Karen

A lovely, wistful story of a young woman sent from her town in Ireland to New York in the 1950's in order to find work. The things the characters know or understand about each other but never speak about leads to a kind of heartbreak, but also make a new life possible. This one will stay with me for a while.

The Wake is the story of one man's experience of the Norman conquest of England in 1066 and its aftermath. Unfortunately, that one man is Buccmaster of Holland, a rageful bully, obsessed with his own status as an independent landowner in the Lincolnshire fens and with the pre-Christian gods of England. I say “unfortunately” because the major barrier to reading the book, for me, was intense dislike of this character. However, it was clear that Buccmaster's unlikeability was deliberate, so I kept reading.

Buccmaster and a ragtag band of survivors of the war set out to drive the French out of England. They hear rumors of other, similar groups of “green men” fighting the French, and they tell themselves that soon the whole country will rise up together and drive the French out. Buccmaster, as the leader of his little war band, is driven by visions of the old gods of England. One of the central tensions of the book, for me, was the beauty of Buccmaster's visions, the sympathy I could feel for those visions, contrasted with the brutality and ugliness of Buccmaster himself.

I expected to find the language of The Wake a bigger barrier than it was. The author, Paul Kingsnorth, created a not-quite Old English, with a pre-Norman vocabulary and spellings that would enable the reader to enter more fully into that past world. There is a helpful glossary for words that are likely to be completely unfamiliar, and, after a few repetitions, some words' meanings become obvious. Many other words look unfamiliar at first because of their spelling, but saying them aloud makes it clear what they are. After about 5 pages I understood the spelling conventions, recognized the most frequently used words and could find the glossary quickly when I needed it.

At the end of the book I didn't like Buccmaster any better, but I had a better understanding of him–and a conviction that this story was worth pondering. I'd love to discuss this book with someone, so if you read it, let me know.

Although I enjoyed 9 year old Nory and her imagination, at times I thought this book was just an exercise in cleverness for Nicholson Baker. The observations that Nory makes about friendships and the social world of 9 year olds are beautifully done, and the stories she tells herself for her own pleasure are strange and wonderful. What really bothered me was Baker's representation of the children's speech–childlike malapropisms were charming at first but then began to get old–and the sense that the story was not really going anywhere. Enjoy the moment in this book, because that is all there is.

Really wonderful. A journey from complete mystification to gradual enlightenment. A community on the edge of civilization. A touch of the supernatural. A love story and a story of people remaking themselves. I did not want to put this book down.

A moving story of a man's experience of trying to find out the truth about his father's somewhat mysterious death thirty years before. I liked the emotional honesty combined with great storytelling about a gritty life in Chicago. I read this in a couple of days, riding back and forth to work on the bus, on lunch break and for an hour or so before bed. It lends itself to stolen moments of reading, because the story is told in short vignettes.

A history of foul language, from the ancient Romans to modern USA and Britain, with lots of examples of what was considered foul under what circumstances and why. It's a fascinating, hilarious and sometimes cringe-inducing read.

This is a great book. I learned so much about the different ways people have historically acquired and shared information since the days of the Roman Empire. We like to think that we're pioneers in inventing and using social media, but Standage shows us that people have been doing much the same thing (even fomenting revolution) with whatever technology they had to hand for a very long time. An example that I thought was especially striking is the story Standage tells about telegraph operators forming a kind of online community among themselves. Operators who never met each other, who were stationed thousands of miles away from each other, would chat or play chess over the telegraph wires when there weren't any messages to transmit. Some people who were stationed in remote areas even came to prefer interacting with their online community of telegraph operators than with the people in their own physical locale.

The book has an extensive bibliography and is engagingly written.

This slender (135 p) book is a gem. A young man, survivor of the Great War, goes to a small village in Yorkshire in 1920 to restore a medieval painting that has been found in the parish church. His shell shock has given him a pronounced facial twitch and a stutter, his wife has run off with another man, and he is prepared to live on a pittance for the summer for the sake of having somewhere peaceful to stay and interesting work to do. The blurb on the back of the book says this is a story of lost love, and it is, but it's not simply a lost lady love. The emergence of the painting, the development of relationships with the villagers, the tentative friendship with another soldier back from the war who is supposed to be excavating a lost grave on the church grounds–all of these illuminate the themes of hell, healing, art and vocation.

I'm ambivalent about this book. I wouldn't have read it if I had realized it was by the same author who wrote The Abstinence Teacher. I picked it out of a Little Free Library because I remembered reading a favorable review of it several years ago and didn't make the connection between it and The Abstinence Teacher until I was already into it. Anyway, I can recognize its merit–a pretty solid portrayal of the predicaments people get into because they don't have insight into themselves–but looking back on it now that I've finished it, I'm not glad I read it. The characters don't experience any redemption after they dig themselves into the shit, they just seem to wallow around or dig themselves in deeper. The only people in the book who are able to see themselves clearly are morally bankrupt, so it doesn't feel good to read about them. So, I think the story is well crafted, but I don't like what I got from it. Proceed with caution.

I would like to give this book 3 1/2 stars. I liked it a lot, but.... There are several storylines in this novel that fit together in ways that become clear as you read along...yet I felt that some of those stories weren't adequately developed, or they occurred in the wrong order, so that it was hard to understand why one of the central events in the book happened in the first place. Still, the characters and their place in history are so well written, lively and interesting, that I just enjoyed reading about them. I know this author has written at least one other novel, and I will probably seek that one out too.

A novel about the Hungarian Gold Train. The parts of the story that were set in the past were deeply engrossing and ultimately heartbreaking, but I thought the parts set in the present were kind of silly.

You could say this was my Lenten reading this year, though I didn't plan it to be. I had read it many years ago and it didn't make a very big impression on me, except that I remember feeling that Merton was a stern, sad person who had had what sounded like a deprived childhood. I'm not sure why I picked it up again.The first 100 pages or so I struggled through. Merton wrote beautifully about the interesting characters of his childhood and the landscapes he remembered, but would then suddenly condemn a whole group of people as heretics without explanation, or condemn himself for holding Protestant beliefs as a child. I wished he could tell the story of his childhood without the moralizing. As the book progressed, though, the moralizing stopped, the story remained, and although I have little in common with Merton apart from being an adult convert to Christianity, I could understand him better and appreciate his story. It also helped to remind myself that he was all of 33 when he wrote The Seven Storey Mountain, and had many years left to learn to have mercy for himself and others. What I think is really wonderful about this book is that he allows the reader to see the whole process, internal and external, of his conversion, with all his uncertainty, doubts and mis-steps. By the end of the book, I found myself rejoicing with him that he had found his home at last.

I decided to read this book because I thought I would learn interesting things about birds and also get a different view of the Bible from it. It did do both of those things for me, but I didn't enjoy the reading as much as I expected because of the book's informal, chatty style.

Consider the beginning of this paragraph: “If you look at Jesus with the idea that looking at him will tell you what God is like, God isn't about showing us how great God is. God's thing isn't power. Like, really isn't, not just like it could be but isn't” (p. 186). This is the way the book is written, and the style really detracts from the interesting things the author has to say about birds and the way birds are used to tell us about God, Jesus and the Kingdom of Heaven.

In short, this book could have been great, but it needed a very firm editor, which it didn't get. It's a disappointment.

There are some run-of-the-mill things about this story: powerless women struggling for self determination in 17th century Europe, oppressed by a rigid society where everyone polices each other and where religious authorities have no mercy. A young woman enters a household that seems hostile, but through her upright character and kindliness she wins friendship. However, this novel is anything but ho-hum. Characters steadfastly refuse to do what you expect them to do, or say what you expect them to say. Mysteries are revealed, but in their own time, not when you expect them to be. There is a feeling of out-of-control-ness that is disorienting, but appropriate. A satisfying novel.

I was completely engrossed in this book until the last 100 pages or so. I liked the structure of a contemporary story framing the imagined history of the Sarajevo haggadah, and how in some ways the contemporary story was quite similar to the past stories. I liked the way Brooks was able to imagine the unknown (and probably impossible to know) history into details of people's lives–people who lived and suffered through disaster while they were focused on ordinary concerns. The end of the book was disappointing, though. The contemporary story took a turn for the unnecessarily dramatic and started seeming more like a Hollywood thriller than a story about real people. Still, I am now a confirmed fan of Geraldine Brooks.

I loved reading this book. It's the story of a young boy in slavery who is mistaken for a girl and “freed”/kidnapped by John Brown during a raid and then, because he has nowhere else to go, stays with Brown's ragtag army as they skirmish across Kansas and prepare for their assault on slavery at Harper's Ferry. “Onion,” as the boy-posing-as-girl is known, is ambivalent throughout the book–always meaning to get away, but never quite doing it, believing that John Brown is insane, but also loving and admiring him. Onion's ambivalence makes him a great narrator–detached enough to be a very funny storyteller, but invested enough to make the story incredibly moving. It's a pleasure to recognize a nod to Huckleberry Finn in the hilarious narration and the theme of youth observing adult hypocrisy, but this story is all its own.

This story gets off to a rocky start. Aemilia Bassano is not very interesting as a privileged court lady who is the mistress of the Lord Chamberlain in late Elizabethan England. She insists she's smarter and more educated than all the other women except Elizabeth herself, but she just comes across as spoiled and bratty. I had a hard time caring about her until she was married off to a shiftless court musician because she'd gotten pregnant. Everyone assumes it's the Lord Chamberlain's child, but actually it's William Shakespeare's–she's been secretly having a torrid affair with him.

Hardship makes Aemilia a lot more interesting. Her struggle to keep herself and her child clothed and fed in spite of her husband's irresponsibility, and her private struggle to be taken seriously as a writer, make her very appealing. Details of life in Elizabethan London are fascinating (this book comes with a bibliography of sources for that detail), and there IS a touch of the supernatural in the story, although not as much as you would think from the publisher's blurb.

These essays address topics related to the culture wars in the United States–attitudes about the nature of democracy, human nature, education, generosity to those with whom you do not share opinions, heritage or class, and cosmology. They are worth reading slowly, partly because Robinson's writing is such a delight in word choice and sentence structure, but also because they are complex creations, traveling through many subjects to forge an argument for study of the humanities. I am not much of an essay reader–I prefer to be absorbed in longer reads–but these essays were satisfying.

A melancholy, even downright sad, book. There is a lovely motif of cranes, anchored by a tale of cranes told by the heroine's father. There is the portrayal of the life of Japan's Imperial Family as like a prison. There is the sorrowful story of the lively young girl (the commoner) who marries into this family and feels herself to be stifled and stunted by it. Then there are glimpses of life returning to her in her later years...and questions come up which can't be answered because the story ends. I am generally OK with ambiguity, but this novel left me unsatisfied. It should not have ended where it did.

I'm fascinated by bibliotherapy, the practice of treating a person's ailments, physical or spiritual, with literature. I occasionally check on the School of Life's bibliotherapy service to see if they've made any blog posts recently. So, I was excited when I found out that Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin of that same School of Life bibliotherapy service were publishing a book of their recommendations. I see this as a reference book to consult as needed, not necessarily to be read straight through. I skipped around quite a bit, reading entries that caught my eye, or that had relevance for me.

This is really a lovely book. The writers have a sympathetic tone, touched with humor, and they tell you enough about the book they prescribe to help you see why it is appropriate. Some of their recommendations are unsurprising (Catcher in the Rye for Adolescence, Moby Dick for Obsession), but others are delightful surprises (Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda for Outsider, Being An; 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea for Hayfever, Lolita for Words, Lost for). These recommendations will make you want to read, even if you don't have the ailment in question.

Along with prescriptions for specific ailments, the writers have included lists of best books for various purposes. There are lists for every age group, from teenagers to centenarians, as well as lists like The Ten Best Novels to Drown Out Snoring, The Ten Best Novels to Make You Weep, Ten Best Audiobooks for Road Rage. I discovered that I had read most of the books on the Ten Best Escapist Novels list. What does that say about me?

One last interesting feature: scattered throughout the book are prescriptions for reading ailments, such as Household chores, distracted by, or Read Instead of Live, Tendency to. This is where the seriousness of the book comes through, since only people who are dedicated to reading would recognize these conditions as ailments that need treatment. The advice is also serious, but in the same gentle tone as the rest of the book.

All authors, novels, lists and reading ailments are indexed in the back of the book, so finding what you are looking for is easy.

This multi-volume biography is impressive for the way Robert Caro is able to convey the heroic qualities of Lyndon Johnson without for a minute whitewashing what an appalling bully he was. I have also enjoyed the finely detailed attention to background–people who had significant interaction with Johnson, historical context of events (what they meant to people at the time), explanations of congressional procedures and tactics. Each volume is large and long, telling its portion of Johnson's tale at a leisurely pace.

This volume covers the lead-up to the 1960 presidential election, the Kennedy presidency and assassination, and the transition to the Johnson presidency before the 1964 elections. One of the main themes is the antagonistic relationship between LBJ and Robert Kennedy, which is both fascinating and sad. I have to admit that I was glad to put the book down for the last time. I am thankful that I can contemplate LBJ from a safe distance, but after a 600 pages, even the horrified fascination gets tiring.

This is a gorgeous story set in England and Wales in the 13th century. The first book in the trilogy was originally meant to be the whole story, and it could stand by itself...but I'm glad it doesn't. The story follows Harry Talvace, a young man of a good Norman family in England, who renounces his heritage to become a mason and becomes entangled in a love triangle when he agrees to build a church for the English nobleman Ralf Isambard. The history and politics of England and its relations with Wales at the time play a role in the story, and there is a truly great villain.

The Disorderly Knights takes Francis Crawford into dark territory. Instead of defending himself against false accusations motivated by political ambition, or uncovering plots against the child queen of Scotland, Crawford finds himself in a struggle with plain evil. True to form for the Lymond Chronicles, it is an evil no one else recognizes. Because of Crawford's past, it is easy even for his friends and family to believe that it is really him who is the problem. This story explores a new aspect of the familiar Lymond Chronicles theme, deceptive appearances: physical beauty and pleasant appearances as tools for distraction and deception.

This story introduces the shadow of deep sadness into what had been a fairly lighthearted adventure tale. At a moment when, no longer an outlaw, Francis Crawford could begin to pursue all the inviting possibilities open to a talented, wealthy and handsome young man of good family, he is instead hijacked into a nightmarish conflict. And at the end, you know there will be more conflict to come.

The Disorderly Knights begins and ends in Scotland, and travels to France, Malta and Tripoli from 1548 to 1551. As always, Crawford's adventures are woven into the events and political intrigues of the time.

I was disappointed. Characters were either good guys or bad guys (or, in the case of women, all good, strong, highly competent, independent–fighting off rapists while becoming successful businesswomen). Hints of a mystery pop up here and there, then fade away for another 150 pages, until the mystery is solved anticlimactically near the end of the book. No attempt is made to give the characters the sensibilities of their own time–Philip, as the prior of the monastery, probably comes the closest, simply because being the prior of a monastery is a rather medieval thing to be. And at 900 pages, the book is flabby. A lot happens in that 900 pages, but not all of it is interesting or significant. I was expecting something gorgeous, like Edith Pargeter's The Heaven Tree (which some web sites recommend to people who liked Pillars of the Earth), a story about moral conflict and being true to oneself. Instead, I thought this book was more like a novel you'd buy at the supermarket.

An engrossing story about a group of travellers, each with a story to hide and to tell, with the 1348 onset of the Black Plague in England as a backdrop. There is a horror-story frame to it, which I didn't like because I thought it was so unnecessary, given that it all takes place while the Plague is raging–what could be more horrifying than that?! The only way I can find the “horror story” aspect of this book acceptable is to explain to myself as a kind of personification of the horror of the Plague. I don't want to spoil anything for other readers, so if you have read the book and have thoughts about this, please comment. Anyway, the book makes good use of historical details about the Plague year 1348 and has well drawn characters –there is a lot to like.