Richardderus's Homeless Reviews, Thread 1

A dazzling, sunshiney room of books to start the New Year 2013's old, forgotten, and otherwise orphaned book-reading.

“Get books, sit yourself down anywhere, and go to reading them yourself.”
― Abraham Lincoln


“Reading is a gift. It's something you can do almost anytime and anywhere. It can be a tremendous way to learn, relax, and even escape. So, enough about the virtues of reading. Time to read on.”
― Richard Carlson


“I never need to find time to read. When people say to me, ‘Oh, yeah, I love reading. I would love to read, but I just don’t have time,’ I’m thinking, ‘How can you not have time?’ I read when I’m drying my hair. I read in the bath. I read when I’m sitting in the bathroom. Pretty much anywhere I can do the job one-handed, I read.”
― J.K. Rowling

I want to treat the Short Story collection challenge as a ticker-to-itself thread, thinking 48 reviews as my goal. I'll keep the thread over in the Short Stories forum.

My 2013 SHORT STORY collections ticker:




The 75 challenge for 2013 will be non-fiction and non-genre-fiction books published in 2012 and 2013, plus recommendations from other 75ers.

My 2013 NEW books ticker:




I'm going to keep a mystery-genre thread over in Crime, Thriller, and Mystery forum, with a goal of 50 reviews. Way way way too many of my reviews this year, in all forums, were mysteries and thrillers, and while I love them, I don't want to get too rut-ified and read only those books while keeping up my self-made review writing census.

My MYSTERY & THRILLER books ticker:




THIS THREAD is the Orphans, which will still catch all the other reading. Thinking 60 reviews as my target.

My 2013 ORPHANED books ticker:




Books are reviewed in post:

1. Three Score and Ten...#27.

2. Guards! Guards!...#38.

3. How to Be Alone: Essays...#42.

4. The Brief History of the Dead...#96.

5. Mulligans...#101.

6. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit...#110.

7. Fadeout...#117.

8. Death Claims...#118.

9. Assuming the Position: A Memoir of Hustling...#121.

10. I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual...#129.

11. Troublemaker...#130.

12. Bad Monkeys...#137.

13. The Little Lavender Book...#138.

14. Published and Perished...#147.

15. From Dead to Worse...#151.

16. Dead Until Dark...#152.

17. Living Dead in Dallas...#154.

18. Club Dead...#155.

19. Dead to the World...#159.

20. Dead as a Doornail...#160.

21. Definitely Dead...#161.

22. All Together Dead...#162.

23. Dead in the Family...#163.

24. The Iron Lance...#168.

25. The Wasp Factory...#186.

26. A Different Kind of Luxury...#190.

27. Camptown Ladies...#203.

28. Sarah, Plain and Tall...#230.

29. Mosquitoes...#250.

Well-loved books from my past:

Pearl Ruled:



Book Circle Reads:

24. An American Tragedy...#104.

25. Advise and Consent...#105.

36. The Maltese Falcon...#5.

55. Babbitt...#54.

56. Elmer Gantry...#55.

75. The Locusts Have No King...#109.

154. Poor Things...#52.

155. The Warden...#16.

158. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit...#146.

163. A Clockwork Orange...#223.

168. Ceremony...#276.

Book Circle Reads 36

Title: THE MALTESE FALCON

Author: DASHIELL HAMMETT

Rating: 3.5* of five, because I love the movie more

The Book Description: Sam Spade, Dashiell Hammett's archetypally tough San Francisco detective, is more noir than L.A. Confidential and more vulnerable than Raymond Chandler's Marlowe. In The Maltese Falcon, the best known of Hammett's Sam Spade novels (including The Dain Curse and The Glass Key), Spade is tough enough to bluff the toughest thugs and hold off the police, risking his reputation when a beautiful woman begs for his help, while knowing that betrayal may deal him a new hand in the next moment.
Spade's partner is murdered on a stakeout; the cops blame him for the killing; a beautiful redhead with a heartbreaking story appears and disappears; grotesque villains demand a payoff he can't provide; and everyone wants a fabulously valuable gold statuette of a falcon, created as tribute for the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV. Who has it? And what will it take to get it back? Spade's solution is as complicated as the motives of the seekers assembled in his hotel room, but the truth can be a cold comfort indeed.

Spade is bigger (and blonder) in the book than in the movie, and his Mephistophelean countenance is by turns seductive and volcanic. Sam knows how to fight, whom to call, how to rifle drawers and secrets without leaving a trace, and just the right way to call a woman "Angel" and convince her that she is. He is the quintessence of intelligent cool, with a wise guy's perfect pitch. If you only know the movie, read the book. If you're riveted by Chinatown or wonder where Robert B. Parker's Spenser gets his comebacks, read the master. --Barbara Schlieper

My Review: There's nothing second-best about this book, no indeed not. It's a fine, solid book, one with a lot of good story packed into some very well-chosen words.

But the film, well now, sometimes perfection comes in unexpected places. Bogart and Sydney Greenstreet! What a pair of second-raters! And how perfectly they meshed, and then add Peter Lorre, another second-rater, and the Holy Trinity couldn't have done better work with the tale being told here. It was a super retelling of the basic story.

Wisecracks that, on the page, made me smile and even giggle, came out of Bogart's mouth, and Lorre's, and even Greenstreet's, at a wonderful pace and were there and gone...just like a wisecrack should be. Not to put down the book by any means! It's a fun read, and it's a well-made novel, and it's a classic noir for a reason.

But for me, only for me, I want the film to be my memory of this story.

Book Circle Reads 17

Title: MORAVAGINE

Author: BLAISE CENDRARS

Rating: 3 sickened stars of five

The Book Description: At once truly appalling and appallingly funny, Blaise Cendrars's Moravagine bears comparison with Naked Lunch—except that it's a lot more entertaining to read. Heir to an immense aristocratic fortune, mental and physical mutant Moravagine is a monster, a man in pursuit of a theorem that will justify his every desire. Released from a hospital for the criminally insane by his starstruck psychiatrist (the narrator of the book), who foresees a companionship in crime that will also be an unprecedented scientific collaboration, Moravagine travels from Moscow to San Antonio to deepest Amazonia, engaged in schemes and scams as, among other things, terrorist, speculator, gold prospector, and pilot. He also enjoys a busy sideline in rape and murder. At last, the two friends return to Europe—just in time for World War I, when "the whole world was doing a Moravagine."

This new edition of Cendrars's underground classic is the first in English to include the author's afterword, "How I Wrote Moravagine."

My Review: Dr. Science, the eunuch-like shrink of mass-murdering rapist and all-around criminal Moravagine, relates this hideous tale of debauchery, rapine, pillage, murder, and all-around good times after springing the title character from the insane asylum where Science worked with him. Their world travels on the eve of the Great War involve blood, misery, and death for everyone but themselves.

Moravagine, literally “death by female genitalia,” is not someone you want to meet. Hannibal Lecter was positively cuddlesome by Moravagine's standards. Science, in his neutral and neutered language, presents the facts of their horrible, horrible crime spree in a way that left me nauseated but curiously unmoved: “Which mother would not prefer to kill and devour her children if she could be sure in doing so of binding to her and keeping her male, of being permeated by him, absorbing him from below, digesting him, letting him be macerated within her in a state reduced to that of foetus, and carrying him thus her life long in womb?”

This is a slasher movie waiting to happen. I've heard others describe it as funny. Not to me. Distastefully misogynistic. Appallingly bloody. I enjoyed one thing about reading the book: The author's evident fury and outrage at a world that tacitly accepts the dehumanizing and belittling effects of Modernity without so much as a bleat of resistance. Resistance, you see, is futile.

Revolting. Fascinating. Deeply unclean.

Book Circle Reads 11

Title: THE DA VINCI CODE

Author: DAN BROWN

Rating: 3 stars of five

The Book Description: An ingenious code hidden in the works of Leonardo da Vinci. A desperate race through the cathedrals and castles of Europe. An astonishing truth concealed for centuries . . . unveiled at last.

While in Paris, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is awakened by a phone call in the dead of the night. The elderly curator of the Louvre has been murdered inside the museum, his body covered in baffling symbols. As Langdon and gifted French cryptologist Sophie Neveu sort through the bizarre riddles, they are stunned to discover a trail of clues hidden in the works of Leonardo da Vinci—clues visible for all to see and yet ingeniously disguised by the painter.

Even more startling, the late curator was involved in the Priory of Sion—a secret society whose members included Sir Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, and Da Vinci—and he guarded a breathtaking historical secret. Unless Langdon and Neveu can decipher the labyrinthine puzzle—while avoiding the faceless adversary who shadows their every move—the explosive, ancient truth will be lost forever.

My Review: Not one word. I mean it. Not ONE WORD of criticism for this book's three-star rating. It is not Literature, it is not even particularly well-written farb, but it is undeniably a page-turning rip-snorting adventure story that pokes fun at christian religion. Therefore it is A-Okay with me.

Snobs: It's not about you. It's about normal people getting their entertainment from a book for once, instead of a TV or a gaming console. Why are you bitching? Who said you had to read it?

Lovers: It's not about how much you love it. I didn't love it. I read the whole thing in a sitting and I wasn't about to get up until it was done, and that's saying a lot for someone whose life list of books read includes the snooty people's snootiest books. So yeah, three-star review is a huge vote of confidence from this source.

Religious christians: What in the hell are you doing reading my reviews?! Are you daft? I won't be saying anything nice about your imaginary friend any time soon. Pass on!

Environmentalists: Yes, the entirety of Siberia was deforested to print the book in its zillions. I feel bad about that too. Tell you what: Get out there and make hemp paper (better for the environment, plus a smokeable side product!) on a commercial scale. Books will go down in price, forests will be saved, and the mellow quotient of the world will go up. Win-win-win!

Normal people: You've all read the book by now, right? If not, go to a used bookstore (Brown's rich enough) and pick a few up. It's a lot of fun.

Richard, both my hubby and I had so much fun reading The Da Vinci Code that we had out the atlases so we could follow the action, and then we bought another version of it that came with pictures, and then we bought the book that explained all the stuff, and then we started reading many books about the history of Christianity. I am not a religious person, nor do I know much about art and architecture, but I sure learned a lot while enjoying it all. :)

>8 nhlsecord: I hope you'll write that in a note to Dan Brown! No author can hear that kind of wonderful praise for his work too often. Thanks for stopping in to say so!

Book Circle Reads 19

Title: HEART OF DARKNESS

Author: JOSEPH CONRAD

Rating: 3 stars of five

The Book Description: More than a century after its publication (1899), Heart of Darkness remains an indisputably classic text and arguably Conrad's finest work.

This extensively revised Norton Critical Edition includes new materials that convey nineteenth-century attitudes toward imperialism as well as the concerns of Conrad's contemporaries about King Leopold's exploitation of his African domain. New to the Fourth Edition are excerpts from Adam Hochschild's recent book, King Leopold's Ghost, and from Sir Roger Casement's influential "Congo Report" on Leopold's atrocities. "Backgrounds and Contexts" also provides readers with a collection of photographs and a map that bring the Congo Free State to life.

A new section, "Nineteenth-Century Attitudes toward Race," includes writings by, among others, Hegel, Darwin, and Sir Francis Galton. New essays by Patrick Brantlinger, Marianna Torgovnik, Edward W. Said, Hunt Hawkins, Anthony Fothergill, and Paul Armstrong debate Chinua Achebe's controversial indictment of the novel's depiction of Africans and offer differing views about whether Conrad's beliefs about race were progressive or retrograde.

A rich selection of writings by Conrad on his life in the Congo is accompanied by extensive excerpts from his essays about art and literature. "Criticism" presents a wealth of new materials on Heart of Darkness, including contemporary responses by Henry James, E.M. Forster, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf. Recent critical assessments by Peter Brooks, Jeremy Hawthorn, Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Andrew Michael Roberts, J. Hillis Miller, and Lissa Schneider cover a ranger of topics, from narrative theory to philosophy and sexuality. Also new to the Fourth Edition is a selection of writings on the connections between the novel and the film Apocalypse Now.

This Norton Critical Edition is again based on Robert Kimbrough's meticulously re-edited text of the novel. An expanded Textual Appendix allows the reader to follow Conrad's revisions at different stages of the creative process. A Chronology has been added, and the Selected Bibliography has been revised and updated.

My Review: Had I not read the critical edition of this book, I wouldn't have given it three stars. It's dense and chewy prose. It's a bleak story. It's Conrad's most famous and most lasting work because it's so astounding that a man of his era could be this perceptive and say so publicly! Oh, there was much tut-tutting at the time about the awfulness of Congo Free State's condition, but it was disingenuous at best and cynically political at worst. Conrad wrote a human response to a human horror, and he did so by making a White Man out to be Wrong!!!!!

Cue gasps! And start the applause.

But it is a slog to read, short though it might be. Simply put, Conrad spoke English as a third, yes THIRD language. He did an extraordinary thing, writing in his third language, but to me it felt like it was his third about half the time.

Still and all, I am quite pleased to have read the Norton Critical Edition, and to have a real sense of the book's revolutionary place. Quite a good use of my limited number of eyeblinks.

"It is not Literature, it is not even particularly well-written farb, but it is undeniably a page-turning rip-snorting adventure story that pokes fun at christian religion. Therefore it is A-Okay with me."

I heartily agree - we all need a good page turner don't we surely !?

>11 roundballnz: That's been my position ever since I got over myself, Alex. We need fun. Sometimes what's fun for me isn't for you, but neither of us is wrong so long as we're each having fun.

I'm happy that you liked the Brown book - Tomm and I listened to it on a long car ride and we both enjoyed it immensely. And I'm in no way embarrassed by that. Poo on those who poo-poo it.

I am here this morning to star this little thread. Your reviews to this point remind me why I read so few "old classics". But I do know there are the occasional gems and I'm pretty sure you'll see them when they pass by. Thanks for your fine work, my friend.

>13 scaifea: That's the spirit, Amber!

>14 maggie1944: Well, now, there are a lot of good'uns. I haven't gotten around to 'em yet.

Book Circle Reads 155

Title: THE WARDEN

Author: ANTHONY TROLLOPE

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Book Description: The Warden centers on Mr. Harding, a clergyman of great personal integrity who is nevertheless in possession of an income from a charity far in excess of the sum devoted to the purposes of the foundation. On discovering this, young John Bold turns his reforming zeal to exposing what he regards as an abuse of privilege, despite the fact that he is in love with Mr. Harding's daughter Eleanor. It was a highly topical novel (a case regarding the misapplication of church funds was the scandalous subject of contemporary debate), but like other great Victorian novelists, Trollope uses the specific case to explore and illuminate the universal complexities of human motivation and social morality.

My Review: First read in the 1980s, during the first Reagan Administration, I was struck at how little things had changed in the past 130 years. Mr. Bold's lawsuit and its unintended consequences, the fuss and kerfuffle over the uses of “public” (really now, could the specific bequest of a trust to support a charitable activity and administered by the church be considered public today?) funds in a manner the onlooker simply didn't like...think Chrysler bailout, but not International Harvester or US Steel...all of this resonated with me.

Eleanor Harding was no one's fool, hooking up with that pill of the first water John Bold! And I have to say that the portrait of Dickens as Mr. Popular Sentiment made me chortle.

But on re-reading the book in 2012...well...the magic eluded me. I think this was a book that needed the element of not knowing the ending to make the events fun. Since I knew already who was going to do what, I had no huge amount of interest in following the path laid out for me. It was still amusing. It wasn't ever gripping, but it was involving. Now, after 30 years, much of what took place had fled from my head until the words hit my eyes. But as they returned, it was as blocks and lumps and boulders, not flowing back into the river of my thoughts like cool springs and bright brooks.

Good Victorian stodge. But once was enough.

Great review of The Warden Richard - I really liked it, and then loved Barchester Towers last year (and will eventually try to read the series).

And I was also a fan of The Da Vinci Code - I read it by accident before all the hype, which helped. I liked it enough to find Angels and Demons, when I went way off Dan Brown because it felt like a repeat.

>17 cushlareads: Thanks, Cushla! It did feel like the less-successful sequel, didn't it, despite being the *predecessor* book?

Oh, yes, Barchester Towers is my very favorite in the series. I liked Doctor Thorne quite a lot too, with the odious Roger and the equally odious Lady Arabella...secondary characters created with that Trollopeian verve that is so much fun! It is, BTW, next up if that will tempt you.

Yup I read the first few pages of Dr Thorne straight after BT. I am keen to read it some time this year.

I don't know about the Warden feeling like a sequel - it was a good (shorter) way for me to get into the world of english church politics. I have been enjoying reading some classic authors over the last couple of years - I've owned Barchester Towers for 10 years but it was only after reading several raves on here that I got up the oomph to tackle it. Same with Tolstoy and that other dude with whom I will not defile your thread!

Oh! Heh, no I was talking about Angels and Demons! I'm sorry, that was completely unclear.

Doh, that makes much more sense now!! I thought you were making a profound literary comment on Trollope.

Just a note on the 'public' nature of the trust -- given that Trollope was writing in an era in which the established church was far more established than it is today, and in which such organizations served the public purpose that government (i.e. truly public) entities went on to do in the 20th century, I think this is one of those instances where the world he was writing about isn't always as obvious to a modern reader -- just like the little character sketches, of Grantly's sons, or of the Jupiter (aka the Times, "thundering" from Olympus!) that would have been immediately obvious to his contemporaries and produced instant chuckles but that ask most of us to stop and ponder a bit. Which is the reason this was a 4.2 star book.

Headache receding, so am going to do a bit of postponed work before heading back to bed. Sigh, two of us sidelined for this meeting by our intractable ailments...

Someday, when I grow up, I want to write highly amusing and creative reviews just like you. And, I totally agree with you on The Da Vinci Code....not literature but a fun rip-snorter....life is to short to take things so seriously!

>22 Chatterbox: OIC! I don't think much about matters of churchly governance, which I suspect will not surprise you, so that didn't enter my head. Thanks!

Oh my yes, these ailments are intractable all right. Mine is chronic and constant, yours chronic and debilitating...and as awful as each is, we're lucky not to be worse off.

Most days I can make myself go with that.

>23 Cobscook: Hi Heidi! Thanks for stopping in. I appreciate the lovely compliment, too!

I get impatient with the snobbery of "oh THAT it's *just* a {fill in name of author/genre} book" and have stopped simply smiling condescendingly at people who utter such tripe. If there's a reason you don't like something/one, out with it! Let's see what kind of burr you've got under your saddle. But the utterers of same like to drop their pearls of wisdom and hasten on, lest they have to give reasons instead of pronouncing judgment.

Yuck.

A quick stop-by this morning. A comment on reading "those kinds" of books - it is true that many people arrive at "snap" judgments regarding what not to read, which is sometimes necessary, of course, because there are way, way too many books in this world! Too many, I'm telling you. I was in the Barnes & Noble last night getting some help to put the Nook app on my MacBook Air, and while the very nice, patient, tech guy was on the phone with their tech people, I had to be looking at all the books they spread out for people to be tempted by. That place is so dangerous! I did not buy any books, but I was able to buy a great big bag made of burlap, with leather straps, which I'll take to the big library convention coming to Seattle later this month. Rumor has it that there will be free stuff. All one can carry. And this little old lady can carry a lot when it comes to books!

Back to snap judgments - I am so happy to have found LT and 75 books because it provides me with so many good ideas of what to read! Thank you, all!

BTW, B&N is having some sort of technical problem with their Nook app so if some of Richard's readers are thinking of downloading it, be prepared, it might not download. It might freeze. Call the tech people and perhaps they will have found a way to fix it. I ended up getting the academic version of the download, which was created for students. I don't know if it will be better or not.

Karen44, I have no kick with judging books by any criteria one chooses to use...for one's own self. It's when it's applied outwards, and used to judge the reading choices of others, that I start to buck and rear.

Except Chuckles the Dick, no one should read that guff. No one.

Review: 1 of sixty

Title: THREE SCORE AND TEN

Author: ANGELA THIRKELL

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Book Description: Finished posthumously by her close friend, C. A. Lejeune, Three Score and Ten concludes the Barsetshire series with the birthday party of the heroine of the first novel, Laura Morland, now seventy years old, surrounded by her grown family, her literary legacy, and the same small-town drama that enchanted and amused readers thirty years previously. Thirkell's last, unfinished novel features a host of new and old friends from the author's beloved Barsetshire. This time out, a little boy appears to save Wiple Terrace, home of Miss Hampton and Miss Bent, from destruction. The budding romance between Lord Mellings and Lavinia Merton flowers, a past love finds Dr. Ford, and the Old Bank House provides the setting for the final scene, an all-Barsetshire party.


My Review: Of all the bittersweet pleasures I know, the completion of a dead author's beloved series stands alone at the top of my list. This, the twenty-ninth book in Thirkell's Barsetshire series, is never to have a companion added. It is a shame, on one level, and a relief on another.

I love the divagations and arabesques of illogic and whimsy that Thirkell specialized in. One's gently daft old Great-Aunt Maude, speaking from the edge of the grave to one's child-self, telling stories of the damnedest things...life before TV?! Horses as transportation instead of sport?! No showers?!...how extraordinary, how unimaginably primitive, how exciting! Laura Morland, introduced in the first book as the slightly harassed and mildly put-upon widowed mother of four wildly energetic, not terribly obedient sons, newly arrived in Barsetshire, is now turning seventy, which was quite a great age in 1959. She sits writing her Madame Koska thrillers, one after another, each just like the next and quite happily so; she has her youngest son's oldest son wished on her for the summer hols; she goes to parties, visits old friends for tea, takes pretty no-longer-young single women to the lairs of elderly single men and somehow makes it all come out right. Mrs. Morland is of the fabric of Barsetshire. She is the weft of the cloth, putting the picture into perspective, adding color and strength, and yet her lifetime habit of self-deprecation is ingrained and requires her to play down her milestone birthday and reject a party celebrating it in her honor.

And herein the relief of the series ending. The attitudes of fifty years ago can jar on modern sensibilities. The attitudes considered old-fashioned fifty years ago...! And of course, as anyone who has read the books before this one knows, there's the racism inherent in the time and place, most strongly evidenced by Thirkell's portraits of the Mixo-Lydian Ambassadress. Ye gods! The assumption that one must be married, must have a wife to care for one, a husband whose babies to have, isn't exactly in line with today's thinking and was slowly losing its hold on womanity even in 1959. The country-simple folks whose lives revolve around the rhythms of nature and the needs of their domestic cattle and crops, then a doomed lot of old-fashioned yokels, are now quite celebrated by the culture. Look at the Fabulous Beekman Boys! They're making a living out of promoting this very lifestyle, a gay couple riffing on Martha Stewart and (probably unknowingly) Thirkell. (Go read their blog. You'll see what I mean. Sharon Springs is like Barchester in a number of ways.)

But for all that, the sheer delight of sitting with Mrs. Morland, the authoress's well-known alter ego in the stories, as she contentedly runs out the sands in her life's hourglass, looking not ahead by much and back with a good deal of affection, is quite a pleasant experience. Mrs. Morland isn't dead yet, you see, she isn't just waiting for God, she is smiling and chatting and dispensing her inimitable style of wisdom to the young things quite without portentousness or even awareness of what she's doing. The Leslies, the Fosters (the Pomfrets, one supposes), the Thornes and Mertons and Keiths...of all generations...open their homes to Laura Morland, celebrated authoress, and old friend in this last installment. As Mrs. Thirkell herself died at seventy-one, it isn't a huge leap to imagine all these quiet teas and dull dinners (self-described!) and Agricultural Shows as Mrs. Morland's own last ones, and see them in this sweetly golden glow of times well and truly lost.

Being a Thirkell novel, well story since novel implies a plot of which this dear and lovely creation is void, there are engagements that will lead to the next generation's birth and upbringing, there are young people of every age busily engaged in the business of becoming themselves, there are so many many bustling scenes of no great moment but such deep pleasure...the knowledge that, despite the impending departure of the main character for good and all, there will be other lives and other worlds and new perspectives on it all. The sadness we feel at inevitable loss is tempered, as it always should be, by the eternal verity that Life, my dear, Life Goes On.

I love Barsetshire, and need its beautiful landscapes and wonderful people in my mental furniture. And sad as I am that I can't go there afresh in a new book, I'm so pleased to have had the chance to close the circle in finally reading this deeply autobiographical book. The door to Barsetshire, however, I refuse to close. The breeze from it is so beguilingly fresh.

Great reviews. Richard! I've now starred this thread. I should have done so long ago. I so wish my reviews were half so good as yours!

As for Three Score and Ten, I know just what you mean about out-dated attitudes. So many times I've found myself forgiving an author from another era for their attitudes - so many from Agatha Christie to Joseph Conrad. Now, I find myself much less tolerant and have begun to abandon books where the author's attitude is dated and the writing doesn't enthrall me, otherwise. Hemingway did not make the cut.

I do look forward to reading Angela Thirkell. I suspect I'll find it easy to forgive her, at least through a few books.

Why thank you! I hope you'll start your Thirkell voyage with The Brandons or Wild Strawberries, though, this isn't the book to cut your teeth on!

Ah, thanks for recommending where to begin. I was thinking of starting with Pomfret Towers, but I'll check to see if the library has The Brandons or Wild Strawberries available.

Pomfret Towers is a very good book, though I think it's more fun if one already has a wee bit of background. It is a little, well, richer in the lore of Barsetshire than the other two.

Oh Richard, I've been checking and checking your thread since I heard you were savoring Ms. Thirkell's last book, waiting anxiously for your thoughts, and you did not disappoint in any way! What a lovely tribute to Ms. Thirkell and Barsetshire. I feel as you do -- I love Barsetshire, which as a fictional place is as vivid and vibrant as any real place. I was at the library today looking for more of her books on audio (I have a long commute now, and her books are wonderful in that format), and horror of horrors, most of their collection has been weeded! To be fair, many were damaged enough that I often checked out the book as well so as not to miss anything. You've inspired me to return to Ms. Thirkell (and you inspired me to read her in the first place). Thank you!

Richard,
I completely trust your literary advice and will take it. Thanks!

Richard, have you read Three houses It's a memoir of Thirkell's childhood and I found it very pleasant.

>32 AMQS: I'm ackcherly (heh, Barsetshire joke) quite surprised that they *had* audios! One of the lovely things about Barsetshire is that it will wait for us. Not goin' anywhere, and ready to welcome the wandering stranger as and when one returns.

I do love it.

>33 bookwoman247: Goodness! *I* don't even trust my taste completely! That is a lovely compliment, and I thank you.

>34 Bjace: I did read it, and was a bit let down by its limitation of time. Still, that was twenty years or more ago, and I wouldn't imagine I'd have precisely that reaction again.

*waving* Hi!

Please forgive me for only stopping by this very quiet, and interesting, thread of yours. I have not the energy to keep up with the multiple hundreds of gossipy, food centric, hello/good bye comments on the longer threads. Perhaps by February I'll have revived.

*smooch* Glad to see you, wherever you decide to be.

Review: 2 of sixty

Title: GUARDS! GUARDS!

Author: TERRY PRATCHETT

Rating: 3* of five

The Book Description: Here there be dragons . . . and the denizens of Ankh-Morpork wish one huge firebreather would return from whence it came. Long believed extinct, a superb specimen of draco nobilis ("noble dragon" for those who don't understand italics) has appeared in Discworld's greatest city. Not only does this unwelcome visitor have a nasty habit of charbroiling everything in its path, in rather short order it is crowned King (it is a noble dragon, after all . . .).

Meanwhile, back at Unseen University, an ancient and long-forgotten volume--The Summoning of Dragons--is missing from the Library's shelves. To the rescue come Captain Vimes, Constable Carrot, and the rest of the Night Watch who, along with other brave citizens, risk everything, including a good roasting, to dethrone the flying monarch and restore order to Ankh-Morpork (before it's burned to a crisp). A rare tale, well done as only Terry Pratchett can.

My Review: I just don't care.

Mildly amusing most of the time, smile-inducingly punny some of the time, and just...well...so what? Trenchant satire? Not to me. More like amusing cocktail party chatter.

This is it for me and Sir Terry. I've tried, and frankly at 53, I don't see the need for me to read stuff that's as bland as unsalted rice.

Agreed. I Pearled it a few weeks ago. Will talk to the RL book club on Monday abut Why. Really, I think all I'll say is "why". Enough.

It's like admitting one doesn't like corn to say one doesn't like Pratchett. This is just...lukewarm stuff. Very pedestrian.

Yes...leave it at Why?

Oh BTW, I think we eat way too much corn, too. The sellers of corn are evil, IMHO.

Review: 3 of sixy

Title: HOW TO BE ALONE: Essays

Author: JONATHAN FRANZEN

Rating: 3* of five

The Book Description: Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections was the best-loved and most-written-about novel of 2001. Nearly every in-depth review of it discussed what became known as "The Harper's Essay," Franzen's controversial 1996 investigation of the fate of the American novel. This essay is reprinted for the first time in How to be Alone, along with the personal essays and the dead-on reportage that earned Franzen a wide readership before the success of The Corrections. Although his subjects range from the sex-advice industry to the way a supermax prison works, each piece wrestles with familiar themes of Franzen's writing: the erosion of civic life and private dignity and the hidden persistence of loneliness in postmodern, imperial America. Recent pieces include a moving essay on his father's stuggle with Alzheimer's disease (which has already been reprinted around the world) and a rueful account of Franzen's brief tenure as an Oprah Winfrey author.

As a collection, these essays record what Franzen calls "a movement away from an angry and frightened isolation toward an acceptance--even a celebration--of being a reader and a writer." At the same time they show the wry distrust of the claims of technology and psychology, the love-hate relationship with consumerism, and the subversive belief in the tragic shape of the individual life that help make Franzen one of our sharpest, toughest, and most entertaining social critics.

My Review: "Why Bother?" or, more familiarly "The Harper's Essay," is the most famous piece in the collection, and probably the most read. I think it's a nice meditation on the nature of reading and writing, and the changes these two things have been through, but it's not (to me) earth-shatteringly amazing. I've been thinking many of the same thoughts for a long time, being both a modeled and a social-isolate reader (the essay gives definitions for these terms, and you should read the text anyway. Wikipedia links to a PDF of it).

That doesn't mean the essay is less valuable, merely makes the point that I, and presumably others like me, don't feel its novelty. For others to whom the ideas are new, this could gong them like a bell. I wonder if those folks are among Franzen's readers, though. I still think Tetris is a cool video game, so how likely am I to be seeking out BioShock X or whatever? My sense of novelty, then, isn't about texts or their creators and/or the act of their creation, it's about the successors to the book and the ethos they create.

But the essay is, like the entire collection, a little bit less than fully coherent. Franzen doesn't so much organize his points around his thoughts as his thoughts around his points. The bits about his marital breakdown, the portions mentioning his teaching job, the revision-points about the Oprah kerfuffle after The Corrections got him into such trouble...all placed here and there, all called upon to do multiple duty and yet never seeming to be the mainstay of any one argument. Why then invoke them at all? I didn't feel the added weight of support in many of Franzen's passing mentions and glancing blows.

"My Father's Brain," on the other hand, was a fine and personal piece of wrestling, and a very involving and moving look at the nature of a time and a space in an adult man's life: The end of a parent's life is fraught for us all, and the ending of the life before the parent's actual death is the hardest thing to process.

Alzheimer's and other dementias are deeply frightening to me, and I suspect to most of us. Franzen reports from the front lines that it's a lot less terrifying than one might imagine, and even more heartrending. This essay is responsible for all three stars I've given the collection all by itself. I like the author a great deal more than I did after reading The Corrections, which I found repetitive rather than recursive, and ~100pp of Freedom, which for some reason I can't quite understand made me angry. The son who wrote "My Father's Brain" is a guy I want to have a beer with, talk about the pessimism-inducing world we fifty-plus social isolates live in, and see if we can't hash out some reason not to despair.

The other essays are well-written pieces about things I wasn't interested in, and ended up not meaning anything to me on a visceral level. Just, well, yeah okay that's nice, but what the devil should I care?

It's very much a library-borrow, and really not something I'll urge you to get out there and procure no matter the source. As usual for me as regards this writer, I don't leave this read eagerly awaiting the next one by him.

"My Father's Brain" was the one I remember most from the collection, I loved it too. And I liked a whole lot of others as well, even though I cant remember them now. Maybe I need to read them again with my much older brain.

>43 LovingLit: Or perhaps the essays just aren't that memorable. That's what I think is the case, anyway.

Thumbed! I'm not a fan of Franzen's and this will never be be a book I'll read but interesting and great review, as usual Richard.

>45 brenzi: Thanks, Bonnie! I appreciate the compliment. And the thumb...though a good case could be made that they're pretty much the same thing.

Nice reviews, Rdear, as always.

>47 Matke: Thanks, Gail, it's nice to hear you say that! *smooch*

Richard, Your review of Guards! Guards! nailed it. Exactly.
Including your comment on your other thread that there were a couple of quotes worth keeping. I don't know what those quotes were for you, but I appreciated a laugh or two. And, at 52, I have better things to do with my time.

What Ellen said. I wish I enjoyed Pratchett more, as I like so many of his avid fans.

I don't think Sir Terry needs our support to make it through, but I'd like to be able to share the laughs with his fans...just not enough to make any more effort!

The quotes I liked are:

“The reason that cliches become cliches is that they are the hammers and screwdrivers in the toolbox of communication.”

and

“Someone out there was about to find that their worst nightmare was a maddened Librarian. With a badge.”

The second made me grin, and the first is just such a crystal-clear statement of the reality of writing and communicating that I couldn't not add them to the collection.

Along with a short list of favorite author, ones when there is a new book, I go get i; I also have a list of not-so-much and I think Prachett can be on that list. I doubt any one cares.

Book Circle Reads 154

Title: POOR THINGS

Author: ALASDAIR GRAY

Rating: 3* of five

The Book Description: With its tantalizing reminders of Mary Shelley, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Lewis Carroll, this is an up-to-date nineteenth-century novel, informed by a thoroughly twentieth-century sensibility. Set in and around Glasgow and the Mediterranean in the early 1880s, it describes the love lives of two Scottish doctors and a twenty-five-year-old woman who has been created by one of them from human remains. A story of true love and scientific daring, it whirls the reader from the private operating rooms of late-Victorian Glasgow through aristocratic casinos, low-life Alexandria, and a Parisian bordello, reaching an interrupted climax in a Scottish church. It contains many unsanctified weddings, but hardly any perversions, and, as The Spectator put it, "an unexpected final twist doesn't make the novel seem trivial but, on the contrary, gives the vivid melodrama a retrospective gravity. You become aware that this odd book has been a great deal more than entertaining only on finishing it. Then your strongest desire is to start reading it again."

My Review: Arch. Witty at times, fall-down funny once or twice. But when I think of this book, as I seldom do, the word resounding through my head is, "Arch."

There is something of the old-time gay subculture campiness, now fast disappearing in this day of mainstreaming, gaybies, and marriage equality on the march, about this erudite man's hommage to the Gothic romantic classic Frankenstein. NB I did not just imply Gray is a gay man. It's an irreverence for the venerated objects of culture, an inside-outing of tradition, that seems to me less and less to be found, to the great impoverishment of culture in general. Gray has done that here, has in this book sexualized the myth of Frankenstein's monster in a kind of appreciative send-up of both the sexual obsession of modern readers and the repression-through-action of Victorian ones. The exotic Mediterranean locales, specifically the louche climes of Alexandria, the successor to then-Austrian-ruled Venice as the wickedness capital of the world, make the story feel of the time. The aura of sinful wickedness is period as well.

The narrative, and its ending, are 20th-century approved...and probably the best bit of the book.

I take off an entire star, though, for the sheer wearing endless sameness of the arch tone. Put that eyebrow back down, sir! Uncrook that pinky! Alas, he never does. 'Tis a pity.

Book Circle Reads 55

Title: BABBITT

Author: SINCLAIR LEWIS

Rating: 4* of five

The Book Description: Prosperous and socially prominent, George Babbitt appears to have everything. But when a personal crisis forces the middle-aged real estate agent to reexamine his life, Babbitt mounts a rebellion that jeopardizes everything he values. Widely considered Sinclair Lewis' greatest novel, this satire remains an ever-relevant tale of an individual caught in the machinery of modern life.

An even better sales copy is on the Buns and Nubile edition's jacket: In the small midwestern city of Zenith, George Babbitt seems to have it all: a successful real-estate business, a devoted wife, three children, and a house with all the modern conveniences. Yet, dissatisfied and lonely, he’s begun to question the conformity, consumerism, and competitiveness of his conservative, and ultimately cultureless middle-class community. His despairing sense that something, many things are missing from his life leads him into a flirtation with liberal politics and a fling with an attractive and seemingly "bohemian” widow. But he soon finds that his attempts at rebellion may cost more than he is willing to pay.

The title of Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 satire on American materialism added a new word to our vocabulary. "Babbittry” has come to stand for all that’s wrong with a world where the pursuit of happiness means the procurement of things—a world that substitutes "stuff” for "soul.” Some twenty years after Babbitt’s initial success, critics called Lewis dated and his fiction old-fashioned. But these judgments have come to seem like wishful thinking. With Babbitry evident all around us, the novel is more relevant than ever.

My Review: This was a book circle read from the 1990s. That wasn't my first time reading the book, and it's well worth re-reading even now.

Poor Babbitt, saddled with that horrible word as an epitaph! Even in Auntie Mame, the most effervescent and light-hearted of romps, Mame excoriates Patrick by by calling him a "beastly, Babbitty snob." And yes, George starts out that way, Babbitty and shallow and consumerist and uncultured and jingoistic. He flirts with enlightenment, though, lest we forget! He grows and changes in his inner life throughout the novel! The implication of calling someone Babbitty or referring to cutural Babbittry presupposes they can't or won't change, and that's what the novel is about! My mother, whose copy I read, told me it was about how middle-aged men go crazy and run off the rails.

I wonder....

But in this specific day and time, this horrible moment when CEOs make over 1000 times what the people who do the work earn, this book is a must-read.

Book Circle Reads 56

Title: ELMER GANTRY

Author: SINCLAIR LEWIS

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Book Description: Today universally recognized as a landmark in American literature, Elmer Gantry scandalized readers when it was first published, causing Sinclair Lewis to be "invited" to a jail cell in New Hampshire and to his own lynching in Virginia. His portrait of a golden-tongued evangelist who rises to power within his church - a saver of souls who lives a life of hypocrisy, sensuality, and ruthless self-indulgence - is also the record of a period, a reign of grotesque vulgarity, which but for Lewis would have left no record of itself. Elmer Gantry has been called the greatest, most vital, and most penetrating study of hypocrisy that has been written since Voltaire.

My Review: I grew up in a single-parent household. My mother was a pedophile, and I was her philed pedo. She was also the most thunderational kind of christian nutball, the most conservative kind of social fascist conformist, and a chilly, appearance-obsessed harpy. Unless you were a stranger, when she presented as a pious, charming, lovely woman.

So Elmer Gantry was, for me, a documentary not a novel. I read it at maybe fifteen or so, just after I read Babbitt, and was astounded to read my own experiences of the asshole religiosifiers who surrounded me in a book over fifty years old! I hated them, powerfully and corrosively, then as now, and there was for me a giant pouring of balm over my outraged soul as I read this book: These people aren't the first! These people didn't invent this idiocy! If Lewis escaped to tell about it, so can I!

The rise of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and that ignorant ilk is not new, ladies and gents, it's happened before. This novel will show you that this kind of perverted conservative religious stupidity has always been with us, and its basic small-souled evil isn't unique to our times either.

Depending on my mood, that's either a comfort or a misery. But it always makes me feel less alone, less like I'm missing something and misinterpreting other things, to read this classic exposé of the long-standing culture of ignorant and evil exploitive "salvation artists."

>55 richardderus:...While i agree with you, regarding the inherent evil of Evangelicals...you have to admit, Elmer Gantry had a certain "style"...whereas, the contemporary Bible Thumpers rely on fear and intimidation, to get their tired points across.....and i loved Burt Lancaster, in the film. Good review, you...

;-}

Book Circle Reads 145

Title: SWANN'S WAY

Author: MARCEL PROUST

Rating: 5* of five

The Book Description: Penguin really skimped on this one--Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time is one of the most entertaining reading experiences in any language and arguably the finest novel of the twentieth century. But since its original prewar translation there has been no completely new version in English. Now, Penguin Classics brings Proust's masterpiece to new audiences throughout the world, beginning with Lydia Davis's internationally acclaimed translation of the first volume, Swann's Way.

The Modern Library does a more creditable job of selling, IMO--Swann's Way tells two related stories, the first of which revolves around Marcel, a younger version of the narrator, and his experiences in, and memories of, the French town Combray. Inspired by the "gusts of memory" that rise up within him as he dips a Madeleine into hot tea, the narrator discusses his fear of going to bed at night. He is a creature of habit and dislikes waking up in the middle of the night not knowing where he is.

He claims that people are defined by the objects that surround them and must piece together their identities bit by bit each time they wake up. The young Marcel is so nervous about sleeping alone that he looks forward to his mother's goodnight kisses, but also dreads them as a sign of an impending sleepless night. One night, when Charles Swann, a friend of his grandparents, is visiting, his mother cannot come kiss him goodnight. He stays up until Swann leaves and looks so sad and pitiful that even his disciplinarian father encourages "Mamma" to spend the night in Marcel's room.

My Review: There is nothing I can add to the reams and reams and reams of verbiage-covered e-inked cyberpaper discussing the merits and demerits (yes, of course there are some of those) of this book. I'm not that interested in engaging in right-versus-wrong debates about books. A review is an opinion. Mine of this book is: Luminously lovely sentences, as re-rendered by the outstanding artist Lydia Davis, wrapping themselves in sinuous and supple and sueded strands around one's neurons, creating new pathways that could never have existed without these almost unbearably mannered, overripe, narcotically slowly orgasmic images and sensations related in smooth sentences of subtle, complex, resonant crystal chiming language.

Book Circle Reads 148

Title: TOBACCO ROAD

Author: ERSKINE CALDWELL

Rating: 3* of five

The Book Description: University of Georgia Press's sales copy--Set during the Depression in the depleted farmlands surrounding Augusta, Georgia, Tobacco Road was first published in 1932. It is the story of the Lesters, a family of white sharecroppers so destitute that most of their creditors have given up on them. Debased by poverty to an elemental state of ignorance and selfishness, the Lesters are preoccupied by their hunger, sexual longings, and fear that they will someday descend to a lower rung on the social ladder than the black families who live near them.

My Review: Ye gods and little fishes! Talk about "been down so long it looks like up to me!"

A shockingly honest book when it was published in 1932, it's still a picture that comparatively rich urban Americans need to see. The details have changed only a little in 80 years. This kind of poverty not only still exists, but these horrific racial prejudices do too. Read Knockemstiff and The Galaxie and Other Rides and American Salvage for the modern-day honest storytellers mining the same vein of American life. Winter's Bone is its direct descendant! So many of the works I've labeled hillbilly noir...and this is the granddaddy of 'em all. I loved the fact that it was so grim when I first read it as an angry, angsty teen, and it still, or again, aroused my loathing and ire when re-read last year at 52.

I can't remember not thinking that people were vile, irredeemable scum, and reading books like this taught me I wasn't the first to have this insight. Even the best are brought low by the vicious kicks of a merciless gawd. They keep going to church, though, to get kicked again...ultimately the solace of "at least we're not black" (though they use the other word I can't stand even to type) isn't enough to overcome the characters' various phobias and anxieties.

This won't make sense to someone who hasn't read the book, and will if one does read or has read it, but constitutes no spoiler: GO RATS!! Sic 'em!

A megaton of misery detonating in your brain, leaving craters a mile wide for compassion to leak out of.

Book Circle Reads 82

Title: WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN? A Novel

Author: BUDD SCHULBERG

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Book Description: Everyone of us knows someone who runs. He is one of the symptoms of our times—from the little man who shoves you out of the way on the street to the go-getter who shoves you out of a job in the office to the Fuehrer who shoves you out of the world. And all of us have stopped to wonder, at some time or another, what it is that makes these people tick. What makes them run?

This is the question Schulberg has asked himself, and the answer is the first novel written with the indignation that only a young writer with talent and ideals could concentrate into a manuscript. It is the story of Sammy Glick, the man with a positive genius for being a heel, who runs through New York’s East Side, through newspaper ranks and finally through Hollywood, leaving in his wake the wrecked careers of his associates; for this is his tragedy and his chief characteristic—his congenital incapacity for friendship.

An older and more experienced novelist might have tempered his story and, in so doing, destroyed one of its outstanding qualities. Compromise would mar the portrait of Sammy Glick. Schulberg has etched it in pure vitriol, and dissected his victim with a precision that is almost frightening.

When a fragment of this book appeared as a short story in a national magazine, Schulberg was surprised at the number of letters he received from people convinced they knew Sammy Glick’s real name. But speculation as to his real identity would be utterly fruitless, for Sammy is a composite picture of a loud and spectacular minority bitterly resented by the many decent and sincere artists who are trying honestly to realize the measureless potentialities of motion pictures. To this group belongs Schulberg himself, who has not only worked as a screen writer since his graduation from Dartmouth College in 1936, but has spent his life, literally, in the heart of the motion-picture colony. In the course of finding out what makes Sammy run (an operation in which the reader is spared none of the grue-some details) Schulberg has poured out everything he has felt about that place. The result is a book which the publishers not only believe to be the most honest ever written about Hollywood, but a penetrating study of one kind of twentieth-century success that is peculiar to no single race of people or walk of life.

My Review: Budd Schulberg got a lot of grief for writing this "anti-Semitic" shriek of outrage at the backstabbing, grasping, greedy, hollow culture of Hollywood. Well, how else could he tell the story? The moguls of the time were almost all Jewish, and they weren't nice little yeshiva boys but street toughs with chips on their shoulders hell bent for leather to make it to the top.

Today it is a lot less true of Hollywood's power elite. Not the behavior, the Jewishness. The behavior is intact! Of this I assure you from personal experience. And people of both genders and all religious and cultural affiliations enact it there. Awful place. As one would expect from any place where there is that much money floating around. *Breathtaking* amounts of money. The greed of these people is utterly beyond the comprehension of mere mortals. "Enough" is what you say to the chauffeur you're firing who complains it's unjust.

Reading this book was a bitter and painful reliving of my education in how "no good deed goes unpunished" and I will never re-read it for that reason. But dayum! What a glorious excoriation of the moral midgets who make our movies, TV shows, and music! I am in *awe* that Schulberg got away with writing it and stayed in Hollywood! Steven Spielberg, that maker of iconically positive movies, said the book should never be made into a movie because it's too anti-movie-biz.

Guess what: It never has been. Even Ben Stiller, who wanted to star and direct, couldn't get it done when he was at his peak of fame and power.

Shows you just how true it was, is, and will remain. *shudder*

>56 jdthloue: Thanks, Jude! Yes, Gantry had style, and today's thug-thumper hybrids are merely odious.

Book Circle Reads 96

Title: RABBIT, RUN

Author: JOHN UPDIKE

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Book Description: Penguin's bumf--Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his — or any other — generation. Its hero is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual gratification and family duty — even, in a sense, human hard-heartedness and divine Grace. Though his flight from home traces a zigzag of evasion, he holds to the faith that he is on the right path, an invisible line toward his own salvation as straight as a ruler’s edge.

Ballantine's is a little better--To millions of Americans, Rabbit Angstrom is like a member of the family. They have followed him through RABBIT, RUN, RABBIT REDUX and RABBIT IS RICH. We meet him for the first time in this novel, when he is 22, and a salesman in the local department store. Married to the second best sweetheart of his high school years, he is the father of a preschool son and husband to an alcoholic wife. The unrelieved squalor and tragedy of their lives remind us that there are such people, and that salvation, after all, is a personal undertaking.

My Review: I suspect my hostility to this book stems from a lack of respect for Rabbit Angstrom. I knew guys like this, I could have been a guy like this, and I think reading this book held up too undistorted a mirror to the facets of my own psyche that I dislike the most for me to enjoy the book as a leisure read.

So now let me get at why I gave it such a low rating: I think Updike's writing is mediocre. I think he's gotten heaps of praise for being unsparing and a brilliant observer, both of which are undeniable, and then the flat-surfaced all-nuance-low-impact writing style in this book got a pass. It's BORING. The story infuriates me, yes, my issue there; but the way it's told...! Blahblahblahblah even in the most tragic moments. Like the Peanuts cartoon adults, the entire cast of the tale seem to honk and blatt, and nothing makes one sit up and take much notice of any one of them.

Flat flat flat. Untoasted white bread spread with Miracle Whip, topped with limp outer leaves of iceberg lettuce and slices of weak-kneed, pale-pink winter tomatoes, with one piece of undrained, undercooked bacon in the middle.

Richard...i love this "orphan" thread of yours

'-}

Book Circle Reads 100

Title: MISS LONELYHEARTS

Author: NATHANAEL WEST

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Book Description: Praised by great writers from Flannery O'Conner to Jonathan Lethem, Miss Lonelyhearts is an American classic. A newspaper reporter assigned to write the agony column in the depths of the Great Depression seeks respite from the poor souls who send in their sad letters, only to be further tormented by his viciously cynical editor, Shrike. This single volume of Miss Lonelyhearts features its original Alvin Lustig jacket design, as well as a new introduction by Harold Bloom, who calls it "my favorite work of modern American fiction."

My Review: Totally with Harold Bloom here, this is one of the USA's cultural treasures. In just under 100pp, anomie and alienation and the Problem of Evil (theodicy) are examined thoroughly and from several viewpoints. While telling a louche little tale of drinking, fucking, and cheating, West also manages to incorporate an acid bath of gallows humor into the proceedings. His nudges and winks at the audience are almost post-modern: Shrike, who is the otherwise-unnamed Miss Lonelyhearts' editor, is named for a particularly nasty bird of prey, and the man we call Miss Lonelyhearts is both emasculated and depersonalized by his yclepture.

It's hard to imagine a more complete telling of the tale of man's bitter fate than this one. Trudge along in your path, you dumb oxen, and this is what will overtake you; lift your heads, look at the sky, and dare to yearn? This is what will overtake you. West knew it, felt it, and ultimately lived it by dying early as he drove drunk. Fitting, isn't it.

Good Monday Morning, Richard, my friend. Thank you for such fascinating reviews that even though I know the books and could have skipped, I read every one.

This thread was a bit "heavy" going for me this morning. It really is too early in the morning to be thinking about Nathanael West's drunk driving ending and "oh, well", it is what it is, and so it goes. Today is the day 4 of my lovely 4 day weekend and I've been enjoying it a good deal. I'm closing in on the end of reading Anna Karènina and comtemplating beginning to read The Magus for the next meeting of my RL book group. I think I may have to go on vacation after that. (-:

I hope your Monday is a good one, filled with good reading, good eating, and good cuddles with your lovely canine companion. No pain today!

EGADS man, good thread.

Thanks for nothing though, Mount TBR is now Everest-esque.

Just picked up Swann's Way from library (an oldie, moldy edition though - almost quite literally).

Book Circle Reads 21

Title: THE WATERWORKS

Author: E.L. DOCTOROW

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Book Description: “An elegant page-turner of nineteenth-century detective fiction.”
–The Washington Post Book World

One rainy morning in 1871 in lower Manhattan, Martin Pemberton, a freelance writer, sees in a passing stagecoach several elderly men, one of whom he recognizes as his supposedly dead and buried father. While trying to unravel the mystery, Pemberton disappears, sending McIlvaine, his employer, the editor of an evening paper, in pursuit of the truth behind his freelancer’s fate. Layer by layer, McIlvaine reveals a modern metropolis surging with primordial urges and sins, where the Tweed Ring operates the city for its own profit and a conspicuously self-satisfied nouveau-riche ignores the poverty and squalor that surrounds them. In E. L. Doctorow’s skilled hands, The Waterworks becomes, in the words of The New York Times, “a dark moral tale . . . an eloquently troubling evocation of our past.”

My Review: Mel-O-Drama!! The novel is set in 1871, and like any good sudser pits one lone man against a system of evildoers and manipulators. Adding to the pleasures are steampunky elements like technology out of its time, a villainous doctor aiming to create immortal men, and double-super-secret hidden bases that are in plain sight.

When I read this for my book circle, I was taken with the plot and somewhat flat on the wiritng. Doctorow makes wonderful sentences at his best, specifically thinking of Ragtime here, but this book fell short of the mark for me then. A quick flip-through to blow fifteen years of cobwebs off my memories didn’t so much refute my earlier contention as show me how very spoiled I was by the olden-days craft of editing. If I read a novel this well-made today, I’d yodel from the housetops and dance mazurkas of rapture down the middle of the parkway.

People who have read my reviews for a while might recall how UP I was over The Night Circus, and how much I loved it. So in that context, I say this: Had The Night Circus been edited as well as this far, far less extraordinary book (published in 1994) was, I think I would simply have melted into the fabric of the cosmos from sheer bliss.

Skills are being lost. It is NOT a good thing. I grow sadder with every mediocre book I read that someone somewhere with the talent and ability to edit even the ~meh~ into BETTER ~meh~ isn’t getting the chance, the training, the mentoring, to do so.

Book Circle Reads 57

Title: FIREBRAND: The Life of Horace Liveright

Author: TOM DARDIS

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Book Description: Horace Liveright was a man of puzzling contradictions - a self-professed socialist and a high-living Wall Street gambler, a deeply caring father and a compulsive philanderer. It was Liveright who first thought of books as front-page news and invented the art of ballyhoo to publicize them. A risk-taker in publishing as well as on Wall Street, Liveright had much to do with the creation of the modern American literary canon. Besides Pound's work, Liveright's firm, Boni and Liveright, brought out T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, all of Eugene O'Neill's plays, Hemingway's In Our Time, Dreiser's An American Tragedy, Faulkner's Soldiers' Pay, and Hart Crane's The Bridge. Daring the fury of the antivice societies, Liveright published Sigmund Freud and Bertrand Russell. He relished bringing out books that were deemed obscene or affronts to common decency. Out of all this came seven Nobel Prize-winning authors. Liveright was also the cofounder of the Modern Library.

My Review: A very very interesting man, Liveright, and one whose efforts to make books into Events were so successful that he ended up sowing the seeds of the current crisis in traditional publishing. Oh well, there once lived a man who invented both Freon gas and tetraethyl lead additive for gasoline...unintended consequences abound in this life.

Liveright had one of those lives: Son of Jewish immigrants, he clawed his way to the top of the Wall Street bond market, married the daughter of a superrich industrialist, went all cultural by founding a publishing company and producing Broadway plays, and ended up broke, divorced, and alone before dying at forty-nine.

Dardis tries his best to ride herd on this gigantic life, but from beyond the grave Liveright refuses to be tidied up and made to make sense. I liked the fact that Dardis allowed the organic connections of materials to take precedence over strict chronology; but that’s also the weakest point of the book. It’s hard to retain all the details of the mess Liveright made of the different parts of his life as they come up at so many odd moments.

But all in all, I found this an exhilarating look at a man unjustly underknown today. What a ride he rode! And died before it all got old, and he did. Massive fun.

He definitely lived his life fast; he was way young, by my lights, to have died. Even before my dear father who died of heart disease, alcoholism, and post traumatic stress at 54. My goodness.

The book does look like a good one.

I've got to come back and finish reading all these, Richard, but a big thumb for the Elmer Gantry one. How you survived your upbringing and became the wisecracking literati and curmudgeonly softie you are now is beyond me.

Book Circle Reads 16

Title: PALESTINE: PEACE NOT APARTHEID

Author: JIMMY CARTER

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Book Description: Following his #1 New York Times bestseller, Our Endangered Values, the former president, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, offers an assessment of what must be done to bring permanent peace to Israel with dignity and justice to Palestine. President Carter, who was able to negotiate peace between Israel and Egypt, has remained deeply involved in Middle East affairs since leaving the White House. He has stayed in touch with the major players from all sides in the conflict and has made numerous trips to the Holy Land, most recently as an observer in the Palestinian elections of 2005 and 2006.

In this book President Carter shares his intimate knowledge of the history of the Middle East and his personal experiences with the principal actors, and he addresses sensitive political issues many American officials avoid. Pulling no punches, Carter prescribes steps that must be taken for the two states to share the Holy Land without a system of apartheid or the constant fear of terrorism.

The general parameters of a long-term, two-state agreement are well known, the president writes. There will be no substantive and permanent peace for any peoples in this troubled region as long as Israel is violating key U.N. resolutions, official American policy, and the international "road map" for peace by occupying Arab lands and oppressing the Palestinians. Except for mutually agreeable negotiated modifications, Israel's official pre-1967 borders must be honored. As were all previous administrations since the founding of Israel, U.S. government leaders must be in the forefront of achieving this long-delayed goal of a just agreement that both sides can honor.

Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid is a challenging, provocative, and courageous book.

My Review: I do not have a dog in this fight. I'm not Jewish, I'm not Palestinian, and I'm not Christian so this isn't homeland or holy land to me.

But I'm a human being, and a very committed secular humanist. Israel's right to exist should be inarguable. The Palestinian homeland should be self-governing. But NEITHER should be run by gawd, since such an entity doesn't exist, and the rule books that the religions here in conflict use are both so revolting and reprehensible.

President Carter is a wise man, and his book is packed with commonsensical compromises. For those reasons alone, there is no chance whatsoever that anyone in power will listen to him. Wisdom is the garlic to the vampires of politics, and common sense can't get any traction where gawd is in the debate.

One side or the other must lose. There is no compromise that will make both sides happy enough to stop killing each other in gawd's name. So the inevitable must occur: Victory for one, defeat for the other, and many more generations of blood spilled over a scrap of desert with little to recommend it.

This is what religion does, people: It makes hate roil the never-calm waters of the human soul. Its purpose is to divide, separate, blame, vilify. It is very very good at those things. The reason is that it was created by humankind in humankind's own worst image. There is nothing "divine" about it...just humans bein' themselves, murdering apes.

Jimmy Carter is not only wise, but the most honest president we have ever had, IMO. Too bad that people do not seem to want to listen to the truth. That's part of what cost him a second term.

What he did, succeedingi in bringing an end to the war between Israel and Egypt was a great feat that has not been matched by a single one of his successors.

I, too, have secular humanist lranings, but while I realize that religion is partly to blame the tangled mess in the ME, I think that there are other considerations as well. I recognize Israels' right to existence, but I can't help but sympathize with then Palestinians who had to give up their territory and land for them. It's also about oil. If oil were not in the picture, I tihnk things would bave been far different. There may be no oil in Palestine, itself, but Israel is a buttress that allows us to continue to exploit the region.

We, the West, have used the ME as pawns and oil is the prize in the game we've played in the ME.

I fear you are right, that this tangled mess cannot be resolved without the demise of one side or the other. My wish is that our nation were neutral in the matter, since neither sideis wrong and niether side is right.

Oh, I'm glad to see someone else dislike the Updike Rabbit books. (>61 richardderus:). Suburban dreck. Boring, flat, and everything else you so eloquently point out.

>71 bookwoman247: It's so sad, isn't it, that it must be this way. I am regularly brought up short by the hateful invective of the parties to the quarrel.

>72 jnwelch: Amen, brother man!

>73 richardderus: It's both sad and frustrating. I wish they, and everyone, could just see each other as the human beings we are, and not some evil entities. That may be beyond our capacity, though. It's too much our nature to demonize others because they seem different from us or have different beliefs. I, myself, struggle not to see the other side of the great political divide in our country as monstrous.

You're noble to struggle at all. I've stopped stuggling and demonized them. Conservatism is the root of all evil, including the love of money.

Richard,

So you are going demonize those you disagree with. Isn't that close-minded and you are doing the same things that liberals accuse conservatives of doing.

And to make a blanket statement that conservatism is root of evil is flat out wrong. What scares me is both sides of the political and ideological spectrum demonize each other and never try to learn from each other. Hmmm....

Bookwoman247,

So it's okay to demonize conservatives because you disagree with their viewpoint or perspective. Then we will never learn to talk each other and will always talk at each other and run to our ideological ghettoes when are emotions get the best of us.

I would like for those on the liberal side of the aisle to acknowledge they are doing the same thing that accuse conservatives of.

I prefer clarity over blanket agreement and I prefer discussion and debate over demonization. Because no one wins and our culture has suffered as a result.

Marion

>77 Kammbia1: Kammbia1: No, I don't think it's okay, which is why I'm tryng hard not to do it. It is very difficult, though, because of the political climatre in our country right now. But it is no more acceptable than Israelis and Palestinians demonizng each other, Christians demonizing Muslims, or anyone demonizing anyone else. Yes, I do it, but I try not to. I'm only huma, and sliip up, sometimes.I hope that you can acknowledge that many conseratives do this, too, and that many also demonize the President.

I'm curious how you got the idea that I thought that this was okay from my post. I said I struggle NOT to see thr other side as monstrous, which basically means that I know its wrong, and I'm workng on it.

Bookwoman247,

My apologizes. I re-read your post after I typed mine and you didn't demonize conservatives. I do agree that conservatives have demonized the president. I don't agree with that. However, I could write how liberals demonize George W. Bush. I know that presidents on either side of the aisle are easy targets for that.

The big point I was making is that both sides have a blind spot when it comes to demonizing the opposition and Richard's post brought it out.

I'm a black conservative Christian and I've been stereotyped and demonized by Liberals all my adult life. But instead of having an honest discussion or debate....it goes to demonization and name calling instead. And that's scary to me because of the reasons I mentioned earlier.

Kammbia1

Good day, Richard! I'm hoping the physical part of your life has eased up some. And that the reading part continues to keep you entertained and happy!

I'm reading happily away, thanks, and it's rainy and windy so it's perfect weather for it. Now to convince the dog to go out. She doesn't like rain.

Nobody seems to like the rain. My two would rather not, too. Poor Rain. I wonder if it has an inferiority complex?

Kammbia1: No problem. I think that it illustrates a couple of other problems with our political discourse at the moment. We tend to just react and respond from an emotional level.

As for demonizing Bush, that is true. I did it, myself. However, I was out there protesting a war that I knew was wrong, and it felt like we were voices crying in the wilderness. The administration was steamrolling into a sovereign nation on false pretenses, which is a very serious thing.

My sign read "Make jobs, not war!". Even back in 2002 or 2003 I knew the economy was not as stable as it seemed, and that
Bush should be paying attention to that, rather than chasing after phantom WMD's.

We, who protested were demonized. Called traitors, scum, any name you can think of. We had rocks and other unpleasant things thrown at us.

I can accept that you want what is best for our country, as do I. We just can't agree on what that is, or how to achieve it. Used to be there was middle ground, where left and right could meet in compromise. That seems nearly impossible now. That is when our country works best, though. When we work together.

And it also "used to be" that all students were taught in school the precepts of civil discourse and it was accepted that in a democracy civil discourse had to be engaged in a polite and respectful manner. Name calling, over simplifying, distortion, statistics, damned statistics and lies are all used in every "debate". Heaven help us! None of this "civil discourse"is accepted as the standard of behavior today. Today it is all school playground brawling with plenty of name calling and out of control emotionality.

>Maggie1944: Add to that the loss of critical thinking skills. It seems that most people now accept whatever they hear as "news". This goes for people of all political persuasions. It's hard to find any real political analysis in what passes for news these days, truly. It's easier to choose a media outlet that reflects your views and to let them reflect your views back to you than to have to do any critical thinking.

Richard, my apologies for hijacking your thread!

This right here......"Flat flat flat. Untoasted white bread spread with Miracle Whip, topped with limp outer leaves of iceberg lettuce and slices of weak-kneed, pale-pink winter tomatoes, with one piece of undrained, undercooked bacon in the middle." . ....is the reason why reading your reviews gives me such pleasure. Such imagery! If only many of the books I read could get the message across in such a humorous way.

Thanks for the entertainment, Richard dear!

No no, y'all have fun with the politics.

>86 Cobscook: Thanks, Heidi! I can't claim conscious design on most of these images, they're just what the brain-picture *is* so I write it down.

>86 Cobscook: That's a favorite of mine, too, Heidi, and I join in your thanks. Entertaining, and leaves no doubt as to RD's views of it.

Book Circle Reads 35

Title: THE HEART OF THE MATTER

Author: GRAHAM GREENE

Rating: 4* of five

The Book Description: Graham Greene's masterpiece The Heart of the Matter tells the story of a good man enmeshed in love, intrigue, and evil in a West African coastal town. Scobie is bound by strict integrity to his role as assistant police commissioner and by severe responsibility to his wife, Louise, for whom he cares with a fatal pity.

When Scobie falls in love with the young widow Helen, he finds vital passion again yielding to pity, integrity giving way to deceit and dishonor—a vortex leading directly to murder. As Scobie's world crumbles, his personal crisis makes for a novel that is suspenseful, fascinating, and, finally, tragic.

Originally published in 1948, The Heart of the Matter is the unforgettable portrait of one man, flawed yet heroic, destroyed and redeemed by a terrible conflict of passion and faith.

My Review: An excellent book. Simply magnificent writing, as always, but more than that the story is perfectly paced (a thing Greene's stories aren't always) and deeply emotional (another thing Greene's stories aren't always, eg Travels With My Aunt).

Greene himself didn't like the book, which was a species of roman à clef. I suspect, though I don't have proof, that he was simply uncomfortable at how much of his inner life he revealed in the book. Scobie's infidelity and his fraught relationship with the wife he's saddled with must have been bad reading for Mrs. Greene. But the essential conflict of the book is man versus church, the giant looming monster of judgment and hatred that is Catholicism. Greene's convert's zeal for the idiotic strictures, rules, and overarching dumb "philosophy" of the religion are tested here, and ultimately upheld, though the price of the struggle and the upholding aren't scanted in the text.

Stories require conflicts to make them interesting, and the essential question an author must address is "what's at stake here?" The more intense and vivid the answer to that question is, the more of an impact the story is able to make. Greene was fond of the story he tells here, that of an individual against his individuality. He told and retold the story. The state, the colonial power whose interests Scobie/Greene serves, is revealed in the text to be an uncaring and ungrateful master; the rules of the state are broken with remarkably few qualms when the stakes get high enough. It is the monolith of the oppressive church, admonishing Scobie of his "moral" failings and withholding "absolution of his sins", that he is in full rebellion against...and in the end it is the church that causes all parties the most trouble and pain.

Greene remained a believing Catholic. I read this book and was stumped as to why. The vileness of the hierarchy was so clear to me, I couldn't imagine why anyone would read it and not drop christianity on the spot. But no matter one's stance on the religion herein portrayed, there's no denying the power of the tension between authority and self in creating an engaging and passionate story. A must-read.

Richard,

Good review of The Heart of The Matter by Graham Greene.

I currently have The Power And The Glory by him on my 2013 Reading List.

I will post a review of that novel when I get to it.

Marion

Thanks, Marion! I expect The Power and the Glory to make it onto my list next year, along with Our Man in Havana. I can't imagine how I've missed them for so long.

Another outstanding review, Richard! The only Greene I've read so far is Travels With My Aunt, which was certainly interesting. Now your review has me intrigued enough to want to read moe of his work.

wonderful book... I am reading happily, thanks :)

Book Circle Reads 43

Title: WHAT MAISIE KNEW

Author: HENRY JAMES

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Book Description: What Maisie Knew (1897) represents one of James's finest reflections on the rites of passage from wonder to knowledge, and the question of their finality. The child of violently divorced parents, Maisie Farange opens her eyes on a distinctly modern world. Mothers and fathers keep changing their partners and names, while she herself becomes the pretext for all sorts of adult sexual intrigue.

In this classic tale of the death of childhood, there is a savage comedy that owes much to Dickens. But for his portrayal of the child's capacity for intelligent wonder, James summons all the subtlety he devotes elsewhere to his most celebrated adult protagonists. Neglected and exploited by everyone around her, Maisie inspires James to dwell with extraordinary acuteness on the things that may pass between adult and child. In addition to a new introduction, this edition of the novel offers particularly detailed notes, bibliography, and a list of variant readings.

My Review: Ida and Beale Farange, Maisie's parents, resemble Winter and Dick Derus, my own parents, very very closely. When I read this book in 1996, I was smacked in the teeth by the eerie similarities between the parenting styles of the adults. I'm still a widge unnerved by it. I am completely certain my father's never read the book since I've never ever seen or heard tell of him reading a novel, and I'm pretty confident that my mother wouldn't have read it, being as she was a thoroughgoing anti-Victorian in her reading preferences.

But it's as if they absorbed it from the aether and used it as a how-to manual. Poor Maisie!

My opinion of the book, then, is strongly colored by the coincidence of its resemblance to my own life. I rate it and respond to it based on that resonance; but that would, all other things being equal, put this much closer to five stars than I rate it here.

I've cut a star off because I, unlike most of the professional critics who have discussed the book, find the long ending section set in Maisie's teenaged years (or so we all think, it's never made explicit) unconvincing and a lot too long to be anything by hamfistedly didactic and tendentious. Maisie faces a decision that no child should have to face and she handles it with an aplomb that I found convincing...for a while...because it was so clearly prefigured in the adults who surrounded her behaving so badly. But James was a moralist, and he grafted his Moral Point onto the logical, inevitable ruminations Maisie goes through to make her horrible decision, and ends up crashing the narrative car into the brick wall of Conviction.

I do so hate that.

As an unrelated aside, there's a movie version...the first ever, apparently...featuring the utterly gorgeous Alexander Skarsgard and the equally toothsome Julianne Moore! Yippee doodles!

OMG, I may have to get this book, and see the movie, too. Although I'm not sure I want to be ready for James having "grafted his Moral Point onto" it.

Review: 4 of sixty

Title: THE BRIEF HISTORY OF THE DEAD

Author: KEVIN BROCKMEIER

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Book Description: From Kevin Brockmeier, one of this generation's most inventive young writers, comes a striking new novel about death, life, and the mysterious place in between. The City is inhabited by those who have departed Earth but are still remembered by the living. They will reside in this afterlife until they are completely forgotten.

But the City is shrinking, and the residents clearing out. Some of the holdouts, like Luka Sims, who produces the City’s only newspaper, are wondering what exactly is going on. Others, like Coleman Kinzler, believe it is the beginning of the end. Meanwhile, Laura Byrd is trapped in an Antarctic research station, her supplies are running low, her radio finds only static, and the power is failing. With little choice, Laura sets out across the ice to look for help, but time is running out.

Kevin Brockmeier alternates these two storylines to create a lyrical and haunting story about love, loss and the power of memory.

My Review: I am simply appalled that my cynical shell has been breached by a man who has an MFA from the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and who has been published in McSweeney's, Crazyhorse, and suchlike Writerly Venues.

Appalled.

But then there's this:

Anyone who has ever experienced love knows that you can have too much or too little. You can have love that parches, love that defeats. You can have love measured out in the wrong proportions. It's like your sunlight and water - the wrong kind of love is just as likely to stifle hope as it is to nourish it.

That, laddies and gentlewomen, needed saying and needed Brockmeier to say it. It's just that true, and just that beautifully crafted.

I hate that.

I make merciless fun of, and throw lots of rotten eggs at, the Writerly Writers like Eggers and Franzen and Foster Wallace for their pretty sentences going nowhere new or even all that interesting. Their self-congratulatory cadres, nay myrmidons, attack anyone who dares say, "yeah, so?" of the myrmidons' ikons. Why can't Brockmeier have inspired such a slavish, culty following, so that I may point and say, "but him! He's a good one! He's a Writerly Writer with something *interesting* to say!"

Life is unfair.

But anyway. The story is a good one, of dislocation in time and space with all that implies for identity...how do we survive as ourselves even knowing that we aren't in any space ever known to us?...so we're already of to a pleasing start. The Writerly Writing is an enhancement of the basic story, because the sentences being self-consciously pretty and profound make a point about the afterlife. It's a well-used technique in this instance, and doesn't feel show-offy as normally it could or even would.

The ending. Well, now, all things have flaws. The important question is, is it a raku pottery crazing-type flaw, or an inclusion-in-the-diamond-type flaw? This will greatly depend on one's point of view of the afterlife. I'm on the fence with this book's ending...and I come down on the raku-pottery side only because I like the rest of the book so much. A different mood, and this would be a three-star review with a sad, impatient growl about the sentimentality of the ending.

Lucky Brockmeier. I had Thin Mints before I wrote this review.

I've finally reviewed Defending Jacob, a really really powerful courtroom drama about a horrible crime and its aftermath, in my thread...post #268.

Richard,

I'm 55 pages into Vale of Laughter by Peter De Vries. It is quite readable and engaging. There is a humorous scene about funny names that had me laughing out loud. :-)

Can't wait to finish this novel. I will post the review from my blog when I'm done.

Marion

*waves* I love reading your reviews, Richard. Yes. I do.

Thank you for an entertaining time, browsing through your reviews. Many book hits. Must go look at kindle...

Review: 5 of sixty

Title: MULLIGANS

Author: CHARLIE DAVID

Rating: 3* of five

The Book Description: Based on the film of the same name, Mulligans is a novel about a poignant family drama with a twist. Tyler, a straight college jock, brings his gay best friend Chase home to stay with his family for summer vacation. The Davidson family welcomes Chase with open arms, but as the summer progresses, so does an unexpected attraction. Stacey, Tyler's Mom, tries to hold on to her family while Tyler's dad Nathan struggles with his long-suppressed sexuality.

My Review: Mulligan, noun. usu. found in golfing context. A free shot sometimes given a golfer in informal play when the previous shot was poorly played.

What a mulligan Nathan gets. He has one whale of a gay kiss with his son's closeted best buddy, gets caught, and suddenly has a do-over at living life the gay way.

And there you have it, whole and entire, the point of the book and the movie. If that doesn't appeal to you, pass on. I liked it, and found it a bit discomfiting because I used to be a specialist in turning out straight married men. Never thought about their wives, and had I paused a moment to do so, I'd've thought "well, *you* ain't doin' what he needs so whose fault is that?"

I wasn't a very nice person in my thirties. I'd blame the booze and the drugs, but they didn't make me angry and mean.

So this story had that going for it, a deep familiarity of subject for reader; but oh dear oh dear the editing and copyediting. Oh the pain. "The Davidson's driveway." owowowow Unless one refers there to a Scottish clan chief's driveway, that's just careless. An entire star off for the clankers.

The other star comes off because, as much as this is a heartfelt and earnestly sincere story, it's not particularly new or freshly told. It's a movie script made into a novel, a very little bit fleshed out, and given something that a movie can't have which is context, backstory that doesn't really fit on screen.

It's a pleasant entertainment, and I don't grudge the fifteen bucks. But I'm not buyin' a case to give as Yule gifts, either.

I, for one, hate books which are just excuses for "want to make a movie outta this".

This ain't a book for you, then! Ye gawds, you'd *loathe* it.

Book Circle Reads 24

Title: AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY

Author: THEODORE DREISER

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Book Description: On one level An American Tragedy is the story of the corruption and destruction of one man, Clyde Griffiths, who forfeits his life in desperate pursuit of success. On a deeper, more profound level, however, the novels represents a massive portrayal of the society whose values both shape Clyde's tawdry ambitions and seal his fate.

Clyde Griffiths is a young man, from the poor branch of his family but with ambitions of making the big-time; and seeks a start in his rich uncle's factory. He gets a poor girl pregnant, Roberta Alden, who works with him at the factory; but then something better turns up in the form of a rich girl, offering a much better future. Meeting the rich girl at a family function at his uncle's home makes him suddenly regret getting involved with Roberta, and he feels trapped.

He takes Roberta canoeing on a lake with the intention of pushing her into the water, changes his mind at the last moment, but she falls into the lake and drowns...and he can never prove that it wasn't what he had planned. His fate is sealed, he is found guilty of murder. A dramatic story, it was based on a real life murder trial of the 1920s, and the success of Dreiser's novel saw it made into a film in the 1950s -- A Place in the Sun, which starred Montgomery Clift, Shelley Winters and Elizabeth Taylor.

My Review: Watch the movie. The "novel" is bloated and Dreiser's prose is as wooden as a plank.

Book Circle Reads 25

Title: ADVISE AND CONSENT

Author: ALLEN DRURY

Rating: 4* of five

The Book Description: ADVISE AND CONSENT is a study of political animals in their natural habitat and is universally recognized as THE Washington novel. It begins with Senate confirmation hearings for a liberal Secretary of State and concludes two weeks later, after debate and controversy have exploded this issue into a major crisis.

"I can recall no other novel in which there is so well presented a president's dilemma when his awful responsibility for the nation's interest conflicts with a personal code of good morals." (The New York Times)

My Review: They's fags in this book! Ack-chew-ull hom'sexshulls!! Myrtle, git the Babble an' we'uns'll exercize it!

Allen Drury was a conservative. He thought World Commanizm was a-gonna ruin the New Nited States of Murrika!! They's a-gonna take us over!!

Ahem.

As one might surmise from my initial response above, I have zero respect for conservatism, equating it with ignorance and intolerance. I should know, as I was raised by parents whose politics were to the right of Hitler. McCarthy was a fine, fine man and an upstanding American patriot to my mumsy and daddums. Goldwater was a bit too liberal for them.

So when I take exception to Drury's preachifyin' and speechifyin', it is from an insider's point of view. The Senate process of advising the President on his cabinet nominees and consenting to the appointment of officers of state is never more brilliantly illuminated (in all senses of that phrase) than in this novel. Drury, who very much knew whereof he wrote, brings a harsh actinic glare to the role of personal charisma and individual power in the business of the Senate. The small, collegial nature of the Senate focuses the astounding power of the body onto a few key players: The Majority and Minority Leaders, in particular, are vitally important to any legislation or appointment passing through the body.

Drury reported on the Senate for United Press International. When he came to write this book, he used two decades' worth of knowledge to weave believable characters and put them in actual situations that have occurred in the Senate, and my gawd it is grim reading. Human nature run rampant, greed and viciousness running roughshod over the needs of We-The-People, and craven poltroons running for re-election from the second they take the oath of office.

Sound familiar? It should. But this came out in 1959, and was based on men in office from 1939 to 1959. Nothing changes. Never will. All we-the-people can hope for is to elect a better class of scumbag (read: beholden to voters not banksters and billionaires) once in a while.

Drury is telling a story of a man's, well, tawdry and tacky infidelity as it figures into the national conversation. *cough*Clinton*cough* The plot in many ways hinges on this private peccadillo, and even though it's never exactly made public, it's the linchpin of the events that follow...a suicide, an international crisis that reaches into space, and the death of a key player at a very delicate moment all come together to make the outcome seem inevitable from the outside.

The genius of the story is that we, who have seen it all unfold, know that it was in no way inevitable. It was an ad hoc decision based on an unforeseen turn of events by way of a surprise occurrence packaged as perfect control by the media.

Sound familiar? It should. It was ever thus. Always will be thus.

Read this and weep. Read this and realize that inaction on your part has huge costs. Vote YOUR conscience, educate YOUR mind. (Unless you're conservative, in which case succumb to despair and sit out every election for evermore, nothing you do will matter or help.)

Time traveling....?

I thumbed your An American Tragedy "review" because it made me laugh! This morning that is a good thing as the Arthritis pain has reared her ugly head and is biting my left wrist! Dang!

>106 mckait: I am, decided to do some catch-up.

>107 maggie1944: Glad I could make you laugh, then!

Book Circle Reads 75

Title: THE LOCUSTS HAVE NO KING

Author: DAWN POWELL

Rating: 4* of five

The Book Description: No one has satirized New York society quite like Dawn Powell, and in this classic novel she turns her sharp eye and stinging wit on the literary world, and "identifies every sort of publishing type with the patience of a pathologist removing organs for inspection."

Frederick Olliver, an obscure historian and writer, is having an affair with the restively married, beautiful, and hugely successful playwright, Lyle Gaynor. Powell sets a see-saw in motion when Olliver is swept up by the tasteless publishing tycoon, Tyson Bricker, and his new book makes its way onto to the bestseller lists just as Lyle's Broadway career is coming apart.

"For decades Dawn Powell was always just on the verge of ceasing to be a cult and becoming a major religion." -- Gore Vidal

My Review: My mother loved Dawn Powell, I think in part because Powell was tart-tongued and in part because no woman in Powell's books gets away with anything...but none of them seems to have any regrets about it.

We had old editions of her novels around, and when I found them and read them, I was surprised by the fact that my religious nut Fascist mama had time for this New York socialite world. When questioned, Mama said, "I grew up, daaaaaaahhhhhliiiin. You might, too. Your books won't, though."

They haven't. I wonder what makes someone hold onto a past they don't like anymore...gosh, can't think why anyone would do that....

So I read this book in the 1990s when Gore Vidal had started making noise about Powell and how very good she was. Steerforth Press, does it even exist now?, put several of the books out (this was after their big success with Mister Sandman, a seriously creepy book that I quite liked) for our book circle. A lot of people found it pretty dated then, what with adultery being gasp-worthy and playwrights being famous for non-musicals and men writing history books getting major publishing contracts.

I found Lyle and Frederick fresh as Vermont cream: She's bored by her life because she's never found a reason not to be, takes up with a man she doesn't much like because he's *completely* unlike the men she's around all the time, and when he becomes like those men, the usual thing happens. Bikini Atoll blows up. I mean, don't hydrogen bombs blow island paradises to kingdom come when you reject your adulterous lovers?

Powell is one witty broad, with a tongue so sharp Dorothy Parker was jealous and afraid. Her writing is **STILL** not yodeled about and caroled over, and I do not for the life of me understand why. It's caustically funny, it's well-constructed in the plot department, and it revels in its wickedness. It's what David Lodge and Christopher Buckley can only aspire to: Good and humorous.

Try this book, see if you agree.

Review: 6 of sixty

Title: ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT
(seriously?! NO TOUCHSTONE?!)

Author: JEANETTE WINTERSON

Rating: 5* of five

The Book Description: Jeanette, the protagonist of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and the author's namesake, has issues--"unnatural" ones: her adopted mam thinks she's the Chosen one from God; she's beginning to fancy girls; and an orange demon keeps popping into her psyche. Already Jeanette Winterson's semi-autobiographical first novel is not your typical coming-of-age tale.

Brought up in a working-class Pentecostal family, up North, Jeanette follows the path her Mam has set for her. This involves Bible quizzes, a stint as a tambourine-playing Salvation Army officer and a future as a missionary in Africa, or some other "heathen state". When Jeanette starts going to school ("The Breeding Ground") and confides in her mother about her feelings for another girl ("Unnatural Passions"), she's swept up in a feverish frenzy for her tainted soul. Confused, angry and alone, Jeanette strikes out on her own path, that involves a funeral parlour and an ice-cream van. Mixed in with the so-called reality of Jeanette's existence growing up are unconventional fairy tales that transcend the everyday world, subverting the traditional preconceptions of the damsel in distress.

In Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Winterson knits a complicated picture of teenage angst through a series of layered narratives, incorporating and subverting fairytales and myths, to present a coherent whole, within which her stories can stand independently. Imaginative and mischievous, she is a born storyteller, teasing and taunting the reader to reconsider their worldview. --Nicola Perry

My Review: I was twenty-five when I read this for the first time, and now upon re-reading it at fifty-three, I am as impressed and more moved than I was even then.

No news to friends, I had a religious nut mother whose deeply insane reliance on a Manichaean gawd-versus-devil double bind system of understanding the universe screwed me up royally. Winterson, poor lambkin, had it even worse because her deeply insane mother was about as unloving as it's possible for a human being to be. There is nothing of tenderness in this rigid religiosifier.

I can't help myself, reading this in late middle years, from judging the mother more harshly than ever. To raise a child is hard, but to seek the job out by adopting and then to do it so harshly should be actionable. Not everyone should be a parent, and this old buster should not have been.

Winterson's writing is so low-key that it's easy to miss the felicities of expression and the sheer cliffs of peerless perception she scales:

There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name.

Breathtaking.

But where was God now, with heaven full of astronauts, and the Lord overthrown? I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don't think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don't even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it. I have an idea that one day it might be possible, I thought once it had become possible, and that glimpse has set me wandering, trying to find the balance between earth and sky. If the servants hadn't rushed in and parted us, I might have been disappointed, might have snatched off the white samite to find a bowl of soup.

Poignant. Also powerful.

If you've read the book at a younger age, revisit it as you would pay a call on your uncomfortably eccentric auntie. If you've never read the book, why ever not? Don't hesitate.

Great review! Drat, no touchstone so that I can give it a well-deserved thumbs up.

Thanks, Linda. It's very annoying not to have a touchstone.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

Great review, Richard, as always! I'm goign to get back to Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit soon! Your review makes me even more eager to finish it.

My upbringing was similar to yours. Thankfully, my mother was not as bad as Winterson's, either, but, honestly, I still feel that my upbringing was something I had to overcome. It left a mark that I am getting past.

Seriously, want to form that support group I mentioned in the other thread? LOL!

>113 Mr.Durick: Thanks, Robert...still not able to bring up the damn touchstone. Oh well.

>114 bookwoman247: Thanks! An old friend of mine suggested that we start the ultimate survivors' group: Adult Survivors of Childhood. Heh.

I've just started An American Tragedy. Dag. Oh well, I'll soldier on with it, I suppose...

Review: 7 of sixty

Title: FADEOUT

Author: JOSEPH HANSEN

Rating: 4* of five

The Book Description: Fadeout is the first of Joseph Hansen's twelve classic mysteries featuring rugged Dave Brandstetter, an insurance investigator who is contentedly gay. When entertainer Fox Olson's car plunges off a bridge in a storm, a death claim is filed, but where is Olson's body? As Brandstetter questions family, fans, and detractors, he grows certain Olson is still alive and that Dave must find him before the would-be killer does. Suspenseful and wry, shrewd and deeply felt, Fadeout remains as fresh today as when it startled readers more than forty years ago.

My Review: I've recently completed a re-read of all twelve Brandstetter books. Why the heck not, it beats writing a new ending for my own book, right? Especially a book I thought of as done, but...oh heck, never mind.

My crazy mother bought this book when it came out because she liked mysteries. It was a little too hard-boiled for her, but she got the next three or so because she just loved the writing. When I was about 12, she handed this one to me when I expressed my joy at reading The Maltese Falcon with the offhand remark, "oh well then, this one'll slay ya."

Wow. A gay OLD man! People like me before there was a me!!

That really mattered to me, since there was such a lack of public and accepted gayness in the Austin of 1971. I remember knowing there were gay guys at the University because the sister who went there complained about it. I remember knowing the term "gay" from a friend of that same sister's who used it, and explained it when asked. The sister in question said, "oh geez he means queers, Rich, the faggots who mince around yelling about rights."

My mother is not the only judgmental and nasty woman I grew up with.

Well, that sort of interchange made Brandstetter all the more pleasurable for me to read! I loved him for being himself, despite his own father's disapproval, and for being a widower...a relationship ends before the series begins, and it was a revelation to me that such a relationship was *possible*. What a wonderful man Joseph Hansen must be, I thought, to create this unicorn of a character.

As the mystery unfolds, Dave Brandstetter does too. He learns so much about the victim, and so much of that resonates with him...Dave just can't stop the grieving he's going through for his dead love from connecting him to the people in his life, even as he makes the honorable choice not to take comfort that's offered to him by someone even more vulnerable than he is.

What I know now as someone older than the old man I thought Dave was in the book...Hansen knew what he was talking about when the subject is grief and grieving. Dave's pain made me weep as a kid. It does so much more to the grief-veteran old-man me...makes me sit, shocked, as I'm taken in to this most personal and intimate of places. Sex is less intimate than a person sharing this passage with you. As a re-reader, I had my initial youthful response in mind. Then the reality hit, and the impact was profound.

When there's writing like this, storytelling like this, out there in the world, why are so many people gobbling down so much crap?

Review: 8 of sixty

Title: DEATH CLAIMS

Author: JOSEPH HANSEN

Rating: 4* of five

The Book Description: "My name is David Brandstetter. I'm a claims investigator for the Medallion Life Insurance Company." He handed her a card. She didn't glance at it. "I'm looking for Peter Oats," he said.

"He's not here. I wish he were. Maybe you can help me. The police don't seem to care."

She was April Stannard. Her lover, Peter's father, had died. April believed he'd been murdered.

Dave Brandstetter's investigation takes him through the rare-book world, to backstage at a community theatre, to the home of a world-famous television performer. Along the way, Dave soon comes to agree with April.

My Review: Small-town California has a lot of atmosphere, according to Hansen; I don't remember it that way, but I was young and miserable, so I'll go with the man who found there something that led to this description of an old mill made into a theater:

The waterwheel was twice a man’s height, wider than a man’s two stretched arms. The timbers, braced and bolted with rusty iron were heavy, hand-hewn, swollen with a century of wet. Moss bearded the paddles, which dripped as they rose. The sounds were good. Wooden stutter like children running down a hall at the end of school. Grudging axle thud like the heartbeat of a strong old man.

Beautiful.

It's with this book, second in the series, that Hansen's chops come fully into play. He's here to wow you, and he's got the story to keep you sitting right there flipping pages. April, the bereaved, is Rita Hayworth in my mind; Oates, the dead guy, looks like John Garfield; Peter, the son and heir, is Cabaret-era Michael York; and so on and so on. (Eve, Oates' ex-wife, is Barbara Stanwyck.) I do this a lot, cast the perfect movie cast as I read along. But this time it felt as if it was all done for me. Oates' murderer, when revealed, was a surprise to me even though this was a re-read. And the actor I'd put in the role was perfect...no testament to my skills, just an example of how beautifully Hansen draws his characters.

Dave's got a man, too...how amazing for the 1970s! I so wish this had been a TV series. Magnum PI only gay! *sigh* What might have been....

You are reading right along, Dear Man. I can't seem to settle to anything...too much distraction going on. Still, dipping into one or two or five items...

>119 Matke: That's COMPLETELY understandable, my beloved pal. Don't stress about this, too. Let the books come to you. They will! *smooch*

Review: 9 of sixty

Title: ASSUMING THE POSITION: A Memoir of Hustling

Author: RICK WHITAKER

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Book Description: Rick Whitaker divulges the complex reasons that drove him to prostitution and reflects on the cost of a life of half-truths and emotional lies. With an unsentimental eye, Whitaker chronicles his descent and eventual resolution.

My Review: That's a pretty sparse description for a pretty intense book. It's a short thing, pared down to its essential points, and purged of prurient detail. (Darn it.)

Whitaker was the editorial assistant to publishing legend Gordon Lish. You know, Raymond Carver? Richard Ford? The one who edited, or quite possibly more than edited, their best stuff. He was, apparently, absorbing a lot from Lish (not a double entendre that I know of) because he wastes no words here describing his descent from broke publishing minion to crack-addled sex worker AND broke publishing minion.

It's amazingly easy to understand and sympathize with Whitaker. He's not some rotten-souled vile being who expresses himself by Doing Shocking Things. He's a guy who needs a center to his life, needs a sense of belonging and of mattering. I speak from experience here: If one needs those things, NEW YORK IS NOT THE PLACE TO LIVE. I watched it eat people alive, make others miserable, and all because the one thing those folks needed was the one thing the city does not reward.

Whitaker sold access to his body for drug money, for the momentary illusion of power, and for the sheer hell of it. He ended up not wanting what he found, and got out, and told his story so all the experience would not go to waste.

I like the book, where lots didn't much. I respect sex workers for the sheer magnitude of their performance capability. I admire their generosity of spirit (how many pretty people do you imagine subcontract their sex lives? Lots of old, lonely, ugly, fat folks do). I've had some very good friends (without benefits, thank you for asking) who did this demanding and difficult job. Whitaker's was a story I've heard with variations for years. It's not something I'd suggest one read for titillation, but any moralists who have accidentally stumbled into reading my reviews (you must feel so lost, poor lambs) should give it a whirl, as should those inclined to judge and find wanting all those billions and billions of people not precisely like themselves. (There is overlap in the categories, but they aren't all the same people.)

Empathy can be learned. Try this and see if you can't find some for a man searching for acceptance.

You are a kind and generous man, Richard, and I sincerely hope you are right that empathy can be learned. I am not so sure as in my experience Judgment rears its ugly head early in the game and swamps any temptation to move to a more giving POV.

>122 maggie1944: ...kind and generous...*looks around for someone else named Richard*

Dearest...have you given yourself the SMILE test to be sure you haven't had a cerebrovascular incident?

But I do appreciate the compliment. Nutsy though it be. *smooch*

OK, nutsy is OK with me. *smooch back at cha*

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
by Jeanette Winterson

yep.. liked it.

I'm sure some people didn't like it, but I can't think that I'd know any of them.

Nice review of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit - read that many years ago ..... great writer & this is a great book

Thanks, Alex!

Review: 10 of sixty

Title: I, PIERRE SEEL, DEPORTED HOMOSEXUAL: A Memoir of Nazi Terror

Author: PIERRE SEEL

Rating: 4* of five

The Book Report: At the age of seventeen, in the arms of a thief, Pierre Seel felt his watch sliding off his wrist. So begins the astonishing chain of events that led to the Schirmeck-Vorbruch concentration camp, where Seel suffered unspeakable horrors for the sole "crime" of being a homosexual.The story of survival in the camps has been told many times, but Seel's is one of the only firsthand accounts of the Nazi roundup and deportation of homosexuals. For nearly forty years he kept his experiences -- including torture, humiliation, and witnessing the vicious murder of his lover at the hands of the Nazis -- a secret in order to cover up his homosexuality. He found a wife through a personal ad, married, and raised three children. "The Liberation", he writes, "was for others". Finally, haunted by his experiences and by the silence of others, he decided to bear witness to an aspect of the Holocaust rarely seen. As he noted, "If I do not speak, I will become the accomplice of my torturers". The result is a terrifying and heartbreaking memoir, extraordinary for its frankness and courage.

My Review: Horrible what hate does to people, makes them bestial and vicious and base. Seel saw all of that, from his entry into the list of homosexuals kept by police to his arrest and deportation. Gay people in concentration camps were not accepted and cared for as were other prisoners, they were victimized by the others as well as the guards.

What is it that you hate so much, straight people? Christian, Jewish, Muslim people? What in your souls says "I hate" so loudly that even your big bully imaginary friend hates too?

Well, anyway, after an amazing wartime changeup and a forced conversion to straightness in the 1950s, Seel finally came to peace with himself in 1981 and, in 1994, finally wrote down the painful facts of his past.

It's not easy to read, but I wish I could make every religious person and every anti-gay bigot read it. I can't, so there's no point in going on about it. If something in you thinks that it's okay to say "sure fine be *that way* but ewww don't talk about it" then you're the reason books like this are necessary.

Review: 11 of sixty

Title: TROUBLEMAKER

Author: JOSEPH HANSEN

Rating: 4* of five

The Book Description: Who killed gay bar owner and all-around nice guy Rick Wendell? Was it Larry Johns, the attractive young man found wiping his prints off the still-smoking gun mere moments after the murder? If so, why was Johns naked? And what happened to the large sum of money Wendell had just withdrawn from the bar's bank account? Hard-boiled, openly gay insurance claims investigator Dave Brandstetter aims to find out in Troublemaker, the third volume in Joseph Hansen's legendary and critically acclaimed Brandstetter mystery series.

My Review: It's always risky to read or perhaps especially re-read an entire series back-to-back. Fortunately for me, the noir tropes overlaid (!) with gay tropes whisked me past any potential eyerolling and gusty sighing over the flaws present in any book.

I've heard tell that some folks don't find Hansen's descriptive passages all that much fun. I don't understand this opinion. I can see, hear, feel along with Dave...and Hansen's words cause that. Since I experience Brandstetterworld so viscerally, I am verschmeckeled by reports others can't.

This story is a real downer for family-oriented types. Dave neglects his man Doug, the families of exactly no one in the story are anything other than vile, venal, and grasping...sounds like the real world to me. At least it accords with my own experience of family life. The mystery of who kills the victim is more easily solved than the mystery of why any of these people aren't dead at each others' hand. And frankly, good riddance!

Dave, of course, solves the crime and Justice prevails. The idea that someone would kill for $25,000 doubtless made more sense forty years ago. Now that's not enough to buy a decent new car.

What a wonderful treat it was to immerse myself in this series again. Now it needs to be made into a TV series. Who knows someone who could make that happen? Anyone?

Thumbed.

Thanked.

#129 added to my wishlist, RD! Like I need one single more book to add to tbr!

My official wishlist contains 287 books right now. My LT catalog of books to be read is 1,339. That is actually books on my shelves.

And I still acquire books. Sigh. Thanks for contributing!

>133 karenmarie:

So: four or five thumbs; some laughter; enjoying Rdear.

Typical visit to your threads, Darling.

>135 Matke: One endeavors to do one's poor best to entertain. *smooch*

Review: 12 of sixty

Title: BAD MONKEYS

Author: MATT RUFF

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Book Report: Jane Charlotte has been arrested for murder.

She tells police that she is a member of a secret organization devoted to fighting evil; her division is called the Department for the Final Disposition of Irredeemable Persons--"Bad Monkeys" for short.

This confession earns Jane a trip to the jail's psychiatric wing, where a doctor attempts to determine whether she is lying, crazy--or playing a different game altogether. What follows is one of the most clever and gripping novels you'll ever read.

My Review: "Clever" is a good word for this book. In fact, maybe "clever-clever" is even better. "Jane Charlotte"? She needs a boyfriend named "Austen Brontë" in that case.

And that is the very last and final connection anywhere within the oddly shaped covers of the book to Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë. From here on, we're on a profane and sometimes profoundly blue trip through the Halls of Micturation that form Jane's psyche. Is she addled? Drugged? One helluva fast-thinking sociopath, like in The Usual Suspects?

Dunno. About half-way through, I lost steam. See, this is the issue I perceive in so much bizarro/New Weird fiction. It goes on too long. It takes the joke, beats that sumbitch to death, scoops up the jellified meatiness, and then sets to stompin' on it in hobnailed boots. And after a while, one loses the desire to be on the sidelines looking on.

So, a month went by, and I picked the book up again. (It was stabbing me in the kidney as I got into bed one night.) Idly flipping to the Book Dart (if you don't have these, get some, they're amazing), I resumed reading with a slight smothered yawnlet.

*slog slog pantpant slog*

And I finished the book, unable to toss it aside for one reason: I had to know how the HELL this guy was gonna get off the horse at the end of the ride.

Good, good job, Sir Matt the Ruff. I did not see that ending happening.

Review: 13 of sixty

Title: THE LITTLE LAVENDER BOOK: On the Love That Once Dared Not Speak Its Name

Editor: SAEKO USUKAWA

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Historically revealing quotations tracing the evolution of gay and lesbian desire amid the myriad struggles for acceptance. "I am the love that dare not speak its name. " Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde's lover

My Review: What on earth can one say about a book of quotes?

All human beings are capable of making a homosexual object-choice and have in fact made one in their subconscious.

Sigmund Freud, who knew how to scare the bejabbers out of straight men.

In 1791, the French National Assembly abolished sodomy as an offense between consenting adults, relegating it in effect to the same category as such archaic crimes as witchcraft, heresy, and blasphemy.

Louis Crompton, whoever he is, reminding us that homophobia is a recent development...not.

Albinos aren't reproached for having pink eyes and whitish hair, why should they hold it against me for being a lesbian?
Natalie Barney, American heiress, who said this in 1900...pretty advanced thinking for the time.

The lover takes courage in her certainty of caressing a body whose secrets she knows, whose preferences her own body has taught her.

Colette, whose word on S-E-X was law in the 1920s and 1930s here in America. Guys, stop drooling.

Little teensy book that this is, it's 96pp long and has some choice moments in it. The selections truly cover the waterfront, as you see above. It's smaller than a snapshot, and it's meant to be sold next to the cash register in stores where an impulse purchase of a little giftie item was once thought to be irresistible. I myownself resisted. My daughter gave this to me as a gift.

It's fun to have these sorts of books around. Open one anywhere! Something fun, funny, thought-provoking will show right up.

I am in a state of admiring anyone who can write anything succinctly. I'm trying to do a "brief analysis" for my class, and brief just is not in my tool kit.

Brevity takes a lot lot lot of time and effort. Prolixity is simple and fast.

Remember not to waffle: "it seems to me that" = "it seems that"

Yes, I do that "trying to do" rather than "doing" thing quite too often

You are a dear with your helpful ideas

thanks

*smooch*

*smch*

Brevity in gestures. :)

grrr

>144 mckait: ...at...?

Book Circle Reads 158

Title: THE MAN IN THE GRAY FLANNEL SUIT

Author: SLOAN WILSON

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Here is the story of Tom and Betsy Rath, a young couple with everthing going for them: three healthy children, a nice home, a steady income. They have every reason to be happy, but for some reason they are not. Like so many young men of the day, Tom finds himself caught up in the corporate rat race - what he encounters there propels him on a voyage of self-discovery that will turn his world inside out.

At once a searing indictment of corporate culture, a story of a young man confronting his past and future with honesty, and a testament to the enduring power of family, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is a deeply rewarding novel about the importance of taking responsibility for one's own life.

My Review: 1955. That is, if you're math-challenged, 58 years ago, and the year that Simon & Schuster published this book. So Wilson was writing it in, it's safe to say, 1953 (60 years ago). And this is what Wilson said:

Money, I need money, {Tom} thought. If they don't build a new public shcool, I should be able to afford a private school. I should get everything but money out of my head and really do a job for Hopkins. I ought to be at work now....
Money, Tom thought. The housing project could make money, but it depends on re-zoning, and Bernstein says we shouldn't ask for that until they vote on a new school.
A new school, he thought---so much depends on that! ... I should work for a new school, and I should work harder for Hopkins, and I should be making plans for our housing project. Where did I ever get the idea that life is supposed to be anything but work? A man's work should be his pleasure---I shouldn't expect anything more.

Tom Rath has just been to see the overcrowded public school his daughters have to attend because, unlike his own father, he can't afford to put them in a private school. He muses on these thoughts while waiting for a late commuter train into the city, where he will take on a lowly personal assistant's position and, in the process, displace a number of female employees from their physical space.

Sixty years since Wilson was penning these words, and not that much has changed. Now, of course, it could easily be a mom having these platform reveries, because we've been sold the bill of goods that nannies and au pairs are plenty good enough to raise the kids we've had but don't feel like raising even if it means NOT having a home theater, six DVR-equipped TVs, and each kid with an unshared Xbox. If mom's better at business, dad, YOU stay home and raise those people you engendered. Read to them, make them a snack after carpool, help with their homework. Hiring out parenthood sorta makes it pointless, doesn't it?

Ahem.

Me and my rants.

Wilson's book analyzes the sources of Tom's inner discontent as disconnection and materialism. I agree. The alarm bell sounded by this, and by the 1956 movie, went unheeded despite the fact that both were hugely popular and successful in their own spheres. (The movie was as good as the book, for once.)

At every turn, MONEY the getting and spending of, obsesses and defines Tom. His wealthy grandmother is being cared for by a greedy granny-nanny, and the hijinks appertaining thereto are most instructive for today's audience. Tom's boss, the venal and piggish Hopkins, plays out before Tom's increasingly revolted gaze his own probable future of alienated kid (extra probable because his three are TV obsessed brats), estranged wife, and grasping mistress(es). Then things get complicated when a wartime indiscretion with an Italian lass provides a surprise to Tom's unsuspecting wife.

Wilson wrote of his own time. Change the props, update the clothes, and make it about Betsy the wife, and nothing much has changed.

I'm sad about that. So much needless hurt caused in this world from sheer, wasteful greed for MORE when there's more than enough right in front of these hungry-souled people.

Review: 14 of sixty

Title: PUBLISHED & PERISHED: Memoria, Eulogies, and Remembrances of American Writers

Editors: STEVEN GILBAR and DEAN STEWART

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: We know the names on both sides of these coins; both the authors whose lives are celebrated, and the names of their friends performing the celebration. And what a list it is: Emerson on Thoreau, Henry James on Lowell, Howells on Twain, O'Hara on Fitzgerald, Tate on Eliot, Davenport on Merton, Merrill on Bishop. If there is a published pantheon in which the best of a writer's life and work is recorded for posterity by their closest friends, this book contains the holy scriptures. Here is a selection of well considered (and often shockingly honest) appraisals of the greatest names in American literature memorialized, eulogized, and sometimes criticized by their dearest friends and their closest peers. All are personal; many are poignant and in every case the reader reaches the final sentences knowing far more about the subject than before, not as they would from a scholarly entry in a biographical dictionary, but at first hand, close up, encomia written in flesh and blood.

These memoria consistently manifest an urgency on the writers' part to convey the personal, the intimate, the unknown. Katherine Anne Porter writes of Flannery O'Connor, "I want to tell what she looked like and how she carried herself and how she sounded standing balanced lightly on her aluminum crutches," John O'Hara starts his appraisal of Fitzgerald with the observation, "It is granted that Scott Fitzgerald was not a lovable man, but most of the time he was a friendly one, and that characteristic, in a man of his professional standing, is as much as anyone can ask."

Personal, forthright, and honest, these appreciations sound the notes of our literary past that still resonate in our minds.

My Review: I love browser books. Those tapas of the brain that publishers so seldom do really well, anyway. I like quotes, as I suppose is fairly obvious to anyone who's paid the slightest attention to me, for much the same reason as I like these all-too-rare interesting short-subject browsers: They point me at things I've never considered looking into, and remind me of pleasures I once experienced, and occasionally both together.

An example of the latter is the memoriam piece by Jonathan Yardley of one of my literary icons, Eudora Welty. I've derived huge pleasure out of reading Miss Eudora's stories, and a little less from reading her novels. I've never sought out her essays, for some reason, and now I think I must:

The novelist works neither to correct nor condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive. ... Fiction writing is an interior affair. Novels and stories always will be little by little out of personal feeling and personal beliefs arrived at alone and at firsthand over a period of time as time is needed. To go outside and beat the drum is only to interrupt, interrupt, and so finally to forget and to lose.

--from "Must the Novelist Crusade?", 1961
Now I must, with almost a starved hunger, seek out and consume these hitherto unsuspected morsels of beautiful writing and clear thought that are Miss Eudora's essays. And all because I am a browser, a grazer, and I buy and hoard these weird collections of odd stuff like the memorial essays written by their peers to recently passed writers.

This sort of book isn't easy to do well because there is so much oddball cultural flotsam around that it's very hard to select a wide, but consistently good, sampling of it. Most often the entries into this genre are single-author collections like 52 McGs or Up in the Old Hotel, both delightful books; but they're one person's work, and therefore a certain level of accomplishment can be expected. How much tougher the task the editors of this volume set themselves, and how much more pleasing the fact that they succeeded.

I want to tell what she looked like and how she carried herself and how she sounded standing balanced lightly on her aluminum crutches, whistling to her peacocks who came floating and rustling to her, calling in their rusty voices.
I do not want to speak of her work because we all know what it was and we don't need to say what we think about it but to read and understand what she was trying to tell us.

--Katherine Anne Porter, about recently passed legend Flannery O'Connor
As beautiful as any sentences Porter ever wrote, or any O'Connor did. A rare pleasure to encounter such a heartfelt and simultaneously a clear-eyed assessment of a person's life and work: O'Connor was defined and consumed by disabling illness, and still had the spirit and strength to stand on her failing legs and whistle for peacocks. Don't know about you, but as a way for someone to remember me, that would make my ghostly ectoplasm glow with pleasure.

So make the effort to find one of these marvelous brain-snack boxes, and dip your weary-of-pretense or simply worn-out-from-outrage toe into a pool of good writing about good, dead writers.


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Hallo RD. Drive by smooches. I don't usually like books about authors or books, but this sounds good.

Richard, your thoughts, and your skill at sharing them, always make me smile. Thank you.

>148 karenmarie: I suspect you might not enjoy this collection too terribly much, Horrible. Might be a bit insubstantial for you. Unless it's a buck at a sale, I say skipitty skip skip.

>149 maggie1944: Thanks, Karen44! How lovely of you to say so!

Review: 15 of sixty

Title: FROM DEAD TO WORSE

Author: CHARLAINE HARRIS

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: After the natural disaster of Hurricane Katrina and the manmade explosion at the vampire summit, everyone human and otherwise is stressed, including Louisiana cocktail waitress Sookie Stackhouse, who is trying to cope with the fact that her boyfriend Quinn has gone missing.

It's clear that things are changing whether the weres and vamps of her corner of Louisiana like it or not. And Sookie, Friend to the Pack and blood-bonded to Eric Northman, leader of the local vampire community is caught up in the changes.

In the ensuing battles, Sookie faces danger, death, and once more, betrayal by someone she loves. And when the fur has finished flying and the cold blood finished flowing, her world will be forever altered.

My Review: After being sorely, sorely disappointed in book 7 of the series, All Together Dead, this was a refreshing, unsaggy unbaggy pointed read. It feels so good to be in Bon Temps again, and to have Sookie acting in her accustomed tartly self-possessed way. She's facing huge changes to the supernatural universe, of course, after the events of the last book, but she's doing so with a sense of purpose...which is what the last book lacked.

Among my most favoritest moments of all time in the series is the un-catting of Bob. 'Nuf sed.

Felipe de Castro, the new King of Louisiana, is memorably vile, and leaves you eager to see how Eric and Sookie will cope with his bland, banal evilness. His catspaw Victor Madden...well, nothing too bad can happen to someone like that, undead or not.

But the shocker of this book, the big baddie, is so horrible that I was compelled to put the book down and breathe deeply for a minute or two. Just, well, it's as bad as anything in the series. For sure and certain.

Better than I'd ever thought to hope, after last outing.


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Review: 16 of sixty

Title: DEAD UNTIL DARK

Author: CHARLAINE HARRIS

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Publisher Says: Sookie Stackhouse is a small-time cocktail waitress in small-town Louisiana. She's quiet, keeps to herself, and doesn't get out much. Not because she's not pretty. She is. It's just that, well, Sookie has this sort of "disability." She can read minds. And that doesn't make her too dateable. And then along comes Bill. He's tall, dark, handsome--and Sookie can't hear a word he's thinking. He's exactly the type of guy she's been waiting for all her life....

But Bill has a disability of his own: He's a vampire with a bad reputation. He hangs with a seriously creepy crowd, all suspected of--big surprise--murder. And when one of Sookie's coworkers is killed, she fears she's next....

My Review: The first book in the iconic series of Sookie Stackhouse novels. Nothing like beginning as you mean to go on! Harris pitches us Sookie's unusual talent, reading minds, on the first page and in Sookie's own voice. It's refreshing, to say the least, to have the set-up done and dusted on page one.

Oh, but how much more there is to come! Sookie meets the vampire of her dreams, Bill; she suffers her first huge loss in the series, and it's a doozie; she suspects, with the rest of the town, that Bill might be involved in some nefarious activity; and she faces down an evil-doer who comes from a pretty damn close to unsuspected quarter.

Whee dawggie! This is the first book, too!

I got this book and devoured it maybe ten years ago, and the series had me utterly hooked in no time at all. I appreciate the storytelling chops Harris has, and I loved then the novel (!) idea of vampires coming out of the coffin (a phrase Sookie uses in this book that still makes me chuckle). Nowadays, it's refreshing when a book has no majgickq or paranormalcy to it. Then it was fresh and new and really, really fun.

Things do change. My response to the book now wouldn't be one of pleasure, I suspect, so I'm happy that it's a comfort re-read and not a first encounter.


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Now I feel enlightened. I now know who Sookie is; I'd been wondering which reality TV show I'd not been watching.

Review: 17 of sixty

Title: LIVING DEAD IN DALLAS

Author: CHARLAINE HARRIS

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Publisher Says: Sookie Stackhouse likes living in Bon Temps, Louisiana, and she likes working as a cocktail waitress at Merlotte's. But she is having a streak of bad luck. First her co-worker is killed, and no one seems to care. Then she comes face-to-face with a beastly creature which gives her a painful and poisonous lashing. Enter the vampires, who graciously suck the poison from her veins (like they didn't enjoy it).

The point is: the vampires saved her life. So when one of her bloodsuckers asks for a favour, she obliges-and soon Sookie's in Dallas, using her telepathic skills to search for a missing vampire. She's supposed to interview certain humans involved, but she makes one condition: the vampires must promise to behave, and let the humans go unharmed. But that's easier than done, and all it takes is one delicious blonde and one small mistake for things to turn deadly...

My Review: Back to Bon Temps! It's a good vacation, let me assure you, since thee and me don't have to endure the bizarreness of the supernatural occurances Sookie Stackhouse has to live through. This time out, Sookie's now-normal intercourse (clean-minded, now, think above the waist!) with the undead is life-saving after she encounters a maenad. Her run-in with this extremely bizarre force of wildness and madness leaves her in a really bad way. Her vampire, well, friends isn't precisely the term but it will have to serve, save her life instead of taking it. (Not that they weren't tempted.)

In return, when Sookie does them a solid in the Dallas part of the story, she thinks they're even. Oh ha.

After coming home to Bon Temps, the maenad must be dealt with. More vampire indebtedness there, Sookie!

But really, the memorable thing about this book is the introduction of a fundamentalist hate group, the Fellowship of the Sun, which targets vampires for destruction. And it's not as if there aren't plenty of vampires that richly deserve destruction, including one Sookie has reason to get to know. But the blanket hate that this religious group spreads, well...it's kinda sorta eerie, how closely it resembles the present-day landscape in regard to gay folks.

Harris doesn't pull punches here, she goes after the hatefulness of the religiosifiers, and she does so in the most effective way possible: She sets Sookie as their contrast, Sookie of the kind and forgiving heart, the girl who believes the message she was taught in her own church of forgiveness, love, and non-judgment.

So refreshing. So rare. So refreshing because it's so rare. Still fun all these years later.


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Review: 18 of sixty

Title: CLUB DEAD

Author: CHARLAINE HARRIS

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Things between cocktail waitress Sookie and her vampire boyfriend Bill seem to be going excellently (apart from the small matter of him being undead) until he leaves town for a while. A long while. Bill's sinister boss Eric has an idea of where to find him, whisking her off to Jackson, Mississippi to mingle with the under-underworld at Club Dead. When she finally catches up with the errant vampire, he is in big trouble and caught in an act of serious betrayal. This raises serious doubts as to whether she should save him or start sharpening a few stakes of her own...

My Review: Ah, the vicissitudes of love...Sookie faces them in a very very very big way in this book. She's afraid she's losing Bill, she's afraid for Bill, she's afraid *of* Bill, and it's barely book three! She also has her fears about Bill's boss Eric, whose hold over her grows.

Sookie doesn't lack for drama in the love department. Add in a werewolf named Alcide, a superultrayummy Cajun construction worker, and you have an exquisitely delicious conundrum: Whom shall I bed, wonders Sookie?

Don't you just hate when there are several hunky men panting after you?

Yeah, me neither.

This is the most sexual of the series to date, and it's not the strongest outing possibly for that reason. The story is pretty straightforward, and it's not as if there's a lot of room for suspense. Plenty of room for "who wins the fair maid," however. Now, I am not one to whinge about some smexy goins-on, but there needs to be either more or less of them to make this work.

Still and all...the series is as addictive as cocktail peanuts. Stop now? Are you MAD?!


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>153 maggie1944: Heh! Glad I could clear that up for you.

Thumbing away...

>157 mckait: Thanks, sweetness. I'm boxing as I review.

Review: 19 of sixty

Title: DEAD TO THE WORLD

Author: CHARLAINE HARRIS

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Publisher Says: In Sookie Stackhouse—a Southern cocktail waitress with a supernatural gift—Harris has a created a heroine like few others, and a series that puts the bite back in vampire fiction. Now the hit series launches into hardcover for Sookie's biggest twist-filled adventure yet.

When cocktail waitress Sookie Stackhouse sees a naked man on the side of the road, she doesn't just drive on by. Turns out the poor thing hasn't a clue who he is, but Sookie does. It's Eric the vampire—but now he's a kinder, gentler Eric. And a scared Eric, because whoever took his memory now wants his life.

My Review: Sookie's life isn't dull, is it? I'd hate to be a character written by Harris, because one thing would be sure and certain. I'd never get a single uncomplicated moment's peace.

Bill's the ex, Eric's the new boy, and Jason (Sookie's playa of a brother) has vanished. That right there, in a person's real life, would be enough for a Jamaican escape cruise and a year of therapy to be necessary. Sookie, she gets no rest. She's got a powerful ancient vampire living in her basement, bereft of his memories and therefore stripped to his essential nature. That he also happens to be a gigantic, gorgeous blond Viking with a millennium's-worth of sex secrets to share (the mind might forget but the body doesn't) makes Sookie's rebound from her breakup with Bill one heckuva lot of fun, in the sack at least.

It's that pesky out-of-bed world.

Eric's memory was taken from him for a reason. There's a new group in Shreveport with domination of the supernatural community on their minds, the witches. Some bad, bad witches. With some really nasty plans for Shreveport, and getting rid of Eric is step one. He's the supernatural law, after all.

Sookie struggles with the fear and grief of losing her brother, her one surviving blood relative, throughout the book. It just can't be good that Jason's vanished after starting a relationship with a werepanther girl. Calvin Norris, the leader of the bizarre werepanther community of Hot Shot (out at the ancient native trails crossroads near Bon Temps), adds to the complexity of the situation by getting a little bit of a Thing for blonde, busty bimbo-lookin' Sookie-with-the-special-powers.

Sookie's world, once devoid of companionship, now teems with people of both genders, all imaginable persuasions, and every conceivable level of bizarreness, all wanting a piece of the woman, and her special mind-reading powers. She was isolated, and now being left alone sounds awful good. She battles the dark witches, she finds her brother, she sacrifices the simplicity of loving for the honorable and dutiful complexity of restoring balance to as much of the world as she can reach.

It's a pretty darn spiffy, if jam-packed, episode in the Stackhouse Files.


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Review: 20 of sixty

Title: DEAD AS A DOORNAIL

Author: CHARLAINE HARRIS

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Publisher Says: Small-town cocktail waitress Sookie Stackhouse has had more than her share of experience with the supernatural—but now it’s really hitting close to home. When Sookie sees her brother Jason’s eyes start to change, she knows he’s about to turn into a were-panther for the first time—a transformation he embraces more readily than most shapeshifters she knows. But her concern becomes cold fear when a sniper sets his deadly sights on the local changeling population, and Jason’s new panther brethren suspect he may be the shooter. Now, Sookie has until the next full moon to find out who’s behind the attacks—unless the killer decides to find her first…

My Review: Jason is such a pain. A narcissistic little creep with sex appeal to spare, he's always been the popular Stackhouse. With humans, anyway. And now? Now he's UNpopular with the shifter, or two-natured, or were community. Seems like Sookie needs to come to the rescue, again.

Of course it doesn't hurt her willingness to work on the little someone's-murdering-the-weres issue that Alcide, Cajun were-muffin, is at risk too. And Sookie, well, she's put her supermegaultra hots for Eric behind her after he becomes his scary boss-man-vamp self again; she's not ready to forgive Bill for her two-books-ago scare at his cheatin' hands; so...what's a lusty lassie of twenty-odd to do, with all that muscular alpha-male sex appeal on the hoof courting her?

Yep. You would too, don't even front.

Problem is, in the course of involving herself in the affairs of the weres, Sookie sees and learns things she can't unsee or forget, or really even do more than just...tolerate. Walking on the wild side isn't always comfortable. Sometimes it's downright upsetting. Sookie, you see, is a good girl at heart, a real believer in do-unto-others and possessor of a very starchy sense of honor. Getting involved in the werewolf pack's life causes the starch to chafe parts of her sensibilities. But involved she is, and she's savvy enough to know that involved is safer for her than bystanding could ever be.

Here at last I feel the need to bring up True Blood, the HBO TV series based on the Sookie-verse. Note that I don't say based on the books. The characters' names and essential beings, some of the events, a few grace notes are all lifted from the books, but the show is radically different in many ways.

One of them is the role of Tara, Sookie's human pal who owns a dress shop and (in this book) gets tangled up with a nasty, nasty vampire, and needs serious rescuing from him. Tara in the series is, well, she's a force of nature and she's a hard-livin' hard-lovin' hot mama. Not so in the novels, not even a little bit.

Sookie rescues Tara, but at a cost to their ancient friendship. It's one of the ways Harris makes the series so compulsively readable, addictively followable: she never hesitates to give actions consequences. Things aren't all cozy-cozy in the Sookie-verse. People die, and people still here fall from grace, and people we love show their dark sides and we love them a little differently for it.

Sometimes respect goes away, sometimes it comes back, but never ever is the relationship the way it once was. And Sookie's character is such that, even though she knows that things have changed, she sees the good that's (usually) still there and accepts the shadows as they come.

The ending of this particular book wraps a thread in the vampire story more tightly around Sookie, as she and Eric face together a threat to their mutual survival and happiness. Eric is driven mad by the hole in his memories from the last book's witch war. He knows something happened, and he knows Sookie knows what it is, and his body carries residual feelings for Sookie...and she ain't tellin' what happened.

How to control a control freak in one easy lesson. Go Sook.


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Review: 21 of sixty

Title: DEFINITELY DEAD

Author: CHARLAINE HARRIS

Rating: 4.1* of five

The Publisher Says: As a person with so few living relatives, Louisiana cocktail waitress Sookie Stackhouse really hated to lose one. But she never guessed that it would be her cousin Hadley—a consort of the Vampire Queen of New Orleans. After all, technically speaking, Hadley was already dead. And now, as unexpected heir to Hadley’s estate, Sookie discovers the inheritance definitely comes with a risk. Someone doesn’t want Sookie looking too deeply into Hadley’s past—or for that matter, Hadley’s possessions. And they’re prepared to do anything in their power to stop her. But who? The range of suspects runs from the Rogue Weres who reject Sookie as a friend of the Pack to the Vampire Queen herself, who could be working through a particularly vulnerable subject—Sookie’s first love, Bill.

Whoever it is, they’re definitely dangerous—and Sookie’s life is definitely on the line…

My Review: A bump in my rating for this entry in the series because I love Quinn, the weretiger we've just met in the last book, as Sookie's new suitor. Also love the ectoplasmic reconstruction of Hadley's murder. So cool.

Hadley, Sookie's cousin, dies the True Death and Sookie now needs to (what a surprise) clean up the loose ends of her worldly estate. You just know bad stuff will happen here...bad bad...and of course, it does. Sookie's never gonna catch a break. Well, there wouldn't be a series if she did, now would there?

And adding to the revels is the Big Reveal of Sookie's fascination for the supernatural community, which it damn near kills me not to spoiler. But I won't. Not that there are any Americans left who can read who haven't read these books already.

Okay, that's an exaggeration, but these are very much as popular as Twilight (thank the gods!) and its hell-spawn. It's just an older crowd. And, I suspect though I cannot prove this, a gayer crowd. There's a degree of identification with Sookie and her relationship problems that most gay guys and lesbians can expect to experience, because there are vocal and crazy-passionate groups hatin' on Sookie and her friends and lovers simply for existing and being themselves. All in the name of what's Good and Right, of course.

Hmm. Not like I've ever heard that line of shit aimed at me before.

So here we have a series that's made phenomenal success out of showing up hatred and intolerance, demonstrating the futility of trying to reason with the insanely hate-filled, and triumphing by refusing to accept anyone else's definition of your essential self.

No wonder I, and so many others, keep reading them.


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Review: 22 of sixty

Title: ALL TOGETHER DEAD

Author: CHARLAINE HARRIS

Rating: 3.4* of five

The Publisher Says: Louisiana cocktail waitress Sookie Stackhouse has her hands full dealing with every sort of undead and paranormal creature imaginable. And after being betrayed by her longtime vampire love, Sookie must not only deal with a new man in her life—the shapeshifter Quinn—but also contend with the long-planned vampire summit.

The summit is a tense situation. The vampire queen of Louisiana is in a precarious position, her power base weakened by hurricane damage to New Orleans. And there are some vamps who would like to finish what nature started. Soon, Sookie must decide what side she'll stand with. And her choice may mean the difference between survival and all-out catastrophe.

My Review: Too many threads with too much happening and the end result is I don't have any idea what it is this entry in the series is about: Sookie and Quinn, after his early trauma is revealed? Sookie and the vamp queen, after Sookie's defense of her succeeds and is repaid with treachery? Sookie and Eric, now that she owes him another round of gratitude? Sookie detecting another of her telepathic kind, and the major events of the nightmare religious cult the Fellowship of the Sun unfold?

I suppose every series has a problem with the transitional tales that need telling. Too many transitions in this one, at least for my little two-volt nervous system.


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I haz thumbed. Now I goze to work

>163 mckait: Thanks LOLKat!

Good reviews, RD! I've loved the series ever since husband found book 4 for me at a local indie and I couldn't resist the idea of Southern Vampires. Immediately got the first three and have kept up ever since. The last book is due on my doorstep today.

>165 karenmarie: Thanks, Horrible!

Review: 23 of sixty

Title: DEAD IN THE FAMILY

Author: CHARLAINE HARRIS

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: It's all about family ...

Sookie Stackhouse is dealing with a whole host of family problems, ranging from her own kin (a non-human fairy and a telepathic second cousin) demanding a place in her life, to her lover Eric's vampire sire, an ancient being who arrives with Eric's "brother" in tow at a most inopportune moment. And Sookie's tracking down a distant relation of her ailing neighbor (and ex), Vampire Bill Compton.

In addition to the multitude of family issues complicating her life, the werewolf pack of Shreveport has asked Sookie for a special favor, and since Sookie is an obliging young woman, she agrees. But this favor for the wolves has dire results for Sookie, who is still recovering from the trauma of her abduction during the Fairy War.

My Review: This is book ten in the thirteen-book series, and somehow I never got around to reviewing it before. I've unearthed it for a re-read preparatory to reading the series finale soon.

Sookie's world, that is the one created for her by Miss Charlaine, is a very rich and varied one. It's amazing to me the depth of the population's weirdness and otherness, and the reason I've kept reading is at least partly that depth. There are so many rules when world-building, and each of them must make sense in the context of the story being told, and form a part of the overall trend of the story or series if it is to be believable. Well, that's a specialty of these tales!

Another big part of my pleasure in the books is the realness of the fantasy. Harris has created slang for her supes, "deader" being the rude term "twoeys" (the two-natured, or weres) use for "vamps" (human slang for vampires); "oneys" then are civilian humans to the weres, though the vamps call us "breathers." It's all very organic for a series of books about a character who is the nexus for a lot of contact among these parties that otherwise wouldn't take place. Of course any group comes up with names for the other, different, competing groups! Naturally. And so Miss Charlaine provides.

This entry in the series does several things that needed doing, snips off some very unprofitable lines of story and blooms open others, and makes a few of the unpalatable fae characters come more alive. Eric, played on TV by the gorgeous Alexander Skarsgard, and Sookie are deeply enmeshed in a relationship that makes Sookie do some very, very against-the-grain things in this book. They're totally understandable, and they add to the sense of the books as lived-life stories as improbable as that sounds.

I liked the ending of this book about the best of them all that I've read. Very satisfying. Very.


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Review: 24 of sixty

Title: THE IRON LANCE

Author: STEPHEN R. LAWHEAD

Rating: 2* of five

The Publisher Says: In the year 1095, Pope Urban II declared war on the infidel. Kings, princes, and lords throughout Europe have joined the Crusade. To Murdo Ranulfson has fallen the duty of guarding his family's interests while his father and brothers fight to win Jerusalem. But when corrupt clergy prove enemies rather than protectors, Murdo must leave his native Scotland in search of his father.

In the company of monks and warriors, he journeys far beyond the rolling fields of home, beyond the fabled Constantinople and the brooding walls of Antioch, to the Holy Land and the sword points of the Saracens. There, where blood, suffering, and human evil at its most horrifying are shot through with rays of the miraculous, he obtains the relic that will guide his life and the lives of his descendants for centuries. And there he grows from a callow youth to a man, trading cynicism for faith and selfishness for the heart of a leader.

Steeped in heroism, treachery, and the clamor of battle, The Iron Lance begins a remarkable, masterfully woven epic trilogy of a Scottish noble family fighting for its existence and its faith during the age of the Great Crusades -- and of a secret society that will shape history for a thousand years.

My Review: There was a time when I tried, and tried hard, to be a christian. Something alluring about feeling sure you're protected by a bid daddy who loves you. But the problem for me is, I have this logical outlook on life and I need stuff to make sense, to follow the rules of storytelling. This religion don't do none o' that, and plus it's riddled with exclusionary language, "moral" justifications for rotten stuff like slavery and incest, and so on and so forth.

Horrible.

This novel is a holdover possession from that period of my life. It's competently written, it's about a period of history I find enthralling, and I hated every single eyeblink I spent on it. There's persuasion and then there's bludgeoning. This is the latter. Had I paid the slightest attention, I would have noticed that the book was published by Zondervan...a christian publishing house. A foolish error on my part.

This review is my reminder to myself: Openness to change is good, but don't get carried away. Borrow from the library. That way the crap that offends you can go back with no damage to your pocketbook.

In the year 1095, Pope Urban II declared war on the infidel.

Does that phrase sound at all familiar?

Fanatics are what they are,no matter location, belief system, color, whathaveyou. I can't understand, ever, anyone who thinks that all those who believe differently must be converted or killed. Who could possibly think that? A crazy person, that's who.

A chaste yet hearty smooch to you, Rdear.

>169 Matke: Thanks, cuddlemonster. I'm just pleased to get this and Swamplandia! off to the Baden liberry. They've been glowering at me since who-whipped-the-cat, making me grumpus as all get-out with the memory of disappointment.

Richard, this is one of the most helpful reviews I've ever read. Thank you!

I actually love the adventure of the Crusades, even though I know it was about bringing Christianity to thre Me, and Jerusalem, especially, by force.

I am almost always able to focus on the adventure part, and overlook the forcing Christianity part, especially in fiction, and I was all ready to start looking for a copy of this book, when you mentioned Zondervan. Seriously, that brought me to a full stop. It let me know that the Christian angle would probably be too strong to ignore. I wonder if I should just ignore Lawhead, in general.

Thank you bunches!

*smooch*

>171 bookwoman247: Thanks! I'm pleased it was a help to you. I'm not able to cope with Lawhead. He is SUCH A CHEERLEADER and it's NOT SUBTLE and I end up with a moue of disgust on my mug that threatens to become a permanent fixture.

hello rdear... the books you sent to my house arrived today.. so yay!! and thank you :) I will be most pleased to continue the Sookie-thon and then move on to some other things... Like maybe The White Mare Sigh, just not enough time....

Thank you sincerely.... and again.

>173 mckait: Good! That was still pretty fast for media mail. Happy Sookieverse-ing! I hope you'll like The White Mare. I thought it was perfectly pleasant. Celtic myths don't mean too much to me, though.

#168 Ha! I made the mistake of requesting two Early Reviewer books without noticing the publishing houses. When the booka arrived, they were by Christian Publishing Houses, making the books pretty much worthless in my non-Christian opinion. The proselytizing was bad enough, but the writing was atrocious as only fundamentalist claptrap can be.

Review 1, Christian claptrap

Review 1, Christian claptrap

We gots to check them sneaky publishing houses carefully, don't we?

It's more upsetting to me than even that because I know Zondervan of old! I just didn't pay attention. Like buying a Thomas Nelson or Tyndale title: You know, and without any vagueness, what you're getting. Don't want that? Don't buy the book.

Book Circle Reads 159

Title: THE ICEMAN COMETH

Author: EUGENE O'NEILL

Rating: get real. It's a play.

The Publisher Says: Eugene O’Neill was the first American playwright to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He completed The Iceman Cometh in 1939, but he delayed production until after the war, when it enjoyed a long run of performances in 1946 after receiving mixed reviews. Three years after O'Neill's death, Jason Robards starred in a Broadway revival that brought new critical attention to O’Neill’s darkest and most nihilistic play. In the half century since, The Iceman Cometh has gained enormously in stature, and many critics now recognize it as one of the greatest plays in American drama. The Iceman Cometh focuses on a group of alcoholics and misfits who endlessly discuss but never act on their dreams, and Hickey, the traveling salesman determined to strip them of their pipe dreams.

My Review: Plays, blech.

This cheery little bagatelle expresses beautifully (as in, with lovely, sonorous sentences) the pointlessness, uselessness, and worthlessness of modern life. Humans are a scourge upon the earth, venal and vicious and horrifyingly stupid, and should all drink themselves to death as rapidly as possible. Redemption is futile. Look where it got whatsisname, the soberest one.

All I can say is that it's a damn good thing that I've got a case of cheap scotch in the liquor cabinet. I ain't comin' up for air until my "check liver" light comes on.

OK, I guess that is a review of the play....

Did you know there are AA chapters in every corner of this country?

I did know that. Infesting the place like roaches or christians or some damn thing. *shudder*

Ha! OK, fine. Just checkin'

(serioiusly, I'm smiling.)

Having spent years in AA meetings it is entirely too easy for me to joke about it. Please for give me, if you misunderstood my intent.

(more smiles, and a wink too)

No, I was chortling as I typed! *smooch*

I'm glad. Laughter is a great gift!

Book Circle Reads 160

TITLE: HADJI MURAD

Author: LEO TOLSTOY

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: In Hadji Murat, Tolstoy recounts the extraordinary meeting of two polarized cultures--the refined, Europeanized court of the Russian tsar and the fierce Muslim chieftains of the Chechen hills. This brilliant, culturally resonant fiction was written towards the end of Tolstoy's life, but the conflict it describes has obvious, ironic parallels with current affairs today.

It is 1852, and Hadji Murat, one of the most feared mountain chiefs, is the scourge of the Russian army. When he comes to surrender, the Russians are delighted. Or have they naively welcomed a double-agent into their midst? With its sardonic portraits--from the inscrutable Hadji Murat to the fat and bumbling tsar--Tolstoy's story is an astute and witty commentary on the nature of political relations and states at war. Leo Tolstoy is one of the world's greatest writers. Best known for his brilliantly crafted epic novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, he used his works to address the problems of Russian society, politics, and traditions.

My Review: Flat prose exposing the bones of a story better told in the Wikipedia entry on Hadji Murad, the historical Avar leader.

The story was among Tolstoy's papers at his death. Louise Shanks Maude, the wife of Tolstoy's good friend and primary translator of non-fiction Aylmer Maude, included Hadji Murad in their 21-volume Oxford University Press edition of the Collected Works of Tolstoy. The Maudes were Fenians, communal-living enthusiasts, and both came from English families firmly rooted in Russia. This constellation of characteristics made them uniquely sympathetic to Tolstoy's rather unusual social views.

Louise Maude did no service to Tolstoy's memory by publishing this story after Tolstoy's death. His own attitude towards the work, based on his correspondence, seems to have focused more on finishing it and with it putting a flourish on his life-long argument with the deterministic world he saw about him. Tragedy being inevitable, Tolstoy takes the historical tale of Hadji Murad (known to him from his service to Russia in the Caucasus) and presents an honorable man's desperate struggle to escape the inescapable fate awaiting him: Death in the attempt to save his beloved family from death, which they will suffer anyway because of his foredoomed death attempting to save them from death.

How Russian.

There's a very involving tale here. What there isn't is a novel or novella of any satisfying substance. The story as it's published reads more like notes towards a novel. The action and the characters are crudely carved from Tolstoy's accustomed fine marble, but lack any fine detail and indeed are only partially revealed; most of the work needed to create a memorable character is left to the imagination of the reader. That it can be done at all is down to the artist's eye for good materials that Tolstoy possessed, refined by a long lifetime's work.

What a pity that its audience isn't legally confined to Tolstoy scholars.

So sad, too bad. A story of this topic from that era of perspective would be very interesting if it were well written.

I agree! This is a terrific movie waiting to be made, too. Just not off this retelling.

Review: 25 of sixty

Title: THE WASP FACTORY

Author: IAIN BANKS

Rating: 4.95* of five

The Publisher Says: Frank--no ordinary sixteen-year-old--lives with his father outside a remote Scottish village. Their life is, to say the least, unconventional. Frank's mother abandoned them years ago: his elder brother Eric is confined to a psychiatric hospital; & his father measures out his eccentricities on an imperial scale. Frank has turned to strange acts of violence to vent his frustrations. In the bizarre daily rituals there is some solace. But when news comes of Eric's escape from the hospital Frank has to prepare the ground for his brother's inevitable return--an event that explodes the mysteries of the past & changes Frank utterly.

My Review: Much has been said in disgust and even anger about this polarizing book. Some have called for it to be banned. Others have written the equivalent of a silent finger-down-the-throat mime.

You are all entitled to your opinion. Here is mine: This book is brilliant. It will be remembered long long after the pleasant entertainments of the day are more forgotten than Restoration drama. (Hands up anyone who knows who Colley Cibber is. And don't front. Or use Wikipedia.)

I'm also an ardent partisan of Lolita, that deeply disturbing and very beautiful book by a pedophile about his pursuit of the perfect lover. I loved Mrs. Dalloway, the chilling, near-perfect narrative of a wealthy woman's desperation and crushing ennui.

So here's the deal: Frank, and his brother Eric, aren't role models, aren't people you'd want to be around, aren't amusing compadres for a jaunt along the path to the Banal Canal. They are, like Hum and Lo and Clarissa and Septimus, avatars (in the pre-Internet sense) of the raw, bleeding, agonic (unangled, in this use) purposelessness of life. They are the proof that salvation is a cruel ruse. These characters rip your fears from the base of your brain and move them, puppetlike, eerily masterful withal, into your worst nightmares.

And all without resorting to the supernatural.

Humanity comes off badly in this book. The truth of what made Frank the person he is will leave you more chilled than any silly evocation of a devil in a religious text. Frank's very being is an ambulatory evil act. But the reason for it, the motivating factor, is the absolute worst horror this book contains. All the animal-torture stuff is unpleasant, I agree. It's not as though it's lovingly and lingeringly described. And it pales in comparison to Frank's raison d'etre.

So yes, this book is strong meat. It's got deeply twisted characters enacting their damage before us, the safely removed audience. It's making a serious point about human nature. And it's doing all of that in quite beautifully wrought prose, without so much as one wasted word.

But it's essentially a warning to the reader: Don't go there. Don't do the pale, weak-kneed versions of the rage-and-hate fueled horrors inflicted on Frank, and even on Eric. Pay attention, be mindful of the many ways we as lazy moral actors condone the creation of Erics and Franks in our world.

Pay attention.

Not on the work page:( when it gets there

Oh heck! I forgot! Okay, I'll do that.

off to look for it and then thumbbbbb

Review: 26 of sixty

Title: A DIFFERENT KIND OF LUXURY

Author: ANDY COUTURIER

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Raised in the tumult of Japan’s industrial powerhouse, the eleven men and women profiled in this book have all made the transition to sustainable, fulfilling lives. They are today artists, philosophers, and farmers who reside deep in the mountains of rural Japan. Their lives may be simple, yet they are surrounded by the luxuries of nature, art, contemplation, delicious food, and an abundance of time.

For example:

--Atsuko Watanabe is an environmentalist and home-schooler who explores Christian mysticism while raising her two daughters in an old farmhouse
--Akira Ito is an ex–petroleum engineer who has become a painter and children’s book illustrator and explores the role of chi (life energy) in the universe through art and music
--Kogan Murata grows rice and crafts elegant bamboo flutes that he plays for alms in the surrounding villages
--Jinko Kaneko is a fine artist and fabric dyer who runs a Himalayan-style curry restaurant in the Japan Alps

By presenting the journeys of these ordinary—yet exceptional—people, Andy Couturier shows how we too can travel a meaningful path of living simply, with respect for our communities and our natural resources. When we leave behind the tremendous burdens of wage labor, debt, stress, and daily busyness, we grow rich in a whole new way. These Japanese are pioneers in a sense; drawing on traditional Eastern spiritual wisdom, they have forged a new style of modernity, and in their success is a lesson for us all: live a life that matters.

My Review: A beautiful book, considered as an object, and an idea that resonates strongly with me: Less can indeed be more. Life’s clutter isn’t inevitable, and it isn’t always desirable. The simple life needn’t be spartan or uncomfortable; the means of making a living needn’t be soul-killingly boring. Choosing a balance of life, living, and lifestyle can be liberating without being impoverishing. It is telling that the land that gave the world Shinto, the natural world’s religion, gives us the exemplars of balanced creativity and productivity shown in this lovely object.

The author lived in Japan for four years. He appears to have that rare quality of being able to become friends with the most interesting person in every room he enters. The eleven people he has selected for this collection of profiles are each worthy of a book of their own. Meeting any one of them would be a highlight in a four-year period, let alone all eleven of them.

Couturier lives in Northern California, which is unsurprising. His affinity for the simple-life-of-purpose would logically lead him to the home of the American Counterculture. His Japanese friends are all urban escapees as well, though several have lived in major urban centers in their lives. Masanori Oe, for example, was an experimental filmmaker in the New York counterculture of the 1960s. He felt he had to leave Japan after World War II:

“That was the psychological scenery then: everything had fallen apart. Even the folk festivals disappeared. There was no money for that kind of thing, and no interest.

At the same time, the experience I had at the end of the war led me to have no confidence that my mother and father could protect me. There was nothing I could rely upon, nothing I could trust. Later, when...a lot of American culture came in to Japan...all of this was locked up inside of me, I began to resist everything, I couldn’t believe in these things that had crumbled before my eyes.”

After New York and its wild ways, Masanori moved to Tokyo for the 1970s and created more art, including a translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead into Japanese. Coming to a Buddhist understanding of illusion, Masanori stepped out of the culture of possession and creation of possessions, moving to Japan’s Alps in a statement of intent to simplify his life and his world. His hectic life of bringing alternative awareness to the urban Japanese culture gave way to a pastoral life of harmony with the seasons, marking passing time with harvests and childrearing milestones, and moving slowly to write and publish his own philosophical view of the world.

His story is archetypically Countercultural, whether for Japan or the US. The outlines of the tale are out of Thoreau, leaving the hurlyburly of the nineteenth century behind as he travels to Walden. This is a seductive, beguiling dream, this laying down of the world’s imposed cultural burdens to take up those of a harder, older tradition, and finding in that trade for a harder way of making a living a tremendous ease of life.

The ten other people profiled made very similar choices, and followed reasonably similar courses. This is the weakness, if it can be called that, of the book. It is repetitive if read as a single experience, as most books are meant to be read. Far better, in my view, to dabble, to shop among the profiles for the one that best suits one’s mood of the moment. Each iteration of storytelling has some unique moment, some wonderful phrase or essential insight, that could easily get lost if the book is gobbled. Approach the experience of reading as you would a bento box meal. The rewards will be commensurate with your patient, inviting effort.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

This review originally appeared on The Small Press Book Review.

My brain is in no shape to gobble.. but this sounds nice. Thoreau...*envy* I have always thought how peaceful that would be. I would miss the internet. off to thumbbb

>191 mckait: Thanks for the thumb, sweetness!

I agree with Kath, that does sound very nice.

I would love to live a simple life but it seems to be very hard to accomplish. I do have a living room which is nearly devoid of clutter. A few more steps to take - I'm actually giving away a book case.

New eyes working well, and I'm trying to catch up, little by little. Hope you are feeling well.

>193 maggie1944: Simplicity, like freedom, isn't free and isn't easy. Clutter is far and away the easiest thing to allow, and to live with, because entropy is the state of nature.

yes. One additional issue I deal with is my wanting to hang on to little mementoes of memories. I've decided I really really need to let them go. Too many collected over 65+ years.

Two new books arrived today, they don't count as clutter though.

New Review! I re-read Mary Renault's THE PRAISE SINGER at my blog, and gave the old girl four stars out of sheer luxurious pleasure in her use of language.

Book Page for upgetthumbing?

It should be there.

Found it - was expecting it to be the most recent review and therefore at the top of the list.

Oh dear, that's the old version then. Never mind!

No it's the same review as on the blog - I guess editing the book didn't update the review date.

It's a good book and deserves more attention:)

I couldn't agree more.

Review: 27 of sixty

Title: CAMPTOWN LADIES

Author: MARI SANGIOVANNI

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Just when you thought it was safe to pitch your tent, the Santora family shows up. Lisa's taken over a rundown campground, baby sister Marie's been dumped (again!) by the actress, and the Santoras don't know the meaning of minding their own business. When the whole clan decides to fix things for their girls, it's a hilarious recipe for havoc. Camptown Ladies is the sequel to Greetings From Jamaica, Wish You Were Queer.

Mari SanGiovani lives the crazy Italian family lifestyle and writes about it like no one else.

My Review: Okay, see, it started like this. A few years ago, I was having a discussion with an old, old, old dyke of my acquaintance (I mean, born in the first Truman administration! And not dead yet!) about how gay men don't support lesbian writers and publishers of lesbian-themed books, and fewer straight men do this than straight women support gay smexy-time publishers. (I suspect ZERO straight men read gay smexy-time books, they're too skittish about the whole thing, poor lambs.) (BTW, when exactly did you dirty, dirty ladies start using men together as bubble-machine starter? I am shocked, shocked!)

Back to my story. So after a somewhat spirited exchange, containing the words "do not!" and "you big stupid!" rather more often than is seemly for two people whose combined age reaches well, well into triple digits, a challenge was issued: Each of us would buy from InsightOut (GLBTQ book club) a novel wholly and entirely about the other's preferred romantic partnerings. I bought Greetings from Jamaica, Wish You Were Queer.

Oh blessèd day. I snorted, howled, giggled, and generally made unseemly noises the entire time I was reading...make that devouring...the book. My then-love interest, the lamented Mr. Man, got so curious he read it too. He laughed, or the relationship would've ended sooner.

I sent the book to another friend, and she howled her way through it. She sherpa'd the sequel, recommending it to me, and keeping me abreast (!) of developments in Mari SanGiovanni's personal life. The fact that I'm finally reviewing the book is due to the fact that I need to get it in the mail to yet another friend who read the first one after several of us pummeled him into reading the first one (he's a straight boy, poor thing, so it took a wee tiny bit of coaxing). Having done so, he's fallen for Marie, Lisa, and Lorn just like the rest of us, and is looking forward to reading more about them.

Little does he know. (Close your eyes, Mark! Spoilers from here on out!)

Mari has made Marie's life easier in this book: She's broken up with Lorn, whose career as a movie star means more to her than her love for Marie, she's got money, and her lunatic out-there Italian family (a lot like several Italian families I know, all up in each other's business and as full of questions and demands as any police interrogator) go to work together. Marie gets to leave Lorn's orbit and lick her wounds, Lisa the older sister who's also a dyke gets to hit on the girls around and about, and so does Vince the youngest child, a straight boy (such a pity, that).

Vince does bring Erica, his girlfriend, into the picture.

Oh well, so much for family harmony. Erica falls in love with Marie, Marie goes back to Lorn, Erica leaves for Italy, and there's a romantic ending that made me mist over. Not before, however, I'd snorted and guffawed a lot. There's the clamdigging scene, with Lisa at her inappropriate best/worst. Think I hurt myself laughing, retching, laughing, and shuddering.

So anyway, off this book goes to its new daddy. I hope he hides it from his wife, there is a goodly amount of lesbian sex of the detailed sort in it. I skimmed. Fast. Now if I can just read this address...I find it improbable that he lives in "Olympus Mons, JI" since we haven't colonized Mars yet. I must've written the address down while still laughing about the clamdigging scene.

Great, great review, Richard! I snorted, giggled and amde unseemlly noises while reading it your review.

Now, understand, I'm a woman who's been in a traditoinal marriage for over 30 years. I'm definitely not homophobic, but I don't tend to read much if any GLBTQ literature. I will make a point of reading this author!

Not only that, but I read your review out loud to Mr. Bookman, and he snorted, giggled, and made unseemly noises, too! LOL!

I knew you had a real gift for writing, and this proves it! All of your writing is strong but this shines.

Please write a book, Richard, or if you have already, let me know the title!

Richard your review inspired me to download both Greetings from Jamaica and Camptown Ladies. I'm an equal opportunity reader-if it's written well I'll read it Paul Monette is probably my favorite LGBT author. He wrote so well and with so much passion

>204 bookwoman247: *blush* Too kind, too kind, with the praises! *blush*

Book Circle Reads 123

Title: THE BEGGAR MAID: Stories of Flo and Rose

Author: ALICE MUNRO

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this series of interweaving stories, Munro recreates the evolving bond between two women in the course of almost forty years. One is Flo, practical, suspicious of other people's airs, at times dismayingly vulgar. The other is Rose, Flo's stepdaughter, a clumsy, shy girl who somehow leaves the small town she grew up in to achieve her own equivocal success in the larger world.

My Review: I hate Flo, and dislike Rose, and can think of no possible reason for anyone to read more than the Pearl Rule requires or the first three stories, whichever comes first in your edition.

Lovely, lovely sentences telling deadly little quotidian stories about dreary, slatternly people. Not recommended to the point of active discouragement.

Well, now that Munro's won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature for the year 2013, it's time to explain my response to these stories.

I am no fan of Woman. I had a mentally ill mother, older sisters of extraordinary unkindness (they would disagree with this last), and a host of relationships with women that didn't meet my needs.

I don't like Woman Writers for this reason. I find their Womanness makes me itch. I recently had a strongly negative response to Gillian Flynn's novel Gone Girl because it played the Uniquely Woman card to unpaint the main character from a corner. That Flynn didn't mean this to be any kind, sort, or form of exoneration of the character did not, in the end, make the smallest difference to me.

Munro's women, in this book, are so estrogen-soaked that the miasma caused my male-pattern baldness to kick up a notch. They are lower class, they strive to be middle-brow, and they are thoroughly miasmically humidly Womanly.

I, as a reader, find this unpleasant, and even the sheer breathtaking crystalline perfection of Munro's writing can't make me want to spend time with these Women.

I like Tillie Olsen ("I Stand Here Ironing" is a story only a woman could tell and I can honestly say it's a top-ten story on my life list). I like Annie Proulx. I like the woman writers whose woman characters aren't Mouthpieces.

So congratulations Ms. Munro on your win. Goodness knows your career deserves recognition. And huzzah Canada for your first "born and bred" Literature winner.

But can we please dim down a notch?

Richard, you raise an issue I ponder from time to time, and would love to have a personally satisfying resolution. When a Good Writer writes in excellent form and style, and yet, has a protagonist, and a host of minor characters, NONE of whom do I like, and none with whom I identify, and no part of the story interests me - then, what do I think of the book? Is it a good one? or nope, not. Do I recommend it, conditionally?

Well, I do not think this will keep me awake tonight or keep me from my appointed rounds today, so I will go ponder and see if I create a perfect answer today.

>209 richardderus: Do share the moment you craft one!

You'll be the first to know...

(I am thinking this may not happen in this life-time)

I personally find that regardless of the quality of the writing, if I can't relate, somehow, to characters or story, I won't want to continue reading a book. I have no qualms about putting a book down. Sometimes I think I might want to try again in the future, but if not, it gets deleted from my collection and put on the yellow table in the sunroom to be given away.

Lots of "great Literature" falls into this good-writing-poor-story-or-dislikable-characters category for me, and I simply won't waste my time slogging through something as a penance to some brownie-point system of books to read. Most recent example is The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. *shudder*

And I seriously dislike most collections of short stories. J.D. Salinger being the most notable exception, Dame Agatha Christie running a close second.

>karen.. I agree. I may continue to read it, especially if it is one I have committed to review, but I usually end up explaining in the review that I didn't like it because I didn't like anyone in the book :P
And, I am also one who dislikes most short stories. Charles deLint excluded, as his are mostly so connected to the Newford series, which I love :)

*prudently ignoring comments about women writers*

>mckait - I stopped asking for ER books and stopped asking for books on websites that were giving them away. I find that being forced to read a book to provide a review is unnecessary stress for me. I want to read what I want when I want without thinking about deadlines.

Woman Writers - I'm sorta past reading strident rhetoric about pretty much everything, including feminism. I simply don't have the emotional wherewithal for it.

Oh, er. Hello, RD! How are you today?

Peachy keen, thanks! *smooches*

And it's "Woman" writers, the ones who make a Giant Production about Woman and Womanliness in their books, that make me unswallow.

Regular ol' women are dandy.

Hmmm I get your point rd... sorta. But I like a good story about strong women.

Karen, I request and usually get one ARC from here, usually 2 a month from vine, and I refuse almost all other ( email) requests, unless I actually think it sounds good. A book a week or so that must be read is fine, most weeks. Right now I have one by Raymond Khoury waiting tbr....and reviewed. It looks good and I like his books,

Wow, lots of free books! Good for you.

What I meant was... I don't take many.. I try to keep it down to a one a week or 5 a month ratio of my reading. I used to take more, but I got buried. It's just that once you get on a list.... you know. Not bragging or anything. I do still get swamped now and then if I get in a funk or read a lot of want to reads instead of need to reads.

213; I have recently thought of doing the same. I hate feeling guilty for late reviews. And some of those giveaways are NOT good.

Thanks for the great review of the Alice Munro collection. I totally get the "Woman" and "Womanliness" comments. I went to a small, liberal arts college in Massachusetts that had only switched to allowing men to attend four years before I started there....sometimes the overt feminista hoo-rah-ness could make ME unswallow!

I also cannot praise a book simply for great writing. I must connect with the story and the characters in some way. I had a similar problem with The Orphan Master's Son as Karen.

>219 Cobscook: I get the feminist agenda, women are NOT second-class citizens and deserve precisely equal treatment to men. I am in full agreement with this.

But Flo and Rose are slatterns. Yes yes, classism snobbery judgmental old white man, blah blah blah. But they're common and they're ignoble and I don't like them, their world, or the kind of stories that these things throw up. (Pun fully intentional.)

Pardon me, I need to go soak in a tub of bleach until the funk washes away.

slatterns. heh.

Chiming in on the posts regarding the need to relate to characters and how to rate our reaction to books.

To Kill A Mockingbird is, in my opinion, a book that has it all. It remains my all-time favorite book, years after reading it.

It contains strong character development, a solid depiction of the travesties of judgment on those poor, or black, or challenged, a wonderful ability to illicit feelings by using well crafted words that are not over dramatic and it contains well deserving heros that get in your soul and stay there long after the last page is read.

Book Circle Reads 163

Title: A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

Author: ANTHONY BURGESS

Rating: 1* of five

The Publisher Says: A vicious fifteen-year-old "droog" is the central character of this 1963 classic, whose stark terror was captured in Stanley Kubrick's magnificent film of the same title.

In Anthony Burgess's nightmare vision of the future, where criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, who talks in a brutal invented slang that brilliantly renders his and his friends' social pathology. A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil, and the meaning of human freedom. When the state undertakes to reform Alex—to "redeem" him—the novel asks, "At what cost?"

This edition includes the controversial last chapter not published in the first edition and Burgess's introduction "A Clockwork Orange Resucked."

My Review: I found the slang, "Nadsat," stupid and tricksy. I found the "ultraviolence" almost risibly dated, since I've seen my nephews playing video games more violent than this. I found the prevalence of rape so voyeuristically deployed, so gratuitously hamfistedly bludgeoningly prevalent, that in the end it evoked only a snort of derision from me.

That, in the end, is my problem with the book. Leaving aside the roll-my-eyes-so-far-I-can-see-my-brain nonsense with words, and the novella becomes a pursey-lipped Great Aunt Prudence-shocker, a piece made to play on the fears of right-wing conservative religious nuts and libertarian dupes of the twin perils of Moral Degeneracy and Government Intervention.

I'll give the last words to Burgess, whose response to the book I found on Wikipedia:

In 1985, Burgess published Flame into Being: The Life and Work of D. H. Lawrence, and while discussing Lady Chatterley's Lover in this biography, Burgess compared that novel's notoriety with A Clockwork Orange: "We all suffer from the popular desire to make the known notorious. The book I am best known for, or only known for, is a novel I am prepared to repudiate: written a quarter of a century ago, a jeu d'esprit knocked off for money in three weeks, it became known as the raw material for a film which seemed to glorify sex and violence. The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me until I die. I should not have written the book because of this danger of misinterpretation, and the same may be said of Lawrence and Lady Chatterley's Lover." Burgess also dismissed A Clockwork Orange as "too didactic to be artistic." (emphasis added)

Oh I remember that one!

And I am so glad I've spent all these year's boycotting it. No reading it, no seeing the movie. Whew.

Nice short review of A Clockwork Orange, Richard. I saw the movie and was left with no desire to read the book. I'll leave it to Great Aunt Prudence after reading your review - and Burgess's repudiation. Did you ever read his Earthly Powers? At the time I thought that one was pretty darn good.

>224 mckait: I don't think anyone in our generation was unaware of the book or the movie. It would've taken an obliviousness too remarkable to believe.

>225 maggie1944: IMO, a good decision not in need of revisiting.

>226 jnwelch: I liked EARTHLY POWERS too, as well as A DEAD MAN IN DEPTFORD. He wasn't an untalented writer. This one's not a great book, IMO.

I read A Clockwork Orange while in college. I was so incensed at Nadsat that I wrote my entire book report in it and at the end commented that reading my book report in Nadsat couldn't be any more irritating than reading an entire book in it. I thought it an affectation then and continue to do so. (got an A on the book report as I recall)

SO agreed re: nadsat! Not at all like Orwellian Doublespeak. A richly merited A, dear Horrible.

Review: 28 of sixty

Title: SARAH, PLAIN AND TALL

Author: PATRICIA MACLACHLAN

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Jacob Witting, a widowed farmer who is still saddened by the death of his wife several years earlier, giving birth to Caleb, finds that the task of taking care of his farm and two children, Anna and Caleb, is too difficult to handle alone. He writes an ad in the newspaper for a mail-order bride. Sarah, from Maine, answers his ad and travels out to become his wife. But Sarah grows homesick - the prairie grass didn't substitute for the Maine sea shore. When Sarah leaves for a trip into town, the kids wonder if she would come back. And she did. She had brought back colored pencils so she could show them the beautiful colors and views of Maine and gorgeous sea shore. She, Anna, Caleb, and Jacob have a lot of good times that lead to Caleb loving Sarah even more, but Anna fears that she will replace her mother.

My Review: I have a tattered, crappy-looking, well-loved copy of this from the 1980s. It's a simple story of life on the prairies in the 19th century, and of a bygone definition of marriage. It was, in simplest terms, a contract meant to provide for a family, an unromantic business deal that led to survival for all concerned in a time when that was a pretty darn good result to a life.

Traditional marriage, my left nut. This is as traditional as they get and it ain't gonna pass the modern woman's sniff test, no matter how conservative and traditional she thinks she is.

So. The story.

Patricia MacLachlan packs more good storytelling into these sixty or so pages than I can shake a stick at. She makes, in a very few words, the children leap off the page and into my mind's eye; Sarah, with her simple love of all things in the world, is kind of a hippie earth mother, and Papa Jacob doesn't come across as much of anybody either, but since it's told from the kids' PoV I didn't mark that as a problem. After all, do kids ever really think of parents in any light other than Parent? Dad or Mom? Not for very long at a stretch, and certainly not when the kid's got a one-digit age.

But the simple story of a wounded family healing, and a new family being built, makes the few and simple events burst with meaning. MacLachlan tells a sentimental story and romanticizes a harsh reality, but does it by emphsizing the goodness inherent in her characters. That works better on her pages than in a short description...it sounds pat and oversimplified when I say it, but in a book aimed at a kid of ten, it is satisfying and beguiling.

I hope that, somewhere in the mists of time, this story came true and the plain and tall mail-order bride was loved and valued like Sarah came to be.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

I've never read this book but my daughter did in the 4th grade. She adored it. Good review, as always, RD.

I'm pretty sure that's when Kristin read it too. Thanks, Horrible!

Good review of Sarah Plain and Tall. I've got this on my wishlist; in a discussion of books loved from childhood, this one came up. Good to hear it stands up to your scrutiny.

This was a favorite book in my classrooms. I loved the simplicity of the story, and I think there were such good stories for real in the "settling of the west".

I will read that one day... I saw a movie.. and it was good. I loved the Anne of Green Gables books, and this seems that it might feel similar. Off to thumb.

eta

I guess I already did that.....

>234 maggie1944: It's a sweet and gentle take on the realities, but very charming.

>235 mckait: It's a very nice tale. Thanks for the thumb!

I think I'm switching to this thread (and how long has it taken me???????).

Ah - the final Thirkell -- yes, dated, and yet..... there is dated and dated - or is it that I am just old enough not to be entirely alienated by the social cues? Who cares!

Miss Lonelyhearts - blew me away when I read it, ditto everything by Dawn Powell.

Updike - yeah - I feel the same way about Roth. Actually, you could say I feel about them the way you do about Munro. Men men men men who only ever look at women thinking about how sex might be with them, ugh ugh ugh ugh. Oh, and the rest of the time, feeling either put upon, ignored - totally self-obsessed.
There are any number of male writers of this generation that I particularly cannot abide.

On the other hand, while I sort of get why you might loathe Munro and I accept it, personal taste and history, being incontrovertible, when I was in my own MFA phase I read her work intently - for the long short story form - and she is something as a writer. I wouldn't call Rose and Flo slatterns but it has been over twenty-five years since I was reading and thinking about those early books. Munro was condemning the narrowness of those lives, furious about it, I think, at that time. A lot of pent up rage, yes, and an ugliness about the way the women treat each other, but she was trying to capture what it was like to be a woman and live in that culture. It should make anyone who reads it very uncomfortable.

You know me somewhat at this point, so you know I'm no knee-jerk feminista but I view Munro's work as part of that 'journey out of the darkness' - the necessary illumination. Of course, there's no guarantee that with opportunity Flo would be a better person, but I think Munro would say women didn't even have the choices. There is something particularly awful about intelligence that gets warped when not allowed to expand that is a truth for women in the past - the bound foot being probably the best metaphor.

Moving on - dislikeable characters...... yes.... well Ahab is dislikeable, and Emma B. and Raskolnikov and really Gregor was prolly not exactly likeable even before he turned into a cockroach. I find that I'll read about dislikeable people when it taps into something, as you say, in the Banks, that is 'true' about humans. In the last few years though I don't read as much about the seriously warped side of humankind. I do feel I sort of get it, at this point. It doesn't help me get through my own days, much. So I seek balance.

I will look in on your other thread for the coffee jokes and the pictures!

"There is something particularly awful about intelligence that gets warped when not allowed to expand that is a truth for women in the past - the bound foot being probably the best metaphor."

So completely agreed. Yes, there is something about that horrible fact of female existence that illuminates the evilness of sexism.

I don't like Flo or Rose, and wouldn't like them more had I known their secrets in real life; and the beauty of Munro's sentences reminds me of the old saw about growing jasmine around the outhouse.

I am simply not her reader. She is not the poorer for it.

Book Circle Reads 166

Title: THE AWAKENING

Author: KATE CHOPIN

Rating: 1.5* of five, all for a few pleasantly turned descriptions

The Publisher Says: This story of a woman's struggle with oppressive social structures received much public contempt at its first release; put aside because of initial controversy, the novel gained popularity in the 1960s, some six decades after its first publication, and has since remained a favorite of many readers. Chopin's depiction of a married woman, bound to her family and with no way to assert a fulfilling life of her own, has become a foundation for feminism and a classic account of gender crises in the late Victorian era.

My Review: Tedious. Nothing at all worth calling a classic considered as a piece of writing; as a work of characterization; or in any way that I can discern.

Edna is awakened by her desire for a man not her husband? And this is a feminist classic? That she then sends away her children to live with her mother-in-law and waves a vaguely affectionate good-bye to her husband as he moves away for ~6 months vitiates any sense of conflict or in fact of what the hell this boring broad is on about when she rattles around New Orleans painting (well enough to sell her work) and conducting the most desultory possible affair with a man so louche that he's a by-word for bad boyish nonsense...and not one word of gossip, not one scintilla of contumely, not a scrap of opprobrium appears to attach itself to her?! IN NEW ORELANS?!

Folks, this is so incredible that I am gobsmacked. That's the gossipiest little burg in the Western world. People who don't know you know you there.Spend a week and there's some hear-tell about what you gettin' up to. Only tourists are anonymous, sort of, and that's pretty much a recent phenomenon.

Nothing outside tedious, bland Edna's direct view is allowed any reality; no character exists except as a bald description; the action is reported much as it would be in a telegram of old, or a tweet of today, stripped to mere outlines to make it fit in as few words as possible.

I've read worse books, much worse books in fact, but few that were so devoid of characterization. Why on earth anyone ever invested an erg of emotional energy in these silhouettes is beyond my ken. Pelletier, Edna's husband, does exactly nothing interesting and she herself feels no animosity towards him because she interacts with him not at all. How they came to have two children is beyond me. I suppose, in the indirect language of the time, she is shown to reject his sexual advances. So? Wives do that a lot. Especially then, before adequate birth control was available. He doesn't appear to make an issue of it, and she just...doesn't.

Her children are left to the nurse unless she breaks free of the fog of indifference shrouding her every action and perception. So? Do something, Kate Chopin, to show me what effect this has on two little boys! As it is they're pawns on the chaotic chess board of this book. Someone who watched a few games of chess and tried to emulate it without troubling to learn the rules or understand the conventions is the closest analogue I can find to the impression the book leaves with me.

Chopin read a few stories, then figured she'd write her own before understanding the demands of characterization, the need for motivations, the purpose of creating a setting...this is what I am left with. I've honestly never felt so at sea when reading a lauded classic as to why it attained the status. I detest Dickens' books, each and every one I've read, but I know why others love the verbose, tortured melodramas. Even Hemingway's pustulent, suppurating psychic wounds made for some moments of humor, and explained his enduring appeal to some people.

This? This has nothing that grand or that icksome to offer. It really offers next to nothing. It can't be hated, that's like hating seltzer water. I can't imagine a less captivating way to spend a snowy Sunday afternoon.

I just found Edna so incredibly annoying throughout the whole book. I read this soon after joining LT. My comments:

"I wanted to like The Awakening, I really did. As a strong, independent woman, I know it is my duty to celebrate others like me, whether real or fictional. But good Lord, Edna Pontellier has got to be one of the most unsympathetic, frustrating, and annoying heroines in all of literature.

Yes, her husband is a boor, her life is a bore, and she feels stifled. I can understand that and sympathize with it, and I applauded her small declarations of independence. What I could not get past, though, was the never ending internal struggle and swings of mood and emotion from one extreme to the other. I think this book is less a classic of feminist fiction and more an early exploration of bipolarity.

I will say no more so as not to give anything away. The novella is beautifully written, with incredibly evocative descriptions of place, home, weather, etc. The strength and beauty of the writing earned this one an extra star for that alone, bumping it up from a paltry two."

BTW - I'm sorry I have not visited this thread before. It is now starred. I love your reviews.

Thank you, smoochling! I concur, obviously, with your remarks.

RD, I couldn't agree more with your review of The Awakening. And without giving it away, I'll say the ending infuriated me.

Heh! I know, Judy. I wanted to drag her out of the Gulf, revive her, slap her stupid face a few hundred times, then toss her back in.

I read The Awakening a very long time ago and don't remember much about it, but I would hope that if I read it today I'd apply the same incisive clarity you've brought to your review, RD. Good stuff as always.

Here we are in central NC getting snowed upon (4" so far) with ice on the way. We're just waiting for the power to go out and our generator is offline (grumble grumble) because of a capacitor. At least I have a gas stove and oven so can cook and bake.

*smoochies* from your own Horrible

*smooch* I bet you'd have a very very different reaction to it now, Horrible!

Most likely, RD, most likely. Even though I can still see the book and cover art in my mind, it's no longer on my shelves, so that must say something, right?

Must is.

Richard, I agree with your comments regarding the writing of Patricia MacLaughlin. I've read most of her works, and she never fails to disappoint.

Oh good! A vote of confidence from a well-informed source is a good thing indeed.

Review: 29 of sixty

Title: MOSQUITOES

Author: WILLIAM FAULKNER

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: Mosquitoes centers around a colorful assortment of passengers, out on a boating excursion from New Orleans. The rich and the aspiring, social butterflies and dissolute dilettantes are all easy game for Faulkner's barbed wit in this engaging high-spirited novel which offers a fascinating glimpse of Faulkner as a young artist.

"It approaches in the first half and reaches in the second half a brilliance that you can rightfully expect only in the writings of a few men. It is full of the fine kind of swift and lusty writing that comes from a healthy, fresh pen."--Lillian Hellman, New York Herald Tribune

My Review: Well, that's over. And thank goodness for that. I loves me some Faulkner, but this is a mediocre book.

It's an hour-by-hour, day-by-day account of a Lake Pontchartrain boat ride, peopled by the louche and the bohemian second-ranking artistes (spoken in a veddy, veddy affected tone) who infest the ever-pretentious city of New Orleans. (I mean, really, the place is a swamp, it's rotting around its own ears, it's poor as dirt, and it's so effin' hot that even mosquitoes have the sense to move out to the lakeshore for the summer. THIS is a place to build a city?)

It's a roman à clef, taking its "inspiration" from an actual boat ride Faulkner went on in New Orleans before moving to Paris. Where, not coincidentally, Faulkner met Sylvia Beach, who published Ulysses, the famously banned-in-Murrika sexytime (for its day in the early 1920s) novel that "inspired" the hour-by-hour day-by-day format of this book.

Also not coincidentally, Joyce's masterwork (which I don't much like) "inspired" Uncle Bill to put in a lot of sex-talk, including *gasp* explicitly lesbian desires!! Maud Martha, bring the sal volatile and loosen my stays, the wimminfolk are runnin' amok!

Now that might seem a tad mean-spirited for a man writing 87 years later, to go after such a very surprising and open sexual transgression of the day, but trust me when I tell you: The roman à clef aspects of the book completely render the daringness of the author's choices into tawdry score-settling and Bret-Easton-Ellisy tittle-tattle.

Want to know why I say that? I'm tellin' ya anyway: Every character on the damn boat (the Nausicaa, "Burner of Ships," get it huh get it get it? Faulkner's bein' all erudite an' stuff!) is a loser, and Faulkner writes himself in as the only "successful" artist around:

"Anyway, I didn't go in swimming where the man got drowned. I was waiting for them, and I got talking to a funny man. A little kind of black man--"
"A nigger?"
"No, he was a white man, except he was awful sunburned and kind of shabby dressed--no necktie and hat. Say, he said some funny things to me. He said I had the best digestion he ever saw, and he said if the straps of my dress was to break I'd devastate the country. He said he was a liar by profession, and he made good money at it, enough to own a Ford as soon as he got it paid out. I think he was crazy. Not dangerous, just crazy."

The speaker goes on to remember his name was something like Walker or Foster, but whatever it was it started with an "F" like her friend's middle name, Frances.

Ye gods.

Well, it was only his second novel. And he'd just come home from Paris when he (most probably) wrote it, so he was still digesting the *huge* bolus of Kulcher he'd swallowed and wallowed in. He was young and this is a very young-man-overachiever kind of a novel. It's not the worst book I've ever read, and not even the least impressive Faulkner I've read (no fan of Wild Palms, me).

But it's just too good to dismiss and just too clever-clever to enjoy and just too coltish to admire in the context of the Faulkner ouevre. Neither fish nor fowl, as Mama said of suchlike creations.

Perfect title, then: Mosquitoes.


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A few other good quotes:

“Talk, talk, talk: the utter and heartbreaking stupidity of words.”

On a loser's "way" with women, spoken by a woman bystander:
“You tell 'em, big boy; treat 'em rough.”

I'm laughing right out loud with the latest review.

>251 Whisper1: Oh good! Thanks, Linda.

Oh, well, then. I'll pass on Mosquitoes.

Thumbed the Faulkner ...

>253 maggie1944: It's funny, Karen44, quite tartly amusant. And it's not in the least like the famously difficult stream-of-consciousness novels. So permaybehaps it wouldn't be a bad fit?

>254 mckait: *smooch* thanks, sweetness.

Thanks, Richard. I think I have enough on the table. You might stop by my Thread and see the lists of hundreds.... books to be read.

Wonderful review. I love Faulkner as well, and this will be on the back burner while I seek out some lightweight fluff to soothe my fevered brain. Off to give it a thumb.

Loved that review, too, RD. You had me running to the dictionary for "bolus" and "sexytime". :-) Digit applied.

>256 maggie1944: Oh indeed, Karen44, it's not a priority read IMO. Just don't toss it on the Nevermore pile quite yet!

>257 Matke: Thanks, Danvers! Fluff out, my good woman, it's richly deserved vaca time for you.

>258 jnwelch: Thank you, Joe, it's always fun to make people scatter to the wordbible.

Loverly Review, RD! Enjoyable. Thrifty too - I won't immediately go out and buy Mosquitoes, so thank'ee kindly.

>260 karenmarie: I live to serve, dear Horrible.

Review: 30 of sixty

Title: THE TALE OF GENJI

Author: MURASAKI SHIKIBU
Translator: ROYALL TYLER

Rating: 5* of five

This review at A Dribble of Ink says more about why Genji matters than I can ever do.

I read the book in 1974. I got a hardcover Modern Library edition from my decade-older sister, who owned a bookstore. I read it in one solid week of enchantment, followed by a year of revisits and studies of the notes and other references. (The librarians at my high school agreed with the kids who teased me for being weird.)

This is a new translation, I have a copy, but many chunksters await my attention that I haven't read before. I'll get back to it. I look forward to getting back to it!


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Review: 31 of sixty

Title: THE IMPERFECTIONISTS: A Novel

Author: TOM RACHMAN

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Set against the gorgeous backdrop of Rome, Tom Rachman’s wry, vibrant debut follows the topsy-turvy private lives of the reporters, editors, and executives of an international English language newspaper as they struggle to keep it—and themselves—afloat.

Fifty years and many changes have ensued since the paper was founded by an enigmatic millionaire, and now, amid the stained carpeting and dingy office furniture, the staff’s personal dramas seem far more important than the daily headlines. Kathleen, the imperious editor in chief, is smarting from a betrayal in her open marriage; Arthur, the lazy obituary writer, is transformed by a personal tragedy; Abby, the embattled financial officer, discovers that her job cuts and her love life are intertwined in a most unexpected way. Out in the field, a veteran Paris freelancer goes to desperate lengths for his next byline, while the new Cairo stringer is mercilessly manipulated by an outrageous war correspondent with an outsize ego. And in the shadows is the isolated young publisher who pays more attention to his prized basset hound, Schopenhauer, than to the fate of his family’s quirky newspaper.

As the era of print news gives way to the Internet age and this imperfect crew stumbles toward an uncertain future, the paper’s rich history is revealed, including the surprising truth about its founder’s intentions.

Spirited, moving, and highly original, The Imperfectionists will establish Tom Rachman as one of our most perceptive, assured literary talents.

My Review: I was very remiss with this book. It came out in 2010, and I read it that year. I've since gifted it to several others. Did I set down a review? No! Lazy lazy me. That doesn't mean that I don't encourage you to read it, because I do.

There is nothing of the novel about the book, though. Don't go in thinking you'll get Time's Arrow bedecked with cohesive details. You're getting interconnected short stories set in the same world. But say that to the marketing people at any publishing house, the buyers at every bookery, and even the Woman in the Street, and watch their eyes dim and their arms cross and their butts shift uncomfortably in the chair. Stories = Death in publishing. Less than a third the copies of a novel, be it hit, bestseller, or failure. So disheartening! So very annoying to me, too, since what is a chapter except a deeply woven short story set in a shared universe?

Anyway. Enough about that.

Why should all you storyphobes read this book?

“What I really fear is time. That's the devil: whipping us on when we'd rather loll, so the present sprints by, impossible to grasp, and all is suddenly past, a past that won't hold still, that slides into these inauthentic tales. My past- it doesn't feel real in the slightest. The person who inhabited it is not me. It's as if the present me is constantly dissolving. There's that line from Heraclitus: 'No man steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.' That's quite right. We enjoy this illusion of continuity, and we call it memory. Which explains, perhaps, why our worst fear isn't the end of life but the end of memories.”

That's one of many passages that made me pause, reach for the Book Darts, and mull. Memories are us, we are our memories, life is a brief flash before the eyes and then a deposit on the stockpile of memories. Yes. Well. What makes that okay, for me, is the existence of literature and the presence in my environment of books. So Rachman puts it to me, in this passage, that my stockpile of memories is susceptible to loss and reminds me that it's something to fear...except:

“You can’t dread what you can’t experience. The only death we experience is that of other people. That’s as bad as it gets. And that’s bad enough, surely.”

Aha. Yes. As bad as it gets is losing the memories to come! Agreed, and in a very odd way, it soothed a bit of my ill temper at the inevitability of death. (I'm still ticked at the prevalence of loss, which is in fact a thing to dread.)

That is the bargain one makes in forming relationships, though. Loss is a part of it, whether to death or separation. We're always in a process of loss after a certain age, or a process of *consciousness* of loss to be precise. It's the defining characteristic of being in relationship. Or A defining characteristic, as Rachman points out:

“I have to wonder if you're not being slightly naive here. I mean, are you saying that you want nothing from people? You have no motives? Everybody has motives. Name the person, the circumstances, I'll name the motive. Even saints have motives -- to feel like saints, probably. ... But still, the point of any relationship is obtaining something from another person.”

For good or for ill, that is the basic motivation, the essential need, the driving desire of them all, be they romantic, sexual, casual, intense, fleeting, or enduring. We want something, unless we're Bodhisattvas. That makes the whole of human existence sound so tawdry, doesn't it?

But nothing in all of the Universe is unmixed. Not even the pure chemical elements are unmixed. After all they each and every one began their existence as hydrogen, the simplest thing in all of creation, and were forced, compressed, annealed into their current pure states by the explosion and death of a star. From that death, that ultimate transformation of a bright and shining object into a myriad of other, unshining things, all of existence as we know it flows. Our own lives show us that endings are beginnings and all beginnings are neutral. It's what one does next, what flash of the present one accepts into the stockpile of memories, that determines which endings are "good" and which "bad." Rachman says this more succinctly, I think, when he writes, “Anything that's worth anything is complicated.”

Mmm hmmm.


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great review, Richard. I'll have to look for the book.

As for getting things from other people, yes, we do want to, but the best news is when someone wants to give what we want to get. And vice versa. Ah.

>264 ffortsa: It's worth the search!

It's a gift. If you don't want to give what the other person wants to get, why are you giving them something?

Book Circle Reads 58

Title: NICE WORK

Author: DAVID LODGE

Rating: one disgusted star of five

The Publisher Says: Vic Wilcox, a self-made man and managing director of an engineering firm. has little regard for academics, and even less for feminists. So when Robyn Penrose, a trendy leftist teacher, is assigned to "shadow" Vic under a goverment program created to foster mutual understanding between town and gown, the hilarious collusion of lifestyles and ideologies that ensues seems unlikely to foster anything besides mutual antipathy. But in the course of a bumpy year, both parties make some surprising discoveries about each other's worlds--and about themselves.

My Review: Annoying git meets termagant. They hate each other, they...oh what's the difference, everyone knows what happens, and frankly who the hell cares? I detested this book, I thought the author's pseudo-arch (how's that for a horrid combination?) faux Firbank twaddle was the literary equivalent of thorazine.

Do not purchase. If given as a gift, get the fireplace tongs and remove it from your living environment. DO NOT BURN as the miasma could prove lethal to small children.

Not recommended.


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Book Circle Reads 165

Title: DEAD SOULS

Author: NIKOLAI GOGOL

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Dead Souls is eloquent on some occasions, lyrical on others, and pious and reverent elsewhere. Nikolai Gogol was a master of the spoof. The American students of today are not the only readers who have been confused by him. Russian literary history records more divergent interpretations of Gogol than perhaps of any other classic.

In a new translation of the comic classic of Russian literature, Chichikov, an enigmatic stranger and schemer, buys deceased serfs' names from their landlords' poll tax lists hoping to mortgage them for profit and to reinvent himself as a gentleman.

My Review: No one seems to have pinned this work down as of yet. 172 years on, Gogol still eludes the butterfly net of scholarship. No one seems to argue that the book is not wryly amusing. That seems not to be enough, for some reason, to the literati.

Is it a satire? Hell, who cares!

“You can't imagine how stupid the whole world has grown nowadays. The things these scribblers write!"
--and--
“However stupid a fool's words may be, they are sometimes enough to confound an intelligent man.”
--and--
“But wise is the man who disdains no character, but with searching glance explores him to the root and cause of all.”

Satire? Maybe. Funny and snarky and ironic? Oh yes. I've read that some scholars compare the, to be kind, circularity of the plot to The Odyssey. Ummm, okay. Some offer Christian subtexts to the idea of buying and selling souls as a commentary on the...yech, whatever, the book is a fun and funny way to wile away a few hours.

Gogol himself considered this a prose poem, and I suspect he called it that so he'd be free of the shackles of novelistic convention. Let him loose, don't lard in your expectations of what a text must or must not do, and smile:

“The current generation now sees everything clearly, it marvels at the errors, it laughs at the folly of its ancestors, not seeing that this chronicle is all overscored by divine fire, that every letter of it cries out, that from everywhere the piercing finger is pointed at it, at this current generation; but the current generation laughs and presumptuously, proudly begins a series of new errors, at which their descendants will also laugh afterwards.”

Yes, lawd, you sing it Brother Nikolai!


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>266 richardderus:
That was easy.

>268 AuntieClio: Au contraire, ma amie, nothing at all was easy about that experience. I took double rations of poop for disliking the book, for saying so, and for making a case as to why it wasn't a very good book. (Lucky Jim, anyone?)

>269 richardderus:
Sorry for your pain, I know reading it wasn't easy for you. What I meant was it was easy for me to decide to never look for that book ever. Thank you for your warning.

>270 AuntieClio: OIC

Well, it is a service happily rendered.

>266 richardderus: I haven't read Dead Souls, but it's one of hubby's favorite books. Your review makes it clear why that is, and has put the book on my radar.

Curse you for feeding my book addiction. ;-)

>272 bookwoman247: Oh good! I hope you'll get a chance to read it soon.

I loved Dead Souls, RD. Our daughter was reading it at college and recommended it. (Another great one she rec'd was The Master and Margarita). I haven't read any commentary, and didn't try to plumb its depths, but I did find it funny and snarky and ironic. I've now read some of his stories like The Overcoat, but this remains my favorite.

>274 jnwelch: Gogol is a very talented writer, Joe, and one who has stood the test of time remarkably well. I've enjoyed every one of the pieces I've read so far. Caro gave me a collection of his shorter works years ago and I'm dipping in and out. I do love The Overcoat!

Book Circle Reads 168

Title: CEREMONY

Author: LESLIE MARMON SILKO

Rating: 2* of five

The Publisher Says: Tayo, a young Native American, has been a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II, and the horrors of captivity have almost eroded his will to survive. His return to the Laguna Pueblo reservation only increases his feeling of estrangement and alienation. While other returning soldiers find easy refuge in alcohol and senseless violence, Tayo searches for another kind of comfort and resolution.

Tayo's quest leads him back to the Indian past and its traditions, to beliefs about witchcraft and evil, and to the ancient stories of his people. The search itself becomes a ritual, a curative ceremny that defeats the most virulent of afflictions—despair.

My Review: Pleasant phrase-making in service of mundane plot. It's by no means a bad book, in fact it's a nice enough novel and I am not sorry I read it.

If Leslie Marmon Silko was a Caucasian lady, or worse yet a Caucasian man, this would've been a midlist novel and would today, almost forty years later, be completely forgotten. Rightly so. It's a perfectly nice first novel, it's a story we all like (returning hero is so badly damaged as to be paralyzed emotionally, finds himself by reconnecting to his deep roots and confronting his past), and it's been very very well edited and honed and massaged into shape.

It isn't a classic, sorry to say in the face of so much praise for it over the years, and it's not one bit better than A Farewell to Arms (his best book) or The Naked and the Dead or The Yellow Birds or Phoenix Rising.

It's a perfectly decent novel. Except, well, except I really don't buy the dialogue, it's poetical speechifyin' and not dialogue. Pretty it is, speech it ain't:

Josiah said that only humans had to endure anything, because only humans resisted what they saw outside themselves. Animals did not resist. But they persisted, because they became part of the wind. (...) So they moved with the snow, became part of the snowstorm which drifted up against the trees and fences. And when they died, frozen solid against a fence, with the snow drifted around their heads? "Ah, Tayo," Josiah said, "the wind convinced them they were the ice.”

Lovely! But that little tag is part of the writing, not a character like Uncle Josiah speaking. He's a stock character with speeches like this, The Wise Old Injun.

Well, anyway, *I* didn't like it that much. I suppose most of my impatience is with the way the novel is venerated. Sheesh.


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Pretty much agree re Ceremony. A book to respect but not to enjoy.

The worst of people writing for grant money rather than passion.

HA! Grant money heh...but she had a contract with Dick Seaver for a book (based on short fiction he'd read) and this is what she delivered. He edited it into the book we see, which I'm sure is a lot better than the book he got. He was never all that effusive about anyone, but he seemed to like this lady all right.

Review: 32 of sixty

Title: WINE OF THE DREAMERS

Author: JOHN D. MACDONALD

Rating: 3 surprised stars of five

The Publisher Says: Wine of the Dreamers, a classic science fiction novel from John D. MacDonald, the beloved author of Cape Fear and the Travis McGee series, is now available as an eBook.

They are the Watchers: pale laboratory creatures living in a remote, sealed-off world. Their game, their religion, their release is to dream, and their dreams carry across the galaxy to lodge in the minds of the inhabitants of another world: the planet Earth. But as the human race approaches a dream of their own—traveling beyond their own planet to other worlds—the Watchers step in. For escape from Earth is an impossible dream, one that the Watchers will go to any length to destroy.

My Review: JOHN D. MACDONALD WROTE SCI FI?!?

*splutter*

Well blow me down and call me Shorty! I would never, ever in a month of Sundays have guessed that Travis McGee's daddy ventured into outer space! But he did, and I have now passed its odd and lumpy lineaments before my eyes.

I poke around the Internet when I'm at a loose end. I found a Wikipedia article on Startling Stories, a pulp rag from the Golden Age of SF. Oooh, lookee here, what innocent things the ancestors were, I thought, and oooh how scrummy there's a link to an internet archive of the magazines!

Babes in brass bras...ads for defunct brands of whisky using Mexican artists...Vaseline Hair Tonic...JOHN D. MACDONALD?!?

Downloaded and read. And what a ride it was: Square-jawed hetero male has non-rapey friendship with bodacious curvy babe. Not at all like the MacDonald we know and love. (Or don't love, as the case may be.) This is an aberration, explained by a plot twist in the story of the Dreamers. Now this is an old chestnut, the mental passengers who suddenly take over innocent earthlings for malign purposes. It wasn't the latest thing in 1950 (!!) when the story appeared in Startling Stories. But it's an evergreen for a reason, it explains the strange turns and periodic about-faces that humans actually do have. There was a moment when I thought, "aha this explains Parseltongue!" before I realized JK Rowling's younger than I am and not known to be related to MacDonald.

In more or less 50,000 words, MacDonald hit all the buttons of an action adventure on multiple planets, America's inevitable domination of the Space Race, and that eternal favorite of male readers, Man's Unique Destiny to Rule and Dominate! It was 1950, go fight the odds.

As I scrolled through the PDF file, I was increasingly amazed at the un-MacDonald-ness of the story. His touch with a wisecrack was entirely absent, his trademark pessimism was not yet at full cry as the ending was hopeful (!), and while I would not put MacDonald up there with Henry James in the ability to convey character in a few well-chosen words, these folks were Central Casting call sheets.

So it was that, despite the siren call of sleep, I scrolled and scrolled through the scanned pages of this deeply forgotten footnote to the popular career of MacDonald. It was certainly MacDonaldy in the sense that, despite the humorously outdated science, and despite the hoary familiar trope being unspooled before me, I couldn't think of a good reason not to keep right on reading until the inevitable ending. And by inevitable, I mean so clearly telegraphed in the set-up that Helen Keller running out of a burning building wouldn't have any trouble supplying it for you.

Sophisticates are therewith warned.

In fact, would I recommend starting this little marvy to most people? No, not really, it's not earth-shatteringly good at anything. It's a curiosity, and a charmingly old-fashioned stroll down memory lane for those of us on the downhill slide to death.


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Totally enjoyed this review, Richard!

Thank you most kindly, cuz!

Me, too, RD. I'll probably read more Travis McGees before I ever get to this one, but the review was a fun time, so I'm glad you read it for that reason alone.

Thanks, Joe! I'm not sure I'd ever revisit it. Maybe stickin' to the McGees is a good thing.

Review: 33 of sixty

Title: VLAD

Author: CARLOS FUENTES
Translator: E. Shaskan Bumas

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Where, Carlos Fuentes asks, is a modern-day vampire to roost? Why not Mexico City, populated by ten million blood sausages (that is, people), and a police force who won't mind a few disappearances? "Vlad" is Vlad the Impaler, of course, whose mythic cruelty was an inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula. In this sly sequel, Vlad really is undead: dispossessed after centuries of mayhem by Eastern European wars and rampant blood shortages. More than a postmodern riff on "the vampire craze," Vlad is also an anatomy of the Mexican bourgeoisie, as well as our culture's ways of dealing with death. For -- as in Dracula -- Vlad has need of both a lawyer and a real-estate agent in order to establish his new kingdom, and Yves Navarro and his wife Asunción fit the bill nicely. Having recently lost a son, might they not welcome the chance to see their remaining child live forever? More importantly, are the pleasures of middle-class life enough to keep one from joining the legions of the damned?

My Review: Well now. This is a later work by Mexican national treasure Fuentes, published (in serial form) in Spanish in 2004, as a book in 2010, and in English in 2012, the year of Fuentes' death. Here in abundance is the glorious, sensuous language of Fuentes' fearless imagination:

At night in our marital bed, Asunción is like the salamander of myth; cold that shall burn, burning that shall freeze; fleeting like mercury and stable as a precious pearl; devoted, mysterious, surprising, flirtatious; imagined and imaginative...No talk, all action.

This is a man discussing his wife, with whom he has made two children! Most men would barely be able to summon up that woman's hair color. Not Fuentes' husband, no indeed, he catalogs his wife's wicked sexy ways. Which, being wise to the source material of the book, lets the non-comatose reader in on the fact that all will soon fall to poo-poo in a big bad way.

Lawyer Navarro meets his senior partner's old schoolmate Count Vladimir Radu as soon as Asunción, in her role as real estate agent, delivers the required house; the scene of the meeting, a spacious and monochromatic modern villa in a fancy mountainside neighborhood, is more creepy and eerie than it would have been if Fuentes had gone the expected route and made Vlad ("all my friends call me Vlad" says the Count, in a bone-chilling moment of ersatz bonhomie) a slave to Old World notions of proper decor and architecture. Something about ancient evil in a Bauhaus-y minimalist setting, well, it made my neck hairs rise.

There sits relentlessly alive and ponderously restrained Yves Navarro (perhaps named so in honor of French writer Yves Navarre? a sensualist, like Fuentes and like Navarro, only gay), noticing the physicality of the repulsively ugly Count, taking inventory of his flaws and repulsed yet seduced by his demeanor:

His hands were eloquent. He moved them with disagreeable elegance, he closed them with sudden strength, and he didn't attempt to conceal the strange abnormality of his long glassy nails,as transparent as his windows before he'd had his house sealed.

I hesitate to use this phrase, but Count Vlad comes to life (!) in this description. It's economical and still replete with imagery that functions as subtext. Ethan Bumas, the lead translator, did good (if mixed, more on that anon) work capturing the dandyish archness of Fuentes' prose without spilling over into parody.

Yves is only at the tip of the stake, as we who have read Dracula know, he is on course to losing everything to the immortal evil Count. His beloved Asunción, she of the freezing salamanderly sexytimes, has fallen asleep after conjugal congress. Yves, in a moment that makes me want to smack him upside the head, is having straight-guy angst about whether Asunción has, errrmmm, achieved her desired completion. He frets about this for a good long while, uninterestingly enough (STRAIGHT GUYS: IF YOU HAVE TO ASK THE ANSWER IS NO, GET USED TO IT OR GET OVER IT), before slipping into a dreamlike state in which Vlad is under the marriage bed. Yves touches the glass-nailed corpse-hand as he reaches for his slippers. He is, understandably enough, flipped out; he convinces himself to go back to sleep, though. Next morning:

In my dream someone had been in my bedroom but then that someone walked out of it. From then on, the bedroom was no longer mine. it became a strange room because someone had walked out.

That...that right there, that short passage of simple sentences using simple words, that explains the heart of the horror of vampire novels. Vampires steal your life. They don't cause your death, unless you're lucky. They steal life and I do not know a more horrifying terrifying knee-knocking pants-pissing concept than that. The Weeping Angels of Doctor Who fame have the same effect on me that this retelling of vampire lore does.

So, of course, by the end of this short novella, Yves is utterly and abjectly alone, despite being granted his heart's secret desire. He is dead. His life was stolen in that awful moment above; he valiantly pretended not to notice, not to know, to deny; he fails, of course, and his failure leads him to a simple act now, in his new undeath, fraught with misery, horror, hellish cruel simulated joy:

He gets in his car.

Now why, with the positive statements I'm making about the effect of the book, did I rate it under 4 stars? Because of two things that annoy me, and one thing that I have no evidence to support but find plausible and therefore ohfagawdsake-worthy. Annoyance the oneth: Translate Spanish or don't. Mixing the two is Bad. For example, Vlad's house (which seems to be a famous one designed by architect Ricardo Legorreta, about which more anon) is first described as being in "Lomas Heights" *wince* which translates to "Hills Heights." Nuh uh. Lomas Altas is a specific house in the Lomas de Chapultepec neighborhood in Mexico City. "High Hills" or "Steep Hills" would work as a translation of that, but why bother? And later in the book, the house is described as being in Bosques de las Lomas, which name is not translated (means "Woods of the Hills"). Translate or don't! Don't shilly-shally!

Thing the twoth: Yves ponderously repeats his wife's name, his daughter's name, his employer's name, and all in 122 pages. If the book was 722 pages and chapters went by without these characters being mentioned, a little refresher wouldn't come amiss. In this space, it's an annoying rubber-headed hammer whacking my kneecap every fifth page. STOP! In the same more-is-actually-less vein, there is a longish and unnecessary recap of Vlad the Impaler's life and career. It served no purpose and is all stuff most readers likely to pick up a Fuentes book will either know or not want to fuss with. No padding needed, folks, when the story's already good.

As to the plausible-but-unproven detail, I return to that famous midcentury house, Casa Loma Alta. Fuentes was a highly cultured man, and likely knew Legorreta the architect and so would probably have known his work. The house was, I am fairly sure, owned most recently by a Chinese-born drug dealer whose 2007 arrest produced over $200MM in cash and an arsenal in some tunnels dug under the house. This set-up is ready-made for Fuentes, that inveterate myth-maker, to appropriate for his relocated vampire; and it provides that little roman à clef touch that haunted me (!) as I read the book. Drugs and drug barons stealing the lives and wealth of the bourgeois Mexicans, with neither party paying even the slightest mind to the millions of average Mexicans ground under their fancy car wheels and/or fangs. Listen, if it rang that bell in me, an American, how loudly must the whole carillon have rung for Fuentes' Mexican audience? That being said, there's the awkward sense in this book of is-it-or-isn't-it a roman à clef, never addressed and never refuted. It gave my reading a jarring neither/nor quality.

I'd still say it's worth a read, since it's short; but don't pay full price.


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That's quite a review!

The creepy hand under the bed.... aieeee

Clearly I've been remiss in not reading this sooner. Wow.

How do I love thy reviews? Let me count the ways...

>262 richardderus: Your review hit me with an immediate BB. The idea of reading The Tale of Genji has been simmering on my mental back burner for some little time. Now convinced, I will be looking for the Penguin special edition.

>263 richardderus: Already on the WL, thank goodness, but again your review has bumped this one up several spots in the queue. If I'd only read the publisher's nonsense, I would have put it way down on the list.

>266 richardderus: Sorry you had to read a book by your least favorite author for the Book Circle.

>267 richardderus: How did I not have Dead Souls on the WL already? What little Gogol I've read has been perfect for my taste. So: another BB.

>276 richardderus: Thank you for reading and reviewing this so I don't have to. You save me so much work.

>279 richardderus: Seriously good review. Your initial reactions are so like mine would have been had I stumbled across this little number. I won't be reading this, but I love your review. (When are you getting them published????) I savored every sentence.

>284 richardderus: Oh my! I would have passed right by this, even by Fuentes, as just another eye-glazing vampire story. I should have known because Fuentes.

Really, dear, you should investigate getting your considerable body of reviews organized and published. They're much better than the majority of reviews published.

xo

Good morning. The Tale of Genji - oh, my. I read a large part of this even larger work years ago and remember being put to sleep. sigh.

I hope Monday is a good deal better than that for us both!

>285 sibylline: I KNOW, RIGHT?!? The only thing under my bed is dog hair and I still hesitated to put my feet down this morning. *shiver*

>286 Matke: You, Mrs. Danvers me lurve, are very good for my ego. *smooch*

READ THE ROYALL TAYLOR TRANSLATION of The Tale of Genji! Seidensticker's is, to be polite, ponderous.

>287 maggie1944: See comments above, Karen44. *smooch* Thanks for visiting!

Where did my post from this morning go? Boo Hoo :-{

>289 mckait: I thought it was in my other thread! Was there one here, too?

Maybe not... morning was days ago.