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!