Shakespeare & Company by Sylvia Beach

I was anxious to read this because Beach played such an important role in the American literary community in the Paris of her time but ended up with mixed feelings about the book. The part I enjoyed most was her relationship with James Joyce and the story of the publishing of Ulysses. But most of the book was just a catalog of the people who frequented her bookshop without many personal or even professional details. So much of her commentary was of the "one of the nicest persons I've ever met" type, which she said of almost everyone.

The Zimmermann Telegram by Barbara Tuchman

I had always thought that America entered the first World War because of German u-boat attacks. That was only a part of the picture. Tuchman describes how the British Intelligence Service breaks the German code and how this affected a scheme to keep America out of the war. By early 1917, the war was at a stalemate. The English and French were exhausted and running out of money. Germany was ready to launch a massive u boat navy, attack all ships, neutral or otherwise, and win the war. They were afraid this might tip the scale of American public opinion towards war. The Germans hoped to keep America so busy dealing with revolts in Mexico and threats from Japan that they would avoid any entanglements in Europe. Even though I knew the outcome, this book had me on the edge of my seat as the plot unfolded. Tuchman brings the characters to life and helps the reader to follow the rather complicated unfolding of events. I loved this book.

The Brontes Went to Woolworths by Rachel Ferguson

Set in 1930s London, this is the story of the Carnes family, three sisters who live with their widowed mother. The eldest, Dierdre, a journalist, is the narrator. Katrine is a struggling actress and Sheil is still in the schoolroom. They are not wealthy but of an educated class and the daughters of a "gentleman". The most striking their about them is the fantasy world that weaves in and out of their everyday lives. All the members of the family share imaginary friends based on dolls, toys, and sometimes real people they have briefly encountered. They have long, ongoing discussions of the daily doings of these people, discussing them as you would old friends with whom you are in daily contact. I found this very confusing to follow at first. Interspersed with this is a seance and ghostly visitors. During a vacation in Yorkshire, the Brontes make an appearance, although frankly, I had to read this portion twice to get what was happening. When her mother is called to jury duty, Dierdre is taken with the judge, Sir Herbert Toddington, and soon "Toddy" and his wife "Lady Mildred" have joined their fantasy world. But things begin to change when the family actually meets them. The story seems to shift at this point, moving at a quicker pace, and I found my interest growing. As their friendship with the Toddingtons develops, and the Brontes return with a disturbing result, the family has to look at the effect all of this is having on the youngest daughter. Although I was off to a shaky start at the beginning of the book, I found myself increasingly caught up in the story.

Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Wench gives a fascinating look at an aspect of slavery I had never imagined. The author sets the story in a real place, Tawawa House, which was a summer resort for both Northern and Southern whites. Southern slave owners would spend the summer hunting and fishing, accompanied by one of their female slaves. This is the story of four slaves who come every year with their owners. The resort is set in Ohio, free territory, and you would have expected the slaves to run. Perkins-Valdez explores the complicated relationships of these four and what a run for freedom would mean for them. There are practical considerations, such as leaving children behind, and emotional and psychological ones as well. The most fascinating story is that of Lizzie, who lives as her owner's mistress year round and has two children with him. She tells herself that they love each other, even though he won't free her or their children. It reminded me of the "Stockholm syndrome" where kidnap victims identify with their captors. Reenie comes every year with a man she calls Sir and explains to Lizzie that he is her half-brother, both having the same father. Mawu comes from a plantation in Louisiana and Sweet from Tennessee. They are unforgettable characters that stay with you after you've finished the story. This is an amazing book that I couldn't put down.

All Over Creation by Ruth Ozeki

All Over Creation is an ambitious book. Yumi Fuller returns home to Idaho with her three children after running away 25 years earlier. She is contacted by her childhood friend, Cass, when her parents are no longer able to care for themselves. It is interesting that her relationship with her parents has frozen in time when she runs away and she hasn't really changed at all in spite of having children of her own. Her anger with her father drives all her life choices. Once she settles in on the family potato farm, the second story begins, an invasion by the Seeds of Revolution, a group of peaceful hippies fighting genetic engineering in plants.
They have come to the farm because of the writings of Yumi's father, Lloyd, and look to him as a sort of guru. The stories play out pretty much as I expected them to but the whole subplot on plant engineering was very interesting.

Short Cuts by Raymond Carver

I remember seeing Robert Altman's film Short Cuts several years ago and even though I couldn't put it all together, I was fascinated by the characters. I felt the same way reading Short Cuts by Raymond Carver on which the film was based. It is a series of vignettes, each giving me the feeling that I had dropped into someone's life mid-sentence. The stories deal with married couples experiencing distress ranging from the great, losing a child, to the small, hunting for a lost dog. There is no real resolution to them, you don't know what has come before or what will happen after, but I felt that I had shared an intense moment in someone's life. I hope to read more of Carver.

Homesick Creek: A Novel by Diane Hammond

Homesick Creek is set on the central Oregon coast. It is the story of two marriages. Anita, a former beauty queen with high hopes, is now middle-aged and overweight with very little expectations for her future. She fantasizes of a real home, a double-wide trailer she knows she'll never have. She is married to Bob, a weak, ineffectual alcoholic with a secret life who seems to take everything and give nothing to his marriage. The other story is that of their friends, Bunny and Hack. Hack is a Vietnam vet who has drifted into town with lots of secrets of his own. He is a car salesman with a roving eye married to Bunny, waitress at the local diner. Bunny and Anita have been best friends since childhood and lean on each other for support. Bunny seems to be marking time, waiting for the pain of Hack's leaving. Hack has other reasons for staying which become clear as the novel develops. The characters are very finely drawn and Hammond does a good job of describing how little they can settle for. There were the elements in the plot I expected, alcoholism, drug use, bitterness and despair. But also some I didn't expect which made it a much more satisfying story.

The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West

I had some difficulty getting into this book. Although not strictly autobiographical, West has based the characters on her family. The story revolves around the fortunes of the Aubrey family. The narrator is Rose, one of the four children of Piers, a small time newspaper editor and pamphleteer, and Clare, formerly a concert pianist who gave up her career upon marriage. Rose struck me at first as another example of the peculiarly British fictional character, the very precocious child who patronizes and condescends to the adults around her. But as I continued, I began to realize that West had created Rose with an adult eye so that she could describe their failings and weaknesses of the others while at the same time loving them with a child's unquestioning love. She describes her father with the words "sneering" and "swaggering", while expressing her adoration. The mother is so sensitive that hearing music performed by one who is not gifted makes her physically ill and yet she is the strength in the family, holding them together through poverty and disappointment. I gradually became fond of them all and fascinated by their lives. My biggest disappointment was the ending, which ends abruptly, almost as if the narrator suddenly put her pen down and had no chance to continue.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

I've just finished The Help and was pleasantly surprised. This was a selection of my book group and I probably wouldn't have searched it out on my own. It's a theme that has been dealt with so many times, black servants/white employers in the south, that I wondered what the author would add. But she has created some compelling characters and I found myself unable to put it down. The main white character, Skeeter, is a well-to-do, educated young woman in Jackson, MS, in the early 60’s. She is doesn't quite fit the southern belle pattern, not because she doesn't want to, but because she doesn't measure up, being socially awkward, very tall, and not especially pretty. She has graduated from college and struggles to reconcile what she has learned in college with what her mother and peers expect of her, mainly a good marriage. Her character is a foil to the other young white women, who range from those blindly following the community social leaders, to those leaders, acting from ignorance and hate. But Skeeter is amazingly naïve in her understanding of how the black maids she encounters regard their employers, even though she is interested in the maids as persons.
Aibileen is one of the black maids, an older woman who has lost her only son to white violence. Her best friend, Minny, is younger, and the mother of four children. Both work in white homes, as maid and nanny to the children. Stockett does a good job of describing the complex mix of love for the children and resentment of the mothers that these women experience. Like the other black women who work as maids, they are totally dependent on the good will of the employers for their livelihood. This tension drives the unfolding of the plot.
The characters and the stories seem very real. I recommend this as an entertaining and interesting story.

Bleeding Heart Square by Andrew Taylor

I have just received this book which was offered in the February 2009 Early Reviewers program. It was well worth the wait. I love British mysteries but had never heard of Andrew Taylor. I will be reading more. Bleeding Heart Square is set in pre-WWII London. He weaves a tale of two types of evil, the institutional kind represented by the British Union of Fascists and a more personal evil of greed and betrayal. Lydia Langstone is escaping her abusive husband who is a member of the fascist organization and takes refuge with her neer-do-well father. Here she meets the other renters in the building, including Rory Wentworth, just back from India. He is searching for his fiancee's aunt, Phillipa Penhow, who used to own the house and has disappeared. The stories of all the characters weave around Penhow's disappearance and they all seem to be involved. In the midst of this, both Lydia and Rory try to dodge the violence of the Fascists as her husband tries to force her back home. Both stories are wrapped up very well with an ending I didn't expect.

The Book of William: How Shakespeare's First Folio Conquered the World by Paul Collins

I've just finished my fourth book, The Book of William: How Shakespeare's First Folio Conquered the World by Paul Collins. I think this book is a must read for those of us who love old books and Shakespeare but are not scholars. The author describes what printing was like in early 17th century, and how books were bought, sold, and cataloged. From a book sale at Sothebys to a Japanese university, he tracks the ownership of first folios and gives a sense of that rarified world where people have fortunes to spend on books. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The Little Book by Selden Edwards

This is my third book of the year. 72 to go!

This novel, involving time travel by three generations of the Burden family, begins in 1898 Vienna, then touches on every major event of the first half of the 20th Century. The story is told by the mother of Wheeler Burden. He is a bit of a cardboard character, as are the others: scholar, incredible athlete, rock star, a perfect character following in the footsteps of his perfect father, who was also a war hero who died at the hands of the Gestapo. Wheeler leaves 1969 San Francisco and suddenly finds himself in 1898 Vienna. The concept, that the Burden family affected almost every historical event of the time, is interesting but at times a bit strained. I found it hard to follow the debates between Wheeler and Freud. I don't want to be a spoiler but Wheeler Burden's love affair was very disturbing, even creepy. But in spite of all that, I really enjoyed the book and couldn't put it down. The author's description of fin de siecle Vienna is fascinating. The plot is very clever and I thought he dealt with the details of time travel, how it can affect the past and the future, very well.

The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

This is my second book of 2010. 73 to go!


I found this to be a very entertaining and interesting novel. Stein tells the story of Denny Swift, race car driver and owner of an amazing dog, Enzo. The story is told through Enzo's eyes, as he spends his life preparing, he is convinced, to be reincarnated as a man. There is a lot of detail about racing which helped me to understand the appeal of this sport, at least to the drivers. Enzo is Denny's best friend and support as he goes through incredible difficulty and loss in his life. Enzo is full of observations and ideas about the life of men around him, some of it quite profound. It is a very sweet story but I think the author does a good job of avoiding getting too sappy.

First book of 2010!

Here is a review of my first book of 2010. Only 74 to go!

Canoe Trip: North to Athabasca by David Curran

This is a recounting of a canoe trip taken by the author and a friend on an extremely remote wilderness river, the MacFarlane, in northern Saskatchewan. Curran describes his previous canoeing experience in wilderness areas of Maine. But, he explains, even though there are not many people there, there is evidence of their presence with dirt roads, trails, etc. He was looking for something more pristine. His descriptions of the MacFarlane area, from the geology, to the black flies that made life miserable, is very detailed. I really enjoyed this book and came away with the sense that I had shared the experience which is what every arm chair adventurer wants.

75 Books in 2010

Although I read every day, I've never kept track of how many books I read in a year. I noticed on Librarything a group committed to reading 75 books in 2010 and decided to give it a try. I have no idea how close to that I might come but it will be interesting to see. I wonder if just making the commitment will stir me on to read more. I will keep you posted on how I'm doing and review as many as I can. I'm just finishing William Boyd's Blue Afternoon and with the holidays coming, my reading time will be severely shortened. But I've got my first book of the New Year selected, Canoe Trip: North to Athabasca by David Curran. Just the ticket for a stormy winter night, the true story of a wilderness adventure. I'm looking forward to this one.

The Polish Officer by Alan Furst

While Furst is generally categorized as a writer of spy novels, I think that's a very narrow way of looking at his books. He is an excellent novelist. He has chosen Europe during WWII as his setting and all his books are so well researched, they "feel" authentic. In this novel, as in his others, a strong but basically ordinary man is tested to the limit. Polish cartographer, Alexander de Milja, is recruited into the Polish Intelligence Service after the German invasion of Poland and is thrown in to a series of dangerous assignments. Furst has a deft touch in surrounding his heroes with very real and interesting characters, all facing life and death decisions daily as they struggle to survive. My only criticism of this book is that it jumps abruptly from one place to another as de Milja is reassigned to various countries. I would have liked a little more transition. Also, his love interest, a woman who assists him with his intelligence work, disappears with a very brief and unsatisfying explanation. While not his best book (I think Night Soldiers and Kingdom of Shadows are better), this is a fascinating read and I highly recommend it.

The Octopus by Frank Norris

For today’s reader, this novel might best be summed up as “the more things change, the more they stay the same”. Set in the final years of the 19th century in the San Joaquin Valley of California, farmers, with thousands of acres of wheat under cultivation, are totally dependent on the railroad for transporting their crops to market. The railroad’s corporate greed and corruption, whose long arms extend to law enforcement, the courts, and government, are pitted against the farmers, who represent the American sense of independence, entrepreneurs who are working hard and think they are in charge of their own destiny. The result is inevitable disaster. By today’s standards, Norris’s writing seems very idealized. The character of Vanamee is more a symbol than a real character. After his young love is raped and killed, he spends his life wandering, yearning for his lost love, and has endless conversations attempting to describe the ineffable, until his final scene in a cemetery calling up her spirit. I found this very hard to get through. The farmers were a more interesting lot, from “The Governor” Magnus Derrick, a highly principled man who thinks honorable men always win, to Annixter, a wealthy farmer who spends his time reading Charles Dickens. It is interesting that Norris represents the railroad as almost a force of nature, a movement that cannot be stopped. He doesn’t really hold the officials to any moral standard. I suspect that this novel is primarily read today for historical interest.

The Hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb

This is not a book I would have picked up to read but it was a Book Group selection so dutifully read. I found it more engrossing than expected. The book is about Caelum and Maureen Quirk, teacher and school nurse at Columbine. He is absent on the fateful day and she was a survivor. The author writes in great historical detail of the event at the school itself, the history of the shooters, and the impact on the whole community. Lamb details the effect of Maureen's post-traumatic stress on her husband and marriage, her downward spiral and ultimate tragedy. The story is told from Caelum's point of view and the reader gets to experience his slow understanding of himself and his behavior. My biggest problem with the book comes with the second half. Lamb leaves his original story and veers off on a related but essentially separate story of Caelum's history and exploration of his family through the discovery of some old family documents. I found myself skipping ahead to try to figure out who these people were that he was writing about. I found this section much slower and less interesting. I kept wanting him to get back to his original story. This second story could have been done as a sequel.

The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa

The Leopard is set in Sicily in the 1860's, around the time a united Italy was formed. The plot involves events in the lives of Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, and his family, set against a backdrop of revolution and the collapse of the old aristocracy. I read this in translation so my comments reflect that rather than the original Italian but the language is breathtaking. When Fabrizio walks into a room in the palace, the reader follows his eyes as they take in every detail and hear his reflections on the history of the objects there. There is such a strong sense of place. I was fascinated with his description of the Sicilian character. When a representative of the new national government asks him to join the Senate, describing all the improvements that will be coming to Sicily, Fabrizio declines, explaining that Sicilians don't want improvements. "They are coming to teach us good manners...But they won't succeed because we think we are gods." The story of his family is simple: love, marriage, jealousy, death, all seen through the old man's eyes and filtered through his understanding of the collapse around him. This is a marvelous book.

A Flickering Light by Jane Kirkpatrick

As in previous novels, Jane Kirkpatrick has based this story on an historical person, in this case her grandmother. Jessie Ann Gaebele lived in Minnesota in the early years of the 20th century. In the story, she discovers a love of photography and dreams of working in what was then a man's profession. Against her parents wishes, she begins training with a local portrait photographer, F. J. Bauer. Kirkpatrick does a good job of describing photography of the time, the use of glass plates and mixing of dangerous chemicals. The conflict in the story arises as a strong attraction grows between Jessie and her employer. The author does a good job of developing her characters and explaining their motivations. By today's standards, the relationship between Jessie and Bauer is almost innocent, more one of feelings than physical actions. But in the community in which they live, their attraction is sinful and shocking. This is the second of Kirkpatrick's novels that I've read and she seems to be drawn to strong females, struggling to overcome the limits placed on women at the time. This book is very well written, with interesting believable characters. A special treat were the actual photographs taken by Jessie and woven into the plot.