Tag: book lust i

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).

Flashman

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Fraser, George MacDonald. Flashman. New York: Harper Collins, 1993.

This is one of those giggly books. The main character is so awful you can’t help but laugh at him and dare I say, even like him a little for his brazen attitude. The premise is Flashman is the first installment of the “Flashman Papers 1839-1842” a sort of journal of Harry Flashman’s. Readers get a taste of Harry’s storytelling from the very start: British boy Harry Flashman manages to get himself drunk, expelled from school and into his father’s mistress’s bed in less than the first dozen pages. What first appears as a punishment for another indiscretionary roll in the hay ultimately becomes Harry’s greatest triumph. He is sent to be a secret agent in Afghanistan and manages to emerge a brave hero after the Retreat from Kabul. Harry is so shameless he basks in the honor despite the fact his cowardice is the only thing that saved him. But, his story is told with such honest sarcasm you can’t help but enjoy his villainy.

Two of Harry’s lesser laughed at traits are his womanizing and his racial comments. One has to keep in mind the Victorian era in which these events take place. Women and minorities are not seen as equals on any level.

Typical Flashy moment: “She stood glaring at me. Her bosom was what the lady novelists call agitated, but if they had seen Judy agitated in a negligee they would think of some other way of describing feminine distress: (p 29).

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter, “George MacDonald Fraser: Too Good To Miss” (p 94).

Old Gringo

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Fuentes, Carlos. The Old Gringo. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1985.

Everything about this story was deceiving. Despite the fact it was written in 1985 it has an old world language and culture to it. The time frame is supposed to take place in 1914 but to read it, it wasn’t full of new language trying to sound old, elderly, or even ancient. Despite the fact it is only 199 pages long it was packed with histories of places and people, cultures and religions. The language was both accessible and challenging. It reminded me of fun house mirrors. Not everything was as it seemed.
Ambrose Bierce is an American writer and soldier traveling to Mexico to die. He is known throughout the story as simply the Old Gringo. Once in Mexico he meets several characters with equally troubling, mysterious stories. Tomas Arroyo is a Villa general who gives the Old Gringo competition when vying for the attention of Harriet Winslow, another American who came to Mexico to teach English. All the characters have a past they can’t forget and a future they can’t escape. The Old Gringo tells the story of these personalities with the same passion used to describe the Mexican landscape. In the end, the Old Gringo does die, but it is worth the read because there is definitely more to the story than that.

Favorite lines: “But the old man wanted to make life difficult for himself” (p 10), and “If her soul was not different from her dreams, she could accept that both were instantaneous. Like a dream, her soul revealed itself in flashes” (p 48).

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter, “Mexican Fiction” (p153).

Death Comes for the Archbishop

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Cather, Willa. Death Comes for the Archbishop. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929.

Father Vaillant and Father LaTour are two friends on a quest. Death Comes for the Archbishop is their story of the attempt to establish a diocese in New Mexico – a landscape fraught with corruption and a complete breakdown of religious morality. On their travels we meet other notable characters such as Padre Martinez and Dona Isabella. They add violence and greed and drama and intrigue to an otherwise seemingly simple story of a religious quest.
While Death Comes for the Archbishop is Cather’s self proclaimed “best written book” I had never heard of it before the Challenge. In the beginning it seemed like an easy, quick read but after I got into it I realized it had amazing depth and powerful symbolism.

Impressionable quotes:
“When they were tramping home, Father Joseph said that, as for him, he would rather combat the superstitions of a whole Indian Pueblo than the vanity of one white woman” (p 219), and “…it was the Indian manner to vanish into the landscape, not to stand out against it” (p 265).

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter”New Mexico” (p 167).

Best American Essays

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Oates, Joyce Carol, ed. The Best American Essays of the Century. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

As bloggers we cannot help but be reminded that November is National Novel Writing Month. It’s as if there a reminding hope that writing these one-three paragraph diatribes could somehow be transformed into something as concrete, or as interesting, as a full blown novel. I squirm with discomfort every time someone says I should write a book. While my stories are interesting…to a point, I don’t see a need to make them more than what they are: tiny bubbles of thought designed to pop (and ultimately, hopefully) go away when released.

Anyway. This isn’t about me and my nonability to write. This is about the complilation of essays from those who can.
Best American Essays of the Century wraps up the creme de la creme of essay writing from 1901 – 1997. Beginning with Mark Twain (“Corn-pone Opinions”) and ending with Saul Bellow (“Graven Images.”) As part of the Book Lust Challenge I read the following essays:

  • “Stickeen” by John Muir ~ “…for many of Nature’s finest lessons are to be found in her storms” (p 32).
  • “Corn-pone Opinions” by Mark Twain ~ “We are creatures of outside influence; as a rule we do not think, we only imitate” (p 1).
  • “A Law of Acceleration” by Henry Adams
  • “The Devil Baby at Hull-House” by Jane Adams
  • “The Crack-up” by F. Scott Fitzgerald ~ Life was something you dominated if you were any good” (p 139).
  • “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: an Autobiographical Sketch” by Richard Wright
  • “Sex Ex Machina” by James Thurber ~ “Every person carries in his consciousness the old scar, or the fresh wound of some harrowing misadventure with a contraption of some sort” (p 157).
  • “Letters from a Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • “The Brown Wasps” by Loren Eisley
  • “A drugstore in Winter” by Cynthia Ozick

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter called, “Essaying Essays” (p 80).

Dubliners

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Joyce, James. Dubliners. New York: Signet, 1991.

When I was in high school I fell in love with James Joyce’s style of writing. We share the same birthday. The Dead, a short story from Dubliners was my all time favorite. Gabriel became my favorite name; a long lost child.

Dubliners is comprised of 15 short  and simple stories all centered around the people of Dublin. To sum up the collection it is a portrait of a city as seen from the eyes of the people living there. The very first story, The Sisters, is nothing more than a family’s reaction to a priest’s death. While the characters are not connected, their stories are. Life and death, love and loss, youth and aging, poverty and wealth. Joyce does a remarkable job capturing the spirit of the Irish while revealing universal truths about mankind as a whole. It is as if we, as readers, get to peek into the character’s lives and are witness to moments of our own circumstances.

What I find so remarkable about Dubliners is that Joyce originally had great trouble getting it published. And even after he finally did it didn’t sell that well.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter “Irish Fiction” (p 125). Where else? Edited to add: I’ll tell you where else…Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Ireland: Beyond Joyce, Behan, Beckett, and Synge” (p 110). I guess you could say Dubliners shouldn’t be included in this chapter because it’s supposed to be about “beyond Joyce.” Something to think about.

Boy With Loaded Gun

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Nordan, Lewis. Boy With Loaded Gun. Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 2000.

Lewis Nordan celebrates a birthday in August. I am pleased to have started off with his nonfiction/fiction memoir, Boy with Loaded Gunas my introduction to Nordan’s writing. I think it will bring insight to everything else I read of his. While this may or may not be a good thing, I am looking forward to it just the same.
Boy with Loaded Gunis heartbreaking and humorous at the same time. Pulling the reader down into sadness, lifting him or her back up with laughter. I found myself comparing the reading experience to that of a fast moving, slightly rickety, out of control rollercoaster. At times I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I didn’t know what was real or an exaggeration. But, I did know one thing, I loved every minute of it; page by page.
Nordan’s memoir begins with the chapter called “Voodoo” and Nordan’s inexplicable love for a voodoo practicing woman. It is at this time Nordan professes, “In these lonely backwaters and days of grief my memory begins” (p 7). We are then taken on a journey through Nordan’s young life while he struggles to love his step-father and escape the confines of small town Itta Bena, Mississippi. Later, it’s coming-of-age encounters with sex and marriage. Babies and buying houses. Alcohol and writing. Down and outs, ups and accomplishements. At times you want to love him. Other times you have to hate him. Just like real life. In other words, human.

Best quotes: “Two men got into an argument about whether a tree was willow or a weed. It was a small knife, and not a deep wound, so neither of the men went home, they just didn’t talk to each other for a while. Then they seemed to forget all about it, and before long they were talking about something else” (p 49).
“Eventually I tried to kill my father, of course” (p 69). Nordan does address the “of course” part of the statement, but it struck me as funny the first time I read it.
“I could scarcely tolerate standing in my own skin, let alone being strong” (p 188).

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter “Lewis Nordan: Too Good To Miss” (p 172).

Act of the Damned

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Antunes, Antonio Lobo. Act of the Damned. New York: Grove Press, 1995.

I have to admit this was not one of my favorite books this month. Maybe something was lost in the translation (literally from Portuguese to English), but there were too many layers of storytelling going on. Dr. Nuno Souza, a dentist, tells his story in first person, but his imagination works overtime to include an Edward G. Robinson, a cigar smoking, gun toting tough guy. Nuno is married to Ana, but has a drug addicted girlfriend on the side.
Even though Nuno is telling the story in the first part, it’s Ana’s family that is the center of the story. Her family is beyond corrupt. Incest and greed come second nature to these people. Ana’s mother is the voice in part two. I think what makes the story so confusing is that no one really uses names. When Ana’s mother tells the story she uses family connections, “my brother-in-law, sister-in-law, my husband, his father, her brother…” Later, Ana herself tells the story…then someone else who uses the same technique…

These are the quotes that caught my attention:
“I opened the drawer to take out a shirt and tie, and was met by enough sicks for an army of ankles” (p 5).
“I laid down the receiver while the two voices tussled, scratched and bit each other in an electric desert of screws and wires” (p 17).
“‘I want her out by the thirtieth at the latest. She can go to tell and listen to conversations down there'” (p 42).
“I wiped the smile off my mouth with a napkin” (p 71).

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust from the chapter “Families in Trouble” (p 83).

True Confessions

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True Confessions
Bringle, Mary. True Confessions. New York: Donald I. Fine, 1996.

This sounds like it would be the title of a very juicy blog. Something I haven’t already spilled in some sordid way or another. Unfortunately, it’s only the latest challenge book for Book Lust. I read this in honor of Mother’s Day and I have to admit it was a strange choice. The inside book cover describes True Confessions (in part) as “…a mother who loves her to death and an ex-mother in-law who doesn’t approve…” So, yes, mothers are part of the story, but you never really meet either mother. As a result I didn’t get that loved to death feeling from mom, nor the disapprovefrom the ex-mother in-law.
But here’s the story in a nutshell: Grace teaches writing in New York, lies to her mother about her location (mom thinks she’s in England), struggles with relationships and fantasizes about being a story in a magazine she is obsessed with called – you guessed it – True Confessions. Grace doesn’t have direction. In the beginning she seems shallow and self-absorbed. Of course there is a period of growth through odd incidents such as her friend’s affair revealed on television, a kidnapping, and even a death. When it is all said and done, Grace emerges a stronger, wiser person.
Critics describe the book as funny, but I have to admit the first laugh-out-loud moment I had was when Grace is in Central Park with her friend Naomi. Naomi has two children, but acts like she wasn’t meant for motherhood: “Grace always felt grateful to Naomi for refusing to submit to the role which it would have been so natural for her to assume” (p 68). On describing her daughter Alice, Naomi says, “Sometimes I think we have her on loan, like a library book…sometimes…it’s not even a book I want to finish” (p 68). There is more. Naomi rants about trying to keep kids away from television. “…unless you want them to be social pariahs they’ll be contaminated sooner or later” (p 69.
Another favorite line: “lunacy is quite impartial. Warps in the genes, screwy endocrines – they don’t count” (p72).

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter “Mothers and Daughters” (p 160).

Apologizing to Dogs

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Apologizing To Dogs
Coomer, Joe. Apologizing to Dogs. New York: Scribner, 1999.

LibraryThing Review: The first thing I thought when I started to read this book is odd, odd, odd. For one, the first character you meet is a man named “Bone.” He’s not called Bone because he’s super skinny. Nothing obvious like that. He’s called Bone because he sucks on a chicken bone all the time. How bizarre.
The whole story just gets weirder and weirder. Elderly Effie sits out on her porch and spies on the neighborhood. She keeps a journal of everything her paranoid self sees. Her neighbors come and go around her, all of them quirky, too. I found the development of each character too shallow to muster up any real feelings for them. In fact, there are so many characters and their development so shallow I had trouble keeping them straight. In all, there are over 18 different characters and each get barely a paragraph at one time. If anyone, I liked Carl the best. In an effort to impress a woman he builds a boat…from inside his house – using the insides of his house. And. And, I liked Himself, the dog. Himself is the star of the story, but you wouldn’t know right away.

Here are a couple of funny/good quotes:
“‘You know what’s wrong with you, Mrs. Haygood? You’ve got opticum rectitus, a growth connecting the optic nerve to the rectum, producing a continual sh!tty outlook,’ Mr. Haygood said. He was oiling a gear on a blue tin tank” (p 34). 
“10:57 Strong marijuana odor from That Big Indian’s. I think one of his bathtubs is creeping over my property line” (p 37). Obviously, this is from Effie’s journal. She’s the funniest one in the book. Her paranoia is great.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter “Great Dogs in Fiction” (p 105). Himself is a great dog but he was barely in it.

Great Expectations

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Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Believe it or not, I had never read this before. Not in high school, not in college, not in fun. Go figure. It’s a classic which translated (back in the day) into the assumption of being boring. It was written in 1861 which translated into practically a foreign language (ekerval?). All that translated into me being narrow minded. Great Expectations is wonderful. It opens with Pip (our young main character) encountering an escaped convict in a field. The convict threatens bodily harm if Pip can’t produce some food and, of course, a file. Why was Pip targeted? His brother-in-law is a blacksmith. Of course he is going to have instruments strong enough to tackle something like…leg irons. So, it starts out pretty exciting and not at all unrealizable.

Here are some of my (early) favorite quotes from Pip’s life with his sister and her husband, Joe:
“She concluded by throwing me – I often served as a connubial missle- at Joe, who, glad to get hold of me on any terms, passed me onto the chimney and quietly fenced me up there with his great leg” (p 7).
“My sister having much to do, was going to church vicariously; that is to say, Joe and I were going” (p 20). While Pip’s sister is seen as cruel I cannot help but find humor in both these passages.
After Pip decides to become a gentleman he makes an observation that struck me: “So, throughout life, our worst weaknesses and meannesses are usually committed for the sake of the people whom we most despise” (p 206). Estrella, his love interest, has another observation akin to Pip’s: “I’ll tell you what real love is…It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter…! (p 227).

The LibraryThing review:
“A classic from Charles Dickens. All of the characters are so well developed that the reader cannot help but drawn into their individual plots. From Pip, the blacksmith apprentice turned gentleman in the making (and the hero of our story) to Miss Havisham, a wealthy woman locked away in self-induced seclusion. “

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust and the chapter “A Dickens of a Tale” (p 72). It’s funny that Pearl laments about Dickens having to be a high school mandatory read that students had to “choke down” because many of the reviews I have read recently about Great Expectations mention having to read it in this manner.

His Excellency

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IMG_0571Ellis, Joseph J. His Excellency: George Washington. New York: Afred A Knopf, 2004.

In honor of Presidents’ Day and Washington’s birthday. The LT review: Ellis writes in an easy, flowing style. Almost conversational in tone, Washington’s life comes alive as the pages turn. While not a great deal of evidence of Washington’s personal life has survived, Ellis does a fantastic job filling in the gaps with Washington’s military career and political rise to power. The text is supplemented by a few pages of photographs – mostly portraits Washington had commissioned of himself.

A few of my favorite quotes that make Washington seem less historical and more human. First, a  description of Washington as a 20-something year old man: “He was the epitome of the man’s man: physically strong, mentally enigmatic, emotionally restrained” (p 12).
A commnet on Washington’s unique military order: “…when a ranger…is killed in action, continue his salary for 28 days to pay for his coffin” (p 26).

BookLust Twist: From More Book Lust in the chapter “Founding Fathers” (p 91). Last month I read about Benjamin Franklin from the same chapter. Note to self: Self, don’t read anything from that chapter in March!

Defiant Hero

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IMG_0573
Brockman, Suzanne. The Defiant Hero. New York, Ivy Books, 2001.

I am not a big fan of romance novels. I’m just not into the language they all seem to require. While the plot of The Defiant Hero is riveting, I am more than a little bored by how good looking the three pivotal couples are. The women are all drop dead gorgeous, “impossibly beautiful” with amazing legs, eyes, breasts, you name it… while the men are chiseled, rugged, handsome, can cry on command, etc, etc. These people are so achingly beautiful and yet…there is something keeping every couple apart. They either hate one another, or are suspicious of each other, or something.
Okay, first the plot (The LibraryThing version): Meg is a translator for a European embassy. Her daughter and grandmother get kidnapped by an “Extremist” group. Meg’s love interest is Navy SEAL Lieutenant John. He’s called in by the FBI to help Meg. She specifically asks for him. Alyssa and Sam are the second couple – Alyssa is FBI and Sam is Navy SEAL – both involved with getting Meg because she has become a kidnapper herself. The third couple is Meg’s grandmother and her past. She reminisces about her first husband while being held captive by the “Extremists.” Got all that? In between the macho FBI/kidnapping violence there is a good amount of romance novel sex – the pantie ripping, throbbing kind.
My favorite quotes:
“Unfortunately, though, penises came attached to men. And therein lay one of her biggest problems” (p 9).
“He was gazing at her as if she were a gourmet delicacy the chef had just presented” (p 218).
“He was supposed to spend the night cuffed to a woman he craved more than oxygen” (p 260).

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust and the chapter ” Romance Novels: Our Love is Here to Stay” (p 203). Obviously chosen in honor of Valentine’s Day. Wanna know something else that’s cheesy? I waited until 2/14 to crack it open, too. It was a fast and fun read!

Bridget Jones

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IMG_0570Fielding, Helen. Bridget Jones’ Diary. New York: Penguin, 1996.

When I first learned this chick-lit was on my list I didn’t know whether to groan or grin. But, after pages and pages of stuffy political biographies I knew I’d need a fluffy change. I just didn’t expect it to be so funny! Luckily, my good friend let me borrow it…Here’s the LibraryThing Review:
Bridget Jones is a likable 30-something Londoner. A little on the plump side (so she thinks) and more than a little single (so everyone keeps pointing out), her year long diary takes the reader on a journey through her attempts at weight loss and dating. While her weight gain is more that her ultimate loss and her initial love interest cheats on her, Bridget triumphs with humor and a naivete that is undeniably charming. Obsessive and narcisstist characteristics aside, Bridget could be any woman’s best friend. A delightful (quick) read.

My favorite lines:
“I know what her secret is: she’s discovered power” (p 58).
“Love the friends, better than extended Turkish family in weird headscarves any day” (p 74).
“There’s nothing worse than people telling you you look tired. They might as well have done with it and say you look like five kinds of shit” (p 92).
“By 11:30 Sharon was in full and splendid auto-rant” (p 108).

The only disappointment was a discrepancy with dates. On Wednesday, March 15 Bridget writes “only two weeks to go until birthday” yet, on Tuesday, March 21 she claims it’s her birthday. Two weeks from the 15th is the 29th or at least the 28th. Even if she is counting work weeks it would have been the 25th. Not sure what to think of that. Then there is the time she spends doing something. How is it possible to spend 230 minutes inspecting your face for wrinkles? I’ve done the math. That’s nearly 4 hours – unless London has more minutes to an hour than we do…(ps~ I’m being a snob here. Of course I know Bridget isn’t spending that much time on one activity…)
Another weirdness is that Bridget makes reference to Goldie Hawn and Susan Sarandon a lot. I couldn’t figure out what the reference was all about considering The Banger Sisters didn’t come out until 2002. I’m thinking she meant Thelma and Louise but in that case she didn’t mean Goldie Hawn, but rather Geena Davis. Whatever.

BookLust Twist: From Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust in the chapter called, you guessed it, “Chick-Lit” (p 53).

American Century

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IMG_0397

Evans, Harold. The American Century. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.

Weighing in at over 700 pages, American Century is nothing short of gorgeous. Bold black and white photos stand out on nearly every page, while satiric comics adorn the others. I have always loved the Brown Brothers photo of the construction workers on the Woolworth Building and was pleasantly surprised to see its inclusion on page xvii. 

I liked learning that President Cleveland bought the “dirt” on an opponent and upon receiving the envelope burned it, unopened, on the spot. He also suffered from cancer of the mouth and had an entire artificial jaw.

“You feel small in the presence of dead men, and you don’t ask silly questions” (p 332).
Here’s the LibraryThing version of my review:
“Any history buff should have this sitting on his or her shelf (and have a shelf sturdy enough to support this 700+ book). Chock full of intriguing cartoons and mesmerizing photographs, American Century covers every aspect of U.S. history from 1889 to the mid 1990s. Well written with commentaries and first hand accounts, history comes alive. The people, the politics, the power, the pitiful downfalls. The 20th century is laid out and every historical moment of worth is described and detailed.”

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust and the chapter “American History: Fiction” (p 21). I have to explain that this isn’t fiction. Pearl referenced The American Century while talking about Ken Baker’s novels. Ken Baker helped Harold Evans with The American Century.