Bucket’s
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(group member since Feb 13, 2015)
Bucket’s
comments
from the Reading with Style group.
Showing 1-20 of 322
15.15 SSBSquare N3 - any book
Men We Reaped: A Memoir by Jesmyn Ward
+15 Task
+50 First line bingo! (B5, I4, N3, G2, O1)
Post total: 65
Season total: 645
B1 I1 N1 G1 O1
B2 I2 N2 G2 O2
B3 I3 N3 G3 O3
B4 I4 N4 G4 O4
B5 I5 N5 G5 O5
15.14 SSBSquare B3 - author’s latest book
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
+15 Task
Post total: 15
Season total: 580
B1 I1 N1 G1 O1
B2 I2 N2 G2 O2
B3 I3 N3 G3 O3
B4 I4 N4 G4 O4
B5 I5 N5 G5 O5
15.13 SSBSquare I4 - short stories
Dead-End Memories: Stories by Banana Yoshimoto
+15 Task
Post total: 15
Season total: 565
B1 I1 N1 G1 O1
B2 I2 N2 G2 O2
B3 I3 N3 G3 O3
B4 I4 N4 G4 O4
B5 I5 N5 G5 O5
15.12 SSBSquare O1 - one word title with 10+ letters
Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri
+15 Task (11 letters)
Post total: 15
Season total: 550
B1 I1 N1 G1 O1
B2 I2 N2 G2 O2
B3 I3 N3 G3 O3
B4 I4 N4 G4 O4
B5 I5 N5 G5 O5
15.11 SSBSquare I3 - nominated for/won 6+ awards
The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi
+15 Task (Stonewall Book Award Nominee for Literature (2021), Orwell Prize Nominee for Political Fiction for Longlist (2021), Audie Award for Literary Fiction & Classics (2021), Los Angeles Times Book Prize Nominee for Fiction (2020), Dylan Thomas Prize Nominee for Shortlist (2021), Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Fiction (2020), and more!)
Post total: 15
Season total: 535
B1 I1 N1 G1 O1
B2 I2 N2 G2 O2
B3 I3 N3 G3 O3
B4 I4 N4 G4 O4
B5 I5 N5 G5 O5
15.10 SSBSquare G2 - first published 2021-2025
Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie
+15 Task (published 2024)
Post total: 15
Season total: 520
B1 I1 N1 G1 O1
B2 I2 N2 G2 O2
B3 I3 N3 G3 O3
B4 I4 N4 G4 O4
B5 I5 N5 G5 O5
15.9 SSBSquare G1 - author’s first book
The Story of a Brief Marriage by Anuk Arudpragasam
+15 Task
Post total: 15
Season total: 505
B1 I1 N1 G1 O1
B2 I2 N2 G2 O2
B3 I3 N3 G3 O3
B4 I4 N4 G4 O4
B5 I5 N5 G5 O5
10.3 1925 MoviesHis Excellency Eugène Rougon by Émile Zola
Review: Like every other book by Zola I've read, the characterization is outstanding and the descriptions are rich and visual without being flowery. Every word is flawless, even in translation - which makes for easy reading that paints a picture without slowing down the story for a second.
So all that is here... but this is a book about political maneuvering which just doesn't draw me in. Still, so many scenes, especially those between Eugene and Clorinde. I can still see them in the horse barn. I can also still see Eugene burning papers in his office the first time he's ousted, the parade of visitors when he's back in power, and his pompous and bombastic speech towards the end of the novel.
Clorinde really makes this book worth reading. Every scene she's part of is instantly better than all the rest. Her nudity and ability to seduce, despite her poor fashion sense and dirty house. The way she's nearly always a step ahead of Rougon - or about to be. And the way she handles grabby men, Rougon included.
I'm looking forward to the less political installments of this series!
+10 Task (Set in Paris, France)
+10 Review
+10 Combo (20.4 - Emile Zola; 20.5 - published 1876 by French-born author)
Post total: 30
Season total: 490
20.10 Fall VacationTerritory of Light by Yūko Tsushima
Review: This is a really quiet book, full of shimmering light imagery. Our main character is depressed and repressed. She's sleeping and quietly surviving most of the time -- until she suddenly lashes out at her daughter (just a toddler) or has a one-night stand or drinks until she pukes.
The reading experience is like getting a bucket of ice water dumped on your head while you're calmly dozing in a sun-dappled forest. Tsushima repeatedly lulls us, then slaps us in the face.
I really enjoyed it. It's short (and Tsushima makes use of every word). The novel in stories structure works perfectly to let her skip the connecting tissue that a straightforward novel would require.
The main character is frustratingly locked in her own inner turmoil, but there's nothing unrealistic about that. She also does stand up for herself many times over the course of the stories, sometimes by inertia alone or even despite herself. I found the way Tsushima wrote about those moments fascinating.
+20 Task (Set in Tokyo, and author born in Japan)
+10 Review
+10 Female
Post total: 40
Season total: 455
10.9 Cheese!My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
Review: Elena and Lila are incredible characters, unique and real, and the ebb and flow of their relationship is so insightfully imagined and told.
This is my second read; 7 years after the first time I read this. This time, I'm equally enamored and just as eager to read book 2 as I was the first time around.
My experience was a little different though. In this reading, I was really struck by how much Elena the character reminds me of myself and my friends as teenagers. I remember that deep love and care coupled with tension and sometimes outright jealousy. That fear of being left out or left behind was so terrifying and it's on every page of this book.
+10 Task (“For years I saw his body - a coarse body, heavy with a mixture of materials - emitting in a swarm salami, provolone, mortadella, lard, and prosciutto.”)
+10 Review
+10 Female
+5 Combo (10.2 - shelved literary fiction 972 times)
Post total: 35
Season total: 415
15.8 SSBSquare G3 - set in the future
Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy
+15 Task (set half in 2137)
+5 Old (pub’d 1976)
Post total: 20
Season total: 380
B1 I1 N1 G1 O1
B2 I2 N2 G2 O2
B3 I3 N3 G3 O3
B4 I4 N4 G4 O4
B5 I5 N5 G5 O5
15.7 SSBSquare N4 - 1 and 6 in page count
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
+15 Task (176 pages)
+5 Old (pub’d 1966)
Post total: 20
Season total: 360
B1 I1 N1 G1 O1
B2 I2 N2 G2 O2
B3 I3 N3 G3 O3
B4 I4 N4 G4 O4
B5 I5 N5 G5 O5
20.7 500 Great Books by WomenExcellent Women by Barbara Pym
Review: I really enjoyed this, which surprised me as it reminded me quite a bit of Austen who never particularly interested me. Maybe because Austen's heroines do find love and marriage ultimately, and are less matter-of-fact about feeling a bit love/hate towards men and conventional romantic relationships.
Mildred is fascinating because she's so boring. Her life is mundane, she's always being asked to do things for others, and she (mostly) does them because of the excellent woman she is. But we also see her bumping her head on the very low ceiling of social conventions and expectations that she can't meet and maybe, just maybe, doesn't want to meet. She wrestles with herself internally all throughout the book and isn't ever really quite sure what a full life is and whether she wants one. The characterization here, plus the very subtle and dry humor, is everything.
+20 Task
+10 Review
+10 Female
Post total: 40
Season total: 340
20.5 Elizabeth’s Comfort ZoneThe Fortune of the Rougons by Émile Zola
Review: I quite enjoyed this, so I'm pretty excited about the rest of the cycle -- knowing that the best of the books are yet to come.
Zola's writing (credit to the translator too) is so effortlessly visual. This installment is full of the details of introducing the family tree and describing the political turmoil of France in 1851. It could have been boring, but it definitely isn't.
I felt like I was there with the characters -- when Silvere and Miette peer at each other's reflections in the well or march with the republicans, when Pierre and Felicite dream their greedy dreams in their gaudy, worn yellow living room, and of course the heart-wrenching climax.
This was a great start and I'm excited for His Excellency Eugene Rougon next. (I'm reading in Zola's recommended order, not the order of publication.)
+20 Task (pub’d 1871; Zola born in France)
+10 Review
+10 Combo (10.3 Set almost entirely in Plasans, France; 20.4 Zola)
Post total: 40
Season total: 300
20.8 A Touch of MagicThe Antidote by Karen Russell
Review: This book is not perfect, but it's wildly ambitious. Reading it felt like watching a play full of wildly talented actors who are unwilling to compromise with each other for the good of the whole.
I loved the perspective shifts and the very visceral sense of place and time (Nebraska during the dust bowl). Every character is strong and flawed - sometimes too much so. I felt right there with the characters most of the time, but would occasionally lose my focus when the tone shifted slightly into melodrama. Melodrama always bothers me, but especially when it's so unnecessary - the plot and the real history it describes is dramatic enough.
This is a book about collective and personal memory in the U.S., and the guilt or trauma (or both) our ancestors or parents (or ourselves) have not confronted but tried to slide under the rug when it comes to colonization and the murder and destruction of Native American people and land. Russell boldly makes the act of forgetting (and remembering) more real and more clearly a choice with her invention of memory banking. And she sends a clear message that hiding from problems, even ones we have become oblivious to, never works for long.
Overall: well researched, well grounded in character and place, a fascinating and unique plot, and a good structure.
+20 Task (MPG Magical Realism)
+10 Review
+10 Female
Post total: 40
Season total: 260
15.6 SSBSquare I5 - No chapter numbers
Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman
+15 Task (The header for each section is either a date or “interlude”)
+5 Old (pub’d 1993)
Post total: 20
Season total: 220
B1 I1 N1 G1 O1
B2 I2 N2 G2 O2
B3 I3 N3 G3 O3
B4 I4 N4 G4 O4
B5 I5 N5 G5 O5
15.5 SSBSquare B2 - Set 51%+ in capital city of not US, UK, etc.
Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras
+15 Task (Set ~80% in Bogota, Colombia)
Post total: 15
Season total: 200
B1 I1 N1 G1 O1
B2 I2 N2 G2 O2
B3 I3 N3 G3 O3
B4 I4 N4 G4 O4
B5 I5 N5 G5 O5
30.1 Go for the GreenThink of a Garden and Other Plays by John Kneubuhl
Review: I'm no expert on plays, but I found this collection fascinating. There are 3 plays here, set in American Samoa and Hawaii. All of them are about culture: the tragedy of its destruction, the horror visited by white culture on the cultures (and people) of the South Pacific, and Kneubuhl's urgent message to his people that saving their cultures is still entirely up to them.
Reading these plays on that sociopolitical level was a great experience. But on top of that, these plays are brilliant experiments in metafiction (not sure if that's the right word in the case of a play). Think of a Garden is the most straight-forward of the bunch, but still features the "writer" who is the ostensible author of what we are seeing, and also the grown-up version of the child main character.
The other two plays are about people putting on a play, coming in and out of character, manipulating set dressing, and more author/writer-as-character. The third play (called A Play: A Play) is a play about a play about a man who just wrote a play -- and soon we see that even when the actors are out of character they are still actually in a play... so, fascinating reading from the structural perspective too.
+30 Task (Set about 65% in American Samoa)
+10 Review
+5 Combo (20.1 - Avg rating 4.10, 10 ratings)
Post total: 45
Season total: 185
15.4 SSBSquare O2 - 6 letters in author last name
The Emigrants by Vilhelm Moberg
+15 Task
+5 Old (1949)
Post total: 20
Season total: 140
B1 I1 N1 G1 O1
B2 I2 N2 G2 O2
B3 I3 N3 G3 O3
B4 I4 N4 G4 O4
B5 I5 N5 G5 O5
15.3 SSBSquare I1 - no “the” in title/subtitle
Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by Sophie Gilbert
+15 Task
Post total: 15
Season total: 120
B1 I1 N1 G1 O1
B2 I2 N2 G2 O2
B3 I3 N3 G3 O3
B4 I4 N4 G4 O4
B5 I5 N5 G5 O5
