Folktales to begin the new year, and the books I didn't read (again)

Books I Can't Wait for in the New Year
So there I was on Friday, looking through the Guardian book site on my lunch time at work.  This is always a dangerous thing to do, since I am always finding out about books I haven't read yet.  This is what happened

on Friday.

It's not out here until the beginning of January, but honestly, after reading in the Guardian this review by Neil Gaiman on this Alan Garner new book, who could resist this?  It looks so good, so perfect, a lovely way to begin the new year. 

Among Others by Jo Walton is out on Jan 3 in softcover.  I've been waiting 8 months for this.   All of you who've read it - Carl, Memory, Nymeth,  have loved it.  I so want to read it too!  Two weeks now, and counting......
 The House at Sea End by Elly Griffiths is also out in softcover Jan 3. I think I like this day already.  This is part of the ongoing Ruth Galloway series which I am really enjoying.

Since I don't own these yet, I thought I'd ask you, what books are you waiting for to come out in the new year?

Random thoughts from other people's blogs:
In news around the book blogging world, Carl has a wonderful post up on books he thought he would have read by now, and hasn't, and wants plans to read next year.  If you have some of your own (and I dare any book reader to not come up with a list of those!), let Carl know what they are.  My  post today is in answer to some of the questions he asked in his wonderful, thoughtful post.

Nymeth also has a wonderful post on books she wants to read as soon as they are out next year.  I've already checked out the Diana Wynne Jones book on writing, which Amazon sadly isn't even listing here yet.

****Edited to add: I had to get off the computer in a hurry as the children were waiting to use it to search for cheats for their Star Wars Wii game.  While I was off, I remembered I had read Care's lovely post about how she failed at reading certain books this year, and challenges, here.  So if you are like us, drop us a line so we don't feel quite so guilty alone about not being the kind of readers we think we should be.  It's all in fun, I know, both wanting to be more well-read, and the plans we make for reading.  It's awfully fun to cross books off the to-read list!!!*******

Some books I thought I'd read this year, and haven't:
Certainly I have books I thought I would have read by now - indeed, Ulysses is top of that list, since I started it last winter, and it languishes on my to be read pile, along with Samuel Pepys Diary, which I also really want to read, started two years ago, and then got sidetracked.  That's only two.  Any Charles Dickens this year - and I'd better finish A Christmas Carol this year, or I am in trouble with myself! **I just checked, and I now own 4 novels by Dickens, PLUS Drood by Dan Simmons, which I also haven't read.  Points finger at self: read Charles Dickens in 2012, Susan! I haven't read either of the annotated Jane Austens I picked up,  nor have I finished the House by The Thames by Gillian Tindall, which I started reading when I got it out of the library, went out and bought my own copy, and now it sits on the same shelf. I wonder if it's possible to have ADHD  when it comes to reading??? Kraken or Perdido Street Station by China Mieville.   I really can't believe I haven't read Boneshaker by Cherie Priest yet.   Or Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb - I have loved the other two series.  So how have I missed this series?  Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden. Oh, there is so much I planned to read this year and haven't yet!  The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Settlefield. A Visit from the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan.

 Books I thought I'd read by now in my life, and haven't.  That's a harder question to answer.  Ulysses, certainly. Any novel by Ursula K LeGuin.  The Gentleman's Daughter by Amanda Vickery.  London the Biography by Peter Ackroyd. Bleak House by Charles Dickens.  Anything by Neal Stephenson - I own Cryptonomicon, Anathem, and Quicksliver.   Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A Heinlein.  I can't believe I haven't read Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist, when I loved the Swedish version of the movie so much that I bought it, and everyone who has read the book says it is one of the best vampire novels ever, and I loved  his Handling the Undead earlier this year.  I really can't believe I haven't read Boneshaker by Cherie Priest yet.    Anything by Anthony Trollope. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons. War and Peace, on every 'I will read this year' list I've ever done. Emily Dickinson.

100 books?
So for the next week, I am setting some reading goals for 2012.  I've been looking at all the challenges surfacing, and thinking over joining some.  I did discover that I read more when I have lots of room for spontaneity.  While it's still in question if I will reach 100 books read this year - 10 books in 10 days, more or less....Christmas and New Year's in the midst of that......I remain optimistic that I will.  I already have had the best reading year in the past 15 years that I've been keeping a book list.  That is something, my friends, something indeed. So I am very proud of what I've accomplished, even if I might fall just short of my goal. My next post will be on the books I did manage to read this year and there are some that I am delighted I did get around to reading, and some new ones that thrilled me.

Meanwhile, Gentle Reader, let me know - are you happy with your reading year?  Is there anything you are really looking forward to coming out in 2012?

I hope you are finding some reading time today, on this Sunday before Christmas!

From a Death of a Joyce Scholar to Joyce's Ulysses, how one book leads to another.....

I guess my title of this post gives it away, doesn't it?  The Death of a Joyce Scholar by Bartholomew Gill is the first book I've read for the Irish Reading Challenge for this year.  I've read a couple of the Peter McGarr mysteries before, many years ago, but this is my first one in some time.  I found it second-hand, and grabbed it because I thought, well, it's about Joyce and Ulysses, and once upon a time a very good friend of my father's loved Ulysses and thought it the greatest book ever written in the English language.  I think that was supposed to encourage me - me, an English Literature Honours student! - to pick it up, but sadly it made me afraid to read it, because if it was the best novel ever written, what hope was there for me as a hopeful writer to even bother writing?  So I plugged on with my writing and kept Ulysses on the back burner.  But I never forgot it.  Who knows what Fate had in mind when I picked up The Death of  a Joyce Scholar in early February? 
In The Death of a Joyce Scholar, Kevin Coyle,  a professor of James Joyce and Trinity Professor,  is found stabbed to death on Bloomsbury, the annual June 16 celebration in Dublin , the day that Ulysses occurs over in the book. Kevin is such a James Joyce scholar that he has had one book about Joyce published, and a new one just about to be - 5 days before his death.  He also has such a fine voice and good memory that he is able to quote pages and scenes from the book, and plays the role of Stephen Dedalus from the book on a tour he runs with his colleague, Fergus Flood.  It was at the ending of this annual night's tour of Dublin following in the footsteps of  the two characters in Ulysses as they move through Dublin over an 18-hour period, that Kevin is killed.  His body is discovered in the night, and moved, and it is only when Kevin's wife seeks out Peter as 'one of us' that his murder is discovered.  For she has his body at their home, propped up on their bed. 

And this is the beginning of a remarkable book.  Not just because it's a good mystery, but because the author has managed to write themes from Ulysses into the characters and themes and of course, the setting.  Chief Superintendent Peter McGarr has not read Ulyssess, but after the first couple of days  of investigating the case, so many of the people involved in and around Coyle are Joyce specialists - his colleagues, past-over student, publisher, who all quote James Joyce and Samuel Beckett to McGarr and the investigating team as a way of showing their superiority and intellectual prowess - that after his own wife guesss that McGarr hasn't read Ulysses, he decides he should, if he is going to understand the myriad threads that make up the motives of the characters.   So we see him settle down to read Ulysses, one night well into the investigation.  Along the way, he stops to think about what he is reading, and says:

        "In his earlier attempts to read Ulysses, McGarr had discovered that the only availing approach for the novice reader was to consult the 'guide' often and in depth.  But he now found himself forgetting the many allusions to symbol, history, and myth and merely "listening" to the words on the page, much as he would listen to a piece of music.
     "It was a particularly Irish song, he understood from the first page, and  a particularly Dublin ditty - now melodic and fine, later rough and raspy, then rambling and vague and what McGarr thought of as ethereal, counterbalanced by a focus as sharp and unsparing as any microscope.........
      "The novel reminded him of the complex weave of voices raised in complaint, laughter, song, noise, and lament that he had heard all his life in one or another Dublin licensed premises, which could not have changed since Joyce's era."

It is that last sentence that caught my eye, and above all, convinced me to haul down my own copy of Ulysses, and open the first page.  There were Stephen Dedalus, and Leopold Bloom, the originals, on the morning of the day in question, June 16, shaving in the early light.  And on page 7 I had to stop and catch my breath, for a phrase leapt off the page and I saw it, the way I've seen it so many times back when I lived on the sailboat, the light of the sun and the clouds on the sea's surface: "A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, shadowing the bay in deeper green."  I know exactly what that looks like, what it feels like.  That's when I knew I have to read this book now, finally.

So The Death of a Joyce Scholar  is a mystery that has become much more than just a mystery for me.  The way the book ends also is deliberately written to echo the ending of Ulysses, with a modern woman in a soliloquy over  a man, and ending with the very end of Molly Bloom's soliloquy about yes, which is a fine way to end both this mystery and a novel about a day in the life of Dublin.

I can hardly wait to read Ulysses now, even though I am still nervous.  I like the idea of it as a novel about the song of life pulsing through Dublin, all the lows and highs and thoughts and memories, songs and faith and tears that make up a city where people live together. I think it will be interesting to see how much this novel is of Ireland, and if I understand any part of the melody, if being Irish isn't just being born in  Ireland, but is something we carry in the soul, too.  So all of us with Irish ancestors, carry some of this song too.  That the enormous flux of Irish people from Ireland took the song of being Irish out into the world, though the eternal song is always back there in the green hills of the country, and noisy streets of Dublin. I'll see, and let you know.

Meantime, I really enjoyed The Death of a Joyce Scholar.  I think every character lied, or hid the truth - certainly, this mystery was written in homage to Joyce, as every main character has thoughts and impulses in their part of the song of the investigation, thoughts they barely notice, impulses they act on, instincts that they use, and as the story unfolds, each of their movements help propel the story along, until each character, with a tiny moment in view or taking up chapters, is firmly in place in the mystery.  Every character is Irish in some way, from the lesbian Mary to the beautiful and free Catty who causes her own misfortune, from Coyle's wife who as a large woman looks like Joyce's own Noreen (commented on a few times in the mystery), to the way all the characters lie, whether evading questions from their spouses or hiding what happened to Ward's gun from the press, to the mystery surrounding who exactly plunged the knife into Kevin's chest.  It's funny, the amount of liars, innocents and cheats, there are in this book - in a way, The Death of  a Joyce Scholar is a miniature mystery slice of Dublin with echoes of Ulysses all the way through, and all the more enjoyable because it's a mystery that discusses books, literature, and the meaning - or not- of words.  It's also funny, with macabre moments and hilarious lawyer double-talk.  
4.7/5, and another half-star for convincing me that I could read Ulysses, at long last.

Read for Irish Reading Challenge