RidgewayGirl's Reading

Currently Reading (or about to begin)



Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace I expect that I will be reading this one for much of the year.

Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell

A Cupboard Full of Coats by Yvvette Edwards

Best books of 2012 -- coming soon.

Books read in 2013

January
Broken Harbor by Tana French
Forged: Why Fakes are the Great Art of Our Age by Jonathon Keats
My First Murder by Leena Lehtolainen
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
The Female of the Species by Joyce Carol Oates
Cell 8 by Anders Roslund
Glaciers by Alexis M. Smith
There But For The by Ali Smith
Black Irish by Stephan Talty
Afterwards by Rosamund Lupton

February
The Moon By Whale Light by Diane Ackerman
The Collector by John Fowles
Black Dahlia & White Rose by Joyce Carol Oates
NW by Zadie Smith
Man in the Woods by Scott Spencer
The Death of Sweet Mister by Daniel Woodrell
Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan
Tenth of December by George Saunders

March
The Liars' Club by Mary Karr
Learning to Swim by Sara J. Henry
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton
The Round House by Louise Erdrich
Raised Right by Alisa Harris

April
Dear Life by Alice Munro
Lessons in French by Hilary Reyl
A Quiet Belief in Angels by R.J. Ellory
The Cat by Edeet Ravel http://www.librarything.com/work/13194798

More books read in 2013

Interesting books mentioned by other Club Read members:

Quiet London by Siobhan Wall (mentioned by kidzdoc)
Traversa by Fran Sandham (discussed by dchaikin)
The Recognitions by William Gaddis (recommended by EF)
Paris Changing by Christopher Rauschenberg (spoken of in passing by petermc)
Trapeze by Simon Mawer (reviewed by southernbluestocking)
New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani (wandering_star reviewed it)
The Absolutist by John Boyne (from Cariola's thread)
Alfred Andersch and Ernst Toller (authors suggested by edwinbcn)
The Maimed by Hermann Ungar (arubabookwoman wrote an excellent review)
Great House by Nicole Krauss (kidzdoc loved this one)
How Literature Works by John Sutherland (Nickelini thought it had merit)
Portrait Of The Mother As A Young Woman by Friedrich Christian Delius and The Beauty and the Sorrow by Peter Englund (both beautifully reviewed by wandering_star)

I've put off opening a thread here until the year began, but it has, so here I am. Last year I focused on reading a little more thoughtfully and so read significantly fewer books than in 2011. I plan to continue in the same vein, beginning with Infinite Jest, which may take a while. I like the idea of footnotes with footnotes; let's see if I like the actual thing.

I suspect my reading this year will be the usual hodgepodge of dark crime novels, awards shortlists, dusty books whose residence on my shelves I cannot fully explain and a few Victorians and pure escapist nonsense thrown in randomly.

The best part, for me, of a new year beginning on Club Read is that I can, for a few months at least, follow all the threads.

Excited to follow your thread again! I always find your book choices interesting.

After a reasonably stressful holiday season I decided to begin the year with a book I'd been saving, Tana French's newest novel. For the uninitiated, French writes superb crime novels set in Dublin. They're basically stand-alone novels, although a character (sometimes major, sometimes barely mentioned) from the previous novel is the narrator of the next one.

In Broken Harbor, Mick "Scorcher" Kennedy is an ambitious detective on the murder squad. He prefers to work alone rather than have to share the work and credit with a partner. Mostly, he believes in keeping things under his control, whether in his personal or working life. So when a high-profile case comes his way only two weeks after being assigned a rookie to train, he prefers to be slowed down with the trainee rather than share the work with an equal. Patrick and Jenny Spain, along with their two children, were found in their home in Brianstown, a housing development built on the site of a village called Broken Harbor. Jenny survives, barely, but the other three are dead. The Spains had a perfect life, attractive and charming, they had never encountered adversity until the economic crash laid off Patrick and left them with a worthless house in a partially built and fast decaying neighborhood.

Scorcher's a bit of a jackass, with his constant lecturing on how to be a good detective, how to live life, on the need for order and for the world to make sense. Despite this, French makes him so wholly sympathetic that I spent the novel rooting for him, and his rookie partner, an awkward young man who so clearly shows his working class background. Broken Harbor is about relationships, and trust and the ways we grow together and apart. French has a lovely, understated way of building relationships between characters, and here the way the characters interact and relate with each other is so well done. I'm looking forward to the next book, and I know who I'd like it to be about.

Do you want the next book to be about the Rookie?

I have In the Woods by Tana French kicking around here somewhere. I might just get to it when I'm in the mood for a mystery detective story

Will be interested in what you have to say about Leena Lehtolainen. Is anyone in Scandinavia not writing a crime novel? If my stress level is down this year, I won't need to go looking for new mystery authors, keeping up with the ones I already read should suffice. Corvus is reprinting Anne Holt's Hanne Wilhelmsen series (1222 is the most recent, and Hanne made an appearance in her Vik/Stubo series -- that was enough to hook me), so I have Blind Goddess coming from the UK (a preorder I had forgotten about). Alas, the book budget this year may prevent me from getting the others. I have the latest Val McDermid kicking around also (reading her stand-alones).

#1 How are you getting on with Infinite Jest? I have browsed it often, most recently last Sunday.

While I have not taken the leap and purchased it yet I did read the introduction and found the discussion on different types of books and people's prejudices to same fascinating.

I will be looking forward to you comments on it.

bas, I do want the next book to be about the rookie.

Avaland, the Lehtolainen is definitely a debut novel, but still interesting and I like the Finnish setting. I have hopes.

pgmcc, Infinite Jest is fun so far. The near future setting is interesting, especially since technology would consider some of the gadgets outdated today. The writing is interesting and very good. I skipped the introduction. Maybe I'll read it when I'm done.

Looking forward to following your reading this year.

Since you like dark crime, have you read David Peace's Red Riding Hood Quartet? Characters migrate among the 4 books, but in my view they must be read in order, and as a unit to be fully appreciated. They were one of my top reads from a few years ago. I believe Rebecca also liked them very much.

Oh, that does look good. I've put Nineteen Seventy-Four on my wish list. Thanks for the recommendation!

I've had Infinite Jest languishing on a shelf...for ??? years. I haven't done a "year long" read since 2006, and that was Gravity's Rainbow...

I will be lurking, to keep up with your progress...

;-}

Jeez, Jude. Someday I will read Pynchon, but I'm willing to wait a decade (or two)!

#15 Now that you mention it, Gravity's Rainbow is presently glowering at me from the bookshelf on my left.

#13, 14 I did like The Red Riding Quartet, and I read it entirely thanks to your recommendation, Deborah. GB84 too.

16> Or maybe you could supplement your reading of IJ with Gravity's Rainbow? Light, breezy reads both.

Go for it, Peter. I'm not touching it this year. I do have Mason & Dixon here, but it will rest undisturbed, although Infinite Jest is a fine ride so far, I have the feeling things will get rocky later. The opening chapters could almost have been written by Jonathan Letham or Michael Chabon.

Enjoyed your Tara French comments. Good luck with IJ. As for Gravities Rainbow....someday I'll get there.

Couldn't get into Gravity's Rainbow, personally, but I enjoyed Mason and Dixon very much.

I enjoyed your review of Broken Harbor. I've read In the Woods and The Likeness and really enjoyed them. I have Faithful Place and I'll have to pick up Broken Harbor one of these days as well.

If the purpose of contemporary art is to unsettle and to cause anxiety, might forgeries then be true art? asks Jonathon Keats in Forged: Why Fakes are the Great Art of Our Age. Of course, it only achieves its goal when it is revealed to be a fake, which is usually not the goal of the forger. But some, upon being discovered, tell all, or a version of all, in which some forgeries are possibly left unrevealed and fingers pointed in so many directions that museums, collectors and experts are left scrambling.

The body of Keats' book tells the stories of several famous forgers and a history of the roots of forgery, beginning in renaissance Italy, when copies were made of coveted works, leading to arguments later as to which version was the original. In this book, forgers seem to have similar motivations; technically brilliant, but lacking a personal vision or style, these artists were rejected by the critics and art community. They found work as restorers and their dissatisfaction allowed them to justify the deception. When their forgeries were celebrated, they could enjoy a secret laugh at the gullibility of the art community. Of course, revenge is only fun when the targets know they have been duped.

My favorite story concerned the restoration of the Schleswig cathedral in 1937. It had been badly restored in the nineteenth century with significant overpainting and as Lothar Malskat began work, entire frescoes crumbled to dust. So he simply recovered the walls with his own freehand painting. The church's restoration became a Nazi success story, with Himmler having books about the project distributed to schools across Germany. With the reputation of the Nazi party at stake, the discovery of a group of turkeys embellishing a painting supposedly painted in 1300 had to be explained away, turkeys being new world animals. And so a group of German vikings who sailed to the new world and brought back the animals was "discovered", because questioning a Nazi endorsed project was too dangerous.

Forgery has always fascinated me. I need to get this. One of my favorite novels ever, The Recognitions, is focussed primarily on Flemish art forgery, and an art dealer who flourishes in its fraudulent underworld. Thanks for this!

Fascinating. A lot of by Robertson Davies's What's Bred in the Bone, the second volume of The Cornish Trilogy, as well as the other two novels in it, also deal with forgery and what is "real" and what is "forgery," so that got me interested in the subject. And thanks for the recommendation of The Recognitions, EnriqueFreeque.

EF, that looks interesting. I've made a note of it.

Rebecca, I read The Cornish Trilogy several years ago. Time for a reread.

That seething stew of the art world is endlessly interesting and forgery is just a fun topic, being an intelligent crime, with justifications that almost, almost work.

Forged: Why fakes are the great art of our Age sounds like one for me to read.

This might be of interest:
Thomas Patrick Keating (March 1, 1917 – February 12, 1984) was an art restorer and famous art forger who claimed to have faked more than 2,000 paintings by over 100 different artists.1

Thomas Patrick Keating not to be confused with Jonathon Keating the conceptual artist, but I like the similar names. No conspiracy of course.

Bas, he's one of the guys in the book, and one of the most sympathetic.

I like Scandinavian crime novels. The setting and the writing style enhance the genre, and the books that get translated into English are usually good. Of course, now so much is being published that I've also come across a few written and plotted just as sloppily as the worst mass market fiction produced here.

My First Murder is the first installment in a Finnish series by Leena Lehtolainen. In it, Maria Kallio is a reluctant homicide detective, having switched to policing partway through a law degree and contemplating returning to it. She's put in charge of what looks to be a fairly simple case when her immediate boss is off work and not due to return soon. Some members of a student choir group went off to spend a weekend together at a summer house and in the morning one of their number is found dead at the edge of the water. Somewhat differently than the usual Scandinavian crime novel, My First Murder is set up like a classic British detective story with a clear group of suspects gathered together in one place. While they do all return to Helsinki, the suspect pool is finite and Kallio is left to discover who the murderer is almost entirely on her own, which of course she does.

I'll confess right here that I find authors like Agatha Christie boring. I appreciate that they laid the building blocks for the modern crime novel, but I don't find the structure all that interesting. Lehtolainen does an adequate job and her protagonist is likable, if not always believable, but I doubt I'll read any more by her. Incidentally, this structure was used more successfully by another Scandinavian author,
Anne Holt, in 1222.

#30 I find authors like Agatha Christie boring.

I was in Hodges Figgis in Dublin last week. They have re-laid out their floor plan and moved some of their book categories around. I noticed that they had split their crime section into two separate areas, one called "Crime", and the other called, "Cozy Crime". I thought the latter was so amusing, yet appropriate and helpful to the people who like the traditional, less violent crime fiction.

>31 pgmcc: I thought it was interesting that Hodges Figgis is using crime and cozy crime. I used to tag books as mysteries, and then the tag 'crime' started slipping in (yes, I know...sounds like I had no control!). What's the difference between mystery and crime fiction now?

>24 RidgewayGirl: 28 must get this, looks fascinating. Also love forgers and all that stuff, and just finished the Cornish trilogy.

EF, when you've done IJ a second time, can we do The Recognitions together? I want to read it again.

Wow, I looked at The Recognitions in a bookstore. It's mammoth!

Seriously, that is one for the kindle! But I'm not looking at it until I've finished with Infinite Jest. Maybe a group read early next year for The Recognitions?

I think that separating crime novels from cozy mysteries is probably a good idea, protecting readers of both genres. Lisa, in the broadest sense, traditional mysteries are more like a puzzle to be solved, with a setting that limits the pool of possible suspects and, at least in the cozy variety, often has whimsical characters and a charming setting. Crime novels are grittier, with a sense of danger, and a protagonist who has issues, or is, at the very least, cranky and alienated. Can anyone improve on this?

35> Cranky and alienated - I like that part of the definition. ;-)

I know! Lisa, I could be the protagonist of a Scandinavian crime novel!

Speaking of which, I spent the afternoon and early evening sheparding my nine-year-old son through a book report. At five I opened the last bottle of viognier in the house. At 7:10 he glued the last portion of the project to the poster board. Then we had a talk about bringing home projects before the day before they were due. We will have this talk again.

A few months ago I bought my SO the first season of A Game of Thrones. A week ago we sat down to watch an episode. I'll pick up season two this weekend. I'm not a reader of fantasy novels and have no intention of reading the series, but the televisation is fantastic. Complex and imaginative and so well done, I can see why people are nuts about this. I'm nuts about this. A few thoughts: HBO is a wee bit more explicit than prime time. And the world depicted is medieval in its portrayals of women as property and prey. But by the third or fourth episode the two most interesting characters were exceptionally powerless females.

oh gosh, I know, it's brilliant. Is season two out in the states yet?

It is. And thank you for causing me a moment of utter panic.

lol

Because I am not great at waiting-to-find-out-what-happens-next. The idea that the second season might not be out! Also, I now know why I have a prophylactic covering over the keyboard of my laptop. Did I mention earlier that I had opened a bottle of wine? Well, the last of the second glass fell over in astonishment that I might have to wait to find out what happened.

LOL, so you understand my plight, stuck here on this rain drenched island, waiting, waiting waiting for the bastards to import season 2. I have told them lives depend on this, but they seem not to care.

Can I have a glass of that, if there's anything left?

One large glass of moderately priced but pretty good viognier, coming right up.

If you want to find out what happens next, why not read the books? I read all of them and I find they are nothing like the standard SF&F fare (which I try to read sometimes but usually end up rather disappointed). There are passages that are rather explicit in a gritty but not a smutty way. The most obscene things about the books is of course the heft of them and above all the absurdly long waiting times between volumes. So, err, yeah. I'm also waiting to read what happens next.

So while we all wait, I'll pour you a glass as well then?

Yes, that would be great.

33,35> would be delighted to! Let's do it.
34> "Mammoth," you say? But, Rebecca, it is only a paltry 956 pages.

#37 RidgewayGirl Then we had a talk about bringing home projects before the day before they were due. We will have this talk again.

Last Halloween, the evening before my son left on a week long school trip to Germany and then a weeke with us in France, he was setting aside school books for us to bring to France so he could do some project work. One of these items was a project on the oil industry for his Chemistry class.

"Oh!" said I, "A project on Oil. That will be fascinating. Do you have to do it over the school break."

"Yes," he replied. "I've to hand it in when I return from France."

"I look forward to helping you with it. Did they just give it to you today?"

"No, they told us about it two months ago."

"...and you're just starting it now? Did you not think of mentioning it to me?"

"Why would I mention it to you?"

"Because as a Geology graduate I might have a few ideas about oil."

"What's Geology got to do with oil? Geology's about rocks and stuff."

Yes, I am familiar with the last minute project dash involving working through the night. Of course, we probably did the same ourselves, but I will never let any child of mine know that, well, not for certain.

#47 EF, I'm not averse to reading a book that's "only" 956 pages, but I certainly didn't see carrying it around the rest of the day as I went about the rest of my activities! I'll either have to buy it sometime when I'm coming straight home or order it from Amazon. And then it will sit on my shelves until I have the time to read such a long book at home, as it is most assuredly not subway reading, which is where I do most of my reading.

#37

I enjoyed it too! I picked up the first season from the library because it came up on a search for Charles Dance DVDs. Except for him and a few older actors (Sean Bean, Julian Glover, Lena Headey...) I don't know or care for any of the younger ones, most of whom are pretty dreadful, especially "Jon Snow" and the platinum blondie...

A friend pressed the first book on me, which was a quick read but utterly unoriginal and pedestrian, a mashup of myth and English history, War of the Roses especially (down to names, Lannister/Lancaster; Stark/York...) Definitely not going to bother with further books, especially as it seems the TV show takes lots of liberties after Season 1, so it doesn't look like the books are going to be much of a guide.

In one respect at least the show improved vastly on the books--I looooove and covet Iain Glen's Jorah Mormont. I hope he gets the blondie! Theirs is the only halfway romantic, tender relationship in the whole thing. Yes, Virginia, I'm only in it for the feels! :) (Oh, and swords.)

>37 RidgewayGirl: ...Loosely based on the War of the Roses, btw.

I'm glad I'm not the only one to think The Game of Thrones is something to watch.

Peter, it's strangely unreassuring to know that this will continue for years.

I've just finished Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. I'll have to think about this one for a while. It was brilliant and strangely shocking for something that was so very not explicit.

Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov's controversial novel, tells the story of Humbert Humbert and his obsession with Lolita, who is twelve when he first meets her. Told from the claustrophobic viewpoint of Humbert recollecting their relationship, the book can be hard to read, dealing as it does with the abduction and serial rape of a child, exclusively from the viewpoint of the rapist. Even Humbert can't pretend for long that Lolita is anything other than broken from the experiences he subjects her to.

I was told to read this book for the language and for the beautiful writing. I was told not to read this book because no woman needs to subject herself to misogynistic crap. I approached this book wondering which side would win and strongly suspecting the second. I've given up on Phillip Roth, after all, for just that reason. And aren't there enough non-misogynistic authors out there to keep me busy? Except Lolita wasn't misogynistic at all. Sure, Humbert regarded actual women with repulsion and dread. He looked at girls with either disinterest or as bodies to use to get off on. But Nabokov manages to make clear, from the depths of Humbert's delusions, that what he is doing is destroying another human being for his own momentary pleasure. And Humbert is quite a piece of work. Every event in his story is about him. When Lolita cries in pain and despair, she hurts his feelings. When Lolita's mother stands between him and his object of desire, she must be removed. This is no grand justification for pedophilia, but a shocking revelation of its costs.

And the writing is among the finest I have read. It doesn't get in the way of the story, but shines through, using the right words at the right places, seamlessly. I'll be reading more of Nabokov, and rereading Lolita in due course.

Excellent review RidgewayGirl.

Huzzah!

Out of curiosity, which Roths did you read, and/ or which one was the last straw?

Excellent thoughts on Lolita, I wonder if you will encourage others to read it. I read it a long time ago and I am wondering what my reactions would be if I re-read it now.

Thank you, all. It really is an extraordinary book.

Lola, I read American Pastoral, which was well written but every female character was a drain on the main (male) character. And then The Human Stain, which was just terrible. Women were either ugly, emasculating shrews or beautiful idiots willing to have sex with the elderly (male) protagonist.

The Human Stain was just dreadfully silly from beginning to end. Roth is hugely overrated, the author of one reasonably funny book and that's it. When he grandly announced his retirement from writing (huh? A REAL writer never 'retires' FFS) my first thought was, did he ever really start? And when American critics started falling over themselves after the death of Bellow, who was a giant of a writer, comparing Roth to him, well, eyes rolled. The only living American writer with any salt is still Pynchon.

Great stuff on Lolita.

Agatha Christie, with her YA-like tidy plots, two-dimensional characters and simplistic moral code, is comforting to read when your brain won't work. Contemporary cosies are sickeningly twee, but I can readily forgive cosiness in another era, with an occasional screech at the snobbery and anti-Semitism.

Crime vs Mystery. In Australia, and possibly Britain?, Crime is the overall category for mysteries, thrillers and suspense. I find the cosy/hard-boiled classifications useful, too.

Agree with your review of Lolita, which I must re-read.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who doesn't like Roth. Tried two books of him and I'm not sure whether I finished the second nor do I care. It seems I missed a lot in Lolita; can hardly remember it anyway. Definitely must reread. Thanks for the great review.

#57 I actually liked American Pastoral a lot, and it is my favorite Roth, but he's definitely a misogynist and there's no getting around that; you have to accept it if you want to read him. And I thought The Human Stain was stupid, as much for the premise as for the misogyny.

I read Lolita ages ago; the movie (the second one, with Jeremy Irons) is pretty good too.

My ideal way to read a book of short stories is to work my way through, reading one each day. Rushing through can make a author's stories become repetitive, and let's me become aware of the way they use words. I don't like to look behind the curtain! But it's inevitable, unless I'm finding the stories a relentless slog, that I will find myself turning the page to just one more story...

So, I'm reading Joyce Carol Oates's The Female of the Species.

In the first story, So Help Me God, a very young wife, married to an older, controlling man gets odd crank calls. She can't tell if the caller is her husband or not. If the calls are from him, she needs to tell him and if the calls are from someone else, she had to keep them a secret. I couldn't help but see parallels between this story and Lolita. It was also a cautionary tale -- stay in school and marry someone your own age, girls!

The Banshee was a restrained story in which all the menace and tragedy takes place off the page. In it, a little girl visits her new brother while her mother throws a garden party. I really liked the ambiguity.

Doll: A Romance of the Mississippi is another Lolita-like fable, in which a father sells his daughter in cities up and down the Mississippi. She's not entirely a victim. But she plays one very well.

Madison at Guignol is the weakest tale so far, and concerns the empty trophy wife of a wealthy man and her disintegration while shopping. Lots of brand names, and resentment of the imagined resentment of the people serving her. This is the JCO I don't like--when her characters are empty stereo-types.

I agree with you, Mr. Murr, on Roth, but I've never read any Bellow. I think he's been too closely associated with Roth in my mind. What would you suggest as a good starting point?

Henk, I am already planning to reread Lolita, but not immediately.

Rebecca, I liked the glove-making history in American Pastoral, and the writing, but I'm just not up for Roth's view of women. Maybe in fifty years, when I can read that as an obsolete historical oddity? And I kinda want to see a movie version or two. I'll have to look into the Jeremy Irons one.

Pam, I am a big fan of escapist reading. But despite liking books like Anne of Green Gables as a child, have no tolerance of whimsy. So cozies are out for me.

Continuing on with The Female of the Species, I have just read the back of the book and I don't think that the person who wrote the blurb actually read any of the stories. This is what it says:

With wicked insight, Joyce Carol Oates demonstrates why the female of the species - be they six-year-old girls, seemingly devoted wives, or aged mothers - are by nature more deadly than the males.

So far, in the actual book, there have been women (or girls) who may (or may not have - JCO is often ambiguous) have killed someone. But the men in these short stories are, as in life, more dangerous, especially to the women in their lives. If a woman fights back against an abusive spouse, is she the "more deadly"?

The Haunting is more a horror story, with a young girl hearing rabbits crying at night and there are hints of a past episode of violence. Very atmospheric. Glad for all the ambiguity.

Hunger is almost a novella, and reminds us that a woman cannot have an affair without being punished.

A Gate at the Stairs is narrated by a Midwestern farmer's daughter and begins the year she gets a job as a babysitter for an older couple who are about to adopt. Tassie is in college, rooming with a girl who has disappeared into her boyfriend's life, leaving Tassie alone and a little lonely and willing to fill her life with the family she babysits for and to fall for the friendly Brazilian guy in her Sufism class. Lorrie Moore can write. Which means what happens in the book is almost beside the point, what with all the words being put into the right places. She's skilled at creating atmosphere, at heading off into short diversions that circle back into the story later on and at capturing the feeling of being caught between trying to appear as experienced and prepared as possible while really not knowing what to do. Set at the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, there's a feeling of uncertainty, of suspicion of the people around you and of a divided country going to war.

This book defies easy summarization, with its divergences and multiple threads of plot. Tassie's a naive, but intelligent observer, and takes her time with the story she's telling, which, being the story of a period of time in her life, is less straight-forward and plot-driven, than it is meandering and, like memory, hurrying through some experiences while slowing down to peer at other events in detail.

After writing this, I browsed the LT reviews for this book and, boy, people either loved or hated it. Kidzdoc came down firmly on the "hated it" side, by the way.

>65 RidgewayGirl:, interesting review. I loved Moore's Anagrams so I might give this a try.

Catching up. Enjoying your JCO posts... and way back at #53 - great post on Lolita.

@ #48 pgmcc - "What's Geology got to do with oil? Geology's about rocks and stuff." - Too funny. But...another geologist! I'm one of two others in CR.

#67 Hi, dchaikin

Any group needs a few geologists to keep things down to Earth.

>63 RidgewayGirl:

I would go for The adventures of Augie March, or Humboldt's Gift, both are outstanding.

Avoid Herzog, unless you wish to be reminded of everything you disliked about Roth.

I enjoyed your comments about Lolita, which I have put off reading for a couple of years.

You're right; I hated A Gate at the Stairs.

Charlotte, I've ordered a book of Moore's short stories, Who Win Run the Frog Hospital?. I hope it arrives soon.

Ok, geologists. No jokes about schist here!

Mr. Murr, I'll look for those. But not for Herzog. Thanks for the warning, Ms. Walser!

And, Darryl? When you hate a book, you really hate it.

# 72

No jokes about schist here!

I prefer something gneiss.

Excellent review of Lolita, it's time I read it.

I prefer talk of books to personal stuff, the former being somewhat rarer and consequently more precious than the latter, but confirmation has come and I will be pulling up stakes and packing books carefully into cardboard boxes. We're moving to Munich for two years. So less reading will get done, despite the long journey, given logistics and things.

Enjoyed your thoughts on Lolita! (and also Roth, of whom I have only read his first book). And I enjoyed your comments on the Oates collection. I got to revisit the stories as you wrote about them. (I agree that the one about the trophy wife is weak). It's funny, but I didn't think of the rabbit story as horror, but just the one about shopping at the boutique...in the dressing room... (I would have to dig the book out to check I'm not mixing stories up).

> 75 Are you excited about moving and living in Munich? It sounds exciting.

Lois, I am excited, but also daunted, since while I've done the move to Europe thing before and now speak the language of the country I'm moving to (amazingly helpful when it comes to getting utilities hooked up, etc), I'm also aware of what needs to be done and this time there are two children, a dog (possibly two, but we are hoping to have found a place for the greyhound as he is delicate), two cats and an elderly rabbit (is it wrong to wish for his demise? He is much older than he is supposed to be able to be.) to move. And we have to figure out what to do with the house for the two years we'll be gone and what to bring and find a place that will allow the dog and cats, etc. It will all work out beautifully, but there is still a lot of logistical stuff.

On the other hand, the kids are nine and twelve, which I think is perfect for this as they're old enough to really get a lot out of the experience. They've been whipped up into a state of excitement about what they'll see and do, although they are worried about things like whether there will be a strings orchestra or a backyard. My son is excited to have been promised a trip to legoland, but I think he'll love the Alps, being a guy who likes to hike and also castles, since he's enormously excited by history. My daughter, having begun French, has been promised a trip to Paris and since her German is reasonably fluent she will, I think, be quite pleased to be able to use it for more than family conversations. We're arranging for their various friends to visit with their families, which will, I hope keep their ties here intact, along with skype. I'm looking forward to traveling with them and with re-introducing myself to German culture. Munich is lousy with museums and concert halls and festivals. And I loved the open air farmers markets, tiny restaurants and cafes.

Sorry for the over-long answer. It's on my mind.

Tell Me You Forgive Me? tells the story of a woman who wasn't content to be a faithful housewife and therefore blighted a few lives, although the person she's apologizing to from the nursing home is her daughter, while scarred from what her mother made her do, has had the resilience to make a successful life for herself.

The final two stories of The Female of the Species were The Angel of Wrath and The Angel of Mercy. The editor could not resist putting those two stories side by side.

The Angel of Wrath has a different ending than the other stories. The narrator is a man, damaged in some way not revealed by his mother, and stalking a single mother who grows increasingly terrified. There's a point in the middle which doesn't make sense, given the previous events, but it is nice to have what could almost pass as a happy ending in this collection.

The Angel of Mercy combines the story of the newest nurse on a floor of a hospital filled with the most hopeless cases. She cares for a once wealthy and handsome young man who is permanently destroyed by his own stupidity. This is entwined with the story of a nurse who died before she was born, who walked the same halls and helped the dying.

I liked The Female of the Species. Joyce Carol Oates spare, unsettling style works well with short stories and she writes with enormous imagination and variety.

Received the books I ordered from my holiday giftcards today, as well as one other. They are:

Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher
The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women by Jessica Valenti
Dare Me by Megan Abbott
Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? by Lorrie Moore
Paris Changing by Christopher Rauschenberg
Mysteries of Winterthurn by Joyce Carol Oates

I am very pleased with myself.

>77 RidgewayGirl: No, I liked your answer! It seems you have everything well in hand, at the moment. And I agree, the childrens ages are perfect to begin such an adventure.

Munich! Great place for art! And starting the Nazi party! :)

Good luck with the move, all the hassle is well worth it. Lucky kids.

Lois and Lola, thanks for the encouragement. It will be fun. And I've missed the museums. Lola, I will try not to start anything I may regret later.

Through the Language Glass has been on my TBR pile for a while now. Curious to hear what you think of it!

Congratulations on your upcoming move to Munich! That sounds fabulous, especially for the kids.

How exciting! And I agree--great ages for the kids. I spent a day in Munich in '92 and it was lovely. Also a quick train ride to Saltzburg, which is also lovely.

I don't suppose you'd like to adopt a third? I'm quiet, house-trained and good with elderly rabbits. What a wonderful opportunity, congratulations (and the very best of luck with the logistics).

Through the Language Glass has been on my wishlist for a while now, looking forward to seeing if I should bump it closer to the top. Also interested in Joyce Carol Oates, I've never read her work but there has been a lot of talk about it on CR and I'm particularly intrigued by Mysteries of Winterthurn.

Earlier this year, detailmuse mentioned Glaciers and it sounded interesting enough to pick up when I ran into it. This is a novella by Alexis M. Smith and tells about a day in the life of a Portland librarian who likes old photographs, dreams of going to the places pictured on old postcards and likes a coworker, an equally quiet veteran. Really, this book is a showcase for the author's ability to write an evocative description.



With There But For The Ali Smith has written another excellent novel in her distinctive style. One evening, in Greenwich, at a dinner party between the main and dessert courses, a man goes upstairs and locks himself in the host's guest room. Told from the viewpoints of four people who knew him, this is as imaginative as any of Smith's other books. The best character is Brooke, who is almost ten.

The Ali Smith sounds interesting, too bad we all don't have enough time to read every book, eh? I've liked her work that I'd read.

I've finished my Early Reviewer book, which I received instead of The Eleven, which everyone else here got and loved. Black Irish was billed as a dark crime novel set in a working class Irish-American community in Buffalo, New York. It was those things, but mostly it was a hurried second draft of a novel with serious structural problems and a myriad of small errors. I hope these will all be addressed before publication, but since it's due out in February and the issues require a substantial rewrite, I'm not hopeful. I'm going to wait to post the official review until the book is released and I can make sure that the book was not improved.

Things I liked:

The setting is fantastic. Talty really captures the feel of a decaying industrial city, and he clearly knows Buffalo and the surrounding areas. I love reading about places that are a little forgotten, I mean who really needs another book set in New York or London? He also sets the book in winter, and describes things in ways that had me reaching for a sweater.

The community presented is vital and real. Talty even captures the cadences of Irish-American speech without resorting to dialect. He describes a community being hit hard by the closing of the port and the steel mills, losing population and closing itself off from the larger city.

Things that didn't work:

The main character. She's a cop, and described as "hot" and as having "two upturned breasts". Otherwise, she's more of an action/adventure rogue guy with an awful lot of alpha posturing. Other factors of this character made no sense. She's supposed to have attended Harvard, but she's not exactly very smart, or knowledgeable about the world around her. I'd expect an intelligent and curious person growing up in an Irish-American community to have some basic knowledge of Irish history, but this is sadly not the case.

The plot. The first half was okay. Then all continuity and plausibility was thrown out for a great deal of nonsense, that was rushed and skimmed over things that should have been explained. And then there were two giant finales, the second of which was tacked on for no reason I could see beyond allowing the protagonist to use her gun a few more times.

The silly errors. Streets described as running parallel and radiating outward. Footwear described as boots, and then as heels. A sex scene in which all the buttons were torn from her blouse, but then she had to rush to several other places -- without having the time or opportunity to change her clothing. Things like that.

The investigation. The protagonist was amazingly cavalier about bleeding all over crime scenes or grabbing stuff from scenes without letting anyone know. She conducted searches alone, leaving people living in the house to wander around destroying evidence. She refused to get vital information in person, saying she was too busy, and then went and worked out, directly after eating an extra-large burrito.

There are a few more complaints, but I feel mean and spiteful enough.

#89 With so much wrong with the book I do not feel hopeful that a quick bit of re-writing will improve the situation.

Lol! Loved your review. I suspect this book is not from a well-known publisher, possibly self published by a vanity press (even some of the well-known publishers have created vanity imprints in order to join Amazon and others)

>89 RidgewayGirl:: No, it was not mean and spiteful - it was really funny. Great review!

>89 RidgewayGirl: Well, it's what (early) reviews are for. Most other reviews posted seem to follow similar lines as yours as well.

But they weren't as funny.

Game of Thrones is everywhere I look at the moment! My OH and I usually have a series on the go and we've just got season 1 on the basis of recommendations from elsewhere - glad to see ClubRead-ers rate it too. We haven't started it yet.

>8 RidgewayGirl: haven't read any Tana French but am always a sucker for a good crime novel.

>53 RidgewayGirl: Lolita has been on my 'I think I should read that' list (as opposed to my wishlist) for ages but your comments have made me really want to read it.

All the best for your move. Munich's a wonderful city in a fabulous area - lucky you!

I'll admit that the promise of a vengeful review is enough to get me through a bad book. This one's being published by Ballantine, so it's not the case of vanity publishing. He's an established non-fiction author making his fiction debut, so the research is thorough, but things like plot, pacing and character development is terrible.

Rachel, The Game of Thrones is amazing, but also HBO, so there are plenty of boobies and dismemberments. Munich is beautiful and close to so much. I'm excited about the move. We are a little worried about getting our dog in -- she's a mutt, a boxer-cattledog mix on her adoption papers, but realistically she's got pit bull in there.

Oh thanks a lot! Just read your mean and spiteful and spit all over my keyboard! So damn funny!

Damn. I wish I had won Black Irish instead of The Eleven.

I do love Tana French's books. I think that Faithful Place is my favorite, but have enjoyed the others too. At this point it will be interesting to see who she chooses to narrate any book she writes.

Loved your review of Black Irish :) go ahead and post it so we can thumb it -- "second draft" sounds right; it's not going to get fixed before publication.

Munich!! Best of everything in getting ready!

>96 RidgewayGirl: Oh, that's interesting about it being Random House/Ballantine, but your explanation, no doubt, is right on the mark. More money in fiction, I dare say, if he can pull it off.

I was oddly unfulfilled in my wish to read a good crime novel after finishing Black Irish and I'd really enjoyed Rosamund Lupton's first novel, Sister, which was a solid crime novel of the old-fashioned psychological suspense variety. So I was happy to pick up her sophomore effort, Afterwards.

Gracie's a comfortable mother of two children, one of whom, Adam, attends an expensive private school in London, and the other, Jenny, is working at the school as she prepares to retake her A levels. On the morning of field day, as she stands watching the children and her son has been sent to the school building with the daughter of her best friend to retrieve his birthday cake, she sees smoke rising from the building and, running over, finds the school on fire. She sees her son is safely outside, but can't find her daughter, who was working up on the third floor.

There's an odd twist to the narration of this story that took a little adjusting to; Gracie tells the story in the first person, from the events of the day of the fire and then forward as she lies in a coma in a hospital bed. She's able to roam around the hospital invisibly, and soon decides that it's vital to discover who set the fire and why. This really, really shouldn't work. I spent the first chapters wondering if Lupton had decided to write sentimental weep-fests instead of crime novels, but soon it became clear that this was a mystery and one full of possible suspects and motives. Lupton made both the unconventional set up work and when the culprit was finally revealed, it was both a surprise, and someone indicated from the beginning.

Ellen Slezak's collection of short stories, Last Year's Jesus, are all set in and around Detroit and feature characters who, like the city, are both down on their luck and hopeful things might just work out anyway. Beyond that, each story is entirely different from the one before. Some of the stories are heart-breaking, and remind me of Bonnie Jo Campbell's American Salvage, like in Lucky where mentally ill Trudger just wants to keep his job sweeping floors at the mall so he can maintain his precarious life outside of the hospital. Others have a wry sense of humor, like in Tomato Watch, where Lucy's long stretch of bad decisions have her unemployed, pregnant and spending the summer caring for her grandfather, who has planted tomatoes in the middle of her mother's well-groomed front lawn. Slezak writes about children with a pitch perfect touch, aware of both their dependence on people who are not always as reliable as their children need them to be and ever eager to hope for things to work out in the end.

Catching up and enjoying your reviews. Lucky you and the kids to have the opportunity of Munich -- and you speak the language!

Jane, I am fluent in German if grammar is excluded from the assessment. I can adequately communicate, but always feel like the third grader allowed to stay up with the adults.

105> I laughed at that - that's the way I would describe my French.

Your reviews of Last Year's Jesus and Afterwards have me adding them to the wishlist.

Thanks, Lisa. Last Year's Jesus was read because Cariola wrote a brief, but enticing review of it last year.

I was unable to put off starting Joyce Carol Oates's new book of short stories last night. Black Dahlia and White Rose caught my eye because of the Black Dahlia angle and, indeed, the title story in the collection is told from the alternating points of view of Betty Short, the murdered girl called the Black Dahlia, and Norma Jean Baker, here called the White Rose. They're roommates trying to make a go of it in Hollywood but only one survives. There a Daddy issues in this story and I noticed them in the previous collection of short stories by JCO I read.

The second story, I.D., went in an entirely different direction. In this story a young teenage girl in Atlantic City is called out of class by police officers but she has trouble understanding what they want. It's both heartbreaking and matter of fact.

>107 RidgewayGirl: Dukedom and I discussed that 2nd story, whether we thought she made a correct ID... I think JCO purposely left some doubt because of the girl's psychological state.

Glad you are enjoying the collection. I really like her short fiction.

Lois, I think she didn't want to recognize what she saw, but JCO is not afraid of ambiguity! I'm sold on her short stories.

The Moon by Whale Light consists of four extended chapters by Diane Ackerman concerning, in turn, bats, crocodilians, whales and penguins. While each chapter contains quite a bit of interesting information about each animal, the real focus is on the dedicated people who have given their lives to learning more about them and to protecting each animal.

I like bats a lot because they eat enormous amounts of insects like mosquitoes. I also lived for a few years in a place where there was a bat colony living in the attic of the garage. It was a beautiful sight to see them emerging at twilight. Ackerman likes bats too. In Praise of Bats takes her to several places in the US, following Merlin D. Tuttle, a respected authority on bats and founder of Bat Conservation International. Ackerman goes to some remote places following Tuttle and others as they research bats, but the startling part is about how much the careless acts of people are causing the bat populations to decline and how vital bats are to the environment.

In The Eyelids of Morning Ackerman is willing to help researchers grab wild alligators in order to tag and weigh them, as well as help removing crocs from populated areas. It takes a certain kind of person to be passionate about crocodilians:

A tall, slender man with long white hair, translucent skin, and a gentle manner, he'd loved crocodilians for most of his seventy years and at one point had had the largest collection of crocodilians in the United States--in fact, a collection second only to that at the Berlin Zoo. What had made this so unusual was that he'd had it in the basement of his house in Detroit. His son tells a wonderful story about his mother during those years. The family swore not to talk about their collection of crocodilians and other reptiles, as it was illegal to keep them in suburban Detroit. One day, when his mother had her sewing group over, the ladies all plugged in their portable sewing machines and suddenly thirty male crocodilians began to bellow from the basement. Nonplussed his mother quickly collected herself and explained that the plumbing had been acting up for days, and to pay it no mind.

From there, Ackerman proceeds to the windy shores of a Patagonian bay where, in The Moon by Whale Light she watches right whales gather near a field station built by the New York Zoological Society. Here she meets other researchers including Tom Ford, who was studying the bacteria in the exhalation of whales. This meant attaching a petri dish to a fishing pole and dangling it over a whale's blowhole just as it was exhaling. She also gets into the water with the whales, who she describes as the size of "reclining buildings".

Finally, in White Lanterns, Ackerman visits the penguin nursery at Sea World, where she falls in love with a chick. And who wouldn't? I now would like a penguin chick of my own to cuddle. She also travels to the wild islands surrounding Antarctica in search of penguins where she discovers that fur seals are vicious and the chance of a penguin reaching maturity are fairly slim.

Ackerman is a good guide through the natural world. Cheerful, curious and always willing to do anything the researchers and conservationists are doing, her essays make for compelling reading.

This sounds like an excellent collection. I like the idea that the people looking after the animals also get some attention, while obviously not ignoring the animals. The bats remind me of some poems D.H. Lawrence wrote in Birds, Beasts and Flowers, a great collection of Whitman-like poems on the natural world.

The Moon by Whale Light is going on my wish list. I love the crocodilian story!

>110 RidgewayGirl: The Moon by Whale Light sounds very entertaining. "... the plumbing had been acting up .... LOL! I don't think I want to know what 30 bellowing male crocodiles sound like.

I like bats too. They are awkward critters though, refusing to nest in the bat boxes I have put up for them, instead they much prefer to live in the space between the roof and the attic, or behind the window shutters. It is great to see them fluttering out at twilight.

Same thing here, bas. Someday our bat house will be inhabited.

Chris, Avidmom, I liked the crocodilian part most -- because they are such unlovable animals. Whales and penguins are such easy animals and bats have that furry Stella Luna thing going for them, as well as being useful, but crocodilians, well, they're just terrifying. The people who are passionate about protecting them are a unique breed.

Dewald, I'll look for Birds, Beasts and Flowers. I'm trying to read more poetry.

Well, bats are just cute! I had picked up that book just because it was by Ackerman but haven't gotten to it yet. Thanks for the review.

I'm generally fond of bats, but not too delighted with them flying around bedrooms in which I'm trying to sleep -- and yes this has happened to me. I did once pick a baby bat off a screen window and take it outside to put on a tree hoping it would survive.

Fascinating review of The Moon By Whale Light, Kay; that's definitely one for the wish list. When we first moved to my parents' current suburban home in the mid 1970s there were a colony of bats living nearby, which were a delight to look at on summer evenings, when we could sit outside largely free of harassment by mosquitoes and summer insects. Within a couple of years the bats were gone; coincidentally we stopped sitting outside, as the house sat behind a small creek and we would be eaten alive by mosquitoes unless we were practically doused in repellent spray.

I loved the crocodile story!

To echo everyone else, great review of The Moon By Whale Light (which starts with an excellent title and sounds like it gets better from there!). Have you read any David Quammen? Your review reminded me a bit of a book of his essays that I have been reading.

For years he's been looking for something to put his madness into. And he found me.

John Fowles's first published novel, The Collector, tells the story of the kidnapping and subsequent imprisonment in a cellar of a young woman by the man obsessed by her. Brilliantly written, Fowles first tells the story from inside the kidnapper's head, which is an uncomfortable and unreliable place to be. Clegg is endlessly self-pitying and self-justifying. His actions are reprehensible, but he sees them as inevitable and reasonable. When the claustrophobia of Clegg's point of view becomes onerous, Fowles begins the story again, this time in Miranda's words.

Today I asked him to bind me and gag me and let me sit at the foot of the cellar steps with the door out open. In the end he agreed. So I could look up and see the sky. A pale grey sky. I saw birds fly across, pigeons, I think. I heard outside sounds. This is the first proper daylight I've seen for two months. It lived. It made me cry.

Miranda's lovely. I could see why Clegg fixated on her. The novel is set during the early sixties, when society was just beginning to open up and, as an art student in London, Miranda was exploring new ideas and ways of living when Clegg took her away. Terrified and confused, she nonetheless refuses to be passive. Locked in a poorly ventilated cellar, she is still able to live more fully than her captor.

Oh, I definitely want to read The Collector now. Not sure when I'll feel brave enough though! I bought it years ago after reading The French Lieutenant's Woman, and I didn't know anything about it. Last month one of my book club members told me about her traumatizing experience reading The Collector at university and I was all ready to toss my copy in the charity shop bin, and then she said "I really want to read it again." So it's still on my shelf. And thanks to you, moving up the TBR stack.

>120 RidgewayGirl: I'm definitely going to read The Collector sooner rather than later. The only book by Fowles that I've read was The Magus, which was a disappointment, but if, at age 15 you read a book called The Magus expecting actual magic, and you don't get it, well then, of course it's going to be disappointing. I should really read it again.

Joyce, I want to read The Collector again, too, but not for years. The ending is shocking.

That's probably a common problem here, Dewald. How many books and authors were ruined for us because we read them at much too young an age? I read The Brothers Karamazov at 14, when I was mostly interested in which brother was the hottest (hint: not Smerdyakov), which is no way to read Dostoevsky at all and has colored my subsequent readings (don't tell Murr). And there are still a few authors that I'm still having to force myself to pick up again decades later, including Fowles, since I tried to read The French Lieutenant's Woman at about the same age and gave up on it -- I think I'd expected some Daphne du Maurier kind of romance full of danger and yearning.

And there you go; I've just delivered a solid justification for the shelves of glittery vampire books.

I think I read The Collector decades ago, but I have no recollection of it at all!

>120 RidgewayGirl: Ooooo, JCO territory. (I haven't read a John Fowles novel since...the 80s? I'm pretty sure it was Mantissa when it came out through the Book of the Month Club)

#123

Dmitry is your Russell Crowe-type generic Hollywood lead; Alyosha is beautiful; Ivan is sinister-handsome. Dmitry for the masses, Alyosha for the aesthetes, Ivan for the bad girls.

I don't want to read Fowles, but I want to see the movie made of the book, with Terence Stamp. It's damn hard to come by.

Hi, Rebecca. I don't think I'll forget The Collector, but looking back just a few years, to before LT and the act of writing something about what I read, and there are hundreds of forgotten books. Many of those, however, deserve to have been forgotten.

Lois, yes, there is a bit of JCO in the tone and the willingness to leave things ambiguous. But JCO would write Miranda differently, I think.

Lola, please don't compare Dmitry to Russell Crowe. Ew. Maybe Russell Crowe a decade or two ago. Maybe. But surely it's Dmitry for the bad girls and Ivan for the bookish rebels? Did you also read The Brothers Karamazov as a teenager?

Maybe Russell Crowe a decade or two ago.

I'll gladly stand corrected, I'm woefully behind in media hotness news. Nah, Dmitry's not bad, just dumb and messed up--the usual type women are supposed to set on the right path. An officer and a gentleman, in his way.

I got Dostoevsky's complete works for my 14th birthday and snarfled through the lot--that whole specific lot--at least four or five times before university. They say only atheists go Dostoevsky-crazy like that. Could be true, I don't know anyone religious deeply into him.

Of the longer stuff, The Idiot was my absolute favourite for a long time, followed by The Demons. As for hotness and such things, I was a queer girl, slow to enthusiasm over boys, then or now. At first I liked Alyosha best, for his gift of inciting love. Ivan seemed cold and cruel. But I think he was the one who suffered the most of all the brothers (meaning the one with most heart). That the pain-loving Katerina Ivanovna changed her sights from Dmitry to him, proves this must be true. ;)

I was just informed that there is a movie version of The Brothers Karamazov that starred Yul Brenner as Dmitri and William Shatner (!) as Alexi. I am thinking that not everyone spends time thinking about how attractive the Karamazov boys were.

I picked up Black Dahlia & White Rose, a collection of short stories by Joyce Carol Oates because of the title story, which is about the Hollywood murder of Betty Short, known as the Black Dahlia. Here, Short and Marilyn Monroe are roomates and aspiring starlets. Monroe is still innocent and holding to her principles, working hard at acting class and playing by the rules, such as they are. Short has been in town longer, is a lot less starry-eyed and more willing to take chances. Which didn't work out well for her.

The rest of the stories are astonishingly diverse. Usually, a collection of stories by a single author can feel repetitive, as stories repeat themes and word choices. JCO doesn't do this at all. The following story, I.D., is told from the point of view of a teenage girl pulled out out of her Atlantic City middle school by the police. Other stories deal with an English class in a prison, an Italian vacation, a meeting with a high school guidance counselor and a graduate school drop-out reconnecting with a TA who had helped her. Some are told in first person, others in third, but always from a close proximity to the protagonist, who changes dramatically in each story. The women are all insecure and several have Daddy issues, but all in very different ways.

There is a sense of unease running through each story or, at least, I spent much of each story waiting for something horrible to happen. Especially when things seemed to be going fine, or when the protagonist felt hope for the future. I don't think these stories are intended to make the reader feel comforted or secure.

I read The Collector way back in the early 1970s and still remember it a bit -- also the film with a wickedly handsome, very young, Terence Stamp, and I think Miranda was played by Samantha Eggers.

I do want to see the film.

>128 LolaWalser: They say only atheists go Dostoevsky-crazy like that. Could be true, I don't know anyone religious deeply into him.

Then you don't mix with the right people. Dostoevsky is a beacon for god botherers who refuse to see the atheistic elements in his work. They leave comments on my blog. I do not publish them. The late (or should that be 'former') Archbishop of Canterbury for one, has written a study of Dostoevsky, focussing on his religious aspects as if that's all that there is.

I too encountered D at a tender age, and yes, also the Idiot, which I read and reread obsessively.

There is also a Russian TV series, which looks AWESOME

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Karamazovy-Brothers-Karamazov-ENGLISH-SUBTITLES/dp/B003Z...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyG-kcJmwo4

a reliable friend is always urging me to read The Magus, but the only Fowles I have read was The French Lieutenant's Woman, which I loved. As an addict of the 19th century novel, I loved his whole take on it.

RG hmm, two JCO collections now. I’ve read just one short-short story by her and was planning to remedy that with Them (four stories leading up to the Detroit riots) but now you add two more possibilities.

>130 RidgewayGirl: I agree. This is not consolatory fiction!

>134 detailmuse: I read Them last year, DM, and it's a novel based on a real person who was in one of JCO's night classes. And yes, it does climax with the riots.

I haven't read JCO in many years, but Black Dahlia & White Rose is now on my wishlist, thanks to your enticing review!

Most FUN and useful analysis of the Brothers ever! It's on my Mt. TBR but I may have to move it up.

Zadie Smith's new novel, NW, tells the story of two friends, who grew up together in a housing estate in London, but have since gone on to live very different lives. Leah went to college up north and then on to work for a local government agency. She's the only white woman working there and she's married to Michel, a French-African hairdresser who really wants to start a family, while Leah still isn't sure, isn't ready and can't see why everyone else is speeding ahead with adulthood. Keisha renamed herself Natalie sometime before law school and married a guy with a public school education and money. She's doing very well for herself with her beautiful house and children as well as a successful career. But she's uncertain of herself, worried about whether she has a personality and genuine desires of her own. The two women still see each other, but it's been years since they were close.

There's an odd self-consciousness to this book, as though Smith is aware on every page that she's writing an important novel about class and ethnicity in today's Britain. It takes away from the characters and the story itself as actions, thoughts and events all carry the weight of representation. Something happens partway through the novel and it takes off despite itself, making for a very good book for a long stretch of its middle. There are some stylistic choices, too, that seem less organic for this particular novel than as ideas the author is trying out. Smith is an intelligent and observant writer, which makes what she writes very good indeed, but that very intelligence and awareness get in her way at times. This is a better book than White Teeth and I suspect that in a few more years, no one will be able to surpass her. She's just not there yet.

Lots of great stuff here, RG! I loved The Collector when I read it a few years ago (hmm, time for a reread maybe?), and totally agree with your thought that Miranda lives more fully than Clegg, even in a cellar.

I often teach a chunk of this novel in my grade 12 class, because we also read The Tempest. I like the connections Fowles makes with the characters' names, and some of the same themes.

I have NW sitting on my TBR shelf, and I think it might be time to read it. I enjoyed your review.

Very interesting thoughts on Zadie Smith's novel. I have not read anything by her so I can't comment on your second paragraph.

sounds dull as ditchwater, like all her books. She's lauded all over the place as a great writer, the inheritor of Forster (snort) etc etc, but to me the blurbs of all her books sound excruciatingly boring. Is she really any better than Jodi Picoult?

Cait, that would be a good combination -- The Tempest and The Collector. When my daughter started encountering Shakespeare in school (grade seven), we had fun watching movies loosely based on his plays. She's too young for The Collector!

Bas, I would have been surprised if you had read her. Don't you have more than a few centuries before you read the twenty-first?

Murr, she's much better than Picoult. Don't be silly. She was just hampered by having her first novel fawned over. I defy any young author to survive that. How do you recover?

The only Zadie Smith I read was On Beauty and I didn't like it, especially because I like Howards End so much. So I haven't been inspired to read anything else by her, although I had hopes for this one.

Rebecca, I haven't read On Beauty, although it's the book of hers I hear most about.

Paul is a man's man, the kind of guy romance novels like to feature. He makes a good living as a carpenter, making beautiful, custom-made pieces for his wealthy clients. He likes to walk in the woods, chop his own firewood and he's a caring partner and nurturing parent. He's with Kate, who found fortune and fame when she wrote an inspirational self-help book after finding God in AA. She's down to earth and so thankful that her life has made such a dramatic turn for the better. Together with Kate's daughter they live in a beautiful old house in a charming and small community in New York.

One day, after a few encounters with difficult clients in the city, Paul stops at a state park on his drive home to clear his head under the trees. There he encounters a man beating a dog. In a horrible, randomly escalating incident, Paul has killed the man and now has to live with the consequences.

In Man in the Woods, Scott Spencer has created complex and realistic characters in both Paul and Kate. They're people who have tried their best to lead lives of honesty and integrity, to care for the people around them, to be contributing members of their community and to love their families, but they're also subject to all of the ordinary doubts and weaknesses of being human. Kate may have a successful career as an inspirational writer and speaker, but she doesn't think she's any more spiritual or knowledgeable than anyone else. Paul thought he'd always just kind of get by, and finding his vocation and such a generous degree of stability is still new to him. The novel is less about the aftermath of a murder than the spiritual and psychological consequences for both Kate and Paul. Spencer took his time setting things up, letting the reader get to know the soon-to-be murdered man, making the altercation less random than it might appear. There is certainly a lot to think about here, and Spencer's less interested in answers than in having the characters struggle with the questions. Can a good man commit murder? How does the events of a few minutes change things? Does a single event negate Paul's entire life of striving for honesty and openness?

#145 - Wow, that sounds pretty intense.

Man in the Woods is now on my wishlist.

Thank you,

Robert

Great review -- sounds like there is some heavy philosophical lifting in this book.

Excellent review of Man in the Woods

Man in the Woods goes on the wishlist. Great review.

Oh I HAVE to read Man in the Woods. I hope he doesn't think that "making amends" means you necessarily need to involve the criminal injustice system!

Great review and it sounds like a fascinating look into a normal situation that spirals completely out of control.

Thanks, everyone. Spencer is good at creating bad consequences arrived at quite logically by people doing their best.

A novelist's version of 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions'. Definitely going on the wish list.

Shug, whose mother affectionately calls her sweet little mister, has been dealt a tough hand in life. He's thirteen, overweight and friendless, with an alcoholic and promiscuous mother and an abusive father his mother hints isn't really his father. They live in a small house in a cemetery, the rent paid in exchange for keeping the cemetery grounds, which falls mainly on Shug to maintain. His father, Red, is a petty criminal with a record who starts including Shug in his activities in that Shug is told which houses to break into and Red and his friend keep the proceeds. Set in the early seventies, The Death of Sweet Mister is a grim and heartbreaking story which should be hard to read, but Daniel Woodrell has given Shug a sweet, clear voice that speaks in the cadences of a poor boy in a rural community. Shug really is a pleasure to spend time with, even if there's very little happiness in his life. He does love his mom, who loves him in return and he's curious about the world around him.

Woodrell writes about poverty-stricken rural communities like no one else. He captures relentlessly hard-scrabble lives with compassion for their narrowness of circumstance and lack of opportunity. He also writes people who, even in the limited choices offered, consistently make the wrong ones. There's an inevitability in what happens to Shug, but this doesn't make the ending of this short novel any less surprising.

Poor Shug. This is a new author to me, enjoyed your review.

Beautiful review!

What Dan said. And Man in the Woods sounds fascinating too, although I've avoided Scott Spencer since reading Endless Love decades ago.

Rebecca, I haven't read Endless Love, but I really liked A Ship Made of Paper, which I read because Francine Prose made a fuss over it.

Thank you, Daniel and Merrikay. Woodrell's fantastic although, like Donald Ray Pollock and Bonnie Jo Campbell, I always walk away a little shell-shocked.

Ian McEwan's new novel is the story of an MI5 agent in the seventies who is part of a group trying to find and secretly fund writers. Serena was good at math in school, which caused her mother to push for her to apply to study math at Cambridge, rather than literature somewhere less exalted, as Serena would have preferred. Along the way, she has a relationship with a professor, which leads her to applying for and getting a job in the secret service. To her disappointment, women at that time were only allowed to be glorified secretaries and, in one memorable instance, cleaning women. Although Serena is less bothered by this state of affairs than her closest colleague, she's nonetheless pleased when she is given a small promotion and sent to offer a stipend to a new writer.

The setting of Sweet Tooth is fantastic. The Cold War was underway and the fabric of British society was fraying, with strikes and shortages lending an air of doom to everyday life. MI5 was competing with MI6, and both were eager to impress the CIA. Intellectual life favored the left, some of whom were allegedly funded by the Soviets, so the idea that funding writers who would be sympathetic to the right seemed perfectly reasonable.

Serena is a true believer in the dangers of communism and finds her work to be of value. Handed Haley's short stories in preparation to her visiting him, she's intrigued by his writing and attracted to him because of that when they do meet. There's a bit of distance built into the story, which is framed as having been written years after the events described, but the actions and feelings of the people involved benefit from the remove. I enjoyed this book, both for its descriptions of time and place and for the themes of the relationship between writer and reader and for the sheer unreliability of a writer's compliance to coercion.

That actually sounds good--I've read so many mediocre reviews of Sweet Tooth here. I have found that McEwans novels are all quite different from each other, but if there's one thing that's familiar, it's how he makes one event near the beginning turn the main character's life in an unexpected direction. Or something along those lines. Does he do that here?

Several times, Joyce. Serena's not sure what she wants, so she's malleable. The professor she is involved with steers her into her profession and accounts for some of the developments later on.

Well, I'm going to add it to my wishlist. Thanks for your comments!

A favourable review of Sweet Tooth! Great stuff Kay. I won't pass this one by if I get a chance to read it.

Your review of Sweet tooth is the first that sounds like McEwan, and makes me curious to read it.

RG, I read Endless Love when it came out to much hype, but if Francine Prose liked A Ship Made of Paper that's good enough for me!

George Saunders's newest collection of short stories, Tenth of December, left me wishing it had been longer. Despite including only ten stories, it was a diverse group, ranging from ordinary events in ordinary lives to futuristic and somewhat gory scenarios. The most successful stories were the ones involving the most pedestrian of characters. In Puppy, the strongest story here, a woman takes her two young children to buy a puppy. This story hits like a bullet, but only upon reflection. The title story is similarly strong. Saunders tells the stories in a claustrophobic first person stream of consciousness, which means that several paragraphs can go by before the reader can grasp what is going on, but he makes this work. Most of the stories contain a wealth of human frailty and emotion and a sense of connections between people missed or misfiring; the unseen emotion behind the callous act. Not all stories succeeded; My Chivalric Fiasco felt like David Foster Wallace channeled through Karen Russell. It was clever, but the cleverness took too much away from the heart of the story. Still, this is a fantastic collection of stories and I'll be reading more by this author.

I've been avoiding this book because of all the hype, but your review is making me rethink that.

I really liked "Tenth of December" and you have made me interested in reading more of Saunders's stories.

Nice review of Tenth of December, Alison. Even though I personally disliked this collection, I enjoyed your views on the stories.

Rebecca, Chris -- I was wary about reading this because of a few lackluster reviews here on Club Read. You should probably take those under consideration, but I really enjoyed Saunders' voice and will be reading more by him soon.

Linda, I know! I wasn't sure if I wanted to read it at all, but despite the misgivings, you all managed to make it attractive.

I finished The Liars' Club by Mary Karr a week ago, and have tried to write something about it a few times, but failed to come up with anything that would do justice to this vivid memoir of growing up in an industrial town in east Texas in the nineteen sixties. I bought this book long before I joined LT, began it and then set it down and forgot about it, maybe because at the time I expected more shocking revelations in the book. Mary's parents, a oil worker and a deeply unhappy artist turned housewife, had a loud and volatile relationship, amplified by booze, but they did their best and loved their children and I needed an additional ten years or so to appreciate the damage that parents can do, when they love their children, but have their own dramas to attend to.

Karr's voice is matter of fact as she describes her upbringing, in which she lived in the loudest house on the block, the one that most kids aren't allowed to play at. She came out swinging, always ready to fight at a moment's notice. She loves her father, only to watch him distance himself from her, as fathers at that time did as their daughters aged. She had a more complicated relationship with her mother, who was stifled by the life she led, haunted by events of her past and overwhelmed by family life. Her mother's mother comes to live with them, a bitter old woman dying painfully of cancer and determined that the girls be beaten into obedience. Karr's mother, nursing her mother, caring for two small children and suffocating in the narrow confines of her life, behaves more and more erratically, until her actions blow the family apart.

The Liars' Club reminded me of both The Glass Castle and Let's Pretend This Never Happened and while the ending seemed a little too tidy, I have already gotten copies of the other two volumes in her memoir and I won't wait years to read them.

I'm so happy to read your review. I do hope to read this myself...although not sure I need another Glass Castle.

Beautiful analysis of The Liars' Club and very conpassionate.

Good review of The Liars club. How authentic a voice did you find the memoirs to be?, because I note that you say that Karr's voice is matter of fact.

The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides' new novel, tells the story of three college students attending Brown during the early eighties. There's a love triangle of sorts, anchored by Madeline, a reserved English major who chose her course of study because she loves to read, only to find that writers such as Austen, James and Eliot are distinctly uncool. She's not the kind of girl to embrace partying and she spends much of her time during her freshman year with Mitchell, a skinny, curly-haired boy who has fallen in love with her but, whether through sensitivity or insecurity, never makes his move. Then Madeline tries to join the cutting edge of scholarship by taking Semiotics 211, where she meets Leonard.

The boy without eyebrows spoke up first. "Um, let's see. I'm finding it hard to introduce myself, actually, because the whole idea of social introductions is so problematized. Like, if I tell you my name is Thurston Meems and that I grew up in Stamford, Connecticut, will you know who I am?"...When it was the turn of the boy next to Madeline, he said in a quiet voice that...his parents had named him Leonard, that it had always seemed pretty handy to have a name, especially when you were being called to dinner, and that if anyone wanted to call him Leonard he would answer to it.

The focus of the book is on the relationships that ebb and flow between the three, but each character is given the chance to tell their own stories with the point of view moving between them, sometimes circling back to revisit events from a different angle. Of the three, Leonard is the flashiest. Brilliant, charismatic and mentally ill, he takes up all of the space in whichever room he is in. He comes from a less affluent home on the west coast.

If you grew up in a house where you weren't loved, you didn't know there was an alternative. If you grew up with emotionally stunted parents, who were unhappy in their marriage and prone to visit that unhappiness on their children, you didn't know they were doing this. It was just your life...If you weren't a lucky child, you didn't know you weren't lucky until you got older. And then it was all you ever thought about.

Mitchell and Madeline are both naturally reserved and so take less space in company than Leonard, but are no less intense when they are telling their own stories. Mitchell is not sure what he wants to do with his life. He's been urged to consider divinity school by a professor, but he's ambivalent. He decides to spend a year traveling with a friend. He and Madeline aren't close anymore, but he hasn't entirely gotten rid of the idea of her. And Madeline's a mess. She graduates without a plan and takes a while to find what she wants to do.

The Marriage Plot is beautifully written. Eugenides leaves a decade between each novel and it is time well spent. There isn't a dud scene or an infelicitous phrase in the entire book.

Good review of The Marriage PLot

Thank you, Bas. I think I may have liked the book far too much to be able to write coherently about it.

Your review of The Marriage Plot sounds very interesting. I haven't read anything by Eugenides. Would you suggest I start with this one?

Middlesex is the most popular of his books, Colleen, but I liked The Marriage Plot enormously and The Virgin Suicides has a following. I would suggest you read the blurb to each and pick based on the one that sounds most interesting to you. Each book is very different. So far he only publishes a book a decade, so he's easy to keep up with!

Thank you Alison.

Interesting reviews of a number of books I'm totally unfamiliar with. I did listen to an audio version of The Liars' Club a number of years ago and found it riveting.

It was riveting in book form, too, Jane. I plan to read the other two volumes in her memoir soon.

Good review of The Liar's Club. I had vowed after The Glass Castle that I was done with that type of memoir, but I have been tempted to read Karr's work.

The Marriage Plot has been on my list for a while, and I think you just moved it further up!

Hmm, that's the first review of The Marriage Plot that's actually made me want to read it, despite the fact that I really liked Middlesex.

Seven Days in the Art World is a look at the world of contemporary art by ethnographic researcher Sarah Thornton. Each "day" comprises a long article about an aspect of the art world. I found it to be fascinating and surprising. You'll laugh, but I hadn't thought of the world of contemporary art as being quite so pretentious or as preoccupied with money.

The book opens with an auction at Christie's, in which one's importance is indicated by where one is allowed to sit. I'd always thought it would be fun to attend an auction. I don't think that anymore. This was a good opening for the book, illustrating how much art is just another plaything of the very wealthy. In subsequent chapters, Thornton looks at a class at CalArts in which students present their work for peer critiques; Art Basel, a Swiss art fair in which galleries have booths and do much of their year's sales; the announcement of the Turner Prize, a British art award which is as much a sign of prestige for artists as the Booker prize is for writers; ArtForum magazine; Japanese artist Takashi Murakami's various studios, in which his work is carried out by other artists and where marketing opportunities are pursued and, finally, the Venice Biennale, an international event for contemporary art.

Even as art itself is a constantly changing thing, how art is created, marketed, sold and resold hasn't changed. The most successful artists are as concerned for securing patronage and in marketing their image as they were in Renaissance Italy. And people have always bought art and, with their choices, indicated both their taste and wealth. If you have an interest in the subject, this is an excellent look at a world hidden from people who visit an art museum or gallery.

That sounds like fun!

Chris, while I did like The Glass Castle, I'm not a fan of the "misery memoir". Karr's book was notable for the writing and her clear eyed view of her family's strengths and weaknesses, although she's harder on her mother, who was so trapped in the life of an east Texas housewife in the sixties.

Bragan, Chris, I liked The Marriage Plot so much that my review is not exactly objective. But it was excellent!

It is, Rebecca. And it made me ready to move to a city with an embarrassment of art museums.

Good review of Seven Days in the Art World From your review there is nothing here that would surprise me, but I would still be interested to read the book.

Your review of The Marriage Plot is excellent. Note to self...actually read this one, don't just think about reading it.

Seven Days in the Art Worlds sounds...disillusioning.

Bas, I think you'd like Seven Days in the Art World. It's not a pretty picture, but I wonder if art hasn't been entwined with money in just the same way for centuries.

Daniel, I'd be interested to see what you think about The Marriage Plot.

The Round House, Louise Erdrich's new novel, is a lot of things. It's a coming of age story, set on a Minnesota reservation during the summer of 1988. It's a crime novel, where a thirteen year old boy tries to discover who raped his mother so justice can be done. It's a wonderfully descriptive look at life on a reservation, with all its strengths and weaknesses but, at heart, it's a political essay about the failings of the justice system, especially as it applies to Native American women. The novel many have been set in 1988, but only this year some of the Congressmen voting against the Violence Against Women Act did so because they disliked the idea that a white man who rapes a Native American woman on Native American land, being subject to the laws of the reservation and potentially facing jurors who aren't all white. The tangled issues in The Round House haven't been resolved twenty five years later.

Joe's got a good life. His father is a judge and his mother works for the BIA, untangling webs of kinship to determine who has claim to Chippewa heritage. She comes home one Sunday afternoon badly hurt and life in Joe's house changes utterly. Joe has a large extended family that rally around and his group of Star Trek obsessed friends do likewise, but that can't assuage his need to see justice done. Erdrich paints an intricate picture of Native American life, from the stories his old grandfather tells and the preparations around religious rites and cultural celebrations, to the role of the Catholic church and the complicated lines of kinship that make everybody tied to each other. Erdrich also writes with both humor and empathy for her characters, from the ex-stripper who runs the local gas station and convenience store, to the priest who is also a Vietnam vet, to Cappy, Joe's best friend, who falls in love that summer.

The crime at the heart of the novel is overly intricate, but brings to light the difficulties of jurisdiction and the laws that have stripped the reservations of legal power. Despite the issues that Erdrich explores and clearly cares deeply about, the book never feels preachy or as though it were written to make a point. Mainly, this is due to the narrator and protagonist. Joe's thirteen. He's obsessed with sex and getting enough to eat and the time he spends with his friends is the most enjoyable part of this book about a boy suddenly having to confront the worst aspects of adulthood.

Very nice review of The Round House, Kay. I'll definitely get to this, but I'll probably read The Plague of Doves first.

I liked The Round House a lot too; good review. Darryl, some of the characters from The Plague of Doves show up peripherally in The Round House (it takes place somewhat later), but can completely be read as a stand-alone novel.

Rebecca, your review, along with the Tournament of Books article, conspired to make me want to read The Round House immediately. And now, it seems, I need to go read The Plague of Doves.

Thanks, Darryl. I've read a few of Erdrich's books and liked every one. I need to read all of them.

I've been meaning to read Erdrich's last couple of books for months, but I can't seem to finish the four or five books I've started lately. But I will get to her -- great review, Kay. I'm also really intrigued by Seven Days in the Art World.

I have a few of Louise Erdrich's books on my iPod. I have had them for a long time, and for some reason, I have never listened. I think it might be time to start.

>185 bragan: that's the first review of The Marriage Plot that's actually made me want to read it, despite the fact that I really liked Middlesex

Ditto.

Kay you also do it for The Liar's Club, which I've had in my TBRs for years. And Seven Days in the Art World too, with info I've been hungry for since reading Steve Martin's An Object of Beauty.

I bought 7 Days in the Art World yesterday based on your review. Now to see whether I will read it.

Robert

Jane and Colleen, I've only read a few of Erdrich's books, but I think she's one of the more interesting writers working today. It's not the usual white male viewpoint. (Which is not to say that that viewpoint isn't interesting or that it doesn't have important things to say -- there's just so much of it.)

I keep running into An Object of Beauty, MJ. I may have to read it now.

Robert, I think you would enjoy it.

>200 RidgewayGirl: hmm read An Object of Beauty for its art world-insider aspect, not its story. Martin does fiction better elsewhere.

Raised Right is less a memoir than a sort of explanation by Alisa Harris of why and how she walked away from the right-leaning politics that her Evangelical Christian upbringing traditionally embraced. Harris marched with an anti-abortion sign when she was a young child. She revered Ronald Reagan and believed fervently that when the Bible referred to the down-trodden and oppressed that it was talking about the owners of businesses bowing down under the weight of regulation. She wore a "W.2004" t-shirt in 2000. And then she reached adulthood and began to think about the beliefs she grew up with, both political and religious, and realized that they didn't always mesh.

I was raised in a household where politics was not something adults discussed with children, but our church was similar to Harris's. For me there were a combination of events, the end result was that I moved on and didn't look back until recently, when I discovered that this is a common event. So I was interested in Harris's story for personal reasons.

Harris is circumspect to a fault. She does point out that walking away from the expected political views results in people choosing everything from becoming a slightly more moderate Republican to moving very far to the left of the Democrats. She's trying to tell her own story and that of a larger trend in the same book and it leaves both subjects a little thin. Still, it's an encouraging book to those who don't believe the same things their parents do (God does not have a party affiliation. He may not even hold an opinion on capitalism) and an explanation of sorts to those who don't understand how anyone could consider themselves both a Christian and a liberal.

>202 RidgewayGirl: Sounds like an interesting book. What led you to read it?

Such a foreign world to me, and so encouraging that even someone in that extreme an environment can learn to think for herself.

Lois, when I left that environment I didn't look back. I assumed that I was an exception. I'd been taught about "back-sliders" and the message was that people who leave no longer have any sort of belief system, or morals, and pretty much live lives that would make the Sex Pistols frown disapprovingly. And then I began running into people and websites (like The Slacktivist) and found out that there's a number of people who have gone through the same process and come out of it without heroin addiction or even bank fraud. So it's fascinating to me, while I can't see it being very interesting to people who have never been involved with fundamentalist, although with their political clout, it might be useful to see both what they believe and why they leave.

Rebecca, there's an expectation that a believer will spent time each day reading the Bible. Eventually, anyone who is thinking about what they are reading (and there are quantities of "study guides" to keep that focused in appropriate directions) will eventually begin to find places where the message in the Bible contradicts the political message. The gay thing was the final straw for me. I couldn't see how the message about living in peace with others and caring deeply for your neighbors applied to everything except sexual orientation. And the church's teaching about how evil homosexuality is doesn't match what Jesus said was important. The environment ends up pushing away anyone who starts questioning things. It's based on the idea that asking questions is rebellion. There's also an unnecessary brittleness to that kind of faith -- instead of being able to adapt a living faith to things like science (like most mainstream forms of Christianity) it doubles down. Hence the home schoolers learning that dinosaurs coexisted with men and the outrage over social issues.

Raven Black is the first book in a four book series by Ann Cleeves set in the Shetland Islands. Taking place during the dark winter days between New Year's Eve and the local festival Up Helly Aa, the book begins with an island incomer finding the body of a teenage girl in a snowy field. Fran Hunter is an artist with a young daughter who has decided to stay even after her marriage to a local man has ended in divorce. There's a deep divide between the locals and the newer residents, with the newer residents never feeling entirely a part of Island life. Suspicion quickly falls on one man, although both the local detective and the head of the group of Aberdeen policemen sent to take charge are reluctant to rush to judgment. The only thing clear in this story is who isn't guilty, the confused old farmer who was also suspected of an earlier murder.

The mystery at the heart of Raven Black is not really the focus of the book. Instead, Cleeves focuses her attention to the unique life on the Shetland Islands. Isolated and swept by constant winds, the islands are a harsh place to live, but the islanders can look back at many unbroken generations. There's a small town feel to island life, with everyone knowing everyone else's business, but also a strong sense of community, forged over hundreds of years. The setting makes this book worthwhile and I plan to read the other books in the series.

Raven Black sounds like it is one I would really like. I am adding to my growing list. Thank you.

202, 205 - I've really enjoyed reading your comments. I was raised in an evangelical culture which I had problems with from an early age, so I can relate to a lot of what you say. "Back-sliders" Hah! I haven't thought of that term in years. It always seemed so threatening, and now it just seems silly.

The Shetland Islands sound like such an exotic location (although, not in the relax on the beach and drink something with an umbrella in it way). Putting Raven Black on my wish list!

Hi - I have fallen behind and am working on catching up, but wanted to thank you for reviewing Man in the Woods, which I read and enjoyed.

Well, The Round House is moving up on my stack, and I'm adding Raised Right and Raven Black. Great reviews - interesting stuff you read! I'm relating to the Raised Right only have to admit I did it to myself rather than being raised that way. You know that black and white way of thinking can make a person feel safe when their world is a mess. Glad I grew out of that.

ETA: Yay for me! I'm already on the waiting list for The Round House, library also has Raven Black and Paperback Swap had a copy of Raised Right!

Joyce, from threatening to silly is a good description. Raven Black's big strength is the setting. I'd go live in Lerwick for a year, but since my SO thinks that even Canada is too cold, that might not happen.

MerriKay, you have had such an interesting life. Man in the Woods is a book to think over later, isn't it? I'll read whatever Spencer writes next, probably.

Colleen, I've had Raven Black on my TBR quite awhile; the setting intrigued me, but I was nervous that it would veer off into cozy territory. It doesn't, although it's not as gritty as most of the Scottish crime novels I've read.

Catching up on your thread -- appreciate your lovely reviews. Wish-listed Raven Black.

>205 RidgewayGirl: Have we had this conversation before? Sounds like you, me and Nickelini should get together for a drink and swap stories.

Thanks, Jane.

Lois, how much fun would that be?

>215 RidgewayGirl: Fun, oh yes.

Sounds like you, me and Nickelini should get together for a drink and swap stories.

I'm in!

202, 205 - these are fascinating posts. Thanks for sharing.

The Devil Wears Prada meets Le Divorce in this coming of age story about a young woman who gets a job as the assistant of a famous photo-journalist in Paris, only to fall into the messy lives of the entire family. Kate's father died when she was a child, and during his long illness she had been sent to stay with relatives in Paris. A decade later she lands the job because of her French language skills. She's eager to please, reflecting back on each member of the family what they want to see, allowing them to confide far more than is appropriate. As for Kate, she longs for the illusion of belonging, every careless inclusion makes her feel as though she's part of the Schell family. Of course, as we know from literature, the servant is only ever let into a family so far, and no further, and that same servant is only viewed with affection insofar as she is useful.

Lydia Schell is a boss very much in the Miranda Priestly mold, knowing just how far she could push Kate, and when to drop some small nugget of affirmation. She has no trouble taking her daughter on shopping sprees for designer clothes or having her large apartment in the fashionable sixieme arrondissement repainted on a whim, but she charges Kate an outrageous rent for the small maid's room she's required to live in and berates her for her stupidity when the fruit Kate was sent out to buy for her cost more than she'd like. Lydia's by far the strongest person in the family, but each gets what they want from Kate, who isn't quite the doormat they believe her to be.

I enjoyed this novel. It doesn't break any new ground, or do anything original, but it does tread familiar ground in a pleasing and entertaining way. It might have been a stronger novel had the final events unfolded with a little more force - Kate repeatedly comes up against difficult decisions and then finds that the consequences are either softer than expected, or she doesn't have to make that decision after all. There's quite a few substantial ideas and themes presented and if they aren't always fully developed, it does mean Lessons in French was never boring.

What was boring, on the other hand, was the cover. And the title. Both were utterly forgettable, meaning that in a few months, even if I haven't forgotten the contents, the title will have been.

Lessons sounds interesting - going on the list.

Well I loved Le Divorce (the book but NOT the movie) and I enjoyed the movie of The Devil Wears Prada because who could not love Meryl Streep? But I didn't like the young woman in Prada so . . . .

What had happened to me was not uncommon, I thought. Not in books or in life. There should be, there must be, some well-worn way of dealing with it. Walking like this, of course. But you had to stop, even in a town this size you have to stop for cars and red lights. Also there were people going round in such clumsy ways, stopping and starting, and hordes of schoolchildren like the ones I used to keep in order. Why so many of them and so idiotic with their yelps and yells and the redundancy, the sheer un-necessity of their existence. Everywhere an insult in your face.

And the shops and their signs were an insult, and the noise of the cars with their stops and starts. Everywhere the proclaiming, this is life. As if we needed it, more of life.

It's hard to review a book of short stories, especially without reviewing each individual story. Ideally, I'd have reviewed each story in Dear Life as I read it, taking the time to appreciate each well-written story as the individual gem it is. But life being as it is, and having immoderately consumed several stories a day, this just isn't possible. Alice Munro's stories are quiet in nature and are set in small towns and communities in Ontario. They take place at different times, but each deals in a different way with near misses; the couple who almost got married, the woman who almost left her husband, the man who almost went home. The emotions flowing through each story are strong, sometimes extreme, but the characters remain true to their self-contained personalities and a day of unbelievable anger and despair shows itself outwardly in only a hastily written letter or a sudden decision to jump from a local train as it slows for a curve.

It took a few stories for me to warm to the understated strength of Munro's stories, but soon it was took an act of will to leave spaces between each story. This is the first time I've read anything by Munro, but it won't be the last.

Thanks, Merrikay. I'm a sucker for books set in Paris. Publishers put words like "French" and "Paris" into titles specifically for me. But I think I would have still liked it had it been set in Berlin. But have you noticed how few books there are about the charming, eccentric ways of Germans?

Rebecca, if you didn't like the girl in The Devil Wears Prada, you'll have no patience with Kate. But the boss is just as manipulative and entitled. That's fun.

Thanks, RG. I'll avoid it. I kept wanting to slap her and tell her to stand up for herself and/or quit.

Oh lord Rebecca I am so with you.

I've never read any Munro, but that brief sample you quoted instantly makes me want to rectify that.

Excellent review of the Alice Munro short stories.

Yeah, MerriKay and Rebecca, I do get that. Although I also remember being 20 and very eager to please.

Thanks, bragan and bas. Munro is really very, very good. I recommend her.

228 Well you know what "they" say - the things that drive us crazy about others is often what we dislike in ourselves. I with I'd been a lot less eager to please! both then AND now!

Oh yes, that's true RG. But I think I always stood up for myself a little bit -- I've just gotten better at it as I've gotten older.

And I like Munro too. I'm always happy when I find one of her stories in the New Yorker, compared to some of the, er, younger writers.

Great review of Dear Life, Alison. I have been wanting to read it and your review is a nice reminder.

>222 RidgewayGirl: Nice review of the Munro, Alison. I read my first Munro collection last year (Open Secrets) although I'd been collecting some of her work steadily over the years. Based on the collection I read and your comments on this one, I think it's due time I pull another one off the shelf.

MerriKay, if you'd like to post the occasional snarky comment here, just to prove you're not out to please anyone, go ahead. You know, saying "your review sucked" a few times should do it.

Munro is a master of the short story. I don't know how it is that I missed reading her for so long.

>222 RidgewayGirl:

Great review :) I like Munro a lot although I rarely read her.

233 Thanks for permission. You do realize that counteracts it?

A Quiet Belief in Angels tells the story of Joseph Vaughn, who lost his father in when he was twelve, living on a farm near a small town in Georgia at the very beginning of the Second World War. Later that year, the first girl is murdered. A Quiet Belief in Angels spans over three decades, some in more detail than others, telling the story of Joseph's difficult life and the way the murders haunt him. R.J. Ellory writes in an elaborate style that suits the time period and the narrator's own complex and confused view of events. This is an event-packed novel, including a monstrous serial killer, a coming of age story, a vivid description of a place and time, madness, false imprisonment, fame, love and retribution, it nonetheless loses its forward momentum a few times along the way.