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.