MAYA'S NOTEBOOK

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Maya's Notebook, Isabel Allende, HarperCollins, 2013, 387 pp

Isabel Allende never lets me down. Whether she writes a novel about a comic book hero (Zorro), a memoir about losing her daughter to a rare disease (Paula), or a coming-of-age/young adult hybrid (Maya's Notebook), I read happily absorbed in the story and the characters. Behind everything she writes is an underlying sense of history and a humanist creed about the worth of individuals.

Maya: deserted physically by her mother and emotionally by her father, was raised by her grandparents-Nini, a strong, protective, mystical woman who escaped from Chile during the politically troubled 1970s and Popo, a gentle and loving African-American astronomer and professor. When Popo dies, Maya goes majorly off the rails, leaves high school, runs away, and descends into drug abuse with all the attendant horrors.

Eventually Nini finds and rescues her but by then she is in so much trouble that Nini sends her to a remote Chilean island to hide out. There, Maya begins to keep a journal and documents her journey back to sanity while making a record of how she got so crazy. Thus Maya's Notebook is exactly that. Maya's story told in Maya's voice. 

Though this is a gritty story with plenty of human degradation, criminality, sex, and drugs, it has equal amounts of beauty. Nini's purple house in Berkeley, CA, and her fellow members of the People's Independent Republic of Berkeley embody a beauty of spirit. The island in the archipelago of Chiloe, where Maya lives for a year comprises wild beauty, native myths, the encroachments of modern civilization, and Manual Arias. Manual is Nini's old friend who has consented to take Maya in and protect her. Their initial meeting goes like this:

"I'm Manual Arias," the man introduced himself in English.

"Hi. I'm on the run from the FBI, Interpol, and a Las Vegas criminal gang," I announced bluntly, to avoid any misunderstandings.

"Congratulations," he said.

"I haven't killed anybody and frankly, I don't think any of them would go to the trouble of coming to look for me all the way down here in the asshole of the world."

"Thanks."

"Sorry, I didn't mean to insult your country, man. Actually it's really pretty, lots of green and lots of water, but look how far away it is!"

"From what?"

"From California, from civilization, from the rest of the world. My Nini didn't tell me it'd be cold."

"It's summer," he informed me.

The snotty tongued Maya and the reticent Manual eventually help each other to dig out of equally horrific pasts and though the final pages of what is a truly exciting story may be a bit sentimental, they are part of the character of the entire tale.

A troubled teen from a fractured family survives by acquiring a whole tribe, because Maya herself contains a beauty that compels many.

Isabel Allende talks about the book here.


(Maya's Notebook is available by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

PLEASE STAY TUNED

I had cataract surgery on my right eye on Monday. Now I have 20/20 vision in that eye but my old near-sighted left eye still has a cataract which will not be fixed until late December. That boils down to a sort of weird monovision for distance and a somewhat useless left eye. This is not conducive to reading or computer work except in short stints. 

Please bear with me. I will be back. I have a pile of excellent books already ready to review. I will get to them as soon as I am able. 

Meanwhile I am catching up on literary podcasts including the awesome Other People, where Brad Listi interviews cutting edge current authors, often published by small and independent presses. Check it out!

Thanks for your patience.

THE INVENTION OF WINGS

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There are certain novels that are so wonderful they keep me reading, always hoping I will find another wonderful one. If you are a reader, I am sure you can think of at least ten such novels. What is even more wonderful is how personal this is, how each reader is unique as to what makes a novel wonderful.

 

Sue Monk Kidd's first novel, The Secret Life of Bees, was such a novel for me. Now I have added her latest novel, The Invention of Wings, to my personal list of wonderful novels. And this is the last time I will use the word wonderful in this review!

The story involves a slave owning family and their slaves. The Grimke household is located in Charleston, NC. In 1803, on her eleventh birthday, Sarah Grimke is given her own personal slave, Hetty, also known as Handful because she is one.

Although her family has always owned slaves, Sarah is horrified by the idea of herself owning another human being. Instead she makes Hetty into a friend and begins teaching her to read. Soon enough both of them are in big trouble, but from that day on Sarah, Hetty, Hetty's mother Charlotte, and Sarah's baby sister Angelina are bound together. 

Sarah and Angelina grow up to be abolitionists and feminists, though of course they are expelled from their family home and from Charleston. All four women struggle, rebel, and suffer before the Civil War has even begun. Each one crosses the treacherous lines and boundaries of family, racism, and patriarchal traditions in a relentless search for freedom.

Readers of this blog know that I take umbrage at writers who unsuccessfully tell stories about other races, nationalities, or countries to which they do not belong. I hereby admit that some authors can manage such a feat convincingly and Sue Monk Kidd has done it twice. But if a person of color reads this review and disagrees, I am open to what you have to say.

I read The Invention of Wings in two days, carried along by the excellence of Ms Kidd's writing craft and immersed in her characters' adventures. I felt proud to be a human being. Here it is 2014 and we still encounter racism and oppression of women on a daily basis but from the beginning of time there have been individuals who stood up to humans oppressing humans and said, "No!"

(The Invention of Wings is available in hardcover on the shelves at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

A SEVERED HEAD

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A Severed Head, Iris Murdoch, The Viking Press, 1961, 248 pp

Martin is happily married to Antonia but also has a mistress names Georgie. Antonia is older than Martin and undergoing analysis. Suddenly she leaves Martin and moves in with Anderson, her analyst. Anderson's sister Honor tells Antonia about Georgie. Honor is such a truly cracked character that she makes the rest of them look only mildly weird in comparison.

Again a 1961 novel about infidelity. In contrast to Wallace Stegner's A Shooting Star, this one is a breath of fresh air with that almost slapstick feeling Murdoch does so well. Every time I felt I had a grip on the plot, she went in exactly the opposite direction I would predict.

I can just hear some of my reading group ladies getting riled up because not one character is likable or admirable. I certainly did not imagine that the tortured, non-self-aware Martin would end up with ...ah, I can't say. But as she tells Martin, "This has nothing to do with happiness, nothing whatever."

And that is the joke percolating through the whole tale. Many of us tried open marriage in the 70s. What a Pandora's Box! We should have read The Severed Head first.

(A Severed Head is available by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE LIE

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The Lie, Hesh Kestin, Scribner, 2014, 229 pp

Once again a reading group steered me to a book I'd never heard about and am glad I read. The Lie is set in Israel and though it is standard fare as thrillers go, the author (a veteran of the Israel Defense Forces) gives readers a provocative look at today's issues.

 

Dahlia Barr, a tough attorney based in Jerusalem and known for defending Palestinians accused of terrorism, accepts recruitment into the Israeli security establishment. She believes she can change the system from within and do away with torture.

 

Then her 21 year old son, a soldier, is kidnapped by Hezbollah and the political becomes personal for Dahlia.

 

I have read David Grossman's To The End Of The Land and Amos Oz's A Tale of Love and Darkness, not to mention a great amount of historical fiction about war. It is the mothers who suffer most, at least from my point of view. 

 

In this novel I found a mother who was in a position to do much more than wait at home in fear and grief but that very position put her straight into the most difficult conflict of her life. What a gripping story.

(The Lie is available by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

A SHOOTING STAR

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Wallace Stegner has been an uneven novelist for this reader. I first read his 1943 historical The Big Rock Candy Mountain, a book I could not put down. The Preacher and the Slave, about Joe Hill and the Wobblies was also riveting. A couple others left me either bored or less than enraptured.

He was a great writer both in craft and the conveying of emotion, but sometimes I feel he tried too hard, even to the point of preaching his message too obviously. In A Shooting Star he went overboard on wordiness, his story arc took too long to arc, and while he tried hard to understand his female protagonist, a judgmental flavor spoiled the result.

I've had a time reading my 1961 list, as it has featured many long books and some weaker books by authors I have previously admired. However, as harbingers of cultural change to come, especially the sexual revolution of the late 60s and the second wave of feminism in the 70s, many of these novels are examples of how writers had their fingers on the pulse of change before it became apparent in mainstream culture.

Sabrina Castro, raised in a deeply screwed up but fabulously wealthy family, married a physician. As her husband became successful with rich matrons in Los Angeles, he began to neglect Sabrina. Because she was not able to conceive a child, she was restless, unfulfilled, and lonely. What does a woman in such straights do? She takes a lover. Thus the drama begins.

And goes on and on. Stegner creates tension with Sabrina's indecision about her marriage, her husband (a sanctimonious jerk), and her future. I am fully aware that female dithering is commonplace. I have been guilty of it myself. Reading about it drives me to distraction.

So OK, he gets that aspect of female life and it is in the 1950s when a woman could not easily go outside of accepted societal norms, no matter how rich she was, but it still went on too long. I also detected whiffs of Freudian concepts about females suffering from infantile behavior. Yuck! A woman working through issues with a messed up mother is not infantile, she is working through issues.

Bottom line: worth reading as a sign of the times; maddening that it took me six days to do so.

(A Shooting Star is available by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

NOVEMBER READING GROUP UPDATE

Pondering the elasticity of time today. October felt endless this year but it also feels like I did the October Reading Group Update just the other day. Here it is: the books we will be reading as we transition from Trick or Treat to Thanksgiving. Let the reading and the eating begin!!

Tiny Book Group:

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New Book Club:

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Once Upon A Time Adult Reading Group:

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Tina's Group:

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Bookie Babes:

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One Book At A Time:

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Luckily I have already read two of these books. Otherwise I might not have time to eat!

What are your reading groups devouring this month?

LOVE ANTHONY

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Love Anthony, Lisa Genova, Gallery Books, 2012, 306 pp

When I was growing up there basically two groups of people: normal people and then all the rest. Of course that was simplistic. As a young woman I became interested in all the people who weren't "normal," as did most of society. Now we've got names for all the different kinds of people though unfortunately many of those names are mostly labels.

One kind of unusual person is devoted to understanding differences among people and passing the info on to others. That is a worthy human endeavor, if not always appreciated. Lisa Genova is such a person. She has a PhD in neuroscience from Harvard and has written three novels about people who suffer from neurological difficulties.

Still Alice (2007) which she originally self-published, was about a Harvard professor with early onset Alzheimer's disease. It became a bestseller and the author was signed by Simon & Schuster. Left Neglected (2011) is the story of a woman trying to recover from a brain injury.

Love Anthony deals with autism. When Anthony was diagnosed as autistic at the age of three, Olivia and her husband had the "reason" for Anthony's differences but their marriage could not hold up when Anthony died some years later.

Olivia separates from her husband and escapes to their summer cottage on Nantucket. After a lonely winter she meets Beth, mother of three and also separated. Due to a series of coincidences and synchronicities they impact each others' lives in positive ways.

I read this for a reading group. Many members, as well as bloggers and readers who post on Goodreads, were dismayed by some unlikely elements in the plot, by its almost chick lit flavor, and by a "different" approach to the relationship between Anthony, Olivia, and Beth. It is as though they were spiritually connected. 

I was not bothered by any of those criticisms. I have an interest in such things as synchronicity, non-verbal connections, and especially the many ways that women help each other. I thought the writing was just fine, even brilliant at times.

The insight into the mind of an autistic child is done so well. It is sensitive, down-to-earth, and because of her education and experience I believe Lisa Genova. Because of my various spiritual studies, women's studies, and experience I think Olivia and Beth are realistic characters. Love Anthony was a good read for me. Now I want to read her other two books.

Is anyone completely "normal?" Of course not!

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

A BET TURNED DEADLY

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A Bet Turned Deadly, Alice Zogg, Aventine Press, 2014, 226 pp

My friend Alice Zogg has just released her 10th novel, a mystery with a complete shocker of an ending and a new direction for the author.

If you have read any of her earlier books, your are familiar with private investigator R A Huber and her assistant Andi. But Regula and Andi play no part in A Bet Turned Deadly, though the setting is still in the Los Angeles area. An even bigger change is that the narrator of this new book is a man!

James Eaton, a successful mystery writer, bets his best friend Jacob $1000 that he can't find a dozen people willing to give up their computers, cell phones, and tablets for a week. The bet results in a camping trip to an isolated spot in the Angeles National Forest. During the week in the woods, one camper dies.

Ms Zogg has always had a talent for plotting and this book showcases that talent in spades. It is the impeccable pacing that makes it a page turner. I kept waiting for a slip up in James' voice, thinking surely I would hear a female tone creep in, but she never faltered. I believed the character on every page. If you have ever spent time in the Angeles National Forest, you will recognize that she got it perfectly.

A Bet Turned Deadly is not long. You could almost read it in one sitting. It is proof that a person can learn to write novels by writing them. I admit to not trying very hard to figure out who done it when I read a murder mystery, but if you can figure out who murdered that camper before it is revealed you should say so in the comments. (Not who did it; just that you did!)

 

Read about all of Alice Zogg's books at her website.

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

THE MAGICIAN'S LAND

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The Magician's Land, Lev Grossman, Viking, 2014, 401 pp

About a month ago during a killer heat wave of temperatures between 105 and 108 degrees, I was forced to go out into the world for a doctor's appointment. I have hardly ever gone to doctors for most of my life but now am at an age when it is a regular occurrence. Trust me, this is relevant to my review of the third volume of Lev Grossman's Magicians Trilogy.

In an attempt to make my outing more fun, I stopped at one of my favorite indie bookstores, Vroman's in Pasadena. I was going to splurge and buy Margaret Atwood's new story collection, Stone Mattress. Alas I was one day too early. That book was releasing the next day. So I chose a different sort of magic and bought The Magician's Land in hardcover. Now I own a complete set!

At the beginning of this book, which promised to put a wrap on the turbulent but self-centered life of Quentin Coldwater, I suffered from a certain ennui. Actually, the first couple chapters devoured while having lunch in Vroman's cafe were entrancing: that nerdy bookish magic guy thing Grossman does so well, especially when he combines it with the seedy world weary characters one expects to find in modern novels written by Russian immigrants. But all too soon both Quentin and his friends are suffering from magic gone bad, some set in Fillory, some at Brakebills, and other incidents at revisited locales from the earlier books. Really? Come on Lev. You can do better than that.

Well, in the end he does. In fact he was doing better than I thought all along. He tackles questions like will a self-involved, less-than-top-rate magician ever grow up? Quentin makes strides. But if he does grow up can he still hang out in his beloved Fillory? Also, in an echoing homage to The Chronicles of Narnia, we learn more about the creation of Fillory. Need I say more? If you've read and loved the two earlier books, you can be assured you will love The Magician's Land.

Why were my experiences of the day I bought the book relevant? Because I have been a person who was reluctant to grow up and who believed in magic for too long. The last few years have forced me to become an adult. Though I am about twice the age Quentin is in this book, I was not bored at all to read a story about a magician reaching maturity.

The Magicians was a coming of age story. We don't really have genres or literary categories for the second two volumes of the trilogy. The Magician King was how do you handle life after your schooling is over. This final book is how do you put life together after all the mistakes you made in the middle part.

(The Magician's Land is available in hardcover on the shelf at Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

HALF-BLOOD BLUES

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Half-Blood Blues, Esi Edugyan, Serpent's Tail, 2011, 319 pp

Some books I love while I am reading them but promptly forget once I am finished. Others are just so-so while I read but I think back on them with pleasure-usually because they end well. With Half-Blood Blues, it was all love, while reading and when I was finished. Now after several weeks have passed the story is still so vivid, I doubt I will ever forget it.

A group of Black American, White German, and one mixed race German musicians had a successful run as a jazz band in Berlin before World War II. They were decimated as a band by Hitler's ban on jazz after he declared it to be degenerate music made by Negroes and Jews. This novel is the story of what became of the them individually and as a group.

The writing is amazing, calling forth the life styles, the rivalries, the joys of making music, and the feel of jazz itself. Perhaps because I have spent my life surrounded by music and musicians, I fell easily into their triumphs and trials. Musicians are a special breed to me, each one being a unique combination of their artistry and a state of being "the other" to most remaining human beings. 

In this tale, hearts are broken, trust is betrayed, lives are lost, dreams die. I experienced every emotion known to man while reading it. Honestly, I don't know how the author did what she did. Esi Edugyan is one of a kind, just like her characters.

(Half-Blood Blues is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE RUM DIARY

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The Rum Diary, Hunter S Thompson, Simon & Schuster, 1998, 204 pp

I have a fascination with Hunter S Thompson. To me, he is the quintessential bad boy of the late 60s and onward. In your face, always high, and getting away with it. I used to fall for guys like that. I even married one but it didn't last. Still, I have a romantic remnant that attracts me to such rebels.

But I haven't read his books, just his Rolling Stone pieces as they appeared during the years I was reading that mag, before it lost its edge. So, in my usual way, I am starting at the beginning.

The Rum Diary is a book dripping with legend and lore: that Thompson wrote it in 1960 when he was a Hemingway worshipper but couldn't get it published, that Johnny Depp found the manuscript among Thompson's papers and got it published in 1998, that Depp finally got it made as a movie in 2011, six years after Thompson's death. When it comes to Hunter S Thompson, the truth is deeply buried in his outrageous persona.

I put the book on the 1961 list for My Big Fat Reading Project. I saw the movie last year and it was good. Depp spiffed it up for the 21st century but the book is better; less flashy, more sunk in youthful despair, and the female character is unrecognizable. She is not the one in the movie, she is more pathetic, but most of all she fits right in with the way bad girls were portrayed by male novelists in the early 60s. Hemingway would have approved.

The Rum Diary is a quick read. Since it is about newspaper people working at a failing daily paper in San Juan, Puerto Rico, it reminded me a little of The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman, though this is the better book in my opinion. As a piece of Hunter Thompson history, the novel contains numerous harbingers of the man's later writing. Next up: Hell's Angels, 1966!

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

THE BOOK OF STRANGE NEW THINGS

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The Book of Strange New Things, Michel Faber, Hogarth, 2014, 495 pp

Michel Faber's new novel, due to be released on October 28, is itself a book of strange new things. I remember devouring his previous novel, The Crimson Petal and the White. It was historical fiction about a prostitute, a bestseller, mildly trashy but with good writing and a fabulous heroine. The Book of Strange New Things is not any of that.

Peter is a recovering alcoholic and drug user who became a minister after he met and married Beatrice, who nursed him through his final overdose. He is deeply committed to his faith in the way that people are when they give up past bad habits and need something new to hang on to.

Bea is the practical member of the couple, but deeply devoted to keeping Peter happy and sober. When he gets recruited by USIC, a multinational corporation, to go to a planet light years away and serve as Chaplain to its indigenous creatures, Bea is not chosen to go with him. Quite soon, I figured out that they chose Peter because of his wide-eyed gullibility.

So he goes to the planet Oasis, pretty much goes native in short order, and feels more at home with the nonhuman Oasans than with the earthlings. The Book of Strange New Things is the Oasans' name for the Bible. 

Faber does an excellent job of creating Peter's character, his obsession with the Oasans and getting the gospel to them, and his obliviousness to other humans. Every other person on Oasis has something odd about them, some troubled past, but none are looking for religion.

By page 175, I could tell that something was very wrong on Oasis and settled in to the remaining 300 plus pages to find out what that something was. The trouble for me was that it turned out not to be a sci fi thriller/first contact story but rather Peter's true redemption story. 

He is able to communicate with Bea by a sort of interplanetary text messaging device. Like many men who travel for work, my husband included, he is not good at long distance communication. Add to this his extreme self-absorption and marital discord develops.

Religion in science fiction or speculative fiction is somewhat rare and is sometimes done extremely well, as in Mary Doria Russel's The Sparrow. You would think it would be used more often. Michel Faber handles the religion aspect well, also the tension in Peter and Bea's marriage, and the beginnings on Earth of an apocalyptic stew of climate change, end of oil, and economic breakdown. He also creates a convincing scenario of USIC, obviously exploiting a new planet for scientific and commercial gain.

In the end though, the novel is just a story about a loser who finally grows up and begins to get a grip. The creepy menace on Oasis, the true reason for the native Oasans' desire for Christianity, and the fate of both planets all just peter out (no pun intended) and it is all about Peter, as it has been for almost 500 pages.

(The Book of Strange New Things is available in various formats for pre-order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE

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All The Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr, Scribner, 2014, 530 pp

I was a satisfied reader throughout this novel. Yet another World War II story set in yet another location, or actually several, but the main one being the walled French city of Saint-Malo. I did not know this city existed prior to reading the novel. It is a place that just begs to have novels set there.

The best war novels for me are the ones set away from the main battles that show the effects of war on various everyday people. Here we have a master of locks at the Natural Museum of History in Paris, his daughter Marie Laure who went blind at the age of six, a reclusive great-uncle who is skilled at radio operation, and the orphan Werner from a German mining town, also skilled with radios.

The novel tells the back stories of these characters, then the story of how their lives converge during the war, and finally a satisfying final section where we find what happened to Marie-Laure and Werner after the war. Did I mention there is a rare and priceless diamond whose mystery is the true engine powering the novel?

It is all put together with the most excellent literary but accessible sentences. Absolutely nothing to complain about and I truly don't understand how anyone could not love this novel, but of course some don't.

(All The Light We Cannot See is available in hardcover on the shelf at Once Upon A Time Bookstore and in ebook by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

SHE IS NOT INVISIBLE

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She Is Not Invisible, Marcus Sedgwick, Roaring Book Press, 2013, 216 pp

THE SUNDAY FAMILY READ

I read a review of this book and it sounded good. It is categorized as YA (or TEEN in my library.)

Laureth Peak (named after the stuff in shampoo) is a 16 year old London girl whose father seems to have gone missing and whose mother seems not to care even if she is clearly mad at the dude. Laureth decides to abscond with her 7 year old brother Benjamin and travel to New York City where Jack Peak was last supposed to be.

A few more facts (not spoilers): Dad is a novelist, author of a series of successful humorous novels and a few not so successful serious ones. He has been stuck writing his current novel for several years. Laureth is blind and therefore needs Benjamin to help her get around in an unfamiliar city, though she has a special cell phone adapted for the blind. Benjamin is a great character but the mom is a cipher.

It is all just this side of plausible. Written as a thriller, the pace is fast except for when the author uses excerpts from the father's journal to explain deep concepts about coincidence, synchronicity, and the theories of Freud and Jung concerning such concepts.

I thought the best aspect of the story was the hurtful bullying stuff about her blindness that Laureth had to get over. 

Speaking of synchronicity, I read this book shortly after finishing All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (review coming next), which features a brave blind teenager with a missing father.

(She Is Not Invisible is available in various formats by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

OCTOBER READING GROUP UPDATE

It is 100 degrees in Los Angeles today, at least in the Valley if not downtown. Not Indian Summer, just still hot. But I can feel autumn in the cooler nights. No matter the season, reading groups go on. Already this past Wednesday at Bookie Babes we had the biggest surprise of the year. Most members liked The Dinner by Hermann Koch. I predicted it would be universally hated but only two of us were thumbs down. You will see Bookie Babes on here twice this month. Due to Rosh Hashanah we met a week later than usual and that pushed our September meeting into October.

Here are the already discussed and upcoming books for this month.

Bookie Babes:

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New Book Club:

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Once Upon A Time Adult Reading Group:

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One Book At A Time:

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Bookie Babes:

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Do you have a good or funny or horrific reading group story? Post it in the comments!

HOME IS THE SAILOR

Home Is the Sailor, Jorge Amado, Alfred A Knopf, 1964, (translated from the Portuguese, published by Livaria Martins Editora, 1961), 298 pp

As has become routine for me with Amado's novels, it seemed to take forever to get my reading up to speed in Home Is the Sailor. As in every earlier novel of his though, I came to the end feeling I had been told an informative and entertaining tale.

The eponymous sailor, Vasco Moscosco de Aragao, had never sailed a ship in all of his 60 years. He was the son of a Brazilian businessman and raised by his grandfather in the city, caring nothing for business or hard work. Wealthy and gregarious, he made friends in high places. His only sorrow in life was that he had no title, no rank, no degree. He was only Mr de Aragao.

Or so the story goes. The book's narrator calls himself a historian, while he is in fact a lowly journalist in a town of retirees, whose lover is the whore of a rich man. When Captain Vasco Moscosco de Aragao arrives in town, calling himself a Master Mariner, he instantly becomes the most popular man around due to his exciting tales of adventure on the oceans of the world. The former most popular townsperson becomes jealous and challenges the truth of the Captain's claims.

Our narrator/historian takes it upon himself to get to the bottom of the conflict and the reader is the beneficiary as his findings are related. Twists and turns, cliffhangers, and Amado's signature humor all come together in the second half of the novel which I read at four times the speed as I did the first half.

It could have been that I am not Brazilian, that Portuguese is difficult to translate, that Amado's sentences are eerily similar to William Faulkner's, or that I have been reading so much contemporary fiction. I don't care what caused my trouble. It was worth reading and the theme is oddly contemporary. Captain de Aragao, Master Mariner, was a certain kind of self-made man, composed of his past, his connections, his dreams, and his gift for enjoying life. As Amado says to us on the final page:

"Does truth lie in the everyday events, the daily incidents, in the pettiness and vulgarity most people's lives are composed of, or does the truth have its abode in the dream it is given us to dream to free our sad human condition?"

(Home Is the Sailor is out of print and best found in your local library or through used book sellers.)

KABUL BEAUTY SCHOOL

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Kabul Beauty School, Deborah Rodriguez, Random House, 2007, 278 pp

This was an interesting read. It was a reading group pick and sparked controversy in the group discussion as it did in the world.

Debbie Rodriguez is the daughter of a hairdresser from Holland, MI. I have spent some time in that town. My Top 40 cover band used to play at the Holiday Inn there in the early 1980s. The first wet burrito I ever ate was at a Mexican Restaurant in Holland. It is a small, mostly blue collar central Michigan town. Debbie is one of those women who do before they think and therefore get a lot done but lead volatile lives.

After a nasty divorce, she leaves her two sons with her mother, gets involved with an NGO and lands in Afghanistan. Within a year, she has a project of her own, backed by Vogue Magazine and Clairol, and starts the first Afghan beauty school in Kabul.

Over the next several years Debbie is either doing total immersion in Afghanistan culture, including marrying a man there, or she is back in the States seeing her sons and drumming up more financial backing for her school.

The book is fast-paced, anecdotal, and entertained me as I learned about the culture, the women, the marriage rites, and the unsettled life of that strange (by American standards) country. Compared to more serious books such as The Bookseller of Kabul or The Swallows of Kabul, Kabul Beauty School made me laugh as well as ponder how women will ever get rights or equality there.

When they do, it will be in part because of women like Rodriguez. She has been criticized both in America and Afghanistan and I don't know how a reader could know for sure if those criticisms are accurate. I believe her when she says that she fell in love with the country and its people. She comes across as having no other agenda than to make the lives of some women better by giving them a skill by which they could make a living. I believe that was her intention.

She made mistakes, she admits it, and finally left because of what she perceived as real threats from the Afghanistan government. I was struck by how much she accomplished precisely because she did not over think things. She just went ahead and got stuff done.

HEADS YOU LOSE

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Heads You Lose, Lisa Lutz and David Hayward, G P Putnam's Sons, 2011, 301 pp

Here we have another example of how my reading groups lead me into books I would not otherwise read. This time it was pretty much a losing proposition.

The book started out OK with some laugh out loud humor. The two authors purport to be frenemies. They agree to write alternate chapters (kind of like AdLibs, only whole chapters) and write snarky notes to each other after the other one's chapter. The notes are included.

Story takes place in a very small town near Mt Shasta, CA. There is a murder but as it turns out there are several murders. A brother (who grows and sells pot) and a sister (who works at the local bar) try to solve the murders. The title comes from the fact that the first dead body is missing his head.

I liked some of the humor and Mt Shasta is one of my favorite locations, though some of my romantic notions about the area were thoroughly trashed. As murder mysteries go it wasn't the best I've ever read and the authorial smack down grew old pretty fast.

 

 

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

STATION ELEVEN

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Station Eleven, Emily St John Mandel, Alfred A Knopf, 2014, 232 pp

When I saw the movie based on Cormac McCarthy's The Road, I decided not to read the book yet. It has been four years now and I still haven't read it though I am a fan of his writing. I read Station Eleven and realized that of all the post-apocalyptic novels out there, this is the one I wanted to read. It is The Road written by a woman.

In saying this I take nothing away from Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy, because as far as I am concerned nothing can be taken away from those three novels. Atwood, as always, works on a larger canvas. Emily St John Mandel brings us the intimate details of small personal lives. 

I finished reading Station Eleven about three weeks ago and am slightly embarrassed to say that I don't remember what the title refers to. One of the reasons the book is not horrific is that the virus that obliterated over 90% of humanity was an incident from more than a decade earlier, but the characters are survivors of that pandemic and the setting is made up of the best of what's still around.

Most of the characters are members of a nomadic troupe of actors and musicians who call themselves the Traveling Symphony. If I were a post-apocalyptic survivor, I sure would not want to be stuck in some stinking community raising food and scavenging for whatever is left. I'd want to be roaming from settlement to settlement bringing the magic of theater and music to all the sad starving people.

I'd want my closest companions to be called "the second clarinet" and so on and I would be militant towards anyone who messed with my company. I would possess treasured secret memories of actors and musicians who brought salvation to audiences on any given night back when there was electricity, the internet, cell phones, fuel, hotels, abundant food but most of all art.

So it is for the actors and musicians of the Traveling Symphony. They have their memories which become part of the fabric of this tale. They have fierce loyalties to each other and a sense of purpose for their personal and collective existence. This novel is their story.

I have read and loved each of Emily St John Mandel's novels: Last Night in Montreal, The Singer's Gun, and The Lola Quartet. She is a magician who creates spells over her readers by means of characters, language, and a special understanding of all types of artists. She is a one woman trauma unit for victims of horrific events. I want her to have a long successful career as a novelist so I can read each book as it is published.

With Station Eleven she moved from the independent publisher Unbridled Books to the big time of Alfred A Knopf. That move is bringing her the increased recognition she deserves. Knopf better be good to her. I'm already miffed that her book tour does not include an appearance in Los Angeles. But I'm not too worried because a talent like hers could survive anything just as the main character of Station Eleven does.

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