Julia’s Comments (group member since Dec 29, 2012)

Julia’s comments from the Mount TBR 2013 Reading Challenge group.

Only 15 books this time, so I fell far short of my intended mountain of Mt. Blanc.

Who are you? Birth of a Chess Queen
What is your opening number? Showtime
What is your quest? Lost Things
What do you fear? The Shortest Way to Hades
Where are you? Lost in Time
How will you leave this world? Phoenix Rising

15. The Sirens Sang of Murder by Sarah Cauldwell. I just finished the third book in the Hilary Tamar series tonight.

Alas I will not reach the peak of Mt Blanc.

FYI, I created a pinterest board with the covers from my challenge.

1. I have read 14 books so far. Ten left and three months to go. Ooof. *looks up the mountain*

2B. Hardest to read overall strangely was Jane Austen's Persuasion, surprising for such a short book. Once I got past a certain slow section, though, I barreled through.

2C. The Sarah Caudwell Hilary Tamar books have been there the longest; I think I bought them all after the author's death. They've been delightful. I wish I'd picked them up sooner. My only regret is there are only four of them.

2D. I did a search on Adonis from Thus was Adonis Murdered and opted for this:



I wonder if my namesake Julia the tax lawyer would have approved of his profile.

14. The Shortest Way to Hades by Sarah Cauldwell. The second book in the Hilary Tamar series was easily as delightful as the first one. The only thing that really confused me was the cricket match in one match; the sport has never made sense to me. I am a little sad knowing there are only two books left in this series with the author's death.

Ten books left in Mt Blanc and three months left. Not sure if I can pull this off...

I agree about looking at how the book is organized beforehand to gauge how long it'll take to read -- although # of chapters (and length) can be deceptive, depending on the text. If it's dense literary material, it make take me awhile to get through even a short book, whereas a long book may go swimmingly if there's plenty of dialogue and interaction. The frustrating ones are where they're broken into parts and the chapters renumber, so I have no idea how long it actually is.

13.Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart: The Perils of Marriage by Anka Mulhstein. A double biography of Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots with a heavy focus on how the queens and cousins approached marriage and romance in distinctly different ways. Where Mary allowed her passions to rule her in two of her marriages, Elizabeth was circumspect and cautious. Elizabeth I had seen what happened to her mother Anne Boleyn when she fell out of favor and she saw how her sister Mary Tudor fared with a foreign husband/king. Elizabeth also seemed more in tune with her subjects' and ministers' wishes than Mary. Mary may have had charm, but Elizabeth knew how to wield it. Elizabeth also never let her emotions hold sway, which is evident with her relationship with brash young Essex. He thinks he can just win her over with a few choice words, but she's not fooled.

12. Phoenix Rising by Tee Morris and Philippa Ballantine. Finally finished this late last night. I had tried to read this before and was underwhelmed so I tried again in a different format. I think it helped listening to author interviews to understand what they were going for -- a steampunk version of TV Avengers John Steed and Emma Peel. I did like that the gadgets has uses rather than just "ooh, look at the steampunky stuff!" style used by other writers. And while the the secret society was suitably distasteful, there was something about the descriptions of the back half of the book that didn't quite match the tone of the earlier part. Curious about the second book, but may be awhile before I get it considering my lonnng TBR list.

One book aware from seeing Pike's Peak -- unfortunately I have 12 more to go!

10 & 11. Pluto volume 7 and volume 8: Like last year, I hadn't intended to included GN/manga, but I'm behind a little and I have my share of series I've meant to finish off. Pluto was a good example. Naoki Urasawa adapted Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy's "Greatest Robot of Earth" sequence, modernizing it for our times. But the focus was shifted to Gesicht, the robot detective, so a massive chunk of the series reads more like a police procedural, set against a world where robots live side by side with humans with all the problems and hate you can imagine. The parts that make me twitch a little are the world building allusions to the Iraq War and a certain American president. Urasawa takes pains to show us what else the Greatest Robots were besides killing machines, so their fates are... painful to say the least.

9. Lost Things by Jo Graham and Melissa Scott. Historical fantasy set in 1929 filled with aviation and airships but also archaeology and magic. Lake Nemi is being drained to discover Caligula's ships, but do they set something far worse loose on the world? And how do four people stop it before it causes even more damage?

I read Mary Roberts Rinehart's The Bat years ago. (Also the movie with Chester Morris who I think of as Boston Blackie in the movies/radio) Made the mistake of reading it when I was babysitting two kids and it was late and dark... a little on the creepyside. I've tried rereading it recently and winced reading the racial stereotypes of some of the characters.

I am up to 8 books on my rise up Mt Blanc. I am somewhere hiding at my base camp debating why I didn't stick to that nice Pike's Peak that seemed so easy to climb last year.

1. Bad Power by Deborah Biancotti
2. Showtime by Narrelle Harris
3. Lost in Time by Melissa De La Cruz
4. The Needlework of Mary Queen of Scots by Margaret Swain
5. Persuasion by Jane Austen
6. The Katerina Trilogy: Gathering Storm by Robin Bridges
7. Thus was Adonis Murdered by Sarah Caudwell
8. Birth of the Chess Queen by Marilyn Yalom

2. (b) Most difficult to read surprisingly was Persuasion. For all its short length, the last Austen novel is sparse on her witty dialogue, so there is long long sections of exposition. Once I was past that one section though I fairly flew through the end.

(c) Longest on my TBR pile of this bunch was probably Sarah Caudwell's Thus Was Adonis Murdered. I bought all four of her books shortly after she died in 2000. I anticipate reading and enjoying the others.

I admit to being a little worried at this checkpoint. When I have 24 books to finish and I'm only a third of the way up my chosen mountains... well, I am *concerned*, to choose Tim Gunn's favorite choice of words. Maybe it'll get better this next quarter.

8. Birth of a Chess Queen by Marilyn Yalom. Fascinating feminist discussion on the chess queen's background. Originally she wasn't even on the board and when she was added was the weakest piece, rather than the all-powerful. Loved seeing the different chess pieces in the plates/illustrations and meeting the different medieval queens that may or may not have inspired the chess queen's rise.

I feel your pain, Margaret. A local charity book sale has opened up their store virtually down the street from me at work for last few months so I always wind up browsing over lunch and bringing home another pile. I'm actually fairly current with my new acquisitions to Goodreads, it's the backlist that I struggle with. I have 1000+ *now* and that's without the bulk of my GN/manga and sf/fantasy collection. (I do own a Kindle though. I have only so much space. And I like being able to carry multiple books with me rather than agonizing over that perfect commute read.)

Margaret, I've emailed you. Maybe you can make more sense of it than I can?

I do know what you mean about mods potentially being buzz kill. I've also seen the opposite unfortunately, where there's no control at all.

Has anyone watched any of Dangerous Liaisons adaptations? There are so many of them from the period pieces (Dangerous Liaisons & Valmont) to the modern (Cruel Intentions) to even a Chinese version.

I pulled up the chart again -- maybe I meant planets? I show Virgo in Sun/Mercury/Venus/Pluto. Rising Sign is Leo, so I've been told I'm a cusp? Oddly no Pisces showing at all in the list. It's just a free thing, so it doesn't do into complete detail. I'd be happy to send you offline what I have, if you're that interested.

To bring it back to books (sorry Bev!), how do our personalities affect what we read? Do certain signs lean towards more analytical or more romantic books?

My mother is a Taurus so I'd agree on stubborn but loyal. I'm a Virgo myself -- nitpicky perfectionists -- and it's pretty accurate. I had my birth chart cast online once and had Virgo in several different houses (?).

I can relate to the "short books that take longer than expected..." problem. I noticed this when I did the read-a-long for Jane Austen's "Persuasion". I thought I'd breeze through until I hit a section that took me forever me to get through. The book finally hit its groove for me near the end and then I was "But it can't be over..."

*laughs* No, Michelle, my French is not nearly that good to read literature. I took a few years in HS and semester in college. I've retained a surprising amount of vocab and general language but not that much! I'm using the Penguin edition of Dangerous Liaisons translated by PWK Stone. It was fascinating to read how the epistolary novel had developed and used by the time Les Liaisons had been published.

7. Thus was Adonis Murdered by Sarah Cauldwell. Delightful British mystery told heavily in epistolary style. The gimmick of the books are that the gender of the narrator Professor Hilary Tamar is never specified in any of the four Cauldwell books. I'm undecided what I think about that.

Had been feeling very depressed about my chances at finishing Mt Blanc this year. But I have a few TBR books halfway done. I just have to stop looking at the new ones right? Right? I may dip into the GN/manga side of my TBR shelves. They'll go a lot faster, much as I wanted this challenge to focus on "proper" books.