PoMo Golightly

What's Not to Love? It has KAL in the Title!

 Like many of you, I've been eagerly following our own Yarn-a-Go-Go's progress from finished draft to book shelf.  I about busted my buttons when the Amazon box arrived with my pre-ordered copy of her debut novel How to Knit a Love Song.  

I wonder how many reviews of this book start with "I don't usually read romance novels..."  Not only do I not usually read romance novels, I also have never read a fiber-arts themed novel.  This was our Rachael, though, and there was no way I would not purchase and read her book.  As I don't usually read these genres, I can't compare it to anything, but I don't need to compare it in order to recommend it.

The story is delightful.  Abigail inherits a cottage.  Fantastic.  There's a problem, though.  The cottage is smack dab in the middle of Cade's ranch, which he just inherited.  Their benefactress, Eliza, bears a loving resemblance to our dearest Elizabeth Zimmerman.  I could not help but think of her as I read about Eliza.  Imagine the misunderstandings, the little bits of progress, the desire as Cade and Abigail are thrown together while Abigail gets the cottage ready to be usable as her shop and home.  Adding complexity to the romance is Abigail's dark past.  A man she once thought she loved turned ugly on her, and this opportunity to regain her confidence and joy for life continues to be threatened by him.

One of my favorite aspects of the novel, beside the pacing, which was strong enough to keep me reading late into the night, was the fulness of the characters.  I don't read romance novels usually, but there was a time when I read many, many of them.  They can be formulaic with flat characters.  Rachael's characters are complex.  They are good and bad.  They are scared and brave.  They were, while I read the book, alive.  That is no small feat, and one that deserves great credit.

And if a good story with sheep, a sweet dog, lots of fiber, a knitting godmother, a hot guy, a determined woman, and the cottage of your dreams (ocean view, people.  Ocean view.) isn't enough to compel you to pick up the novel, then consider this.  When you abbreviate the title (which I did when tweeting about it), get a look at it: HTKaLS.  If you don't start showering Rachael with requests for a Love Song KAL, I just don't know what to think!

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead...

Every Thursday night for over eighteen months, ending in early 2002, I had a date with a varied and somewhat eclectic group of people from widely different backgrounds to read James Joyce’s Ulysses aloud. Tackling this masterpiece of experimental fiction seemed too daunting a task to be accomplished on my own, but savoring the words, sentences, and images as part of a group was an exhilarating and enlightening experience. Every year on this day, I think back on my Ulysses group with fondness.

"...yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

Anyone for Finnegan's Wake?

Happy Bloomsday!

The Women

I've finished up a few books recently and would like to share reviews of two that I enjoyed.  First is Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell.  I saw the PBS miniseries and liked it enough to want to read the book, which I did as an inexpensive Kindle download.  As an added bonus, it is on my 1% Well-Read Challenge list.  The novel is narrated by Mary, a young woman devoted to the true protagonist, Miss Mattie Jenkyns.  The reader becomes engrossed in the doings of the little English village as it struggles to retain its comfortable manners in the face of impending modernity.  A quiet book, the novel gives a glimpse into the complex layers that rest beneath the manners and fashions of the town.  It was a pleasure to read each evening before I fell asleep.

The second book about which I want to tell you is The Women by T.C. Boyle.  I read reviews of this and had downloaded a sample on the Kindle, so when I saw it at the library, I snatched it up.  I take real satisfaction in being the first patron to read a new book at the library.  I have no idea why; am I alone in this?  The subject matter--Frank Lloyd Wright's scandalous love affairs--intrigued me.  Who, after all, doesn't love a bit of gossip, even if it is fictionalized. 

The novel is narrated by Tadeshi Sato, an American-educated Japanese architect who pays handsomely for the privilege of apprenticing with Wright at Taliesen.  Tadeshi aims to stick with the facts, but he often injects his wry humor, typically through footnotes.  The novel traces the roles of Wright's women, as well as his treatment of them and their treatment of him.  The reader first meets Olgivanna Lazovich Milanoff, Wright's third wife.  The second part examines Miriam Noel, Wright's free-thinking, drug-using second wife who becomes bitter as she watches Wright repeat his infidelity pattern, not with her this time, but with Olgivanna.  The third section looks at Mamah, Wright's mistress whom Boyle portrays as the true love of Wright's life.  Even as the novel focuses on Wright's women, it manages to create a rich world in which the reader gets a real sense of the weight of Wright's transgressions.

On every level, this is a book as finely crafted as a Frank Lloyd Wright house.  Boyle removes Wright from the pedastal on which his talent has placed him and allows the reader to see him as a man.  His passion and moodiness both enchant and alarm.  Characters are round with a depth that reaches beyond the book.  On a sentence level, the complexity of language and structure invites the reader to linger, even in the saddest moments of the book.

I'm about a third of the way through Trainspotting, which I'm reading for my book group.  If that were not the case, I think I'd  stop.  I'll let you know what I think when I finish it, though.

What are you reading this summer?

Lovely Spring Morning

My Huskies may have lost last night, but a sunny spring morning helps soothe the wound.

Last night I made this Butterless Almond Cake, which I saw linked on another blog (but can't remember where). It is yummy with a little of my strawberry jam on it, and I think will be a delightful treat with tea later today.

I finished another book on tape yesterday, and I have to tell you about it. Maybe you remember the movie from the early 90s. Even if you saw the movie, though, The Enchanted April is worth reading.

I selected this book because I wanted a taste of warmth and flowers, something to celebrate spring, and it did not disappoint.  Four women from varied social and economic backgrounds are brought together by their desire to spend time away from regular life.  They rent a small castle in San Salvatore, Italy, and each finds what she needs there, even if it wasn't what she expected.  Von Arnim writes in lovely early-20th century prose.  She handles the omniscient point of view gracefully. I'll return to this book as a model if I'm ever brave enough for omniscience myself.  Love, in its many forms is explored.  In fact, there is a riot of love at San Salvatore--just the balm needed after a bitter winter.

I hope you're having a restful Sunday!

A Few Reviews

(Please forgive me for the lack of links and the funky font.  I pasted this in here from my reading log.  I am too lazy to link or try harder to fix the font.  I hope the reviews will interest you nonetheless.  Also, pleas note: SPOILER ALERT)

I selected The Reader by Bernhard Schlink as the first book to read on my Kindle because of the title; I wanted a book about reading as a tribute to my new way of reading.  I’ve also wanted to see the movie and decided to read the book first. 

 The first-person narrator meets Hanna, an older woman, and begins an affair with her while he is a teen still in school.  She is aloof, but free with her sexual favors.  She loves to have him read out loud to her.  After the abrupt end of the affair, the narrator thinks of her often.  While at university in a law class, he must observe a trial of former SS guards, Hanna among them.  Listening to her testimony, he realizes that she is illiterate, taking full blame for crimes committed by the group to avoid admitting her ignorance.  She is imprisoned, and the narrator resumes reading to her—this time by sending her tapes of his reading books.

I found little negative to say about this book.  While I read a translation, I still felt it was well written.  The p.o.v. worked well in this case.  It was more intriguing to look at Hanna from the outside than to be in her p.o.v., although I’m sure an argument could be made to the contrary.

 ***

I listened to A Virtuous Woman by Kaye Gibbons on tape.  The story entwines the first-person narratives of married couple Ruby (the runaway daughter of a wealthy farmer) and Jack (a much older tenant farmer).  Despite their many differences, they’ve had a devoted and tender marriage. The story begins with Ruby’s diagnosis of cancer and balances past and present action throughout. 

 While the two voices were delightful, I was disconcerted at the end when the story reverts to a third-person narrative.  I thought it was unneeded, even a carelessness on the author’s part, and it jolted me out of the narrative dream.  Despite this, it was a tender and beautiful story that stays on the right side of sentimentality.

 ***

 I’m not fanatical about the Harry Potter series, but I’ve enjoyed the books, so when I saw Tales of Beedle the Bard by J.K. Rowling at the library, I grabbed it.

 The tales are funny—as appealing to adults as I imagine they are to children.  Rowling adds commentary from Albus Dumbledore, which in many cases is even more humorous than the tales.  The book provided a delightful afternoon of reading and is light and entertaining.

***

I downloaded The Help by Kathryn Stockett to my Kindle on advice from SnB Sarah.  Without a doubt, this is my favorite book I’ve read all year.  I could not put it down.  Told through the perspective of Aibileen and Minny, Black maids, and Skeeter Phelan, a white, recently-graduated-from-college girl, this amazing story tracks Skeeter’s quest to write about something important to her as she tries to get a job in publishing.  Set in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s, the book never fails to entertain even while making the reader think hard about stereotypes and racism.

 Skeeter decides to write about the experiences of the Black maids, and at great risk for all involved, interviews them and transcribes their stories.  I felt I was in capable hands from start to finish.  The setting is precise with many strong sensory details.  The characters—even the minor ones—are richly drawn, and the plot is suspenseful.  I can’t recommend this one enough!

 ***

I enjoyed the movie version of Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg many years ago and decided to check out the audiobook.  Smilla’s young neighbor is found dead after falling or jumping from their building’s roof.  His death is called an accident, but Smilla is suspicious: the boy was horribly afraid of heights.  She lodges a complaint with the police and begins her own investigation, which ends up bringing her to her homeland, Greenland.

 Her character was difficult to take at times.  In her late 30s, she has a huge chip on her shoulder.  Her father is a famous doctor, and even though she despises him, she takes his money, which seems to be enough that she doesn’t need to work.  At every turn, Smilla resists authority, but she also seems to have infinite knowledge about everything scientific.  I had to suspend my disbelief a lot to get through the novel (nearly 18 hours of listening!), but it was worth it as it was quite an adventure story.  This might make an excellent beach read.

***

 I’m helpless when it comes to Tudor England.  I can’t resist anything about the period, and historical fiction about the era is better than candy to me.  The Last Wife of Henry VIII by Carolly Erickson follows the life of Catherine Parr from age seven until her death.  Told through the first-person p.o.v., we get a glimpse of a youthful Henry, whom Erickson imagines as having a crush on Parr from her teens.

This is a light, amusing book that investigates love as pleasure and love as duty.  The fear Catherine felt during her brief marriage to Henry is understandable, but as readers, we, of course, know she has nothing to fear.  What might she have done if only she’d known?

1% Well Read Redux

I liked the focus participating in last year's 1% Well Read challenge gave to my reading, and I decided to have another go at it.  I'm using the "old" list, not the one from the revised edition of the 1001 book.  Here is my tentative list for this year's challenge:

Agnes Grey
Cranford
Walden (I read this a long,long time ago, but can't claim to remember much)
The Sound and the Fury
Cold Comfort Farm
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Brighton Rock
Oscar and Lucinda
The Reader (on my Kindle)
Amsterdam
White Teeth (on my nightstand)
The Corrections (on my bookshelf)

As of today, according to this list, I'm 16.28% well read.  Not so great for a voracious reader, but there are a load of books that I think worthy of the list not on it.  Ah, well, that's how these lists go.

Reading, Listening: Reviews

I've been entertained by Phillipa Gregory's Tudor novels, even if they do take some blatant liberties with history.  When I saw Wideacre at the library, I thought, why not?  The novel follows Beatrice Lacey from early childhood to her death in a first person narrative.  The youngest of two children, Beatrice's gender means she can never inherit the treasured family estate, Wideacre, despite understanding how to run it better than her brother ever can.  The novel tracks Beatrice's spiral into darkness as she plots to ensure that even if she cannot own the estate, her children will.  Once beloved by the estate's tenants, she becomes hated and feared as she loses her good, common sense in her greed. 

I kept hoping to like this book, but it was over the top with incest and bad behavior.  I didn't buy Beatrice's transformation, and I felt that a lot of the bad behavior was repated too often.  The reader isn't trusted, and the characters lack dimension--they end up being all bad or all good, very smart or very dumb.  I didn't want to finish the book, but did so I coudl review it.  It is the first in a trilogy, and Gregory's first novel, which may explain a lot, but I don't think I'll read the subsequent installments.

***

I also recently finished listening to Annie Proulx's The Shipping News.  On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I drive home on my long break between my second and third class to let Coco out of her crate for a bit.  To make the extra driving palatable (an extra hour each day), I've been listening to books I might not normally read.

Quoyle's beloved but unfaithful wife Petal is killed in a car accident, leaving him alone with two young daughters.  An unknown aunt comes to help him, and they move to the family home in Newfoundland.  There Quoyle finally becomes a man, gainign confidence and a better understanding of his difficult childhood.  Proulx does an excellent job creating the wrold of the novel.  The closed-in feeling of the very small community, with all of its advantages and disadvantages is well rendered.  At first I disliked being there, but the more I knew about the various inhabitants, the more I liked being among them.  As I reflect on this, I realize that Proulx has given me the experience that I might have on moving to a small town.

Even though I understood that she emulated the region's speech, I did not care for the habit of dropping articles in the narration.  That, along with short, choppy sentences in descriptive passages took me out of the narrative dream too often (maybe that was a good thing as I was driving, after all!).  Because I listened to the book rather than read it, it may be that hearing those sentences was more distracting than they might have been otherwise.

Reading this book made me mindful of the importance of community in some books.  The house, the place truly do become characters, and I admire the roundness Proulx gives to even the most minor of characters who populate the town.

***

I needed a book for the flights to and from Chicago, so I picked a rapid read from the library, The Piano Teacher by Janice Y.K. Lee.  The flap synopsis intrigued me, and I'm interested in first novels.  This one did not disappoint.

The omniscient narrator moves between the early 1940s and the early 1950s.  In the 1950s section, the narration follows Claire, a young English woman who has married Martin more to get out of her home than for love.  She moves with him to Hong Kong where she becomes the piano teacher to Locket, the daughter of a prominent, wealthy Chinese family.  There she meets Will, with whom she has an affair.  During their affair, the novel shifts back to the 1940s, when Will first arrives in Hong Kong and falls in love with Trudy, a half-Portuguese and half-Chinese heiress.  These sections are told in the present tense and follow their love affair (Trudy and Will), the Japanese invasion, and the betrayals that follow.

It was smart of Lee to change the verb tense in the two different times, and it makes sense to have the more distant one be present tense as I imagine Will playing the events over and over in his head as though they are still happening.  The language and sentences are precise and elegant.  It was a true pleasure to read this book.  I liked the examination of human nature and behavior during war, and I felt the characters were well developed.

I'm now reading John Dufresne's Requiem, Mass and listening to The Nanny Diaries.  Full reports to follow!

Disgrace

One of my goals for this year is to have a reading group again.  I miss my New York group, and it seems to me that there are plenty of people who want to read literary fiction in this area, so I've begun to ask people to participate.  I reconnected with former classmates on FaceBook, and two of them are game.  We decided to start with a Booker Prize winner and narrowed it down to Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee.*  I read it on my flight to Albuquerque and could not put it down.  I think it is an excellent first read for our little band.

David Lurie, a professor and perv of sorts, is the protagonist.  The story opens with his getting his sexual satisfaction from an exotic call girl, a woman he's used long enough to wonder if she's starting to have feelings for him.  This liason crashes to a halt when he glimpses her with her children in public.  Eventually, Lurie is told she's left the agency, and he has to find another outlet.  Before long he targets Melanie, a student.  She is less than thrilled about his attentions, but can't stay away from him.  The discomfort of the situation permeates the page.  The reader is left to squirm throughout this section of the novel, which is told in third person, close to Lurie.  Melanie skips class more than she attends, Lurie passes her on an exam she doesn't take, and the reader is left to wonder how Lurie can think their encounters were welcome when the sex scenes point to rape.  Melanie brings charges, and Lurie leaves the college angry and indignant. 

And the story isn't even really started yet.  Lurie moves in with his daughter on her farm and begins another relationship, one that, for a change, seems fairly appropriate.  Disaster strikes.  He is left on the other side of rape and must attempt to understand his daughter's reactions and demands.  The reader never quite feels that Lurie connects his own sexual depravity to that inflicted on his adult child.

The narrative is in present tense, which I generally don't care for, but I think it works well in this case. Present tense is more immediate, and I believe more reflective of Lurie's mind. Coetzee's writing is rich and fun to read, even if the subject is difficult.  I especially like the juxtaposition of Lurie as perpatrator and victim's father, which leads to a powerful last section.

I've got a few more books partially read, but now that I'm done with my 1% Well Read Challenge, what do you suggest I put on my book queue?

* and, hey, we share our birthdates!

Unless

I selected Unless by Carol Shields as part of my 1% Well-Read Challenge.  During my 2003 novel workshop with Sharon Oard Warner in Iowa, she recommended that I read Shields, and I subsequently picked up The Stone Diaries, which I liked.

Unless is a first-person narrative told from the p.o.v. of Reta Winters, a translators of the memoirs of early feminist Danielle Westerman.  Reta is working on her second novel, a followup to her surprisingly successful beach read first effort.  Her new novel is a relief from the stress she feels at her eldest daughter's choice to drop out of school and life in order to sit on a sidewalk corner in Toronto wearing a sign that reads "Goodness".  Reta puzzles through her own life choices as she seeks to understand her daughter's.

I was interested in the novel as a piece that is more reflective rather than scene based.  The writing is meditative and sometimes funny.  At times the heaviness Reta feels is almost too much to bear, but relief comes in the form of terrific, well-developed minor characters.  Sheilds imagines full lives for even her most minor charachters off the page, so that when they are on the page, they are dimensional.

I came away from the novel convinced that I must bring more lightness to my own work and that I ought to write something frothy to help me bring back the fun to my writing.

Casino Royale

Casino Royale is the first Bond novel.  I'll confess that I picked it up because of the fabulous Penguin edition pulp cover.  The first 50 or so pages dragged.  I stayed with the book for only two reasons: it is on my 1% Well-Read Challenge list (I'm up to 15.78%), and Neal read it and wanted me to check it out, too. 

Once the situation is established, though, the story picked up.  From the point where Bond sits at the Baccarat table with Le Chiffre until the final page, I read it in one sitting. 

Around the time the film came out, I listened to an NPR show about Ian Fleming and Casino Royale.  The journalist discussed how Daniel Craig's (my secret boyfriend)portrayal of Bond is much closer to Fleming's character: dark, brooding, uncertain.  I was interested, then, to take in this truer picture of Bond. 

At times the writing has a similar feel to Miss Pettigrew in the overuse of descriptors, but as the pace picked up, I found this less distracting.

Ultimately, I believe any Bond fan will have a good time reading the novel and seeing the connection to the film Bonds who are so familiar.
(Review taken from my Goodreads page)

Two more books to go on my challenge.  What are you dipping into this holiday season?