Karen
This novel covers the events of four days in the medieval village of Oakham, where the most important man, Tom Newman, has gone missing and is believed to have drowned in the river. The story is told backwards, beginning in the early hours of Shrove Tuesday and going back to Shrove (or Egg) Saturday. Contrary to what we might expect, as the story goes backward in time, more is revealed to us, not just about the context of events, but about what actually happened.
The narrator of the story is John Reve, the parish priest. His only living relative, his younger sister Annie, has just gotten married and moved to a different town with her husband. He struggles with loneliness and questions his vocation to the priesthood as he tries to guide the spiritual life of his parish. Tom Newman challenged his theological beliefs, but was also someone he could have a deep conversation with. In the story's present time, Reve is being challenged by the dean, a religious authority who reports to the bishop and who came at Reve's request to investigate Tom Newman's death. The dean is critical of the state in which he finds the parish, and wants Reve to name someone guilty of Newman's murder.
John Reve is caught in an intricate web of circumstances, some of which are his own fault and some of which are beyond anyone's control. I admire the way everything is set up, and the way we see the push and pull between Reve's compassion for the suffering of people in his parish and his realism about their capacity to overcome their circumstances. Whenever I started to get tired of his disgusted lament that “Oakham is a backward, muddy little hole that will never amount to anything,” he switched to “But it's golden in summer!”
I'm not sure whether telling the story backwards really adds anything, except that it corresponds to an idea of Reve's about reassuring his people that Newman's soul has passed into heaven. I do feel that it adds a little confusion about the order of events, and I'm not sure it's worth it for that. Otherwise, I recommend this heart-tugging book.
I read this as part of the Tournament of Books Summer reading program (Camp ToB). It's clever in some ways (“Couplets” as a title for a book about coupling, come on!), has a lot of sex, and the narrator seems to be trying to develop a sense of self. It wasn't really my cup of tea, though. I was glad I could read it in two moderate sittings.
“I dig up a lot of awful history when I kneel in my garden. But, my god, a lot of beauty grows out of this soil as well.”
This wonderful book is about the garden in Ft. Collins, CO that Camille T. Dungy, a professor at Colorado State University, cultivates. It is also about the history of nature writing in the US, and the historical relationship Black people have with land and gardens here. It's about ecology, understanding ecosystems and trying to work with them instead of dominating the landscape. There is a lot in this book that is not specifically about gardens, but bears directly on the garden that Dr. Dungy is building. I loved it and I think it's an important contribution to the nature writing genre.
For about the first half of this book, I thought it was funny, but as the story progressed, I changed my mind. This is not the comic novel the blurbs want you to think it is. Greta is on the run from some painful truths about her life, which is how she ends up in a little Hudson Valley tourist town, transcribing recorded coaching sessions for a self annointed sex and relationship coach. She is captivated by the voice and “aura” of one of the coaching clients, a woman she calls Big Swiss. When she meets Big Swiss in person by accident, she lies about her name and occupation, which presents problems as they become romantically and sexually entangled.
The town of Hudson reminds me of my college town in Massachusetts, with its “town vs. gown” dynamic, abundance of suspect people in the “healing” business, and large population of people who are there for a short time and then leave forever (students or tourists). Partly because of that, and partly because the precarious, patched together life that Greta is living seems more like a college student's than a woman in her 40's, I kept being surprised at references to Greta's age.
Unsurprisingly, things don't go well for Greta, and Greta makes them worse for herself before the novel is over. The aspects of the book that seemed funny at the beginning seem much more like sad bravado by the end. If I look at the book this way, without expecting it to be funny, I like certain aspects of it much more. The character of Sabine, who is absent for much of the action, is much wiser than she seems at first. I also appreciated the character of the beehive, which inhabits the old farmhouse where Greta and Sabine live.
This was a fun book to read on my lunch breaks at work, as it didn't require close reading, but I could look at each page for a while, notice things and meditate on them, and then move on. Giorgia and Stefanie sent postcards to each other with hand drawn visualizations of data that they collected about themselves over the previous week. Each week the data topic changed, and topics ranged from tracking each time they thanked someone, to the times they were alone, to apps on their phones, to all the times they said goodbye.
Over the course of reading the book, you become acquainted with the different styles of the two women. Giorgia's drawings are filled with tiny details, and she often makes her visualization resemble the type of data she's tracking. Stefanie's drawings are often more blunt and expansive. Both add humourous commentary along the sides of their postcards.
I read this to try to learn something about how to do data visualization. I've read some manual-type books, but looking at an art book of data visualization put into practice was a much more pleasant way to learn.
This book is about the intersection of librarianship and social work, and what collaboration between librarians and social workers can look like or produce. Many of the examples are about social workers having staff positions in public libraries and working with homeless people, but it's clear that the collaboration can take many other forms. The book emphasizes the value of listening to people and taking your cue from them about what services they need.
The book provides background information about the differences in training between librarians and social workers, as well as their commonalities. There is an accompanying web site at wholepersonlibrarianship.com, with a few resources for connecting with others, however, the blog hasn't been updated since February 2022. There is also a substantial amount of back matter to the book: 6 appendices, a bibliography, and an index.
If connections between social services and libraries is a topic of interest to you, this is a well-written, substantive, and practical book. I recommend it!
This historical novel about two women who drive a Red Cross Clubmobile donut-and-coffee truck on the front lines of World War II Europe took a while to get interesting. The main characters, Irene and Dorothy, read like stereotypes of 1940's fast-talking-dames. The sense of stereotype never quite goes away, but Irene and Dorothy do become a bit more real as the novel gets into the details of their service and their friendship starts to develop.
The end also seemed a bit “Hollywood” to me, but the fact that this was a World War II novel about the friendship and service of two women goes a long way.
Killers of the Flower Moon tells another part of Native American history that I had never heard about: the time in the late 19th and early 20th century when Osage people turned out to own the rights to the oil found in what the US government had thought were the barren hills of Oklahoma, and became millionaires, and then became targets for murder by vicious whites who wanted their money. This is a well written page turner for a mystery lover, but it's horrifying and absolutely heartbreaking because it's true. The trauma that a generation of people endured when their relatives and loved ones were murdered is still present in the conversations that their grandchildren have with the author. Read this book, but brace yourself for deep sadness. There are notes for each chapter at the end of the book, a list of unpublished sources, and a bibliography.
Update: I want to also mention that this book has a perspective on the development of the FBI as a federal law enforcement agency that is fascinating. According to the author, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's focus on making the FBI (and by association, himself) look like heroes led to a job only half done, and many Osage families were left with grief and unanswered questions about what happened to their relatives.
This is the story of a young Croatian girl, Ana, growing up in the time of the Yugoslavian Wars. She, her parents, and her infant sister, Rahela, live in Zagreb where tensions are rising between Serbs and Croats, where there are shortages of food and clean water, and where there are regular air raids and bombings. Although these things are scary and stressful, Ana has her family and her best friend Luka with her, so she has a basic sense of security. Rahela, the baby, is sick, though, and all the medical treatments they have tried with doctors in Zagreb have not helped, so the family decides to take her to an organization in Sarajevo that can help. On this trip, everything falls apart for Ana, and she spends the rest of the book trying to put her life back together.
The story is written in the first person, from Ana's point of view, which gives it a feeling of intimacy and immediacy. Ana's voice is self aware, a little bit cynical about people's motivations and their ability to take in the pain of strangers (justifiably so, given her experiences). In some ways she sounds like a normal, somewhat disaffected young adult, but her experiences are not normal.
We learn about Ana's experiences out of chronological order, with childhood war experiences alternating with post-war college years in which she is struggling to relate to others and feel connected. I had questions that weren't answered immediately, but I was able to trust that the story would tell me what I needed to know and in fact, most of my questions were eventually answered.
I recommend this book, but be forewarned: it will hurt your heart.
This is a book of non-fiction that reads like a novel. It tells the story of Suleyman's rise to power in the 16th century, the Ottoman Empire's relationship with Venice, Charles V the “Holy Roman Emperor,” and Francis I of France. More intimately, it tells the story of Ibrahim Pasha, a Westerner who became Suleyman's close friend as an enslaved boy and rose with him to power, wealth, and influence. Hurrem, the woman who was captured in what is now Ukraine, made a concubine of the Sultan, and eventually became his wife, is also depicted here.
De Bellaigue writes about Suleyman's life and times with wit and appreciation for the the forces at play, as well as insight into human nature. Lest you think that some of the more outrageous events in the book couldn't possibly have happened, there are notes and a bibliography, as well as an index.
If you're interested in the subject, this is truly a great read.
We meet the main character of this book, Robin Swift, when he is a young boy dying of cholera in a house in Guangzhou (referred to as Canton), China. His mother has already died, and he is close to death, when an Englishman comes into his house and touches him with a mysterious silver bar that heals him. The Englishman, Professor Lovell, assumes guardianship of the boy, has him pick an English sounding name (we never learn the boy's real name), and brings him back to England to be educated in Latin, Greek, and Mandarin. Everything seems fine, if strange, until Robin neglects his studies one day to finish reading a novel he had started, and Professor Lovell beats him viciously as punishment. It becomes clear to us, if not to Robin, that Professor Lovell is not a benefactor. He is educating Robin for a purpose and Robin is not to be allowed to stray from that purpose at all.
Eventually Robin is sent to Oxford, to the prestigious Royal Institute of Translation, or Babel. He and the three other entering “Babblers,” two of whom are foreign born like him, become close friends as they endure the rigors of their first year at university. Robin, however, encounters a boy, Griffin, who knows some of the secrets of Professor Lovell and Babel, and draws him into a nerve-wracking and disturbing double life.
This epic novel is the story of the friendship of those 4 students, a story about colonialism and exploitation at work in people's lives, and the story of the ways people attempt to deal (or not deal) with such all-encompassing forces. It also involves fascinating discussions of etymology and the power of translation. As a librarian I love a good footnote, and this book delivers footnotes! I felt like the book verged on preachy when it came to the central conflict between the friends, but that feeling faded as the story developed.
If you like a nice, fat, complex novel that takes you to surprising places, this is a good one!
There are too many ways to give spoilers if I review this book in detail, so I will keep it general. It's about Nell Young, who was considered an up and coming scholar in cartography, next in line to take her father's place as the Map Curator at the New York Public Library, until she fell from grace when she found what she thought were rare and precious maps in a box labeled “junk” in the basement. The book begins 7 years after that, Nell and her father having been estranged for all of that time, when she gets a call from one of his colleagues asking her to come to the NYPL, where she finds out her father has died in his office. The novel tells the story of Nell searching for the answers to all the questions she has about their estrangement, her father's legacy, and his death.
The central feature of the story, once you see it, is pretty interesting, but it takes almost half the book to come fully into view. The author is good at creating suspense and keeping you with her as the story develops, but in retrospect I wondered how much of all that development was necessary. Soon after that, I made some guesses about how things would turn out and, sad to say, I was right. I still enjoyed reading it and you might too, if you enjoy stories about academic scholarship.
As a teenager I was somewhat aware of the group of young actors just a bit older than me that were labeled the “Brat Pack.” Out of all of them, I liked Andrew McCarthy the best. That was a long time ago, and not a huge part of my life, but it was enough to make me pick up this memoir, which I liked quite a bit.
McCarthy tells about his early family history, discovering his vocation to be an actor in high school, his experience of moving to New York to study theater at NYU, and finding his way into the acting business, all as a lead up to focusing on the 1980s when fame found him. It's not a gossipy story, though. He mentions people he worked with, but his focus is more on his own experience–his approach to becoming a professional, his struggle with anxiety, and his developing drinking problem. He alludes a bit to his later career, but this book is mostly about the 1980s.
Written in a conversational, self-deprecating style, with accompanying black and white pictures.
I liked the character of AJ Fikry, the heartbroken bookseller on the fictional Alice Island off the coast of Massachusetts, who takes in the 2 year old foundling left in his bookshop. He's prickly and barely even trying to cope after the death of his wife and business partner, Nicole, in a car accident. However, I was disappointed by all the worn out tropes in the The Storied Life of AJ Fikry. Without spoiling it for anyone who wants to read the book anyway, I thought a little bit about the chapter headings and made an educated guess about what was going to happen. Unfortunately, I was right.
There were enjoyable parts that were not predictable, though. The author's booktalk and reception that goes ridiculously sideways is one that I thought would be developed further on, but it wasn't. Developments concerning the parentage of the foundling were surprising to me, and were developed a little later in the book. Gabrielle Zevin's lovely dialogue writing kept me reading even when I was pretty sure I knew what was going to happen. I enjoyed the book, but I wanted it to be more than it was.
I'm not sure who it was that told me recently that Kate Atkinson wrote mysteries, but when I found that out, I had to go out and read one. I enjoyed this one, told from multiple perspectives, with characters who are infuriatingly obtuse, stubborn, wrong headed, and, uh... human. There were times when I thought it was going in a predictable direction, but then it took another path instead. One of the main characters is a 16 year old orphan who is heartbroken and grieving, but refuses to let anyone know her well enough to find that out. Another main character is also an orphan, a famous one who is trying to leave her notoriety behind. There are also several problematic or outright doomed marriages, as well as a couple of cases of mistaken identity. Some problems are settled by the end of the book, but others are just beginning. Entertaining, but with some serious psychological subject matter.
I took this book as essentially a fairy tale about being a “noble” person. Count Alexander Rostov is sentenced in 1922 to live out the rest of his life in the Metropol Hotel. If he steps foot outside, he will be shot. He's moved out of his luxurious suite and into a cramped attic room and begins a new life under house arrest. Although he experiences some moments of feeling trapped and bored, he manages to accept changes in his circumstances and to find happiness, friendship, and meaning in the life he makes for himself.
I call this a fairy tale because although the people around him experience the consequences of changes in Soviet life, Alexander Rostov seems to be largely insulated from it all. He experiences sadness at the death and disappearance of his friends, and he does what he can to protect the people he cares about. However, his charm, his ability to talk to people, and his willingness to adapt his skills to his circumstances endear him to some of the important people he meets, and they protect him when they have occasion to. I found this insulation from the hardest hardships of Soviet Russia hard to believe, no matter how charming the former Count was. So, although I enjoyed the story very much, I take it about as seriously as I take bubble gum or cotton candy. Charm, emotional intelligence, and adaptability are important, but a totalitarian regime can still easily crush a person with those attributes.
Read with scepticism.
I accidentally got the shortened version of War Music that covers only Books 16-19 of the Iliad, so that's what I am reviewing here. On the strength of this small part of the book, I am going to buy myself a copy of the full version. It is gorgeous. Full of phrases to treasure, like:
“Or those with everything to lose, the kings,
Asleep like pistols in red velvet.”
“Noon. In the foothills
Melons emerge from their green hidings.
Heat.”
There is a wonderful balance of still moments like these above, and momentum in action scenes, and both are captured in beautiful phrases. I was sceptical about Logue's declining to use the famous stock phrases like “rosy fingered dawn” and “wine-dark sea,” but he is so good at making his own descriptive phrases that I didn't miss those familiar ones. Judging by these three Books, this version of The Iliad is modern and ancient, readable and brilliant. I can't wait to read the whole thing.
This book starts out in Wadi al-Uyoun, an ancient desert oasis that, unbeknownst to the inhabitants, is about to be destroyed to develop an oil well. The first indication the inhabitants have that something is about to change is when a group of Americans show up and ask a lot of questions about the land. The outlandish behavior of the Americans stirs up controversy and alarm almost from the beginning, but since the inhabitants have no idea of the scale of what is to come, they are unable to resist effectively and are displaced from their homes and their land.
The largest part of the book takes place in Harran, an isolated seaside town that is also taken over by Americans to serve as a port for receiving machinery and materials for building the infrastructure needed to transport oil from the interior to the coast. Arabs displaced from Wadi al-Uyoun and other places have been recruited to work on building the pipeline and the other oil industry infrastructure. Americans live in a compound (built by Arab workers) separate from the Arab population of the town and maintain a paternalistic and exploitative relationship with all the Arabs they have contact with. Arab elites such as the royal family and emirs support the Americans because of the benefits to themselves. Their support is bought with cars, and other technological gadgets, like radios and telephones. In the midst of all this, ordinary people are experiencing the breakdown of their traditional culture.
I would describe this book as epic, because it spans locations and generations of people. Most of the people who you see in the beginning of the book are no longer present at the end, but the story has a continuous flow. Individual characters are vibrant, but they come and go as the movement of the story goes on. It is highly readable.
A quick mystery read between other books for relaxation. I recall reading this as a teenager. Cordelia Gray is a rather solemn 24 year old private detective who is left on her own when her older, more experienced business partner dies suddenly. No sooner does she attend his funeral than her first solo case arrives on her doorstep. There are some dated and appalling attitudes described without irony in this book, but otherwise it's an enjoyable English mystery of the slightly gloomy variety.
A good old fashioned novel with a lot of story to get lost in. Cora Seaborne is freed from a terrible marriage by the death of her husband. The doctor who treated Michael Seaborne has fallen in love with her, but she is focused on experiencing and enjoying her freedom. She goes to Essex to look for fossils and comes into a community of people who believe there is a sea monster terrorizing their village. Here she meets William Ransome, the local priest, his wife Stella, and their children. Although Cora does not think much of religion, she becomes close friends with Will and his family, with surprising results.
There are so many oppositions in this novel: religion vs. science, superstition vs. reason, tradition vs. modernity, social classes rubbing up against each other in uncomfortable ways, innovations in medicine that go against people's sense of God's place in their lives or against their sense of human value. Almost everyone in the story is baffled, but out of all this friction comes a sense of growth.
The movie (1975) was formational for me when I was a kid, and when something brought it to mind this fall I decided I needed to read the book the movie was based on.
I wasn't disappointed. The sci fi weirdness, the feeling that Tony and Tia were at the mercy of adults with malevolent intentions without really understanding what was going on, Winkie the cat, all of it was there. I was also touched at Father O'Day's defending aliens as part of God's creation–that's 1970s theology for ya!
I truly enjoyed this journey back to a story that made such a deep impression on me as a child.
This novel evaded my expectations all the way through until the last few pages. The main character is a writer of true crime books who moves into a building where a grisly double murder occurred in the 1980's, with the intent to investigate and write his next book about what really happened there. We learn that his first book, about a woman who killed her teenage attackers and inexplicably dismembered them and tried to throw their bodies in the ocean, was successful enough to be made into a movie. There is enough gruesome detail and enough inhabiting the lives of the people involved in these murders to be creepy, more than a little disturbing, but this book is definitely not horror. Nor is it exactly a mystery. True, there are a lot of unanswered questions about the Devil House murders and certainly the character of Gage Chandler wants to get at the truth, but it's not clear that the story is going to deliver on that.
Wherever it was going, I was willing to follow, though, even through some abrupt changes of perspective and style. This was a highly readable book. It had an aura of 1970's-‘80's nostalgia that drew me in, reminding me of the so-called “Satanic Panic” of my adolescence. There were some portrayals of adolescent and teenage friendship that were deep, nuanced, and very much of the time period that made the story irresistible to me. The end was not at all what I expected, but once I read it I could look back and see how the roots of the ending went far back into the book. It did not just pop out of nowhere.
The action in this book takes place over the course of a week. The story starts with two fires: one is the master's dovecote, set on fire by a few discontented villagers. The other is a small fire set by newcomers on the outskirts of the village to alert others that they were there. The two fires indicate a transition from the customary ways into a week of violent upheaval.
The narrator of these events is Walter Thirsk, the master's former servant, who came to the village and fell in love with the land and with a young woman of the village. He has tried to integrate himself into the life of the villagers, but especially since his wife died he feels himself to still be an outsider.
There is a lot of shifted blame in this story. The villagers point the finger at the newcomers on the outskirts of the village to blame them for burning the master's dovecote, instead of their fellow villagers. A couple of women and a young child are accused of witchcraft after another act of violence clearly done by someone else. Meanwhile, the master's authority is shifted onto his dead wife's cousin, who shows up to take control of the land.
All of this takes place at harvest time in an unspecified year. The atmosphere of ancient tradition that the villagers inhabit makes it feel like it could be 13th or 14th century, but other aspects of the story make it seem like 17th century or a bit later. The vagueness on this point serves to make the story feel more allegorical or mythical, but at the same time I don't stop trying to pin it down.
There's a strong vein of melancholy in this book. Early in the story, Walter tells an itinerant map maker that they don't have names for the different places of their land, and the sense is that everyone feels themselves so deeply part of the land that there is no need to name it. The disruption that occurs changes that forever. I think this is everyone's story.
It has been a while since I read a Jane Austen novel. Fanny, the shy, sensitive, intelligent and morally upright girl is the poor cousin brought up in her wealthy maternal aunt's house. Nobody takes any notice of her but her cousin Edmund, so of course she loves him devotedly. The arrival of Mary and Henry Crawford, a well to do, lively, and attractive brother and sister brings changes to the more or less placid life everyone is leading at Mansfield Park.
I feel a little queasy about the way things turned out. I was rooting for Henry, so that Fanny could get out of the Bertram household and experience a little more of the world. But rooting for which man the heroine “gets to” (has to) marry also feels bad–mercenary, crude, in bad taste. And crude and mercenary people who value the wrong things are at issue in this book. The idea of marrying without love is spoken of as shameful, but at the same time Fanny is pressured to marry Henry even though she says she can never love him, and all around her women are marrying without love so that they can have the closest thing to an independent life that exists in those times.
Also, there is class consciousness. Fanny, the daughter of an “unsuitable” marriage between a young woman of a “good family” and a sailor, is gentle, kind, has good manners and a good mind, although her aunts and cousins undervalue her because of her lower class background. But Mrs. Norris, one of her “quality” aunts, is selfish, mean, and unable to see those qualities in herself or others.
In spite of my queasiness about how insular Fanny's life is, it's an absorbing book and a classic for a reason. Jane Austen has an unmerciful eye for people and their hypocrisy.