A Work in Progress

Almost the Weekend Reading Notes

I was going to create a list of hot, sultry reads, and by that I mean setting-wise.  I was thinking of hot locales or places enduring a heat wave, which as a last hurrah we are experiencing here.  As always, the first week of school bring super sticky temperatures.  But it would be adding insult to injury since my A/C decided to give up the ghost a couple of days ago.  Of course.  So I am living the hot stickiness of these dog days of summer (are we in those days now?) and maybe reading about them would not be so much a pleasure.  More a commiseration.

It's too bad I don't have a cold, snowy read, but this too shall pass.  I have plenty of other good books on the go.  I was going to tell you about my last library haul, but that was last weekend and I will be going tomorrow for a fresh batch, so I will wait and share those instead.  Good library news--a few branches of the public library are going to open, though I am not sure how limited their hours and services will be.  My branch is not one that will be opening, but the remaining branches might be open in October.  Until then I find curbside pick up of food and library books quite convenient.

September is just days away and thus a new prompt.  My prompts, as you know, are hit or miss this year.  I think I will give myself permission to skip months where the book just did not grab me and move forward.  2020 has been a pretty abysmal year so I will take any successes and call them good and let the misses just float on by.  So my new prompt is going to be "Ready for New Beginnings".  Was there ever a more true wish?  How do I interpret that in stories/book talk?  Hmm.  We'll see what I come up with next week.

While I have that turning in my mind I think this weekend will be spent mostly with Kinsey Millhone.  It is so good to be back in her company.  She rarely seems to get involved in murder cases (well, Q was a cold case murder).  I like how Sue Grafton can make some boring sounding crime (embezzlement anyone?) actually quite interesting.  I think it helps that the supporting cast in these stories creates a very believable environment.  And, while I think Kinsey is a pretty determined singleton these days, she has started a new romance with a cop (and he isn't married this time).  

For a while thrillers were not especially appealing to me.  There was this sameyness to them it seemed.  Must every thriller be compared to Gone Girl?  I think most are still marketed to be like some other bestseller, but I guess I am paying less attention to those blurbs these days (or have mellowed to them).  I have started reading Alice Feeney's His and Hers.  Only a few chapters in and already it is twisty turny.  The story is told from a his and hers perspective.  He is a detective and she is a news broadcaster.  The body of a murdered woman is found.  You think it is perhaps the beautiful and perfect anchorwoman who has returned to her job displacing the 'her" in the story, but it's not.  She is, however, a woman the detective slept with the night before.  Ah, so many secrets and lies.  He is pretty smarmy.  She has a tendency to drink too much and forget.  Kind of a mess of a story really, but not in the bad way you might think.

And for something a little different.  This month's prompt book is Sophia Tobin's A Map of the Damage.  This is a dual storyline narrative set in 1940s Blitz London and 1838 Victorian England. It concerns an architectural wonder called The Mirrormaker's Club--built then but used still in wartime Britain and a very large, lost diamond.  The women in the painting in the club was the recipient and now it is lost.  The woman tasked with trying to find it has lost her memory due to a bomb blast.  There are more smarmy characters--maybe I should call them villains?  I wasn't sure how it would go as one of the main protagonists is rather prickly and hard to like.  Must I like a character, though?  Sometimes it doesn't matter and sometimes they are the most interesting.  I'll give her a chance--I want to know her story.

Happy reading everyone.  I hope you have some good stories to take you away this weekend, too.

A Suitable Boy: Part 10

Picking up the threads from a book I lasted visited (ouch, I know!) some two years ago, hasn't been as difficult as I was expecting.  It helps that I had been writing about each section as I went (maybe in my subconscious I knew I would need these notes to keep track of everything going on in this massive story.  Here I am back with a few (as of yet but more to come) characters of Vikram Seths' multilayered novel, A Suitable Boy.  If I am still in semi-quarantine still, why not have a serious project for the long haul?  If I can finish finally it will be a happy accomplishment.

Untangling a few threads now.  I am at page 740 having just finished section 10 of 19 (and 1,474 pages).  This story is about so much more than a young woman who has fallen for a very unsuitable boy and whose mother and family are looking for a much more suitable match.  There are four families involved, so many different plotlines and family dramas--mostly interconnected in some way.  It is, however, set against the backdrop of post-Partition India ca.1951.  There is so much going on politically and socially.  There are two main religious groups and a caste system and all kinds of conflicts both within the disparate ethnic groups and familially.

Lata Mehra is our main character, and I thought she would remain far off stage for a while, but she does make an appearance through the pages of a letter received by Maan.  Nothing we don't already know--Lata had gone to Calcutta and her mother, Mrs. Rupa Mehra to Delhi.  It is Maan who takes stage in this section.  Maan is the younger, rather dissolute, brother of Praan Kapoor, the husband of Lata's sister, Savita.  Yes, I do have a print out of the various family trees (along with notations) to keep them all straight.  Well, just a sideways glance, Lata.  I hope we can get back together soon!

Maan has been sent to the countryside by his love Saeeda Bai, who feels he is too much of a distraction from her music.  Her younger sister's Urdu tutor, Rasheed, has taken Maan under his wing so to speak.  They are an odd pair really.  Maan is trying to learn Urdu to be able to communicate more fully with Saeeda.  Whereas he is of a wealthy and well-connected Hindu family, Rasheed is a moral and progressive Muslim who has had to take responsibility for his brother's wife and child after his brother's death.  Curiously Maan has become quite a fixture in these small communities--villagers and family members coming to unload their problems and worries to him.  Maybe is such an outsider that he is simply an innocuous listener.

Just when Maan finally receives a letter from Saeeda and prepares to return to her--we are literally left hanging at the end of this section, the letter unread as Maan's Urdu reading abilities lacking.  Rasheed has been thrust into disgrace by his political and social overtures.  His father is a landowner (if I have all the threads straight), and Rasheed cannot support a system where those who work the land have no rights to it.  He has made some family decisions and overtures with those workers without family approval and has gotten a thorough dressing down.  Just as Maan hopes to engage Rasheed in some letter-reading-translating, Rasheed stalks off in anger from the family home.  Maan left in ignorance with letter in hand . . .

Drop curtain.  End of Act 10 and onwards to section 11.  Whew.  I did it.  I managed to get past one section that just sat like a boulder in the middle of the road.  I am not sure if section 11 is actually going to be as engaging (or, hopefully not, less so), but I press on now.  Taking a peek ahead I see we are moving from the countryside back to Brahmpur (even though Lata is in Calcutta) and into a courtroom.  So, more political maneuvering!

Way back when I was struggling with toting such a chunky book around (because you know, of course, that I always have ore than one book in hand at a time), so I took a knife to it and literally cut it into five mostly equal size sections.  So much easier to carry about a few hundred pages than more than a 1,000.  I am on the third section and am looking forward to moving on to the fourth physical section.  My treat at the end?  I will try and get my hands on the film (or maybe it will air here on PBS in the Winter?).  Something especially nice to look forward to (and an accomplishment long in the making).

August 14: Reading Notes

It has been ages since I had a nice chatty, link-filled post!  So in honor of it being Friday and with a sticky weekend ahead of me in which I hope to be following the lead of the lady in the painting above--by reading my books and catching up on a movie or two perhaps and lots of good things to read online--here is what has been on my mind lately.

I love it when someone makes a purely by chance find of a diary or letters or ephemera of a life lived and then possibly forgotten and then shares it with others online or in book format.  The latest is this recipe diary from 1968 that Georgie Williams in the UK found in a piece of furniture she bought for her apartment.  She has been trying out the recipes and documenting the creations on her Instagram account, @forgottendelights.  Apparently some of the ingredients have been hard to source and some of the recipes are perhaps not quite to modern tastes.  She is eventually (and happily) going to turn this into a book.

This reminds me of The Madeleine Project from a few years back.  Clara Beaudoux had moved into a Paris apartment and discovered that the storage room was still full of the belongings of a previous owner--a woman who passed away in her nineties leaving her possessions behind,  Beaudoux started a Twitter feed (@clarabdx) sharing those interesting bits of a life lived and a world long gone.  I read the book and it was fascinating.

And do you remember Lily Koppel's antique journal find?  The Red Leather Diary: Reclaiming a Life Through the Pages of a Lost Journal, was another fascinating read.  I love diaries and this makes me want to go in search of one in my own stacks.

And then there is the anonymous life lived now via Twitter (@duchessgoldblat) whose recently released memoir, Becoming Duchess Goldblatt, is currently waiting for me on my TBR.  I have heard many good things about it and she sounds quite gracious!  It feels like there is no good news these days, so I am on the look out for books that will distract me and remind me that there is still some civility somewhere.

I left Kinsey Millhone at Q is for Quarry, which I think is one of my favorites in the series.  I was reading it during the lockdown and when life got a little wonky and I was having a lot of problems focusing on reading in general.  R is for Ricochet has been sitting on top of my mystery novels pile for ages now and I am very much in the mood to see what Kinsey is up to so have finally reached for R.  You know I almost always reach for books by women writers or with female protagonists, but this profile on Robert B. Parker's Spenser caught my eye and has put him firmly on my radar.  So much so, that I have bought a copy of the first Spenser mystery, The Godwulf Manuscript. 

I was thinking it would be fun to read the two in tandem.  Not quite the same time period, but close.  A sort of she said he said little mini-read.  What I especially like is this is crime and hardboiled detecting in the days before technology so the puzzle piecing is done in an entirely different manner (and one in which I really enjoy).  Besides Spenser sounds quite moral, quotes poet Wallace Stevens and is a gourmet cook.  If we get on well together there are loads of Spenser novels, too.

I hate that I can't got to movies--in person, in the theater movies.  I love them and miss them and when the day comes and it is safe to sit in a movie theater I will be back!  Until then I am looking far and wide for movie watching opportunities and happily (though seeing the on a laptop and not the big screen is not quite the same experience) there are plenty out there.  I have quite a few new releases that I can rent online, but there are some other interesting repertories lined up as well.  

At the end of the month is the Vision Maker online Indigenous Film Festival.  (Have to give a little extra push here as Vision Maker is a Nebraska organization).  I am psyched about the New York Film Festival in September and October.  I think it is normally a NY thing and I would never had had the chance to go, but as some/all (?) of the films will stream virtually (not sure what the ticket prices will be--may have to choose just one or two), I hope to be able to see some of them. 

And star this one **!  As a cable TV subscriber (I am sort of glad I didn't drop even though I have Netflix and Amazon Prime) I can access TCM movies on demand.  I am very, very, very excited, however, that starting in September they are starting a (I think) thirteen part series documentary on women directors.  The series will air every Tuesday over four months.  Part of the documentary followed by what will eventually be 100 films.  The only downside is the films run after the documentary and through the night, which won't really work for me as I have to get up early and go to work.  I hope that some or all of the films will be films on demand and I can watch them at a time convenient to me.  Some of them I hope to get ahead of time and watch now.

I prefer to err on the side of caution and mostly stay in and away from crowds of people, but I am happy that I have books (Kinsey and Spenser at the moment--among the other books I am reading) and lots of good movies to keep me engaged in other ways.

A Suitable Boy Re-Redux (Is this the year?)

Has something you have watched ever inspired you to pick up a book and read further on a subject?  Or you just want to continue on a theme and remain in a particular time or place?  Many years ago, way back in 2016, I picked up the novel A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth and even then it had not been the first time I attempted to read it.  However, I was determined that 'that' was the moment I would master it.  Fast forward a couple of years and I was still at it, trying to kick start my enthusiasm.  It wasn't that I was not enthusiastic, but I was simply bogged down in a particular spot.  And still it languished.

Fast forward a couple more years and here we are in a strange world indeed.  One where I look for any good distraction on TV to take me out of the current moment.  I have spend the last couple of weekends binge watching a few Netflix series.  One I am nearly finished watching is Indian Matchmaking, which follows several people who have decided to try their romantic luck with a matchmaker.  I am not generally keen on 'reality TV', but this is the sort that I do like.  It is part documentary and part drama.  Will these couples eventually marry (I suspect probably not), but I have been pretty well engrossed in their journey.  This is contemporary matchmaking both here in the US and in India--a world pretty much unknown to me.

The next step, of course, is to notice my copy (actually split into sections!) return to A Suitable Boy, which in its way is also about matchmaking.  Remember Lata and her three potential love interests?  I was reading and writing about each section, but caught on a snag somewhere on page 672!  (Basically mid-read).  It's a shame to leave a book like that unfinished.  Is it strange to pick it up again after so long and just continue where I left off?  Handy were my posts as I read them and made notes and feel pretty good about just diving back in.  

I am on section ten, which finds Maan, the brother of Lata's brother-in-law sent away to the country--to this village called Debaria where his tutor is from--in order to separate him from his unsuitable lover.  Maan is a rather dissolute youth and this section ventures back somewhat into the world of politics.  I think he is going to be drawn into some kind of a hunt, and really all I want is to get back to Lata's story, but I must persist through these 60 pages until the narrations switches again--if not back to Lata, at least back to the city.

I'm not entirely sure I can do this, but it might be the last real attempt.  Part of my desire to finally tackle this is also due to the film adaptation.  I knew way back when that one was coming . . . sometime in the distant future, and here we are.  I saw it on the list of movies that will be showing at the Toronto International Film Festival.  And I watched the trailer and was suitably impressed and really want to finish the book before (whenever it is due to arrive in the US!) watching the adaptation.

Taking a deep breath and diving in.  Please Maan, grab my attention and make me want to keep reading . . .

August Prompt: The Bedside Pile Beckons

Can you believe it is August already?  It's not such a bad thing, maybe, that the year feels like it is flying by.  The sooner it is over, the better (and maybe the closer we will be to better and healthier times).  My August prompt was meant to be 'la dolce vita', but life is just not feeling very sweet right now and I was not feeling very inspired when thinking about books.

I have for some time, however, been thinking of the pile of books by my bedside.  Now I do my daily (well, my own version of) yoga routine in my bedroom.  Sitting on the floor I'm at birds eye view of the little stacks and they keep beckoning to me.  Why ignore them.  So here are five possibilities.  Never judge a book by the cover?  Well, just a cover and a line or two from the novel to help decide.

"First of all, it seemed to us you were very handsome.  And the principle windows of your house were perfectly positioned to display a blazing reflection at sunset."

"Where did life go?  Everyday I find myself asking this one same question of the mirror, yet the answer always eludes me.  All I see if a stranger staring back."

"Her destination was the Mirrormakers' Club, but she did not know it.  Her feet guided her through the two-hour walk through to the City of London, that maze of streets which sat behind ancient walls in the heart of the wider city."

"Amma is walking along the promenade of the waterway that bisects her city, a few early morning barges cruise slowly by"

"One we had a father, but our father dies without us noticing.  It's wrong to say we don't notice.  We are just absorbed in ourselves, that afternoon when he dies."

How to choose.  I might just close my eyes, spin around a few times and point to the one I will read.  But will I stick to it, or look at the ones not chosen longingly?