Tag: 2010

Great Gatsby

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Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925.

Everyone knows The Great Gatsby, but the ironic thing is no one can figure out James Gatz Jay Gatsby. Every time someone saw me with this slim (182 page) paperback I was reminded of just how “great” Gatsby is, but no one could really tell me what it was about.

Consider this: the plot (set in the 1920s) is basically about a bunch of adulterous affairs observed by Nick Carraway. First, there is his second cousin, Daisy, and her husband, Tom. Tom is cheating with Myrtle. Myrtle is married to George Wilson, the drunk. Daisy is hooking up with Gatsby because five years earlier they had a thing and in Gatsby’s mind, he never let Daisy go.  The hook of the entire book is the mystery surrounding Jay Gatsby. For starters, that’s not his real name. He may or may not be wealthy, he may or may not be a war hero, he may or may not be a bootlegger, he may or may not be connected with organized crime, and he may or not be a murderer. He is a complex study in contradictions – throwing outrageous parties every weekend but not knowing enough people who would care enough to attend his funeral. Besides being an interesting portrait Jay Gatsby, The Great Gatsby is also a picture of society in the roaring 1920s, and a commentary on morality and the pitfalls of wealth.

Favorite lines:
“‘I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library'” (p 46)…yeah, libraries have that effect on drunks.
“”No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart” (p 97).
“She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand” (p 108).

Most shocking: Tom breaking Myrtle’s nose and the exclusion of Tom & Daisy’s three year old child, Penny, in the story.

BookLust Twist: The Great Gatsby gets a double mention. First, in Book Lust in the chapter called “Dewey Deconstructed: 600s” (mentioned for the teacakes) (p 73). Also in More Book Lust in the chapter called 100 good Reads, Decade By Decade: 1920s” (p 176).

Firewall

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Mankell, Henning. Firewall. Trans. Ebba Segerberg. New York: The New Press, 1998.

I have to say it again. I think something got lost in the translation of this book.

Kurt Wallander is a Swedish detective trying to solve a series of mysterious deaths. At first the only common factor is the time frame in which these people died. A man falls dead after using an ATM, a cab driver is beaten to death, and someone has apparently committed suicide at a power station all within a matter of days. But, as the investigation continues pieces of the puzzle fall into place. Somehow the picture reveals an absurd terrorist plot.

What makes Firewall so entertaining is Kurt Wallander’s personality. He is a short tempered detective, good at what he does but not as great at being a divorced dad to his near-adult daughter. She finds him overbearing and lonely. I found Wallander and his Swedish police work very strange. For starters, Wallander is accused of not doing things by the book and for the most part those accusations hold true. Over and over he considers sharing information about the various investigations with his colleagues but over and over again he finds reasons not to. Also, computers connected to the crimes aren’t confiscated, potential witnesses and suspects aren’t detained for questioning, and despite rooms being searched several times, key evidence is not discovered right away. Case in point: an office was searched several times and yet Wallander finds a postcard under a computer keyboard days later.
I found some parts of Firewall predictable. Wallander is single. At his daughter’s urging he joins a dating service. Within days he gets a letter from a potential match. Right away I knew this “response” was trouble, for the letter is slid under his door – no return address or postmark. Wouldn’t Wallander have read how the service works and wouldn’t he have found a nondescript letter without a postmark a little suspect?
All in all Firewallwas a good vacation read. It was fast paced and highly entertaining.

Favorite line: “A person who died eventually became a person who had never existed” (p 7).

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

Master & Commander

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O’Brian, Patrick. Master And Commander. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1969.

Sorry! Sorry! Sorry! I couldn’t get into this. As the last book of the month I found it incredibly boring. Maybe it was stopping every ten minutes to look up words like felluca and dursn’t and slops. It was all I could do to call up my father’s ghost and remember nautical terms like foretopgallantsail and cockade and halliards. To be honest, it was too much work for summer reading. This is something I went to bury myself in in the dead of winter when nothing else can distract me or call me away. I’ll put it back on the list in honor of something else.

PS ~ this was made into a movie starring Russell Crow. Maybe I should just shut up and watch it.

Less Than Angels

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Pym, Barbara. Less than Angels. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1980.

My impression of the first 50 pages of Less Than Angels was that the plot was very slow-moving, like a wide river with almost no perceptible action. Indeed, the first 50 pages are the reader’s surface introduction to at least fifteen different characters and only the very beginnings of a plot. Some of the characters are unnecessary to know for they never resurface again. Others are more important. On the whole, Less Than Angels is a community of contrasts. Professors of Anthropology mingle with fledgling students. The aged and retired cast a skeptical eye on the young and impulsive. Frenchmen stand baffled by the British. At the center of the story is Tom Mallow, a distinguished yet vain anthropologist caught between a relationship with a sophisticated older journalist and a younger wide-eyed student. In addition, Less Than Angels is an excellent study of English culture (lots of tea-times and interesting meals) along with the typical social graces and faux pas.

Favorite lines: “Curiosity has its pains as well as its pleasures, and the bitterness of its pains must surely be the inability to follow-up everything to its conclusion” (p 9) and, “And so it came about that, like so many other well-meaning people, they worried not so much about the dreadful things themselves as about their own inability to worry about them” (p 41)

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter “Barbara Pym: Too Good To Miss” (p 195).

I Don’t Know Why I Swallowed the Fly

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Maxwell, Jessica. I Don’t Know Why I Swallowed the Fly: My Fly Fishing Rookie Season. Seattle: Sasquach, 1997.

Jessica Maxwell takes on fly fishing. I Don’t Know Why I Swallowed the Fly is an account of her very first year learning the sport. As with any hunting sport Jessica needed to learn how to think like her prey. She needed to teach her body, muscle, bones and nerve, to perform the movements necessary for a perfect, flowing cast. As psychological as the game of golf, Jessica found herself untangling the intricacies of throwing out the flawless line. Rod and reel in perfect harmony with human dynamics. Aside from Jessica’s expanse of humor throughout I Don’t Know Why.. I was drawn to the vibrant imagery of the landscapes around her. I adored the way she described, nature – especially when it came to light. Sunlight, especially. Her words had a way of dancing like rays on water, sparkling and bright.
But I Don’t Know Why… isn’t just about one woman’s fly fishing adventure. Jessica subtly deals with the loss of her father with poignant memories and in the end, revelations about the man who shaped her future with a simple love for nature and of course, fishing.

I don’t know anything about fly fishing so, for me, this was a nice 101 about a typically male-dominated sport.

Favorite lines: “Every day somebody somewhere becomes obsessed with an idea that won’t turn them loose” (p 50), “Now the radio static was so bad, Sting sounded like Bob Denver” (p 101), and “My mind was gone to the joy of the memory of what was for a moment so long ago but couldn’t last, and to the pain of what could have been but wasn’t” (p 214).

Small question for Jessica: where is the wrong side of Oregon? I couldn’t find it on a map…

Side note: Make no mistake about it. I always at least glance at the acknowledgments. They are usually a long blahblahblah list filled with family names and “I’d like to thank my editor…” It’s like looking at a yearbook from a school you have never heard of. Names and faces mean nothing. Jessica Maxwell’s acknowledgment page is another yearbook, but a fun one. True, it’s all names I don’t know, but for once Jessica made me want an introduction.

BookLust Twist: From More Book Lust in the chapter called, “Gone Fishin’ (p 101).

Writing Dangerously

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Brightman, Carol. Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World. New York: Clarkson Potter, 1992.

Mary McCarthy was born on June 2nd, 1912. Hence my reasoning for picking up her biography by Carol Brightman this month.

Mary reminds me of my friend, Ruth. Beautiful, outspoken inasmuch as she says what she feels, means what she says. In addition, she doesn’t take sh!t from anyone, yet has a heart of gold. She laughs when anyone else would have crocodile tears. She can confront fights with fire. She’s popular with the men with a come-hither glint in her eye and has no time for sugar cookie lies. Need I say, independent yet fidelis. I think I would have gotten along with Mary had I been in her day or she in mine.

Mary McCarthy was an outspoken critic of practically everything around her. From her humble beginnings as a self-proclaimed abused orphan Mary quickly grew into a witty writer and reporter with a constant comment about the world around her. No subject was off-limits whether it be about the abuse she suffered at the hands of her uncle, her contradictory religious views, losing her virginity at age 14, a scathing look at her peers in academia, Communism or war. Carol Brightman often quotes McCarthy to support her biography using both McCarthy’s fiction and nonfiction. Two sections of photography round out an already very thorough account of the controversial Mary McCarthy.

Favorite word, “bildungsroman” ( a genre of novel of complete self-development).

Favorite quote: “One of Mary McCarthy’s legendary attributes is that no matter how much fire and brimstone she and her fictional heroines traverse before they see the light, they never seem to get burned” (p 58).

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

Confessions of Nat Turner

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Styron, William. The Confessions of Nat Turner. New York: Random House, 1966.

I have never run so hot and cold about a book before. On the one hand William Styron has a beautiful writing style. His descriptions of the Virginian south in the 1830s are breathtaking while his depictions of slavery are simultaneously heartbreaking. What I didn’t care for was the obvious artistic liberties Styron took with the plot surrounding  historical fact. Obviously, in order to fill an entire novel he needed to expound on the factual confession of Nat Turner which was less than a standard chapter in length. He had to assume supporting plots and characters, but was it necessary to have Nat Turner only lust after white women? Do we know this to be a true trait of Nat? His sexuality seems to be fodder for controversy. I saw The Confessions of Nat Turner to be the truth bundled by fiction. At the heart of Styron’s novel is Nat Turner’s confession, but what surrounds it is pure imagination and speculation. While the book garnered a Pulitzer Prize it was also banned in some parts of the south. That should tell you something.

Two lines that stuck with me: “They were in the profoundest dark” (p 17), and “I do not believe that I had ever thought of the future, it is not in the mood of a Negro, once aware of the irrecoverable fact of his bondage…” (p 171).

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust and More Book Lust. From Book Lust in the chapter called, “100 Good Reads, Decade by Decade: 1960s” (p 178) and from More Book Lust in the chapter called, ” Southern-Fried Fiction: Virginia” (p 209).

Hatchet

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Paulsen, Gary. Hatchet. New York: Aladdin, 1987.

Considering this book was written for kids ages 11-13 this was a breeze to read. I think I started it around 5:3pm and finished about 7:45pm…

Brian Robeson is a pouty thirteen year old on his way to visit his newly divorced dad. Despite an exhilarating, first time ride in a single engine airplane (sitting as copilot), Brian is not impressed. He is more obsessed with thinking  about his new fate – shuttled between two parents who don’t love each other anymore. What’s worse is that his mother has a Secret. It’s all Brian can think about until the pilot has a heart attack…

Somehow Brian survives the crash and is plunged into a vast Canadian wilderness with only a small hatchet  his mother had given to him as a gift right before getting on the plane. It is obvious the pilot is dead and Brian is very much alone. As the realization of his situation is revealed Brian’s preoccupation with  his parents and The Secret fades from his mind. His self pity is replaced with a new priority, staying alive. The best parts of Hatchet are Paulsen’s descriptive hunting scenes. As Brian learns to build a fire, pick edible berries and hunt small game he grows into a mature individual. This is a coming of age story, survival style.

Probably my favorite section of the story is the epilogue. Paulsen is able to wrap up every concerning loose end – how Brian makes it home (hey, this is a kids book. You didn’t expect him to stay lost forever, did you?), what Brian took away from his ordeal in the Canadian wilderness, and the confronting of the obvious truth that Brian probably wouldn’t have survived a winter. What further intrigued me was the research Paulsen put into Hatchet. Brian’s adventure is very believable.

Favorite line: “Time had come, time that he measured but didn’t care about; time had come into his life and moved out and left him different” (p 122).

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called, “Adventure By the Book: Fiction” (p 7).

Happenstance

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Shields, Carol. Happenstance: Two Novels in One About a Marriage in Transition. New York: Penguin, 1994.

The very first thing I noticed about this book is how it is arranged. I understood that Happenstance had originally been two very separate stories, published with two very different names. The husband’s side of the story was the original Happenstance (published in the early 80’s) and the wife’s side of the story was called A Fairly Conventional Woman. The wife’s story was published sometime later. The version of Happenstance Nancy Pearl suggested was the combined stories of the husband and wife. So, back to the arrangement of the book – her side has a pink cover with a photo of a woman’s upper torso in a frame. To see his side you have to flip the book upside down and over. His cover is blue with a photo of a man’s lower legs in a frame. Clever. I started with the wife’s story because if the book were to sit on a shelf properly (spine displayed correctly) it is her cover you see first when you pull it off the shelf. I’m sure this is the way Shields meant it to be read even though the husband’s story was written and published first.

In the first 50 pages I couldn’t tell if I liked Mrs. Brenda Bowman. She seemed too persnickety to me. Too particular. Too fussy. I am prone to comparing characters to myself, especially if we have something in common like upbringing, hobbies, schooling, age, or certain circumstance. In Brenda’s case, it was age. We are almost the same age. So, by default her actions made me seem fuddy-duddy. I don’t act that old, do I? Her husband seemed more laid back in an odd, disconnected kind of way. Together, they made up a marriage that needed some waking up, some simultaneous letting go. Both husband and wife had the opportunity to cheat on the other. I don’t think it’s a plot spoiler if I say the wife comes closer to doing so than the husband, even though the husband has a better excuse.

The most honest line in the whole book, “You could become crippled by this kind of rage” (p 49). How true.

What I liked the best about Happenstance is the idea of two sides of the same marriage. Both husband and wife notice small things while separated: Brenda notices small accomplishments like going out of town by herself. Jack notices small changes in the family he has practically taken for granted.

BookLust Twist: From More Book Lust in the chapter called, “Carol Shields: Too  Good To Miss” (p 197). I have to say I am sad that breast cancer took the life of this great author.

Zorba the Greek

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Kazantzakis, Nikos. Zorba the Greek. Trans. Carl Wildman. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952.

I will be the first to admit it wholeheartedly. I did not enjoy Zorba the Greek. There, I said it. I am beginning to feel I have a built in prejudice against translated stories because this is not the first time I have said this. Something gets lost in the translation. I am sure of it. Not only that, but this time I was bored. Supposedly, Nikos Kazantzakis’s Last Temptation of Christ is more exciting. I can only wait and see.

Lines I did happen to like, “And I’m making it snappy so I don’t kick the bucket before I’ve had the bird!” (p 36), and “The mischievous demon in the wine had carried her back to the good old days” (p 37).

BookLust Twist: From More Book Lust in the chapter “The Alpha, Betas, Gammas of Greece” (p 9).

Wobegone Boy

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Keillor, Garrison. Wobegon Boy. New York: Viking, 1997.

It is strange to (finally) read something written by Garrison Keillor. For years and years and years I have heard wonderful things about Lake Wobegon Days and it seems,  for even longer, I have heard Keillor on NPR radio. Yet – nothing in print has been before my eyes or in my hands. Ever. Go figure.

John Tollefson is the manager of an academic public radio station. He has an idyllic life that is boring him to tears. His job, his home, his relationships, all are going well – so well that he no longer feels like he is in the drivers seat. Coasting through everything his life lacks depth and more importantly, it lacks meaning. John, with the help of his can’t-commit-to-marriage girlfriend Alida, sets out to make his life more interesting by opening a farm restaurant and other daring risks. John is perpetually guided by history, the life stories of his ancestors – a butcher, publisher, politician, among a wild cast of others, and a philosophical slant unlike any other.

While the plot of Wobegon Boy is a little slow and laborious, the voice is exceptional. As John Tollefson tells his story you cannot help but often laugh out loud. The sly wit and juicy humor radiate from every page. I wanted to quote line after line until I realized I what I really wanted was to quote the entire book.

Here are a few of my favorites: “Lake Wobegon was a rough town then, where, all on one block, for less than five dollars, you could get a tattoo, a glass of gin, and a social disease, and have enough left over to get in a poker game” (p2). See, by page 2 it’s funny! Here’s another one, “You could romp naked in periodicals and copulate on the carpet, and the librarians would be grateful if, after climax, you took down a magazine and thumbed through it” (p 7-8). Knowing the importance of circulation statistics, yes. Yes, we would be grateful.

BookLust Twist: From More Book Lust in the chapter called, “Big Ten Country: The Literary Midwest (Minnesota)” (p 28).

Samuel Johnson is Indignant

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Davis, Lydia. Samuel Johnson is Indignant: stories. Brooklyn: McSweeney’s Books, 2001.

I always love it when I get a collection of short stories to read. For some reason I like idea of the simplicity of keeping something short when sometimes, nothing could be further than the truth; especially when it comes to a short story. A short story might be short on words or sentences or even paragraphs, but long on meaning and, in the end might turn out to be a little thought provoking or dare I say didactic? In other words, I might learn something!

Lydia Davis is funny. But, more importantly she has an amazing range of subject material. So much so that I found myself asking what subject does Lydia Davis NOT cover in a short story? What’s more, Lydia Davis has a wide range of writing styles. Everything she writes has a common theme: strange and wonderful, but no two stories could be characterized as “the same.” Her stories are eerie and contemplative, funny and sad, wise and irreverent.

Favorite lines, “You can’t tell everyone the truth all the time, and you certainly can’t tell anyone the whole truth, ever, because it would take too long” (p 7).

BookLust Twist: From  Book Lust in the chapter called simply, “Short Stories” (p 221). Duh.

You Make Me Feel…

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Newman, Judith. You Make Me Feel Like an Unnatural Woman: Diary of a New (Older) Mother. New York: Miramax Books, 2004.

There are three reoccurring themes in You Make Me Feel Like an Unnatural Woman. Judith likes to portray herself as an over-forty, unhappily married,  yet wealthy woman with a moral on parenting: be careful what you wish for. While she is extremely funny about it, she is constantly criticizing her husband, John, for not being around more to help with twins, born after seven years and & $70,000 worth of IVF procedures. As an over-sixty man living at a different address, what exactly did she expect? He’s not about to change. Judith handles the trials and tribulations of raising twins with more aplomb and name dropping than any new mom I know. Having a $250 a day nanny certainly helps!

Favorite funny lines, “If he’s like most men I’ve known he’ll spend the rest of his life thinking of his dick as a masterpiece anyway. “Yes, honey, that’s art,” I said” (p 215).

My only complaint? Newman tries so freakin’ hard to be funny all the time that the tenderness of what she has (supposedly) longed for for so long gets lost. There were glimpses of caring at times, like, when she describes thinking her babies are beautiful. But, on the whole, it was if Newman was constantly “on” all the time. I never really thought I saw the real mother because she was veiled behind a thousand jokes.

BookLust Twist: From More Book Lust in the chapter called, “Nagging Mothers, Crying children” (p 172). Appropriate for Mother’s Day, don’t you think?

Endless Love

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Spencer, Scott. Endless Love. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.

At the center of Endless Love is David Axelrod. David starts his story remembering how, as a 17 year in love, he set fire to his girlfriend’s house. Not as an out-of-anger act of revenge but more of an uncontrollable response to an all-consuming love for his girlfriend, Jade Butterfield, and her family. Having been banished from the Butterfield home David’s plot is to ignite the house in the hopes the fire will give him the perverse opportunity to become the hero and ultimately rescue the entire family from the inferno he started. His desire to be needed by the entire family is blinding. Of course David’s plot doesn’t work out so smoothly…and thus begins Unless Love. It is a dark and tangled tale about obsessions and the inability to see past them. It is about dysfunctional families that use one another to seem normal. It is about struggling relationships set against the ever turbulent late 1960s. In the middle is confused, young, obsessed David Axelrod. He reminds me of Llyod Dobler from ‘Say Anything’ – an all-around nice guy with little direction and not much more ambition who can sum up his life in one sentence, “I just want to be with your daughter….sir.”

My favorite quotes are on the subject of love: “Love gives us a heightened consciousness through which to apprehend the world, but anger gives us a precise, detached perception of its own” (p 40) and, “If endless love was a dream, then it was a dream we all shared, even more than we all shared the dream of never dying or of traveling through time, and if anything set me apart it was not my impulses but my stubbornness, my willingness to take the dream past what had been agreed upon as the reasonable limits, to declare that this dream was not a feverish trick of the mind but was an actuality at least as real as that other, thinner, more unhappy illusion we call normal life” (p 162).

I think the reason why I liked Endless Love so much is because every character was a head-scratcher. It wasn’t just David Axelrod who had a personality worth paying attention to. the story of his parents held mysteries to be explored. Every member of Jade Butterfield’s family kept the story alive and buzzing with intrigue. The questions most asked – who would defend David? Who would forgive him? Who wouldn’t forget?

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in two different chapters. First, in the chapter called, “First Lines to Remember” (p 87), and again in “Sex and the Single Reader” (p 218).

The Book of Calamities

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Trachtenberg, Peter. The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning. New York: Little, Brown & co., 2008

This was an off-list addition. Glutton for punishment? Maybe. April had already been a hard month and here I am, deciding to add to the drama by deciding to read a book about suffering. It’s perverse but I find comfort in my little, uneventful life when I am reminded of fates worse than mine…much, much worse than mine. It’s the same reason why I watch ugly shows about murder and drug addiction. It’s my constant reminder that anyone, at anytime, can fall from grace. And fall hard.

But, anyway, back to Calamities. I will be honest. I picked up the book after reading a dedication. After researching the recipients I realized I needed to know more. It wasn’t enough to be aware and move on. I wanted knowledge. Who were these people and why did they die? Notice I didn’t say how? That much was obvious. Their tragedy deserved more than two seconds of my time. Which led me to Peter Trachtenberg’s book.

The Book of Calamities covers man-induced sufferings as well as the ones seemingly without explanation. The answer to each catastrophe lies in simple words like religion, nature, sanity, hatred, illness but try explaining those words beyond dictionary etymology and terminology. What exactly IS hatred? What drives two religions to war? How can Mother Nature be so cruel to the ignorant? Who defines mental illness and calls it insanity? These are hard questions but, Trachtenberg asks an even bigger question – why is suffering such a shock to us? It happens all the time. It happens everywhere. Why aren’t we more prepared for catastrophe? Is it a cultural thing? For some reason we, as a society,  have this sense of entitlement to happiness; this sense of denial that bad things always happen to someone, anyone, else but us. Not so.

I didn’t have favorite quotes in this book, but there was one particular event that stood out. Here is the quote: “The first thing they did for me was to make me stop, kindly, with care not to make me feel any more foolish than I already felt, for who feels more foolish than a failed suicide?” (p 95). The reason why this passage stood out to me is this – in my friend’s suicide note he made reference to being embarrassed by possible failure. He understood suffering and didn’t want to make compromises to accommodate that suffering. Here’s the thing – he didn’t need to be embarrassed. He didn’t fail on May 10th, 1993.