THE DETOUR

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The Detour, Andromeda Romano-Lax, Soho Press, 2012, 320 pp

Andromeda Romano-Lax is worthy of being much more widely known. In other words, she would be loved, feted, and sought after if she were promoted more. But she is not published by one of the big houses and she doesn't write about vampires or sado-masochistic love affairs. Soho Press is fairly small in today's publishing scheme of things. For what it is worth, I am here to tell you that she is truly a great writer.

The Detour is her second novel, following the wonderful Spanish Bow. Again it is historical and lies on the fault line between art and politics. If it were not so beautifully written, it would be labeled a historical thriller. The unwitting Ernst Vogler, thinking he is really getting somewhere in the Third Reich, has been sent to Rome to pick up a famous ancient marble statue, The Discus Thrower. 

All he has to do is get it to the Italian/German border and turn it over to the Gestapo. The Fuhrer has added art thief to his roster of dastardly deeds, but it turns out he has gotten in over his head. There are more dastardly art thieves who are counting on Hitler's sudden interest in art to raise the stakes.

Ernst Vogler has a sorrowful past including an alcoholic and abusive working class father and a secret physical deformity. In the 1938 world of Germany's fascination with youthful physical perfection, Ernst has nothing going for him except his recently acquired position with Hitler's Sonderprojekte (translates as Special Project.) On all levels, personal, political, and passionate (the young man is an art geek bordering on obsessive), he needs to make good.

Of course nothing goes right and Vogler spends the entire story getting a grip, finding his strengths and losing his innocence both politically and in matters of the heart. Once the novel gets going, it is a hair-raising bloody tale filled with desperate characters both Italian and German.

This was the first book I downloaded onto the iPad I got for my birthday in August, so I had to overcome two barriers. I got 22 pages in and felt so adrift that I quit reading it for two months, blaming my troubles on being an eReader virgin. But truthfully, the novel has a slow, confusing opening that does not draw the reader into the story. Risky!

Once I got back to reading it, I saw that the author was putting me directly and immediately into Ernst Vogler's viewpoint: his lack of self confidence, his bumbling ways, and his confusion about what was happening with the statue he revered. The protagonist's traits became mine as a reader. Risky indeed!

Ernst finally completes the transaction with the Italian art dealer and gets the statue loaded onto a truck. He has hired two drivers, Italian twins, but doesn't speak Italian. He can barely decipher the map they are following. Eventually it dawns on him that they are far off from the planned route to the border and have taken a detour for reasons known only to the drivers.

Underlying what becomes a thrilling tale is the theme of the ways that evil infects those who become involved with it. The reader perceives all this through the eyes and mind of Ernst. The lulls in the plot serve to depict this young man's dawning self-knowledge. He moves away from the fear that was driving him into the most intense human involvement he has known thus far in his short life.

THE BALLAD OF PECKHAM RYE

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The Ballad of Peckham Rye, Muriel Spark, J B Lippincott Company, 1960, 160 pp

As usual, Muriel Spark was enough over my head that I finished this highly comic novel and was not quite sure what I had just read.

Peckham Rye is a small town outside London and the setting for all kinds of poking fun at members of the English lower middle class. These characters dwell amongst their stodgy British habits but carry on in quite a modern style for the times. Lots of illicit sex going on, gossip and rumor of course.

When Dougal Douglas comes to town and insinuates himself into two rival companies as a "human research" man, ostensibly to improve productivity and thereby profits, he upsets many fixed conditions. He is quite the con man, hardly ever shows up at work, has the business owners completely fooled and messes with various relationships in the town.

If I were to give the novel my own title, it might be "Sympathy for the Devil." It is clever, dastardly, and no one escapes this man's antics including the reader. Though each character is an archetype, or at least a type, they have at the same time a unique humanness. 

Muriel Spark has taken the mannered, upper class English novel and turned it on its head. Dougal Douglas does his human research, looking for the fatal flaw in each subject. Thus does the author release the fatal flaw concept from its association with heros and grants the condition to everyman.

(The Ballad of Peckham Rye is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

NINE DAYS TO CHRISTMAS

Nine Days To Christmas, Marie Hall Ets & Aurora Labastida, Viking Press, 1959, 44 pp

THE SUNDAY FAMILY READ 

The Caldecott Award winner in 1960 was a co-production between an author of Mexican heritage and an American illustrator. Unfortunately it is out of print and I could not even find a good image of the cover which would do justice to the illustration.

Ceci is a kindergartner who is finally old enough to stay up for a Mexican Christmas celebration called "Posadas," celebrated for nine days at the homes of different families with the final party on Christmas Eve.

This lucky little girl gets to have her own pinata! The story covers her anticipation and excitement, a day of shopping for the pinata, and the event itself.

The illustrations are pen and ink with splashes of pink, orange and yellow. I think they show how kids see the world. The pen and ink parts are just the background that children take for granted. The splashes of color are the things they actually see.

Ceci's family is clearly well-to-do, so I got the feeling of a middle class Mexican family living somewhere in an American city with a Mexican shopping area. But the book could also have been set in a Mexican city.

Typically, five-year-old Ceci is enchanted with her pinata and cries when it gets broken to release the treats inside. While the rest of the kids scramble for oranges and candies, she stands behind a tree. Her imaginative take on the experience is lovely.

Most interesting to me is that Nine Days to Christmas is the first Caldecott winner to address a multicultural topic, a sign of the new decade.

 

WHITE TEETH

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White Teeth, Zadie Smith, Random House Inc, 2000, 448 pp

If literary fiction could always, or at least more often, be as good as this...well, I guess I would be an even more voracious reader than I am. I decided to read White Teeth before I jumped into NW because I read somewhere that both books are set in the same neighborhood of Northwest London. I have not felt as satisfied as I did while reading White Teeth in quite a while--well except for two weeks earlier when I read Telegraph Avenue.

In fact the two books have some parallels. Both throw together families of varying backgrounds who are joined together by a friendship between two men. Both are grounded in a neighborhood and poke around into what makes people the way they are.

I have only been to London once when I was a teen, but I could see, even smell, the setting of this book. I think watching movies helps, but the descriptions put me there, in the streets, in the apartments, restaurants, bars, and schools.

Working class Archie Jones and Bangladeshi Samad Iqbal have been friends since fighting together in World War II, when one saved the other's life. Samad lost the use of one hand and Archie has a piece of metal forever in his thigh. Archie's second wife Clara is the daughter of a Jamaican immigrant who is a devout Jehovah's Witness. Samad's wife came to him via an arranged marriage in the Deshi community. Each man in his own way is bewildered by his offspring as well as by his wife, not to mention the pace of life in the last decade of the century and the millennium. 

Smith uses multiple viewpoints and various bits of history which she calls "root canals" to build the intertwining strands of three families. The children of Archie and Samad get tangled up with a middle class English family, the Chalfens: progressive, liberal, educated idiots with their beliefs in science, psychology and enlightened parenting. 

They all have white teeth. The each want love, a better life, a belief in something beyond themselves. That sounds serious but they ricochet off each other in the most comic ways. White Teeth is a comedy show and a reality show resting on a keen awareness and observance of the multicultural lives we now lead.

Though Zadie Smith takes her time developing the stories of these characters, she begins right off with a sense of tension, maintaining it at a disturbing steadily intensifying rate until the final explosion. Really, I had no idea where she was taking me but went willingly only to have it brought home to me that these root canals are reproduced in every generation.

"But first the endgames. Because it seems no matter what you think of them, they must be played, even if, like the independence of India or Jamaica, like the signing of peace treaties or the docking of passenger boats, the end is simply the beginning of an even longer story."

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

BOY PROOF

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Boy Proof, Cecil Castellucci, Candlewick Press, 2005, 203 pp

Last month I attended a reading by Jonathan Evison (The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving) at Skylight Books in Hollywood. Introducing Jonathan was Cecil Castellucci. "I know that name," I thought. Sure enough she is one of the more truly hip YA authors writing these days. I had seen her books all the time when I worked at Once Upon A Time Bookstore, but somehow never read any.

In my usual fashion I started with her first novel. Cecil Castellucci, in my opinion, is a direct literary descendant of Francesca Lia Block. For contemporary teens she take the place of Beverly Cleary.

Egg is the all time, essential high school geek heroine. She is brilliantly intelligent, has the highest grades in her school, knows all about science fiction books and movies. Her mom, with whom Egg lives in a teen vs mother detente, strives daily to recover her life as an actress. Egg's dad, divorced from the mom naturally, is a successful special effects dude who travels most of the time.

So yeah, broken home, deeply sad and alienated, dressing and acting as weird as possible, Egg is "boy proof." But to have a novel, that has to change. Enter Max Carter. He shows up first in AP English. He is as smart as Egg, possibly smarter, but he is a chick magnet. You know the rest.

Of course, I loved it. Just the right tone all the way through, especially for teens living in Los Angeles or wishing they did. The happy ending is not what you think it is going to be. It is so much cooler than that.

(Boy Proof is available in paperback on the YA shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore. It is also available as an eBook by order.)

MOTOR CITY SHAKEDOWN

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Motor City Shakedown, D E Johnson, Minotaur Books, 2011, 340 pp

I have been visiting Detroit, MI, since I was a toddler. My mom's family are all Michigan people and we went there every summer, driving from Princeton, NJ, across the Pennsylvania Turnpike, the Ohio Turnpike and stopping first in Royal Oak, a suburb of Detroit. My mom's older brother worked for Ford Motor Company and I had three cousins there.

I transferred to the University of Michigan in my junior year and remained living in Ann Arbor for the next 24 years. Detroit has played a large part in my life. When I learned about D E Johnson's historical mystery series set in 1911 and featuring the son of a car company owner, I had to check it out. Detroit Electric was a producer of early electric cars and Ford Motor was a big competitor.

Unwittingly, I read the second in the series which picks up shortly after the first left off. But Johnson handles the back story adroitly so it all makes sense and actually made me want to read the first one: Detroit Electric Scheme.

The writing is not stunning but serves the purpose for a mystery just fine. Though Will Anderson is a well-to-do young man, he manages to get himself mixed up with gangsters, a crime boss, union organizers and crooked cops. In fact, besides covering the transition from electric to internal combustion engines, the story also delves into the early days of the Teamsters Union. And Edsel Ford is a character.

Pretty good stuff. The heroine is a socialite but is no girly girl. She has guts and in the end practically saves her boyfriend, Will Anderson. I will be back to read The Detroit Electric Scheme and his latest release, Detroit Breakdown.

(Motor City Shakedown is available in hardcover and eBook by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DORIS LESSING

 1950

2011

Today is Doris Lessing's birthday. She is 93. She was born in the same year as my mother, 1919. She is one of my heroines. I like that she wears blue in many of her later photos and how she is often resting her face on a hand. Most of all I love how fearless, creative, on the bleeding edge she has always been. 

She is one of only 12 women to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. She does not yield to praise, criticism, mockery, or worship. She is herself. What more can any human being hope to be, but especially women?

I am just a short way into reading her novels. I began with The Summer Before the Dark, 1973, a novel about a woman waking up to herself after playing the mother and wife role for many years. I loved her realism, her courage and her truth. From there I went to the beginning of her list and am coming forward.

The Grass Is Singing, 1950. I was blown away by the quality of the writing and again the realism about family, girlhood, and race.

This Was the Old Chiefs Country, 1951. Her first collection of short stories mostly derived from her early years in Zimbabwe, where she was raised.

Martha Quest, 1952, is the first in her Children of Violence series. Her is where her feminism really begins to show, though she does not like being lumped in with feminists.

Five, 1953 is a compilation of five short novels. I do not generally read short stories or novellas but Doris Lessing loses no power because of brevity.

A Proper Marriage, 1954. This is how we end up married, pregnant, mothering, going crazy, leaving it all behind. Or at least it is how it happened back in the day.

Retreat to Innocence, 1956. The first novel set in England. She later wished it had not been published but I see it as a logical progression of thought.

Ripple From the Storm, 1958. The third in the Children of Violence series, follows Martha after A Proper Marriage. This is the stage where we try to find out who we are by joining questionable political groups and getting disillusioned.

The next book for me is The Golden Notebook, 1962, her most well known novel. I am about a third of the way through my 1960 list, so it will be a little while.

I doubt that she will come across this post, but I do hope that more readers will discover her books because of it. And I send out my admiration and best wishes to a woman who put me into words. That is a large part of why I read.

TELEGRAPH AVENUE

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Telegraph Avenue, Michael Chabon, HarperCollins Publishers, 2012, 465 pp

Michael Chabon makes me a happy reader. When I finish one of his novels, I know I have been worked over, played with, and challenged. With Telegraph Avenue he has done it to me again.

How did he work me over? With a convoluted plot for one thing. As usual I was fairly lost and confused for the first 60 pages. He is busy introducing characters, setting scenes, jumping into the past, and I'm just trying to keep up. It is like hiking with an experienced, fit, onward! type in an unfamiliar location.

Though a protagonist does emerge and is in fact introduced on page one (Archy Stallings, part owner of the failing Brokeland Records, a black veteran of Desert Storm who has yet to mature), I spent the entire book thinking there were six main characters whose lives are intertwined just as in real life. You may be the protagonist of your own life but without at least five other key people, your life would be inexplicable.

How was I played with? He made me wade through the minutia of universes with which I am partially or wholly unfamiliar, but he made me like it. (He always does this: comic books and superheros in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay; an alternate history of Jews, gangsters and natives in Alaska in The Yiddish Policeman's Union.) This time it is 1970s jazz and soul plus Blaxploitation martial arts cinema and modern midwifery mixed with the history of the borderline between Oakland and Berkeley.

Pulsing along beneath the surface like a rhythm section are Chabon's usual themes: Love-hetero, homo, parental, and between same sex friends. Multicultural clash and blending with a strong Jewish flavor. Fatherhood-what does it mean, how is it ever done right, what does it have to do with manhood? Last but not least, the mystery of females-their ferocity, their needs, their hormones, their destinies.

Words, words, words. I happen to love smart Jewish males showing off. Details, lovingly and lengthily described, tossed out into cul de sacs which do not further the plot. Chabon can turn the world into a combination shopping mall/museum. But the plot keeps moving inexorably to a finale.

Telegraph Avenue takes place over just a few weeks. Archy's wife is about to give birth, Brokeland Records about to go under, deep old social, racial, and personal wounds coming back to haunt these two families who are pretty much the salt of the earth when it comes to their neighborhood. They are challenged, they each come close to complete failure. I was challenged to live outside of my life, wondering all the while how on earth life just keeps on.

(Telegraph Avenue is available right now in hardcover on the shelf at Once Upon A Time Bookstore. It is also available in other formats by order.)

THE RIVER OF DOUBT

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The River of Doubt, Candice Millard, Doubleday, 2005, 353 pp

My adult children tell me I am opinionated. Well, first of all, at my age I feel entitled to a few opinions. Here are a couple definitions: "unduly adhering to one's own opinion or to preconceived notion" (Merriam Webster); "someone who isn't afraid to give their personal opinion" (Urban Dictionary). 

I think it boils down to two things. In this age of post-political-correctness, saying what one thinks is fraught, unless you are a political talk radio person or blogger. Opinions become opinionated views if one is not open to reinspecting them or even changing them from time to time.

For years and years I have preferred fiction (novels actually) to nonfiction. My only exceptions to this opinion were biographies and memoirs about writers and artists. In recent months my reading groups have been choosing more nonfiction. I have moaned and groaned, but I always read the chosen book. I have also been reading some history as research for my own memoir. The upshot of all this is that I have changed my opinion or at least altered it. I can learn from nonfiction, but more to the point I can enjoy it.

The River of Doubt did not change my opinion of Teddy Roosevelt, who has always seemed to me to have lived by an annoying ubermacho, war mongering creed. I got some insight into why that is in Candance Millard's book but I still feel that way. However, I also realized that I have a heretofore unadmitted weakness for extreme adventure tales, of which this book is a good example.

In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt lost a presidential election and got depressed. He couldn't lead his country, he had no war to fight in, so he turned to his other love: exploration. Apparently, he had always used extreme physical challenges as an antidote for depression. A never before explored river in the heart of the Amazon jungle was just the ticket.

While the story has its share of malaria, disgusting creatures, infected injuries and low food rations, it is still a fascinating journey through the jungle. Roosevelt met his match in Brazilian explorer Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon, one of the toughest, most principled dudes I have ever met in any book. As these two alpha males duked it out, overcoming every possible barrier to making it down the river and back to civilization, the reader is there with them, their crew, the indigenous peoples, the piranhas, the monkeys and the bugs.

Despite a couple of lulls in the narrative, the story rages on, as though the author were channeling Roosevelt. In fact, she herself spent time on what is now called Rio Roosevelt. I read the whole book in two days. Nonfiction rocks!

(The River of Doubt is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

TWO WEEKS IN ANOTHER TOWN

Two Weeks in Another Town, Irwin Shaw, Random House, 1960, 372 pp

Another novel about Americans in Rome, as was The Imperfectionists, but much better. The era is postwar mid 1950s. Jack Andrus was a hot Hollywood star in the 1940s until World War II completely disrupted his life. He served in the army, came home wounded and scarred, lost both his place in the movie industry and his wife, then emigrated to Paris.

As the novel opens he is married to a French woman of the conservative French wife and mother type. They have two children, have spent whatever passion they once had, and Jack has a boring administrative post in NATO. A call from his old director changes everything.

Off he goes to Rome for two weeks to help his one-time friend in an attempted comeback as a player in the world of cinema. All of Jack's past comes back to haunt him and he spends the two weeks working it out. It is a satisfying, dramatic story because Irwin Shaw struck that magic balance between literary chops and storytelling.

Because I have done so much reading about Europe in the 1950s recently, including the Simone de Beauvoir memoirs, I felt familiar with the Paris and Rome portrayed. Shaw was a screenwriter early in his career and some of his novels, including this one, were made into movies. He knew the movie world from financing to studios to stars. He also had his fingers on the pulse of society and since he lived in Europe from 1951 onwards, had a wider view than some of the America-centered novelists I have read from those years.

I was entertained throughout. Perhaps he went a shade too far on the melodrama but I admired the skill with which he put the reader into the minds and hearts of his characters while imbuing the story with a sense of menace. Life in the late 1950s was not as dull and "normal" as it looked on the surface, especially in Europe. Two Weeks in Another Town offers a glimpse into those times.

(Two Weeks in Another Town is out of print, so best found in libraries or through used booksellers.)

THE IMPERFECTIONISTS

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The Imperfectionists, Tom Rachman, The Dial Press, 2010, 269 pp

This did not turn out to be the book I expected. It's form is short stories connected by their setting: an English-language newspaper in Rome. Each story features a reporter, columnist, editor, or staff person at the paper. Throughout the book, a history of the paper becomes clear.

Some of these individuals turn up more than once, along with details about their personal lives, so the reader gets to know them in a sketchy, scattered way. Because The Imperfectionists traces the death of a particular newspaper, it is timely but not particularly dramatic.

It just did not come together in a satisfying way. Probably for readers who have worked as journalists, it would be an emotionally relevant story, the way fiction about bookstores is for booksellers.

I have never been a journalist nor have I been a reader of newspapers. I haven't a sentimental bone in my body for young writers whose passion is to report the truth and I don't really care that they become disillusioned. How could they not know going in that newspapers are mostly in the business of selling sensation and that their owners must please the advertisers if they want to stay in business?

Finally, I am weary of collections of short stories presented as novels. I am not a fan of short stories so with few exceptions, I end up feeling tricked. Rachman is a good writer and if he wrote an actual novel, I would read him again.

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

THE KINGDOM AND THE CAVE

The Kingdom and the Cave, Joan Aiken, Doubleday & Company, 1960, 160 pp

THE SUNDAY FAMILY READ

Many years ago when I was reading by the alphabet system (as did Francie in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn), trying to read all the fiction in my library by authors whose last name began with "A", I discovered Joan Aiken. I read several of her novels for adults and especially liked Midnight Is a Place as well as Voices In an Empty House.

The Kingdom and the Cave is her first novel, written when she was just 17 years old, which would have been 1941, but not published until 1960. It is now out of print and rather hard to find. By 1960 she had published two collections of short stories for children. 

This first novel has the quality which had charmed me in the novels I read: she presents children as fully fleshed out individuals who are capable, full of courage and often more sensible than the surrounding adults.

Such a child is Michael, son of a King and Queen whose kingdom is threatened but who are clueless about how to protect it. Michael, his excellent cat Mickle and an old mare by the name of Minerva, save the day. One of the first things Michael has to learn is to speak U. A. L. (Universal Animal Language.)

So there is danger, adventure and magic. There are talking animals and evil Under People. Honestly, this is as good as the Narnia books (and free of the moral lessons) or even equal to Harry Potter in many ways. The book is recommended for middle grade readers.

Joan Aiken just wrote and wrote for more than 40 years; over 35 books (including the award winning Wolves of Willoughby Chase) and hundreds of short stories. In 1982 she even wrote The Way to Write for Children. I must check that out.

(As mentioned above, this book is out of print. I could not find it at any of the libraries I use. It is available from used booksellers.)

THE ORPHAN MASTER'S SON

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The Orphan Master's Son, Adam Johnson, Random House Inc, 2012, 443 pp

Sometimes, not too often, but sometimes, an author writes fiction about people and places outside of his own milieu and pulls it off. As far as I can tell, Adam Johnson is not any part Korean, so I was leery about this book, but it is great! He did his research, both reading and trips to North Korea. As he said in interviews, for the rest he used his imagination. For us, who can't know what goes on there, he has told at least part of the story.

The hero was deserted by his mother and raised by his father, who runs an "orphanage" which is in truth a child labor camp. The father dared not show favoritism to his son and so was harder on him than the orphans. But just the fact that Pak Jun Do knows he is not an orphan (worst status of all for a North Korean) gives him a sense of self that carries him through a life of horror and suffering and allows him to be a hero, at least in his own mind.

The first part of the book is about Pak's young life. It is reminiscent of David Copperfield except a hundred times worse. He comports himself well as a young man and rise to some heights in the eyes of the state but more tragedy strikes.

In the second part, a new voice takes over; jolting in the extreme but somehow Johnson made me get over it. This second part was harder to believe because Pak takes on the personality of a legend and the tale gets taller in every chapter. I wondered if Johnson himself became so horrified by the totalitarian oppression that he was compelled to get fantastic in the opposite direction. If North Korea had saints, Pak would be one.

Two things struck me. One is when Pak had a shattering realization about his mother's act of leaving him behind. It was the strongest emotional passage in a story bursting with the full range of human emotion.

The second was the overall assertion that the human spirit is unconquerable. That is one of my cherished beliefs and also a frequent message in fiction. On my cynical days I think the idea is just a daydream I use to make myself feel better. I'm almost afraid I have been played by Adam Johnson, but he did it so well, I am fine with being gullible.

(The Orphan Master's Son is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

RABBIT, RUN

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Rabbit, Run, John Updike, Alfred A Knopf, 1960, 309 pp

John Updike's second novel definitely has the feel and sound of a new decade in literature. Getting through my 1959 reading list was such a slog but 1960 so far has been enjoyable with strong signs that a sort of literary tipping point had been reached.

Novels from the 1950s such as Peyton Place, Lady Chatterley's Lover, and Lolita, gave evidence that cultural taboos against writing about sex were loosening. In Rabbit, Run Updike raised the bar. Rabbit Angstrom's sexual thoughts and encounters are fully described. 

Disillusion with a proscribed middle class world of dull work in offices and social climbing at home, which I read about in The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Revolutionary Road, Saul Bellow's early novels and others, explodes in this account of one man's boredom and frustration and longing for escape. Rabbit, with his conflicted sense of responsibility, of moral rights and wrongs, is so far from the earnest, upright sort of hero found in the first half of the century. As I read, I kept thinking of modern male characters such as Chip Lambert in The Corrections.

The writing is exciting but polished at the same time. Updike spent some years writing stories and columns for "The New Yorker" and that influence shows. He veers from finely crafted sentences and descriptions to terse bursts of words when relaying Rabbit's actions, but it is all balanced nicely.

The biggest surprise to me was the religious angle. Rabbit, after deserting his pregnant wife and young son, is approached by the wife's family minister who endeavors to bring the couple back together. There is a satiric tone to their interactions on a par with Muriel Spark. At the same time, both grapple with faith and sin in passages that sound like Graham Greene. 

Except for his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, which I read 10 years ago, I have not read John Updike before. I just always heard about him and his Rabbit novels. It seemed to me he was either revered or reviled, usually because of the sex, and I would get him confused with Philip Roth. Well, nothing beats actually reading the books.

(Rabbit, Run is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE LEOPARD

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The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa, Pantheon Books, 1960, 285 pp

The #3 bestseller in 1960 is historical fiction, translated from Italian. It was the Sicilian author's only novel and when it was published in Italy, became that country's top-selling novel ever! Today it is considered one of the most important novels in modern Italian literature, according to Wikipedia.

Sicilian nobleman Don Fabrizio Corbera's world is being forever changed. The 1860 revolutionary Garibaldi along with his Redshirts set into motion the Risorgimento, resulting in the unification of Italy into a nation. For Don Fabrizio, this meant the disintegration of his family as nobility due to an erosion of Italy's class system and the rise of a moneyed middle class. 

Of course, this is not an isolated story. The Age of Enlightenment, begun by 17th century philosophers and leading to upheavals all over the continent, eventually changed the entire Western world. In the 18th and 19th centuries, nobles losing their good thing was the story.

The Leopard's author was the last in a line of minor princes in Sicily and wrote his novel, based on the life of his great-grandfather, in an effort to combat depression after his palace was bombed during World War II. His style is a wonderful mix of human insight, humor, philosophy, and nostalgia. 

The old prince Fabrizio, a womanizer who also loves his wife, a thinker and astronomer, father of daughters, places his hope for the future on a favorite nephew. He foresees the downfall of his family and the nobility, but knows he is powerless to prevent it. 

Besides the engaging prose and evocation of a long gone lifestyle, I was drawn in to an understanding of what it was like for such people to see their way of life crumble. Lampedusa also seems to be questioning if the lower classes were really any better off under "democracy." He shows how serving a prince or a noble family gave them a sort of honor that could not be replaced under the new political system. Maybe so, maybe not. 

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

THE VIOLENT BEAR IT AWAY

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The Violent Bear It Away, Flannery O'Connor, Farrar Straus & Cudahy, 1960, 243 pp

I just didn't like this very much. I have liked Flannery O'Connor's earlier novel Wise Blood and her story collection A Good Man Is Hard To Find, because of the way she digs deep into evil.

I don't mind dark tales. In fact, I seek them out. But the main character, Tarwater, orphan raised in the backcountry by a truly insane fundamentalist great-uncle, is so unrelievedly screwed up, so utterly devoid of humanity. The surrounding characters do not fare much better.

Some readers and reviewers found humor and satire here. I was waiting for it, looking for it; I didn't find any. A battle between Tarwater and his uncle Rayber concerns the baptism of Rayber's idiot son. Tarwater wins through a hideous scene of violence.

"The violent bear it away" is a quote from the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 11, verse 12, according to the frontispiece. In all the versions of the Bible on my shelves it is written, "From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and men of violence take it by force." Well, if she  was writing a parable of Tarwater trying to take the kingdom of heaven by force, she succeeded.

It could be that because I was not raised Catholic nor in the South, I am missing something. It could be because I see heaven and hell side by side in the world, not somewhere or sometime else. I wish I could talk to Flannery O'Connor. I guess I will have to read her collected letters and her biography.

Comments welcome.

THE SOT-WEED FACTOR

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The Sot-Weed Factor, John Barth, Doubleday & Company Inc, 1960, 756 pp

So there I was, excitedly embarking on my reading list for 1960, expecting all things more modern. I checked The Sot-Weed Factor out of the library and hit a few barriers.

First off was the title. Sometimes I go around for years with a tantalizing title in my mind but without any conception of what the book is about. For example, The View From Pompey's Head, a 1954 bestseller by Hamilton Basso. I'd picked it up at a going-out-of-business sale at a local used bookstore, thinking it must be about ancient Rome and Pompey's ideas. Ha! It was about a New York lawyer who returned to his sleepy South Carolina hometown and got embroiled in racism.

I don't remember now what I thought The Sot-Weed Factor was about except that with John Barth as the author, who knew anyway. Turns out sot-weed was the name for tobacco in colonial American days and a factor was a colonial agent who took care of business in the colonies for the owner, who was usually back in England.

It took me almost two weeks to read this tome of satirical historical fiction. Frustrating? Yes, I normally read three books a week. Boring? Never. I did read the revised edition from 1967 which is purported to be 50 pages shorter than the original. Another 50 pages might have done me in. (I tried downloading an iBook of the original but it had so many typos I went back to the book, which weighed 4 pounds. I was already suffering from a pinched nerve, so I read under the influence of large doses of ibuprofin.)

Anyway, Maryland, 1600s, starring Ebenezer Cooke, poet and virgin. Catholics vs Protestants, white man vs Negro slave vs Native American (called "salvages," Geraldine Brooks in Caleb's Crossing was not the first to resurrect that term.) Wild, lawless pioneers, more whores than tobacco plants, more plot twists than whores. All written in a sort of Old English patois.

Clearly not a book for everyone, but hey, I have read two thirds of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle trilogy and I do enjoy history, especially historical fiction laced with irony and pathos. Someday I hope to read Don Quixote but if I never get to it, I have read The Sot-Weed Factor. 

Now I know that our fine country has ever been made up of criminals and dreamers and whores.

(The Sot-Weed Factor is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE SNOW CHILD

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The Snow Child, Eowyn Ivey, Little Brown and Company, 2012, 388 pp

I complained the other day about The Newlyweds being too lightweight as a novel and some readers felt that way about The Snow Child. These quibbles fall under a category of artistic criticism I call "a sense of the fitness of things."

The Snow Child is written in the style of an updated fairytale and quite successfully so. In 1920, a middle-aged couple left their home and family in New England and moved to Alaska. The husband came from a farming background so he figured he would do well as a homesteader in Alaska.

They had been disappointed when their first child was stillborn and never conceived again. It was a sorrow the wife could not get over and left her feeling inadequate as a woman. For Jack, Alaska was a chance for independence; for Mabel it was an escape from constant reminders of her failure to have children.

During their first hard winter, in a rare moment of happiness, this increasingly estranged couple built a child out of snow and that is where the fairytale began. The snow child melted away but a real child appeared, a feral blond-haired girl wearing the red scarf Mabel had wrapped around the snow child's neck.

Mabel was a life long reader. She brought her collection of books to the Alaskan wilderness, among which was an ancient tome of folktales. One of those tales is about a child made of snow who grows up to fall in love with a human man. It is not one of those stories with a happy ending.

The novel moves slowly at the pace of a dream. There in the passage of time and seasons events transpire, but these are presented as vignettes, almost like scenes in a play. I knew it would end in tragedy, I could recognize and feel the progression towards that. Mabel knows the end of the folktale but lives and hopes as though she has a daughter of her own at last.

I read the book while on vacation in Marin County, CA. The trip was a respite from weeks of hot weather, from months of dieting and exercise, from my so-called real life. A nephew's wedding took place on the shores of the San Francisco Bay followed by the reception at a rustic bed-and-breakfast deep in the fog of Muir Woods near the top of Mt Tamalpias. We spent lovely sunny days surrounded by extended family and grandchildren.

The pace of The Snow Child fit perfectly. It calmed and relaxed me. Children are a gift, they grow and leave, they rarely turn out the way you planned, they are sometimes spiteful and ungrateful for all your sacrifices on their behalf. Sometimes they die before you. All of that is contained in this novel. The complex tangled strands of parenthood presented simply as part of the truth of life. Not a pageturner, not a thriller, not a bit pretentious, but stark and raw and full of love and wonder.

(The Snow Child is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE NEWLYWEDS

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The Newlyweds, Nell Freudenberger, Alfred A Knopf, 2012, 337pp

Let me just say right at the start that I read this less than impressive novel for a reading group. I have many highly anticipated novels on my TBR list and would much rather have been reading Michael Chabon (Telegraph Avenue), Zadie Smith (NW) or Susan Straight (Between Heaven and Here).

I have not read Ms Freudenberger's earlier novel, The Dissidents. I have been aware of her status as a hot young author. She did not measure up for me to the young authors who have blown me away in my reading this year: Jennifer Egan, Emily St John Mandel, Hari Kunzru, Scarlett Thomas, and more.

Her purpose in writing about Amina, a young Bangladeshi woman who marries an American man she met on an internet dating site, is to show the stresses and confusions of living between two cultures. She does make those stresses and confusions clear but compared to Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake or Brick Lane by Monica Ali, The Newlyweds felt too light, too thin; the characters lacked depth; and the story was weak on tension and emotional heft.

Of course, these are merely my opinions. The reading group members all enjoyed the book and felt they had learned something. The Newlyweds is a nice, easy read for those who don't like to be challenged too much. I know that sounds so condescending but I can't help it.

The Newlyweds is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE STATUS SEEKERS

The Status Seekers, Vance Packard, David McKay Co, 1959, 323 pp

This volume is Packard's follow-up to The Hidden Persuaders. In it he posits that despite our fond belief in America being a democratic society, we are in fact not classless. According to his studies of sociology and observations based on his travels and interviews, he outlines a "system of horizontal social strata" consisting of five divisions. In addition he presents a vertical system of cross-strata based on differentness, such as racial (Blacks, immigrants) and religious (Jews.) In other words you can be a wealthy, educated African American but that does not mean you are wholly or truly considered upper class.

He also points out trends following World War II and their results as of the the 1950s: the growing emphasis on college education, the tendency of big business to hire college grads for management positions instead of people with experience in running their own businesses, and the increase in technology as it influences blue collar professions.

I was not convinced that all his data adds up in the way he seemed to think it did, but he is one of only a few writers at that time who tackled the subject. He presents his findings in everyday language, taking them out of academia and to the streets.

As I read, I realized the stresses my parents were under while raising a family. They were both college graduates from families who were blue collar, second generation German immigrants. Although they claimed to resist the marketing pressures of the 1950s, they were proud to be homeowners who could afford to put an addition on the house as we grew up and to raise us in a "good" neighborhood in Princeton, NJ. They sent me and my two sisters to college. I think they felt they had achieved a somewhat upper middle class status and wanted us to live that way.

Of course, we entered college in the 60s, all became hippies, dropped out and took up alternative lifestyles. Then those lifestyles ended up being mainstream in the yuppie 90s. We were also raised with plenty of encouragement and opportunities in the arts. Packard states that artists, musicians, and writers float more effortlessly among the classes and I have found that to be true.

The Status Seekers is slanted against big business because of its regimentation which he documents at length. Packard is also clearly on the side of the common man and considers himself free of racial and religious prejudice. I suppose today he would be called a bleeding liberal. 

The writing style is less lively than in his previous book. I did a good bit of skimming. He gets downright preachy in the final chapters and comes across as an innocent utopian. "If only people would..." People don't, in my experience. I admire him though, for telling it like it was and I hope he made some people uncomfortable. He provides a sociological perspective on how we ended up in a deep recession with the one percenters holding most of the wealth.

(The Status Seekers is out of print but can be found through used booksellers.)

ARE YOU THERE GOD? IT'S ME, MARGARET

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Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, Judy Blume, Yearling, 1970, 149 pp

THE SUNDAY FAMILY READ

Judy Blume is nine years older than I am. I did not read her books growing up because they weren't published yet. They would have helped me a great deal but by the time this one was published in 1970, I was married and having my first baby.

I decided to read this now because I have come to the part of my memoir where I need to write about my early awareness of sex and all that goes along with changing from a child to a teen to a young woman. I found myself very blocked and finally decided that early taboos about the discussion of these subjects were damming up my creativity. I'd heard that Judy Blume addressed these issues and thought maybe reading her books would help. It has!

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret is not much about sex; it is about waiting for and finally getting that first period. It is also about family, friends, boys, and religion.

Margaret is eleven, almost twelve, and entering the 6th grade. She is an only child and has been brought up with no religion because her mom was Catholic, her dad Jewish. The marriage caused Margaret's mom to cut all ties with her parents. So big issue right there. Though her parents are fairly cool, Margaret feels she needs to learn about both religions.

That is all I am going to say because if you haven't read it, I would spoil it for you. It is a fabulous, honest, and open book about a girl growing up in America, full of humor and heartbreak. I think every 6th grade girl should read it but of course the book banners and challengers don't agree.

If you are a mom and your daughter wants to read it, I advise you read it first yourself and make your own decision. If you are a daughter and your mom or teacher or anyone tells you not to read it, you will have to make your own decision as well. All I can say is that I have found out lots of things no one would tell me about by reading books.

(Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret is available in paperback on the children's shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE REVISED FUNDAMENTALS OF CAREGIVING

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The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, Jonathan Evison, Algonquin Books, 2012, 276 pp

 Ever since his debut novel, All About Lulu, I have been in love with Jonathan Evison. He wowed me again with last year's West of Here. I am thrilled to say he has done it yet another time with his new one. He is among a handful of current novelists who reassure me that the age of fiction is far from over, no matter what the doomsayers would have us believe. I am going to see him read and regale us next Tuesday night at Skylight, one of LA's ultra cool indie bookstores.

Ben Benjamin is one of those early 21st century men who walk the fine line of gender roles as we slowly balance the male/female spectrum of existence. His wife got the better job early in their marriage, so he stayed home to raise the kids. I love the truthful, heartfelt, and hilarious rendition of what that is like for a guy. Funny thing is, it's not that different from what it's like for a woman.

If there is a theme to this novel, it is that we are all called upon to be caregivers at some point in our adult lives and we all fail in so many ways. Ben fails miserably when his children die in an accident for which he is pretty much fully responsible, even if it was an accident.

Having lost everyone and everything he truly loves (his wife leaves him after the accident), having run out of money and nearly maxed out his credit lines, having no marketable job skills, having really no reason to go on living but just keeping on the way most of us do, Ben enrolls in a class: The Fundamentals of Caregiving. Evison serves up more truth, heart, and hilarity.

So, bolstered only by the barest essentials of bodily care, professional bullet points, and the unlikely recommendation to keep an emotional distance from your client, Ben becomes the caregiver for Trev, a 19-year-old, horny, moody, domineering victim of Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Instantly the already wobbly Ben is in way over his head.

The story careens its way into a redemption tale that only Jonathan Evison could have written. Poised on the exact brink between antic humor and deep despair, he depicts Ben, Trev, and a collection of desperate, heartbroken human beings as they take a road trip worthy of Kerouac or Steinbeck.

In my professional review at BookBrowse, I attempt to explain how great is Jonathan Evison's writing. He has always been great but now he has honed and fine-tuned everything: plot, characters, description, emotion. He makes it look effortless, as if he is merely tossing off a tall tale at the pub over a few pints.

Just read it! It is short, it is not ever boring even for a paragraph. Best of all, during this election season when all you hear is recycled bullshit, you will get the truth of modern American life.

(The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving is available by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

CALEB'S CROSSING

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Caleb's Crossing, Geraldine Brooks, Viking, 2011, 300 pp

The plot (or is it the theme?) of Geraldine Brooks' latest novel could be "life sucks and then you die."

Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed reading it because Brooks is a good storyteller and a competent writer, if a bit careful and self-controlled.

Set in the mid 1600s during the pioneer days of English Puritans, it is based on the true story of how a Native American youth, Caleb, became the first of his people to graduate from Harvard. The tale reeks with adversity: "good" versus "bad" Puritans; white man versus native; male versus female; human versus the elements; and more. The minister father of Bethia, the heroine, even pits his one God against the magic and pantheism of Caleb's uncle, the medicine man.

I have a horror of attempts at religious conversion; the idea that a person must believe in a certain god in order to attain eternal life just makes me cringe and always has ever since I was a five-year-old in Sunday School. But it is a prevalent practice among human beings and Brooks does well using it for tension without too much of a judgmental tone.

Bethia is one of Brooks' signature females. She is put through the wringer and holds up for a good long time. I kept thinking about The Winthrop Woman by Anya Seton, though Bethia is more Anne Hutchinson than she is Mrs Winthrop. As in all her other novels, Ms Brooks made me care about her heroine and kept me interested in her suffering, which was huge, and her triumphs, which were puny by comparison.

Bethia first meets Caleb when they are children and he opens her eyes to new ways of looking at life and the world, while she teaches him to read. That time of innocence, when a child begins to look outside her family and upbringing, when we have that certainty that anything is possible and are clueless about the dangers of trying to change the status quo, is one of the shining sections in Caleb's Crossing.

I don't think it is a spoiler to say this tale is a tragedy. Surely we are supposed to see that these characters were trail blazers and opened doors to those who came after them. But at the end of the book I did not feel uplifted. I felt like, no matter how hard someone tries, life sucks and then you die.

(Caleb's Crossing is available in paperback on the shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

HORSE HEAVEN

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Horse Heaven, Jane Smiley, Alfred A Knopf, 2000, 561 pp

 Jane Smiley's novel about horse racing is one of the best books I have read this summer. It was loaned to me by my sister-in-law, a horse woman herself and daughter of a horse woman. Jane Smiley owns a race horse or two and clearly knows plenty about the subject. A big part of the book's success is the way she makes the horses characters in the story as much as she does the humans.

I knew nothing about the world of horse racing, except that people like to go to the races and bet money. I learned more than I knew there was to know about the individuals who own race horses (usually wealthy), the ones who train them (often fanatical), the jockeys, and the major races of each year along with their locations and prizes. Smiley provides a list of characters and horses but not a glossary, so I kept my iPhone handy and the terminology is easy to find on the web.

For the most part, reading the book was a perfectly painless way to learn because the facts are couched in the stories of individuals, including their dreams, their interpersonal troubles, the highs and lows of the racing life, and the many, various ways that these persons relate to horses.

Smiley takes on the big issues and questions of live, love, business, ethics, etc. Her novel is sprawling and long and rich with emotion. I always enjoy her fiction because of the non-judgmental approach she takes to human foibles; the heady brew of dry humor plus pathos by which she makes us know that often the bad guy wins and the nice people lose. In this one, almost every character, human or horse, gets what he or she wants in one way or another, deserved or not.

It is a long book, cleverly plotted with intertwining destinies, and I never wanted it to be over. I will probably not ride a horse again in my life and, unless someone invited me along, I would not attend a race, even though the Santa Anita track is just down the freeway. But I don't think I will ever forget the animals or the humans, so well did she bring them to life. Now I understand completely how people can love horses so much.

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

HOUSEBOAT GIRL

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Houseboat Girl, Lois Lenski, J B Lippincott Company, 1957, 176 pp

THE SUNDAY FAMILY READ

Houseboat Girl is another Lois Lenski book that stands out in my memory as a favorite when I was growing up. I was ten years old when it was first published and I bet I found it at the library. I did not find it at the library in 2012, but my sister collects the Lenski books and she had a copy. It has also recently been republished in paperback and as an eBook by Open Road Media.

Patsy is going through that most wrenching experience for a ten-year-old girl of moving away from all your friends. On top of that, her family is setting off in a houseboat, planning to live on the Mississippi River all summer with no firm destination in mind. Patsy's parents are river people who get restless when they stay too long in one place.

Patsy's story is similar to Birdie Boyer's in Strawberry Girl. Both girls are in new locales and situations and have to learn about "mean people" when their fathers get into conflicts with other men. Like Judy in Judy's Journey, Patsy wants to settle down in a real house somewhere so she can go to school and have friends. But she also discovers the wonders of the river and the excitement of being on a journey.

The book is part of Lenski's American Regional Series. I'm amused at myself to have discovered that I read all the "girl" stories and skipped the "boy" ones when I was a kid. Obviously I was not boy crazy yet. By the time I was, I had moved on to Beverly Cleary's teen books.

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

READING LIST FOR 1959

A couple weeks ago I completed my reading list for 1959. These lists are part of what I call My Big Fat Reading Project. I have been working on the project since June 2002, when I started with a reading list from 1940. So finishing 1959 is a milestone because I have now completed the second decade of the project. I also turned 65 last month and am beginning to realize that I may never complete the darn thing. I mean, do the math. Also the lists keep getting longer. However I am getting the education in literature that I envisioned and that is what matters to me.

The 1959 list took me a year and a half to complete for all kinds of reasons. I was distracted by several life changes but most of all it felt like because it was the end of a decade and I was so eager to get into the 1960s, it just went dragging on and on.

You can find reviews for almost all of these books here on the blog. Just put the title into the search window in the top left corner. You can also find all the earlier lists by looking through the archives. I suppose I should gather the links for these in the sidebar. If even one person comments with such a request, I will do it!

BESTSELLERS:

Exodus, Leon Uris

Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak

Hawaii, James Michener

Advise and Consent, Allen Drury

Lady Chatterley's Lover, D H Lawrence

The Ugly American, William J Lederer and Eugene L Burdick

Dear and Glorious Physician, Taylor Caldwell

Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

Mrs 'Arris Goes to Paris, Paul Gallico

Poor No More, Robert Ruark

AWARD WINNERS:

PULITZER: The Travels of Jamie McPheeters, Robert Lewis Taylor

NEWBERY: The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Elizabeth George Speare

CALDECOTT: Chanticleer and the Fox, Barbara Cooney

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD: The Magic Barrel, Bernard Malamud

HUGO: A Case of Conscience, James Blish

EDGAR: The Eighth Circle, Stanley Ellin

OTHERS:

Absolute Beginners, Colin Macinnes

The Borrowers Afloat, Mary Norton

The Cave, Robert Penn Warren

Children of the Alley, Naguib Mahfouz

Coal Camp Girl, Lois Lenski

Free Fall, William Golding

The Good Conscience, Carlos Fuentes

The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson

Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellow

Jean and Johnny, Beverly Cleary

The Mansion, William Faulkner

Miguel Street, V S Naipaul

Momento Mori, Muriel Spark

My Brother Michael, Mary Stewart

Passage of Arms, Eric Ambler

The Poorhouse Fair, John Updike

Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut

The Status Seekers, Vance Packard

Time Out of Joint, Philip K Dick

Zazie in the Metro, Raymond Queneau