100 different books by 100 different authors – 1850 to 1949!

I realised some time ago that the way to finish a  project like this was to take my time; to focus on it when I want to and to put it to one side when I want to read other things. I’m reading the books I want to read. Sometimes I realise that a book I want to read will fill a year; and sometimes I think it’s time I filled another year and see if I can spot a book to fill a gap.

That’s why it’s been nearly a year and a half since my last 10% report; and it’s also why since looking at my list of possible books a few weeks ago I’ve read four of them and have several more sitting on my bedside table because I really want to read them soon!

I want to press on with this  100 Years of Books project, and maybe finish by the end of the year.

Now that I have read seventy books I really feel that the end is in sight and that this can be done.

But I say maybe because I know I’ll want to read other things, and I’m never going to tell myself that I can’t.

And I am never going to read a book just to fill a year; every book on the list is going to be one I wanted to read for its own sake.

I really want to see the final list one day – 100 years, 100 books and 100 authors!

Today though I just have my latest ten books – here they are:

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1870 – Man and Wife by Wilkie Collins

‘The very best things were the points that were made about the absurdities of marriage laws and the inequity of men and women in marriage. They were powerfully made and they were utterly right. That is both this books greatest strength and its greatest weakness. The author seems over-bearing when he addresses the reader directly; and his wish to make his point sometimes bends his characters and their stories out of shape.’

1871 – Desperate Remedies by Thomas Hardy

‘Thomas Hardy wrote a good sensation novel; and it was lovely to read that story mixed with the things that Hardy did so well. That made it feel familiar and yet unlike any other book I’ve read. I’m glad though that he didn’t continue down that route, and that he went on to do the other things he began to do well in this book even better as his writing career progressed.’

1872 – The Runaway by Elizabeth Anna Hart

‘I loved Clarice for her lovely mix of imagination and sensibleness; and I appreciated that she was good not for its own sake but because the world and the people around her cared for her and she cared for them and wanted them to be happy. I loved Olga for her vitality, her joie de vivre, and her gift for doing the unexpected. The story shows them both off so well, a dramatic conclusion bring the best out of both of them, and I was captivated from the first page to the last.’

1880 – A Strange Disappearance by Anna Katherine Green

‘Anna Katherine Green constructed a very cunning plot, and she wrote very well. The story could have been set in any of a number of periods, but her writing style and her handling of romance places it very firmly in the Victorian era. When I read ‘The Leavenworth Case’ I saw the influence of Wilkie Collins, and I see it again in this book.’

1890 – An Australian Girl by Catherine Martin

‘ ‘An Australian Girl’ is the story of Stella Courtland. She was beautiful, articulate, and sociable; and she loved the world around her and all the things she could do in that world just as much as she loved her books and intellectual pursuits. She was one of the youngest children of a large family, most of her siblings had scattered, and only the youngest were left at home with their widowed mother. Stella was ready to fly, but she would never flout the conventions of society’

1896 – Beauty’s Hour by Olivia Shakespear

‘The plot is well constructed, and the story moves along at a good pace. It makes its points well, and though some of them might feel obvious they were points that were definitely worth making clearly. It was fantastical, but there was enough truth in the characters and the situations to make it feel real and to make me believe that it might have happened. And the suspense, the atmosphere, was perfect.’

1908 – Crossriggs by Jane and Mary Findlater

‘The story was beautifully positioned between two different eras. Much of it feels wonderfully Victorian, but Alex is quite clearly a ‘New Woman’ caught up in small town life. The influences were clear. There are definite echoes of a particular Jane Austen novel in the characters and the relationships, and there were something in the style and in the drawing of the community that told me that the Findlater sisters must have read and loved Trollope too.’

1922 – Rough-Hewn by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

‘The story of each life was told quite beautifully, with sensitivity, with intelligence, with empathy, and without one single drop of sentimentality. There is no plot as such, but I was captivated by the unfolding of each life. I noticed that they were told rather differently. Neale’s story was told in a straightforward way, always from his point of view; while Marise’s story was often told through the accounts of people around her. That reflected the different nature of the stories, and while I found Neale’s story easier to read I was more anxious to follow Marise’s story.’

1931 – Saraband by Eliot Bliss

‘I saw the influence of Dorothy Richardson – a friend of the authors – on her writing; but I found Eliot Bliss’s style to be simpler and more accessible. Louie remembered and considered things; I was particularly taken with passages late in the book where she remembered stories her grandmother had told her about her youth, as the end of grandmother’s life was drawing near.’

1933 – Hostages to Fortune by Elizabeth Cambridge

‘ ‘Hostages to Fortune’ is one of those books, wisely rescued by the lovely Persephone Books, and it does some of the things I love most in a quiet book. It speaks to my sense of wonder that there are so many people in the world and that each and every one of them has a story of their own that might be told. It illuminates lives lived at a particular time, at a particular point in history so very well that I really do feel that these fictional characters lived and breathed, and that I have come understand how their lives were for them without ever intruding at all.’

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The full list of what I’ve read is here and my first six 10% reports are  here, here, here, here , here and here.

My thoughts on the books that will represent 1892 and 1917 will be along quite soon.

And I’ll get back to my list once I’ve read a book for Elizabeth Goudge’s birthday, a book for Margaret Kennedy’s birthday,  a wonderful new book by an author whose first novel I fell in love with a few years ago ….

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