Tag: series

Beautiful Room is Empty

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White, Edmund. The Beautiful Room is Empty. Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.

Reason read: to continue the series started in June in honor of Pride Month.

When we rejoin our nameless narrator he is now seventeen years old and exploring deeper relationships, sexual and platonic. He has moved from the Midwest to the culturally explosive Greenwich Village of New York to pursue college and a career. There he keeps his relationships in different compartments. The fraternity brothers do not mingle with the bohemians and the bohemians do not know the Chinese. And no one knows of the anonymous hairy legs and hard penises of grimy bathrooms. There is a lot more descriptive sex in The Beautiful Room is Empty. Our narrator is less concerned with “going straight” then he is finding a handsome man with whom to link arms and entwine legs. The shame of homosexuality burns with a smaller flame but is always there.

Favorite lines, “A small black toad of a laugh hopped through his lips” (p 137)

Author fact: Edmund’s middle name is Valentine.

Book trivia: The Beautiful Room is Empty is the second book in the trilogy.

Playlist: Bach, Barbra Streisand’s “Happy Days are Here Again”, Bartok, Baroque Revival, Beethoven, Brahms, Brenda Lee’s “Break It to Me Gently”, Caruso’s “Oh Ginnie Whiskey”, Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker, Des Grieux aria, Dionne Warwick, Everly Brothers, “God bless the Chile That’s Got His Own”, “Good Morning Heartache”, Hammerklavier Sonata, Handel, Haydn, “I’ll Be Seeing You in Apple Blossom Time”, “I’m Travelin’ Light”, “Kitten on the Keys”, “Mister”, Pucci’s “Marion Lescaut”, “My Guy”, Rosemary Clooney’s “If I Had Known You Was A-Comin’ I’d’ve Baked a Cake”, Stravinsky’s “the Firebird”, Tchaikovsky, “This is Love”, Timi Yuro’s “Make the World Go Away”,

Nancy said: Pearl did not say anything specific about The Beautiful Room is Empty.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the outdated chapter called “Gay and Lesbian Fiction: Out of the Closet” (p 93). These days we would say LGBTQ Fiction: Loud and Proud!

Rebels of Ireland

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Rutherfurd, Edward. The Rebels of Ireland. Doubleday, 2006.

Reason read: to continue the series started in May.

This is the sequel to the Princes of Ireland. The Rebels of Ireland follow six families through history but before doing so, Rutherfurd takes the time to catch the reader up by giving a recap of The Princes of Ireland. Once caught up historically, Rutherfurd focuses on deep character development of the families and their political involvements in Ireland’s struggle for independence.
Throughout history, differences in religion have been dangerous. A tale as old as time and will never change. I found it interesting when a character used the pulpit to announce his declaration of war. Everyone in the church knew what his sermon would be, but none expected the vehemence of his words.
Another notable moment: looking for the staff of St. Patrick.
The Rebels of Ireland is well researched. Rutherfurd consulted the National Library of Ireland as well as other national offices in Ireland to make sure he had his history accurate.
Word to the wise: do not try to read two different Irish historical novels in one month. All month long I was getting Rutherfurd mixed up with Flanagan and Flanagan confused with Rutherfurd.

Author fact: Edward Rutherfurd’s real name is Francis Edward Wintle.

Book trivia: The Rebels of Ireland contains a map of Ireland, a map of the Dublin region and a map of the city of Dublin.

Nancy said: Pearl said nothing specific about The Rebels of Ireland except it is a historical novel.

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

End of the Hunt

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Flanagan, Thomas. End of the Hunt. Dutton, 1994.

Reason read: to finish the series started in April.

Flanagan’s End of the Hunt picks up where Tenants of Time left off; right after the Easter Rebellion. So begins the birth of the IRA (Irish Republic Army). Flanagan weaves intimate portraits of widow Janice Nugent as she tries to find love again; Patrick Prentiss as he navigates the world as a World War I amputee; and Frank Lacy, a contradiction in character with his weapons and Virgil in hand. Character development is so on point you swear you have met these people before. Meshed with real historic events and people, it is easy to see why End of the Hunt is a best-seller.

As an aside, how can you be historically deliberate and accurate and yet only coincidentally name actual people? I realize the coincidence phrase is a standard blurb to cover an author’s ass, but either these people were a part of history or they weren’t.

Line I liked, “Dublin is a city of half sentence” (p 7).

Author fact: At the time of publication, Flanagan divided his time between Long Island (New York) and Ireland.

Book trivia: End of the Hunt is the final book in the Irish trilogy and has been compared to Leon Iris’s Trinity.

Playlist: “Lead, Kindly Light”, “Sean O Dwyer”, “Slievenamon”, and “A Nation Once Again”.

Nancy said: Pearl called the entire trilogy “magnificent” and End of the Hunt “good.”

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the obvious chapter called “Historical Fiction From Around the World” (p 113) and again in the chapter called “Irish Fiction” (p 125). Funny how none of the other books in the trilogy are mentioned in this chapter.

Sweet Cheat Gone

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Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past: The Sweet Cheat Gone. Vol. 6. Translated by C.K. Scott Montcrieff. Chatto & Windus, 1961.

Reason read: to continue the series started in November for National Writing Month. Obviously, I have skipped a month or two.

If The Fugitive was all about keeping Albertine hostage, The Sweet Cheat Gone is her escape. Albertine’s departure sets the stage for volume six. Proust has this way of capturing obsession and grief in all their painful intricacies. You know that moment, right before coming fully awake when you thinks maybe yesterday has all been some kind of horrible nightmare? But then remembrance brings back the horror with a vengeance. Yesterday’s reality is today’s truth. Proust’s narrator is constantly remembering the times he bused Albertine’s love. He couldn’t tell her she reminded him of paintings of other female forms because he didn’t want her to think of female nude bodies. His jealousies were that strong. After her departure, he is inconsolable; able to pick up his grief right where he left off before sleep; as if he had never closed his eyes. He repeatedly fixates on how to return the escaped Albertine back to him. If you don’t believe me, count the times Albertine’s name appears on every page. It got to the point where I wanted to please take this man out behind the barn and put him out of his misery.
It is so cliché to say, but you really do not know what you have until it is gone. Proust’s narrator is no different. He enjoyed hurting Albertine while she was in his possession, but upon hearing of her death he fixates on all the times he took her for granted or thought her company to be a nuisance. Her charms, her innocence was something to be scoffed at until she vanished. Now that he has lost her everything she touched (including “the pedals of the pianola she pressed with golden slippers”) becomes all too precious. He knows he has abused her and admits as much in the way he describes her departure as flight, escape, gone, and on the run. His obsession grows worse when he thinks her dead. He couldn’t even read newspapers because the mere act of opening and lifting one to his eyes brought back memories of Albertine doing the same.
In volume two there is a return to M. de Guermantes and Gilberte. Everything remains the same. Our nameless narrator is still looking for love wherever he can find it. His mother is unwilling to let him see just how much she loved him and that bothers him.

Quotes to ponder, “An impression of love is out of proportion to the other impressions of life, but it is not when it is lost in their midst that we can take account of it” (p 107) and “We wish to be understood, because we wish to be loved, and we wish to be loved because we are in love” (p 111). This last sentence is probably my all time favorite quote of Proust’s.

Author fact: For the first volume I told you Proust’s full name. In the second review I explained where the term romans-fleuve came from. In the third review I mentioned Proust spent a year in the army. In the fourth review I mentioned the influence of Flaubert, but by the fifth review I had run out of things to say (either that or I just forgot to add an author fact). Now, in this sixth review, my author fact is Proust was also an essayist. I won’t be reading any of his essays.

Book trivia: Sweet Cheat Gone is also called The Fugitive or Albertine Gone. So many different titles, I can’t keep track! Another tidbit of info: in the French text Albertine Disparue volume one ends before chapter two, “Mademoiselle De Forcheville.” It is at this time that the obsession with Albertine abruptly ends. She is not mentioned on every page life the first volume.

Nancy said: Pearl said absolutely nothing about this volume of Remembrance of Things Past.

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

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).

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).

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?

Tenants of Time

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Flanagan, Thomas. Tenants of Time. Warner Books, 1989.

Reason read: to continue the series started in March in honor of St. Patrick’s Day.

This is the account of the Fenian Rising of 1867 in the time of the Parnell Special Commission. All of Ireland rises up and greets war with bravery and stern determination. The chief storytellers are Patrick Prentiss and Hugh MacMahon, but you’ll also meet Robert Delaney, a shopkeeper and Ned Nolan, a terrorist. Like Katherine by Anya Seton Tenants of Time walks a tightrope between fact and fiction – a beautiful balance of great storytelling.

As an aside, I have a pang of nostalgia reading about Waterford crystal. I dated someone who lived in Waterford. He was my first “exotic” love.

Quotes to quote, “It was in a different world that he tended his roses, not the world of the white March morning” (p 174), and “It was a moment hinged upon silence, upon dreadful expectation” ( 201).

Playlist: “A Nation Once Again”, “The West’s Lake”, and “God Save Ireland”.

Nancy said: Pearl called the entire trilogy “magnificent.”

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Historical Fiction for Kids of All Ages” (p 114).

Year of the French

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Flanagan, Thomas. Year of the French. Henry Holt & Company, 1979.

1798. Ireland. It all starts when a school teacher is asked to write a letter to a landlord. Arthur Vincent Broome offers a narrative of the events that followed. Malcolm Elliot writes a memoir. Sean MacKenna shares a diary. Characters from every angle share a voice in the telling. Thus begins a long and tumultuous history of Ireland, starting with the Rebellion of 1798. As with any war, the Rebellion is violent tide that sweeps up anyone in its path, be they Protestant, Catholic, Papist, landowner, landless, landlord, farmer, soldier, blacksmith, teacher, poet, peasant, gentry, French, English, Irish, man, woman, or child. Narratives come from all of the above and readers are cautioned to read carefully, to concentrate on the voices. Flanagan puts you into the plot so well that at any given moment you are either on the side of the Protestants or Catholics. Either the French or the English welcomed you into their camps. Year of the French describes war maneuvers as well as personal rifts between families, struggles in marriages and livelihoods.
As an aside, I felt like Year of the French was half written in a foreign language. Words like boreen, kernes and omadhaun kept me diving into Google for answers.

Line I liked, “I have never broken the law when sober” (p 92). Amen to that. Here’s another from the diary of Sean MacKenna, “There are some pf these fellows who don’t know that the world is round, and for all they knew, they were being marched off to the edge of it” (p 260).

Confessional: I always keep a running biography list of characters whenever I see there are too many to keep track of. For example, Citizen Wolfe Tone is the founder of the Society of United Irishmen. Donal Hennessey has a handsome wife and is the father of two sons. Malachi Duggan is a unicorn in Ireland because he doesn’t drink. Matthew Quigley owns the tavern where Duggan doesn’t take drink.

Orbital information: I love it when one part of my life informs another. In Year of the French Flanagan writes the words “the parting glass.” If I wasn’t listening to an Irishman’s music, I wouldn’t know “The Parting Glass” is a funeral song (and a very beautiful one at that).

Book trivia: Year of the French is book one in Flanagan’s trilogy about the history of Ireland. I am reading all three.

Author fact: Amherst College holds Professor Flanagan’s papers. Too cool.

Nancy said: Pearl called Year of the French magnificent.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Historical Fiction Around the World” (p 113).

Cities of the Plain

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Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past. “Cities of the Plain” Translated by C.K. Scott Montcrieff. Chatto and Windus, 1961.

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

All of the usual suspects are back in volume seven of Remembrance of Things Past. Swann, Guermantes, Gilberte, and Albertine are alive and well. Proust delves deeper into human emotions and behaviors in Cities of the Plain. This time he explores sexual deception in the form of homosexuality as a pact sealed with Gomorrah. A great deal of the action takes place at Guermantes’ party. The narrator is not even sure he wants to go to the shindig, but he’s also not sure he has been invited. A certain snobbery permeates the narration. Words like scandal, society, position, connexion (sp), privilege, exclusivity, eminence, aristocracy, class, glamour, regal, and influence pepper the pages.
As an aside, I am growing weary of Proust’s long-winded-ness. The man can go on and on. Here is just one example, “It is with these professional organisations that the mind contrasts the taste of the solitaries and in one respect without straining the points of difference, since it is doing no more than copy the solitaries themselves who imagine that nothing differs more widely from organised vice than what appears to them to be a misunderstood love, but with some strain nevertheless, for these different classes correspond, no less than to diverse physiological types, to successive stages, in a pathological or merely social evolution” (p 27).
His obsession with sleep and memory continues. I do adore the illustrations by Philippe Jullian.

Best line of the book, “Everybody becomes different upon entering another person’s house” (p 207).

Author fact: according to the web, Proust was influenced by Flaubert.

Book trivia: Sodom and Gomorrah is the French title for Cities of the Plain.

Playlist: Beethoven

Nancy said: Pearl didn’t say anything specific about Cities of the Plain because she only mentions Remembrance of Things Past.

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

Fear Itself

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

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

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

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

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

Playlist: Beethoven’s 5th.

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

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

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

Guermantes Way

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Proust, Marcel. “The Guermantes Way.” Remembrance of Things Past: In Search of Lost Time. Vol. 5 Reanslated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff. Illustrated by Philippe Jullian. Chatto & Windos, 1960.

Reason read: to continue the series started in November in memory of Proust’s death month. Obviously, I skipped a month.

As Proust’s narrator grows up his narrative becomes drier and less whimsical. There is a larger focus on French society and the titles within it. We move beyond intimate portraits of individuals, but Proust is careful to let his narrator grow through the people he meets and the obsessions he develops. TI was struck by the genius of lines well delivered. For example, “Perhaps another winter would level her with the dust” (p 275). In the end I found myself asking, how do you cope with a love that is held only by the games one plays? Is this a form of emotional hostage-taking? What will become of one so enamored with another?

Author fact: Proust spent a year in the army.

Book trivia: I have to admit even though I am three books into the Remembrance of Things Past series, I get confused about the different published titles. Someone said Guermantes Way is also called In Search of Lost Time: Finding Time Again. What the what?

Nancy said: Pearl did not mention Guermantes Way specifically.

BookLust Twist: from Book Lust in the chapter called “Romans-Fleuves” (p 208). In all fairness, the individual titles of Remembrance of Things Past were not mentioned at all.

Within a Budding Grove

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Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past: Within a Budding Grove. Translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff. Chatto & Windus, 1966.

Reason read: to continue the series.

If you remember from Proust’s first volume of Remembrance of Things Past our narrator was looking back on his childhood. Now he is thinking back to when he was a young adult; the coming of age stage of life. This time he has a sweetheart named Gilberte, the daughter of M. Swann, and he still has a singular attachment to his mother. Many of the same characters that were in the first installment are back in volume two, only now they are more refined due to their changing circumstances. Family relations change. Gilberte starts to drift away. The chase of Gilberte seemed endless. Twenty pages later and our narrator is still stalking her; looking for excuses to connect with her. The turning point was when he decides to play hard to get himself. The head game of renouncing Gilberte and then realizing this could backfire and he could lose her forever had a very modern feel to it.
Most of the drama takes place in the seaside town of Balbec or Normandy, France. There are times when Within a Budding Grove drags. Entire pages are dedicated to the description of ladies gowns. Society’s dedication to cordial formalities and the quest for the value of Beauty were tiresome. Questioning the possibilities of happiness or suffering seems an age-old topic. Only when the narrator was looking for intellectual distraction in a dinner conversation did I find the situation funny. To see what others had done with the carnation wrapped in silver paper was relatable.

Quotes I liked, “My father had always meant me to become a diplomat, and I could not endure the thought of that…” (p 13) and “There is perhaps nothing that gives us so strong an impression of the reality of the external world as the difference in the positions, relative to ourself, of even a quite unimportant person before we have not met him and after” (p 341).

Author fact: Marcel Proust’s books coined the phrase “romans-fleuves” as a way to describe them.

Book trivia: Within a Budding Grove is also called In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower.

Nancy said: Pearl does not say anything specific about Budding Grove.

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

Fearless Jones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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