Literature as solace
I’m not sure what to say about Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse, by Faith Sullivan. I was intrigued by the title, since I love what I have read by Wodehouse, notably the Bertie Wooster and Jeeves pairing. This book made me want to seek out his other books to see what I’ve been missing…but it didn’t particularly make me want to seek out others of this author’s. I did enjoy the book, but it’s what I would call a quiet read, almost too quiet for my taste.
It’s an old-fashioned story, told in a rather demure style (I wasn’t sure, initially, that this was a modern novel) about a woman who lives in a small town called Harvester, Minnesota, at the turn of the 20th century. The action begins around 1900 and finishes up when Nell Stillman is in her 80s, so the story encompasses many of the big changes of that century, including technological innovations (indoor plumbing, the telephone, airplanes) and two world wars, but all seen from the vewpoint of a 3rd-grade schoolteacher in a semi-rural, insular setting.
There isn’t much of a story arc; it’s more an accounting of one woman’s life as she moves through both historical and personal events. Hers has its share of tragedy and not a huge amount of joy; she is widowed young, loses her child’s sanity to the after-effects of war, and is plagued by the small-minded gossips and nay-sayers who surround her. But her growing love of all kinds of literature sustains her through many of her trials, particularly the writings of P. G. Wodehouse, with whom she has a personal relationship in her active imagination.
Life could toss your sanity about like a glass ball; books were a cushion. How on earth did non-readers cope when they had nowhere to turn? How lonely such a non-reading world must be.”
Nell Stillman, reader
The story has the feel, although not quite the literary quality, of the books of Kaye Gibbons; I haven’t read those for many years, but Gibbons’ book Charms for the Easy Life kept coming to mind for some reason while I was reading this—another small-town saga of generational and community ties featuring eccentric characters.
There were aspects that I found disappointing: A truly major character in the first half of the book (and my personal favorite) leaves the town in disgrace and the author simply drops her character except for a few sparse references towards the end. Similarly, when Nell is elderly she takes three young girls under her wing; they feature briefly but vividly, and then nothing more is heard about them. These weren’t major flaws, but they did cause my enjoyment of the book to be considerably less than if their arcs had been followed through.
I found Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse to be a pleasant read, but it left me with no desire to find out more about either the main character herself or the town of Harvester, which is apparently featured in others of Ms. Sullivan’s works. I did, however, identify closely with all her sentiments about the blessings being a reader brings to one’s life, so I do plan to find and peruse a copy of Love Among the Chickens!
A deep dive into fantasy
While I was a teen librarian I had the pleasure of discovering the book Graceling, by Kristin Cashore. It’s one of those fantasy books that was (perhaps) written with teens in mind but which appeals more widely to fantasy readers in general, and I recommended it, during my tenure, to as many adults as I did to teens.
A “shelf-talker” I made
Since I read it with two of my book clubs, I ended up reading the book three times, and it held up well. I was excited to read the sequel, Fire, but although I did enjoy it, it was a companion novel rather than a continuation of the story of Katsa, Po, and Bitterblue, and I was disappointed not to find out what happened to them after the conclusion of Graceling.
When Bitterblue came out, I thought, Finally! but I think I was not in the right place to enjoy Cashore’s envisioning of the continuation of King Leck’s kingdom, and I actually put the book down without finishing it, feeling disappointed in its air of quiet misery, disillusionment, and bewilderment.
I had always meant to reread it, but had no pressing reason why until I recently noticed that there were not one but two “new” sequels to the story, all still incorporating the original characters to an extent but also expanding beyond them to open up the world of the Seven Kingdoms and venture into the lands beyond. So a few weeks ago, I resolved to reread Bitterblue, no matter how lackluster I might find it, in preparation for Winterkeep and Seasparrow.
I was delighted to find that the story engrossed me, that I was able to feel the mood Cashore had wanted to convey as one appropriate to the history that came before it, and that it was no longer a letdown.
Some background: Graceling
The main character in Graceling is Katsa, an orphan who lives at the court of her uncle, a ruler of one of the Seven Kingdoms. Katsa was born with eyes that are two different colors; people who are born with this “tell” are gifted with a “grace,” a special skill or talent. It can be something silly, like the ability to open your mouth wide enough to swallow your face; something practical, such as skill with baking; or something serious, in Katsa’s case a grace for killing. In her uncle’s kingdom, it is mandatory that all children born with a grace be surrendered to the king, who makes use of their graces for his own benefit. Katsa, who killed her first man at age eight when he made inappropriate advances, is acting against her will as her uncle’s enforcer.
To counteract this, she has banded together with several likeminded people of the court (including the king’s son, her cousin Raffin) to form a secret society to help people solve big problems. While working one of these missions, Katsa meets Prince Po, who has snuck into the kingdom to rescue his kidnapped grandfather, and the two team up and plan a journey that is partially to return the old man home and partially to seek out a wrongness in a neighboring kingdom that is causing trouble to seep over the borders in every direction. Thus begins the story that brings Katsa and Po to the attention of a terrible power from which they must save the young heir to that kingdom, 10-year-old Bitterblue.
The book Bitterblue takes up eight years after the conclusion of Graceling. Bitterblue is now the young queen of Monsea, and is struggling, with the help of a bunch of stodgy advisors, to salvage her kingdom from the disaster of the past 35 years when her psychopath father, Leck, terrorized everyone under his rule. The kingdom has supposedly moved on from this dark time in its history, but Bitterblue is uneasy at the anomalies and discrepancies she discovers between the rosy picture her advisors paint for her and the truth she sees once she begins sneaking out beyond the walls of her castle and into the surrounding communities, seeking for answers.
Bitterblue is an intensely in-turned story, focusing primarily on Bitterblue herself as a ruler and on the well-being of her kingdom. But with Winterkeep, the story goes out into the world, and introspection and the minute solving of vague puzzles is replaced with new terrain, new characters, and a lot of action. Torla, a land new to the Seven Kingdoms, has been discovered, a democratic republic with two political parties—Scholars and Industrialists—and some fascinating technologies (dirigibles, for one). Bitterblue sends envoys to Winterkeep, but when she discovers they have drowned under suspicious circumstances, she decides, along with her friend Giddon and her half-sister, Hava, to travel there to discover what Torla is trying to cover up. A key player in the story is Lovisa, daughter to the two ranking heads of the opposing parties, whose position places her in a unique situation when it comes to solving secrets and helping Bitterblue and her friends.
Seasparrow takes place in the immediate aftermath of the events of Winterkeep, and is narrated by Hava, Bitterblue’s half sister, the secret and forgotten daughter of King Leck and the sculptor Bellamew. Bitterblue, Giddon, and Hava and their three advisors are on a ship bound for home, but a shipwreck in the frozen North puts all their bodies and spirits to the test. It especially becomes a personal journey for Hava, who needs to heal her childhood trauma while coming to terms with her own identity in the middle of political upheaval and a tangible threat from a frightening new technology. Although the latter is a big plot point, this book is primarily character-driven, and encompasses the healing of many different kinds of relationships, for Hava and others. I think this book, of the five, is my favorite next to the original Graceling, because of its depth of character and the nicely balanced introspection and adventure.
I’m glad I finally embarked on this continued journey through the Seven Kingdoms and beyond, and would recommend this series to anyone who likes an engaging, thoughtful, somewhat philosophical story that also happens to be set in a world where there are telepathic blue foxes!
Travel fiction
A “beach read” is defined as “a book, usually fiction, that one might enjoy during a vacation or a day at the beach because it is engaging, entertaining, and easy to read.” And without doubt a subgenre of the beach read is the vacation saga, the “let’s run away from our lives for a while and see what happens” theme, or what I like to call the sub-subgenre “travel fiction.”
The question you have to answer, with this subgenre, is how much bad writing you are willing to endure in order to have the escapist experience because, let’s face it, books that carry their British or American or Irish protagonists away from their various unfortunate events (break-up, lost job, eviction) and their inhospitable environments (damp, gloomy weather, or a small town where they can’t avoid their ex-whatever) are turned out without a lot of editing by a bunch of publishers on a quest to score the next Emily Henry or Elin Hilderbrand or Jenny Colgan novel.
Even with the bad writing contained by those novels not written by the top 10 authors in this field, it’s hard to stay immune to their charms. All of us have a fantasy of what we would do should we decide to abruptly leave our mundane lives behind and simply refuse to come home when our dream vacation is supposed to end.
I recently read two such novels, and have to say that I extended my tolerance for bad writing almost to the breaking point in order to go with the transporting experience of escaping to an unfamiliar and potentially beguiling part of Italy. The two books were One Italian Summer, and The Italian Escape, both by Catherine Mangan, and the constant balancing act was the repetitive language and clichéd sentiments expressed by and about the characters on the one hand, versus the heft of lyrical descriptions of the balmy atmosphere, delectable food, and romantic prospects.
I have never understood why writers make such heavy work of finding original language with which to tell their story—it’s sloppy. I, myself, when writing a book review, an essay, or a paper, simply read each sentence and paragraph aloud to discover if I have used the same word twice (or three times or half a dozen) within the given piece of writing, and then I go back and find another word or another way to express the sentiment, using a thesaurus to good purpose to give my writing the variation necessary to make it feel fresh. Furthermore, if the writer isn’t up to this task, the editor needs must.
I therefore laughed out loud, after reading the painfully repetitive prose of the first chapters of One Italian Summer, when I came to an exchange on pages 70-71. The main character, Lily, having escaped from a break-up in New York City to be maid of honor at a “destination” wedding, is breakfasting alone early on her first day at an Italian resort on the island of Ischia. At a nearby table is an American named Matt, who murmurs “Cranky person. Ten letters.” She asks if he is talking to her, and he replies that he’s two clues away from finishing the New York Times crossword puzzle. She supplies the word “Curmudgeon,” and he expresses doubt that that’s even a real word.
“It’s my job to know words,” she replied matter-of-factly.
“You’re a writer?”
“No, but I write for a living.”
“Okay, is that supposed to be cryptic? How can you write for a living but not be a writer?”
“I’m a copywriter. I write for a living, but it’s just blurb for adverts and products, so I honestly can’t call myself a writer, not in the true sense of the word.”
Then she goes on to provide his final word, which is “capricious.”
“You’re like some sort of crossword Olympic champion!”
“I just need to know a lot of words in my line of work because you can’t keep saying the same thing over and over.”
Lily, p. 71
I laughed because this came after pages of heavy-handed, somewhat pedantic scene-setting narrative and excessive use of the words “so,” “like,” and “really,” not to mention describing someone as a “hot sweaty mess,” then a “shiny mess,” then a “pathetic mess,” in the space of six consecutive paragraphs.
If you can get past such pet peeves, the basic story lines of both of these books are sufficiently escapist to entertain anyone seeking a light read about a fantasy trip; in addition, the location of said trips, slightly off the beaten path of the usual retreats (Ischia rather than Capri; and Liguria, rather than Milan), make for some entertaining speculation about exploring them for yourself someday.
Both books include a little romance for their protagonists, but that is refreshingly not the main theme; rather, it’s the discovery of unexpected depths that lead to life changes. The first book details a week-long itinerary surrounding a lesbian wedding celebration, all of it fraught with way too many drunken evenings described in excruciating detail, while the second is the transformation of a Dublin girl who’s been dating her boss at a business with which she has little affinity who decides, after she’s dumped, that a big change is in order, and refuses to go home when her week in paradise is up. There’s a bit too much interference of a deus ex machina in the form of a wealthy, powerful, and indulgent older woman who takes a liking to protagonist Niamh and smooths her way to a ridiculous degree for a chance-met stranger, but hey, who doesn’t dream of a fairy godmother and wish to immerse themselves in this kind of fantasy?
Bottom line: Not too demanding, pleasantly diverting and, if you’re a foodie, way too provocative!
How it is
Laurie Frankel’s book is called This Is How It Always Is, I believe with the direct message (and hope) that someday it will not be this way. I am happy to say that I picked up this book without knowing anything about it, and therefore got to have the “clean,” straightforward experience of reading it without expectations. If you are contemplating reading it and okay with having its contents be a surprise, perhaps you should stop reading my review right here and go put your energy into the book instead.
If you do have some idea of what it’s about and want more perspective, or a simple reassurance that it will give you a distinctive understanding of the issue, then read on.
A few reviewers on Goodreads called this book sentimental (one even said “cloying”), but I didn’t find it so in the least. I thought it was a lovely, honest, positive depiction of the foibles of one large, eclectic family when confronted with the difficulties of navigating life in our culture.
Rosie and Penn already have a set-up that is not the norm in America: Rosie is an emergency room doctor, while Penn is a stay-at-home father working on a novel and caring for their large family—four boys, when the story opens. After having two in a row followed by twins, Rosie is longing for a girl (and fairly convinced she will finally have one), but Claude comes along and they are happy with their new baby, boy or not. But at an early age, Claude begins the show-and-tell process of becoming someone whose name for the next eight years will be Poppy.
After the initial surprise that when he grows up he wants to be a girl, Rosie and Penn step up for Claude. He is allowed to wear what he wants, play how he wants, and call himself the name with which he feels most comfortable, making an almost seamless transition at home between pronouns and names, from Claude to Poppy, son to daughter. But the transition for his brothers, his school, and the people in their orbit is not so seamless. After several parent-teacher and parent-administration discussions at school, the absurdity of the rules for a transgender child make themselves apparent: Wisconsin schools have accommodations for a trans student, but still somehow manage to insist that the gender binary be enforced. This is best illustrated in quotes from his teacher, Miss Appleton:
“Little boys do not wear dresses.
Little girls wear dresses. If you are a
little boy, you can’t wear a dress. If you are a little girl, you have to use the nurse’s bathroom.
***
“Meaning if he is a girl, he has gender dysphoria, and we will accommodate that. If he just wants to wear a dress, he is being disruptive and must wear
normal clothes.”
Meaning, in other words, that trans students must still check one box or the other, and adopt all the expected characteristics of the “selected” role of “male” or “female,” thus invalidating any character trait that might not conform to our static and polarized cultural gender norms. (Please note that I put the word “selected” in quotes on purpose.) One character comments,
“This is a medical issue, but mostly
it’s a cultural issue. It’s a social issue and an emotional issue and a family dynamic issue and a community issue.
Maybe we need to medically intervene so Poppy doesn’t grow a beard.
Or maybe the world needs to learn to love a person with a beard who goes by ‘she’ and wears a skirt.”
When Wisconsin proves to be hostile in several ways to the child Poppy is becoming, Rosie and Penn decide it’s time to go somewhere their child can find a greater degree of acceptance, and they move the entire family to Seattle, shaking up all their children’s lives in order to accommodate the needs of the youngest. For the eldest, Roo, this means leaving behind all those things that are precious to a high school teenager who has lived his entire life in one place with one group of friends. It has similar, though lesser, effects on the other three boys, who are divided between accepting the necessity of providing safety for Poppy while also believing it won’t make much difference. In this, they are perhaps more realistic than their parents. On the first day in their new house, Rosie and Penn reveal Poppy’s “secret” to their next-door neighbors (intending to be similarly honest with everyone in their new city), but the neighbors encourage them to allow Poppy to be a girl without revealing her past as a boy to anyone. This is how the entire family’s never intentional life of deception begins, and continues until Poppy is on the verge of puberty and the whole thing blows up in their faces.
I won’t say much more about the story, because I have already outlined the first half pretty thoroughly, and would like you to have a reading experience unfettered by expectations for the remainder of the book. I will say that I appreciated the author bringing in the situations of transgender individuals in more fluid societies, which is why I feature this painting at the end. If you read the book, which I hope you will do, you will understand its significance and inclusion.
Immersive
I just finished a re-read (for the third—or fourth?—go-round) of Rosamund Pilcher’s book, Coming Home, which has to be one of my favorite books, as much as I try not to name favorites (because it always provokes a way-too-long list in my head and ends up getting re-ordered during hours of insomnia). Pilcher is sometimes under-rated because of a handful of (short) books she wrote that are obviously formula-driven romance novels, and people expect all her writing to be the same, when, in fact, it’s almost as if (except for the Cornwall setting, which remains pretty constant) there are two writers, with the second waiting to emerge when all the formula stuff was out of her system.
Her most famous books are The Shell Seekers and Winter Solstice, and I love (and re-read) those as well, but for me, Coming Home is the definitive book of her career. It’s a coming-of-age story set within the framework of World War II, beginning in the pre-war years and ending after the war is over. It follows the life of Judith Dunbar, whose father works for a company in Ceylon; Judith spent her first 10 years there, but when her younger sister, Jess, came along, her mother brought the two girls back to England, to Cornwall, leaving her father to a bachelor existence. (This was a common living situation in a time when it was considered dangerous to try to raise Caucasian children in that hot climate.) Now Jess is four years old and Judith is 14; in 1935, their father receives a promotion to a position at the company’s offices in Singapore and wants his wife with him, so Mrs. Dunbar and Jess are traveling back out to the East, while Judith will stay in Cornwall, attending a boarding school in Penzance and holidaying with either her father’s or her mother’s sister, both of whom live fairly close by.
Judith’s existence is transformed by her friendship with a week-to-week boarder at the school, Loveday Carey-Lewis, who returns home each weekend and invites Judith to accompany her. These British aristocrats have an extensive estate called Nancherrow, out at Land’s End, with luxuries about which Judith has never dreamed—a butler, a cook, a nanny, stables, their own cove and beach—and soon Judith is welcomed as one of the extended family by Loveday’s glamorous mother, Diana. But the war imposes hardships on everyone, lower class to royalty, and Judith has her share of life changes that determine her responses to both love and tragedy as the years pass.
It doesn’t sound like such an exciting story, detailed here, but there is something so poignant and so immersive about the stages of Judith’s somewhat lonely teenage and young adult years, especially set against the magical backdrop of Cornwall (and her adoptive family) and dealing with the sobering consequences of living in a country at war. The joys, the sorrows, the suspense about which way the story will go next always hold me enthralled from beginning to end.
I also confess that the artistic aspect Cornwall represents, with its Newlyn School of painters (that are also detailed in Pilcher’s The Shell Seekers), is an additional draw for me. Pilcher’s books, along with Daphne du Maurier’s, are the reason I spent 10 days in Cornwall in April of 2002; my cousin Kirsten and I rented Whitstone Cottage from the National Trust, formerly inhabited by the blacksmith for the Penrose estate between Helston and Porthleven. After reading about it for all those years, it was like coming home for me!
If you’re in the mood for an intimately personal tale with an historical backdrop and multiple settings that portray various ways of life during that time, be sure to check out this book. If you’d like to read an amusing anecdote about our stay in Cornwall, go here.
Resolution
I just finished reading the last two books in Elly Griffiths’s Ruth Galloway mystery series: The Locked Room, and The Last Remains. For those who aren’t familiar, Ruth is (now) a 40-something archaeologist/professor at the University of North Norfolk, and lives in a cottage overlooking the Fens (marshlands) and the ocean. Norfolk was settled in pre-Roman times and then taken over by the Romans; during the Middle Ages it was a center for the wool trade, resulting in the building of many churches. Since it has remained a largely rural county, this makes the area a rich archaeological source of artifacts and, as Ruth discovers in her role as a forensic consultant to the police, bodies both ancient and modern.
I don’t want to get too spoiler-y in this post, but the arc of the books is partly professional and partly personal, and it is the personal for which all we fans and readers have been waiting resolution for many years and volumes. In her role as a consultant, Ruth is thrown into the company of Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) Harry Nelson, a married man with a couple of children, and an impulsive one-night stand results in a pregnancy for Ruth. She doesn’t ask for anything to change, knowing how deeply dug into married life is Nelson, and although she has doubts about her own abilities to raise a child effectively by herself, her love for her daughter, Kate, conquers all.
Kate is born at the end of book #2, and there are 13 books that follow after. In each one, the discovery of a body or bodies draws Ruth into the subsequent police investigations, regularly renewing questions about her relationship to Nelson. There are at least two books that constitute partial departures from proximity: In one, Ruth and Kate travel to Italy without Nelson, while in another they actually move away from Norfolk to Cambridge and in with a “boyfriend” of Ruth’s for a period of time. But if you are a long-term reader of this blog, you will perhaps remember how many times I have complained about the on-again, off-again nature of their interactions, the glacial slowness with which things have moved, and the constant wondering: Will they ever get together? Will Nelson get up the courage to leave his wife for Ruth? Will Ruth ever let her growing exasperation prompt her to kick Nelson to the curb for good? This speculation has overshadowed the mysteries in more than one book in this series and has caused me to swear off reading them on several occasions, but there’s something appealing about the awkward archaeologist that I have found hard to resist, and I have always come back to get caught up.
At last, however, that is at an end: Book #15 is the last in the series, and finally we have resolution to the decade-long question: Will they or won’t they? But first we have to participate in the perpetual angst throughout Book #14 and part of the last.
I’m not going to reveal anything else here, so let’s take a look at the mysteries detailed in these two books. As I have commented before, the books have seemed to alternate, throughout the series, between one that is compelling and one that phones it in, to the point where there were at least two books I recommended that readers skip, going instead to a synopsis to find out the details about the personal relationships while avoiding the somewhat boring plots. That has held true to the end; The Locked Room‘s mystery is both confusing and slight, while The Last Remains has a tight, interesting story line that includes several characters both new and old and nicely ties up some dangling questions by taking us back to the very first mystery on which Ruth and Nelson collaborated. The one thing that does distinguish The Locked Room is that Griffiths set it during the recent pandemic and imbued her story with all the inconveniences and tragedies we experienced during that time period, which was both refreshingly real and disturbingly uncomfortable, a reminder of all that we did and didn’t do and all that we lost.
I still struggle a bit with the idea that Ruth and Harry have taken 15 years to confront their feelings, but I congratulate Elly Griffiths on a largely successful and mostly involving mystery series. I hope with her Harbinder Kaur books that she draws us into many more murderous adventures.
Clandestine
That’s the word most descriptive of the third “episode” in Cynthia Harrod-Eagles’s newish series about the inhabitants of Ashmore Castle. This one is called The Mistress of Ashmore Castle, although I was a bit puzzled, by the end, at the name, since the book seems to divide its attention equally between multiple “actors” without focusing particularly on Kitty, aka the new Lady Stainton.
Lord Stainton, Giles, has rejected the stifling existence at the castle to resume his chosen avocation excavating tombs in Egypt, leaving poor Kitty behind to cope with their young son, the house, and the rest of his family, while longing for him to return. Kitty seems to be the only one in her family-by-marriage (my mother always called them “the outlaws,” which works here) to love the person with whom she is paired; Giles remains enamored of Kitty’s best friend Nina, who is married to the elderly and smitten businessman Joseph Cowling but who returns Giles’s affections. Both must keep their forbidden feelings a secret from their respective spouses and from everyone else; Nina attempts to deflect her energies towards a pursuit of women’s rights, while Giles is reunited in Egypt with Julia, the daughter of an old friend on a previous dig, who was six years old when he met her but is now in the full flower of sultry Italian womanhood. He is enjoying what he thinks is the simple resumption of their friendship, but his attentions may be giving Julia other ideas. (Giles is kind of a dick.)
Meanwhile, Giles’s sister, Rachel, is having her coming-out season in London. Fueled by Kitty’s money, Giles’s mother has thrown a lavish ball for the richly attired and vivacious Rachel, at which she is supposed to fall in love with a suitable suitor and make a marriage; instead, she succumbs to an infatuation for her cousin Angus, who reciprocates her passion despite his father instructing him to propose to Diana, a wealthy heiress. Thus ensues much wailing and angst and a convoluted letter-writing campaign (Angus resides in Scotland) enabled by their sisters’ connivance.
Meanwhile, Giles’s other sister, Alice, still harbors a doomed passion for the hunky woodsman on the Ashmore estate despite his inherent unsuitability; his uncle Sebastian continues his hopeless pursuit of the castle’s seamstress, who loves him but already has a husband somewhere in London; and his brother Richard hasn’t given up on persuading their father’s former mistress to come away with him to Europe, if only he can find the funds to support them both. There is even a romance (of sorts) in the offing for Giles’s formidable mother, Maud, the previous Lady Stainton, who is much affronted by anyone daring to approach her in this way, but is also considering the alternative—no longer ruling the roost of her former home, and collapsing into grandmotherhood—and wondering if a second marriage could be tolerated if enough wealth came along with it.
In short, there is not one truly happy individual in the entire bunch, either above- or below-stairs. And non-romantic drama is also brewing amongst the staff, as Mr. Moss (the butler) suffers a loss that is taken advantage of by the dastardly footman James Hook, who covets money and position and will ruthlessly exploit his position to gain both.
The ins and outs of all the relationships are simultaneously enthralling and exhausting, and while I enjoyed reading this one as much as I did the first two, Ms. Harrod-Eagles has once again dropped the ending amidst multiple cliffhangers, causing me to swear audibly at breakfast when I turned the next page only to find a listing of “other books written by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles.” And once again I have read the latest volume of this series mere days after its release, so a long year of anticipation for the next will again ensue. Sigh.
On an up note, a friend on Facebook just told me that Elly Griffiths has just published the last in her series about archaeologist Ruth Galloway, in which she finally resolves the relationship between Ruth and her baby-daddy, DCI Harry Nelson. Since I hadn’t yet read what turns out to be the next-to-last book, I’m perusing it now, so I can get on to the big finish.
Day for cats
A friend’s post on Facebook reminded me that today is International Cat Day, which I dare not let go by unremarked, lest Gidget do some big-time scolding (at which she is quite proficient!). So here are some titles guaranteed to appeal to readers of various types who are also cat lovers.
MISCELLANEOUS STUFF YOU WON’T WANT TO MISS
The Dalai Lama’s Cat, by David Michie, in which the Tibetan Buddhist leader’s cat offers insights on happiness and meaning.
The Rabbi’s Cat, by Joann Sfar, a graphic novel about a cat who eats the family parrot, gains the ability to speak, and demands a Bar Mitzvah, by a celebrated French comic artist.
James Herriot’s Cat Stories, by, you guessed it, James Herriot! Celebrating his feline friends…
On Cats, by Charles Bukowski, the irreverent and profane poet whose primary subjects of women and booze also apparently expand to include his take on cats.
The Travelling Cat Chronicles, by Hiro Arikawa, in which Nana the cat and her person, Satoru, go on a road trip, for what purpose Nana isn’t quite sure. Be prepared to cry.
The Cat Who Went to Paris, by Peter Gethers, the story of how a Scottish Fold kitten named Norton turned a curmudgeonly cat hater into a compassionate human.
A Street Cat Named Bob: How One Man and His Cat Found Hope on the Streets, by James Bowen. It’s all there in the very long title.
I Could Pee On This, and Other Poems by Cats, by Francesco Marciuliano. From the singular minds of housecats.
Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, by T. S. Eliot, in which the author describes cats each by their distinct personality.
The Tribe of Tiger: Cats and Their Culture, by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, a naturalist and anthropologist who explores the worlds of lions, tigers, pumas, and housecats.
MYSTERIES
The Cat Who… mysteries, by Lilian Jackson Braun, in which a reporter and his cat solve mysteries. First book: The Cat Who Could Read Backwards.
The Mrs. Murphy mysteries, by Rita Mae Brown & Sneaky Pie Brown, in which Mrs. Murphy and her human companion solve mysteries. First book: Wish You Were Here.
The Joe Grey mysteries, by Shirley Rousseau Murphy, in which there are talking cats and also a human who discovers an ability to morph into a cat. First book: Cat on the Edge.
SCIENCE FICTION/HORROR
Catfantastic: Nine Lives and Fifteen Tales, by Andre Norton, editor, in which sci fi and fantasy writers tell tall tales about furry felines. (Short stories.)
The Chanur novels, by C. J. Cherryh, in which a leonine species—the Chanur—take in a human refugee and by so doing threaten the interspecies Compact. First book: The Pride of Chanur.
The Cinder Spires books, by Jim Butcher, in which there are also cat clans and some naval airship action. First book: The Aeronaut’s Windlass.
The Cult of the Cat books, by Zoe Kalo, in which Trinity is left with a dead grandmother and a thousand grieving cats. A sort of Egyptian urban fantasy. First book: Daughter of the Sun.
Pet Sematary, by Stephen King. I always have trouble with the spelling of this one, seeing as how it’s spelled “cemetery.” Hm. But if you like to be scared by revenants, this one’s for you.
FOR SMALL, MEDIUM, AND LARGE CHILDREN:
Millions of Cats, by Wanda Gág, in which a lonely old couple acquires companions. This is known as the original picture book for children.
The Owl and the Pussycat, by Edward Lear. A classic.
Time Cat, by Lloyd Alexander. He can talk, he can time travel…what’s not to like? By the wonderful author of The Prydain Chronicles.
The Fur Person, by May Sarton. Yes, that May Sarton. A charming tale about a Cat About Town who decides to become a Fur Person instead. It could be read as either a children’s book or a novelty book for adults.
The Warriors books, by Erin Hunter, in which a house cat discovers clans of cats living in the wild in the forest…. First book: Into the Wild.
The Wildings books, by Nilanjana Roy, in which a small band of cats lives in the alleys and ruins of Nizamuddin, an old neighborhood in Delhi, India.
The Feline Wizards series, by Diane Duane, in which feline wizards time travel to avert disasters. First book: The Book of Night with Moon.
Tales of the Barque Cats, by Anne McCaffrey, in which cats are essential members of the crews of space vessels…until an epidemic threatens their extinction.
For many, many more books with or about cats, hit up this gargantuan list on Goodreads of Great Cat Books (1,511).
Invested
How to weigh the investment
I have made in the ongoing relationship that is still not a “relationship” between Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott against the increasingly lengthy tomes that, while well written and intriguing, still need the hand of a ruthless editor to bring them in under a thousand pages? It’s a toughie. I refer to the latest by “Robert Galbraith,” aka J. K. Rowling, The Ink Black Heart, #6 in this series, each book anticipated with both excitement and dread.
On the positive side, I love the effortless way she paints a picture of the inner workings of each character, lets us in on what each is thinking, and then shows us how they choose to respond on the outside regardless of their inner conclusions. The understanding of the misunderstandings inherent in human relations is masterful, and never on better display than in the interplay between Cormoran and Robin. This skill carries over to the rest of the characters that inhabit this somewhat sordid world observed by London’s private detectives, and it’s hard not to get caught up in the drama Rowling, er, Galbraith provides.
This particular book assays some formidable subjects. The seamy side of social media is on full display as people in chat rooms and on Twitter grab rumor and turn it into accusations and abuse. Some sincerely believe what they have read and are addressing it, while others are just meanly happy for the drama or are using it to manipulate situations for their own purposes. It’s also a political book, showcasing as it does the use extremists make of naive folk online, and the determined denigration of women by incels and just about everyone else.
The negative side is, well, the page count. The book is more than a thousand pages and, while I am not opposed to a lengthy story, there is something to be said for not turning over every single rock on the beach. This book could have been about 25-30 percent shorter and still been just as (or perhaps more) effective. I also simultaneously applaud the ingenuity of including the chatroom interchanges to thoroughly explore the largely anonymous characters in the game, any one of whom could be a murderer, while also bemoaning how repetitive and lengthy is that back-and-forth documentation. Sheesh!
The basic plot: Two people, Edie and Josh, have created a popular online cartoon, The Ink Black Heart. Two other anonymous parties came along afterwards and made a game (Drek’s Game) to accompany that cartoon, which features all the characters from the cartoon and also hosts chat rooms. There has been hostility between one of the creators of the game (and from his minions who play and enjoy it) and the people who made the original cartoon ever since the female creator, Edie Ledwell, expressed dislike for the game. The trolls have been out in full force, and the level of abuse is toxic. Edie is desperate to find out the identity of the creator, Anomie, who is out to get her, especially because now that the cartoon has gained interest from Netflix and will be made into a film, new rumors and abuse are flying. Edie approaches Robin to try to hire the agency to discover her nemesis, but Cormoran, Robin, and their subcontractors are already overwhelmed with work and Robin turns her away. A few days later, Edie turns up stabbed to death in Highgate Cemetery, the setting where the cartoon takes place. Through another client, Robin and Cormoran are drawn into the investigation to uncover Anomie’s identity, but considering the number of suspects with both motive and affiliation to the dead creators, it will be a long, tedious, and ultimately dangerous search.
Both the suspense and the level of frustration are doubled in this book because not only are they trying to unmask a villain, but—before they are able to do so—they must also unmask all the anonymous online personae.
And speaking of levels of frustration, the growing consciousness between Robin and Cormoran that there is something more to their partnership than friendship and work is definitely still present and ongoing, but I felt like it stalled out significantly in this book. I am beginning to fear that Rowling will drag this out for as long as Elly Griffiths has milked the connection between Ruth Galloway and DCI Harry Nelson in her series, and if Rowling and Griffiths don’t get on with it, their fans are going to start dropping off.
This book won’t cause me to do so, but I would love to say to Rowling, empower both your editor and your romance next time!
Literary fiction
As I get older, read more, and spend a lot of time and energy reviewing what I have read, I am beginning to realize that I am not, despite aspirations, a particularly sophisticated reader. Beyond that, I have recently concluded that I tend not to trust my own reactions when it comes to reading and reviewing books that are deemed “literary” by other critics and/or readers. My priority in my reading life has always been to find and experience good story, but when I am confronted with something that doesn’t feel that way to me, rather than judge the book as being lacking, I judge myself as a reader. I think I am going to aim to change that in future.
I have experienced this twice in the past six months, and the way I came to realize it was to read others’ extremely perceptive (and much more objective) reviews on Goodreads. I just finished reading Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese, and at some point during its perusal I remarked that I found it nearly as hard going as Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver. This observation should have revealed more to me than it did; but it took the remarks of “Ayaz,” on Goodreads, who gave the book a measly two stars (indicative of “it was okay”) to make my thoughts suddenly gel on the whole subject of literary fiction.
First, a description of the book: The protagonist, Marion, is a twin. He and his brother, Shiva, are the offspring of a brilliant but flawed British surgeon and his surgical assistant, a young and extremely devout Indian nun, whose pregnancy is only revealed to her colleagues (including the father) when she goes into labor. Their mother dies and, unable to cope with either the loss of Sister Mary Joseph Praise or the unexpected manifestation of offspring, their father abandons them; the twins are raised by a loving foster family made up of the remaining staff members (and their servants) of the mission hospital in Ethiopia in which they were born. Given the circumstances of their birth and that they are constantly exposed by their foster parents to both talk about and observation of medical procedures, it’s nearly inevitable that the two will grow up to become doctors, although the twins take entirely different paths towards this end. Personal conflicts and political events serve to separate the twins for an extended period, until tragedy reunites them.
I always have high hopes at the beginning of a book that has come recommended for its voice, its story, and/or the quality of its writing. Sometimes, as with Demon Copperhead, I recognize those merits for myself, while nonetheless being somewhat dragged down by both the intensity and longevity. But sometimes, as with Cutting for Stone, I struggle to recognize the merit as I grapple with the completion of the reading.
I’m not saying this is a bad book; although I breathed a small sigh of relief and reduced my rating from five stars to three after coming to certain realizations about my reaction to the book, I still found much to admire. But there were also unacknowledged problems with its narrative that I didn’t trust myself to articulate but that I could plainly see when someone else pointed them out for me.
One observation that resonated was a problem with a sustained development of the characters. When I reviewed Demon Copperhead, I noted that even though the book took me more than a month to read—having put it down for extended intervals to peruse more light-hearted works—I never lost sight of who the characters were, because their portrayal was so strong. With Verghese’s book I came to recognize that part of my frustration that caused me to drag out its completion was that there were certain key characters about whom I wanted to know more, but the author’s promising start in developing them was, over and over again, truncated or abandoned in favor of a sensationalistic denouement in the story as it transitioned from one stage to the next. His female characters are particularly clichéd, but even the men sometimes become indistinguishable one from another because of the similarity of their language, sentiments, and presentation. There were a couple of characters who stood out, but for the most part they were all subsumed by their careers.
Although Verghese is himself a medical doctor, I discovered that having that expertise and perspective were not enough for his descriptions to transport me into the lives of his characters. There were certain compelling moments in the throes of a complex operation that were exciting and involving, but the rest of it felt both clinical and too educational, for want of a better word, for a novel.
The purpose of this book was clearly to illustrate the depth and breadth of the idea of family amongst people who are unrelated but bonded, and although that was, to an extent, achieved, I grew first exasperated with and then bored by Marion’s viewpoint. And although this is ultimately a coming-of-age story like Demon Copperfield, I never perceived from Marion the same quality of voice that carried us from childhood to manhood. There was a certain sameness about the narration that caused it to be more tedious than it should have been.
The part I think I enjoyed most, and where I felt Verghese shone, was in the presentation of Ethiopia as a country and culture, caught up in the politics of change that were sweeping that nation in the upheaval of multiple revolutions. The world-building felt fresh and genuine.
Because of my realization about the sometimes excessive reverence I have for literary fiction, I will freely admit that I may have gone too far the other direction in judging this book. Certainly there are many readers out there who find its language, characters, and story completely compelling and who have freely awarded it top marks. If you still have a desire, after my comments, to read it for yourself, then by all means do so. We are all gripped differently by our reading, and you may agree with many that this is a masterpiece. But as for me, I’m going to try, in future, to tune in better to my innate sense of the quality of the story itself, which is my ultimate criteria, and let that lead me when evaluating any book, literary or otherwise.
The Book Adept 