Hi #Whartonbuddyread

How does a Fast and Loose discussion on Oct 18 sound?

Note: the only easy way to get the book is on amazon through their kindle edition of the collected works of Edith Wharton for $1 (usa - link: https://a.co/d/fdvZX12 )Otherwise it‘s hard to find.

While reading a 950-page edition of Thomas Malory, and the 900-page Collect Stories of William Faulkner, and waiting for The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (came yesterday!), I‘ve started this wonderful 1984 Booker winner.

If now is everything, Pepper has chosen to use it for an afternoon snooze.

My 12th from the #Booker longlist is one to read slowly and carefully. Layered and indirect. Teresa returns to a coastal town in Greece to mourn and read Homer. And she instead spends a lot of time insinuating herself into the private lives of locals. The reader has to work out the actual story and what she‘s doing. Recommended, but know it‘s difficult.
#Booker2025

Trying a new audiobook, currently free on audible.

My 11th #Booker is one I really fell for and adore. Thomas Flett scrapes for shrimp at low tide with a horse and nets. He's feels old, but he‘s only 20. Then someone comes and gets him inspired.

That prose. We get excited when Tom gets excited, reserved when he's suspicious, won over when he's somehow won over, and we're steady and accepting when he is. And yet it's never too much.

I feel good recommending it to anyone.
#Booker2025

My 10th #Booker is an American roadway novel. Tom is dealing with, or not dealing with, male uncertainty. He is confronting his own promise - to leave his wife once his youngest child reaches 18 because she had an affair twelve years prior. (The title is a play on the marriage vows.)

I've kept thinking about this book. Initially I felt it didn't do enough, but slowly I came to realize how well it does what it intended.
#Booker2025

My 9th #Booker Prize longlist paces itself through the lives of two married couples whose marriages are strained during an historic winter blizzard in England in 1962/63.

Paced slow with building intensity, reader attachment and speed. The nature of these marriages is striking, maybe even disheartening, and also totally normal. Our real strains. I thought of Middlemarch. We get to know them, and then helplessly watch what happens. #Booker2025

My 8th from the #Booker Prize longlist was fun, clever, politically timely satire, if a little thin. Very interesting in light of recent assassination of rightwing Charlie Kirk, whose form of disguised racism is exactly in line with that of our main satirized character here, Lenny. Lenny is a highly confident self-interested pundit in need of a public reboot, who won't spend a moment in self-doubt about her terrible logic. #Booker2025

I‘ve read the 12 available Booker Prize longlist books. Last one is on preorder. Now starting this.

A 16-yr-old boy from KL meets 19-yr-old free spirit on his family farm, and they‘re both gay. Jay comes to the country with his strained family. Chuan, strained with his own father, works at a local 7/11 in a nearby town where he knows everyone on the street. Coming of age, family and rural Malaysia probably in the later 1990‘s. It isn‘t fast, and it‘s maybe the softest of the #Booker books I‘ve read. But it works, it lingers.
#Booker2025

My 6th from the #Booker Prize longlist is a book of surprises with an international scope. It opens in LA after dad has gone missing in Japan, along a rocky beach. A mystery of sorts. Louise and mom must carry on.

It's wordy by style - the key strength and weakness of the book. Choi uses this to create atmosphere. There is also a lot of Japan, and Korea.

I enjoyed this. It was tough for me up front, but nice once it got going.
#Booker2025

Playing with the Bookly app. August was all #Booker Prize longlist.

Starting book ten on the #Booker Prize longlist.
#Booker2025

My 5th from the #Booker longlist required some adjustment after Audition. No gimmicks here. This is direct and slower paced; honest and sincere by tone. It builds narrative tension It took me time to adapt. I both admired the honesty and worried about it. But I came to fully embrace it. A few books later I still think about this book and this narrator who gave her baby up for adoption in a foreign country when she was only 16. #Booker2025

My 4th from the #Booker longlist completely wowed me. Brain whirring. This was a really intense reading experience for me. The wording is precise and meaningful, but the meaning is elusive. I was just very engaged on the sentence level, in a fun way. I have too much to say for a Litsy post. ☺️

For those open to uncertainty, I can't recommend this book highly enough. It's not only doing a ton of stuff, but it's doing it beautifully.

#Booker2025

Starting this tonight. It will be book 9 from the #Booker longlist
#Booker2025

My main memory of this book is of mushroom cookies. What a wonderful trippy scene. This book is international NY, where one character can‘t learn English because everyone around him speaks Albanian. It also builds a whole lot of wonderful mysterious sexualized tension with green eyes. Then shockingly dissipates it. She hasn‘t read her Checkhov. Anyway, a really fun mysterious novel that i enjoyed. #Booker no. 3
#Booker2025

Getting into this. It‘s fun. This will be book 8 in my #Booker longlist quest. (Yes, I have several reviews to post) #Booker2025

New audiobook. Just starting

It‘s my lunch break and i‘m in a phone room in my office, about to start this book. I finished Love Forms this morning. #booker #Booker2025

Morning all. I‘m in a bit of a book hangover, as I adored Audition by Katie Kitamura. So it‘s hard getting into another book. But this one has a lovely opening. And i‘ll spend part of my morning here.

#booker #Booker2025

I‘m on chapter 3. Everyone seems bewildered trying to understand this one. Little 🧠 primed. #booker #Booker2025

My 2nd from the #Booker longlist

Goodness, I‘m still thinking about this. Our main character, István, fascinates without saying anything. A book of spare prose, raging underneath. I was sucked in, raced through its 350 spare pages in 4 days. You love István, and he‘s awful, and does awful stuff. But suffers awful stuff too without ever a complaint. Just saying, “ok”. And not much else. I‘ll leaven the masculinity stuff off this mini review. ?

My 1st from the #Booker longlist. #Booker2025

🐌s, an industry of Ukraine brides for foreign bachelors, and the gruesome invasion.

I was nervous at first, but the book does a shift at about page 100, a metafictional interlude. The context changes and what I didn‘t like before i suddenly adored. I finished having really enjoyed it, and having been smitten. It was fun and disarmingly deep. I'm still thinking on it.

I‘m 1/3 through my current read. So far it‘s elegant and complex and i‘m loving it, even if i need breaks.

#booker #Booker2025

An early Wharton story about a shop run competently by two sisters in lower Manhattan, ~1890. This sisters have their tight bond, and codependency. An eligible bachelor strains all this. It looks at sibling relationships, and also at loneliness, loss, and, quietly, at longing. It's a lovely novella, showcasing Wharton's early natural sense of prose and composition.

Thanks #whartonbuddyread for the company and conversation!

Starting today.
#booker #Booker2025

Showing you the back, because the front shows a person and that‘s a kind of no no. There are no physical descriptions in this 1980‘s-1990‘s setting with one mysterious dystopian element. Ishi‘s prose is so simple, and yet… i felt the mystery. I carried it around with me between readings. I finished midnight before the Booker longlist was announced, which five days later feels like some distant past. But the feeling lingers still. Recommended!

This turned out ok. It‘s a lot like The Town, a later Faulkner novel narrated by Charles McCaslin and Gavin Stephens. Personally i hated The Town. This is better. A simple story, with race-relations exploration. A mixed-race man is charged with a murder he didn‘t commit. Everyone is waiting for a lynching. But it‘s Faulkner, so wordy, thick, and slow, with some deep soul searching by the well-educated always wrong Gavin.

It anyone were to scroll down my thread, they will notice a post on my starting this 5 months ago. Well, it didn‘t take 5 months. I put it down, paused my Faulkner reading, and started again. I found it unexpected, going ways i did not anticipate. But exceptionally powerful. A rewarding if difficult book. It includes The Bear, a famous Faulkner short story that is novel-sized in the contents. That story does a lot. (But it‘s not my favorite part)

The winner of the 2025 Women‘s Prize for Nonfiction is terrific. Heartbreaking, and heartwarming and all other things heart. Clarke is just so sensitive and aware. And she can write. And she reads it herself wonderfully. This is the story of the transplant of a 9-yr-old heart in the UK, from donor to recipient.

And i also started this last night, from the #Booker2025 longlist. An endling is the last of a species to die before extinction. The book is so far a look at extinction, a kind of bride-supplier, and the Ukraine on the edge of the coming big invasion.

I get so excited about the #Booker longlist, and then I start the 1st book, and it‘s like - wait, who are you? I need to step back and look a bit and get acquainted with this year‘s list of books. Can‘t take these relationships too fast…. This one is 1st. Possibly my only one on audio. Not sure yet if this ten year old in the prolonged is a sociopath. #Booker2025

Stuyevsant Park, 16th st Manhattan. 1910? (if our lady with puffy sleeves is our author)

Less ambitious than some of Wharton‘s work, she focuses on the Bunner sisters and their little stitching shop. The book looks at sibling relationships, poverty and industry, and ultimately loneliness and loss - and loss of faith and purpose.

It‘s been a while. What were your thoughts coming back to Wharton? Did you enjoy? Did you like these sisters?

Tomorrow (but not at this specific time 🙂)
#whartonbuddyread

One week till we discuss Bunner Sisters #whartonbuddyread

Reminder #whartonbuddyread -ers. See you in 13 days - July 26

Anne Serre‘s novel is partly a response to her sister‘s death. This is a character study that plays games with the narrator… or The Narrator. It‘s wonderful in language, but a little lacking in reader drive. I enjoyed it enough and… it completes my read through the 2025 International #Booker Longlist! #IB2025

I will add my personal ranking of all 13 books in the comments. But leave off my quirky reasoning. Feel free to ask questions, though.

This is a terrific book - a narrative nonfiction history of the Apollo program told mainly through the astronauts. The book will win over jaded resistant readers and often keep us glued. The astronauts are super smart, but also foolish and emotionally distant.

One thing that struck me was the scale of the moonscape. Pike‘s Peak sized mountains outside the landers.

The 2013 Booker Prize winner. Catton is the youngest winner, and The Luminaries is the longest winner.

A murder mystery during the New Zealand gold rush, woven into astrology.

Long, but fun stuff. Easy going. Then in the end it becomes a different, more nuanced evocative, memorable, curious. Crazy complex, but doesn‘t get lost in the details. It‘s all used to aesthetic purpose. That was cool.

#booker #IB2025 12 of 13. I have one left.

This is a novel about the life of descendants of African slavery on Reunion Island - a French territory in the Indian Ocean. Despite some humor and charm, don‘t expect to be uplifted.

“For here, their pain is told, their disgrace blessed. By night, as by day, I wanted them to exist here, to have an ode to their madness, a book that avenges them even as it absolves them."

After lots of playing around with decisions and introductions of various books, it seems i‘ve committed myself to this book - my new morning read. Bring on Mallory.

Whose up for a buddy read of this? It‘s 100 pages. I suggest we chat July 26, in one month.

#whartonbuddyread

@AllDebooks @CarolynM @Currey @IMASLOWREADER @jewright @LapReader @Lcsmcat @Leftcoastzen @TheBookHippie

Started this. And it will complete my reading through this year‘s International Booker longlist - the 1st i will have done this.

#booker #IB2025

New audiobook - the new winner of the Women‘s Prize for Nonfiction

Phew, I did eventually finish. And a week after that I can fully say I‘m glad i read it. But, it took all week to get there.

Saleem Sinai is India. Born at midnight at the moment of Independence, he goes through an absurd life that parallels 🇮🇳‘s history, and also seems to undermine itself constantly. He‘s only 31 when he tells us his story - in heavily affected, circular, strained exhausting prose. 🙂 But, it still a pretty fantastic thing

A book looking at social media appearance, how it seems real life should measure up. To hammer home the point, the book focuses on how things look, and treats our characters from a distance.

Not sure I‘m a fan of this cold distant literature. But it reads nicely and is well-executed.

This is my 11th from the International #Booker longlist. #IB2025

Well, I got lost 🙁

An important book. On Nov 24, 2021 a sinking boat with 29 refugees wasn‘t rescued. A French radio operator was in contact with them for hours, but failed to get them help, and criticized them. 27 people drowned.

This is a fictional look at the radio operator. She narrates her thoughts and a perhaps imaginary questioning.

Unfortunately I couldn‘t follow what she was thinking. Didn‘t make sense to me. I just missed too much.

The IB Prize winner

The stories are Wharton-esque

The author is a native Kannada speaker, and also activist, lawyer and feminist. Kannada has 60 million speakers, and is older than Hindi.

These stories do not directly challenge cultural norms. The characters all exist in their Muslim Indian world and accept their realities, including their economic reality, as the natural order. It's within this mindset that BM‘s feminism lays its hands.

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

William Blake was fascinating and strange artist, poet and thinker. John Higgs, the author, is very interested in all aspects of Blake, including Blake's weirdest and most arcane, where he spends a whole lot of this book. Not a perfect book, but well done. Fun, fascinating, insightful stuff.