Tag: book review

Boy’s Own Story

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White, Edmund. A Boy’s Own Story. Iconic Books, Open Road Media. 2000.
White, Edmund. A Boy’s Own Story. Vintage International, 1982.

Reason read: June is Pride Month.

First published in 1982, A Boy’s Own Story‘s main character has been compared to Teddy Roosevelt and characters from Lolita and Huckleberry Finn. The first in a trilogy and supposedly autobiographical in nature, A Boy’s Own Story introduces themes of desire, coming of age, and identity. The book’s nameless young narrator navigates his own sexuality in an age when parents simply warn their children about predators who seem “oversexed” and “take advantage of younger boys.” Our hero fights his homosexual tendencies while wondering why the adult camp counselor doesn’t rub his back in the middle of the night. Torn between propriety and passion, he struggles to find normalcy in his desires. Will his feelings for other boys fade in time? It this something to grow out of? In an effort to “change” he first seeks the advice of a priest. When that does not work, he convinces his father to send him to an all-boys boarding school. Maybe being in the presence of so many males would normalize his sexuality and set him straight? Not so. Next came a psychiatrist. Maybe he can address the psychological aspects of being attracted to men? Ultimately, he is looking for a way to have sex with a man and then disown him so to disavow his homosexuality. The secret to his longing is power which makes A Boy’s Own Story all at once poignant and sad.

Line I liked, “The subject of this book might be that brief eloquence between the fantasies of a dream-bound child and his implementing through charm, sexuality, his wits” (p 6). The saddest sentence in the book, “I had spent so much of my childhood sunk into a cross-eyed, nose-picking turpitude of shame and self-loathing, scrunched up in the corner of a sweating leather chair on a hot summer day, the heat having silenced the birds, even the construction workers on the site next door, and delivering me up to the admonishing black head of the fan on the floor slowly shaking from left to right, right to left to signal its tedious repetition of no, no, no, and to exhale the faintly irritating vacillations of its breath” (p 126).

Author fact: White lists Proust as one of his influences. I love it when I’m reading a connection to another book.

Book trivia: A Boy’s Own Story is autobiographical.

Playlist: “Dies Irae”, Juliette Greco, “Nothing Like a Dame”, Odetta, “Pat Boone’s “Twixt Twelve and Twenty”, “Now is the Hour”, “Zip-a-Dee Doo-Dah”, “Kitten on the Keys”, “I’ll Be Seeing You in Apple Blossom Time”, “The Tennessee Waltz”, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Liberace, Schubert’s “Unfinished”,

Nancy said: Pearl said Boy’s Own Story was “set prior to Stonewall” (Book Lust p 94). For those who don’t know, Stonewall refers to the Stonewall Rebellion or Stonewall Uprising; a riot in the early morning of June 28th, 1969. Police violently raided an establishment known as Stonewall. The community in and around Greenwich Village, New York, protested the attack.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the too-short chapter called “Gay and Lesbian Fiction: Out of the Closet” (p 93). There are so many other great novels Pearl could have mentioned (like Annie On My Mind by Nancy Garden).

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).

At Weddings and Wakes

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McDermott, Alice. At Weddings and Wakes. Farrar Straus Giroux, 1992.

Reason read: June is a very popular month for weddings…to the point where it is almost cliché.

Time is handled in a “This Is Us” fashion: time goes backwards and forwards in At Weddings and Wakes. Time moves through memory and observation and seems incrementally slow. This is the story of what it means to be Irish-American in New York, told from the point of view of Lucy Dailey’s school-aged children. Again, I was reminded of “This Is Us.” The viewpoints are poignant and sad, tender and true to life. This Is Life. Lucy dutifully brings her children from Long Island to see her sisters and stepmother in Brooklyn. The three generations of family all have a rich bittersweet history to tell. Aunt Veronica needs alcohol to numb her grief. Aunt Agnes is nothing but sharp-tongued and career driven. But, the sweetness and light is found with Aunt May, a former nun in the midst of a romance with mailman.
McDermott is a master at displaying human emotions and behaviors in a way that you swear the characters are in your life; just ghosts who have just passed into another room while you weren’t looking.
As an aside, can I just say how much I love the slug scene that appears in the beginning of the book and then returns at the end?

Line I liked, “She inherited her mother’s easy access to regret” (p 52) and “The need to disagree rose in her like appetite” (p 87).

Author fact: I am reading five McDermott books. I cannot wait for That Night and Child of My Heart. I have already read Charming Billy and The Bigamist’s Daughter .

Book trivia: this should have been a movie.

Setlist: “All the Things You Are” by Jerome Kern, “Wild Irish Rose”, “I’ll Be Seeing You”, “I’ve Been Working On the Railroad”, “Rambling Wreck From Georgia Tech”, and “The Caissons Go Rolling Along”.

Nancy said: Pearl did not say anything specific about At Weddings and Wakes.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “A…is for Alice (p 1).

Grow Your Business with ChatGPT

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Kelley, Steve. Grow Your Business with ChatGPT: The 5-Step Al Blueprint to Generate More Revenue by Automating and Optimizing Your Business Processes Using Artificial Intelligence. Kindle Edition, 2023.

Reason read: as a member of the Early Review Program for LibraryThing I am occasionally asked to review interesting books. My institution is getting into ChatGPT and so I thought I would expand my horizons a little with this review.

Confessional: I didn’t read the fine print about how this book would be delivered. Yes, I knew it was an e-book. Yes, I knew the author would send me a link. No, I didn’t know it would be an Amazon-only product (brought to you by Kindle). I don’t own a Kindle. What if I didn’t even have an Amazon account? I have to log into Amazon as if I am shopping in order to read Grow Your Business with ChatGPT. Amazon’s bots must think I’m doing a lot of browsing, but I never seem to buy anything.

Second Confessional: I don’t have a business from which to generate more revenue. I don’t have a business to automate. I don’t have a business process to optimize. I chose Grow Your Business with ChatGPT: The 5-Step Al Blueprint to Generate More Revenue by Automating and Optimizing Your Business Processes Using Artificial Intelligence because I wanted to come at it from the perspective of someone who is interested in starting a business. A business to automate and optimize and certainly from which to generate more revenue (who doesn’t want that).

I found Grow Your Business with ChatGPT to be very straightforward and dare I say, fun? Kelley writes with a conversational tone when his subject matter could be very dry and technical. Confessional Number Three: I did skip some parts, but only when he told me I could. There is a lot of sound advice and solid information in the parts I did read. In truth, I think Grow Your Business with ChatGPT is best suited for the audience Kelley intended – the folks already in business; the people wanting to stay well ahead of the curve.

Berserk

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Mercy, David. Berserk: My Voyage to the Antarctic in a Twenty-Seven Foot Sailboat. Lyons Press, 2004.

Reason read: June is the month to celebrate the ocean. Nothing celebrates the ocean more than sailing on it.

From the very onset, David Mercy is a little berserk. Who signs up to sail to the Antarctic with two other men he met only a week earlier? Mercy does. He agrees to travel in a twenty-seven foot sailboat with a twenty-one year old Norwegian and an immature Argentine. The book opens with the three of them, practically strangers, in the middle of a hurricane off Cape Horn. But Mercy is no stranger to adventure – he has already been to the Congo, Outback of Australia, Tibet, China, India, the Bering Sea, and Mexico. He has been on every continent save one. Antarctica. Mercy is not tethered to the normal trappings of adulthood – no job to clock, no romantic or plutonic relationships to miss, pets nor even a vehicle to look after; nor is he afraid to try new things (like touring the La Paz prison system with a cocaine-dealing inmate). This is the perfect time to sail to the Antarctic with a couple of strangers. What could possibly go wrong?
Aside from the adventure it was to reach the Antarctic, Mercy’s story is primarily about getting along (mostly not) with his shipmates. His rash choice to travel with these men is a little suspect. “Jarle had seemed competent enough in the ten minutes we had spent together” (p 31). Sure. Then there’s whiney Manuel. This man wants to go home at the first sight of whitecaps or hard labor. Stating the obvious, the infighting begins immediately. I don’t know about you, but I would think it a red flag to travel to the Antarctic (or anywhere) with someone who has never heard of Shackleton. Just saying.

As an aside, I am not a fan of inconsistencies. Mercy says “I undress, stripping off my wet clothes” but several sentences later someone “grabs me by the collar of my Richard III sweater” (p 5). What gives? Did he undress or not? Is it that I don’t understand what a Richard III sweater is? As an another aside, Mercy seems fashion-centric. Besides the Richard III sweater (whatever that is), he is wearing a Peruvian llama-wool cap. But, I digress. Back to inconsistencies. At one point he dons a Viking helmet but a few sentences later he was forced to cover his head to protect his scalp from dive-bombing skuas. Wait. I thought he was already wearing something to protect himself? What happens when the writing skills do not match the caliber of the adventure begging to be told? You sigh and move on because, overall, it’s such a great story.

Author fact: Berserk is Mercy’s only work in LibraryThing. He calls himself a director and producer of film.

Book trivia: Berserk contains no photography even though they all took turns with a camera. Bummer. I would have liked to see the whales or at least a penguin.

Playlist: AC/DC’s “High Voltage”, Iron Maiden’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, Metallica’s “Sanitarium” and “Unforgiven”, James Hatfield, Grateful Dead, and Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Nancy said: Pearl said “Here are some books about sailors whose grasp of the fundamentals is much better than mine…and many of whose outcomes were far worse” (Book Lust To Go p 201).

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “See the Sea” (p 201).

Everything All at Once

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Catudal, Steph. Everything All at Once. Harper Collins, 2023.

Reason read: Team Rivs!

Celebrity is a weird thing. I first learned of Tommy “Rivs” Puzey when my husband bought me a new treadmill and it came with a free subscription to some training thing called iFit, a catalog of pre-recorded training/workout videos. I was a once-upon-a-time long distance runner, sidelined by injury and in desperate need of a comeback. Running was my therapy, truly the only way I could clear the mental fog caused by the everyday world that could cloud my wellbeing. One of my first workouts was with a strange, very tall, bearded man who walked and ran on tiptoe and called himself Rivs. He always wore a hat, tripped a lot and had many sayings that would soon become mantras (don’t get dead being one of my favorites). In addition to giving great advice about getting back into running, Rivs talked geology, anthropology, architecture, physiology, linguistics and history like a soft-spoken nutty professor. He couldn’t run by a plant without naming it or sometimes tasting it. I learned more about Portugal by running “with” Rivs than had I been there with a flag-yielding group tour guide. Aside from his didactic nature, I couldn’t help but be drawn in by Rivs; a guy who tries to eat an unripe olive straight from the tree (bitter!), or licks rocks to taste for salt, or is humble enough to not edit out the part when he falls on his ass while running down a steep hill. (Stay vertical!) Kind and considerate. In one session, calling himself rude, he actually apologized for eating a persimmon he knew his viewers could not taste. Who does that? I’m sure I’m not alone when I say I tried to finish every series Rivs shot (except Japan eludes me to this day). So, when I got the news Rivs was deathly ill (good old Instagram) I was floored. Like millions of other avid fans, I followed his case and condition as best as social media would allow. Once he was well enough to reach out to the world, we all, from every corner of the earth, anxiously awaited the words “not today.” We willed the words Not Today to show up every. single. day. I know I would feel a sense of despair when a few days would go by without those two simple words that held so much weight. I found myself praying for a complete stranger. And I am one of the faithless.
Then came Steph. Beautifully broken but brave Steph. As his wife, she became the lifeline for us Rivs fanatics. Team Rivs. She filled us in on treatments and prognosis. Her words were the balm despite the potential for permanent bruising. I fell in love with her lyrical fragility. Her words were at once stark and orchestral. A single cello note held low and sweet in orchestral medical chaos.
But, oh how I digress. Steph’s book, Everything All at Once, is what I’m here to talk about.

Reading Everything All at Once, it is as if Steph Catudal takes off all of her clothes, stands before you, and shamelessly points out every emotional battle scar she has ever acquired over the years. In the vehicle that is Everything all At Once and without fear she describes the historic places where her childhood cut and coming of age left invisible burn marks. With total honesty she appears to leave nothing out. The rage, the rebellion, the overwhelming urge to self-destruct. She courageously shows you her biggest wound: how she coped with the pain of losing her father to cancer. She embraced drug-fueled recklessness as a mechanism to forget; a secret seething rage. She didn’t know who she was without the destructive behavior of addiction. Her healing is a story in itself but wait, there is more. Her youth is only a preface to a bigger disaster of the heart. When her husband of twelve years develops a cancer so rare only ten other people had its diagnosis (and didn’t survive), Steph acquires the ultimate damaging scar only love can inflict. He is expected to die. How many times can medical professionals and hospital chaplains tell you this before you believe it? Expect it? Steph had to wish end of life in order to be in the same hospital room as her husband. I don’t want to spoil the rest of the book. I spent way more time explaining its importance than reviewing it. In a nutshell, Steph is a rare bird, rising from the ashes of a past that should have killed her. Instead, she emerges stronger, more resilient, and dare I say, even more badass?

As an aside: as soon as I read these words from Steph, I knew I wasn’t crazy for having a connection to Rivs, a complete stranger: “Once Rivs let you in, it was almost impossible not to love him. To not be changed by him.” I want to tell Steph this: you don’t have to be let in. You don’t have to know Rivs at all. You can be a stranger, a nameless and faceless fan on a treadmill, listening to him babble on about bitter olives and basalt tile and it will have an inexplicable impact on your life. Losing weight, trying to get fit, recovering from illness, striving for mental health, keeping the demons at bay. Whatever the reason for getting on the treadmill, it’s personal. Rivs somehow reaches through the technology with humble grace and holds you up, keeps you going. Eyes Up. Without telling you he tells you; you are not alone.

Playlist: Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” and Mason Jennings

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).

Brothers Karamazov

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Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.

Reason read: I no longer remember why this was chosen for May.

The question of nature versus nurture has always been a topic for debate. Who are we? Why are we here? Do we have a divine reason for being on this planet? In short, Dostoevsky is asking for the meaning of life. Sort of. This is the story of a patricide when any of Fyodor’s children could have been his killer because no one has a good relationship with him. Not to mention the competition between father and son over Agrafena (Grushenka). Here is a brief overview of The Brothers Karamazov:

  • Book One sets up the family dynamic
  • Book Two introduces the dispute over the family inheritance
  • Book Three is about the love triangle between Fyodor, Dmitri, and Grushenka
  • Book Four – you can skip. It’s a side story
  • Book Five is pros and contra, the Grand Inquisition & Jesus (reason and blind faith)
  • Book Six is about the Russian monk; the life and history of Elder Zosima, dying in his cell
  • Book Seven introduces Alyosha and the death and decay of Zosima
  • Book Eight illustrates Dmitri’s greed in order to run away with Grushenka
  • Book Nine is Fyodor’s murder (finally)
  • Book Ten is another side story
  • Book eleven is about Brother Ivan and his quest to find his father’s killer
  • Book Twelve is the trial of Dimitri

Author fact: Dostoevsky died shortly after finishing The Brothers Karamazov.

Book trivia: The Brothers Karamazov was originally published as a serial.

Nancy said: Pearl said “A good part of reading life can be spent most productively with the great (and well-known) Russian books…” (Book Lust p 210). She said more but you’ll just have to read it for yourself.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Russian Heavies” (p 210).

Let Me In

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Lindqvist, John Ajvide. Let Me In. Translated by Ebba Segerberg. Thomas Dunne Books, 2007.

Reason read: Mr. Nash

Admittedly, it took me a few pages to get into Let Me In. Once I fell in love with Oskar and Eli I couldn’t get enough of their story. Being a twelve year old sensitive boy, Oskar is the subject of daily bullying at school. He dreams of murderous revenge far beyond his sad and lonely years. At night he takes a hunting knife into the woods and repeatedly stabs trees, imagining the soft and penetrable flesh of his school yard enemies. Meanwhile, Eli is a mystery. With a strange way of speaking and no history to speak of, Eli fascinates Oskar to the point of obsession. He finds himself in love with a strange girl who only comes out at night, repeatedly says she neither a girl nor boy, and can solve puzzles she has never seen before in the blink of an eye. Who is she? Then the murders begin. Gruesome and strange, victims are drained of blood. Is Eli to blame?
A running theme through Let Me In is the absence of father figures. Eli has a fake father. Tommy has a fake step-father. Oskar’s dad has divorced his mom and is living an alcohol-soaked life outside of town. I wanted to pay attention to the mothers for I hoped they would be the unspoken heroes of Let Me In.
Not so much.
As an aside, I appreciated the literary references of Plato, Dante, Pyramus, Thisbe, and King Minos.

As another aside, I’ve never really paid attention to the traits of vampires, so Let Me In taught me a lot. The manner of speech, how quickly they can solve puzzles, the aversion to light and potential for spontaneous combustion, their physical strength and dexterity, the need to be invited to enter a residence, how they can be killed with a stake through the heart, and of course, the constant need for “food”, for blood. As yet another aside, I never considered the quality of the blood a vampire must consume. Someone on drugs could cause an overdose and “Blood from the dead was worthless, harmful even” (p 126).

Quotes to quote, “But Eli was a terrible monster who ate beautiful maidens for lunch and she was the one he would have to fight” (p 211).

Author fact: Lindqvist has been called Sweden’s Stephen King.

Book trivia: Let Me In was also a movie in 2010. All the characters have different names, but the story is essentially the same. Guess what? I haven’t seen it yet. Let Me In was also published under the title Let the Right One In.

Playlist: Alice Tegner, Kiss, Iron Maiden, Gene Simmons, “The Internationale”, “We Come Unto Jerusalem”, Morrissey’s “The Last of the Famous International Playboys”, “Beth”, “Can’t Help Falling in Love”, Blessed Be”, Hallelujah”, “Joy to the World”,

Crack in the Edge of the World

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Winchester, Simon. Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906. Narrated by Simon Winchester. Harper Collins, 2005.

Reason read: San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge opened on May 27th, 1937.

From soup to nuts, Simon Winchester’s Crack in the Edge of the World tells the complete story of the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 with humor, intelligence, and clarity. He begins with the humble birth of the city coupled with the scientific explanation for earth’s volatile nature.
Curiously, when talking about other disasters which have wiped out entire regions Winchester mentions Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but only hints at the destruction of a large portion of Manhattan after the attacks of 9/11. And speaking of the attacks on the World Trade Center, I imagine that witnessing the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake was similar to east coast residents watching the events of 9/11 unfold on their smartphones and television sets. If you were not suffering personal tragedy and your barometer for compassion was at an all-time low, you looked upon the destruction with awe and a strange but removed fascination.
My favorite post-disaster response. The post office was the hero of my childhood, keeping me connected to friends and family miles away. San Francisco’s post office employees made and all-out effort to save their building. As a result they were able to resume service two days after the earthquake. The postmaster understood the importance of communicating with loved ones; an early version of “marked safe.”

Edited to add: I had to come back in here to add this! How could I forget that Winchester quoted Natalie Merchant! She wrote about the San Andreas fault on her first solo album, Tigerlily.

Quote to quote, “But generally speaking, so far as their respective quiddities are concerned, great cities always recover” (p 313).

Author fact: I have a total of eight Winchester books on my Challenge list. I have read three of them so far. Crack in the Edge of the World is my favorite at present.

Nancy said: Pearl said Crack in the Edge of the World was one of the best – if not the best – books about the great earthquake.

Book trivia: Winchesters description of German photographer Genthe sparked an interest in his work.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “San Francisco” (p 196).

Princes of Ireland

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Rutherfurd, Edward. The Princes of Ireland. Narrated by Richard Matthews. Books on Tape, 2004.
Rutherfurd, Edward. The Princes of Ireland. Doubleday, 2004.

Reason read: in honor of the Cat Laugh Comedy Festival in Ireland.

Rutherfurd’s Princes of Ireland opens with a lesson in geography, anthropology, and history. I am always learning something new with historical fiction, like the difference between overlords and feudal lords. Did you know that Celtic warriors rode their horses naked? Kissing each other’s nipples is a show of forgiveness? Clans buried their warriors standing up, facing their enemies camp, to keep an eye on them? So many customs and traditions and that is not even getting into the politics of the country!
Although I kept making comparisons to Thomas Flanagan’s Irish series, Rutherfurd’s Ireland is much rowdier than Flanagan’s epic tale. People stealing horses for animalistic (pun intended) pleasures was a head scratcher for me. I have heard the rumors of men with sheep, but horses? Mythology and rituals abound. As an example, the success of the season’s harvest is dependent on the druid’s blessing. All of these details are a vehicle for the clever entanglement of fact and fiction – details so interwoven it is hard to tease them apart.
My favorite part of the story was Rutherfurd’s mastermind of the relationship between Margaret and Joan. Margaret’s misconceptions and prejudices of Joan were skillful and plausible. It was like a medieval gossip rag. Here is another drama: the king’s wish to divorce his Spanish wife for the love of another. The townspeople quarrel about who is in the right.

Edited to add a quote I liked, “Marriage is like religion, in a way, it requires an act of faith” (said by Dame Doyle, p 740).

Author fact: beyond the Ireland saga, Rutherford has also written London, Sarum, and The Forest which are all on my Challenge list. I am not reading the novel about New York.

Book trivia: Princes of Ireland is epic. It spans seventeen centuries of Irish history and is only part one of the saga. The Rebels of Ireland continues the journey.

Nancy said: Pearl did not say anything specific about Princes of Ireland.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Ireland: Beyond Joyce, Behan, Beckett, and Synge” (p 110).

The Prisoner

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Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past. Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff. Modern Library, 1956.

Reason read: to continue the series started in November in honor of Proust.

Whatever you want to call this volume of Remembrance of Things Past, whether it be “The Prisoner” or “The Captive”, it is also for obvious reasons called “The Albertine Novel.” In the beginning of “The Captive/Prisoner” Albertine is the narrator’s mistress. As soon as she wants to visit friends he (as narrator finally named Marcel at times) bribes Albertine with furs and jewels to make her stay in his family’s Paris apartment. There he keeps a close eye on her. Despite this possessive nature, he (Marcel) soon grows tired of Albertine but cannot completely let her go, hence the title of prisoner or captive. He becomes progressively more jealous, possessive, obsessive to the point of borderline psychotic worrying and wondering about who Albertine is with, male or female. Her confession of a friendship with lesbians forces Marcel to stoop to spying to see if she has relationships with other women. As usual, Proust has his finger squarely on the pulse of human nature. Albertine is the epitome of freedom while Marcel embodies jealousy and rage.
Sadly, because I had to switch to another publication, this version does not have the beautiful and whimsical illustrations of the other volumes.

Lines to like, “People who learn some accurate detail of another person’s life at once deduce consequences which are not accurate, and see in the newly discovered fact an explanation of things that have no connexion with it whatsoever” (p 2).

Book trivia: The Prisoner was published posthumously. The next book to read is The Past Recaptured.

Nancy said: Pearl didn’t say anything specific about “The Captive” or “The Prisoner.”

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Romans-Fleuves” (p 208).

Brunetti’s Venice

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Sepeda, Toni. Brunetti’s Venice: Walks with the City’s Best-Loved Detective. Grove Press, 2008.

Reason read: prepping for a grand trip to Italy. Venice is on the list. I cannot wait to walk the same streets as Lord Byron, Wagner, Goethe, and Proust. They all went to the San Marco district of Venice for inspiration. I must see the equestrian statue of Colleoni.

Brunetti’s Venice is a very clever book. Part travel guide to Venice and part homage to Donna Leon’s character, Guido Brunetti, Brunetti’s Venice is one hundred percent entertainment. Using direct quotes from each of Leon’s mysteries a reader can tour Venice through the eyes of Brunetti. Places like Murano become more vivid. Quoting from all Leon’s mysteries was a bonus for me. I am afforded glimpses of passages from books not on my Challenge list. It also gave me a chance to get to know Guido Brunetti better, as Sepeda writes just as equally about Commissario Brunetti the person as she does the island city of Venice.
As a travel book, the most appreciated information was the time it should take to walk each route using the detailed map. I have to wonder if the information has held up. Information like when restaurants are closed, how to visit a basilica, how to avoid the seedy parts of town. When Brunetti’s Venice went to press Sepeda said, “…today only three exist until the new bridge linking Piazzale Roma and the train station designed by the Spanish architect Calatrava is finished” (p 143). Well, is it finished? Are Venetians still suspicious of Sicilians?
Aside from wondering how current the information, I loved the idea of the great authors who have wandered around Venice: Charles Dickens, George Sand, Balzac, and Cocteau to name a few. Imagine Othello in Venice…
Confessional: I fell in love with Guido from the very first book. He is passionate, sensitive, and predictable. I loved that as a member of the law he lived in an illegal apartment; a structure without permits, blueprints, or statement of intent.

As an aside: Donna Leon admits to getting lost in Venice. Tommy Puzey guaranteed we would get lost during his Walk Italy series on iFit (so far we haven’t).

Quote to quote, “One of the secrets Paolo and Brunetti never revealed to anyone was their decades-long search for the ugliest Christ child in western art” (p 127). Can you just see them whispering to each other, rating the artwork across Venice?

Author fact: I heard a rumor that Sepeda has given guided tours of Brunetti’s Venice. She must really love Donna Leon’s books.

Book trivia: Sepeda uses arrows to indicate when it is time for walkers to move on. I felt it was unnecessary.

Playlist: Vivaldi

Nancy said: Pearl said it would be fun to recreate strolls described in Brunetti’s Venice.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter “Veni, Vidi, Venice” (p 240).

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?

We Need To Talk

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Headlee, Celeste. We Need To Talk: How to Have Conversations That Matter. Harper, 2017.

Reason read: a colleague came back from a conference with a bunch of books. What’s better than free books?

This is a great little book full of common sense advice about how to be a better conversationalist. It is not necessarily geared towards getting ahead in the corporate world, but it is helpful. Written by a “human nature expert” Headlee offers practical tips for listening and speaking with meaning. I appreciated the reminders about repeating oneself and using negative language. Even though she did not provide much information I haven’t heard before I would like to check out her TED talk. Out of all of the self help books on communication I’ve read, We Need to Talk was the most enjoyable.

Author fact: Headlee is cohost of a PBS television show called Retro Report.

Book trivia: Headless includes some tips on meditation.

Playlist: Barenaked Ladies, Michael Jackson, Verdi, Pucci, Mozart, and Wagner.