Stitches

Stitches by David Small is a graphic memoir. David Small grew up in a rather awful household with an angry mother and father with very little love. I am so over the graphic novel thing and the memoir thing that I imagined the two together would be the kiss of death however I am astonished to say I actually liked it. 

Let me preface this by saying that it takes less than an hour to read and I did not fork over $24.99 to read it, I borrowed it from the library. The kind of resentment that slowly builds in your heart after they take your $24 and then make you read their whining for days and days on end did not happen.

The book is simple enough...in the 1950's a small sensitive boy with a cold unpleasant secretive family develops cancer from radiation treatments his father gives him to cure asthma. The story and drawings move together in and out of the boy's dreams and reality. There were a few moments in it when my eyes actually welled up with tears. 

Unlike other (most) graphic novels the drawings actually told a story where I think words wouldn't have worked as well. Especially in dreams----no one can write a dream---dreams are visual, they're images---not words on a page--in childhood the two are so much closer together and harder to tell apart. In the dream sequences of the book the text and the pictures run together in a way that captures that feeling very effectively. In a scene where the sullen boy first cries with his therapist, Small expresses what those tears mean through some very simple but powerful drawings, words would have belittled the emotion and weight of the scene.

So in the end if there must be graphic novels and memoirs, and the inevitable fusion of the two---as I'm afraid there must---this was a pretty good one.

A Bend in the the River

 

 

Finally finished A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul. It's not something you just trip along in merrily. It's a very serious book, reminiscent of Coetzee with the unnamed country, the vague menace lurking and the general coolness in his writing. The contrast of the cold brilliant prose with a sudden soaring poetic image is always a bit of a shock. There's this stunning final image in the book of a searchlight on the river, illuminating tons of insects and bugs flying in the air, suddenly going dark and the insects all vanishing into the darkness. It was very powerful and somehow he managed to capture the whole book in that one image...it captures life actually.

So he deserved the Nobel---the man can write. I will not be taking it away from him.

Brooklyn

This was a very reserved and careful little book. A miniature really about a young Irish girl, Eilis Lacey, who leaves home in the early 50's and comes to Brooklyn, works in a dress shop, goes to night school, meets an Italian boy and...I will draw a veil over the rest. But Colm Toibin writes very well. No word out of place or unconsidered. Nothing extraneous. Everything packed neatly and folded like in the two suitcases Eilis carries across the Atlantic. No trailing bits and pieces. Very nice.

The Anthologist

I am very fond of Nicholson Baker. I like how his mind works and you can see it working away in his books. It's like one of those clocks with the transparent backs where you can see all the inner workings clicking away (although now with digital clocks who knows what the inner workings look like.). Anyway The Anthologist has him ruminating about poetry. The story is pretty slim: a poet must write the introduction to an anthology and his girlfriend just left him. But he goes on about enjambments, rhyme and iambic pentameter (which he says comes from French and is not natural to our language, ditto with Haiku only with Japanese this time)  with such fervour and enthusiam you're carried throughout the whole book without realizing there's not much story. I still am very fond of Nicolson Baker.

Take the Blame

I had read Michelle Huneven's earlier books Round Rock and Jamesland and remembered liking them but this was pre-blog so can not verify why. But I know I liked them. This compelled me to rush out and buy her new book Blame in hardcover. All of her books deal with AA and getting sober. This is a story of a woman,Patsy, a college professor who goes to jail after a drunken black out after which she wakes up to be told she killed a mother and a daughter while driving drunk.

For something so raw and horrendous Huneven surprisingly writes from a distance from the main character and the whole book is at arms length. I'm not saying it was bad just that it felt a bit as if she were coddling her characters. Patsy gets out of prison and (as most convicts do) goes right back to her tenured teaching job, the husband of the victims forgives her and she marries a very wealthy older man who buys her a Morgan horse. Maybe AA is all about not beating yourself up ...but that doesn't mean Huneven can't beat Patsy up just a little. I guess I don't mind her writing about AA but I don't want the story told through a lense of their philosophy.

The Road Home

This book was pleasant enough. The story of an Eastern European immigrant who comes to London to make a better living for his daughter and mother back in their home country. The story is pretty predictable. There's a lot of nobility going on but it's not so bad. Glowing reviews all over the jacket and inside make me wonder if maybe they're referring to a hardcover version that somehow was mysteriously better than the paperback version I ended up with. It wasn't awful, it just wasn't the "at once timeless and bitingly contemporary" "gem of a novel" that makes "us hear English anew" I was expecting.

Where the Wild Things Are

I went to see this today with Olivia. I think they captured the unease of the book quite well; the perilous sense of danger in the monsters and the loneliness and rage in Max. It's a wonderful film. That being said this is not a child's movie.  The recurring themes are loneliness, anguish at why things have to change and out and out anger. These are all things children feel but not things children like to see necessarily. At the end Olivia said the monsters were Max's story just told in a different way. She said it made her feel uncomfortable (in a bad way). I concur.(but in a good way). Our favorite read aloud books were always funny anyway, George and Martha, Ernest and Celestine and Bread and Jam for Frances got us every time. No disquiet there and doubtless they will never be made into motion pictures for adults. But Liv and I would go see them happily.

Hons and Rebels

I read Jessica Mitford's Hons and Rebels last week and really was interested by the Mitford sisters. One, Unity, was an intimate of Hitlers, another, Diana, married Walter Mosley, a British Fascist, Nancy Mitford was a novelist and Jessica ran off with a Communist to fight in the Spanish Civil War. She later on wrote The American Way of Death exposing the American funeral industry. The book is a rather quick account of their eccentric childhoods, parents and adolescence. I got rather overexcited by the whole thing and ordered the Mitford Sisters which just got here in the mail. It looks rather large and I'm not sure if my interest will be sustained throughout the weight of the book.

Wuthering Low

Seduced by the very cool cover on this new edition I tried to read this again. I still don't like it. Maybe my list of things I will not tolerate in fiction (narrative written in dialect and dream sequences) was born out of this very book. Because after opening with the wild dream sequence with the ghost of Cathy clawing at the windows we get to Joseph speaking the immortal words "Und hah isn't that nowt comed in frough th'field, be this time? What is he abaht? girt eedle seeght!"

Why is this book romantic? Heathcliff is a brutal lout and Cathy is a selfish spoiled snob. OK so it's modern but what is the romance abaht? I could care less about any of them. Girt eedle shite to them!

Why? I Ask

Hmmm. I don't know why I thought this would be any good. It's not.  It's billed as Harry Potter for adults. It plays on the same story of some kid (college age this time) being whisked away into a parallel universe to a wizard school. Every mention or review says 'not for children'. Mostly because there's sex and drugs but I think any self respecting child would put this down for the sheer boredom of it all. He's not a bad writer, just a bad storyteller and if J.K. Rowling is anything, she's a great storyteller. Harry Potter is light on any substance or subtlety other than the traditional Battle between Good and Evil but it's still a great ride. In the future if I want Harry Potter I'll read Harry Potter, if I want HP with subtlety and adult themes I'd read Philip Pullman. If I want Lev Grossman...wait...that does not fit anywhere...not even in any parallel universe.

Grenville and Muriel Spark Fall Down

Finally a stinker from Kate Grenville, although it actually doesn't qualify as a true stinker, more the vaguely unpleasant odor of boredom, I finally put it down and thought as a cleanse I would read the very slim and enticing Aiding and Abetting by Muriel Spark. Alas, I was meant for more dissappointment (I was avoiding using this word since I never can spell it and rely on spell check to always fix it for me but rather alarmingly for all of us the spellcheck function in Blogger has dissap....wait, can't spell that one either.... vanished.) Anyway dese buks verry baad! Dont reed.

Comic Madame Bovary

After reading Madame Bovary I remembered I had a graphic novel retelling called Gemma Bovery so I pulled that out. I had heard about the writer/illustrator on a Clive James podcast where he sits on a couch with the interviewee smoking and drinking wine. Posy Simmonds was one of his many interviewees. They didn't get as down and dirty and wreathed in smoke clouds as he did with Martin Amis but I still looked up her books after.

The book is still set in France but in modern day with a bored, restless Gemma married to a weak furniture restorer Charles Bovery. She is endlessly recreating their house and her look, she obsessed with her weight. It's all told through the eyes of a local baker and manages to get in quite a few digs at the brits who come and buy cheap places in Normandy but never learn French or integrate into village life. Fun to read after the real stuff.

Nobel Prize for Literature

Herta Müller wins Nobel Prize in Literature. Herta Müller, the Romanian-born German novelist and essayist who writes of the oppression of dictatorship in her native country and the unmoored existence of the political exile, won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. Is this her?  I've never heard of her so am not 100% sure. Is that the Nobel Prize? It looks oddly like an Emmy. The outfit seems a little glitzy for the Nobels but hey---Doris Lessing can't win every year. Which gives us the perfect entre into viewing the video on YouTube of Doris Lessing's winning of the Nobel again:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuBODHFBZ8k&feature=youtube_gdata

So much more adorable than Herta Müller and I believe the plaid shirted man behind her is holding not a Nobel/Emmy but an artichoke. She should win every year.

Books I Plan to Read

But have yet to purchase.

What is Written in Barcelona...

Stays in Barcelona. I left it there. This was pretty bad. Gothic and overdone. A blurb on the cover from Stephen King says something about even the subplots having subplots, like that's a good thing! George chose to read a more intellectually challenging Colm Toibin memoir of his time in Barcelona. He chose the high road, I chose the low road. I recommend following George on this one. But let's meet in Barcelona, it's a fantastic city.

Madame Bovary

I hardly think I need to throw my hat into the ring of literary criticism of Flaubert's Madame Bovary---and some of you may even question my having a hat to throw---but I will say that this was a very good book. A surprisingly modern, readable universal story. Emma Bovary's quest for material possessions was almost yuppie-like in it's superficiality (do I really need 15 black skirts?). Her mounting debt made me think humbly of all my bills stuffed behind the radio in the kitchen. Her adultery....phew! Saved! And that's why it's called Madame Bovary and not Madame Gentes.

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Did Alice Munro wake up one morning and decide she was Russian? Too Much Happiness is a very odd story---a novella in Harpers---about a Russian woman scientist and her affairs of the heart. Apparently Alice Munro happened to read up on this woman in an encyclopedia (how old fashioned is that?!) and became fascinated by her and decided to write a story about her. It seemed very alien for me from her other work. In fact I'd say now Elizabeth Strout is more like Alice Munro than Alice Munro is like Alice Munro.
So if you want Tolstoy read Alice Munro , if you want Alice Munro read Elizabeth Strout. Put that in the encyclopedia!

Heroic Measures

I really liked this book. About an elderly couple in Manhattan forced to sell their million dollar walk-up apartment for a similarly priced one in an elevator building. Their elderly dachshund Dorothy tells some of the story while they deal with her health problems. It's told over a 48 hour period that coincides with their open house, Dorothy's hospitalization and a terrorist situation happening in NYC. It's a quiet little book but very good.

Jane Gardam

I read this when I was a teenager in Mexico. Libreria Cristal had a small section of British books. They didn't carry American books because this was way before NAFTA. They used to cost like $15 or $16 pesos.

A Long Way from Verona is a sort of British wartime female version of the Catcher in the Rye. Most Jane Gardam novels are out of print in the U.S. now for some reason. I found this copy in a used bookstore. I remembered quite a bit of it from over 30 years ago so either I have a great memeory or it really resonated with me. It's about a young girl who wants to be a writer. Simple enough but clever and well written.

I can't imagine a teenager nowadays having much in common with the narrator. I suppose the present day version would be a young woman who wants to be a blogger, or is a blogger. Adolescence seemed to be more about longing and desire then, now is seems to be all fulfillment and purpose. No more 'Long Way from Verona' simply 'Verona'!

Olive Kitteridge

This---quite simply--- was a wonderful book. Elizabeth Strout is pretty consistently great. All the way from Amy and Isabel to these interwoven short stories. They're set in a small town in Maine. The stories are up there with anything by Alice Munro. The character thread throughout is Olive Kittredge who is a difficult, problematic character. You usually don't always experience her full on but out of the corner of your eye in a story of someone else where she pops up in the periphery. Some of her central story is only glimpsed in passing through someone else's story. The final story is Olive's though and it is a deserved ending for her which you are surprised at yourself for wanting so much.
Chalk up one for the Pulitzer people.

Cracks

Cracks by Sheila Kohler is an argument for co-ed education if I ever saw one. It's set in an all girls boarding school in the middle of nowhere in South Africa and is the story of the disappearance of one of girls from the swimming team. Dripping with hormones and longing it really captures the exquisite sort of boredom and feelings of adolescence. Where to go with all that feeling with only girls,girls, girls as far as the eye can see? Read the book and find out.

Interestingly it is written in the first person plural "we" like that other book I liked so much: And Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris, about the death of an ad agency. It works very well here too.
We like that.

Glover's Mistake

This bills itself as a contemporary look at modern romance and relationships. I suppose maybe because a lot of the communication is through texting, email, blogs and cell phones we can call it modern. But since none of these mediums lend themselves to any sort of profundity the book, not surprisingly, doesn't either. It was just ho-hum. It's a story of two male roommates and a female artist and their relationships to each other. Of course the inner jacket flap talks about it also being about the nature of art criticism and the art world but that was pretty thin.

It's the sort of book that they recommend in Vogue or Elle because it's inoffensive but mostly because then they get to show the author's picture. Nick Laird looks like a young intellectual George Michael, before he started to look like he does now, which is like a dirty man under a bridge.

Skip the book, google Nick Laird's image, it's what the characters in the book would do.

Zeitoun

I really enjoyed Dave Eggers' last book What is the What and this is in the same vein. A true story told in a very unsensational way. What is the What made the horrific story of the Sudanese lost boys somehow bearable. Eggers' tone is always even and unemotional, a blank slate on which you put your own emotions, he isn't always telling you what to feel. Zeitoun is a story of a Syrian American man who stays behind in New Orleans while his family flees Hurricane Katrina.
The first part of the book is about Zeitoun, his last name, paddling quietly around the city in a canoe. The second part of the book is the nightmare that he and his family fall into. In the first part of the book he's simply a citizen of New Orleans quietly helping out, the second part reminds us that he is also a Muslim and an Arab.
Not watching TV I didn't have all the visual images of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina that everyone else did, this book opened my eyes to the complete mismanagement of the disaster. I imagine for people who knew more about it, it will resonate even more.

Fasting, Feasting

I read this rather quickly and found it very sad and bleak. A very sad older unmarried Indian woman, Uma, living at home with her parents in a very isolated existence. An Anita Brookner character transplanted. Her brother far away in Massachusetts studying and living with an American family in a very similar isolation.
The title Fasting, Feasting probably refers to the overabundance of food in America and is meant to contrast with the Indian situation but since the Indian family seems pretty cushioned from the outside I don't think that worked so well. Nonetheless Uma seemed very real and her situation very heartbreaking and inescapable.
The exasperation you feel with Anita Brookner's characters at their inability to act is gone since this is not the Western world and Uma does not have the choices or opportunities Brookner's characters do. At least Uma has better excuses. It's all even sadder in a claustrophobic kind of way.
Onward!

Born to Read about Running

You will no doubt wonder why I am reading Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes and the Greatest Race the World Has Ever Seen by Christopher McDougall when the only time I ever ran was senior year in college when we had to run a mile to pass the Physical Ed requirement. I think my wheezey panting burst of speed in that final mile when I saw the coach looking at me was one of the highest physical achievements ever in sports history. So I chose to go out on top and retired---some might say with dignity---from the sport. Let others have a chance at running greatness, I was content to lie on my sofa with a Diet Coke reading a book. Preferably not a book about running.
I heard this book was about the Tarahumara indians in the Copper Canyon in Mexico though so was interested. It turns out it is a fascinating book about running: the crazy people who do 100 mile marathons, scientists, the people who design sneakers, people who run barefoot, Olympic athletes and the mysterious Tarahumara who really are still all a mystery by the end of the book.
McDougall is no anthropologist, he's a sports writer and the writing is pretty awful in a magazine writing sort of way with lots of manufactured cliff hangers and devices to keep you reading. One of his most typical phrases is "And the worst was yet to come...". But in spite of his writing some of the stories are truly very engaging and some of the thinking on different styles of running are pretty convincing.
McDougall himself is a runner and he set out to discover why he kept getting injured and other people, the Tarahumara for instance, never get hurt and run huge distances. I think he answers that question. The question as to why anyone would go out to do a 100 mile run while they could lie on the sofa reading a book about people doing 100 mile runs goes unanswered.

Marblehead Used Book Sale

Next week the Friends of the Marblehead Public Library have combined my two favorite things into one: their book sale and free alcohol. They are having a private sale for members with a $25 limit of book buying, meaning NO BUYERS will be there elbowing me aside, plus free wine and snacks! I am dizzy with excitement.

A Far Cry from Kensington

This book kicked bottom! I loved it. Not sure what it was about it that I loved so much...it's British as everything I seem to read lately is, it postwar, it's about a young woman who works in publishing and lives in a rooming house. It's quick, it's light; there's not a false step. I think any Muriel Spark character could kick anyone's bottom in a Anita Brookner's book in a heartbeat. It's about someone actually living rather than thinking about living.
Like Brookner she can write too:
Sir Alec was thin and grey and his voice matched his looks. It sounded like a wisp of smoke wafting from some burning of leaves hidden by a clump of lavender.
Who comes up with these things? Why do I like it so much?
Or this bit:.... for Fred talked like the sea, in ebbs and flows each ending with a big wave which washed up the main idea. So that you didn't have to listen at all, just wait for the big splash.
Brilliant. What a joy!
Ugly cover though.

Brookner Redux All Over Again

Just finished Anita Brookner's Making Things Better. It's not her latest but I don't think that matters. It is the same novel over and over again with the same painfully self aware protagonist failing to connect with the world. This is about an older man, alone, retired, trying to come to terms with his final choices. It's very sad but at least the character this time is more aware that his decisions led him to where he ends up. He is timid as all her characters are but not passive.

A typical reflection : "From this he gradually deduced that his relations with women were still inchoate, that good manners had, time and time again, disguised desire, and in disguising it, or in keeping it in its place, had denatured it." The whole book is, as all her books are, lots of thought and reflection no action. maybe that's why I like her so much; I am so the opposite that anyone who thinks so much fascinates me.

Her books are like the Narnia Chronicles where whole life times go by but when the children tumble back into the non-Narnia world no time has passed at all. In Brookner pages and pages of his tortured musings go on while no one has even done anything yet. As always I long for E.M. Forester to come in and slap her characters around shouting "Only connect!". But then although they never connect they are more self aware than I or E.M. will probably ever be.

"He ordered coffee, looked about him with no particular shock of recognition, realized that the true balefulness of age was an inability to bring those memories back to life, to rekindle the intensity of the past as it surely once been felt."

The Children's Book

I really liked this book----it was big and old fashioned stuffed with plot and characters. Maybe too many characters? By page 50 I think she had introduced as many characters as pages. I didn't know who I was supposed to remember who I could forget...well actually it turned out she wanted me to remember all of them since she drags them all on through the next 600 pages. It's not an interior sort of book, it can't be with so many people to keep track of, it's too crammed full for that.

It's the story of some loosely interwoven bohemian families set at the end of the Victorian age in England, right into the Edwardian age. It's a story of the time as well as the characters. It reminds me of the Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao where you learn all about the history of the Dominican Republic in the margins. I know a lot about the intellectual artistic life late 1800's early 1900's in Britain now. Less brutal than the Dominicans by the way.

It's also about fairy tales which A.S. Byatt has a lot of opinions on. Like Possession where you had to read quite a bit of poetry supposedly written by the characters, here you read a lot of fairy tales written or told or acted out by the characters. The grown ups are writers, artists, potters and thinkers, but the story is more focused on the children. The pivotal character, if there is just one, would be Olive Wellwood, a children's book writer, who is loosely based on E. Nesbit.

I remember seeing A.S.Byatt at the Brattle right after she won the Booker and her talking about the satisfaction of the ending of Possession and how it tied in to our primitive need for 'closure' in our stories. Closure wasn't such a overused term in those days and I like that about her books. She gives good closure. The only problem this time is that I expected 50 points of closure rather than the neatly tied knot in Possession. There were so many characters that it didn't have the omphh of just one big knot; it was more of a Fisherman Knit Sweater.

Note: I ordered this edition from Canada since it won't be printed in the U.S. until the Fall. Canada is on a British printing schedule.

Barbara Vine aka Ruth Rendell

My cousin Kathy told me to read Barbara Vine, who apparently is not content being just Ruth Rendell ,she has to adopt a pseudonym to write more books. Well there is no shame in having written the Grasshopper, she is a very fine writer. Apparently when Toni Morrison is finished writing a novel she turns to Ruth Rendell ''You marvel at the economy and this choice of words,'' Ms. Morrison said. ''How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say?'' .
What can I say? It's a story of a girl who has a tragic accident while climbing electric pylons and her life afterwards. It's filled with dread and menace but immensely readable. She is a very good writer. Thank you Kathy and Toni.

What Fresh Twee Is This?

I have read The Guernsey Literary Potato Peel Pie Society finally. I was avoiding it since it looked pretty twee and I am here to say---"Yep---it's twee alright." But I actually enjoyed it, at least it's fresh twee, the next epistolary novel that mimics it ---say The Outer Hebrides Book and Gooseberry Trifle Knitting Club ----will be the death of the genre. The island of Guernsey was occupied during World War II by the Germans for five years which was news to me, the stories are affecting, the romance is pleasant. It gives twee a good name.

My Bedside Table

Titanic

I ordered Every Man For Himself from Canada since it was out of print here. It's an fictionalized account of the sinking of the Titanic. It's a little too disjointed and vague in the beginning but after I "wiki-ed" the real story of the Titanic I could fill in the blanks and it got better. Actually a very tragic story with a lot of tragic errors on the part of the designers and builders: insufficient lifeboats, miscommunication etc etc. To further my research I was tempted to watch Titanic again but didn't know if I could bear watching them peer over the bow with Celine Dion wailing in the background so found something called I was a Chambermaid on the Titanic instead, an obscure French film. Not sure about it. Beryl Bainbridge also wrote that wonderful book of the Shackleton expedition The Birthday Boys, she has a way with tragedy.

Kate Grenville

Awhile ago I read Kate Grenville's The Secret River and really liked it. I can't remember who recommended it to me, but it's a story of a convict from London sent to Australia with his wife. They're very poorly equipped to do anything in the open country but they settle on some land and try to build a life for themselves. Some aborigines are settled close by and almost live better than they do. At some point in the book there is a choice made and it allows them to stay on their land but at a price. You're left wondering if the price was worth it. It's a very provocative book, reminded me too of David Malouf's Remembering Babylon, another Australian heart breaker and one of my all time favorites.
The Lieutenant is much more gentle on the heart but still pretty painful. It's the story of a British science prodigy in the 1700's who grows up in his own quiet world, always at a distance from everyone. And because of the times he ends up in Australia as a Lieutenant in the navy establishing a settlement of convicts. He is perched in a makeshift observatory to charts the stars and slowly and shyly connects with the aborigines they are 'co-existing' with. In this book too a choice is made and again there are consequences. Grenville writes very simply and beautifully. There is nothing extra. She seems to be looking at the story of the colonization of Australia over and over again, each time thinking it through with different outcomes for the characters whom you grow to care about. Both are very good books.

Losing Mum and Pup

This is a memoir by Christopher Buckley about losing his parents,Pat and William F. Buckley, both in the same year. I actually liked it, it does a good job of recognising their awfulness but still loving them in spite of it all. So on one hand he was truthful about their narcissism and distance while on the other he acknowledged their good qualities. It manages to be funny and exasperated with them but still very tender. An interesting detail about Buckley was that he was a remote control hog, he had to always be in control and this extended to the remote. People would be over to watch a movie and right when the important plot point would be revealed he would switch to a documentary on another channel. When he died Christopher Buckley placed a few things in his casket with him: his rosary, a jar of peanut butter and the remote. It's only about that one year in their lives but manages to somehow radiate beyond that. It's up there with John Bayley's Elegy for Iris.

One thing he quoted from William Hazlitt that I thought quite useful when confronting death:

"Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death, is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not; this gives us no concern---why then should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?"

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

This is a mystery with an 11 year old girl narrator who is a bit of a prodigy in Chemistry. She lives in a moldering old British estate with two older sisters and a distant stamp collecting father. A dead body shows up in the garden and she decides to investigate. It's quite enjoyable in a Nancy Drew sort of way. Although her voice is way older than her years she stills acts like a child whizzing along on her bike to sleuth. Her bike has a name which reminds me of when I was young and my bike was an extension of myself, a character in my stories. She is constantly plotting rather sophisticated chemical mischief against her sisters which I would never had been intellectually capable of (although I hasten to add I am sure I would have been morally capable!) which is fun to read and the mystery unfolds quite nicely with only a few characters to keep track of and suspect.

More Lucia

I read another M.C. Beaton Agatha Raisin mystery. Not sure why since, while I like the character, I do not like her writing, I think she pops out a couple of these a year and it shows. The writing is very sloppy. At the library the librarian -----dare I say it?----coo'ed when she saw them. It turns out she loves them and all her friends do too. I started protesting how poorly written they were but since I stood there checking out two more I felt the firm ground beneath my argument shifting. 'Perfect for when you're sick' I tried backtracking weakly. I coughed discreetly into the crook of my elbow as we have been instructed to do. The librarian looked away in distaste. I won't be invited to join her bookclub.
One good thing about Agatha Raisin is she's like a flu shot, over quickly and I moved back to my beloved Lucia. It is the last one and I think I am glad since although they are quite fun, as Georgie says so much arch dialogue can be a bit "tarsome". Like reading too much Woodehouse.

Mapp and Lucia

These books by E. F .Benson are hilariously funny. Like P.G. Woodehose only with middle aged women and without the painfully funny language. Elizabeth Mapp and Emmeline Lucas (called Lucia) are social rivals in the small town of Tilling. Neither will concede the upper hand and the books Mapp and Lucia and Make Way for Lucia are all about their endless competition for supremacy. Mapp is a stubborn, narrow minded little woman while Lucia is, while more open minded, quite a snob and fake. There are about 6-7 other main characaters who are in their orbit.

One is Georgie, Lucia's best friend who is ridiculously vain with an auburn toupee, and lots of costumey little capes and outfits, but also rather touchingly devoted to Lucia and the excitement she brings to life. They speak a very affected and made-up 'Italian' to each other and are almost unmasked as fakes when an Italian countess comes to town. Lucia is always coming up with new schemes with Georgie in tow: " for the spark was lit now, and it went roaring through her fertile brain like a prairie fire in a high gale".

A vaguely aristocratic snobby couple the Wyses' spend most of the books driving up and down the narrow streets of Tilling in an enormous Rolls Royce. "when the party broke up Mrs. Wyse begged him to allow her to give him a lift in the Royce, but as this would entail a turning of that majestic car, which would take at least five minutes followed by a long drive for them round the church square and down into the High Street and up again to Porpoise Street, he adventured forth on foot for his walk of thirty yards and arrived with undue fatigue." One woman is always referred to as "quaint Irene", quaint apparently being code for "lesbian". Major Benjy is always sneaking a nip of alcohol and yelling "Quai Hi!!!!" (left over from his army days) when he wants the servants.

The BBC made a wonderful television series of the books with Prunella Scales as Mapp and Nigel Hawthorne as a very camp Georgie. Equally as enjoyable.

Flush the Twilit

I finally read Twilight after half of America had already clutched it sobbing to their collective heaving bosoms. Basically it's one long heaving flushed bosom of a novel...all 'ragged breaths' and 'muffled oaths' and 'smoldering glances'. It's as if Nicholson Baker's Mezzanine were re-written by a 17 year old girl who dozed off in Biology class. Mezzanine is that entire book written about Mr. Baker's trip to the lobby of his building to buy shoelaces. Twilight is one long uninterrupted passionate eye lock between Bella and her vampire boyfriend Edward. I'd rather go buy some more shoelaces.

I Don't Believe I Do

I was very excited to read this book. I loved her Notes From a Scandal and this got great reviews. But I didn't like it. It was not unreadable even though the characters were all insanely unlikable. I actually thought the characters were well drawn but the plot was awkward. It's the story of a family of radicals, the father is in a coma with a stroke and his family of a British wife and two daughters plus an adopted son come together around him. The mother Audrey is so supremely unlikable that any sort of friends Heller gave her or any familial relationship would be impossible, this is the type of woman who says to a British 'friend' she runs into on the street going to the British market "I've never understood why people go to shops like that. If you all miss your crappy English food so much, why don't you go back home?" This woman later takes in her son, sticking around for more abuse. Very improbable. I don't need to like the characters, in Notes From a Scandal the narrator was terrible, vain and selfish...but in a delicious sort of way. I guess I like a little charm in the badness, like Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost for example, this badness though was just....bad. The daughters are alright. One is supposed to be 'good' though Zoe makes her fat to punish her for that and the other one is bent on becoming an orthodox Jew for no discernible reason other than to be difficult. All in all a disappointment of a book.

A-ya Wish A Hadn't Bothered

A-ya forgot what this was about but it's a graphic novel set in Africa---which I thought was an interesting premise. It's not. I'm officially off Graphic Novels.

Seven Days in the Art World

This was quite interesting about the art world. Written by Sarah Thornton it represents seven different aspects in the art world: the auction house, the art fair, the art school,the art prize, the art magazine, the art studio and the art Biennale. Early on she presents the opinion that Art has become the religion of Atheists. It's a very exclusive and competetive religion then with everyone in the Art Market vying for the best seat in the temple and auctioneers so beset with offers that they can cull through them to make sure the art works go to "good homes" (i.e. people not obstensibly buying art for an investment). It is ugly to see the way people might transfer something beautiful or meaningful (although some of the "emerging art" she discusses seems to be hardly that) into power. One collector is heard toying on the phone with various curators at different museums who are all anxious to be the ones getting his collection when the time comes. He seems to be getting off on the power the objects give him over others in the 'religion'.
The 'Crit' at an Art School is an all day endless event where people talk in very inpenetrable language about whatever work is on display. Much of the book was about that language being used by everyone. Not many people seem to have a emotional response to Art any more, it's all intellectual. I thought the author did a nice job of maintaining a distance throughout so that you never felt she was either fawning or condemming. Good book.

Mexican Low

Mexican High was a waste of time. I bought it because I went to a Mexican high school and thought it might be interesting. It wasn't. It wasn't even bad, just boring. The protagonist, daughter of a diplomat mother who's lived all over the world lands in the the wealthiest Mexican high school in Mexico City. She doesn't even bother to assimulate. What impresses her most about Mexico is how much drugs and alcohol you can buy without getting carded. Yawn. There's supposed to be some plot with her searching for her mysterious Mexican father but that's dull too. Don't bother.

Food Matters

OK. I love this man!!! I own every cookbook of his and, unlike Jamie Oliver who I also adore, I use all his recipes. I clip out all his recipes in the Minimalist section in the NYT. I remember as if they were poetry his Cod and Potatoes recipe, his Pork Loin Stuffed with Sage, his Salmon Fillets with Green Lentils, his 1960's Veal Cutlets (which he graciously allows to be done with chicken breasts). His recipes follow the classic narrative formulas so that you can actually remember them, the Exposition of the slicing of the potatoes, the Rising Action of tossing those potatoes in Olive Oil and Salt and putting them into the oven for 40 minutes and then the Climax of the broiler. You can tell them to people without trailing off into uncertainity if it was 2 or 3 tablespoons of creme de menthe.....
He is not a perfectionist and his second How to Cook Everything loosens things up further. Instead of the authoritarian Cod Fillets he tells you any white firm fleshed fish are fine. So this is his new book which sounds vaguely like Michael Pollan's Defense of Food but with recipes. What more can I say? Did I mention I love this man?

Three Bags Full

This was a very clever book: a murder mystery where a flock of Irish sheep solve the mystery of their shepherd's murder. All the sheep have different personalities and levels of intelligence. They use their senses of smell to great effect and are often bewildered by human behavior in a sweet way. Somehow though it stays away from being too cute. Of course perhaps this was because I refused to look any deeper than the surface of the book. I'm sure beneath the surface the author, Leonie Swann, was trying to make all sort of allusions and connections to human behavior. Our tendency to move in flocks, to be herded along willy-nilly without protest because that's just how it's done, I chose to ignore. So I just read a rather clever story of some woolly characters solving a mystery. BAAAAAA philosophical baaaallusions!!!!!

Half Eaten Avocado

This was supposed to be a funny book recently reissued by the NYRB press. The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy is the story of a young American woman living in Paris for a year. It's trying to be a cross between Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim and Breakfast at Tiffanys...I stopped halfway through since the voice of the narrator is annoying and over-arch and I realised I could care less about her or her situation. Humor, I am reminded, is a very personal thing. One woman's ha-ha is another woman's uh-oh.