Friday Reads – on Saturday

It’s been a couple of weeks since I posted, so I’m going to do a recap and preview today. My mom was in town for a visit, and we went on a quilting retreat for five days. This is something that we’ve done together for the last four years – I’m not a very good quilter, but she’s really accomplished, and it’s a lot of fun. Quilters are typically a pretty interesting group – lots of retired nurses and teachers. And, quilting and reading go together somehow, so there’s usually a lot of book chat to go along with the sewing.

Anyway, to recap! I finished The Last Chronicle of Barset. That is a huge book, and is a wonderful wrap up to the sequence. I love Barsetshire – this is my second visit and I think I enjoyed it even more than the first read. I will be rereading these books forever. My plan was to start Kristin Lavransdatter, but I had also promised to do a read-along of He Knew He Was Right in one of my GR groups with a few people. I couldn’t do both, so I’ve pushed out Sigrid Undset, and started He Knew He Was Right. I’m about 300 pages in at this point and, spoiler alert, he was not right.

As for Kristin Lavransdatter, that’s on an indefinite hold. It was meant to be one of my six long reads for the year, but I’m subbing it out at this point. My plan was to read Moby Dick in September/October and then a Dickens in November/December. I’m always wanting to read Dickens in December. I have Hard Times and Great Expectations as possibles (GE is a reread, HT is new). Neither of those are particularly long, so I may insert Kristin Lavransdatter into the post-Dickens December/January/February.

I also finished the Cazalet Chronicles! I enjoyed this simmering, immersive series so much that I think that I need to read more multi-part family saga style books. It was different, but reminded me of the Fortunes of War sextet by Olivia Manning, which I also loved. I’m collecting multi-book sagas right now, so if you have any ideas, drop them in the comments. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

1. The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy
2. Swann Family Saga by R.F. Delderfield
3. The Passing Bells by Philip Rock
4. The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell
5. The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz

I’ve also read 4 of the 6 Philip Marlowes – I just finished The Little Sister last night. I have The Long Goodbye & Playback left, and I’m going to save them until August. I re-read The Talented Mr. Ripley and – once I finish He Knew He Was Right – I’m going to reread The Ambassadors by Henry James. I’ve already located my copy, and it’s sitting in the book cart.

So, what is on the immediate agenda?

1. He Knew He Was Right by Anthony Trollope. This is the only time I will put this book on the Friday Reads image, but it will take me several weeks to read because it is almost 1000 pages long. I think it may be Trollope’s longest book.
2. Knave of Diamonds by Laurie R. King. Installment 19 in the Mary Russell & Sherlock Holmes series, I’ve been planning to fit this one in since it was published on June 10. I had a break in my scheduled, so here we go.
3. Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple. If my history with Whipple holds true, I will devour this book in a single, long, lazy day.