THE SHORT REIGN OF PIPPIN IV

The Short Reign of Pippin IV, John Steinbeck, The Viking Press, 1957, 188 pp

 In this short work of political satire, Steinbeck proved he could write just about anything. I have also been reading a biography of Steinbeck by Jackson J Benson, as I make my way through Steinbeck's novels. There I learned that the author never succeeded in writing a play, so perhaps that format eluded him. He also did not enjoy writing for magazines, but he could do humor. A long visit to France with a contract for a series of magazine articles resulted in this highly entertaining novel.

  The Short Reign of Pippin IV demonstrates both Steinbeck's intimate familiarity with Paris of the mid 1950s as well as his thorough understanding of French political history. But the story carries all this information so lightly that the humor and characters are allowed to make an amusing tale.

 Unable to get their politics back in order after World War II, French political parties decide the only solution that will be acceptable to all is to bring back the monarchy. An obscure descendant of the House of Charlemagne is chosen. Pippin Heristal, middle-aged amateur astronomer, living off the profits of an inherited vineyard, must take the throne.

 Pippin's wife, the consummate French housewife, becomes Queen while Clotilde, a spoof on Francoise Sagan, is the jitterbug age Princess. All very hilarious, except for the few times Steinbeck cannot resist putting his own political philosophy in King Pippin's mouth.

 What surprised me the most, though I might have guessed from his earlier novels, is the level of political sophistication combined with the amount of humor that John Steinbeck carried around in his mind.

(A Penguin Classic paperback edition of The Short Reign of Pippin IV is available by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

BOUND TO LAST

Bound to Last, Sean Manning, editor, DaCapo Press, 2010, 215 pp

 This is the book that led to my first reading project of 2011. I first heard of Bound to Last because of a post on The Millions, where Susan Straight had an essay about the influence of Toni Morrison's Sula. Her words inspired me to read all the Susan Straight novels I'd missed. I sent a comment to Ms Straight and received a nice reply from her publicist pointing me to Bound to Last. It turned out that the post about Sula was excerpted straight from it.

  The subtitle of this collection of essays is 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book. The writers include Chris Abani on Another Country by James Baldwin; Sigrid Nunez on Mythology by Edith Hamilton; Karen Joy Fowler on The Once and Future King by T H White; and many more. I was introduced to Victoria Patterson, whose first novel, This Vacant Paradise comes out in February, 2011. Karen Green, widow of David Foster Wallace, stunned me with her account of living through the first weeks after her husband's death by reading The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel.

 Each essay is a memoir, a book talk, a story about the impact of a book on the writer's life. Cherished books range from The Bible through Les Miserables, The Stranger by Albert Camus, The Merck Manual to The Carpetbaggers and Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon. Almost every one of the thirty is impressive, entertaining or downright moving.

 I got to thinking about what book I would call my most cherished. I decided that I have at least one for every decade of my life. It would make a good writing exercise for any voracious reader who also writes. Beyond being a celebration of the act of reading and of the physical book, as opposed to an ebook, Bound to Last summons readers to remember the books that influenced or even changed the trajectory of their lives.

 What is your most cherished book?

(Bound to Last is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

TAKE ONE CANDLE LIGHT A ROOM

Take One Candle Light A Room, Susan Straight, Pantheon Books, 2010, 320 pp

Day Five: Susan Straight Week

 Now I have come to the end of reading Susan Straight, at least for now. This is her most recent novel, just released in October, 2010, but I am pretty sure she has not come to the end of her stories yet.

  Take One Candle Light A Room is almost a sequel to A Million Nightingales. The main character  is known as FX when she is out in the world publishing her pieces in travel magazines. At home in Rio Seco, she is Fantine, named after an ancestor who lived with Moinette in Louisiana. The Antoine family, living amidst the orange groves of southern California, knows their history all the way back to Moinette's mother, especially because many of that slave woman's descendants are of mixed race, due to the history of rape perpetrated on black women by white men.

 FX is light-skinned enough herself to pass as Italian or Hawaiian. She is the one, as there often is in Susan Straight's novels, who is different from the rest of her family. She is the one who left and whom her mother and sisters will never forgive for doing so.

 When this complicated woman returns home to participate in the fifth anniversary remembrance of the murder of Glorette, the best friend of her childhood, she finds that Glorette's son Victor has disappeared. FX has no children of her own. She doesn't even have a boyfriend but Victor is her godson and means more to her than anyone else in the world. He'd been riding with two gangsta friends that weekend and involved in a shooting which left one person dead and one wounded.

 So begins a desperate hunt for Victor, taking Fantine and her father across the country on Interstate 10 all the way to New Orleans. As Fantine wrestles with her professional aspirations set against her love for Victor, the long history of more than eight generations of this family comes to light. 

 Over three hundred pages of road trip, tension and suspense was excruciating. The wonder is that the author could sustain it through about nine hours of reading. That level of anxiety and stress is usually only found in two hours of an action/thriller film. A further wonder is her explication of why race, violence and drugs plague so many young Americans.

 Susan Straight never preaches, her tone is never strident and she refrains from cheap emotional tricks. Once again she put me into the lives of the characters, their homes and cars and neighborhoods, as well as into their hearts and minds. She just tells the story but reading it is as close as one can come to living someone else's life. And yet, every book is different from the last. What a great reading adventure I have had. I recommend it!

(Take One Candle Light A Room is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

A MILLION NIGHTINGALES

A Million Nightingales, Susan Straight, Pantheon Books, 2006, 333 pp

Part Four: Susan Straight Week

 In A Million Nightingales, her fifth novel, Susan Straight achieves parity with the writing that made Toni Morrison one of my top three most admired novelists: a perfect amalgam of intelligence, empathy and artistry.

 This novel is a slave story, and like the Civil War, World War II, the Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution, it takes hundreds, maybe thousands of stories to encompass these huge, life altering events. Fiction, biography, memoir, as well as history books are all required to bring the tales of individual human beings, locations and the legacies of the past forward to people who live now.

 Through Moinette, daughter of a Louisiana slave and a white sugarcane planter, we get an entire society and socio-economic world set in a discreet location. Susan Straight has said that she combined the stories of slave ancestors told by her in-laws with extensive research. By sheer artistic genius she transmuted it all into the life of Moinette and created a woman whose experiences made her a strong survivor.

 It is a horrific tale but left me with huge love and admiration for Moinette, who was a "cadeau-fille" or "gift girl", because her mother, Marie-Therese was gifted to a visiting white planter for an evening's entertainment. Various characters present gifts to Moinette, in the form of education, protection and funds which enable her to survive. Cephaline, the rebellious daughter of Moinette's first master, who lived only to study, read and write, passed on the skill of reading to Moinette. Between Marie-Therese and Cephaline, though their words and teaching differed, Moinette worked out the basics of survival for a mixed-blood slave woman.

 As in all of Ms Straight's novels, motherhood is a strong factor, as is a love of language and an implacable urge for freedom. She makes it clear that personal freedom is attained and maintained through strength, intelligence, extreme wariness and plenty of luck. Even with all of those elements in place in any individual, there are absolutely no guarantees because human beings are also capable of depths of weakness, stupidity and unawareness. Furthermore, life is random including weather and dangerous environments. These are the lessons and realities of Moinette's life.

 One of the great benefits of reading an author's novels from earliest to most recent is seeing the development of the author herself. I see A Million Nightingales as Susan Straight's finest, most powerful novel. In answer to the question of what she wanted readers to take away she says, "I'd like them to take away a few hours of having lived like someone else." I have taken that from all of her novels so far, but more than ever in this one.

(A Million Nightingales, along with the other Susan Straight novels reviewed this week, will soon be available at Once Upon A Time Bookstore in paperback. You can also order them by email.)

HIGHWIRE MOON

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Highwire Moon, Susan Straight, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001, 305 pp

Part 3: Susan Straight Week

I read Highwire Moon back in 2008, so it was not part of my recent Straight marathon. It is her fourth novel and different in that the characters are mostly Mexican and white, though it takes place in Rio Seco. Now that I have read all of her novels in order, I notice that Ms Straight began writing in a somewhat new and modified style in Highwire Moon; less words, more imagery and, in my opinion, more Toni Morrison-like.

Here is my posted review of Highwire Moon from July, 2008.

THE GETTIN PLACE

The Gettin Place, Susan Straight, Hyperion, 1996, 488 pp

Part Two: Susan Straight Week

 The theme of Susan Straight's third novel is racial violence. In Treetown on the northern edge of Straight's fictional Rio Seco, the Thompson family lives in clannish isolation, running their car towing and repair business from within chain link fencing. As the LA riots break out after the acquittal of Rodney King's attackers, violence also breaks out in Rio Seco. The Thompsons are subjected to a string of incidents beginning on the night two white women burn to death in a car abandoned on their property. 

  Hosea Thompson, the patriarch, was himself chased out of Tulsa, OK, after his father was killed in a violent attack on the ghetto where Hosea had grown up decades ago. He is a proud, hardened man with no trust in white people, law enforcement or government. He is also a wily one, well versed in the treacherous ways of the white race, who keeps his own counsel and depends on his sons for backup and moral support. 

 Marcus Thompson, the youngest son, nicknamed Sissyfly as he grew up, is literate and more open to all peoples. He is a school teacher, lives in downtown Rio Seco and possesses a sense of ease with whites, Mexicans and Asians which his father and brothers find incomprehensible, if not downright foolish. Marcus finally becomes of use to his family as his ability to negotiate with the white world helps them hang on to their land and livelihood. 

 The Rodney King riots, as they are called in Los Angeles, were about the first thing that happened when I moved here and started a new job in Pasadena in January, 1992. Black youths streamed down Colorado Blvd from their neighborhoods in Altadena, breaking the plate glass windows in the front of the building where I worked. Though I had lived in Ann Arbor, MI, around the time of the Detroit riots, I had never been that close to mass violence. I found out that I had no concept of how frightening it actually is. Which means I had no concept of how close to violence, attack and potential annihilation most Black people live. Black fathers raise their sons to be as tough as possible and the mothers protect their daughters ferociously while they fear for their sons. The complications in their lives are myriad and the losses of children, spouses, property and finance are beyond what most Americans have to face. 

 The "gettin place" is slang for where your people, your loving, your security and just about anything else you might need as a Black person can be found. This story of a family clan's implacable will had me so mesmerised that the last few days of 2010 were obliterated for me. The novel is dense and thick, with the mystery of who wants the Thompson's land running through it. The histories of Hosea Thompson, his brother Oscar, his half-Mexican wife, their missing daughter, and the fates of their sons are wound together like the vines that cover the chain link fence around their property.

 I came away with a new respect for the use of force and a renewed appreciation of the need for reason in human relationships. A combination of the two wins the day in The Gettin Place.

(Susan Straight's novels will be available in paperback in the next few days at Once Upon A Time Bookstore. You can also place a special order by email.)

BLACKER THAN A THOUSAND MIDNIGHTS

Blacker Than A Thousand Midnights, Susan Straight, Hyperion, 1994, 388 pp

 Part One: Susan Straight Week

 [After Christmas, I resolved to reward myself for a good year of reading which included research, books read for professional reviewing and reading groups, as well as plenty of pleasure reading. I was going to take a week and read the four Susan Straight novels I had not yet read. In actuality it took me two and a half weeks but it was so fine to immerse myself in an author's work and bring myself from early to present. I have now read all of her novels. This week I will post about one of them each day.]

 There are certain novelists, mostly women but some men as well, whose theme is the power and strength of family. Susan Straight embraces this with the underlying theme of the effect of racism on the American family. In 1995 I read her first novel, I've Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots, published in 1993. Being a musician, I picked the book for its title, which sounded like a blues song, but I knew nothing about the author. I was struck by the intense truths she wove into a story of a single African American mother who raised her two sons with care, giving them the skills and moral character needed to survive the violence and fractured nature of black urban life.

 I could not figure out how a white woman from Southern California could write with such insight and authority about Black people. Later of course, I learned that she had married a Black man from her hometown of Riverside, CA. She lived surrounded by Black culture while they had three daughters. Susan and that man later divorced but remained friends. Their daughters have been raised amidst the extended families of both parents.

 This author likes numbers (Blacker Than A Thousand Midnights, A Million Nightingales.) She creates the surroundings of her stories by taking the reader through the same streets, over and over; by following the dawns, mornings, afternoons, sundowns and nights of consecutive days. She has an uncanny ability to put you inside the skin and minds of characters whether they are Black, White, Mexican or Asian, until you finally stop seeing these characters through your own racial, economic and experiential framework but somehow enter each one's consciousness. Her pace is leisurely even when events of great moment are taking place.

 Blacker Than A Thousand Midnights begins with Darnell Tucker on the cusp of adulthood. When he returns from a season of fighting fires in the mountains surrounding Rio Seco, he finds his girlfriend pregnant and wants to do right by her, but lacking any prospects he feels deeply insecure about beginning the straight and narrow life of a family man. (Rio Seco is Straight's imaginary town based on Riverside. All of her fiction is anchored there, much like William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County.) It doesn't help Darnell that his future wife is pathologically afraid of the fires he loves to fight or that his friends jeer at his pussywhipped status.

 Rio Seco is booming with the gated housing communities mushrooming in the hills surrounding widened freeways and filling up with escapees from Los Angeles. In the Black and Mexican neighborhoods drugs, rap music and shiftless youth live side by side with the gardeners, domestic workers, auto repairmen and shopkeepers. Tensions run high in sprawling webs of interactions between so many racial and economic differences.

 Darnell struggles with and weaves through all of it as he develops his sense of self and builds a business caring for the lawns of the new upscale citizens. His parents, relatives and life-long friends are sources of strength but also of annoyance and temptation while the lure of the fires with their beauty and violence threaten to tear him away.

 I was impressed by the way Straight traces Darnell's development as a father and husband. While he is no exemplary model of parenthood, he has plenty of heart and a sense of humor. The story deepens the themes and issues of I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen, being the next stage of life for boys raised in the hood of Rio Seco. By the end, Susan Straight had once again put her spell on me.

(Once Upon A Time Bookstore will soon have all of Susan Straight's novels on the "Books You Have Always Wanted to Read" shelves. You can also order them in paperback.)

THE DREAMER

The Dreamer, Pam Munoz Ryan, Scholastic Press, 2010, 370 pp

 (Ages 10-14)

 I have a confession to make. I do not read poetry. I know that sounds odd for someone who has written song lyrics for many years, but there you have it. Somewhere along the way, I got addicted to STORY and I get that from novels more than from poems. If the Adult Reading Group at Once Upon A Time had not chosen The Dreamer for its December read, I would probably not have read it. A fictional retelling of events in the life of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was not really my cup of tea. (Actually I don't drink tea either. I am a coffee drinker.)

  Pam Munos Ryan is a wonderful writer and a poet herself. Many of her picture books feature her poetry as the text. Esperanza Rising, given to me by an eleven year old student I was tutoring in math, was one of the best books I read in 2003. Ms Ryan has so much empathy for her characters and writes with so much heart that she made me love a poet, if not the reading of poetry.

 She tells the story of Neruda's life in a dreamy poetic tone, bringing the images of his surroundings into my mind with her words alone. Accompanying illustrations by Peter Sis compliment her words so perfectly that she must have communicated those images to him as well. 

 As a child, Neruda, whose real name was Neftali Reyes, was frail but filled with fascination about the natural world and possessed of a vivid imagination. He suffered his father's displeasure because he was not a tough energetic boy and had no aspirations to go into business or medicine as his father hoped. Here is another story about a naturally born artistic soul finding himself in a harsh materialistic world. 

 Around the age of 12, Neftali began to assist his uncle who owned and published a small local newspaper. Uncle Orlando also believed in supporting the rights of Chile's native Napuche population, giving Neftali a life-long passion for human rights.

 Before I review books for children, I like to find out what young readers think about them. One of my most trusted sources is a a fifth grader named Laura who has read all of the Newbery winners and much more. She blogs about her reading at Laura's Life. She is a poetry lover and reader and gave The Dreamer a rave review. 

 My opinion is that the book would work for children who already like poetry. It is also a great story about a child who triumphed despite cruelty and misunderstanding from his father. I can imagine it as a book to be read aloud by parents or teachers or even as a good reference for introducing kids to poetry. Thanks to Ms Ryan's writing, I am considering having another go at poetry. 

(The Dreamer is available in hardcover on the shelves for readers 8-12 at Once Upon a Time Bookstore.)

THE SANDCASTLE

The Sandcastle, Iris Murdoch, The Viking Press, 1957, 342 pp

 Interesting story for Murdoch. Mor is a teacher and housemaster at St Bride's school. His wife Nan is a carping, controlling woman who has beaten her husband down with a superior attitude. They have a teenage son who attends St Bride's and a pubescent daughter at another private school. Because I have read Harry Potter, I am familiar with this English school scene.

  A young female painter arrives at St Bride's where she has been commissioned to paint the portrait  of the former headmaster. Mor falls in love with her, wants to throw away his marriage, and Nan must find a way to hold on to him. Because this is Iris Murdoch, there are plenty of hilarious, silly, and nail-biting scenes. 

 I hadn't quite noticed this before in her novels, but I see it now. Murdoch is no feminist. She is as hard on her female characters as she is on the men. She finds the absurdity in any human endeavor and tromps hard. But she also makes it clear how dearly we all hold to our purposes and our ways of life.

 I am just blundering along in my reading of mid twentieth century English literature by women and so just beginning to glimpse what is going on. The major similarity I see between them (Murdoch, Muriel Spark, Doris Lessing, etc.) is a dedicated attempt to use intellect and philosophy as a means of going more deeply into human relations. To my thinking, that is a worthy aim.

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

RAISING DEMONS

Raising Demons, Shirley Jackson, Farrar Straus and Cudahy, 1957, 310 pp

 Shirley Jackson's follow-up to Life Among the Savages covers the middle years of her children's lives. I loved every page. She is a consummate writer. The family moves to a larger home, acquires more cats and dogs, while Shirley learns the mixed emotions that come with being a faculty wife.

 Once again I was amazed  at the amount of humor and true affection for children that she brought to this further account of her family life. It is such a contrast to her spooky novels and the troubled characters she created for them.

 Though I only had two children our house was always full of neighborhood kids. I also ran a daycare for a while. So I was right at home with the barely controlled chaos she describes. Her four children are as precocious as ever and she brings their characters to full life, especially in the way she has recorded their speech.

 A huge amount of sheer energy propels this book. I got the sense of a woman driving a run-away buggy, just barely hanging on, who can only laugh at the crazy life she is having. Singlehandedly, she created a whole genre carried on by Jean Kerr and Erma Brombeck, not to mention Ayelet Waldman.

 The final chapter is an account of their family Christmas: the hiding of gifts, the last minute special mail order, the decorating of the tree and the joy of the kids. It was so moving that I wanted to start a family all over again. Parenthood is possibly one of the hardest jobs in life and while Ms Jackson had as hard a time as any mother, I salute her for capturing the frustrations, rewards and humor of it all.

(Sadly, Raising Demons is out of print. I found it at my local library. It is also available at Powells.)

PNIN

Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov, Doubleday, 1957, 191 pp

 Professor Timofey Pnin is a Russian immigrant who came to America via Europe, particularly Paris, and in this account is teaching Russian at small Waindell College in New England. This short novel is more a collection of stories about Pnin. Nabakov puts the reader into the mind and heart of a man who has lost much but continues on in his sometimes endearing, sometimes ridiculous way. 

  I found the book easy to read, unlike some of Nabokov's other novels, and I wanted always to know more about Pnin, what happened to his sad and crazy wife, how he would get along with the artistic genius who is his son. By the end when Pnin suffers yet another blow in his tortured life, I felt I had been living with these characters at Waindell College. I could have gone to the party Pnin hosted at one of his many dwellings and got on just fine.

 The wonder of Nabokov is how he can capture so much in so few words. It is like taking dried foods and adding water to reconstitute all the richness and flavor. Just add a reader and out of the book comes so much experience, location, character and emotion.

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

PAPA YOU'RE CRAZY

Papa, You're Crazy, William Saroyan, Little Brown and Company, 1957, 165 pp

 A man who is a writer and his son Aram, who is ten years old, hang out together at the father's beach shack. The father gives his son tips about life and about how to become a writer. This man is divorced from Aram's mother and the son, who had been living with his mother and sister, asked to go live with his father for a week.

  In another of his short autobiographical novels, Saroyan charmed me, as he always does. I liked the talks they had, the foods they prepared and ate together, such as "writer's rice" made from rice mixed with whatever else is in the cupboard or refrigerator. I liked the road trip they made to San Francisco. Saroyan's succinct lessons on how to become a writer were the best parts of all.

(Papa You're Crazy is out of print. I found it at my local library. It may also be in some of the many collections of Saroyan's writings.)

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT, THE WOMAN BEHIND LITTLE WOMEN

Louisa May Alcott, The Woman Behind Little Women, Harriet Reisen, Henry Holt and Company, 2009, 302 pp

 After a slow start, this biography of Louisa May Alcott became great. Her early life was comparable to the childhoods of hippie kids from the 1960s and 1970s. The family moved constantly, were always broke and in debt to friends and extended family. Mr Alcott was a dreamer, impractical and chronically unable to make a living. He started several schools but they all failed as the Puritan families of the day found his methods much too progressive. Alcott's educational ideas reminded me of Summerhill by A S Neill and the ideas I had about schools back in my twenties.

  Harriet Reisen clearly loved her subject. Her excellent research and wonderful writing brought Louisa May to life for me. She was an intrepid woman and determined to take on the role of providing for her family through her writing. She wrote in many genres before Little Women, lurid sensational tales for magazines, as she trained herself to write for money. But it was Little Women that made her famous and rich.

 The second half of the book flew by like a pageturner. Louisa's conflicts between caring for her parents and sisters while craving personal freedom touched me deeply. Though she never married, she had all the responsibilities of a mother, wife, sister and breadwinner without the passion or love of a man. Reisen describes her relationships with Emerson, Thoreau and many of the Transcendentalists, but the relationship with her mother was the most interesting to me.

 This is truly a woman's book for strong, independent, artistic women. It will hold up as a definitive biography of the woman who gave me one of my favorite childhood books.

(Louisa May Alcott, The Woman Behind Little Women is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

REVAMP CAMP

Revamp Camp, Alice Zogg, Aventine Press, 2010, 220 pp

 I have been remiss in not posting a review of Alice Zogg's latest mystery, released in Fall, 2010. Alice is a good friend of mine and I have read and reviewed all but the first of her six previous books. There lies the problem because what does a reviewer and blogger do when she is less than thrilled by her friend's latest book?

  I have long admired Alice for her decision to bypass the whole publishing world in favor of enjoying the writing process without the stress of the traditional publishing world. She took up writing late in life and has a great deal of fun with it. Her strongest suit is plotting and she keeps that up in Revamp Camp. In subject matter she has broadened her scope considerably by taking on the world of a rehab facility for troubled teens including methods of therapy and questions of drug therapy to treat drug abuse. Her earlier books have been strong on vivid descriptions of the surroundings where the stories take place and in Revamp Camp she has taken this to a positively cinematic quality.

 However I feel she may have stepped too far out of her zone or that she failed to do enough homework. The teen characters in the story and their dialogue show that the author has not spent much time with teens or listened to the ways they actually talk, both to each other and to adults. These characters are simply not believable and fail to come alive on the page. I was also unconvinced by the descriptions of Revamp Camp itself as a youth facility and the activities that went on there. After all, it is set in Solvang, CA and must have had to follow certain mental health standards. Perhaps her point is that some private rehab centers get away with gross improprieties but then that should have been included in the plot.

 I met with Alice for lunch the other day, expressed my concerns, and got her blessing to write my review though it would not be wholly positive. I am happy to report that we are still friends! Whew. That was tough.

(Because she is a local author and the store never fails to support our local talent, Revamp Camp is available in paperback on the Mystery shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

PALACE OF DESIRE

Palace of Desire, Naguib Mahfouz, Doubleday, 1957, (US translation 1991), 422 pp

 In the second volume of his Cairo Trilogy (Palace Walk is the first), Naguib Mahfouz continues the story of Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad and his family. All but one of his four children are now grown, married and living outside the home. There are in-laws and grandchildren, but they are all still very close and visit each other often. Egypt has not yet achieved independence from Great Britain but is moving through changes of political leaders and their perfidies.

  I found this volume easier to read because this time I knew all the characters. Also the rate of change in each of their lives seemed to increase giving more impetus to the narrative. Al-Sayyid is still, at least in his own mind, the rigid, feared patriarch of the family, but in his other life of debauchery and women, he suffers setbacks due to his increasing age and decreasing health. He continues to take his long suffering wife for granted, to excuse his eldest son's despicable behavior and to torment his youngest son Kamal, whose idealism and innocence are incomprehensible to almost everyone.

 I came to see more clearly the literary feat that Mahfouz pulled off in the trilogy. Imagine a trilogy of American novels that followed a family from 1900 to the middle of the 20th century, with all of the social and political changes. I am sure there are several examples of such, usually centered around a great American city. In the Cairo Trilogy, Mahfouz is creating an awareness of his country as it moved into the modern world.

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

THE ORDEAL OF GILBERT PINFOLD

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Evelyn Waugh, Little Brown and Company, 1957, 232 pp

 This book falls into my personal category of odd stories. Gilbert Pinfold is an English novelist, a sort of country gentleman whose wife does the farming. He is more than a bit of a stodgy fellow. His middle-aged body is giving him trouble, causing insomnia with twinges of rheumatism. He adds some large drab pills prescribed by his doctor, as well as sleeping powders provided by his druggist to his usual generous consumption of alcohol. We thought self-medicating was a recent phenomenon?

  Soon enough Pinfold is majorly hallucinating, hearing voices and suffering from deep paranoia. As a cure he decides on a sea voyage, during which he plans to complete his latest novel. But his troubles only magnify at sea. There follow a series of  ridiculous incidents which have a slight Kafka flavor mixed with images from an LSD trip gone very wrong.

 My father would have called this a shaggy dog story. It is one of my least favorite types of story to read. But Evelyn Waugh can't help being humorous and the book is short. I made it through and so did Gilbert Pinfold. (Odd coincidence: Also in 1957 Muriel Spark published The Comforters, in which a novelist heard voices.)

(The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

BEST 25 BOOKS READ IN 2010

2010 was a great reading year for me. I started out with a resolution to read more books in a year than I ever had before and I did it! I read 160 books. Last year I found a blog by a woman who read a book a day for an entire year. I wish! Maybe someday. 

 I completed the reading lists for 1957 and 1958 as part of My Big Fat Reading Project. I am excited that in 2011 I will move into the 1960s.

 I wrote 10 paid reviews for BookBrowse.com.

 I made lots of new reading friends in real life and on the internet and Keep The Wisdom had more hits than any earlier year.

 So without any more bragging or boring statistics, here is my list of the best books I read this year:

•  Little Big,  John Crowley
• The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, David Wroblewski
• The Small Rain, Madeleine L'Engle
• Darwin's Children, Greg Bear
• 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, Rebecca Goldstein
• Paradise of the Blind, Duong Thu Huong
• Rebel Yell, Alice Randall
• The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Michael Chabon
• Breath, Eyes, Memory, Edwidge Danticat
• The Surrendered, Chang-rae Lee
• The Long Song, Andrea Levy
• Rat, Fernanda Eberstadt
• Telex From Cuba, Rachel Kushner
• The Furies, Fernanda Eberstadt
• The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi
• Rock Paper Tiger, Lisa Brackman
• The Winthrop Woman, Anya Seton
• Await Your Reply, Dan Chaon
• The Wind Done Gone, Alice Randall
• In the Woods, Tana French
• Room, Emma Donoghue
• The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouc
• My Hollywood, Mona Simpson
• The Snakewoman of Little Egypt, Robert Hellenga
• Just Kids, Patti Smith 

I hope your reading for the year was as enjoyable as mine and wish you a fantastic year of reading in 2011. Thanks so much to all who visit and read the blog and an extra special thanks to those who leave comments.

JUST KIDS

Just Kids,  Patti Smith, HarperCollins Publishers, 2010, 279 pp

 I loved, loved, loved this book! Patti Smith recreates the lives of so many people who only lived to create. Her love for Robert Mapplethorpe just throbs on every page. She promised Robert, before he died, that she would write their story and she fulfilled that promise with so much taste and passion and exuberance that it made me want to live and die for art.

 I was never a Patti Smith fan. Anyone who reads my blog knows that among singer/songwriters Joni Mitchell is the one I revere. I did however once write a song in the style of "Because the Night." I've only ever played it for my husband and my most intimate songwriter friend, but there it is. As an artist and as a woman though, I have always had great respect for Patti Smith. When a friend whose reading tastes I admire pressed Just Kids on me (literally she put the book in my hands) I knew I would read it.

 I took my time. For me, this was an intense reading experience. Patti and I are almost the same age and both grew up in New Jersey. Like me, she had to wend her way through the sexual mores and expectations for women that prevailed in the 1950s and early 1960s. Unlike me, she was much braver. She makes it clear that meeting and loving Robert was the most momentous event of her life. Together they gave each other the support and unconditional care that every artist needs. They also gave each other unlimited freedom. It could be argued that that much freedom is dangerous and indeed it is. But the danger versus the opportunity to achieve artistic goals was balanced perfectly in their lives.

 A luxurious quantity of photos throughout the book bring the story to life better than any video ever could, though I did go to YouTube immediately on finishing the last page and watched almost every Patti Smith video I could find. Mapplethorpe's photography is stunning. Hard to believe that he took a huge proportion of them on Polaroid because he could not afford a better camera for many years. The Polaroid film was a larger budget item for him than food or rent.

 Stories about nearly everyone who was anyone during their days at the Chelsea Hotel, including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and many more, feel like affection more than anything else. She completely captures those magical years in New York City. I never knew, but of course loved it, that Patti's biggest songwriting hero was Bob Dylan. Her inside look at her poetry writing process was another eye opener.

 The announcement that Patti Smith had won the National Book Award for Just Kids got me to finish the book. Truly I did not want it to end. I must give back the copy I read to my friend but I am going to buy one for myself. I want to read it again and again.

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

THE MYSTIC MASSEUR

The Mystic Masseur, V S Naipaul, Alfred A Knopf, 1957, 171 pp

 This is Naipaul's first novel, which I found at my local library in a volume of his first three novels. Apparently Naipaul has had two phases in his writing: an early comic vision of which The Mystic Masseur is an example and a later disturbing darker period. 

  V S Naipaul was born in Trinidad, an island in the Caribbean, to which his grandfather had come from India. The island is a polyglot of races, nationalities and languages and has been ruled by various European nations since the 15th century. After slavery was abolished, the plantation owners brought in indentured labor from India.

 Naipaul uses a combination of humor, magical realism and scenes from Indian/Hindu immigrant life to describe the coming of age of Ganesh Ramsumair, an orphan who makes it through some college education, fails as a school teacher and returns to his native village. In an effort to support his wife, he takes up healing as a masseur, though he is a complete quack. Mostly he studies the books he acquires, lining his walls and gaining knowledge until he gains fame as the "pundit."

 The Indians from India who reside in Trinindad comprise a tightly knit and enclosed culture with their own foods, customs and competitions. Ganesh finally rises in the world and enters politics only to find disillusionment in the end. Naipaul's writing is lively and robust but I can't fully agree that his vision is comic. He makes some fun of his own people but what comes through is a rueful account of life as second class citizens in a post colonial world.

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

HOLIDAY REASONS

Just announcing that I will be absent from Keep The Wisdom until after Christmas Day. Actually I have been absent since Wednesday because I was getting ready for a visit from my son, daughter-in-law and my three grandchildren. Yesterday they arrived from Florida, expecting a nice sunny California day but we are in the middle of some kind of monsoon condition. It has been raining steadily for two days and will continue for three more.

Hopefully the rain will stop by Thursday when I will take us all to Disneyland, fulfilling a dream I have had to take the grandkids there someday.


Unfortunately my husband is missing the whole thing, including Christmas, because he is sailing on the maiden voyage of Disney's newest cruise ship; as a sound technician, not a passenger.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO ALL WHEREVER YOU MAY BE!

FAERY TALE: ONE WOMAN'S SEARCH FOR ENCHANTMENT IN A MODERN WORLD

Faery Tale: One Woman's Search for Enchantment in a Modern World, Signe Pike, Penguin Group USA, 2010, 295 pp

 This enchanting memoir is sort of Eat Pray Love for faery lovers. Signe Pike is a young woman who quit her job as a book editor for a New York publisher and went on a quest to find out if faeries are real. I was maddened, delighted and inspired many times over during my reading of this truly modern faery tale.

  Because that is what it is, a faery tale in the voice of a modern young woman who wanted to believe in magic, in things that cannot be seen and in happy endings. Signe Pike is young enough to be my daughter (or maybe it's that I am old enough to be her mother.) She is almost young enough to be my granddaughter (actually I have no idea how old she is, I'm just guessing.) Anyway, it was inevitable that she would make me mad sometimes.

 I started the book and by about page 30, I threw it down and thought I would not waste my time for another page. The voice of Signe Pike struck me as silly; an amalgam of the tone of Facebook comments, texting between teens and People magazine. I now realize that I was suffering from generation gap. 

 That evening I spent hours with my youngest friend, a 25-year-old aspiring writer. We drank wine, told each other stories, talked about life and read our latest efforts to each other. I love this woman because she reminds me of my younger self and hanging out with her is effortless. Somehow that evening led me to pick up Faery Tale again the next morning and I read it all day until I got to the end.

 I still got mad a few times but mostly I was delighted. I've done my own faery research over the years. I too believed in faeries as a child. I have encountered disembodied beings on an island in Lake Michigan, on Mt Tamalpias, in Ireland, in the Redwoods and in my own backyard. About ten years ago I spent a few months reading up on how to contact faeries and I have always read magical stories, from C S Lewis and E Nesbit as a child to Suzanne Clarke and John Crowley in recent years. As I kept reading Signe Pike, I saw that she was trying as hard as she could to remain objective and not get sucked in to a bunch of airy-fairy, New Age ridiculousness. She was on a quest to find some meaning for her life and to make sense of her relationship with her father who had passed away. She was also looking for hope in a world that seemed to be heading for disaster. I am so down with all of that.

 As she traveled to Glastonbury (where I have always wanted to go), to Ireland (where I have been), to the Isles of Man and Skye, to Scotland and Findhorn, I began to feel I was in pretty good hands. Her process of slowing down, learning to let things happen, listening more closely to her intuition and bonding with the various faery "experts" she interviewed, made me happy for her.

 And that is all I am going to say because I don't want to spoil anymore of the adventure of reading this book. It's cool and it's real and it's magical. Plus there is an awesome bibliography in the back and Signe has one the best author websites I've seen.

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

THE NAKED SUN

The Naked Sun, Isaac Asimov, Street & Smith Pualications, 1957, 196 pp

 This is the sequel to The Caves of Steel, again featuring Detective Lige Baley and his robot assistant R Daneel Olivaw. They go offworld to investigate a murder on Solaria, one of the 50 Outer Worlds inhabited by humans.

  Solaria's most eminent scientist has been found dead and it appears that he was done in by his wife. The planet has something like 200 robots for every human, similar to the slave/master populations of certain ancient civilizations. These robots are all under the Three Laws of Robotics as laid out in I, Robot, but there is an uneasy feeling on Earth about ominous rumors coming from Solaria, so Bayley is also serving as a spy.

 Despite his unreasoning fear of the naked sun after living his entire life in the steel caves of Earth, Bayley's professional skill soon has him flaunting all protocol on Solaria. He finds the murderer of course but also a much more deadly character. 

 I thought The Caves of Steel was better as far as storytelling and suspense, but Asimov has the detective genre nailed and his futuristic observations are as brilliant and icily witty as always.

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

OUT

Out, Natsuo Kirino, Vintage International, 2005, 416 pp

 A young mother in Tokyo, working the night shift in a boxed lunch factory, murders her abusive husband. Her three best friends at work band together to help her dispose of the body. These women are desperate housewives beyond anything we see in American entertainment, though there are undoubtedly women in our great society who live equally on the edge of disaster, hopelessness and criminality. So while Out is brutally bloody and violent, more hard-boiled than almost anything I have ever read, I think it is realistic.

  Natsuo Kirino shows deep insight regarding feminism, male and female psychology, and Japanese society in the late 20th century. She is one hell of a criminal writer and keeps up a relentless pace. Sometimes I could hardly take the sheer amount of gore but I was fascinated and reading as fast as I could. As the friendships between the four women deteriorate following the crime and as one of the women finds herself involved in the Tokyo criminal underworld, it was the psychological aspects of the story that I found the most intriguing. What does getting out actually involve for these women?

 This is dark stuff.  I was put in mind of Patricia Highsmith, Mary Gaitskill, Joyce Carol Oates, Shirley Jackson; female authors who can look the dark underside of female existence straight in the face. The novel is as far as you can get from a feel-good family story. It is probably not the thing for most women readers I know, but it sure is powerful and is as close to horror as I want to get.

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

MRS DAFFODIL

Mrs Daffodil, Gladys Taber, J P Lippincott Company, 1957, 284 pp

 Back before I invented My Big Fat Reading Project, I was on a quest to read all the fiction in my local library. Crazy, I know. I started out working through all the books authored by anyone whose last name started with A, like Francie in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, from whom I got the idea. But I am easily bored and I had gotten into some author I did not really like, so I moved on. I read the first book I found at the beginning of each letter. That is how I ended up reading Mrs Daffodil. Eventually, because it was recorded in my reading log from 2001, it ended up on the 1957 list of books read for the Big Fat Reading Project.

 Because of the cover, I thought it was going to be a dumb little book, but it was actually charming and humorous. Gladys Taber was a real life author of magazine articles in the 1950s and she turned this experience into a novel. A reviewer I read on Amazon speculated that she got to say things she could not write about in her articles. 

 Mrs Daffodil is a magazine and short story writer who lives with a friend named Kay. I imagined these two women as a sort of harmless American version of Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas. They live in a house in the country (probably outside of NYC) with a Siamese, a red setter and several other dogs. Mrs Daffodil is always under deadline and stressed out by that, but the two bumble along continuously dieting, hosting weekend visitors, trying to find domestic help and overall being very caring, loving women to each other and their friends.

 I ended up loving it and having lots of laughs. I am a happily married woman and definitely heterosexual but from time to time I think about how much fun it would be to live with a woman friend instead of a man. It would be a whole different set of circumstances. I wonder if there are any modern novels that would compare to Mrs Daffodil. Please let us know in the comments if you know of any.

(Mrs Daffodil is out of print and the lowest price I found on the web for a used copy was $50! It must be some kind of collector's item. I found it of course at the library.)

INTRODUCING...

I haven't had a guest blogger in a long time. Today I am happy to introduce Michael Barron, an up and coming writer who has been commenting on my posts here at Keep The Wisdom. I visited him at his blog and learned that he has written a fantasy novel for Young Adult readers entitled Wilderness. His website, Barron Wilderness, features the first three chapters. I read them and was quite impressed. 

 I invited Michael to write something for my blog and he has sent me a fascinating account of what it was like for him to write his first novel. Welcome Michael!

A few years ago I was driving home from Dover, DE where I bought a birthday present for one of my friends. As I let my mind wander, I glanced to my right at a clump of trees behind a cornfield. There wasn't anything unusual about the sight (there are millions of cornfields in that part of Maryland), but I was struck with the image of a seemingly normal young man slipping out of his girlfriend's house to meet with friends in the woods. These friends would be like family to him but a part of a double life no one else, not even the girlfriend, knew about. For the rest of the drive I thought about this strange young man and tried to figure out his story. As soon as I reached my college's parking lot, I ran inside (so fast that I left my friend's present in the car), grabbed a pen and started writing.

The wonderful thing about rough drafts is all you need to do is just “vomit” your ideas out onto the page without caring how good they are. Seriously, who cares if the characters don't make sense or if the plot is filled with more holes than the car Bonnie and Clyde were shot up in? No one else is EVER going to read it until you're ready for them to. What I learned from Wilderness is: just write and let the story take you where it needs to go. I guarantee that when you finish writing a first chapter a little voice will say “Wait! You need to go back! It isn't perfect yet!” My advice is to gag and hogtie that voice until you write the second draft. Otherwise, you will spend all your time polishing something you will eventually change anyway. The first draft of Wilderness is nothing like the version I am submitting to agents. It was about a thousand pages long, half the characters hadn't been created and the rules of the magical world were confusing. I spent too much time pushing around commas and rearranging sentences when I should have just been writing and discovering the characters. Fortunately, I got wise, plowed my way through and created a rough draft I could later rewrite.

Many writers turn their noses at outlines. There is the attitude that “real writers” just write. I agree with this to a certain extent. The danger of outlines is that a writer won't use them sparingly enough. He or she will spend months (or even years) outlining the story rather than writing it. At the end of the day they will have a very beautiful outline, but when people go into bookstores they want books, not outlines. Then again, jotting down notes can work for some authors. My ideas come to me so rapidly and from so many directions that I can never get them down fast enough. Outlines can be great if you're just jotting down ideas for scenes and character but time spent outlining does not count as time spent writing. Honestly, I didn't even use that many notes until Wilderness' later drafts. By then I had so much material it was impossible to keep it all straight in my head. Making an outline (especially on notecards) can help with revisions because you're rearranging the pieces of the puzzle in front of you as well as in your imagination. I would keep outlining a rough draft to a minimum and save the heavy stuff for the rewrites. Also, never forget the golden rule of outlining: YOU NEVER HAVE TO FOLLOW IT! Just because you've jotted it down doesn't mean you have to include it in the draft.

In a perfect world, I would just tie my manuscript to the talons of an eagle, the bird would fly into the heavens and copies of my novel would rain down all over the world. Unfortunately, getting Wilderness published is going to be much more difficult. I have only just begun submitting the book to agents, but I have spent the past few months preparing. First of all, I created a website where one can view the synopsis along with the first three chapters (see link above). Along with a website I created a “Fans of Wilderness” Facebook page (see link below). The purpose of the Facebook page is to gain as many “friends” as possible for the book. This way I can show it to agents and say “See! A ton of people already know about my novel!” (Feel free to join the group and help out an aspiring author.)

I also learned how to present my book by creating the following pitch:

“Lee is a normal nine-year-old boy...or so he thinks.

“On Fourth of July, a crazy neighbor shoots a coyote outside his house.  As Lee approaches the body, he notices war paint smeared across the animal’s face.  Before the coyote dies, he speaks with a human voice, whispering, "Sister Raven." Lee’s world is blown to pieces.

“Lee discovers that the forest behind his house is a gateway to Mid Country, a world of talking animals and ancient spirits.  There, the lonely boy befriends a warrior raccoon and a girl with a maze of tattoos that tell an ancient story.  He is also hunted by a tribe of demons known as Ashmen.  They were once honorable warriors but became feral beasts  with beautiful faces after selling their souls to the Goddess of Fear.  The Ashmen believe that they can free their mistress from banishment by devouring Lee’s flesh.  

“In our world, Lee’s father abandons the family.  With their money dwindling, the boy and his mother are on the verge of becoming homeless.  Determined to save their house, Lee searches for a treasure hidden in Mid Country’s forbidden territory and in doing so uncovers a conspiracy that goes back to the beginning of time.”

This pitch sums up both the story and spirit of the novel. It describes the main character (Lee), gives us his motives (saving his home), introduces the buddy characters (the raccoon and song) and tells us about his problems (finding the treasure / the Ashmen). Even more importantly it is short. When you are describing your novel to anyone (especially an agent) you don't want to go rambling off on every single subplot. There are several characters and story elements I left out here, but an agent doesn't need to know about them right now. All they need are the characters, the plot, the problem and a cliffhanger that makes them want more.

So that is a (very brief) summary of my adventures writing a novel. While I have just started the submission process (and we all know what kind of road that will be), I am optimistic. With luck, that weird little story that grabbed my imagination while driving home will someday be available for everyone to enjoy. I have started the rough draft of a second novel which is coming along much faster because of all the things I learned from writing the first.

Check out and join Michael's Facebook group: Fans of Wilderness.

I hope you enjoyed Michael's writing story. Of course you can comment here but it would make Michael very happy to hear from you at his website (where you can read his first three chapters) or at his Facebook page.

SNAKEWOMAN OF LITTLE EGYPT

Snakewoman of Little Egypt, Robert Hellenga, Bloomsbury USA, 2010 340 pp

 One of the best things about being a paid reviewer of books is that I find myself reading  amazing books I might otherwise have missed. Reading Snakewoman of Little Egypt was such an experience. And I was so ready for something unique compared to what else I had been reading lately. Sometimes a book has all the elements that I feel make it magically good and Robert Hellenga got that combination: strong female character, snakes (!), varieties of spiritual experience, love of course, and information about things I had formerly known nothing about. 

 My review begins:

"I had not previously read a book by Robert Hellenga, although he has already published five novels, but I was intrigued by the title of his latest. After all, woman's mythical history with snakes stretches back to Genesis and beyond, and I remember reading with great pleasure Marion Zimmer Bradley's Firebrand, in which a snakewoman plays a key role during the Trojan War. But who knew that right now in America we still have fundamentalist Christian sects handling snakes as a method of avoiding hell and reaching heaven?

Sunny, formerly known as Willa Fern Cochrane, was born and raised in the Church of the Burning Bush With Signs Following in southeastern Illinois and married to its most powerful preacher until she got 'backed up on God' and took justice into her own hands..."

 You can read the rest of the review at BookBrowse magazine. Better yet, just read the book. It is really that good and my husband liked it as much as I did, so it has been guy-tested.

 (Snakewoman of Little Egypt is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.