There's an urban legend about an Australian cricketer (baseball's forerunner yes?) David Boon who drank 30 beers on a flight from Melbourne to Sydney. The flight lasts an hour.
Man, the 80s.

I thought baseball was like America's sport - how come no one is watching? I agree with your assessment, btw.

I've gotta think about this - I wasn't expecting it. I'll get back to you!

Yes, there is a lyricism to Chandler which makes all the dirt somehow noble. Hammett never lets you get away with it.

I read Kidnapped this year and sort of remember reading an abridged version as a tyke. I liked RLS's writing a lot more as a child which made me sad because Treasure Island was like a home for me when I was younger. I don't think I'll risk re-reading it.

And, unrelated to that, The Lathe of Heaven, which is kind of like Ursula Le Guin by way of Philip K. Dick.

I remember sneering at The Golden Bowl and James' doing of a similar thing - three pages on a character's thoughts as she looks at something for an instant. But I was 22 and stupid. I'm nearly 40 and I still think about that sequence.

Wow - ambitious year.
I've read none of them! But may do so next year.

I've only read The Secret History so I am unqualified to disagree, but I will! I think that may be the theory but she creates a glamour around her monied characters. In both ways I suppose. As someone to whom those kinds of people are very much mythological, I left TSH feeling that Tartt loved these people and found a…

I read The Secret History last year ? after I found it in an op shop and really didn't see what the fuss was. For me the only bit of writing that seemed alive was in the prologue and the rest was the expected 'good' writing that Americans seem to excel at. Also I am not white enough to get the importances in the book…

You may be the person I warned of the series after book three. If not STOP now. Seriously. Especially Wizard and Glass. It is terrible. But the momentum returns in the following books (I haven't read the 7th?latest) but what they do to the story was hard for me.

Lord of Light and JS and MrN are two of my favourite books. Isn't Susanna Clarke a wonder?

The Golem and The Djinni is my benchmark for fantasy fiction now. I am so jealous of her command of the worlds she creates. I'm curious to know what you consider to be the loose end, and why you thought the ending was weird. I love talking about this book but no one I know has really read it.

Mr Bennet is a troglodyte.
Darcy is overrated, but his digs? Now there's a passionate love story.

That reminds me that I only read Frankenstein this year (I'd read a lot of stage adaptations and thought I understood the ur-text). Mary Shelley was straight up a genius and a damned fine prose technician. Wonderful book. It's haunting really.

I have read the first three, then I found The Other Wind in an op shop, but haven't read it yet as I've been looking for the other two also in op shops and failing for like a year (why don't I use libraries?) because it seemed like a quest or something.

Oh what a great analysis of The Earthsea books. I was trying to explain them to someone recently and didn't come even a little close.

Red Harvest is brutalistic and so good.

The Marriage Plot

Thanks for this!