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.

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.