The Books List, Part Two

20 Books I Would Recommend Reading, 5 Books I Wouldn't, and 50 from my Reading List

Still in quarantine, so time for another Books List post! I hope that you found the first post helpful in bringing some enjoyable books to your attention. If you didn't read it, go here:https://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-books-list-part-one.html

You'll probably note that there is a continuing pattern in the proportion of books that I liked (20), books I didn't like (5), and books I might like (50). It's true that I do enjoy the majority of the books that I read, but that's not because I have low literary standards. Although I tend to be an optimistic chick, I don't appreciate bad writing, nor will I recommend a book that left me flat, even if it's by a favorite author (out of fairness, I almost always finish a book, even if it's not great, to give it every chance).

So how do I get so lucky? Well, it's because I tend to read books that have either come well-recommended or that are by an author I like. Sometimes I am betrayed, but most of the time I am delighted. Sometimes I just idly pick something out or read what's handy, and that's where taking my chances is less likely to pay off (sometimes it does). Basically what I'm saying here is that you, too, stand a better chance of liking something that was recommended – hence my list!

My likes/loves: These are books that entertained me, moved me, taught me things, made me think, inspired me, and that I would heartily recommend. They are not ranked – they are merely in the order in which I read them.

1. 3001: The Final Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke
2. Moses, Man of the Mountain – Zora Neale Hurston
3. Seraph on the Suwanee – Zora Neale Hurston
4. Bird by Bird – Anne Lamott
5. Odd Thomas – Dean Koontz
6. The Haunting of Hill House – Shirley Jackson
7. The Taking – Dean Koontz
8. The Dark: New Ghost Stories – Ed. By Ellen Datlow
9. A Cold Heart – Jonathan Kellerman
10. The Conspiracy Club – Jonathan Kellerman
11. The Last Juror – John Grisham
12. Writing the Breakout Novel – Donald Maass
13. A Primer on Mental Disorders – Allen, Liebman, Park, Wimmer
14. Wake Up, I'm Fat! - Camryn Manheim
15. Wasted – Marya Hornbacher
16. Helping Someone with Mental Illness – Rosalyn Carter
17. When the Wind Blows – James Patterson
18. Cradle and All – James Patterson
19. Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence
20. Along Came a Spider – James Patterson

My meh/yuck list: Did not find these appealing for any number of reasons – some were boring; some had an interesting subject but did not do it justice; some were flat-out terrible. All simply left me cold in some way. Although I am likely to read multiple books by authors I like (you will see a lot of Dean Koontz, Jonathan Kellerman, Margaret Atwood, Charles deLint and Zora Neale Hurston), I do not excuse those authors when they write a book I didn't like, so they might just show up here, as well.

1. Unexplained! - Jerome Clark
2. The Chronicle of Crime – Martin Fido
3. 563 Stupid Things People Do to Mess Up their Lives – Dr. Larry
4. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
5. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston

My Reading List: these are books I haven't read yet, so I don't have a reaction for you. However, I could semi-recommend them, based on the reasons they made it onto my list:

1. They were on one of those “100 Greatest Books” lists;
2. They are other books written by authors I really enjoy; or
3. I read a review, and it sounded like something I'd like.

#1 can be a bit hit-or-miss; #2 is almost (but not always) foolproof for me (but maybe not for you), and #3 usually works out pretty well, as it's a combination of the first two. As always, your results may vary, but consider them suggestions. These may tend to come in chunks of stuff by author (apologies). There are literally over 1400 books currently on my reading list (I'm stupidly ambitious), so this is a very small chunk. Don't worry; there will be more of these posts.

1. The Princess of Cleves – Madame de LaFayette
2. The Stranger – Albert Camus
3. The Counterfeiters – Andre Gide
4. The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford
5. Germinal – Emile Zola
6. U.S.A. Trilogy – John dos Pasos
7. Hunger – Knut Hamsun
8. Berlin Alexanderplatz – Alfred Doblin
9. Cities of Salt – Abd al Rahman Munif
10. The Death of Artemio Cruz - Carlos Fuentes
11. The Last Chronicles of Barset – Anthony Trollope
12. The Pickwick Papers – Charles Dickens
13. The Sorrows of Young Werther – Goethe
14. Oblomov – Ivan Goncharov
15. Waverly – Sir Walter Scott
16. Snow Country – Yasunari Kawabata
17. The Betrothed – Alessandro Manzoni
18. Cold Sassy Tree – Olive Ann Burns
19. Dawn – Octavia Butler
20. Boys and Girls Together – William Goldman
21. Bimbos of the Death Sun – Sharyn McCrumb
22. Suttree – Cormac McCarthy
23. Mythago Wood – Robert Holdstock
24. Illusions – Richard Bach
25. The Cunning Man – Robertson Davies
26. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
27. In Search of Lost Time – Marcel Proust
28. The Tale of Genji – Murasaki Shikibu
29. Emma – Jane Austen
30. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
31. The Ambassadors – Henry James
32. 100 Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
33. Finnegans Wake – James Joyce
34. The Man without Qualities – Robert Musil
35. Women in Love – D.H. Lawrence
36. Yarrow – Charles de Lint
37. Memory and Dream - Charles de Lint
38. Trader - Charles de Lint
39. Greenmantle - Charles de Lint
40. The Little Country - Charles de Lint
41. Mulengro - Charles de Lint
42. Spirits in the Wires - Charles de Lint
43. Medicine Road - Charles de Lint
44. The Blue Girl - Charles de Lint
45. Angel of Darkness - Charles de Lint
46. Dreams Underfoot - Charles de Lint
47. The Fair in Emain Mancha - Charles de Lint
48. From a Whisper to a Scream - Charles de Lint
49. I'll Be Watching You - Charles de Lint
50. Into the Green - Charles de Lint

That's all for now; hope you find these lists useful as you think about things you might like to read.

Here's the next, uh, chapter: https://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-books-list-part-three.html

Image from Pixabay https://pixabay.com/illustrations/book-old-clouds-tree-birds-bank-863418/

Review of Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale by Chuck Kinder

I want to be nice to Chuck Kinder. I want to give him a great review, because he is from West Virginia. Although I was not born in West Virginia, I grew up there, and I have had to deal with the most astonishingly ignorant comments from people who either have no idea that West Virginia is actually separate from Virginia (What part of Virginia did you say you were from? The part that became a state in 1863), or who think it is a land peopled solely by unlettered inbreds of the Deliverance ilk (by the way, Deliverance was set in Georgia , and the people in the movie were actors).

Okay, so clearly I'm a little defensive about the West Virginia thing, and I wanted to praise my homeboy Chuck Kinder as a fantastic writer who has penned an amazing book. And yet, although I don't think Kinder is a bad writer--as a matter of fact, he is a good writer--I do not, in fact, think that he has penned an amazing book, or even a very good one. It is not so much a bad book, either, as an aggressively pointless one.

Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale is the story of friends Ralph Crawford and Jim Stark, two intelligent yet self-defeating writers who are unlikely to achieve their big dreams of being star novelists, as they have made a second career of doing inadvisable quantities of recreational drugs, screwing around on their spouses, wandering off aimlessly, running out on restaurant checks, and blathering, blathering, blathering about all the great stuff they are going to do as soon as the world stops holding them back. Arghhh. I don't feel I need to tell you more; I am sure you know people just like this and probably have restraining orders against them.

What initially drew me to this book was the deadpan hilarity of the cover (in retrospect, the best part of the book), backed up by approving cover blurbs by such renowned literary figures as Michael Chabon, Richard Ford, Scott Turow and Larry McMurtry. But I should have taken warning from those same blurbs: Ford, for example, invokes the likes of Kerouac, Ken Kesey and even R. Crumb. The term 'iconoclast' is used, with reverence. Sigh. I have read Kerouac, Kesey and Crumb (now there's a nice, alliterative law firm for you), and they seem to enjoy writing about the pointless pursuits of drug-addled hedonists (by turns, nihilists), so, hey, if that's what you're into, this book fits right in. It also occurred to me that the blurbists are all known for writing "manly man" fiction, so maybe that's the problem--maybe I just don't have the right plumbing to enjoy this stuff. And here I was thinking a pointless, plotless, train wreck of a book with unlikable characters doing nothing worthwhile or even remotely interesting wouldn't appeal to anyone , regardless of gender.

Sorry, Chuck. At least I don't think it's because you're from West Virginia, if that's any consolation.

Hey, here's a book I liked: 

https://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2022/02/review-of-james-pattersons-quickie.html