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.
Saturday, May 16, 2015
Saturday, April 4, 2015
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.
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.
Friday, March 20, 2015
TV
I've been watching quite a bit of good TV lately:
1. Vikings.
2. Broadchurch, Season 2.
3. Outlander, Season 1.
4. Game of Thrones, Season 4.
1. Vikings.
2. Broadchurch, Season 2.
3. Outlander, Season 1.
4. Game of Thrones, Season 4.
Sunday, March 8, 2015
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.
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.
Friday, February 13, 2015
Bernadette Peters in Concert
Last weekend Bernadette Peters was in town to perform for one night. Well, not really in town. She was in St. Charles at Lindenwood University's J. Scheiddegger Center for the Arts. This was my first visit to this facility, and I was impressed.
I've seen Bernadette Peters in concert a few times and she was, as usual, highly entertaining. Wearing a signature slinky gown, backed by a full orchestra, she strutted onto the stage to perform Let Me Entertain You, a song from the musical Gypsy, which she starred in a few years ago on Broadway. That wasn't one of the songs she sang in that show but it was the type of song that Peters loves to sell. She followed that up with No One is Alone from Into the Woods, another show she starred in on Broadway and another song she didn't perform in the original production. From there she went on to There is Nothing Like a Dame, from Rogers and Hammerstein's South Pacific. This number is usually performed by a chorus of men dressed as sailors but Peters vamped it in high style.
The nice thing about a concert is that the performer can perform Broadway Musical songs that she would be the wrong age, or sex, or even size to perform in the actual Broadway show. And Peters took advantage of that, performing Some Enchanted Evening, again from South Pacific, and Johanna from Sweeney Todd. She did When I Marry Mr. Snow from Carousel, a song she would now be far to old to perform in the show itself.
In between numbers she chatted to the audience, although I had heard much of her schtick about having a house in Florida to sell before. Although she must be in her mid-60's she looks great and can still pull off the sexy pout when singing the Peggy Lee classic, Fever, on top of a piano.
But my favorite part of the show was the two songs from Follies that she sang. These were songs she sang herself in the show a couple of years ago: In Buddy's Eyes and Am I Losing My Mind. Peters can take a lyric and deliver it in a way that makes you hear it for the first time. I would have predicted that I didn't need to hear Send in the Clowns ever again in my life, but she made it fresh.
Her high notes are not always as bell-like as they have been in the past, but she can still deliver. And she is probably the world's leading interpreter of the songs of Stephen Sondheim. One of my favorite songs that she performs is Sondheim's You Could Drive a Person Crazy.
Her final song was Sondheim's Being Alive, and she gave it her all. For an encore she performed a song that she wrote herself to support her favorite charity, Broadway Barks.
It was a wonderful evening of show tunes by a Broadway legend.
Friday, February 6, 2015
Tango Buenos Aires
I'm a sucker for live tango (for filmed tango too, for that matter). I can never get over the fact that they aren't accidentally kicking each other through the whole performance. I constantly rue the fact that I am uncoordinated and could never learn to tango - I mean, really tango.
Dance St. Louis brought us, this past weekend, "direct from Buenos Aires, Argentina" Tango Buenos Aires performing "a journey through dance and music of the life of Eva Peron". The live dance performance was accompanied by live music (always a joy) performed by an ensemble of pianist Fernando Marzon, bandoneon players Marco Antonio Fernandez and Emiliano Guerrero, violinist Mayumi Urgino and bassists Roberto Santocono and Sebastian Noya (there was only one bass in our performance and I don't know which one was playing).
Bandoneons are like accordians - the old fashioned kind - like what the Italian waiter plays in the famous spaghetti scene in Lady and the Tramp. Some of the music was familiar and some was composed for the performance. All of the musicians were wonderful but I particularly liked the violinist who had a couple of extensive solos that brought huge rounds of applause from the audience.
You'll notice that I'm speaking more of the music than the dance. That's because the music in a way seemed the center of the evening. The dancers sometimes (not always) seemed secondary.
The "journey" was, of course, all in dance. If I didn't already have an idea of the biography of Eva Peron (mostly from watching Evita) I probably would have been lost. But it wouldn't have mattered because most of the dances could have stood alone without a story. At the end of the first act the men perform Las Boleadoras - these are dances where each man holds an Argentinian tool used to catch cattle in the countryside in each of his hands - ropes with a weight at the end. The men would swing the two ropes and make clacking noises on the ground with them. The combination of dance and the rhythmic sounds of the ropes hitting the ground were compelling. Then one of the men took center stage and performed on his own for a good 10 minutes without any accompaniment other than two box drums that the other dancers drummed. At times he swung his ropes so fast that it was hard to believe that he wouldn't hit himself with the ropes. The audience was wowed.
The second act also had some dances between various couples that were exquisitely done. Strangely, the program never told us the names of the various dancers so I don't know who was who. It seemed that the female dancers especially were of varying degrees of virtuosi, one of them seemed more of a beginner than the others. Another was perfect, holding herself straight and haughty - the way you always picture tango dancers - her arms and hands casually elegant and her footwork impeccable.
Tango Buenos Aires has visited St. Louis a number of times previously. I always enjoy them when I get a chance to see them. I hope they come back the next time they tour.
Dance St. Louis brought us, this past weekend, "direct from Buenos Aires, Argentina" Tango Buenos Aires performing "a journey through dance and music of the life of Eva Peron". The live dance performance was accompanied by live music (always a joy) performed by an ensemble of pianist Fernando Marzon, bandoneon players Marco Antonio Fernandez and Emiliano Guerrero, violinist Mayumi Urgino and bassists Roberto Santocono and Sebastian Noya (there was only one bass in our performance and I don't know which one was playing).
Bandoneons are like accordians - the old fashioned kind - like what the Italian waiter plays in the famous spaghetti scene in Lady and the Tramp. Some of the music was familiar and some was composed for the performance. All of the musicians were wonderful but I particularly liked the violinist who had a couple of extensive solos that brought huge rounds of applause from the audience.
You'll notice that I'm speaking more of the music than the dance. That's because the music in a way seemed the center of the evening. The dancers sometimes (not always) seemed secondary.
The "journey" was, of course, all in dance. If I didn't already have an idea of the biography of Eva Peron (mostly from watching Evita) I probably would have been lost. But it wouldn't have mattered because most of the dances could have stood alone without a story. At the end of the first act the men perform Las Boleadoras - these are dances where each man holds an Argentinian tool used to catch cattle in the countryside in each of his hands - ropes with a weight at the end. The men would swing the two ropes and make clacking noises on the ground with them. The combination of dance and the rhythmic sounds of the ropes hitting the ground were compelling. Then one of the men took center stage and performed on his own for a good 10 minutes without any accompaniment other than two box drums that the other dancers drummed. At times he swung his ropes so fast that it was hard to believe that he wouldn't hit himself with the ropes. The audience was wowed.
The second act also had some dances between various couples that were exquisitely done. Strangely, the program never told us the names of the various dancers so I don't know who was who. It seemed that the female dancers especially were of varying degrees of virtuosi, one of them seemed more of a beginner than the others. Another was perfect, holding herself straight and haughty - the way you always picture tango dancers - her arms and hands casually elegant and her footwork impeccable.
Tango Buenos Aires has visited St. Louis a number of times previously. I always enjoy them when I get a chance to see them. I hope they come back the next time they tour.
Sunday, February 1, 2015
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.
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.
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