Category: Book Reviews

The Art of Dying

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Weenolsen, Patricia. The Art of Dying: How to Leave This World with Dignity and Grace, at Peace with Yourself and Your Loved Ones. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.

Reason read: February (in some circles) is Psychology Month.

Do you need to be terminally ill to read this book? I hope not. But, I would think having a terminal illness would help to read this book more effectively, especially when performing the “Meaning of Disease” exercise 40 pages in. It’s the first of many exercises surrounding the subject of terminal illness. It’s difficult to answer some of Weenolsen’s questions as a seemingly healthy person. But, back to my original question. It prompted another: how many healthy people have read this book and stored information away for when a life threatening illness eventually  settles in? As it stands right now, we are all terminal, but does anyone plan (beside the hypochondriac) for a terminal illness?
This book is chock full of information but probably the biggest surprise was Weenolsen’s humor. Sometimes snarky, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, there was a lightheartedness to some of her chapters; as if humor would make the subject matter easier to swallow. [Note: in my case it did, once I identified why death made me so squirmy.]

Before reading The Art of Dying I had to wonder what prompted Weenolsen to devote her life to the subject.

Quotes that put things into perspective immediately: On the subject of dying: “We can look neither into the sun nor death directly” (p 3) and “People want to name the disease” (p 48). On the subject of letting go (in this case, a neat house): “If you’re not dust-sensitive, think of the layers as mounting thick enough to hatch something – and then to keep them around as pets” (p 66).

Author fact: Weenolsen is a psychologist who specializes in death and dying and counsels people on both.

Book trivia: As I mentioned before, I didn’t expect humor from The Art of Dying. The jokes come out of nowhere. Weenolsen has this quirky sense of humor that emerges every so often.

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Dewey Deconstructed: 100s” (p 64).

Strength in What Remains

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Kidder, Tracy. Strength in What Remains. Read by the author. New York: Books on Tape, 2009.

Reason read: okay, so this is a stretch. Tracy Kidder is from Northampton, Massachusetts. In February 1995 I moved from New Jersey to Easthampton. In February 2002 I moved up to Northampton. (Again in a different February I moved to Chicopee but that is another story for another time.) So, in honor of the second move, moving to Northampton in February (2002), I’m reading Kidder.

This is the remarkable story of Deo, a man who survived the horrific violence of 1993 in not only Burundi but Rwanda as well. Trying to escape the political upheaval between Tutsi and Hutu, Deo fled into Rwanda only to find infighting and ethnic cleansing there as well. Finally, with $200 to his name he was able to escape to New York City where he found work as a grocery delivery boy. Earning only $15 a day he lived in Central Park to make ends meet. It was after he delivered groceries to a nun when Deo’s life drastically changed. Through her generosity Deo was able to meet a middle aged couple who essentially took him in as their own; a quasi-adoption, if you will (his parents had survived the genocide so he was not a legal orphan). They gave him a place to live but more importantly, once they found out he had been a medical student in Burundi they helped put him through school at Columbia, majoring in biochemistry and philosophy. Remarkable, considering he didn’t have a green card or visa of any kind. What’s even more remarkable is that Deo not only went on to become a doctor, but he found forgiveness and went back to his homeland to start a clinic.

I liked Kidder’s direct, never-wavering sense of storytelling. Compared to Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, Kidder maintains a linear language and nothing is off-topic. It’s as if he knows he is limited to only so many words to tell the story and he doesn’t want to waste a single one on superfluous detail.

Author fact: One of Kidder’s favorite poems is Wordsworth’s “Ode to Intimations of Immortality” and used a line from that poem for the title of his book.

Book trivia: this is the first audio I have listened to that is read by the author.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Africa: the Greenest Continent” (p 7).
Note: Throughout Book Lust To Go Pearl includes links to videos of interviews she conducted with certain authors. I decided to wait until I was reading the book to watch that author’s interview. Big mistake. The URL no longer works for Tracy Kidder so I thought the video no longer existed. The funny thing is, when I was first reading Book Lust To Go I questioned the practice of putting URLs in a book. First off, the link is cumbersome to type into a browser (When I couldn’t find the Kidder interview I was convinced I had typos in the URL.), and secondly links break and content often is removed.
UPDATED TO ADD: I contacted SeattleChannel and they confirmed, yes the Kidder video had been removed. Anything older than 2012 had been taken down (which would mean all Pearl interviews mentioned in Book Lust To Go). But. But! But, they graciously returned the video to the site and sent me the URL. It was a pleasure to watch. My favorite line from Kidder, “I’m jumping out a window and I don’t know what floor I’m on.” I LOVE that illustration of risk. I am grateful for the staff at SeattleChannel because they really came through for me.

Path to Power

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Caro, Robert A. The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power. New York: Vintage Books, 1982.

Reason read: Presidents Day is celebrated in February and Johnson was our 36th President of the United States.

Here’s what I knew about Johnson before reading Caro’s book: sworn in as President after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Came into office as the “Great Society” President because he carried Kennedy’s platform: he cared about social issues such as education, civil rights and anti-poverty. He left office as the “Baby Killer” President because he had led the United States further into the Vietnam war. Here’s what I learned about President Johnson after reading Caro’s first book: Johnson was a pathological liar about his childhood and personal life, was a genius for secrecy, and was a terrible kid growing up. He was constantly disobeying his parents, had no respect for his father, even disliked reading books…that didn’t change once he got to college, nor did it sit well with me. He continue to lie and manipulate like Othello’s Iago throughout his entire life. His hunger for power was displayed in odd ways (like forcing assistants to converse with him while he was on the toilet).

In the very beginning of Path to Power Caro introduces his readers to Hill Country Texas, setting the stage of poverty as the very first driving force behind Johnson’s ruthless ambition. Subsequently, every following chapter is scaffolded (my word) by the political and economic climate and influential people of the time. As a result, Path to Power appears to veer off topic from time to time. It also creates a wordiness and heft to the biography that some deem unnecessary.

Author fact: Caro has his own website here.

Book trivia: Path to Power is the first book in what was supposed to be the Years of Lyndon Johnson trilogy. Those three books are on my list. However, a fourth book, The Passage of Power covers years 1958 to 1964.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter obviously and logically called “Presidential Biographies” (p 193). Note: it would have been awesome to biographies of each president right up to publication date. I would have liked to have read Jimmy Carter, Rutherford B. Hayes or even William Harrison.

Tom Brown’s School Days

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Hughes, Thomas. Tom Brown’s School Days. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1911.

Reason read: to finish the series started in April in honor of George MacDonald Fraser’s birth month…even though this has nothing to do with George MacDonald Fraser.

Victorian-era literature always gets to me. I know that Tom Brown’s School Days centers on the manner and customs of the mid 1850s and is the basis for the Flashman series by George MacDonald Fraser, but I found myself completely bored. Aside from the great illustrations this wasn’t the most entertaining of reads.

An odd quote, “They can’t let anything alone which they think going wrong” (p 5).

As an aside – Hughes called his readers either gentle or simple. I couldn’t decide which category I fell into.

Author fact: Thomas Hughes looked like Mario Balzic from the cover of Always a Body to Trade by K.C. Constantine.

Book trivia: I tried reading both an electronic and print versions of this. The full title on the 1911 electronic version was Tom Brown’s School~Days By An Old Boy (Thomas Hughes) with Numerous Illustrations Made at Rugby School by Louis Rhead, MCMXI. And to be fair, the illustrations were great. Introduction was by W.D. Howells.
The print version (published in 1918) was a little different. Title page reads, “Tom Brown’s School-Days By an Old Boy (Thomas Hughes) Edited by H.C. Bradby, B.A. Assistant Headmaster at Rugby School Illustrated by Hugh Thomson.” Interesting, huh?

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “George MacDonald Fraser: Too Good To Miss” (p 93). Except…Tom Brown’s School Days was not written by George MacDonald Fraser as I mentioned earlier.

Her First American

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Segal, Lore. Her First American. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985.

Reason read: my college celebrated “Immigrant Awareness Week” in February.

Ilka Weissnix is a twenty one year old immigrant from Vienna. Arriving in New York City for the very first time, she is hungry to learn everything she can about America. Her cousin, Litvak, arranges for her to travel cross country by train to the wild, wild west. It’s in Nevada where Ilka meets her “first American”, Carter Bayoux. This is the 1950s so meeting Carter is blessing and a curse. Being an intellectual he is eager to show Ilka the world of artists and scholars. Being a heavy drinker  and a reckless romantic he also exposes her to jokes that aren’t always funny and a world that sometimes is unfair and unpredictable. Needless to say she is confused a lot of the time. But, it’s his drinking that really hit home for me. I live on the fringe of other people’s addiction and Segal does an amazing job bringing that harsh reality into the spotlight with subtle grace. Carter’s bouts of loneliness and helplessness are amplified through his constant summoning of Ilka to his hotel room as if there is a dire emergency. His brother’s inability to be around him is an indication of the shame Carter has brought to his family. And yet, Carter is surrounded by friends who obviously adore him.

I found this to be a fascinating read. At times I caught myself pondering American slang and thinking how strange it must sound in the ears of a foreigner.
As an aside, I have no idea why Lore wanted Ilka to travel all the way to Nevada to meet Carter. They both live in New York City so wouldn’t it have been easier to have them bump into each other there? The trip out west is just an odd blip in an otherwise mostly New York-centric story.

Most profound quote, “Like the series of points that make a line, the moments in which Carter did not pick up the glass made half a minute, a minute, five minutes, half an hour – became the morning Carter Bayoux stopped drinking” (p 82).
More quotes, “She was moved by the delicacy of his enormous sleep” (p 106) and “The prospect of sending her voice out among so many strangers made her heart beat and strangled her breath” (p 171).

Author fact: Segal was born in Vienna. Could Her First American be somewhat autobiographical in nature? Does she have a “first” American?

Book trivia: The cover of Her First American is from a painting called “City Activities with Subway” by Thomas Hart Benton (1930). Even though the story takes place twenty years later, the scene still works.

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter simply called “The Immigrant Experience” (p 124).

And I Shall Sleep…

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Llewellyn, Richard. And I Shall Sleep…Down Where the Moon Was Small. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1966.

Reason read: to finish the series incorrectly started in December in honor of Patagonia.

Like Llewellyn’s first two novels, And I Shall Sleep… starts off with Huw and his mother’s little blue cloth, the one she “wore about her hair when cleaning” (p 1). This will become significant later, as you might have guessed.
And I Shall Sleep is the third and final book in the Huw Morgan series. When we join back up with Huw, he and his small group of Patagonians have made a new settlement in the Andes mountains. Previously Huw’s love, Lal, had decided to stay behind but early in And I Shall Sleep she changes her mind and joins Huw in the mountains. While this may seem like a good thing for Huw (since he was so infatuated with her in Up, Into the Singing Mountain), his attraction to an evasive Indio girl complicates the relationship. It doesn’t help that Huw is becoming more and more sympathetic to the Indio plight (“they were denied a land where their fathers had ridden” p 122), Interestingly enough, this new girl, Liliutro, is half sister to Lal. [Semi-spoiler alert: the inside flap reveals that mysterious Lili is able to lure Huw away from Lal so the whole time Huw and Lal are seemingly happy together I wondered when his betrayal would begin…and then when it did I regretted waiting for it.]
On the professional side, Huw’s trading company is getting bigger and bigger. He is able to travel to America and meet Henry Ford. As a businessman he grows more and more successful.

As an aside: towards the end of And I Shall Sleep I was starting to dislike Huw a great deal. There is this one curious scene where Huw has just slept with a married woman and she announces she is going to tell her husband. The next day the husband comes to Huw to inform him I know what you did and oh, by the way, you should call the police because I put my hands around her neck….”Heard it go. Told you. I’m finished” (p 308).
And then there’s the scene with the puma…and that’s all I’m going to say about that.

Quote I like: right from the beginning, the very first sentence grabbed me, “Dearly touched a heart can be with proof of love from an absent one” (p 1). This set the whole stage for me.
Other quote I liked, “A pity it takes so long to reach good sense” (p 99).

Book trivia: And I Shall Sleep… is sometimes called simply Down Where the Moon Was Small.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter simply and predictably called “Patagonia” (p 174). Note: both titles are indexed in Book Lust To Go.

Thirty Nine Steps

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Buchan, John. The Thirty-Nine Steps. New York: Buccaneer Books, 1996.

Reason read: in honor of my birthday I wanted to read something fast and fun.

It’s May 1914 in London, England. Scottish expatriate Richard Hannay has a troublesome visitor. That’s the first thing I would say about The Thirty Nine Steps. An American stranger has come to him with a wild tale of espionage and knowledge of a planned assassination. Because he was in the know, according to this stranger, Mr. Scudder, he had to fake his own death. He has come to Hannay to hide himself and his little coded book of secrets. However, imagine Hannay’s surprise when that same man is found with a knife so thoroughly through the heart it skewered him to the floor! Needless to say, Hannay is now on the run…with the cipher of secrets. With Mr. Scudder dead on his floor, surely he will be the number one suspect. The rest of the short book is Hannay’s attempts to hide out in Scotland, a place he hasn’t seen since he was six years old, thirty one years ago. The key to the whole mystery is a reference to “39 steps” in Scudder’s little book.

Head scratching quotes, “He had about as much gift of gab as a hippopotamus and was not a great hand at valeting, but I knew I could count on his loyalty” (p 22)

Author fact: Buchan was a member of Parliament and Governor-General of Canada.

Book trivia: This is another super short book, only 126 pages long. Originally published in 1915 and made into a movie several times.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “100 Good Reads, Decade by Decade: 1910s” (p 174). But wait! There’s more! From Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Oxford – nonfiction” (p 171). It should be noted that Thirty-Nine Steps does not take place in Oxford, nor is it nonfiction.

As She Climbed Across the Table

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Lethem, Jonathan. As She Climbed Across the Table. Read by David Aaron Baker. Maryland: Books on Tape, 2007.

Reason read: February is Lethem’s birth month.

I love Jonathan Lethem’s voice. The style he writes in is so casual, so sly you feel like you need to reread the words to make sure you haven’t missed something important or at least clever. As She Climbed Across the Table is told from the perspective of Anthropology professor Philip. The story he tells you is at once heartbreaking and humorous. His girlfriend and colleague, particle physicist Alice Coombs has fallen in love with a void, a tiny black hole. The only problem with this? The void, named Lack for obvious reasons, has refused Alice’s attempts to lose herself in his depths. This “lack” of affection on Lack’s part only makes Alice desire him more. Why? Because it seems as if he (because it has to be a he for Alice to love) has a personality capable of rejection. He will devour car keys and other items of significance, but not Alice.

As an aside: When Alice repeatedly admits she loves Lack the way she used to love Philip, (but doesn’t anymore), I wanted Philip to be more rebellious. Here is he, allowing crazy, non-speaking, dopey Alice to live in the same apartment all the while refusing the advances of a beautiful and smart therapist who is practically throwing herself at him. Am I too cold blooded to think Philip should have developed more of a “screw you” spine?

Author Fact: This is not a fact per se…but, I ran into a photo of Jonathan Lethem and in it he looked sorta, kinda, somewhat like Mike Gordon from the band Phish. Not exactly like him, mind you. But, close enough to be his kid brother or something.

Audio trivia: David Aaron Baker does a great job with voice accents. The part when Philip is drunk is hilarious.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the obvious chapter “Jonathan Lethem: Too Good To Miss” (p 146).

If You Lived Here You’d Be Home By Now

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Loh, Sandra Tsing. If You Lived Here You’d Be Home By Now. New York: riverhead books, 1997.

Reason read: Loh’s birth month is in February.

Confessional: I finished this in a day. Not because it was my favorite book but because I was home sick.

This is the story of Bronwyn Peters and her boyfriend, Paul, trying to make it in the glamorous city of Los Angeles. Be prepared. This is a very dated (1990s) story and there will be times when you want to maybe slap the sh!t out of Sandra Loh. I grew weary of the plenitude of brand-name dropping that went on (Guess?, Porche, Sanyo, Motorola, Kohler, BMW, Berber, Dolce & Gabbana, Wamsutta, Crate and Barrel…to name a few), as well as hot-now celebrity names like David Lynch, Frank Zappa, Malcolm Forbes, and Madonna…
Confessional: there were definitely times I wanted to slap Bronwyn Peters. Despite listening to NPR and identifying with a Bohemian lifestyle, Bronwyn hungers for the lifestyle of $200 haircuts and Corian counters. She even convinces her struggling writer boyfriend to buy a condo in downtown Los Angeles after they come into a modest amount of money (clearly not enough for L.A. standards). They settle on a place they obviously cannot afford for long. Bronwyn knows full well they are out of their league and yet continues to plays the game to the hilt. Bronwyn’s one redeeming quality is her steadfast love for Paul. She stands by him through temptation and failure. In the end, If you Lived Here… is Loh’s platform for bringing to the forefront L.A.’s socio-economic class structure. She uses the riots as a backdrop to her commentary on attitudes, prejudices and the simple act of just wanting more.

Lines I liked: “Feeling like Bruce Willis is some sort of Dead Something action picture, Bronwyn gripped her flashlight” (p176), and “and because there was nothing else to do, she rolled over and stole her arms around her fellow, such as he was, because his was the body that was still there” (p 221).

Author fact: If you Lived Here You’d Be Home By Now is Loh’s first novel.

Book trivia: short, short, short!

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “California, Here We Come” (p 49).

Forgetting February

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Okay, so here it is, the first week of February and I never wrote a summary for January or looked ahead to February. What is this world coming to? I’ll tell you what the what. My life has been upside down lately. Between being sick and injured I haven’t been myself lately. Not working out has left me crank, crank, cranky! Not running has unhinged my balance. Being sick for the second time this winter doesn’t help.
So even though I blew it for January, here’s a redeemer for February. Without further ado, the books I will read (or have already read) for the month:

  1.  A.D.: After the Deluge by Josh Neufeld in honor of Mardi Gras
  2. Her First American by Lore Segal in honor of immigration month
  3. I Shall Sleep…Down Where the Moon is Small by Richard Llewellyn (to finish the series started in December)
  4. Tom Brown’s School Days by Thomas Hughes (to finish the series started LAST April)
  5. Beautiful Place to Die by Philip Craig
  6. If You Lived Here You’d Be Home By Now by Sandra Loh in honor of Loh’s birth month
  7. Rocksburg Railroad Murders by K.C. Constantine (in finish the series started last month)
  8. As She Crawled Across the Table by Jonathan Lethem in honor of his birth month (an audio book)
  9. Liar by Rob Roberge (Early Review book)
  10. The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano (not on the challenge list; a recommendation by my sister)

Okay. So that’s a lot of books. But not really once you read my confessional: There were four that took a day apiece to read (Neufeld, Loh, Constantine, and Craig) and four more I have been reading for a while now (Llewellyn, Hughes, Roberge and Giordano). So, already a total of six are “in the can” so to speak even though it’s only early February. Clarification: I have a “new” rule for series. I’ll use the Constantine series to illustrate: I started Constantine’s series in honor of mystery month in January. When I finished the January book I didn’t wait until February 1st to start the second book in the series. True, I give myself a month to read a book but sometimes I don’t need that much time. If that makes sense.

I will be adding two more:

  1. The Path to Power by Robert Caro in honor of Presidents Day
  2. Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder (audio book) in honor of February being the month we moved to Northampton (Kidder is a Northampton author).

the Solitude of Prime Numbers

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Giordano, Paolo. The Solitude of Prime Numbers. New York: Penguin Books, 2009.

Reason read: for fun…because my sister said so.

I don’t know what it was about this book that made it so difficult to read. I must have picked it up and put it down a hundred times before I finally got to the last page. It wasn’t that it was a horribly written book. In fact, just the opposite. It was so beautiful in a haunting, painful way that I could only read it in short bursts.

Alice and Mattia are two misfit loners who accidentally find each other as teenagers at a birthday party. Despite the fact they are thrown together on a malicious dare, they develop a bond of solidarity. To quote Pink Floyd, they were “two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl” recognizing the loneliness in each other. Except, their friendship does not develop as one normally would. They remain just as singular (primary, as the title suggests) as if they had never met.

Quotes that moved me, “They lived the slow and invisible interpenetration of their universes, like two stars gravitating around a common axis, in ever tighter orbits, whose clear destiny it to coalesce at some point in time” (p 136). Someone else liked that line. It was marked in the book. And, “Every one of them had a love that had rotted alone in their hearts” (p 144).

A lot like Rob Roberge’s Liar, I found this book took me a really long time to read. As I said with Liar, it wasn’t that the story wasn’t interesting. Only that it was too lonely for words.

Author fact: Solitude is Paolo Giordano’s first book.

Book trivia: Solitude won Giordano the Premio Straga award.

 

Beautiful Place to Die

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Craig, Philip A. A Beautiful Place to Die. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989.

Reason read: February is the month in which Massachusetts became a state and Martha’s Vineyard is the “beautiful place to die”.

You can always tell when an author has either spent time or lived in the area where his or her book takes place. The details are sharper, the descriptions more lovingly told…if that makes sense. There is a care to the words. Philip R. Craig is no different. Because of the way he describes the island of Martha’s Vineyard early on in A Beautiful Place To Die, you can tell he calls it home.

Jefferson Washington Jackson is a retired Boston cop/Vietnam veteran living on the island of Martha’s Vineyard trying to forget about the bullet still lodged in his back. To keep himself occupied he is an avid fisherman, a successful gardener (does better with vegetables than flowers) and a decent cook. After a friend’s boat explodes and someone he knew was killed Jeff finds a new hobby as private investigator. Along with a suspicious boat explosion there are rumors of drug busts and murder. There are plenty of little twists and turns to A Beautiful Place to Die so even though it is a short (211 pages) read, it is entertaining.

Quotes I love (see confessional), “Librarians are wonderfully valuable people” (p 122), “Women are the gender of reality” (p 174), and “When I’m king of the world I’m going to ban pay toilets as an affront to civilization” (p 175).

Side note: When J.W. tells Zee how he came to live on M.V. it reminded me of Monhegan. Many islanders can’t afford to buy a place where they grew up. They rely on inheriting family property to stay on the island…

Confessional: I have a crush on Jefferson Washington Jackson. Consider the facts: he gardens, cooks, appreciates librarians, understands a Barbar kind of day, likes Sam Adams beer and a clean house, has a sense of humor, has the same opinion of pay toilets, and is able to survive getting shot twice in 48 hours! What’s not to love?

Author fact: According the to back flap, Philip Craig grew up on a small cattle ranch in Durango, Colorado. The Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard is quite a departure from the wild west.

Book trivia: This is book one is the Martha’s Vineyard series.

BookLust Twist: from <em>Book Lust To Go</em> in the chapter simply called “Martha’s Vineyard” (p 142). No twist there…

A.D.

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Neufeld, Josh. A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge. New York: Pantheon Books, 2010.

Reason read: Mardi Gras is held in New Orleans every February. Rather than read this in August (typical because of the date of Hurricane Katrina) I decided to twist it up a little. Just as Pearl did (see BookLust Twist at the end of this review).

Right from the very beginning you know you are in for something deeply moving and very special when reading the graphic novel A.D. (although technically it is not a novel. Novel implies fiction, right?). Neufeld starts the reader off looking at Earth from outer space. As we look down on North America we almost get a sense of the calm before the storm. On the next page the graphic orientates us to the tragedy to come as we get a bird’s eye view of the city of New Orleans. We are coming in closer. We see the city as one entity and the storm as another, as if they are two strangers being introduced at a party. As the days go by we follow the lives of seven New Orleans residents. This becomes a biography of each individual.
To me, what is incredibly sad is the emphasis on their naivete, their attitude of “this is no big deal” all because hurricanes in their corner of the world come and go. They have lived through them before. They are experts in the realm of weather. That may be true, but no one expected the levies to go…

Yes. You can read this in one day as posting this on the first implies. My recommendation? Read it several times. Read and share it. There is a message hidden in the comic.

My favorite StopYouInYourTracks quote: “At least then we wouldn’t have had to walk on top of the things I cared about the most” (Leo, on page 171).

As an aside: Neufeld wasn’t the only artist to be shocked by Hurricane Katrina. Many talented individuals expressed their grief through art. But, listen to Natalie Merchant. She wrote a song called “Go Down Moses” (on her self titled album) that addresses not only the city of New Orleans after the hurricane, but the Danziger Bridge tragedy as well. Danziger is what she was referring to when she says, “let your people cross over.” Sad.

Author fact: the author of A.D. is JOSH Neufeld. Josh, not Joshua as Nancy Pearl refers to him. He is Josh in twelve different places in the book: on the front cover, on the title page, four times on the copyright page, in the afterward, on the “about the author” page, on the back flap and three in separate instances on the back cover. Not once does the name “Joshua” appear anywhere. Call me crazy, but I think he wants to be called Josh. For more information on Josh and this project, check out this link.

Book trivia: this was a New York Times best seller. Of course it was.

BookLust Twist: in Book Lust To Go but not for the reasons you would think. You’re thinking this would be in the chapter “New Orleans” but it’s not. It’s in “Comics with a Sense of Place” (p 68).

Liar

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Roberge, Rob. Liar.New York: Crown Publishers, 2016.

Publishing Date: February 2016

Reason read: Early Review book for LibraryThing.

When I first received Liar I did what I always do when receiving an Early Review: I checked the pub date to see how long I had to finish reading it in order to write an “early” review. I was dismayed to see I had approximately three weeks. Three weeks may not seem like a short amount of time, but it is when you are already involved in four other 300+ page books. I shouldn’t have worried. Not with Liar.

This is a quick, quick read. Be prepared. The timeline jumps around a lot. But maybe that’s the point. You can’t keep the chronology straight so it’s harder to keep Roberge’s story straight. Hence, the title of the book. It’s supposed to be a memoir. Is he lying or not? Reading Liar reminded me of those picture viewers: you slide in the disc, look through the viewer to see a particular scene. Advancing the disc allows you to see another scene. When trying to describe this toy (and book) to a friend he said, “oh. You mean like a peep show?” Yeah. Like a peep show. Roberge shows you just hints of a mentally ill/bipolar/suicidal, crazy drug addled, violent/kinky sex fueled life and then quickly closes the curtain. When the curtain reopens it’s a completely different view; a little more is revealed…or not. It could be about the Titanic sinking or some other misconstrued moment in history. You never know what you are going to get. I am resisting the urge to make a timeline and “map” all of Roberge’s life events just to see how his life has played out thus far.

Confessional: there were times when I got “tired” reading this book. My attitude wavered between fascination and boredom. How many times could one read about Roberge waking unremembering in a sticky puddle of his own puke? How many “I Have No Idea What I Did Last Night” scenarios could be described in one book? There was a definite repetition of shock value to Liar and yet, yet I found myself asking what next? I needed to know how did he get through the latest debacle in his life?

 

Rocksburg Railroad Murders

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Constantine, K.C. The Rocksburg Railroad Murders. Boston: David R. Godine, Publisher, 1982.

Reason read: to “finish” the series started in December with Always a Body to Trade in honor of January being Mystery Month. Yes, I read them out of order.

Written in a much different time. When else can you have a Meet Me At the Bar kind of cop who has a priest for a drinking and gambling buddy (on the clock, no less)? Here are some other facts about Chief of Police Mario Balzic: he’s married and a father of two teenage daughters. His mother lives with him and he’s a wicked gin player. A senior in 1942 he joined the Marines fresh out of high school. As a tough but sensitive Chief of Police in Rocksburg, Pennsylvania it’s up to him to figure out who bashed in John Andrasko’s face with a soda bottle at the railway station. For Mario, this murder is personal for he’s known John since they were kids.

Quote I liked, “A man went goofy with grief, he saw to it that the victims were covered, and everybody went home to a hot shower and a cold glass of wine. What else did you do when somebody you loved got killed?” (p 181).

Author fact: Mario is a lot like K.C. in that both are military men.

Book trivia: The Rocksburg Railroad Murders is Constantine’s first book.

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Big Ten Country: The Literary Midwest (Pennsylvania)” (p 31).