The 2011 Homeless Reviews Thread of richardderus

This still life by Spanish artist Juan de ZURBARÁN, the son of far better known artist Francisco de ZURBARÁN. Juan was born in 1620 and died in 1649, which makes me want to scream. This painting was completed in 1628, and it's got a delightful composition plus a clear passion for color. Imagine, just try to wrap your head around, how much more and how wonderful the works he could have created in a normal lifespan would have been!

The apples are the glorious cold red that the painting by Hovsep Pushman uses. Unlike the more overblown Dutch still lifes, this Zurbaran is lush and luxurious due to what it does NOT show: Excess!

It worked last year. I believe I shall continue the multi-thread approach to reviews for 2011.

This thread is for any book I review that was published in 2008 or before, whether I own the book or not, and for whatever reason isn't a book I will get off the shelves.




The NEW books read, those published from 2009 to the present, is over here.




The Books off the Shelf thread for 2011 is up, though sort of nekkid. My goal there is now 30 books from my shelves read and donated, shared, or generally gotten out of the house.




Book reviews are in post:

26. Death in Venice...#238.

25. A Great Deliverance...#200.

24. Murder in the Rue Chartres...#192.

23. Loose Lips...#184.

22. Murder in the Rue St. Ann...#169.

21. Murder in the Rue Dauphine...#159.

20. Six of One...#133.

19. Notorious: The Life of Ingrid Bergman...#123.

18. I Was Amelia Earhart...#116.

17. Dancing on the Ceiling...#113.

16. Sketches from a Hunter's Album...#109.

15. Serenity Found...#99.

14. Finding Serenity...#93.

13. The Dreyfus Affair: A Love Story...#91.

12. Snow Country...#87.

11. The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen...#72.

10. Carpe Demon...#65.

9. The Last Refuge...#63.

8. Candy Everybody Wants...#56.

7. Don't Look Back...#52.

6. Strong Poison...#43.

5. Shuck...#42.

4. Duck...#41.

3. Murder-Go-Round...#36.

2. Reading the OED...#12.

1. The Invention of Clouds... #3.

Review: 1 of seventy-five

Title: THE INVENTION OF CLOUDS

Author: RICHARD HAMBLYN

Rating: 4* of five

The Book Report: Late eighteenth century London was an amazingly fertile place, with many concurrent revolutions burgeoning, and knowledge as such becoming an object of trade, almost, it was seen as so very desirable and advantageous to possess a new piece of it. The idea of scientific study of the natural world was relatively new, but had already made very solid and quite impressive inroads into the public consciousness. No longer was a person pursuing research into the material world liable to excite unwelcome and potentially hazardous attention from religious authorities. The world was open at last to apparently limitless desire of humans to ask questions and seek answers.

Into that atmosphere was born Luke Howard, a scion of a stolid, solid, money-making Quaker (more accurately called "Dissenters") family. He was cursed with unquenchable curiosity in a relgious sect that valued the practical over the notional, and obedience over personal happiness. (Depressingly familiar, eh what?) His childhood fascination with clouds was subsumed into the coerced "need" that his wealthy father felt for Luke to have a trade.

Nonetheless, Luke pursued his passion for observing clouds, in time falling in with the other members of his age and class and religion who were among the vanguard of scientific researches (eg, William Allen, Richard Phillips, WH Pepys) at that moment, largely due to their cultural isolation from more mainstream pursuits by faith and the laws of the day. His friend and business partner William Allen had founded something called The Askesian Society, where Howard presented a lecture in December 1802 that set the world on its ear: He proposed and defended a naming system for the clouds that, with minor extensions, we use to this good day.

Not bad for a 30-year-old ne'er-do-well (per his father) who was pathologically shy and unwilling to be "famous."

My Review: It's a beautiful looking little book, in a landscape trim, illustrated with paintings, etchings, and drawings of the clouds; it's a nicely written explanation of the science of nephology (the study of clouds) and its relationship to meteorology (the study of weather overall); and it's just plain interesting to read about how outsiders and the marginalized have always, it seems, been the pointers to huge advances in the arts and sciences.

Very much recommended.

I can't keep up with all the threads! :(

*Passing wave*

starred

That's all I got.

Regarding The Invention of Clouds), thumbs up and added to my wish list! God, I wish I could write as good as you!

Ohhh, I just now learned why you have the homeless thread. I 'spose I wasn't paying attention last year but in 2011 I'm right on top of things, yes siree.

>4 Ape: I'll post links to reviews I put in here, Stephen.

>5 mckait: *smooch*

>6 Whisper1: I doesn't rite so guud. You's jus dreamin.

>7 Carmenere: Lynda, you're a laugh a minute tonight! Who gave you tee-hee pills?

I love clouds.. I love looking at them.. and like to think I know what kind I am looking at. I doubt I am right though, since my knowledge dates back to elementary school science. My favorite name is Cumulonimbus. My second favorite cloud name is puffy.

........

No, no. Not tee-hee pills, just Tension Tamer tea from Celestial Seasonings. A cup before bedtime and I sleep like a baby. Ingredients include Eleuthero, peppermint, cinnamon, chamomile and West, not East, Indian Lemongrass. A friend was talking about the relaxing effects of it months ago, but I dismissed it til now.
Amazing what a good nights sleep will do for the humor.

>9 mckait: That's why I picked it up...the names of clouds are just *there*, so I never gave an instant's thought to who, what, or when someone named them. And "puffy" is right up there with "cottony" on my cloud-name scale.

>10 Carmenere: ...where lemongrass comes from is important...? Well, anyway, it sounds like the stuff does its advertised job well! I hadda look up "eleuthero", but I like the rest of the stuff in it.

Review: 2 of seventy-five

Title: READING THE OED

Author: AMMON SHEA

Rating: 3.8* of five

The Book Report: Ammon Shea, whom I suspect of autodidacticism, was a New York City furniture mover and dicitionary freak living with his recovering lexicographer girlfriend when he conceives of a way to get paid for sitting in a corner and reading: He will, in one year, read the entire 20-volume print version of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), and report on the experience of doing so, what lexicological gems he found while doing so, and what the experience does to his sneaking-up-on-forty body. (Nothing good, as one can imagine.) I strongly suspect he thought this wheeze up so someone would buy him the whole thousand-dollar kit and kaboodle. I have no evidence to support this conjecture, just a little quiver in my antennae. What the heck, he'll never see this review, so where's the harm?

My Review: I confess: I am such a nerd that, at age 11, I set out to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica (1947 edition) that my mother prized above all her other books. Originally, I approached the task sternly alphabetically. I understood very little of what I was reading, so I abandoned this approach and instead began jumping around to cross-references as entries confused, excited, angered me; I learned a lot more that way, and before six months were out, I got my first major dictionary (Random House Dictionary of the English Language 1966) so I would stop pestering my mother to tell me what words she'd never heard before meant.

My mother, my sisters, and my First Great Love all made gentle fun of me at first, but mostly left me to get on with it because it was *such* a relief that I no longer wanted to talk only about cars. The charm of this, inevitably, waned as I discoursed upon late Imperial/early Republican China's woes; motifs in Greek painting; the apple and its manifold wonders (though my mother, the foodie, was more willing to listen to this than most of the other stuff) (oh, and that last is still a source of abiding fascination to me), etc etc. Soon I faced open hostility as I approached, big brown volume in hand, gleam of joy in newfound knowledge lighting my face; I learned quickly how very little fondness most people have for someone smarter than they are, better informed than they are, and unafraid to show it.

So imagine my rapturous surprise when my eye lit on this book in the bargain bin! (Sorry, Mr. Shea, but if it's any consolation, it's from the third printing. I owe you a cup of coffee.) There exists in the world a bigger nerd than I am! W00t!

I read the book with a delight that's rare, the eager and guilt-laden urgency to see how far *this* big ol' nerd will go out of his cave. It was an impressive distance. He's a very, very curmudgeonly person, at least as he portrays himself; and he's unafraid of social opprobrium, which is laudable in a smartypants.

But in the end, much as I liked reading his alphabetical listings of the weird and wonderful discoveries, I was left wanting something more than the brief introductory essays in each letter provided: I wanted some synthesis, which he implies he did; he mentions several times compiling lists of synonyms and antonyms and words that define the same concept in slightly different ways, which lists and definitions I really wish had been in the book.

I suspect this is the work of his editor, who then is proof of my contention that no editor is always right, and occasionally should be fought. Oh well. Maybe next book.

Still and all, minor quibbles aside, this is a wonderful read and should be read ASAP by word freaks everywhere; and also by those socially inept folk in need of reassurance that, somewhere in New York City, there is a man who can give them a solid run for their awkward money. Recommended.

I've had Reading the OED wishlisted for ages: I'm glad to hear its so good and since I am a word freak AND socially inept, I shall definitely try to pick up a copy ASAP. Great review, Richard.

This "word freak" will be reading this book soonest! I'll have to chip in on that coffee, Richard. My $2.99 HC copy came from the B&N post-Christmas sale online. Could not resist.

#12 Since you enjoyed Reading the OED so much, you may enjoy Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words. It goes through many of the commonly misused words today. I am working my way through slowly, a few pages at a time so that perhaps I can actually remember most of it. The majority of the entries have been fascinating so far.

ETA: I forgot a verb...oops.

I confess: I am such a nerd that, at age 11, I set out to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica (1947 edition) that my mother prized above all her other books. Originally, I approached the task sternly alphabetically.

You have read The Know-it-All, right? A.J. Jacobs actually sat down and did exactly that. (Well, not his mother's 1947 edition at age 11, but reading the EB all the way through alphabetically.)

>13 Eat_Read_Knit: Oh boy, Caty, I think you're in for a major treat when you get to this one!

>14 Donna828: Coolio, Donna! Let me know when you review it...I love to see how different this group of readers' perceptions are.

>15 jasmyn9: I like Bryson in general, Jasmyn, but found this one a little too...crusty...for me. I suppose because I found his tone a bit wearing.

>16 lorax: Oh yeah, that was a very interesting book! I never could make myself do a second read of it, though, it was somehow...uninviting...can't explain why, exactly, but I wasn't drawn to read it again.

Word freaks and the socially inept...hmmm...am I sensing a bit of redundancy here?

Wait--no, it's just me and Caty, I guess.

Another fun review and a book on the list, Rdear.

I confess: I am such a nerd that, at age 11, I set out to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica (1947 edition) that my mother prized above all her other books.
Oh I love this Richard! I did not read the whole encyclopedia we had at home, I had more with numbers... A vivid memory pops up with this, I think I was 8 or 9 years old when my dad brought an unused, old, large, and empty account book home, I used it, starting with:
1
1
-- +
2
2
-- +
4 etcetera
It kept me busy for days, until I got numbers as wide as the page of the account book!

another good one..

I really enjoyed Reading the OED when I read it a couple years ago and remember being particularly tickled that there is a word for people who enjoy sitting in corners (one of my favourite pastimes, especially if there's a book involved) but now the word eludes me.

> 21

Latibulate (v.) To hide oneself in a corner.

(The joys of searching on an e-reader. :) )

I read Reading the OED last month, and really enjoyed it.

>18 Matke: Well, *I* am a word freak, and no one dares to call me socially inept. To my face, at least....

>19 FAMeulstee: LOL @ Anita! That's so very cute! I never had that sort of relationship to numbers. Ours is a distant and mutually suspicious relationship. They do tricks that I don't approve of, numbers. They get smaller with no good reason, and never consent to get big enough to suit me.

>20 mckait: Good! Or wait...did you mean the *book* or the *review*?

>21 MickyFine: Many thanks for delatibulating, Micky, to come and say hi!

>22 SarahHodgkiss: It bids fair to make me get some NooKindlEreader soon, that feature.

Although I may have to read it first, :-), I picked up Reading the OED for my word-loving dad's birthday. Thanks for the review.

Latibulating

>24 jnwelch: Joe, it so repays a good read...enjoy!

>25 mckait: Delatibulate and join the party!

#25 Ooo, a new to me word. Hmmm, is it legal? Is it something you do by yourself or with others?
NM, I scrolled up and found the answer. Carry on.

> 23:
I never had that sort of relationship to numbers. Ours is a distant and mutually suspicious relationship. They do tricks that I don't approve of, numbers. They get smaller with no good reason, and never consent to get big enough to suit me.
Don't mix up money with numbers Richard.

For me the poetry is in the numbers themself, some are dislikable, others sheer beauty... for some mileages in the car we ride an extra block to see them, like some time ago: 22155, with the LED numbers it is the same when viewed upside down. And of course our marriage on the ultimate day: 11/13

I used to like numbers, until we got to imaginary numbers. The teacher didn't like mine, even when I explained my imagination was just as good as hers.

I don't even trust numbers now. I was taught (mistakenly) that multiplication was a fast form of addition.

Therefore, if I add 1/2 pie and 1/2 pie, I will have 1 whole pie, but if I actually multiply 1/2 pie by 1/2 pie, I only have a quarter of a pie, and nobody can tell me what happened to the other three quarters of my pie. :-)

I used to like numbers, until we got to imaginary numbers. The teacher didn't like mine, even when I explained my imagination was just as good as hers.

LOL

Numbers, money, algebra, sines and cosines and tangents and all that happy horseapples...no thanks. I'll leave it to the folks wired that way. I can't be arsed.

Oh, imaginary numbers are the best! Mine have bat wings and breathe fire.

LOL @ fool of a boy

You've split your reading up into 3 categories, and one of them is already on the 5th thread? You must be tired just from that!

Actually, Suse, the 2011 75er threads are seldom about reading or reviews. That's my fun social club! But I am very reluctant to review the books I've been reading, since some of them aren't worth the effort and others I just don't want to re-read. I suspect I'm going to drop the twice-through requirement for reviews this year, since there have been a lot of books I do *not* want to do it for.

Well, okay, this is my first group review of the new year. It's not really necessary to review anything by Agatha Christie at this late date, is it? So I'm not going to *review* review the three books I've just finished. I'm going to give a general impression of them.

In reading Christie's Poirot novels, one is transported to a time and a place where saying "one" wasn't looked upon as affected or uppish, it was simply using correct grammar. One is also reminded that Dame Ags was a beastly, beastly snob, an anti-Semite, a chauvinist, a racist, and one helluva good storyteller. Even though she really only told one story. Well, two, but the second one only once (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd wouldn't have worked twice from the same author). So happens that I like that story enough to read it multiple times.

I found a volume in our wine cellar called Murder-Go-Round, a three-in-one omnibus edition of Thirteen at Dinner, The A.B.C. Murders, and Funerals are Fatal. The first two were written when Dame A. wasn't yet sick unto death of Herc, so we still had Capt. Hastings narrating the books. He'd disappeared by the 1950s, when the fatal funeral was penned. (And may I say, go Aggie! Good call!) So while auntie's away and I've been pretending to be a walrus, lolling and grunting and scratching and napping, I've taken a few moments to pass these marvies before my eyes. Somehow, I've managed never to read a single one of them! Now having rectified my oversight, let me pass the remark: Oy.

This is NOT literature, this is NOT groundbreaking technical tour-de-force writing, this is plain ol' TV for the pre-television era. Same sort of thing as TV gives us now: Familiar faces with different names, doing the same things again and again, while we smile and nod (off) and pay very little real attention while being entertained. But it's Channel 4 TV, not BBC or Canal-Plus. Pseudo-high-brow, or middle-brow with pretensions...kind of the stuff one imagines Hyacinth Bucket reads between candlelight suppers. As such it's really a lot of fun, and David Suchet, the actor condemned forever and always to be the Face and the Moustaches of Poirot, would sound perfectly at home delivering any of the lines in the books.

Oh my oh my, have the plots dated! Someone discovers a painting, a Vermeer if you please, and it will fetch the princely sum of two thousand pounds! Someone commits a murder to resolve a minor social issue, by today's standards. Period pieces, one and all. Are they to be considered historical mysteries then? They're about as much related to today's world...but nay, they were written at the time when these problems were real and vital issues. So how to categorize them?

Fun. That is about the size of it. They're fun. And don't miss out just because you think the fun is fusty and needs a bit of tarting up! Just go along with Dame Agatha, there's a good little soldier, and see what fun you can have following little old ladies, short Belgian fops, and glamourous film staaahs about.

G'wan.

I couldn't possibly agree more heartily with your group review, Richard, except for one small point: she did have a third story, that of Murder on the Orient Express, again used once. But how marvelous it was!

I love being transported back in time to that (slightly dusty and over-decorated but) charming era, where we meet old friends and have a cozy chat about the latest crime wave in St. Mary Mead, or perhaps discuss just how M. Poirot maintains those moustaches. It's relaxing and soothing to jangled nerve endings.

It's hit and miss for me with her books. Glad you had fun :)

I am another admirer of Dame Agatha and mostly for the reasons you and bohemima state. She's a go-to author, great to cleanse the palate and refresh yourself before moving on to something a little more daunting. There is something so calming about reading of the morals and murders of days past.

I get this same general pleasure from reading the (now) period pieces of Frances & Richard Lockridge. They won't appeal to you, Richard, because of the presence of certain 4-footed characters in most of them. But they are so wonderfully evocative of a fictional time and place----mostly New York City and its still-country suburbs of the 1940's, '50's and '60's. Although by the 60's, Frances had died, and Richard did not handle that decade very well. I read one or two of them whenever I feel the need to run away and hide.

Review: 4 of seventy-five

Title: DUCK: An Outer Banks Village

Author: JUDITH MERCIER

Rating: 3.2* of five

The Book Report: Academic and writer Mercier finds paradise on the Outer Banks in the form of Duck, NC, a dinky little dune burg between the mighty Atlantic and the estuarine remnants of a bay that got cut off from the sea by the inevitable actions of time and tide. She then sets about excavating as much as she can of town history, both black and white, to preserve and present the face of change in a sad little elegy to the Good Old Days.

My Review: I am uncomfortable with made-up conversations in this sort of book. An entire chapter on the largely unchronicled life of Duck's black folks contains imagined dialogue that makes me squirm. It's condescending, and I don't think for an instant that it's what they said, and why in the hell didn't the lady stick to facts and let the cutesy impulse go? She could, and maybe should, write a novel about the life of the couple she places at the center of the black world of Duck. Better still, let someone more ept do it.

But don't lard it in to the "growth has prices, always has and always will" book that you've got here, Dr. Mercier. It detracts from the real merits of the book as it is, and it isn't your forte, quite frankly. It's not really recommended by me for that reason, unless you're a fanatical enthusiast for the Outer Banks. (Guilty.)

Review: 5 of seventy-five

Title: SHUCK

Author: DANIEL ALLEN COX

Rating: 4* of five

The Book Report: In the late 1990s, hustler/street trash Jaeven Marshall gets rescued by remittance man/blocked perfectionsit artist Derek Brathwaite, who grooves on Jaeven's bruised and abused body. The two begin a peculiar and passionate love affair that never involves sex, but truly touches the heart of any romantic in its deep and vital connection. Jaeven uses Derek as a home base, a touchstone, and a security blanket. He rises (!) in the just-then-efflorescing porn world as a porn performer and a model, taking it as his 22yr-old naif would: His due. What no one but Derek, and the strange photographer/trick Richard, know is that Jaeven is a writer. A real one, one who writes and who sponges up images...the book is littered with lists Jaeven keeps of the "shit and ephemera" that Manhattan excels at putting in the path of the observant, letting the reader in on Jaeven's private coping mechanism for his rampant ADD (and his inability to break past the surface of anything, too)...so while he's using himself to live and eat and keep moving, he's fueling the creative rage inside himself. Derek, blocked because surfaces are all he knows, uses Jaeven's unpublished writing to break through into an actual creative frenzy, painting at last the gaudy and exciting colors that he's seen but never managed to reach inside to creat before. Jaeven's downward track is, well, inevitable: He gets into meth, gets meth-mouth, stops getting calls from his various munificent tricks (except the peculiarly loyal Richard), and even manages to make Derek so angry that he gets thrown back onto the streets he's only just clawed his way up from. In the end, though, as is inevitable in a first novel, the redemption occurs and all is well.

My Review: It's a first novel, or I would've been more chary with my stars. I think it's a fun ride through a Manhattan that's been sanitized out of existence. I liked that Manhattan, I trolled it, and I felt at home in it; I'm inclined to spot Mr. Cox some points for that. It's reasonably clear to me that it's also a roman a clef, and that also counts in my ratings. I have no way of knowing how much of it is self-referential, but at a guess I'll say a lot. I like a writer whose take on himself isn't in any way reverential. I like reading about the world that my thirties were spent in. I like a lot the amiably nihilistic, irretrievably broken kid comes out (!) with hope, and therefore a future. It's not perfect, but damn it's good. Read it!

Review: 6 of seventy-five

Title: STRONG POISON

Author: DOROTHY L. SAYERS

Rating: 4* of five

The Book Report: Lord Peter Wimsey, younger brother of the Duke of Denver, bibliophile, and dilettante in the arts and sciences of murder, meets his One True Love, the Other Half of His Soul; where else would he do this, but in court? Too bad she's the accused in a rather sensational murder trial, in which she is accused and about to be convicted of poisoning by arsenic her Illicit Lover, now ex- after having the *temerity* to propose honorable and legal marriage to her. He was, it turns out, having her on when he refused to countenance the idea of marriage; he was counting on his Peculiar Charms to sway his Muse and fellow novelist into revealing her true depths of devotion to him by setting this test. Having fallen (and Fallen) for it, Harriet felt (not at all unreasonably) that she'd been a right prat and, in umbrage extreme, slung the rotter out on his ear, refusing thereafter to treat his suit. Subsequent to their final meeting, unluckily, the rotter collapses and dies at his cousin's home, where he's been living for over a year since the end of the dream.
Lord Peter, attending the trial (as who would not?) with the Hon. Freddy and the Dowager Duchess of Denver (aka Mater), forms the simultaneous convictions that Harriet is innocent, and that she shall be Lady Wimsey as soon as the event can be fixed. How to forestall the hangman's deft attentions is his sole focus, needless to say, and he goes about proving the identity of the real culprit with his accustomed panache, energy, and cunning.
Ah, but stay the strain's of the Wedding March, dear readers, because Harriet...quite sensibly...is Once Bitten, Twice Shy re: matrimony. She offers herself as his leman, his dolly-bird, his bit o' stuff, but marriage? To a well-known aristocrat, with all the attendant hoo and pla? No, indeed. Wimsey is, well, not to fobbed off with mere sex when what he craves is glory and delight everlasting in matrimony golden, so he ankles off as soon as he sees her acquitted. The End. Only, of course, not so much. But that's another book.

My Review: A Certain Party, who shall remain nameless herein but is frequently addressed by me as "Horrible" and is known on LibraryThing as "karenmarie", has really, really put her foot in it this time. I mention, oh so casually in passing, that long, long ago I read and disliked this book. "Oh," burbles The Evil One, "I read that and found it both witty and amusing, don't you think it would be fun to re-read it?" I, ever the innocent and naive victim, forgot that the aforementioned Evil One has hooked me on ever-so many mystery series with her offhand cruelty, fell for it and re-read the book. Reader, beware! NEVER VENTURE NEAR HER! You'll end up reading long lists of (admittedly quite good) mysteries.

Wimsey is certainly not for every taste. His erudition, not notably fine for that era, is huge by modern standards, and so his references to poets, writers, and cultural furniture quite ordinary in the 1930s, will come across as condescending to thos of this less well-versed (!) time and place. His general attitude of privilege might cause some sensitive souls in the era of Political Correctness to flinch. And Sayers' lovely, steady, and quite dry prose will go down like a martini at a Salvation Army bash with the modern reader accustomed to gutter talk, explosions, gunshots, and generally seamy turpitude that passes for most modern mysteries.

And thank GOD for that. It's a breath of chamomile-scented mountain meadow air to me to re-find these books in a state and at a time when I can appreciate them. No one tell The Evil One, blast her eyes, that I am thoroughly glad to have read this book at 51 that I understood and so little of at 25. Loose lips sink ships!

Hah! Whar a great review, Richard! "To a well-known aristocrat, with all the attendant hoop and la?" Your breathless prose makes me want to have a deep martini at the next Salvation Army bash I attend.

I must confess I love the Wimsey mysteries, particularly the ones like this with Harriet. Bravo to karenmarie for persuading you.

>44 jnwelch: Well, Joe, I can't claim extensive familiarity with Miss Dorothy's ouevre, but I'll get there. Really, what book-lover couldn't love these? Wimsey and his first editions are more, more, I don't know, rafinee that clunky ol' Cliff Janeway.

How are you faring in these degenerate times?

Nice word for it!

I'm regenerating in these degenerate times, freshly outfitted with a new bionic hip that leaves me warmly venerating my surgeon. Life has its difficulties, but sometimes they do get removed, and even replaced with something so much better. Off the crutches, off the cane, and back to near-normal, it's amazing how exhilarating simply walking old favorite walks can be.

Plus we had a great Chicago area LT get-together last weekend thanks to our friend Mark. Wish you could have joined us.

Good! New hip = very much improved quality of life, then...such a good thing. I know, a meetup every so often is good for the soul, isn't it? I'm jonesin' for the next one. Chicago's pretty much permanently out, though, because it's off the flight path for me...I have a crazy ex-brother in law there who, mysteriously, Knows All when it comes to my movements. It actually makes me feel a little stalked. Didn't like him when we met 40 years ago, no more a fan today. The disdain is not reciprocal, sadly.

interesting.....

If you want to come next time in disguise, Richard, we won't let him know.

I also thought ex-brother-in-laws generally disappear into the mists after becoming ex. The crazy ones are an exception, apparently.

#43 Thanks, darlin! I'm flattered. If you wish to just read the Wimsey-Vane books, your next choice should be Have His Carcase.

Beautiful review, too.

Review: 7 of seventy-five

Title: DON'T LOOK BACK

Author: KARIN FOSSUM

Rating: 3.875* of five

The Book Report: Herein we're introduced to Inspector Konrad Sejer, homicide detective in a Norwegian city, as he solves the murder of the popular, universally beloved young athlete and all-around good girl Annie Holland. Sejer can't crack the shell of acclaim and plaudits that surround the dead girl. No one, and I mean NO ONE, will admit that she was anything but beautiful and perfectly kind. Well, no one except her slow-top sexpot older sister...make that half-sister...who finally, in an unedited moment, admits that she found Annie a bit snide at times. No one else, from her horrible harpy of a mother to her convicted rapist of a sports coach to the neighbor whose dead toddler she was the only one who could handle, will give Sejer the way in to her life that he needs to discover her killer.

Since this is a mystery, not real life, Sejer and his newly minted partner Jacob Skarre do find the way in, and the killer is brought to justice barely in time to prevent a third needless death. Along the way, as really happens when police start turning over rocks in the search for evidence, lives are altered, lives are ruined, and even lost; in the end, does the guilt of the murderer being proved make up for the pace of destruction left in the wake of the search? Fossum provides no answer, or does she pretend that it's even of more than passing concern for her characters.

My Review: I began this book excited, if a little reluctant; I am always conflicted when starting a series of mysteries. It's nice to know that there are a few more pleasures to be had with an agreeable set of characters; my orderly side likes to know that justice will be served; but then, well, then there's that oppressive sense that *yet*more*books* have landed on the pile of material that, should I live to be 150, will never disappear, or even appreciably diminish. That feels a little depressing to me, to have a task (however much I love the task, and I do) that simply cannot be finished. Sort of like laundry, a Sisyphean labor of impossibly distant closure. (Unless you launder naked and don't put on clothes until you go outside your house, everything is always a little dirty, and therefore always laundry. It's just depressing.)

And then the trouble set in. We have dead children, never ever a favorite theme of mine. We have violent men, never ever a favorite theme of mine. We have a grouchy, isolated older detective, kind of overused. But then we have Norway as our backdrop, fresh and new to me. We have prose that, in English translation, feels immediate and grippingly suspenseful. We have characters limned against a bright background in sharp, dark strokes, like reverse film noir...hard to do, and done well here. But on balance, I really don't feel four-starry about the book. I'll read more, of course. I'll even enjoy them, provided we don't have more dead children. But the bright bloom of excitement dimmed a bit, as I suppose was inevitable, and it seems to me that it needn't have. Other choices could have been made. But they weren't, and so here I am, only pleased, not overwhelmed.

Welcome to life as an adult, I suppose.

Pleased is not to be sneezed at. What if every book you read overwhelmed you? Imagine the intensity of that oppressive sense then. I've had Karin Fossum on my "investigate" list for a couple years now. I'm extremely wary of books in which children or animals come to harm, but if they are dead to begin with, I can manage it for the sake of the writing and/or story.
Oh, and thanks for making me uncomfortably aware that every stitch I'm wearing will soon have to be washed, folded or hung AGAIN.

I live to serve, Linda3rd. *smooch*

Go do laundry.

hmmm... wonder if my library has sayers ebooks...

Review: 8 of seventy-five

Title: CANDY EVERYBODY WANTS

Author: JOSH KILMER-PURCELL

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Book Report: The author himself describes this as his childhood and coming-of-age as he'd've liked them to be. I can see no point in adding to that description.

My Review: Oh dear.

Damn. Never, ever, ever-ending laundry. Once in a blue moon I summon dh to the laundry room and say, "Look! The hamper's empty!" Of course, he immediately either a.)changes clothes or b.)takes a shower and then changes clothes. And so the cycle starts again.

I'm for doing laundry in the nude. Or perhaps we could bring back the idea of paper clothing?

that doesn't sound like a recommendation... lol

Hah! Very concise review.

#52 - RD - nice review. If I like this series I can chastise you for adding to MY tbr.....

#57 - my husband and I married when he was 35 and I was 38. He had been doing his own laundry since getting out of the service (11 years), so I informed him that since had done it successfully for so long I didn't feel any responsibility for washing his dirty clothes. He's continued to do his laundry for the 20 years of our marriage. And I haven't felt guilty a single minute.

Hi! Just catching up. I am so glad that you revisited Strong Poison and loved it. How a fiction reader, a mystery reader, can not read Dorothy Sayers is...well, frankly, it's unthinkable. So, kudos to karenmarie. Now go read the rest of them.

As always, loving the wit and spirit of your reviews.

#60

I am in awe. Seriously. Well Done!
I am not nearly that smart... :-/

Review: 9 of seventy-five

Title: THE LAST REFUGE

Author: CHRIS KNOPF

Rating: 3.875* of five

The Book Report: Damaged systems engineer, divorced dad, and all-around working class hero Sam Acquillo retreats to his parents' old cabin in North Sea, a part of Southampton Township that us rich white folk used to call "Blackhampton", aka the working class part of New York's trendy and eternally inflating Hamptons. Sam's licking his wounds after a messy divorce from Boston/Connecticut Aryan-from-Darien Abby, and his scandalous separation from his Fortune 500 corporate employer, after beating up the revolting toady who wants to sell Sam's division to the highest bidder without regard to its consequences for the engineers he supervises.

Sam's horrible old-lady neighbor, Regina, dies; she's got no heirs, she's got no money, she doesn't even own the home she's occupied for over 50 years. And Sam, who has nothing but time on his hands, doesn't buy the manner of her death: she drowned in her bathtub. Problem is, she had severe arthritis, and used the cottage's (separate) shower. This gets Sam's problem-solving brain occupied for the first time since his divorce. And thereby hangs the tale of the first-ever Long Island Noir mystery novel. What he discovers during his nosing about the facts and the fallacies of his tiny North Sea peninsula neighborhood's past and present makes him appreciate anew the peace and solitude he left behind when he chose to become the champion of truth and justice and the populist way; he cannot go back and he doesn't want to go forward, yet he knows he must make his choice. And so he does. And nothing in North Sea can ever be the same.

My Review: Oh wow. What a fun ride! What a delight to have this book that harks back to the Dashiell Hammett "Continental Op" books! And all set here on Long Island, mah home! I loved reading the author's supple, decriptive prose; I loved the author's ability to make me invest in and care for the flawed hero main character, and I was bowled over by the clear-eyed populism of the author's presentation of the social issues plaguing the Hamptons. I have friends in East Hampton who experience the world in the same way as Sam Acquillo does. It's very exciting to see that on the page, as anyone who's read a book that "gets it right" about their home partch can tell you.

Then there's the modern dearth of real, heartfelt NOIR in fiction and movie-making. Characters who've lost everything, and so can't be scared. Situations that're based in the real concerns of real people. Problems that have no counterpart in most mysteries and thrillers, but should.

Okay. That's the upside.

Then there's the downsside. The copyediting **rots**. "Noyac Rd." in ****dialogue**** oofwince...and on the facing page, "Harbor Road." Oh now really. You can get it right on one page and not on the other? grrrrrrr

The gawawful spelling mistakes! The parallelism errors. *wince*

But in the end, well, the beauty of the book is simply in its characters and its ability to draw you into its lie-filled world. Sam, his love interest Eddie the dog, and the women who want them are deeply involving. I care about them, and I want to read motr about them.

How wonderful to have you back, with your outstanding reviews, Rdear. Welcome home.

*Smooch*

Review: 10 of seventy-five

Title: CARPE DEMON: Adventures of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom

Author: JULIE KENNER

Rating: 2.75* of five

The Book Report: Retired demon hunter, remarried widow, and mother of a teen and a toddler Kate Conner is forced out of her 'burbsy life by The Call of Duty: San Diablo, her hitherto peaceful adopted hometown, has attracted the attention of major baddie demon Goramesh, who wants something that he can't get because it's hidden within the sacred ground of the town's amazingly well-protected cathedral. Goramesh has targeted Our Heroine because she, as a Hunter, must be neutralized, thinks Kate's Vatican handler. She is sent a new handler, whose arrival in her home coincides with a demon attack and a cocktail party in aid of her new husband's political ambitions...and the handler happens to be showing signs of demonhood hisownself....

Hijinks ensue, Good (or Catholicism, anyway) triumphs over Evil, and middle-aged mama Kate unretires because, as TV has taught us, once a target for demons, always a target for demons.

My Review: Many points off for homophobia p15, "...realized {her son} had been completely mesmerized by four gyrating Australian men. If he were fifteen, I'd worry. At twenty-five months, I figured we were okay." That might be funny to the author's straight-mommy readership, but it shouldn't be. Having a gay son is grounds to worry? Really? And why is that, exactly?

Many points off for assuming the world is Catholic in multiple places around the text. Many points off for out-and-out lifting the structure of her demon-world and its fighters from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." And lastly, a minor deduction for the main character's use and abuse of a long-suffering, and I do mean suffering, best friend. Why that lady puts up with this self-involved fool is beyond me.

I started this book with very high hopes. I lost most of them on p15, as mentioned above. Then it was down to "finish or abandon?" debate...the only reason I review the book is that, in the end, I did finish it, and the ending was reasonably not-sucky. Go ahead and read it if you're an insensitive straight-supremacist man-hater. You'll laugh your socks off.

Homophobia... That's something I cannot stand. Unfortunately I can spot it all around me.

>65 richardderus:: The only reason to be concerned if one's son or daughter is gay is that his/her life will be even more difficult than one that is more in accord with the prevalent culture stream. I really can't imagine why else it would matter.

>66 trandism:: It sure is all around us. Why is that? More acceptable than the old country-of-origin jokes? It shouldn't be. I understand about people fearing the unknown, but c'mon. Just don't open the bedroom door, ya know?

I started this book with very high hopes.

You did not! No way do I believe you started a chick lit with religious undertones with high hopes. In fact, I'm surprised you started it at all. Who suckered you into reading it, hm?

>66 trandism: Because it **is** all around you.

>67 Matke: Faggotry is actually more of a sacred cow than fatness, Gail; that's truly undefended territory. Humor requires a foil, but can it not be HOSTILE? Or can it be about choices, not about character? I have no beef with people targeting public figures for their missteps, because once you've decided to be a public figure, well...guess what...you're fair game. Sarah Palin. She's totally in the crosshairs, because she's decided to be a politician. (Sort of.) But to target everyone in a group is just meanness.

>68 Ape: I like demon/vampire/slaying books! I don't like *this* one. And no one told me it would be pro-Catholic. Had I known, I'd've avoided it like it had herpes.

Nope,.....not for me.....

Oh lawsy law, Tina! You would ***hate*** this book! It would raise every hackle you have! Give it wide berth, and pretend I never spoke!

Review: 11 of seventy-five

Title: THE LOST MEMOIRS OF JANE AUSTEN

Author: SYRIE JAMES

Rating: 3.875* of five

The Book Report: Every Austenian knows Jane went quiet for 10 years, then produced what is arguably the finest body of novelistic work to come out of nineteenth-century England, then died. Nobody knows poo-diddly about Miss Jane's romantic life, or even if there ever was one, in large part because Jane's sister Cassandra went wild with the scissors and made like a Nazi with a Torah (burn, baby, burn) to make sure none of Jane's letters or diaries (if any) survived unexpurgated. Cassandra doubtless felt she was doing the pathologically shy Jane a service by making sure The Ages never got hold of her innermost secrets. The Ages, however, feel most hard-done-by, and to redress the disgruntlement that our own nosy day and time feels, screenwriter and novelist Syrie James has stepped in to provide us with a startlingly plausible and well-executed "recovered memoir" plugging up the egregious gaps in our knowledge of Miss Austen's private life.

My Reivew: Depending on what one is expecting when reading the book, it will either be a genuine pleasure to immerse one's self into, or an annoying pastiche of Austen's crystalline, ringing prose. I fall into Camp A.

No one else is Jane Austen, so drop that ax at the door, no grinding allowed. Yes, the authoress has the *gall* to present her story as Austen's own voice telling her own tale; get over it. No one can remotely pretend to be deceived by the narrative frame, so no one can reasonably judge the book by the prose yardstick of Austen herself. Stop it! Quit bellyaching about the pretenders, the laborers in the pasticherie of Austenland. They exist because Austen is a nonpareil, a monadnock of literary talent. That they are not up to her standard of talent is simply *irrelevant* and those who snort derisively that only *true* Austen prose will satisfy them should carry this thought about with them: "So? Who asked you? Go point your nose into some *real* Austen, then."

The rest of us can now get about enjoying Syrie James's full-bodied claret-jug of a book. The memoir tells the tale of Jane Austen's one great love, invented by James out of a one-line reference to some passion of Jane's by Cassandra, many years after the fact; and some clever literary sleuthing in Austen's work. Brava, Miss James! How nicely done!

And also to be praised is James's fidelity to the known facts of Austen's life. At no point does Miss James deviate from the historical record *where one exists.* This by itself would win my praise for the effort. But combine that with a truly Austenian imagination, and a pleasant facility with the language, and one has a rare thing: A novel that *should* be true.

Why not spend a leisurely spring-shading-into-summer afternoon with Jane, Cassandra, Mother, and the miscellany that make up Regency England's finest writer's world? This is, I declare, a most worthy enterprise in which to engage yourself.

Good review, Richard! Although I'm one of those that gave up on Austen extenders a while ago after being let down by the shortfall in talent, this one sounds like it's worth giving a go.

>73 jnwelch: I think this one's worhty of your time, Joe. Not many are, but here is one of the good 'uns.

Thumbed. I'd have given you two if I could. And I don't even read Austen. (PLEASE don't hate me...I tend to prefer the late 19th century...and generally from the perspective of 20th century writers. I know I need to do better.)

...and I leave more enlightened than when I arrived...

>75 laytonwoman3rd: Oh no, Linda3rd, I don't hate anyone for not being an Austenian! I'm not much of one myownself, and The Divine Miss would prefer to have hot pokers applied to her eyes than read Austen. I think Austen's enduring fame and legions of lovers are well merited by the sheer audacity of her imagination...singlehandedly popularizing the comedy of manners is no small thing!...but I don't actually enjoy the books themselves all that much. Sorta like Shakespeare, it's all very nice in theory but slogging through the actual thing is not always any fun at all.

Still, this book was unusually above the average Austen pastiche, and deserves the attention even of the Austenophobic.

>76 mckait: It worries me when you go all sibylline....

...my true self, in fact..

#72

Thanks for the review. I'm a huge Austen fan, and grow easily impatient with some of the trite writings that try to hang onto Jane's coat tails, or should that be shawl tails?

However, given your review, I'll think I'll take a chance and read this one.

>79 millhold: I consider that a great compliment, Donna! And welcome. I hope you'll make a habit of visiting to see other reviews.

As I see you're a member of the Almack's group, I feel safe thinking you're familiar with Georgette Heyer's marvelous Regencies. I read The Corinthian not long ago, and was pleasantly re-surprised at how very enveloping and smoothly satisfying Heyer's prose is. Somewhere around here I have Devil's Cub, but I can't find it.

Speaking as a "lighten-my-loader", I understand what you mean when you say books can't let you down the way people do...but I lost, through no fault of my own, over 2,000 books when I left Texas to come to New York...and found that it actually felt *good* not to have so many *objects* around me! It was a huge surprise to me. I expected to mourn and be miserable. Instead, I've redefined myself as being in the "catch-and-release" stage of life. I'm loving it!

People are so different, even when united by a shared passion...how fun that is!

#80

Yes, I love Heyer's novels--especially the Regencies--and in fact read both These Old Shades and Devil's Cub just this past weekend. I own at least one copy of almost all the Regencies, and two of most of them, because my original ones were falling apart.

When I moved to NYC from Texas, I took all my books. It's a good thing I did, as everything I left in storage in Texas got stolen! When I moved back to Texas from NYC, I brought all those same books plus God knows how many more back with me! Having been back for 10 years now, and buying so many books all the time, I'm now beginning to weed out, but it is surprisingly difficult. (Kindle is making it easier for having tons of books.)

P.S. Saw your review of the Mrs. Quent and loved it. I also was NOT impressed!

>81 millhold: Oh, that was just *dreadful*! I liked Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, so I'd hoped to like that Quent nonsense, and I even went into it *consciously* saying to myself, "This is NOT going to be as good as Clarke's book, don't get your expectations up, not gonna happen..." and was still just, well, completely let down by the book. Oh well, at least I have a clear picture of what NOT to read...the sequel!

I have Johathan Strange and Mr. Norrell on my TBR pile, but simply haven't gotten to it yet. I think I'll move it nearer the top. So many people are mentioning it, and I feel lost that I haven't read it. I've had it for years, and don't know why I haven't read it yet?!

ETA Just noticed yours is shown as a *hot* review.

>83 millhold: Hot review! How nice, and thanks for letting me know!

Jonathan Strange is a very idiosyncratic book. I really hesitate before recommending it to others because it is not in an ordinary genre. Alternative history, magical realism, Regency paranormal romance, bildungsroman...all suit, none encompass. Go in open as wide as possible, and the pleasures of well-wrought prose and of very traditional storytelling structure will woo and beguile you. Try to fit it into a pigeonhole, too much of it will squoosh out and leave a bad taste in your mental mouth.

Just sayin'....

#84 Okay, I'll keep all of that in mind. Thanks, and congratulations.

>72 richardderus:: I've always avoided anything faux-Austen but your review has me curious about in this one. "Startlingly plausible" is higher praise than I've ever thought any of them would deserve. I was also reassured to hear that the story doesn't mess with anything we already know. Hmmmm ...

Review: 12 of seventy-five

Title: SNOW COUNTRY

Author: YASUNARI KAWABATA

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Book Report: Married, bored (but I repeat myself) aesthete, philanderer, and flaneur Shimamura, an aficionado of Western ballet (although he's never seen one), takes a solo trip into Japan's Snow Country. While there in the wildest of boondocks Japan possesses, he meets Komako, probably the world's worst geisha, but apparently a fascinating contrast to all other women for Shimamura. They meet a total of three times in two years. Another woman, Yoko, hovers purposelessly around the narrative until, for no apparent reason, Komako and Shimamura have a fight over his feelings (?) for Yoko, who for some reason nursed Komako's not-quite-fiance Yukio while he died, despite the fact that Komako indentured herself to the (apparently quite unsuitable) career of geisha to pay for his death expenses.

Then a fire breaks out and Komako runs into the burning building and saves Yoko while Shimamura stands there and looks up at the sky. Fin.

No, seriously.

My Review: I spent the entire month I was reading this book, all 175pp of it, alternately claustrophobic and bemused. WTF, I kept thinking, why am I still at this rock-pile, trying to winkle out some small purpose to the narrative; then along would come a gem, eg: "It was a stern night landscape. The sound of the freezing of snow over the land seemed to roar deep into the earth. There was no moon. The stars, almost too many of them to be true, came forward so brightly that it was as if they were falling with the swiftness of the void." (p44, Vintage ed., trans. Seidensticker)

Oh wow, I thought, and plowed on. And on. And on. Every damn time Komako exhibits what today we'd call a bipolar break exacerbated by alcohol abuse, I'd find myself thinking, "This damned book is Come Back, Little Sheba directed by Kurosawa." Seriously. Shirley Booth did the same bloody role in that movie, only Burt Lancaster (whose role as her husband bewitched by a younger woman was pretty much exactly like Shimamura) is the one who drank.

I drank a good bit myself, trudging ever onward, marching off to war with the cross of Jesus going on before; okay, I'm a piss-poor Christian soldier, but you get the sense of futility I was experiencing. Then, it happened.

Pp154-155: "He had stayed so long that one might wonder whether he had forgotten his wife and children. He stayed not because he could not leave Komako nor because he did not want to. He had simply fallen into the habit of waiting for those frequent visits. And the more continuous the assault became, the more he began to wonder what was lacking in him, what kept him from living as completely...All of Komako came to him, but it seemed that nothing went out from him to her. He heard in his chest, like snow piling up, the sound of Komako, an echo beating against empty walls. And he knew he could not go on pampering himself forever."

So there *is* a point to this hike! And a profound one: The sudden awakening of human feeling in an otherwise dead heart. It was a payoff, and a major one. But did it have to be such a Bataan Death March of a journey to get here? And the stupid-ass last line of the book, which made me so bloody angry that I began raining curses on the lady whose idea it was our book circle read the book...! INFURIATINGLY SOPHOMORICALLY PORTENTOUS, I shrieked. The dog ran away from me. The same dog who, at an earlier moment in my tossing about of the book, expressed her opinion of it by fanging the corner. She calmed down after I did, but really...does one *want* to read this book? I won't do it again. But, on balance and after sleeping on it, I'm glad that I did.

Articulate, as always. I'm glad there was a pay-off for you in the end. But really, Richard dear, you still need to work on expressing precisely what you feel instead of shilly-shallying aroung. ;-)

Nope, I won't be adding Snow Country to my wish list. Thank you for that useful and entertaining review!

Hallo RichardDear!

Your review reminds me of my feelings towards the book Waiting by Ha Jin. I kept on reading, waiting for the payoff, waiting for SOMETHING. It was a bookclub book, too. There were a few beautiful sentences, a few hints at feelings. By the end of the book I was pretty mad at it. I will never read it again, but I find myself thinking about it far more than many other books I thought memorable just after reading the last page.

Review: 13 of seventy-five

Title: THE DREYFUS AFFAIR: A Love Story

Author: PETER LEFCOURT

Rating: 3.875* of five

The Book Report: The eponymous Dreyfus, baseball star Randy, is an All-American Guy with a wife and two daughters. We meet him with that family as he opens a strip mall named for him near his suburban California home. Randy is a man with a problem, however: He's coming to know, at age 28, that he is really a gay man living a straight man's dream life. He's fallen in love with D.J. Pickett, second baseman to his pitcher (the joke here will become obvious in the review), despite the existence of a perfect wife, blonde and beautiful and hot for him. Not only is D.J. a man, he's a BLACK man! The scandal, the shock, the general all-around kerfuffle that ensues when the two men are caught in a clearly sexual situation! But true to Mr. Lefcourt's Hollywood writing pedigree, there is A Happy Ending. No, not *that* kind of happy ending, get your mind out of the gutter! This isn't a romance novel, it's A Love Story. Even the subtitle says so.

My Review: I'd love to live in the America of the ending of this book. In fact, what with some more adventurous sports stars like Ben Cohen starting to come out as against bullying and homophobia as cultural forces, it might *be* this world soon. Why, he's even started a foundation to combat these pernicious, ancient evils! Good on him, and his wife, and his two kids! Besides, he's really really hot:



But he was released from his international rugby-playing job after he started talking about these matters, despite being the MVP for his team. Plus he's over 30, which in rugby as in football means headin' for the barn. Still, bravo for doing it. Now, the reaction to this in the rugby-playing world has been muted because of his superstar status, but I note a singular quietude among teams in his former league.

Pro sports is not gonna welcome or acknowledge gay players if they're not even gonna let a gay-FRIENDLY guy work to change his childrens' world while working for them. So I find the Hollywood ending of the book, with the two men walking onto the field together to play a World Series game, poignantly amusing if improbable to the point of alternate-Universe-ness.

But the trip to get there is, well, amusing and improbable: the soon-to-be-ex-wife is all sympathy and understanding, a thing no woman of my acquaintance is when she's being left for someone else, and I mean *not*one*of*them* who've had it happen, the two daughters not being shown to be bullied mercilessly for having a fag-daddy (ha!), and the Salty Old Sports Columnist coming out (oops) in their favor...! Oh the glories of Lefcourt's imagination! Let this world come into being, and soon, if you please o kind and beneficent God! (Another improbable-to-the-point-of-humor concept.)

And then there are the odd choices, like making D.J. a black man who's the bottom and Randy a white top who plays *pitcher*! Top and bottom (pitcher and catcher, get it?), for the straight, are the sexual positions of the parties. They are also the source of stress and tension in the gay mating market, because logically two men having sex can't BOTH do the same thing at the same time, and a great big stigma attaches to the bottom (I hope I don't need to explain the source of these names...that would be too depressing...although Randy, our hero with the porn name {srsly, RANDY?!}, is specifically revealed to be clueless about how to satisfy his lust for D.J. until a specific moment quite late in his 28 years of life!), as it does to the effiminate man. In other words, homophobia among the homos is alive and well. And Lefcourt chose an ethnic minority for his secondary character that has historically been completely, utterly, and often violently unsupportive of gay life. I have to wonder why he did that. Oh, but never fear: We're not given any actual sex to wince over, straight people. It's all implied. Honest and truly.

And baseball is, I mourn to report, an ever-more-marginal sport. In Murrika today, the uber-violent and pointless and boring football (which involves feet only tangentially, so far as I can see) is the dominant sport. Why pick on poor, fading baseball? Although the venality, the coarseness, and the criminality of the management are played against that sport's backdrop, I feel very sure that the same behaviors, attitudes, and law-breakings would happen in any of the professional sports. They're handling a LOT of money here. No way in hell does that not attract, if not breed, criminality. It simply can't help but do so.

So why'd I read it? And why would I recommend it? Because it's upbeat and it's nicely plotted and it's got its moments of trenchant commentary. Everybody needs a fairy tale every now and then. In baseball season, let this be yours.

Good review... I won't be adding, it.. but I am glad you reviewed it :)

Review: 14 of seventy-five

Title: FINDING SERENITY: Anti-Heroes, Lost Shepherds, and Space Hookers in Joss Whedon's Firefly

Editor: JANE ESPENSON

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Book Report: Twenty-one essays on Firefly and its underlying assumptions, pre-Serenity-the-movie, by a motley crew of writers, philosophers, actors, and bon vivants, edited by Whedonesque Goddess Jane Espenson, creatrix of the fine, fine episode "Shindig."

My Review: Unless you're already familiar with "Firefly," none of this will make one whit of sense. If you've drunk the Kool-Aid, it's a balm in this age to re-immerse yourself in the 'verse. So much richness and challenging freshness were lost when the series was amputated after 14 episodes! A wild-assed solar system, per Joss's insistence, with a zillion and seven terraformable planets and moons. A society made up of solely human inhabitants that still manages to feel alien as all hell and still contains people...oh dear, oh dear, I *meant* characters!...that I know, some well, some not well, some I'd cross the street to avoid. Just like my block. A crew of thieves and whores, plus one bona-fide Companion/geisha/hetaeara as a nod to respectability(!).

Essays treat all, well most, facets of this fascinating and deeply textured fictional reality, from deep philosophical musings that, frankly, I found impenetrably dull and in spite of four separate runs at it have never finished, to Jewel Staite (Kaylee!) musing on her top-five moments of joy making or watching or both each of the 14 episodes. Mercedes Lackey, a favorite author of mine some of the time and a keen observer of humanity all of the time, wrote an excellent meditation on the libertarian overtones of the series, whether that was her stated aim I know not. David Gerrold (he wrote "The Trouble with Tribbles" for ST:TOS, and if any part of that sentence doesn't scan for you, I can't help you) meditates elegantly, since he can't write any other way, on subtext and its many traps and rewards.

But no one takes on some of the cringe-inducing tech flubs, like the universally-accessible Cortex, "waves" that allow real-time conversation, and the explicit **lack** of relativity-bending FTL drives still allowing us to go from place to place in a reasonable facsimile of a blink! EEEUUU But well, what a geeky fan-boy am I, over in fan-fiction-land, I wrote stories treating these very subjects: This is indeed a system, just part of a system in a star cluster (Google it) that's held together by dark matter, which is what the gravity drives on space ships use to get to near-relativistic speeds so get from planet to planet in less than the months it'd take otherwise...wait, this isn't *my* essay in the book! It's a review!

*sigh*

Anyway, I turned to this essay collection because I miss with a starved passion the fixes of the 'verse that I've come to need like I need single-malt Scotch whisky. I truly, passionately, deeply love this vision of humanity's probable future, and wish that I could win one of those super-ultra-mega-big lottery jackpots. I'd put some of it, like Nathan Fillion said, to use buying "Firefly" back from the gorram Reavers at FOX and make as many more episodes as I could afford, netcasting them to my fellow Browncoats. A fine bunch, may I add. I chould know. They helped me get through the lowest ebb of my independent adult life, generously and without making a fuss about it.

But I can't recommend it to any and all comers. It truly is just for the initiates, so I can't rate it higher than I have here. For Browncoats, though, I give it full star marks! If you don't have it already, get it.

Great review! That one's going on my TBR list immediately.

Shiny review, Richard. I miss Firefly too and we watch all 14 episodes and Serenity about once a year. (Without mentioning what type of animal she is, one of our furry friends is named Inara.)

XO Browncoat Karen

Oh, the stories we've missed out on! This would be season TEN, if you please! And imagine how gruntled and kempt we'd all be.

*wistful*

( thumbed)

I've reviewed a new noir/mystery novel sent to me by the publisher, Livingston Press, called Senestre on Vacation...my 75er thread, post #164.

Review: 15 of seventy-five

Title: SERENITY FOUND: More Unauthorized Essays on Joss Whedon's Firefly Universe

Editor: JANE ESPENSON

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Book Report: Eighteen more essays about the moral, political, and ethical underpinnings, implications, and effects of the late, lamented "Firefly" TV series.

My Review: Last collection had yummy-yummy Jewel Staite, aka Kaylee, writing about her favorite things in each episode; this collection has the slurpsome Nathan Fillion reflecting on being the Captain! For that alone, it's worth the price of admission!

But wait! There's more! Loni Peristere (also a beauteous hunk of man-flesh, maybe Joss is a switch-hitter? All the men in the 'verse are so toothsome!), the f/x wizard behind the whole Whedonesque world, talks about the amazing and exacting Creator in terms of inspiring the best work from Loni and his minions, an essay that made me even angrier at the business-sound-but-aesthetically-idiotic cancellation of "Firefly". Then one Geoff Klock pulls apart and analyzes the brilliant, brilliant episode "Out of Gas", in search of storytelling genius and its telltale markers; there are many, and they are important for anyone interested in storytelling craft to study in depth. This essay makes that process almost easy, which is in itself a feat of storytelling.

Bruce Bethke's essay, "Cut 'Em Off At The Horsehead Nebula!", goes into the whys and wherefores of the SFnal aversion to Western tropes invading "its" territory, rooted in the pulp origins of SF, and its early competition with Western pulps for writers and readers. One can still hear nasty, condescending echoes of the war, which SF **won** and could and should drop, in the covert critical reception of "Firefly" as a damned Bat Durston story. Read the essay, I ain't explainin' that one. Too long, and also it pisses me the hell off.

My personal favorite essay is "The Bonnie Brown Flag", relating the "Firefly" underpinnings to the American Civil War's myth of the Noble Losers, the Gentleman Planters following the Bonnie Blue Flag. It's poignant, it's well crafted, and it's quite nicely argued.

The only essay that's a real flop is "The Virtual 'Verse", which was a waaay premature ad for the dead-in-the-water MMORPG of "Firefly" that was, at that time, being touted as forthcoming. Well, it never forthcame, and the essay looks like what it was: Blatant product placement. Ptui.

But then comes what I think is the most important essay: "The Alliance's War on Science" by Ken Wharton. Ten pages of keen observation on the nature of political propaganda masquerading as science. Again, if all you read is this one essay, your purchase price will be fully amortized. The subject is ever-more important, and this essay will sensitize you to the issue like never before.

Just like "Firefly" would have, had it survived intact to this good day. Next best thing is buying BenBella Books's essay collections. And, of course, reading them with the starved passion of a jilted lover. Or is it just me...?

NQ snoogie!

I think Out of Gas is my favorite episode of all, and since I love them all, that's saying something.

I've loaned the series and Serenity to a friend. She's got about 2 more weeks, and then I absolutely need to have it back.

>102 karenmarie: Over on the OB, there is a huge majority of folk who choose "OoG" as their top fave ep. And these folk been there since 2002!

Jumping in late on Austen. I've only read one of her novels, Emma, and have it listed among the top five funniest novels I've ever read. One of these days I'll get to some of the others.

Every time I go to visit my mother, however, she makes me watch the Laurence Olivier, Maureen O'Sullivan 1940 version of Pride and Prejudice. Now that is a wonderful and funny movie.

It surely is, Jerry!

On my current latest re-watch of Firefly, I've got as far as Out of Gas. I noticed this time more than before the clever intercutting of 3 stories: the first meetings of characters, the start of the crisis and the end of the crisis. An essay analysing the storytelling sounds just what I need to pursue these thoughts further. What with that and Fillion's reflections, and the science/propaganda essay, sounds like this volume is a must-have for me too!

Congrats on another "hot" review!

Thank you!

Review: 16 of seventy-five

Title: SKETCHES FROM A HUNTER'S ALBUM

Author: IVAN TURGENEV

Rating: 4* of five

The Book Report: This edition of "A Sportsman's Sketches" or "Sketches from a Hunter's Album" contains 13 of a possible 25 short fictions published by the tyro writer in Russia's preeminent literary magazine, The Contemporary, from 1847 to 1851. These were his first prose outpourings, designed to sustain his independent life far away from his autocratic and abusive mother. He brought these luminous, beautiful vignettes to life in partial imitation of his beloved's husband's work...Louis Viardot, much older husband of opera singer Pauline Viardot, and author of Souvenirs de chasse, a very similar collection of huntsman's memories of the countryside and people of Viardot's youth...but of his own youthful world at his mother's country estate.

The stories all illustrate the young author's liberalism, his disdain for the serf system sustaining a luxurious lifestyle for some and penury and privation for most. They were hailed by his fellow liberals, and entered the canon of Russian literature on the strength of that appeal. But generations of readers will attest that what keeps people reading these vignettes is a certain deftness and facility with characters and descriptions that is so robust that it even survives translation. These are objects of rare beauty. Not much when considered as stories, they blossom into beauty when viewed as moments lived by a very acute observer.

My Review: "Singers" is possibly my favorite of the sketches. The bleakness of the village, the unexpectedness of the singing contest in such a place, and the sheer animal drive of humans to find SOME joy in life...memorable.

"Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands" makes me weep...the dwarf, his simple belief that the world is good but mankind is not, his strength and certainty, all in contrast to our helpless and feckless narrator...how clear is Turgenev's picture of the unfairness of privilege unearned.

"Forest and Steppe" is, alone, the best reason I can give to you to go and get this book and read it. It shimmers. Its beauty of image and of imagination is simply unsurpassable. It is as close to perfect as any piece of writing I've ever seen.

So many of the others are, while good and worthy pieces of fiction, just not superb, that I feel it's best to say...the reason to read this collection is the cumulative effect of many a small, beautiful moment, not a Grand Revelation. More like walking in the woods by yourself, noticing birdsong and small shy flowers, than stumbling all unaware across the Grand Canyon.

Adding Finding Serenity and Serenity Found to my wishlist as we speak. I've often wondered about these books and was worried I'd be very disappointed. Looks like that won't happen. Thank you for your wonderful, hilarious, and heart-felt reviews!

Shiny indeed, Richard. We are Serenity fiends here, total addicts. I might get those books as a present..... ahem..... for someone, not me (but really actually me) .....

I am a profound Turgenev fan, first time I read "Forest and Steppe" I couldn't believe it almost, something that gorgeous.

Review: 17 of seventy-five

Title: DANCING ON THE CEILING: Stanley Donen and His Movies

Author: STEPHEN M. SILVERMAN

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Book Report: Really now, how mysterious is the subject treated in this book? It's a professional biography/filmography of the life of ace director/former wunderkind Stanley Donen, of "Singin' in the Rain", "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers", "Indiscreet" and "Charade" fame. Being a professional biography, don't expect his personal life to come under salacious scrutiny, or hear whimperings and moanings from ex-wives (five!) or sons (three). Darn it.

My Review: The author knows his subject. Personally. And it shows: The anecdotage of any Hollywood player can come across as a personal hagiography, and so the trend towards memoir ("I remember") by these folks. Donen clearly cooperated with the author, and clearly smoothed his path to the major players in the Donen life story. There is some sense of stuff not gone into that a less involved and more prurient biographer, one bent on delivering the sense of the man to the detriment of the sense of the player, would have pursued. In some ways that feels like a loss to me, but overall I really was not aware of the small smears of whitewash that might or might not have been applied to certain passages in Donen's remarkable career until I had sat down to cogitate for this review.

From unpromising beginnings in middle-class Columbia, South Carolina, Donen ran far away to glamourous exciting New York City at age 17. He was in every right place at every right time for the next 20 years and became a close work associate of Gene Kelly's, leading him to Hollywood and to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, THE place for a dancer/choreographer/aspiring director to break into the biggest time musicals anywhere ever. There he worked on a long series of projects for Arthur Freed, a legendary producer of MGM's top-flight musicals. It was a good association, though Freed seems never to have fully appreciated the talent and the drive of Donen. He wasn't above making use of the man, though, and it's to our lasting benefit as filmgoers that he did.

At the end of the rainbow for musicals, about 1958, Donen had already read the tea leaves and fled Hollywood for London. There he produced and directed some of his best and worst stuff: "Indiscreet" (mature love affair between equals) and "Charade" (delightful caper dramedy about secrets, lies, and how gorgeous Audrey Hepburn was), some of the best work ever, both starred Donen's friend Cary Grant and are even today delightful and watchable. "Arabesque" and "Staircase", Donen's remake of "Charade" without Grant or Audrey Hepburn, and his sole effort at directing a story about gay men, were the pits.

But the two films that, I venture to say, will be remembered by cineastes long long after you and I are dead, are the 1957 musical "Funny Face" starring Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire, and "Two for the Road" starring Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney. Both are *achingly* romantic. Both are gorgeously filmed, well acted, and far deeper than a casual glance at their stats will show. And both get a good long treatment in the book, the author and the director seeming to agree that here are monunments too large to ignore. The only other film so treated is "Singin' in the Rain," which has emerged as a major classic since the 1970s. And in every case, the stories told and the pitures painted are satisfying to the fan, and informative to the curious reader. In fact, that can be said of every part of the book.

I have to say that I'd've given the book a higher rating if it had gone into more personal detail...not prurient stuff, but more about Donen's off-set, off-screen life...than it does. I can understand the choice made by the author to focus on the *work*--probably required by the man written about, is my guess--but a **little** more than cursory mentions of marriages and divorces would not have come amiss.

The book has photos throughout the text, which I prefer to photo inserts, even though there is some sacrifice of quality. It seems worth it to me, I like seeing the photos near to the anecdotes they amplify. Recommended to film buffs, fanboys, and serious readers of movie-biz books. It's too light on fizz for the celeb-bio reader.

sounds very good!

>110 mckait:, 114 Thanks, dearie!

>111 LauraBrook: You're very welcome, Laura! I live to serve.

>112 sibylline: My feelings exactly, Lucy...profound profound amazement and awe, followed by a wonderful sense of bathing in crytal waters.

Review: 18 of seventy-five

Title: I WAS AMELIA EARHART

Author: JANE MENDELSOHN

Rating: 4* of five

The Book Report: The speculation about what really happened to Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan in 1937 has always been pretty durned feverish. This récit, can't really call it a novel because nothing happens and it's all a narrative inside the character's head, purports to be the internal monologue and reported dialogue with Noonan of Earhart herself as she takes off on her fateful round-the-world trip, gets lost, and then...well, it's the "and then" that's this story. It's a lovely thing, like most of the récits I've read over the years. Book itself is really pretty, too: A beautiful design, a jacket moody and evocative, type beautifully chosen...the whole enchilada.

My Review: This morning, I got a lovely note from a member new to LT regarding my review of another book. It being quite an agreeable sensation to receive praise for one's efforts, I popped over to that member's profile to say thank you, as a well-brought-up boy does. He lists in his current readings a few books about Amelia Earhart, whose name never comes up but I immediately gush to everyone around me about how I enjoyed "I Was Amelia Earhart" when I read it, and so they should trot right out and get copies theirownselves. True to form, I suggested this to my new best friend who told me I wrote a nice review that nobody else noticed, not that I'm bitter or anything but two lousy thumbs?, and then on a nagging suspicion went to look at my reviews.

I've never reviewed this book.

I was quite stunned. I have loved the atmospherics and the insights of this delight to the senses for fifteen years, and never written a review of it?!? So, after an afternoon of pleasure spent reacquainting myself with its brief, intense delights, I sat down to write this review. And sat. And sat.

This is a tough book to review because it's not a novel, so I can't point to action, and it's not a story because it's got too little urgency, and it's nothing like the popular books by popular writers that I read like everyone else to pass the time since I don't adore TV. What to say that doesn't sound pretentious and uppish? I just do not know.

I've settled on this: I'll show you the passage that made me stop reading, go get another glass of Montepulciano d'Abruzzo, scratch the dog in her favorite places, and open the book back up to read it again. If you like this passage, you will like the book:

"Now, when she tries to remember her first excursion in an airplane, she can't distinguish it from the heavenly beauty of California in 1921...The spring came suddenly; the rains stopped, the days grew noticeably longer, and the afternoon light felt powdery, as if it might blow away. She doesn't remember that maiden voyage, but she remembers walking across the airfield when she stepped out of the plane. Strong, fresh skirts of breeze brushed against her face and body as she walked across the landing strip. Strands of her honey-blonde hair swept into her line of sight. She looked out past the hangars, over a field of tall, dry grass, and in the buttery light, with the wind grazing past her, she thought she could see forever. She had the sensation of seeing a length of time stretch out in front of her, endlessly, effortlessly, on an invisible wing. She felt as though an experience she had always anticipated were about to take place, as if a tender, unearthly feeling were finally going to reveal itself to her." (pp113-114, Knopf hardcover edition)

So?

Works for me. I've added it to the TBR list.

>117 MickyFine: Good! I hope you'll enjoy the immersion into Earhart's head.

Thumbs up for your review, RD, although I avoid the BB since I have already read the book :)

yep. I loved that one..

I'm sold! I've added it to my wishlist. :)

I read the Amelia Earhart book a couple of years back and enjoyed it, too.

Review: 19 of seventy-five

Title: NOTORIOUS: The Life of Ingrid Bergman

Author: DONALD SPOTO

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Book Report: The subtitle says it all. For those who might be unfamiliar with Planet Earth, Ingrid Bergman was a stunningly beautiful film and stage actress of the 1930s to the 1980s. Donald Spoto, the author, will celebrate his 70th birthday this year (2011); he was a monk, a teacher, and then a pop-culture apologist/celebrist/analyst with some 20 celebrity biographies to his credit, plus several books on Christian/mystical themes.

My Review: Preston Sturges. Alfred Hitchcock. Grace Kelly. Miss Bergman. Diana, Princess of Wales. All subjects of Spoto's apparently unstoppable urge to biographize, expressed over the past 35-plus years. So look at that list: Is this author gay? Oh my goodness, yes. Gladly and openly so.

I start out each book, then, with a very strong connection to the author. He's One Of Mine. Small moments that might slip past a non-gay reader are here, smirking at me. I *love* that sense of being in on the joke. And that right there? That's the reason people read celebrity bios. They're in the know, they're totally equipped with gossip material, they are Inquiring Minds that are now sated. It's fun. It's harmless. It's hugely profitable.

Well....

IS it fun? For readers of the better quality books about figures of their personal interest, yes...for the fussbudgetty writers, probably...for the cooperative subjects, maybe. At any point in that chain, whether it be a writer whose passion for organizing and categorizing gives out before the job is done, finishing this type of fact-checking nightmare of a book can be awful, and not to mention the bliss and heaven of a source recanting important testimony! Or a cooperative subject who turns uncooperative!

Harmless? Hardly. Harmful in the extreme. We The People do *not* have the right to know what, for example, Ingrid Bergman felt in her last days on this earth as she slowly and painfully died of metastatic breast cancer. That her friends and family cooperated with Spoto, as Bergman herself had in a different context (a series of interviews about Alfred Hitchcock gave birth to this bio of Bergman, because she was very forthcoming with the author), does not absolve the reader of such a book as this of a defensible charge of prurience, and passive or active participation in a cultural trend that leaves those who are not resolutely anonymous with no zone of privacy anywhere ever. Contemplate that for a few seconds. What a horrifying thought. So spend that $30 and feel entitled to ALL THE DIRT!! The dirtier, the better. Then imagine that it's *your* life under this scrutiny.

Profits are made in stacks, for sure and certain, because the books keep a-comin'. Spoto alone has published 27 books to date. The publishers aren't in the charity game, so they're minting the spondulix or there wouldn't be any more.

Okay, all that said...this book was a blast! It gossiped my ears off for two whole days and the pictures were so cool! I loved the evocation of some of my favorite actors and movies and learned interesting new stuff about them all.

I admit it: I am part of the problem. But I have a smile on my face!

I love celebrity autobiographies and biographies, too, and I share your fun of being "in the know". Yes, it is nosey in the extreme, and yes, I am part of the problem. But...but...but I do not buy the tabloid newspapers or magazines and their horrid photographs gotten at all kinds of wrong moments, private moments, which should be ignored by polite people. So, I feel a little less guilty.

I am on a book diet right now so will not grab this one, but if it falls into my gaze I might just buy it.

Thanks for a fun review.

>123 richardderus: Wow, you covered it all, from prurience to passivity...the Celebrity Bio Tango.....while I have always been a "fan" of Ms Bergman I am not such a one for Mr Spoto(ff)....

Thumbed your review, though, for its sheer exuberance!

*smooch*

Make that two thumbs for your inspiring exuberance!

Thanks, Karen44, Jude, and Joe! I know I should feel guilty about enjoying these books. Well, I do, hence the term "guilty pleasure." Better this than more ice cream. Sometimes. But not today, since I have cocnut ice cream, pineapple chunks, rum, and a blender. And I'm not afraid to use 'em.

omg, and all I can add is a hot latte made with 2% milk, and Sweet Leaf (no calorie sweetener). I'll bet yours is more yummy than mine!

@128 Karen, yours sounds tasty, too, but...

@127 Richard, that sounds yummy, and better than the bottled concoction that has been--up to now--my preferred way to consume pineapple (otherwise too citrus-y, acidic, and sweet). Even coconut milk has been going mainstream in cartons as an alternative to regular milk, so I'm thinking that it could be frozen in cubes and blended, too! Sometimes I order it with 1/2 the rum (or none, now that driving laws are getting quite strict)! Do you include orange juice, or maybe some bananas or mango?

By the way, that ice cream drink would be a perfect companion to perusing your funny, clever reviews, especially when I need to check Merriam-Webster or Wikipedia before I can finish one! I have been working my way through this thread before plunging back into the more (dauntingly) lengthy world of your main salon. However, I have also been dabbling in the review thumbing business, including several of the reviews above!

I've added Dancing on the Ceiling to my TBR stack. Notorious is tempting, too, but I am restraining myself for now. I was college-age in the late 70's and tell-all truth was becoming almost the only dish du jour. A bio of Judy Garland brought me abruptly into the real world where sad things happen to nice people and, often, other people with money and power are behind it. It taught me to be careful of being too curious about backstory unless I was ready for all the answers.

I am back, after a month's forced computer abstinence (at least at home). The 'puter needed a new fan--and a new board. Unfortunately, I could only afford a replacement rather than an upgrade. And my computer guy needs a body upgrade--his health has been as bad as my computer's. He hasn't needed overnight care at any facility as yet, thank goodness.

OK, back to more reviews!!!

>128 maggie1944: Stevia is the least revolting of the fake sugars, for sure, Karen44. I like it just slightly less than being flogged, so a LOT more than nutrasweet or the others.

>129 littleshell: Hi Michele! Glad to see you, and glad you're enjoying my reviews. Not big on oranges that're not inside the skin, but that mango idea has real possibilities. *ponders droolingly*

*smooch*

Yes, RD, I think Sweet Leaf works pretty well. I am back from my mini-vacation, in which I ate way, way too many real sugar sweets, and need to go back to dating my Sweet Leaf.

Review: 20 of seventy-five

Title: SIX OF ONE

Author: RITA MAE BROWN

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Book Report: The life and times of a matriarchal clan made up of a mixture of lesbians, hell-raisers, and goody-two-shoeses in the fictional town of Runnymede that sits smack on the Mason-Dixon line. From 1909 to 1980, Cora Hunsenmeir and her daughters Julia Ellen and Louise live, love, fight, make up, and generally enjoy themselves hugely, often to the detriment of though never at the expense of their fellow-travelers and employers Celeste Chalfonte, Ramelle Bowman, and Fannie Jump Creighton, that horny old dipsomaniacal hussy. (She's my hero.)

My Review: There is a lot of pleasure to be had in re-reading books that once made an impact on you. If, of course, they hold up well. This novel holds up well. It's not perfect, it's got small inconsistencies and this 1984 printing wasn't ever corrected for some minor textual flubs, but even the Pieta has chisel marks.

The women in this story are heroes and role models for me. I wish with all my might that they were my sisters, mothers, the crones who ruled my town. CERTAINLY not my wife, not a one of 'em, who needs the tsurres? I'll take a nice, easy man any day. (Which I now have the *legal* option to do!) But damn, is it fun to watch Julia Ellen get revenge on Louise for stealing her birthday hair ribbon on her fourth birthday in 1909...revenge served up in 1980! Had this been my own sisters, the revenge would've been a knife in the ribs, or a tchotchke smashed on the head...real hatred and sibling rivalry taken to a toxic extreme. Which is why, when I discovered this book in 1978, I loved it so immoderately.

I yearned to be witty, worldly Celeste Chalfonte, and also wise, simple Cora Hunsenmeir...but suspected deep down that I was already fated to be alcoholic sex addict Fannie Jump. (Which bit of self-knowledge changed nothing, thank GOD.) I was sure I would find redemption in these characters. (Redemption, like happiness, can't be pursued. It's not a grouse. {That's a quote.}) It was clear to me that this was a road map, a way to live my life, if I could just...Well, I never could, darn it, but the book lost none of its impact for all that. It's a real pleasure to come home to Runnymede and sit on Cora's porch listening to crickets and Idabelle's accordion from the porch of her own house at the bottom of Bumblebee Hill. Then wander over to Celeste and Ramelle's back porch to have magnolia droppings (aka gin, in discreet frosted glasses) with the ladies. Join in the tutting as Minta Mae Dexter assaults good taste with her brigade of soiled doves, the Sisters of Gettysburg. Rejoice heartily when Brutus Rife, the town's robber-baron industrialist, is ushered off this mortal coil in one of my very favorite literary homicides.

The magic of the book for me is that I can and do...these pleasures haven't faded for being re-experienced. I still sob at the loss of sweet gentle souls whose lives are lived in honest labor, and the inevitable passing of the ladies grand and common of the early generation in their various ways. Characters like this are a real pleasure to discover. This level of investment in the fictional lives of fictional people indicates a very high level of writerly ability is at work. The plot, the execution of the life-patterns of the women, is in a way secondary. The events chosen by the author to illuminate the spirits of the characters are the important criteria...though there are a lot of wonderful lines and zingers in here, make no mistake: "Who cares who you fuck in Pittsburgh?" demanded of a rigidly conventional sourpuss by a hearty old bawd is a favorite; but of them all, the reason I truly treasure this novel is the sad, sad glory of Cora Hunsenmeir's final moments: As she knows she is dying, she, this unlettered laboring daughter of a working man with no pretensions to status or learning, reaches up for the sun one last time and says, "Thank you, God, for all of it."

I hope that, when my time comes as it surely must, I can say that line with as much gratitude and sincerity as Cora did. I will live my life so as to make that a reality.

I do need to re-read this and get through the series.. ow that I know that there is one.. !
I loved that one the first time around. On my way to thumb...

>135 calm:

Love your review! And love Rita Mae and must get back to her work.

It will refresh your soul, Gail. Worth it on a hot summer afternoon, eh what?

Why are you up so early?

But yes, to the refreshment, especially where I live...those books are so very funny. She's a wonder, for sure; have you read her biographical novel, Rubyfruit Jungle? A treasure.

I liked that one, too ..

It was a treasure indeed. The scene of her showing her final film project in a class full of silly boys was a classic!

Beautiful review, Richard. Thumb from me.

Beautiful? Beautiful! Thank you, Joe!

Another lovely review!

Thankee kindly, Miss Roni...nice to hear.

Another wunnerful review, RDear, and a thumb from me. Have not read Ms. Brown myself. Should she be next on my TBR List From Richard? I have Charlotte's Web here on the coffee table to be read on Thursday, when I next have off. I have off on Friday as well, so let me know if Rita Mae should accompany my lounging.

I'll give her the push over the top, and say yes. I think her style is fun, if a little engineered. *anoints Six of One* Thou art The Next Read. Go forth and do not disappoint!

Except that I just re-read it recently, RD, I'd read it again just because your review is such a joy to read.

Have you read Bingo?

I did I did...the least successful one, IMO. Loose Lips is next up for a re-red...don't remember being too all-fired whoopeed about that one, either.

@133 tsurres? And thanks for reminding me of another series by Brown, although it features some creatures that I can't mention here.

Nah. Six of One is the bestest. The others are amusing, Six of One hit me right between the eyes the first time I read it and has knocked me over every time since.

Bingo has some fun moments, mostly with Juts and Wheezie. The blackmail is hilarious. Nickel gets a bit conservative and self-justificatingly whiney (I'm not sure self-justificatingly is a word, but there you are.). Having said that, I'd still like to be her friend or somehow biologically related to her family.

Loose Lips is still sitting on the night stand in the guest bedroom. I'm sorta floundering around right now. Haven't actually completed a book for a couple of weeks, so might pick it up just to get a sense of accomplishment.

Hmm I read Bingo at one time, too..
I gave all of my Rita Mae Brown's away in a fit of .. you know..
regrets? maybe some..

Sleeping in rdear?

tsurres - Yiddish aggravation? "I don't need the grief"?

>150 littleshell: *choo* Eved thigkig aboud dem makes me sdeeze. Ad Cydara has it aboud "tsurres".

>151 karenmarie: Time for a Loose Lips-ing, then! Shouldn't pose a problem to wrestle it to the ground in a day or so, should it?

>152 mckait: No, not sleeping. I was working on a project, and oh my my is it deep. Edits for *days*! Makes my fingers and eyes hurt.

>153 Cynara: Thanks! Less typing for me, today, is a Good Thing. Glad to see you here, BTW!

Okay. Tonight after I get home and mourn Roger Federer losing after being two sets up to Tsonga, for God's sake, at Wimbledon, feed the unmentionable mammals, eat dinner, do the day 3 work on the sweet pickles, hang with daughter and watch more Buffy, AND feed the fish, I'll start Loose Lips.

Although I must say I'm actually past page 100 of a book for the first time in weeks- The Water Room by Christopher Fowler.

Oh well, if you'e going to let all that *finger-flick* "life" stuff get in the way of something crucial like reading, I simply don't know what to tell you.

What happened to Federer?! Wilt...scrunch...what? It's just *weird*.

Ah, the Peculiar Crimes Unit! Yes, that'll de-doldrumize anyone, won't it?

I don't know what happened to Roger - all I saw was the scores. I'm still in training, floating around during breaks and lunch. I'll have to check out his website to see what HE says about it and then what Wimbledon says about it. And, what Jon Wertheim says about it too.

He lost the last 3 sets by one break each. I scratch my head in wonder. Seriously disappointed. Nobody is as beautiful on the court as Roger. I adore a one-handed backhand.

Yes, PCU. Fun so far.

And, unfortunately, life does get in the way of reading sometimes. Sigh.

At least one report said Tsonga just played really well in beating Federer. It does happen sometimes.

Review: 21 of seventy-five

Title: MURDER IN THE RUE DAUPHINE

Author: GREG HERREN

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Book Report: Chanse MacLeod, former LSU football star, New Orleans policeman, and present-day private detective, gets a client in the most appealing possible way for a gay male mystery: His hottie hirer picks him out, and up, at the gym. Hunky Mike Hansen is, wait for it, in love with a rich, married, closeted doctor who is being blackmailed. Mike arranges to meet Chanse at Mike's home, after getting the incriminating blackmail tape from Dr. Delicious McWallet. (We don't find out his real name until well into the book.) Chanse, worn out from the workout and still sad over his peripatetic lover's departure for another multi-day trip as a flight attendant, oversleeps and is an hour late for their meeting. Darn good thing, too, since if he'd been on time, he'd've seen Mike being murdered.

Discovering the body, reporting the murder to his former colleagues at NOPD, and then trying to stay out of the circus that ensues is the meat of this short first mystery in a series by author and anthologist Herren. Gold diggers, horny creeps, jaded reporters, single-minded do-gooders, whores and whoremongers jig and caper through Herren's pre-Katrina French Quarter and Faubourg Marigny. MacLeod's laconic page presence still allows for character development, since we're in first person. What solves the mystery is an attempted murder that, for a wonder, vivifies the term "feed 'em to the fishes." The resolution is in no way a surprise, but the way it arrives is fun.

My Review: I'm not sure Chanse would give my fat carcass the time of day, muscle queen that he is, but I don't mind hitchhiking on his betank-topped muscular shoulder. The book is a fantasy, and it's not played for realism, but it's got some good character bases for a long-legged series: gruff black lady cop, honest and forthright, whom everyone erroneously assumes to be a lesbian; Chanse's hag, reporter Paige Tourneur, is appealingly damaged and quite obviously hangin' with his hunky self out of self-protection, so fertile ground for fun developments; Chanse's lover the air mattress (gay male slang for stewards), who commits the Unpardonable Sin of saying "I love you" to Chanse not once, oh no we can ignore that, but TWICE! Chanse's attack of the fantods led me to the mirror to see if maybe Herren had a camera in there...and leads Chanse to the brink of an affair with a most, most inappropriate man.

Enjoyable fluff, this. I wish the author's editor had made him do a few of the obvious development tricks, delving just a wee bit deeper into the recurring characters' pasts, but all in all this is a good and solid effort. It lacks suspense to an almost fatal degree as a mystery, but it makes up for it in blithe and quick-witted writing. Book 2, Murder in the Rue St. Ann, awaits on the nightstand. It's only 1am, I can fit in 50pp or so, can't I?

thumb

thank

I'm surprised Dr. Delicious McWallet hasn't shown up on Grey's Anatomy - or maybe he has, since I don't actually watch that show. Thumb from me.

Thanks, Joe! I don't watch much TV. That show in particular holds little appeal, for some reason.

Another thumb, sir! You sure do hit these reviews out of the park.

*blush*stammer*blush*

Review: 22 of seventy-five

Title: MURDER IN THE RUE ST. ANN

Author: GREG HERREN

Rating: 4* of five

The Book Report: Second of the Chanse MacLeod murder mysteries set in New Orleans, this is a more assured performance by author Herren. He winds a good tale around the sudden end of happiness for our tight-lipped hero...boyfriend Paul goes, in the space of twenty-four *really* lousy hours, from apple dumpling sweetie pie to murder suspect to missing person. Chanse reveals more to us in the course of his frantic search for Paul, and along the way steps in the dogshit-laden middle of a Federal Mob case, almost becomes a wrestle-porn whore, and winds up with a tender and loving experience of family and love and acceptance. As his entire world ends. Ain't it always the way?

My Review: *SPOILERS FROM HERE ON*
*
*
I don't know if I've told my grim secrets often enough for them to be scabbed over or not, but this book ripped them scabs right off. Chanse's trailer-trash past is detailed here, and while the setting of his agonies was way way down-market from mine and my mother was the abuser not my father, we came from similar backgrounds of unknowable trigger-points for screaming violent abuse. It was harrowing to read. (Sucked to live, too.)

Then, after a very unpleasant break-up, we see Chanse's self-involvement and inability to love and care in a real and significant way for others: Check! Did that. I hid it behind being an AIDS volunteer, and put a braver face on it for the public, but oh yeah. Ask any of the women I married. Ask the men I dated. I promise they'd back me up here: Cold as a walk-in freezer when it came down to it.

And then, and then...oh my oh my...Chanse loses Paul to a vile and horrible crime, as I lost my son to his mother's drunk driving in 1981, as I lost my dearly, dearly treasured Bland to AIDS in 1992. Herren gives his reactions to the horror in a direct and laconic way, which makes them all the more affecting. Those of us only slightly and tangentially able to feel emotions anyway respond to grief in a particular way...all the color goes out of the world. There may be a storm of weeping, then *slam* the gate goes down. No more tears. And then the torment begins: You are made of lead, of iron-bound lead, and the world is papier mache. Moving is a delicate task. Nothing at all works. Drinking and drugging suddenly seem like *wonderful* ideas, so off you go!

And that, my friends, is where Herren leaves Chanse--at a bar, drink in front of him, at 11:45am.

Oh yeah. Been there, done that, and so (I suspect) has Herren. I don't think a person can make this imaginitive leap without a real solid launching pad. I hurt for him, no one should have to know what it's like. But then, isn't that what art does? Take the fortunate to the places the unfortunate know how to find? Well, whatever the source, the book takes the reader there, that awful agonized place of loss.

But then you get to close the book, put it on a shelf, and get a glass of water for your nightstand as you go to bed.

Sweet dreams.

I, too, know the country of which you speak, my friend. And god knows reading books was one of a very few bridges back to sanity for myself. And they continue to be good friends, and occasionally, I find another good friend who also reads books. I hope your dreams were sweet and that your waking day is even better. More shall be revealed.

rise and shine already, would ya?

I'm up, I'm up, and the dog is walked. Albeit a short one because she misbehaved.

good. If I am awake, I like everyone to be awake!
Well, almost everybody.

Saves me the trouble of challenging your assertion. Foul humor today...awoke to a call from A Certain Party whose politics appall me, and silly fool that I am I answered the phone thinking if it was important enough to call me at 7:45a, it was important. No, just wanted to tell me how wrong-headed I am. Really? That couldn't wait until a civilized hour for conversation?

WHAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That's terrible. ugh

It's certainly thoughtless. Disagreeing with my politics, fine...hollering about it before there are two digits in the hour, SO not fine.

Hollering about it period... not fine.

Oh heck, of course hollering about it is okay! When something matters, a person getting heated in discussion isn't problematic...it's the Oratorical Condemnation that offends me: Shouting from the position of a perceived pulpit of righteousness is the fastest way to send me into a screaming, spit-slinging fury. And I am one loud motherfucker when pressed. LOUD.

the time stamp on your post is later than the time on the toshibitch. You posted from THE FUTURE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Pls tell.. lottery number for tonight?

A rousing discussion yes.. pulpit-izing.. no. I agree

Gawd, that Toshibitch.

Ummm...9-14-19-32-50

thanks !

I know, and the "Mm" doesn't work right. I am always going back to add the m's, cause
goddess forbid I just leave the miserable things out or miss one. I will hear about it from sundry.
You know how much I enjoy that!

Oodles!

I will bet you that the issue with the Toshibitch is the keyboard. There is a little pluggy doohicker that connects the keyboard to the computer, and that starts to come unstuck on most PC-based laptops. (Don't know about Apple products, I suspect they use quantum buckyball fibers made by pixies in the 9th dimension or something.) It's a super-easy fix. Remove the keyboard and re-seat the pluggy doohicker.

Nope. The keyboard is sort of ... a wave. Bumpy. hard to describe. It won't flatten out.
It seems t be only the M that is difficult

I don't have the admittedly valid excuse of a sticky Mm - all errors on karenmarie posts are PEBCAK.

Problem Exists Between Chair and Keyboard, don'cha know.

love that !
lol

when I am on my own laptop, that is the case.. this
is totally different from the inside out, andit pains me.
so I will use the excuse while I can.

Mac, come home!
C is also wonky, btw..
grrr

Review: 23 of seventy-five

Title: LOOSE LIPS

Author: RITA MAE BROWN

Rating: 3.875* of five

The Book Report: Julia Ellen Hunsenmeir and her big sister Louise do WWII and motherhood and heading into middle age, with an excursion into grandmotherhood and infidelity. All of Runnymeade, Maryland-and-Pennsylvania, is agog, when they are not aghast, at the antics of the sisters. This book fills in some *huge* gaps in the storytelling of Six of One, as I suspect Ms. Brown is out to tell the whole tale and not only the bits and patches from the first book. One side effect of this is that the characters sometimes shift...for example, Minta Mae Dexter was the leader of the Sisters of Gettysburg, where in this book it was Caesura Frothingham, previously known as the leader of the Daughters of the Confederacy. Fannie Jump Creighton, I am happy to report, is still busy seducing the young men of Runnymeade. SOME things must remain sacred. Oh, and Cora gets the surprise of her life in this book...plus we meet Chessy's, Jut's husband, mother...what a complete pill.

Readers of Six of One recall how Nickel, the stand-in for Ms. Brown, came to be...well, now we see a piece of her not-easy childhood with a crazy, vibrant, exciting, but utterly self-absorbed Julia Ellen for a momma. Some of the most moving moments in the book involve the mother/daughter mishegas these ladies endured.

My Review: I don't know if I'm unusual in this, but I feel very *proprietary* about characters and books in the series that I come to love. Since I adored the first book in this series, Six of One, I came to all the others thinking There Is But One Way for things in this world to be. And then Brown, creatrix of the series, shifts things willy-nilly! How dare she! After all, these are *my* books!

Oh wait....

Still and all, I arrived at an explanation that satisfies me: Memories change when a person gets old. I mean, after all, those of us back here in our twenties can't imagine really what it's like to have a half-century of events stored in our brains! (Shut up. It's MY review.) And Brown published this the year she turned sixty, which we all know is somewhat older than God. So of course her elderbrain wandered and led her into little boo-boos. It's not her fault, I decided magnanimously, from my extreme distance in age. (Stop laughing!) And then I got into the swing of things, enjoying mightily the antics and the goins-on of the one-horse burg called Runnymeade. It was lovely to see Celeste again, and to know a little more about Rillma and her jam (figures big in this book)...well, it was good to see the old gang and I hope I can see them again. I suspect one reason Brown is writing the fill-in books is that her mother is now dead. She has to be, doesn't she? But now, after the generations before us have thinned out to few and far between, now's the time to get it down and keep it there. Before the curtain drops on our...I mean HER!...generation too.

If you have a romantic or sentimental bone in you, this series is for you. Order doesn't matter. Pick one up and laugh and cry along with the Humsenmeir sisters, it's a load of fun.

my current favorite review of yours.....off to thumb

A lot rings true here. One of your best reviews.

>185 calm: Thanks, calm!

>186 mckait: You too, cuddles.

ETA>187 Travis1259: What I get for taking so long to hit "enter"...thank you David!

Richarddear - I literally just now finished my re-read of Loose Lips. You're right - knocked it off in two days.

Good review. Smooches and hugs your way.

And I feel better.

I always feel better after reading RMB. I just checked out my shelves and see a new acquisition - Alma Mater. (thank goodness for the thrift stores!)

Am reading The Hamlet by William Faulkner, and, which is not like me, occasionally skimming ....

I loved Alma Mater, and Venus Envy, too...

Review: 24 of seventy-five

Title: MURDER IN THE RUE CHARTRES

Author: GREG HERREN

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Book Report: There is no escape from the past. It supports us, if we're lucky; it drags us down from otherwise attainable heights, if we're not. This third installment of Herren's Chanse MacLeod mysteries reinforces this sad, inescapable lesson in a harsh and cruel and painful way, only for once it's not Chanse that does most of the suffering. Hired to look into a 32-year-old disappearance by the daughter of a vanished father, Chanse ends up fired before he can so much as cash the check...and then his client turns up dead. Odd, that...and her in the throes of planning her wedding? Something smells fishy to Chanse, who returns her retainer check in person to the dead woman's older brother. Surprise there: Chanse now has a much larger retainer check and a new client who wants the same job done. In short order, Chanse meets the patriarch of this singularly unlucky clan; loses his new client to what he is morally sure is murder; breaks up with his rebound guy, a nice-but... that he met in the last book; has a quickie with an old friend, newly single; and learns that his hag/best friend is leaving post-Katrina New Orleans. To finish her book, she says.

Rest assured, though: The right people end up in the right places and Chanse, for a wonder, actually unthaws his cryogenically preserved, battered, bruised, and broken heart, resolving to live his life and not simply exist in it because he's not dead yet.

My Review: New Orleans post-Katrina is a grim backdrop for this outing. I suspect in many ways anyone who has written about New Orleans since 2005 has written out of a sense of atonement, or expiation, or making things right, because after all they're alive and so very many aren't any more. Chanse comes home from a stay in Dallas to find that he's lost nothing in the storm or the flood; his friend Venus lost everything, for example, as did so many. The hero of a mystery series needs obstacles to make him more interesting that simply a crime-solving computer. The obstacles here, well, they're pretty grisly...driving around and seeing those horrible, horrible "X"s showing where bodies were found...refrigerators abandoned as far from homes as possible so they won't add to the mold problems, and adorned with anti-government slogans...well, this leads Chanse to a minor breakdown. No duh.

I am not, at heart, a New Orleanian. I got out of the car in 1975 and said, "Jesus, what a dump." Nothing in all the time since has made me think anything different. I don't miss going there, and wish our friends from there would come here to visit. But the city is one of the world's most popular destinations, and it's got a certain raffish charm that shines through in these books. I still don't want to go there. But I like the Chanse MacLeod character's development and growth, and I like the secondary characters like Paige, his hag, and Venus, the tall and elegant lady detective; who knows, maybe Herren has let us see a glimmer of hope for Chanse to have a shot at boyfriendly bliss!

Kinda doubt it, though. Remember what happened to "Moonlighting" when Cybill Shepard and Bruce Willis finally got it on?

Richard, sometime you pull thoughts right from my mind! You have captured my feelings about New Orleans. I would have been crawling right back into the car in 1975, echoing your words. Even if some miraculous occurence could transform the tarnished and grisly into its (possibly) enchanting potential, it would still be too...tawdry underneath, and humid beyond bearing. I almost wish you were writing books, but I enjoy finding such nuggets right here, not buried in a book somewhere (selfish creature that I am).

Nice review, RD, but I do hate the term *hag*.

Nice review, Richard. I lived in New Orleans for the better part of three years in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the people, food and unique culture were the aspects that made the Crescent City memorable for me, although the city itself, as you said, isn't much to look at.

>193 littleshell: Michele, I suspect many of us feel this way and don't say anything about it. Too many vigorous partisans come unstuck at the merest criticism of their sacred place. BTW, I do write books. Gettin' 'em ready for publication is the bear to end all bears.

>194 ffortsa: Why, Judy? All us fags needs our hags! I found "fruit fly" far more offensive, and "fellow traveler" (my mother's locution) a wee tidge too self-important. Anyway, it's not my most common phrase, so I doubt it will trouble anyone again soon. Still and all, glad you liked the review.

>195 kidzdoc: Yeah, my grandmother was a Creole lady from Opelousas. Nothin' new to me there, so I guess I'm jaded.

Lived in New Orleans from 1979 through 1986. Sure did love it, with all its troubles and seediness. Different strokes for different folks, though.

Gee, Richard, I left New Orleans (well, OK, the West Bank, really) in 1975. Couldn't wait to get back to the great Northeast, away from hurricanes and humidity and mosquitoes the size of Coast Guard helicopters. And to get my husband out of Coast Guard helicopters before his luck ran out. ('Cause there's no WAY those things can really fly, you know?) But I enjoyed the bits of the City we were able to experience on our meager military salary. By which, of course, I mean food. Some things just don't exist and can't be reproduced anywhere else, no matter what anyone tells you.

>197 rocketjk:, 198 Y'all can have my slice. I know how to make muffalettas and beignets so I don't need to go back.

Review: 25 of seventy-five

Title: A GREAT DELIVERANCE

Author: ELIZABETH GEORGE

Rating: 4* of five

The Book Report: The first book of the ongoing Inspector Lynley/DS Havers series, this book reads more like the fourth or fifth in the series, which I intend as a compliment. The author is very assured as she tells the story of a murder in an idyllic North Country village, one that seems from the start to be open-and-shut. As always in a mystery, though, there are many many twists and turns to the tale. Family secrets from every imaginable quarter. Horrible crimes past, as well as present, suppurate through the skin of the story, causing the characters to blanch regularly. (Readers too.) Lynley, an urbane and polished public school/Oxford First beauty, comes alive as a wounded man of many facets and a sharp, critical eye. His emotional acuity is high order; his past, as we know it so far, explains that quite well. Havers, who here in the first book is presented in all her hideous glory as receiving a Very Last Chance at being permanently assigned to Scotland Yard's prestigious Criminal Investigation Division, seems hell-bent for leather on tossing the opportunity away because, as Lynley says, "{she's} mad at him" and justifiably so.

But, in patented mystery fashion, miscreants are punished and those less culpable find some measure of relief from their hideous, tormented sadness. Hard to argue with those results since they occur so seldom in reality.

My Review: Is murder always wrong? Can you be sure of your answer? I know I've never been able to be absolutist about the topic. Reading this book, I felt absolutism and unimpeded judgment flapping their flightless wings desperately, sensing their ever-deeper immersion into the stock-pot of my subconscious.

I don't know about you, but there are times I think a good murdering rampage would do the world a power of good. Problem is, the bad guys have the weapons.

And reading this book, well, I just don't know that justice as practiced by the courts and described by the laws can really do a good enough job. And believe you me, that thought scares the bejabbers out of me. It makes me think about the nature of crime, and of punishment, and of the intersection of the two; it makes me afraid of the apparently boundless human capacity to commit horrible acts; and it makes me think hard about what I want out of my time on this planet...and whether I'm doing a single thing to make that want become fact.

A very great deliverance indeed, this book. In entertaining me, it also grew me up a little more.

#199 Can you give me a fried oyster po'boy? A pot of steamed crayfish dumped out on a picnic table covered with newspaper? Seafood gumbo with non-slimy okra? Red beans and rice with or without gator boudin? Pralines? EXACTLY the right amount of chicory and hot milk in the coffee when you hand around those beignets? (Now that I think about it, I'll bet we ate mo'betta because we were poor---if we'd had lots of discretionary income we probably would have skipped all those things and gone for the upscale restaurant stuff. And that would have been a shame.)

#200 Oh, is this thread about books, then?

>201 laytonwoman3rd: Chicory in coffee *shudder* is never to be found chez moi. NEVER. The rest, well we did that last year at the Fourth picnic. Minus the beignets, since The Divine Miss doesn't like 'em.

thumbed

So glad you enjoyed your maiden Elizabeth George voyage.......and hope you continue with the series, as time permits. Her work is a powerful and worthy addiction...i should know...i think I own the entire set of Lynley/Havers!

Thumb from me!

;-}

I am with you, rd, 1000% re: chicory. Real coffee only for me. REAL, real, real.

Yes, chicory coffee is one of New Orleans' "troubles" I mentioned in my post above. Never could cotton to the stuff. But in addition to all of LW3's food descriptions, above, there is also unsurpassed anywhere blues and r&b, plus jazz galore, all going into the wee, wee hours (no closing time at the bars, you see). Different strokes for different folks, though.

>203 mckait:, 204 Thanks, girls! I have the next two, and then three or four more from later in the series. I suspect I'll be devouring them.

>205 maggie1944: Soul sister!

>206 rocketjk: Tipitina's, please. Love that place!

The first coffee I ever drank had chicory in it, and I didn't know any better. Neither of my parents were ever coffee drinkers, but my grandma used to let me have a few sips when I stayed with her on the farm (in Pennsylvania, btw), and she was using a chicory blend, I think CDM at that time. Probably because it was cheaper than pure coffee. Isn't that why they started putting chicory in it in the first place? Sadly, we lived there for three years and never experienced the live music scene in NO. We were dumb kids, what can I tell you?

To those who have actually experienced New Orleans, thanks for reminding me about the good stuff: "people, food and unique culture" and Jazz with a capital J. One of the cool things about this country is the variety of places one can live without crossing national boundaries. And several mysteries I've read included tasty food descriptions that made me think about traveling there, once.

As someone who has only lived in Pennsylvania (well, there was one summer near Ontario), my first reaction was to the feelings Richard's words expressed so well for me. And somehow, it also evoked my vague horror of *serious* humidity. I prefer water in a glass or frozen. Yes, I even prefer snow--my apartment complex even uses the snowblower between cars, if needed!

@196> Wow, I didn't realize about the authorship, though I'm not surprised. Finishing a book and letting the work go out in the world is too big a concept for me, although I am a technical writer, so I should be able to handle it, in theory. But I am better at tweaking paragraphs, not pages.

>208 laytonwoman3rd: Oh Linda3rd...so sad that you were so abused...imagine giving a child, already severely disadvantaged by being raised in a coffeeless environment, CHICORY coffee! Why, Social Services would have something to say about that today! *there there, pat pat*

>209 littleshell: Technical writing...a skill so far beyond me as to be unimaginable...

I've finally reviewed Solo, which beautiful book was a gift from a delightful friend here, over in my thread...post #224.

No experience with chicory coffee, but we had 'Kinderkaffee' in Germany in the 70s. Sweetened instant barley coffee, so children could imagine having coffee like the grown-ups (maybe the coffee equivalent to the chocolate cigarettes). I hated it, because my Slesian grandmother had gotten me used to real coffee at an early age. But I found barley coffee ('orzo') even exists and is consumed here in Italy.

Btw. thanks for explaining the muffaletta a while ago on the other thread. What a delicious combination!

Mom and Dad gave us real coffee from a young age. It was about half coffee, half cream, and probably had 2-3 teaspoons of sugar. I loved it and it made me feel like a grown up.

So I drank coffee with cream and sugar until the summer of 1972. First job, inventory clerk, one day there was no sugar. Coffee with cream tasted terrible to me, so I tried it black.

Now that's the only way I take it. Black, no sugar. Can't stand cream/milk and/or sugar in coffee.

Back to the NO trip in 1987 - ordered black coffee at Cafe du Monde with my beignets, but it tasted TERRIBLE. Had to get them to "fix" it for me. The only time I've had adulterated coffee since 1972 and truly enjoyed it.

I started drinking coffee at about 11 or so..but it was instant. Who knew @ that age?
My kids.. Only of them drink coffee... they started drinking it in high school...

#210 Thanks for your concern, Richard. But I'm alright, really. Both my brother and I managed to grow into responsible, coffee-drinking adults despite the deprived upbringing. And I haven't touched chicory in 35 years.

>211 Deern: Nathalie, what y'all called "Kinderkaffee" Americans call "Postum"...it was developed during WWII to "replace" coffee. Gag-inducing stuff.

Muffalettas, now, are the diametric opposite. SOOO GOOD!

>212 karenmarie: I like hot milk in my morning coffee, but I can't *abide* sugar in it.

>213 mckait: But at least they can never say they were deprived of a proper coffee-drinking role model.

>214 laytonwoman3rd: I am so impressed by y'all's fortitude in overcoming the hazard.

No milk, sugar or cream for my coffee, thank you very much, and the stronger the better.

I'm craving an authentic muffuletta now, but I would happily settle for an oyster po' boy or, better yet, my late great-aunt's seafood gumbo or red beans & rice with andouille sausage.

So sorry to break ranks with the coffee lovers but I make every morning a cup of espresso and I steam up some 2% milk to go on top, with a dab of flavored vanilla syrup, or if I've wathcing my p's and q's I use Sweet Leaf (a sugar substitute).

But I spent many years as a teacher drinking plain black coffee, even in the classroom. The kids were not happy, but really I needed it to keep up with the demands of the job.

The kids were not happy because it kept you too alert, or what? ("Hey, let's switch her to decaf---maybe she'll nod off and we can have a little fun!")

ya, something like that or maybe they felt there was some hypocrisy in my drinking coffee while telling them they were not allowed to eat/drink in the classroom. As my father was wont to say: rank has its privileges.

Karen... kids these days never have to learn that. It is a huge pet peeve of mine.
By age 5 most kids have a tv and dvd player in their room.. and half the time, they
at least have some sort of electronic toy ALWAYS available. At least that is what I see.

Rank, if only the rank of adulthood, does have its privileges, and kids do need to learn that
there are some things that they need to just wait for. Or at least that is my opinion.
As much as I love Oliver, now 2.5 yrs old.. he is so terribly spoiled it worries me. And I see
it with strangers each time I am out shopping, or trying to eat out. No wonder I like being at
home alone so much.

I am of your tribe, Kath. Love staying home with curtains closed, as long as I have my door open to my lovely little private backyard.

#220 - McKait - Whoa....I shouldn't even get started, but speaking as a former single parent with not a lot of discretionary income, I think kids get to much just handed to them not only because they want it and haven't learned to wait or work for it, but because parents give in to the pressure, whether it's just constant whining and begging, or peer pressure..."but all my friends have it!". I heard it all! My answer was to have my son get a paper route (he got 3) and earn the things he wanted. It worked well and he really understands things like bills and wants and budgeting....although sometimes I'm wondering if he's learned about waiting! LOL

In message #1, does the text actually say "Juan was born in 1620....." and the next sentence say "This painting was completed in 1628..."? This is excellent work for an eight-year-old boy!

222: I agree completely with this. But I also think it is important to pay kids for work they do, such as mowing the lawn. I know some people disagree, and I believe they have valid arguments, but I know I wasn't paid for it for the longest time, and developed they belief that working wasn't worth the effort. It was hard to motivate myself to get a job after I graduated high school because I didn't have it instilled in me that there was a payoff for all the work I would do.

It's important to teach kids to work for the things they want, but they should also understand the benefits of working. It would be even better if you can teach them the non-monetary rewards of working, the goodness of helping someone out without pay, but I think that lesson should be taught at a distance from physical labor. Grass mowing = $$$ for the kids, please.

I think the work involved in maintaining a family's home should be shared by all members of the family, with consideration for age, strength, and judgment. I don't think the youngsters in the family should feel entitled to a nice home, clean, tidy, with good food served regularly, and to nice, clean, attractive clothing all because their Parental Units are willing and able to do the providing (money and work). Everyone should shoulder some of the work. Mowing the lawn is a good task for young persons and I really do not think the Parental Units should have to pay the offspring to do their part in home maintenance.

Said young persons are certainly welcome to take their skills at lawn mowing and attempt to trade them for monetary rewards at neighbors homes.

You get my POV, I'm sure. Mom and Dad are not free servants for the benefit of the kids.

#225, et al> Seems like my parents struck a happy medium. I wasn't paid by the hour or per job for home chores, but I received a weekly allowance which was understood to both pay for the chores I was required to do and also afford me the opportunity enjoy myself from time to time without having to ask for money each time. Of course, my parents made sure to keep this weekly sum low enough so that I had to make serious choices about how that money was spent. Plus, it allowed them free range to use the oft repeated phrase, "You want that? Save your allowance and buy it."

This led in time to the desired result, as least from their point of view. As soon as I was old enough, I started baby-sitting for the neighbors to earn additional funds, and when I got to be a junior in high school, it was a steady after school job at the grocery store. Once I learned the noble art of grocery bagging, of course, that was it for the allowance.

btw, I still often jump in and bag my own groceries. Gotta keep my touch. You never know what's coming in this crazy world.

also afford me the opportunity enjoy myself from time to time without having to ask for money each time.

Exactly. At some point or another kids are going to be old enough to want social lives, but not old enough to work professionally. You can hand them money for no reason, or you can say "I'm giving you this money because you worked for it." I like the latter.

I wasn't paid much either. After many years of mowing the lawn for nothing, I talked my mom up to $5 per mowing. It was a measly sum, but I felt like I was earning something, I learned to save up money, I learned the value of a dollar, I learned to make wise choices when making purchases, and so on.

I just like the idea of teaching kids that their hard work will pay off, and the money doesn't just appear out of thin air. The values of doing good to others/helping out the parents/maintaining a clean and functioning house should have been instilled long before they were old enough to operate a lawn mower. At that point, labor = $$$.

Of course, not having children, it's easy for me to sit back and say these things now. I'm not speaking from experience...

I don't disagree that kids should be given some money. They need the practice; its just I don't like to think parents have to pay their kids for helping out around the house.

Sorry for the thread hyjack!

I got an allowance. For this, I was expected to (uncomplainingly) pitch in and do stuff around the house. I was expected to make minor purchases myself: Toothpaste, deodorant, new socks & undies, blah blah blah. Then, beyond my mother's control, I got an inheritance and stopped doing a single damned thing, then moved out. I'm not dead of an overdose, or morally derelict, or brutishly self-centered. ...?...

Yeah, I suppose you are right Richard, and I'm not in the least bit depraved or anything... ...errr...well, not THAT much anyway...right? ;)

I agree with maggie.
I gave my kids money for lunches at school and expected them to help around the
house. IF they complied, and did what they were expected to do, I willingly gave them money
for movies or eating out with friends when the asked. At least as much as I was able. We did have
a fair amount of time where money was tight, but they got that.

When They were in high school, they found jobs. Before that Craig would negotiate with me
for jobs that were usually mine ( floor, bathroom etc ) and work for cash :) he also found ways to make
money outside the home.. distributing flyers for a friends mom who was a real estate agent, and a few other legal things :)

Adam started his own business when he was about.. 13 or so. I fronted him card stock and envelopes, pens and ink. .. and he used his talent to make individual cards for family and friends.. doing portraits or special art of whatever kind on them. He did that until college and did well.

I firmly believe that it is my generation that raised kids who have that entitlement feeling, and they are raising their kids to be the same or worse. I managed to avoid that, thank goodness.. I admit not all young people have that entitlement thing, but an overwhelming majority seem to.

On a slightly different tack, I think "sense of entitlement" may be the worst American personal trait going! I wish people, myself included, could take humility pills more often, without mahem, of course.

OK, I know that was kind of "random" as the kids say today. I'll move along.

My daughter has been saving her money since she was small, with occasional splurges that have always had my complete approval: Mickey Mouse pocket watch, alto saxophone, half of the cost of her straight trombone, etc. Her saving her money has made me feel comfortable with buying her the things she needs and the occasional thing she just wants. She has been mowing lawns since she was about 12 (riding mower, 2-4 acres at a time) and worked as a waitress and then hostess during the last year and a half of high school, only spending her money on gas for her truck and the occasional meal out with a friend or two. She's also bought her dad and me anniversary gifts and birthday gifts for about 2 years or so now out of her own money.

She will be leaving for college on August 19th. When she turns 18, on August 3rd, we're going to the bank and because she's had a checking account since she was 15 she'll be able to get a debit card. She wants to pay for all her own incidentals at college. Her dad and I are very comfortable with this - trust her completely - and will just help her make sure she transfers enough money from her savings to her checking as she needs to in advance of spending.

I agree with the dislike for and concern about the sense of entitlement that so many U.S.'ers have demonstrated. I have seen a greater sense of reality and humility appearing in my bailiwick because of the economic downturn. I actually had one young woman complain a few years ago that a substantial raise wasn't big enough. I'll never forget it. And she's very likeable in general. Nothing like that from her or others in more recent years - they're glad to have a job.

Now I worry that it's gotten too tough out there. My daughter wants to be a teacher, but where I am there have been huge layoffs in the school system, and when the schools hire, they have a large pool of more experienced teachers to draw upon. She's starting to set up a tutoring service to help pay the bills.

>229 richardderus: Toothpaste, deoderant and undies came out of your allowance??? sheesh. i didn't know keeping clean and civilized was optional behavior for a minor.

I finished and reviewed Heart-Shaped Box, years after everyone else; a fun afternoon's read, see my review in my thread...post #70.

not everyone.. it's still on my shelf..

Review: 26 of seventy-five

Title: DEATH IN VENICE

Author: THOMAS MANN

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Book Report: I feel a complete fool providing a plot precis for this canonical work. Gustav von Ascherbach, literary lion in his sixties, wanders about his home town of Munich while struggling with a recalcitrant new story. His chance encounter with a weirdo, though no words are exchanged between them, ignites in Herr von Ascherbach the need to get out of town, to get himself to the delicious fleshpots of the South. An abortive stay in Illyria (now Bosnia or Montenegro or Croatia, no knowing which since we're not given much to go on) leads him to make his second journey to Venice. Arriving in the sin capital of the early modern world, and even in the early 20th century possessed of a louche reputation, brings him into contact with two life-changing things: A beautiful teenaged boy, and cholera. I think the title fills you in on the rest.

My Review: I know this was written in 1911-1912, and is therefore to be judged by the standards of another era, but I am bone-weary of stories featuring men whose love for other males brings them to disaster and death. This is the story that started me on that path of dislike. Von Ascherbach realizes he's in love for the first time in his pinched, narrow life, and it's with a 14-year-old boy; his response is to make himself ridiculous, following the kid around, staying in his Venetian Garden of Eros despite knowing for sure there's a cholera epidemic, despite being warned of the dangers of staying, despite smelling decay and death and miasmic uccchiness all around, because he's in love. But with the wrong kind of person...a male. Therefore Mann makes him pay the ultimate price, he loses his life because he gives in and falls hopelessly, stupidly in love. With a male. Mann makes his judgment of this moral turpitude even more explicit by making it a chaste, though to modern eyes not unrequited, love between an old man and a boy. Explicit references to Classical culture aside, the entire atmosphere of the novel is quite evidently designed to point up the absurdity and the impossibility of such a love being rewarding or rewarded. It's not in the least mysterious what Mann's after: Denial, denial, denial! It's your only salvation, faggots! Deny yourself, don't let yourself feel anything rather than feel *that*!

This book offends my sensibilities. Gorgeously built images and sonorously elegant sentences earn it all of its points.

Thanks!

Hmmm, I didn't read it as being the wrong kind of love (although that may have been what the author intended...) I was thinking of it more as the power of fascination/enchantment/idealized love that is irrational not necc. because the object is male but because it's someone much younger. It could equally be a woman who is married and who ignores him, and I think the story would still work -- i.e the narrative would be intact. Or you could make it a 14 year old girl.

But the point is, he *didn't* do those things...illicit love of a man for a woman doesn't carry the same opprobrium as does the expressly homoerotic love for Tadzio. Even for a young girl, less so then than it does now, but you'll still find that pedophilia is most commonly perceived as homosexual. Statistically, it almost never is. But it's so *wrong* in peoples' minds, it **must** be them faggits that's a-doin' it.

I enjoyed the book and I enjoyed and thumbed your review, but I'd also agree with Suzanne's comment, there clearly was an age issue as well. I remember I liked the morbid atmosphere, I need to re-read it.

I agree with Chatterbox, too. I don't think Mann's point was to lecture gays on their need to deny their passions. At all.

"{T}he power of fascination/enchantment/idealized love that is irrational not necc. because the object is male but because it's someone much younger" is exactly the point, in my view. If a man in love with another man was considered such a horror in Mann's time and place, then Death in Venice would not have been hailed a masterpiece when it was published, but scorned as scandalous and crass.

Also, if Mann was so intent on ridiculing gay love, he would not have portrayed his protagonist with the sympathetic gentleness that he receives.

". . . . staying in his Venetian Garden of Eros despite knowing for sure there's a cholera epidemic, despite being warned of the dangers of staying, despite smelling decay and death and miasmic uccchiness all around, because he's in love.But with the wrong kind of person...a male. Therefore Mann makes him pay the ultimate price, he loses his life because he gives in and falls hopelessly, stupidly in love. With a male."

Well, yes, but the fact that that love is with a young man, someone with whom he would never get to share a comfortable, public love, makes his sacrifice to love more poignant, in my view, not more ridiculous.

You can be mad that an older man's love for a young boy would be seen as a relatively hopeless situation in turn-of-the century Europe, but being mad at Mann for focusing a tragic story around that standard misses the point of the exercise, in my opinion.

At any rate, as quoted in Wikipedia, Mann fashioned the story around the reaction he, himself, had to a young boy while vacationing with his wife in Vienna:

"Thomas Mann's wife Katia (in a 1974 book) recalls that the idea for the story came during an actual holiday in Venice (staying at the Grand Hôtel des Bains on the Lido), which she and Thomas took in the summer of 1911:

All the details of the story, beginning with the man at the cemetery, are taken from experience … In the dining-room, on the very first day, we saw the Polish family, which looked exactly the way my husband described them: the girls were dressed rather stiffly and severely, and the very charming, beautiful boy of about 13 was wearing a sailor suit with an open collar and very pretty lacings. He caught my husband's attention immediately. This boy was tremendously attractive, and my husband was always watching him with his companions on the beach. He didn't pursue him through all of Venice—that he didn't do—but the boy did fascinate him, and he thought of him often … I still remember that my uncle, Privy Counsellor Friedberg, a famous professor of canon law in Leipzig, was outraged: 'What a story! And a married man with a family!'"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_in_Venice

Given all that, it's hard for me to imagine that Mann meant to heap scorn on our hero for his obsession. It seems to me more a relatively sympathetic but sad testimony to the absurdity of the human condition itself.

A totally "on the side" comment, not responding to this on going discussion, I just wanted to say that I am glad you took the time to present a plot precis. I am not from a literary background and knew nothing more than the title is one I recognize, and so is the author. I needed the precis to make sense of the rest of your review. Thank you. I liked the review.

Okay. The straight majority wins. I don't care enough to argue any more. The book is grim, I think it's unpleasant, and whatever y'all say is okay by me. I understand not seeing the minority PoV, so whatever.

The new thread's up over here!

Plz see comment on new thread. Thanks.