A Work in Progress

A Little Taste: Traveling with Pomegranates

When perusing bookstore shelves have you ever skimmed over the same book many times, maybe edged it out to take a glance but then edged it back in thinking it wasn't for you?  Return trips and you do the same thing.  Edge out and edge it back in.  Oh yeah, that book.  Nope.  Then much later you see it again, maybe facing out, and take a closer look and think . . . maybe.  

I say it all the time, and I guess I'm right.  Timing is everything.  Used books would have been a no-no when I was working in an indie bookshop.  Now I buy almost more used books than new and have a soft spot for them (especially when I find some little piece of ephemera inside).  And stories?  Books with older protagonists for example, I would have never given a second thought about reading.  Now I seek them out.  As a matter of fact, while I still don't really feel my age (not mentally but maybe just sometimes a tad bit physically), I find myself being more open to books about getting older.  

So I cannot tell you how many times my eyes have slipped over Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor's travelogue/memoir Traveling with Pomegranates.  Subtitled "A Mother and Daughter Journey to the Sacre Places of Greece, Turkey, and France."  I think what was off putting, maybe aside from a coauthored work, was the idea of the idea of a midlife quest.  To be honest, now, that is why I so eagerly revisited the thought of actually pulling the book from the shelf.  And sacred paces probably did nothing to really endear me to the subject matter (not being 'religious'), that appealed even more.

Aside from the fact that I definitely need a good nonfiction to get me back on track with my nonfiction reading (and someone, please, help me with a good classic--why can't I Finish any of the classics I pick up and start?), all of a sudden I am feeling drawn to books about how to deal with getting older, about getting rid of all the extraneous and unimportant details and finding the important things that matter, about possibly reinventing myself, about getting back on the right path in life (but then wondering if I ever had found it to begin with).  I know that is a lot to ask for in a book, but if someone has already been asking and writing about these questions, I am happy to explore their answers.  Maybe it will give me some inspiration.

Last weekend when I was at the bookstore, once again my eyes flicked past this book and then returned and I snapped it up.  I started reading the first pages and they resonated with me so it was an easy sell after all that.  All those many other times I had not even considered it.  

Sue and her daughter Ann have written the book together but in alternating chapters.  I bought it more for Sue's voice, as a woman nearing fifty who decides to travel to sacred places in Greece, Turkey and France.  It is her story I want to know.  At first when I got to Ann's chapter, I felt a little disappointed.  A mother-daughter book, I thought.  That's fine, but I am not a mother.  And it has been a long time since I was a not much over twenty-year-old student with my life ahead of me.  My own path diverges so much from what is expected of women, or what so many women want and/or choose.  But I am a daughter even now.  And the more I read the more I appreciate Ann's voice as much as Sue's.  It may well have been a long time ago, but I still understand and remember some of those youthful worries that she is encountering.  

There is all kinds of interesting things in this book--not least the references to mythology, which I love.  And if these stories, these myths do not go a long way to explaining emotions and feelings and expectations, nothing else does either.  But this is one of the excerpts which made want to keep reading.  Sue begins by writing about a journal she bought that would describe the bucket list that so many subscribe to.

" . . . I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred.  The small, telling 'betrayals' of my body.  The stalled, eerie stillness in my writing, accompanied by an ache for some unlived destiny.  I wrote about the raw, unsettled feelings coursing through me, the need to divest and relocate, the urge to radically simplify and distill life into a new, unknown meaning .  And why, I asked myself, had I begun to think for the first time about my own mortality?  Some days, the thought of dying gouged into my heart to the point I filled up with tears at the sight of the small, ordinary things I would miss."

"Finally, I wrote a series of questions: Is there an odyssey the female longs to make at the approach of fifty--one has been blurred and lost within a culture awesomely alienated from soul?  If so, what sort of journey would that be?  Where would it take me?"

"The impulse to go to Greece emerged out of those questions.  It seized me before I got back to the minuscule apartment.  Greece. That would be the portal.  I would make a pilgrimage in search of an initiation."

I'm intrigued by her questions and her journey.  I wish I could make such a pilgrimage, but maybe I can find some inspiration in the pages of this book, reading about her own quest.  I might not find answers to my own questions, but at least I can see I am not alone in the search.

New Cat Cafe, or a Little Feline Therapy!

Have you heard of cat cafés?  Apparently they are not new, but it was only this year that I had heard of them and now one has opened locally and I happen to walk past it every day on my way to work!

I have not had a chance yet to actually go in and interact with the cats, but I did pop in this week and take a peek.  Felius just opened its doors a few days ago and already I see lots of visitors when I pass by.  The actual café and cat play area are fairly small but it seems such a warm and inviting space, I can't wait to go and have a coffee and play with the resident cats/kittens.

If, like me, you are new to the concept--the idea is to have a safe and happy environment for rescue cats and be able to adopt them out to new owners/families.  You pay a small fee to go in and hang with the cats, or you can simply just buy a coffee and look in on the play area and support the facility with your purchase.  The money goes towards the care of the cats and as you can see it is a happy environment for them.  The café is a square area but cut in a diagonal with a glass window separating actual café area from the cat space.  The main window looks in on the cat area, which I think I will always be walking past very slowly to see what the cats are up to!

The day I stopped it was nearly closing time, so I had a peek and then took one last look in the window from the street, and this little kitten was looking rather lost with the exodus of catlovers.  Doesn't she look like she is beckoning me back in?  'No, wait, come back and play with me.  Don't leave me alone, I need to be entertained!'  

Of course, typical curious kitten . . .  A staff member came in and the kitten turned tail to see what he was up, too.  'Okay, fine, I'm going to see if he will play with me . . .!".  I plan on stopping by soon for a cup of something warm.  And hopefully for a little cat/kitten therapy.  I wish I could have a cat for a companion again, but until my situation changes I can at least hang with the cats at Felius!

A Little Bird Told Me, Marrianne Holmes

Memory is a funny thing.  It can be selective and inaccurate.  I'm not sure if it is a matter of self-preservation or simply the way time frays the edges of past recollections.  And a child's perception of events is even hazier, so add on a layer of adolescent angst and a lack of experience and understanding.  In Marianne Holmes's engaging debut novel, A Little Bird Told Me, she manages to evoke that sense of mystery and misunderstanding of family trauma as witnessed through the eyes of a nine-year-old girl who feels all but invisible to the world around her.  Or almost all.

Robyn Stanton and her brother Kit have returned to the little village where they spent the early years of their youth until devastating events forced them leave.  Now they have come back to try and find out the truth of that terrible summer some dozen years previously.  For Robyn, she needs to set to rights her part in what happened that summer.  The summer her father came back into their lives and their mother went missing.  The summer she betrayed all who loved her.

Holmes has shifted things around a bit in her storytelling.  Often the reader holds all the cards and watches the characters struggle for truth and resolution knowing many of the little secrets and details the characters might not be privy to.  This time out, however, the reader must piece it all together as the story plays out and try and suss out not only what exactly did happen so long ago but why everyone seems so against Kit and especially Robyn as they dredge up old memories.  It's like opening an old wound that never quite healed correctly, and they ruffle not a few feathers.  Not only does Robyn still not quite understand what happened, like reading a book that has missing chapters, but her nine-year old self never really knew the whole story and most of the important little details.  Seeing is not always understanding and that nine-year-old Robyn saw quite a lot, but it was a murky kind of knowledge.  So reader and character get to experience events together.  It's hazy memories and facts until the layers of story are peeled back to the core.

Bit and pieces from the past.  What do they all mean?  Two St. Christopher medals.  A charm bracelet.  Old newspapers with stories relating a domestic abuse allegation that Robyn's mum, Jemima, was involved in.  A purse with a wallet inside containing a photograph of two young girls sitting side by side.  And a town with residents filled with resentment and ill feelings towards the Stantons.  Then there is Neil.  Kit's good friend and the boy who Robyn blames for not getting help in time.  So many mysteries little pieces to the puzzle.  

The story moves back and forth in time between 1976 and 1988.  Robyn and Kit are only children when those fearful events occurred.  That summer Robyn is being bullied and no one seems to notice or care.  Her only savior is the man everyone calls the cowboy, perhaps worse than any local bully but he always seems to step in just when Robyn needs him.  Her mother Jemima and stepfather Matthew are already dealing with their own problems, one being the village boy whose mother comes to Jemima for help and sanctuary from an abusive husband.  Worse worries come in the form of Robyn's cowboy since he claims to be her dad, a fact she finds more interesting than fearful.  For Kit, however, he shakes in his shoes when he encounters the man.  Curiously Robyn feels almost empowered by her run-ins with him.  He gives her the attention no one else seems capable of.  

More than a decade later, though, Robyn looks back on those events with a different eye.  They return to find answers.  For Kit it is meant to be a quick in and out search.  A hopeful search that they might find out what happened to their missing mother.  But for Robyn this is her moment to make some kind of amends to those she feels she let down. Not everyone is happy to see the pair, hardly grown up and still at the start of their young lives yet already jaded by what they have endured.  A Little Bird Told Me is a slow burn sort of story.  It takes a little time and attention to orient oneself to what's happening in the story and who is who and who knows what.  But Holmes makes the revelations intriguing in a way that you keep going in order to find out answers until you get to a point of no return and can't stop until the very last revelation.  This is a perfect fall read, a haunted kind of story that comes from the sort of ghosts that creep into your mind from memories half recalled and not fully formed.  

This is Marianne Holmes first novel and an auspicious start.  She had a varied and colorful upbringing and youth and I look forward to seeing how it plays into her next book and future writing.  Thanks to Agora Books for sending this book my way.  It had already been on my own wishlist, so I was thrilled to get a copy sooner rather than later.  You can check out Marianne Holmes's website here.

A Little Bird Told Me (On Tour)

Check back tomorrow and I'll tell you more about A Little Bird Told Me by Marianne Holmes.  (A little preview . . . I really enjoyed this one!  A great fall read!)

Bookstore Finds and Newly Acquired

This weekend I made a little bookstore visit and look what I found!  Some of Georgette Heyer's novels are getting a makeover.  I have quite a few of the original Sourcebook reissues from ten years ago with the Regency romance inspired covers with images of ladies in proper period dress and sometimes couples.  I kind of like these, though they do have a very different feel to them.  They seem almost less romance novels--maybe more period pieces/historical fiction perhaps?  It reminds me of the rejacketing of Mary Stewart's work some years ago as well. 

I actually prefer covers without the swooning couples or heroines with heaving chests, if you know what I mean.  Maybe these would appeal more to reluctant romance readers?  I had Arabella (the book on the far right) on my pile to buy, but then I had to whittle down my selections as I am meant to be on a 'budget'.  I believe some of her mysteries are also getting reissued with new covers, too.  I found this interview about the new books, and you can see how much the cover illustrations have changed over time here.  For a short chunk of time I was seriously binging on Heyer books, but it has been quite a while since I have read one.  Maybe it is time to revisit her work again.

I did bring a few books home, however.  Can you tell I am in a crime/scary story/ghost story sort of mood at the moment?  The weather may not be cooperating, but I am all ready for fall, falling leaves and maybe light sweaters or sweatshirts.  Not cold, mind you, just cool weather.  

Since I am finally reading Sue Grafton's books, I see that I have been missing out by not picking up crime novels/mysteries with US settings.  I nearly always reach for international or British crime novels.  If I do pick up an American author it is usually someone who sets their books abroad.  Now I realize there is so much to explore.  

I like the fact that Jeffery Deaver's detective is a quadriplegic and that his partner is a woman.  I picked up The Bone Collector since it is the first in the series, and I am pretty sure I saw the movie at some point, but it has been so long now that I don't remember much about the story.  I am not sure I will read more than one of his Lincoln Rhyme books, but I want to have a taste of some different authors.

For a while it seemed I could not open a bookish email without seeing references to Megan Abbott.  Interviews with her, articles by her or about her work.  But I have never read any of her books.  Since I found this nice inexpensive mass market edition of You Will Know Me, I will start here with her work.

And then Kate Mosse, who I have read before, though it has been ages.  This ghost story, The Winter Ghosts, takes place after WWI yet it hearkens back to those war years.  It is set in France during a snowstorm, all good ingredients for a good ghost story.  Plus it looks like it will read quickly.  If I don't manage to squeeze it in this fall I will save it for the holidays (my other favorite time for a good ghost story).

I know I need to stop accumulating books and concentrate on what I already own.  I have more than enough to read for many many years to come.  But it is so hard to leave a bookstore empty handed.  I am trying to not bring home more than one, so I had a nice little splurge as you see here!

September 14: Weekend Reading Notes

Summer seems to have returned here after a very happy taste of almost-fall-like weather.  It is warm and toasty here so perhaps a last gasp of real summer temperatures.  I'll be happy when the last of it moves on and it becomes milder and cooler.  My reading is already syncing with fall even if it doesn't feel like it outside.  My small stack of just a few books has grown a bit but I am still trying to keep it under control.

I have a nice variety of books and genres on the go at the moment.  For fall-ish reading I have picked up Claire Fuller's Bitter Orange.  It was this podcast with the author that made me order the book right away.  Dilapidated country house, a questionable narrator, a hole in the wall (or in this case the floor) with a bit of voyeurism going on and I was sold.  I like, too, that the narrator is an older woman.  Lately I have been looking for female narrators over the age of 30.  Why are there so few of them?

I really enjoyed Sue Grafton's B is for Burglar.  She even managed to trip me up on the solution.  I thought I knew how it was going to play out but I was pleasantly surprised by the twist (if you can call it a twist really).  I have just barely started C is for Corpse, but it looks quite promising, too.  I like reading them back to back as the time sequence in the books is really very close with each story.  I find, too, that I pick up on the references to the previous case or events that I might not otherwise if I let a lot of time pass between cases.  

I know it is RIP reading season but I am not formally joining in, but I can't resist picking up books that would fit nicely if I were.  To that end, I saw that the movie Burnt Offerings was based on a book by Robert Marasco, so I found a copy at the library and have started reading.  I vaguely recall having seen the movie (or bits of it), but it has been long enough that I only have a slight sense of what it is about.  Besides more often than not the books are better anyway.  Talk about dilapidated old houses.  The one in this book is almost ready to collapse it seems.  A family living in NYC is contemplating renting it for the summer at the moment.  Considering the state it is in you would think warning signs would be going off all over the place, but we'll see.  It's early days yet.  The book was written in the early 1970s just when some of Stephen King's big creepy books were also being written and  horror was becoming a proper genre.

To round things out I am reading Peter Lovesey's On the Edge, which is more crime than mystery.  It is a standalone novel set just after WWII.  Two women who were WAAFs together happen across each other after the war and start talking.  Neither is particularly happy with their lives and even less so with their husbands.  So they decide to kill them off.  Well, one has already been buried.  Will they get away with it.  Am I actually sympathetic towards them?  These situations always make for interesting and curious reading.  Apparently this was also filmed and aired on PBS (though under a different title).  I might see if I can find a way to watch it when I finish reading.  

A while back I was looking for a book that has a crime in the past but is set in the present and the characters are looking back at that period in their lives.  Well, I think I might have come across one that works out nicely with that particular trope--if not exactly as I was imagining it--close enough.  I am going to be a part of a blog tour for Marianne Holmes's forthcoming A Little Bird Told Me.  I have only gotten a taste and will be reading in earnest, but check back later next week to hear more about it.

And then for something just a little bit different I have a modern classic in translation--Giorgio Bassani's Within the Walls, which is translated from the Italian.  The book is a collection of five novellas.  I am only on the first and not quite sure what I think so far.  It is the first book in a series of books known as the Romanzo di Ferrara, novels set in the city of Ferrara.

Happily I am also reading short stories again.  Have you ever read Mavis Gallant?  I always mean to pick her books up and I finally did.  I randomly decided to try The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories written between 1951 and 1971.  She is marvelous.  I am just three stories in (at the moment the third one is quite long so I am just pecking away at it).  Buried in Print has inspired me to pick up her stories as she has been working her way through all of them (and there seem to be quite a lot).

This is the pool of books I will be reading from this weekend.  I am hoping to get in lots of reading time as I want to make my way through several of these soon.  (And maybe I can motivate myself to be better about writing about them).  

What are you reading this weekend?

A is for Alibi by Sue Grafton

I almost wish Kinsey Millhone was a real person and I could see what she looks like.  See her tiny garage-converted apartment and take a virtual tour of Santa Teresa!  I can imagine her jogging along the beach or shooting the breeze with her clients.  I like to think if she was a real person we might be friends, but I think I prefer to just observe her.  (Though she might make a really interesting dinner party guest!).

Things I have learned about Kinsey so far.  She is in her early thirties and twice divorced.  I have yet to learn anything about her ex-husbands or why the marriages failed.  She doesn't seem to have a special love interest, but she is not averse to a possibly casual relationship.  She began her career as a police recruit, but that didn't quite work out and now she is a private investigator.  She has an office in the California Fidelity Insurance Company building where she used to work but now only occasionally does jobs for. 

She doesn't seem to have any real hobbies.  Her job seems to take up most of her time and fill her thoughts.  She likes to run, but less for fitness or a drive to be healthy, as she will as often follow up her runs with a Big Mac and fries.  Her usual hangout is a bar called Rosie's that sounds a bit of a dive so it doesn't attract tourists which is just fine with her, but Rosie is Hungarian and makes the best meals.  Kinsey calls them "devil-may-care cuisine with a Hungarian twist."

I already mentioned her apartment, which is cramped and small but Kinsey likes cramped and small.  Her car is a little VW filled to the brim, it sounds, with files and law books.  She likes to be able to travel at a moment's notice and keeps a briefcase handy complete with a little automatic pistol.  Her landlord is this eighty-year old author of the most intricate crossword puzzles and a baker extraordinaire.  He actually was formerly a baker in his working-life and will often trade bread for meals at local restaurants.  Kinsey is often a happy recipient of loaves, too.  The two often share curious glances as Henry is a not unattractive much older man, but neither would ever dream of acting upon them.

Oh, and yes, she is working on a case in A is for Alibi, which I greatly enjoyed.  I'm not sure which I like better, the piecing together of the puzzle or reading about Kinsey, and being inside her head.  She has a dry sense of humor and I find that her observations often elicit a very audible guffaw from me.  She is so traditional hardboiled in her detecting style and it is a happy experience to read a hardboiled female detective narrating the story.  Why did I not pick up these books before now?  All the better that I have almost a complete alphabet to make my way through, however, as these are almost like eating candy--you just keep reaching your hand in the bag.

I was almost (though not sure why really) surprised by how nicely complex and layered the mystery Kinsey needed to solve and the way she worked through the problem asking endless questions and traveling to talk to witnesses combing through all the clues with a fine tooth comb.  She is methodical in her working style, a bit wisecracking, fairly fearless and not afraid to ask the hard questions.  She is a tough cookie and a smart one at that. 

In this, her first, case (only first for us, but she has been a PI for a while is the sense you get from the story) she has been asked to investigate the murder of a man by the woman who was accused, charged and sentenced for the crime.  She even served her time in jail, biding time until she got out.  She hires Kinsey to find the real culprit.  Nikki Fife spent eight years for the poisoning death of her husband, a crime she has never admitted to.  It sounds fairly straightforward and even while investigating few people are convinced that Nikki is not to blame.  But nothing is really as it appears and one death morphs into two and then another during the investigation.  The story opens with Kinsey relating how she has just killed someone and how it weighs on her mind.  With that in mind she narrates the case and the story ends with her final report on her investigation.  

Such a thoroughly satisfying detective novel.  I have already read my way well into B and hope to pick up C very soon.  I hope to spend a lot of time with Kinsey in the coming months.  What I like is with each new chapter and now with the second novel a bit more is revealed or fleshed out in Kinsey's character.  And Sue Grafton does such a perfect job of setting the scene and painting the details of Kinsey's world so it all seems so real.  So nice to finally meet you Kinsey Millhone.

When I am Just Not the Right Audience . . .

Sometimes it happens.  And it just happened to me.  This is the book that the book club I am in chose to read next.  I tried.  I really did.  It is a novel of suspense which has been called creepy and chilling, and I am all for that at this time of year.  But I have decided that I am just not the right audience for this particular story.  Told in alternating voices between mother and 7-year-old daughter (who has not yet started talking).  It is a 'bad seed' sort of creepy tale. 

However, I found those voices so odious I could not make myself go on.  I feel bad as I know lots of readers have really enjoyed this.  I often really enjoy unlikable characters as they make for interesting storytellers, but this time?  I couldn't.  They disturbed me too much.  I hope the book does well and more power to the author, but I think I will spend time with Kinsey Millhone this weekend and maybe start a reread of a Shirley Jackson novel.  So many other books to try on my piles to spend time with one that isn't quite working for me.

Does this happen to you, too?  A character (or characters) turn you off so much you just have to set the book aside?  I think I will still go to book club as I am curious what the other readers will think of it.  And I would love to know the ending (so feel free to share if you have read it--in this case--spoil away).

September Prompt: Dear Diary, Dear Friend

I'm so happy to put August behind me.  It has been a long hot, sticky summer and I welcome cooler weather (even though I know there are still warm days in store).  I finished my August book in plenty of time and now it is time to choose a new book.  September's prompt is "Dear Diary, Dear Friend" so a novel written in diary or letter format or a nonfiction book about either.  I love epistolary novels and am really looking forward to this.  

I only took a quick look around my shelves, so my pile is actually pretty small.  Sometimes having too many choices only makes the decision harder, but I am hoping that I can read two books this month rather than one.  My choices:

The Diary of Lady Murasaki by Murasaki Shikibu -- "Told in a series of vignettes, it offers revealing glimpses of the Japanese imperial palace - the auspicious birth of a prince, rivalries between the Emperor's consorts, with sharp criticism of Murasaki's fellow ladies-in-waiting and drunken courtiers, and telling remarks about the timid Empress and her powerful father, Michinaga."

Attachments by Rainbow Rowell -- "Beth Fremont and Jennifer Scribner-Snyder know that somebody is monitoring their work e-mail. (Everybody in the newsroom knows. It's company policy.) But they can't quite bring themselves to take it seriously. They go on sending each other endless and endlessly hilarious e-mails, discussing every aspect of their personal lives.  Meanwhile, Lincoln O'Neill can't believe this is his job now- reading other people's e-mail. When he applied to be "internet security officer," he pictured himself building firewalls and crushing hackers- not writing up a report every time a sports reporter forwards a dirty joke.  When Lincoln comes across Beth's and Jennifer's messages, he knows he should turn them in. But he can't help being entertained-and captivated-by their stories."

Dead Letters by Caite Dolan-Leach -- "Caite Dolan-Leach’s debut thriller is a literary scavenger hunt for secrets hidden everywhere from wine country to social media, and buried at the dysfunctional heart of one utterly unforgettable family." 

Love Lessons by Joan Wyndham -- "August 1939. As a teenage Catholic virgin, Joan Wyndham spent her days trying to remain pure and unsullied and her nights trying to stay alive. Huddled in the air-raid shelter, she wrote secretly and obsessively about the strange yet exhilarating times she was living through, sure that this was ' the happiest time of my life'."

Frances Donaldson: A Woman's War by Rose Deakin -- "Female farming in "The War". A laughing, crying, gripping, writer-to-be's letters to her husband through five long years of separation. She, a famous playwright's daughter from high society turned farmer, responds with candour and can-do to male dominance in the cowshed and the realities of the woman's land army volunteers. A moving must-read of feminism two generations before its time coupled with the real smell of Britain before and after Dunkirk. The fear and the relief."-- Robert Boyd.

I am leaning heavily towards Rainbow Rowell's first novel as I like the idea of the story being told through emails.  just out of curiosity, do you have a favorite epistolary novel?