Cariola's 2013 Reading Log

Sidney Family Emblem, Penshurst

Finished the first book of the year, so we're ready to roll!

January
The Servants' Quarters by Lynn Freed
Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li
Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan
Merivel: A Man of His Time by Rose Tremain
The Absolutist by John Boyne
Lucky Us by Joan Silber
The Eleven by Pierre Michon

February
Mortality by Christopher Hitchens
Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare
Richard III by William Shakespeare
Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier
The Leisure Seeker by Michael Zadoorian
The Poet's Wife by Judith Allnatt
The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
Trigger Man: More Tales of the Motor City by Jim Ray Daniels

March
Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo
The Abundance by Amit Majmudar
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier (reread it with my class)
The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare (reread for a course)
The Heather Blazing by Colm Toibin
The Memory of Love by Linda Olsson

April
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare (reread)
Proof by David Auburn (reread)
Othello by William Shakespeare (reread)
Honour by Elif Shafak
An Imaginative Experience by Mary Wesley
Q & A (aka Slumdog Millionaire) by Vikas Swarup (reread with my class)
The Tempest by William Shakespeare (reread)

May
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster
The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A Taste of Sorrow by Jude Morgan

June
Quarrel with the King (or, Earls of Paradise) by Adam Nicolson
High Rising by Angela Thirkell
Bodily Secrets by William Trevor
Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet Doctrine by Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster
The Cooked Seed by Anchee Min
The Translator by Leila Aboulela
Playing Sardines by Michele Roberts
The Sonnets by Warwick Collins

July
Transatlantic by Colum McCann
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
Songs of Willow Frost by Jamie Ford
The Colonel's Daughter and Other Stories by Rose Tremain
Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O'Farrell
A Fatal Likeness by Lynn Shepherd

August
I am quite embarrassed to report that I did not complete a single book this month! I was reading from 3-4 different books, but I got sidetracked by contractors, household projects and emergencies, and planning for the new semester. I'm wondering if I will make my goal of 75 by the end of the year. We shall see . . .

September
New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families by Colm Toibin
The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd
Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare (reread with my students)
Richard III by William Shakespeare (reread with my students)
Edward II by Christopher Marlowe (reread with my students)
The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare (reread with my students)
Arden of Faversham by Anonymous (reread with my students)
The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
A Constellation of Vital Phenomenoa by Anthony Marra

October
Toby's Room by Pat Barker
Volpone by Ben Jonson
The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster
The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare (reread for my class)
Zeitoun by Dave Eggers (reread with my students)
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

November
A Chaste Maid in Cheapside by Thomas Middleton
King Lear by William Shakespeare
The Making of a Marchioness by Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Hired Man by Aminatta Forna
The Witch of Edmonton by Thomas Dekker, William Rowley, and John Ford
The Changeling by Thomas Middleton
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
Havisham by Ronald Frame

December
The Tempest by William Shakespeare
Here Comes Trouble: Stories from My Life by Michael Moore
The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert

The Servants' Quarters by Lynn Freed

Set in post-World War II Africa (but it could as easily have been set in Shropshire or Vermont or anywhere else), The Servants' Quarters can best be described as a coming of age novel, but a rather distressing one. It's three parts follow Cressida, younger daughter of a Jewish family, at the ages of nine, fifteen, and eighteen. To say that her family is dysfunctional is an understatement. Muriel, the mother, is a flirt, if not worse, and a gold digger who constantly belittles her children; the father has been totally incapacitated since he was struck in the head by a golf club in an argument with one of his wife's suspected lovers. Although they are non-practicing Jews who escaped the ravages of Hitler's Germany, Cressida and her sister Miranda are haunted by the photographs of concentration camp victims in two books given to their father by their neighbor, Mr. Harding. First Miranda, then later Cressida suffer from nightmares of Germans coming over the walls. And always with them is Mr. Harding, a pilot whose plane was shot down, leaving him not only a prisoner of war but horribly disfigured by the ensuing flames.

Strapped for cash, the family lives in the Servants' Quarters on Mr. Harding's estate, and Cressida resents the fact that it seems to be she who has to be responsible to repay his generosity. She is called upon to be a companion and tutor to Edgar, the odd boy Mr. Harding brings home from who-knows-where, and she soon becomes Harding's own companion for afternoon tea and piano playing sessions.

There's an element of Beauty and the Beast here, but someone else used the word "creepy," and that is most appropriate. Mr. Harding keeps talking about his "plans" for Cressida and what is or isn't good enough for her, tells her how to style her hair and what kind of clothes to wear . . . I kept waiting for the "ick-factor" to kick in, and eventually it did.

Lots of themes circulating here: sex, power, love, class, materialism, obligation, and more. Although she was a horrible person, Muriel was also the most intriguing character. The novel is generally well-written, and it's a quick read at 213 pages, but it didn't exactly bowl me over.

Sounds like this one is not essential reading.

It's a great review, even if not a great book. Leaves me curious.

Tell us more about the sculpture in post 1. I'm left thinking, what Sydney family and why do they have an emblem like this. It's striking.

4> I took this photo at Penshurst, the Sidney family estate in Kent (about which Ben Jonson wrote a famous poem, "To Penshurst"). This is where Sir Philip Sidney, the courtier poet, was born and raised and spent time exiled from court. I believe it's actually a bronze casting. The arrow on the pedestal is part of the family coat of arms; it refers to the W in William, an early common family name. I'm really not sure why the porcupine was adopted.

I did find this excerpt from 'A London Provisioner's Chronicle, 1550-53' by Henry Machen:

The twenty-fourth day of February was buried Sir William Sidney, knight, in the county of Kent at his place, called Penshurst, with two heralds of arms, with his standard and his banner of arms and his coat of arms and four banderoles of armors, and his target and mantles and helmet and the crest a blue porcupine and seven dozen and a half escutcheons. And there were many mourners. And there were a great dole of money.

Sir William was the father of Philip, his sister, the famous patron of the arts the Countess of Pembroke, and Robert, who eventually inherited the title of his uncle, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, the favorite of Queen Elizabeth. Sir William was a close friend of Henry VIII.

Glad I asked! Thanks for the nice answer. Off to find the Ben Johnson poem.

6> I'd post it here, but it's a rather long one! BTW, it's Jonson, without the "h". Here are the opening lines:

Thou art not, Penshurst, built to envious show,
Of touch or marble; nor canst boast a row
Of polished pillars, or a roof of gold;
Thou hast no lantern, whereof tales are told,
Or stair, or courts; but stand’st an ancient pile,
And, these grudged at, art reverenced the while.
Thou joy’st in better marks, of soil, of air,
Of wood, of water; therein thou art fair.

It's probably the most well-known of the country house poem genre. Jonson here is comparing it to the "prodigy houses" built for show and to attract the king to visit--and comparing the Sidneys to their upstart owners. It's a really intriguing poem--one ripe for a Marxist reading, but I doubt Jonson intended it that way. Then again, the fish are jumping into the nets because they are so eager to be eaten by the Sidneys . . .

Yeah, the animals willingly sacrificing themselves caught my attention too. I read through it quickly this morning, with eyes crossing more and more along the way. I'm missing too much context, but could maybe get the nature-man made tensions if I read it bit slower...and a few more times...

"of soil, of air, / Of wood, of water"--the four elements. He is trying to say that his patron, Robert Sidney, is naturally noble, and his home has 'naturally' risen from the earthly elements. Notice how he moves from the outer grounds to the courtyard to the Great Hall to the inner chambers. Everything and everyone is so happy to be governed by Sidney that they are all blossoming and fertile (including Sidney's wife).

Gold Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li

I almost put down this book after reading the first story, a long (81-page) and rather dry reminiscence of a woman's time in the Chinese army, spurred by the death notice of her company officer. It was salvaged by her parallel memories of a local professor who befriended her and introduced her to Dickens and Hardy and told her the truth about her own background, so, fortunately, I kept reading.

Yiyun Li is a writer with a delicate touch and a poetic voice. The stories in this collection focus mainly on lonely people, forgotten people, people suffering devastating losses, people whose lives have been shaped more by tradition and government policy and fate than by their own needs and desires. They long for meaning: to do something significant, to marry someone to whom they will matter, to have children who will depend upon them and through whom they can live vicariously. A widow sets up a shop across from a prison, selling goods at high prices to visiting women and, in turn, listens to their stories, often offering assistance; but is it for them or more for herself? A twice-divorced woman in her fifties, now living alone in her family's childhood home, pursues the widowed neighbor on whom she once had a crush. A secretly gay son agrees to his aging mother's plans to marry him to her one-time favorite student, who has a secret of her own. An aging group of women become detectives spying on cheating spouses.

If you are looking for the funny or uplifting, you won't find it here. But Li is clearly in touch with the human heart, and these stories have a depth and beauty that will resonate long after you finish reading them.

#9 - An online version of the poem is sitting on a tab on I-Pad, just haven't convinced myself to re-read it yet. I'll keep your comments in mind.

Enjoyed your review of Gold Boy, Emerald Girl.

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan

I'm a huge McEwan fan--well, at least a fan of everything he has written from Enduring Love onwards. (I don't care for his earlier, kinkier, creepier fiction, although I did like The Child in Time.) But his latest, Sweet Tooth, fell short of my usual expectations. I missed the undercutting humor, the brilliant turns of language, the spot on insights into the human heart that characterize McEwan's work for me. Here, he seems a bit too caught up in the idea of the story itself: it's 1972, and a beautiful girl has an affair with an older married man who happens to work for MI-5. He recommends Serena for a position, and she eventually becomes part of a low-level operation called "Sweet Tooth," the purpose of which is to uncover leftist writers in various fields by setting up a front organization to fund their work. Acting as an agent of the foundation, Serena is sent to spy on a young professor.

Enough plot summary--I hate reviews that give away too much and spoil a book for others who might want to read it. Suffice it to say that there are some twists and turns and revelations as the story develops. Maybe it's because I'm not British, maybe it's because I've never been a fan of spy novels, maybe it's because the other book I'm reading at the moment is absolutely wonderful, but Sweet Tooth just never really engaged me. In novels outrageous, sentimental, or experimental, I've come to expect more from McEwan. He almost always stuns me, but the most I can say of this was is that it was OK.

I agree Cariola OK is not good enough for Ian McEwan

Sorry to hear Sweet Tooth was a bit disappointing; still, as with you, I will give it a try and find out for myself.

I'm a McEwan fan, but the lukewarm reviews about Sweet Tooth dissuaded me from buying it last year. I'll pass on this book, and hope that he returns to form with his next novel.

Oh dear, first William Boyd and now Ian McEwan. I know I will read Sweet Tooth though, and trust he will return to form later.

I gave up on Solar and Saturday, but have kept Saturday to try again with as my father loved it. I'll try Sweet Tooth, but I won't expect anything. Thanks for the clear review.

Too bad. I appreciate your criticism.

17> I can't say that I 'loved' either Solar or Saturday, but the writing and characterization in both were much finer than in this one.

>

I think McEwan is or has been looking for a new style. I disliked Saturday because there was hardly any story, and no particular style.

I enjoyed Solar as a new, perhaps not so very uniquely McEwanish style, yet a clear style, and a plot and really funny at the same time. In my review, I proposed that McEwan had renewed, or re-invented his style.

Comments here suggest that Sweet Tooth does not develop further up, but might be more of the stray style of Saturday.

20> At least in Saturday, the main character came to some insights about himself and made some changes and decisions. Which is more than I can say about Serena Plume.

I liked Saturday--just found it interesting. Not too excited about this latest one though!

22.> Saturday wasn't a favorite of mine, but I liked it well enough. This one--meh.

Merivel: A Man of His Time by Rose Tremain

I note that when I first set down my Story, I speculated that there may have been more than one Beginning to it. I suggested indeed Five Beginnings. For I understood then that no life begins only when it begins, but has many additional inceptions, and each of these determine the course of what is to come.

And now I see with equal clarity that a man's life may have more than one Ending.

So ponders Sir Robert Merivel, protagonist of Rose Tremain's Restoration and this sequel, while reading the worm-eaten, mouse dropping stained journal found underneath his bed, now fondly referred to as The Wedge. Those who have read Restoration will recall some of those Beginnings: the exceptional medical skills that first called Merivel to court; the opportunities there, won and lost and won again; the revival of his devotion to medicine, first in a humble Quaker home for the insane, then in treating victims of the plague; the unexpected love for his newborn daughter. As the sequel begins, Merivel, now aged 57, has been happily settled at Bidnold for a good many years, living comfortably, if not extravagantly, on the King's annual loyer. His daughter, Margaret, has blossomed into a lovely, intelligent young woman of seventeen and is eager to see the world. When she is invited by a neighboring nobleman and his family to join them in a visit to Cornwall to see the puffins, Merivel's loneliness spurs him to seek adventure abroad. Granted a letter of introduction from the king to his cousin, Louis XIV, Merivel heads to France in hopes of finding a position in the court of Versailles.

Tremain does a fine job of depicting a court that is even more insular, snobbish, and au courant than Whitehall. While Merivel never finds a position, he finds love (well, maybe) and more than a few adventures--as does Margaret, who is herself called to court--much, initially, to Merivel's dismay.

Much of the pleasure of reading Merivel: A Man of His Time is in the smaller details and connections to the first novel, and I don't want to give away too many of them here. Suffice it to say that Will Gates is back, cantankerous and devoted as ever, but slowing down a bit. Rosie Pierpoint and Violet Bathurst are still in the neighborhood, and Merivel is again on good terms with the King. And there is a bear, named Clarendon by the king . . .

The only reason this book received 4.5 stars instead of 5 is because I adored Restoration, and while the sequel kept me engrossed, well, it wasn't (and really couldn't be) Restoration. It would have been impossible to recreate those moments of surprise and delight, once I had been introduced to the characters and the court, as Tremain depicts them. I highly recommend reading both of Tremain's Merivel novels, in sequence, to get the most out of both.

I loved Restoration, Deborah, and now you've got me eager to read Merivel. I may reread Restoration first, though.

And sad to see about the new McEwan. I was disappointed in Saturday, and I think I'll skip Sweet Tooth altogether.

Another Restoration fan here, indeed everything I've read by Tremain I've loved. I have to admit I've been on the fence about Merivel, only because Restoration was SO good, but it's back on the wishlist. I'll need to have a bit of a Merival festival and read the novels in sequence.

Deborah, I finished the Lorraine Adams and my comments are on my thread here or on the book's page. I'm not sure if you would like this one...

The Absolutist by John Boyne

It's 1916, and Tristan Sadler has lied about his age in order to sign up to play his part in the Great War. Not, like many other boys, because of any rah-rah bandwagonism or sense of duty . . . but what else can a young man do when his family has disowned him? Things are so bad that his father, upon hearing of Tristan's enlistment, declares that he hopes the Germans kill his son, because "that would be the best thing for all of us."

The novel actually begins in 1919, with Tristan, now 21, aboard a train to Norwich with a packet of letters in his pocket. He plans to return them to the writer, the sister of his wartime friend, Will Bancroft, one of the young men who didn't come home. We soon find that Tristan hopes to unburden himself of a secret, one that goes far beyond the sexual identity he has been trying to keep under wraps. Yes, he and Will did have a few romantic interludes, but where Tristan felt deep love for his friend, Will claimed only that the trauma of war and the immediacy of death pushed him to seek "comfort." But what preys on Tristan's mind is their last conversation and the truth--the whole truth--about Will's last moments.

Tristan's narration takes us through horrific scenes in the trenches that are as vivid as any in Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy or Gallipoli. It's difficult to read these passages without despairing over the tragic loss of a generation and the extreme and often pointless sacrifices these young men--many little more than boys--were expected to make.

Many LT readers have mentioned that Boyne seems to be playing too many themes at once: the repression of homosexuality, an anti-war statement, the struggle between group mentality and personal values, and whether it is better to die for one's principles or to live without any. I wasn't troubled by this; after all, life is complex, not always linear or singularly focused.

Overall, Boyne has given us an original story, finely written.

(I do have one caveat for anyone who, like me, listens to the book on audio. Michael Maloney is an excellent reader who is able to distinguish each character with his wide vocal range and repertoire of accents. However, he has a tendency to drop his voice for dramatic effect. As someone who is hearing impaired, I found myself constantly fiddling with the volume controls, and I still feel that I probably missed a lot. If I had it to do over, I would choose to read thi8s book in print.)

4 out of 5 stars.

Good review of The Absolutist, Deborah! I've seen it in the bookshops, but wasn't sure about it. Now, I just might get it.

Great review of Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, Deborah. I reviewed Yiyun Li's novel The Vagrants for Belletrista a couple of years ago and felt the same way about it - definitely not funny and uplifting, but hauntingly beautiful and a book that stayed with me for a long time.

Excellent review of The Absolutist

Lucky Us by Joan Silber

I loved Joan Silber's Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories, so I've been trying to read her other works. Lucky Us is the rather bittersweet love story of Gabe and Elisa, a couple that initially seem to be horribly mismatched. Elisa is young, hot, and sexy; Gabe, twenty years her senior, has led a quiet life since his long-ago release from prison after serving a short sentence for drug dealing. He's happy with his low-key job in a camera shop, quiet nights at home, and cooking for Elisa. She's a typical urban party girl with a past, a struggling artist. Yet despite their differences, everyone can see that they are perfect for one another. Out of the blue, they decide to get married and start planning a wedding. A friend of Elisa's informs her that she no longer will need a blood test but does need to be tested for HIV. Their lives begin to crumble when the report comes back: positive.

The book alternates between chapters narrated by Gabe and others narrated by Elisa. We learn about their pasts, apart and together, and we see their reactions to Elisa's diagnosis. HIV and the spectres of illness and death make this not quite a typical love story (although maybe it's true for Gabe and Elisa that "Love means never having to say you're sorry"); but don't expect a typical tragic ending either.

While the story itself may not be earthshaking, Silber is one of the finest American writers of our time. Lucky Us is worth reading for that reason alone.

The Eleven by Pierre Michon

Well, I tried. I really did. But I just couldn't bring myself to finish this book, short as it is. The problem is in the writing, which is deliberately obtuse, obscure, and pretentiously poetic--so much so that half of the time I couldn't figure out what was going on (and I'm a literature professor). What could have been an interesting story gets buried in a self-conscious effort in experimental style. To be fair, some readers that I trust have said it gets better, but I just don't have the patience to plod through any more pages. I'm not going to rate this book, which would probably be unfair, due to my not finishing it.

I don't think I would have finished The Eleven if I didn't feel compelled to write a review for the ER program. I'm glad that I stuck with it, though.

Interesting, but too bad about Eleven. Enjoyed your reviews of Lucky Us and The Absolutist, and will certainly keep Joan Silber in mind.

Mortality by Christopher Hitchens

While I may not have always agreed with Christopher Hitchens, I always admired him. He was a light whose brilliance could not be denied, a writer and thinker whose unique voice resounded through the last 40 years of British and American culture. Mortality is a short collection of essays written by Hitchens in the last 18 months of his life, a clear-eyed view of his experience with esophageal cancer and the various treatments he endured in hopes of buying some time.

The thing I loved most about Hitch is that he was never afraid to say out loud or in print what other people were probably thinking but generally kept to themselves. Here, he has plenty to say about clichéed cancer metaphors and euphemisms (like "battling cancer," which comes with the built-in assumption that those who "lose the battle" just haven't fought hard enough). He's at his best telling stories about the hypocrites around him, like the woman in a checkout line who tells him about a relative who had liver cancer, beat it for awhile, then got it again and died--in her opinion, "because he was gay." Was this intended to give Hitchens--a staunch atheist--hope, push him towards a god who would be so feebly vengeful ("Why not a lightning bolt?"), or what? Hitchens is also brutally honest about the devastation of both cancer and chemotherapy--honest, but without wallowing in self-pity. It's as if his own body has become a subject of observation and investigation.

While it's sad, yes, to have lost Christopher Hitchens, Mortality isn't the depressing read you might imagine. It reflects the humor, brilliance, vitality, and clear-eyed realism that readers came to expect from him.

Catching up on some excellent reviews here! Mortality reminds me of It's Always Something by Gilda Radner. Both The Absolutist and Lucky Us sound good!

I've never read anything by Hitchens, but I have seen him on television. I didn't agree with everything he said, but he seemed a very intelligent, honest man. Thanks for the review!

Dewald - you may be surprised to find that you may actually have read Hitchens. He's written a zillion magazine articles as well as intros to books. I know I've read him a lot but I only started noticing after I read his book on Mother Theresa.

Excellent review of Mortality, Deborah; that definitely makes it onto my wish list.

I also enjoyed Mortality and miss Hitchens. I hope I die as well as he did. The book made me remember the photos of Susan Sontag takwn by Leibowitz showing purposefully the hard realities of cancer.

And 39 how did you like the Mother Teresa book? I thought he made some pretty important points that had not occurred to me, especially about the financial scandal character testimony.

ETA that was the Jerry Keating scandal.

#41 - I've never been a Mother Teresa fan anyway, so I really enjoyed the book. It was all based on words out of her own mouth, but just a different way of looking at her. Amazing what you can see when you do that. The Missionary Position is a short book, so I highly recommend it to everyone.

Just catching up on all your interesting reviews!

A few rereads for courses I'm teaching:

Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare
Richard III by William Shakespeare
Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier

The Leisure Seeker by Michael Zadoorian.

As someone who was born in Detroit, grew up in the northwest suburbs, and lived in the general area for most of my first 40+ years of life, I enjoyed Michael Zadoorian's short story collection, The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit, and, now, this novel about an elderly Michigan couple. Ella Robina has terminal cancer; her husband, John, is starting to fade away with Alzheimer's. Thinking about the short amount of time they have left and the many adventures they've enjoyed in the past, Ella decides that they need to rev up their Leisure Seeker RV one more time. Her goal: to follow old Route 66 all the way from Detroit to Disneyland in California. Along the way, they run into good folks and some not-so-good folks, and John and Ella each have their good days and some not-so-good days. But there's never any doubt that this trip was just what they needed--despite their doctors' and children's objections.

Zadoorian creates in Ella, his narrator, the kind of little old lady that you'd never think of calling a little old lady: she's spunky, outspoken, and resourceful, and even though she's well into her eighties and not in the best of health, she shows a real interest in other people. The novel depicts some frustrating moments, some painful ones, and some that will make you laugh; but most of all, it depicts the enduring strength and memory of love.

I'll definitely be looking for more of Zadoorian's work, and I hope he keeps sneaking in those Michigan references (Faygo, the big tire, et al).

Good review of The Leisure Seeker, Deborah. I don't know a lot about Detroit or Michigan, but my parents did have contact with a South African family that moved to Michigan a few years ago. They kept referring to things in Michigan that we obviously had no clue about. Can't remember any right now, unfortunately.

Somehow I always picture you a British and have to remind myself of your American-ness. Anyway enjoyed your review of Zadoorian's the Leisure Seeker.

47> Ah, that's because of my reading preferences, perhaps, and the fact that I teach so much Brit Lit. I'm flattered to be thought one of the queen's subjects!

Good review of The Leisure Seekers. Sounds like I might enjoy that book.

I also enjoyed The Leisure Seekers and was especially touched by what the children wanted versus what the parents wanted. Great review.

The Poet's Wife by Judith Allnatt

The Poet's Wife tells the story of Patty, the long-suffering wife of the mad peasant poet John Claire. It opens with Patty surprised to run into her husband on a road not far from home, since he is supposed to be a patient at an asylum 80 miles away. Apparently he has walked all the way--but not to be with Patty and their children, but in search of his 'other wife,' Mary, his childhood sweetheart. Not only were the two never married, but Mary died in a fire some years earlier--a fact that John refuses to believe. Patty has to endure John's cruel slights, including his fervent penning of love sonnets to another woman. And the more violent effects of his madness begin to reassert themselves as well.

The novel is aptly titled, for most of it focuses on Patty's struggles to maintain a decent household for her large family. In addition to the basically useless John and his aging father, there are still five children at home, and the daughter who lives nearby is none too happily married. Yet there were moments when it was difficult for me not to get frustrated with her as a character; she was just a little too resourceful and self-sacrificing and loyal to be believable.

Then there is her second eldest daughter, Eliza, who needed a cold pail of water dumped over her head and a good smack. Eliza is "in love" with her sister's husband, and she spends most of the second half of the novel whining and moping in bed with the covers pulled up over her head because she can't have him. The reason I put "in love" in quotation marks is that--as if it isn't bad enough that she slept with her pregnant sister's husband--this jerk is a drunken sot who can't hold down a job and who rejects his newborn daughter because she has a birth defect. Now, if you're married to a man who turns out that way, well, that's one thing; but who in their right mind would CHOOSE a guy like this and act as though her life is ruined when she can't have him? Oh, and did I mention that he sold the watch his wife gave him for Christmas the day after to buy a silver locket for Eliza? And that he blames Eliza for leading him on ("After all, men must have their fancies") and causing God to curse him with a deformed child? What a guy! Um, can you tell that I wasn't moved to sympathy by the Eliza subplot? It really rather ruined what wasn't a bad story up to that point.

I began to wonder if I am getting tired of historical novels. But then I remembered several that I've recently read, like Bring Up the Bodies and Merivel, and I know that it's just that some, like this one, are pretty formulaic and run-of-the-mill. I'll likely be moving on to a different genre for awhile.

Oye. I'll pass on this one (but still enjoyed the review)

Trigger Man: More Tales of the Motor City by Jim Ray Daniels

I really enjoyed Jim Ray Daniels's Detroit Tales, but, unfortunately, this one didn't quite live up to its predecessor. The stories in this collection are a bit grittier, but for some reason, I was less interested in these characters and had little empathy for them. Perhaps it was because so many of them seem to have brought their troubles upon themselves unnecessarily. The writing itself just wasn't as fine. Daniels seemed to be relying on tricks rather than expertise and insight--tricks such as having characters in several stories spend time at the same seedy motel, Carl's Kabins (and inevitably someone in each comments on the fact that Carl didn't change the C in Carl to a K or the K in Kabins to a C). I will probably read more by Daniels, but not for awhile.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

I almost feel guilty giving this book only three and a half stars. Almost. It has been much honored with awards and much praised by reviewers both professional and non-professional, and its subject matter--the hard life of the poor living in one of Mumbai's airport slums--is certainly something of which the world should take more note. But for a number of reasons, Beyond the Beautiful Forevers, while a worthy enough book, did not quite live up to my expectations.

The first reason has more, perhaps, to do with me than with Boo's book. I have a great interest in India, it's history and culture. I have read so many books, both fiction and nonfiction, and seen so many documentaries on the subject that I didn't find much here that was new or surprising. Police and government corruption of all kinds; families killing sick or unwanted members; children digging through garbage in search of something to eat or to sell; supposedly 'free' clinics and doctors demanding bribes in return for treatment; neighbors stealing from and turning on one another; young women committing suicide rather than being forced into marriage or, once married, being burned to death in kitchen 'accidents'; children working at jobs we cannot imagine. It's awful, it's brutal. But it's the stuff on which a cadre of works about India are based, at least in part: City of Joy, Q & A (aka Slumdog Millionaire, A Fine Balance, The Death of Vishnu, documentaries like 'Born into Brothels' and National Geographic's 'The Real Slumdogs' and more.

That's not to say that we shouldn't care; but it gets frustrating to read about these problems over and over without knowing what exactly one can do about them. Eighty years ago, it was easy to blame all the corruption and poverty and prejudice on the usurping British; once they were gone, the Hindus blamed it on the Muslims, the Muslims blamed the Hindus, and the Sikhs, Christians, and others got caught in the crossfire. So who or what is to blame today, in an increasingly wealthy India, and how can the ongoing problems of unbelievable poverty be solved? As another LT reviewer points out, Boo seems to want us to do something--but what? In the end, she wants us to be uplifted by the undaunted hope of some of Anawadi's young inhabitants. But it's hard to imagine that hope being sustained in a world where the police beat innocent children wrongfully accused of crimes and take bribes to stop the beatings; where a father pours a pot of boiling lentils on a sick child for whom he can't afford medical treatment; where a woman lights herself on fire, hoping to survive and blame it on her neighbors in hope of both petty revenge and financial restitution; where a boy drinks rat poison because he believes his future holds nothing but either being killed by gang members who know that he witnessed a murder or being beaten to death by the police who questioned him about that murder and covered it up; where a woman starts an organization to make small business loans to other poor women, then takes the funds to buy herself jewelry.

To some extent, I felt that Boo was piling on the horrors so thickly that it was difficult to stay focused on the main individuals whose stories she was telling. At other times, the stories were so familiar that I felt I was reading fiction. The narrative jumps around quite a bit, from character to character and back and forth in time, and with the large number of persons involved, it is easy to get lost and blur them all together. And that also makes it hard to stay focused on or empathize strongly with any one character. This is a problem, because what, I think, Boo hopes to achieve is to put a face on each of the suffering poor, not to lump them into the anonymous 'teeming masses'.

So overall, would I recommend this book? Despite the comments above, yes, perhaps especially to those who haven't read, seen or heard much about the lives of India's slum dwellers. It's hard for Americans and others in more generally prosperous countries to imagine their world, but knowing about it does make one grateful for what we have.

And leaves us wishing we knew what we could do to help them to help themselves.

Excellent review, Deborah. I'm with you on this subject.

Thanks for the very excellent review.

Great review of Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Deborah. I own it and still plan to read it, but I'll keep your comments about it in mind when I do get to it.

Excellent and thoughtful review of this book. I had been wondering about it, but suspected it would be one horror after another without as you suggest, adding much, so had not read it.

Have you read Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance? If you have, what did you think of it?

Whenever I think of help for India, I go back to the American introduction of the Green Revolution and all the destabilization in domestic agriculture that caused, after starting out so hopefully and then I see one failure after another. It seems almost impossible to know what can be done.

I appreciated Behind the Beautiful Forevers, but my reservation about it was that it was so strongly narrative that I started having a hard time remembering this was about real people and events and not a novel. I thought a little more distance and factual reporting would have been more effective for me personally.

Enjoyed your thoughts!

Joining in with the chorus; excellent review of Behind the Beautiful Forever. There must be something wrong with the book if a non fiction book reads like fiction.

It's an awkward thing, reading about all these horrible problems, and having no answer. I had a similar experience when i tried to read a book a Palestinians recently...it rest like a list, one bad story after another, and nothing new to me. Ok, what now? Unfortunatley I simply stopped reading.

The Abundance by Amit Majmudar

This book has gotten a lot of praise from LTers, and while I liked it well enough, I'm not quite as enthusiastic. There's something rather precious and emotionally manipulative about it. That may not bother some readers, but it does bother me; I want to be genuinely moved by a book, not manipulated. In some ways, of course, the story of a woman dying of cancer can't help but wring one's emotions, but still . . .

The central storyline revolves around the narrator, an Indian immigrant to the US, attempting to strengthen the bonds with her two Americanized adult children in the final months of her life. Her daughter Mala, a doctor, flies home for long weekends, caring for and cooking with her mother. One of her goals is to learn how to make all of her mother's specialities and to write down the recipes; she is also writing a diary of their time together. Ronak (or Ron), a financial wizard who has married outside of the Indian culture and all but rejected it, visits less often, but enough to appear dutiful. He causes a brief crisis when he proposes selling a cookbook--along with the 'hook,' the story of the estranged daughter-dying mother reunion.

Maybe it's because I went through this experience with my own mother, but I found the narrator almost too perfect and self-sacrificing to be real. She puts off telling her adult children and everyone else for as long as possible. She accepts but won't ask for help. She never complains. She makes excuses for her distant, uninvolved husband. She seems to have expectations for her children but won't voice them. I would say that perhaps this is just the way traditional Indian women act when they are seriously ill--except that we get quite another view in the flashbacks of the narrator taking care of her mother and mother-in-law in their final illnesses.

As others have mentioned, Majmudar does an admirable job of creating a voice for his female narrator, and there are indeed some touching moments in The Abundance. I also give him credit for writing a book that couldn't be more different from his first, Partitions,which focused on the chaos and atrocities surrounding the division of India and Pakistan. Too often writers allow themselves to get pigeonholed, but that certainly isn't the case here.

Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier

I just finished rereading this one, and it was just as good the third time. I'm teaching it in a gen ed intro to lit class.

The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare--reread for another class.

The Heather Blazing by Colm Toibin

Eamon Redmond, the narrator of The Heather Blazing, is a middle-aged Irish judge nearing retirement. The novel opens as he and his wife return to their County Wexford family home from Dublin where Eamon works on a ruling in the controversial case of an pregnant unmarried teacher who was fired from her position at a Catholic school. Most of the novel is composed of Eamon's reminiscences of his earlier life in Enniscothy (Toibin's home town): his grandfather's and uncle's deaths, his schooldays, his father's launching of a museum and his later stroke, his first sexual experiences and falling in love with his wife, his political activities and early days as a government prosecutor, etc. These memories are interwoven with present-day episodes involving his wife Carmel and his adult children, Maeve and Donal.

One repeated refrain is Carmel's complaint that Eamon seems "distant" and her unsuccessful efforts to break through his reserve. The closest he comes is early in their marriage, when he admits that, his mother having died when he was a baby, he grew up to be self-sufficient, believing that if he ever had to ask anyone for something, they would likely refuse. "No one ever wanted me," he tearfully confesses. Yet decades later, as Carmel struggles to speak after a stroke, she tells him, "We need to talk. You are always so distant. You never tell me anything. You don't love me. You don't love the children." I have to admit that I was a bit mystified by her complaint, having been privy to a lot of Eamon's thoughts, feelings, and concerns, and having seen him caring tenderly for his ailing wife, grieving after her death, and reaching out to his children in his loneliness. There are, after all, a lot of ways to express love besides talking about one's feelings, and Eamon seemed to me a good man who was devoted to his family.

This is not a book with a powerhouse plot and lots of action: it's a quiet revelation of and meditation on a life. The afterward reveals, as I suspected all along, that much of it was based on episodes from Toibin's own life, although he insists that Eamon is a totally fictitious character. Toibin's writing is moving and insightful, his love of Ireland and small town Irish culture apparent. A lovely book overall.

Too bad about The Abundance, I had heard good things about Partitions. And nice review of The Heather Blazing. It's been on my wishlist since 2009...I have no memory of putting it there, or why I did so.

I agree Cold Mountain is excellent

65> I wouldn't discourage you from reading The Abundance. It was OK, but it was far different from Partitions, and not as good, in my opinion.

67> Not sure my students would agree with the two of us (sigh).

The Memory of Love by Linda Olsson

It seems that Linda Olsson has a penchant for writing about lonely, wounded people who are otherwise quite dissimilar finding one another. In Astrid and Veronika (a novel I loved), her characters are an elderly recluse, thought by the townsfolk to be a witch, and a 30-year old writer devastated by the death of her fiance. In her latest, Marion, a physician in her 50s, has been living as a semi-recluse on the New Zealand coast when an eight-year old boy, Ika, comes into her life. Ika doesn't talk much, makes little eye contact, and hates to be touched; Marion suspects that he may be autistic, and she soon finds evidence that he has been abused as well. Through Ika, Marion slowly comes back in touch with her own inner child and the tragic events and losses of her own past. And through Ika, she earns to let go and love again.

Olsson has experimented with structure here in a way that can sometimes be confusing. She leaps unexpectedly from the present to the past, from Ika's story to Marianne's, from Marion at 50 to Marianne at four, at eight, at 30. Her reminiscences often involve a "he" that isn't clearly defined, and even when he is, she speaks of ominous intuitions and forebodings that aren't always clear to the reader. In a way, it parellels the way that the mind works under pressure . . . but, still, it can be frustratingly confusing. This is what holds my overall rating of the novel back a bit.

On the whole, The Memory of Love doesn't match up to Astrid and Veronika, which for me was particularly notable for its lovely, spare but precise style that matched the novel's stark landscape. Perhaps it's time for Olsson to move on to other themes. Still, this is an engaging story and worth the reading time.

Nice review of The Memory of Love, Deborah. BTW, your link goes to Aminatta Forna's novel instead of Linda Olsson's.

The Memory of Love sounds wonderful actually!

Great review, enjoyed learning about Olson's writing.

69> Thanks, Darryl, it's fixed now.

70, 71> It was a good book--but Astrid and Veronika impressed me much more.

Reread for courses I'm teaching:

Twelfth Night
Othello
Proof by David Auburn

Honour by Elif Shafak

Honor tells the story of several members of a Turkish-Kurdish family, extending over several generations and taking place in Turkey, the UK, and Abu Dhabi. It centers around Iskender, a man about to be released from an English prison. His crime: the honor killing of his mother when he was a teenager. The novel weaves back and forth through time: from the birth of his mother, Pembe, and her twin, Jamila; to Iskandar's fleeing from his circumcision; to Pembe's marriage to Adem in a Kurdish village and their early years in London; to the youngest son Yunus's infatuation with a punk girl; to Adem's drinking, gambling, and eventual desertion; to Pembe's meetings with Elias; to young Adem's memories of his depressed mother; to Iskender's prison experiences; and finally to a rather surprising conclusion.

If this sounds a bit complex and confusing, well, yes, it is at first. So many voices, so many stories, so much jumping around in time. But I got used to it and eventually sorted everyone out. Part of the reason for the odd chronology is, I'm sure, to make the point that events have an impact on future generations. For example, Adem was excessively indulged by his mother, and so was Iskender, and both turned out to have little regard for the feelings of others. Pembe had seen a sister literally die of shame, yet she finds herself the object of an honor killing. The family has moved from Turkey to London, and the children live very modern lives, yet Iskender gets caught up in the Muslim traditionalist movement. Once I sorted out the initial complications, I enjoyed making the connections in the various sections.

While I agree with other reviewers who found that the plot relies a little too heavily on coincidence at times, nevertheless, I found the characters unique and compelling and got caught up in their stories. I'm looking forward to reading more by Elif Shafak.

>74 Cariola:
That sounds like a very interesting book - sometimes I wonder if a book for a culture we don't understand is not by default more interesting than something we can associate with...

An Imaginative Experience by Mary Wesley

This was a bit of fluff--in the best possible way. I'm at a stressful point at work and needed something fairly light (although it does have a vein of tragedy running through it). It begins when a young woman pulls the emergency brake on a train--something passenger Sylvester Wykes admits that he's always wanted to do but never had the guts. The reason Julia Piper pulled the brake? To help a sheep she had seen from her window who was stuck on its back. When they all disembark at the next station, Sylvester sees her again, mildly curious, but Maurice Benson takes a more stalkerish mode, determined to find out everything he can about her.

Wesley has created a group of intriguing characters not only in Julia, Sylvester, and Maurice, but in the secondary characters as well. There's Sylvester's soon-to-be ex-wife, Celia, who ran off with another man, denuding the house in the process; even things that had been handed down from his father were gone, as well as the teakettle he had just purchased to replace the one she had just taken. Rebecca, Sylvester's domineering former secretary, can't help herself from frequently popping in with attempts to take charge. It's great fun to see how the mild-mannered Sylvester gradually learns how to manage her. Much of the story centers around the shop on the corner, run by the agreeable Mr. Patel. Julia befriends his wife, despite her inability to speak English, and becomes close to the Patel's two little boys. Her mother, Clodagh, is the epitome of a horrible mother, for various reaosns preferring her son-in-law to her own daughter. And there's a dog in the mix--a lurcher eventually named Joyful.

In some ways, as one reviewer states, this is a pretty typical love story. But it's one with a little surprise around every corner. It has been a long time since I've read a Mary Wesley novel, and this one remionded me of how much I've enjoyed her others.

>73 Cariola:, Does your interpretation of these plays change as you reread them, especially if it has been several years since the last reading? I just read Othello for the first time and wondered about this.

Honour sounds like a worthwhile read and a new author for me.

73> Sometimes it does, but not often. I've been teaching them for about 25 years now, so I've got a pretty good handle on them and on the various interpretations. Next fall I'll be teaching my favorite, King Lear, which I gave up on about 5-6 years ago; the students just couldn't relate to it. But I've seen some new performances that I hope will make it more interesting for them.

I loved King Lear! Not as much as Hamlet and the Tempest, but it's a strong 3rd.

I just started reading MacBeth so I can discuss it with Nina, who is currently doing it in English 11. It was the one Shakespeare play that I wanted to study at uni but didn't get to. I really know nothing about it other than a few of the character names, and it's Scottish, I think, and there are three witches in it, I think. See? Pretty blank. Anyway, I picked up a nice study edition, and I hope I can get something out of the whole exercise.

I taught that one about a year ago. 'The Scottish play'--actors won't speak it's name.

Where are Lady Macbeth's kids?

Notice how hung up Macbeth is on children--everyone else's, b/c he has none. A little bit of his manhood at stake, methinks.

For you but not for Nina: watch the Roman Polanski version. It was his first film after his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was killed by the Manson tribe--very bloody images tht reflect that violence, especially in the slaying of Macduff's family. It was a Playboy production, so lots of nudity. A little dated, but still interesting.

Ooooh, thanks. You always have the best Shakespeare comments and tips. I laughed out loud when I got to the "Playboy production, so lots of nudity." Oh my. Playboy does Macbeth. Hmmmm.

And funny you should mention that--two days ago I was explaining the whole Manson/Helter Skelter story to Nina. She had never heard of it.

Deborah - I was working at Macbeth (I don't call it reading, because I look things up and go off on tangents and end up not actually reading much of the play itself) and came across a version of Macbeth starring Ian McKellen, who is one of Nina's very favourite actors, and it just happened to be available at the library, and I just happened to be near the library. So we are both looking forward to watching it this weekend.

82> It's a very dark version, but a good one. McKellan in his younger and handsomer days . . . Judi Dench is Lady Macbeth.

If you'd like to watch an interesting modern update, look for 'Men of Respect' with John Turturro. It sets Macbeth within the Mafia.

In ShakespeaREtold's version, Macbeth is a chef and Duncan is a food critic. Didn't quite work for me.

Last reread for teaching my classes this semester: The Tempest.

I *heart* The Tempest. Don't know why . . . I think it's the strangeness of it. Also, "full fathom five my father lies" is just awesome. . . I think my love for that comes from the song Blue Lagoon, by Laurie Anderson ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkeB-J9IlAI). I listened to that for years before I knew it was Shakespeare, although I knew the "Call Me Ishmael" was Moby Dick.

The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

Well, I'm not quite sure what to say about this one. Bowles certainly had an eye for detail and a knack for atmospheric writing: he puts the reader right in the center of North Africa, from the smoke-filled cafes to the dry stretches of the Sahara to the gritty streets. New Yorkers Port and Kit Moresby (joined at times by another American, Tunner) travel through various cities and landscapes of North Africa in 1949, trying, in part, to sort out their troubled marriage. But infidelity and/or suspicion get the better of both of them, and the two travel on separate paths, at least until a crisis briefly reunites them.

I was quite enjoying the novel, despite its darkness and deeply nihilistic theme, when WHAM! All of a sudden I found myself in the middle of 'The Sheik' with Rudolph Valentino. I sat scratching my head for awhile, wondering what the heck just happened and how the novel had taken this weird turn. I still don't get it. At that point, I plodded through to the end, greatly disappointed (when I wasn't shaking my head or snorting).

I can't recommend this one. So much emotional investment building up to an unbelievable ending that was totally out of sync with the rest of the novel.

If I read anything else by Bowles, it will be because of his style--not his nearly-nonexistent agility with plot or character.

Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster

While this novel won't be among my favorite of Forster's, I did appreciate it as a precursor to such masterpieces as A Room with a View, Howard's End, and A Passage to India. Widow Lilia Herriton, aged 33, decides to spend a year in Italy with a female companion, leaving her young daughter with her mother-in-law. When the family learns that she has become engaged to a younger Italian--the son of a dentist, God forbid!--Philip Herriton is hustled off to persuade her to return. Alas, he is too late; the couple is already married, and passion seems to have prevailed over middle-class British stodginess and propriety. Sadly, things don't work out well for Lilia, as her romantic ideals don't mesh with the reality of Italian married life. After she dies in childbirth, Philip is sent on a second mission: to 'rescue' Lilia's child and bring it back into the fold of British respectability.

It's at this point that the novel falls into a hazy category where I would also place Chekhov's play The Seagull. Is it comedy, tragedy, or melodrama? Or perhaps a combination of all three? While generally categorized as comedies (most likely because of their sharp social critiques), characters in both works endure some truly tragic events--and respond quite melodramatically. This fuzziness of genre doesn't really detract from either the play or the novel but does leave one wondering what the author's original intention might have been, and whether he might have gone a bit off track.

So my recommendation is: If you've never read Forster before, don't start here; but if you have, Where Angels Fear to Tread is worth adding to your TBR shelf.

I loved the other three Forster books that you mentioned. I may just have to give this one a try.

Thanks for the recommendation for Where Angels Fear to Tread

Really great comments on Where Angels Fear to Tread. It was a perfect read before my England/Italy trip in 2009, and completely agree with you, although I wouldn't be able to say it so eloquently. (I also enjoy the movie version)

Does sound like classic Forster. I've read the other three, but this one is a new title to me and one I'll have to look for. Thanks.

Coming in late, but I wanted to tell you that I enjoyed your review of Where Angels Fear to Thread...you've also left me really wanted to read Macbeth...

Why thank you! I do love teaching Shakespeare (even though the students don't always love having to take it.)

The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

As one of the apparently rare few who wasn't blown away by Half of a Yellow Sun, I took a gamble on Adichie's short story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck--and I'm very glad that I did. These twelve stories all feature Nigerian protagonists, but the settings, time periods, and situations shift from the 1967 Biafran war, to immigrants in the contemporary United States, back to a time when white missionaries were still a rare sight in Nigeria. Many of the stories deal with women struggling to balance between the old ways and the new, but Adichie also focuses on Nigeria's brutal politics, history of violence, divisive class system, and exploitation by the west. But behind those messages are real characters--real people--working hard at relationships and trying to make tomorrow just a little better than today. Adichie's writing itself is engaging and compelling, and the stories have encouraged me to seek out her other novels. Perhaps even to give Half of a Yellow Sun another try.

A Taste of Sorrow by Jude Morgan

I'm a big fan of Jude Morgan's historical novels, and I also love the Brontes, so I expected to be borne away by A Taste of Sorrow. Sadly, not so. I found the book extremely slow going. At first I thought this was simply because I was occupied with end-of-semester tasks that inevitably kept my reading sessions short. Once the semester ended, I figured I would whirl through to the end in a few days, but my reading plodded on at a snail's pace. I just did not find the story very compelling. Perhaps that is not entirely the author's fault: I found myself wondering if the Brontes lives could really have been that dull, and, if they were, well, no wonder they lived such exciting imaginary lives through their characters. The plot pretty much boils down to someone gets sick and either dies or gets better--only to get sick again and die shortly thereafter. In between, Branwell gets drunk, acts like a spoiled brat and a boor, and gets fired from a series of jobs that decline in status. Everyone but Emily hates being at home, but they also hate wherever they are sent away to. The highlights, of course, are Charlotte falling in love with a married man, and the eventual publication and popularity of Anne's, Emily's, and Charlotte's novels. Morgan does a decent job of portraying the complex, ambiguous relationships among the siblings and their overbearing father, but that wasn't enough to keep me engrossed in A Taste of Sorrow.

Did you read Romancing the Brontes by Juliet Gael? Horrible title, I know, but I was pleasantly surprised by this historical fiction focusing mainly on the life of Charlotte. I do get the feeling that their lives were fairly boring. I've been curious to read the Barker biography for a while but haven't made the time for it yet.

96> I did read and review Romancing Miss Bronte, which I liked a little better than this one (3 stars) but still wasn't overwhelmed by it. I have another Bronte-related book on my shelves, Emily's Ghost, which I may get to before long. Maybe they are more interesting in the afterlife!

Encouraged by your review of The Thing Around Your Neck. I did like Half a Yellow Sun, but it's been a while now and I find myself somewhat indifferent to reading Adichie again. Not sure why.

I feel sort of the same way, Dan, even though I was a huge fan (and LT promoter) of Half of a Yellow Sun, and also liked Purple Hibiscus a lot too. I think my indifference to Americanah is partly because I was underwhelmed by The Thing around Your Neck and partly because it is being so heavily promoted. But I'm sure I'll read it eventually.

Quarrel with the King (also published as Earls of Paradise) by Adam Nicolson

While Nicolson's well-researched history focuses on the Pembroke family, his true subject is the shifting English power politics and economic base in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Earls of Pembroke are the perfect representation of the rapidly changing social and political structures at court and in the countryside. The first earl was a 'made man' from Wales who rose through the ranks on the merits of his rather shady talents (he was both a spy and a murderer), and once he arrived, he sought to legitimize his title and his legacy by tying his allegiance to the old manorial system--a system that was already beginning to crumble as the country shifted from a land-based to a money-based economy, and as the London became increasingly centralized. Much of Nicolson's study focuses on the third earl, William Herbert, who perhaps most successfully straddled the fences between two worlds and two eras, working to extend the pastoral ideal of his uncle, Sir Philip Sidney, into the heart of the Jacobean court itself. But the Pembrokes fared less well under Charles I, who so firmly believed in the divine right of kings that he ignored the old chains of reciprocity between king and lords, lords and tenants. Treating the rest of the country as if its sole purpose was to provide the luxuries of an isolated, effete court and cannon fodder for ill-conceived wars was an attitude that disturbed the third earl--and one that eventually led to the outbreak of civil war, the dissolution of the monarchy, and the loss of Charles's head. The family fortunes fell under Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth, and by the time the monarchy was restored, both it and the ideals of the Pembrokes had drastically changed forever--as had England itself. Nicolson's afterward points out how the gap between rich and poor expanded drastically in the 18th century, affecting in particular those who lived in the outlying counties, where farmers who were once self-sufficient, able to feed and clothe their own families from the direct results of their own labor, were now forced to focus on producing goods for sale and rarely earned enough coins to sustain them.

I found this approach to be an interesting and clever way to address familiar issues in a new way, one that put a more human face on them. Nicolson includes descriptions of well-known portraits of the Pembrokes by VanDyke, Lely, and other famous painters, includes quotes from letters and literature of the day, and provides just enough personal anecdotes about the family and members of their circle to keep the narrative engaging. I do wonder, however, if those less familiar with this period in history and the many persons mentioned in the book might be a bit overwhelmed. While it is indeed an interesting look at history, I wouldn't recommend it as an introduction to English court politics.

Enjoyed your review of Quarrel with the King

Sounds like an interesting book. From what I understand, this was quite wild territory at the time and this would give a more focussed picture.

Fascinating review of Quarrel with the King, Deb -- I think I must hunt it up.

Quarrel With the King sounds very interesting.

High Rising by Angela Thirkell

A clutch of Angela Thirkell's novels have been sitting on my shelf for awhile, gently calling my name, and I finally responded. The first, Ankle Deep, didn't impress me, but before resigning the whole lot to the library donation bin unread, I decided to give Thirkell one more try and picked up High Rising. What a delightful summer read!

The novel, set in the 1930s, centers around Laura Morland, a 40-ish widow and author of popular (though decidedly not literary) thrillers and her circle of friends. Laura decides to play matchmaker, setting up her publisher, Adrian Coates, with her young friend Sybil Knox. Not only do they make a handsome pair, but since Sybil is writing a manuscript (novel? poems? essays? biography?--no one knows), they would seem to have a lot in common. But with love on the horizon, Laura and her friends have deep concerns about George Knox, Sybil's biographer father, whose life seems to have been taken over by his new secretary, Miss Grey--referred to in private conversation as The Incubus.

Thirkell throws a bevy of wonderful characters into the mix. There's Laura's son, Tony, a non-stop talker who is obsessed with trains, and her house servant, Stoker, a budding suffragette who is practical, wise, and loyal. Anne Todd, Laura's part-time secretary, is a clever woman who has devoted her life to caring for an ailing mother. Mrs. Knox, George's French-born mother, is the epitome of the cranky, opinionated matriarch. The reliable Dr. Ford seems always to be at hand, whether for medical assistance or to take part in minor scheming, and when Laura's friend Amy Birkett, wife of Tony's headmaster, comes to visit, it's clear that she has some suspicions of her own about The Incubus.

If High Rising is the norm for Thirkell, I have to agree with LT friends who say that her novels compare to those of Barbara Pym. Both feature clever, insightful, witty (but never nasty) female protagonists and a cast of amusing characters who find themselves in situations that, while seemingly mundane, become quite complex. There's much gentle fun poked at the foibles of humans and society; I found myself smiling a lot while reading High Rising. I highly recommend it for a light read--and I'll be getting to the other Thirkells on my shelf soon.

I enjoyed your review of High Rising

High Rising sounds like my kind of book. Nice review...

Bodily Secrets by William Trevor

A fine little collection of five unusual love stories, all very Irish in content and tone. In "The Day We Got Drunk on Cake," Mike is looking for love in all the wrong places--and constantly ringing up Lucy in his efforts to escape. "Lovers of Their Time" is the story of Norman Britt, a henpecked travel agent who falls for a shop girl in the 1960s. The title story focuses on wealthy widow Norah O'Neill who, unhappy with the fact that her son is closing down the toy factory that helped to make the family fortunes, offers the 'job' of husband to one of the employees. "Honeymoon in Tramore" is a bittersweet story of one-sided love and the sacrifices young Davy makes in its name. Barney Prenderville recalls his days as a student boarder, when he fell "In Love with Ariadne," the landlady's reserved, old-fashioned daughter. Trevor is a master at conveying his character's thoughts and feelings. I highly recommend this charming collection, part of Penguin's 'Great Loves' series.

Stay, Illusion! by Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster

This is one of the most unjustifiably pretentious books on Shakespeare that I've read in a long time. While the cover blurb promises "a passionate encounter with the play Hamlet that affords an original look at this work of literature and the prismatic quality of the play to project meaning," the authors say little that hasn't been said before--many times. Yet they present each stale observation as if it were an original--and brilliant--insight. Since one is a philosopher and the other a psychoanalyst, they throw Freud, Hegel, Benjamin, Plato, Nietzsche, Gorgias, Lacan and others into the mix. This may be of interest to some readers, but I found that these discussions often just bogged things down in a display of pedantry.

The book is divided into five parts, each consisting of a number of short essays (2-6 pages) with titles that connect to the play with specific lines ("Get Thee to a Nunnery"), cutesiness ("Psychoanalysts Eat Their Young," "O, O, O, O. Dies."), or a desire to shock ("Gertrude, a Gaping Cunt"). These may tell you all you really need to know. Obviously the effort here has been to out-Freud Freud's analysis of Hamlet, and the authors seem quite impressed with their own results.

While the book may hold interest for some readers, I'm a Shakespearean, and it did nothing to enhance my understanding of the play or concepts for teaching it.

It is good to be warned about books like Stay' Illusion, thumbed.

Thanks for the warning!

Nice review of Bodily Secrets, Deborah. And thanks for reminding me about William Trevor; I'll probably read Selected Stories in August and/or September.

Stay, Illusion! sounds horrific. Thanks for taking one for the team.

110,111,112> Thankfully, the other Amazon Vine ARC I'm reading is very good: The Cooked Seed, Anchee Min's memoir.

The Cooked Seed by Anchee Min

Having enjoyed Min's first memoir, I looked forward to reading The Cooked Seed, which picks up roughly where Red Azalea left off. That book detailed Min's sometimes up but mostly down fortunes in Communist China: she had been plucked from oblivion in a labor camp to play the role of the proletarian heroine in a film to be made by Madame Mao's company, but the cultural sweep that followed Mao's death and his wife's execution left Min among China's living dead. She was "a cooked seed"--one that would never sprout, never amount to anything; she would merely dry up and be blown away. Her only hope was escape to America.

The Cooked Seed opens with Min's struggle to learn (or fake) enough English to get accepted into an American university and get a visa. But once here, more troubles ensued. Finding work was essential, but her limited English (a barrier to her studies) and the lack of a permanent work visa left her with few opportunities, and she soon found herself working five low-paying jobs just to get by. Even so, Min never lost sight of the fact that at least there were opportunities and choices, and she never lost faith in her belief that hard work would eventually bring rewards. In the years that followed, she experienced many hardships and disappointments: homesickness, loneliness, exhaustion, serious illness, rape, extreme poverty, racial intolerance, a bad marriage followed by divorce, and more. But eventually, she found her voice and began to write. And Lauryann, the child she had so desperately longed for, gave her a future worth living for.

About twelve years ago, I had the opportunity to host Anchee Min and her daughter when she was invited to speak on campus. As she describes in the book her pride in Lauryann's dancing (she had won many competitions for both ballet and folk dancing), I recalled how her talk ended with a little performance in which Lauryann took part. The love between mother and daughter was apparent; but I would not have guessed that this confident little girl (who was then about ten years old) would be going home to help install drywall and repair plumbing in the small run-down apartment building they owned. Min explains that she needed to teach Lauryann to be independent and to know the value of hard work. Years later, it would be Lauryann who pushed her mother to "dig deeper" into her feelings about her past and to write this book as a means of helping other women who feel trapped in similar situations. "She was my repayment to America," Min writes.

Today, life means getting to know myself more, staying in touch with myself, making improvements upon myself, and, most of all, enjoying myself. The cooked seed sprouted. My root generated, deepened, and spread. I blossomed, thrived, and grew into a big tree.

The Cooked Seed is a moving and inspiring portrait of a woman who embodies the concepts of perseverance, determination, and resourcefulness in the face of great obstacles. Highly recommended.

Deborah, this one looks really good. I should read Red Azalea first though. I am adding to my wishlist. Thank you.

Oh what a good review of The Cooked Seed.

115> Yes, I would definitely start with Red Azalea.

116> Thank you!

I loved Red Azalea and have reread it a few times. I'm very excited to see there's another volume in Min's memoirs. Amazing that she learned English as an adult -- Becoming Madame Mao shows a real mastery -- enough to play with language and form.

The Translator by Leila Aboulela

This is the story of Sammar, a young Sudanese widow working as a translator in an Aberdeen university. When her husband, Tariq (who was also her cousin), a medical student at the university, was killed in an accident several years earlier, Sammar was so devastated that she left their son with her mother-in-law. (It's hard to empathize with a mother who says to her toddler, "Why couldn't it have been you?") She returned to Aberdeen, where she has lived a lonely life.

But things are changing all at once. Sammar has been selected as translator for a two-year project that will take her back to Africa. She has decided to visit her aunt/mother-in-law and to bring her son Amir back Scotland with her. One snag in the plan is that Sammar has fallen in love with Rae, her supervisor, a professor and expert in Islam. If he asks her to marry him, Sammar won't leave. The catch is that she won't marry Rae unless he converts to Islam--not only converts but sincerely accept her faith.

As others have said, the novel becomes more of a romance than a study of faith and culture at this point. I did not find any of the characters very appealing. In fact, I found Sammar's passive-aggressive personality downright irritating. Rae was a bit of a stereotype as well: the intellectualizing academic, once burned in love, forever hesitant, his answer to whether or not he believes in the tenets of Islam is "I don't know." IN other words, a lot of wishy-washy people who think they know what they want but aren't certain enough to go for it. And the conclusion, yes, is just too pat.

I've read better novels by Aboulela, but she hasn't stunned me yet. I'm willing to give her another try . . . but not for awhile.

Playing Sardines by Michele Roberts

This collection of short stories reads almost like an experiment in sensuality. Many of the stories focus on food, describing in detail the textures, colors, aromas, and colors of various dishes. Others describe in detail the beauty of objets d'art or even the beauty of everyday things. Still others wallow in the sensuality of love and sex. Even religion is approached through the senses. Most of Roberts's protagonists are in rather bittersweet--if not simply bitter--situations, but they seem to be redeemed by their sensual memories.

While this is not the best of Roberts's works that I have read, it was certainly interesting.

I read The Translator, although I didn't rate or review it, and I was underwhelmed by it and Coloured Lights. I did like Lyrics Alley more than the other two, but I would only mildly recommend it.

Darryl, I haven't read Lyrics Alley and certainly won't for quite awhile. I didn't write a review for Minaret, but I only gave it three stars. Her novels seems to start with a good premise and promising characters but then fall flat.

Playing Sardines sounds intriguing actually.

Her novels seems to start with a good premise and promising characters but then fall flat.

I agree completely.

The Sonnets by Warwick Collins

This clever novel focuses on the period in 1592 when, the theatres closed due to the threat of the plague, Shakespeare retreated to the country home of his young patron, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. Collins has expanded on facts and theories surrounding the writing of Shakespeare's sonnets and has come up with a delightful novel. We know, for example, that they were dedicated to a "Mr. W. H." and that Southampton, to whom both Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece were dedicated, is a likely candidate. We also know that the first 18 sonnets strive to persuade a young man to marry, and scholars speculate that Wriothesley's mother may have hired the poet to write them. And we know that over time the speaker develops a passion for the young man that is disrupted by two triangles: one involving a rival poet, the other focused on the so-called "dark lady." By using a first-person narrator--Shakespeare himself--, the novel fleshes out the construction of the sonnets while creating a fascinating story.

Collins begins by developing a casual friendship between poet and patron that is engaging and believable. While Wriothesley often uses Shakespeare as a sounding board for his complaints (most of them against his guardian, the powerful Lord Burghley, and an arranged marriage), the two never quite forget the distinction of rank between them. As the story unfolds, Collins weaves in 32 of the sonnets as he imagines them having been written in response to developing events, and we are privy to the patron's critiques as well. Christopher Marlowe, clearly a rival for Wriothesley's attentions, shows up at the table, and Collins explores two candidates for the role of the dark lady, Emilia Lanier and Lucia Florio, wide of Southampton's tutor, John Florio.

I'm often overly critical of novels that fictionalize Shakespeare's life; too often they sensationalize minor details, make absurd leaps of fancy, or are just too clever for their own good in the way they attempt to integrate well-known lines and characters. The Sonnets, however, hits just the right note.

That does sound like a great fictional treatment. Nice review. I hadn't heard of Warwick Collins before and just looked him up. Unfortunately he died just this winter, but what an interesting person.

There's that headless woman again.

Swallowing the Sea: On Writing by Lee Upton

I found Swallowing the Sea a bit of a hard go. As other reviewers have suggested, it's a difficult book to categorize: what it's certainly not is a guide for beginning writers. Perhaps the closest equivalent would be the early modern commonplace book, a hodgepodge of observations, significant quotes, critiques, and personal thoughts. Upton muses on the emotions and difficulties that writers encounter; on relevant passages from a myriad of works (the six page bibliography--in tiny print--covers writers from the Pearl Poet to Jane Austen to Zadie Smith); on her own discovery of the magic of literature; and much, much more. As the subtitle suggests, she breaks the book into subsections on ambition, boredom, purity, and secrecy, aspects the writer alternately pursues and rejects. While there is much of interest here, the writing is dense and the book, overall, rather esoteric. It might have been a better read for me if I had the time and patience to labor over it, but, unfortunately, I did not.

Excellent review of The Sonnets. This sounds like it would interest me.

Transatlantic by Colum McCann

I read the first section of Transatlantic about a month ago, but, not having been particularly captivated by the story of Alcock and Brown's 1919 transatlantic flight, I set it aside. I expected that the next section, about Frederick Douglass's visit to Ireland on behalf of the abolitionist, would engage me more, so I tucked the book into my bag when I went on vacation last week. My expectations were not only met but exceeded: I could not put this book down, and no matter what else I was doing, I found myself thinking about getting back to it.

If, like me, you love novels consisting of interconnected stories that are told in different voices or from different points of view, you will love Transatlantic. It begins with three transatlantic journeys: the 1919 Alcock-Brown flight, Douglass's 1845 tour of Ireland, and George Mitchell's 1998 mission to work out a peace accord in Belfast. As stated above, the first story didn't thrill me, but the next two were absolutely fascinating. McCann was wise enough to use a light hand and let the irony speak for itself as Douglass, a runaway slave feted by the wealthy Anglo-Irish advocates of abolition, sees all around him the suffering of the Irish people. Mitchell's story, too, steps back from the volatile situation surrounding British rule, the overwhelming grief and loss on all sides becoming more pressing than any religious or political tenets.

McCann then shifts to the stories of Lily Duggan and her female descendants--women who (with perhaps the exception of Lily herself) slipped past as minor characters in the background of these celebrated men's accounts. He lets us know that they, too, played significant roles in history, perhaps less obvious than the men's but no less influential.

McCann has mastered two things that make Transatlantic an exceptional work: he has created unique, believable characters and has placed the reader directly inside their heads and hearts; and his writing is stunningly beautiful. He doesn't need to tell us that George Mitchell is a modest, caring man; we recognize it in his gratitude for the baseball scores slipped to him by his driver, in his determination to remember a woman's name (one name among the hundreds of grieving women he has met), in his reluctant acceptance of any VIP perks. And we don't need to be told that Hannah loves the land on which the family home--which is about to be repossessed--sits; we feel it in simple descriptions like these:

"In the morning,---after the news from the bank--a flock of brent geese came gunneling over the lough, bringing with them their own mystery, low over the water. They arrive every year. Regular as clockwork. Swaths of them. I have in years past seen twenty or thirty thousand over the course of a few days. They can momentarily darken the sky, huge clouds, then tuck their wings, and blanket onto the water and grass. Not so much grace as hunger. They arrange themselves among the marshes and paddies and the sudden thrust of drumlins. . . . Not a soul for miles. The birds flew vast across the sky. They dipped and rose and came in a mass towards the shore, over our roof, and then vanished behind me, only for another group to come along moments later, from out in Bird Island direction."

"I walked Georgie around the island in the cold snap of dawn. Or rather she walked me. My curlew was calling from the eastern pladdies. I was glad to hear her after so long. I used to think her call was forlorn, but her return makes her so much more than a sound.
Georgie ambled alongside me among the tangle of old ropes and smashed oars and broken orange buoys washed in on the edge of the shore. The tide was returning and I cut up towards the mudflats, pulled myself along by holding on to the long reeds, unsettled a smoky muck from the bottom of the water. I sat still for several minutes, the better to absorb the landscape, or rather be absorbed by it."

History writ small and large. Connections that neither time nor troubles can break. Finding one's sense of place. The acceptance of moving on. And so much more. Overall, TranAtlantic is a moving, thought-provoking, memorable, and thoroughly satisfying novel, one of a handful that I know I will be reading again.

I have this on my wishlist. Glad to see another positive review.

Yes thanks for the great review!

Wonderful review and I love novels consisting of interconnected stories that are told in different voices or from different points of view, so this sounds like a winner. All three of those stories are of interest to me. I don't know why I don't read Colm McCann more, but I think you may have just corrected that.

I was a huge fan of Let the Great World Spin, which is definitely one of my favorite recent novels, but for some reason I've been dragging my feet about Transatlantic. Your review is making me rethink this!

132, 133> I hope you do pick it up--it's a wonderful book.

I've added High Rising and Transatlantic to my wish list. High Rising sounds like my cuppa, and I have heard so many good things about Transatlantic.

Happy to have given you some reading suggestions, Nana.

The Cooked Seed, The Sonnets, Transatlantic are now at the top of my wishlist -- I was intrigued by the reviews in the NYTBR of The Cooked Seed and Transatlantic, but your reviews have convinced me. Thanks, Deb.

You're quite welcome! I love passing on word of a great book.

Great review of Transatlantic, Cariola. I was slightly disappointed with this author after reading This side of brightness and Everything in this country must and would like to see him sparkle. It sounds that Transatlantic might be that book.

Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

After reading the first 50 pages of Life After Life, I couldn't decide whether it was brilliant or lazy writing (lazy in the sense that the frame is simply the old writer's trick of coming up with multiple endings for a story in progress). I'm still not certain, but I'm leaning towards semi-brilliant.

What this is NOT is a story about reincarnation per se, despite the claim of several reviewers and the prefatory Nietzsche quote. In each of her "lives," Ursula Todd is the same person with the same name and the same family, born on the same day, in the same year; hers is not a spirit that passes on from one being or form to another. The book is also touted as a meditation on the choices that we make and the consequences that follow, suggesting the "What if?" that is the basis of the writer's exercise mentioned above. In each story/life, Ursula makes different choices or falls into different circumstances that lead to different outcomes, from being strangled by the umbilical cord during birth (hardly what I'd call a choice) to mundane deaths, violent deaths, accidental deaths, and into old age. Towards the end of the novel, she makes an observation that all time seems to be simultaneous--a metaphysical statement that may as easily be the novel's theme. "It seemed even the instability of time can't be relied upon," the young Ursula observes. In a later episode, Ursula experiences a moment of panic riddled with déja vu:

"She had been here before. She had never been here before. . . The past seemed to leak into the present, as if there was a fault somewhere, or was it the future spilling into the past? . . . Time was out of joint, that was certain."

Whatever its theme, Life After Life is a captivating story. In many aspects, the Todd family seems to represent the typical middle class British family of the last century, yet each member is also distinctive in his or her own right. Some, like Ursula's surly oldest brother Maurice, remain constant through each retelling; others, like her mother Sylvie, change considerably in reaction to events. It's easy to engage with interesting secondary characters like her wild aunt Izzie, Bridget the Irish maid, Miss Wolfe, and others. The depictions of the Blitz, brutal but realistic, are particularly affecting. Atkinson helps the reader to experience what life must have been like for those who experienced death and destruction on a massive scale, sensibilities numbed and life dominated by the need to carry on. However, I did find the long episode in Berlin with Eva Braun a bit tedious, although it does eventually link to others.

Atkinson's writing is indeed fine, at times poetic, at other times tersely straightforward, always perfectly pitched for the tone of the moment. Those moments range from charming to horrific, from humorous to spiritual, from jubilant to sorrowful--all the emotions of Ursula's many lives. Life After Life is, in fact, quite an emotional ride. At the conclusion, it still feels a bit unsettled and experimental, unsure of just what it means to convey to its readers. Still, the fact that it entertains so well while making one ask significant questions merits a strong recommendation.

That was a superb and balanced review of Life After Life, Deborah. It was a bit experimental, as you said, but I was completely caught up in the story.

I previously gave your review of TransAtlantic a thumb but I don't think I let you know how much I enjoyed it. I'll pick up a copy of it this weekend and read it next week.

I liked your review of Life After Life. I really enjoyed that book. It was one that I felt I would read again, maybe just to see what I might have missed the first time round.

Sounds absolutely Intriguing To Me. Thanks For The Excellent Review. It's Always So Interesting To Hear Different Reactions To Books. Don't You Sometimes Wonder If Others Even ReAD The Same BookYou Did!?

Apologies For The New Keyboard.

141,142, 143> Thank you. Despite a few flaws, Life After Life was indeed captivating and thought-provoking.

143> I wondered about all those capitals!

Merrikay, there must be some setting you can turn off??????

Rebecca you know there has to be, but I'm not good with symbols and haven't figured it out yet. It just appeared on my phone - I don't even know how, but it looks like it may be an upgrade and will actually be better so I'm going to keep trying rather than defaulting to the old one. Wish me luck. Meanwhile, internet spots with my iPAD it is! LT posts are usually too long for phone use anyway.

Try googling your problem, Merrikay. It can't be yours alone.

Agreeing with doc: That was a superb and balanced review of Life After Life. I was leaning away from reading it, then heard the author on the radio, thought better of it, then vacillated again. I believe you have convinced me to join the "Read It" camp.

Life After Life sounds intriguing and like something I would enjoy reading. I've been wondering what Atkinson to read next after finishing and loving Behind the Scenes at the Museum.

Life after Life one for the book club perhaps. Enjoyed your excellent review.

>150 baswood: I think that Life After Life would be a great book club pick. It would probably spark quite a bit of discussion.

Songs of Willow Frost by Jamie Ford

I probably shouldn't list this one as a book read because I couldn't finish it; but it felt like I had read a 500-pager by the time I stopped. I'm sure a lot of readers will love it, but I found it melodramatic and unrealistic, full of annoyingly stereotypical characters (the mean, tippling nun; the bully; the sweet, beautiful blind girl; etc.). The setting--San Francisco in the 1930s--was intriguing, and the author clearly did a lot of research on the time period. The problem is that it stuck out like a sore thumb rather than being subtly integrated into the story. In addition, I found much of the dialogue to be stilted and unrealistic as well. Perhaps I would have been more kindly inclined towards the book had I not just read a string of superb novels . . . but I doubt it.

I have the author's much-loved first novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, in my TBR stacks. I'll get around to it eventually, and hopefully will like it better than his second effort.

The Colonel's Daughter and Other Stories by Rose Tremain

In this early collection of short stories, it's apparent that Rose Tremain can write--but also that she hasn't quite found her voice yet. This is not the Tremain most of us love for her historical fiction like Restoration, Music and Silence, The Colour, Wolf Hall, or Bring Up the Bodies. Here, her subject matter, style and language are contemporary, and there's a dark quirkiness to the stories that remind me of the earlier works of Ian McEwan. I've come across this Tremain before, when I read The Way I Found Her.

The title story is by far the most interesting. Charlotte, activist daughter of aristocratic parents, breaks into the family estate while her parents are on holiday. Her plan is to steal enough pawnable loot to support her lover Jim, a down-and-out writer who spends his time looking (unsuccessfully) for odd jobs and drinking instead of producing the Next Great Novel. The narrative moves among Charlotte, her parents, Jim, and Doyle, a reporter whose live-in love first leaves him for another man and later begs him to take her back--sort of, since she explain that she needs both of them to be happy. But Doyle has fallen for Charlotte after a brief meeting in the emergency room where she has been taken to have a head wound treated before being hustled off to jail. Reading this over, it sounds like a comedy of errors, and in a way, I suppose it is. But it's a sad tale of misguided people misreading other people, making mistakes that change their lives for the worse.

The remaining stories are far less interesting. A toughened woman tells her tough story in an it-is-what-it-is-and-what-are-you-going-to-make-of-it? manner. An actor playing the Duke of Buckingham falls for James I. A man complains of his loveless marriage. Another remembers his father's second marriage and the way he and his twin reacted to it. An artist betrays the much older lover who supports him. Etc. They are all fine enough, all rather depressing, and all sound a bit dated in 2013. In the end, I'm glad that Tremain turned her hand to historical fiction.

This is not the Tremain most of us love for her historical fiction like Wolf Hall, or Bring Up the Bodies. {sic!}

Instructions for a Heatwave b y Maggie O'Farrell

Once again, Maggie O'Farrell creates a set of well-developed characters and turns her focus to complex family dynamics. The year is 1976, and England is in the midst of a heatwave. While his wife Gretta follows her usual morning bread baking routine, recent retiree Robert Riordan goes for his morning walk--and doesn't return. As most of us would do in a time of crisis, Gretta calls the family together for support. There's her favorite, Monica, a childless woman married to a second husband whose daughters despise her; Michael Francis, a high school history teacher who hates his job and whose ideal family may not be so ideal behind closed doors; and Aiofe, the so-called black sheep, who never seemed to get anything right and had moved to New York eight years earlier to escape the constant criticism and disappointments.

As they reunite to decide how to proceed in finding Robert, repressed emotions, individual frailties, and long-held secrets come to the surface. O'Farrell does a masterful job of moving from one perspective to another and between past and present, showing us the truth within each character and the source of their misperceptions about one another. Towards the end, we learn that the children aren't the only ones living lives built of facades: Gretta and Robert have their own buried secrets.

In the end, many threads are left to be untangled. The lack of a neatly tied-up conclusion might be considered a flaw, but it also highlights the fact that the relationships among the Riordans and her characters' psyches are O'Farrell's intended focus, more so than the story of a missing person. The writing here is quite fine; not only are the descriptions vivid and the dialogue believable, but the author has a gift for subtly evoking a reader's empathy even for characters who may not be on their best behavior. Instructions for a Heatwave may not be the best Maggie O'Farrell novel I've read, but it comes pretty close.

Nice review of Instructions for a Heatwave, Deborah.

I'd have bought that one at any price couple weeks ago when I was crossing the Mojave. Ha!

Seriously tho, beautiful review.

A Fatal Likeness by Lynn Shepherd

This is the second Charles Maddox mystery I have read, having been sent The Solitary House from Library Thing's Early Review program as well, and I have to say that I enjoyed A Fatal Likeness much more. That is probably because I'm more familiar with the Shelley circle than with Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Bleak House. In reading the first novel, I had the same sense of missing out on something that other reviewers have complained about in regards to Fatal Likeness.

The year is 1850, and young detective Charles Maddox is moving into the home of his uncle, the prime detective of his own time, who has suffered a debilitating stroke, apparently in response to a visit from a potential client: Sir Percy Shelley, the only surviving child of the famous poet and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley. Charles picks up the case and is asked by Sir Percy and his wife to investigate a person who has papers that could be damaging to both his mother's reputation and his father's legacy. But as Charles soon learns, there are usually two--and sometimes more--sides to every story. Secrets from the past begin to unfold, some of them appearing to involve the elder Maddox in some very unprofessional and unsavory business. What really happened in the years that Mary and Percy Shelley were together? What role did Claire Clairmont play? Was Shelley's wife Harriet's death truly a suicide--or something more sinister? Was Shelley really the cruel, narcissistic devil that Charles suspects? And was the now-aging Mary nothing but an angel who had endured her husband's misbehavior, the loss of three infants, and an early widowhood?

I'm not usually a reader of mysteries, but I do enjoy historical fiction, and I found myself fairly caught up with this story (as impossible as I found some points in the plot). The character of Charles Maddox was much less fleshed out than in The Solitary House, so (as other reviewers have noted) those who haven't read that book might not find him so engaging. Shepherd writes well and does a fine job of recreating the atmosphere of Victorian London. However, in both Maddox novels, I felt that the conclusions were rushed and rather confusing. She seems to want to force a twist at the end, but it isn't handled very smoothly: not sure of just what had happened, I had to go back and reread the last 20 pages or so in order to understand who these new characters were, how they figured into the mystery as a whole, and, ultimately, what the significance of the title was (since there were multiple "likenesses" of sorts).

Despite its flaws, not a bad summer read.

I am trying to resist another new series for now. But I will put this series on a list for possible future reference. :)

It's a pretty good one, Nana (but, as I said, I don't usually read mysteries, so what do I know?)

Sounding like an interesting series with the Victorian London connection. I just reread your review of the first one and think the two might be fun summer reads. Enjoyed both your Shepherd reviews. I like mysteries to take on vacation travelling time.

What would you recommend for a first Tremain?

161> Hmm, much as I loved Wolf Hall, most readers found Bring Up the Bodies easier to follow. But the first Tremain that I read and loved was Restoration, so I'm going to recommend starting with that one.

I did enjoy the Charles Maddox mysteries. You will get to know his character better if you start with The Solitary House.

New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families by Colm Toibin

Toibin's collection of biographical literary essays focuses on the relationships between writers and their parents and the effects these relationships had upon their work. There's something here for everyone--which is both the book's strength and its weakness. While I read them all, this is the kind of collection from which a reader might best pick and choose. For me, the most intriguing essays were those on Jane Austen, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, and Roddy Doyle, writers whose work I already enjoy. (Sorry to say, however, that Yeats comes off as somewhat of an idiot tyrant; in a second essay, Toibin devotes equal time to George, Yeats's much ill-treated wife.)

With the exception of the section on Hart Crane, about whom I knew little but who led a particularly sad, brief life dominated by a snobbish, overbearing mother, I was less interested in Toibin's essays on writers whose work I either haven't read or don't particularly care for, among them Samuel Beckett, Sebastian Barry, Thomas Mann, Jorge Luis Borges, and John Cheever. The effect of Toibin's essays on Mann and Cheever confirmed that I will probably never want to read their works; both come off as nasty, cruel human beings whose families suffered their worst abuse. I learned nothing that I didn't already know from the essay on Tennessee Williams, but it would probably be interesting to someone who came to it fresh.

Toibin includes two essays on James Baldwin. The first, "James Baldwin and the 'American Confusion,'" provides an interesting discussion of the writer's place in U.S. literature, despite his ex-patriot status. In the second, Toibin compares the works of Baldwin and Barack Obama, both "Men without Fathers." I felt that he strained a bit too much to be haut courant in his effort to show Obama channeling Baldwin's prose style.

Toibin is a sensitive reader who arrives at some brilliant insights, and he has unearthed intriguing tidbits about each author's life that make the essays more enjoyable than straight literary criticism might have been. Still, like me, most readers will probably find the collection rather uneven. (I thought the essay on Borges was never going to end, and it seemed quite repetitive.) To be best appreciated at its best, go at New Ways to Kill Your Mother like a box of fine chocolates: savor them one at a time.

The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd

This is--literally--the mother of all English revenge plays. It was such a spectacular hit in London in the 1580s that it likely inspired the young Shakespeare to write Titus Andronicus in an effort to outdo Kyd's talent for bringing violence and the grotesque onstage. I just finished the play with my students, and they were quick to pick up on what Shakespeare had also borrowed for Hamlet: the ghost of a wrongfully murdered man walking the earth; a righteous revenger who doesn't trust the information he is given and goes to great lengths to prove it true before taking action--including writing a play-within-a play; the revenger pretending to be mad (or IS he pretending?) while a woman close to him most certainly goes mad from grief; and, of course, a pile of bodies onstage in the final scene. (Kyd beats Shakespeare; final score 6 to 4 in the last scene, and the total body count comparison is 11 to 9.)

Kyd adds a double dose of blood, gore and spectacle to the play. First, he gives us an onstage audience--a kind of chorus--who comment on events between acts. These are the ghost of Andrea, a soldier dishonorably slain in battle, accompanied by Revenge; their purpose is to see justice served to his murderer, Balthazar. When Andrea's friend Horatio (yes, something else for Shakespeare to borrow) reveals the details of his demise to his sweetheart, Bel-imperia, she vows revenge against Balthazar, who has fallen in love with her--and promptly decides that she will love Horatio for his loyalty to Andrea. But in the midst of a rendezvous, Horatio is overtaken by his rival and a company of followers, hanged in the arbor, and stabbed multiple times. Bel-imperia calls for help but is whisked away and locked up. Hieronimo, Horatio's father, responds to the call, only to find the body of his son. This murder--and this body--become the focal points of the play. Hieronimo dips a handkerchief in his son's blood and carries it next to his heart, periodically bringing it out to spur his revenge; and he vows that Horatio shall remain unburied until justice is served.

As we're propelled through Act 3, more chaos erupts. I'll spare you the details, in case you're inspired to read the play. In short: suicide threats, people going mad, betrayal and murder among the murderers, a large dose of gallows humor, an execution, a suicide . . . all leading up to Act 4, in which Bel-imperia and Hieronimo join forces to enact their revenge through a play that is supposed to celebrate the peace treaty between Portugal and Spain and the engagement of Balthazar and Bel-imperia. And the body count is on the rise, Horatio's body arriving just in time for the encore.

It was a little hard to read my students' reactions to the play (they are always a bit reticent for the first few weeks); I'll know more when I read their written responses over the weekend. But I enjoyed reading the play again after many years, especially as I'm teaching Titus Andronicus in another class. Kyd was certainly less subtle than Shakespeare, but he knew his way around the stage and clearly had his finger on the pulse of the groundlings. I'd love to see The Spanish Tragedy in performance some day.

153> Is Rose Tremain a pseudonym for Hilary Mantel or vice versa?

Very interesting reviews.

154, 165, 166> corrections made. What was I thinking?

>168 Cariola:

You wanted to know whether we really read your thread...

Love the body count stats of Kyd vs Shakespeare.

Catching up on all your wonderful reviews in June and July. I read your review of Life After Life when it was a hot review, it's the one review that most makes me want to read that book.

Great review of The Spanish Tragedy I am slowly working my way through English Renaissance literature and I am looking forward to reading Kyd's play soon.

170, 171> Next up for my students: Marlowe's The Jew of Malta.

Great reviews of New Ways to Kill Your Mother and The Spanish Tragedy, Deborah. I'll add the Tóibín to my wish list.

I'm catching up with posts of reading/rereading done for two courses that I am currently teaching. For Shakespeare:



I've posted notes on these before, so I won't repeat.

In studies in English Renaissance Literature, after The Spanish Tragedy, we've been working with:



and the class is are just about to begin



If you're not familiar with Edward II, it's an amazing piece of drama, based on the true story of the English king who was forced to abdicate in favor of his son and then murdered by his barons, with his wife's complicity. Lest you think he was a blameless victim, Marlowe makes it clear that he was not: his sole concern is reveling with his male lover, Gaveston, and while such affairs were generally tolerated, Edward was ignoring his duties as king and emptying the treasury for his and Gaveston's entertainment. His borders were being invaded, he lost his holdings in France, he confiscated church property and alienated the pope by his mistreatment of high-ranking clergy, and he banished his wife--the sister of the king of France--from both his bed and his court. But the genius of Marlowe is that he keeps our sympathies shifting. It's hard not to feel for the abandoned queen or to empathize with the outraged barons--until their bloodthirsty and ambitious natures show. And while it's easy to revile the selfish, neglectful king, it's also easy to pity Edward, who happens to have been born into a position that he is totally unfit for and who wants nothing more than "to live and die with Gaveston." Brilliant verse to boot.

Arden of Faversham is another true story of an adulterous wife who conspires to murder her land speculator husband. The anonymous author (or authors) has woven in a lot of black humor in the form of missed 'opportunities.' When Arden spits out the poisoned porridge because of a bad taste, Alice and her lover Mosby hire a painter to devise a poisoned portrait, and for good measure, she hires two bumbling crooks named Black Will and Shakebag (hmmm . . . ) to waylay him on the road, but their every plot is foiled. Is Providence watching over Arden? Well, maybe. But he meets his end at home, with Alice literally getting blood on her hands as well. As soon as the deed is done, remorse sets in, and it doesn't take long for the hangman to put an end to the tragedy.

Very interesting reviews, Deborah. I am interested in reading Edward II.

I would love to be on that course Cariola.

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri returns to a familiar topic in her long-awaited novel The Lowland: the cultural and familial angst of the transplanted Indian. The story begins in Tollygunge, outside of Calcutta, in the 1960s. Two brothers, Subhash and Udayan, are so close and so much alike that they might be twins. Both seem to have bright futures ahead of them as they enroll in universities, but here their lives take different paths. Subhash, the dutiful son, excels and earns a scholarship to continue his oceanography studies in the United States; Udayan gets caught up in an idealistic but radical movement to overthrow the Indian government. After his involvement in bombmaking and the murder of a policemen, Udayan meets his death in the lowland, the site of happier times for the brothers, in full view of his family.

It is this tragedy, and the decisions made in its wake, that change the lives of three generations. I hesitate to say more--I hate reviews that give too much away. Suffice it to say that there are devastating repercussions for the aging parents, who have lost one son to death and another to immigration; for Subhash, who makes a sacrifice out of love for his brother that brings him both the greatest joy of his life and the greatest pain; and for the third generation daughter, Bela, who suffers the consequences of so many secrets.

As to be expected, Lahiri's writing itself is exquisite. The narrative shifts among the various characters, giving voice to the internal thoughts and feelings of each. As a reader, I found it difficult to identify or empathize with any of them, except perhaps Subhash. This was, I think, because each of them is so emotionally isolated from the others that they come across as self-absorbed, uncaring, and distant. Yet I can't claim this entirely as a flaw: if Lahiri's intention was to show the deep and far-reaching damage that trauma and betrayal inflict on individuals and even generations, she has certainly succeeded.

Overall, an admirable work, although I may not be quite as enthusiastic as the pre-publication reviewers and prize committees. I may have to agree with the handful who feel that Lahiri may be at her best in the short story genre. Still, I look forward to her next novel. And this one may even deserve a second reading.

Great review of The Lowland, Deborah.

I confess I was underwhelmed by Interpreter of Maladies and have avoided Lahiri every since. But perhaps I should try again.

I heard an interview with Lahiri on NPR this morning. Somehow, I don't think the subject matter here appeals very much to me -- but good review.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra

This is one of the most difficult reviews that I can remember writing. I am extremely conflicted about Anthony Marra's debut novel. My head pulls me in one direction, but my gut pulls me in another: which way should I go? and where should I start?

There are many gushing reviews here already, and most of them repeat the plot outline and character descriptions. I will avoid those routes as much as possible; read elsewhere if that is what you seek.

Let's start with the points of conflict.

1) Marra's prose is stunningly beautiful. Marra's prose is too stunningly beautiful.

How can that be? Well, at many points in the novel, I simply got lost in it, more caught up in the turn of phrase, the image, the way a sentence seemed to meander on forever, leaving me with a sense of anticipation, waiting . . . waiting . . . waiting . . . for that exquisite final . . . what, exactly? The end of the sentence? And where were we, and what was happening to . . which character was that again? In other words, while, overall, I greatly admire Marra's mastery of language and can point to a number of exquisite and even perfect passages, I sometimes felt that style conquered substance. I'm well aware that this opinion deviates from the popular one, but there it is. A few readers have complained that the book is unnecessarily long, mainly due to lengthy 'poetic' descriptions, and I'm leaning towards agreement with them.

2) The events in the book and the connections among the characters are believable. Most of the events in the book are believable, but there are way too many extraordinary coincidences.

The horrors of the Chechnyan wars, the killings, the torture, the missing, the betrayals of friends and family members are, as depicted, all too real. Marra gives us the worst of human nature and the lengths to which we will go to preserve our own lives. And he also gives us moments of hope, generosity, and selflessness--the other side of the coin. But the coincidences seemed stretched. For example: The missing sister of Sonja, the female Russian doctor, just happens to have been the nurse who eight years earlier delivered the infant Havaa, the girl now brought to Sonja by Akhmed, the Chechan doctor who just started working for her, who happened to be at the birth with his friend Dokka, the new father, who also happened several years later to shelter this same nurse in his home when she was a refugee . . . I know the population was cut down significantly in a decade of wars, but I just didn't buy this, or several other similar circumstances.

3) The characterizations were brilliant.

No argument here. Even the most reprehensible characters, such as Ramzan the informer, were thoroughly and believably developed in such a way that I had to empathize with their motives, even when I did not agree with them. I loved Akhmed, the character whose loyalties were the most divided but at the same time the most clear, and Khassan, the aged historian who loved, pitied, and hated his son and struggled every minute to determine the moral right. Even the minor characters were unique individuals, carefully drawn and memorable.

4) The book taught me a lot that I didn't know about the Chechan wars. The book really didn't teach me anything about the Chechan wars.

War is hell. The Chechan wars were hell. I still don't have a really clear idea of what caused them or the ideology of the opposing sides.

That's probably enough to draw this to a conclusion. Overall, I enjoyed the book (although "enjoyed" seems like the wrong word for a novel in which there is so much suffering; maybe I should say that I admired it or was completely engrossed with it). There were, however, several rather long stretches that seemed to drag on forever. It took me quite awhile to finish the book, but the last third or so went really fast. I'm giving it a 4-star rating--which is open to change upon reflection, but I feel pretty sure that it will stand. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena certainly gets my recommendation, and I look forward to Marra's next effort.

Thoughtful and intriguing review, Deb. I'll have to keep this one on my radar.

Thank you. It's definitely worth the time, despite some flaws.

Yes I liked the way you highlighted the conflicts you experienced. So interesting and I could relate to feeling that way about some books.

I think I should avoid it and read it as soon as possible. Entertaining review.

As for Lahiri, I hope to try her short stories again, but after The Namesake I'm hesitant to try another novel.

185 - LOL - brilliant!

Wow, that sounds like quite the book. I've never heard of it, but something tells me I will hear LOTS about it in the future. I will tentatively put it on my wishlist, or possibly "avoid it and read it as soon as possible." (Ha ha ha--that's awesome, thanks.) Your feelings on this book remind me of my feelings when I read A Fine Balance years ago. I truly hated it, but it was so well done, and after the dust had settled, I realized how wonderful it was. But how could it be wonderful--I hated it. For many years I couldn't decided whether it was a 1 or a 5 star read.

War is hell. The Chechan wars were hell. I still don't have a really clear idea of what caused them or the ideology of the opposing sides.

Back when the Chechens were making the news in the 90s, my now-husband told me that he'd heard that the Chechens held grudges for 7 generations. He said this with a certain awe as an Italian who was used to people from the Mediterranean regions for holding looooong grudge. But 7 generations! Crazy? Or admirable.

185> !

The Lowland was very, very different from The Namesake, although both do deal with Indian immigrants and intergenerational conflicts. The Namesake was much gentler, more subtle, and of course, the reasons for leaving India were no so harsh or politically motivated.

187> My feelings about the book weren't quite that extreme. More like, is this a 3.5 or a 4.5?

I gather that some of the conflict was political and went back to the Soviet takeover. Although the Russians had repatriated by the 1990s, there were still squabbles over whether the country should remain communist or take another route. But yes, there were also ethnic grudges continuing.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is going on my wish list.

Fabulous commentary about A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Deborah. I'll read it after I finish The Lowland next week when I'm on vacation.

Enjoyed reading about your English Renaissance Literature class. Have you seen Derek Jarman's Edward II, and if so, is it a fair representation of the play?

You've certainly put A Constellation of Vital Phenomena on my list with your thoughtful review.

190> I'll be looking forward to your thoughts on The Lowland.

191> Yes, I own the Jarman version on DVD and have used it in my classes. For some reason, the students found it confusing this time (they aren't the brightest class in general) and preferred the 1970s version with a very young and handsome Ian McKellan. The Jarman is an update, of course (although he maintains the original verse), and, as a gay man, he had his own agenda. He has done a LOT of cutting and moves around a lot of scenes, plus he emphasizes and exaggerates for effect. Isabella, for example (Tilda Swinton), is so hyperfeminine that she almost looks like a drag queen. Plus aside from making the gay lovers in the play sympathetic (as does Marlowe), the heterosexual characters are depicted as sexually perverse--his way of normalizing homosexuality, I guess. Still, I think it's interesting. But I'm not quite sure what to make of the Sugar Plum Fairy finale.

Oh, that sounds interesting! I'm going to have to hunt down a copy of that. (And as an aside, if they ever make a film of my life, I want Tilda Swinton to play me).

She's wonderful, isn't she? I think this was the first film I ever saw her in.

Thanks, I'll look for both the Jarman and the actual Marlowe text.

>193 Nickelini:, I was going to put this in your wonderful Virginia Woolf list, but have you seen Tilda Swinton in Orlando?

Definitely one of my favourite actresses. The first thing I saw her in was a 1990 series on BBC Scotland of John Byrne's Your Cheatin' Heart. Quite different from the Tilda Swinton of today. I've never been able to find a DVD of the series, but I see today that it opened the first Dunoon Film Festival this past summer. Tiny Dunoon also had a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition this past spring.

#195 - Yes, I have. I loved her in that. I also thought she was wonderful in the Narnia films.

196> Loved Orlando and use part of it in teaching the 17th-century poets--the scene where she is manuevering all those farthingales down the corridor, then attending the literary salon with Pope, Dr. Johnson, et al. Works great with the "debate on women" section in the Norton anthology . . . all that misogyny.

I can't say that I liked 'We Need to Talk about Kevin,' but Swinton gave quite a performance.

Toby's Room by Pat Barker

As a fan of Barker's brilliant Regeneration series, I had high hopes for Toby's Room, but I confess to being somewhat underwhelmed. Art student Elinor Brooke, familiar to readers of Life Class, returns at the heart of the story. World War I is peering over the horizon but has not yet crossed the English shores, and Elinor's greatest concerns are her art classes at the Slade, her parents' dissolving marriage, and her close relationship with her older brother Toby. But something disturbing happens, causing a rupture that brother and sister can never quite repair. Still, Elinor persists with her classes and Toby finished his medical degree. And then the war takes over.

Fast forward a few years. Toby has signed up as a medic and is serving in France, and Elinor is getting a bit bored with the Slade, uncertain of what she will do when her studies are completed. News comes that Toby has gone missing in action and is presumed dead. Shortly after, a package with his belongings arrives, and Elinor finds a brief note among them, addressed to her. In it, Toby mysteriously reveals that he won't be coming back. Convinced that he must still be alive, Elinor sets out to solve the mystery. She enlists the help of Paul Tarrant, a fellow Slade student and former lover who has just returned from the war with a severe leg injury, and the two of them focus on another former student, Kit Neville, who served with Toby as a stretcher bearer. Kit is among the patients of Dr. Harold Gillies (a factual person, the 'father' of modern plastic surgery) at Queen Mary Hospital, all of whom have suffered traumatic facial injuries.

Fortunately for Elinor, she is offered a job by Henry Tonks (another real person), her former professor, drawing the faces of the injured. The purpose of the drawings is educational: to assist Dr. Gillies in facial reconstruction and to create an archive of his efforts for other surgeons. In this capacity, she is able to visit Kit, but he is either unable or unwilling to tell her anything about Toby's apparent demise. Paul strikes up an uneasy friendship with Kit, partly out of sympathy for a fellow artist and wounded warrior, but partly in hopes of aiding Elinor.

The truth is finally revealed in the last pages of the book. Don't worry--no spoilers here. But I am rather puzzled at just how Toby got from Point A to Point C. Barker seems to imply a cause-and-effect between two events that just doesn't make sense to me. Putting that aside, however, there are many things to commend in Toby's Room. The characters are well drawn and, as always, Barker gives us a portrait of war and its effects on human lives that is both brutal and poignant. While I can't recommend this novel as highly as Regeneration, it is certainly worth reading, especially for Barker fans or for those interested in the impact of the war on those at home and the extraordinary efforts to mend the wounded.

I have the companion book, Life Class. Thanks for the reminder to pull it out and read it.

Wow - just found your thread and have been catching up on your reading from the start of the year. Some really interesting books here that I hadn't heard of before - and some excellent reviews too.

Enjoyed your review of Toby's Room. I would like to read the Regeneration series some time...

The Regeneration series has always been high on my list. For some unknown reason, I hadn't realized there were more books out there. I'll have to look for Toby's Room after reading your review.

Three reread for classes that I'm teaching:

Volpone by Ben Jonson. It has been quite a few years since I've read this one; I liked it better this time around.

The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster. It gets better every time. Absolutely brilliant.

The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare

This past weekend, under pressure to get my book orders for next semester in, I finalized the list for my Seminar in Historical Fiction:

Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
Restoration by Rose Tremain
Regeneration by Pat Barker
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Small Island by Andrea Levy



There were so many great books to consider that narrowing it down was really hard. Since it would only be practical to read five in one semester, I decided to focus solely on award-winning books set in the UK/Commonwealth that were written within the last 30 years. And since the students will have to write a semester paper and give a presentation, these had to be books on which there is fairly extensive critical commentary; that eliminated quite a few. Having a film version available on DVD was another plus. And these had to be books that I personally love rather than ones I'm not keen on but felt "ought to be included." (The only thing worse than having to read a book you don't want to read is having to teach a book that you don't really love.)

In the end, these five fell into place quite nicely.

Those are some lucky students!

Your class would be perfect, because I've only read two of those and would love to read them again and actually study them. I'd love to sign up. I have to read the others for sure.

I'd take that class!

Thanks--hope the students feel the same way!

There's no film version (yet) of Bring Up the Bodies . . . but I can show some clips fro 'The Tudors'!

Great selection of books!

Excuse the typos--for some reason, my keyboard is leaving out the ms. (I just had to retype one in this message.)

Great choice of books for your seminar, Deborah! Where do I sign up?

Now I am just hoping that enough students sign up for my seminar. So far I have six--need 10-15 to keep it on the books, but scheduling is still underway.

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann.

Let the Great World Spin is one of those "must read" books that everyone raves about but that I somehow resisted reading until now. What finally pushed me to read it was how much I admired McCann's most recent novel, Transatlantic. While I ended up being mildly disappointed, maybe that's good news: since Transatlantic is so much the better of the two, that must mean that McCann's writing is getting better, and I can look forward to his next endeavor.

I'm a great fan of novels told from multiple points of view and in multiple voices, but a number of things in this novel smacked too hard of artifice, in my opinion. For one thing, there were just too many coincidences. I get it: New York may be a big city, but in the end, we're living in a small world. Well . . . really, it's not THAT small. The judge who sentences the prostitute is married to the woman who is in a group for grieving mothers whose sons were killed in Vietnam where she meets an African-American woman who is the neighbor who takes in the granddaughters of the prostitute because the prostitute's daughter was killed in an automobile accident, and the driver, who was also killed, was the monk who devoted his life to watching out for prostitutes, and his brother figures out that the woman who comes to the girl's funeral was in the car that caused the hit-and-run, but they fall in love and get married . . . um, no, sorry, the world is rarely that small and our lives are rarely that contrived. I would have enjoyed the novel more had McCann not felt compelled to devise such links between each character's story. It really wasn't necessary, since he already relied on the frame of Petit's tightrope walk between the World Trade Center Towers, which at least half of the characters have seen or heard about. I hope that McCann structures his next novel on something other than unexpected coincidences--something that he used in Transatlantic as well, but with a much subtler hand.

My feelings about the characters themselves are mixed. Too many of them--especially the minority characters--fall into stereotypes, and to some extent, the book is just too big and too ambitious to allow us to get a real sense of any of them. Some, like the California hackers, seemed totally pointless (not to mention irritating).

By now, you may be wondering if I liked anything about this book and why I gave it 3.5 stars. Well, there are those moments when the writing itself absolutely soars, and these moments make it all worthwhile. McCann has a touch of the poet in him, and when he doesn't let it get away from him and flounder into the melodramatic, his writing can be wonderful. And in retrospect, it's interesting to see how much he has progressed in using similar techniques in Transatlantic.

So . . . 3.5 stars. If you haven't read Transatlantic yet, you really should. Skip Let the Great World Spin and then wait for McCann's next novel.

Hmm. I loved Let the Great World Spin, and found it moving, but of course you are right about the coincidences. I think I particularly appreciated it as New Yorker, and it is the only book that alludes to 9/11 that I have ever liked. (Of course it doesn't mention 9/11, but the people looking up at Petit crossing between the towers foreshadow the people looking up at the towers under attack.)

214> Having looked at a good number of the LT reviews, it seems to me that the book seems to be a love it/hate it one with New Yorkers. I certainly understand the pleasure of reading a book that takes you to familiar places and describes local color.

Reread with my students:

A Chaste Maid in Cheapside by Thomas Middleton

King Lear by William Shakespeare--my favorite of the tragedies.

The Making of a Marchioness by Frances Hodgson Burnett

This book certainly had its charms, and I can understand why it might have been a popular women's novel in its day (it was originally published in 1901). It tells the story of a refined but impoverished woman in her thirties, Miss Emily Fox-Seton, who scratches out a living by assisting her betters to shop wisely and plan parties while remaining obligingly in the background. Just as disaster seems about to befall (her kindly landlady and her daughter plan to give up the house where Emily rooms), wonder of wonders, she receives an unexpected marriage proposal that catapults her into the upper echelon of society. Lord Waldehurst has been won over by Emily's good taste and unprepossessing nature--undoubtedly the dream of many an aging spinster in 1901.

But, alas, it is at this point that the novel falls a bit short for the 21st-century reader. Emily's kindness and naiveté seem to know no bounds. She tries to befriend Alec Osbourne (who has been Lord Waldehurst's sole heir for the past 30 years or so) and his pregnant half-Indian wife, even coaxing her husband--who is about to leave for business in India--to allow her to furnish a house on the estate grounds for their use. It never enters her head that the Osbournes might see her as a potential threat to the property, money, and title that they hope to inherit, and she is hurt and confused by their often surly manners and Hortense's frequent angry outbursts. (When her trusty maid tells Emily that she fears that Amira, Hortense's ayah, is up to no good, Emily encourages her to read Uncle Tom's Cabin to improve her view of "the blacks.") Following several near-misses--accidents that would have been fatal--plus a confession from Hortense that she sometimes hates the now-pregnant Emily and that Alec wants to kill her, Emily feels that the best solution to her dilemma is to take Hortense's advice to "go away" to stay safe until her child is born. Emily's goodness is just too unbelievable; I started to agree with Alec's estimation that she was just "a big fool," and I wanted to smack her back into reality. And the Osbournes and Amira fall into caricatures of villains so evil that I expected even Hortense and Amira to be twirling long black moustachios.

I'm giving the book three stars as a period piece and an example of early 20th century women's novels, and perhaps with some bonus points for Persephone's quite lovely cover. Read it when you are in the mood for pure fluff.

Interesting comments about Let the Great World Spin. I had been entirely disinterested in it when it came out and became a book of the moment. And I was gobsmacked by how good Transatlantic was. I think I'll take your advice and just wait for his next. I also have an earlier book of short stories, Everything in this Country Must, to keep me company until then.

The Making of a Marchioness looks like the perfect book for a certain sort of cold, rainy Sunday.

The Hired Man by Aminatta Forna

If I had to narrow my impressions of this book down to two words, they would be "atmospheric" and "disturbing." Set in a small town in the former Yugoslavia in 2007, The Hired Man focuses a local man, Duro, and ties his memories of the past to events in the present. Duro is a rather solitary man who spends most of his time with his dogs, either in the small home he converted from a pig house or out hunting--although he does drop in to the local bar on occasion. One day he is surprised to see a car and some activity at a place called simply "the blue house." He is surprised to learn that the house has been bought by an Englishwoman, Laura, who is moving in with her teenaged son and daughter. Duro offers his help in fixing up the place, and it soon becomes clear that this is a house with which he is quite familiar. For example, when Grace, Laura's daughter, cracks a chunk of whitewash off an outer wall and uncovers what turns out to be a beautiful mosaic bird, Duro's memories begin to flood back: his childhood, his friendships, his lost love, the war and all the pain, tragedy, betrayal, and inhumanity that came along with it.

Forna skillfully weaves the story of the past into that of the present, what can never be forgotten into what can never be spoken of. Laura and her children provide a contrast to the citizens of Gost. Confident and privileged, Laura feels she has settled into a pastoral fairyland; she seems oblivious as to how out of place she really is among these taciturn people who keep to themselves and resent--or perhaps fear?--the arrival of outsiders. While she assures Grace that Gost was untouched by the not-so-distant ethnic war, Duro's story gradually reveals that nothing could be further from the truth.

Back to my two words: "atmospheric" and "disturbing." It's hard to describe the effect of this novel; perhaps I should put those words together and say that it is permeated by a disturbing atmosphere. Forna made it easy to feel what it must have been like in Gost: feeling that you were constantly being watched, that you had to be careful of what you said and to whom, that there were secrets behind those closed doors and generally unsmiling faces, that nothing and no one could be counted on, that life was boringly predictable and yet suddenly and dangerously unpredictable. In short, while I read, I felt rather tightly wound--which is exactly how I imagine the citizens of Gost lived each moment. While there were a few places where the story bogged down a bit, or where the relation of past events was somewhat confusing The Hired Man is a powerful novel that explores the lingering consequences of war--in particular, an ethnic war between neighbors.

Wonderful review of The Hired Man. It makes me want to pick it up and read it immediately.

Agreeing with Jane. The Hired Man is now on my wishlist.

The Hired Man excellent review of this, which sounds ideal for my book club to read.

220, 221, 222> Thank you; it was an impressive read. There are a few other good reviews posted on LT that give a lot more detail than mine, if you are interested. I try to keep the plot details to a minimum.

Great review of The Hired Man, Deborah. I'm still surprised that it wasn't chosen for this year's Booker Prize longlist. Aminatta Forna would get my vote as the most underrated contemporary English language author, based on this book and her previous novel, The Memory of Love.

67. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Readers have waited ten long years for two esteemed writers, Jhumpa Lahiri and Donna Tartt, to follow up their bestsellers with a new novel this year. While beautifully written, The Lowlands was somewhat of a disappointment, leaving many readers to wonder if Lahiri shouldn't stick to the genre of short story. On the contrary, Tartt's The Goldfinch, a 700+ pager that takes the reader on a bleak but fascinating ride with 13-year old Theo Decker, was, overall, well worth the wait.

From the first page, Tartt sweeps us up in Theo's story. Like many kids his age, Theo, a promising student who lives in New York with his mother (his alcoholic would-be actor dad having simply disappeared one day), has fallen in with the wrong crowd. Theo knows that this day's outing to the art museum, to be followed by lunch, will not end in a pleasant mother-son conversation; but he has no idea that a disaster is about to occur that will change his life forever. As his mother pops into the gift shop and Theo follows a red-haired girl who has caught his eye, a massive explosion rips through the museum.

Tartt's description of the immediate aftermath is horrifying and heart-wrenching--but nevertheless necessary if we are to understand the emotional roller coaster ride that Theo embarks upon. When he regains consciousness, the only living person he sees--the elderly man who was with the red-haired girl--is clearly dying. It is he who encourages Theo to take "The Goldfinch," a small 17th-century masterpiece, and who gives him a token that will lead him, later, to the man who will give him a second chance at life.

I won't spoil the novel by giving away any further plot details. Suffice it to say that one thought that struck me is how desperate life can become for those who, like Theo, don't have caring families to rely upon. His one devoted friend, a Polish-Russian boy named Boris, comes from a family even more fractured than Theo's, and it's as easy to damn him as to praise him. Nevertheless, he's an unforgettable character.

The Goldfinch is not a flawless novel, by any means. For me, the long, drug-drenched sections got a bit tedious, and Tartt falls into the overtly philosophical towards the end with musings on life, death, love, art, and beauty. Still, there's no denying that she has spun quite a tale, created some unique characters and made us feel not just for but with them, and painted a seductively visual atmosphere with her detailed descriptions.

Adding some rereads that I shared with my students:

The Witch of Edmonton by Thomas Dekker, William Rowley, and John Ford
The Changeling by Thomas Middleton
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare

I'm glad you liked The Goldfinch. I've been waiting to hear something about this book.

I'm glad you liked The Goldfinch. I have it on my kindle but will probably wait until January to read it. The holidays take up a lot of reading time.

227> It's definitely worth reading.

228> I just got my first Kindle (a paperwhite) a few weeks ago, and this was the first book I read on it.

Great review of The Goldfinch, Deborah; I'll add it to my Christmas wish list.

I saw that the Kindle version is currently on sale for $7.99 in the US, so I just bought it.

Thanks, Darryl. I think you'll enjoy this one.

Those daily/weekly/monthly Kindle specials have me hooked. I really like being able to read the samples on my Kindle before purchasing. I guess you can usually "Look Inside" the print books online, too, but I just hate reading that way.

I've been waiting to hear about The Goldfinch too, since I was turned off by all the hype about The Secret History. Still not sure if it's one for me, but I appreciated your review.

Havisham by Ronald Frame

Imagining the life of a secondary figure in a classic novel can sometimes be a fruitful exercise and can lead to an intriguing new story. But sometimes, such imaginings fall flat, and unfortunately, that is the case with Ronald Frame's Havisham. I've never been a huge fan of Charles Dickens; in fact, I confess that, even though I am an English professor, I've never been able to drag myself through a complete Dickens novel. They dramatize well, however, and that is how I came to know Great Expectations. The idea of learning what might have happened to bring Miss Havisham to the state we see her in intrigued me. As a number of reviewers have noted, Frame's book starts out better than it ends--but that may not be saying much.

Catherine Havisham is the only daughter of a successful brewery owner. Like many in the rising middle class of the day, her father uses his money to propel Catherine into a better social sphere--or so he hopes. She is kept away from the hard realities of the workers, allowed only to play for small supervised periods of time with hand-picked children, and later is sent to live with an upper class family for polishing. One would like to feel sorry for her, but Catherine is such a nincompoop and such an inveterate snob in her own right that it was downright impossible. First she "befriends" Sally, a local girl, by giving her cast-off clothes and allowing her the luxury of playing, now and then, with toys she could never hope to own. Later, she considers making Sally her maid, but, alas, Sally has taken employment elsewhere and soon stops answering Catherine's letters, which are full of descriptions of parties and travels and new dresses. Then she looks down her nose at the boy she discovers is her half-brother (her father not being the saint she thought him). Yes, the boy is indeed horrid, but if I had to deal with Catherine, I'm afraid I'd be tempted to bait her, too. Finally, she falls for Henry Compeysen, a man who, as far as I could see, had no apparent charms whatsoever (well, aside from causing the "stirring" and "wetness" between Catherine's legs, of which we get innumerable icky descriptions). Only a nincompoop like Catherine would be blind to the fact that this man felt no attraction to her whatsoever, never expressed any affection for her, and constantly came up with schemes to put himself in charge of the brewery--and her money. So, of course, she gets taken for a ride and dumped at the altar, and that is where the Miss Haversham we know from Great Expectations comes in.

The adoption of Estella is as tacky as one would expect in this version of the story. Catherine has a pair of cats, and after the male is killed by locals, the female goes into mourning. Yes, the abandoned Catherine identifies with the cat (whose mate at least left through no desire of his own). Miraculously, although the cat has assumedly been spayed, she turns out to be pregnant, and watching her fuss over the kittens arouses Miss Haversham's maternal instincts, to the point that she buys a child from passing gypsies. But soon Estella becomes little more than a project for revenge on the opposite sex: beautiful and refined, she will be groomed for the purpose of leading men on, only to crush them. And Pip becomes a part of the experiment.

Frame concludes the novel with Dickens's ending, but gives us a brief taste of what has happened to Estella and to Pip as well--none of which is particularly original or interesting.

Well, by this time, you probably know that I won't be recommending Havisham, which was one of the more boring books I've read in quite some time, and not particularly well written either. Maybe I would have liked it more had I not just finished a string of pretty extraordinary novels . . . but I doubt it. On to better things.

Mr Timothy by Louis Bayard is an example of taking a Dickens character and telling the rest of the story. It's brilliant. I'm sorry Havisham was not because that is a character in need of a book.

234> Thanks for the suggestion--I have that one somewhere in my TBR stacks!

Agreeing with RG about Miss Havisham certainly being a character in need of a book. Too bad it didn't work, but terrific review. Miss Havisham made a huge impression on me when I was a child and she still stands out whenever I read Great Expectations. For lovers of Dickens, there is Jack Maggs, the Magwitch like character from Great Expectations

I think perhaps the most successful one of these secondary character novels might be The Wide Sargasso Sea.

Will look for Mr Timothy.

I'm so glad that I'm not the only English professor who doesn't like Dickens. I did read David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities (by far the better of the two) in HS classes and tried to get through Bleak House for comp exams -- but other than that, my knowledge of Dickens' books also comes from films. I do admire his exposure of the social ills of Victorian England, however.

237> I'm with you! One of the perks of being in Advanced English in HS was that I DIDN'T have to read Dickens (although I got stuck reading Heart of Darkness twice--blech!). I agree with you about the social element, however, plus he got a lot of people reading who normally wouldn't. Maybe the J. K. Rowling of his day . . .

I too had to read Heart of Darkness twice, and agree: Blech! However, I do like Dickens. He's not my favourite-favourite, but I like him a lot. Sorry that Havisham was a bust--she's definitely an intriguing character and I'd like to know more about her.

shame about Havisham perhaps you would have been better off reading Great Expectations

English professors not enjoying Dickens! What is the world coming to. (only joking; its whatever turns you on)

Odd about Dickens. I'm on the side that really likes him. One of the stranger things in my book accumulating life is that when I turned nine, my grandmother started giving me the Oxford editions of his works in hardcover and that same birthday some elderly friends of my family also started giving me another set of Dickens. My mother was didn't want to tell either party about the other, so I sometimes got the same book twice in the same year, but would miss out on others completely. I still have those books and have added in most of the missing works. I read them all when I got them and have reread most of them several times over the years. Not sure I would equate him with J K Rowling, but then I've never read her work.

Now if only I could warm up to Trollope.

I felt a deep resentment towards having to read a guy who was paid by the word in high school, but I have since fallen for Dickens' charms. It was Great Expectations that hooked me.

It was reading Great Expectations in school that turned me off Dickens, but that was so many decades ago, I probably should try him again. I have Bleak House and A Tale of Two Cities (which I also read as a teenager) on the TBR.

>243 rebeccanyc: Rebecca, I listened to an unabridged audiobook of Great Expectations several years ago. I was pleasantly surprised after hating it in high school, to find that I enjoyed it immensely. I never caught the humor when I was in my teens.

Who would have guessed that this bad review would drum up so much support for old Charles Dickens? ;)

On the Rowling comment: I've never read a Harry Potter book either, so I can't say if they are good, bad, mediocre, or just not my cup of tea. Their novels are undoubtedly quite different. My thought in mentioning her alongside Dickens is that both were immensely popular in their day (Rowling's popularity continues), and both are credited with getting a lot of people reading who otherwise wouldn't. For that alone, I praise them both!

Here Comes Trouble: Stories from My Life by Michael Moore

Whether you love him or hate him, you have to agree that Michael Moore is a man passionate about his beliefs who knows how to tell a good story. Here Comes Trouble is an entertaining and engaging non-chronological memoir told through a series significant stories from Moore's life that help us to understand how he evolved into the committed, controversial filmmaker that we know today. If you are expecting a long political harangue, you'll be pleasantly surprised. Many of the stories focus on Moore's familial relationships, his friends, awkward adolescent moments, his spirituality, etc. I never knew, for example, that he attended seminary and planned to become a priest--until he was expelled for asking too many questions. Or that he campaigned for Richard Nixon.

Moore opens with a story that relates the backlash that followed his Oscar acceptance speech, from the young man who called him an a--hole as he walked offstage, to Glenn Beck's suggestion that killing him would feel pretty good, through a series of threats and actual attacks that caused him to hire a cadre of bodyguards--most of whom were tough former Navy Seals--to protect him and his family. Whatever you think of Moore's politics, you will (or should) be appalled by what he went through in a country that supposedly values free speech.

Personal memories intermingle with the more political: his mother's death, a favorite teacher, the pros and cons of attending a Catholic school, family vacations, his teenage crushes, an oddball neighbor ostracized for what Moore later recognized as his homosexuality. But one thing the connects all of the stories is Moore's penchant for asking questions--the habit that ultimately led him to become first the editor of a small liberal newspaper in Flint, Michigan, and later a documentary filmmaker. Why wouldn't his mother allow him to skip a grade, considering how bored he was in school? Why couldn't his Catholic grade school have a newspaper? Why was Boys' State accepting sponsorship from an organization that excluded African-Americans? How, in a state that outlawed abortion, could he help a close friend who had gotten pregnant? What options would he have if he was drafted? Why wasn't the president keeping his campaign promises? How was it that people he liked and respected were revealed to hold racist views? Was it right to honor the German war dead if among them were fallen Nazis? Why was the government sponsoring business seminars promoting job outsourcing?

If, like Moore and me, you grew up in the late 1950s and 1960s and remember the turmoil of the 1970s, you will find a lot to relate to here. (I was born in Detroit, grew up in the suburbs, and didn't leave Michigan until 1990, so many of Moore's recollections were personally familiar.) If you're younger, I can't think of a better introduction to those decades. Moore's stories are variously funny, surprising, moving, maddening, uplifting. Whether you're a fan or foe, Here Comes Trouble will convince you that Michael Moore is a man who loves America, who strives to love and understand his fellow humans, and who deserves respect for living by his convictions.

I listened to the book on audio, read by Moore himself--a great choice, as no one else could have told his stories with quite the same effect.

Great review of Here Comes Trouble: Stories from my Life by Michael Moore. His films come across really well in the UK and the French love him. It's good to read a little about his personality from your review of his audio book.

The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert

Initially, I had no interest in reading this book, mainly because I couldn't get through Gilbert's last best seller, the super-sappy Eat, Pray, Love. But a colleague recommended it, so I decided to give it a try. It ended up Kate Atkinson's Life After Life off my Top 5 Books of 2013.

The novel focuses on the life of Alma Whittaker, pampered daughter of a wealthy American botanical merchant, who has enough spare time on her hands to study a specialty of her own: mosses. The story covers more than 100 years, beginning with Alma's birth, backtracking to explain how her English father made his fortune and ended up in America, then moving through her charmed childhood, lonely young womanhood, a disappointing late marriage, a series of middle age adventures, and finally, into her last years. At its heart The Signature of All Things is Alma's gradual blossoming from a short-sighted, rather selfish person living in an insular world into a fully-developed member of the human community, one willing to care about others and take the time to understand their feelings, needs, and motives. Gilbert uses the world of plants--particularly mosses--as a metaphor for the human world: under the microscope, each moss colony is a world unto itself, yet each continually tests its boundaries, tentatively or aggressively reaching into other worlds.

If all this sounds dull, believe me, it isn't. Alma has quite a few adventures along the way, including an extended visit to a remote island in the South Seas. And Gilbert peppers the novel with wonderfully drawn characters: her practical but rigid Dutch mother and her business mogul father; Prudence, the beautiful adopted sister who struggles to catch up to Alma intellectually but remains emotionally distant; the painter of orchids who seems to be Alma's soul mate; the flighty new neighbor who insists on befriending the Whittaker sisters, bringing laughter into their house; Tomorrow Morning, a charismatic native evangelist; and many, many more. Add to this the fact that The Signature of All Things is an exquisitely written and finely researched book.

While I won't be going back to read Eat, Pray, Love, I will most certainly be looking for Gilbert's earlier works of fiction. Highly recommended. This is one of those rare books that you have trouble tearing yourself away from, and that you hate to see come to an end.

Interesting! Yours is the second positive review from a Club Read-er and now I'm even more convinced. Never thought I'd want to read a book from the author of Eat, Pray, Love, but I could see myself reading this in 2014.

249> Definitely give it a try. I felt the same way initially.

》248, 249

Same here, I hated Eat, Pray, Love and did not want to go back to this author, but bought The Signature of all things one day after reading Margaret's review on Club Read in October.

I didn't even try to read Eat, Pray, Love because I knew I would hate it, but this one sounds intriguing.

252> I didn't get very far into Eat, Pray, Love . . . way too self-indulgent for my taste. But this novel is a winner.

I finished my last book of the year tonight; review to follow tomorrow.

The Good Lord Bird by James McBride

There sure are a heck of a lot of reasons to like The Good Lord Bird. After all, it just won the National Book Award, beating out highly anticipated novels such as Jhumpha Lahiri's The Lowland and George Saunders's Tenth of December, the latest works by perennial favorites like Thomas Pynchon and Alice McDermott, and glowingly reviewed books by newer kids on the block Rachel Kushner and Anthony Marra, among others. Many reviewers likened the folksy, vernacular voice of the narrator, Henry Shackleford (aka Onion) to Huck Finn, and everybody loves Mark Twain, right? (Um . . . maybe not.) McBride's memoir, The Color of Water, a remarkable portrait of his mother, had such an impact that it is still being assigned as the freshman summer reading project by many colleges and universities, and he has written several pretty good novels since. And with some recent refocus on the subjects of the American Civil War, slavery, civil rights, and apartheid, the timing for this story of a young slave taken in by abolitionist John Brown couldn't be more timely. In the past year or so, films like "Lincoln," "Twelve Years a Slave," "Django Unchained," "The North Star," "Lee Daniels' The Butler," and "The Long Walk to Freedom" have been popular with both critics and the public. The new year will mark the 50th anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin by federal and state governments as well as some public places. It also marks the 20th anniversary of Nelson Mandela's successful negotiations to abolish apartheid in South Africa and establish multi-racial elections (which saw him elected as the country's first black President). And, of course, we just said farewell to Mandela last month. So general interest in the topics McBride addresses should be pretty high.

Add to that several personal reasons for me to look forward to reading The Good Lord Bird. I've been to Harper's Ferry--several times--and know a bit about John Brown's campaign. I live about a half hour's drive from Gettysburg, where an ancestor has a commemorative statue. Needless to say, I've been there many times, too, and I have a fringe interest in all things Civil War related, barring play-by-play battle descriptions. (By the way, 2013 was the 150th anniversary of the great battle that ended the Confederates' invasion of the northern states--and also the sesquicentennial of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.) In addition, I live in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, a town that figures prominently in the war, Brown's campaign, and McBride's book. Chambersburg was the northernmost town captured by the Confederates, who burned it down when the citizens refused to pay ransom. It was here that Brown had his famous meeting with Frederick Douglass, which forms an extended chapter in The Good Lord Bird that presents a startlingly different view of the man than we get from history books or other novels--for example, Colum McCann's Transatlantic, which I read (and loved) earlier this year. At several points in the novel, Onion is advised to head north to Chambersburg, to "the railroad." One of the few remaining period buildings in Chambersburg that wasn't totally burned down is the old stone jail. I've been there, too, and I've seen the hiding place for runaway slaves. I also lived in Missouri for six years, which is where Onion and Brown's story begins, and I've been to some of the relevant historic sites there as well. So this was a book that I knew I could relate to, understand, even picture vividly in my mind.

So what went wrong? And what went right? Let's start on the plus side. McBride seems to have gotten the basic outline of what led up to the debacle at Harper's Ferry right--with, of course, some necessary liberties taken to give the novel interest, such as Onion's role in Brown's ultimate defeat. If you've read anything about the book, you know that 12-year old Henry gets caught in a dangerous situation in which his father gets killed, and he puts on a dress in hopes of escaping a similar fate; this is how Brown (and nearly everybody else except the black women he encounters) comes to think he is a girl. As a narrator, Henry brings an innocence and raw truth that are refreshing; he doesn't think too far beyond the immediate moment and his own survival, which is fairly typical of a child. His folksy speech apparently reminds a lot of readers of Huck Finn. I have to admit that I'm no fan of Twain, and at times I found some of the turns of speech annoying, especially when overused (like the fourth or fifth time Henry refers to eating as throwing something down his "little red lane"--just too cutesy for words).

As to other characters, most of them were underdeveloped. I expected Brown (called "the Old Man" by Henry) to be depicted as a one-note madman, and he was, although at one point Henry admits that he was a gifted strategist and would have done well in the army. The majority of the white people in the novel could pretty much be summed up as brutal, selfish, appetite-driven, and cowardly. Blacks, both slave and free, don't fare a whole lot better, although they are generally forgiven due to the circumstances under which they have to live. They use one another. They're suspicious of one another. They turn each other in. They prefer the relative security of slavery to the unpredictability of the freedom struggle. The portrait of Douglass is broadly comic, but I'd be surprised if some readers don't find it degrading and disrespectful, and I'm not quite sure why McBride chose to depict him in this way. Thankfully, Harriet Tubman gets somewhat better treatment.

The book's greatest flaw, for me, was it's repetitiveness, especially all those darn skirmishes (which made up the bulk of its pages). The men go down the hill and shoot. The men go up the hill and get shot at. The men go into a tavern and get shot at. The men hide in the trees and shoot. The men cross a stream and get shot at. Yaaawwwwn. Maybe McBride was trying to make a point about the nature of war, but I don't think so; I sensed that he was trying to make this seem suspenseful. It wasn't. Even the final scenes at Harper's Ferry--well, I just wanted to get it over with.

So that explains my mediocre rating. I didn't hate The Good Lord Bird, but I wouldn't recommend it either. And I'm still not sure how it won the National Book Award over a wonderful novel like A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (which was longlisted but didn't make it as a finalist) or Transatlantic (which was ignored altogether).

Come and join me on my new thread for 2014.

Great review of The good Lord Bird

Thanks!

Great reviews of the Michael Moore book, The Signature of All Things and The Good Lord Bird -- the first two, I'd really like to get to. My son gave my husband The Good Lord Bird for his birthday, but he wasn't really a fan -- had many of the same caveats you did. I think I'll skip this one.

Finished the first book of 2014:



1. The Headmaster's Wife by Thomas Christopher Greene

What started out as a strange novel ended up also being a sad and depressing one. Arthur Winthrop, the 50-something headmaster of a Vermont prep school, has just been arrested for running naked in Central Park in the middle of a snowy winter's evening. In the police station, he begins to unravel his story. Bored with the job that he virtually inherited from his father and with his increasingly distant wife, Arthur has begun to drink heavily--and to obsess about one of his students. He confesses to having done some creepy and horrible things, putting his job on the line--and now this.

Halfway through the book, I began to wonder why it was titled The Headmaster's Wife--and then the author drops a bomb that totally turns the plot around, devoting the second half of the book to Elizabeth Winthrop's story. I won't reveal what changes the reader's perspective, in case anyone wants to read the book, but suffice it to say that it's one of those revelations that is truly surprising and that also kind of makes you groan because you should have figured it out. Although Greene tries to conclude on a hopeful note, I found the sadness overwhelming. Perhaps that is because, as Greene notes in the afterward, he started writing it during the six months that his now-deceased daughter spent in a neo-natal ICU; he dedicates the book to her.

Written in short chapters and a relatively spare style, The Headmaster's Wife is a quick read with some compelling (if creepy) moments. It ended up being quite different from the blurb I read on Book Browse, and if I hadn't committed to reviewing it for them, I probably wouldn't have chosen it for my first book of 2014. Someone who enjoys psychological studies might enjoy it more than I did.

2.5 out of 5 stars.