"The Little Paris Bookshop" by Nina George

Well, that was charming, if ultimately kind of hollow.

I picked this book up at an airport bookstore on my way home from visiting my parents earlier this month.  I'd seen it on Instagram a few times, and it sounded really enjoyable.  I generally like books about people who like books.  No surprise there, right?

And I did like this book pretty well, overall.  It's all about Jean, a 50-yr-old man who learns the real fate of the woman he loved and lost 20 years earlier, and works through his grief by travelling to her home in the French countryside.  He owns and runs a bookshop on a barge in Paris, and he just takes off on his floating bookstore one day.  His neighbor Max, a bestselling author who's trying to escape his rabid new fans, comes along for the ride.

They travel by river; they travel by car.  They meet lots of interesting people, and they do a lot of soul-searching.  And they both find the peace they're looking for.  Also, they talk a lot about books and how they affect us.  All of that, I liked.  Jean was very likeable, and Max grew on me.  By the end, Max may have been my favorite.

What I didn't like was the love story that Jean was trying to come to terms with and put behind him.  Twenty years earlier, he had been in love with a woman named Manon.  She was married, but her husband never came to Paris with her on her visits, and she spent those visits in Jean's bed.  They carried on an adulterous affair for five years, and this is all supposed to be somehow just fine and understandable.  Why?  Because Manon simply could never be satisfied with sharing her life with only one man -- she was too large a spirit, or too varied a person, or something.

Toward the end of the book, I realized suddenly that Manon was essentially a Manic Pixie Dream Girl.  She was a plot device, only here to give Jean a reason to brood and mourn and search his soul for meaning or whatever.  She was too much to be real.  And the weird thing is, I tend to be fond of Manic Pixie Dream Girls.  They usually don't bug me.  I really love quirky, oddball characters, male or female.  But Manon... bugged me.  And a lot of that is because she insisted on adultery being her right, and she wrecked Jean's life and her husband's life in a lot of ways because she refused to see the meaning or power of contentment.  Yet she's adulated and revered by the author, through the characters, and that left a really bad taste in my mouth.

So, in the end, I enjoyed this book.  I cried at the end, in a good way.  But it's not one I will reread or even recommend.  I did really appreciate that it showed that love and romance are not only for hot people in their twenties, and that love and forgiveness are very closely interconnected.  But, ultimately, I was not charmed the way I would like to have been.

Particularly Good Bits:

Memories are like wolves.  You can't lock them away and hope they leave you alone (p. 5).

"Do you think only people in books do crazy things?" (p. 93).

Nobody would ever wise up if they hadn't at some stage been young and stupid (p. 129).

Reading -- an an endless journey; a long, indeed never-ending journey that made one more temperate as well as more loving and kind.  Max had set out on that journey.  With each book he would absorb more of the world, things and people (p. 142).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It: R.  It has a lot of sex scenes, some of them semi-graphic and some of them not.  They creep up on you and ambush you with little warning, getting woven into the story in a way that makes them very hard to see coming.  I did a lot of, "Oh!  Oh my.  Skim skim skim skim skim... I think it's safe now?" kinds of reading, which was annoying.

This was my 40th book read off my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2021.

"The Screwtape Letters" by C. S. Lewis

I've wanted to read this book since the year 2000.  One of my roommates my sophomore year of college read it for a class and said she laughed all the way through it, and it was just so witty and brilliant, and she insisted I would love it.

And it's taken me seventeen years to finally read it.  Partly because I didn't have a copy for a long time, and kept forgetting to get it from the library, and partly because I was pretty worried it was not going to live up to the hype she bestowed on it.  I even bought a copy last year, and then just... didn't read it.

Sometimes, I'm so lame.

But now, I've read it!  And wowwowwow.  Witty?  Yes.  Brilliant?  Yes.  Funny?  Not so much.

I mean, I can see how it could be funny, but it wasn't funny to me.

In fact, it was downright terrifying in spots.

Why?  Because I saw so much of myself in this book.  Complacent, distracted, and not very invested in my faith?  Yeah, that is me just FAR too often.  This was a very convicting book for me, and made me take a long look at how habitual my faith can become.  Which is great, because it made me examine my prayer life, my Bible-reading habits, and my investment in my vocations and see so many places where I am not doing what I should to thank and praise, serve and obey my Savior.

Which is not to say that it didn't make me laugh, because it did make me laugh a couple of times.  But it made me think much more than laugh, which I was not expecting, but which I appreciate so much.

In other words... this was way better than I had hoped.

If you've never read it, the whole book is letters from a demon named Screwtape to his nephew, a demon named Wormwood who is trying to prevent a human from remaining a Christian, but instead to win his soul for Satan.  Fascinating concept that's executed so masterfully.

Particularly Good Bits:

It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out (p. 16).

The duty of planning the morrow's work is today's duty; though its material is borrowed from the future, the duty, like all duties, is in the Present (p. 77).

If we neglect our duty, men will be not only contented but transported by the mixed novelty and familiarity of snowdrops this January, sunrise this morning, plum pudding this Christmas (p. 136).

A woman means by Unselfishness chiefly taking trouble for others; a man means not giving trouble to others (p. 142).

It is not fatigue simply as such that produces... anger, but unexpected demands on a man already tired (p. 166).

(I underlined a LOT more than these, but they give you a taste, anyway.  Fantastic book!)

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG-13 for non-explicit discussions of human sexuality.

This is my 12th book read and reviewed for my second stint at The Classics Club, and my 11th for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2017.

Top Ten Tuesday: Hidden Gems

This week's prompt from The Broke and the Bookish is "Top Ten Underrated/Hidden Gem Books We've Read In The Past Year Or So."  I've decided to follow their lead and narrow this down by only including books I've read in the past year that have fewer than 500 ratings on Goodreads.  

I'm listing them alphabetically by title, and all but one of the titles is linked to my review of that book, if you want to know more about them.  And I've included my movie-style rating in parentheses for those who are interested.

Ain't We Got Fun by Emily Chapman and Emily Ann Putzke -- a fun, light-hearted collection of letters between two sisters during the Great Depression.  (G)

Greenwillow by B. J. Chute -- a quiet, gentle story of people living in the idyllic English countryside about a hundred years ago.  (PG-13)

I, Claudia by Charity Bishop -- a fictionalized account of how Pontious Pilate and his wife Claudia married, went to Jerusalem, and were involved in Jesus Christ's trial and death.  (PG-13)

Letters on an Elk Hunt by a Woman Homesteader by Eleanor Pruitt Stewart -- an enthralling collection of real-life letters from an intrepid woman in the last days of the Old West.  (PG)

And Now Tomorrow by Rachel Field -- a rich, engrossing story about a deaf woman and the doctor who brings her hope of hearing once again.  (PG)

Once by Elisabeth Grace Foley, Rachel Heffington, J. Grace Pennington, Emily Ann Putzke, Suzannah Rowntree, and Hayden Wand -- six fairy tale retellings with settings ranging from the Old West to steampunk to WWII to fairy tale kingdoms.  (PG-13)

A Portrait of Emily Price by Katherine Reay -- a beautiful look at how love can both repair and damage people.  (PG-13)

Sixguns and Society:  A Structural Study of the Western by Will Wright -- an in-depth look at how western films changed as America's society changed during the 20th century.  (PG-13)

Song of the Ëan by Emily Nordberg -- a high-fantasy story about a pampered young noble who becomes mixed up with guerrilla fighters and sets about righting some grievous wrongs.  I'm not done reading this yet, but so far I'd rate it PG.

The World of Raymond Chandler (In His Own Words) edited by Barry Day -- Chandler is my favorite author, and this collection of his letters gave me lots of insight into his life and writing.  (PG-13)

That's all for this week, friends!  Have you read any of these?  Did you participate in TTT this week too?  Do you have some "hidden gems" you'd like to recommend to me?  Please share!

"Ethan Frome" by Edith Wharton

I have a head cold.  Not a terrible one, but still, enough to make me want to sit and rest a lot these last couple of days.  Cowboy had today off from work, and he built us a lovely fire this afternoon.  I made everyone hot chocolate (mine in one of my favorite mugs from The Ring and the Lion -- it says "Forth now, and fear no darkness" in Elvish) and settled down with a book I've been meaning to read for over a year:  Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton.  

Way back when I started the Women's Classic Literature Event last December, I said that Edith Wharton was the author I was most excited to read for the event.  Well, I've finally managed to read a book by her, my very last for the event.  

I did not love this book.  It's not a book one loves, I think.  It's a book one reads and ponders and learns from, a hard look at hard people living a hard life.  And yet, not a bitter book, somehow.  Tragic, sad, and poignant, but not bitter, which is astonishing to me.

Ethan Frome ekes out a bare living for himself and his ailing wife from their Massachusetts farm and mill.  He married his wife Zenobia out of duty and gratitude for the way she nursed his mother before she died.  Zenobia then turned into an invalid herself, the kind that delights in her many ailments and the importance it gives her.  The sort of character I want to slap.  Ethan trudges on through life until his wife's poor relation, Mattie, comes to stay and help.  Ethan comes to care for Mattie, and she for him, but they both come to realize they can never be together.  They make a desperate bid for freedom, tragedy strikes, and their lives are ruined forever.  All this told with a kind of emotionless detachment that never judges them or their behavior, but simply presents it as a story to experience and perhaps learn from.

While I didn't enjoy this book so much as find it interesting, I do want to read more of Wharton's novels!  I could probably say more intelligent things about it if I wasn't doped up on Advil Cold & Sinus, but I want to write about this while it's fresh in my head, so I'll just leave it at that.

Particularly Good Bits:

He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing unfriendly in his silence (p. 14).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  G.  There's no cussing, no violence, no adult situations.  A bit of kissing between unmarried people, but nothing lurid.

This has been my twentieth book read and reviewed for the Women's Classic Literature Event, and my fifty-second for the Classics Club.

"And Now Tomorrow" by Rachel Field

I can't believe I hadn't read this before now.

I mean, I spent like 20 years trying to find the 1944 movie version after seeing part of it on TV when I was a teen.  I knew it was an adaptation of a book.  But I never tried to find the book until after they'd released the movie to DVD and I'd finally seen the whole thing.  Silly me.  All the years I've spent without this enriching experience!

Because wow, did I love this book.  I also love the movie, but the book is even better.  It's broader, and we get to hear the protag's thoughts and insights and feelings in such deep, compelling ways, which a movie can never match.  (But the movie has Alan Ladd.  No book can quite match that, either.  However, he so precisely matched the book character that I had a very easy time imagining him while reading, which was most pleasant...) 

And the writing!  A slow, simmering feast, like a beef roast you've cooked for hours until it is tender and succulent, each bite filled with flavor and nutrition until it bursts.  You'll see below how many passages struck me as so remarkable, I want to write them up and remember them.

And the love story!  Understated, buried beneath layer after layer of dialog and action, but flaring out bright and sure by the end.  I'm going to have to read this again just to study how Field managed to write it that way.  There's no overt romance, just this slow realization of understanding, mutual compassion, and eventually attraction.  Fascinating stuff.

I suppose I should tell you a little bit about the storyline itself at some point, shouldn't I?  Since this isn't exactly a widely known book anymore.  Wealthy Emily Blair grew up used to life unrolling smoothly before her.  Life in Blairstown revolved around the mill her family owned and managed.  Mill workers lived on one side of the river, the more well-to-do folks lived on the other, and the Blairs ruled everyone benevolently.

Then, Emily contracted meningitis when in her early 20s, and lost her hearing as a result.  At the insistence of her family and her fiance, she traveled the country searching for a cure, but to no avail.  So she returned home determined to get married and make the best of things.  She had learned to read lips very well, and could make her way in the world with some semblance of normalcy.

But she returned to find Blairstown a changed world.  The Great Depression was just hitting the country, and the millworkers wanted to organize a union, were resisting pay cuts, and everything was generally tense and unpleasant.  Also, Emily's fiance Jeff kept putting off the wedding, saying they needed to wait until things at the mill settled down.

In the midst of all this chaos and unwelcome change, a young doctor named Merek Vance entered Emily's life.  He had formerly found great success in restoring hearing loss through a serum he had created, and he wanted to try it on Emily.  She refused.  Then she agreed.  And the once-predictable course of her life was changed forever.

I did something with this book that I truly never do.  I flipped to the end and read it before I got through the first chapter.  I basically never read the ending of a book first.  Never.  I consider it cheating.  However, the beginning chapter or two made it sound as if Emily was NOT going to end up marrying the person she ends up with in the movie, and if that had been so in the book, I knew I would have thrown it across the room in disgust (even though my copy is 50 years old) and been annoyed with the world for days. 

That doesn't mean the movie didn't make any changes from the book.  They trimmed all the unionizing of the mill right out, along with an entire important character, which makes sense since the movie was made during WWII and the country was doing its best to forget the Great Depression altogether.  Also, all my favorite lines from the movie are not in the book, so I can now lay them squarely to the credit of my beloved Raymond Chandler, who co-write the screenplay.  But a lot of the stuff with the mill workers reminded me or Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, only in the 20th century, which made it especially interesting to me.

I'm counting this for the Classics Club because it fits my criteria of being more than 50 years old, well-known, and being written by a well-known author who influenced other writers and/or society.  And Now Tomorrow was published in 1942, the year that Field died, so it's certainly old enough.  Not only was it a best-seller at the time, but of course, Rachel Field had previously won the Newbery Award for Hitty, Her First Hundred Years, and she posthumously received the Caldecott Medal for Prayer for a Child.

Particularly Good Bits:

There is a fascination in places that hold our past in safe keeping.  We are drawn to them, often against our will.  For the past is a shadow grown greater than its substance, and shadows have power to mock and betray us to the end of our days (p. 1).

In the life of each of us, I told myself, there comes a time when we must pause to look back and see by what straight or twisting ways we have arrived at the place where we find ourselves.  Instinct is not enough, and even hope is not enough.  We must have eyes to see where we missed this turn or that, and where we struggled through dark thickets that threatened to confound us (p. 4-5).

...that was the trouble with small towns, one was too much a part of them ever to escape from one's self (p. 89).

"Always on the go, you young people," she reproved across the silver coffee service.  "No stability or sense about you.  It's as if you were all too busy tracking down happiness ever to meet up with it" (p. 222).

No hardy perennial has the enduring quality of hope.  Cut it to the rots, stamp it underfoot, let frost and fire work their will, and still some valiant shoot will push, to grow again on such scanty fare as it can find (p. 241).

In the adult world to which I suddenly realized we all belonged, I supposed a triangle would be substituted for the outline of a heart.  Well, after all, what was a triangle but a heart with the grace taken out of it? (p. 255)

Memories will withdraw into their right perspective if we let them have their way (p. 350).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG for some mild curse words.

This is my 39th book read and reviewed for the Classics Club, and my 7th for the Women's Classic Literature Event. 

"Peace Like a River" by Leif Enger

I'm not entirely sure how to talk about this book.  I finished reading it almost two whole weeks ago, and every time I thought, "Oh, I have time to write a book review," I'd then think, "But what can I say about Peace Like a River?"

So this is me doing my best.

Cowboy's youngest sister sent me this book when I was recovering from my surgery back in September.  I started reading it, got through two chapters, and decided I did not want to read more.  The narrator kept warning that the story was not going to be a happy one, that seriously bad things were going to happen, and that his ordinary, happy childhood was going to be irrevocably changed by the events he was about to relate.  And I didn't really want to deal with any of that.  So I put it away.

But then I thought that surely my sister-in-law wouldn't have sent me a depressing book to cheer me up while I recuperated.  So I gave it another chance.  And in chapter three, the narrator's younger sister began writing an epic western poem.  And I identified so strongly with her love of the romanticized wild west that I read the whole book.  And I'm so glad that I did.  Because this book is lyrical and beautiful and haunting.  Yes, it's got sadness.  Yes, it's got pain.  But it also has love and warmth and joy and miracles.

Actual miracles.  Thanks to them, I'd almost characterize this as speculative fiction, or maybe even magical realism.  The narrator's father reads his Bible and prays and talks about God a lot, but there's little mention of Jesus, if any, so I wouldn't classify this as Christian fiction.

A quick summary of the plot might be in order.  Except I don't want to spoil things.  Suffice it to say that when the narrator's older brother's girlfriend is assaulted at school, violent act piles on violent act, culminating in bloodshed, an epic journey, and a lot of self-discovery and growing up for all involved.

Did I love this book?  I think so.  It's very different from the books I read most of the time, but in a good way.  

Particularly Good Bits:

Let me say something about that word:  miracle.  For too long it's been used to characterize things or events that, though pleasant, are entirely normal.  Peeping chicks at Easter time, spring generally, a clear sunrise after an overcast week -- a miracle, people say, as if they've been educated from greeting cards.  I'm sorry, but nope.  Such things are worth our notice every day of the week, but to call them miracles evaporates the strength of the word (p. 3).

I remember it as October days are always remembered, cloudless, maple-flavored, the air gold and so clean it quivers (p. 40).

Cole Younger?  Butch Cassidy?  John Wesley Hardin?  Maybe these fellows were just flush with Christmas spirit, but I'd never heard about it.  I mentioned these doubts to my sister (p. 118).

"What is spookism, anyhow?" I complained.  The word conjured a scary version of faith in which a person believed mostly in malicious unseen fellows who might creep up behind you and breathe on your neck hairs (p. 204).

When I thought about it, a dead fellow doing sit-ups in your yard might make you faint just as handily as one strolling (p. 222).

The infirm wait always, and know it (p. 290).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG-13 for violence and suspense.  I can't remember any bad language, but there may have been some mild curse words.

"Tortilla Flat" by John Steinbeck

Shall I make a shocking confession?  Until this week, I had only read one book by John Steinbeck.  I read Of Mice and Men in high school.  I disliked it enough that I haven't read any other Steinbeck since.  But I decided that after seventeen years, maybe I should give the guy a break.  So I picked this up at the library.  

I didn't actively dislike it, so that's a step up for Steinbeck.  On the other hand, I didn't particularly like it either.  Mostly because I didn't care for the characters, but partly because the blurb on the back cover made it sound a lot awesomer than it was.

Tortilla Flat is a sort of shanty slum place on the outskirts of Monterey inhabitied by Spanish-Mexican-Americans.  After WWI, a man named Danny inherits two houses there.  He invites some friends to live with him, and they spend the book drinking a lot of wine, gossiping, and doing as little work as possible.  They do invite a mentally handicapped man to live with them, which is nice since he was living in an abandoned chicken coop before, but then they proceed to rely on him to go begging scraps from restaurant kitchens to feed all of them.  He was my favorite character, called simply The Pirate even though he wasn't a pirate, and the way they exploited him was pretty shameless and made me dislike the rest of the characters enough that I won't be reading this again.

So.  Yes, Steinbeck can write, but his characters are unpleasant and so is what happens to them.  Still not a fan.

Particularly Good Bits:

Fruit trees were there, bony and black with age, and gnarled and broken with neglect (p. 13).

The afternoon came down as imperceptibly as age comes to a happy man (p. 39).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  R for all the love-making that gets casually mentioned, and all the drinking.  Probably would just get a PG-13 from the MPAA, though.

This is my 12th book read and reviewed for The Classics Club and my 11th for the I Love Library Books challenge.

"Shades of Grey" by Jasper Fforde

Some of you, having read the book title at the head of this post, may have been horribly aghast that someone whose blog you read would ever read That Book.  But then you looked at the author name, and then you saw the book cover image, and by now you've realized that I did not read That Book.  I read this book, an off-beat, speculative fiction kind of novel that defies easy description.

Shades of Grey takes place several centuries in the future, in a strange world few but Fforde could have imagined.  There are flocks of killer swans.  Everyone is terrified of the dark, because very few people can see in it.  Making new spoons is illegal.  And all of society is ordered according to a hierarchy of how much of what color you can see.  People can only see one color, or no color at all, and how much color you can see determines how important you are.

Some kind of cataclysmic event (referred to as The Something That Happened, and never explained in the book) is responsible for changing an advanced version of our world into this strange new one.  Weirdness and mysteries abound, and Eddie Russett, a young Red too curious for his own good, slowly figures some of them out.  He also falls in love with a violent Grey named Jane and gets eaten by a tree. 

By this point, you already know whether or not you'd like this book -- those last two paragraphs have made you either intrigued or annoyed.  So I'm not gong to make any recommendations here.  This was not my favorite Jasper Fforde book, but it wasn't my least-favorite either.  Fforde is clearly making a statement about the arbitrary hierarchies of today's world and the way we treat nonconformists, and probably several other points that I was too dizzied by his wackiness to catch.  In the end, I felt like it was too silly to be a serious novel, and too serious to be a silly novel.  Still, it was a fun read.

Particularly Good Bits:

I didn't set out to discover a truth.  I was actually sent to the Outer Fringes to conduct a chair census and learn some humility.  But the truth inevitably found me, as important truths often do, like a lost thought in need of a mind (p. 1).

I returned home, made sure Jane wasn't in the house, carefully filed the telegram in my valise and then hid under the bed for half an hour before making my way down to the sports fields (p. 254).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG-13 for adult dialog and situations (sex is always called "you know," but you know what "you know" stands for).

This is my ninth book read and reviewed for the I Love Library Books challenge.

"The Sun Also Rises" by Ernest Hemingway

If I needed to sum up this story and these characters in one word, it would be 'desire.'  If I were permitted two words, I would add 'disappointment.'

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  I meant to say first that this is the first Hemingway novel I ever read.  I'd read a short story or two in high school, and during my freshman year at college, my friends and I watched City of Angels (1998) a lot.  Hemingway's memoir A Moveable Feast figures prominently in the movie, and I decided to read it once school was done.  But when I got home that summer, I discovered my library didn't have it.  They did have this, and the quote from Ecclesiastes inside intrigued me, so I checked it out.  I can still remember that copy, old and rebound in that funny, rough hardcover stuff libraries used to use.  Bright orange.  I felt so intellectual, reading Ernest Hemingway at nineteen.  Reading and enjoying him.

I didn't quite get everything that was going on, that first time through.  Or rather, I didn't quite get that the protagonist, Jake Barnes, had been emasculated by a war wound.  I knew he'd been wounded, I knew he was angry and disappointed about things, but Hemingway implies everything about the wound, in his inimitable way, and I didn't figure it out.  Not that it mattered, because I was perpetually drunk on his prose.  Hemingway was unlike any writer I'd encountered up to that point -- strong, evasive, beautiful, ugly, and with such a feeling of truth running under everything.

Okay, back to 'desire' and 'disappointment.'  From here on, there are spoilers. 

As I said, Jake Barnes was wounded in WWI in such a way that he's no longer able to have sex.  He's a foreign correspondent for some American newspaper, living in Paris in the expatriate community.  And he's in love with Lady Brett Ashley, a divorcee with a fondness for alcohol and sex.  She's almost in love with him too, but because he can't fulfill her desires, she knows she'd never truly be happy with him.  So she is engaged to a guy named Mike, but goes off on a trip with another guy named Cohn, and then dumps him, and later takes up with a bullfighter and has a fling with him instead.  And Jake tries not to be miserable during all that.

Like I said, it's all about desires and disappointment.  Jake and Brett desire each other, but can't do anything about it.  Mike and Cohn and the bullfighter desire Brett, but are all disappointed when she leaves them for someone else.  Brett desires them too, but they all disappoint her one way or another.  In the end, no one really gets what they want.  Jake at least seems to understand that what he wishes could have been between him and Brett might not have been as wonderful as they can always imagine it would have been.

And if that sounds sordid and depressing, you're not wrong.  Or right.  It's not completely sordid in that Hemingway never actually uses the word 'sex' or describes anything of that nature, other than that sometimes characters kiss each other.  Everything else is implied -- even the characters talk around it.  And it's not completely depressing because by the end, I feel like Jake at least has come to accept what can and can't be and can move forward with his life a bit.

My one quibble with Hemingway's writing is that he often does these long conversations with not enough dialog tags, so I have to go back and reread parts to figure out who's saying what.  But I've become resigned to that issue, as his writing delights me otherwise.  

Particularly Good Bits:

"I can't stand it to think my life is going so fast and I'm not really living it" (p. 18).

"You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another" (p. 19).

It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing (p. 42).

He was the archivist, and all the archives of the town were in his office.  That has nothing to do with the story (p. 102).

"Good.  Coffee is good for you.  It's the caffeine in it.  Caffeine, we are here" (p. 120).

The things that happened could only have happened during a fiesta.  Everything became quite unreal finally and it seemed as though nothing could have any consequences.  It seemed out of place to think of consequences during the fiesta (p. 158).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG-13 for language, alcohol use, oblique references to sex, and violence.

EDIT:  I forgot to mention there are some racist comments made about Jews, and the "n" word gets used in a matter-of-fact way, not as a slur.  Remember, this was written almost 90 years ago, when things were a lot different.

This is my eighth book read and reviewed for the Classics Club, and my fifth for the I Love Library Books challenge.

"A Slight Trick of the Mind" by Mitch Cullin

This is not a happy book.  I didn't like it very well.  I found it quite depressing, to be honest.  I'm not saying it's a bad book, because it's not.  It's perfectly readable, and other people might really like it.  There's a movie version in the works, starring Ian McKellen, which is how I first heard of this and why I read it.

Anyway, A Slight Trick of the Mind is about an aging Sherlock Holmes who is slowly losing his memory.  He's in his nineties and succumbing to the ravages of age, just like anyone else.  He's living in Sussex, tending his bees, mentoring his housekeeper's son, and trying to finish writing up an account of a case he worked on back in London decades ago.  He also spends time reminiscing about his recent trip to Japan, and the author weaves those three sections of his life together to form a cohesive whole by the end.

But, like I said, I didn't like this book.  Seeing a character I have loved for twenty years as a frail, failing old man was very hard for me, and I will not read this book again.  

First Line:

Upon arriving from his travels abroad, he entered his stone-built farmhouse on a summer's afternoon, leaving the luggage by the front door for his housekeeper to manage (p. 3).

Particularly Good Bits:

His ears registered the low, concentrated murmur of the hive -- the sound of which, in that moment, refused to summon his isolated, content years cultivating the beeyard, but, rather, conveyed the undeniable and deepening loneliness of his existence (p. 186).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG for themes of death and loss.

"Beautiful Ruins" by Jess Walter

This is one of those books that make me want to give up writing in despair of ever creating anything that comes close to this kind of mastery.  I'm not saying this is a great book, mind you.  But it's written very, very well, and I admire that.

Jess Walter intertwines the lives of four protagonists and several lesser characters, allowing their connected stories to unfold slowly and not particularly linearly.  Pieces of the puzzle fall into their places at different moments, so that by the end of the book, you have the whole picture.  But in the middle of the book, that picture is very fragmented, and I spent quite a bit of time wondering how it would all mesh.  

Here is the basic story:  In the early 1960s, while Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor are filming Cleopatra in Italy, a young actress called Dee Moray leaves the production and ends up at a very small hotel in a very small Italian town.  The hotel's owner, Pasquale, falls a little bit in love with Dee Moray.  And then a whole bunch of stuff happens.  The rest of the story takes place in the present, revolving around Dee's son Pat and the way he tries to piece his fractured life back together.  There's also a WWII veteran trying to write a book, a Hollywood producer's assistant longing to make just one good movie, an aspiring screenwriter searching for meaning in his life, and Richard Burton himself playing a small but significant part.

As you can see, it's a little hard to explain.  The story bounces back and forth from the 1960s to the present, and to points in between too.  But it all makes sense in the end, and even ends pretty happily.  I wasn't very hopeful for a happy ending through most of the book, so I was pleasantly surprised.  This is one of those books where all the characters have problems and issues and hang-ups and are very troubled in their own way.  None of them are very happy through most of the book, and I have to admit the book as a whole is a little too depressing for me to want to read it again.


Particularly Good Bits:

He had never really mastered English, but he'd studied enough to have a healthy fear of its random severity, the senseless brutality of its conjugations; it was unpredictable, like a cross-bred dog (p. 9).

Weren't movies his generation's faith anyway -- its true religion?  Wasn't the hteater our temple, the one place we enter separately but emerge from two hours later together, with the same experience, same guided emotions, same moral? (p. 21).

It was curious what trying to speak English had done lately to his mind; it reminded him of studying poetry in college, words gaining and losing their meaning, overlapping with images, the curious echo of ideas behind the words people used (p. 112).

What if the only way to save the ones you love... is to leave them behind? (p. 126).

People can handle an unjust world; it's when the world becomes arbitrary and inexplicable that order breaks down (p. 148).

This is what happens when you live in dreams, he thought:  you dream this and you dream that and you sleep right through your life (p. 218).

We want what we want.  At home, she works herself into a frenzy worrying about what she isn't -- and perhaps loses track of just where she is (p. 301).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  R for sexual situations, drug use, adult dialog, and language.

"The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I read this once before, probably about ten years ago, when I'd been out of college a couple of years and was catching up on all the things I felt I should have read, but hadn't had time for before.  I didn't care for it.  At all.  But I think that's because I'd read that Fitzgerald and Hemingway were friends, and so for some weird reason, I thought it would be kind of like Hemingway's books.

Silly me.

If Hemingway's writing is a pair of worn leather work gloves, then Fitzgerald's is a silk evening dress with a long train.  Hemingway's writing is solid, grounded in reality, sometimes brutal in its honesty.  Fitzgerald's is ethereal, concerned with how things are and aren't and should be, and full of wistful longing.

This time around, I knew more of what to expect.  This time around, I really dug The Great Gatsby.

Okay, anyway, The Great Gatsby is about a guy named Nick Carraway who moves into a cheap little house next to a mansion owned by a mysterious guy named Jay Gatsby.  This is in the Roaring Twenties, near NYC, and rumor has it that Gatsby is a bootlegger.  Or a murderer.  Or a spy.  No one knows for sure.  He throws fabulous parties.  He stares across the water at a green light glowing on the end of a pier by the opposite shore.  He befriends Nick, sort of.  He pines for a girl he loved years and years earlier, and thinks that somehow he and she can still be in love and have a life together.  Basically, Gatsby is living his entire life inside a self-created dream, getting other people to dream it with him whenever he can.

Fitzgerald turns out delicate phrases that make me catch my breath.  I had to read parts of this very, very slowly, particularly the first few chapters, sometimes pausing multiple times per page to savor a line or phrase.  I'll list lots of them here, as they're so exquisite I must share them.

Yes, I'm looking forward to Baz Luhrmann's movie adaptation, which opens next month.  I'll review it over on my Soliloquy once I see it.  I just saw the trailer in the theater again this morning, and it looks sleek and glittering, like it should.


If this was a movie, I would rate it:  PG for alcohol use and innuendo.


Particularly Good Bits:  

Instead of being the warm center of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe -- so I decided to go East and learn the bond business.

I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others -- poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner -- young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

When he realized what I was talking about, that there were twinkle-bells of sunshine in the room, he smiled like a weather man, like an ecstatic patron of recurrent light, and repeated the news to Daisy.  "What do you think of that?  It's stopped raining."

No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

I was thirty.  Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

"The Cove" by Ron Rash

Isn’t it interesting what will get someone to read a book? We all have things that automatically interest us in a book. One of mine is the state of North Carolina. My parents moved there when I was 12, to the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I did my real growing up there, and it still feels like home to me. When I read the description of Ron Rash’s The Cove, I was drawn to it by the fact that it is set in those mountains.

The Cove begins with a man in the 1950s walking into a shadowy, creepy cove, which in this book is a dark valley, not a place where you keep boats. He stops at an abandoned homestead to draw a bucket of water from the well and finds something in that well that tells readers that this will not be a happy book, that it will not end well, that something very bad indeed has happened here.

Then the book flashes back to that same cove, but in early 1919, when the cove is the home of a sister and brother, Laurel and Hank. Laurel has a large, purple birthmark on her shoulder that has led the superstitious mountain folk to believe she is either cursed or a witch. As a result, most people shun her, and she is very lonely. Hank lost an arm in the early part of WWI, and is having a hard time patching up their farm as a result. A stranger arrives in the cove, a speechless man bearing a flute, sixty dollars, and a note explaining that his name is Walter. Hank hires him to help fix up the farm, Laurel falls in love with him, but an ominous shadow looms over all the happiness springing up in the cove. As I read this, I always had that opening scene in the back of my mind, the well’s contents and what they could mean.

I can’t say much more, as I’d be spoiling the story for anyone who would like to read it. If you like beautiful writing and learning about the impact our decisions have on the lives of others, The Cove could delight you. However, the characters do engage in activities that some readers may not appreciate. And it is dark and sometimes bleak, I will warn you of that, though it deals with joy and happiness as well. I found it a good book for the end of winter, when I am weary of grey skies and bare trees, but know spring will brighten the world again soon.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate it:  PG-13 for non-explicit sexual situations and alcohol use.  Also contains a few swear words.

(Originally published on Novel Book Ratings on March 7, 2013.)

"Care of Wooden Floors" by Will Wiles

I did not like this book, even though it made me laugh.  And I almost always like books that make me laugh, so this is something of a rarity.

I liked it at first, for its quirky descriptions and for the protagonist's tendency to get himself into ever-escalating scrapes, the sort that happen to me.  You know, set the cup too close to the edge, it falls and splashes something sticky all over the clean floor, and then someone (for me, a child, for him, a cat) walks in it and tracks the stickiness everywhere.  Mishaps, really.  My life is flooded with them.

The protagonist, who remains nameless, flies to an unnamed Eastern European country to house-sit his friend Oskar's apartment and cats for a couple weeks.  Oskar is a fastidious composer whose apartment contains magnificent wooden floors.  He leaves little notes all over the apartment to help his friend care for the floors, the cats, the pristine piano, and so on.

Things do not go well.  At all.

Now, I'm going to spoil the ending with my criticism here, so if you think you want to read this book and don't want to know how it ends, close this and come back when you're done.

You've been duly warned.

Okay, so why didn't I like this book?  It's not because of the fair amount of cursing or the scene where the protagonist unwittingly winds up at a low-class strip joint.  It's not because a cat and a person die.  (I did warn you about the spoilage.)  It's because at the very end, the protagonist is handed a get-out-of-jail-free card.  He faces zero consequences for his actions, his mishaps, his cover-up of another person's death.  He just gets to hop on a plane back to England, supposedly having learned to value his own messy life after trying to inhabit a spotless one.

That being said, the writing was superb, and I did stay riveted to every last squirm-inducing detail of the hapless protagonist's travails.

Particularly Good Bits:

Furniture is like that.  Used and enjoyed as intended, it absorbs that experience and exudes it back into the atmosphere, but if simply bought for effect and left to languish in a corner, it vibrates with melancholy. 

The mixing of bookshelves in a relationship is a gesture of vast, almost foolhardy, mutual trust, and Oskar wasn't able to live on the same continent as his wife, let alone jumble up the contents of his library with hers.

How was the concert?  I have been asked this before by people, on the rare occasions that I have attended concerts, and I have never known what to say.  Normally, I would just reply: 'Oh, very good.'  By this I mean:  'There were no obvious mistakes.  No notes were missed in such a clunkingly apparent fashion that I was able to detect the error.  No one forgot how to play their instrument halfway through.  No one ran amok in the audience.  Nothing caught fire.  Music played and I was so bored that my hair was bored.'

If This was a Movie it Would be Rated: R for language and sexual situations.

"This Side of Paradise" by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Oh bother.  I'm afraid I didn't like this book very well at all.  Much of the writing was quite brilliant, of course, but it depressed me a great deal.  Not because it's sad, because it's not sad.  I mean, it's not sad like Old Yeller or Doctor Zhivago.  It's just that the character spends his young adulthood wandering around, trying to figure out who he is and what life is all about.  It's pretty well a perfect picture of the whole Lost Generation, which is what it was intended to be, but it got into my head and started making me wonder if I was doing anything with my own life.  And I know that I am doing worthwhile things, such as raising three children, being a loving wife, and even writing something to amuse other people now and then.  But sometimes I feel like I'm just coasting along, and this book really intensified that feeling.  So I'm glad I'm finished with it, and I've picked up a nice, cheerful murder mystery to wash the ennui out.

Particularly Good Bits:

The invitation to Miss Myra St. Claire's bobbing party spent the morning in his coat pocket, where it had an intense physical affair with a dusty piece of peanut brittle.

The great tapestries of trees had darkened to ghosts back at the last edge of twilight.

(Originally posted on Hamlette's Soliloquy on Aug. 9, 2012.)

Two Books: A Comparison

I recently read Death Qualified by Kate Wilhelm and Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd. They're rather different books, but they both have a mystery at the heart of them, yet aren't exactly mysteries. And my expectations of -- and reactions to -- these two books was quite different. So I thought I'd compare them here.

+++WARNING!+++ There's spoilage ahead, so if you've been meaning to read either of these and don't want to be spoiled, don't read this post!

Death Qualified is about Barbara Holloway, a former defense lawyer who gets sucked into defending a woman who's up on charges of murdering her absentee husband. It's got some sci-fi/fantasy elements to it -- no aliens or unicorns, just an alternate way of interacting with the universe that I will not attempt to explain here. But by and large, it works like a mystery/courtroom drama, trying to establish the client's innocence, figure out who did kill the husband, etc.

Ordinary Thunderstorms also involves a murder. Adam Kincaid, an American scientist in London to apply for a job, accidentally walks in on the freshly-committed murder of a stranger he'd bumped into earlier that day. Suddenly he's wanted for murder, on the run, hiding out with London's homeless. Eventually, he rebuilds a life for himself, and the real murderer gets brought to justice.

So, two books, both involving a murder. Neither one is a conventional mystery. And neither one ever reveals the whole plot behind the murder, brings the culprits to justice, or clears the wrongly accused. They're very similar in their open-ended endings.

And yet, I did not like Death Qualified when I'd finished it. I felt let down, unfulfilled. I wanted my good guys to triumph and my bad guys to pay, darn it all! And although Ordinary Thunderstorms had a similar lack of resolution of similar issues, I liked it.

Why?

I think it's because, somehow, Death sets itself up as a mystery/courtroom drama with a bit of a supernatural twist. And then it fails to fulfill the rules about solutions or crimes that those kinds of books generally adhere to. Thunderstorms, on the other hand, sets itself up as a literary novel with a mystery as a catalyst but not the central theme of the story. And so I didn't mind not getting a tidy wrap-up at the end because I wasn't expecting one.

Silly expectations.

However, both books are quite well-written, so I do recommend them both.

(Originally posted on The Huggermugger Blog on Aug. 9, 2010.)

"The Sound and the Fury" by William Faulkner

I got about 120 pages into this book, then realized that for three days running, I'd chosen to read Potty Training in Less Than a Day rather than Faulkner because the potty training book was more interesting. So I quit reading Faulkner. Because I have very little time to read right now, and I'm not going to waste it on something I'm not enjoying or learning from.

I'm not a big fan of stream-of-consciousness. Virginia Woolf gives me a headache. This didn't quite go that far, as it's not entirely stream-of-consciousness... but it's also told all out of order, which also annoys me. Sometimes it can work to tell a story in circles -- think Catch-22 by Joseph Heller -- and sometimes it seems to serve no purpose other than to try to show how clever the author is to tell a story in a non-conventional way.

Yes, Faulkner is an Important Writer. Yes, I've read some of his short stories and liked them. Yes, his books are Modern Classics. But I simply didn't like this book.

(Originally posted on The Huggermugger Blog on Jun. 29, 2009.)