Karen
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.
I mostly enjoyed this novel about a plague struck English village in 1666 closing itself off to protect surrounding villages from the spread of the disease. The details of daily life, the background of Puritanism, and the restoration of the monarchy made the story so interesting. The different ways that people responded to the threat of the disease really resonated now that I have experienced living through a pandemic. The main character, Anna Frith, a young widow with two small boys who works as a maid for the parish clergyman and his wife, is a calm and intelligent person who thinks through all she experiences and manages to help people this way. The story is told by her character, so everything is seen through her eyes. I did suspect her of being a little anachronistic at times in her thought about how disease spreads, but I thought her loss of traditional religious faith after what she had experienced made sense and was evidence of growth in her character.
The last 30 or so pages seemed like the ending to a different book, though. I was disappointed in what seemed like a flip flop in the character of the clergyman, Michael Mompellion, and in a fantasy-adventure ending for Anna. If you've read this book, let's chat about it.
The narrator and protagonist of this novel is a 58 year old female professor of English Literature at a small college in upstate New York whose husband, also a professor in the same department, is in trouble for having had affairs with students in the past. She is anything but the wronged “supportive, silent wife,” though, as one delightful scene with some of her students shows. Her “arrangement” with her husband, that they could each be as sexually free as they liked, allows her space to pursue her own interests, sexual and otherwise. Her attitude towards the women who have come forward to accuse her husband of abusing his power over them is impatience. She thinks they are refusing to acknowledge the power they had in the situation. Indeed she goes on to exercise her own power in some startling ways, especially in relation to Vladimir Vladinski, a new professor with a hot new novel just published.
Whether you agree with her about the power dynamics of teacher-student relationships or not, this woman is fascinating. Her unsentimental view of herself and others, the energy she directs toward teaching, writing, and other parts of her profession, and the inspiration she feels as she realizes how attracted she is to Vladimir all come out in a sparkling (and sometimes spikey) narrative that moves along quickly. I felt drawn in by her voice, intensely sympathetic... until things started to go down a very strange road.
In at least two places, the narrator disparages readers who review a book harshly because they are offended by what happens in it or they don't relate to the characters the way they expect to. She wants her students to see what those elements are accomplishing technically in the book instead of merely rejecting them because they're not pleasing. I love this point and I love that this character makes this point, because almost every person in the book does something cringeworthy or has terrible motives, and yet the relationships feel mostly true. I will be thinking about this novel for a while.
This is a complex novel that centers around the idea that in the near future, people are able to upload their consciousness to the cloud where other people can have access to it. The book starts with Bix Bouton, the tech guru who invented the technology to do this, attending a salon-like party incognito and worrying that he is all out of great ideas. Going “incognito”/posing as someone you're not vs. authenticity is a theme in this world. There is a significant group of people, “eluders,” who are resistant to the idea of granting the public access to their private lives. They maintain a “shell” online, an account that posts and interacts to give the illusion that a real person is behind it for as long as possible, while the real person escapes to somewhere inaccessible. There are also people who work to facilitate “eluding,” a kind of technological resistance movement. There is also a character who, from a young age, demands authenticity from the people around him, and as an adult creates scenes in public to elicit “authentic” reactions from bystanders.
Chapters in The Candy House are written in different styles; some are straightforward third person omniscient narration, some are epistolary (email style), some are what turns out to be first person-writing-a-guidebook style. The novel tends to move from one character to another without going back much. Although it starts with Bix Bouton's worries about his ability to come up with great ideas and maintain his mover-and-shaker status, once it moves on from him it doesn't go back until near the end. I found that a bit frustrating, because once I invested in a character I wanted more development of their story. That frustration was somewhat tempered by the fact that the characters are interconnected–they are children, spouses, friends or acquaintances of someone you've already met, so you are getting development of those stories, but it's on the periphery.
At times it felt like a loosely connected series of short stories or novellas on a theme rather than a novel, though.
Ivory Frame (yes, that's her name) is a young woman estranged from her family and enrolled in an art conservatory in Paris between the world wars. She is also an elderly biologist who has spent her adult life recording the languages of animals with the understanding that their existence is threatened by human encroachment and climate change. We get her story alternating in the present and the past. The Ivory of the present is shaken to receive a letter telling her she has a granddaughter, because she apparently has no child of her own. The book sets out to give us the context and the backstory for this letter, although Ivory's story meanders quite a bit in the process. She has a difficult love affair in her past, and a sympathetic assistant in the present, and the events and emotions seem to take place on an operatic level. I am generally one who appreciates melodrama, but I think it may be a bit overdone in this book. Still, there is a lot going on in The Dictionary of Animal Languages with ideas about the purpose of art, and the difference between art and science, or art and language. This is a rich book and I am glad I read it.
I put this book on my TBR list as a consequence of reading Paul Kingsnorth's The Wake. This book tells of the real English resistance to Norman invaders in the first five years after the Battle of Hastings. Peter Rex, the author, tells us that the transition to a new King, William, went as smoothly as it did because much of the administrative body of the kingdom accepted William as ruler. But people lower down in the hierarchy resisted, in part because many of them stood to lose property and livelihood.
Two chapters near the end are devoted to Hereward “the Wake,” the legendary resistance fighter against the Normans. Rex examines the historical records to see what support there is for the commonly accepted parts of Hereward's story and to try to determine where he lived and who his family was. This is the aspect of history of that is fascinating to me: when authors are explicit about what can be known and what can only be suspected or speculated about, given what is left to us in the historical record. Throughout the book, Rex references the Domesday Book, Orderic Vitalis' Ecclesiastical History, and other sources from the period. He gives reasons for his interpretations, which I'm not really in a position to evaluate, but it is the method of building a picture of what happened long ago from scant surviving evidence that fascinates me.
The last real chapter of the book is called “the protagonists,” and it would have been more helpful to have it at the beginning of the book. It names the main characters in the conflict, the names of the well known resisters and collaborators, as well as officials and royal household members. There is a large cast of characters to keep straight, and I had difficulty knowing my Aethelwigs from my Aethelhelms, so I appreciated the help.
There are also maps and genealogies, a bibliography and index, and a few pages of black and white photo plates.
A very dark story set at a graduate art institute in Washington DC and in the woods of Maine. It's told in two time frames; one in the summer and fall of 1988 at an artist's camp in Maine and one in the fall of 2018 as Audra Colfax, a degree candidate at the art institute prepares to defend her thesis. There are also descriptions of art pieces submitted by Audra Colfax for her thesis.
The story centers around an artistically gifted young woman with bipolar disorder, and characters who either exploit and abuse her or are complicit in her abuse. There's an implication that the complicity extends to degree granting art departments, since the people involved in the story go on to become art professors. All these issues are present in a well-written page-turner of a suspense novel. You know something terrible has happened and is going to happen, but you don't know exactly what and you can't look away until you find out.
The story of a boy, Jahan, who runs away from his abusive stepfather in India and becomes an elephant keeper in the menagerie of Suleiman the Magnificent, Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul, Turkey. By being in the right place at the right time as a young man, he becomes an apprentice to Sinan, the Chief Royal Architect. The book accompanies Jahan as he grows up, develops in his profession and in his character, encountering some long-simmering difficulties along the way. The book takes a leisurely approach to dealing with its central issues; they are allowed to develop organically over the course of Jahan's whole lifetime. There are periods of action, but also long periods where these issues seem to be dormant.
Elif Shafak's writing is wonderful for an adventure novel, which this is. She conveys the atmosphere of her locations with a sure touch, without overdoing the description. Jahan is a sympathetic character, an outsider without any status in the Ottoman Empire, observing the environment and customs and attempting to fit in and avoid making fatal mistakes.
This book tells the history of the United States with regard to the indigenous inhabitants of the land. It tells the stories that were left out of the history most people educated in the US learned in school, including stories about people we were raised to think of as admirable, like Daniel Boone. After it fills in the gaps you didn't know were in your education about the forming of the United States, it shows how our stance in the world today as a dominant power, bringer of democracy, a militaristic empire, has developed directly out of the way we treated the indigenous people of this land. This is an eye opening book, suitable for academic environments and for general readers. It has an extensive bibliography and notes, as well as an index, but is written in approachable language. Everyone should read it.
Sara Ahmed illuminates the work of feminism with wordplay. For example, in talking about leaving the life she was expected to live (heterosexuality), she says, “When I was wearing it, I found it wearing” (p. 48). This is one way that someone can become a feminist: by coming to understand that the world around you wants you to live a life that you don't want.
This is in some ways an academic book, but its mode of discourse is not typical academic language. She uses the different senses of words, takes advantage of the difference in meaning when a word is a noun as opposed to a verb, constructs sentences around puns, and other playful tactics to express some of the difficulties or intricacies of becoming and being a feminist. Sometimes this style conveys meaning viscerally and sometimes more meaning comes from spending time with her sentences and letting them percolate. This was not a quick book to read, but it was rewarding.
This clever and fun novel casts John Dee as a spy for Elizabeth I. Mary Stuart is being held prisoner and watched closely on suspicion that she is plotting against the Queen, while everyone also worries about Philip of Spain sending ships to invade England and overthrow the Queen. Francis Walsingham has concocted a ruse to divert some of this trouble, but it goes wrong and he sends John Dee to fix the mess. The mess turns out to be more complex than expected, and the result is an enjoyable spy novel with an unusual hero.
Mary Stuart is portrayed as truly awful, so beware if you are a Mary Queen of Scots fan.
The misery in this book is unrelenting. The working class in 1980's Glasgow endure unemployment and resulting poverty with a judgmental outlook that punishes anyone who stands out as getting above themselves, and cruelty to anyone perceived as weak or vulnerable. In the midst of all this is the Bain family. Their mother, Agnes Bain, left her marriage to an upstanding but boring man to marry Hugh Bain (Shug), a volatile, womanizing taxi driver who beat her and eventually abandoned her. She becomes an alcoholic. Her two older children get out of the house as soon as they can, but her youngest, Shuggie, dotes on her and tries to protect her from herself. Shuggie is vulnerable because he is a delicate boy, particular about his dress and his speech, and he prefers to play with dolls and other girls' things rather than sports. The book follows Shuggie and his mother as Shuggie grows up. There are moments of kindness and beauty, but they make the misery that inevitably follows that much more heartbreaking. I kept reading, though, because I hoped for some redemption. It was hard won and subtle, but it eventually came. I think this is a really fine novel.
“Shards” imply something shattered, and indeed, you do understand reading this memoir that something was shattered in this narrator's life. The book starts out with a narrative of severe illness and fragility–a brain tumor–but you soon learn of physical abuse and mental illness as well. The narrator has traveled all over the world and read a great deal too, but there is darkness overshadowing much of his experience. I had a difficult time figuring out when was the right time to read this book, because next to his beautiful reflections would be a description of torture or animal suffering. I couldn't read it at mealtimes or bedtime. I would have put the book down for good, but the beauty of his writing and the quality of wonder in it drew me back over and over again. Proceed with caution.
I enjoyed this novel about an elderly woman whose journey into dementia allows her daughter, scarred from a difficult childhood, and grandson, recovering from a harrowing experience as a soldier in the Iraq War, to gain some understanding about their family history. This isn't a story with a neatly tied in a bow redemption ending or cozy, feel-good cliches about forgiveness and healing. All the main characters have had terrible difficulties to deal with, and the problems they now face are so recognizable as problems that ordinary people have to manage. The story manages to show the movement of a small amount of grace into the life of this struggling family, and the sense of wonder that can come with it.
That's pretty vague, but I don't want to give anything away by providing detail. Suffice it to say, I appreciated this author's attention to the details of conversation in contexts from the retirement home to the battlefield. Descriptions of the crowds at a Blackpool festival and of the details of armoured vehicles were equally well attended to. This book is worth reading.
This is a story of a young American man living abroad in Paris and coming to terms with his homosexuality in the 1950's. The narrator and protagonist, David, is drawn into an affair with a young Italian bartender working in Paris, which throws his life into turmoil. The tale is told in retrospect from a pivotal moment which we can't understand fully until we get the whole story. David as a narrator gives us a candid view of his confusion, his shame, his desire to resist a path that he knows will be condemned by others and which he fears will make him despicable. James Baldwin's writing is operatic. There is so much emotion and drama in David's situation that, although he is trying to keep his cool, he is not fooling anyone, least of all his girlfriend Hella. You will need Kleenex when you read this book.
The (fictional) story of the making of the Bayeux Tapestry in 1071 is narrated by the nun Aelthwyfe, who, we learn early on, has a beard that she hides under her wimple. We wonder what her story is, and we soon find out that each of the nuns working on the “tapestry,” (which Aelthwyfe points out is not really a tapestry, but a “broidery,” since the design is embroidered onto the cloth instead of woven into it) has a strange story to tell. These English nuns have all lived through the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 and the violence and upheaval that followed. Although they are following the plan laid out for the tapestry, they add embellishments in the margins that tell something of their trials, and each sister takes a turn to tell her story and explain the significance of the images she has embroidered on the hanging. As the nuns work at the embroidery, a couple of mysteries are playing out at their convent. The most troubling is the one involving their abbess, Aelfgyva, who is afflicted with a mysterious illness (mysterious to the nuns, although not to the reader) after coming back from visiting Bishop Odo, who has commissioned the tapestry.
The book is written in pseudo Old English, with some archaic spellyng and with Old English and Norman words substituted for modern English, such as “heafod” for “head” and “cou” for “neck.” There's no glossary, but after a couple of pages it starts to seem normal and reading is not hard. I started to find the instances of modern words and turns of phrase a little jarring, in fact.
The nuns' tales all have fantastic elements to them. One nun flies away from her persecutors, and thereafter is able to hover above the ground when she wants. Another nun is transformed into a creature with the body and legs of a lion and the head and torso of a woman, and then back. We also learn how Aelfwyfe came to have a beard. These fantastic elements come into the story through the traumatic events of the Norman conquest, and the nuns' revealing their stories to each other constitutes quiet solidarity with each other and resistance to the Norman rule.
“These are not novels for those like King Philip of Spain who do not appreciate games, nor are they for those like Richard Crawford who need everything spelled out and aboveboard. They are novels for game players.” This book satisfied my desire to talk to someone about Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles. I've met very few people who have read them, so talking them over to get a better understanding of them (and their appeal) has been an unscratched itch since I first read Game of Kings many years ago. Scott Richardson's analysis is appreciative of the books, insightful, well researched and written. He looks at the Lymond Chronicles as a hero's story, comparing it to other heroic narratives (like The Odyssey, for example), as an espionage novel, and as a series of games. I got to think about the Lymond Chronicles in new ways while reading this, and for that I am grateful.
This is a spy novel set in Cold War Berlin around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. An American woman working in West Berlin finds out that her second husband, Stefan, who she thought was a West German piano tuner, was actually an East German agent. Drama ensues.
The story was not predictable, but it also didn't draw me in very much. Although much of it is focused on the responses and actions of Anne, the main character, I never got a strong sense of her as a person. I did enjoy the atmosphere of the two Berlins just before the fall of the Wall. I probably won't read another book by this author.
This novel follows the never-to-be-realized lives of five children who were killed in the 1944 bombing of a Woolworth's in a working class part of London. The book starts with their deaths and then proceeds to track their might-have-been lives at intervals of about 15 years. I found myself drawn into those lives, caring about what was happening to the characters, but then being caught up short remembering that these characters were already dead.
Not all of the characters are likeable or lead exemplary lives. One does his best to make a fortune by scamming people. Nevertheless, the lives are rich, full of passion and striving, and moments of love and dedication. The city of London is also a character, predating and outliving its occupants in the background, filled with the lives of millions of others, and suggesting eternity.
I'm not sure if this novel needed the deaths of its protagonists in the first chapter. On one hand, it provides a kind of paradox to meditate on for the rest of the book. On the other hand, I found it to be a stumbling block. I had to “forget” about it to care about the characters and what happened to them.
The premise for this book is that Otto and Xavier have publicly declared their love for each other, and Xavier's aunt has booked them a trip on a sleeper train (formerly used for smuggling tea) in celebration. Beyond that, all bets are off. The pair board the train with their pet mongoose, Arpad, and immediately begin to encounter strange, ambiguous events. The proprietor of the train is an heiress who may or may not be a prisoner or delusional, the heiress has a past entanglement with a man whose son may or may not exist, friends of Xavier's may or may not be interfering in their lives for nefarious purposes. The train itself is fantastical, with furniture fixed to the ceiling, bazaar full of outlandish wares and tricky vendors, portrait gallery car, shower car, and library car.
There isn't much to cling to in this book. It raises many more questions than it answers, but it's an enjoyable read if you have a high tolerance for not knowing what's going on.