Play Book Tag discussion

First, because my son would be mad if I didn't, I want to bring attention to 6, 7. If ya know ya know.

“Reading it is not a passive experience but one that provokes, that exasperates, that moves.”
— Intro to I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

What book (or books) have you read that truly provoked you, exasperated you, or deeply moved you — in a way that made reading feel anything but passive?

Share the title and what specifically stirred those strong feelings (a character, idea, scene, writing style, etc.). How did it affect you afterward?

Creative responses are warmly encouraged!
Feel free to reply with a short essay, a poem, a reflective paragraph, a fictional letter to the author or a character, a diary-style entry, or any other creative format that captures your experience with the book. Regular shares and thoughts are equally welcome — whatever feels right for you.

Do you generally prefer books that challenge and unsettle you, or do you lean more toward comforting/escapist reads?

Have you ever pushed through a book that exasperated you… only to be very glad you did?

Go in any direction you like — personal stories, strong opinions, recommendations, or creative pieces are all appreciated!

6, 7, HA HA. I thought that one had finally died down, but I suppose the Internet is bringing it back because of the date. Who knew something so inane was going to take hold in the way that it did? I’m not actually answering this question, and especially because I sat down in the sun during a brief moment that I had during Cameron soccer game, to do a lot of other things that I just found myself here for a moment. I do want to say a couple of things, though in advance of answering the question, just in case I never do. I get passionately involved in the books that I read. Even the ones that I think you’re going to be silly and superficial. I cry a lot. I really do. I want a book is a little bit of nothing. My reviews aren’t all that great. But you guys know I like to write reviews that are thoughtful when I’m really moved and I’m moved a lot. We once, I want to say six years ago, because I’m thinking 2020, so maybe it was 2019, had the tag called thought-provoking. I have to say I loved that as a tag. I was so captivated by it. So the following year, which I think was our 10th anniversary, when I was asked what my favorite tag was, or maybe it was another time. We were all asked what our favorite tag was. It’s always gonna be that now. I love it when a book brings you something that you think about long after. When even if the book is in Maine, it brings you back to a memory or a question. So I guess I am answering this question.

So because I’m on my phone, I had to post and start again. Cause maybe as long as I was answering the question I wasn’t quite done. Even though my phone was done. Sometimes I’ve been outright tears when a book has left me. During or after. Actually, it’s probably pretty often. But more often, I am left with thought-provoking questions. Ideas that move me. Things I wonder about. Things I connect to. I do think we’re all that way or we wouldn’t be discussing books in the way that we do. Or having book clubs. Or writing the kinds of reviews that we do. My book reviews had to be more atmospheric as they’re never really about the plot. Because I always want to read her to enjoy their own experience of it. Right now I’m reading how to read a book by Monica Wood. And that is thought-provoking by God. But one of the thoughts that I had this morning, as I was plowing through it, was how I never would have picked this up. The one I didn’t like the title and I didn’t find it catchy. I was turned off. But when I went to look at the synopsis, everything about it would not be what I would pick. And how many times have I said that this is true, that I would not have picked a book from its synopsis by any stretch. And I have often loved these that people have told me I am forced to read. Or that the book club settled on. Oops, looks like I’m gonna have to press send and post again.

I would not have picked up wild dark shore. I would not have picked up the Danny Devoss thing. I use this example all the time, but I certainly would not have picked up a constellation of vital phenomena, because who wants to read a book about war torn Chechnya. But it was so powerfully loved by everybody in this group, that I eventually picked it up to see what the fuss was about. And God did I love that book. So why did I pick up how to read a book by Monica Wood? Because my book group forced me into it. But let me tell you, at 40% through it’s already moving and thought provoking. It has everything I never would have wanted to read. But this is why we trust other people when they tell us what we might like. What might be a good discussion. They were not on my phone. I will probably be putting a paragraph break here…. But I also want to say one more thing about my reviews. They’re often personal and filled with stories. That’s just how I write and relate. Sometimes not. Sometimes I’m in a rush, or my thoughts have already left me by the time I sit down to write the review. But this is a profound question, because I think it gets that why we are readers and a community of readers. I hope that helps. May you all have a wonderful 6–7 day.

I definitely prefer to be an active part of the reading process, to participate, to play games and to comment on developments. I think this became a serious pursuit with Italo Calvino, who remains my favorite, but the ranks are growing each year and my top reads are usually from his peers, like David Mitchell, Thomas Pynchon, John Bart, Tom Robbins, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A. S. Byatt, Milan Kundera, Julio Cortazar,

Postmodernism doesn't take away from the books that are personally, emotionally precious to me. I am an unrepentant romantic, even as I sometimes trash review a novel that makes only a cheap, unoriginal effort.

If a book has both, and touches on the reading experience or on solitude, I'm one happy bunny. Too Loud a Solitude, Stoner, The Book of Disquiet , The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll are a few examples.

“I wasn’t meant for reality, but life came and found me.” (Pessoa)

“We said it really wasn’t very late, that we were listening to him with growing interest. The bottle of bourbon was empty. I brought another, along with more ice, and we asked the Gaviero to continue his story. On summer nights in California, time stretches like an elastic, compliant material, perfect for hearing the confidences of someone who had a store of tales that could lead us from one marvel to another until dawn.” (Mutis)

“Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.” (Calvino)

For me, this relates to the arts stuff we wrote about recently :)

I had to ask my daughter what 6, 7 is and I'll be right back with two or three books I think will fit this creative response for how books affected me. I'm going to borrow from a couple of old reviews that fit this. These are three times where I wrote reviews in the same style as the books, and this is one of many ways I interact with books, but not the most common one. This sometimes happens with humour.

The one I liked best doesn't work here because I can't put the response with one column beside the other, although I'll include it. It's one with a form of sentence/phrase palindromes and I had fun writing the review that way. It's third.

The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel by Don Marquis

i've only read this once
archy used to be a vers
libre poet but he
transmigrated
into a cockroach and
writes poems for no pay
some people think
mehitabel is his friend
but that cat can't be
trusted and so sometimes
archy has to hide
in the typewriter keys
you can google early twentieth
century typewriters if you
don't know what those are
archy had to throw
himself from key to key
and couldn t do capitals
or punctuation

mehitabel says she was
cleopatra but has transmigrated
many times always
great ladies and now
is a cat and still always
a lady wotthehell wotthehell
she still has a few moves in her
but keeps having kittens
whenever she marries

archy wrote poems for
free for marquis who had them
printed in his column for decades
and no matter how much
archy asked for money
in the 1930s he never
got any just crumbs

this copy has illustrations too
and is still worth reading
if you can find one like
i did at the library
don't get any of the modern
compilations but get one
that was first printed
when archy was still
writing by throwing
himself on the keys

You Can Date Boys When You're Forty: Dave Barry on Parenting and Other Topics He Knows Very Little About by Dave Barry 3 stars

This is, at the time of this writing, Dave Barry’s latest book of hitherto unpublished essays, based on the fact that it was published in 2014 and it’s only April. The title, naturally, is misleading and has been chosen from one line in the book because it’s funny. Or at least I thought it was funny, and it makes me look good because I—stay with me here—want my kids to hold off on dating until they are twenty-five when their brains have fully matured, biologically speaking. Not that anyone else in my house agrees with me, and one of my daughters has had two boyfriends already and she hasn’t even finished high school (I know, you’re shocked).

In this book Dave tells us about his trip to a Justin Bieber concert with his 13 year old daughter, Sophie, manliness, what women want (that essay could just as easily be titled “a review of 50 Shades of Grey,” and I’m sure I enjoyed it far more than I would ever enjoy the book, which, like his wife, I haven’t read), and so on. This book is about more than just laughs, however, for example, in one essay he learns you real good grammar.

So why only three stars, even though my 15 year old yelled at me for laughing too loud when she was trying to fall asleep on a school night? I’ll tell you:

1. not all the essays are equally funny
2. sometimes he uses language offensive to me (but perhaps not to you)
3. He is sporting, and I’m not making this up, a haircut that looks a lot like what some of the boys I went to school with wore—in the 1970s.
4. No other reasons that I can think of.

Imagine that the two verses of this review are side by side, matching the poetry arrangement in this picture book.

Mirror Mirror: A Book of Reverso Poems by Marilyn Singer


“There are two sides to every story.”
Mirror, Mirror
is the fairy tale book
full of reversible verse
with fairy tale pictures
for very young kids
but mostly
for adults who actually understand these
though they are similar,
These are not true palindromes.

These are not true palindromes
though they are similar
for adults who actually understand these
but mostly
for very young kids
with fairy tale pictures
full of reversible verse
is the fairy tale book
Mirror, Mirror
“There are two sides to every story.”

This was a delightful collection of verse that showed two sides to every story with the reversible poems which were rather more clever than what I whipped off for the review. I can see why adults might appreciate the verses more than very young children, but the pictures are very child friendly. I enjoyed it.

Karin wrote: "Imagine that the two verses of this review are side by side, matching the poetry arrangement in this picture book.

Mirror Mirror: A Book of Reverso Poems by [author:Marilyn Singer|6..."

I loved this one! I'm not a poetry fan, but in the past when I've "had" to read poetry for a challenge, I've chosen this reverse poetry.

I gave it either 4.5 or 5 stars and it made my top 10 the year I read it.

Algernon wrote: "I definitely prefer to be an active part of the reading process, to participate, to play games and to comment on developments. I think this became a serious pursuit with Italo Calvino, who remains ..."

I also like books that play with our expectations, like Calvino, Barth, etc. This probably started when I was a French Lit major reading books from the French New Novel movement - Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, etc. Today we call those books "meta". They sometimes break the fourth wall, as it's called in theater, speaking right to the audience. One of them has no characters or dialogue. It just describes things, like "the shades are open. a woman comes into the room, " etc. and the reader figures out that an affair is going on. Or the chronology is backwards or mixed up.

Those are intellectual rather than emotional involvements. I was very emotionally involved in The Goldfinch, The Time Traveler's Wife, Ordinary Grace, Small Things Like These.

Some books have unusual style that fascinates me - The Shipping News - most original metaphors I've ever seen. Or In the Distance -one section is written as what you hear when you don't really know a language well. Another section describes the repetitive nature of the character's life by repeating sentences over and over.

LibraryCin wrote: "Karin wrote: "Imagine that the two verses of this review are side by side, matching the poetry arrangement in this picture book.

Mirror Mirror: A Book of Reverso Poems by [author:Ma..."

I gave it 4 stars, so also liked it :)

What book (or books) have you read that truly provoked you, exasperated you, or deeply moved you — in a way that made reading feel anything but passive?

I love a book that tears your heart out. I think of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Cold Mountain and The Orphan Master's Son.
Recent reads that deeply and emotionally effected me were The Young Will RememberDear Psychosis,, a memoir, Women of a Promiscuous Nature , Sacrament, and Heartwood

Kazuo Ishiguro is an author who always provokes me into deeper thinking. All of the books of his which I read, Never Let Me Go, The Buried Giant and Klara and the Sun all caused me to ponder things. They all are so different.

I often am provoked into deeper thinking by nonfiction books.
Some I have read recently are: Escape from Kabul: The Inside Story, Thirty Below: The Harrowing and Heroic Story of the First All-Women's Ascent of Denali, This Is What America Looks Like: My Journey from Refugee to Congresswoman, and Liberty's First Crisis: Adams, Jefferson, and the Misfits Who Saved Free Speech.

As far as exasperated, often those are fairly mundane books which are not well written, in which the main character is being a bit stupid. On the more literary scale, I would say Yesteryear fits in that category.

Other recent which exasperated me were: Who is Ma Kemah?, and Where the Wildflowers Grow.

Klara and the Sun is a book that touched me, and although many people found it depressing, I didn't. I was absolutely charmed by Klara.

I am often moved by the life stories of the historical women I speak about. They accomplished so much while cooking over wood stoves, washing clothes by hand, tending the young, old and sick, and having little or no formal education. Some of the biographies I use are either too old and inaccurate or too academic to recommend.

I am often exasperated in mysteries by the TSTL (too stupid to live) female amateur detective who goes alone to explore or even to confront the bad guy. And how characters get hit on the head and always become immediately unconscious, even when the hitter is another amateur, or maybe the female sleuth who just happens to aim a vase exactly right


Also annoyed by the many characters in romance novels who won't just talk to each other to work things out (of course the books would be a lot shorter then.) And exasperated by the authors conveniently giving characters serious or terminal illnesses to add melodrama.

And I am exasperated by spelling and usage mistakes in commericially published books - where was the editor?

I'm a very engaged reader, seeing and hearing it all in my head, sometimes to the point that I truly feel inside the plot. A couple of really memorable ones were first in series mysteries and I recommend them all the time: Murder on the Iditarod Trail has you in race, feeling the cold, hearing the dogs. Also Deadly Safari - taste the dust, smell Africa, hear the lions roar - this put me on the safari and for the first time made me yearn to go on safari - still on the travel wish list.

I'll never forget my trip to France in 1987, in the fall, when a terrible hurricane raging through Northern France/Southern England (which btw was memorialized by A. S. Byatt in the climax of Possession) that drove me to leave Paris for the Riviera. I was reading the hefty Tom Clancy paperback Red Storm Rising which is essentially a WWIII story. I was so enveloped in the book that at one point I actually was shocked to look out my hotel window and not see tanks rolling down the street in Nice.

Not all books absorb me that completely!

I am particularly annoyed by authors who set scenes in places like Paris or New York, ones I know well and also have lots of maps and information available for author to use to figure out routes and travel times to use. Dan Brown is one of the worse offenders --- his Paris car chase in the The Da Vinci Code was absolutely undoable in real life and the location of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre and how they approached her at the time of the book was nothing as presented. Too many authors setting books in NYC have the characters traveling from Manhattan to Brooklyn or Queens in an absurdly short period of time, whether by subway or cab - Chris Pavone's The Travelers had his character make it in 10 minutes -- an hour is more like it. There are no excuses for this when one of my favorite historical romance & mystery writers manages to put reasonably proper travel and timing in her books set in the early 19th Century - she once informed a fan that she does deep research into period maps, time tables, even travel speeds of different breeds of horses and styles of carriages.

Like Amy, I cry a lot - not just at books - give me a sentimental holiday commercial or a worthy winner of a food competition - hand me the tissues. Somehow I always seem to be reading in public when some scene hits me hard, ugly cry hard! One of the books I read so long ago that had me literally sobbing for pages and pages -- Pat Conroy's The Prince of Tides

I am pretty tolerant generally, rarely DNF unless I find totally unreadable usually due to writing. Many many books reward me when I do that -- one I happened to be discussing recently was A Wizard of Earthsea - until near the end it felt like someone reciting a story from a remove, leaving me unengaged but when it changed, worth it. But I do get really irritated with ebooks that are filled with those misspellings and wrong words that the human eye/brain picks up but spell check doesn't/can't. Anyone who has converted a document for business knows you have to proof read it yourself so why do publishers get away with skipping that????

I often dream about books that I have been reading - either I am watching something from the book or I am in it.

Robin P wrote: "I often dream about books that I have been reading - either I am watching something from the book or I am in it."

I sometimes dream about books, but the ones I tend to remember are the nightmare ones.

Robin P wrote: "Klara and the Sun is a book that touched me, and although many people found it depressing, I didn't. I was absolutely charmed by Klara.

I am often moved by the life stories of the..."

I am in the group who found it utterly depressing. I gave it three stars, but this is one of the things I wrote in my review But it's disturbing, dark, dreary, despondent and depressing, to put it mildly.

Evidently, I was in an alliterative mood at the time--I'm guessing the words flowed easily as they sometimes do when I'm in what I call an alliterative mood.

There was something about Klara's love that was so perfect to me. And although I am not a traditionally religious person, the way her faith in the sun was magically rewarded was very moving. True, the human beings were mostly terrible!

I too really liked Klara and the Sun. I'd recommended it to my Feminerdy Book Club, and we had a really good discussion about it. Not everyone liked it though I don't think anyone failed to finish it or outright disliked it. It's dark for sure, but there's such a purity to Klara herself and her faith as a counter.

Murakami created something that was meant to make you think about AI and robots and where this all leads, and it really did, and still does. Another book that explores sentient robots using a detective story format is Scalzi's wonderful Lock In. Also of course Murderbot.

A book that I loved and I think is not unlike the Murakami is Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy. It too is quite dark, disturbing - intentionally so - but I also found it incredibly hopeful.

Robin P wrote: "There was something about Klara's love that was so perfect to me. And although I am not a traditionally religious person, the way her faith in the sun was magically rewarded was very moving. True, ..."

Fair enough. I actually liked the sun part at the start. I hated the disturbing society, the thought of AI companions (I recently heard some disturbing things from an uber-tech person about that) and what happened to Klara, but to each her own! I did "get" his points, though :)

I agree that Migrations, which I loved, is dark but also hopeful.

Algernon wrote: "I definitely prefer to be an active part of the reading process, to participate, to play games and to comment on developments. I think this became a serious pursuit with Italo Calvino, who remains ..."

Algernon,

I have started following the Anthony Jeselnik book club that he started this year. His May book was Stoner. I plan on reading it eventually, but I enjoy listening to Jeselnik talk about the books he reads. He has an hour and a half video of discussing the book, reviewing quotes he liked, and answering questions from other readers. Don't know if you would be interested. I've seen you mention this book several times as a favorite.

Jason wrote: "Algernon wrote: "I definitely prefer to be an active part of the reading process, to participate, to play games and to comment on developments. I think this became a serious pursuit with Italo Calv..."

Thank you, yes the book is on of my all time favorites, but podcasts and video interviews and even audio books are not . I very much prefer the written word and I don't even have a youtube account. So I will try to find out more about Jeselnik, but I'm not planning on following his videos. Actual movies are different, because I usually watch them with English subtitles