IN TRIAL: be back soon

100th Book of the Year!

Much to my surprise, I figured out that I have read 100 books already this year. I usually read about 100 in a whole year, so I am not sure why I am ahead of the game this year. A big part of it has to do with listening to more audiobooks, I know. After over ten years of working at home, I started working in a law firm again. Even though my commute is only about 15 minutes each way, that half an hour a day listening to a book adds up. Also, because I have been listening in the car more, I got in the habit of listening while I putter around the house making dinner and doing chores. So it could be the audiobooks. It could also be that I am not working actively on any major lists right now. After I finished the Modern Library list, I have been reading more randomly. It's not that the books I have been choosing are all light reading -- I've gone through Moby Dick and that very dense biography of John Stuart Mill in the past month alone -- but I haven't been wading through Theodore Dreiser or Henry James. Whatever the reason, I have enjoyed my 100 books of 2008 and look forward to three more months of reading before the end of the year. My 100th book? Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome K. Jerome. Part of my 19th Century reading jag. It's sort of a cross between Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and a P. G. Wodehouse novel.

Even better!

Bookforum.com just added my John Stuart Mill review to their system of telling people about things they might want to read. It's in the "monsters" paragraph at the top of the page right now, but here is the permanent link. How exciting!

I'm moving up!

My stock as a book geek is rising! My review of Richard Reeve's new biography of John Stuart Mill is the top review in the current edition of the Internet Review of Books. I'll post the review here when I get a chance.

List of the Day: Vacation Books

Oh, it is hard to come home from vacation! How nice it was to spend two weeks away from work, doing nothing but peeping at leaves, avoiding headlines, taking in the New England vibe, and reading the kinds of books that I store up for such trips:

Kane and Able by Jeffery Archer;

The Glass Lake by Maeve Binchy;

A Drink Before the War by Dennis Lehane;

Absolute Zero by Chuck Logan;

To the Hilt by Dick Francis; and

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler.

These were all good yarns; all entertaining. Perfect for vacation.

Review: How Far Can You Go?

How Far Can You Go? by David Lodge is a fascinating, anthropological novel following the lives and religious development of a group of English Catholics from their days in a college church group in the 1950s, through the tumultuous years of the sexual revolution.

The friends question their religious tenant and traditions as they face marriage, families, religious callings, sexual identity, and mortality. At the same time, the Catholic Church wrestled with Vatican II, the battle over contraception, internal reform efforts, and the charismatic movement.

The title jokingly refers to the question the young Catholic men asked their priests about “How far can you go with a girl?” But more substantively, the book asks how far the Catholic Church can alter its rituals and adapt to modern mores and still remain the Catholic Church. Or how far individuals can abandon their religious customs and personalize their faith and still remain Catholics or even Christians. On a different level, the title refers to how far a novelist narrator can insert himself into the story and still count the book as a novel.

This is an absolutely intriguing novel. It won the Costa (Whitbread) Award for best novel in 1980. Anthony Burgess included the book in his list of the best 99 novels since 1939. Catholics (whether they lived through the changes depicted or came along after), other Christians, and general readers interested in religious cultures should find it mesmerizing.

Review: Crescent City

Crescent City by Belva Plain has all the makings of a great historic saga: Jewish immigrants flee the poverty and persecution of 19th Century Europe for a life of luxury in the religiously tolerant boomtown of antebellum New Orleans; families are torn apart over the slavery issue and fight on opposite sides of the Civil War; there are loveless marriages, adulterous affairs, hoop skirts, burning plantations, and even blockage runners.

Unfortunately, the book is still boring. It only skims the surface of the major events of the plot and the conflicts the characters face. It lacks the emotional depth and pure entertainment of the classic Gone with the Wind. It lacks the details of the really good historic epics, like John Jakes’s Kent Family Chronicles. It lacks the smutty thrill of a good bodice ripper like that 1970s gem, The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss.

Despite being over 500 pages long, Crescent City comes up short.

OTHER REVIEWS

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Review: Thomas Paine

In Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations, Craig Nelson taught me that Thomas Paine was the Forrest Gump of the Enlightenment.  He bumbled along through life, usually with no money, no real job, or no home of his own.  Yet he was involved in the most important events, and with the most notable figures, of the Eighteenth Century.

Paine (then Pain) spent his first 37 years in England when, separated from his wife, bankrupt, and fired from his job, he decided to go to America.   It was then that he precipitously met the most famous American in Europe, Benjamin Franklin, who became his lifelong friend and his immediate benefactor by providing him letters of introduction.

Arriving in America in 1774 with his cache of Franklin letters, Paine was a delegate at the first Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.   He began another lifelong friendship, this time with George Washington.  While struggling along as a magazine writer and editor, he wrote Common Sense, which sparked the American Revolution. Although he did not fight in the Revolution, he was often at the front lines with Washington, and his line, “These are the times that try men’s souls” was the troops’ rallying cry.

Following American independence, Paine did not hold office like many of the other Founding Fathers.  But he was sent to France to represent America in negotiating peace with Britain.  He wrote Rights of Man, which sparked the French Revolution and was a world-wide best seller.   It also earned Paine, in abstentia, a British death sentence for sedition.

During the French Revolution, Paine was elected to the French National Assembly, where he was the only member to vote against beheading Louis XVI.  He got himself crosswise with Robespierre and was thrown into prison, destined for the guillotine, when the tide turned against Robespierre and American diplomacy got him released.

While waiting in France until it was safe to sail to America, Paine wrote The Age of Reason.  He also provided military advice to Napoleon Bonaparte about how to invade Britain.  He returned to America upon the invitation Thomas Jefferson.

Nelson does a good job with the story of Paine’s life and adventures.   His “grand theme” gets a little attenuated towards the end as he tried to tie everything together.  But overall this is an entertaining overview of this omnipresent at the revolution Founding Father.

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Review: The Right Stuff

The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe is my favorite book about astronauts. Of course, it is the only book about astronauts that I will ever read, so that isn't the strongest praise. But it is perfect for a general reader like me looking for an entertaining history of America's early space program.

Wolfe definitely keeps the tale interesting. He focuses on the personal, rather than the technical and administrative, aspects of the Mercury space program and the first seven astronauts involved. He follows the seven through their early careers, mostly as test pilots, through each of their turns in a Mercury capsule.

The most remarkable part of the story is the connection Wolfe makes between fighter jet pilots and astronauts. Having grown up in the NASA age, I did not know that the Air Force had a competing rocket program (a program that managed to send pilots several miles into space and then have them actually land the aircraft back on earth) before it was scuttled in favor of NASA's moon missions.

The only drawback of the book is Wolfe's Gonzo journalism style, which much have been refreshing and bold back in 1979. Now, the hipper-than-thou tone is a little tired and can get exasperating.

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Review: Restless

 

Restless by William Boyd is one of the rare novels that is enjoyable from the opening quote to the final paragraph. The story goes back and forth between the cloak-and-dagger world of WWII British espionage and the “contemporary” (1976) relationship between a mother and her daughter.

The premise is that a proper English grandmother, tucked away in a tiny Oxfordshire village, puttering in her garden, gives her daughter a manuscript she wrote, which reveals that she had been a British spy. From there, the story of her life as an intelligence agent develops along with the daughter’s completely new understanding of the person her mother is.

While it has its exciting bits, it is not a heart-racing thriller. Instead, gets into the minds of the characters to look at what it was like to have once been a spy, then live a normal life, and what it would be like to learn that your parent had been a spy with an adventurous life no one knew anything about. Fascinating.

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NOTES

The audio book version was particularly entertaining because the woman who read did remarkably well on the accents. She had to portray characters with a variety of English and American accents, as well as Irish, Scottish, French, German, Russian, Mexican, and Iranian. She did an incredible job.

Review: The Adventures of Augie March

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow won the National Book Award in 1964.

The story follows the life of the eponymous hero from childhood in Chicago, through a sojourn in Mexico with a zany huntress, to life on the seas in the Merchant Marines. Full of Bellow's over-the-top characters and riddled with discourses on Big Ideas, Augie is a great American hero. Bellow is a treasure.


OTHER REVIEWS

Bibliofreak (a thorough and excellent review)

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Review: The Shell Seekers

The Shell Seekers by Rosamunde Pilcher is a plot-driven family saga centered around Penelope Sterne, daughter of an artist and mother of three unlikable adult children (well, two are outright unlikable; one is supposed to be admirable but is singularly off-putting). Penelope, now 64 and suffering from a weak ticker, putters in her English garden, ponders her past, and considers how and when to dispose of the few of her father’s now-valuable art works in her possession.

The story moves right along at a bracing clip, through lengthy detours into Penelope’s childhood in Cornwall, Britain’s WWII home front, and the younger daughter’s sojourn in Ibiza. It is an enjoyable read, well-deserving of its decades of popularity.

Only in retrospect does the novel disappoint. The main weakness is a lack of character development. The characters spring fully-formed onto the page. The “good” people are all generous, hard-working, independent, and bluntly forthright. (They are also startlingly unsentimental.) The “bad” folks are greedy, vain, self-centered, and silly. None of them change, either individually or in relation to the others. When the narrative reaches its chronologically natural ending, resolution of the various threads is brusquely efficient, but not convincing or satisfying.

Overall, it is an entertaining but unfulfilling read.

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NOTES

The Shell Seekers is on the BBC's Big Read list.  

Review: Hard Times

Hard Times by Charles Dickens is one of the many Victorian Era classics that I had never gotten around to reading. But thanks to an audio version new on the shelf of my library branch, it made it to the top of my TBR pile.

In equal parts good old fashioned storytelling and outdated social criticism, Hard Times is the tale of the Gradgrind family and their struggle to reconcile the rational, fact-based side of life with the emotional and imaginative side. Thomas Gradgrind, Sr. is proud of his “system” of raising children – his own and those in the school he runs – to know and depend only on facts, with no “wondering” or amusement. The ultimate failure of his system leads to the final showdown and resolution of the story.

Dickens packed the book (first published in installments in 1854) full of his usual extraordinary characters. These really came to life in the audio version. Along with some Victorian moralizing, he mixed in plenty of humor and even a little intrigue and adventure. None of the characters are particularly likeable, perhaps especially to a modern reader with less sympathy for the outmoded social constraints under which the characters labor, but they all get their just deserts – for good or ill – in the end. Despite its age, Hard Times remains thoroughly entertaining.

Review: The Assistant

The Assistant by Bernard Malamud is the moving story of an Italian-American stranger who works his way into the lives of an immigrant Jewish shopkeeper and his family.

Malamud perfectly portrays the grinding worries of running a mom-and-pop grocery, but also brings out bigger themes such as the importance of education and an individual’s ability to overcome bigotry. Focusing on the value of loyalty, repentance, and personal responsibility, it is a story of the redemptive power of love and forgiveness. Four stars.

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Review: Havoc in its Third Year

Havoc in Its Third Year by Ronan Bennett is a mystery and a morality play and a historical novel all rolled into one.

In 1630, John Brigge is the coroner and one of the Governors in an unnamed Northern England town. When he is called into town from his family and farm on the other side of the desolate moor, he finds not only a woman accused of murdering her newborn son, but political upheaval as law-and-order extremists use fiery oratory and public torture to consolidate their power.

There are times when the implicit comparison to modern times is a little heavy handed, but, in general, the author avoids preaching by focusing on human ambiguity rather than human hypocrisy. Whether the final ending is hard-heartedly cynical or comfortingly realistic is up for debate.

Review: On Chesil Beach

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan is a perfectly crafted tragedy that describes the way a life can go so easily astray. Through the eyes of the omniscient narrator, we watch the excruciating, awkward wedding night of Florence and Edward who, in 1962, are too freighted with history to breach the cusp of the sexual revolution. The consequences are heartbreaking.

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Review: The Pirate's Daughter

The Pirate's Daughter by Margaret Cezair-Thompson spans generations of a Jamaican family, focusing first on Ida Joseph who, as a teenager, has an affair with aging movie star Errol Flynn and bears his daughter May Flynn, the focus of the second half.

Usually, I find novels using real people as characters to be irritating, and I am not a big fan of mother/daughter novels, so I had trepidations about reading Cezair-Thompson' s hefty novel.  My worries were put to rest within the first couple of chapters.  The Pirate’s Daughter turned out to be a surprisingly delightful read.  It has an elegantly constructed plot, complex characters, steady pacing, and a satisfying resolution.

The book is about the story, not the writing, which is clean and unobtrusive.  Even the author’s use of Jamaican dialect is so natural it blends right into the narrative.

At one point, May is talking with her would-be lover, a character based on novelist and ex-pat Jamaica resident, Ian Fleming, about writing books.  He tells her he is thinking of writing a book that would be “Lolita, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Rebecca all mixed together and set in Jamaica.”  Cezair-Thompson may not have accomplished such a lofty goal, but she made a respectable effort.  The Pirate’s Daughter is a good book.

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Review: Thérèse Raquin

Published in 1867, Thérèse Raquin is Emile Zola's first novel and a magnificent proto-noir thriller.  All the necessary elements are here -- a hot-to-trot young wife, an invalid husband, a greedy lover – all simmered together in a Parisian stew of lust, murder, deception, debauchery, and guilt. 

With the macabre ghoulishness of Poe and the diabolical desperation of Cain, Thérèse Raquin should be on any noir-lover's bookshelf.

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Review: Gifted

Appropriately enough for a book about math, Gifted by Nikita Lalwani is more than the sum of its parts. It is the story of a math prodigy, a coming-of-age novel, and a look at immigrant life. But it all comes together in a way that is so interesting, so satisfying, that it is a truly great novel of general appeal.

The heroine, Rumi Vasi, is the “gifted” young daughter of Indian parents living in Wales. Driven by her parents to excel in mathematics, Rumi achieves their highest hope for her – acceptance at Oxford University when she is 15. Lalwani masterfully captures the awkwardness and inner turmoil of this out-of-place adolescent.

Lawani’s writing is remarkably polished for a first novel. Her language does not get in the way of the story, either by being distractingly beautiful or stumblingly clunky. The words flow so naturally you do not notice them, allowing the story to unfold with natural grace, right up to the suitably dramatic ending with its hope of positive resolution.

NOTES

This was the first book I received from the LibraryThing Early Reviewer program.

Review: Lost in Translation

 

Lost in Translation* is an imaginative and satisfying novel by Nicole Mones. The protagonist, Alice Mannegan, is an American living in China, working as an interpreter, and striving to be accepted in the culture she has adopted. When hired by a second-rate American anthropologist, the two hook up with his Chinese counterparts and head to Inner Mongolia looking for the lost remains of Peking Man.

Mones does a great job of weaving the histories of the characters into the main story. While the team follows the trail of homo erectus, Alice struggles to understand her relationship with her powerful father; her boss worries about losing his son’s affection and respect; and their Chinese cohort searches on the sly for the wife he cannot abandon although she disappeared to a work camp during the Cultural Revolution.

Mones uses the historic relationship between French priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and his platonic lover, Lucile Swan, to bring thematic unity to the varied story lines. Equal parts historical mystery, foreign adventure, and cross-cultural romance, Lost in Translation has a lot to offer.

* Which has nothing to do with the Scarlett Johansson movie with the same title.

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Review: The Bone People

The Bone People by Keri Hulme is a difficult book about identity, love, and belonging.  Hulme tells the story of three tough-as-nails characters: Kerewin, an isolated artist who can no longer paint; Joe, a Maori workman struggling to raise his adopted son alone; and Simon, the mute little boy Joe found washed up on the seashore.

The style is difficult because the point of view switches around among the three main characters without warning; Hulme uses Joycean made-up words as well as Maori words; and it is hard to tell when the adults are speaking their own words or thinking out loud what they think the mute little Simon is trying to communicate.

The story is difficult because of the child abuse at the center of the plot. The ambivalence with which Hulme treats the topic makes the story incredibly interesting, but absolutely distressing.

The characters are difficult because none of them are likable. Simon is sympathetic, for sure. But even he has his moments of maliciousness, although these are less convincing than Hulme may have intended. Joe, on the other hand, does not deserve the sympathy Hulme seems to want the reader to give him. Yes, he gets his comeuppance in the end, but it does not seem sufficient punishment. His role is key to the story because he is the hinge between Simon and Kerewin, but the ultimate resolution seems a little unrealistic, given the prior conflict.

Kerwin is particularly prickly and seething with anger. She is quick to lash out verbally, and if angry enough or drunk enough, physically. She has cut herself off from her family and her community, preferring to live in an isolated tower by the ocean. She has even isolated herself from her own sex, considering herself to be a third gender – a “neuter.” But Kerwin’s story makes the book worth reading. She is one of the most complex and intriguing characters in contemporary literature.

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