sensible shoes: a liberal librarian's blog

Who knows what is going to survive the cutting room floor, but right now I feel like the coolest person on the planet.

For some reason, TCR glommed on to a news story about a library that denied a child borrowing privileges because he wasn't a resident of their town.  The town where the family does live has refused to fund the regional library, because they think a $12/year per capita tax is too expensive for unlimited access to books, DVDs, databases, educational programs and expert research help (can you tell I'm biased here?)

ANYWAY, the politics of library funding aside, when you've got a cute kid who wants a library book, you've got a news story.  Since the family didn't want to step foot inside the library that denied them privileges, they asked if they could film inside my library and just pretend it was the other (mean, anti-kid) library.

What was interesting was how staged the segment is. They wanted shots of the child bringing books to the circulation desk to be checked out.  It involved multiple takes and calls of "Action!" More like a movie than a news story: this was, literally, fake news.  I'm not an idiot, and I know that TCR and The Daily Show are fake news, but I sort of thought the field pieces were based on reality.

I have a feeling that TCR will end up ridiculing the "mean library", and I feel bad about being part of the ruse, but hey - I was filmed for The Colbert Report!

(by the way, if the story and my footage survives, I'm the lady checking out the books).

A Reliable Wife

In 1907, Ralph Truitt, a wealthy but lonely and embittered  Wisconsin businessman advertises for a wife . He ends up with Catherine Land, posing as a "simple, honest woman," but who carries with her a little blue bottle of something and dreams about the time when she'll have all his money.  Uh-oh!  

The book is an odd combination of a fast-moving, suspenseful plot along with lyrical, almost hypnotic prose.  The page-turning story is ultimately subservient to the psychological development of the characters, which makes it just my cup of tea.    A beautiful, ultimately uplifting book that would make a good book club selection.

Slammerkin

This is another gripping read from Donoghue, author of The Sealed Letter. Mary  Saunders, the daughter of a struggling London seamstress, is disowned after selling herself for a ribbon. She becomes a street prostitute in London and escapes to Monmouth, near Wales, when a notorious pimp comes after her.  She is sheltered by  her estranged mother's friend, telling her  that her "dying" mother's last wish was that her friend look after her girl. She becomes a skilled seamstress, but despite being safe and well-treated she still longs for independence and glamour, and returns to whoring to make money for a return to London.

Donoghue did a great job creating likable but flawed female characters in The Sealed Letter.  Mary Saunders, too,  is a complex character - you have to admire her smarts and her spirit, but you want to shake her as she throws away a chance at security and love for the sake of beautiful clothes.  I like the fact that the book is true to its historical setting, but not ponderously written.  And while the story is harrowing and ultimately unhappy, Donoghue doesn't pile on the misery in a way that depresses.  

The Last Child

John Hart's new novel was a huge disappointment to me.  I loved his last, Down River, because of the beautifully rendered setting and the rich characterization.  This one sacrifices setting and character to plot.  

It's a dandy plot, admittedly, about a 13 year-old boy desperate to find his missing twin sister, and the police detective obsessed with the case and perhaps with the missing girl's mother, as well.  It's a fast-paced affair, with the requisite one-sentence paragraphs to keep things moving, although to be accurate, they are usually not sentences.

Just fragments.

Unfortunately, the book calls upon too many tv-movie cliches: the angst-ridden detective, his politically-minded boss who throws bureaucratic obstacles in his way, the rich, well-connected and evil businessman, the beautiful, weak woman who needs the hero to rescue her.

The pivotal character is the boy, Johnny, who takes it upon himself to find his sister.  He has studied up on vision quests and native American lore, and armed himself with eagle feathers, for reasons that remain obscure to me.  This character is a major missed opportunity.  I would love to have had a better look inside him, but the imperative of the
suspense-novel structure precluded that.

Oh, and I pinpointed the doers pretty early.

The Little Stranger

In the newest from Sarah Waters, set in postwar Britain, a family living in a dilapidated manor house are befriended by a country doctor whose mother had been a servant there.  They have the mundane troubles of the fading gentry: lack of money, the seeming irrelevance of their class in the new England, a house that they can't maintain.  With all that difficulty, it seems superfluous when a malevolent poltergeist manifests, apparently intent on tormenting them to  the point of madness.

I love this writer.  Her sense of place is incredibly vivid and her characters tug at your heart.   Like many of her novels, this one starts slow and then grabs you by the throat and won't let go - I was up until 2:00 a.m. finishing it. 

Exit Ghost (Vintage International)

I didn't love this latest (and last?) installment of Roth's Nathan Zuckerman novels.  Zuckerman, impotent and incontinent following prostate surgery, leaves his Berkshires haven for Manhattan.  He connects with the lover of his late literary hero, I. E. Lonoff, an aggressive would-be biographer of Lonoff who claims to know a secret, and a young couple with whom he agrees to swap homes for a year.  The story was absorbing, and the writing as good as always, but the tone put me off.  Zuckerman seems to equate his sexual impotency with his literary decline, and that's so facile.  He also seems to revere the Great Male Writers with their Big Ideas and their Propulsive Energy, and gives me the impression he would disdain women writers.  I've been reading a Roth novel a year, and the recent ones I've read didn't have this vaguely anti-feminist tone.  

For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Chicago

Simon Baatz has written a thorough, workmanlike account of the notorious thrill-killing that inspired the films Compulsion and Rope.  Baatz's recounting of the murder is chilling, and his explanation of the legal strategy behind the defense and the prosecution is fascinating.  Conventional wisdom has it that Clarence Darrow's brilliant summation is what saved the boys from the gallows, but Baatz notes that the judge in the case specifically disregarded Darrow's arguments and imposed a life sentence on other grounds.  Actually, Baatz seems to be faintly contemptuous of Darrow's defense.  I would have liked to hear a bit more of Darrow's own words so I could decide for myself.

The Plague of Doves

This is the story of Pluto, North Dakota, and how generations of its residents are affected by the brutal murder of a family and the lynching of a group of Indians innocent of the crime.

This is my first Erdrich, believe it or not.  The book is billed as a novel, but it  reads like a short story collection with a common theme.  Multiple points of view and time shifting, that's to be expected today, but what was different was the different emotional peaks - the individual stories had their own crescendos, and the novel as a whole did not, at least not in my reading of it.  Still, most of the stories were absorbing, and the characters felt real.  I'll read her again.

The Heretic's Daughter: A Novel

In Kathleen Kent's debut novel, Sarah Carrier, the daughter of a woman hanged for witchcraft in Massachusetts, recounts the story of the Salem witch hunts.

By telling the Salem story through  the eyes of one child, Kent does a good job in making these historical events real and immediate.    The characters are complex; only one, the family servant, is presented as thoroughly evil. Sarah's understanding of her family grows as she does.  Her mother  is presented initially as unloving and unpleasant, and her father as remote, but as we learn about their motives we grow to sympathize with them.  Likewise the family of relatives go from angels of mercy to enemies to - in one case, a martyr and savior of sorts.

A page turner with a little meat to it, and characters that breathe. What's not to like?

Side note:  one thing I learned while reading the book is that torture is not necessarily an effective way to get at the truth.  Imagine that.

Yesterday, a firestorm broke out over Amazon.com's delisting of gay and lesbian books from sales rankings and search tools, on the grounds of their "adult" content.  Heather Has Two Mommies is deemed "adult," as are books by E. M. Forster, Rita Mae Brown and Radclyffe Hall.  You can find these books by searching authors and titles, but if you're just browsing, you're out of luck.

The jury is out on why this this happened, but one thing is clear: Amazon has completely mishandled the public relations aspect of this.  Their first response to a complaint was a bland corporate email explaining that they delisted "adult" books out of consideration for all their customers.  Now, they're saying it was all a "software glitch."

Now, the word "glitch" is spectacularly non-communicative.  It means "something went wrong" - yeah, we kinda know that already.  It's actually a word used to deflect responsibility from human error.  I know from experience that describing a problem as a glitch really means "we did something new with our system we didn't think it through we had no idea of the enormous implications please leave us alone so we can fix it."  

I hope Amazon's glitch was that innocent.  But even so, they owe us a better explanation, because this glitch has intellectual freedom implications for readers and financial implications for writers.