Category: BookLust I

Backup Men

gr4c5Leave a comment

Thomas, Ross. The Backup Men.New York: William Morrow & Company, 1971.

Reason read: Thomas was born in the month of February. Read in his honor.

Mac McCorkle and Mike Padillo are “saloon” keepers in Washington D.C. They came to Washington after their place of the same name in Bonn on the banks of the Rein had been blown up. Oddly enough, despite their reputations, their Washington D.C. establishment has yet to be assaulted. Despite the fact they are trying to put their pasts behind them and keep their noses clean, through various mishaps they find themselves with a new job, to protect a young man from assassination. Peter Paul Kassim is on the brink of becoming King of Llaquah, a country that has recently discovered it sits on nearly 100 billion barrels of oil reserves. Kassim stands in the way of political enemies who are extremely interested in getting Kassim out of the way.
The Backup Men is a fast paced suspense novel, but what really hold the story together is McCorkle and Padillo’s relationship. Their characters and conversations are witty, humorous and at times, utterly astonishing.

As an aside: From everything I have read, The Backup Men is not a continuation of a series, but rather has some of the same characters from previous novels. From what I could tell, it was not necessary to read the previous stories in order to understand The Backup Men.

Edited to add the only quote that I liked, “That type of revenge was based on rage which, if heated to the right temperature, can make any action, no matter how foolish, seem coldly logical and completely justified… (p 154). I won’t quote the whole sentence because it involves the word “baby” and the verb “slam.”

Author fact: Thomas wrote a ton of books. I have 24 of them on my list.

Book trivia: Many of Thomas’s books have reoccurring characters. The Backup Men is the third book to include Mac and Mike (Mac McCorkle and Mike Padillo). Both characters were first introduced in The Cold War Swap (also on my list).

Nancy said: Absolutely nothing.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Ross Thomas: Too Good To Miss” (p 234).

Captivated

gr4c5Leave a comment

Roberts, Nora. Captivated: Donovan Legacy, Book One. New York: Harper Collins, 2011.

Reason read: Nora Roberts writes romances. Valentine’s Day is supposed to be full of candy hearts, flowers and…love.

In the interest of getting through as many books as possible for the Challenge, I have to say I love this kind of read. It’s fast and easy and painless. I read Captivated in four days.
Book One of the Donovan Legacy is Captivated. Morgana Donovan is a beautiful woman with one of those trendy New Age shops in Monterey, California. She is content to be a single, thirty-something, business owner who lives with a dog and a cat and practices magic in her spare time. She is proud of her legacy as she comes from a long line of witches from Ireland. Nash Kirkland is a successful screenwriter, known for his horror films. He is on the prowl for information on his next topic of terror, witches. He comes to Morgana’s shop in the hopes of interviewing a real live witch…only he doesn’t believe in such a thing for real. What follows is Morgana’s attempt to convince him her powers are real and Nash’s struggle to not fall in love with what he doesn’t believe. From there, it’s a pretty cut and dried love story.

Author fact: Roberts has written a whole slew of romance novels. I am reading the Donovan Legacy series, the Dream series and the Sisters series. Ten books total.

Book trivia: Captivated is Book One in the Donovan Legacy, followed by Entranced, Charmed, and Enchanted.

Nancy said: Nancy called the Donovan Legacy a “great historical” (p 207). I didn’t really get that in Captivated. Morgana does go to Ireland to be with her parents and they talked family history…maybe there is something in a later book that is more related to history.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Romance Novels: Our Love is Here To Stay” (p 207). Confessional: I have a complaint about this. Nancy only mentions The Donovan Legacy as the title, never mentioning that it is comprised of four separate novels. So, the individual titles are not indexed in Book Lust. Oddly enough, she does spell out the individual titles in the Three sisters Island trilogy.

Traveller’s Prelude

gr4c5Leave a comment

Stark, Freya. Traveller’s Prelude. London: John Murray, 1950.

Reason read: Freya Stark was born in January. Read in her honor.

This is first of Stark’s autobiographies (followed by Beyond the Euphrates and Coast of Incense.) Traveller’s Prelude starts at the very beginning with Stark’s grandparents (all with the surname Stark) in 1893. Stark’s parents were first cousins. From the very beginning Freya’s life was filled with adventure. At the age of two and a half. Freya’s parents took her and her sister over the Dolomites. Freya began “running away” when she was only four years old. Her mother recalls losing Freya on a train only to find the child in the smoky third class car, sitting on the knee of a sailor (p 34). As a young woman she volunteered medical services in the First Would War. After the war she bought a farm and made her own wine. While lonely for marriage, Freya didn’t while away her time pining for a man. She had friends and mountaineered often; she believed she was the first woman to climb the Rocca Provenzale. Traveller’s Prelude ends with the death of Freya’s sister, Vera and the very beginnings of Freya’s interest in the middle east.

Do you know that question, what famous person, living or dead, with whom you would most like to have dinner? My answers were always Natalie Merchant (living) or Edgar Allan Poe (deceased). After reading Traveller’s Prelude I change my second answer to Freya Stark. Sorry, Ed!

Favorite lines, “Running away is the wrong word for such adventures, that go notto escape but to seek” (p 37-38), “They might look like railway trains, streaking with swift bodies of lighted carriages and smoke, but I remember making myself think that they were dragons, and dragons to all intents there were” (p 48).

Author fact: Freya almost died when her hair got caught in some factory machinery when she was a teenager.

Book trivia: Traveller’s Prelude has the coolest photographs of Freya as a young child, beginning when she was only one year old. They are not clumped together in the center of the book, but interspersed throughout the narrative which makes the reading delightful. One of my favorites is of Freya, at age one, standing with a man I can only assume is her father, grasping his tie in her little hand. But, the one of her reading is delightful, too.

Nancy said: Freya Stark wrote “insightfully” about the Middle East (p 143).

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Lady Travellers” (p 142).

February Progress

gr4c5Leave a comment

I have been seeing a chiropractor for over a month and have all but stopped running. At first, I admit, this bothered me to no end. Now, I’m okay with it for all the books I have been reading. And speaking of books, here is February’s plan for The Books:

Fiction:

  • The Almond Picker by Simonetta Agnello ~ in honor of Almond Blossom festival in Sicily.
  • The Color of Money by Walter Tevis ~ in honor of Tevis’s birth month.
  • Dead Room Farce by Simon Brett ~ in honor of February being Theater month.

Nonfiction:

  • City of Falling Angels by John Berendt~ in honor of February being the month of the Venice Carnival (AB/print).
  • Full Steam Ahead: the Race to Build a Transcontinental Railroad by Rhoda Blumberg~ in honor of February being Train Month.

Series continuations:

  • Beyond Euphrates by Freya Stark ~ in honor of Freya’s birthday in January.

For fun:

  • Ready, Player One by Ernest Cline ~ because a friend recommended it (E-book).

There might be room for more titles, considering Dead Room Farce and Full Steam Ahead are barely 200 pages apiece. We’ll see…

Last Cheater’s Waltz

gr4c5Leave a comment

Meloy, Ellen. The Last Cheater’s Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1999.

Reason read: Most of Last Cheater’s Waltz takes place in Utah and Utah became a state in January.

Ellen Meloy is hunkered down in a corner of the desert near the San Juan River in Utah. While she and her husband, Mark, call this barren land home, it is also close to Los Alamos and the White Sands Missile Range. Meloy, using her love for the west and naturalist instincts, explores what this atomic history’s proximity means to the environment. As the subtitle implies, it’s the juxtaposition of violence and beauty across a landscape that is teeming with the will to go on.
Meloy writes with wit, humor, and dare I say, sarcasm. I found a whole slew of passages I wanted to quote. I knew I was in for a good ride when I read that Meloy had just poured scalding hot water over coffee grounds and, inadvertently, a sleeping lizard: “I sat on the front steps of the screenhouse with sunrise burning crimson on the sandstone cliffs above the river and a boiled reptile in my cup” (p 3).

Another line I liked (out of a bunch): “While I could not be certain I was simply drowsily apathetic or enraged to the point of catatonia, I thought it best to cover both fronts by considering some kind of low-grade home lobotomy or one of those highly touted anger management seminars” (p 4). One more, because it made me laugh, “I am the aunt who laughs her head off at the funeral” (p 29).

Author fact: Meloy also wrote Raven’s Exile which is on my Challenge list.

Book trivia: Much of Meloy’s story is about a hand-drawn map she is creating of her known universe, the circumference of land around her home in the desert. While the description of Meloy’s Map Of the Known Universe would have been fun to see, it isn’t included.

Nancy said: Nancy compared Richard Shelton’s writing to Meloy.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “A Geography of Family and Place” (p 98).

What Did It Mean?

gr4c5Leave a comment

Thirkell, Angela. What did It Mean? . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954.

Reason read: Thirkell was born on January 30th and interestingly enough, died on January 29th seventy one years later. Read What Did It Mean? in her honor.

From the onset, I didn’t think I would care for What Did It Mean?. Before the reader gets ten pages in he or she is introduced to a myriad of characters with no clue as to their importance to the plot. I had to start a list and was constantly wondering if I needed to remember these people later on. The plot itself centers around the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Everyone is frantically planning complicated festivities through various committees. Of course, every member has ulterior motives and the main objective is often forgotten in the frenzy. With there being so many different characters, it is a study in society as much as it is about a specific locale, Barsetshire. I couldn’t help it but I found myself getting bored.

The only line I liked, “The Women’s Institutes and the Townswomen’s Guild became as sisters, though always reserving the right of a sister to dislike a sister wholeheartedly (p 7).

Author fact: Thirkell also wrote Pomfret Towers: a Novel which is on my Challenge list. Sigh.
Author gossip: According to Thirkell’s Wikipedia page, Thirkell left her second husband in Australia under the guise of going on holiday to England when, in reality, she was leaving for good. To be fair, Thirkell’s first husband insisted on naming their first child after a former lover.

Book trivia: What Did It Mean is one of almost 30 books in the Barsetshire Chronicles (yes, Anthony Trollope’s fictional Barsetshire).

Nancy said: Nancy had a lot to say about Thirkell’s writing in general, but nothing specific about What Did It Mean? Probably the most interesting comment Pearl had about Thirkell is the “appallingly nasty things” Thirkell had her characters utter.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Barsetshire and Beyond” (p 15).

Tea From an Empty Cup

gr4c5Leave a comment

Cadigan, Pat. Tea From an Empty Cup. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1998.

Reason read: Read in honor of January is Drink Tea month even though this has nothing to do with the beverage.

I have admitted this before, science fiction is usually not my cup of tea. Or in this case, an empty cup is completely accurate. I made an exception with Willis’s Doomsday Book because it was clever and, more importantly, there was substantial character development. I had a hard time drinking in Cadigan’s Tea From an Empty Cup because it was missing the element that matters most to me – the character development. I ended up not really caring about a single character. Unfortunately, that made the ending bitter and hard to swallow.
The premise is simple, a young man is found murdered with his throat slashed. He isn’t the only victim but for homicide detective Dore Konstatin, it is important enough that she dons the victim’s ‘skin suit and enters the artificial reality of Nee Yawk Sitty, the apocalyptic cyberspace playground. She needs to play the same game Tomoyuki Iguchi played before he died. She needs to be him before he died. Her first lead is an allusive witness by the name of Body Sativa. Meanwhile, Tom’s friend, Yuki, is trying to uncover the same mystery.
Confessional: At first I thought this was a science fiction erotica story. The references to sex come quickly and often (pun completely intended).

No quotes to quote.

Author fact: Cadigan is famous for his science fiction.

Book trivia: Tea From an Empty Cup is dedicated to five different people. I wish I knew why. They all seem like very important people, though!

Nancy said: Nancy said Tea From an Empty Cup is “a great example of melding of science fiction with postmodernism” (p 69).

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Cyberspace.Com” (p 69).

Sarah, Plain and Tall

gr4c5Leave a comment

MacLachlan, Patricia. Sarah, Plain and Tall. New York: Harper & Row, 1985.

Reason read: for the fun of it (because I wanted something super quick to read).

Book summary (taken from inside cover):When their father invites a mail-order bride to come live with them in their prairie home, Caleb and Anna are captivated by her and hope that she will stay.” Not exactly. Widower dad places and advertisement for a wife and Sarah answers. One of the first things she tells them is that she is “plain and tall.” What follows is delightful story about the lengths people will go to in order to banish loneliness. Anna and Caleb are hungry for a new mother and want to see their father happy again so they welcome a stranger with open arms. But, probably the most heartbreaking sacrifice is made by Sarah herself. She gives up the coast of Maine and the ocean for the prairies of the Midwest. I have no idea how she does it.
As an aside, I was glad to learn this is the first book in the Witting Family series. When I finished Sarah, Plain and Tall I didn’t want to leave them, especially Sarah.

Edited to add quote: “There is something to miss no matter where you are” (p 42). How could I forget putting this in the review? I love this!

Author fact: MacLachlan won a Newbery Medal for Sarah, Plain and Tall.

Book trivia: Sarah, Plain and Tall was made into a movie starring Glenn Close and Christopher Walken.

Nancy said: Nancy said Sarah, Plain and Tall was good for both boys and girls.

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Best for Boys and Girls” (p 22).

Black Alibi

gr4c5Leave a comment

Woolrich, Cornell. Black Alibi. New York: Collier Books, 1942.

Reason read: Woolrich was born in December. This book didn’t come in time to read it during the month of December, but I’m breaking a rule and reading it in January because it is so short. Read over one weekend.

In the South American city of Cuidad Real a glamorous woman enters a trendy, high-profile restaurant with a black panther tenuously tethered to the end of a thin gold leash. For Kiki Walker, an up and coming singer, no publicity stunt is too outrageous even though the big cat and Kiki are equally on edge. It isn’t long before disaster strikes and the panther is sprung free. Of course he is! That’s when the grisly murders begin. Young women in different parts of Cuidad Real are found torn to bits but is the panther to blame? One man doesn’t think so. How does an out of work booking agent clear his panther’s reputation when all evidence points to the cat?
Black Alibi is set in an era when establishments hired people to dust off your shoes or straighten your errant hair and the end is a little hokey but, overall, a very entertaining read.

Lines I liked, “One’s sense can identify one’s aura of sounds at all time” (p 41) and “Pain was a thing between oneself and one’s God” (p 52).

Author fact: Woolrich died in 1965 and according to a bio on the IMDB website, his funeral went unattended. So sad!

Book trivia: this piece of trivia is unique to my book alone. This is my handwriting from when I was in high school and this is definitely something I would do. I am constantly thinking of lyrics and I loved smiley faces back in the day. However, I don’t remember writing this at all. Nor do I ever remember reading this book before. Odd.

thumbnail

Nancy said: “Woolrich’s [people] are anxious and afraid, stuck in a world that is full of shocking and dangerous surprises” (p 66).

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Les Crimes Noir” (p 65).

Nero Wolfe of West Thirty-fifth Street

gr4c51 Comment

Baring-Gould, William S. Nero Wolfe of West Thirty-Fifth Street: the Life and Times of America’s Largest Detective. New York: Viking Press, 1969.

Reason read: Rex Stout was born in December. Read in his honor.

Right off the bat I need to tell you Nero Wolfe of West Thirty-Fifth Street is better read after you have consumed every Rex Stout mystery starring the portly private detective. I guarantee you will have many more ah-ha moments if you already know the cases. Baring-Gould fills his book with a mountain of facts but they are oddly assembled; a veritable mishmash of all things Nero Wolfe (and Archie Goodwin).  Everything from fashion, and facial tics to food and every case in between is scrutinized. It’s as if Baring-Gould combed the pages of every mystery, never missing a single detail, to build a character profile and biography of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin.
Baring-Gould also has some interesting theories. I don’t think it is a spoiler to say that Baring-Gould thinks Sherlock Holmes fathered Nero Wolfe. He draws thought-provoking connections between Holmes and Wolfe, including the similar phrases they utter.

Author fact: Baring-Gould’s first claim to fame was his analysis of Sherlock Holmes. He was the editor of the Annotated Sherlock Holmes among other publications.

Book trivia: in addition to the floor plan to Wolfe’s ground floor apartment, Baring-Gould also lays out an impressive chronology of Nero Wolfe’s movements from his birth in 1892 or 1893 to The Father Hunt case in August – September of 1967.

Nancy said: Nancy recommends reading Nero Wolfe of West Thirty-Fifth Street… if “the Nero Wolfe bug bites you” (p 226).

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe: Too Good to Miss” (p 226).

Doomsday Book

gr4c5Leave a comment

Willis, Connie. Doomsday Book. New York: Bantam Books, 1992.
Willis, Connie. Doomsday Book. Read by Jenny Sterlin.

Reason read: Connie Willis was born in the month of December. Read in her honor. Confessional: this book is nearly 600 pages long so I decided to start it early.

I don’t know why I get so nervous about reading science fiction. I really shouldn’t when it comes to Connie Willis. I have enjoyed everything I had read from her so far and Doomsday Book is no different. In a word Doomsday Book is brilliant. Young and ambitious student historian Kivrin has been eagerly preparing to leave her 21st century world for that of fourteenth century Oxford. Wearing a costume proper for women of the era? Check. Middle English language lessons completed? Check. Customs training for her alibi for a woman traveling alone? Check. Proper inoculations for illnesses of the day? Check. Or it is check with a question mark? Her instructors back in 2054 had made painstaking calculation to ensure she would arrive decades before the Black Death, but is it possible she slipped twenty eight years passed the targeted date? Did she arrive at ground zero at the exact wrong time? Strangely enough, the 21st century is suffering an epidemic of its own. Modern day Oxford is quarantined and fear bordering on panic runs rampant.
This is a story of parallel tragedies and the human nature that transcends all time…despite being “sci-fi.”

Author fact: at the time of publication Willis lived in Greeley, Colorado. Such a beautiful place!

Book trivia: Doomsday Book won both the Hugo and Nebula award for science fiction.

Nancy said: in Book Lust, “many people believe Doomsday Book Willis’s most accomplished novel (p 246). In More Book Lust, nothing other than to list it as a time travel book.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Connie Willis: Too Good To Miss” (p 246). Also from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Time Travel” (p 221).

Fay

gr4c5Leave a comment

Brown, Larry. Fay. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2000.

Reason reading: December is Southern Literature Month. Fay takes place in Mississippi.

You can’t help but fall in love with Fay…in the beginning. Despite being abused by animals and humans alike beautiful seventeen year old Fay Jones holds out hope she can be friends with either of them. Preferably both at some point in her young life. But for now she is eager to find Biloxi after running away from a potentially dangerous and definitely drunk father. With only the clothes on her back and two dollars hidden in her bra, she is uneducated and generous; thoughtful in a complicated and naive way. She’ll trust anyone who can steer her in the right direction. You’ll find yourself holding your breath as she hitches a ride with three drunk boys back to their trailer deep in the woods. You again become breathless when a cop picks her up and takes her home. Fay’s ignorance makes people want to help her and hurt her all at the same time. I must admit, over time Fay’s willingness (eagerness?) to fall in with some really bad people grew wearisome. She’s either intensely shallow or so stupid she can’t help herself. She doesn’t recognize when someone is taking advantage of her. When she goes from being a blushing virgin to an easy lay in one week’s time I felt myself losing interest in her fate and willing the character I did care about to stay away from her.
Because Brown will make you care about some people. Even Fay.

My biggest pet peeve? Brown is almost too coy, too cute and dare I say, cheesy? about creating reader suspense at times. His first mention of Alesandra elicited an eye roll from me. One inappropriate remark that spoke volumes in a sea of other details and then nothing for pages and pages. It’s the proverbial gun on a table. Sooner or later it has to go off.

The only line I liked, “Then he was standing there with his neatly pressed gray trousers, a blue stripe down each leg, a gun on his hip and a crisp shirt, his nameplate and his shiny brass and all the authority she feared” (p 34).

Author fact: Brown also wrote Joe and Dirty Work. I’m reading both. Here is the crazy thing. For the first time I have started tracking the approximate time certain books will come up on the schedule. According to the master calendar I will be reading Joe in December of 2037 and Dirty Work in October of 2040.

Book trivia: This should be a movie. It has everything. Sex, drugs and rock and roll. Strippers, prostitutes and drug dealers. Explosions and violence. And don’t forget beautiful scenery of the Mississippi gulf coast.

Nancy said: Nancy said “any list of grit-lit practitioners worth its whiskey would also include Larry Brown” (p 106). She also said Fay drifts through life “serenely” and “almost untouched” by the violence around her. I don’t know if I would agree. Fay’s traumas haunt her constantly. I would see her more as resilient; trying to push on despite the abuses. She has a steely determination to survive.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the very appropriate chapter called “Grit Lit” (p 106).

Edge of the Crazies

gr4c5Leave a comment

Harrison, Jamie. The Edge of the Crazies. New York: Hyperion, 1995.

Reason read: November is the month Montana became a state.

As an aside, I love it when a book introduces me to new music. “If Love was a Train” by Michelle Shocked is an example.

Be prepared to meet a lot of people. Jamie Harrison likes to introduce her readers to a bunch of people (kind of reminded me of Batya Gur). Jules Clement (sheriff) of Blue Deer is the main character but you’ll meet his family (sister and father). You’ll even meet an old girlfriend and her family. Don’t forget current girlfriends and arch enemies. Then there’s attempted murder victim George Blackwater and his entire entourage of family and friends (brother, wife, son, housekeeper, assistant – past and present. Don’t forget his love life, too). The introductions continue with a bunch of reporters, police officers, lawyers, doctors, coroners, personal assistants, paramedics, even the principal, a librarian, a caterer, and a banker.
But, back to the plot. Someone has tried to kill George. He has plenty of enemies but it’s up to Jules Clement to figure out who hates him the most. Is it his wife? His girlfriend? His brother? His agent? But, there is a bigger mystery at play. Who hates Jules Clement even more?

Confessional: I had a hard time pinning down in what decade Edge of the Crazies was supposed to happen. Even though it was published in 1995 the story seems to take place much earlier. An hourly wage was $4.50, you could buy a truck for $700 and a house for $30,000 and yet a couch was $1,000 “back in the eighties.” Harrison quotes a Lucinda Williams tune from 1992….
Another observation: I was surprised Jules wasn’t used to seeing his father’s name in print, especially since he is sheriff of the same town as his father. As sheriff of Blue Deer in 1972, wouldn’t Jules’s father’s signature be on a lot of things at the station?

Lines worth mentioning, “they both mulled over the educational properties of cheap fiction in silence” (p 104),

Author fact: Harrison definitely puts a little of herself in a few of her characters. In her former life she was a caterer and script reader. In Edge of the Crazies there is a caterer and script writer.

Book trivia: There was a section of timeline that didn’t sit well with me at all. Around pages 279-281 Jules goes to the Baird Hotel for lunch. The meal lasts two hours. When he returns to the station Grace fills him in on what happened while he was at lunch. After the conversation he “grabbed his coat and eyed the clock. It was 11, and he had plenty of time” (p 281). 11 in the morning? That would make lunch sometime between 8:30 and 8:45am depending on how long it took him to have his conversation with Grace. Further muddying the waters is that when Jules goes back to the hotel he sees the waitress who served him “an hour earlier.” Obviously, Harrison meant to say Jules had breakfast that lasted two hours. Although I still found it odd that the meal took two hours but he was only served his meal an hour earlier. Does that mean he sat around for an hour before the waitress served him?

Nancy said: Nancy called Edge of the Crazies a “good police procedural” (p 121).

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust twice. First, in the easy chapter called “I Love a Mystery” (p 117) and again the chapter called “Montana: In Big Sky Country” (p 156).

Gastronomical Me

gr4c5Leave a comment

Fisher, M.F.K. The Gastronomical Me. New York: North Point Press, 1989.

Reason read: November is Hunger and Homelessness Awareness month.

This is a series of essays written about Fisher’s life between 1912 and 1941. She covers a wide range of topics; from the first time food became significant to her as a teenager in boarding school to her adventures as a newly married wife living in France. When she said goodbye to her Californian-American palate and encountered French cuisine it was like having an epiphany for Fisher. Her ears (and taste buds) were open to a whole new way of experiencing food and drink. Sprinkled throughout the stories are glimpses of Fisher’s personal history. Her relationship with sister Norah and brother David, the demise of her first marriage with Al, the slow death of her second love, Chexbres, and her awakening to a different culture in Mexico. At times I found Fisher’s language to be overly dramatic. I wondered if she spoke like that in real life.

Confessional: I found Fisher to be a bit snobbish. Every time she called someone stupid or simple for whatever reason, I cringed.

Quote I cared for, “Everyone knows, from books or experience, that living out of sight of any shore does rich and powerful things to humans (p 40).

Author fact: Fisher has written over thirty books. I have already read A Considerable Town for the Challenge and have two more to go. Another more basic piece of trivia is that M.F.K. stands for Mary Frances Kennedy.

Book trivia: Gastronomical Me has been called Fisher’s most autobiographical work and has been considered her best.

Nancy said: M.F.K. Fisher “expresses her love of good food and its importance in the lives of families and communities” (p 91).

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Food for Thought” (p 91).

A Fine Balance

gr4c5Leave a comment

Mistry, Rohinton. A Fine Balance.New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.
Mistry, Rohinton. A Fine Balance. Read by John Lee. Santa Ana, CA: Books on Tape, Inc., 2001.

Reason read: in honor of India celebrating Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s birth month as Children’s Day in November. Okay, that’s not entirely true. Originally, I chose this book to read in November because supposedly November is a good month to visit India. Since I have never been to India in November or at any time, I couldn’t really say when is the best time to visit.

I could tell I was going to like A Fine Balance when I got to this line early in the the novel, “How much gratitude for a little sherbet…how starved they seemed for ordinary kindness” (p 8). The writing is so graceful and honest. This is the story of the daily lives of four people in an unnamed seaside town in India, thrown together by a housing shortage after the government has declared a state of emergency. At the center is Dina Dalal, a widowed seamstress. As a matter of pride she will not remarry just to be supported by a man. In order to stay self sufficient she takes in borders. One such border is Manek Kohlah, a student attending college in the city. He is studying refrigeration. Ishvar Darji and Omprakash, two other borders, are tailors fleeing caste-centric brutalities in their village. There is no doubt in my mind most people find this story incredibly tragic, considering its ending. I found it sad but with a thin thread of optimism. When a once bitter character can laugh by the end of it, you know the human spirit has not been broken.

The word that comes up time and time again when describing Mistry’s work is depth. Depth of characters, depth of plot, and of human emotion. That being said, pay attention to Dina. Her transformation is the best part of the book.

Author fact: Mistry also wrote Such a Long Journey in 1991. It’s also on my list.

Favorite line, “If there was an abundance of misery in the world, there was also sufficient joy, yes – as long as one knew where to look for it” (p 588.)

Book trivia: On November 30th, 2001 A Fine Balance was chosen as an “Oprah book” for her book club. As an aside, I went to her website to see how such a book is talked about, promoted, marketed, and so on. I was surprised to see her website would have such a crappy cover shot. The image is super blurry so my guess is the file is too big. I guess I expected Oprah’s website to be just like her magazine, big and glossy.

Nancy said: not much. Just described the plot, which is surprising considering Mistry’s masterful writing. I would have thought Pearl would want to say more.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust twice. First, in the chapter called “100 Good Reads, Decade By Decade (1990)s” (p 179) and again in “Passage to India” (p 181).