Translation: Books Bookstore

Far From the Madding Crowd

I had never read this and it turns out it was--- not surprisingly--- very good. Light for Hardy with lots of drama and tension. Bathsheba is a flawed but appealing heroine and you honestly don't know where Hardy is going with her three suitors. Well that is not exactly true----Hardy will always err on the side of Nature and the Land and by naming a character Gabriel Oak and saying about him "among the multitude of interests by which he was surrounded, those which affected his personal well-being were not the most absorbing and important in his eyes" there was a tip-off. At times I actually found myself desperate to get back to it and see "what happens next".

Surprisingly although Bathsheba is a strong female character who inherits her uncle's farm and runs it herself without a bailiff Hardy could not resist quite a few little misogynist jabs but in the end the story itself overwhelms his petty remarks.

If I ever unpack all my books I want to get out my Hardy biography and re-read what he was up to when this was written.

Muriel Spark

I recently listened to The Ballad of Peckham Rye on audio book. It was quite brilliant, the reader did a beautiful job and it was quite wickedly funny. It's the story of a rather devilish man named Dougal Douglas in a small industrial town who worms his ways uncomfortably into everyone's lives. It's mostly dialogue and works very well on audio. Quite enjoyable.

More Mendelson

Love, Work, Children. This was the second in the Cheryl Mendolson trilogy and also quite good. She can write very well. I am saving the third for a time when I need something safe to read. This is another story of a Manhattan well to do family and their 'travails' with a car accident, mis-directed love affairs and a happy Dicken's like ending with everyone all sorted out and happily crammed in one room. I am very fond of her. She is a little heavy on the tying up of loose ends but after skimming her Housekeeping manual Home Comforts I realized she's a maniacal cleaning woman without a speck of extraneous foreign matter, unsanitized space or dangling threads. Her writing too is spick and span and her plot although a bit overstuffed is covered in a well laundered and ironed cover with no threads of plots left dangling at the end. Very satisfying.

A Million Shades of Gray

I forgot I read this. It's a children's book and Olivia's teacher read it aloud to them in her sixth grade class. She loved it and couldn't wait until she would hear another chapter. It's about a boy in the Vietnam war whose village is invaded and the village flees to the jungle. The boy ends up living with the elephants his family keeps. It's a very good book with no false notes or manipulative moments. It's told very sparely, as an adult you fill in the scary blanks but I think as an 11 year old it's enough information but not too much so that you're scarred for life. Olivia told me that when her teacher was reading the end the teacher started to cry and they had to pat her and bring her kleenexes. I know the feeling.

Cheryl Mendelson

Morningside Heights is like a really good Woody Allen movie. Like Hannah and Her Sisters when he was still good. It's about fairly well off established academics/ musicians/artists living in Manhattan in a neighborhood near Columbia with a lot of similar like minded people. The tension of the book is the threat of one of the families potentially having to move to ---gasp---the suburbs because they just can't afford the city life any more, i.e. Rich People's problems. What saves this from being rather unsympathetic and unappealing is Mendelson's writing. She is a lovely clean writer with a ---dare I use so hackneyed a description?---a Jane Austen-like ability for observation of a certain type of people from a certain type of social class. I really loved this book.

Shakespeare Garden by Lore Segal

I picked this up at the book sale with no expectations but thoroughly enjoyed it. It's a book of interwoven short stories that had appeared in the New Yorker. They're about a Viennese woman, Ilka who grew up in America and goes to work at an artistic sort of think tank affiliated with a college. The characters are all poets and writers, all academics in each other's business bumbling along. Ilka is such a real, believable character who is always trying to say provocative things and be noticed. She is moving about in each story trying constantly to 'connect' as E.M. Forster says. She latches on to a very charismatic couple, the man, Leslie Shakespeare, is the director of the Institute, and clings for dear life. But somehow in her determination to 'make friends' and connect she is very endearing.

Segal says some very insightful things through her characters----when someone dies and everyone reacts in different ,mostly awkward,ways to the death one character remarks "Calamity is a foreign country. We don't know how to talk to the people who live there." Some of the stories aren't as effective but overall I was happy to have read this.

The Sibyl in her Grave

This is a very clever mystery written in the P.G. Woodehouse vein. Very arch and clever but almost exhaustingly so. I had a little trouble differentiating the characters but that didn't seem to matter much. So even though the plot was very ornate and the dialogue very arch, it was still a fun read.

SLAM

Nick Hornby apparently decided to write a young adult novel. I found it in the Teen Room at the library. It's about a skateboarder who gets a girl pregnant and has to deal with it. He writes well, you like the characters and as far as I could tell he resisted moralizing. There are some goofy bits and I don't know if an actual teenager would like it but it's OK, slight, yet OK.

A Severed Head (not mine)

Not sure why I picked up Iris Murdoch. But it was one I hadn't read and I was nostalgic for my excitement when I first read the Word Child or The Sea the Sea. The cover promised me a Terrifying Tangle of Erotic Impulses. Perhaps they were in 1961 but at this point it was more of just an improbable tangle.  Part of the whole premise is suspending belief that the main character would act so passively in a situation where his wife decides to be run off with his best friend. It is trying a bit too hard to be brazen and modern and ultimately rings untrue. Not her best.
Apparently a critic at the time said about it:  'With less philosophising and more shagging than Murdoch's other books, it is a joy to see this wonderful writer let her hair (and her knickers) down. '
Pull 'em back up I say!

The Return of the Chain Reader?

There is a reason this is called the Chain Reader not the Chain Blogger. I have still been reading  nothing of any merit that requires any mention. I read mostly genre fiction I think and, of that, mostly cozy mysteries. I read Hazel Holt who writes mysteries but also is the biographer of Barbara Pym. I vaguely remember reading some Patricia Moyes, some 40's women authors like Elizabeth Taylor (no, not that one!). I read Emma Donoghue's Room which despite it's grim premise I quite enjoyed. And I read Freedom.

Yes he can write. And yes, it was very juicy and engrossing. But it didn't change my life. It reminded me a lot of that Joseph Heller book Something Happened that I read way back in high school. That awkward sense of TMI (Too Much Information!) prevailed.

As a statement of our times I much prefer the slimmer Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O'Nan. Freedom had every possible theme crammed into it: Title Nine, violence against woman, politics, the environment, 9/11. If you mention 9/11 in a book does that make it about 9/11? If one of the characters works in a coal company does that make it about the environment? Does all this introduction of weighty themes make the story more than just a book about some interesting characters? In the end maybe I am reacting to the reviews of the book as being about all these big themes and maybe Franzen's pretensions were smaller? I don't know at this point.

All I know is I prefer O'Nan's approach which was simpler--tell the small story about a sad cast of characters in a closing down Red Lobster in a strip mall in the middle of nowhere and it becomes universal. Freedom had so much weighing it down that it never went beyond what it was to me. A big heavy book. But maybe that's all he meant it to be.

The Chain Reader and Jonathan Franzen

Well if you bought your copy by now you'll know that it was dedicated to me. The secret's out. A smooth move on Mr. Franzen's John's part (I actually call him Jon (his friends don't pronounce the 'h"), he knew I was not crazy about The Corrections (too uncomfortable) and I think in recognition of my ability to make or break a book with my blog he rather touchingly dedicated it to me.

Of course I am fiercely ethical and my praise can not be bought so he should have known better. But you can't blame the guy for trying. He lost Oprah the last time with a strategical misstep, now he's wisened up a bit. I am immune to flattery however and will give an honest review once I get past that first title page.

Frankly I am a bit embarressed and dismayed by all the inevitable attention. Hmm....I wonder why the talk shows haven't called me yet....let me just go check that my ringer isn't turned off....

It's Summer and There's Homework?

Oh... I think they mean working on the home which I've been doing a lot of. Working on the homes to be more exact. Buying one and selling one. No time to read anything of note except a lot of home decor magazines and books and some genre fiction. The Chain Reader hopes to return to full literary capacity in the Fall.

My Mysterious Descent

When the going gets tough I turn to either something I've read before or to genre fiction. I remember one long summer in Mexico lying in the hammock in my cream colored caftan near the pool eating oranges and Maria biscuits and reading an Agatha Christie a day. Since it is summer I decided to recreate the experience---oh well at least the Agatha Christie part of it and I have been reading Agatha Christie and Patricia Moyes, who I tend to like a little better, at a pretty much one-a-day rate. I may have already read them but can never tell the difference and they just wash over me until the end and then I can pick up the next one.
What I'm saying here is: don't expect me to read Buddenbrooks this summer vacation.

Small Island

Who ever thought I would like a book that held the sentences "Me nuh know, Miss Hortense. When me mudda did pregnant dem seh smaddy obeah'r. A likkle spell yah no"? Certainly not me. But I did like Andrea Levy's Small Island very much. It's a story of the Jamaican experience of England back after the Second World War. Something you never hear about. The Jamaican men have fought for England, their motherland that they have learned about ever since they were small at school. They're taught to revere it, expected to fight for it but are completely unwelcome when they arrive on it's shores looking for a home and work. Despite the above horror she does capture the cadence of the voices nicely. The ending is a bit over the top but still it's quite a good book. And something that me nuh know nutin about, until now.

Lest We Forget

In all the bustle forgot I read this too in June and the Unattached House by Emily Eden too. Oh wait---is that the collected works of Proust right next to Kate Atkinson??? Hmm...must of read that too....funny how I forgot....

Surprise!

I knew nothing about this book and read the first chapter sample on the Kindle. I couldn't stop reading it. It was the literary equivalent of Memento or the Usual Suspects where you had to constantly be realigning your understanding of what was going on. It's three separate storylines that become interwoven in the end. Very clever.
The fun too was since I read it on the Kindle I had no physical measure of how much further the book was going. I was too involved in the story to keep an eye on the percentage on the bottom of the screen.  I had just figured everything out and ---pouf---it was over!

Staging a House for Sale

The Bradshaw Variations

I guess Rachel Cusk doesn't watch Sex in the City or she'd have known to give her characters different last names. Bradshaw is taken! But Rachel Cusk does not seem to be watching much TV. Not like Lorrie Moore's whose book seemed jammed with pop cultural references, Cusk's writing is lovely and perfect. There is no TV or cable in Cusk's house, her writing exists in it's own rarified atmosphere. The book is about different people in the same family (Bradshaw), some of who are unpleasant and some who aren't ,or at least you're not sure what they are. It's told in short chapters that exist on their own which serves to make each of the characters lonely and distant.

She's such a good writer that in the end I forgave her that not much goes on in the book.

She herself wears old clogs, a poncho, flared cordoroy trousers. When Howard met Claudia she was still a student at art college. It is part of the mythology of Claudia and Howard's life that he carried her off before she could finish her degree.The myth makes it difficult to remember exactly what happened. Claudia has a painting studio at the bottom of the garden, a kind of memorial to her forsaken career. To Thomas her clothes are sysmbolic too, commemorative, like the uniform veterans wear on Remembrance Day to remind people of their sacrifices.

In the next to final chapters there is end a moment of high drama and then a new chapter starts. She leaves the high drama dangling without any closure at the end of the book and since, I doubt there is a Bradshaw Variations Part II in the works, not finishing the story seems much more pretentious a move than I would expect of Rachel Cusk. So maybe she is watching a little TV on the sly and hoping for a regular series with her use of cliffhangers.

The Imperfectionists

This was very good. Some loosely woven stories of a failing newspaper. All the blurbs and reviews go on and on at how funny it is yet I actually found it kind of heartbreaking. Mostly about sad and dysfunctional people muddling through their lives. One of the stories about a young primatologist who in an effort to switch careers goes to Cairo to try out for a newspaper stringer position is quite funny but the rest are just sad. The writing is very good and clean, there are no pretensions in it. The last few stories sort of fizzle out and it loses it's earlier momentum but in the end maybe that's what is happening to the newspapers. Out with a fizzle, not a bang.

Tween Anxiety

An emergency pitstop for the Chain Reader when I was overcome with Middle School anxiety. This is basically a self-help book for the anxious Middle School mother. Some of the information is helpful---"Adolescence is a beauty pageant and every girl is automatically entered into it whether they want to be or not."

Every girl in the clique is described as a type----the Queen Bee, the Sidekick, the Target, the Conflicted Bystander...you want your daughter to be the Floater who is part of no clique and sails above the fray. Then Ms. Wiseman moves her steely eye on to the parents....like a Cosmo self quiz I anxiously tabulated the results wanting to proclaim myself the Hard Ass Loving Parent which according to Ms. Wisemen is the only good choice. Sadly I fell in the Benign Neglect Parent slot.

After that I didn't have the heart to go much further. Livvie's hardly the age where she's going out the back door at midnight to meet boys. She'll be fine.... I decided to return to my Benign Neglect and reached for the next book of fiction of the nightstand....Lolita ...The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie...Lord of the Flies....hmm ...maybe not those today.

Let the Great World Spin---Without Me

I started this after rapturous reviews from one of the founding members of the MV Bookgroup. In fact the book jacket and interior were stuffed with rapturous blurbs and reviews and it had a big fat National Book Award sticker sitting smugly on the front...but somehow I didn't like it. After discussion I realized that I do not have patience for the sort of stream of conscience writing that is very popular now. Dare I call it Letham-esque? I want someone who writes straightforward prose. I'm sure it is a good book---Jonathan Letham liked it...half of the MV book group liked it...I just didn't like it.

Reading the Classics

Here I was so happy they were reading. Until I read the reviews of these books which everyone in Olivia's class was supposedly reading. TTYL is written in text message form between three 10th graders. Apparently they are not studying for their Advanced Placement exams but getting drunk at parties and talking about sex. After I read the reviews I weakly tried to pull them out of Olivia's tight grasp. "Hee-hee-hee" she chuckled "Too late".......arrrgggghhhhh......she unerringly found the the Jacqueline Susann of tween-lit. I went down to the basement and sadly dusted off my Little House of the Prairie books that I read in 5th grade...what would Ma and Pa think?

Blindness

I have nothing clever to say about this book. It was really one of the best books I've read in a long time. It's nothing I would want to read: a nameless city has an epidemic of blindness. First they herd the newly blind into an old asylum but the epidemic spreads and soon the whole place, the whole city has gone blind. No one has a name, they are the Girl With Dark Glasses, the First Man to Go Blind, the Doctor's Wife, the Boy with the Squint. The Doctor's Wife somehow escapes infection and she alone can see the horrors of the life of all the helpless blind people living on top of each other, wandering up and down streets searching for food, separated from their families and homes. In all this devastation and misery there is a part towards the end that was so filled with hope and promise that I actually cried.

And I thought I only cried at Reality Shows when someone gets sent home. Who knew?

Year of the Whipple

Can it be? Another Dorothy Whipple Book so soon? Yes, I just read her They Were Sisters after reading Someone at a Distance. They Were Sisters was out of print but they found an ancient copy in Beverly. Last time someone took it out the fines were a penny a day. This is a family saga of three sisters and the directions their lives take. Two of them marry very badly and the happy one, Lucy, tries to help them as best she can. There are some pretty bleak family situations here but once again, it's quite a good book.


Here is a nice little article in the British Telegraph where the author confesses to having had a WhippleFest.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/5094681/Endpaper.html


I did not know that they called them that but that's what I'm having apparently. A WhippleFest! At a penny a day I can afford it.

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

This was pleasant enough. An elderly retired major in a small town in England becomes friends with the local shopkeeper who happens to be a Pakistani widow. The writing is pretty forced. You can tell she mapped it all out in her head...hmm...now I need an incident to bring them together outside so the cliff scene will work later...let's see.... Anyway as I said it was pleasant enough. Twee though...in not a very twee-tastic sort of way. On to the next book!

The Invisible Wall

If I were to have to describe this I would say it's an Angela's Ashes for British Jewish people. It's a memoir written by a 96 year old man, Harry Bernstein, growing up in a slum in an industrial town in England before the First World War. His parents were Polish Jews and they live a pretty awful life on a street where one side is Jewish and the other Christian. The father is a monster,an alcoholic, angry man; the mother is who holds the family together. Harry's sister falls in love with a Christian boy from across the street and crosses the 'invisible wall". The writing is good, not as beautiful or as vivid as Angela's Ashes, but still quite good.

When I read about the author in the NYT a long time ago the article talked about the author's wife of 63 (?) years dying and he being so lonely he contemplated killing himself. Instead he wrote this book. Good choice.

The Semi Attached Couple

The Semi Attached Couple by Emily Eden. Where has this book been hiding all my life? It was written in around 1830, it was not published in England until 1860, and I did not read it until 2010. Something gravely wrong with that. It is delightful. A cross between Trollope and Jane Austen, slightly more fluff than either. A young married couple at odds with each other trying to work it out in the midst of all sorts of wonderfully drawn characters. Country houses, acid tongued mother-in-laws, social climbers, politics---nothing is missing. Very pleasant and light.

I immediately bought a copy off Ebay to keep for myself. It is apparently out of print? Criminal! Stop publishing all the new books with the name Jane Austen sprinkled throughout (Austenland, Jane Austen Ruined My Life, The Jane Austen Book Club, Jane Austen and Zombies etc., etc.)and publish an actual existing book that does resemble Jane Austen for godsake!

Someone At A Distance

I adored this book. It was written in the 1950's by someone named Dorothy Whipple. It's first of all a story of a little old wealthy grumpy lady who takes in a French girl for 'light household duties and French conversation'. The direction the book took after that was completely unexpected in some ways and completely predictable in others. The old woman dies, the French girl inherits some money and goes to stay for a bit with the son and his family.....not knowing this author, not having a cover jacket filled with spoilers I was never sure where it was going. An old fashioned ending in some ways but in some ways quite modern.

Kid's Books

I told Olivia I would read this and so I did. I was actually looking forward to it. She loved it and it's very popular. I was disappointed though. It's fantasy or science fiction I suppose but the world lacks the richness of Philip Pullman or J.K. Rowling's fictional worlds. It feels very sketchy like the children are running around in that awful Perception of Time painting by Salvador Dali not in a fully realized world. Frankly I was bored by the whole thing. Back to the Adult section!

Too Much Happiness?

Although I complained mightily about the title story Too Much Happiness in Alice Munro's new collection of short stories when I read it in Harpers a year or so ago the rest of this collection kicked ass. (If I may be so bold.) It has that wonderful bizarre  story Wenlock Edge about the young college girl going for dinner at an older man's house and having to be naked the whole time while sitting primly in a chair and eating dinner. I remember the unexpected thrill of reading that in the New Yorker a few years ago. The first story Dimensions is fantastic capturing the feeling of a battered woman perfectly. Overall everything but the title story is worthwhile.

Graphic Novel Again

While home with a bad cold, instead of reaching for Buddenbrooks as one so often does, I reached instead for this graphic novel. It was fine for someone with a head cold. A story of  first love between two Midwestern kids who meet at church camp. It wasn't awful and did capture some of the intensity of the experience. Achoo! That's all I have to say.

Martha's Vineyard Bookgroup Emergency March Meeting

Seduced by the rapturous reviews of the Three Weissmans of Westport in the NYTBR an emergency off season meeting of the bookgroup was called to order. One member retired to Jackson Hole to read while the other lolled in a red leather chair in the Boston Athenaeum. The conceit is that the book is a homage to Sense and Sensibility with the sisters and mother now wealthy Jewish sisters and recently divorced mother who are forced into 'reduced circumstances'.


Neither illustrious member was much impressed with the book. Both felt that Catherine Schine's tone was off---were you supposed to like the characters and care when she was so obviously condescending to them? If she couldn't be bothered with them why should they? She is clever though and says some funny things they both acceded. Some of the parallels with Sense and Sensibility are fun to catch. But in the end it was no more than chick lit.

However this prophetic group once more expects it to follow the meteoric and inexplicable rise of their other disastrous choices Edward Sawtelle and Eat, Stink, Pray, Love up the NYTBR charts. Not much sense there.

The bookgroup in happier times.....

Anne Tyler

Noah's Compass. I thought I'd write that first since by the end of the post I will probably have forgotten the name. This was Anne Tyler's very forgettable new novel which is perfectly fine but nothing new in the land of Tyler. I did notice they even put in bigger than usual margins and spaces to bulk this little thing out. The usual dysfunctional characters trying to function. Now what was the name of that book I just read? hmmm.....can't recall.

Kurt Wallander

I got a little over excited about the Kurt Wallander mysteries. I saw the series with Kenneth Branagh and they were great with stunning photography and this very moody glum sort of atmosphere. I read Firewall which is about a very large plot to bring down the world's financial system from a tiny little Swedish town. I'm not used to reading thrillers and it went to my head a little and when they were looking for a navy blue Mercedes van in the book, the murderer's get away car, I was driving to work, saw a navy blue van and almost went off the road with excitement "Kurt! He's here in Swampscott!" I wanted to yell into my cell phone. 

Henning Mankell is a very spare writer, nothing extra, I'm not sure if that is due to the fact that it is a translation or to his style. But this is typical: "Linda didn't call back. Wallander went to bed around eleven o'clock.

It took him a long time to fall asleep."  That's two paragraphs! He's the Hemingway of Swedish mysteries.

In Firewall there were some murders but offstage, with not too much goriness and I was planning to dedicate my life to reading all of them. I loaded up on all the library copies, told all my friends and bought the chronologically first one, Faceless Killers,  read a chapter and realized my life would have to take another direction. A elderly couple on a farm murdered in a very grisly fashion, impossible to read further. I am too much of a coward but maybe someone else can take up this quest for me. They are probably very good.

Help Me Feel Clean Again

Ok I feel dirty. I, along with everyone else in America, succumbed to Kathryn Stockett's The Help. It is actually quite hard to put down. It's a story of African American maids in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960's told through their voices and then the voice of a young white woman who writes a book of their stories.
The voices of the maids are very engaging but  the author's intentions are less so. She panders to the liberal white readers, you're allowed to feel comfortably superior to the white Southern women who employ 'the help'. It skims over any real danger involved in these women's lives and then has the effrontery to try to make the white woman character in some way noble because she doesn't have a boyfriend, has literary ambitions and has bad hair. It never challenges or provokes us, just flatters.

Lit

I read Mary Karr's Lit a little reluctantly since it's described as somewhat spiritual and after a run-in with Annie LaMott's "spirituality" I am wary of anything with that word attached. It's Karr's memoir of her struggle with alcoholism which craving for "shadowed (her) every waking instant". It's as you can imagine a sad story but she has a slangy loose writing style that reads easily and she can be very honest at times. She writes about alcohol in such luminous prose that you can feel the seduction. The drinks sound great! I must confess I was a little bored when she got sober and "spiritual" which happens inevitably. Coffee and eating canned frosting straight with a bunch of AA'ers is somehow not as appetizing. Oh well.

When You Reach Me

Almost forgot I read this. It's a a "middle reader "novel that everyone is raving about. When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead.  It was well done. I think Olivia will like it a year or so from now and  if the Kindle is not in a dump in New Jersey I can lend it to her. If she ever finishes Harry Potter 5-6-7 that is.

Bachelor Brother' Bed and Breakfast

Bachelor Brothers' is one of those cozy books you sometimes read in between other things. I had read it a long time ago and found it in a pile and decided to read it again. I read it again. Nothing has changed. It's about two brothers who own a Bed and Breakfast somewhere in Canada which caters to readers. It's a bit cute but fine in-between Proust and War and Peace. Or whatever it was I just read and was about to read.

A Gate on the Stairs

"The wrinkly recursiveness of her language seems lodged at the layer of consciousness itself, where Moore demands readers’ attention to the innate thingliness of words." Says Jonathan Lethem in the NYT's about The Gate in the Stairs by Lorrie Moore..... huh?

Anyway Lorrie Moore traditionally writes short stories and this probably was one once. However in bulking it up, detail after detail is piled on needlessly. She seems to have decided it needs to be an important book with larger themes so threw in---just to name a few---global warming, 9/11, racism, child abuse, the Iran Iraq war, terrorism, the food industry, etc etc. She has clever little opinions and bon mots on pretty much everything, usually smug, usually extraneous. Underneath it all, like a slim little toddler in a snowsuit, is a wisp of a story of a college girl who works as a nanny for parents of an adopted biracial girl. It must be the innate thingliness of words that I object to. Less thingliness please.

Don't Go Down that Road!

I know Cormac McCarthy is a spectacular writer. I read All the Pretty Horses and was very very impressed with the writing. However he writes in this kind of romanticized tough guy way that it's like some Clint Eastwood movie. (Like Pale Rider which was actually quite delicious in it's silent macho kind of way). However for my romance I prefer Jane Austen not a dystopic wasteland with small children present.

But The Road won a Pulitzer and I feel like everyone has read it and so I should too. So I bought it at the Book Sale and finally opened it up. So....as I rise and stand tottering in that cold autistic dark with my arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in my skull crank out their reckonings....as Cormac says....I realize I can't do it. My vestibular calculations cranked away and when I have to spend that much time unraveling a sentence and ...it's in English, I feel safe in putting the book down.

Sadly as you can see above in the photo my brief time on the paths of feral fire in the coagulate sands did affect my looks somewhat. But imagine what I would look like if I read the whole book....and be thankful.

Juliet Naked

I read Juliet Naked and liked it fine. No more or less than any other of his books and I am quite fond of Nick Hornby. It's about an aged reclusive rock star who releases an acoustic album of his greatest all time album 'Juliet' and  connects to the girlfriend of one of his biggest fans. Neither the boyfriend nor the aged rock star are particularly appealing and you spend the whole book hoping the girlfriend will dump them both and listen to the new Peter Doherty album instead.

The Thing Around Your Neck

These stories by the woman I call "that Nigerian writer" for obvious reasons are quite good. She writes very well and there are some very haunting images in them. I read her Half a Yellow Sun last winter in Mexico and liked that too. I would tell people about her but can't ever remember or pronounce her name to let them know to read her. Alas.

Kindle-cita

(Big news over the holidays was that Santa brought me a Kindle. So now you may have to endure various photos of Mommy's wittle Kindle-windle in many cute poses. )

I have one small gripe with the Kindle other than the enormous one that IT IS NOT A BOOK and that is: it has no backlighting and on a dark plane flight the Kindle is as dark as a book. So in the one slim instance where the Kindle might actually trounce the book it sadly falls short.

But on to what was on the Kindle's screen for some of the holidays. I read Juliet, Naked on it and Wolf's Hall.

Wolf's Hall was surprise for me. It was  historical fiction about Thomas Cromwell who for a time was Henry VIII's closest advisor. It was very engaging from the begining and the writing was very intimate and immediate without being romanticized. Hillary Mantel apparently was trying to put a better spin on Cromwell's character than history and the Cromwell she depicts is almost like a girl he's so sensitive and likable. I wonder about that since when I wiki-ed old Cromwell's ass (easy to do right from the Kindle btw) he was actually spending a lot of time boiling the heads of his enemies and putting them on spikes. Ah mere details in the way of the fiction!

She had a very odd use of pronouns, the very intimacy of the story with Cromwell called merely "he" backfires on her somewhat.  When there are many possible 'he's' in a scene and you get confused you wish she's call them by their actual names. Then suddenly she uses a 'we' and you're really confused.

But other than that it was a pretty solid read and  she quite enjoyed it.

Tracy Kidder

This was, as all of Tracy Kidder's work, very good. A young man, Deo, from Burundi escapes his war torn country and comes to America. He lives in Central Park for awhile and through sheer persistence, luck and intelligence ends up in med school. He meets Paul Farmer from Tracy Kidder's previous book Mountains Beyond Mountains and becomes involved in Partners for Health.
There are some very endearing stories of the immigrant experience tucked into a lot of tragic ones. One story was how Deo learned that you could bargain with the men who would fix the pay phones for immigrants so that they could call home. The first time he uses it it's $5 but sometimes he can bargain them down to $3. After learning that Deo goes down to the subway station and tries to bargain with the subway worker for the tokens. It doesn't work.
My only quibble about this book is that Tracy Kidder is so far away from this young man in culture, upbringing, economic status....everything, that all he can do is stand and marvel at him. Deo is still a mystery at the end. We get the story through the eyes of a 63 year old white intellectual who picks out the important bits for his story, it is not through Deo's eyes. But of course Deo probably can't write half as well as Tracy Kidder so I suppose I should not complain.