At a glance, I sensed the first scent of winter on the morning's breath. Written on the Body gives a similar sensual chill emanating from Jeanette Winterson's prose. The story unfolds perfectly without haste, without hesitation and without a gender for the narrator.
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Pick out your darkest petticoats ladies because Seth Grahame- Smith and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a classic zombie novel unlike any other.
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My one-year-old daughter’s favorite toy is a frog that attached to her infant car seat when she was a baby. She lost it, so her grandmother bought another one. We found the first one again, so now she has two. Sometimes she will hold one in each hand in her crib at night, so I decided to read her a chapter from each of the Frog and Toad books by author/illustrator Arnold Lobel before she goes to bed.
Last night we began with the story “The Letter” in Frog and Toad Are Friends (1970), the first title in the Frog and Toad series and a Caldecott Medal Honor Book. Toad is sad because he never receives any mail, so Frog sends him a letter to cheer him up. Lobel’s simple text and charming illustrations in soft greens and browns capture all the emotions of true friendship.
I’m looking forward to reading more of their adventures this evening, but these stories are perfect chapter books for beginning readers, too! And don’t forget to also check out:
When I hear the words "high school," certain memories spring to mind: catching the city bus each morning, memorizing those French verb conjugations, and putting off "required reading"--the tedious Shakespeare plays, Melville stories, and the Dickens novels--as long as possible.
I wasn't averted to reading; after all, my bedside was cluttered with books by Amy Tan and John Grisham, among others. But the idea that I was required to read certain books because they were "important" always bothered the teen-aged me.
Luckily, the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County provides ample opportunities to discover (or rediscover) classic literature, old and new. Today, for example, not only can I read the library's copy of Hamlet and watch it performed by Patrick Stewart, but also I can download an audio-recording of the play from NetLibrary or a video study guide from MyLibraryDV and gain an even better understanding of this classic that became one of my favorites, long after I had to read it for eleventh-grade English.
The short story index, one of the many internet databases to which the library subscribes, allows users to read entire short stories from their home computer or on one of the library's public terminals. I found some of wonderful stories there, including Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find." And after rereading that classic, be sure to check out this recent biography of O'Connor, simply titled, Flannery.
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At Halloween, I heard a radio story that asked people about the frightening movie scenes they remembered most vividly from childhood. (The flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz seem to have scarred many otherwise healthy adults.)
In the kinder, gentler spirit of Thanksgiving, I have a different question for you: what are the childhood books that made you grateful you learned to read? All the way back to Green Eggs and Ham, or whatever that very first book was for you.
It isn’t just Thanksgiving that has brought this to my mind lately. I’ve been recommending some favorite books for a third-grader (hi, Nathan!), and it has been a lot of fun to root through old memories for things he might like. It turns out that he loves some of them as much as I did.
So what books are you grateful for? What childhood favorites would you recommend?
I’ll just pick one. Well, I’ll cheat, since it has a sequel: Elizabeth Enright’s 1957 Gone-Away Lake and its sequel, Return to Gone-Away.
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Here’s something cheerful.
Paula Marantz Cohen writes charming modern-day Jane Austen tributes. Her Jane Austen in Boca was a very funny take-off on Pride and Prejudice, set in a Florida senior community, where any widower with any means at all must be in want of a wife.
Now with Jane Austen in Scarsdale, she takes on Persuasion, in a tale of a mild high school guidance counselor who has lost in love.
Anne was once talked out of marrying a young travel agent, Ben, by her imperious grandmother. Ben has since gone on to found a wildly successful line of cultural travel guides. Now he’s back in town to enroll his nephew in Fennimore High School. All of the required complications ensue.
It’s hard to capture the spirit of an Austen novel, as the many readers of the many, many recent knock-offs can attest. Cohen hits the mark. No assembly balls or empire dresses, but plenty of gentle satire (the book’s subtitle, Love, Death, and the SATs, hints at the mockery of the modern college application frenzy) and a satisfying romance.
When Daniel Mendelsohn was a boy, elderly relatives in New York or Florida would pinch his cheeks and begin to cry. Daniel, it seemed, looked uncannily like his great-uncle Shmiel (Sam) Jaeger, who, along with his wife and daughters, died in the Holocaust.
Mendelsohn’s grandfather and most of his grandfather’s siblings were safe in America, having emigrated long before the war. Only one estranged brother stayed behind in Bolechow, Poland, with his family.
But to Mendelsohn, his grandfather’s mesmerizing tales of life in the old country made Bolechow almost a legend, and the family likeness between himself and his long-vanished great-uncle haunted him. Years after his beloved grandfather’s death, he decided to trace the clues to his uncle’s family’s fate.
The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million is the deeply moving account of how Mendelsohn worked from a few snapshots and letters, a few half-rumored family stories, to discover the fate of his uncle, his aunt, and their four daughters.
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I’ve been reading some old historical fiction lately since a friend encouraged me to try Kenneth Roberts’ novels of the American frontier and Revolution, which were written in the 1930s.
It’s taking me back to childhood, when that kind of sturdy, old-fashioned American adventure story was what I found on my parents’ and grandparents’ bookshelves.
Nowadays I’m seeing more books with courtiers and courtesans and queens on the covers than eighteenth-century American frontiersmen. But in recent years, there have been some American historical novels as transporting as any bestselling time travel romance. Very different from those earnest childhood tales, though.
Here are two splendid ones: The Old American, by Ernest Hebert, and Peter Loon, by Van Reid.
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Okay, have you eaten your Wheaties this morning? This novel based on a real-life survival story will make you want to start bulking up.
Michael Punke's 2002 novel The Revenant tells the story of frontiersman Hugh Glass. Hired as a hunter for a trapping expedition into the northern Rocky Mountain reaches of the Louisiana Territory in 1823, he is attacked by a grizzly and horribly mauled.
With winter coming on, hostile tribes nearby, and the expedition suffering from bad luck all around, the expedition leader makes the decision to move on, leaving two men to bury Glass after he dies of his wounds.
The two don't wait. They strip Glass of his weapons and hurry to catch up with their comrades.
But Glass doesn't die.
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A friend and I went to the Playhouse in the Park’s production of Jane Austen's Emma the other night, and something curious happened during the curtain call. The actor playing Mr. Knightley, Emma’s leading man, winked at us! “Did you see that?” asked my friend.
Now, seeing as we were sitting about ten rows up, there is the possibility that he was winking at somebody else, perhaps someone in the first nine rows. As this is my blog entry, though, I say we go with my version of events. Anyways, the wink was just the nice, final note of what is the start of a wonderful re-introduction to Jane Austen’s work.
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I don't know which I like best of Silas House's books set in his native mountains of eastern Kentucky. They're loosely linked by characters, but you don't have to read them in order. The strong sense of connection between the people and the landscape they live in is vivid and deeply appealing in all three of the books.
The first book was Clay's Quilt, a surprisingly assured and graceful first novel, filled with deep affection for the mountain way of life. Clay is a young man who was raised by relatives in tiny Free Creek after his mother's violent death at the hands of a jealous lover. He finds what he has always felt was missing from life when he meets Alma, a fiddler who comes to the local honkytonk from another part of the county. Their romance is complicated by her pending divorce and the jealousy of her ex. Violence enters Clay's life a second time.
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I was talking about Richard B. Wright's 2002 Clara Callan with someone yesterday and realized I have never blogged it. It's a gorgeous book, an absolutely transporting work of fiction, so here you go:
The title character is the older of two sisters, small-town Canadian girls in the 1930s. Clara is a schoolteacher, living alone now that her father has died and now that her sister, Nora, has gone off to New York to work in radio. Her story and Nora's are told through the letters they exchange and through Clara's diary entries.
Compared to Nora's bit of glamor, Clara's life is very uneventful. She reads, plays the piano, and writes a little poetry, but she burns that because it doesn't come up to her standards. She struggles quietly with a sudden disillusionment about her faith and (slightly less quietly) with the cranky coal-burning furnace her father used to tend.
But this isn't a tidy little book. Something shattering happens to Clara that irrevocably changes her life.
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Okay, here's one you probably haven't read. It's in a genre you may not have read in a while, either, the New York City satire of glittering literati and bright lights/big city excess. It's Kurt Wenzel's punningly titled 2001 debut, Lit Life.
Seven years before, Kyle Clayton was the latest Bret Easton Ellis, a hip, young, party-going, literary superstar. But he hasn't written a word to follow up his megabestseller, and he has just about hit bottom in drunken celebrity.
Richard Whitehurst is almost totally his opposite, a disciplined, prolific, literary writer who has achieved almost no recognition for his substantial oeuvre.
When the two meet at a disastrous PEN reception, Richard invites Kyle to stay at his house in the Hamptoms. Richard hopes Kyle will be his literary heir and will write a scathing roman a clef to punish the New York literary establishment that has rejected them both.
Kyle, his imagination sparked by Richard's suggestion, hope to prove that he really does have what it takes. But both pay a rather painful price for another go-round on the New York literary carousel.
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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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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.
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.
Continue Reading…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.
“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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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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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.
Continue Reading…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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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!
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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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?
Continue Reading…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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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:
Those were simpler times when children played healthy outdoor games like this rather than evil videogames.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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“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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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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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...
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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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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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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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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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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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. Continue Reading…
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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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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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.
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.
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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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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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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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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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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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.
Continue Reading…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.
Phyllis Gotlieb dazzles with her sheer imagination in world-building in her 1998 science fiction novel Flesh and Gold. ”What if?” is the basic question behind science fiction, and a writer who can imagine an “if” that seems truly different from the here and now yet that still seems vividly lifelike is not to be missed.
In a far-future universe richly populated by a dozen or so alien races and several varieties of humans, we follow the adventures of a small band of characters, the chief of whom is Skerow. Skerow is an interplanetary circuit judge from Khagodi. She is a ponderously slow but deeply honorable being. (One human friend thinks of Skerow’s race as “streamlined baby allosaurs.”) Skerow is shocked and disillusioned to discover that a fellow judge she has traveled with for decades has been taking bribes.
It’s just the first of several shocks this being of great integrity suffers.
Continue Reading…Sometimes it’s hard to plunge in and start reading a prolific author. You feel as though you’ll never catch up. So if the thought of tackling James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux mysteries is a little intimidating, or if you’d like a change of pace from the steamy, haunted Louisiana delta setting of that famous series, try The Lost Get-Back Boogie, a stand-alone suspense novel Burke published in 1986. You’ll get the gorgeously lyrical writing, the gritty realism, and the inescapable violence, all set against a big Montana landscape.
Iry Paret is out on parole after serving two years for manslaughter (a barroom fight that got out of hand) and is finding it impossible to settle down quietly in his home parish. With his guitar, his pickup, and an open case of beer, he takes off for Montana, where a former fellow prisoner, Buddy Riordan, has offered him a job on a ranch.
But trouble follows Iry there, too.
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In a recent post, I headed a list of milestones in modern comics history with Will Eisner’s 1978 A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories. The pioneering writer, artist, publisher, and teacher for whom the Eisner Awards are named marketed this collection of adult tales as a “graphic novel.”
A few months before his death in January 2005, Eisner decided to republish his landmark work together with two other collections set on the mythical New York tenement street that reflects his childhood home. The Contract with God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie Avenue includes the stories of A Life Force, written in 1983, and Dropsie Avenue from 1995, both new to the Library with this omnibus volume.
While A Contract with God and A Life Force portray the world of the 1930s, Dropsie Avenue traces the changes in the neighborhood, especially the succession of ethnic groups, since 1870, when “still there were farms in the Bronx.”
Continue Reading…“Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.” Erica Jong
I'm not very interested in current-day self-help books, but I love old ones. There is nothing like immersing yourself in the aphorisms and advice of the first half of the twentieth century to give yourself a feeling of the utter strangeness of a familiar culture.
We recently got a book that sent me down that road again. How to be Popular is a collection of short excerpts from self-help books and articles for teens on the subject of popularity. These are drawn from books and magazines, mostly from the 1960's and 70's, with art from the same time period. A classic quote from this title is "Take a good look at those who are popular. Where do they go? What do they do? Try to be like them."
I found Unleashed: Poems by Writers’ Dogs more than ten years ago, when it first came out. Yesterday I found a scrap of paper with a quote from it stuck to my refrigerator door (which I clearly don’t clean often enough), and it reminded me how much I adored this little volume.
Editors Amy Hempel and Jim Shepard claim that the collection came about after a drunken campfire verse-making session, when their fishing buddy, Bob Shacochis, composed this one-line poem, “Wind,” in the voice of his Irish setter, Frank:
Leaves—I thought they were birds.
It inspired them to solicit poems from famous writers, all the poems written as though from the dogs’ point of view.
The result is irresistible, a charming, surprisingly varied collection of poems in all genres, on all kinds of doggish subjects.
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For a crisp, fast-moving mystery with appealing characters and snappy dialogue, you can’t beat Don Winslow’s 1991 debut, A Cool Breeze on the Underground. It got an Edgar nomination for best first crime novel.
Neal Carey, an investigator for a very discreet New England firm called Friends of the Family, was brought into the business at age eleven, when he tried to pick the pocket of New York-Irish p.i. Joe Graham. Graham took Neal under his wing, trained him in investigative techniques, and arranged for the firm to get him an expensive education. Now Neal just wants to finish his degree in English lit (specializing in Smollett), but the firm has a job for him. The daughter of Vice-Presidential hopeful John Chase is missing. Not that Chase really cares, but he needs her for the photo ops.
Continue Reading…Most of the leading comics professionals created moving tributes to the events of September 11, 2001. Their work is collected in three anthologies – 9-11: The World’s Finest Comic Book Artists and Writers Tell Stories to Remember, 9-11: Artists Respond, and 9-11 Emergency Relief. In addition, The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón will be at the Library very soon.
But the most cogent and intimate graphic treatment, In the Shadow of No Towers, comes from Art Spiegelman -- appropriately, since Spiegelman is the author of another powerful study of the human spirit grappling with ultimate darkness. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale uses the cat-and-mouse cartoon tradition to tell the story of his parents’ sufferings and heroism during the Holocaust.
An equally significant credential is the fact that In the Shadow of No Towers is also a survivor’s tale: Spiegelman and his family witnessed the destruction of the World Trade Center from their Lower Manhattan neighborhood, and were among the crowds fleeing its collapse.
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I've never really bothered about locking my door, because if anyone wanted to get in, it wouldn't be that difficult to break a window, and then I'd just have to have it fixed. Before you look up my address, though, note that I've kind of rearranged my position on the lock issue since this morning, when I went downstairs and found an apparently homeless guy sleeping on the futon in my living room. He'd eaten some soup and drunk a full bottle of vermouth. He stole $40 from my purse and made me drive him to Price Hill, so that's why I was late.
I think a lot of people would have been more upset than I about this--actually, I felt ashamed about how long my grass was and was glad I'd stayed up late steamvaccing the rug. Probably I would have been more upset if I hadn't already started my Travels With Lizbeth blog.
Continue Reading…Lucia St. Clair Robson has written several historical novels set in frontier America. They’re immensely readable, with down-to-earth characters, engaging adventure plots, and plenty of appeal for fans of both historical fiction and romance.
Her 1991 novel The Tokaido Road is a frontier romance of a different kind, set on the high roads of eighteenth-century Japan. Unlike some romance novelists, who use exotic settings as so much scenery, Robson manages to make her love story suit its unfamiliar time and place.
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I just remembered a wonderful book that I read about 2 years ago. Ursula Under by Ingrid Hill (2004) is the story of a little girl, Ursula Wong, who accidentally falls down the air shaft of an abandoned copper mine.
The book goes back in time to follow the family history that led to Ursula, whose ancestry is an amazing yet typically American mixed assortment of cultures and people. We also get to know Ursula's modern world and how wonderfully everything around her helps make her who she is.
Ursula's story is engrossing, it is empowering, and it has an ending that will stay with you for a long time. I loved this book!
Continue Reading…I was emailing the other day with a genre fan about sf as sociological satire. We both loved Carol Emshwiller’s The Mount, for example, and think it works brilliantly as a Swiftian parable of social intolerance, even for readers who don’t care that it’s a “first contact” novel.
First contact and its subgenre alien invasion are actually great choices for non-genre readers interested in social commentary. (Hard to engineer a meeting between humans and aliens without giving thought to what humanity means.)
Which brings me to one of my all-time favorite first contact stories, and it fits our “Rediscoveries” category twice over, since most genre fans missed it, too—God’s Fires, by Patricia Anthony.
Continue Reading…The Great World is a war novel without battle scenes and a POW novel with only a few chapters set in a prison, but quietly and obliquely it conveys the devastation of war through the story of two men drawn into reluctant lifelong friendship by their shared experiences in Malayan and Thai POW camps during World War II.
Digger Keen, a quiet, steady man with an eidetic memory, lives in the house he grew up in in a backwater Australian town. Apart from the war, he has hardly ever left, and for twenty-six years he has kept in his memory the roll call of his fellow soldiers and their fates that he memorized during his years in the prison camp.
Visiting him now and then (more frequently as the years pass) is Vic Curran, who had a hard-luck childhood but has become wealthy in the years since the war. He fastened onto Digger’s close group of buddies in the service and ended up in the prison camp with him.
Continue Reading…It's called We Need to Talk about Kevin. It's written in the voice of the mother of a fifteen year old who's murdered nine people. It's even more upsetting than the blurb indicates. Don't read the last chapter and skip all parts about the character Celia.
I put it in the Friends Collection box today along with a bunch of Disney cassettes.
So I turned to Miss Read, whose real name is Dora Jessie Saint. I was surprised to learn she was still alive; her books give the impression of having been written long, long ago. "Quaint" is a word one might use. Her books definitely fall into the "good reads" category; there is little major conflict--mostly character development and interaction. There are a lot of characters, and they reappear from book to book, so you may have to read several books (there are about 30) to get them straight in your mind.
Continue Reading…I've been so busy at work lately. Flying from one thing to the next, hurry, scurry out to the reference desk and then back to the office to work on everything else I have to do. Busy is good. It's fun to be involved in all the great things the library is doing, but sometimes when I get home I need a little help winding down.
Enter Hamish MacBeth. No, I haven't found a pleasant Scotsman to greet me at the door with dinner when I arrive home; Hamish is a character in a series of books by M.C. Beaton. A cozy mystery with a pleasant main character is a great way to unwind, and though Hamish can't beat an actual man bearing dinner, he is pleasant to curl up with nonetheless.
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I have to blog this 1991 novel by David Noonan, even though I don’t golf, because it has an irresisitble line in it:
“One of the appeals of golf is that you can do all the things you would normally do in a bar while engaging in an actual sport—you can eat, drink, talk, and smoke cigarettes.”
The hero of Memoirs of a Caddy, seventeen-year-old Jim Mooney, is pretty irresistible, too. This is his coming of age story. It’s the summer of 1968, and Jim is spending it caddying at the local country club, playing cards, thinking about girls, and wasting time with his big brother, Matt. Matt has ditched college and is waiting to be drafted to Vietnam. That’s not Matt’s only self-destructive act. But there’s still time for summer’s immortal pleasures, including a perfect vacation hanging out together at the beach, before Matt is shipped out.
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Now that the school year is upon us, I recently began thinking about some of the novels I read in high school and college. This also got me thinking about a website I stumbled across a few years ago, called First Lines. It's a compilation of some of the most famous opening sentences in literature. Check out the site--it's a lot of fun. Are some of your favorites on the list? Here are a few of mine:
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again--Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day--Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre
This is the saddest story I have ever heard--Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier
Continue Reading… A recent trip to Border's Bookstore prompted me to think (dangerous) about what some of my favorite books as a child were. The series that really stands out to me is the Frog and Toad series by Arnold Lobel. Frog and Toad were among some of the first literary characters that my parents introduced me to. I probably drove my parents nuts wanting them to read the Frog and Toad stories over and over (at least I was born in the pre-Barney era), and as an added bonus my brother was driven nuts as well.
I found a copy of Guy Gavriel Kay’s fantasy novel Tigana in the Friends of the Library bookstore the other day. I haven’t read it in years, but it’s on my to-be-read pile again. Those of you who waited so impatiently for George R. R. Martin’s long-delayed Song of Ice and Fire sequel, A Feast for Crows, which finally came out last year, should add it to your pile, too. It’s another splendid (fat!) work of complex fantasy.
Kay’s novels aren’t exactly alternate histories, but they’re set in cultures evocative of historic ones we’re familiar with. There’s one set in a culture much like Moorish Spain, another like the chivalric France of the troubadours, a series set in a Byzantine empire, and so on. Drawing on these cultures to create new fantasy worlds, Kay writes rich, satisfying fantasies.
Tigana has a setting much like Renaissance Italy, where dozens of rival city-states war on a peninsula, fatally leaving the door open to foreign invaders.
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A lot of people are good at something, and they like to write how-to books about it. Sometimes the writer sees things differently than you do, and you don't exactly get what you were expecting. A how-to-redecorate-cheaply book advises me to buy a $1,400 chandelier, for example. I had been looking for tips on wrapping old phone books with duct tape to make cute ottomans (or whole sofas, if you have access, say from work, to a lot of phone books and duct tape).
Maybe it's time to take a break from all the earnestness and read some parodies.
Elinor Goulding Smith's 1956 The Complete Book of Absolutely Perfect Housekeeping; an Uproarious Guide for Disorganized Housewives really is uproarious. Her decorating tips, for example, involve stealing art from your friends' houses under the guise of "cleaning it," and she's appropriately sarcastic about the phrase "window treatments" used in place of "curtains."
Continue Reading…Recently, while sorting though dusty bookshelves at home, I started paging through Letters From a Nut by Ted L. Nancy (rumored pen name of Jerry Seinfeld). Nancy writes bogus letters to corporations, and then publishes the letters alongside the corporate responses. ABC even had a sitcom in the works based on the books, but the project was cancelled. If you start reading and can't get enough, try More Letters from a Nut where Ted questions not the validity, but the grammatical correctness of the slogan "Nobody doesn't like Sara Lee."
If you’re lucky enough to be on summer break, spend a few hours with Michael Malone’s inspired satire of academia and the literary scene, Foolscap. If you’re not, pick it up on your lunch hour, and it will have you smiling even at work.
Theo Ryan, the son of New York show biz parents, left his colorful backstage childhood behind to settle quietly as a drama professor at a backwater North Carolina university. Though he does have a play tucked away in a drawer (a drama about Sir Walter Raleigh, which a workshop director once cruelly panned), the most colorful thing in Theo’s life now is his friendship with Ford Rexford, a leading playwright and famous drunk, whose biography Theo is writing.
Ford pushes Theo to escape his safe little life, and Theo decides to go for it: he auditions for an amateur production of Guys and Dolls, gives in to a dizzying crush on a university preacher named Maude Fletcher, and even shows Ford his play.
Naturally, disaster follows.
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Okay, this really has nothing to do with The Da Vinci Code except that it involves (round-about-ly) a museum employee and an art history puzzle. But not mentioning TDVC up front seemed like ignoring the 800-pound gorilla in the room.
I recently recommended a book to a friend of mine, a Taft Museum docent. "Recommended" is puttting it mildly--I pressed it on her and insisted she take it home. Fortunately she loved it, couldn't put it down. So I thought I'd see whether I can persuade any of you to take it home, too. It's one of my favorite novels, certainly one of my top two literary-puzzle-suspense-novels of all time. (The other one is A. S. Byatt's Possession.) It's Michael Frayn's Headlong, a dazzling art history thriller about a lost Bruegel painting. In addition to its truly nerve-wracking puzzle plot, it's a brilliant example of first-person narration. And it's positively stuffed with fascinating art history that passed even my friend's high standards. Academic research has never been so exciting.
Really.
Continue Reading…Okay, I need to pay more attention. I just discovered that the library now owns Fortunes of War on DVD.
So?
So! I saw this on a thirteen-inch black and white TV in 1988, and I’ve wanted to see it again ever since. I've been watching Masterpiece Theatre since the days of The Six Wives of Henry VIII (yes, I am very, very old), and of all of the wonderful adaptations I’ve ever seen, it's right up there with A Town Like Alice and (insert your own favorite here). For almost twenty years it wasn’t available for love or money. And now here it is, right here, finally published, and on the shelves at the library.
The question is, if you haven't already, should you watch first or read first?
Continue Reading…Happy Bastille Day, I guess.
Louis the Sixteenth was the King of France in 1789.
He was worse than Louis the Fifteenth.
He was worse than Louis the Fourteenth.
He was worse than Louis the Thirteenth.
He was the worst since Louis the First.-- Alan Sherman
If You've seen La Nuit de Varennes, one of my three favorite movies (the other two being Nashville and Best in Show), or if you have an interest in the French Revolution, you're going to want to read Les Nuits de Paris; or, the Nocturnal Spectator, in which Nicolas Edme Restif de la Bretonne recounts--and probably sometimes invents--the events of his hundreds of nights spent meandering the streets of Paris betwen 1789 and 1793, and his general disapproval of the greed and crime in Paris during the days leading up to and following the Revolution.
Continue Reading…Comics fans and music lovers alike cherished the biographical cartoon strips that Justin Green created for Pulse, a magazine produced by Tower Records until 2002. Happily, the gems Green created for a decade were published the following year in Musical Legends: The Collected Comics from Pulse Magazine.
Himself a legend among cartoonists, Green brought his famous sense of irony and a passion for music to anecdotes about an enormous range of musicians. Both characteristics are apparent right from the start, in Green’s introduction to the collection:
“It was my father's spirit that instigated this cartoon project. I'd done an illustration depicting him personally telling Frank Sinatra to Shut Up! in a Vegas nightclub setting. 'The Chairman' had the nerve to revel with his cronies while my father's lifelong friend, the great Dixieland banjo player and singer Clancy Hayes, had to play over their noise. It was called 'Great Moments in Alcoholism.'"
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There is no butler character in this hilarious play by Joe Orton. What the Butler Saw begins with a psychiatrist's interview with a candidate for a secretarial position. When the candidate admits she cannot type, the lecherous psychiatrist asks her to remove her clothes so he can conduct a psychological evaluation. When the psychiatrist's wife arrives suddenly, the secretary must hide behind a screen. An inspector of psychiatrists threatens to commit the secretary to a mental institution because of her inappropriate nudity. A missing body part of a statue of Winston Churchill is key to the plot.
If you liked The Importance of Being Earnest, you'll like What the Butler Saw. The play's opening is certainly reminiscent of Wilde's work. (I've omitted the stage directions to save space.)
Continue Reading…Prentice: I'm going to ask you a few questions. Write them down. In English, please. What was your father? Put that at the head of the page. And now the reply immediately underneath for quick reference.
Geraldine: I've no idea who my father was.
Prentice: I'd better be frank, Miss Barclay. I can't employ you if you're in any way miraculous. It would be contrary to established practice.
Too hot even for chilly reads featuring frosty adventures in cold climes? Try a different approach. Here's a little British satire as deliciously cool as a teaspoonful of sorbet.
But not cold-hearted at all. Human Voices is Penelope Fitzgerald's valentine to the men and women of the BBC radio service during World War II. She worked there herself as a junior programming assistant. The novel positively brims with sardonic fondness for the eccentric characters who labored to broadcast to the world during the war’s darkest days.
Continue Reading…I recently recommended Pride, Prejudice and Jasmin Field to someone who had just watched the new screen version of Pride and Prejudice for the ninth time. But you don't have to be a fanatic to enjoy Melissa Nathan's 2001 tale of a newspaper columnist and an actor brought together by a stage production of that classic novel.
Trendy columnist Jazz Field is just enough of a celebrity to be asked, along with her actress sister, George, to audition for a charity fundraising production of P&P being directed by Harry Noble, beloved heir of Britain’s most famous family of actors. When she overhears him call her “the ugly sister,” she’s furious enough to ace the audition.
Of course, anyone who knows P&P knows what happens next.
Continue Reading…With the World Series of Poker about to begin, pick up G. W. Hawkes’ engaging wild card of a novel about a family of card sharks and the son who wants out of the business, Gambler’s Rose.
Charlie Halloran is the youngest in a long line of gamblers and cheats. His father, Music, trained him to the peak of perfection in card counting and the practical psychology of gambling. But Charlie doesn’t like the calculating person he has become, and falling in love with a mathematician has given him reason to change his life. Can he really walk away from such a perfectly honed skill, though, or change the way his mind has been trained from infancy? As Music sets up a crucial poker game, Charlie has to decide whether he’s in or not.
This odd, fascinating little novel is both suspenseful and philosophical. The tension isn’t so much in the card games but in Charlie’s struggles over his decision, in the complex relationship between him and his father, and in the really big stakes—true love—he’s playing for. It’s a winner.
If you’ve seen Casablanca more times than you can count, try Alan Furst’s stylish novel of Paris under the Occupation, The World at Night. It’s the love story of a man and his city.
Jean Casson is a film producer whose beloved Paris has been invaded. At first, this means putting up with small deprivations and indignities—working with a German production company, accepting a curtailed social life. But as the noose tightens, Casson is approached by British intelligence agents and then by the suspicious Germans. His job makes him a perfect tool for either espionage service. While Paris tries to pretend that everything is normal, Casson feels his pleasant life slipping irretrievably away.
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The press of bodies, the clamor of the hunters, the excitement of the find. Throngs of people traveled downtown to the Main Library to the Friends' Annual Book Sale for a chance to find and purchase books, movies, and music for just a few dollars.
People performed versions of the shuffle dance to navigate the various areas where materials were stacked and I heard the call "Look what I found!" from every direction. Hunters came with trolleys and shopping carts to lug their trophies home. By end of day, the tired but jublilant hunters departed with promises to continue the pursuit next year.
Many of the treasures at the book sale are also in our collection. Here are a few of the diverse trophies I captured during my hunt
There are always treasures at the Library, don't wait for the book sales to discover this gold mine of entertainment.
That description is from the dust jacket of Zev Chafet’s 1991 debut novel, and it’s a perfect tease for this spoof on The Godfather and all its heirs. Tony Soprano might not be amused, but his fans will find Inherit the Mob an appealing beach read while Tony’s on hiatus.
Journalist William Gordon is the nephew of famed New York Jewish gangster Max Grossman. Gordon never had anything to do with his uncle’s business (not realizing Max fed him many of his Pulitzer-winning stories), so he’s rather startled when he inherits Max’s half-billion-dollar partnership with Don Luigi Spadafore. Gordon’s inclination is to refuse, but his best friend is thrilled at the chance to play-act as Gordon’s honest-to-godfather consigliere. Of course, they’re soon in over their heads. It takes an outrageous plot and some retired members of Uncle Max’s old Jewish gang to rescue them from certain death.
Fast, funny, and mischievously satiric, this is a send-up bound to raise smiles from anyone familiar with traditional mob fiction or movies.
In 1997, Charles Frazier published his debut, Cold Mountain, a Civil War historical novel. It inspired a movie, hundreds of book club discussions, and thousands of devoted fans. The same year, Howard Bahr published his debut, The Black Flower: A Novel of the Civil War. It didn't.
Which is a pity, because it's also a lyrical and heartrending story of love and war. Cold Mountain has the sweeping scope of an epic journey, as its wounded hero struggles to return to his Southern home and the woman he loves. The Black Flower focuses on one short moment of the war--it follows weary young Confederate soldier Bushrod Carter through a single, horrendous battle (the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee, in 1864) and to a makeshift field hospital afterwards, where a young woman named Anna struggles to save him and scores of his comrades. The brief, elegiac contact between them stands in delicate counterpoise to all the carnage the two have seen.
Civil War buffs, romantics at heart, and readers of literary fiction shouldn't miss this fine short novel. Personally, I found it more moving than its much more famous brother-in-arms--it's a lovely and powerful read.
The current tv-movie-of-the-week hysteria about bird flu made me think about a book called Eyewitness to History, which I read several years ago. It's a collection of I-was-there accounts about all kinds of historical events, including several epidemics. I thought I was remembering one about the Black Death, but it turns out it was a description of plague in ancient Greece that was sticking in my mind. It was written by the historian Thucydides, who survived the disease himself. (More from him below.)
Browse around in this book and you'll find something that will stick in your mind, too. The editor, John Carey, has collected dozens of eyewitness accounts about all kinds of events. Memories of famous catastrophies (like the sinking of the Titanic), meetings with memorable people (how about dinner with Atilla the Hun?), and man-on-the-street reports of major historical events (an anonymous German private's account of the D-Day assault) are captured in vivid excerpts. The book is long (706 pages), and it's a little heavy on British historical events, but it's easy to dip into randomly.
Continue Reading…Unfortunately: The sexy man Nicola meets at her lunchtime café is a serial killer. Fortunately: She chickens out of making a date with him. Unfortunately: This frees up the afternoon for her to be abducted by a pair of teenagers who want her ATM card. Fortunately: The teens were hired by Nicola’s ex, Scooter, and Nicola can handle Scooter with both hands tied behind her back. Unfortunately: Scooter needs the money to pay off a loan shark. Fortunately: The loan shark is pretty sexy, too. Unfortunately: The serial killer is pretty persistent....
Raise your hand if you're gearing up for the World Cup matches in Germany. Thirty-five hundred English fans have been banned from attending because of past bad behavior at previous football (we call it soccer) matches.
Bill Buford was editor of Granta and fiction editor for The New Yorker, and then he gave it all up to study cooking seriously. His book about the learning experience, Heat, got such a good New York Times review that I wanted to read something else he'd written and discovered his 1992 bestseller, Among the Thugs.
Buford had lived in England for fifteen years and never seen a football match. Intrigued by the sight of soccer fans systematically destroying a train, Buford took a package tour to Turin, Italy, with a group of historically violent Manchester United supporters and was carried away by the rioting and looting that followed the game.
Buford's original thought was that the rioters were disenfranchised outsiders who used soccer violence as a way of venting their understandable rage against society. Surprisingly, he found that many of the supporters had high-paying jobs, and he had to find new theories to explain the violence that football engenders around the world. Part of the blame seems to go to the nature of football itself.
A colleague recently recommended A Giant's House by Elizabeth McCracken following a discussion of "cult" titles. The novel proved to be a very quick read, and ultimately profound in its depiction of the short and meaningful life of one very big person. The story takes place in a small town that is home to a young man who suffers from gigantism- he reaches a height of over 8 and a half feet by the end of his life. What follows is an improbable love story involving the town's librarian and James Sweatt, the tallest person in the world. The novel is tender without being sentimental, and eccentric enough to appeal to those of us who have always held a secret penchant for the Guinness Book....
Spare me The Final Club. Spare me the plagiarized How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life. I'm too old to feel the pain of not having gotten into Princeton or Harvard, but right now I'm in the mood to read about students and teachers stuck for whatever reason in truly awful schools. There's Jane Eyre, but I'm looking for ineptitude, not cruelty.
