Tag: 2009

Close Range

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Proulx, Annie. Close Range: Wyoming Stories. New York: Scribner, 1999.

I am fascinated by Wyoming. Have been ever since I was a teenager. I think it started when a boyfriend of mine enthralled me with stories of Coffin Lake. It sounded so beautiful and wild and so far away. Close Range is a collection of short stories that take place in Wyoming. Here is a list of the short stories:

  • “The Half Skinned Steer” ~ a creepy story about an over-eighty year old man who travels from New England to Wyoming by car for his brother’s funeral. It’s an odd story because he and his brother weren’t close. Favorite line, “He wanted caffeine. The roots of his mind felt withered and punky” (p 29) and “He traveled against curdled sky” (p 34).
  • “The Mud Below” ~ a desperate tale about a man obsessed with bull riding because it’s all he knows how to do.
  • “Job History” ~ Literally, a fast-forward version of the job history of Lee Leland.
  • “The Blood Bay” ~ okay, I admit it. I don’t know how to describe this story. Just read it for yourself!
  • “People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water”
  • “The Bunchgrass Edge of the World” ~ Girl talks to a tractor.
  • “Pair a Spurs” ~ favorite line, “I get the rough end a the pineapple every day” (p 153).
  • “A Lonely Coast”
  • “The Governors of Wyoming”
  • “55 Miles to the Gas Pump”
  • “Brokeback Mountain” ~ I think everyone knows this story, thanks to the movie.

Confessional: I read Close Range at the same time as Stillmeadow Road by Gladys Taber. Bad idea. Not because one made the other worse. It was just that they were too completely different books and the contrast made it difficult for me to concentrate.

Close Range: Wyoming Stories sets a very harsh, violent, sad landscape for its characters. Poverty and a sense of futility is in every story. Every situation is a lesson in survival and dealing with the crappy hand you have been dealt. Words like stark and bleak and depressed come to mind. The characters are born into a way of life that has barely any opportunity for change. There is no easy means of escape. The brutality of the landscape is matched only by the grit of its inhabitants.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called, “Companion Reads” (p 64).

Up the Down Staircase

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Kaufman, Bel. Up the Down Staircase. New York: Avon Books, 1964.

I admit it. I left work in a hurry. I didn’t clean up my desk and I didn’t pack my books. So, I had a weekend with nothing to read. True, I had some loose ends to finish up (Close Range turned out to be not my thing), but determining that didn’t take all weekend. Desperate for something that would be a quick read I found Up the Down Staircase by Bel Kaufman. Funny! I was supposed to read this sometime in May. Oh well. It ended up being a July 11th read.

In the spirit of every new-to-the-business, green educator, Sylvia Barrett is no different than all the rest. Every first year teacher can claim Up the Down Staircase illustrates his or her career. When Sylvia begins her first term in New York’s Calvin Coolidge high school she has nothing short of big dreams and great expectations. Within days she discovers her classes, her students, fellow teachers and the entire school administration are nothing like she imagined. Getting through to the students is an exercise in swimming in quicksand. Getting through to the administration is like screaming into the wind. In both situations Sylvia plods through with humor and grace. What makes this book such a pleasure to read is how the story is communicated. Through “intraschool communications,” homework assignments, suggestion box missives, and letters to a friend Sylvia’s teaching triumphs and tragedies come to life.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called, “Teachers and Teaching Tales” (p 230).

Stillmeadow Road

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Taber, Gladys. The Stillmeadow Road. New York: Harper & Row, 1984.

This was first published in 1962 and reissued in 1984. I like books that make a comeback. It is 1960’s quaint. Whimsical, even. Taber has a way of writing that is light and airy. There is no other way to describe it. Well, maybe it just seemed that way since I read it along side Annie Proulx’s harsh Close Range: Wyoming Stories. Whereas Proulx is arid and brutal and ugly, Taber is lush and sweet and pretty. Like, for example, I found it interesting that Taber glossed over everything involving her good, good friend Jill. They lived at Stillmeadow together. They did everything together. Yet, when Jill dies there is only a paragraph or two dedicated to the tragedy. It almost seemed as if Taber was skirting around her friend’s illness and death as a way to avoid talking about what Jill really meant to her.
Stillmeadow Road is a time capsule memoir about a homestead in Connecticut that Taber purchases with her friend, Jill. It’s all about country living, each chapter separated by the seasons. Month by month Taber lovingly describes life in a farmhouse by the weather, what’s happening in nature, how humans react to it all. Her observations focus on the trees, flowers, animals, and condition of the house throughout the changing seasons. Why do squirrels stay active throughout the winter? Why does it rain during dog shows? Why are storm doors so ugly? At the same time Taber injects social commentary about raising children, dealing with death, being neighborly, sorting out religious beliefs, remembering childhood…the story jumps between country-life observation and spiritual introspection.

A couple of favorite parts: “I do not know whether this happens to everyone, but I always have channeled great shocks into as many smaller ones as I can think of” (p 167), and “I have discovered if you take two steps forward and slip back one, you are sill a step ahead, which is a cliche but a true one” (p 169).

BookLust Twist: From More Book Lust in the chapter called “Cozies” (p 57).

Skull Mantra

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Pattison, Eliot. The Skull Mantra. New York: St. Martin’s Minotaur, 1999.

This is the first piece of fiction I have read that has covered Tibetan culture in such great detail.

Shan Tao Yun is a former veteran police inspector – the perfect person to solve a murder. The clothing of the decapitated victim suggests he was either American or Chinese, and wealthy either way. With a delegation of American tourists arriving for a visit, the district commander is anxious to find the killer as soon as possible. Shan Tao Yun is enlisted except, there is one problem – Shan is currently serving time in a Tibetan prison for offending the Party in Beijing. He has been sentenced to the same hard labor as the Tibetan priests he reveres. Shan is given an ultimatum: find the killer or the priests get brutally punished. In the course of the investigation clues lead Shan to an illegal monastery, a mystical world of demons and spells, political upheaval, and historical tragedies bestowed upon the Tibetan people at the hands of China’s government.

This book definitely opened my eyes to the Tibetan culture. I am a big fan of Tibetan music and have seen several documentaries about the Chinese invasion, but Skull Mantra not only illustrated the struggles of the Tibetan people, but their mysteries as well. My favorite scenes involved Dr. Sung, the medical examiner. Pattison created a sarcastic, funny woman who wasn’t afraid to speak her mind. Here’s a tiny example: “A soiled cardboard box was on an examining table, resting on top of a covered body. He [Shan] turned away as Dr. Sung removed the contents of the box and leaned over the body. “Amazing. It [the head] fits.” She made a gesture to Shan. “Perhaps you would like to try? I know. We’ll cut off the limbs and play mix and match.”” (p 126).

BookLust Twist: From More Book Lust in the chapter called, “Crime is a Globetrotter: Tibet” (p 60).

Adventures of Tom Sawyer

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Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

A classic is a classic is a classic. No doubt about it. My copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was a facsimile of the first American edition so it includes the original illustrations, typeset, etc. This made reading really fun because the illustrations really add to the story. Truth be known, I had forgotten a great deal of the plot. While I remembered Tom was a troublemaker, I couldn’t remember details of his escapades. I’m glad I reread this.

Tom Sawyer is a typical Southern boy looking for adventure. I don’t think there are many young boys that would skin a cat or fake his own death so that he might attend the funeral, but the mischief of such a boy has always been there…and will always be there, too! Tom lives with his auntie and while he is well loved he is always looking for ways to run away. His sidekick, Huck Finn is eager to join him in adventures “down river.” Both are “smarties” as my grandfather would say. Showing off for their peers, and besting the adults -there is never a dull moment in Tom Sawyer’s world.

Two favorite lines: “The strangling hero sprung up with a relieving snort” (p 40), and “Huckleberry was cordially hated…” (p 63).

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called, “Literary Lives: The Americans” (p 145).

Comfort of Strangers

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McEwan, Ian. The Comfort of Strangers. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981.

The entire time I was reading The Comfort of Strangers I felt an uneasiness – so much so that the hairs on the back of my neck would stand up from time to time. There was something sinister about nearly every scene, every page (all 127 of them). I can just imagine what the movie is like.

Colin and Mary are unmarried, unhappy lovers on vacation. Bored with each other and frustrated with their foreign holiday destination (probably Venice or Rome), they are constantly having to remind each other and themselves they are on holiday and are supposed to be relaxing and enjoying themselves. Their disdain for each other annoyed me at times. For the couple getting lost in the ancient, winding, narrow streets wasn’t supposed to be a problem because they have nowhere specific to be. Colin and Mary go on like this until suddenly, the story changes gears after a native enters their bored bubble. That chance meeting changes the course of their lives forever. It is a psychological, violent, erotic second half to the book, full of sex and selfishness. From the moment, Robert, the charismatic stranger, comes into the picture nothing seems normal again.

I didn’t find any particular lines that grabbed me. The whole story in its simplicity was enough to shock me.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called, “Ian McEwan: Too Good To Miss” (p 149).

This Boy’s Life

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Wolff, Tobias. This Boy’s Life. New York: Perennial Library, 1989.

This Boy’s Life was spellbinding. Tobias Wolff’s personal memoir is not tremendous. It may even sound familiar to anyone who came from a broken home, had trouble with a step-parent, or had a mischievous streak growing up (who hasn’t?). What makes This Boy’s Life such a page turner is the honesty that radiates from every page, every sentence. It is not an overwhelming tragic tale, but it is painful and very real. Wolff does not paint a picture of hero, nor victim. It’s just an account of a troubled childhood. The writing is so clear, so unmuddied, that we can easily see bits of our own childhoods reflected in every chapter.

Probably one of my favorite parts was when Tobias (going by the name ‘Jack’ at this point) talks about altering his less than stellar grades in school. Report cards were written in pencil and ‘Jack’s’ admission of guilt is simply, “I owned some pencils myself” (p 184). It’s sly and smile evoking.

BookLust Twist: From More Book Lust in the chapter called, “All in the Family: Writer Dynasties” (p 5).

Cat Who Saw Red

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Braun, Lilian Jackson. The Cat Who Saw Red. New york: Jove Books, 1986.

Only 183 pages long The Cat Who Saw Red  was a really quick, really fun read. Although it had all the elements of an on-your-toes thriller: a possible murder, intrigue, scandalous affiars, missing persons, and too many possible suspects to count, it was what I would call a “gentle” mystery. A quiet, light suspense ripples throughout the plot. There is just as much humor as danger.
James Qwilleran is an award winning journalist sent on assignment to write a food column. As a former cop Qwill, as he is known by everyone, smells as mystery sooner than a burning souffle. Sniffing out leads, it is not long before he is using his restaurant experiences to wine and dine clues out  of unsuspecting suspects.
As an aside: every chapter begins with a sentence that mentions James Qwilleran. I found that to be a weird thing to notice.

Tidbit of trivia: I find it amazing that Lilian J. Bruan first started her “The Cat Who…” series back in the 1960’s and then vanished for eighteen years. Her triumphant return was with The Cat Who Saw Red.

Funny conversation: “…’This is crummy soup.’
                                             ‘Is it canned?’
                                              ‘No, worse! It tastes like I made it.'” (p 101)

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called, “Cat Crazy” (p 52).

Bigamist’s Daughter

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McDermott, Alice. A Bigamist’s Daughter. New York: Random House, 1982.

A Bigamist’s Daughter is Alice McDermott’s first book. Even though I read it in less than 24 hours I thought it was wildly imaginative and thought-provoking. Elizabeth is editor-in-chief for a vanity publishing house in Manhattan. while the title sounds impressive she knows she’s not fooling herself. In fact, the central theme of A Bigamist’s Daughter is all about false impressions. Her father, never home, always leaving for somewhere (or someone?) else, is perceived to be a bigamist. Even in Elizabeth’s adult life she is confused about who her father was or what he meant to her. Marriage becomes a mirage as she tries to make sense of relationships both past and present. When Elizabeth meets an author who hasn’t finished his book (about a bigamist) the questions become harder and the answers more complicated.

Favorite lines: “She’s been divorced from Brian for nearly seven years now, but his name still haunts her conversations; she seems to hold it in her mouth like a dog with a bit of coattail: the only part of the thief that didn’t get away” (p 11).
“If cancer can be said to have any compensations, surely it is in the cliche of time allowed. Time to say what can no longer wait to be discovered. Time when death is not merely a thought to put your teeth on edge, to be dismissed with a swallow, when life is marked clearly by beginnings and endings, by spoken words that mean something and change everything” (p 127).
“She could treat her vagina like a hungover roommate: I don’t care what you did last night, I’m going to the library” (p 137).
There are a ton more, but I’ll leave the discovery up to the reader.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the very first chapter called, “A…My Name is Alice” (p 1).

Living High

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Burn, June. Living High: an Unconventional Autobiography. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1941.

I like books that make me ask questions. I like books that leave me wanting more. Not more of the story. Usually, the ending is adequate enough and I don’t need to know more about that. I am left wanting to know more about the author, about the life of the author at that time. Such was the case with June Burn. When I read Living High I held in my hands a first edition copy signed by June herself. Maddeningly, there were no pictures to guide my imagination. How old was she when she finished Living High? Where were her parents? What did she looked like? I pictured a fiery redhead with an unmatchable zest for life. But, I wanted the truth of who she was.

Living High is called an “Unconventional Autobiography” and I would have to agree. Not because it doesn’t cover a life from the sunrise of birth to the sunset of death, but because it has a moral to the story. There is a lesson to be learned within Living High’s pages and that lesson is live life to the fullest. Enjoy every single moment of each and every day. June is elegant and adventurous when describing living on the gumdrop island of Sentinel off Puget Sound with her husband, Farrar; or remembering walrus hunting and dogsledding in Alaska; or later, bombing around the west coast in the Burn’s Ballad Bungalow with Farrar and two kids (named North and South, I kid you not).

Best quotes: “Be thrifty with the things that count and you won’t have time to worry about whether your wallet is fullor not” (p 7), “To go on an island and pull the ladder up after us and live, untroubled by anything – that would be heaven” (p 11), and “the wind came howling out of the north, with icicles in its whiskers” (p 150). My favorite is, “When you walk you are somewhere at every step” (p 264).

Interesting side note: June changed her name and so did her second son, South. One day he decided he was Bobby or Bob.

BookLust Twist: From More Book Lust in the chapter called, “Living High in Cascadia” (p 149). Go figure.

Three Farmers

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Powers, Richard. Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. New York: Beech Tree Books, 1985.

Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance centers around a clever theme: a photograph. It begins with a contemporary first person account from a man traveling across the country. Seeking to occupy his time during a five hour layover in Detroit he visits an art museum and discovers a photograph that hijacks his imagination. It is a 1914-1915 photograph of three men identically dressed, identically posed, walking down a muddy road. The story then moves to third person as the narrative crawls inside the photograph and relives the three brothers’s perspective on the brink of war. The final aspect of The Farmers is another contemporary story of a Boston based computer writer who finds the same photograph in his family heirlooms. While the story centers on a photograph, the central theme is technology and it’s contribution to World War I. Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance intertwines fiction with nonfiction, mixing real people and events to a fictional landscape.

Favorite line: “You ride a bicycle instead of an auto, and you tel lies for a living. I cannot think of a worse combination” (p 26).

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter, “Richard Powers: Too Good to Miss” (p 192).

Don’t Look Back

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Fossum, Karin. Don’t Look Back. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc. 2002.

This is one of those mystery books you read on a rainy Saturday afternoon in one sitting. The story flows in a simplistic but compelling manner; An easy read with a great story line. As someone from LibraryThing once said suggested for a genre, “a bring-to-the-beach kind of book.” In that case Don’t Look Back was summer fare read too early (for me). It is the mystery of the death of a teenage girl. Known throughout her small town she was loved by nearly everyone. How could someone so charming, so lovable, so perfect die so young? Inspector Sejer is the lead investigator on the case. With calm and quiet tenacity he unravels a seemingly sweet life only to reveal lies and suspicions. This is the kind of mystery that keeps the pages turning as things become more and more complicated. Originally written in Norwegian and translated by Felicity David, Don’t Look Back urges the reader to keep turning the pages until compulsively, the entire book has been read from cover to cover.

Favorite lines: “Puberty was a really rough time. She was a sunbeam until she turned thirteen, then she began to snarl. she snarled until she was fourteen, then she began to bark” (p 71). ”

BookLust Twist: From More Book Lust in the chapter, “Crime is a Globetrotter: Norway” (p 59).

Edited to add: I read this back in 2009 but what I just discovered five years later is that it is also included in Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Norway: the Land of the Midnight Sun” (p 163). So there!

Slow Dancing on Dinosaur Bones

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Witt, Lana. Slow Dancing on Dinosaur Bones. New York: Scribner, 1996.

I don’t understand the title of this book. It should have been something about ghosts or Indians or something like that. Aside from the random primordial slime comment, dinosaurs don’t really factor into the title, figuratively or literally. And aside from the title confusion I loved, loved, loved this book! It provided me with laughs, cries, anger, confusion, fear, and even triumph. It was the kind of book that I couldn’t put down, yet I was terribly afraid of what would happen next.

Slow Dancing on Dinosaur Bones is a quirky story about a small town community. There is Gilman, the singing, bootlegging, gruff-but-loveable mechanic; Gemma, the town beauty with a viper’s heart; Ten-Fifteen, Gilman’s best friend; Tom, the from-out-of-town philosopher-turned-carpenter; and Rosalyn, the torch singer with a nasty secret. It’s that secret that supplies the suspense. Rosalyn has an ex-lover looking for her. Fearing harm, her friends hide her and take turns protecting her and falling in love with her. Meanwhile, to add to the drama there is a big, nasty, corporate coal company threatening to drill on Gilman’s land and a skeleton waiting in a prayer chamber for a shot of whiskey. There’s good old fashioned sabatoge and danger mixed with ancient love and laughter.

Best moments: “He remembered the exact moment he had decided to leave the beach and look for trouble, this decision coming from his belief that something and nothing are the same thing” (p 85).
“Sometimes you want to ask a person something, but it can’t be said in words, and you don’t know if he would understand it, anyway, so you think of other things to say, except the words won’t come out because they are trapped behind the question you want to ask” (p 114).
“I confused her when I gave her a glimpse of who I really am. Maybe a person should never try to be honest to their parents” (p 119).

BookLust Twist: From More Book Lust in the chapter called, “Small-Town Life” (p 202).

And the Band Played On

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Shilts, Randy. And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987.

This book has always intimidated me. For three decades I have heard words like “powerful,” “scary,” “depressing,” and even “a necessary evil” to describe And the Band Played On. I was afraid to really know That much about “the gay man’s disease.” I was squeamish about the how vivid I imagined the details to be. I anticipated TMI – Too Much Information – about deviant sex and the agonies of dying. In other words I was in denial and afraid.

And the Band Played Onhas got to be one of the best pieces of journalism I have read in a long, long time. Shilts’ reporting of every aspect of the AIDS epidemic is nothing short of mesmerizing. From the very beginning controlling the spread  of AIDS never stood a chance. AIDS was to be ignored by everyone. If you were heterosexual you didn’t want anything to do with the gay man’s disease. If you were homosexual you didn’t want someone telling you how to have sex, disease or no disease. Shilts does a fantastic job bringing to light the political power struggles that kept education and research about AIDS in the dark for nearly a decade.

Intriguing lines: “A group of drag queens, dressed as nuns and calling themselves the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, had picked the day for their debut” (p 14). “Being gay in New York was something you did on the weekends, it seemed” (p 27). “When a London gay switchboard’s lines broke down because they were so overwhelmed with AIDS calls, telephone company employees refused to fix them because they were afriad of contracting AIDS from the wiring” (p 565).

PS~ Remember my statement about being afraid of TMI, of learning something I realllly didn’t want to know? Well, Shilts did not disappoint. Not only did I get the full description of what fisting (with the whole frickin’ arm) was all about, but I learned of the practice called rimming. Politely put, it’s the human to human equivalent of licking an overflowingly full porta-potty. Good lord.

PPS~ What changed everything for me: learning that Randy Shilts took an HIV test while writing And The Band Played On; that he insisted on not knowing the results until the book was finished so as not to bias his writing; that he learned he was HIV positive on the day he sent his manuscript in…and finally, that in 1995 he died just like the AIDs patients he vividly described in his book.

Terms of Endearment

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McMurtry, Larry. Terms of Endearment. New York: Signet, 1975.

I really should have a “on a whim” category because this was not on my list to read this month. In fact, this was not on my list to read until May 2010. Here’s what happened. I was home, had no desire to slog through Herzog, saw Terms of Endearment on my mother’s bookshelf (saw it there for years and years), knew it was on The List somewhere, and in a split second decided to read it. I don’t regret the decision. I was able to read it, start to finish, within two days.

Terms of Endearment is the kind of book that makes you feel things. Larry McMurtry has the ability to make you change your mind about the people you meet…several times over. In the beginning I saw Terms as a story about a bunch of miserable people. I was shocked by the hatred these people carried around (see ‘shocking quotes’ below). I didn’t think I would like a single character. I saw Aurora as nasty and Emma as just plain pathetic. By the end of the book I had completely changed my mind about everything and everyone.
The premise for Terms of Endearment is really quite simple. It’s the story of a mother and daughter and the relationships that orbit around them. Aurora is a Boston widow transplanted to Houston, Texas. She has five different “suitors” who tolerate her abrasive tongue and haughty manner and despite all that, continuously vie for her hand in marriage. At first she appears caustic and self-centered. Selfish and conniving, she bends situations to suite her ever-changing needs. Her story takes up the first 324 pages and by the end of it you realize she is a woman of conviction who simply tells it like it is. Emma, her daughter, at first appears to be one of Aurora’s victims – always manipulated and belittled. The strength of their relationship and the depth of their love for one another isn’t readily apparent until life gets complicated for Emma. Emma hasn’t married well. She hasn’t been educated and she has bad hair. On the surface she is poor and pathetic. But, true to McMurtry form, by the end Emma is a strong, defiant woman.
My only disappointment about Terms of Endearment is the inclusion of Book II, Emma’s story. 324 pages are dedicated to Aurora while Emma gets the last 47. I don’t really understand the need for separate “books” when Emma’s story – her bad marriage to Flap, her pregnancy, her lifestyle and relationship with her mother – are all woven seamlessly into Aurora’s story. Emma’s portion of the book seems weak and it’s inclusion, an afterthought.

Shocking quotes: “She was convinced that she could have stood in the driveway dripping blood, both arms amputated at the elbow, and Cecil would still have driven up, said “Hi Toots,” smiled broadly, and squeezed her stump” (p 16).
“She would have liked to have a heavy chain in her hand, and if she had had one she would have hit him with it, right across the lower part of his spine. If it broke his back, so much the better” (p 32).

BookLust Twist: In Book Lust in the chapter called, “Three-Hanky Reads” (p236).