A Work in Progress

Books I Want to Read: Five New/Five Old

I can barely open my email these days, or look at the new books lists on the library's website or browse even just a tiny bit online before I am bombarded by books that catch my eye and my desire to go hide away (far away) and read by a sunny window in a quiet room.  The sunny window is not always in reach, but the desire remains and you know me--I am always trying to squeeze just one more book into my reading pile.  Here are five new books and five older (from my stacks) books that have been on my mind lately.  

The Paris Hours by Alex George -- Okay, what did I say about not wanting war stories?  Oh well, sometimes I can't resist after all.  Technically this is 'between' the wars!  Paris between the wars teems with artists, writers, and musicians, a glittering crucible of genius. But amidst the dazzling creativity of the city’s most famous citizens, four regular people are each searching for something they’ve lost."

The Body Double by Emily Beyda -- I love dopperganger stories!  "A dark, glittering debut novel, The Body Double is the suspenseful story of a young woman who is recruited by a stranger to give up her old life and identity to impersonate a reclusive Hollywood star."

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia -- This sounds really unusual--maybe a story that is not new but in a different setting that makes the story seem 'fresh'?  "From the author of Gods of Jade and Shadow comes a reimagining of the classic gothic suspense novel, a story about an isolated mansion in 1950s Mexico—and the brave socialite drawn to its treacherous secrets."

Watching from the Dark by Gytha Lodge -- "One crime. One witness. One question . . . Why didn't he call the police? When a vibrant young woman is murdered while on a video chat, a small-town detective wades into a circle of friends and lovers with dangerous secrets.  Aidan Poole logs on to his laptop late at night to Skype his girlfriend, Zoe. To his horror, he realizes that there is someone else in her flat. Aidan can only listen to the sounds of a violent struggle taking place in the bathroom--and then the sound of silence. He is desperate to find out if Zoe is okay. But then why is he so hesitant to call the police? When Aidan's cryptic messages finally reach them, Detective Chief Inspector Jonah Sheens and his team take the case--and discover the body. They soon find that no one has a bad word to say about Zoe, a big hearted young artist at the center of a curious web of waifs and strays, each relying on her for support, each hiding dark secrets and buried resentments. Has one of her so-called 'friends' been driven to murder? Or does Aidan have the biggest secret of them all?"

Things I Never Told You by Kelly Rimmer -- "A poignant post-WWII novel that explores the expectations society places on women set within an engrossing family mystery that may unravel everything once believed to be true. With her father recently moved to a care facility, Beth Walsh volunteers to clear out the family home and is surprised to discover the door to her childhood playroom padlocked. She's even more shocked at what's behind it--a hoarder's mess of her father's paintings, mounds of discarded papers and miscellaneous junk in the otherwise fastidiously tidy house. As she picks through the clutter, she finds a loose journal entry in what appears to be her late mother's handwriting. Beth and her siblings grew up believing their mother died in a car accident when they were little more than toddlers, but this note suggests something much darker. Beth soon pieces together a disturbing portrait of a woman suffering from postpartum depression and a husband who bears little resemblance to the loving father Beth and her siblings know. With a newborn of her own and struggling with motherhood, Beth finds there may be more tying her and her mother together than she ever suspected."

***

The new books above I am looking forward to getting my hands on eventually.  But the books below are close at hand, mostly on bedside stacks and I find myself wanting to reach for one or two and start reading now (rather than waiting to finish something else first--my worst bookish-reading habit).  Most of these have been shelf sitters for a while.  I think the Barker on the top is the newest acquisitions.  

Come Tell Me Some Lies by Raffaella Barker -- This reminds me of I Capture the Castle.  "Gabriella lives in a damp, ramshackle, book-strewn farmhouse in Norfolk with her tempestuous poet father and unconventional mother. Alongside her ever expanding set of siblings and half-siblings, numerous pets and her father's rag-tag admirers, Gabriella navigates a chaotic childhood of wild bohemian parties and fluctuating levels of poverty. Longing to be normal, Gabriella enrols in a strict day school, only to find herself balancing two very different lives. Struggling to keep the eccentricities of her family contained, her failure to achieve conformity amongst her peers is endearing, and absolute."

Conversation Piece by Molly Keane -- Will this be the year I get back to reading Molly Keane's work?  "When Oliver visits Pullinstown, he is introduced to wild days of hunting and shooting, and to characters like his cousins, with their passion for horses and trickery, and Sir Richard, elderly, but a match for his headstrong offspring."

The Weather in the Streets by Rosamond Lehmann -- I read Invitation to the Waltz several years back and this is a sequel of sorts.  "Taking up where An Invitation to the Waltz left off, The Weather in the Streets shows us Olivia Curtis ten years older, a failed marriage behind her, thinner, sadder, and apprently not much wiser. A chance encounter on a train with a man who enchanted her as a teenager leads to a forbidden love affair and a new world of secret meetings, brief phone calls and snatched liaisons in anonymous hotel rooms."  I am mostly just in the mood right now for a Virago of any sort, but she popped out at me when I was looking at my VMC bookcase.

Chronicle of a Last Summer by Yasmine El Rashidi -- Although this is not translated but written in English (and I want to read more translated fiction this year), I like the sound of the story and have picked this up more time than I can remember.  "A young Egyptian woman recounts her personal and political coming of age in this brilliant debut novel.  We meet her across three decades, from youth to adulthood: As a six-year old absorbing the world around her, filled with questions she can’t ask; as a college student and aspiring filmmaker pre-occupied with love, language, and the repression that surrounds her; and then later, in the turbulent aftermath of Mubarak’s overthrow, as a writer exploring her own past. Reunited with her father, she wonders about the silences that have marked and shaped her life."

The Misinterpretation of Tara Jupp by Eva Rice -- I loved Eva Rice's novel The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets and hope this is equally as charming.  I Had to have it when it first came out (how many years ago . . .), and really need to get around to read.  "Country girl Tara is whisked off to '60s London to become a star; there she is dressed, she is shown off at Chelsea parties, photographed by the best. She meets songwriters, singers, designers, and records her song. And she falls in love - with two men. Behind the buzz and excitement of her success, the bitterness between her elder sister Lucy and her friend Matilda haunts Tara. Their past friendship is broken and among the secrets and the strangeness of both their marriages, the past keeps on reappearing."

So I am finishing Rachel Kushner's The Mars Room and it is really, really good, but it is not a feel good happy sort of story.  It is bleak and makes me happy to have a quiet, boring, very conventional life.  She is such a good writer that she can make a story set mostly in a women's prison both compelling and engaging.  However, I think I need something gentle and comforting to follow.

So I leave you with a (very easy) question for the weekend.  What is your favorite charming/comforting read?  Something newly encountered or an old favorite?

Reading Notes: Valentine Edition

By coincidence I am reading a few books, though one in particular chosen especially, that seem perfect choices for Valentine's Day.  Although the three are more romantic love than any other kind, in my own life I fall into the other kind--love as an appreciate for friends and good books and sunny days and happy mail.  

Let me start with a book I came across by chance and bought for Valentine's Day reading--because I am always drawn to letters, letter writing and on those especially happy days, days where something other than bills arrive in my mail box!  Have you heard of the Juliet Club in Verona, Italy?  It is a real place, and I vaguely recall seeing a movie based on it, so when I saw a collection of some of the letters they had received, I could not resist.  Dear Juliet: Letters from the Lovestruck and Lovelorn to Shakespare's Juliet in Verona by the Juliet Club and Giulio Tamassia is pretty lovely.  

The book is a collection of letters from all over the world--the facsimile of the letter side by side with the translation and in a few cases even a response from Juliet herself.  Although I am on the curmudgeonly side when it comes to love these days, maybe there is a tiny warm place in my cold heart for something like this.  Maybe it is true for someone out there, which is a nice thought and why I read books--if nothing else the stories are happy and we all need a little happy in life.  The letters are about love--lost, unrequited, in search of, filled with problems, and sometimes found.  

I think how the organization came about is really interesting--it began in 1972 by a group of artists and scholars and their love for Shakespeare's most famous pair of lovers.  It started as a way to celebrate the story and has ever since received letters from all over the world.  The Club awards a prize, the "Dear Juliet Award" for the most beautiful letters and there is also an international prize for literature, Scrivere per Amore, dedicated to novels, which I am very curious about.

Anita Abriel's,The Light After the War, which I am currently reading might be an odd choice for a love story, since it is a post-WWII historical novel which moves back in time from Naples after the war and Hungary during the war.  Of course some of the best love stories are also war stories and usually they come with a good dose of the bittersweet.  I have been a little wary of war fiction of late, particularly WWII as there is just so much of it around these days.  It can be hard going, but this comes with as much lightness (and maybe more) as darkness.  

The story opens with two young women, lifelong friends sitting in a sunny piazza in Naples savoring pizza and the sight of happy people going on about their business.  This sweetness of life is tinged with sadness as the two are survivors of the war burdened by their losses and the pain that comes with living when so many of their loved ones have suffered and died.  But here is the difference--the story is more forward looking and life is filled with new beginnings and potential love stories and happy endings, which sets it apart from so many other war novels these days.  I like a story with a different slant than the rest.  Bad things happen, or rather happened.  But this is a story of 'after the war' and the promises that new beginnings bring.  And there are many different kinds of love stories.  Here there is promise or potential romantic love, but the affection that the two friends have for each other is as strong as, and maybe even stronger than any romantic love.  

Anita Abriel based the story on actual events in her mother's life.  Both she and her friend escaped the train carrying them and others to Auschwitz.  It took them six years and journeys across four continents to begin their lives.  The stories were told to Anita and now they carry on through her novel.  Many thanks to the folks at Atria Books for sharing this wonderful novel with me.

Signe Pike's The Lost Queen never crossed my radar when it was first released.  It somehow made it into my email inbox in an offer for a review copy on its paperback publication.  I was in the mood for historical fiction, but not of the war kind (as noted above!).  A story that is a cross between Camelot and Outlander?  Hmm.  A sweeping saga for fans of The Mists of Avalon?  They had my attention.  But it was a podcast between readers who loved, no--Loved, the book.  Their enthusiasm carried me along and I had to have the book to read, too.  I will say, they are right.  I admit it took me a bit to get into the story.  I liked the start, but as Languoreth comes into her own as a young woman--I am totally engrossed and don't want to put the book down.  

So, somewhere in the 6th century in a place that sounds much like early Scotland where the old ways are the perhaps beginning to wane we meet a set of twins--Lailoken and Languoreth as children. Their mother, a Wisdom Keeper, is dead.  Their father is King but the kingdom is getting smaller as their pagan ways are being edged out by Christianity.  While Lailoken will lead men and become a Wisdom Keeper, Languoreth is left to mend ties and unite kingdoms.  For a woman this means marriage.  Of course she has fallen in love with one of her father's warriors, she is meant for greater things.  This means she must marry into the family of not only another king, but a Christian one at that.

As I write this post she and her father and brother have just set off to cross the Clyde River to meet her potential match and unite two disparate kingdoms and hopefully settle any problems and unify against the warring Picts who are increasingly pounding at their doors.  

I believe this is the first of three book, with the second, The Forgotten Kingdom, coming out in September.  I am thoroughly enjoying this story.  It is engaging and atmospheric.  Historical fiction done really well.  I can feel the mists swirling around and know the pain Langoureth feels to face a future she does not want and a love she cannot imagine with a man who is nearly an enemy to her people and way of life.  What will happen next?  I finish my post here to go find out.  Many thanks to the people at Atria Books (again).  I am busy with their books, it seems.  Good stories, perfect for today (or any day).  And my own perfect Valentine Day reading!

Reading Now: A Few Teasers

I am hoping to get back into the habit of picking up and reading classic literature.  For a while I was reading classics of all sorts including big hefty novels, but in the last few years I want to read them but seem to pass them by.  I know it is just a matter of perseverance and dedication.  I need to get into the habit of daily reading and spending time with classics as they are very much an investment and not usually something you can just idly dip into on occasion.  When I do that, it is pretty much a recipe for failure on my part.  (Think--A Suitable Boy, Undine Spragg's "follies" or my inability to even finish a short novel by Janet Frame.  There have been a few here and there that I have successfully managed--more modern classics or Japanese classics.

So rather than choosing something simply because it is a classic and I should really read "x", I have picked up a book I have for a very long time wanted to read.  Another Japanese classic, Junichiro Tanizaki's The Makioka Sisters.  Like so many other books, or genres, I have put off reading it for a couple of reasons--it is a heftier book with smaller print than others I have been reaching for in the last couple of years.  I was intimidated by the thought of a modern Japanese classic, which I thought might be hard to get into or understand.

However.  Stuff and nonsense as I am thoroughly enjoying it--even if I do take some time to work my way through it.  In its way it is not so very different than a novel by Jane Austen.  It was published in 1957 and the setting is 1930s Japan--in particular Osaka and Ashiya.  The story revolves around the four Makioka sisters, a once distinguished family now perhaps beginning to decline as the modern age (and the war) arrives. 

The two eldest are married and have children.  Tsuruko and her family live in Osaka and as the eldest in the family have the largest and most important home.  So far she seems to have been mostly off stage in the story.  Sachiko, her husband Teinosuke and their daughter Etsuko have some prominence in the story thus far.  They, as do the two younger sisters, live in Ashiya.  The youngest daughter Taeko (Koi-san as she is affectionately called) has a suitor she wants to marry, but as the youngest she cannot marry until Yukiko, the third daughter, does so first.  Alas, Yukiko is not inclined to marry and would happily stay and care for her niece Etsuko, for whom she has a great love and regard. 

Do you see where we're going here?  It is so interesting to read about the three sisters and the cultural aspects of Japanese family life in this particular time and place.  I have noticed this before in the Japanese novels I have read--the sadness of a way of life, of losing a particular Japanese-ness/or culture as the modern age brings so many vast changes.

So a few teasers from what I have been reading.  And this is a book to be read slowly and savored, too, I must point out.

"The best days for the Makiokas had lasted perhaps into the mid-twenties.  Their prosperity lived now only in the mind of the Osakan who knew the old days well.  Indeed even in the mid-twenties, extravagance and bad management were having their effect on the family business.  The first of a series of crises had overtaken them then.  Soon afterwards Sachiko's father died, the business was cut back, and the shop in Semba, the heart of old Osaka--a shop that boasted a history from the middle of the last century and the days of the Shogunate--had to be sold.  Sachiko and Yukiko found it hard to forget how it had been while their father lived.  Before the shop was torn down to make way for a more modern building, they could not pass the solid earthen front and look in through the shop windows at the dusky interior without a twinge of sorrow."

***

"The three were not monotonously alike, however.  Each had her special beauties, and they set one another off most effectively.  Still they had an unmistakable something in common--what fine sisters! one immediately thought.  Sachiko was the tallest, with Yukiko and Taeko shorter by equal steps, ad that fact alone was enough to give a certain charm and balance to the composition as they walked down the street together.  Yukiko was the most Japanese in appearance and dress, Taeko the most Western, and Sachiko stood midway between.  Taeko had a round face and a firm, plump body to go with it.  Yukiko by contrast, had a long, thin face and a very slender figure.  Sachiko again stood between, as if to combine their best features.  Taeko usually wore Western clothes in the summer and Japanese clothes the rest of the year.  There was something bright and lively about Sachiko and Taeko, both of whom resembled their father.  Yukiko was different.  Her face impressed one as sad, lonely, and yet she looked best in gay clothes.  The sombre kimonos so stylish in Tokyo were quite wrong for her."

***

"'What a nice smell,' said Sachiko.  They were walking down a hedge-lined street.  'The cloves are in bloom somewhere.'

'Only one month more to the cherry blossoms.  I can hardly wait.'"

This is such an interesting world to immerse myself in and Tanizaki had caught me from the first page.  I think my favorite filmmaker (or one of my favorite anyway) is Yasujiro Ozu and to read Tanizaki is to be in the literary equivalent of this particular Japan.  Are you surprised that I have already started collecting Tanizaki's other works?  And maybe it is time to revisit Ozu's films as well.  In any case a happy encounter with Classic Fiction once again for me.

Starting: Year's Worth of Graphic Novels

I have started off the year with some very good reads already, though I am not sure I will be as prompt in talking about them.  If nothing else I hope to mention them or share a blurb or two.  I do want to mention my graphic novel reading so far.  I was thinking this year I would read one a month and end up with a nice round dozen at the end.  A new genre, sort of, for me.  I have read some good ones in the past and a few comics that I quite enjoyed as well.  I find, however, that my comics reading is hit or miss, but graphic novels, or graphic memoirs in particular, are more to my taste.

I hope Nora Krug hurries up and writes/illustrates more graphic novels.  She can write about anything, I think, and I will like it.  I loved Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home, which won an award or two and was named to a number of favorites lists.  I knew I would get to it eventually and lucked upon it in paperback form at the bookstore.  I am pleased to have a copy for my own library.

In a sense I think you might call this a war story of sorts.  As much as I am interested in the WWII era there are so many books about that period that I feel satiated to a point I will set a book back on the shelf if I see that is the setting of a new book.  But this one is quite different.  It is very illuminating about the war and the way she tells her story, that of her family and her search for the truth of her parent's and grandparent's lives is truly engaging.  

Although she was born after the end of the war, she felt her German heritage marked her in ways that others would think her 'suspect'.  Maybe it was a guilt she carried by way of how the war was taught in school or that her family never quite spoke of those years.  So she set out to discover the truth and potential culpability of her family during the war years.  The illustrations are amazing and they are enhanced by use of ephemera and images from the war years.  It is an interesting way to learn about the post war generation in Germany.  Very highly recommended.

I am not sure where I came across Penny Nichols  by MK Reed, Greg Means and Matt Wiegle, but I was happy to find it.  It is a graphic novel, but I do wonder if the creators had some kind of experience in making horror films (and indeed in the back of the book there is advice for novice filmmakers).  Yes, that is the subject of the book--Penny is an unconventional young woman with a going nowhere job.  She meets two guys who are beginning to make a horror film.  Let's call it a low-budget B film, which they enter into an amateur competition.

It was a hoot!  I am not really a fan of horror films, but I thoroughly enjoyed this.  It was an insiders look at low budget filmmaking, which was very perfectly told in this format.  And yes, Penny is a very engaging storyteller and likable woman who finds her niche in this unusual world.  The illustrations are great, too.  Colorful and just the sort I like.  Another one I can recommend.

Next up is the award winning graphic memoir by Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic.  I am just starting but it is definitely going to be another favorite of mine.  I already have at least three other graphic novels lined up and might just have to take more suggestions if you have a favorite on the same caliber of these three!

February: It's a Woman's World

When I was making my list of reading prompts for the year and I chose "It's a Woman's World" I was thinking along the lines of domestic fiction, maybe something by Elizabeth Taylor.  Now that the prompt has come up, however, I was thinking about various situations or places or worlds that are mostly women, so I have put a slightly different spin on the theme.  Here are novels and a graphic memoir that are all made up of primarily women.

Black Narcissus by Rumer Godden -- "High in the Himalayas near Darjeeling, the old mountaintop palace shines like a jewel. When it was the General's 'harem' palace, richly dressed ladies wandered the windswept terraces; at night, music floated out over the villages and gorges. Now, the General's son has bestowed it on an order of nuns, the Sisters of Mary.  Well-intentioned yet misguided, the nuns set about taming the gardens and opening a school and dispensary for the villagers. They are dependent on the local English agent of Empire, Mr Dean; but his charm and insolent candour are disconcerting. And the implacable emptiness of the mountain, the ceaseless winds, exact a toll on the Sisters."  I will be seeing the film adaptation of this book in March as part of a film class I am signed up for and hope to read the book first.

The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh -- "King has tenderly staked out a territory for his wife and three daughters, Grace, Lia, and Sky. Here on his island, women are protected from the chaos and violence of men on the mainland. The cult-like rituals and therapies they endure fortify them from the spreading toxicity of a degrading world.  But when King disappears and two men and a boy wash ashore, the sisters’ safe world begins to unravel. Over the span of one blistering hot week, a psychological cat-and-mouse game plays out. Sexual tensions and sibling rivalries flare as the sisters are forced to confront the amorphous threat the strangers represent."

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner -- "It’s 2003 and Romy Hall, named after a German actress, is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, deep in California’s Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: her young son, Jackson, and the San Francisco of her youth. Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; and the deadpan absurdities of institutional living, portrayed with great humor and precision."

Five Days of Fog by Anna Freeman -- "As the Great Smog falls over London in 1952, Florrie Palmer has a choice to make.  Will she stay with the Cutters, a gang of female criminals who have terrorized London for years and are led by her own mother? Or leave it all behind to make a safer, duller life with the man she loves? And what will she do if she's too crooked to go straight, and too good to go bad?  Over the next five days, Florrie will have to find her own path and the courage to stumble along it - in a fog so thick that she can't see her own feet."

Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World by Penelope Bagieu -- "With her characteristic wit and dazzling drawings, celebrated graphic novelist Pénélope Bagieu profiles the lives of these feisty female role models, some world famous, some little known. From Nellie Bly to Mae Jemison or Josephine Baker to Naziq al-Abid, the stories in this comic biography are sure to inspire the next generation of rebel ladies."  If you have never come across this, it is well worth searching out--the illustrations are wonderful.  I will definitely be reading this at some point this year!

So, I have a variety--a nunnery, a dystopian world, a women's prison, an all-female criminal gang and a survey of strong, independent women.  Definitely a list of excellent books to choose from this month!