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.