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Touch and Go by Thad Nodine (2011)

2012-01-28T22:45:00.000-06:00

My latest selection from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program is Thad Nodine's debut novel, Touch and Go (2011).

Our narrator, Kevin, is a struggling journalist and recovering junkie who has been clean for two years. He is also completely blind, having lost his sight in an accident when he was five. He lives in Burbank with a married couple, Isa (who Kevin is secretly in love with) and Patrick, who he met while they were all in rehab together. Isa and Patrick have two foster children, a 16-year-old black teen named Devon, and a 12-year-old Hispanic boy named Ray. Isa's estranged father is dying in Pensacola and the whole gang decides to pile into Patrick's shitty car and drive out to see him with an ornately carved wooded casket tied to the top of their car. Oh, and they've accidentally timed it so that they'll be on the gulf in Biloxi when a little hurricane called Katrina blows in.

The quirky dysfunctional family / road trip set up had me nervous at first, but this book really pulled me in. Telling the entire story from the perspective of a blind character was a risk, but Nodine pulls it off and the result is rewarding. Rarely do we have a book where we really don't know what any of the characters or locations look like, but we know how their footsteps sound and the smell of their perfume, or exactly the way their skin feels. The climactic scene in the hurricane is made even more harrowing because we can't see it, and characterizations and actions open up to the reader in unexpected ways when our primary sense is taken out of the narrative.

There are some mis-steps in the action, and the dialogue is occasionally a little off, but overall this is an energetic and well-written first novel. It's worth seeking this one out.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (1962)

2012-01-22T15:12:00.000-06:00

My good friend Dan gave me this copy of We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (1962). At least I think he did -- it has been in my pile for so long that neither one of us can really remember how I got it. I do know that I have been excited to read more Shirley Jackson ever since Dan lent me The Haunting of Hill House, and I can't believe it took me so long to get to this one.

Six years ago, four members of the wealthy Blackwood family were killed at the dinner table after their sugar bowl was laced with arsenic. The younger sister, twelve-year-old Mary Katherine (known affectionately as Merricat), had been sent to bed without supper, and so avoided the deathly sugar bowl. The older sister, Constance, prepared the meal and didn't take any sugar on her berries, and so became the prime suspect, although she was eventually acquitted and sent back to live with Merricat and their Uncle Julian. Julian survived the arsenic, but was permanently disabled and weakened after the poisoning.

The Blackwoods are hated by the people in the village, both for their wealth and for getting away with murder. Constance refuses to leave the estate, and Merricat is teased and harassed on her twice-weekly trips to the village for food. Still the two women and the dotty old man are happy in their isolation and seem willing to continue on like that indefinitely, until Merricat senses that things are about to change. That change is the arrival of their estranged Cousin Charles, and what he sets into motion can never be undone.

This is a relatively simple story that is elevated by the decision to give us as a narrator the increasingly unreliable Merricat. Ordinary actions and coincidences take on a sinister meaning through her mystical mind, and anything that moves to disrupt the sanctuary of her home or the routines of her beloved sister is treated severely. Like The Haunting of Hill House, the mystery in We Have Always Lived in the Castle is secondary to the psychology of the characters. This was Jackson's last novel, and it should move its way up to the top of every reader's pile

A Storm of Swords (A Song of Ice and Fire #3) by George R. R. Martin (2000)

2012-01-16T10:31:00.000-06:00

The always-amazing John lent me the extremely hefty third book in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series A Storm of Swords (2000), and even though it took me three weeks (!) to read it, I'm still a little sad that it's done.

The third book in the series amps things up with more maps, more appendices, more characters, and more pages (almost 1200). This infrastructure is nicely balanced with more action, more death, more freaky magic, and more improbable creatures. I'm not sure how Martin turned me into a fantasy lover, but I think it happened. I actually get excited to see the dragons!

I don't even know how to begin describing the plot of this one in a way that would make sense without spoiling things for those who haven't read the other two, so I'm not going to try. It is safe to say that the battle for power over the kingdom of Westeros continues, and no one is giving up anytime soon. Sometimes Martin's creation gets a little big for even him to handle, and some characters were ignored for hundreds and hundreds of pages while the action went on elsewhere. I'm not sure that there is anyway around that when your series is so epic and huge, but it might be nice to check in with everyone a little more often.

Finally: this book made me really like the previously rather evil character of Jaime Lannister, which was unexpected. Also people die. A lot of them. Suddenly and surprisingly. And that never gets old, sweetlings.

Get book #4 ready for me John, because after a little break, I'm going to want to dive right back in to Westeros...

All My Friends Are Going to be Strangers by Larry McMurtry (1972)

2012-01-07T10:32:00.000-06:00

The supremely lovely Jennifer LaSuprema lent me a copy of Larry McMurtry's All My Friends Are Going to be Strangers (1972) and as a huge McMurtry fan, there was no way I could resist.

All My Friends... is McMurtry's sixth book, but it has the easy flowing, autobiographical feel of a younger work. Our hero is Rice student and aspiring author, Danny Deck. On a spur-of-the-moment trip to Austin, Danny wakes up on a floor next to the beautiful (and super tall) Sally, and instantly falls in love with her. He steals her away from her drunken professor lover and takes her back to Houston where they decide they might as well get married. Sally doesn't really like any of Danny's friends, or even Danny, all that much, and the two of them mostly have sex and sit around silently. Things change for Danny when he finds that his first novel is going to be published, and that Hollywood is interested in making a movie version. Flush with cash, the book turns into a road trip when Sally and Danny leave behind Danny's sultry neighbor and motherly friend and head to San Francisco where their relationship falls even further apart at the same rate that Sally's pregnant belly grows. Things go down and up and down again and end up back in Texas. Because how could you not go back?

One thing my summary doesn't capture is how freaking funny this book is. I could name a dozen scenes that had me laughing out loud, and the loose, anything-can-happen structure of the book reminds me of my favorite seventies movies. And if you have lived in Texas for anytime at all, McMurtry's descriptions are going to bowl you over. From drunken, academic Austin to swampy Houston to the dry expanses of West Texas and the contradictions of the Valley, McMurtry knows Texas.

The "young" feeling of this book and its protagonist that give it so much energy and humor sometimes drag it down with a bit of sad isolated artist syndrome. Danny simultaneously envies the warm acceptance in the homey kitchen of his best friend's wife Emma (who he can't mention without describing as chubby), but also feels he is too artistic, different, and special, to ever have that kind of comfort. I think these are the conclusions of a young artist who needs to feel like his successes and romances and life is much different from all the ordinary people he sees around him (the ending scene of the book really backs this up). If I read this book when I was 18 I would have been cheering for Danny the whole way. Reading it as a 35 year old makes some of his artistic antics a little annoying.

Still, if you like Texas, the 70s, a good laugh, or McMurtry, this one is highly recommended. A fun and fascinating look into an artist as a young man. Read it!

The Selected Verse of Ogden Nash (The Modern Library, 1945)

2011-12-29T10:19:00.002-06:00

I got this absolutely lovely copy of The Modern Library's collection of The Selected Verse of Ogden Nash (1945) at the book sale at my library this year, and I've found it to be an instant cure for the blues.

Nash is known for his light, comedic, rhyming poetry. His most famous poem might be the very brief "Reflections on Ice-Breaking" (Candy / Is dandy / But liquor / Is quicker), but his longer poems are just as perceptive and satisfying. While some of the verses have rather dated gender and racial views, most of them are just as enjoyable as they were when they were written.

And you are really missing out if you don't read them out loud.

Here is one of my favorites (long, but quick):

The Life of the Party

Lily, there isn't a thing you lack,
Your effect is simply stunning.
But Lily, your gown is low in the back,
So conduct yourself with cunning.
Some of your charm is charm of face,
But some of your charm is spinal;
Losing your looks is no disgrace,
But losing your poise is final.
Ridicule's name is Legion,
So look to your dorsal region.

For Artie,
Old Artie,
The life of the party,
Is practically perfect tonight;
He's prettily, properly tight;
He's never appeared so bright.
Have you ever seen Artie
Enliven a party?
You've never seen Artie --
Why Lord love a duck!
At present old Artie is running amuck.
There's a wink in his eye
And a smile on his lips
For the matron he tickles,
The waiter he trips.
There's a rubber cigar,
And a smoking-room jest,
To melt the reserve
Of the clerical guest.
There's a pin for the man who stoops over,
And a little trained flea for Rover.
So Lily, beware of your back!
More daring than duller and older blades,
Artie is hot on the track.
I've noticed him eying your shoulder blades.
And maybe it's salad,
And maybe it's ice,
But I fear he has planned
Some amusing device,
For the laughter is slack
And he's taking it hard --
He's eying your back --
And Artie's a card --
He's forming a plan --
May I fetch you a shawl?
That inventive young man --
There is one in the hall.
Though your back is divine
In its natural state,
May I curtain your spine? --
Dear Heaven, I'm late!
Aren't you glad that you came to the party?
And weren't you amused by Artie?

Horace, the moment that you appeared,
I admired your manly beauty,
But I feel that a word about your beard
Is only my bounden duty.
Your tailor's craft is a dandy's dream,
Your suavity leaves me lyrical,
But escaping tonight with your self-esteem
Will require a minor miracle.
Fun is a gay deceiver,
So look to your kingly beaver.

For Artie,
Old Artie,
The life of the party,
Is hitting his stride tonight.
No bushel obscures his light.
He's knocking them left and right.
Have you ever seen Artie
Enliven a party?
You've never seen Artie --
My lad, you're in luck,
For Artie, old Artie, is running amuck.
At Artie's approach
Lesser wags droop.
Have you seen the tin roach
He drops in your soup?
Is a spoon in your pocket?
Or gum on your chair?
It's Artie, old Artie,
Who magicked them there.
And of those who complain, there's a rumor
That they're lacking in sense of humor.
So Horace, beware of your beard!
I sense some fantastic flubdubbery!
Old Artie has just disappeared
And I've noticed him eying your shrubbery.
And maybe it's syrup,
And maybe it's mice,
But I fear he has planned
Some amusing device.
His conceptions are weird,
And nothing is barred --
He was eying your beard --
And Artie's a card --
When Artie returns,
The fun will begin --
May I fetch you a bag
To put on your chin?
Just a small paper bag
To envelop the bait?
For Artie's a wag --
Dear Heaven, I'm late!
Aren't you glad that you came to the party?
And weren't you amused by Artie?

As always, the Modern Library put out a wonderful copy of these poems. The book is just the right size, nicely printed, and sturdily bound. This one will go into the permanent collection, to be pulled out on occasions when I'm taking myself too seriously.

Mudd's Angels by J.A. Lawrence (1978)

2011-12-22T09:26:00.001-06:00

It should be no real surprise that I bought this copy of Mudd's Angels by J.A. Lawrence (1978) for the cover. Just look at it! Who could resist Mudd and his bevy of beauties?

This book consists of adaptations of two Star Trek episodes ("Mudd's Women" and "I, Mudd") and an original novella featuring Mudd and the Star Trek crew ("The Business, as Usual, During Altercations"). I've seen some Star Trek movies and the occasional episode of the original show, but I've never been a super fan. The character of Harvey Mudd, a sloppy, selfish, con-man who doesn't fit at all into the neat regulations of the Starship Enterprise, however, could make me change my mind.

When they first meet Mudd, he is charging along in an unregistered spaceship and gets beamed up, along with his crew, just before their ship is hit by an asteroid. Mudd's crew is nothing but three extremely beautiful ladies that quickly entrance the Enterprise crew (except for Spock). Mudd plans to wed the ladies to three lonely space miners (for a small fee), but his secret is soon revealed by Captain Kirk: he's been giving the ladies a drug that makes them irresistible to men. It's unclear why that matters so much to the three lonely space miners, and in the end the main lady learns that she is just as beautiful without taking the drug, ala Dumbo's feather.

In the next story, Mudd is back, and this time he has found a planet of abandoned high-tech androids that have been waiting for a human to serve for over a million years. He quickly molds them to his liking (including hundreds of identical fem-bots "programmed for pleasure"). The bots, however, want more humans to study and serve, so Mudd sneakily gets the Enterprise crew onto the planet, where they find it very difficult to leave. When the bots' plan to take over the universe and enslave humanity in a web of pleasure is revealed, Kirk and his crew use illogic (even Spock!) to get the bots' circuits to lock up so they can escape (there might be an ad at the start of this video, but it is worth it):

In the final novella, Mudd has gotten even more creative with his androids and his conning and has stolen the galaxy's supply of dilithium crystals, needed to power the starships. The Enterprise is in charge of finding out where the crystals went, and follow Mudd and his rogue ship out of the galaxy, bending space and time when they return. There is a slightly dull trial of robots vs. humans in this one, but ultimately it stays true to all the characters and involves some fun time travel.

This isn't high literature by any means, but as a non-Star Trek sci-fi fan, I found the stories nicely thought out and well written. If I was more sensitive to that kind of thing, the objectification of the ladies might get to me a bit, but somehow in the context of Mudd, I didn't mind. Also, J.A. Lawrence is a woman, the widow of James Blish, another Star Trek novelist. Sometimes the characterizations were hammered in a little too hard (Spock's raised eyebrow, Scotty's accent, McCoy's bickering), but overall the book lives up to its cover.

Life long and prosper!

Other People's Money by Justin Cartwright (2011)

2011-12-17T10:05:00.000-06:00

My latest read from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program is Other People's Money by Justin Cartwright (2011), a look at the recent financial crisis through the eyes of one of Britain's oldest banking families.

The patriarch of the family, Sir Harry Trevelyan-Tubal, has had a stroke and no one can understand him but his devoted old maid secretary, Estelle. The bank has been put in the hands of the younger son, Julian, as his older brother took off to find himself in the world of international adventure after the death of their mother. Julian and his right-hand-man, Nigel, both got caught up in hedge fund mania, and the Trubal bank is in just as much trouble as all the "new money" banks in London. They can't let anyone know about it because they hope to sell the bank to an American conglomerate and get out while the getting is good. In the meantime, Fleur, Harry's much younger trophy wife, is on unsteady footing with the family; Artair MacCleod (playwright, director, and Fleur's ex-husband) has stopped receiving his long-term "grant" from the Trubal estate (which was basically a pay off for letting Fleur go); and Melissa Tregarthen, a young Cornish journalist, is sent off to interview MacCleod about his new play but ends up uncovering a major banking scandal.

This is a very readable (and very British) book, which is also often very funny: "[MacCleod's] grand project is to produce a five-hour play based on the life and novels of Flann O'Brien. But today he has taken a break to start hand-writing his manuscript, because he has heard that a university in Texas will pay good money for original manuscripts; his is, in fact, mostly a cut-and-paste job from the work of O'Brien, with stage directions added in marker pen." -- archives humor!. Cartwright is at his best when he shows us how the interior view of a person contrasts with how they are seen by others, but the clunky dialogue can put a wrench in the action and the book occasionally gets dragged down in predictability and cliche. There are also a couple of weirdly sexualized descriptions of Julian's four-year-old daughter that made me uncomfortable, and didn't seem to serve any real purpose.

The book makes for a quick and satisfying read despite these reservations, and while its explorations of class and morality might not be as in-depth as I would have liked, there was enough here to keep me interested until the nicely drawn conclusion.

The Works of Samuel Johnson: With an Essay on His Life and Genius, by Arthur Murphy. Volume 1 (1792)

2011-12-04T09:43:00.001-06:00

My latest dip into the western canon is the first of twelve volumes of the Works of Samuel Johnson, as compiled and edited by his contemporary and friend, Arthur Murphy, in 1792, eight years after Johnson's death.

About half of this first volume is dedicated to Murphy's lengthy biographical essay on Johnson, in which he sets the record straight on Johnson's life after the publication of a previous biography that he felt misrepresented his friend. Murphy's biography sometimes goes a little overboard with praise, but for the most part seems to be a fair impression of Samuel Johnson as a man and doesn't hide all his warts and flaws. Johnson's slow and often poverty-striken rise from the son of a bookseller to England's most well-known man of letters makes for interesting reading, and Murphy hits all the literary high points of Johnson's career, including the extended Dictionary project.

Johnson comes through in the biographical essay mostly through quotes from his letters and publications. Here, for example, is Johnson's take on having to write a regular column in one of his magazines (advice which may also apply to the occasional blogger): "He that condemns himself to compose on a stated day, will often bring to his task an attention dissipated, a memory embarrassed, an imagination overwhelmed, a mind distracted with anxieties, a body languishing with disease: he will labour on a barren topic, till it is too late to change it; or, in the ardour of invention, diffuse his thoughts into wild exuberance, which the pressing hour of publication cannot suffer judgement to examine or reduce."

The rest of this first volume is dedicated to Johnson's poetry, including two longer poems, a five act tragedy in verse, and a series of shorter poems and epitaphs (including about 30 pages of poems in Latin). The strongest section for me was the tragedy, Irene, which is beautifully written and appropriately tragic. Definitely something worth reading out loud.

And as someone who recently had her 35th birthday, this jaunty poem really spoke to me:

To Mrs. Thrale on completing her thirty-fifth year
Oft in danger, yet alive,
We are come to thirty-five;
Long may better years arrive,
Better years than thirty-five.
Could philosophers contrive
Life to stop at thirty-five,
Time his hours should never drive
O'er the bounds of thirty-five.
High to soar, and deep to dive,
Nature gives at thirty-five;
Ladies, stock and tend your hive,
Trifle not at thirty-five;
For, howe'er we boast and strive,
Life declines from thirty-five;
He that ever hopes to thrive,
Must begin by thirty-five;
And all who wisely wish to wive
Must look on Thrale at thirty-five.

My copy of this book is a direct reproduction of the 1792 edition, so it includes archaic typographic conventions like the long s (those s's that look like f's), which take some getting used to (and also makes the word sun-beams look like fun-beams, which never stops making me laugh). My only problem with this edition is that in some cases the text in this reproduction is very light, and that combined with the old typography can make certain lines very difficult to read.

My first dip into the life and works of Samuel Johnson was a success -- only 11 more volumes to go! (Hopefully containing a little less Latin.)

Galíndez by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (1992)

2011-11-15T17:45:00.002-06:00

I bought this copy of Galíndez by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (1992) a looooooooong time ago when it was a super bargain book while I worked at Barnes and Noble. I've moved it around with me for years but never read it, mostly, I think, because the cover is particularly ugly and indistinct. I've been trying to weed my bookshelves a bit to make room for more books, so I decided to get rid of old Galíndez, but I have a hard time getting rid of a book I owned for years but never read. I'm still letting Galíndez go, but I'm very glad I read it and I'm interested in checking out some more Montalbán in the future.

This is a novelization of the true story of Jesús Galíndez, a Basque nationalist and Spanish exile after the civil war who ended up in the Dominican Republic for several years before moving to the United States. After writing a thesis exposing the violence behind the Trujillo dictatorship in in the Dominican Republic, Galíndez disappeared from the streets of New York in 1956 and his body was never found.

In Montalbán's novel, an ex-Mormon American graduate student named Muriel Colbert takes up the life of Galíndez for her doctoral thesis in the late 1980s and begins to interview people in New York and Madrid who knew him. Chapters alternate between the intertwining of Muriel's research and personal life, flashbacks to the last hours of the life of Galíndez, and the present-day work of two FBI agents who want Colbert to stop her digging before she uncovers too much and disrupts relations between the U.S. and the Dominican Republic during the not-entirely-frozen Cold War.

The prose style veers between experimental chapters with pages of text unbroken by paragraphs or quotation marks to snappy dialogue and fast-paced action worthy of a spy novel. In Agent Robards, Montalbán has created one of the most creepy and hilarious salmon-paste eating drunken characters ever put to the page (the scene where he pisses on the hot rocks in a sauna is particularly evocative of his nature). But even in the experimental sections, Montalbán never loses his readers' attention or the suspicious mood of the book. This is the kind of book that could be weakened by the wrong ending, but Montalbán doesn't let us down: The ending is brutal but perfect, and tightly snaps together the structure of the novel.

I'm not sure why this famous Barcelonaean novelist slipped through the cracks of my reading pile, but I'm glad he eventually found his way to the top. This is a nice very Spanish feeling novel, and worth a read despite the ugly cover.

As You Like It: edited with a life of Shakespeare, an account of the theatre in his time, and numerous aids to the study of the play by William Shakespeare, Samuel Thurber, Jr. and Louise Wetherbee (1599, 1922)

2011-11-05T15:26:00.001-05:00

In my continuing quest to read all of the books I won in a big giveaway from the Forgotten Bookmarks blog, I recently finished reading the epically titled As You Like It: edited with a life of Shakespeare, an account of the theatre in his time, and numerous aids to the study of the play by William Shakespeare, Samuel Thurber, Jr. and Louise Wetherbee (1599, 1922).

This nicely constructed little book consists of the text of the play, extensive schoolmarmish notes (Rosalind: "Thou losest thy old smell." Note: "Remember that Rosalind's vulgarity was very common at the time."), a glossary, discussion questions for each scene, a selection of literary criticism from the 19th century, a biographical sketch of Shakespeare, and a discussion of Elizabethan theatre.

But, better than all that, the book contains extensive annotations made by a certain schoolboy named Edward R. Scudder in 1929. How do I know his name? Because he wrote it about 200 times throughout the book.

This is the inside back cover, but you can see a larger selection of the annotations here. Note that one of the drawings is pretty racially insensitive, but it seems that kind of thing flew at Oneonta High School in 1929.

How did I know Mr. Scudder lived in Oneonta? Why because I am an amazing information professional, that's why! I noticed that he put "OHS '29" on the inside back cover of his book, which told me that he lived in a town that started with an "O" and that he graduated from high school in 1929. A little searching on the Social Security Death Index showed me an Edward Scudder who was born in 1911 and who died in Oneonta, New York in 1981. That would make him 18 in 1929, and a perfect candidate for our book. Further research showed that this Edward Scudder's middle initial was R., which sealed the deal.

Other random facts: In 1938 Edward visited Mr.and Mrs. Edgar Boyce in Kingston, NY in the company of Mr. and Mrs. Lee D. Crouch and their daughter Dorothy (as reported in The Kingston Daily Freeman, February 25, 1938); in 1953 he served on the Oneonta Chamber of Commerce election committee (as reported in The Binghamton NY Press, February 7, 1953); and he was a member of the Men’s Chorus in Oneonta in 1957 (as reported in a flashback feature in the Oneonta Daily Press, December 7, 2007).

I won't deny that I have amazing search skills, but it also helped that Mr. Scudder had a very googleable name.It seems that Mr. Scudder did get married, although I wasn't able to find the names of any of his children. If by some chance a relative comes across this post and would be interested in the book, just let me know and I'd be happy to mail it to you. Otherwise I'm going to keep this little gem forever -- it is a nice copy of a great play, with some wonderful history inside!

[Curious how Edward felt about "As You Like It"? He didn't really like it.]

A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin (1998)

2011-10-28T09:45:00.001-05:00

It doesn't usually take me over two weeks between books and posts, but I've been spending my time reading the exceedingly hefty, 1,000+ page, A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin (1998) -- the second addition to his exceedingly popular Song of Ice and Fire series.In A Clash of Kings Martin continues his fantasy series that satisfies the non-fantasy reader.

At the start of the book, the formerly united kingdom of Westeros is divided into factions supporting four or five different kings. Who can keep track! The children of Ned Stark are equally divided: His oldest son, Robb, is leading an army as the King of the North; Sansa is locked away at King's Landing and still betrothed to the evil Joffery Lannister; Asha is posing as an orphan boy and on the run from the Lannisters; Jon Snow, the bastard son, is becoming an invaluable member of the Night Watch; and the crippled Bran and young Rickon are holding Winterfell.

Martin doesn't seem to be much of one for happy reunions or easy solutions, so things generally get more complicated for all our characters as the book progresses instead of easing up. But we wouldn't have it any other way, George!

Once again this book is filled with impressive set pieces, and awesome kills, and Martin's famous disregard for killing off main characters gives every near-miss a hint of finality. Martin also continues to keep the magic reigned in -- and when he lets some sneak out it is used to such good effect that an anti-magic/dragon reader like me doesn't mind at all.

I'm going to take a little breather, but the wonderful John has already lent me the third volume, so A Storm of Swords is on the horizon. If I don't post for a couple weeks, you will know what's going on.

Hollywood Remembered: An Oral History of its Golden Age by Paul Zollo (2002)

2011-10-12T20:17:00.000-05:00

I received a copy of the 2011 reprinting of Paul Zollo's 2002 release, Hollywood Remembered: An Oral History of its Golden Age through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. Zollo clearly has a passion for the early days of Hollywood, and although the book has some flaws, that passion and the book's exhaustiveness make it a worthwhile read.

The book is divided into three parts: a history of Hollywood written by Zollo (going all the way back to the dinosaurs!), a collection of oral history "memoirs," and a written tour of existing and torn down hollywood landmarks. By far the most engaging section is the collection of memoirs. Zollo interviews stars (Steve Allen, Jonathan Winters, Karl Malden, Evelyn Keyes), extras, bartenders, secretaries, one of the munchkins from The Wizard of Oz, cinematographers, businessmen, housewives, and lingerie models. Coming at these memories from so many angles makes for an encompassing look at the city and the phenomenon called Hollywood, even if many of the memories are clouded with nostalgia, age, and sometimes bitterness and frustration.

Zollo's subjects are arranged by the year of their birth, ranging from 101 to 62 at the time of their interviews. Each subject is given a brief introduction by the author and then allowed to present his or her own story, without the inclusion of Zollo's questions. The memories include rosy pictures of streetcars, safe streets, and lots of orange groves; kiss-and-tell episodes of famous stars (apparently Anthony Quinn has a huge penis); and grumpy old men reactions to the way kids act these days. While some of the interviews are more interesting and informative than others, they all capture the voice of their subjects. And if they don't always shed light on the way old Hollywood really was, they certainly give a complicated picture of how it was remembered.

The book is nicely indexed (yay!) but has a few more typos than I could overlook, particularly for a reprinting. Still, if you are interested in Hollywood, oral history, and the world of yesteryear, this might just be the book for you.

Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy (1985)

2011-10-05T20:23:00.002-05:00

Before dark they encountered laboring up the western slope of the mountain a conducta of one hundred and twenty-two mules bearing flasks of quicksilver for the mines... The others of the company hardly turned to advise themselves of what had occurred. They fell from their mounts and lay in the trail or slid from the escarpment and vanished. The drivers below got their animals turned and were attempting to flee back down the trail and the laden packmules were beginning to clamber white-eyed at the sheer wall of the bluff like enormous rats. The riders pushed between them and the rock and methodically rode them from the escarpment, the animals dropping silently as martyrs, turning sedately in the empty air and exploding on the rocks below in startling burst of blood and silver as the flasks broke open and the mercury loomed wobbling in the air in great sheets and lobes and small trembling satellites and all its forms grouping below and racing in the stone arroyos like the imbreachment of some ultimate alchemic work decocted from out the secret dark of the earth's heart, the fleeing stag of the ancients fugitive on the mountainside and bright and quick in the dry path of the storm channels and shaping out the sockets in the rock and hurrying from ledge to ledge down the slope shimmering and deft as eels. (194-195)

Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (1985) is one of those books that it seems everyone on earth has read but me -- and I love reading! And Cormac McCarthy! And violence! So I made the executive decision to move it up to the top of my pile. And although this is the most densely violent and biblically overwhelming book I have ever read, I don't regret one word.

In the mid-19th century, a 14-year-old kid (known as "the kid") leaves his unhappy home in Kentucky and heads west. After a series of violent and drunken exchanges, he finds himself joining a gang of Indian hunters led by an ex-soldier named John Joel Glanton* and a freaky, well-educated, gigantic, hairless man named Judge Holden (who is possibly the best ambiguous villain in all of literature). Apart from sections at the beginning and ending of the book where we closely follow the kid, much of the novel gives us the experiences of the collective group of men and their fight against Indians, Mexicans, white people, each other, and more than anything else, nature.

The communal near-death slog across the harsh landscape of Northern Mexico and the (now) Southwestern United States is broken up with visceral explosions of violence against groups of Indians (lots of warriors, but also women, children, and old folks), who they scalp when they can; and groups of Mexicans (many of whom welcome them as heroes for killing the Indians that have been terrorizing their villages but soon learn that the gang are not the most well-mannered guests), and who they also scalp because other Mexicans pay them for every scalp they bring in and a Mexican scalp must look enough like an Indian scalp to get them paid.

Between the thirst-filled journeying and the blood-filled fighting, there is room for some philosophy, a small amount of extremely dry humor, and a whole boat-load of amazing descriptions of the Western landscape that make me want to put my English major hat on and start doing some linguistic studies.

This book probably isn't for everyone -- the violence can be off-putting and the style and language, alternating between seemingly straightforward descriptions and breathless spirals of clauses and vocabulary, is dense and tough to crack. For readers with a tough stomach and a little patience, though, the payoffs are amazing. Definitely one of the best things I've ever read.

*Archives note: I once did some research for a patron trying to find a mention of Glanton in historical records we have for an early Presbyterian church in San Antonio. The theory was that the pastor of the church spoke out against Glanton and his gang from the pulpit and had his house shot at in retaliation before the gang was run out of town. My research was sadly inconclusive -- I found several versions of that story, but none that mentioned Glanton.

**Personal note: This is 100% a book of dudes, and I think this is what happens to some men when there aren't any women around. You can see a slightly less intense version of the same behavior in Fraternity Houses and certain military actions.

The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter by Ambrose Bierce (1892)

2011-10-01T09:24:00.001-05:00

I'd never read any Ambrose Bierce before, but how could I resist the cover of this collection featuring his novella The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter (1892) and seven other short stories from the 1880s and 1890s? I just couldn't. And I'm glad I couldn't because Bierce has an amusing cynicism, beautifully written prose, and a sense for the perfect twist that make his stories very readable 120 years after they were written.

In the title story, a young monk is sent with some of his brothers to an isolated village in the Alps. He soon encounters a beautiful young girl who is shunned by the villagers because her father is the hangman. The monk thinks this injustice is ungodly, and tries to comfort and protect the young girl but is reprimanded by his superiors. The monk is sent up a mountain to a lonely cottage to search his soul and rethink his attraction to the doomed girl, but his life is set on a tragic course and things don't end up turning out very well for anyone up on that mountain.

Bierce hates phonies and is at his best when his naive narrator reveals the hypocrisies he sees around him (and the double-sidedness of his own monkly nature):

I looked about me to see if the child of the hangman were present, but I could not see her anywhere, and knew not whether to rejoice that she was out of reach of the insults of the people or to mourn because deprived of the spiritual strength that might have come to me from looking upon her heavenly beauty.... The wheaten bread was brought in immense baskets, and as to drink, there was assuredly no scarcity of that, for the Superior and the Saltmaster had each given a mighty cask of beer. Both of these monstrous barrels lay on wooden stands under an ancient oak. The boys and the Saltmaster's men drew from the cask which he had given, while that of the Superior was served by the brother butler and a number of us younger monks. In honor of Saint Franciscus I must say that the clerical barrel was of vastly greater size than that of the Saltmaster...

At the table, surrounded by their beautiful wives and daughters, sat many knights, who had come from their distant castles to share in the great festival. I helped at table. I handed the dishes and filled the goblets and was able to see how good an appetite the company had, and how they loved that brown and bitter drink. I could see also how amorously the Saltmaster's son looked at the ladies, which provoked me very much, as he could not marry them all, especially those already married.

We had music, too. Some boys from the village, who practice on various instruments in their spare moments, were the performers. Ah, how they yelled, those flutes and pipes, and how the fiddle bows danced and chirped! I do not doubt the music was very good, but Heaven has not seen fit to give me the right kind of ears...

But the women seemed to dislike the beer, especially the young girls. Usually before drinking a young man would hand his cup to one of the maids, who barely touched it with her lips, and, making a grimace, turned away her face. I am not sufficiently acquainted with the ways of woman to say with certainty if this proved that at other times they were so abstemious.

The rest of the collected short stories are all perfectly crafted with biting twists. My favorite (and probably Bierce's best known work besides The Devil's Dictionary is "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" (1890) -- a Civil War story about a prisoner being hanged that has some of the most visceral and beautiful descriptions of dying that I've ever read [and to save me doing a bunch more quoting, just read the whole thing here. It is very short and totally worth your time]. In fact, since all of Bierce's work was published before 1923 it is all in the public domain and readily available for your online reading pleasure!

[Book nerd alert: my copy is a 1955 Avon Publications book. If you think the front cover is cool, then just feast your eyes on the back cover.]

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (2011)

2011-09-24T10:29:00.000-05:00

My bookclub (go DAFFODILS!) decided to read Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (2011) after reading the glowing review of the book on Boing Boing. We had been talking about reading something genre-y, and Cline is from Austin, so it seemed like a nice idea to support a first-time local author. I can't say I loved it as much as Boing Boing did, but although it has a few flaws, this is overall a solid piece of science fiction with nicely drawn characters and a fast-moving plot.

Ready Player One is set in a mid-century America (the 2050s not the 1950s) that is feeling the dire effects of a failing economy, environment, and social structure. Unemployment is off the charts, there is hardly any fuel, and crime and drugs are everywhere. No one seems to mind all that much, though, because everyone is plugged into the OASIS, an immersive virtual reality / Internet / gaming world that was invented by James Halliday. When Halliday dies in 2044, he surprises everyone by leaving his entire fortune and the control of the OASIS to whomever can solve the game he created (filled with references to the 1980s, the decade he grew up in) and find the Easter Egg he has hidden in the OASIS. People go crazy trying to solve his first riddle and find the first of the three keys, but years pass and soon most people lose interest or start to think that the whole thing is unsolvable. A sub-set of super nerd egg hunters (or "gunters") obsess over the puzzle and fill endless message boards with their research. And a giant evil corporation, Innovative Online Industries, puts together its own team of ringers to try and win the contest so it can subvert Halliday's intentions and use the OASIS for its own evil purposes. Then our hero, the 18-year-old orphan, Wade Watts, finds the first key.

Wade is a classic underdog: he has no parents, no money, lives with a mean aunt in a giant slum of stacked trailers outside of Oklahoma City, was beat up at school until he got hooked up with one of Halliday's projects to provide public education in the OASIS (and got free equipment to access his account), and spends most of his time in his hideout (a van deep inside a giant pile of abandoned cars). Wade focuses as little of his energy as possible on the real world and spends all of his time watching 80s movies, playing 80s video games, and reading about everything that James Halliday was ever interested in. He has one friend, Aech, who is a fellow gunter, and an unrequited crush on a girl gunter/blogger named Art3mis. When he finds the first key, his avatar becomes famous, and things really start rolling.

Cline does a good job of giving his reader enough context that even a non-geek can read through the reams of 1980s geek culture references in Ready Player One and keep up, but I think I would have gotten a lot more out of this book if I had that video game experience in my past, and if I had some kind of World of Warcraft-esque contemporary multi-player questing experience. I have a little bit of geekiness in my background -- my dad was always into computers and we had a VIC-20 while I was growing up that I would type programs into from a little book. As our computers got better, I got really into freeware games that I could order through the mail, especially text-based adventure games, and I spent many high school evenings logging into a local BBS (shout out to Cyperspace in Lincoln, NE!) that could host 20 people at a time on its message boards, chat rooms, and extremely popular trivia contests. No pictures back in those days, kiddies, just words! The local modemers would have midnight coffee meet-ups once a week, and once I was 16 with a job and a car, I would join the group. I was easily 10 years younger than everyone else there, and one of only a few women, but the modemers were always gentlemen and I got some more exposure to the world of the geek while watching them play Magic, prepare for Renaissance Faires, and have exhaustive debates about Star Trek. But while I was sitting right next to the ultra geek culture, I never really embraced it. I haven't really watched the shows and movies, I never played Dungeons and Dragons, and while I have sci-fi inclinations, they are rather unfocused. The big hole in my geek experience is video games -- beyond the text-based adventure games, I really have never played any video games seriously at any point in my life.

Beyond the slew of references, I don't always like Cline's writing style which sometimes seems to simple for his subject matter and can get a little ham-fisted when addressing larger social issues -- a friend mentioned that this might have worked better as a young adult novel, and I really agree with that. Cline also suffers from what I like to call Cory Doctorow-itis. I like Boing Boing too, but there is a certain holier-than-thou / know-it-all geekiness factor that oozes from those guys, and I can draw some parallels between the things that irked me about Cline's books with the things that irk me about the Doctorow I've read.

Style issues aside, Cline sets up a classic good vs. evil plot with a dash of young romance, coming of age, and rags to riches, that all builds to a satisfying conclusion. His vision of the future is inventive and smart, and as a reader I was never bored. Definitely recommended for science fiction fans, and fans of Cory Doctorow.

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (1996)

2011-09-17T10:47:00.001-05:00

The always amazing Corie lent me this copy of Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (1996) quite some time ago, but even though I'd read it back in college, I decided I wanted to read it again. And I'm glad I did, because it is awesome and I didn't remember all that much about it. Atwood is an author that I read so much of in high school and college but not that much of for the past dozen or so years. I think I might need to rectify that...

In Alias Grace, Atwood gives us a literary true crime novel based on the real story of Grace Marks [archives connection: check out the neat interface on a digitized copy of their "true confessions" from the Toronto Public Library]. Marks was an Irish immigrant who came to Canada with her family when she was 12. Her mother died on the ocean voyage over, and her drunk father wasn't much of a provider for her and her many brothers and sisters. When she was almost 13 she took a job as a servant, her father and siblings eventually left Toronto for the west, and she was on her own. She worked through several positions, accepting an offer to serve as a maid at Mr. Thomas Kinnear's country home when she was almost 16. Mr. Kinnear was a wealthy bachelor, and something of a dark sheep in the neighborhood. His staff was very small, just Grace, the housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery (who was suspiciously close to Mr. Kinnear), and a recently hired man named James McDermott who saw to the horses and other outdoorsy chores.

Some facts are unarguable: in 1843 both Nancy Montgomery and Thomas Kinnear were murdered and their bodies hidden in the cellar. James McDermott and Grace Marks took valuables from the home and went to Toronto where they caught a ferry over to the United States. They were arrested the morning after they arrived, tried, and sentenced to death. McDermott was hanged, but Grace Marks had her sentence commuted to life in the Kingston Penitentiary. She also spent some time in the asylum.

In Atwood's book, we learn Grace's story through a mixture of contemporary newspaper clippings, the published confession, letters from the main characters, and Grace's own narrative, both inside her head and what she decides to say to Simon Jordon, a young psychiatrist who is studying her case. Grace claims that she has no memory of what happened during the time of the murders, and Simon hopes to cure her memory and find out the truth. Really, though, Simon is kind of a dilettante. He is an American who comes from money, and instead of taking over his father's company, he has decided to dabble in the emerging science of psychology. He spends some time in Europe, and then returns to North America but still can't face his clinging mother and her solitary goal of getting him to marry and settle down.

Grace is hard to figure out. By this time she has been in prison for 16 years and has learned how to read people and how to keep things to herself. She manages to seem both very innocent and straightforward and extremely dangerous and duplicitous. Atwood pitches Grace's voice just right so that even the reader (who is often inside her head) can't really tell what she has done and what she knows:

I am sitting in the sewing room, at the head of the stairs in the Governor's wife's house, in the usual chair at the usual table with the sewing things in the basket as usual, except for the scissors. They insist on removing those from within my reach, so if I want to cut a thread or trim a seam I have to ask Dr. Jordon, who takes them out of his vest pocket and returns them to it when I have finished. He says he does not feel any such rigmarole is necessary, as he considers me to be entirely harmless and in control of myself. He appears to be a trusting man.

Although sometimes I just bite the thread off with my teeth. (p. 62)

Alias Grace is a satisfying fictionalization of a true crime and a well-researched piece of historical fiction, but it also engages issues of gender and class in meaningful ways, dips its toes into psychology, sex, the penitentiary system, mesmerism, quilting, journalism, immigration, and the occult. All that and it also manages to be a fascinating read that is hard to put down. Definitely one of my favorite of Atwood's novels, and a great place to start if you haven't read any of her books.

Baby Cat-Face by Barry Gifford (1995)

2011-09-11T10:06:00.000-05:00

I bought this copy of Baby Cat-Face by Barry Gifford (1995) right after I finished an omnibus collection of Gifford's seven Sailor and Lula novels and read that this one also had some Sailor and Lula in it, even though it wasn't included in the collection. The wonderful Sailor and Lula are indeed in this novel, but more as a side show than the main attraction, so I can see why Gifford and his publishers don't include this one with the rest of the Sailor and Lula canon. But never fear: Baby Cat-Face is just as wild and weird and funny and awesome as the Sailor and Lula novels -- in fact, it might even be weirder.

Baby Cat-Face is a woman who has a cat-like face and who was nicknamed "Baby" since she was the baby of the family. Her real name is Esquerita Reyna, and she ends up in New Orleans hooked up with Jimbo Deal. One night while Jimbo is at work, Baby goes down to the Evening in Seville Bar on Lesseps Street to have a drink (rum and oj, which the bartender calls a "Rat Tango, as in 'I don't need no rat to do no tango at my funeral'") and ends up witnessing a murder. This freaks her out so much that she catches the first bus to North Carolina to get away from things for awhile and visit her aunt.

Things quickly veer out of control when Baby's bus is hijacked by a woman named Daylight DuRapeau who forces the passengers to watch an interpretive dance / poem performance put on by DuRapeau's spiritual leader. Baby and the friends she meets on the bus are rescued by a deus ex machina in the form of teenage Sailor and Lula out for a joy ride while Lula's mama is out of town. But it's when Baby goes back to New Orleans, sanctifies herself, and joins Mother Bizco's Temple of the Few Washed Pure by her Blood that things start getting really weird.

I won't give much more of the plot away since, in true Gifford fashion, the plot is a bit of a chaotic roller coaster and the meat of the story is the characters, the names, the one-sentence back stories, and the dialogue. Anyone who liked Wild at Heart or the other Sailor and Lula stories, who likes Southern literature and greasy gritty New Orleans, or who just likes to have a tornado of messy creativity bowl them over, should check out Baby Cat-Face and the rest of Gifford's novels.

[Gifford is apparently also an extensively published poet and non-fiction writer. I might have to get me some of those as well...]

The World's One Hundred Best Short Stories, Volume 3: Mystery, edited by Grant Overton (1927)

2011-09-06T19:57:00.000-05:00

I recently won this exciting pile of old books through a giveaway on the Forgotten Bookmarks blog (and if you don't follow that blog, you should, because it is awesome). And rather than just put them on my shelf and gaze at their pretty spines, I thought I'd read them. I know that is unusual behavior for me, but just bear with it.

Starting off the pile is one volume of a multi-volume collection of short stories edited by Grant Overton: The World's One Hundred Best Short Stories, Volume 3: Mystery (1927). The title page doesn't do this adorable 4"X6" book justice -- it was physically fun to hold and in great shape, with clear type and a nice binding. Oh, and the stories were pretty great too.

Overton's definition of mystery is broad and includes some authors who are still very well known today, and others that I'd never heard of. A very worthwhile collection, and most of the stories are available in full-text online since they were published before 1923 -- just Google them, fools!

Here's the line up:

"The Doomdorf Mystery," by Melville Davisson Post (1918)
A brain twister where two friends try to figure out how the town meanie was shot when he was locked in a room by himself that could only be opened from the inside. Everyone wanted him dead, but no one could actually have done it!

"The Three Strangers," by Thomas Hardy (1883)
During a christening celebration in an isolated cottage in rural England, a stranger comes knocking on the door to get out of the rain. A few minutes later, another stranger does the same. And while he entertains the company with a song about his profession, a third man comes to the door asking for directions, takes one look inside, and runs away as if his life depended on it.

"The Gold Bug," by Edgar Allan Poe (1843)
Probably the most famous story in this collection -- William Legrand and his former slave Jupiter live alone together on an island off the coast of South Carolina. While walking one day, they find an unusual gold colored bug that bites Legrand as he tries to catch it. Legrand soon starts acting very peculiarly, and sends Jupiter for his good friend, our unnamed narrator, who joins the pair on what turns out to be an extremely profitable expedition.

"The Guilty Secret," by Paul de Kock (1910)
A funny mystery of romantic misunderstandings, tobacco, and protective uncles who like to play backgammon.

"Out of Exile," by Wilbur Daniel Steele (1919)
Possibly my favorite story in the anthology -- a moody story of two brothers in love with the same young woman. When she makes a flippant comment at a party that the first to sail to the mainland and come back with a golden ring will be the one she marries, both brothers head out in a violent storm but only one returns. She refuses to believe that the missing brother has died, and won't marry until he can attend the wedding. Told through the eyes of a teenager in the village, and its the distanced but character-based narration that make this one so great. [Read it here -- do it!]

"The Knightsbridge Mystery," by Charles Reade (1896)
This is the most detective-y of all the stories in this collection. Tells the story of a British boarding house whose tenants include a down-on-his-luck retired Captain and a substantial business man. On a night when the Captain's fortunes have fallen further and the businessman has a bag full of all his collected rents, the businessman ends up murdered in his bed and all his money stolen. The murder is pinned on the drunken horsemaster, but a police detective finds too many doubts in the story and tests all the honest tenants with another irresistible set-up.

"Silence," by Leonid Andreyev (1910)
A heartbreaking story of a stern minister whose daughter kills herself without an explanation, and whose wife then has a stroke that leaves her unable to speak or move. Beautifully written, lonely, and harsh.

"The Doll's House," by Katherine Mansfield (1923)
Three young sisters receive a marvelously huge dollhouse from their aunt and savor the attention it brings them at school, hand selecting no more than two girls a day to come and see it. Everyone gets a turn except the little Kelveys, whose mother takes in laundry, and whose father is out of the picture. No respectable family will let their children play with the Kelveys! A wonderful balance between the open-minded excitement of the youngest sister (who really really loves the tiny lamp in the dollhouse) and the hilariously biting asides and descriptions of the "proper" adult society.

"A Terribly Strange Bed," by Wilkie Collins (1852)
An Englishman who has amazing luck at a seedy French casino soon finds himself exceptionally drunk and checked into a room at the gambling house for the night. But then he runs up against a terribly strange bed, and his night takes a turn for the worse. This one was great fun.

"The Bamboozling of Mr. Gascoigne," by E. Phillips Oppenheim (1925)
This one wins the award for most exciting title -- an American swindler in Monte Carlo hooks up with a local man and his niece when they try to swindle him out of the cost of their lunch. Together the three team up to bamboozle the titular Mr. Gascoigne.

The Double Life of Alfred Buber by David Schmahmann (2011)

2011-09-03T11:05:00.001-05:00

The latest pick for me from the algorithms of the LibraryThing Early Reviewer program was The Double Life of Alfred Buber by David Schmahmann (2011).

Alfred Buber does indeed live a double life, but he lives each half of his life at such a distance from himself, that even his double life doesn't seem to equal a whole person. Buber was born in Rhodesia, the son of a Jewish Communist and a British woman. He was sent to the U.S. for college, first living with his uncle, then in a boarding house while he completed law school. He never wanted to be a lawyer, but found that he was pretty good at it, and got a position with a prestigious firm. He spent almost no money on anything except the dream house that he was building in a commuter town outside of the city. He fills the house with artwork, and has the grounds impeccably landscaped. Then he moves into it alone.

Buber is a lonely guy. He had a brief fling in law school, but the only other time he spends with members of the opposite sex are the lawyers and secretaries at work, who mostly respect but ignore him, and the prostitutes that he visits habitually. It is that second interest that leads Buber to tell his boss and uncle that he is going on a trip to Paris while he really boards a plane for an un-named city in Southeast Asia, well known for its prostitutes. Once he is there, however, he is disgusted with the whole procedure, locks himself in his hotel room, and books a flight for home. But not before venturing down an ally off the main street and making his way into a small bar filled with beautiful young women in open robes. There he "meets" Nok, a young girl from the country, as she gives him a perfunctory blow job. He buys her a book to help her learn English and promises he will come back to her. Then he heads back home, but he can't stop thinking about Nok.

Buber is a liar. He lies when it is important that no one find out the truth about his secret life, and he lies when it is of no importance at all. He lies to himself, and he lies quite a bit to his reader (who is us, obviously, but also someone quite specific in Buber's life). Many reviews have called The Double Life of Alfred Buber Nabakovian, and the combination of self-delusion, self-awareness, and isolation definitely owe a debt to Humbert Humbert. But where Humbert's obsession has a strength and power to it, Buber's seems to result in half-hearted actions, eternal doubt, and more inconsequential lies. Schmahmann brings it all together in a well-earned exhale of an ending that is satisfying for its utter Buberness. This slim character study is worth reading if you like you unreliable narrators mixed with a little humor and a lot of discomfort.

The Works and Days by Hesiod, Translated by Richmond Lattimore (circa 700 BC)

2011-08-30T20:58:00.000-05:00

My latest dip into Harold Bloom's Western Canon is the Ancient Greek poem The Works and Days by Hesiod (circa 700 BC). As Bloom suggests, I read Richmond Lattimore's translation (published together with Theogony and The Shield of Herakles, which I'm saving for later).

Hesiod was from a region in Greece called Boetia and may have been a younger contemporary of Homer. In The Works and Days, instead of getting the narrative journey of past warriors that we see in Homer's the Iliad or the Odyssey, we have a contemporary piece of writing addressed to Hesiod's brother, Perses. Hesiod and Perses' father was a farmer, and when he died his land and estate was distributed between the two brothers, but Perses used the influence of some local judges to take more than his fair share (at least that is Hesiod's story).

In this poem to his brother, Hesiod responds to Perses by evoking the Gods and their justice, the story of Pandora's box, and the punishment in store for an unjust humanity that has strayed from its godly beginnings. He then goes on to list some practical advice: What time of year to plant your corn, what you should be doing in the winter (hint, it involves a lot of work preparing your equipment for the summer), what kind of woman you should marry, when you should harvest your grapevines, and the very small chunk of the year when you can relax. He also briefly touches on the best seasons for starting a sea voyage, and then ends the poetic advice with a listing of the lucky and unlucky days of the year for various pursuits.

If this sounds a little dull compared to the battles and characters of Homer, well, it kind of is, but there is a certain beauty in Hesiod's lists and advice, as well as some well placed jabs at his ne'er-do-well brother:

I mean you well, Perses, you great idiot, and I will tell you. Look, badness is easy to have, you can take it by handfuls without effort. The road that way is smooth and starts here beside you. But between us and virtue the immortals have put what will make us sweat. The road to virtue is long and goes steep up hill, hard climbing at first, but the last of it, when you get to the summit (if you get there) is easy going after the hard part.

Classics can be pretty fun, and The Works and Days only takes an hour or so to read, so embrace the listy advice and learn a thing or two from Hesiod!

4 for the Future, edited by Groff Conklin (1959)

2011-08-26T11:16:00.001-05:00

In this science fiction anthology, 4 for the Future (1959), Groff Conklin, the prolific sci-fi editor (and possessor of an excellent name) brings together strong stories by Poul Anderson ("Enough Rope," 1953), Theodore Sturgeon ("The Claustrophile," 1956), Henry Kuttner ("The Children's Hour," 1944), and Eric Frank Russell ("Plus X," 1956).

While the stories run the gamut from an alien-filled space opera to a quiet story of love in a separate dimension, all four of the stories focus less on technology or exploration, and more on the humanness of the characters and the power of thinking your way out of a tight spot.

All four of these stories were very strong, but I particularly liked the family drama of personalities at the core of Sturgeon's "The Claustrophile," and the light touch of Henry Kuttner's very literary "The Children's Hour." The 1940s and 1950s are my favorite era of science fiction, and this collection doesn't disappoint. Also includes adorable anachronisms like an ink well tipping over in a futuristic office. If you like science fiction, you will like this.

[Equally awesome back cover available here if you are into that kind of thing.]

The Book of Negroes by Lawerence Hill (2007)

2011-08-19T10:06:00.002-05:00

My lovely Aunt Charlotte loaned me a copy of Canadian author Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes [published in the US as Someone Knows My Name] (2007) an embarrassingly long time ago, and it just recently floated up to the top of my pile. Even though I had heard so many good things about the book, it was hard to make myself pick up what I imagined had to be a very sad and upsetting story of slavery. I was right that Hill's novel is sad and upsetting, but it is also moving, occasionally uplifting, and a surprisingly energetic read.

Hill gives us the first-person story of Aminata Diallo, who at the start of the book (in 1802) is an older woman, without any family, who was brought to London by abolitionists who want her to testify before Parliament in their fight to outlaw the slave trade. As part of her work with the abolitionists, Aminata decides to write her own life story, and that is the book we are holding in our hands.

Aminata starts with her life in a small African village with her parents. When she is 11 and walking home with her mother, a midwife, from assisting with a birth in another village, the two of them are attacked and Aminata is taken by the slave traders. The novel takes us through Aminata's brutal three month march to the sea, chained to other captured Africans, the putrid and deadly sea voyage, and her eventual purchase as a "refuse slave" by the owner of a South Carolina indigo plantation.

Through a series of coincidences, providence, and her own strong personality and aptitude for languages, Aminata survives these ordeals, learns both black and white English, and learns how to read and write. She also, at the age of 15, has a baby boy with a young man named Chekura who had been her companion since the long march in Africa. Chekura ends up on a nearby plantation and is able to sneak away once a month to visit Aminata. As with many slaves, their family is broken up.

I don't want to give away too much of the book, so I'll just say that through more coincidence and bravery, Aminata ends up with her freedom in New York City, and ultimately works with the British Loyalists during the Revolutionary War. The British promised freedom to any slaves that worked for them, and after the end of the war, Aminata is asked by the British to help them register all the blacks that served the Loyalist cause in "The Book of Negroes" so that they can be transported to Nova Scotia.

As you might imagine, things are not much better in Canada. The land promised to the former slaves is never given. They are forced to live in a separate town miles from the white settlement where they work, and when jobs become scarce, lynch mobs and arsonists attack the black settlement. A group of British abolitionists organize an exodus of former slaves to settle back in Africa in Sierra Leone, and Aminata Diallo, who by this point feels she has nothing to lose and who wants to see her home village again, decides to go.

This is obviously an epic and sweeping book that covers a lot of time, a lot of events, and a lot of countries. Keeping the entire narrative tied to the first person experiences of Aminata and allowing us to view these unimaginable actions on an individual scale allows the book to sink deeper than a birds-eye view of the topic. And Hill does a wonderful job with Aminata. Her narrative is straight forward and unflinching, very physical, pragmatic, and intelligent. She is a character that you admire much more than you pity.

The Canadian section of the book and the move to Sierra Leone was the part of the slave story that I wasn't that familiar with. The Book of Negroes is a real document (actually one of the most detailed and comprehensive archival records of individual slaves), and Hill definitely did his research -- there are dozens of recommended books for further reading at the end of the novel. Reading a story about slavery, showing all the horribleness of humanity, is never a fun endeavor, but Hill gives us something new in The Book of Negroes and something that we shouldn't look away from.

The Wicked Heart by Christopher Pike (1993)

2011-08-13T11:22:00.001-05:00

Hey, guess what, guys! I found another Christopher Pike book from my secret stash, and this one pretty much tops all the other ones in bad descriptions, far-fetched plots, and disturbing violence. I'm talking about The Wicked Heart (1993), the story of a teenage serial killer named Dusty Shame and his chemistry lab partner, Sheila, who helps solve the mystery and bring his story to an end. Let me say that again: Dusty Shame.

I'll just let Pike describe Dusty for you:

He was a handsome young man. His hair was light brown, soft and fine like that of an angel, his eyes green as grass in evening twilight. He was five ten, fit and muscular, but plagued by repeated heartburn. He had a tendency, when in social situations, to be jerky in his movements. But when he was alone, especially when he killed, he moved smoothly and gracefully as a dancer. Always, though, he was quiet. Had he been more talkative, he certainly could have had plenty of dates. And maybe if he had spoken to more girls and listened to their voices instead of the one [in] his head, he wouldn't have become a murderer....

Dusty was in many ways like his nickname, Dust, and viewed everything from the ground level, where the insects that crawled through the mud were the best friends of the flowers that scented the air with their perfume.

Here we go (spoilers follow, but I don't know that it matters much):

As the book begins, Dusty has killed two teenage girls and is about to kill a third. A voice in his head tells him he needs to kill six girls and bury them in an isolated cave in the California desert, where six other old graves already lie. The other girls Dusty killed lived in other towns, but for this third murder he picks Nancy, a girl from his chemistry class, who was talking about how her parents were going to be out of town for a couple days.

When Nancy doesn't show up for class the next day, her best friend (and Dusty's lab partner) Sheila, is worried. Sheila is also upset because her boyfriend Matt recently broke up with her. She runs into Matt after school and starts crying so hard that he offers to drive her home, but she insists that they stop at Nancy's house to check on her. When there is no answer, Matt breaks into the house and they notice nothing out of place except that Nancy and her purse are gone, and there is a white card with a hand-drawn swastika on the bed. They call Nancy's parents and then the police. Eventually they get put in touch with Lieutenant Black who has been tracking the other murders.

The ridiculousness level amps up as Lt. Black entrusts Sheila with details of the ongoing investigation and asks her for help in understanding how the Einstein computer network works (an adorably described Prodigy-like creation), since it appears that the killer finds his victims using the message boards. Sheila doesn't know much about Einstein, but her lab partner Dusty does! Uh oh! Dusty and Shelia go to Lt. Black's house and meet his cute teenage daughter Dixie. Uh oh!

Then things get really improbable:

Lt. Black sends Sheila out to another city to talk to a retired police officer named Gossick who has a theory about this case. She decides to take Matt with her and they hear the guy out. Here is the outline: Back in Nazi Germany, Heinrich Himmler had a girlfriend named Frau Scheimer. They were both empty evil beings without humanity that fed off of the suffering of others. Gossick was present when Himmler and Scheimer were caught and Himmler killed himself before being interrogated. Frau Scheimer and her young daughter (uh oh!) were released and ended up going to California. A similar set of murders of young women started up and Gossick started investigating. Through a deep meditation regimen, he connected in with the mysteries of the universe and realized that Frau Scheimer was responsible for the killings. Things happen, Gossick ends up shooting Scheimer, burying her in a secret grave, fostering her daughter for awhile, and then getting fired from the force, and losing custody of the daughter, who he had grown to love. The daughter's adopted parents end up dying and she changes her name and has a son of her own. She loses her mind to Alzheimer's when her son is a young man, but the evil voice of her mother is still able to talk to him and tell him to commit horrible acts. That's right: Dusty Shame is the grandson of Himmler!

And now he has Dixie and is driving her out to the desert with Sheila hot on their trail. Gossick and Matt are trying to find them! So is Lt. Black! What will happen!

So, this one was satisfyingly ridiculous, but also one of the worst written of all of Pike's books. The dialogue is horrible, the descriptions clunky, and the plot ridiculous. This was written in the heyday of Pike's career (it was the fourth book he published in 1993) and it reads like a poorly edited first draft. It is much much darker than other Pike books, but the ridiculous plot and poor writing do little to help the violence and tragedy to coalesce into anything suspenseful or engaging. If you love to hate Pike books, this is the one for you. If you are looking for a good murder mystery, then you should probably stay away.

The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips (2011)

2011-08-06T10:47:00.000-05:00

The next LibraryThing Early Reviewers book in my pile is The Tragedy of Arthur (2011) by Arthur Phillips. Spacebeer readers who pay even more attention than I do will remember that I read Phillips' first book, Prague way back in 2006 for the first meeting of the awesome, but now defunct/transmogrified Smarter Than You Book Club. I remember liking Prague but having some reservations, and I feel similarly towards The Tragedy of Arthur, although Phillips gets way more ambition points with the conceit of his most recent novel.

"The Tragedy of Arthur" in The Tragedy of Arthur is an undiscovered Shakespeare play that our narrator's father discovered and liberated from a wealthy manor house over thirty years ago. Of course, our narrator's father is a talented forger who has spent most of the intervening years in prison. And our narrator happens to be a novelist named Arthur Phillips who has written several books, including a debut novel titled Prague.

Although he is suspicious at first, all the experts agree that the 1597 edition of "The Tragedy of Shakespeare" that his father found are authentic, and Arthur enters into a contract with his publisher, Random House, to publish this unseen play. Arthur secures the right to write the introduction and annotate the play for modern audiences himself. But when his doubts of the play's authenticity increase and Random House refuses to stop publication, he bulks his introduction to the play up into a 250 page memoir / explanation of his life, his father, his twin sister, his failed relationships, and everything else.

And then, just in case you didn't think Phillips was the smartest guy in the room, we have the text of "The Tragedy of Arthur": a five-act, straight-faced, iambic pentameter-ed, credibly Shakespearean tragedy. Complete with annotations by Arthur and co/cross-annotations by a Shakespearean expert.

Setting the novel's weaknesses aside, you have to admire Phillips' ambition and dedication to pull this off. It's awfully, awfully, clever, and he does it well. The meditations on forgery and reality are well thought out, and the comments on the legacy of Shakespeare are all pretty accurate and difficult to argue with, whether you love or hate the Bard.

While the introduction is well written, I was often put off by Phillips' distancing word play ("disparate desperate adventures," "disoriented in the JFK holding area where counterterrorism shades into countertourism") and meta-ness (it's a character, with the name of the author, writing an introduction, to a fake play, that really exists, and the introduction's like a memoir, and he tells us it's like a memoir! And why he hates memoirs!). I don't think that the revelations of the narrator's intentions end up being as emotionally connecting as Phillips' hopes they will be, and the unsatisfying twist that leads to those revelations is an out of character reaction to Arthur on the behalf of every other character of the novel.

Arthur Phillips' "Arthur Phillips" owes some literary debt to Phillip Roth's "Phillip Roth," and like Roth's novels that I've read, the narrator of The Tragedy of Arthur is very self centered, has ridiculous relationships with women, and kind of turns me off with his overly dude-centered ways. And although Phillips is a good writer, he doesn't have the dark, neurotic, over-the-topness that keeps me reading Roth even though I find most of his characters pretty despicable. I think that both Roth and Phillips want their narrators to be unlikable, but Roth pulls it off in a way that Phillips does not.

Either way, this book obviously gave me a lot to think about, and although when I just re-read what I wrote about it I realize I had a lot of criticisms, I really did like the novel overall. Anyone with a sense of literary playfulness, and particularly any English nerds who have read a lot of Shakespeare, will get a lot of enjoyment from this book.

The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli (2010)

2011-07-30T11:02:00.000-05:00

When my excellent friend Corie loaned me Tatjana Soli's debut novel, The Lotus Eaters (2010), I wasn't entirely sure I'd get into this story of a female American photojournalist in Vietnam. Of course, I should have remembered Corie's track record of book recommendations -- I was quickly engrossed in this one and was carried away by it until the end.

In 1965, after Helen Adams' brother is killed in Vietnam, she drops out of college and with a high school photography class under her belt, decides to travel to Vietnam and cover the war as a freelance photojournalist. A tall blond woman is a unique sight in Saigon, and particularly unusual in the boys club of foreign journalism. Helen makes her share of newbie mistakes, one of which initially appears to be falling into bed with the handsome Pulitzer prize winning bad boy of the bunch, Sam Darrow. After getting brushed off by Darrow, Helen regroups and quickly (honestly maybe a little too quickly) makes a name for herself as a natural photographer who is willing to take risks to bring in the shot. She gets a job as a Life staff photographer and is once again in the orbit of Darrow and his Vietnamese assistant, Linh.

Linh, like many of the Vietnamese assisting the Americans, has had a complicated and tragic life because of the complicated and tragic series of wars in his country. He keeps his feelings and history to himself, for the most part, but his story is slowly revealed over the course of the book, as is his hidden love for Helen that grows even as she and Darrow become inseparable.

Soli starts the book with the American evacuation of Saigon in 1975 as Helen and Linh struggle to escape with their lives and Helen's film, and then drops us back a decade. This structure gives us a unique perspective as we watch the characters move forward to the action at the beginning of the book, and deepens our understanding of their actions. In fact, throughout the book, Soli's biggest strength is her structuring of the plot and her hints and revelations of the past.

Helen Adams, Sam Darrow, and Linh are no cynical Thomas Fowlers, but there is a lot from this expatriate community of journalists that hearkens back to Graham Greene's The Quiet American (in fact, in an early scene, Helen throws her copy of Greene's book in the trash and then decides to read it one more time after it is rescued by her room boy). While Helen and the other characters do lose their idealism and optimism, they also become more a part of the Vietnamese culture than Fowler ever did and never entirely distance themselves from the events surrounding them -- to the extent that they are ultimately nearly destroyed by their inability to isolate themselves.

Soli is a beautiful writer, and this is a well researched and accurate-feeling novel about a country and a war that have been written about many times before. The characters, the romance, and the action are all believable and moving, but her descriptions of the environment and her compassion for all the components of her novel, even the smallest characters or briefest scenes, are part of what really make The Lotus Eaters stand out. Definitely worth reading.

Huntington, West Virginia "On the Fly" by Harvey Pekar (2011)

2011-07-27T18:03:00.000-05:00

I haven't read everything that Harvey Pekar (author of the American Splendor comics) has written, but what I've read I've really liked. So when Dr. M picked up the copy of his most recent (and final, since he sadly died about a year ago) book, the posthumously published and awesomely punctuated Huntington, West Virginia "On the Fly" (2011), I was happy to take a look.

Like his other work, this book consists of vignettes of Pekar's everyday life and some of the stories of people that Pekar has met. In this collection we have the story of "Hollywood Bob" (my favorite) who went from being a small time hood to the successful owner and driver of a limo business; the separate and then together stories of Tunc and Eileen (plus Eileen is a comic book archivist!); the drama behind a local toy store owner's purchase and renovation of a old timey diner; and Pekar's trip to the titular Huntington, West Virginia for a book festival.

Pekar's voice and presence melds with his subject in each story, and the perfectly ordinary events of regular life become a little more interesting through his eyes. This collection is beautifully illustrated by Summer McClinton. Definitely recommended for Pekar fans, and if you aren't a Pekar fan, then what have you been doing with your life?

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (2000)

2011-07-21T21:15:00.000-05:00

The always amazing Joolie lent me this copy of Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin (2000) after I raved so much about liking books with interesting structures like The Cloud Atlas. As always, Joolie was right on target with what I might like.

"The Blind Assassin" in The Blind Assassin is the title of a posthumously published novel by Laura Chase -- a woman who drives off a bridge and dies at the age of 25 on the first page of our book. Our narrator, Iris Chase, is Laura's older sister, and she had the book published after Laura's death. This book follows a young upper-class woman who is having an affair with a fascinatingly poor writer who is wanted by the police for his work with the labor unions. As they lay in bed together, the man spins a science fiction story about the blind assassins for his lover. The Blind Assassin alternates between sections of Laura Chase's novel, the current musings of the elderly Iris, and Iris's memoir of she and Laura's parallel lives.

The structure is obviously the star here, and Atwood expertly intertwines the different facets of the story, perfectly wrapping up all the loose strings by the end. The ending is a little predictable, but it hid itself long enough to be satisfying when it occurred to me. Beyond the structure we have Atwood's cold, distancing, unknowable, and fragile characters (and I mean all that in a good way). Our narrator, the character through whom we see everyone else, is tragically disconnected from everyone else in her life, and because of this distance, we can't ever know the other characters very well. And most of them come off as people I would prefer not to know anyway.

Part of the reason I think I responded so much to this book is that at its core it's about sisters -- I have two sisters (and no brothers) and sister stories have always gotten to me. The relationship between Iris and Laura is an exaggerated version of that combination of closeness and distance that any sisters share -- they are the people that are most like you and that you know better than anyone in the world, while at the same time being even more unknowable than a perfect stranger. This simultaneous closeness and distance between Iris and Laura drives the action of the book to its inevitably tragic (but ultimately satisfying) conclusion.

Just Kids by Patti Smith (2010)

2011-07-13T20:11:00.001-05:00

The next book for the best book club in the U.S.A. (Go DAFFODILS!) is Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids (2010). I'm not the most informed on Patti Smith's musical career, and while I like Horses quite a bit, I find some of her music is a little too poetic and overtly political for my taste. This book, however, hardly gets into Smith's music at all. Instead it is a kind of dual coming of age story of Patti Smith and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in late-1960s / early-1970s New York City. It's a story of a foundational friendship and young artists finding their voice. But most of all, its a love story.

Smith and Mapplethorpe were both born in 1946 and moved to New York City in the late 1960s. Once they found each other, they quickly formed a life together that supported the two of them both personally and artistically, and which didn't end until Mapplethorpe's death in 1989.

I'm not the hugest fan of the memoir as a genre (they can occasionally be wonderful, but usually either try to out do other memoirists in a horrible experiences contest or fall into the the rose-colored nostalgia trap), but Smith has written a beautiful and readable book about her experience in New York City and her relationship with Mapplethorpe, both hard subjects to approach without falling into cliches or glossing over rough edges.

Smith's background as a poet sometimes bleeds too heavily into her prose for my taste (particularly when describing herself), but for the most part she maintains a straightforward style that works well with her subject matter. The large chapter of the book that covers the couple's time in the Hotel Chelsea gets a little namedroppy (does Smith really remember every person that was at Max's Kansas City or some party or poetry reading every time?), but I imagine many readers are coming to the book for that 1970s New York experience and will appreciate knowing all the details.

I'll save some of my comments for the book club, but be prepared for the final chapter to melt even the coldest of hearts. Worth reading regardless of your musical tastes.

The War Prayer by Mark Twain (1916)

2011-07-08T09:56:00.000-05:00

I got this copy of The War Prayer by Mark Twain (1916) at the seminary library book sale this past year -- it just called out to me from in between all the theological tomes and philosophy books.

Twain wrote this poetic protest in response to the Spanish-American war but wouldn't let it be published during his lifetime out of respect for his family, who thought the sentiments too harsh. It was first published in Harper's in 1916, in the heart of World War I, and has been a perennial favorite whenever the nation goes to war.

The copy I have was published during Vietnam, in 1971. Here Twain's words are accompanied by the powerful and chaotic line drawings of John Groth. The combination of the words and images really help to twist Twain's knife. Definitely worth a read.

[And if you want to read it (without Groth's wonderful illustrations) it is all right here.]

The Anatomy of a Moment: Thirty-five Minutes in History and Imagination by Javier Cercas (2011)

2011-07-04T11:19:00.001-05:00

I got a copy of The Anatomy of a Moment: Thirty-five Minutes in History and Imagination by Javier Cercas (published in Spain in 2009, and in an English translation in 2011) through the Library Thing EarlyReviewers program. I have to admit that even though I requested it and I do have some interest in modern Spanish politics, it took me awhile to bring this book about a failed 1981 coup d'etat up to the top of my list. And while it was slow going at first, this book really exceeded my expectations and turned into something very unique and exciting.

My first clue that this was no ordinary history or political science book should have been the first two blurbs on the back of the book: "The best history book of the year" and "A masterpiece of twenty-first century European literature." Cercas is an established novelist in Spain, and found himself moved by the half an hour of video footage of the attempted February 23, 1981 takeover of the government by a faction of the military (commonly referred to as 23-F). Although the vote of a new Prime Minister that was going on at the time was being broadcast live on the radio, a couple of cameras were in the room recording when the soldiers entered. They recorded, unmanned, for about half an hour before they were both shut off. This footage is played often in Spain on the anniversary of the coup, and the reactions of the participants, particularly the recently disgraced Prime Minister Adolfo Suarez, inspired Cercas to write a novel. After the novel was done, it just didn't work for him, so he translated his extensive research and endless thoughts into this non-fiction novel of the events of the coup and the men on either side of the standoff.

During the coup, when the soldiers, led by Lieutenant-Colonel Antonio Tejero, entered the parliament floor and took the legislators hostage, three men refused to get down on the floor, even when the bullets started flying. I think wikipedia describes their reactions pretty well: "During the shooting of several machine gun rounds, whilst almost all deputies dropped terrified on the floor, three kept standing defiantly: acting Minister of Defense General Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado, who stood up and ordered Tejero to desist; acting President of the Government Adolfo Suárez, who remained sitting down instead of crouching on the floor; and Communist leader Santiago Carrillo, who, sitting down, calmly lit a cigarette and did not seem to be disturbed by the events." [You can get a hint of the coup here (and there is a lot more on You Tube -- search for "23 Febrero golpe de estado")]

But let's back up for a very tiny bit of Spanish history (feel free to skip the next two paragraphs if this is not your thing): In 1936, Francisco Franco led an unsuccessful coup against the left-wing Popular Front government. The coup started the Spanish Civil War, which pitted left against right and ended with Franco declaring himself the leader of Spain for life. And he lived for another 40 years. Knowing that he would need to take steps to carry on Francoism after his death, Franco allowed the heir of the Spanish monarchy, Juan Carlos, to return to Spain from Italy and be educated there. Franco was secure that Juan Carlos would continue his policies after his death and named him his official successor. He wasn't aware, however, that Juan Carlos had been meeting with political dissidents behind Franco's back, and when he came to power in 1975, he masterminded the transition of Spain from a dictatorship to a democracy.

The major creator of the new Spanish state was the first Prime Minister (who was initially appointed by the King but later elected democratically), Adolfo Suarez. Cercas describes Suarez as a "pure politician" and he did what seemed almost impossible -- got the Francoist legislature to vote their system out and a democratic one in, legalized political parties, including Communism, and extended autonomy to distinct regions of Spain. It was all going pretty great until Suarez leaned a little too far to the left from his centrist foundation, while international politics leaned heavily to the right (Thatcher, Reagan). Add in the oil crisis and increased terrorist activity from the ETA and you have a bunch of Spaniards who think that Franco wasn't so bad and another coup and a return to the right might not be a bad idea.

The background details and results of the coup (which are covered extensively in the book) are way too complicated to get into here, but I'll just say that Cercas does an amazing job of combining historical research with his novelist's eye for human psychology and emotion. The book has a wonderful structure -- each section starts with a detailed analysis of the existing video from inside the legislative chamber and ends with a step-by-step move through the action of the coup itself. In between we get the histories of all the major players, the cultural and political climate leading up to the coup, and the ultimate consequences of the military action.

Cercas' writing style takes a little getting used to, but as a lover of long sentences and multiple asides, I got into it pretty quickly. Here's a representative example: "I insist: I'm not saying that this was the only possible result of the coup for the monarchy if the King opposed it; what I'm saying is that, like any of the rest of the plotters, before joining the coup Cortina might have arrived at the conclusion that the risks the coup entailed for the monarchy were much fewer than the benefits it might bring in its wake, and that in consequence the coup was a good coup because it would triumph whether it triumphed or failed: the triumph of the coup would strengthen the Crown (that's at least what Cortina might have thought and what Armada and Milans were thinking); its failure would likewise do so."

Whew.

Obviously this isn't the book for everyone, and I have a little background in this kind of thing, so I might be a special audience (I was a Spanish minor in college and took a class all in Spanish about modern Spain), but if you have a little patience and some interest in Spanish politics, try picking this one up. I've never read anything else like it.

The Maeander Project

2011-07-01T10:28:00.002-05:00

Do you remember watching Indiana Jones as a kid? And how cool being an archaeologist seemed? Obviously real archaeologists don't (always) act like Mr. Jones (Dr. Jones?), but they are still pretty cool. [Also, as an aside, I can see how constantly being reminded of Indiana Jones could get irritating for an archaeologist, but I sort of wish archivists had a parallel film hero.]

Two of my cool archaeologist friends (Colleen and John) are participating in a very interesting sounding project this August in the Maeander River area of Southwestern Turkey. When their funding stumbled, the group didn't give up, instead they started a Kickstarter page to raise $5,000 for the trip.

If you aren't familiar with Kickstarter, it is a neat system where people can pledge money to a project in exchange for a graduated level of thank you gifts (like when you contribute to PBS). If the project doesn't meet its funding goal within the designated time frame, no one pays anything. If it reaches its funding level, everyone contributes the bit they've pledged and project goes forward. I love the idea of crowdsourcing funding for good people to do interesting things. Some projects are never going to be attractive enough to big corporations, governments, or universities to support them, for whatever reason, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't get funding. Guys, we can fund them! With as little as $1!

The Maeander Project is up to 48 backers and $3,098 as of this posting, with two weeks to go. If they hit the $5,000 goal, they have a donor who has pledged to match it. Do me a favor and read their proposal and then contribute if you can. And even if you can't contribute, spread the word about this worthwhile project.

[Photo credit: Rol1000 on Flickr. Also I don't know much about Turkey or archaeology, but this is tagged as being in the Maeander River region with a Creative Commons license and I thought it was a nice illustration. So there.]

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959)

2011-06-23T21:21:00.001-05:00

No human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair, more frightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice. Almost any house, caught unexpectedly or at an odd angle, can turn a deeply humorous look on a watching person; even a mischievous little chimney, or a dormer like a dimple, can catch up a beholder with a sense of fellowship; but a house arrogant and hating, never off guard, can only be evil. This house, which seemed somehow to have formed itself, flying together into its own powerful pattern under the hands of its builders, fitting itself into its own construction of lines and angles, reared its great head back against the sky without concession to humanity. It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope. Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed.

My super awesome friend Dan loaned me a copy of one of his favorite books, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959). This book was made into a movie called The Haunting in 1963 (which I have seen and which is awesome) [and remade in 1999 into a movie I haven't seen, but have heard kind of sucks]. And since I liked the old movie so much, I was very excited to check out the book. As you might expect, it was wonderfully great.

Dr. Montague is a supernatural researcher who has finally found the perfect haunted house -- Hill House -- so he rents it out (naturally no one was living there at the time) and writes letters to dozens of people who, for one reason or another, seem like they may be receptive to ghosts and hauntings. Only two people respond: the shy and inexperienced Eleanor, who spent the past decade caring for her sick and recently deceased mother, and who experienced a three day storm of stones on her house after her father died when she was a young girl; and the cynical and urbane and somewhat psychic Theodora who comes out to Hill House from the city on a whim after a big fight with her partner. The doctor and the two women are joined by Luke, the nephew of the woman who currently owns Hill House.

The two women have an instant rapport, and Eleanor is fascinated by all her companions and amazed that they find her interesting and worth talking to. Even when the house starts acting up at night, Eleanor is more happy to be away from her family and out in the world than scared of the supernatural presence. The group spends most of their days joking with each other, exploring the grounds, and making fun of the dour housekeeper. Their nights are spent drinking brandy, playing chess, and eventually going to bed only to be woken up by strange noises in the hallways. Things escalate when Eleanor's name is written on the walls in chalk and blood. Eventually the tight-knit group blows apart -- but is it the fault of the ghosts or the fault of the humans?

Jackson's book is not only genuinely creepy, it is a masterful psychological thriller and a wonderful piece of literature. Our look at this group is through the eyes of Eleanor, a completely sympathetic (and yet also unreliable) narrator who journeys farther than any of the other characters in the book, even though she is only a few hours from her home in the city. And the ending is just perfect. I lovedlovedloved this book and I can't wait to read more of Shirley Jackson's work.

Thanks Dan!

[back cover available here, for all you book cover nerds.]

Abigail Adams by Woody Holton (2009)

2011-06-17T10:44:00.001-05:00

My lovely aunt Charlotte lent me her copy of Woody Holton's recent biography of our second First Lady, Abigail Adams (2009).

I will be the first to admit that my geographical knowledge of New England and my ready knowledge about the Revolution is a little muddied. In fact, I always thought pre-Civil War US history was the most boring of the required history classes in high school and college. Sneaking up on the Boston Tea Party, the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the Declaration of Independence, George Washington, the Constitution and all that through the lens of Abigail Adams' life was a nice way to ingest some of the timelines and politics that usually zip right past me.

Abigail was the daughter of a Congregationalist minister in Weymouth, Massachusetts, not far from Boston. As a young woman she met the young lawyer John Adams, who lived in Braintree, Massachusetts, a nearby town. He was initially put off by her outspoken and "giddy" nature, but later praised her for her being "saucy." And throughout their long marriage, the revolution, and John's political career, Abigail never lost the saucyness that she was known for.

Because John was frequently sent to political posts that kept him away from Abigail for months (or years) at a time, the two had a deep and extensive correspondence. There is, in fact, more surviving documentary evidence of Abigail Adams than almost any other 18th century American woman. And that correspondence shows a woman who never shied from decrying the lack of educational opportunities for women; shrewdly invested money that she managed to set aside as her own, often against the wishes of John (even though by law all her property and money belonged to her husband); and closely followed and offered her strong opinion on all the politics of the day.

This was actually a nice companion to World Enough and Time, since it pre-dates and then overlaps with the action of that novel. Of course, the furthest south Abigail goes most of the time is New York (with a few months in the newly constructed White House as its first occupant), and she holds a strong New England prejudice against the southern states (and the French, the English, blacks, foreigners, Catholics, Calvinists, the very rich, and the poor -- with exceptions made in all categories for people she knows personally).

This book is nicely researched and well written. A family tree might have been a nice addition, since the Adams family reproduces widely and everyone seems to have the same names. Holton pushes the feminist angle pretty strongly (Adams is well known for her "Remember the Ladies!" letter to her husband), and while Adams certainly displayed a lifelong interest in the rights and education of women, I think he sometimes holds her relationship with John up as more unusually egalitarian than it really was. Most of all, you get a real sense for the every day life of the period -- the problems that distance (even what now seems like a small distance) put on communication; the parallels between the federalists / anti-federalists and today's politicians; the economy crippling speculation and real estate bubbles after the war; and a truly moving exchange when Abigail's daughter finds a lump in her breast and has to be convinced to get a mastectomy. I'm very glad I had a chance to read this book.

[And if you'd like a taste of Abigail's "saucy" and extensive correspondence with her husband, you are in luck because the Massachusetts Historical Society has put 1160 of them online. And yesterday, while I was finishing this book, I saw a link to this news story of a newly uncovered letter from Abigail!]

Hate Annual #9 by Peter Bagge (2011)

2011-06-12T10:40:00.000-05:00

In his latest installment in the Buddy and Lisa saga, Peter Bagge takes us back to Lisa's estranged homestead when her mom calls to tell her that her dad has Alzheimers. Lisa hasn't seen her parents in over a decade, and they've never met Buddy or Harold, so the whole family comes along and while they are there, more than one skeleton comes out of the closet. Best of all, though, are Bagge's expressive and exaggerated drawings and the goofy niceness of the Buddy that we've gotten to know over decades of comics. This one in particular made me want to go back and re-read our other anthologies. Go Buddy!

World Enough and Time by Robert Penn Warren (1950)

2011-06-08T19:41:00.000-05:00

"Therefore I searched my books for what truth might be beyond the bustle of the hour and the empty lusts of time."

My next stop on the western canon caravan is Robert Penn Warren's delightfully melodramatic and engagingly uneven World Enough and Time (1950). Warren is best known for his novel about Louisiana politics, All the King's Men, and while I haven't read that one (although I will because it is also on this list, along with Warren's Selected Poems), I can only imagine that World Enough and Time does for 1820s Kentucky politics what All the King's Men did for 1930s Louisiana.

I mentioned that the book is uneven and melodramatic, and usually I'd view that as a negative, but in this case, the uneven and melodramatic narrative perfectly matches the uneven and melodramatic nature of the two main characters, Jeremiah Beaumont and his infatuation, and later wife, Rachael Jordon.

Jeremiah grows up in rural eastern Kentucky in the late 18th / early 19th century. It was a time when the state had just recently stopped being the wild frontier, where memories of wars with the Indians (and the British) were still fresh, and every tavern had an old uncivilized hunter sitting in the corner and spinning tales. It was a land of people who, for whatever reason, had to leave and strike west to make their fortune, which leads to a lot of dissatisfied wives clinging to their good family names and wishing they were back in Virginia. It was also, of course, a time of slavery, although Warren doesn't let that enter much into the story.

A learned neighbor of Jeremiah's sets up a school, and he proves to be a quick student. When he becomes a young man, his teacher introduces Jeremiah to one of his good friends, Colonel Cassius Fort, a lawyer and politician who invites Jeremiah to Frankfort to study law under Fort's instruction and mentorship. Jeremiah does just that, staying in Frankfort with the carefree Wilkie Barron and his widowed mother, and getting involved in some heated politics. When Wilkie gets into a passion over a girl named Rachael Jordon who has been taken advantage of and impregnated by Fort, Jeremiah drops everything to insinuate himself into her life and avenge her name.

The story is closely based on the almost too tragically romantic to be true "Kentucky Tragedy." If you want to keep the bulk of the plot a secret, you obviously shouldn't read the Wikipedia article about it, but I would argue that the strength of this book comes from its layered build-up and relentless punishment of its characters, and not from the actions of the crime or the findings of the trial. And if you agree with me, or if you don't think you'll ever read this book, then you should definitely read about the tragedy. The one part I'm unsure about liking in the novel is towards the end where it drastically swings away from the true story, but the more I think about it the more I like where Warren took me.

And even better than where he takes you, is how you get there. Just sample some of this, and try to resist reading it out loud:

"He belonged to that old race of Devil-breakers who were a terror and a blessing across the land, men who had been born to be the stomp-and-gouge bully of a tavern, the Indian fighter with warm scalps at his belt, the ice-eyed tubercular duelist of a county courthouse, the half-horse, half-alligator abomination of a keelboat, or a raper of women by the cow pen, but who got their hot prides and cold lusts short-circuited into obsessed hosannas and a ferocious striving for God's sake."

"'Ah, gentlemen,' [Lancaster] said, 'I trust that I do not intrude.' He spoke in a slow, very musical voice, which caressed the ear. But no one answered a word, and those lips which apparently were designed for 'An expression of melancholy, almost female sweetness, drew back as from long practice into a twisted, thinning smile which made you think of new silk being ripped by a careless blade for wantonness or in hatred and contempt.... 'And I'll remember what you said to me when we met,' Lancaster said, and smiled again, but this time a smile of pitying friendliness, so sweet and sincere that you took that face to be the face of your dearest other self.

It should come as no surprise that Warren is the only person that has won the Pulitzer Prize for both fiction and poetry.

This one takes some slogging, but it is necessary and so worth it. If you have any love for tragic romance, psychological drama, or Kentucky, then you should give it a shot.

[p.s. I can't believe I forgot to mention this above, but the whole book is narrated by a contemporary historian telling the story of Jeremiah and Rachael through archival documents and Jeremiah's prison narrative justifying his actions. That's right: Archives!]

Grasses of a Thousand Colors by Wallace Shawn (2009)

2011-05-26T20:15:00.000-05:00

Our lovely friend Ike lent Dr. M a copy of Wallace Shawn's play "Grasses of a Thousand Colors" (2009) recently, and since it was readable and in my house, I decided to read it. I really like Wallace Shawn as an actor, and I enjoyed My Dinner with Andre (which Shawn wrote and costarred in with Andre Gregory, who happened to direct the stage version of "Grasses of a Thousand Colors"), so I was interested to read one of his plays. And I think I liked it! Or rather, I know I liked it, although I'm not always sure why.

In "Grasses of a Thousand Colors," our protagonist, Ben (who was played by Wallace Shawn), is a sexually obsessed scientist who made great breakthroughs in genetic modification of food. He is addressing the audience as the author of a memoir, looking back over his successes and failures, and criss-crossing it all with the females of his life: his wife, Cerise; his lovers Robin and Rose; and one very mysterious white cat named Blanche.

In the end, the play, and Ben's life, come down to two things: eating and sex. Eating is no good anymore because the genetic trick that solved the food crisis by letting animals survive on the dead corpses of other animals has poisoned the food supply and resulted in excessive vomiting, an inability to eat potatoes, and death. Sex is no good anymore because as soon as our hero finds a new woman to satisfy his often-described penis, things change and the sexual relationship drifts apart. In fact, the only consistent lover he has is the beautiful long-haired Blanche, but even she becomes standoffish and bored after Robin cuts her head off.

So you see: it is a confusing play. And it involves a lot of barfing, penis describing, and cat sex. And yet it is extremely enjoyable! There is, as you might expect, a lot of humor hidden in the psychological symbolism of this play, and it is impossible to read it without hearing Shawn's unique voice speaking all of Ben's lines. Three hours might seem a little long for live theatre, but I wish I could have seen Gregory's staging of the play -- I feel like even more of the humor and playfulness would come out in a live performance.

Thanks, Ike!

A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin (1996)

2011-05-18T20:12:00.001-05:00

I've always considered myself a science fiction reader and not a fantasy reader. Give me robots, aliens, and dystopian futures -- no dragons, elves, fairies, or magic for me, please! So, much like with the Harry Potter series, it took a huge number of my friends reading and loving A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin (1996) for me to dip my toe into the A Song of Ice and Fire series. And now that I have, I'm lucky that I'm a fast reader, because I can't believe what I've gotten myself into.

But who am I kidding -- I love long novels and after about 100 pages, I was solidly hooked on this one. Of course there is the obligatory map at the beginning of the book guiding us through the imaginary kingdom, and a host of appendices giving family histories, genealogies, and alliances, but don't let that get you down. Martin makes it so easy to love: supernatural elements are just hinted at, or talked about as stories from the distant past; the present is full of violence and sex and political intrigue; and most of the story is more like straightforward adventure than mystical old fantasy.

The basic plot is something like this: Seven formerly independent kingdoms have been ruled over by a single king for three centuries. The first of these kings was a Targaryen, of the House of the Dragon, and his family stayed in power until a rebellion, about a dozen years ago, killed all of them but two exiled children, and put Robert Baratheon on the throne. Robert's best friend and fellow warrior is the Lord of Winterfell, the northernmost kingdom, Eddard Stark, and most of this first book comes to us from the perspective of Eddard, his wife, his two daughters, and three of his sons. When Robert calls Eddard south to rule at court as the Hand of the King, his family is divided and their comfortable (and peaceful) lives in the North are forever changed.

Shit, that makes it sound like a crappy fantasy novel. But I swear it is way more compelling than it sounds! For example, there are super creepy vampire/zombie-type creatures called The Others, extra smart and vicious direwolves, a nice sprinkling of sex, and tons and tons of unexpected death and betrayal. Martin is not afraid to hurt or kill off his characters, even ones that seem essential to the story, and I like that aura of unpredictable tragedy. He also writes an awesome villain.

It is unsurprising that this has been made into an HBO series, and while I haven't seen any of it, I'm sure it looks great. Martin has a way with landscapes and locations that ease the transition from book to film. A few of my favorites:

A gigantic ice wall, built up over the centuries, dividing the northernmost kingdom from the untamed land "Beyond the Wall."
The road leading to the central camp for a nomadic Eastern people, flanked on both sides with the statues and icons of the people they have conquered.
An isolated castle so high on a mountain that no horses can reach it -- you have to crawl up or be hoisted in a bucket. And the dungeon cells aren't underneath -- they line a tower, are missing their outside wall, and have floors that are slightly tilted down towards a fall off the mountain.

Extra thanks to the always excellent John for lending this one to me, and here's hoping that I read the rest of them slowly enough that the series is finished before I catch up with Martin.

Renegade Craft Fair & PGT!

2011-05-16T10:57:00.000-05:00

If you are in the Austin area this weekend, don't forget to stop by the Palmer Events center for the 2nd Annual Renegade Craft Fair! And while you are there, I know you won't want to miss the Pretty Good Things booth (booth #44), where me and the fabulous Mary P. will be selling her unique, vintage inspired hats, fascinators and hair do-dads. If you bring us a taco or a cup of coffee or a beer or a smile and some encouragement, you will be rewarded with giant hugs and good karma. Crafts!

Lexicon Injection

2011-05-07T10:55:00.001-05:00

I've decided that the world needs to invent at least three new words.

1. When I check my Twitter or Facebook accounts, I don't scroll down to where I left off the last time and then scroll up to the present. Instead I start with the most recent updates and scroll back into the past until I meet where I ended the last time I checked in. There should be a word for reading about friends / reactions to world events in reverse.

2. The above sometimes leads to occasions where you realize something bad or good happened by the reactions, but you don't find out what it was until you scroll far enough back in time. I think we need a word for that too.

3. When I'm looking through RSS feeds, Facebook posts, and tweets, I always hover over a link before clicking on it and take a look at the full URL. Most of the time you can figure out the title or topic of the article / blog post / whatever is being linked to, and half of the time that is good enough for me and I never click through to read it. There should be a word for reading URLs instead of articles.

Or maybe these words already exist -- you are a smart crowd, can you help me out?

[photo credit]

Funeral for a Dog by Thomas Pletzinger (2011)

2011-05-03T17:52:00.001-05:00

The always wonderful LibraryThing Early Reviewers program sent me a copy of the recent English translation of German author Thomas Pletzinger's debut novel, Funeral for a Dog (2011), and since my experience of contemporary German fiction is pretty slight, I'm quite glad they did.

This is the story of two men: Daniel Mandelkern, a budding ABD ethnologist turned journalist for his wife's magazine; and Dirk Svensson, the reclusive author of a hit children's book. Mandelkern gets the assignment to travel to Svensson's isolated lakeside home in Italy, interview the author, and write a 3000 word profile, and after walking out on his wife in the middle of a giant fight and heading to the airport, he is happy to go. When he meets Svensson at the marina he finds himself walking into the middle of a reunion between Svensson, a three legged dog, a young boy, and the beautiful chain-smoking stranger named Tuuli that Mandelkern has been admiring all the way from Germany.

Both Mandelkern and Svensson have their share of regrets, failed romances, and missed opportunities, and Pletzinger reveals their stories to us through alternating sections of Mandelkern's ethnographic notes on his investigations into Svensson's life and his reflections on his own relationships; and the text of Svensson's unpublished (and unfinished) autobiographical novel that tells the story of a three-person (and one dog) romance that travels from Brazil to New York to Italy. Mandelkern is isolated from his own problems and is quickly drawn into the story of his host (who wants Mandelkern to stay, but who doesn't want to answer any questions) and the Finnish woman with the sad eyes. Their tragic romance, and the death and melancholy that haunt the lonely house push Mandelkern to figure out his own desires at the same time that he unravels the mysteries of his companions.

Pletzinger's writing is fresh and engaging, even when the subject matter goes in circles or threatens to drag the reader down. The translation (by Ross Benjamin) is crisp and seems to retain the sometimes experimental tone of the original. Like many novels about men trying to figure out their relationships with women, the female characters in this book are all cool, collected, beautiful, and always say the perfect thing, while the men are flawed, uncertain, and floundering. While this often bothers me, in this case I think the structure and perspective of the book make those characterizations work, and what would ordinarily be a negative turns into a positive. This is an excellent debut novel, and definitely worth a read.

Slumber Party by Christopher Pike (1985)

2011-04-26T19:15:00.000-05:00

It's hard to believe, but Christopher Pike's Slumber Party (1985) is the last Pike book in my childhood nostalgia pile! Of course, he has written many more books than the ones I bought in my youth, so maybe some more will come into my life some sweet day in the future.

Slumber Party is a good one to go out on, because I remember reading it in junior high and loving it. In this book, six friends reunite at an isolated ski cabin for a weekend of snow and fun. The last time all of them were together was eight years ago when they were at an ill-fated slumber party. A candlelit game (combined with a tragic mistake by our protagonist, Lara) leaves one girl, Nell, severely burned, and kills Nell's younger sister Nicole. Nell's family moved away after the incident and all the girls tried to put that night behind them. When Nell returns during their senior year of high school, who wouldn't want to go for a free ski weekend at her rich parent's deluxe ski cabin? Certainly no one would be plotting revenge!

Odd things start happening the moment the girls arrive at the cabin. First a snowman melts into a puddle of water in minutes even though it is below freezing outside. Then Lara's best friend Dana disappears when skiing back to the cabin, leaving behind one ski, no footprints, and a puddle of water. Lara has been distracting herself with her new crush, Percy (who is coming over with one of his friends for a party with this odd crew), and her new friend, Celeste who is younger than the other girls, and very mysterious -- she just showed up at school recently, and doesn't like to talk about her past. But those distractions can't put her suspicions about her friends' motives out of her mind.

Things escalate very quickly: incriminating conversations are overheard, Mindy is set on fire, Percy's friend gets extremely drunk, Lara tries to run back to the ski lodge and saves herself from frostbite by peeing on her hands, and soon everyone finds themselves tied up in the basement of the house with gasoline poured all around them and a gigantic propane tank ready to blow. Uh oh, who could have seen this happening?

This isn't really one of Pike's best books (the foreshadowing is blatant, the red herrings are irritating, and the pacing is off), but there are some good bits in there and the nostalgia factor is high if you liked this one as a kid. Probably not the best place to start, but definitely some good classic Pike.

Bloody Mary by Carolly Erickson (1978)

2011-04-20T17:36:00.001-05:00

I swear I didn't forget about this blog, I've just been busy ready the rather long and dense, but extremely readable and enjoyable Bloody Mary by Carolly Erickson (1978). My always awesome friend Chad, who shares my love of the Tudors, kindly lent it to me, and I'm very glad he did.

While I've read quite a few books about Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and even the ill-fated Mary Queen of Scots, I'd never read that much about Mary. Her reign, squeezed between the brief reign of her younger half-brother Edward after Henry's death, and the very long and stable reign of her half-sister Elizabeth, is mostly remembered for the hundreds of Protestants that were burned at the stake as she tried to bring the country back to Catholicism. Mary's story, however, is much more complicated and tragic than just the five years that she served as the first official Queen of England, and Erickson's book paints a sympathetic portrait of this often demonized woman.

Mary was the only surviving child from the union of Henry VIII and the Spanish Catherine of Aragon. She was raised as a princess, although not as a potential ruler, since Henry always held out for the possibility of a son. Mary was 17 when Henry declared his marriage with Catherine to be invalid and broke with the church to marry Anne Boleyn. Princess Mary soon became both a bastard and a religious liability to her father. Mary was not allowed to see her mother, lost her royal privileges, and was routinely harassed about her faith. The marriage plans and engagements that were so much a part of her life up until that point were all severed, and although Mary's treatment and position at court became better through the course of Henry's four other wives, she led a stressful and unstable existence for the next eleven years.

When her father died and her nine-year-old brother took the throne, Mary's Catholicism became even more of a burden. England was run by a Council of Regents and corruption, famine, and religious turmoil further battered the country. Edward IV died in 1553, at the age of fifteen, and after brief skirmish, Mary became the Queen of England. Erickson gives us a view of Mary at the beginning of her reign as a strong and pragmatic ruler who inherited a lot of debt and religious confusion. She was determined to bring England back to Catholicism, but realized that she would need to move slowly. She was an excellent public speaker, and was initially beloved by her subjects, particularly those who wished to return to the Catholic faith.

You'd think everything would finally start going Mary's way, but she ended up deciding to marry Prince Philip of Spain, her cousin Charles V's son who was set to inherit much of his father's empire. Philip was a politically logical match, but he was eleven years younger than Mary's virginal 37, and the two had little in common besides their faith. For her part, Mary was desperately in love with Philip, and their marriage led her to make religious reforms and commit to foreign wars that she might not have otherwise considered. After two false pregnancies and a lot of grief, Philip went off to govern his other territories and never returned to England.

When Mary died in 1558 at the age of 42, England celebrated the accession of Queen Elizabeth I, re-embraced Protestantism, and did not particularly mourn the death of their barren Catholic queen. Mary had a hard life, but was an intelligent and strong ruler when she was given a chance, and its sad that she wasn't able to do more for England that she did.

Erickson's book is well-researched and very readable -- often more like a novel than a history book. My only qualm is that the photographs in the book include three pictures of Henry VIII, three pictures of Elizabeth I, and even a picture of Mary Queen of Scots (who hardly enters into Mary Tudor's story at all) but NO pictures of Mary I herself. The only picture of her is on the front of the book (and plenty of pictures are available). It's like the book designer just did a quick search for "Tudor dynasty" and put in the first eleven pictures that showed up.

Overall, though, this is a wonderful book, and a must-read for anyone interested in the Tudors. Thanks Chad!

Moving Archives: The Experiences of Eleven Archivists edited byJohn Newman and Walter Jones (2002)

2011-04-09T09:59:00.001-05:00

Earlier this year I moved my office, processing area, and supplies up from the basement of the library to a recently vacated space on the third floor, and my repository of archival boxes, books, and what not is going to be moving up to a matching room sometime this year. I thought that instead of trying to figure all that box moving by myself, I'd get some hints from the archivists featured in Moving Archives: The Experiences of Eleven Archivists edited by John Newman and Walter Jones (2002).

This book is a series of case studies written by archivists who managed large archival moves during their careers. In most cases their moves were very very very large, and between buildings (or across state lines) and not the kind of smaller move inside a single building that I'm contemplating. The case studies were all very readable, and some went into much more detail than others. I would have liked to see something in addition to the case studies -- maybe check lists or some distilled advice pulled out of the narratives. Still, there were some pieces of advice that are universal to any move, and I think I extracted some tidbits that will help me make my small-scale move as smooth as possible. Definitely recommended if you are planning an archival move and can easily get your hands on it.

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (2004)

2011-03-31T20:18:00.000-05:00

Our latest book club read (go DAFFODILS!), suggested by the always amazing Corie, is Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (2004). I sometimes feel like I gush a little too much on this blog (maybe because I'm easy to please, or maybe because I read things I know I'm going to like), but at the risk of overgushing and giving the hard sell to my fellow DAFFODILS, I loved loved loved loved loved this book.

If you and I get into a discussion about aesthetics, you will soon realize that my favorite aspect of a story is its structure. It isn't the only thing, but a crappy structure (or a bad ending) can ruin a movie or book for me, and a solid structure can lift up an ordinary story and make it into something worth exploring. Cloud Atlas has one of the most unique and well-executed structures I've seen in a long time, and that alone is enough to hook me as a reader.

Here is the structure in a nutshell, without giving too much away: six stories, each interrupted halfway through, except for the sixth, which is told in its entirety. After the center story ends, we finish the fifth story, then the fourth, then the third, then the second, then the first. Sometime during each story except the first, a connection between that story and the preceding story (which seem to have nothing to do with each other) is revealed.

Luckily, Mitchell offers way more than just structure in this engaging exploration of the past, present, and future; cultural domination; nuclear politics; and escape escape escape. And he does all that while juggling the stories of a 19th century notary on a ship in the south seas, a risk taking bisexual composer taking refuge from his debtors as an amanuensis in Belgium, a mid-70s California journalist investigating nuclear cover-ups, a snarky British publisher who has been locked up in a nursing home against his will, a revolutionary clone in corpratist future Korea, and a plucky young man and his mysterious visitor on post-apocalyptic Hawaii. Whew.

Mitchell writes all of that in a way that makes sense, sticks to the structure without being too cutesy, and tackles writing styles ranging from a mid-century epistolary novel to a clockwork-orange science fiction vocabulary explosion. Plus it is fun to read!

I'll set a discussion of the themes and many complexities of this novel aside for our book club meeting and leave it at this: you should read this book. And I should read it again.

Mutants by Gordon R. Dickson (1970)

2011-03-19T10:34:00.005-05:00

Way back last summer I had an extremely fun Eastern Nebraska / Western Nebraska / Fort Collins vacation and while we were wandering around in Fort Collins, I picked up this wonderfully covered collection of short stories by Gordon R. Dickson called Mutants (1970). It finally migrated up to the top of my very slow-moving reading pile, and I'm happy to announce that the contents are just as great as the cover.

While some of the stories are a little dated, there are some very strong contenders included in this collection. One of my very favorites is the sci-fi / western story "Roofs of Silver," where a group of scientists from the home planet check in on a community of settlers who colonized a new mining planet 100 years ago and have been living as a closely knit group since then. One of the scientists "goes native," marries a settlers daughter, and leads the group to believe that he is a rehabilitated "wild one" -- one of the humans on the planet who is not part of the settled community. When the scientists' scans show that the community is becoming inbred and unstable, our protagonist refuses to believe the evidence and tries to conduct his own experiments to prove that the instability is in the wild people on the planet, and not in his new family.

Other stories include galactic space opera style battles, small environmental morality tales, and a prim and proper spinster who is given super human powers by a chance visitation from a little dude from a different dimension who makes her clock strike 13.

Dickson is particularly great at the first few sentences of his stories:

But you know, I could sense it coming a long time off. It was a little extra time taken in drinking a cup of coffee, it was lingering over the magazines in a drugstore as I picked out a handful. It was a girl I looked at twice as I ran out and down the steps of a library. ["Of the People"]

Reru did not like to see humans eat. So he was waiting in the living room while Taddy and his parents finished breakfast. ["Listen"]

The last dog on Earth was dying. ["By New Hearth Fires"]

Miss Lydia Prinks was somebody's aunt. Not the aunt of several somebodies, but the aunt of one person only and with no other living brothers, sisters, cousins, nephews, or nieces to her name. A sort of singleton aunt. It would be possible to describe her further, but it would not be in good taste." ["Miss Prinks"]

Well, it was about four in the afternoon. You know how it is that time of day at Savannah Stand, with most of the day-charter flyers back in the ranks. All the hanging around and talking and the smell of cigarette smoke in the air, and the water stains drying back to the pale color of the concrete from the flyers that have just been washed down. You know what a good time of day that is. ["Home from the Shore"]

And it isn't just the beginnings of these stories that are good -- Dickson was a prolific and widely published science fiction writer, and there is no doubt that the man could write a solid story. While I have a slight preference for science fiction short story anthologies by a variety of authors, the stories in this collection are each unique and make up a very lovely book. With a very amazing cover.

[As an aside: My copy was printed in 1978 and it looks like it was printed last week. Maybe they used some super-special science fiction acid free buffered paper here, or maybe it came to Fort Collins from the fourth dimension!]

The Sweet Relief of Missing Children by Sarah Braunstein (2011)

2011-03-13T10:43:00.002-05:00

Ah, the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program knows me so well. Their fancy algorithms put me in touch with another novel I had never heard of before that I absolutely loved. Sarah Braunstein's The Sweet Relief of Missing Children (2011) is not a fun and happy read, but it is a compelling and fulfilling one, and I'm very glad it was magically sent to my doorstep.

One of my favorite story elements is structure, and the structure of this novel is unique and perfectly suited to the interlinked characters, places, and times. The book is divided into parts, each of which begins with a chapter titled "Leonora." Leonora is twelve, and we know from the very first time that we hear from her that she is going to be kidnapped. Her story, popping up throughout the novel, anchors us as we drift between the other characters while the connections slowly become more concrete and inevitable.

The stories of the other characters initially seem like vignettes held together by the theme of missing children -- literally missing in the case of runaways and abortions, but also missing in the sense of disconnections, misunderstandings, and missed opportunities. Paul lives in an isolated cottage with his lonely mother Goldie, and Thomas, an abortion doctor's nurse, has been peeping through their windows for years. Judith is a surly teenager who runs away to the city with her sketchy boyfriend Q and calls to be rescued, or witnessed, by a family friend and his teenage son. Sam's mother drove her entire family into a train when he was three, killing everyone but him. Now he balances the goodness he wants to show to the aunt and uncle that raised him, and the anger and rebelliousness that eat at him from the inside.

This novel is filled with people who are lost, unsatisfied, and unsure what to do next. As the novel moves forward through time, characters age, intersect, lose each other, and find something else. Nothing is entirely resolved, but everything is settled, and the book comes together beautifully. Braunstein has a descriptive and empathetic writing style that fills out every character, even the most tangential, and the tension in the book's plots make this a fast and moving read. Highly recommended.

[p.s. Corie, I am totally going to lend this to you the next time I see you.]

Laughter in the Dark by Vladimir Nabokov (1938)

2011-03-07T09:45:00.003-06:00

Nabokov is one of those authors that I like too much to rush out and read all his books, because then there wouldn't be any more to read. Instead, I savor one every year or two and then set the rest aside for future enjoyment. Laughter in the Dark (1938) is such a perfect knife-twistingly hilarious story that I'm glad I finally picked it up off the shelf.

Every review of this book seems to quote the first couple of sentences, so I'll join the club and include them here. They do tell you pretty much everything you need to know about the story and why it is being told:

Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster.

This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling; and although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man’s life, detail is always welcome.

This doomed love affair between the wealthy older Albinus and the vampy, sexual, and young Margot is often cited as being "practice" for Nabokov's most famous novel, Lolita. While there are definitely parallels between the two novels, the feel of the two is very different for me, and I don't think Laughter in the Dark should be thrown away as a lesser novel. This is a tragic story with a foregone conclusion, but Nabokov's insistence on heaping one misfortune after another on this group of fascinatingly unlikable people has a lot of humor in it. I don't want to spoil it, but the rescue scene towards the end of the book is one of the funniest things I've ever read, and I didn't expect to be that amused by this book.

The widely available English version of this novel was translated from the Russian by Nabokov himself in 1938 (after he was dissatisfied by the original English translation) and revised again in 1960. I couldn't imagine a different translation of this book where every word fits perfectly in its place. This is a fast read with a perfect balance of comedy and tragedy, and just enough moral lessons for a person to sink their teeth into.

***

Has anyone seen the 1969 film version of this with Anna Karina? I'm pretty interested in how it translates to the screen...

The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990 by Charles Wright (1990)

2011-03-01T19:52:00.004-06:00

I have a dirty little secret: I am horrible at reading poetry. I read all the time. I love fiction, non-fiction, everything I get my hands on. But poetry is my downfall. I read it too fast, I can't tell if I like it or not, and my mind always starts to wander. I want to be good at reading it, but usually just get frustrated and put it down.

But not this time!

The World of the Ten Thousand Things by Charles Wright (1990) showed up on Harold Bloom's western canon list, and since I have made it a life-long project to work my way through the list, I figure now is as good a time as any to dive into some poetry.

Obviously the way I had been reading poetry (the same way I read fiction) wasn't working for me, so I decided I'd try something new: Every morning before work I would read one or two poems out loud, and then read them silently. Then I'd put the book down. The next day I would re-read silently the poems I read the day before, and then read another poem or two out loud. I essentially read the book three times (and it took three months), but I feel like spending that much time with the words -- and particularly reading them out loud -- really helped it all to sink in.

This book is actually a collection of four of Wright's poetry books, written between 1980 and 1990. Wright is a past winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, so as you might imagine, this is a nicely written collection. Wright's poems explore memory, language, death, time, seasons, nature, and all that good poetic stuff, but they are firmly rooted in experience, his personal past, and the geography and natural beauty of the places that surround him. Most of the poems are two or three pages long, although some are as short as half a page, and a few are much longer -- including a forty-page journey through a single year. While the themes and style are consistent across the collection, we still see Wright change his focus and play with different tones and formats as the collection progresses.

While I really enjoyed reading this collection, I'm not sure I've mastered the art of talking about what I like about poetry yet, but I'll keep practicing and see what I come up with next time...

***
I just spent twenty minutes flipping through the book and trying to find something to quote, but it is hard to find the perfect thing. Instead I'll just quote the first part of the first poem in the collection, which happens to be one of my favorites:

From "Homage to Paul Cézanne"

At night, in the fish-light of the moon, the dead wear our white shirts
To stay warm, and litter the fields.
We pick them up in the mornings, dewy pieces of paper and scraps of
cloth.
Like us, they refract themselves. Like us,
They keep on saying the same thing, trying to get it right.
Like us, the water unsettles their names.

Sometimes they lie like leaves in their little arks, and curl up at the
edges.
Sometimes they come inside, wearing our shoes, and walk
From mirror to mirror.
Or lie in our beds with their gloves off
And touch our bodies. Or talk
In a corner. Or wait like envelopes on a desk.

They reach up from the ice plant.
They shuttle their messengers through the oat grass.
Their answers rise like rust on the stalks and the spidery leaves.

We rub them off our hands.

Pulp Fiction: The Dames edited by Otto Penzler (2008)

2011-02-23T18:12:00.006-06:00

I may have mentioned before that I have the best husband in the world. Part of the reason he is so great is that he can spot just the thing I would love to read. A case in point: Pulp Fiction: The Dames, edited by Otto Penzler with an introduction by Laura Lippman (2008). This book features 22 stories and one set of comics that were published in detective and mystery "pulps" of the 20s, 30s, and 40s. That would be pretty great in and of itself, but what brings this collection together is that each story features a woman -- sometimes as a simpering sap, sometimes as a hard-as-nails thief, and more often than not as a smart and sexy gal who uses her looks and her brains to either solve the case or get away with the loot.

There are a few well-known names in the collection (Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Cornell Woolrich), but most of the authors are either forgotten bestsellers of the past or untraceable hacks who wrote under a pseudonym. Penzler's introductions are wonderful -- providing just enough context about the author and the original publisher, without going overboard -- and they serve as a solid introduction to the world of pulpy publishing. The quality of the stories varies, but they are representative of a genre that included both the literary Hammett and the low-rent Spicy Detective.

While this is not a feminist collection by any means, there are a lot of spunky gals that can hold their own in the man's world of gangsters, police, journalists, and private eyes -- even if they do wear extremely tight dresses and bat their eyes a few times while doing so.

This is a really great collection -- highly recommended if you like mysteries, gangsters, or pulpy action and adventure.

Bubbles

2011-02-16T21:24:00.001-06:00

I always suspected it.

Last Act by Christopher Pike (1988)

2011-02-09T19:51:00.004-06:00

Lately I've been reading some later-period Christopher Pike books that I had never read before, but Pike's Last Act came out in 1988, when I was twelve -- perfectly timed for my post-Little House on the Prairie / Narnia love and my pre-Stephen King glut. But would the 34-year-old me like this as much as I did 22 years ago? (In addition: 22 years ago? How the hell did that happen?)

Well, I don't know that I liked it as much, but it still packs that Pike punch, and it is a much tighter and more enjoyable mystery than some of the later ones. In Last Act, Melanie Martin and her father have moved from San Francisco to a small town in Iowa after her parents' divorce. She is having a hard time making any friends until she impulsively helps popular Susan Trels with a trigonometry quiz, strikes up a conversation, and ends up going to audition for a play that Susan is directing at the high school. Melanie gets the part and is thrown into the tangled relationships of Rindy (beautiful, rich, and distant - she and Melanie got into a fender bender earlier in the year), Marc (handsome, athletic, Melanie's dream man), Carl (young and dorky, Rindy's brother), Jeramie (tall and crazy, but smart), and Tracy (ditzy and rude). Susan directs this group in a play filled with twisted relationships, unrequited love, injury, and jealousy that conveniently matches the real-life teenage emotions of this group from before Melanie came to town.

At the end of Act 2, Melanie's character shoots the beautiful Rindy. They had practiced the scene dozens of times, and Melanie loaded the blanks into the gun herself, but when Rindy falls there is way more blood than there should have been, and she never gets up. Melanie, with the help of a friendly detective, sets herself to untangling the twisted lives of her new friends and solving the murder of Rindy to clear her own name.

This book follows a lot of Pike's usual plot points: beautiful people who seem mean end up being nice; beautiful people who seem nice end up being evil; and perfectly ordinary teenage angst harnessed into elaborate plots of murder and revenge. Still, the hokey dialogue and descriptions are kept to a minimum here, the mystery is solid (although unrealistic), and the climactic scene is action-packed and suspenseful. If you have been thinking of re-reading some Christopher Pike, you couldn't do better than picking up Last Act.

A Geography of Secrets by Frederick Reuss (2010)

2011-02-05T10:30:00.004-06:00

I recently received a review copy of A Geography of Secrets (2010), the fifth novel by Frederick Reuss, through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers Program. The books I get through the Early Reviewers program are always interesting to read, but only rarely do I luck on one as beautifully written and nicely constructed as this.

A Geography of Secrets is told in alternating chapters -- the third person story of Noel Leonard, a federal defense analyst; and the first person story of our unnamed narrator, a mapmaker whose father, retired from the Foreign Service, has recently died in Switzerland. Both men are based in Washington, D.C. and the city and its bureaucracies, and their influence on the two men, are lovingly described by Reuss.

Noel is feeling disconnected from his only child, a daughter, who recently left home for college and won't return his calls, and he and his wife are drifting apart. He can't tell them (or anyone) about his job analyzing maps and drone footage to plan military attacks with the defense department, and when his decisions lead to a school being bombed in Pakistan, his delicate balance of routine is irrevocably shifted.

Our narrator travels to Switzerland for his father's funeral and meets a friend of his father's that he had never seen before. This pushes him to dig into the past and learn the truth about the work his father did for the government and the real implications of the end of his parent's marriage when the family was living in Germany.

The two narratives intersect briefly at the beginning of the book and then unexpectedly (and perfectly) at the end. Choosing to structure the book in a back and forth switch between first and third person provides a satisfying foundation to this exploration of the things we say and the things we withhold. Reuss is a beautiful writer -- descriptive without being flowery, with (for the most part) realistic dialogue and convincing interactions. The male mid-life crisis has been explored over and over again in literature, and while I like a lot of those novels, I generally have a hard time relating to them. Reuss does the genre justice, and this book was a pleasure to read.

Frommer's Montréal & Québec City by Leslie Brokaw (2010)

2011-02-02T20:57:00.005-06:00

I've always wanted to take a trip north of the border, so I recently picked up a travel guide to Montréal and Québec City, because if you are going to go to Canada, shouldn't you go to the part with the oldest buildings, the different language, and the exciting separatist movement? Of course you should!

Montréal is very appealing as an urban and kind of cosmopolitan getaway, but I think in my ideal trip I'd spend a day or two there at the start and end of the visit, and spend the rest of the time in Québec City and the little towns nearby. If you don't ski and aren't particularly interested in shopping, it seems the big things to do in Québec City are stroll around the old streets looking at old buildings, sit down and look at the river, or sit in a café, restaurant, or bar and eat and drink tasty things. These happen to be some of my favorite activities ever!

This Frommer's guide was a great introduction to the region -- it was nicely written with clear maps, gave just enough detail without being overwhelming, and included a pretty detailed section on the history of the region, which is something I really like to have in a travel guide.

Also, the national dish in Québec is the amazing sounding poutine. I seriously can't think of any better reason to go to Canada and I wish I had a big bowl of gravy and cheese curd covered french fries in front of me right now.

A Killing Frost (The Tomorrow Series #3) by John Marsden (1995)

2011-01-29T11:01:00.003-06:00

Dr. M got this book free at the end of one of his teaching classes, and while I don't usually like to start a series in the middle, I wanted to put the book in my "sell" pile* and just couldn't let myself do that until I'd read it. It's really kind of a compulsion.

I didn't know until I started exploring things that A Killing Frost (1995) (originally titled The Third Day, The Frost) is the third book in Australian author John Marsden's extremely popular Tomorrow Series.

In the first book in the series, Ellie Linton (our narrator), a rural Australian teenager, and six of her friends go camping in the bush outside of their small town. When they get back, they quickly notice that there are no people around and all the farm animals are starving. After finding a warning from her father, Ellie and the other teens learn that the country was invaded by a foreign army (never named in the book) who wants to imprison the Australians and colonize the country. They go back into hiding and end up fighting a guerrilla war against the invaders, with their actions building up and becoming more and more ambitious.

By the time we get to this third book, some of the group is dead and some are imprisoned. Ellie and the remaining friends are extremely bored in hiding and decide to walk to the big regional port, which is being used by the enemy to bring in people and weapons. They come up with a plan to attack the port, but at great risk to themselves. And if they survive the explosion, they realize the enemy won't be able to ignore them any longer.

While I almost certainly would have enjoyed this book more if I had read the first two books in the series, Marsden gives enough background that the book works reasonably well on its own. Motivations and emotions are sometimes spelled out a little too clearly, and sometimes the characters and dialogue are pretty broad, but I think that can be forgiven in a young adult book. The action and suspense scenes are very well written and make the book hard to put down -- I can see why the series has been such a success with young readers. I didn't like the book enough to seek out the rest of the books in the series (which was initially supposed to be a trilogy, but ended up having seven books plus a follow-up series called The Ellie Chronicles), but if one landed in my lap I'd probably give it a read.

[* holy shit, I just looked the trade paperback version that I have of this up on Amazon and its going for at least 50 bucks! Mayhaps I will get lucky...]

Instead of a Letter by Diana Athill (1962)

2011-01-23T10:00:00.002-06:00

My good friend Corie recently lent me a pile of books which included Diana Athill's 1962 memoir Instead of a Letter. I hadn't heard of Athill, who has had a long career as a editor and publisher in England, but I've definitely heard of the authors she has worked with, including Jean Rhys, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, and Simone de Beauvoir. While she has written several other memoirs, this one, her first, doesn't focus on her publishing career. Instead, it tells the story of her growing up, her young adulthood, and her relatively lonely life up until her early 40s when she writes the book, all of which hinge on a devastatingly failed relationship.

Athill grew up in a well-off family in East Anglia that didn't have nearly as much money as it used to, but still had its name and a big family estate in the country. She was always a big reader, but never that interested in school. Still, the family decided she would go to Oxford and when she was 15 they hired an Oxford undergraduate to come tutor her and her siblings. This was Paul, and Diana fell in love with him before she even saw him. Her adolescent admiration turned into friendship and later a mutual love. They slept together, went to parties and pubs, and eventually, when Diana was herself at Oxford, they got engaged. Paul joined the Royal Air Force and went off to spend a year abroad while Diana finished up school. They had a passionate correspondence which suddenly stopped on Paul's end. Diana kept sending letters -- pleading ones, angry ones, questioning ones, but he didn't write back. For two years. And when he did, it was a cool letter requesting that she release him from their engagement because he was going to marry someone else.

This confusing and cruel treatment would be a blow to anyone, but particularly so to a passionate young woman who had seen her life goals as marrying Paul, being a military wife, and having children. Her confidence was shocked and her ability to enter into another open and trusting relationship was hurt. Even more so when Paul dies in the war and she never gets to confront him or ask him why.

The book goes on and Athill gets a job at the BBC, meets her friend and publishing partner André Deutsch, travels, reads, thinks, and eventually starts writing. The back of the book (and honestly, my description of it above) makes this sound like it is about nothing but her relationship with Paul, whereas the book is really much more philosophical and self-reflective than that. Athill has obviously spent a lot of time thinking about her personality, her actions, and her desires, and that thoughtfulness is spread thickly amongst the anecdotes and happenings of her youth.

While Athill's experiences as a young woman are unique, very British, rather upper class, and happened in the 1930s, her descriptions of adolescent longing, sexuality, intellectual exploration, and family dynamics are relatable and universal. The book has a distant, well crafted tone that is missing from many memoirs (which today tend to be much more flashy and winky), which made it relaxing and enjoyable to read.

I'd definitely like to check out more of Athill's autobiographical work, including her most recent book Somewhere Towards the End about her old age. Here's to classy British ladies of letters!

Cat Among the Pigeons by Agatha Christie (1959)

2011-01-17T14:35:00.003-06:00

The always amazingly awesome Dan likes to read Agatha Christie books, and since she wrote so many of them, he sometimes accidentally buys one he already has. This worked out great for me, because he recently gave me his extra copy of Christie's Cat Among the Pigeons (1959), and I've really liked all the Christie I've read so I was quite happy to read it.

Cat Among the Pigeons takes place at Meadowbank, an exclusive English girls school run by the formidable Miss Bulstrode. But it starts in the middle eastern kingdom of Ramat where the ruling price is about to be ousted in a revolution and asks Bob Rawlinson his best friend, pilot, and friend from his school days in England to take care of his family nest egg -- a small but very valuable cache of exquisite jewels.

At the start of the new term at Meadowbank there are many returning students and staff, as well as a few new faces. However, not everyone is what they seem on the surface, and at least one of them is a cold blooded killer. When a school mistress gets in between the killer and the treasure, the murders begin.

Christie does a wonderful job of drawing a convincing proper boarding school and juggles the personalities and motives of a couple dozen characters masterfully. The key to the mystery isn't too hard to figure out, but there are a couple of secondary twists that are very satisfying and no pesky loose ends are left at the end of the book. This is billed as "A Hercule Poirot Murder Mystery," and Poirot does show up in the last third of the book to perfunctorily sift through clues and explain it all for us. I really like the character of Poirot, but in this book his presence seems tacked on and unnecessary and he really isn't given much to do.

So, don't read this one for the Poirot angle, but do read it for a satisfying mystery with a complex stable of characters and an oh-so-British setting. Thumbs up!

[Note: this isn't the cover of the book that I read, which is an 80s-tastic Pocket Books edition, but I like this one better. Photo credit.]

tweet tweet

2011-01-14T09:23:00.004-06:00

If you like that new-fangled Twitter thing that is all the rage amongst the youngsters, you must follow @DrMystery99, who happens to be both the funniest man on Twitter and the love of my life. You will not be disappointed.

Achewood Volume 3: A Home for Scared People by Chris Onstad (2010)

2011-01-13T19:59:00.003-06:00

I don't like book signings, author readings, or literary events. I just like sitting and reading books. And yet, I did walk to a local comic book store with my husband (and had "nerds!" yelled at us by some dudes in a car) so that I could stand in line for a couple hours, briefly meet Chris Onstad, and have him sign a couple of books. And it was totally worth it. Achewood is one of the best parts of the internet, and it just keeps getting smarter and more elegant with every strip. Plus there are still cuss words and the occasional crude joke.

Achewood Volume 3: A Home for Scared People is the third Achewood collection put out by Dark Horse Books, and includes the strips from May through October 2002. This happens to include my favorite strip of all time. Just look at it -- I defy you to find anything else as funny on the entire internet!

Much like Volume 2, all of the strips are presented with the alt text from the web site, and annotated by Onstad. And, once again, the strips are accompanied by a few wonderful character-based prose pieces -- one of Onstad's biggest strengths is the depth of his characters and their voices, and his ability to bring out those voices both in the comics and in the longer pieces.

If you like Achewood, or even if you just like very nice looking books, then Achewood Volume 3 should probably find a place on your shelf right next to Volume 1 and Volume 2. I know that's where I'm putting mine...

[note: I realized after looking up my review of Volume 2 that I opened it with the same story of going to the comic store, but its a pretty good story, so it won't hurt you to hear it twice.]

Lost Lustre by Josh Karlen (2010)

2011-01-09T09:44:00.003-06:00

I received a copy of Josh Karlen's collection of biographical essays, Lost Lustre: A New York Memoir (2010), as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. Despite some flaws, and a rough beginning, I ended up liking this one.

Karlen was born in 1964 and grew up split between his father's place in the bohemian, intellectual, and relatively well-off Village, and his mother's place in a new housing development right in the middle of Alphabet City, a poor, drug-filled, crime-ridden neighborhood that wouldn't really be gentrified for another twenty years. He went to an arts-focused public high school, flunked out, drank a lot, did some drugs, went to lots of punk clubs, graduated from an alternative high school, worked some crappy jobs, briefly visited the Amazon, and then was accepted to a college program in Wisconsin. He eventually went on to work as a journalist and then a lawyer, get married and move back to the city, and make some time for some serious reflection on his childhood, adolescence, and the nature of memory itself.

Karlen is at his best when he describes the experiences, people, and places of his youth. Sometimes his descriptions can get a little out of control, but for the most part his narrative is evocative and intriguing. Where he falters is when he gives into his overwhelming desire for self reflection and philosophizing on the nature of his life, the passing of time, and the act of remembering (particularly in the first essay, "My Sixties," which made me think I wasn't going to like the rest of the book at all). Of course any memoir springs from a need for self-reflection, but the best ones walk the balance between sharing experiences and ideas that reflect the human experience and devolving into "me me me me me me me."

The essays in this memoir seem to have been written for different purposes and collected later under one title, and there is some repetition of details between pieces which leads to a choppy flow for the book. On the plus side, this means that each essay can pretty much stand on its own, including the title piece, the longest and most developed part of the book, which describes Karlan's relationship with his boyhood friend who grew into a charming front man for a band and a horrible alcoholic who ended up dying when he was 29. Karlan loses touch with his friend and doesn't find out that he died until 14 years have passed, at which time he looks up all their old friends and tries to reconstruct the magic of their friendship and the downhill slide that Karlan missed while he was living his life and assuming that his friend was doing fine.

Having never even been to New York, I'm not sure how Karlan's descriptions and experiences compare to other city-dwellers, but for the most part I found them interesting and this would be a fun and quick read if you are a big fan of memoirs, self-reflection, or New York City.

The Life of Elizabeth I by Alison Weir (1998)

2011-01-02T09:42:00.003-06:00

I have a bit of a thing for royalty, particularly English royalty, and most of all, the queens. I've read quite a few fiction and non-fiction books that cover the reign of the Tudors in England, but I've never read a whole biography just of the exceedingly influential and interesting Elizabeth I until I picked up Alison Weir's The Life of Elizabeth I (1998).

This book primarily covers Elizabeth's time as queen of England, starting at the age of 25, although there is some discussion of her early life and her life under the reign of her sister, Mary Tudor. Those interested in more information on Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn (Elizabeth's parents) will have to turn to another book, and although their story is pretty damn interesting, Elizabeth's reign is full enough to fill multiple volumes so Weir made a wise decision to limit the scope of the book.

Weir's book is well researched and very readable -- giving you enough social and political context to understand Elizabeth's actions and motivations, without drowning you in dates, details, and battles. Weir seems to focus more on the personal life of Elizabeth than the political one (although in many cases they are inseparable) and much of the book is devoted to Elizabeth's "will she or won't she" negotiations of marriage.

Beyond the question of marriage, a big focus in Elizabeth's life was her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, who she corresponded with extensively, imprisoned in England for 17 years, and eventually executed. Since I read a rather comprehensive biography of Mary of a few years ago, it was really fascinating to see their relationship described from the other side.

Overall, Elizabeth comes off as a very smart, funny, vain, powerful, and private woman who kept peace in England for 45 years during a period of religious upheaval in Europe, a task few other sovereigns could handle, and Weir's book provides a comprehensive and engaging look at both the woman and her reign.

Of course, it isn't all fighting the Spanish Armada, flirting with courtiers, and saving Shakespearean theatre from the Puritans. Weir makes sure to throw in some pretty amusing anecdotes. Like the time an Italian pyrotechnics expert had to be dissuaded from shooting live cats and dogs into the air as part of a display honoring a visit by Elizabeth.

Or this one:
When the Earl of Oxford broke wind when bowing before her, he was so ashamed that he went into self-imposed exile for seven years; upon his return, Elizabeth warmly received him, then said, with a mischievous twinkle, 'My Lord, I had forgot the fart.'

Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli (2009)

2010-12-30T09:24:00.005-06:00

I've loved all the graphic novels that my friend St. Murse has lent me, but Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli (2009) may be my favorite of them all.

This book starts with a lightning bolt -- Asterios Polyp is in a sad state in his apartment in New York City when it is struck by lightning and burns to the ground. He grabs a few objects and his wallet, and buys a ticket on a bus as far away as his money will take him which happens to be the aptly named Apogee, NY. Asterios wasn't always so sad and random. In fact, he used to have a successful career teaching architecture and he used to share his life with his wife, Hana, an artist. The story of how everything went wrong and how everything got to be sort of right again is told through flashes back and forward through the journey of Asterios Polyp.

That isn't even the start of it, though: Mazzucchelli's drawings are both straight-forward and complex, his use of color and the way his drawings reflect the philosophies of the book are genius, and the structure of the story is just perfect. This is a hefty and satisfying book to hold, and one that you will read way faster than you intend, so just plan on reading it twice. At least.

[p.s. Holiday travels and a long-reading book have disrupted my posting for the past few weeks, but I should be back to normal pretty soon.]

Carnet de Voyage by Craig Thompson (2004)

2010-12-08T18:43:00.005-06:00

The always awesome St. Murse has been my go-to graphic novel guy lately, and he didn't disappoint when he loaned me Craig Thompson's Carnet de Voyage (2004).

Thompson, as you may remember, was the author of Blankets and Good-bye, Chunky Rice, both of which are awesome. Carnet de Voyage (which means travel journal in French) is Thompson's artistic diary documenting his 2004 European book tour and a personal side-trip to Morocco. It gives us a look at life on a book tour; a window onto Thompson's personal feelings, doubts and insecurities; and some gorgeous drawings of France, the Alps, Morocco, and Barcelona.

Since Thompson opened his life to his readers in Blankets, this loosely chronological collection of drawings and writings almost feels like a sequel (what is "Craig" up to now?!). His drawings of street scenes, old friends, and friendly strangers are more real than any photograph, and his documentation of his insecurities, disappointments, and triumphs make me interested to read whatever he wants to put out -- tightly structured graphic novel, loose and quick travel journal, or anything in between.

The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay by Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi (2010)

2010-12-04T11:01:00.002-06:00

My latest book from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program is The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay by Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi (2010). This is Indian author Shanghvi's second book, and it has received some positive reviews, but for the most part, I just couldn't get that into it.

The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay is the story of Karan Seth, a young photographer who comes to Bombay as a schoolteacher, falls in love with the city, and vows to document all its contradictions through his art. While working as a photojournalist, he is assigned the job of photographing Samar Arora, a former piano prodigy who gave up music and now lives the rich playboy life, accompanied by his boyfriend, an American writer named Leo, and his best friend Zaira, a famous Bollywood actress. Karan gets caught up in Samar's orbit, eventually becoming very close friends with Zaira as well. Things are further complicated with Karan meets Rhea, a beautiful (and married) potter with whom he has an affair of both the mind and the body. A shocking and violent event derails all our characters in the second half of the book, and the book closes as the characters come to terms with their changed world and their past decisions.

There is nothing wrong with the plot or, for the most part, the characters. My problems with this book have to do with the writing. Shanghvi never met an adjective he didn't decide to throw into his book, and he uses metaphors the way other authors use pronouns. Sometimes these metaphors are cringingly sexual:

Glee dripped out of Natasha like precum.

or

It occurred to Mantra that Priya had a crusty librarian's voice, one that could only be relieved with a dildo.

Sometimes they are just meandering and overly poetic:

Her voice wrapped itself around him; it was easy to imagine that at the end of the corridor of her voice there was a little room in which a blues singer was hiding from the world, serenading emptiness.

A little bit of this florid description goes a long way, and Shanghvi goes way beyond my level of patience for this kind of thing. His dialogue is also often at odds with his characters, moving the action along in sloppy skips instead of remaining true to the people and relationships that he has created for us.

All that being said, sometimes Shanghvi's technique of throwing all the adjectives into a bag, shaking it around, and pouring it onto the page ends up with some really nice and evocative descriptions of Bombay and his characters. And the plot really is engaging -- if it hadn't been, there is no way I could have forged my way through the text.

Only recommended if you have a lot of patience or a great interest in Bombay. Or if you haven't gotten your annual dose of adjectives.

Hate Annual #8 by Peter Bagge (2010)

2010-12-01T18:12:00.004-06:00

It is probably cheating to write up a slim little comics collection when I usually write about big old books, but I recently read Hate Annual #8 (2010) by Peter Bagge and I'm sort of a completist, so I'm going to post about it here.

I happen to love Peter Bagge and his grotesque realism, and I found a lot to enjoy in this comic. The centerpiece is another installment in the world of Buddy and Lisa in which Lisa, bored with staying at home and watching their kid, joins a two-woman band with another "cool mom" that she meets at a PTA meeting. Their first gig does not go quite as Lisa had planned, but both she and Buddy take it in stride.

Also collected here are a series of wonderful one-page "scientist" comics that were originally printed in Discover Magazine, confessions of a book festival attendee, and a behind-the-scenes look at the filming of Reefer Madness. And more!

I shall always give a million thumbs up to the great Peter Bagge.

My Life, Starring Dara Falcon by Ann Beattie (1997)

2010-11-28T09:08:00.004-06:00

I got a copy of Ann Beattie's My Life, Starring Dara Falcon (1997) when it came out in paperback while I was working at Barnes and Noble in college. We had some remaindered copies, so the covers were torn off and sent back to the distributors, and the books were put in a free box for employees. I've been carrying around this coverless copy of the book for a dozen years, and finally decided to read it. Now I'm happy that I can just recycle the thing.

The book is not bad or poorly written, it is just very dull. Very very very dull. It is the 1970s and our protagonist, Jean Warner, has been living in a small town in New Hampshire for a few years with her husband Bob, who she married at age 19, and near his large family. Jean has no family -- her parents died in a plane crash when she was young, and she is estranged from the aunt who raised her.

Jean and Bob's marriage isn't really working out. He spends a lot of time in Boston, where is is taking classes, and she spends a lot of time feeling resentful and overthinking her relationships with his family members. Then Dara moves back to town. Dara Falcon is an aspiring actress, a dramatic talker, and an unconventional person. At first Jean doesn't really like her. Then Dara pulls Jean into her orbit and Jean thinks she is just great.

Things sort of happen -- Jean leaves her husband, Dara leaves her boyfriend and moves to New York, there is a play, there is a fancy ring, someone dies, there are revelations, but none of the pieces fit together into any kind of moving whole. The book hinges on the changing intensities of the relationship between Jean and Dara, but not enough time is spent on building this critical relationship. It would have been better if Jean was one-sidedly obsessed with Dara, or if the two of them were mutually bad for each other, or if Dara held more sway over Jean's decisions. As it is written, it is sort of all of these things and sort of none of these things. Nothing is pushed to a dramatic point, or realistically described and character building either. Except for one scene where Jean spontaneously sleeps with the grown son of one of her husband's friends (which was a great scene, but ends up going nowhere), everything is quotidian, predictable, and unaffecting with a big scoop of predictable 1970s feminism on top.

But at least this poor coverless book won't be on my bookshelf anymore...

The Fatal Bullet:: The Assassination of President James A. Garfield by Rick Geary (1999)

2010-11-25T09:12:00.005-06:00

Yet another friend (the always awesome St. Murse) recently lent me yet another entry in Rick Geary's Treasury of Victorian Murder series, The Fatal Bullet: A True Account of the Assassination, Lingering Pain, Death, and Burial of James A. Garfield, Twentieth President of the United States. Also Including the Inglorious Life and Career of the Despised Assassin Guiteau (1999). Whew.

Much like The Borden Tragedy, Geary gives his reader a straightforward account of Guiteau's attack on Garfield, along with a description of what happened in their lives that brought them to that fatal point. Mixed in with the recitation of facts are Geary's amazing and detailed drawings and anecdotal asides that bring personality and a certain amount of sympathy to everyone involved.

In his delusions of grandeur, religious aspirations, and functional craziness, Guiteau is an extremely plausible and familiar type. As an archivist, I've read through correspondence to public figures (both historic and modern) that could have come straight from Guiteau's hand. He is mostly a pitiful figure, the only scariness about him comes from his actually acting on his idea of killing the president.

If you have any interest at all in Garfield, presidential assassinations, crazy dudes, or perfectly wonderful drawings, then The Fatal Bullet is the book for you.

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1930)

2010-11-20T10:56:00.006-06:00

I've read a couple Dashiell Hammett books, and a really great collection of his short stories and novellas, and I always kind of thought that I'd already read Hammett's most famous book, The Maltese Falcon (1930). I mean, I owned it. It was right there on the shelf. And I remembered the story really well. When I suggested it as the next read for my book club (go DAFFODILS!), I thought I'd enjoy reading it again. And then once I started it, I realized I'd never read it before and that I was just remembering the extremely memorable 1941 film version. Finding an unread Hammett novel is always a nice surprise, so I wasn't disappointed with my memory at all...

The Maltese Falcon gives us the iconic Sam Spade, who laid the foundation for Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe and countless other fictional private investigators and detectives in books and on the screen. Spade is tough, smart, and has an instinct about people and situations that saves his neck over and over again. He is also rather irresistible to the ladies. When a mysterious and beautiful woman, Brigid O'Shaughnessy comes into his office with a suspicious sounding job, Spade's partner jumps on the chance to help her out. But then he ends up dead and Spade ends up being pulled into the orbit of O'Shaughnessy, the strange Joe Cairo (who is impossible to picture as anyone but Peter Lorre), and the wealthy and devious Mr. Gutman. All our characters are desperate to get their hands on an antique statue of a falcon from the isle of Malta -- each of them in it for themselves, and none of them with any regrets for the people who die along the way.

Hammett has an amazing sense of the bodies of his characters and how they move. His detailed descriptions of faces, skin, and the changing light in Spade's eyes, in combination with step-by-step descriptions of characters walking across the room, rolling a cigarette, or throwing a punch make this a book that you watch almost more than you read. This level of detail makes the book a little hard to get into at first (honestly a little harder for me than some of his other books), but the payoff in terms of the characters and the plot is completely worth it.

I'll save the rest for book club, but if you are interested in crime fiction, you really should read a bunch of Hammett, and The Maltese Falcon should be at the top of your list.

Fatal Lady by Rae Foley (1964)

2010-11-10T19:18:00.004-06:00

If you buy as many goofy mystery / sci-fi / suspense books as I do just because you like the cover, you learn to appreciate it when the books also turn out to be well written and entertaining. Fatal Lady by Rae Foley (1964) turns out to be just one of those books.

Rae Foley was the pseudonym of Elinor Denniston (1900-1978), who also published as Dennis Allan and Helen K. Maxwell. Rae Foley was her most prolific author-name, though, and this book is apparently part of a series of romance/mysteries featuring the sometimes-detective Mr. Potter.

In Fatal Lady, we come into the story after much of the action has taken place: Janet Grant is a wealthy socialite, and her playboy brother Cass married a beautiful woman with an unknown background named Eve. The sister, brother, wife, and father all live together in a fancy townhouse that is attached to the home of their neighbors and close friends, the Frederick's. When Mrs. Frederick confronts Janet and Cass with the news that Eve is having an affair with Mr. Frederick, a famous artist, Cass is enraged. He goes out to the art studio at the back of the property and comes back fifteen minutes later saying that he found Mr. Frederick strangled. Naturally everyone thinks he did the strangling, and it takes some fancy lawyering from Pete Russlin, the family lawyer (who is in love with Janet) to get Cass declared insane and set up in a posh asylum. As the novel begins, Janet is determined to set Cass free from the asylum, but when her plan succeeds, more people start dying and everyone becomes a suspect, including Janet herself.

The mystery is good, with a satisfying twist that can't quite be predicted before the end of the book. The writing is crisp and all the loose ends are nicely tied up by the end. There are some slightly goofy scenes of romance, but nothing too sappy. Definitely worth reading.

[I don't know if you can see it on the little picture of the cover on this book, but check out the larger version: Someone stamped a "30 c" on the woman's face, her dress, and on the curtain above her. Then in each case they put a line through the "c" (making it a cents sign) and changed the "0" to an "8". Apparently they wanted this book to cost exactly 38 cents, even if they had to totally fuck up the awesome cover for it. Honestly, I would be more irritated at this if it was just stamped "30 c" since I find the "8" kind of endearing. Also I think I paid a dollar for this... Finally, the back cover is pictured here.]

Little Bee by Chris Cleave (2008)

2010-11-07T19:49:00.005-06:00

A friend at work loaned me Chris Cleave's novel Little Bee (2008 -- published as The Other Hand in England), and I wish I could say I liked it more than I did.

To start with, there is the copy on the back of the book:

We don't want to tell you too much about this book!

It is a truly special story and we don't want to spoil it.

Nevertheless, you need to know something, so we will just say this:

It is extremely funny, but the African beach scene is horrific.

The story starts there, but the book doesn't.

And it's what happens afterward that is most important.

Once you have read it, you'll want to tell everyone about it. When you do, please don't tell them what happens either. The magic is in how it unfolds.

Blech. First of all, I am not a fan of books (or movies, or TV shows, or anything) that try to enforce some kind of voluntary non-disclosure agreement for their readers, and it is a definite strike against your plot if you have to resort to this kind of "find out the secret!" sales technique. Secondly, the plot of the book doesn't rely on a twist or surprise or anything any more than any other book, so the warning is a little unnecessary.

The plot itself isn't bad at all -- the book is structured in alternating chapters narrated by Little Bee, a sixteen year old Nigerian refugee, and Sarah, a thirty-two year old British magazine editor with a journalist husband and a four year old son. The two women had a tragic and random encounter on a beach in Nigeria two years before, and during the course of the book their lives become even more intertwined.

The first few chapters from Little Bee are good. She has a unique voice and a sense of humor and lightness that is missing from the rest of the book. The Sarah chapters, on the other hand, are heavy-handed and feature some of the most horribly awkward and unbelievable dialogue I've ever read. And as soon as Little Bee enters Sarah's orbit, her chapters become leaden and clichéd as well.

Here's a little taste, complete with moral (from Sarah):

So, I realized -- life had finally broken through. How silly it looked now, my careful set of defenses against nature: my brazen magazine, my handsome husband, my Maginot Line of motherhood and affairs. The world, the real world, had found a way through. It had sat down on my sofa and it would not be denied any longer.

Now imagine reading 300 pages of that.

This book was a disappointment -- after a promising start with Little Bee's character, and what is ultimately an interesting and moving plot, the book falls into a whirlpool of predictable patterns, cardboard characters, and moralistic conclusions.

Buttoned

2010-11-06T17:42:00.002-05:00

Check out my crappy picture of the awesome button that my friend milk and cake made for me! It is one of my favorite buttons ever created. Yay!

How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behavior by Laura Kipnis (2010)

2010-11-03T17:48:00.004-05:00

My latest LibraryThing Early Reviewers adventure was How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behavior by Laura Kipnis (2010). That's right: non-fiction! It doesn't happen all that often, but I do enjoy the occasional non-fiction read.

I really liked the premise of this book, which seeks to explore the nature of scandal in modern society: why we love to get on our high horses when a scandal comes out, how we can't get enough details on a high-profile scandal (the juicier the better), and why on earth these people do what they do when it is so obvious (in retrospect) that they would get caught and that we would heap scorn upon them.

Kipnis uses four case-studies in making her argument: Lisa Nowak (the be-diapered astronaut), Sol Wachtler (the respected New York judge who bizarrely blackmailed his socialite mistress), Linda Tripp (Monica Lewinsky's "friend" who taped their phone calls in order to expose Clinton), and James Frey (the author of A Million Little Pieces, the memoir that pissed Oprah off when it ended up being more of a novel).

The interest I had in re-reading (and in the case of Wachtler, reading for the first time) the details of these scandals pretty much proves Kipnis's point about the appeal of a downfall. In each case she was also able to broaden the focus and make connections between the individual media flurry and the larger social and cultural implications of our reactions to these events.

Where Kipnis lost me was in her somewhat rambling and dashed-off seeming introduction and conclusion, which lack the structure and focus of her chapters and include many irritating (to me) writing quirks. Actually, what irritated me about them was that they sounded like a blog post, which is an admittedly weird objection from a woman who writes on a blog, but I think books take a different writing style. [Plus no one is paying me for this, so you can suck it if it seems dashed off.]

Overall this is a somewhat slight but enjoyable look at contemporary culture that fairly judges its subjects and makes some intelligent comments on society. Totally worth a casual read.

More Die of Heartbreak by Saul Bellow (1987)

2010-10-27T19:53:00.004-05:00

I'd been meaning to read some Saul Bellow for quite some time, and picked this one up on the dollar shelf at a now-defunct used bookstore. This is later-period Bellow (his tenth novel) and not one of the ones he is famous for, so I probably could have picked a better one to start with. Still, even though it had a rough start, I really grew to enjoy this psychological bit of fiction.

Our rather neurotic narrator, Kenneth Trachtenberg, grew up in Paris, the product of two Midwestern expatriates. His father is widely known for being irresistible to the ladies and quite a womanizer, while Kenneth is a relative dud in that department. In order to both flee from his father's reputation and to be closer to his beloved uncle, Kenneth takes a job as a Russian Literature professor in the Midwestern town where his mother's family is from (unnamed in the book, but I'm guessing Detroit). His uncle, Benn Crader, is a distinguished botanist who has an uncanny, almost psychic relationship with plants. Kenneth's aims are a little obscure (although he spends a claustrophobic hundred pages or so explaining them), but have something to do with making his life a turning point and translating Benn's understanding of plants into an understanding of humans: "As earlier stated, unless you made your life a turning point, there was no reason for existing. Only you didn't make, you found the turning point that was the crying need (unconscious, of course, as the most crying needs are) of humankind."

Once you get a little further into the book, the story expands into Benn's sudden marriage to Matilda, a beautiful woman with very wealthy parents who have manipulative plans for Benn that involve his estranged and very rich (and very corrupt and very old) uncle. Kenneth puts himself in the role of Benn's protector while simultaneously pining over the mother of his child (who left him for a snowmobile salesman in Seattle) and starting a relationship with a doting former student.

This book definitely has the same kind of east-coast, masculine, sex-obsessed vibe as Philip Roth, but while that can sometimes be a little trying, it isn't necessarily a bad thing. Bellow is often very funny, and the pay off in the narrative for his characters' obsessive traits makes it all worthwhile.

A few more quotes that I couldn't resist:

"Also, it would be against my rule of truthfulness to conceal the fact that I am fond of preposterous people. And what stunning offers you get from the insane!"

"I kept seeing Bethe's mask face, like human features painted on the sole of somebody's foot, and Teller like the atomic Moses coming down from Sinai with the Commandments on hydrogen tablets."

"Once you get into the erotic life, modern style, you are accelerated till your minutest particles fly apart."

[Also, I couldn't find a big enough version of the cover of this book that I own (and I was too lazy to scan it), but it really couldn't look more like a Danielle Steele cover and was apparently published in a series of bright romantic colors -- mine is a lovely turquoise.]

The Singing Detective

2010-10-24T10:15:00.002-05:00

Although I consider myself more of a movie person, there are a lot of nice things out there in TV Land. We just finished watching The Wire, recently started The Sopranos, and have found ourselves deep in lots of other series and miniseries. Rarely, however, does a TV show really eat at me the way a movie or a book, can. I found a big exception to that rule in the 1986 British mini-series The Singing Detective, which is one of the best things ever created for TV ever.

In just six episodes, Dennis Potter (the writer), Jon Amiel (the director), and Michael Gambon (the star) weave together an amazingly complicated and moving story. Philip Marlowe, a writer, is hospitalized with a debilitating skin condition. From his bed he brings together memories of his boyhood, the plot of his detective novel, the perceived machinations of his ex-wife, and some truly wonderful musical numbers. You really must watch it.

This is definitely in my top three favorite television productions (right up there with Twin Peaks and Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz). If you have NetFlix, I suggest you order it right now. Or if you see me, let me know if you want to borrow it. We watched this months ago, and I still think of it all the time.

There are lots of clips from The Singing Detective on YouTube, but it is hard to find one that makes sense on its own or that doesn't give too much away out of context. But, for a taste of what I'm talking about, try this out:

The Borden Tragedy: A Memoir of the Infamous Double Murder at Fall River, Mass., 1892 by Rick Geary (1997)

2010-10-21T17:44:00.005-05:00

Oh hey, look! Another graphic novel! That a friend lent to me (thanks, Joolie)! This one, however, is not a melancholy coming of age memoir. Instead, it is The Borden Tragedy by Rick Geary (1997), part of Geary's Treasury of Victorian Murder that I would truly like to explore further.

Although the well-known story of Lizzie Borden and the murders by axe of her father and step-mother in their home in 1892 are also rather disturbing, I found this book to be an uplifting change after reading Stitches. The bold drawings, the straightforward, procedural text, and the direct physical tragedy were a nice escape from the beautiful but sad look at human nature in Small's story.

I particularly enjoyed the (somewhat dated but still valid) comparison between Lizzie Borden and OJ Simpson on the back of this book: both were wealthy defendants, accused of killing a man and woman, with no motive and no other likely killer. And yet, both of them were acquitted, the murders never solved, and they were generally assumed to have gotten away with it.

Of particular note are Geary's attention to the homes, rooms, and furniture in his story. All the backgrounds are detailed without being overdone and add just the right amount of realism to the sordid tale.

Stitches: A Memoir by David Small (2009)

2010-10-19T20:30:00.005-05:00

Continuing my trend of reading graphic memoirs that have been loaned to me by friends, I just finished David Small's Stitches: A Memoir (2009), which was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award.

This book is heartbreaking, but the whole time I was reading it I kept looking back at the author's picture, showing a happy looking man in his mid-sixties, and reminding myself that he was nominated for a National Book Award, so obviously things turned out relatively okay.

Small was sickly as a child, and had lots of problems with his sinuses. His dad, a radiologist, gave him radiation treatments, which were thought to be helpful at the time. Several years later, the family noticed a growth on the side of Small's neck. They thought it was just a cyst and waited a few more years, when he was fourteen, to have it removed. During that surgery, the doctors realized that the growth was cancerous and ended up removing one of Small's vocal chords, leaving him voiceless and scarred when he woke up. Small's family was a family of silences, outbursts, and grudges and no one told him that he had had cancer. And the more you learn about the family, Small's cancer is just a small piece in the larger scheme of illness, betrayal, and cruelty.

The drawings are amazing -- especially the postures, the faces, and the washed out backgrounds. The perfect illustration for this book of memories, pain, and ultimately, escape.

World's Fair by E. L. Doctorow (1985)

2010-10-16T09:43:00.005-05:00

My next dip into Harold Bloom's western canon list is World's Fair by E. L. Doctorow (1985). This is the first Doctorow I've read (although I hear that Ragtime and Billy Bathgate are very good), and I'd love to read more.

World's Fair is a story of Edgar, a nine-year old boy growing up in the Bronx in the late 1930s with his music-salesman father, his often-frustrated mother, and his much older brother. The strengths of World's Fair aren't in breathtaking action sequences or tightly structured plot twists -- instead, the book slowly creates a fully experienced time and place for the reader in a way that few historically-set books can do. Doctorow's own life closely mirrors that of Edgar, including a coveted trip to the World's Fair, so it is understandable that the details of the neighborhood, family, and house are so vivid and moving.

The book is written in first person, from Edgar's perspective (with occasional brief chapters from other relatives), but the voice of the narrator masterfully moves between the emotions and naivety of a young boy and the poetry and philosophy of a grown man remembering his past. Even more than the detailed descriptions, this narrative voice is the heart of the book.

[also, I haven't watched the whole thing, but if you are interested in the 1939 World's Fair (or Westinghouse, or little boys wearing ties, or parental guilt trips -- skip to about 8:30 for the fair), this is probably worth a look.]

***
Update

Just remembered that I had marked a particularly nice passage to quote:

Death was on my mind, I thought about it, brooded about it, and studied its representations. I had an old book of nursery rhymes that I hadn't looked at in a while. The letters were large, the drawings tinted in pale orange and pale green. The children and other beings in nursery rhymes were peculiar, ethereal, they inhabited nations, worlds, with which I was not familiar. Their characters were a source of uneasy imaginings. Little Miss Muffet: I would not call any girl of my acquaintance Miss anything; this one was so prissy and girlgood as to be insufferable, fully deserving her fate. I did not like Humpty Dumpty, who lacked all manly definition and was so irrevocably fragile. Georgie Porgie, Jack Horner, Jack and Jill, all seemed to me unnatural abstractions of child existence; there was some menacing propaganda latent in their circumstances but I couldn't quite work out what it was. It was a strange planet they lived on, some place of enormous fearful loneliness and punishment. Or it was as if they were dead but continued to be alive. Whatever happened to them kept happening over and over, good or bad, and I perceived a true moral in this repetition of fate, this recurring inevitable conclusion to the flaws in their beings. They suffered humiliation, damage, and shame, all forms of death or the feeling of death. They were like my dreams -- birds flew out of pies, children ran with kings and queens, sheep, those most docile and slow-moving of animals, ran away, whereas the sheep in the Farm exhibit in Claremont Park in the spring didn't even move when you touched them. No human, animal or egg acted quite right in these stories. My final unalterable judgment was that nursery rhymes were for babies and I would not suffer hearing them again.

Blankets by Craig Thompson (2003)

2010-10-10T09:41:00.004-05:00

I had planned to put it a bit further down in my pile, but the copy of Blankets by Craig Thompson (2003) that the always-amazing St. Murse lent me was calling my name, and I couldn't resist. To be honest, I was also influenced by the fact that this book is as giant as Good-bye, Chunky Rice is slender, and it was about to topple over my very precarious "to-read" pile.

Blankets is a coming-of-age memoir about Thompson growing up in rural Wisconsin with his brother and parents, being teased at school for being skinny and poor, navigating the Evangelical Christianity of his family, and falling in love for the first time at a winter bible camp. The story moves back and forth between childhood and adolescence, focusing much of its time on a pivotal two-week visit to Michigan to stay with the family of Raina, the girl he met in bible camp.

The narrative in Blankets is much more concrete than Good-bye, Chunky Rice, but the feelings of necessary separation, of growth, and of fond sadness are the same. So are Thompson's knack for humorous details, vulnerable revelations, and an emotional (but not manipulative) connection with his readers.

Thompson also draws a Midwestern meathead bully better than anyone else on earth.

The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor (2002)

2010-10-06T20:31:00.003-05:00

The always-amazing Choo recently lent me a copy of William Trevor's tragic novel The Story of Lucy Gault (2002). I've never read anything by Trevor before this, but he is a well-respected and prolific Irish author and playwright, and I would imagine that his age and experiences make him well qualified to pen such a classically told exploration of morality.

The Story of Lucy Gault begins in Ireland in 1921. Captain Gault comes from a prominent Protestant Irish family, and he and his English wife have a young daughter named Lucy. Being Protestant, married to an Englishwoman, and a former member of the British army puts Gault on the wrong side of the Irish War of Independence, and when three young men from a nearby village poison his dogs and attempt to burn down his house, Captain Gault accidentally shoots one of them in the shoulder as he tries to scare them away. A fear of vengeance leads the Gault's to plan a move to England, and while the household prepares for retreat, little Lucy gets more and more frustrated and angry at the idea of having to leave the beautiful country home that she loves.

Shortly before they are to depart for England, Lucy makes a last bid to stay in Ireland by packing up some food and clothes and running away through the forest to the home of a recently-let-go chamber maid. She figures that her parents will take her seriously and change their minds about moving if she does something drastic. Lucy trips and hurts her ankle in the woods and can't make it to town or back to her house. Her dad then finds some of her clothes washed up on the shore (she left them there after swimming by herself -- something she wasn't supposed to do), and when she doesn't return for days, her parents, the servants, and the townspeople all believe she drowned in the ocean. Her parents, distraught with grief, leave as planned -- but instead of going to England, they travel blindly around the continent and cut off all contact with Ireland. When Lucy is found by Henry, the groundskeeper, a few days after their departure, there is no way to contact her parents to let them know she is okay.

From this one action, a young child playing at running away, the lives of all our characters are completely broken, and the hurt keeps on coming. And just when you think you can't take any more of it, life goes on. Characters age, find routines, avoid their pain, and keep their vigils for past mistakes. While there are some reunions, there are still more heartbreaks before the end of the book, and Trevor has a perfect sense of when to twist his knife and when to give his characters some breathing room.

This novel is almost theological in its insistence on the ability of humans to transcend tragedy and find beauty and comfort in the natural world and the routine of the everyday. The dialogue is sometimes a little stiff, but Trevor's old-fashioned writing style works perfectly with this heartbreaking story. Not a barrel of laughs, but if you appreciate the calm that comes after a nicely structured tragedy, this is the book for you.

Pursuit of the Screamer by Ansen Dibell (1978)

2010-10-03T15:05:00.005-05:00

I bought a copy of Pursuit of the Screamer by Ansen Dibell (1978) at a used bookstore on vacation in Fort Collins this summer, partly because it was only a dollar, and mostly because of its very entertaining cover. I'm still kind of mortified / fascinated by the odd crotch drapery of the woman's outfit. Not particularly comfy-looking...

When I started reading this book, I suspected that the author was a woman, mostly because the name Ansen Dibell couldn't possibly sound more like a pseudonym, and the reason many genre authors use pseudonyms is that they are actually women. In Dibell's case, she was not only a woman, but also a professor of English literature, who probably didn't want her CV filled up with books featuring creative crotch draping on the cover.

Pursuit of the Screamer gracefully tells a pretty complicated story of a distant planet made up of a native people (the Valde -- warriors, able to read minds and communicate telepathically, very empathetic to the environment, mostly women), a colonizing group of humans (the Bremneri -- mostly merchants in strict feudal settlements run by women and guarded by Valde), and a technologically advanced and now Deathless race called the Teks (as well as some other sub-groups that have split off and formed over the last several thousand years). Jannus, a young Bremneri man, falls in love with Poli, a Valde woman at the end of her 10 year military service guarding his town. He also finds himself responsible for Lur, a Deathless Tek who is first in the body of a young boy, and later in the body of a giant cat (that is when the cover starts making a little more sense).

When the Teks ruled the planet, they discovered a way to create a recording of all their memories and experiences that could be stored away in a vault and implanted in a new living body at the time of their death. This essentially gave them immortality and took away the finality of death. Suicide became an artistic statement. People were murdered just to prove a point. Death could even be a simple way of traveling since you could kill your body in one location and then be reborn in a new body in a distant keep. A series of circumstances and a whole lot of time eventually led to a breakdown in the system and although Teks were still dying and being reborn, they were locked into their own territory and forced to fight over water and kill each other for food, only to be reborn again in a sick Groundhog's Day of an eternal life. Talk about comeuppance for grasping at immortality...

The intricate history of the planet and the motives of the main characters are more than a little too complicated to get into in the course of this review, but eventually Jannus, Poli and Lur, along with their capable partner Elda, find themselves responsible for bringing a welcomed death to the deathless and pushing the planet away from an inevitable war.

Dibell nicely balances the big social and political movements of this world with an intimate story of the love between Jannus and Poli. This is a well written and engaging book with an entertaining (although misleading and ultimately unfortunate) cover. I'd definitely like to read the rest of the series.

Good-bye, Chunky Rice by Craig Thompson (1999)

2010-09-29T20:13:00.005-05:00

The always-excellent St. Murse recently loaned me two graphic novels by Craig Thompson. I figured I would read them in chronological order, which put the slim volume Good-bye, Chunky Rice (1999) in my hands.

I'm kind of a dilettante about it, but I really enjoy reading graphic novels when they find their way to me. Rarely, however, do I find that they really move me in the way that a novel moves me. Part of that is probably because I read them too fast, but I slowed down and took my time with Good-bye, Chunky Rice -- actually I read the whole thing twice -- and every page got right to me, half the time I couldn't stop giggling, and twice it made me cry.

This is the story of Chunky Rice, a turtle who decides he needs to leave his hometown, and his best lady friend, a sweet deer mouse, for unknown somethings far away. His roommate at a boarding house, gets him passage on his brother's boat. Chunky, the captain, a pair of Siamese twins, and a busty cook set off on their ocean voyage.

Thompson manages to make a book about a turtle, a mouse, abandonment, disappointment, sorrow, and goodbyes into a funny, enjoyable, and emotionally moving story that feels filled with characters from the reader's own life.

I can't wait to read Blankets...

Doot doot!

No Place for Heroes by Laura Restrepo (2009)

2010-09-25T09:28:00.006-05:00

I got a copy of No Place for Heroes by Laura Restrepo (2009, English translation 2010) through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program awhile ago, but I had put off reading it because the description on the back was so dumb sounding. I figured the time had come for me to take my hits and, surprisingly, the book was pretty great!

Lorenza is a Columbian woman who joined the socialist party in Madrid as a young woman and then went to Buenos Aires to fight in the underground against the dictatorship in the late 1970s. She meets and moves in with a local leader of the movement, Ramón, and the two of them have a son, Mateo. When Mateo is a few years old, and after several close calls with the police, Lorenza and Ramón move to Columbia and cut off their ties with the movement. Lorenza throws herself into her work as a journalist, but Ramón is increasingly depressed and the two end up separating. When Ramón kidnaps Mateo in order to regain Lorenza's love and their former relationship, Lorenza is willing to sacrifice anything to get her son back.

Fast forwarding a dozen years or so, Lorenza and a teenage Mateo are back in Bueons Aires because Mateo wants to meet his father, a man he hasn't seen since he was three years old and hardly remembers. The city, now released from the dictatorship, brings back memories of her political youth and Lorenza spends hours telling Mateo stories of his father and their time together in the movement. Mateo, in typical teenager fashion, interrupts constantly, sometimes hungering for more stories of his father and other times getting frustrated with his mother and shutting her out. They find Ramón's number in the phone book, but Mateo can't get the courage up to call it. As they search for clues to Ramón's past, and Mateo tries to figure out why his father has never tried to look for him, Lorenza leads us back through the death of her father, she and Ramón's early life together, the excitement and terror of life under the dictatorship, and Mateo's kidnapping.

This is a nicely structured and well-written novel that managed to cover motherhood, teenagerness, social struggle, and past loves equally well. The descriptions of Buenos Aires are lovingly done without being oppressive, and it is no wonder that Restrepo can conjure these feelings and descriptions since much of Lorenza's history comes from Restrepo's own life. Definitely worth a read, especially if you are a fan of Latin American literature. Just don't judge this one by the back cover...

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (2005)

2010-09-20T20:16:00.005-05:00

For a book lover, I really am remarkably out of touch with what is going on in the book world. I almost never go into a bookstore that sells new books, most of my weird reading list (with the exception of my book club and my western canon project) comes from garage sales, thrift stores, or things that my nice friends lend me, and I don't read the New York Times Book Review or often even know if one of my favorite authors has come out with a new book. So, when I saw this copy of The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova was a dollar at the library book sale, I decided to go for it. I'm an archivist, so I like historians, and I also like really long books and am not averse to small doses of vampirism. Little did I know (until, actually, a minute ago when I skimmed this insanely comprehensive Wikipedia article) that the rights to Kostova's debut novel earned her a $2 million paycheck, and that, thanks to a hefty advertising budget, this was the first debut novel to hit the New York Times bestsellers list in its first week of publication. And all thanks to a certain runaway bestseller called The Da Vinci Code that got publishers all hot about historical mystery/adventure books.

I haven't read The Da Vinci Code, but from what I've read about it, Kostova's novel has to be the better written of the two. This 650 page novel is told through a series of letters, diaries, remembered stories, folk songs, historical manuscripts, and journal articles. Our narrator, a middle-aged historian in the present day, pieces together the story of her teenage years in the mid-1970s, her father's grad school days in the 1950s, and her father's adviser's youthful research in the 1930s. All three characters become enmeshed in a never-ending cycle of obsessive research on Vlad Ţepeş aka Vlad the Impaler aka the historical Dracula, and in particular a desire to find the location of his grave. As historians, they naturally don't believe in superstitious notions like vampires, but after finding a very old bound volume containing nothing but blank pages with a woodcut of a dragon and the word Drakula in the center, their researcher brains take over. And they make rapid progress, quickly setting aside their real research projects, chasing down one lead after another, and traveling to distant countries to find another clue to the whereabouts of Dracula. And then: things start getting weird. They see an odd looking broad shouldered man following them. Their pets and friends start dying. People with bite marks on the side of their necks tell them that they should stop their research. And ultimately they are personally threatened by the big D. himself.

One by one our historians take the hint and stop researching Dracula. And one by one the next person in the chain discovers the book and picks up the research.

I was expecting to do a lot of cringing whenever the characters went to a library or an archives, because usually historical research in fictional books or movies is not portrayed very realistically. Kostova, on the other hand, gives us a book where historical research looks pretty familiar: no characters steal books or manuscripts from a repository; rare documents are treated with respect; the research takes a very very very long time, nothing is all in one repository, and plenty of documents just never made it into a collection at all. Big thumbs up on her research knowledge!

In the book the characters do a lot of traveling: from Oxford to Harvard, all around Eastern Europe, to France, Istanbul, Hungary, Bulgaria. The first 100 pages or so read more like a travel guide than a novel, and while it is clear that Kostova has really been to the places mentioned in the book, her descriptions of the sights and sounds of Europe are a little overblown and take away from the drive of the narrative. Once she gets going, however, the plot picks up and the last 100 pages are very exciting and bring us to a satisfying conclusion.

This isn't the best thing I've ever read (there is not a lot of variety in the characters' voices, it could use some tightening up, and sometimes her pacing is off), but is a fun read and the historical look at Vlad the Impaler, the fall of Byzantium, and the rise of the Ottoman empire is almost more exciting than the actual vampires. And there are some of those, including a character referred to as the "evil librarian."

If you want lots of sexy vampire action, this book is probably not for you, but if you have a little patience and a love for historiography, then it don't let its bestselling nature scare you away.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel (2006)

2010-09-15T18:49:00.003-05:00

The always amazing A. recently lent me her copy of Alison Bechdel's graphic novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006), and I'm so so glad she did, because this is one I've been wanting to read for awhile. Bechdel is the author of the "Dykes to Watch Out For" comic strip, which is also excellent, and which really made me want to read this more personal work.

Fun Home is a memoir about Bechdel's childhood, coming of age, and her relationship with her father. Bechdel's coming out to her family in college was immediately followed by the news that her mother was leaving her father, and that her father was gay. A few weeks after that, at the age of 44, her father was dead after stepping in front of a bread truck while doing yard work. The evidence is inconclusive, but Bechdel believes that her father committed suicide and Fun Home, in part, looks back over her father's life and their time together and tries to come to terms with their past and his death.

Bechdel reveals this very personal story with a compelling sense of self-awareness and perspective. Events are presented and then revisited, background details highlight the difference between what the child and adult Bechdel see, and visuals of everyday scenes underlie the revealing and sometimes upsetting text.

Overall Fun Home really is a tragicomic -- a memoir filled with the comedy of adolescence and childhood memory, but washed over by the tragedy of her father's death. As soon as I finished it, I wanted to read the whole thing again and soak up more of the detailed drawings (which, incidentally, is exactly what A. said to me when she finished it). You should probably read this one.

[for a sense of Bechdel's amazing art work, check out the Google Books version.]

The Rough Guide to Barcelona by Jules Brown (2009)

2010-09-11T14:44:00.006-05:00

Aside from a college trip to Mexico, I've never been out of the country, but international travel is something that I aspire to and I take a strange pleasure in reading about cities I've never been to, looking through street maps, and reading about hotels and restaurants and odd little neighborhoods. One city I could see myself exploring is Barcelona, so I got myself a used copy of The Rough Guide to Barcelona by Jules Brown (2009). I ordered it off Amazon and actually ended up with a UK version of the book that was withdrawn from a library in Edinburgh -- I'm not sure what it means when your travel guide has actually done more travel than you have.

Barcelona has several qualities that are important to me: It is on a coast; it has an interesting and long history; I can speak one of the languages (Spanish, not Catalan); cool architecture; good food. If I were to go, I think I'd like to spend three or four days in the city just wandering around and people watching and then do some side trips to cool things in the region.

Some things I would definitely want to see and do:

1. The Sagrada Familia and other Gaudí creations

2. Montjuïc (and I would naturally want to ride the funicular up there.)

3. Cable car across the harbor.

4. Old streets.

5. Beach stuff.

6. Exciting and big food markets.

And for some out of town excursions:

1. Montserrat

2. Girona

3. The Dalí museum in Figures

The Rough Guide series is a solid one, and although I haven't used this guide in the field, it seems to have plenty of useful information and easy to understand maps. Not a lot of pictures, but Google Image Search makes up for that.

Tinkers by Paul Harding (2009)

2010-09-06T17:06:00.004-05:00

George Crosby remembered many things as he died, but in an order he could not control. To look at his life, to take the stock he always imagined a man would at his end, was to witness a shifting mass, the tiles of a mosaic spinning, swirling, reportraying, always in recognizable swaths of colors, familiar elements, molecular units, intimate currents, but also independent now of his will, showing him a different self every time he tried to make an assessment.

The latest selection for my book club (go DAFFODILS!) was Paul Harding's debut novel (and recent Pulitzer Prize winner) Tinkers (2009). The action of this book is the memories and thoughts of clock-repairer George Crosby as he lies, an old man, on his death bed and thinks back on his childhood in Maine and his epileptic father, Howard. The narrative is loose and the plot dreamlike, with point of view bouncing between George, Howard, and others, sometimes in the third person, and sometimes in the first. The language is often poetic with multiple clauses strung together, the punctuation mimicking the jumbled thoughts of a dying man. This book is literary, but not overly so, and its short length, beautiful language, and well-developed characters (who really come to life, even within the non-linear plot) should keep most readers engaged. Me: I loved it.

As might be expected, this poetic and not-action-packed slim novel was not gulped up by the big publishing houses when they saw it, and ended up being published by a small independent press. The story of how the book was written, published, found its audience and eventually won the Pulitzer is a great one, and should be required reading for all "unmarketable" artists.

And now, because the language in the book is too lovely to leave on the page, and because this is my blog and I can do what I want, please indulge me in another quotation:

He thought, buy the pendant, sneak it into your hand from the folds of your dress and let the low light of the fire lap at it late at night as you wait for the roof to give out or your will to snap and the ice to be too thick to chop through with the ax as you stand in your husband's boots on the frozen lake at midnight, the dry hack of the blade on ice so tiny under the wheeling and frozen stars, the soundproof lid of heaven, that your husband would never stir from his sleep in the cabin across the ice, would never hear and come running, half-frozen, in only his union suit, to save you from chopping a hole in the ice and sliding into it as if it were a blue vein, sliding down into the black, silty bottom of the lake, where you would see nothing, would perhaps feel only the stir of some somnolent fish in the murk as the plunge of you in your wool dress and the big boots disturbed it from its sluggish winter dreams of ancient seas. Maybe you would not even feel that, as you struggled in clothes that felt like cooling tar, and as you slowed calmed, even, and opened your eyes and looked for a pulse of silver, an imbrication of scales, and as you closed your eyes again and felt their lids turn to slippery, ichthyic skin, the blood behind them suddenly cold, and as you found yourself not caring, wanting, finally, to rest, finally wanting nothing more than the sudden, new, simple hum threading between your eyes. The ice is far too thick to chop through. You will never do it. You could never do it. So buy the gold, warm it with your skin, slip it onto your lap when you are sitting by the fire and all you will otherwise have to look at is your splintery husband gumming chew or the craquelure of your own chapped hands.

"An imbrication of scales" = awesome.

Master of Murder by Christopher Pike (1992)

2010-09-02T19:46:00.004-05:00

You may have heard of a certain bestselling author of young adult thrillers who goes by the name of Christopher Pike. That is, of course, a pseudonym, and little is known about Pike who keeps his private life very private and never does publicity or publishes author photos.

This might remind you of a character in Pike's 1992 novel Master of Murder: Marvin Summer is a 17-year-old high school student. But he is also the author of the Mack Slate novels -- a bestselling series of young adult thrillers which he writes under a pseudonym -- and no one in his town, not even his parents, suspects a thing. The reason he is still in high school and not living the high life with his millions of dollars is that both his parents are alcoholics and he is afraid that his dad will take all his money if he finds out how rich he is before his 18th birthday. This, of course, makes perfect sense.

Marvin may be a successful author and rich young man, but he has not been lucky in love. His relationship with the girl of his dreams, Shelly, was cut short when another boy she was seeing, Harry was found dead in the lake outside of town a year ago. Everyone says he committed suicide, but Shelly is sure he was murdered, and she wants Marvin to find out who did it. Meanwhile, Marvin has gotten a series of letters in his PO Box from someone who knows who he is, and that are postmarked from his hometown (this is not really a surprise since his fan mail is forwarded to "Mack Slate" at that address since his agent doesn't know his real name).

There are some definite rocky patches in this one, and the reader has to suspend quite a bit of disbelief, but overall the book is a fun read, and Pike seems to be having fun writing about writing. In fact, he even seems to understand his own overemphasis on descriptions of his character's hair:

Shelly had hair and she had skin -- both lovely. (p.3)

The book also features a character named Triad, which is possibly the best high school football jock name I have ever heard.

[And if you don't want to read the book, but want all the plot details, check out the nice summary here.]

London Fields by Martin Amis (1989)

2010-08-29T10:44:00.005-05:00

The black cab will move away, unrecallably and for ever, its driver paid, and handsomely tipped, by the murderee. She will walk down the dead-end street. The heavy car will be waiting; its lights will come on as it lumbers towards her. It will stop, and idle, as the passenger door swings open.

His face will be barred in darkness, but she will see shattered glass on the passenger seat and the car-tool ready on his lap.

'Get in.'

She will lean forward, 'You,' she will say, in intense recognition: 'Always you.'

'Get in.'

And in she'll climb...

The novel London Fields by Martin Amis (1989) takes place in a crowded and distracted London in 1999. And as the world hurls towards the uncertainty and potential Crisis of the Millennium, our four characters hurl toward their inevitable conclusion. We have Nicola Six, the sexually controlling femme fatale and murderee who has foretold her own death; Keith Talent, the professional cheat, verile womanizer, olympic drinker, and aspiring darts champion; Guy Clinch, the wealthy but personally and sexually dissatisfied new father whose son, Marmaduke, is a truly amazing physical terror; and our narrator, Samson Young, a failed non-fiction writer, dying of a terminal disease, who comes across the triangle of Nicola, Keith and Guy and decides to document their drama and turn it into a best-selling novel.

The book abounds with black humor (the attacks of Marmaduke, the epic and excruciating hard-on of Guy, the charmed squalor of Keith) and post-modern meta-narratives on the act of writing (every chapter "written" by Samson is followed by a short section in Samson's voice commenting on his process of gathering information and putting it into his novel). Dark comedy and post-modernism can so easily fall into the trap of a winky and substanceless exchange between the reader and writer, but Amis counters that with his enticingly rich descriptions and gradual escalation of the panic and loss of control of his narrator and cast of characters.

This is a wonderfully strong and engrossing novel that is both fun to read, literary, and impossible to stop thinking about when you are done.

Speaking of enticingly rich descriptions, here are a couple of my favorites:

Keith's crowning glory, his hair, was thick and full-bodied; but it always had the look of being recently washed, imperfectly rinsed, and then, still slick with cheap shampoo, slow-dried in a huddled pub -- the thermals of the booze, the sallowing fagsmoke.

And:
Here was a blonde to whom everything that could happen to a blonde had gone ahead and happened.

The Company of Heaven: Stories from haiti by Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell (2010)

2010-08-17T19:57:00.004-05:00

The always intriguing LibraryThing Early Reviewers program recently sent me a copy of Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell's short story collection The Company of Heaven: Stories from Haiti (October 2010).

Besides writing short stories, Phipps-Kettlewell is a visual artist and poet (you can see some examples of her work on her web site), and her work in these other artistic mediums is reflected in her often lyrical storytelling and economical description. While most of the stories stand alone, there is a subtle interlocking of characters and events that strings through the collection. Her narrative criss-crosses her native country of Haiti, touching on the black and the white, the rich and the poor, the old and the young. All the stories were interesting and readable, and some (like "Dogs," "River Valley Rooms," and "At the Gate") were just about perfect. Definitely worth a look.

The Would-Be Gentleman by Molière (1670)

2010-08-09T20:58:00.006-05:00

My next stop on the non-stop literature train that is Harold Bloom's Western Canon list is the French play "The Would-Be Gentleman" by Molière (1670).

Molière is known as one of the great masters of comedy and "The Would-Be Gentleman" is no exception. Here Molière pokes fun at the greatly expanding French middle-class, typified by Monsieur Jourdain, a nouveau riche merchant who has plenty of money to spend on learning how to be a "person of quality." To this end he hires music instructors, dancing instructors, and fencing instructors who all gladly take his money and put up with his gauche opinions while waiting for a commission from a real noble.

Jourdain has a very practical and witty wife, and a lovely daughter, Lucile, who is in love with Cléonte. Madame Jourdain would be very happy for her daughter to marry Cléonte, but her husband is bound and determined for his daughter to marry a nobleman. Through a series of disguises, and leaning heavily on the suggestibility of Monsieur Jourdain, the romance is brought to a suitable ending for a comedy.

I really enjoyed this play -- it is predictable, but in just the way you want a good comedy to be, and many of the jokes and gags are just as funny now as they were over 300 years ago. All plays are meant to be performed, of course, and not just read, and since this play also includes several music/dance numbers, it perhaps loses even more than most by being read on the page instead of watched on the screen. Still, Molière's sense of fun and the comedy of his characters comes through in this archetypal French comedy.

***
Luckily for me, I got my copy of "The Would-Be Gentleman" in a collection of Molière's plays that includes four other plays from Bloom's canon list, and which I have bookmarked to read later. Since there were just two plays in this collection that Bloom overlooked, I read them this time around.

The first: "The Doctor In Spite of Himself" (1666) is a very funny story of a poor man who gets mad at his wife and hits her (that's not the funny part) -- she gets her revenge by telling two men who are in search of a doctor to cure their rich master's daughter that her husband is the greatest doctor of all time, but he has the eccentricity of denying that he is a doctor unless you beat him senseless. After you do that, he will agree he is a doctor and cure your patient. As you might imagine, everything eventually works out, and along the way is a play that is so funny I can't figure out why it didn't make the big W.C. list.

The second is "The Mischievous Machinations of Scapin" (1671) which focuses on the entertainingly conniving valet Scapin who gets himself and his masters into plenty of trouble, but always manages to get them back out again. Some really nice gags in this one, which also features the familiar doomed love affairs that end up working out just perfectly.

1000!

2010-08-06T16:54:00.003-05:00

Hey jerks, this is my 1000th post! What have I been doing for the past five and a half years (since February 16, 2005), you might ask? Well, lately I've been writing a lot about books, of course. I've also explored the intimate world of my secret boyfriends. And there was that wonderful spring that was dominated by The Serious Debate (which is by far the most popular post on this blog).

Thanks for stopping by for the first 1000 posts, and maybe over the next five years or so I will grace you with 1000 more.

Zip!

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow (2010)

2010-08-03T17:34:00.003-05:00

The always lovely choo thrust this book upon me a few months ago, and it took quite some time to work its way up to the top of my ever-expanding pile. Once it did, though, I zoomed through it in a day and a half and enjoyed every second of it.

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (2010) by Heidi W. Durrow is a coming-of-age story, a novel about race, a psychological study, and an engaging read. The book tells the story of Rachel, the daughter of a Danish woman and an African-American military man who has mostly grown up overseas on military bases. When she alone survives a family tragedy, she is sent off to live with her father's mother and sister in Portland. Rachel tries to put on a happy face while inside she struggles with her racial identity and her lost family.

The book alternates between the viewpoints of Rachel, the diaries of her late mother, her mom's boss and friend, her father, and a boy from Chicago who witnessed her family's last moments. While the story seems like it could be a heavy-handed or simplistic look at race and growing up, Durrow's straightforward (and yet sometimes poetic) prose, gradual revelations about the family secrets, and her perfect control of the plot keep things from getting too easy or clichéd. A great book for anyone, and one that I think would particularly resonate with teenagers.

Banana + Lime = Jam??

2010-08-02T21:10:00.004-05:00

Do you like bananas? Do you like limes? Do you think you could even figure out what Banana-Lime Jam would taste like?

Lucky for you I took the plunge and made this recipe from Cooking Light (very nicely described and photographed on the Noble Pig blog). It was weird. But good! But also weird. I honestly can't describe it entirely, although it is more tart than I thought it would be, and the consistency is extremely satisfying.

To make myself seem even more awesome, I made buttermilk biscuits for the first time in my life as a vehicle for some of the jam. Both making biscuits and making jam were way easier than I thought they would be. Is there a life lesson in there somewhere?

Happy Endings edited by Diana Schutz (2002)

2010-08-01T09:53:00.004-05:00

Dr. M bought this Dark Horse comics anthology [Happy Endings edited by Diana Schutz (2002)] when we were on vacation in Fort Collins, at the same comics shop he would sometimes get to go to as a kid. From the same grumpy comic book guy. With the same awesome grumpy cat.

The anthology, like most anthologies, is pleasant enough, although not particularly mind-blowing. Schutz brought together sixteen established comic artists and had them each produce a short piece on the theme "Happy Endings." Some interpreted that quite literally, some poked fun at the idea, but they all tackled it creatively and true to their own style. I liked the entries by Bernie Mireault, Craig Thompson, Farel Dalrymple and Harvey Pekar the best -- especially the Craig Thompson piece, which was by far the strongest in the book.

Which reminds me, does anyone have a copy of Blankets I could borrow? I'd really like to get more Craig Thompson into my life...

Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women by Harriet Reisen (2009)

2010-07-29T17:49:00.007-05:00

As I've probably mentioned before, I've loved Louisa May Alcott ever since I read Little Women as a child and then found out that Alcott and I shared the same birthday. When I picked her as the topic for an elementary school report I also learned that she was tall and thin, had only sisters, and that she loved to read. And now that I've read this well written biography by Harriet Reisen, I've also learned that, like me, Alcott shared a birthday with one of her relatives (in her case, her father; in my case, my sister) and that she loved to read (and made quite a bit of money writing) pulpy fiction serials for popular magazines.

Okay, the similarities between myself and Louisa May Alcott pretty much end there: my dad is sometimes philosophical, but he is a good provider and way more down to earth than Transcendentalist Bronson Alcott; I only lived in three houses growing up -- Alcott moved 30 times before she was in her mid-twenties; I'm no fiction writer; and my personality tends to be pretty even keeled and not as frenetic as Louisa May Alcott's. Still, I like to think we would be good friends if she hadn't passed away back in 1888.

Reisen's biography is an extremely readable exploration of Louisa May Alcott's life, starting with her parents' childhoods and ending with her death (which, incidentally, was only two days after the death of her father). While the author is closely focused on the life of Alcott, her family was at the center of many important aspects of 19th century America (abolition, Transcendentalism, the Civil War, women's suffrage) that the reader can't help but get a healthy dose of American (and Bostonian) history.

It is well known that Alcott based her best-selling novel, Little Women on her own family, and in fact much of Alcott's fiction was drawn from her real life experiences. And while all the characters and many of the events in Little Women have their parallels in reality, Louisa May Alcott's childhood was much rougher than the book allows. Having a Transcendentalist father meant that Alcott grew up with Emerson and Thoreau as neighbors and friends, but her father's writing was never successful, and for much of his life he was not much respected outside of his circle of friends. He never made money at his philosophical and educational work, and the Alcott family struggled to make ends meet through loans from friends and family (that were never paid back), and by moving frequently to escape their debts. Bronson Alcott's philosophies of diet (nothing but bread, water and apples) and cleanliness (cold shower outdoors) didn't make life any more comfortable for his wife and four daughters. And yet, the family was very close, and Louisa May Alcott was ultimately able to support both her parents and her sisters through her writing.

Lucky for us, an intellectual family like the Alcotts placed a big emphasis on writing and Alcott kept a journal from the time of her childhood and sent out a huge number of letters to her friends and family. Because of this, Reisen is often able to tell us Alcott's story in her own voice and cut our impression of the moralistic narrator of Little Women with the biting wit and outspoken nature of the real Louisa May Alcott.

And now that I've read this biography, I want to go out and read everything by Louisa May Alcott that I can get my hands on....

Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels by Barry Gifford (2010)

2010-07-19T19:47:00.004-05:00

Lula Pace Fortune. Sailor Ripley. Coot Veal. Buford Dufour. Rip Ford. Dalceda Hopewell Delahoussaye. Lefty Grove. Elmer Désespéré. The names alone make this collection a first rate contribution to American literature.

Sometimes (although not often) I have to slog a bit to get through a free book from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. Other times the magical algorithm reads my tastes perfectly and sends me a book that couldn't do anything else but make me smile -- Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels by Barry Gifford (2010) is just that kind of book.

If you have seen David Lynch's movie Wild at Heart, (which includes one of my favorite Nicolas Cage lines of all time) then you are already familiar with the cast of the first novel in this collection: the star-crossed lovebirds, Sailor and Lula; Lula's overprotective mother, Marietta; and the ill-fated Bobby Peru and his girlfriend, Perdita Durango.

In fact, the second novel in the collection, Perdita Durango was also made into a movie -- I've never seen it, but it has been added to my list. And if you take a second to watch the trailer, you will see that Javier Bardem's haircut in No Country for Old Men is actually not the most unflattering hairstyle he has ever sported.

Gifford wrote the screenplays for both of these film adaptations of his work (as well as the original screenplay for Lost Highway), and while Lynch obviously brought a big bag of his own Lynchiness to Wild at Heart, these books have the same humor, violence, philosophies, and energy.

I won't go through the whole collection except to say that the books as a whole, written between 1990 and 2009, take us way beyond the end of Wild at Heart, through Sailor and Lula's middle age, the life of their son, and all the way until the end of their lives. In each episode, the main narrative shoots out on side stories, brushes up against minor characters with one-paragraph plots (and awesome names), steps up to the radio to tell us of a crazy crime, has a little sex, reads the newspaper for a bit, tells us about someone's dream, and then unexpectedly and inevitably blows apart with a breath-taking (and plot changing) act of violence. And just when things seem like they can't get any worse, an equally unexpected act of violence and some good luck set everything right again.

Oddly enough, even though this collection is sub-titled "The Complete Novels," there is another Sailor and Lula novel that wasn't included, Baby Cat-Face (1995). That the publishers didn't include that novel doesn't make me too sad, though, because just when I thought I had exhausted the Southern mythology of Sailor and Lula, I've found that there is a whole other chapter waiting for me.

The Bread Bible by Christine Ingram and Jennie Shapter (2006)

2010-07-13T20:11:00.005-05:00

One of my resolutions this year was to finally get tough and make my own bread. I had made my share of banana bread and beer bread, but I wanted to make the kind that uses yeast and that you have to knead and wait around for. The internet led me to some tips and simple recipes, and I completed my goal pretty early in the year. But I wanted more!

I found just the book to scratch my bread knowledge itch in Christine Ingram and Jennie Shapter's The Bread Bible (2006). This book starts with some introductory material on the history of bread making and the ingredients used in baking bread, then moves into some nicely illustrated step-by-step techniques and a nod to the different equipment a bread-maker might want. After this preparation the book pushes into an encyclopedic look at different types of bread from around the world, with a pretty heavy emphasis on breads from the U.K. and Europe. Finally, after reading about all the tasty bread options and drooling over the full-color photography on every page, Ingram and Shapter give us over 100 step-by-step recipes for a selection of breads that we read about in the first section of the book.

I haven't tried making any of these yet, but I have about a dozen recipes marked for immediate experimentation. My only qualm is that this book is a British publication and while the measurements are converted into US units, I still think a certain amount of translation is going to be necessary. There are also some endearing (and sometimes confusing) Britishisms used throughout: "greased greaseproof paper," "maize meal" (instead of corn meal), and she always seems to call a measuring cup a "jug." Overall, this is a fun read for a curious breadmaker and includes such a variety of recipes that it should cover pretty much every bread baking need (or knead).

Let the bready experiments begin!

Giant by Edna Ferber (1952)

2010-07-09T09:53:00.004-05:00

I bought this copy of Giant by Edna Ferber (1952) about a year ago when I was up in Madison, Wisconsin for the wedding celebration of a year. It may seem odd to have purchased a novel all about Texas in a state about as far from Texas as you can get, but Ferber herself was born in Michigan and raised in the lovely city of Appleton, Wisconsin, so it is actually quite appropriate.

Giant is the story of Bick Benedict, the head of the Benedict Ranch, one of the largest and most prosperous in Texas. After the first World War, while doing business in Washington, he stops in Virginia to see a man about a horse. He comes back to Texas not only with the horse, but also with the man's lovely and outspoken daughter Leslie. Bick and Leslie are about as different as 1920s Virginia and Texas, but they are passionately in love and Leslie makes plenty of sacrifices to make their family work. Things aren't made any easier by Jett Rink, a crude and outspoken ranch hand who pretty awesomely crosses Bick and becomes a lifelong enemy of the family at the same time that he strikes it rich in oil.

Giant encompasses the story of the Benedict family and their friends and neighbors, but it also gives the reader a series of contrasts: cattle vs. oil, the old generation vs. the new one, the east cost vs. Texas, men vs. women, Mexicans vs. Anglos. Not surprisingly for Ferber (who also wrote the novel that Showboat -- one of the best musicals of all time -- was based on), racial equality and social justice are big themes in the book. While sometimes these themes are pushed at the expense of the story, the book is an interesting read as a non-Texan's view of these ranching men and women with all their quirks -- both the endearing ones and the irritating ones. Of course, maybe I liked it because I'm not from Texas either, even though I've lived here for ten years. I could see "real" Texans having some problems with the book...

I haven't ever seen the film version of Giant, the one staring James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor, but I have put it high on my list. I imagine it is chock full of 1950s hugeness and melodrama, and sometimes that is just the thing I want.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (2004)

2010-06-16T17:07:00.005-05:00

I am trying my hardest to understand why Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2004) is such a runaway bestseller, because I really did not like this book at all. And I love books!

I borrowed this one from my mother, who got it from my sister, who got it in a gift exchange at Christmas. Neither of them had read it yet, but I had heard so much about this and the other two books in Larsson's posthumously published Millennium series that I was interested to check them out. I think it is pretty fair to say that I will not be finishing the trilogy...

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo focuses on Mikael Blomkvist, a financial journalist in Stockholm, and co-publisher of an investigative magazine along with his best friend and (married) casual sex partner, Erika Berger. Blomkvist gets a tip on financial fraud being committed by the Swedish industrialist Hans-Erik Wennerström from a friend who wants to remain an anonymous source. The first hundred or so pages of this 600 page book trudge us through the financial misdealings, Blomkvist's publication of an article on Wennerström, and his eventual trial and conviction for libel when his story falls apart.

The conviction does not bode well for Blomkvist's journalistic career or for the future of his magazine, so when he is contacted by another Swedish businessman, Henrik Vanger, about a mysterious opportunity, he decides to make a trip to an island up north to see what Vanger has to say.

Vanger is the patriarch of a corporation that has been a major business in Sweden for generations. The company is currently run by Vanger's nephew, since Vanger is getting older, but ownership of the company is divided between a couple dozen relatives who all have skeletons in their closets and who just can't get along. Vanger doesn't like many of the other Vangers, and part of his dislike stems from a day 34 years ago when his favorite niece Harriet, who was 16 at the time, disappeared from the island without a trace. Although no body was found, Vanger is convinced she was murdered by one of his relatives and he wants to pay Blomkvist a huge amount of money to research the case for a year and see what he can find. At the end of the year, Vanger also promises to give Blomkvist some dirt on Wennerström, who started his career with the Vanger corporation. Not having any other choice, Blomkvist agrees.

Oh, and that girl? With the tattoo? She is the anti-social and uncommunicative Lisbeth Salander -- an accomplished hacker and investigator with some serious emotional problems. She was hired to investigate Blomkvist by Vanger's lawyer in preparation for Vanger's offer of employment. Blomkvist eventually gets his hands on her report on him and is so impressed by her researching skills that he asks her to be his assistant in the disappearance of Harriet.

So, doesn't sound too bad, right? Why don't I like it? Here are some of my thoughts in bulleted list format:

The structure and narrative is a mess. Larsson wrote this book and the two sequels in his spare time (he was professionally a journalist). He submitted them to a publisher in 2004 and then unexpectedly died at the age of 50. This book reads like the editor was so moved by Larsson's death that he decided not to change a thing from the first draft.
The characters are flat and unappealing. You would think that in 600 pages we could start to feel something about Lisbeth or Mikael but I didn't understand (or care about) either of them any more at the end than I did at the beginning.
Larsson is weirdly specific about some things. This is nitpicky, but it bugged me: nothing was ever a laptop, it was a Mac PowerBook. And then he would give the model number. And the amount of RAM. And the hard drive size. He would mention a database program. Then mention who wrote it. That it was shareware. And then give the URL for the program! Again, the book seems unedited.
The writing, especially the dialogue, is not good. Possibly a translation problem? Still, it didn't work for me at all.
A scene in a corporate archives where our irritating tattooed pixie does some all night research and then leaves things in a mess for the archivist (who she calls a slut) did not make me happy.
The solution to the mystery is both dumb and unearned. And is then followed with another 100 pages about financial malfeasance and bank fraud.

And here is the big thing: Larsson's heavy-handed message about violence against women. The original Swedish title of this book is translated as Men who Hate Women and that is pretty appropriate since, as Alex Berenson points out in his review (which I largely agree with), "Except for Blomkvist, nearly every man in the book under age 70 is a violent misogynist." Add to that the fact that every woman under 70 in the book instantly wants to sleep with Blomkvist (and most of them follow up on that urge). Larsson is obviously anti-violence. This is made abundantly clear with the statistics about violence against women in Sweden that start off each section of the book. However the book itself is so black and white about its misogyny and so explicit in its scenes of violence (particularly sexual violence) against women, that it feels like Larsson is trying to have his cake and eat it too.

Have you read this book? Did you like it? I won't hold it against you if you did, because I am honestly baffled by my response to this book.

Science!

2010-06-14T21:28:00.003-05:00

As an archivist, I get to use lots of fun tools: bone folders, microspatulas, um.... pencils? But the most fun of all is my brand new toy, the sling psychrometer!

First of all, the name "sling psychrometer" is immensely fun to say. Almost as fun as hygrothermograph.

Secondly, it is helpful in that it tells me the actual relative humidity in a room, allowing me to mentally calibrate my digital (and uncalibratable) temperature/humidity monitors and then be sad because the humidity is always too high in my storage area and there isn't anything I can do about it.

And thirdly, and most importantly, when using the sling psychrometer, you actually whirl it around in a very satisfying way. Just take a look at this video and watch some sports dude show you how to use this tool.

Sling Psychrometer!

Good Wives (or Little Women, Volume 2) by Louisa May Alcott (1869)

2010-06-11T10:17:00.006-05:00

After the success of Little Women in 1868, Louisa May Alcott penned a companion volume in 1869 that is sometimes bound separately as Good Wives and sometimes (like in the case of my grandmother's copy of the book that I'm reading), bound together as a second part of the story.

I had read this part of the book once before, but not nearly as many times as I read the first part of the book. Maybe it is because I'm grown up now, but I liked the "young womanhood" part of the collection even more than the childhood part.

In Good Wives the oldest March sister, Meg, marries her fiance John Brooke and starts a family. Jo, the second daughter (and the one modeled after Alcott), refuses the hand of their cute and wealthy and nice next door neighbor Laurie who has loved her since childhood. She breaks his heart and he heads to Europe while she goes to New York City to work as a governess and work on her writing. The third daughter, Beth, stays close to home and is still a little sickly from her battle with scarlet fever, but is just as kind and thoughtful as ever. Little Amy, the artistic one, hits the jackpot as a companion to her wealthy aunt on a trip to Europe where she stretches her artistic wings.

Although each of the "Little Women" are moving further and further from their childhood home, they are still just as close with their mother and one another. Each is sometimes tempted and starts down the wrong path, but their solid character and good upbringing always bring them back to the good life. This book deals with more grown up difficulties, tragedies, and blessings, but the core of the characters is just the same as when Alcott laid their foundations in the first volume of the book. And I challenge anyone on earth to write a better betrothal scene than Alcott. She has two in this book that got me a little weepy they were so perfect.

There is still some moralizing in this book (it was written in the late 1800s after all), but nothing that a patient reader can't handle. And if you give it a little time, you are rewarded by passages like the following (which I'm going to quote at length, because I can). This is particularly revealing since Alcott herself never married:

"An old maid, that's what I'm to be. A literary spinster, with a pen for a spouse, a family of stories for children, and twenty years hence a morsel of fame, perhaps; when, like poor Johnson, I'm old, and can't enjoy it, solitary, and can't share it, independent, and don't need it. Well, I needn't be a sour saint nor a selfish sinner; and, I dare say, old maids are very comfortable when they get used to it; but—" and there Jo sighed, as if the prospect was not inviting.

It seldom is, at first, and thirty seems the end of all things to five-and-twenty. But it's not as bad as it looks, and one can get on quite happily if one has something in one's self to fall back upon. At twenty-five, girls begin to talk about being old maids, but secretly resolve that they never will be. At thirty they say nothing about it, but quietly accept the fact, and if sensible, console themselves by remembering that they have twenty more useful, happy years, in which they may be learning to grow old gracefully. Don't laugh at the spinsters, dear girls, for often very tender, tragic romances are hidden away in the hearts that beat so quietly under the sober gowns, and many silent sacrifices of youth, health, ambition, love itself, make the faded faces beautiful in God's sight. Even the sad, sour sisters should be kindly dealt with, because they have missed the sweetest part of life, if for no other reason. And looking at them with compassion, not contempt, girls in their bloom should remember that they too may miss the blossom time. That rosy cheeks don't last forever, that silver threads will come in the bonnie brown hair, and that, by-and-by, kindness and respect will be as sweet as love and admiration now.

Gentlemen, which means boys, be courteous to the old maids, no matter how poor and plain and prim, for the only chivalry worth having is that which is the readiest to pay deference to the old, protect the feeble, and serve womankind, regardless of rank, age, or color. Just recollect the good aunts who have not only lectured and fussed, but nursed and petted, too often without thanks, the scrapes they have helped you out of, the tips they have given you from their small store, the stitches the patient old fingers have set for you, the steps the willing old feet have taken, and gratefully pay the dear old ladies the little attentions that women love to receive as long as they live. The bright-eyed girls are quick to see such traits, and will like you all the better for them, and if death, almost the only power that can part mother and son, should rob you of yours, you will be sure to find a tender welcome and maternal cherishing from some Aunt Priscilla, who has kept the warmest corner of her lonely old heart for 'the best nevvy in the world'.