When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson

Kate Atkinson's website

As I was reading this book I realized I had "met" one of the characters before -- Jackson Brodie. I saw "Case Histories" on "Masterpiece Theater" and thought it was good. It was fun to run across him again. Now I plan to track him down in all the books he's in.

Don't you love that the British love mysteries? I'm so glad they respect them and seem to afford their authors as much respect as novelists and other writers. I'm an anglophile and a always attracted to a British mystery. My Netflix queue is full of them. My son is disgusted that every time he turns around we're watching another one.

Anyway, When Will There Be Good News was a good book. It starts with the story of a horrible, random murder of a mother and 2 of her children as they were walking home from the bus stop. The 3rd child, the middle daughter, runs away, hides in the tall wheat and survives. After telling that story it cuts to a man who seems to be stalking a little boy and possibly preparing to kidnap him. Then it starts a chapter named "The Life and Adventures of Reggie Chase, Containing a Faithful Account of the Fortunes, Misfortunes, Uprisings, Downfallings, and Complete Career of the Chase Family." Reggie is a young woman working as a nanny for Dr. Hunter.

Pretty soon all of this connects and you realize who is who. It may sound confusing but I promise you if I can understand it, anyone can. I don't often work hard to retain a lot of details as I'm reading -- or maybe I should say I am not able to retain a lot of details as I'm reading -- and I got what was going on and the back stories with no problem. Probably most people would have understood it all sooner, but, whatever, it's not an issue, in fact it's just a fun book to read.

I liked the characters. It was fun to be in Reggie's head and hear what and how she thought. Jackson Brodie is a good character who's interesting to get to know. He's an ex-detective, by the way, who ends up being instrumental in solving the mystery. Louise, the actual detective, is also someone I liked getting acquainted with. Even the minor characters, even the ones who do bad things, are well written.

As far as the plot, Dr. Hunter and her baby disappear and Reggie is pretty much the only one who doesn't believe Dr. Hunter's husband's story that she went to be with a sick aunt. There's a big railroad crash that eventually connects Reggie with Jackson, and she also tries to get Louise to investigate the disappearance. At first Louise dismisses Reggie, but she comes around.

I pretty much devoured the book, just kept reading and turning the pages and loving being in it. I believe I'll be starting a Kate Atkinson "jag" any day now.

Still by Lauren Winner

Lauren Winner's website

I heard Lauren Winner speak at the Faith & Writing Festival one year. It was several years ago and she seemed quite young but I liked her a lot. I liked the way she just said whatever, even if it wasn't something you'd expect from a literary, highly educated writer.

This book, Still, has the subtitle "Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis." It's written shortly after Winner divorced her husband of, I think, 7 years. Winner grew up "with a Jewish father and a lapsed Baptist mother who had agreed to raise my sister and me as Jews." She writes that she loved Judaism and everything that went with it - the food, the songs, even "every letter of the Hebrew alphabet." But in college she had a dream about Jesus, read Jan Karon's Mitford novels, bought a Book of Common Prayer and after graduating from college she was baptized. After seeing her at the Festival I read and enjoyed her book Girl Meets God: On the Path to Spiritual Life.


I suppose you could compare Lauren Winner to Anne Lamott, who I love, but I didn't even think of that until now, when I was trying to figure out how to write about Winner and this book. It is a memoir about faith, as some of Lamott's books have been, but Winner has a very different style of writing. She's more serious, for one, although not heavy or preachy or anything like that.

Winner is writing about "middle" in this book. She feels she's in a mid-Faith crisis, when she is no longer as certain and joyful in her faith as she was in the past. Yet even while she expresses doubt, I never felt she'd lost her faith. One thing I thought was notable is that she continued to go to church, to kind of go through the motions, even when she didn't feel like it, and she found that was good. It helped. That's good to hear.

I liked all the meditations and musings on the word "middle." I had never heard of the "middle voice," a grammatical term. She says that we don't have the middle voice in English but it's found in ancient Greek, Sanskrit and some other languages. She says it's "somewhere between the agent and the one acted upon. When you have something done to you. I will have myself carried. I will have myself saved." She said she started listening for hints of the middle in English and heard it in sentences like "That scotch drank smoothly; politicians bribe easily." She says the middle voice is used "when the subject has some caracteristic, some quality, that makes it partly responsible for whatever has happened in the sentence...The subject is changed....but the subject is not just being...acted upon; something in its own qualities...is necessary for the action, too--if the scotch weren't smooth, it wouldn't drink well."

I don't know why I think that is so interesting, but I do. She writes about middle verbs being verbs that "name a change in bodily posture but not much motion (lie down, kneel). Also...verbs for speech actions with emotional overtones (confess), verbs of cognition (think), and verbs of spontaneous happening (grow, become, change) and she says "these middle verbs...are religious; they are the very actions that constitute a religious life: to forgive, to imagine, to grow, to yearn, to lament, to meet, to kneel." Cool. Never thought of that.

Finally she writes, "If I could make English speak middle, I would use it to say this: I wait; I doubt; as the deer yearns for a drink of water, so I yearn. I long. I praise."


I highlighted this quote from a historian Christopher Grasse who, she said, was writing about the religious late-eighteenth-century America: "Faith...meant more than intellectual assent to a set of doctrines. It was a commitment of the whole self, a hope and trust that, if genuine, ought to be the foundation of an entire way of life and vision of the world."

I also liked this: "I am not a saint. I am, however, beginning to learn that I am a small character in a story that is always fundamentally about God."

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

"Fresh Air" interview w Isaacson

Steve Jobs is a fascination. He was so mysterious. You heard so many rumors about him, you saw him on t.v., you heard him quoted, you were amazed at the products his company produced, he was like a rock star for many of his years yet he disappeared from the news for quite a space of time. He started Apple, they kicked him out, he came back, Apple became amazing.

Reading this biography was very enjoyable to me. I wanted to know more about Steve Jobs, what he was like as a person and as the man who ran Apple. It was great that Jobs gave Isaacson so much access to himself.

I came away thinking that it would have been hard to live or work for Jobs. I have a feeling I would have been unhappy if I'd actually ever been around him. He was unkind, more than that he was just plain mean to people. He loved his wife and kids but he was still odd and basically selfish.

One thought in my mind after reading about how Apple started and some of the people who worked there and had the ideas that produced the products such as the ipod, ipad, the Mac and so on was I wondered if he, or Apple, would have been as successful as they were if he had not been such a difficult person to work for. Would they have succeeded if he'd actually treated his co-workers with respect?

Some people who worked for him said they didn't think so. They felt like when he made them feel so bad, it inspired them to prove him wrong. I'm sure that's true for some people. But I thought that one incident in the book showed he probably could have succeeded without being so mean. There was one time when Jobs was talking to a supplier about what he wanted. The supplier was saying there was no way he could give Jobs the product he wanted and no way do it in the time Jobs wanted. Jobs stared at him in the way he was famous for staring at people, and said something like yes, he could do it. And he told the supplier not to be afraid, he knew he could do it. And the supplier did it. To me, that shows that he could have worked that way with others and gotten results, too. But who knows?

Anyway, I thought it was a good book. I plan to reread it sometime to refresh myself on the details. There's no doubt he was an incredible person who made a company that created some amazing things.

Blue Nights by Joan Didion

New York Times Article

I liked Joan Didion's book The Year of Magical Thinking and I liked this one, too. They are similar in that they are both memoirs about the death of a beloved family member. Magical Thinking was written during the year after her husband suddenly and unexpectedly died, and Blue Nights is about surviving the death of her daughter, who died tragically young.

You'd think these would be depressing books but for some reason they did not affect me that way. When other people say about a book that it has beautiful writing, I immediately become skeptical that I won't like the book. I'm all about the story, I think, and often say. But these books by Joan Didion are not books with a story of the traditional sort - with the beginning at the beginning, then the middle, then the end. They are like listening to Didion's thoughts.

I could say that I like them because she so eloquently says what I feel, what I think we all feel when such sad, inexplicable things happen. One of the reasons I admire writers is their ability to do that -- to express what I feel, but so much better than I can. And that is one of the reasons I like these books.

But you wouldn't think that would be enough to make you turn the pages and keep reading the whole book. Just because she is so good at expressing feelings isn't enough. But I can't really figure out how to say much more than that about why I like the books.

Another thing that makes my liking of the books somewhat surprising is that Joan Didion has no faith, or at least she does not profess any faith or belief. She doesn't even bring up the subject of what she believes. She certainly does not say that her faith is giving her strength and helping her to get through these tragic events. And it seems impossible to me to even understand how anyone can get through things like this without faith. Yet I admire the way she gets through them.

I read this book from Kindle on my iPad. A nice little bonus in that format is it includes three videos of Joan Didion reading chapters 1, 2 and 7. The filmmaker does a good job showing scenes of Joan in her apartment, in New York, the city skyline, and so on. I love the smell, feel and look of paper books, but I do also love the richness of this kind of additional material in digital books.

True Compass by Edward M. Kennedy

So, yeah, this is Ted Kennedy's memoir. I probably would not have picked it from a shelf, but someone loaned it to me and said they'd enjoyed it. Now I can't remember who loaned it to me. I thought it was my friend Sally but she says it's not her. I can picture her face in my mind telling me she'd gravitated to the biographies and picked this up -- but I've got the wrong face in my brain. Hopefully it'll come to me or someone will ask.

Anyway, I did enjoy the book. It was interesting to read about him growing up in that nearly mythical Kennedy family. Ted was quite a lot younger than Jack and Robert but he was highly influenced by them. And they did a lot for him.

I liked the tone of Ted Kennedy's book. He wasn't bragging and he wasn't being defensive. He seemed to be trying to be honest. I believe that by the time he was writing this he knew he was near the end of his life.

I wondered what he'd write about the "Chappaquiddick incident." He didn't go into a lot of detail, but he did tell the story. I actually never heard any accounting of the whole story -- only the bits about how he had gotten himself out of the water but not the woman he was with, Mary Jo Kopechne.

He wrote that they were only acquaintances who'd met that night at a gathering. When she needed a ride to the ferry, he was happy to have the excuse to leave. Then there was the accident and the car slipped off a bridge into the water. He says that he can't even remember how he got out of the car and he dived back in for Mary Jo many times and couldn't see her. He hoped she'd gotten out but was afraid she hadn't; he got help and others also dived in and could not see her.

About the hours after the accident he wrote that they have been "copiously recorded....my devising and rejecting scenarios with Joe and the others...; swimming across the channel...; elaying in reporting the accident. My actions were inexcusable." He also said he's lived with the guilt of causing an innocent woman's death for years and felt that he should atone for it.

After reading about all that he did and tried to do, I think it's a shame that he was not able to make the big changes in healthcare that he was working for. I wish he would have succeeded. Our healthcare is so terribly messed up, and he did honestly seem to have devoted most of his political life to trying to ensure that everyone, regardless of their income or status, would have the basic health care that everyone needs.

The Black Tulip by Alexandre Dumas

Our book club chose this "old school" book. Alexandre Dumas is most famous for having written The Three Musketeers. This book is much shorter than that one.

It's set in Holland, and the title is referring to an actual flower. The government offered a large prize to anyone who could produce a truly black tulip, and the quest to get that prize is central to the plot.

The beginning of the book is quite exciting. Two men are fleeing for their lives from a mob who thinks they are traitors and liars. To be honest, I wasn't quite sure what the two men did but some papers they had hidden with a friend led us into the actual story. That friend, Cornelius Van Baerle (Dutch enough for you?), is the main character.

Cornelius has not read the hidden papers, and has actually almost forgotten them. He took on a quiet life, devoting himself to gardening and breeding tulips, trying to produce that pure black tulip. Because of the papers he is arrested and put in jail. In prison he falls in love with the guard's daughter and entrusts her with the 3 bulbs that he is sure will produce a black tulip. His fiendish neighbor, though, is watching and determined to steal the bulb. He does, but his evil plans are foiled in the end.

This is a good story. It's a little old fashioned but not enough to bother you. The story moves along like a rollicking movie. I felt like I could see the characters, scenes, landscape and action in my mind. According to Wikipedia, it has been made into a movie and BBC miniseries. It'd be fun to see a movie version.

I'm glad to have read this. If you want a good, historical adventure, I recommend The Black Tulip.

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

I didn't think I was going to like this book. I thought it might be old fashioned or boring or something but it turned out I did like it.

The book is set in Vietnam, in the 1950's, I believe, when the French were fighting there. The main characters are a British reporter, Fowler, and an American man, Pyle.

There's a sort of love story/love triangle but it's probably not fair to call it love. Fowler is living with a Vietnamese woman named Phuong and Pyle falls in love with her. Phuong wants to marry a man who will take her out of Vietnam. Once she feels that won't happen with Fowler, she goes with Pyle. That's why it might not really qualify as love.

The Whole World Over by Julia Glass

I enjoyed this book. The main character is Greenie, wife of Alan, mother of George. They live in a small apartment in New York. Greenie started her own business as a baker, and Alan is a psychoanalyst. George is 4 years old.

Greenie gets a call from the assistant to New Mexico's governor who has tasted her coconut cake and fallen in love with it. He asks her to come to New Mexico and be his chef. She decides to do it, as a kind of adventure. She takes George and goes out to New Mexico. Alan stays in New York. Greenie ends up loving New Mexico and encourages Alan to join them so he begins to "wean" his patients (which are very few anyway) and prepares to move.

But that move doesn't happen. Greenie meets an old boyfriend and falls in love with him. She decides to separate from Alan. Some things happen that end up with Alan taking George back to New York with him. Then September 11 happens and everything changes again.

It sounds kind of shallow as I describe it, and I was kind of disgusted with Greenie for leaving Alan. But she still was a likeable character. There are a lot of other characters, too. The governor, his assistant, the restaurant owner next door, the bookstore owner across the street, a woman named Saga who has brain damage from an accident, memories of Greenie's mother. Somehow it all works. I liked the characters and the writing. It was a good story that kept me turning the pages. I enjoyed being in New York and New Mexico, especially New Mexico. I thought it was a good presentation of what marriage can feel like, too.

It was interesting to read a novel with September 11 as an event within it. That's a first for me. The author described one of the characters in New York looking out her window and seeing paper falling like snow. I suppose that happened. I had not thought of it, although I saw the photos of all the debris at the towers and on the people there at the scene. It sounds like paper fell in a similar way to ashes falling when a volcano happens.

I recommend this book, and I think I'll try another book by Julia Glass. The book references "the National Book Award-Winning" Three Junes. That sounds familiar; I'm not sure if I've read it or not.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell

I liked this book a lot. At first I thought it was kind of confusing. There were a lot of characters, and their names were either Japanese or Dutch, both kind of strange to remember, although the Dutch ones had a ring of familiarity. But it wasn't long before I was caught up in the story and enjoying it very much.

Jacob De Zoet works for the Dutch East Indies Company in Japan, in 1799. I didn't (and still don't) know much about this period of Japan's history, but the book talked about it being after Japan had thrown out all the Christians, and killed many, then tried to keep themselves isolated from the Western world. But they did allow the Dutch Indies Company to have this one port and conduct trade.

The Japanese were so anti-Christian that they actually had a holiday where the people stepped on a picture of Jesus and gave an oath to declare their hatred of Christianity. There were "Hidden Christians" who were killed if discovered. The people of the Dutch East Indies Company were not allowed to bring any religious material into the country. Jacob, though, smuggled in a Psalter, of the Dutch Reformed Church, which had been his great grandfather's. It had a bullet hole where the book had stopped a bullet while being carried by his great grandfather during a war. Jacob felt he could not be so disloyal as to give up that Psalter so he hid it among many other books and hoped it would not be discovered.

It turned out his translator did see it but did not inform on Jacob. This translator had loved and wanted to marry a woman named Aibagawa, but his family would not let him marry her. Aibagawa is a midwife and, rare for a Japanese woman, was studying medicine with a doctor from the company. Jacob becomes infatuated with her, but they cannot pursue a relationship either and Aibagawa is sent to what is almost like a convent run by a secret society.

The author goes back and forth between Jacob and Aibagawa as the story unfolds. He does a good job of telling enough from one character's perspective before changing to the other. I did not get at all frustrated at the switches. There are even a few places where other characters are telling the story and that works, too.

I thought it was interesting to be in another time and country like that, and to get to know these characters. I would definitely recommend it.

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson

So very British. That's this novel -- Anglophiles, you'll love it.

I was trying to underline very British-sounding sentences but, of course, I got caught up in the story and only remembered once or twice. Here are a few.

And yet there was that fine line across which one might be betrayed into womanish fretting over details...He decided that perhaps he would undertake a brief, manly attempt at carpentry...

...the color seemed incongruous, thought the Major, in a woman who preferred mushroom-brown tweeds. Today's dull burgundy and black blouse and dark green stockings would have rendered her invisible in any mildly wet woodland. 

"My dear lady, what is there to fear?" he said. "Except putting the other ladies quite in the shade."

"Oh, it's simple pragmatism, Dad. It's called the real world. If we refused to do business with the morally questionable,...then where would we all be?"  "On a nice dry spit of land known as the moral high ground?" suggested the Major.

The Major wished young men wouldn't think so much. It always seemed to result in absurd revolutionary movements or, as in the case of several of his former pupils, the production of very bad poetry.

The story is about Major Pettigrew who lives in a small British village. He is a widower with one grown son. When the story begins, the Major's brother has just died. He and his brother each have a "Churchill gun," a pair of valuable guns which their father had given them with the dying promise that they would be joined back together as a pair when one of the brothers died. The other main character is Jasmina Ali, a woman of Pakistani background who owns and runs a shop in the village. She, too, has lost her spouse and her nephew is helping her to run the shop, which sounds kind of like a 7-11, a convenience store where they have a little bit of everything but no one does their full shopping there.

The Major and Mrs. Ali start to enjoy each others' company. They both love books and they like to talk and spend time with each other. This is a little extraordinary because there is some prejudice against the two of them having a relationship, including from Jasmina's nephew and family.

There are several other characters who play a part in the story -- the Major's son, Mrs. Ali's nephew, a young woman who has a child who turns out to be the nephew's, a nice woman in the village who seems like a more perfect match for the Major, and the Lord of the manor in the village.

An exciting climax happens when the nephew threatens to kill himself. Everything isn't tied up into a completely happy ending for all concerned, but it definitely is wrapped up well & tidily at the end.

I highly recommend this book. I felt it was charming and just a joy to read.

The Postmistress by Sarah Blake

I finished The Postmistress this week. I liked it a lot. It definitely kept me turning the pages. In fact, I finished it very late at night because I didn't want to stop reading.

The book starts with a kind of prelude where one of the characters is seemingly at a dinner party and asks, "What would you think of a postmistress who chose not to deliver the mail?" Those first couple pages are written in first person, by one of the main characters, Frances Bard, a woman who'd been a reporter with Edward Murrow, in England, in the years before the US joined World War II.

Then it switches to third person and gets into the full story. Most of the characters come from a small town in Maine. There's Iris, the postmistress (except the author says it is incorrect in the US to say postmistress even when the person is female); Emma a young wife of the town doctor; and Henry, Iris' boyfriend. The author begins with these Maine characters -- Iris realizing she's falling in love at  rather a late age with Henry, Emma ecstatic at being loved by her husband Will, the doctor, after a fairly unloved childhood.

We pick up with Frances, called Frankie, the reporter, in London. It doesn't state it explicitly but you get the feeling that Frankie is thrilled to be working with Murrow, living in such exciting times and reporting on it all.

The lives of the characters in Maine progress, and it's fun to read about it. Because of a crucial event in his career, the doctor decides to go to London to help in the war effort. When he and Frankie end up together in a bomb shelter, the stories and characters become connected.

I won't give away any more. I recommend the book. I felt like I got a little better feeling of what it felt like to be in that time, which seems kind of limbo-like to me just because the US wasn't in the war yet -- and how strange is that since I wasn't even alive then? Anyway, good writing, excellent storytelling, characters you like getting to know.

A note - Stars & Ebooks

I've decided to try to go back in the blog and use the labels to indicate a star rating, from 0 to 5, kind of like grades A through F. That way these ratings will be listed under "Labels" and it will be possible to find books by their rating.

On another subject, I've felt almost guilty that the last several books I've read have been on my iPad using Kindle. I love physical books. I love their smell and feel and look. I love sitting surrounded by them in my library. I feel conflicted about not purchasing them or going to the library for them. My plan is that if I think I'll re-read a book because I think it's so good, I will purchase it. And I know that I won't purchase all my books that way. It's a changing world. Even a big chain bookstore like Borders is going bankrupt. I wonder how it will all turn out.

Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand

Unbroken is by Laura Hillenbrand, who wrote Seabiscuit. I like both these books. Hillenbrand is a good writer who can make non-fiction interesting. I don't read as much non-fiction as fiction but I've always liked biographies because they are still a story.

My brother and father both mentioned reading this book, which is why I picked it up. It's about Louis Silvie Zamperini. I'd never heard of him but it turns out he was quite a famous runner. He came close to breaking the 4-minute mile record back in the days when everyone was trying to beat that mark.

The book tells about his childhood. It sounds like he was a naughty boy and got into more serious trouble in his teenage years, but his brother encouraged him to put his energies into running and that turned out to be something he could do well at. He went to the Olympics and would have continued competing in running except the war started -- World War II.

Louis joined up and became a bombadier. I never knew that the saying "bombs away" came from such a literal source. As a bombadier Louis would sit by the bomb doors, open them, and when the bombs had gone out he'd yell, "Bombs away!" so the pilot knew he could start climbing higher.

Louis was in the Pacific arena in the war. It was interesting to read about the way the war went over there, some of the strategies and reasons the U.S. was fighting for these islands, and also the way the mechanical abilities of the planes had a lot to do with those strategies. That may sound dry but, trust me, it wasn't, which is why I say that Hillenbrand is good at making non-fiction interesting.

Louis' plane was shot down and he was one of 3 survivors. The tale of their survival for more than 3 weeks on an inflatable raft is amazing. One of the 3 died during that time and then Louis and the other, the pilot, were captured. Japanese prisoners of war had a horrible time, much worse than those taken in Europe, another thing I had never known. Louis' experiences in prison were horrible and unforgettable.

After the war Louis' body had been so wrecked by prison that he couldn't go back to running. He bacame a kind of celebrity for the military but started drinking and went into a downward spiral. He also started to be obsessed about killing a particularly horrible Japanese officer who had singled Louis out for torture during the war. Hillenbrand also chronicles that officer's life.

Louis' wife persuaded him to attend a Billy Graham crusade. What Graham said affected him so much and reminded him of his childhood plus the promises he'd made to God during the war and he absolutely turned his life around. He opened a nonprofit boys camp where he helped boys learn how to turn their lives around, too. He also went on speaking tours and was given many awards. He lived a long, active life, even skiing at the age of 90.

As you read the book you get to know other people important in Louis' life, such as the pilot who survived the plane crash and prison with him, his brother, and others. I just found it very interesting to get to know Louis and these others and to hear how they lived and changed.

Never in My Wildest Dreams by Belva Davis

I read this book for a book club. My overall assessment is that it was good, rather more interesting because it is about a "local girl" but I didn't feel like it was extremely well written or compelling.

Belva Davis is a journalist/reporter in the Bay Area. She was born in Louisiana but nearly immediately was given to her Aunt Ophelia and her husband, who had no children, to be cared for by them. When Belva was 3 her aunt died and Belva then went back to her mother & father's home and for the rest of her childhood was shuffled around from one part of the family to another. She wasn't always badly treated, but she was pretty much unwanted, there was a period where she was molested by one of her male relatives, and when her father was under the influence of drugs and alcohol she was abused, so her childhood was an unhappy one. It got to a point where Belva was ready to commit suicide. She didn't do that but she did decide to escape somehow.

By high school they were living in Berkeley and she attended Berkeley High. They were integrated but Belva experience many instances of discrimination, at places of business refusing to serve her and many other things.  She got married at 18  and had two kids. Belva worked throughout her marriage and eventual divorce. Eventually she started to write and became a reporter. She had many jobs around the Bay Area and ended up with a career at NPR.

It was interesting to read about the experience of growing up as a black woman, especially as she was experiencing the changes that happened in the '60's and '70's. When I try to figure out why I didn't particularly love the book, I think it's because I didn't feel like I got to know her well enough. When I read of all that she went through, it is a marvel that she turned out so strong and successful, but I feel like I didn't really learn how that happened.

So, a pretty good book.

Island Under the Sea by Isabel Allende

I read a different book by Isabel Allende previously and didn't like it particularly. I can't remember the title but the thing I didn't like was the spiritualism, or mysticism, or whatever you want to call it, that was in it. There were things about ghosts and spiritual worlds that I didn't enjoy having as part of the story.

This book, however, I liked a lot better. It is well written and has some very interesting characters. It's told in first person by "Tete," who starts out as a slave in Haiti, called Santa Domingue at the time. You learn a lot about the history of Haiti, which was interesting since it's been in the news lately with the flooding and all. Tete and her family and friends leave Haiti for Louisiana later in the book, when the revolution is going on in Haiti.

It's good writing and I was interested to read what was going to happen next. I didn't find it super compelling -- I read a different book in between starting and finishing this one -- but I did want to finish it.

The Risk Pool by Richard Russo

This book is cracking me up. I'm less than halfway through but it's made me laugh out loud several times already. Here's the scene I just read:

The narrator is a boy. He's in a restaurant with his father and a man walks in with his daughter, "the most beautiful girl I had ever seen, and she looked about my age." His father talks to the girl for a while and then says,

"I tell you what, how about I introduce you to somebody your own age. He's not as good-looking as his father, but you can't have everything."


Suddenly, everyone was looking at me, as luck would have it, just as a song ended on the jukebox. Tria Ward gave me a weak smile, as if to acknowledge my reality, or perhaps the fact that I wasn't too bad-looking, or that, yes, it was true, I wasn't as as good-looking as my father.


And in response to her beautiful smile, I bleated.


I remember the horror of it even now. The sound I made resembled no word. It didn't even sound human. My father blinked, probably in disbelief, and for long terrible seconds nobody said anything. I flushed so deeply that my skin burned.

That struck me so funny I laughed until I cried and actually had to run to the bathroom to prevent peeing my pants.

The book is separated into four sections named after something the boy's grandpa used to say about Mohawk, the town the book is set in (as are many - maybe all? - of Richard Russo's books):

"There are four season in Mohawk," he always remarked, "Fourth of July, Mohawk Fair, Eat the Bird, and Winter." No way around it, Mohawk winters did cling to our town tenaciously. Deep into spring, when tulips were blooming elsewhere, brown crusted snowbanks still rose high from the terraces along our streets, and although yellow water ran along the curbs, forming tunnels beneath the snow, the banks themselves shrank reluctantly, and it had been known to snow cruelly in May. It was late June before the ground was firm enough for baseball, and by Labor Day the sun had already lost its conviction when the Mohawk Fair opened.

Apologies to my Michigan friends and family, but I thought this was a great description of the weather in Michigan.

I like all of Richard Russo's books that I've read. This one is my favorite, at least so far.

So Brave, Young and Handsome by Leif Enger

After reading Wolf Hall, like a chain smoker I put that book down and immediately picked up So Brave, Young and Handsome, which I'd bought earlier because I'd like Peace Like a River, by the same author. I loved it. Loved it, loved it.

It's very different from Wolf Hall, no historical fiction to it, no list of many characters or family trees, just a great story. In one of her movies, Katherine Hepburn says, "My, she was yar." That's how I felt after reading this book.

The main character is a writer, Monte Becket. He was a postman who wrote a book that became a bestseller so he quite his day job and thought he'd devote himself to writing. His first book was about a pony express rider and Monte Becket loves cowboys. At the beginning of the book he's realizing that he's not going to be able to write another book. He has a wife Susannah and a son Redstart. He can't bear to confess to Susannah that he's unable to write.

He becomes friends with a kind of mysterious man named Glendon Hale who builds beautiful rowboats. Glendon and Monte end up going on an adventure together, meeting up with other great characters including a boy who wants to become a cowboy and an ex-Pinkerton Detective.

I love the story and I love the writing. Here are a few quotes:

"I'm afraid Franco is taciturn." "Well, disappointment comes to us all.")

"You authors, I mean--this world ain't no romance, in case you didn't notice." "So I am discovering," I replied...but now I am taking it back. I take issue with Royal, much as I came to like him; violent and doomed as this world might be, a romance it certainly is.

"...You were never in jail, I suppose." "Not yet." "Well, it ain't any good. You don't ever wake up and say to yourself, What a pretty day, I feel good today. No," he reflected, "a jail ain't nothing but a collection of corners."

"Of course it's been years, but I doubt forgiveness is the sort of fruit he cultivates."

At this we heard a sharp metallic lurch and Hood roared a string of impolite adjectives. He might even have cried a little. It wasn't his fault. I've looked under a car or two myself, since then--it's bedlam down there, no beginning no end, and a consequence for everything you touch.

That's just from flipping through the first several chapters. I thought the book was enchanting.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

The librarian at Sinaloa recommended Wolf Hall to me, and then so did several other people. It's about Thomas Cromwell, a novel but historical fiction.

When I first opened the book I was worried I might not be able to keep track of things. It starts with a list of characters and also some family trees. This is during Henry VII's time. I decided to read slowly and not skim things, which I often do otherwise, and so far so good (I'm a little over halfway through the book). The only thing that makes it a little difficult is that the author often doesn't use Cromwell's name as she's describing his actions, just "he" and since the sentence before often is about a different male person, I sometime realizes after several sentences that this must be Cromwell and not the other person. It's rather annoying. Why would she do that?

But, besides that minor complaint, I'm very much enjoying the book. The writing is good, and you really feel like you're in England in the 1500's. It's incredible what life was like then. It's horrible the way they burned people at the stake and tortured them in the Tower. She writes about Tyndale and Luther, not as main characters, but several people are killed or tortured because they have Tyndale's book in their possession. Sir Thomas More is rather obsessed with finding those people, it seems. How we take things for granted -- these people were killed for believing that we should be allowed to read the Bible in our own native language.

The peoples' belief in what the Roman Catholic church proclaims is also remarkable. It's a novel so you don't know how exactly right this is, but she writes about King Henry being very worried about whether he'll go to hell if he divorces his wife Katherine and marries Anne Boleyn, although that is most definitely what he plans to do. He, and those who are helping him, do all kinds of things to try to get the church to declare Henry was never married to Katherine in the first place. So far the book's been during that time -- when Henry's trying to get Anne Boleyn. Since I'm over halfway through, I wonder if it'll end when he finally does. The author is working on a sequel.

..............................
later addition
My sister wrote the following about this book. Thought it would be good input to include. She knows her stuff:

I liked Wolf Hall but I was disappointed at the portrayal of Thomas More. He may not have been as wonderful as he was portrayed in "A Man for All Seasons" (or maybe he was), but Hilary Mantel goes to the opposite extreme to make it seem like he really didn't have a redeeming feature--even his martyrdom was just showing off for his European fans. It seemed spiteful. I looked her up on Wikipedia and it seems she grew up in Catholic schools; maybe she's one who has turned against her upbringing.
 
From what I've read elsewhere, I could buy her portrayals of Anne Bolyn and Henry VIII.
 
I'm not sure I believe in her Jane Seymour, however. From what I've read, Jane Seymour did her best to turn Henry back toward Catholicism. She also did her best to bring his daughter Mary back into his favor, while trying to undo Anne Bolyn's legacy. On the other hand, her brother who was regent for her son, Edward VI, promoted more Protestant reforms than Henry VIII had ever implemented.
 
It was interesting to learn anything at all about Thomas Cromwell, the central character of the book. I'd read his name in reading biographies of other figures of the time, but never knew much about him. I was always curious if he was an ancestor of Oliver Cromwell. I looked that up too, and it seems Oliver Cromwell is a descendant of Thomas Cromwell's sister.
 
One thing I was dubious about as a part of Thomas Cromwell's life was the description of really brutal abuse by his father. It seems unlikely to me that someone whose dad beat him up regularly and neglected his education as described in this novel would grow up into the cultured, multi-lingual, Latin-speaking, and humane person Mantel shows Cromwell to be as an adult.
 
Just a few thoughts. And, below, a poem by Thomas Wyatt, reputed to be about Anne Bolyn.

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, alas, I may no more;
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that furthest come behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow; I leave off therefore,
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I, may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain,
There is written her fair neck round about,
"Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame." 

A Room With a View by E.M. Forster

 How much do I love this book and movie? Oh my goodness, so much!


If I remember rightly, I think I saw the movie before reading the book and I fell in love with the movie. I don't know what year it was that I went to the movie. I think I went with Randy and my sister Jan. I remember we arrived late and had to sit so far in front we had to lay our heads on the seat backs to watch. When the chapter headings came up between scenes, I sometimes didn't have time to read what they said because I had to move my head from side to side to side to read all the words.


But what a great movie it was. First, it's British and I do love British movies. The stars are wonderful, too. Helena Bonham Carter is beautiful -- all that thick, long hair -- and so good as Lucy. I love her expressions and mannerisms. Her pettish look when Charlotte bothers her, her giggle when she sees Mr. Beebe by the pond, her disgust when her mother says she's just like Charlotte -- "to a T." The other actors, too. There's one scene that I just wait for, and all it is is a look. Lucy's mother and brother are sitting at the piano and both look out the window on Lucy and Cecil with such a look of *sigh*.


Another scene I love is when they're all in the carriages "and Italians drive them." The Reverend Mr. Eager kicks the driver's girlfriend off and Mr. Emerson says, "Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?" Classic.


I could go on and on. Much of the dialog in the movie comes straight out of the book. I love the book, too, and have read it several times, but in my mind's eye I see and hear the actors, scenery and rooms of the movie, and I feel my reading is all the better for it.

My Life With the Saints by James Martin

Doesn't it just figure that when I finally sit down to blog about some reading again, I can't find the first book I want to write about? I found it in Google Books, though. The main thing I am left with after reading this book is the feeling that my life is meaningful and worthwhile just by living a life of faith and prayer.

The other night at a meeting Brad said he finds that when he reads books by some great theologians their message is: Read Scripture. Pray. Be in community.

There you go. In My Life With the Saints, James Martin writes about one saint per chapter. He writes them in the order that he "met" them in his life. In each chapter he tells about how the saint came to his attention and attracted him, then he writes the story of the saint, then he reflects on the saints' life and what he can see as he relates his life to that, and finally summarizes how and when he prays to that saint.

In the first chapter he writes about why he decided to write the book. He says he started researching and learning about the saints and "Gradually, I found myself growing fonder of these saints and developing a tenderness towards them. I began to see them as models of holiness relevant to contemporary believers, and to understand the remarkable ways that God works in the lives of individuals. Each saint was holy in his or her unique way, revealing how God celebrates individuality. As C.S. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity, 'How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.'" He quotes someone who says the saints are like "older brothers and sisters to whom one can look for advice and counsel." He says "Some might argue...that all you need is Jesus....But God in his wisdom has also given us these companions of Jesus to accompany us along the way, so why not accept the gift of their friendship and encouragement? ....Everything the saints say and do is centered on Christ and points us in his direction."

Over and over as I read about the saints, people so very much dedicated to living a life in Christ, I saw that in many cases it was not because of some spectacular contribution to mankind that they were saints. In fact, some of the saints lived secluded lives and performed menial tasks in a religious community. But, they read Scripture, prayed and were in community.

I'm sure I'll find the book again, and I am confident I'll re-read it.