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.