Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

Evocative.

That was the word that kept coming to my mind in the first half of Esi Edugyan's Booker Prize nominated novel Washington Black.  This is the first time I've ever read a novel set in the West Indies where I felt like I was there.  And everything made sense.   And I could see it in my mind (which happens rarely when I read) and I could feel the heat and I could sense the fear.  

And when the story moved on to the Artic and Canada I felt the same way. She was able to evoke the cold and the blinding snow and the sense of the vastness. 

It was a delight to my senses. 

The plot was pretty good too.  Washington Black, a slave born on the plantation Faith in Barbados, is the eponymous title character of this novel.  As a young boy he is chosen to become the personal servant and assistant to the brother of the plantation owner, whom he is invited to call Titch. Titch is an early 19th century scientist who, at that moment, is interested in building a balloon that can cross the Atlantic. Through a series of events that I feel no need to spoil, Titch and Washington (or Wash, as he is called) end up escaping Barbados in the balloon and embarking on a series of adventures that take them all the way to the Artic.

But is Titch really the enlightened fellow that we would like him to be or is he just using Wash?   And why can't Wash move on and forget about Titch after they part ways?  These are the questions posed in the second half of the novel.  The second half is much less evocative (or maybe I've just read too many novels set in London) but is where Wash, still young but an adult, begins to ask these questions.   And we the reader ask them too.  And if you are like me you have arguments with yourself and with Edugyan about it. 

This is a novel of ideas and the questions that are raised are good questions, ones that I'll be thinking about for a while.   The characters are well drawn.  She doesn't answer all of our questions about them but gives us enough to see them and understand them and care about what happens to them.

I will say that the plot of the novel does rely on us believing a number of coincidences.  (All novels rely on coincidence to move the plot along; a great writer makes us forget that).  A few times I rolled my eyes.  But then I shrugged and moved on - they didn't really affect my enjoyment. 

My only complaint about the entire novel is the very last paragraph.   I won't say too much other than that I like my novels with definitive endings that I understand.   But up until that last paragraph, I was hooked. 

Warlight and The Witch Elm

I blame the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Really.

After the last few weeks of focusing on the Senate Judiciary Committee and their Supreme Court confirmation hearings I was just not in the mood to read a novel in which a white youth can't be bothered to see the world through anybody else's eyes.  I definitely wasn't in the mood to read TWO novels with that kind of protagonist.

Warlight, by Michael Ondaatje, and The Witch Elm by Tana French, are two novels that couldn't be more different.  Warlight is the story of a boy growing up in post-World War II London.  His parents leave he and his sister for a year, ostensibly to travel to the other side of the world due to his father's job.  The people that they are left with are unusual to say the least and it becomes clear very soon that the parents have lied to the children and there is more going on than meets the eye.

The Witch Elm is a crime novel in which the protagonist is beaten to a pulp in the first fifty pages by two burglars, causing a loss of memory.  This becomes important when skeletal remains are found and the protagonist can't remember details that might lead to the discovery of who killed the victim.

But despite their differences, they seemed to have basically the same premise.  The male protagonist  is so self-centered that he spends his youth oblivious to what is going on around him.  In Warlight, Nathaniel can't even be bothered to know the real names of the adults who are ostensibly in charge of him.   Ostensibly he can't remember them years later because he was so traumatized by his youth. 

Oh c'mon.

In The Witch Elm, Toby remembers his teen years at school as being a pleasant time where people occasionally play pranks on each other.  He is shocked to learn, years later, that others have memories of bullying and sexual assault.   HE doesn't remember that.

Oh c'mon. 

I rapidly lost interest in both of these characters.  I found myself utterly bored by Nathaniel's story.   But it's a short novel so I finished it.  I was annoyed by Toby and his white male privilege from the first few pages of The Witch Elm and rapidly found that I didn't care what happened to him.   I kept reading because, up until now, I have loved Tana French's books.  It never improved.  I was never shocked (or even surprised).  Even her writing style in this novel annoyed me - far too much exposition.

So all in all, I didn't care for either book and I can't recommend either one.  Especially after the last few weeks and the Senate Judiciary Committee.  

January 2018 Reading

I miss doing a monthly summary of all that I've read so I thought I would try it again.  We'll see how long this lasts.

Here's what I read in January:

The Medicus Mystery Series by Ruth Downie.  I spent the early part of the New Year catching up on all the Ruth Downie Medicus mysteries.  About  year ago I read her first book in the series, simply entitled Medicus.  Since I am a big fan of Lindsey Davis' Roman mysteries I thought I might like it.  I did, but it took me a while to get back to them.  Finally I loaded up on the rest of them through the beginning of January and filled the very cold nights reading away.  There are now seven published novels with the eighth coming this year.  Although they are Roman, most of the action takes place in Brittania where Gaius Petreius Ruso is a doctor to the Roman legions.  Ruso is from the south of Gaul (France) and has joined up to make some money to pay off the debts left by his deceased father and to escape his ex-wife. Two of the books move out of Brittania, one into Gaul and one into Rome, but Downie constantly returns her hero to Brittania, specifically the area up near the border with Sccotland where the "barbarians" live.  Hadrian is building his wall during this time.  Her books seem well researched, her main character is appealing, the other characters are interesting and  it is a time period I'm interested in.  She does particularly well writing a male character that thinks the way women assume that men think (I have no idea of course if they really think that way.)  She also allows him all the prejudices of his time and doesn't make him perfect.  While I think I like the Lindsey Davis books a bit better, this is a good series and I'll continue to read it as books come out.

Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Eagan. I'm not sure what to say about this.  Full disclosure, I wasn't wild about A Visit From the Goon Squad.  I liked this novel better.  It kept my interest through most of the story.  She created a very believable world.  The story includes graphic descriptions of what it was like to go down in a diving suit during WWII that I found difficult to read because they made me claustrophobic.  There was an entire section set on a merchant marine ship that I found fascinating.  But it felt like she didn't know how to end it so, she just ended it.  And a key part of the story is how one character avoids sure death - and I found it completely unbelievable.  All in all, I think Jennifer Egan is just not for me.

Niccolo Rising by Dorothy Dunnett.  This was a re-read.  Lots of people I follow on Twitter are reading this series so I decided to re-read it.  I'll probably write about the whole series when I finish the re-read (and there are eight novels).  Dunnett is one of my favorite authors.  I read this novel when it first came out and then re-read it before every succeeding novel in the series came out.  But I didn't re-read it after the end of the last novel and I find myself interpreting the story in light of what ultimately happens to all the characters eight novels from now.  

Golden Hill by Francis Spufford

The age of Hamilton (the hit musical, not the man) is spawning a new interest in eighteenth century America, something that seemed impossible just a few years ago.  Characters sporting powdered hair, breeches and tri-corner hats are no longer assumed to be beyond the understanding of today's audiences, but are understood to harbor the same emotions and flaws that one might find among one's own neighbors.  Or at least on any modern cable television drama. 

Francis Spufford sets his novel, Golden Hill:  A Novel of Old New York, thirty years before the infamous declaration written in Philadelphia.  On November 1, 1746, a mysterious traveler from London named Richard Smith arrives in New York harbor bound for the firm of Lovell & Company on Golden Hill Street.  Smith presents a bill of exchange drawn upon Lovell & Company for a thousand pounds sterling payable 60 days after presentment - a fortune in that day and age.  During the 60 days that the mysterious Mr. Smith waits for his money, he refuses to tell a soul why he has come to New York, where he came by this fortune or what he will use the funds for, thus commencing much speculation by the denizens of this small city as to his background and his intentions.  Is he a spy?  Is he a representative of one of the ministries of government?  Is he an actor? A Saracen conjurer?  An agent of the French?  Or is he simply a fraud and a scoundrel?

Solving the mystery of Smith and his fortune is not so much the plot of the novel, as an excuse to give us a picture of colonial New York. Eighteenth century New York is as much a character in this novel as any of the human characters.  This is a New York that no longer exists. Indeed it had disappeared by the early nineteenth century, mostly destroyed by war and fire. Not the metropolis that it is today, it occupies only the lower tip of Manhattan island and was small by world standards.  As Spufford points out in his Author's Note, in 1746 the city of New York had a population of only seven thousand while London, the largest city in Europe, had seven hundred thousand.  It is, in fact, a small town compared to London.  And in a small town it is difficult to keep secrets or, indeed, to have a private life. Mr. Smith finds that, within 24 hours of his arriving, "the news was all around the town that a stranger had arrived with a fortune in his pocket."

The people of this colonial city are familiar and yet foreign to Mr. Smith.  He is astonished to discover on his first day in the city that the faces of women are not marked by the pox as they are in Europe. He also finds that New York does not stink as London does.  "A Scene of City-Life, his eyes reported. A Country-Walk, in a Seaside District, his nostrils counter argued. No smells; also, he realized, no beggars."  And the people were taller than he expected.  "He was used, in the piazza of Covent Garden, to stand taller by a head than the general crowd; but here, in the busy bobbing mass of heads, he was no taller than the average."

We explore the streets of old New York with Smith; they are not only described but they are named. Smith chases a thief from the tip of Manhattan up to the commons; he winds through the streets visiting every tavern and dive looking for a particular kind of investigator.  At one point, suspected of being a papist French spy, he is chased through the town by a drunken mob.  One recommendation to the publishers:  a map of Old New York would have been useful to those of us who are not native and could not follow the street by street descriptions in our minds. 

One of the joys of this novel is its depiction of commerce in eighteenth century America and specifically how the shortage of real money (coin money) made transactions difficult. Mr. Smith discovers this when he tries to convert some gold guineas into smaller change in the local currency:

Lovell accordingly began to count out a pile of creased and folded slips next to the silver, some printed black and some printed red and some brown, like the despoiled pages of a prayerbook, only of varying shapes and sizes; some limp and torn; some leathery with grease; some marked only with dirty letterpress and others bearing coats-of-arms, whales spouting, shooting stars, feathers, leaves, savages; all of which he laid down with the rapidity of a card dealer, licking his fingers for the better passage of it all.

"Wait a minute," said Mr. Smith.  "What's this?"

"You don't know our money, sir?" said the clerk.  "They didn't tell you we use notes, specie being so scarce, this side?"

"No," said Smith.

The pile grew.

"Fourpence Connecticut, eightpence Rhode Island," murmured Lovell. "Two shilling Rhode Island, eighteenpence Jersey, one shilling Jersey, eighteenpence Philadelphia, one shilling Maryland ..."

It makes one appreciate the banking genius of Alexander Hamilton after the revolution. But Alexander Hamilton is not yet born, much less arrived in New York to attend Kings College (Columbia University).  Indeed there is no King's College yet.

As the title states, this is a novel of "Old New York" not a novel about the thirteen colonies or even about North America.  Except for one short errand up the Hudson, the action all takes place in lower Manhattan.  There are no visits to the larger city of Philadelphia or up to Boston.  There is almost no discussion of the other colonies.  There is, in fact, little discussion of the vast continent that lies across the Hudson River. At one point someone points out to Smith that New York is crowded with transient persons - they disembark from ships and then leave, the continent "devouring" them.  But Smith is remarkably incurious about the continent, only once or twice reflecting on its vastness. When native Americans are mentioned, it is generally in connection with the war with the French.  And not one native American seems to be residing in New York during Mr. Smith's time there; or at least he never encounters one. 

 

This is a novel about how normal New York would seem to a Londoner, while at the same time remaining foreign. The people are in some ways more patriotic than Londoners.  Smith is constantly surprised by the fervor with which the people support, and toast, King George II.  But at the same time they are obsessed with the idea of liberty.  The City is in the midst of an ideological battle between adherents of the Assembly, led by chief judge DeLancey ("a massive and statuesque Roman head, finely modeled at ear and nose, like a slightly depraved but very intelligent emperor"), and Governor Clinton ("with a peanut-shaped brow and an anxious expression letting down the blue and gold of his coat").  The Assembly adherents are strongly protective of their sole right over the purse strings; the Governor is desperate for a budget.

War with France is on the minds of the people of New York.  They are bothered by the idea that they are alone on the other side of the Atlantic to fight the French (and papist) enemy on their border. But they are also outraged that the Governor has sent a regiment into upstate New York and expects New York to support them.  In fact the Assembly has not deigned to vote any money for support.  

But this political background is not really the point.  The point is that, while it is a British colony, New York is also different than Britain.  News from Europe about the waging of the war in Europe arrives slowly and late.  Even the name of the war is foreign to Mr. Smith.  King George's war, the local people call it. "We call all our wars, here, by the names of monarchs; as, King William's War, Queen Anne's War, King George's."  Smith again remarks that they are quite the royalists in New York.  It  turns out that Smith's assumption that New York does not have its own dangers, political and otherwise, is what gets him into trouble time and again.

For all the New Yorkers' talk of liberty, Smith is constantly aware that some in the City are not at liberty.  Enslaved black people populate the City.  They seem to be almost invisible to the white population and yet they are everywhere, carrying on the work that the upper classes don't want to do.  Smith and the narrator are always aware of them, whether they have names like Achilles, a slave of the Governor's staff, and Zephyra, who acts as a sort of chaperone and maid for the Lovell daughters, or the unnamed black musician who plays at a dinner party given by the Lovells. 

And others, while more at liberty than slaves, still find themselves fettered by society.  This is not a society in which open homosexuality is tolerated.  And women are not as free as men to follow their desires.  When women do act on their impulses, society spurns them.

 

For a time it isn't clear whether Spufford is simply trying to do a better job than most white male writers at accurately representing the diversity of a society or whether there is a method to this inclusiveness.  Eventually it becomes clear that all of this diversity is a necessary component of his plot, which is both a delight and a relief.  

In form, this novel walks a line between imitating the style of an eighteenth century author and making it readable to modern eyes.  Not being well versed in the novels of Fielding and other novelists of the time, I can't say if he successfully captures their style.  It was a relief that after the first few paragraphs, he seemed to move into a more modern mode.  A small part of the novel is epistolary and while I generally love epistolary novels, I thought that was the weakest part of the novel although it became clear why the author felt it was necessary.

Most of the novel uses an omniscient narrator who does sometimes break the fourth wall and address the audience in humorous ways.  At one point the narrator admits that the description of a duel had to be researched in a book as the author had no experience of sword fighting and another time the narrator simply gives up on the attempt to describe the rules of a card game.  One of the best moments in the novel is when the omniscient narrator grows bored (or embarrassed) describing a sex scene from the point of view of a male character and suddenly suggests that we look at it from the point of view of the woman, going on to give a perceptive but humorous description. 

There is a romance of sorts in the novel.  The characters, familiar with Shakespeare, compare themselves to Beatrice and Benedick but allow that they aren't really very much like them.  In fact, the play that is never mentioned but seems to be the model for part of the novel is The Taming of the Shrew.  A wealthy man with two daughters.  One, the younger, is lovely and docile and has suitors.  The older may be lovely but is a shrew that no one wants to marry.  Perhaps the newly arrived stranger in town will take her off their hands?  

Shakespeare's Kate is a fascinating and yet frustrating character.  Each actress must make her own artistic decisions about Kate's motivation as Shakespeare never really explains her . And of course she is cured or "tamed"in the end,  the moral seemingly being that whether you are a shrew or not is a choice made solely by the individual.  The cage is of your own making.  Spufford makes it more interesting.  Is the cage of your own making?  Or is it made by society?  Or does it exist because of a part of your nature you can't change?  Or is it some combination? In the end, this is the question that readers will be debating in their own minds (or with friends) after they put down this novel.  

Spufford has now won the Desmond Elliott prize for debut novels as well as the Costa award for first novels (he has written other nonfiction books, but never a novel) as well as the Ondaatje award for books with a sense of place.  With such a striking debut, I look forward to more from his pen in the future.

August Reading

Looking back at August, I almost can't believe how many books I read.  Of course part of the time I was on vacation with lots of time to read.  The sad thing is that, years ago, I always read at this pace.  But the last few years my reading pace has slowed considerably.  But this year, once I got on a roll on vacation, I kept going.  Of course, a lot of my reading was genre (mystery) reading which I enjoy but find easy to fly through.  I can finish a book in a night if it is genre.

Here goes:

Phryne Fisher Mysteries by Kerry Greenwood.  Yes, this series was on my list for July but I finished the rest of the series in August.  I really enjoy these mysteries.  Phryne doesn't take crap from anyone and is a thoroughly modern woman (for the 1920s and even for today).  In the later books I found some of the "skills" that Phryne has a little eye-rolling - it's almost like she is a female James Bond.  But it wasn't enough to stop me from enjoying them.  I look forward to her next adventure.   Recommended

Four Tana French Books:   The Secret Place; Faithful Place; Broken Harbor and The Likeness.   I began reading Tana French last month, starting with her first novel In the Woods.   The books are a series but unlike other crime novel series, she hasn't created a detective who solves all the crimes.   In the first novel our point of view character was a homicide detective in Dublin and we met his partner and other homicide cops.  The second novel is from the point of view of the partner, who is approached by her former boss from the undercover division for a job.  The third novel is from the point of view of the undercover detective and the fourth novel is from the point of view of a homicide detective we met in the third novel.  Her mysteries are good but it really her character development that makes these novels so wonderful.  These aren't light reading and yet they are page turners.  Highly Recommended.

Four Francis Brody Novels:  Dying in the Wool; A Medal for Murder; Murder in the Afternoon; and Woman Unknown.    After finishing Phryne Fisher I decided to look for another series set in the 1920's Post Great-War world.  Brody created an amateur detective, Kate Shackleton, whose husband was declared missing in action in the Great War.  A suburban widow who doesn't want to admit she is a widow, she assists people in finding loved ones lost in the War.  Then someone asks her to solve a real mystery and things get interesting.  I enjoyed these books. Recommended

Deadly Election by Lindsey Davis.   Lindsey Davis is one of my favorite mystery writers.  Her novels are set during the first century AD in Ancient Rome.  This new series features a woman detective, Flavia Albia, the adopted daughter of long-time Davis detective Marcus Didius Falco.  These days Flavia is all grown up and a widow.  I always like Davis' depiction of the Rome of yesterday and I've always liked her characters.  It took a couple of novels for her to settle in with Flavia Albia as her main character but with this novel she hit her stride.  Recommended. 

A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson.  A "companion novel" to her wonderful novel Life After Life, this is the story of Ursula's brother Teddy who died (or not) in the first novel.  In this novel, he survives World War II - not an easy feat for a flyer.  The story moves back and forth in time between Teddy as a post-war survivor trying to figure out what to do now that he's survived and Teddy during the war when he was sure that he was going to eventually die.  I really liked this novel - although not as much as Life After Life.  Mostly because Life After Life was so unique.  My book club read this book and no one else liked it.  So maybe I'm an outlier.  Highly Recommended.

The Daisy Dalrymple Series by Carola Dunn.   After finishing Brody's Kate Shackleton series I again decided to look for a series set in the 1920's.  The Honorable Daisy Dalrymple has a title but no money.  Her father's estate was entailed.  With the death of her brother during the War followed by the death of her father in the influenza epidemic, a distant cousin inherited the title and the estate.  Rather than live with her mother in the Dower House (and listen to her mother complain about everything) Daisy decides to support herself.  She moves into a house with a school friend/photographer and convinces a magazine that her title will gain her entree into great country houses so that she can then write articles about them.  Unfortunately for Daisy, everywhere she goes she finds a dead body.  Carola Dunn has a sense of humor about this and how unlikely this would be.  In the first novel Daisy meets Detective Chief Inspector Alec Fletcher and the two team up to solve mysteries - somewhat reluctantly on Alec's part.  I'm almost finished with this 22 book series - which seems hard to believe but the first 15 novels or so are pretty short, less than 200 pages each.  I'm enjoying them.   Recommended

July Reading

June was a very light month for reading - in July I couldn't stop reading.

A Dead Man in Instanbul by Michael Pearce.  The second in the series of mysteries I started last month, this time the hero is sent to Istanbul.  It's a nice view of pre-World War I Turkey but the mystery is a little weak.  I'm not sure I'll go further with this series.  Can't really recommend.

Phryne Fisher Mysteries by Kerry Greenwood.   I've really been enjoying the television series on Netflix so I thought I'd go back to the original mysteries.  I started at the first and am working my way through them - I won't list them all.  The plots are different than the TV series and there is no sexual tension between Phryne and the police inspector.  Instead she has multiple lovers but her main squeeze is a Chinese importer, Lin Chung.  I am enjoying these very much and will probably finish the entire 20 volume series next month. Recommended.

In the Woods by Tana French   The first in Tana French's series of mysteries set in Dublin.  This was a very good novel although it was somewhat frustrating that one of the mysteries was never solved.  The novel is written from the point of view of the detective investigating the murder who is slowly falling apart.  When characters do things that I think are stupid, I prefer not to be in their minds.  I'd rather read about it in third person.  But it was not enough to stop me enjoying the novel. Recommended.

The Art Forger by B.A. Shapiro.   Another novel written in the first person.  For plot purposes she needs to be naive and a little bit stupid.  Again, I prefer that if the protagonist is not smart that I not be in their head.  There were interesting facts about forgeries but not nearly as good as the robertson Davies novel What's Bred in the Bone.  Not particularly recommended but would make a decent beach read.

The Prisoner of Heaven by Carlos Ruiz Zafon.   Parts of this novel are written in the first person and parts are written in the third person. The narrator is not stupid which is a relief.  This novel is the third in the series. Truthfully I don't remember all the characters of the other two novels but that didn't matter. It was a compelling read.  Some day I'm going to read all three again, closer in time to each other.  Recommended.

The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante.   This is the second volume of the Neapolitan Series.  About halfway through this novel I found myself exasperated and thinking that the characters were all acting like a bunch of teenagers.  And then I realized that they were a bunch of teenagers.  Again, this is a novel written in the first person and again the narrator, for plot purposes, seems to be be required to not really be able to figure out what is going on.  Probably I was just tired of first person narrative, but I didn't really enjoy this volume as much as the first one.  I already have the third volume so I'll read it but I am still at a loss as to why people are raving about the style of the writer.  Recommended with reservations.

Before She Met Me by Julian Barnes.  This was an interesting novel - the story of a man who slowly drives himself crazy by being jealous of men that his wife slept with before she met him.  The ending did totally surprise me.  It was well written but sometimes I get tired of those 20th century novels written by men who are obsessed with sex.  But at least it was written in the third person.  Recommended with reservations.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.   The whole time I was reading this novel I kept wishing that I was seeing it as a movie instead.  Then, right after I finished this novel, I read that Steven Spielberg would be directing a move version.  This novel, set in a dystopian near-future, is about a society obsessed with 1980s culture.   There were so many references that it was almost overwhelming.  Many of them I didn't get since I never played video or arcade games.  I'm also bad at identifying songs by titles or artists - I have to hear them.  But despite that, I did really enjoy this novel.  It was clever.   And, even though it was a first person narrator, he wasn't stupid - at all.   Recommended.

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs.  This was an odd book. Again written in the first person but not a stupid narrator.  it kept my attention but I didn't really like it.   I never felt invested in the characters.  Recommended.

June Reading and Watching

I've gotten behind in posting what I've read.  For some reason I thought I had done a post for June, but now I realize I never pushed "publish".  In June I finished only three books:

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante.   Lila has gone missing but Elena is not about to let her disappear without a trace.  Instead she embarks on this memoir which takes the relationship between the two women from the time they were small girls until they are about sixteen.  Lila isn't a particularly nice friend. She isn't particularly lucky in life but she is smart.  Elena constantly feels inferior and tries to live up to Lila.  It's a story that kept my interest and I enjoyed it.  But I don't really see why the critics find her writing so compelling.

A Dead Man in Trieste by Michael Pearce.   I'm not sure where I heard of Michael Pearce or why I decided to try this book.  Maybe because I didn't really know where Trieste is and wanted to.  The style is very old fashioned and the story is not particularly complicated.  But he did paint a vivid picture of Trieste and the Balkins in the early 1900's. 

Citizen: an American Lyric by Claudia Rankine.  The winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry, this isn't your typical book of poetry.  Most of it, in fact, isn't poetry in the traditional sense.  Her theme is the lived life of a black woman, of feeling invisible, or not belonging even in relationships with white friends.  I appreciated the perspective but as a work of literature it didn't speak to me.

The reason I didn't finish many books in June is that I was spending a lot of time at the theatre:

Antony and Cleopatra at St. Louis Shakespeare in the Park

The Barber of Seville at Opera Theatre of St. Louis

La Rondine at Opera Theatre of St. Louis

Richard the Lionheart at Opera Theatre of St. Louis

 Emmeline at Opera Theatre of St. Louis

My Fair Lady at the Muny 

May Reading

 Here is what I read in May:

Mr. Mac and Me by Esther Freud.   Real life Scottish architect Charles Rennie MacIntosh and his artist wife Margaret MacDonald have retreated to a village on the Suffolk coast to recuperate and paint.  An unlikely friendship arises between them and a local (fictional) boy named Thomas Maggs, son of an alcoholic pub keeper.  When World War I breaks out, life changes for the village and strangers are viewed with suspicion.  Even Mr. Mac.  A lovely portrait of a coastal village at war, Freud also vividly portrays the artistic process as Mr. Mac and Margaret work on their studies of local plant life.  This novel sent me to Google to look at some of their work and once again despair that I arrived in Glasgow the day after the School of Art (MacIntosh's masterpiece) burned and, thus, never had a chance to see it. 

Faithful and Virtuous Night by Louise Gluck.    The latest collection of poetry by Louise Gluck is concerned with death, aging and the act of dying.   Parents die in a sudden collision with a tree, leaving two children to be brought up by an Aunt.  A painter is dying and can no longer use his arm to paint - it seems the painter is one of the children all grown up.  At some point the Aunt dies.  But each poem could also stand on its own.  Is the voice female or male?   Is the voice the poet's or her creation's?  Sometimes it is hard to tell - and really, what does it matter?  Time itself seems mutable - the present and the past confused in the way that they often are for old people.  Is the poem representing reality or a dream?  Again, hard to say.

The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters.  With the end of World War I many formerly upper middle class women found themselves in straightened circumstances.  The men in the family were dead, money was often tight and good help was hard to find.  The Wrays are just such a family of women, living in a fine old house in a genteel suburb of London - a house that they can no longer afford.  They are forced to take in lodgers, or "paying guests" as Mrs. Wray would prefer to call them.  In the first third of this novel, Sarah Waters creates the world of 1922 in great detail with appropriate atmosphere.  If you, like I, have little interest in novels about obsessive love or criminal trials you might find the last two-thirds of the novel somewhat hard going.   The twist here is that the love affair is between two women, but otherwise it reads something like an early Alfred Hitchcock thriller.  I truly love the way that Sarah Waters strings together her sentences, but the plot of this novel just did not grab me.



 The Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust by Alan Bradley.  Flavia de Luce has been shipped off to boarding school in Toronto, Canada, a foreign land that uses dimes and nickels rather than good old English money.  Of course the first night she arrives a body is discovered in the bedroom to which she has been assigned.  In addition, the school is not all that it seems.  More strange is the fact that she misses Feely and Daffy back at home.  This particular mystery suffered from the need to introduce a new country, a new school and an entirely new cast of characters.   This is a story that seems meant to take Flavia to the next level.  Flavia is as enjoyable as ever but I hope she can return to Buckshaw and her friends in England.





St. Louis Rising:  The French Regime of Louis de St. Ange de Bellerive, by Carl J. Ekberg and Sharon K. Person.   A book about the founding of St. Louis that focuses on the first Commandant of Upper Louisiana to live here.  Louis de St. Ange de Bellerive lived a fascinating life.  Born in Canada, he came from a military family and followed his father and brother to the new colony of Louisiana.  They were the first French to try to permanently settle the Missouri River Valley.  After the death of his brother, Louis was put in charge of the post at Vincennes.  After the end of the French and Indian War he was moved to Fort de Chartres and made Commandant of Upper Louisiana where one of his principal jobs was to hand over the fort to the British.  After the handover he moved his command to the west side of the river to the new settlement of St. Louis.  I reviewed this book here.

April Reading

 April was a busy month.   Here's what I was reading.

In the King's Service by Katherine Kurtz.  This article caused me to remember how I had enjoyed Katherine Kurtz when I was young.  I looked her up and realized that I had never read the last three books she published.   Kurtz is a fantasy writer who began writing back in the late 60s/early 70s.  She created a world of historical fantasy loosely based on medieval England, including a strong pre-reformation Catholic Church.  The fantasy involves a group of people with the ability to read minds and do some magic, called The Deryni.  I remember loving the world that she built.  Back in those days people didn't write fantasy novels that were 1000 pages long (a la George R. R. Martin) so, instead, she wrote in trilogies.  Each trilogy totaled about 1000 pages.  Each trilogy takes place in the world she created but often at different time periods.  It has been years since I read them and maybe that's why I found many of the "family trees" hard to follow in the first part of this novel.  But eventually I got into it and am ready to move on to the other two books.  The article compared her to Dorothy Dunnett but I don't really see it.  Her style and language is much simpler and, in fact, sometimes too simple; her characters are interesting but the side characters are not as deeply developed as Dunnetts' and her plots are not nearly as complicated.   And she tends to "tell" and not "show.   But I do love the world she created and am happy to go back to it. 

How to be Both by Ali Smith.   This Booker Prize longlisted novel has a gimmick.   The dual story of a teenage girl in the 21st Century and a yohttps://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=1974275832677042000#editor/target=post;postID=4052206831820001768;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=0;src=postnameung female artist in the Rennaissance, half of the book is told from the point of view of one character and half the book is told from the point of view of the other character.  That isn't really the gimmick.  The gimmick is that in some editions of the novel, one story is first and in other editions the other story is first.  I read it in the NOOK version so I was asked to pick which half I wanted to read first.  I ended up with the renaissance character first.   Since that character is a dead consciousness come back to life in the 21st Century, the first 20-30 pages are a little confusing; not to mention that you don't know that the character is female.  And the "ghost" thinks that she's following a boy, but she's really following George, the girl from the other part of the novel.  But once I caught on to what was happening, it worked fine for me.  A meditation on how the past is always with us, there was a lot to think about in this novel.

The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches by Alan Bradley.   The sixth Flavia de Luce novel.   Turns out I wasn't quite right in my guess about Flavia's mother's demise but I was close.   Some loose ends were tied up, but not all.   Flavia's sisters are getting much more human and Flavia has grown slightly less annoying in her ways.  When Alan Bradley began the series he clearly did not intend to be writing a series.   He's done a good job of opening up the characters little by little, while still keeping them the stereotypes that girls of Flavia's age think people are.  Again, the mysteries are really beside the point.

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell.   An unexpected delight chosen by my reading group.  Eleanor is the new girl at school and Park is the only Asian American boy.  Both ride the bus and eventually become friends and then more than friends.  Rowell's depiction of the slow way in which people get to know each other was spot on.   The two studiously ignore each other on the bus until Park realizes that Eleanor is reading along with him as he reads his comic books.  Even then the conversations are limited as they very slowly get to know each other; each holding back from the other the harder aspects of his or her life.   Rowell does not tie up the ending with a bow, which seemed appropriate. 

Aimless Love by Billy Collins.   I received this collection of poems by the former US Poet Laureate for Christmas and I read it very slowly - one poem a day.   It is not, technically, a completely new book as two-thirds of the poems were previously published.   Collins is known as our "accessible" poet and he certainly is.  But his poems are humorous and sometimes poignant and often don't end where you think they are leading.   It seems that he can turn anything into a poem and, apparently, people are always pointing this out to him: 

In the afternoon a woman I barely knew
said you could write a poem about that,
pointing to a dirigible that was passing overhead.

West of the Revolution:  An Uncommon History of 1776 by Claudio Saunt.   In our Anglo-centric view of American history we focus on what the British and their colonists on the east coast of the North American continent were doing in the 1770's.   In Alaska, the Inuit were dealing with abusive Russian fisherman; in California the Spanish were moving up the coast to found San Franciso as a result of the threat that Russia would move down the west coast of North America.  In the north, British traders were exploring the vast Canadian wilderness in search of trade.  And in the south, the Creeks were seeking help from Spain to fight the English.   This relatively short book (about 200 pages before the end notes) gives a good overview of what the rest of the North American continent  was dealing with in 1776.   And what is clear is that they weren't at all concerned about the civil war that was going on in the East between the British.

March Reading

Here's what I read in March:

1.  Bad Feminist by Roxanne Gay.   I read this book of essays over the last few months while I was getting my hair colored or getting a pedicure or sitting in waiting rooms.  Many good topics, some good thoughts, but I found myself mostly unsatisfied with the essays.  And I can't explain why.

2.  My Dear I wanted to Tell You by Louisa Young.

Riley Purefoy is a young, working class boy, who becomes friends with Nadine Waveney and her upper middle class family who live near Kensington Gardens.  The Waveneys are friends with an artistic set and Riley meets and begins to study with an artist friend-of-the-family.  As he grows older, he and Nadine form a close friendship and begin to fall in love, but her family disapproves because of the difference in their classes.  Feeling rejected young Riley joins the army to go to France where the new war has started.  It is summer of 1914, everyone expects it will be over by Christmas.  Up until this point (which is fairly early in the novel) this is fairly conventional novel.  But more than almost any other novel about World War I that I've read, Young really captures the slow mental and physical disintegration that happened to men who survived the war, as well as the women who spent the war nursing the hundreds of thousands of casualties and also the women who stayed behind where life changed at a different pace than for those on the battlefield.  The mental states of Riley and his Commanding Officer, Peter Locke, are reflected while they attempt to appear "normal" on the outside.  Unlike other novels where the main characters make it through the war, these men don't come through undamaged either physically or mentally.  I very much enjoyed the last two thirds of this novel (although some the long descriptions of the medical procedures might have been a bit shorter for my taste).  I understand there is a sequel and I'm sure I will read it.

3.  Speaking from Among the Bones by Alan Bradley.
 
This is the next installment in the Flavia de Luce mystery series.  I only have one more to go before I'm caught up and I'm not looking forward to the day that I don't have a Flavia de Luce novel to read.  Flavia and her sisters are getting along much better.  Feely (Ophelia) is engaged and Flavia spends some time trying to figure out which of Feely's beaus is the lucky winner.  Could it be the American, Carl, from St. Louis, Missouri?   "Carl's going to take me to watch Stan Musial knock one out of the park."  I had forgotten that Carl was from St. Louis and I wonder why Bradley decided to choose St. Louis out of all the obscure (to the British) cities in America.   The actual mystery revolves around the exhumation of the bones of the local saint from his vault in the village church.  Flavia is surprised that some of the history of the saint seems to have been forgotten and Bradley has a great line:  "History is like the kitchen sink ... Everything goes round and round until eventually, sooner or later, most of it goes down the waste pipe.  Things are forgotten.  Things are mislaid.  Things are covered up.  Sometimes, it's simply a matter of neglect."   How true. The ending has a twist that I've suspected was coming for some time but I did not expect it at the time it happened and the way it happened.  Can't wait to read the next book.

4.  Murder on the Champ de Mars by Cara Black.

The next in the Aimee Leduc mystery series, Aimee is now a single mother with a six month old baby named Chloe.  But she has a great child-minder and is able to spend all the hours she needs solving crimes, still dressed in her chic second hand designer clothes, albeit with a little baby spit-up on her shoulder, and wearing her red Chanel lipstick.  This mystery is a little more personal to Aimee because it might lead to clues as to who is responsible for the death of Aimee's father many years before.  I can't say I was completely surprised by the ending, I've seen it coming.  But I still liked it and it makes me want the next novel to come sooner.

5.  Hush Hush by Laura Lippman.  The long awaited next installment of the Tess Monaghan series, it picks up a few years after the last one.  I almost had forgotten where we were in Tess' life story, that's how long it has been.  In the meantime, Lippman has been writing stand-alone crime novels with a strong psychological bent and that comes through in this novel.  In some ways she seems more interested in all the characters other than Tess.  But I enjoyed it.  

6.  A Dangerous Place by Jacqueline Winspear.   Another long awaited next volume, this time in the Maisie Dobbs series (not as long as wait as from Lippman, but long enough).  One of the weaknesses in the last few Maisie Dobbs mysteries has been Winspear's reluctance to break off Maisie's relationship with James or to have Maisie commit to James.  She solves that in this novel.  I won't say how but you will know very early on in the novel.  And it works.  This novel takes place in Gibralter in the late 1930's with the Spanish Civil War raging just across the border.  Moving Maisie out of England works too - although I'll be content to have her return home eventually.  The mystery is serviceable but the picture of Maisie at this point in her life is very good.  Well done.

7.  Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill.  The narrator explains to us, her readers, how her world was so normal but then it came apart.  She speaks to us directly in short little bursts, very much like a character in a play.  In fact I was very much reminded of those plays from the 1980’s that explored women’s “consciousness”.  The Vagina Monologues maybe. Except this was a lot about being obsessed with a child.  But then suddenly it becomes a third person novel, the narrator no longer, apparently, even able to speak directly about what happened in her life.  Finally it reverts back to the first person.  This is an odd little book.  Most of the time,  I just felt sorry for the narrator’s husband.   Which I’m thinking was not what the author was going for.

8.  The House Girl by Tara Conklin.  This was a book chosen by my book group and no one, including me, liked it.  Perhaps because we are mostly lawyers and roll our eyes at unrealistic depictions of first year associates in Big Law Firms.  Perhaps because some of us (me) have done a lot of genealogical research and it is NEVER this easy (this novel makes those people on the PBS genealogy show look like they are really working, and I never think that about them).  The novel is divided into two parts, one of which takes place on a plantation in the mid 1800s.  That part is fine and Conklin should have stuck to it.  She did create a compelling character and set up a good, tense storyline.  The other, modern, part?  Not so much.

My February Reading

This is a little late, but here's what I read in February.

1.  Song of the Vikings:  Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths by Nancy Marie Brown.  

Snorri Sturluson was an Icelander who lived in the middle ages (13th century) and wrote down many of the Norse myth stories that are the basis of what we know today about Scandinavian mythology, including the stories on which Wagner's Ring Cycle is based as well as "The Lord of the Rings".  This is a biography, in a general sense of the word, of Snorri that also gives a lot of information about what Iceland in the medieval times was like.  The biography of the author says she keeps an Icelandic sheepdog, which I had to Google. I'm a bit of a geek when it comes to these things so I enjoyed reading this book, but even I had a hard time keeping track of the tangled family tree of Snorri.  A chart would have helped. This book took me a while to get through so I didn't read as much this month as I might normally.

2.  The Red House Mystery by A.A. Milne.

Yes, that A.A. Milne, of Winnie the Pooh fame.  The amateur detective in this mystery at times reminded me of Christopher Robin, all grown up and surrounded by bears of very little intellect.  The mystery was pretty standard British country house fare of the type published in the 1920's.  I happen to like that genre of mystery so I enjoyed it.

3.   I am Half-Sick of Shadows by Alan Bradley ( a  Flavia de Luce Mystery).  In this volume, Bradley opens up the home of the somewhat reclusive de Luce family to a film company.  Of course, murder ensues and Flavia is helpful in solving it, to the amusement and chagrin of Detective Inspector Hewitt.  Although time moves on in these mysteries, it moves very slowly so Flavia hasn't aged much and she is still at war with her two older sisters (although perhaps there is hope of a truce).

4.  Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I loved this novel.  Adichie is a Nigerian author who spent much time in the United States and her main character, Ifemelu, experiences being a black person in the United States who is not African American. Ifemelu is born in Nigeria and spends her formative years there where she meets and falls in love with Obinze.  Ifemelu leaves to attend college in the United States, where her Aunt and cousin live.  Obinze cannot get a visa and ends up an undocumented alien in London.  Eventually both return to Nigeria.  The ending was a little too "love story" for me but the rest of the novel was a knock out.  Ifemelu says: "I came from a country where race was not an issue; I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America."   Adichie is also capable of writing beautiful description:  "In London, night came too soon, it hung in the morning air like a threat, and then in the afternoon a blue-gray dusk descended, and the Victorian buildings all wore a mournful air."  Parts of the novel required the suspension of disbelief (specifically that she could be so financially successful as a blogger) but the story hung together and I couldn't put it down.

My January Reading

Well, 2015 started out strong on the reading front so I've decided to re-start my monthly summary of what I've been reading.  If I read something that really strikes me (and if I have the time) I'll blog about that book separately.  Although I enjoyed much of what I read this month, nothing hit me so strongly that I needed to drop everything and write about it.  Here's what I read:

1.  Kate Atkinson.

I've been wanting to read more Kate Atkinson ever since I read Life after Life last summer so I took the opportunity of my January "lull" in the workplace to do that.  I discovered through Helen at She Reads Novels that Akinson has written a series of "sorta" detective novels.  That seemed up my alley and a good way to ease back into reading.  In January I read  four of them:  Case Histories, One Good Turn, When Will There be Good News, and Started Early, Took My Dog.   I think those are all she has written in her series so far.

I call them "sorta" detective novels because they aren't really detective novels in the true sense of the word.  They seem more like literary fiction that simply features a (somewhat reluctant) detective named Jackson Brodie.  Former military and retired police, Brodie is more than up to whatever life throws at him. And Brodie is very fallible and at times can seem somewhat incompetent.   In Case Histories he has set himself up as a private investigator and is approached to find missing persons and missing things.  By the end of that novel he is able to retire completely but the next few books find him dragged into situations that require him to solve crimes.  Atkinson seems just as much, if not more, interested in the other characters she creates as she is in Brodie and it usually takes a good 100 pages or so before she really gets us into a real plot. That was ok with me because plot is often the least important thing in a book to me.  I admit, though, that her habit of spending a lot of time in characters' minds rather than on their actions does get a little tiring at times. But just about the time that I'm starting wonder if anything is ever going to happen, something unexpected happens.   Case Histories is probably the weakest of the four novels and she gets better and better with each subsequent novel, probably because with each novel she strays further and further from the genre demands of detective fiction.

One of the things that I really liked about Life after Life  was Atkinson's "voice" as a novelist, especially her devastating but understated sense of humor.  That sense of humor is there in the Brodie books but less so in the first couple books than in the last two.  Finally, in Started Early, Took my Dog she seems to have hit her stride and that same voice really comes out.   One of my favorite lines was when she was describing Brodie's taste in books.  He wasn't much of a guy for fiction.  "What he had discovered was that the great novels of the world were about three things -- death, money and sex.  Occasionally a whale." 

On the whole I enjoyed this series and hopes she gives us more Jackson Brodie.  I plan to look up her other novels this year and work my way through them.

2.  Storm at the Edge of Time by Pamela F. Service.    This may seem an odd choice for me to read, as it is really a children's book.  I was drawn to it because the author has a background in archaeology and the story is set in the Orkney Islands, which I would like to visit some day.   Three children, all from three different time periods, are drawn to a stone circle on one of the Orkney Islands and end up coming together through some kind of magic.  They go on a quest through the time periods to find the three pieces of a broken magical staff that will save the world.   Part of the story takes place in the last days of the Vikings, part takes place in current time and part takes place in the 26th century.  As an adult I didn't find it particularly gripping but I think an 11 year old might like it.

3.  The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson.  My book club chose this book and I was glad because I've been wanting to read it. Wilkerson won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction a few years ago for this book.   She tells the story of black migration from the American South to the rest of the United States in the years from about 1915 through 1970.  Wilkerson primarily tells this long history by focusing on three individuals:  Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster.

Ida Mae was born in Mississippi where her family picked cotton.  She moved up to industrial Chicago with her husband in the 1930's after a relative was beaten almost to death for a crime he didn't commit.  Ida Mae was an uneducated woman who was hard working and seemed to be genuinely good person.  George was from Florida where his people were fruit pickers.  He got part of a college education before his father stopped paying for it.  He moved New York in the 1940's when he was warned that he was going to by lynched for trying to gain more rights for the pickers.  George got a job as a baggage handler on the east coast train lines.  Robert Foster was born in Louisiana, became a doctor and moved to California in the 1950's because he thought there was more scope for him to succeed than there was in Louisiana.  He was married to a woman from an upper class black Atlanta family.  Robert eventually became the physician to Ray Charles.

The substance of the book is fascinating and thought provoking.  Be warned that it is long - my paperback version is over 600 pages (although the pages after p. 538 are acknowledgements, notes, index, etc.)  It took me a long time to get through, longer than I expected.  My one complaint (and the one reason I kept putting it down) is that it is written in language that,  to me, seemed to be at about the 6th grade level.  Certainly a high school student could easily read this book and understand it.  Most people would call it "accessible" and consider that a compliment.  I, on the other hand, found myself bored by the style.   For instance, here she is on the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor:  "On the other side of the Earth, at a harbor in Hawaii, a bomb exploded. It was at a naval base. Pearl Harbor.  People heard it on the radio, not knowing what it meant."

Almost all of the book is written in that style.  You could easily read this book out loud to a child of seven (if you didn't mind reading to your child about lynchings and racism) and they would understand what they were hearing.  Sometimes there will be interludes between the stories of Ida Mae, George and Bob that are written in normal, adult non-fiction style and I found myself flying through those parts.   Most people will not have a problem with this and will probably consider it a plus, but for me it was sometimes excruciating and I just had to put it down and read something else written at an adult level. Besides that, however, I'm glad I read it.

4.  Some Luck by Jane Smiley.  The first book in a planned trilogy, Jane Smiley is telling a family saga.  Interestingly, however, she doesn't tell it in an epic style.  There is no narrative arc, things just happen.  Every chapter is another year, beginning in 1920 and ending in 1953.  In some ways the family experiences everything that happened to the country in that time period and in other ways they just skirted the edges.  Within each chapter, the story is told in the third person, but shifting between the points of view of the various characters.  Often the point of view is that of a child ... which I, truthfully, found mostly boring.  But I liked the adult points of view, including the points of view of the adults who started out as children.  I can't honestly say that I loved this novel.  I love her writing style but I found the structure of the novel caused me difficulty engaging with the characters.  But I enjoyed it enough that I'll read the next two books.

5.  A Fine Summers Day by Charles Todd.  The next in the Inspector Rutledge series, Todd goes back in time to before the Great War, before Rutledge became a victim of PTSD.  I was doubtful about this, prequels often don't work.  There is no suspense because we know what comes next.  But this one does work.  The future doesn't really matter for the story itself and seeing Rutledge as he was before the War makes Rutledge after the War much sadder.  So far, the writing duo of Charles Todd, hasn't managed to create a woman character worthy of Rutledge but I wondered if maybe one of the female characters in this volume might come back later.  And no, I don't mean the vapid fiance, Jean who of course is back.

6.  The Children Act by Ian McEwan.  I admit to being a big Ian McEwan fan.  I like the way he strings sentences together and I usually like the settings of his novels.   This one is set in the legal community of London.  I spent some time in London during one trip wandering around near Lincoln's Inn and so I could picture some of the settings.  It's not a long novel and I flew through it.  Not my very favorite McEwan novel but I did enjoy it.

7.  Poetry of the First World War:  An Anthology edited by Tim Kendall.  I've been working my way through the poems in this anthology for three or four months and finally finished it.  My immediate take away was that it wasn't a surprise that, of the poets that survived the war, only Robert Graves really went on to great things.  My second thought was that I really don't like most of the WWI poets.  I was glad to find the Laurence Binyon poem, For the Fallen, from whence came the famous stanza: "They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:  Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them."  I don't think I had ever read the entire poem before. But it ended up being symbolic of the entire set of poems.  Certain lines in some of the poems struck me, very few entire poems touched me.  I might, however, read some more Robert Graves.