THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS

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The Signature of All Things, Elizabeth Gilbert, Viking, 2013, 499 pp

Oh my. I loved this book. I didn't want it to end. I wish I was still reading it. Let me see if I can stop gushing and say something intelligent about why I loved it so much.

First of all, Alma Whittaker, so flawed a character yet so brave and in the end so wise. I suppose not all readers will feel that way, especially female readers. I admired her and suffered with her. Of course, I recognized that Gilbert put a good deal of herself into Alma but found nothing wrong with that.

As a piece of historical fiction, the book excels in terms of evoking the times without showing off the research. I am a gardener and the daughter of gardeners so I was captivated by all the botany stuff.

Finally, Gilbert writes in this novel with such balance between the plot and her empathy for her exotic characters. She has got the controlled abandon of Neal Stephenson, the wit of A M Homes, but is fully herself. She kept upending my expectations as to where the story was going in such a brilliant way that I was willing to follow wherever she took me.

Alma, who put almost all of her mind and energies into science, who used her studies and experiments in botany to make sense of the world, eventually arrived at a theory similar to Darwin's. She had published other books and plenty of articles in scientific journals but put off publishing her theory because she had an unanswered question about life, an anomaly that did not fit. Then Darwin's book came out, he acquired fame and credit for the theory of evolution.

By this time Alma was elderly and I loved most of all the insight and light-handed approach Gilbert took with this final disappointment in Alma's life. Between the lines of these final chapters, much gets said about science, truth, men, women, fame, and integrity.

(The Signature of All Things is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

BLACK LIKE ME

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Black Like Me, John Howard Griffin, Signet, 1961, 176 pp

I don't read much non-fiction for My Big Fat Reading Project. When I do, I choose books that give me the sense of living amidst the times or that fill in parts of history I never fully learned. Black Like Me gave me a great deal of insight into what life was like for southern Blacks in the early years of the Civil Rights struggle.

The premise is almost unbelievable. A white journalist from Texas, by means of medication and dyes, turns himself into a Negro and spends time with other Negroes in various towns: New Orleans, small towns in Mississippi and Alabama, Atlanta. 

Griffin may have invented immersive journalism. He had a contract for the story with a magazine called Sepia and as far as I can tell, his experiences were the real deal.

He discovered that though he already believed racism to be a terrible thing, white people really had no idea what it was like to be a Negro, especially in the South. He could enter a drug store and make a purchase, but could not sit at the counter to eat. Negroes could only eat at Negro cafes. He could not even get a drink of water and often had to walk many blocks to find a restroom he could use. 

Worst of all was what he came to call "the hate stare." The constant degradation got to him so much that there were times when he felt insane.

It is a moving story and goes far to explain the complex barrier Black people in America have to overcome to gain rights that are inalienable according to our Constitution. Once Griffin's article came out he became an overnight celebrity in the North but was so reviled and threatened in his home town that he moved his family to Mexico to protect their lives. 

This is a short book, well written, and should be read by every American citizen.

 

 

(Black Like Me is available in paperback on the Classics shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

FEBRUARY READING GROUP UPDATE

After a warm and sunny January here in Los Angeles, we are in for cooler weather, clouds, and hopefully some rain. Perfect weather for reading. Here is what we will discuss in my reading groups during February:

Tina's Group

Once Upon A Time Bookstore Adult Fiction Group

One Book At A Time

Bookie Babes

 

 

 

What is happening with your reading groups? Any suggestions for books that make for good discussions? 

THE WATERS OF KRONOS

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The Waters of Kronos, Conrad Richter, Alfred A Knopf, 1960, 176 pp

Conrad Richter was a well respected mid-century writer whose series about a midwestern pioneer family, The Trees (1940), The Fields (1946), and The Town (1950), were his most popular books. I read The Town because it won a Pulitzer Prize in 1951 and enjoyed it for the good story telling and the history of the midwest.

The Waters of Kronos is a whole different type of novel. I would say it was experimental for its time though not as far out there as his contemporaries Wright Morris or John Barth.

John Donner is an aging man in ill heath when he goes back to his home town, seeking answers in the past. Unionville lies somewhere amongst the mountains of the northeastern United States and has been underwater for years due to a large hydroelectric dam on the River Kronos.

Donner talks his way past a guard at the gates of the fenced lake and before long finds himself in the Unionville of the past, in the years of his childhood. Richter uses a cross between time travel and symbolism as he has Donner roam the town where no one, even members of his own family, recognizes him.

Page after page of description, of memories and nostalgia, do not reveal much about Donner's childhood, except that he feared his father, adored his mother, and left home as a young man. He works through a Freudian/Jungian hatred of his father but finally still longs for the mother's love and acceptance.

Richter won the National Book Award for The Waters of Kronos, wrote one more novel and passed away in 1968 at the age of 78.

(The Waters of Kronos is available in a university paperback reprint by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore. I found a copy at my local library.)

THE LUMINARIES

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The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton, Little Brown and Company, 2013, 830 pp

I was dying to read this book from the moment I heard about it. The Booker Prize winner for 2013, a young female author purported to be highly intelligent (I love young intelligent female authors) from New Zealand (I have a thing for fiction from down under.) Finally I got through the holidays and all that end of the year stuff, cleared the decks, and settled down for a nice long winter read.

Well! Reading the beginning of The Luminaries is an eye-of-the-needle proposition. If you can make it through Part One, 360 pages, you will probably make it to the end. Many are called but few are chosen, though I must say that is rather true of most Booker Prize winners.

Before I had gone even 100 pages, I switched from my beautiful hardcover copy (graciously sent to me by the publisher free of charge, I guess because I have a blog) and began reading the digital galley edition on my iPad. Because the hardcover was so heavy it was hard to switch back and forth from the page I was reading to the character chart at the beginning. That chart of characters is essential to following the story.

Yes, the characters. There are 20 main characters, one of whom is dead; all important and intrinsic to this tale of the 1860s Gold Rush in New Zealand. At first I was annoyed by the lengthy description of each person. It felt like too much telling, but it turned out that the author had painted vivid pictures of each in my mind helping me to remember them as I got to know them further through the story.

I tried to make sense of the astrology connection but finally gave it up. I don't know enough about astrology to get what she was doing, though I might have missed a whole level of the novel.

It took me a full week to read The Luminaries. By the end I was reading over 200 pages a day due to the telescoping nature of the book's structure, but the beginning was rough. I'm not sure quite how she captured me. I do like gold rush stories for the sheer lawlessness and desperation involved. This one is also a mystery with possibly a few too many red herrings and ultimately it's a love story though that does not become apparent until the end. She does a good end, tying up all the loose threads and sorting out all the clues. I became extremely fond of the lovers and don't guess I will ever forget them.

I felt a sense of accomplishment in finishing The Luminaries. I didn't love it but I knew Eleanor Catton had had her way with me for which I admire her immensely. Not a book for the faint of heart or the light-minded, but a rollicking, honest, and in-depth look at human nature run amok.

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

EMILY'S RUNAWAY IMAGINATION

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Emily's Runaway Imagination, Beverly Cleary, William Morrow and Company, 1961, 221 pp

THE SUNDAY FAMILY READ

I was in a bad mood when I started reading this book, about a girl who is always being told that she lets her imagination run away with her. It instantly made me feel happy.

Emily is nine going on ten. She is the only child of a farming family outside Pitchfork, a very small town in Oregon. Her mother came from somewhere east, possibly Chicago, where she had been a teacher. Her father is descended from pioneers who came to Oregon generations ago. They all work hard and Emily's mom gets involved in starting the town's first library.

Though a specific date is never mentioned, times are hard and Emily's grandfather gets one of the town's first automobiles, so it must be the 1920s. Beverly Cleary later wrote a two volume autobiography. I haven't read those yet but from what I have gathered, I would say Emily's Runaway Imagination is somewhat autobiographical. In any case, the book is another example of her smooth and entertaining writing style with children as fully realized characters.

My favorite chapter was the one where Emily decides to bleach their horse, an old plow horse whose white coat, mane, and tail are mud stained and yellowed. Emily's cousin, who has lately read Black Beauty three times in a row and thinks it the most wonderful book ever, is coming for a visit from Portland, where she lives with her well off parents.

When Emily tells her mom she wants to bleach the horse, Mom just tells her to follow carefully the directions on the bottle. She works hard, all day in the hot summer weather, and gets a good result but worries that the animal is still clearly a plow horse. But the cousin is enchanted and even learns to ride it without a saddle.

One of the important rules on the farm is never waste food. The first step is always clean your plate because "think of the starving Armenians." I was still told that growing up in the 1950s! It cracked me up because I've never seen that phrase in a book before.

Since the book is set in the past, compared to most of Cleary's books which were contemporary for the times, I felt I was reading a combination of Lois Lenski and Beverly Cleary. I wonder if Lenski was an influence of Cleary's. If I were still teaching or tutoring, I would use the books of both these authors to bring history alive for my students.

(Emily's Runaway Imagination is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE BIRD SKINNER

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The Bird Skinner, Alice Greenway, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2014, 306 pp

I might never have heard of Alice Greenway if it weren't for my practice of being in multiple reading groups. The leader of one of those groups brought Ms Greenway in to do a reading from her first book, White Ghost Girls, in 2006. I immediately bought and read the book and had that wonderful feeling I get when I find a new author to love.

I've had to wait eight years for the second novel, probably worth the wait, because there is not a shred of sophomore slump in The Bird Skinner. While the first novel was essentially about teenage sisters, this one is about an old broken curmudgeon at the end of his life.

Alice Greenway is a tragedian of the first order. She sees into the minutely individual ways a human being can suffer. It takes an old soul to understand that to live is to suffer, a Buddhist concept, as well as to comprehend that a person may come to terms with loss and with his own shortcomings but not necessarily recover from them.

Jim Carroway has suffered great losses in every decade of his life while also following his consuming passion for ornithology whenever his life permitted, even at times when he should have been taking more care with that life. His most recent loss is the leg that has been amputated, for what reason we never learn. He retreats to the family house on an island off the coast of Maine where he spent summers as a child, determined to drink and smoke himself to death.

Sounds awful, I know. And it is. The novel is a study of a man whose life-changing incidents all left him with post-traumatic stress; serial PTSD. If he hadn't been the tough and nasty character he became, he would never have survived for as long as he did.

When it came to studying birds, he was fearless, ultra competent, and driven. A Darwin. An Edward O Wilson. When it came to human interaction he was found lacking. 

Because the novel follows the form of a person looking back over his life, the whole story comes to light in the patchy, uneven way that memory works. Every scene of suffering is leavened with exquisite writing about the natural world as well as the moments of grace Jim finds. The reader is made to care about this most graceless of men and to hope for his recovery.

The wonder is that even as various fine people come to Jim on his island and help him in various ways, even as he seems to find his soul again, even as we are seduced into hope, the author keeps from us what will come about in the end, though she has Jim telling us all along where he is headed.

I have a little pile of books called "How did she/he do it?" Books I will reread or have reread to discover the answer. This one goes on that pile.

(The Bird Skinner is available in hardcover by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE PROGRESS OF A CRIME

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The Progress of a Crime, Julian Symons, Harper & Brothers, 1960, 211 pp

This mystery won the Edgar Award in 1961. Hugh Bennett is a 22-year-old reporter for a small town paper in England. He dreams of getting to London eventually for work on a national paper.

When he is sent out on the usual boring assignment to cover a Guy Fawkes Night, he witnesses the murder of a local tavern owner. Before long he is involved with a top crime reporter from a big London paper as well as with the sister of one of the suspects.

A gang of knife-carrying motorcycle youths are called in, questioned, and eventually two of them are charged and tried for the crime. The London paper pays for a lawyer to defend the youths in exchange for access to the families. As the situation grows more tense, Hugh learns the ways of the world and has to grapple with his own moral compass.

The storytelling is not particularly gripping, in fact might be a bit too literary for crime fiction, but does deal with teen crime, the political and economic conditions of the times, and class conflict in mid-20th century Britain. These are the times that gave us the Beatles, the Kinks, and the Rolling Stones. Not many writers were addressing teens yet in 1960. Probably Catcher in the Rye spawned the genre and I read a 1959 novel, Absolute Beginners, also set in England, that featured teens as a new demographic. It will be interesting to see the development of such books as I continue through My Big Fat Reading Project, especially since I myself became a teen in 1960.

(The Progress of a Crime is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE EDGE OF SADNESS

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The Edge of Sadness, Edwin O'Connor, Little Brown and Company, 1961, 460 pp

The bestseller list for 1961 had a good share of long books and this one, at #8, seemed longer than its pages. I have now finished reading the top 10 bestsellers for that year.

Edwin O'Connor wrote in that wordy 1940s style, aspects of which were over-explaining and repetition. I am quite weary of the style and got weary of the story long before it was over.

Novels about religious themes still made the bestseller lists throughout the 1960s. The Edge of Sadness, about the troubles of a Catholic priest, also won the Pulitzer Prize in 1962. God was not dead yet.

Father Hugh Kennedy is middle-aged when the novel opens but his entire life story gets told as well as the history of an Irish-American family who influenced him. No sexual troubles but a period of alcoholism from which he recovered and the loss of his mother at a young age had lasting effects.

O'Connor in my mind is the Irish John O'Hara. His novels are all set in Boston and he wrote about an era that was passing away during the middle decades of the 20th century. 1961 was the year John F Kennedy took office and American Protestants were curious about Catholicism not to mention queasy about having the first Catholic president. That explains to me the bestseller status and the Pulitzer.

While the novel was only moderately good it was interesting from a historical/sociological viewpoint.

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

ON SUCH A FULL SEA

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On Such a Full Sea, Chang-rae Lee, Riverhead Books, 2014, 352 pp

If Chang-rae Lee chooses to write a futuristic novel we can safely say that speculative fiction has moved out of the ghetto of genre into the uptown of mainstream fiction. That he has brought about a distillation of the gated-compound-versus-the-barbaric-wilds trope into a quest for the fine line between free will and fate only proves what we have known all along: that speculative fiction explores the various what-ifs of human existence and is built upon our oldest myths.

"It is known where we come from, but no one much cares about things like that anymore. We think, Why bother? Except for a lucky few, everyone is from someplace, but that someplace, it turns out, is gone. You can search it, you can find pix or vids that show what the place last looked like, in our case a gravel-colored town of stoop-shouldered buildings on a riverbank in China, shorn hills in the distance. Rooftops a mess of wires and junk. The river tea-still, a swath of black. And blunting it all is a haze that you can almost smell, a smell, you think, that you don't want to breathe in."

That calm measured prose, a Chang-rae Lee hallmark; that theme of the displaced Asian person trying to understand how to fit into the Western world; a heroine, strong, slightly skewed, but eerily sympathetic. Anyone who has read this author will feel that familiar zing in this first paragraph.

We are placed in the midst of the repurposed areas of a future America following a long decline. Have I read a modern novel where the narrator is a plural first person representing the consciousness of an entire town? I don't think so.

They are retelling the story of Fan, skilled diver in the labor settlement of B-Mor. She maintains the gigantic fish tanks where high quality seafood is grown for the inhabitants of the elite walled villages, the areas where only the most intelligent and wealthy live in supreme luxury and safety.

Fan is about 16 years old and Reg, her lover and husband to be, has vanished. They think he has been captured for some role in a Charter village because the rumor in B-Mor is that Reg was "C-free." His blood did not carry the taint that almost every other person harbored, an anomaly of serious interest to the medical science of the day.

Fan commits an act of destruction in a town where order and obedience is revered, then hits the road. The town figures she has gone in search of Reg and indeed she has. Thereafter we follow her through the anarchistic counties where she suffers from violence and benefits from kindness; then into the village where she suspects Reg might be, where she benefits from kindness but in the end suffers from a different sort of violence. To readers of The Road or Oryx and Crake, this is familiar territory.

I wanted Fan to accomplish her quest. I craved the moment when she and Reg would be reunited. I marveled at Fan's strength of character even as I feared it would not be enough.

The title comes from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar:

"There is a tide in the affairs of men,

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat,

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our venture."

Fan flames out into obscurity. The collective voice of B-Mor is finally convinced of the rightness of the quest. "Don't hurry Fan. Stay put for now. We'll find a way. You need not come back for us." Freedom is a state of mind maintained by persistence and action. We yearn for the protection of irony but Chang-rae Lee once again has stripped that all away.

 

 

(On Such A Full Sea is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

EISENHOWER IN WAR AND PEACE

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Eisenhower in War and Peace, Jean Edward Smith, Random House, 2012, 766 pp

Another long, seemingly endless biography of an American president. For those of you whose knowledge of American history is shaky, Eisenhower was the 34th president and served two terms from 1953 to 1960 as a Republican. In my plan to read the biographies of Presidents under whom I have lived, completing this one puts me at two down and ten to go.

Eisenhower is known for keeping the country out of war, for balancing the budget, for standing firm on desegregation, and for being tough on unions. He was Supreme Allied Commander Europe during World War II and had never declared a political party until the Republicans nominated him in 1952.

According to Jean Edward Smith, Eisenhower's two main strengths were luck and administrative ability. Due to many years of smoking four packs of cigarettes a day and bad eating habits, he had major surgery for a digestive ailment and a heart attack near the end of his first term. He lived to run again, get re-elected, and serve a second term.

He had a long marriage to Mamie but they spent extended periods of time apart during his military career. Their first child died at three from scarlet fever. The second had a military career as well as four children, the eldest of which married Julie Nixon and had Camp David named after him.

It was interesting to realize that this man kept us on a fairly even keel during the beginning years of the Cold War. Despite never having faced combat as a soldier, he had seen enough of war to know that it was not a workable solution to world problems and he abhorred atomic weapons. He tried his best to keep a restraining hand on the military and arms budget but I'm not sure he succeeded. According to Howard Zinn in A People's History of the United States, by the time Eisenhower left office in 1960, the military budget was at 49.7% of the entire US budget.

Despite Eisenhower's warning in his farewell address about the dangers of our "military-industrial complex" that scenario has only increased during my entire adult life. Possibly our 34th President meant well but I came away from the biography with the impression that big business and the military were the power behind him. I can't believe he didn't know that.

I grew up thinking that Eisenhower was an ineffective, middle-of-the-road joke of a President. (My dad was an Adlai Stevenson supporter.) Jean Edward Smith clearly attempted a balanced picture of the man but he didn't change my mind.

(Eisenhower in War and Peace is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

REBECCA WEST: A LIFE

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Rebecca West: A Life, Victoria Glendinning, Ballantine Books, 1987, 263 pp

It was about twenty years ago that I decided to move on from reading mostly trashy novels and became an autodidact in the field of literature. It was a good decision and set me on a fabulous adventure. Every now and then however, I would get in over my head and fall into the abyss of abysmal ignorance. Such has been my experience with Rebecca West.

Possibly due to a new reissue in 2007 by Penguin Classics of her magnum opus, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, possibly due to my frustrated efforts to understand the Bosnian War, I obtained a copy of the book; the 1982 Penguin edition. I began to read and was defeated before I even made it through the 23 page Prologue. What I retained was a mysterious curiosity about the author. It was clear to me that here was a genius at work.

About a year later I came across a copy of her novel, The Fountain Overflows. I was browsing through a used bookstore (oh how I miss those days) and picked up the book for 49 cents. Here was a book of only 313 pages instead of 1150 and a novel at that!

I read it and was transported. It still stands out in my memory as one of the best books I have ever read. The writing is astonishing and the story of the family somehow heartbreaking and soothing at the same time. After finishing the novel, I made another stab at Black Lamb and Grey Falcon but again was overwhelmed, though at least I recognized my trouble: I lacked the mental geography for a place once known as Yugoslavia, a big black hole also containing the history of Europe before World War I. That was about five years ago.

I kept on reading my odd mix of those old books from the 1940s and 1950s for My Big Fat Reading Project, contemporary fiction, Will Durant's Story of Civilization series, not to mention all the books I might otherwise have never read except for the many reading groups I attend. The reading pattern of an autodidact indeed.

I've also been reading the Blog of a Bookslut for several years. Jessa Crispin is a sort of modern Rebecca West who never fails to alert me to books not mentioned on most other bookish sites. Last fall she mentioned a biography of Dame Rebecca by the acclaimed literary biographer Victoria Glendinning. I procured a used paperback and read it as part of my end of year reading spree.

At last my eyes were opened. Yes, Rebecca West was a genius. She wrote prodigiously for her entire life: book reviews, journalism, novels, and non-fiction books on many topics. She made her living as a writer and a good living it was. She was the lover of H G Wells by whom she had a son and suffered mightily in her attempts to raise the child while maintaining her career. She was the personification of the trap in which most creative and intelligent women of the 20th century lived.

Glendinning portrays Rebecca West as "both an agent for change and a victim of change. In a very early article, 'Things Men Never Know,' she described how girls were reproached for having weaker bodies, weaker brains, weaker wills, and weaker emotions than boys, but if a girl decided to put this right and to become strong and clever and brave, then she was told she had lost her 'real value' and that no one would love her." (Introduction, p xv.) Anatomy of a trap!

I began writing this review on January 9th, the birthday of Simone de Beauvoir. Rebecca West was born in December, 1892. For me it shakes out like this: Rebecca West could have been my grandmother; Simone de Beauvoir could have been my mother. Neither of them were quite mother material and neither have I been, but I am talking about a philosophical maternal lineage. It gives me great comfort to claim these women as ancestors of my mind. I am enriched, encouraged, and spurred on to make the most of what gifts they have bestowed upon me in the years remaining to me.

I will read Black Lamb and Grey Falcon in 2014.

(Rebecca West: A Life is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore, as well as from used booksellers.)

YOU ARE ONE OF THEM

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You Are One of Them, Elliott Holt, The Penguin Press, 2013, 290 pp

Elliott Holt's first novel was just OK, not great but an interesting story about a friendship between two young girls, the Cold War, Russia, and moving on. Novels by American writers set in Russia have proliferated in recent years and I have read quite a few, so it is hard not to compare them.

I'll get my quibbles out of the way. Sometimes the dates of incidents in the story occurring in the late 1970s and early 1980s felt inaccurate to me. I was not following the Cold War and fear of atomic annihilation in those years. Looking back now, I can't recall thinking about that stuff after 1969, so I could be wrong.

I kept comparing this book to A Partial History of Lost Causes. Holt covers a similar set of descriptions about post-communist Russia, the cold, the vodka, the smoking, the ugliness, and the scamming, but the emotional depth of her tale does not plunge as far as Jennifer DuBois did in her novel.

What I liked was the main character, Sarah Zuckerman, and her slow emergence from innocence. It is true to me that one can become submerged beneath the personal power of a friend, especially at 10 years old, and when the inevitable betrayal comes, it causes an arrested development in the betrayed. One has been a dupe. The author accurately portrays such a catastrophe.

She also writes well and I will read her next novel. As she says in the last line, "I had new stories to tell." When it comes to books set in contemporary Russia, I plan to stick to Russian authors in the future.

(You Are One of Them is available in hardcover and eBook by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore. The paperback will be released in March, 2014)

THE GIRL WHO CIRCUMNAVIGATED FAIRYLAND IN A SHIP OF HER OWN MAKING

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The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making, Catherynne Valente, Feiwel and Friends, 2011, 245 pp

SUNDAY FAMILY READ

Here is another book I read for the title. Who could resist a book with "circumnavigated" in the title? Also for the cover because it has a red dragon on it, not to mention a blurb from Neil Gaiman.

The story is fantasy for middle-grade readers. September had just turned twelve and had grown bored of her life when the Green Wind, dressed all in green, appeared at her window and said, 

"You seem an ill-tempered and irascible enough child. How would you like to come away with me and ride upon the Leopard of Little Breezes and be delivered to the great sea, which borders Fairyland?"

"Oh yes!" breathed September.

So she goes and gets a red dragon with his wings in lockdown as a best friend. Warned not to eat fairy food she is hungry for much of the book. She has to learn who to trust and who to fear. Soon enough, she becomes a champion for justice and does indeed make her own ship in order to fulfill a promise while she rescues her friends from an evil Marquess.

It is all wonderful with never a boring paragraph. September is a complex, rarely well-behaved girl who struggles with her temper, with disobedience and selfishness, and who suffers due to loyalty. Moralizing is absent except when September truly attempts to reign in behaviors that are preventing her from her quest to restore Fairyland to better days.

Ms Valente has restored the fairytale to all its gruesome glory. There are sequels.

(The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making is available in paperback on the shelf at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

JANUARY READING GROUP UPDATE

Well I wasn't late for New Year's Day, but I never did post the Reading Group Update for December. Now it is a new year and hopefully lots of great reading and discussing to look forward to. Here is what I have coming up in my reading groups this month.

The New Book Club:

Once Upon A Time Bookstore Adult Fiction Group:

One Book at a Time:

Bookie Babes:

World's Smallest Reading Group:

I have already read The Goldfinch and am so excited to discuss it. Clearly the movies are driving some of our selections, but I am looking forward to reading all the other books.

What are your reading groups reading in January?

TOP 25 BOOKS READ IN 2013

I only read 111 books in 2013, my lowest ever since 2005 when I read 110. I averaged 2 books a week instead of 3 or 4, averaged 110 pages a day instead of 140. Those higher averages are from 2010 when I read 160 books. 

Looking back over this past year I see that I was distracted by personal troubles and turned to the internet and (most shameful of all) playing Solitaire on my iPad, when I could not settle down to reading. On the positive side, I wrote more including progress on my memoir and on my novel. I also wrote 18 professional reviews. Some of that time on the internet was spent on research for my writing but I can't deny that way too many hours went by while I jumped around here and there. 

That is the trap I guess. I think I could maintain my focus better when I used to research in libraries using books. It is so easy for one thing to lead to another on the web but I also think it is a matter of finding the best way to use it as a resource. The internet is an amazing invention and like all new inventions there are benefits as well as drawbacks. 

Enough! I need to get reading!!

I still managed to read many great books last year and as usual had fun winnowing my list of favorites down to 25. Except for We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (only found on BookBrowse) and On Such a Full Sea (releasing next week and not posted yet), my reviews of all the rest of the books can be found here on my blog. Not all of these books were published this year and the order is alphabetical by title, not most favorite to least. I loved all of these books for many different reasons.

THE LIST

The Agony and the Ecstasy, Irving Stone

The Accursed, Joyce Carol Oates

The Bone People, Keri Hulme

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Anthony Marra

Five Star Billionaire, Tash Aw

Flight Behavior, Barbara Kingsolver

The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt

Hild, Nicola Griffith

The Lowland, Jhumpa Lahiri

MaddAddam, Margaret Atwood

May We Be Forgiven, A M Homes

My Education, Susan Choi

The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern

On Such a Full Sea, Chang-rae Lee

The Round House, Louise Erdrich

The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Gary Shteyngart

Sisterland, Curtis Sittenfeld

Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl

South of the Angels, Jessamyn West

Thinner Than Skin, Uzma Aslam Khan

To the End of the Land, David Grossman

Transatlantic, Colum McCann

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler

Woke Up Lonely, Fiona Maazel

The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, Anto Di Sclafani

HOLIDAY BREAK FOR ME AND WISHES FOR YOU!

A SHORT LIST OF CHRISTMAS NOVELS

As of tomorrow, I am taking the rest of December off from blogging. I am just going to read. Yes, a reading vacation. Can' think of a better kind.

Thank you to all of you from around the world who visit and read my blog. I do not make any income from this blog unless you count the free books I get from publishers who want me to review them. I look at it as my service to literature and writers and readers. The only thing I could ask for in return is more comments, especially if you have read the books I review and would like to share your reading experience. If you have trouble posting a comment please let me know. My email address can be found in the profile section.

I will be back on or about New Year's Day with my top favorites list, the reading group update and more reviews. Meanwhile here are some suggestions of books that approach Christmas from many different viewpoints. They are all books I have read and enjoyed.

Wishing you a happy and non-stressful Holiday Week with lots of good reading!!

See my review

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There are three holiday stories in this collection: two about Christmas and one about Thanksgiving. It is all autobiographical and gives us insight into Capote and the childhood that strongly influenced him. The writing is exquisite.

"In 'The Sister of the Angels,' Elizabeth Goudge takes us back to the City of Bells, and tells an enchanting story about Henrietta, a young girl in love with every nook and cranny of her grandfather's cathedral. This is a perfect story for the holiday season, and, because of its peace and charm, a book to cherish all the year round." (Publisher's blurb)
Henrietta is an orphan adopted by a minister and his wife, a charming but realistic child. The novel has the theme of someone returning from an earlier life to finish what was left unfinished. 

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Owen Meany is one of the most amazing characters I have run across in a book. When I read books like this, I feel so ordinary. Actually, I know I am not, but I don't even know people with this much depth. It makes me feel like trying to be normal is a ridiculous pursuit.

The main point of the novel is that the human spirit has nothing to do with environment. Some fulfill their destiny no matter what the circumstances. The section with the Christmas pageant is moving beyond belief.

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See my review

GUILTY OR NOT

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Guilty or Not, Alice Zogg, Aventine Press, 2013, 222 pp

Full disclosure: Alice Zogg has been a friend of mine for almost a decade. We have been in a writers group together and a reading group. During that time she has written and self-published a mystery novel every year. I have read all but the first one and reviewed most of them here on Keep The Wisdom.

Guilty or Not is the ninth mystery in her R A Huber series. I had not been a mystery reader before I met Alice but because of her I now read mysteries regularly, becoming ever more familiar with the genre. Meanwhile Alice, who taught herself to write mysteries just because she wanted to, has been honing her craft. The new one is her best yet.

R A Huber, first name Regula, is a retired woman who reinvented herself as a private investigator. This time she has been hired by a young man to find a murderer. Jonathan's friend Rachel, about to stand trial for the murder of her fiance, is innocent in his eyes.

In a race for time, Huber must sort through the family secrets of the dead man, a fellow who was highly successful in business but incapable of being faithful to one woman. Rachel, whose heart is broken, is strangely passive about the whole thing.

From Italian restaurants to a luxury home in Pasadena, CA; from a CEO's boardroom to an Alaskan cruise ship, R A Huber tracks the real culprit, using her superior intellect to sort through the evidence. As usual, she forgets to protect her own safety.

In a dramatic eleventh hour courtroom scene, she manages to save Rachel from life without parole and live to solve another crime.

But the biggest surprise of all to me is the news from Alice. She has told me that this may be the last of her R A Huber series because she has plans for a whole new direction in her next book. Having watched and read her for so long, I am confident I will be reviewing that next one in about a year.

(Guilty or Not is available in hardcover and paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

HORSEMAN, PASS BY

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Horseman, Pass By, Larry McMurtry, Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1961, 179 pp

I've read Larry McMurtry over the years, mostly the famous ones, and have always liked his romantic cowboys and quirky females. Horseman, Pass By was his first published novel. Two years later it was adapted into the movie Hud starring Paul Newman. I remember that movie but it changed the book in a couple radical ways.

Horseman, Pass By, at 179 pages, is just barely a novel. Lonnie Bannon, raised by his grandfather on a West Texas cattle ranch, is coming of age. Hud is his stepbrother, son of the grandfather's second wife. In the novel he is a somewhat background character, someone whom Lonnie watches, just as he watches everyone else-his grandfather, the ranch hands, his buddies in town and Halmea, the black housekeeper/cook. Halmea fuels Lonnie's sexual fantasies while also being a mother substitute. (In the movie, this character is white and has a different name.) 

It's a great little book with a stoic old rancher, a disastrous cattle disease, and Hud's attempts to inherit the ranch. Seen through the eyes of a teenage boy who idolizes his grandfather but has been left to figure out life pretty much on his own, the story throbs with Texas-style adolescent angst.

I was prepared for a throw away first novel. Instead I got a little masterpiece containing all of McMurtry's virtues as a writer without the sentimental excesses he got into later. I am going to watch Hud again but I bet I'll end up liking the book more than the movie.

(Horseman, Pass By is available in paperback and eBook by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH

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The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster, Yearling, 1961, 256 pp

THE SUNDAY FAMILY READ

(posted on Monday, somehow Sunday got away from me)

Though this fantasy classic was published in 1961 and meant for children, by 1961 I was starting high school. Trying to wend my way through boys, popular girls, and Latin class; trying desperately and hopelessly to shed my nerdy image, I was mostly reading Seventeen magazine. In fact, I had never heard of The Phantom Tollbooth until I read Lev Grossman's The Magicians a few years ago.

When I worked at Once Upon A Time Bookstore, I would restock the Yearling paperback reissue on the shelf almost weekly it seemed and be drawn to the intense blue cover and the dog with a clock embedded in his side. Finally it came up on the 1961 list of My Big Fat Reading Project and I read it.

Lev Grossman has talked in interviews about his fascination with portals. The phantom tollbooth is a portal, like the wardrobe, the fractional train platform, and the amulet. But the book itself is riddled with something I love even more than portals: words, word play, plays on words.

Milo, the hero, is a bored and lazy boy who finds most things a waste of time, the process of seeking knowledge being the greatest. Once Milo passes through the tollbooth, driving a little sort of Smart car, he travels over the Foothills of Confusion to the city of Dictionopolis, acquires Tock the ticking watch dog, takes on a quest to rescue the princesses Rhyme and Reason from the Mountains of Ignorance and becomes a literate person.

I would have loved this book in 6th grade. Alas it was published two years later. Reading it now, I had no fond memories to look back on and its "lessons" were too obvious for me. I would have giggled about jumping to the Island of Conclusions,  encountering the Gross Exaggeration, and the Threadbare Excuse.

The saddest thing of all is thinking about what children to whom I could recommend The Phantom Tollbooth today. Except for the most nerdy middle grade bookworms with advanced vocabularies, I fear it would just go over the heads of most contemporary children.

(The Phantom Tollbooth is available in paperback on the shelf at Once Upon A Time Bookstore. It is also available in hardcover and ebook by order.)

THE CASUAL VACANCY

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The Casual Vacancy, J K Rowling, Little Brown and Company, 2012, 503pp

I did not find J K Rowling's first novel for adults as impressive as I did her second, The Cuckoo's Calling. But I did like it and appreciate what she addressed in the story.

For My Big Fat Reading Project I read a non-fiction book by Vance Packard entitled The Status Seekers, 1959. One of the points he made about the United States was that we are not a classless society despite our democratic view of ourselves. Neither is Great Britain, though they have a much longer history of class consciousness. Rowling pointed up the wide gap between those with money and those without in her fictional little town of Pagford and she did it well.

I was prepared for the large array of characters from reviews I had read, so I did what I usually do in that case: made a list of characters as I read. It helped a great deal and by about 40 pages in I was tracking with all of them.

Once the story got going I was fully engaged with all those characters and wanted to know what would happen to them. The second half flew by and her narrative climax worked for me. The unfortunate got what you would expect and the rich bad guys got what they deserved.

Maybe because she wrote for kids, has kids, and followed four kids through 10 years of their lives in the Harry Potter series, she has got kids and teen down. The teens were the most interesting people in the story and the most convincing.

Lest any negative or snarky reviews put you off, I hereby declare that the woman can write. I can't imagine what the pressures of fame and fortune must be like for her but those pressures have not diminished her drive to do what she loves. I admire her and will read whatever she creates.

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

THE UNLIKELY PILGRIMAGE OF HAROLD FRY

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The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Rachel Joyce, Random House, 2012, 320 pp

I was surprised that I liked this unlikely novel as much as I did. I am not a crier so I give Rachel Joyce plenty of credit for making me cry so many times. I could have felt manipulated I suppose, but I didn't.

Harold Fry had so much misfortune in his life. The few good things that happened to him were not enough to make up for the bad stuff. When he decides to make his long walk of more than 600 miles to repay an obligation to one of the two good people in his life, he is able to get outside of himself enough to gain some perspective. Walking will do that.

I read the book for a reading group discussion. A close friend who is also in this group disliked the novel completely, wondering why Harold didn't just drive to see his old friend and get there in a few hours. Others found the pacing of the story problematical.

Having recently read Wild by Cheryl Strayed, I was willing to believe that walking was an essential element. I did not mind the slow and fractured revelations of Harold's misfortunes. In fact, it was the juxtaposition of the walking pace with the drama of his life that kept the story from plodding.

I have never read Pilgrim's Progress except for a few pages many years ago which bored me to insensibility, but the title, the events of Harold's pilgrimage and a quote from John Bunyan at the beginning, made me compare the two while reading. The author has said that Pilgrim's Progress was not a conscious model for her except in that Harold is an ordinary guy, an everyman.

In any case, I liked the walk. I was impressed by the ways that Harold's encounters with strangers opened his eyes to what actually makes up life. I wasn't sure about the final scenes between Harold and his wife.

Probably the story works best for older women than anyone else. Its main emotional theme is regret, a feeling more prevalent in later life than when one is young. At least for me, it was Harold's consuming regrets that made me cry. That he became free of his regrets made me cry too. By the end, I decided to let my own regrets go, so thank you to Rachel Joyce for that.

(The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

HILD

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Hild, Nicola Griffith, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2013, 536 pp

I have spent the last four days in seventh century Britain so fully engrossed in its brutal and beautiful world that sitting down at my computer feels like I have come back to the future.

Saint Hilda of Whitby, daughter of a Northumbrian prince, grew up to become an Abbess, a trainer of bishops for the growing Christian church in Britain, and a consultant to kings and princes, but except for a brief mention in The Ecclesiastical History of the English People by Bede, aka the Father of English History, the details of her early life are scant.

Nicola Griffith, award-winning author of science fiction and mystery novels, grew up in Yorkshire, on the coast of Great Britain, formerly part of Northumbria. In 2008 she set out to write a historical novel based there. She now lives in Seattle but says, "I'm the product of two thousand years of history." She has been visiting Whitby at least once a year for about 30 years and researching the time period corresponding to Hild's first twenty years for over a decade. The result is her fictional creation of what might have been the young life of Hild.

Like many dedicated readers of fiction, I have long been fascinated by the legend of King Arthur. It wasn't until I read The Mists of Avalon in 1988 that I realized what I wanted to know about was the transition from the old pagan mysteries to the Roman religion based on Jesus Christ. At least in the Western world, it was an insidious transformation from a more balanced male/female culture to the partriarchal template under which we still live.

Hild, who lived a century after Arthur, was born a "pagan" under the Anglo-Saxon deity Woden yet became a Christian saint. Her mother called her "the light of the world." In Nicola Griffith's imagination she becomes a girl of preternatural intelligence, strong willed, observant, able to see the patterns in natural life and in human relations both personal and political.

She is one of those characters balanced on the bleeding edge between the male and female principles, between knowledge and intuition. She learns to read, she is brave, knows how to wield a knife, and does not shrink from violence. Yet she loves both men and women with a full heart. She is pushed into the role of the King's seer by her wily and ambitious mother and uses that position to keep those she loves safe in a treacherous and bloodthirsty world.

How could I not become completely entangled with her fate? She holds her own amongst many of my favorite heroes and heroines: from Ayla of Clan of the Cave Bear to Morgaine of The Mists of Avalon to Thomas Cromwell of Wolf Hall to Killashandra Ree of The Crystal Singer Trilogy and many more.

A word to the skeptical: The book is long. It moves at the pace of Medieval life, with the seasons and long periods of daily drudgery broken by feasting and sudden outbursts of war. It vacillates between the contemplative inner life of Hild and her feats of strength. Like most courts in these locations, they move from place to place on a regular basis and these locations, as well as the characters, are named in the Old English style, which can become confusing. A list of characters, a glossary and old maps are helpful.

But as expected from a speculative fiction writer, Nicola Griffith is a master of world building and she employs her vast research only in service of the story. Her writing is poetic and tuneful, like lyrics to a song. Either one likes this sort of thing or one doesn't and the author does not hold your hand. You must work for your reading pleasure just as the characters must work everyday to ensure their survival, but it is all leavened with wry humor, sex, and plenty of beer and mead.


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

THE LIGHT IN THE RUINS

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The Light in the Ruins, Chris Bohjalian, Doubleday, 2013, 309 pp

Sometimes, well actually often, I come across coincidences in my reading. This time it was a back to back occurrence. I finished Daughter of Silence published in 1961, then read The Last Man Standing, followed immediately by The Light in the Ruins. All three novels are set in the Tuscany region of Italy. The first and the third concern murders committed as revenge with a taint of vendetta and roots buried in World War II; the middle one is set in the future. It was like spending a century in Tuscany.

The Last Man Standing was the most impressive of the three. Where Daughter of Silence was overly wordy, The Light in the Ruins featured smooth, easy prose and told a better story but though I was kept guessing about who committed the murders, it was too simply written. Neither one was strong on characterization. Picky, I know. I sound like a judge on American Idol.

Thanks to a comment on my review of Daughter of Silence, I have learned that I have better books by Morris L West to look forward to. The Light in the Ruins was the first book I've read by Chris Bohjalian. At this point I would read him again if I was stuck somewhere without any books but ones written by him. Unless someone can recommend a better book by Bohjalian I am moving on.

THE LAST MAN STANDING

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The Last Man Standing, Davide Longo, MacLehose Press, (translated from Italian by Silvester Mazzarella), 2013, 256 pp

This month I had the pleasure of reading and reviewing this post-apocalyptic novel by Italian author Davide Longo. Interesting that I read it between two other books set in Italy, Daughter of Silence by Morris L West (published in 1961) and The Light in the Ruins by Chris Bohjalian (published in 2013 and to be reviewed here on this blog in the next few days.) Reading a book by an author who actually lives there was a fitting antidote to what I found lacking in the other two novels. Reading a post-apocalyptic story set somewhere besides the United States gave me a fascinating look at the different ways a societal breakdown could affect a different culture.

My review of The Last Man Standing was written for BookBrowse, so I am under an agreement to them to direct readers of this blog to their site to peruse the review. Normally you would need to be a subscriber to read it but from today until Sunday, December 8, you can read it on the homepage as part of the Editor's Choice feature.

My review begins thus:

In The Last Man Standing, Italian author Davide Longo's first novel to be translated into English, a double apocalypse transforms a literary author into a hero when his country deteriorates into anarchy after an economic collapse. Leonardo has trashed his career and his family and retreated to the village of his birth. As Italy descends into chaos with fuel, food, and services getting more scarce month by month, he sits in a room full of thousands of books waiting for things to improve...

 

Read the rest here.

(The Last Man Standing is available in hardcover and ebook by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)