Rules of Civility

Rules of Civility was written by someone named Amor Towles and it wasn't until the last page and the acknowledgments that I knew he was a man. On a Kindle you have no author photo to ponder. Since it's written in the voice of a woman I found it interesting that I didn't know one way or the other.

The Rules of Civility it refers to are those rules written by a young George Washington to himself which one of the characters tries to live by. It's a story of a young woman in Manhattan in1938 who starts out working in the secretarial pool and then slowly makes her way up the ladder both career wise and socially. The setting is the Manhattan of old black and white screwball comedies with a My Man Godfrey sort of vibe. The novel deals a lot with the role of fate in so much of our life. Certain seemingly minor choices lead to certain major outcomes and before you know it you're working here or married to that person you met that night you happened to walk into a bar.

The young woman, Katya, who now goes by Katie, lives in a rooming house with other women and becomes friends with Eve, they walk into a bar and meet a man named Tinker Grey who reshapes both of their lives in very different ways. Through him they move into the very rich trust fund set and go to glamorous parties. Both the women have their sights set on him and the author handles that tension quite well.

My only quibble with the book is that there are certain characters that are shunted off at some point when they no longer serve the narrative and you never know what really happens to them and then there is an endless trove of Dickies and Bitsy's and Bucky's who you can't tell apart and who never exist beyond their names. He writes well though and there is a real feel for the time and place that they're in.

The Rules of Civility by George Washington are also enclosed in the book and they are quite instructive. If nothing else I appreciate having learned about them. Quite handy.

The Sisters Brothers are Sissies

This was another Mann Booker Prize Short List and while it was perfectly adequate it did not shine. I am wondering what the Booker judges saw that I didn't. It's basically a Western in which two brothers named Sisters are hired killers searching for a mysterious man. There are some comic bits and some gruesome bits and some sad bits but nothing ever feels fully developed or fleshed out. I enjoyed it but the sum wasn't any greater than its parts.  Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty was better, that book tore out my heart and trampled all over it, The Sisters Brothers just poked feebly at me from behind a cottonwood tree.

Forty Year Old Classic

Soon to be rocketing to the top of the NYT's Best Sellers List. What they're saying about it:

"A unique book… . al-Azm sought to strip Arab thought of its belief in fate and folk tales and superstition… . He told his people the sort of truths that outsiders are too embarrassed to tell, even when they were themselves able to see these truths." — Fouad Ajami
The 1967 War — which led to the defeat of Syria, Jordan, and Egypt by Israel — felt like an unprecedented and unimaginable disaster for the Arab world at the time. For many, the easiest solution was to shift the blame and to ignore some of the glaring defects of Arab society.

Hailed as one of the foremost Arab intellectuals of recent decades, Sadik al-Azm was one of the few to challenge such a view in his seminal Self-Criticism After the Defeat. In it, he offered a penetrating analysis that probed deep into Arab society, and reasoned that Arabs had to embrace democracy, gender equality, and science to achieve progress.

Self-Criticism After the Defeat represents a milestone in modern Arab intellectual history. It marked a turning point in Arab discourse about society and politics on publication in 1968, and spawned other intellectual ventures into Arab self-criticism. This is the first translation of the work into English.

Author's Bio: Born in Damascus in 1934, Sadik al-Azm is professor emeritus of modern European philosophy at the University of Damascus, Syria. He earned his PhD (1961) from Yale University, and was visiting professor in the department of near Eastern studies at Princeton University until 2008.

Translators Bio: George Stergios is married to Gaye Gentes. 

Read more:
http://www.aljadid.com/content/40-year-old-classic-remains-influential-sadiq-jalal-al-azm%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%98-critique-religious-thought%E2%80%99

When I'm Not Blogging

 

When I am not blogging about what I read I am reading but not necessarily blogging. If there is a brief interlude it is usually because I am reading some gravy stained old library copy of some forgotten women author.  There is D.E. Stevenson (her accolytes call themselves Dessies), Elizabeth Goudge, Ann Bridge and no doubt many others. They are usually British, invariably cozy and totally forgettable. I often take out the same copy twice in my confusion over whether I have read it before. Then I notice the particular stain on page 38 and realize I have already read it... Nothing much bad happens and everything is all right in the end. It is my equivalent to a brief pause for a Station Identification Break.

The Sense of an Ending

Another Booker Prize nominee and the actual Booker Mann winner. This is the most obviously well written of the others I have read this year. It is such an English book. Very very crisp and clean story of an older man looking back on an episode in  his young adulthood. Compared to Pigeon English or Jamrach's Menagerie Julian Barnes writes in such a thoughtful, intellectual way, he sets out to examine the nature of history and memory and explores them through the narrative in this novella. The other two novels just sweep you away in a voice or an adventure and while they completely contain you and move you, it's your heart that reacts. Julian Barnes goes for the brain. Completely different organs.

So all of them are excellent but to say one is better than another is comparing apples and oranges.....hey wait, isn't there the Orange Prize? So all we need is an Apple Prize and we can scrap the Booker.

The Marriage Plot

I

It's seems as if lately I can only read books relating to my own situation. Jeffrey Eugenides obviously held off on publishing this until October 2011 just to get one more reader. The Marriage Plot is quite satisfying. Not hugely ambitious but just happy to go along telling a story of three bright young people graduating from Brown and going on with their lives. I cared about the characters and enjoyed their stories, nothing much happens but so what? Since the characters are in college in 1983, the year Eugenides graduated from Brown, Eugenides gets to return to all the courses he probably took and argue with all the  professors through his characters, with the clear eyes of a 50 year old. How much more satisfying could that be?

The Wedding Invitation

Hmm. This looks like a good read.

A Cheerful Day for a Wedding

Attracted by the cover and the title. It's another one of those 'lost and found' titles by women authors, in this case Julia Strachey. This reminds me of Ivy Compton-Burnett a bit. A brittle novella about the day of an unhappy wedding. Hopefully not prophetic for me.

And Now for Something Completely Different

http://www.nowness.com/day/2011/10/17/1640/spike-jonze-mourir-aupres-de-toi

This is a stop-motion video directed by Spike Jonze set in the Shakespeare and Co. bookstore in Paris.

The Comix

There is a book out by a woman, Kate Beaton, based on her website of comics, called Hark a Vagrant. It has been floating around on the periphery of my cultural vision and has just bobbed to surface in front of me as it were. The comics are all about literary and historical  figures. Here is her take on the Bronte Sisters. If Borders still existed down the street I would go at lunch and leaf through it...now I would have to order it from Amazon. Ah, these are strange times we live in.

Jamrach's Menagerie

Another Booker Shortlist. I really enjoyed it. Very unexpectedly satisfying story of a young boy, Jaffy Brown, growing up in the slums of London in the 1800's who links up with a purveyor of exotic animals, Mr. Jamrach. I thought the novel would be about the very Dickensian urchins running about the filthy streets until it suddenly veers off in another direction. When Jaffy 15 he goes to sea with his best friend, Tim, from the Menagerie to hunt for a dragon in the South Pacific on a whaling boat, the Lysander. Not quite a dragon but a sort of enormous very unpleasant reptile that no one has seen before.The rest is too exciting, heartbreaking and enthralling to share.

Reading a little about the book I found out that there was a real Mr. Jamrach who supplied exotic animals to P.T. Barnum and other collectors. The story of what happens on the ship was real also and the dragon it turns out was a Komodo Dragon.

I am now conflicted about the Booker. Jamrach's Managerie or Pigeon English? Impossible to say. Just not Snowdrops! 

Blood, Bones and Butter

Gabrielle Hamilton can apparently both cook and write. I ate at Prune one birthday and loved it. Now I have read her memoir of becoming the person who she is today and quite like that too. She writes in a matter-of-fact fresh way that is easy to read (easy to digest?). Some of her metaphors actually work: she talks about forgiving her mother after 20 years " the oppressive heavy wet burden of snow slides off the roof of my soul in one giant thawing chunk and suddenly I feel clear, light and permissive."

Surprisingly, although she is very honest and forthcoming in many ways, she is always somewhat guarded about her inner motivations. Her shift from a 'radical feminist' to a mother of two boys with a male Italian doctor is unexamined, it just suddenly is. But she seems genuine, like the memoir of Patti Smith, Just Kids, there is little pretension,only authentic emotion and drive.

Pigeon English

Continuing my Booker Short List Quest I read Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman which was excellent. It's a first time novel written in the voice of an 11 year old boy from Ghana living in the projects of London with his mother and sister. His father and younger sister are still saving the money to come to England. The boy Harrison and his friend Dean decide to solve a mystery of a murdered boy who Harrison knew vaguely. His voice is so true: exuberant, breathless and open like only an 11 year old can be. I fell in love. 

There is a slightly annoying sort of omniscient narrator voice in italics but I decided to skip those bits. So this was a new handy rule to be filed away with other rules: I don't read dream sequences, I don't read books written in dialect, I won't read anything described as lyrical and now I don't read passages in italics purporting to be the voice of a pigeon. But this is minor quibble in an otherwise heartrending and fantastic book.

And the Booker goes to.......Pigeon English!

Snowdrops

The oddest books seem to make the Booker Shortlist lately. Snowdrops by A.D. Miller is no exception. It is a lightweight 'thriller' but with heavy weight reviews " a chilling first novel about the slide from relative innocence into amorality." "a nuanced character study". 

It's the classic tale of a  self-deluding fairly innocent man being duped by Russian girls. A British banker who is living in Moscow slowly gets entangled with two very lovely Russian girls who are obviously scheming. The tension I suppose is in the con---you're not sure what they're up to but you know it's something. The conceit of the story is that it is supposedly written later when this man is back in London and as a way of confessing his past to his future wife. That premise is unnecessary and weakens the whole book. What idiot would tell this whole sorry story to his future wife? 

And what idiot would put this book on the Shortlist?

Solar

I didn't read this when it came out because it got poor reviews but it actually was quite fun. It's the story of a rather unlikeable academic who won the Nobel Prize for Physics back in his youth and has been coasting along on his laurels ever since. He is now trying to make money out of the energy crisis. He's been married 5 times and is generally a huge failure. The book pushes him from crisis to crisis until he is spiraling out of control. The tone and action is reminiscent of Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim, that book by Michael Frayn, Headlong, or something by David Lodge. Considering that Ian McEwan lives in loftier literary circles than these writers maybe this isn't such a great book, but other than a bit of a drag at the end, I really enjoyed it.

D. E. Stevenson

This is chick-lit before there were even Chicks. These are very cozy 1930's novels about young women who can always be perked up by buying a new hat and frock. These are books where women tell their fiancee's they have to leave them to nurse dying uncles in the wilds of Scotland or else they wouldn't be "Christian". These are novels where everyone has servants and dresses for dinner. No one sleeps together and one heroine is appalled that she let someone kiss her that she wasn't really serious about. These are novels where the mentally challenged are still called Congenital Idiots. These are books that you get gravy stained from the library with multiple copies in large print. No one checks them out anymore and I have a feeling they will end up at the knackers pretty soon so am reading them all at a great rate, gravy stains and all.

The Woman In White

This was so much fun. Wilkie Collins is fantastic. There are impossible circumstances after improbable coincidences all piled on top of each other and they don't bother you, you just go along with it. Whenever the plot needs a woman to do an unlikely thing he has her faint away and take to her bed so they can lug the bed (carefully constructed) around to suit the plot...when she needs some more time spent passively he gives her typhoid! An immensely fat villain Count Fosco, scampers around on his little fat feet with his pet caged birds and mice giving them little kisses and talking baby talk to them while stills managing to somehow be mesmerizing, evil and sexy in a very un-Victorian sort of way.
My only quibble is that of the 21rst century----Marian, the most dynamic fearless heroine is left without a worthy mate---she has an attraction to the bad boy Count Fosco but other than that she seems doomed to wait on the children of the other characters since they 'couldn't possibly spare her'. Too bad. There needs to be a sequel where Marian finds her match and he isn't 60 years old crammed into too small waistcoats!

Miss Hargreaves

This was a fun little book. A hapless bored hero carelessly invents an elderly spinster Miss Hargreaves who mysteriously becomes real and starts to thwart him. It's like P.G. Woodehouse only not as arch, like Lucky Jim but more old fashioned. Pleasant enough.

A Sobering Message

Effi Briest

I read Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane a few weeks ago in a fit of seriousness. I imagined it a sort of German Madame Bovary but it lacked the immediacy of Bovary for me. But it may have been the translation which although they rave about on the back jacket as "clear and modern"  to me was jarring. Phrases like "Effi was not for reheated leftovers; fresh dishes were what she longed for, variety." conjure up images of microwaves and saran wrap which I imagine were not prevalent in 1895. So it was like one of those classics were they rework the language to appeal to a young audiences. Poor Effi, she should have stuck with the leftovers.

BOOK SALE!!!!!

Big Book sale at the Abbot Public Library in Marblehead this weekend. I sort books one night a week and our coffers are overflowing. (It's amazing that they let me sort, it's like giving an alcoholic the keys to a bar and asking them to go count the bottles.) 
Come one come all! Lets get drunk on books!

Just Kids

I enjoyed this book. In Just Kids Patty Smith writes about her slow meandering way towards success and her intimate friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe. You watch her and Mapplethorpe move from hippy kids sleeping on people's floors to dedicated artists who work endlessly trying to find expression. I was apprehensive that her writing would be all pretentious and  'lyrical', and I refuse to read 'lyrical' writing, but it was not bad, it was clean and quiet. Her voice is genuine and unaffected. She seems truly enthusiastic about the names she drops and any quirkiness appears real not put on. Oh my god---she might actually be the real thing! An artist.

Nothing Daunted

Nothing Daunted but nothing interesting either. It is a cool premise of two society women in the very early 1900's who graduate from college and then bored with their confined lives head off to Colorado to teach in a one room schoolhouse and---oh yes---to find husbands too. It's written by a New Yorker editor so the writing is clean and crisp with a full complement of appropriately placed commas, but not much feeling. The women aren't remarkable enough to be compelling as history so it's just a nice sweet story without the strength of other pioneer tales like the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. It might have been better if it was dealt with as a story not history.

Mockingbird

Mockingbird is a small YA novel with a lot of topics crammed into it. It's written in the voice of a young girl with Asperger's syndrome whose mother died plus her brother was just shot in a Columbine type shooting. That's a lot of stuff going on. It's an earnest attempt to show how literal and un-empathetic people can be who suffer from the disease. But it is a tad too earnest and fraught with MESSAGES.  If I were a Young Adult I would feel condescended to.  It has a layer of smarminess that is off putting.

The Curious Incident of a Dog in the Night told the autism story much better. Read That Not This.

Ann Patchett

I love Ann Patchett. She writes so well, her writing never intrudes, it seems completely effortless. So this book was not bad it just wasn't great. It's the story of a woman research scientist who goes down to the Amazon jungles to find a co-worker who died under the supervision of a slightly mad scientist who is working on developing a top secret potential fertility drug from a bark that the tribal women eat every day that causes them to be fertile into their 60's. 
For some reason the story or the characters never grabbed me. The main character always felt a bit remote, she was in a relationship that didn't make much sense other than for narrative purposes and so I never cared deeply about her angst. The ending was neat with a few very nice touches. After the surprising tacked on stinker of an ending in Bel Canto she owed us something though. I even shed a few tears but overall it was not her best work.

Where Have I Been? Pray tell.

I was in Heyerland. I was taking an extended break from the literary world and re-reading all my old Georgette Heyer's quite happily.Puce gowns, gleaming Hessian boots and routs. Sigh. I have returned to the real world though and will be blogging accordingly.

Meg Wolitzer Defies Logic

I read a short piece recently that said that Jennifer Egan was reading Meg Wolitzer's The Uncoupling and liking it very much. Using my High School Logic background I concluded that since I liked Jennifer Egan I would tend to like Meg Wollitzer. Since Logic was the only form of Mathematics I ever truly enjoyed or got an A in I was shocked to discover that my conclusion was faulty. I do not like Meg Wolitzer, or more precisely, her book. Of course this was before I partially read the Invisible Circus by Jennifer Egan that I decided I did not like either so maybe I will not have to give back my A. Just give up on those two.

Betrayed by Tessa Hadley, the Novelist

Shock! I didn't like The Master Bedroom by Tessa Hadley----I read and read and never actually could care about any of the characters. Her short stories are perfect gems but she can not sustain a whole novel, if this is any indication. It dragged on and on. I feel betrayed.

Another betrayal: I also read most of Jennifer Egan's Invisible Circus and was uninterested throughout. That was her first novel I believe. 

I am a broken woman.

Don't Say Her Name

The Wave, the piece Francisco Goldman wrote about his much younger Mexican wife Aura Estrada's death in a bodysurfing accident in Mexico, was a small masterpiece. It was powerful and mysterious enough that I decided to buy the book, Say Her Name. The short piece was excerpted from the book and I was left wanting to know more. Alas, now I do know more, and I rather I didn't.

Aura comes across as vain, pretentious and needy. She marries Goldman, she makes him dye his hair for the over the top wedding while all the time protesting she'd rather get married at City Hall, she belittles him constantly . Goldman comes across as pathetically and foolishly besotted by her. They were only married for two years, together for four, and you know that she would have left him sooner rather than later for someone less slavishly adoring and much younger. She doesn't let him drop her off at graduate school because she doesn't want the other students to see she is with such an old man. She regularly tells him how ugly he is "Que feo estas." and how lucky he is to have her. He innocently finds this charming.

He even includes her dreadful writing fragments to show how 'wonderful' she really was. In his quest to keep her he runs up enormous credit card debt while he finds after her death that she had squirreled away quite a sizable separate savings account on her own. Just when you start feeling sorry for him in his widower status though (he has an altar in their apartment to her with her wedding dress still hanging there!) he starts sleeping with all her old friends and you lose sympathy. He whines and wallows in his grief and at some point you want to say "Have some dignity!'.

I will concede that he is very honest in his writing but it did not improve in an elongated book form. If he had just left it to the size of The Wave he would have kept his dignity and hers, as it is he did both himself and Aura a disservice by being so honest. Best not say her name anymore.

Something About a Herring

This is another Flavia de Luce mystery. Not great but quite adequate. I read it and then I was not reading it.  End of story.

My Secret Weapon

What do I owe my recent surge in reading level to? How did I get through so many books in the last few months? The answer is simple, my new found love, my bus. One hour and 15 minutes there and one hour and 15 minutes back.....

The Emerald Atlas

In an effort to find something to replace Olivia's mourning for Philip Pullman's Dark Materials  and her dismissiveness of anything not the Golden Compass I have been trying to tempt her with other stories. This book is on a quest, as is every other current kid's book; a Quest To Be The Next Harry Potter. While it falls short of this noble goal, it's ok, but slightly hollow.

The obligatory magical world does not feel fully realized as HP or the Golden Compass. It's as if the waterfall you see them jumping over in the cover above is a green screen and all the action takes place in a Hollywood stage lot. But who knows, she might like it when she stops taking the quiz online to find out what animal form her daemon would take. Apparently hers is a pinemartin and mine is a hummingbird.....ahhh...she's right! Nothing beats the Golden Compass!

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

This was a quick read and quite engaging. It's the story of some eternally replicating cancer cells harvested from a poor black woman called Henrietta Lacks who was dying of cancer. It raises interesting ethical questions about our ownership of our bodies,tissues, organs, cells. I don't think there are any easy answers. The children of Henrietta Lacks whose cells were used in cures for multiple diseases are poor and health insurance-less,  incapable of paying for any of the medicines or treatments that their mother's cells helped discover. But the author also questions what if those cells had come with informed consent, the red tape and complications of using them would have completely halted most of the research. Should her cells be like music with royalties paid each time someone plays a song? No easy answers but some good questions.

Tennis, Anyone?

Abraham Verghese has two passions: being an internist and playing tennis. The Tennis Partner combines both with some other addictions thrown in. This is a memoir of a younger intern who Verghese befriends in El Paso, Texas. The young man, David Smith, is a former tennis pro and it awakens in Verghese all his inner tennis nerdiness. He keeps journals of every play and tip he's ever received. They begin to play together whenever possible. The book is also about Verghese's failed marriage and he and his wife's attempts to protect their children from any hurt or pain. But primarily it is the story of Smith's addiction and struggles with cocaine which Verghese slowly learns about.

The book reminded me of Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty about her difficult friendship with Lucy Grealey, where at the end of the book you're not so enamoured with the self centered selfish Lucy but with Patchett. David Smith is pretty uninteresting but Verghese is so excited by the fact that he was once a pro that he ignores all his other flaws. And you get so carried away by Verghese's enthusiasm for both tennis and medicine that you don't mind David tagging along.

Look at Me

I'm on a Jennifer Egan bender, as must be the rest of America, since she just won the Pullitzer Prize for A Visit from the Goon Squad. This is more of a novel than the loose interwoven stories of Goon Squad. It's about a fashion model who is in a terrble car accident and has major plastic surgery done to her face and a young adolescent girl living in a small town who is loosely connected to her. This is quite good, as all her writing seems to be.

Atkinson,Kate

I love Kate Atkinson and this wasn't bad but it wasn't great. She has this ability to throw multiple narrative balls in the air and juggle them all sucessfully, but this time it just didn't seem to work as well. Jackson Brodie was back but just wandering around aimlessly with some new characters that I can't even remember now. Not the cause for celebration it should have been.

Cutting for Stone

Verghese can tell a story better than anyone. It is a big old fashioned story of twins born to a British surgeon and an Indian nun in Ethiopia. It reminds me of Rohinton's Mistry's A Fine Balance, the characters pulling at your heartstrings, although without as much squalor.

Verghese is actually a doctor and while reading the book I feel like he had secretly operated on me, removed my heart and held it in his hands throughout, it's one of those books where they hold you prisoner, he had my heart in his hands until the very end where he put it back in and sadly stitched up the opening as I put the book down. As a doctor too he relished some of the medical information that I could have done without but other than that he can really write a good story.

I Think---No I Know---I Didn't Love This

I Think I Love You was about a 12 year old Welsh fan of David Cassidy and a man who writes in the voice of David Cassidy for the fanzine. The biggest disappointment in the book is apparently that the stuff in the fanzine's was not true, David Cassidy's favorite color was NOT BROWN. The biggest thing about this novelist is that she is married to Anthony Lane. How can she actually allow him to read her stuff. I blush to think of it.

Visit From the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan's Visit from the Goon Squad was very very good. It was a delight from start to finish...vivid characters and situations all weaving in and out of different stories. Close up you could take each story separately and then step back and see it as a cohesive whole. Time was fluid and dizzying. You're in the not so distant future when toddlers are addicted to their 'starfishes', which are some sort of handheld device that eerily sounds like an Iphone a few years from now, and then back in the 1970's listening to the start of punk in the backseat of a car.


The story is vaguely about the music scene and a few recurring characters who play a part in it. Structurally it reminded us (unofficial MV bookgroup pick)of Olive Kittredge or the Imperfectionists by Tim Rackman. I hope however that this does not spawn a whole series of the 'lots of short stories crammed together to make a novel' genre. It worked for them but I can see it not working for others.

I have gotten a couple more of her books to check up on her ouevre but if this is any indication she deserves all the prizes Jonathan Frantzen's novel didn't get.

The Human Stink

This was a real dog. Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life is supposedly  "a charming and witty memoir of how we live now". It is not. It's conceit is that it's a memoir where the author says from the onset that nothing really bad has ever happened to her and it is an 'encyclopedia' of themes of ordinariness. What a waste of paper and ink. Perhaps nothing bad ever happened to her but I think I now qualify for a memoir based on the horrors inflicted by having read hers. Her conceit is that she thinks she has found beauty in banality....sadly she has only found banality. Do not read this book.

The Human Stain

The blurb on the front of the book says "In American literature today, there's Philip Roth, and then there's everybody else." It's true. He is nothing short of serious at all times and thought provoking. In one page he can create a character more vivid than someone you've known for years, he does it with just a rush of short sentences detailing their life history, hitting on the essence of the person before you turn the page. But he is so angry and bitter. And this particular book The Human Stain has a hard time containing that anger. It's written in the time of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal and his rants at times just seem like..... rants.

The story is of a classics professor, Coleman Silk, at a small New England college who just happens to be passing as a Jew when he is really a very light skinned black. (Less ludicrous in the book than when played by Anthony (Whitest Man on the Planet) Hopkins in the movie.) He has an affair with a much younger woman who is the illiterate janitor (Nicole Kidman!) at the college from which he is ostracized and forced to retire after being accused of racism by a black student. Roth is mad and he takes it out on his characters...poor Nathan Zuckerman is outed as incontinent and impotent, having to wear little cotton pads in his underwear to soak up the urine. It stinks being human in Roth's world.

But notwithstanding the stain in my mind of the image of Anthony Hopkins superimposed on Coleman Silk, it is a good book. Not his best book, but it is Phillip Roth after all, not everybody else, and we should pay attention.

Swamplandia!

This was getting rapturous previews. Like the second coming of Freedom. So I felt compelled to get it at the library and be among the first to read it. It started off well, the odd Bigtree family own and work on a Florida island Alligator Wrestling Theme Park . A new and shiny mainland theme park threatens their way of life. The mother dies, the father and son go off separately to the mainland. The 12 year old narrator and her 16 year old sister stay behind. It starts out not bad, it rises to the level of Geek Love in ways but then towards the ending it goes really bad. Like the author suddenly couldn't figure out what to do and picked an ending out of a variety of tired cliches. Too bad, she had me going for awhile.

Tessa Hadley

She is one of those writers I forget about. I read her stories in The New Yorker and am blown away and then forget her. But she actually writes novels and there are books of her short stories...who knew? I purchased one of these books Sunstroke, and other Stories  and was once more---blown away. 

In just one story she can move you through so many emotions that you feel like you've been spun around and around until you're dizzy. She breaks your heart and then picks it up and glues it back together for you. 

My particular favorite in this collection is Buckets of Blood. Two sisters, in a family of nine children, bond together in their revulsion for their mother; "she was fearless in the mornings  about stalking around the house in her ancient baggy underwear, big pants and maternity bra, chasing the little ones to get them dressed, her older children fled the sight of her." The older sister is off in college and her younger sister goes to visit for a week. Buckets of blood ensue.

As good as Alice Munro. I'll say no more.

Monica Dickens

A very lovely edition of an out of an print writer, Monica Dickens. It's a coming of age story of a young girl that is mostly forgettable and belongs in a certain time and place. Not bad, just filler. When I was young I had read her children's books about a hippyish family with lots of animals . I think they were called World's End. They had a monkey and the enviable absent parents that all great children's literature needs. No hippies and no monkeys in Mariana. She could have used them.

The Emperor of All Maladies

I am so impressed with myself that I actually read this. It's a lot more serious than I am used to and at times a lot more technical than I could manage. But I made it. (Words will not do justice to the joy I experienced when I realized the last 100 pages were footnotes!) 

It's described as a biography of cancer. In the beginning cancer is attributed to black bile and related to the humors, people just die. Eventually someone comes up with the idea to cut out the cancers. It evolves to the point that breast cancer was treated solely with radical mascectomies “an extraordinarily morbid, disfiguring procedure in which surgeons removed the breast, the pectoral muscles, the axillary nodes, the chest wall and occasionally the ribs, parts of the sternum, the clavicle and the lymph nodes inside the chest.”. Ouch.

Sadly the more people progress in knowing about cancer the harder it was for me to follow so I can not cite any of the subsequent genetic and chemical breakthroughs that happened with much authority. Things get better though.

He is a very earnest writer, undoubtedly an excellent doctor and sounds like a very decent human being. Certain passages can bring tears to your eyes. He writes about cancer being a foreign country. “But surely,” he writes, “it was the most sublime moment of my clinical life to have watched that voyage in reverse, to encounter men and women returning from that strange country— to see them so very close, ­clambering back.”

Barbara Vine

It is odd that I read two mysteries in a row but---there it is---it's exactly what I just did. Although come to think of it ----this was not a mystery. It was more of a psychological  thriller type of thing, although low on thrills and high on psyche. Barbara Vine is a very good writer but to me it just seems like you read it until it's over and then you read something else. It's an awful lot of writing and foreshadowing and examining of motives and thoughts and then it's over.

The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

I'll never remember the name of this book but it's the second in the series that starts with The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. It's a mystery with an 11 year old girl, Flavia De Luce, as the detective. It's fun although the clues are at the heavy handed level of an 11 year old. A minor character is introduced so that they can conveniently hand Flavia a whistle that will go around unmentioned in her pocket until the very moment when she reaches a crisis and needs to blow it. Flavia is conveniently right there when anything happens every time. So the mystery is like a beginners level Soduku. Minimal strain (I speak as an expert since the only Soduku's I have ever solved are the easy ones). The characters are thankfully sophisticated though and it is a fun light read.

Reading Nabokov in Marblehead

Ah yes...reading Nabokov. As I so often do. This is a great book, very silly and playful about a Russian man, Pnin, who teaches Russian language at a New England college. His English is terrible, he is so very Russian: entitled, emotional and tender. Comic and poignant at the same time.(Pnoignant!) Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim and Mister Magoo owe him a literary debt.

It's a small quiet book. Like a Philip Larkin character but much more joyous. His writing is so fresh. Pnin's teeth are all pulled: "His tongue, a fat sleek seal, used to flop and slide so happily among the familiar rocks, checking the contours of a battered but stills secure kingdom, plunging from cave to cove, climbing this jag, nuzzling that notch, finding a shred of sweet seaweed in the same old cleft; but now not a landmark remained, and all there existed was a great dark wound, a terra icognita of gums which dread and disgust forbade one to investigate." No one else writes that well. I either have to have my teeth pulled or read Lolita finally.

I think I'll read Lolita.

The Possessed

This is one of those books I stumbled on to and really enjoyed. It's a memoir without the author really dwelling on herself or her personal story. It is what it sets out to be: a story about the authors obsession with Russian literature, not a veiled attempt to talk about herself. 

The author gets a PhD in Russian Literature. By rights, Elif Batuman, as a first generation Turkish American should be working with Turkish literature but as she points out nobody reads Turkish literature so why should she? Take that Orhan! Her research, writing, grants and conferences take her to various Russian locations and she cleverly describes the people she meets and the literature she is reading.
 
After some formative early experiences of my own  sparring over whether peanut butter counted as a protein while dealing with Russians at a Food Pantry, any remaining regrets I had about not giving them Spam were swept away by her landladies mistreatment of her and her boyfriend while Ms. Batuman was researching the Uzbek language. Their landlady gave them jam with ants and had them use an outhouse while she and her family used the indoor toilet and ate the un-infested  jam. Then she pouted and removed all the furniture from their room when an extra $100 of the grant money wasn't handed to her at the end of the trip and went to the poorly paid teachers who tried to teach Ms. Batuman Uzbek. No spam for them!
 
So my only regret is that I have not read enough Russian literature to really keep up with all her references.Other than that, quite a good book.

Girl With the Dragon Tatoo

OK. I succumbed like the rest of America and read this too. It was OK. He writes adequately but it is nothing important. Some of the characters were interesting and the disappeared girl investigation bit was exciting but it reminded me of Anna Karenina where you think once Anna throws herself under the train it's over and then it goes on for chapter after chapter about other people that you never were interested in---- before the book ends. Girl with the Dragon Tattoo had a very compelling mystery and once the mystery was solved it should have been over but then he launches into quite a few more chapters about a very dull plot line that no one even cared about. Tolstoy we forgive...Stieg Larsson....maybe not?