The Captive Reader

credit: Horia Varlan (flickr)

Retrospective posts seem to be going up on blogs everywhere as 2011 draws to a close.  I have been loving the many 2011 favourites lists, which making for some excellent and very tempting reading.  My list is a few days off, both because I’m finishing off a book that might very well make it on and because I find it excruciatingly difficult to pass judgement on the many wonderful books I’ve read.  I’ll draft a list one day and then come back the next and wonder what I was thinking; how could I have though ——– was worthy of the list?  How could I have excluded ———?  List making is serious business, a delicate art rather than science, and I have some difficult choices ahead of me.

Less challenging, thankfully, is recapping the challenges I participated in this year (excluding the Canadian Book Challenge 4, which wrapped up at the end of June): the Victorian Literature Challenge and the Eastern European Reading Challenge.

My goal for the Victorian Literature Challenge was to read between 5 and 9 books.  I had an enormous amount of fun coming up with a book list for this challenge and then promptly ignored all Victorian lit for several months.  As usual when I spend hours making a reading list for a challenge, I ended up reading almost nothing from it.  It took me until April to get started on the challenge, with a wonderful reread of Wives and Daughters, one of my all-time favourite books.  I then read Agnes Grey and, in Anne, finally found a Brontë sister whose work I can enjoy.  I tried Mrs Oliphant for the first time, reading her novellas The Rector and The Doctor’s Family, and was not particularly won over (though listening to the BBC radio dramatization of Miss Marjoribanks this autumn has made me wonder if I shouldn’t give Oliphant another chance).  And, most wonderfully of all, I finally discovered Trollope.  I enjoyed The Warden but fell completely in love with The American Senator.  Reading Trollope has truly been one of the delights of 2011 and, having now amassed a considerable collection of his novels, I plan to continue my enjoyment in 2012 (and, most likely, every year after, reading and then rereading).

Here is the list of what I read for this challenge, with snippets from each review:

Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell (highly recommended)
“Gaskell’s straightforwardness has always appealed to me. Artifice and obfuscation are the talents of her minor characters, never her heroes or heroines, admirable for their plain speaking and clarity of purpose. Never is this contrast clearer than between Molly and her stepsister Cynthia. Cynthia bursts into the novel and into Molly’s life in a whirl of colour and energy. She is beautiful and captivating, spirited and somewhat mysterious. She can be all things to all people, knowing how to act best to please each member of her audience. And though the contrast between her and the honest, direct Molly is great, they quickly become close confidents, true sisters…”

Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë
“This is not an affectionate portrayal of the life of a governess. It stresses the isolation Agnes feels in the households where she is employed, how powerless she is in dealing with both the children and the adults but, generally, it is by no means a dreary book. If anything, it attempts to cover too many things in too few pages, turning this into a book crammed with wit, romance, a shocking amount of moralizing (usually expressed with some painfully affected writing), and some rather heavy themes (isolation and oppression being the two main ones). It is an interesting but confusing mix.”

The American Senator by Anthony Trollope (highly recommended)
“After reading The American Senator by Anthony Trollope, I am now certain that Trollope will become one of my favourite authors. I had suspected as much before but, now that I have finally read him, I know. So chatty, so funny, so detailed, so entertaining – this book was everything that a book should be!”

The Rector and The Doctor’s Family by Margaret Oliphant
“I found Oliphant’s writing style unmemorable and uneven, with some quite clever passages followed by pages and pages of dull plodding stuff, and her tendency to moralize reminiscent of all those lesser Victorian novelists who rely on sentiment rather than skill.”

The Warden by Anthony Trollope
“What I particularly loved about The Warden were Trollope’s descriptive passages. Most of these were mere tangents to the main plot, with Trollope poking fun at newspaper men, politicians, clergymen, lovers, spouses…really anyone and everyone who could possibly be woven into the story however remotely, but they had me giggling away throughout the book. It is these passages that allow the observant, witty narrator to establish himself as the most entertaining character of all.”

And then there was the Eastern European Reading Challenge.  My aim was to read 12 books either by authors from or set in Eastern Europe.  Considering the generous definition of ‘Eastern’ (here, “Eastern Bloc” countries are all considered Eastern, regardless of their actual geographic orientation), I thought this would be a breeze.  It really just seemed like a challenge tailor made to encourage me to read more Czech literature, history, and biographies, maybe with a dash over to Russia or Hungary for a bit of variety.  Again, there was a delightful book list made to start things off and, again, I ended up reading very little from it (3 titles, somewhat better than the 1 I managed from the Victorian lit list).  I started off well but then read nothing for the challenge between June and November.  Whoops.  Readers may have noticed a flood of reviews over the last few weeks of Eastern European titles in my desperate attempt to catch up and meet my targeted 12.  But with only a few days left in 2011 and mountains of other, non-Eastern European books that I’m eager to read, I am officially admitting defeat and calling it quits at 11 books.  Though it was hectic towards the end, I had an amazing time with this challenge.  I ventured well outside of my comfort zone and found some absolute delights on my journey (The Snows of Yesteryear, The Gardener’s Year, Skylark, and Prague Tales stand out – several of which are currently in competition for spots on my Best of 2011 list).  This challenge did absolutely what a challenge is meant to do: it expanded my horizons as a reader, enriching my life by introducing me to the unfamiliar.

Here are the 11 (sadly, not 12) books I read:

A Mountain of Crumbs by Elena Gorokhova
“…a good but certainly not great memoir of Gorkhova’s life growing up in St. Petersburg during the 1960s and 1970s. Gorokhova is charming and at times quite engaging; overall, it was a pleasant but not particularly special or memorable reading experience.”

The Snows of Yesteryear by Gregor von Rezzori (highly recommended)
“Strictly speaking, yes, this is a memoir but really it is von Rezzori telling the life stories of those who surrounded him in his childhood and adolescence. He is their biographer but also our subject. Through portraits of five others – his nurse, his mother, his father, his sister, and his governess – von Rezzori tells the story of his family and his early life, a strangely rootless existence begun in Czernowitz (in Austria-Hungary) in 1914. His homeland eventually became part of Romania and von Rezzori seems to have accepted and love his new country though he was ethnically anything but Romanian.”

The Russian Album by Michael Ignatieff
“… a thoughtful, intimate book, absolutely worthy of all the praise that has been heaped upon it since it was first published in 1987.”

Far to Go by Alison Pick
“This really should be a book that I have strong feelings about – it was, after all, a book I was quite excited to read, so much so that I requested a copy from the publisher; when have I ever been able to refuse a book about Czechoslovakia, never mind one set in the exciting years of 1938 and 1939 and written by a Canadian? And yet even as I was reading it, I felt strangely disconnected from it. It was neither glaringly bad nor especially good.”

The Gardener’s Year by Karel Čapek (highly recommended)
“Even new as I am to the obsession, my own recent gardening plights, the missteps and mistakes that were weighing heavily on my soul, were perfectly echoed by Čapek, as though he had been in the garden witnessing my incompetence only a few days previously…”

The Legends of Prague by František Langer
“While these stories are definitely friendlier and less bloodthirsty than the ones I adored as a child, they are still captivating and delightful. And they do what any book about Prague should do: bring the magic of that city to life, allowing the reader, regardless of age, to take as a matter of fact that normal Praguers share drinks with known water sprites and headless horsemen, that statues act as godparents, and that saints still shape the city as they wish to see it, regardless of the bureaucrats’ intentions. Because if it could happen anywhere, it would be there…”

Skylark by Dezső Kosztolányi (highly recommended)
“When the Vakjay’s beloved, spinster daughter Skylark leaves for a week to visit relatives, Mother and Father don’t know quite what to do with themselves. Their lives revolve around their much loved, ugly, dull daughter and in her absence they find themselves doing the most unexpected things. They dine out, reconnect with old friends and make new ones, go to the theatre, and Father even attends one of the Panther drinking club’s infamous Thursday nights (which all of Friday is needed to recover from). It is an inversion of the classic plot of children running wild once adult authority and supervision is removed, but here it is Skylark, the child, whose mild, loving attentions and constant presence at home restricts her parents.”

Sunflower by Gyula Krúdy
“…a strange, strange novel and not in a particularly endearing way. If I hadn’t been reading it for the Eastern European Reading Challenge, I’m not sure I would have stuck with it until the end. It confirmed all of my family’s most dearly held prejudices against Hungarians. Here, they are the dramatic, suicidal, alcoholic, crazy, passionate and rather obsessive eccentrics I have been forever warned about and yet are sadly uninteresting.”

How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed by Slavenka Drakulić (highly recommended)
“Although this was written twenty years ago, I was astonished by how informative I found it, how many of the essays brought new details to my attention that have never been mentioned in the histories or even memoirs that I’ve read covering the same area during the same time period. I may be astonished by that, but Drakulić would not be. She knows that the lives and stories she is concerned with, those of normal, unexceptional women, are the ones most easily ignored and most quickly forgotten. And yet by lacking any kind of political power, they were the ones whose lives most clearly mirrored the politics of the day…”

Café Europa by Slavenka Drakulić
“Here, the essays are more cynical, more disappointed, written in the mid-90s when Drakulić was clearly frustrated by the lack of change in post-communist Europe. The governments may have changed but people’s attitudes have not. Whether it is people lying to and cheating the customs officials or the widespread apathy when a democratic government behaves with the arrogance and secrecy of a communist one, citizens mourning a dictator or Bulgarians grudgingly providing customer ‘service’ with a grimace rather than a smile, Drakulić’s observations are always intelligent and absorbingly personal.”

Prague Tales by Jan Neruda (highly recommended)
“All set in the Malá Strana district of Prague…the stories were originally written in the 1860s and 1870s before being collected and published together in Czech in 1878. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect before I started reading. Neruda is primarily remembered as a poet and these are certainly not what I would expect from a poet. Tender and sharp, witty and sympathetic, each story reveals Neruda’s skill as a realist.”

I truly loved my reading challenges for 2011, despite a few issues along the way, and am now in the midst of trying to decide what to join for 2012.  The Eastern European Reading Challenge is being continued so that is a definite option but I do also like the idea of trying something new.  If you’re participating in or are hosting any challenges next year that you think I might be interested in, please let me know!