Keep The Wisdom

A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD

2012-01-31T20:32:00.000-08:00

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A Visit From the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan, Random House Inc, 2010, 340 pp

I am probably the last person in the world to read this book. I made a mistake. I read too many reviews of it before I read it. So then I waited a whole year, thinking that possibly all those reviews, all the hype and awards, would slide back deeper into my memory banks. But still, the expectations were there.

When I read The Keep, I had never heard of Jennifer Egan. I was unprepared for how much I was going to love that book. I did like, maybe even love Goon Squad, but not as much.

I liked all the stuff about the music business, in which I played a small part in my earlier life. I am of the opinion that the music industry is second only to the banking business in nefarious wickedness (yes, I meant to be redundant.) The musicians and other related characters were dead on.

I didn't like so much the construction of the novel as a collection of interrelated stories, rather than a continuous narrative, though I could understand why she chose that method. I just felt that she was trying a tad too hard to be terminally hip and that makes me worry. Because I love Jennifer Egan as a novelist and, as she clearly shows in Goon Squad, not many of the terminally hip survive.

Having said all that, I recommend the book to anyone. It is part of the chronicle of the world in which we live, she does not resort to any cheap tricks, and she tells the truth.

(A Visit From the Goon Squad is available in paperback and ebook by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore. To find it in your nearest indie bookstore click on the cover image above.)

MAMA HATTIE'S GIRL

2012-01-29T21:52:00.000-08:00

Mama Hattie's Girl, Lois Lenski, J B Lippincott Company, 1953, 182 pp

THE SUNDAY FAMILY READ

The ninth book in Lois Lenski's American Regional Series is about Lula Bell, who lives on Hibiscus Street in a Florida town with her mother, her grandmother Mama Hattie, and various other family members. Lenski brings this Black neighborhood to life with incidents involving the neighbors and their relationship to Lula Bell and Mama Hattie.

Lula Bell's father is up north trying to make money. In fact, "up north" is like a promised land to these people, full of riches, opportunity and other good things. Lula likes to brag to her friends about how she is going up north soon. Eventually she and her mother do go north and join her father. The conflict in this story concerns the good and the bad in both locations. Lula Bell goes through some tough experiences in New York City.

Lenski portrays the lives of these people and the subtle differences between southern and northern racism. She refrains from any judgment but just tells it like it is. I now have a new favorite Lois Lenski book and my admiration for what she achieved in this series continues to grow.

(Like all of the volumes in the American Regional Series, Mama Hattie's Girl is out of print but can be found in libraries and through used book sellers.)

THE CALL

2012-01-28T11:11:00.000-08:00

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The Call, Yannick Murphy, Harper Perennial, 2011, 223 pp

With a sigh, I picked up this selection for one of my reading groups and was glad to see it was short. "The daily rhythm of a veterinarian's family in rural New England" would not be something I chose to read about.

Then I read the first page and sighed more deeply. It is written as a sort of log of the vet's day: what he was called for, how it went (gruesome), and some comments on the family. I thought it might take a couple bottles of wine to get me through.

Luckily, happily, and admiringly, I had been fooled. The family in this story is mundane the way that most families are but they are unique and deep and spirited in the way most of probably wish our families were. When the 13 year old son gets shot and knocked out of a tree in a hunting accident, leaving him in a coma for months, the family's idyllic but rather dull life turns into a Greek tragedy. And then other stuff happens.

It all turns out OK. This is not one of those melodramatic Oprah novels. But I was so in tune with the vet, the wife, the two younger daughters. God, I was even in tune with the dog. I am not sure I would have dealt with their situation as gracefully as they did. That's where that awkward adverb (admiringly) came from in the third paragraph of this review.

Yannick Murphy performed some kind of alchemy here, turning the dross of daily life into something of great value. It is not always a bad thing when others pick books for me to read.

(The Call is available in paperback on the shelf and in ebook by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore. To find it in your nearest indie bookstore click on the cover image above.)

STONER

2012-01-26T11:27:00.000-08:00

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Stoner, John Williams, Viking Press, 1965, 278 pp

For someone such as myself, who believes in fiction with almost religious zeal, Stoner was an ideal novel. William Stoner, raised on a small family farm in Missouri, only child of exhausted parents who rarely even spoke, sent to the University of Missouri to study agriculture, gets his first taste of literature, is redeemed and never looks back. He goes on to get his degrees, including a PhD in literature, and works as an instructor and then a professor of literature at that same university for the rest of his days. Not a single aspect of his life turns out well, yet he plows that field of literature with the same stoicism that kept his parents farming.

Though Stoner is one of the saddest, most tragic novels I have read, it revealed to me a basic belief that I cherish but hadn't known I carried with me through life: If I stay true to what I am passionate about I will be alright.

John Williams, himself a professor of literature and creative writing at the University of Denver, also wrote poetry. He only wrote four novels. His last, Augustus, won the National Book Award in 1973. Like most novelists I've read who publish infrequently, his writing kept me moving inexorably through the story, fully entertained and completely emotionally involved. Yet the writing is plain and as natural as speaking.

As Stoner grapples with marriage, fatherhood, a lethal enemy in his department, as he finds and loses his true love, I cared more about what would become of him than I do about many people that I know. The man marries disastrously. His wife is insane in the ways women brought up in the early 20th century with all sexuality suppressed did become insane. Somehow Williams causes you to pity them both, as well as the daughter who becomes their battleground.

Will Durant, whose The Life of Greece I was finishing during the time I read Stoner, gives a summary of the Greek version of stoicism:

"The Stoic...will shun luxury and complexity, economic or political strife; he will content himself with little, and will accept without complaint the difficulties and disappointments of life...He will seek so complete an...absence of feeling, that his peace of mind will be secure against all the attacks and vicissitudes of fortune, pity or love."

I am more of an Epicurean in temperament, but I was raised by a stoic and a depressive. After reading the story of William Stoner, who was a perfect embodiment of Stoicism, I understand the Stoic parent. I even understand the philosophy and that is does not preclude a sense of joy.

(Stoner is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore. To find it in your nearest indie bookstore click on the cover image above.)

CHILDHOOD'S END

2012-01-23T20:43:00.000-08:00

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Childhood's End, Arthur C Clarke, Harcourt Brace & World, 1953, 220 pp

Wow! All I knew about this book was people considered it a Clarke classic. From the dustcover blurb I learned that some aliens called The Overlords came to Earth and created a sort of utopia: no arms race, war, disease, or poverty. But then...

If you have read it, you know. If you haven't, I am not going to tell you. This is a most thought provoking story about the fate of the human race. Was he telling us to be careful what we wish for or was he terribly prescient about mankind?

Well, you could say it is just science fiction. But Arthur C Clarke covers a span of ideas that shoots all the way to the present day. Here we are still using an arms race as an excuse to go to war and still arguing over what is to become of our species.

That is why this author is still read. Could we force our political candidates to read stuff like this as a prerequisite to running for office?

(Childhood's End is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore. To find it at your nearest indie bookstore click on the cover image above.)

HENRY AND BEEZUS

2012-01-22T11:47:00.000-08:00

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Henry and Beezus, Beverly Cleary, William Morrow and Company, 1952, 192 pp

THE SUNDAY FAMILY READ

In her third book for middle-grade readers, Henry Huggins returns. This time he wants a bicycle, another icon of 1950s suburban life. His adventures and efforts to procure the bike are shared with Beezus and her little sister Ramona, who feature in some of the later stories.

A third grade boy being forced into hanging out with a girl is the issue here. Funnily enough, I don't recall it being a big deal if you played with boys or girls when I was that age, but there was only one boy among several girls in my neighborhood, so it could have been more of a problem for him.

Henry's dog Ribsy as much of a character as the kids. The neighborhood bully gets what's coming to him and everyone has fun. Cleary makes it clear that a kid's problems are as real and important as any adult's.

I am still mystified as to how I missed these books when I was that age. I can only figure that I was living that life instead of reading about it.

(Henry and Beezus is available in paperback on the shelf at Once Upon A Time Bookstore. It is also available as an eBook by order. To find it in your nearest indie bookstore, click on the cover image above.)

MAUD MARTHA

2012-01-20T10:26:00.000-08:00

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Maud Martha, Gwendolyn Brooks, Harper & Brothers, 1953, 180 pp

I learned about Maud Martha from Elaine Showalter's excellent overview of American women writers, A Jury of Her Peers. Gwendolyn Brooks was primarily a poet and this was her only novel.

The novel is short, composed of vignettes in Maud Martha's life from childhood through courting, marriage and motherhood. The tone is lighthearted but Brooks spares no aspect of what life was really like for a young black woman in 1950s Chicago.

The writing is indeed poetic; in fact consummately so. She tells it to us, without censure or preaching, but man, do we get it: black, female, mother and wife. So well done.

(Maud Martha is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore. To find it in your nearest indie bookstore, click on the cover image above.)

GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN

2012-01-18T19:24:00.000-08:00

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Go Tell It On The Mountain, James Baldwin, The Dial Press, 1953, 253 pp

I had always heard of this book but somehow never read it before. It is a powerful story about a young man raised in Harlem by his stepfather who is a preacher. The family are all members of a fundamentalist church and while racism plays a part in their lives, it is the religious angle that Baldwin emphasizes.

John is fourteen, in fact it is his birthday. Throughout the course of the day, when his birthday seems to have been forgotten by the family (not for the first time), we are taken through the early life of his parents in a series of flashbacks during which we learn how each came to be believers. Later in the day, the family goes to church and John feels the possibility of belief for the first time in his life.

The structure of the novel is a bit clunky but the scenes of religious conversion are possibly the best written of any I have ever read. Literature in the 1940s and 1950s is saturated with Christian novels. The Robe, by Lloyd C Douglas, (a bestseller in 1942, 1943, 1944 and 1945) made a comeback in 1953 due to a movie version having been released that year. However, as far as I know there had not been a novel specifically about the Christian theme amongst Black people.

John's stepfather is a hypocrite, a child beater, a religious fanatic. This theme of the fundamentalist who harbors his own sins can be found in any race, any culture. Baldwin takes it apart with ruthless sensitivity, including its effect on the children of such a man.

John's mother is a complete believer in Jesus Christ, in the rewards of the afterlife, and in giving up all one's sorrows to God. She is fully confident that her son will benefit from being "saved."

Between the flashbacks we are taken step by step through John's night of spiritual journey, full of anguish and fear; hours he spends lost outside of his body. Only someone who has lived the experience could have written such a harrowing account. Baldwin did become a believer in his teens, but later rejected religion. In this novel however, he presents a cogent explanation of religious belief and conversion. Whether one is a believer or not, one cannot deny that he makes the connection between human life and religion plain and comprehensible.

At the end, as John walks home with his family, he sees clearly that nothing around him has changed, especially regarding his stepfather, but inside himself he feels changed. That pretty much says it all as far as I am concerned.

(Go Tell It On The Mountain is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore. To find it in your nearest indie bookstore, click on the cover image above.)

CAMILLA

2012-01-15T16:21:00.000-08:00

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Camilla, Madeleine L'Engle, Simon and Schuster, 1951, 278 pp

THE SUNDAY FAMILY READ

This was my least liked book by Madeleine L'Engle. She began writing romances suitable for a young adult audience and Camilla is one of those; another tale about a teenage girl having trouble with her parents. Camilla lives with these parents in an apartment in New York City. She loves them both though her father is a distant, undemonstrative sort and her mother is childlike.

When Camilla discovers her mother kissing another man right in their living room, she falls into confusion. She has to learn that her parents are people too who have their own troubles and are not perfect. Her best friend and an older boy help her through and she comes out older, sadder, and wiser.

The weaknesses here are a slow moving plot and a bit of a preachy tone about what is important in life. I had not found those weaknesses in any of L'Engle's other early novels.

In any case, I have now read most of those early novels. When I get to 1960 in My Big Fat Reading Project, I will be reading the books that made her famous, beginning with A Wrinkle in Time.

(Camilla is available in paperback, audio and eBook by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore. To find it in your nearest indie store, click on the cover image above.)

THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL

2012-01-12T20:56:00.000-08:00

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The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank, Doubleday & Company, 1952, 283 pp

I don't remember when I first read this or how many time I have read it before--at least two times I think. I probably first read it as a young teen, when it was a shocking book for me. I'm quite sure it was the first book I read about the holocaust.

It held up this time as a good and interesting read. There seems to be a backlash against holocaust lit these days, but to me that is one of those whole earth events, so huge and horrid, that the stories must be told over and over.

I hadn't remembered how much it is a coming of age tale or how much Anne Frank captured the emotional and intellectual development of a teenage girl. Also, even though the circumstances are so different, having recently read I Capture the Castle, also written in diary form, I couldn't help but compare them.

When I first read Anne Frank's diary, I was mostly interested in her developing relationship with Peter. This time I was fascinated by her fractious interactions with her mother, her growth from Daddy's girl into aware young woman, and her attempts at being a writer. Had she survived, she would have been a literary force I am sure. Because she did not survive and because her obviously admirable father got the book published, she became immortal.

I remember the movie "Freedom Writers" from 2007. Hilary Swank plays a new teacher in a gang-ridden school who gets to the kids by having them read Anne Frank, then getting them to write their own diaries. I need to watch that again.

(The Diary of a Young Girl is available in paperback on the shelf or by order at Once Upon A Time Bookstore. To find it in your nearest indie store click on the cover image above.)

BLACKLIST

2012-01-11T20:40:00.000-08:00

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Blacklist, Sara Paretsky, G P Putnam's Sons, 2003, 415 pp

I have been reading my way through Sara Paretsky's novels and have now read everything she wrote prior to Fire Sale, 2005, the one I read first. Her books are a journey through the major issues of the past 20 years, as well as an in depth look at the best features of a true liberal.

In Blacklist, the intrepid V I Warshawski is missing her boyfriend, the journalist Morrell, who is on assignment in Afghanistan and mostly out of touch. Meanwhile she finds herself tracking down the murderer of an African American journalist in the unlikely neighborhood of some of Chicago's richest residents. Soon enough she is embroiled in the fallout from the depredations of the HUAC in the 1950s.

What I like most about Paretsky are the layers and complexity in her stories. She is able to embrace the big picture and tie together the societal elements that make up an issue, showing us that no single one is isolated but interweaves with many tendrils.

So in Blacklist you get rich people in their suburban enclaves, the old and the young, black and white, as well as communism and the Red Scare as it relates to the Patriot Act and the War on Terror. Warshawski must sort through the personal secrets of men and women of advanced age at the same time as she deals with the ill-advised shenanigans of a teenage girl trying to protect an Egyptian boy suspected of terrorism.

This novel is a smart and deep look into American life as we now live it since the attack on the Twin Towers. A page-turner that eschews any cheap tricks of sensationalism while it admits there are many ways to approach a bad situation. Since 9/11 our society has fractured into as much polarization as we had during the Vietnam War years. Paretsky's view is that a good liberal, fighting for justice, must be able to see and understand both sides of the issues.

(Blacklist is available in paperback and on CD by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore. To find it in your local indie bookstore, click on the title image above.)

THE SEA AROUND US

2012-01-09T20:33:00.000-08:00

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The Sea Around Us, Rachel Carson, Oxford University Press, 1951, 243 pp

Without reservation I can say this is one of the most amazing reading experiences I have ever had. I rarely read non-fiction in book form. When I do, I read memoirs, biographies (usually of writers and artists), and occasionally history, but never science. I decided to read The Sea Around Us because it was a non-fiction bestseller in 1951, a year that falls within my Big Fat Reading Project, but also because Rachel Carson is one of my heroines.

She is an eloquent and inspiring science writer. She writes about scientific information better than some sci fi authors I could mention. As far as my interactions with the sea go, I have always loved sitting on a beach and watching waves. But I do not enjoy swimming or boating. I like to keep my feet on solid ground.

Now I have realized that I had little to no idea about more than half of the planet I live on. I read the book slowly, a chapter at a time over several weeks, with a globe and the Internet close by. It was like taking a tour of the world and getting oriented in a whole new way.

I learned about the history of planet Earth, at least as far as what was known by 1951 plus new developments up to 1961 when the book was revised. I learned about currents, winds, tides, and oceanic wild life; about the ice ages and the relationship of continents to oceans. Most importantly I learned that what we do on land ends up in the seas; that though we keep learning more about the seas we still keep doing our best to use them to spread radioactivity and toxins.

All that learning was excellent and good for me but what I loved most was a feeling I got in every chapter. It was as if I were in a spaceship far out from the earth's surface, looking down and seeing the whole big picture. This was a better high than any substance has ever given me; almost better even than music has ever given me.

Second to that effect was a suspicion that while it is crazy to use up natural resources faster than they can be replaced and stupid to toxify our world and ourselves, the oceans will outlast us and possibly transmute mankind's insanity and stupidity into more life and future. We are racing ahead at an almost incomprehensible speed but still the earth, its continents and oceans are almost eternal. When it comes to material existence, the closest thing I have to faith is that the cycle of life goes on. Rachel Carson's book renewed that faith for me.

(The Sea Around Us is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore. To find it in your local indie bookstore, click on the cover image above.)

LAST TRAIN TO MEMPHIS

2012-01-05T21:50:00.000-08:00

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Last Train to Memphis, Peter Guralnick, Little Brown and Company, 1994, 488 pp

I read this Elvis Presley biography as research on the 1950s for my memoir. When Elvis had his first big hit, "Heartbreak Hotel", in 1956, I was a nine-year-old in 4th grade. Today I know that kids that age are already up on pop music, the hits and the stars, but it was not like that in middle-class Princeton, N J. By the time I got interested in pop music, it was Bob Dylan and then the Beatles. So I never became an Elvis fan.

Subtitled The Rise of Elvis Presley, Last Train to Memphis covers his life from birth to his army induction in 1958. He was already a huge star by then and had made four movies under the management thumb of the infamous Colonel Tom Parker. It is a good old American rags to riches story and basically the original template for all those VH1 Behind the Music features.

Elvis was in the right place at the right time. The 1950s were the beginning of the era of teenage rebellion, paving the way for the sexual revolution in the 1960s. Civil Rights was a hot new item after Rosa Parks did her thing on the bus. Elvis, with his mix of country, bluegrass and Beale Street blues, his pelvis-centered moves, and his James Dean stance was the complete package. He encapsulated it all and his screaming female fans showed the Beatles' fans how to do it.

Peter Guralnick is clearly a complete Elvis fan and the entire book sings his praises without a hint of criticism or censure. He certainly brings to life the whole Memphis recording and radio scene as well as everyday life in a small Southern city and the day to day performing grind of a rising pop star. The slightly skewed family dynamics of Elvis and his parents are covered in depth, including how Elvis became the owner of Graceland.

At some points, I grew weary of reading about every gig, recording session, TV appearance, and movie set. But I can't deny the thoroughness and depth of the account. By the end, I felt I knew Elvis Presley and his world.

(Last Train to Memphis is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore. To find it in your local bookstore, click on the cover image above.)

PRAIRIE SCHOOL

2012-01-03T21:09:00.000-08:00

Prairie School, Lois Lenski, J B Lippincott Company, 1951, 196 pp

Prairie School is the eighth novel, for readers 8-12 years old, in Lois Lenski's "American Regional Series." It is a standout. Set in South Dakota, it tells of a one-room school in the Great Plains during one of the worst winters in recorded history as of 1950.

Blizzard after blizzard hits the area, temperatures are well below zero and most mechanical devices are shut down. Students can only get to school by walking or horseback and some afternoons they can't get home again. But they come to school almost every day.

Delores and Darrell are children of a cattle ranching family. Darrell is worried about their cattle and torn between keeping them from freezing and going to school. Their father is so busy dealing with his ranch and helping his friends that he forgets to bring coal for both their home and the school. When Delores gets seriously ill while staying overnight with the teacher, the drama is intense.

The non-stop action, the very real dangers and the courage of the kids all make this an exciting read. Miss Martin is the brave and resourceful school teacher who saves Delores' life. I was reminded again of how easy and relatively uneventful life is for most modern American kids. These prairie children are tough!

Prairie School would make a great winter read for both boys and girls. It is truly a shame that these books are out of print, but they can be found in libraries.

WHEREVER YOU GO

2011-12-28T10:40:00.000-08:00

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Wherever You Go, Joan Leegant, W W Norton & Company, 2010, 253 pp

I have always had a fascination with Israel and the whole history and idea that Jews should have their own country. Trying to understand the seemingly endless conflict in Israel by reading the news never fails to leave me hopelessly confused. I've gotten much better results reading novels.

Wherever You Go is set in contemporary Israel, mainly in Jerusalem. Joan Leegant has tackled two gigantic though related aspects of the conflict in her short and rather light novel. One is the relationship of American Jews to Israel and the other is the debate about Jewish terrorism versus political attempts to structure some form of peace between Israelis and Arabs.

Employing the device of three American characters who are in Jerusalem to work out personal issues is a thin disguise for Leegant's views which are clearly anti-extremist. The characters themselves are well drawn however.

Yona is an unfulfilled promiscuous young woman who seeks reconciliation with her estranged sister, a radical proponent of the Jewish state. In fact, the sister, raising her five children under extreme duress in a small Israeli town, is the most intriguing character in the novel.

Mark Greenglass, former drug addict in New York, son of a domineering businessman, turned to Orthodox Judaism but has doubts and conflicts about his teaching life in Jerusalem. Then there is Aaron, a failure at the age of 20, who comes to Israel for specious reasons and ends up in a terrorist cell.

It sounds overly dramatic and somewhat cliched but Leegant is skilled enough as a writer to draw the reader into these lives and tell a good story. She paints a clear picture of life in Jerusalem today.

So it was an interesting read; better than Leon Uris' Exodus as literature goes, not as exciting as Herman Wouk's The Hope in its dramatic arc. What I appreciated most was her attempt to put individual human faces on the conflicts. Leegant's novel is one of the few I have read to avoid the pitfall of ideology. In fact, in her own way, she exposes ideology as the potentially destructive role that it plays in human interaction whether on a personal or political level.

(Wherever You Go is available in paperback, hardcover and eBook by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore. To find it in your local indie bookstore, click on the cover image above.)

THE INVENTION OF HUGO CABRET

2011-12-27T10:15:00.000-08:00

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The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick, Scholastic Press, 2007, 533 pp

I kept putting off reading this book, winner of the Caldecott Award in 2008. A few days before the movie ("Hugo") came out, I picked it up and read it in a couple hours. It is astonishingly good and speaks to adults as well as children.

Hugo Cabret has had much sorrow and loss in his young life. Orphaned, then abandoned, he lives a secret, lonely life in a Paris railroad station, keeping the clocks running and stealing food. His fascination with an automaton, a mechanical man who can write messages, and his technical skill are the only means Hugo has of making sense of his life.

The story of how he solves the mysteries and problems besetting him is full of danger, chance encounters, determination and wonder. Hugo is a child hero in the spirit of Harry Potter, David Copperfield, and Nobody Owens. While courage and intelligence are essential to his survival, it is imagination which drives him.

Brian Selznick's illustrations are sublime. In a unique arrangement that transcends both picture books and graphic novels, those illustrations tell parts of the story in the place of text. Somehow the transitions from pictures to text and back again are seamless.

I had started to read The Invention of Hugo Cabret to my granddaughters this past summer but we never finished it. The ten-year-old read it on her own, also in anticipation of the movie. Then we all saw "Hugo" together. It was so cool to sit next to Emma and whisper about what was just like the book and what was changed. The film completely captures the wonder of the book and enhances the story with clips from the silent movies that are integral to it.

Read the book!

See the movie!

(The Invention of Hugo Cabret is available on the children's book shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore. To find it in your local bookstore click on the cover image above.)

MERRY CHRISTMAS, ETC

2011-12-25T09:30:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas or Happy Whatever Sacred Event you celebrate. My wish for you and all mankind is that illusive thing called Peace On Earth. At least for today we could practice Good Will Towards Men. It is a start.

Thank you to all of you who read my blog or just stop by. As I told some friends the other night, literature is my religion. In America it is still possible for writers to tell their truths in the books they write. In all parts of the world, you can kill or imprison the writer, you can burn the books, but you cannot kill the ideas. They always get out and circulate eventually.

My gift to you today is a song. I wrote these lyrics to what I call "The Christmas Song" many years ago when we had a family feud going between some members and that was making some other members sad. Today feuds abound in every land. This may be the age of feuding. So the words are for all.

On a cold winter night in the desert a light did shine
From the silky black sky on a baby and mother so fine
Mary looked down on that innocent face and feared
Shepherds looked as they wondered what brought them there

Can a child of love live in this evil world
Can he change the hearts of men
Will we make it safe for him to enter in
Can we live in peace again?

Look all around, there are reasons a'plenty to hate
Do you ever wonder if the time comes when it's too late
Can you see the gift comes to those who can love friend or foe?
Look to yourself for it's only there that you know

Can a child of love live in this evil world
Can he change the hearts of men
Will we make it safe for him to enter in
Can we live in peace again?

ELLEN TEBBITS

2011-12-23T09:53:00.000-08:00

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Ellen Tebbits, Beverly Cleary, William Morrow & Company, 1951, 160 pp

Continuing my reading of Beverly Cleary's books as research on the 1950s, I read her second novel for middle-grade readers. Ellen Tebbits is a third grader with two main problems in life. She needs a best friend and she wants her teacher to like her so she can get picked to clap the erasers. Interesting to me because those were my main problems in third grade. She also has an over-protective mother who is a neat freak.

The story opens with a chapter about ballet class. Ellen has been made to wear long underwear because it is winter but she doesn't want anyone else to know and tries to hide it under her ballet outfit. It is funny but also captures those things that were so important yet made you feel so squeamish at the age of eight.

Despite all those points of similarity to my eight-year-old life, I didn't find this one as exciting as Henry Huggins. The girls in the story were so girly girl, while the boys seemed to have more fun. I suppose that is an accurate picture of how things were for us females in the 1950s.

(Ellen Tebbits is available in paperback on the shelf at Once Upon A Time and in other formats by order. To find it at your local bookstore click on the cover image above.)

THE BARBARIAN NURSERIES

2011-12-20T15:25:00.000-08:00

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The Barbarian Nurseries, Hector Tobar, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2011, 422 pp

I read this wonderful novel simply because the author lives in Los Angeles. Hector Tobar, son of Guatemalan parents who immigrated to Los Angeles in the 1960s, is an LA Times columnist. The Barbarian Nurseries is his third book; his second novel. He has created a unique hybrid: a factual portrayal of a city and its immigration woes couched in fiction and driven by characters who surprised me at every turn.

Araceli is an undocumented Mexican immigrant working for an affluent family inside a gated community in Orange County. Scott Torres made his money in the days of the dot com boom but now holds down an uninspiring IT job while trying to maintain the standard of living he overspent to attain. In an effort to economize, he and his wife have laid off their full-time gardener and nanny, leaving Araceli to pick up dropped hats in addition to her job as maid. She cooks and cleans, is paid in cash, lives in a tiny guest house and has one day off every two weeks. Now she is expected to also help with the three children.

Back in Mexico City, Araceli had studied art in college while she dreamed of el norte. She has not a motherly bone in her body. When Scott and his wife both vanish after a violent argument, Araceli is left with the two older children, with no news of or contact from the parents, and not much food in the house.

So begins a journey to and through Los Angeles using public transportation, a picture of the boys' grandfather and what turns out to be a long outdated address. Naturally various types of hell break loose.

I have lived in LA for twenty years but Hector Tobar and Araceli took me to places I have never been; pockets of neighborhoods populated by all levels of Hispanic society from the homeless to educated politicians. We have a Mexican gardener who mows and blows once every other week. We eat Mexican food in restaurants regularly. And that is all I know except for when immigration issues get enough press to penetrate my virtually complete neglect of the news media.

At first I was put off by Hector Tobar' writing style. I have read enough novels by former journalists to be wary. But this author uses his reportorial chops to create places, occurrences, and characters, making it all so real that you feel you are there yourself. He lets us into his characters' minds and souls by chronicling their thoughts and then describing their actions. By the end of what became a more gripping story page by page, I was in a fever of anticipation to learn how it would all turn out. I never could guess or predict the fate of Araceli or the family she ultimately saved until the last few pages.

Did I mention the kids? The eleven-year-old son who reads like crazy and processes his experiences in LA by relating them to all the fantasy novels he devours? The homeless boy taken in by a single mom and made to serve her and her children to the point that the OC kids think he is a slave? Tobar knows kids.

As any avid reader of fiction has found, many and various are the high points, disappointments, and sometimes slogging boredom involved. The Barbarian Nurseries is a shining high point. Except for Native Americans, every American citizen is ultimately a descendent of an immigrant. We are a country of immigrants built on the backs, the labor, and the hopes of other immigrants. Despite the hardships, the ridiculous prejudices, the exploitation, the immigrant story may be the most romantic story our country has to tell. Hector Tobar certainly made it so.

If you only get through a novel a month, or less, I highly recommend you squander some reading time on this one.

(The Barbarian Nurseries is available in hardcover on the shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore. It is also available by order as an eBook. To find it at your local bookstore, click on the cover image above.)

THE STUPIDEST ANGEL

2011-12-15T12:37:00.000-08:00

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The Stupidest Angel, Christopher Moore, William Morrow, 2004, 275 pp

I'm in a grinchy, grumbly, bah humbug mood today. Ordering Christmas presents on-line is easier than fighting through the mall, but it is hard enough to get the Christmas spirit in So Cal, so that doesn't help. It feels kind of stupid.

As did this book, read for one of my reading groups. At least it wasn't as stupid as the stupid Christmas mysteries we have read in years past. But it felt like reading a TV show. Since I don't watch TV anymore, I guess I shouldn't complain, but the guy humor did not make me laugh.

There are zombies in this "Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror." They are gross but not as scary as the characters in The Graveyard Book. As far as the other dysfunctional, heavy drinking, stupid characters go, my heart somehow never warmed.

Most of the readers in the group found it hilarious. Now I know the difference between Christopher Moore and Michael Moore. I could only recommend this "book" to people who are going to have a monumentally sucky Christmas in the hopes that it might cheer them up a little.

(The Stupidest Angel is available in hardcover and eBook by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore. To find it at your local indie store click on the cover image above.)

THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE

2011-12-13T14:12:00.000-08:00

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The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson, Viking Penguin, 1959, 246 pp

This turned out to be my least liked novel by Shirley Jackson. In fact, I like the early Hangsaman, 1951, the most.

In The Haunting of Hill House, Dr Montague, an occult scholar, has gathered with three individuals selected for evidence of psychic abilities, in the old unoccupied mansion with its sad history of deaths, including suicide. The Doctor hopes to find solid evidence for what is called "haunting."

Eleanor, the protagonist, is a typical Jackson heroine. She comes from unhappy family experiences and has a vaguely alluded to record of causing poltergeist activity. During her journey to Hill House, which takes up the entire first chapter, it becomes clear that she is an unbalanced personality.

My trouble with the novel began in Chapter 2 when Eleanor arrives at Hill House and begins to meet the other characters. We only ever get glimpses of them and I never was sure if any of them were good people or bad; certainly they were unreliable.

Hauntings occur every night and Jackson's descriptions of them are harrowing but they don't mesh with the rest of the narrative. The characters pop in and out of several personalities which enhances the instability. I got the feel of a horror story but was not convincingly alarmed.

An unforeseen twist at the end threw me into doubt about the whole book I had just read. Was the author making fun of psychic phenonemena? Was she saying such things are real but unpredictable? I don't know and I was not a happy reader being left that way.

NAGUIB MAHFOUZ BIRTHDAY

2011-12-12T11:06:00.000-08:00

Naguib Mahfouz, December 11,1911-August 30, 2006

Naguib Mahfouz was born 100 years ago yesterday. He is credited as one of the first modern novelists of Egypt and one of the first writers of contemporary Arabic literature. He published over 50 novels beginning in the 1930s, but was not translated into English until around 1970. In 1988 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature after which many of his novels began to appear in English.

In 1999 I read The Memoirs of Cleopatra, a novel by Margaret George. Around that time I also read Wilbur Smith's River God. After reading The Egyptian by Mika Waltari in 2005, I suddenly began to wonder how Egypt of the Egyptian empire became the Egypt of today. I made a quick study of the history of Egypt on Wikipedia, just enough to feel overwhelmed by the county's long and tumultuous story. By that time I had heard of Mahfouz because his Cairo Trilogy had been translated into English, a project overseen in part by Jackie Kennedy Onassis during her stint as an editor at Doubleday Books. Each volume was conspicuously reviewed as it was released and Mahfouz became widely known in the United States for the first time.

Mahfouz wrote his novels about contemporary times in Cairo with his overall theme being the impact of social change on the lives of ordinary people. If you wish to learn what it has been like to be an Egyptian person since the 1930s, reading Mahfouz will give you that insight.

I first read Midaq Alley, published in Egypt in 1947, in the United States by Doubleday in 1966. I entered a world of eccentric characters living in an alley in the old section of Cairo during World War II. The influence of Western culture, particularly British, was gradually eroding the religious faith and morals of these people, causing conflict between generations and the sexes. I became a fan.

I have since read The Beginning and the End, from 1947 and the entire Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, & Sugar Street. Once I became accustomed to Mahfouz's pace and style, his characters and their lives captured my interest. I intend to read through all of his novels that are available in English as I move through My Big Fat Reading Project.

In 1994 an attempted assassination by Islamic extremists reduced Mahfouz to ill health leaving him unable to write for more than a few minutes a day. He lived for twelve more years under constant bodyguard protection. He was the oldest living Noble Literature laureate, the third oldest of all time and the only Arabic language writer to win the prize.

HENRY HUGGINS

2011-12-11T19:00:00.000-08:00

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Henry Huggins, Beverly Cleary, HarperCollins, 1950, 175 pp

THE SUNDAY FAMILY READ

The Luckiest Girl, Beverly Cleary's Young Adult novel from 1958, was one of my favorite books in my preteen years. After re-reading it a few months ago, I decided to read her middle grade books as research for the memoir I am writing. Henry Huggins was the first of these and the first book she published.

I don't remember reading it as a child but I very well may have because it is about a boy who got a dog. I wanted a dog so much when I was in third grade that I convinced my friend across the street to say that her dog was half mine.

Beverly Cleary's intention and genius was to write stories that kids in the 1950s could relate to. She had been a children's librarian and had spent countless hours talking to kids about what they liked to read. Finally she decided to write such books herself and started an entire trend.

Henry Huggins is a small town, middle-class third grader who feels his life is not very exciting. He rides a bus, by himself, to the center of town every Wednesday to go swimming at the YMCA. One day while waiting for the bus home, he finds a stray dog, names him Ribsy because the dog is so thin, manages to get Ribsy home and convince his parents to let him keep the dog.

The entire first chapter is full of excitement. The book goes on to relate Henry's life with Ribsy and other pets on Klickitat Street. I love that name! Every time I came to it I would say it out loud.

The atmosphere on Klickitat Street is a microcosm of 1950s American small town life. The kids play, roam the neighborhood, perform in school plays and enter their pets in a dog show. From the moment that Henry gets Ribsy his life is full of exciting problems and Henry turns out to be very good at solving problems.

The kids talk the way we talked in those days. "Hey, cut that out!" "Golly." "Gee whiz." " Beat it!" And even "Shut up!" to any friend who was teasing.

Lessons are learned but these kids already have a moral sense, so the lessons are practical, how-to-get-along-in-life type experiences illustrated by the story rather than relayed through the mouths of adults.

I think parents today could learn more about child rearing from Beverly Cleary than from any modern book on parenting. Maybe the kids could read her books on their iPhones.

(Henry Huggins is available in paperback on the shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore. To find it in an indie bookstore nearest to you, click on the book cover image above.)

A CHARMED LIFE

2011-12-09T11:47:00.000-08:00

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A Charmed Life, Mary McCarthy, Harcourt Brace and Company, 1955, 313 pp

Mary McCarthy sets her novels in small claustrophobic locations. In A Charmed Life a tiny community of unsuccessful artists crowd each other socially, artistically, even personally. They get together for dinners or play readings, are literary or experimental, or just plain cracked, but all harbor secret unpleasant opinions about each other. Husbands and wives manipulate each other through lies and half truths. If these omissions have consequences, they are not relayed in the novel, but make the reader uncomfortable and nervous.

Martha Sinnott is the exception. She is a former actress, a playwright, seven years into her second marriage and specializes in bad decisions. Along with her current husband John, she has moved back to New Leeds, where she had lived with her first husband, Miles. He is remarried but still in the area.

When Martha and Miles meet up again at a party, they reconnect in the worst possible way. The consequences wreak havoc with Martha's plans for her life with John. By the time this disaster is fully in place, I was weary of the characters, New Leeds, and the story. It could only end in tragedy.

McCarthy's use of the omniscient third person point of view is impressive. All the thoughts and emotions of each main character were fully exposed. After immersing her readers in everyone's heads, she then tortures us with a drawn out, suspenseful second half of the novel.

I did not like the end though I made myself wait to see what it would be. I could not admire a single character. I felt manipulated myself even to the point of grudging admiration for McCarthy's skill and wit. To one degree or another, everyone I know including myself has some of these characters' unlovely attributes.

(A Charmed Life is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore. To find the novel at your nearest indie bookstore click on the cover image above.)

I CAPTURE THE CASTLE

2011-12-07T14:06:00.000-08:00

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I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith, Atlantic-Little, Brown Books, 1948, 343 pp

Some novels about the teenage female experience are best read when you are a teenage female, such as the Twilight series. Others, such as this one, are brilliant for reminding you what it was like to be a teenage female, whether you are now 26, 45, or over 60.

Cassandra Mortmain, seventeen, living in poverty with her family in an ancient crumbling English castle, is writing a journal. Having realized that she is a terrible poet, she is now "capturing" her family, her life and the castle in order to train herself to write prose. Wonderful prose it is.

Cassandra is naive in the extreme for her seventeen years. She has never been kissed or even felt desire. But she has lived a sheltered life for the past eight years since her mother died, her father leased the castle and remarried and fell into deep writer's block. James Montmain was once an acclaimed writer due to his first "modernist" novel, but now he is a has been and the family is selling off their furniture in order to eat.

It is March, cold and dreary. Rose, the older sister, is 21 and bitter because she will never "make a good marriage." It may be the 1930s but I Capture the Castle sits firmly in Jane Austen territory, socially and emotionally. When the American sons of the castle's owner arrive on the scene, Cassandra and Rose begin to act out Pride and Prejudice.

Not exactly though, for Cassandra is well read, smart and resourceful. She also possesses deep insight into people, excluding herself, and has a huge heart. She loves her self-centered sister, her hapless father and her quirky stepmother. Most of all, she knows that she wants to be a writer and has doubts about marriage; a very 20th century viewpoint.

The arrival of Neil and Simon Cotton brings excitement, hope and a much improved financial condition. Dinner parties, who loves whom, trips to London, involve a whole new set of problems. These events also provide entertaining contrasts between the English social classes and humorous comments on the English versus the American.

As a reader, I was captured by Dodie Smith and put through everything I have loved about books like The Little Princess, Jane Eyre, Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, and many more. At this point in my reading life, I would not be happy with a steady diet of such books but strangely enough, I could see reading I Capture the Castle again someday. The end of the story is unexpected; much more realistic than any of the above. It left me thinking about Cassandra.

(I Capture the Castle is available in paperback on the shelf at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

CHIME

2011-12-06T13:22:00.000-08:00

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Chime, Franny Billingsley, Dial Books, 2011, 361 pp

This YA novel is the book that got all that backlash attention during the lead up to the 2011 National Book Awards. Through an error never fully explained, Shine by Lauren Myracle was announced on NPR as a finalist for the Young Adult category, though by the following day it turned out that the judges had actually chosen Chime. Despite all the upset, Chime did not win the award but was beaten out by Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones.

I have not read either of the other two books, but ever since I read The Folk Keeper by Franny Billingsley, I was hoping she would win for Chime.

Briony is a 14 year old girl who believes she is a witch. She lives with her twin sister Rose and her father, a widowed minister, in an imaginary English village. In Briony's times, witches are hanged. If Briony tells anyone she will be hanged but if she does not tell, she fears herself as a danger to those around her.

The brilliance of Billingsley's tale lies in double layers. One layer illustrates through the voice of Briony how children can develop a false picture of who they are as they try to make sense of the adult lives around them. Briony's mother died giving birth to the twins and they were raised by a complicated stepmother. The second layer is a drawn out reveal, a mystery in which we learn what actually happened to Briony, Rose and their father.

So much goes on that any attempt to explain would be full of spoilers. Eldric, a young man who awakens love and self-awareness in Briony; Rose, who is "odd" in some emotional but gifted way; the superstitious beliefs of the villagers; and some highly supernatural beings all combine to create the atmosphere of Briony's life.

I love Billingsley's writing because she does not spell out anything but by hints and through multiple viewpoints, draws on the reader's imagination so strongly that I almost feel I am creating the story with her.

Chime is the sort of book you give to a strong reader with a healthy ability to suspend her disbelief and just say, "Read this!"

(Chime is available in hardcover, audio and eBook by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore. To find it in your nearest indie bookstore click on the cover image above.)

THE ASTOUNDING, THE AMAZING AND THE UNKNOWN

2011-12-05T19:15:00.000-08:00

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The Astounding, The Amazing, and The Unknown, Paul Malmont, Simon & Schuster, 2011, 416 pp

Having read so much Heinlein and Asimov, I could not resist reading this. It falls into a category I have named Reading Fun. It is a rather specific category for me. It means books that are just big fun to read the whole way through.

It is a fact that mid World War II several pulp writers were recruited by the US Navy and set up in a lab at the Philadelphia Naval Yard. Their orders: to turn the science fiction wonders they had written about into scientific fact in an effort to win the war. Death rays, force fields, invisibility and the creation of a super weapon inform their experiments. The reason: unknown to them and to the reader until the end of this highly entertaining novel.

Robert A Heinlein heads what he has named the Kamikaze Group, which includes Isaac Asimov, Sprague de Camp, and various other writers from the Golden Age of pulp science fiction. Even L Ron Hubbard shows up, on leave from the Navy after barely escaping the worst from a court martial. John Campbell, editor of the zines which make up the title and icons such as Doc Savage, Lester Dent, and Walter Gibson all play their parts.

Key to what turns out to be a mystery is the old conflict between Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison. Even Albert Einstein makes a cameo appearance. Then there are the romantic escapades involving Heinlein's wives, Asimov's only wife, and Hubbard's various flames including one he shares with the drug addled magician Jack Parsons.

The pace is non-stop, the inside jokes are LOL funny, but best of all is Malmont's capturing of the pulp writing style. Heinlein, Asimov, de Camp, and Hubbard become the dare devil heroes they wrote about, facing danger and deceit, secrets and intrigue, as well as female entanglements.

At the same time, he satirizes these characters and their times, reminding us that all heroes have their foibles.

(The Astounding, The Amazing, and The Unknown is available in hardcover, eBook, and audio CD by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore. To find it in the indie bookstore nearest you, click on the cover image above.)

PATTERN RECOGNITION

2011-12-02T12:13:00.000-08:00

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Pattern Recognition, William Gibson, G P Putnam's Sons, 2003, 356 pp

I have been meaning to read William Gibson for a long time. I have all of his early books on my shelves. Now I am hooked.

Pattern Recognition put me in mind of Alex Shakar's first novel, The Savage Girl, in terms of the whole global marketing issue. But Cayce Pollard, the heroine in Gibson's book, is a much cooler character. I liked all the techie computer stuff and felt good about my aging self because I could follow it quite well.

The novel is a blend of mystery/thriller, romance and modern concerns. In that regard it doesn't stand out particularly from others of that combined genre. But the secret ingredient is the mysterious film clips that Cayce must track down. Gibson brought art into the mix and it brightens up the whole story. It also doesn't hurt one bit that he is a great writer.

(Pattern Recognition is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore. To find it in the independent bookstore nearest you, click on the book cover above.)

THE LOTUS EATERS

2011-11-30T14:05:00.000-08:00

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The Lotus Eaters, Tatjana Soli, St Martin's Press, 2010, 386 pp

I have tirelessly suggested The Lotus Eaters for consideration to all of my reading groups. (Currently I am a member of four.) Finally it was chosen and read for the November meeting of the One Book at a Time group. We meet at a Mexican restaurant in Sunland, CA. We drink margaritas, iced tea and diet coke. We all talk at once. We are writers, lawyers and ex-school teachers. Not everyone finishes their books but the ones who did finish The Lotus Eaters were as enthralled as I was.

The novel opens as the city of Saigon falls in 1975. Americans are fleeing like rats on a sinking ship and Tatjana Soli deftly paints the picture of our country's utter abandonment of the Vietnamese people. Photojournalist Helen Adams is about to be airlifted from the roof of the American Embassy, along with her mortally wounded Vietnamese husband, when she suddenly bolts from the helicopter and heads back into Saigon. She is unable to leave before she has seen the final end of the war including the takeover by the Vietcong. It is one of the most powerful opening scenes I have ever read.

The remainder of the novel covers the twelve years this American young woman spent photographing the war. She arrived, a college drop out, looking for adventure and hoping to somehow process the loss of her brother, who died in Korea. A complete amateur, she can barely load her camera. Although she is a fictional character, loosely inspired by Dickey Chapelle who was one of only three female photojournalists in Vietnam, she is a complex mix of insecurities, losses, fears, determination, and a growing political awareness.

Her drive to succeed in a profession dominated by men leads her into extreme adventure, love, and fame. One of those men is a hardened, long time war journalist. He becomes her mentor, her lover and a source of endless frustration. The other main character is Lin, Vietnamese photographer's assistant as well as spy, who has lost his wife, family, village and profession because of the war. Eventually Helen marries him. But Helen's inability to walk away from the war is more than the addiction to violence as in The Hurt Locker. Her love affairs go far beyond romance becoming a way to find human connection in the face of the violence, devastation and daily threat of death that make up a photojournalist's life.

The Lotus Eaters is not like anything else you have ever read about Vietnam. It is without doubt the best book I have read this year. How Tatjana Soli was able to seamlessly combine the elements of possibly the stupidest war in which America has ever been involved, into such a deeply moving story is a testament to her abilities as a writer. It is her first novel, it took her ten years to write and get published, and she had never been to Vietnam until after it became a New York Times bestseller in April, 2010.

Her website is fascinating and includes an illuminating bio. This interview with Michael Silverblatt of BookWorm gave me more insight into why and how she accomplished the writing.

The best aspect of an amazing novel is a certain magic. The Lotus Eaters has that magic woven throughout and tells the Vietnam story in a way that heals as it relates the horrors. Perhaps mankind will always fight stupid wars. Perhaps if enough writers like this get read by enough readers, we can move on to something just as exciting but not so destructive.

BLACKBERRY WINE

2011-11-29T11:38:00.000-08:00

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Blackberry Wine, Joanne Harris, William Morris, 2000, 357 pp

This was a reading group pick and I voted for it because I liked the movie "Chocolat" so wanted to read some books by this author. Blackberry Wine is pretty good; a romance made better because she addressed creativity, community, financial greed and a few other issues.

Jay Mackintosh is a blocked novelist, living in London with one of those business-like, smart, pushy young women who seem to run the world these days. He wrote one good novel but now can only write trash. Luckily the trash brings him good money, so when he spies a real estate brochure for a farmhouse in a remote French village, he can just buy it and move there.

Despite the girlfriend, a few troublesome villagers and a mysterious neighbor, Jay's wishes all come true in a year's time. He even finds love.

Because this is Joanne Harris, a magical element runs through the story. I do love magic in stories, though I wasn't entirely thrilled by the ways this author employed it. Most surprising was how most of my fellow reading group members did not have a problem with it because they are absolutely NOT fantasy readers.

My favorite character was Jay's childhood friend, a gypsy girl named Gilly who helped him man up when he was a wimpy kid. I also liked the French villagers who preferred their tight-knit community and small vineyards to becoming a tourist town in Provence.

Joanne Harris has her heart in the right place and I like her whimsical outlook as well as her humor. I found her almost too lightweight but she will be one of those authors I turn to after a stint of the dark, heavy, literary reading I love the best.

(Blackberry Wine is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore. Click on the image above to locate the book in your closest independent store.)

ANNE MCCAFFREY HAS LEFT THE PLANET

2011-11-28T12:24:00.000-08:00

Anne McCaffrey was a prolific science fiction and fantasy writer. She passed away at her home in Ireland this past Monday, November 21. She was 85, born on April 1, 1926.

I first discovered her books when I bought a used book containing the first three books in her Dragonriders of Pern Series. I read Dragonflight, the first in the series, in 1992. I liked the characters and the concept but was only mildly impressed.

Back then I had started my reading log but was not very good at writing about the books I read. Here is what I had to say about Dragonflight:

"Dragonflight takes place on Pern, a planet colonized by Earth. About every 200 years another planet swings into Pern's orbit and drops "threads" which are very destructive to vegetation on Pern. This is the story of how the traditions which keep Pern safe from thread, including dragons and their riders (an elite race called Dragonkind), have fallen into disrepute over the past 200 years and must be revived. Threads are about to fall again.

The heroine, Lessa, is a feisty, courageous, and impatient young woman who usually turns out to be right and saves the day. I liked it a lot. The dragonkind get bonded with their dragons when the baby dragon hatches and can communicate by telepathy. The dragons are more level-headed than the humans."

I went on to read many more in the Dragonriders series, growing more and more impressed by Lessa and caught up in the whole dragonrider thing. Dragonflight was first published in 1968 and I always thought that the thread concept was based on the napalm dropped during the Vietnam War.

My next discovery was the Crystal Singer Trilogy. Those three books are my favorite Anne McCaffrey novels because of Killashandra Ree, the heroine, who is a failed singer, a tough chick along the lines of the Dragon Tattoo girl, and has a fabulous lover named Lars.

Crystal Singer, Anne McCaffrey, Ballantine Books, 1982

I read this one in 1993 and said:

"Great science fiction. Killashandra Ree doesn't make it as a singer after years of training but makes it big on another planet 'singing crystal.' (Crystal is a valuable commodity which must be mined out of rock by means of hitting it with a clear note sung in perfect pitch.) The price she pays is being forever captive to the planet Ballybran and forever addicted to the pleasures inherent in handling crystal.

Not much freedom but high adventure for Killashandra."

Killashandra, Anne McCaffrey, Ballantine Books, 1985

This is the sequel to Crystal Singer. I had this to say:

Killashandra goes offworld on an assignment, falls in love and helps bust a mind control operation. She loses her lover and suffers a complete memory loss. But the lover ends up on Ballybran as a crystal singer. Again good adventure as well as romance."

Crystal Line, Anne McCaffrey, Ballantine Books, 1992

The final book in the trilogy was Crystal Line. My extremely short comment contains spoilers:

"Killashandra goes through numerous changes and finally gets her memory back. She and Lars (her lover) take over the Guild and attain eternal love."

The series made a huge impression on me, got me back into music after a rather long absence and made me feel that all my attempts to save the world in my early adult years were worth the adventures I had. I even named my indie record label "OffWorld Records."

Finally, in 2004 or so, my husband and I took a trip to Ireland. Thanks to Anne McCaffrey's website at the time (apparently no longer on the internet) I figured out how to email her and how to find her house in the Wicklow Mountains. On the site at the time was a google earth type map by which you could sort of fly in as though you were a dragon. She also had an open invitation to come to tea.

I didn't get an answer to my email before we left but we decided to try to find her house anyway. Well, actually my husband was shocked that I would be so bold and afraid we were being rudely intrusive, but I insisted. We got completely lost but then came upon a coffee house out in the middle of nowhere, which is so Irish. I had a feeling we were close and figured that if anyone would know the whereabouts of a famous local author, it would be the coffeehouse staff.

Sure enough. We got directions along the lines of: Go down that road. When you get to the fork with the big tree, take the left fork. Curve around a few times and you will see the house.

Well we did and we found it! The house, her stables and all, looking out over the mountains. The front door was ajar and I heard voices, so I called out, walked in and found Anne in her kitchen with a young woman and her father who were visiting from Australia! Anne offered us tea or coffee. Since we were American she totally understood that we might prefer coffee. She was so relaxed and gracious, as though these visitors were an everyday occurrence.

She gave us a tour of her house, her office, her library. Her walls were covered with works of art by fans; drawings of dragons, suggestions for book covers, etc. Her library was a hallway that ran the entire width of her house with shelves on each side. Then she took us out to the stables. She told us she could not ride anymore due to arthritis but still kept a couple horses and boarded others. A totally energetic, wiry, semi-friendly woman took care of it all.

After posing for pictures with us, she walked us back to our rental car. The last time I saw Anne McCaffrey was in Hollywood at the Writers of the Future Awards, about four years ago. She looked not a bit older and was smiling, cracking jokes and signing books. She was known for being extremely open and interactive with her fans, encouraging new writers, accepting all that proposed book cover art. I felt all of that when I saw her that day. She just did not seem one bit bothered by any amount of people.

For me she was an example of a woman who did what she wanted, had a great time doing it, and would never consider she should not do something just because she was a woman. A huge shining creative spirit.

SOLAR LOTTERY

2011-11-21T14:07:00.000-08:00

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Solar Lottery, Philip K Dick, Ace Books, 1955, 200 pp

I have always steered clear of this author. Somehow I had gotten the impression that he was insane in some way or at least egregiously weird. But I read a review or two of the recently released The Exegesis of Philip K Dick, noting that Jonathan Lethem was one of the editors, and decided to give him a try. He wrote 44 novels! Solar Lottery is his first.

I did not get any impression of insanity or weirdness at all. He seemed to be fitting right in with the way science fiction was in the 1950s. In fact, I thought I got a glimpse of a theme that I found while reading The Hunger Games.

The ruler of the Universe in 2203 is chosen by random. Everything runs on games of chance which are wildly popular among the general populace. Workers have to sign up via fealty oaths to the various companies available. A huge proportion of people are just, as Margaret Atwood called them in Oryx and Crake, plebes: semi-homeless, unemployed folks who are cared for by social welfare programs. Honestly, I felt right at home.

The big surprise for me in the novel was the overall theme; that self determined individuals who can think for themselves have the power to bring things back to rights. Now that is a rather 1950s concept but it is also one of the major themes of literature all through the ages.

Hm. Maybe he got weird later? Who said he was weird anyway? I like this author. I added all 44 novels to My Big Fat Reading Project list. That will slow me down some but I look forward to a nice counterbalance to the increasing deterioration in the quality of the bestsellers in the coming decades of the project.

(Solar Lottery is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore. Or click on the book cover image above to find it at the local bookstore closest to you.)

THE BORROWERS AFLOAT

2011-11-20T09:50:00.000-08:00

The Borrowers Afloat, Mary Norton, Harcourt Brace & World, 1959, 191 pp

THE SUNDAY FAMILY READ

In the third book of The Borrowers series, the family takes to the water. At the end of The Borrowers Afield, Pod, Homily, and their daughter Arrietty finally arrived at the cottage where Uncle Hendreary and his family lived. Their dwelling was between the walls behind the fireplace in the cottage of the gamekeeper for the Big House.

Initially they were all relieved to have found shelter and safety, but in this story it soon became apparent that being dependent on relatives and in very cramped quarters was far from ideal. Arrietty had become used to the wide outdoors and began to pine away for more space.

When the cottage humans moved out, leaving no food or other necessities for "borrowing" a crisis was reached. Arrietty and her family decided to move on.

This time they head for a miniature village called Little Fordham, all Borrower-size, where human visitors pay admission to wander through. The plan is to float two days down the river in an old teakettle.

The escape, the river journey and another run in with the Gypsies make for dramatic adventure. Homily gains even more strength, daring and insight. While Arrietty and her father have always been brave and resourceful, Homily is the true heroine in this book.

The Borrowers Afloat was the most exciting story in the series so far, though reading the books in order makes each story mean more.

(The Borrowers Afloat is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

FREEDOM

2011-11-18T12:24:00.000-08:00

Freedom, Jonathan Franzen, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2010, 562 pp

Like many other readers, I loved The Corrections. I bought the hardcover of Freedom soon after it came out in August, 2010 and I don't buy a lot of hardcover books. Somehow I did not get around to reading it until now; another reason I don't buy hardcovers. I think I was worried that he could not write another book as good as The Corrections, even if it did take him nine years. Well, he did.

I love a long book, unless of course it is one of those endless bestseller tomes from the 1950s that I have been reading lately. Franzen writes so smoothly that while he may go over the top a few too many times and he may preach a little bit, he is never boring.

Freedom is about our times, our American issues, about family and families, about love, ideals and dreams. These are the timeless themes of literature from Homer to the present day, but I consider it a feat to write a good old-fashioned narrative and make it crackle with modernity.

I won't go into any more detail as to what takes place in the story. You can go to any major review outlet from The New York Times to The Guardian and read about that in exhausting detail. Perhaps because it is a long book, the reviewers felt they must write long reviews. I find it interesting that the critics gave the book high praises but readers were quite equally divided across the spectrum of one star to five.

I will say that while Franzen digs deeply into our failings as human beings and as a society, even to the point of irritating the wound his digging causes, he did not write a depressing tale or even a cautionary one. The final chapters of Freedom are romantic in the way an old couple who have preserved their love through all the trials of a long life together are romantic.

He seems to be telling us that our insistence on freedom is both our curse and our salvation; that anyone has the potential to finally grow up and make something good out of life. How old-fashioned is that?

(Freedom is available in hardcover and paperback on the shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore. It is also available in several other formats, including e-book, by order.)

FINDING NOUF

2011-11-16T11:17:00.000-08:00

Finding Nouf, Zoe Ferraris, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008, 305 pp

This book was a reading group read. Fortunately I had wanted to read it anyway because it is a mystery set in Saudi Arabia.

Nouf, sixteen year old daughter of a wealthy Saudi Arabian family, is found dead in the desert after she had been missing for ten days. Nayir, family friend, desert guide, pious but single Muslim, is asked by Nouf's family to find her murderer, even though the family had also paid off the authorities to avoid any police investigation.

When Nayir determines that the family does not really want to know what happened to Nouf, he begins to investigate on his own. This requires him to interact with Katya, a female from the coroner's office. Katya is single and relatively free for a woman. Though she must wear the veil when out of her house and have an escort wherever she goes, she causes Nayir many uncomfortable moments with her forward ways.

So the book puts a different spin on the mystery genre because of the setting. Looking at it from another viewpoint, the author's decision to write her book as a mystery is a brilliant ploy because it gets a broad readership to learn about modern Saudi Arabian culture and the ways of Muslims.

The mystery is well done, if a bit slow to get started. A bit of romance, Muslim style, between Nayir and Katya brings the interaction between the sexes to life. The scenes in Nouf's home clearly depict the stifling protection under which every female there lives. Ferraris spent some years in Saudi Arabia and her nuanced picture of the conditions for women and the slow changes in their status comes across as very true to life.

I was also fascinated by the way American culture and ideas get past the walls, the burkas, the protective parents, and infect female teens with the longing for freedom. Equally gripping was the progress for Nayir from an obsessively pious Muslim to a man enlightened about women.

(Finding Nouf is available in paperback on the shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore. It is also available in hardcover and ebook by order.)

AND BOTH WERE YOUNG

2011-11-14T15:07:00.000-08:00

And Both Were Young, Madeleine L'Engle, Lothrop Lee & Shepard Co, 1949, 241 pp

Madeleine L'Engle's career did not take off until the publication in 1962 of A Wrinkle in Time, which went on to win the Newbery Medal and remains her most well known book to this day. But she began writing adult novels in 1945, novels that were published but did not sell very well and quickly fell out of print. She almost gave up writing in 1958.

Had these early novels been around when I was in my teens, I would have read and loved them I am sure. Reading them now, I like them better than A Wrinkle in Time.

And Both Were Young was her first novel for young adults, published in 1949. It was revised and reprinted in 1983 and that is the version I read. In the Foreword to the revised edition, Ms L'Engle says, "When And Both Were Young was first published, there were a great many very simple things that could not be put in a book that was to be read by children and young adults." She goes on to mention attitudes about death and sex in those days. She says, "So the portions that are now in the book that were not in the original are truer to the original typescript than what was actually printed." Good! I did not miss anything by reading the later edition.

No matter her understandable discouragement, L'Engle's early novels are well written with more believable characters than much of the fiction I have read from the 1940s and 1950s. Her female characters especially say and do things just the way actual people would.

In this novel, Flip (nickname for Philippa), has been sent to boarding school in Switzerland, just one year after her mother died. Her father, whom she adores, is an illustrator of children's books. He has a new woman in his life who "lusts after him" as Flip says, and whom Flip cannot stand. His current assignment will take him to China, a place he considers unsafe for Flip. The solution is boarding school and daily letters back and forth.

Flip is homesick, still missing her mother, angry at being abandoned, and hating the new woman; all appropriate feelings for a 14 year old girl. She does not fit in and cannot make any friends. But she is a Madeleine L'Engle creation, so figures out how to sneak away from the confining regulations at school and walk by herself in the woods. She meets Paul, who is also troubled and angry for his own reasons. Slowly and beautifully they become friends and then fall in love.

One could complain that a few too many unlikely coincidences bring Flip and Paul through their troubles to a happy ending. One could also make the same complaints about the Twilight series, but Madeleine L'Engle does it without vampires or werewolves, in 241 pages, and with just as much sexual tension.

And Both Were Young was reissued in hardcover by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2010; then in paperback by Square Fish in 2011. It is for ages 12 and up. I think the book would make a lovely Christmas gift for any female teen on your list who loves to read.

(And Both Were Young is available in hardcover, paperback, audio and e-book versions by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE GROVES OF ACADEME

2011-11-11T13:57:00.000-08:00

The Groves of Academe, Mary McCarthy, Harcourt Brace & World, 1952, 255 pp

Another campus novel of the several I read this fall. (You Deserve Nothing; The Secret History) I wonder if Donna Tartt read Mary McCarthy. One difference from Tartt's book is that in The Groves of Academe the professors and President of Jocelyn College are the focus of the novel rather than the students. A similarity is that in both books the colleges are small and progressive though the stories are 30 years apart in time.

Henry Mulcahy, middle-aged, unsuccessful, overburdened, renegade literature instructor, gets a letter from President Maynard Hoar informing him that his appointment will not be confirmed in the next academic year. Henry has a wife and four children living with him in substandard conditions. They are permanently in debt and his wife has had health issues since the birth of their last child.

In desperation, he cooks up a plot based on exaggerations of his wife's condition and an untruthful account of his political past. He intimates these "facts" to one of his students and to a young, beautiful, Russian colleague in his department. The student is responsible for a viral rumor line and Domna Rejnev becomes his accomplice, tirelessly gathering faculty support for Mulcahy. The gist is that by means of pity and political pressure, President Hoar will be forced to keep Mulcahy. Hoar is a published opponent of the current loyalty oath and Mulcahy claims to have been a communist in his youth.

It is all quite complex to read about in 2011. As much as I have come across about the anti-communist witch hunts in the fiction of the early 1950s, I felt that I would have caught on faster if I had been reading the newspapers in those years. More than that, the political implications aside, the entire novel is a continuous spoof on colleges, progressive education, the claustrophobic infighting and personality conflicts on a small campus, topped off by a hilarious send up on poets.

Mary McCarthy is a perceptive, intellectually rigorous writer and assumes that her readers are on a similar level. She is also a savage satirist given to mocking pretensions and dearly held ideas. Once I got my head around the various views and vested interests of the characters, I was amused, intrigued and a victim of the suspense inherent in her story. Most hilarious of all, after all the drama is over, nothing really has changed. Life goes on at Jocelyn College.

This is McCarthy's third novel. She achieved bestseller status with her fifth, The Group, in 1962 and made her name through political journalism. I think her novels were almost too brilliant and intellectual for the male dominated publishing world of the 1940s and 1950s. I love fiction written by dazzlingly intelligent women. If only they could run the world.

The Groves of Academe is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

A CASE OF CONSCIENCE

2011-11-10T12:58:00.000-08:00

A Case of Conscience, James Blish, Ballantine Books, 1958, 188 pp

I am not well read in the science fiction genre, but in comparing A Case of Conscience to science fiction novels I have read, it stands as one of the oddest. It won the Hugo Award in 1959.

A four man exploratory team is investigating Lithia, the first planet found so far with sentient life. The aliens are reptilian, have no experience of faith or religious belief, and their complete reliance on reason has produced a society devoid of evil or sin.

Father Ruiz-Sanchez, a Jesuit and a biologist, is one member of this team, who are charged with recommending to their superiors what should be done with Lithia. The physicist on the team proposes making it into an atomic research planet, but the Jesuit decides it is a product of the Devil and wants it sealed off to protect mankind from temptation.

My only knowledge of Jesuit scientific philosophy come from Mary Doria Russell's excellent novel, The Sparrow. James Blish did nothing but confuse me as I attempted to follow the reasoning of Father Ruiz-Sanchez. (Hilarious plot element: the Jesuit is studying Ulysses by James Joyce to learn more about the Devil.)

In the second half of A Case of Conscience, the team returns to Earth with one of the alien creatures. This little Lithian grows up to become a psychopathic menace to society; a character who could have been created by Truman Capote. Is this supposed to prove the Jesuit's theory?

The book was actually a good exciting read. I just could not figure out what the author meant by his obviously deeply pondered theme of science vs religion. Does anyone want to help me out here?

(A Case of Conscience is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

MY BROTHER MICHAEL

2011-11-08T12:34:00.000-08:00

My Brother Michael, Mary Stewart, William Morrow & Company, 1959, 255 pp

The Greek theme continues with Stewart's fifth mystery novel. Camilla Haven is traveling in Greece and feeling free after having left a long, stifling relationship but trying to regain her self-confidence. After a hair-raising drive from Athens to Delphi in a rented car, she finds herself mixed up with a mysterious Englishman named Simon.

Simon's idolized older brother Michael had met his death outside Delphi during World War II. His last letter to the family hinted at a find of great importance which Simon is determined to track down. Out of the recent past come Grecian revolutionaries who put Simon and Mary into danger.

Stewart's usual ingredients of a young English woman meeting up with romance and danger in a foreign country are embellished by excellent description of 1950s Greece combined with classical Greek history. Her characters are much more deeply developed than in the previous books and the romance is more mature.

Best of all is a whiff of the mythological invoking The Kindly Ones (also known as The Furies), whose ancient role was to wreak vengeance on mortals who wrongly committed murder. Simon and Camilla discover a cave containing a very old statue of Apollo, hidden away by devout worshipers, bringing the spiritual world of over 2000 years ago into the story.

I got a spine tingling sense that Ms Stewart was a good Greek scholar herself and had deftly woven that knowledge into her tale. She was telling us that the past is ever with us; the gods and goddesses never far away.

(My Brother Michael is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE MARRIAGE PLOT

2011-11-07T14:01:00.000-08:00

The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2011, 416 pp

A new novel by Jeffrey Eugenides is a big event. It has been nine years since Middlesex. Though this is a much different sort of story I enjoyed it just as much.

The Marriage Plot begins in the middle of the story on the day of Madeleine Hannah's graduation from Brown University; the day after her breakup with Leonard and the morning after the kind of night you can never tell your parents about. Weaving between past and present, he brings the reader up to date on Madeleine's love triangle featuring Leonard , the brilliant but bipolar science geek and Mitchell, Religious Studies major of Greek descent whose dearest wish is to marry Madeleine. But Madeleine loves Leonard. But Leonard is crazy.

I mentioned the other day about the threads of college and Greece in my recent reading. Here they are again. Later in the story Mitchell goes on a quest for religious experience which begins in Greece.

Madeleine is an English major and on the first page alone, eleven authors are mentioned. She met Leonard in a semiotics seminar and her senior thesis is called "The Marriage Plot." A reading geek like me just loves books about books and writers and stories and plots.

For the remainder of the novel Eugenides moves around the triangle until we know all three characters about as well as you can know anyone. I became intimately involved with both the manic and the depressive Leonard. I followed Mitchell as he searched for the meaning of his life. And while Madeleine can be maddening with her middle class ideas about cleanliness, relationships and duty, she is also admirable for wanting the independence and selfhood promised to young women in the 1980s. I wanted all three characters to get what they wanted even though it was impossible.

Eugenides has a way of meandering with his own plots, but he still burrowed into my heart. With plenty of humor he satirizes the early 80s and especially the Semiotics era of literary instruction. "Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights."

He is wordy, his prose is never flashy. Like a good friend telling an overlong story, he goes on and on, but the result is an immersion into a time, a place, and a big idea. Hermaphroditism is a big idea. Romantic love is a bigger idea. But Madeleine and her boyfriends are not ideas. They are unique individuals newly graduated from college who are each discovering how to turn their passions into a life that can be lived.

Ultimately The Marriage Plot is very much a moral tale while at the same time being a literary romp through 80s style sex, love and marriage. I think both women who don't hate themselves and men who like women will find it absorbing.

(The Marriage Plot is available in hardcover on the shelf at Once Upon A Time Bookstore. It is also available by order in eBook and audio editions.)

ADVISE AND CONSENT

2011-11-06T11:08:00.000-08:00

Advise and Consent, Allen Drury, Doubleday and Company, 1959, 760 pp

One of the burdens of My Big Fat Reading Project is slogging my way through long tomes like Advise and Consent. It was the #4 bestseller in 1959 and went on to be the #1 bestseller and Pulitzer Prize winner in 1960. The New York Times Book Review stated, "Advise and Consent will stand as one of the finest and most gripping political novels of our era..." The book stayed on that paper's bestseller list for over 100 weeks!

It is the story of a fictional American President's attempt to put a new Secretary of State into his cabinet, an action which requires confirmation by the Senate. Robert Leffingwell, the nominee, is seen as an appeaser of Communist Russia by the more conservative senators but is a darling of the liberals. The fight to get Leffingwell confirmed is down and dirty, ruining lives and causing great upheaval in the Senate.

Interestingly, though I was being taught the forms of United States government in high school during the same time the book was popular, not much of it stayed with me. I had to do a quick review of Congressional terminology and positions, but once I got a grip on ranks such as Majority Leader, President of the Senate, Senior Senator, etc, the characters and their battles came alive. Reading the book then became an education in how the Senate works; its relationship to the Presidency, the media, and the voters back home; as well as the daily life of a Senator. (You could not pay me enough to be a Senator and I was confirmed in my belief that democracy in practice differs widely from it high flown ideals.)

Advise and Consent is not the pageturner its fans claim it to be, but it is a dramatic story still read today and is considered to have started a genre: political novels set in Washington, DC. Allen Drury, who started his professional life as a US Senate correspondent for United Press International, became a ponderous fiction author. His attention to detail drove me to distraction, his characterizations are complex but artless, and he repeats himself. Compared to a civics textbook however, the book is wildly exciting and humanized the Congressional men and women we hear about in the news.

I am glad I read it. The novel did more to explain the 1950s and 1960s American views on communism that almost anything else I have read so far.

(Advise and Consent is out of print and only available in libraries and from used booksellers.)

PROSPERO REGAINED

2011-11-05T14:30:00.000-07:00

Prospero Regained, L Jagi Lamplighter, Tom Doherty Associates, 2011, 476 pp

Prospero Regained is the final book in the Prospero's Daughter trilogy. The entire series is an impressive feat of fantasy writing that stands up to the accomplishments of such bestsellers as China Mieville, Philip Pullman and JRR Tolkein. This final volume was the best of all. The mysteries, the supernatural enemies and the purposes of the Prospero family introduced in the first two volumes are all fully explained and revealed. Each of Miranda's siblings and Miranda herself find the strength to rise above his or her flaws and overcome the demons who plague them. I give nothing away when I say this because Miranda's deepest desires and the future of Prospero Inc, not to mention the future of humanity are all at stake and the suspense is palpable.

To fully enjoy Prospero Regained you really must read the whole series in order. (See my reviews of Prospero Lost and Prospero in Hell.) This final volume takes place for the most part in Hell. Many of the earlier mythical creatures, friends and foes, make appearances and we finally meet Prospero himself. Miranda's love for the elf Astreus goes through surprising developments and we learn who her mother really was. After losing her connection to the Goddess Eurynome in the last book, Miranda gets another chance for redemption.

Underlying the suspense, adventure and mystery is a strong sense of hope for mankind and the world. Lamplighter draws from a deep well of mythological and centuries old religious wisdom meshing it together ingeniously. I finished these books with much of my faith in mankind and in the power of personal integrity restored; something I sorely needed at this time in my life.

(Prospero Regained is available in hardcover and eBook by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE SECRET HISTORY

2011-11-03T14:01:00.000-07:00

The Secret History, Donna Tartt, Alfred A Knopf, 1992, 524 pp

My October reading was a month of books set in schools and books with references to the Greeks. The Secret History fell into both categories. I read the book for a reading group meeting that never happened. It was chosen by the group's leader because it is one of her all time favorite books. It took me a full week to read and it did not become one of my all time favorite books, yet it left a strong impression. It is a book I will never forget.

The school theme actually began for me in September, appropriately enough, with Alexander Masik's You Deserve Nothing, featuring the charismatic teacher Will Silver. The Secret History (set in Vermont at Hamden College, a fictional somewhat progressive institution and featuring five students and their eccentric Greek professor Julian Morrow) follows these students through one year during which they commit two murders and try to live with the hell they have created for themselves.

Steeped in literary references, the chill of a Vermont winter, the peculiar madnesses that afflict each character, the novel is atmospheric, dreamlike, and haunting. All of the above are elements in many unforgettable books I have loved: The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfeld; The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruis Zafon; Atonement, by Ian McEwan; The Likeness, by Tana French and many more. Curious that I can't think of any written by Americans.

Donna Tartt is clearly well read and brilliant. It makes sense that she was raised in Mississippi and educated in New England. The students in the novel are the sort of oddball tortured misfits I always sought out in college. But I had one heck of a time reading the novel.

The plot takes forever to get going. Huge chunks of text go by with the five friends just hanging out and each one of these chunks felt like a repeat of the ones that came before. Richard Papen, who tells the tale and is something of an outsider in the group because of his widely different roots and upbringing, spends pages maundering about what happened. He is a pawn in the strange games that these kids are acting out and gets used and fooled by everyone else. He is also not quite believable as a male though he acts more like a guy that the other three male friends while he falls in love with Camilla, the only female. Camilla herself is practically androgynous.

Even in the second half of the book, where an actual plot becomes apparent, I felt I could not grab hold of anything to anchor me as a reader. Possibly that is a problem most of us had in college. What with the drinking, the drugs, the casual sex, the bad food and the lack of sleep, it all becomes an amorphous daze until we either dropped out or graduated.

Which goes a long way to explaining why the novel has hung around and haunted me for the past two weeks since I finished it. College is a strange rite of passage during which people aged 18 to 21 are not really responsible for anything yet have left home. Somehow one's college years don't count for much in the real world, whether you studied your head off, partied continuously or committed murder. Yet whatever one did in those years follows you for the rest of your life just as deeply as if you had spent those years fighting in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. At least that seems to be Richard's conclusion ten years later.

I might need to read The Secret History again someday. By the way, after I finished the book I found a website called Book Drum with a deconstruction of this novel. All the phrases in other languages are translated, the cultural references explained, and the literary figures introduced. Working my way through all that explication, I had to admit that Donna Tartt is way more intelligent and much better educated than I. Part of my problem with her novel may have been that I was in over my head.

(The Secret History is available in hardcover, paperback and audio cassette by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE BORROWERS AFIELD

2011-10-31T15:44:00.000-07:00

The Borrowers Afield, Mary Norton, Harcourt Brace & World, 1955, 215 pp

THE SUNDAY FAMILY READ

In the second book of The Borrowers series, Pod, Homily and Arrietty are on the run after escaping from the terrible Mrs Driver and the ferret. No long able to live snugly beneath the kitchen in the big house, they are forced to run, hide from field mice and insects, and sleep in ditches.

Finally they take up residence in an abandoned boot and adopt a vegetarian diet. Homily tries to be brave but is miserably out of her element. Pod is his usual resourceful self. Arrietty however is thrilled to be in the great outdoors. She ventures far and wide and when she meets Spiller, a mysterious and feral Borrower youth, she sets in motion the family's salvation.

I read this one as a child but didn't remember it as well. It is just as delightful and imaginative as the first book. I did not read the other two in the series because by the time The Borrowers Afloat was published in 1959, I was twelve years old and had moved on as a reader. I will be reading Afloat and Aloft soon though thanks to my Big Fat Reading Project.

(The Borrowers Afield is available in hardcover, paperback or eBook by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

STATE OF WONDER

2011-10-29T09:43:00.000-07:00

State of Wonder, Ann Patchett, HarperCollinsPublishers, 2011, 353 pp

In her latest novel, Ann Patchett returns to South America, but the setting and subject matter differ dramatically from that of Bel Canto. It was Bel Canto that made me her fan though for some reason since then I have only read The Patron Saint of Liars (her first novel and my favorite) and Run, which I liked very much but which did not have the success of Bel Canto. Over the past nineteen years she has only published six novels but like some of my other best-loved authors, the pace of a novel about every three years seems to keep her quality high.

State of Wonder begins slowly in the midst of a Minnesota winter. The opening is dramatic with the news that Marina Singh's colleague Anders Eckman has succumbed to fever in the Amazonian jungle.

Marina is a research scientist for a pharmaceutical company, a single woman in her thirties having an affair with the company's CEO, a rather reserved and lonely person. The news of Eckman's death hits hard but when her lover/boss virtually orders her to travel to Brazil and investigate the situation, her life changes in multiple ways.

However, the novel is nearly half over by the time she actually reaches the jungle and confronts the potential villain of the story, her former medical professor and the key researcher for the company, Dr Annick Swenson. The long set up is a risky move since all the action in the novel takes place at the jungle research camp. We have learned that Dr Swenson has been developing a fertility drug and that the two women have collided in the past, but it is not until we meet Swenson that her draconian personality becomes real.

I did not mind the leisurely opening pace because I happen to love Patchett's writing. As a reader, I feel as safe in her hands as I do riding in the backseat of a car with a good driver. This author has similar sentiments to mine when it comes to women, families, love and children. Every character in her books has redeeming qualities and difficult quirks. No one ever fully lives up to what others expect of them and to me that is quite like real life.

The fertility issue is of course a hot one these days and the novel is full of astute observations on that subject. Somehow fertility is and yet is not the main theme. Either instead of or in addition to the questions of childbearing, is the theme of life purposes and how both men and women, civilized and primitive, carry out these purposes amidst the pressures of family and society.

Ann Patchett has almost become an old fashioned author by now, especially because she is so invested in matters of family and love. I would imagine she is most admired by middle-aged women. I wonder if young women find her relevant.

After a startling denouement in State of Wonder, she leaves quite a few plot threads unresolved. All the main characters experience life changing moments in the Amazon basin, leaving the reader to imagine what will happen to them after the novel ends. I like that!

(State of Wonder is available in hardcover on the shelf at Once Upon A Time Bookstore. It is also available as an e-book.)

THE PACT

2011-10-27T11:35:00.000-07:00

The Pact, Jodi Picoult, William Morrow and Company, 1998, 389 pp

Jodi Picoult is a writer who tackles the thorny moral issues we face in modern life. She is one of many, particularly female, authors who approach novel writing with a similar focus: Sara Paretsky, Anita Shreve, the late Olivia Goldsmith, Meg Wolitzer, to name a few. These novelists serve the purpose in fiction loosely called "to entertain and inform." In my opinion they vary widely in writing skill and I would place Jodi Picoult somewhere in the middle range between horrible and great.

The Pact is her fifth novel out of eighteen. The story is anchored by two teenagers, Chris and Emily, who were raised together by neighboring families, making their relationship something like a very close brother and sister bond. As teens they begin having sex and falling in love.

Due to a childhood incident of sexual abuse, never revealed to anyone, Emily has problems with the sex though she loves Chris with all her heart. During their senior year in high school, she becomes depressed and pregnant. She decides to kill herself, convincing Chris to help her. After her death, Chris is arrested for murder, held in prison with no bail for over a year, and emerges from the entire experience changed and probably permanently damaged. The two families, who were best friends, turn into enemies.

The entire novel is fraught with issues: how well parents really know their children is a major one, but mainly the troubles and quandaries of teens rule the tale. Though Picoult reveals the death of Emily and the fact that the two lovers had a suicide pact in the first chapters, the reasons for their problems are explained gradually throughout the book, giving it the feel of a mystery.

With all the elements for a blockbuster pageturner and a deep story in place, this was Jodi Picoult's breakout novel. It has an average of 4 stars on both Amazon and Goodreads, though the hardcover is out of print and the paperback was hard to find in my local libraries and bookstores. My fellow reading group members almost all gave it a resounding thumbs up. Then there is me.

I felt squirmy and creeped out the whole time I was reading The Pact. I didn't like the way it was plotted and I was painfully aware of the author's research. Of course, I didn't like Twilight either. Apparently The Pact has been read and loved by many teens, so the author must have touched on what it is like to be a teen. I do approve of that.

The issue that hit me hardest was the disconnect between the loving, devoted parents and their kids. I couldn't believe that such "good" parents could be that clueless about what was going on. If that is a common problem in American families, and I suspect it is, then parents of teens would do well to read this book. I will most likely not read Jodi Picoult again.

(The Pact is available in paperback and ebook by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

PROSPERO IN HELL

2011-10-25T11:35:00.000-07:00

Prospero in Hell, L Jagi Lamplighter, Tom Doherty Associates, 2010, 347 pp

While I enjoyed Prospero Lost, the first volume of Lamplighter's Prospero's Daughter trilogy, this second volume took a leap forward in many ways. Miranda, who is the eldest of Prospero's offspring, was contacted by her father at the beginning of the first book, informing her that one of his spells had gone awry, that he was accidentally trapped in Hell, and that Miranda was to gather the family and warn them of impending doom.

By the end of Prospero Lost she had only found four of her eight siblings, hardly any of whom were on good terms with each other. Many more questions and mysteries had been raised than were answered or solved. As a reader I was mostly impressed but also somewhat overwhelmed by a sprawling plot covering over 400 years and a gargantuan cast of characters both human and supernatural.

Oh reader of little faith! In Prospero in Hell, Miranda locates her remaining siblings, they overcome their differences barely enough to band together, and set off for Hell. Several points of confusion are made clear and Miranda grows into an admirable character even as she remains conflicted, cold and oddly capricious.

The expression "all hell broke loose" takes on new meaning as Prospero's children begin their trek towards the prison of torture that holds their father. Lamplighter's writing blossoms into a Tolkeinian effect both in terms of description and the powers of evil which these characters must overcome.

With this second volume, which belies the tendency of the middle book of a trilogy to be the weakest, Lamplighter demonstrates that she is addressing well thought out themes. What appeared to be a weakness of plotting skills in the first book turns out to be just the beginnings of many complex plot threads that coalesce into an astounding world view. Miranda is not the only contradictory character in the story. Each sibling has deep faults, even if those faults are caused by demons, and the quest to rescue Prospero is the means by which they will overcome weaknesses and grow into their true selves.

Prospero in Hell contains equal parts of despair and hope. By the end I was convinced I was in the hands of a competent fantasy writer and sure that I would follow along to the trilogy's conclusion, experiencing changes in myself as I read.

(Prospero in Hell is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

NIGHTWOODS

2011-10-20T09:27:00.000-07:00

Nightwoods, Charles Frazier, Random House Inc, 2011, 259 pp

I love Charles Frazier. Cold Mountain, the novel, was amazing. Forget the movie. Thirteen Moons was under appreciated because Cold Mountain was so huge. He just gets to something in his characters that no one else does in quite the same way. Possibly it is a Southern thing but also it is just purely great writing from a guy who has the soul of a poet. Both of the previous novels were historical (Civil War and Trail of Tears) but I don't think it was from history that he derived his power as a writer but from the depth and breadth of his characterizations and his ability to bring the natural world surrounding those characters so vividly to life. Though Nightwoods takes place in the 1960s, he has lost none of that power.

Lit and Lola: Lit is that kind of soldier who never moves on. World War II and its grueling mix of boredom, discomfort and violence have never been matched since then for Lit, not to mention the quality of the drugs available. Lola is the teen bride and mother who would rather drink, party and fight with her husband than raise babies.

Luce and Lily: The daughters of these two, who were abandoned by their mother and neglected by their father; who grew up destined to be harmed by men.

Such potential caricatures of dysfunctional life take on roles suitable for a parable in the hands of Frazier. When Lily's husband Bud, a character straight out of Flannery O'Connor territory, kills her in cold blood, the state dumps Lily's fraternal twin youngsters on Luce. These kids have obvious signs of abuse, something to which Luce is no stranger. She herself is living practically like a hermit in a rundown former summer lodge as a nominal caretaker, wanting nothing more than to be left alone. When she learns that Bud has been acquitted of the murder, she knows such will not be her destiny.

Charles Frazier takes a good half of the novel setting this up but every few pages he drops in another startling fact. By the time it becomes clear that Bud is the psychopath bent on ruining Luce's entire family, I was so wrought up and unbalanced there was nothing left to do but read on, never knowing who would live and who would die.

The problem then was that Frazier's writing is so fine, it needs to be savored. These people are as unique as all human beings are; not one of them can be wholly admired or detested. The mountains, the weather, the flora, close around the story, as much a part of the tale as any other aspect. And those kids--my goodness.

The question in all of Charles Frazier's novels has to do with how our humanity to others can possibly survive when one insanely evil person can ruin it for everyone around him. Bud was made to go to church as a child, where his natural born criminal instincts left him open to the message that the sacred shedding of blood mattered above all else. The proffered answer in Nightwoods is that shared blood can redeem a lost soul now and then, but not always and not for good.

(Nightwoods is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE FORGOTTEN WALTZ

2011-10-18T10:01:00.000-07:00

The Forgotten Waltz, Anne Enright, W W Norton & Company, 2011, 259 pp

I spent the summer reading plenty of novels by smart, young, cutting-edge writers. It was fun and exhilarating. But as fall approached and the days grew shorter, it felt appropriate to read a novel about adultery and its consequences by a seasoned author who knows the pathways of the heart.

The Forgotten Waltz, set in and around Dublin, encompasses those incredible years when Ireland, after all its sad centuries of impoverished outsider status, finally got to be a player in the mad scramble for wealth that characterized the early years of the millennium. Gina Moynihan, recently married career woman, feeling she can have any kind of life, house, job, or husband that she wants, falls in love with an older married man over a period of five years and infrequent encounters.

At first it is simply lust, drunken indulgence, meeting Sean Vallely in hotel rooms. The kissing is more transporting than the actual sex; the sneaking around more exciting than the man himself. In what Gina suspects is an attempt by Sean's wife to check out the competition, she receives an invitation to the Vallely's annual New Year's Day party. Something about the encounter with her lover's wife and daughter Evie raises a dalliance into a full-blown affair. An almost innocent air of just fooling around becomes the messy business of adultery.

The novel begins in 2009, after all the dirty deeds have broken up two marriages. Gina, who narrates her own tale, is looking back in an effort to understand how she came to be living in her deceased mother's house with a man who now seems rather ordinary. She tells us, "I can't be too bothered here with chronology. The idea that if you tell it, one thing after another, then everything will make sense. It doesn't make sense." The style of Enright's discerning look at many types of love is in tune with the above quotation. Gina looks back over the past seven years like someone awaking from a dream or coming out of an obsession. It does not all make sense, even to the reader.

In the first sentence of the preface we learn that, "If it hadn't been for the child then none of this might have happened, but the fact that a child was involved made everything that much harder to forgive." We also learn that there was something peculiar about this child, Evie. That preface is an almost too subtle hint that Evie is a central and important character, but not until the very end of the novel do we find out why and how.

What did Gina want? What did Sean want? It is not clear and I found myself fascinated and puzzled but unable to stop thinking about those questions until I had found my own answers several hours after turning the last page. What appears to be a story of adultery has a secret layer. In her Booker Prize winning novel, The Gathering, Anne Enright told a dark and shameful family saga. The Forgotten Waltz is perhaps lighter, but it is nonetheless an examination of Irish family life as it plays out in our fractured contemporary world.

(The Forgotten Waltz is available in hardcover and e-book by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

YOU DESERVE NOTHING

2011-10-15T11:43:00.000-07:00

You Deserve Nothing, Alexander Maksik, Europa Editions, 2011, 320 pp

I had many high expectations for this novel. It is set in Paris, a city I love. It was given to me by a reading friend who has similar tastes. It was edited by Alice Sebold. Most of all, I had read that the author was inspired by Albert Camus's The Stranger, a book and an author I rather revere. However, as the title proclaims, I deserve nothing.

Reading the book was pure pleasure, almost guilty pleasure. What could be more enjoyable than a love story between an older man and a very young woman, set in Paris? I was in bliss reading Diane Johnson's Le Divorce. I devoured both Bonjour Tristesse and A Certain Smile by Francoise Sagan. Don't even get me started on Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins.

If I were considerably younger and wanted to have a guilt free affair with an older man, I would definitely do it in Paris. So Alexander Maksik combines quasi-existentialism, youth, romance, and idealism in modern day Paris. His writing is very fine, well-crafted, and fairly traditional in style. He got me invested in every character. I never wanted to put his book down and could read happily for hours at a time. I did not want the story to end.

And yet...

I was left feeling a little bit let down. I was quite aware of the author's admiration for Camus, but I don't think he totally gets Camus. I'm not trying to brag here about how well I get Camus, but when I first read him in my twenties, I didn't understand his novels. (They were pressed on me by my father.) As it turned out, I needed to suffer first. When I read The Stranger again a few years ago, I found the main character, Meursault, a much more compelling character than Will Silver in You Deserve Nothing. The moral ambiguity from which each of these characters suffers is of a different magnitude.

I suppose I am being a bit petty. Alexander Maksik is clearly an ambitious writer and probably destined for a brilliant career. And I did enjoy the book. And he is male. I had more admiration for young Marie than I did for Will Silver with his clay feet. Now there is a down-to-earth French woman for you. Moral ambiguity? Not something French women indulge in.

(You Deserve Nothing is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

WENCH

2011-10-13T10:22:00.000-07:00

Wench, Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Amistad, 2010, 290 pp

The provocative title would not necessarily have convinced me to read this novel but it was a reading group pick. The eponymous wenches are four slave women in the mid 1800s whose masters bring them on vacation each summer.

Outside Cincinnati, OH, a resort caters to men who enjoy hunting. Both slave-owning Southerners and abolitionist Northerners coexist in uneasy detachment, with the Southerners and the wenches eschewing the hotel for a group of cabins.

When the men go off hunting, often for days at a time, the slave women gather and talk things over. Each of the four is from a different plantation but they have come to know each other over several summers.

A Quaker woman who lives back in the woods with her husband, provides fresh vegetables to the hotel. Her cabin is a stop on the Underground Railroad, so she becomes a source of fascination for the wenches. They begin to steal away for visits to the cabin where they dream of freedom.

I couldn't stop comparing this book to Beloved, because of the location and the subject matter. Though this story draws on the complex fears, attachments and sufferings of the women, it does not begin to wield the power of Toni Morrison's book.

The deepest meanings in Wench came from an examination of the ties these women had with their children who, being fathered by their white masters, lived a precarious existence. Should the plantation wives take up against these offspring, they could be sold away, but the master could also decide to educate a son giving him a chance in life. The daughters of course were doomed to follow in their mother's footsteps.

The decisions these women made about freedom, about their children, and the consequences thereof, provide the tension in the novel. The story gives another look at slavery and the damage done to families because of it.

(Wench is available in paperback and hardcover on the shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore. It is also available by order as a e-book.)

A SHORT BREAK

2011-10-06T05:25:00.000-07:00

Dear Readers,

I will be on vacation for a week. Free from the internet! See you soon.

THE TRAVELS OF JAIMIE MCPHEETERS

2011-10-05T09:32:00.000-07:00

The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, Robert Taylor Lewis, Doubleday & Company, 1958, 535 pp

I really didn't feel the need for another novel about the Gold Rush, but I was surprised and impressed by the Pulitzer Prize winning novel of 1959. It is full of the usual hardships and pitfalls of westward travel in the 1800s: Indians, lawless villains, weather and death. Unique for this sort of tale is the humor.

Jaimie McPheeters is the son of a reluctant medical doctor from Louisville, Kentucky; a man who would rather gamble and dream of great adventures. The story is told from Jaimie's 14 year old point of view interspersed with his father's bombastic letters back to his wife. Between the two voices you get a full picture of their adventures. Jaimie, in his impulsive youthful way, lands himself in trouble and danger over and over. He is a gambler with his own person. But he has no illusions about his father and as he matures he finds it ever more difficult to maintain his belief in the man.

When they finally reach the gold fields they experience the disillusionment you know is coming and go through even harder times. Since they made a group of true friends during their trek, something like a community keeps Jaimie afloat as his father loses the battle with his addictions. The characters in this novel are wonderful.

In the end I felt enriched for having made my way through what amounts to a reading journey. I came to see that some events in history are so vast, so varied, that it takes hundreds of stories to fully cover them.

(The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

PROSPERO LOST

2011-10-04T15:05:00.000-07:00

Prospero Lost, L Jagi Lamplighter, Tom Doherty Associates, 2009, 347 pp

L Jagi Lamplighter spent 15 years writing, re-writing and revising her Prospero's Daughter Trilogy before this first volume was published in 2009. Other compelling data include her history as a roleplaying gamer and the novel's roots in a game she was involved with in the early 1990s. All of this can be perused on her website. It also explains the slightly dated feeling of the novel.

During those 15 years I was reading and completely enjoying a type of novel that has elements of fantasy or non-reality while it crosses boundaries between science fiction, fantasy and mainstream fiction. (See list of examples at the end of this post.) Only when I was introduced to Prospero Lost did I learn that such novels belong to a genre called "slipstream," coined by sci fi writer Bruce Sterling.

I have had some difficulty writing about Prospero Lost because it does not in all ways measure up to some of these other "slipstream" novels while at the same time it surpasses the wonders of them. One more sentence in this distressingly long prologue: Having a familiarity with Shakespeare's The Tempest enhanced my enjoyment while reading Prospero Lost, but unless you are a hopeless nerd like me it is not required reading.

Prospero Lost introduces Miranda some 500 years after the time of The Tempest. She has been the CEO of Prospero, Inc for many years. Prospero created the company long ago by means of contracts with the Airie Ones (think Ariel in the play) with the purpose of using magic to keep natural disasters at bay and ensure the safety of petroleum and electricity when in human hands.

In The Tempest, Miranda's mother died in childbirth. Since then, Prospero remarried and had seven sons and one daughter. Over the centuries the second wife passed away and the family had disintegrated due to these siblings going off in different directions, taking with them magical gifts from their father and leaving only Miranda to keep Prospero, Inc running. Prospero himself has been up to other secret projects. When Miranda receives a cryptic cry for help from Prospero, she attempts to gather the family back together and give them Propero's warning of impending doom.

Full of conflicting desires, Miranda is hard to pin down as a character. For one thing, she is kept perpetually young and beautiful by a magical water from the end of the world, yet when working for Prospero, Inc she acts like a seasoned executive. She is committed to Eurynome, a Goddess affectionately known as The Lady, who provides guidance in matters both temporal and spiritual. Miranda also has two love interests: Ferdinand, to whom she was engaged at the end of The Tempest, and Astreus, an elf. Her unreasoning loyalty to Prospero compels her to put his demands above all else.

I liked best the overall idea that magic and supernatural entities are at work in the world, unbeknownst to humans. I also found the centuries long history of the Prospero family entertaining and sometimes thrilling. I was not so enamored of the plotting. I suppose that continuous battles with evil enemies are a necessary element in the fantasy genre, but I found them boring after a while, especially since Miranda's immortality means that she can't ever truly lose.

Due to her publisher's wishes, the author broke her 1000+ page tale into a trilogy, so by the end of Prospero Lost, Miranda has found only half of her siblings and is not one whit closer to finding Prospero. But a gift from Atreus, the passionate elf, has put into reach the attainment of her deepest desire. Since that desire is in direct opposition to the foundations of Prospero, Inc, Lamplighter leaves the reader hanging by a cliff. Will magic save the world or destroy it?

SHORT LIST OF SLIPSTREAM NOVELS I HAVE READ

Little, Big, John Crowley
A Brief History of the Dead, Kevin Brockmeier
The Thin Place, Kathryn Davis
The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Marcia Marquez
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison

(Prospero Lost is available in paperback, hardcover and e-book by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

TEXAS TOMBOY

2011-10-02T14:46:00.000-07:00

Texas Tomboy, Lois Lenski, J B Lippincott Company, 1950, 180 pp

THE SUNDAY FAMILY READ

Charlotte, who prefers to be called Charlie, is an eight-year-old growing up on a Texas cattle ranch. She loves to ride out with her father everyday and help him with ranch duties. She has no interest in wearing dresses, helping her mother in the house, or going to school. She memorizes a poem only so her uncle will get her a horse. She is the Texas Tomboy.

Texas is in the third year of a drought. Not a drop of rain has fallen, the cattle are dying of thirst and hunger, and Charlie's ranch is in danger. For her mother, ranching is too hard and stark. She longs to move into town and tries in vain to get Charlie to act like a girl.

I liked this story as much as my other well-loved Lenski books, because Charlie is one of the most complex characters yet. Her stubborn determination is looked upon as selfishness by her mother and older sister, but her dad encourages her to becomes a ranch woman. His only son, the youngest in the family, is not a sturdy lad and is a bit of a mama's boy.

Because of their war with nature and the hardships, Charlie grows up fast and learns to understand the people around her but she never loses her sense of who she is and what she wants. As it turns out, the mother is the selfish one but she learns her own lessons.

Good stuff. I wish I had read this one when I was growing up.

(Texas Tomboy, like all of Lois Lenski Regional Series, is out of print and best found in libraries with a good children's section.)

THE ROAD THROUGH THE WALL

2011-09-30T11:51:00.000-07:00

The Road Through The Wall, Shirley Jackson, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1948, 192 pp

As far as I can tell, this was Shirley Jackson's first novel. It has a few flaws but you can recognize her. She already had her fingers on the pulse of the dark underside in American suburban life. "The Lottery," the short story which made her career, was published in The New Yorker in the same year as this novel.

Over a period of one summer, a group of families, all of which live on the same block, interact in the way of small neighborhoods. Each family is introduced with a bit about their backgrounds, their children if they have any, and a description of their house. (This part was hard to keep straight; I ended up making a map of the block with the names of the characters next to the houses.)

It becomes clear that most of these families are in flux. Each one is either on the way up or down; in the case of a couple elderly women living alone, on the way out.

The children drive the events but with much interference from their hovering parents. For a reader like myself, who grew up in just such a neighborhood during the mid 1950s, reading this short novel was excruciating and eye-opening. We might as well have had these very same families on our block.

Jackson's trademark sense of foreboding is apparent from the first page of the Prologue and continues through to the tragic conclusion. Pepper Street in 1936 in a small California town is home to Harriet Merriam, young teen, overweight, aspiring writer. Her overbearing, Puritanical mother interferes at every opportunity but especially when Harriet befriends the lone Jewish girl on the block. Anyone could say that the parents in the neighborhood mean well, but all of them are caught up in attitudes and outside forces beyond their awareness.

By the end of the summer, the wall that surrounds the highly affluent section which abuts Pepper Street is being broken through to allow for a new street into the area, giving access to a coming subdivision. The wall is symbolic of the barriers which keep certain classes of people out (or in, depending on the point of view.) Most families on Pepper Street aspire to live inside that wall, never acknowledging the walls that already surround them.

The kids only know that something has become unsettled and for the reader they are the barometer of change. It will be another decade or so, but these are the neighborhoods from which my generation boiled out in rebellion, in destruction, in the restructuring of American life known as The Sixites.

Today many baby boomers look back with nostalgia on those years when we knew all our neighbors and could run free all day. They should read The Road Through The Wall.

(The Road Through The Wall is out of print but can be ordered from used book sellers.)

SIRENS OF TITAN

2011-09-29T11:19:00.000-07:00

Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut, Dell Publishing, 1959, 326 pp

Vonnegut's second novel started off great for me. The whole thing about the chronosynclastic infundibulum being "those places...where all the different kinds of truth fit together" struck me as pretty cool. I thought the hapless irresponsible Malachi Constant, richest man in America, was going to get straightened out and find the meaning of life.

Well, he did, but it did not make him happy. Rumfoord, who at first appeared to me as someone who had the good of mankind at heart, turned out to be quite the opposite. He didn't end up happy either. That terrible antisocial kid Chrono becomes the only guy who redeems himself in any way.

The story just seemed to sputter out exactly the way some people's lives do and I found that depressing. So Vonnegut fooled me, which is OK because I actually don't mind when authors jerk me around a bit. In fact, at this point in my life, I also believe that we live in an indifferent universe but we still ought to love "whoever is around to be loved" while we do our best to survive, keep the planet going and practice kindness when at all possible.

(Sirens of Titan is available in paperback and ebook by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

LUMINARIUM

2011-09-26T15:03:00.000-07:00

Luminarium, Alex Shakar, Soho Press, 2011, 432 pp

Luminarium is the best book I have read this year. It just has everything I like: a super intelligent author, set in contemporary times with hip current issues, a quirky family tale, and the science vs religion question handled with plenty of irony and humor.

Alex Shakar's first novel, The Savage Girl was good but I had some problems with it, one of which was the soullessness of his characters. In Luminarium he clearly went looking for spiritual underpinnings, as does his main character, and was successful in his quest.

Fred Brounian, the seeker in the story, is a twin. He and George grew up with yearnings for a better world which they found by creating one virtually. Meanwhile the real world got worse: the attack on the World Trade Center, the resulting fear of terrorism and wars, and the rise of the military in American life. In fact, Fred, George and a third brother Sam, suffered their own attack when Urth, their highly successful virtual world company, was gobbled up by Armation, whose government contracts involved creating virtual worlds for military training. During this descent from utopia to total war, George fell fatally ill and now lies in a coma. He is being kept alive at a financial cost that is bankrupting Fred.

It is a bit of a cliche. A modern man, fairly atheistic, who is intelligent and has always put his faith in science and technology, hits rock bottom and turns to religion. Alex Shakar doesn't do cliches except to turn them inside out by means of the above mentioned irony and humor. So when Fred signs up for a neurological study and puts on the "God helmet" while Mira, his researcher and guide, alludes to "faith without ignorance," he and the reader are in for some wild rides straddling the boundaries between science and religion.

The impressive degree of complexity here make reading Luminarium compelling. Fred falls in love with Mira, a woman full of mystery and contradictions. Concurrently he is receiving emails and texts from his comatose twin and while rationally he knows they have to be bogus, the chance that George is actually reaching out to him on some inexplicable spiritual plane propels him into researching religions ancient and modern and comparing his findings to the quantum physics he has always pursued in his spare time.

All of this is conveyed in some of the most consummate prose I have read. Fred's out of body adventures, brought on by the "God helmet" electrodes, are explained to him in terms of the targeted stimulation of various lobes in his brain. But descriptions of the ways Fred experiences feeling one with the universe, being overwhelmed by love for strangers, etc are comparable to those found in the early Carlos Castaneda books. Taking the reader through Fred's search for meaning as he tries to solve the chaos that is his current life, Shakar maintains the confusions and anxiety of his characters without ever losing the reader.

By the end of the story, most of the mysteries in the lives of Fred and his brothers are solved and the questions raised have been answered. True to life though is a final chapter that opens a whole new set of possibilities for Fred's future. I personally dream of a future where science and religion have met. Whatever your beliefs or dreams, this novel will challenge you and make you think about where our world is going. In our current state of rapid technological advance, Alex Shakar posits that we still need spiritual answers, that family and love matter, but loss and misunderstandings confront us at every turn. It is a wonder how he made such potentially weighty ideas so entertaining.

(Luminarium is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE POORHOUSE FAIR

2011-09-22T09:45:00.000-07:00

The Poorhouse Fair, John Updike, Alfred A Knopf, 1959, 185 pp

I have always confused John Updike and Philip Roth. I don't think they are all that similar, though I can't be sure because I have never read either of them except for this first novel by Updike, read by me in 2002 for I don't know what reason. The confusion must stem from the fact that both writers began publishing in 1959, both were considered disgustingly sex obsessed in their material, and both were the hottest male fiction writers of the day. Anyway, as I wrap up my reading list for 1959 I will be reading Roth's Goodbye, Columbus. As I move on, I will read 4 novels by John Updike and 3 by Philip Roth in the 1960s. That should handle my confusion or maybe not.

Another odd point: here is a second novel in 1959 about the elderly (the first being Muriel Spark's Memento Mori.) Maybe it is a last gasp before the 1960s youth culture takes over.

So yes, The Poorhouse Fair is a day in the life of a state supported "old folks home" as it was called in those days. The residents are there because they are old, have no family left and are penniless. This does not mean they are completely beaten down however; they are a feisty bunch.

A new director has recently taken over the place. His efforts to make improvements have raised the hackles of the elderly residents and they have begun to rebel. It all comes to a head on the day of the eponymous fair.

It is a great story about the personalities of aging people. Right out of the gate, Updike is an amazing writer with deep insight into his characters and the dynamics of a group of people. I look forward to more.

(The Poorhouse Fair is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

MEMENTO MORI

2011-09-20T12:20:00.000-07:00

Memento Mori, Muriel Spark, J B Lippincott Company, 1959, 246 pp

Novel number three by Muriel Spark is just as odd and fitful as the first two. This time she takes on old age, though she was barely 40 when she wrote it. I can't say that reading Spark is pleasurable but it is never boring. She just comes out and has her characters do and say things that most of us would rather not admit to, though we all do and say such things ourselves. No one enjoys being made to look foolish but Spark almost makes the reader enjoy it.

Several elderly characters are receiving anonymous phone calls reminding them that they must die. I have observed that the elderly, though they may be beset by ailments, regrets, and worries, do not really believe they are going to die anymore than the young do. They need reminding I suppose.

The novel is mostly peopled with a large cast of older people, some sick, some senile, some outrageous, all annoying in their own ways. Whether well off or poor, employer or employee, each one is fulfilling the logical outcome of the personality he or she has always had.

Old secrets of the heart come to light, a former maid tries to get a will written in her favor, and a retired sociologist carries on a scientific study of the aged. Just when I was getting weary of gerontological novels of the current day (Emily Alone, Turn of Mind), I read Memento Mori and realized that even fifty years ago in England, old age was a subject about which we must laugh or else we would cry.

(Memento Mori is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE GIRL PROJECT

2011-09-19T12:48:00.000-07:00

The Girl Project, Kate Engelbrecht, Universe, 2011, 224 pp

The most amazing thing about this amazing book is that it got published at all. Kate Engelbrecht, who majored in sociology but didn't actually want to be a sociologist, then worked in advertising but did not actually want to do that either, reinvented herself as a photographer. After some years spent mulling it all over, she created The Girl Project out of her two passions: photography and girlhood. Girls, teens, chicks (call us what you want) are fortunate that Kate turned her project into a book.

Kate's quest was to understand female adolescents by going to the source. In 2007, she began sending a disposable camera and a questionnaire to teen girls all over the United States with requests to fill the camera with pictures representing the girl's life, fill out the questionnaire, and send both back to Kate. Anonymity was promised.

Eventually 5000 young adult females 13 to 18, of varied backgrounds, faiths, and races, sent in their photos and answers. Kate had developed her questionnaire by adapting the Proust Questionnaire, a nineteenth century personality profile made famous by Marcel Proust who used the list several times over his life to record his tastes, views and aspirations. Kate's version asks such questions as "What adjectives best describe you? What is the hardest part about being a teenager? Tell me one thing about you that nobody seems to get?"

Any female reader of The Girl Project will find herself in this book. Any young adult female reader will feel less alone and more herself. If I were a teenage girl, I would get all my friends to answer the questions and take pictures of themselves so we could make our own book. I will be giving copies to all the female teens I know (and maybe some male teens) as well as moms and grandmothers of teens.

Reading what these young women have to say about what life is like for them socially and privately is a sobering experience, because of how much most of them keep inside. Almost universally they are unhappy with how the media portrays teen girls at the same time that they struggle to live up to the body and fashion images they are presented with at every turn. The most wonderful answers are to the question, "What are your favorite qualities in a person?" Those qualities are a recipe for a better world.

The layout is perfect. Some pages show the entire questionnaire filled out in the girl's own handwriting. Many are whole page photos of girls with their friends, in their rooms, or showing us what they love and how they feel. Since not every questionnaire could be included, there are pages full of the answers from just one question, again in each individual's handwriting. All of it is beautiful and so expressive. You must see the book to fully comprehend and appreciate what a treasure it is.

(The Girl Project) is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE MAGICIAN KING

2011-09-16T11:54:00.000-07:00

The Magician King, Lev Grossman, Viking Penguin, 2011, 400 pp

Lev Grossman, that world-weary, fairly hip nerd, is back with his sequel to The Magicians. The first book in what will eventually be a trilogy, thrilled and entertained me with all it insider nods to Harry Potter and The Chronicles of Narnia. He answered the question of whether adult magicians can survive in the 21st century real world with a resounding no! Our hero, Quentin Coldwater, grew up just a little thanks to having faced actual danger and heavy loss.

The Magician King could only require Quentin to move on to the second stage in a modern version of coming-of-age tales. The novel opens with Quentin living the pampered life of one of the Kings of Fillory, though his friend Elliot got to be High King. Frankly, Quentin is bored and yearns for more adventure. It is not so good to be King when you find out that having all your dreams come true only leads to an expanding waistline.

In his self-involved and impulsive way, Quentin dives in to plenty of adventure and spends much of the book in over his head, both in Fillory and back in the real world. He wants to be a hero, but of course he wants the glory. He gets the pain and more loss. You could say that the message here is "growing up is a bitch, if you live."

All Quentin all the time would be way too much, so Grossman turns to Julia, the one who loved Quentin's friend James, the one who did not get into Brakebills, the one who is now improbably Quentin's Queen.

It is Julia's back story of what she had to survive in order to acquire magic in the unofficial, non-Brakebills sanctioned hinterlands that makes The Magician King a gripping tale. She turns out to be the heroine you can't look away from. Neither can Quentin, at least in those rare moments when he thinks of anyone but himself. Julia is involved in some deep magic that borders on mysticism.

Lev Grossman has given us another fabulous read but a few days after coming out of the spell he casts, I found some worrying doubts creeping in. I will spare you my convoluted thought process, my discussions with other readers. I arrived at the conclusion that possibly Mr Grossman was trying for something deeper this time, was God forbid looking for a moral to the story. The trouble is he is not C S Lewis, he ain't got religion, and he can't stop joking or being ironic.

It's OK. I can't really fault him too much. I am dying to read the third book. In these days of the coming singularity, perhaps I won't have to wait another two years. I suppose I could read the last two Harry Potter books while I am waiting.

(The Magician King is available in hardcover and e-book by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

PASSAGE OF ARMS

2011-09-14T12:26:00.000-07:00

Passage of Arms, Eric Ambler, Alfred A Knopf, 1959, 246 pp

Eric Ambler's 10th novel is the first one of his I have read. He is known for a recurring theme concerning an amateur who finds himself unwittingly mixed up with criminals or spies; that theme is in evidence here. Greg Nilsen and his wife Dorothy are taking their first vacation in years. He runs a small manufacturing company in Baltimore, MD.

Wanting to visit out-of-the-way places so they can have adventures, they book a cruise in the South China Sea. Before long, Greg is bored and gets mixed up in a small arms deal, landing himself and his wife in an adventure with features such as communist agitators, anti-communist rebels, prison and probable torture on an out-of-the-way Indonesian island.

This is post Korean War, Southeast Asian Cold War intrigue. The characters and their individual stories are brilliantly fleshed out and the excitement is nonstop. Plenty of references to novels of the time, including The Quiet American by Graham Greene, make for dry humor. Ambler paints a picture of Cold War goings on that reveal much bungling as various ambassadors coordinate face-saving scenarios for their respective countries, which reminded me of the bestselling 1959 novel The Ugly American.

Great reading!

(Passage of Arms is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

ORDINARY THUNDERSTORMS

2011-09-12T17:06:00.000-07:00

Ordinary Thunderstorms, William Boyd, HarperCollinsPublishers, 2010, 403 pp

William Boyd is Scottish by descent, was born in Ghana, and educated in Scotland and France. He completed a PhD in literature at Oxford. He is to my thinking a hybrid, an intellectual who has written a dozen novels, won awards but is considered British because he lives there part of the time. (You will see where I am going with this.) I have always been curious about his books, though Ordinary Thunderstorms, his 12th novel, is the first I have read. It won't be the last.

Recently I have come across several discussions on various lit blogs about highbrow vs lowbrow novels and whether or not literary fiction is passe because it doesn't sell well. Some see a trend where literary authors are trying their hands at genre fiction is an effort to sell more copies of their novels. Others see it as a marketing ploy by publishers in an effort to sell more books.

I find most of this speculation to be hogwash, though I am pretty sure marketing personnel are the key suspects. After all, it is their job. I think an author should write what he or she wants to write, should experiment, not always write the same story over and over for the sake of fans, income or profits. Basically, if an author can write well, I will read just about any novel by that author despite subject matter or genre.

William Boyd has a pretty solid reputation as a literary writer. Ordinary Thunderstorms was marketed as a "literary mystery about crime and punishment." See what I mean? Well, it is tremendously exciting, it does involve murder, crime, the dastardly side of big pharma, and the underbelly of London. The violence is brutal and the mystery is complex. Not one truly admirable character inhabits its pages.

However, the novel is about identity. Adam Kindred has returned to the country of his birth after many years in the United States. He is in London to interview for a job. A respected and successful climatologist, he has made a mess of his personal life. While he intends to start anew in London he was surely not planning the drastic transformation he undergoes.

Within 24 hours he is a prime suspect for a murder he did not commit. He makes the decision to go "underground" for a while until he figures out what to do. He goes about as far underground as a person can go in a major metropolis, sleeping in a park, begging for food, and becoming a man with no social identity.

In an interview, William Boyd says his intention was to write about what happens to a person who loses everything that makes him who he is. One thing that happens is that a person who loses his social identity finds he still has a self. Adam is intelligent, resourceful, often impulsive and foolish, a risk taker where people he cares for are involved. His innate goodness and humanity bring him up against a couple of true psychopathic personalities. His intelligence and something like bravery make him a Dickensian character in a modern world.

William Boyd calls no attention to himself as an author, but in straightforward prose tells us a powerful and exciting tale full of heart while it is steeped in all manner of human degradation.

In no way would I call the novel lowbrow. I suppose one could read it just for the thriller aspect, as Boyd does not write in any sort of wordy or obscure manner. He is certainly several cuts above Brad Thor, David Baldacci, and the like. Does that mean he is highbrow?

(Ordinary Thunderstorms is available in hardcover or paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS

2011-09-09T12:35:00.000-07:00

Absolute Beginners, Colin MacInnes, The MacMillan Company, 1959, 223 pp

I was led to this British novel a few years ago from an interview in the Los Angeles Times book section (back when it was truly a book section.) Pauls Toutonghi, then teaching a class on novels about rock music, included a syllabus of such novels. Absolute Beginners was not mentioned in the interview, which means I must have made my own search and found additional titles. Someday I might get around to posting my personal list of rock'n'roll novels.

The novel is about teenage life in London in the late 1950s. It is a luscious mix of parties, jazz, interracial friendships, varieties of sexuality, and social history. There are several great scenes set in jazz clubs, so I guess that is how the book found its way onto my list.

Absolute Beginners is the middle book in what is now called Colin MacInnes's "London Trilogy." When it was first published it was to English teens approximately what The Catcher in the Rye was to American ones. Our narrator however is not much like Holden Caufield except in his hypersensivity to phoniness. He also is never given a name, but we see the life of London teens in that decade through his eyes.

Two social upheavals in British history are prominent in this postwar tale. Due to economics and politics, meaning the Labor party and a new affluence for the middle classes, it was the first decade when teens had money to spend and became a force in the marketplace. It was also a time of massive immigration from various British colonies, injecting a large Black population into the culture and sparking racial tension. For more see this Believer Mag article.

Through his articulate and self-sufficient though nameless narrator, MacInnes gives readers an immersion into this teen culture over the months of one summer, culminating in a race riot. It is a great read and certainly one of the books that signify the arrival of a new era in writing, literature and popular culture.

(Absolute Beginners is out of print but can be found in libraries or purchased from used book sellers.)

THE SAVAGE GIRL

2011-09-07T10:35:00.000-07:00

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The Savage Girl, Alex Shakar, HarperCollinsPublishers, 2001, 275 pp

If a candidate for a PhD in marketing were to write a novel as his thesis, The Savage Girl might fit the bill. Therein lies the trouble with this clever novel. Clearly Alex Shakar had done his research and measured the pulse driving marketing at the turn of the millennium, but his characters are hard to fathom.

Maybe all people involved in marketing become soulless robots who look at consumers as witless marks to be conned into buying crap. Perhaps that was the point?

Ivy Van Urden was on a fast track to becoming a supermodel until her relationship with powerful marketing genius Chas Lacouture triggered a psychotic break. Her sister Ursula, aspiring fine artist, arrives in town to look after Ivy and winds up working for Lacouture's trendspotting firm, Tomorrow, Ltd. Soon enough, Ursula's artistic sense combines with her high IQ and she creates and sells a campaign for a weight reducing water based on the "savage girl" she spotted among the homeless of Middle City.

Not long after that, the elements of this prescient tale combine in toxic and preposterous ways. Ivy gets released from the mental hospital when her insurance runs out and becomes the model for the Savage Girl. But she is no saner than when the breakdown occurred, so it all spirals further downward. I don't believe I have read a thriller about marketing before but now I have.

It sounds thrilling right? And it is. Deep thoughts about "postirony" and the dichotomy inherent in creating want weave through societal commentary alongside non-stop action. But Ursula, Ivy, Chas, plus the other main characters just never came alive. For me, the necessary suspension of disbelief required would not remain suspended. It took me days to read the mere 275 pages.

Somewhere past the halfway point a change occurred, possibly the pacing of the plot, possibly Ursula becoming a character I could believe in or care about, and the last 100 pages flew by. Still, though all the loose ends were tied, though the bad guys lost and the less bad guys kind of won, (there are no good guys in this novel) I didn't feel anything but dread for the future. Again, that may have been the point.

Alex Shakar's second novel, Luminarium has just been released. I have read it and it is stunning. His razor sharp intelligence is obvious in The Savage Girl; his ability to assimilate and recombine vast amounts of sociological data is in no doubt. He just needed to work on those characters and in his new novel, he put it all together. I always like reading first novels because they give clues as to where an author is going to go. It was worth reading The Savage Girl for that very reason.

(The Savage Girl is available in paperback and ebook by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE EIGHTH CIRCLE

2011-09-06T14:46:00.000-07:00

The Eighth Circle, Stanley Ellin, Random House Inc, 1958, 210 pp

This mystery won the Edgar Award in 1959. Murray Kirk is head of a private detective agency in New York City. He gets involved in a case centered around a cop named Lundeen who has been accused of taking a bribe from bookmakers.

Murray Kirk doesn't need the money or the headaches of this case. He has every material thing he has ever wanted and a mistress who is also his good friend. But he is in love with the beautiful and proper Ruth Vincent, Lundeen's fiancee. Murray Kirk takes this case with the intention of proving the cop guilty so he can have the girl.

The story takes a good while to get going, though all the characters and the workings of a detective agency are intriguing. Stanley Ellin contrived a complex story that weaves together a lawyer, a detective, cops, gangsters, women, and New York City society in the 1950s. He does not let the reader find out who is guilty until Murray Kirk does, right at the end of the book.

It wasn't the best mystery I have read but had some unique aspects and kept my interest all the way.

(Like many of the Edgar winners from the 1950s, The Eighth Circle is out of print. Check your local library or a used book seller.)

CHANTICLEER AND THE FOX

2011-09-04T12:14:00.000-07:00

Chanticleer and the Fox, Barbara Cooney (illustrator), HarperCollins, 1958, 33 pp

THE SUNDAY FAMILY READ

This picture book won the Caldecott Medal in 1959. The story is adapted from Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tale, "The Nun's Priest's Tale." There are no nuns or priests in this version.

Chanticleer is the sole rooster belonging to a widow and her two children. The fox tricks the rooster and carries him off. Chanticleer works out a trick of his own and gets free.

The illustrations are indeed excellent, especially the colors and the use of orange as an accent against gold and black. But at the end the rooster, the fox and the widow recite the moral of the story: don't trust flattery. We children don't like our lessons told in such a flat boring tone but we do like to outsmart those who would harm us.

(Chanticleer and the Fox is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

SACCO AND VANZETTI MUST DIE!

2011-09-03T10:15:00.000-07:00

Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die!, Mark Binelli, Dalkey Archive Press, 2006, 353 pp

I read this for a new reading group I joined. It is a great group, willing to read challenging books. This one fits squarely in that category. I can't say that I enjoyed reading it. It felt like work. Mark Binelli seems to have defied every convention of novel writing. Only near the very end did I begin to figure out what he was doing with his characters.

The fictional Sacco and Vanzetti of the novel are vaudeville performers who do slapstick comedy (pie in the face, etc.), a genre of performance art I have never liked. They are tied in oh so loosely with the real Sacco and Vanzetti, Italian immigrants with anarchist connections who were given the death penalty in 1927 for murdering two men during a robbery. The conviction made headlines and is still disputed to this day.

In a mash up of incidents that follow the careers of these comedians, supposed historical data, journal entries, and other extraneous bits, you get an overview of the actual case, some comedy and the personalities of these invented clowns.

I finished the book a few weeks ago and I attended the discussion which was wide-ranging and deep. Looking back now what remains with me is an education in how slapstick comedy works and in what entertainment was like in the early 20th century. I am also haunted by those guys, the fictional Sacco and his partner, Vanzetti, who made up a truly odd couple. Finally, I was stunned with admiration by how Binelli could describe a slapstick act in words alone and make me feel like I was watching it in real time.

I am not sorry I read it. I am a firm believer in reading outside my comfort zone because I always learn something. Also I am at heart an anarchist of sorts and revel in seeing a novelist break all the rules.

(Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die! is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

MRS 'ARRIS GOES TO PARIS

2011-09-01T11:31:00.000-07:00

Mrs 'Arris Goes to Paris, Paul Gallico, Doubleday & Company Inc, 1958, 157 pp

The bestsellers of 1959 are either extremely long or incredibly short. At #9, Mrs 'Arris is one of the short ones. It is a romantic piece of fluff.

Mrs 'Arris is a London char woman who is not that unhappy with her lot but conceives of a desire to own a Dior gown. By means of luck, planning and sacrifice, she gets her wish. Then, as in any fairytale, she learns to watch what she wishes for.

You can read it in an hour and while it is not Breakfast at Tiffany's, it is wickedly fun. Especially if you love Paris.

There is also a made for TV movie starring Angela Lansbury which amazingly you can watch on YouTube.

(Mrs 'Arris Goes to Paris is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE GIRL WHO FELL FROM THE SKY

2011-08-29T12:02:00.000-07:00

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, Heidi W Durrow, Algonquin Books, 2010, 264 pp

I have read some great books this summer but this one was the most beautifully written. Rachel is the daughter of Roger, African American soldier, and Nella, a Scandinavian woman whom Roger married during his service in Germany. As the story opens, we only know that Rachel has somehow lost her family and has been taken in by Roger's mother. Grandma is a hard working woman living in a mostly Black Portland, Oregon neighborhood. She has set ideas about bringing up girl children and is fundamentally kind, though she did not approve of Rachel's mother.

With the lightest touch, Durrow shows us Rachel's emotional state, her grief, her struggle to adapt to Grandma's house and life, her conflicts with schoolmates. Eventually you come to realize the horrendous degree of what happened to Rachel, Nella and Roger.

So much sorrow drenches the first half of the story, my heart literally ached. Then more loss and disaster occurs. Still the style and voice of Heidi Durrow just holds you steady, never letting you look away from the devastating results of racism but keeping you secure in the perception that Rachel is no ordinary victim.

As years pass and Rachel finds her place in this new society (outside the military, in a racially divided town) she gets so darn brave and reckless that she scared me to death. I worried she was too damaged to stand up to all that life was asking of her.

In the end, Durrow shows us not all people are dangerous. Because of love, support, and understanding, because of a generosity of spirit found in some people, Rachel grows into young adulthood with a chance to navigate life as a mixed race woman with a tragic past.

The novel is emotional without being sentimental. It is socially conscious without preaching. Most of all though it is exquisitely written with a Toni Morrison influence that is uncanny. Please, Ms Durrow, keep writing novels.

(The Girl Who Fell From the Sky is available in paperback on the shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE WITCH OF BLACKBIRD POND

2011-08-28T19:03:00.000-07:00

The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Elizabeth George Speare, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1958, 205 pp

THE SUNDAY FAMILY READ

I read this book several times as a kid and it had remained in my memory as a book I loved though I did not remember what it was about. It won the Newbery Award in 1959, the year I turned 13.

At that time there was not a separate genre for Young Adult readers. In my library, where my mother took us every week, there was a children's room and the rest was adult. I would go to the children's room and pick out my own books. This one probably spoke out to me because of the cover, with Kit standing in the marshes looking to the river surrounded by cloudy skies all done in shades of bluish-green. I also had a fascination with witches in my pre-teen years.

Reading it again was the strangest combination of familiarity beneath what felt like a first read. I truly did not remember that the story took place amidst Puritans in the 1760s. I surely did not recall that Kit came from Barbados. It is entirely possible that I had never heard of Barbados when I was 12 and might have been only vaguely aware of what constituted a Puritan.

So I realized (again) that kids can read anything that holds their interest while lacking all manner of factual information related to the book. I can't to this day figure out how that can be true, but it is so. When I read The Winthrop Woman last summer, it was probably all the many readings of The Witch of Blackbird Pond which made it feel so familiar.

The other aspect fairly lost on me back in the day was the romance and love story. I see now that Elizabeth George Speare must have known her Jane Austen. This time, it still took me more than half the story to realize that Kit belonged with Nat. I am not usually so dim about romantic intrigue so I can only assume that Ms Speare was a great writer.

I think what I loved about this book as a girl was Kit herself, with all her warm-hearted impulsiveness, her flaws and her bravery. I could identify with the personality type down to the last brightly hued silk gown along with her love for Hannah and Prudence.

If a book written over fifty years ago can still make me cry (and it did, several times) it is a "good novel" for sure and for all time.

(The Witch of Blackbird Pond is available in paperback on the Newbery shelf at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE UGLY AMERICAN

2011-08-27T10:15:00.000-07:00

The Ugly American, William J Lederer & Eugene Burdick, W W Norton Company, 1958, 285 pp

Though The Ugly American was published in 1958, it rose to #6 on the bestseller list in 1959. Set in the fictional country Sarkhan, it is a fictional account of American foreign policy in Southeast Asia and particularly in Vietnam. The writing style is reminiscent of James Michener, especially his early books such as Tales of the South Pacific. I was surprised at what a page turner it was and read it in just a few hours.

In the 1950s, America had decided that the USSR was our greatest enemy, that Communism was dedicated to the eradication of our "way of life," that foreign aid was the solution to successfully overcoming these threats to freedom and democracy. America, it would seem, was born in revolt against a powerful enemy and so must always have one selected to keep us going.

The point in The Ugly American is not that we should fail to fight against Communism, but that we were going about it in all the wrong ways. The authors claimed that incidents in the book were true with only the names changed. According to their views, we were losing the fight against Communism in Southeast Asia because our diplomats and foreign service workers were alienating the peoples of Vietnam, Indonesia, Burma, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand due to arrogance, rudeness, and the inappropriate appropriations of billions of dollars in those countries.

Ambassadors and their administrative aides seldom knew anything about the countries where they served, could not speak the languages and consequently were woefully out of touch with the peoples. In contrast to the chapters exemplifying the above are others about honest, hardworking, well intentioned Americans who actually helped certain Asian villagers improve their lots by small effective measures such as showing them how to farm more effectively or start small industries.

The book had a large impact in America and some say it led the way to the formation of the Peace Corps. I was surprised to see a chapter, "The Lessons of War," in which a US Army Major, one of the good ones, studied Mao Tse-tung's writings on war and figured out why the Western armies cannot ever win against Asian guerillas.

As I finished the book, I wondered if it was still relevant today. After all, haven't we won in Asia because of Coca Cola, Hollywood movies, fashion, the internet, and all that? I came across Mekong Network that featured a review of The Ugly American. Bruce Sharpe, founder of the site, is an American who became involved with modern day issues in Southeast Asia after he began tutoring refugees from those countries in Chicago. The last line of his review states,
"And yet America's foreign policy is still haunted by the same mistakes. The Cold War is long finished and communism discredited, but it hardly matters. Who needs an enemy like communism, when you are already your own worst enemy?"

So we still have a problem with our image, not only in the Middle East but also in Asia. And yes, The Ugly American is still relevant.

I know that I have readers of this blog from Southeast Asian countries. I am curious to know if any of you have read The Ugly American and would like to hear from you. Did you find the book to be true or false or some combination?

(The Ugly American is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

GOOD OMENS

2011-08-25T12:40:00.000-07:00

Good Omens, Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, William Morrow, 1990, 369 pp

Surely I am going to get some dissenting comments for this review. Left to my own reading plan I would have read this book when I ran out of anything else to read that was written by Neil Gaiman. Alas, it was chosen by one of my reading groups. I found it mildly entertaining but did not love it, though it seems nearly everyone else in the world did. I was in good company at the reading group meeting though. They nearly all disliked it so much that only three of us even finished the book.

So what do we have here? We have Armageddon made funny, in a British humor style. Actually the humor is the best part and is usually truly funny. We have a demon and an angel who are friends and secretly don't want the world to end. Also a cool group of kids who call themselves The Them.

The potential is there. The similarities to A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (a book I love) are numerous. Satire is probably one of the trickiest genres, but I thought Neil Gaiman was adulterated by the addition of Terry Pratchett. Oh yes, and did I mention there are footnotes? I purely hate footnotes in fiction. They are bad enough in non-fiction.

What I learned:
1) I am a tough customer when it comes to humorous fiction.
2) I don't need to read Terry Pratchett this life time.
3) The Apocalypse is best approached with humor. Serious novelists would do better to remain in the present or the past.
4) I love Neil Gaiman so much that I will forgive him anything.

(Good Omens is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER

2011-08-24T12:31:00.000-07:00

Lady Chatterley's Lover, D H Lawrence, Penguin Classics (most recent edition, pub 2010), 1928 in Italy, 1959 in United States, 283 pp

Banned for over 30 years in Great Britain and the United States, Lawrence's novel about his sexual theories has become famous. Lady Chatterley, married to a man paralyzed physically and emotionally in World War I, falls in love with the gardener. They have a passionate affair.

The writing is not good, in my opinion, but all feminists thank the author for putting forth the idea that women should enjoy sex and have orgasms.

I reread this a few years ago for one of my reading groups. It sparked a lively discussion! The youngest member of the group wondered what all the fuss was about. The ban was lifted in the United States in 1959 and Lady Chatterley's Lover was the #5 bestseller in that year. I recall reading the book while on a babysitting job in the early 60s when I was a teenager trying to learn about sex.

When is the first time you read it?

(Lady Chatterley's Lover is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

SEA OF POPPIES

2011-08-20T10:49:00.000-07:00

Sea of Poppies, Amitav Ghosh, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2008, 468 pp

I have wanted to read this novel since it was published in 2008. It is the first of a trilogy. The second volume, River of Smoke, is being published in September, 2011.

Sea of Poppies is a wonderful book written somewhat in the style of Salman Rushdie with a bit of Charles Dickens thrown in. I was also reminded of some of the great historical fiction from the 1940s which I have read as part of My Big Fat Reading Project, especially Mika Waltari's The Egyptian and The Adventurer.

India, 1938, is in the clutches of the British and their template of empire building, the East India Company. Having converted most of India's agriculture to the raising of poppies, thus devastating the country's ability to feed her own people, the Company is gearing up for the Opium Wars with China. Free trade is the religion of empire building but the Chinese Emperor has objected to the systematic drugging of his populace and is attempting to control the importation of opium. Coming on the heels of the abolition of the slave trade, Britain's coffers are severely jeopardized.

That is the historical context from an Indian point of view and is educational as well as enlightening in terms of 19th century world history. Such issues were not addressed when I studied history in school. But the delight of Sea of Poppies arises from its characters. Here you have a destitute poppy grower, a deposed Raja, various indentured laborers, a sailor born of his slave mother and her master from Baltimore, MD, as well as various British mariners, businessmen and more.

All of these characters play roles in the manning up and filling with passengers of the Ibis, a ship destined for the Opium Wars. Despite such a large cast, you get to know most of them well and are seduced into caring about them. Their backgrounds, sorrows, hopes and dreams are the driving force of the story.

That is not all. Amitav Ghosh has also created a philosophical tale about change, migration and the intermingling of nationalities, social castes and language. His polyglot of tongues and slang come close to overwhelming the reader with unfamiliar words, but he does just enough explication and provides a glossary of sorts, so that you can satisfy your desperate desire to find out what happens next.

I love books like this. After reading plenty of contemporary literary fiction, which tends to dwell in small, almost claustrophobic worlds of towns, or single families, or one current event, reading Sea of Poppies is like embarking on a voyage on the open sea amongst passengers from many lands and backgrounds under a huge open expanse of sky.

As befits a traditional series, the book ends on a total cliffhanger, leaving you longing for the next installment. Thankfully, I've only got to wait a month or so.

(Sea of Poppies is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

EXODUS

2011-08-19T13:54:00.000-07:00

Exodus, Leon Uris, Doubleday, 1958, 599 pp

The #1 bestseller of 1959 was this long book about the history of the Zionist movement and the founding of modern day Israel. I have previously read The Hope, Herman Wouk's novel, which takes up the story in 1958 soon after Exodus ends, and carries it through the Six Day War of 1967. Wouk provides the reader with the 1950s American government's views on the conflict. I have also read A Tale of Love and Darkness, in which Amos Oz gives his account of growing up in Jerusalem in the 40s and 50s.

The result for me of reading all three comprises a start on being able to see into the complexities of Israel. I can't say that I understand all the ramifications of what is so rightly called a "conflict." It seems clear to me that Great Britain has behaved treacherously since before World War II, when it comes to dealing with both the Jews and the Arabs. In Exodus, the British come off very badly indeed and are accused of playing both sides, inflaming the Arabs to a point where any resolution looks unlikely until the end of time.

Leon Uris is not much of a writer. His characters, especially the women, are as flat as pancakes. His plotting skills depend on the history he obviously researched. Too many skirmishes and battles along with endless accounts of overcoming a lack of weapons and ammunition with clever strategy, add a good 100 pages to what is already an overly long book.

What he did convey brilliantly however is the power of purpose and hope to bring back to life a people who by the end of the Holocaust had been as beaten down, oppressed and overcome as any group of human beings on this earth.

(Exodus is available in mass market paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE RULES OF THE TUNNEL

2011-08-16T13:11:00.000-07:00

The Rules of the Tunnel, My Brief Period of Madness, Ned Zeman, Gotham Books, 2011, 307 pp

Who knew that reading a memoir about depression, mania and amnesia could be so much fun? You read about Ned Zeman's descent into madness and begin to feel a bit mad yourself. You wonder if your aren't possibly bipolar. But you don't feel depressed for a moment while reading this manic handbook of his journey through today's mental health system.

Ned Zeman, a long-time writer for Vanity Fair, has that zippy, ironic, right up to the moment style. He knows his territory because that is what reporters do; they find out all there is to know about their topic. Add to that the experiences he has had writing about eccentric adventurers who were about as manic as they come, who pushed all known limits, and who died young in places like Antarctica.

When depression settles in, when the meds can no longer get him out of bed, after therapist one through five fail to help, he goes the distance to "the treatment of last resort." His troubles with electroconvulsive therapy, known back in the 1950s as shock treatment, are the truly creepy part of the story. He was warned about possible temporary short-term amnesia but like everything else in Ned's life, his reaction was over the top. Despite a team of close friends, a devoted girlfriend and two loving brothers, all attempting to keep watch over him between treatments, he races from city to city, from woman to woman and remembers none of it.

Ultimately, he must use his highly honed researching and profiling skills to reconstruct the two years of memory burned out of his brain by those pesky shocks. This is the only part you find hard to believe. If the human mind is capable of solving the problems of the human mind, Ned Zeman is living proof of that hypothesis. In his case, it is a fitting sort of justice. Here is a guy who specialized in evasion, never quite forthcoming with his therapists, his employers, his girlfriends or his friends. Being dangerously self-involved and compulsively self-defeating, he appeared incapable of listening to the common sense advice from any of them.

Still, you can't help liking and admiring this maddening individual. Because he makes life exciting and like many socially challenged artists, he attracts help and care wherever he goes. Lucky for him, because as he documents, most artists and writers who followed the path of meds, therapist, mental wards and shock treatment are no longer with us. Many of them never wrote again after the "treatment of last resort."

If you have suffered from manic depression or bipolar disorder or the inevitable ups and downs of life, Ned Zeman's memoir will make you think twice about taking those meds. He might just keep you out of mental hospitals altogether. The surprising conclusion, which you don't see coming, takes a mere three pages at the very end of the story. You should definitely read those last three pages.

(The Rules of the Tunnel is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.

ACROSS THE UNIVERSE

2011-08-14T19:03:00.000-07:00

Across the Universe, Beth Revis, Razorbill, 2011, 398 pp

The Sunday Family Read

Wow, did this YA novel have the buzz when it came out earlier this year. I can see why: it is science fiction with a sixteen year old heroine. Truly this is unusual.

Amy decided to join her parents in cryogenic sleep. They are on the spaceship Godspeed headed to a new planet and scheduled to arrive 300 years from when they launched. Amy gets woken up too early and when she realizes that she will be older than her beloved parents when they awaken, she is beyond dismayed. She meets Elder, raised on the ship and being groomed to take over as supreme ruler over the thousands of people who are keeping the ship going until they land. But mysteries and attempted murders of frozen passengers bring them together in an effort to save the day. Really this book has it all.

The story telling and plotting are such that I could not put the book down. There are some glaring flaws in the writing. You could say that it is a new twist on a story that has been told many times by better writers or you could say that Beth Revis's influences are transparent.

All in all, she has opened a genre to teens. Especially cool is the Amy character who exemplifies the teen view of life quite well and is way less annoying than Bella but not quite as cool as Katniss.

I checked out several YA reviewers who are also teens and Across the Universe was pretty much a hit. The blogosphere is now well populated by teenaged reviewers, something I had wished for a couple years ago.

The book is also the first in a trilogy with the second book, A Million Suns, coming out in January 2012.

(Across the Universe is available in hardcover on the shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore. It can also be ordered from the store for download as an e-book.)

BOOKS READ FROM 1958

2011-08-12T10:46:00.000-07:00

I am engaged in a self-directed study of 20th century literature. I call this My Big Fat Reading Project. Today's post is my reading list for 1958. Most of these books have been reviewed here on my blog. If a title has a star you can search the blog and find the review.

The first 10 books are the top bestsellers of the year, according to Publisher's Weekly as compiled in an out of print book I found in my local library years ago but which is no longer there. Currently you can find these lists in Making the List by Michael Korda, (also out of print but available from used book sellers.)

The next section of my list covers award winners from the year, in the order that those awards were founded.

The final section is my own curated list made up of authors I have decided to follow during the Project, giving myself a full overview of their development as authors. These books are listed alphabetically by title.

If you know of an important book from 1958 that I missed, please mention it in the comments or send me an email (my email address can be found on my profile page. )

BESTSELLERS
1. Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak*
2. Anatomy of a Murder, Robert Traver*
3, Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov*
4. Around the World With Auntie Mame, Patrick Dennis*
5. From the Terrace, John O'Hara*
6. Eloise at Christmastime, Kay Thompson*
7. Ice Palace, Edna Ferber*
8. The Winthrop Woman, Anya Seton*
9. The Enemy Camp, Jerome Weidman*
10. Victorine, Frances Parkinson Keyes*

AWARD WINNERS
PULITZER: A Death in the Family, James Agee
NBA: The Wapshot Chronicle, John Cheever*
NEWBERY: Rifles for Watie, Harold Keith*
CALDECOTT: Time of Wonder, Robert McCloskey*
EDGAR: Room to Swing, Ed Lacy*
HUGO: The Big Time, Fritz Leiber*

OTHERS
1. Balthazar, Lawrence Durrell*
2. The Bell, Iris Murdoch*
3. The Best of Everything, Rona Jaffe*
4. Boulevard, Robert Sabatier
5. Breakfast at Tiffany's, Truman Capote*
6. Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac*
7. The End of the Road, John Barth*
8. Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, Jorge Amado*
9. A Game for the Living, Patricia Highsmith*
10. The Ginger Man, J P Donleavy*
11. Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, Robert A Heinlein*
12. The Long Dream, Richard Wright*
13. The Lost Traveler, Sanora Babb*
14. The Luckiest Girl, Beverly Cleary*
15. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Simone de Beauvoir*
16. Methuselah's Children, Robert A Heinlein*
17. Mount Olive, Lawrence Durrell*
18. Nine Coaches Waiting, Mary Stewart*
19. Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, Kenzaburo Oe*
20. Our Man in Havana, Graham Greene*
21. Playback, Raymond Chandler*
22. A Ripple From the Storm, Doris Lessing*
23. Robinson, Muriel Spark*
24. The Suffrage of Elvira, V S Naipaul*
25. The Sundial, Shirley Jackson*
26. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
27. Where the Air is Clear, Carlos Fuentes*
28. The White Witch, Elizabeth Goudge
29. A World of Strangers, Nadine Gordimer*

A NOVEL BOOKSTORE

2011-08-10T13:30:00.000-07:00

A Novel Bookstore, Laurence Cosse, Europa Editions, 2009, 416 pp

I enjoyed this book immensely while I was reading it and thought about it for days afterward, not for the writing, not for the mystery, but because of the subject matter. Two people, a rich woman and a book lover, start a bookstore in Paris. They have a distinct vision: they will only sell "good novels" from over the years by authors from many countries. By independent bookstore standards, they are wildly successful and then come the attacks.

The purported mystery concerning who is behind the attacks is not much except a sort of framework for telling the story. It does not even get satisfactorily solved. Half of the reading group in which we discussed the book were very mad about that!

The writing is just barely alright and I could not tell if the translation was to blame or the original French. I think some of both. There were an inordinate number of sentences that were odd, incomprehensible or just plain bad. That is ironic for a novel about the best written novels of the past 300 years.

In the end, none of these quibbles mattered a bit. For myself, a bookstore lover, a reading fool, a former bookseller and a novice writer, it was just plain wonderful to read about the planning, the decisions on what to carry, the ordering and stocking of the shelves, the day to day life of the store. How well I know the drama inherent in just that.

I also reveled in the characters. Francesca, the founder and owner, is a fascinating woman with a quintessential European past as well as a deep seated purpose to do something with her life that matters. Though Ivan, the manager and bookseller, is severely challenged when it comes to women and affairs of the heart, he is consistently an interesting and complex character. His love interest, Alis, is straight out of a Simone de Beauvoir novel.

Despite the clunky plotting and disastrous sentences, Laurence Cosse writes passages about the importance of literature that are as eloquent as Camus, as heartfelt as Barbara Kingsolver. This book is a tribute to books, writers, and bookstores while sounding a warning to civilization about what we stand to lose if we let literature be determined only by the bottom line.

She raises all the current issues and questions about the state of literature today. By the end of our reading group discussion, we had delved into all of them.

(A Novel Bookstore is available in paperback on the shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

A WORLD OF STRANGERS

2011-08-08T12:31:00.000-07:00

A World of Strangers, Nadine Gordimer, Simon & Schuster, 1958, 312 pp

As always, when I begin a story or novel by Nadine Gordimer, I have to reset something in my mind in order to navigate her sentences. They are beautiful sentences but are somehow constructed differently than what I am used to reading in fiction. Someday I will take the time to analyze why and how.

Because no sooner do I make the mental reset, than I am absorbed into her story. In A World of Strangers she has created a compelling main character, Tobias Hood, a man! The exclamation point is meant to show my astonishment at how she could write an entire novel in first person as a man. It works; she nailed the viewpoint completely.

Toby Hood, a young Englishman with already formed strong views about life, is sent to run the Johannesburg office of his uncle's publishing company. Raised by liberal parents post WW II, educated at Oxford, Toby is in complete rebellion against causes and wants nothing to do with the abstractions of racial issues or politics. He enjoys living the privileged life.

Johannesburg in the 1950s is a hotbed of racial issues and related politics, so A World of Strangers is a story about the awakening of political consciousness. However, compared to Doris Lessing's Martha, this awakening happens to Toby because of his interactions with people, not because of his exposure to ideas. That is what makes the novel come alive, what made me keep working through thoses sentences and wanting to find out how it would turn out for Toby.

(A World of Strangers is currently out of print. You can find it in libraries or get it from a used book seller.

FLY TRAP

2011-08-07T14:47:00.000-07:00

Fly Trap, Frances Hardinge, HarperCollins Publishers, 2011, 584 pp

THE SUNDAY FAMILY READ

While reading Fly Trap, I was struck by how fantasy, in all its many forms and for any given age group, just might be the most fun one can have as a reader. Who can ever forget their first reading of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or The Children of the Amulet? Portals to other worlds, strange creatures, and odd twists of time are such lovely flights of imagination in which not everything has to make sense. Always there is the delicious thrill of evil lurking, and always a hero or heroine equal to overcoming that evil.

So while Fly Trap is intended for readers age 11-13, I would recommend it to any reader who is still willing to be transported into another world. Mosca Mye is a fabulous heroine, equal to Harry Potter or Philip Pullman's Lyra Belaqua, and yet is uniquely herself. "Drips fell from the tip of a pointed nose. Beneath a drooping bonnet with a frayed brim, hair spiked and straggled like a tempest-tossed blackbird's nest. An olive green dress two sizes too big was hitched at the waist and daubed knee-high in thick yellow mud. And behind the clinging strands of damp hair, two large black eyes glistened like coal and gave the marketplace a look that spoke of coal's grit, griminess, and hidden fire." That is Mosca - orphan, scrapper, nearly always hungry and cold, careening through life righting wrongs and dreaming of warmth, food and a soft bed.

Her animal companion is an equally hungry goose, Saracen, who also acts as bodyguard. Her human companion and partner in crime is the poet and grifter Eponymous Clent, a man with a quick wit and a horror of a day's work, who is usually talking his way out of the latest disaster he created. The three arrive in Toll hoping to make their way to warmer, more prosperous lands for the winter. Naturally Toll is not what it seems, and they are instantly entangled in both their own deep troubles as well as the twisted circumstances of the town. It is the role of Eponymous to come up with plans, which Mosca carries out despite any amount of hardship and danger.

Toll is a town that serves as the sole gateway from one area to another; it is as two sided as a coin, with daytime and nighttime set simultaneously in the same streets, markets and alleys, though never can the two meet or interact. In this world, a person's place and name is determined by his or her hour of birth. Every house has a patron saint, a little god called a Beloved, and Mosca's Beloved is Palpitattle - He Who Keeps Flies Out of Jams and Butter Churns - explaining Mosca's name, which means housefly. In this town, all are subject to their names and Beloveds, except the Locksmiths who play day against night in an effort to control everything.

In a story of non-stop action and incident, Frances Hardinge magically manages to fill in the back-story from the first volume in the series, Fly By Night, and explain the religion of the Beloveds, the politics of Toll, and the dastardly goal of the evil Locksmiths. Her description of how Toll-by-Day becomes Toll-by-Night rivals the writing of Neil Gaiman and China Mieville. Possibly because I am an adult, I got weary of reading what started to seem an endless tale and thought Hardinge could have left off about 100 pages without harm. However, I remember being of a reading age where the longer the book the better, so I doubt that younger readers would have the same problem.

No matter your age, I highly recommend Fly Trap to those who like the fantasy genre. It would make a great read for a middle-school book group as well.

(Fly Trap is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

WHERE THE AIR IS CLEAR

2011-08-04T16:43:00.000-07:00

Where the Air is Clear, Carlos Fuentes, Ivan Obolensky Inc, 1960, 378 pp

So I have entered the world of Fuentes, with his first novel, published in Mexico in 1958. It was a treacherous portal for me. In the first few pages I saw that I needed some background in Mexican history. Thanks to the internet, that was easy and helped me tie together the paltry loose ends I knew about Mexico. I should also point out that Mexican PR in Los Angeles is terrible, so I had to overcome some prejudices to get into Fuentes's head.

Ixca Cienfuegos, a character in the book, is our omniscient third person narrator (when he isn't a first person narrator) who also, according to some, represents the Aztec sun god Huitzilopochtli, come back to avenge himself and Mexico's indigenous peoples on the descendants of the Spanish conquistadors. Confusing? Oh yes.

Otherwise, there is not much of a plot. The book is more of a commentary on Mexican government and society in the mid 1950s, comprised of vignettes and various intertwined accounts of the lives of the characters. Where the Air is Clear has been compared to Dos Passos's USA Trilogy, which I have not read. But the method of the story telling reminded me a bit of James Michener. (I like James Michener by the way.)

Finally, Fuentes is bemoaning the usual state of affairs after a revolution, where the rebels become the new status quo, creating a new bourgeoisie made up of the nouveau riche. I did learn more about Mexico than I knew before. I think I could grow to like Carlos Fuentes, but I am not there yet.

(Where the Air is Clear is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

STONE ARABIA

2011-08-03T10:18:00.000-07:00

Stone Arabia, Dana Spiotta, Scribner, 2011, 235 pp

Dana Spiotta's third novel hit me so hard and deeply that I haven't been able to write about it for weeks. I won't rehash the plot because you can find that in numerous places on the Web. Briefly, it is a story about a musician and his younger sister in Los Angeles.

What it is really about is the life of a creative individual who was never recognized by the music industry or by pop culture. I would guess that such a fate is usual for a huge percentage of creative persons. Most of us take it more or less in stride, "move on" as they say, find other ways to make a living, sometimes do our creative thing as a hobby. Nik and his sister Denise never moved on.

I was surprised and delighted by Spiotta's previous novel, Eat the Document. In fact I think it was better written than Stone Arabia. But it was about revolutionary politics and its fallout in terms of the personal lives of those involved. I have never participated in anything remotely political, I don't like politics and don't think anyone can achieve positive societal change through it.

I do love music; have been a professional musician and songwriter. I do think that art, music, and literature can effect societal change. In fact, all I have ever truly desired to do in life is play music, read books and try to write both. I have had close to zero success with any of that.

Nik chose to retreat from life, hole up in a cabin in Topanga Canyon, work as a bartender and keep creating. He had about five fans, his sister Denise being number one.

What is success? How much does one person owe another? How true is memory? Is the life we see on television, in the news, more interesting, more impacting than our own little lives? What is creativity for? Big questions in a little book that reminds me, now that I think of it, of the early novels of Carolyn See (mother of Lisa See.) Spiotta says her inspiration as a writer comes from Don DeLillo.

I found Nik, Denise, Denise's daughter Ada, so annoying at times. Only after finishing the novel did I realize that I was supposed to be annoyed. This author gets under your skin and makes you look again at your cherished beliefs in new lights. It is an uncomfortable experience.

For me, she made it all right to feel really sad and discouraged about not having come even close to the dreams I had when I was young. Nik just refused to accept that fact. Whether Spiotta meant for it to happen or not, I ended up seeing him as some kind of tarnished hero.

(Stone Arabia is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE SUNDIAL

2011-08-01T14:05:00.000-07:00

The Sundial, Shirley Jackson, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1958, 245 pp

Shirley Jackson was a writer unlike any other. The Sundial was not my favorite book of hers and yet it has all the qualities that are uniquely hers: suspense, psychological insight, humor and irony.

The Hallorans live in a manor house, outside the local village. Grandfather Halloran, a self-made millionaire, built the house and surrounded the estate completely by a wall. "The first Mr Halloran...was a man who, in the astonishment of finding himself extremely wealthy, could think of nothing better to do with his money that set up his own world."

As the story opens, Richard, son of the first Mr Halloran, is head of the house, though he is an invalid suffering from dementia and confined to a wheelchair. Lionel, Richard's son, has been buried that day, having suffered a fatal tumble down the stairs. Richard's current wife, suspected within the family of having pushed the hapless Lionel down the stairs, is clearly in charge.

But Aunt Fanny, Richard's sister, has had a vision: the world is going to end with her father, the first but dead Mr Halloran, promising to protect the family so that they will be the only survivors and will build a new world.

I found all of this less than exciting as I read the first fifty pages. But soon enough, Shirley Jackson put into motion the conflicting interests, the creepy details and the irony until I was intrigued. Oddly enough, through there is a final twist of the plot in the end, it was not the denouement that made the story. It was the characters.

This is an author who has an almost mystical ability to delve into the psychological quirks of people, whether they be her own children, as in Raising Demons, or the disturbed heroine of The Bird's Nest.

(I found The Sundial at one of my local libraries. It does not appear to be easily found on-line. Possibly used bookstores. Anyone have an tips on how to find this book for purchase?)

THE FOLK KEEPER

2011-07-31T13:57:00.000-07:00

The Folk Keeper, Franny Billingsley, Simon & Schuster, 1999, 162 pp

THE SUNDAY FAMILY READ

Corin is the Folk Keeper. He keeps the Folk at bay, invisible angry creatures who sour the milk, make the hens stop laying, ruin the crops. Through the Folk Door, into the caverns, via the cellar, Corin brings the food offerings and spends hours in the dark, keeping the Folk Record.

But Corin is really Corinna, an orphan who has learned to protect herself from drudgery and humiliation. Now she is being fetched by a wealthy family from Cliffsend in the Northern Isles. Some mysterious past has come to claim her.

The tale continues as Corin learns the ways of the extra fierce and wild Folk of the Isles. He becomes a friend of Finian, a boy who prefers boats to running an estate. Danger from Sir Edward, the frustrated heir, forces Corin to learn who and what she really is.

I loved the folk tale atmosphere that Billingsley creates. This is the kind of story, like Island of the Blue Dolphins, that pits a strong young girl against hardship. As Corinna comes of age, her fierceness is tempered by her discoveries about her true nature. The author investigates that odd territory many girls must pass through when we might rather have been a boy and must come to terms with the restrictions of our gender. She does it well with the lightest sensitivity.

The Folk Keeper is also a love story told in the most tasteful yet realistic way, making it completely appropriate for middle school readers. I have not found a book quite like this in a long while.

(The Folk Keeper is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

TURN OF MIND

2011-07-30T09:47:00.000-07:00

Turn of Mind, Alice LaPlante, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011, 305 pp

Though Turn of Mind revolves around a murder mystery, the real mystery being investigated is what goes on in the mind of someone suffering from Alzheimer's disease.

Jennifer White was a successful orthopedic surgeon forced to retire in her fifties due to dementia. When the novel opens she is 64 years old and somewhere in the middle stages of the disease. Amanda, her neighbor three doors down and her best friend for decades, has been found dead. Four fingers were surgically removed from the right hand of the dead body but other than that, virtually no forensic evidence can be found, making Jennifer the prime person of interest in the case.

Certainly a unique premise for a murder investigation. How do police investigators get reliable information from a woman who does not recognize her own children some days? If Jennifer had committed the murder, would she even remember doing so? The novel is compulsively readable.

As the shared history of Jennifer and Amanda is revealed, it becomes clear that despite their professional accomplishments, these two women lived in a fraught state of moral ambiguity, playing out many years of crime and punishment. Jennifer was a better surgeon than she was a mother. Amanda was an unyielding and strict schoolteacher with no children of her own. Both were married to eccentric men and the couples knew more about each other than might be strictly healthy.

Anyone who has cared for or lost a loved one who was in the throes of Alzheimer's will recognize the day to day states Jennifer exhibits, the techniques used to halt the memory loss, the medications used and the effects of steady deterioration on friends, relatives and caregivers. In fact, the main appeal of Turn of Mind could be its purported inside view of Jennifer's mind, precisely because no one actually knows what an Alzheimer's patient is thinking, perceiving, or experiencing except by observing the person's actions and responses.

Improbably, the novel is written primarily in the first person voice of Jennifer, alternating between her journal entries and the thoughts in her mind as she thinks them. Alice LePlante, who herself cared for a parent afflicted with Alzheimer's, imagined her way into the mental workings of dementia.

One of the notable features of family members interacting with an Alzheimer's victim is the way they will discuss what they think might be going on with that person's mental and emotional state. What a relief then to read exactly what Jennifer is thinking, feeling, and perceiving as she disrobes in the middle of a grocery store or attempts to ascertain what her son and daughter are trying to tell her.

Some of the most poignant scenes are those where Jennifer recalls incidents from her early life: her mother's death, her daughter's birth, falling in love with her husband.

Whether any of it is true or believable, author LaPlante has the literary chops to carry if off. She makes the reader truly care about Jennifer. She gets you on her side. In the end, when the mystery is solved, you are relieved at the outcome, for Jennifer's sake.

Nearly all the pre-publication reviews from both critics and readers were deliriously positive. A few have mentioned that the murder mystery itself leaves something to be desired. But the mystery of the mind has surely been solved. No one mentions that Alzheimer's has no known cause or cure. I wonder what Jennifer would think about that.

(Turn of Mind is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE SUFFRAGE OF ELVIRA

2011-07-28T12:24:00.000-07:00

The Suffrage of Elvira, V S Naipaul, Alfred A Knopf, 1958, 179 pp

Naipaul's second novel again takes place in Trinidad. It is a spoof on democracy and elections in a developing country.

Mr Surujpat Harbans is running for General Assembly as representative for the village of Elvira. Of course he doesn't live there but lives in the city. He is financing his own campaign and visits Elvira to line up his supporters. The villagers, in just four years of democracy, have figured out how to make money for themselves by offering various services to the candidate.

This makes for a hilarious story as Harbans is fleeced for everything from posters to a loudspeaking van and a final cavalcade of taxis on election eve. Then there are the niceties of the Hindu vote, the Muslim vote, the Negro vote and the Spanish vote, not to mention various necessary bribes. One of the funniest lines comes from a less wealthy candidate who proclaims that there ought to be a law about how much a candidate can spend on his own election campaign. This story is set in 1950!

Apparently Naipaul's humor turns to a more bitter cynicism in his later novels, which I have not read. So far, in The Mystic Masseur and in this one, he provides great entertainment and an inside look at the various peoples who make up post colonial life in Trinidad.

(The Suffrage of Elvira is out of print. It can be found in libraries and from used book sellers.)

UNTOLD STORY

2011-07-26T17:33:00.000-07:00

Untold Story, Monica Ali, Scribner, 2011, 259 pp

What if Diana, Princess of Wales, had not died, but instead had staged her death and escaped into anonymity? This is the premise of Monica Ali's new novel. The manner in which she creates the tale demonstrates her versatility, being the author who also gave us an inside look at Bangladeshi immigrants in Brick Lane and at the life of a top London chef with In the Kitchen.

The Princess, aided by her private secretary, takes on a new identity in Kensington, a small American Midwestern town, posing as a divorcee in hiding from an abusive husband. Lydia, as she calls herself, comes across as sweet but a bit dull, beautiful but low on self-esteem. She has managed to surround herself with female friends who don't pry.

Her boyfriend, Carson, wants to know more than she can reveal, so though he helps to keep her company, he also causes her continuous mental and emotional turmoil. When John Grabowski, British photojournalist on sabbatical to write a book, washes up at the Kensington bed-and-breakfast, the tension mounts.

Despite plastic surgery and darkened hair, the paparazzo who had photographed Diana intensely during the crazy years before her "death" recognizes the former princess by her eyes. It would be the scoop of his life, but he (and the reader) find out what this woman is really made of. The final chapters read like a thriller, with the exception that thrillers often have predictable, formulaic endings. The denouement of Untold Story is satisfyingly unpredictable and perplexing.

When released in the United Kingdom on March 31 of this year, the novel was the most reviewed book throughout the following week, stirring up intense controversy amongst British critics. Did Monica Ali desert her multicultural vision and stoop to trashy commercialism just in time for the Royal Wedding? Or did she rescue Princess Diana from her tabloid identity and conjure up a reverse fairy tale that explores the cost of our celebrity culture and the price paid by non-conforming women?

I go with the latter opinion. Lydia, her female friends, the boyfriend and Grabowski are certainly familiar types found in our everyday world. In other hands, the fate of a beautiful and world famous woman leaving it all behind, including her sons, could have been no better than chick lit with a twist. But Untold Story goes deeper. Even the most avid Diana fanatic would have to ask herself if she would really want to be a princess in the 21st century.

(Untold Story is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE LUCKIEST GIRL

2011-07-23T10:52:00.000-07:00

The Luckiest Girl, Beverly Cleary, HarperCollins, 1958, 297 pp

The Sunday Family Read

This was my top favorite novel when I was a teenager. I don't even remember how many times I read it; at least once a year and every year it meant something different to me as I went through boy friends and heart breaks. I can still recall my mental picture of the pink raincoat with the velvet collar. I don't think my library copy had the dust jacket as illustrated above.

I identified so completely with Shelley being bored with her boyfriend, feeling misunderstood by her mother, making plans to reinvent herself when the new school year began.

Most of all, I envied her for the chance to spend an entire school year away from home in California! I probably first read The Luckiest Girl when I was twelve or thirteen. By the time "California Dreamin" came out in 1965, I had already been dreaming about living in California for years. It took several more decades but now I do!

Reading the book again now, I was amazed by how truly Beverly Cleary captured what it was like to be a teenager at that time. It was the end of an era. The straight (meaning no drugs), good (meaning no sex) teen girl was already a thing of the past by the time my youngest sister entered high school.

I think many teen girls are boy crazy, even today, but man, it was an obsession in the early sixties, because it was the only outlet for mischief most suburban, well brought up girls had. I never even drank alcohol until I went to college. Of course, by then it was the mid-sixties, everything changed and we all just went wild.

Would teens today like The Luckiest Girl? It might seem as old fashioned as Pride and Prejudice. But I am going to see if one of my granddaughters will read it. I will tell them, "This is what it was like to be a teenage girl when I was growing up." They will most likely roll their eyes.

(The Luckiest Girl is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

ROBINSON

2011-07-22T10:25:00.000-07:00

Robinson, Muriel Spark, J B Lippincott Company, 1958, 186 pp

What is it about the 1950s and novels about wrecks on deserted islands? In Muriel Spark's second novel, three survivors of a plane crash find themselves on a tiny island in the south Atlantic. Robinson is an eccentric hermit who owns the island, named after himself, and lives there with an adopted young boy. Once a year, a boat stops there and the crew harvests the pomegranates.

By adding the three characters from the plane crash, one of them a woman, Spark has just enough people to set up tension, an apparent murder and a look at various approaches to religion and life, as well as a bit of romance.

It is all done in such a way that little resembles any other novel I have read. Quirky, close to brilliant, this short book kept me riveted to the story and left me satisfied at the end.

(Robinson is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

ANTHILL

2011-07-21T13:30:00.000-07:00

Anthill, E O Wilson, W W Norton & Company, 2010, 378 pp

The Buddha introduced a major change in religion by teaching a way of living called The Middle Path. In order to understand a problem, he taught, a person should start without bias, investigate from various angles, analyze the findings, understand the truth, find a reasonable conclusion, and then act. It sounds rather scientific as well as philosophical.

E O Wilson, naturalist, Harvard professor, author of Pulitzer Prize winning scientific books, has written a novel that celebrates the Middle Path.

His hero, Raff Cody, is one of those Harry Potter types, or if you will, an old fashioned hero, who has an upright soul, believes in honor and goodness, but is brave and has enough intelligence to solve big dangerous problems. In other words, he is not a victim, not given to extremes, but will give all he has got to whatever is his highest passion.

Raff Cody's highest passion is an area of fairly virgin land near his home in Alabama, where he spent hours as a boy, exploring and observing the natural world. He dedicates his life to keeping that tract free of harmful development that would endanger its ecological balance and its many species of plants, insects and animals.

Wilson attracted some fairly snarky reviews last year from "literary" critics who just had to complain about his novelist failings. But both Margaret Atwood and Barbara Kingsolver (two of my top favorite novelists) were enchanted and impressed. That was enough to make me curious. I was also a child who watched ants.

Anthill is a perfectly fine novel. On the matters of love for the natural world and the creation of a truly heroic main character, it excels. If you don't care about ants, you can skim or even skip a long section called "The Ant Chronicles," but let me tell you, ants live a more exciting life than a few people I know. At least the females do.

Have you read The Iliad? I have. It was mostly boring with a few highlights, in my estimation. Margaret Atwood called Anthill an "Iliad of the ants." It is mostly highlights with a few boring parts. And perhaps most significant, E O Wilson demonstrates an approach to the whole eco question that exemplifies the Middle Path. A gentle shower of sensible thought to cool the fires of extreme opposition.

(Antill is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

A RIPPLE FROM THE STORM

2011-07-20T14:15:00.000-07:00

A Ripple from the Storm, Doris Lessing, Simon & Schuster Inc, 1958, 272 pp

This is the third volume in Doris Lessing's "Children of Violence" series. I believe these novels are considered highly autobiographical and are meant to show a young woman trying to find herself as she moves out of her middle-class South African/English upbringing.

The first novel in the series, Martha Quest, shows her breaking away from the family to go live and work in the city. At the end of that one, Martha impulsively marries the first man who asks her. In the second, A Proper Marriage, Martha has a baby, struggles with expectations for her as a wife and mother, and by the end has left her husband and daughter to throw herself into left wing politics.

A Ripple from the Storm opens with a communist party meeting and in fact most of the book is taken up with meetings, squabbles, and party activities, all of which I found not very interesting. That may be because of all the other books I have read from the 1950s about people becoming disillusioned with communism.

My interest in A Ripple from the Storm was engaged whenever the story focused on Martha and other women in the story. Each one is moving through their individual ideas about self as they balance relationships with activism while continually running into male patriarchal attitudes. The question or problem of finding love with a man is an old one for women these days but many of Doris Lessing's observations on the subject remain pertinent and she has a unique viewpoint. She digs deeply into the lack of self that women must always deal with when trying to assert themselves as thinking, active members of the human race.

This volume ends with Martha in a quandary between two convictions: "One, it was inevitable that everything should have happened in exactly the way it had happened: no one could have behaved differently. Two, that everything that had happened was unreal, grotesque, and irrelevant." She feels overwhelmed with futility and falls asleep.

Clearly Doris Lessing did not give in to futility. She won the Nobel prize in 2007 and is still writing novels. So I look forward to what happens next.

(A Ripple from the Storm is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)