A Work in Progress

Library Loot Highlights

I sometimes think library books are just part of my exercise regimen.  I request lots of new and forthcoming titles online (giving my fingers a little workout).  Inevitably when I go to pick them up there are more books than I anticipate as Murphy's Law states they will all arrive at the same time.  So I have an armload to take home, which is a good muscle builder.  I shift them about at home dragging them from one room to the next perusing, skimming, setting aside.  Then due dates all approach at once to they have to be returned, again an armload, which generally means a walk to the library creating a nice aerobic workout.  I won't say how many (how few) give me a nice mental workout due to actually reading them.  As always intentions are good, but free time is limited and the current reads pile always towering. 

But I still love them.  No matter how often I say I am going to tack a break and go on the wagon, I always fall off sooner or later.  I have a nice stack of books to choose from at the moment (most from the public library but a few, too, from the library where I work), and thought it was about time to share a few highlights.

With San Francisco in mind I made a quick trip to the third floor stacks at my library and found a copy of Dashiell Hammett's The Continental Op.  For some reason I thought he wrote a series of novels with this character, but it seems as though it is only a series of short stories.  I'm not sure if his other books have San Francisco settings, but these stories do so will be my starting point for my "vacation-preparation" reading.

I am taking this one as a sign that my vacation is really going to come together and actually happen.  By chance Susan Shea's The King's Jar was on the holdshelf at the public library and it happens to also have a San Francisco setting.  How's that for a nice coincidence.  This is the second Dani O'Rourke mystery.  She is a fundraiser for the fiction Devor Museum who gets involved in a murder investigation.  I'm looking forward to both of these.

Another possible beach read is Patricia Beard's A Certain Summer set in post-WWII Long Island and involves a MIA husband and love triangle.  It looks promising and the setting is appealing.

I started reading John Boyne's first novel The Absolutist set in post-WWI England, but at the time I was a little burnt out by war books.  It still sits in my reading pile.  The House of Special Purpose is quite different--"an audaciously imagine alternate history" about the Russian Revolution.  (I had  no idea, by the way, that he had written so many books!).

I've already heard good things about A Murder at Rosamund's Gate by Susanna Calkins.  I've not read a good historical mystery for a while, though of late I'd been contemplating something with a Medieval setting (along the lines of a Peter Ellis or Sharan Newman), but maybe one set in 17th century England would hit the spot.

And to round things out I have Maryska Biaggio's Parlor Games which sounds like great fun.  It involves an unflappable and unapologetic heroine and a tenacious Pinkerton detective.  Her misadventures take her from San Francisco (there it is, popping up yet again) to Shanghai, London and points in between.  I believe this is also based on a true story. 

As a side note, my Netflix DVD this week is the first disc of Ken Burns's The Dust Bowl which aired last year on PBS.  I am always interested in Depression-era America so am looking forward to watching it this weekend.  Not too long ago I watched his Prohibition and it was fascinating stuff.

I know it was a short work week, but I'm always happy to see the weekend roll around.  I probably won't get in as much reading time as last weekend (and I have a whole pile of books I need to write about), but It's always nice to know I have a couple of relaxing days ahead of me. 

A Thursday Mishmash of Things

Guess where I might be going later this year?  I had all but written off taking a (proper-go-away-somewhere-exciting) vacation this year, but things are sort of falling together.  I might be going to lovely San Francisco in October.  I am still in the thinking/planning/fantasizing mode but as I am looking into accommodations I guess you could say I am closer to being sure about it all than unsure.  I loved (no really, really loved) San Francisco when I went last year.  If I could afford to live there I would happily pack my bags and go.  Alas, I can barely afford a short stay there (which this will be--but better than nothing), so a mini-vacation is still very welcome.

So this post is going to be on the abbreviated side, since I can't concentrate enough to write a proper book post.  I do have all sorts of bookish bits to share still (when can I not talk about books?).

Since I am most likely going to San Francisco, I'll be reprising my reading list from last year. Hopefully I'll get to read more than I did than last summer.  Reading about a place is (almost) as good as going there. I've already decided I need to read Dashiell Hammett who lived in the city and set his stories there.  Not sure what else will pique my reading curiosity, but I'm on the lookout for some good, atmospheric stories.  If you have any suggestions they would be most welcome.

I'm down to the last forty pages of Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room, which I hope to finish tonight (as I come down off my vacation-planning high).  I'm not sure I have a good handle on what I've read so will be pondering it for a few days before trying to write about it (and will go in search of a little criticism).  Guidance is always welcome with writers like Woolf, though I am so glad I have finally had a chance to read her again.  After reading Renate Adler, I was thinking that Virginia Woolf would be a cakewalk, but now I am not so sure.

Not to be thinking ahead, but thinking ahead--I have several new novellas to choose from when I finish the Woolf novel.  I am leaning towards Jane Austen's Lady Susan, which I think I read a number of years ago (epistolary novel I seem to remember?).  All of a sudden I am having this overwhelming desire to read classics.  My eyes begin glazing over when I turn to my rather massive pile (they get the top shelf of a small bookcase in my bedroom) of unread classics.  Oh the anticipation.  I've done a poor job the last few years of classics-reading.  Not that this year will be much of an improvement considering the year is swiftly approaching the halfway mark. 

I've been reading Barbara Pym's Crampton Hodnet, which I think I am going to try and race to the finish before the end of the month (sheesh, just one more day?  that may be wishful thinking).  You know, I am really, really enjoying it.  It  makes me wonder why I waited so long to read another Pym novel (after her most excellent Excellent Women).  The novel was published posthumously but was the first novel she wrote, and it seems I saw somewhere that it is listed as juvenilia?  Interesting.  So far it seems like it is in firm Pym territory--there is an elderly spinster, her companion, a handsome vicar who is trying to avoid romantic entanglements, a possible love affair between a young woman and an Oxford student, the young woman's parents are long-married--her mother having given up helping her husband with his book--for fear he will finish it!  All totally delightful!

I have finally decided on a beach read.  It won't be my sole beach read, but it is the first and a good one I've chosen, too.  Agatha Christie's Evil Under the Sun.  I read it years ago, though I couldn't for the life of me find my copy so had to go off and buy a new one.  I have seen the film adaptation with Peter Ustinov numerous times, too.  The film doesn't quite follow the book, but that's okay.  I liked them both.  I remember who the perpetrator is, so it won't be a surprise, but instead I will concentrate on "how" Christie pulls her story off and simply the pleasure of island life--all the little details, which I so enjoy in an Agatha Christie novel.  It's a Hercule Poirot story by the way.  Though I have been reading the Miss Marple's in order they were written, I have no qualms about reading the Poirot's in a haphazard fashion.  This reminds me I need to pick up another Miss Marple soon.  I love vintage crime novels.  They just hit the spot. 

One more find to share.  I can't remember where I came across Constellation of Genius: 1922: Modernism Year One by Kevin Jackson, but it is a promising looking book.  I just brought it home from the library, though I had to request it specially from interlibrary loan.  It's a diary of sorts.  It goes  month by month through the year 1922.

"Ezra Pound referred to 1922 as Year One of a new era. It was the year that began with the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses and ended with the publication of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: respectively, the most influential English-language novel and poem of the century. To this day, these two works remain the titanic figures of modern literature—some would say, of modernity itself. And it was the indefatigable Pound who played a significant part in the launch of both writers’ careers."

"In Constellation of Genius, Kevin Jackson puts the accomplishments of Joyce and Eliot in the context of the world in which their works first appeared. We see the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the end of Dada, and the death of Proust. Meanwhile, Hollywood transformed the nature of fame, making Charlie Chaplin the most recognizable man on the planet. Hitchcock directed his first feature, Kandinsky and Klee joined the Bauhaus, and Louis Armstrong took the train from New Orleans to Chicago, heralding the start of modern jazz."

I've not read Joyce or Eliot (or Pound for that matter), but Virginia Woolf published Jacob's Room in 1922.  How fitting is that?  Doesn't the book sound good?  Rather hefty but a fun way to get a taste of the world in 1922.

I'm actually reading lots of other really good books, too, but I think I'll save talking about them for another day.  See, even without being able to concentrate I can yammer on about books!

Jack Absolute by C.C. Humphreys

"Jack Absolute.  Soldier.  Mohawk.  Duelist.  Dramatist.  Chef!"

The last is a bit tongue in cheek.

How's this for a bit of metafiction.  Captain Jack Absolute, creation of 18th century playwright Richard Sheridan, pulled from the pages of a play called The Rivals and plunked into the pages of a historical novel.  Then, in the pages of the novel he becomes the subject of a fictional Richard Sheridan who decides to write a play about his swashbuckling and enviable adventures.  And within the same story plays himself on stage.  It's all very larger than life and if you have an opportunity to "meet" Captain Absolute you'll realize just how fitting and to character all this is!

Author C.C. Humphreys knows well of which he writes as he has himself played Jack Absolute on stage.  As a matter of fact he began his career as an actor and playwright and unsurprisingly such a vivid and colorful character as Jack Absolute (and isn't that a marvelous invention of a name?) became his inspiration and prompted him to create a story around the fictional character.  Humphreys quite literally brought Jack Absolute to life after living and breathing the character himself.  I like the story behind the story almost as much as the story itself. 

And I do love a good adventure story, and even more so one that can be described as swashbuckling.  Dashing heroes, especially those like Jack who have wit, humor and keen intelligence are rather on the agreeable side, don't you think?  Let's see, I can add him to the list.  There's Captain Alatriste, Beauvallet, and my all time favorite Horatio Hornblower (an officer and a gentleman).  Jack, a well-seasoned soldier, has been out of the game as such for a number of years.  He gave up his commission to travel to India and is set to return after conducting business in London when he's asked to take on the task of spy.  He'd rather not but falls into it all by accident.

This story has another twist (there are a number of twists in this story as you might imagine).  It's 1775 and the Revolutionary War is being fought on the other side of the Atlantic.  Jack is a Redcoat, though an enlightened British soldier.  His first allegiance is to the Crown but he's not without a few sympathies for the Rebels (he gets it from his mother's side who had a streak of the rebellious in her Irish blood).  As a younger man he spent many years in Canada and the Hudson Valley among the Iroquois so is well versed in the ways of frontier life.

But let me backtrack just a moment here.  Jack would prefer to steer well clear of the War for American Independence.  He kindly refuses the offer to be reappointed to his former regiment.  Aside from his desire to return to India where he is trying to recoup his fortune he has recently acquired estate in the West Indies that needs attending to.  Only a day shy of his departure, however, he gets dragged into a duel and barely misses being caught.  Duels being illegal and all but frowned upon it's a friendly bit of blackmail by General John Burgoyne that finally convinces Jack that a journey to the American Colonies might be a good idea after all.  It doesn't hurt that aboard the same ship will be the beautiful Miss Louisa Reardon returning to her family in New York, Jack having a fondness for Colonial women.

Jack's expertise and experience is needed not just in leading troops but in his abilities as a spy and his knowledge of the Six Nations of the Iroquois who are, Jack is quick to point out, His Majesty's Native Allies (not Subjects).  If the war is to be won, it can only be done with their help, and they will need convincing.  Jack considers the Iroquois his brothers and is known to them as Daganoweda.  On more than one occasion, as a matter of fact, his life has been saved by Até who travels with him as friend and companion.  Midway through the story Jack reflects on the many and varied ways in which his enemies have tried to kill him but have oft been routed by a very calm, always cerebral, Shakespeare-quoting Até.

Jack Absolute is a wholly entertaining romp through the Revolutionary War, at least through the pivotal and bloody Battle of Saratoga.  There's a nice balance between swashbuckling adventure (including duels, battles, swordplay, quick escapes, a nasty snake bite and an amorous liaison or two) and historical spy story (complete with stolen missives and lost code breakers, double agents and a secret society of Illuminati with their own hidden agenda) with an entirely different perspective on the War.

Many thanks to Liz at Sourcebooks for sending this one my way.  There are two more books featuring Jack Absolute.  The Blooding of Jack Absolute, which is a prequel and will be published in the US in November, and Absolute Honour which also takes place before the Revolutionary War.

Short Story (Sunday): Wednesday

Short Story (Sunday): Wednesday.  That would be my normally scheduled (Sunday) short story on a Tuesday and this week's story happens to be titled "Wednesday".  How's that for a mouthful? 

I really like Dorothy Whipple.  This is the second story by her in the Persephone collection, earlier I read "A Lovely Time" and prior to that three of her many novels (Someone at a Distance, Greenbanks and They Knew Mr. Knight).  So often Dorothy Whipple's stories are quite devastating.  They might ultimately have happy or at least satisfying endings, but the domestic situations she writes about are not usually of the storybook mold or terribly blissful.  Like most of the really good stories in this collection she offers a perfect slice of life no matter how flawed the characters or blemished the relationships.  Much like reality the people she writes about have made mistakes, are no longer young and beautiful and want only to carve out a little happiness in life for themselves.

Once a month on a Wednesday Mrs. Bulford (as she still calls herself) is allowed to see her three children.  No longer seen as a fit mother she is lucky her ex-husband has allowed this one small privilege no matter how painful each meeting is.  After her time with them and the difficult separation once more she vows to put an end to it all but cannot face not having contact with them.  Each Wednesday she waits for them outside the gate of what was once her home.  A home now belonging to another woman.  Sheila.  Why had she never heard this name before?  Barely with the divorce decree finalized her husband married a younger, beautiful woman named Sheila.  The children call her "Mumsie" in order to keep the two women separate.  Mum and Mumsie. 

"It had been a temporary madness, induced by loneliness, the cold withdrawal of Cecil, the approach of middle age.  She felt her looks were going, she made a last grab at the romance she had missed.  She felt that if she didn't get it then, she would have missed it for ever, and how sad to die without having loved or been loved.  As it stood on the horizon like the sun about to go down into night, love seemed the most important thing in life and Jack, to her incredulous happiness, seemed to love her as Cecil had never done."

And what woman would not grab for such happiness to try and relieve some of the emptiness she might feel, sadness at no longer being young and the feeling that whatever attractions one had at twenty are fading away by thirty-five?  But the affair, only illusory, comes at a devastating price.  That of her children.  And now she must watch from a distance, living on the very outskirts of town, how quickly the children grow to accept Sheila as part of their lives.  The younger children not understanding what has happened and crying for her to not leave them, and the older daughter just old enough to begin to understand the choice her mother made the the mistake that cannot now be undone.   

Imagine looking in on what was once your life.  One false move.  One misstep and you are relegated to living on the outskirts of your world.  Smelling the flowers of your own garden from outside the garden gate.  Vintage Dorothy Whipple.  Such a melancholic story, but treated with the usual light touch that I have come to observe that Whipple is so talented at having.

Next week another new to me author: Frances Towers.

(Long) Weekend Reading Plans

Joy.  A long holiday weekend to look forward to.  And it couldn't have come a moment sooner!  I feel like I've been dragging lately and am hoping to rest, relax and do lots of reading and a little needlework, too.  I expect it's going to be really quiet here this weekend (continuing the trend of late in general I think as it's been very quiet these last few weeks of May), so I think I am going to take a mini-break from posting.  I'll be back on Tuesday with a short story (maybe even two!). 

I'll be mostly offline in order to take advantage of the extra day off from work, but I hope to catch up a little with blog reading (and maybe contemplate the switch to a new RSS feed reader, which I have been putting off but can't ignore much longer).  I have lots of reading plans (as usual), though I suspect this will be another case of  my eyes being bigger than my stomach.  Still, plans are good and these are the books I will likely spend most of my reading time with over the course of the next few days.

Those three weeks go really fast when it comes to borrowing library books.  Jacqueline Winspear's Leaving Everything Most Loved is already due back at the library tomorrow.  It is on the top of my pile and I hope to return it on time or just a day late.  As I am well beyond the midway point it shouldn't be a problem.  I always enjoy Maisie Dobbs mysteries and this story promises to be a pivotal book in the series.  More about it later.

I wonder if I am being overly optimistic by hoping planning on finishing Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room as well?  It's not really hard going, though not a straightforward narrative either.  I've just a little over one hundred pages to go, so I think I  might manage it.  As Stefanie and I are reading it in tandem, she has helped me stay focused on it.  I'm trying to take notes as I go, though my post about it later will be challenging to write . . .

Another little readalong, but with a much longer book.  In this case Buried in Print and I are tackling Charles Palliser's The Quincunx.  It's pretty hefty with over 700 pages so a bit more slower going than the rest of my books, but I hope to spend some extra uninterrupted reading time on it.  The story reminds me of a good Wilkie Collins' story, and I love Wilkie Collins.

I'm not too far into Anna Funder's All That I Am, but I like what I've read so far.  I want to try and finish by the end of the month for Caroline's readalong.  I've still got a bit of time, but this is a story that goes better with frequent quiet reading periods as it moves around in time a little and I am still trying to figure out just what the different relationships between characters are.  I was thinking this was a WWII story, and it is sort of.  It begins with references to WWI and the build up to WWII--I'm very curious to see where it's going.

This is an impulse (well, sort of) choice.  Earlier this year I had planned on joining in the Barbara Pym reading week, and my how quickly the time flies as June 2 is just around the corner.  I've tentatively chosen Crampton Hodnet as the book I'll read for the week and have dipped into it just a little and like what I've read, so I hope there will be a little time this weekend to spend with it.  I am always in the mood for (it seems) a country house setting and this one has just that.   

I think I have found a likely candidate for my beach read.  Red Ruby Heart In a Cold Blue Sea by Morgan Callen Rogers is set in the 1960s in (coastal) Maine.  I am hoping it will have a strong sense of setting.  I'm going to give it a try this weekend in any case--a sort of 'try out' to see if it's the story I want.  I think it might turn out to be just what I had in mind.  It sometimes feels like I have a roundabout way of choosing books.  I choose stories rather than authors (though I do that too).  I have an idea in mind of the story I want to read and then try and match the book. 

There might be some other books and magazines interspersed with these as I must let whim guide me a little, too.  The top two books are the ones I am most hoping to finish reading before heading back to work on Tuesday. 

I am hoping, too, that next week I'll be back with a Lost in the Stacks post.  Until Tuesday, I hope everyone has a great (bookish) weekend.

New & Noteworthy: Wishlist Books (Part 2)

How ever did my wishlist get so long?  That's a silly question, strike that.  I have a really long wishlist gleaned from a variety of sources.  Most are not due to be published until later in the summer, fall and even a few early next year.  When I see those dates, books to be published in October or November or later, I think that sounds so very far away, but scarrily it will come much sooner than I think.  Better to keep the books on my list and not think about them too much and concentrate on the books I have right now.  Still, lists are good to have and I am a planner when it comes to forthcoming books.  I tend to request them as soon as they begin appearing in my public library's catalog.  So a few more to share with you.  And as it is hard to choose which ones to share, I am going to split the list once more and there will be a part three in another week or so.  (Yes, my wishlist really is that long . . . ).

In no particular order here are a dozen more books I am looking forward to reading.  See any favorite authors?  Any books you can't wait to read, too?

Lillian and Dash by Sam Toperoff -- "This exciting novel about Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man) and Lillian Hellman (The Children’s Hour) reintroduces their larger-than-life personalities and the vicissitudes of their affair that spanned three decades."

The Love-charm of Bombs: Restless Lives in the Second World War by Lara Feigel -- "When the first bombs fell on London in August 1940, the city was transformed overnight into a strange kind of battlefield. For most Londoners, the sirens, guns, planes, and bombs brought sleepless nights, fear and loss. But for a group of writers, the war became an incomparably vivid source of inspiration, the blazing streets scenes of exhilaration in which fear could transmute into love. In this powerful chronicle of literary life under the Blitz, Lara Feigel vividly conjures the lives of five prominent writers: Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, Rose Macaulay, Hilde Spiel and the novelist Henry Green. Starting with a sparklingly detailed recreation of a single night of September 1940, the narrative traces the tempestuous experiences of these five figures through five years in London and Ireland, followed by postwar Vienna and Berlin."  (A must have for me--I'll be buying this one I think).

Letters from Skye: A Novel by Jessica Brockmole -- "A sweeping story told in letters, spanning two continents and two world wars, Jessica Brockmole’s atmospheric debut novel captures the indelible ways that people fall in love, and celebrates the power of the written word to stir the heart."  The story appears to flip back and forth between 1912 and 1940.  I'm in need of a book of letters, and this one is due out in July.

MaddAddam: A Novel by Margaret Atwood -- I'm behind!  I have yet to read Oryx and Crake or Year of the Flood (own them both of course) and now the third book in the trilogy is coming out this September.  It's been far, far too long since I've read anything by Atwood and I feel a desire to do something about that.  Not sure if I will reach for one of her dystopian stories or an older (unread) novel.  I've got several to choose from.  But for Atwood fans, you have a new novel to look forward to.

The Valley of Amazement by Amy Tan -- I *loved* both The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife.  I haven't read her later two novels, but this one sounds quite appealing to me.  "Moving between the dazzling world of courtesans in turn of the century Shanghai, a remote Chinese mountain village, and the rough-hewn streets of nineteenth-century San Francisco, Amy Tan's sweeping new novel maps the lives of three generations of women connected by blood and history - and the mystery of an evocative painting known as 'The Valley of Amazement'."  I wouldn't mind rereading either (both?) of those earlier novels in anticipation for this forthcoming one.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt -- "Composed with the skills of a master, The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present-day America, and a drama of almost unbearable acuity and power. It is a story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention, and the enormous power of art."  I have tried at least twice now to read The Secret History but can't seem to find just the right mood and moment for it (strangely), but I did read her second book, The Little Friend.  I'm very curious about this one, as it sounds very different from both of her previous novels. 

Night Film by Marisha Pessl -- "Brilliant, haunting, breathtakingly suspenseful, Night Film is a superb literary thriller by the New York Times bestselling author of the “blockbuster debut” (People) Special Topics in Calamity Physics."

Sisterland: A Novel by Curtis Sittenfeld -- "Curtis Sittenfeld, New York Times bestselling author of American Wife and Prep, returns with a mesmerizing novel of family and identity, loyalty and deception, and the delicate line between truth and belief."  I should really start with her book, Prep, which has been sitting unread on my shelf for ages, but I'll likely at least look this one over when it comes out.

A Treacherous Paradise by Henning Mankell -- "From the internationally acclaimed author of the Kurt Wallander crime novels, a powerful stand-alone novel set in early-twentieth-century Sweden and Mozambique, whose vividly drawn female protagonist is awoken from her naïveté by her exposure to racism and by her own unexpected inner strengths."  This sounds very different from his Wallander books.

Teatime for the Firefly by Shona Patel -- "With lyrical prose and exquisite detail, Shona Patel's novel brings to life the rich and rugged landscape of India's tea plantation, harboring a sweet love story at its core."

Revolutionary by Alex Myers -- I'm really keen to read this one, no doubt due to my current read--Jack Absolute.  "A fascinating retelling of the story of America’s first female soldier, Deborah Sampson Gannett, who ran away from home in 1782, successfully disguised herself as a man, and fought valiantly in the Revolutionary War."  Colonial America is one of those periods that fascinates me and I always mean to start a new reading project with that in mind but haven't quite seemed to manage it yet.

The Bookman's Tale: A Novel of Obsession by Charlie Lovett -- A book about books--what's not to like?  "A mysterious portrait ignites an antiquarian bookseller’s search through time and the works of Shakespeare for his lost love."

Okay.  One more list of new books to come and then I promise to focus on what I'm reading now (and I am reading lots of really good books at the moment).  If only there was a new book by Sarah Waters listed somewhere, life would be good!

Hotel Paradise by Martha Grimes

My copy of Hotel Paradise by Martha Grimes has a cracked spine, is dog eared with chips broken off the corners of the cover and the pages are turning slightly yellow.  I bought it new, but it is now well worn from multiple readings (I think this last go was read number three).  It's as comfortable to hold in the hand as it is comforting to read.  I can  happily say that I enjoyed it as much this time around as the previous two.  This is going to sound strange and it's meant to be a compliment, but it's soporific sort of story (and I'll explain that more in a moment).  I mean that in a warm and cozy and contented sort of way.  It's not a fast moving story.  There is lots of detail and description, and lots of ruminating that goes on, but I enjoyed every minute that I was ensconced within its pages.  It's best read on a lazy summer afternoon lying in a hammock, if at all possible.     

Hotel Paradise is not a traditional mystery, though there is a detective/policeman in the story and a crime occurs.  Not just one murder but two suspicious deaths.  And it's all told through the eyes of a twelve-year-old girl.  She's a little bit of a misfit, but an entertaining and wholly likable one.  Let me begin with Emma Graham, the heroine (if I can call her that) of the story, and her world.  If you want to know what Small Town, USA is like, just drop by the Hotel Paradise.  I've yet to figure out where exactly the story takes place, but it really doesn't matter ultimately.  It could stand in for so many small towns.  It's somewhere where it snows in winter and is warm in summer.  Although it was published in 1996 and I suspect it's meant to be set at about the same time, there is a timeless feel about it.     

So, Emma.  She's a Graham, though she and her mother and brother, Will, are the closest living relatives to the Paradises.  The Hotel Paradise doesn't refer to a locale rather to a family.  The last actual Paradise is Emma's great aunt Aurora who lives on the fourth floor.  Actually it's better to say she has command of or inhabits the fourth floor.  She's a cantankerous old woman, bossy and opinionated.  If she doesn't like you she's apt to throw her dinner tray at you (along with the food sitting on it), though Emma is on her good side (if you can call it that) since she brings her creatively mixed cocktails.  Aurora does like a good stiff drink. 

Emma's mother is the cook at the hotel and famous for her abilities in the kitchen.  Those abilities are much appreciated and often contemplated by Emma (expect a few hunger pains while reading by the way).  Emma is often left to her own devices.  She's expected to help wait tables at mealtimes but otherwise spends her time in the Pink Elephant (the hotel's basement) or hanging out in La Porte, the main town not far from the hotel.  Emma is a thoughtful, intelligent girl and maybe a little quirky.  She tends to get on better with adults, like Sheriff DeGheyn with whom she likes to"walk the meters"--checking which are expired and chatting with the Sheriff as he tickets the offenders, or Maud who works in the local diner.  Neither talks down to her or condescends because of her age.  Unlike Regina Jane Davidow, or Réjane as she likes to be called, four years older and another resident of the hotel.  Rejane lives at the Hotel Paradise with her mother who is the hotel's manager.  Lola and her daughter Rejan, especially Rejane, often make life difficult for Emma.

Emma is quite content to pass her free time with the sheriff or Maud or drinking hot chocolate (carefully and as unobtrusively as possible--removing the filmy skin from the top first) with two of the town's spinsters and local shopkeepers.  She often finds herself lulled into a state of contentment, soporific contentment (I told you I'd get back to that one) chatting with the two elderly women.  Mostly though she has a knack for getting the adults and older residents to talk about the curious death of a young girl, Mary-Evelyn Devereau, some forty years earlier.  Mary-Evelyn was the younger sibling of the very odd Devereau sisters.  A bit like Emma really in that she was often left on her own, but taken further as she was also ignored and perhaps even slightly mistreated.  One day she took her rowboat out on the lake and drowned.  It was declared and accident and forgotten about, but Emma obsesses over Mary-Evelyn and the Devereau family--certain that something untoward happened all those years ago and trying to work out just what it was.

And then the body of a woman is found.  Shot but not likely self-inflicted.  She's not from La Porte.  Maybe from Cold Flat Junction.  But no one steps forward with any information, and for days everyone speculates who she might be.  Emma believes she might be a girl she spotted on the local train platform.  The Girl is someone she believes might be related to the Devereaus in some way.  As much as she asks questions in the hope of finding out who the dead woman is, she also doesn't really want to know.  What if it is The Girl?  And is there a link between the recent murder and the death all those years previously?  

This is such a great story.  In a way not much happens, yet you get such a vivid sense of Emma and the world around her.  It's just the type of story I like--a mystery wrapped up in another larger story.  You feel like you are there, too, in Spirit Lake or the Hotel Paradise or Cold Flat Junction.  I can visualize these places and the people who live there.  It may just be words on the page, but I have such a strong sense of what Emma is like and what she thinks and how she feels.  For me, Grimes did everything just right in this story. 

I've already got Cold Flat Junction, the second Emma Graham book, sitting on my night stand and am just waiting for when I have a little chunk reading time to get well into the story.  I've read it before, too.  I haven't, however, read the next two books: Belle Ruin or Fadeaway Girl but will be rectifying that this summer. 

A Few for Review, or Summer Reading

As tempting as many of the offers are, I don't often take review copies unless a book really piques my curiosity and it is likely something I would pick up or borrow from the library anyway.  My own reading list is just too long and I have this mental queue that I try to stick to (easier said than done).  But once and a while I can't resist and then occasionally a book will arrive unannounced and it's always a treat when it turns out to be hugely appealing to me. 

I seem to have accumulated a little pile of review copies that I'll be reading my way through over the course of the summer (if not even sooner), so I thought I might share them as I'm quite excited about these recent finds.  Expect to hear more about them soon.  (See, now that I'm sharing them I'll have to make sure I get to them all in a timely manner).

Stephen King's Joyland was something of a surprise though Titan Books kindly sends me the occasional parcel now and again (am reading a Helen MacInness spy novel at the moment, which I was thrilled to get).  I just came across an article about Joyland.  It seems Stephen King is going to hold off publishing this as an ebook as he wants to try and get readers into brick and mortar stores to buy it.  Joyland has a wonderfully pulpy cover.  it's set in a North Carolina amusement park in 1973.  "Joyland is at once a mystery, a horror story, and a bittersweet coming-of-age novel, one that will leave even the most hard-boiled reader profoundly moved."  It's been years since I read Stephen King and I am looking forward to this.  It has summer read written all over it!  It's due out June 4.

Another surprise arrival actually came to me via my work.  I sometimes will attend webinars put on by publishers announcing their new releases.  I especially look forward to those that are about mysteries and I must have dropped my name in a virtual hat to win a review copy.  I  missed the last webinar I signed up for and have been too busy to listen to the recording, so Pierre Lemaitre's Alex is another welcome surprise.  Lemaitre is a French author who has written a number of award winning crime novels, though this is the first to be published in English.  "In this gripping, fiendishly plotted detective novel, Alex Prévost is kidnapped, savagely beaten, and suspended from the ceiling of an abandoned industrial building in a wooden cage—she is running out of time. Her abductor/torturer appears to desire only one thing: to watch her die. Will hunger, thirst, or the rats get her first?"  Le Monde calls it "“Exhilarating, literary, Hitchcockian."  It's due out September 3.

I won a copy of Anton Disclafani's The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls from Library Thing.  Every once and a while I will try my luck and request one of their review copies from their Early Reviewers program.  I'm very excited to start reading this as I was in line for a copy at the library.  And my luck held out since I have a copy in my hot little hands right now.  "A lush, sexy, evocative debut novel of family secrets and girls’-school rituals, set in the 1930s South."  This is due out June 4.

I've already mentioned Kimberly Gerry-Tucker's Under the Banana Moon: Living, Loving, Loss and Asperger's.  I'll be starting it very soon.  Copies are available now.

And one that's already underway, C.C. Humphreys' Jack Absolute.  It's an edge of your seat adventure story set during the American Revolution, but this is a story with a twist.  Jack Absolute is a British spy.  This is the first in a series of historical novels featuring this dashing hero (though maybe he's more of an antihero really).  I can't say I mind a swoon-worthy protagonist.  I suspect the rest of the books will be published in the US eventually, though I might have to cheat and get the UK versions when I finish this one!  It was published last month.

It's a good thing I have a long weekend to look forward to this coming weekend.  I think you know what I'll be doing!

The Alienist by Machado De Assis

I love my monthly novella instalments from Melville House.  My only criticism of the series is that I wish the books, since they are classics, had introductions.  Of course I can decide for myself whether or not I like a story, but with authors who are unfamiliar to me, a little added insight is always welcome.  I find in reading books like these I often miss important things, so reading a bit more about an author, his work or his style makes the reading experience richer.

The Alienist is the only Brazilian novel I can think of that I have ever read.  Machado de Assis, or Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, was born in 1839 and died in 1908 and is considered the greatest writer of Brazilian literature.  Apparently he is not often translated into English, and while I have a feeling this slender little novella isn't his best or most important work, it was an interesting and entertaining read.  Perhaps a little anticlimactic in the end, it was still a perfect pairing for Guy de Maupassant's The Horla, which I loved.  Both authors look at the question of what constitutes sanity, though in both these stories it is more apt to say insanity, since it is madness that the characters are dealing in.

Published in 1882, it's interesting to think of this story being a product of the Victorian era, as it's this period (if I understand correctly) that saw the rise of psychology as a science.  How does one person judge the sanity of another is the theme explored by de Assis.  One of the great doctors of the period, Simão Bacamarte, decides to return home to Itaguai in Brazil.  After a most successful European career he decides to become an "alienist" and turn his attention to psychopathology.

"The health of the soul!" he exclaimed.  "The loftiest possible goal for a doctor."

In the town of Itaguai the mentally ill, the violent madmen were locked up at home and the peaceable lunatics were simply left to their own devices and no one was offered treatment of any kind.  Bacamarte decided to change all this.  He created an institution known as The Green House where insanity could be studied in depth.  He doesn't have to look far to find patients to fill up his asylum.  Within just four months the Green House was a community unto its own.

And so Bacamarte begins an exhaustive study of his patients.  He spends many hours studying, inventing and experimenting with therapeutic methods and observing all that is around him.  Through his observations he believes that many more people around him suffer from insanity than first thought.

"Till now, madness has been thought a small island in an ocean of sanity.  I am beginning to suspect that it is not an island at all but a continent."

Pretty soon there are more people confined to the Green House than not including some of Itaguai's most prominent citizens.  While Bacamarte assures all that only the mentally ill are admitted, there are rumors and accusations that admittance comes as a result of revenge, greed or even punishment.  And then the citizens of Itaguai begin to rebel.

"I know nothing about science, but if so many men whom we considered sane are locked up as madmen, how do we know that the real madman is not the alienist himself?"

Maybe it's those who appear most sane and normal who are really the mad.  And so the thinking comes full circle.  Who's really mad and who isn't?  Anyone could fit the type.  Who decides and how does one decide.  Bacamarte has lots of questions and not so many answers.  Has he cured his patients perhaps?  Or were they never really insane to begin with.  So many questions, so few concrete answers.  Such a roundabout story.  It all verges on farce.  An amusing and satirical farce. 

With my latest (May) novellas, I am now fully four books behind in my reading.  Five if you count Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room, though reading is underway (I'm reading along with Stefanie by the way).  My novellas got put aside temporarily as I concentrated on my NYRB subscription, now I guess it's time to change tack once again.  I was hoping to keep up with the books but life's just been too busy of late.  Maybe this week all my energies will go towards novella reading. 

My latest parcel of books included (yay another woman author) Jane Austen's Lady Susan, which I read several years ago but look forward to revisiting and Nikolai Gogol's How the Two Ivans Quarrelled.  I  like the theme for this next pairing: purple covers!  Purple for spring.  And they are cheery.

Short Story Sunday: Subject for a Sermon

I've read and enjoyed Elizabeth Berridge's work before.  As a matter of fact I liked her 1964 novel Across the Commons so much that I mentally added her to my list authors 'whose work I want to read all of' when I read it a couple of years ago.  Another hearty nod in the direction of The Persephone Book of Short Stories for finally giving me the opportunity to read her once again, if only just a short story.  I'm going to borrow the quote I used before to describe Berridge:

"Although she was, on the surface, a conventional master of conservative suburban fiction, her work concealed a deep subversiveness. The reader continually finds his expectations railroaded on to a completely different track. She was, par excellence, the celebrator of family life. There is, as she said herself, no substitute for the family: 'It is society's first teething ring, man's proving ground. When repudiated, it still leaves its strengthening mark. When it does the rejecting, the outcast is damaged. Within its confines, devils and angels rage together, emotions creep underfoot like wet rot, or flourish like Russian ivy. It is the world in microcosm, the nursery of tyrants, the no man's land of suffering, a place and a time, a rehearsal for silent parlour murder'."

She sounds like such an interesting woman and was obviously much respected during the active years she was writing.

"Subject for a Sermon" was written in 1944, and not surprisingly Berridge writes about the domestic sphere and how the War impinges upon it.  Actually for Lady Hayley, the war gives her her raison d'être.  I sometimes have to remind myself that the stories in this collection were written (so far anyway--they are presented chronologically) early in the Twentieth Century.  There is a freshness and immediacy to them, which someone writing now about the era cannot quite match.  And, too, most interestingly Berridge could sense which way the winds were shifting, and it's the changes in attitude about class and responsibility that are at the heart of this story.

This is the story of a mother and son, two generations facing the same reality but each with their own experiences and beliefs and solutions to the problems they see in a world gone a little crazy and one that is not likely to recover in quite the same way once the war comes to an end.  And Berridge was writing this as the war was occurring, which gave me pause as I was reading it.  Of course I know how everything turns out, but even in 1944 there must have been so many uncertainties.  The world had changed and was changing daily and it was obviously so much on people's minds and Berridge captures it all wonderfully.

If you were a mother and your son was a soldier, would you spend each moment of his leave as close to home and close to him as you could?  Or would you continue with your war work?  Lady Hayley tells a village group doing their part for the war effort, "I've always said the Red Cross comes first, now's my chance to prove it."  And prove it she does.  She's there with the village rather than at the train station meeting her son for his leave from the war.  A confident look from the village rector and one of the ladies can read on his face that now he's got the subject for his next sermon--Lady Hayley's selflessness no doubt.

The thing is Lady Hayley is an aristocrat, and as such she has a responsibility to those around her to set the proper example.  It's a responsibility she doesn't take lightly and one she is long settled into.  It's a telling remark when she thinks to herself how she hates "any purposeless movement."  Even a planned outing with her son isn't performed as a simple act of pleasure but as part of a grander scheme.  She is the ultimate example of a 'multi-tasker'.  She might spend the afternoon with her son, but there is an agenda behind it all--a meeting she must chair or a function she must supervise.

Fresh back from the battlefield, however, John brings with him a new perspective.  He accuses his mother of not allowing the people in the village the chance to organize their own schemes, of not really seeing or understanding those who are not part of her own class.  Rather than come together during this time of war, mother and son seem to be driven apart.  One is all for tradition--following it no matter how outdated, and the other is ready for change.  He's been out in the world and seen a different side of it, of people around him that he might not have known before the war.  And how they live, what they feel and think make an impression on him and widen his own vistas. 

Another perfect slice of life, rather an imperfect one in this case, captured by an author with a keen eye and sensibility to the impending changes writ small and large during the War.  Although I mentally shake my head at Lady Hayley, in a way it's hard not being sympathetic towards someone who tries to do the best she can according to her circumstances, but it would seem also to be at the cost of her son.

Next up: Dorothy Whipple.  It's the last story written during the war, but I'll still be in the 40s for another five stories after.  I'm on the home stretch with just a dozen stories left, however.