Cariola's 2013 Reading Log

Unknown Man by Sir Isaac Oliver




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 (reread)
Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier (reread
Richard III by William Shakespeare (reread)
The Leisure Seeker by Michael Zadoorian
The Poet's Wife by Judith Allnatt
The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare (reread)
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 (rereading it with my class)
The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare (reread for my 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 with my Shakespeare students)

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 (also published as 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
Swallowing the Sea: On Writing by Lee Upton

July
Transatlantic by Colm 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 Phenomena 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 by Michael Moore
The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert
The Good Lord Bird by James McBride

Good reading this year, Deborah, and much joy in it!

Welcome back!

Hello, Deborah! I'm always anxious to see what you've been reading!

Happy New Year, Deborah!

Hope 2013 brings lots of good reading your way, Deborah!

I wish you the best year yet, Deborah - and that includes a lot of reading!

And here we go! (Still gotta post a painting up there--so many choices!)



1. 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.

3 out of 5 stars.

Very nice review of The Servants' Quarters, Deborah. I'll pass on it, given your final comment.

Thanks, Darryl. Did you notice that I finally got a picture posted at the top of my thread?

Happy New Year, Deborah, albeit a bit belatedly. I hope you have a wonderful reading year ahead.

>10 Cariola: I didn't notice it then, but I do now!

Happy New Year...The opening photo is great!

13> Same to you. I wish my feet were that small!

Adding The Servants' Quarters to the list of books I am never going to read ever. Sorry your reading year is off to such a bad start. I hope that your enjoyment of books goes up from here on out.

15> Hi, Stasia! It will get better--I'm reading a good one now!

2. 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.

4.5 out of 5 stars.

3. 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.

3 out of 5 stars.

I've just had a similar experience with Richard Ford whose work I usually love.

19> Oh, does that mean that Canada was a disappointment? It's on my wish list . . .

4. 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.

4.5 out of 5 stars.

>21 Cariola:: ooh, another Restoration fan here. This is one I've been eying (OK, that doesn't look right, and "eyeing" does, but Windows flags it. Whatever.)

Very glad to see such a positive review.

I loved Restoration too - and we've got Merivel on the shelf ready to be read. Glad you liked it.

Nice review of Merivel, Deborah. I bought it and Restoration last year, and I intend to read them, in order, later this year.

Lovely review, Deborah...I have read and thoroughly enjoyed Restoration but not this one. So many books....

5. 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 this book in print.)

4 out of 5 stars.

Hi Deb! Great review, and thanks for the heads up about the audio version - that kind of stuff can drive me bonkers when I'm listening. Who wants to keep having to rewind and/or turn the volume up all of the time?!?

Fabulous review of The Absolutist, Deborah; I'll add it to my wish list.

6. 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.

3.5 out of 5 stars.

You are reading such great books!

Your reviews are wonderful!

Thank you, Linda! I've been on a pretty good streak.

Thanks for the heads up about Joan Silber. I downloaded Ideas of Heaven yesterday and am enjoying it.

7. 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.

8. 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.

4.5 out of 5 stars.

You've read some great books here -- and very nice reviews. I've had Restoration on my list for a while and now am anxious to get to it sooner.

I'm also a McEwan fan, but have heard many not-so-great comments about Sweet Tooth. I'll have to think about that.

35> Thanks--glad you enjoy the reviews. Sweet Tooth was quite a disappointment.

Hi, there! I've added Mortality to my TBR--thanks for the recommendation!

Karen O.

Thumbs up from me for your excellent review of Mortality

Superb review of Morality, Deborah. Thumb up from me, too.

I have Restoration waiting in the wings, can't wait. Great review.

I love Joan Silber - glad to see she's written a new one.

Really well said about Hitch's Mortality, Deborah. Thumberooni.

Deborah

Thanks for recommending Mortality. I read this tonight, then, re-read your excellent review.

You are an incredible writer. You captured the essence of the book in a wonderful manner.

Delurking to drop a greeting...I so enjoyed your review of Merivel! I haven't read Restoration so I'll go get that first.

Well, thank you all for the lovely comments. Linda, I'm glad you enjoyed Mortality. I'm currently listening to another one that I think you will like: The Poet's Wife by Judith Allnatt. The poet in the title is John Claire. If you know anything about him, he had bouts of insanity.

Richard, Restoration remains my favorite book by Rose Tremain, although Merivel is a wrothy sequel. Do read them in sequence. Hope you enjoy them!

Three rereads for courses I'm teaching:

9. Titus Andronicus by William Shaksepare
10. Richard III by William Shakespeare
11. Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier

The latter is for Introduction to the Interdisciplinary Arts. It was a great choice for the course, which focuses on how the arts inspire and often work with one another. So we have a novel inspired by a painting, and a film inspired by the novel, and they have also seen a short film on how the painting inspired the photographer who took the famous portrait of a young Afghan girl that was on the cover of National Geographic many years ago.

Your mention of John Claire, sent me scurrying to remember where I had previously heard of him. Now, after reading this, I remember:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Clare

Good wishes with the courses you are teaching.

12. 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).

4 out of 5 stars.

Hi Deborah

A few years ago Madeline recommended The Leisure Seeker. I loved it!

Yes, I got The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit from Madeline, and I knew she had loved this one, too.

You know, The Leisure Seeker is not listed in my library, but I'm almost positive I have it in a TBR box. I'm glad to know that a couple of you loved it. That's one of those books that I picked up just because of the cover. My parents went RVing after Mom retired and went to every state in the U.S. with the exception of Alaska and Hawaii. I always loved going with them on short trips (and so did my cat -- well, actually he liked it more when we got there than the getting there part). The last couple of years that they were able to go I did most of the driving for them. We'd plan their trips around my breaks.

Richard III is timely!

13. 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.

2.5 out of 5 stars.

14. The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare. Reread for one of my classes.

I do love your beginning picture, such dainty feet and such a pleased expression on the man's face!

Not to mention the lace garters!

15. 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.

2.5 out of 5 stars.

16. 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.

3.5 out of 5 stars.

Very interesting review. I've dithered over whether I should read this. I think it would be a real eye-opener for those who haven't read much about India. I can see why it was chosen as, say, a book for all incoming university freshmen to read during the summer. I don't think I'm quite as well versed on the subject as you are, but I'm "versed" enough that I can probably give this a pass.

Deborah, Laura said pretty much what I was thinking. And like you, I have a fascination with stories written about India and have read a few in my day. This sounds like it misses the tremendous beauty of both the land and the people which other authors have captured for me. Another pass.

17. 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.

3.5 out of 5 stars.

18. Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier.

Reread it with my students; I'm teaching it in a gen ed Intro to Lit class. Just as wonderful the third time as the first.

19. The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare--reread for my course.

20. 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.

4 out of 5 stars.

>62 Cariola: Thumbs-upped that one, very nicely made review.

Good review of the Toibin book, Deborah. I'll seek it out.

Ditto Richard & Tui. I loved Toibin's The Master and have always meant to read more of his work.

65> Oddly, his most popular book, Brooklyn, is probably my least favorite. I really enjoyed The Master, The Empty Family, and Mothers and Sons, as well as The Heather Blazing. I haven't yet gotten around to The Blackwater Lightship, which is in my stacks somewhere.

I'm catching up. The only Toibin book that I've read is Brooklyn. I intend to read more by him, because I'd love to read some of the ones set in Ireland. Which is your favorite?

I'm glad to see a review of The Abundance. I love the cover, and I've been curious about the book itself.

67> They are all so different that it's hard to say. Of those I mentioned above, only The Heather Blazing is set solely in Ireland. The Master is about Henry James and is set in England, and the other two are short story collections, set in various locales, including Ireland.

You're right, The Abundance dos hae a lovely cover. I think the cover and blurbs mnay be a bit deceiving, however; I really didn't think the story was as focusesd on cooking as they suggest.

Deborah

I'm way behind on the threads. Post #57 is very interesting. I totally agree with you regarding India and the fact that it was easy to blame British imperialism, but now...who to blame????

As you know, you and I have very similar reading habits. I also read a lot about India. Freedom at Midnight remains one of my favorite books regarding the break up of India and Pakistan.

Thumbs up for your incredible review.

21. 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 finace. 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 Ike, 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 Ike'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.

3.5 out of 5 stars.

69> Linda, I haven't read that book, but I will definitely look for it. Have you seen Deepa Mehta's film 'Fire'? It's part of a trilogy, but this one is specifically about the Indai-Pakistan civil wars. Beautiful but tragic (as are the other two).

The following are rereads for classes that I'm teaching:

22. Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare

23. Othello by William Shakespeare

24. Proof by David Auburn

25. 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.

4 out of 5 stars.

26. 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.

4 out of 5 stars.

27. Q & A (aka Slumdog Millionaire) by Vikas Swarup. This is a reread--I'm teaching it yet again. Aside from the quiz show connection, it has very little in common with the movie, which chose to expand the love story and gangster milieu. Each chapter is a different story in Ram's life (yes, Ram Mohammed Thomas, not Jamal, and Salim is NOT his brother), all very amusing but with a touch of tragedy, that taught him the answers to the various quiz show questions. It's a wonderful book, and I encourage eveyone to read it! My students are loving it but are very surprised at how much the movie differs from the book.

28. The Tempest by William Shakespeare (reread with my Shakespeare class)

#75: I own Q & A and really need to get it read. I have never seen the movie version of the book, so I will not have to worry about comparisons between the two.

77> Both are good--just not comparable. My students all knew the movie and were shocked at how different the book is--but they loved it, too.

29. 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.

2.5 out of 5 stars.

30. 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.

3.5 out of 5 stars.

A feast of wonderful reviews - starting with the Boo. Like you and Tui I have read a lot about India, so I feel somewhat relieved that I don't have to read this one. The Toibin is going on the list. I read the Bowles a while back and I might even have written it up when I did as that was while I was in my MFA program and had to write up endless annotations..... I remember just letting myself give in to it - that the desert atmo induces a kind of delirium..... but that's all I remember. Have you read any of Jane Bowles?

In agreement that Angels is lesser - but very interesting nonetheless.

31. 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.

4 out of 5 stars.

I really liked The Thing Around your Neck.

>82 Cariola:: oh hey, I just read that too! I enjoyed her novels quite a lot, had the short stories on my shelves, and wanted to read them before "allowing" myself to read her latest, Americanah. I agree with you about her characters, they were very real.

It was great to meet you!

85> Yes, loved meeting so many LTers! It's always wonderful when the people you've been chatting with in a group turn out to be as nice and interesting in person. No disappointments in this group!

Interesting that you liked The Thing Around Your Neck more than Half of a Yellow Sun. As many know, I was a big fan of HoaYS, and I didn't enjoy Adicihei's stories as much. I'm looking forward to Americanah though.

Deborah, it was so nice to meet you in Philadelphia. I enjoyed the weekend, had so much fun & loved meeting everyone. Thank you for staying & chatting while I had dinner Sat. P.M. and you sure can pick a great desert. I am still having dreams of that Baileys cheesecake.
I am now on the hunt for The King's Touch. Thank you for the rec and helping to make the weekend so special.
hugs,
belva

I'm glad that you enjoyed The Thing Around Your Neck, Deborah. I haven't read it yet, but I'll probably do so later this year.

32. 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.

2.5 out of 5 stars.

Deb. I've added your two recent reads to my TBR pile. While you only gave A Taste of Sorrow 2.5 stars, still I think my obsession with the Bronte's worth hunting for this book.

I've never heard of Jude Morgan and now, I'm sure you are taking me down the path of yet another good author.

MY TBR list is filled with your recommendations. As you know, you and I share a fascination with English history and the many cast of characters.

Happy Sunday to you. Did you find any books that you could add to your course this fall?

Linda, you will love Jude Morgan. I especially recommend Passion, which is about the women involved in the lives of the Romantic poets, The King's Touch, about Charles II's illegitimate son the Duke of Monmouth, and his latest, The Secret Life of William Shakespeare. (One thing I don't care for is his titles, which often suggest something sensationalist that is far from what the books is really about; this goes for two of the books mentioned above, which sound like scandal rags). If you read A Taste of Sorrow, I hope you enjoy it more than I did.

I'm still hashing out what to teach for the historical fiction seminar, which is scheduled for the spring.

My dear Deborah;
I have been hunting down recipes for Baileys Cheesecake and have come across 3 or 4 that sound really enticing. Next comes the baking thereof and taste-testing. Probably at the rate of about 1 a month. I could do one a week but can you imagine me walking from the museum back to 21st S. in Philly afterward? lol!~! T'would be a sight to behold. I will probably think of you with every bite. ;-)
warm hug,

It really was delicious, wasn't it? I don't indulge in things like that very often, but the weekend called for a lovely capper.

33. 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.

3.5 out of 5 stars.

34. 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.

4 out of 5 stars.

A thumb for an interesting review!

>96 Cariola:: I received Thirkell's Pomfret Towers in the Virago Secret Santa and really enjoyed it. I'd now like to start with the beginning of the series. Great review!

Great review of High Rising, Deborah!

Thanks for the positive comments, everyone!

Laura, that's what I had planned to do, and why I started with Ankle Deep. I'd recommend skipping that one. I really don't think it's necessary to read them in order, at least not in terms of their content. She jumps all over time periods, and I don't get the impression that characters recur (i.e., it's not exactly a series).

So delighted that you enjoyed High Rising. I'm a long long time fan.

A thumb from me too and a warm smile to welcome you to the wonderful world of Angela Thirkell. Add me to the long time fan list. And, just so you'll know, some characters do recur, pretty much the way they do in Trollope's Barchester. It's not exactly a series, but we always are happy to meet an old acquaintance!

35. 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.

4.5 out of 5 stars.

36. 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.

1 out of 5 stars.

37. 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.

4.5 out of 5 stars.

You remind me that I shouldn't get much older before I get into Wm. Trevor. Thanks, Deborah. No chance of my being seduced by the phil/pscyh approach to Shakespeare, but thanks for taking one for the group. And Min looks moving and inspirational, but I don't think I can take on one more new thing right now. I'll favorite it though!

106> Oh, yes, you must read Trevor! I haven't loved everything of his I've read, but he has a pretty good average with me. This little book would be a great place to start.

I'm thumbs up #nine for your great review of High Rising.

And, then, another great review of The Cooked Seed. Thumbs up for that one as well.

38. 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.

2.5 out of 5 stars.

Yeah, that one didn't blow me away either.

39. 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.

3 out of 5 stars.

What Michele Roberts would you recommend? I read one by her many years ago, which I don't remember at the moment, and I wasn't that impressed.

The one I liked the most is Fair Exchange. I didn't care at all for Dauighters of the House. The others I've read are pretty much three star reads.

40. 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.

4 out of 5 stars.

41. 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.

3 out of 5 stars.

42. 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, your 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 do 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, TransAtlantic is a moving, thought-provoking, memorable, and thoroughly satisfying novel, one of a handful that I know I will be reading again.

5 out of 5 stars.

43. 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.

4 out of 5 stars.

I loved Life After Life. I'm glad you ended up "leaning towards semi-brilliant." :)

I've enjoyed reading your latest reviews a LOT, Deborah, and have just ordered The Marriage of Souls from PBS on the weight of your comments about The Sonnets. Thank you!

119> I just read the blurb on amazon.uk--it sounds like a great read!

I'm in the process of listening to Life After Life, and I think I'm forming the same opinions as you. Some parts are tedious, but overall, I'm just fascinated by the possibilities!

44. 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. I'm being generous with my stars due to my not finishing the book and the fact that the writing itself isn't bad.

2 out of 5 stars.

45. 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.

3 out of 5 stars.

46. Instructions for a Heatwave by 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.

4 out of 5 stars.

Wow - have you ever been reading.

So sorry the Upton didn't work for you - I totally sympathize with the density issue - I need to go review my review, but my memory is that a couple of the essays really wowed me.... tipped the balance to glad I read it....

I can't wait for my birthday and my copy of Life after Life!!!!!

125> Gotta take advantage of the summer break!

47. 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.

4 out of 5 stars.

Nice review of A Fatal Likeness, Deborah.

Being a great Dickens lover, I will eventually get to The Solitary House, but I'll leave A Fatal Likeness until I see what I think of the first. (I have the sense of being very disciplined and rational about that decision.)

Oof, I should've put on my protective armour before I got caught up here - too many BBs to count! ;)

48. 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.

3.5 out of 5 stars.

Sounds like one to get from the library . . .

133> Yep, that's what I would recommend.

49. 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.

3.5 out of 5.

Rereads for my current Shakespeare course:


50. Titus Andronicus


51. Richard III


52. The Merchant of Venice

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

And a few rereads with my Studies in English Renaissance Literature students:

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



53. Edward II by Christopher Marlowe

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.



54. Arden of Faversham by Anonymous

(and despite what the touchstone may say, this is not the same Anonymous who wrote Go Ask Alice!)

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.

I'm almost done with two books, The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra and should be posting those reviews in a few days.

I've run across Edward II in my readings and movie watching in the past, and I always find him a fascinating character. I may have to read that one (although I'd rather read a more recently written novel . . )

Deborah - Edward II is something I haven't read or seen performed for the longest time and brought memories flooding back. Marlowe was of course more popular in his day than WS:

"I must have wanton poets, pleasant wits,
Musicians, that with touching of a string
May draw the pliant King which way I please"

Great stuff.

Have a lovely weekend.

55. 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.

4 out of 5 stars.

Nice review of The Lowland, Deborah. I'll read it next week, but I suspect that it won't replace The Luminaries or Harvest on the top of my Booker longlist ranking.

Mmmm ... I'm looking forward to The Lowland, Deborah. I'm #47 on my library's hold list, but of course they don't have copies yet. It could be worse -- there are 80 hold requests already.

56. 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 Ahkmed, 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 Ahkmed, 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.

4 out of 5 stars.

Deb, I love your review of A Constellation of Vital Pheonomena.

I hope the semester has slowed and there is an even, steady pace.

I've never had such a semester as this in 29 years at Lehigh! What in the world is happening in academia?

passed right by your review of Constellation, Deborah, because I just started it last night. I'll check out your thoughts when I'm finished.

Umm. I just read it, and you make me sure that I'll read the book eventually. Thanks!
I'll probably read the Lahiri too although I don't think I've read anything of hers yet in spite of owning one.

Deborah, I've now read your review of Constellation and really enjoyed it (although I agree about the use of the word "enjoyed"). I rated the book 5 stars but can understand the points you made. For some reason I liked the coincidences rather than finding them unbelievable. Great review ... lots to think about.

57. 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.

3.5 out of 5 stars.

Three reread for classes that I'm teaching:

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

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

60. The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare

61. Zeitoun by Dave Eggers (reread with my freshmen)

62. 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.

A host of great and useful reviews here - the Marra one being the best - one of my favorite LT reviews ever.

I had the same response to Barker, I think the books get less interesting as they continue, the first was so inspired.

Everyone has pretty much the same exact response to the latest Lahiri too. There was an excerpted chapter in the New Yorker, but it stopped on a (at least potentially) positive note, although..... I admit I had a feeling even then this was a story that would end badly.

Some novellists need to take a break between books to chew on things - the Toibin sounds like one of those.

Hope the semester is going well!

152> Thanks for your comments!

I'm at that point in the semester when I'm looking forward to the next one--especially as I'll be teaching a seminar in historical fiction!

That sounds like great fun. I'll be interested to see your reading list.

And here it is--all books set in the UK, written in the last 30 years:

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

As of yesterday, there were only three seats left in the class.

>155 Cariola:: that's an excellent selection, Deborah! I'm not surprised it's a popular class.

Rereads with my students:

63. A Chaste Maid in Cheapside by Thomas Middleton

A topsy-turvy city comedy with characters that rather surprised my students. We have Yellowhammer the goldsmith and his wife Maudlin, who are trying to force their daughter Moll to marry Sir Walter Whorehound for his title. Maudlin coaches her daughter in how to attract a husband--in ways any decent mother would never suggest! Moll is in love with a nice young man, Touchwood Jr, who plans a series of unsuccessful elopements. His brother, Touchwood Sr, has just parted from his wife because he is so fertile that they produce at least one child every year and have gone broke (not to mention the string of bastards he has fathered). The solution to his money problems? He will "assist" a childless couple, the Kixes, to have a child by supplying "magical water" that the lady must take lying down while her husband goes riding. The there's Mr. Allwit, who willingly pimps his wife to Sir Walter (she's about to have her third illegitimate child) and brags about how great it is that he doesn't have to work since Sir Walter furnishes everything they need. A satire on Puritans, social climbers, upended morality and more.

64. King Lear by William Shakespeare

In my opinion, the best of Shakespeare's tragedies, although also the bleakest. It's always a hard one to teach because the students don't have a lot of sympathy for Lear.

65. 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, gentle nature, 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.

3 stars out of 5.

Deborah, I like your choice of historical fiction: there's some great reading there. I particularly like Restoration that I read years ago. We have Tremain's follow-up Merivel on the shelves, but it's such a long time since I read Restoration that I feel I ought to give it a reread before tackling it.

I've got The Making of a Marchioness sitting on the TBR shelf: sounds maybe like it's one I should save for a duvet day!

159> Oh, you will catch up quickly with Merivel. It's not quite as good as Restoration, but I did enjoy it.

It has been a long time since I've so looked forward to a new class.

66. 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.

4 out of 5 stars.

What do you think Burnett's purpose was with The Making of a Marchioness - the books sounds mighty odd.

Fine review of the Forna, which I am not likely to read, but am happy to read about.

That reading list for your class looks irresistible!

162> I think she was probably appealing to the romance readers of the day who wanted a moral at the end of the book: Goodness, though under siege, wins out in the end, and even a poor woman will be recognized and rewarded for her kindness, good taste, and noble qualities. Self-sacrifice is the ultimate virtue for women (Emily nearly dies and is rewarded with life and the devotion of Lord Waldehurst.) In a way, The Making of a Marchioness is a kind of Little Princess for adult women.

Deborah, happy thanksgiving!

164> Thank you, Paul, same to you! It's a quiet one for me, but I rather like it that way.

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.

4.5 out of 5 stars.

Forgot to add these rereads that I shared with my students:

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

I might make 75 by the end of the year after all!

71. 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.

1.5 out of 5 stars.

Nice review of Havisham, Deborah. I definitely won't read it!

Today's NYT Sunday Book Review includes a less-than-favorable review as well. I've linked to the entire book review section because there's a review of the new Jeeves homage by Sebastian Faulks, and a few excellent reviews of British monarch biographies (did you get the latest Alison Weir from LT Early Reviewers? I now wish I had ...). I like to complain about the Book Review but this edition made for pleasant Sunday morning reading.

170> I read that review after finishing mine and agreed with the critic; even posted a brief excerpt on the book's LT home page.

I didn't request the Weir, mainly because I found her last few books, both fiction and nonfiction, so disappointing. But I'll read the review and see what they think, and maybe put it on my wish list if it sound good. Thanks!

72. The Tempest by William Shakespeare

Forgot to add this one I reread with my students--and I really needed it if I'm going to make it to 75 this year!

Interested to read your review of the new Tartt - I'll have to think about it. I didn't care for the second one at all, did not finish, in fact, a rarity with me. Although less rare than of yore.

I think I read another meh review of Havisham as well, so two makes it a definite pass.

73. 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.

4.5 out of 5 stars.

As with Moore, Deborah, I am also passionate about my beliefs. I believe sincerely that this group is possibly the most wonderful discovery I have made on line and is now a constant source of warmth, amusement and companionship to me in my otherwise isolated spot.

Have a lovely Christmas.

Have a great Christmas and New year Deborah!

Thank you for all the holiday wishes. And Happy New Year! Is everyone planning to be back with a new thread?

74. 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.

4.5 out of 5 stars.

What wonderful books you read in 2013. I had a very negative reaction to Eat, Love, Pray. I know many loved the book. To me, it seemed obnoxiously self centered. I remember thinking who cares about this? I'm 61, had a life of ups and downs, missed the hole mid-life crisis cult like phase, like to believe I've helped more than hurt, struggle with degenerative disk disease, laugh at the rain, for the most part love life...and, I don't think my life would be worthy of a book.

After readiing Eat, Love, Pray I knew this author would not be someone I would want to spend time with. I know people like her and I avoid them.

It is good to know she redeemed herself. And, since I value your judgment, I'll venture to read her latest.

I send lots of good wishes for a wonderful 2014 Deb. Let's pray each semester gets better.

Linda, I totally agree with you about Eat, Pray, Love--but this new one is truly wonderful. She should stick to fiction and stop wallowing in her own life (which didn't sound so bad--I only wish I had her money when I got divorced).

My thoughts exactly!

I made it! Just finished my 75th books this evening--review to follow tomorrow, then on to a new thread for 2014.

Excellent!

And here is the final review of the year:



75. 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).

3 out of 5 stars.

That's it for 2013, folks! Join me on my new thread for 2014.