#still so many Zola Dumas and Hugo books to read

[take-me-to-valhalla]

The 2022 Big Book Review

Books read in 2022

Absolutely non-exhaustive. I dropped Goodreads and can’t keep track of anything I don’t write down. Also not counting the children’s books and other quite short stuff I read in 5 minutes so I can tell customers what it’s about.

All in all : it’s a CLASSIC year lads. And I’ll be screaming about Marguerite Yourcenar to everyone forever.

Total (minus comics): 60 books

Total (including everything): 168 books

I organized them loosely, but it won’t be very consistent. Tried to add some comment but this won’t be a literary review

Classics

Mémoires d’Hadrien – So good omg. One of the books ever. Words fail me to say how much this book is amazing. Made me visit the Villa Adriana when I went to Rome. Indirectly responsible for a tendinitis in my left foot. Madeline Miller WISHES she were Yourcenar.

Miss Pettigrew lives for a day - A cute one! Recommended by my sister

La guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu - found in an old edition in a tiny free library. Very good & depressing

La vie de Monsieur de Molière, Boulgakov - If I had a nickel each time I read a book by a beloved author written by another beloved author, I’ll have two nickels.

Balzac, le roman de sa vie, Zweig – See above

Mille et un fantômes, Dumas - a Russian-doll-type-set of stories, but I have no recollection of them

Lorenzaccio - my sister recommended it to me in 2010. Finally got around to it.

Little House in the Big Woods - Cottagecore before it was cool. Also devoid of the unfortunate racism of the sequel

Le Vicomte de Bragelonne 1 & 2 - I’ll finish it next year for sure

Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise - loved the book, hated the ending

Pauline, Dumas - it was okay, I guess

La fin de Satan, Hugo - “Les soleils étaient loin, mais ils brillaient encore”. Hugo always goes HARD

Balzac :

Here’s an extract from a June entry in my diary : «  because of a tumblr post, I started reading Le père Goriot, and it’s quite good, which I find irritating ». And now look here we are.

Le père Goriot - So Good. So good I keep jokingly (?) recommending it to customers when they don’t know what book to buy

Le Code des Gens honnêtes - a fun read. Serves as documentation for 19th century life, too

Illusions Perdues - It’s like watching a car crash for 800 pages. In other words, excellent. Also did not expect the ending.

Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes - Come for the story, stay for the harsh commentary on capitalists that Marx wishes he wrote. Horrible, and a masterpiece.

Ferragus - only read it because of the “there’s a secret society in La Comédie Humaine” premice.

La Duchesse de Langeais - funnier once you learn exactly why Balzac wrote it

La Fille aux yeux d’or - Marsay is a dick and I love it

Le Colonel Chabert - SO. GOOD.

La peau de chagrin - This year’s mandatory reading for highschoolers. I pity them.

La Rabouilleuse - Ft the most punchable asshole you’ll ever read in your life

La maison du chat qui pelote – which does not mean, as I initially thought « the house of the cat who plays with a ball of yarn »

Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées - Both very good and quite sad, I couldn’t say why

Le Curé de Tours - Beware the Old Maids, they’ll ruin your life if you don’t treat them well. Pettiness is not a crime, except when it is.

Pathologie de la vie sociale - no recollection of it

History

Les bas-fonds, naissance d’un imaginaire - Very good! Required reading if you love 19th century (and early 20th) literature

La vie quotidienne des religieux au Moyen-âge - Read for documentation purposes

La vie quotidienne des templiers - ditto

La vie quotidienne sous le Directoire - ditto. Quite interesting!

La vie quotidienne des français sous Napoléon, Tulard - I had to hunt it down, but it was worth it. Tulard knows his stuff.

La vie quotidienne à Florence au temps de Dante - Read in Florence, of course.

La vie quotidienne en Italie au temps de Machiavel - To carry on after the previous one.

Yeah, I own quite a lot of these books.

Les jours sans : l’alimentation en temps de guerre - Read it before, but worth it. It’s always good to see history from the side of everyday life.

Pour vous mesdames ! La mode en temps de guerre - Disappointing.

Les Douze heures noires, la nuit à Paris au XIXè siècle - SO GOOD. But I said this before.

Le monde du crime sous Napoléon - Jean Tulard again. Still knows his stuff, but it’s more trivia than a real historical study

Manga

I have to read quite a lot of them for my work. It’s hard, I know. I read the whole series, unless specified

Thermae Romae - still a favourite

Vinland Saga - everyone should read Vinland Saga. Everyone.

Angel Sanctuary 1-20 - Sadly does not hold up today.

Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun - One of my favourite new series. I laud it (and sell it) every chance I can.

Look Back - are you an artist? Read this.

Nonnonbâ, Mizuki Shigeru - a very sweet story. But then I love Mizuki’s work.

Berserk 1-4 - good art, but I’m not sold on the story. I’ll try again, I think.

Spy x Family - For once, a series that is both popular and good enough for me to sell to parents who don’t know anything about manga

The Apothicary’s diaries, 1-5 - Not bad, maybe even good, but I don’t get the hype around it

Atelier of Witch Hat, 10 - read this series. That is all.

Kitchen of Witch Hat - Exactly what I want: short, slice of life stories in a fantasy world, centered around food.

Heaven’s Design team 1 - Not bad.

Beastars 21&22 - Good ending to a great series

DanDaDan - the other of my favourite new series. Highly recommended if you’re not allergic to absurd stuff.

Chouchin X 1&2 - Can’t get behind this, sorry. And yet I loved Tokyo Ghoul.

Comics

Not much to say about this section, I’m afraid.

Three Joker

The Joker : 80 years

I, Joker (yeah, it was a Joker binge)

Batman : Year one

Beasts of Burden

The Ex-People - a nice indie comic ft an immortal horse (among others)

The entire Calvin & Hobbes series - as often

Franco-belgian comics

Les cahiers d’Esther 3 – 7

Journal d’un ingénu 3 - 4

Le Projet Jules Verne

E.C. Jacobs, le rêveur d’apocalypse

La Marque jaune - directly linked to the one above.

Jours de sable - an indie comic about the Dustbowl. Both excellent and depressing

L’arabe du futur 6 - READ IT

Mystery & Thrillers

Messieurs les hommes, S. Antonio - San Antonio is (was?) a big name in the roman de gare genre. The language used is worth bearing the sexism of the MC (in par for the course for a novel written in the 50s, but still)

La Daronne - a very fun read

The Cuckoo’s Call

Career of Evil

Lethal White

Troubled Blood - All of these are good, but I especially loved this one + Career of Evil (bc BÖC)

The Shawshanks Redemption

Du plomb dans la tête – Absolutely bad. Doesn’t help that it was supposed to be a revenge story, and instead I got a badly written pseudo-shocking thriller. Blah.

Which strenghtens my theory that women just write better thrillers than men.

Contemporary, fantasy & YA

Game Changer, N. Shusterman

A Deathly Education – Why don’t I see anything about this series anywhere ? It’s so good.

The Invisible Life of Addie Larue, V. Schwab - aka I think one of the only YA writers worth reading past 25

Legends and Lattes – The best coffeshop slice of life fantasy I had the pleasure of reading. The only one in existence, which is a crying shame

Gideon the Ninth - no need to say anything about it. Tumblr knows it’s a masterpiece

Âge Tendre, C. Beauvais - A sweet read, and cleverly written, too

Les petites reines, C. Beauvais

Vampyria 3, V. Dixen – See my comment about Deathly Education. We’ve got a dystopian YA series where Louis XIV is a vampire and no one talks about this ?

Hogfather

Equal Rites

Mort

The Truth - Yeah, I re-read a bit of Discworld. Whenever I find myself in a reading slump, Pratchett’s always got my back.

Others :

Vers la sobriété heureuse, P. Rabbi

L’humanité en péril 2, Vargas

Tried reading more books about ecology and sobriey but it’s quite depressing.

[lastchancevillagegreen]

The Top Ten Best Novels Read in 2021:

The year of 2021 was a great year for reading as I read many things that impressed and I felt were some of the best things I’ve read.  That first photo you see is the stack of books making my Top Ten.  Yes, there are actually 13 books shown.  It will all be clear after you read all my folderol. 

The best book was actually six books known as The Fortunes of War series and it combines two different trilogies.  The first is The Fortunes of War: The Balkan Trilogy which is comprised of The Great Fortune (1960), The Spoilt City (1962), and Friends and Heroes (1965) and it takes place in Greece.  These books are about World War II and they are unique in that they do not feature Nazis.  We follow a married couple Harriet and Guy Pringle through the entirety of the six novels.  This couple is based on author Olivia Manning and her husband RD Smith.  One can only hope that Manning’s real life husband is not the contemptible ass that Guy Pringle is (he is one of literature’s most infuriating characters).  This couple has fled England so that Guy may teach college in Greece.  We watch in those first three novels as Greece slowly falls to the Nazis and by the end of the trilogy, the Pringles are leaving Greece for Egypt. 

The second trilogy is The Fortunes of War: The Levant Trilogy and it is comprised of he Danger Tree (1977), The Battle Lost and Won (1978), and The Sum of Things (1980).  Guy spend most of his time in Greece in this novel and we never have to put up with his self indulgent nonsense.  While the secondary characters are different in both trilogies some of them such Prince Yakimov, a swindler and gormandizer extraordinaire, appears in both novels.  The characters in these books are complicated and often contradictory just like in real life.  You won’t always love them (I never love Guy, I don’t even like him) but they feel authentic and in both trilogies, author Manning has crafted some of the greatest characterizations I’ve had the pleasure of reading.  These books are suspenseful.  I learn we do not need Nazis (they are around, but rarely are they ever even minor characters) to make World War II suspenseful and taut.  It is amazing to learn how other countries dealt with the war and how those involved even peripherally were still on edge due to the horrors everywhere that plagued the world.  I consumed all six novels over the course of May 2021 and I simply couldn’t get through them any faster.  The books consumed 1500 pages. 

My second favorite book I read was a 1400 page tome, The Mysteries of Paris (published in 1842-43).  It tells the story of the mysterious Rodolphe Durand, his sidekick Murph and the young woman Durand befriends named Songbird.  Durand spends the greater portion of the novel doing good deeds for the poor and unfortunate people and it is up to us to determine why.  The book is infused with many noteworthy villains with names such as The Owl, Schoolmaster, Gammy, Red-Arm and The Skeleton and they are without morality.  But the most heinous villain might just be Countess Sarah who masquerades as a man.  This book takes many twists and turns and is a pure joy to read.  And my God...that ending.  Perhaps the most important aspect of this novel is that it was the best selling novel in the world at the time, breaking records worldwide (it was written by French novelist Eugène Sue) despite the fact it was originally published in daily installments in the Journal des Dèats beginning 19 June 1842 and running until 15 October 1843.  It triggered knockoffs known as City Mysteries and there were books involving London, Naples, New York, Lisbon, etc (including The Mystery Marseille by Émile Zola of all people).  This novel inspired Alexandre Dumas to write his beloved The Count of Monte Cristo and Victor Hugo to pen his epic Les Miserables.  

My third favorite novel this year goes to Wilkie Collins’ 1860 novel The Woman In White. It takes a pair of sisters (half-sisters, mind you) named Laura Fairlie and Marian Holcombe and throws them in with a cad named Sir Percival Glyde and his villainous side kick the contemptable (but brilliant character) Count Fosco.  This pair of men will upend the lives of the two half sisters but fortunately for literature, it is the ‘ugly’ sister Marian, a true feminist if ever there were one who manages to fight back.  The titular character is an altogether different woman who is actually a secondary character yet she is as important to the story as anyone I have named.  The book is unique in that it is told from different points of view all meant to confound the reader and keep us alert.  Mysterious, compulsive reading (it exceeds 700 pages and I read it in four days) and I loved it so much I bought three more novels by Wilkie (virtually everyone agrees the prolific Wilkie wrote four great novels beginning with this one and ending with The Moonstone).

From there comes Frank Norris’ first installment of his proposed trilogy The Epic of The Wheat (Norris was only able to write the first two novels before he died (see the next entry above) at the painfully early age of 32).  The Octopus (1901) is a vicious novel about a group of wheat farmers who are seriously hoodwinked by the railroad that runs through their town.   Norris was a huge fan of Émile Zola’s realism literature, particularly Zola’s massive achievement, the 20 novels comprising the Rougons and Macquarts saga.  Norris is heartless with his characters and the fates that befall those farmers is shocking and intense.  The title refers to the many arms the railroad has which dip into the pockets of everyone from the farmers to the politicians and everyone in between.  This was another 700 page book and it was another one I simply could not put down.  Norris loves long chapters that run 50 to 70 pages long and they are impossible to stop in the middle of.  I sat outside on my porch this summer and read this amazing novel and it was damn near perfect. 

My fifth favorite novel is another trilogy penned by poet Tove Ditlevsen of Copenhagen, Denmark known as The Copenhagen Trilogy (1967-1971).  Told in three novels subtitled Childhood, Youth and Dependency (in Denmark the title was Gift which can translate to both marriage and poison, a perfect summing up of that third installment). these are harrowing true accounts of Ditlevsen’s terrible life as a child and then as a youth who finally is vindicated with publishing her first book of poetry in 1939 at the age of 22.  The final book tells of her first marriage which is a wild, peculiar arrangement.  She led a hard life but she was one of Denmark’s greatest authors before committing suicide in 1978 at the age of 58. 

The photo above shows you these all five of those titles in a stack.  I stole this idea of stacking from Penguin’s twitter page who always asks people to stack up their ten favorite novels--whether published by Penguin or not.  I spend much of December ogling people’s stacks and marveling at the amount of books people read during the year.  I read 168 books and this is but a pittance compared to most people who respond to Penguin.  Most claim to read 300 to 500 books a year (and they are dense, massive political tomes and philosophical tomes, all difficult things that the NYRB crowd seems to mainline.  I’m not sure how they do it, but I know they certainly never read graphic novels or children’s books like I do.  I am but a child compared to serious readers. 

The photo directly above shows you my next five favorite books read in 2021. 

My next favorite five novels which round out my Top Ten begins with the most recent novel on my Top Ten.  New York writer Katherine Lacey’s third novel is the exquisite and daring Pew (2020).   When a homeless person is found sleeping in a conservative church the town immediately runs into overdrive trying to save this poor soul.  The problem is “Pew” doesn’t want to be saved.  Pew refuses to talk and wont even cop to being either a male or a female.  This is not a transgender power story, but rather a look at the noxious behaviors of religious conservatives as well as America’s often contradictory standards.  Culminating in a vicious festival known as The Forgiveness Festival (dear God, don't give my wife any ideas) this is a savage book.  As for the final ending?  Look at goodreads and you will find most are clueless as to what happened. 

Dorothy Allison’s 1992 novel Bastard Out of Carolina was a ‘fictionalized’ account of her life growing up.  The book tells the story of Ruth Anne “Bone” Boatwright who at the age of seven, while her mother is in the hospital having a baby, is first raped by her stepfather.   The sexual assaults continue and the mother always blames poor Bone.  A harrowing and dark book I discovered this at my library where it was on display celebrating authors who were gay or lesbian.  I’d never heard of it but the title certainly grabbed my attention.  I’m thrilled my library never backs down from controversial novels no matter who writes them.  Allison is predominantly a poet and author of short stories. 

Donna Tartt’s debut novel from 1992 is The Secret History and this is the book most frequently blamed for the new sub-genre known as Dark Academia.  The novel opens with a murder committed by a group of six students who kill one of their classmates.  We know how it is committed we just don’t know why.  The book then proceeds to explain the whys and hows of this heinous act.  Dark and foreboding, I like Tartt’s work as I’ve read all three of her novels.  I know many are not fans, but I’ve no complaint.  One of the characters of this novel, Francis Abernathy, appears briefly in Tartt’s most recent novel, 2013′s The Goldfinch.  Unfortunately for this reader, I read The Goldfinch well before The Secret History so it made zero impact on me. 

Then we have the brilliant and hilarious The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao published in 2007 written by Dominican American author Junot Díaz. Oscar comes to Paterson, New Jersey by way of the Dominican Republic which he and his family escape from thanks to the dictatorial government run by Rafael Trujillo who was president from 1931 to 1961.  Oscar’s real name is Oscar de Léon but everyone calls him Oscar Wao.  That nickname is a dig at his weight as well as a dig at those from Oscar’s homeland who cannot properly pronounce Oscar Wilde from which the nickname comes because Oscar’s forever writing (his goal in life is to be the first Dominican Republic JRR Tolkien).  Yes Oscar is an overweight (at one point he clocks in at over 300 pounds) lover of science fiction, comic books and yes, a life-long virgin even though that is not by choice.  The novel is narrated by Yunior, Oscar’s college roommate and his only friend.  He became Oscar’s friend by default in an effort to climb into bed with Oscar’s sister (and to accept Oscar as a tutor).  This novel jumps back and forth through time (no, it is not a time travel book) so we can meet all of Oscar’s family and hear how their lives changed thanks to Trujillo. We learn about familial curses (fukú) and antidotes to those curses (zafa) and slowly but surely we discover that the entire de Léon  bloodline is cursed.  A grand, greatly entertaining novel that I also spent reading on my front porch this past summer.  Oscar might just be one of my favorite characters in modern literature.  I loved this kid!

And finally at #10, is JD Salinger’s classic novel The Catcher In The Rye from 1951.  I’m not summarizing this novel which I have probably read a dozen times since discovering it in high school.  When I was in college I worked for the student newspaper briefly.  One of my assignments was to interview a judge who was being tried for embezzlement.  He asked me what my hobbies were and I said I enjoy reading classic novels.  When his eyes lit up he asked me my favorite.  I told him this novel and he laughed loud and long.  “That’s not a classic, son.  You need to investigate the real classics, Moby Dick, Don Quixote,” and who knows what else he suggested.  At the time I couldn’t imagine reading those novels or those kinds of novels.  All these years later, it turns out that 19th century literature is probably my choice for reading.  Moby Dick was the first true classic I ever read (1851, 19th Century) and Don Quixote (1615, 17th Century) could easily be my very favorite book (I have the newest translation of Don Quixote by Edith Grossman from 2003 which I’d love to read again soon).  To talk to that judge today...

Below you will find a photo of all my Top Ten Favorite/ Best Books from 2021 in a stack.

[nicolawritesnovels]

Book Challenege

Blah, blah blah how many have I read

not as many as I should have probably

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

The Bible (I am currently reading this, it’s been an ongoing process for most of my life)

Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (on my TBR)

Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

Complete Works of Shakespeare

Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

Middlemarch - George Eliot

Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

Bleak House - Charles Dickens

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (I read the first page)

Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

Emma - Jane Austen

Persuasion - Jane Austen

The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

Animal Farm - George Orwell

The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving (I’ve read so many others by him, but this one is still on my TBR)

The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy.

The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

Lord of the Flies - William Golding

Atonement - Ian McEwan

Life of Pi - Yann Martel

Dune - Frank Herbert

Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (I didn’t actually finish it, but I got most of the way through it)

The Secret History - Donna Tartt

The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

On The Road - Jack Kerouac

Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

Moby Dick - Herman Melville

Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

Dracula - Bram Stoker

The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

Ulysses - James Joyce

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

Germinal - Emile Zola

Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

Possession - AS Byatt.

A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

The Color Purple - Alice Walker

The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

Charlotte’s Web - EB White

The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

Watership Down - Richard Adams

A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

Hamlet - William Shakespeare

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

19 and a half or so?

I’m too lazy to tag people, do it if you want