Category Archives: 05. A Century of Women

Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith

Deep Water
by Patricia Highsmith
Rating: ★★★★
Publication Date: January 1, 1957
Genre: mystery: silver age (1950-1979)
Pages: 271
ReRead?: No
Project: a century of women

In Deep Water, set in the quiet, small town of Little Wesley, Patricia Highsmith has created a vicious and suspenseful tale of love gone sour. Vic and Melinda Van Allen's loveless marriage is held together only by a precarious arrangement whereby, in order to avoid the messiness of divorce, Melinda is allowed to take any number of lovers as long as she does not desert her family. Eventually, Vic can no longer suppress his jealousy and tries to win back his wife by asserting himself through a tall tale of murder — one that soon comes true. In this complex portrayal of a dangerous psychosis emerging in the most unlikely of places, Highsmith examines the chilling reality behind the idyllic facade of American suburban life.

Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn and domestic suspense don’t exist without Patricia Highsmith.

OK, maybe that is an overstatement – after all, it’s entirely possible that someone not named Patricia Highsmith would have come up with domestic suspense had she not published Ripley, Strangers on a Train and a book like Deep Water. Nonetheless, there is a through-line between Patricia Highsmith and books like Gone Girl.

Patricia Highsmith does not screw around, but she does mess with the reader’s head. And no one that I’ve read describes murder with so much visceral banality. When someone is murdered on the page in a Highsmith book, it is so extraordinarily disturbing – explained with clinical detachment, but also with rapt attention to the physical details and experience of murder.

Deep Water is the exploration of a man who is slowly cracking, but the facade is so resilient and convincing that it takes about 300 pages for him to completely unravel. The ending is utterly unavoidable and still shocking.

The Sleeping Beauty by Elizabeth Taylor

The Sleeping Beauty
by Elizabeth Taylor
Rating: ★★★★
Publication Date: January 1, 1953
Genre: fiction
Pages: 226
ReRead?: No
Project: 2025 read my hoard, a century of women

A subtle love story by one of the most accomplished writers of the 20th century

Vinny Tumulty is a quiet, sensible man. When he goes to stay at a seaside town, his task is to comfort a bereaved friend. Vinny is prepared for a solemn few days of tears and consolation. But on the evening of his arrival, he looks out of the window at the sunset and catches sight of a mysterious, romantic figure: a beautiful woman walking by the seashore. Before the week is over Vinny has fallen in love, completely and utterly, for the first time in his middle-aged life. Emily, though, is a sleeping beauty, her secluded life hiding bitter secrets from the past.

This was my third book by Elizabeth Taylor (the mid-century British author, not the movie star) – I’ve previously read Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (March, 2020) and A Game of Hide and Seek (January, 2019). Elizabeth Taylor makes me think of a slightly more acerbic version of Barbara Pym. There is definitely some acid there, but it is carefully masked.

In August, 2020, I noticed that Virago had issued kindle versions of Taylor’s novels, and that they were very reasonably priced. I thought it was probably a sale price, so I bought 7 of them: The Sleeping Beauty, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (I already owned the paperback, but what the heck, the kindle version was less than a cup of coffee), Blaming, A Wreath of Roses, At Mrs. Lippencotes, In a Summer Season and the Collected Short Stories. The prices don’t seem to have gone up since then, but I’m not sorry I grabbed them, and intend to read them all.

I have liked all three of the novels that I have read so far, and would really struggle to rank them. Elizabeth Taylor excels at characterization, and I always feel as if I really know her characters by the time I close the book. I’m rooting for all of them – even the ones that I didn’t really like (well, hello there Isabella), the ones who do stupid shit (good morning, Vinny), but especially the ones who really seem to deserve to find some happiness (Emily, Laurence, how are you?).

Like Barbara Pym, she seems to write very quiet plots, without much in the way of action. In spite of that, though, her books move forward in a compelling way. No one would call an Elizabeth Taylor novel propulsive, but, honestly, that’s one of the things I like most about mid-century women’s fiction. There is some tension in this book, but it’s a quiet sort of tension – no murder, no mayhem, no car chases. Still, the stakes are high, and, by the end, I was fully committed to these characters.

Autumn by Ali Smith

Autumn
by Ali Smith
Rating: ★★★½
Series: Seasonal Quartet #1
Publication Date: October 20, 2016
Genre: fiction
Pages: 264
ReRead?: No
Project: a century of women, booker prize

Autumn. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. That's what it felt like for Keats in 1819.

How about Autumn 2016?

Daniel is a century old. Elisabeth, born in 1984, has her eye on the future. The United Kingdom is in pieces, divided by a historic once-in-a-generation summer.

Love is won, love is lost. Hope is hand in hand with hopelessness. The seasons roll round, as ever.

Ali Smith's new novel is a meditation on a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, on what harvest means. This first in a seasonal quartet casts an eye over our own time. Who are we? What are we made of? Shakespearian jeu d'esprit, Keatsian melancholy, the sheer bright energy of 1960s Pop art: the centuries cast their eyes over our own history-making.

Here's where we're living. Here's time at its most contemporaneous and its most cyclic.

From the imagination of the peerless Ali Smith comes a shape-shifting series, wide-ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories, and a story about ageing and time and love and stories themselves.

For many years, from the time that I was probably 18 until about 20 years ago, when I was just shy of 40, I read tons of literary fiction – my reading was split pretty evenly between literary fiction and mysteries. In my late 30’s, though, I went on a romance reading binge that lasted for two or three years, and at that point I essentially quit reading contemporary lit fic and have read almost exclusively genre fiction and/or classic/vintage fiction since then. The romance phase was short lived, but the anti-lit-fic phase had staying power.

I can’t exactly say why, but if I had to speculate it is because I grew weary of the great literary fiction theme of late-middle aged men and their obsession with their waning virility.

However, somewhat strangely, I’ve found myself drawn back in the direction of literary fiction – especially literary fiction by women (I am still impatient with literary fiction by men). I picked up Autumn both because I needed a book for 2016, but more importantly because I have a bookish friend who really loves Ali Smith. She is probably a big deal in England, but I had never heard of her.

It’s strange, but in a good way. It’s quite stream of consciousness, and can be difficult to follow. The frame of the story is, basically, a young woman named Elisabeth and her friendship with her very elderly neighbor, Daniel Gluck. Daniel is (now) a centenarian, and is in a coma. Elisabeth is visiting him in the hospital. Within this frame we have Daniel’s memories of his life, Elisabeth’s memories of Daniel, and digressions into Pauline Boty, a British painter and founder of the British pop art movement in the 1960’s, Christine Keeler and the Profumo scandal, and how both of them impacted Daniel (directly) and Elisabeth (indirectly).

The time period of the book is immediately after the Brexit vote, which occurred on 6/23/2016, so there are references to that political conflict.

All across the country, people called each other cunts. All across the country, people felt unsafe. All across the country, people were laughing their heads off. All across the country, people felt legitimized. All across the country, people felt bereaved and shocked. All across the country, people felt righteous. All across the country, people felt sick. All across the country, people said it wasn’t that they didn’t like immigrants. All across the country, people said it was about control. All across the country, everything changed overnight. All across the country, the haves and the have nots stayed the same. All across the country, the usual tiny per cent of the people made their money out of the usual huge per cent of the people. All across the country, money money money money. All across the country, no money no money no money no money.

Sounds exactly like the first (and second) election of Donald Trump.

Autumn is the first book in Smith’s “Seasonal Quartet.” My TBR list is so absurdly long that I cannot even begin to speculate when, or even if, I will get to Winter, Spring and/or Summer.

Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke

Bluebird, Bluebird
by Attica Locke
Rating: ★★★★
Series: Highway 59 #1
Publication Date: September 12, 2017
Genre: mystery: modern (1980-present)
Pages: 320
ReRead?: Yes

A powerful thriller about the explosive intersection of love, race, and justice from a writer and producer of the Emmy winning Fox TV show Empire.

When it comes to law and order, East Texas plays by its own rules--a fact that Darren Mathews, a black Texas Ranger, knows all too well. Deeply ambivalent about growing up black in the lone star state, he was the first in his family to get as far away from Texas as he could. Until duty called him home.

When his allegiance to his roots puts his job in jeopardy, he travels up Highway 59 to the small town of Lark, where two murders--a black lawyer from Chicago and a local white woman--have stirred up a hornet's nest of resentment. Darren must solve the crimes--and save himself in the process--before Lark's long-simmering racial fault lines erupt.

A rural noir suffused with the unique music, color, and nuance of East Texas, Bluebird, Bluebird is an exhilarating, timely novel about the collision of race and justice in America.

This is the first book in the Highway 59 trilogy by Attica Locke, featuring Darren Mathews, a black man and a Texas Ranger. Locke is a screenwriter as well as a novelist – she was a writer on the Fox series Empire – and it definitely shows in this book. It fairly crackles with tension and visitual imagery and would make an incredible piece of streaming television in the Bosch tradition.

Set in Lark, Texas, a small town the piney woods of east Texas, the main character is a deeply conflicted man, torn between his sworn duty as a peace officer and the reality of the racism that entirely infects the culture around him. He becomes involved in the investigation of a black lawyer from Chicago, who was murdered in Lark after he was blamed for the murder of a local white woman, that reaches back into a violent and racist past.

Mathews meets the wife of the murdered lawyer and stubbornly persists in an investigation that everyone, including his superiors in the Rangers, would just as soon he left alone. And his badge cannot protect him as he continues to dig around in the lives of the people living in Lark, who would also prefer that he return to Houston and leave them to their new Klan gatherings and meth dealing. As the investigation unfolds, there are wheels within wheels turning, and it has the potential to cost him everything, from his badge to his marriage to his life.

There are three books in Locke’s trilogy – Heaven my Home and Guide Me Home. The final book was published in September of 2024, and I just haven’t had time to get to it yet.

Some Luck by Jane Smiley

Some Luck
by Jane Smiley
Rating: ★★★★
Series: Last Hundred Years: A Family Saga #1
Publication Date: October 7, 2014
Genre: historical fiction
Pages: 395
ReRead?: No
Project: a century of women

On their farm in Denby, Iowa, Rosanna and Walter Langdon abide by time-honored values that they pass on to their five wildly different yet equally remarkable children: Frank, the brilliant, stubborn first-born; Joe, whose love of animals makes him the natural heir to his family's land; Lillian, an angelic child who enters a fairy-tale marriage with a man only she will fully know; Henry, the bookworm who's not afraid to be different; and Claire, who earns the highest place in her father's heart.

Moving from post-World War I America through the early 1950s, Some Luck gives us an intimate look at this family's triumphs and tragedies, zooming in on the realities of farm life, while casting-as the children grow up and scatter to New York, California, and everywhere in between-a panoramic eye on the monumental changes that marked the first half of the twentieth century. Rich with humor and wisdom, twists and surprises, Some Luck takes us through deeply emotional cycles of births and deaths, passions, and betrayals, displaying Smiley's dazzling virtuosity, compassion, and understanding of human nature and the nature of history, never discounting the role of fate and chance. This potent conjuring of many lives across generations is a stunning tour de force.

I’m going to be leaning in to my Century of Women project in 2025, because I’d really like to finish it. I picked this book for 2014 using the Orange Prize/Women’s Prize website, which has a nice search function (you can find the search page here). It’s searchable by prize year & genre, as well as an author search. The Women’s Prize started in 1996, so there’s almost 30 years worth of women’s fiction on offer.

I read A Thousand Acres by Smiley close to its publication in 1991 – of course I did. It seemed like everyone was reading it at that point. I also read a very early little murder mystery of hers, Duplicate Keys, which I also really liked. Somehow, at that point, she just sort of fell off my radar. I’ve occasionally thought about going back and picking up some of her books in the interim, but it got away from me.

I remember liking the notion behind Some Luck, and the other books in the trilogy when I heard about them around the time of publication. I am a sucker for historical family sagas, and, as well, I was born in Nebraska, so the idea of following a midwestern farm family through the decades appealed to me.

I really enjoyed Some Luck – the Langdon family was interesting and well-drawn, and dedicating one chapter to each year was a nice way to showcase the changes in the community and the family. Some Luck covers the years 1920 through 1953, immediately post-WWI through the Korean War. It focuses on the patriarch – Walter – and the matriarch – Rosanna – of the Langdon family, their six children: Frank, Joe, Mary Elizabeth, Lillian, Henry and Claire Anna, and their farm in Denby, Iowa.

I’m unlikely to use the later two books in the trilogy, Early Warning and Golden Age, for this project, although I do plan to read them at some point, so I can find out what happens with the Langdon family as the century progresses.

In a Lonely Place by Dorothy Hughes

In a Lonely Place
by Dorothy Hughes
Rating: ★★★★½
Publication Date: January 1, 1947
Genre: mystery: golden age (1920-1949), noir
Pages: 206
Project: a century of crime

Postwar Los Angeles is a lonely place where the American Dream is showing its seamy underside—and a stranger is preying on young women. The suggestively named Dix Steele, a cynical vet with a chip on his shoulder about the opposite sex, is the LAPD's top suspect. Dix knows enough to watch his step, especially since his best friend is on the force, but when he meets the luscious Laurel Gray—a femme fatale with brains—something begins to crack. The basis for extraordinary performances by Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame in the 1950 film version of the book, In a Lonely Place tightens the suspense with taut, hard-boiled prose and stunningly undoes the conventional noir plot.

I read this one at the end of March, 2023. I was lucky enough to score a copy of the Library of America edition of Women Crime Writers of the 1940’s for my kindle when it was on sale for $2.99. My edition contains: Laura, by Vera Caspary; The Horizontal Man by Helen Eustis; In a Lonely Place by Dorothy Hughes and The Blank Wall by Elisabeth Sanxay. I have read Laura and In a Lonely Place so far.

In a Lonely Place was also adapted for a well-regarded noir film in 1950, starring Humphrey Bogart. I’ve never seen it, although I understand that the film deviates substantially from the book. I had planned to pair the film with the book, but never managed to do it.

I highly recommend the book. It feels like it was groundbreaking – noir written by a woman, where we spend the entire book inside of the head of the killer, during a time when women were expected to be purely decorative. Yet, somehow, it’s the women of the book who strike the sparks in the narrative. Dix Steele, the main character, is a void.

Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum

Grand Hotel
by Vicki Baum
Translated from: German
Rating: ★★★★
Publication Date: January 1, 1929
Genre: fiction
Pages: 270
ReRead?: No

A grand hotel in the center of 1920s Berlin serves as a microcosm of the modern world in Vicki Baum’s celebrated novel, a Weimar-era bestseller that retains all its verve and luster today. Among the guests of the hotel is Dr. Otternschlag, a World War I veteran whose face has been sliced in half by a shell. Day after day he emerges to read the paper in the lobby, discreetly inquiring at the desk if the letter he’s been awaiting for years has arrived. Then there is Grusinskaya, a great ballerina now fighting a losing battle not so much against age as against her fear of it, and Gaigern, a sleek professional thief, who may or may not be made for each other. Herr Preysing also checks in, the director of a family firm that isn’t as flourishing as it appears, who would never imagine that Kringelein, his underling, a timorous petty clerk he’s bullied for years, has also come to Berlin, determined to live at last now that he’s received a medical death sentence. All these characters and more, with their secret fears and hopes, come together and come alive in the pages of Baum’s delicious and disturbing masterpiece.

I’m looping back to write up posts on books that I’ve assigned to one of my projects but never reviewed. I actually read this one over two years ago, in November, 2022. The only thing I wrote about it (on Goodreads) was: What a strange and compelling book.

One of my favorite bookish podcasts (The Mookse and the Gripes, for anyone who is interested), did an episode on hotel books, which mentioned this book. Hotel books are unique in that they will often bring together characters who, otherwise, would never cross paths. They are like balls on a pool table, hitting one other and changing trajectories. A hotel novel is an ensemble experience, taking place in lavishly decorated lobbies and dingy hotel rooms.

This book is an excellent examplar of the hotel book, with a collection of disparate characters that includes an aging ballerina, a doctor who has suffered an injury, a playboy thief, and a humble book keeper who has been told he is dying and has decided to experience one big blow-out before the end of his life.

Vicki Baum was Jewish, born in Austria. She emigrated to the United States in 1932 and became a U.S. citizen in 1938, dying in Los Angeles in 1960. Her books, originally written in German, were banned by the Third Reich in 1938. In response, she began publishing in English, and she worked as a screenwriter in the 1930’s and 1940’s.

She apparently wrote a sequel to The Grand Hotel, Hotel Berlin, set in the same hotel, in 1943. It doesn’t appear that one has ever been available in English.

Fortunes of War: The Levant Trilogy by Olivia Manning

Fortunes of War: The Levant Trilogy
by Olivia Manning
Rating: ★★★★★
Series: Fortunes of War #2
Publication Date: January 1, 1981
Genre: fiction
Pages: 548
ReRead?: No
Project: a century of women

It’s the spring of 1941 and the German army’s eastward march appears unstoppable. In the Egyptian desert, the young officer Simon Boulderstone, twenty years old and wet behind the ears, waits in dreadful anticipation of his first experience of combat. The people of Cairo are waiting, too. In crowded apartments, refugees from Europe wait; in palm-shaded mansions, Anglo-Egyptians wait. At night they are joined in the city’s bars and cabarets by soldiers on leave, looking for a last dance before going off to the front lines.

Into this mix enter Guy and Harriet Pringle, whose story began in Olivia Manning’s magisterial Balkan Trilogy. They have successfully escaped Nazi-occupied Greece but are dogged by uncertainties about their marriage. And, as Simon discovers that the realities of war are both more prosaic and more terrible than he had imagined, Harriet is forced to confront her precarious health and her place beside her husband.

As is often the case, while I meant to read this second omnibus on the immediate heels of finishing the first, I didn’t. I needed a bit of a break from Harriet and, especially, Guy Pringle. It took me several months to pull this chunkster off my NYRB shelf.

I am so glad I did. When I last left Harriet and Guy, they had managed to publicly shame a quartet (or so) of deeply self-centered jerks into allowing a much larger group of refugees to board their ships for Egypt. This set of three books begins with Harriet and Guy in Cairo. Guy is still bound to employment with The Institute, but there is no one there to oversee him.

The three books in this omnibus are The Danger Tree, published in 1977, The Battle Lost and Won, published in 1978, and The Sum of Things, published in 1981. Harriet and her marriage remain a narrative focus, but Manning adds a second POV character, Simon Boulderstone, a young English soldier who arrives in Egypt at the beginning of The Danger Tree. I really loved his contribution to the story, which brought verisimilitude as well as an emotional anchor to the trilogy.

The title of the first book is a reference to the mango tree which grows outside of the room where Harriet and Guy are living in Cairo. I struggled with Guy in The Balkan Trilogy. That did not change throughout these three books. I know that the entire six book cycle is based, at least in part, on the author’s experience as a young married woman during the war. How she did not punch her husband in the face will remain a mystery for all eternity.

Because Guy is worse, here. He is self-centered and pompous, barely giving his wife a thought from time to time. He has a grotesquely overblown sense of his own importance. When Harriet tries to make him understand that he shouldn’t treat her like shit, his response is basically that she is “a part of him” and he can treat himself like shit if he wants. He constantly puts her last. She should have shoved him out of a window and gone home. There were a few times that I had to rage quit and walk away.

But, even for all of this, I loved this book. It was a journey that I won’t soon forget, and I am already planning to reread it in a few years or so.

I want to close this with the Coda that Manning put at the end of the final book:

Two more years were to pass before the war ended. Then, at last, peace, precarious peace, came down upon the world and the survivors could go home. Like the stray figures left on the stage at the end of a great tragedy, they had now to tidy up the ruins of war and in their hearts bury the noble dead.

I wonder what happened to Simon and Harriet and Guy. Did they return to England and find work in peacetime? Did the Pringle’s marriage survive peace as it survived war? Did Guy ever pull his head out of his ass and figure out how to be a decent human being?

These are questions that will never be answered.

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

Housekeeping
 by Marilynne Robinson
Rating: ★★★★½
Publication Date: March 1, 1980
Genre: fiction
Pages: 219
ReRead?: No
Project: a century of women, classics club round 2
A modern classic, Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, their eccentric and remote aunt. The family house is in the small Far West town of Fingerbone set on a glacial lake, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck, and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience.

Marilynne Robinson has been on my TBR list for decades, at least. When I was putting together my second Classics Club list, I dithered between Housekeeping, her debut novel, and Gilead, her unconnected follow-up. I ultimately settled on Housekeeping. I had little background on the book, and even fewer expectations, when I started.

This book is so beautifully written that the sadness is almost lost in the gorgeous prose. I gather from my research that Robinson was previously on the faculty at University of Iowa, and was part of the well-regarded Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

Housekeeping is the story of a family – told from the perspective of Ruth – that has experienced more than its fair share of tragedy. It begins with the death of Ruth’s grandfather in a spectacular train derailment into Fingerbone Lake off of the long railway bridge into the town of Fingerbone, where he and his wife, Sylvia, live in the home he built. Fingerbone is never situated on a map, but seems to correspond to Sandpoint, Idaho.

The timeframe is also not clearly identified – it feels like it is set in the 1940’s or 1950’s, but that may simply have been because the narrator, Ruthie, isn’t particularly interested in the trappings of modernity. Published in 1980, It seems likely that Ruthie would have been slightly older than I was, so she was probably born in around 1960, which would mean it is occurring in the 1970’s.

Aside from the beautiful writing, it is hard to say that I “liked” this novel. The tone is melancholy and almost elegiac. The actions of most of the women in the book who preceded Ruthie are inexplicable at best, indicative of serious mental health issues. Her mother, Helen, abandons her two girls, Ruthie and Lucille, to their grandmother and commits suicide by driving her car into the same lake that claimed her father. The lake looms large over the family, a reminder of tragedy that is inescapable.

Helen’s older sister, Molly, developed a religious fervor and disappears into China, presumably as a missionary. After Helen’s death, the girls are raised by their grandmother until her death.

After Sylvia dies, the youngest sister, Sylvie, returns to Fingerbone after being essentially a drifter for the years since she has left, and ends up as the caregiver for Ruth and Lucille, a job for which she is poorly equipped. The townspeople ignore the neglect and oddness of the behavior of the three until Lucille decides that she has had enough of the squalor and strangeness of their living situation and leaves to live with a teacher. This seems to breach the code of silence that the three of them have operating within and provides a glimpse to the rest of the community about how things really are in the old, crumbling house within an orchard inhabited by the strange aunt and her two odd school-aged nieces.

The title of the book comes from Sylvie’s increasingly frenetic behavior to try to stave off the removal of Ruthie from her car. Her “housekeeping” before intervention consisted of piling up newspapers and cans in what was previously the parlor of the home:

The visitors glanced at the cans and papers as if they thought Sylvie must consider things appropriate to a parlor. That was ridiculous. We had simply ceased to consider that room a parlor, since, until we had attracted the attention of these ladies, no one ever came to call. Who would think of dusting or sweeping the cobsebs down in a room used for the storage of cans and newspapers – things utterly without value? Sylvie only kept them, I think, because she consider accumulation to be the essence of housekeeping, and because she considered the hoarding of worthless things to be proof of a particularly scrupulous thrift.

Ruth speaks of the conditions in which she is living with no insight to their strangeness. Ultimately, the actions of the Sheriff and well-meaning townspeople lead to far reaching consequences, Sylvie’s attempts to align Ruth’s living conditions with the expectations of the community being inadequate to stop the proceedings that have already begun.

In the same way I’m not sure how I feel about the book, I’m not sure how I feel about the ending.

2023 Reading Plans and Updates

This time of year, I always get excited, thinking about a brand new reading year in the offing, and I start making plans for what I want to tackle in the new year. 2023 isn’t an exception to that rule – in fact, because I am retiring on 9/30, I’m extra excited about the possibility of more reading time at the end of the year.

I still have several ongoing projects that I am working on, and will continue with next year:

With respect to my A Century of Women project, I made a lot of progress early in 2022 and then sort of fizzled out towards the end of the year. I have been struggling with 1900 through 1919 because I haven’t been enthusiastic about the books that I have found for that part of the challenge. I decided to change up the challenge, and, instead of starting in 1900, to start in 1920 and read through 2019. This should open up my book choices a lot and enable me to put this particular project to bed – probably not in 2023, but maybe in 2024, which would be great. I have a follow up project – A Century of Crime – that I have been waiting to start until the finish line is in sight.

I also decided to do the Back to the Classics Challenge this year.

Again, I did really well on this one early in the year. There are a total of 12 prompts, and I have read for & posted about 8 of them. There is 1 more that I can finish off with books I’ve already read. I finished Jane Eyre, which will work for 19th Century Classic. That leaves me with 3 unread. I’m satisfied with that. I think I’m going to pass on this challenge for next year, because I have some other plans.

I also have an ongoing Classics Club project that I largely ignored in 2022. I’d really like to make some progress on this project. I read a few of the books on it, but never got around to writing up a post, so that’s probably going to be something I work on during January. The books are: Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum, The Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning, and Lolly Willows by Sylvia Townsend Warner, all three of which I loved. I DNF’d Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell, which is odd because I usually love her, so I may give that one another try. If it continues to not work for me, I’ll read a different Gaskell. I also started, but lost interest in, The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch. I’m also going to give that one another chance because I didn’t get very far into it, but if it’s not for me, I’m taking Murdoch off the list and adding someone else. Life is too short.

My new projects for next year are:

All of the Agatha Christie mysteries for 2023 (in my GR group) were published in the 1940’s, so I decided to focus on that decade next year. It was a really good decade for mystery publishing, and I’m looking forward to reading a lot of different mystery styles by different vintage authors, both men and women. My library has a lot of the American Mystery Classics reprints, many of which were published during this decade, and there are a number of reprints from BLCC and DSP that are from the ’40s. As a part of this project, I may also watch some film adaptations from the books I read. This will give me a jump start on my Century of Crime project – I expect I will fill in the entire decade by the end of the year.

Because I am planning to focus on mysteries published in the 1940’s, I think it’s time to start this project in earnest.

My final challenge for 2023 is a short story challenge.

My other project for next year is to try to finish the Deal Me In Challenge, which is a short story challenge that I have tried to complete several times and have consistently failed. The basic challenge structure is to assign each card in a deck of cards a different short story, and then draw a card each week to select that week’s story. I will have a separate master post that sets out the stories I have assigned to each card. I have some really great anthologies that I will be reading out of:

Deep Waters: Murder on the Waves: a BLCC anthology edited by Martin Edwards (assigned to Clubs)
The Collected Stories of Willa Cather by Willa Cather (assigned to Hearts)
The Persephone Book of Short Stories, Volume 1: a Persephone anthology edited by Susan Glaspell (assigned to Spades)
Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: an anthology of vintage crime stories written by women, edited by Sarah Weinman (assigned to Diamonds)

The only suit that I haven’t managed to assign at this point is Spades, because the Persephone anthology hasn’t arrived and I can’t find a list of stories anywhere on the internet. My copy isn’t going to be here for a few weeks, but my library has a copy that I can check out to start the project. I am really happy with the anthologies I have chosen for this challenge, so I’m hopeful I can finish it!

There are some other, smaller items I have in my general reading plans – more Maigret, more Inspector Alleyn, catch up on a few series, finish all of Willa Cather’s published works (only 1 novel left, and that short story collection!) read more Dorothy Whipple, Patricia Highsmith, Barbara Pym & Stella Gibbons.