A Work in Progress

New & Noteworthy: Wishlist Books (Part 1)

The next best thing to reading a book is thinking about reading a book.  And the next best thing to that is looking for new books to read.  I shouldn't look for new books when I already have so many good unread books on my bookshelves, but that's like walking through a bookstore and then saying 'now close your eyes and don't look'.  For me this is where wishlists and libraries come in.  Nothing lost by looking or borrowing. 

The last time I put together one of these posts (last year) I was looking forward to the new Maisie Dobbs mystery, and now here I am actually reading it (and enjoying it very much).  Time flies.  As my wishlist is long I'll divide this into two and share a few more a bit later.  In no particular order here are a few titles that have caught my eye and I am looking forward to checking out.

Human Remains by Elizabeth Haynes -- Both Caroline and Litlove have recently written about two different novels by Haynes.  I suspect I will like her very much so am adding yet another of her titles to my list.  "Human Remains is a chilling, masterful thriller by New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Haynes that explores our darkest fears, showing how vulnerable we are—and how easily ordinary lives can fall apart when no one is watching."  

Kind of Cruel by Sophie Hannah -- Do you know I have not yet read Sophie Hannah yet either.  I keep pulling out her books to read but then never seem to get around to it (I am extremely spoiled for choice when it comes to mysteries, novels of suspense and thrillers so competition is always stiff for authors in this genre).  I will start with an earlier book by her, but those who have kept up with her releases might be happy to see another new book coming out.

Back to Back by Julia Franck --"Julia Franck's German-Book-Prize-winning novel, The Blindness of the Heart, was an international phenomenon, selling 850,000 copies in Germany alone and being published in thirty-five countries. Her newest work, Back to Back echoes the themes of The Blindness of the Heart, telling a moving personal story set against the tragedies of twentieth-century Germany."

Just One Evil Act: An Inspector Lynley Novel by Elizabeth George -- I've read every Lynley novel from the very first and have the most recent waiting for me to read this summer.  I guess it'll soon be time to turn my attention to it since another will be coming out this fall.

A Question of Honor by Charles Todd -- I have some catching up to do with Bess Crawford as well.  I read one earlier this year and enjoyed it, but I'll have two more in between it and Todd's forthcoming novel.

Behind the Shattered Glass by Tasha Alexander -- Ditto with the Lady Emily mysteries.  I've fallen behind in reading them as well.  Lady Emily is a Victorian woman whose husband is involved with her Majesty's government--usually involved in foreign concerns of the realm and association Lady Emily gets involved too (though it seems more that Lady Emily gets mixed up in something deadly and draws Colin into her adventures).  These latter two series are perfect summertime vacation reading.

The Gardener's Son by Cormac McCarthy -- And now for something a little more sobering and serious.  I went through a big Cormac McCarthy phase years ago and think he is a pretty amazing writer.  I was recently thinking that I need to revisit his work and see now that there will be something new to look forward to, though there will be a bit of a wait--his newest doesn't come out until early 2014!

Lost by S.J. Bolton -- Bolton is another favorite author whose work I follow.  I think I have only one unread book by her, but I have read all the Lacey Flint books so far and am happy to see the newest will be released next month.  "S.J. Bolton, an award-winning author of five novels, delivers her most compelling novel to date, in which a fragile police detective and a courageous, lonely eleven-year-old boy must work together to unmask a killer. Lost provides all of the pulse-pounding suspense, beautifully drawn characters, and intricate plotting thriller fans could hope for—and more.  Please note, this title is published in the UK as Like This For Ever."

Garlic, Mint, and Sweet Basil: Essays on Marseilles, the Mediterranean, and Noir Fiction by Jean-Claude Izzo -- Have you seen Europa Editions' World Noir imprint?  The books are just beginning to be released (or reissued).  I pretty much want them all and suspect I'll be buying them as they come out (or at least slowly acquiring them over time).

Rules of Murder by Julianna Deering -- A new, and interesting-sounding mystery featuring Drew Farthering.  "From The Tip of his black Homburg to the crease in his stylish cheviot trousers, he's the epitome of a stylish 1930s English gentleman. His only problem? The body he just discovered.  Drew Farthering loves a good mystery, although he generally expects to find it in the pages of a novel, not on the grounds of his country estate."

A Certain Summer by Patricia Beard -- This one goes directly to my beach reads list as a very strong potential summer reading candidate!  "'Nothing ever changes at Wauregan.' That mystique is the tradition of the idyllic island colony off the shore of Long Island, the comforting tradition that its summer dwellers have lived by for over half a century. But in the summer of 1948, after a world war has claimed countless men—even those who came home—the time has come to deal with history’s indelible scars."

Sandrine's Case by Thomas Cook -- I've read a smattering of books by Cook and liked them all. I've accumulated a few more and look forward to reading them.  They are suspenseful and sometimes dark and always well written.  "Thomas H. Cook offers one of his most compelling novels ever in Sandrine's Case, in which a college professor falls in love with his wife all over again...while on trial for her murder."

Ah, the joys of books.  Doesn't it make you feel all happy and tingly knowing you have good books to look forward to.  I'll never be able to keep up with them but it's always fun trying.

More new books later.

A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor

In Peter Taylor's Pulitzer Prize winning novel A Summons to Memphis, it's the vagaries of memory that is explored so brilliantly.  What makes this, for me, not just a good story but a great story is how Phillip Carver comes to terms with his past, how over the course of the story he not only begins to understand but also accepts the events of his childhood and youth and how they shaped him and his two older sisters.  And there's not just just acceptance of the past but forgiveness of those he has all his life perceived as being the source of his (and his sisters') unhappiness.  The telling of this tale makes me think of a kaleidoscope.  With each turn the shapes shift to create a new pattern out of the old one.  

"The courtship and remarriage of an old widower is always made more difficult when middle-aged children are involved--especially when there are unmarried daughters.  This seemed particularly true in the landlocked, backwater city of Memphis some forty-odd years ago.  At least it is a certainty that remarriage was more difficult for old widowers in Memphis than it was over in Nashville, say, or Knoxville--or even Chattanooga, for that matter.  One needs to know those other cities only slightly to be absolutely sure of this.  Yet one cannot say with equal certainty just why the difficulty was so peculiar to Memphis, unless it is that Memphis , unlike other Tennessee cities, remains to this day a 'land-oriented' place.  Nearly everybody there who is anybody is apt to own some land.  He owns it in Arkansas or West Tennessee or in the Mississippi Delta.  And it may be that whenever or wherever land gets involved, any family matter is bound to become more complex, less reasonable, more desperate."

It all begins with a phone call.  Two calls actually.  Phillip Carver is an antiquarian bookseller living in New York City when his older sisters Betsy and Josephine call with the news that his widowed father is remarrying a younger woman.  When their father first began socializing after the death of his wife, a woman he was dedicated to, it was looked upon indulgently by his daughters, even encouraged.  But when the choice of women becomes younger and things become serious, the two step in and try and put an end to things.  And Phillip is summoned to Memphis to help.

It's over this framework that Phillip Carver relates his story.  His recollections of people and place are often presented from varying angles, with each successive telling a little more detail is added to the picture created out of these memories until a fuller and more complete picture is presented.  In 1931 the Carver family moved from Nashville to Memphis after scandalous dealings with a business partner leave the Carvers broke.  Phillip's father, a distinguished and well respected lawyer, genteel but very formidable, decides to reinvent himself in a new place after the humiliation wrought upon him by his friend and business partner. 

His decision, however, has repercussions for each member of the family.  Phillip's mother has always lived in Nashville.  After a brief flourishing in her new town she succumbs to illness and is ever after bedridden.  George, Phillip's brother, is something of a black sheep and continues down his own lonely and self-destructive path which will end on the battlefields of Europe in the 40s.  At the time of the family's move to Memphis Betsy is practically engaged and it's all but assumed that she will soon enough return to Nashville as a bride, Jo to eventually follow in her footsteps.  And for Phillip, just a boy still, his sense of importance and burgeoning independence as well as his feelings of contentedness are dashed when his father picks up stakes for a new city.

While Mr. Carver thrives in Memphis, not so very far from where he grew up, each of his children's hopes and desires seems to come to nought, helped along by Mr. Carver himself it would seem.  He has a hand in each child's life and promise for happiness, breaking up relationships that he sees as being unworthy or below the family name.  None of the three go on to marry, and while Betsy and Jo appear dedicated to their father, having remained close to home while aiding Phillip in his escape to New York, it's apparent as the story rolls out that at the heart of their later manipulations are long-standing grudges.  They place the blame for their failed relationships firmly on the shoulders of their father and see that any hope for happiness with second wife are destroyed.  

This is such a wonderfully rich story.  I love this kind of storytelling.  There truly is a story to tell, pieced together but done so vividly.  Each character is fully formed, almost as though they are really flesh and blood and filled with emotions that are palpable.  And with flaws that feel very real and believable.  In those opening lines Phillip talks of that so important land.

". . . one cannot say with equal certainty just why the difficulty was so peculiar to Memphis, unless it is that Memphis , unlike other Tennessee cities, remains to this day a 'land-oriented' place.  Nearly everybody there who is anybody is apt to own some land."

Is there a fear between Betsy and Jo that a lifetime spent unmarried and taking care of their father will be rewarded by their inheritance being frittered away instead on this new, young wife?  Or is there some deeper animosity at play?  The summons to Memphis, such an ordinary reaction by grown children in just such a situation, gives Phillip fodder for his memories and a reason to analyze them finally after forty years spent away from his childhood home.

It was William McPherson's exceptional Testing the Current which pointed me in the direction of Peter Taylor (adding him to my lists of 'great new finds' and author's whose work I must explore further).  The two are similar in that they have a nostalgic feel to them, and tell stories of a certain class of people at a certain time in America.  Now I must go back and see which other books were referenced in the afterword in the McPherson novel.  Peter Taylor has been compared to Eudora Welty, James Agee and Walker Percy, so I'll be looking up their work next.  I can very enthusiastically recommend A Summons to Memphis to you!

A Brief Interlude: In Search of Beach Books

I guess it was yesterday's record setting 101F/38.3C high temperature (not having had a proper spring sort of takes one a little by surprise) that puts me in mind of beach reads.  I am very much a mood reader and as I was leaving work and soaking up the very warm sunshine I started thinking of the beach and how nice it would be to be there about now.  As I am about as far from any major body of water as you can get in the U.S., any wish to spend time at the beach must be fulfilled through the pages of a book. 

For me, 'beach reads' doesn't mean books you might read at the beach (I mean you could read War and Peace at the Beach just as easily as a NYT bestseller).  Rather my beach reads are books with a beach/seaside setting.  I could happily (and would happily given a chance) live close to the ocean and it is my secret fantasy to someday live close to the ocean.  Since I've been thinking about beaches why not read a book with that setting. 

Every year I like to come up with a new list of possible 'beach reads', though the heat has prodded me to think of making one earlier than normal (I like to at least wait until June).  Since I've not had a chance to do any browsing for new titles, I'll ask for a little help.  I'll start the ball rolling with a few books I pulled from my shelves last night. 

Dorothea Benton Frank, Plantation - ". . . a lush plantation in the heart of modern-day South Carolina--where family ties and hidden truths run as deep and dark as the mighty Edisto River. . . "

Iris Rainer Dart, Beaches - "One is rich and pampered.  The other, poor and ambitious.  Never has there been a friendship that made more sense."

Ann Brashares, The Last Summer (of You & Me) - "Three friends, two sisters, one love--and the summer that would change their lives."

Dorothea Benton Frank, Return to Sullivans Island - "It was impossible to remember how gorgeous the Lowcountry was.  It never changed and everyone depended on that."

Feel free to help me add titles to the list.  Suggestions are welcome.  I am looking for stories with (any) beach setting and that has a strong sense of place as well as a good, engrossing story. 

Pitch Dark by Renata Adler

I don't mind a good challenge now and again, but it's with a little sigh of relief (if I can be honest) that I turned the last page of Renata Adler's Pitch Dark.  Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the book very much but less as an entertainment than an exercise, if you get my meaning.

"Renata Adler's novel Pitch Dark, like her first work of fiction, Speedboat, is a genre unto itself, a discontinuous first-person narrative.  Miss Adler's mind is analytical and her style ebullient.  She also has an old-fashioned real story to tell, a love story, although it is by no means told plain.  You have to piece it together as you would if you had picked up a stranger's private journal.  You have to read between the lines (the lines themselves are another sort of entertainment) and snatch at hints and fragments until the whole becomes clear, and the character of the narrator is filled out by the honest expression of her feelings, her opinions and pensées, her daily experiences, always with an edge of desperation."

Oops.  Did you catch that?  In her afterword, Muriel Spark notes the 'reading between the lines' is another sort of entertainment.  That's okay.  There were moments/aspects of the novel that were entertaining.  I waited to read the afterword until after, but mostly out of sheer laziness and the fact that I had built up momentum and didn't want to stop the flow of reading the story.  I was happy to see that, while a challenging read for me, I wasn't quite as lost as I thought.  I caught on to quite a bit, Spark clarified a few things, and shed light on a few more. 

Since this is a story told in fragments, you'll forgive me if my post, too, is presented in fragments.  One inspires the other, right?  Pitch Dark is broken into three sections.  The second has the most straightforward narrative and quite a ride it was, too, which is only fitting considering the story she was telling.

The first and third sections were definitely fragmentary, a little disorienting and required notetaking on my part.  My notes are a hodge podge of facts and ideas, so let me try and make sense of them.  Kate Ennis, rather like Adler herself, is a journalist.  She's been in an unsatisfying love affair with a married man and has broken it off.  I got the sense that Jake, her lover, dumped her, but as he wants her back by the end, maybe it was Kate who did the dumping.  Her relationship with Jake was unsatisfying, more of a 'take' than 'give' sort of situation at least on his part.  At one point Kate thinks that all the joy and beauty of his life were things of which she had no part.  They never even managed to spend an entire week together.  Over the course of the novel it's this relationship, this love affair that is central to what Kate is thinking. 

The story is told in first person, It's Kate who is the "I", or is it?  But more about that in a minute.  Along with her failed love affair she shares many other reminiscences.  In the first part she talks/or is thinking about her years as a grad student, her friends at university, about her trip to Orcas Island off the coast of Washington where a raccoon wedged its way into one of her walls and then goes on to die.  The last section resembles the first but it has much more of a journalistic tilt to the stories she tells.  The fragments are almost ruminations on current events--on law and government, on legal matters, history, even on the outlawing of handguns, which is pretty timely.  Pitch Dark, by the way was published in 1983.

The middle section, for me, flowed the most naturally.  She travels to Ireland for a visit at the invitation of the ambassador.  She rents a car and has a mishap--dinging a truck along the way.  She owns up to it, but what happens next is a little surreal (or maybe just paranoid at first glance).  The owner of the truck and the local police seem not to terribly concerned about the accident, though they've noted the rental sticker and by story's end it's obvious they decide to milk the insurance company for more than the worth of the car.  Kate doesn't know that and believes she has simply run afoul of the law.  It's a mad ride through Ireland with Kate looking over her shoulder at every turn.  She's removed the sticker from the car and then worries it'll be seen as a cover up on her part even though she tried to pay the truck's owner for the damage.  She goes so far as to plan on leaving the country under an assumed name.  Spark called it a "superb piece of nightmare writing", and it did have thriller-ish moments.  I had hopes it would descend into a good crime story, so you see it had its moments.

Adler uses lots of repetition throughout the course of the novel, which I tried to note and tie to the themes, though I had less success and had to turn to Muriel Spark for a little illumination on intention.  Actually I'm still not entirely sure about intentions, but I do think this aspect is quite clever and like Adler's play on the text.  Kate Ennis is the "I" of the story, but author and character merge at one point.  When Kate is thinking up names she can use at the airport, she wants something similar to her own that will be easy to remember yet  not her own at all.  She first thinks Alder, which made me wonder (since Kate's last name is Ennis) just who the "I" really was.  There are parallels between Kate the character and Renata the journalist (from what little I know of the latter).  All through the text she (Adler would write and Kate would think) the refrain would be--"Whose voice is that. Not here.  Not mine."  (Or a similar riff anyway). 

"Does Miss Adler meant to suggest that she herself is Kate Ennis?  Illogical characters are fine, but this has the effect of professional illogic.  It breaks the fiction, and, for a brief moment, we have autobiography."

Spark believes the question a work like this poses to the reader is, what is a novel?  "There is no absolute definition, but certainly, to some extent, a novel is a representation of the author's vision of life."  So you see this is a novel that (for me anyway) takes some puzzling out.  I don't know that I've figured it all out, but it's certainly been an interesting ride!  And as often happens in my reading, I find it's after I have finished a book--when I've had a chance to mull it over a little and maybe read something more about it (like Spark's enthusiastic afterword), that I discover I have a much greater appreciation for what an author set out to do in their work.  It was a challenge at times, but challenges are good now and again, right.

I've tentatively picked up Anna Segher's Transit for my next NYRB read.  I've also got Paul Hazard's The Crisis of the European Mind (a very hefty nonfiction read), and Adolfo Bioy Casares's The Invention of Morel waiting for me as well.  Before I delve too far into any of them, however, I need to turn my attention to my Meville House novellas for a bit.  I've started Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room and am looking forward to getting back to the story.  A challenge of a different sort.

Weekend Reading: More Samplings

Let me apologize in advance.  This is becoming a (sadly) familiar and repetitive refrain . . . I have fallen behind once again (of course my phrasing assumes that I ever actually caught up, which I don't think I really did) in emails, blog reading--generally anything going on online.  Add to that a busy weekend of Confirmations, Mother's Day and the usual weekend busy-ness and I feel completely disjointed and out of touch with my online friends.  Someday I might not only get caught up for real but feel caught up too, but I am not sure when that will happen.  So I continue to chip away at things.  I tried to squeeze in whatever reading I could cobble together over the weekend between family obligations, so thought I'd share a little bookishness.

First, though it's not a very good picture, I was so thrilled to see a tree in bloom on my morning walk yesterday that I had to take a picture of it.  Can you see the sunshine and blue sky behind the branches?  It's been such a miserable spring--pretty much a nonevent here--that I have to stop and appreciate these signs of new life and warmth when I come across them!  And hey, it's almost June, can you believe that?  

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I was sifting through library books over the weekend deciding which had to go back in order to swap out new ones for the old.  This is always a slightly agonizing process as, in theory, I want to read everything (or at least try them) I check out from the library.  But every week there seems to be a new pile waiting for me, and rather than let masses of books accumulate, I try and return as many books as I have waiting for me to pick up. 

Left in my 'can't quite part with this one yet' pile was Joe Queenan's One for the Books.  How can you miss with a book about books?  Especially when the writer is so enthusiastic about reading.  It is a book of essays so one that is easy to dip into.  Even if I don't read all the essays I can get a little taste, skip what doesn't appeal and enjoy the ones I can't pass up. 

Joe Queenan is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, though his work has appeared in a number of publications.  His writing is amusing and irreverent, and while I don't agree with everything he says (when it comes to books and reading I think every serious reader has their own idiosyncracies...most definitely Queenan does), I mostly was mentally agreeing with much of what he writes in "Great Expectations", the first essay in the collection.  A few of the good bits I've picked out:

Queenan makes a point of reading at least two hours every day.  My own reading is always cobbled together as I mentioned above.  I read on the bus, on breaks at work, while walking on the treadmill at the gym, and any other time I have a few free moments.  I won't complain too much because I probably have more reading time than others, but it's not often I get a chunk of uninterrupted, quiet reading time.  I grab it when I can and have been trying to make a point of carving out of my day (at least on weekends) at least an hour or two without any other distractions (for this I try and read away from home and the computer--another reason I have fallen behind so).

"I have never squandered an opportunity to read.  There are only twenty-four hours in the day, seven of which are spent sleeping, and in my view at least four of the remaining seventeen must be devoted to reading."

Wishful thinking.  He writes that if he could read eight to ten hours a day if he could.  I think I would, too, but I wonder would I get fidgety reading so much every day?  If only I could test the possibility and see.

I've heard this argument before, and heard dissenting voices, too.  Queenan grew up poor in Philadelphia to "substandard parents", so for him reading was an escape from his unhappy youth.  He started reading as if there was no tomorrow and is "convinced that this desire to escape from reality--on a daily, even an hourly, basis--is the main reason people read books."

"No matter what they profess to believe, no matter what they may tell themselves,  most book lovers do no read primarily to obtain information or to while away the time or to better themselves even, in the words of C.S. Lewis, to know that they are not alone.  They read to escape to a more exciting, more rewarding world.  A world where they do not hate their jobs, their spouses, their governments, their lives."

Maybe.  I might argue with him on a few of those points (I read to learn and expand my horizons and in some cases it's nice knowing I'm not alone in what I have to deal with in life sometimes) but I have to agree with the escapism part of the equation.  Life has been particularly stressful this year and books have provided a really nice respite from life's problems.  It's nice to be able to think about another place or time or situation that is a world away from my own.

Queenan has decidedly firm opinions about eReaders and digital books (he doesn't use them), about book buying (he prefers reading/rereading from his own book piles rather than acquiring new ones), book collecting (he amasses them rather than collects them) and various other sundry topics of concern to a true bibliophile.  The next essay is "Face Without a Name, Bag Without a Number" and the opening line reads: "I have not always had the best experiences in libraries."  Hmm.  I'm certainly intrigued enough to continue on . . .

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A few other bookish items.

I finished Renata Adler's Pitch Dark.  I will be writing about it soon (before it begins fading from mind) in order to try and make a little sense of what I read.  I now have three unread NYRB selections to choose from, but I think I'm going to begin skipping around and not read in order (in the order that they've arrived anyway).

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Since May is moving right along I guess it's time to pull out my copy of Anna Funder's All That I Am for later this month.  I don't think I mentioned it before, but the Slaves will be reading Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard for June.  I was all gung ho when I voted but hope now I am not getting into something more than I bargained for.  Have you read it?  It does sound good, but why do I imagine di Lampedusa is a formidable author?  I shall soon find out.  There is plenty of time if you'd like to read along with either group!

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Did I tell you that I made a list of books on my nightstand?  They are the books that I am in the progress of reading, plus a few that had been set aside temporarily.  It covers almost an entire page, though the notebook is a small one.  The idea is to try and whittle the piles down, which is more wishful thinking.  I will continue to chip away at those, too.  Although I've not shared any recent purchases, I have made quite a few and with each new parcel that arrives I have a strong desire to crack the book open and begin reading . . .  Finally, too, over the weekend I did a little housecleaning and organizing (but only a little . . . ) as piles were beginning to look like clutter and were making me feel a little claustrophobic.  It's always nice to have those TBR piles all neat and tidy, isn't it?

Short Story Sunday: Good Evening Mrs. Craven

Although I am feeling the pull of noir fiction at the moment, the appeal of rereading Mollie Panter-Downes, the next story up in the Persephone collection, was a little too strong to ignore this weekend.

I really love the work of Mollie Panter-Downes.  I've loved everything I've read by her from her first novel written at the age of 17, The Shoreless Sea, to her wonderfully evocative One Fine Day (I think I've now read it three times) as well as her short stories collected in Good Evening Mrs. Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes also published by Persephone Books.  Granted her first novel was very much a first novel, sweet and sentimental, her more mature One Fine Day is as good a novel as you'll find describing the mood of the middle class in post-war Britain. 

I recall the stories In Good Evening Mrs. Craven fall somewhere in between but certainly closer to her more sophisticated later work.  Each story is a perfect slice of life in wartime Britain.  Although the lives of the characters are ordinary, their circumstances are anything but, and Panter-Downes trains a keen eye on her subjects.  It's hard not to be impressed that in so few pages an author can bring to life the petty squabbles, the disappointments great and small, the sadness and anguish and the tiny joys of people living through a terrible war, and she tells her stories with great sympathy yet always with dignity.

Life is really messy.  And whatever the circumstances, in times of peace or times of war people continue on dealing the with daily business that must be attended to, even in the case (maybe even more so in times of war) of the affairs of the heart.  In "Good Evening Mrs. Craven", Mrs. Craven is not who you think she is.

"For years now they had been going to Porter's, in one of the little side streets off the strand.  They had their particular table in the far corner of the upstairs room, cosily near the fire in winter, cooled in the summer by a window at their backs, through which drifted soot and the remote bumble of traffic." [...]

"Every Thursday evening, wet or fine, they would be dining in their corner under the bust of Mrs. Siddons, talking quietly, sometimes holding hands under the tablecloth.  It was the evening when he was supposed to have a standing engagement to play bridge at his club.  Sometimes he called for her at her flat; more often they arrived separately."

And now do you know who Mrs. Craven is?  Yes, the "other woman".  Life is messy.  Affairs happen and my inclination is always to side with the wife as the wronged party, and I do feel for the wife in this story, if only from a 'this is bad/wrong behavior on the husband's side'.  But in the hands of Mollie Panter-Downes, it's hard, too, not to feel a certain sympathy for this other 'Mrs. Craven'.  What do you do when a likable person falls for a married man and gets herself into a situation from which she cannot and probably does not want to extricate herself?

A woman alone in times of peace but with a married lover is not such a sad situation.  There is always the next rendezvous to look forward to.  But in times of war?  When her married lover goes off to Libya where rumors fly of fierce fighting, being alone is not such a good thing to be at all.

"There was no one to confide in; all these years she had been so careful that she had hardly mentioned his name to anyone else.  She went out with other people, but she imagined that she wasn't so amusing or attractive as she used to be and that they noticed it.  She began to stay home most evenings, reading in bed or writing him long letters."

They came up with a system of code words so she might know where he was and what he was doing.  But the letters began to lag, perfectly normal under the circumstances, but what would happen if something terrible happened?  How would she know and would someone contact her?  The mistress?  He has a wife and children, and she had never before hoped to break them up, but now?  How does one carry on in a time of war?

And like women have done all through time, whether wife or mistress she must carry on.  Such a poignant and beautiful story and I can't help but feel for this "other" woman.

Mollie Panter-Downes wrote exclusively for the New Yorker and she was better known to American audiences than British for this fact.  Between 1938 and 1987 she published 857 pieces in the magazine ranging from poetry to short stories to book reviews to her weekly column.  She considered herself a journalist first, which is perhaps why she never tried to preserve her short stories.  I have read nearly all of MPD's fiction, but I still  have yet to read the columns she wrote during wartime for The New Yorker.  Eventually I will rectify that.     

It's noted in the obituary that appeared in The Guardian that it was "divined that she was 'one of those writers who will, without doubt, be rediscovered'."  I'm happy she's been rediscovered and hope that more of her work will be brought back into print. 

Next week's story?  Hmm.  Let me surprise you (and maybe me, too).

Lost in the Stacks Home Edition: Margaret

One of the things I love most (aside from being able to take a peek at other readers' book collections) is getting to know another side of them.  I am pretty familiar with those on my blogroll and often feel I can put, if not actual face, then a personality to the name.  Often, though, they share some interesting things here that I hadn't come across previously when reading their blogs.  I've been following Margaret of BooksPlease almost as long as I've been blogging, but I had no idea of several of the things she was kind enough to share about herself:

I'm a lifelong bookaholic and trained and worked for a while as a librarian in a local history library and then as a cataloguer.  Danielle's series 'Lost in the Stacks' brings back happy memories of the time I spent in the stacks working in Manchester Public Libraries years ago, so I'm delighted she asked me to contribute to her 'Lost in the Stacks Home Edition'.

I began my blog after I left my job as a Definitive Map Officer working in the Rights of Way section in local government in the south-east of England.  Part of my job involved meeting and interviewing people about the footpaths and bridleways they used, researching the history of the paths and writing reports.  I wanted to carry on writing and researching after I left work and writing a blog seemed to fill the gap -- and it's meant that I've 'met' lots of people from different parts of the world, all with similar interests to me, as well as adding many books to  my collection.  It's also meant that I've developed an interest in photography.

For the last three years I've lived in Northumberland in the north-east of England, not far from the border with Scotland and I've been enjoying exploring the countryside in the Borders.  When I'm not reading I like walking and finding out about the area and its history.  I've also learned to paint and have joined a local art club, which has helped me enormously.  I've always thought I couldn't paint and I'm still very much a beginner. 

Do click on over and check out BooksPlease, Margaret often has several interesting-sounding mysteries on the go and I am always curious what her current reads happen to be!

1. Describe your library/bookshelves. Are the books randomly placed or do you have them organized in a special way?

My bookcases are full to overflowing with some double-shelved.  They are a mix of non-fiction and fiction according to their size.  I've arranged the fiction in two sections -- books that I've read and unread books -- both in A-Z author order.  But my difficulty is that I haven't enough room on the 'read' shelves to fit any more in so the 'unread' bookshelves also hold books that I've read recently.

The non-fiction is randomly placed on the shelves, mainly by size, although I have placed books on the same subject together where possible -- books on history, biography and autobiography, art, cookery, gardening, yoga, religion, philosophy, language, travel and nature books mainly.

2.  Do you like to weed and recycle as you read or do you prefer to hold on to all your books?

When I worked in the library I only used to buy books that I thought I'd want to re-read and I borrowed lots of books from the library.  Later on I began buying more books, and those 3 or 2 offers meant that it was usually more than one book at a time and the numbers grew.  In an ideal world I would keep all my books, but as space is limited I try to be firm with myself and week out books that I'm unlikely to want to re-read.  It's very difficult because there have been so many times I've wanted to re-read or just check a particular book only to realise I no longer have it.  So it's a slow process.

I take some books to charity shops but I'm lucky that I live within driving distance of one of the biggest second-hand bookshops in the UK -- Barter Books in Alnwick -- and I've taken quite a few there in the last 3 years.  The drawback is though they don't actually buy the books -- they offer you a sum of money for them and then you 'buy' more.  That's a drawback or a bonus depending on how you look at it.

3.  Are your books confined to one area or are they spread out over your house?

My books are spread out over nearly the whole house, with bookcases in most of the rooms.  Four bookcases line one wall of the hallway.  These hold unread fiction and some non-fiction (photo 1).  the fiction is double-shelved, which does make it more difficult to see what I have.

There are more bookcases in the other rooms.  On the top shelf of the one in the lounge (photo 2) are more of the unread novels -- again double shelved.  I have far too many unread books!  The lower shelves hold a mix of fiction and non-fiction. 

Photo 3 shows some of the books in the office.  These are a mix of novels that I've read and non-fiction, mainly art books, cookery books, books on religion and health.

Most of the non-fiction is in a tall bookcase at the end of the inner hallway.  It's a real jumble of books as show in photo 4, with books on history, travel, football (my husband's books), language, gardening, biography, walking and so on sitting side by side.  I see there's even a novel that has infiltrated the non-fiction section!  (photo 5 is a close up of a few of these books)

Photo 6 is of the little bookcase my Dad made me for my bedroom when I was about 8.  It doesn't look anything special -- just a three shelf wooden bookcase he painted white, but I could never part with it.  It's looking a bit the worse for ear now.  On the top are some very old children's books and a pile of brochures from National Trust properties we've visited.  The shelves contain many history books and some philosophy books.

There are very old books in a spare bedroom -- again some children's books from my childhood and my parents' childhoods, too, some history and gardening books and some dictionaries.  I also have a few cookery books that I use regularly on a shelf in the kitchen.

I'd like to have all the books close at hand, but there just isn't enough space so up in the loft there are boxes of books that I've read and want to keep.  Every now and then I have to go up and retrieve a few.

4.  How long has your oldest unread book sat on your shelves?

I've had to think very hard to answer this question.  It's difficult because I haven't kept a record of when I acquired my books.  I began to list my books on LibraryThing in April 2007 but by that time I already had a number of unread books, and some of those are still unread.  So I started to answer this by trying to remember how long I'd had them --  impossible.  And then I realised I still have a number of reference books that I bought when I was at school, doing my 'A' levels!  One is a biography of King James the Sixth of Scotland and First of England, by David Harris Willson.  I was studying the Stuarts for 'A' Level History and thought I'd read it after the exams were over, but I never got round to it!  I'm not owning up to how many years I've had this book!  It's probably very dated now in terms of historical biographies and it's not in very good condition due to the passage of time and 9 house moves.

5.  What is your most treasured book?

This is another hard question to answer, because many of my books have sentimental value.  I have books that were given to me as Sunday School prizes and as presents from my family and friends and I would be really upset if I lost them.  But the book I'd be most devastated to lose is my Family Bible.  This Bible belonged to my Welsh great grandfather, Isaac.  Inside he recorded that he was born on 7 August 1848 and he married Elizabeth on 10 November 1877.  (Coincidentally my birthday is 7 August and wedding anniversary is 8 November!)  It contains details of births, marriages and deaths in the family from the latter part of the 19th century onwards.

6.  If you could pick one "lost in the stacks/on your bookshelves" book to rediscover and share with other readers, which would it be?

There are so  many I could choose and I've spend some time thinking about this question and taking lots of books off the shelves trying to decide which one to write about.  As I understand the question it should be a book that I've not read for a while/forgotten about. 

In the end I decided upon one of Iris Murdoch's later books, The Green Knight, published in 1993.  It is one of my favourites, but it's a book I haven't read in years, so my memory of it is a little vague.  But I do remember thinking it was really good, if rather strange.  It combines myth, magic and philosophy and some very eccentric characters, including three sisters, a dog called Anax who misses his former owner, a mysterious figure and a professor who unintentionally kills a nocturnal assailant with his umbrella -- or does he?  The blurb on the back from a review in the Independent states that:

"it explores darkness as well as light, the route from sadness through self-knowledge into joy, and how loss and emptiness, if truthfully traversed, can be transformed into fullness and fertility  ...A Romance in the fullest and most positive sense."

Many thanks to Margaret for sharing photos of her bookshelves with us.  Check back next Friday for a peek into another reader's library.

Grey Mask by Patricia Wentworth

I've finally been formally introduced to the venerable Miss Silver.  I like her, and as so often happens in these situations--I'm wondering whyever did I wait to read a Miss Silver mystery?  She seems a little formidable in her knowledge and canny ability to untangle a mystery.  She reminds me a lot of another favorite and well respected sleuth, Miss Jane Marple.  Considering the love and admiration Miss Marple garners from so many readers, that can only be a good thing. 

Given the choice I always like to start a new mystery series at the beginning.  I realize first books are often not the best in a long run of books, and the author is usually just building the foundation and setting the scene, getting things ready for even bigger things to happen later when the stories really pick up momentum.  But Grey Mask by Patricia Wentworth, the first Miss Silver mystery (published in 1928 putting it smack dab in the Golden Age of detective fiction) is a good solid mystery, quite enjoyable really, even if Miss Silver only makes brief appearances in the story.

As a matter of fact Maud Silver doesn't even take the stage until page 74.  A first impression:

"Miss Silver sat in front of a pad of pink blotting-paper.  She was a little person with no features, no complexion, and a great deal of tidy mouse-colored hair done in a large bun at the back of her head.  She inclined her head slightly, but did no offer to shake hands."

She has a knack for getting more information out of her clients than they seem willing to give and expects complete trust from them.  Seated behind her massive writing table with a stack of different-colored exercise books (to keep track of her cases), her knitting seems to be always close at hand.  In Grey Mask I think she knitted at least one pair of socks, baby bootees and maybe even a little baby sweater (if I recall correctly).  She is always cool, calm and collected, usually with a faint, fleeting smile playing on her lips.  I don't yet know much about her back story, only that she is a trained "sleuthess" who operates with no fuss or scandal and the utmost discretion.

In Grey Mask Maud Silver is hired by Charles Moray who has been away for a number of years after he was jilted by his fiancé Margaret Langton right before their wedding.  Not lacking in funds he decided the only way to get over the failed relationship was through exotic travels and adventures abroad.  But when he returns home more adventures, but of a decidedly sinister nature, are in store for him.  He discovers the family home is being used by a criminal gang.  Hiding in an unused bedroom he overhears plans for a plot to get rid of an heiress.  Most devastating, however, is that Margaret seems to be involved.

My edition of the book has the cover with the angry young man on it (above), which fits the story perfectly.  Charles is bitter over what happened and disappointed in Margaret.  All too willing to take his anger out on her, they nonetheless become involved once more in trying to protect Margot Standing from being murdered.  Her father has recently died in a boating accident.  Margot, just eighteen, stands to inherit a small fortune unless it can be proved her parents were unwed at the time of her birth.  Margot is a beautiful, silly, empty-headed young woman (a flapper!) who is too fond of chocolates, and cannot keep a secret to save her life (almost literally).  She's mostly concerned with receiving marriage proposals, falls for Charles and cannot understand why Margaret is still unmarried at the ripe old age of twenty-five.

For a cozy mystery, and one with a knitting-needle wielding sleuth at that, the story moves remarkably quickly.  Wentworth knows how to plot and move her mystery along at a nice steady pace.  There are lots of good period details, though they are not in the least intrusive, though I think "frightfully" must appear on every other page (particularly as exclaimed by Margot Standing).  I'm going to have to place Miss Silver up there as a favorite sleuth.  Although I am now reading the first Inspector Gamache mystery, Still Life, by Louise Penny (another, so far, really excellent book), I am already looking forward to reading more books by Patricia Wentworth.  She wrote over thirty Miss Silver novels.  Next up is The Case is Closed.  I'm curious to see how Miss Silver develops as a character and learning more about her. 

By the way, a number of you recommended Patricia Wentworth to me, which is appreciated.  And most recently Kathy chose her as her lost in the stacks recommendation!  The Miss Silver books are also available as ebooks with those cool vintage-y looking monochromatic covers.

Have You Heard of: Jean Stafford (and other library books I want to read)

Have you heard of Jean Stafford?  I must have heard the name somewhere at some time, but when a coworker mentioned (very enthusiastically I might add) the NYRB reissue of Stafford's The Mountain Lion, I knew I had to check her out.  Actually I have caved in and ordered a copy of The Mountain Lion, and in the interim (while I wait for it to arrive in the mail) grabbed her 1951 novel The Catherine Wheel from the library's shelves.  She won the Pulitzer Prize for her The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford in 1970, and given my short story kick, I am going to have to go grab that as well.

The Mountain Lion, which I am told has a fairy tale-ish quality to it, is a story of childhood. 

"A wonderful record of childhood and adolescence…I do not know where to turn in contemporary fiction for a more wonderful recording of the sights and smells, the emotions and values, the hates and passions of childhood and youth…[a] beautifully modeled tale."
—Howard Mumford Jones, The New York Times

Given my positive experiences with NYRB titles, I have a feeling this is a book I will like very much.  As for The Catherine Wheel, I only know it is set in Maine in the 1930s and is a story of a family--domestic fiction?  Will be giving it a try soon.

Although I've not been sharing my library finds much lately, they have been present "behind the scenes".  I still am reaching more often for books from my own shelves, but I have some really tempting books out from the library and the problem is (as always) how to juggle those with my 'in progress' books.  Here are a few highlights.

The Last Telegram by Liz Trenow -- "Decades ago, as Nazi planes dominated the sky, Lily Verner made a terrible choice. She's tried to forget, but now an unexpected event pulls her back to the 1940s British countryside. She finds herself remembering the brilliant colors of the silk she helped to weave at her family's mill, the relentless pressure of the worsening war, and the kind of heartbreaking loss that stops time."

A Spear of Summer Grass by Deanna Raybourn -- I've fallen behind in reading the Lady Julia Julia Grey novels (which I have enjoyed immensely), but this is a standalone set in Colonial Africa.  I love the period and the setting so look forward to it.

Oh yay, a new Maisie Dobbs Mystery, Leaving Everything Most Loved by Jacqueline Winspear.  I think this is going directly to the reading pile on my night stand.  If I don't read it now and it goes back to the library I will have to go to the end of a very long line!  This is set in 1933 and the mystery is about the death of an Indian immigrant.  This story "marks a pivotal moment" in the series.  Hmm.  I think it will be going to work with me tomorrow.

The Frozen Shroud by Martin Edwards is not the first in the series, but it is the first Lake District Mystery I hope to read.  "Death has come twice to Ravenbank, a remote community in England's Lake District, each time on Hallowe'en. Just before the First World War, a young woman's corpse was found, with a makeshift shroud frozen to her battered face. Her ghost - the Faceless Woman - is said to walk through Ravenbank on Hallowe-en. Five years ago, another woman, Katya Moss, was murdered, and again her face was covered to hide her injuries. Daniel Kind, a specialist in the history of murder, becomes fascinated by the old cases, and wonders whether the obvious suspects really did commit the crimes. He spends Hallowe'en at a party in Ravenbank - only to find death returning to this beautiful but isolated spot. Once more, the victim is a woman, once more her damaged face is shrouded from view."

Rapscallion: A Regency Crime Thriller by James McGee -- I read the first Matthew Hawkwood novel a couple of years ago and didn't realize subsequent novels had finally been published in the US.  As this is the third, I will likely try and get my hands on the second book in the series.  The first was a bit of a romp if I recall correctly, so I am happy to see I have two more books to look forward to.

As usual spoiled for choice and in dire need of extra reading time.

Not Quite So Adrift, or reading Renate Adler

I've officially passed the halfway mark of Renate Adler's Pitch Dark, my current NYRB Classic and a book I was afraid I was going to struggle with.  After that initial feeling of disorientation, I'm progressing steadily through the story (though I sort of hesitate to call it a story as it is not what I traditionally think of as a straightforward novel).  I think this is a book I am going to, when I finish, consider it one I'm happy to have read and been exposed to, but maybe not one that I love in the same way as I've loved my first two NYRB subscription books (the McPherson and the Grossman).  And that's okay.  It certainly doesn't mean it's not an exceptional book, only that maybe I am not the perfect reader/audience for it.

But then again, a lot can happen in the span of seventy pages!  I will say that while I do occasionally feel a little adrift still, I'm not nearly so lost as I was afraid I might be.  I've been trying to read a set number of pages every day in order to keep the momentum going, and today I found that when I had passed my allotted pages I wanted to keep going.  A good sign that she is pulling me in and keeping my attention and not losing me along the way.

I wanted to give a little update at the halfway mark, and while I'm still not sure of all the 'whys' of the story, I do see a few patterns emerging.  This is a book I am reading with pencil in hand and notebook close by.  I like to keep notes as I read, but usually I am very lazy about noting more than characters and location details.  My notes this time around are fairly scattered and they probably don't really make a lot of sense, but here are some things I've jotted down so far.

Pitch Dark is narrated in the first person.  Kate Ennis has been having an affair with a married man, Jake.  He's behaving badly--taking Kate for granted and not acting as a lover normally would (or what we consider a married man who takes a lover to act like towards his mistress).

". . . perhaps you never loved me quite enough, and I didn't want to know."

"What you've done, though, is to arrange your life so that all the things with a little joy or beauty in them were the things in which I had no part.  No, I don't mean that.  It is only that I didn't think I set the price so very high.  There wasn't ever going to be a price.  Yet here I am, after all, alone on Orcas Island.  And it's just that what happens now is just so bleak and ordinary, either way."

Orcas Island, the first of three chapters, is where Kate is at the beginning of the story--all alone.  It has an episodic (Anne Tyler calls them fragments in her jacket blurb--a perfect description) feel to it.  Adler throws out lots of bits of information which has to be pieced together to create a fuller picture of just what's going on.  Kate is telling this story twenty years after when the events occurred (in the mid-1960s).  She was a grad student with a wide circle of diverse friends.  Eight years she and this man were together, though they had never had an entire week together. 

There is lots of repetition of words and phrases.

"But you are, you know, you were, the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life."

And an occasional (and amusing) play on words.  She talks about the Attorney General who would mention the Ku Klux Klan but always called them "Clamsmen".

"I remember a young radical, in the sixties, denouncing her roommates as prawns of imperialism."

(I found that amusing since she had been on a riff of fishy sorts of words . . . molluscs, bivalves, even crustaceans.

I'm now reading the second part, "Pitch Dark" which is set in Ireland.  By now Kate is a journalist and she is staying as a guest at the house of the Ambassador.  I'm not sure why exactly, or rather what her relationship with him is, though she is looking for somewhere quiet and by the sea, a place to rest.  By now she is a journalist, and Jake, her married lover has essentially dumped her. 

It is perhaps easier going as this second chapter is closer to a regular narrative, even though it still has a slightly episodic feel to it.  She's run afoul of the law on the road to Dublin driving a rented vehicle which she's dented.  Maybe my curiosity has been peaked since there is a feeling of suspense and mystery to her journey to Ireland, I'm not sure.  Certainly the people around her now are not so nice and maybe even a little strange, which makes me wonder where this story is going, and wanting to know more than ever the whys and motivations behind Kate's journey.

I've held off reading Muriel Spark's afterword, just a very few pages long actually, though I might cave in and do a little extracurricular reading now before I start the last section, which I hope to do tomorrow.  I am determined to finish the book by the end of the weekend.  This is a book that is not best read in fits and starts I've decided.  Definitely it is more of a challenge than I normally look for, but a good challenge, and maybe not so hard as I was expecting (and I even had more to say about it than I thought--I'll have to do mid-way posts more often with those books that call for more attention and thought).