Month: May 2024

Odd Woman

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Godwin, Gail. The Odd Woman. Ballantine Books, 1974.

Reason read: I needed a book for the Portland Public Library Reading challenge in the category of a book that takes place in the Midwest. The Odd Woman opens in a midwestern town. This is also a companion read for another book I am reading in honor of Mother’s Day.

On the outside, Jane Clifford has everything going for her. She is a respected professor, teaching Women in Literature (the British section) at a Midwestern college, but secretly Jane is a neurotic mess. She lives vicariously through the beloved characters of literature; every character is either a friend or a mentor or a villain. She gets all of her advice from these imaginary people. Poor Jane doesn’t know how to relate to people in the real world, especially her own mother. The death of her stylish grandmother sends Jane down upsetting memory lanes especially when she returns to her childhood home for the funeral.
To make matters worse, Jane’s love life revolves around a married man who has no plans to leave his wife. Gabriel patronizes Jane by being controlling and condescending and like a good girl, she puts up with it. He gently admonishes and corrects and chides. Pay attention to the language Godwin uses about Gabriel and his hands. He is always “trapping” Jane’s hand in his own. He holds all the cards because he is the married one.
In the end I didn’t know whether to cheer on Jane or cry for her.

Quotes that had me thinking for days, “If Jane Austen were putting me in a novel, how would she define me?” (p 27), and “Jane, face it: we are all just basically neurotic creatures trying to get through our days and nights” (p 46).

Author fact: Gail Godwin reported for the Miami Herald.

Book trivia: The Odd Woman is a bit dated. Written when flying meant you could sit wherever you wanted and planes had magazine racks.

Playlist: Mozart, Al Martino’s “Here in My Heart”, Glenn Miller’s “Little Brown Jug”, The Ink Spots’ “If I Didn’t Care”, and Nat King Cole’s “Somewhere Along the Way”.

Nancy said: Not only did Pearl suggest reading The Odd Women and The Odd Woman together as “companion reads, Godwin practically insisted upon it as well, albeit in a much more subtle manner. I found it a disappointment to do so. In The Odd Woman Godwin revealed a spoiler in The Odd Women that I wasn’t prepared to absorb. I did not want to know Monica died.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Companion Reads” (p 62) because Jane in Odd Woman is using George Gissing’s Odd Women in her Women in Literature class. Also in the chapter called “Mothers and Daughters” (p 159).

Presenters Aren’t Robots

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Pettit, F. Annie. Presenter’s Aren’t Robots: a Practical Guide to Becoming a Fearless and Engaging Public Speaker. 2024.

Reason read: as a member of the Early Review program for LibraryThing I get to read interesting books. This is one of them.

I struggle to call Presenters Aren’t Robots a full length book. There are only seventy-five pages of text. Chapter one doesn’t begin until page eleven, but that’s me reading it on my phone. Maybe the print version will be different.
Practical is the key word to Presenters Aren’t Robots. Most of the suggestions were intuitive. I learned a few things (it was cool to see AI art options mentioned) and relearned a few things (handouts are still a thing). Some information was micro-detailed (like explaining the colored buttons on a clicker for a presentation), while other information was vague (like no suggestions of software for presentations). I appreciated the speaker checklist the most. I am sure I will use it in the future. Aside from a few typos and font changes, I found Presenters Aren’t Robots to be a helpful and friendly book.

As an aside, why all the illustrations of robots if presenters aren’t robots? Are the robots the audience?

Author fact: Pettit mentors people in public speaking and she is a marketing research author.

I Sleep Around

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Jaffarian, Sue Ann. I Sleep Around: the Humorous Memoir of a Nomadic Writer. Harbor Lane Books, 2024.

Reason read: An Early Review selection from LibraryThing…another travelogue book. I am sensing a pattern with my preferences. Ha!

How to describe I Sleep Around? Part primer on how to retire to a life on the road with tips and tricks to make the transition to fulltime traveler, part humorous travelogue and touching memoir. Sue Ann Jaffarian will help you keep your body, sanity, and snail mail healthy while on the road for long periods of time. She can help you chose an RV of the right size, the right amount of storage, and any other options you desire. She found “Novella”, her Winnebago Travato 59K, to be just perfect for her new life as a nomadic writer. When I Sleep Around takes a break from RV instruction in the first quarter of the book, Jaffarian talks about the business of writing as a professional before circling back to RV repairs. The second half detailed the places she visited along her five-year journey.
As an aside, I found it interesting that she chose to switch to RV life before officially retiring from her job as a paralegal. Juggling both the planning for a life on the road and finishing up a career must have been exhausting and emotional.
The section on RVing during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown was interesting for those of us who were housebound for that period.
Jaffarian makes the claim that travel changes you. I would have loved for her to expound on that. Tell me more about that metamorphosis. I am so curious! Another wish – I wish Jaffarian would have included a compiled list of all of the attractions she was able to take in along her journey. It would have been cool to have a directory of interesting places to visit. High on my list is the Tabasco factory. I put that sauce on everything! Pictures would have been cool, too.

Question: has Jaffarian read Gogarty? Paul’s Coast Road is a similar excursion.

Confessional: Jaffairian’s first test camp was Yosemite. I have decided to make visiting all the U. S. national parks a life goal. My first official park since choosing this challenge is Yosemite. Other things we have in common: she and I share the “alone” trait. She likes sightseeing and sleeping alone in parking lots. I prefer to run alone, watch tv, and cook alone. As she says, “loneliness is not about being alone” (a line I hope she keeps in I Sleep Around). I fully agree.

Author fact: I love Jaffarian’s independence, confidence and humor. If she wrote I Sleep Around to get people interested in her fiction, job well done. I plan to look her up on the socials and possibly read an earlier book or two. She wrote the Odelia Grey, Granny Apples, and Zelda Bowen series; as well as the Madison Rose Vampire mysteries.

Chef on Ice

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Kuhn, Sebastien J.M. Chef on Ice: Living and Working as a Chef in Antarctica.

Reason read: This is a LibraryThing Early Review win for the month of May.

Chef on Ice is sort of a misnomer. Kuhn does not just tell the story of cooking in Antarctica, he also describes starting up a pretzel business in the off months in Brisbane and Melbourne. He mentions other cooking gigs as well. A better title for the book would have been Adventure Chef: Daring to Cook Anywhere. Seriously. Sebastien sounds like one of those people who would be perfect for an assignment with CoolJobsdotcom. While not a professional writer, Kuhn writes with an abundance of emotion, briefly remembering the sights, sounds, experiences of his various cooking expeditions. He has fantastic subject matter but not the articulation to translate it to the written word. I would have liked more stories about the actual cooking – more about the meals served, sourcing the ingredients in such a remote area, food prep. That sort of thing.
Confessional: I had one head-scratching moment in terms of chronology. Admittedly, for most of the book I didn’t try to keep up, but when it came to Covid-19 Kuhn stated they endured a year and a half of lockdowns. Later he states he was back in business by November 2020. That would mean the Australian lockdown started September of 2018. I don’t know. Maybe I read that part wrong?
Most impressive moment: I was impressed with Sebastien’s level of respect when recounting the death of a crew member; never revealing the nature of the accident or the deceased’s identity. Other authors would sensationalize such a tragedy.

Confessional: I had to look up Kelly Slater and Zach Galifianakis.

Author fact: The entire time I was reading Chef on Ice I was wondering what kind of family Kuhn was leaving behind every time he ventured to Antarctica. He made mention of a mysterious partner and some dogs. It would have been better to leave them out of the story completely.

Book trivia: Chef on Ice includes a generous amount of color photographs. Some didn’t need an explanation, but some description would have been cool for others. It was hard to read on a phone. The formatting was strange. I could only read for less than thirty minutes at a time.

Playlist: none. There were plenty of opportunities for Kuhn to mention music but he never did. Blah.

On Being Different

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Miller, Merle. On Being Different. Random House, 1987.

Reason read: Merle Miller celebrated a birthday in May. Read in his honor.

The prejudice one has for homosexuals borders on insane, yet it exists. Why anyone would see a link between homosexuality and communism is beyond me. Same with thinking marriage could be a potential “cure” for homosexuality. These are the beliefs of the ignorant. It took Miller fifty years to come out of the closet. That is an unimaginable length of time to hide one’s true self yet it happens all the time. Miller’s essay “On Being Different” is a valiant attempt to respond to the ignorant and expose the human side of love. He discusses the prejudices and fears without flinching. There is grace threaded throughout his anger.

Book trivia: the foreword was written by Dan Savage. Afterword One was written by Merle Miller. Afterword Two was written by Charles Kaiser. Acknowledgments were written by Carol Hanley. On Being Different is only a twenty-one page essay, but with all these other additions and appendices A through C is becomes a much longer book.

Confessional: I, too, like Halloween for all of its mask wearing.

Playlist: Paul Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Peggy Lee’s “Love Story”, Liberace, Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, and “We Shall Overcome”.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Merle Miller: Too Good To Miss” (p 155).

Titan

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Chernow, Ron. Titan: the Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. Narrated by Grover Gardner. Blackstone Publishing, 2013.

Reason read: April is Banking Month.

Chernow has a knack for digging into the details of a person’s life, personally and professionally. He took on the project of writing John D. Rockefeller Sr’s life story after he studied other biographies about the man and discovered that significant parts of Rockefeller’s life had either been glossed over or omitted altogether. Other biographers (who shall remain nameless) focused more on Rockefeller the business man than Rockefeller the person after retirement. Even though it is true that John D. Rockefeller was history’s first billionaire, he had an interesting life beyond the lifelong quest for money. Never mind the fact that at a young age he did declare that someday “he was going to be the richest man in America.” There was more to the man than business smarts. He was a man of great contradictions. While he was a ruthless businessman hell bent on crippling competitors, he also understood the benefits of philanthropy and gave generous to causes and people in which he believed. He continuously bailed his brother out of debt time and time again while disowning his father just as often. More on that later.
By having unrestricted access to interviews and papers and by using Rockefeller’s own memoirs, Chernow was able to weave a first person voice throughout the history of the times.
I was always taught to respect my elders, no matter what my relationship to them. Rockefeller disowned his father at a very young age, telling people his father was dead; his mother, a widow. Indeed, “Big Bill” was a bigamist, scam artist, and liar. Not someone John D. wanted to be associated with. Luckily, John’s relationship with his own son, Junior, was not a contemptuous relationship.
By the end of Titan I was overwhelmed by number of projects to whom the Rockefeller name is attached: the Museum of Modern Art, the Grand Tetons, Acadia, Colonial Williamsburg, I could go on and on.

Confessional: I do not understand how someone considered frugal with a rural background cannot be fastidious. Maybe what Chernow was trying to say was that Rockefeller was frugal, and from a poor background, a skinflint. Rockefeller bought expensive clothes which he wore with impeccable immaculacy.

One degree of separation from Natalie Merchant: she and John D. Rockefeller, Sr. share a fascination with Joan of Arc.

Author fact: Chernow won a Pulitzer in 2011 for nonfiction biography. He also has his own website.

Book trivia: Titan includes two sections of black and white photographs. I have to say Rockefeller was a stern looking man.

Playlist: Beethoven, Handel, Mozart, Chopin, “Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow”, and “Hesitation Waltz”.

Nancy said: Pearl said if you like Chernow, you should read Titan.

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Founding Fathers” (p 91). Confessional: this book shouldn’t be in this chapter. Rockefeller was not a founding father. Pearl included Titan because of Chernow’s other biographies.

Coast Road

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Gogarty, Paul. The Coast Road: a 3,000 mile journey around the edge of England. Robson Books, 2007.

Reason read: April is the month in which Earth Day is celebrated. Gogarty took the time to travel around his corner of the earth.

Gogarty faithfully records the sights, sounds, and smells of villages and people he meets along his journey around the coast of England. All 2,800 miles of it in a newly acquired emotive motorhome he named Sid Sundance. He is no stranger to traveling around England. Gogarty previously spent four month on a pilgrimage around 900 miles of England’s inland waterways. This time he is traveling from town to town following the sea. At every stop he meets interesting people. From refugees seeking asylum to fishermen and artists; a man who poses as Dracula for tourists.
There is a sadness to Gogarty’s observations and conversations with locals in these poor seaside towns. Like Coney Island in New York, the grandness of the metropole in the late 1800s has all been changed since the devastation of war. The nostalgic heyday of Joseph Conrad and Henry James has given way to gaudy health clubs and modern art galleries with bad art. Gogarty describes the depressed area like a deflated balloon long forgotten after a birthday party. The children have all gone home and the decorations droop neglected. But Coast Road is not just a travelogue. You will get history lessons, studies in architecture, a running commentary on ecology and natural history, humor.
Can I just say I loved Gogarty’s writing? Every sentence was a explosion of imagery filled with aching beauty. My heart broke for the fisherman who could not quit the sea even though he had long since resigned himself to a life on terra firma. I smiled at the delightful memory of the Gogarty family bombing down the road – mom and dad on a motorcycle while the kids (all three of them) snuggled in the sidecar. Fast forward to adulthood: the advance of technology and the ability to send copy from the comfort of the front seat of Gogarty’s car elicited a grin from me. I would like to visit the pub that can only serve three guests at one time.

As an aside, I liked Gogarty’s “see no” monkeys. He has four: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, and “hopefully do no evil”.
Second aside, I never thought about England being “stuck” between America and the Continent.
Third aside, how exactly does a Dutch auction work? It doesn’t make sense to me.

Quote I immediately identified with: “As an island race, we are all suckled by the sea, and whatever the particulars of the image seared on our memory, inside each of us there is an seaside all our own” (p xii). Amen.
Here is one I liked for its subtle humor, “the current PC climate has meant less of Punch knowing seven bells out of Judy” (p 68). Another amen. Another example of Gogarty being funny, “It has existed since 1050 and doesn’t look as if its had a lick of paint since” (p 270).

Author fact: Coast Road is actually Gogarty’s second travelogue. I am not reading the first, The Water Road.

Book trivia: Coast Road includes a collection of delightful color photographs.

Gogarty likes his music! Playlist: Abba, “Aint No Stopping Us Now”, “Aint She Sweet”, Albert King, “All You Need is Love”, “And Then He Kissed Me”, Andy Sheppard Trio, Anthony Keidis, Bay City Rollers, Beatles’ “Love Me Do” and She Loves You” , Ben Waters’ Boogie Band, Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock”, Bob Dylan’s “New Morning”, Billy J Kramer’s “Bad To Me”, “Born to be Wild”, “Bunty’s Such a Big Girl Now”, “California Dreaming”, “Anything Goes” by Cole Porter, Charlie Drake, “Da-Doo-Ron-Ron”, “Delilah”, The Denisons, Des O’Connor, Dr John’s “Iko Iko”, Elvis Presley, Eminem’s “Cleaning Out My Closet”, “England Swings”, “Evergreen”, “A Fine Romance”, Four Tops, Gillian Welch, “God Bless the Child” by Billie Holiday, George Harrison, “God Save the King”, “Good Golly Miss Molly”, Hank Marvin, Hank Williams, “Hi Ho Silver Lining”, Howlin’ Wolf, “Imagine”, “It’s Raining Men”, JJ Cale’s Troubadour album, James Brown, Jalikunda Cissokho, Jamiroquai, “Jesu, Lover of My Soul”, John Lennon, John Martyn’s “London Conversation”, John Williams, “Joy and Pain” by Maze, Julian Bream, Keith Moon, “Land of Hope and Glory”, “Little Ukulele in My Hand”, Lulu, Luvvers’ “Shout”, Mary J Blige’s “No More Pain”, Miles Davis, Morrissey, the Mojos, “Mr Wu’s a Window Cleaner Now”, Nat King Cole, Nickleback, “Night and Day”, Nolan Sisters, O Jay’s “I Love Music”, The Pogues, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Ringo, Robert Johnson, Roger Daltry, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Rose Royce, Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman”, Ry Cooder, Screaming Lord Such, Sex Pistols, Skatalites, Solo’s “Blowing My Mind”, The Stranglers, Stevie Marriott, Stevie Wonder, “A Summer Place”, Temptations, Tom Jones’ “It’s Not Unusual”, Tonic, the Troggs’ “The Very Thought of You” and “I Can’t Control Myself”, Tower of Power’s “It Really Doesn’t Matter”, The Undertakers, “We are Family”, “Wild Thing”, Watership Brass, Waterson: Carthy, The White Stripes, Willie Nelson, Van Morrison, Vera Lynn, and “Uptown Girl”.

Nancy said: Pearl called Coast Road excellent.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Entering England” (p 76).