterill (I've only read the first book)
Ambergris Series by Jeff VanderMeer (I own 2/3 of these)

How about you?

I'd love to hear what you are planning for this challenge!

Series - the Good, the Bad, the Undead

I just finished Dead Until Dark: A Sookie Stackhouse Novelby Charlaine Harris, which is book #1 of the Sookie Stackhouse, made even more popular by the HBO series based on the book series: True Blood.

I thought about basically copying my GoodReads review into this space, but I'm trying to make this blog about more than just single book reviews.  So I thought I would reflect a little about series in general - what I like and what I don't.

When I was younger, I read series all the time, probably more than anything else.  My Mom sells Christian books to libraries, and the series I remember the most vividly is The Mandie Books by Lois Gladys Leppard.  They could be seen as a pre-cursor to Nancy Drew, a young girl detective, with the added interest of being set in the 19th century, and Mandie's father is pure Cherokee.  (Wow, I just looked these up for the first time in years and years, only to find that the author went to the university where I work.  How is that for a connection?)

One summer my Mom brought home an entire run of the old Bobbsey Twins mysteries, the ones with the light purple cover.  I must have read each one three times.  My favorite was The Bobbsey Twins and the Secret of Candy Castle because of this one scene where a closet turns out to be a secret elevator, and I spent hours that summer trying to find the button in my bedroom closet.

I remember reading The Babysitter's Club, Sweet Valley High, you name it.  Maybe part of my problem with series as an adult is that I associate them so heavily with childhood.  I can't think of a single series that is what I would call "serious," in fact most belong to the "beach reading" genre.  I have to admit to not really understanding this genre. (I read Gravity's Rainbow on vacation once.   Does that make it a beach read?)  

In my adult reading life, the only series I can say I read all of is Harry Potter.  Of course, these are children's books too, right?   I read the first book of a lot of series.  I thought I'd like The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan, until I realized in book 3 that the author was intentionally sending all his characters off on quests with no real action until the end, just in time to create a cliffhanger to make me buy the next book.  I caught on and was not amused.  Most of the time, if you don't like the characters or the story in the first book of a series, you might as well skip the rest, because the whole point seems to be to capitalize on what made the first one successful.

Assuming that philosophy is true, I would imagine the rest of the Sookie Stackhouse novels are full of naive Sookie trying to navigate a new world of vampire's girlfriend etiquette, life-threatening drama, and how to use her mind-reading abilities, with a good dose of gratuitous sex and violence thrown in for good measure.  I think a lot of readers like that predictability, with enough action to make you think you've gone somewhere, not really realizing that the author is actually limiting what is going on so she can squeeze out another 10-15 books in the series before the story is over.  I guess I'd rather read a long, well-developed, self-contained novel.  To me, that is just more satisfying.

One more side note before I go - the Sookie Stackhouse books are often classified into the sub-genre of urban fantasy, but these are set in a small southern town.  I'll go along with the masses and reign in my impulse to reclassify everything.