The 2024 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge

For 2024 I have decided to participate in The Historical Fiction Reading Challenge hosted by Marg at The Intrepid Reader and Baker (http://www.theintrepidreader.com)

As Marg tells us: "Any sub-genre of historical fiction is accepted (Historical Romance, Historical Mystery, Historical Fantasy, Young Adult, History/Non-Fiction, etc" and you can choose from the following categories: 

20th Century Reader - 2 books  

Victorian Reader - 5 books

Renaissance Reader - 10 books

Medieval - 15 books

Ancient History - 25 books 

 Prehistoric books - 50+ books                                         

I have decided to go with 15 historical novels from the Medieval period (500 AD to 1500 AD).  It sounds like a fun challenge.

My Top 5 Books for 2023

Next year I am hoping to increase the number of books I read so that my top 5 books will have more depth.  Still, this year I did read 32 books some of which I have reviewed.  And in no particular order here are my top 5:  

I have been hearing about Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe for years and this is a classic that definitely lived up to the praise.  As with two other classics (Frankenstein and The Call of the Wild), Things Fall Apart is not a very long book but it is so worth your time.

I am not a birder but H is For Hawk is a beautifully written memoir.  I would advise you read this book in the audio version by the author Helen MacDonald.  She reads her memoir with emotion and it adds to her story.

I loved The Outcasts by Sarah Stegall.  The setting 1816 Lake Geneva Switzerland and how one stormy night in response to a challenge from Lord Byron, Mary Shelley conceives the idea for her classic novel Frankenstein.  The story itself is interesting but in addition Sarah Stegall does a very good job of letting us know what Lord Byron, Dr. John Polodori, Claire Claremont and Percy and Mary Shelley may have been like and it rings true.  

I love Louise Penny's Three Pines Mystery series and A Trick of the Light is my favorite book so far in this series.  I enjoyed it so much because A Trick of The Light takes place entirely in the village of Three Pines and the focus is on Clara and Peter's relationship which has interested me from the start of this series.  

Many years ago I read Thomas Cook's Red Leaves and the book made a lasting impression on me.  I was pleased to discover this year that Thomas Cook's The Last Talk With Lola Faye is equally memorable and I did not see the ending coming!

Hope everyone has a great Holiday Season and a Happy and Healthy New Year!

Maybe You Should Talk To Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed by Lori Gottlieb

When Lori Gottlieb was in her forties her life was going great.  She had a successful and fulfilling career as a psychotherapist, an eight year old son Zach who was everything to her; she was writing a new book and was in a relationship with a great guy.

But then one night two years into their relationship the great guy tells Lori it's over.  It's not that he doesn't want to marry Lori but he doesn't want to help raise her eight year old son. He likes Zach well enough but he has already raised his own kids and his parenting days are behind him. 

Lori is devastated.  The break-up brings on a midlife crisis and a friend suggests that maybe she needs to see a therapist.  Lori agrees and the result would end up being her bestselling memoir Maybe You Should Talk To Someone which was published in 2019 to critical acclaim. 

Now, some may ask themselves, do I want to spend an entire book with an author in her therapist's office as she discusses the break-up.   I worried about that too.  But Lori Gottlieb's sessions with her therapist represents only a small portion of the book. And as we get deeper into Maybe You Should Talk To Someone the boyfriend issues fade.  The book becomes about alot more.  It's part memoir but it's also about what therapy entails, how and why people change and the meaning of life.  And for me Maybe You Should Talk To Someone is most memorably about Lori's own patients and their struggles. 

Lori Gottlieb let's us in on the therapy sessions she has with four of her patients.  She has changed their names and the stories these patients tell are interesting and often heartbreaking.  I will not forget Julie's story in particular.  And these patients are a reminder of how we can never know what people have been through just by looking at them.  

Maybe You Should Talk To Someone is very well written, humorous and I think the book will help many readers navigate their own journeys.  Over 42,000 reviews on Amazon.com for Maybe I Should Talk To Someone and 92% of them 4 and 5 stars.  That's very impressive and put me in the 4 and 5 star category as well.  

Ithaka by C. P. Cavafy

I am a bit obsessed right now with the poet C P Cavafy (1863-1933).  He  was born to Greek parents but lived most of his life in Alexandria Egypt.  I first discovered him in a book of essays by the very fine writer Philip Lopate.  It's another example of how books can lead us to other books and authors we otherwise would never have heard of.  

Ithaka is Cavafy's best known poem and though it is set in ancient Greece, critics say its really about the journey through life

ITHAKA BY C. P. CAVAFY 

(Translated by Edmund Keeley)

As you set out for Ithaka

hope your road is a long one,

full of adventure, full of discovery.

Laistrygonians, Cyclops,

angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:

you’ll never find things like that on your way

as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,

as long as a rare excitement

stirs your spirit and your body.

Laistrygonians, Cyclops,

wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them

unless you bring them along inside your soul,

unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope your road is a long one.

May there be many summer mornings when,

with what pleasure, what joy,

you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;

may you stop at Phoenician trading stations

to buy fine things,

mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,

sensual perfume of every kind—

as many sensual perfumes as you can;

and may you visit many Egyptian cities

to learn and go on learning from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.

Arriving there is what you’re destined for.

But don’t hurry the journey at all.

Better if it lasts for years,

so you’re old by the time you reach the island,

wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,

not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.

Without her you wouldn't have set out.

She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.

Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,

you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean"

The Last Talk With Lola Faye by Thomas H Cook

"A wave of relief passed over me. So this is why Lola Faye Gilroy had dragged herself from God knows where over to the Museum of the West on a wet December night. She'd come to make the case before me, clarify the issue Woody Gilroy had raised in his suicide note, rid herself of the guilt he'd laid at her feet, revisit all that in a talk with me, then enter her plea at the end of it: not guilty".

Lucas Paige the narrator of The Last Talk With Lola Faye (2010) has been successful in life one would think. He's a Harvard educated college professor who has published a number of history books.  All the more impressive since Lucas grew up in a small Southern town where very few of his peers went to college, let alone Harvard.

But Lucas is bitter and angry because his dream was to write great books, not the mediocrities he's been writing as he sees it.  Lucas' personal life is not going well either.  His wife Julia left him a few years back and her departing words were "Call me, Luke, when your past is in the past".  

And so at the start of The Last Talk With Lola Faye, Lucas is in St Louis at a book signing when Lola Faye walks in.  Lucas hasn't seen Lola Faye or been back to Glenville, Alabama in twenty years.  And yet here is Lola, his father's mistress.  Their affair led to Lucas' father's murder when Lola's husband found out.  Lucas is furious and in shock.   How does this woman dare to show up at his book signing after the pain she caused?  And why has she sought him out?  

Lola Faye asks if they can go somewhere to talk.  Lucas is not thrilled with this idea but he cautiously agrees.  And as the two sit down for drinks they discuss the tragic events of the night of Lucas' father's murder and what really happened.  Lucas it turns out consumed with his own ambition and desire to get out of Glenville made alot of assumptions about his parents and their marriage that turned out not to be true and led to tragic results.

All through the novel as Lucas and Lola have their talk I thought I knew what the big reveal would be, the deep secret, but then Thomas Cook would expertly draw back from where I thought the story was heading.  Publisher's Weekly gave The Last Talk With Lola Faye a starred review and I agree.  I was gripped all the way through and the ending was powerful, redemptive and a suprise I did not see coming.  If you have never read Thomas H Cook you absolutely should.  I highly recommend The Last Talk With Lola Faye.

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

The Victorian novel is a favorite genre of mine and I am pleased to say that in the past eight years I have read some of the great novels from this period.  I had yet to read Wilkie Collins however and I was torn.  He is best known for two classic novels: The Woman In White and The Moonstone.  I went with The Moonstone (1868) and I am happy with my choice.

The Moonstone begins in 1799 when a British officer Colonel John Herncastle while serving in India steals a precious yellow diamond adorning a statue of the Hindu God of the Moon.  Herncastle is a bad character who murders three of the Hindu priests guarding the yellow diamond and he takes the gem back to England.  

Fast forward and it's 1848.  John Herncastle is a an elderly spiteful man and his life has not gone well.  He has never been able to shake the rumors of what he did as a young officer in India.  He has no friends and his sister, the wealthy Lady Verinder, refuses to see him.  Herncastle is furious and writes out his will stating that after his death the yellow diamond will be given to his niece Rachel Verinder, Lady Verinder's daughter, on her 18th birthday.  Herncastle is giving the diamond to Rachel not to make amends. He knows that possessing the diamond comes with a curse and so it's his way of getting back at his family.

Herncastle dies and Rachel's eighteenth birthday arrives.  Rachel is thrilled to receive the diamond not knowing it's backstory.  But her mother and her cousin Franklin Blake do know or they suspect something and they are worried.  Also three mysterious Indian men have recently been seen walking the grounds of the Verinder estate.

On the night of Rachel's party all her friends are there including two men who are competing for Rachel's hand in marriage, her cousin Franklin Blake and her other cousin Godfrey Ablewhite.  Apparently in the 19th century you could marry your cousin.  

Rachel wears the diamond on her dress at the party.  It's a festive evening and then the next morning the diamond is missing, a detective is called in and things go downhill with alot of unhappiness for the characters involved.  The yellow diamond (the moonstone) does have a curse attached to it but not in the way I originally thought.  

It's not that people in posession of the diamond come down with a fatal illness or fall down a flight of stairs.  But rather once the diamond goes missing people start suspecting each other, tempers flare, engagements are broken off and in one tragic case a young housemaid of the Verinders with a past that included prison for theft is afraid she will be blamed and though she is not responsible it ends tragically.  

The Moonstone is told in the form of a number of first person narrators.  My favorite narrator is the butler Gabrielle Betteredge who is certain that all of life's answers can be found in the pages of his well worn copy of Robinson Crusoe.  My least favorite character and narrator was Drusilla Clack, a busy body who is constantly forcing her religious pamphlets on friends and relatives.  In fact the one complaint I have about The Moonstone is that the eight chapters narrated by Drusilla distracted from the story and should have been omitted.  Doing so would have tightened up the book in my opinion.

But otherwise I enjoyed The Moonstone.  Along with Bleak House it is considered to be one the first British Detective novels.  It is also a romance and I found The Moonstone to be a classic worthy of praise.

The Warden by Anthony Trollope

"Mr Harding is a good man, the warden to an alms house which provides a peaceful home to twelve old men. The young and zealous John Bold is also a good man, but he believes he sees in Harding's comfortable existence an injustice which must be exposed. The law, the church and the self-righteous national press all have their say in the scandal that ensues, causing a crisis in the hearts and minds of many in the quiet country town of Barchester". - Penguin Books

My thoughts - The Warden (1855) by Anthony Trollope is the first novel in his acclaimed Chronicles of Barsetshire series.  There are six books in the series, all set in the fictional English cathedral town of Barchester.  And having read Trollope's excellent stand alone novel The Way We Live Now, I came to The Warden with high expectations.  The Warden is 113 pages and so I was sure I would have the book finished in three days tops.  

But the Warden took me longer to complete than I anticipated.  I struggled to finish it actually.  I think it's partly because I am not a focused reader these days.  Increasingly I read ten pages of a book then I'm scrolling the internet or turning on the news, picking up another novel and that's not a good way to read.  I need to start committing to a book because otherwise I lose the rhythm.  

That said, if The Warden had held my interest I would have been able to finish it in three days.  It's one of Anthony Trollope's earliest novels and maybe his powers as a writer weren't yet at the heights they would reach in his later classics.   The story itself didn't grab me nor did the characters but I understand that changes as one reads deeper into the Barchester series.

The Warden is the first book I have now read from my Victober list and I am hoping to get to Moonstone by Wilkie Collins and the Heir of Redclyffe by Charlotte Mary Young before the month is through but to do so I will resolve to read thirty pages a night and focus.