THE SECRET HISTORY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Readers,

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

THE TRAVELS OF JAIMIE MCPHEETERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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

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

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!

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

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.)