A person who reads is never bored, but rather entertains the ideas of the world. Reading is recreational, educational, ethical, inspirational, imaginative and artistic. It aids in the development of the mind and the spirit. The written word is one of our greatest inventions.
Monday, December 30, 2013
Dead like you (2010) by Peter James
642 pages should have been 342 pages. The plots and subplots connected in a very contrived way, with a final murder being completely out of sync with the character. In fact, the main suspect, rapist and killer, seemed totally unbelievable to me. However, I kept reading, waiting for a brilliant conclusion. Was the obsession by Roy Grace with the cold case of Rachel really his wanting to solve his wife's disappearance?
http://www.peterjames.com/review/dead-like-you/the-washington-post
Friday, December 20, 2013
Friday, December 13, 2013
Bloodletting and other miraculous cures by Vincent Lam
Excellent! Interplay of three characters as they experience their medical careers form med school to marriage.
Friday, November 29, 2013
Tell me no ssecrets (1993) by Joy Fielding
Tuesday, November 26, 2013
The Glass Wives (2013) by Amy Sue Nathan
Richard Glass left one wife for a younger version, then died in a car accident. There was little in the way of insurance and there were mortgages on two homes with children in each home. Neither wife could manage, so they formed an alliance with their children and their homes.
I liked the novel until it became predictable. Nicole is not accepted by Evie's friends and has to decided what to do and conveniently patches things up with her mother. Evie's gets a dream job and a dream relationship. She keeps her bossy, meddling friends. All seems well in the kingdom, except for children who lose siblings.
Sunday, November 24, 2013
American Wife (2008) by Sittenfeld Curtis
Fictitious, but a parallel to the life of Laura Bush. I could not tell where the fiction left off and the reality began. The character Alice seemed too good to be true, whereas Charlie was seriously flawed with his drinking, crudity, and inflated ego. He often referred to "his destiny", whereas Alice believed that destiny was not something you created, but rather life's unfolding. The author certainly wrote with sensitivity. Her prose is delightful and her insights into the life of Alice/Laura are keen.
The first two parts of the novel were my favourite: Alice's childhood and high school years and then her entry into adult hood with her career as a teacher-librarian. Her grandmother was an interesting character; well read and conducting a long-term sexual relationship with a female doctor in Chicago. Alice caused the death of a classmate in a car accident, which caused long term guilt and obsession for Alice.
Charlie's determination to win a seat in Congress shadowed their married life. Alice was definitely the strong woman behind the throne. Always well spoken and well groomed, kind, and inclusive, Alice was the perfect woman to become a president's wife, except for her political beliefs. This book is fascinating, but I recommend that you read a credible biography of Laura Busch to determine fact from fiction.
Tuesday, November 19, 2013
Lady Chatterely's Lover (1928) by D.H. Lawrence
This review is long, but it is excellent. Written by Doris Lessing for The Guardian Newspaper 2006.Lady Chatterley is as alive in the popular imagination as is naked Lady Godiva riding on her horse through Coventry, hiding behind the curtains of her hair. But Lady Godiva was a heroine of purity and integrity, and most people were ashamed to take even a peek at her, whereas Lady Chatterley is always good for a laugh, or rather a dirty snigger: Lady Chatterley and her bit of rough. Because of DH Lawrence, any comic has only to mention game- keepers to get a laugh, and what an irony, for Lawrence was preaching sex as a kind of sacrament, and more than that, one that would save us all from the results of war and the nastinesses of our civilisation. "Doing dirt on sex," he anathematised; "it is the crime of our times, because what we need is tenderness towards the body, towards sex, we need tender-hearted fucking." So he went on, but what happened? He stands for dirt and the snigger, at least on the popular level.
Many novels do not gain by relating them to their times. Others, usually the polemical kind, may only be understood in context, and Lady Chatterley's Lover is one. To read it unenlightened, particularly the feverish third version, can only leave the reader wondering what on earth is all this urgent preaching about, particularly now, when it is hard even to remember what a mealy-mouthed society Lawrence was writing in. It was prudish, repressed and priggish, and as always in such a time the dirty snigger was never far away.
The three versions of Lady Chatterley's Lover were written in the four years before his death. It was his way to completely rewrite, not so much as revision as a fresh vision. He valued the liveliness of the new more than a reworking. We may argue that the third version is not the best, and many people have, but it is the one Lawrence took his stand on. It is the most emotional, insistent, urgent: perhaps it is the intensity of the novel that has earned Lawrence his reputation as a sex-obsessed writer.
So, what were the circumstances? First, he was dying of tuberculosis, but he was, as we put it, in denial, though it had been properly diagnosed, and with part of his mind he knew the truth. He had always had "a weak chest": in those days this was often a euphemism for tuberculosis. Even as a young man he had suffered all kinds of pneumonia, bronchitis, colds, coughs. It looks as if he succumbed to the great flu epidemic of 1918-19. Yet he refused to admit to tuberculosis, talked of his bronchials, his colds, his coughs, he had caught a chill - anything but TB. And this was strange in a man who valued the truth, and clear thinking and speaking, particularly on physical matters.
Before Lady Chatterley's Lover he had earned the reputation of a sexual crusader. His novels and tales had been banned, confiscated, caused scandals. He was sometimes reviewed more in sorrow than in anger: such talents, allied with such grossness - this was often the tone of literary criticism of him and his work. Women in Love had particularly shocked people. He was always in an embattled position, defending, attacking, being defended by others.
He had the temperament that goes with tuberculosis: hypersensitive, excitable. Very irritable, are these sufferers, given to explosions of temper. They know their time is short. They are reminded of their deaths with every rattling breath, every cough. The incessant coughing of Lawrence's later years got him thrown out of hotels, meant he had to choose his lodgings with care. As a young man Lawrence had been proud of his body, his "weak chest" notwithstanding. What comes out of the earlier novels, particularly The White Peacock, is the picture of a youth at home in the countryside, with friends, alert to every bird, animal, insect, plant. He could have said with John Clare, "I love wild things almost to foolishness."
This body-proud countryman with "a weak chest" became the man whose rotting body filled him with miserable self-loathing. So many weltering aggravating emotions were at work in this very ill man as he wrote and rewrote Lady Chatterley's Lover
His wife Frieda was having an affair with a lusty Italian, and Lawrence knew it. Never the most tactful of women, she did not go out of her way to conceal her assignations. She did not spare his feelings in anything. She is supposed to have told friends that Lawrence had been impotent since 1926. Tuberculosis does two unkind contradictory things: it heightens sexuality and its feverish imaginings, and it causes impotence.
The sexual life of these two was always noisily combative; nothing secretive about it. Friends, visitors and the enamoured acolytes Lawrence attracted were informed about the stages of their love and their love- making, in prose and in verse - Lawrence wrote about everything, what he thought, what he did, all the time, in letters to friends everywhere, in talk. Frieda complained to sisters, ex-lovers, friends, about his sexuality. He did not satisfy her, he was really more homosexual than normal. Frieda was a woman who had had, and would have, many lovers: she got Lawrence into bed within a few minutes of their first meeting.
In spite of all her earthiness and her expertise, he retained some ideas not far off the mystical. He always believed that nothing would do in lovemaking but the mutual orgasm. "We came off together that time" - or words to that effect, occur in more than one of his tales. Some of his fantasies, as exposed in Lady Chatterley's Lover, were those of a romantic boy. This was a sexually ignorant time to the point that these days it is hard to remember it or understand it. Lawrence did not know about the clitoris, which he called "a beak". A beak that rubbed and tore "in the old stagers, particularly". To him the clitoris was a weapon, against the male. This level of ignorance about the clitoris was common. It would be mentioned in sex manuals without emphasis, or not mentioned at all.
As for me, I learned of the clitoris from Balzac - not of its existence or its uses, but that it was part of the lexicon of love, with a status. Lawrence knew everything about the G-spot, though he would not have heard the term and probably would have found the idea of localising it and naming it abhorrent. The vaginal orgasm at its best, as described by him - his informant must have been one of his lovers - is as accurate as his talk about the clitoris is ignorant. But we are in an emotional battlefield here: Lawrence came too quickly, said Frieda, and then, complained Lawrence, she had to bring herself to orgasm with the aid of the pesky clit. But with sexual accomplishment as a banner of progress in this polemical war, what they said in their times of complaint was probably not more than the half of it.
When Lawrence discovered anal sex, things went well, for him at least, though his amiable pet name for her was "shitbag".
If the lovemaking in Lady Chatterley is a mix of the misleading and the wonderful, then the talk, as reported from the ranch in Taos, the quarrels, the gossip, was repellent. While Lawrence was shocking and thrilling the world with his novels and tales, visitors to the ranch were often disappointed and even driven away from the couple because of the violence, sometimes the sheer nastiness of it all. Visitors might report that Lawrence would "punish" Frieda for some misdemeanour by making her scrub the floor, and Frieda obeyed, weeping and whining and thoroughly enjoying herself. Lawrence hit Frieda. She hit him. It all went on noisily and publicly on that stage peopled by the acolytes, hopeful future lovers, invited visitors, the uninvited; and yet a young disciple reported that this man who was in the newspapers as some kind of monster for his writing was the most charming host, a wonderful talker - he enthralled his listeners - and a fine cook. He was good to children, who liked him.
The frequent unpleasantness of their emotional life was clearly not what the two thought important, or central. They shared something deep that transcended the sadomasochistic games, the quarrels. Lawrence told Frieda that she was and always had been the central experience of his life and that he would have been nothing without her. When somebody sympathised with Frieda after Lawrence's death because of what he saw as an ugly marriage, Frieda told him that he knew nothing about it: Lawrence had been wonderful, and together they had enjoyed an experience that was beyond most people.
It was not only the embattled marital relations that often shocked witnesses; it was reported that Lawrence was sometimes cruel to animals. He beat a little bitch for being on heat, and he hanged a hen upside down "to cool her off down there" when she was broody. There he was, impotent, while preaching about the importance of sex; here they were obdurately female, as if the Bacchae had assumed the shape of domestic animals, and he had to punish them. So, he was capable of lapses into craziness, but the trouble was, he had always to be in the right, even though so contradictory. This man, who was capable of hurting animals, wrote wonderful poems about them, unforgettable stories.
Which brings us to the tales that have infuriated feminists. "The Fox" is one, but I can't see it. More and more do I feel the bleak cold threadbare dismalness of England after the war, struck by the great flu epidemic, short of food and warmth. And who is that red fox flickering through the grass, his knowing eyes on the two young women and their struggle for survival?
"St Mawr" is described as woman-hating, that magical tale about the horse, but what surely is strongest in it is the rage of complaints about men, who are not male enough, not men at all, for this is Lawrence's perennial discontent, that men have become effeminate. St Mawr, the horse, is male and marvellous, but no real horse was ever such a creature of myth and the demonic, this fiery glowing stallion which - if we do have to diminish the power of the thing - is probably an emanation of Lawrence's wish-thinking, poor Lawrence, so ill, so weakened. St Mawr is all male, and the women in the tale compare him to modern males, who they say are so tame and so feeble.
From the start of Lawrence's work, to its end, we find men described as inadequate, weak, without balls, unmale, feeble, and women are always looking for "real" men. In Women in Love, in "St Mawr", in stories like "The Captain's Doll", men are mocked, derided, women ride away in search of "real" men, look for gamekeepers, gypsies, Indians, all the time cruelly jeering.
Lawrence is described as a misogynist. This is surely one of the great ironies. What we do have from him is a report on the sex war of his time, and no one has done it better. His men and women are usually at odds, or in strange spiritual conjunctions, as in "The Ladybird". "Men and women do not like each other" - the theme comes up again in Lady Chatterley's Lover. No one ever wrote better about the power struggles of sex and love. What a paradox. Lawrence often wrote nonsense about the mechanics of sex but is full of insights about men and women.
"We are among the ruins," says Lawrence, opening the tale which is supposed to be all about sex, and announcing what I think is the major theme of the novel, usually overlooked. It is permeated with the first world war, the horror of it. And against the horrors, the rotting bodies, the senseless slaughter of the trenches, the postwar poverty and bleakness - against the cataclysm, "the fallen skies", Lawrence proposes to put in the scales love, tender sex, the tender bodies of people in love; England would be saved by warm-hearted fucking.
Now, looking back from our perspective of over 60 years after that second terrible war, we see Mellors, who was a soldier in India in the first world war, and Constance Chatterley with her war-crippled husband, clinging on to each other, and just ahead the next war that would involve the whole world.
It is not that, once having seen how war overshadows this tale, threatens these lovers, the love story loses its poignancy, but for me it is no longer the central theme, despite what Lawrence intended. Now I think this is one of the most powerful anti-war novels ever written. How was it I had not seen that, when I first read it?
But I had. I remember reading it and thinking - Yes, that's my father (and it was my mother too, but I was years off seeing that). I was a young woman, and here was this novel with all its scandalous fame at last in my hands. It had come across the U-boat haunted sea, from the London bookshops. The expurgated edition, of course. I was soon besotted with the lovers, in their little hut, with scenes like Connie crouching to hold the baby pheasants on her palm, while Mellors bends over her to help; her tears; the wonderful scenes of spring beginning in the woods where she walks; the invocations to tenderness; the great theme of two against the world.
Rereading this novel many years and some loves later, the great sex scenes have lost their power. We have had a sexual revolution, and a great deal of information. Some of the lyrical passages still thrill young women. In parts of the world where women are not free, may be stoned to death or publicly hanged for adultery, this novel is being read as Lawrence wanted it read, as a manifesto for sex, for love.
Some of his scenes are on the edge of the ridiculous, but surely we have to salute him for his courage. Lovers do behave absurdly, in love talk and in intimacies they might not want outsiders to guess at, but Lawrence is not shy about making his lovers run about in the rain, the woman dancing - it was the fashion then, Isadora Duncan was responsible - or twining flowers in each other's pubic hair. It is precisely his courage that sometimes brings him to the edge of farce. A more canny, and a lesser, novelist would have excised these passages that were bound to invite mockery. But throughout all his work, the wonderful can be side by side with the absurd.
Lawrence, the miner's son, had a great deal to say about the class war. His verses about the upper classes, the middle classes, are among the silliest ever written. Hard to believe that the same man wrote some of the most beautiful poems in the language. "Snake", "Bavarian Gentians", "Not I, ... but the wind", the lovely poem "The Piano", about the grown man remembering his mother playing to him as a child. The Lawrence who wrote "The Ship of Death" was surely never introduced to the man who wrote about the beastly bourgeois.
He married a German aristocrat, and wrote a novel about a Lady Chatterley who was married to a baronet. Among his friends were aristocrats. When some scribbler snipes at the people living in fashionable areas of London he will probably be living there himself as soon as he can afford it.
Lawrence may have chosen to live far from his origins, but he never wrote better than about the unforgettable daughter of the mining community, Ivy Bolton, who is as solidly inside the values of her class, though she aspires to the refinements of the upper classes, as Clifford Chatterley is inside his, believing that "there is an absolute gulf between the ruling and the serving classes".
Ivy Bolton's husband was killed in a mining accident, and she says, "No, I'll abide by my own. I've not much respect for people."
A sentiment expressed by many of the people in this book, in their times and seasons. Which brings us to Clifford's cronies, who come to visit and who sit around exchanging their disillusioned views. They are all officers from the trenches, and the skies have very thoroughly fallen for them, and they see themselves as bound to set things right, or at least to define them. They believe in the life of the mind, and Constance sits and listens, her heart cold within her because of the deadly negativity of it all.
She asks Tommy Dukes why men and women don't like each other very much these days. Brigadier Tommy Dukes is here to illustrate Lawrence's perennial thesis, that Englishmen lack virility, lack balls, are generally weak and unmanly. Though there is nothing unmasculine about Tommy Dukes. He is quite happy, thank you, going his own way, without sex.
Constance asks, wistfully enough, if he would not want to make love with her, but no, Tommy Dukes says he likes her but he would not want to make love. Whereas Mellors says that he could die for a bit of good cunt. Constance is present throughout this novel as a real woman, with a proper arse on her, and a woman's legs, not one of these modern girls with "Small boy buttocks like two collar-studs" and without any real femininity.
How I did respond to this, as a young woman, to Mellors who loved Constance Chatterley for being womanly.
During the 1960s feminist revolution I was surprised and amused to hear some very vocal feminists say that they had read Lady Chatterley as I had, a generation or two before. One has to accept the fact that most women still yearn for the real, the perfect, the whole lover, their lost twin halves (Plato - but Lawrence had no time for him), for Mr Right, and recent events have confirmed it. That witty book, Bridget Jones's Diary, unleashed dozens of novels by young women, all looking for Mr Right, and for a man who, like Mellors, "had the courage of his tenderness", though tenderness certainly was not on the agendas of the 1960s revolution. And none of these feminists, children of peace, noticed the deep anger against war and the results of war that I think is the emotional foundation of the novel. They could barely remember the second world war, their parents' show, and the first world war was still not being remembered as it is now, was still the Great Unmentionable, or a line or two in the history books.
In 1960 there was a court case about this novel, a noisy affair, a landmark in the story of English literature, since there was an attempt to have the unexpurgated version banned. Many literary notables stood up for it, and for the freedom of speech. An aspect of that trial has taken a long time to be seen.
Among the famous love scenes there is one that was not noticed by judge or jury, by the prosecution or defence - not by anybody. In it Lawrence lauds the anal fuck as the apex of sexual experience, but it is written in such a way as not to be explicit. Well, it is known that a lot of people enjoy anal sex. In these days he would not have to write so obscurely. Apparently he is leaving behind tender-hearted fucking, and the vaginal orgasm, not to mention the poor old clitoris, for what is described is really an anal rape. Constance enjoys it and reaches her fulfilment as a woman - we have Lawrence's word for it. But it is so funny that no one in that court saw what Lawrence was actually saying in this novel, defended as being really so moral and so wholesome.
What has to strike us now is the angry polemics of the piece. And now, in this passage, we do reach the ridiculous, because of his blindness as to how its insistence must strike us, once we notice it. We do know that Lawrence's sexual problems were resolved in anal sex, and these days probably few people would say more than, "Really? Now that's interesting, seeing how he did go on about cunt." Here is this fierce moralistic writing, with all of Lawrence's power behind it. And what has tender-hearted sex got to do with anal rape? Why not say, simply, that Mellors and his Constance did enjoy a bit of buggery? But no, this novel is a manifesto, or perhaps several, because of the number of different selves who lived inside Lawrence's skin, and it was fused by the force of this dying, driven man's need to tell the world that he could save it.
I once owned a farm cottage on the edge of Dartmoor and I often drove up and down from London, giving lifts, as in those days we thought nothing of it. Once, coming up from Devon, I stopped near Salisbury Plain, where they train soldiers, to give a lift to a very young soldier who I at once saw was in an unusual state of mind. He was flushed, smiling, could not stop talking, sometimes exploding in a young laugh, surprising himself and me. He was in love. Scarcely conscious of me, the middle-aged woman driving him up to London and his true love, he had to talk, had to tell someone ... he wished he could tell me how he felt, he didn't have the words, but did I know this book here? And he brought out a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover. A friend had given it to him, saying it was all about love, and yes, he was right, this friend, he had never read anything like it, well, he wasn't really a reader, actually this was the only book he had ever read. But he had read it several times, and kept finding new things in it. Had I read it? he wanted to know, and if not I must look out for a copy. Then I would understand what he was feeling now ... and there he sat, all the way to London, Lady Chatterley's Lover in his hand, smiling, laughing, given over to joy.
Surely this youth, who was soon going to be married, was Lawrence's ideal reader for whom he wrote his testament novel three times.
This happened a long time ago, the ecstatic young soldier would be in his sixties now, Lawrence has been dead for over 70 years, and Lady Chatterley's Lover is still at large in the world, still potent and persuasive, and in the hands of young women in countries where they know they may be killed for love.
· This is an edited extract from Doris Lessing's introduction to the new Penguin Classic edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover
Affair (1997) by Amanda Quick
Enlarge cover
Affairrlotte Arkendale knew all there was to know about men. After all, she'd made a career out of steering marriage-minded women away from untrustworthy members of the opposite sex.
Yet nothing could have prepared her for Baxter St. Ives--an arresting stranger too daring, too determined, too dangerous to be her new man-of-affairs. Still, perhaps he was the perfect person to h...moCharlotte Arkendale knew all there was to know about men. After all, she'd made a career out of steering marriage-minded women away from untrustworthy members of the opposite sex.
Yet nothing could have prepared her for Baxter St. Ives--an arresting stranger too daring, too determined, too dangerous to be her new man-of-affairs. Still, perhaps he was the perfect person to help Charlotte investigate the recent murder of one of her clients. So she gave him a chance, never realizing that Baxter, a gifted scientist, would soon conduct a risky exploration into the alchemy of desire, with Charlotte as his subject But even as he sets out to seduce Charlotte, a twisted killer lies in wait, ready to part the lovers...or see them joined together forever--in death.
Review thanks to Goodreads 2013.
Yet nothing could have prepared her for Baxter St. Ives--an arresting stranger too daring, too determined, too dangerous to be her new man-of-affairs. Still, perhaps he was the perfect person to h...moCharlotte Arkendale knew all there was to know about men. After all, she'd made a career out of steering marriage-minded women away from untrustworthy members of the opposite sex.
Yet nothing could have prepared her for Baxter St. Ives--an arresting stranger too daring, too determined, too dangerous to be her new man-of-affairs. Still, perhaps he was the perfect person to help Charlotte investigate the recent murder of one of her clients. So she gave him a chance, never realizing that Baxter, a gifted scientist, would soon conduct a risky exploration into the alchemy of desire, with Charlotte as his subject But even as he sets out to seduce Charlotte, a twisted killer lies in wait, ready to part the lovers...or see them joined together forever--in death.
original title
Affair
ISBN
0553574078 (ISBN13: 9780553574074)
edition language
English
characters
ive New York Times bestsellers, JAYNE ANN KRENTZ writes romantic-suspense, often with a psychic and paranormal twist, in three different worlds: Contemporary (as Jayne Ann Krentz), historical (as Amanda Quick) and futuristic (as Jayne Castle). There are over 30 million copies of her books in print.
She earned a B.A. in History from the University of California at Santa Cruz and went on to obtain a Masters degree in Library Science from San Jose State University in California. Before she began writing full time she worked as a librarian in both academic and corporate libraries.
Ms. Krentz is married and lives with her husband, Frank, in Seattle, Washington.
Pseudonym(s):Jayne Ann Krentz
Jayne Castle
Stephanie James
Jayne Bentley
Jayne Taylor
Amanda Glass(less)
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Friday, November 15, 2013
Playing for the ashes(1994) by Elizabeth George
When country milkman Martin Snell makes his usual delivery to fifteenth-century Celandine Cottage one fine spring morning in Kent, he expects to be greeted by the cottage's seductive tenant, Gabriella Patten, not the ugly remains of a fire pointing to murder.
A burnt-out chair, a peculiar pattern of soot on the walls, an asphyxiated corpse, two footprints, and a collection of discarded cigarette butts bring Detective Inspector and his partner Detective Sergeant Barbaraout of their London territory and into conflict with the local investigator whose turf they are invading. Treading carefully, they begin investigating the ripples of shock spreading outward from the crime: from Gabriella Pattern's husband, who knows of his wife's faithlessness and declares himself completely indifferent, to the estranged wife of a member of the national cricket team whose hopes for a reconciliation with her husband have been permanently smashed; from a former lover of Gabriella who has sworn her off to save his marriage, to an angry teenage boy whose holiday with his father was canceled at the crook of a mistress's finger; from a wealthy older widow whose influence has allowed a much younger man to live his dream of playing cricket, to a former prostitute faced with a devastating choice in the wake of a murder whose victim she has never met and yet whose presence has long shadowed her life.
As all of England, as well and the magnetic world of national cricket, discovers itself reeling from the shock of this particular crime, Lynley and Havers find themselves working on the most frustrating case of their careers: the perfect crime. When in an act of desperation Lynleyn Playing for the Ashes, a deft study of human nature and a crime with too much evidence result in a powerful work of fiction that pulls the reader into a fully created world to explore the dark side of passion and self-de
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Saturday, November 9, 2013
love anthony (2012) by Lisa Genova
'Love Anthony' is a novel that explores autism through a 10-year-old boy and early on-set Alzheimer's through a 50-year-old woman. (Simon & Schuster)
Neuroscientst and novelist Lisa Genova tell us how she came to write Love Anthony, a heartbreaking and beautiful novel which shapes how we see those with autism through the prism of a 10-year-old boy.
"I did nothing, and I experienced simply being - the blue sky, the warm sun, the cool air, the hot decking and Anthony next to me.
"I did nothing, and I experienced simply being - the blue sky, the warm sun, the cool air, the hot decking and Anthony next to me.
At some point, I looked over at him, and he had the biggest smile stretched across his face. God, his smile makes me so happy. And so there we were, the two of us lying on the deck together, smiling at the sky.But Lisa Genova couldn't draw on her scientific background to write her latest book ... because there isn't a neuroscience textbook on the subject. Nevertheless she has received stellar reviews for Love Anthony, an exploration of autism that revolves around a 10-year-old boy.
And then the sun moved on, and our square turned to shade. Anthony sat up and shot me a sideways glance and a pleased grin that I swear said, Wasn't that AWESOME, Mom? Didn't you have the best time looking up at the sky with me?
And then he screeched and flapped his hands and ran into the house.
Yes, it was, Anthony. It was one of the best times I've ever had".
Excerpt from the fictional character Olivia writing about a special moment shared with her autistic son in the novel, Love Anthony. Lisa Genova relied on her years as a neuroscientist to write her breakthrough novel, Still Alice. It told the story of early on-set Alzheimer's, through the experiences of a 50-year-old woman.
Tuesday, November 5, 2013
The Scotiabank Giller Prize 15 years: An anthology of prize-winning Canadian fiction (2008)
This anthology contains works by the following authors:
M.G. Vassanji, Rohinton Mistry, Margaret Atwood, Mordecai Richler, Alice Munroe, Bonnie Burnard, Michael Ondaatje, David Adam Richards, Richard B. Wright, Austin Clarke, David Bergen, Vincent Lam, Elizabeth Hay, Joseph Boyden, Anthony De Sa, Marina Endicott, Rawi Hage, Mary Swan.
Literary selections are taken from novels, yet the selections chosen seem to work well on their own, much as a short story would. This is an excellent way to become acquainted with Canadian authors. It is an impressive selection.
Love (2003) by Toni Morrison
An eighteen year old girl, just out of juvenile detention, answers an ad in a newspaper to assist an elderly lady withy her memoirs. Junior (you can just call me June) comes from a childhood of neglect and lands in detention for stealing a chocolate bar. Her tough attitude keeps her there longer than necessary, when she won't comply with giving herself sexually to staff. The novel revolves around the deceased Bill Cosey, who owned a dance hall and restaurant in the 40's and 50's. Black musicians would come from great distances to play there, so esteemed was the reputation.
Bill Cosey first wife died. His daughter Christine was the same age as May, his second wife. But the shocking situation was that May went from being Christine's playmate to Bill's wife at age 11. Her parents literary gave her away. Now, decades later, Christine and May share the family home, with great animosity between them. Neither would be deprived of what they tho7ght was their rightful property. As Junior listened to the stories, their past was revealed and also the way that Bill Cosey used people to his own ends, with dramatic impact of the lives of all those around him. Why is the novel entitled "Love"? There are those who live with love for their children and family, and there are those who have lost love and only know envy and regret. Bill Cosey, who seemed so loved, was responsible for destroying love's potential.
The snowman (2011) by Jo Nesbo
Harry Hole remains a loveable, yet seriously flawed man. His love for Rakel has been challenged as she contemplated marrying another man. Her son remains in Harry's heart. But Rakel is giving Harry mixed messages about their relationship. Amongst this personal drama, Harry is assigned a peculiar case involving missing women who are then brutally murdered. The killer leaves a snowman at the scene as his signature.
The more that the killer evades Harry and his team, Harry pushed himself to the estreme to find justice. It is not until Rakel's life is in peril, that he is able to confront the killer and save the day. What a guy! Hary's bosses cannot dispute his results, but often do not understand his methods.what a An excellent thriller. Harry Hole is again the hero.
Saturday, November 2, 2013
The leftovers (2011) by Tom Perrotta
An event like the Rapture hit the United States
such that every family experienced the disappearance of a love one. Grief and dismay settled upon society, such that religious cults flourished and families became dysfunctional. Kevin Garvey was the new mayor of Mapleton. Her tried to carry on in spite of his wife and son joining peculiar communal groups. Eventually he found some support in a neighbour, whose husband and young children has been taken. An imaginative, but provocative, look at loss and connection.
In the Garden of the Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin
Review By Janet Maslin, NY Times May 19, 2011
As Erik Larson, author of “The Devil in the White City,” points out at the start of “In the Garden of Beasts,” by far his best and most enthralling work of novelistic history, nobody named Dodd was the president’s first choice. And the Berlin post was no plum. Other candidates had already shown their reluctance to do time in what, even before Adolf Hitler assumed absolute power, was an increasingly menacing Germany.
But Dodd was unusual. So was the modesty of his ambitions. And so were the extraordinarily candid, often unflattering records of his thoughts upon which Mr. Larson has abundantly drawn. Dodd was also the father of Martha Dodd Stern, an indiscriminate flirt who looked at a stint in Germany as a glamorous lark, and whose own abundant writing fills “In the Garden of Beasts” with outré remarks. Though she would become a popular author, live a long, complicated life and eventually be accused of spying for the Soviet Union, the young Martha favored breathless, thick-headed comments that no nonfiction chronicler of the Dodds’ misadventure would have dared to make up.
Unlike many of his wealthy, socially connected fellow diplomats, Dodd was a relatively impecunious historian, the chairman of the department at the University of Chicago, who dreaded the obligations that came with an ambassadorship. But he was 64, felt morosely elderly and thought that Germany might be a safe, quiet place for him to complete his writing project. His book was to be a study of the antebellum American South. Dodd did not arrive in Germany predisposed to notice the way a regime might mistreat certain segments of its population.
“In the Garden of Beasts” has the clarity of purpose to see the Germany of 1933 through the eyes of this uniquely well-positioned American family. There are hindsight-laden books that see the rise of Hitler as a parade of telltale signs. There are individual accounts that personalize the atmosphere of mounting oppression and terror. But there has been nothing quite like Mr. Larson’s story of the four Dodds, characters straight out of a 1930s family drama, transporting their shortcomings to a new world full of nasty surprises.
The new ambassador was the fuddy-duddy, the man whose favorite way to end an evening was with a glass of milk, a bowl of stewed peaches and a good book. “I can never adapt myself,” he complained to Carl Sandburg — who was one of Martha’s many gentleman friends, and whose language in writing to her is one of this book’s many unexpected treats — “to the usual habit of eating too much, drinking five varieties of wine and saying nothing, yet talking, for three long hours.” But Dodd was forced to attend, host and pay for such events with his dutiful wife, Mattie. Their son, William Jr., was at 28 four years older than Martha when their father took the Berlin posting, and stayed much less visible than his highly dramatic sister.
“I was slightly anti-Semitic in this sense: I accepted the attitude that Jews were not as physically attractive as gentiles and were less socially desirable.” Thus spake the “slightly” opinionated Martha, whose remarks were unfailingly inflammatory and who quivered with excitement over the marvels of her new surroundings. She adapted to Berlin much more easily than her father did. But she was not the one who had to contend with increasingly violent and random attacks by German storm troopers on American visitors or had to report back to President Roosevelt. As Germany prepared to deprive Jews of their citizenship, Dodd — only slightly less casually disparaging than his daughter — advised the president: “Give men a chance to try their schemes.”
Mr. Larson makes every aspect of the Dodds’ domestic lives reflect the larger changes around them. When looking for a home in Berlin, he writes, the Dodds found many good prospects, “though at first they failed to ask themselves why so many grand old mansions were available for lease so fully and luxuriously furnished.” The thrifty ambassador was at first pleased to rent at a bargain rate the home of a Jewish family in exile — and quite annoyed when the owner’s wife and children reappeared on the building’s top floor.
“In the Garden of Beasts,” which takes its name from Tiergarten, the park across the street from this residence (though “Animal Garden” is a less lurid translation), would be smugly heavy-handed if it did nothing but emphasize the Dodds’ prejudices and naïveté. But it appreciates the ambassador’s inherent backbone, the mounting provocations that he faced, and the great dread he felt about having to deal directly with Hitler, once such meetings became inevitable. When they did meet, Dodd in top hat and tails, Hitler made a fool of him time and again.
Yes, this was a family that joked excitedly after Hitler had kissed Martha’s hand, advising that she not wash the part that his lips had touched. (Hitler felt withering contempt for the ambassador’s party-girl daughter, despite his show of courtliness.) But Dodd, who did not rise to become a great statesman but did not bend to German pressure either, would eventually be transformed by what he saw coming in Germany. And it was his sense of history, not his morality, that made him savage the German vice chancellor who dared to profess ignorance at a party about why the United States had entered the First World War. “I can tell you that,” responded Dodd, in one of his uncharacteristically dynamic moments. “It was through the sheer, consummate stupidity of German diplomats.”
The Dodds’ story is rich with incident, populated by fascinating secondary characters, tinged with rising peril and pityingly persuasive about the futility of Dodd’s mission. In his time, he was taunted, undercut and called “Ambassador Dud.” Hitler would refer to him in retrospect as “an imbecile.” Yet Dodd spent four years, from 1933 to 1937, in what was arguably the worst job of that era. And he ultimately recognized enough reality, and clung to enough dignity, to make Mr. Larson’s powerful, poignant historical narrative a transportingly true story.
Unlike many of his wealthy, socially connected fellow diplomats, Dodd was a relatively impecunious historian, the chairman of the department at the University of Chicago, who dreaded the obligations that came with an ambassadorship. But he was 64, felt morosely elderly and thought that Germany might be a safe, quiet place for him to complete his writing project. His book was to be a study of the antebellum American South. Dodd did not arrive in Germany predisposed to notice the way a regime might mistreat certain segments of its population.
“In the Garden of Beasts” has the clarity of purpose to see the Germany of 1933 through the eyes of this uniquely well-positioned American family. There are hindsight-laden books that see the rise of Hitler as a parade of telltale signs. There are individual accounts that personalize the atmosphere of mounting oppression and terror. But there has been nothing quite like Mr. Larson’s story of the four Dodds, characters straight out of a 1930s family drama, transporting their shortcomings to a new world full of nasty surprises.
The new ambassador was the fuddy-duddy, the man whose favorite way to end an evening was with a glass of milk, a bowl of stewed peaches and a good book. “I can never adapt myself,” he complained to Carl Sandburg — who was one of Martha’s many gentleman friends, and whose language in writing to her is one of this book’s many unexpected treats — “to the usual habit of eating too much, drinking five varieties of wine and saying nothing, yet talking, for three long hours.” But Dodd was forced to attend, host and pay for such events with his dutiful wife, Mattie. Their son, William Jr., was at 28 four years older than Martha when their father took the Berlin posting, and stayed much less visible than his highly dramatic sister.
“I was slightly anti-Semitic in this sense: I accepted the attitude that Jews were not as physically attractive as gentiles and were less socially desirable.” Thus spake the “slightly” opinionated Martha, whose remarks were unfailingly inflammatory and who quivered with excitement over the marvels of her new surroundings. She adapted to Berlin much more easily than her father did. But she was not the one who had to contend with increasingly violent and random attacks by German storm troopers on American visitors or had to report back to President Roosevelt. As Germany prepared to deprive Jews of their citizenship, Dodd — only slightly less casually disparaging than his daughter — advised the president: “Give men a chance to try their schemes.”
Mr. Larson makes every aspect of the Dodds’ domestic lives reflect the larger changes around them. When looking for a home in Berlin, he writes, the Dodds found many good prospects, “though at first they failed to ask themselves why so many grand old mansions were available for lease so fully and luxuriously furnished.” The thrifty ambassador was at first pleased to rent at a bargain rate the home of a Jewish family in exile — and quite annoyed when the owner’s wife and children reappeared on the building’s top floor.
“In the Garden of Beasts,” which takes its name from Tiergarten, the park across the street from this residence (though “Animal Garden” is a less lurid translation), would be smugly heavy-handed if it did nothing but emphasize the Dodds’ prejudices and naïveté. But it appreciates the ambassador’s inherent backbone, the mounting provocations that he faced, and the great dread he felt about having to deal directly with Hitler, once such meetings became inevitable. When they did meet, Dodd in top hat and tails, Hitler made a fool of him time and again.
Yes, this was a family that joked excitedly after Hitler had kissed Martha’s hand, advising that she not wash the part that his lips had touched. (Hitler felt withering contempt for the ambassador’s party-girl daughter, despite his show of courtliness.) But Dodd, who did not rise to become a great statesman but did not bend to German pressure either, would eventually be transformed by what he saw coming in Germany. And it was his sense of history, not his morality, that made him savage the German vice chancellor who dared to profess ignorance at a party about why the United States had entered the First World War. “I can tell you that,” responded Dodd, in one of his uncharacteristically dynamic moments. “It was through the sheer, consummate stupidity of German diplomats.”
The Dodds’ story is rich with incident, populated by fascinating secondary characters, tinged with rising peril and pityingly persuasive about the futility of Dodd’s mission. In his time, he was taunted, undercut and called “Ambassador Dud.” Hitler would refer to him in retrospect as “an imbecile.” Yet Dodd spent four years, from 1933 to 1937, in what was arguably the worst job of that era. And he ultimately recognized enough reality, and clung to enough dignity, to make Mr. Larson’s powerful, poignant historical narrative a transportingly true story.
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