Tag: book lust ii

Unless

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Shields, Carol. Unless. Read by Joan Allen. Harper Collins, 2002.

Reason read: Shields celebrates a birthday in June. Read in her honor.

How do you carry on with your life when one of your children is mentally ill and choosing to live on the streets for no apparent reason? I read a review where someone called Unless whiney and self-indulgent. I’m sorry but if I had a loved one “lost” like that, I too would be fixated on their wellbeing. Are they getting enough food to eat? Where are they going to go when the temperatures are minus ten degrees (not including wind chill factor) or one hundred and two (in the shade)? Reta Winters is trying to be a mother to her two other teenage daughters while thinking these things about a third, her eldest. She is a wife going through the motions with her trilobite-obsessed husband. She is a translator while trying to write her own second novel. She is an aging woman, trying to stay relevant in the youth-obsessed world around her.
There is a little trickery going on with Unless. Like mirrors angled so images are reflected to infinity, Unless is a story about a woman writing about a woman writer who is writing about a woman writer. The nesting dolls of feminism. Then there is the carefully disguised biography of her mentor, Danielle. Danielle is at once a strong holocaust survivor and a fragile French woman who relies on Reta for writing support. Finally, there is the mystery of why eldest daughter, Nora, insists on sitting out on a street corner with a sign that simply reads “Goodness.”

Author fact: Shields died when she was only 68 years old, shortly after Unless was published. My audio had an interview with Ms. Shields and I was struck by how oddly she spoke. I have to wonder if she was ill at the time of the interview.

Book trivia: Chapters are titled with adverbs and conjunctions. If I read more carefully I probably would have seen how each word tied back into the storyline.
Audio trivia: at the end of the reading of Unless Carol Shields answers some questions. I have to admit I was distracted by her strange manner of halting speech.

Playlist: Mozart, Sinatra, Beethoven, and Bach.

Nancy said: Pearl did not say anything specific about Unless.

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Carol Shields: Too Good To Miss” (p 197).

Blue Bowl

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Minot, George. The Blue Bowl. Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.

Reason read: June is National Family Month.

On the surface The Blue Bowl is the story of Simon Curtis, accused of killing his father. It is an open and shut case for the prosecution. Simon blamed his father for his mother’s death because he heard her exclaim she would kill herself if his father didn’t stop drinking; Simon wanted his father’s money; when Simon wasn’t squatting in his father’s Maine house (when his father wasn’t there), he was living as ghost with his father in Massachusetts. Maine or Massachusetts, it didn’t matter. His father didn’t want him in either place. If his father knew Simon was disobeying him and squatting in either house he never let on. Are you supposed to like Simon? He has no social graces, an anarchist attitude, lazy, barely cognizant of the world around him, tags along uninvited, lies, scams and steals. As the trial progresses you want him to be guilty.
I have to admit, The Blue Bowl was a little annoying. Because of Minot’s style of writing I wasn’t sure in which house Simon was squatting, Maine or Massachusetts. It seemed like both at one point. I know the death happened in Manchester, Massachusetts and the trial took place in Boston, but then there are all these other connections to Maine. Everyone in Boston seemed to have something or someone somewhere in Maine.
Then there was the issue with the word “like.” I am not a fan of repetition. Like is everywhere. Like like like.
Run on sentences are not my thing either. Holy marathon run-on sentences. It is if Minot has so many thought running through his head and, afraid of losing them, spits them out in a stream of consciousness.

But here is a spoiler. I figured out who killed dad pretty early on. The Blue Bowl opens with the first person narrative of Simon’s nameless brother. He relays how Simon came to visit him in New York and then backtracks to tell the story of the murder, “starting with the aftermath.” The reader is given a ppe-show montage of Simon’s family, but here is thing thing – this first-person brother never inserts himself into the story. Who is he? How come he never came to Simon’s trial? He tells Simon’s story in third person narrative but never breaks in to say where he fit in. Because this “nameless” brother has something to hide.

Author fact: Minot lived in New York City at the time The Blue Bowl was published and leonine is a favorite word of his.

Book trivia: I don’t think it is a spoiler alert to say that the title of the book, the blue bowl, doesn’t really come into frame until the very end of the book. The Blue Bowl is the only work of Minot’s in LibraryThing.

As an aside, it was cool to see so many Maine names I knew. I decided to track them: Babbidge, Bangor, Blue Hill, Burnt Island, Camden Hills, Georges Bank, Iron Point, Isle au Haut, Thorofare, Little Thorofare, North Haven, Rockland, Thomaston, Portland, Mullen’s Head, Belfast, Rockport, Camden Hills,
As an another aside confessional, I never thought about the phrase “man-child” until a friend used it to describe someone with whom I was desperately in lust. I couldn’t understand his hot-cold nature and his loose grasp on reality. Simon is that same man-child.

Playlist: “American Pie”, “Allelujah”, Bee Gees’ “Lonely Days”, Billy Joel, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, Chopin’s “Nocturnal”, “Coconut”, Counting Crows (as an aside, I thought it ridiculously funny that Minot described the line “I need a raincoat” as whiney), James Taylor, Jimi Hendrix, “Lean On Me”, Mick Jagger, Neil Diamond, Neil Young’s “Helpless”, Pete Townsend, “Rock of Ages”, Three Dog Night’s “Jeremiah”, and the Who.

Nancy said: when talking about the Minot siblings as writers, Pearl said they each offered their own perspective on growing up in a large, dysfunctional family, but nothing specific about each individual author.

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

Queen Victoria

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Strachey, Lytton. Queen Victoria. Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1921.

Reason read: Queen Victoria was born on May 24th, 1819. Read in her honor.

The biography of Queen Victoria opens with the unhappy life of Princess Charlotte who is in the care of her father. She is betrothed to a man of her father’s choosing but has fallen in love with a married man. O the scandal! As a result Charlotte is exiled to Windsor Park. When all the other suitors fall away due to her absence she ends up marrying Prince Leopold and having a baby girl. Thus begins Victoria’s royal lineage. Victoria became queen in 1837 at the age of eighteen. Much like any new political leader, there were high hopes for Queen Victoria’s honest and scrupulous rule: the abolishment of slavery, the elimination of crime, and the improvement of education. Funny how some things never change.
This was a time when impulsive marriages could be made void with the stroke of a pen and uncles could fancy their nieces for matrimony. All marriages were open political and economical strategies. Marriage could alter friendships between entire nations. With arranged marriages it is usually the bride who feels trapped. Not so with the wedding of Albert and Victoria. It is the groom who does not want to go through with it. Too bad Victoria ended up marrying someone who wasn’t all that popular. She had to deal with a “foreign” husband who could not be accepted by her ruling nation. After Albert’s death, widowed at forty-two years old, she tried to bolster Albert’s reputation posthumously. What she succeeds in accomplishing is a nation in love with her. She becomes one of the most adored royalty of all time.

As an aside, Queen Victoria’s reaction to her husband’s death reminded me of my mother in the years after my father’s passing. Victoria puts Albert on a pedestal and worships his memory with grandiose gestures. My mother did the same thing. Saint and savior, my father could do no wrong once he was gone. Here is an example of Victoria’s “loyalty” – “Within those precincts everything remained as it had been at the Prince’s death; but the mysterious preoccupation of Victoria had commanded that her husband’s clothing should be laid out afresh, each evening, upon the bed, and that, each evening, the water should be set ready in the basin, as if he were still alive, and this incredible rite was performed with scrupulous regularity for nearly forty years” (p 404). Interestingly enough, this tidbit of information does not have a source. It comes from “private information” whatever that means.

Quotes to quote, “Cold and formal in manner, collected in speech, careful in action, he soon dominated the wild, impetuous, generous creature by his side” (p 3) and “…the dragon of his dissatisfaction devoured with dark relish that ever-growing tribute of laborious days and nights; but it was hungry still” (p 285)..

Author fact: Strachey also wrote Eminent Victorians which is on my Challenge list. Strachey’s full name is Giles Lytton Strachey.

Book trivia: Queen Victoria is dedicated to Virginia Woolf and also includes some black and white portraits of Victoria. The first portrait of Victoria is when she was seventeen years old. The final portrait is of Victoria at seventy-eight. Confessional: unfamiliar with British fashion, I never knew what was on Victoria’s head. It blended in with her hair so well that I always thought she had a mohawk hairstyle.

Playlist: “God Save the Queen”, “Come Holy Ghost”, “Hallelujah Chorus”, Hayden, Mendelssohn, “Rock of Ages”, and the National Anthem.

Nancy said: Pearl said Strachey produced one of the better biographies of Queen Victoria.

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Queen Victoria and Her Times” (p 191).

Bachelor Brothers’ Bed and Breakfast Pillow Book

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Richardson, Bill. Bachelor Brothers’ Bed and Breakfast Pillow Book. St. Martin’s Press, 1995.

Reason read: to continue the series started in April.

Hector and Virgil are back! Their charming bed and breakfast is still a safe haven for bibliophiles, although this time there are not as many “bookish” moments. There is a list of must-read cookbooks, books for a baby’s first five years (I loved seeing Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown, Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, and When We Were Very Young by A.A. Milne on the list), and another list of books specific for bathroom reading. The focus of book number two (pun intended) is the discovery of local controversial poet Solomon Solomon’s manuscript in the B&B safe. The town decides to celebrate his works with a festival involving a poetry contest, food, and a ball of foil.
Cutest moment in the book? When asked by their schoolteacher each twin said he wanted to be a bachelor when he grew up. Neither had no idea what that meant. My one complaint? The brothers do not narrate as much of the sequel as they did in Bachelor Brothers’ Bed and Breakfast.
As an aside, Nancy Pearl has a chapter in one of her Lust books about characters you would like to meet. I would like to meet mother. She practiced chemistry, built model planes, played football, studied anatomy, collected road kill, and raised twins all on her own. She sounds like a hell raiser. Natalie Merchant has a song called “Sister Tilly” and I could see mother as a Miss Tilly as someone who would stand at the barricades; a girl in the fray.

Line I liked, “I flashed her a pertinent finger and stooped to conquer” (p 130).

As another aside, I find it strange that Hector celebrates learning how to hula hoop on the same morning I wake from a dream that involved carrying a hula hoop onto a plane. I have no idea from where that came.

Author fact: I did a what the what when I found out Richardson is also a radio broadcaster. That is beyond cool.

Book trivia: As with the first Bachelor Brothers’ Bed and Breakfast there is a very cute illustration of a cat.

Playlist: Albinoni Adagio, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band”, Bach, Baker, “Blowin’ in the Wind”, Callas, Corelli, “Do You Know the Way To San Jose?”, “Donkey Serenade”, “E Luceran le Stelle”, Elvis, Flagstad, Gigli, “Holly and the Ivy”, “I Saw Three Ships”, John Coltrane, “Like a Virgin”, “Little Drummer Boy,” “Lullaby of Broadway”, Madame Butterfly, Madonna, “Material Girl”, Mio Babbino Caro, Mitch Miller, Mozart, O Holy Night”, Pachabel Canon, Piaf, Puccini, “Red Rover Valley”, “Silver Bells”, Stratas, Village People, Vivaldi, Wayne Newton, and “You’ll Never Walk Alone”.

Nancy said: Pearl called Bachelor Brothers’ Bed and Breakfast Pillow Book “light-as-air.”

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Gallivanting in the Graveyard” (p 96) and again in the simple chapter called “Parrots” (p 183). There are no ghosts in Bachelor Brothers’ Bed and Breakfast Pillow Book. Although, to be fair, there is a scene when Caedmon is dusting in mother’s room and he has a hint of a spirit with him. Does that count?

Hong Kong

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Morris, Jan. Hong Kong. Vintage, 1997.

Reason read: for the Portland Public Reading Challenge I needed a book about a region that interests me. Hong Kong is a place I know little about.

Hong Kong is densely factual. Someone else described it this way and that was my ah-ha moment. I couldn’t put my finger on why it was such a slog to read. Morris spends an inordinate amount of time describing one of Hong Kong’s first modern structures but fails incite any passion about it. Her detached voice left me wondering what is the fascination with the area? She spent a long time describing a photograph of a building I wanted her to include it in the book. This, you will see, is a reoccurring pet peeve of mine. Morris’s photographs are uninspiring and grainy.
A word of warning. Hong Kong is outdated. I found myself wondering about the Hong Kong of today. Are there still more Rolls-Royces per head in the city?
At first I wasn’t sure I would enjoy Hong Kong. Aside from dated material, in the early pages, Morris jumps from pleasures of the flesh to pleasure of the palette to playing mah-jongg and the mythology of disturbing the spirits in the earth within several seemingly unrelated pages.
My take-aways: honey was a euphemism for sex for hire. Opium was a legally smoked drug until 1940. A deeper understanding of the art and logic of feng shui. At least I learned something.

Author fact: I have an astounding twelve books by Jan Morris on my Challenge list. She has written many more.

Book trivia: I don’t know why but I find it selfish when an author describes a photograph that they took but don’t share the image in the book. They would rather go through great lengths to describe it. As it was, the clump of pictures Morris chose to include were grainy, somewhat irrelevant and completely uninteresting. I am repeating myself.

Playlist: “One Stolen Kiss”, and “Deep in My Heart, Dear”.

Nancy said: Pearl said Hong Kong is filled with evocative writing.

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Hong Kong Holidays” (p 118).

Why Read?

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Edmundson, Mark. Why Read? Bloomsbury, 2004.

Reason read: April is National Library Month. Plus, I needed a short book for the Portland Public Library reading challenge. This fit the bill.

Why Read? is a compilation of the clever thoughts of others. Edmundson is constantly direct quoting, recalling or paraphrasing the intelligent works of Arthur Schoppenhauer, Ann Marlowe, Camille Paglia, David Denby, David Rieff, de Man, Edmund Burke, Friedrich Schiller, Foucault, Frye, George Orwell, Henry James, Harold Bloom, Heidegger, Herman Melville, James Edwards, Keats, Kierkegaard, Karen Armstrong, Jacques Derrida, JH van den Burg, Lionel Trilling, Marcel Proust, Marilyn Butler, Matthew Arnold, Martha Nussbaum, Milan Kundera, Oscar Wilde, the Marquis de Sade, Nietche, Paul Cantor, Paul Ricoeur, Sir Philip Sidney, Richard Rorty, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Frost, Robert McKee, Simon Frith, Stanley Fish, Socrates, Sigmund Freud, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Walter Jackson Bate, William B. Yeats, Wordsworth (among others), without a single footnote or bibliography, works cited page, or what have you. Sections on the connections to God, questioning God, and delving into the importance of critical thinking had me yawning. Is it deliberate that Edmundson’s examples of his students are mostly female? Just curious.
My favorite sections are when Edmundson was drawing connections to humanism – finding the deep parallels between individual reality and literary imagination. Can we identify with Hamlet’s situation? How does this relate to the here and now?

Author fact: Edmundson likes to start his book titles with the word why.

Book trivia: Why Read? is a very short book, but should not be read in one sitting.

Playlist: Keith Richards, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Muddy Waters, and Britney Spears.

Nancy said: Pearl called Why Read? stimulating,

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Dewey Deconstructed 800s” (p 76).

Bachelor Brothers’ Bed and Breakfast

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Richardson, Bill. Bachelor Brothers’ Bed and Breakfast. St. Martin’s Press, 1996.

Reason read: April is the month people start planning their holiday get aways to B&Bs.

Confessional: I hate it when I read a book too fast and I don’t start a blog to take notes. I feel like I have a great deal of catching up to do. In a nutshell, Bachelor Brothers’ Bed and Breakfast is exactly that, a slim volume about two aging twin brothers who run a bed and breakfast on an island off the coast of British Columbia. Neither has ever married or had children, although one brother is dating. Their bed and breakfast is popular despite never being advertised. Guests share their experiences in alternating chapters, while the brothers share reading lists (Top 10 Authors, Books When Feeling Low, and Authors for the Bath), recipes, and stories of their mother who has since passed. In a word, Bachelor Brothers’ Bed and Breakfast is charming. Many reviewers have stated they wouldn’t mind staying a night or two with the brothers. With only ten guests at a time, I have to agree.

Author fact: Richardson has written quite a few books. I am only reading Bachelor Brothers’ Bed and Breakfast, Bachelor Brothers’ Bed and Breakfast Pillow Book, and Waiting for Gertrude for the Lust Challenge.

Book trivia: Bachelor Brothers’ Bed and Breakfast won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour.

Nancy said: the only thing Pearl mentioned about Bachelor Brothers’ Bed and Breakfast is that she wished the B&B was a real place. I think we all do.

Connection to my own life: the Morris Dancers used to come to Monhegan every summer. I can remember walking by an open field and watching a group of people bouncing around with bells around their knees, waving hankies to and fro.

Setlist: “Allegra Ma Non Troppo”, “Auld Lang Syne”, “Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms”, “English Countryside”, “Flow Gently Sweet Afternoon”, “Frosty the Snowman”, “Jingle Bells”, “June is Busting Out All Over”, “Just Wild About Harry”, “La Cucaracha”, “La Donna E Mobile”, Liberace, “Love’s Old Sweet Song”, “Moon River”, “Muzetta’s Waltz”, “O Susanna”, “Pachebel Cannon”, “She’s Like the Swallow”, “Shuffle Off To Buffalo”, “Sky Boat song”, “Summertime”, “The Swan”, “Voi Che Supete”, “William Tell Overture”, Edith Pilaf, Debussy, Joan Baez, Saint Saens, Vivaldi,

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Gallivanting in the Graveyard” (p 96). In truth, I am not sure why this book and it’s companion, Bachelor Brothers’ Bed and Breakfast Pillow Book, are included in this chapter. There is not enough ghostly activity for either book to be considered ghost stories. There is a separate chapter in Book Book Lust about parrots. Bachelor Brothers’ Bed and Breakfast is not included, but should be because Mrs. Rochester is a prominent character in both Bachelor Brothers books.

Birth of the Beat Generation

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Watson, Steven. The Birth of the Beat Generation” Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters, 1944 – 1960. Pantheon Books, 1995.

Reason read: Allen Ginsberg died in April. Read in his memory.

We begin by exploring the phrase “beat generation.” Where it came from and what does it mean. What exactly is a Beat? Were these people a brand new class of genius? Or were they just plain crazy? Maybe it is a cultural thing, but I was alarmed at the behaviors of some members of the group. The violence, self-mutilation, sexual escapades. Whether it was the drugs or their need to be seen as over the top artistic, I don’t know.
Birth of the Beat Generation does not only delve into the core members of the original group. Watson takes you behind the curtain to meet the mothers, girlfriends, wives, and muses of the Beats, the less often talked about women of the generation. They had their own addictions and mental failings, but they always played second fiddle to the boys. Everyone seemed to searching for sexual identity. Everyone seemed to be one card short of a full deck. Everyone slept with anyone, regardless of actual preference. Celebrity was a beast to be chased, but once caught, extremely hard to tame. To be a Beat you had to be a libertarian, write confessional poetry, be open to mind-bending drugs, sexual liberation, and embrace pacifism.
Birth of the Beat Generation is not your average book. It has unusual dimensions. The photography is sprinkled throughout like Easter eggs. Quotes, a slang dictionary, and fun facts are written in the margins. I appreciated the flow chart of players, when they met, their relationships to one another, and the seriousness of their connections. The best margin information was what was on everyone’s book shelves. I found that fascinating.

As an aside, I learned of two new words today. I want to use them often – bewilderness (I visit that place whenever I am at a festival) and “alcoholized”.
As another aside, this is the second book in as many months where someone cuts off their own digit. There is an amputation scene in Little Bee and William Burroughs does his thing…
As yet another aside, and you knew this was coming if you know anything about me. How could I not think of the 10,000 Maniacs song, “Hey, Jack Kerouac” while reading Birth of the Beat Generation? Especially when Natalie sings, “Allen baby, why so jaded? Have the boys all grown up and their beauty faded. Billy, what a saint they made you.” That particular line took on a whole new meaning when I read about Burroughs and his wife, Joan, and a little game they played called William Tell. In an interesting twist of fate, I sat in a jury pool room, waiting for #70 to be called when I was reading the part about the perjury of the witnesses.

Quotes to quote, “The notion of the anti-hero as icon – the underworld beautified – had already been partly codified” (p 72).

Author fact: Watson has his own website here. He has written a handful of other books, but I am only reading The Birth of the Beats.

Book trivia: At the end of the book there is a chronology of what the Beats were up to at the same time as the rest of the world, including when Tupperware was invented.

Playlist: Charlie Parker, “The Red Flag”, “On the Line”, “Last Night the Nightingale Woke Me”, Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, Brahms Trio Number One, Thelonious Monk, Bach’s Toccata, Edith Pilaf, “Too Close for Comfort”, “You Always Hurt the One You Love”, Leadbelly, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky Suit, Billie Holiday, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Lee Konitz, “My Funny Valentine”, “Just You, Just Me”, Cal Tjader, “Deep in the Heart of Texas”, Pat Boone, Wagner’s “Gotterdammerung”, “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, Steely Dan, David Bowie, Tom Waits, Patti Smith, Frank Zappa, and John Cage.

Nancy said: Pearl commented on the same thing I did. She called the extra information in the margins cunning.

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “The Beats and Their Generation” (p 17).

Portrait of a Lady

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James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady. Random House, 1951.
James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady. Read by Elizabeth McGovern. Naxos Audio, 2006.

Reason read: James celebrates a birthday in April. Read in his honor.

Did you ever meet a character so charming and fun that you wished you knew them in real life? I would have liked to pal around with Isabel Archer, American heiress and orphan. When her father dies, Isabel makes the journey to visit her aunt, Mrs. Touchett. Despite being outspoken and extremely independent, Isabel makes fast friends with her European cousin, Ralph, an older woman named Mrs. Merle and a few eligible bachelors who express an interest in Isabel. Everyone bores Isabel until she meets dashing suitor, Gilbert Osmond. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what she saw in him. Ignoring the warnings of her family and friends, Isabel throws caution to the wind and marries Mr. Osmond, only to discover he control over her is fueled by jealousy and greed. When he forbids her to see her dying cousin, I just about lost my mind. Who does that? Obviously, this is not the end of the story, but The Portrait of a Lady is a classic so you know what happens next.

Quotes I liked, “Ralph smokingly considered” (p 211). I don’t know what that means.

Author fact: James is lauded as one of the great American-British authors.

Book trivia: Portrait of a Lady is in two volumes with seamless chapter continuation.
Audio trivia: music plays between the chapters.

Nancy said: Pearl said that novels about female Americans abroad own a debt to Henry James for Isabel Archer.

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “American Girls” (p 18).

Fear Itself

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Mosely, Walter. Fear Itself. Read by Don Cheadle. Hachett Book Group, 2003.

Reason read: to finish the series started in January in honor of Mosely’s birth month.

Fearless Jones is at it again, getting his friend Paris Minton in trouble. Since we last saw Minton he was trying to rebuild his life after his bookstore was burned to the ground and he was beaten and shot at in Fearless Jones. Now, in Fear Itself Minton has been able to rebuild his bookstore and get back to a quiet life, thanks to a settlement from the last book. He still doesn’t want trouble, but yet Fearless soon finds a way to get Paris in the thick of it. This time, the wealthiest woman in Los Angeles is missing her nephew. She tricks Fearless into looking for him and Fearless pulls Minton into the mystery. You will meet a whole host of strange characters in Fear Itself. There are so many plot twists I almost needed a flow chart to keep everything straight.
Confessional: I want to sit across from Paris Minton and have him tell me stories about his collection of books.

Line I liked, “When you come right down to it, there’s nothing like a fire for putting the spunk back into a body” (p 41).

Author fact: I think Mosely’s other series featuring Easy Rawlins is more popular.

Playlist: Beethoven’s 5th.

Book trivia: This is actually trivia about the audio version – audio not only includes music, but the characters belch like a real performance.

Nancy said: Pearl didn’t say anything specific about the Fearless series other than to say is was something Mosely wrote.

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Walter Mosely: Too Good To Miss” (p 168).

Travels of Jaimie McPheeters

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Taylor, Robert Lewis. The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters. Doubleday & Company, Inc. 1958.

Reason read: February is national history month and Travels of Jaimie McPheeters is a historical fiction.

Although The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters is grounded in fiction its bibliography indicates Taylor made extensive use of letters, memorandums, maps, memoirs, guidebooks, journals, and sermons to give the novel sincere authenticity. In a nutshell, it is the adventures of young Jaimie McPheeters as he journeyed with his father to seek gold in the mid 1800s. [As an aside, I could not help but think of Natalie Merchant’s song “Gold Rush Brides” when I read The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters.] The story has everything: clashes with Indian tribes (including kidnapping, torture and murder), gambling, religion (Mormonism and the question of polygamy), humor, weather, and the hardships of the trail. This was the wild west; a time when at plate passing someone could offer a live rattlesnake in lieu of money. Confessional: I didn’t know if I liked audacious Jaimie McPheeters when I first met him. My favorite parts were the interactions he had with his father. The interesting conversation about Latin and who killed the dead language was one of my favorites. Taylor has an interesting way of using words. The words ‘pranced’ and ‘shotgun’ usually do not go together in the same sentence.
A word of warning: speaking of language, it is a bit dated with derogatory and racist words.

Line I liked, “When one set of sense lies down on the job, another reports in and takes over” (p 18). This quote hit a little too close to home, “It went along very much like a dentist trying to pry out a wisdom tooth that had got wrapped around the jawbone” (p 101). I have a wisdom tooth that is sitting too close to my jaw bone.

Author fact: Taylor was first a journalist before becoming a Pulitzer winning author.

Book trivia: It is my personal opinion that The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters would have benefitted from a few maps, but it won a Pulitzer without them.

Nancy said: Pearl said she would buy The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters for a history buff in her family.

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “A Holiday List” (p 114).

Fearless Jones

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Mosely, Walter. Fearless Jones. Little, Brown and Company, 2001.

Reason read: Walter Mosely was born in the month of January. Read in his honor.

Paris Minton ingeniously builds his used bookstore from discards and sales from local libraries. For a Negro to own his business in 1950s Watts, California, Minton knows he is an anomaly. What he also is, is unlucky. Soon after a beautiful woman in distress hides in his bookstore he is badly beaten and his store, burned to the ground. Who was the impossibly beautiful woman? Who would want to burn down his store and do that has anything to do with the men who beat him? There is only one thing to do, bail his good friend Fearless Jones out of prison and enlist him to solve the mystery. As Minton tells the story he builds the character of Fearless Jones through their friendship, setting up the character development in future stories.
When you read Walter Mosely expect crackling humor, fast paced action, racial truths, and lots of quick-jab violence.
As an aside, one of the things I like about Walter Mosely’s writing is that his characters use the bathroom. Not many authors include the details of common bodily functions.

Lines I liked, “Being challenged by the law was a rite of passenger for any Negro who wanted to better himself or his situation” (p 4), “The best cop I ever saw was the cop who wasn’t there” (p 87), and “These were men who had lived with Satan before coming to God, and they were still willing to venture over to the wrong side of holiness if the situation demanded it” (p 227).

Author fact: I have twelve Mosely books on my Challenge list, including two nonfiction contributions.

Book trivia: Fearless Jones is the first book in the Fearless Jones series.

Setlist: Louis Armstrong, Billie Holliday, and Pat Boone.

Nancy said: Pearl included Fearless Jones as part of the Fearless Jones series. She didn’t say anything beyond that about the book.

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Walter Mosely: Too Good To Miss” (p 168).

Vinland the Good

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Shute, Nevil. Vinland the Good. William Morrow & Co, Inc. 1946.

Reason read: Shute’s birth and death month is January. Read in his honor and memory. I also needed a book for the Portland Reading Challenge. The category is a book that is under 150 pages long. Vinland the Good is 126 pages.

This is the historical fiction story of Leif Ericsson and his quest to discover new lands. Cleverly hidden in a history lesson at a boy’s boarding school, teacher Callender describes Leif’s life’s adventures. Callender is back after six years to teach U.S. History and finds a clever way to keep the students engaged despite the headmaster’s disapproval. [Spoiler: there is a section of the story where Leif warns Thorgunna to keep her ladies away from Leif’s men. It is hinted that Leif worries the men could rape the fair maidens. Thorgunna replies that Leif gives sound advice because her ladies have been without variety…]
Vinland the Good comes to us in the form of a treatment for a script as if Shute planned it as a movie or theater production. Stage directions and props describe each scene before narratives begin. Themes in Vinland the Good include forgiveness (when King Olaf lifts Leif’s stigma of being the son of an outlaw and teaches Leif the art of shipbuilding) and the spread of Christianity. You could also call Vinland the Good a tragic love story as Leif and Thorgunna’s relationship blossoms into love and loyalty.

Best quote, “LEIF (Heavily) Thorgunna, as one goes through life one has to make the best decisions that one can, and work on them” (p 70). Amen to that.

As an aside, I love any book that uses the word ‘gloaming’ in some manner.

Author fact: I have read five of the twenty four Nevil Shute books on my list. He has written a bunch more.

Book trivia: Even though a map is included on the free and pastedown endpapers, there are no other illustrations. Bummer.

Nancy said: Pearl didn’t say anything specific about Vinland the Good.

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Nevil Shute: Too Good To Miss” (p).

Confessional: this doesn’t happen to me often. I am proud of the fact that my Book Lust Challenge is very organized. I would like to think I have every book cataloged; so it came as a shock to learn Vinland the Good was NOT cataloged in LibraryThing. It was in all of my spreadsheets (TwistList, MBL list, ToGo list, and Schedule list), but somehow I missed the most important place of all, LibraryThing.

Heartburn

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Ephron, Nora. Heartburn. Pocketbooks, 1983.

Reason read: a Christmas gift to myself.

What do you do when you are seven months pregnant and you discover your second husband is having an affair? To make matters worse, you already have a handful in the form of a two year old named Sam. It’s complicated to say the least. Heartburn is fiction but it could be all true. Ephron based this fictional falling apart of a marriage on her own experiences with love gone awry. Told from the perspective of Rachel, a cookbook author who has discovered her husband is having an affair with someone in their social circle. Like all good gossips, everyone knows Thelma is having a fling with someone’s husband. They all take turns guessing until Rachel discovers it’s her Mark Thelma has been seeing. Heartburn is at once heartbreaking and hilarious. Rachel’s revenge is sweet and swift.

Lines I liked, He said it with the animation of a tree sloth” (p 87) and “Second of all, it means even a simple flat inquiry like “How’s Helen?” is taken amiss, since your friend always thinks that what you hope he’s going to say is “Dead.” ” (p 138).

Author fact: Ephron was better known for her romantic comedies, but she was also a journalist and novelist.

Book trivia: Heartburn contains fifteen recipes.

Playlist: Irving Berlin’s “Always”.

Nancy said: Pearl said Nora is best known for Heartburn.

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

Clockers

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Price, Richard. Clockers. Houghton Mifflin, 1992.

Reason read: New Jersey became a state in December and I needed a book with a one-word title for the Portland Public Library Reading Challenge.

Dig down. Dig beneath the slang and bravado and you will find a gritty story about two very different human beings trying to survive the poverty stricken streets of New Jersey and New York. Rocco Klein has been a homicide detective for too long. He has seen it all and maybe he is too jaded because, as of late, the drug deaths he encounters inch him closer and closer to a yawning apathy. It might be time to retire. That is, until he meets young, barely out of his teens, Victor Dunham. Victor seems to be too innocent to be readily and eagerly confessing to a murder. Klein knows better. Who is Vincent covering for? Could it be his always in trouble drug-dealing brother? The cat and mouse game cops and crook play makes for an adventure (albeit a little long).
As an aside: Clockers is code for drug runners. Cocaine dealers, to be more specific.

Great lines, “At least with enemies, you knew what they were right up front” (p 8),”But the coffee didn’t pour itself, so nothing had come of it” (p 40). Yup. I’ve had those days, too.

Author fact: Richard Price wrote the screenplay for The Color of Money.

Book trivia: Clockers was made into a movie in 1995 and directed by Spike Lee. Of course I have not seen it.

Playlist: Wilson Pickett’s “International Playboy”, the Impressions’ “It’s All Right”, Kool and the Gang, “Ninety-Nine and a Half Just Won’t Do”, “I Found a Love”, the Rolling Stones, James Brown, and “One Love”.

Nancy said: Pearl said Price’s novels are hard to define.

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Jersey Guys and Gals” (p 129).