A pretty great month of reading if you look purely at the numbers:  23 total books, 3 of them 5-star reads and 4 just missing perfection at 4.5 stars.  Just one DNF.

 

Slightly less great is how many of those came from my April TBR Pile:  just the 6 listed above, although I'm currently reading 2 of the others: The Folio Book of Comic Short Stories and The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York.  

 

That means I've totally blown off reading Undeniably Yours and A Morbid Taste for Bones.  I'd look at them on the table and just think "meh", then go find something else to read. The monthly stacks are working though; I'm getting to the books that I want to read but keep getting nudged aside for newer books.

 

Non-fiction read (* = 4.5/5 stars):

*The Etymologicon

*The Hotel on Place Vendome

Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

Carrots Love Tomatoes: Secrets of Companion Planting for Successful Gardening 

Dr. Seuss & Co. Go to War

 

Fiction read (* = 4.5/5 stars):

The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend

*The House at the End of Hope Street 

Love in a Nutshell

*Something Rotten

Crime and Poetry

The Conspiring Woman

Whispers in the Reading Room

Austenland 

*The Madwoman Upstairs 

Counterfeit Conspiracies 

The Cracked Spine

*The Other Side of Midnight

 

Hope everyone had a great April.

One of Mayle's follow-ups to A Year in Provence (there are at least two), this one read more like a collection of short essays of the type that might have perhaps been columns in a newspaper or magazine.

 

Nevertheless, it was thoroughly enjoyable and dangerous to read him describing a life that sounds so purely wonderful, especially as the days here turn cold and short.  Reading this is a taste of the beautiful, warm life of a small village in Provence.

Since I did much better with my semi-planned reading in March than I thought I might, I'm trying it again this month with the above books, some of which have been sitting in the TBR pile for a very long time.  No non-fiction bricks this month, so perhaps I can get through the stack this time.

 

Happy reading!

When MT and I were on our mini-break and I was doing damage in a small UBS in Bright, the owner and I were chatting and she told me she got quite a bit of her stock from a man here in Melbourne, in a neighborhood just 20 minutes from me.  He's only open on the weekends and doesn't advertise - which perversely, made me want to visit his shop.  So I went last Sunday and I figured, while I was at it, it would only make sense to stop at any nearby UBSs too, right?  For comparison's sake...

 

4 UBSs later... (and 4 parcels in the post)

 

What can I say?  I came, I saw, I bought.  I'm going to blame mom: she always let me buy whatever books I wanted as a child, you know, to encourage a love of reading. But we lived an hour away from the closest bookshops and the internet didn't exist so she could be magnanimous, little knowing she was creating a bibliophile with a total lack of impulse control.  Love you mom!

 

I'm not going to do this in two posts, so here are the rest of the books that didn't fit above:  (All the images link to their respective BookLikes pages.)

 

            

 

That last one that looks vaguely Masonic is actually the Folio Society edition of The Scarlet Pimpernel.

 

I'm a little red-faced over the sheer number of them, so I'm not going to mention them all individually.  I've always wanted a copy of The Canterville Ghost because I loved the TV adaptation as a child.  The Peter Mayle books are follow-ups to A Year in Provence which I liked in that way you like a Food Network show.  Banvard's Folly: Tales Of Reknowned Obscurity, Famous Anonymity And Rotten Luck is the book Paul Collins talked about writing in Sixpence House and the UBS owner said it was really good.

 

The Holt and Rinehart books are throwbacks to Mom's bookcase and ever since I heard about Agatha Christie going surfing, I wanted to read her autobiography.

 

Since I've enjoyed Angela Thirkell, I decided to up my game and give Pym a try and the Heyers I took a chance on: I love some of her stuff and others were just... not worth mentioning.  Hopefully I picked some winners.

 

So...

Total new books this week:  16

Total books read this week:  3

Total physical books on TBR: 217

After rereading A Year in Provence, my next logical book to read was Toujours Provence, Peter Mayle's follow-up to the wildly successful A Year in Provence. To be honest, while I could remember reading the first book, I had no recollection of reading Toujours Provence and now I remember why.::: When a Sequel Isn't a Sequel :::A Year in Provence dealt with Mayle and his wife's move to Provence, near the Lubéron, their struggles with the language, their interesting neighbors, and the renovations they were making to their house while they explored their new neighborhood. That book progressed logically a month at a time; relationships developed over periods of months; and renovations progress or don't progress as the year goes by.Toujours Provence takes the familiar neighbors, workmen, and narrative structure and tosses them all right out the window. No longer is there any sort of continuity to Mayle's writing, but rather a collection of short vignettes, some of which might tie into an earlier story or theme, but most that just seem like a glimpse into lives we were given a front-row seat to in A Year in Provence.Chapters in Toujours Provence are given actual titles, a departure from the month titles of the previous book, and it's very telling. The titles feel like titles to magazine articles, which each short section might very well be. We get short stories without much follow-through, and as the book progresses, the readers is left to feel almost as if they are being pushed back from an interesting scene by a police barricade. A first glimpse of the Mayles' life as Madame Mayle adopts a new dog (bringing their total to three) toward the beginning of the book gives way to fewer and fewer mentions of Madame Mayle, fewer interactions with the fascinating neighbors like Massot and Faustin we met in A Year in Provence, and more and more of a feeling that Mayle is saying the "nos" to his readers that he isn't able to say to the guests who invite themselves for vacations at his house.::: Is It Horrible? :::Toujours Provence is in no means a horrible book, and if expectations after A Year in Provence weren't so high, it would probably be a very decent read: witty and interesting. But I don't find it odd at all that there were several reviews of the first book, which won awards, and no reviews of Toujours Provence, because it just isn't that memorable a book. I think that Mayle kept the reader at too far a distance with this book for it to be the must-read that its predecessor was, and that's a great loss.This review previously published at Epinions: http://www.epinions.com/review/Toujours_Provence_by_Peter_Mayle/content_163015265924