BW1: Welcome to our Wild and Whimsical Reading Quest

 

"If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, 

you can only think what everyone else is thinking."

— Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood)

Happy New Year! Welcome to another year of Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.  Welcome back to all our regulars and our newbies. If you haven't participated in years past, the goal is to read 52 Books. How you get there is up to you. And if you prefer to set your own goal, you are welcome to do so. We don't have a set reading list so you can choose to play along or chart your own path in your quest to read.  All that matters is the reading. 

To aid in the journey, there are a number of weekly, monthly, annual, and perpetual quests along with an updated quirky 52 Books Bingo and our author of the month Bookish Bookology to explore.  

We traditionally start out the year in the weird and wonderful world of Haruki Murakami, our January author of the month. While we wait for his newest book, The City and It's Uncertain Walls to be released in the United States some time this year, I'll be exploring his non fiction conversations with Seiji Ozawa in Absolutely on Music, and dive into the fiction world of Sputnik Sweetheart.

Although Penguin suggests starting with some of Murakami's slimmer novels, my first introduction to Murakami was his chunky fantasy novel 1Q84, filled with magical realism, music, cats, weird characters, choices, and the meaning of life.  Which lead to reading most of his bibliography. 

Discover more about Murakami in his non fiction memoir, Novelist as a Vocation in which the man seriously doesn’t think he is a good writer, but shares his stories, his process, and so much more.

Plus, we are traveling through the alphabet again with A to Z and Back Again. There are a variety of ways to complete the project and you don't have to stick with authors or titles only. The choices are unlimited, including:

• Choose an author whose first or last name begin with the letter. 
• Pick a book starting with the letter in the title of the book. Except for those pesky articles or prepositions. 
• Read a book with a character whose name starts with the letter. 
• Choose a book in which the setting of the story starts with the letter. 
• Choose a genre that starts with the letter.
• Read a book with a literary term or plot device starting with the letter. 

Big A, little A, what begins with A -  Allusion, Angels, Agatha, Adams, Adventure, and Action all begin with A. 

Are you ready to go? Great! Put on your hat and walking shoes, strap on your backpack, grab your walking stick as we follow rabbit trails of thought throughout the world on a wild and whimsical reading quest.

Happy Reading! 

Please share your book reviews and link to your website, blog, Goodreads, Google+, Tumblers, or Instagram page. If you do not have a social media account, please leave a comment to let us know what you are reading. The link widget closes at the end of each book week. In the Your Name field, type in your name and the name of the book in parenthesis. In the Your URL field paste a link to your post, then check the privacy box and click enter.

BW16: Renew, Rebirth, Recharge, Restore

"Revel in your freedom. Live wholeheartedly,

laugh loud, love much, spread joy, be truthful,

and give yourself to everything.

You, who are already whole, can lose nothing.

Your ego may fall from time to time,

but you will not. Live big!"  ~~Robert Holden

Happy Easter, my friends. Our letter of the week is R and the word, the theme this week is rebirth, recharge, renewal, or restore. 

“Poetry is the renewal of words, setting them free,

and that’s what a poet is doing:

loosening the words.” ~~Robert Frost

Or how about resurrection, rejoice, renaissance, revival or rejuvenation. 

“It is not easy to convey a sense of wonder,

let alone resurrection wonder, to another.

It’s the very nature of wonder to catch us off guard,

to circumvent expectations and assumptions.

Wonder can’t be packaged, and it can’t be worked up.

It requires some sense of being there

and some sense of engagement.” ~~Eugene H. Peterson

Let's revel in whatever Re- word you chose this week, because, you guessed it; it's all related to reading or rereading our favorite books. 

“A truly great book should be read in youth,

again in maturity and once more in old age,

as a fine building should be seen by

morning light, at noon and

by moonlight.” ~~ Robertson Davies

************************

Please share your book thoughts reviews and link to your website, blog, Goodreads, Google+, Tumblers, or Instagram page. If you do not have a social media account, please leave a comment to let us know what you are reading. The link widget closes at the end of each book week. 

In the Your Name field, type in your name and the name of the book in parenthesis. In the Your URL field paste a link to your post, then check the privacy box and click enter.

BW21: Modernism

Hans Hofman "The Gate"

If you've read James Joyce's Portrait of a Young Artist, Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse or other modernist authors you've had the joy of reading stream of consciousness narrative.  It takes a bit of getting used too, being pulled into the mind of characters whose thoughts go from here to there and back again.   It can be amusing, exasperating, mind expanding or make your brain explode, depending on the story.  You definitely have to read a bit more slowly and be in the mood in order to read their books. 

The Literature Network (one of my favorite resources) sums is all up:

In American Literature, the group of writers and thinkers known as the Lost Generation has become synonymous with Modernism. In the wake of the First World War, several American artists chose to live abroad as they pursued their creative impulses. These included the intellectual Gertrude Stein, the novelists Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the painter Waldo Pierce, among others. The term itself refers to the spiritual and existential hangover left by four years of unimaginably destructive warfare. The artists of the Lost Generation struggled to find some meaning in the world in the wake of chaos.

As with much of Modernist literature, this was achieved by turning the mind’s eye inward and attempting to record the workings of consciousness. For Hemingway, this meant the abandonment of all ornamental language. His novels are famous for their extremely spare, blunt, simple sentences and emotions that play out right on the surface of things. There is an irony to this bluntness, however, as his characters often have hidden agendas, hidden sometimes even from themselves, which serve to guide their actions. The Lost Generation, like other “High Modernists,” gave up on the idea that anything was truly knowable. All truth became relative, conditional, and in flux. The War demonstrated that no guiding spirit rules the events of the world, and that absolute destruction was kept in check by only the tiniest of margins.

The novel was by no means immune from the self-conscious, reflective impulses of the new century. Modernism introduced a new kind of narration to the novel, one that would fundamentally change the entire essence of novel writing. The “unreliable” narrator supplanted the omniscient, trustworthy narrator of preceding centuries, and readers were forced to question even the most basic assumptions about how the novel should operate. James Joyce’s Ulysses is the prime example of a novel whose events are really the happenings of the mind, the goal of which is to translate as well as possible the strange pathways of human consciousness. A whole new perspective came into being known as “stream of consciousness.” Rather than looking out into the world, the great novelists of the early twentieth century surveyed the inner space of the human mind. At the same time, the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud had come into mainstream acceptance. These two forces worked together to alter people’s basic understanding of what constituted truth and reality.

Experimentation with genre and form was yet another defining characteristic of Modernist literature. Perhaps the most representative example of this experimental mode is T. S. Eliot’s long poem The Waste Land. Literary critics often single out The Waste Land as the definitive sample of Modernist literature. In it, one is confronted by biblical-sounding verse forms, quasi-conversational interludes, dense and frequent references which frustrate even the most well-read readers, and sections that resemble prose more than poetry. At the same time, Eliot fully displays all the conventions which one expects in Modernist literature. There is the occupation with self and inwardness, the loss of traditional structures to buttress the ego against shocking realities, and a fluid nature to truth and knowledge.

Major modernist writers also includes Marcel Proust, T.S. Eliot,  E.E. Cummings, William Faulkner, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Franz Kafka, Boris Pasternak, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and W.B. Yeats to name a few.  

I've had The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald on the shelves for a few years now and for some reason have never gotten around to reading it.  I seem to be stuck at G and H in my A to Z Challenge because there are a few interesting books on my shelves that struck my fancy. And it's also on SWB's list of books to read from the Well Educated Mind. So....  My quest will be to read The Great Gatsby this week. Who wants to join me?

************************************************************************

Link to your most current read. Please link to your specific book review post and not your general blog link. In the Your Name field, type in your name and the name of the book in parenthesis. In the Your URL field leave a link to your specific post. If you have multiple reviews, then type in (multi) after your name and link to your general blog url.  If you don't have a blog, tell us about the books you are reading in the comment section of this post.

BW50: X is for Qui Xiaolong

 Qiu Xiaolong

I just finished reading "Death of the Red Heroine" by novelist and poet Qiu Xiaolong, book one in his inspector Chen series and found it to be extremely interesting.  Set in the mid 1990's in China, it was a police procedural blending fact and fiction delving into the politics and culture of the country.  Publisher's Weekly says:

"Set a decade ago in Shanghai, this political mystery offers a peek into the tightly sealed, often crooked world of post-Tiananmen Square China. Chen Cao, a poet and T.S. Eliot translator bureaucratically assigned to be chief inspector, has to investigate the murder of Guan Hongying, a young woman celebrated as a National Model Worker, but who kept her personal life strictly and mysteriously confidential. Chen and his comrade, Detective Yu, take turns interviewing Guan's neighbors and co-workers, but it seems most of them either know nothing or are afraid to talk openly about a deceased, highly regarded public figure. Maybe they shouldn't be so uneasy, some characters reason; after all, these are "modern times" and socialist China is taking great leaps toward free speech. Chen and Yu make headway when they stumble on Wu Xiaoming, senior editor of Red Star magazine, who apparently was involved with Guan before her death. Tiptoeing around touchy politics and using investigative tactics bordering on blackmail, Chen slowly pieces together the motives behind the crime. The author, himself a poet and critic, peppers the story with allusions to classical Chinese literature, juxtaposing poignant poetry with a gruesome murder so that the novel reads like the translation of an ancient text imposed over a modern tale of intrigue. This is an impressive and welcome respite from the typical crime novel."

I discovered Qui Xiaolong while searching for an author whose name begins with X for my a to z by title challenge.  Glad I discovered him and look forward to reading more of his Detective Chen novels. The books in the series are:

Death of a Red Heroine

A Loyal Character Dancer 

When Red is Black

A Case of Two Cities

Red Mandarin Dress 

The Mao Case

********************************************

Link to your most current read. Please link to your specific book review post and not your general blog link. In the Your Name field, type in your name and the name of the book in parenthesis. In the Your URL field leave a link to your specific post. If you have multiple reviews, then type in (multi) after your name and link to your general blog url.

If you don't have a blog, tell us about the books you are reading in the comment section of this post.

BW47: Big U, little U, what begins with U

In my quest to complete the A to Z challenge by author and title, I am up to U. I managed to squeak past Q with a two-fer when I read Quicksilver by Amanda Quick. How lucky was that! So, U. Big U, Little u, what begins with U.

I came across this interesting little book the other day about mathematical obsession and thought I'd give it a go: Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture: A Novel of Mathematical Obsession by Apostolos Doxiadis. In the process get to read an new author as well.  Plus there is always my fall back gal when it comes to the alphabet, Sue Grafton and her Alphabet Series with p.i. Kinsey Milhone set in the 1980's pre cell phones and computers.  

So now the search is one for an author whose first name or last name ends with U.  AND, their books sound interesting and hopefully aren't chunksters that will take forever to read. I have Leon Uris's QB VII on the shelves and read it several years ago. It's on standby in case can't find anything else. Not ready to delve into any of his other stories. Will save him for next year.  So did a bit of searching and found a few people I've never heard of before. 

Thrity Umrigar

Lisa Unger

Errol Lincoln Uys

Luis Alberto Urrea

Then you have the known - Upton Sinclair and  John Updike.  Plus a list of freebies on Project Gutenberg that you can check out at your own risk.

After a bit of Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble browsing,  decided I'll go with Lisa Unger's Beautiful Lies.  Sounds quite interesting and thankfully so easy to download on my nook. 

Synopsis:  What if your family was a lie?  What if your name was a lie? What if your whole life was just a pack of Beautiful Lies?

If Ridley Jones had slept ten minutes later or had taken the subway instead of waiting for a cab, she would still be living the lie she used to call her perfect life. Instead, she's in the wrong place at the right time to unleash a chain of events that begins with a mysterious package on her doorstep. A package that informs her that her entire world is just an illusion. Forced to question everything she knows about herself, Ridley wanders into dark territory, where everyone is hiding something.

Anyone else doing the A to Z quest?  If you are, which letter are you on?  

*********************************************

Link to your most current read. Please link to your specific book review post and not your general blog link. In the Your Name field, type in your name and the name of the book in parenthesis. In the Your URL field leave a link to your specific post. If you have multiple reviews, then type in (multi) after your name and link to your general blog url.

If you don't have a blog, tell us about the books you are reading in the comment section of this post.