Laura
I read this because Scott loved it when he read it many years ago and because Hitchens mentioned it in Mortality and because it was short and light enough to start and finish on a Sunday afternoon after finishing Tristram Shandy. Lovely and thought-provoking, but somehow a little slight, I thought. Which isn‰ЫЄt necessarily bad. I kept waiting for something that went over my head, that would push it into deeper territory, but it stayed accessible, which isn‰ЫЄt usually disappointing but kind of was here. It kept reminding me of D. M. Thomas‰ЫЄs The White Hotel, although I can‰ЫЄt put my finger on why. More obviously, it reminded me of Italo Calvino, which in turn reminded me that I should read more of his books. And that it would be lovely to understand more about science, but novels are so much more interesting.
Haven‰ЫЄt read any of Hitchens‰ЫЄs books before, but I might want to now. It made me feel like there is a whole world of non-fiction that I am totally missing out on. I very rarely feel that way; I stick to fiction and feel bad because maybe I‰ЫЄm dumber than I could be, but not because I think there is non-fiction that I would really enjoy. Annie Dillard excluded. I was hoping for something more along the lines of Anatole Broyard‰ЫЄs Intoxicated by My Illness, but this was even slighter (if that‰ЫЄs possible). The fragments at the end should have been left out.
I brought this book on our road trip down to Florida for American Thanksgiving. The author‰ЫЄs been getting so much positive attention and we had this book of stories and I‰ЫЄm not sure what else I can say about my motivation. But I was on vacation and reading was a lower priority than staring out the window or talking to family or poking at my new iPhone. I liked it enough to finish it in the car the first day driving home (bent close to my lap, one arm hiding the windows from view so I wouldn‰ЫЄt get carsick), if that tells you anything. The stories were of the gut-kicking variety, with wrenching poverty and sad families but a bit of joy here and there. Made me feel sick and over-privileged, like I have my priorities all wrong. But I know enough that it wasn‰ЫЄt a feeling that would last (and maybe that‰ЫЄs why I wanted to finish it so much).
Re-read via audiobook in November 2014.
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Fun stuff! I picked this up because of the movie forthcoming next year, and of course because of Levi Stahl‰ЫЄs infectious enjoyment of the author‰ЫЄs work. Enjoyed this more than the earlier Parker book I read, and made me want to read more of these. The pseudo love triangle that never happened stuck with me afterward for some reason. When we actually were in the vicinity of Palm Beach visiting Scott‰ЫЄs grandparents before American Thanksgiving, I kept thinking back to this book. That's the best kind of book, I think, the one that keeps coming back to you after you finish it.
Really, really enjoyed this. Read probably too much in one sitting several times, which I guess is common with compilations. Bechdel‰ЫЄs memoirs were amazing and this comic isn‰ЫЄt that different, just less sustained. I never got to read this strip while I was growing up but if I had I would probably be a different person. There are so many things in here that would have been valuable to me as a teenager.
An enjoyable read but I kept waiting for it to go somewhere it never did. It started and continued and then it ended. Would have enjoyed more elaboration on Laura‰ЫЄs relationship with her second husband Irving, because it looked empty but sounded full. Most of the book seemed to have Vaseline on the lens – although of course writing it that way, it sounds intentional. And now I‰ЫЄm done trying to tell someone else how to write a book.
I am grateful to this book for putting me into the right mindset for watching ‰ЫПThe Rise of Minna Nordstrom‰Ыќ and ‰ЫПThe Nodder‰Ыќ episodes from Wodehouse Playhouse, which I discovered shortly after reading this. It is dated but hilarious. I keep trying to imitate Pauline Collins‰ЫЄs voice, British and American.
One of those Canadian classics I was expecting to dislike, but it was actually a bit more subtle than I was expecting (not by much though) and I enjoyed it. The story kept heading in the direction of sustaining too much tension while being too boring, but somehow it kept taut enough that although I couldn‰ЫЄt wait for that tension to release, I stayed interested. Not something I would recommend to anyone unless they were really into Thomas Hardy. It‰ЫЄs that kind of book. And I used to love me some Thomas Hardy.
I'm not sure why I let this book keep me away from Tristram Shandy, except that it was much faster to read and easier to follow. This book did not require me to re-read sentences a few times before I understood them. This was light and fun although perhaps longer than it should have been. A lot of the elements in and of themselves were interesting – wanting to be a ‘young gentleman' of a previous era, sexual confusion, having a mentor from whom you hide yourself, etc. – and in combination with early-nineties New York (pre-9/11!), this was a good story, engaging and funny and stuff and stuff. But why did I let it suck me in when I had on hand a literary classic well ahead of its time, as well as many other perfectly readable, short, engaging, and amazing works of literary art? Browsing in libraries can be a terrible thing.
Reading this shortly before Halloween was a coincidence. I‰ЫЄm not a horror fan. I read this more for the local history than the ghost stories. Most of the stories are in the form of legends or first-person accounts that might as well have been completely made up – more like newspaper articles than the properly-sourced writing I‰ЫЄm used to. Although, the stories I enjoyed the most were those that actually had sources other than the Haunted Hamilton website, like articles from the Spectator rather than hearsay from unnamed individuals. Far too many Wikipedia citations! The writing was not bad but the book was poorly edited (‰ЫПthe reporter bemused that ‰Ы_‰Ыќ).
I would have liked to see the author take a bit more of a personal approach to the stories, like describing his conversations with people who had these experiences or told these stories (as he did a bit in the last chapter). It would have been interesting to hear the ghost stories more from the storytellers themselves than from a third party, I guess.
The author made a couple of references to ghost stories as metaphors rather than actual things that happened, and I appreciate the idea that paranormal experiences are representations of the past within the imagination, triggered particularly in places which physically give the impression of previous life and subsequent abandonment and neglect. Of course something terrible happened there; otherwise why does no one live or work in these places anymore? I like this way of thinking about ghost stories. I have no patience for things like orbs and EVP. I have my own irrational fears of dark and unknown places, usually related to insects and wild animals instead of spirits. I have had my own experiences that I know some people would interpret as paranormal. (Just last week I was sitting in a meeting and during a conversation that didn‰ЫЄt involve me I could have sworn someone said my name loudly, almost right in my ear, but when I looked around everyone was carrying on the same and no one had said anything to me. Not like seeing a ghost but.) Our senses can and do deceive us, and as far as I‰ЫЄm concerned the likelihood that these experiences are caused by spirits from another world, rather than by our own brains, are little to none. But I can‰ЫЄt deny the power of ghosts, monsters, aliens, etc. as metaphors for important and meaningful aspects of our lives.
In any case, I appreciate that the author did not commit himself entirely to having paranormal beliefs, but served as the medium for sharing them, and focused so much on the history. In some ways it seems that the deeper interest (as it was for me) was in the strange and fantastic aspects of our city‰ЫЄs history, but it was overpowered by the popular interest in the paranormal. I‰ЫЄm looking forward to taking a closer look at the suggested reading.
I picked up this book because I was working on a short story recently and, obviously, wanted to read something that would make me want to kill myself (i.e. give up writing forever). It was excruciating to read this. So perfect! Too perfect! I look at her stories and look at my stories and then abruptly disappear into the gaping abyss between them.
Someone should start a tumblr just quoting those tight, mind-blowing turns of phrase that she does so well. Is fuckyeahlorriemoore.tumblr.com taken already?
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“... sometimes she seemed not to have a look of her own, or any look whatsoever, and it began to amaze her that her students and colleagues were able to recognize her at all. How did they know? When she walked into a room, how did she look so that they knew it was her? Like this? Did she look like this? And so she returned the mirror.”
I picked this up because Maggie Nelson mentions it in Bluets and this was sitting right on the coffee table within reach when I finished the other book. I started off enjoying it but then it began to falter and by the end of it I was well sick of the story and the writing both. Jean Rhys deals with similar themes (socially unacceptable sex, colonies in the tropics, madness, etc.) much better in Wide Sargasso Sea and Voyage in the Dark, and Maidenhead is a contemporary Canadian take on the topic. Set up against those two this book doesn‰ЫЄt stand a chance.
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“Her apartment was the huge top floor of a block overlooking the Seine. People went to dinner there in the winter. Or to lunch in the summer. The meals were ordered from the best caterers in Paris. Always passable, almost. But only just enough, skimpy. She was never seen anywhere else but at home, never out. Sometimes there was an expert on Mallarme there. And often one, two, or three literary people, they'd come once and never be seen again. I never found out where she got them from, where she met them, or why she invited them. I never heard anyone else refer to any one of them, and I never read or heard of their work. The meals didn't last very long. We talked a lot about the war .... Marie-Claude Carpenter used to listen a lot, ask a lot of questions, but didn't say much, often used to express surprise at how little she knew of what went on, then she'd laugh. Straightway after the meal she'd apologize for having to leave so soon, but she had things to do, she said. She never said what. When there were enough of us we'd stay on for an hour or two after she left. She used to say, Stay as long as you like. No one spoke about her when she wasn't there. I don't think anyone could have, because no one knew her. You always went home with the feeling of having experienced a sort of empty nightmare, of having spend a few hours as the guest of strangers with other guests who were strangers too, of having lived through a space of time without any consequences and without any cause, human or other. It was like having crossed a third frontier, having been on a train, having waited in doctors' waiting rooms, hotels, airports.”
I can‰ЫЄt believe I left off reading Wodehouse for so many years! How could I forget how amazing and hilarious his writing is? I always think of these books as funny, which they are, situationally, but Wooster‰ЫЄs voice is just the bomb – so energetic and creative and sometimes a little bonkers. The plot here was rather twisted and ridiculous but that is utterly beside the point.
More fun and games with Holmes and Watson! I‰ЫЄm getting bored with the story-inside-a-story thing but I‰ЫЄll keep my complaints to myself. Or is that a convention with Sherlock Holmes and I‰ЫЄll just have to put up with it? I‰ЫЄll put up with it. These books kind of fall under the heading of research for me now so it would take more than that to make me quit now.
Really great. I love the Hitchcock film and was not expecting to like this more, but I did. There was a lag in the middle while Guy‰ЫЄs internal torture just went on and on and I thought it would never end, but I got through it (while suffering from a cold to boot) and the end arrived and it was worth the wait.
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“But love and hate, he thought now, good and evil, lived side by side in the human heart, and not merely in differing proportions in one man and the next, but all good and all evil. One had merely to look for a little of either to find it all, one had merely to scratch the surface. All things had opposites close by, every decision a reason against it, every animal an animal that destroys it, the male the female, the positive the negative. The splitting of the atom was the only true destruction, the breaking of the universal law of oneness. Nothing could be without its opposite that was bound up with it. Could space exist in a building without objects that stopped it? Could energy exist without matter, or matter without energy? Matter and energy, the inert and the active, once considered opposites, were now known to be one.”
I hadn‰ЫЄt been particularly looking forward to this book‰ЫЄs release this September but picked it up on a whim in the bookstore because I‰ЫЄve enjoyed her previous novels and am (or have pretensions of being) interested in famous contemporary female novelists, etc. etc. I was also intrigued by the nonsensical vibe of the first chapter – I usually don‰ЫЄt like that kind of thing but from Zadie Smith I thought I could handle it. It was easier to read than I expected. I really liked how the friendship between Leah and Natalie slowly became clear over the course of the novel, and how closely we became caught up in their concerns, in growing into women and becoming different from those around them. The section on Felix seemed to pull too far away from the central Leah-Natalie story. But I felt like we spent too much time with Natalie by the end of the book and would‰ЫЄve liked to know more about Leah to sort of come full circle with their friendship. And that‰ЫЄs me critiquing Zadie Smith for how she structured her novel, ha ha! Slinking back to my mudhole.
Scott mentioned this book as one of the classics of his childhood, and I know I read it as a kid but had no memory whatsoever of the story. I read a lot of books as a kid (a particularly huge amount in I think Grade 4 when we had a reading competition and I read every book I could get my hands on) but apparently had poor retention (unless you want to talk about Laura Ingalls Wilder or the Mandie Shaw books). So I borrowed the ebook from the library and plowed through it. It was great! Rich New Yorkers in the 1970s. What kind of name is Ole Golly? Harriet‰ЫЄs difficult phase was heartbreaking. I am not interested in the sequels.
Fun! I developed quite a fondness for the narrator. Reminiscent of Mark Twain but with less bite. But I have to admit that I read this pretty lazily – I thought Montmorency was one of the three men in the boat until about halfway through the book when I finally did the math and found that by my count there were four men in the boat, not three. At first I thought it was a joke, but then I considered the book‰ЫЄs subtitle (‰ЫПTo say nothing of the dog‰Ыќ) and realized that Montmorency was, in fact, the dog. In my defense, on our first introduction to Montmorency there is dialogue attributed to him, and I started out reading the non-illustrated Penguin edition and only later switched to an illustrated ebook which had pictures of the dog. Also, the actual story of their trip down the river was not nearly as interesting as the sidebar stories and anecdotes and hypothetical situations, which were the best parts and had little or nothing to do with the dog.
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‰ЫПThrow the lumber over, man! Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need – a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.‰Ыќ
I was not expecting a cliffhanger, especially in the last book of a four-book deal! I‰ЫЄm interested in seeing how the show deals with the book (if at all) and what connections we can make between Heat‰ЫЄs mom‰ЫЄs murder and Beckett‰ЫЄs mom‰ЫЄs murder (if any). I have heard that the premiere will end on an ambiguous note re: Johanna Beckett‰ЫЄs case, which is unlikely to be a cliffhanger. Maybe there will be nothing but I really like thinking about how the books and the show correspond, especially since the books now seem to be getting into territory that reflects real life more closely than usual.
I found it really interesting that Heat‰ЫЄs mom‰ЫЄs case actually seems to be partly about Castle working through the possibilities of his own father being in the CIA. That‰ЫЄs one of the ways this book even more clearly shows what Dana Delany‰ЫЄs character observed way back in season 2 – that Nikki Heat is part Beckett, part Castle. I‰ЫЄve always thought of Nikki Heat as a fantasy version of Beckett, but it‰ЫЄs more complicated than that.
I wish there were some way for us to know when Castle is writing his books in the context of the show. Was he already writing Frozen Heat by the time Heat Rises was published? Especially given the Storm e-books he released over the summer? I read the earlier books without knowing the earlier seasons very well, so this was the first time I was able to connect elements of the story more clearly to elements of the cases in season four. So obviously he was writing throughout the season and afterward, but I want more details or at least hints! When did he include that part about Rook and Heat having the ‰ЫПI love you‰Ыќ moment pass them by? Was he still writing and making revisions over late spring and summer when he and Beckett were together? Did he write the first chapter with Heat helping Rook with his rehab while Beckett kept Castle away while she was recuperating over the summer? Maybe it‰ЫЄs just because I know first hand how real life can show up (clearly or obscurely) in one‰ЫЄs fiction, and how writing fiction can be a way of working things out in your own life. And the show has never taken much of a chance to explore that – maybe we‰ЫЄll get to see it now that Castle and Beckett are together, but maybe we won‰ЫЄt.
So promising to begin with but somehow it went off the rails. When we go back in time to see the evolution of Dick‰ЫЄs and Nicole‰ЫЄs relationship, we are supposed to get to know them better, but we never really do. Dick, especially, seems simply to fade out. I would have been more interested in seeing what Rosemary was up to, honestly. Knowing a little bit about Fitzgerald‰ЫЄs very personal investment in this story, I can‰ЫЄt help making assumptions and jumping to conclusions about how the story came about and why it has the flaws it does, but I don‰ЫЄt think I‰ЫЄll go there. In the end this was such a personal book from one of the great writers and you take the bad with the good.
I was expecting to enjoy this much more than I did, but maybe it was just the wrong time for me. It felt overwritten and boring, although I usually love the kind of thing they call ‰ЫПsumptuous prose‰Ыќ and the kind of stories where ‰ЫПnothing happens‰Ыќ. There were parts I really enjoyed, like the train at the bottom of the lake and all the flooding and the cabin in the woods that had sunk into its cellar and the final efforts at cleaning house. But it felt like it should have been a short story or a novella, not a novel.
Hard to believe but I‰ЫЄve never actually read Sherlock Holmes before. I know! Much easier and more fun than I was expecting. Holmes is pretty likable in this, but we‰ЫЄll see – The Sign of Four is up next and we may get to know him better. Reading the actual books makes me a little more interested in watching the TV series; we watched the first season and ‰ЫПThe Blind Banker‰Ыќ really turned me off (icky but typical British xenophobia; you‰ЫЄd think they‰ЫЄd be better these days but they aren‰ЫЄt).
Four stars because it was a fast, enjoyable read without being stupid, although Marie herself was pretty stupid but in a believable way. I usually give four stars to books I would re-read, and I will probably never re-read this one, but I would read another book like it. It didn‰ЫЄt have quite the substance I would normally give a four-star book, but it‰ЫЄs better than three stars.
The form of these prose poems is similar to the stuff I've been writing lately. I wanted to give it five stars just for that but then I realized how sort of impossible it is to read or understand or make much of and I know I can do better than that. I can hide in prose poems (or flash fiction, if you prefer; not sure where the line falls) but there's more to it than that.