(A little late with the cross-post; I've been sick.)
As badly as I have been neglecting this blog, I have been even worse at my book review and bookstore blog and at Deborama's Kitchen, my food and food politics blog. So I am cross-posting this at both, because I have been a) actively reading and planning, bursting even, to review a couple of books, and b) I have some cookie recipes to post and some simmering thoughts about all this diet and nutrition stuff. First the cookies. As those of you in Britain will know, last week was the big Children In Need charity fund drive. My employer (a mega multi-national) is a big participant and this year I sold cookies. Real American cookies baked by a real American grannie, is how I advertised them. They even (ugh!) put my picture on the intranet, posing with my cookies held out in front, a fake smile on my face, not a hint of (detectable) irony (I hope.) As for food politics, it has been brought to the fore, for me, by the recent hunting-with-dogs ban. I used to be a vegetarian. I am still selective about what animal products I will eat, and I try to influence DH who is pretty much not. I saw a Countryfile show on Sunday where a gamekeeper and a leader of a shooting ("wild" birds) group debated two anti-hunting activists. My thoughts, about which I will probably not get more specific, were about the comparative ethics (from an anti-animal-cruelty viewpoint) of eating game vs. farm animals. I do believe that the world is evolving towards total veganism, which I think is a good thing. But I tried and failed at that for myself, in the here and now. So this is a pragmatic argument for me. Maybe I will get more specific, later. I have to think about it.
Now, as to the books. While the siege of Fallujah was going on, I was reading Absolute Friends, by John le Carre. This book echoed against some very dark and despairing sentiments I was already experiencing due to watching "The Power of Nightmares" on the BBC, and due to the same nightmare scenario being acted out in Fallujah and elsewhere. I need , desparately, to review this book. I want to talk about it to someone. But my energy continues to wane and every little task I accomplish after work or on the weekend is a major triumph. So in the meantime, life must go on, and long train journeys must be endured, so I started on some other books. Right now I am about halfway through Cryptonomicon (Neal Stephenson) and it is so very very excellent. I am enjoying it immensely.
2004-07-03
Be very afraid of what's not on the label
"I thought I had some idea about how supermarkets operate and how our food is produced, but I didn't know the half of it. Read this book (then lend it to everyone you know), ponder its contents for a while and I am sure you will change your shopping habits."
"All the chapters made a big impact but I was particularly moved by the descriptions of the migrant agricultural workers living on rubbish tips in Spain, of coffee farmers who were paid so little for their crop that they couldn't support their families and of the phenomenally destructive (and disgusting) practice of prawn farming in South-East Asia. . . Time and time again what came across is the enormous power of the supermarkets and how in competing with each other to be cheapest they create misery all the way down the food supply chain. Some of the supermarket practices described simply beggar belief."
2004-05-04
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
I loved this book, and even more importantly, my darling hubby liked this book. I give him about 12 to 20 books a year to read, after I have read and liked them, and think he might like them, and he only likes about a fifth of them. So either he is very hard to please, or I am rubbish at guessing what he will like (a bit of both really.)
So, you have probably heard about this book by Mark Haddon - that it is about a 12 year old boy with Asperger's syndrome, and neighbour's dog that gets killed with a pitchfork. And since the title is a well-known quote from a Sherlock Holmes story, you would guess that it's a sort of detective story. Well, it is and it isn't. Mostly it isn't. I think this is mostly a story about how people's brains work, and how they don't all work the same way. And this can be a tragedy. There is a certain amount of tragedy in this story, and I felt some overwhelming maternal protectiveness for the likable hero, Christopher.
This has occasionally been referred to as a children's book, but I have never seen it in the children's or young adult section. It is no more a children's book than Life of Pi, which also features a young boy protagonist and is a very similar book in many ways. It is far too short a book to get away with telling even a little bit of the narrative (apart from the fact that a dog is killed in the opening chapter, but everyone knows that). I prefer to concentrate on why I liked it, and why DH liked it. I think we both liked it because the boy reminded us of ourselves, but for each of us, these were very different aspects of ourselves. I identified with Chris's inability to "take in" all of his sensory environment, while being unable to screen it out the way normal people do. Although I do not have Asperger's syndrome or any diagnosed condition, I am what is known as a "low-screener" which means that all my senses are very acute (although often not particularly accurate) and I can be very "oppressed", like Chris, by colours I don't like, crowds, smells and chaos in general. And, like Chris, I use mental exercise to calm myself, often pursuing activities that would drive normal people crazy, in order to drive myself sane. DH, on the other hand, is a very, very "high screener". But he has another of the traits of Asperger's syndrome (in common with some other conditions) which is an extreme difficulty "reading" the emotions, facial expressions and body language of other people, and an aversion to the sort of familiar touching that most people do as part of their socializing. DH again is not diagnosed with a syndrome, and he likes hugs and has no problem shaking hands or anything, but still there is that commonality there and I think that plus the boy protagonist's clever maths-geek atheism, made him really identify with Chris.
This is, I think, the great strength of this wonderful little book, that it enables anyone to feel a real kinship with someone with a condition which usually makes its sufferers seems very alien to the rest of humanity. And it makes his condition, and mental illness generally, very knowable and understandable and not a cause for fear and dread.
So, you have probably heard about this book by Mark Haddon - that it is about a 12 year old boy with Asperger's syndrome, and neighbour's dog that gets killed with a pitchfork. And since the title is a well-known quote from a Sherlock Holmes story, you would guess that it's a sort of detective story. Well, it is and it isn't. Mostly it isn't. I think this is mostly a story about how people's brains work, and how they don't all work the same way. And this can be a tragedy. There is a certain amount of tragedy in this story, and I felt some overwhelming maternal protectiveness for the likable hero, Christopher.
This has occasionally been referred to as a children's book, but I have never seen it in the children's or young adult section. It is no more a children's book than Life of Pi, which also features a young boy protagonist and is a very similar book in many ways. It is far too short a book to get away with telling even a little bit of the narrative (apart from the fact that a dog is killed in the opening chapter, but everyone knows that). I prefer to concentrate on why I liked it, and why DH liked it. I think we both liked it because the boy reminded us of ourselves, but for each of us, these were very different aspects of ourselves. I identified with Chris's inability to "take in" all of his sensory environment, while being unable to screen it out the way normal people do. Although I do not have Asperger's syndrome or any diagnosed condition, I am what is known as a "low-screener" which means that all my senses are very acute (although often not particularly accurate) and I can be very "oppressed", like Chris, by colours I don't like, crowds, smells and chaos in general. And, like Chris, I use mental exercise to calm myself, often pursuing activities that would drive normal people crazy, in order to drive myself sane. DH, on the other hand, is a very, very "high screener". But he has another of the traits of Asperger's syndrome (in common with some other conditions) which is an extreme difficulty "reading" the emotions, facial expressions and body language of other people, and an aversion to the sort of familiar touching that most people do as part of their socializing. DH again is not diagnosed with a syndrome, and he likes hugs and has no problem shaking hands or anything, but still there is that commonality there and I think that plus the boy protagonist's clever maths-geek atheism, made him really identify with Chris.
This is, I think, the great strength of this wonderful little book, that it enables anyone to feel a real kinship with someone with a condition which usually makes its sufferers seems very alien to the rest of humanity. And it makes his condition, and mental illness generally, very knowable and understandable and not a cause for fear and dread.
2004-05-03
Northern Lights / The Subtle Knife / The Amber Spyglass : His Dark Materials Trilogy
Editor's Note: In the US, the first volume of the trilogy is called The Golden Compass. Also, a film has been made.
I heard these books described as a thinking-person's Harry Potter. That doesn't really do them justice. The format, the intent, the audience, the world-view, all are different in several degrees from Harry Potter. The main thing is that the Harry Potter stories are in the familiar reductionist mode of children's fiction that has borrowed from the highly stylized world of Saturday morning cartoons. Utterly absent are moral nuance, and pleasures are simple and greedy, even for the "good" characters. Everything is very easy to identify as good or evil, fun or boring, giving feelings of pride or shame, and the violence is strangely sanitized. The only moral choices the "good" characters face is whether to act loyally to their friends ("friendship" being the highest imaginable "good" in this world-view) and the power of loyalty to friends neutralizes any other action, from being silent and stubborn to authority figures, right on up to remorselessly killing "bad" characters.
Pullman's stories, though, apart from seeming to me to be too intellectually challenging for most modern pre-teens (I don't mean that to sound as insulting as it probably does, but really they are quite philosophically rarefied in parts) are more in the old style of children's literature, being as weird as Alice in Wonderland and as violent as Grimm's fairy tales and yet as modern as The Little Prince was in its day. And talk about moral nuance, hard choices, and ethical grey areas, these not only proliferate as the story goes on, they more or less drive the entire plot. There are parts that are better than others in the books, and this is something that I imagine young readers will find especially difficult, because there are times when as the focus switched from one group battling unspeakable evil to another, I was quite tempted to read ahead to where the dropped thread was picked up again, and got quite annoyed at almost turgid parts, even though I could tell they were necessary for the whole picture. The sweep of the stories are quite broad, encompassing universes and their creation and destruction, yet somehow not in the old SF Dr. Who kind of way ("Oh, well, when you've seen one megalomaniac who wants to rule the universe, you have pretty much seen them all") but more in that vertiginous way one feels if one allows oneself to really think about the possible implications of quantum physics.
To sum up the trilogy, without injecting any narrative or teasers, I would say that these three books comprise a Faustian fairy tale about parallel histories, theology and physics, featuring a pair of protagonists who are a twist on the old Tristan and Iseult mythology. And it's got talking warrior bears and witches and magical implements that can be replicated in a physics lab.
I heard these books described as a thinking-person's Harry Potter. That doesn't really do them justice. The format, the intent, the audience, the world-view, all are different in several degrees from Harry Potter. The main thing is that the Harry Potter stories are in the familiar reductionist mode of children's fiction that has borrowed from the highly stylized world of Saturday morning cartoons. Utterly absent are moral nuance, and pleasures are simple and greedy, even for the "good" characters. Everything is very easy to identify as good or evil, fun or boring, giving feelings of pride or shame, and the violence is strangely sanitized. The only moral choices the "good" characters face is whether to act loyally to their friends ("friendship" being the highest imaginable "good" in this world-view) and the power of loyalty to friends neutralizes any other action, from being silent and stubborn to authority figures, right on up to remorselessly killing "bad" characters.
Pullman's stories, though, apart from seeming to me to be too intellectually challenging for most modern pre-teens (I don't mean that to sound as insulting as it probably does, but really they are quite philosophically rarefied in parts) are more in the old style of children's literature, being as weird as Alice in Wonderland and as violent as Grimm's fairy tales and yet as modern as The Little Prince was in its day. And talk about moral nuance, hard choices, and ethical grey areas, these not only proliferate as the story goes on, they more or less drive the entire plot. There are parts that are better than others in the books, and this is something that I imagine young readers will find especially difficult, because there are times when as the focus switched from one group battling unspeakable evil to another, I was quite tempted to read ahead to where the dropped thread was picked up again, and got quite annoyed at almost turgid parts, even though I could tell they were necessary for the whole picture. The sweep of the stories are quite broad, encompassing universes and their creation and destruction, yet somehow not in the old SF Dr. Who kind of way ("Oh, well, when you've seen one megalomaniac who wants to rule the universe, you have pretty much seen them all") but more in that vertiginous way one feels if one allows oneself to really think about the possible implications of quantum physics.
To sum up the trilogy, without injecting any narrative or teasers, I would say that these three books comprise a Faustian fairy tale about parallel histories, theology and physics, featuring a pair of protagonists who are a twist on the old Tristan and Iseult mythology. And it's got talking warrior bears and witches and magical implements that can be replicated in a physics lab.
2004-04-09
Hungry Mind Book Review's Best 100 of the 20th Century
Blog editor's note: I confess, I am cheating on this one. The only thing that's the same as the original Deborama's Book Review and Store's post is the title. There has been so much water under the bridge. The original post, which was just a link and a promise anyway, happened to appear just before the Ruminator Bookstore, successor to the Hungry Mind of fond memories, closed. The Ruminator Review, also previously known as Hungry Mind, ceased publication in 2005. And the link this goes to looks dodgy and impermanent, so I am copying to the whole list in the post to preserve it.
Back in 1998, when I left the Twin Cities, one of the cultural jewels of our fair towns was the Hungry Mind bookstore, located on the Macalester College campus and owned by David Unowsky. He also published The Hungry Mind Review. The bookstore and the review changed their names to Ruminator in 2000, when Unowsky sold the rights to the name Hungry Mind to Hungry Minds, Inc., publishers of the ... for Dummies books.
Here's another great website with some more information about the associated publishing company, also called Hungry Minds and then later Ruminator.
Some time in the free book review's heyday, when it was still called The Hungry Mind Review, they published this list of the 100 best books of the 20th Century. In a lot of ways that I cannot pinpoint or justify, this seems to me to be a very Minnesotan list. Not that it has too many Minnesota books on it, oh, no. Because Minnesotans are like Brits in that way, smug and self-satisfied, maybe, but they would never blow their own horns. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than most of these lists.
Source: The Hungry Mind Review. I am actually embarrassed to say how many of these I have read. I have bolded the author and title of those I have read, and just the author if I have read other works by her/him.
Back in 1998, when I left the Twin Cities, one of the cultural jewels of our fair towns was the Hungry Mind bookstore, located on the Macalester College campus and owned by David Unowsky. He also published The Hungry Mind Review. The bookstore and the review changed their names to Ruminator in 2000, when Unowsky sold the rights to the name Hungry Mind to Hungry Minds, Inc., publishers of the ... for Dummies books.
Here's another great website with some more information about the associated publishing company, also called Hungry Minds and then later Ruminator.
Some time in the free book review's heyday, when it was still called The Hungry Mind Review, they published this list of the 100 best books of the 20th Century. In a lot of ways that I cannot pinpoint or justify, this seems to me to be a very Minnesotan list. Not that it has too many Minnesota books on it, oh, no. Because Minnesotans are like Brits in that way, smug and self-satisfied, maybe, but they would never blow their own horns. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than most of these lists.
The Hungry Mind Review's 100 Best 20th Century Books
| Rank | Author | Novel and Year |
| 1 | Henry Adams | The Education of Henry Adams (1918) |
| 2 | James Agee and Walker Evans | Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) |
| 3 | Dorothy Allison | Bastard out of Carolina (1992) |
| 4 | Rudolfo Anaya | Bless Me Ultima (1972) |
| 5 | Sherwood Anderson | Winesburg, Ohio (1919) |
| 6 | Maya Angelou | I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970) |
| 7 | Gloria Anzaldúa | Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) |
| 8 | James Baldwin | Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) |
| 9 | James Baldwin | The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction (1985) |
| 10 | Edward Ball | Slaves in the Family (1998) |
| 11 | Saul Bellow | Herzog (1964) |
| 12 | Paul Bowles | The Sheltering Sky (1948) |
| 13 | William Burroughs | Naked Lunch (1959) |
| 14 | Truman Capote | In Cold Blood (1966) |
| 15 | Raymond Carver | Cathedral (1983) |
| 16 | Willa Cather | O Pioneers! (1913) |
| 17 | Willa Cather | Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) |
| 18 | John Cheever | Collected Stories (1978) |
| 19 | Sandra Cisneros | House on Mango Street (1984) |
| 20 | Don DeLillo | White Noise (1985) |
| 21 | Joan Didion | Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) |
| 22 | Vine Deloria Jr. | Custer Died for Your Sins (1983) |
| 23 | John Dos Passos | U.S.A. (1930) |
| 24 | Theodore Dreiser | An American Tragedy (1925) |
| 25 | W.E.B. DuBois | The Souls of Black Folk (1903) |
| 26 | Ralph Ellison | Invisible Man (1952) |
| 27 | Louise Erdrich | Love Medicine (1984) |
| 28 | William Faulkner | The Sound and the Fury (1926) |
| 29 | William Faulkner | As I Lay Dying (1930) |
| 30 | William Faulkner | Go Down, Moses (1940) |
| 31 | F. Scott Fitzgerald | The Great Gatsby (1925) |
| 32 | M.F.K. Fisher | The Art of Eating (1954) |
| 33 | Francisco Goldman | The Ordinary Seaman (1997) |
| 34 | Alex Haley | Roots (1976) |
| 35 | Joseph Heller | Catch-22 (1961) |
| 36 | Ernest Hemingway | The Sun Also Rises (1926) |
| 37 | Ernest Hemingway | The Short Stories (1938) |
| 38 | Michael Herr | Dispatches (1984) |
| 39 | Chester Himes | My Life of Absurdity: The Autobiography (1976) |
| 40 | Linda Hogan | Mean Spirit (1990) |
| 41 | bell hooks | Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1982) |
| 42 | Zora Neale Hurston | Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) |
| 43 | Henry James | The Wings of the Dove (1902) |
| 44 | LeRoi Jones (Amira Baraka) | Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963) |
| 45 | Jack Kerouac | On the Road (1957) |
| 46 | Ken Kesey | One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) |
| 47 | Jamaica Kincaid | Annie John (1983) |
| 48 | Maxine Hong Kingston | Woman Warrior (1976) |
| 49 | Jerzy Kosinski | The Painted Bird (1976) |
| 50 | Harper Lee | To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) |
| 51 | Li-Young Lee | The Winged Seed (1995) |
| 52 | Sinclair Lewis | Babbitt (1922) |
| 53 | Cormac McCarthy | The Crossing (1994) |
| 54 | Carson McCullers | The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) |
| 55 | Norman Mailer | The Naked and the Dead (1948) |
| 56 | Bernard Malamud | The Magic Barrel (1958) |
| 57 | Malcolm X and Alex Haley | The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) |
| 58 | Rollo May | Love and Will (1969) |
| 59 | Thomas Merton | The Seven Storey Mountain (1948) |
| 60 | Henry Miller | Tropic of Cancer (1934) |
| 61 | N. Scott Momaday | House Made of Dawn (1968) |
| 62 | Wright Morris | Field of Vision (1956) |
| 63 | Toni Morrison | Sula (1973) |
| 64 | Toni Morrison | Song of Solomon (1977) |
| 65 | Toni Morrison | Beloved (1987) |
| 66 | Toni Morrison | Jazz (1992) |
| 67 | Vladimir Nabokov | Lolita (1958) |
| 68 | John G. Neihardt | Black Elk Speaks (1932) |
| 69 | Flannery O'Connor | A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955) |
| 70 | Charles Olson | Call Me Ishmael (1947) |
| 71 | Tillie Olson | Tell Me a Riddle (1961) |
| 72 | Jon Okada | No-No Boy (1977) |
| 73 | Grace Paley | Collected Stories (1994) |
| 74 | Walker Percy | The Moviegoer (1961) |
| 75 | Katherine Anne Porter | Flowering Judas and Other Stories (1930) |
| 76 | Thomas Pynchon | Gravity's Rainbow (1973) |
| 77 | Adrienne Rich | On Lies, Secrets and Silence (1979) |
| 78 | Philip Roth | Portnoy's Complaint (1969) |
| 79 | J.D. Salinger | The Catcher in the Rye (1951) |
| 80 | May Sarton | At Seventy (1984) |
| 81 | Leslie Marmon Silko | Ceremony (1977) |
| 82 | Isaac B. Singer | The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer (1982) |
| 83 | Gertrude Stein | The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1993) |
| 84 | John Steinbeck | The Grapes of Wrath (1937) |
| 85 | William Styron | Sophie's Choice (1979) |
| 86 | James Thurber | A Thurber Carnival (1945) |
| 87 | Jean Toomer | Cane (1923) |
| 88 | Mark Twain | Letters from the Earth (1962) |
| 89 | John Updike | Rabbit, Run (1960) |
| 90 | Gore Vidal | The United States: Essays (1952-1992) |
| 91 | Kurt Vonnegut | Slaughterhouse Five (1969) |
| 92 | Alice Walker | The Color Purple (1982) |
| 93 | Robert Penn Warren | All the Kings Men (1946) |
| 94 | Nathanael West | The Day of the Locust (1939) |
| 95 | John Edgar Wideman | Philadelphia Fire (1990) |
| 96 | William Carlos Williams | In the American Grain (1925) |
| 97 | Edmund Wilson | To the Finland Station (1940) |
| 98 | Thomas Wolfe | You Can't Go Home Again (1941) |
| 99 | Richard Wright | Native Son (1940) |
| 100 | Wakako Yamauchi | Songs My Mother Taught Me (1994) |
Source: The Hungry Mind Review. I am actually embarrassed to say how many of these I have read. I have bolded the author and title of those I have read, and just the author if I have read other works by her/him.
2004-04-03
Jennifer Government, by Max Barry
Editor's note: This is one future dystopia that has really stood the test of time. I am still recommending it to people. In fact, I need to get a copy from the library and read it again myself.
I am finally getting around to reviewing Jennifer Government, and what excellent timing, coming on the heels of the latest atrocity wrought by the US use of privatized paramilitaries (also known as mercenaries). It is the complete privatization of all "services" that could possibly be performed by the government that drives the plot of this small, frantically-paced, quirky SF novel, set in the usual near-future dystopia. But as near-future dystopias go, this one is the most believable yet, and the real likely result of current neo-con trends. Jennifer works for the government, true, just as Buy Mitsui works for Mitsui and Hack Nike works for Nike and Billy NRA - well, one of them does work for the NRA and the other one is pretending to, hence the confusion. But even though Jennifer's job with the government is tracking down and apprehending criminals (not that there's much one can do anymore that is criminal) she can only go to work if she gets funding, and that may have to come from the grief-stricken parents of a murder victim. Funding once acquired, she goes to work to uncover a brilliant new marketing strategy at Nike - mass murders of youths who have just purchased their $2,500 trainers (to raise the street cred, you see.) Jennifer thinks the style of this sounds familiar - sounds like her ex-husband, as a matter of fact. And so it is! John Nike, he is known as now. But it turns out that the killing was assigned to a soft little pleb named Hack Nike who contracted it out to The Police (TM) (who, in one of the novel's many comic touches, play "Every Breath You Take" constantly at their headquarters, because it's their corporate anthem.) They in turn contract it out to the NRA, who are essentially the best funded and most profitable of all the private armies on the planet.
I have a mixed reaction to this book. The premise is spot-on, and some of the wise-ass comedy is absolutely brilliant. On the down-side, and this is not necessary in a black-comic SF novel but it is often the case, the characters are very cartoon-y. I think Barry is trying to humanize Jennifer by giving her a child (the reason she is no longer married to evil John) and the usual single-parent struggle, and a beginnings of a love-life, but all it does is detract from her integrity as a character (rather than as a person) because he is not quite a good enough writer to pull that off. It might have been better to centre her character around devotion to the job and make her lonely and introspective. Also, I am not a big fan of slapstick, even in visual forms, and I find most attempts to write slapstick vaguely irritating. (The one exception being Thomas Pynchon, which is why I admire him so much.) But in all, the good outweighs the bad, and I would give this book an 8.5 out of 10 as SF and a 5 out of 10 as "Literature".
I am finally getting around to reviewing Jennifer Government, and what excellent timing, coming on the heels of the latest atrocity wrought by the US use of privatized paramilitaries (also known as mercenaries). It is the complete privatization of all "services" that could possibly be performed by the government that drives the plot of this small, frantically-paced, quirky SF novel, set in the usual near-future dystopia. But as near-future dystopias go, this one is the most believable yet, and the real likely result of current neo-con trends. Jennifer works for the government, true, just as Buy Mitsui works for Mitsui and Hack Nike works for Nike and Billy NRA - well, one of them does work for the NRA and the other one is pretending to, hence the confusion. But even though Jennifer's job with the government is tracking down and apprehending criminals (not that there's much one can do anymore that is criminal) she can only go to work if she gets funding, and that may have to come from the grief-stricken parents of a murder victim. Funding once acquired, she goes to work to uncover a brilliant new marketing strategy at Nike - mass murders of youths who have just purchased their $2,500 trainers (to raise the street cred, you see.) Jennifer thinks the style of this sounds familiar - sounds like her ex-husband, as a matter of fact. And so it is! John Nike, he is known as now. But it turns out that the killing was assigned to a soft little pleb named Hack Nike who contracted it out to The Police (TM) (who, in one of the novel's many comic touches, play "Every Breath You Take" constantly at their headquarters, because it's their corporate anthem.) They in turn contract it out to the NRA, who are essentially the best funded and most profitable of all the private armies on the planet.I have a mixed reaction to this book. The premise is spot-on, and some of the wise-ass comedy is absolutely brilliant. On the down-side, and this is not necessary in a black-comic SF novel but it is often the case, the characters are very cartoon-y. I think Barry is trying to humanize Jennifer by giving her a child (the reason she is no longer married to evil John) and the usual single-parent struggle, and a beginnings of a love-life, but all it does is detract from her integrity as a character (rather than as a person) because he is not quite a good enough writer to pull that off. It might have been better to centre her character around devotion to the job and make her lonely and introspective. Also, I am not a big fan of slapstick, even in visual forms, and I find most attempts to write slapstick vaguely irritating. (The one exception being Thomas Pynchon, which is why I admire him so much.) But in all, the good outweighs the bad, and I would give this book an 8.5 out of 10 as SF and a 5 out of 10 as "Literature".
2004-02-08
Cavedweller, by Dorothy Allison (Dorothy Allison Lite?)
I guess it was about twelve years ago at least that I read Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina. (Editor's Note: Now eighteen!) What an experience that was; it absolutely bowled me over. A few years later she came to Minneapolis to speak at the Amazon Women's Bookstore (no relation to the online outfit, which it pre-dated by two decades.) I think it was then that I bought Two or Three Things I Know For Sure, her book of essays which quickly became a classic of queer non-fiction, as her novel was of queer literature.
I was probably expecting more of the same in Cavedweller. Although there is some pain and guilt and a soap-opera worth of messed-up lives, and although it still has that ineffable ability to bring back my own Southern childhood and young adult days through subtle references to sounds and smells and plants and foods and places, it is just not in the same league as Bastard Out of Carolina. That might be A Good Thing, though, because I am sure a lot of people just couldn't quite take Bastard Out of Carolina; it was very raw and very real (largely autobiographical) and yet very alien to most people who, when they say they had a horrible childhood, don't quite mean the same thing as Dorothy Allison means. I love Dorothy Allison, and I will happily read anything she writes. But I think BOOC was a one-shot deal.
2004-01-25
A novel like a poem: If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things, by Jon McGregor
Editor's Note: At the time I wrote this, McGregor had no further novels, but now, nine years later, he does. Also, I am not sure if I knew when I wrote this that he was local, not to the town in Leicestershire where I lived, but to the city, Nottingham, where I worked, a city that started to almost feel like a hometown to me. He has come into the recognition I felt he deserved back then, and the novel is now referred to as "critically acclaimed" on Alibris.
The first, and so far, I believe, only novel by Jon McGregor, this is a book that needs more recognition. Reviewers liked it - a lot - and so did I. It is written in a poetic style like a long poem in blank verse. Many of the main characters in the story are never named but are referred to by the house number on the street where the "remarkable things" take place. The story is also like a Greek tragedy, in that almost all of the action takes place in a very short space of time, and on a single street in a typical Northern English city. The street is not a posh or fashionable one; most of the inhabitants are students or immigrants or disabled. There are children playing in the street, which doesn't happen so much in the upscale neighbourhoods. There are people making love in the afternoon, there are very old people who stand at the window and see what goes on in the street. This is an elegaic story, a story full of wonder and melancholy and miracles and disasters and minute observation of the everyday. It's not like any other novel you have ever read.
The first, and so far, I believe, only novel by Jon McGregor, this is a book that needs more recognition. Reviewers liked it - a lot - and so did I. It is written in a poetic style like a long poem in blank verse. Many of the main characters in the story are never named but are referred to by the house number on the street where the "remarkable things" take place. The story is also like a Greek tragedy, in that almost all of the action takes place in a very short space of time, and on a single street in a typical Northern English city. The street is not a posh or fashionable one; most of the inhabitants are students or immigrants or disabled. There are children playing in the street, which doesn't happen so much in the upscale neighbourhoods. There are people making love in the afternoon, there are very old people who stand at the window and see what goes on in the street. This is an elegaic story, a story full of wonder and melancholy and miracles and disasters and minute observation of the everyday. It's not like any other novel you have ever read.
Girl with a Pearl Earring, by Tracy Chevalier
Now a major motion picture, as they say. This was a very cinematic book, as other reviewers of the film have pointed out, and did really cry out to be made into a lovely movie. I haven't seen the movie, just read the book. It had a really authentic-seeming feel, in that as one read it, one felt immersed in this 17th century Dutch town culture, but do we really know what that was like? No, but it was convincing. A little less convincing were the motivations of the main character, Griet. What Chevalier has done with this book is to imagine a persona for the mysterious girl in the painting, of whom no one knows a thing - her age, name, relationship to the painter Vermeer if any. Of especial mystery is her clothing in the painting, which is not typical of any known style at the time. It is vaguely exotic-looking, yet the girl herself is anything but exotic, and is in fact most remarkable for her simplicity and quintessential pretty-young-Dutch-girl appearance. So Chevalier has imagined her as a teenaged maid, from a nice "middle-class" artisan family, forced into service because of her father's industrial accident, and thrust into a slightly alien Catholic household headed by a non-communicative painter and his troubled wife and dominating mother-in-law. All in all I had mixed feelings about the book. It was like a great painting of which you don't know enough; it seemed to promise more than it delivered somehow. And yet I have to give it points for realism, for that very reason: life is often mysterious and vaguely unsatifying, and this book is a hyper-realistic slice of life.2003-12-12
Princess Diana fictions
News.Scotsman.com, the online version of The Scotsman, has an article titled "If Diana had lived", which combines a review of a forthcoming book with more speculation on the meaning of the Diana phenomenon. This is undoubtedly a tie-in with the new public inquiry being conducted in Scotland, at the request of Mohamed al Fayed, into the car crash deaths of the Princess and al Fayed's son, Dodi. Mention is also made of the private investigation carried out by best-selling crime writer Patricia Cornwell, who revealed her findings on a TV show on ABC last October.Balmoral is first being published in serial form in the Talk of the Town Sunday magazine, and will be published in book form in spring 2004. The authors are Emma Tennant and Hilary Bailey, writing under the pseudonym of Isabel Vane.
This is a literary reference to an obvious precursor novel, East Lynne (Broadview Literary Texts), published 1860, in which the narrator/protagonist has that name; she is a "lost" mother who returns to her family home disguised as a governess to care for her two sons. In Balmoral, a nurse named Sister Julia, with a more than passing resemblance to the deceased princess, comes to Balmoral Castle to tend to an injured Prince Harry. The main thrust of the book is a critique of the current state of the British monarchy, and the authors call it a "fable" wherein Diana has not died, and returns, sans the trappings and traps of royalty, to finish the job of reforming the institution and shaking up the dysfunctional Windsor family. It is also a fond homage to the splendid old Victorian romance, including the practices of serialisation and mixing fantasy with true contemporary figures.
Update: Balmoral: The Novel is now available, if you're interested.
2003-11-16
New trends in crime novels?
Motherless Brooklyn, by Jonathan Lethem
It could be a new trend in detective stories, which have always tended to have a social criticism edge to them anyway (well, the good ones.) A PI or an amateur or an innocent fitted up for a crime is endowed with a little understood disability, which paradoxically gives him or her great advantage in solving the crime. In a way, it's not a new idea. Miss Marple springs to mind, the disability in this case being that she is old and single and thus subject to all kinds of stereotypical assumptions which prove untrue. And then the creation of PIs who are morbidly obese, female, black, quite old or quite young, as well as unlikely combinations, from "I Spy" (OK, they were spies, but the same idea) to Randall and Hopkirk (deceased) have captured the interests of viewers and readers and smashed stereotypes along with bigoted or just unimaginative villains.
Motherless Brooklyn (great title, don't you think?) is about Lionel Essrog, aka the Human Freak Show, who is not only motherless, but suffers from Tourette's Syndrome as well, putting him at the social bottom of his little gang of outsiders, a group of orphan boys employed by small-time Brooklyn hood, Frank Minna. Frank is murdered, and the gang tries to find out who done it and who else is in danger.
I have to confess I knew very little about Tourette's before reading this and it really raised my consciousness. I was running around trying to get everyone I know to read it, too, just because it was so well written.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, by Mark Haddon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time was short-listed for the Booker Prize. I won't review it because I have not read it yet (but mean to soon). It concerns Christopher, a boy with autism, who is obsessed with finding out who killed the next-door neighbour's dog with a pitch-fork. From the reviews I have read, it sounds like it has a lot in common with Motherless Brooklyn, including the compassionate attempt to glimpse the inner world of the "mentally different".
It could be a new trend in detective stories, which have always tended to have a social criticism edge to them anyway (well, the good ones.) A PI or an amateur or an innocent fitted up for a crime is endowed with a little understood disability, which paradoxically gives him or her great advantage in solving the crime. In a way, it's not a new idea. Miss Marple springs to mind, the disability in this case being that she is old and single and thus subject to all kinds of stereotypical assumptions which prove untrue. And then the creation of PIs who are morbidly obese, female, black, quite old or quite young, as well as unlikely combinations, from "I Spy" (OK, they were spies, but the same idea) to Randall and Hopkirk (deceased) have captured the interests of viewers and readers and smashed stereotypes along with bigoted or just unimaginative villains.
Motherless Brooklyn (great title, don't you think?) is about Lionel Essrog, aka the Human Freak Show, who is not only motherless, but suffers from Tourette's Syndrome as well, putting him at the social bottom of his little gang of outsiders, a group of orphan boys employed by small-time Brooklyn hood, Frank Minna. Frank is murdered, and the gang tries to find out who done it and who else is in danger.
I have to confess I knew very little about Tourette's before reading this and it really raised my consciousness. I was running around trying to get everyone I know to read it, too, just because it was so well written.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, by Mark Haddon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time was short-listed for the Booker Prize. I won't review it because I have not read it yet (but mean to soon). It concerns Christopher, a boy with autism, who is obsessed with finding out who killed the next-door neighbour's dog with a pitch-fork. From the reviews I have read, it sounds like it has a lot in common with Motherless Brooklyn, including the compassionate attempt to glimpse the inner world of the "mentally different".
An Excellent Con from Liza Cody
Gimme More, by Liza Cody
Liza Cody is mainly known for detective novels, the Anna Lee mysteries: Dupe, Bad Company, Head Case, Stalker, Under Contract and Backhand. This is one of a handful of other novels. It's an exciting and fast-paced con-game story about Birdie Walker, an aging but still attractive rock widow who has long-standing issues with record company moguls. The bigwigs are trying to enlist her input for a retrospective film about her deceased megastar husband, Jack. She is trying to protect something but it is not clear what. Her sister, her niece, and her one ally in the business, a sound engineer who has semi-retired to New Orleans, are all drawn into the scheming and mind-games. Then the corporate bad guys up the stakes by sending in a young, naive but ambitious chancer to act as a honeypot to Birdie's niece. In the end, it turns out to be sort of a detective story after all, and has a very gratifying surprise ending.2003-10-26
Two Crackers from Once Upon A Crime
Blog editor note: Nowadays, Lia Matera is a friend on Facebook. Although I still have not met her in person, and we can't go out for coffee together because we live a couple of thousand miles apart, we actually are as good friends as two can be on Facebook, chatting, cross-commenting, and liking a lot of the same things. I was really honored to have her accept me as a friend, given that I am "just a fan". But it's true, her books are some of my favorites amongst contemporary crime drama.
In a previous post, I bemoaned the lack of good, independent bookstores in most of Britain. Once Upon A Crime, in Minneapolis, is one of the type of bookstores I was thinking about. On my recent trip there for the birth of grand-daughter Savannah, I visited OUAC and purchased five books, reviews of which follow.
Bad Boy Brawly Brown, by Walter Mosley, is a book you will expect to be good if you are already familiar with Mosley's Easy Rawlins series. And it doesn't disappoint. The Easy Rawlins books are all in chronological order, so the story develops, society in multi-racial Los Angeles changes through the decades, and characters grow, change and in some cases die. This is the first novel after the death of Mouse, Easy's criminally violent but strangely endearing oldest friend. The ghost of Mouse haunts the story, plaguing Easy and giving him strength at the same time. This story takes place in the early 1970s, and concerns Easy's attempts to save a young boy from falling into a life of criminality through the strange politics of black power in that era. It is full of all the things you want in an Easy Rawlins story: tender family dramas and piercing sociological insights alternating with anatomically described fight scenes and thrilling car chases.
Star Witness, a Willa Jansson Mystery, by Lia Matera, is one in a series that is a personal favourite of mine. Willa Jansson is a lawyer with a colourful past. She is what we used to call a "red diaper baby"; her parents are 1960s radicals, her values are unashamedly leftist, and her heroes are secular and intellectual and revolutionary, like her parents. The early books in the series featured Willa working for a leading leftist lawyer and then, when he died in an early book, an idealistic legal cooperative. Now she works for a corporate firm, and so gets into those typical nineties-naughties conflicts of belief vs. livelihood. In this story, a bit of a departure, she gets roped into the world of alien abductees and conspiracy theorists, and gets herself tied up in some Gordian knots of legal ethics and personal responsibility. The thing that really shines about Lia Matera's books is the dialogue, both internal and external. I cannot recommend them highly enough.
In a previous post, I bemoaned the lack of good, independent bookstores in most of Britain. Once Upon A Crime, in Minneapolis, is one of the type of bookstores I was thinking about. On my recent trip there for the birth of grand-daughter Savannah, I visited OUAC and purchased five books, reviews of which follow.
Bad Boy Brawly Brown, by Walter Mosley, is a book you will expect to be good if you are already familiar with Mosley's Easy Rawlins series. And it doesn't disappoint. The Easy Rawlins books are all in chronological order, so the story develops, society in multi-racial Los Angeles changes through the decades, and characters grow, change and in some cases die. This is the first novel after the death of Mouse, Easy's criminally violent but strangely endearing oldest friend. The ghost of Mouse haunts the story, plaguing Easy and giving him strength at the same time. This story takes place in the early 1970s, and concerns Easy's attempts to save a young boy from falling into a life of criminality through the strange politics of black power in that era. It is full of all the things you want in an Easy Rawlins story: tender family dramas and piercing sociological insights alternating with anatomically described fight scenes and thrilling car chases.
Star Witness, a Willa Jansson Mystery, by Lia Matera, is one in a series that is a personal favourite of mine. Willa Jansson is a lawyer with a colourful past. She is what we used to call a "red diaper baby"; her parents are 1960s radicals, her values are unashamedly leftist, and her heroes are secular and intellectual and revolutionary, like her parents. The early books in the series featured Willa working for a leading leftist lawyer and then, when he died in an early book, an idealistic legal cooperative. Now she works for a corporate firm, and so gets into those typical nineties-naughties conflicts of belief vs. livelihood. In this story, a bit of a departure, she gets roped into the world of alien abductees and conspiracy theorists, and gets herself tied up in some Gordian knots of legal ethics and personal responsibility. The thing that really shines about Lia Matera's books is the dialogue, both internal and external. I cannot recommend them highly enough.
2003-10-25
Persia Cafe, by Melany Nielson
This is the fifth book that I bought at Once Upon A Crime in Minneapolis.
This is a mystery of sorts, but it features neither a cop nor a PI nor even an amateur investigator. But a crime occurs, what we would now call a hate crime, although in the time and place of the story - Mississippi in the 1960s - such a term did not exist. The principal character is a young white woman, Fannie Leary, who runs the Persia Cafe. At the start of the story, the Persia Cafe is the only place in town to eat out or even have coffee and it is patronised by whites only. The cook, of course, is black, and in the way of white families in the South, because she has worked for Fannie's family all her life, she is in the sort of relationship with them that I will not even try to describe, because you cannot understand it unless you experience it. This is the relationship that my ex-father-in-law and others of his ilk referred to when they said "We care for our nigras," in a tone and context that made it clear that "yankees" and outsiders cared not for their own nigras and were exposing them to harm. But if a black person did something to put himself outside their "protection", well, that is a relationship that it is also hard to understand, except in terms of pure evil, the natural predatory nature of the human beast coming out.
The main arc of this story is what used to happen when a white woman did something to put herself outside the protection of the Southern white men. Fannie does not quite declare herself a race traitor (as I did myself in the 1960s in suburban Atlanta, and if I had done the same in Mississippi, I may not have grown up to tell about it.) But her crime of omission is enough to get the Persia Cafe boycotted by the white community, so in a moment of supreme courage, she invites the black community to dinner at the cafe.
What we get at this point is a great picture of a small southern community on the cusp of change. Having lived through this era and this place, I can attest that the picture is accurate and believable. Oh, and Fannie solves the crime, too, the original crime, which does turn out to be murder. This is a great story, a cut above the genre.
This is a mystery of sorts, but it features neither a cop nor a PI nor even an amateur investigator. But a crime occurs, what we would now call a hate crime, although in the time and place of the story - Mississippi in the 1960s - such a term did not exist. The principal character is a young white woman, Fannie Leary, who runs the Persia Cafe. At the start of the story, the Persia Cafe is the only place in town to eat out or even have coffee and it is patronised by whites only. The cook, of course, is black, and in the way of white families in the South, because she has worked for Fannie's family all her life, she is in the sort of relationship with them that I will not even try to describe, because you cannot understand it unless you experience it. This is the relationship that my ex-father-in-law and others of his ilk referred to when they said "We care for our nigras," in a tone and context that made it clear that "yankees" and outsiders cared not for their own nigras and were exposing them to harm. But if a black person did something to put himself outside their "protection", well, that is a relationship that it is also hard to understand, except in terms of pure evil, the natural predatory nature of the human beast coming out.
The main arc of this story is what used to happen when a white woman did something to put herself outside the protection of the Southern white men. Fannie does not quite declare herself a race traitor (as I did myself in the 1960s in suburban Atlanta, and if I had done the same in Mississippi, I may not have grown up to tell about it.) But her crime of omission is enough to get the Persia Cafe boycotted by the white community, so in a moment of supreme courage, she invites the black community to dinner at the cafe.
What we get at this point is a great picture of a small southern community on the cusp of change. Having lived through this era and this place, I can attest that the picture is accurate and believable. Oh, and Fannie solves the crime, too, the original crime, which does turn out to be murder. This is a great story, a cut above the genre.
Two Women - A PI and A Vicar - Two Mysteries
Here are two more books that I bought at Once Upon A Crime in Minneapolis.
In the Bleak Midwinter, by Julia Spencer-Fleming, is a first crime novel, featuring one of those unlikely buddy pairs that can make detective stories either really entertaining or cringingly bad, depending mostly on the writer's skill with dialogue and narrative touch with relationships. (There is an obvious intention to start a "series" here, including a taster of the forthcoming second novel.) This writer is neither the best nor the worst I have encountered, but nearer the top than the bottom, so, so far so good. The pair is a newly appointed female Episcopalian priest and a married, male, non-religious local police chief. The scene is set to bring them together by a newborn baby being left in the church porch, and the attempts to find the mother, the father or the truth about what happened to them. Extra tension is added to the relationship by a small romantic attachment on both sides, and needs to be filled that are not being met by the wife on one hand or the vocation on the other. Not at all bad for a first timer.
The Big Dig, on the other hand, is one in a long-established and well-respected series by crime author Linda Barnes. The female PI, six-foot tall, red-headed, ex-cop Carlotta Carlyle of Boston, is very much in the V. I. Warshawski/Kinsey Mullhone vein. The Big Dig is a real project, the massive engineering feat of putting all the freeways in downtown Boston underground, the "central artery tunnel", which is the largest modern engineering project in the world. And a great setting for a mysterious death that may be a murder.
In the Bleak Midwinter, by Julia Spencer-Fleming, is a first crime novel, featuring one of those unlikely buddy pairs that can make detective stories either really entertaining or cringingly bad, depending mostly on the writer's skill with dialogue and narrative touch with relationships. (There is an obvious intention to start a "series" here, including a taster of the forthcoming second novel.) This writer is neither the best nor the worst I have encountered, but nearer the top than the bottom, so, so far so good. The pair is a newly appointed female Episcopalian priest and a married, male, non-religious local police chief. The scene is set to bring them together by a newborn baby being left in the church porch, and the attempts to find the mother, the father or the truth about what happened to them. Extra tension is added to the relationship by a small romantic attachment on both sides, and needs to be filled that are not being met by the wife on one hand or the vocation on the other. Not at all bad for a first timer.
The Big Dig, on the other hand, is one in a long-established and well-respected series by crime author Linda Barnes. The female PI, six-foot tall, red-headed, ex-cop Carlotta Carlyle of Boston, is very much in the V. I. Warshawski/Kinsey Mullhone vein. The Big Dig is a real project, the massive engineering feat of putting all the freeways in downtown Boston underground, the "central artery tunnel", which is the largest modern engineering project in the world. And a great setting for a mysterious death that may be a murder.
2003-10-12
Too Posh to Pluck - the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire's Cookery Book
(Blog editor note - when I wrote this review in 2003, she was still the Duchess of Devonshire, residing in the big house called Chatsworth. Since then, her husband the Duke passed on and their son inherited, and she now lives in the small dower house. She is now in her 90s and a bit of a recluse, after having had to fend off an enamored stalker when she was a late-80-something widow! One of the things not mentioned here, because most Brits either know this or don't give a toss, is that she was Deborah Mitford, the youngest of the famous Mitford girls. By the way, she has also since becoming the Dowager Duchess written a very charming autobiography.)
I really shouldn't have this in my book reviews at all; for one thing, it's more of a tourist attraction than a book, and for another, I haven't read it. But I just read Lynn Barber's very amusing review of it, and interview with the Duchess, in the Observer Food Monthly, and it made me want to look into it. The first paragraph will give you a flavour:
"It is quite thrilling for me to meet someone who knows even less about cooking than I do - especially when she is publishing her very own cookery book. The Duchess of Devonshire - for it is she - actually begins her Chatsworth Cookery Book with the words 'I haven't cooked since the war'. She says she would have liked to make that the title, but the publishers wouldn't agree. Her friend, the hairdresser in Chesterfield, told her that her writing a cookery book was 'a bit rich!' but of course it will be - being by the Duchess, it will sell like hot cakes."
There is a recipe in the book for Oeufs Mollet which the Duchess, when pressed, chooses as her personal favourite. It is a dish she was "brought up on". (Her mother, Lady Readesdale, was an avid cook and an early health food advocate, and this was one of her mother's standards.) The dish is very simple, poached eggs with fried capers and parsley, basically, but here is what Her Grace has to say about it:
"Well it's soft, you know.' What? 'Like a hard-boiled egg only soft, and you take the shell off - quite tricky sometimes. I don't think you or I could do it! And then you put butter and fried capers." Ah, bless. Is it really possible that an 80-something year old woman, who raises prize chickens and has dined in all the best houses of the world, whose own house is one of the best in the world, and who went to the Cordon Bleu (admittedly sixty years ago) does not recognise and know the term for a poached egg?
By the way, I stole the above title from the Observer review.
But even though the Duchess got most of these recipes from her cook or in some cases, her friends' cooks or the cooks for her wildly successful farm shop at Chatsworth, I think this is a good cookbook for those who like really posh food (that would be me too, reverse snob though I am) or for those who just like reading about really posh food (also me.)
I really shouldn't have this in my book reviews at all; for one thing, it's more of a tourist attraction than a book, and for another, I haven't read it. But I just read Lynn Barber's very amusing review of it, and interview with the Duchess, in the Observer Food Monthly, and it made me want to look into it. The first paragraph will give you a flavour:
"It is quite thrilling for me to meet someone who knows even less about cooking than I do - especially when she is publishing her very own cookery book. The Duchess of Devonshire - for it is she - actually begins her Chatsworth Cookery Book with the words 'I haven't cooked since the war'. She says she would have liked to make that the title, but the publishers wouldn't agree. Her friend, the hairdresser in Chesterfield, told her that her writing a cookery book was 'a bit rich!' but of course it will be - being by the Duchess, it will sell like hot cakes."
There is a recipe in the book for Oeufs Mollet which the Duchess, when pressed, chooses as her personal favourite. It is a dish she was "brought up on". (Her mother, Lady Readesdale, was an avid cook and an early health food advocate, and this was one of her mother's standards.) The dish is very simple, poached eggs with fried capers and parsley, basically, but here is what Her Grace has to say about it:
"Well it's soft, you know.' What? 'Like a hard-boiled egg only soft, and you take the shell off - quite tricky sometimes. I don't think you or I could do it! And then you put butter and fried capers." Ah, bless. Is it really possible that an 80-something year old woman, who raises prize chickens and has dined in all the best houses of the world, whose own house is one of the best in the world, and who went to the Cordon Bleu (admittedly sixty years ago) does not recognise and know the term for a poached egg?
By the way, I stole the above title from the Observer review.
But even though the Duchess got most of these recipes from her cook or in some cases, her friends' cooks or the cooks for her wildly successful farm shop at Chatsworth, I think this is a good cookbook for those who like really posh food (that would be me too, reverse snob though I am) or for those who just like reading about really posh food (also me.)
2003-10-04
Bringing Out the Dead, by Joe Connelly
Let me make it clear that this is not a movie review; in fact, I haven't seen the movie. (Well, I hadn't when I wrote this review back in 2003, but I did see it about seven years later on TV.) But I did picture it in my head as a movie (with Nicholas Cage, indeed) all the time I was reading it. In fact, this is an almost autobiographical novel, and the author, from his picture on the back, looks enough like Nicholas Cage to make it all plausible. The writing is in some ways very cinematographic, but I doubt that quite all the inner action - the fantasies, hallucinations, bizarre metaphors for the way the first-person narrator/protagonist was feeling - would have been portrayed in the film.
I found this book to be like the bastard son of The Crying of Lot 49 (the mother) and Naked Lunch (the father). Which is high praise, coming from me. Yet the romantic in me, the old-fashioned romantic who shouldn't like Burroughs and Pynchon as much as I do, wanted Frank to get the girl. And I almost didn't care which girl, whether it was Mona (recently departed wife) or Mary (ex-junkie daughter of the man who takes the whole book to die from a heart-attack) or even Rose (deceased asthma patient who haunts Frank's night-shift days.) But, you know, he didn't. Or maybe he did.
I found this book to be like the bastard son of The Crying of Lot 49 (the mother) and Naked Lunch (the father). Which is high praise, coming from me. Yet the romantic in me, the old-fashioned romantic who shouldn't like Burroughs and Pynchon as much as I do, wanted Frank to get the girl. And I almost didn't care which girl, whether it was Mona (recently departed wife) or Mary (ex-junkie daughter of the man who takes the whole book to die from a heart-attack) or even Rose (deceased asthma patient who haunts Frank's night-shift days.) But, you know, he didn't. Or maybe he did.
2003-09-21
Two obscure British mysteries
For some reason I ended up reading two little-known British detective stories, both from the Nottingham Public Library, both set in the late Victorian period. [rant mode on] It annoys me no end that books like these are not available in ordinary bookstores, at least not if you don't already know about them and want them enough to order them. All the bookstores in the UK seem to be clones of one horrible bookstore, with five hundred copies of the latest Harry Potter, and lots of books about sports that I care nothing about, and loads of celebrity chef cookbooks. (And in fact I like celebrity chef cookbooks, but I don't like depressing bookstores with nothing of interest to browse.) In other words, I rarely go into even a large "good" bookstore in the UK (like Waterstones) and FIND SOMETHING, as in something that I haven't heard of before but that I am compelled to buy and read. In some ways that's good - I spend less money impulse buying, but, look, I am going to read the same amount anyway, I am just enjoying it less. [rant mode off]
The Detective Wore Silk Drawers (Peter Lovesey) refers to boxing shorts (I thought it was going to have some erotic element to it, but any that it has is only incidental to the plot.) It is quite interesting though, and you learn a lot about the sport of bare-knuckle fighting which was made illegal in the UK in the 1870s but persisted for a long time after. You also learn the origins of such expressions as "come up to scratch" and "throw in the sponge" and "throw his hat in the ring".
I didn't realise that An Orkney Murder, by Alanna Knight, was also set in late Victorian times until I started reading it. It features a way-ahead-of-her-time Scottish female private investigator. It also features an archaeological dig in the Orkneys and dark domestic secrets in a Scottish family. In the end, I got rather irritated at this book, for a reason that often applies when I am reading novels by contemporary writers set in the Victorian period. They just sound far too contemporary and therefore anachronistic. It is always a problem when writing a story set in the past to know how the people would sound, their diction, their colloquialisms, their social markers, all that. The bigger problem with a Victorian setting is that there are so many wonderful extant Victorian writers. I have read so much Conan Doyle, Dickens, Trollope and the like, not to mention my favourite childhood novels Little Women and Black Beauty, which I must have read 100 times each, that it is a very rare historical novel from that period that doesn't sound horribly false to me. But this one was egregiously so. But if you don't have my problem, you may be able to enjoy it, if only for the plot (which was only pretty good) and the main character.
The Lovesey book was, for me, a far better read, even though I have little interest in the Victorian London underworld and bare-knuckle fighting, and lots of interest in Victorian Orkney and archaeology and women private detectives. Just goes to show what a huge difference writing style, careful research and natural talent can make.
Update from 2013: I just finished another Peter Lovesey book featuring the same detectives. It's called Wobble To Death and centers around the sport of marathon walking. These bizarre sporting events featured men getting around a track as fast as they could for as many hours per day as they could in a period of six continuous days. They all start at the same time and finish at the same time, and whoever finishes and has the most total miles logged wins.
The Detective Wore Silk Drawers (Peter Lovesey) refers to boxing shorts (I thought it was going to have some erotic element to it, but any that it has is only incidental to the plot.) It is quite interesting though, and you learn a lot about the sport of bare-knuckle fighting which was made illegal in the UK in the 1870s but persisted for a long time after. You also learn the origins of such expressions as "come up to scratch" and "throw in the sponge" and "throw his hat in the ring".
I didn't realise that An Orkney Murder, by Alanna Knight, was also set in late Victorian times until I started reading it. It features a way-ahead-of-her-time Scottish female private investigator. It also features an archaeological dig in the Orkneys and dark domestic secrets in a Scottish family. In the end, I got rather irritated at this book, for a reason that often applies when I am reading novels by contemporary writers set in the Victorian period. They just sound far too contemporary and therefore anachronistic. It is always a problem when writing a story set in the past to know how the people would sound, their diction, their colloquialisms, their social markers, all that. The bigger problem with a Victorian setting is that there are so many wonderful extant Victorian writers. I have read so much Conan Doyle, Dickens, Trollope and the like, not to mention my favourite childhood novels Little Women and Black Beauty, which I must have read 100 times each, that it is a very rare historical novel from that period that doesn't sound horribly false to me. But this one was egregiously so. But if you don't have my problem, you may be able to enjoy it, if only for the plot (which was only pretty good) and the main character.
The Lovesey book was, for me, a far better read, even though I have little interest in the Victorian London underworld and bare-knuckle fighting, and lots of interest in Victorian Orkney and archaeology and women private detectives. Just goes to show what a huge difference writing style, careful research and natural talent can make.
Update from 2013: I just finished another Peter Lovesey book featuring the same detectives. It's called Wobble To Death and centers around the sport of marathon walking. These bizarre sporting events featured men getting around a track as fast as they could for as many hours per day as they could in a period of six continuous days. They all start at the same time and finish at the same time, and whoever finishes and has the most total miles logged wins.
2003-08-18
American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
Mythology, fantasy, an adventure story, an allegory. A young man named Shadow went to prison, mainly to protect his beloved wife Laura from being implicated in the crime she planned and he unwillingly participated in. Just before he is to be released, Laura dies in a car crash, along with his "best friend".
Shadow is only out of prison a short time when a mysterious but compelling older man named Mr. Wednesday latches onto him, doing him favours, but also setting him extremely difficult tasks. Through Mr. Wednesday, Shadow meets more bizarre characters, many of whom have the strange character traits of Mr. Wednesday. Gradually, Shadow figures out that they are gods, gods who have followed their worshippers to America, only to find that their religions fade away or are absorbed into the folk traditions of American life.
If you liked Sandman, you will definitely like this. It has the feeling of some of the more compelling sub-plots in Sandman, but is developed fully as a novel. Very highly recommended. Also, you can read long complex discussion threads about this and other Neil Gaiman works at the message boards on Neil Gaiman's Journal.
NB: These are still the British blog originals, so please excuse the spelling.
2013 Update: They are making a film of this book. I know nothing more for now.
Shadow is only out of prison a short time when a mysterious but compelling older man named Mr. Wednesday latches onto him, doing him favours, but also setting him extremely difficult tasks. Through Mr. Wednesday, Shadow meets more bizarre characters, many of whom have the strange character traits of Mr. Wednesday. Gradually, Shadow figures out that they are gods, gods who have followed their worshippers to America, only to find that their religions fade away or are absorbed into the folk traditions of American life.
If you liked Sandman, you will definitely like this. It has the feeling of some of the more compelling sub-plots in Sandman, but is developed fully as a novel. Very highly recommended. Also, you can read long complex discussion threads about this and other Neil Gaiman works at the message boards on Neil Gaiman's Journal.
NB: These are still the British blog originals, so please excuse the spelling.
2013 Update: They are making a film of this book. I know nothing more for now.
2003-08-11
A very sad novel that may make you laugh a lot - Everything Is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer
Another first novel written in a funny dialect! But it is much more than that. Jonathan Safran Foer's first novel concerns a journey through the Ukraine by a young man named Jonathan Safran Foer. He is trying to find the Ukrainian woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. The main narrator of the story is Alex, a Ukrainian teenager. Also on the trip are Alex's grandfather Alex and a flatulent dog named Sammy Davis Jr. Jr.
Alex's prose style, in his letters to Jonathan after the trip, which carry the main weight of the story, is quite controversial amongst readers and reviewers, most finding it a bit too much. I was annoyed by it at first but it began to grow on me.
Interspersed with the main story of the trip are excerpts from the magical realist novel that Jonathan is writing, which is based on old historic legends about the now non-existent village where his grandfather lived, and Alex's commentary on the fragments of the novel. There are a lot of secrets and mysteries in the stories, and Alex's grandfather Alex seems to hold the key to them. But he is unable to remember, let alone talk about, what he knows.
This really is an unmissable novel, and one that you may want to re-read several times.
Alex's prose style, in his letters to Jonathan after the trip, which carry the main weight of the story, is quite controversial amongst readers and reviewers, most finding it a bit too much. I was annoyed by it at first but it began to grow on me.
Interspersed with the main story of the trip are excerpts from the magical realist novel that Jonathan is writing, which is based on old historic legends about the now non-existent village where his grandfather lived, and Alex's commentary on the fragments of the novel. There are a lot of secrets and mysteries in the stories, and Alex's grandfather Alex seems to hold the key to them. But he is unable to remember, let alone talk about, what he knows.
This really is an unmissable novel, and one that you may want to re-read several times.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)