TRUSTEE FROM THE TOOLROOM

Trustee From the Toolroom, Nevil Shute, William Morrow & Company, 1960, 311 pp

The #9 bestseller from 1960 took me completely by surprise. The title invoked boredom and also made little sense. But On The Beach, Shute's bestseller from 1957, had made a big impression on me and gave me hope.

The trustee of the title is Keith Stewart, one of those unprepossessing fellows from postwar England who bumbles along, doesn't expect much, but is an honest and honorable sort. These days he would be considered a world class nerd.

In his basement workshop he makes miniature models of engines, clocks, motorcycles, etc, carefully milling and lathing his own machine parts. He also writes a column for a niche magazine, the "Miniature Mechanic." Though he receives letter from all over the world and conscientiously answers every one, his take home pay is as minuscule as his models. 

Then, in the way of any good story, upheaval arrives when his sister and her fairly wealthy husband perish at sea, leaving Keith and his long suffering but supremely practical wife as guardians for their nine-year-old niece. Keith is also named trustee for the little girl's inheritance which turns out to include a valuable stash of diamonds lost on a corral island near Hawaii.

Soon enough this man who has never left England and rarely ventures from his hometown, has an adventure by air and sea the likes of which he had never imagined. Somehow, despite the unlikelihood of several coincidences, the story hooked me.

It is one of those tales where uprightness and hard work pay off. In our current world where dishonesty pays until it doesn't, where our heroes usually turn out to be false, I fell for the heartwarming simplicity of a guy who faces hardship to do the right thing and who, because he is skilled and clever and willing to go every extra mile required, wins in the end.

I made my husband read it. He is an engineer of sorts himself and a practical guy. It brought a tear to his one good eye, as we like to say about him when he (rarely) gets emotional, and pronounced it great. 

(Trustee From the Toolroom is out of print but available in libraries and from used book sellers. Also, curiously, many novels by Nevil Shute, including this one are available as eBooks from the two big eBook sellers who shall remained unnamed.)

HOW SHOULD A PERSON BE?

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How Should A Person Be?, Sheila Heti, Henry Holt and Company, 2012, 306 pp

What is it about Canadian women who write? The level of intelligence is somehow a bit higher. Readers of this blog know my opinion of Margaret Atwood as one of the most intelligent women alive. Then there is Emily St John Mandell.

How Should A Person Be? touched many a nerve among readers, some pleasurably, some unpleasantly. I loved it as an honest look at the perils and responsibilities of friendship between women. That the women in the story are both artists (one a painter, one a playwright) only made it more intense for me.

I also dived right into Sheila's troubles with being married. The question of this novel set in the interrogative mood is how to be faithful (not necessarily sexually) without sacrificing one's own personhood. Another aspect of the question is how to stay in love with another person and still be selfish when one needs to be. 

I think what raises Heti's novel above the navel-gazing of which she has been accused is its philosophical underpinnings. Now that I consider that last sentence, I realize that at least a couple of my favorite philosophers were quite the navel-gazers. Didn't one philosopher say that the unexamined life is not worth living, or something like that?

I thank Sheila Heti for examining her life and having the courage to write about it. I also thank the Tournament of Books folks for putting her book on the 2013 list.

(How Should A Person Be? is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE LISTENER

The Listener, Taylor Caldwell, Doubleday & Company Inc, 1960, 332 pp

I did not like one thing about this book. The perils of my self-imposed Big Fat Reading Project. I only read Taylor Caldwell because she keeps showing up on the bestseller lists. There will be four more, but finally in the mid 1970s she fades away. Ever since she got on her weird variety of Christian writing, she went right downhill in my opinion. But people who read books for comfort or reassurance from a Christian standpoint seem to like her which explains how she made #8 on the bestseller list for 1960.

The Listener is not even really a novel. It is a collection of stories connected by the visits of each character to an odd sort of shrine in an unnamed midwestern city. The shrine is named The Man Who Listens. People from various walks of life come and talk to a curtain, tell their troubles, then open the curtain and realize they have been talking to God. They see the answers to their problems and then go straighten out their lives.

It felt highly contrived and gave Caldwell a platform from which she preached in a reactionary tone about the evils of modern society. I confess, I did a lot of skimming but kept on to the end. It did not get any better. In fact it got worse until I was gagging when I finished.

(The Listener is out of print, available in libraries and from used book sellers, also curiously, it is available as an eBook from your usual eBook sellers.)

HHhH

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HHhH, Laurent Binet, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2012, 327 pp

Facts: Laurent Binet is French. This is his debut novel and won the Prix Goncourt for a first novel in 2010; the French equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. The book I read is translated from French and is on the Tournament of Books list for 2013.

Opinions: Anyone who can write a historical novel set during World War II and do something new is alright with me. Laurent Binet bravely, perhaps recklessly, put himself as author into the story, all very meta-fiction, and created an absorbing read.

It was cool to go straight from reading The Russian Debutante's Handbook, set partially in modern Prague, to reading HHhH, set in 1939-1942 Prague. The title is an acronym for "Himmler's Brain is called Heydrich." If you don't know who Himmler and Heydrich were, don't worry. Binet is a teacher by profession and knows how to teach history while making it exciting.

This is a tale about assassination and bravery and evil Nazis and war and people. Despite the authorial intrusions, or maybe even because of them, there is not a dull moment or paragraph. In fact, the intrusions create suspense.

I have not had this much enjoyment from historical fiction since I read Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. I have gotten the biggest benefit so far from pushing myself unmercifully to complete the Tournament of Books list by March.

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

THE RUSSIAN DEBUTANTE'S HANDBOOK

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The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Gary Shteyngart, Riverhead Books, 2002, 452 pp

I read Gary Shteyngart's debut novel at fever pitch because I started it late for a reading group discussion. Fever pitch was the correct approach; it matches the pace of the story.

In the grand tradition of immigrant novels, Vladimir Girshkin is a young man of Russian descent adrift in a sea of confusion. He works at an immigrant resettlement agency in New York City, making non-profit wages. His girlfriend is a dominatrix by night, his father is an MD who scams Medicare, and his mother-well I never figured out exactly what it was she did but she was trying to beat the Russian immigrant odds in the 1990s by going straight.

I suppose the novel isn't for everyone. The two reading group members who showed up at the meeting at least tried but "couldn't get into it." I loved it the way I loved Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March; the way I loved Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker; the way I loved Isaac Asimov's autobiography In Memory Yet Green. The book is part of a huge story called "How I Became an American" fraught with identity crises, family strife, and hilarity.

The post-Soviet Union Russian criminal element is well represented but done with heavy sarcasm. A good part of the story is set in Prague, that city's celebrated Baroque soul swamped in the tatters of two world wars and one Cold War. Shteyngart's Eastern European characters are raised to a level of slapstick often seen in film but rarely in novels.

It was not clear to me whether Vladimir actually found himself or love or even a career, but he found safety. Just writing this now it occurs to me that safety is the rarest commodity of all for an immigrant. Rather than riches or enough to eat or religious freedom, safety is in the end what the displaced person craves most.

(The Russian Debutante's Handbook is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS

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When We Were Orphans, Kazuo Ishiguro, Alfred A Knopf, 2000, 336 pp

I have only read one other Ishiguro novel before: Never Let Me Go. I once saw him speak about that book at a reading and learned that he is rather obsessed with memory and how it is related to sense of self. On the experience of reading two of his six novels, I would call him difficult to read but emotionally deep.

The emotional depth is not in the writing which is almost without emotion. By some alchemy though, I felt or maybe even contributed emotion while reading. Was I trying to add it in because it is so submerged into the text or what? At this point I am not sure.

Christopher Banks was born to English parents in Shanghai a few years before the Japanese invasion, raised in its International Settlement, and his best friend was a Japanese boy. His parents disappear when he is about ten leaving him effectively orphaned, so he is sent back to an aunt in England. He grows up to become a famous detective.

Christopher is the most unreliable narrator I have met in fiction. He has almost no awareness of his effect on other people and pictures himself differently than anyone around him does. He is attracted to a woman who also displays a fractured sense of who she is, but he proceeds through life in complete denial about the attraction.

Eventually he returns to Shanghai in his thirties, having become convinced that his parents were kidnapped. Operating under the delusion that he can find them after all these years, he feels that he can also save China from some terrible fate. I think he is actually trying to save himself.

This is a most confusing tale written in segments that alternatively move the story forward while revealing the past. Each time the narrative returned to the present, some character or situation not previously mentioned would spring up, making me feel I had missed something.

Finally, despite numerous clues, I realized that Christopher's story was not the real story. By almost the last page I saw that Ishiguro had been ruminating all along as to how well we really know ourselves, how incorrectly we sometimes perceive the world and people around us, and how trauma and displacement can render a personality into fragments. I found all of this disturbing. I was left thinking that I got what he was trying to do but was not sure he pulled it off, but I'm not sure he didn't.

(When We Were Orphans is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE LOVELY AMBITION

The Lovely Ambition, Mary Ellen Chase, W W Norton, 1960, 288 pp

This novel was both a lovely surprise and an example of the split personality of the 1960 bestseller list. In among the somewhat shocking contemporary books about sexual and political matters of mid 20th century life, the #7 bestseller concerns family life and the power of religion.

I should have known it would be good because Mary Ellen Chase was an excellent writer. The Lovely Ambition is every bit as good as my best loved book of hers, Windswept.

A British family at the turn of the 20th century makes the amazing transition to life in the United States. John Tillyard, an unassuming, earnest young Wesleyan parson, accepts a call to take over a Methodist parish in downeast Maine. Though the move is from one rural setting to another, the contrasts are many between their English village with its conflicts between high church and low to an American community where democracy is only constrained by local habits.

Tillyard has a brilliant but long-suffering wife and three children. He is a dreamy sort of guy who loves to read and take long walks. He also has a love of sheep, shepherds, and the lambing season. In other words, an impractical sort more interested in people than in making a living.

Once the family is settled in Maine, John becomes a part-time chaplain at an asylum for the mentally deranged in the nearest city. Before long he begins to invite some of the patients for visits to their home. His belief is that by interacting with "normal" people in a calm and loving environment, they can heal from their personal traumas. Naturally, the results are mixed.

While the sexual is certainly not emphasized, the psychological questions of the time are. This aspect makes for an interesting relation to The Chapman Report in terms of examining the best ways to approach human problems.

In tone and writing style, I was reminded of some novels by Elizabeth Goudge, also of Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows and I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, both of which feature unreliable fathers as seen through the eyes of their daughters.

The Lovely Ambition is out of print and hard to find but I am glad I tracked down a used paperback from Alibris.

THE MAN FROM BEIJING

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The Man From Beijing, Henning Mankel, Alfred A Knopf, 2010, 367 pp

A good read, fast and smooth. If any Swedish crime writer can match up to Steig Larsson, Mankel is at least in the running. I like him much better than Nesbo. I haven't read his Kurt Wallander mysteries and The Man From Beijing is a standalone. When I ever get through the Sara Paretsky books, I might try reading more Mankel.

I liked the character Birgitta Roslin, a middle-aged judge whose persistence solved the gruesome murder of 19 people in a tiny Swedish hamlet. She stood as a symbol of justice versus the mere efforts of the police to find a culprit.

The Chinese connection, the analysis of 21st century Chinese politics and that country's development as a world power, were all fascinating aspects of the story. I am no expert on China. What I know mostly comes from novels and I have wondered if, as Mankel notes, I should be encouraging my grandchildren to learn Chinese.

This is the kind of book that makes me feel like a citizen of the world, bewildered, anxious, but at the same time curious.

(The Man From Beijing is available on the mystery shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE SONG OF ACHILLES

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The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller, Ecco, 2012, 369 pp

Here I go again. The lone dissenter. It seems that everyone but me LOVED this modern fictional account of Achilles and the Trojan War. (I am not saying that The Iliad was not fictional. Even Homer is considered fictional by some.)

In any case, Homer's classic about the great war of ancient Greece, written in the style of his times, was an ode to Greece, its heroes, its glories, and its close relationship to the gods. I read it five years ago just because I thought I should and did not enjoy it much. Dick Lit, the original example, I thought.

I wanted to read The Song of Achilles because I had so admired The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon, a story about Alexander the Great as a youth. When Song of Achilles made the 2013 Tournament of Books list, I just sat down and read it.

Madeline Miller says it took her a decade to write her first novel. She teaches Latin and Ancient Greek. She obviously poured her knowledge and love of the period into her writing.

Because this version gives a portrait of Achilles through the eyes of his companion and lover Patroclus, it paints a much different picture of the hero from Homer's. Reading The Iliad, I found Achilles to be a spoiled mama's boy. Mama, the Goddess Thetis, the sea nymph who made Achilles partly immortal, does her best to keep her son under control but Achilles comes across with more of a mind of his own in Miller's treatment.

I admired the writing and the somewhat idyllic narrative of the first half morphing into the battle scenes of the second. But I could not get past the clearly feminine voice of the entire book, the opposite problem of what I had reading Homer. A snarky suspicion kept creeping into my mind as I read: if the same sex love between Achilles and Patroclus were not the heart and engine of the story, would the novel have been so well received? Is there an agenda underlying both the efforts of the author and the adulation of readers, if not all reviewers?

I am not sorry I read it. I am glad I had read The Iliad first. Currently I am also reading Caesar and Christ by Will Durant, the third volume of his Story of Civilization. Because of reading The Life of Greece, Vol II, I finally read The Iliad. Granted that Durant was writing history, not fiction, but he hoped to reach an audience of regular readers as opposed to academics. In writing about people and life in such long ago times, he always managed to make a distinction between what he had gleaned from his own studies of the past and what were his views from the present.

Perhaps a certain lack of that distinction, sorely missing in The Song of Achilles, is what tainted my view.

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

REFUGEE HOTEL

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Refugee Hotel, Juliet Linderman, McSweeney's Books, 2012, 317 pp

Refugees entering the United States from Asian and African countries in the 21st century number 64,000 a year. After often years, even decades, in refugee camps, their first experience of America is a night in an airport hotel until they are flown to their destination city. Hence the title.

Half the book is photos of these people in the hotels and in their new homes. Many end up in high-rise projects but they are given services to help them adjust, learn English, find jobs and become citizens.

The rest of the book relates the immigration stories of many of these people. Heartbreak, broken families, and lost nationalities combine with determination and hope. The 64,000 a year are the lucky ones. Millions more are still in the refugee camps, underfed, barely housed, and dying.

The book moved me and opened my eyes to the realities of the countries from which these people come. We live in a world of intense upheaval and I wonder at the disparity between my safe, secure, and prosperous life and the desperation of so many. It is hard to fathom.

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

THE FAULT IN OUR STARS

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The Fault in Our Stars, John Green, Dutton Books, 2012, 194 pp

Here I go with the second book I read from the Tournament of Books list, another book I was not ever going to read because of the subject matter. I know I am going against the grain here because it won four awards and is that rare book that has 5 stars everywhere you look. But I was right. I did not need to read this book.

In another way, I'm not sorry I did. It was an informative example of a certain type of emotional enslavement accomplished by writing fiction. Call me what you want but I am not an emotionally cold person. I have strong feelings across the entire spectrum every day. When it comes to writing of any kind though, I subscribe to Wordsworth's dictum that "poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility." 

Some subjects are still too raw and unprocessed, at least to me, and though I would never endeavor to suppress the creativity or right to communicate of any artist, such subjects must be handled with extreme care in order to produce what I consider art. I understand that this view is utterly personal and that is as it should be.

Having said all that, I also am aware that a large proportion of our society just loves to be emotionally manipulated in ways that I find abusive. This is equally true of the lesser proportion of people who read books. Hence the wild popularity of certain books with reading groups, hence Oprah Winfrey, Dr Phil, etc. Hence most of what is on TV and our news coverage these days and the astonishing pervasiveness of marketing in shaping our society. I won't even begin on our political process.

It was not lost on me that the book Hazel reads over and over turns out to have been written by an alcoholic psychopath. Because adolescence is the most highly charged emotional period of life, it is not surprising that many teens loved The Fault in Our Stars. I don't begrudge them that. But the fault in John Green is that he should have been more careful and less emotionally abusive, because he is a good YA writer and could have pulled it off.

One more thing: (from Chapter 4) "Cancer kids are essentially side effects of the relentless mutation that made the diversity of life on earth possible." Really? Hazel says it but where did that idea come from? I searched the web but only found references to John Green's book. If this idea is part of current cancer research I would like to know how it came about. Does anyone know?

(The Fault in Our Stars is available in hardcover on the Young Adult shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

GONE GIRL

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Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn, Crown, 2012, 444 pp

OK. I have read one of the most talked about books of 2012. I read Sharp Objects last year and didn't like it much, so I was not going to read Gone Girl, but it is on the Tournament of Books list.

So. Plotting leading to compulsive page turning. Check.

The two voices of the wife, the one of the husband. Check. (But an overused device these days.)

The Patricia Highsmith influence. Check.

The surprising twist at the end. That was the best part of the book.

Bad parents do produce dysfunctional offspring sometimes (Flynn's theme in both books, it seems) and often, said offspring never recover. Sometimes great parents, like mine, produce troubled offspring. There are no answers in Gone Girl.

My opinion: the good points including the timeliness (about the current economic scene), do not make up for a novel that is mostly a spectator sport. It might make a good movie. Keep your eyes peeled for that.

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

FAITHFUL PLACE

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Faithful Place, Tana French, Viking, 2010, 400 pp

Tana French manages never to write the same book twice while staying in her police procedural/mystery genre, her location in Dublin, Ireland, and among the same main characters, all members of the Dublin Murder Squad.

Frank Mackey, the cynical and controlling Undercover guy who put Cassie Maddox in harm's way over and over again in The Likeness, shows his softer side. Faithful Place is a street in one of the most downscale neighborhoods of Dublin and is where Frank grew up. The whole lower-class Irish life, complete with abusive alcoholic father, crazy controlling mother, and squabbling siblings, provides the setting that made Frank who he is.

But even assholes can have fallen in love once, lost that love, and become cynical. As a matter of fact, the same thing happened to Frank's father but Frank managed to get out of his personal ghetto when he became a cop. Turns out, as always, that you can't get the ghetto out of the man.

French is at her best, again, combining murder, plot, and personal turmoil. It is almost ridiculously easy to read her novels yet she never lets up with the literary writing or the deep characters. I hope she never lets up period and keeps on giving me a new novel to love every two years.

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

NW

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NW, Zadie Smith, The Penguin Press, 2012, 401 pp

My husband is a recording engineer and sound mixer. He is also one of the most tasteful guitarists I know. He spends his days recording and mixing music for both professional clients and his songwriter friends.

He is always studying and learning from the masters. One morning he played for me a comparison demo he had set up to show the results of what has come to be called the Loudness Wars. Since the 1980s, recorded music has gotten louder and louder. It started out as a kind of King of the Hill thing: the louder the CD, the more it would stand out, particularly on the radio. The result is that the contemporary wall of loudness has submerged the clarity of the human voice, the brilliance of solo instruments, and the punch of the drums.

I could go into the technical nuances of Zadie Smith's writing in NW and they are many, making her latest novel a challenging read. I finished her book a week and a half before writing this review. After listening to my husband's demo, I suddenly saw the brilliance of NW.

Fiction is tales of the myriad particulars of the human condition. Each novel gives us the big picture of human life by telling the details which make up a certain group of characters in certain times and places. My main beef with the modern world is a relentless extinction of the details due to factors like marketing and the internet, until a homogenization of the particulars brings about an ennui of sameness. In what I would call current popular fiction, it all begins to sound alike. We read what is the agreed upon synthesis of emotion, experience, and possibility for life.

NW takes place in a neighborhood of London where this homogenization effect is in process but not by any means complete. The characters are in various stages of either resisting or flowing with the process.

Thus I got the nuances, the exotic differences, the extinction factors, and the pressures to conform because of the techniques used by the author. Most of all I got the psychic distress experienced by each character. Once again, it is the end of the world as we know it and Zadie Smith bears witness.

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

THE CHAPMAN REPORT

The Chapman Report, Irving Wallace, Simon and Schuster Inc, 1960, 383 pp

The #4 bestseller of 1960 is yet another confirmation that the 60s was THE decade when sex took its place of prominence in fiction. Now it is a commonplace, almost required or expected in contemporary fiction, but by the end of the 1950s most of the big censorship cases against sexually explicit novels had been defeated and the Pandora's Box of literature was forever opened.

Too bad then that The Chapman Report is also an example of the worst trashy bestseller writing; so bad it made me laugh. But Wallace made his point: when you get women talking about their sex lives, anything can happen.

A team of sex researchers are finishing their rounds of surveys in a Los Angeles suburb. The location is fictional but resembles a mix of the Santa Monica/Brentwood/Bel Air neighborhoods. The women are married, widowed, or divorced. They are also well-off and many have small children. Additionally, each female character is a type: nympho, intellectual, frigid, Daddy's girl, adulteress, and driven career woman. The lives of each of these women blow up once they begin to participate in the interviews.

Wallace has a second point to make: a soulless, scientific, numerical approach to female sexual practices leaves out the emotional life of these women. It was after this book that Erica Jong and others came along in the 1970s to reveal the female side of the story.

Wallace, a prolific journalist and screenwriter, clearly did his research. The major sex researchers of the day and their conflicts with each other are mentioned, including Alfred Kinsey. Wallace claimed that his researcher is not based on Kinsey or any of the others. Having read T C Boyle's The Inner Circle, a novel based on the life of Kinsey, I beg to differ.

In the end, despite the laughable prose, this melodramatic and juicy story was a titillating read. Apparently the American reading public of 1960 also found it to be so.

(The Chapman Report is out of print but can be found as a used paperback, an eBook, and in audible form by searching the internet.)

HOW THE DEAD DREAM

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How the Dead Dream, Lydia Millet, Counterpoint, 2008, 244 pp

I have always meant to read Lydia Millet. Instead of starting with her first novel, as I usually do, I decided to begin with the first of her trilogy.

How the Dead Dream is an intriguing title. I was expecting something like Kevin Brockmeier's The Brief History of the Dead. I didn't get that but I got something equally astounding and good.

A curious mix of dry humor, tragedy, and unique characters makes up the story of T. As a boy he grows up with a reverence for money and institutions. He becomes a savvy and successful real estate developer only to be felled in the end by loss. After learning the truth about his distant and indifferent father, finding and losing the love of his life, and taking on the burden of his loopy, Christian, and somewhat senile mother, T turns to animals for comfort and answers.

Not just any animals but animals who are on the verge of extinction become his obsession. When Barbara Kingsolver writes about what mankind is doing to each other and the environment, she lays it on the line in no uncertain terms. Lydia Millet takes a different approach.

By way of T's gradually developing awareness of how the practices that have made him successful are the very actions causing losses in the natural world, Millet shows the answers to two of my most perplexing questions: how will mankind ever wake up to the damage being done and will we wake up in time to avert our own extinction? Her answer to the first is, very slowly. To the second, possibly not.

One of the recent developments in writing style is evident in How the Dead Dream. It is a certain deadpan, reportorial, removed voice. I am coming across it more and more in contemporary fiction and sometimes find it disconcerting. I wonder if the trend in non-fiction writing toward a more creative, literary style is having an inverse effect on fiction toward a fact-based journalistic style.

Millet took me into the psyche of T but with a distinct lack of sentiment. And yet, when he loses his girlfriend, her rendering of the grief process is one of the best I have ever read. Some of the scenes between T and animals have the potential to rend the heart with a Steven Spielberg-type sentimentality, but she never crosses that line. She keeps her distance. It is as though she were practicing tough love on her readers, saying this is what real life is made up of, so you better just suck it up and keep trying for some semblance of being admirable.

In the end, the book did not end but left me hanging. Then I remembered it was the first of a trilogy and there is more to come. Some readers complain about author manipulation. I've never been much bothered by it. I expect an author to have her way with me. Why else would I read so much? Along with the voice I mentioned above, Millet's prose is also poetic, even other worldly at times.

Reader, beware. You will be manipulated and you might just like it.

CLOUD ATLAS

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Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell, Random House Inc, 2004, 509 pp

What can I say? I had a hard time with this book, extremely hard. If it hadn't been made into a movie this year, it would still be on my shelf where it has been for many years and I would still be filled with the anticipation of a great read. But the movie was released, I have read the book, and I feel like a failure because I did not really love it and I can't gush.

All my pride as a reader is gone. After dissing reading group members who whine about too many characters, too much jumping around in time, having to read dialect, I have been defeated by all of the above.

I wonder if I should take a class on Cloud Atlas so I can have it explained or at least be made to write a paper or take an exam, forcing me to find and answer the right questions.

OK, there were some parts I liked, some characters I remember. I can admit, grudgingly, that Mitchell created and mastered all those different voices and styles. I got his message that we are ruining our planet and our fellowmen. 

I can tell you one thing for sure: at a 2.5 hours running time, I will not be seeing Cloud Atlas in a theater. I would have to pee at least once and I would surely need a smoke.

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

THE HOUSE AT TYNEFORD

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The House at Tyneford, Natasha Solomons, Penguin Group, 2011, 351 pp

I read this for one of my reading groups and found it fairly good historical fiction. It stands out as yet another story derived from the global event called World War II. I don't suppose we will run out of tales about that for a good long time.

Elise Landau is 19 and forced to emigrate from Vienna to England in 1938 because she is Jewish, her father is a novelist out of favor with the Third Reich, and her parents want to keep her safe. Apparently, many young, affluent girls escaped Europe on a domestic service visa to Great Britain in those years.

Elise had been spoiled by her family's comfortable circumstances in Vienna including a rich social life due to her mother's status as an opera singer and her father's fame as a novelist. Arriving at the Tyneford House on the wild Dorset coast, she found it difficult to adjust to being a servant rather than being served.

In truth, the story was like The Secret Garden for adults. The writing is nicely done, except for a tiresome tendency of the author to begin each chapter with a page of description. Fortunately Ms Solomons writes well about the beauties and fitful weather of the area.

Most of my fellow reading group members found it improbable and even cringe inducing. Elise and the son of this family fall in love, so she rises from her servant station to family member. Because of the war, the love affair is doomed.

In my view, historical fiction of this sort must include a love story; war usually sends love into disastrous and sad directions; disruption of family life, economic conditions, and treasured traditions is inevitable. The House at Tyneford touches on all of the above. It made me cry once and sob near the end.

Not bad. More than a piece of fluff. And I am now determined to learn to make a Sacher torte. (Did you know it is a gluten-free dessert?)

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

TOP 25 BOOKS READ IN 2012

This past year I read 138 books; not too bad but not as many as I had planned to read. Some were for reading groups, some were for research, some I read just to keep up with the unusually large amount of good novels published in 2012. This list is compiled from the ones that gave me the largest kick or pleasure or just plain awe.

I got an iPad for my birthday and navigated the changes necessary to read in a digital format. It turned out to be fine and an e-reader is especially good for reading those huge tomes that give me reader's elbow. Like most modern people, I am now hooked on being able to get a book in minutes without having to leave the house. 

My goal this year is to read 161 books. That is one more than my highest ever total books read in one year. Please, let's not have anyone I love getting sick, dying, or deciding to need me for large chunks of time. My mantra will be, "Leave me alone, I am reading." I can dream, can't I?

THE LIST

Among Others, Jo Walton

As Though She Were Sleeping, Elias Khoury

Childhood's End, Arthur C Clarke

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe

The Golden Mean, Annabel Lyon

Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin

Henderson The Rain King, Saul Bellow

Horse Heaven, Jane Smiley

How the Dead Dream, Lydia Millet*

The Inner Circle, T C Boyle

Last Night in Montreal, Emily St John Mandel

Lovers and Tyrants, Francine du Plessix Gray

NW, Zadie Smith*

The Orphan Master's Son, Adam Johnson

Our Tragic Universe, Scarlett Thomas

A Partial History of Lost Causes, Jennifer duBois
The Patagonian Hare, Claude Lanzmann

The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, Jonathan Evison

Stoner, John Williams

Telegraph Avenue, Michael Chabon

Tete-A-Tete, Hazel Rowley

Truman, David McCullough

White Teeth, Zadie Smith

Who Fears Death, Nnedi Okorafur

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Jeanette Winterson

* review coming soon. The rest of the list can be found reviewed on this blog.

MR IVES' CHRISTMAS

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Mr Ives's Christmas, Oscar Hijuelos, HarperCollins, 1995, 248 pp

Oscar Hijuelos' third novel began a bit slowly but in some way I have yet to figure out, took hold of me with a gradually tightening grip and left me gasping for relief at the end. The writing is deceptive. It seemed almost simple, almost pedestrian, until I found myself embedded in the hearts and minds of Mr Ives and his wife.

The couple, Mr Ives of Cuban descent and Mrs Ives of Irish, are bound together by passion, intellect, and faith. Content to remain living in a multicultural neighborhood in Upper Manhattan which has seen better days, they are raising two children and are deeply involved in their church and community when disaster strikes. Robert, their son, who is days from entering the seminary, is killed during an incident of senseless violence by a neighborhood punk. Every good thing in their lives, especially their love for each other and their faith in God, is tested.

The impact of a child's death on a marriage and family has been depicted many times in fiction. Hijuelos makes the story new again, mostly due to his two main characters. In an almost bland third person voice he brings the reader so close to Mr Ives and his lovely, vibrant wife Annie, he dives so intricately into the minute personal differences between them as they deal with grief, with religious belief, with life itself, that the novel tested my own faith in love, in mankind, in a Supreme Being, and in life itself.

I don't know if the amount of emotional turmoil in Mr Ives' Christmas is every reader's cup of tea. I didn't think I would be able to stomach the overtly Catholic views. But then again, I have been drawn in by Graham Greene, especially The Power and the Glory. As I watched the movie version of The Life of Pi on Christmas Eve, I remembered that part of my love for that book was Pi's seriously held and seriously tested faith in the three religions he practiced simultaneously.

Oscar Hijuelos did not turn me back to the Christian faith of my youth. He performed another kind of miracle and renewed my faith in living by one's values and in the divine nature of human love.

(Mr Ives's Christmas is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

LOVERS AND TYRANTS

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Lovers and Tyrants, Francine du Plessix Gray, Simon and Schuster, 1967, 316 pp

I loved this novel unconditionally. I have always meant to read Francine du Plessix Gray because I had the impression of a smart, outspoken female, along the lines of Mary McCarthy, Simone de Beauvoir, etc. Her latest novel, The Queen's Lover, was released recently, reminding me that I still hadn't read anything she had written. As is my usual practice, I went for her first novel.

Her books seem to get tepid reviews, though she gets a lot of respect, making me think that possibly she is not easily accessible and has a unique take on whatever she writes about. I was right!

Lovers and Tyrants is probably autobiographical since the life of Stephanie, the main character, follows Gray's life: born of a French father and Russian emigre mother, raised in France and then America after escaping the dangers of World War II. The theme of tyranny by those who love us the most felt true to me.

If I had read this novel in the 70s when I was going through my own awakening to feminism and personal freedom (and I so wish I had), I would have loved it and learned from it and been given courage by it. Women in their 20s and 30s today might not find it as moving because life actually is better for women now. Not perfect, but better.

Reading it now, in my 60s, with my children grown and having worked out many of my issues with men, marriage, and motherhood, was an emotionally satisfying way of looking back over what it was like for me. In many ways, it acted as absolution and benediction for all the missteps I made.

If you are a woman who has grappled with the disconnect between the urge to nurture and the urge to flee, I recommend Lovers and Tyrants to you. Gray's writing is wild and impassioned, sometimes undisciplined, sometimes overblown. But it is from the depths of an intelligent, creative woman who will not be denied and who claims all the rights due to a human being.

(Lovers and Tyrants is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE QUEEN OF COOL

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The Queen of Cool, Cecil Castellucci, Candlewick Press, 2006, 166 pp

THE CHRISTMAS WEEK FAMILY READ

Continuing my completist reading of Cecil Castellucci's novels. The Queen of Cool is her second after Boy Proof.

I didn't love this one as much but it has highlights. Libby Brin is #1 popular girl at school. She is spoiled at home: even when she rarely gets grounded, she gets out of it. She has her own car, a huge wardrobe, and all the requisite toys. Her boyfriend's mind resides in a lower body organ than his brain or heart.

She lives in Los Angeles and (highlight) stumbles into an internship at the LA Zoo. I admit, I always enjoy books set in LA since I live here. At the zoo she has to work with Tiny, a "Little Person" and Sheldon, a science geek, two people at the extreme bottom of the coolness rating.

Naturally her eyes are opened to the shallowness of her existence. I have nothing against midgets or geeks but the message that they are people too was a bit off-putting in its preachiness.

I did enjoy watching a female teen realize that life includes more than clothes, parties, cars, and gossip. The biggest highlight was a novel for teens that admits to the amount of drinking, drug use, and sex going on in high school.

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

THE CONSTANT IMAGE

The Constant Image, Marcia Davenport, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1960, 253 pp

The #6 bestseller of 1960 was purely awful. It falls in that category of fiction by the likes of Danielle Steele: endless descriptions of clothing, jewelry, and furnishings; passages of mildly bad sex writing; the vacillating obsessive maunderings of a young woman in love with the wrong man. Perfect bestseller material for a certain type of female reader who is not me.

Set in Milan, the story makes a big deal about the difference in moral values between Americans and Italians. Of course, they are all rich and in fact, infidelity is still infidelity when such an amount of lip service is paid to the sanctity of family. Included is the old conventional wisdom that the men are expected to fool around but the women are either victims or sluts. As my straight-laced grandma used to say, "It takes two to tango."

I guess that is enough ranting. After all, it was my freely taken decision to read the bestsellers from 1940 onward and even books like this fit the premise: the popular books reflect the culture of the time.

(The Constant Image is justifiably out of print but available in libraries and through used book sellers.)

THE HOURS BEFORE DAWN

The Hours Before Dawn, Celia Fremlin, Victor Gollancz, 1958, 190 pp

One of the pleasures of reading all those old books for My Big Fat Reading Project is discovering gems like this. The Hours Before Dawn won the Edgar Award in 1960.

Louise Henderson is the young mother of two children in 1950s London. Her infant does not sleep much, especially between the hours of 2 AM and dawn. He cries incessantly so that by the time he is just a few months old, Louise is so sleep deprived she moves through her daily housewifery duties in a daze.

Mr Henderson is a typical 50s husband who wants his dinner on time and thinks his wife should be able to quiet that baby so he can sleep at night. Neighbor women on either side of their home are busybodies: one is full of advice on child rearing and the other threatens to call the authorities about the screaming baby.

When the Hendersons let out a bedroom to a local school teacher, strange things begin to happen. It takes Louise several weeks to realize something weird is going on, being so sleepy that she is always on the verge of nodding off.

Once she realizes their boarder Vera may be the cause of the trouble, Louise turns amateur sleuth and saves her family in the nick of time.

The Hours Before Dawn equals the best of Shirley Jackson for its abundance of creeping creepiness as well as its wry take on motherhood and the plight of the housewife. Luckily for me, the book was reprinted in 1995 by Black Dagger Crime Series and I found it at my local library.

GOODBYE, COLUMBUS

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Goodbye, Columbus, Philip Roth, Houghton Mifflin, 1959, 298 pp

At last, I am no longer a Philip Roth virgin. He broke out with this collection of the novella, Goodbye, Columbus and five short stories, for which he won the National Book Award in 1960.

The theme of all the pieces is second and third-generation Jews moving from the ghetto into assimilation as Americans. I liked the novella for its characters and plot, though he stole shamelessly from Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar. I fell shamelessly into the love story between Neil Klugman, poor New York City Jew, and Brenda Patimkin, New Jersey suburban Jewish American Princess. After all, this is one of the major plots of American literature in the late 20th century and already Roth could write like nobody's business.

The short stories ranged from not quite good to deeply weird but they had all been published in mags like "The Paris Review" and "The New Yorker." That was the way young, white, male writers gained recognition in those days and clearly Roth got his due.

Conclusion: I will continue with Roth's novels and ignore the short stories.

(Goodbye, Columbus is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

CLEA

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Clea, Lawrence Durrell, E P Dutton & Company, 1960, 287 pp

Sadly, I have come to the end of The Alexandria Quartet*. It has been a revelatory reading experience and I now see why this dated collection is still read, praised, even loved.

I found Clea the weakest of the four, perhaps because Durrell is winding down, as is the historic city of Alexandria. (These days it is considered an unsafe location for tourists.) During the time covered by Clea, the British Empire's heyday is coming to a close. In his inimitable way, Durrell infuses all of this into a sad farewell.

Clea, who had always been a shadowy presence in the earlier novels, now has her day. She is an artist, a painter. Of all the women in the Quartet, she comes across as the most well balanced; a sort of Earth Mother figure and the feminist of the bunch. The nararator (whom I assume is Durrell himself) finally has a love affair with her. He is older and wiser now, but Clea is wiser still.

The End.

*The Books of the Alexandria Quartet:

Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea

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

THE WEIRD SISTERS

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The Weird Sisters, Eleanor Brown, G P Putnam's Sons, 2011, 318 pp

This novel did pretty much nothing for me. It is a type: I would call it "women's fiction with a quirk." The three Andreas sisters, raised by a nice but distant mother and a Shakespeare professor who named them after Shakespearean women, grew up in a small college town. The family was wont to approach life via quotes from Shakespeare plays and sonnets. They were all great readers, mostly because there was nothing else to do in their small town.

As the novel opens, they are all adults, two have moved away and one is living nearby. Because their mother has been diagnosed with breast cancer, they come together in their childhood home, ostensibly to care for her, but actually to escape their screwed up lives. Then they have conflicts and realizations and it all turns out happy.

Readers of my blog know that I have a fatal flaw which prevents me from being able to enjoy Shakespeare. When I realized how lame it was, I only finished The Weird Sisters because it was a reading group pick. I thought I might like it because three years ago my two sisters and I came together to care for our mother after she had a major stroke. That experience brought out the worst in our relationship. 

But this excuse for a novel borders on Shakespeare-light, worse than No Fear or Cliff Notes, just a bunch of quotes thrown in sometimes apropos of nothing. The characters are predictable and they get off much too easy for the mistakes they've made.

I used to have an acquaintance who was a writer and opened a bookstore on the California coast. She had a sign by the cash register offering a refund for any book you bought there that you didn't like. One day a man came in brandishing a book and yelling that she had robbed him of his time. She had recommended the book to him and he had hated it. He was demanding to be repaid for his reading time.

Of course that is one of those tales of horror told by booksellers and we had a good laugh about it. But honestly, I felt this way about The Weird Sisters.

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

WITH OR WITHOUT YOU

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With or Without You, Domenica Ruta, Spiegel & Grau, 2012, 207 pp

This memoir came into my hands in advance reader's edition form. It will be released in February, 2013. I devoured it in one gulp. It came with high praise from Amy Bloom and Gary Shteyngart. The marketing person compared it favorably to The Glass Castle. All good.

But for at least 50 pages I was underwhelmed. Where was the lyricism of The Glass Castle? Where was the "darkly hilarious" tone? I admit those 50 pages went by in a flash but couldn't say why.

So yes, bad mother on drugs, poverty, crazy unstable life, addiction, blah, blah, blah. The kid turns out to be a reader, the mom does a couple actual helpful things, and this girl, who by middle school was hooked on OxyContin, managed to graduate with good grades from high school and college, while getting into a prestigious MFA program. Did I mention that she also became an alcoholic?

Try as I might to analyze what happened, all I know is that I got hooked on Domenica Ruta's deadpan, affectless prose. Then when she finally figured out that to survive she needed to lose the mom, I had to find out how she did it. Because the truth that makes this memoir real is that we love our mothers no matter who they are or what they do. Even the best, most perfect moms can haunt you; the poisonous ones are an addiction in themselves.

Final analysis: With or Without You is powerful, possibly a classic in the memoir genre, and does not sugarcoat the damage done nor what it takes to live with said damage. Not exactly inspiring, definitely sobering (no pun intended.)

(With or Without You is available in hardcover or audio CD by advance order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

WELCOME TO HARD TIMES

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Welcome to Hard Times, E L Doctorow, Simon and Schuster, 1960, 209 pp

Doctorow's first novel is a literary western. That's right. It was shelved in Westerns at my library. In truth, it is a philosophical though action packed story set in Dakota Territory during the wild, lawless days when the West was being settled.

The writing is taut and just about perfect. You can see, hear, almost smell the town of Hard Times and the characters leap to life. The "Bad Man from Bodie" rides into town, rapes the whores, then burns down the entire town.

Blue is the default philosophizing mayor. In penance for failing to defend his town from the Bad Man because he was not willing to kill the guy, he attempts to rebuild the town and to create a family by taking in Molly, one of the raped whores, as well as the young son of his best friend who died in the fire. Molly reminded me of Kathy from Steinbeck's East of Eden.

But evil has visited the town once and Doctorow creates some serious foreboding and foreshadowing. You know it's coming back. Quite a page-turner for such a philosophical book because the symbolism is embedded in the drama.

(Welcome to Hard Times is available in paperback and eBook by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

MEET THE AUSTINS

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Meet the Austins, Madeleine L'Engle, Vanguard Press, 1960, 191 pp

THE SUNDAY FAMILY READ

 

When Meet the Austins was published in 1960, Madeleine L'Engle was two years away from publishing her break out book A Wrinkle in Time. Somewhere I read that she was quite discouraged as an author at this time, even though she had been writing stories since childhood. She got published but prior to Wrinkle in Time her books had not sold well. In the long run, Meet the Austins grew into her second most well-known series.

I loved this book. It has all the charm of my favorite childhood book, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, but is set in contemporary times. L'Engle had a rather sad and lonely childhood, spent mostly in boarding schools. She must have channeled all her longing for a close family life into this book.

The Austins live in comfortable but not overly prosperous conditions in a rambling house somewhere outside of New York City. Mr Austin is a medical doctor, Mrs Austin a stay-at-home mom. Four kids, two dogs, several cats. Classical music, books (their mother reads to all four every night before bed even though the littlest is four and the oldest in high school.) An uncle who lives in the city is an artist and Mrs Austin's BFF, Elena, is a touring pianist.

Into this idyllic scene comes seven-year-old Maggy, who has just been orphaned and has no where to go. Maggy was the daughter of one of Elena's friends but since Elena is often touring, the Austins take her in. The little orphan is a spoiled brat who behaves badly so the Austins tame her with love and their special brand of discipline, but not before she manages to bring turmoil and even danger to the family.

The story is predictable, narrated in the first person of Vicky, an observant 12-year-old who sounds much like L'Engle, but the tone is an indescribable mix of common sense and warmth. I can't imagine any reader not falling for this family and wanting to be part of it.

Interesting biographical fact: L'Engle and her husband adopted a seven-year-old girl in 1957. The child's parent who left her an orphan had been a close friend of Madeleine's, who by 1957 had a 10-year-old daughter and a five-year-old son.

Meet the Austins is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)