Jane Gardam

My first encounter with Jane Gardam was at the MinnPost's Book Club Blast, last March. Magers & Quinn was sellling books and I picked up a copy of Old Filth. The man staffing the book table was delighted that I bought it and told me I'd love it. He was right.

Today I've finished reading Flight of the Maidens, the story of three 17-year-old girls in 1946 England that begins on the day they learn they have been given scholarships that allow them to go to college. There is a wonderful balance between longing for independence versus the need for family. Highly recommended.

The Book Thief

Just finished reading Markus Zusak's, The Book Thief, a novel about a young girl living in Germany during the Third Reich. I was reluctant to read this book. I tend to hate authors who place child characters in dangerous circumstances. Children get enough shit in reality, why compound it in fiction? Also reminds me far too much of my childhood.

However, this book drew me. The writing was good. The characters are fascinating and do unexpected things. The descriptions of place and time completely drew me in. There is a certain audacity in describing teenagers who think of their Hitler Youth meetings as boring and tedious. But when I read it, it made perfect sense.

Definitely recommend this book to others.

How the Dead Dream by Lydia Millet

What a very strange book. Again, I kept reading without really liking it. The language is beautiful and the picture painted is complete, but the story is so strange and doomed that I wanted to slap the protagonist upside the head. Or I wanted him dead.

This book has the most solitary character I have ever read. As a child he is alone, he briefly marries but she dies tragically, and his grief is monumental, to be followed by more loneliness.

T. is so isolated that he seeks comfort in other isolated beings: the last survivors of various soon-to-be-extinct animals. What can come of this? You can figure that out.

Three Weeks to Say Goodbye by CJ Box

I finished this book because I always finish books, even the ones I hate. This one disappoints all the way to the end.

I've read a bit more about this novel and the story behind it. The three weeks in the title are the time that adoptive parents are given before having to turn over their adopted infant to the birth father and grandfather. The adoptive agency fucked up and didn't get a signature from the birth father before "finalizing" the adoption. This comes as a complete surprise for the adoptive parents and they face a confusing and terrifying world in which the birth grandfather is a federal judge and the birth father is a sadistic asshole.

Along the way, we get racist rants against Mexicans, "admirable" wild-west, gun-toting caricatures, and cops whose cynicism drives them to accept murder, smack downs, set-ups and tampering with evidence.

The main characters are the very definition of middle class twits. Faced with this horrible dilemma, they do nothing to protect themselves or their child. This pissed me off.

If you've never been faced with the classism and racism inherent in our justice system, you might be stupid enough to allow a federal judge and his spoiled brat into your home with no witnesses, no lawyer, no tape recorder or video tape. That's the only way these creeps could get away with the crap that they pull in this book.

If you aren't clueless, you protect yourself. You gather your neighbors, whom you have met and actual know and interact with, to help document the harassment you are facing. The asshole judge and his son would have been stopped in their tracks at the beginning of this book if the parents weren't such go-it-alone, individualistic idiots.

If I had the energy, I could make an important argument about how the thinking, exemplified in this book, is an example of the very worst that can happen when we take the idea of responsibility, property rights and individualism way too seriously. The ONLY choices these parents make are wrong and doomed to fail. The ONLY options they imagine are about personal retribution. At one point the parents ask themselves if there was anything else they could have done and they CAN"T THINK OF A THING.

I'm not that cynical. I do not believe that people are this stupid. Again and again, when things go horribly wrong, communities turn around and act admirably. You'd have to be obtuse not to see that.

Some people really are that stupid.

Three Weeks to Say Goodbye

A novel by C.J. Box that is really starting to piss me off. This novel depends on the fact that our protaganists are middle class twits who understand nothing about community activism and struggle. I more than half way through the book and I fricking hate these people. Ah well.

Recent Reading

America, America by Ethan Canin
I loved the first part of this book. I admire the ability of writers to successfully pull off the unrealiable narrative. We don't distrust the narrator because we think he is lying, we distrust him because of his naivete. And so I loved this romp into class differences and the guilty pleasure our young working class kid gets with his chance to rub elbows with the rich and famous. And we understand his ability to detach himself from his own realization that the only reason the workers are given attention is because the unions can deliver votes. Yet, we are left disappointed by the failure of our narrator to recognize his gullibility. I found it hard to believe that someone so accustomed to analysis could so completely miss the clues live had given him. So, although I admire the class consciousness of this novel, I despair of the way our hero makes excuses for the ruling classes.

Dark House by Theresa Monsour
This author has moved to another pseudonym and her books are out of print. I found this used book at a local store. It is the third of third and final novel in a trilogy focused on St. Paul homicide detective Paris Murphy. Serene Ransom is a fascinating villain. Crazy cat lady, child molester, academic. Of course! I have a sense that the earlier books provided an interesting back-story for Murphy, but I'll have to search the used bookstores to find out, it seems.

Blind Rage by Terri Persons
Terri Persons is the next pseudonym used by the woman who wrote as Theresa Monsour. This series wanders into the currently fashionable psychic field of crime fiction. Our heroine, Bernadette Saint Clare, is able to see through the eyes of murderers. Yet her vision has serious limitations and has caused her to draw erroneous conclusions. It's an interesting way to portray esp: useful sometimes, but often misleading. It makes us questions the very concept of "hunches" and "gut reactions". I read the first in the series, Blind Spot and liked it enough to pick up the second book on a recent bookstore expedition. Saint Clare's visitors from beyond the grave are fascinating, infuriating and their powers are mystifying. But it's a fun read and I'm willing to take the ride.

Black Bolshevik by Harry Haywood
Reading this with one of my book groups. We read the first half of the book for our first meeting last Sunday. I didn't make it all the way through. I am fascinating by the discussion of black nationalism and how the Communist Party position diverged from the more popular Marcus Garvey "back to Africa" movement. I have a lot to learn about the discussion and don't feel as if I understand it from reading this book. Haywood spends lots of time attacking sectarianism in a very sectarian way, which makes this book difficult and fascinating. It is fascinating when it shows the "correct" political thinking doesn't mean much if an activist is not connected with the actual struggles going on here and now. We activists have a tendency to build utopian structures that fundamentally miss the realities of the people we claim to support. I look forward to reading the second half of this fascinating portrayal of an American communist activist.

An Equal Music

I just finished reading this novel by Vikram Seth. I can't even remember what prompted me to buy it. The novel's central character is a musician, Michael Holme, who plays second violin in a classical quartet. He has loved and lost and attempts to retrieve the lost love of another musician, Julia McNicholl.

First, I must admit that the main character was totally unlikable to me. Selfish, obsessed, inconsiderate and absurd, he makes a mountain of his love affair and fails to understand or even remotely understand the person who is Julia. He's like a stalker, forever obsessed with the way she affects him, rather than the person she is. I found him contemptible. I found her weak and barely forgivable.

And yet, there is an understanding of musicians and their obsession with their instrument that makes this novel worth reading. The real love story is between Michael and the violin he plays, a gift from a patroness who has known him since childhood.

Also, this book deals with class. Michael is the son of a butcher, a man unlikely to become a world-class musician. It is only through the patronage of a local aristocrat, that Michael is able to access this world of musicianship.

And this is where the book goes wrong. You cannot transform a working class child into a self-absorded bourgeois twit without some explanation. There is none. What is it that gives this manchild his massive ego? What makes him so completely insensitive to Julia's reality. How is he able to elevate his lover for her to a mythic Utopia without the least consideration or her reality or his?

I can see writing a novel like this that makes clear the extreme selfishness of Michael and his blindness to reality. But this is not the book Seth has written.

How unfair this book is to the reality of love and living with another human being. How dismissive of Julia's husband and child.

The Lace Reader

Just finished reading this book by Brunonia Barry. It starts with a great premise, the unreliable narrator. The narrator begins by saying she lies all the time and that she's a crazy woman.

Okay. Let's see how a crazy woman thinks.

Except we then go into a fairly logical narrative of which we are expected to believe most of what we read, but be prepared to toss out some of the more outlandish claims. That's cheating.

For an amazing example of reading the words of a crazy woman while being able to discern reality from fiction, I recommend and highly prefer Charlotte Gillman's "The Yellow Wallpaper." It's free on the web at Gutenberg.

However, to review the book on its merits, I should say I was pulled along by the plot and kept coming back to it when I had time to read. The sense of place is awesome, I assume, although I've never been to Salem. I was fascinated by the family, Towner, her twin sister Lindley, her mother May and her guardian Eva. All were strong, fascinating women with quirky habits and powerful beliefs. Even the secondary female characters get fleshed out: Angela, Roberta, Anya and Ann.

But I was really bothered by the shift from first person narrative by Towner to first person narrative by Rafferty, the detective who falls for Towner, midway through the book. In comparison to the women of the book, Rafferty is poorly developed. We know little of his beliefs or his desires. He is curiously incapable of action.

I'm not sorry I read this book, but I'm not recommending it to others.

The Way the Crow Flies

Just finished reading this book by Ann Marie MacDonald. I picked this book out of the stacks at the Book House in Dinkytown having heard nothing about it. It packs a wallop.

I felt as if the author was almost cruel in her persistence of portraying an abuser who suffered no consequences. And then I looked up the book on the internets, and discovered this was based on a true story. Just like reality, the abusers of the 1960s get away with it. An innocent boy was convicted of murder, while the true culprits survived and kept their secrets.

MacDonald's story weaves this ugly reality of child abuse into the ugly reality of the Cold War and the brain drain of Nazi scientists to the west. There are moments of amazing beauty in her ability to portray the confusing view of the world that we have as children who have learned about evil long before we are capable of handling the consequences.

There is also a convincing portrayal of a reality most people miss. Children who suffer abuse spend a lot of effort protecting their parents from the facts of their own lives. This comes through loud and clear in this novel. Even when the heroine, Madeline, tries to tell the truth about her life to her beloved father, you can see the tremendous effort it takes. Our parents are taught that the tragedies we experience are their fault. How convenient for society at large to be pin the blame on parents rather than focus on the sickness among us

This book affected me. I honestly don't know whether I would recommend this book to other readers. It needs a trigger warning. I wish I had known when I began the book that this was based on a true story. I would have been able to forgive the author for putting me through such pain and heartache.

A Thousand Splendid Suns

I have been a member of a women's reading group for over 20 years now. We are not the typical reading group. For one thing, we are diverse in our tastes and have NEVER found a book that we all agreed upon as good reading. We tried, at first, to all read the same book. But we also agreed that nobody should feel pressured to read a book she doesn't like. The result? You guessed it. We have never all read the same book.

However, one of our members was especially impressed by Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns. So much so that she gave each of us a copy of the book for Xmas/Hannukah. So I finally got around to reading it this past month.

First, the writing is truly awesome. I felt immersed in the place and time of the book. I felt moved by the women who form the basis of this book.

Also, I was confused by the structure. The book begins telling the story of Miriam, a bastard child who lives alone in a secluded "kolba" with weekly visits from her father. Then, abruptly, the book shifts to concentrate on Laila, Miriam's neighbor. Which is weird and confusing.

I suppose authors must have to trust their readers to let them take these abrupt turns. If the characters are of interest, we will accept the change and trust that all will be resolved. But, dammit, it takes a really long time for that to happen. But, what a miracle, I was patient.

This book throttles you with the reality of war and abuse. It isn't pretty. There are no miraculous escapes. The choices are few and brutal. We have hope for these women, but we also know how foolish that hope is.

The Flight from the Enchanter by Iris Murdoch

I Just finished reading this book last week. I've only read one other book by Murdoch, The Bell, which I enjoyed quite a lot. This is an early novel, Murdoch's second, and it's damned funny. Quite a combination of characters, all connected to each other in ways that are hard to figure out in the beginning. Each character is bounced from one event to the other, seemingly unaware and out of control most of the time. Which is kind of like life.

The part that had me laughing, long-time activist I am, is the meeting of the old ladies to discuss the sale of "The Artemis", a magazine they founded in the radicalism of youth, maintain "shares" in but haven't bothered to read or consider for years. Now, however, there is a proposal to sell the publication and, of course, everyone has an opinion and feels honor bound to expound upon it. Except for one woman with a hearing aid who can understand nothing and keeps lamenting the fact loudly. Unfortunately, with my bad hearing, that seems to be my role these days.

"Order, order!" said Mrs. Carrington-Morris.

"Oh, get on with it!" sazid Mrs. Wingfiled.

"Look here," said the lady in the mantilla, "do I rightly understand that it is proposed that the Artemis be sold?"

"That is the proposal," said Hunter.

"I don't think we can allow that, you know," said the woman with the grey fringe who had the air of one who believed herself to be the only person present who really understood what was going on.

.....A veiled lady who had not spoken so far leaned forward, rumbling like a clock before she gave utterance. "Mmmm - do I understand you to say that it is proposed to sell the Artemis to - a man?"

Hunter gestured hopelessly. "I've been running the thing for two years now," he said, "and after all I'm a man!"

A stiff silence followed this shameless declaration.

Yup. Familiar. Heh.

1,000 books?

You've got to be kidding me. 1,000 books? You MUST read?

OK. Confession time. Way back when I was a struggling English major at the University of Minnesota, I stumbled upon a book called something like "Books for the college bound" and I decided I had to collect them all. I haunted used bookstores and many of the local ones, most notably Biermaiers Books, made quite a lot of money off my efforts to collect all of the listed books. I read and I read and I tried to become a self-taught literature snob. I wrote long hand-written reviews in the college-ruled notebooks I favored at the time.

Rather than savoring the reading, I racked up the reading like points on a basketball scoreboard. So I missed quite a lot, of course.

And still, the lure of the "XXX best books" list still has its appeal. I want to be one of those cultured people who has read the books and understands the cultural references. Also, I want the pleasure of a damn good book.

But these lists, they are so arbitrary. This latest one by the Guardian newspaper in the UK is beyond ridiculous. How many of us have the time to read 1,000 books? Isn't that cheating? Shouldn't we demand the list be chopped down to 10 or thereabouts?

Because, seriously, just read Beloved a few hundred times and you will have learned more than you could possibly know about life and the power of words.

Run by Ann Patchett

I read the novel Run by Ann Patchett last week and cried relentlessly at the happy ending. Patchett has an awesome way with words in which nothing is wasted. The pages fly by and I kept wanting to learn more, know more, find out the secrets, get to know the characters more.

I first encountered Patchett when I read Bel Canto a few years ago. That was an awesome experience. I loved so much about it and my book group passed the novel among us, each enjoying it for different reasons.

Run takes place in Boston and centers around a political family not unlike the Kennedys. Bernard Doyle, the former mayor of Boston, white an Catholic, dreams that one of his three sons will follow in his footsteps. Unsurprisingly, none of the boys are headed on that path. The oldest son, Sullivan, is the outcast, having caused a scandal that brought his father's political career to an end. The two younger sons, African-American boys adopted a year apart, have other career goals. Tip is fascinated by fish and studies ichthyology, Teddy considers the seminary.

The book begins with a car crash. The younger boys have reluctantly joined their father at a speech by Jesse Jackson. As they argue about whether to attend a reception, Tip turns away in anger and is saved from being hit by a car by a complete stranger, an African American woman, who pushes him out of the way and takes the full blow of the oncoming truck.

It turns out that the "stranger" is, in fact, the birth mother of Teddy and Tip and the rest of the book takes up the unraveling of secret upon secret.

I highly recommend this book. Being part of an adoptive family, I'm sure I reacted to this book more strongly than most people. Like I said. Cried. Uncontrollably. For a good while.

Overcoming Zionism

The local group, Coalition for Palestinian Rights hosted author Joel Kovel this weekend and I was able to attend a Friday night talk. When I learned last week that Kovel would be speaking, I bought and read his book, Overcoming Zionism. The book is great in the way it shows how modern Zionism and western imperialism worked hand in glove to create the racist state of Israel. It also highlights all the many steps along the way that provided opportunities to avoid creating a racist state and how these opportunities were sabotaged or ignored.

What struck me most about Kovel's book was the great respect he gave to other writers and thinkers and they way he encouraged the reader toward ways to learn more about the many opinions about Zionism and the state of Israel. This is so outside the norm for books by political thinkers. In fact, it is much more in line with people who work as on-the-ground activists, supporting each other in our different struggles. It was pretty damn awesome, actually.

Vietnam; the (last) war the U.S. lost



I just finished reading this excellent re-telling of the Vietnam War and the movement against it by Joe Allen. I met Joe at the Cleveland anti-war conference in June and he signed a copy of his book for me.

I'll write a full review in a bit, but here's some existing rules to get you started.

He got a very favorable review at Z magazine from Ron Jacobs.

An older and much shorter version of the book is available on-line from International Socialist:

Part One: from the French conquest to the overthrow of Diem

From the overthrow of Diem to the Tet Offensive

From Quagmire to Defeat

And an excerpt from the current book is available here:

1968: The Democrats and the antiwar movement

The Great Tattoo by Val McDermid

I've been reading Val McDermid for years and almost always enjoy her work. This is no exception.

The book has a fascinating construct, based around the fact that Fletcher Christian, the lead mutineer on the Bounty, was acquainted with William Wordsworth, famous English poet. McDermid takes this fact and posits a hidden manuscript that Wordsworth wrote telling Christian's side of the tale. The lead character, Jane Gresham, is a Wordsworth scholar who picks up hints of this manuscript while digging through Wordsworth family correspondence and sets out to investigate. Meanwhile a "bog body" is discovered in the area, preserved by peat and bearing tattoos from the South Seas. Could "Pirate Peat" by the man himself?

None of which adds up to a murder mystery until ruthless collectors get involved in the process and the locals connected with Gresham's investigation start ending up dead.

Along the way we get to know Jane, a low-level academic struggling to make ends meet by working a side job at the local pub and living in a squalid housing complex with its local variety of gangster. Jane's brother, a pompous, jealous headmaster at the local school. Janes' friends fellow academic Dan and his partner Howard who runs the bar where Jane works. We meet Jane's friend, Tenille, a young black woman with a love of poetry and a knack for avoiding school. Jane's parents, sheepherders in the Lakes District, a fascinating forensic scientist who is turning her investigation into Pirate Peat into a TV documentary and the local lawman.

Between chapters, we are granted short passages from the story of Fletcher Christian.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and recommend it to others. I was kept guessing right until the killer was revealed, which is a real treat. I like being surprised.

Raven Black by Ann Cleeves

I just finished reading this mystery novel set in the Shetland islands. Frankly, I'm ambivalent.

There are things about this book that piss me off. Two girls are murdered and the immediate suspect is a man with mental illness. When he is arrested, the community heaves a huge sigh of relief. There! We don't have to worry. Only *damaged* people need be feared.

Of course, we readers know this solution is too easy. Of course the old man is not the culprit.

And yet, the resolution, while shocking, is fundamentally disappointing. The writer has tricked us by letting us into the head of the murderer without letting us know the whole story. This is the same technique Agatha Christie used in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Christie was much better at this.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

by David Wroblewski is getting a lot of good press. I think I first read about it in this USA Today review. This part:

Wroblewski, whose parents ran a kennel in Wisconsin, lets the dogs in his novel share in the narration, to a small degree. Sounds hokey, but it works remarkably well.

grabbed my attention. A dog as narrator? Cool! The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski is indeed a great read.

I saw a copy in the Barnes & Noble store at Wayne State University when I visited Detroit. Decided against spending money at a chain store. So I jumped at the chance to buy the only copy available at Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative in Madison, WI on our way back from Cleveland. I spent this weekend reading it much too quickly. I needed to now what would happen. The language and location are fascinating, but the plot drove me to read as fast as possible. Which means not savoring and enjoying it as much as I like.

There are allusions to Hamlet in this story of a young man whose father dies and whose mother takes up with his uncle. So I guess we have to hate Trudy (Gertude) for her stupidity/vulnerability. Which is a shame because the mother was a fascinating character until she got forced into the plotline (at least in my opinion) of Hamlet. I don't buy her being so stupid. The uncle, Claude (Claudius), is a smooth-talking manipulator who is very, very good at getting other people to believe the lies he tells. So I'll give the author a pass, I guess, although grudgingly!

To read this book, you need to be willing to engage in fantasy. Ghosts provide some of the most important information. Dogs are conveyors of wisdom and provide training. Storms arise to answer questions. A crazy old witch predicts the future.

What comes through in this telling of the Hamlet story, is how much burden is placed on the young boy, who is, in this re-telling, barely a teenager. He is burdened with too much knowledge and too little practice in using it. In fact, he is overburdened in every way. He can hear but cannot speak and his disability is the cause of some of the most wrenching events told in the story.

In the world today, we do not expect children to be able to solve the problems of adults as well as all the flora and fauna of their environment. Edgar does not have the luxury and I'm not sure the author cuts him enough slack for his failures.

And still, it's an awesome read. And I will read it again. I think you should too.