39 posts tagged “books”

Lillian survives a Russian pogrom that kills her parents, husband and presumably her child.  She flees to America

where she finds work as a seamstress for a Yiddish theater. Then one day a cousin arrives at her door and tells her that her daughter may still be alive, secreted away to Siberia by a neighbor. Lillian decides she must travel to Siberia to find her.  This sounds impossibly grim, and I haven't begun to describe every hardship that Lillian endure.  In fact, the book is oddly upbeat, leavened with a survivor's optimism, initiative and sense of humor.

I spent a couple of years thinking this book was about three women named June!  In fact, it's about three distinct summers in the lives of a Scottish family and the people they love  (or don't).   The first section is about the family patriarch, Paul McLeod, who is vacationing in Greece upon the death of his wife, and reflecting on his imperfect marriage.  The second section, the emotional heart of the book, concerns Paul's son Fenno, a reserved, even stodgy

gay man who has emigrated to New York where he befriends a music critic dying of AIDS. The final section is about Fern (we also meet her in part one) who is coping with the ambiguous death of her husband and the discovery that  she is pregnant with her new lover's child.

Glass has created likeable, flawed, sometimes infuriating characters. I especially enjoyed her depiction of the McLeod family dynamics.  I seem to read about a lot of women, and it was interesting reading about brothers.

Oh, I didn't actually read this book; I listened to the unabridged audiobook narrated by John Keating.  I'm not usually fussy about narrators, but Keating was hard to listen to.  His American accents were just plain bad.  He made all the American men sound like whiny queens.  OK, a lot of the American characters are gay, but I hope we all know that not all gay men sound like whiny queens! Also, he seemed to slow down when "talking American," as if he needed all his concentration to pull it off. But how many New Yorkers are agonizingly slow talkers? I didn't much care for the third section of the book, but I wonder how much was because this section was full of Americans with their slow whiny accents.

The blurb on the back of my copy calls this “a cracking good yarn,” and indeed it is.  Shortlisted for the Booker, this novel is about George Edalji, a country lawyer accused of a series of terrible crimes.  Justice is in short supply in the rural England of the early 1900s, but George gains an influential friend when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle takes up his case. The plot is intriguing – and it’s based on a true story – but it’s the two protagonists that carry the day.  Each is finely drawn, and deeply sympathetic despite their many human flaws.

This is a good airplane book: short, slight, diverting.  The subtitle “Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog” is overstating the case; Marley, a slobbery, tail-wagging, galumphing yellow lab, is really just a run-of-the-mill bad boy. If you like dogs, you’ll be amused, but really Grogan has nothing original to say about dogs, life or love.

ETA: On reflection, I think I was too easy on this book, and I think the Grograns were lousy dog owners.

I read and loved most of Stephen King's early novels and then got sidetracked.  This one is quintessential King, encompassing all that I enjoy about his books and also all that I find annoying.

Lisey is the widow of a renowned novelist, Scott Landon, who in trying to clean out her husband's studio dredges up suppressed memories of his stories of extreme child abuse and his experience in a parallel universe.  The other world is a metaphor for the artistic imagination and also for the place, both safe and dangerous, that abused kids construct for themselves internally.  The episodes that take in that other world are the most vivid and interesting in the book.

The story is extremely inventive and suspenseful (oh, I forgot, Lisey is being stalked by a homicidal maniac), and the characters are interesting.  What still and I suppose forever turns me off about King's writing is the stilted dialog and the cutesy, look-at-me prose in general. Here, the effect is magnified by King's use of the invented slang used by Scott and Lisey. It got on my smucking nerves.

Genna Meade is the well-meaning daughter of well-to-do, radical hippie parents. Her college roommate Minette, the daughter of an African American minister, is reserved, prickly, eccentric and unpopular.  Genna is almost desperate to win Minette's friendship, but a series of racist incidents in their dorm complicates their relationship and sets the stage

for a tragedy. 

As always, Oates presents finely drawn characters and an engrossing story.  My only criticism is that Genna seems too naive, politically and socially, considering her home environment.  The college, too, seemed quaint and genteel, and I doubt even a Main Line women's college was genteel in the 1970s.

The subtitle is Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon--And the Journey of a Generation, so you can guess why I

bought it.  I cheated and only read the Joni chapters so far.  The author managed to talk to a lot of people, and uncovered stories that as far as I can tell have never been told before.  It's certainly interesting stuff, and for the most part the author is fair.  But the overwhelming emphasis is on Joni's romantic relationships, and that was disappointing.  The woman is an incredibly ambitious artist.  I would have liked to read more about her artistic vision and her struggles as a woman in the music business.

In The Road, an unnamed father and son are trying to survive in the aftermath of a worldwide catastrophe that leaves

the earth literally dying.  They are heading south in attempt to escape worst of winter, but the world is cloaked in winter.  Finding food is difficult, as all animals and plants are apparently dead by this time. There is danger from bands of survivors who have their own ideas where to find food.

We never know what caused the disaster, just as we never know the characters' names or the precise time and place.  It's not about geopolitics or man's evil nature.  It has interesting things to say about god or the absence of god, but it's not by any means a religious parable.

Bleak? Yes. Monotonous? Yes, at times, deliberately so.  But it is remarkably readable.  And the character of the little boy is brilliantly rendered.

Haunting doesn't begin to describe this work. Read it, please. 

The Age of American Unreason is about the dumbing down of the United States in many areas: belief in creationism

and in biblical inerrancy, the inability of students to locate countries on a map, widespread innumeracy, civic illiteracy, and the media's promotion of junk science, to name but a few examples.  She lays the blame on the video revolution, on the ascendancy of cultural studies in universities, and of course on the religious right.

She laments the passing of middlebrow culture, which encouraged non-academics to better themselves with good reading.  As a librarian, I'm also sad to see the end of that era, and to see how uninterested the library community is in preserving it.  These days, the public library culture is mostly about mass-marketing and giving 'em (the presumably stupid public) what they want, meaning what the publishers tell them to want. Read your James Patterson and like it, you dumb slob, because the library is going to buy 20 copies. Meanwhile, we're discarding our Michener books (Jacoby looks fondly on those fat middlebrow tomes) because they don't circulate enough.

Of all the books I've read about suicide attempts, A Long Way Down is the funniest.  Nick Hornby takes four disparate

characters, places them on a ledge on New Year's Eve, and lets them interact.  Fortunately, they don't jump - hence the title.  Having decided, temporarily, to live, they form an unstable and often hilarious alliance that helps each of them learn to survive.  Hornby is very conscious of not being hokey and inspirational, yet the book ends up being moving.  

I could have done with fewer pop culture references, but I'm told that's Hornby.