Tag: book review

Red Bones

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Cleeves, Ann. Red Bones. New York: Minotaur Press, 2009.

Reason read: I started the Cleeves series in January in honor of the Up Helly Aa festival. This is the third book in the series.

Detective Jimmy Perez has a new case. At first it is a simple open and shut accidental shooting involving his partner’s grandmother and a rabbit hunt gone wrong. Sandy’s grandmother has been found dead of a gunshot wound and Sandy’s own cousin, Ronald Clouston, confessed to hunting rabbits by moonlight. It was just a horrible mistake. Or was it? Weird coincidences start piling up. Just days before Mina’s death old pieces of a skeleton were found on her property. She had approved an archaeology dig just steps from her front door and a student, hoping to prove existence of an ancient estate on the property, discovered the bones. This same student later discovers ancient coins, proving her theory. She is elated. So, when she is found dead of an apparent suicide, supposedly despondent over Mina’s death, everyone is shocked. What is going on? It’s up to Jimmy to figure it out. While his love interest (Fran from the other Cleeves mysteries) is away in London, he has plenty of time.
A bonus to Red Bones is that Jimmy’s partner, Sandy, plays a bigger role in this mystery. Because it involves his family we get to see more of his character.

As an aside, I can see why Raven Black was everyone’s favorite. I found Red Bones a bit whiny for lack of a better term. Everyone seems really emotional, especially Sandy and not just because his grandmother died. And. And! And, why is it that Jimmy Perez is the only murder investigator in all of the Shetland Islands? He never seems to work with anyone else on a case.

Author fact: My first fact was about how Cleeves is the reader-in residence at a crime writing festival. My second fact was about the awards she either has been short listed for or has won. My third fact, taken from the dust jacket, is that she lives in Yorkshire, England (as of 2009).

Book trivia: this time there is a map of the Shetland Islands in the book (no need to go to Cleeves’ website this time).

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go again, in the chapter called “Sheltering in the Shetlands” (p 204).

Hall of a Thousand Columns

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Mackintosh-Smith, Tim. Hall of a Thousand Columns: Hindustan to Malabar with Ibn Battutah. London: John Murray, 2005.

Reason read: to continue the story started in February in honor of travel adventure.

Following in the footsteps of Ibn Battutah, the year was 1333 Battutah had now traveled to Delhi, India. Some 600+ years later and Tim Mackintosh-Smith is “hot” on his heels. Smith continues Hall of a Thousand Columns with the same wit and humor found in Travels with a Tangerine. For example here’s a line that made me giggle, “For a ship supposed to be leaving on her maiden voyage, she was being annoyingly coy about her virginity” (p 17).
Mackintosh-Smith titled his continuation of Tangerine Hall of a Thousand Columns because he felt that when IB came face to face with the hall he also came face to face with his destiny (p 31). As much as I liked Tangerine is wasn’t able to finish Hall.

More lines I liked, “Some things are meant to be found, not looked for, and this was one of them” (p 37).

Book trivia: The illustrations are great. Martin Yeoman was Smith’s companion for most of the travel.

Nancy said: Hall of a Thousand Columns was a “pleasure” (p 101).

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “In the Footsteps Of…” (p 100).

Falling Angels

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Gowdy, Barbara. Falling Angels. New York: Soho Press, 1990.

Reason read: On March 29th in 1848 Niagara Falls stopped flowing.

First and foremost I have to say this is a tragic book. I was not expecting it to be so violent, so scary or so very, very sad. The terrible thing is this: I realize there are probably hundreds of thousands of households just like the Fields out there. That thought alone makes the book all the scarier.
Second comment: Nancy included this in the chapter called “Niagara Falls” and yet Niagara Falls isn’t really in the book. It’s a memory and an end.
From the outside, the Fields family looks like your typical suburban household. Dad goes to work everyday. Mom stays home and looks after their three daughters, Sandy age eight, Lou age nine and Norma, ten. The children go to school and occasionally are seen around the neighborhood. No one questions when the family disappears for two weeks. What they don’t know is instead of going to Disney for a family vacation militant and World War III-expectant dad forces them to live in an underground bunker as training for a nuclear disaster. It is the post-war early 60s after all. No one seems to notice middle daughter, Lou, as she does all the grocery shopping for the family, or that the mother is rarely seen outside.
Go inside and the Fields household is even less of a pretty sight. Mom, practically comatose, drinks to erase a terrible memory (involving Niagara Falls). Dad has a violent temper and is prone to attack whomever is in reach when he’s in between girlfriends.
In the ten year span of the story the daughters get older and experience puberty and do so without a responsible parent to guide them. They are on their own. Each daughter copes in her own way. The end results are disastrous.

Scary line, “He was as unpredictable as a police dog”. For one, police dogs are not supposed to be unpredictable to anyone except a criminal.
Two more sad lines, “But his eyes are her eyes gone to hell” (p 105) and “Extreme happiness and terror have always felt the same to her” (p 150).

Author fact: Gowdy has her own website here.

Book trivia: Falling Angels was made into a movie in 2003 and why not? the book has sex, drugs, and death. All that’s missing is a good car chase.

Nancy said: absolutely nothing. But, as an aside: she could have included this in Book Lust in the chapter “Families in Trouble” (p 86).

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the short chapter “Niagara Falls” (p 156).

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

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Capote, Truman. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Read by Michael C. Hall. Grand Haven MI: Brilliance Audion, 1986.

Reason read: Because I read Like Water for Chocolate in honor of March being the best time to visit Mexico instead of in honor of the Oscars I decided to chose Breakfast for the Oscars even though this year the awards were dished out in February.

Everyone loves Holiday Golightly. Holly, as she is known to her friends, seems to appeal to all kinds of men and a certain kind of woman. This sassy and shallow teenager makes her way through a Manhattan existence surviving as a society girl, an “American Geisha” as Capote called his creation. She is eye candy to dangle on the arm of a wealthy gentleman so that he might buy her dinners in fancy restaurants, expensive gifts, and maybe, breakfast or two at Tiffany’s. Holly Golightly wants to be taken seriously but she is seen as more of an unusual mystery than anything else.
Told from the point of view of her neighbor, a writer who befriends her and becomes enthralled with her (like everyone else), he wants to believe his relationship with her is different. He believes she isn’t using him because he has nothing to offer…until she has nothing to offer him.

As an aside, I am betting many more people have seen the movie than read the book.

Favorite line, “Certain shades of limelight wreck a girl’s complexion” (p 134).

Author fact: Truman Capote also wrote the short story A Christmas Memory which I make my staff watch every year because I love it so much.

Book trivia: this is actually a novella. Short. Short . Short. You can read it in one sitting.

Narrator trivia: Michael C. Hall is the same actor who played serial killer Dexter.

Nancy said: The curious thing about what Nancy said about BAT is this – she includes Breakfast at Tiffany’s in the “American Girls” chapter and then discredits the choice by saying, …all novels about female Americans abroad owe a debt to Henry James…Many of them owe at least a little something to Truman Capote’s greatest invention, Holly Golightly, heroine and heartbreaker of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but that’s not my subject here” (p 18). Does Holly belong in this chapter or not?

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “American Girls” (p 18). See previous paragraph for my comment on this.

Treachery in the Yard

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Ibe, Adimchinma. Treachery in the Yard. New York: Minotaur Books, 2010.

Reason read: Nigeria’s new president was sworn into office March of 2005.

Meet Tamunoemi “Tammy” Peterside. If this was a television show or a movie, Tammy would be the barely playing by the rules, dripping with sarcasm, wise mouthed but good looking cop who goes rogue from time to time. He would play by his own rules but always for the best reasons, of course. He’d have a beautiful girlfriend he pretends to care nothing about but wear a fierce loyalty to his work on his sleeve. In Treachery in the Yard he is the creation of Adimchinma Ibe, designed to be around for awhile. In this first mystery Tammy needs to solve a bombing that has left several people dead and a politician wounded. Every time Tammy gets close to the truth another body finds its way to the morgue. When someone very close to him is the next murder victim, Tammy knows he has to wrap up the case and fast. The ending may seem a little predictable and Ibe makes too many references to the heat, but other than that this is a good read!

Lines I liked, “You have to spend a lot of time climbing over the bodies to get to the truth” (p 49) and “Nothing is tough if you have an Uzi” (p 143).

As an aside, for a such a short book Ibe mentions Nigeria’s poverty a lot (I already mentioned the heat). Many sentences contained the words “could not afford,” or “it was expensive,” or “no new [fill in the blank],” or “it is cheaper to [fill in the blank].” I counted nearly a dozen such phrases by page 66, not even halfway through the book. It was a little distracting.

Author fact: Adimchinma was born in 1977 which makes me older than him by a few years.

Book trivia: Treachery in the Yard is a super short novel or a longer short story. At only 146 pages one could read it in one sitting. I did.

Nancy said: Pearl said she is confident we will see more of Adimchinma Ibe “in years to come” (p 157). She was right. He has gone on to publish another Tammy Peterside mystery titled Cronies.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called simply, “Nigeria” (p 157).

Song of the Dodo

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Quammen, David. Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions. New York: Scribner, 1996.

Reason read: February is David Quammen’s birth month. Reading Song of the Dodo in his honor.

I had never fully understood the word “biogeography” until reading Quammen’s Song of the Dodo. According to Quammen on page 17 of Dodo, “Biogeography is the study of the facts and the patterns of species distribution.” More importantly, the distribution of specific species on islands does much to argue the point of origin and “survival of the fittest” and adversely, extinction.

Song of the Dodo is a scientific adventure. It will prompt you to ask questions. Here’s an example: I was particularly struck by the obvious/not-so-obvious Noah’s Ark conundrum: exactly how big was this vessel if every single species was welcomed aboard two by two? As Quammen pointed out, “Noah’s ark was getting too full” (p 34).
What about this question – who was responsible for the theory of natural selection? Quammen delves into the controversy surrounding the competition between Alfred Wallace and Charles Darwin. Again, to quote Quammen “Was Darwin guilty of scummy behavior, or wasn’t he?” (p 109).
All in all, the subject matter for Song of the Dodo could be considered dry but the writing is most definitely entertaining. Where else can you find such a scientific topic interspersed with words like crazybig, godawful, helluva, whonks, and my personal favorite, badass?

Quote I liked, “But the hapless iguana wasn’t dealing with some idle yahoo, some sadistic schoolboy with a short attention span; it was dealing with Charles Darwin” (p 232).

Author fact: Quammen has written for Rolling Stone but his two of his books, Monsters of God and The Soul of Viktor Tronko are on my list.

Book trivia: maps are by Kris Ellingsen. Also, I have to admit Quammen invoked the Saint Helena earwig so many times I had to look it up. Can’t say I’m glad I did.

Nancy said: “well written and always fascinating” (p 70).

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the long chapter called “Dewey Deconstructed: 500s” (p 70).

Fall of Hyperion

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Simmons, Dan. The Fall of Hyperion. New York: Bantam Books, 1991.

Reason read: to continue the series started in January in honor of science fiction month.

The Fall of Hyperion is a sequel to Hyperion. We return to the world of Hyperion where seven pilgrims and an infant are seeking an audience with the Shrike, a creature rumored to grant only one wish. In Hyperion the pilgrims and their life stories are laid out, allowing for the plot in The Fall of Hyperion to concentrate on the politics (the Time Tombs are opening; there is a war going on). Taking place in the 29th century and mostly in the Valley of the Tombs, each pilgrim encounters a personal struggle. We finally are introduced to the Tree of Pain where individuals are long suffering; impaled on thorns of steel and left writhing. Strange. No one is dead on the Tree of Pain. The point is they are supposed to suffer a fate worse than death. One pf the seven pilgrims end up here, but I haven’t given away his fate.
[To be honest, I had trouble knowing if and when someone actually died. I don’t think it’s a spoiler alert to say that “everyone” dies because most of them come back again, one way or another.]

As an aside – I don’t know why this matters to me, but it does. According to the written description of the Shrike the creature supposedly has four arms. Four. The Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion and even the Endymion covers show the Shrike looking more human with only two arms. What gives? Is the second set of arms retractable?

Disclaimer: I am still not a huge fan of sci-fi. I wanted to quit this one a few times over. The Fall of Hyperion wasn’t grabbing me like I thought it would. To make matters worse, judging by the awards, I read the best one first. The sequels aren’t as popular. I’m a little afraid of the next one, Endymion, because it’s even longer than The Fall of

The one quote I liked, “It was now my name but never my identity” (p 3).

Author fact: Simmons won the Locus Award for The Fall of the Hyperion.

Book trivia: Fall of Hyperion was heavily influenced by the works of John Keats (for whom the book was dedicated) and John Muir.

Nancy said: nada

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the obvious chapter called “Space Operas” (p 211).

Antarctic Destinies

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Barczewski, Stephanie. Antarctic Destinies: Scott, Shackleton and the Changing Face of Heroism. London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007.

Reason read: February is exploration month.

Stephanie Barczewski’s Antarctic Destinies is organized into thirteen different topics. She is careful to set the groundwork for Destinies with an overview of Antarctic exploration from its humble beginnings with the 1901 Discoveries expedition. She goes on to make comparisons between the 1940 Terra Nova expedition of Robert Scott and the 1914 Endurance expedition of Ernest Shackleton. The ever-present question is of heroism. Scott had a heroic death while Shackleton had a heroic survival. So what exactly is a hero? Of the two, who is more the hero? How does the public respond to failure as opposed to the perception of success? Barczewski analyzes the reputations of both before wrapping up Destinies with how each member of the different expeditions has been commemorated. She finishes with Where Are Our Heroes Now?

As an aside – someone wrote in the margins, “how does sheer luck get transmuted into survival?” They wrote a whole bunch of other gobbledygook, but I liked that question best.

On a personal note: my father was busy in the Antarctic when I was born. There is some debate as to what he was actually doing. As a member of the Coast Guard I recall he was on a Coast Guard cutter clearing ice for research vessels. Mom remembers he was actually on board the research vessel itself. But, doing what?

Author fact: a Google query brought me to a Clemson University faculty web page where a smiley Barczewski poses with Mickey Mouse.

Book trivia: Antarctic Destinies includes only nine black and white photographs.

Nancy said: nothing interesting.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “To the Ends of the Earth: North and South (Antarctic)” (p 235).

White Nights

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Cleeves, Ann. White Nights. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2008.

Reason read: to continue the series started with Raven Black in honor of Shetland’s Viking Fire Fest (Up Helly Aa) in January.

Jimmy Perez (from Raven Black) is back in White Nights. Even though this is a sequel it could be read on its own. A few characters are the same but the plot is not a continuation of the first. This time it’s  midsummer in the Shetland Islands, a time when the sun doesn’t set completely and there’s always a hint of light. It’s the time for insomnia and…murder. A stranger has come to the Shetland Islands to  disrupt the art opening of established artist, Bella Sinclair. Crying and creating a scene, he succeeds in ruining the party and then disappears into the night. When the same stranger is found wearing a clown mask and hanging from the rafters in an old fishing shed Jimmy Perez must untangle the mystery. Who was this masked man, why did he create such a disturbance at Bella’s party and why is he now dead? Jimmy is sure it’s murder. Each question leads Jimmy to clues that further confuse him. When another man is found dead, this time the nephew of Bella Sinclair, it seems obvious someone wants to hurt Bella…but why?

Author fact: last time the fact was Cleeves was the reader-in-residence for the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival & that’s still true. This time the fact is Cleeves was short listed twice for the CWA Gold Dagger Award before winning the Duncan Lawrie Dagger Award.

Book trivia: Fran (from the first book) finds the two bodies. This time Kenny finds the two bodies.

Nancy said: I think I’ll skip Nancy said part when it comes to series. Most of the time she isn’t going to say anything different about the second, third, or even fourth book.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Sheltering in the Shetlands” (p 204).

Travels with a Tangerine

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Mackintosh-Smith, Tim. Travels with a Tangerine: from Morocco to Turkey in the Footsteps of Islam’s Greatest Traveler. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2004.

Reason read: Admittedly, this is an oops read. I had Hall of a Thousand Columns on my list a few years back. At the time I didn’t realize you must read Travels before Hall so I vowed when the subject of “exploration” was to be honored again, I would circle back to Mackintosh-Smith and read Travels. The mistake lies in the fact I forgot to remove the other exploration book I had slated for 2017, Antarctic Destinies. As a result, I am reading them both.

Travels with a Tangerine takes us back to the year 1325 when the “greatest Islamic traveler” Ibn Battutah departed from Tangier on a pilgrimage to Mecca when he was 21 years old. There is nothing astonishing about someone wanting to take a pilgrimage to Mecca. What is so remarkable is where Ibn Battutah ended up. The trip took him almost thirty years and 75,000 miles. He spent his life on the road. At the same age, author Mackintosh-Smith sets out to follow in IB’s footsteps, admittedly taking short cuts because he doesn’t want to spend his entire life on this journey. But the result of this fascination is an interesting look back at the Arabic fourteenth century with eye an toward the future. Mackintosh-Smith’s humor makes it an easy read.

Quote to quote: “Then there were those reports of violence against Maghribi immigrants in Paris and Marseille, the deportations, the unimaginable shittiness of being an illegal alien” (p 31). Think about that sentence for a second. What has changed? Here’s another one, a little more lighthearted, “Defecation and ingestion of knowledge are such complementary activities” (p 105). So, that’s why men bring newspapers in the bathroom!

Author fact: Mackintosh-Smith is the winner of the Thomas Cook/Daily Telegraph Travel Book Award

Book trivia: Illustrations by Martin Yeoman. They are delightful. I especially liked the monkey on page 249.

BookLust Twist: Twisted twice – once from Book Lust in the chapter called “Here Be Dragons: the GReat Explorers and Expeditions” (p 110) and once in Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “In the Footsteps Of…” (p 100-101).

Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman

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Gaines, Ernest J. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Read by Lynn Thigpen. New York: Recorded Books, 1994.

Reason read: February is Black History month

Miss Jane Pittman could be your great-grandmother, she is that real of a character. I’m sure listening to this on audio had something to do with that perception. When 100 year old Miss Pittman tells her life story to an unidentified high school history teacher it’s as if she is sitting in your living room. Beginning when she was ten years old and freed from slavery in the deep south, she recounts her journey to leave the Louisiana plantation she has known all her life. She is looking for the white abolitionist who gave her new “free” name. All she knows is that he is somewhere in Ohio. So, to Ohio she heads. Along the way she befriends an orphan boy and encounters seemingly overwhelming obstacles. But, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say, overcome these obstacles, she does. She raises the orphan boy as her own and even though she doesn’t make it out of Louisiana, forges a life for herself.
One point of observation is that while Miss Jane Pittman has lived a long life, you don’t hear her talk a lot about her own personal life. She would rather discuss the people around her and how they influenced her.

Quotes to quote, ‘”…America is for all of us.” he said,”and all of America is for all of us”‘ (p 115), “He wasn’t aiming to break the door in, he wanted to chop it down” (p 195), and my favorite, “And I will eat vanilla ice cream which I loves and enjoys” (p 219).

Author fact: I could have read this last month in honor of Gaines’s birth month. He was born in January.

Narrator funny: There were times when I was reminded of the actress Whoopie Goldberg when listening to Ms. Thigpen.

Book trivia: The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman was made into a movie. The release date was January 11th, 2005.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the early chapter called “African American Fiction: He Say” (p 11).

Wonder

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Palacio, R.J. Wonder. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.

Reason read: I know what you’re thinking. This is a book inspired by a Natalie Merchant song and I haven’t read it until now. How come? I don’t know. I can’t answer that except to say I knew it wasn’t written by Natalie and it wasn’t about Natalie. And then there is that list of 5,000 other books I promised myself I would read…So. Why now? Two things. Wonder is mentioned in Natalie’s video memoir and…curiosity got the better of me.

The back story to Wonder as I understand it is this: “R.J. Palacio” was leaving an ice cream shop with her daughter when they passed a special needs child. Palacio reportedly steered her daughter away from the other child to avoid an embarrassing situation. Maybe she was sure her child would blurt out something inappropriate. Her obvious avoidance ended up being more of an embarrassment to everyone. Subsequently, after hearing Natalie Merchant’s song of the same name was prompted to write Wonder. Which is why you find the song quoted in several different places.

Wonder is written from the point of view of ten year old August Pullman, a boy born with severe facial deformities. Auggie as he is known to his parents and older sister, was home schooled for health reasons through fourth grade. Now as a fifth grader he is about to enter Beecher Prep. Auggie is used to people staring at him but a school of over 500 kids is a whole new world and we all know how cruel kids can be. How August navigates through the triumphs and tribulations will Break Your Heart (to quote another Natalie tune).

Book trivia: Other characters tell their sides of the “Auggie story” including Olivia (Auggie’s old sister), Summer (Auggie’s true friend) and Justin (Olivia’s boyfriend). It’s interesting to have their perspective; what it’s like to have a special needs brother, what it’s like to always be the strong one, what it’s like to be that good friend. Etc. Etc.

Author fact: R.J. Palacio admits that is not her real name.

Better Off

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Brende, Eric. Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology. New York: Harper Collins, 2004.

Reason read: February is Science month

The cover of Better Off reads, “Two People. One Year. Zero Watts.” That is the premise of the book in a nutshell. Eric Brende and his new wife, Mary, travel to an undisclosed community to try a life without technology. It ends up lasting a little over a year and it’s like a science project on a much more grandiose scale; to live in a community considered “primitive” even by Amish standards. But, as I read I found myself asking how far back does one scale back technology in order to be considered primitive? According to Brende, this Minimite community used flashlights. You forgo electricity in favor of kerosene. Yet, how is that different from using a flashlight? Electricity is electricity. Shouldn’t the limit be a candle for illumination? Nothing more, nothing less?
But in truth, I fell in love with Brende’s book right from the start, mainly because of his explanatory note, “…Readers have some options in how they choose to proceed. The story can be read the way stories usually are, that is, as entertainment (I hope riveting), or as food for thought on the broader human condition (I hope stimulating), or even in this case as a real-life model for practical action (I hope instructive).” In giving us choices he voices no expectation. This is not meant to be trivial, preachy or didactic, but rather interesting, thought-provoking and education.

Quotes that gave me pause, “Friendship was something you could only sidle up to obliquely” (p 33), “When the quantity of machines shrinks, another area of human realization expands: skill” (p 50), and “The compass of Mary’s homesickness reversed its arrow” (p 78).

Author fact: According to Brende, he and his wife honeymooned in Maine. I am dying to know where. Did they try the remote and rustic (often called ‘quaint’) island of Monhegan where one can find kerosene lamps, communal dining and not one McDonald’s in sight?

Book trivia: Better Off includes some interesting illustrations in the “A Barn Raising” chapter.

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

Island to Oneself

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Neale, Tom. An Island to Oneself. Woodbridge, Connecticut: Ox Bow Press, 1966.

Reason read: In January I read The Book of Puka-Puka by Dan Frisbie. Pearl recommended reading Tom Neale after, so I did.

I didn’t understand what would make a person pick up and leave all aspects of civilization until I read An Island to Oneself. Even Frisbie’s account in The Book of Puka-Puka didn’t answer the question because at least Frisbie lived and married among the natives. There were people to talk to. On the atoll of Suvarov in the South Pacific Tom Neale had (on his first visit 1952 – 1954) two cats, chickens & a wild duck he tamed for companionship. The occasional freighter would deter from its shipping lane, but those visits were few and far between. And yet, Neale thrived in that environment. Survival was his challenge and he prided himself on his ingenuity, creativeness and sheer willpower to make his self imposed solitary confinement comfortable. He spent his days keeping his abode spotless, working the land for farming, and fishing (the pig slaughter was a little difficult to read). On his second journey to Suvarov (he left the first time due to illness), Neale came back a smarter man. He built a better cook stove, brought more appropriate supplies and was better prepared for the wild weather that could batter his island from time to time. This time he stayed from 1960 to 1963. It wasn’t that Neale didn’t like people. He enjoyed the “tourists” who ended up visiting him. It was just that he wanted to do his own thing. Being alone wasn’t lonely.

Best quote I liked, “Mine was a simple existence” (p 24). No kidding!

AS an aside, I just learned Neale went back a third time and this time stayed ten years. Amazing.

Author fact: Tom Neale didn’t mind being naked. An Island to Oneself has 17 pictures with an almost naked Neale.

Book trivia: As mentioned before, there are great black and white photos, mostly of Neale, included.

Nancy said: Nancy called Island to Oneself a “classic account” (p 128).

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Islands, Desert and Otherwise” (p 128)

Island Voices II

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Various. Island Voices II: Poetry of Monhegan. Stone Island Press, 2014.

Reason read: a Christmas gift from my mother.

It is hard for me to read anything Monhegan related from a critical point of view. My mind instantly goes to what I know and love about the island, and if the poetry captured even a smidgen of that memory, I am instantly biased. Biased and definitely devoted. I have to wonder how someone completely ignorant of Monhegan would read these poems. Where would be his or her focus? What would stick in their minds as relevant or real?
Further complicating my review are my varying relationships with the poets themselves. True, Catherine Morocco and Marilyn Ringer are complete strangers, although I am sure I would recognize them by sight. Kate Chappell, Iris Miller, and Frances Vaughn I only know by long standing history and name. While I am more acquainted with Jan Bailey, Mary Kordak, Jan Kornbluth, & Joanne Scott, in truth K.K. Iannicelli and Judith Ponturo are island mothers. They could be my island mothers.

So. To review Island Voice II. I simply can’t. When I read about the ocean’s melodic drumming, I also hear Kathi’s wheelbarrow coming up the hard packed dirt road. When I see words about the salt, salt air I also see Judy humming in Winter Works. On the page the gulls may laugh overhear but I see Jan’s secret smile as another tourist tries on a wrestling mask. Queen Anne’s Lace blown bent backwards in Mary’s garden but all I see is her radiant smile. I admit it, I read the words but see the home.