Julie's Bookshelf

MY TBR STACK

2010-09-08T10:46:00.000-07:00

This isn't my TBR stack - I found it on the web, but

I have read - and recommend - "Odd Thomas",

"The Time Traveler's Wife" and "Traveling Mercies".

I have been meaning to read something by Flannery O'Connor,
and I like Bret Lot so I will check into "A Song I Knew By Heart"

What's in your TBR (To Be Read) stack? Actually, I have two "stacks". One is a set of five books gathered nicely in between spaniel bookends on the little table by the couch. In it are books I plan to read soon - brand new hardcover books from my book-of-the-month clubs, plus a used book ordered for my September online book club discussion ("Troubles" by J. G. Farrell). The others are "Juliet" by Anne Fortier, highly touted by all my book-of-the-month clubs, "The Island" by Erin Hildebrand and "The Whisper" by Carla Neggers. However, I was miffed to learn that to get the most out of the Neggers book I need to go back and read her previous three books involving the same cast of characters.

My other "stack" is really a bookcase shelf I have given over to books I THINK I will be reading. The trouble is, a lot of these books have been sitting there a long time and I'm wondering if I should weed them out. It's not as if I haven't been adding to the shelf. That's the problem. The books that have been added latest have been the ones I have chosen to read first.

My TBR stack can be divided into several categories. Under the "started but couldn't finish" books are "Gentlemen and Players" by Joanne Harris (I love all her other books!), "West With The Night" by Beryl Markham, "The Sultan's Seal" by Jenny White, "When Madeline Was Young" by Jane Hamilton, "Wicked" by Gregory Maguire and "Leonardo's Swans" by Karen Essex. Having listed them, I realize that's quite a few, as I usually don't start a book and then not finish it. I think I will give each one another try and if I still can't read it, move it elsewhere.

Three of the books aren't really mine. "Pope Joan" by Donna Woolfolk Cross is actually my daughter's book. I love historical novels and this one looks kind of interesting. I gave "Tipperary" by Frank Delaney to my husband for Christmas one year and he never read it. And a very recent (and unread) gift to Dan is "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet" by David Mitchell. Since they aren't mine, I don't feel guilty if I don't read them. However, Jacob De Zoet has been highly touted by my online book club members so I think I will pick it up soon.

Then there are the books that are quite lengthy but I'm pretty sure they will be good. I just feel as if I need a big chunk of time to devote to them. They are "Sacajawea" by Anna Lee Waldo, "A Rose For The Crown" by Ann Easter Smith and "My Sister, My Love" by Joyce Carol Oates.

I bought "The Lost German Slave Girl" at a used book store and THEN found out it is a true (and therefore dull?) account. I might or might not have already read "Cold Sassy Tree" by Olive Ann Burns, (bought at a thrift shop so little is lost if I have read it). "Cane River" by Lalita Tademy is left over from the good old days of Oprah's Book Club when I purchased and read (almost) every one. Since I have read Alison Weir and Philippa Gregory lately, I am saving "Earthly Joys" (Gregory) and "Innocent Traitor" (Weir) for a while.

Finally, there are the series books. I bought "Child of Prophecy" by Juliet Marillier and then discovered it is the third book in a trilogy ("Daughters of The Forest" is No. 1 and "Son of the Shadows" is No. 2). So now all three sit there mocking me. "Rebel Angels" by Libra Bray is a sequel to her "A Great and Terrible Beauty" but it's been a long time since I read that and fear I need to read it again. Ditto with "Isolde, Queen of the Western Isle", which is the first book in Rosalind Miles Tristan and Isolde trilogy, followed by "The Maid of the White Hands" and "The Lady of the Sea". Now these two languish unread.

I have read the first three books of Mary Stewart's wonderful Arthurian saga, but I hesitate to read the fourth and final book, "The Wicked Day" because I know that Arthur dies in it and the story must finally end.

I was definitely seduced by the gorgeous covers and location (the moors and glens of the Scottish Lowlands, 1788) of Liz Curtis Higgs' trilogy. I read the first, "Thorn In My Heart", and found it to have a heavily religious bent so although I bought them, I have not read "Fair Is The Rose" or "Whence Came A Prince".

Will I or will I not read these TBR books? Only the future will tell.

THE COOKBOOK COLLECTOR

2010-08-14T20:17:00.000-07:00

"EATING PEACHES" by Ena Joyce

On my regular blog, Celtic Lady, I recently posted about the joys of summer still left to partake of in August, one of which was slicing lush, ripe peaches and drizzling them with cream and sugar.

That same evening, as I was reading "The Cookbook Collector" by Allegra Goodman, I came across this passage: "...she washed [the] ripe fruit, and bit and broke the skin. An intense tang, the underside of velvet. Then the flesh dissolved in a wash of nectar. Juice drenched her hand and wet the inside of her wrist. She had forgotten, if she had ever known, that what was sweet could also be complicated, that fruit could have a nap, like fabric, soft one way, sleek the other. She licked the juice dripping down her arm."

Now that's great food writing - great descriptive writing of any type, right? If the book had continued in that vein, "The Cookbook Collector" would have ranked as high, in my opinion, as "The School of Essential Ingredients" (previously reviewed).

Unfortunately, that description occurred on page 402 of a 587-page (large-print) book, and what had come before had been so boring as to be sleep inducing.

It would have been great if the book had stuck with its opening character, Jessamine, a retro hippie-Berkeley philosophy student-tree hugging-independent bookstore clerk and her employer, George. It is their delight to discover and archive an amazing, heretofore-unknown collection of very old cookbooks, and discover the delights of each other in the process.

Unfortunately, a great deal of the book is devoted to Jessamine's sister Emily, a driven, successful president of a start-up dot.com company. (If I have mangled this description badly enough to make computer geeks shriek, too bad, I'm not offering any apology. Go back to your cubicle now.)

The story of the ups and downs of Emily and her sleazy boyfriend Jonathan's companies is mind-numbingly, excruciatingly boring. Way, way too much time is wasted on Em and company. As quickly as the dot.com companies soar, they plummet like Icarus. Such is the way of the world of the late 1990s, during which most of this novel takes place.

Then 9/11 arrives and a couple of the principals, who are passengers on the doomed flight out of Boston, are killed - ho-hum, we scarcely care - but this does shake up the survivors. I think that Goodman created these obscenely rich, opportunistic, unprincipled characters to be foils for the protagonists - appreciators of fine books and art, connoisseurs of fine wine and food, philosophers, humanists, caring individuals attuned to the natural world and each other.

Then, you have a side story of long-lost relatives belonging to a a mystical Jewish sect I had never heard of, and which involved two rabbis so alike in character I could not distinguish between them. These Jewish relatives provide several way-too-neat plot tie-ups.

By the way, we actually learn very, very little about the eponymous cookbook collector. As I previously mentioned, if only the story had concentrated on Jessamine, George, and the collector and his mysterious lady love who is revealed only through the drawings and poems he had tucked into his cookbooks.

A MOCKINGBIRD MILESTONE

2010-07-16T17:07:00.000-07:00

Fifty years ago, on July 11, 1960, a book was published that came to have enormous impact on millions of Americans and indeed, on readers worldwide. The book was "To Kill A Mockingbird", by Harper Lee.

I can't remember when I first read the book, although I do know it was not for a school assignment. And I don't know how often I have re-read it. But I do know I have been touting it as "my favorite book ever" for a good 40 years. It has been called "America's novel".

Reading TKAM gave me my first exposure to great Southern literature. My first exposure to the character of a plucky young Southern girl. My first exposure to a "Southern Eccentric" (including the young Dill). And most importantly, a first exposure to the hard cold fact that justice is not aways served.

Bookstores around the country have planned anniversary celebrations this summer, some including showings of the eponymous 1962 film. Harper Collins has put out a 50th anniversary slip-cased edition for a surprisingly low price of $25.00.

Harper has also created a special website for the celebration - http://tokillamockingbird50year.com/ - which includes a chance to win a 50th Anniversary Prize Pack of books and DVD (easy online entry!), suggestions for book club discussions, resources for teachers and a listing of events (although many took place on July 11, there are still a lot scheduled for the remainder of July and August).

(Lee, who is now 84 and famously reclusive, is not involved in any of the anniversary events.)

For anyone re-reading TKAM this summer (or reading it for the first time ever!), here are a couple of books to read along with it:

I have read and thoroughly enjoyed "Mockingbird", Lee's biography, in which I learned (among many other things) these facts: that her full name was Nelle Harper Lee (she was called Nelle by friends and family) and that she was robbed of a well-deserved co-authorship of "In Cold Blood" by her "supposed" longtime friend Truman Capote ("Dill" in TKAM).

Our library doesn't have "Scout, Atticus and Boo" yet but I have put it on reserve. In it, such famous people as Tom Brokaw and Oprah Winfrey share the impressions and effects the novel has had on them. I am sure I will find that they will describe their feelings way more eloquently than I can.

I think my experience of TKAM is summed up by the cover blurb on the edition shown at the top of this post: "The timeless classic of growing up and the human dignity that unites us all."

I read a comment somewhere on the web by a woman who, although she liked TKAM, declared that it was not a perfect book. I disagree. I think it is as close to perfect as a book can be. There is not one sentence, not one word, that does not serve a purpose or help to bring the book forward.

TKAM can be read on so many levels. On one level, it can be seen as a rousing good story, but it is also a classic example of a coming of age book. It slides effortlessly into another time (1930s) and place (the Deep South) as easily as slipping into a river on a sweltering summer's day. It contains some of the most fully-limned characters ever put on page. It is an affecting portrait of an upstanding man, whether he is being the lawyer or the father. It is a blistering commentary on (the lack of) civil rights in America.

I didn't know if I would re-read the book this summer or not. I didn't have to re-read it to perfectly remember the first line: "When he was nearly 13 my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow."

I didn't have to re-read it to conjure up the sleepy town of Maycomb, Alabama, or the characters of Scout and Jem, Atticus and Calpurnia, Miss Maudie Atkinson and Miss Stephanie Crawford, Dill and Boo Radley. They are my neighbors, Maycomb is my town.

I didn't need to re-read TKAM to remember Scout finding little gifts in the knot hole of the tree on the corner, or her hilarious late appearance on a school pageant stage dressed a cured ham, or her taking that sickening tire ride up the sidewalk to Boo Radley's front steps. I vividly remember the night Jem had to leave his pants snagged on a fence, and the children sitting in the colored gallery at the courthouse. I'll never forget the benighted walk from the high school to home on that memorable last night.

I think the main things I came away with after all my readings of TKAM are that class has nothing to do with money, but with "the way we conduct ourselves when the chips are down", in other words, acting with grace under pressure. And that the definition of courage is "when you know you're licked before you begin with but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what." And most of all, that it is a sin to kill a mockingbird, a creature that does nothing but please us with song, or another creature who only watched over "his children".

In the end, I did re-read it again, yesterday, just so that I could spend some more time in that world where it was "hotter then that it is now", and when people moved slower than they do now. The world of scuppernongs and azaleas, barefoot overalled children and tin bucket lunch pails, of Miss Rachel's "Do-oo Je-sus" and Atticus' dry wit, Calpurnia's colored church and children playing outdoors unsupervised from morning 'til night. I had forgotten a few things, such as how unintentionally funny Scout was, and that even a confirmed tomboy can learn when it's essential to behave: "After all, if Aunty could be a lady at a time like this, so could I."

I have often wondered why Lee never published another book (she worked on at least one other for years), but then again, when you write a near-perfect book on your first try, there's no need to write another.

A HUGE MILESTONE

2010-07-12T13:21:00.000-07:00

"Woman Lying on a Bench" by Carl Larsson

A few days ago, I passed a huge milestone in terms of reading. On July 7, I finished my 100th book of the year. (Which, by the way, was the quite strange and even disturbing "Beatrice and Virgil" by Yann Martel.)

This is the first year I have ever kept a record of the books I have read. I read 10 in January, 14 in February, 13 in March, 14 in April, 15 in May, 27 in June and so far in July, 11. At first I was surprised that I read the most books in a summer month rather than in a winter month, but then again the long days of June gave way to many a long evening spent reading out on the deck, sometimes almost until 10 p.m.

I was also surprised to have read 15 books in May, as I was working that entire month (and not working at all the other months.)

I do admit to having set a goal of reading at least 100 books in 2010, but I did not at all expect to reach this milestone so early in the year. I did not cheat by looking for short books - most of those that I read were on my TBR (to be read) list, and most averaged between 300 and 400 pages. I expect to continue to keep reading at this pace, at least so long as I remain unemployed.

Obviously, since I haven't reviewed a book since May, I am extremely behind in reviewing, so behind that I will not even attempt to start. Therefore, I'm just printing a list of the books that I have read but not reviewed since April:

"Happiness Sold Separately", Lolly Winston
"The Rain Before It Falls", Jonathan Coe
"As Hot As It Gets You Ought To Thank Me", Nanci Kincaid
"My Cousin Rachel", Daphne DuMaurier (May online book club)
"The Book Of The Dead", Patricia Cornwell
"The Kindness of Strangers", Katrina Kittle
"Morning, Noon and Night" by Judy Collins
"On Folly Beach", Karen White
"Push", Sapphire
"A Year In The World," Frances Mayes
"The Monster of Florence", Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi
"The Sister", Poppy Adams
"The Girl Who Chased The Moon", Sarah Addison Allen
"The Language of Secrets", Dianne Dixon
"Letters to Juliet", Lise Friedman and Ciel Friedman
"The Murderer's Daughters", Randy Susan Meyers
"The Weight of Silence", Heather Gudenkauf
"April and Oliver", Tess Callahan
"Slow Love: How I Lost My Job, Put On My Pajamas &
Found Happiness", Dominique Browning
"Etta", Gerald Kopan
"Girl In Translation", Jean Kwok
"The Season of Second Chances", Diane Meier
"The Map Of True Places", Brunonia Barry
"Death Comes For The Archbishop", Willa Cather (June online book club)
"The Story Sisters", Alice Hoffman
"The Scent of Rain and Lightning", Nancy Pickard
"Lit", Mary Karr
"One Good Dog", Susan Wilson
"The First Annual Grand Prairie Rabbit Festival", Ken Wheaton
"Behind The Scenes At The Museum", Kate Atkinson
"The Hiding Place", Trezza Azzopardi
"Mistress of the Art of Death", Ariana Franklin
"The Double Comfort Safari Club", Alexander McCall Smith
"Lake of Sorrows", Erin Hart
"Still Missing", Chevy Stevens
"The Girl Who Played With Fire", Stieg Larsson
"The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest", Stieg Larsson
"Major Pettigrew's Last Stand", Helen Simonson
"The Solitude of Prime Numbers", Paolo Giordano
"Let The Great World Spin", Colum McCann
"Blood Harvest", S. J. Bolton
"False Mermaid", Erin Hart
"Beatrice and Virgil", Yann Martel
"Becky: The Life And Loves of Becky Thatcher", Lenore Hart
"Anthropology Of An American Girl", Hilary Thayer Hamann
"The Art of Racing In The Rain", Garth Stein
"The Shadow Year", Jeffrey Ford

SACRED HEARTS

2010-05-27T08:21:00.000-07:00

I had eagerly anticipated "Sacred Hearts" after having read Sarah Dunant's other books, "The Birth of Venus" and "In the Company of the Courtesan". But "Sacred Hearts" was not what I had expected and I was disappointed with it at first.

I knew the book was about nuns, but I did not think that the entire book would take place in a convent. I thought that like the characters in the other two books, they would be involved in the world around them - 16th Renaissance Italy. For a time, I felt as trapped in the convent as newly-arrived novice Suora (Sister) Serafina.

In 1570, Italian convents were filled with the daughters of noblemen who were unable or unwilling to pay a dowry to marry them off, and Santa Caterina in Ferrara is no exception. Serafina's father finds the convent a perfect solution for a daughter who's been having a love affair with an unsuitable young man.

Like many girls before her at Santa Caterina, Serafina is a reluctant novice. But unlike most, she fiercely resists her fate, to the point of upsetting the entire convent with her rages. Although she has a beautiful singing voice, which would have been a tremendous asset to the convent, she refuses to sing for them.

Enter Suora Zuana, Santa Caterina's dispensary sister. A healer and herbalist, Suora Zuana is initially called upon to use her medicines to calm Serafina, but a bond soon develops between the older nun and the girl. In Serafina, Zuana sees a strong willed, spirited, intelligent girl who, like herself, shows a talent for medicine, and who, like herself, was sent to the convent against her will. (Zuana was placed there after her physician father died unexpectedly.) Zuana comes to care for the girl a great deal and tries to comfort her in her rage and sorrow.

Serafina's sense of being walled up alive inside the convent walls is very palpable and powerful. Just reading the book made me feel terribly claustrophobic.

I was soon caught up in the two women's struggles - Serafina's in trying to try to adapt and fit into her new life and Zuana's as she experiences continuing doubts about her faith.

I hugely enjoyed the characters of the two sisters as they take their journeys of devotion and doubt, obedience and disobedience, pain and joy. The "supporting" cast of characters is good as well. There is the abbess, Madonna Chiara, who in today's world would be an extremely competent company CEO. Suora Umiliana, the mistress of the novices, is engaged in a power struggle with the abbess and has enlisted a number of the sisters on her side. There is Suora Perseveranza, who goes to the extremes of faith by inflicting pain on herself. And then there is elderly Suora Magdalena, who has starved herself for many years (it is rumored that she only dines on the host) to the point where she has visions and raptures.

Mix them all together and you have a convent life that is not as boring as it would seem on the surface. And indeed, the outside world is pressing against the walls of the convent, as new church leaders try to impose more rules and regulations upon the already-burdened sisters.

The more the vibrant life of the sisters opened up to me, the less "trapped" I felt, and I ended up liking this book as well as Dunant's other, more adventurous, dramatic tales.

SUMMER READING LIST

2010-05-26T19:50:00.000-07:00

"The Sonnet" by Thomas Baker

Back in January I listed 20 books that I wanted to read during the first part of 2010 (I was being deliberately vague as to the time frame). As I said in a recent post, I read 16 of them. One book is not available in the U.S., and three were not available at my library and too expensive to purchase. Therefore, I consider this list complete.

Now I have compiled my summer reading list. I hope to read these books during the months of June, July and August. And, I don't have to wait in line (figuratively speaking) at the library for them. I own them all! I recently re-joined two book clubs - Quality Paperback Book Club and Doubleday Book Club - which got me 11 books for low, low prices. I waited for a good deal to come along at Literary Guild and consequently obtained two books with free shipping. I fulfilled my Book of the Month Club obligation by ordering two books (though they were sort of pricey). And that garnered me an offer from BOMC to purchase two books with no shipping, so that was another good deal. All in all, I got 17 books for an average of less than $7.00 each. (Having worked nearly four weeks now, I felt very flush financially.)

After perusing all the book clubs' listings carefully, I chose the following books:
1. "The Murderer's Daughters" by Randy Susan Meyers.
2. "The Language of Secrets" by Dianne Dixon.
3. "The Scent of Rain and Lightning" by Nancy Pickard.
4. "The Solitude of Prime Numbers" by Paolo Giordano.
5. "Etta" by Gerald Kaplan.
6. "On Folly Beach" by Karen White.
7. "The Season of Second Chances" by Diane Meier.
8. "The Art of Racing in the Rain" by Garth Stein.
9. "The Girl Who Chased the Moon" by Sarah Addison Allen.
10. "Push" by Sapphire.
11. The Monster of Florence" by Douglas Preston and Mario Spezi.
12. "Let the Great World Spin" by Colum McCann.
13. "April and Oliver" by Tess Callahan.
14. "The Sister" by Poppy Adams.
15. "Girl in Translation" by Jean Kwok.
16. "The Map of True Places" by Brunonia Barry
17. "Sacred Hearts" by Sarah Dunant. (Actually, I jumped the gun on this and read it last weekend. I love Sarah Dunant and couldn't wait to start another book of hers. Review coming soon.)

Some of these books are or were on the bestseller lists. Some were recommended by other bloggers. Others I had never heard of until I checked out the book club offerings. Obviously, they all sounded good. I'm looking forward to many a long summer evening reading on the deck.

I'll also be reading three other books this summer, although I don't know the titles of two of them yet. They are the books for my online book group sponsored by Cornflower Books in Scotland. The June selection is:

18. "Death Comes for the Archbishop" by Willa Cather.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(Added later):

19. "The Go-Between" by (July online book club selection).
20. "I Capture the Castle" by Dodie Smith (August selection).

IMPERFECT BIRDS

2010-05-17T10:10:00.000-07:00

I shouldn't have read "Imperfect Birds" right after reading "Every Last One" (review below). I confess I hadn't really read the plot outline for "Imperfect Birds", I just knew this was a new book by Anne Lamott and like her fiction and non-fiction works. Also, I had just gotten both books from the library and I like to read the high-demand library books first so others don't have to wait long to get them.

The reason why I should not have read them back to back is that the subjects are very similar. Both focus on moms who are worried about their kids, with great reason, as it turns out in both cases. Elizabeth is concerned that daughter Rosie is into drugs, yet she overlooks every single clue that Rosie drops. In fact, I would say that Elizabeth is The Queen of Denial. Although Rosie is a consummate liar, any other reasonable mother would be hard pressed to overlook what is obviously going on with Rosie. Even when Rosie partially confesses: "I've only smoked marijuana a couple of times, Mom, I swear", or "I had just one beer, Mom", Elizabeth just brushes her worries away.

Elizabeth herself has problems. She has struggled with depression and other mental illness for years, and is a recovering alcoholic. Hmm, you suspect your daughter of drinking and using drugs, and you know that alcoholism is inherited, but you still sweep all your suspicions under the rug? One of your daughter's very best friends went to rehab for drug use? She's become too friendly with an older guy who is known to hang with the tweakers and stoners? You smell bleach in Rosie's urine test cup but blow it off? Get a clue, Elizabeth.

James, Elizabeth's husband and Rosie's stepfather, is not as stupid, but he has to walk on eggshells around Elizabeth. He's also trying to walk a fine line between maintaining Rosie's obvious affection for him and saving her from herself.

Although I actually did like all three characters, plus Elizabeth's earth mother friend Rae, I was so frustrated with all the lying and using that went on page after page, chapter after chapter.The denial finally stops when Rosie has to go to the emergency room for an overdose of cough syrup. Elizabeth at last wises up and she and James send Rosie off to a wilderness camp.

This could have been the best part of the book but it came too little, too late. And the book ends abruptly with Rosie having finished only the first month of her three-month stint at the camp. I would have loved to have known what happened to Rosie. It was like watching the A&E TV series "Intervention" and not getting to see the part where you learn if the participants have stayed sober or relapsed.

ADDED LATER: Maybe we'll see what happens to Rosie in a future Lamott book. I just found out that "Imperfect Birds" is a follow-up to other books about Elizabeth and Rosie, "Rosie" (Rosie at age 5) and "Crooked Little Heart" (Rosie at age 13).

EVERY LAST ONE

2010-05-14T16:36:00.000-07:00

I have been a fan of Anna Quindlen ever since she was a columnist for the New York Times. I knew I had found a kindred spirit when I read her column about appearing perfect on the outside but on the inside, if you only knew . . . her skirt hem is held up with safety pins, and under one of her her tall, fashionable boots is a big run in her pantyhose (this was years ago when women still wore pantyhose). Or, open the door to the cabinet in her neat and tidy living room and all manner of odd things come tumbling out.

Given her accomplishments in the world of non-fiction, I was surprised - but delighted - to learn that Quindlen had switched to fiction. I think she is as good, or better, fiction writer than she was a columnist.

Anna Quindlen knows families, be they blended ("Blessings"), strongly ethnic ("Object Lessons"), dysfunctional ("One True Thing"), abusive ("Black and Blue"), or closely-knit, as in this book, "Every Last One".

Not only are the Lathams a close family, they also appear almost perfect to the outside world. But as that long-ago column attests, no one is perfect, nothing is perfect. Mary Beth is a devoted mother and wife, but is her squeaky-clean image all that it seems to be, or is it really tarnished? The oldest child, 17-year-old Ruby, is a golden girl: beautiful, a gifted writer, beloved friend and respected student, but there is trouble lurking near her. Junior-high-schooler Alex is a terrific athlete and popular kid, but his fraternal brother Max, is a loner and outsider who is on the fringe and struggling with depression.

The Latham home is a haven for the children's friends and neighbors, the kind of house that kids love to hang out at. But these kids have secrets too, including Ruby's best girlfriends and Kiernan, who's been super close to Ruby from a very young age.

It would not be a spoiler to say that tragedy strikes the Lathams. The cover blurb itself tells of a "shocking act of violence" that alters the family forever. I am certainly not going to reveal that act, as some reviewers have done. I will say that Mary Beth should have known the warning signs - the signals were very clear and there were clues everywhere.

Because I don't want to give anything else away, I am not going to write much more about "Every Last One". But just because this is a fairly short review, don't think that I didn't like this book, because I loved it. Not only does Anna Quindlen know families, she understands people, especially women. She is comfortable with them and conveys that comfort to her readers. Mary Beth is one the most living, breathing characters Quindlen has ever written, and that is saying a lot. Mary Beth's is a fully-limned portrait of a woman whose life had seemed perfectly mapped out but whose compass has been lost. At the end of the book, a pathway is cut through the woods between two families' homes. I thought this was an excellent parallel with Mary Beth's situation. Mary Beth has had to find entirely new bearings, but her way now seems a bit more certain, less obstructed, more sure-footed, and a little less dark.

THE POSTMISTRESS

2010-05-10T15:59:00.000-07:00

"The Postmistress" by Sarah Blake was heavily promoted by the Book of the Month Club magazine, but I found it to be quite disappointing. First of all, the title doesn't really fit. Iris James, the eponymous postmistress, is not the main character. A more proper title would have been "The Woman War Correspondent", referring to Frankie Bard, an American who broadcasting from London during the Blitz of 1940.

While Frankie is daily facing death from German bombs, Iris and other residents of Franklin, MA, are behaving like most Americans did in 1940 - they're in denial of the danger the world is facing. However, Dr. Will Fitch and his new wife Emma start listening to Frankie's broadcasts. "We must do something", insists Emma. However, when Will decides to go to London and offer his services as a doctor, Emma is horrified.

Incredible as the coincidence may seem, Frankie and Will end up spending a night together in an air raid shelter. Very soon after, Will is killed by a bomb and Frankie finds a letter addressed to Emma in his pocket.

Frankie saves the letter, intending to one day deliver it to Emma back in America. But meanwhile she has an extremely important assignment - to meet up with the Jews escaping from Germany, Poland and other occupied countries. At great risk to her life, she does so, amassing countless recording cylinders containing refugee horror stories told in their own voices.

Back at the home front, you have middle-aged Iris, who considers herself to be an exemplary postmistress - always on time, efficient, accurate, never failing in her duty to get the mail out no matter the circumstances - snow, rain, sleet, hail, dark of night, etc. Except for one letter. This paragon of postal virtue of has taken it upon herself to not deliver one letter - the one from England notifying Emma of Will's death.

Iris' motives are not clear, except that perhaps she was fearful that such terrible news would cause pregnant Emma to go into labor.

Frankie's part of the story is the strongest and most engaging, whether she is avoiding bombs in London or riding trains crammed with refugees. Regarding the characters back home in Massachusetts, they are dull as dishwater. There's a "love" story between Iris and her boyfriend Harry that is just plain odd. A subplot involving Otto, a German Jew who now lives in Franklin, goes nowhere, as does the possible threat of a German sub lurking just offshore.

The book begins in the present, with famous newswoman Frankie regaling dinner party guests with the story of a postmistress who never delivered a certain letter. There's no reason for her to be so smug, however, for even though she eventually makes it to Franklin, she never does deliver Will's letter.

Reading this book was a lesson for me not to believe the hype written by book club magazine editors.

ERIN HART AND KATE ATKINSON

2010-05-09T18:45:00.000-07:00

I am surprised to discover that I have become a fan of series mystery novels. Although I have read at least one of each, I was never enthralled with Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta books, John Grisham's legal thrillers, Sue Grafton's alphabet series, or James Patterson's numerical series. (I note that Patterson's The Ninth Judgment" is on the top of the bestseller list today.)

But I have lately fallen under the thrall of 11-year-old Flavia de Luce, the amateur sleuth of the Alan Bradley mysteries. I really enjoyed "The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie" and "The Weed That Strings The Hangman's Bag", both of which I have reviewed here, and I'm eagerly awaiting the third book.

Since then, I have discovered two more mystery/suspense/detective novelists I like enough to look for other books by them. The first is Kate Atkinson, whose book, "When Will There Be Good News?" I found at a consignment shop. I wasn't lucky enough to happen upon the first book in the series, but it hardly mattered. "When . . . . " is actually the third book that pairs Private Detective Jackson Brodie and Edinburgh's Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe. But except for learning that Brodie had somehow become a millionaire along the way, it didn't matter that I was reading the third book without having read the first two.

When a train Brodie is traveling in crashes, he is rescued by Reggie, a 16-year-old nanny, whose efforts at CPR save his life. At an Edinburgh hospital, Dr. Joanna Hunter takes over the lifesaving effort. Meanwhile, Inspector Monroe has been advised that a man involved in a long-ago multiple murder has turned up in a local hospital. But as it turns out, identities were mistakenly switched in the aftermath of the train crash. To Monroe's surprise, her old pal Brodie is the man who has ended up with Andrew Decker's wallet.

Reggie, who becomes very attached to Brodie after saving his life and visiting him at the hospital, has her own worries. Her employer, Dr. Hunter, has gone missing, and no one, not even her husband, seems to care. In a strange quirk of fate, Brodie learns that Dr. Joanna Hunter is one and the same person as Joanna Mason, whose mother, sister and baby brother were murdered by a madman wielding a knife, leaving only 6-year-old Joanna alive. In fact, it is Brodie himself who found traumatized little Joanna hiding in the wheat fields.

Now, 30 years later, Inspector Monroe is looking for that very same murderer. Reggie convinces Brodie to help her find Dr. Mason, Monroe continues to search for Decker, and all the while plots are converging and everyone is careening toward an ending that may be as disatrous as the train wreck.

Atkinson lives in Edinburgh, and I enjoyed the glimpses of the city she weaves into the story. And I especially enjoyed the character of Reggie, stalwart, independent and plucky. I hope she turns up in later Brodie/Hunter mysteries. In the meantime, I am going back to read the previous two books in the series, "Case Histories" and "One Good Turn".

Not one but two blogging friends recommended Erin Hart's "False Mermaid" to me, knowing how much I love everything Celtic. I was a little bit smarter this time, and looked up the book on amazon.com. It turns out that "False Mermaid" is the third book in Hart's series about Dr. Nora Gavin, an American MD and forensic anthropologist lecturing at Trinity College Medical School, and Dublin University archaeologist Cormac Maguire.

When a body is discovered in a peat bog by Brendan McGann, a local who's been cutting turf, police are called in, as well as Cormac and Nora, who is especially interested in studying ancient bodies preserved in bogs. As they begin excavating the site, they learn that it is actually just a head that has been discovered. Almost perfectly preserved because of the peat, the head is clearly that of a red-headed woman who has been executed by having her head chopped off.

The question is, how old is the head, and where is the rest of the body? And the villagers ask another, inevitable question: Does the head belong to Mina Osborne, who disappeared two years ago, along with her three-year-old son?

Working together, Nora and Cormac, along with detective Garret Devaney, try to solve both mysteries. Nora is convinced that local landowner Hugh Osborne, Mina's husband, murdered his wife and son. However, she and Cormac do accept an invitation to stay with Hugh and help in the excavation of some property he plans to develop. Also living at Hugh's house are his icy cousin Lucy and her strange son, Jeremy. And then there's McGann, who is a well known adversary of Hugh. Hugh has been the primary suspect in his wife's disappearance from the beginning, but could one of the others have done away with Mina and her son, or did she simply disappear of her own volition?

Except for a substory involving Detective Devaney's home life, I found that the plot unfolded very well. A romance between Nora and Hugh is handled subtly. Nora is reluctant to become involved with anyone, especially since she can't get another murder out of her mind - that of her own red-haired sister back in her home town of St. Paul, MN. I especially liked Nora for her devotion to discovering the true identity of "The Cailin Rua," or "Red Colleen," as the girl found in the bog comes to be called.

I will now be reading the second book, "Lake of Sorrows", also set in Ireland and involving Cormac, and then "False Mermaid", which moves betweens Ireland and St. Paul and is reportedly the book in which Nora really begins to investigate her sister's death, which she blames on her brother-in-law.

SO MANY BOOKS, SO LITTLE TIME

2010-05-07T18:46:00.000-07:00

"GIRL READING AT A SUNLIT WINDOW"

By Carl Vilhelm Holsoe

Way back on the first day of January 2010 I posted what I thought was an ambitious reading list of 20 books to be read in the first few months of the new year. As it turned out, I actually read 16 of the books! Needless to say, I am very proud of myself. Of the remaining four, "The Winter Ghosts" by Kate Mosse is still not available in the United States. (I will keep looking for it, as I loved her "Labyrinthe" and "Sepulchre".)

Regarding the other three books, I had determined that I was only going to read the ones found at a discount at at thrift shops, consignment shops, used bookstores and the like, or were available at my local library. Although the Bismarck Public Municipal Library has other Sherman Alexie books, they don't have the one on my list. To their shame, it would seem, they do not have "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie". They also did not have "Winter House" by Nicci Gerard.

Here is my original list:

1. "The Elegance Of The Hedgehog" by Muriel Barbery.

2. "Olive Kitteridge: Fiction" by Elizabeth Strout.
3. "Her Fearful Symmetry" by Audrey Niffeneger.
4. "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" by Stieg Larsson.
5. "The Sweetness At The Bottom Of The Pie" by Alan Bradley.
6. Testament" by Alis Hawkins.
7. "The Winter Ghosts" by Kate Mosse.
8. "South of Broad" by Pat Conroy
9. "Half-Broke Horses: A True Life Novel" by Jeannette Walls.
10. "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" by Muriel Sparks.
11. "Remarkable Creatures" by Tracy Chevalier.
12. "The Absolutely True Diary of A Part-time Indian" by Sherman Alexie.
13. "Howards End Is On The Landing" by Susan Hill.
14. "The Blue Tattoo" by Margaret Mifflin.
15. "The Zookeeper's Wife" by Diane Ackerman.
16. "People Of The Book" by Geraldine Brooks
17. "The Winter House" by Nicci Gerrard
18. "The Swan Thieves" by Elizabeth Kostova
19. "Travels With Charlie" by John Steinbeck
20. "The Road" by Cormack McCarthy

Actually, have I read many more books than those 16. In fact, I am very proud of myself that I have been reading at a terrific pace and will definitely (barring unforseen circumstances) read over 100 books this year. So far, I have read 53. (A direct result of having been unemployed the first four months of the year.) And I have posted reviews of all but three of them, with the other reviews coming shortly!)

I was figuratively strutting around like a peacock at how many books I have read this year until I read about a British blogger who (claims she) has read 375 books this year so far!!

HOUSE RULES

2010-05-07T17:58:00.000-07:00

Jodi Picoult has written a lot of bestselling novels, many of them "ripped from the headlines." She has covered such topics as mercy killing, teen suicide pacts, conceiving a second child solely in order to provide stem cells for a sick older child and school shootings (I had to pass on "Nineteen Minutes" because of the latter, too-painful-for-me subject.)

In "House Rules", Picoult tackles autism, a condition that is - according to which authority you believe - either greatly on the rise or just diagnosed better these days. Eighteen-year-old Jacob Hunt, one of the central characters in the book, has Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism.

Jacob is at the high end of the Asperger's spectrum. "They tell me I'm lucky to have a son who's so verbal, who is blisteringly intelligent, who can take apart the broken microwave and have it working again an hour later", says his mother Emma. "They think there is no greater hell than having a son who is locked in his own world, unaware that there's a wider one to explore. But try having a son who is locked in his own world, and still wants to make a connection. A son who tries to be like everyone else, but truly doesn't know how."

Jacob displays many of the "symptoms" noticed in autistic people: he has a compulsive attachment to order and routine; has a tendency to take comments literally; displays a hypersensitivity to bright lights, human touch, and scratchy fabrics; shows a reluctance to make eye contact; has a distinct lack of empathy; has public tantrums when overwhelmed; is painfully blunt; has difficulty relating to others and expressing emotions; is unable to read social clues.

Like many autistics, Jacob tends to focus on a subject to the point of obsession. He is particularly obsessed with the television series "Crimebusters". He knows all the episodes by heart but still cannot bear to miss a single repeat airing. A theoretical expert on forensic science, he has been known to butt himself into local crime scenes after hearing about them on his police scanner. Once there, he proceeds to give advice (spot on, as it turns out), to the policemen and detectives.

So when Jacob's life skills coach, Jessica (whom he likes a great deal) is murdered, Jacob is very much a person of interest. Not only does he have a connection to her, there's that obsession with crime scenes, and certain aspects of his condition that make him appear suspect, such as not being able to meet another person's eyes and therefore looking guilty.

I thought that Picoult painted quite a good portrayal of a character with Asperger's. I know that I learned a lot about it. I thought she was wise, when mentioning that some experts believe that Asperger's is caused by faulty immunization vaccines, to leave it as one theory out of several possible theories.

Some of the chapters in the book are "written" by Jacob, and his personality really shines through in them. Other chapters are written from the points of view of Emma and his brother Theo. (Some of the chapters are also written from the point of view of the detective, but I found this device to be really unncessary.)

One of the most striking points Picoult makes is that Asperger's affects everyone in the family. Emma, a divorcee, has devoted her life totally to Jacob, probably at the expense of Theo. And although Theo, also a teen, loves his brother, Jacob is a social embarrassment, a pain in the butt for him.

A great deal of their life revolves around Jacob's wishes and demands. For example, they have to eat a color-coded meal every day of the week, so Friday, for example, would be all-brown food: beef, gravy, pork and beans, brownies.

I thought the plot deteriorated badly after the revelation of Jessica's murder. It seemed ludicrous to me that Jacob even went to trial for it. Any sane person should have been able to put two and two together and come up with the method and cause of Jessica's death. Jacob, with the "excuse" of Asperger's, may be forgiven on this point, but any of the other characters could have come up with the correct answer if they had just deliberated for a few minutes or even thought (duh!) to ask Jacob the right questions.

These flaws in the book are exacerbated by the excellent portrayals of the characters, especially Jacob and Emma. However, there is an extremely weak romance involving Emma and another man that just did not ring true.

I do admit to having checked amazon.com for their reviews. A lot of people, it seems, were confused by the conclusion, but to me it is obvious. Just go back and read some of the passages again!

In many ways, "House Rules" resembles Picoult's "Her Sister's Keeper", only in reverse. In this case, who turns out to be his brother's keeper?

Personal Note:

By happenstance I recently watched a program on children with autism and was surprised to learn that this may be the origin of the term "fairy changeling", the folk belief that a normal child is taken by the fairies and replaced by another. For it has been documented that some children appear perfectly normal up to the age of 2 or 3 and then their demeanor, personality and abilities dramatically deteroriate and they display all the "symptoms" of autism. (I use quotes around "symptoms" because so many parents of children with autism are incensed that their children are said to have a disease.)

A RELIABLE WIFE

2010-05-06T16:33:00.000-07:00

I learned about "A Reliable Wife" on "Turning Point", the book blog by Julie Brichta. Not long after having read her positive review, I ran across a used copy. I join Julie in lauding this novel by Robert Goolrick.

It's 1907, rural Wisconsin. Middle-aged and wealthy Ralph Truitt is waiting for the train to deliver his future wife, whom he "ordered like a pair of new boots" after placing an ad for a mail-order bride in a Chicago newspaper. After a disastrous first marriage, what Truitt wants now is a "reliable wife" - a plain-looking, simple, honest woman. When Catherine Land steps off the train, Truitt is shocked to see that she is very beautiful. And that she is not the same woman as the one in the photograph she has sent him. This is just one of the many deceits Ralph uncovers about Catherine. But a bargain is a bargain and together they set off across the frozen plains for his home.

What we don't know in this opening scenario that Catherine and Ralph both have hidden agendas, secrets, plans. We soon learn that Catherine has a shadowy history not suited to a reliable wife. One might call her a "black widow spider". At least that's what she wants to be. Catherine's plan is to become a wealthy widow by killing her husband with the poison she has brought with her. But "best-laid plans" are put aside temporarily when their carriage is involved in an accident and Ralph is injured.

Months later, it's time for Ralph's plan to be revealed. He wants to use his young wife as a lure to bring his estranged son back home. He asks Catherine to travel to St. Louis to effect the reconciliation. When Catherine meets Antonio, we realize that he, too, has a plan - a plan that intersects with Catherine's.

One of the marks of a good novel is that the characters evolve over time, and Catherine certainly does. She may not be as cold-blooded and heartless as she first appears, even though yes, she is slowly poisoning Ralph. And what to say about Ralph? He KNOWS Catherine is poisoning him but accepts it because he feels he "deserves it". I liked one description that I came across regarding Ralph and Catherine: that they are "two wounded hearts" that have come together. I think the book very satisfactorily answers the question, "Can a person find redemption?"

Catherine, Antonio and even Ralph may be looked upon as deplorable, flawed, cruel, perhaps even evil characters. But by showing us their terrible pasts, Goolrick reveals their motivations and gives us cause to feel sympathetic toward them (even Antonio).

I don't want to reveal more of the plot, except to say that there are many unexpected twists and turns. It is up to the reader to discover whose plan, whose agenda, whose scheme - if any - will win the day.

THE BOTTICELLI SECRET

2010-05-05T18:32:00.000-07:00

I learned about Marina Fiorato's "The Botticelli Secret" on another blog. It was described as being a combination of a Dan Brown-type mystery and the books of Sarah Dunant. After getting it from the library, however, I almost didn't read it, because the first few pages gave me the impression that it was going to be a lusty bodice ripper, and I don't read bodice rippers.

However, I gave it a chance, and I'm glad I did, for it is not a bodice ripper, and the description that had intrigued me proved to be accurate. The story is based upon Ialian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli's famous painting called "La Primavera". As the book proceeds, clues hidden in the painting will eventually reveal a great political intrigue. It is left to Luciana Vetra, a beautiful Florentine prostitute, and her unlikely companion, novice monk Guido della Torro, to unravel the clues and prevent conspirators from consummating their deadly plan.

Luciana becomes enmeshed in the mystery when she is asked by Botticelli to be the model for Primavera, the main figure in the painting. Angry with Botticelli, she steals a small version of the painting from him. She soon deduces that this is no mere painting, because there are people searching for it - and her - and her friends are being murdering because of it. She decides to seek help from Guido, whom she had met earlier in the day when he tried to turn her from her sinful ways. After a fellow monk is murdered, Luciana and Guido must escape from Florence.

In an author's note at the back of the book, Fiorato writes that "La Primavera" enjoys more interpretations than perhaps any other painting in art history. For her book, she implements an Italian professor's interpretation that the figures represent Italian cities. As they begin to figure out the clues hidden in the faces, dress and postures of the eight figures of the painting, Luciana and Guido learn not only the identity of the cities, but discern that belonging to each city is one of the conspirators, including well-known political figures like the Duke of Milan, Lorenzo di Medici and the Pope himself.

Luciana and Guido find themselves swept away on a perilous journey from one Italian city to another - including Florence, Venice, Milan and Genoa. Thankfully, Fiorato does not plot to have Luciana and Guido be swept away by passion as well. Theirs IS a love story, but it proceeds slowly and reservedly, while along the way Luciana discovers that she is no mere prostitute but royally born, and Guido becomes less and less enamored with the church. "The Botticelli Secret" deserves to take its place alongside Dan Brown's symbol-based mysteries and Dunant's glorious novels of the Italian Renaissance.

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS: MY LIFE AND CAPTIVITY IN IRAN

2010-05-05T17:57:00.000-07:00

When American journalist Roxana Saberi was falsely imprisoned in Iran, I and other residents of North Dakota followed her case closely, because she is from Fargo, ND. She moved there with her Iranian-born father and Japanese mother when she was a child. She graduated from Fargo North High School with honors in 1994 and from Concordia College across the river in Moorhead, MN three years later. She was crowned Miss North Dakota in 1997 and was among the top 10 Miss America finalists a year later. Aided by scholarship money, she has earned two master's degrees, from Northwestern University's School of Journalism and Cambridge University, England.

Saberi moved to her father's homeland in 2003 to work for US-based Feature Story News and to complete a master’s degree in Iranian studies. FSN distributed her television and radio reports to a wide range of broadcasters around the world. In 2006, the Iranian authorities revoked Saberi's press accreditation and closed the FSN bureau in Iran. However, she maintained a second press accreditation, permitting her to freelance for the BBC. But in late 2006, it was also peremptorily revoked. Saberi continued to file occasional reports for NPR, IPS and ABC Radio.

Saberi decided to stay in Iran and finish writing what she describes as a balanced book about Iran, a country she deeply loved. Her personal nightmare began on Jan. 31, 2009, when she was arrested on the orders of the Islamic Revolutionary Court.

She was suspected of being a spy because, she was told, she had interviewed dozens of people for her book. She was accused of using the book as a cover to gather intelligence for the CIA. From then on, her story becomes a Catch-22 type nightmare. No matter how much she denied the accusations, no one listened. "I felt there was nothing more I can say to these men", she ultimately decided. "The only way I could change their minds about me was to change their minds about America, and that was an impossible feat."

Finally, under great duress, she gave a false confession after being told she would be set free if she confessed but faced years of imprisonment and even execution if she did not. She later came to regret this decision, and recanted her story. From that time on she went on periodic hunger strikes rather than "confess" again. Her captors later told her that they knew all along that her "confession" was a lie.

Saberi waited five weeks to even meet her attorney, and he turned out to be incompetent, to say the least. Repeated futile trips to court did nothing but prove that the judge was conducting a ludicrous kangaroo court. She was eventually sentenced to eight years in prison.

Word of Saberi's imprisonment finally reached her parents and American officials. Unbeknownst to her, a groundswell of support to free her was underway. North Dakota's two senators, Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan, and its representative, Earl Pomeroy, worked tirelessly toward that end. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton demanded her release, and even President Obama got into the act. Great pressure was exerted on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by world leaders, journalists and human rights organizations such as Amnesty International.

Obviously, their efforts worked. In April 2009 Ahmadinejad declared that Saberi "must have her legal right to defend herself". The next month, an appeals court reduced the charge against her from espionage to possessing classified information (a charge Saberi denies) and cut her eight-year sentence to a two-year suspended sentence. She walked out of Evin Prison on May 11, 2009.

"Between Two Worlds" affirms Saberi as an excellent journalist. Reading this vividly-detailed book was an extremely painful experience. Even though Saberi was not physically tortured during her captivity, she was placed under "severe psychological and mental pressure". Her captors blindfolded her during days of interrogation, held her in solitary confinement, and initially would not allow her to inform anyone of her whereabouts.

Reading the book was also an exercise in frustration and futility. So often, I wanted to strangle her captors, interrogators, her lawyer, the judges and other players for conducting the elaborate farce that Iran substitutes for due process of law. I call them nuts, she describes them as paranoid. "And it was people with this kind of mind-set," she wrote, "who held so much power in the Islamic Republic".

After being freed, Saberi returned with her parents to Fargo and wrote "Between Two Worlds" there. She says she still loves Iran, and would like to someday finish the book she had started there. She continues to be haunted by the memory of fellow prisoners who are still imprisoned or who have died because they didn't have the attention and support of the free world behind them that she did.

HALF BROKE HORSES

2010-05-03T14:07:00.000-07:00

I was delighted when I learned that Jeannette Walls had written another book. My fellow book club members and I really enjoyed her memoir, "The Glass Castle." I had been waiting to obtain "Half Broke Horses" for a long time. When I put my name on the reserve list at the library, there were 28 readers ahead of me. I can understand now why it is in such demand, and it was definitely worth the wait. (It can be compared to waiting for hours and hours for the Thanksgiving dinner to cook and then polishing it off in 15 minutes, because I couldn't put "Half Broke Horses" down and finished it in a couple of hours).

This time, Walls tells the story of her maternal grandmother, who was born in 1901 and grew up on ranches in West Texas and Arizona in a still quite Wild West. "Half Broke Horses" reads like it is Lily Casey Smith's autobiography, not biography. It's true that Walls had many family stories to relate about her crackerjack of a grandmother, but it's more than that. It's as if Walls is channeling Lily.

Grandma Lily grew up to be quite a character. Her first home was in a dugout, but her mother tried to raise the children genteely, and she furnished the dugout "with some real finery". At age 10, Lily saved her younger brother and sister from a flash flood by getting them up a tree and keeping them awake and clinging to safety the entire night. She and her family later survived a tornado that destroyed their second home, a real house.

As a child Lily broke wild horses for her dad. At 15 she had no qualms about riding her pony 500 miles alone to her first teaching job. She conquered the big city of Chicago and overcame a first marriage to a bigamist. She and her second husband later ran a vast ranch in Arizona. On several occasions she didn't hesitate to use her "pearl-handled revolver" to defend herself and her children. She bravely stood up to polyglamous Mormon elders who didn't like the way she taught freedom of choice to their little girls.

A horse lover from the get-go, Lily decided to conquer the automobile and fell in love with cars. In fact, she loved them better than horses: "Cars didn't need to be fed if they weren't working, and they didn't leave big piles of manure all over the place. Cars were faster than horses, and they didn't run off or kick down fences. They didn't buck, bite, or rear, and they didn't need to be broke or trained, or caught and saddled up every time you need to go somewhere. They didn't have a mind of their own. Cars obeyed you."

The next thing for Lily to conquer was the airplane. When she approached a pilot advertising $5.00 flying lessons he said he'd never taught a woman before and asked her husband "Think the little lady's up to it?" She replied, "Don't you 'little lady' me, I said. 'I break horses. I brand steers. I run a ranch with a couple dozen cowboys on it, and I can beat them all at poker. I'll be damned if some nincompoop is going to stand there and tell me I don't have what it takes to fly that dinky heap of tin.'"

Walls was often told that she was very much like her grandmother, who died when Walls was 8. But although they were kindred spirits, in a sense, Walls never heistates to show Lily's dark side too. As fearless as she was, as enterprising, as determined to get her college degree, as devoted to her students, Lily was, like all of us, a flawed individual. After having a "crumb bum" for a first husband, Lily coldly chose her second husband not for love but for practical qualities. In my opinion, she showed way too much "tough love" to her two children. And she didn't think twice about becoming a bootlegger if it brought in extra money for her family.

Hard-headed, determined and opinionated, Lily always did what she thought had to be done, whether that meant standing up to the school district, paddling her children, or whaling on the sheriff's boy who needed to be taught a lesson.

One of Lily's children was Rosemary, a girl with a mile-wide "wild streak". At the end of "Half Broke Horses" Rosemary meets Rex Walls, a flyboy, a hellion, a fellow with a matching wild streak. Although Lily sees him as a con man with grand schemes who's always acting on whims, Rosemary falls for him hard and they marry. Even while dating Rosemary, Rex does one of his "skedaddles" (sneaking out of town ahead of the law), these skedaddles later becoming a famous, repeating theme in Walls' excellent memoir of growing up with Rex and Rosemary (now called Rose Mary), two half-broke horses trying to raise their own brood.

DAY AFTER NIGHT

2010-04-30T15:59:00.000-07:00

Beginning with "The Diary of Anne Frank", I have read many novels over the years that dealt with the Jewish situation during World War II - the Jews who were in hiding, those who were saved by Schindler, those who died in concentration camps, those who survived the camps.

But I haven't really read any books about the Jews who arrived in Palestine, their "Promised Land", after the war. "Exodus" does deal with some refugees, but it focuses on the sabras (those born in Israel) and their fight to win statehood for Israel. "Ship of Fools" and "The Lambs' War" related the tales of the Jews' struggle to get to Palestine.

"Day After Night", however, begins when a group of refugees arrives in country. I had no idea that new arrivals in Palestine were held in camps by the British until they were parceled out to kibbutzes. Those who were concentration camp inmates again have to face the horror of barbed wire fences and captors. The frightened survivors think the Delousing Shed is actually a shower room cum gas chamber like those in the camps and are naturally terrified to enter.

Anita Diamant, who wrote the excellent "The Red Tent", tells the refugees' story by means of four women: angry Shayndel, a Polish Zionist and freedom fighter; beautiful Frenchwoman Leonie, who was an unwilling prostitute for the Nazis in Paris; blonde, Aryan-looking Tedi, a Dutch Jew who had been in hiding; and Zorah, a concentration camp survivor. Some, like Shayndel, have had the goal of immigrating to Palestine for years, while others end up on her shores by accident, apathy or the winds of fate.

Slowly the girls form tentative friendships, gain weight from the abundant food, begin to be interested in their appearance and the men in the adjacent camp, and start to think that they might just be able to lead semi-normal lives again. Even the concentration camp survivors start to come alive again.

The only fault I would find with this excellent book is how willing and unfazed the four women are when they learn they are to be separated and sent to different settlements. It seems to me that this tearing apart of friends who had lost so many other people in their lives would shatter the fragile peace they have worked so hard - and finally begun - to achieve.

THE WEDNESDAY SISTERS

2010-04-30T15:34:00.000-07:00

If I had been told that the premise of this novel was that a group of five women meet and form friendships at their kids' playground and then decide to form a writing group - with three of them ultimately becoming published authors, one an excellent book editor and the fifth the author of an unpublished novel - I would have thought it preposterous. Except for the fact that "The Wednesday Sisters" actually is based on a true story.

Along with three other women, author Meg Waite Clayton formed a very similar writing group. All four members eventually published articles, essays, stories and novels. Real-life friend and fellow writing group member Brenda Rickman Vantrease is the author of "The Illuminator", a marvelous book about a 14th-century medieval manuscript illuminator and his lady love.

I highly recommend "The Illuminator". In fact, I suggest you seek it out instead of "The Wednesday Sisters", which is a vastly inferior book. It was interesting, however, to see these women through the sixties and seventies as they discover Women's Lib. Other than that, you have the usual divorce, breast cancer scare, infertility and other women's issues that seem to permeate any book about a group of modern-day women, especially book club groups.

Not only do the Wednesday Sisters write books, they also read them. Their list of favorites is published at the back of the book. Many books on their list are also ones I would list: "In Cold Blood", "To Kill A Mockingbird", "Great Expectations", "The Great Gatsby", "The Bell Jar", "Rebecca", "Breakfast at Tiffany's", "The French Lieutenant's Woman." But some others on the list? "Love Story"?? C'mon! And although I respect Frankie, who is the unspoken head of the Wednesday Sisters, I cannot abide the fact that her model book was "Middlemarch".

THERE'S A (SLIGHT) CHANCE I MIGHT BE GOING TO HELL

2010-04-30T09:07:00.000-07:00

Never has a $2.00 consignment shop book given me such immediate gratification. I laughed out loud - many times - while reading "there's a (slight) chance i might be going to hell" by Laurie Notaro.

Poor Maye Roberts. She had plenty of friends in Phoenix, but she doesn't live in Phoenix anymore. Her husband has accepted a post as a college professor in Spaulding, Washington. He fits right into their new life, but Maye can't seem to buy a friend. An early effort to impress leads her to disaster at a faculty party. Trying to remove a vintage pink cardigan which has somehow offended Dean Spaulding's wife, she ends up getting the cardigan and her blouse stuck up around her shoulders and upper arms.

Hopping frantically around to free herself, with "Mae's bra, Mae's belly and the waistband of Mae's girdle" exposed to all, Maye realizes that "dozens of eyes were now witnessing her earthy dance in the corner of the dean's living room as she displayed the brand of inhibition typically evinced only after ingesting cactus buttons or licking poisonous toads. Some were filled with disbelief, some with disgust, some with dismay. There was one particularly offended pair that caught Maye's eye and triggered a voice in her head. 'Melissabeth', it said surprisingly. 'I can't believe I remembered your name after all!'"

In a last-ditch effort to find new friends, Maye enters the Spaulding Sewer Pipe Queen Pageant. At the turn of the century, Malcolm Spaulding,"visionary and ambassador of indoor plumbing", chose "the prettiest spot in the country to call his home and build himself a new sewer pipe factory". (Maye describes Spaulding as "an insufferable romantic despite the fact that his life was shit").

In her effort to win the contest and beat ex-queen Rowena Spaulding's favorite candidate, Maye locates the whereabouts of a former Sewer Pipe Queen, who was blamed for a dreadful fire in Spaulding many years ago and is now a cigarette-smoking, booze-swilling recluse. In doing so, Maye discovers the reason why Mrs. Spaulding loathes that vintage sweater, and also uncovers the long-lost secret regarding the actual perpetrator of the fire.

In some ways, this book is a lot like the "Sweet Potato Pie Queen" books, but even funnier. Here are some of Notaro's wittiest descriptions:

"Maye was so relieved when the front door opened that she almost squealed like a sorority girl after one beer on an empty stomach."

"Not good," the plumber informed them gruffly. "You have old galvanized down there; it's coming apart like a celebrity marriage."

"and Glynda . . . who had the dryest hair Maye had ever seen that was not sprouted from the head of a Barbie doll lying naked in a Goodwill bin."

"New businesses popped up all over town like pimples on the face of puberty."

Maye's sweater "was kelly green and boasted not one badly knitted reindeer pulling Santa's sleigh but a pair of them, complete with real live bells on what was probably meant to be their harness but resembled more of a rope, suggesting the reindeer had escaped from their own lynching amid snowflakes the size of hubcaps. Reindeer number one particularly was in grave danger as a boulder-size chunk of hail was virtually an inch from his little holiday skull. It was a wretched, horrible thing, fit a bit too tightly, the sort of sweater a mother-in-law gives to her son's wife when she thinks he has married poorly."

"Maye thought about it for a moment, and other than the fact that she had roofied up an officer of the law to rat out his old, alcoholic, allegedly arsonist aunt, she supposed it really didn't make a difference if they were related or not".

If you've been given an Rx to laugh more, please read this book.

THE KITCHEN HOUSE

2010-04-30T08:25:00.000-07:00

After reviewing a couple of truly forgettable books I am happy to present a book I know I will remember for a long time. "The Kitchen House" by Kathleen Grissom is already one of my favorite books for 2010.

Seven-year-old Lavinia McCarten's family is traveling from Ireland to America in 1791 when both her mother and father become ill and die aboard ship. Because her parents were indebted to Captain James Pyke for their passage, Lavinia becomes an indentured servant to the Cap'n and goes to live on his southern plantation. Although she is white Irish, she is put to work with the black cook, Belle. She is soon taken under the kindly, loving wing of Mama Mae, the head of the house slaves. Mama Mae's family becomes Lavinia's too. She is soon fast friends with Mama's twin daughters, Beattie and Fanny, who are her own age.

Called Abinia by her new family, Lavinia comes to love Belle, Mama Mae, Mama's eldest daughter Dory, Mama's husband Papa George and her adopted sisters, as well as "Uncle" Jacob and Belle's lover Ben.

Although she has some contact with the Captain and Mrs. Pyke and their children Marshall and Sally, Lavinia is, to all intents and purposes, considered to be a little negro slave. Mama Mae is her mama and her life is the life of a house slave, who exists below the white people of the big house but above the lesser slaves, the field negroes. Her world, indeed, is the small world of Mama Mae's cabin and Belle's kitchen house.

In the course of time, Lavinia, indentured servant that she is, is sent to town to live with Mrs. Pyke's sister and her family. There, she is integrated into the white world and taught the social graces. When Lavinia reaches adulthood she receives her freedom and Marshall, the new master of the plantation, asks her to marry him.

Lavinia consents with delight. It has always been her dream to return "home" and be reunited with her beloved family. But of course, nothing remains the same. Lavinia is a white lady now. Mae, Belle, Beattie, Fanny, Papa George and the rest are her servants, not her friends. She can't even call Mama Mae "mama" any more. Mrs. Pyke has descended into a world of madness and Marshall, whose always-present cruel streak has widened to include Lavinia as a target, is gambling away his inheritance.

The nightmare continues to unfold, but Lavinia discovers strengths she barely knew she had. By 1810, saving her home and her true family becomes the sole focus of her existence. Just 26, Lavinia has to muster all her resources and race against time to protect those that she loves.

The characters in "The Kitchen House" are very well written and the love that exists between Lavinia and her family shimmers on every page. On the plantation, Grisson has created a vibrant microcosm of the struggle between the races in America.

In terms of creating that special relationship that often exists between a little girl and her black nanny/servant, "The Kitchen House" stands equal with such classics as "Gone With The Wind" and "To Kill A Mockingbird".

THE HOUSEGUEST

2010-04-29T17:19:00.000-07:00

I just didn't care for "The Houseguest" by Agnes Rossi. Thank goodness it was another thrift shop book for which I only had to fork out a measly dollar. I would have been angry with myself if I had purchased it full price, or even from amazon.com used.

The characters are just so unlikeable. I began to detest Edward Devlin immediately after his wife dies in the opening pages and he leaves for America without his six-year-old daughter. He fobs little Maura off on relatives, who in turn send her away to school. Not only has Maura her lost parents, but she has been set adrift in a sea of Irish speakers when she speaks only American English. Devlin and Sadie had emigrated to America when they got married and returned to Ireland with Maura only when Sadie became ill with TB.

Now back in America, Edward hooks up with old acquaintance John Fitzgibbon, who not only helps him find a job but offers him a place to stay in his home. It is no surprise when Edward falls in love with Sylvia, Fitz's sensuous wife. It's not surprising that she reciprocates, since Fitz is a cold fish. What is surprising is that Fitz had been looking to get rid of Sylvia.

Although Maura was a sympathetic character, Edward, Sylvia and Fitz are so wooden and unfeeling that I wanted to slap them upside the head. It wasn't long before I quit caring whether or not Edward and Sylvia would end up happily ever after, or if Maura would be able to leave Ireland and join them in America (an outcome that childless Sylvia wants way more than Edward appears to).

THE LUMBY LINES

2010-04-29T17:07:00.000-07:00

For the first time ever, I can say that I purchased a book with an eye toward reviewing it more than toward actually reading it. It cost just a dollar at a thrift shop, otherwise I would not have been so foolhardy. But I had read the blurb on the back cover saying it was first in a new series. Perusing it, I could tell it was written along the lines of Jan Karon's Mitford series of books centered around the characters in a small town. When finding series books at thrift or used book stores, I am seldom lucky enough to find the first in a series, so I said "What the heck!" and splurged on it.

I have only read one Mitford book (the first one) and did not care to read the others. I feel the same way about the the Lumby books. I doubt if I will ever pick one up again, though I did like it better than the Mitford books (perhaps because the characters are younger?).

The biggest flaw in series books like these is that you are introduced to so many characters at one time that you can scarcely keep them apart. This is true of "The Lumby Lines" (which was the accidental but kept-anyway name of the town newspaper). Some of the main characters are irascible Lumby Lines publisher William Beezer and his estranged son, Dennis Beezer, who edits the newspaper in a nearby town, and Mark and Pam Walker, who decide to take up residence in Lumby and remodel the old Montis Abbey, former home to a group of monks.

Mark and Pam have come from somewhere "Out East". I don't believe the state Lumby is located in is ever named, but it is western, although Lumby appeared to me to be a typical quaint New England town.

The main thing that irritated me about this book is that everything proceeded way too smoothly for Mark and Pam. The abbey is restored with seemingly nary a snag. There had been a mysterious fire at the abbey some years ago, and I thought that Mark and Pam might be plagued by a similar fire, but no such "luck". Even the monks, who now live at another abbey, are saved from financial ruin and the loss of their new home thanks to help from the Walkers.

Sorry, Gail Fraser, but I, for one, won't be buying "Lumby on the Air", "The Promise of Lumby", "Lumby's Bounty" or "Stealing Lumby".

SHUTTER ISLAND

2010-04-28T16:36:00.000-07:00

I chose "Shutter Island" from my book-of-the-month club's catalog because I had seen ads for the movie starring Leonardo Di Caprio and based on the Dennis Lehane novel.

I have to admit that while I was reading the book I did envision Di Caprio as the protagonist, U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels, and another well-known TV character actor as his sidekick Chuck Aule (sorry, I can't remember his name.)

Teddy and Chuck have been called to Shutter Island to assist the authorities at the Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Dangerous inmate Rachel Soldano, who had murdered her three children years ago, is missing. Even though the hospital is located on an island, Rachel cannot be found anywhere.

As Teddy and Chuck begin the investigation into Rachel's disappearance, they find that things are not as they appear on the surface. They deduce that Rachel had to have had inside help to escape. As they probe into the dark corners of the hospital, the other buildings on the grounds and the island itself, they pick up hints that something is terribly, terribly wrong.

Why are the warden and the hospital chief of staff acting so oddly? Everyone, from warden to guards to prisoners alike, all seem to be in on the mystery. And why has Rachel's psychiatrist left the island to go on vacation precisely when he is needed the most? Teddy and Chuck even hear rumors of a sinister government plot to experiment on patients with gruesome brain operations much like the Nazis conducted during World War II.

Moreover, Teddy starts to suspect he has been drugged with psychotropic drugs. Then, Chuck disappears. Teddy, desperately searching for Chuck, realizes he himself is being hunted. And if that weren't enough, as we race along with Teddy toward the climax, a powerful hurricane bears down on the island.

"Shutter Island" is all it has been touted to be. It is a superb thriller that moves at breakneck speed, and it has a truly shocking plot twist that left me dazed. I had not read Lehane before, but I will certainly read more of him ("Mystic River" is another of his books turned into a movie) because he is an extremely clever and satisfying suspense/mystery writer.

SAVING CEECEE HONEYCUTT

2010-04-28T16:17:00.000-07:00

I waited forever to get "Saving CeeCee Honeycutt" from the Bismarck Public Library. It seemed to be stuck on two reservations ahead of mine for months. When I received it I discovered it was just 468 pages of large print, and not difficult to read at all. In fact, I zipped through it in a couple of hours. I can't understand the reason for the wait.

And I'm not at all sure the wait was worth it. When we meet CeeCee, she is 11-years-old, with a psychotic mother and mostly-absent father. She is basically left alone to care for her out-of-control mother. There is no one to care for her, except an elderly neighbor who provides a little sanity. Camille Sugarbaker Honeycutt is stuck in the past, when she was the 1951 Vidalia Onion Queen. Wearing formal dresses she buys at the thrift shop, she is constantly doing outlandish things like joining the local parade, embarassing her daughter to no end. While CeeCee loves her mother (and her mother was very loving before she became ill), she wants her mom to just go away.

Sadly, her mother does go away, by getting hit by an ice cream truck. Her father decides to send her to live with her great aunt Tootie Caldwell, who lives in Savannah.

From the moment she arrives in Savannah from Ohio, her life is transformed just as much as the climate she lives in has. And that is where my trouble with the book started. It seemed as if nearly everything in CeeCee's life is just too perfect. Her aunt is loving, the black housekeeper seems to be gruff but really isn't, CeeCee gets all new clothes and other nice things, and delights in meeting her great aunt's eccentric neighbors. (There have to be eccentric characters in a southern novel, otherwise it just isn't southern.)

Except for a terrifying robbery and a flashback about her mother's death, CeeCee could have stepped into a Danielle Steele novel. It's as if the author, having given CeeCee so much hardship and heartache in the first part of the book, is determined to make everything rainbows and roses for CeeCee in the second part. Having CeeCee's old neighbor lady end up moving from Ohio to Savannah to live with them was the straw that broke the camel's back for me.

However, I did enjoy CeeCee's character, her relationship with Housekeeper Oletta and her black friends, and the descriptions of life in the south. But again, there was that inkling of too much perfection, because not one single character complains about the intense heat of a Savannah summer.

THE DEBT TO PLEASURE

2010-04-23T13:00:00.000-07:00

I read "The Debt to Pleasure" for the April selection of the online book club conducted by Cornflower on her book blog (link on sidebar). I was very frustrated at the beginning of the book. Reading it felt like climbing a difficult mountain peak. Instead of stopping for rest though, I had to keep stopping to look up new words and obscure phrases and to catch my breath after slogging through untranslated passages in French and paragraphs- or pages-long philosophical treatises (and I consider myself to have quite a large vocabulary and am quite literate).

However, I kept on trudging along, one foot in front of the other, because I knew my fellow book club members were climbing away too, and I wasn't going to let them reach the top without me.

Then, my feelings turned toward frustration at having to read about a dreadful little man whose book on culinary reflections is supposedly comparable to "Brillat-Savarin's masterpiece "The Physiology of Taste". For one who supposedly loves food, narrator Tarquin Winot provides some truly distasteful descriptions of foods, including cheese as "the corpse of milk", matelote with its "disturbingly phallic and alive seeming eel," and a dish of cottage pie "steaming like fresh horse dung on a cold morning."

In setting out to share his "gastro-historico-psycho-autobiographico-anthropico-philosophical lucubrations", British-born, France-residing Winot reveals himself to be an insufferable, elitist, effete snob. He's an egomaniac, a narcissist. He's mean, nasty, supercilious, delusional and jealous. I found him so loathsome that I nearly quit reading the book. But then I began to get a clue that Winot was more, way more, than an intolerably smug foodie. Whereas earlier in the book I had marked lyrical passages on diverse subjects, I was instead marking passages illustrating Winot's ever increasing, ever more disturbing, apparently aberrant behavior.

I admit, sometimes I am slow on the uptake. It may have taken me a bit longer than other readers to figure out that this was a parody, and even longer to discover that the author, John Lanchester, was pulling my leg.

SPOILER ALERT: DON'T READ BEYOND HERE IF YOU DON'T WANT THE PLOT REVEALED.

For, as anyone who makes it to the top of the mountain (which became easier and more fun to climb the closer I got to the summit) learns, Winot is a sociopathic murderer who has dispensed of his many victims by such various means as gas explosions, pushing them in front of trains and (fittingly for him) poisoned mushrooms. He spares neither friend, family member or foe.

Near the end of the book, Mr. Winot takes pains to point out that he has never once used the word "delicious" to describe any of the foods in his book. But I will certainly use the words delicious, delectable and savory for Lanchester's dark, clever send up.

To read what other book club readers had to say about "A Debt to Pleasure", read Cornflower's Book Blog on Saturday, April 24.

THE WEED THAT STRINGS THE HANGMAN'S BAG

2010-04-21T11:22:00.000-07:00

"The Weed That Strings The Hangman's Bag" is the second in Alan Bradley's Flavia deLuce mysteries. I reviewed the first book in the series, "The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie" here: http://juliesbookshelf.blogspot.com/2010/01/sweetness-at-bottom-of-pie.html

In that review, I provided a lot of background information on this 11-year-old sleuth, her family and neighbors in the English countryside and village of Bishop's Lacey. In this book, Flavia has to figure out who killed beloved TV personality and puppeteer Rupert Porson, electrocuted as he puts on a puppet show. His presence in Bishop's Lacey, it turns out, is connected to a cold case, the hanging of a young boy, so Flavia ends up investigating both deaths. (The strange title of the book refers to a hanging in the poem "Sir Walter Raleigh to His Son.")

I was a tiny bit disappointed in "The Weed, etc." for several reasons:

1. I wanted to see more of the character of Nialla, Porson's "wife".
2. Several red herrings as to the murderer were tossed about, one pointing toward the vicar, which was too ridiculous to believe.
3. There wasn't as much interaction between Flavia and the local detective, Inspector Hewitt. In the first book it was fun to see the sparring between amateur and experienced detective.
4. At no time was Flavia in peril (which is a good thing if you are Flavia), as opposed to the nail-biting suspense caused by the threat to Flavia's life in Book 1.

Despite all this, it was still a very good book. As another reviewer put it, there is such period (1950s) detail and Flavia such an interesting character one can't help being intrigued. I will definitely look for the third book in the Flavia deLuce series.

AND FIVE BOOKS MORE

2010-03-27T14:22:00.000-07:00

After I finished reading "The Center of Everything", by Laura Moriarty, I realized that not a great deal happened in the book - not, at least, for those who want high drama, action, suspense, mystery and true love. And the book basically stops rather than coming to a clear-cut end. But I loved every minute of it. It is about a girl who basically has to "grow herself up". A blurb on the cover flap describes Evelyn Bucknow as endearing, and I totally agree. That's probably why I loved reading about Evelyn even when her life is pretty much a hamster wheel.

Evelyn lives with her hapless mother, Tina, in a dreary, low-rent apartment. Tina is not a bad mother but they seldom have enough to eat or decent clothes to wear, and Evelyn is teased at school. Tina's affair with the manager at the one job she manages to land has resulted in the birth of Evelyn's mentally handicapped little brother Samuel. Evelyn has a grandmother, Eileen, who loves them, but a grandfather, Joe, who calls Tina a whore for not having a husband. There's a sad-funny moment when a little girl hears Joe say "the whore's coming" and later innocently asks, "When's the horse coming?"

Grandma Eileen, however loving, is a fundamentalist Christian who has failed to keep Tina in the faith but is all to ready to indoctrinate Evelyn. Then there's Travis, a neighbor boy whom Evelyn has loved unrequitedly for a long time. Travis gets Evelyn's best friend Deena pregnant and marries her. If this all sounds utterly depressing to you, there are some redeeming, hope-bringing characters in the book, in the form of a couple of good teachers at the high school.

Events in Evelyn's life don't bring dramatic changes but do transform her in little ways. Tina finds a way to get through to little Samuel and becomes a hit at her new job at McDonald's. A schoolmate who has taunted and tormented Evelyn is killed in a tragic car crash. Protests over the teaching of evolution at the high school lessen Grandma Eileen's religious hold on Eileen. And even as Travis and Deena' marriage sours, Evelyn sadly comprehends that Travis will still always be lost to her. She eventually concludes that she has perhaps judged her mother, Travis and Deena too harshly.

A lot of the book is just about Evelyn's everyday life in her small Kansas town - hanging in Deena's room, walking along the highway strip, school days, stopping by the soda fountain - but it is in no way boring. The characters, especially Evelyn, are spot on and the conversations are real and natural. We leave Evelyn at the end of her senior year. She's a smart girl and one just knows she will end up far from her redneck beginnings. But she will not leave behind the wisdom and compassion she has learned along the way.

Truly Plaice is one of the strangest things the citizens of Aberdeen County, NY, have ever seen. She is bigger than any other woman and most of the men. She's not fat, she's a giant. Tiffany Baker, the author, has a doctor give Truly a diagnosis of acromegaly, but that's not quite right. Truly, in fact, exhibited the different condition of giantism at a very young age. Gigantism is sometimes equated with acromegaly, but more precisely, an excess of growth hormone leads to pituitary gigantism (vertical growth) if the epiphyseal (bone cartilage) plates have not yet closed, but it leads to acromegaly (lateral growth) if they have closed.

Either term is practically moot anyway, as Truly is not diagnosed until she's middle aged. As a child, she's never even seen by a doctor. I seem to have read a lot of books lately about downtrodden young girls/women, and I always find myself rooting for them, and loving a lot of them too. I truly loved Truly.

Even if she hadn't been a giant, she would have had so many obstacles to a happy, productive life. Her father blames Truly when her mother dies giving birth to her. After he dies Truly is sent to live with a hardscrabble backwoods family while her beautiful sister Serena Jane is adopted and lives like a princess. Her sister marries Dr. Robert Morgan, one of a long line of Dr. Robert Morgans to have treated the sick of Aberdeen County. But Serena dies, so Truly, a spinster, moves in to take care of Serena Jane's young son.

The relationship between Truly and Dr. Morgan is one of the strangest ever set down on paper. There is no love lost between them. Dr. Morgan is vile toward Truly, but he is the one to diagnose her and start her treatments. She ends up staying with him to the bitter end, even after a horrific secret about Serena is revealed. And it is while living in Dr. Morgan's house that Truly discovers a shadow book thought to be long lost. Created by Tabitha, the strange wife of the town's first Dr. Morgan, it sets Truly on a path to her own vocation after she figures out its clues.

Some reviewers have described Truly as witchy, and the book as being touched with magic. However, it is not magic that Truly discovers, but plain old scientific knowledge. Truly, however, must learn how to wisely use the powers her knowledge gives her. And there is no magic involved when Truly finds a man to care for her. For it is apparent that size doesn't matter where True-ly love is concerned.

I found this book for a really great price ($2.50) at a consignment shop. It was a trade paperback with endpapers (which always USED to say "Quality Book" to me). It was written by James Patterson, and I have read at least two fairly good mystery/suspense novels by him, "Kiss the Girls" and "Along Came A Spider" (both Alex Cross novels.) Also, the title, "Sundays at Tiffany's" spoke to me, having very fond memories of "Breakfast at Tiffany's", the movie and the book by Truman Capote.

Oh, my god. I am such a fool. I didn't have my glasses with me so I basically just skimmed the blurbs. If I could have read those lovely endpapers more closely I would have discovered that this book is about a woman named Jane who once had an invisible friend as a little girl and all of a sudden, 25 years later, she meets him again. She recognizes him, which she is not supposed to do (in the incredible world of invisible friends). He is a real, tangible presence. He can be seen, he can be felt, but he is not quite human. But he is becoming more and more human as he spends more time with Jane. And he is the handsomest, the smartest, the kindest man . . . and they fall in love. Oh Lord, let's stop here. Why did I bother finishing it?

Ben Givens is dying of colon cancer. A retired doctor, he knows full well the agony that faces him, and does not wish to go through it. A long-time hunter, he plans to kill himself but - to protect his family -disguise it as a hunting accident. So one morning in October, which he thinks is his last day on earth, he takes his two dogs and leaves his home in Seattle to travel to the apple country east of the mountains - his childhood home. The old saying that "the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley" certainly applies to Ben on this day. A car accident "derails" him not long after he starts out. It is just the first in a chain of events that lead him hither and yon across the Washington countryside.

Ben is banged up, without transportation, in pain from his cancer, tired, and dirty and dusty as a tramp. An encounter with a pack of coyote-hunting wolfhounds leaves one of his dogs dead and another severely injured. His own physical struggles, his efforts to find a vet for the dog, obtaining medical assistance for a migrant worker with TB and helping to birth a baby all certainly do stand in the way of his original plan. Will he still carry it out? You have to read the book to find out. I was hesitant to start "East of the Mountains", thinking it might be a depressing book, but it turns out not to be. I particularly enjoyed Guterson's description of Washington's interior, it being less well known than Seattle and other points on the coast. My husband is and avid hunter and outdoorsman and I think the book would have great appeal to him as well.

I don't know about you readers, but I have really stayed away from those Monster parodies by "Jane Austen and Ben H. Winters" or "Jane Austen and Steve Hockensmith" ("Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" and "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies", respectively). I don't think I could even stand to own, much less read a copy, with their horrendous covers. So when I chanced upon a book called "The Pale Blue Eye" by Louis Bayard at a thrift shop, I was hesitant. In this book, no less a literary personage than Edgar Allan Poe is called upon to help solve a murder mystery. I was relieved to find that although there are ghoulish details, the novel in the main is a great detective story worthy of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Poe himself.

The novel combines truth and fiction. Poe was actually a cadet at West Point Academy in 1830-1831. However, no cadet was murdered and had his heart torn out during Poe's time at the academy. After the first murder occurs, retired New York City detective Gus Landor, living nearby, is called in to help solve the crime (eventually crimes). He is captivated by Poe's personality and intelligence and enlists him in the search for the murderer.

More than that, I will not say. However, I will say this: If you think you have solved the mystery at some point during the book, I would wager that you have not. And if you did, you are far, far smarter than I.

"NO EASY ROAD"

2010-03-27T08:15:00.000-07:00

This past winter I wrote a post about Scottish Tinkers and Travellers on my regular blog, "Celtic Lady". It led me to read two books by women who wrote about their experiences as tinker children. I reviewed Jess Smith's "Jessie's Journey" on Feb. 1 and Betsy Whyte's "The Yellow on the Broom" on Feb. 22.

My post and reviews garnered me an appreciative note from Jess Smith. Betsy Whyte is long gone, but I did hear from her great niece, Patsy Whyte, who wrote to thank me for bringing the plight of Scottish Highland Travellers to the forefront. Sadly, says Patsy, "Travellers in Scotland still have a really tough time. Discrimination is as bad as it ever was. Everywhere else, things seem to have moved forward - but not in Scotland."

Patsy and I have exchanged several e-mails and she gave me permission to print anything she wrote, so here is an excerpt from one of her "letters":

"Hi Julie,

"Many thanks for adding my comment to your blog and for your interest in Scottish travellers. As I relate in my book, I was born in a disused army barracks, condemned as unfit for human habitation, which was taken over by the city authorities in Aberdeen." (My note: that's Aberdeen, Scotland, not Aberdeen, SD.)

"My mum and dad and seven children, including me, lived in two damp rooms which had neither hot water or electricity. All of us children slept in the same double bed! My dad turned his hand at anything to earn some money. Sometimes he and mum would go hawking around the doors, selling old clothes and anything else they picked up in the market in the Castlegate.

"When spring arrived, marked by the yellow on the broom, we all piled on the back of a horse and cart and travelled the countryside for weeks on end. We'd meet up with other travellers on the road or at the traditional camping grounds, exchanging news and telling stories and singing songs around the camp fire.

"Of course, I was much too young to remember any of that . . .

"When the summer was over, we returned to the miserable conditions of the army barracks. I fell ill and the day I was taken into hospital was the last day we would ever spend together as a family."

Like Jessie and Betsy, Patsy is a wonderful writer, and has set down her story up to age 16 in her first book, "No Easy Road", which she sent me. "In a sense," she told me, "my book hopefully takes over where my great aunt's book leaves off."

Jessie and Betsy, like all HIghland Travellers, were cruelly treated and discriminated against, but they also had happy times on the road. However, Patsy had very little of the joy of a Traveller child and all of the grief, heartache, abuse and neglect. Her book is almost too painful to get through. My heart went out to her time and time again.

The day that Patsy was torn from her family, she was just 19 months old. She was almost adopted from her first residence, the not-too-bad Airyhall, but that fell through and she was transferred to be "brought up" in the Castlegate Children's Home in Aberdeen. In a world of cruel people, Castlegate's house mother seems to be among the cruelest. One of the saddest incidents was when pretty little Patsy was chosen to switch on the city of Edinburgh's Christmas lights. She was a princess for a night, with a beauty shop hairdo and wearing a beautiful dress and cloak purchased by the house mother. After the ceremony, the housemother strips Patsy's lovely clothes away from her and they are never seen again.

School was just as bad as the home, as was the embarrassment of encounters with her down and out mother, who lived nearby. She had only intermittent contact with her siblings, some of whom moved in and out of the same children's home. Eventually, she leaves the place at age 15, but is thrust from the frying pan into the fire, into the network of social services and hostels. (Don't think of hostels as being friendly youth hotels.)

Finally, she empancipates herself from social service workers, who have betrayed her at every turn. But even then, Patsy falters. She was given some fine chances at employment but messes them up. She has an abusive boyfriend (whose first act is to rape her), she is nearly pimped out as a prostitute and has brushes with the law. But she does rebound from each experience and she does learn from them. I really couldn't fault her actions given the circumstances of her hard life.

"No Easy Road" is a testament to the powers of endurance and survival. I honestly don't think I could have endured some of the experiences she lived through.

Patsy now lives in a town called Glenrothes near Edinburgh and has five grown children. I asked her about her life now and she replied: "Most of my time is taken up with trying to push my book. I am also working hard on a second book, taking my life forward from age 16."

I'm anticipating Patsy's second book to see what else she had to overcome. For, as she says, "It took another eight years or so for my life to eventually settle down into some kind of normality."

I haven't yet mentioned the fascinating psychic experiences Patsy relates in "No Easy Road": Seeing a silent lady every day in the orphanage dining room (who turns out to be the ghost of her grandmother), being visited in bed by a little girl who "went to buy sweeties and was murdered", a rescue from near rape by a man who then mysteriously disappears, and an "imaginary" friend, a young boy who escorts her to and from school every day. She was also once rescued from drowning by what I would call an angelic presence. Patsy says her follow-up book will include further psychic experiences, which became more and more a part of her life.

FIVE MORE BOOKS

2010-03-15T17:52:00.000-07:00

I recently read somewhere that bloggers shouldn't be allowed to review books. I was aghast! Anyone can review a book. They may not review it well, but they are certainly allowed to review it. When I was a newspaper reporter I reviewed books both for my gardening column and my religion beat, and my editors certainly never told me I didn't know how to review a book, so I guess I will continue to do so. However, I have gotten behind on reviewing and am going to combine five short book reviews into one post.

"SECRETS OF EDEN" by Chris Bohjalian

I first read Chris Bohjalian when Oprah's book club featured "The Midwife." I knew then that I would enjoy further books by him. I hate to say it after publishing that cartoon at the top of this post, but I did read it in one sitting. The crux of the story is that a parishioner of Rev. Stephen Drew is murdered on the same day that he baptizes her. At first it seems cut and dried that Alice Hayward's husband George has strangled her in one of his furious rages and then killed himself. Immediately after this, Stephen suffers a crisis of faith and leaves his parish. But all too soon Stephen is being considered a suspect in the deaths. I'm not writing a lot about the book here because I don't want to give anything away. There are no secrets in Eden, but there is one in this small Vermont town. I will certainly not reveal what the secret is, but I hope that it is one that stayed buried forever.

"THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO"

by Stieg Larsson

I may not have read "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" in one sitting but it did take me only two days to get through the 465-page book. Mikael Blomkvist is a Swedish financial journalist who has been convicted of libel. Being at loose ends, he accepts the one-year job of ostensibly writing the history of the famous Swedish industrialist family The Vangers. He soon learns that the true assignment is to find out who killed 16-year old Harriet Vanger. If the focus of the book had been on Blomkvist I doubt I would have liked the book that much. Frankly, he is not that likeable a person. But enter the person of Lisbeth Sanders, a computer hacker who works for a private eye. Hired at first to check out Blomkvist, Lisbeth eventually joins him on his quest.

Lisbeth is unlike any other mystery novel heroine you will ever meet. She is "the girl with the dragon tattoo". She also has several facial piercings, violently-colored hair, kooky clothes and a condition that appears to be something like Asperger's Syndrome. And I loved her! A person who has often felt powerless in my life, I would love to exert revenge like she can. Larssen featured her in at least two-more novels before he died. I have "The Girl Who Played With Fire" on reserve at the library and "The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest" comes out in the U.S. in May.

"HOWARDS END IS ON THE LANDING"

by Susan Hill

"Howards End is on the Landing" is the story of how Susan Hill devoted one year to reading only the books she had in her home - books that she had read and loved, books that she had never read: "I wanted to repossess my books, to explore what I had accumulated over a lifetime of reading, to map this house of many volumes. There are enough here to instruct, divert, entertain, amaze, amuse, edify, improve and enrich me for far longer than a year and every one of them deserves to be taken down, dusted off, open and read. A book which is left on a shelf is a dead thing but is also a chrysalis, an inanimate object packed with potential to burst into new life."

In the world of literary lists there is actually a category called "Books About Books" and this is a most delightful addition to the list. I thought Hill might have been a bit of a book snob but this turned out not to be true. I was especially thrilled to find out that she too thinks Jane Austen is boring! One small flaw for me as an American is that Hill listed so many books by British authors I had never heard of. Hill, who has written 37 books, is another British author I had not heard of. Since she is famous over there, and since her novels have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and have won the Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Award, I am going to rectify my ignorance and seek out her books.

"SOPHIE'S CHOICE" by William Styron

There is no need to review "Sophie's Choice". It's a classic. I had seen the movie but had never read the book until this past weekend. After seeing the movie I thought I knew what Sophie's choice was, but now I think the actual choice was something different. As much as I liked the book, I do think Styron could have used some judicious editing. The book could have been trimmed in parts, and his language could have been edited as well. He always chose the more convoluted, esoteric word when a much simpler word would have sufficed.

"WATERWOMAN" by Lenore Hart

I picked up "Waterwoman" at a thrift shop and never even noticed that the book, an advance reading copy, was signed by the author. Having finished the book, I am thrilled that Lenore Hart inscribed her name in it. It is lovely and lyrical, but I don't think it made a splash in the literary world (it was published in 2002). However, I certainly treasure the book and look forward to finding more books from Hart. The waterwoman of the title is Annie Revels, who follows her father's calling as a fisherman off the barrier islands of Virginia. Her people might be described as backwoods except that they are not of the woods but the shore, so I will call them "backwater people."

"Waterwoman" is similar in tone to the books of Pat Conroy and Anne Rivers Siddons in their passion for the outer banks and low country of North and South Carolina. Annie, forced by her work to be masculine in appearance, is surprised and amazed when Nathan Combs shows an interest in her. Her happiness is short-lived, however, as her sister Rebecca steals him away. The themes of choice and fate are explored in a subtlely-told and touching story that culminates in a terrible storm, "The Great Nor'easter of 1920".

"HOTEL ON THE CORNER OF BITTER AND SWEET"

2010-03-04T12:10:00.000-08:00

I borrowed "Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet" from the library after reading about it on another book blog. But I think that I would have picked it up just for the title alone. Because don't we all live on the corner of bitter and sweet? And don't we all relate to others experiencing those feelings?

"Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet" is an excellent title for this novel. It alludes to an actual hotel, the Panama, which plays an important part in the book. The story alternates between 1942 and 1986. Throughout most of the book, the 1942 chapters melt sweetly on the tongue while the 1986 chapters are tinged with not a little bitterness. The flavors coalesce at the end and, taken all together, they make for a fine book.

The protagonist of the book is Henry Lee, who is 12 years old in 1942. It is wartime, and although he is Chinese American, he is often mistaken for the hated Japanese. His father makes him wear an "I am Chinese" button, but this does not prevent him from being taunted by fellow students at the mostly-white school he attends.

A scholarship student, Henry works in the school cafeteria at lunchtime. There, he meets another scholarship student, a girl he immediately likes. Hearing her name as Kay, he thinks she is Chinese, and is shocked to learn that her name is actually Keiko Okabe, a Japanese name! (Although Keiko insists that she and Henry are neither Chinese nor Japanese, but American.) Unfortunately, Henry's father is rabidly anti-Japanese, so this friendship has to be hidden from his parents.

That Henry and Keiko fall in love will be no surprise to readers. But the author doesn't rush things. His portrayal of their budding friendship is tender and endearing to behold. Also wonderful to "behold" are the wartime scenes of Seattle, with its busy seaport, smoky jazz joints, bustling Chinatown and thriving Japantown. Japantown, especially, is shown through a golden filter of memory, because it no longer exists.

Because of the war, Japantown is slowly but surely erased, and because of war, the two friends are separated. Keiko and her family, like the rest of the Japanese people on the West Coast, are taken away to internment camps.

I knew about Japanese internment during the war, but I did not realize what it meant to these loyal American citizens after the war, returning to places that no longer existed, their homes torn down, their possessions gone, their savings stolen, their occupations and businesses wiped out.

At first I did not care for a plot twist that alienates Henry from Keiko, a contrivance that has been used at least as back as far as R. D. Blackmore's 1869 novel "Lorna Doone". However, I decided that given Henry's father's anti-Japanese sentiment and the power he held in his neighborhood, it turns out to be very plausible and effective.

I was a bit upset that the author portrays the Henry of 1986 as acting like an older man, although he is only 56 years old. I caught myself thinking several times that he must be in his 70s at least. But that is a minor irritation. Overall, I thought this was a wonderful book, whether we were in the Seattle of 1942 or the Seattle of 1986, when Henry sets out to find a memento of great sentimental value to himself and Keiko in the Panama.

Along the way, Henry comes to understand his father's motives, and Henry's 20-something, modern son comes to see his dad in a new light.

I mentioned in the beginning that I buy some books, like "Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet", because of their titles. Some I buy because of their covers, some because they've been recommended to me, some because they are on the bestseller list, some because I've read or wanted to read the author. With "Bitter and Sweet" I didn't know anything about the author until I got to the back end page.

To my surprise, although named Jamie Ford, the author is (at least part) Chinese. He is the great-grandson of Nevada mining pioneer Min Chung who emigrated from China to San Francisco, where he adopted his Western name. I look forward to more books by Ford.

"THE YELLOW-LIGHTED BOOKSHOP"

2010-03-01T12:05:00.000-08:00

I'm glad I borrowed "The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop" from the library instead of buying it. I was that disappointed. I guess I should not blame the author Lewis Buzbee, for I borrowed it on the recommendation of a friend without knowing a lot about it. Still, though, I can't be blamed for thinking it was about one particular bookshop when I read the cover blurb "a memoir, a history".

It is not. There is no actual place called "The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop". It's just a place in Buzbee's imagination, an amalgam of all the comfortable and inviting bookshops he's loved, with warm, welcoming yellow light pooling through the windows.

There were some things I liked about the book and I found myself marking a lot of passages at the beginning, and then hardly any as the book became a compendium facts about the bookselling business, publishing, paper making, book making and even the world's first libraries and booksellers (the latter usually of dubious character). Don't get me wrong - if facts about books are what you're searching for, then "The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop" would be a good place to find them.

Back to the things I liked about the book. They include Buzbee's description of the ideal time to be in a bookstore: "November, a dark, rainy Tuesday, late afternoon . . . The shortened light of the afternoon and the idleness and hush of the hour gather everything close, the shelves of the books and the few other customers who graze head-bent in the narrow aisles."

Having read this book, I feel absolved of the guilt I have felt about whiling away the hours in a bookstore, reading magazines, paging through books, even reading a few chapters. "Imagine going into a department store trying on a new jacket and walking around for half an hour, maybe coming back the following Wednesday, to try it on again, with no real intention of buying it. Go into a pizzeria and see if you might sample a slice; you're pretty hungry so you taste a bit of the pepperoni, the sausage, the artichoke and pineapple, and they're delicious but not quite what you're looking for that particular day. In other retail shops, the clerks and management are much less forgiving of those customers who would consume without paying."

In contrast, says Buzbee, the extended time spent in a bookstore is "allowable leisure". Time may be money in the rest of the world, he says, "but not in the bookstore. There's little money here, so we can all take our time."

I like the idea of browsing in a bookstore as "being alone among others". I love the name he gave to the fever that consumes me, him and so many other people. It's called book lust. "For those who are afflicted with book lust, those for whom reading is more than information or escape, the road to our passions is quite simple, paved merely by the presence of printed matter. It's a common story; fill in your own blanks: I was __ years old when I happened on a novel called _____________ and within six months I had read every other book by the writer known as ______________." (For Buzbee, those answers were 15, "The Grapes of Wrath", John Steinbeck. For me, the answers would be 15, "Rebecca", Daphne Du Maurier.)

In reading this book, I shared with Buzbee his delight in finding a new volume to take home, even in a bookshop he haunts almost daily. I enjoyed his reminiscences of the times he spent as a book seller in several independent California bookshops, and as a publisher's sales rep.

I was surprised and pleased that Buzbee is not of the opinion that chain bookstores are "evil ogres", rather, that they "have brought a greater selection of books to more people than independents could have." He also delivers the good news that the independents' share of the market has leveled to about 15% and that the remaining independents are stronger than ever. "Every bookstore," says Buzbee, "from the most opulent Parisian emporium to the anonymous strip mall in Tucson, offers its own surprises."

Considering how much reading I have been doing this winter, I was gratified to learn that "The actual physical movement of scanning the pages from left to right . . . stimulates and conditions the brain, a Stairmaster of the mind."

Toward the end of the book, Buzbee discusses some of his favorite bookstores, including "City Lights Bookstore" in San Francisco, famous for its publication of Alan Ginsburg's "Howl" and as a meeting place for the Beat poets.

Buzbee concludes that books and bookstores are not dead yet. However, as the book was written in 2006 (with an afterward added for the 2008 paperback addition), his statistics on e-books are already out of date. PS - I love this paperback edition. Obviously, Buzbee had a hand in choosing it, for it has end papers, highly prized but seldom seen in paperbacks.

"Take someone who likes to read; give her a comfy place to do so and ample time for doing it; add one good book, and then more; stand back."

~ Lewis Buzbee, "The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop".

"THE SWAN THIEVES"

2010-03-01T10:01:00.000-08:00

I had read Elizabeth Kostova's "The Historian" a couple of years ago and really liked it. I like "The Swan Thieves" even better. I found it to be more accessible than "The Historian" (less difficult to follow). At 561 pages in the hardcover edition, it may seem a bit daunting at first, but I hungrily devoured it in two days. Thank you, Little Brown and Company, for publishing a book in a bit larger print for us older readers. (And this was not a large-print edition.)

I am probably one of the few readers who did not already know or figure out right away that "The Swan Thieves" was, in addition to the book's title, the title of a painting. Duh! But once I did, I soon figured out what it was the swan thieves stole. I discovered it soon enough to be smug about it but not so soon that it spoiled the read for me.

Washington DC psychiatrist Andrew Marlowe is called in to treat a patient who has attempted to slash a painting at the National Gallery of Art. The work of art Robert Oliver tried to destroy with a knife is '"Leda (Leda vaincue par le Cygne)", painted by Frenchman Gilbert Thomas in 1879. "Leda" is Gilbert's interpretation of the famous myth of the rape of Leda by Zeus in the form of a swan. Perhaps it was my concentration on the swan in "Leda" that made me fail to ponder the title "The Swan Thieves."

Marlowe feels he must discover why Oliver felt such rage against the painting. There is one huge problem, however. Oliver, though stabilized and on meds, refuses to talk. At all. Feeling it is imperative for Oliver's treatment, Marlowe sets out to interview the people in his life, beginning with Kate Oliver, Robert's ex-wife. He also meets Mary, a former lover of Robert's, and travels to Mexico and Paris to talk with art collectors.

Marlowe also must discover why Oliver is in possession of original letters from French painter Beatrice de Clerval to her husband's uncle, Olivier Vignot, also a renowned painter. These letters are interspersed throughout the book, giving us a glimpse of Parisian life at the end of the 19th Century and the burgeoning Impressionist movement.

There is also a great deal of information on Marlowe, both past and present. One may wonder why Kostova has devoted so much time both to Marlowe's personal life and to the letters, but all questions are eventually answered and these loose ends will be tied up, very neatly and satisfactorily, by the end of the book.

Kostova has done a wonderful job of combining past and present. Her descriptions of paintings are exquisite, and her characters are full-dimensional and believable, be they 21st Century wife and mother Kate Oliver or Fin de Siecle Parisian lady Beatrice de Clerval. Kostova is also excellent in portraying her male characters, including tortured artist Robert Oliver. Kudos to her for making Marlowe the protagonist. Instead of a character who might have been just a clinical, impartial observer, Marlowe is engaged and engaging as he strives to help Robert and, in doing so, finds love.

"REMARKABLE CREATURES"

2010-02-24T13:05:00.000-08:00

I had been waiting to read Tracy Chevalier's new book, "Remarkable Creatures", and I was not disappointed. I have read everything Chevalier has written and I don't think she can write a bad book. (Her previous works are "Girl With A Pearl Earring", "Burning Bright", "The Virgin Blue", "The Lady and the Unicorn" and "Falling Angels".)

The title "Remarkable Creatures" could refer to Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot, or it could mean the creatures they hunted - the fossilized remains of prehistoric animals. I knew little about the book except that it featured two women friends who were fossil hunters. I visualized them as being scientists in the Victorian Era (the book actually begins earlier, in 1805). I did not realize that they would come from two different social classes and that they were untrained and, in the case of Mary, virtually unschooled (though self-taught and very knowledgeable in their fields).

Elizabeth Philpot and her two sisters, all spinsters, are forced to move to Lyme Regis from their comfortable home in London after their brother inherits the house and takes a wife. In this seaside town in southwest England, sister Louise takes up gardening and sister Margaret joins the social life of the town. Elizabeth, well-educated and curious about the natural world, determines that she must have some pastime of her own and takes up fossil hunting, concentrating on fish fossils.

While the Philpot sisters are able to get by on their 150 pounds a year allowance, Mary and her family live in poverty. They are shunned because of their low economic status and for being religious Dissenters. Father Richard is a cabinet maker and also hunts fossils, which the family sells at their tiny shop. Mary often goes with her father to hunt fossils. After his death, Mary, only 11 years old, is soon out alone on the beaches and cliffs in all weathers, looking for ammonites, belemnites, bezoar stones, vertebrates (which she calls verteberries) and other ancient remains to sell to tourists. Her cheeks are whipped by the wind, her fingernails are full of the blue clay of the region and her hands are raw and chapped, but Mary is compelled by more than the need to make money for her family. She has a true passion for her "curies" (curiosities).

As a small child, Mary was struck by lightning. For years afterward members of her community would attribute the child's curiosity, intelligence, and lively personality to the incident. Although only 15-months old, Mary remembers being struck, and it makes her feel special. "I feel an echo of that lightning each time I find a fossil, a little jolt that says, 'Yes, Mary Anning, you are different from all the rocks on the beach.' That is why I am a hunter: to feel that bolt of lightning, and that difference, every day."

Mary and Elizabeth meet each other while they are out hunting for fossils. Although separated in age by almost 20 years, they form a deep bond as they scour the sands and cliffs. While Elizabeth is a keen observer in her own right, it is Mary who has the true gift for making rare finds.

Everything changes when Mary's brother finds the giant head of what they and the townspeople call a crocodile. Mary later finds the rest of the body, causing the eyes of fossil collectors everywhere to be focused on Lyme Regis. Eventually, Mary will uncover several other splendid specimens of the "crocs" (which will come to be called ichthyosaurs) and she also finds the skeletons of giant "turtles" (plesiosaurs).

"Finding that crocodile changed everything", says Mary. "Sometimes I try to imagine my life without those big bold beasts hidden in the cliffs and ledges. If all I ever found were ammos and bellies and lilies and gryphies, my life would have been as piddling as those curies, with no lightning to turn me inside out and give me joy and pain at the same time.

"It weren't just the money from selling the croc that changed things. It was knowing there was something to hunt for and I was better at finding it than most - this was what was different. I could look ahead now and see - not random rocks thrown togeter, but a pattern forming of what my life could be."

As young, poor FEMALE, Mary's important scientific finds are claimed by others, her family is underpaid or totally ripped off financially, and her skills are discredited. Mary, they say, is a mere finder of fossils for the learned professors and geologists, nothing more. It's as if the world cannot believe that a mere working class girl could be capable of such achievements, that she could never be entitled to call herself a paleontologist.

"Remarkable Creatures" is based on the true stories of Mary Anning and Elizabeth Philpot. Later in life, the real Mary does finally receive due credit and recognition for her immense knowledge of fossils. (Although it's not mentioned in the book, Mary was also the first person in Britain to find the fossilized remains of a pterosaur, or dimorphodon, of the Early Jurassic Period).

Chevalier has often taken famous historical figures and woven them into her novels, such as Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer in "Girl With A Pearl Earring" and English poet William Blake in "Burning Bright". In these books, the renowned figures have had major or minor roles. This time, Chevalier has basically written what I will call a "fictionalized biography" of Mary and, to some extent, Elizabeth. Events in the book closely parallel those in their real lives.

Having known nothing about Anning or Philpot, I did some research and was fascinated to learn about their contributions to science. (In actuality, all three Philpot sisters were fossil collectors, but it was Elizabeth who corresponded with leading scientists. Their extensive and meticulously-labeled fossil collection was used for research by many geologists.) I learned that the hanging cliffs surrounding Lyme Regis - part of a geological formation called the Blue Lias - are among the richest fossil locations in Britain. This formation consists of alternating layers of limestone and shale, laid down as sediment on a shallow marine bed early in what would come to be called the Jurassic Period (about 210-195 million years ago).

Chevalier turns what might have been a dry story of interest only to palentologists into a highly-readable book that has at its heart the development of a great friendship between a genteel lady and a working class girl. This friendship is sorely tested and a years-long rift develops between the two. But despite this, Elizabeth helps Mary receive the recognition she so richly deserves.

Mary has many other crosses to bear, including ongoing, grinding poverty, the sullying of her reputation, falling in love with a dishonest man and nearly dying in a landslip (landslide). Indeed, fossil hunting on the notoriously unstable cliffs and rising tides at Lyme Regis was extremely dangerous. But landslips were also a godsend to collectors, because they uncovered new fossils.

In addition to compelling characters, a vivid slice of life of coastal Dorset, well-described passages on fossil hunting and preservation, Chevalier provides a lot of food for thought in her characters' discussions of religion versus science. People of that time were told that the earth was only 6,000 years old. Hadn't famed cleric Bishop James Ussher decreed that God had created Heaven and Earth precisely on the night preceding Oct. 23, 4004 BC? Preachers were decrying the theory of evolution, and the concept of extinction, arguing that the almighty God could not have eliminated a creature of his own creation.

Imagine then, a young, unstudied, poor, rural girl like Mary trying to wrap her head around the fact that the 17-foot "monster" and other creatures she had found were not giant crocodiles or turtles but different species entirely, ones that no longer walked earth but rather existed millions of years ago. In Mary, Elizabeth and the scientists who flocked to Lyme Regis, Chevalier has created a microcosm of a fascinating time in the 19th century when fossil hunting evolved from mere hobby to the science of paleontology.

"SOUTH OF REASON"

2010-02-22T16:35:00.000-08:00

I absolutely loved "South of Reason" by Cindy Eppes. Not only do I love finding wonderful new (to me) authors, but I just love finding good books at thrift shops ($1.50 for this one). I have great affection for smart, plucky pre-teen or teenage protagonists. I like them even better if they're Southern. Kayla Sanders is both.

Thirteen-year-old Kayla and her family have just moved to Rosalita, TX, as the book begins. On the very first day, she meets next-door neighbor Lou Jean Perry, who will become a prime adult role model in her life. She also meets Lou Jean's son Charles Dale Perry, who quickly becomes her best friend.

On the surface it would seem to be an idyllic summer for Kayla, with warming and welcoming Lou Jean teaching her to can fruits and vegetables and put up pickles, catching up with her beloved, wise Grandmother Rose, hanging out with Charles Dale, taking a trip to Mexico with Rose and her friend Carmen. But Kayla soon realizes there are enormous reasons why her mom and dad left East Texas and came back to Rosalita, their hometown, and why they moved in right next door to the big Spanish house owned by Lou Jean, a widow whose husband was killed in Vietnam. Old secrets come to light like the old photographs Kayla finds of her parents' and Lou Jean's high school days.

Over a brief few months, Kayla has to face many stunning revelations and some overwhelming changes in her family. She puzzles over why her normally conservative mother starts wearing sundresses and getting youthful haircuts, and why her mother is so taken with Charles Dale but dislikes Lou Jean. She finds out that Lou Jean's fun loving, cheerful nature is a facade for some serious mental problems. And she discovers that Charles Dale is way more to her than a best friend.

Kayla reacts to these discoveries in the way a tender young teen full of unfamiliar emotions might: in a variety of cascading feelings. She is shocked and saddened. She is torn asunder and feels betrayed. But she also finds wisdom, maturity, acceptance and overwhelming love.

Settling in to read "South of Reason" is to slide into the river for a cool swim on a hot day. There's just something about the Southern landscape. You have mockingbirds and frozen Milky Ways, swimming holes and honeysuckle, fried chicken and First Baptist ladies' prayer circles, girls wearing overalls and people saying "y'all". I don't think this particular book mentions moon pies and RC Cola, but it might as well have.

This book reminds me of many other Southern books and characters, including Scout Finch in "To Kill A Mockingbird", Jeannette Wall's true story "The Glass Castle", Ruth Ann Boatwright in "Bastard out of Carolina" and Tessa Lee in "Firefly Cloak". All are survivors, and we find ourselves rooting for them all the way.

"THE YELLOW ON THE BROOM"

2010-02-22T12:25:00.000-08:00

I'm not at all sure how to proceed with this review. I loved Betsy Whyte's "The Yellow on the Broom," about a nomadic group of people known as "Scottish Travellers" (British spelling). Scottish Highland Travellers were the subject of a post I wrote a short time ago on my regular (not book) blog, Celtic Lady.

The trouble is, I reviewed a book on the same subject just a few weeks ago. My research into the Scottish Highland Travellers, or Tinkers, as they are pejoratively called, led me to buy both Betsy's book and "Jessie's Journey: Autobiography of a Traveller Girl" by Jess Smith at the same time. In reviewing "Jessie's Journey", I gave background information on the travellers and addressed the terrible discrimination that has been directed against them.

There are differences between the two books, of course. Jessie (maiden name Riley) traveled with her parents and her seven sisters in an old blue bus in the 1960s. Betsy's story takes place in an earlier era - the 1930s. She and her family (the Townsleys) traveled in the more traditional way, with a pony and cart. They slept in bow tents formed by fabric draped over bent willow sticks.

Even though they had the reputation of being dirty, lazy, thieving Gypsies, Betsy's family, like Jessie's, were honest people who worked for their living. They picked berries, worked on farms and made willow and wire baskets for sale. Whyte's father was also a pearl fisherman.

Betsy would often go with her mother, Maggie, as they bartered or asked for food, or for rags to sell. Maggie sometimes did a bit of fortune telling as well, for she had The Gift of second sight. In the book we see signs that Betsy too, had The Gift.

Like most traveller families, Betsy's was very close knit and they met up with their kinsmen on the road as often as possible. For relaxation in the evenings, they played and sang old Scottish tunes carried along through the centuries by oral tradition. One of my favorite chapters in the book is when Betsy and her dad are invited to play their pipes at the farm home of Cameron Cameron, son of a Scottish laird. Cameron was a bit mad, convinced that Bonnie Prince Charlie could still be found roaming the local glen, but he and his family were very kind to the Townsleys and they returned to work at the farm for several seasons.

Another name for travellers was The Summer People. Although traveller children were required to attend 200 half days of school, Betsy's family would try to get on the road as early as possible in the spring. When Maggie complained about having to live in a house in the winter ("that dirty wee dark hole"), Betsy's father would say, "Never mind, Maggie. I'll take you away when the yellow's on the broom." (Broom is a shrub that was covered in profuse golden-yellow flowers in the spring.)

One spring the family stayed extra long in town because the headmaster had convinced them that Betsy, an excellent student, deserved to take her qualifying exams for secondary school. She took them and won a bursary (scholarship). But bright as she was, Betsy hated school because of the bullying she received from the other students. One one especially sad occasion, she was accused of stealing. A10-pound note had been planted in her coat pocket, but Betsy knew she could not convince anyone of her innocence, so the family fled town in the middle of the night.

Betsy is an excellent storyteller and I thoroughly enjoyed her descriptions of traveller life and her use of cant, the secret traveller language. While many of Betsy's stories paralleled Jessie's accounts, Betsy addresses a couple of subjects that were either only touched on or not mentioned in "Jessie's Journey." In doing research on the travellers I had learned that they were deathly afraid of doctors and hospitals, because they believed they could be snatched up and murdered so their bodies could be used in anatomy schools. This seemed rather far fetched to me when I read it, but Betsy describes that very fear.

I was especially moved by Betsy's recounting of the many ways travellers expressed their generosity. Having little and wanting little, their greatest pleasure in life was giving. She also lauded the country people for being good to the travellers. "There were hundreds of travellers who would never have survived but for the generous goodness of the warm-hearted Scottish people." This went on, she writes, up until the time the Welfare State came into being.

For as much as the travellers had previously experienced cruelty, intolerance, injustice and prejudice, life was in many ways wonderful for them as they enjoyed the beauty of nature and the freedom of the road. The government made their lives worse, says Betsy. "This Welfare State - which was meant to help people - brought much suffering, confusion, and unhappiness to the travelers." Travellers especially hated being told what to do. The government forced them to live in houses, like caged birds. Although they were given jobs, they hated being tied down to a monotonous routine. "It was not laziness", writes Betsy. "Most travellers are good workers. It was the compulsion that irked them."

After I wrote about the tinkers and travellers in my regular blog, I was contacted by Patsy Whyte, Betsy's great niece. Patsy has an even more terrible story to tell: she lived all of the horrors of the Welfare State and very few if any of the delights of the vanishing traveller way of life. I hope to obtain a copy of her book, "No Easy Road."

"LYDIA CASSATT READING THE MORNING PAPERS"

2010-02-20T13:19:00.000-08:00

I found this little gem of a hardcover book for a dollar at a local thrift shop. I say little, because it is just 5 1/2 inches by 7 1/2 inches. I had better keep this review short too, or it will be longer than the book's 162 pages! But small and short as it is, it is by no means a "fluff" book.

Harriet Scott Chessman's "Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Papers" is centered around five paintings by American Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt. Her sister, Lydia, is the model in all of these paintings. (Each painting is reproduced as a full-page plate.)

When the book opens in Paris in 1878, Lydia and Mary are living with their mother, father and sister in a Paris apartment. The year before, 41-year-old Lydia had been diagnosed with Bright's Disease, a serious affliction which we now call nephritis. Always weak and pale, Lydia sometimes spends days or weeks unable to leave her bed. But when she is better she walks, with much difficulty, the short distance to Mary's studio.

In contrast, Mary (called May by her family) is robust, vibrant, brimming with life. Her works are displayed in the Impressionist Exhibition and they are selling well. She has a bustling social life with many friends, and is beginning a romance with another famous painter, Edgar Degas. At first Lydia is wary of Degas and jealous of his relationship with Mary, but a companionship builds between her and Edgar. Their relationship is not romantic, but one of deep understanding.

Lydia is fully aware of her impending death, as related in this passage: "And here is May, her life in full flush, a success now, and healthy, and boldly independent. And she will continue, for years and years, after I'm no longer here. She'll ride her horse in the Bois de Boulogne, she'll paint and visit galleries and go to the Opera and to Versailles, and in the summer she'll come back to Marly, or she'll go to the Mediterranean and feel the breezes, watch the water turn color through a whole day, a whole week, and she'll have her friends, and more than friends, for after Edgar Degas, she may love someone else, and embrace him in another garden, and even if I am a thought in her mind, a sadness, she will have happiness too. Her days glitter, round and new, like gold coins in a huge jar, filled almost to the brim, her only worry how to spend them."

The book is filled with other poignant scenes, but also with lovely, lyrical depictions of life as noted by Lydia, its keen observer rather than its participant. Looking out her apartment window, Lydia sees this: "Over the tops of the apartments across from us, I see the white and cream buildings scrambling up the hill of Montmartre, among trees and gardens. Looking down to the Avenue of Trudaine, I see a girl in a royal blue coat and a red hat racing down the street with a dog. I am in love with all of this, this bright and foreign life."

There are also beautiful descriptions of Mary's paintings: "Looking at the painting {"The Cup of Tea"} I see a woman, clothed in pink and white, the white (my dress's lace) making a brilliant cloud around her neck, and again at the opening of her sleeve, with a tumult of color (the hyacinths) around her head. I bend closer to the woman's face, her chin half-hidden in whiteness, her forehead in the swirls of golden-red, her eyes, touched with quick strokes of blue, looking elsewhere, her mouth half-smiling, holding in her thoughts."

Three years go by, during which Mary paints Lydia in a series of vignettes - reading the morning paper, drinking a cup of tea, crocheting in the garden, driving a buggy and embroidering in her room. As time passes, Lydia, who often feels she is a burden to her family, one who can only live vicariously through Mary and her young nieces and nephews, comes to the realization that she has been a great contributor to Mary's art and learns just how valuable she is to Mary. "Jai besoin de toi", Mary pleads when Lydia demurs to pose, "I need you. It's as simple as that."

I was not familiar with any of the five Cassat portraits featured in the book, but I will certainly study them more closely now, knowing what Lydia was thinking or how she was feeling when the paintings were being executed (at least in Ms. Chessman's mind's eye): how her illness made her feel, the knowledge of her impending death, her deep and abiding affection for Mary, her changing feelings toward Degas and her memories of her lost love, who was killed in the American Civil War.

Lydia Cassatt died in Paris in 1882. But she lives on in Mary Cassatt's paintings. This book, too, will live long in my memory.

"PEOPLE OF THE BOOK"

2010-02-17T11:13:00.000-08:00

"People of the Book", by Geraldine Brooks, is a work of fiction inspired by the true story of the Sarajevo Haggadah, "a famous rarity, a lavishly illustrated Hebrew manuscript made at a time when Jewish belief was firmly against illustration of any kind." A Haggadah is a Jewish religious text that sets out the order of the Passover Seder. Reading the Haggadah is a fulfillment of the scriptural commandment to each Jew to "tell your son" about the Jewish liberation from slavery in Egypt as described in the Book of Exodus.

This fictional Haggadah was created in medieval Spain and, like the real Sarajevo Haggadah, ultimately ends up in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia (now Bosnia-Herzegovina). In 1996, Hanna Heath, a book conservator, is called to Sarajevo to study the Haggadah and do the conservation work on it. During the conservation (which is not a restoration), Hanna discovers some mysterious objects inside the book that she feels may give clues as to its history. She also discovers that something is missing from the book: its original clasps.

Through research, she discovers that the clasps had an extraordinarily beautiful rose and feather design. By taking the other objects to various experts for analysis, she learns what they are, but can only surmise how they got into the book. But we, the readers, are treated to flashbacks in which the book's history is revealed. We know the origin of the fine white hair, the salt crystals, the red stains, the fragment of an insect wing.

Although I am never bothered by a book that jumps back and forth in time, it was a bit confusing to read the Haggadah's history from end to beginning rather than the other way around. I was also confused by the map on the inside cover of the book portraying the stops the Haggadah took on its journey from Seville to Sarajevo. The map and the story did not match. I finally determined that one leg of the journey was incorrectly illustrated. To give her credit, perhaps Brooks had no say or no involvement in choosing this map (but if not, she should have).

As if the questions raised by the objects found inside the book aren't enough, there is a modern-day mystery as well, for after the Haggadah is placed in a display in a special climate-controlled room in the new national museum, Hanna is invited back to see it. At first glance, Hanna, an expert in ancient parchments, can immediately tell that the parchment in this book is different from that of the book she conserved. However, she cannot change the minds of the the museum authorities, who convince her she is wrong. Losing confidence in herself, she returns to her native Australia and gives up book conservation.

Was the book on display a fake? And if so, will we ever see the real book again?

Six chapters are devoted to Hanna, and we follow her from Australia to Sarajevo to Vienna to the US and back home to Australia. Along the way we learn about her Sarajevan lover and about her strained relationship with her mother, a famous and driven surgeon. Unfortunately, Hanna's character is rather flat and one-dimensional, and I never warmed up to her.

It is in the other chapters that we meet way more compelling, sympathetic and vividly-drawn characters - the true "People of the Book". There is Zahra, the Moorish slave girl who, in 15th-Century Seville, paints the illustrations in gorgeous colors like lapis lazuli and saffron. By the late 1400s the book is still in Spain - but in Tarragona. There we encounter David Ben Shoushan, who buys the illustrated parchment pages, adds Hebrew text to them and has them bound into a small book with a soft kid covering and silver clasps. It is his daughter, Ruti, who takes the book on the next leg of its journey. Using the silver medallion from the cover of the book as payment, she boards a ship bound away from her homeland.

The book surfaces again over 100 years later, in 1609 Venice. At the last minute, Father Domenico Vistorini, the official censor of any books suspected as being against the Catholic faith, uncharacteristically saves the Haggadah, which had been destined to be burned along with the Pope's other banned books. After "disappearing" for a lengthy time, the Haggadah comes to light again in Sarajevo in 1894. It is briefly taken to Vienna, that city being the center of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There, bookbinder Herr Florien Mittl is assigned the task of restoring the book. He remove the worn binding and replaces it with a cheap, shoddy cover and also sells the valuable clasps to pay for his expensive medical treatments for syphilis.

The Haggada was eventually returned to Sarajevo and placed in the National Museum. Many years later, we meet one of the most interesting "book people" of all. Lola is a young Jewish girl who fights with the partisans in WWII. After the partisan group breaks up, she is befriended by museum worker Serif and his wife. In order to save "a Jewish girl and a Jewish treasure", Serif smuggles the book out of the museum and takes it and Lola to a hiding place high in the mountains. We meet up with Lola again in 2002, in Jerusalem. There, some unresolved questions are finally answered.

I have known that Brooks is an excellent historical fiction writer since I read her book, "Year of Wonders". In it, she turns the bare-bones, seemingly depressing story of how the plague affected the lives of 17th Century English villagers into a compelling, highly-readable book. With "People of the Book" her reputation is cemented in my mind.

(PS - The real Sarajevo Haggadah has an exciting history too. It is one of the oldest Sephardic Haggadahs in the world, originating in Barcelona around 1350. It also survived several episodes of near destruction. It was hidden from the Nazis during WWII and magically survived a break-in at the Sarajevo National Museum during the Bosnian War in 1992. Painted with vivid pigments and copper and gold, it is considered to be the most beautiful illuminated Jewish manuscript in existence and one of the most valuable books in the world, appraised at $700 million.)

"THE SCHOOL OF ESSENTIAL INGREDIENTS"

2010-02-16T16:31:00.000-08:00

If you are a foodie you will love "The School of Essential Ingredients" by Erica Baumeister. Even if you aren't a foodie but just appreciate good food, you will still love it.

Different chapters of the book tell the stories of the eight people who have signed up to attend a Monday night cooking class at a restaurant named Lillian's. There's harried young mother Claire; Tom, who has lost his soul mate to cancer; Antonia, a kitchen designer originally from Italy; married couple Helen and Carl; Isabella, an older lady who fears she is losing her memory; clumsy teenage Chloe; and reluctant Ian, whose mother gave him a gift certificate for the classes. We also learn about Lillian, the restaurant owner, herself.

Most of the students already know how to cook, but Lillian teaches them how to really appreciate food. "As a sensualist, your ingredients are your first priority," Lillian remarked, holding up the bottle of thick green olive oil. "Beautiful, luscious ingredients will color the atmosphere of a meal, as will those which are mean and cheap."

Their lessons include how to make the perfect cake, crab in a wine sauce, pasta with red sauce, handmade tortillas and salsa, a Valentine's dinner of cheese fondue, and a superb Thanksgiving dinner which I wish I had been invited to attend: Pumpkin ravioli; stuffed turkey breast with rosemary, cranberries and pancetta; polenta with gorgonzola; green beans with lemons and pine nuts; espresso with chocolate biscotti.

"The pace was leisurely as each person at the table took slow contemplative bites. The turkey lay in slices across their plates, palest pink, with spirals of herb and pancetta ribbons running through it. The polenta was a bright dash of color, the crisp tang of green beans and lemon a contrast to the soft, luxuriant texture of the warm cornmeal."

Over the months we see the students blending into a cohesive group much like the ingredients they employ. There are flashbacks of Helen and Carl's long marriage and several romantic entanglements and dis-entanglements that I won't spoil by revealing who ends up with whom.

I thought several of the story lines were wrapped up all too swiftly and a little too neatly. And I thought it ridiculous that Lillian could bring her mother out of depression solely with food, no matter how tantalizing it may have been.

However, it doesn't really matter, for the main enjoyment of the book comes from the description of the foods. Bauermeister, like Lillian, obviously has a sensual relationship with food, from choosing the basic ingredients, to preparing it, to eating it.

For example: "The hard, round cake of chocolate was wrapped in yellow plastic with red stripes, shiny and dark when she opened it. The chocolate made a rough sound as it brushed across the fine section of the grater, falling in soft clouds onto the counter, releasing a scent of dusty back rooms filled with bitter sweet chocolate and old love letters, the bottom drawers of antique desks and the last leaves of autumn, almonds, cinnamon and sugar."

Or:

"The sugar met and mingled with the butter, each drawing color and texture from the other, expanding, softening, lifting up the sides of the bowl in silken waves. Minutes passed, and still Lillian waited. Finally when the butter and sugar reached the cloud like consistency of whipped cream, she turned off the motor."

And:

"Claire...lifted the crab to her mouth, closing her eyes one more time, shutting out the room around her. The meat touched her tongue and the taste ran through her, full and rich and complicated, dense as a long, deep kiss. She took another bite and felt her feet settle into the floor and the rest of her flow into a river of ginger and garlic and lemon and wine. She stood, even when that bite, and the next and the next were gone, feeling the river wind its way to her fingers, her toes, her belly, the base of her spine, melting all the pieces of her into something warm and golden. She breathed in, and that one, quiet moment felt herself come back together again."

You've got the picture. This review must end now, for I am drooling on my keyboard and I must go find something sensuous to eat.

(P. S. This book is titled "The Monday Night Cooking School" in England.)

"ACEDIA AND ME: A MARRIAGE, MONKS AND A WRITER'S LIFE"

2010-02-15T19:03:00.000-08:00

I decided to read "Acedia and Me" by Kathleen Norris for two reasons. I wanted to discover if acedia was the malady that has dogged me since my 30s (it is not), and whether or not Norris is as intellectually dense to me as she has always been. Or rather, to see if I am as intellectually dense - in the sense of a dullard - as I usually am when I read her.

Kathleen Norris is a familiar name to those of us in western North Dakota. She is a New York Times bestselling author that we can claim as one of our own. Actually, she lived in Lemmon, SD, but that's close enough for us Dakotans. Her other bestsellers include "The Cloister Walk" and "Dakota: A Spiritual Geography."

You could even say that Norris is my bugaboo, journalistically speaking. I actually interviewed her once when I was working at the Bismarck Tribune. When I went to my notes afterward, I discovered that I could not write the story, as I could not make head nor tail out of what she had said. That had never happened to me before, and never happened again.

And I doubt very much that Norris was at fault. I do not remember her being inarticulate, or scattered, or deliberately obtuse. If she were, she could not have had such success with her books. No, I feel as if it is I, not Norris, who is the problem. I'm afraid she is often inaccessible to me, intellectually.

I approached "Acedia" then, with a sense of impending failure to comprehend it; a failure, even, to finish the book. I am relieved to say that I did finish it and I did understand it.

As I mentioned before, I wanted to read the book to see if acedia is the "ailment" that has plagued me for so long. But no, my albatross is plain old depression, not of the weeping and sadness kind, but of the "can't get up off the couch" variety.

And acedia is neither. Norris believes that such standard dictionary definitions of acedia as apathy, boredom or torpor "do not begin to cover it". Other concepts of acedia include weariness, despair, ennui, restless, futility, sloth.

Indeed, French monk Placide Desaille describes acedia as "so pregnant with meaning that it frustrates every attempt to translate it." At its Greek root, acedia means the absence of care. Writes Norris, "The person afflicted by acedia refuses to care or is incapable of doing so. When life becomes too challenging and engagement with others too demanding, acedia offers a kind of spiritual morphine: you know the pain is there, you can't rouse yourself to give a damn."

The boundaries between depression and acedia are notoriously fluid, Norris writes. "At the risk of oversimplifying, I would suggest that while depression is an illness treatable by counseling and medication, acedia is a vice that is best countered by spiritual practice and the discipline of prayer."

Acedia was a problem for monks as early as the Fourth Century AD, and so Norris studied their writings extensively to understand their "noonday demon" in order to learn how to conquer her own acedia. To these monks, acedia was one of the eight "bad habits". In the Fifth Century, these became the 7 Deadly Sins, with acedia dropped from the list.

Norris' study of "Monks" explains one word of her subtitle; as does her interaction with the Benedictine monks at Assumption Abbey in Richardton, ND. Although she was and still remains a Protestant, fully engaged in her religion and in her worship at the local Presbyterian church of her grandparents, Norris becomes an oblate of the abbey. In particular, she takes great comfort in the singing of the Psalms.

Another word in the subtitle is "Marriage". Norris' husband David, a lapsed Catholic, doesn't quite comprehend her affinity for monastic ways, but is understanding. And she is understanding and compassionate about his depression. I found it fascinating that a woman with acedia and a man with depression (he nearly commits suicide and is hospitalized in a psychiatric ward for a time) had such a strong and long-lived (30 year) marriage. They did work on it.

The best parts of the book, for me, were when Norris wrote about the "Me" in "Acedia and Me." As a teenager growing up in Hawaii, she was a shy, awkward teenager holding on to her copy of one of Soren's Kierkegaard's books as if it were a rescue raft. She eventually "escapes" to New York. In her 30s, she and her husband, both poets, move from New York to rural South Dakota. There, she struggles with her acedia and also with depression, thinking herself at one time to be manic depressive.

She also wrestles with her writing and her tendency to turn people away from her. She becomes an advocate and a fierce warrior for her husband in his battles with his emotional and physical illnesses. Finally, she writes of the tender, loving way they together faced his death at age 57 from cancer. At the end of the book, she is a widow trying to define herself but still walking a spiritual path.

Even though I learned that acedia is not a problem of mine, I still found great value in this book in Norris' discussions of attaining grace, dealing with unresolved anger and the general acedia that plagues inhabitants of the technological 21st Century world. "Acedia is not a relic of the fourth century or a hang-up of some Christian monks," she says, "but a force we ignore at our peril."

"We may look to physicians or therapists, when our lives go off track, or we may pray the Psalms, or take refuge in a favorite novel. But in a sense we are all seeking the same thing. We want to prepare a good soil where grace can grow; we want to regard the cracks and fissures in ourselves with fresh eyes, so that they may be revealed not merely as the cause or the symptom of our misery but also as places where the light of promise shines through."

~ "Acedia and Me", Kathleen Norris

"THE BLUE TATTOO: THE LIFE OF OLIVE OATMAN"

2010-02-12T08:55:00.000-08:00

Just a few days after reading "The Zookeeper's Wife", I have read another non-fiction book that presents a fascinating story in a very boring way. I'm guessing by its dryness that Margot Mifflin's "The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman" was written - or at least started out - as a master's thesis. (At least the footnotes are all at the back of the book, thank goodness.)

As I already stated, Olive's is a fascinating story. She turned 14 years old while her family was enroute via wagon train to a Mormon settlement out West. Not long after that, the family, who had broken away from the train, was attacked by the Yavapai Indians. Her family was slaughtered, but Olive and her 9-year-old sister Mary Ann were captured as slaves. (The girls and the Yavapai warriros thought that everyone else had perished, but brother Lorenzo did survive, although he suffered a grievous head wound.)

The Yavapais treated them brutally, forcing them into back breaking labor. Mary Ann, especially, who had always been sickly and frail, suffered greatly. After about a year, they were traded to the Mohave Indians, who were kindly toward them and in fact, considered them family members. Olive and Mary Ann thrived for a while in the peaceful world of the Mohaves, who have been described as a friendly and happy people. Sadly, Mary Ann died during a famine that struck the tribe.

In 1858, When Olive was 17, she was "given back" to the white world. Olive and Lorenzo were ultimately reunited and with the help of Royal Baron Stratton, a Methodist Episcopal minister, they published their story. Unfortunately, Stratton badly distorted the facts and inserted his anti-Indian bigotry into the book. In "Life Among the Indians: Being an Interesting Narrative of the Captivity of the Oatman Girls", Stratton "omitted, exaggerated and fabricated information in order to deliver a title that was at once pious and titillating to his publisher."

Despite this, the book was a huge success. It soon became clear that Olive was the "star" of the story, and she went on the road lecturing about her experiences. This lasted for years. She eventually married and moved to Texas, where she lived until her death at the age of 66 in 1903.

Olive was not the only woman to be captured by the Indians and later returned to the whites. But unlike these other storied women, Olive had a permanent, highly visible memento of her time with the Indians - her chin had been tattooed in the traditional Mohave way. In photos of her, the blue markings on her face stand in great contrast to her proper Victorian dress.

Rumors abounded about Olive's time with the Mohave: that she had allowed herself to be tattooed, that she hid herself away during the tribe's lengthy association with the white Whipple party in order not to be returned to the white world, that she had married a Mohave and had children. Regarding the latter, Olive herself never addressed the subject. However, the repressed Victorians of her era presented Olive upon her return as not having been raped by the "savages"; that she was, in fact, still a virgin.

Mifflin has done an excellent job of winnowing out truth from rumor and fiction. Regarding the rumors of a marriage and children while in captivity, it is Mifflin's opinion, from her vast amount of research, that they were untrue. However, Mifflin posits that Olive was probably sexually active during her time with the Indians.

Mifflin believes that Olive had willingly allowed herself to be tattooed by the Mohaves and indeed had become thoroughly assimilated into the tribe, that she had found friends and substitute parents, and that she had formed strong bonds with these people. Although in her lectures Olive portrays both the Yavapai and the Mohaves unfavorably, in early interviews just after her release, she speaks of the Mohaves with love and respect.

Mifflin concludes that it is likely true that Olive did not want to be repatriated and that she grieved for the rest of her life at having been torn away from her new family. After all, she was with them from the tender age of 14 until 17, four very formative years. Mifflin says social attitudes "likely prevented Oatman from expressing her powerful feelings for the Mohaves."

An undisputed fact is that Olive, who had in esssence become a Mohave, never fully reassimilated into white society. A woman forever suspended between two worlds, she was often portrayed as being "sad".

I remarked at the beginning of this review that Olive's is a fascinating story presented in a boring way. There is just too much background information about Mormon history, Stratton's background, the negotiations for Olive's release, the taming of the West and the Indian wars, the portrayal of women in non-fiction and fiction of the time, etc. etc.

In reviewing "The Zookeeper's Wife", I ascribed the addition of extraneous material to three reasons: That the author had done so much research she didn't want to waste it, that she was so enamored with all that she learned that she just had to share it, and that the story was too short for a full-length book so it was padded.

I add another reason for the length of "The Blue Tattoo": That it began its life as a scholarly treatise.

I understand that "The Blue Tattoo" is part of a series entitled Women of the West. Despite its shortcomings, it is a valuable addition to the series and the literature of frontier women. I am eager to read other stories of white women who lived with Indians, either voluntarily or not. I also recommend an excellent work of fiction on this subject entitled "One Thousand White Women: The Journal of May Dodd", by Jim Fergus.

"THE ZOOKEEPER'S WIFE"

2010-02-10T10:35:00.000-08:00

I had thought "The Zookeeper's Wife", by Diane Ackerman, was a novel, but it is actually it is the true story of how the proprietors of the Warsaw, Poland zoo saved many Jewish people during WWII, when Poland was occupied by the Nazis.

I am not sure why Ackerman titled her book "The Zookeeper's Wife" when Antonia and Jan Zabinski played equally important roles in rescuing people. Jan, in fact, was the one who often physically walked Jews out of the Warsaw Ghetto. Oftentimes sheer bravado enabled him to smuggle a person out right before the eyes of Nazi officials. Antonia, for her part, was the motherly figure who held together the extended family of herself, Jan, their son Rhys, staff members and "guests and relatives". She not only hid, sheltered and fed them, but also kept everyone's spirits high.

Too, Antonia had extreme empathy with animals and seemed to be able to interact with them without fear and communicate with them in their "language". She was what one might today be called a horse whisperer, though she was "conversant" with all animals. This talent carried over to her interaction with humans as well. This stood her in good stead in a confrontation with the Germans. Hiding Jews at the zoo was especially fraught with danger because a group of Germans was headquartered on the zoo grounds. When a building near their HQ catches fire, Antonia is questioned, but despite her great fear, she is able to easily converse with the German officers, earn their admiration and trust, and allay their suspicions.

The book begins with an idyllic portrayal of the zoo before the war. Her description of all the animals awakening to another day is especially lyrical. This was one of my favorite parts of the book, as are all the scenes where we see the family interact with the animals they take in as house guests, ranging from dogs to a rabbit to otters to a badger.

The zoo was heavily damaged near the beginning of the war, and most of the animals were either killed or escaped. Most of those remaining were taken away to German zoos. After that, it was humans who lived in the cages and outbuildings until it was time for them (days, weeks or months later) to move on to another stop in their Underground journey to freedom.

Despite lovely scenes like the ones mentioned above, "The Zookeeper's Wife" is a very uneven book. I was most seriously annoyed with what I consider to be too much extraneous information. I can only think that Ackerman's forays into other subjects were included for one of three reasons:

1. She had done too much research and she didn't want it to go to waste.

2. The zookeepers' story alone was not enough so she padded it so as to make a full-length book.

3. As a scientist and naturalist, she could not bear to not share her findings.

Especially irksome to me was the extensive coverage of research by the Germans to recreate extinct species of the region, such as the auroch and the tarpan. Ackerman goes to great lengths to equate these experiments with the Nazis' efforts to create a pure Aryan race.

Even her explanation of why civilians during the war had no access to penicillin goes on for paragraphs when she could have simply stated, "no penicillin was available".

I did enjoy her asides on other subjects, such as how the Warsaw Poles helped the Jews assimilate into their Christian (Catholic) culture. They taught them prayers, kept them abreast on such mundane things as the price of tram tickets, showed women new hairstyles to help them blend in (no bangs or frizz), taught them how to cook various pork recipes. Just as there were no atheists in foxholes, there was no adherence to Jewish dietary rules in wartime.

More compelling, pertinent and sad, were her statistics on how many Polish Jews were crammed into the Warsaw Ghetto, how many were hiding throughout the city, how many were killed during the ghetto uprising and how many died during the six years of the war. And a final, more uplifting statistic - how many Jews the Zabinskis saved: about 300.

While "The Zookeeper's Wife" is seriously flawed, it should be read by anyone who needs a reminder of what the Jewish people endured, the list of freedoms they lost bit by bit, the atrocities that were perpetuated against them, and finally, the brave, staunch and truly heroic Poles who helped them.

"A BRIEF HISTORY OF MONTMARAY"

2010-02-08T14:17:00.000-08:00

I learned about "A Brief History of Montmaray" in a blog post by Loretta at "Pomegranantes and Paper". It sounded really good so I looked for it at my local library. I was surprised to find it in the teen section. This wasn't the library's doing, I later learned. It is classified everywhere as teen literature. But although it has a teenage narrator it is not a teen book any more than is "The Diary of Anne Frank".

In a lot of ways, it brought to mind a comparison with "I Capture the Castle" by Dodie Smith, a book I and my book club loved, for Montmaray also features a crumbling castle and eccentric inhabitants.

Montmaray is a (fictional) small island, basically a great rock topped by a castle, located in the Bay of Biscayne west of France, north of Spain and southwest of Great Britain. In 1936, it is home to the FitzOzborne family and only two others, the Smiths and the Spensers. The population was greatly reduced after the turn of the century, many of its young men having been killed in the Great War and other residents returning to Cornwall, home of their ancestors.

The FitzOzbornes, though impoverished, are the royal family of the island. They are descendants of (then) Baron Bartholomew FitzOzborne who was forced to flee his Cornish estate in 1542, sailed south, tangled with a sea monster for a day and a night, defeated it valiantly, and then washed up on the shore of an uninhabited island halfway between France and Spain. He then declared the island to be a new kingdom, which he called Montmaray.

Montmaray, despite its tiny size, is a sovereign state, recognized by Britain, France and Spain. Although ownership of such a tiny kingdom might seem a joke to others, the FitzOsbornes take themselves very seriously (although not snobbishly) and consider themselves equal to other European royalty. However, they are basically isolated and cut off from the world. Usually their only outside contact is with passing ships, but the Civil War in Spain has greatly reduced travel in that part of the Atlantic.

The FitzOzborne household consists of:

1. "One middle-age man of indifferent health and intermittent insanity. {King John}.

2. One middle-age housekeeper {Rebecca Chester}, who prefers not to housekeep too much as it interferes with the worship of the man previously mentioned.

3. Two young ladies not turned 18, neither of whom can cook very well, although between them they have adequate skills in the areas of bookkeeping, plumbing, dusting, historical research, laundering, and storytelling. {Narrator Sophia and family historian Veronica, who is Sophia's cousin and daughter of King John}.

4. One 10-year-old tomboy, able to fish, swear and trap rabbits, but unable to write, make her own bed, or remember to brush her teeth. {Sophia's little sister Henrietta, or Henry}.

5. One dog, several mad cats, numerous chickens, half a dozen pigeons, and far too many rats."

King John's wife Isabella apparently hied herself off to the mainland years ago, and Sophia and Henry's parents are dead. Their older brother Toby and Rebecca's son Simon Chester are away in England, although they do return for occasional visits.

Sophia and Veronica, with help from Toby and Simon, try to keep up with world affairs. None of the four is quite sure whom to root for in the Spanish Civil War, the Nazis or the Fascists. (Being royal themselves, they would actually prefer that the Spanish royal family be returned to the throne, but the royals had been ousted in the democratic elections of 1931.)

However, the FitzOsbornes' feelings regarding the Nazis are soon solidified. Toby and Simon have returned to England when the rest of the family discovers that two German soldiers (Nazis, Veronica is sure) have "invaded" their island, supposedly in search of the Holy Grail. A break-in at the castle leads to the disappearance of one of the Germans and the death of King John. After Toby and Simon return to Montmaray for the king's funeral, the Germans viciously attack the island.

The family's efforts to save themselves from the Germans make for a gripping, harrowing adventure. Luckily, Sophia and Veronica are both quick-witted, plucky girls who rise to the occasion.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book about the (mostly) charming Montmoravians, except for a few niggling questions. It is never revealed what the soldiers were actually looking for on Montmaray, or why the Germans retaliated so violently, seeing as how the one soldier's disappearance was not proven to be foul play, nor even that he was dead. There is also a small hint that Simon and Toby might be homosexual lovers, but as soon as the subject is broached it is as quickly dropped.

"TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY: IN SEARCH OF AMERICA"

2010-02-08T13:00:00.000-08:00

I had read "Travels With Charley" some years ago and re-read it yesterday for an online British book club I recently joined. I soon realized how very little of the book I had remembered. Because I live in North Dakota, his collection of impressions of our state was the one thing that did remain strong with me.

He wrote that he had always thought that "The West" began at Fargo, because his trusty old map was folded so that the crease was on the ND-MN state line at Fargo. But Fargo on a beautiful October day was totally unlike his mental expectation of it. "The countryside was no different than Minnesota over the river. . . It's bad to have one's impressions shaken up like that. Would Samarkand or Cathay or Cipango have the same fate if I visited?" However, he soon realizes that "the fact of Fargo had in no way disturbed my mind's picture of it. I could still think of Fargo as I always had - blizzard-ridden, heat-blasted, dust-raddled. I am happy to report that in the war between reality and romance, reality is not the stronger." (Actually, Fargo is and always will be blizzard ridden in winter and heat blasted in summer, but is not dust raddled.)

At Bismarck, where I live, Steinbeck does find the West: "Somebody must have told me about the Missouri River at Bismarck, North Dakota, or I must have read about it. In either case, I hadn't paid attention. I came on it in amazement. Here is where the map should fold. Here is the boundary between East and West. On the Bismarck side it is Eastern landscape, Eastern grass, with the look and smell of Eastern America. Across the Missouri on the Mandan side, it is pure West, with brown grass and water scorings and small outcrops. The two sides of the river might well be a thousand miles apart."

Before he leaves North Dakota, he must cross the Badlands. At first look he feels they are Bad Lands, frightening and disturbing, but before he departs the state, he comes to feel that they are the Good Lands. He senses that they are sentient. He has the same feelings about the redwoods of his native Northern California. I think that Steinbeck must have had Celtic roots, for the Celts, too, believed in the sentience of nature. He also picks up on what might be called the unseen but not unfelt elements of the places he visits.

I was truly, truly shocked to find that there is no description of him camped out on the North Dakota prairie at night, feeling totally alone and afraid. I have carried away and held this false memory for all these years.

It was a shock, too, to realize that Steinbeck took his trip 50 years ago already. The autumn that Steinbeck was on the road, Kruschev was at the UN in New York, banging his shoe on the table. The 1950s-early 1960s fear of "the bomb" was still all prevalent. The Civil Rights Movement was in its infancy. Here we are, 50 years later, the world still not blown to bits, our fears focused more on global warming and on Islamic terrorists than the Russians and Chinese. The Soviet Union is in shambles and we are more afraid of China for the astronomical debt we owe them and their goods flooding our markets. Black people are no longer called negroes, nigras or niggers. And while racial tension still exists, great strides have been made.

In those ways, the book is dated. But in many ways it is fresh. I was amazed to learn that people worried about their cholesterol 50 years ago. The America Steinbeck saw back then was in the main what we still see today if we stay on the Interstates: ugly cities, urban sprawl, the proliferation of mobile homes, ribbons of concrete highways ("wonderful for moving goods, but not for inspection of a countryside").

"Civilization has made great strides {since his last trip}", he writes, tongue planted firmly in cheek. American food, although clean, was to him "tasteless, colorless and of complete sameness." Restrooms and hotels were sanitized and "so incensed with deodorants and detergents that it takes time to get your sense of smell back."

He found America's dominant publication to be the comic book, or paperbacks full of "sex, sadism and homicide." Be it newspaper or radio, the mental fare "has been as generalized, as packaged, as undistinguished as the food." American people in 1960, he though, were indifferent to politics: "strong opinions were just not stated." What would Steinbeck think of today's political situation, its movies and television, cell phones, the Internet, texting, Facebooking? What would the finest portrayer of America's Great Depression think of today's recession?

"Travels With Charley" is not a travelogue. It is rather a journey that is mainly internal. Steinbeck took his three-month trip across America to "find the truth about my country." Toward the end, he wishes he could say he had found it. "It would be such a simple matter to set down my findings and lean back comfortably with a fine sense of having discovered truths and taught them to my readers. I wish it were that easy." Instead, what he found was "closely intermeshed with what I felt at the moment. External reality has a way of being not so external at all."

"This monster of a land," he says, "this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of the microcosm of me. If an Englishman or a Frenchman or an Italian should travel my route, see what I saw, hear what I heard, their storied pictures would not only be different from mine but equally different from one another."

He does learn some truths. Despite all our differences, he says, Americans are more alike than we are unalike. "Americans are more American than Northerners, Southerners, Westerners or Easterners . . . California Chinese, Boston Irish, Wisconsin Germans, and yes, Alabama Negroes, have more in common than they have apart . . . It is a fact that Americans from all sections and of all racial extractions are more alike than the Welsh are like the English, the Lancashireman like the Cockney, or for that matter the Lowland Scot is like the Highlander." (What do you think, British readers?)

Returning to his hometown of Salinas, California, he learns from sad experience that what Thomas Wolfe had said was true: "You can't go home again."

And Steinbeck discovers that the human race can be incredibly evil. He had heard about "The Cheerleaders", a group of women in New Orleans violently opposed to school integration. He decides he must see one of their daily demonstrations for himself and is consequently terribly disturbed by the vicious, obscene epithets thrown at "the littlest Negro girl you ever saw."

"I heard the words, bestial and filthy, and degenerate" shouted by "blowzy women with their little hats", he wrote. "Theirs was the demented cruelty of egocentric children, and somehow this made their insensate beastliness even more heartbreaking. They were not mothers, not even women. They were crazy actors playing to a crazy audience."

Steinbeck is at his best when he departs from generalizations to focus on specifics, especially in describing encounters with individuals he meets along the way: The "Canucks" from Canada working as migrant farm laborers in Maine, the young man who plans to kick Steinbeck off his campsite and ends up befriending him, a veterinarian who obviously loves animals and knows his job, an enlightened white Southerner whom Steinbeck dubs Monsieur Ci Git. There is a funny "Catch 22" scene with American border officials when he tries to get his dog "back into" the United States when he had actually never entered Canada. In Idaho, he meets young Robbie, who desperately yearns to go to New York to be a hairdresser. Today we'd call this young man gay. Steinbeck gives him no label but is sympathetic.

For all the people he meets, Steinbeck was essential alone and lonely, at least regarding human company. He did have one great friend, his dog. Charley was a blue-gray French poodle born and raised in France, a fine gentleman and a perfect companion for a long road trip. Because he had crooked teeth, Steinbeck says, Charlie was the only dog in the world who could pronounce the consonant "f". His "Ftt" meant "Stop the truck, I want to pee". A mild-mannered dog with a benign acceptance even of cats, Charlie becomes a raving lunatic at his first sighting of a bear in Yellowstone Park.

Steinbeck's descriptions of his interactions with wise old Charley are among the best in the book. A natural ice breaker between strangers, Charley was a great judge of human behavior. He disliked neurotics and detested drunks. He was a creature, who, like his four-legged brethern, thought most people are basically nuts, a dog who sometimes gave a person "a quickly vanished look of amazed contempt."

I didn't recall from my first reading that Steinbeck was kind of a futzy guy - such a nervous driver that he panicked in heavy traffic and continually got lost. He spent way too much time (in my opinion) in Maine, but oftentimes he put the pedal to the metal and barreled his way through a bunch of states in a row (granted, he did have the pressure of impending winter to get across the Northern states quickly.)

In the last chapter, he says that "people don't take trips - trips take people." He adds, "Who has not known a journey to be over and dead before the traveler returns?" Steinbeck believed that his personal journey ended at a very specific place, Abingdon, VA. But I felt that his trip, except for his time in Louisiana, was basically over once he left California. But before that, it was a great ride. I only wish that had gotten off the Interstates and like William Least Heat Moon, had traveled the blue highways - the back roads marked blue on old maps. (Heat-Moon's book is "Blue Highways: A Journey Into America".)

"A COUNTRY AFFAIR"

2010-02-08T09:28:00.000-08:00

I found "A Country Affair" by Rebecca Shaw at a local thrift shop for a very good price. I love novels set in the English countryside and I loved James Herriott's books, so I thought this would be a winner. And if I liked it, there would be more, because beneath the title it says "A Barleybridge Novel".

It was not a winner. Too bad I didn't look too far inside the book and discover there was a list of characters. Now, a list of characters is very helpful with a massively big novel like "War and Peace". But it is not a good sign in a 280 page book. It means there will be a lot of extraneous characters who sometimes never even appear except to be mentioned by name.

"A Country Affair" is about the affairs of an English veterinary clinic in rural Barleybridge. The heroine, 19-year-old Kate Howard, has always wanted to be a vet, but unfortunately did not receive a high enough grade in chemistry. So she does - in her mind - the next best thing and goes to work as a receptionist/accounts person at the clinic. Obviously she is more well-educated than the other office people and this causes conflicts.

She is immediately pursued by a handsome Aussie vet, Scott Spencer. The trouble is that she already has a boyfriend, boring, weird old Adam Pentecost, who has their whole future planned out for them. When he becomes too possessive, she breaks it off with him and he becomes a full-fledged stalker.

Kate's relationships with the two men were the most troublesome parts of the novel. In real life, a stalker would not have gone away as easily as Adam did. And she should have seen red flags all over the place with Scott. She knows he is a womanizer. She knows he is more than likely the father of the baby Bunty Page, a clinic nurse, is expecting. And she knows that other handsome Aussie vets have been at the practice and, with the Australian man's supposed wanderlust, flown off to other adventures. Yet she falls for Scott anyway.

I was irritated that Shaw portrated Kate as being very intelligent but gives her no sense whatsoever when it comes to men. And it is so predictable that Kate will come to her senses regarding her career, get tutoring so she can re-take her chemistry exam, and study to be a vet.

There are also a couple of sub-plots that are extraneous. I can only think we are introduced to these people because we will meet them again in the small village of Barleybride. As far as I could tell on amazon.com, there are at least two more Barleybridge novels. If you like Jan Karon's novels, you will probably like this one, but like Karon's books, I will be giving other Barleybridge books a wide berth.

"BURNING BRIGHT" by Tracy Chevalier

2010-02-01T15:00:00.000-08:00

I have read all of Tracy Chevalier's books and enjoyed every one. Perhaps her best known book is "Girl With a Pearl Earring", which told the fictionalized story of a young girl who came to live in Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer's household and posed for his famous painting.

In her book "Burning Bright", Chevalier ties another famous person, English poet and painter William Blake, into her storyline. However, she is not nearly as successful in her attempt to intertwine Blake with her other characters. Throughout the book, he remains on the periphery. He is a neighbor to the protagonist, young Jem Kellaway, but the kind of neighbor you know little about, see only occasionally and interact with very seldom.

Chevalier's failure to truly incorporate Blake's character into the book does not mean that "Burning Bright" is a failure. On the contrary, it is an excellent book, and I read it in less than 24 hours. It tells the story of the the Kellaway family, father Thomas, mother Anne, Jem and sister Maisie, who move from bucolic Dorsetshire to teeming London in 1792. Jem's father, a craftsman of Winsdor chairs, has moved to London at the invitation of Philip Astley to be a carpenter at Astley's circus amphitheatre.

Jem is befriended by Maggie Butterfield, a savvy, streetwise girl who is basically an urchin, although she does have a mother, father and brother. London is a baffling and quite frightening city for the Kellaways, but Maggie helps them navigate its streets, literally and figuratively.

Chevalier's colorful and well-drawn cast of characters include Astley and his handsome horseman son John, slack rope dancer Miss Laura Devine, Maggie's parents Dick and Bet Butterfield and the Kellaway's snooty landlady Miss Pelham. In contrast, Blake and his wife, Catherine, seem pale and one dimensional.

Chevalier does a wonderful job of limning the filthy, stinky, sooty city of London in the late 18th century, from Westminster Abbey, teeming market street Lambeth Marsh, Newgate Prison, Bedlam Hospital for the insane, Cut-Throat Lane, Blackfriars Bridge, pubs like the Canterbury Arms and the Red Lion, and the mucky Thames that flows through it all.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Kellaway becomes besotted with the circus, her daughter Maisie is dazzled with the handsome and rakish John Astley, and Jem is by turns put off by and intrigued with Maggie.

I'm not at all sure why Chevalier decided to incorporate Blake into the book, except that she is a great admirer of his poetry. There is a subplot regarding Blake's anti-parliamentary views and his wearing of Le Bonnet Rouge in sympathy with French Revolutionaries. As Blake tells Jem and Maggie, he writes about "children, and the helpless, and the poor. Children lost and cold and hungry. The government does not like to be told it is not looking after its people. They think I am suggesting revolution, as there has been in France".

I don't believe Chevalier needed this weak subplot - or even the character of Blake - to tell the story of London's downtrodden. Her settings and her characters are more than enough to convey her passion, as shared by Blake in this poem:

"LONDON"

"I wander thro' each chartered street,

Near where the charter'd Thames does flow

A mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infant's cry of fear,

In every voice; in every ban,

The mind-fogg'd manacles I hear.

How the chimney sweep's cry

Every blackning Church appalls,

And the hapless Soldier's sigh

Runs in blood down Palace walls.

But most thro' the midnight streets I hear

How the youthful Harlot's curse

Blasts the new born Infant's tear

And blights with plague the Marriage hearse."

JESSIE'S JOURNEY

2010-02-01T11:18:00.000-08:00

Three years ago, I was "found" by my Scottish second cousin, Shirl. An excellent amateur genealogist, Shirl had amassed a great deal information on the Munros of Sutherland County, Scotland, and had turned her attention to the ones who had emigrated to Canada and the U.S. She found exactly one link to the Munros of North Dakota: me! Since then, Shirl has provided our family with tons of information about the Munros who stayed behind in Golspie, Scotland, and access to the Sutherland Golspie Family Tree on ancestry.com.

A line about my Great Aunt Christina "Teenie" Munro really caught my eye. Teenie, it said, loved it when the tinkers came around, so that she could practice her Gaelic on them. This piqued my interest about tinkers.

Not long after, a Scottish blogger named Ruthie mentioned two books about Scottish tinkers. My interest was piqued even further, and I did some research on Scottish tinkers, also called travellers (British spelling). I wrote a post about the Scottish Highland Travellers on my regular blog, Celtic Lady (http://celticanamcara.blogspot.com/2010/01/scottish-tinkers-and-travellers.html).

Since writing my post, I have read "Jessie's Journey: The Autobiography of a Traveller Girl" by Jess Smith. (I also purchased the other book mentioned by Ruthie, "The Yellow on the Broom", by Betsy Whyte, but have decided to save that for a later time.)

In case you didn't follow the link above, here's a bit of background on Scottish Highland Travelers: They are among seven different types of nomadic people found in Scotland. Unfortunately, all of them have been lumped together under the prejudicial term of tinker or gypsy after the ancient Roma group that originated in Northern India and spread throughout Europe.

Scottish Highland Travellers, however, are not Roma Gypsy. They are a Gaelic-speaking people indigenous to the Highlands of Scotland. They traveled around peddling their wares, mending household items, fishing for pearls, doing farm labor and tinsmithing. In fact, the word tinker comes from the Gaelic word tinceard, or tinsmith.

Over the years, tinker has become a pejorative term, which is why many of the original tinkers came to call themselves Travellers. (Another, lovely name for them is the Summer People).

For 10 years, between the ages of 5 to 15, Jessie Riley traveled around all of Scotland and part of northern England in an old blue Bedford bus, also home to her seven sisters and her mom and dad, Charlie and Jeannie Riley.

Although the Rileys had little money, they truly loved their life on the road. Jessie's father, especially, was loathe to settle down in one place. Theirs was a loving family, and they also enjoyed the times spent with extended family members met up with on the road.

Their world was by no means perfect. Although they were an honest traveling family, they encountered discrimination and prejudice from people who thought them dirty, thieving "Gypos". They are forced to move from their campgrounds by English police; they are barred from burying their dead in traditional ground by a prejudiced landholder. Jessie, especially, was subjected to bullying at the schools the Travellers were compelled to attend.

However, the good outweighs the bad in Jessie's recounting. As with many other travellers, Jessie is a wonderful storyteller, whether she is discussing the foods they prepared, her delight in the natural world, her experiences peddling and fortunetelling with her mom, the death of an elderly Traveller woman, a family feud erupting into a gun fight or her own hair-raising adventures, like the eerie encounter with a piper on ghostly Culloden Moor.

Highland Scottish Travellers carried a wealth of oral storytelling, and Jessie weaves these tales of Highland heroes, ghosts and Banshees into her story. Thanks to Jessie and people like her, these tales have now been written down. The travellers have also preserved ancient Highland ballads and songs that might otherwise have been lost. In short, this book is about a way of life nearly extinct in Scotland today.

Jessie's poem, "Scotia's Bairn", printed at the end of the book, is alone worth the price of the book. Here are some excerpts from this poem by a self-described "Child of the Mist":

"Yes, it may be said that you are 'better' than I, your peers have obviously blessed you with a grand home, fine clothes, the best of schooling, good clothes, etc.

I, on the other hand, saw life from the mouth of a 'tinker's' tent.

But I have felt the breath wind of John O'Groats.

I have seen the hills of Glen Coe clothed in purple heather, heard her mountaintops whisper a thousand curses on the murderers of the MacDonald bairns,

The ghosts of Culloden brushed against my cheek as I sat on a rock seat, watching heaven's lightning streak across the land to the sea beyond..."

AND

"We are different, you and I: I am the wind in your hair, you are the voice of mistrust:

I am the blue of the Atlantic as she thrusts her watery fingers into Scotland's west coast.

You are the gates that stop me from entering the forest.

I am the grouse in the purpled heather, you are the hunter who denies me my flight.

I am the salmon that leaps to her favorite spawning stream, you are the rod who would end my epic journey.

I am the seed of all who went before me. I am the brave ones who hid, not burned the tartan. I am from those who spoke the Gaelic in secret places. I am part of the 'true' Earth, the sea, the sky -

I am the Scotia Bairn."

Jessie continued her story in two other books, "Tales From the Tent" and "Tears For A Tinker". As a traditional storyteller, she is in great demand for live performances throughout Scotland.

"HER FEARFUL SYMMETRY"

2010-01-27T12:50:00.000-08:00

I bought "Her Fearful Symmetry" solely because it was written by Audrey Niffenegger, author of "The Time Travelers' Wife", which I loved.

"Her Fearful Symmetry" tells the story of two sets of twins. The younger set, Americans Julia and Valentina, are left a flat in Vautravers Mews in London by their late Aunt Elspeth. The stipulations are that they cannot live in the flat until they turn 21, they must stay there for a year before they can sell it, and they must never let their father and their mother (Elspeth's twin Edie) visit the flat.

Valentina is the more fearful twin (Julia calls her "Mouse"), but eventually she acquiesces in accepting the legacy and they move to London after their 21st birthday. What the twins do not know - but learn quite early on - is that their late Aunt Elspeth haunts the flat. (That was no spoiler - Elspeth's ghost is revealed to the reader even before the twins arrive.)

Other characters include Robert, who was Elspeth's younger lover and is mourning her to distraction. Instead of living with Elspeth in her second-floor flat, Robert had kept his own flat on the first floor. After avoiding the twins at first, he later befriends them and forms an attachment to Valentina. A side story involves the third-floor residents of Vautravers, the obsessive-compulsive Martin and his wife Marijka.

I've often said a city can be just as much a character of a book as a human. In this case, it's not a city but a cemetery. London's famous Highgate Cemetery, burial place of such famous people as Christina Rossetti, Karl Marx and George Eliot, abuts right on the property of their apartment building.

This may sound weird, but the cemetery, where Robert volunteers and where Elspeth's remains are encrypted, is portrayed as a delightful place to be - beautiful, peaceful, calm.

I mentioned that the presence and identity of Elspeth's ghost is no secret, but there is a secret regarding the reason why Elspeth and Edie were estranged and Edie moved to and stayed put in America, the twins never to see each other again. When the secret is eventually revealed, I felt quite a letdown.

There are episodes of twin switching among Elspeth and Edie which left me totally confused and I still do not know which twin was which at certain key points in the story.

For these two reasons, I didn't enjoy the book as much as I did "The Time Traveler's Wife" (although it too can become confusing, especially when the time traveler meets himself in the past).

You will enjoy the portrayal of the younger twins and their forays into the neighborhoods of London. At the beginning the twins dress alike and do everything together in very eerie fashion. But this intense attachment begins to weaken as Valentina tries to find a way to be her own person and separate from Julia. How she attempts it - and how it goes awry - is where the book definitely veers off into magical realism.

I do have a problem with magical realism in books. Or I should say certain types of magical realism. Note that I have no problem accepting time travel and ghosts, but some plot twists really do take one's willing suspension of disbelief to the limits.

I believe the title of the books comes from the William Blake's famous poem: "Tiger, burning bright / In the forests of the night, / What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?" One reason for the choice of title might be that Julie and Valentina are mirror twins, in which some of their internal organs are reversed, although they are so symmetrical on the outside as to appear identical. However, I think the tiger could also refer to Elspeth, who might not be as benign a character as she seems.

Ms. Niffeneger is a guide at Highgate Cemetery, which is probably why the cemetery is portrayed as such a welcoming place and its caretakers as such appealing people. What is shown as Robert's research on the history of Highgate is no doubt her own.

"THE ROAD"

2010-01-23T20:53:00.000-08:00

"THE ROAD" by Cormac McCarthy

I had not intended to purchase or read "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy. I do not like post-apocalyptic stories. That's why I do not read Revelations in the Bible. I did not like Mel Gibson's Mad Max movies. And as much as I like the actor Skeet Ulrich, I did not like the TV series Jericho.

Yet, I somehow felt as if I were missing out on something. "The Road" won the Pulitzer Prize. It was on the Bestsellers List. It was made into a movie starring another very good actor, Viggo Mortensen.

So, having a gift card in hand and a passel of books to choose from, I ended up buying it. I had chosen two other books but didn't have enough money to buy a third trade paperback. However, I had just enough to buy a mass market paperback.

So: "The Road". The story of two people traveling through a ravaged world (probably a nuclear holocaust, although this is not made clear.) They are constantly on the move, forever on The Road.

Sun blotted out. Falling ash, permanently gray skies, dirty snow, bone-chilling rain. No living trees, no plants. No birds, no fish. No animals except dogs. No fresh food.

Burned-out cities. Utter desolation. Dust. Barrenness. Devastation. Anarchy. Humans reverting to savages.

Bad people. Very bad people. Murderers. Cannibals. Barbecued babies on a spit.

Freezing cold. Starvation. Nightmares. Fatigue. Loneliness. Mistrust. Sickness. Paralyzing, constant fear.

No future. No hope. No reason to go on putting one foot in front of another on The Road. No Nothing.

Nothing. Nothing. Except:

The love that passes between a man and his young son.

Is it enough? Is it enough in the end?

OLIVE KITTERIDGE: A NOVEL

2010-01-22T20:12:00.000-08:00

"OLIVE KITTERIDGE: A NOVEL"

by Elizabeth Strout

What to say about Olive Kitteridge? And I do mean the character, not the book. Except for a couple of disappointing chapters, I loved the book for its spot-on characterizations of small-town residents.

I find I must elaborate on my previous sentence in case you are wondering why I would disparage a few chapters and still love the book as a whole. The reason is that each chapter is almost a short story unto itself, all involving the character of Olive Kitteridge in major or minor fashion. In fact, when I first heard about the book, I had the mistaken impression that it was a collection of short stories. I tend to shy away from short story collections, especially in a collection by one writer, but rest assured, "Olive Kitteridge" is, as the title asserts, a novel.

I was quite prepared to dislike Olive, based on her first appearance in the book: Olive's husband, Henry, asks her if it is too much to ask that "a man's wife" accompany him to Sunday church. 'Yes, it most certainly is too goddamn much to ask,' Olive had almost spit, her fury's door flung open. 'You have no idea how tired I am, teaching all day, going to foolish meetings where the goddamn principal is a moron! Shopping. Cooking. Ironing. Laundry. Doing Christopher's homework with him! And you - '. She had grabbed onto the back of the dining room chair, and her dark hair, still uncombed from its night's disarrangement, had fallen across her eyes. 'You, Mr. Head Deacon Claptrap Nice Guy, expects me to give up my Sunday mornings and go and sit among a bunch of snot-wots!'"

Allllrighty then, Olive! Tell us what you're really thinking!

But as I saw Olive through the eyes of her high school students and fellow townspeople of Crosby, Maine, I began to see her redeeming qualities, especially as she aged. Definitely one to express her opinions and admittedly caustic, Olive, it is revealed, does have tender, caring qualities which endear her to us, especially regarding her memories of Henry after his death, and later, her relationship with rich widower Jack Kennison.

Among the residents of Crosby, Maine, a couple of people particularly engaged me, including secret lovers Harmon and Daisy, new widow Marlene Bonney, and Henry. A pharmacist of a small-town drugstore, Henry becomes extremely fond of his sales clerk, Denise. Henry is a standup guy who would never stoop to having an affair, but he does have deep feelings for Denise, no matter that he does not act on them.

Amazingly, we learn that Henry truly loves Olive, despite her abrasive character.

As I mentioned before, the chapters that make up the book all mention Olive in some form or another, forming the glue that holds everything together. In some instances, the connection may be just in passing, as when the Kitteridges visit The Warehouse Bar and Grille, where 50-ish Angela O'Meara is the piano player.

I loved the story of Angela, who was a gorgeous redhead in her youth. Now, she is plagued by stage fright and has acquired a taste for alcohol to assuage that fear. A single woman, she has a married lover named Malcolm, and an old flame named Simon who "wanted to be a pianist and ended up a real estate lawyer." When Simon pays a surprise visit, Angela discovers that Simon, who wants to tell her he has pitied her for years, is himself to be pitied. She informs him he "had married a woman and stayed married to her for 30 years, when she did not ever find you lovely in bed. "

Such insights into the human character just floored me.

A character much closer to Olive is her son, Christopher. From Olive's point of view, Christopher is strangely remote, and she cannot understand why he doesn't love her after all the affection she has lavised upon him. But as we come to learn, Olive may have been a smothering, even abusive mother. Again, the difference between perception and reality is enlightening.

Frankly, I was surprised that this book won the Pulitzer Prize, for it is quite uneven. As much as I did like it, I found that a few chapters were especially weak: Kevin Coulson returns to Crosby to commit suicide at his old childhood home, in imitation of his late manic-depressive mother. Instead, he ends up saving a woman who falls (jumps?) off a cliff into the ocean. But what of Kevin after that? And what of the woman?

As with all small towns, everyone in Crosby, Maine, knows way too much about all the other residents. "Jesus", asks Kevin quietly of Olive about his hometown. "Does everyone know everything?"

"Oh sure", she said comfortably. " What else is there to do?" For all of us who ever lived in a small town, her reply is both an answer long time in coming and undoubtedly true.

Getting back to unresolved questions, what about young Julie Harwood, the spurned bride, who runs away from her family to join her definitely uncommitted lover? And what about Rebecca Brown, the kooky girl-child who can't get a job and definitely has some mental issues, including her habit of setting fires? Both stories are decidedly unresolved and consequently frustrating.

In many ways, I found Olive to be like me, a person who thinks herself to be a really nice, good person but who is mystified as to why not everyone in the world likes her. Perhaps the most redeeming quality of the book is the self-knowledge that Olive Kitteridge acquires along the way.

Usually I remember the authors of the books I have read, but it wasn't until after I had finished "Olive Kitteridge" that I learned that Elizabeth Strout is the author of a book I read years ago, "Amy and Isabelle" (which I also recommend).

"THE SWEETNESS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PIE"

2010-01-18T08:17:00.000-08:00

"It was as black in the closet as old blood. They had shoved me in and locked the door. I breathed heavily through my nose fighting desperately to remain calm. I tried counting to ten on every intake of breath, and to eight as I released each one slowly into the darkness. Luckily for me, they had pulled the gag so tightly into my open mouth that my nostrils were left unobstructed, and I was able to draw in one slow lungful after another of the stale, musty air."

Did those lines grab you the way they did me? They're the opening paragraph of "The Sweetness of the Bottom of the Pie" by Alan Bradley. I was hooked. Although I seldom read mysteries, I knew I was going to like this book.

The heroine, 11-year-old Flavia de Luce, is destined to become a classic fictional character. Motherless Flavia lives with her father and two older sisters, Feely (Opelia) and Daffy (Daphne) at Buckshaw, an English manor house.

I have loved books set in English manor houses all my life ("Last night I dreamed I was at Manderly again") and this one, set in 1950, is no exception. Here's Flavia's description of her home: "As I climbed over the last style and Buckshaw came into view across the field, it almost took my breath away. It was from this angle and at this time of day that I loved it most. As I approached from the west, the mellow old stone glowed like saffron in the late afternoon sun, well settled into the landscape like a complacent mother hen squatting on her eggs, with the Union Jack stretching itself contentedly overhead."

A lonely child, Flavia has a cantankerous relationship with Feely and Daffy, and an almost-non-existent relationship with her father. For comfort, she turns to her love of chemistry and an elaborate chem lab, both inherited from an uncle. In her sanctum sanctorum, she creates her favorite chemical compounds, which just happen to be poisons. Fortunately, she doesn't use them on any one.

A mysterious stranger's late-night visit to Flavia's father, followed by her discovery of a soon-to-be corpse in the garden, begins a whodunit in which she must clear her father of a murder charge and find the real villain.

In addition to possessing a keen intellect, Flavia is naturally curious, determined and plucky. Of the dead man in the garden, Flavia says "I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn't. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that has ever happened in my life."

With Gladys, her trusty bicycle, Flavia sets out to scour town and countryside looking for clues. They include stolen rare stamps, a 30-year-old murder and characters from her father's past, and of course, poison as a murder weapon.

"Sweetness" is the well-deserving winner of the (British) Crime Writers' Association Debut Dagger Award. It has also won other awards, including a best young adult book. I feel that is a misnomer, for in no way is "Sweetness" a book for children even if the heroine is a child.

In many ways, "Sweetness" reminds me of that wonderful book, "I Capture the Castle" by Dodie Smith, for its evocation of a similar time and place.

It wasn't until I reached the "About the Author" page that I learned that Bradley will be featuring Flavia de Luce in a series of books. "The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag" will be out on March 9. I can't wait! At last I too have a murder mystery series to follow and an ongoing character to watch as she grows and develops as a sleuth.

"TESTAMENT" BY ALIS HAWKINS

2010-01-11T15:45:00.000-08:00

"Testament" by Alis Hawkins is the January selection of the Cornflower Book Club, an online book club (see link under sidebar). I joined this club because I quit my local book club, because this U.K.-based club features many British authors I am unfamiliar with and because last year's selections looked really interesting.

As a lover of historical novels, especially those set in Great Britain, I tore through the nearly-600 pages at a gallop after I got past the first chapter or two. At first I thought it was going to be a "brick and mortar" story like "Pillars of the Earth". Not that I disliked "Pillars", but once is enough.

The book travels alternately back and forth between medieval and present-day Salster, England. Although I know quite a few English cities, I had to research whether or not Salster actually exists. It does not, but one can envision a city like Oxford, which contains many colleges that together form a university.

Kineton and Dacre College is 600 years old when we first encounter it, in present times. A minor fire discloses eight previously hidden wall paintings (frescoes?) that are, to say the least, disturbing. It falls to new marketing director Damia Miller to discover the meaning behind the paintings and the history of the building of the college.

Although I am not bothered by books that jump around in time, I by far enjoyed the historical sections of "Testament" over the modern. They contain part political intrigue and part family drama, as wealthy merchant Richard Daker, master mason Simon of Kineton and - more reluctantly - Simon's wife, master carpenter Gwyneth, join forces to build an outstanding institution of higher education.

Just as the plans for the college are taking form in 1385, Gwyneth gives birth to a child she and Simon have desperately wanted for 20 years. Sadly, Simon and Gwyneth discover Toby is crippled and thought by townspeople to be possessed by the devil (from the description of his symptoms, Toby probably had cerebral palsy).

A side benefit of historical novels is that they are educational. I found it very illuminating to learn how colleges in the late 14th-Century were controlled by the Catholic church, that they were only for the chosen few and that all classes were conducted in Latin. Daker, a not-too-secret Lollard (followers of John Wycliffe, critical of the traditional church), believes that men should learn in their native language, that colleges should be open to the common man and not be controlled by the Church.

I found the story of Gwyneth's love for her damaged son to be heartwrenching and real. In contrast, the modern-day characters are much less empathetic.

At the turn of the 21st Century, Kineton and Dacre College, nicknamed Toby by fond students, is full of political intrigue too - in the form of university politics. There is a tenant's strike and a possible takeover by the smarmy leader of a fellow college. Those subplots either bored or mystified me and I skimmed through them - perhaps because I'm not English. Our colleges do not have tenant farmers and our universities are much more cohesive under their university umbrella.

I had the hardest time with Damia' character. I found it extremely difficult to believe that Ms. Miller, lacking a college degree, could suddenly become a marketing director of a major college and do a bang up job of it. I also found it a real stretch to believe that the only coach the school can find for their annual Fairings, the most-famous footrace in the world, is, you guessed it, Damia.

Since I am listing Damia's faults, I am also going to say it bothered me that she is a lesbian. Not that a lesbian protagonist in itself bother me - I say kudos to Hawkins, herself a lesbian, for having a lesbian (and black, to boot) character who is an intelligent, savvy career woman. But really, I see it as a contrivance and just so unnecessary. The side stories of Damia's present and past lovers - both male and female - were empty and bland. I felt no sympathy toward Damia's "plight", in vivid contrast to the way Hawkins made me feel about Gwyneth and Toby's situation.

Toby ends up being the hero of the story, ending up with not one but two statues of himself at Kineton and Dacre. How a crippled boy achieves this is a story that begs reading.

AN ODE TO CHARLESTON

2010-01-08T19:00:00.000-08:00

"I carry the delicate porcelain beauty of Charleston like the hinged-shell of a soft-tissued mollusk. My soul is peninsula-shaped and sun-hardened and river-swollen. The high tides of the city flood my consciousness each day, subject to the whims and harmonies of full moons rising out of the Atlantic. I grow calm when I see the ranks of palmetto trees pulling guard duty on the banks of Colonial Lake or hear the bells of St. Michael's calling cadence to the cicada-filled trees along Meeting Street."

Sometimes the city in which a book is located is just as much a character in the book as the people who populate it. Such is the case with "Miss Garnet's Angel" by Salley Vickers, in which Venice takes center stage. And then there is "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" by John Berendt, in which Savannah, GA, is the shining star.

And so it is with Charleston, SC. Years ago our family flew to Florida and after a short stay rented a car to drive to Washington, DC. I was "allowed" to pick a famous Southern city to visit along the way - but just one. I wavered between Savannah or Charleston. Going to Savannah meant driving a ways inland, so Dan was rooting for Charleston. I was leaning toward Savannah, but I was glad I acquiesced, for I had a magical time in Charleston. I fell in love with the city. Who doesn't?

In his latest book, "South of Broad", Pat Conroy returns to one of his favorite spots on earth, the Low Country of South Carolina. This time, he concentrates on the city of Charleston. As I read "South of Broad", I again encountered the city I had fallen head over heels for - St. Michael's Church, The Battery, the old Slave Market, the stately homes and nearby antebellum plantations, the antique shops, the enchanting hidden-away gardens, the seafood restaurants along Shem Creek.

"South of Broad" has its flaws, but it has two very redeeming qualities: the City of Charleston, a character unto itself, and the overwhelmingly beautiful language with its cadence of rivers and sea.

The book begins with the fateful day of June 19, 1969, during which the protagonist, Leopold Bloom King, encounters the people who will figure importantly in his future. That he meets them all in one day - deeply-wounded twins Sheba and Trevor Poe; orphaned brother and sister Niles and Starla Whitehead; privileged brother and sister Chad and Fraser Rutledge; Chad's socialite girlfriend Molly Huger; and black football player Ike Jefferson - is a stretch in itself, and there are other passages in which credulity is stretched to the limit. As much as I wish they did, people in real life do not actually talk like Conroy's characters.

The main flaw of the book is that it skips from 1969 to 1989, leaving out a huge chunk of time during which the friendships formed among the teenagers. Though Conroy does fill in some blanks later, the back stories are sketchy, to say the least. The biggest stretch of unexplored and unexplained territory is how and why Starla, who later becomes Leo's wife, descends into madness when her equally-troubled brother and the even-more-troubled twins do not.

Another "character" in the book is Hurricane Hugo, which devastated the City of Charleston in 1989. I thought for sure that the hurricane would be the perfect time for the psychopathic stalker/murderer we had already encountered to make his reappearance. What better plot twist than to have a group of people trapped by a murderous hurricane be stalked by an equally violent killer?

Good thing I'm not a novelist. Conroy instead elects to have his villain reappear later in a much less dramatic way. Quite the letdown. In regard to the stalker, I had early on guessed his identity and later, his fate. These revelations were meant to be dramatic, but instead of providing us with "a-ha" moments Conroy gives us "ho-hum" moments.

As always, Conroy does do some things right. He is always good at writing about strong male friendships, such as that between Leo and Ike. Leo's character, fortunately, is fully drawn. He's a good man, a fine man - complicated but likable, wise but oh-so-human, nearly broken but resilient as the trees that survived the hurricane. I loved the portraits of Starla and Trevor, also survivors - of a hellish childhood - who turn to their imaginations and a love of beauty for salvation. But other characters are poorly developed. For example, though we learn that Niles, too, is a fine and good man, we are only told this, not shown it.

For me, Conroy's best book will always be "The Prince of Tides" (one of my favorite books of all time). So I will forgive him the flaws in "South of Broad". For despite its deficits, he has still given me a great deal - the story of a Dolphin Queen, a stellar early-morning bike ride through a sleeping city, a mother who is a Joycean scholar and who was a nun, a town rife with the scents of jasmine and magnolia, the swell of the tides, friendships beyond measure.

"Since the day I have been born I have been afraid that heaven would never be half as beautiful as Charleston, the city formed where two rivers meet in ecstacy to place a harbor and a bay and an exit to the world."

It's apparent Conroy loves his city, and it was certainly a pleasure for me to to re-visit it during a time in which my personal landscape is white and bitterly cold.

THE ELEGANCE OF THE HEDGEHOG

2010-01-04T14:10:00.000-08:00

So far I am doing smashingly well with my (one and only) New Year's Resolution: to post about a book in my book blog before I begin the next one! I bought "The Elegance of the Hedgehog" by Muriel Barbery with my Christmas gift card last Wednesday, and finished it New Year's Day, so I'm counting it as the first book for 2010.

I had heard about this book through Cornflower's Book Blog (link on my sidebar). From her I learned that readers are very divided about this book, either loving it or hating it. Those who didn't care for it had two major complaints: that the main characters were snobbish, elitist and unlikable, and that the book itself was too intellectual, too philosophical, boring even.

Although I am a smart, quite well-educated person, I do not consider myself an intellectual, and am, in fact, put off by the yammering of self-important intellectuals. (I think of a girl at school named Blatherwick whom my friends and I called Blatheralot). I was a bit intimidated too: afraid to buy the book and let myself in for philosophical treatises too deep for me. But the glowing descriptions of those who liked the book tipped the balance. And "The Elegance of the Hedgehog" turned out to be one of the best books I have read in a long time. I know I will be reading it again and again.

The two major characters are Renee Michel, the apparently sterotypical concierce of a Parisian apartment building, and 12-year-old Paloma Josse, who lives in the building with her family. Both are stunningly intelligent but - for reasons that will ultimately revealed - each chooses to hide her intellectual light under a bushel basket of anonymity.

Renee, a 54-year-old widow, is known only as Mme. Michel to the tenants. They have no idea that behind closed doors Madame is vastly unlike her public persona of the dowdy, grumpy concierge. Rather than sitting glued to mind-numbing television, Renee, an autodidact, listens to classical music, reads philosophy and watches DVDs of Japanese films.

Precocious Paloma is world-weary and disillusioned. Her parents, sister, schoolmates and teachers have no idea of the depths of her still waters. Perhaps too well read and too informed for her tender age, Paloma has come to the conclusion that life is not worth living. She plans to commit suicide and burn down the apartment building on her upcoming 13th birthday.

The arrival of a new tenant in the building - the extremely perceptive Japanese businessman and aesthete Kakuro Ozu - is the catalyst that brings Paloma and Renee together, lifts Renee out of her self-spun cocoon and gives Paloma an abiding reason to live.

Rather than finding them snobbish and offputting, I loved Renee and Paloma immediately. Perhaps it's because I was and am still in many ways a misfit that I identified with them so. I found the philosophical discussions to be intriguing and sailed through them fairly well, finding only Chapter 2 under "Paloma" a bit daunting. But to balance out that chapter is Chapter 11 under "Summer Rain" that begins "What is the purpose of art?" and ends with this sublime sentence: "For art is emotion without desire."

The language of "Hedgehog" is glorious throughout. Through the character of Paloma, Barbery writes, "Pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language." For those who recognize it, the enchantment and beauty of language are on every page of "Hedgehog". For example, this paragraph which ends a description of a summer rain:

"Just as teardrops, when they are large and round and compassionate, can leave a long strand washed clean of discord, the summer rain as it washes away the motionless dust can bring to a person's soul something like endless breathing."

Or this:

"In the split second when I saw the stem and the bud drop to the counter I intuited the essence of beauty....Because beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It's the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their beauty and their death."

If you're wondering about the title, it's Paloma's description of Renee: "Mme. Michele has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside, she's covered with quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary - and terribly elegant."

A LIST FOR 2010: FOR STARTERS

2010-01-01T10:16:00.000-08:00

"WOMAN READING" by Teodor Axtenowicz

Do you have some friends who have no books in their homes? I mean none? What do you think about these people?

"To me a room without books is missing an essential feature, as important as lights, chairs or carpets. Or pictures: in their way, books are like pictures on the wall; they reveal whether you are a minimalist with all covers hidden under plain wrappers, a maximalist whose every room has a generously filled bookcase, or an anarchist whose preferred method of storage is an untidy heap." (from "Books Do Furnish A Room" by Leslie Geddes-Brown).

The presence of books reveals many things, according to the above paragraph. The lack of books reveals a great many things too, about the homeowners. I look down on people who neither display nor own books. I think they are small minded, shallow, ignorant. Hardly worth spending my time with.

By Geddes-Brown's definitions, I guess I am a maximalist, although I wouldn't mind being in an anarchist's house. I would rather spend time in a house messy with books than a house antiseptic with none.

I heard a supervisor (the president of the company) say that she had read a book on the plane during a recent vacation, and it was the first book she had read in many years. Is that something to reveal - something to brag about?

Am I being mean spirited when I say these things about people who don't read, who don't own books? Perhaps I should pity them istead. In her book "The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery writes, "Pity the poor spirit who knows neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language."

I am reading this book now, and I will review it soon. Meanwhile, be assured, it is filled with the enchantment and the beauty of language, there on every single page.

"A WOMAN READING NEAR A

GOLDFISH BOWL" by Lovis Corinth

Here is my very ambitious to-read list for the beginning of 2010:

1. "The Elegance Of The Hedgehog" by Muriel Barbery.

2. "Olive Kitteridge: Fiction" by Elizabeth Strout.

3. "Her Fearful Symmetry" by Audrey Niffeneger.|

4. "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" by Stieg Larsson.

5. "The Sweetness At The Bottom Of The Pie" by Alan Bradley.

6. "Testament" by Alis Hawkins.

7. "The Winter Ghosts" by Kate Mosse.

8. "South of Broad" by Pat Conroy

9. "Half-Broke Horses: A True Life Novel" by Jeannette Walls.

10. "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" by Muriel Sparks.

11. "Remarkable Creatures" by Tracy Chevalier.

12. "The Absolutely True Diary of A Part-time Indian" by Sherman Alexie.

13. "Howards End Is On The Landing" by Susan Hill.

14. "The Blue Tattoo" by Margaret Mifflin.

15. "The Zookeeper's Wife" by Diane Ackerman.

16. "People Of The Book" by Geraldine Brooks

17. "The Winter House" by Nicci Gerrard

18. "The Swan Thieves" by Elizabeth Kostova

19. "Travels With Charlie" by John Steinbeck

20. "The Road" by Cormack McCarthy

Three I have; two ("Testament" and "Travels With Charlie") are for Cornflower Books' online book club (see link above). Others will come to me via BOMC2's monthly shipments (a good deal - $10.00 per book, no shipping). Others I will have to wait to afford. One, "The Winter Ghosts", isn't even published in the United States yet.

Whatever your list, happy reading in 2010.

"WOMAN READING IN A STUDY"

by Mary Ferris Kelly

BEHIND YET AGAIN

2009-12-31T16:02:00.000-08:00

"THE HELP" by Kathryn Stockett

Once again I find myself with 10 books to review instead of posting about them one or two at a time. This time the task was so daunting I almost didn't write this post.

"The Help" is wonderful! I am not at all surprised that it is on bestseller lists. If you read only one book out of the ones listed here, read "The Help". It is set in Jackson, MS, in the 1960s, where, as one review put it, "black women were trusted to raise white children but not to polish the household silver." It centers around the genteel young white woman Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan and black maids/nannies Minny and Aibileen. Though she socializes with other white women in bridge clubs and the country club, Skeeter has more intelligence and/or sense than her peers. She becomes interested in the plight of black women servants and sets out to write their (anonymous) stories.

The turning point in Skeeter's enlightenment is learning that black women are not allowed to use the same bathrooms as her white employers. You may be reading this in disbelief, but it is absolutely true, as are many more disturbing facts revealed about this era of integration in the South. There is a hilarious episode during which Skeeter inadvertently (or through a Freudian slip) causes a whole bunch of old toilets to be dumped on a socialite's lawn. The best part of the book is Stockett's warm and wise portrayal of her black women characters.

THE CROWNING GLORY OF

CALLA LILY PONDER" by Rebecca Wells

This book is by the same author of "The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood". I absolutely loved the book and the movie it was based on. I was surprised and disappointed that my book club members did not care for the book. I don't think they "got" what the Ya-Yas were all about, but I did, and would have joined the sisterhood in a moment. I guess if you like Wells' heroines, you'll like Calla Lily Ponder, and vice versa. Calla Lily's "crowning glory" is hair. Like her mother, she is a hairdresser, and feels she has the gift of healing people while working on their hair. I did like Calla Lily, but I didn't love her like I did the Ya-Yas. I really got frustrated with the way she clung to the memory of the boyfriend who left her for the bright lights, big city. I did love the descriptions of life in little La Luna, LA, her hometown, and New Orleans. As usual, Wells' book is full of nutty Southern characters.

"QUITE A YEAR FOR PLUMS" by Bailey White

I had encountered Bailey White before, in her memoir, "Mama Makes Up Her Mind: And Other Dangers Of Southern Living". So when I found this book in a thrift shop, I snapped it up. I wish I hadn't wasted the money. Like Rebecca Wells' books White's are full of nutty - or more kindly - eccentric characters and a big dose of peculiar Southern ways (here, it's Georgia). But what works in the memoir doesn't in the book. For one thing, the characters are just too darn eccentric to be believable. For example, there's the woman who leaves things at the local dump with cute little notes attached to them. One thing that really bothered me is that I could not keep the main female characters apart: Which retired schoolteacher is Hilma, and which is Meade? Of Eula, Ethel and Louise, which is the mother, which the daughter and which the aunt? There is no plot whatsoever. Rather, "Quite A Year For Plums" is more like a collection of little vignettes, each a chapter long.

"THE WHITE GARDEN: A NOVEL OF

VIRGINIA WOOLF" by Stephanie Barron

If you, as I do, love reading English whodunits; learning about Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Nigel Nicolson and other members of the Bloomsbury Group; salivating over descriptions of Vita and Nigel's famous White Garden at Sissinghurst Castle and reading fictional stories about gardens and gardeners, then you'll love "The White Garden". Barron has cleverly drawn all these elements together into a smashing mystery. You could also call this an "alternative history" novel. Everyone knows that Woolf committed suicide in 1941 by loading her coat pocket with stones and walking into a river. Or did she? Since her body was not found for days afterward, what if instead she deliberately disappeared and was later murdered for possessing a dangerous war-time secret? A couple of minor criticisms: I found the conspiracy plot to be quite far fetched, and I also do not understand why American gardener Jo's English grandfather Jock felt such responsibility in the death of "The Lady".

"A CHANGE IN ALTITUDE" by Anita Shreve

In my above review of "The White Garden", I wrote that I didn't quite understand why the protagonist's grandfather felt such guilt over the (ficticious) demise of Virginia Woolf. I felt the same way about the female protagonist in "A Change In Altitude". Although I am a great fan of Shreve's, I did not enjoy this book as much as I have many of her others. I did enjoy her foray into a new setting: Africa. (I learned that Shreve worked as a journalist in Kenya early in her career.) Kenya newcomers Patrick, an American doctor, and his photographer wife Margaret are invited to climb Mt. Kenya by Diana and Arthur, English ex-patriots. Diana and Arthur are experienced climbers; Patrick and Margaret are not. The climb is ill fated, and haunts Margaret throughout the rest of the book. But why should it, I ask? What happened wasn't her fault. That, to me, was a serious flaw in the plot. But more importantly I asked myself why should I care about any of these insipid characters?

"A BIG LITTLE LIFE" by Dean Koontz

I was first introduced to Dean Koontz' passion for golden retrievers in one of his novels. This book is subtitled "A Memoir of a Joyful Dog" and is about Koontz' and his wife's life with their golden, Trixie. As an owner of a (now-deceased) golden, I know how smart and lovable these dogs are. It's been almost a year since Penny died, and I mourn her still. Trixie is a very special dog as well. She seems to have a sixth sense which not even most dogs have. I bought this book knowing I would cry at the end. Sorry if that was a spoiler for you, but you must have known that people don't write memoirs about their dogs until after the dogs have passed on ("Marley and Me", for example). So be prepared to cry over Trixie's demise, but first enjoy and celebrate the life of this big little dog the way the Koontz' did.

"LABOR DAY" by Joyce Maynard

I have been a fan of Joyce Maynard since my teens. I read her various columns in girls' and women's magazines as she progressed from teenager to young woman to wife and mother. I also read her book "At Home In The World", in which she detailed her affair with that American icon, J. D. Salinger. Like fellow writer Anna Quindlen, Maynard successfully made the transition from columnist to fiction writer. "Labor Day" takes place in and around Labor Day weekend in Holton Mills, NH, centering on the lives of teenager Henry, his mother Adele, and an escaped convict named Frank, who at first takes them hostage but then is absorbed into their lives. Maynard proves, with believable and likable characters, that a family is whatever you define it as, and that love is where ever you find it.

"THE PHYSICK BOOK OF DELIVERANCE DANE"

by Katherine Howe

A fellow book club member recommended this book, but I was wary, knowing that she had selected a (gag) Danielle Steele book when it was her turn to host the club. However, I did see the book in my Literary Guild magazine, so I took a chance on it. I needn't have worried. The book is set partly in the present and partly in Salem, MA, during the Witch Trials in 1692. The protagonist, Connie Goodwin, is a Harvard graduate student studying women in American history. Traveling to Marblehead, MA, to clean out her late grandmother's house in preparation for selling it, Connie discovers a physick (or spells) book of a woman named Deliverance Dane. We learn that while most of the women accused as witches in Salem were innocent, Deliverance was not. Connie finds that she is a descendant of Deliverance, an actual witch, and what's more, she discovers that she has witchy powers. In a race against time, she must learn the secrets of Deliverance's book to save the man she loves.

"WILD LIFE" by Molly Gloss

This book relates the tale (real or imaginary??) of how Charlotte Bridger Drummond gets lost in the primeval forests of Washington State and comes to spend time with a small group of the legendary ape-like creature Sasquatch. Charlotte is quite the character - a widow bringing up five sons in near-wilderness, supporting them by writing dime novels featuring romantic, brave and plucky women. When a little girl gets lost at a logging camp in the Cascade Mountains in 1905, Charlotte - independent, cigar-smoking, men's-clothing-wearing feminist that she is - goes to the camp to help. After she becomes separated from a searching party, she strives to stay alive in the woods.

It is then that Charlotte, starving and near death, meets up with a small bunch of Sasquatch who eventually accept her as part of their group. I loved this section of the book the best. Charlotte forges a deep bond with the creatures, especially the mother, and eventually becomes more animal than human. I did have trouble with the writing. Charlotte's first-person story resembles the dense, convoluted style of newspapers of that day.Yes, Charlotte is extremely intelligent and well read, but would she have told her story in these words? However, that is a minor criticism, for "Wild Life" is a gripping - and ripping good - adventure story.

I've read that a lot of people were disappointed in Barbara Kingsolver's new book "The Lacuna", saying it was not as good as her other books. I disagree. While I loved Kingsolver's older books, especially "The Bean Trees" and "Animal Dreams", I think "The Lacuna" is just as good. It is definitely more ambitious in scope. Knowing a bit about Mexican artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera helped, I think. And while I had known that Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky was exiled in Mexico, I had no real understanding of his politics. I didn't know that he and Stalin had conflicting views, thinking a Communist is a Columnist, plain and simple. I also learned a great deal of the 1950s-era Communist witch hunts in the U.S., again having no idea of how bad conditions were for many artists and writers. But above all I empathized so much with the hero, William Shepherd. The son of an American father and a Mexican mother, William is an ex-pat in both countries, never fully Mexican nor America.

A MEME

2009-12-01T11:09:00.000-08:00

Despite my best intentions, I have again delayed writing book reviews. I've now read six more books that I need to review. I'll get to them, but in the meantime I'll post this MeMe that I found on Janet's blog.

Do you snack while you read?

Yes, I am guilty of that. My books do have food smudges in them, and dog slobber too. And if a dog jostles me at the wrong time, there may be splashes of red wine on the page too.

Do you tend to mark your books as you read them, or does the idea of writing on your books horrify you?

I usually don't mark my books. I put post it notes on pages with passages I want to go back to.

How do you keep your place while reading a book? Bookmark? Dog ears? Leaving the book open flat?

I am guilty of both dog earing my books and leaving them open flat. I love bookmarks but seldom use them as I tend to misplace them right away. Someone gave me a magnetic bookmark that worked great, but Gracie chewed it up.

Fiction, Non-Fiction or both?

Mostly fiction, but I do like well-written non-fiction too. This past spring I read a glut of non-fiction books about the Celts. And I do love a good biography.

Are you a person who tends to read to the end of chapters, or are you able to put a book down at any point?

I keep on reading until I have finished the book, or have run out of time, or until I'm too sleepy to read one more word. I've often stayed up all night just to finish a book. I read "The Stand" almost non-stop for two days.

If you come across an unfamiliar word, do you stop to look it up right away?

No, I have a pretty good vocabulary. If I run into a word I don't know, I try to take the meaning from the context. However, that sometimes leads me to having an incorrect or only vague understanding of the word's meaning. I only just realized that avuncular means uncle-like, not jolly.

What are you currently reading?

"The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder" by Rebecca Wells.

What is the last book you bought?

Just ordered "The White Garden" by Stephanie Barron and "Testament" by Alis Hawkins from amazon.com used books. "Testament" is the January pick for an online book club I just joined.

Are you the type of person who can only read one book at a time or can you read more than one at a time?

I usually read only one novel at a time, but can have a non-fiction book going on the side at the same time.

Do you prefer series or stand alone books?

Series can be wonderful but they can also be terribly disappointing. I loved "Outlander" by Diana Gabaldon but the succeeding books in the series got worse and worse.

Is there a specific book or author that you find yourself recommending over and over?

The one book I have been consistently recommending for 40 years is "To Kill A Mockingbird". Of more current books, I often recommend "Water For Elephants."

How do you organize your books?

Willy-nilly. They are stuffed into bookcases as they are read. This fall I was finally able to get the various stacks of books off the bedroom and hall floors.

LET'S START AGAIN

2009-10-12T12:41:00.000-07:00

"LYING WITH THE ENEMY" by Tim Binding

I can't believe it's been over a year and a half since I posted anything to this blog. However, I do know the reason why. It's because I felt that I had to write full-blown, detailed reviews of each book. And consequently, I put off writing the reviews, causing me to forget details about the books.

I have decided to give only thumbnail reviews from now on, and post them as soon as I have read the book, or two or three at most. Contained in this post are the books I have read most recently.

Shown above, "Lying With the Enemy" tells about the German occupation of the British Island of Guernsey during WWII. I was particularly interested to get this book when I found it in The Owl bookstore, because I have read the bestseller, "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society." Although both books deal with the same subject, Lying is a much more somber book than Potato Peel, which is far lighter in tone. Altough Potato Peel touches on the privations of the islanders, it very often does so with humor. Not so with Lying. We see the starvation, the cruelty of the German invaders, and in particular, the fraternization of the Guernsey women with the German troops. I found this book difficult to get into, but then it became a page turner as an island policeman tries to discover who murdered one of these women - a rich socialite who was once his lover.

"THE LEGACY OF LUNA" by Julia Butterfly Hill

I don't know if I would have picked up "The Legacy of Luna" if it hadn't been just a dollar on the hardcover discount table. I remember when Julia Butterfly Hill was occupying a giant redwood tree in California to prevent it and its neighbors from being logged. At the time, I thought she was a crazy tree hugger (not that I dislike tree huggers - I am one myself, but I hug my trees in private). But the more I read, the more I got to like and admire Hill. It took amazing stamina, determination and courage to live for two years high among branches violently tossed by winter storms. She is no environmental dilettante. In time she comes to love Luna, the redwood, not just as a symbol of the great redwood forests, but as an individual tree with a soul and a personality. Having studied the Celts, I realized that her feelings are in line with those of my ancient ancestors.

"THE LOST SYMBOL" by Dan Brown

I must admit that I read some reviews of "The Lost Symbol", the newest bestseller by Dan Brown. But, at least I read them after I read the book. I was surprised at how unkind the reviews were. The readers seemed to have expected that Brown undergo a metamorphosis as a writer since his last book, for what they complained about most was his style of writing, his plotting, his lack of romance between the protagonists, his use of clues and puzzles to solve a mystery. Whoa, people, Dan Brown is not going to change a very successful formula. While I wouldn't give it five stars, I did like it. I thought it was more suspenseful than a couple of his other books, and I liked how he wove the architecture of various buildings and monuments in Washington, DC into his story. Washington is one of my favorite cities (and it is obviously his too) and I loved how he explained the hidden symbols within the Washington Monument, the Capitol Rotunda and the National Cathedral (one of my favorite places on earth).

"THE PAINTED KISS" by Elizabeth Hickey

Although I had heard of the painter Gustav Klimt before, I was not really acquainted with any of his works. The book is fictional, but is based on his relationship with a real-life woman, Emilie Floge. She was the subject of the Klimt painting featured on the book's cover. Emilie, who later became a famous Viennese fashion designer, met Klimt at age 12 when she was his drawing student. She had a friendship with him that lasted the rest of his life (although he is quite an unlovable character, she loved him very much). That she was his longtime companion and confidante is undisputed, whether or not they were lovers is. I especially enjoyed the portrait of bohemian Vienna at the turn of the century. Hickey brings the city, the food, the fashions, the manners, the society, the arts and the artists to vibrant life. The next time I see a Klimt painting I will surely recognize it.

"THE SECRET OF LOST THINGS" by Sheridan Hay

Rosemary Savage is only 18 years old when she arrives in New York City from far distant Tasmania. Incredibly - it seemed to me - she finds a job at an antiquarian bookstore within a matter of days. At The Arcade, she meets a cast of extermely eccentric characters, some nice, some not so nice. There's the irascible owner George Pike, his creepy albino assistant Walter Geist, gay Art of the art department, the sympathetic transsexual cashier Pearl, and Oscar, the nonfiction specialist with whom Rosemary is infatuated. There is an unsatisfying end to a mystery involving a lost manuscript by Herman Melville. Having slogged through "Moby Dick" in junior English class, I am not a huge fan of Melville, and I'm not a huge fan of this book either. Equally unsatisfying is the unexplained, abrupt departure of Oscar at the end of the book.

"KRISTIN LAVRANSDATTIR"

2008-03-14T17:17:00.000-07:00

THE LIVES AND TIMES OF MEDIEVAL NORWAY ARE PERFECTLY

CAPTURED BY SIGRID UNDSET IN "KRISTIN LAVRANSDATTIR"

As a person of Norwegian descent, I knew of the "Kristin Lavransdattir" trilogy by Sigrid Undset, but had never read it. I certainly had seen it featured in North Dakota bookstores, at the Norsk Hostfest and at Sons of Norway meetings, but had never felt the urge to pick up a copy. This past November, I rented Liv Ullmann's movie version of "Kristin," and I was hooked. The movie covers only Part I, so I was eager to continue following Kristin's saga. For most of a whole month, I was immersed in the lives and times of 14th Century Norway. (Volume I is "The Wreath," Volume II is "The Wife" and Volume III is "The Cross".)

I understand why "Kristin Lavransdattir" was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. It is truly epic in scope, while also telling the tale of a single person. It shows us a woman in all three stages of life - from maiden to mother to crone - set against a backdrop of political intrigue, Catholic religion mixed with pagan beliefs, Scandinavian traditions and customs, family and ancestral obligations, societal mores, and the landscape of the Northern World. I had never been exposed to a novel in which a person's spiritual life was so much more important than the secular life (a commonly-held view in Medieval times). What a contrast to my life and that of my contemporaries.

Kristen's struggle with God is always at the forefront of her story. By constantly dwelling on her sins and on her husband, Erlend's, failures, she never truly enjoys the moments of her life as they are happening. At one point, another character chastises Kristin because she keeps harping on her sins, never believing herself to have been truly forgiven. "Exactly!" I thought, "you tell her. " To use very modern vernacular, I kept thinking as I read, "Kristen, get over it and get on with it."

Yes, Kristin Lavransdattir is a flawed character, but she is also an intriguing mix of the spiritual and the carnal, of defiance and compliance, love and hatred. She is, at various times, careworn and carefree, devoted to her family or indifferent and selfish, a woman who can't live with Erland, but also can't live without him.

Whether standing tall and proud, or brought low, whether the queen of the manor or the shoved-aside mother-in-law, whether a spirited child or an overburdened mother, Kristin Lavransdattir is "of whole cloth", and that's what makes this 1200-plus page trilogy so compelling.

"EAT, PRAY, LOVE"

2008-03-14T17:01:00.000-07:00

If I had to limit myself to choosing just one book to read for a month, I'd choose "Eat, Pray, Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert. I ordered it thinking it was going to be a pleasant travelogue. And it is. Gilbert is a superb writer. She could pen fascinating essays from Siberia, the Sahara or even the Antarctic. It is truly a "couldn't put it down" book. But "Eat, Pray, Love" is so much more.

After a devastating, long-drawn-out divorce, an on-the-rebound failed love affair and subsequent depression, Gilbert decides to take a year to travel to Italy, India and Indonesia (specifically Bali). She planned to explore pleasure (through food) in Italy, devotion (by living at an ashram in Indian) and a combination of worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence in Bali. As I read it, I found myself earmarking the book, something I don't even do while reading my book club books.

Little did I know that while Gilbert was exploring her spirituality, I was exploring mine. For me, it was literally a self-help book (and I never buy self-help books because they do nothing for me.) In her pages I found peace, serenity, contentment, release from pain, succor, call it what you will, for a difficult situation I'm enduring right now.

I'm going to print some passages from the book here, because they are ones that spoke to me. But I think everyone who reads it will find something to meditate upon. (I will leave the passage about soul friends for another post.) I HIGHLY recommend this book.

Page 120: "I honor the divinity that resides inside me." (Me: God is in me. God is love, therefore I must love myself. I AM good, I have worth, I am someone, I am not to be taken lightly. I may have overstepped the Yogi's concept a bit, but isn't the purpose of any text to take your thoughts to the next step?)

Page 178-179. "I will not harbor unhealthy thoughts anymore.....A harbor of course is a place of refuge, a port of entry. I pictured the harbor of my mind - a little beat-up, perhaps, a little storm-worn, but well situated and with a nice depth. The harbor of my mind is an open bay, the only access to the island of my Self (which is a young and volcanic island, yes, but fertile and promising). The island has been through some wars, it is true, but now committed to peace, under a new leader (me) who has instituted new policies to protect the place....You may not come here any more with your hard and abusive thoughts, with your plague ships of thoughts, with your slave ships of thoughts, with your warships of thoughts--all these will be turned away....This is a peaceful harbor, the entryway to a fine and proud island this is only now beginning to cultivate tranquillity...."

Page 251: "The [Balinese] child is taught from the earliest consciousness that she has these four brothers with her in the world wherever she goes, and that they will always look after her. the brothers inhabit the four virtues a person needs in order to be safe and happy in life: Intelligence, friendship, strength and (I love this one) poetry. The brothers can be called upon in any critical situation for rescue and assistance. When you die, your four spirit brothers will collect your soul and bring you to heaven."

Page 260: "...I also keep remembering a simple idea my friend Darcey once told me--that all the sorrow and trouble of this world is caused by unhappy people. Not only the big global Hitler-'n'-Stalin picture, but on the smallest personal level....The search for contentment is therefore, not merely a self-preserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself, but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people."

"LUNCHEON OF THE BOATING PARTY"

2008-03-14T16:43:00.000-07:00

I have been on a vacation of sorts for the past few days, even though I haven't set foot outside of Bismarck. I've been devouring Susan Vreeland's "Luncheon of the Boating Party" after Pierre-Auguste Renoir's painting of the same name. I have been walking the streets of Monmartre or dining on exquisite dishes on the upper terrace of a restaurant overlooking the Seine near Paris.

Of course, I have seen this painting before, but I will never look at it the same way again. Vreeland's book tells how Renoir came to gather these 14 people together for a series of eight sittings en plein air at La Maison Fournaise on the Isle de Chatou near Paris.

Renoir brings these wonderful people and their setting to vibrant life. In the front with her little dog is Alene, the seamstress from the country who falls in love with Renoir. Also in love with Auguste, as they call him, is Alphonsine Fournaise, the restaurant owners' daughter, leaning on the railing. In the rear, holding her hands to her ears, is Jeanne, whom Renoir is in love with. All are based on real people, Vreeland's notes tell us.

The only mystery figure is the man watching the woman drink wine. Is he Renoir, or is he the famous writer Guy de Maupassant? Renoir frantically searched to find a 14th person to pose. Thirteen would have been very bad juju, and would have insulted the Catholic hierarchy of France, with its reference to "The Last Supper."

You have two men in their singlets and boaters, obviously just finished rowing. But who is the dapper man in the top hat, looking so out of place? Vreeland has rounded out their personalities so well. There is Helen, the actress at the Folies Bergere, who hopes some day to be more than just a mime. We have Auguste's very good friend, Gustave, himself an artist who is trying desperately to hold the French Impressionist movement together. Meanwhile, Auguste is trying desperately to hold his group together and finish the enormous canvas before he loses the light of summer.

I nearly salivated on my book as I read about the fabulous meals they ate and the wines they drank before they got down to posing each Sunday afternoon. (Boeuf Richileau in Madeira sauce, anyone?) Even the Seine, so pastoral in its rural incarnation, is a living, breathing character. Just the description of someone peeling a peach made me want to throw down the book and run to buy one.

Back in the city, Monmartre is cheerful and gay, with its dance halls, restaurants, musicians and pleasure gardens. But there is a hidden dark side as well. There are the demimondaines and their lovers; the pickpockets and thugs who beat up Renoir.

He has many struggles to face before he can complete the painting: He's always scrambling to beg or borrow money to buy paint and canvas and pay models. Somewhat hapless, he has one arm in a cast and then falls off his steam-powered bicycle and scrapes up his face. He has to fire one model and others don't show up. He is rejected by Jeanne and can't make up his mind between Aline and Alphonsine. He has to decide whether to stay with the Impressionists or break away from his dear friends. He rearranges poses, scrapes faces off the canvas, is despondent and hopeless, then finds solutions and is rejuvenated and indeed falls in love with painting again.

It all culminates gloriously in one of the most beautiful paintings in the world. Vreeland describes how Renoir daubs peach on a face here, highlights a white ruffle there, brings in shades of lavender on a white tablecloth to create his masterpiece. But she herself painted a glorious portrait of the bohemian life of Paris in 1881 as she layered on detail after detail. I have read other books by Vreeland in which she imagines the lives of other famous painters. I would say this is HER masterpiece.

"THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL"

2008-02-29T20:15:00.000-08:00

Some of you may know, from reading my primary blog, that reading historical fiction is one of my guilty pleasures. Aware that the movie "The Other Boleyn Girl" would be opening this weekend, and that I had a copy of the book by Philippa Gregory in my historical fiction stash, I read the book this past week.

Most everyone knows about Anne Boleyn, the ill-fated second wife of Henry VIII of England. But not many know that there was another Boleyn sister, Mary Boleyn. According to Gregory's book, narrated by Mary, she was Henry's mistress before Anne and bore him a son and a daughter. (Remember that the term "Historical Fiction" includes the word "fiction.") History tells us that there actually was a Mary Boleyn, sister of Anne, but whether or not she bore Henry's child is questionable.

But no matter to the reader who is willing to suspend disbelief. What matters to me is that this is a ripping good story, a page turner. I couldn't read the 660 pages fast enough. It soon enough became clear to me that either Anne or Mary could be referred to as "The Other Boleyn Girl", for each had her ascendancy in Henry's court, Mary first and Anne second.

Actually, the title of this book should be "One or Another of the Boleyn Girls", for the whole theme of the book is that both Mary and Anne - and their brother George - were controlled by their power-hungry family, the Howards/Boleyns. The two girls were interchangeable pawns in a game to win the heart of the king.

For some reason, I had the (incorrect) impression that Philippa Gregory was a bodice-ripper type novelist who wrote this and other books years ago. She is very much a contemporary writer and she is an extremely capable writer. The portrait of the court, the life of Tudor England and the emotions of love, lust, revenge, hatred, intrigue and familial loyalty are totally believable and absolutely enthralling.

As I mentioned before, a movie has been made based upon the book. Scarlet Johansson plays Mary, Natalie Portman is Anne and Eric Bana is a young, virile Henry VIII, long before he was the fat, spindly legged King of the famed Hans Holbein portrait. I'm going to see the movie, if, for nothing else, to see those fabulous costumes and royal scenery.