Tag: september

Best Game Ever

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Bowden, Mark. The Best Game Ever: Giants Vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008.

Reason read: Football season starts in September. Even though Brady is out for the month I have confidence the Patriots will do well. In fact, they won their first game without Brady AND Gronk. Edited to add: 3 out of 4 without Brady isn’t too shabby.

This is the story of a football game, but not just any football game. It’s the nail biting, down-to-the-wire play by play of the December 28th, 1958 NFL World Championship Game (now known as the Superbowl) between the New York Giants and the Baltimore Colts. I’ll pause to let that sink it…the Baltimore Colts…not the ravens nor in Denver. Anyway, Bowden takes the reader through the late 1950s and football’s growing popularity. He builds each team with mini biographies of team owners, coaches and star acquisition athletes like Frank Gifford and John Unitas. He sets the scene for their historic match-up, all the while outlining how the game has changed over the years. It isn’t until chapter six (out of eight, not including the epilogue) that Bowden gets to the night before the big game. 75 pages out of 239 are dedicated to the Best Game Ever. But, if you are a football fan of any kind, you will appreciate those 75 pages! Bowden has the ability to capture the excitement.

Author fact: Bowden also wrote Black Hawk Down (not on my list, but made into a movie). What are on my list are these two: Killing Pablo and Guests of the Ayatollah.

Book trivia: This is not unique to this book, but I really like the photos included up front: Bert Bell, the Giants in mid action, and coaches Tom Landry and Weeb Ewbank. There are other pictures but they are in the typical location, throughout the center of the book.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Baltimore” (p 34). I don’t necessarily agree with the inclusion of this book in the Baltimore chapter, but Nancy says it definitely belongs.

Edwin Mullhouse

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Millhauser, Steven. Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943 – 1954 By Jeffrey Cartwright. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972.

Reason read: September is National Child Month…or something like that.

Confessional: this totally reminded me of John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany because Edwin reminded me of Owen.

Jeffrey Cartwright is six months older than Edwin Mullhouse so by default they have known each other pretty much all their lives. Jeffrey, with his perfect memory, has taken it upon himself to become Edwin’s biographer. His story is in three sections: the Early Years, the Middle Years, and the Late Years (when Edwin dies at age eleven). Jeffrey carefully documents everything from baby talk (“salivary sonatas” p 58) to grade school crushes. One of the disappointments of the story is the tedious repetition. It’s as if Millhauser wants to express the idea that to speak like a child is to be incredibly repetitious. Here is an example, “Before Karen was born, the grandmothers slept in the empty bed in the extra room, but after Karen was born the empty bed was moved into Edwin’s room and the grandmothers slept there. The empty bed was never moved back, and before Karen had a bed of her own, the grandmothers slept in Karen’s bed and Karen slept in the empty bed in Edwin’s room” (p 45). These two sentences exhaust me. In addition, Steven Millhauser writes with a great deal of detail. It is not enough to say a leg was dangling. It is important for you to know it was the right leg that was dangling and how it was dangling.
And it wasn’t just the repetition that got to me. The only hook to the plot seemed to be the knowledge that Edwin dies at the end of it. Eleven years old is too young to die so you keep reading to find out how he dies at such a young age.

Quotes to quote, “The fatal flaw of all biography, according to its enemies, is its helpless conformity to the laws of fiction” (p 100) and “A book is an intolerable pressure on the inside of the skull, demanding release” (p 257).

Book trivia: I wouldn’t necessarily call this book illustrated, but there is a cute drawing on page 21.

Author fact: Edwin Mullhouse (the character) and Steven Millhauser (the author) were both born in August 1973.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “100 Good Reads Decade by Decade: 1970s” (p 177).

The Four-Story Mistake

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Enright, Elizabeth. The Four-Story Mistake. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1942.

Reason read: Elizabeth Enright was born in September.

The Melendy family has moved to the country. In the previous story, The Saturdays, their brownstone in New York was damaged by fire. Now Father Melendy has moved his four kids (Rush, Miranda, Oliver and Mona), dog (Isaac), handyman (Willy), and housekeeper (Cuffy) to “the Four-Story mistake”, a house that when originally designed was supposed to have four stories but the fourth story was somehow left off during construction. It’s an odd looking house since the fourth story was added after the roof was finished. Father is often away (hence the live-in housekeeper) so the four children are left to explore their new surroundings, the countryside and the house.

Book trivia: the is Book Two of the Melendy Quartet. Yes, I read two of them them out of order. It is important to read them in order because I didn’t know what happened to mom, I wasn’t sure what year we were in, and I could guess as to how Cuffy and Willy fit into the story, but I wanted more information.

Author fact: Enright also wrote The Saturdays, Then There Were Five, and Spiderweb for Two: A Melendy Maze. All of these titles are on my list.

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Best for Boys and Girls” (p 21).

Tear of Autumn

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McCarry, Charles. The Tears of Autumn. Read by Stefan Rudnicki. Oregon: Blackstone Audio, 2005.

Reason read: Cold War ended in September.

Paul Christopher is back; Christopher, the the cool-as-a-cucumber, jet-setting, incorruptible CIA secret agent. This time he is trying to convince his superiors he knows who killed John F. Kennedy and why. But, is this a story of revenge or not? When Vietnam’s president, Ngo Dinh Diem, is assassinated Christopher can’t help but think there is a connection when JFK is murdered just three weeks later in Texas. Was Oswald just a switch someone far-reaching flicked on? Christopher seeks the truth and along the way puts the people he cares about in danger (especially a love interest, of course). While the plot is predictable and the characters, typecast, I enjoyed Christopher’s next adventure.

Author fact: McCarry also wrote The Last Supper and Shelley’s Heart both of which are on my list.

Book trivia: this is part of a seven-book series but I don’t think you would be missing anything if you didn’t read them one right after the other or out of order.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Cold War Spy Fiction” (p 61).

The Trial

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Kafka, Franz. The Trial. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.

Reason read: Czech Republic is lovely in September. Some say that is the best time to visit.

Where does Franz Kafka get his ideas? Everyone knows Metamorphosis and The Trial is no different. It has been made into theater productions, television shows and movies. Everything Kafka has ever written has been analyzed within an inch of its life so I will not be able to add anything new with my review of The Trial. In one sentence, The Trial is about a man on trial for an unknown crime. The end. Why Josef K was indicted is a mystery; why he was convicted is even more so. What is so haunting about The Trial is the tone of voice. The frightening subject matter is told in such a robotic, matter of fact manner. The outrage just isn’t there.

As an aside, I can remember reading this in World Lit class in college.

Author fact: Kafka studied law and received a degree in 1906.

Book trivia: The Trial was published posthumously.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Czech It Out” (p 70).

Consul’s Wife

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Tyler, W.T. The Consul’s Wife. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1998.

Reason read: at the time I chose this book I was reading it in honor of Odette Krempin being an honorary consul of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but now I’m hearing she supposedly died (or is hiding to avoid corruption charges in Belgium). The plot thickens!

This is a love story. Hugh Mathews, a foreign service officer stationed in the Congo, juggles his embassy’s embarrassing ineptitude concerning tribal relations while slowly falling in love with the consul’s wife. Hugh and Margaret (Blakey to her friends) share a deep appreciation for authentic African art, the older and the uglier, the better.
Hugh is a complicated man of few words. As the African landscape grows more violent he questions the world around him. That inquiry leads to deeper self reflection and soon he questions his own being and motives.

Quotes to quote (and there were a lot of them). I lost my notes, so here is the one I remember: “All I knew was that there was far more to my life that I understood or could reveal to others” (p 50), “The little truths that shrivel the soul are always uglier than the ones you brought back” (p 133), and “Terribly rich in memory. he was terribly poor in practical things” (p 170).

Book trivia: The Consul’s Wife is short, barely 200 pages long.

Author fact: Tyler is a former diplomat.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Congo: From Colonialism to Catastrophe” (p 69).

Curse of the Pogo Stick

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Cotterill, Colin. Curse of the Pogo Stick. New York: Soho, 2008.

Reason read: to continue the series started in May in honor of Laos Rocket Day.

Here’s what we know about Dr. Siri Paiboun. He is a 73 year old coroner in the village of Vientiane, Laos. He has two loyal sidekicks, Nurse Dtui (now three months pregnant) and helper Mr. Geung. When we last left Dr. Siri he had proposed to Madame Daeng and she accepted so now he has a girlfriend to add to the mix. He is still plagued by the spirit of a thousand-year-old shaman, Yeh Ming and it’s this spirit that gets Siri into his trouble this time. He is kidnapped by a group of women Hmong villagers thinking Yeh Ming can exorcise the head tribesman’s daughter. She appears to be pregnant with twins by a demon. The title of the book comes from the Hmong belief that a pogo stick, sent in a relief package, was the root of evil.
Meanwhile Nurse Dtui and Phosy search for the Lizard, a woman hellbent on killing Dr. Siri.
One of the best things about Cotterill’s writing (besides the humor) is that way he subtly reminds the readers where they are at in the saga. Like a television series voice over recap “previously on Badge of Justice…” before the new episode. In this case, Siri’s best friend was found to be a traitor in the last installment. When Madame Daeng & Nurse Dtui pay him a visit in Curse his new role in the story makes sense.

Line I liked, “It was rather sad that his last memory on earth might have been how to encourage bulls to increase their semen count” (p 37).

Book trivia: This is another  really short book. Expect to finish it in a weekend.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the chapter called “Laos” (p 128).

Which Side Are You On?

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Lyon, George Ella. Which Side Are You On: the story of a song. Texas: Cinco Puntos Press, 2011.

Reason read: curiosity piqued after it was mentioned in an Early Review book by the same name.

I first heard the protest song Which Side Are You On? from singer-songwriter Natalie Merchant back in 2000 when she toured the U.S. singing folk songs. Her tour was unique given the fact she wasn’t supporting an album (that came later), the songs were all but forgotten British and American folk tunes, and audiences were treated to a history lesson with almost every song. Florence Reese’s “Which Side Are You On?” became one of my favorite.

Of course, no one knows Ms. Reese’s true story and her lyrics have changed over time, but George Ella Lyon’s book (with illustrations by Christopher Cardinale) is entertaining and informative for children and adults alike. I especially liked the author note and bibliography.

Life and Death in Shanghai

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Cheng, Nien. Life and Death in Shanghai. New York: Grove Press, 1986

Reason read: Best time to visit China is in September or so I have heard.

At one time Cheng’s husband used to be a diplomatic officer for the Kuomintang government. Due to the entrance of the Communist army, his appointment soon led him to a career with the British Shell International Petroleum Company. Upon his death, his widow, Nien Cheng, became the assistant to the new general manager. Cheng’s bilingual skills were invaluable to the organization and she soon filled in for the general manager. In addition, she had many international friendships and relationships. All these facts were seen as disloyal during the Cultural Revolution. Ultimately, she was accused of being a spy and imprisoned for six and a half years where she was treated to inhumane conditions and sometimes tortured. Despite everything, Cheng was able to use her fast thinking wit to turn Mao teachings against her captures as they tried time and time again to get her to confess to being a spy.

Quotes to quote, “The cacophony told me that the time of waiting was over and that I must face the threat of the Red Guards and the destruction of my home” (p 70). Can you imagine? You are powerless to stop what violence is yet to come.
Another quote, “When one tries to show emotion one does not genuinely feel, one tends to exaggerate” (p 275). True.
Last one, “Back doors in America only lead into people’s kitchens” (p 538).

Author fact: Cheng died of renal failure.

Book trivia: Life and Death in Shanghai does not contain any photographs which is sad, because I think a picture of her daughter would have been a nice tribute.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “China Voices” (p 55).

 

Murder of Roger Ackroyd

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Christie, Agatha. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Read by Robin Bailey. Kingston, RI: BBC Audiobook America, 1987.

Reason read: Christie’s birth month and I had just finished a book following Christies’s footsteps, 8:55 to Baghdad by Andrew Eames.

Who has never heard of Hercule Poirot? He’s almost as popular as Sherlock Holmes. In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd Poirot emerges from retirement to uncover the killer of Roger Ackroyd, found with a knife in his neck. But, that is not the first death in the story. Mrs. Ferrars commits suicide after admitting she poisoned her husband.
It is easy to see why this story is such a classic. It has it all: secrets, romance, murder, suicide, blackmail, and a bevy of suspects (including a butler). The story is told from the perspective of Dr. James Settles, the doctor who was on hand to examine Roger Ackroyd’s body after the murder. He is the perfect narrator as he becomes Poirot’s right hand man and seems to be involved…in everything.

Author fact: Christie was also an avid archaeologist.

Book (audio) trivia: Robin Bailey does a great job with all the different voices.

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Tricky, Tricky” (p 222).

A Prayer for Owen Meany

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Irving, John. A Prayer for Owen Meany. Read by Joe Barrett. Michigan: Brilliance Audio, 2009

Reason read: Even though most of A Prayer for Owen Meany does not take place in Canada I am reading this in honor of September being the best time to visit Toronto.

I don’t know where to begin with a review for A Prayer for Owen Meany. I have been driving to and from work everyday, listening to this incredible tale about a boy named Owen for a month now and I’ve been thinking there is no way I can sum this up story succinctly. Like other Irving tales, this is multifaceted and wrought with symbolism. As an adult living as an ex-pat in Toronto, Canada Johnny Wheelwright remembers his childhood and best friend, Owen Meany. They grew up together in the fictional seaside town of Gravesend, New Hampshire. To describe Owen as special is as inadequate as saying the Grand Canyon is “big”. There is so much more to Owen and his story from every angle. For starters, there is his size (barely five feet) and his voice (high-pitched and distinct). Then, there is his personal belief that is he is an instrument of God. Even when he accidentally hits Johnny’s mother with a line drive baseball, killing her instantly, he believes it was meant to happen that way. Owen is smart, witty, kind and considerate, but you can’t sway him from his political or religious beliefs (don’t get him started on John F Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe or later, the Vietnam war). I don’t want to spoil the story except to say you can’t help but fall in love with Owen and be shocked by the outrageous things he does.

My favorite scene was when Owen asks his dad to take him and Johnny to the beach in the middle of the night. The image of Owen banging on the cab of the truck, urging his father to drive faster will always stay with me.

Author fact: According to Irving’s website his birth name was Blunt but changed to Irving after his mom remarried.

Book trivia: the movie “Simon Birch” is based on A Prayer for Owen Meany but because the film is so dissimilar to the book Irving asked that the title and names of characters be different as well.

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter “Lines That Linger; Sentences That Stick” (p 142). The line (or sentence) Pearl is referring to from A Prayer for Owen Meany is the opening sentence, “I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice – not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.”

As an aside: I love John Irving’s work so much I thought Pearl should have included a “Too Good To Miss” chapter for him.

Flashman and the Redskins

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Fraser, George MacDonald. Flashman and the Redskins. New York: Plume, 1983.

Reason read: Flashman and the Redskins continues the series I started in April in honor of Fraser’s birth month.

Flashman and the Redskins circles back to where Flash for Freedom left off. Harry Flashman is up to his old tricks again. If you think I’m joking just know that sex is mentioned on the very first page. That’s Flashy for you! But, in Flashman and the Redskins he takes it a bit further. To get out of yet another jam Flashman is forced to take up with Susie, a madame of a New Orleans brothel (surprise, surprise), but to further complicate things, he ends up marrying her to ensure safe passage across the west to California. It’s on this journey that Flashman encounters the “redskins” and ends up marrying an Apache Indian too. Never a dull moment for 28 year old Harry. The multiple marriages set the stage for the rest of Flashman’s story with a twist at the end.
Fast forward and Flash is back in the States, this time with his real wife, Elspeth. To give you some perspective, the events in Royal Flash happened twenty eight years earlier. Remember Otto von Bismarck? This time Flashman is up against an even craftier opponent…a woman he has wronged (it was bound to happen sometime).

The charming way Flashman looks at women: “…she looked like a bellydancer who’s gone in for banking” (p 337).

Best line, “But life aint a bed of roses, and you must just pluck the thorns out of your rump and get on” (p 442).

As an aside, earlier this year someone decided Washington D.C.’s professional football team’s name needed to be changed. Suddenly the word “redskin” wasn’t political correct. I have to wonder if someone will try to ban this book on the same premise?

Author fact: What can I tell you about Mr. Fraser this time? According to Flashman and the Redskins Fraser also wrote The Pyrates (another Flashy book; after The Great Game but before Lady). This book is not listed in Book Lust. Hmmm…

Book trivia: for some reason the pagination is weird. The pages skip from xii to 15 immediately and I don’t think any are missing. Odd. Another piece of trivia: my copy included a map of the U.S. from Minnesota to Idaho called “Flashman’s West.”

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the obvious chapter “George MacDonald Fraser: Too Good To Miss” (p 93). Where else?

Mysterious Affair at Styles

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Christie, Agatha. The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Duke Classics, 2012. Epub 2015.

Reason read: September is Christie’s birth month.

Told from the point of view of Hastings, a guest at Styles, The Mysterious Affair at Styles tells the tale of a woman poisoned for her inheritance. Desperate for answers, Hastings introduces his friend, Inspector Hercule Poirot, to the dead woman’s son and to the crime in the hope the detective can solve the mystery. As with any mystery there is a revolving cast of characters, all suitable for the label “guilty.”
Having never seen film or television versions of Hercule Poirot, I picture him as a smug little man. His review of the crime scene is fascinating and I could picture his scrutiny perfectly. His relationship with Hastings is humorous, almost patronizing. The key to remember with this mystery is once a man is acquitted of a specific crime he can never be tried again for the same offense.

Lines worth mentioning: “Imagination is always a good servant and a bad master” (p 91) and “Who on earth but Poirot would have thought of a trial for murder as a restorer of conjugal happiness” (p 238).

Author fact: There is a lot of mystery surrounding Christie’s own life. At one point she herself became the center of a mystery as a missing person.

Book trivia: The Mysterious Affair at Styles is Inspector Hercule Poirot’s first appearance in an Agatha Christie mystery.

BookLust Twist: from More Book Lust in the chapter called “Tickle Your Funny Bone” (p 220).

Queens’ Play

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Dunnett, Dorothy. Queens’ Play. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1964.

Reason read: to continue the series started in August in honor of Dunnett’s birth month.

Queens’ Play is the second book in the Lymond series starring “cool, daring, strangely haunted” Francis Crawford of Lymond. [By the way, don’t you just love that description of him? Not my words, though.] The year is 1550 and Mary, Queen of Scots is now a precocious seven years old. Actually, she’s not in this enough for me to call her precocious, I’m just imagining her that way. She has been sent to France as the betrothed to the Dauphin. Francis (or Lymond as he is sometimes called) goes “undercover” to follow her and protect her. There are a lot of other people who have designs on the throne and she is constantly at risk. As “Thady Boy Ballage” Lymond has dyed his hair jet black and poses as the companion to an Irish prince. He doesn’t stand on the fringes of politics and just watch for enemies. True to Francis form, Thady prefers and enjoys being in the thick of it, causing most of the trouble. He still drinks like a fish and plays just as hard as he protects.

I thought the cheetah/hare hunt was pretty outrageous and not nearly as fun as the rooftop scavenger hunt.

A word of warning – there are a great many characters in Queens’ Play and while Dunnett introduces you to the main players (three pages worth), there are more. I have read that Queens’ Play is the “slowest” of all the books in the Lymond series. For that I am grateful because I don’t want to give up quite yet. I still have several books to go!

Quote I liked for some weird reason, “Strong wine and stretched muscles disregarded, Lymond strode to the window and stayed there, gripping his anger hard until he could speak” (p 165).

Author fact: Dunnett was also an artist.

Book trivia: Queens’ Play is the second book in the six-book series.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Lines That Linger, Sentences That Stick” (p 142).

Homicide

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Simon, David. Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991.

Reason read: There is a book festival held in Baltimore every September.

Question: What happens when a reporter, already on the Baltimore police beat, is allowed to have unlimited access to the city’s homicide unit for a full year? Answer: Homicide: a Year on the Killing Streets, a 600 page play by play of what it is like to work a murder from start to finish. From the first report of a cold body to (sometimes) solving the case, Simon was there to witness and document every little moment. He followed various detectives as they got the call, examined the victim for cause of death, poured over the crime scene for clues, canvassed the neighborhoods for reluctant witnesses, stood over autopsies waiting for more evidence, paced the halls in hospital emergency rooms impatient for first-hand accounts from survivors, went on death notifications, stared at their murder boards trying to put the pieces together…These police officers portray the grim reality of crime but they also share moments of humor, sarcasm and a genuine love of the job. I found myself liking Detective McLarney and thinking it would be cool to have a beer with him.

Probably the hardest cases to read about were young Latonya Wallace and police officer Gene Cassidy.

Line I liked, “A heavily armed nation prone to violence finds it only reasonable to give law officers weapons and the authority to use them” (p 108).

Book trivia: This is an informal reporting on crime in Baltimore. No index, photographs or footnoted references.

Author fact: At the time of publication David Simon was a reporter with the Baltimore Sun. He took a leave of absence to write this book. In the time he took him to write Homicide 567 additional murders occurred.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust To Go in the obvious chapter called, you guessed it, “Baltimore” (p 34).