The FIRST Homeless Reviews thread for Richardderus in 2012

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.
Francis Bacon

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

--Leo Tolstoy

My 2012 ORPHANED books ticker:




My 2012 NEW books ticker:




Books are reviewed in post:

1. The Gods Will Have Blood...#3. BkC1. Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands...#8.

2. Tristan and Isolde, Restoring Palamede...#4. BkC2. The Epic of Gilgamesh...#18.

3. The Circular Staircase...#76. BkC3. The Book of Illusions...#22.

4. The Yellow Room...#78. BkC4. The Salt Eaters...#34.

5. God's Little Acre...#79. BkC5. I forgot one! Damn.

6. Nightwood...#106. BkC6. Mr. Sammler's Planet...#49.

7. My Life in France...#120. BkC7. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil...#54.

8. The Frozen Thames...#121. BkC8. The Sheltering Sky...#58.

9. Kneel to the Rising Sun...#122. BkC9. Manservant and Maidservant

10. Ernie's Ark...#127. BkC10. Kindred...#89.

11. Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen...#133. BkC11. The Da Vinci Code...#111.

12. It's Kind of a Funny Story...#140. BkC12) DOUBLE INDEMNITY...#115.

13. Suicide Notes...#142. BkC13) In Cold Blood...#137.

14. The Lovely Bones...#150.

15. The Count of Monte Cristo...#151. BkC15) Nights at the Circus...#259.

16. The Ginseng Hunter...#155.

17. A Real Basket Case...#170.

18. The Summer Isles...#171. BkC18) Disgrace...#193.

19. Time on My Hands...#172.

20. Monsoon...#173. BkC20) The Hours...#220.

21. The Scold's Bridle...#178.

22. There Was A Time......#179.

23. The Voice at the Back Door...#181.

24. Flanders: a novel...#182.

25. Swift Thoughts...#185.

26. Knockemstiff...#188.

27. The Gates...#195.

28. House of Sand and Fog...#202.

BkC34) Memoirs of a Geisha...#213.

Pearl Ruled. Lavondyss...#224.

29. The Symposium...#226.

30. Desolation Road...#236.

Pearl Ruled: Black Swan Green...#243.

Review: 1 of fifty

Title: THE GODS WILL HAVE BLOOD

Author: ANATOLE FRANCE

Rating: 3.625* of five

The Book Report: The journey through the Terror of the French Revolution made by artist Évariste Gamelin, aspiring bourgeois to Jacobin true believer to his inevitable fall after the Coup de Thermidor. One man's life journey explores the entire *amazing* and enthralling course of the defining break between the Old World Order and the New.

My Review: This book was a Book Circle read. Frederick Davies translated this work very ably, in that the prose is supple and muscular. The book is inexorably gripping...to start is to need to finish...and the historical developments, so well-known to M. France, are explored fully without being windy and drawn out.

I love the French Revolution as a fictional backdrop. How can you heighten suspense more than set a book against the backdrop of a murderous rampage that changed the world? Can't say that for most massacres. The history of the French Revolution is equally enthralling to me. I read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica article on it, fascinated and riveted, while I was recovering from mumps one spring in the 1960s. Been hooked ever since.

I detested Évariste Gamelin. Start to finish, he ticked me off, made me ill, caused my blood pressure to spike to unsafe levels, and my shouting at the book (ineffective, sad to say) drove the dog to sleep on Puppy-mommy's bed. Getting that engaged with a book is a Good Thing. It means I've invested my feelings in the experience. This book is 100 years old this year. The events chronicled took place 220 years ago. It's as vibrant and exciting today as ever.

Recommended for all lovers of history. Read it, and weep.

Review: 2 of fifty

Title: TRISTAN AND ISOLDE, Restoring Palamede

Author: JOHN ERSKINE

Rating: 4* of five

The Book Report: I cannot conceive that anyone who can type "www.librarything.com" does not know the story of Tristan and Isolde, so I won't recap it here.

Palomedes/Palamede needs some explanation. He was the insertion of a thirteenth-century author into the Arthurian mythos, the Stranger Who Calls and stays. He was the son of a pagan king who, being educated by his father's Christian slave, decides to set off for Christendom and see what he can see. In Erskine's beautifully wrought novel, Palamede is more honorable and Christian than that adulterous lout Tristan; in the antique version, he's the close-second parfit gentil knight, the foil of His Perfectness Tristan.

I like Erskine's version a lot better.

My Review: John Erskine published this book in 1932. It wasn't a terribly optimistic time in American history, and that sense of gloom-and-doom is reflected in his use of the perfect outsider commenting on the foibles of the smug, self-satisfied host Westerners. They're all nobility, so equivalent to the plutocrats who, in that more enlightened time, got the proper degree of blame and suffered the proper degree of economic punishment (unlike our own pusillanimous age, fearful of taxing the wealthiest entities at appropriate levels); Erskine isn't in any way shy about blasting the bad behavior, selfishness, and all-around turpitude of these small-souled greed machines.

I *batten* on his outrage. I share it.

Well, anyway, should you read it? Yes. Yes indeed. It is beautifully, simply written, and it's an evergreen plot. Marvelous stuff. Save it from obscurity, and read it soon.

for the Anatole France

Love the sound of the Erskine but I can't give your review a thumb and my local library doesn't have the book:(

I forgot to post it to the book. I sure hope you can get the book on inter-library loan!

xo for the thumb!

Review now thumbed. I would have to ask the library to get a copy - I don't think they do interlibrary loans

So, anyone who has visited my profile knows I've been in a book circle in RL for many years, and I posted our group reading list. Most of those books I read long long long before I knew about LT, and so I've either never reviewed them or reviewed them for the long-vanished book blog.

Whatthehell, I figured, I should go back and glance over the list, maybe write some reviews of those oldsters.

So that's what I'm a-gonna do.

BkC1) DONA FLOR AND HER TWO HUSBANDS by Jorge Amado Adored it! Ghosts get horny, too, and why not?

I stand by the one-liner. It's a wonderful book, so it deserves a real appreciation.

The Book Report: Flor and Vadinho are as happy as two opposites can be in a marriage. Their relationship doesn't make sense to any of Flor's stuffy, social-climbing family (really, whose relationship makes sense to the family?), as Vadinho spends and cheats and generally makes a spectacle of himself in dreary 1940s Bahia (provincial Brazilian city, think Baltimore or Philadelphia). Especially the day he drops dead in a Carnival street dance.

Flor grieves for him, but life goes on, and the aforementioned stuffy family won't tolerate a single woman in her prime to be left in peace. So Flor marries Babbitt. Oh dear, I mean Teodoro (which is Brazilian for Babbitt). He's not a lot of fun, but he's thoughtful, and gentle, and considerate of her feelings, and a BIG FAT BORE especially in bed. Flor settles in for a life of having settled. So many people of both genders and all persuasions can relate to this.

Then...then...Vadinho's horny ghost shows up! Moral crisis: Is it cheating on your husband to sleep with your dead husband? Is this a serious question? To Flor it is, and to be frank, I was so bought in at that point that I took it seriously too.

My Review: Written in 1966, this novel felt as fresh as yesterday to me when I read it in the 1990s. It is subtle and grotesque and sly and, in the end, it's the way a real person is: Conflicted. Is the story in Flor's mind, a desperately bored woman's attempt to recapture some small sense of joy in life, or is Vadinho real?

I don't exactly know, even yet. But you know what? Don't matter one little speck. I believe Flor. She would never lie to me.

Amado was that good. Recommended, ESPECIALLY for married people of all persuasions.

Many years ago a good movie was made of Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands starring the incomparable Sonia Braga. You'd probably get a kick out of it.

I've not read Jorge Amado, and this might be a good one to start with.

I loved the movie! I felt so sophisticated, going to see a subtitled movie and even liking it...maybe I was 17?...it was a wonderful film. I wonder if the adaptation would be up to my exacting standards these days.

Good Books...gad zooks!

Loved Dona Flor...... when I read it back in college...and still do

I must seek out The Gods will Have Blood.....your reaction to this reminds me of my reaction to Citizens, which weren't "fiction"....I didn't exactly weep, but did shake my head rather forcefully.

**smooch**

Forceful head-shaking will substitute for 0.75 of a weep credit.

Thank you, Sweetie

Speaking of "credits"....i found a copy of The Gods Will have Blood on Bookmooch...I only hope the person offering the book isn't an asshat!

;-}

I have abandoned my Bookmooch and PBS accounts because I was getting all bollixed up between sending things out and not getting them.

Sigh.

I understand. I have had few problems with PBS....but Bookmooch is another beast, entirely..I'm trying to use up my last points...then I'll be gone, too!

No sigh.

I SO adored Dona Flor when I read this years ago!! Must must must read it again.

>16 tututhefirst: No time like the present! Overdrive it!

BkC2) THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH: Not sorry I read it, but what a slog.

The Book Report: Evil King Gilgamesh is hatefully cruel to the citizens of Uruk, his kingdom. The gods, hearing the cries of his oppressed people, send Gilgamesh a companion, Enkidu. (Yes, that's right, a man.) Gilgamesh falls so in love with Enkidu, and has such big fun playing around and exploring the world and generally raising hell with Enkidu that his people are left alone to get on with...whatever it was that they weren't allowed to do before. And there was much rejoicing *yay*

No one is allowed to be too happy for too long. Gilgamesh learns this when he royally screws up by refusing to screw goddess Ishtar because he's busy having fun with Enkidu. It is **NEVER** a good idea to turn down nookie from a goddess. She gets her knickers in a twist and decides that, if he's gonna be *that* way about it, he's not gonna have his boy-toy either! THEN the boys do the colossally stupid thing of stealing Ishtar's bull, and it's lights out for Enkidu.

Gilgamesh's grief, to his peoples' relief, sends him on a quest for immortality. Which, frankly, makes not one whit of sense. Grief, in my extensive experience, makes one want oblivion, not eternity. Well, whatever, not me writin' the story, so off goes Gilgamesh to have more adventures.

My Review: A whole bunch of the Old Testament is lifted from this book. Amazingly whole and entire, too. Methuselah, Noah...all here first.

It's a slog to read, like the Bible, but it's fascinating if kept to smaller doses. I had no faith for it to rock, but it might rock a religious person's sacred book fantasy pretty hard. Highly instructive is the treatment of a strong love between men as perfectly boringly ordinary. No sexual component is implied in their relationship, but go find me a more loving relationship in sacred literature. Their closeness was so complete that it threatened the gods. But, crucially, it was the *CLOSENESS* that threatened the gods, not any inherent evil. The men loved each other so completely that there was no room for gods, which pisses gods off somethin' fierce.

Food for thought, homophobes who think Leviticus is right on *this* count.

Richard I have to add Dona Flor to my wish list! thanks for reviewing! And smooch to you across the LIS!

You're welcome, Maureen! Bet cash money you'll enjoy it.

I'm just about to start A Girl Made of Dust by Nathalie Abi-Ezzi, my sixth book so far this year!

BkC 3) THE BOOK OF ILLUSIONS by Paul Auster: Sorry I read it, and what a slog.

Another one where I stand by my one-liner. Ye gods and little fishes, what a snore!

The Book Report: Protagonist loses family, isolates self from world to plumb solipsistic depths of grief and depression, discovers obsessive interest in an artist now of no great interest, sets out to rediscover and rehabilitate said artist, succeeds, and through a miracle of identification with the vanished artist's sufferings which mirror his own, protagonist resumes living in the real world again.

My Review: Does that sound familiar? It ought to...it's also the plot of the over-praised and underwhelming "New York Trilogy." Every writer, every artist, rides their hobbyhorses. Nothing new there. The question is, do you want to go along for the ride? In Auster's case, I do not.

But why not? Because I experienced a lot lot lot of grieving very early in life, when the AIDS epidemic was at its height. I lost every gay friend I'd made. I volunteered as a helper in the hospital...just showed up and did stuff, no training, no pay, and lots of nurses and porters would teach me what to do so they wouldn't risk getting the disease.

I held a lot of hands as men died. I saw a few mothers come to their sons' bedsides to excoriate them one last time for being queer and so embarrassing the church, the family, god. I had no idea what to say to their terrified faces as they died at 23...27...31.

But I fuckin' got up every morning and I went and DID SOMETHING.

I have ZERO tolerance for these a-holes who think their teensy little selves are so important that their pain is all that matters in the world. SHUT THE FUCK UP and get out of your own asshole and DO SOMETHING.

Okay, unsympathetic much? Yes. I lost the love of my life to AIDS in 1992. He died at 35. I do not want to hear crap from anyone about depression 'cause I been there too, and didn't treat it like it was All Important. I went to the doctor, I got help, I gave up some very unpleasant addictions, and I got on with life the whole time.

And I would give anything I have ever had to have my man back. Anything. I miss him fiercely even now, 20 years later.

So Mr. Auster can keep his wet-mouthed wet-eyed puling to his damn self.

Oh my, book review aside, I'm really sorry about what you've seen and been through, Richard. There was even more stupidity about AIDS and gayness back then. I lost a good friend of mine the year after that (1993), and miss him all the time.

Thank you, Joe. I lose perspective when I encounter whininess. I lost it in a big way over this book.

Great reviews as always, Rdear.

Wait a minute...there was a plot to New York Trilogy? Eh? You must be exceedingly perceptive to have divined such a thing.

I read the New York Trilogy only two years ago and don't remember anything, except that it was three times the same thing (but what thing it was... no idea).

I am very sorry you lost your man and all those friends, much too early to that terrible disease.
This is such an honest review, and I thumbed it (if you don't mind) and thank you for it. I admire your spirit. Sending (((hugs))) over the ocean.

>25 Matke: I am reliably informed by third parties that there was indeed a plot, and much as I have outlined it, in those dreary, dreary books. Couldn't prove it by me. I just find his prose more annoying than a room full of bound-foot ladies scratching their hoofy-looking long-toenailed feet on a floor made of blackboard.

xo for the compliment.

>26 Deern: Thank you, dear Nathalie. I appreciate the hugs! Loss defines life, the older one gets the more diverse the losses become. It's still painful after 20 years! My son's death is now 30 years ago, and I still wake up sometimes thinking he's calling me.

Death isn't the cruelest loss, though, and to be honest, I feel a complete fraud complaining about my little life when suffering on an unimaginable scale takes place every day. It's why I try very hard to keep my sorrows to myself, smile a lot, and make whatever place I happen to be as much happier as I can do at that moment.

Today clearly was not one of my chirpier days.

Oh Richard I am so sorry for your losses--your love and your son... heartbreaking...you have hugs from me as well!

#22 Well done, Richard. When the emperor has no clothes on, someone has to say so. Given your review, the title is rather ironic. I have read only one book by Auster, and regretted it -- Timbuktu. It was short, but it was pointless. As for that whining thing...right on. I've put Auster in a box with Philip Roth, and closed the lid. Here I go to thumb your review. Oh, and you get extra points for saying "Ye gods and little fishes", which we just don't hear often enough these days. *hugs*

>28 momom248: Thank you, Maureen, most kind of you to say so. *smooch*

>29 laytonwoman3rd: I appreciate that, Linda3rd! The only Roth novel I've ever really warmed to was The Plot Against America, and that's only because it was an alternative history. If I may presume on our connection to make a confession, I've shoveled John Updike in there too. Dreary dreary dreary.

Yeah, I've got no use for him either.

Rabbit Angstrom just made me tired. Couples was a study in ennui, in theme and (unintentionally, I suspect) in execution. I want to know what the yodelers are yodeling about: WHAT is so great about Updike? I'm here to listen.

*cricket chirps*

too many threads! sigh..

BkC 4) THE SALT EATERS by Toni Cade Bambara: Wonderful prose, not so much on the storytelling.

I haven't changed my mind on that one, either.

The Book Report: Velma is a healer's worst nightmare: a failed suicide depressed by life and Life. Minnie and Old Wife, who is Minnie's spirit guide, work to heal Velma's wounds both inner and outer, in the course of this novel.

And that, mes amis, is it.

My Review: Which is kinda the problem. It makes this gorgeous incantation of a tale into a pretty tough swallow. Interiority can be overdone. Bambara's enraged response to the world of 1980 (when this wa first published) was perfectly justified, as she saw coming the horrors we presently live through in the never subtle, never hidden class warfare counterattack begun after Nixon's crash and burn. Velma is a computer programmer, a telling detail that Bambara clearly wants to remain a detail, who can't cope with the workload...prescient much?...and whose entire world centers around *yawn* an unworthy man *cue 21st-century Serious Lady Lit music* so she loses her inner Old Wife just like Minnie did.

Minnie is a daughter of privilege, a former Bible college attendee, and now a root woman who talks to haints. I love Minnie and Old Wife with a passion! They are the kind of ladies I want to live next door to, so I can go over with a plate of blondies and a bottle of bourbon and talk about Life to them.

But loving them, and loving the loooooooooooooong internal monologues that Minnie and Old Wife share as they work to heal dull little Velma, does not make this book a novel. In French, it would be called a récit: a simple internal narrative, usually in past tense, with one PoV. It's an excellent récit, and a ~meh~ novel.

Recommended for language lovers, Southerners, and white people wondering what the fuss about African American literature is.

I liked Linda's comment, "When the emperor has no clothes, someone needs to say so." Thank you, Richard, for being so willing!

It's good to hear someone else finds John Updike's books dreary. Snoozers for me.

Good review of The Salt Eaters, but I'm going to have to dodge that book bullet.

I'm still flabbergasted by your losses. Seems like more than a person should have to bear. And you bear it well (despite, no doubt, some dark nights inside). Like others, I wish I could somehow lighten it. You sure have my sympathy.

>33 mckait: Too many threads for what, dearest?

>35 jnwelch: Thank you, Joe. Being part of a loving community like this one is balm and healing enough for anyone.

Nice review of The Salt Eaters; I'll give it a pass, though.

I agree with you about The Plot Against America, the only novel by Roth that I've highly enjoyed.

I'll go even further than that and say it's the only one that wasn't Roth so far up his own backside that it's unnerving.

Think you're missing something on The Salt Eaters, though. There are some stunningly beautiful moments in it.

*Waves* and *Hugs*

A WITCH!! BURN HIM!!

You break my heart Richard. :(

Now I have to take it back out of the canopic jar and glue it back together AGAIN. *Sigh*

LOL

Very, very good one! **gold star**

BkC5) MURPHY by Samuel Beckett: Scintillating, superb, fractal geometry in words.

Yeah, that verdict stands too.

Rating: 5* of five

The Book Report: This is always hard when describing Beckett. Murphy loves Celia, the prostitute. Miss Counihan, surprisingly anthropoid for an Irishwoman, loves Murphy. Neary, a philosopher, comes to love Murphy as his best friend. Then there's this guy Murphy plays chess with in the mental hospital where Murphy goes to work.

Okay, it can't really be this hard. Murphy, an Irish depressive, has to get a job because Celia, his petite amie, thinks it will do him good. So he leaves Ireland, goes to London and starts working at a mental hospital. All sorts of Irish problems follow him, but Murphy finds himself escaping them among the mad, who have abdicated their responsibilities to the staff and lead lives of unencumbered irresponsibility that Murphy envies. Mr. Endon, the wisest madman, lures Murphy into playing a game of chess with him, and it's that game that forms the spine of the book. It's described in loving, and to me incomprehensible, detail, but if you're patient and willing to educate yourself with a chess reference source as you read, you'll come to realize that this game is the novel you're reading, and the novel is the chess game.

How do chess games end? Think on that for a moment. The novel's ending will then be clear to you.

My Review: It's not the easiest read on the shelf. It's well worth your time and effort to engage with, because it's gorgeously wrought...there's a line about owls in the zoo, their joys and sufferings not starting until dark, that I wish I could find so as to quote exactly, but it's...well...perfect, and at the moment it comes in the narrative, so startlingly apt that it makes my hair stand up to remember it.

Beckett hated Ireland for its conformist, dead-spirited religiosity. He abhorred any and all forms of hypocrisy, and this (I think, could be wrong about this) is the last novel he wrote in English because he regarded the language as the carrier (think Typhoid Mary) of hypocrisy. (So what did he do? He wrote in FRENCH! Oh the irony.) Murphy is the soul-scream of an angry lover. It caustically throws in your face every unkind or unworthy thought you've ever had, every casually cruel deed you've ever done, and makes you weep and smile and sigh with pleasure as it alternately berated and caresses you.

Yes, this book is a bad love affair with a beautiful man put between hard covers. It's brilliant, it's beautiful, and it's never to be forgotten, even when you wish you could.

I love Beckett's plays but have never been able to get into his novels. But you despise plays, don't you Richard?

Loathe, despise, and detest. Plays are only to be endured under the most extraordinary duress.

But that's why there's chocolate and vanilla! Glad to see you out and about, Jo.

Excellent review of Murphy; one thumbs up from me, and onto the wish list it goes.

Plays are only to be endured under the most extraordinary duress.

What??? Ten thumbs down for that blasphemous comment.

kidzdoc: bravo!!!

"Plays are only to be endured under the most extraordinary duress." Blasphemous ??? I think not !

BkC6) MR. SAMMLER’S PLANET by Saul Bellow: Fun, fun, fun to read. Not the story, mind, but the storytelling!

Have to take issue with myself here. This isn't quite as fluffy as this one-liner makes it sound.

The Book Report: Mr. Artur Sammler survived the Holocaust, but isn't sure he'll survive 1960s New York. Once without food and without dignity and without hope, he looks on bemused as people with everything material the planet can supply wallow in misery and spiritual angst. Sammler, an observer by nature, doesn't know how to get past his own limitations of spirit to reach out to men or up to god to make connections that could guide his fellow beings out of desperation or himself out of stasis.

But this is a novel. A National Book Award-winning novel. So, he does. It is a gorgeous piece of writing.

My Review: This was less catharsis than exegesis for me. Sammler's idea of a Good Life, as opposed to the Americans he sees around himself living The Good Life, is knowing the terms of the contract...what's expected of me, now that I'm here? what is it that makes a life worthy, therefore worth living?...presupposes that there is an inherent moral compass and that it's oriented the same way for all people, that is along the Judeo-Christian axis.

Hmmm.

Well, go with it, I instruct myself, because it's the author's thesis, not yours. So I did, and I found the resolution to Sammler's crisis very moving.

But, if I'm honest, it still irks me that there is a monopolar world of the spirit, and there is nothing at all outside of it allowed in. Still...it's some wonderful writing!

I refuse to add Murphy to my TBR. srsly. refuse.

>50 mckait: VERY wise. You would ***hate*** it with a vibrating Day-Glo orange passion. And I mean HATE.

> 49: my better half loves Saul Bellow, we have a lot of his books on our shelves. Maybe I should try someday...

His work will either appeal to you instantly or repel you instantly, Anita, so don't make yourself keep on if you're a "not" person.

BkC7) MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL by John Berendt: Delicious, shimmering prose. Wonderful story. Savannah really should give Mr. Berendt a pension.

I have to dim my searchlight to a streetlight. Still think it's good but now, well, now I can't see past the one-hit-wonderness to the glories I once took for granted.

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Book Report: Bored Manhattanite journalist realizes, back in the 1980s, that lunch at a trendy restaurant costs more than air fare to a sexy Southern retreat (those were the days!) and the resulting experience was more lasting. So John Berendt becomes a commuter to Savannah, Georgia, which is the American Bath for sheer physical prettiness, though quite a lot hotter.

Being a good journalist, he meets everyone worth meeting, and being a gay man, meets the entire A list of gay life in this small city in record time. Then he stumbles into an amazing story of murder and skulduggery among the social elite as the elite intersects with gay and gay-for-pay culture.

Along the way he talks to every single interesting person in Savannah and builds a word-picture of its typically Southern hierarchical social scene. As The Lady Chablis, an African-American drag queen would say, "Flawless!"

My Review: Not exactly flawless, but wonderful. Southern characters abound, including the old root woman who introduces Yankee John to the world of the haints and spitits and loa that Southerners, even the Babdiss ones, are aware exists, even when they scream and rail about it as evil, wrong, bad...well, they do that about sex too, and with as much effect.

Cemetery dirt is a powerful ingredient in the sympathetic magic the old root women practice. Where it comes from, that is whose grave it was, matters, as do many other factors, and Yankee John reports with wide-eyed fascination on the entire experience of getting involved in the magical universe to help an accused murderer.

The end of the story is, very sadly, the end of a single book career. The City of Falling Angels notwithstanding, this is Mr. B's one book. Fortunately, it's a very good one. Unfortunately, it's the only one. And so I ding a half-star off for literary incomplete pass. But it's a helluva read!

Hah! Good review, Richard. I enjoyed this one, too. I never did read The City of Falling Angels. I'm not sure what to compare this one hit wonder to. "I'm Too Sexy" by Right Said Fred? Except we'd probably like to hear more from Berendt, and that one hit from RSF seems like more than enough.

Good comparo, Joe, but I think "Obsession" by Animotion would be more apt.

I never want to hear either song again, frankly.

LOL! Me either. Unfortunately they play the first one occasionally at Bulls basketball games for the mascot to dance to. Arggh.

BkC8) THE SHELTERING SKY by Paul Bowles: Tedious twaddle.

When I'm right, I'm right.

The Book Report: Kit and Port Moresby (get the Australia/New Guinea colonial joke, huh? huh? How clever is Paul Bowles, right?) are not gonna make it as a couple. They just aren't. So, in time-honored rich-couple-in-over-relationship fashion, they Travel. They don't take a trip, or a vacation, oh perish forbid, they Travel. North Africa, they think, no one we know will be there so we won't have to confront how little is left of what was a marriage.

So, this being midcentury fiction, while they Travel, they pick up a guy named Tunner who is also Traveling with his Mama. (Code of the day for "he's a fag.") I would say "hijinks ensue," but they really, really don't.

My Review: Tunner and Kit. Tunner and Port. Port and Kit. Find me some sexual heat in any of these variations. G'wan g'wan double-dog dare ya.

Arab as Wily Native. Murrikin as Rich Rube. Okay, been there done that, even in 1949...sixty-three years ago this wasn't an under-used trope, and by now it's a dreary cliche when used without irony or other meta-element to waft away its corpse-like odor.

Books told in dialogue. Really now. Robert Pinget did it better.

So "tedious twaddle" remains my judgment. Gay rights have swept away the shock, shock! of Port and Tunner's implied affair. Kit's a dreary stereotype of the Bored White Woman Seeking Dusky Lover. Whatever value the book still has, it's in the language, which I myownself found very close to intolerably dull and lifeless.

I suppose I have to give this Ambien-between-covers two stars because there will be lynch mobs of admirers outside my door anyway, but if I gave it the 1/2 star I think it actually deserves, there'd be snipers and Inquisitionists too. But god, I feel hypocritical doing it.

Run Away! Run Away! Don't even accept a copy as a gift!

> 58: Okay Richard, I will stay FAR away from that book!
(Did not like the movie either!)

Hah! I would say "hijinks ensue," but they really, really don't. Great!

I don't have a hankering for Ambien-between-the-covers, thank you very much. I managed to steer clear of this one for many a year but still wondered. With your helpful guidance I'll now happily continue.

>59 FAMeulstee: Wise, wise use of reading time, Anita. You will never be sorry, ever.

>60 jnwelch: Live long and prosper Bowles-less, my friend.

Good review Richard....I remember reading and thoroughly enjoying Midnight and now you've made me want to go hunt it down to put on the re-read shelf! Can't quite remember....do you think it would make a good book club discussion read?

#58 So....now I really want to read it. Because I am THAT perverse.

Hi Richard, I saw over on the WhatareyouReading thread that you'd reviewed The Sheltering Sky. I read it recently (and loved it) and wanted to point out that it wasn't Tunner who was traveling with his mother-- it was Eric Lyle and his mother. I'm not sure I remember an implied affair between Tunner and Port. Tunner slept with Kit, and Port flirted with Eric knowing that he could convince him to do him the favor of driving Tunner away. -- Jenny

>62 tututhefirst: Oh my yes! It would be great as a discussion book, judging by our long-ago two and a half hour session. Lots of excitement and passion unleashed.

>63 laytonwoman3rd: LOLOL Well, have fun, and keep the gin bottle handy to dull the pain.

>64 GCPLreader: Huh! Well, blow me down and call me Shorty...my memory is clearly not what it once was. Thanks for telling me, Jenny!

BkC9) MANSERVANT AND MAIDSERVANT by Ivy Compton-Burnett: Next to SONS AND LOVERS, the worst, most horrendously offensively overrated piece of crap I've read in my life.

I have no reason to revisit this decision. I still feel slightly ill when I think about this boring, annoying book. I left my copy on the subway so some wino would pick it up and realize that life has more to offer than misery, boredom, and despair.

I refuse to go any further into this book's gynecology. I hate it too much, and yet still am not masochist enough to go at it with both barrels and an AK-47.

rd, you really need to stop holding back.. it isn't good for you might happen

I C-B's work is a bit of a slog (of treacle)

Sons and Lovers I read at a very "tender" age...and it affected me, as such....good adolescent angst, as only DH could dish...

❥

I was in a foul humor, so I decided to take it out on a book I hate.

Rating: 0.125* of five

BkC51) SONS AND LOVERS by D.H. Lawrence: The worst, most horrendously offensively overrated piece of crap I've read in my life.

Yeup. Since I'm in a real bitch-slappin' mood, here goes.

The Book Report: Sensitive, aesthetic nebbish gets born to rough miner and his neurasthenic dishcloth of a wife. She falls in love with her progeny and tries to Save Him From Being Like His Father, which clearly is a fate worse than death. So, lady, if you didn't like the guy, why didn't you just become a prostitute like all the other women too dumb to teach did in the 19th century?

Things drone tediously on, some vaguely coherent sentences pass before one's eyes, the end and not a moment too soon.

My Review: Listen. DH Lawrence couldn't write his way out of a wet paper bag. The reason his stuff is known at all today is the scene in Lady Chatterly where the gamekeeper bangs her from behind. Oh, and those two dudes wrestling naked in front of the fireplace in Women in Love.

Believe me when I tell you, those are *the* highlights of the man's ouevre. The hero of this book, Paul MOREL, is named after a bloody MUSHROOM! He's as soft and ishy and vaguely dirty-smelling as a mushroom, too.

Lawrence was one of those lads I'd've beaten the snot out of in grade school, just because he was gross. Weedy and moist are the two words that leap forcefully to mind when I contemplate his sorry visage, which exercise in masochistic knowledge-seeking I do not urge upon you.

If you, for some reason, liked this tedious, crapulous drivel, then goody good good, but if we're friends, I urge you not to communicate your admiration to me. It will not do good things for our relationship. I more easily forgive Hemingwayism than affection for this.

"I more easily forgive Hemingwayism than affection for this." - hmm very tough call there!

I wish you wouldn't pussyfoot around so. What did think of the book?????

So I can confess I did read The old man and the sea in highschool and liked it back then ;-)

This makes me laugh

Whoa, what did you really think about Sons and Lovers, Richard? Beneath those restrained comments I sensed you didn't like it or think much of its author. Just reading between the lines.

Don't know whether any Lawrence-loyalists will rally to contest your review, but I agree with you. He has always seemed so overwrought and over the top and - as you point out - not very good.

>70 roundballnz: Surprisingly easy for me, Alex. I don't like Hemingway, I don't think his style works all that well applied across a whole career since it gets unendurably precious and distastefully pit-sniffing, but Lawrence simply could not write. He might have accidentally produced a pleasing sentence or two, or thought up a pretty image now and again, but basically...dreck.

>71 laytonwoman3rd: It was one for the ages. The ages from twelve to fifteen, to be precise.

>72 FAMeulstee: Great HEAVENS, Anita, you were in HIGH SCHOOL! No reasonable person could blame you for your likes and dislikes in that rough transitional period! Now, if you re-read it as a grown woman and like it, your dispensation is lifted and the TransAtlantic Book-Storm Troopers will leave Frank an IOU for one wife.

>73 Aljensen: I'm glad to hear it!

>74 jnwelch: Simultaneously overheated and half-baked. When you think about it, that's quite an achievement.

Review: 3 of fifty

Title: THE CIRCULAR STAIRCASE

Author: MARY ROBERTS RINEHART

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Book Report: Miss Rachel Innes, spinster of circa-1908 Pittsburgh, inheritrix of two children now relatively safely launched into adulthood, and possessor of a large automobile, determines that her town residence needs significant tarting up and, to avoid the attendant chaos and disarray, moves herself, her ladies' maid, and her now-adult charges to Sunnyside, the large and vulgar country home of a local banker. As he, his wife, and his step-daughter (note old-fashioned spelling, it is relevant) are traveling to the almost foreign climes of California, Miss Innes and entourage are left in possession of Sunnyside (a more dramatic misnomer is hard to envision) for the entire summer that renovating Miss Innes's home will require. Perfect!

Not so much.

Miss Innes's maid begins the descent into spookyworld. Noises, disappearing people, mysterious presences, all cause her to think Sunnyside is haunted. Hah, says the commonsensical Miss Innes, there's a rational explanation for it all. And there is. Sadly enough.

When people start dying, as in "no longer sucking air," Miss Innes gets a wee tidge tense. When the homeowner's step-daughter shows up, in a state of complete collapse and her ward's evident amour for the girl makes it impossible to turf her out, Miss Innes begins a logical and determined effort to explain the bizarre happenings at Sunnyside. Amid this tough-enough assignment comes the local banker's reported death from far-off California, the revelation that he embezzled A MILLION DOLLARS!! (a Madoff-sized payday in 1908), and the disappearance of the embezzled bank's head cashier (also the amour of Miss Innes's female ward), and the impossibility of keeping good staff conspire to give good Miss Innes many a sleepless night. In the end, all is well, and the redoubtable Miss Rachel Innes possesses all the facts.

My Review: God bless her cotton socks, this lady is just a blast to read about! I like formidable old dowagers. (Lady Grantham aside.) They are so *certain* of their Rightness that it's fun to watch them screw up and fail. This being fiction, the formidable old dowager in question doesn't fail, and manages not to be any more overbearing, opinionated, and adamantine than is absolutely necessary.

Rinehart was a decent writer, and a decent plotter, and so the book offers pleasures in both those measures. It's not going to make the Louise Pennyites abandon the Mistress to read only Rinehart. It's over a century old, and thrills and chills come at a dramatically different pace and price in our time. But frills and furbelows aside, a good figure is a good figure, and this book has a good figure.

Visit your great-grandmother's world for a while. You might surprise yourself with how much you enjoy it.

#69: I am just reading that one, and I am relieved to see I am not the only one who hates it. I am 60% through and find it more and more unbearable. Not only the story which at least has the benefit of being kind of realistic (I know at least 5 such mothers and their sons), but even more the writing with those short sentences without any content. It reads like a draft version. I am still determined to finish it, but it will be a long while before I read the next DHL, if ever.

So - thanks for that review, Richard

Review:4 of fifty

Title: THE YELLOW ROOM

Author: MARY ROBERTS RINEHART

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Book Report: Poor Carol Spencer. She has a tiresome semi-invalid mama, a married older sister in love with her own comfort, a war hero brother who, despite being 10 years her elder acts like a schoolboy, and a dead body. Of her brother's previous unknown trollop. Oh, also wife. Plus she's a mother. (Not Carol, the dead trollop/wife.)

Who killed the trollop...errr, lady? Why? And importantly, why in the Spencer family summer home when no Spencers were there? Why did the killer then go on to kill the Spencers' housekeeper while that worthy was in the hospital with a broken leg? (And my haven't things changed since 1945 when this book was published...imagine being admitted to a hospital for a broken leg now, unless it required orthopedic surgery to reconstruct!)

Was it the brother, who understandably did not wish to remain married to a trollop since he's from the summer-home class and, not that much is made of this, engaged to a bombshell of a rich girl? Was it the sister, selfish chilly nasty piece of work that she is? Was it one of the elderly neighbors, for reasons unknown but probably having to do with their mysteriously absent grandson and sole living descendant? Or was it Carol's own missing, presumed dead, fiancé, the boy from the little house down the hill from her big, fancy one?

My Review: Very much a product of its time, this story has aged less well than some of Rinehart's earlier ones because the mere existence of a murder and the presence of a sleuth are considered to be enough to make the story work. The major, gaping holes (characters appear then vanish never to be heard of again, gods come out of more boxes than UPS ever saw, the sleuth learns things that we don't which is a major cheat) weren't really a big issue in mysteries of the day. They were part and parcel of Dame Agatha's bag of tricks, too.

The local cop is fat and shrewd, but not imaginative enough to outmatch the sleuth, and his deputy is an idiot who sleeps a lot. The local spinster busybody has a horse-face and a crush on the Spencer brother, so she elects to lie about something she saw. The Irish cook starts out with two maids, who suddenly vanish from mention, but still takes trays to Miss Carol and brings her endless cups of coffee. That woman ain't no cook, since the stove is an old coal range and speaking from experience, you turn your back on the fire in one of those babies and you ain't cookin' you's burnin'.

But I reserve my main snort of disgust for the romantic subplot that Rinehart, God bless her cotton socks, felt was crucial to a successful story. This has to be the most inept romance I've ever seen in all my days. The sleuth, a war hero recovering from his wounds sustained in about four battles if Rinehart's to be believed, is Major Dane, a well-born member of the pre-war FBI and now some sort of unspecified spook for the war effort. Carol sees him as trying to frame her brother one minute, trying to frame her sister the next, and then swoons into his arms with a "daaarrrling!" and a kiss. Dane, for his part, seems annoyed by her privileged cluelessness...yet he's supposed to be the grandson of a Senator and a scion himself. Which is it?

So why read this book, since there are so many flaws in it? Back in 1945, a series character wasn't strictly speaking necessary for a writer to get a mystery published, and Rinehart was America's Dame Agatha, so no hook there since this book has no repeat characters. I don't make any kind of a case for you to seek it out. But if one swims your way for some reason, and there's an afternoon you'd like to wile away with a complete read, this will not hurt you in the least. Won't fascinate you, and no one anywhere will make a case (unless I'm completely wrong about the subject) that the characters will haunt your dreams. Heck, they're already fuzzing out of my mental TV screen. But there is pleasure to be had in just relaxing with a perfectly okay book. No demands, no strings, won't change your life, just...nice.

Literary Afternoon Delight.

Review: 5 of fifty

Title: GOD'S LITTLE ACRE

Author: ERSKINE CALDWELL

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Book Report: First published in 1933, when the author was a mere slip of a thirty-year-old, this novel starts in a hole and keeps digging deeper and deeper. Literally, not metaphorically. Well, literally AND metaphorically.

Ty Ty and his sons are poor white Southern Americans in the grimmest economic times of the 20th century. There was revolution brewing because of the depth of the economic crisis, and the complete absence of any safety net for anyone at all. Ty Ty and his boys, like modern-day conservatives, are digging for gold in their unpromising Georgia home's unyielding land, and finding lots of dirt and not much else. The womenfolk are trying to keep food on the table and as many rapists as possible outside. The ones at home, well, we all have our crosses to bear, don't we?

Since the land's being dug up for gold instead of farmed for food, the boys go off to work in the textile mills. Yes Virginia, there once was a textile industry in the USA. Now it's all in Pakistan, where a couple dollars a month is a (barely) living wage. Mill owners naturally want to keep their costs down to maximize profits, and families are going hungry to make sure the rich get richer (is this sounding familiar?), until the unions come to town. With predictable results.

There's death, there's misery, there's hard work followed by failure, there's more misery, the end.

My Review: And what an end! What a beautiful piece of writing this is, and how very grim the picture it paints in its simple shapes and clear colors. There is nothing unclear or muddy about the book, except the minds of the characters, and that is by the author's design.

The search for gold isn't as stupid as it sounds. The Georgia north was Cherokee country until white folks found gold in them thar hills and booted the native inhabitants off the land. In the novel, some few flakes are found, but never enough to do what Ty Ty wants, which is free him and his family from want and dependence on others. It works well as a metaphor for the frayed and threadbare Murrikin dream, too: Keep working keep working keep working and the rewards will (not) come! Or if they come, at what cost, and ultimately to what end?

The title, God's Little Acre, refers to Ty Ty's gift of one acre of his farmland to God to support the church. But because Ty Ty wants gold for himself and his family, he moves the location of the acre at will, so he'll be sure not to give his gold away. Not so unfamiliar here, either, is it?

Murder, betrayal, lust, rage, and that's all before we get to the workplace! Is it any wonder this book was called obscene by the forces of reaction? It *was* obscene! The horrible exploitive relationships in every single nook and cranny of the world the characters inhabit is obscene. The dreadful ignorance, the grinding and maliciously intentional poverty, all of it obscene!

Sadly, with the slow withering of liberalism, the story's outlines are rapidly recrudescing in the modern Murrika being carved from the living flesh of the unwashed masses too drugged on the crack of an American Dream they will never, ever attain by Lotto or hard work or virtue rewarded. The horror is we've been here before, and a few brave and good men tried to steer us away from this hideous abyss. And here we are, back again.

Sick-making, isn't it? Read the book, and use it as a cautionary tale.

Well, damn...it's God's Little Acre....another Erskine Caldwell....

I must give you a Thumb, Sweetie...because you nailed it...socioeconomically.....and literary

I read most of Caldwell's work...back in the day..in high school and college..Tobacco Road was considered "porn" when i was a kid in the 50s.....which was weird cause most of the people in our neighborhood were god-damn hillbillies...and i come from White Trash on both sides (though my Dad's side would deny it)

Makes no never mind...thank you fer yer review (now, i gotta rustle me up some Caldwell)

***smooch***

Woo, that's some review, Richard. Thanks. I started out with wiseacre thoughts about Darryl associating the taste of Maxwell House coffee with Georgia clay, but I sobered up quickly. That's some tale. Thumb from me.

yowza >8 richardderus:-O

oracle says:

213.5, uncertainty 4

LibraryThing thinks you probably will like God's Little Acre (prediction confidence: very high)

lol

Jeesh Kath..do you actually look at LT predictions? I'd be afraid...

I always look if I go to read a review.. I like the oracle..
it's like a game. even if I have read and rated a book with 4 stars it might think I won't like it,
or vice versa :) a bult in magic 8 ball!

I love my Magic 8 Ball

...but don't trust LT with my book recommends.....but, i have certain "tastes" that wouldn't figure, to begin...too much difference

I didn't say I followed it.. I do enjoy it though.. whimsy.
Whimsy is good.

Erskine Caldwell is unjustly neglected or relegated to the 'pulp fiction' category. Thanks for waving his flag around, Richard.

>87 laytonwoman3rd: So true, so true. Kneel to the Rising Sun is an amazingly good collection of stories, and the title story is one of the greats of Southern literature.

BkC10) KINDRED by Octavia E. Butler: Excellent!!

I still agree with myself. And what better review for Valentine's Day than this time-travel novel in which a modern-day African-American woman is summoned by her slave-owning ancestor to rescue him at critical moments, and then must pimp her slave ancestress to the slave owner to ensure that she is born?

The Book Report: Kinda spoilered that above, and there's the basic plot in a nutshell...time travel, ownership of humans, personal morality versus survival versus the endless mutability of human emotion. You know, the Big Questions.

My Review: Oh my heck. Modern African American, circa 1976, makes her way in the slave society of 1815, and all that that entails. It's not an easy, fluffy read, but it's amazing how Butler pulls no punches and still manages to keep the easy, smug path of good = noble, bad = horrible, from making her characters into masks capable of expressing only one emotion. I liked reading the book because it pulls no punches, and it left me breathless at frequent intervals with its complete willingness to engage all, each, every, facet of human love.

Octavia Butler, gone too soon, wrote this meditation on survival when she was abour thirty. What a feat that is. So young, and so sharply critical of denial and misdirection...so ready to face up to the underlying motivations and the foundational lies of each and every character's identity...what she must have been like as a friend! Her insights would be Buddha-like, if they were anything like the honest and unsparing insights she used in creating this book.

Beautiful, hard, fiery. Like a diamond, it will cut anything you can show it.

Thanks for the excellent review. I note that this book is on my TBR list since 2010. Time to read it!

>90 Whisper1: Srsly...do not wait...make it next!

and my local library lets me down - the only Butler they have is the third in a series:(

Oh well I'll keep my eyes open, thanks for the review Richard.

sigh.

I have it too.. unread.
I am always saying that? What is it that I am reading???

Oooh, good. I have it. I wonder where? *purses lips*

>92 calm: Oh boo hiss calm! That rots on ice! I don't have my copy anymore, but if I run across one I'll send it to you.

>93 mckait: Not this. I don't know how you've missed it, though, and hope you'll make up the deficit soon.

>94 laytonwoman3rd: Ah the evergreen question: "Now where did I put that..."

"Now where did I put that..." .. A question I have been asking about half a dozen books lately..

Wonderful review, Richard, thank you.

>96 mckait: Round these parts, books ain't the only things I ask that about.

>97 AMQS: Thank you, Anne, it's nice of you to say!

There was a time, pre-LT, when I knew exactly where every book in my possession was to be found. That was probably 1500 books ago. I should go check and see how many book I've added to my collection since entering what was here to begin with. No.....no...I probably shouldn't do that.

a'right a'ready. you certainly are pushy. i'm going to have to upgrade my audible membership at this rate. jeez. it was that last bit that got me. you know, the fire and ice and diamonds and whatever you can show it part. hmmmmph.

>99 laytonwoman3rd: Oh goodness gracious me, NO! That way madness lies!

>100 mirrordrum: Now Ellie...would *I* try to push *you* around? Just because you haven't yet read one of America's great literary treasures? Simply on account of your moral and intellectual turpitude in not reading this book before now? Perish forbid, madam!

>89 richardderus: I feel almost fated now to read Kindred. I was catching up on some podcasts on my way to work this morning where Kindred was recommended in two different episodes. I'd never heard of it before, and now here you are, doing the same...

>102 Copperskye: GIIIVVVE IIIIIN GIIIIIVVVVVE IIIIIINNNNNNN

WHOA! - never read any Caldwell - I'm sure the good sisters didn't consider it suitable for young catholic ladies to need to know about such things....must go see if I can rustle up an old copy to throw onto the "Richard says READ IT!" pile. Of course, you realize that even it I did manage to read it, I'd never be able to review it because your standard is too intimidating. Perhaps I'll just link to yours.

>104 tututhefirst: Oh ha ha ha, Popular Blog Lady, I just snap out some observations and people like 'em or they don't. I'm happy you like them!

Review: 6 of fifty

Title: NIGHTWOOD

Author: DJUNA BARNES

Rating: 1.75* of five

The Book Report: Serial adultress and all-around malcontent Robin leaves her too, too unendurable husband "Baron Felix" after presenting him with the desired heir...only the child is crippled...and takes up with Nora, a whiny dishrag of a nothing-much who represents Robin's desire for dreary domesticity. Needless to say, Robin can't stand too much of that and leaves Nora at home so she can cavort and disport herself with all and sundry. While so doing, Robin meets Jenny, a serial widow (why does no one wonder how this dry, juiceless woman LOST FOUR HUSBANDS?!) and a sociopath whose sole pleasure in life is making others unhappy. Bye bye Nora, hello Jenny, and ultimately Robin seeks the help of Dr. O'Connor, a male transvestite and fraudulent medico, with predictable results. The ending of the book is one of the weirdest I've ever read, involving Nora, Robin, a dog, and a truly weird accident in a church.

My Review: Queer Ulysses. Famous for "raunchy" sex descriptions, most of which would not raise a Baptist preacher's eyebrows in this day and time. Dreadful, sesquipedalian sentences recounting unpleasant peoples' doings in endlessly recursive and curiously directionless arabesques.

Do not read this after the age of twenty-four. It will cause your nose hairs to ignite and your T-zone to break out in painful cysts. Seriously...don't.

"Do not read this after the age of twenty-four. It will cause your nose hairs to ignite and your T-zone to break out in painful cysts. Seriously...don't."

so this could be a new form of torture ?????

Oh good....one I DON"T have to feel bad about choosing to ignore.

k

I don't know which draws the most laughter, Sweets...your review of Nightwood...which I read, as though it belonged in Scripture, when I was in college....or my reaction the last time I read it..the walls are still echoing with my guffaws....Ah, youth!

Ol' Djuna did traffic with the weirdness-for-its-own-sake....a pity, that

;-}

BkC11) THE DA VINCI CODE by Dan Brown: I plead the Fifth.

Hey, this is a high-brow place, and I have a fairly public profile around here! Think what it would do to my rep if I admitted that this book kept me up one whole night flipping pages as fast as I could read them!

The Book Report: Seriously, no one needs a synopsis of this, do they? Vast global conspiracy to hide the existence of a bloodline descended from Christ? Murder, mayhem, self-flagellation, Catholics as bad guys, too old guy falls in love with too young girl who proves to be Jesus's great-to-the-eighth granddaugher? YOU know.

My Review: Well, I don't love the writing and I am a little tired of the cottage industry the novel has spawned and I don't even acknowledge that there ever was a Jesus, so what's left to say?

Dan Brown's a fucking GENIUS, is what's left to say. What an amazing achievement this book is! The research, the synthesis...amazing. The plotting, the pacing...outstanding. Kudos, bravoes, and yodels of praise to you, Mr. Dan Brown, for the work you put in and for the vision you had.

But goddesses, you really need to hone those sentence-building skills.

I enjoy Dan Browns writing.. and I am not ashamed of it. However I am not what one would
call a discerning reader. I read what I want to read, fluff, thriller or whatever.

Dan brown is unlikely to be thought of a a great literature writer - but can he put a good story together ? I think we all know the answer to that.

>112 mckait:, 113 It's all down to taste, and he doesn't suit mine in the writing realms, but he's a storyteller par excellence!

BkC12) DOUBLE INDEMNITY by James M. Cain: I liked the book better than the movie.

I don't think I agree with myself on this one. I like both book and movie, and the movie version is a wonderful treat available free on YouTube. I'll put the two on a par.

The Book Report: Yet again I feel like a fool offering a summary of a story doubtless extremely well-known: Young wife of older, boring man seeks life insurance for the coot from desperately smitten insurance agent. His lust for her leads him way past the usual level of customer service, leading him to establish an alibi for them both AFTER killing the old bore...errr, boy. Hardly a spoiler since it's the whole point of the movie.

The payoff doesn't go quite as smoothly as the conspirators might wish, and after various cool twists and turns, the story wraps up with a humdinger of an ending that I am gnawing my knuckles to the bone not to reveal. Many, including >moi, saw it coming on p2, but let me assure you that, while almost fanning the last pages of this short novel in your haste to find out what you probably already know is going to happen, you will not be bored.

Or if you are, please, if you value our friendship, don't tell me.

My Review: *gruntled sigh* Noir books and films explain, if one needs an explanation, the concept "it hurts so good." The characters are low, vulgar trollops and cads (my favorite kind of people!), and the good guys...the cops, the mothers, the priests...are all such knobs, such squares, so unspeakably unhip as to be dismissable.

Yeah, that's a life worth livin', that is. And we get to live it vicariously through these louche, blowsy people while maintaining our public solid-citizen-ness. For some folks, it's horror novels; for some, it's technothrillers; for just about everyone in the world, based on sales figures, it's online porn; all of us, each and every one, need to get out of our own humdrum skins and into the world of another, very different character once in a way. (Of course, by that reasoning, I'd read John Cheever and John Updike like a madman, with their dull straight boys lusting after slatternly women, this being the polar opposite of my own needs and desires. There are exceptions to every rule.)

And in Double Indemnity, what could be more deeply satisfying that the idea of dressing in the coolest clothes, wearing the hottest, sexiest shoes, and causing such an insane level of desire in someone that he's willing to murder another human being to be with you? What more powerful feeling in the world can there be than to make a reasonable, adult male go bonkers, throw away every scruple and moral that he's ever had, and do your bidding? And for the boys, what could possibly be hotter than a lust-object that teases and promises and offers oh-so-coyly to fulfill the dark fantasy of total control, of ownership, that comes (pardon) from breaking every rule *at the desired one's behest and behalf*? It's mutual submission and mutual domination in a subtle, minute-by-minute exchange of roles.

OF COURSE one wouldn't do that in Real Life, would one?, so that's why James M. Cain wrote the story. And it is BLAZING HOT, on screen or on page.

Read this bad boy. You get to channel your inner naughty, naughty, naughty self. I don't suggest doing either the reading or the movie-viewing alone. If I need to explain why, you shouldn't be reading this review.

Loved The Postman Always Rings Twice (both movie versions) and Mildred Pierce, but have somehow missed Double Indemnity. That will have to be corrected.

I don't suggest doing either the reading or the movie-viewing alone Heh, heh, heh. Word.

>116 laytonwoman3rd: Oooh, Linda3rd, this one's as hawt as Postman and as twisted as Mildred! You are in for a short, bittersweet treat.

Great review, RD! I loved all 3 of the key Cain books, but this one is the stand-out. I'm so glad you included the film, which might even over-shadow it. How about Edward G.? Does it get any better?
I've heard it mentioned that it was a love story between the men not the women. Is it like that in the book?

No, not really. It's a huge overreach of the subtext IMHO. EGR loves good Freddie Mac, but it's the son-he-never-had love. On that level, okay. I've heard a lot of queer theorists go into the homoerotic blah blah blah, and frankly it makes me cringe.

And the book even less so than the movie!

Review: 7 of fifty

Title: MY LIFE IN FRANCE

Author: JULIA CHILD

Rating: 3.875* of five

The Book Report: Truth in advertising had no greater champion than Julia Child. Her book is called exactly and precisely what it is: The narrative of her life in France. She begins her book on November 3, 1948, with the Child family landing at Le Havre, getting into their gigantic Buick station wagon, and motoring off across northern France towards Paris. They stop at thirty-six-year-old native Californian Mrs. Child's first French restaurant, La Couronne, where her husband Paul (already fluent in French from his first stint living there more than 20 years before) consults with M. Dorin, the maitre d', and decides the young marrieds (relatively speaking, as he's 46 by then) will have a sole meuniere with a glass of wine! I mean! A nice Republican-raised gal from Pasadena, California, drinking wine with lunch! Who heard of this?! Mais certainement not Mme. Child, nee McWilliams!

It was the beginning of a life-long love affair between Julia Child and la belle France, and Julia Child and la cuisine Francaise. It led to several books, several TV series, and a long, happy life spent teaching, teaching, teaching. Mme. Child had found her metier, at close to forty, in a day and time where living past sixty-five was ** considered to be ancient. In the process, the person she became changed the American, and possibly the world as a result, culture surrounding food. Yet Julia Child wrote this book with her husband's great-nephew Alex Prud'homme, who tells us in his brief Foreword that getting his garrulous old relative to open up about the feelings and secrets that make up the majority of any human life. His degree of success was formidable, given the generational and gender-induced reticence he fought against to extract the juicy bits from her.

Bravo, M. Prud'homme, et merci bien par tout le faire.

My Review: Julia Child was a fixture around our house when I was young. I got the TV-watching habits I carry with me to this good day at a tender age, and part of the formative process was The French Chef. My mother didn't like Mrs. Child much. She was a fan of M.F.K. Fisher's food work, which wasn't in sympathy with Mrs. Child's careful and precise measuring and nice and accurate timing. Mama was a feast-maker, not a dinner-preparer, and that's why she watched Julia Child programs.

I learned about enthusiastic appreciation of food from my mother and Mrs. Child. I was never a picky eater, and only rejected a few foods. (I still hate corn on the cob.) It always seemed like the ladies were having so much fun making these weird dishes! It made sense to me that it would be fun to eat them, and so it proved to be.

In reading this memoir, I immersed myself in the flow of Child's later-life awakening to the joy of food and the sheer exhilaration of preparing special and delicious and carefully thought-out meals for one's loved ones. While I understand the co-author's challenge in balancing the need to afford the famous personality privacy against the buying public's desire to know the dirt, I can only lament that Prud'homme either didn't or couldn't press Child on the topic of her childlessness. I suspect burying herself in research and in obsessive experimentation was a means of assuaging her sadness at not being a mother. She was, or at least she is painted in this book as being, a very nurturing person, and given the prevailing attitudes of the era, it is unlikely that this absence did not cause her pangs of regret. I would have liked to see some exploration of that, mostly because I think glittering surfaces (which this book limns in loving detail) are even more beautiful when seen with shadows. It's like sterling silver flatware: When dipped into a cleaning bath as opposed to hand-polished, it's true that all the tarnish comes off, but all the character does too, and the pattern is flat and blah for lack of a bit of dark contrast that is left by the more labor-intensive hand polishing method.

The delight of the book was in Child's almost orgasmic recollections of the foods and wines she and her dearly beloved husband Paul Child ate and drank across the years. In the course of learning to cook the haute bourgeoise cuisine that she made famous in her native land, Child came alive to the joys and thrills of sight, smell, and taste in a way that only truly delicious food can cause a person to become. It was the positive counterpoint to her manifold frustrations in collaborative cook-bookery. The travails of preparing the Magnum Opus that is Mastering the Art of French Cooking simply don't do enough to make the author come off the page and join me in my reading chair. I rate books based on this type of measure, this degree of ability to enfold and immerse me in the narrative and the emotional reality of the tale being told. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, but I wasn't swept into it and away to France circa 1950, and that was what I came to the read expecting to happen. In fact, when I saw the film partially based on this book, Julie & Julia, I was completely swept away and eager to read the source material.

In the end, I got more out of watching Meryl Streep enact Julia Child than I did reading Julia Child reporting herself. I was disappointed.

And hungry.

Review: 8 of fifty

Title: THE FROZEN THAMES

Author: HELEN HUMPHREYS

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Book Report: It is a matter of historical record that the Thames, giant river and estuary that drains the heart of Southern England, has frozen solid forty times in the span of record-keeping that we possess. Author Humphreys sets about telling the story of these extraordinary events, one at a time, and in a very compressed and taut way, by giving us brief slices of the lives of people experiencing the once-in-a-lifetime event. Each of these stories is very, very short, and often accompanied by lovely historical illustrations of the Thames and of the Frost Fairs that took place on the mighty river.

My Review: This is a physically beautiful book. The paper is heavy matte-coated stock, perfect for the illustrations and the nature of the text. It's all too rare to find such a lovely match between subject and medium coming from a major US publishing house. I was pleasantly surprised by this.

I was a little less pleasantly impressed by the somewhat smug little Author's Note, in which Humphreys says that, due to the exigencies of global warming, she's trying with this set of stories to preserve “...the idea of ice {in} our consciousness.”

Oof.

One whole star off for hubris, and for the slightness of the edifice built in memoriam for the concept of ice. Much much more would be required to capture an essence of the vast power of ice. Enough to say that this book is meant to capture some of the experience of ice as a transformative force. Going that extra length to make it so global...well, that's just too far, too much, and too bad.

Review: 9 of fifty

Title: KNEEL TO THE RISING SUN

Author: ERSKINE CALDWELL

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Book Report: Erskine Caldwell, author of the indelible splotches on the American Southern escutcheon God's Little Acre and Tobacco Road, here collects seventeen of his short stories written before 1934, and set in the interwar period South, that was uneasily eyeing change and almost imperceptibly moving into the 20th Century...much against the white folks's will.

Caldwell says, in his introduction to this collection, that many writers are guided away from the short story format by well-meaning self-appointed cicerones. The novel, an aspiring writer is told, is the principle written medium, and short stories are a dead end. Pfui, says novelist Caldwell, some stories only need a few hundred words, and don't let anyone tell you any different.

Caldwell was right. Some stories don't need a novel. Even if some of these collected tales could be blown up into good novels, they're right-sized in this memorable, wonderful (if depressing) body of good work.

My Review: For this review of a collection of short stories, I'm adopting what I've come to call “The Bryce Method.” for the gentleman who first brought it to my attention on Goodreads. I will offer capsule reviews of the stories that make up the collection, since they're the important players and not the gestalt of the collection as such.

Candy-Man Beechum: A very short tale of Candy-Man, a seven-foot-tall mule-skinner who, one fateful Friday night, sets off across the fields and through the white folks's town to see his little yellow gal. Stopping for a fish-fry dinner, Candy-Man runs afoul of the white night policeman, refuses to stop and submit to being imprisoned for the crime of being on his way, and is shot dead in front of everyone at the fish-fry. He dies, however, glad not to be cowed and submissive, but instead as a man and worthy of respect.

The Walnut Hunt: Church and Ray, two young country lads, meet up to hunt them some walnuts from the trees growing wild around P.G. Howard's farm. They jump over ditches in the red cotton-farming dirt to get to the grove closest to them, and damn if they don't find somebody's beaten them to all the walnuts in there. The boys jump another ditch when Ray says he sees someone already diwn there. Scared, the two lean over the ditch and see a strange sight: Annie, the town pump, at the bottom of the red-clay ditch staring up at the sky and screaming! She makes the boys promise they won't tell. Tell what, they ask, since they have not clue one about what they're witnessing. “I'm having a baby,” replies Annie. With that, she screams again, and the boys take off running like the Devil himself is after them. Ray, a little more scared than Church, and a little less emotional about it, reaches his front porch without even checking to see if his sobbing buddy has gotten up from the stubble he fell down in there in P.G. Howard's cotton field.

Childhood ends for us all. For some, the ending is rougher than for others.

Horse Thief: Mr. John Turner's hired man takes Betsy, the rawboned mare, out for a clandestine rendezvous with Lud Moseley's younger daughter, Naomi, one Thursday night. Since he's only supposed to call on Naomi on Sundays, he won't tell Mr. John where he's going, though Mr. John pretty much knows, and gets a chuckle out of it. Seeing Naomi and her older sister arguing through their bedroom window, he knows he'll have to wait an hour or more for Naomi to sneak out and meet him by the swing in her front yard, so to keep his presence a secret, he puts Betsy into an empty stall in Lud Moseley's barn. Comes midnight or one, he gropes around the unfamiliar barn, finds Betsy all unbridled and unharnessed, figures he did it himself in his excitement at seeing Naomi, bridles and harnesses the horse and rides off home to Mr. John Turner's. The next morning, Lud Moseley and the sheriff come to get him for horse theft! Turns out he took Lightfoot, Lud Moseley's calico horse, by mistake, and the only way out of trouble would be to tell the men that he was there to see Naomi...thus ruining her reputation, getting her into trouble with her pa, and breaking his promise that he'd do anything for her.

Even go to prison for being a horse thief. Which anyone who knows him knows he's not. Such is the role of honor among the not so bright Southern males.

The Man Who Looked like Himself: Luther Branch, past forty, can't catch a break or make a dime. No one in his little town can figure it out, why Luther can't sell a single solitary thing to anyone...why he can't even sell oranges to Mrs. Todd, who came out her front door to look at the ones Luther'd brought onto her porch! But everything changes when Luther, trying to tell Ben Howard at the grocery that he's decided to apply to get on the county poor farm, gets the break of his life: Henry needs a hog butchered AND NOW because it's been run over! Ben and Henry look Luther over, and decide then and there that this is Luther's calling: Butcher. Why, he even looks like a butcher.

Luther finally knows what he looks like, and so who he is: He looks like himself, and he's a butcher. He can finally take up life and make a living. He looks like himself, and he's a butcher. Every misfit's dream is to find the place he fits. Luther Branch does it.

Huzzah?

Maud Island: Jim and Milt are out camping on Maud Island with their Uncle Marvin the preacher when, alas alack and welladay, a shantyboat comes along to take advantage of the privacy afforded by being in the middle of the Mighty Mississippi River for Jane and Marge and Mr. Graham. And, it looks like, for Uncle Marvin the preacher too. He drinks a beer or two with the low companions foisted on him by fate, then rushes the boys off to the Tennessee shore to get themselves on home before he takes full advantage of his luck. Once home, the boys's Aunt Sophie wants to know the whereabouts of Uncle Marvin. They don't tell, and turns out they don't need to: Sophie lays into the absent Marvin Hutchins with fury and verve for taking up with another shantyboat girl. Thus do Milt and Jim learn, forcefully, that the adult world is riddled with secrets and most of them are sordid and creepy and involve lies and sex.

Childhood ends for us all.

The Shooting: A girl with a gun starts shooting up the town square, aiming for a man who is running as fast as he can away from her. Townsfolk are up in arms and along comes Toy Shaw, the local lawman. He's as scared as anyone else, but the crowds force him to deal with the scared girl with the big gun...he orders her to drop it, she refuses and fires again at the man she's trying to kill, then Toy shouts at her to aim for the sky, not to kill the man...she aims for the sky, drops the gun when it's empty, and swoons into her terrified would-be victim's arms. Toy, according to the townsfolk, saved the day. Sort of. From a girl with a gun.

Beats me what this one's got to say. Nothin' much, if you want my opinion.

Honeymoon: Claude Barker and Willeen Howard get married. It's Claude's first time with a white girl. Willeen, a willing young slut who's even offered herself to dimwitted ol' Crip who works down at the gas station, has gone and tied herself to no-account Claude, who'd rather shoot pool than takes his low-rent bride on a low-rent honeymoon in his daddy's no-rent house. And there's poor Crip, all sad because he never took Willeen up on her offer.

Yeah, it's a slice of life. It's just not a slice I myownself fancy. In fact, Claude makes me queasy and Willeen makes me mad and the story is just distasteful. In the 1970s, there was a song called “Third-Rate Romance.” The chorus was, “Third-rate romance, low-rent redezvous...” I never knew it before now, but the band that sang it was made up of Erskine Caldwell readers.

Martha Jean: When Hal and his pal The Type get tossed out of their crap game, busted flat, they brave the sleety winter night long enough to get to Nick's, where they expect a quick loan and maybe something to eat. What they get is the stiff-arm, as Nick tries to close up for the night and save some money on heating his mostly empty place where no one's playing the slots. Then in walks a pretty young girl, who tells Nick her name's Martha Jean. Nick clearly decides he's going to have his way with her the instant he sees her, and she, hungry as she is, either doesn't see it or doesn't understand it until it's too late. Hal tries to step in between them, but gets no back-up from The Type or anyone else, and ends up on the floor after Nick clocks him. Next thing Hal knows, he's out the door int the cold and sleety night, listening to Martha Jean scream.

Erskine Caldwell did not think much of his fellow man. No indeed he did not, no sirree bob.

A Day's Wooing: Painfully shy Tuffy goes a-wooin' Miss Nancy after he moves the cows over to the johnson grass to give them a change of diet. He can't make himself say a single word to Miss Nancy, and her daddy Berry, sitting on the front porch with the rest of the family having a late summer Sunday watermelon, has to carry the conversation pretty much by himself. Carry it he does, as Tuffy can't make a sound to express the fact that he's come to ask for Nancy's hand in marriage. Finally, Nancy's pill of a brother drives Tuffy away by snapping him with a garter and urging him to go over to Hardpan and pick up some girls with them. Tuffy, completely undone, runs back to his car and leaves. Berry is confused, Nancy is distraught, and the brothers go for another melon out of the field.

It must be torture to be shy. I read this story while shouting “SPIT IT OUT!!” at hopeless, hapless Tuffy. I squirm and writhe in acute emotional pain when I read about this type of character. I try to help them, to shove my own “what's the worst that can happen” mindset into their “cannibals will eat me if I Do It” fearful, anxious brains. Oddly, it never works. sigh

The Cold Winter: A man in a single unheated room listens to the life of a little girl and her mother in the single room next door as a way of keeping himself from feeling the numbing, deadly cold of February outside. The mother and child talk and laugh, and go about their lives, in a curious state of waiting. Finally, the man hears what they've all come to wait for: the arrival of the child's father, and the tense confrontation that ends in murder. The man next door shivers under his blanket in his unheated room, doing nothing.

There is a paralysis that comes with desperation. The man in this story is desperate. He has no job, he has no life, he has no support system. And he has no reason left to do even the simplest thing, like open his door and look at the murder taking place in the room next to him. Caldwell thinks about this level of society a lot, as most good socialists did back in his day. Those were the days....

The Girl Ellen: Jim and Doris have a single girlfriend named Ellen. She shows up on Jim's one day off from the factory where he works, when he and Doris were planning to go for a swim. Flirty Ellen horns right on in and, as she follows Doris into the house to get ready for the three-way outing, turns to give the startled and displeased Jim a quick kiss on the lips. Things degenerate from there to the point where Doris is aware of the inappropriate flirtation because Jim is warming up to the idea of some adventure with Ellen. Sadly, things go wrong, Doris ends up dead on the bottom of the pool, and Jim walks miles home only to collapse exhausted on his own floor, falling asleep wondering if Ellen would be there when he awoke.

I once had a close relationship with a married couple. It ended badly because the wife developed strong and unreciprocated feelings for me. It was a painful situation. I can't imagine how such a three-legged stool can ever be anything but trouble waiting to happen. Happily for me, in my case no one died!

The Growing Season: Jesse's cotton crop is dying under the double threat of wire-grass (a horrible, horrible weed) and blistering, unrelenting heat. He's got no help, and he got behind in killing the wire-grass; his wife had a sunstroke year before, so she's no use, and there isn't even a Negro around the place. While he's out scraping the wire-grass, he finally loses what little is left of his sanity and kills Fiddler. What Fiddler might be, we are not told. Hounds are mentioned as a class of being, but not named, so Fiddler wouldn't seem to be a dog, and yet was kept chained outside under a chinaberry tree. Your guess is as good as mine, but my money's on Fiddler being a defective child or relative, because the wife has a twelve-volt conniption fit as Jesse's out killing Fiddler. Afterwards, Jesse's all energized and goes into battle with the wire-grass again. The end.

Yikes!

Daughter: After that last story, one shudders to think what this one might be about....

And rightly so, as it turns out. Jim Carlisle, sharecropper for Colonel Henry Maxwell, shot his eight-year-old daughter dead because she woke up again saying she was hungry. Her daddy couldn't take it any more. He'd made enough to feed the family on his share. Colonel Maxwell took it all away because a mule died on Jim's watch. The whole town's there at the jail to find out what happened, and when they hear, there assembles a mob set to free Jim from jail. The sheriff walks away on home.

Grim, grim, grim. Life among the poor isn't any fun ever, but ye gods and little fishes! The Slough of Despond looks like a movie star's pool compared to the dark, stagnant waters Caldwell has us treading in these stories!

Blue Boy: What fresh hell is this....

Blue Boy is a mentally defective Negro servant of Grady's, trained by the master to entertain his guests with repulsive party tricks. This New Year's Day, Grady has five counties' worth of relations to his hog-and-turkey dinner and, in the post-prandial stupor that a feast can leave a person in, has Blue Boy come and entertain the assembled company. For the last time, it turns out, as Blue Boy has a fatal fit after his last party trick.

Horrible, and horrifying, and completely without any tiniest stretch of human decency.

Slow Death: Doesn't THAT title just buoy your hopes for some relief from the grims!

Dave was a family man, a wife and three daughters and a modest rented home, until he lost his job at the fertilizer plant in South Augusta, Georgia. His landlord was unusually generous, letting him slide for six months. After that, though, the pressure to move cost Dave the lives of two daughters and his wife as windows were removed, doors taken away, and the January elements and hunger did the rest. Dave's remaining daughter was last seen in the arms of a policeman, carrying her off to a fate he doesn't know. Now Dave lives with Mike in a packing crate down under the Fifth Street Bridge, picks up odd jobs for fifty cents a day at most, and shares what he makes with the younger Mike, who tries not to take what little Dave has. This is the slow death of the title. It's speeded up for Dave as a traffic accident leaves him barely breathing and his fellow bums cluster around calling for the driver who hit him (a scumbag who denies Dave is even hurt, and finally runs away) to take Dave to the hospital, which never happens. Mike watches Dave die, the whole time refusing Dave's insistent urgings to take the half-dollar in his right-hand pants pocket. In the end, when a cop arrives, it's the bums he's eager to rush off, and Mike catches the worst of it, a billy club to the head. He wakes up being carried back to the Hooverville by his fellow bums.

Brother, can you spare a dime? It would surprise many of the people able to read this review online to know just how easy it is to lose everything. It's happened to me, and it took less than two years. Luckily for me I have a social network and I was not forced to live in a packing crate under a bridge. But believe someone who has been there when he tells you, conservatives and libertarians, the “generous handouts” that so many of you rail against were not there for me, and I was not able to...am still fighting for, in fact...access the disability benefits that my Social Security contributions over the years theoretically, and socialistically according to many, funded. My own savings long gone from fighting to retain my home against the insurance companies that refused and the hospital that demanded payments my employer-provided plan guaranteed, what hope was there? My family? No. My friends? Thank goodness, yes, but all personally granted generosity has a limit. So perhaps some of you who haven't experienced this upending and upheaval will pause to reflect on WHY your payment taxes, if some of those taxes save your fellow humans from starvation and homelessness, should cause you such pain.

Shut up and pay for what a decent person should not complain about funding: Food, shelter, and health care for all.

Masses of Men: Too disgusting even to describe. Mother so desperate she pimps her ten-year-old out for food because her husband was killed on the job and suddenly no one at the company knows who he was.

Greed appalls me at the best of times. This level of greed is unthinkable, and yet it's not. When I was unemployed, I was denied benefits because my employer didn't want to pay them. Explain to me again how capitalism and a free, unfettered market are good. I've forgotten.

Kneel to the Rising Sun: Lonnie Newsome, starving sharecropper of vile bully Arch Gunnard, is too cowardly, too stupid, and too hungry to ask for his due rations for himself, his father, and his wife, or to prevent Arch from sadistically cutting off Lonnie's dog's tail. When his father wanders away in the night, searching for food, and falls to his death into the hog pen, Lonnie wakes his Negro friend Clem up to help Lonnie look for the old man. Clem ends up talking back to Arch, and runs away when Arch calls up a lynching party. Lonnie, too weak and cowardly to resist the pressure on him, tells the lynch mob where to find Clem, sealing the Negro man's doom. After witnessing the murder, Lonnie goes home to his wife, who asks him to get them some food before his father comes home. Lonnie can't even bring himself to tell her what has happened to his father, and greets the dawn of another day as he greets them all: On his knees, unable to stand on his feet.

ye gods man! what a lot of words!
I did not read all through all of the reviews though. forgive?
Julia Child.. thinking of her makes me smile.

smooch

What wee Katie said....

Uhm, I think you need to write longer reviews.

>123 mckait:, 124, 125 HARUMPH! I pour my hearty, my soul, my everything into this, this masterwork of literary criticism and and you you philistines don't appreciate me *waaah* I'm not loved

Review: 10 of fifty

Title: ERNIE'S ARK

Author: MONICA WOOD

Rating: 4.875* of five

The Book Report: Ernie Whitten no longer has a purpose. He's been a pipe-fitter in Abbots Falls, Maine, at the papermill, for most of his life and now he's...retired, unemployed, not working, whatever...BORED. So he decides to build something.

An ark. Like in the Bible. Maybe miracles will come with it, for Marie, his sick wife.

Nine stories spin in their orbits around this one major event in Abbots Falls, involving town residents both willing and unwilling, and purposeful and aimless, and old and young.

My Review: Sparkles like a gem. The writing is delectable, a sensory feast and an emotional powerhouse. The characters are all limned in quick, indelible strokes and the way Monica Wood works is to make you care just this side of too much for each of them, and then moves on to the next one, all before your readerly feet are fully under you. It's a really cool trick, gotta tell ya.

I said once upon a time that I couldn't understand why this wasn't a TV series. I still don't get it. Abbotts Falls should be on the airwaves somehow. Don't hesitate to pick this book up. It will pay your attention back many times over.

Not the first time I have been called a philistine. Not even the first time by you... LOL

That was the first time I have ever been called a philistine. I'm hurt. I haven't slept since.

>129 Quixada: Drink more.

Oh I love MOnica Woods.....have read this one, and I love short stories....must go track this one down...

I particularly loved this collection, Tina, though I also liked My Only Story a lot.

Review: 11 of fifty

Title: LORD KALVAN OF OTHERWHEN

Author: H. BEAM PIPER

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Book Report: It has been said since there were people to say it that you have to leave home to find yourself. It was never more truly said than with Corporal Calvin Morrison, Pennsylvania State Police. He had to leave Earth as he knew it in order to feel at home at last.

Calvin, you see, ran afoul of a glitch in an alien (though still Earthly) technology, was swept into a temporal conveyor, and despite being thrust into a unique environment, still managed to defend himself against a fellow cop's energy weapon (versus Calvin's .38 revolver), and escape from the unknown but self-evident threat of that weird place.

But where in the world was he? It looks like the same spot he just left, only...not.

He comes to discover that he's traveled laterally in timespace, he's in the same geography as the Pennsylvania he left, but the people in this place aren't like him in culture or language. They're early-Renaissance level of technology, polytheistic Aryans from Asia. And their kingdom, Hostigos, is about to be swatted like a mosquito by the Big Baddies: the priests of the House of Styphon, the Gunpowder God. Thus does Calvin morph into Kalvan, the war leader, the bringer of miracles, the architect of a complete shift in this world's future history.

Now remember that alien-but-Earthly technology? Those Earthlings are from a different time-stream from thee and me, and from the Hostigos (called “Aryan-Transpacific” which specifies the direction of the ancient migration) time-stream. They developed high technology long before we did, and consequently used up the resources of their own Earth before we have. The Paratime Secret, which is the existence of aliens who can't be told from the natives, is policed by the Paratime Police, now headed by Verkan Vall, whose observation of Kalvan was supposed to be an elimination until some bright academic realized Kalvan was a rare case of a man out of time who was IN his new element, more so than he was in his native time-stream.

And so is born the Kalvan Subsector, a set of adjacent time-streams that define a new direction in history. It's a priceless chance to see how one exceptional individual can change the course of the world.

My Review: I bought my first copy of this book, published in 1965, from The Book Stall on Burnet Road in Austin, Texas, in 1970. It was a dime, and my mama blew a fuse. She had given me the dime to buy two National Geographics, and was furious I chose mind-rot over edification. As a result of this tantrum on her part, I treasured that little book until it finally and definitively disintegrated in 2006.

I loved the parallel universes in the book. I eagerly looked into strangers' faces, hoping one of them would be a Paracop and whisk me away from the life I didn't much like into a romantic, exciting life hopping the time-streams. (Not long after this, I encountered The Warlord of the Air by Michael Moorcock, and my fate was sealed...I was a chrononaut/Paracop Without Portfolio, and still am.)

I loved every pulpy, overheated sentence of the book. I said things like “yesterday at the latest” and “Dralm dammit” so often that Mama finally blew a fuse and took the book away. I didn't know then, though I strongly suspected it, that Piper was a crappy writer with a gift for the cliché. But hell, who gives the ass of a rat when you're swept away into a world different from and better than your own?

I feel the same way today. It's just that, at mumblety-two, I know it's not good writing. But I still don't care, if the story can sweep my considerable intellectual and physical avoirdupois off my aching, elderly feet.

I have recently taking a liking of these Alt history / cross worlds / Time Travel books and the above look interesting and have placed them on my wish list.

Ah, you got me again, Richard. The likelihood of my reading this book was zippo prior to your review, and now, somehow, in this timeslipstream, I'm gonna do it. Why do I have this sense of deja vu all over again? And my thumb's up again, too.

>134 usnmm2: Mike, one of the things I liked about this book was the military element to the storytelling. A lot of the time is spent analyzing tactics and it comes across as urgent and fascinating, instead of tedious, as it can be in less exciting tales.

>135 jnwelch: *evil Muttley laugh* My work here is done.

BkC13) IN COLD BLOOD by Truman Capote: As good as it gets. Only really good thing he wrote.

The first statement being unassailable, I'll focus on the second.

Breakfast at Tiffany's is fun, and a little bit risqué, but deathless literature? Even a well-made novella? Not so much. Other Voices, Other Rooms? A roman à clef that, because it dealt with hoMOsexuals (plural) in 1948, was much tutted over and hollered about. Reading it in the 21st century, one is struck at just how dreary adolescence as a subject of fiction almost always is, the queer factor being so very much less of an issue than it was back then when mastodons roamed Manhattan and giant krakens swam the seas.

His short stories, A Christmas Memory in particular, are sometimes brilliant. It was his métier. He excelled at it, and In Cold Blood is the anomaly in his career. The fact that he reputedly had a sexual affair with Perry Smith, and the fact that his cousin Harper Lee was deeply involved in his creation of the book, make me wonder if he wasn't simply a front for Harper Lee's second novel publication. He would have been better able to benefit from it, being completely Lee's opposite when it comes to publicity, and his personal emotional stake in the tale and its outcome would doubtless appeal to Lee's apparent help-the-underdog bias. Speculation, and without insider information, I grant you. But I can't help feeling the beauty and the shimmering perfection of In Cold Blood, coupled with the complete absence of any further publications from Capote after this book, are...suggestive.

None of which really matters a lot. In Cold Blood is excellent. Read it with the full expectation of readerly pleasure.

make me wonder if he wasn't simply a front for Harper Lee's second novel publication. Interesting observation, since so many people purported to suspect that Capote really wrote To Kill a Mockingbird.

>138 laytonwoman3rd: I know, Linda3rd, and I can't even begin to fathom that. I don't see Capote-ish tropes or phrases or suchlike in Lee's book. It could be that I am blind to them, it could simply be that they're not there, but IMHO In Cold Blood has more of Lee in it that To Kill A Mockingbird has Capote in it.

Review: 12 of fifty

Title: IT'S KIND OF A FUNNY STORY

Author: NED VIZZINI

Rating: 2* of five (p99)

Do you know what? It's NOT kind of funny! It's kind of irritating, and it's kind of stupid, and it's kind of droningly dull!

I do not ever, ever, ever want to read another syllable about a suicidal adolescent. EV. ER. I will cheerfully curse with boils and frigidity the next person who dares even *suggest* I read another word of adolescent angst.

Author Vizzini has talent, no doubt about it. I wish he'd write something that had no teenagers in it. I am sick of stories about teenagers. And even with that, I made it almost 100pp into the book.

I remember what an impact In Cold Blood had on me when I read it many years ago. It is a beautifully, chillingly written book. I've never read anything else by him, having heard only lukewarm comments like yours at best.

I'd read rumors of Harper Lee writing/contributing to ICB, but never the one about Truman C. writing To Kill A Mockingbird. Hard to see why he wouldn't take credit if there was credit to be had, although I suppose they could have entered some sort of solemn agreement about it for unknown reasons. But my instincts say no, for the reasons you give. I don't see any of the writer of In Cold Blood in TKAM, and you've read more of his work than I have.

Review: 13 of fifty

Title: SUICIDE NOTES

Author: MICHAEL THOMAS FORD

Rating: 2.5* of five

All the points are for the ending, which is entirely worth the long, tedious, acne-inducing slog to get there.

Seriously...does the world NEED to hear about adolescence anymore? Is there something we missed, as adults, while going through that training ground for evil demons called "junior high" (that's middle school for the under-fifty set)? If so, is it something that we actually *need*?

Basically...no more. No no no. Poke me with a fork, I'm done.

and moving on to?

A mystery novel. Beth Groundwater's first. Forgot the title.

*nods*

now where the hell did i put my fork *casting about for any tined implement suitable for poking.* **ow frackin' ch** hoist on my own cutlery!

had never heard of Beth groundwater but NLS has, bless 'em. i'm downloading her first as i'm typing. cheers, rd!

*snerk* Cutlery...a man's best friend. The Groundwater book is adequate. Not much more than that, at least so far.

Hmmm If you voluntarily read a book about adolescents ....... then dare I say it you ENJOY pain

ack. typed a comment in the wrong place, idiot that i am.

Review: 14 of fifty

Title: THE LOVELY BONES

Author: ALICE SEBOLD

Rating: 2.75* of five

The Book Report: .Susie Salmon is dead. She knows she's dead, and she's even indoctrinated into the rules of the Afterlife by Franny, her spirit guide: Heaven can be whatever you want it to be. What Susie wants is to be part of the life she's supposed to leave behind.

Susie was murdered. And she doesn't want her killer to go unpunished.

Susie watches as her killer kills again, and again, and her father—resolutely pursuing leads the police have dismissed, with the help of Susie's sister Lindsay—gets closer and closer to solving the heinous crime of child-murder.

Susie, who can never grow up since she's dead, comes to terms with her afterlife, although she can't really get with the program about adulthood. Her mother mires herself in the horrendous cloud of mourning and grief that follows the death of your child. Her friends move on, sort of, though she sees how her death has changed their lives. Susie ends her surveillance and moves on to...

My Review: ...who knows what.

And here is the problem that I have with the book. What was the point of this framing device? What, in the end, is served by poor little Susie leading us all a merry chase and we voyeuristically move inside the lives of her nearest and dearest? At the end of the day, the point of the book has got to be about Susie, or her presence is contrived at best and prurient at worst.

I read this on a vacation to DC many years ago. I wasn't sure why I was so dyspeptic about the read then, and took quite some time to realize that I do NOT like being jerked around by unnecessary child-harm in stories. Okay, the point is the murder of a child, okay, okay: BUT then the child doesn't need to be part of the murder's solution! It smacks of abuse to me. Let the poor little thing rest.

Millions disagree with me here. I didn't like Room for the same reasons. It's just me, I guess.

Review: 15 of fifty

Title: THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO

Author: ALEXANDRE DUMAS

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Book Report: .Edmond Dantès is truly on top of the world...he's handsome, young, successful, and about to marry a woman he loves. His boss promoted him, his lady-love's family beams approvingly at their wedding feast, and...

...the police arrive and arrest him for treason (this takes place in the Napoleonic War era, so this was a hot-button topic), he's sent to the Chateau d'If, tortured, held despite protestations if innocence, and finally escapes with the terminal assistance of the Abbé Faria, whose death offers Edmond the means of escape and the means to achieve revenge on the horrible people who, out of jealousy, deprived him of his youth.

Revenge is, indeed, a dish best served cold.

My Review: All three and a half stars are for the revenge part. I squirmed and writhed and generally caused my undies to bunch all during the incarceration part. Oh my gracious me. Yikes. Ow.

This is one of the most appalling stories ever told, to me, because it's TRUE!! Ye gods and little fishes! Horrifying! A man actually suffered through this agony! Although he didn't escape, he was released, and the treasure was in Milan, not on the mythical island of Monte Cristo. (I've now read that so many times that I'm hungry. I do love a monte cristo sammy.) When I learned this, I was so overwhelmed with fury at the long-dead perpetrators of this heinous crime, I was almost unable to finish the book.

All in all, I can't imagine wanting to read this ever again, but the journey was worth the pain.

#150 It's not just you. I think The Lovely Bones was one of the worst books I've ever read. And I refuse to read Room. Contrived, manipulative and unseemly.

>152 laytonwoman3rd: I feel less like a leper now, Linda3rd. Thanks.

I liked THE LOVELY BONES..book and movie.

Review: 16 of fifty

Title: THE GINSENG HUNTER

Author: JEFF TALARIGO

Rating: 3* of five

The Book Report: A short, poetic novel of the Cultural Revolution era as seen from the viewpoint of a man whose life has been defined by following his family's tradition of gathering ginseng root in the wild. He narrates for us the events of that uneventful life, with a wistful, elegiac tone. The book illuminates a life and a folkway that this half-Korean, half-Chinese man is so deeply enmeshed into that the metaphors he uses in his head to explain the world to himself are all tied, in the end, to the natural world of his ginseng hunting.

Intertwined with his first-person narrative is a third-person narrative of a much younger North Korean woman, a prostitute with a daughter to support in a country where there is next to nothing material available to its citizens. She meets the ginseng hunter in the course of business, as he traverses the border between the two countries freely. He pursues a peculiar, sort-kinda relationship with her, and as the North Korean regime turns more insane than ever, lives are lost (to put it mildly) and the ginseng hunter's petite amie is at serious risk.

The novel's resolution of these strands...unworldly man must decide the fate of worldly woman...is succinct and played out like Chinese opera: Gesturally, accompanied by the bare minimum of speech needed, and set against the most gorgeous, lavish scenery imaginable.

My Review: I want to kill the lousy, incompetent, damnfool idiot editor and copy editor of this book. Dead. I'll be merciful and say it can be quick. But the truly lovely récit that is in this awkward short novel, the beautiful sparkling gem that could have been cut from the rock here, is lost.

What earthly use was there, I wondered as I cruised through this, in putting in the third-person narrative of the prostitute's dreary life? Did it do anything for the arc of the story? Not that I could see, it didn't. It jarred against the ginseng hunter's flowing narrative of his world and its widening circles in an unnecessary way. If the récit form had been followed, the young woman's dreadful plight, and his decision as to how he'd resolve it, would have been just as powerful. The ginseng hunter is the heart and soul and point of the book, or if he's not, the young prostitute is too poorly developed to play her role effectively.

But that's the book the editor created, and I assume she (specifically named in the author's acknowledgments) intended to create. That it isn't the book I'd've made out of the material at hand is just too damn bad for me, eh what?

Fair enough point. But in reading a book, is the reader not expected, indeed almost required, to participate in the creation of the story as the writer and the editor (and the copy editor, more on that anon) unfold it before him (in my case)? That is, in the act of reading, isn't the reader's job to allow the words to create emotional responses, to call up sense memories, to paint on the mind's canvas images of things known and unknown? And therefore, isn't it also incumbent on the reader to look carefully at those images, analyze those sense memories, and determine which ones are successfully evoked and which are wanting? Then comes the “why” of it...why did this not work for me? What was the author aiming at, and did I get there with him?

As my answers to all the above are “yes,” I'm willing to use my review, my opinion, informed by a long lifetime of reading and a career in publishing's outer groves, to offer informed conclusions as to what went right and what went wrong in a given text.

What went right in this story was all the ginseng hunter's viewpoint, and what went wrong was the awkward intersection between the prostitute's viewpoint and the ginseng hunter's viewpoint. Less can indeed be more, but more was needed to stitch these two narratives together and make a successful novel out of them. Less of what was given would have turned this into a beautiful récit. As it was, the beautiful bits earned the book three stars, which is more than I'd normally give a Frankenbook.

Lastly, I want to comment in terms most censorious upon the job done by the copy editor. By page 23, I was so angry that I followed my punkin pie around the house reading howlers and snarling about them, and then called a friend of mine and made HER listen to me rant about them. A person hired to copy edit a book who allows the non-word “clinged” to be typeset, printed, bound, and offered for sale in the United States of America should be subject to legal sanctions. I'll stop there, because I can feel my blood pressure rising, but there are other errors, not mere infelicities, that caused me severe pain. Copyediting is a serious job. How words are presented on a page is a very important part of how a book is perceived by readers. The purpose of the job is to make the author's words transparent vehicles for communicating the ideas they carry. It is jolting, jarring, to have to stop and say to one's self, “wha...? what was that again?” in the process of reading. That is what poor, or no, copyediting leads to, and why editors and copy editors are such crucial (if invisible to most readers) parts of the reading process.

Rant over. For today. Read the book, the ideas are wonderful and even mediocre presentation of them can't make them unpleasant enough to avoid.

I loved the book and didn't notice all the issues you had with it. Ignorance is bliss, I suppose! :)

So long as you liked it, all is well.

Definitely, although I'm a whore when it comes to that style and like just about everything I read in it, I'm afraid. Probably best not to trust my judgement when it comes to those.

It's not you that's the problem with the book. It's the "copy editor" that screwed that pooch. You loved the story, which was really good, and liked the style, which was good, too. So what about that was your judgment? Nothing!

Not everyone will have my responses to spelling and grammar. I don't even think it would be good if they did!

Hmmmm, is you're opinion of people effected similarly when they have bad spelling and grammar?

(Yes, those mistakes were on purpose!)

Your Honor, it is my intention to assert my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America against self-incrimination during any questioning on that subject.

Fascinating review, Richard. isn't it also incumbent on the reader to look carefully at those images, analyze those sense memories, and determine which ones are successfully evoked and which are wanting? I think the answer's yes when the book falls short, at least for those readers compelled to think about why the book fell short.

When the book works seamlessly, the images and sense memories draw only pleasure (even if it may be of a painful sort in a book like The Siege), and the examination may be unnecessary, or if done, only done in appreciation of the craft?

Still musing thumb from me.

It's that 'Wha..' moment that's the killer, isn't it. A misuse or misspelling can pull me right out of a sentence or paragraph, even in a short newspaper article - heck, even in a headline! And once the magic of the reader-book conspiracy is lost, it's hard to forgive the copy editor that let it happen. I think I'll skip this one, to save myself the aggravation.

>162 jnwelch: I've done my job well, if you're still musing! Glad you liked the review.

>163 ffortsa: And once the magic of the reader-book conspiracy is lost, it's hard to forgive the copy editor that let it happen.

BEAUTIFULLY said, judy! Precisely!

Reading up on all those reviews I missed, I just thumbed The Lovely Bones (still have to read the others). I agree with you here - I couldn't read this book, felt terribly manipulated already in the first chapter and for the same reason didn't even finish the Kindle test chapter of Room.

>165 Deern: That would be, Nathalie, due to the fact that you're a woman of discernment and taste. *Impeccable* taste, since we agree on these two books.

:-)

It seems to me that more and more I am coming across books absolutely littered with typos and just down right grammatical errors. Is it because the publishers are trying to save money (and maybe even stay in business) by hiring cheaper (less experienced) copy editors, or maybe no copy editor (gasp!)? I have the same reaction as you do Richard when I come across this. The typos jump out at me and it feels like fingernails across a chalkboard.

I won't even go into the atrocity that is online news (even major sites like CNN and Fox News). There is a different angle there - they're trying to get it out as quickly as possible; but that doesn't make it any less forgivable.

>167 Quixada: Right on! The worst part is, it dumbs down the audience, which is now accustomed to seeing incorrect spellings and usages, from trustworthy sources, and therefore is set up to accept them!

#155 There you go, preaching to the choir again. You should send a tightly controlled, yet obviously wrathful letter to the publisher and to the editor herself c/o the publisher stating your case. No, it probably won't make any difference in their practices, but you never know. And it might make you feel less hypertensive.

ETA: Oh, that will be $175.00 please. I do not accept insurance or credit cards.

Review: 17 of fifty

Title: A REAL BASKET CASE

Author: BETH GROUNDWATER

Rating: 3* of five

The Book Report: Mrs. Roger Hanover hasn't seen the love-light in her husband's eyes in ten years. Kids in college, money in bank, stupid expensive car she didn't want in garage of stupid expensive house she didn't want, and...not much else, just a home-based gift-basket-making business that she's run ragged by (thank goodness, something to do!). Her best friend, divorcée Ellen, leads her into the path of temptation by introducing her to hawt yoga instructor Enrique. That sets off a chain of events powering this entire first novel, as Enrique is murdered in Mrs. Hanover's bedroom in the course of an innocent, non-sexual (to Enrique's mild annoyance) massage...and Roger, standing in the doorway with the murder weapon, looks like the murderer.

She's all verschmeckeled, our intrepid heroine, what with being caught in what was once called a compromising position by the husband she loves even now, and whose apparent murder of the louche and rentable Enrique becomes the cause célèbre of Denver seems to her exceedingly unlike him...well, these facts force her, the publicly branded Cheating Wife, to stop the trial before it starts by discovering the real killer.

Which she does, much to her sorrow, and after making all sorts of bizarre new acquaintances, accusing old friends of heinous things, and fighting to show her husband she's not a cheater.

My Review: Enrique the latin lover/drug dealer. His Mexican spitfire girlfriend. A drug kingpin in a limousine.

Oh heavenly days, as my other-mother used to say, do stop now.

Adequate plotting, adequate dialogue, and a surprise killer get the book three stars, and the racist profiling is so blind, so not the point the author's making, that all it does is keep any more from being subtracted instead of making me rate it 1 star in irritation. This is a first novel, and is the first in a series, but I am not seeking the others out.

Review: 18 of fifty

Title: THE SUMMER ISLES

Author: IAN R. MACLEOD

Rating: As close to five full stars as makes no difference

The Book Report: England in 1940...shiny happy people, none the worse for wear after their crushing 1916 defeat at the hands of the Hun. All the mod cons in every home! All the freedoms any one man can handle responsibly! Where did the Jews go?

Why do you want to know that, faggot?

Griffin Brooke fails to heed the social conventions of his fascist state, England, first by being a homosexual, and second by failing to stop asking questions when it's obvious to a complete fool that it's only going to get him in trouble to keep going. He knows he's a second-rater, he knows that his tutorship at Oxford is a joke because he's no brainiac or original thinker, and he knows that, after the defeat of England in the Great War, he's lost his one true love to death.

Only he hasn't. His younger love, his boy-man, the other half of his soul, is Francis, lost at nineteen in 1916; Francis reincarnated himself as John Arthur, a Fascist thug, and has publicly acknowledged Griffin's role in his life as "inspiring" him. The anniversary of John Arthur's rise is coming up. Griffin, now elderly and also terminally ill, is required to play a part in the party piece planned for the masses. The trouble the Powers That Be face is, Griffin doesn't care any more.

His eyes are open to the horror of the state he is complicit with. He even doesn't care who, now that he's dying, knows he's gay.

He is, in short, a very dangerous man. And he plans to use his dangerous knowledge...John Arthur used to bottom for me!...to ruin the horrible plans and change the unthinkable future of his England.

Or die trying.

My Review: Chilling. Very, very chilling. The 1998 novella of the same name won Hugo and Sidewise awards for a very good reason. Very, very good. Almost, only a hair away from, excellent. The pleasure of reading the book is close to unmarred, and my quibbles are just that...quibbles.

They involve the Francis Eveleigh/John Arthur transition, and the subsequent co-opting of Griffin with a golden chain and muzzle...why, suddenly, do the PTB opt to alienate him? Why not simply kill him?

And Griffin himself, opting for a life of anonymous sex, can't possibly have imagined that he was getting away with it. No state this repressive would not know this important and dangerous secret, and act more effectively to neutralize it...provide him with a beard, give him a steady stream of men, bob's your uncle!

But all of that aside, I can't imagine how this idea occurred to the straight Mr. MacLeod, and I applaud vigorously the way in which he presented the closeted life. I am impressed by this book on so many levels. And I am delighted that I read it in both versions. It's worth seeking out.

Review: 19 of fifty

Title: TIME ON MY HANDS: A Novel with Photographs

Author: PETER DELACORTE

Rating: 4* of five

The Book Report: Jasper Hudnut is, indeed, a nut. He tells travel writer Gabriel Prince, a footloose and fancy-free po0litical semi-exile from their mutual homeland of the USA as perverted by Ronald Reagan, that he has a time machine, a lot of money, and a proposition for him: Kill Reagan before WWII and the death of his liberal ideas makes him into the nightmare president he turned out to be.

Hudnut, 72, can't do it...what if it takes years to accomplish in the past? Who wants 1930s health care as an oldster? Plus he gets monster headaches if he so much as moves back to last week...but he really wants it done, and he'll make Gabriel a rich man for doing it.

Hell, I'll do it for free!

But of course, this being fiction, nothing goes according to plan. It all begins with Gabriel falling in love (women always ruin everything) with Jasper's niece Lorna, an actress who died in a mudslide on the way to Malibu one night in 1938. Gabriel can't let this happen, of course! So he prevents it.

Then there's Reagan himself. Gabriel LIKES the guy! He's genuine, he's sweet, he's not yet a closed-minded conservative...how can he make himself kill the Boy Next Door?

He does. Things in the future change. No one can step in the same river twice. And, since the time machine was sort of borrowed from parties unknown by old Hudnut, now Gabriel has an angry owner with a secret to worry about evading.

I'd still love to be Gabriel Prince. Oh my yes. The ending of this novel makes me want to be him quite badly. The weaving together of the strands of the story, the seemingly random found photos from the period, the threads not quite woven back in, are harmonized and made relevant. It's a very good piece of work.

My Review: I love alternative histories, and I love anything that goes against the prevailing political conservative orthodoxy, and I detested Reagan from my early youth (lived in California, parents politically to the right of Attila the Hun, met the Guvnor and as a kid thought he was boring). This novel, then, is tailor made for each and every one of my quirks. It should have made me warble with joy and yodel my rapture from the housetops.

That, in case you weren't paying attention, is what I'm doing now.

More to a review's point, though, are discussions of the merits of the book or lack thereof. Delacorte hasn't written a perfect book, but it's got the required stuff covered: Believable motivations, plausible explanations for the actions of the time machine, realistic extrapolations of the effects of Gabriel's meddling, and the door left open for a sequel.

Which has never happened. Damn.

Review:20 of fifty

Title:MONSOON

Author: WILBUR A. SMITH

Rating: 4* of five

The Book Report: Second chronologically in the Courtney family saga, Monsoon covers Hal Courtney and his sons' efforts to end the scourge of piracy plaguing the East India Company, and their inexorable, inevitable removal from an England too small and too meager to hold the family's talents, abilities, and personalities, to a colonial future in the Cape Colony.

The multipolar world of southern and eastern Africa, its long-established power dynamics, and the astounding riches of India, south Asia, and Arabia, are all economically and still excitingly delineated by the Courtney family's arrival and conquest of and by this gigantic, extraordinary prize they seek. Their family dynamic, a violent and competitive and bitter one, is brought to several surprisingly exciting climaxes...it's not like one can't see the events coming, but Smith's ability to tell a tale is such that the inevitable feels like a shipwreck in progress.

After an amazing set of adventures in the clutches of people whose self-interest marches against the Courtneys', the family's future is firmly established and their connection to Africa becomes, by the dawn of the 18th Century, unbreakable.

My Review: Of all the Courtney family saga, this book reigns supreme in my affections. Hal's sons are a quarrelsome, angry, fascinating lot, and their well-roundedness makes even their worst traits and meanest actions feel real, comprehensible, and emotionally powerful.

I've read Wilbur Smith books since I was eleven, and I've only seldom felt let down. This book was not, in any way at all, a let-down. It was as violent as the monsoon it takes its name from, and still, like that monsoon, it gave life and comfort to its recipients. Powerfully imagined, powerfully written, passionate and real and engrossing. Don't miss it.

Daggone it Richard, now I have another series to put on the list....why have I never heard of these?

>174 tututhefirst: Oh noes, Tina! Please tell me you mean Smith's Courtney family books, not that dreary Groundwater mess!

Yes. dear I meant whatever you featured in review #19....but if they're dreary...speak now so I can cross them off the list!!!

Wait...review #19 is the time travel/kill Reagan book. #17 is a Denver-set cozy series about a dull little hausfrau in a dreary marriage who doesn't have anything interesting to say. AT. ALL. Evasive maneuvers!

Review: 21 of fifty

Title: THE SCOLD'S BRIDLE

Author: MINETTE WALTERS

Rating: 2.875* of five

The Book Report: Mathilda Gillespie reminds me of my female relatives: Argumentative, judgmental, unforgiving, grudge-holding, snobbish...is it any wonder Mathilda turns up very, very dead? She's so dead, in fact, that no one with a grain of sense could mistake her overkilling for anything but murder. Her daughter and granddaughter, lucky recipients of Mathilda's viciousness all their lives, are logically suspected of doing the old bat in so as to inherit her dragon's hoard...but they don't, the doc who has (inexplicably) kept her alive has scarfed the lot. What about her as public-spirited citizen, I mean murderer? But wait! What about Mathilda's ex-lover, the man next door? Or his wife? For good measure, the much-richer-now doc has an artist husband who, appalling as it seems, verifiably painted the gorgon starkers, and is evasive about what else the two might've got themselves up to.

But wait, there's more! We're treated to Mathilda's inner monologue, via her missing diaries, where she's revealed to have been...what else...A Victim Of Abuse. Oh poor lambie, dreadfully abused, now heaping it on her “nearest and dearest” and blahblahblah with quotes from Shakespeare and a whole lot of hand-wringing and then the murderer is discovered, and mercifully the agony ends.

My Review: Woman as victim. Standard stuff. Mildly enlivened by the fact that she's not a Saint Who Has Risen Above, but basically another woeful longface tale about how awful it is to be a woman.

Amen. Makes me extra-special glad I'm not one.

Review: 22 of fifty

Title: THERE WAS A TIME...

Author: ROY BONISTEEL

Rating: 3* of five

The Book Report: The memoir of a seventh-generation Canadian farm boy turned journalist and TV presenter, There Was A Time... is a seasonally organized set of memories of his youth in a bygone, simple time overlaid with his later-life return, plus family, to the area and style of his past...of course, nothing stays the same, but the changes bring as many memories as the similarities do.

My Review: Based on a year's worth of columns commissioned by the (USA residents, stifle your snickers at this name) Kingston Whig-Standard, this lovely, elegiac writing about a boyhood in a time long gone feels more like the 19th than the 20th century. I loved reading it.

What makes me rather sad is that, even though it was published 21 years ago, it was impossible to find in the USA even then. I got my copy because I worked at Bantam Doubleday Dell then, and it was left out in the hall by an editor who got it from the Canadians as part of an attempt to interest her in publishing it, and a few Paul Quarrington novels (also scarfed up by yours truly), which was a complete non-starter. “Who cares?” came the response to my query about why the books were in front of her office. “Canada...booorrriiinnng!”

It's an attitude all too common among us here in the USA. Canada? Uh...yeah...and...? It's short-sighted, it's wrong-headed, and it's demonstrably annoying to the Canadians. It's also persistent. Were I Canadian (which, given a Romney victory in November 2012, I will be), I'd be grateful for this attitude. Sort of like the old Lovecraftian hymn, “PRAISE CTHULHU! He hasn't noticed you yet.”

Ah, Richard - sorry you didn't like The Scold's Bridle. I probably won't try to read it, and I've been liking Minette Walters so far with The Echo and The Shape of Snakes.

But, too many books, too little time! Enough other ones to read to keep me happy forever.

Review: 23 of fifty

Title: THE VOICE AT THE BACK DOOR

Author: ELIZABETH SPENCER

Rating: 3* of five

The Book Report: Travis Brevard is dying, and he knows it. For years, he's kept the lid on his county, the sheriff without rivals or challengers, turning a blind eye to what suits him not to see and zooming in like an owl on a mouse if he's a mind to; but this 1949 day, his life is over and he knows it. Not convenient with a tax list in his pocket, doom for them that hasn't paid and salvation for the elect on the list, and an election before too long. Looks like Travis needs to make sure there's an anointed successor.

He chooses Duncan Harper, town grocer, husband of Tinker and still in love with Marcia Mae Hunt, socially far above a mere shopkeeper and son of a shopkeeper; now returned to her hometown, a war widow, and a source of anxiety for Tinker...and Duncan.

So is set in motion the plot of Antigone...the power change is coming, huzzah huzzah, but not without deaths and secrets exploding in the faces of all and sundry. King Creon's role is assumed by Jimmy Tallant (formerly the swain of Tinker), a bootlegger who advocates for the power of the state and the adherence to the law, albeit as the law is actually practiced if not written. Antigone, mourning love lost or died, is Duncan's role, the advocate for the right of the actual people, as opposed to the state-constituted We-the-People, to assemble and thereby agree on and cause change.

The structure of the argument between the two forces is the campaign for sheriff, eating up that entire summer. At the end of the book, a crime is resolved, the new sheriff is baptized in the deep and cold pool of race and politics as practiced in the Southern States since the end of Reconstruction exactly as in ancient Athens during its civil unrest and social change during Sophocles' time, and a tangle of old feelings, old hurts, and old bonds reformed...all the same strands that drama has always woven into cloth, whether whole and bright enough of color to last for centuries or not, since catharsis was invented by the priestly healers and crying in reflected rage and pain was recognized as more medicinal than the finest potions or pills could ever be.

My Review: Spencer's well-mannered Southern-lady language, with its stateliness and its rather deliberate pace, will likely jangle in modern ears. Her liberal (!) use of the n-word (I loathe political correctness, but I was raised by a mama who thumped me if I uttered that word because it was disrespectful of people I'd never met, and that was Not Allowed, so I just can't type it...I flinch too hard, waiting for the blow) is not of today, not done in coolness. (I go on record here as thinking that behavior is not cool, no matter who does it. I also don't like constant swearing for the same reason: It's not cool. It's just ill-mannered.)

Well, anyway, this novel won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, at least according to the jury, but the board declined to award the novel the prize. Rather like 2012, the board felt the jury chose an inadequate exemplar of the year's American fiction crop. Happen I agree, in this case, as I agreed with the board's 2012 decision not to award a prize to any of the literary chaff nominated by the 2012 jury. Only I can't find a list of the other books the judges considered, so I can't say I the board was simply being conservative (in 1957, remember, the Little Rock riots happened and LBJ got the first-ever civil rights legislation through a very very very scared and divided Congress, so there's some logic to this) or if the field consisted of microbooks like it did this year (srsly, Swamplandia! for a literary prize?! Sheesh).

This isn't High Literature, and it's nowhere near as good as Spencer's short fiction. It's just fine. It's a middlin'-good story, it's got nicely drawn characters that I've already gone hazy on, and it's got a few lovely turns of phrase that are so typically Southern that I felt no need to note them down.

I'd put it in the Better Beach Reads category of my own private bookstore. More meat than shudder Dan Brown. A book for Rehoboth Beach, not Venice Beach.

Review: 24 of fifty

Title: FLANDERS

Author: PATRICIA ANTHONY

Rating: 4* of five

The Book Report: Travis Lee Stanhope leaves Harvard for France to join in the fighting of The Great War (WWI to thee and me), as so many of his generation of young American men did, on the side of the Allies. He chronicles his experiences as the lone Texan among European officers and men who, unlike the cruel and dismissive Yankee boys he's been spending his education among, chaff him good-naturedly about his accent and his origins.

He becomes, by virtue of his origins, a sharpshooter, and develops a track record of success in his task. He also makes some very...well...some discoveries, shall we say, that completely revolutionize his view of the material world, and what it contains, and what it conceals.

War isn't hell. War is only the gateway to it.

My Review: This wasn't a bestseller in 1998, when it was published. It wasn't widely reviewed. It wasn't a succès d'estime. High Literature, as defined by the unofficial and unconstituted American academy, excludes all forms of genre fiction...that condescending little shudder-word used to mark off the territory of Serious Books by excluding those which a writer without an MFA from Iowa, or a PhD in Literature, might wish to produce and an ordinary person might wish to read.

I'd direct those academicians, self-appointed or recognized at large, to books like this one Magical realism isn't simply a Latin American phenomenon. This epistolary work (and right there is the reason it was never a bestseller) rivals the storytelling gifts of Mujica Lainez or Cortazar or Vargas Llosa.

Oh. Bobby, I can't remember what he said—I only recall the joy of it, the terror of watching the dark approach. Then we were at the cypress; O'Shaughnessey had to see it coming. He had to. The dark took up all Here, all Now. I wanted to run, but with the helplessness of dreamers, I trailed O'Shaughnessey inside.

I don't remember closing my eyes as we passed through that shadow membrane, but I remember opening them. Around me lay the broken countryside of No Man's Land. That was all. Nothing frightening, but a place like a thousand others—a spot where ghosties wander, searching for the land of the found,

O'Shaughnessey stopped, offered his hand in a goodbye, no extraordinary power but that of affection in his touch. “Travis?” he said.

“Yes?”

He leaned close to whisper a secret. His breath was warm and smelled of chocolate. “It's love.”

Don't overlook Travis Lee's magical adventures. You'll be the poorer for it.

*pout* Why do you read all these great books that aren't translated for me?
I am no shape to read a book in English... Dutch is difficult enough at the moment :-(

>183 FAMeulstee: Oh darn, Anita, I never thought to check on Dutch translations! Tell you what: I'll mark all of my reviews with little "No Anitas Allowed" for good books!

:-P

Review: 25 of fifty

Title: SWIFT THOUGHTS

Author: GEORGE ZEBROWSKI

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Book Report: Twenty-four short fictions from philosophical scientist Zebrowski. All the stories in the collection are centered around Big Ideas...what if Gödel's incompleteness theorem can be disproved by artificial intelligence? What if Lenin's assassination by Sidney Reilly succeeded in 1918?...and are, in the finest sense of the word, speculative masterworks rendered in prose.

My Review: What they aren't is any fun at all to read. The characters are wooden, the dialogue is sermonific (as sleep-inducing as a sermon, with all a sermon's stiffness that induces the neck's looseness and the eyelids' heaviness), but the concepts are stellar.

There are two stories that I like: “The Eichmann Variations,” which explores the nature of revenge, forgiveness, selfhood, and evil, all in about 3200 words. It's compact, it's eerie, it has as a background a fascinating alternative to our own history, which is simply put out there and assumed that the reader got it, processed it, and took in the implications of it. I found this story compelling while reading it, and still think about it days later. I appreciate being treated this respectfully by an author.

And “Lenin in Odessa,” an alternative to the events as played out in our own world surrounding a British-backed attempt to rid the world of Lenin in 1918. It's nothing short of superb. The narrative voice is Stalin's, and that seems to make the chunkiness of the dialogue okay to me; I can imagine with ease that the voice of the real Stalin would sound this windbaggy swaggering way.

The other twenty-two were not fun for me to read. I found “Gödel's Doom” unpleasantly reminiscent of a workshop piece that didn't quite make it; I liked “Swift Thoughts,” the title piece, so little that I was outraged to read Zebrowski's self-assessment of the piece as like Elgar's or Mahler's music. The others passed by my eyes, doing little enough damage to them, but offering little reward for the effort.

I read fairly frequently in reviewers' comments reported to us by Zebrowski himself comparisons of his writing to that of Olaf Stapledon (Last and First Men). Yes. Exactly. Agreed. Wooden, awkward, overweeningly self-congratulatory stuff by a minor talent.

I'm going to try to track down Flanders. Sounds wonderful. I am drawn to all things Great War. Two summers ago our family took a 13-day 3300 mile trip through 18 states. One of the highlights of the trip was The National World War I Museum in Kansas City, MO.

Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey and Charles Todd's Inspector Ian Rutledge are two of my favorite series, both with heroes traumatized by TGW.

Review: 26 of fifty

Title: KNOCKEMSTIFF

Author: DONALD RAY POLLOCK

Rating: 4.9* of five

The Book Report: Published in 2008, this collection of eighteen interwoven stories about the lives of the men and women and children caught in rural poverty is the first work by Donald Ray Pollock. He lived in Knockemstiff, a real, honest-to-goodness place. He escaped, sort of, by working for thirty years in a nearby town's papermill.

I believe it was lowercase-karen on Goodreads who introduced me to the term “hillbilly noir.” Authors like Bonnie Jo Campbell of American Salvage fame as well as Pollock fall into this category of writers who mine the vein of American underclass misery worked so brilliantly by John Steinbeck and Erskine Caldwell. Noir it certainly is, thematically and in its laconic, almost kabuki play-like, emphasis on grotesque surfaces, implying that every action and every gesture is born out of unfathomable darkness and unbearable pain. The Publishers Weekly review of this collection compares Pollock's work to Winesburg, Ohio. I agree, from a structural point of view, but Sherwood Anderson's grim stories are the comedy stylings of P.G. Wodehouse compared to this collection.

Pollock is brilliantly successful at portraying the...no. Scratch that.

Donald Ray Pollock is brilliant.

My Review: I've been bitch-slapped by this writer's ten-inch dick of the imagination. The stories treated me the way those hillbillies treated Ned Beatty in Deliverance. No part of my brain will ever again be clean and unviolated.

There is one story in this collection that, in my humble (!) opinion, doesn't measure up and doesn't belong: “I Start Over,” about a trip through the Dairy Queen drive-through, would be the star turn of any other writer's collection of stories, but here it merely fills up page count and takes the book over 200pp. Left out, no one would notice or feel a lack.

There are two stand-out stories for me, two that should be in high-school literature anthologies and passed from reader to reader with whispered injunctions just to read it, read it: “Schott's Bridge” is the bleak and horrifying story of a young gay man and his fate in this grim, grim world; and “Bactine,” the shortest story in the collection, a quick hit of despair and decline, as two young men escape the present into a futureless fog. They are, in simplest terms, heart-stopping.

But the story that made me hurt the most, though it's not the finest structurally or stylistically, was “Knockemstiff.” Two strangers in a Cadillac convertible, husband and wife, pull into Maude's store for gas, and for the wife to take photos of the “Welcome to Knockemstiff” sign. The husband makes small talk with the clerk, commenting that “it's hard to believe there's people that poor living in this country.”

I am that California goon, insensitive lout that he is. I've driven through countless places like Knockemstiff in my expensive car, looked out my window, and thought, “No way. This is a movie set. No one lives here, lives like this.” I've stopped for gas, bought a bag of chips, made inconsequential chat with the clerk, wondering the while how he drags himself out of bed to face another day in that kind of place.

I don't want to believe it's true, you see, and I don't like to think that it's not the subject of outrage and outreach and action.

It isn't. Donald Ray Pollock is their voice, these people in the hollers, shouting at us to look, to look, to see the cost of indifference. He's singing an old song. He's doing it well. He's making art, and seducing the susceptible into seeing the invisible, the ignored, the ignoble and unrefined. His artistry is superior. His eye is unerring. His ear is emotional sonar.

Donald Ray Pollock is brilliant.

Richard my dear, you've just earned a thumb and a groan at the same time with your review of Flanders. You know I've embarked on this year of reading all things (oK-many things) WW I ish, and this looks way too good to pass up. So I'm off on a quest to unearth a copy. Thank you for adding to the obesity of my TBR pile.

P.S> on Flanders....I've located in to get through ILL, but why is it cataloged as SCIFI????

>189 tututhefirst:, 190 I think, because the lady's other stuff was sci-fi and her publisher was Ace, the connection was inevitable. Plus the speculative ghost-y incorporeal elements contribute to that.

It's well worth your eyeblinks, though. Truly it is.

OK....if you say so.. Lately every book I've picked up has its resident ghost. I'm thinking it may be time for some good old bodice ripping chick-lit to cleanse the pallet.

BkC 18) Coetzee, J.M., DISGRACE: Wonderful writing, is there a story here?

I think I must have been in a foul humor when I wrote that. There is indeed a story here.

About disgrace, about the taking of grace from another being, about the horrors of which grace, in its religious meaning, is capable of holding back.

David Lurie, fifty-two, isn't a bad man. He isn't a good man, either. He is a human male possessed of a libido and enough facility of mind and tongue to service that libido's demands. This means he is also capable of performing, to the absolute minimum standard, the demands of teaching the youth of Cape Town, South Africa, a subject barely worthy of attention: "Communication." Not, you will note, English, or a language, but the abstraction of communication, whole and entire.

Bah. Modern "education" rots. So David, after he loses his erotic focus Soraya, leaves it and Cape Town behind to join his daughter Lucy in the countryside. She has a farm there, and it is the farm that leads to dis-grace, the shedding of grace, the negation of grace, for father and daughter alike. Horrors occur that I have no desire to relate to you, and that should keep those readers whose anxiety buttons are easily engaged far, far away from this book.

I don't think Coetzee likes people too terribly much.

The ending is the final act of dis-grace. I strongly strongly urge dog-lovers not to read the ending. Put it this way: I'd love the ending had it featured a cat. Now, does that scare y'all off? Good.

But the writing. Oh me, oh my.

A risk to own anything: a car, a pair of shoes, a packet of cigarettes. Not enough to go around, not enough cars, shoes, cigarettes. Too many people, too few things. What there is must go into circulation, so that everyone can have a chance to be happy for a day. That is the theory; hold to the theory and to the comforts of theory. Not human evil, just a vast circulatory system, to whose workings pity and terror are irrelevant. That is how one must see life in this country: in its schematic aspect. Otherwise one could go mad.

Thus the musings of a father after a horrific crisis. David Lurie is dis-graced. Grace is no longer part of David Lurie's mental furniture, and while he fights it for over 100pp, in the end, at the ending, David Lurie accepts his fate:

He is disgraced.

Oh good, another BB dodged. {{smoochie thanks}}

Review: 27 of fifty

Title: THE GATES

Author: JOHN CONNOLLY

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Book Report: Samuel Johnson and his dachshund Boswell are on an early trick-or-treat run, demonstrating initiative by beating out the competition or so Samuel thinks. Boswell sighs a lot. I think he knows. They go to the Abernathys house, and Mr. Abernathy (a miserably unhappy self-help book writer, married to Satan...no, seriously!) sends them on their way before rejoining his horrifying wife and two of their revolting bores of friends.

They are summoning a demon for fun and, maybe, profit.

Trouble is...heard of CERN? The quest for the God Particle?...no one ever thought that maybe, just maybe, it was the DEVIL particle....

My Review: The world is saved from enslavement and destruction by a nebbishy little boy. Does this ring a bell? It's less portentous than the Harry Potter books, more like an extra-long boy-centric episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

It's amusing and it's a charming way to spend a few hours. If it changes your life, you didn't have much of a one before. If the next installment somehow makes it through my door with no effort whatsoever on my part, I'll get around to reading it. About the best I can say is that I chuckled every half-hour or so.

>194 tututhefirst: Glad I could spare you, dearie! xo

Devil particle? I guess that one is not for me, although I quite liked Buffy.
The Coetzee however... I always guessed it wouldn't be a pleasant read, just looking at the cover. And I love dogs! Now I am carefully moving it towards my WL. 'Wonderful writing' will always get me.

Not up to a kid centered book... even if it does come with a devil particle..
not today anyway :)

>197 Deern: Don't know about that, Nathalie, Disgrace is a really really powerful emotional experience....

>198 mckait: I wasn't stoked about it, either, and I ended up chortling and snickering a lot. It's one of those books that transcends the mood one is in.

But good lawsy me am I sick to damn death of kids!

Nice review of Disgrace, one of my favorite Booker Prize winners. It was emotionally wrenching and I cringed in fear and horror throughout most of its latter half, but it is a beautifully written and unforgettable novel.

It is a beautiful book, Darryl, and very nearly my favorite four-hankies-and-a-pistol read. Certainly in the top five.

Review: 28 of fifty

Title: HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG

Author: ANDRE DUBUS III

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Book Report: Behrani. An exiled colonel in the Shah's army. Kathy. A fucked-up druggie living off her inheritance. Lester. A major idiot whose law-enforcement career is his last best shot at staying off welfare.

Not one of these people will leave this book better than they entered it. Kathy's only home is the one she inherited, and the county says it's not hers anymore because she hasn't paid the taxes. She has, though. She's completely unable to function in the world because she's hazed on drugs for so long that even when she's clean she can't think straight. That means she can't figure out how to prove she has complied with the law.

Behrani can't get an American life going. He has savings (one hesitates to imagine where the money came from originally) that barely keep him afloat, and jobs that demean him but are all a man with no skills except being an Army officer can get. But his son's college money is sufficient to buy a distressed property at auction. Kathy's home, as it turns out. He plans to renovate and flip it, using this as a stepping-stone to American Dream-level prosperity.

Lester comes in as the deputy assigned to be sure Kathy gets out of the home that's no longer hers. Love at first sight! Lame-o Lester and Loser Kathy...surely the white trash Romeo and Juliet!

Pretty much.

Dubus drags us through the legal system as the parties battle out the rights and wrongs of the case. No one here is a good person, just a greedy selfish prick who deserves what, in the end, is meted out to them by the author's just and pitiless exercise of karmic debt collection.

My Review: NOT an uplifting book. My withers were wrung about every twenty pages, and I took frequent breaks in order to console myself with excessive liquor consumption and sordid sexual escapades.

I love a book that brings out the best in me.

There's a scene where Lame-o Lester gets his first-ever BJ from Loser Kathy, which Dubus goes into in a bizarrely flat and affectless way that completely desxualizes the act, makes it a symptom of a pathology and not an erotic or intimate or even sexy development. It's just part of the sickness pervading these broken, unfixable people's existences.

Did you *get* that? A man wrote about the thing most men want more than food and only slightly less than air, and made it *unappealing*.

Dubus is a master of his craft. He is an artist. He can do anything he wants with words to make them dance in the reader's head to HIS tune, screw whatever you were expecting, reader! He can fashion a story that, in its outlines, sounds juicy and ripe with conflict, and make it a sharp object that will deflate whatever happy illusions were still in your head about yourself and this Murrikin Dream we're supposed to be having, reader!

And that is why you should read this book.

I loved Disgrace, even more in retrospect, but I disagree with your conclusion. I think David may finally have found a little grace, down there at the bottom of the well. But it's a hard, hard falling journey to get there.

I can't fathom the last act he performs in the book being a sign of grace! Surely it's an acceptance that there *is* no grace to be had...

Richard, loved you review of The House of Sand and Fog, a book I couldn't make myself read no matter how I tried. It was clearly a book that would seriously depress me, but a book I would love AND hate. I appreciate that you told me so much about the plot I couldn't force myself to read.

I also enjoyed your review of Disgrace, which I read many years ago and loved. One of the things I appreciated was that you reminded me of so much that I loved in that book. I thought it was a wonderful mea culpa, mea culpa for South Africa's appartide.

thumbed this and that

RD,., you and I are in total agreement about the talents of Mr. Dubus III.....if you haven't read Townie do so...it's another that is probably even more appreciated by men than us dainty wilting females. Thumbs up to ya on this one.

>206 mckait: More thumbs from me. Where do you keep all these?

>205 whymaggiemay: Thank you very much for stopping in to say so! I loved Disgrace, mea culpas and all.

>206 mckait: Thank you, dearest!

>207 tututhefirst: Townie is promised to over 100 people ahead of me. I'll get there this summer, most likely. I'm really eager to read it.

>208 jnwelch: Hannibal Lecter and I share a cookie jar....

Hi RD- Great review of HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG. You gotta Thumb. I've wanted to read this one for awhile, so thanks to you, I will move it up a bunch of slots.
I have still not read Coetzee and that one also sounds terrific.

I saw Rush's rant yesterday, that this is Obama's "WAR ON MARRIAGE"! This guy has been married 3 or 4 times hasn't he? Maybe he should try a guy!

>210 msf59: Thanks for the thumb!

I suspect Obama's political instincts tell him it's time to move the queers into his tent for good and ever, but the noises are right. I've gone from not being able to hold my dinner down at the idea of voting for him in November (reauthorized the USA PATRIOT Act) to being on the fence.

Rush Limbaugh should be euthanized.

Among the well-loved books from my past is Islandia...one of the reads that made me, me. I've finally reviewed it in my thread, post #50.

BkC34) Golden, Arthur, MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA: Flawed, but elegant and very readable.

Yes. Yes indeed.

Rating: 3* of five

The Book Report: The politics of the okiya, or geisha house, closely examined through the rise of Chiyo, an unpromising girl sold into slavery by her peasant family, to become Sayuri, a sought-after and renowned geisha in pre-WWII Kyoto.

Chiyo's arrival in the okiya is inauspicious, and her introduction into the horrible world of all-female hatreds and politics comes at a heavy price. She attempts to run away back to the family that sold her into slavery in the first place, which shows that kids don't think in logical patterns; fortunately, she falls off the roof and breaks her arm. Her friendship with a fellow slave, Pumpkin, thus begins, and with it the events that will lead her into rivalry with Hatsumomo, the okiya's lead geisha, and ultimately into her new identity as Sayuri, a full-fledged geisha.

Golden treats us to the full world of geisha, including its roots as slavery and its unpalatable customs, such as misuage, the ritualized and monetized deflowering of barely pubescent girls as a preparatory step to their ascent into geishahood.

Sayuri lives through the tribulations of having only a minimal say in the men she must serve as companion, as hetaira, as whore; she falls in love with one man, whom she cannot, for good reasons, pursue a relationship with; and she uses her wits, her wiles, and her body to survive and thrive during the national trauma of WWII and its aftermath. By the end of the story, Sayuri is a free woman, possessed of a life many many women across the world would envy, and telling us the remarkable and astonishing story of a slave girl's rise to wealth and position.


My Review: Quite a lovely book to read, and really very nicely made. Well, except for that whole missing bit that we like to call “World War Two.” The author spends what, five pages maybe, on the *entire second world war. One whole star off for that, so we're down to four.

Then there's the whole issue of sourcing. Golden interviewed an actual reitred geisha and used her life as a basis for his novel. Nothing untoward there, is there? Well, apparently so...the lady was acknowledged in the book and she was subject to death threats and other reprisals. She sued Golden and the publishers, claiming breach of contract, and got an out-of-court settlement. Then she went on to publish her memoirs! After getting the settlement for having her privacy broached! Oh gross. Greed is a turn-off for me, and so, despite the fact that Golden didn't do jack poop wrong, half a star off. Three and a half, for those counting along.

But the last half star vanished more recently than I read the book (back in 1999). It went away because Arthur Golden's source, Mineko Iwasaki, painted in her memoir a very very different picture of her life and that of a modern geisha than Golden did. Different enough that I felt the novel, representing itself as an accurate portrayal of a geisha's life, was flying false colors. It's fiction, so changing stuff up is normal and acceptable, but the background of the book is what made it interesting, the world of the okiya and its rituals and its rhythms were the *point of my reading the book...and the source herself, in a polite Japanese way, said “pfui” to it.

And now we're at three stars. All of them, at this point, are for Arthur Golden's pretty, pretty sentences.

Fascinating review, thanks, Richard. I remember the flap with the source and her bringing out her own book, but I didn't read her memoir. Maybe I should? I didn't realize she painted quite a different picture of that life, and you're right, that was part of the appeal of Golden's book, that we were getting an accurate portrayal of it. Much food for thought in your review, and a thumb from me.

I wouldn't say it's crucial to read the lady's account, Joe, but it's not boring. It's not as facile or fluid as Golden's work. I really felt very little emotional connection to her in the memoir as compared to the novel.

Huh. This is the opposite of that James Frey kerfuffle, isn't it? There is just no pleasin' the readin' public.

I'm not hard to please on this subject. Just don't misrepresent what you're doing, Author, and I'm fine with it. If it's fiction, say so. And if you're going to take great liberties with real people's stories, especially still-living real people, maybe you should make more of a point of the "fiction" part than of the "based on" part.

>216 laytonwoman3rd: Yuh-huh. What she said.

Well-loved books from my past

Title: A BOOK LOVER IN TEXAS

Author: EVELYN OPPENHEIMER

Rating: 3.5 very nostalgic stars out of five

The Book Report: Miss Evelyn Oppenheimer was not the typical woman of her generation. She was born in 1907 to modestly well-off parents, and would, in the normal course of events, have been expected to marry and produce children and dinner parties.

Not for Evelyn, and with her parents in her corner, she lit out for the University of Chicago and a degree...something the majority of *men didn't have in that day and time. Awarded a PhB in 1929 (such timing!), Evelyn had two life changing events while she was still there: she had appendicitis, and she heard, while recovering from emergency surgery that barely saved her life, a radio broadcast of Alexander Woollcott giving one of his patented snarky radio book review-cum-readings, and knew immediately what she would do for the rest of her life: Oral book reviews.

By gum, she did! From 1934 to the late 1970s, her radio reviews were on the air across the country. From humble beginnings writing reviews for the newspapers, to leading book clubs in department stores, to her radio career...all in a time when a woman wasn't really encouraged to be independent. Oh, and add to that the fact that she had, for thirty-five years, a literary agency...IN TEXAS! Not quite so weird nowadays, but think on it...publishing is in New York City, for the most part, even now, and then...the 1940s...there were no faxes, there was no internet, no FedEx...she was just one helluva maverick, Miss Evelyn.

She died in 1998. We are all poorer for her loss, even yet.


My Review: Far from perfect, with several editing choices that seem very odd, not least of which is the complete absence of a personal life in the story as it's told. I realize Miss Oppenheimer came from a different, more modest and retiring, school than did today's memoirists, and I certainly don't want gory bedroom details...but what did Miss Oppenheimer DO all those years, when she wasn't on stage or in front of a mic delivering oral reviews??

Her agenting days come in for pretty thorough treatment, as I surmise she was quite proud of her ability to spot talent. She was, for example, the one who discovered Elithe Hamilton Kirkland, whose novel Love Is A Wild Assault was a huge bestseller in 1959, telling the story of the Republic of Texas from a woman's point of view. It was based on a factual woman, and was just salacious enough to make both the ladies secure financially. Apart from department store magnate Stanley Marcus of Neiman-Marcus, this was Miss Oppenheimer's biggest client, but her roster was heavy on quality midlisters of the day. Maybe it's not the most glitzy of lives, but it was impressive for being lived in a time that didn't make room for women at the head of the table.

I won't kid you about her writing, either. It's very much of its day. She's not quite breathless but she's getting there; she not self-aggrandizing but she's quite dramatic. Still...search this book out, if you're reading this review. It repays your attention with a small, heavily curtained window on a vanished world of book-love.

I've reviewed the very bizarre work of bizarro fiction called EDITORIAL over in my thread...post #174.

BkC20) Cunningham, Michael, THE HOURS: Loved it. Then again, I'm a gay "Mrs. Dalloway" fan.

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Book Report: Three women mirror the facets of the life of Clarissa Dalloway, heroine of the novel Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. One life is Mrs. Woolf herself, shown in the depths of despair as she convalesces from one of her crippling bouts with depression in the suburban aridity of Richmond while pining for life in London's Bloomsbury, writing her novel of the exquisite nature of the quotidian. Another is the life of Mrs. Laura Brown, dying a million deaths every day in suburban Los Angeles, raising a son and pregnant again by a good man she doesn't love, as she reads Mrs. Dalloway and ponders escape. Lastly the life of Clarissa Vaughn, whose long unrequited love for Richard Brown, her gay poet/novelist friend, has led her to care for him tenderly in his final years as an AIDS patient. He long ago nicknamed her “Mrs. Dalloway,” both for her first name and for her exquisitely self-abnegating strength.

Over the course of one day in the life of each woman, everything she knows and feels about her life is sharply refocused; it is made clear to each that, to escape the trap she is in, she must accept change or die in the trap. The ending of the book brings all three strands to their inevitable conclusions, with surprising overlaps.

My Review: I first read this when it came out in 1998. I fell in love instantly, as I had with Mrs. Dalloway at a slightly earlier date. I loved the imaginative structure of interwoven lives, commenting on each other and riffing off the events in each world, echoing some facet in every case the events in the iconic novel Mrs. Dalloway.

I can't give it five stars because, in the end, I wondered a bit if the clever-clever hadn't gotten in the way of the emotional core of the book, which I saw as the gritty determination of the women to live on their own terms and in their own lives not dependent on convention. In making the book conform to this ideal, I felt that some plot strands weren't honestly dealt with but rather forced into a shape required by the author's plans.

That cavil aside, the book is beautifully written and wonderfully interestingly conceived. I'd recommend it heartily, and suggest reading it in conjunction with the movie.

220 > Nice! I hope this get others to read this book - remember it being a great read ......

Pearl Ruled: LAVONDYSS by ROBERT HOLDSTOCK

Rating: 2.5* of five (p79)

BOOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNG!

As good as Mythago Wood was, that is how good this book wasn't.

”I can't replace it,” Tallis called. “If it hasn't grown back then it wasn't meant to grow back. What can I do? I can't stick it back on. It's mine, now. The tine belongs to me, You can't be angry. Please don't be angry.”

Broken Boy roared. The sound carried across the land. It drowned the somber tone of the Shadoxhurst bell. It marked the end of the encounter.

The stag walked out of sight across the hill.

Tallis did not follow. Rather, she stood for a while, and only when darkness made the woods fade to black did she turn for home again.”

I turned for home again after that. Here, we are defining “home” as a gin bottle, a vermouth atomizer, and an icy cold shaker.

For anyone still even slightly awake, Harry's sister Tallis goes into the wood to rescue him. (See last book.) Total snore. Don't care, don't want to read one more word about Ryhope Wood, and that is a crime. It's one of the most fascinating ideas I've read in a long time.

And it just got goobered on. Damn! Blast! Hate that hate it hate it hate it!

#220 Great review of The Hours. I must read it and see the movie again. Somehow, I've managed to be the first to give this one a thumb.

Oh dear - sorry to hear that about Lavondyss. I've been collecting the Ryhope Wood series but not reading them as I am still on the look out for a copy of Mythago Wood as I wanted to re-read before reading the rest.

Hope your next book is much better.

>223 laytonwoman3rd: Thanks, Linda3rd! *smooch*

>224 calm: Oh dear calm, I hope your reading experience is better than mine was!

Review: 29 of fifty

Title: THE SYMPOSIUM

Author: PLATO

Rating: 2* of five, all for Aristophanes's way trippy remix of Genesis

While perusing a review of Death in Venice (dreadful tale, yet another fag-must-die-rather-than-love piece of normative propaganda) written by my GoodReads good friend Stephen, he expressed a desire to read The Symposium before he eventually re-reads this crapulous homophobic maundering deathless work of art. As I have read The Symposium with less than stellar results, I warned him off. Well, see below for what happened next.

Stephen wrote: "Damn...can you do a quick cliff notes summary or maybe a video lecture? I would much rather take advantage of your previous suffering than have to duplicate it."

THE SYMPOSIUM

So this boring poet dude wins some big-ass prize and has a few buds over for a binge. They're all lying around together on couches, which is as promising a start to a story as I can think of, when the boys decide to stay sober (boo!) and debate the Nature of Luuuv.

Phaedrus (subject of a previous Socratic dialogue by Plato) gives a nice little speech, dry as a popcorn fart, about how Love is the oldest of the gods and Achilles was younger than Patroclus, and Alcestis died of love for her husband, and some other stuff I don't remember because I was drifting off, so got up to see if I would stay awake better on the patio. It was a little nippy that day.

So next up is the lawyer. I know, right? Ask a lawyer to talk about love! Like asking a priest to talk about honor, or a politician to talk about common decency! So he pontificates about pederasty for a while, which made me uncomfortable, so I got up to get some coffee. I may have stopped by the brandy bottle on the way back out, I can't recall.

So after the lawyer tells when *exactly* it's okay to pork a teenager, the doctor chimes in that luuuuuv is the drug, it's everything, man, the whole uuuuuuuniiiiiveeeeeeeeeerse is luuuuv. Who knew they had hippies in those days? I needed more brandy, I mean coffee!, and the text of my ancient Penguin paperback was getting smaller and smaller for some reason, so I went to look for the brandy get the magnifying glass so I could see the footnotes.

Then comes Aristophanes. Now seriously, this is a good bit. Aristophanes, in Plato's world, tells us why we feel whole, complete, when we're with our true love: Once upon a time, we were all two-bodied and two-souled beings, all male, all female, or hermaphroditic. When these conjoined twins fell into disfavor, Zeus cleaved them apart, and for all eternity to come, those souls will wander the earth seeking the other half torn from us.

Now being Aristophanes, Plato plays it for laughs, but this is really the heart of the piece. Plato quite clearly thought this one through, in terms of what makes us humans want and need love. It's a bizarre version of Genesis, don'cha think?

So there I was glazed over with brandy-fog admiration for the imagination of this ancient Greek boybanger, and I was about to give up and pass out take my contemplations indoors when the wind, riffling the pages a bit, caused me to light on an interesting line. I continued with the host's speech.

Now really...is there anything on this wide green earth more boring than listening to a poet bloviate? Especially about luuuuv? Blah blah noble blah blah youthful yakkity blah brave *snore*

Then it's Socrates's turn, and I was hoping Plato gave him some good zingers to make up for the tedium of the preceding sixteen years of my life. I mean, the previous speech. It was a little bit hard to hold the magnifying glass, for some reason, and it kept getting in the way of the brandy bottle. I mean, coffee thermos! COFFEE THERMOS.

I'm not all the way sure what Plato had Socrates say, but it wasn't riveting lemme tell ya what. I woke up, I mean came to, ummm that is I resumed full attention when the major studmuffin and hawttie Alcibiades comes in, late and drunk (!), and proceeds to pour out his unrequited lust for (older, uglier) Socrates. He really gets into the nitty-gritty here, talking about worming his way into the old dude's bed and *still* Socrastupid won't play hide the salami.

Various noises of incredulity and derision were heard to come from my mouth, I feel sure, though I was a little muzzy by that time, and it is about this point that the brandy bottle COFFEE THERMOS slid to the ground and needed picking up. As I leaned to do so, I remember thinking how lovely and soft the bricks looked.

When I woke up under the glass table top, the goddamned magnifying glass had set what remains of the hair on top of my head on fire.

The moral of the story is, reading The Symposium should never be undertaken while outdoors.

OUCH

I KNOW! My scalp is still sensitive.

Didn't the half people roll around looking for each other? Really foggy memory of this too but nothing to do with brandy, er COFFEE, just the wind whistling through the misty halls of memory.

ETA: about Lavondyss, yeah.

>226 richardderus:: Magnificent.

Hello, Rdear.

Too bad about Lavondyss. Your symposium review is a hoot!

P.S. Can't find your review to thumb it.

>230 Matke: Hi Gail!! So glad to see you!! And thanks.

>231 jnwelch: I didn't see the point of posting it to the work, since there are so many classicists on the site. I did now, so you can thumb at your leisure.

I was able to use the remote control thumb from my recliner, thanks. Screw the classicists, right? No, I have no clue what classicists have to do with this.

I haven't looked, but I expect at some point the Longface Puritans League will begin flagging that review. It isn't respectful enough.

Ah. Okay. Well, they're no fun anyway.

Review: 30 of fifty

Title: DESOLATION ROAD

Author: IAN MC DONALD

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Book Report: Earth can't sustain its current population in the style to which all 7 billion of us wish to become accustomed, and no one is predicting a sudden outbreak of common sense and birth prevention to bring the numbers down. What are we to do?

Move, of course. Where? More than one place. There's the Metropolis, the geosynchronous city in space reached by fixed space elevators; but that's filling up too; wherever shall we go?

Well, Mars, for one. The Remote Orbital Terraforming and Environmental Control Headquarters (ROTECH for short) consortium is created on the Motherworld, sent into a moonbelt orbit around Mars, and given a thousand years of development, has finally produced a planetary ecosystem that can sustain unsuited humans in the open.

ROTECH governs Mars as lightly as any frontier is governed. People, let loose from cities and rules, pretty much do what comes naturally. They have babies, they make farms, they organize themselves into Us and Them, and they do it all at breakneck speed without worrying too hard about consequences. When Consequences rain down from the Heavens, well, adapt or die.

Ian McDonald does in 363 pages what others do in 1000. He makes Mars come alive, he peoples it with fabulous characters (human and cyborg and robotic), he creates a logical thought experiment...how can humanity survive its inevitable wearing out of the Motherworld?...and uses it to tell us about ourselves, about what we are *actually* made of, and about what triumphs and tragedies flow naturally and inevitably from that.

My Review: I adore this book.

There.

No, really, that's it. I adore this book. You should read it, especially if you point your booger-holder at the sky when science fiction is mentioned. I don't read THAT people should read this. If you don't, then you should be ashamed of your inflexibility.

I even re-read Jane Austen recently. And liked it. So. What's that “I don't like THAT” stuff again?

Hah! Excellent review, Richard! You had me convinced before, and now you have me convinced again. Thumb to the sky. I'm going to stick my just-kleenexed booger-holder into this book and read it - the book I mean.

P.S. Glad to hear it about Jane Austen!

Hmmm is the review double posted or am I seeing double?
I loved Stranger in a Strange Land, is this similar?
Well, without religion?

>237 jnwelch: Thanks, Joe! I really really like the book, so I'm glad it's giving you impetus to read it.

>238 mckait: You're seeing double unless I'm filtering a second one out. It's not a lot like Stranger in that the POV changes when the time index does. And there are more centuries in Desolation Road.

Weird, I still see two. One right after another... :-/

Sounds good !

Read Ian MacDonald yonks ago: Queen of Morning, King of something something, and Out on Blue Six or somesuch. This sounds fun. Thanks, Richard.

>240 mckait: Oh dear! I looked again, I still only see one! *skritchskritch*

>241 tiffin: River of Gods is my all-time fave-rave of his books, but I'd say read this first. It's ever so much shorter.

Pearl Ruled: BLACK SWAN GREEN by DAVID MITCHELL

Rating: 1.5* of five (p66)

Strike one: Teenaged protagonist.

Strike two, and ball one of strike three: Majgicqk. Or something like it.

Strike three: David Mitchell's writing reminds me of all the MFA program writing I've ever read.

I thought The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and Cloud Atlas were disorganized, and NO I did NOT misunderstand the fractured POV he used, I thought he did a poor job of executing it, and I found the preciosity of his phrasemaking in each of the three books I've either read through or Pearl Ruled unpleasant to the point of actual snort of derision coming out of me as I read.

I don't think he's a good writer, I don't like the story he told here (which has nothing to do with him, only to do with my response), and I won't be reading more stuff like this:

The first torrent of vomit kicked a GUUURRRRRR noise out of me, and poured on the muddy grass. In the hot slurry were bits of prawn and carrot. Some'd got n my splayed fingers. It was warm as warm rice pudding. More was coming, Inside my eyelids was a Lambert and Butler cigarette sticking out of its box, like in an advert. The second torrent was a mustardier yellow. I guppered for fresh oxygen like a man in an airlock. Prayed that was the last of it. Then came three short, boiling subslurries, slicker and sweeter, as if composed of the Baked Alaska.

If you can make a kid puking tedious, brother, you can make ANYthing tedious. And he does.

Poke me with a fork, I'm done.

242 are you lookt at where you wrote it? the editable page? or from "outside"

wow ... last book sounds like a well.. a... I mean it sounds..

never mind.

>244 mckait: Believe me when I tell you, never mind is precisely where you should go with this!

I looked at the "outside" view...only there once...???

Eeeew... You convinced me. Won't read the Mitchell.

No Kindle version of Desolation Road? So it's wishlisted for now.

There has never been any point in my life when I wanted to read about puking. "Majgicqk" *snort*

>243 richardderus:....Interesting reaction to Mitchell. You know full well I don't usually do scifi, fantasy, etc etc, but Cloud Atlas was certainly an interesting and enthralling read for me and Thousand Autumns was one of my all time favorites, perhaps because I spent so much time in Japan and found myself able to envision both the mindset, the environs, and the implausible but totally acceptable fantasy.

All that said, I'm pretty sure I'm not ready to dive into any more Mitchell for the foreseeable future. Nor am I ready for any more Ann Tyler, David Foster Wallace, Stephen King, David McCullough, Carlos Ruiz Zaffron, or numerous other writers who can produce one blazing star of gorgeous writing and then tend to bore the crap out of me. Can you say John Barth? Lawrence Turrell? Thomas Cagill?

When I ponder this question I often think it might have been a blessing that John Kennedy Toole died before Confederacy of Dunces was published.....he can thereby stay enshrined in my heart as the author of my favorite all time book without my grabbing his next "best seller" and being forever disappointed.

>248 tututhefirst:: How true about authors disappointing/boring us. Sad.

Rdear, thank you for carrying the freight on what must have been an ugly, ugly read.

>246 Deern: Oh boo hiss Nathalie! It's available on Kindle here in the US. I'm so sorry you can't get it.

>247 tiffin: Well, I find the Mispellingues in fauntaysyee novels annoying. VERY annoying.

>248 tututhefirst: I'll go with your judgment on Toole particularly. One truly was enough. And very probably Harper Lee was brilliant not to publish a follow-up to her work of genius.

>249 Matke: GAIL!! *smoochiesmoochsmooch* Glad to see you! And I only carried it to p66...after that, I threw its raisin-filled badness back into the Slough of Despond. (See other thread for reference)

Hi Richard, I tried a few times to read Black Swan Green and just couldn't do it...

>251 Copperskye: *confetti toss* AND JOANNE TOO!! Welcome as the spring rains we didn't get but it still managed to be summer today boo hiss.

Yeah, know what you mean by Black Swan Green.

Bizarre - have thoroughly enjoyed all of David Mitchell books ...... the weakest being The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet I guess the world we would be boring if we all agreed

Exactly, Alex, if we all liked the same things it would be dull indeed.

*note.. Avoid Black Swan Green*

*adds Black Swan Green to wish list*

I own Desolation Road now. It had better be good, Richard.

Robert

>255 mckait: Sound. Sensible. Wise.

>256 kidzdoc: Typical. Although I suppose, given what you do for a living, teenagers describing their unswallowings are simply part of the day.

>257 Mr.Durick: Assuming you aren't a pursey-mouthed h8er, Robert, all should go swimmingly!

BkC15) Carter, Angela, NIGHTS AT THE CIRCUS: *swoon*

Yes indeed, I still agree with myself here. In these fill-in reviews of the over 100 books my RL (or F2F, whichever) book circle has read since 1994 that I have never written reviews for, I'm finding that some opinions have changed significantly. Not here. *SWOON*

Whatever I tell you about the plot, which is unremarkable (boy meets girl-oid, etc.), is utterly overshadowed by one fact of the book: Fevvers.

She is an aerialiste, the best in the world, and it's all down to her unknown avian ancestry, she tells Jack, the newspaperman who's in love with her (as who isn't?). See, she was hatched from an egg, and spent her post-menarche years as a living cupid in a bordello foyer. Now she's a six-two, winged sensation with only a nodding acquaintance with reality, since she's always lived outside its dreary confines in the bordello, which she helped burn down, and then with Col. Kearney's circus, where she's the star attraction.

The novel takes us from London to Petersburg and points east at the tail end of the 19th century. We meet Lizzie, Fevvers' adopted mom (and probably a witch); the Princess of Abyssinia, a silent-through-trauma cat-tamer and lesbian lover of Mignon, the young lassie with the beautiful voice that drives a jealous spike between Fevvers and Jack; Christian the christian idiot who believes Fevvers is an angel fallen from Heaven and sets about sacrificing her to obtain immortality from god; and not least Col. Kearney himself, the profligate owner of the circus that's on tour, who is advised by his pig Sybil.

PG Wodehouse writes a Monty Python sketch in the style of Virginia Woolf. Enchanting. Scintillating. Close to perfect. A bottle of Veuve Cliquot served in a crystal flute while sitting in the shade of an ancient oak in a summery forest glade.

Great review It is a wonderful book Richard:)

That sounds fab! thumb

>260 calm:, 261 Thanks, ladies! *smooch*

PG Wodehouse writes a Monty Python sketch in the style of Virginia Woolf. Who could resist checking that out? Thumb!

You will be awfully glad you did!

Another superb review. I adore Angela Carter. Thumbed and added to WL...and moved way, way up.

xo