A Life of Reading Words
DATE: 1/6/26
Challenge Titles Finished (Totals To Date):
Titles Finished: Totals for 2025:
All titles left to go for Challenge: 3,540
Next count: 1/1/27
Thom, James Alexander. From Sea to Shining Sea. Ballantine Books, 1984.
Reason read: August is Friendship month and there is no doubt Lewis and Clark were friends. However, From Sea to Shining Sea is less about the relationship between the two adventurers and more about the entire Clark family.
What a violent time the late 1700s were for fledging America. Battling Native Americans and British soldiers simultaneously. It is as if James Alexander Thom lived in these brutal times in a previous life. His attention to every detail is astonishing. From chamber pots to fashion, mannerisms and foodstuff, real and imagined characters; it is all picture perfect. Each character is fully realized to the point you feel as if you are living beside them at every moment. Was is another character drawn in excellence. It becomes clear that was is not noble; it is not glorious or heroic. War is the explosion of blood and the shattering of bone.
From Sea To Shining Sea tells the story of the tight-knit Clark family from birth to death. Each member of the family receives ample page space to create biographies for all.
Confessional: it took so long to get to the “Lewis and Clark” part of the story that I started to get impatient. William Clark does not meet Meriwether Lewis until page 573. The expedition does not start until another thirty or so pages. On page 616 Discovery finally departs from Camp Wood.
Personal connection: Thom mentions Captain John Smith in the early pages of From Sea to Shining Sea. Captain John Smith is credited with being the first white man to settle on my island. Of course, there were people already there, but the history books ignore that elephant-in-the-room detail.
Author fact: James Alexander Thom was a U.S. Marine, a newspaper and magazine editor, a freelance writer, and a professor.
Book trivia: From Sea to Shining Sea is over 900 pages long. I had to take this behemoth to work to read on my lunch break as well as before breakfast and at night. Phew!
Music: “Betsy Kiss My Lips,” “A Patriot Song,” “Barbara Allen,” “Hang on Till Morning,” “The Hog’s Heart,” “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” “Johnny Has Gone for A-Soldier,” “Katy Cruel,” “The Lawyer Outwitted,” “The Quaker’s Wooing,” “The Spoiling o’ Katy Morah,” “Yankee Doodle,”
BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Lewis and Clark: Adventurers Extraordinaire” (p 136).
Graves, Robert. Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina. Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, Inc. 1935.
Reason read: to finish the series started with I, Claudius.
Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus has come a long way from the weak and stuttering fool in I, Claudius. After the murder of his cousin, Caligula, Claudius is now the new emperor at fifty years old. He still is a cripple, but has gained a wisdom from carefully watching those who went before him. He creates safeguards against perceived assassination attempts. He refrains from doing anything that would make the ghosts of his family disapprove. Despite all this, and if you know the story, you know what happens to dear Claudius in the end.
Even though Claudius is deeply in love with his seventeen year old wife Messalina, she does not factor much in the beginning of the story. The life of Harold Agrippa is more fully examined than Messalina’s. Towards the middle of the tale, Messalina reveals a devious side. She encourages Claudius to have an open marriage, as long as the other women do not outrank her. Messalina begins to emerge as a strong power player in Claudius’s life, politically and emotionally. Towards the end of the tale the moral of the story is love weaves a tangled web.
Quote I loved, “I detest forensic oratory” (p 123).
Author fact: I already told you about the connection to Natalie Merchant. Graves also wrote Goodbye to All That which I have already read. Claudius the God marks the end of my time with Mr. Graves.
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “The Classical World” (p 60).
Lim, Shirley Geok-Lin. Among the White Moon Faces: an Asian-American Memoir of Homelands. The Feminist Press, 1996.
Reason read: Merdeka Day is in August. In 1957 the Federation of Malaya received its independence and became a sovereign state. Read in honor of that event.
Lim begins her memoir with the introspective commentary on her sense of self – the name with which she most identifies, but ends the introduction by saying she found her identity wrapped up in the women who shaped her entire life. She did not have an easy childhood. She lacked women role models to teach her how to be feminine. Her first time wearing a bra reminded me of my own foray into adult garments.
Confessional: I had a hard time reading Among the White Moon Faces. Lim had a tug of war with chronology; going back and forth in time. One minute Lim is making excuses for the Hokkien language, the next she is describing Ah Chan, their servant. Next, Lim has memories of her mother’s appearance but moves quickly to stories of her grandfather or the Tan Family. All along she interrupts herself to ask questions we as readers cannot answer.
Despite the leapfrogging of the timeline, I appreciated Lim’s honesty. Growing up, she was no angel. She admitted to changing grades on a report card and lying about where she was on Friday nights. As the story progressed I lost track of Lim’s age when her father and a nurse scrubbed her body clean. No one had ever taught her her to clean…anything.
Throughout Among the White Moon Faces Lim struggles with abandonment. Her mother left the family early on. Father would bring his dates home and ignore his children. Interspersed in this honest narrative Lim makes commentaries on British colonialism and American waste. She steps away from her memories to voice her opinions about corrupt cultures.
By the end of Among the White Moon Faces I admired Lim for her determination to make something of herself in a very competitive academic society.
Line I liked a lot, “Nurturing is a human act that overleaps categories, but is not free of history” (p 67), and “There were more ways to be a poet than sit still beneath his judgment” (p 144).
Author fact: Geok-Lin also wrote Joss and Gold which I am scheduled to read at some point.
Book trivia: there is a small collection of black and white photographs in Among the White Moon Faces. There are mostly of Shirley as a child.
Music, “A Summer Place,” “Red Sails in the Sunset,” Elvis Presley, Chubby Checker, “Sixteen Candles,” “Strangers in the Night,” “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head,” “Jolly Miller,” “O Susanna,” “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain,” James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” and “You’ve Got a Friend,” “On Top of Old Smoky,” Beatles, “Oh Rosemarie, I Love You So, I’m Always Dreaming of You,” “Mockingbird’s Song,” Everly Brothers, Ali Akbar Khan, Hawaiian Wedding Song, Pat Boone’s “April Love,” “Ye Banks and Braes of Bonne Doon,” “The Minstrel Boy,” and Bill Haley and His Comets.
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called simply, “Malaysia” (p 40).
Horne, Alistair. Age of Napoleon. Modern Library, 2004.
Reason read: Napoleon was born on August 15th. Read in his honor.
After already covering Napoleon’s military career in Master of Europe and How Far From Austerlitz, Alistair Horne felt he could concentrate on writing a book about Napoleon’s contributions to French society above and beyond his military career (although that is not left out of the story). Architecture (the construction of the Quai d’Orsay and rescuing Paris’s Sorbonne University), society (encouraging freedom of religion by restoring the relationship with the Vatican and restoring the sanctity of marriage after the Revolution), art, and even the renumbering of streets. Napoleon liked the finer things in life, but could turn on a dime and have little tolerance for those individuals making his beautiful things come to life. Even his wife Josephine was fired from the job of being his wife because she couldn’t produce an heir fast enough.
Horne simultaneously looks future forward as well as historically back to tell Napoleon’s story. He reminds his audience more than once that Napoleon was “no Hitler” and he makes multiple comparisons to World War II. Yet, for all of Napoleon’s military shortcomings, Horne is quick to point out, his legacy was that he was instrumental in creating important and lasting social equalities.
As an aside, I couldn’t help buy think of Dermot Kennedy’s line, “his eyes lit up with all the power” when reading Age of Napoleon. Napoleon was touted as being a hands-on leader. These days, I think his subjects would call him a micromanager or deranged. Just the fact he would ban plays if he didn’t care for them shows his ego.
Author fact: Is it any wonder that Alistair Horne is a British historian? Of course he is.
Book trivia: Age of Napoleon is a quick read, less that 200 pages.
Music: Beethoven’s Fidelo, Te Deum, Chopin, Edith Pilaf, and Le Triomphe de Tra Jan opera.
BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “The Complex Napoleon” (p 53).
Nordan, Lewis. Lightning Song. Algonquin Books, 1997.
Reason read: Nordan’s birth month is in August.
The crackling electricity of doing something sneaky can be thrilling to a boy coming of age. Lightning Song begins with twelve year old Leroy Dearman, lost in complete innocence while furtively studying naked woman in the pages of a glossy Playboy magazine. Nordan must have tapped into his own boyhood innocence, because he describes Leroy’s naive thoughts perfectly as he stares at the smiling women.
Leroy is a sheltered boy, growing up on an llama farm in rural Mississippi with his parents and two younger sisters. He confronts adult things: naked women, his mother’s coy and giddy behavior around his uncle, and the creepy death of his grandfather in the attic. Lightning Song only becomes more bizarre as you read on: to name a few: the New Couple’s oddity, Leroy’s mother’s obsession with a kidnapped prime minister, Leroy’s sister and her ferocious courage (confessional: my favorite act of bravery was when she was not afraid to take her father’s withered hand).
The lightning is another character in Lightning Song. It creates tension and an air of danger. It is witness to illicit behaviors and illuminates dark secrets.
Favorite line, “He longed to be his father’s son” (p 122).
Author fact: as there is a whole chapter for Lewis Nordan in Book Lust, I am reading a few. Eight to be exact. I have finished three so far.
Book trivia: this could have been a movie.
Music: Elvis Presley, “Dixie,” “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” and “Are You From Dixie?”
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter “Lewis Nordan: Too Good To Miss” (p 172).
Michaels, Barbara. Shattered Silk. Atheneum, 1986.
Reason read: Michaels passed away in the month of August. Read in her memory.
Shattered Silk begins with such a benign plot I questioned the seriousness of including it in a More Book Lust chapter called “Girl Guides, Or It’s a Dark and Stormy Night…” (p 99). Karen Nevitt, soon to be divorced, has sought refuge at her aunt and uncle’s home in Georgetown, Washington D.C. under the auspicious of housesitting and dog watching. This is a return to her college roots, complete with old frienemies and an old boyfriend with whom a relationship ended badly. What originated as an escape from a bad marriage turns into a business venture when a family friend urges Karen to start a vintage clothing shop. That’s when the trouble starts. Karen experiences harassing behavior from an unknown person, but no one knows why. The sad thing is, I honestly did not really care to know the reason. Karen’s personality was such that I did not root for her either way. She wasn’t a likeable or believable character. She was just meh. All of the characters were just blah. I didn’t believe them. Why would a cop buy a house for a woman’s business before even asking her?
I will say this about reading Shattered Silk: I know more about taking care of various fabrics than I ever cared to. Even though Michaels introduces Karen as not knowing much about fine fabrics, Karen brings herself up to an expert in record time. Readers will learn about designers, textiles, and even receive fashion tips.
I am always curious about the relationships people have with one another. Exactly who is Karen to Jill and vice versa. What Michaels writes, “They parted with mutually insincere expressions of affection” (p 24), I had to wonder.
Personal connection: When Michaels was describing Karen’s relationship with her mother she could have been describing mine. A mother who asks what you did wrong when you share that a serious relationship is coming to an end. Failure is on you o matter what happened.
Author fact: Peter Mertz’s photograph of Barbara Michaels has her looking like a character straight out of a Victorian romance; big hat, fuzzy cat and all.
Book trivia: this could have been a movie.
BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter with the long title, “Girl Guides, Or It’s a Dark and Stormy Night, Good Thing You Have a Flashlight” (p 99). As an aside, Shattered Silk is the first book I am reading for this chapter. Believe it or not, after ten years of this Challenge there are still some chapters I haven’t touched.
Matthews, Sebastian. In My Father’s Footsteps. W.W. Norton & Company, 2004
Reason read: Matthews was born in August. Read in his honor.
How do you pay homage to a person who repeatedly broke your heart and let you down as a child; a good guy with harmful tendencies in adulthood? Sebastian Matthews, by turns loved and looked to respect his father. From an early age, father and son had a complicated relationship. When William Matthews died of a heart attack at just 55 it was a shock, but no one was surprised. A womanizer, a drinker, and a smoker (and maybe a midnight toker), Matthews senior was a force to be reckoned with. In My Father’s Footsteps is aptly named for Sebastian followed closely behind his father: a lifelong jazz enthusiast, becoming a writer, and poet unable to commit to any relationship for more than a few dates. Deeply buried resentments over the divorce of his parents; standing in the shadow of his father’s brilliance as a poet and professor; trying to understand the complexity of his inheritance, Matthews carefully picks his way through the emotions to share a loving, yet brutally honest tribute to his father.
Confessional: there was a part of Matthews’s story when he was watching father and son bricklayers build a wall. It reminded me of an earlier story I read about a son following in his father’s footsteps as a bricklayer until he found science.
Author fact: I want to believe Sebastian has found happiness in marriage and fatherhood. As of the publication of In My Father’s Footsteps he still lived in Asheville.
Book trivia: both of Matthews’s parents were poets. At times Matthews would put poetry from each parent side by side.
As an aside, when the police were at Matthews’s father’s apartment they went from room to room turning on lights. Why don’t do they do that in the movies?
Personal connection: Dying alone requires the procurement of a court order before gaining permanent access to the deceased residence. If you die in public, even if it is of natural causes, your body is considered a crime scene and cannot be moved until fully investigated.
Setlist: James Taylor, Cowboy Junkies. Indigo Girls, Joni Mitchell’s Hejira album, Tommy Flanagan, Booker Erwin, John Handy, Carnell Jones, Horace Silver’s “Song for My Father,” Gerry Mulligan, Joe Henderson, Alfredo Kraus, Elton John’s “Your Song,” Bob Dylan’s “On a night Like This” “Idiot Wind,” “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” “Shelter From the Storm,” and “Blood on the Tracks,” Mozart, Ella Fitzgerald, Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, Duke Ellington’s “Cottontail,” “Amazing Grace,” Bach, Miles Davis’s “Flamenco Sketches,” Tallest Trees album, “All Blues,” and “Kind of Blue,” Bob Marley’s Babylon By Bus album, Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section, John Coltrane, Stan Getz’s “Sweet Rain,” the Jazz Messengers, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Earl Hines, Mal Waldron, Billie Holiday’s “I Can’t Get Started,” and “Miss Brown to You,” John Bunch Trio, Charlie Mingus’ Alum, “Goodbye Porkpie Hat,” and “Better Git It in Your Soul,” Thelonius Monk’s “Round Midnight,” Dexter Gordon, JJ Johnson, Bud Power, “Some Other Spring,” Getz and Gilberto’s “Girl from Ipanema,” Prince, Sweetheart of the Rodeo, Grateful Dead, Anita O’Day, the Police’s Zenyatta Mondatta album, “Easy Living,” “Let’s Get It On,” and “John Wesley Harding.”
BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Me, Me, Me: Autobiographies and Memoirs” (p 162).
Kretschmer, John. At the Mercy of the Sea: the True Story of Three Sailors in a Caribbean Hurricane. International Marine/McGraw Hill, 2007.
Reason read: August is the best time to be on the water. Read in honor of the perfect month for a sail.
John Kretschmer begins his story on November 14th, 1999. His main focus begins with his friend, Carl Wake, captain of the 42′ sailboat La Vie en Rose. Carl was sailing from the Chesapeake Bay to the Caribbean in time to meet Kretschmer for Thanksgiving so this part of At Mercy of the Sea is heartbreakingly personal. [How could it have been Carl’s first and last at-sea voyage?] Tragically, Carl meets up with Hurricane Lenny and does not survive the storm’s wrath. In addition to Carl’s story, Kretschmer also follows the tragedies of Steve Rigby, sailing English Braids and Guillaume Llobregat, captain of Frederic-Anne, also victims of Hurricane Lenny.
Hurricane Lenny was an anomaly, a dangerous freak storm that defied logic. Understanding how a hurricane is supposed to behave plays a huge part of the drama. Part of At Mercy of the Sea is the biography of a hurricane from birth (African, Gulf of Mexico or other) to its landfall slow death. Kretschmer carefully outlines what typically happens from start to finish, beginning with the naming of each hurricane. In this way, he is able to illustrate just how unusual Lenny turned out to be.
Confessional: Like The Diary of Anne Frank, I had a hard time reading towards the end of At the Mercy of the Sea. As the pages turned, the story brought me closer and closer to the demise of the sailors. I knew it was coming, but dreaded the end all the same.
As an aside, last month I read a book about the Vendee Globe race. When Kretschmer mentioned it I was thankful I had more than a passing knowledge of what he was talking about. He also mentioned the book A Voyage for Madmen by Peter Nichols, which is on my Challenge list.
Line I adored, “Retreating into the past is one way to keep your sanity – or disturb it, depending on what you run into there” (p 10). Kretschmer is not wrong. He is able to make keen observations about the psyche of a sailor too long at sea, probably because he has been there himself.
Other lines I really liked, “My wife was weary of my dreams and, worse, downright sick of my realities” (p 70) and “The only way to savor the essence of life is to nearly lose it” (p 173).
Another confessional: reading about hurricanes brings me face to face with conflicting emotions. I got married in the middle of Hurricane Ivan. I was twelve miles out to sea. According to Kretschmer, Ivan produced the highest measured significant wave height, fifty feet.
Author fact: Kretschmer is a professional sailor in his own right.
Book trivia: I would have liked to see photographs of the sailors or, at the very least, their boats.
Music: Louis Armstrong’s “La Vie en Rose,” Edith Pilaf, Neil Young’s “Rust Never Sleeps,” Pink Floyd, and Jimmy Buffett.
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “See the Sea” (p 201).
Van den Broeck, Vincent. Everything Feels Impossible Until It’s Done: How the Life You Build Becomes the Life That Saves You. Publish Nation, 2026.
Reason read: as a member of the Early Review Program for LibraryThing I get to read tragic yet inspirational books. This is one such story.
You get the sense that Vincent’s life was adrift in his younger years. Example: when considering higher education he chose a degree because it sounded impressive. Unbelievably, he did not actually having a clue what it was for. Losing his mother to cancer at a young age must have played a significant part in this drifting. Grief can untether you from reality. It wasn’t until he entered the world of hospitality did Vincent begin to shine and really find his focus. He became a workaholic, taking on too much too soon; opening one restaurant after another; drowning in debt. It took an accident that nearly killed him before he was forced to slow down, take stock of his life and find his future.
You will have to read for yourself, but there are some really beautiful sentences and phrases in Everything Feels Impossible Until It’s Done. So much so that I wanted more of the story. It was too short! I wanted to hear more. Imagine a bumblebee darting from one fragrant flower to another; never taking the time to linger on one bloom for very long. Everything Feels Impossible Until It’s Done is a bumblebee of a story. Vincent never digs into the details of his life more than he needs to…but I wish he did.
As an aside, Vincent called the accident inevitable. I want to know why was it inevitable? Instead, I argue that our system for dealing with reckless or illegal drivers is tragically flawed. If it wasn’t, the driver who struck Vincent would not have been driving at all. Think about it. The driver was dangerous enough before Vincent’s accident to have his license taken away. We can do better as a society.
Book trivia: in the advance copy I received Everything Feels Impossible Until It’s Done did not include photographs. I would have liked to see the restaurant or meet his amazing wife.
Parks, Tim. An Italian Education: the Further Adventures of an Expatriate in Verona. Grove Press, 1995.
Reason read: to continue the series started in June in honor of a festival.
With Italian Education British-born Tim Parks continues his lighthearted memoir about life outside Verona where he moved in the early 1980s. In addition to capturing the social, political, and cultural life of Italians, Parks introduces family life and raising his children as bilingual Italians. He and his wife Rita already had a toddler, but in the introductory chapters of Italian Education they discovered they were expecting child number two. This time a daughter. Stefi brings all the trials and tribulations of what it means to father a newborn who never sleeps. As Stefi and her brother Michele grow up they give Parks plenty of subject material on schooling (Italian schools do not offer extracurricular pursuits such as music, organized sports, hymns, or classes in carpentry or cooking), what to ask Santa Lucia for at Christmastime, fishing and going to the beach (Italy offers public beaches to avoid being accused of privatization).
Unlike his previous book, Italian Neighbors, Parks writes with an undertone of discontent in Italian Education. Like the soft green mold slowly starting to spoil a loaf of bread, there is a subtle sense of malcontent hidden in the descriptions of his narrative. There is less humor and more criticism. At the end of Italian Education Parks reveals his wife is pregnant with their third child. It is hard to tell if this brings him joy or angst.
Line I liked, “…the Italians are mislaying their rosaries among the clutter of their economic success” (p 312).
Author fact: Even though Parks has written a bunch of books, I am only reading two more: Juggling the Stars and A Season With Verona.
Book trivia: I wish Parks had included some maps of the region.
Music mentioned: Vivaldi’s Concerto in Re Maggiore for Two Mandolins, “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” “Oh When the Saints,” “Imparare in Liberta,” “Bells of Bovolon,” Giuseppe Verdi, Bellini, “Il treno dei desideri,” and L’Aida.
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Verona” (p 243). Pretty simple.
Sayers, Dorothy. Have His Carcase. Harper & Brothers, 1932.
Reason read: a murder takes place on a beach. July is beach season. Confessional: I did not read this on a beach, but I should have!
Harriet Vane, a twenty-eight year old writer of detective fiction, stumbles across the prone body of a man lying awkwardly across some rocks on a deserted beach. Upon closer inspection she discovers the young man’s throat has been cut and, with the tide coming in, his body will be soon swept out to sea. Harriet’s first order of business is to photograph the dead man. She writes detective stories, after all. She thinks she knows what to do at a crime scene. Next she faces the challenge of trying to find someone to sound the alarm about the murder; someone who will believe her and jump into action before the tide comes up and drags the man out to sea. The ridiculousness of Harriet not being able to find a single person to help her set the tone for me. So begins the adventure of Have His Carcase.
Harriet is supposed to be on vacation after being acquitted for the murder of her boyfriend. After acquiring a fair amount of wealth she decided to go on a walking tour of the southwest coast of England and plan her next mystery plot. Lord Peter Wimsey, Harriet’s friend and not-so-secret admirer arrives to help her solve the mystery at hand. He steals the story for me.
As an aside, this is the perfect case for that crime show called “Accident, Suicide, or Murder.” Did Paul Alexis kill himself or was he murdered? The coroner’s jury all voted for suicide.
Most irritating detail – Inspector Umpelty didn’t know the difference between written Chinese and Russian.
Confession: I had to look up the word carcase and figure out what a trunk call was. Also, this was the first I heard of a locked-room mystery.
Best line, “I am a mannequin by profession” (p 295). Excuse me?
Author fact: Dorothy Sayers’s full name is Dorothy Leigh Sayers Flemming. I think that is a beautifully full name.
Book trivia: Each chapter is evidence which begins on June 18th.
Music: “Blue Danube,” “God Save the King,” Eine Kleine Nachtmusik by Mozart, Lieder ohne Worter by Mendelssohn, Bach’s “Air for G Strong,” Handel’s Suit, Beethoven’s Eroica, and “Moonlight.”
BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Ms. Mystery” (p 170).
Cheever, Susan. Treetops: a Family Memoir. Bantam Books, 1991.
Reason read: Read in honor of Cheever’s birth month in July.
Susan Cheever had already written a biography of her father called Home Before Dark so I was excited when she wrote in the introduction to Treetops that this was a book about the three generations of her mother’s family and Treetops as a place. By the end of the introduction she returns to the men: Tom Watson the inventor who assisted Alexander Graham Bell, Winter the grandfather who started the Yale School of Medicine and of course, her father, acclaimed writer John Cheever. Susan Cheever’s father dominates a great deal of the Treetops story…again. Cheever needs to share her father’s accolades and affairs with a healthy dose of name-dropping. It would have been refreshing if Treetops contained less about the man she had already written a full biography about and concentrated more on her mother’s life. Her mother is talked about as footnotes when she describes the short stories (in detail) of her father’s. Cheever would rather describe her father’s relationships with, and perception of, women as a gender. Most of the time the details of her mother as in reaction to something her father said, did, or wrote. The more Susan Cheever quoted her father’s short stories the less I enjoyed Treetops.
As an aside, when Cheever relived the invention of the telephone and detailed exactly what happened between Alexander Graham Bell and her great-grandfather Thomas Watson, I know she was setting up the historical backdrop to her family’s history, but I couldn’t help but think it was also device to subtly suggest Watson invented the telephone and Bell took all the credit.
Author fact: I have satisfied all of the Susan Cheever books I needed for the Challenge.
Book trivia: there are a smattering of photographs in Treetops.
Music: Ella Fitzgerald, Charlie Parker, and “Happy Birthday.”
BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “All in the Family: Writer Dynasties” (p 5). Pearl put it perfectly when she said that when you related to someone famous there is almost an “irresistible temptation to write about the experience” (More Book Lust p 5). Cheever takes it a step further by writing about her famous great grandfather and notable grandfather as well.
Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Little, Brown, and Company, 1969.
Reason read: there is something called a Swan Upping in England every July. Read in honor of that event.
John Fowles approaches the story of The French Lieutenant’s Woman as if he is a modern man looking into a Victorian crystal ball and sharing what he sees with his readers. His technique allows him to make lengthy comments on society, religion, science, politics and economy of the time. He can (and often does) insert himself into the story and even imagines various endings to the romantic saga. Fowles begins his tale by introducing us to Charles Smithson, a thirty-two year old independently wealthy wannabe natural scientist. Charles has impulsively become engaged to the young and beautiful Ernestina Freeman. Ernestina (Tina) also has wealth in her family, being the daughter of a savvy dry goods merchant. As the saying goes, every good romance needs some sort of tension. Enter Sarah Woodruff, an older and mysterious redhead. Rumor has it she was abandoned after a torrid affair with a French naval officer. The entire town of Lyme Regis thinks of her as a whore; utterly damaged goods. And yet Charles cannot help but be drawn to this silent and haunted woman who waits on the quay quietly staring out to sea. As much as he tries to keep his distance, there is something about the French lieutenant’s woman he cannot resist. What is redemption in the heart of an atheist? Fowles imagines three different possibilities for the love triangle’s conclusion. Everyone roots for passion, but I am not convinced there is a happy ending to satisfy all.
Confessional: for the longest time I kept calling the book The French Lieutenant’s Wife instead of Woman. I have no idea why. Here is an interesting tidbit – my husband also thought the same thing.
Another confessional: I did not care one whit about Charles. As Noah Kahan says, I kept “rooting for [his] downfall.”
As an aside, I have to wonder if Josh Ritter read The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Was he inspired by John Fowles’s description of Sarah’s eyes, “…they bubbled as the best champagne bubbles” (p 75).
Lines I Loved, “People sink out of sight, drown in the shadow of closer things” (p 337) and “Love had left the world” (p 429).
Author fact: Fowles has written a great deal but I am only reading The French Lieutenant’s Woman for the Challenge.
Book trivia: The French Lieutenant’s Woman was made into a movie starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons. I have to put this one on my list because I love Meryl (who doesn’t?).
Music: “As Sylvia Was Walking.”
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Lyme Regis” (p 134).
Mandel, Emily St. John. The Singer’s Gun: a Novel. Unbridled Books, 2010.
Reason read: the first fingerprints used to solve a crime were in July of 1901. Read in honor of Crime Prevention Month.
Anton Waker comes from a long line of scammers and thieves. The desire to commit crime should naturally flow through his veins. For as long as he can remember his parents have stolen antique valuables to resell them. Anton’s beautiful and brash cousin ensnared him early into the business of creating fake documents such as passports, social security cards and birth certificates. Anton himself has faked his own academic credentials in an attempt to get a “real” job. Despite his intimacy with fraud, Anton continuously tries to make a clean start. This makes him a likeable character. New job which he is successful at. New marriage with the girl of his dreams. Every decision starts with good intentions yet deception always finds a way to fray the edges. Every time Anton thinks he has escaped, corruption sucks him back down the hole. There is always one more job to do. Like a trapped rat, he cannot escape his criminal family until his cousin offers him one last job. She promises him his freedom if he delivers this one last package on a remote island in Italy. However, it will mean the end of his carefully constructed crime-free lifestyle.
I thoroughly enjoyed Mandel’s work. I had only one cringe moment. Elena, a Russian recipient of a passport, was instructed to not carry a handbag to the meeting place yet at the end of a transaction she puts the documents in a bag.
As an aside, when I was in college a professor said to me that if you introduce a gun in an early chapter it has to go off before the book ends. His exact words were, “If you put a gun on the table in the first chapter it has to be fired by the last chapter.” Mandel must have gotten that wisdom as well, but she was far more clever with the advice. She debuts the gun in the title but withholds the singer and his or her weapon until you have all but forgotten about them.
Author fact: I am also reading Last night in Montreal for the Challenge. I am excited to be revisiting Mandel’s work in the future.
Book trivia: the audio version of Singer’s Gun is narrated by Morgan Hallet.
Music: New Order and Depeche Mode.
BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “O Canada O Canada” (p 51). Note: Singer’s Gun has nothing to do with Canada except Emily St. John Mandel (and one character) is from Canada.
Benson, Robert Henry. A Small Tree in a Texas Hurricane: a Memoir. Pauraque Ridge Press, 2026.
Reason read: as a member of the Early Review Program for LibraryThing I get to read moving memoirs. This is one such book.
Benson makes you feel as though the two of you are sitting on a big wraparound porch in the summertime gloaming. As darkness grows and we can no longer see each other’s face the mood turns somber; the words become quiet confessional. There is a great deal Benson wants to share in A Small Tree in Texas Hurricane. His childhood and early adolescence was not easy. Peeling back the layers of his father’s volatile personality Benson reveals a hair trigger temper followed by outbursts of violence and crime. Poverty was a constant. Benson had the potential to follow in his father’s hothead footsteps, but through gritty perseverance he chose a different path. Earning a Ph.D in Physics seems an unlikely success for a bricklayer and one-time high school dropout.
Benson’s story is remarkable, but what I appreciated more was the way with words Benson has. He may have a Ph.D. in Physics, but his real talent is writing. I inhaled this book.
As with any advance reader copy, there were a few typos here and there such as quotation marks where they did not belong and a handful misspelled words.
Music: “A Boy Named Sue,” Paul Anka’s “And They Call It Puppy Love,” and “Away in a Manager.”
~*LunaSea*~ 