tuesday june 17
As little girls, I think every woman of my generation fell in love with Atlantic coastal island life when we read Misty of Chincoteague (1947) by Marguerite Henry. The adventures of Paul and Maureen Beebe and their family seemed so exciting and wonderful! I was fascinated by the ponies, the ocean, the islands, and daily island life.
The book opens with the escape of terrified ponies on board a Spanish galleon that runs aground in a storm in the early years of Spanish exploration. These ponies were the ancestors of the present day island ponies that live all along the barrier islands of the east coast.
Henry was awarded a Newbery Honor for Misty of Chincoteauge. She followed it up in 1949 with Sea Star, Orphan of Chincoteague that she was inspired to write on a visit back to Assategue Island, the home of the ponies. Later, she wrote Stormy, Misty's Foal (1963) after the devastating 1962 "Ash Wednesday Storm" ripped into the islands.
I have had the extreme privilege of seeing the wild island ponies on North Carolina's Outer Banks islands. They weren't afraid of us humans, but they really didn't have much time for us, turning their backs pointedly as we tried to photograph them.
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wednesday april 02
I'm passing this along to all of you who enjoy a nice, quirky memoir. Another librarian recommended Ruth Reichl's Tender at the Bone: Growing up at the Table to me. It's not a new book, but that just means there are two sequels, Comfort Me with Apples and Garlic and Sapphires to put on your list, too, if like me you didn't read them when they came out.
Reichl is a food writer, the editor of Gourmet magazine, a one-time chef, and most famously a former restaurant critic for the New York Times. Tender at the Bone is the story of her childhood and youth.
How she ever became a foodie is something of a mystery, given the stories she tells about her manic-depressive mother's odd ways of dealing with food, particularly her blithe habit of scraping the blue layer off of leftovers and declaring, "It's only mold."
But a long line of mentors and fellow enthusiasts helped Reichl to some memorable meals, and she lovingly remembers every friend and every bite. How a boarding school friend's French father introduced her to fois gras, how two courtly locals fed her couscous in Tunis on a college trip, the time she asked a lower Manhattan matron to teach her to make gefilte fish, to the days when she whipped up the daily specials at a Berkeley collective restaurant--Reichl fills her pages with warm and delicious stories.
And she includes recipes.
monday february 25
Joseph, protagonist of Bruce Jay Friedman's A Mother's Kisses was a good student in high school, but due to stiff competition from returning WWII soldiers, he finds himself in the summer after his senior year with nowhere to go next. (These were the days before community colleges and proprietary schools with flexible deadlines.) Fortunately for Joseph (or maybe not), he's got his mother fighting for him.
You'll either love or hate this book. I love it, but I'm not crazy about this particular cover, because I think the mother should be more glamorous.
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wednesday february 20
I keep seeing trailers for a new movie with Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson, but the Fool's Gold that pops into my mind every time I see them is a completely unrelated 1993 novel of that title by Albert DiBartolomeo. Only his second novel (and apparently his last), it was a crisp little mob thriller about a cache of gold coins.
As the book opens, Benny Bean, a violent young thug, steals those coins from a beach house. But before he has even got them out the door, someone in turn steals them from him. Furious, Benny tracks down the second thief and kidnaps his daughter, Claire, for ransom. But the second thief has already been robbed of the coins, too.
Those are just the opening twists in a spirallingly complicated plot. The coins (which belong to a mob boss) pass through several more pairs of hands while Benny keeps Claire a prisoner and Claire's boyfriend races to recover the coins that will buy her life.
Fans of the genre will appreciate DiBartolomeo's snappy plotting. I remember the book as being pretty violent, though with a comic edge, so keep that in mind. But let me know whether it stands up to my memory of it. And whether it would make a good movie itself.
wednesday january 09
“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation."
That’s the first line of Donna Tartt’s cult classic The Secret History, and the first time I read the sentence, I was hooked.
When narrator and native Californian Richard Papen transfers to Hampden College in Vermont, he joins an exclusive group of five other students studying ancient Greek taught by an eccentric professor. Gradually Richard earns their trust and becomes privy to the group’s secret history: they accidentally murdered a farmer during their recreation of an ancient Greek bacchanal.
One of the members, Bunny Corcorran, did not participate in the bacchanal and learns of the murder. As Bunny threatens to reveal their secret, Richard must decide whether to go along with their decision to silence him.
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wednesday december 19
I love minor novels. Don’t get me wrong, I love major novels, too—big, muscular novels of ideas and literary bravura—but sometimes a small-scale work is just the right size. Lately, that seems to be what I’ve been in the mood for. (Did you like Moon Women and Uninvited Daughters?)
Englishwoman Marika Cobbold’s 1994 debut, Guppies for Tea, is another graceful, assured, and deliberately small-scale work.
Amelia Lindsey, by nature rather vague and irresolute, finds herself forced to take up the role of caretaker for her widowed grandmother, Selma. The family has put Selma into a nursing home—nice enough in its way, but depressingly cheerful—and Selma hates it.
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wednesday december 05
Okay, last week’s entry was about a cool and formal book for readers who like to see how a writer thinks.
This week’s is for readers who like to plunge right into a sympathetic story about likeable characters.
Moon Women, by Pamela Duncan, is the story of three generations of Southern women learning to find peace with each other and with their changing lives.
Middle-aged, divorced mill worker Ruth Ann Payne is going to pick up her daughter, nineteen-year-old Ashley, from a rehab center. Ashley, always trouble, is now pregnant, too. Meanwhile, Marvelle, Ruth Ann’s mother, who has begun to suffer from dementia, has wandered away from her other daughter’s house, determined to stay with Ruth Ann. So Ruth Ann’s house becomes home for all three of them, and the delicate process of accommodating each other begins.
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wednesday november 21
Odessa Levin lives in a Vermont saltbox cottage sparely furnished with Shaker pieces of the sort she always longed for during her Long Island-Jewish childhood, which was, let’s say, somewhat more baroque.
She’s single, and she has pared the complications of her life down almost to nothing. But now she’s beginning to wonder whether that was a good idea.
Into her life walks Megan Vasquez, a lonely and eccentric ten-year-old who’s suffering through the divorce of her Mexican-American father and her New-Age, WASP-rebel stepmother.
Of course, as every experienced fiction reader or moviegoer can guess, befriending Megan will bring lots of sticky complications to Odessa’s tidy, pseudo-Yankee life. But of course that’s the delight of Elinor Spielberg’s 1993 debut, Uninvited Daughters.
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tuesday november 20
Who doesn't love the Moon, sometimes lovely, sometimes spooky, always fascinating with its undeniable influence over the time and tides of earth?
The Native Americans all over the continent mark time with the moon, but they count 13 of them. A lovely book that explains this is Joseph Bruchac's Thirteen Moons on Turtle's Back: A Native American Year of Moons (1992).
Long Night Moon (2004) by Cynthia Rylant describes the full moon in 12 months of the year, explaining the names of each. Another gorgeous book is by Penny Pollock, When the Moon Is Full: A Lunar Year (2001).
In How the Moon Regianed Her Shape (2006) Janet Ruth Heller borrows from Native American tales to tell the story of the moon phases. Included is interesting factual information on the moon, along with a list of names of each full moon.
We'll have a full moon this weekend, and if my reckoning is right, it will be the Frosty Moon. Or the Beaver Moon. But either way, it will be beautiful!
thursday november 15
Here are the rest of the titles I previewed last week.
The political love story is Letter to Lorenzo, by Amanda Prantera. Julia, the English wife of a wealthy young Roman, is devastated when she is told that he has been killed by a car bomb. Her agonizing grief for her husband is complicated by her bewilderment: why would Red Brigade terrorists kill her husband when the two of them were known for their own socialist convictions? It must be a neo-fascist plot to discredit him. But careful, relentless interrogation by the investigating magistrate reveals that the police think her husband was a terrorist transporting the bomb himself. Julia’s world is turned upside down again. Her grief is powerfully portrayed, and her painfully honest attempts to understand her marriage and her politics are utterly persuasive, as is the subtle characterization of the magistrate who forces her into this possible reconsideration of everything she believed.
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wednesday november 14
Last week I dug through my piles and files of books and reviews to post about some titles I thought you might have missed.
I got a little bit of response, including a few emails, from people who were curious about what the titles might be (no guesses, though!). No one commented about what kind of books they'd like to see more of in these posts, though, so I just want to repeat--don't be shy if there's something you're looking for. There's always more where these came from!
Anyway, read on if you were curious about any of the little blurbs and what the titles were. Did any of you recognize these titles?
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wednesday november 07
I knew a regular library user who carried a tiny notebook in his jacket pocket. It was the latest in a long line of notebooks he had kept over the years, stretching back to when he lived in Shanghai in 1945, neatly recording all of the books he had read since then.
I was always somewhat awestruck by this, but I couldn’t help but feel it was Too Late for me to follow his example, even if I weren’t Too Lazy to keep it up.
The wonderful LibraryThing, a website that lets you catalog your library and share it, is the modern equivalent (and much more!) of those notebooks, but even that strikes me as Too Exhausting when I look around at all of the books I’d love to add to it.
Still, looking around at all of those books does make me want to share them with you.
So here’s my question. What kind of books would you most like me to post about?
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wednesday october 31
Okay, I know it’s Halloween, but how about some romantic fantasy that’s a little less creature-of-the-night than the current crop of vampire romances?
The authors of these books would describe themselves as fantasy writers rather than romance writers, but I think their books have plenty of appeal for readers of both genres. Whether your heart lies with high fantasy or with grand romance, you’ll find yourself swept away.
I wrote last year about War for the Oaks, Emma Bull’s fantasy about a rocker chick who gets caught up in a faerie war. Here are just a few more suggestions of fantasies with strong romantic elements—lots more where they came from! Teen readers might enjoy these, too.
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wednesday october 17
I haven’t read Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything across Italy, India, and Indonesia, about the voyage of self-discovery she undertook after her marriage fell apart. (I’m in line behind many of you!)
But seeing her name in reviews brings back fond memories of her 2000 debut novel, Stern Men, a memorable coming of age story set in the islands off the coast of Maine.
Its heroine is young Ruth Thomas, born and bred on Fort Niles, one of two neighboring islands that survive on the lobster industry. (The island’s other main industry is suspicion of outsiders, including those from the other island.) Ruth is the daughter of a lobsterman and an outsider.
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wednesday october 03
I don’t like football. I understand the rules, but not the fascination with the game. As strange as it may seem, I enjoy watching the television show Friday Night Lights, starring Kyle Chandler and the Dillon Panthers, the high school football team of small town Dillon, Texas. Season two kicks off this Friday, October 5th.
The television series (and the 2004 movie) is based on the book Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream by H.G. Bissinger. Originally published in 1990 (around the time yours truly was graduating from high school), Bissinger follows the 1988 Permian Panthers of Odessa, Texas into the locker room and onto the field, from preseason to playoffs.
The Panthers keep the hopes and dreams of this oil town alive, so Odessa takes its championship team seriously. The Permian High School stadium seats 19,000 and has artificial turf. Women carry black leather purses that look like footballs. One man has attended every game since the school opened in 1959 (except when he had heart bypass surgery). And angry fans, upset over a loss, place “For Sale” signs in the coach’s front yard.
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Here’s an oddball little title that has stuck with me for years: Claudia Casper’s debut novel The Reconstruction. It begins as a well-done but fairly predictable story of a woman at a loss at the loss of her marriage. But midway through, things get considerably more quirky and charming.
Artist Margaret has been plunged into a stagnating depression since her marriage fell apart. She’s not working or doing anything else too constructive until she is hired to make a museum diorama figure of a (presumed) female Australopithecus afarensis hominid. This recreation is to show the hominid pausing, half-turned, as recorded in the famous fossil footprints of Laetoli.
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saturday september 29
An acquaintance* was facing legal difficulties. She didn't know what to do. Finally a solution came to her: she would write to John Grisham and ask for advice and money. I felt sorry for my acquaintance's desperation and ineptitude. But apparently writing to a public figure when in bad straits, or just for the heck of it, is not uncommon.
I was surprised to learn just how much time Eleanor Roosevelt spent corresponding with non-famous Americans. The book I have before me, If You Ask Me (1946), is a collection of letters from regular people along with Mrs. Roosevelt's responses. Eleanor Roosevelt died in 1962, and other editors have compiled collections of her letters since then, including Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: Letters from Children of the Great Depression (1998) and Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: Letters to Eleanor Roosevelt Through Depression and War (2004).
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wednesday september 19
I wrote last week about a tragedy in the classic American Western genre. Here’s another elegant short novel that’s both adventure story and tragic character study. A pretty different setting, though.
The book is The Fencing Master, by Arturo Perez-Reverte.
In a Spain racked by political upheaval and rumors of revolution (it’s 1868), fencing master Don Jaime Astarloa abstains from politics and devotes himself to his ancient and honorable art. Though modern weapons are making sword work obsolete, Don Jaime continues to teach it to a small group of noble pupils, and still hopes to bring it to perfection by formulating the legendary unstoppable thrust.
Despite his academic isolation and his old-fashioned ideas of honor, he bends his principles enough to take on a very unusual pupil, the beautiful and mysterious Adela de Otero, who comes to him already an accomplished swordswoman and asks to learn his most advanced technique.
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wednesday september 12
I’m glad the new version of 3:10 to Yuma is getting good reviews. The Western is such a classic American genre, and it’s wonderful to see it rediscovered periodically both in film and on the page.
I’ve blogged previously about Elmer Kelton and how much I like his Western novels, elegantly simple frontier tales that are somehow as grand as the landscape in which they’re set.
Refugio, They Named You Wrong, by Susan Clark Schofield, is another favorite of mine.
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wednesday september 05
From Aesop to Animal Farm to the delightful mystery Mark blogged a few weeks ago, it’s a fine old literary tradition to dress up a sharp-toothed bit of satire in sheep’s clothing, so to speak, telling a telling tale by pretending you’re just talking about animals.
Or even insects. Yep, there’s precedent for that, too, of course.
So readers of Donald Harington’s The Cockroaches of Stay More shouldn’t be surprised to find a sly literary spoof and social satire between the covers of this cult classic, an immensely clever and entertaining novel that pokes fun at a whole range of human foibles—literature, sex, class, religion, and the atom bomb—all from the point of view of cockroaches.
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monday august 27
Paul Pennyfeather, an industrious third-year student at the College of Scone, Oxford, and the protagonist of Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, innocently crosses paths with members of the posh Bollinger Club. Naturally, the next thing that happens is that Oxford administrators unfairly "send him down" for "indecent behavior," and Paul is forced to take work as an instructor at a Welsh preparatory school. Since the novel is a dark comedy, Paul quiets his first class by offering a prize to the student who can write the longest essay, regardless of merit.
Interestingly, although Waugh certainly does not mean for us to respect Paul's teaching ability, this writing-instruction technique is quite popular among contemporary English composition instructors, including me.
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wednesday july 25
Mark Merlis’s 2003 novel,
Man about Town,
is a low-key but wonderfully resonant story of midlife crisis.
Joe Lingeman is a mid-level advisor on legislative matters to Congress. It’s an interesting job, but not exactly earth-shaking.
He has been in a relationship with his lover, Sam, for fifteen years. Again, comfortable, but the earth doesn’t really move.
Then Sam leaves him. And on the job, he’s suddenly in bed (legislatively speaking) with a homophobic senator who wants to ban Medicare payments to gay AIDS patients. Joe is forced to face the fact that he doesn’t have any of the things he wanted to have by midlife.
And what were those things? He remembers the glimpse of infinite possibilities he got at fourteen, when he came across the photo of a beautiful youth in a swimsuit ad at the back of a suave men’s magazine. It seemed like a window into another world to the naïve, repressed boy he was.
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wednesday july 18
Thirty-something high school Latin teacher April Epner has never had any desire to find the woman who gave her up for adoption. Her adoptive parents were perfectly loving, if rather restrained, and she is contented with her single state and quiet career.
But into her tidy life bursts Bernice Graverman, a flamboyantly self-dramatizing woman who wears “toad sized clip-on earrings” and “wet-look white eyeshadow.” Bernice, who is a local talk show host, confessed to her TV audience that she once gave up a child for adoption, and the ratings were so good (“You didn’t happen to see the show, did you?”) that tracking down April was the inevitable next step.
That’s how Elinor Lipman’s 1990 debut novel Then She Found Me begins. The rest of it is just as wryly funny and perfectly pitched.
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wednesday july 11
I recently joined a book club where the members are all (we would admit this) women of a certain age. While we were making our list of must-reads, scribbling down titles of great books we always wished we had read, we discovered that not everyone in the group had read Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman.
Well, that was that. Half the room leaned forward and said in chorus, “Oh, you’ve got to read it!”
There’s something about living through an era of social change that makes you want to tell people about it and gives you an enormous camaraderie with other people who went through it, too. (Any social change—this summer, ask someone older what life was like before air conditioning, for example.)
If someone can do that telling as vividly and hilariously as Atwood does in this 1969 classic of the early women’s movement, you’ve just got to pay attention.
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wednesday july 04
I’ve been blogging mystery and suspense novels for the past few weeks. This one’s a mystery, too, but a delightfully charming period mystery quite unlike those other titles.
Kate Ross’s series debut, Cut to the Quick¸ introduced Julian Kestrel, a London dandy of the 1820s. Invited to a country house to be the best man at a wedding, he finds that the groom’s aristocratic family is being blackmailed into accepting a former stable hand’s daughter as the bride.
More startling still, Julian finds the body of an unidentified young woman in the bed of his guest room. When his own manservant (a former cutpurse) is accused of her murder, Julian steps in to find the real culprit, and of course discovers that the murder and the blackmail are linked.
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wednesday june 13
You wouldn’t guess it from the title, but Leaving Disneyland, the debut suspense novel by Alexander Parsons, is one I recommended to a fan of Walter Mosley and George P. Pelecanos.
The book’s main character, Doc, has served sixteen years of a twenty-year sentence in the grim and crumbling Tyburn Federal Penitentiary. He is almost due to face the parole board again when is assigned to a new cell. And it can’t be a coincidence that his new cellmate is a young druglord from a rival gang, whom honor requires Doc and his friends to kill.
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monday june 11
1958 was an interesting time to be born, because World War II, though long past, was still a part of everyone's collective memory, and the Cold War was really gearing up. Most of my friends and teachers believed Hitler had been a communist, and our games of Russian Interrogation and Nazi Interrogation were identical:
"Vhat iss your name?"
"Laurie"
(Facial slap) "You lie. Vhat iss your name?"
"Laurie"
(Slap) "You lie."
Those were simpler times when children played healthy outdoor games like this rather than evil videogames.
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wednesday june 06
Big Red Tequila is a great title for a Texas mystery, isn’t it? This novel gets it right right on the title page.
Rick Riordan is probably more famous nowadays as the author of a teen fantasy series based on Greek mythology—his bestselling The Lightning Thief was our teen book choice for On the Same Page.
But back in 1997 he debuted an adult mystery series set in San Antonio. He got more than the title just right. All of you readers who enjoy a nice semi-hard-boiled mystery with an appealingly thoughtful but smart-talking hero and a well-realized regional setting should try the Tres Navarre series.
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wednesday may 30
I don't mean to brag, but one of my uncles might have invented chocolate syrup. I think I heard a family member mention this once. Amino acids are involved. Uncle Jim is in his 80s, so when I see him this summer, I'll have to discuss this with him. I don't know though if I can spin a whole book out of my memories of Uncle Jim, especially if it turns out he actually didn't invent chocolate syrup.
In the stacks I found My Uncle Joseph Stalin, by Budu Svanidze. Here was someone who didn't have to read up on amino acids, the "building blocks of protein," to make an interesting famous-relative-exploitation book! Budu was a loyal communist, but he fell in love with a Hungarian woman who refused to live behind the Iron Curtain, so they snuck out to Paris and perhaps also South America under assumed names. The idea is that Budu wrote this and several other memoirs because he needed the money--and he was successful, as his several volumes of memoirs were translated into English and other languages. He even sold an article on Joseph Stalin's three wives to McCalls.
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How about a little suspense?
I’m looking back at a whole stash of good, nailbiting suspense novels and nice, twisty mysteries that I’ve read in the past few years, and I think my next several posts are going to be about those genres.
Maybe it’s the hot sunshine we’ve been having lately that has put me in a noir mood—I once read a definition that said a true noir movie had to have a shot somewhere in it of broken light slanting in through venetian blinds.
I don’t think my first title quite fits that definition, since it takes place in Glasgow. But it sure fills the bill for gripping suspense.
It’s Denise Mina’s award-winning 1999 debut, Garnethill.
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wednesday may 23
News of the death of children’s writer Lloyd Alexander last week sent me to the bookshelves to reread his Chronicles of Prydain. It's one of my all-time favorite works of fantasy, whether for children or for adults, a splendid work of high fantasy based on Welsh legend. Have all of you Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter fans discovered it? The first volume is The Book of Three.
In quiet Caer Dahlben, the sheltered farm of the great enchanter Dahlben, orphaned Taran tends the oracular pig, Hen Wen, and helps out in the fields and the smithy.
But what he really longs for is to be a hero. Glory and grandeur fill his dreams—he’s sure he could do noble deeds, given the chance.
So when the war bands of the terrible dark lord Arawn threaten Caer Dahlben, causing Hen Wen to run off in a panic, Taran doesn’t think twice. He dashes off after her, plunging himself into perilous adventure.
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wednesday may 02
Michael Dibdin died on March 30. He was best known for his mystery series featuring Venetian Police Commissioner Aurelio Zen. The final novel in the series, End Games, will be published in the fall.
As much as the character of Zen defines the novels—morose, psychologically complex, and world-weary—so does the character of Italy, where Dibdin lived for several years.
Each of the novels is set in a different part of the country, and the style of each novel seems to reflect the cultural differences among Italy’s regions. But all are richly cynical, darkly funny, intricate in plot, and acute in their understanding of modern Italian politics, religion, and everyday life.
My personal favorite among Dibdin’s novels is set in England, though. It’s one of his stand-alone works, the 1991 suspense/satire of Thatcher’s England, Dirty Tricks.
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saturday april 21
If you go to library school, you'll sooner or later have the conversation about "What if someone comes into the library and asks for a book on how to build a bomb?" As far as I can tell, the library has no how-to books on this subject, but if it did, the answer is that we would help the customer find it and not question his or her motivation.
In library school, this discussion will quickly deteriorate to questions like "What if a customer comes in and wants a book about how to make crystal meth?" The library has chosen not to buy books on this subject either, although there are certainly books about the problems associated with meth labs and addiction. The library's electronic collection, which you can access from home, however, has a government document called Clandestine Methamphetamine Labs. This 78-page PDF file includes photos, so you can recognize a meth lab if you see one, and compelling reasons why you shouldn't build your own.
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wednesday april 18
I think most people would be able to answer this question easily: Are you a re-reader?
I think we're pretty firmly divded, those of us who are from those of us who aren't. If you're not a re-reader, you wonder why people bother spending precious time reading things they've already read when there's so much else out there to read. If you are a re-reader, you wonder how people get along never revisiting beloved authors and characters and settings. (And we don't even need Maria's desert island as an excuse to re-read.)
I'm a re-reader, and there are certain authors I binge on over and over again. Currently, I'm re-reading every single Regency novel by Georgette Heyer. I love their sparkle and wit, their charming characters, and their sweetly humorous variations on the conventions of the old-fashioned historical romance.
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saturday april 14
April 15th marks the 95th anniversary of the sinking of the steamship RMS Titanic in the North Atlantic Ocean on a calm, starry night in 1912. What better way to commemorate the event and honor the 1,523 lives lost than by attending Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition, closing May 6th at the Cincinnati Museum Center.
If you’re looking for a good read on the subject, why not try a book published in 1955 that still makes the disaster come alive today: A Night to Remember by Walter Lord. I decided to pick up my copy (after many sad years of gathering dust on my bookshelf) and was surprised by its immediacy.
Lord interviewed Titanic survivors before writing his classic tale and the result is a minute-by-minute account of the ship’s sinking and its aftermath. His narrative “you are there” style is considered groundbreaking and influential, and when combined with a viewing of the Titanic artifacts, you can’t help but be moved.
tuesday march 27
No “Irish History Month” would be complete without a tribute to the Easter Rising, the 1916 rebellion against Great Britain that failed, but sparked the astonishing victory of the War of Independence (1919-1921). William Butler Yeats, a contemporary, was the first writer to make great literature of the story. His poem “Easter, 1916” commemorates the 16 rebel leaders whose executions roused the country to revolution:
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Among recent literary accounts are two superb novels by award-winning writers: Jamie O'Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys (2001) and Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry (1999), which follows the story through the revolution and the subsequent civil war. The approaches of these native Dubliners couldn’t be less similar.
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saturday march 24
In Alice Walker's story "Everyday Use," a mother and her two daughters view the cultural importance of some beautiful inherited quilts in different ways. The plan is for the uneducated daughter to get the quilts when she marries, and when the quilts wear out, the uneducated daughter knows how to quilt and will make some more.
The educated but mean daughter, who doesn't know how to quilt, is appalled that a piece of history will be lost when the quilts wear out. She wants to preserve the quilts and hang them on her wall. Our sympathies are meant to be with the uneducated mother and daughter--but the mean daughter does have a point. The quilts will wear out, and a piece of the characters' family and ethnic heritage will be gone.
It's sort of the same with books.
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thursday march 15
I’ll be after the wearin’ o’ the green in this space during March, which makes a fine Irish History Month. It’s not just the St. Patrick’s Day that’s in it; rain and spring air recall the Emerald Isle, so fertile that the Sassenach (English, or “Saxons”) kept it “the most distressful country that ever yet was seen.” Bad as it could be to have a thriving neighbor, it was even worse for Protestant England to have Catholic harbors next door from which other Papist countries could (and did) try to launch invasions.
“They are going, going, going, and we cannot bid them stay.” My ancestors came to America over the past 300 years of increasing crisis in the homeland. The most fortunate ones were 18th-century refugees from the anti-Catholic penal laws. The Meade family and Stephen Moylan (first president of The Friendly Sons of Saint Patrick) fought alongside George Washington. Thomas Riley, one of the “wild geese” who found work as mercenaries, arrived in Lafayette’s Irish regiment to whack the Sassenach over here.
At the other extreme were my Toohey great-great-grandparents, who disembarked dead in New Orleans from a "coffin ship" during the Famine of the mid-19th century. In True History of the Kelly Gang, a Man Booker Prize-winning novel about the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly, Peter Carey makes a beautiful immigrant song out of the lives of the luckless exiles, especially in a passage that intones the names of convict ships like Homer’s catalogue of ships in the Iliad.
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saturday march 10
“One hundred nations descend upon us. The armies of all Asia. Funneled into this narrow corridor, their numbers count for nothing. They shatter with each advance.”
300, the film based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel about the 480 B.C. Battle of Thermopylae (“hot gates”), opened this week here and across the country. Typically for Miller, whose talents and concepts are equally extreme, the movie has drawn praise for its power, but also diatribes against its historical and (perceived) political content, as well as Miller’s trademark violence.
The book is certainly a fine example of Miller’s potent, “artful” storytelling, and the story itself can’t be told often enough. Stationing themselves in a narrow mountain pass, 300 Spartans faced certain death to hold the gigantic army of the Persian Empire at bay, enabling the Greek city-states to marshal their forces and eventually rebuff the invaders.
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wednesday march 07
When you wonder how in the world Peter O’Toole missed winning an Academy Award for Lawrence of Arabia and then discover he lost to Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird, the famous gaps in Oscar honors seem less shocking. But – Rocky beating Taxi Driver? Best Picture and Best Director? Actually, Martin Scorsese wasn’t even nominated for directing Taxi Driver.
Oscar history is so full of surprises that it was painful to watch the aged O’Toole sitting among mere mortals at this year’s ceremony, hoping to end a record series of losses: seven fruitless nominations at the start of the evening, eight by the end. Fortunately, he had received an honorary award in 2002.
I saw the nearly four-hour Lawrence of Arabia four times during its initial run in 1963, when I was 13. Before I try to explain myself, some cover from Roger Ebert: “I've noticed that when people remember Lawrence of Arabia, they don't talk about the details of the plot. They get a certain look in their eye, as if they are remembering the whole experience, and have never quite been able to put it into words.”
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monday march 05
Anne Rivers Siddons, noted author of contemporary North Carolina "low country" fiction, produced one and only one horror novel, The House Next Door. I wish she would write more!
The seeping darkness of a gorgeous modern marvel of a house stands out like a stain in the well-to-do, long established neighborhood where it is built and takes on a life of its own. It also takes over the lives of its owners. It's an interesting twist on the haunted house story, based on a sleek brand new contemporary house rather than a decrepit mansion.
The stunning beauty of the house hides the misery and terror that it seemingly causes, making rational people do wildly irrational things and turning spotless lives into great big messes.
The book was written in 1978, and the lack of "modern" technology shows but doesn't detract from the suspense.
Siddons has a crafty way of describing things in terms of everyday life, which makes the horrifying events even scarier, placing them just outside the kitchen door.
Be careful, and wish your neighbors well...
wednesday february 14
It’s February—time for a big, fat novel to settle in with, so you don’t have to go out again till spring. At 406 pages, Keith Maillard’s The Clarinet Polka may or may not get you that far, but it will certainly sweep you away.
What makes it even more appropriately for the season is that it’s a big, fat valentine. It’s the Canadian-born author’s love song to the Polish-American community of the West Virginia steel towns where he was raised. It makes me think of Richard Russo, but a little closer to home.
So if you missed it in 2003, get out your afghan and settle in.
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wednesday february 07
I did a booklist of some of my favorite coming of age novels in 2003. Ardashir Vakil’s Beach Boy was on it. If you didn’t pick it up then, try it now! The cover is one of the most apt illustrations I’ve ever seen on a book—against a bright saffron-colored background, a boy takes an adventurous leap. The cover perfectly captures the novel and its depiction of the busy, risky, hopeful spirit of a child’s interior life.
The novel is set in 1970s Bombay. Cyrus Readymoney is a quiet, anxious boy with an insatiable curiosity to understand the world he’s growing up in. His parents’ difficult marriage, the mysteries of sex, his friends’ strangely different lives, and the endless fascinations of his beach neighborhood and bustling city—all of these interesting subjects churn constantly through his mind.
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wednesday january 31
For a first novel, this little book made it big—the author of Fields of Glory, Jean Rouaud, went from selling newspapers to being the 1990 winner of the most prestigious French literary prize, the Prix Goncourt.
I read the book in its English translation by Ralph Manheim in 1992, and it’s one of the books that have stayed with me over many years. It’s tiny (only about 150 pages) and gently effortless to read, but it’s indelible.
The unnamed narrator, one of the grandchildren of a family in a little Loire Valley town pays tribute to his eccentric elders—his grandparents and his Great-Aunt Marie—whose lives were long ago altered by the Great War.
At first, the humorous stories of their oddities charm and amuse. There’s Aunt Marie’s card catalog of saints and their specialized responsibilities, Grandmother’s martyrdom to Grandfather’s notoriously dangerous driving, and so on. But gradually the stories become more poignant.
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tuesday january 16
Roddy Doyle has a new book out, Paula Spencer. It’s the sequel to The Woman Who Walked into Doors, his 1996 character study of a working-class Dublin woman beset by alcoholism and abuse. Paula is now sober and managing an ordinary, workaday life, though she's walking on eggshells with her children, who can't quite afford to trust her yet.
It's a lovely book, an intimate character study with a richly original voice. It's getting the same critical acclaim as its predecessor did.
But I have to confess a preference for Doyle's more comic works. My favorite Doyle characters of all are the Rabbitte family, who were introduced in his debut and showed up in two more novels, now collectively known as the Barrytown Trilogy.
I pulled The Commitments off the shelf to review in 1989, a skinny, paperback U.S. edition of a first novel by an unknown Irish writer. I was giggling from the first page, where three loutish, untalented Dublin youths decide that their fledgling rock band needs some help and recruit their more musically knowledgeable friend, Jimmy Rabbitte, to manage it.
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wednesday january 03
It used to be that you could hardly get a novel published in the crime and mystery genre unless you were willing to commit to a series, but lately, long-established mystery authors are going the other way, hitting the blockbuster charts with stand-alone suspense titles (think Harlan Coben, for example).
Greg Rucka, the author of the Atticus Kodiak mysteries and, more recently, of several superhero graphic novels and a superspy thriller series, did a (yes) super stand-alone suspenser a few years back. I wish he’d do another.
That one was A Fistful of Rain. Its heroine was no Wonder Woman, but she was a knockout of a character.
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wednesday december 27
Small people caught up in large events can be great characters for a novel. I think this is the fourth or fifth World War II novel I’ve posted about--not a theme I expected to see running through my blog entries, but there’s something about that combination of intimate, personal stories and the inexorable sweep of historic events that makes for great reading. So here’s another novel I can’t resist telling you about.
Melvyn Bragg’s
The Soldier’s Return is actually about the aftermath of the war, as you may guess from the title. It’s a quiet but heartbreaking novel about a soldier’s difficulty in readjusting to life back home in a northern English town.
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wednesday december 13
Remember Frank Hurley’s spectacular photographs from the Shackleton expedition to the Antarctic, where the utter clarity of the light on the ice around the captive ship makes every detail seem truer than life?
I always think of those photos when I reread Beryl Bainbridge’s novel The Birthday Boys, about another Antarctic voyage, Scott’s ill-fated 1910-12 race to the South Pole. The crisp perfection of Bainbridge’s writing and her sharp, utterly clear-eyed attitude toward her characters and their venture seem to match perfectly the crystalline quality of those photos.
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saturday december 02
I bought
Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, two long novellas generally published together, in Italy on a drizzly day, and stayed in bed reading them even after the sun came out. Nancy Mitford was a genius, and these books are her best fiction. They're based on her own family, which has spawned several exuberant biographies:
The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family and
The House of Mitford.
Unsuitable Attachments and Love in a Cold Climate tell the stories of sensible Fanny Logan's eccentric cousins and of the wealthy and ancient Montdore family. Fanny's quiet life could hardly be more different than her beloved cousin Linda Radlett's, and also than that of her friend Polly Montdore. The Radletts' terrifying father Matthew hunts his chldren when foxhounds are not available (and also when they are) and writes down the names of the many people he dislikes on pieces of paper and puts the papers in a drawer, believing this will cause something bad to happen to these enemies.
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friday december 01
Flann O'Brien (one of many pen names--real name Brian Ó Nuallain) wrote a phenomenal novel, At Swim-Two-Birds, in the late 1930's. It is a whacked out, hilariously psychedelic, and nearly indescribable work of postmodern metafiction. The fact that it was originally published almost seventy years ago makes it even more mindbending. I was sitting in a doctor's office waiting room, reading this book, laughing out loud to the extent that others must've thought I was nutty. Because I enjoyed it so much I read four others by him--The Third Policeman, The Dalkey Archive, The Hard Life: An Exegesis of Squalor, and The Poor Mouth: A Bad Story About the Hard Life.
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I've been working my way through the classics of literature on CD as I find them, catching up with all those books I should have read long ago. But I feel I have to be honest and share my defeats as well as my victories here. I am now batting only .330 in my attempts to read James Joyce's Ulysses. Yes, I've only succeeded once out of three attempts, and even then I was in high school and may have skipped one or two pages. This time, determined to appreciate it as an adult, I got it on CD--that should have made it easy, right? Well, this morning I returned the unabridged CD version. Someone else had a hold on it, and I had only made it to disc ten.
Now, there's a good chance that I'm sleep deprived, so it probably wasn't the best idea to try to listen to this title right before bed. The fact is, it was a great audiobook. The narrator had a lovely voice, and of course there was the prose, the fantastic melodious prose. Well, melodious it was, and I tripped down those notes straight into dreamland, night after night.
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wednesday november 29
One of my favorite parts of my job is talking to people about what they’re reading. Watching people light up when they tell me about something really, really good, and listening to their voices become urgent when they tell me “you’ve just got to try this”—I find that absolutely irresistible.
And of course, if it’s something I’ve read, we get to do that “isn’t he an amazing writer” and “wasn’t it wonderful when” and even “ooh, if you liked that, you have to read.”
I love writing for this blog, because of course I get to do the “you’ve just got to.” (You can probably tell from some of my much-too-long entries how enthused I can get.)
But it’s not one-way. It just occurred to me that everything I have out on my card right now and everything I currently have on hold was recommended to me personally by a library user or another librarian.
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wednesday november 08
Now that Prince is calling himself Prince again, maybe it’s time to revisit this fantasy set in the 1980s music scene of Minneapolis.
Eddi McCandry is a rocker chick in a struggling band when she is unwillingly recruited as a pawn in a faerie war. A handsome phouka (who is sometimes dog, sometimes “human”) explains that she has been magically bound to appear on the battlefield on May Eve, as human blood is necessary to make the ritual combat real. In the meantime, the phouka will be her bodyguard, because the dark side of the faerie court will be after her.
Since Eddi hates being told what to do, how will she cope with her unwanted guard dog, either in his alarming animal form or in his alarmingly sexy human one? And how will she keep body and soul together till May Eve, since her band has broken up?
By starting a new band, of course, with some very unusual musicians. And getting ready for the ultimate battle of the bands.
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thursday november 02
Elmer Kelton has won prize after prize from Western writers’ associations and regional literature competitions. Fans of Westerns will recognize his name, but readers of all kinds of historical fiction should give his work a try.
His marvelous historical novels of the American West are written with deliberate simplicity, but there’s a lot of art in that unadorned, pared-down prose. The novels give a vivid picture of life on both sides of the frontier between Native American culture and the westward settlement push.
Slaughter follows a ragtag group of whites as they scratch a dwindling living hunting the last of the buffalo south through Texas. They know their way of life is dying out with the herds. A disbelieving and finally desperate clan of Commanches watches them arrive—the destruction of the buffalo means the wholesale destruction of the Commanche way of life, too. Tragedy is inevitable.
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sunday october 29
It’s the perfect time of year to read Roger Zelazny’s delightfully clever spoof of supernatural fantasy, A Night in the Lonesome October.
A group of animal “familiars” led by our narrator, Snuff the Watchdog, are helping their masters (including a knife-wielding Jack, a Count, and the Good Doctor and his Experimental Man) prepare for a rare Victorian-era conjunction of Halloween and the full moon.
It seems that such conjunctions are the only times when a Gate can be opened for the return of the old gods, and magical combatants must gather to prevent its opening.
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monday october 23
There are some books I return to over and over. Kate Wilhelm’s Welcome Chaos is one of them—I reread it this weekend, and it pulled me in again, though it’s hard to define why it’s so appealing to me.
It’s a hard book to blog, too, since the plot involves a secret. Do I tell you the secret to convince you to pick up the book? The book jacket does, though the author doesn’t for several chapters.
Let me start by saying that the novel was written when the major threat to world survival was the superpowers’ arms race. That makes it seem almost innocent, dated by our knowledge of all the other dangers that threaten our peace and our planet.
But in ways that makes it even more powerful, as it’s a thoughtful novel about civilized people deciding how far to go, balancing the lives of millions to save the world.
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friday october 13
Girl with a Pearl Earring helped make historical fiction featuring ordinary women a hot publishing trend in the past few years. And with the recent reconsideration of Marie Antoinette’s reputation, there seem to be a lot of French Revolution novels lately.
How about a novel featuring ordinary women in revolutionary France? The Rose Grower, by Michelle de Kretser, is a surprisingly moving book that will appeal to fans of both light and serious historical fiction.
In a rural province, three sisters of good but not aristocratic family sympathetically follow the news of political and philosophical unrest in Paris. It’s all rather distant, though—their own lives and budding romances are of far more real importance.
Until, slowly, revolution reaches their comfortable corner of the country.
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sunday october 08
It’s a typical weekend of mayhem at the Hotel California for assistant manager Am Caulfield: a bra theft, a Bob Johnson Society convention (every single member checking in is named Bob Johnson), a chef who serves roadkill to an eminent food critic, and, oh yes, an apparent suicide and a double murder.
Since Am has just been appointed acting security chief, too, all of this falls straight into his lap. With the help of his new intern, Sharon Baker, Am copes. But his troubles aren’t over—he’s promoted to general manager just in time for his hotel’s takeover by a Japanese conglomerate.
The Hotel Detective was the 1994 debut for an unfortunately short-lived series by veteran mystery writer Alan Russell. Russell has a field day revealing the amusing and horrific details of hotel management (the dust jacket says he was a hotel manager himself), and the mystery plot is clever, too. If you like humorous mysteries, go back and find this one. Just don’t plan any hotel stays soon afterwards.
tuesday october 03
