Janet's bookshelf: all en-US Sun, 20 Apr 2025 16:44:34 -0700 60 Janet's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg <![CDATA[Advise and Consent (Advise and Consent)]]> 159346
"I can recall no other novel in which there is so well presented a president's dilemma when his awful responsibility for the nation's interest conflicts with a personal code of good morals." (The New York Times)]]> 616 Allen Drury 0380010070 Janet 5 read-years-ago 4.08 1959 Advise and Consent (Advise and Consent)
author: Allen Drury
name: Janet
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1959
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/04/20
shelves: read-years-ago
review:
I have been thinking a lot about this novel these days, think it's time for a return. An exciting, engaging political novel against the backdrop of the workings of American government--how the power of one branch is moderated by the power of another. Centers upon the nomination of a new Secretary of State. Won the Pulitzer Prize in 1960.
]]> For Whom the Bell Tolls 46170 For Whom the Bell Tolls. The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal. In his portrayal of Jordan's love for the beautiful Maria and his superb account of El Sordo's last stand, in his brilliant travesty of La Pasionaria and his unwillingness to believe in blind faith, Hemingway surpasses his achievement in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms to create a work at once rare and beautiful, strong and brutal, compassionate, moving and wise. "If the function of a writer is to reveal reality," Maxwell Perkins wrote to Hemingway after reading the manuscript, "no one ever so completely performed it." Greater in power, broader in scope, and more intensely emotional than any of the author's previous works, it stands as one of the best war novels of all time.]]> 471 Ernest Hemingway Janet 5 read-years-ago 3.98 1940 For Whom the Bell Tolls
author: Ernest Hemingway
name: Janet
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1940
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/04/20
shelves: read-years-ago
review:
Taking place during the Spanish Civil War, an arena which should be more familiar to us--1935, the great run-up to the fascist takeover of Europe. Also touches on the questionable participation of Soviet Russia, whose aims were somewhat different than that of the Spanish Republicans and the idealistic Americans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. A fine love story too. Gets us out of the self-impressed Hemingway, more like A Call To Arms.
]]> The Extinction of Irena Rey 172979818 From the International Booker Prize–winning translator and Women's Prize finalist, a propulsive, beguiling novel about eight translators and their search for a world-renowned author who goes missing in a primeval Polish forest.

Eight translators arrive at a house in a forest on the border of Belarus. It belongs to the world-renowned author Irena Rey, and they are there to translate her magnum opus, Gray Eminence. But within days of their arrival, Irena disappears without a trace.

The translators, who hail from eight different countries but share the same reverence for their beloved author, begin to investigate where she may have gone while proceeding with work on her masterpiece. They explore this ancient wooded refuge with its intoxicating slime molds and lichens, and study her exotic belongings and layered texts for clues. But doing so reveals secrets � and deceptions � of Irena Rey's that they are utterly unprepared for. Forced to face their differences as they grow increasingly paranoid in this fever dream of isolation and obsession, soon the translators are tangled up in a web of rivalries and desire, threatening not only their work but the fate of their beloved author herself.

This hilarious, thought-provoking second outing by award-winning translator and author Jennifer Croft is a brilliant examination of art, celebrity, the natural world, and the power of language. It is an unforgettable, unputdownable adventure with a small but global cast of characters shaken by the shocks of love, destruction, and creation in one of Europe’s last great wildernesses.]]> 320 Jennifer Croft 1639731709 Janet 5
Gorgeous and audacious, with fascinating insights on environmental degradation as well as the process of translation, the personalities behind the people who literally write (rewrite) every word of a novel. Croft is herself a noted translator from both Spanish and Polish--she is the translator of Nobelist's Olga Tokarczuk's "Flights" and "The Books of Jacob", as well as author of her beautiful autofictional memoir "Homesick".


]]> 3.18 2024 The Extinction of Irena Rey
author: Jennifer Croft
name: Janet
average rating: 3.18
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/04/20
shelves:
review:
Loved this book about a group of translators, translating a famous and mysterious Polish novelist into eight different languages, all staying in a house together in the deep primeval Bialoweiza Forest of eastern Poland--the last unlogged ancient forest in Europe--to translate their novelist's (and their devotion to her is extreme, cult like) latest work. As work is beginning, the revered novelist disappears, and all hell breaks out among the translators, each known only as their language--"English", "Spanish" and so on.

Gorgeous and audacious, with fascinating insights on environmental degradation as well as the process of translation, the personalities behind the people who literally write (rewrite) every word of a novel. Croft is herself a noted translator from both Spanish and Polish--she is the translator of Nobelist's Olga Tokarczuk's "Flights" and "The Books of Jacob", as well as author of her beautiful autofictional memoir "Homesick".



]]> Aflame: Learning from Silence 211399655 From the bestselling author of The Art of Stillness, a revelatory exploration of the abiding clarity and calm to be found in quiet retreat

Pico Iyer has made more than one hundred retreats over the past three decades to a small Benedictine hermitage high above the sea in Big Sur, California. He’s not a Christian—or a member of any religious group—but his life has been transformed by these periods of time spent in silence. That silence reminds him of what is essential and awakens a joy that nothing can efface. It’s not just freedom from distraction and noise and it’s a reminder of some deeper truths he misplaced along the way.

In Aflame, Iyer connects with inner stillness and joy in his many seasons at the monastery, even as his life is going through constant a house burns down, a parent dies, a daughter is diagnosed with cancer. He shares the revelations he experiences, alongside wisdom from other nonmonastics who have learned from adversity and inwardness. And most profoundly, he shows how solitude can be a training in community and companionship. In so doing, he offers a unique outsider’s view of monastic life—and of a group of selfless souls who have dedicated their days to ensuring there’s a space for quiet and recollection that’s open to us all.

Radiant, intimate, and gripping, Aflame offers ageless counsel about the power of silence and what it can teach us about how to live, how to love, and, ultimately, how to die.]]> 234 Pico Iyer 0593420306 Janet 0 to-read 3.86 Aflame: Learning from Silence
author: Pico Iyer
name: Janet
average rating: 3.86
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[City of Glass (The New York Trilogy, #1)]]> 432 City of Glass inaugurates an intriguing New York Trilogy of novels that The Washington Post Book World has classified as "post-existentialist private eye... It's as if Kafka has gotten hooked on the gumshoe game and penned his own ever-spiraling version." As a result of a strange phone call in the middle of the night, Quinn, a writer of detective stories, becomes enmeshed in a case more puzzling than any he might have written. Written with hallucinatory clarity, City of Glass combines dark humor with Hitchcock-like suspense.

Ghosts and The Locked Room are the next two brilliant installments in Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy.

]]> 203 Paul Auster 0140097317 Janet 2
I like when a character assumes the identity of another, and Quinn, the protagonist, finally decides to become Paul Auster, detective, and arrives at the caller's apartment--and is told, for many pages, in a fragmented engaging manner, about his strange client, a man kept in a dark room for years by his professor father who is trying to recreate the original language of man, the language of Babel. He believes the father is going to return to kill him off. Now we're cooking, I thought to myself.

But it's downhill from there. Quinn, faux Auster, meets the train where the father is coming back to New York after a prolonged stint in the mental hospital. There are two men, both of whom could be the father. Quinn picks the. more disheveled of the two, follows him around, he doesn't do much, and ditto the book. It follows Quinn's descent into obsession and the complete loss of self and material life--with a quick stop at the apartment of the 'real' Auster.

And then it turns out--well, no spoilers, but let's just say I hate movies that end 'it was all a dream.' and this is the metafictional version of that. Some here clearly adored that, but to me, drawn into a promising novel only to find a shaggy dog story was highly disappointing, though the writing was always good and observations excellent. There was a bit of a Pynchonesque moment (Lot 49) where Quinn graphs the father's wanderings and finds he's spelling out a key obsession--but after that, not much. To me it seemed like a writer not knowing what to do with the world he's created. Not Borgesian--who knew how to tie up his fictions in an emotionally satisfying way. Auster presents some interesting problems, but doesn't really crack them open--just glimpses them in passing. Not for me.]]> 3.79 1985 City of Glass (The New York Trilogy, #1)
author: Paul Auster
name: Janet
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1985
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/17
date added: 2025/04/17
shelves:
review:
This is not my first Auster. I enjoyed the rather more realist Sunset Park and the intriguing Leviathan. But I'd tried on several occasions to start City of Glass, and the first pages always bounced me out. The tone, the announcement that there was a man, a writer, whose story we weren't going to get into because the author isn't interested in him, who was divorced from his own life? No, it was because the mysterious call for a detective named Paul Auster. I dislike that metafictional tool, the author of the book as a character in the book. It announces, 'I am going to be very very clever here." But for some reason--probably because I'd recently returned from New York and had the streets and squares very firmly in my mind, as Auster doesn't so much describe New York as name-check streets, Grand Central station and so on-- however, this time, I settled in.

I like when a character assumes the identity of another, and Quinn, the protagonist, finally decides to become Paul Auster, detective, and arrives at the caller's apartment--and is told, for many pages, in a fragmented engaging manner, about his strange client, a man kept in a dark room for years by his professor father who is trying to recreate the original language of man, the language of Babel. He believes the father is going to return to kill him off. Now we're cooking, I thought to myself.

But it's downhill from there. Quinn, faux Auster, meets the train where the father is coming back to New York after a prolonged stint in the mental hospital. There are two men, both of whom could be the father. Quinn picks the. more disheveled of the two, follows him around, he doesn't do much, and ditto the book. It follows Quinn's descent into obsession and the complete loss of self and material life--with a quick stop at the apartment of the 'real' Auster.

And then it turns out--well, no spoilers, but let's just say I hate movies that end 'it was all a dream.' and this is the metafictional version of that. Some here clearly adored that, but to me, drawn into a promising novel only to find a shaggy dog story was highly disappointing, though the writing was always good and observations excellent. There was a bit of a Pynchonesque moment (Lot 49) where Quinn graphs the father's wanderings and finds he's spelling out a key obsession--but after that, not much. To me it seemed like a writer not knowing what to do with the world he's created. Not Borgesian--who knew how to tie up his fictions in an emotionally satisfying way. Auster presents some interesting problems, but doesn't really crack them open--just glimpses them in passing. Not for me.
]]> The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle 11275
In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife's missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo. As these searches intersect, Okada encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute; a malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid sixteen-year-old-girl; and an aging war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria.

Gripping, prophetic, suffused with comedy and menace, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force equal in scope to the masterpieces of Mishima and Pynchon.]]> 607 Haruki Murakami 0965341984 Janet 0 currently-reading 4.16 1994 The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Janet
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1994
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/14
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Before the Coffee Gets Cold (Before the Coffee Gets Cold, #1)]]> 44421460 What would you change if you could go back in time?

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.

In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer's, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.

But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . . .

Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s beautiful, moving story explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?]]> 213 Toshikazu Kawaguchi 1529029589 Janet 0 currently-reading 3.66 2015 Before the Coffee Gets Cold (Before the Coffee Gets Cold, #1)
author: Toshikazu Kawaguchi
name: Janet
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/13
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> Train Dreams 12991188 116 Denis Johnson 1250007658 Janet 4
In some ways it reminded me of Suttree by Cormac McCarthy, a very big incident filled book--this guy would have looked on at McCarthy's characters and just gone about his business. His West, which was still a-building--still railroad camps and horse-drawn wagons, wolves and strange tales, both the opposite of a book like Jesus' Son--that world of fuckups--and yet with the same shorthanded style. Worth reading.]]> 3.91 2002 Train Dreams
author: Denis Johnson
name: Janet
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2002
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/09
date added: 2025/04/09
shelves:
review:
Funny, I love Denis Johnson and generally adore a novella, was expecting to go through the roof on this one. Not so much. A man in the Panhandle of Idaho, up by the Canadian border, lives an entire an old-fashioned life in a blurry matter of fact way after a few strange or unsettling incidents which are just briefly touched upon. A quiet man's quiet life, all lived along the train routes. working as a logger, working the railroad, builds his own cabin, gets burned out, works as a hauler, that's about it.

In some ways it reminded me of Suttree by Cormac McCarthy, a very big incident filled book--this guy would have looked on at McCarthy's characters and just gone about his business. His West, which was still a-building--still railroad camps and horse-drawn wagons, wolves and strange tales, both the opposite of a book like Jesus' Son--that world of fuckups--and yet with the same shorthanded style. Worth reading.
]]> Perfection 225025440 120 Vincenzo Latronico 1804271047 Janet 0 to-read 3.92 2022 Perfection
author: Vincenzo Latronico
name: Janet
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now]]> 38122464
In Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now Jaron Lanier draws on his insider's expertise to explain precisely how social media works and why its cruel and dangerous effects are at the heart of its current business model and design. As well as offering ten simple arguments for liberating yourself from its addictive hold, his witty and urgent manifesto outlines a vision for an alternative that provides all the benefits of social media without the harm. nicer person in the process.]]> 146 Jaron Lanier 125019668X Janet 5 philosophy-essay-criticism
Lanier, with his white guy dreads and pale eyes, is a noticeable figure on the tech scene, having contributed to the development of many of these BUMMER platforms in the early internet days. He knows how it came about and why it has become so pernicious. In the current era, as Elon Musk's Silicon Valley factotums are inside the government breaking things in Washington, I needed to go back into the unfolding of tech world and understand how we got here and where it is going.

This small book is quite the education. I only wish we had 'media literacy' programs in our schools as they do in Finland--this could be the first textbook.

Lanier's first argument against Social Media is interestingly, about cats. It's called "You Are Losing your Free Will." Dogs do what they're trained to do, they take to training, we have domesticated them. In relation to social media, we're dogs. We have been trained. We respond to 'dog whistles'. Cats on the other hand, are random. They pick and choose. they refuse to behave on cue. You can't train a cat. Where Social Media is all about getting us to click more often, to depend upon it more and more--Lanier suggests we should try to be more like cats. Where BUMMER uses the term "engagement", Lanier convincingly argues that "addiction" is more accurate. BUMMER is designed to be addictive through behavior modification methods--the dopamine rush, variable reward, plus the punishment of erasure, peer pressure, 'likes' and so on. anyone who has posted something and. no one 'liked' it, that feeling, has felt the stick. Or the little dopamine reward of the 'like'--it makes us post more, so we can get more of that dopamine carrot.

What BUMMER wants is more "engagement," more addiction. and it studies the user to see what causes greater engagement. And the algorithm, tracking your every move on BUMMER, has discovered that negative feedback turns out to be more efficient in getting those clicks. Fear is faster. Anger is faster. It's not that BUMMER is full of evil programmers--it's that the algorithm has discovered a glitch in human behavior, that it naturally exploits for efficiency's sake.

So it studies your data and feeds you more things to make you irritable, sad, fearful and upset. Making people feel bad is more "engaging" than making them feel good. Hence, more profitable.

Corporations, foreign agents, bad actors, conmen etc. hire BUMMER to modify the user to their own ends.

this is not a self-help approach to social media--dieting, limiting time, using site blockers and so on. This is an examination of the underpinnings and history of the working of the BUMMER machine.

Here are his arguments, each well-supported with data and context, and full of surprises for someone who thought they were pretty media literate.
"Argument Two: Quitting social Media is the most finely targeted way to resist the insanity of our times."
"Argument Three: Social media is making you into an asshole."
"Argument Four: Social media is undermining truth."
"Argument Five: Social media is making what you say meaningless."
"Argument Six: Social. media is destroying your capacity for empathy."
"Argument Seven: Social media is making you unhappy."
"Argument Eight: Social media doesn't want you to have economic dignity."
"Argument Nine: Social media is making politics impossible."
"Argument Ten: Social media hates your soul."

Argument Nine was the biggest shocker, truly repulsive. It takes a look at the BUMMER manipulation behind the subversion of Black Lives Matter movement from the truly incredible use of social media to spread consciousness/conscience about the deaths of black people at the hands of police to targeting those same people, bombarding them with posts specifically to denigrate Hilary Clinton in their eyes, to increase hopelessness and irritation, with the purpose of turning BLM supporters away from supporting Clinton in the 2016 election and increasing likelihood of them not voting at all. Absolutely chilling.

The thing is, BUMMER doesn't care if it's left or right, black people or white people, what it wants is to irritate everybody, push them into groups they never expected to be part of, make them more and more extreme so they click more. But the people who pay to 'advertise' to those roiled masses--be it conmen or bad actors--are paying for access to the behavior modification, where then they can supply the content.

I have not gone on Facebook since reading this. I'm going to be a cat, occasionally dipping in here and there, but I'm breaking my engagement with BUMMER. I've re-subscribed to Wired, will stick to actual news sources, accessed directly, for my news--and look forward to reading everything this guy writes.









]]> 3.63 2018 Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
author: Jaron Lanier
name: Janet
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/08
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: philosophy-essay-criticism
review:
This is one of those books I began telling everyone I knew about before I was even finished. Now I have to go back and try to digest Lanier's stunning ideas/experience with the real structure of social media like Facebook, X, Google and so on--for which he uses the acronym "BUMMER" (quite appropriately)--as in "The Bummer Machine"--which is selling, not communication and community, but behavior modification in its users. Sold, not to the users, but to third parties. They are the customers, not us. We are the ones being altered. Without us even knowing it. He coins BUMMER--"Behaviors of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent."

Lanier, with his white guy dreads and pale eyes, is a noticeable figure on the tech scene, having contributed to the development of many of these BUMMER platforms in the early internet days. He knows how it came about and why it has become so pernicious. In the current era, as Elon Musk's Silicon Valley factotums are inside the government breaking things in Washington, I needed to go back into the unfolding of tech world and understand how we got here and where it is going.

This small book is quite the education. I only wish we had 'media literacy' programs in our schools as they do in Finland--this could be the first textbook.

Lanier's first argument against Social Media is interestingly, about cats. It's called "You Are Losing your Free Will." Dogs do what they're trained to do, they take to training, we have domesticated them. In relation to social media, we're dogs. We have been trained. We respond to 'dog whistles'. Cats on the other hand, are random. They pick and choose. they refuse to behave on cue. You can't train a cat. Where Social Media is all about getting us to click more often, to depend upon it more and more--Lanier suggests we should try to be more like cats. Where BUMMER uses the term "engagement", Lanier convincingly argues that "addiction" is more accurate. BUMMER is designed to be addictive through behavior modification methods--the dopamine rush, variable reward, plus the punishment of erasure, peer pressure, 'likes' and so on. anyone who has posted something and. no one 'liked' it, that feeling, has felt the stick. Or the little dopamine reward of the 'like'--it makes us post more, so we can get more of that dopamine carrot.

What BUMMER wants is more "engagement," more addiction. and it studies the user to see what causes greater engagement. And the algorithm, tracking your every move on BUMMER, has discovered that negative feedback turns out to be more efficient in getting those clicks. Fear is faster. Anger is faster. It's not that BUMMER is full of evil programmers--it's that the algorithm has discovered a glitch in human behavior, that it naturally exploits for efficiency's sake.

So it studies your data and feeds you more things to make you irritable, sad, fearful and upset. Making people feel bad is more "engaging" than making them feel good. Hence, more profitable.

Corporations, foreign agents, bad actors, conmen etc. hire BUMMER to modify the user to their own ends.

this is not a self-help approach to social media--dieting, limiting time, using site blockers and so on. This is an examination of the underpinnings and history of the working of the BUMMER machine.

Here are his arguments, each well-supported with data and context, and full of surprises for someone who thought they were pretty media literate.
"Argument Two: Quitting social Media is the most finely targeted way to resist the insanity of our times."
"Argument Three: Social media is making you into an asshole."
"Argument Four: Social media is undermining truth."
"Argument Five: Social media is making what you say meaningless."
"Argument Six: Social. media is destroying your capacity for empathy."
"Argument Seven: Social media is making you unhappy."
"Argument Eight: Social media doesn't want you to have economic dignity."
"Argument Nine: Social media is making politics impossible."
"Argument Ten: Social media hates your soul."

Argument Nine was the biggest shocker, truly repulsive. It takes a look at the BUMMER manipulation behind the subversion of Black Lives Matter movement from the truly incredible use of social media to spread consciousness/conscience about the deaths of black people at the hands of police to targeting those same people, bombarding them with posts specifically to denigrate Hilary Clinton in their eyes, to increase hopelessness and irritation, with the purpose of turning BLM supporters away from supporting Clinton in the 2016 election and increasing likelihood of them not voting at all. Absolutely chilling.

The thing is, BUMMER doesn't care if it's left or right, black people or white people, what it wants is to irritate everybody, push them into groups they never expected to be part of, make them more and more extreme so they click more. But the people who pay to 'advertise' to those roiled masses--be it conmen or bad actors--are paying for access to the behavior modification, where then they can supply the content.

I have not gone on Facebook since reading this. I'm going to be a cat, occasionally dipping in here and there, but I'm breaking my engagement with BUMMER. I've re-subscribed to Wired, will stick to actual news sources, accessed directly, for my news--and look forward to reading everything this guy writes.










]]> The House of Doors 65215270
The year is 1921. Lesley Hamlyn and her husband, Robert, a lawyer and war veteran, are living at Cassowary House on the Straits Settlement of Penang. When “Willie� Somerset Maugham, a famed writer and old friend of Robert's, arrives for an extended visit with his secretary Gerald, the pair threatens a rift that could alter more lives than one.

Maugham, one of the great novelists of his day, is beleaguered: Having long hidden his homosexuality, his unhappy and expensive marriage of convenience becomes unbearable after he loses his savings-and the freedom to travel with Gerald. His career deflating, his health failing, Maugham arrives at Cassowary House in desperate need of a subject for his next book. Lesley, too, is enduring a marriage more duplicitous than it first appears. Maugham suspects an affair, and, learning of Lesley's past connection to the Chinese revolutionary, Dr. Sun Yat Sen, decides to probe deeper. But as their friendship grows and Lesley confides in him about life in the Straits, Maugham discovers a far more surprising tale than he imagined, one that involves not only war and scandal but the trial of an Englishwoman charged with murder. It is, to Maugham, a story worthy of fiction.

A mesmerizingly beautiful novel based on real events, The House of Doors traces the fault lines of race, gender, sexuality, and power under empire, and dives deep into the complicated nature of love and friendship in its shadow.]]> 306 Tan Twan Eng 1639731938 Janet 0 to-read 3.98 2023 The House of Doors
author: Tan Twan Eng
name: Janet
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> My Friends 219334833
The trick time plays is to lull us into the belief that everything lasts forever, and although nothing does, we continue, inside our dream.

One evening, as a young boy growing up in Benghazi, Khaled hears a bizarre short story read aloud on the radio and has the sense that his life has been changed forever. Obsessed by the power of those words—and by their enigmatic author, Hosam Zawa—Khaled eventually embarks on a journey that will take him far from home, to pursue a life of the mind at the University of Edinburgh.

There, thrust into an open society that is light years away from the world he knew in Libya, Khaled begins to change. He attends a protest against the Qaddafi regime in London, only to watch it explode in tragedy. In a flash, Khaled finds himself injured, clinging to life, an exile, unable to leave England. To even tell his mother and father back home what he has done, on tapped phone lines, would mark them for death.

When a chance encounter in a hotel brings Khaled face to face with Hosam Zawa, the author of the fateful short story, he is subsumed into the deepest friendship of his life. It is a friendship that not only sustains him, but eventually forces him, as the Arab Spring erupts, to confront agonizing tensions between revolution and safety, family and exile, and how to define his own sense of self against those closest to him.

A devastating meditation on friendship and family, and the ways in which time tests—and frays—those bonds, My Friends is an achingly beautiful work of literature by an author working at the peak of his powers.]]> 416 Hisham Matar 0812985095 Janet 5
Khaled is a middle-aged Libyan man living in London when we meet him, but the time is very fluid in the book. He's a boy in the bosom of his family, with a cautious but respected teacher father, a smart boy, listening to a mysterious author's short story on the radio from England, on the ARab language BBC, and there are intimations that we will later meet that author. Then he is a student on a government sponsored scholarship to Edinburgh, where he falls in with a group of Libyan students, his first group of friends.

Then he's in London with one of them, Mustafa, where, for a lark, they decide to attend a demonstration against Qaddafi at the Libyan Embassy. Suitably garbed in balaclavas, as the Qaddafi regime is quite murderous about any kind of protest, there is a shocking break in Khaled's life. In a well-documented incident, the demonstrators are fired upon from inside the Embassy. Mustafa escapes, but Khaled is shot, and after hospitalization and recovery, he realizes that his chances of ever returning home are nil.

The book traces his relationship with Mustafa and others, girls and boys, women and men, his inability to even tell anyone, including--most of all--his parents what has happened to him for fear of the regime's reprisals. Khaled is not an immigrant to England, he makes little effort to truly immigrate and make a new life for himself. What happens is--his life stops. He is left circling that moment, emotionally stuck. He eventually becomes friends with that mysterious author, who himself has become an exile, Hosam Howa, and he moves between Mustafa and Hosam in an interesting dance.

Eventually, with the start of Arab Spring, Mustafa--the least political of them--returns to fight against the regime, and surprisingly to Khaled, Howa returns as well. Libya so much more real to them than their lives in exile. Khaled's choice not to return is the fascinating puzzle at the heart of the book.

The book has a beautiful tone, very internal--it covers some thirty years of Khaled's life, from age 18 to his fifties, the 1984 shooting, to 2016, five years after the death of Qaddafi--and one can follow the history of Libya in those years, the shooting of the students in London, the show trials and the outbreak of the Arab Spring as well as its aftermath. But the timeline is the internal one, the thoughts and life of exile, when even the joy has the hollowness of being not at home. I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about exile, and the book really lets you step into that space.

The writing is beautiful, the character deeply aware of his own state--disappointed in himself, limiting the possibilities of moving ahead as his father did, a brilliant scholar who took a mediocre teaching job in a high school to stay out of the limelight and have a life, diminished but continuing to inspire those around him. The shooting, his exile, gets between Khaled and the rest of life, like looking through a window at it.

The ending was oddly shocking in its quiet way, and made me want to start over.

To give you a sense of tone, here's Khaled with Hosam, shortly after having finally met the writer working as a clerk at a hotel in Paris. They are two Libyans at a cafe, each suspicious of the other, wondering if he might be a Qaddafi agent--calling themselves Sam and Fred. And then 'Fred' begins to talk about himself, about the demonstration, as he never does in his usual life:

"I regret attending," I said, and meant it, but was also wishing to absolve myself. "It's not true what some say, that dying, when in comes, bring with it its own acceptance. The opposite, if you ask me. It brings rebellion. Because you realize then that you've sent every day of your life learning how to live. That you don't know how to do anything else. Certainly not death. And I could see it, the blackness. And could see also how endless it was. But even that wasn't the worst of it. What horrified me was I knew then that part of me, a spot-of-consciousness, would survive and continue even after death, trapped within a nothing and silence for eternity."

In other words, more exile.

Here's a scene many years later, after Hosam has returned to Libya, after having attending his father's funeral (a well-known father who once denied his writer-son as part of a televised torture-confession):

"In the days after the burial and the wake, Hosam returned to writing me emails. Thee in particular transported me home. I had never since leaving felt more vividly connected to my country. I realized then that I had always somehow anticipated this, perhaps even from as far back as when I was fourteen and first heard his story read on the radio, that he would be a medium, that we ask of writers what we ask of our closest friends, to help us mediate and interpret the world."

This is not a flashy book, not packed with incident and thrills, not about the drama between characters, but unpacking a human life derailed by politics and yet buoyed by friendships. Read it in a quiet mood.]]> 4.19 2024 My Friends
author: Hisham Matar
name: Janet
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/03
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves:
review:
This was such a strangely quiet book, contrasting with most of the fiction I've been reading lately, a novel about a life lived in exile, one's tentative but pervasive ties to others also living in that limbo, always aware of that steel cable of home, family and country.

Khaled is a middle-aged Libyan man living in London when we meet him, but the time is very fluid in the book. He's a boy in the bosom of his family, with a cautious but respected teacher father, a smart boy, listening to a mysterious author's short story on the radio from England, on the ARab language BBC, and there are intimations that we will later meet that author. Then he is a student on a government sponsored scholarship to Edinburgh, where he falls in with a group of Libyan students, his first group of friends.

Then he's in London with one of them, Mustafa, where, for a lark, they decide to attend a demonstration against Qaddafi at the Libyan Embassy. Suitably garbed in balaclavas, as the Qaddafi regime is quite murderous about any kind of protest, there is a shocking break in Khaled's life. In a well-documented incident, the demonstrators are fired upon from inside the Embassy. Mustafa escapes, but Khaled is shot, and after hospitalization and recovery, he realizes that his chances of ever returning home are nil.

The book traces his relationship with Mustafa and others, girls and boys, women and men, his inability to even tell anyone, including--most of all--his parents what has happened to him for fear of the regime's reprisals. Khaled is not an immigrant to England, he makes little effort to truly immigrate and make a new life for himself. What happens is--his life stops. He is left circling that moment, emotionally stuck. He eventually becomes friends with that mysterious author, who himself has become an exile, Hosam Howa, and he moves between Mustafa and Hosam in an interesting dance.

Eventually, with the start of Arab Spring, Mustafa--the least political of them--returns to fight against the regime, and surprisingly to Khaled, Howa returns as well. Libya so much more real to them than their lives in exile. Khaled's choice not to return is the fascinating puzzle at the heart of the book.

The book has a beautiful tone, very internal--it covers some thirty years of Khaled's life, from age 18 to his fifties, the 1984 shooting, to 2016, five years after the death of Qaddafi--and one can follow the history of Libya in those years, the shooting of the students in London, the show trials and the outbreak of the Arab Spring as well as its aftermath. But the timeline is the internal one, the thoughts and life of exile, when even the joy has the hollowness of being not at home. I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about exile, and the book really lets you step into that space.

The writing is beautiful, the character deeply aware of his own state--disappointed in himself, limiting the possibilities of moving ahead as his father did, a brilliant scholar who took a mediocre teaching job in a high school to stay out of the limelight and have a life, diminished but continuing to inspire those around him. The shooting, his exile, gets between Khaled and the rest of life, like looking through a window at it.

The ending was oddly shocking in its quiet way, and made me want to start over.

To give you a sense of tone, here's Khaled with Hosam, shortly after having finally met the writer working as a clerk at a hotel in Paris. They are two Libyans at a cafe, each suspicious of the other, wondering if he might be a Qaddafi agent--calling themselves Sam and Fred. And then 'Fred' begins to talk about himself, about the demonstration, as he never does in his usual life:

"I regret attending," I said, and meant it, but was also wishing to absolve myself. "It's not true what some say, that dying, when in comes, bring with it its own acceptance. The opposite, if you ask me. It brings rebellion. Because you realize then that you've sent every day of your life learning how to live. That you don't know how to do anything else. Certainly not death. And I could see it, the blackness. And could see also how endless it was. But even that wasn't the worst of it. What horrified me was I knew then that part of me, a spot-of-consciousness, would survive and continue even after death, trapped within a nothing and silence for eternity."

In other words, more exile.

Here's a scene many years later, after Hosam has returned to Libya, after having attending his father's funeral (a well-known father who once denied his writer-son as part of a televised torture-confession):

"In the days after the burial and the wake, Hosam returned to writing me emails. Thee in particular transported me home. I had never since leaving felt more vividly connected to my country. I realized then that I had always somehow anticipated this, perhaps even from as far back as when I was fourteen and first heard his story read on the radio, that he would be a medium, that we ask of writers what we ask of our closest friends, to help us mediate and interpret the world."

This is not a flashy book, not packed with incident and thrills, not about the drama between characters, but unpacking a human life derailed by politics and yet buoyed by friendships. Read it in a quiet mood.
]]> <![CDATA[The Golden Hour: A Story of Family and Power in Hollywood]]> 216724291 A personal and cultural exploration of the struggles between art and business at the heart of modern Hollywood, through the eyes of the talent that shaped it

Matthew Specktor grew up in the film the son of legendary CAA superagent Fred Specktor, his childhood was one where Beau Bridges came over for dinner, Martin Sheen’s daughter was his close friend, and Marlon Brando left long messages on the family answering machine. He would eventually spend time working in Hollywood himself, first as a reluctant studio executive and later as a screenwriter.

Now, with The Golden Hour, Specktor blends memoir, cultural criticism, and narrative history to tell the story of the modern motion picture industry—illuminating the conflict between art and business that has played out over the last seventy-five years in Hollywood. Braiding his own story with that of his father, mother (a talented screenwriter whose career was cut short), and figures ranging from Jack Nicholson to CAA’s Michael Ovitz, Specktor reveals how Hollywood became a laboratory for the eternal struggle between art, labor, and capital.

Beginning with the rise of Music Corporation of America in the 1950s,ĚýThe Golden HourĚýlays out a series of clashes between fathers and sons, talent agents and studio heads, artists, activists, unions, and corporations. With vivid prose and immersive scenes, Specktor shows how Hollywood grew from the epicenter of American cultural life to a full-fledged multinational concern—and what this shift has meant for the nation’s place in the world. At once a book about the movie business and an intimate family drama, The Golden Hour is a sweeping portrait of the American Century.]]> 384 Matthew Specktor 0063008335 Janet 0 to-read 4.10 The Golden Hour: A Story of Family and Power in Hollywood
author: Matthew Specktor
name: Janet
average rating: 4.10
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Service (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)]]> 217247996 A darkly comic novel set on the lower slopes of the Los Angeles literary world.

I stepped out to behold a crimson-streaked sky that would soon be adorning ten thousand Instagram posts, and walked down the sleepy residential streets, suffused with a soft and forgiving evening light, to the main drag. It felt like the end here, both sanctuary and a soft place of harsh realities where a sun that once meant something barely brushed against the world. The perfect spring evening was blighted only by the citizenry.

A journalist in his late forties—having lost his job as a consequence of the death of print media—finds himself working at a bookstore in a rapidly gentrifying Los Angeles neighborhood, where he is thrown into the company of a younger generation with whom he has little in common. Embittered by his lowly position at this late stage of what had once been a promising career, he collapses his longtime ambition of writing a novel into a hilariously cathartic litany of contempt for his present circumstances.Ěý

Service examines the plight of the unrepentant artistic outsider in an unforgiving day and age. It alternates between passages that painstakingly describe the protagonist’s fraught attempts to write his novel and such scenes of service work as wrapping children’s books for Silver Lake moms and being “pilloried by duncesâ€� on Yelp. As his writing process stalls in a “stale ceremonyâ€� of indolence and self-doubt, these unfamiliar humiliations become a toxic wellspring for his irascible observations.Ěý

With his notoriously dry wit, John Tottenham’s debut novel reflects on a farrago of contemporary gentrification, debt, friendship, aging gracelessly, self-medication, male vanity, professional jealousy, the perils of political correctness, and the role of literature in the digital era. Eventually, after endlessly agonizing about matters of form and style, he finds that despite himself he has actually written a book.]]> 328 John Tottenham 1635902495 Janet 0 to-read 5.00 Service (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)
author: John Tottenham
name: Janet
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Creation Lake 207300960 416 Rachel Kushner 1982116528 Janet 5 interrupted-reads
Her protagonists tend to on the cold side--this one certainly was--but very much as such an undercover agent would have to be, and her descriptive ability is dynamite. In another's hands, the character might seem a bit unbelievable, but in Kushner's hands, entirely of a piece. The novel's fascination with the cave system of Southwestern France reminded me a bit of the Agricultural Question in Anna Karenina or the whaling paraphernalia in Moby Dick, but her descriptions kept me engaged despite myself.

I like her attachment to extreme characters, idealists and the unsavory realities that often emerge in their context. In that, it returns to the European radical politics of The Flamethrowers, after the women-prison based Mars Room and the nonfiction San Francisco-based memoir The Hard Crowd.

Listening to this on audio, read by the author, was heaven itself. The crunch of the prose is unmistakeable. ]]> 3.35 2024 Creation Lake
author: Rachel Kushner
name: Janet
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/02
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: interrupted-reads
review:
I am crazy about Rachel Kushner's work. To be exact, her diction, word choice, way of putting a sentence together. Frankly, I care a lot less about the plot--in this novel, about a freelance secret agent, disruptor, agent provocateur, infiltrating a rural French commune with radical sympathies trying to head off the usurpation of the local water supply for a big government water project--than the telling of the story.

Her protagonists tend to on the cold side--this one certainly was--but very much as such an undercover agent would have to be, and her descriptive ability is dynamite. In another's hands, the character might seem a bit unbelievable, but in Kushner's hands, entirely of a piece. The novel's fascination with the cave system of Southwestern France reminded me a bit of the Agricultural Question in Anna Karenina or the whaling paraphernalia in Moby Dick, but her descriptions kept me engaged despite myself.

I like her attachment to extreme characters, idealists and the unsavory realities that often emerge in their context. In that, it returns to the European radical politics of The Flamethrowers, after the women-prison based Mars Room and the nonfiction San Francisco-based memoir The Hard Crowd.

Listening to this on audio, read by the author, was heaven itself. The crunch of the prose is unmistakeable.
]]> Tetra Nova 205668512 Tetra Nova tells the story of Lua Mater, an obscure Roman goddess who re-imagines herself as an assassin coming to terms with an emerging performance artist identity in the late-20th century. The operatic text begins in Saigon, where she meets a little girl named Emi, an American of Vietnamese-Japanese descent visiting her mother’s country for the first time since the war’s end. As the voices of Lua and Emi blend into one dissociated narration, the stories accelerate out of sequence, mapping upon the globe a series of collective memories and traumas passed from one generation to the next.

Darting between the temples of Nagasaki, the mountains of Tucson, and an island refugee camp off the coast of Malaysia, Lua and Emi in one embodied memory travel across the English language itself to make sense of a history neither wanted. When a tiny Panda named Panda suddenly arrives, fate intervenes, and the work acts as a larger historical document, unpacking legacies of genocide and the radical modes of resistance that follow.

At the heart of this production lies a postcolonial identity in exile, and the performers must come to terms with who may or may not carry their stories Emi or Lua. Part dreamscape, part investigative poetics, multiple fragmenting identities traverse across time and space, the mythic and the profane, toward an understanding of humanity beyond those temple chamber doors.]]> 250 Sophia Terazawa 1646053567 Janet 0 to-read 4.50 2025 Tetra Nova
author: Sophia Terazawa
name: Janet
average rating: 4.50
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Villain's Dance 122800968 272 Fiston Mwanza Mujila 1646051270 Janet 0 to-read 3.28 2020 The Villain's Dance
author: Fiston Mwanza Mujila
name: Janet
average rating: 3.28
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Life on Mars: Poems 9639765 Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe to accompany the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence. In these new poems, Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant, and revisits the kitschy concepts like “love� and “illness� now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence. These poems reveal the realities of life lived here, on the ground, where a daughter is imprisoned in the basement by her own father, where celebrities and pop stars walk among us, and where the poet herself loses her father, one of the engineers who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope.]]> 75 Tracy K. Smith 1555975844 Janet 0 to-read 4.10 2011 Life on Mars: Poems
author: Tracy K. Smith
name: Janet
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Playground 205478762 The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane’s work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough.

They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity’s next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island’s residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away.

Set in the world’s largest ocean, this awe-filled book explores that last wild place we have yet to colonize in a still-unfolding oceanic game, and interweaves beautiful writing, rich characterization, profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity in a way only Richard Powers can.]]> 381 Richard Powers 1324086033 Janet 0 to-read 4.16 2024 Playground
author: Richard Powers
name: Janet
average rating: 4.16
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Olive Kitteridge (Olive Kitteridge, #1)]]> 1736739
At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her: a lounge musician haunted by a past romance; a former student who has lost the will to live; Olive’s own adult child, who feels tyrannized by her irrational sensitivities; and her husband, Henry, who finds his loyalty to his marriage both a blessing and a curse.

As the townspeople grapple with their problems, mild and dire, Olive is brought to a deeper understanding of herself and her life � sometimes painfully, but always with ruthless honesty.]]> 270 Elizabeth Strout Janet 5
What I liked most is the tone of these stories, very cool, and the time and attention Strout gives to every detail in creating her world.

One of my favorite stories, "The Piano Player" concerns the aging pianist in the local bar/lounge, a former glamour girl, and her romantic but circumscribed life. Just the opening description of the lounge gives you some idea of the care that's going to be taken with the story. (Note Strout's use of 'you,' putting the reader inside the story):

"Four nights a week Angela O'Meara played the piano in the cocktail lounge and the Warehouse Bar and Grill. The cocktail lounge, commodious and comfortable with a sprawl of couches, plump leather chairs and wow tables, was right there as soon as you walked through the heavy doors of the old establishment; the dining room was farther back with windows over looking the water. Early in the week the lounge tended to be rather empty, but by Wednesday nigh and continuing straight through Saturday, the place was filled with people. When you stepped from the sidewalk through the thick oak doors, there was the sound of piano notes, tinkling and constant; and the talk of the people where were slung back on their couches, or sitting forward tin their chairs, or leaning over the bar seemed to accommodate itself to this, so the piano was not so much 'background' music as it was a character in the room. In other words, the townspeople of Crosby Maine, had for many years now taken into the lives the cocktail music and presence of Angie O'Meara."

Strout's control of point of view is nothing short of miraculous, how in several of the stories the point of view passes easily from one character to another, almost imperceptibly, to better make a point or illuminate some corner of character. A character has the sudden realization that other people knew things about your children, your life, that you yourself didn't, and then "The lamp from the side table threw a dim and serious light throughout the silent room."




]]> 3.85 2008 Olive Kitteridge (Olive Kitteridge, #1)
author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Janet
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2008
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/23
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves:
review:
A beautiful collection of interrelated short stories set in a small Maine town, the world of a cranky, overbearing, tart and very New England math teacher Olive Kitteridge. She's not the protagonist of every story and in some she only features peripherally, but she's the spice in the mix, a certain expected flavor in the lives of those around her--including her sympathetic pharmacist husband, Henry, her former students, neighbors, other couples, families with their own sorrows and difficulties, her son Christopher, true object of her unabashed love, who has his own personality problems adn who wouldn't with Olive as a mother. ... Small town life at its most adult.

What I liked most is the tone of these stories, very cool, and the time and attention Strout gives to every detail in creating her world.

One of my favorite stories, "The Piano Player" concerns the aging pianist in the local bar/lounge, a former glamour girl, and her romantic but circumscribed life. Just the opening description of the lounge gives you some idea of the care that's going to be taken with the story. (Note Strout's use of 'you,' putting the reader inside the story):

"Four nights a week Angela O'Meara played the piano in the cocktail lounge and the Warehouse Bar and Grill. The cocktail lounge, commodious and comfortable with a sprawl of couches, plump leather chairs and wow tables, was right there as soon as you walked through the heavy doors of the old establishment; the dining room was farther back with windows over looking the water. Early in the week the lounge tended to be rather empty, but by Wednesday nigh and continuing straight through Saturday, the place was filled with people. When you stepped from the sidewalk through the thick oak doors, there was the sound of piano notes, tinkling and constant; and the talk of the people where were slung back on their couches, or sitting forward tin their chairs, or leaning over the bar seemed to accommodate itself to this, so the piano was not so much 'background' music as it was a character in the room. In other words, the townspeople of Crosby Maine, had for many years now taken into the lives the cocktail music and presence of Angie O'Meara."

Strout's control of point of view is nothing short of miraculous, how in several of the stories the point of view passes easily from one character to another, almost imperceptibly, to better make a point or illuminate some corner of character. A character has the sudden realization that other people knew things about your children, your life, that you yourself didn't, and then "The lamp from the side table threw a dim and serious light throughout the silent room."





]]> Dime-Store Alchemy 45986 Dime-Store Alchemy, poet Charles Simic refects on the life and work of Joseph Cornell, the maverick surrealist who is one of America’s great artists. Simic’s spare prose is as enchanting and luminous as the mysterious boxes of found objects for which Cornell is justly renowned.

In a work that is in various degrees biography, criticism, and sheer poetry, Simic tells the story of Cornell’s life and illuminates the hermetic mysteries of his extraordinary boxes–objects in which private obsessions were alchemically transformed into enduring works of art. Simic sees Cornell’s work as exemplifying a distinctively American aesthetic, open to the world, improvisatory, at once homemade and universal, modest and teasing and profound. Full of unexpected riches, Dime-Store Alchemy is both an entrancing meditation on the nature of art and a perfect introduction to a major American artist by one of his peers–a book that can be perused at length or dipped into at leisure again and again.

]]> Charles Simic Janet 0 to-read 4.19 1992 Dime-Store Alchemy
author: Charles Simic
name: Janet
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> No Longer Human 11222940 Mine has been a life of much shame. I can't even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being.

Portraying himself as a failure, the protagonist of No Longer Human narrates a seemingly normal life even while he feels incapable of understanding human beings. Oba Yozo's attempts to reconcile himself to the world around him begin in early childhood, continue through high school, where he becomes a "clown" to mask his alienation, and eventually lead to a failed suicide attempt as an adult. Without sentimentality, he records the casual cruelties of life and its fleeting moments of human connection and tenderness.

Semi-autobiographical, No Longer Human is the final completed work of Osamu Dazai. Still one of the ten bestselling books in Japan, No Longer Human is a powerful exploration of an individual's alienation from society.]]> 177 Osamu Dazai Janet 0 to-read 3.80 1948 No Longer Human
author: Osamu Dazai
name: Janet
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1948
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Visitation 8638226 Visitation offers the life stories of twelve individuals who seek to make their home in this one magical little house. The novel breaks into the everyday life of the house and shimmers through it, while relating the passions and fates of its inhabitants. Elegant and poetic, Visitation forms a literary mosaic of the last century, tearing open wounds and offering moments of reconciliation, with its drama and its exquisite evocation of a landscape no political upheaval can truly change.]]> 160 Jenny Erpenbeck 081121835X Janet 0 to-read 3.76 2008 Visitation
author: Jenny Erpenbeck
name: Janet
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto]]> 6411373 An icon of the environmental movement outlines a provocative approach for reclaiming our planet.

According to Stewart Brand, a lifelong environmentalist who sees everything in terms of solvable design problems, three profound transformations are underway on Earth right now. Climate change is real and is pushing us toward managing the planet as a whole. Urbanization--half the world's population now lives in cities, and eighty percent will by midcentury--is altering humanity's land impact and wealth. And biotechnology is becoming the world's dominant engineering tool. In light of these changes, Brand suggests that environmentalists are going to have to reverse some longheld opinions and embrace tools that they have traditionally distrusted. Only a radical rethinking of traditional green pieties will allow us to forestall the cataclysmic deterioration of the earth's resources.

Whole Earth Discipline shatters a number of myths and presents counterintuitive observations on why cities are actually greener than the countryside, how nuclear power is the future of energy, and why genetic engineering is the key to crop and land management. With a combination of scientific rigour and passionate advocacy, Brand shows us exactly where the sources of our dilemmas lie and offer a bold and inventive set of policies and solutions for creating a more sustainable society.

In the end, says Brand, the environmental movement must become newly responsive to fast-moving science and take up the tools and discipline of engineering. We have to learn how to manage the planet's global-scale natural infrastructure with as light a touch as possible and as much intervention as necessary.

]]> 336 Stewart Brand 0670021210 Janet 5
And the truth also is, reading this right at the moment, is that solutions might be out of reach. Even the most clear and logical and implementable. But that speaks more to the moment than to Brand's vision--which I neither embrace nor reject, but have stored on the RAM drive of my beliefs. These ideas are chock-a-block and each (most) at least bear consideration.

the four main propositions: that nuclear energy should be reconsidered as the only solution to the carbon problem that is killing us and the planet. It's the only one with a small enough footprint, economically feasible, and lays out a pretty good argument for its use, citing the countries that get most of their power from nuclear (France and Sweden) and how they handle nuclear waste, and issues of nuclear proliferation. Having always been anti-nuke, it opens the door my even considering the idea, and now I will have to find what other science-based environmentalists are thinking.

Ditto the idea that the city is the best solution to overpopulation. That the innovation happens in the cities, that even agriculture around cities is more innovative and effective. That the informal economy of cities--ie poor people making a living in the streets--is half the economy of the world and should be encouraged rather than legislated out of existence. Which includes migration. So many ideas, it will take a lot more reading to triangulate with others who have studied the city and the socio-economic impact, the informal networks and so on. Absolutely fascinating.

And then there's the pro-genetic engineering point--as someone who has avoided GMO foods like poison, this point of view suggests, convincingly, that breeding, as we do in traditional agriculture, is merely a less accurate engineering program that' been going on for centuries. Eons. That you can breed for a certain disease resistance in plants or for a higher yield or for higher protein, but it takes decades of hit or miss to get there--and as climate is pushing plants northwards, what is a 'native' plant anyway? I'm starting to think differently about this one, as the numbers of people on the planet rise and have to be fed. It's a mind-opener.

The fourth point is taking the view that the planet has been "terra-formed"--geoformed--since earth's first inhabitants, that it's not a wilderness but a garden, and with the loss of indigenous knowledge we turned the land into feral land--let it 'run wild' rather than shaping it for health of the forest, health of the fauna, fire safety and carbon fixing. I can't say I could take an exam on the hundreds of ideas presented in the book--but all of it has opened up areas of ecological thinking I had never thought I might consider.

And it's not every day that someone you have been reading in other contexts opens your mind to ideas you might have rejected without a second thought from any other quarter.
Definitely worth the read.

]]> 4.10 2009 Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto
author: Stewart Brand
name: Janet
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/14
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves:
review:
It's been a long time since I've read a book that has given me so much to think about. I'm not sure I agree with any of the arguments Brand lays out for a pragmatic approach to saving the planet, but I'm not sure I disagree with them either. They are approaches I have not really thought about, nor have been exposed to as arguments that recognize the danger of climate change--normally the arguments here are that of business and conservative thought. Coming from Brand, however, and in light of what we can do to head off climate catastrophe, I think they deserve further thought. More exploration. These are discussions happening in the eco-scientific community right now, and as I tend to be a sentimental ecologist, rather than a scientific one, it's pushing me to take a hard look at my own romanticism and the effect it might be having on the climate disaster. That I want certain things to be right and wrong--and look away from the hard science.

And the truth also is, reading this right at the moment, is that solutions might be out of reach. Even the most clear and logical and implementable. But that speaks more to the moment than to Brand's vision--which I neither embrace nor reject, but have stored on the RAM drive of my beliefs. These ideas are chock-a-block and each (most) at least bear consideration.

the four main propositions: that nuclear energy should be reconsidered as the only solution to the carbon problem that is killing us and the planet. It's the only one with a small enough footprint, economically feasible, and lays out a pretty good argument for its use, citing the countries that get most of their power from nuclear (France and Sweden) and how they handle nuclear waste, and issues of nuclear proliferation. Having always been anti-nuke, it opens the door my even considering the idea, and now I will have to find what other science-based environmentalists are thinking.

Ditto the idea that the city is the best solution to overpopulation. That the innovation happens in the cities, that even agriculture around cities is more innovative and effective. That the informal economy of cities--ie poor people making a living in the streets--is half the economy of the world and should be encouraged rather than legislated out of existence. Which includes migration. So many ideas, it will take a lot more reading to triangulate with others who have studied the city and the socio-economic impact, the informal networks and so on. Absolutely fascinating.

And then there's the pro-genetic engineering point--as someone who has avoided GMO foods like poison, this point of view suggests, convincingly, that breeding, as we do in traditional agriculture, is merely a less accurate engineering program that' been going on for centuries. Eons. That you can breed for a certain disease resistance in plants or for a higher yield or for higher protein, but it takes decades of hit or miss to get there--and as climate is pushing plants northwards, what is a 'native' plant anyway? I'm starting to think differently about this one, as the numbers of people on the planet rise and have to be fed. It's a mind-opener.

The fourth point is taking the view that the planet has been "terra-formed"--geoformed--since earth's first inhabitants, that it's not a wilderness but a garden, and with the loss of indigenous knowledge we turned the land into feral land--let it 'run wild' rather than shaping it for health of the forest, health of the fauna, fire safety and carbon fixing. I can't say I could take an exam on the hundreds of ideas presented in the book--but all of it has opened up areas of ecological thinking I had never thought I might consider.

And it's not every day that someone you have been reading in other contexts opens your mind to ideas you might have rejected without a second thought from any other quarter.
Definitely worth the read.


]]> Piranesi 50202953
There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.]]> 272 Susanna Clarke 163557563X Janet 4
Our guide into this World, Piranesi, keeps Careful Track of the Doings in each of Halls, devising his own System of record keeping.

This said, the first half of the book is almost as static as the Statuary that lines its great Halls, Vestibules and Stairways--and is so laden with Capital Letters in this Fashion, I Despaired of anything Happening, Ever. Something does eventually Happen in the book, but there is an awful lot Describing the House. More happens in a six-page Borges story which might take place in exactly the same type of labyrinthine location. I did stick it out until we moved from deliriously long set up to the actual story. I did enjoy the story, though when it did unfold, I have to say, the author could have started the actual action a lot sooner, and the story could have been far more complex, even accounting for the brevity of the book.

Though it's been equated to The Name of the Rose, it is a very simple book with little of the interpersonal drama and the complex mystery of the Eco. It's more a dizzying Borgesian world, but which never takes on the more challenging aspects of Borges, because Piranesi is very simple guy, almost a Chauncey Gardener. There was a reason Being There was as short as it was. Think of the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in which most of the book takes place in the wardrobe.

I enjoyed the book increasingly as I hit the halfway mark, and started to understand how everything fit together, but it sure was a slow starter for such a short book.]]> 4.22 2020 Piranesi
author: Susanna Clarke
name: Janet
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves:
review:
This is quite a short book compared to Clarke's compendious Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and cuts an interesting slice of imaginative territory. A vast House with innumerable Rooms lined with classical Statuary from floor to ceiling and comprised of Levels and degrees of decay--the under level flooded by sea water, the upper level which has in many places lost its roof--inhabited only by the protagonist and the Other and various birds. (The Other, a mysterious and somewhat sinister figure, refers to his companion as "Piranesi.")

Our guide into this World, Piranesi, keeps Careful Track of the Doings in each of Halls, devising his own System of record keeping.

This said, the first half of the book is almost as static as the Statuary that lines its great Halls, Vestibules and Stairways--and is so laden with Capital Letters in this Fashion, I Despaired of anything Happening, Ever. Something does eventually Happen in the book, but there is an awful lot Describing the House. More happens in a six-page Borges story which might take place in exactly the same type of labyrinthine location. I did stick it out until we moved from deliriously long set up to the actual story. I did enjoy the story, though when it did unfold, I have to say, the author could have started the actual action a lot sooner, and the story could have been far more complex, even accounting for the brevity of the book.

Though it's been equated to The Name of the Rose, it is a very simple book with little of the interpersonal drama and the complex mystery of the Eco. It's more a dizzying Borgesian world, but which never takes on the more challenging aspects of Borges, because Piranesi is very simple guy, almost a Chauncey Gardener. There was a reason Being There was as short as it was. Think of the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in which most of the book takes place in the wardrobe.

I enjoyed the book increasingly as I hit the halfway mark, and started to understand how everything fit together, but it sure was a slow starter for such a short book.
]]> Henry Miller: The Paris Years 787331 µţ°ů˛ą˛ő˛ő˛ąĂŻ 0961771526 Janet 5 3.57 1975 Henry Miller: The Paris Years
author: µţ°ů˛ą˛ő˛ő˛ąĂŻ
name: Janet
average rating: 3.57
book published: 1975
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves:
review:
A picture book in landscape format from 1991, showing you the places and people inhabiting Miller's Tropic of Cancer--the denizens of the Villa Seurat, the people he borrowed money off and the women he slept with, the artist he knew and their work... you get a real feel for the vibrant life that was lived in those years before the war, a Paris a decade later that that of the well heeled expats of the '20s.
]]> Time Shelter 58999261
In Time Shelter, an enigmatic flâneur named Gaustine opens a “clinic for the past� that offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back in time. As Gaustine’s assistant, the unnamed narrator is tasked with collecting the flotsam and jetsam of the past, from 1960s furniture and 1940s shirt buttons to scents and even afternoon light. But as the rooms become more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek out the clinic as a “time shelter”—a development that results in an unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present. Intricately crafted, and eloquently translated by Angela Rodel, Time Shelter announces Gospodinov to American readers as an essential voice in international literature.]]> 304 Georgi Gospodinov 1324090952 Janet 0 to-read, abandoned-books 3.59 2020 Time Shelter
author: Georgi Gospodinov
name: Janet
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: to-read, abandoned-books
review:

]]> <![CDATA[They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45]]> 978689 Ěý
That’s Milton Mayer, writing in a foreword to the 1966 edition of They Thought They Were Free. He’s right about the critics: the book was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1956. General readers may have been slower to take notice, but over time they did—what we’ve seen over decades is that any time people, across the political spectrum, start to feel that freedom is threatened, the book experiences a ripple of word-of-mouth interest. And that interest has never been more prominent or potent than what we’ve seen in the past year.
Ěý
They Thought They Were Free is an eloquent and provocative examination of the development of fascism in Germany. Mayer’s book is a study of ten Germans and their lives from 1933-45, based on interviews he conducted after the war when he lived in Germany. Mayer had a position as a research professor at the University of Frankfurt and lived in a nearby small Hessian town which he disguised with the name “Kronenberg.� “These ten men were not men of distinction,� Mayer noted, but they had been members of the Nazi Party; Mayer wanted to discover what had made them Nazis. His discussions with them of Nazism, the rise of the Reich, and mass complicity with evil became the backbone of this book, an indictment of the ordinary German that is all the more powerful for its refusal to let the rest of us pretend that our moment, our society, our country are fundamentally immune.
Ěý
A new foreword to this edition by eminent historian of the Reich Richard J. Evans puts the book in historical and contemporary context. We live in an age of fervid politics and hyperbolic rhetoric. They Thought They Were Free cuts through that, revealing instead the slow, quiet accretions of change, complicity, and abdication of moral authority that quietly mark the rise of evil.]]> 346 Milton Sanford Mayer 0226511928 Janet 0 to-read 4.14 1955 They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45
author: Milton Sanford Mayer
name: Janet
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1955
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Calling In: How to Start Making Change with Those You'd Rather Cancel]]> 214152325 From a pioneering Black feminist and MacArthur “Genius� Fellow, an urgent and exhilarating memoir-manifesto-handbook about how to rein in the excesses of cancel culture so we can truly communicate and solve problems together.

In 1979, Loretta Ross was a single mother who’d had to drop out of Howard University. She was working at Washington, DC’s Rape Crisis Center when she got a letter from a man in prison saying he wanted to learn how to not be a rapist anymore. At first, she was furious. As a survivor of sexual violence, she wanted to write back pouring out her rage. But instead, she made a different choice, a choice to reject the response her trauma was pushing her towards, a choice that set her on the path towards developing a philosophy that would come to guide her whole rather than calling people out, try to call even your unlikeliest allies in. Hold them accountable—but do so with love.

Calling In is at once a handbook, a manifesto, and a memoir—because the power of Loretta Ross’s message comes from who she is and what she’s lived through. She’s a Black woman who’s deprogrammed white supremacists, a survivor who’s taught convicted rapists the principles of feminism. With stories from her five remarkable decades in activism, she vividly illustrates why calling people in—inviting them into conversation instead of conflict by focusing on your shared values over a desire for punishment—is the more strategic choice if you want to make real change. And she shows you how to do so, whether in the workplace, on a college campus, or in your living room.

Courageous, awe-inspiring, and blisteringly authentic, Calling In is a practical new solution from one of our country’s most extraordinary change-makers—one anyone can learn to use to transform frustrating and divisive conflicts that stand in the way of real connection with the people in your life.]]> 288 Loretta Ross 1982190795 Janet 0 to-read 4.44 Calling In: How to Start Making Change with Those You'd Rather Cancel
author: Loretta Ross
name: Janet
average rating: 4.44
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: Selected Stories of Nikolai Leskov]]> 50570460
Contents
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk
The Sealed Angel
The Enchanted Wanderer
The Steel Flea
The Unmercenary Engineers
The Innocent Prudentius]]> 448 Nikolai Leskov 1681374900 Janet 0 to-read 3.87 1865 Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk: Selected Stories of Nikolai Leskov
author: Nikolai Leskov
name: Janet
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1865
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film]]> 5949 The Conversations is a treasure, essential for any lover or student of film, and a rare, intimate glimpse into the worlds of two accomplished artists who share a great passion for film and storytelling, and whose knowledge and love of the crafts of writing and film shine through.

It was on the set of the movie adaptation of his Booker Prize-winning novel, The English Patient, that Michael Ondaatje met the master film and sound editor Walter Murch, and the two began a remarkable personal conversation about the making of films and books in our time that continued over two years. From those conversations stemmed this enlightened, affectionate book -- a mine of wonderful, surprising observations and information about editing, writing and literature, music and sound, the I-Ching, dreams, art and history.

The Conversations is filled with stories about how some of the most important movies of the last thirty years were made and about the people who brought them to the screen. It traces the artistic growth of Murch, as well as his friends and contemporaries -- including directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Fred Zinneman and Anthony Minghella -- from the creation of the independent, anti-Hollywood Zoetrope by a handful of brilliant, bearded young men to the recent triumph of Apocalypse Now Redux.

Among the films Murch has worked on are American Graffiti, The Conversation, the remake of A Touch of Evil, Julia, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather (all three), The Talented Mr. Ripley, and The English Patient.

"Walter Murch is a true oddity in Hollywood. A genuine intellectual and renaissance man who appears wise and private at the centre of various temporary storms to do with film making and his whole generation of filmmakers. He knows, probably, where a lot of the bodies are buried."]]> 368 Michael Ondaatje 0375709827 Janet 5 best-books-about-writing The English Patient . Murch was also responsible for editing Coppola's Godfather trilogy, plus Apocalypse Now, and The Conversation among dozens of other stellar, stellar films, coming out of a sound mixing and editing background. If anybody remembers the thrilling opener of Apocalypse Now, the helicopter blades becoming the fan in Willard's room, back and forth, and the bleed of the sound... that was Murch's handiwork.

What was most interesting to me about the book was not only the insider's view of the making of these and other films--some of my favorites ever, the ones that lured me into film school for a brief moment--but also the lessons that film editing has for fiction-writing, something that struck Ondaatje as well. In that way, it was a great book about writing when it wasn't about writing at all, but about rhythm, framing, narrative juxtaposition, choice.

I have underlined so much of this book, it's an embarrassment of riches what to quote here.

"Don't get too smart too early. When you've finally gotten it all assembled, you can see how far the film has strayed from its intended trajectory."

"If you're too much on the nose, or you present too many ideas too quickly, either they are so obvious that they're uninteresting or there's so much confusion that you can't take it all in.
The editor works at both the macroscopic and the microscopic levels: ranging from deciding how long precisely each shot is held, to restructuring and repositioning scenes, and sometimes to eliminating entire subplots."

Cutting a linear story with a single pov like The Talented Mr. Ripley or The Conversation, as opposed to multi-pov stories like The English Patient or the Godfathers:
"Linearity does sometimes present its own problems... particularly regarding a film's length... Films with a single point of view are on borrowed time if they are more than two hours long. Since there's only one point of view, there's no relief if the audience is not one hundred percent with the film and it can subsequently seem too long even if it isn't objectively so.'

Ondaatje asks about Martin Sheen's intimate, inner voice as narrator of Apocalypse Now, where did that come from?
"There's a direct line from the narration in John Huston's Moby Dick through Zinnemann's Julia [which Murch also worked on] into Apocalypse Now.... a sonically intimate quality... Houston was dissatisfied with how it was sounding because he thought it had a defamatory quality... [during the recording, Basehart] leaned forward close to the microphone and asked 'John, what should I do next?" The microphone was right against his mouth. And Huston said, "That's it!... I want all the narration to sound just like that." "But I'm much too close." "No, you're not!"... If you position the microphone perfectly, you can get the intimacy without too many unwanted side effects... I asked Marty [Sheen} to imagine that the microphone was somebody's head on the pillow next to him, and that he was just talking to her with that kind of intimacy."


On editing actors:
he doesn't watch the shooting, he doesn't want to see any of that Sturm und Drang.

"The editor, who also has an influence on the way the film is construction, can (and should in my view) remain ignorant of all that stuff in order to find value where others might not see value, and on the other hand, to diminish the value of certain things that other people see as far too important. It's one of the crucial functions of the editor. To take, as far as it is possible to take, the view of the audience, who is seeing the film without any knowledge of all the things that went into its contrsuciton. You are studying them the way a sculptor studies a piece of marble tbefore decking to chisel it--here. So have to know al the hidden veins and strnetht and weaknesses of the rock that I'm working with, in order to know where best to put the chisel."

On ambiguity:
Ondaatje: "I've heard you talk before about the importance of ambiguity in film, and the need to save that ambiguous quality which exists in a book or painting and which you think a film does not often have. And at the same time in a mix you are trying to 'perfect' that ambiguity."

Murch: "It's a paradox. And one of the most fruitful paradoxes... even when the film is finished, there should be unsolved problems. Because there's another stage, beyond the finished film: when the audience views it. You want the audience to be co-conspirators in the creation of the work..." If you removed the ambiguity, you would "be doing the film a disservice. But the paradox is that uoui have to approach every problem as if it's desperately important to solve it. You can't say I don't want to slave this because it's got to be anbiguous if you do that, then there's a sort of haemorrhaging of the organism.
... As hard as you work, you must have this secret, unspoken hope that one very significant problem will remain unsolved. But you never know what it is until the film is one."

This kind of thinking goes so far beyond the average movie book--Murch is able to handle large ideas, his work comes out of those ideas. Just a few examples of where this book goes, plus real insider stuff on the making of some of the great films of our time.

Tiny example: I didn't know that Harry Caul--protagonist of The Conversation--was named for Harry Hall, protagonist of Hesse's Steppenwolf. Murch talking about Caul's transparent raincoat (his 'caul'): "It led from he costume to a way of acting, a way of being: Harry Caul is a man who has a membrane between himself and reality The film is about the shedding of that membrane, and how painful it is for this character."

"]]> 4.34 2002 The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film
author: Michael Ondaatje
name: Janet
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2002
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/03
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: best-books-about-writing
review:
Four conversations between novelist Michael Ondaatje and the great film editor Walter Murch---who had worked on the filmic adaptation of Ondaatje's The English Patient . Murch was also responsible for editing Coppola's Godfather trilogy, plus Apocalypse Now, and The Conversation among dozens of other stellar, stellar films, coming out of a sound mixing and editing background. If anybody remembers the thrilling opener of Apocalypse Now, the helicopter blades becoming the fan in Willard's room, back and forth, and the bleed of the sound... that was Murch's handiwork.

What was most interesting to me about the book was not only the insider's view of the making of these and other films--some of my favorites ever, the ones that lured me into film school for a brief moment--but also the lessons that film editing has for fiction-writing, something that struck Ondaatje as well. In that way, it was a great book about writing when it wasn't about writing at all, but about rhythm, framing, narrative juxtaposition, choice.

I have underlined so much of this book, it's an embarrassment of riches what to quote here.

"Don't get too smart too early. When you've finally gotten it all assembled, you can see how far the film has strayed from its intended trajectory."

"If you're too much on the nose, or you present too many ideas too quickly, either they are so obvious that they're uninteresting or there's so much confusion that you can't take it all in.
The editor works at both the macroscopic and the microscopic levels: ranging from deciding how long precisely each shot is held, to restructuring and repositioning scenes, and sometimes to eliminating entire subplots."

Cutting a linear story with a single pov like The Talented Mr. Ripley or The Conversation, as opposed to multi-pov stories like The English Patient or the Godfathers:
"Linearity does sometimes present its own problems... particularly regarding a film's length... Films with a single point of view are on borrowed time if they are more than two hours long. Since there's only one point of view, there's no relief if the audience is not one hundred percent with the film and it can subsequently seem too long even if it isn't objectively so.'

Ondaatje asks about Martin Sheen's intimate, inner voice as narrator of Apocalypse Now, where did that come from?
"There's a direct line from the narration in John Huston's Moby Dick through Zinnemann's Julia [which Murch also worked on] into Apocalypse Now.... a sonically intimate quality... Houston was dissatisfied with how it was sounding because he thought it had a defamatory quality... [during the recording, Basehart] leaned forward close to the microphone and asked 'John, what should I do next?" The microphone was right against his mouth. And Huston said, "That's it!... I want all the narration to sound just like that." "But I'm much too close." "No, you're not!"... If you position the microphone perfectly, you can get the intimacy without too many unwanted side effects... I asked Marty [Sheen} to imagine that the microphone was somebody's head on the pillow next to him, and that he was just talking to her with that kind of intimacy."


On editing actors:
he doesn't watch the shooting, he doesn't want to see any of that Sturm und Drang.

"The editor, who also has an influence on the way the film is construction, can (and should in my view) remain ignorant of all that stuff in order to find value where others might not see value, and on the other hand, to diminish the value of certain things that other people see as far too important. It's one of the crucial functions of the editor. To take, as far as it is possible to take, the view of the audience, who is seeing the film without any knowledge of all the things that went into its contrsuciton. You are studying them the way a sculptor studies a piece of marble tbefore decking to chisel it--here. So have to know al the hidden veins and strnetht and weaknesses of the rock that I'm working with, in order to know where best to put the chisel."

On ambiguity:
Ondaatje: "I've heard you talk before about the importance of ambiguity in film, and the need to save that ambiguous quality which exists in a book or painting and which you think a film does not often have. And at the same time in a mix you are trying to 'perfect' that ambiguity."

Murch: "It's a paradox. And one of the most fruitful paradoxes... even when the film is finished, there should be unsolved problems. Because there's another stage, beyond the finished film: when the audience views it. You want the audience to be co-conspirators in the creation of the work..." If you removed the ambiguity, you would "be doing the film a disservice. But the paradox is that uoui have to approach every problem as if it's desperately important to solve it. You can't say I don't want to slave this because it's got to be anbiguous if you do that, then there's a sort of haemorrhaging of the organism.
... As hard as you work, you must have this secret, unspoken hope that one very significant problem will remain unsolved. But you never know what it is until the film is one."

This kind of thinking goes so far beyond the average movie book--Murch is able to handle large ideas, his work comes out of those ideas. Just a few examples of where this book goes, plus real insider stuff on the making of some of the great films of our time.

Tiny example: I didn't know that Harry Caul--protagonist of The Conversation--was named for Harry Hall, protagonist of Hesse's Steppenwolf. Murch talking about Caul's transparent raincoat (his 'caul'): "It led from he costume to a way of acting, a way of being: Harry Caul is a man who has a membrane between himself and reality The film is about the shedding of that membrane, and how painful it is for this character."

"
]]> <![CDATA[Joseph Cornell's Theater of the Mind: Selected Diaries, Letters, and Files]]> 81267 496 Mary Ann Caws 0500282439 Janet 0 art, to-read 4.31 1992 Joseph Cornell's Theater of the Mind: Selected Diaries, Letters, and Files
author: Mary Ann Caws
name: Janet
average rating: 4.31
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/03
shelves: art, to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Western Lands (The Red Night Trilogy, #3)]]> 257506 The Western Lands is the eagerly awaited new novel by the most visionary American novelist of the twentieth century—a haunting Book of the Dead for the nuclear age.

Every new work from the pen of William S. Burroughs is an important literary event. This is especially so in the case of The Western Lands. For in this novel, Burroughs completes a trilogy that began with Cities of the Red Night and The Place of Dead Roads, with a profound, revealing, and often astounding meditation on the themes of mortality, loneliness, nuclear peril—and the inextinguishable hope for an existence beyond bodily death.

The symbolic vehicle Burroughs uses here is ancient Egyptian mythology, a long-standing interest of his. "The Western Lands" of the title are the territory to which the Egyptians believed the souls of the dead made a hazardous pilgrimage in their quest for true immortality. The questers—Joe the Dead, Kim Carsons, the scribe Neferti, Hassan i Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain—travel through an unmistakably Burroughs-esque universe of appalling danger and otherworldly beauty—now the back alleys of ancient Egypt, now bombed-out Berlin, now the Old West of the shootists. Their hallucinatory journeys express the author's belief that only through facing the most extreme dangers and testing the possibilities of biological mutation can man escape a dead-end world of blasted dreams and atomic finale. And presiding over all is the haunting figure of "the old writer," who shares in the fate of his characters in being finally unable to write himself out of Time, and into Space.

The Western Lands continues and extends one of the great literary odysseys of our time, adding to Burroughs's awesome literary style and black humor chilling touches of elegy and autobiography. It is at once Burroughs's most personal and most universal work, yet another masterwork from the reigning genius of the American literary avant-garde.]]> 258 William S. Burroughs 0140094563 Janet 4 abandoned-books, to-read
]]> 4.07 1987 The Western Lands (The Red Night Trilogy, #3)
author: William S. Burroughs
name: Janet
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1987
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/03
date added: 2025/01/03
shelves: abandoned-books, to-read
review:
I love Burrough's style but this baroque novel is like someone relating an intricate dream after seeing say, a week or two of Pasolini and Jadorowsky film (Actually, I have a book of Burroughs' actual dreams--"My Education" very short and far more quotidian than The Western Lands.) I made the mistake of getting this out on audio, which is great for the cadence of Burrough's prose but murder on the sensibility--the slow, real-time description of the psycho surgeons operating on a host of animals and producing suitably grotesque "hybrids" was my bridge too far. Can't take the prolonged immersion in the gore. Though I love the writing, and enjoyed the Egyptian Book of the Dead journey for as long as I could, this is a must read on the page.


]]> Orbital 123136728 207 Samantha Harvey 0802161545 Janet 0 to-read 3.56 2023 Orbital
author: Samantha Harvey
name: Janet
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[A Year With Swollen Appendices]]> 56314455 441 Brian Eno Janet 5
It's not just about music, although thoughts and philosophy about music, observation of the famous musicians he's working with, Bowie and Bono etc. are part of the story, they're more presented in context of character, philosophy and working method in a highly literary way. Not written for publication, it's an account of what this fascinating man thought and experienced day by day in the year 1995. I'm so glad he published it. It's inspiring--Eno did more in a day than most people do in months, or ever. But it's the range of thoughts and ideas that kept me glued to this thing--I've written in the margins, underlined. His range of his interests is immense and the richness of his take on what he sees and experiences makes this book a super-keeper.

Married to a woman deeply involved in aid to the child victims of war, they have two small children, and Eno is intimately--and joyously--involved in their lives, as well as working on albums with incredible artists. He's primarily a collaborator, and they turn to him because he forces them to think differently. The thinking on music more philosophical or painterly than technical... (For instance, describing Bowie as an HB6 pencil while he is a H6 pencil. (He'd started his musical interests in art college, as many rockers did. An H6 is a hard pencil that draws a very fine line, while an HB6 is a soft pencil that draws a bold line.)

But so many projects! A happening called Pagan Fun Wear, a concert with Bono, Edge and Pavarotti, students creating an environment in a huge warehouse (he's teaching at the Royal College of Art) called 'Storage.' He's constantly traveling, though sometimes he hardly mentions the change of locale, it's what he's doing there that interests him. Trips to New York, to Paris, to Berlin, a project he's doing creating a community music center in Bosnia. A wonderful, spontaneous trip to Egypt full of funny moments and revelations of his own outre personality.

But it's also what he made for dinner, some interesting moment at a kid's birthday party, dinners with friends, art shows, plays, and an extensive correspondence with Stewart Brand winding through it. (Brand, a visionary and futurist, who started the Whole Earth Catalogue and the fascinating project Clock of the Long Now, of which Eno is one of the founding members.) This is really someone operating on all eight cylinders. I found it equal parts amusing, thought-provoking, revealing and inspiring. Not to mention endlessly quotable.

"Noticing the overwhelming relief--almost joy--that some people feel when it transpires that they are 'really' ill, and so can at last relax and become inert without feeling guilty anymore. My dad was a good example--after a life of cruel working hours, the relief of resignation."

"Cold bright sky. No one about at 8:15 as I go to Bron. I like taking the bus... One of the unsung benefits of public transport: people relate to each other and have a chance to be nice to each other. It's a mobile version of the village well. Cars are the equivalent of private plumbing."

"I always admire people who marvel at things that anyone could have noticed before but didn't."

"I noticed two things about the Belgians. First, they only get wild with their spectacle frames--Belgian spectacles are spectacular--second, they seem almost universally tainted (blessed?) with personal, regional and national self-doubt--reservation, detachment, melancholy. Almost universally, because the woman in the museum... had the most genuine and deep smile for all her children (dozens of them) --a smile that only issues from complete sweetness and confidence. What a person to have as a mother. I bet Belgians have very complicated affairs and tortuous, heart-searching marital breakups.
But all the same I enjoy these spuddy, craggy, torn-by-conflicting-emotions Flemish faces. When they smile it's like the sun in a cold country--so welcome, so sweet. Such fabulous noses. Proposal: A Book of Flemish Noses--coffee-table type, like Roadside Shrines of India."

All this just from the first few pages. Can't tell you how much I loved this book.

It's fun to see someone else's themes emerge. The issue of value comes up--intrinsic value vs. Conferred value. Context (framing) vs. content in art. Responses to attractive women--he's very aware throughout of a little flirtatious glance. Wonderful brushstroke descriptions of people. Love of chance and randomness--he developed a set of cards he uses to get musicians out of what they would normally do, called Oblique Strategies. Lateral thinking.

I just love how much he brings to a moment, how rich his response to the world is.

The Swollen Appendices, little essays at the end, address certain topics in slightly more depth. I thought I'd like them, but found the ideas less interesting when spelled out than they were in context of the diary, where they're like a little spark. I think the jokey title shows he understood that.]]> 4.00 1996 A Year With Swollen Appendices
author: Brian Eno
name: Janet
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1996
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/20
date added: 2024/12/20
shelves:
review:
Cannot recommend this enough. Eno is a figure I associate with he glam rock era and Roxy Music. But I picked it up at random in a quirky local bookstore and began reading, and suddenly, I felt that charge all readers get when they've found something amazing.

It's not just about music, although thoughts and philosophy about music, observation of the famous musicians he's working with, Bowie and Bono etc. are part of the story, they're more presented in context of character, philosophy and working method in a highly literary way. Not written for publication, it's an account of what this fascinating man thought and experienced day by day in the year 1995. I'm so glad he published it. It's inspiring--Eno did more in a day than most people do in months, or ever. But it's the range of thoughts and ideas that kept me glued to this thing--I've written in the margins, underlined. His range of his interests is immense and the richness of his take on what he sees and experiences makes this book a super-keeper.

Married to a woman deeply involved in aid to the child victims of war, they have two small children, and Eno is intimately--and joyously--involved in their lives, as well as working on albums with incredible artists. He's primarily a collaborator, and they turn to him because he forces them to think differently. The thinking on music more philosophical or painterly than technical... (For instance, describing Bowie as an HB6 pencil while he is a H6 pencil. (He'd started his musical interests in art college, as many rockers did. An H6 is a hard pencil that draws a very fine line, while an HB6 is a soft pencil that draws a bold line.)

But so many projects! A happening called Pagan Fun Wear, a concert with Bono, Edge and Pavarotti, students creating an environment in a huge warehouse (he's teaching at the Royal College of Art) called 'Storage.' He's constantly traveling, though sometimes he hardly mentions the change of locale, it's what he's doing there that interests him. Trips to New York, to Paris, to Berlin, a project he's doing creating a community music center in Bosnia. A wonderful, spontaneous trip to Egypt full of funny moments and revelations of his own outre personality.

But it's also what he made for dinner, some interesting moment at a kid's birthday party, dinners with friends, art shows, plays, and an extensive correspondence with Stewart Brand winding through it. (Brand, a visionary and futurist, who started the Whole Earth Catalogue and the fascinating project Clock of the Long Now, of which Eno is one of the founding members.) This is really someone operating on all eight cylinders. I found it equal parts amusing, thought-provoking, revealing and inspiring. Not to mention endlessly quotable.

"Noticing the overwhelming relief--almost joy--that some people feel when it transpires that they are 'really' ill, and so can at last relax and become inert without feeling guilty anymore. My dad was a good example--after a life of cruel working hours, the relief of resignation."

"Cold bright sky. No one about at 8:15 as I go to Bron. I like taking the bus... One of the unsung benefits of public transport: people relate to each other and have a chance to be nice to each other. It's a mobile version of the village well. Cars are the equivalent of private plumbing."

"I always admire people who marvel at things that anyone could have noticed before but didn't."

"I noticed two things about the Belgians. First, they only get wild with their spectacle frames--Belgian spectacles are spectacular--second, they seem almost universally tainted (blessed?) with personal, regional and national self-doubt--reservation, detachment, melancholy. Almost universally, because the woman in the museum... had the most genuine and deep smile for all her children (dozens of them) --a smile that only issues from complete sweetness and confidence. What a person to have as a mother. I bet Belgians have very complicated affairs and tortuous, heart-searching marital breakups.
But all the same I enjoy these spuddy, craggy, torn-by-conflicting-emotions Flemish faces. When they smile it's like the sun in a cold country--so welcome, so sweet. Such fabulous noses. Proposal: A Book of Flemish Noses--coffee-table type, like Roadside Shrines of India."

All this just from the first few pages. Can't tell you how much I loved this book.

It's fun to see someone else's themes emerge. The issue of value comes up--intrinsic value vs. Conferred value. Context (framing) vs. content in art. Responses to attractive women--he's very aware throughout of a little flirtatious glance. Wonderful brushstroke descriptions of people. Love of chance and randomness--he developed a set of cards he uses to get musicians out of what they would normally do, called Oblique Strategies. Lateral thinking.

I just love how much he brings to a moment, how rich his response to the world is.

The Swollen Appendices, little essays at the end, address certain topics in slightly more depth. I thought I'd like them, but found the ideas less interesting when spelled out than they were in context of the diary, where they're like a little spark. I think the jokey title shows he understood that.
]]> The Book of Chuang Tzu 640565 320 Zhuangzi 0140194886 Janet 0 to-read 4.38 -350 The Book of Chuang Tzu
author: Zhuangzi
name: Janet
average rating: 4.38
book published: -350
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Zhuangzi (Chinese Edition) by Master Zhuangzi (2014-01-30)]]> 143098542 0 Master Zhuangzi Janet 0 to-read 0.0 The Zhuangzi (Chinese Edition) by Master Zhuangzi (2014-01-30)
author: Master Zhuangzi
name: Janet
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times]]> 687278
� Using painful emotions to cultivate wisdom, compassion, and courage
� Communicating so as to encourage others to open up rather than shut down
� Practices for reversing habitual patterns
� Methods for working with chaotic situations
� Ways for creating effective social action]]> 148 Pema Chödrön 1570623449 Janet 5
Outwardly, it often resembles the Stoic reaction to adversity--"that which one cannot change should be a matter of indifference." But there's something of the trickster in Chodron and her Buddhism, the advice to move towards what's painful, to be curious about it rather than armoring against its pain. To give up hope one can achieve security or absence of pain, and so, relax into that state of hopelessness which suggests a new way of being in a world without resolution or security. Not to grasp for relief from the chaos, but the patience to just let it be, to let things unfold and see what happens--to me a VERY different way to be in the world.

I read it, of course, when I was in a state of extreme anxiety over a personal matter--and decided to try the patience method, not to clutch at 'saving' anybody, at heading off disaster, but to let things evolve as they would without my intervention. It was certainly work trying not to DO anything. But in the end, the situation did work itself out without me 'handling' it in any way. A big surprise.

One of the strongest ideas I got from this was that we don't know if something is really good or bad--because a good thing can lead to a bad situation and vice versa. Change is the one constant. Her are my notes: ". But surely gratitude for the impermanent good is not the same as thinking it has to last. Accepting what is while trying to relieve suffering. Gratitude for the impermanent good."

Most important to me of the book's concepts is--when painful things happen, soften, rather than harden. Accept rather than resist, and not make it a Problem, a narrative. To feel the pleasure but not attach to it, to feel the pain but not run or shut down or amuse it away." That's a noble tool in the toolkit.

"The joy there is the joy of equilibrium, rain or shine. Peace." But I struggle with the concept of peace as the highest good. As a creative person, I feel one has to embrace the whole piano of emotion, that the deepening our humanity, the embrace of the whole thing, is the highest good. That if you're going to experience the joy of living, the passion and delight and pleasure, one must at least be ready to accept the pain and fear and grief as part of it and not add resistance to the suffering. And know that this moment's trouble is just this moment's trouble. To wait for the flower to open, without prognosticating the future.

So while I don't embrace everything Chodron is advocating here, I do find it a useful, especially when things are going absolutely to hell. Knowing that whatever I imagine is fantasy, and something else always happens. Life is surprising and we don't control it by our wishing it was different.

The most important thing, says Chodron is:

"When you get squeezed, did you close down or open up? Did we feel resentful and bitter or did we soften? Did we become wiser or more stupid? Were we more critical of our world or more generous?"

Knowing when it's time to listen, to be open, to embrace the new situation, to retreat, to accept, "to find a new place to sit." When dealing with problems, the book suggests one take a new approach, the one you haven't tried before. That a lone was worth the price of the book.

Where meditation comes in--and meditation is a the heart of this book--is developing a self that can sit still. That can be that patient. To sit with strong emotion and not give it a story. Don't make it a story, don't make it a problem.

This is a book I will re-read over the years, full of things that bear thinking about when life seems like it's tearing itself apart. Tough observations about our way of being in the world, and how we increase our own suffering (suffering because our reaction to the negative things that happen to us) by struggling against the event, presenting other modes of living and thinking. Invaluable.]]> 4.27 1996 When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times
author: Pema Chödrön
name: Janet
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1996
rating: 5
read at: 2020/09/22
date added: 2024/12/09
shelves:
review:
This book is what I would call "tough-ass Buddhism." There's no chicken soup here, nothing cuddly or sentimental--it's not a consolation for tough times, but rather, a cool-toned introduction to the simple but rigorous practice of Buddhism as a vehicle for change, a different way to view one's self and the world.

Outwardly, it often resembles the Stoic reaction to adversity--"that which one cannot change should be a matter of indifference." But there's something of the trickster in Chodron and her Buddhism, the advice to move towards what's painful, to be curious about it rather than armoring against its pain. To give up hope one can achieve security or absence of pain, and so, relax into that state of hopelessness which suggests a new way of being in a world without resolution or security. Not to grasp for relief from the chaos, but the patience to just let it be, to let things unfold and see what happens--to me a VERY different way to be in the world.

I read it, of course, when I was in a state of extreme anxiety over a personal matter--and decided to try the patience method, not to clutch at 'saving' anybody, at heading off disaster, but to let things evolve as they would without my intervention. It was certainly work trying not to DO anything. But in the end, the situation did work itself out without me 'handling' it in any way. A big surprise.

One of the strongest ideas I got from this was that we don't know if something is really good or bad--because a good thing can lead to a bad situation and vice versa. Change is the one constant. Her are my notes: ". But surely gratitude for the impermanent good is not the same as thinking it has to last. Accepting what is while trying to relieve suffering. Gratitude for the impermanent good."

Most important to me of the book's concepts is--when painful things happen, soften, rather than harden. Accept rather than resist, and not make it a Problem, a narrative. To feel the pleasure but not attach to it, to feel the pain but not run or shut down or amuse it away." That's a noble tool in the toolkit.

"The joy there is the joy of equilibrium, rain or shine. Peace." But I struggle with the concept of peace as the highest good. As a creative person, I feel one has to embrace the whole piano of emotion, that the deepening our humanity, the embrace of the whole thing, is the highest good. That if you're going to experience the joy of living, the passion and delight and pleasure, one must at least be ready to accept the pain and fear and grief as part of it and not add resistance to the suffering. And know that this moment's trouble is just this moment's trouble. To wait for the flower to open, without prognosticating the future.

So while I don't embrace everything Chodron is advocating here, I do find it a useful, especially when things are going absolutely to hell. Knowing that whatever I imagine is fantasy, and something else always happens. Life is surprising and we don't control it by our wishing it was different.

The most important thing, says Chodron is:

"When you get squeezed, did you close down or open up? Did we feel resentful and bitter or did we soften? Did we become wiser or more stupid? Were we more critical of our world or more generous?"

Knowing when it's time to listen, to be open, to embrace the new situation, to retreat, to accept, "to find a new place to sit." When dealing with problems, the book suggests one take a new approach, the one you haven't tried before. That a lone was worth the price of the book.

Where meditation comes in--and meditation is a the heart of this book--is developing a self that can sit still. That can be that patient. To sit with strong emotion and not give it a story. Don't make it a story, don't make it a problem.

This is a book I will re-read over the years, full of things that bear thinking about when life seems like it's tearing itself apart. Tough observations about our way of being in the world, and how we increase our own suffering (suffering because our reaction to the negative things that happen to us) by struggling against the event, presenting other modes of living and thinking. Invaluable.
]]> <![CDATA[How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built]]> 38310 How Buildings Learn is a masterful new synthesis that proposes that buildings adapt best when constantly refined and reshaped by their occupants, and that architects can mature from being artists of space to becoming artists of time. From the connected farmhouses of New England to I.M. Pei's Media Lab, from "satisficing" to "form follows funding," from the evolution of bungalows to the invention of Santa Fe Style, from Low Road military surplus buildings to a High Road English classic like Chatsworth—this is a far-ranging survey of unexplored essential territory.

More than any other human artifacts, buildings improve with time—if they're allowed to. How Buildings Learn shows how to work with time rather than against it.]]> 256 Stewart Brand 0140139966 Janet 0 to-read 4.34 1994 How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built
author: Stewart Brand
name: Janet
average rating: 4.34
book published: 1994
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Mother Doll 195660554 A kaleidoscopic novel about the shadow of trauma in Russian history that follows four generations of mothers and daughters

Zhenia is pregnant, her marriage is languishing, and Vera, her Russian grandmother and favorite person in the world, is dying. Enter Paul, a famous psychic medium who’s been approached by Irina, mother of Vera and great-grandmother of Zhenia. Irina is an interdimensional being who lives in a cloud of ancestral grief. She hopes Paul will be a willing conduit for her epic story of doomed revolt and nation-rending heartbreak, and that through him Zhenia will be her confessor and grant her absolution for her greatest shame: abandoning her daughter in a Soviet orphanage for children of spies.

But does either woman have what the other needs to understand the predicament they’re in? Or will the very legacy of trauma that they carry be what damns them both forever?

Accompanied by a chorus of fellow Russians also stuck in the cloud of grief, Irina decides to forge ahead. She speaks of the unspeakable, answers forbidden questions, and excavates repressed memories. And Zhenia decides to join her on the journey. Ferociously funny and deeply moving, Mother Doll is, ultimately, a bold and irrepressible depiction of generational trauma and the shifting expectations of womanhood and motherhood.]]> 320 Katya Apekina 1419770950 Janet 5
When Zhenia--who hates children and has declared she never wants them--becomes pregnant in an affair with the doctor she translates for--she surprises us, and her husband, by deciding to keep it. But in her way, deciding by not deciding. Into this difficult life comes a call from a man who claims to be channelling her great grandmother, Irina--the woman who abandoned her beloved grandmother and left Russia on her own during the Civil War. He needs Zhenia to translate Irina's missives, write them down and send them to him, so he can make a book out of it. This is the second timeline, as Irina, in the first person, tells her story with greater and greater urgency, the story of the Russian Revolution. Irina and her cohort in the afterlife--inventively weird and wonderful, a bit like Lincoln in the Bardo, but with a great heaping scoop of humor.

The story goes back and forth between Zhenia and her great grandmother, although unlike most multi=generational novels, my interest was much more with difficult, struggling Zhenia in the present story than with Irina and the oddly more straightforward story from the beyond. A wonderfully inventive novel, and I loved the darkly funny, emotionally angular, self-sabotaging protagonist.]]> 3.74 2024 Mother Doll
author: Katya Apekina
name: Janet
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/12/05
date added: 2024/12/05
shelves:
review:
A ghost story, a strange coming of age, a book ultimately about the unseen effects of history down the line of generations. We begin with the difficult, disgruntled young wife Zhenia, who emigrated as a child from Russia with her scientist mother and her beloved grandmother. Zhenia just can't get comfortable in her life--she left her family to work as in actress in Los Angeles, married, lost friends, became a translator for medical patients, and eventually drives her husband off with her constant negativity--which she thinks of as just conversation. I loved this character. The more of her the better. I have seen people like that, who just have to tear down the people around them, and think it's the way relationships are, that people should constantly prove their love or friendship despite this treatment. That they should know there's love (somewhere) behind it--or is there?

When Zhenia--who hates children and has declared she never wants them--becomes pregnant in an affair with the doctor she translates for--she surprises us, and her husband, by deciding to keep it. But in her way, deciding by not deciding. Into this difficult life comes a call from a man who claims to be channelling her great grandmother, Irina--the woman who abandoned her beloved grandmother and left Russia on her own during the Civil War. He needs Zhenia to translate Irina's missives, write them down and send them to him, so he can make a book out of it. This is the second timeline, as Irina, in the first person, tells her story with greater and greater urgency, the story of the Russian Revolution. Irina and her cohort in the afterlife--inventively weird and wonderful, a bit like Lincoln in the Bardo, but with a great heaping scoop of humor.

The story goes back and forth between Zhenia and her great grandmother, although unlike most multi=generational novels, my interest was much more with difficult, struggling Zhenia in the present story than with Irina and the oddly more straightforward story from the beyond. A wonderfully inventive novel, and I loved the darkly funny, emotionally angular, self-sabotaging protagonist.
]]> The Man Who Could Move Clouds 59411559 A TIME BEST BOOK OF THE SUMMER

From the author of the "original, politically daring and passionately written" (Vogue) novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree, comes a dazzling, kaleidoscopic memoir reclaiming her family's otherworldly legacy.

For Ingrid Rojas Contreras, magic runs in the family. Raised amid the political violence of 1980s and '90s Colombia, in a house bustling with her mother's fortune-telling clients, she was a hard child to surprise. Her maternal grandfather, Nono, was a renowned curandero, a community healer gifted with what the family called "the secrets" the power to talk to the dead, tell the future, treat the sick, and move the clouds. And as the first woman to inherit "the secrets," Rojas Contreras' mother was just as powerful. Mami delighted in her ability to appear in two places at once, and she could cast out even the most persistent spirits with nothing more than a glass of water.

This legacy had always felt like it belonged to her mother and grandfather, until, while living in the U.S. in her twenties, Rojas Contreras suffered a head injury that left her with amnesia. As she regained partial memory, her family was excited to tell her that this had happened before: Decades ago Mami had taken a fall that left her with amnesia, too. And when she recovered, she had gained access to "the secrets."

In 2012, spurred by a shared dream among Mami and her sisters, and her own powerful urge to relearn her family history in the aftermath of her memory loss, Rojas Contreras joins her mother on a journey to Colombia to disinter Nono's remains. With Mami as her unpredictable, stubborn, and often hilarious guide, Rojas Contreras traces her lineage back to her Indigenous and Spanish roots, uncovering the violent and rigid colonial narrative that would eventually break her mestizo family into two camps: those who believe "the secrets" are a gift, and those who are convinced they are a curse.

Interweaving family stories more enchanting than those in any novel, resurrected Colombian history, and her own deeply personal reckonings with the bounds of reality, Rojas Contreras writes her way through the incomprehensible and into her inheritance. The result is a luminous testament to the power of storytelling as a healing art and an invitation to embrace the extraordinary.]]> 306 Ingrid Rojas Contreras 0385546661 Janet 5
Contreras, a Columbian, begins the memoir with a blow to the head, a fall from a bike in Chicago, which renders her, a woman in her twenties, with amnesia for several weeks. Questioning the weight of memory in light of its sudden loss--which she experiences as a lightness and a wonder, to get rid of all that self, to not know again, like a child, the joy of experiencing for the first time--and then the regaining, which loops into family legacy--her mother's parallel amnesia, which occurred at eight when she fell down a well. That fall set off the mother's psychic abilities, also a legacy, as the grandfather was a curandero, and though there was a taboo against teaching the secrets to a female, her gifts were so obvious, compared to the rest of the family, he guided her and developed her talents as far as he was willing.

The book poses the perspective of the Columbians toward the supernatural, the omnipresence of ghosts and acceptance of powers and intercession, the traditional knowledge of plants, the importance of dreams, against the imposed European rationalism, colonization and suppression of native traditions and peoples. All while telling a personal story--the return of Contreras to Columbia, as she and her mother have had the same dream, about reinterring the grandfather.

One of the most interesting parts of the book is the doubling of Contreras and her fascinating mother--they are mirror images of each other, down to their moles--so much so that when they return to the mother's native village, people her mother's age talk to Contreras as if she is her mother, still young. And in some deep way, she is. I loved the loving acceptance/admiration of the author of this twinship, actually reveling in it rather than resisting it. (The mother too is known for a strange doubling--while she sleeps or is in a stressful state, projections of herself might appear in other places--the appearance of which Contreras finds comforting rather than frightening. )

How this small, beautiful book can contain so much is testimony to Contreras' skill at weaving the various parts of the story--personal and collective, political, historical and present drama and--I keep wanting to say "otherworldly" but the book discourages that point of view, that it's more "larger-world"ly. In college in America, it seemed strange to her that her classmates in literature distinguished the "realism" of Jane Austen from the "magical realism" of Gabriel Garcia Marquez--
when in her experience, the latter is quite real, while the former is unreachable.

Her language is beautiful, her tale gripping, her intelligence remarkable, the landscape so vivid, and her insights run fast and deep amid the magic, ghosts, hauntings, political violence and family legacy.

]]> 4.04 2022 The Man Who Could Move Clouds
author: Ingrid Rojas Contreras
name: Janet
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/08
date added: 2024/11/08
shelves:
review:
This mesmerizing book, a memoir of sorts, a sorting of family and self, of legacy and memory and connection to the supernatural--asking the question, is it 'super' or just outside the conventions established by colonial world-views?

Contreras, a Columbian, begins the memoir with a blow to the head, a fall from a bike in Chicago, which renders her, a woman in her twenties, with amnesia for several weeks. Questioning the weight of memory in light of its sudden loss--which she experiences as a lightness and a wonder, to get rid of all that self, to not know again, like a child, the joy of experiencing for the first time--and then the regaining, which loops into family legacy--her mother's parallel amnesia, which occurred at eight when she fell down a well. That fall set off the mother's psychic abilities, also a legacy, as the grandfather was a curandero, and though there was a taboo against teaching the secrets to a female, her gifts were so obvious, compared to the rest of the family, he guided her and developed her talents as far as he was willing.

The book poses the perspective of the Columbians toward the supernatural, the omnipresence of ghosts and acceptance of powers and intercession, the traditional knowledge of plants, the importance of dreams, against the imposed European rationalism, colonization and suppression of native traditions and peoples. All while telling a personal story--the return of Contreras to Columbia, as she and her mother have had the same dream, about reinterring the grandfather.

One of the most interesting parts of the book is the doubling of Contreras and her fascinating mother--they are mirror images of each other, down to their moles--so much so that when they return to the mother's native village, people her mother's age talk to Contreras as if she is her mother, still young. And in some deep way, she is. I loved the loving acceptance/admiration of the author of this twinship, actually reveling in it rather than resisting it. (The mother too is known for a strange doubling--while she sleeps or is in a stressful state, projections of herself might appear in other places--the appearance of which Contreras finds comforting rather than frightening. )

How this small, beautiful book can contain so much is testimony to Contreras' skill at weaving the various parts of the story--personal and collective, political, historical and present drama and--I keep wanting to say "otherworldly" but the book discourages that point of view, that it's more "larger-world"ly. In college in America, it seemed strange to her that her classmates in literature distinguished the "realism" of Jane Austen from the "magical realism" of Gabriel Garcia Marquez--
when in her experience, the latter is quite real, while the former is unreachable.

Her language is beautiful, her tale gripping, her intelligence remarkable, the landscape so vivid, and her insights run fast and deep amid the magic, ghosts, hauntings, political violence and family legacy.


]]> Fugitive Pieces 15836 Winner of the Lannan Literary Fiction Award
Winner of the Guardian Fiction Award
Ěý
In 1940 a boy bursts from the mud of a war-torn Polish city, where he has buried himself to hide from the soldiers who murdered his family. His name is Jakob Beer. He is only seven years old. And although by all rights he should have shared the fate of the other Jews in his village, he has not only survived but been rescued by a Greek geologist, who does not recognize the boy as human until he begins to cry. With this electrifying image, Anne Michaels ushers us into her rapturously acclaimed novel of loss, memory, history, and redemption.
Ěý
As Michaels follows Jakob across two continents, she lets us witness his transformation from a half-wild casualty of the Holocaust to an artist who extracts meaning from its abyss. Filled with mysterious symmetries and rendered in heart-stopping prose, Fugitive Pieces is a triumphant work, a book that should not so much be read as it should be surrendered to.]]> 294 Anne Michaels 0679776591 Janet 0 to-read 3.93 1996 Fugitive Pieces
author: Anne Michaels
name: Janet
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1996
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Winter of Artifice 46066
* Stella

* Winter of Artifice

and

* The Voice

"A handful of perfectly fold fables, and prose which is so daringly elaborate, so accurately timed...using words as magnificently colorful, evocative and imagist as any plastic combination on canvas but as mysteriously idiosyncratic as any abstract." - Times Literary Supplement]]> 175 AnaĂŻs Nin 080400322X Janet 5
The first story in this collection--in my edition of it, all of them are different, for historical/censorship reasons. The history of the publication of this book is fascinating. "Stella", is a heartbreakingly lovely portrait of the actress Luise Rainer, who was a very close friend of Nin's, a stunning artist who was incredibly uneasy with her stardom. (Though the interaction with the father is all Nin's own story). So many of its images stay with me. Make sure, if you read this collection, that you get one that has "Stella" is in it. Although the Paris facsimile edition, put out by Blue Sky Press, has a story that appears in none of the others, "Djuna" which is a portrait of June Miller, well known from the Diaries and the film 'Henry and June'. Here's Stella:

"Stella sat in a small dark room and watched her own figure acting on the screen. Stella watched her "double" moving in the light, and she did not recognize her. She almost hated her. � The shock came from some violent contrast between Stella's image of herself and the projected self she could not recognize at all�. the image on the screen was completely washed of the coloring and tones of sadness�"

"Sitting next to her, they [the audience] did not see her, intent on loving the woman on the screen. Because she was giving to many what most gave to the loved one� They were permitted to witness the exposure of being in a moment of high feeling, of tenderness, indulgence, dreaming, abandon, sloppiness, mischievousness, which was only uncovered in moments of love and intimacy� The woman on the screen was a stranger to her. � What stella had seen on the screen, the figure of which she had been so instantaneously jealous, was the free stella. What did not appear on the screen was the shadow of Stella, her demons, doubt and fear. And Stella was jealous. She was not only jealous of a more beautiful woman, but of a free woman."

And this is the image that will always haunt me:

"Once when Stella was on the stage acting a love scene, which was taking place after a scene in a snowstorm, one of the flakes of artificial snow remained on the wing of her small and delicate nose�. all during the is scene there lay the snowflake catching the light and flashing signals of gently humorous inappropriateness and misplacement. The snowflake gave the scene an imperfection which touched the heart and brought all the feelings of the watchers to converge and rest upon than infinitely moving absurdity of the misplaced snowflake�"

I will always think of Luise Rainer and that snowflake.



Merged review:

I'm a lover of Anais Nin's fiction, and Winter of artifice is one of the greats. A spiderweb, a veil--you either love her or you hate her.

The first story in this collection--in my edition of it, all of them are different, for historical/censorship reasons. The history of the publication of this book is fascinating. "Stella", is a heartbreakingly lovely portrait of the actress Luise Rainer, who was a very close friend of Nin's, a stunning artist who was incredibly uneasy with her stardom. (Though the interaction with the father is all Nin's own story). So many of its images stay with me. Make sure, if you read this collection, that you get one that has "Stella" is in it. Although the Paris facsimile edition, put out by Blue Sky Press, has a story that appears in none of the others, "Djuna" which is a portrait of June Miller, well known from the Diaries and the film 'Henry and June'. Here's Stella:

"Stella sat in a small dark room and watched her own figure acting on the screen. Stella watched her "double" moving in the light, and she did not recognize her. She almost hated her. � The shock came from some violent contrast between Stella's image of herself and the projected self she could not recognize at all�. the image on the screen was completely washed of the coloring and tones of sadness�"

"Sitting next to her, they [the audience] did not see her, intent on loving the woman on the screen. Because she was giving to many what most gave to the loved one� They were permitted to witness the exposure of being in a moment of high feeling, of tenderness, indulgence, dreaming, abandon, sloppiness, mischievousness, which was only uncovered in moments of love and intimacy� The woman on the screen was a stranger to her. � What stella had seen on the screen, the figure of which she had been so instantaneously jealous, was the free stella. What did not appear on the screen was the shadow of Stella, her demons, doubt and fear. And Stella was jealous. She was not only jealous of a more beautiful woman, but of a free woman."

And this is the image that will always haunt me:

"Once when Stella was on the stage acting a love scene, which was taking place after a scene in a snowstorm, one of the flakes of artificial snow remained on the wing of her small and delicate nose�. all during the is scene there lay the snowflake catching the light and flashing signals of gently humorous inappropriateness and misplacement. The snowflake gave the scene an imperfection which touched the heart and brought all the feelings of the watchers to converge and rest upon than infinitely moving absurdity of the misplaced snowflake�"

I will always think of Luise Rainer and that snowflake.]]> 3.84 1948 Winter of Artifice
author: AnaĂŻs Nin
name: Janet
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1948
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/10/24
shelves:
review:
I'm a lover of Anais Nin's fiction, and Winter of artifice is one of the greats. A spiderweb, a veil--you either love her or you hate her.

The first story in this collection--in my edition of it, all of them are different, for historical/censorship reasons. The history of the publication of this book is fascinating. "Stella", is a heartbreakingly lovely portrait of the actress Luise Rainer, who was a very close friend of Nin's, a stunning artist who was incredibly uneasy with her stardom. (Though the interaction with the father is all Nin's own story). So many of its images stay with me. Make sure, if you read this collection, that you get one that has "Stella" is in it. Although the Paris facsimile edition, put out by Blue Sky Press, has a story that appears in none of the others, "Djuna" which is a portrait of June Miller, well known from the Diaries and the film 'Henry and June'. Here's Stella:

"Stella sat in a small dark room and watched her own figure acting on the screen. Stella watched her "double" moving in the light, and she did not recognize her. She almost hated her. � The shock came from some violent contrast between Stella's image of herself and the projected self she could not recognize at all�. the image on the screen was completely washed of the coloring and tones of sadness�"

"Sitting next to her, they [the audience] did not see her, intent on loving the woman on the screen. Because she was giving to many what most gave to the loved one� They were permitted to witness the exposure of being in a moment of high feeling, of tenderness, indulgence, dreaming, abandon, sloppiness, mischievousness, which was only uncovered in moments of love and intimacy� The woman on the screen was a stranger to her. � What stella had seen on the screen, the figure of which she had been so instantaneously jealous, was the free stella. What did not appear on the screen was the shadow of Stella, her demons, doubt and fear. And Stella was jealous. She was not only jealous of a more beautiful woman, but of a free woman."

And this is the image that will always haunt me:

"Once when Stella was on the stage acting a love scene, which was taking place after a scene in a snowstorm, one of the flakes of artificial snow remained on the wing of her small and delicate nose�. all during the is scene there lay the snowflake catching the light and flashing signals of gently humorous inappropriateness and misplacement. The snowflake gave the scene an imperfection which touched the heart and brought all the feelings of the watchers to converge and rest upon than infinitely moving absurdity of the misplaced snowflake�"

I will always think of Luise Rainer and that snowflake.



Merged review:

I'm a lover of Anais Nin's fiction, and Winter of artifice is one of the greats. A spiderweb, a veil--you either love her or you hate her.

The first story in this collection--in my edition of it, all of them are different, for historical/censorship reasons. The history of the publication of this book is fascinating. "Stella", is a heartbreakingly lovely portrait of the actress Luise Rainer, who was a very close friend of Nin's, a stunning artist who was incredibly uneasy with her stardom. (Though the interaction with the father is all Nin's own story). So many of its images stay with me. Make sure, if you read this collection, that you get one that has "Stella" is in it. Although the Paris facsimile edition, put out by Blue Sky Press, has a story that appears in none of the others, "Djuna" which is a portrait of June Miller, well known from the Diaries and the film 'Henry and June'. Here's Stella:

"Stella sat in a small dark room and watched her own figure acting on the screen. Stella watched her "double" moving in the light, and she did not recognize her. She almost hated her. � The shock came from some violent contrast between Stella's image of herself and the projected self she could not recognize at all�. the image on the screen was completely washed of the coloring and tones of sadness�"

"Sitting next to her, they [the audience] did not see her, intent on loving the woman on the screen. Because she was giving to many what most gave to the loved one� They were permitted to witness the exposure of being in a moment of high feeling, of tenderness, indulgence, dreaming, abandon, sloppiness, mischievousness, which was only uncovered in moments of love and intimacy� The woman on the screen was a stranger to her. � What stella had seen on the screen, the figure of which she had been so instantaneously jealous, was the free stella. What did not appear on the screen was the shadow of Stella, her demons, doubt and fear. And Stella was jealous. She was not only jealous of a more beautiful woman, but of a free woman."

And this is the image that will always haunt me:

"Once when Stella was on the stage acting a love scene, which was taking place after a scene in a snowstorm, one of the flakes of artificial snow remained on the wing of her small and delicate nose�. all during the is scene there lay the snowflake catching the light and flashing signals of gently humorous inappropriateness and misplacement. The snowflake gave the scene an imperfection which touched the heart and brought all the feelings of the watchers to converge and rest upon than infinitely moving absurdity of the misplaced snowflake�"

I will always think of Luise Rainer and that snowflake.
]]> The Night Bird Cantata 2818263 256 Donald Rawley 0380795841 Janet 5
A very Capote-like story, but more personal, more Tennessee Williams in tone, told in a uniquely Rawley-esque lyrical style and keen perception of human character, failings and desire.

"Phoenix was the balm, the nothingness, the last stop. Powdered with midwestern money, it hid ancient people ridding themselves of tuberculosis and asthma in air-conditioned adobes with pruned cacti. Their children and grandchildren grew up wicked and full of air .."

"They tried their best to make a white boy feel comfortable, in return I was expected to go out and play, run, stay up at night. I was to be a boy, something I had never thought of, and it was an intoxication."

Speaking of Betty, the housekeeper, "She had small collections of precious, abandoned things, discarded for something new, something better, and I didn't realize, that summer, I was one of them."

A gay child who does not yet understand himself fully, he is able to decode the preoccupations of women with such sympathy--like Betty's obsession with her church hats: "Betty explained that in her church, all the colored ladies wore their best hats. This selection as a ritual and a chance to remember other days, when she was on the road, before Frank. Her hats were hard and crinkled, covered with grapes and peacock feather and faded yellow lace. Betty kept a diary of which one she wore to church each Sunday... I came to identify the wearing of hats with devotion and pure spirituality, the most religious hats being the ones with the most feathers. That summer I noticed it took a lot of planning and effort to wear a big hat to church. You had to make sure the people in back of you could see the preacher and, according to Betty, you couldn't wear a hat more than three times the same year."

And here's the grandmother, upon whom LP and his mother are dependent:
"My grandmother was a tarantula in mink."

It's a story of women. The women in LP's life and the pull each of them has over him, the vulnerability of a sensitive child growing up in a world where there is little love and much grasping for shreds of self-respect and power over others.

Donald Rawley died in 1998 of AIDS at the age of 40, and this was his sole novel. He also had two collections of short stories and five volumes of poetry.]]> 3.95 1998 The Night Bird Cantata
author: Donald Rawley
name: Janet
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1998
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/10/24
shelves:
review:
Ten year old L.P., a sensitive White boy, is shuffled off to stay with his grandmother's Black housekeeper and her husband, a mortician, in Phoenix, Arizona, when his glamorous, helpless mother remarries. "It was the summer of my mother's second husband," the novel begins. "... There had been the scent of a man in my mother's hair for almost six months. She smiled with a slow, backwards shimmer, talking to me as though I were one of the poodles."

A very Capote-like story, but more personal, more Tennessee Williams in tone, told in a uniquely Rawley-esque lyrical style and keen perception of human character, failings and desire.

"Phoenix was the balm, the nothingness, the last stop. Powdered with midwestern money, it hid ancient people ridding themselves of tuberculosis and asthma in air-conditioned adobes with pruned cacti. Their children and grandchildren grew up wicked and full of air .."

"They tried their best to make a white boy feel comfortable, in return I was expected to go out and play, run, stay up at night. I was to be a boy, something I had never thought of, and it was an intoxication."

Speaking of Betty, the housekeeper, "She had small collections of precious, abandoned things, discarded for something new, something better, and I didn't realize, that summer, I was one of them."

A gay child who does not yet understand himself fully, he is able to decode the preoccupations of women with such sympathy--like Betty's obsession with her church hats: "Betty explained that in her church, all the colored ladies wore their best hats. This selection as a ritual and a chance to remember other days, when she was on the road, before Frank. Her hats were hard and crinkled, covered with grapes and peacock feather and faded yellow lace. Betty kept a diary of which one she wore to church each Sunday... I came to identify the wearing of hats with devotion and pure spirituality, the most religious hats being the ones with the most feathers. That summer I noticed it took a lot of planning and effort to wear a big hat to church. You had to make sure the people in back of you could see the preacher and, according to Betty, you couldn't wear a hat more than three times the same year."

And here's the grandmother, upon whom LP and his mother are dependent:
"My grandmother was a tarantula in mink."

It's a story of women. The women in LP's life and the pull each of them has over him, the vulnerability of a sensitive child growing up in a world where there is little love and much grasping for shreds of self-respect and power over others.

Donald Rawley died in 1998 of AIDS at the age of 40, and this was his sole novel. He also had two collections of short stories and five volumes of poetry.
]]> Slow Dance on the Fault Line 2625004 223 Donald Rawley 0380799596 Janet 5 short-stories
Here's the opening to the story "DeMarco's Jazz":

"It was as though the trees around the house had been planted by fire. their branches were twisted with crippled black arms and tropical berries that looked poisonous under waxed flowers. Italian cypress, so easy to grow in Los Angeles--stuck out in neat rows, wind bend at vulgar angles and hiding things that flew. Its hedges were voluptuous as an old French bed, pulsing with fat roses that spilled over a short front lawn of pink and white gravel."

Here's a bit of "Rattlesnake Season":

"In Boston he had loved his wife. And still did. She was oxygen and musk, calculating and frail. She had natural auburn hair that seemed to mirror each season they sped through. Her white skin could powder him with heat and pornographic oaths that he never thought he knew; her arms were the only safe place left. Here in Los Angeles, in their house of riptide balconies and spiraling air, she was trapped by a sun that would burn her Irish skin, by a poverty they had tried to escape..."

I didn't realize I hadn't reviewed his work before--two collections of short stories, a novel and five poetry collections.]]> 3.93 1997 Slow Dance on the Fault Line
author: Donald Rawley
name: Janet
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1997
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/10/21
shelves: short-stories
review:
Donald Rawley was an exceptional LA writer who died tragically at 40 of AIDS in 1998, a mentor who was a penetrating influence and inspiration in my own writing. This collection of California stories contain much of his best work, exhibiting every beautiful thing about his sensibility and prose. There's a lush, lyrical sound to Rawley's work, as well as a romantic, Neo-Noirish point of view.

Here's the opening to the story "DeMarco's Jazz":

"It was as though the trees around the house had been planted by fire. their branches were twisted with crippled black arms and tropical berries that looked poisonous under waxed flowers. Italian cypress, so easy to grow in Los Angeles--stuck out in neat rows, wind bend at vulgar angles and hiding things that flew. Its hedges were voluptuous as an old French bed, pulsing with fat roses that spilled over a short front lawn of pink and white gravel."

Here's a bit of "Rattlesnake Season":

"In Boston he had loved his wife. And still did. She was oxygen and musk, calculating and frail. She had natural auburn hair that seemed to mirror each season they sped through. Her white skin could powder him with heat and pornographic oaths that he never thought he knew; her arms were the only safe place left. Here in Los Angeles, in their house of riptide balconies and spiraling air, she was trapped by a sun that would burn her Irish skin, by a poverty they had tried to escape..."

I didn't realize I hadn't reviewed his work before--two collections of short stories, a novel and five poetry collections.
]]> Malibu Stories: Poems 2818262 0 Donald Rawley 0941749231 Janet 5 poetry 4.33 1991 Malibu Stories: Poems
author: Donald Rawley
name: Janet
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1991
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/10/18
shelves: poetry
review:

]]> Steaming 516256 Solid copy with visible wear. 72 Donald Rawley 0941749304 Janet 5 poetry 5.00 Steaming
author: Donald Rawley
name: Janet
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/10/18
shelves: poetry
review:

]]> Duende: Poems 2227964 0 Donald Rawley 0941749320 Janet 5 poetry 5.00 Duende: Poems
author: Donald Rawley
name: Janet
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/10/18
shelves: poetry
review:

]]> Sirens 4420532 70 Donald Rawley 1882550218 Janet 5 poetry 5.00 1996 Sirens
author: Donald Rawley
name: Janet
average rating: 5.00
book published: 1996
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/10/18
shelves: poetry
review:

]]> Mecca: Poems 50385946 0 Donald Rawley 094174924X Janet 5 poetry 5.00 Mecca: Poems
author: Donald Rawley
name: Janet
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/10/18
shelves: poetry
review:

]]> Tina in the Back Seat 1946076 160 Donald Rawley 0380807238 Janet 5 short-stories 3.81 1999 Tina in the Back Seat
author: Donald Rawley
name: Janet
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1999
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/10/18
shelves: short-stories
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Rich People Have Gone Away]]> 201750876 343 Regina Porter 059324186X Janet 5 The Travelers, this too is a rich, multi-racial, multi-point-of-view novel--this time circling around the disappearance of a pregnant woman on a hike with her husband in the woods in upstate New York--the pair have left New York for a bit of reprieve during COVID. The story widens as it explores the lives of a web of husbands, wives, friends, parents, neighbors, cops, co-workers-- whose lives are in various ways knit in with theirs.

While I was reading it, it reminded me of "A Little Life"--though far less gruesome, also a far more diverse cast--as the portrait of a circle, each character from their own point of view. Porter is a master at carrying simultaneous and linking stories, though unlike her first novel, these characters aren't representing a generational cascade following a central event--these are all present-contemporary parallel lives--including but not limited to: a kid living apart from his family as his mother is hospitalized with COVID, the sex-addicted husband (a total asshole and my favorite character, actually), the mother of the missing woman--whose own husband was lost in the attack on the World Trade Center, and the woman's best friend, a chef. Issues of privilege, issues of race, issues of friendship and love and the nuances of relationship, the fight to succeed and the rebellion around success. A variegated, shimmering, compelling read.]]> 3.30 2024 The Rich People Have Gone Away
author: Regina Porter
name: Janet
average rating: 3.30
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/16
date added: 2024/10/17
shelves:
review:
I couldn't wait to read this book! Already a fan of Regina Porter's from The Travelers, this too is a rich, multi-racial, multi-point-of-view novel--this time circling around the disappearance of a pregnant woman on a hike with her husband in the woods in upstate New York--the pair have left New York for a bit of reprieve during COVID. The story widens as it explores the lives of a web of husbands, wives, friends, parents, neighbors, cops, co-workers-- whose lives are in various ways knit in with theirs.

While I was reading it, it reminded me of "A Little Life"--though far less gruesome, also a far more diverse cast--as the portrait of a circle, each character from their own point of view. Porter is a master at carrying simultaneous and linking stories, though unlike her first novel, these characters aren't representing a generational cascade following a central event--these are all present-contemporary parallel lives--including but not limited to: a kid living apart from his family as his mother is hospitalized with COVID, the sex-addicted husband (a total asshole and my favorite character, actually), the mother of the missing woman--whose own husband was lost in the attack on the World Trade Center, and the woman's best friend, a chef. Issues of privilege, issues of race, issues of friendship and love and the nuances of relationship, the fight to succeed and the rebellion around success. A variegated, shimmering, compelling read.
]]> <![CDATA[Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours]]> 22513977 Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are YoursĚýis a rare book: Goebel's ingenuity, humanity, and humor streak through every page.]]> 184 Luke B. Goebel 1573661805 Janet 0 to-read 3.93 2014 Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours
author: Luke B. Goebel
name: Janet
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Want, the Lake 203553337 With all the power of a long-brewing storm, the brilliant poet Jenny Factor finally returns to make public the interior work and spoils of decades in Want, The Lake, her second poetry collection.

This book of fifty-two poems spans twenty years of life—accumulated wisdom, images, and desires—with a dedication to craft that has been honed and clarified by time.]]> 144 Jenny Factor 1636281648 Janet 0 to-read 4.29 Want, the Lake
author: Jenny Factor
name: Janet
average rating: 4.29
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Brothers Karamazov 4934
This award-winning translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky remains true to the verbal inventiveness of Dostoevsky’s prose, preserving the multiple voices, the humor, and the surprising modernity of the original. It is an achievement worthy of Dostoevsky’s last and greatest novel.]]> 796 Fyodor Dostoevsky 0374528373 Janet 5 russia
They say that Dostoyevsky tied a girl to the tracks in the first fifty pages of every novel, and this is absolutely true of The Brothers Karamazov. A horrible, awful, hilariously dirty old man is found bludgeoned to death, and it seems one of his very different sons is the culprit. As I've aged, I've identified with different brothers--it's almost like 'which Beatle do you like the best?' When I was young it was the brooding young intellectual nihilist, Ivan. I was an "Ivan." It's Ivan who has the famous encounter with the Grand Inquisitor. Then there was the angelic son Alyosha. Can't we just get along? Great embrace of the poor, a spiritual young man, living his beliefs. Finally there's the passionate, headstrong Dmitri, who boils over and smashes things up, and is passionately in love with the questionable Grushenka--who I later identified with, (and I think is the true hero of the book). There's also an illegitimate half-brother in the wings, Smerdyakov, and even his name tells you what Dostoyevsky thinks of him--the likely product of a rape of a simple girl, a holy fool, and the grotesque senior Karamazov.

It's a great epic contest of spirit and earth, of passion and greed and everything else under the sun. If only one book were to be saved at the end of the world... to encapsulate the range of the Human Condition, who we were and what we did on earth, for me it would be a tie between the Brothers Karamazov and Ulysses.]]> 4.36 1880 The Brothers Karamazov
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: Janet
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1880
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/10/02
shelves: russia
review:
I've read the Brothers K maybe five or six times in the Constance Garnett edition--Garnett translated all the major 19th Century Russian authors, and was the first to translate Dostoevsky into English. Respect due, but her translations (re Brodsky and Nabokov) lack sensitivity to the language of the individual writers. Pevear and Volokhonsky's translations do not suffer this, and the new translation of Doestoyevsky's masterpiece is amazing. Who knew Dostoevsky was funny? But the father is funny/awful/funny/awful in the most brilliant way. Every time I read this book, it's different, because I'm different. Great literature is such a mirror that way. Doestoyevsky saved my life as a young person. The overheated claustrophobic drama that was my life found its explication.

They say that Dostoyevsky tied a girl to the tracks in the first fifty pages of every novel, and this is absolutely true of The Brothers Karamazov. A horrible, awful, hilariously dirty old man is found bludgeoned to death, and it seems one of his very different sons is the culprit. As I've aged, I've identified with different brothers--it's almost like 'which Beatle do you like the best?' When I was young it was the brooding young intellectual nihilist, Ivan. I was an "Ivan." It's Ivan who has the famous encounter with the Grand Inquisitor. Then there was the angelic son Alyosha. Can't we just get along? Great embrace of the poor, a spiritual young man, living his beliefs. Finally there's the passionate, headstrong Dmitri, who boils over and smashes things up, and is passionately in love with the questionable Grushenka--who I later identified with, (and I think is the true hero of the book). There's also an illegitimate half-brother in the wings, Smerdyakov, and even his name tells you what Dostoyevsky thinks of him--the likely product of a rape of a simple girl, a holy fool, and the grotesque senior Karamazov.

It's a great epic contest of spirit and earth, of passion and greed and everything else under the sun. If only one book were to be saved at the end of the world... to encapsulate the range of the Human Condition, who we were and what we did on earth, for me it would be a tie between the Brothers Karamazov and Ulysses.
]]> Martyr! 139400713 Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others—in which a newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of Tehran in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the Angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Electrifying, funny, wholly original, and profound, Martyr! heralds the arrival of a blazing and essential new voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 331 Kaveh Akbar 0593537610 Janet 5
His mother was killed in the senseless, accidental downing of an Iranian passenger jet by the US navy. His father moved to the United States with their baby son, and raised him alone in Indiana, working in an industrial chicken farm as a quality control guy. When the novel opens, the father has recently died, having lived a circumscribed but blameless life.

There are all kinds of twists to the story, but it's the telling that makes this so captivating. Each chapter is comprised of shorter entries--not only third person narration close on Cyrus and his story, but various characters get first person sections, it jumps around in time, picking up, say, the mother as a girl, or the father's early life, or an uncle who served in the Iranian military as a ghostly battlefield "Angel of Death"--riding through among the dying to give them courage not to kill themselves, a figure that haunts the book. There are memos from the Navy, there are short headlines and ledes on the attack on the passenger jet. There are poems from the book Cyrus is writing about people who have died meaningful deaths.

In the present, Cyrus's search leads him, through his best friend and sometimes lover Zee (and the name "Cyrus Shams" has its resonance-- Cyrus, a king of Persia, and especially 'Shams' who is the Beloved in the work of Rumi, the Friend)--to the work of Orkideh, an Iranian performance artist who, dying, is staging her last work in the Brooklyn Museum, speaking to members of the public.

The short chapters and the variety of forms and voices make this an absolute delight.]]> 4.22 2024 Martyr!
author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Janet
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/02
date added: 2024/10/02
shelves:
review:
This wonderful book! It's all in the style--not surprisingly for the first novel of Kaveh Akbar, a well-known poet. The story: A 20-something Iranian-American poet from Indiana, Cyrus Shams, just two years sober after a young adulthood of blackout drinking and drug use, struggles with the blandness and blankness of sobriety--asking himself, what would make a meaningful death?

His mother was killed in the senseless, accidental downing of an Iranian passenger jet by the US navy. His father moved to the United States with their baby son, and raised him alone in Indiana, working in an industrial chicken farm as a quality control guy. When the novel opens, the father has recently died, having lived a circumscribed but blameless life.

There are all kinds of twists to the story, but it's the telling that makes this so captivating. Each chapter is comprised of shorter entries--not only third person narration close on Cyrus and his story, but various characters get first person sections, it jumps around in time, picking up, say, the mother as a girl, or the father's early life, or an uncle who served in the Iranian military as a ghostly battlefield "Angel of Death"--riding through among the dying to give them courage not to kill themselves, a figure that haunts the book. There are memos from the Navy, there are short headlines and ledes on the attack on the passenger jet. There are poems from the book Cyrus is writing about people who have died meaningful deaths.

In the present, Cyrus's search leads him, through his best friend and sometimes lover Zee (and the name "Cyrus Shams" has its resonance-- Cyrus, a king of Persia, and especially 'Shams' who is the Beloved in the work of Rumi, the Friend)--to the work of Orkideh, an Iranian performance artist who, dying, is staging her last work in the Brooklyn Museum, speaking to members of the public.

The short chapters and the variety of forms and voices make this an absolute delight.
]]> Small Rain 205363938 A medical crisis brings one man close to death—and to love, art, and beauty—in a profound and luminous novel by award-winning author Garth Greenwell.

A poet's life is turned inside out by a sudden, wrenching pain. The pain brings him to his knees, and eventually to the ICU. Confined to bed, plunged into the dysfunctional American healthcare system, he struggles to understand what is happening to his body, as someone who has lived for many years in his mind.

This is a searching, sweeping novel set at the furthest edges of human experience, where the forces that give life value—art, memory, poetry, music, care—are thrown into sharp relief. Time expands and contracts. Sudden intimacies bloom. Small Rain surges beyond the hospital to encompass a radiant vision of human life: our shared vulnerability, the limits and possibilities of sympathy, the ideal of art and the fragile dream of America. Above all, this is a love story of the most unexpected kind.]]> 306 Garth Greenwell 0374279543 Janet 5 Cleanness and What Belongs to You explore life in the body, sexual desire, shame, explicitly and movingly, the protagonist pushing past taboos and testing the extremes of his nature, strangeness/foreigness --the stories in those books concern a teacher of English living in Bulgaria--the most brilliant writing, but tough tough tough.

Small Rain's protagonist, on the other hand, is living in a small town in Iowa, doing the homeowner thing, renovation, he's a poet and teacher, married to L, a Spaniard teaching Spanish Literature, who was the one who asked to stay in Iowa, which he loves, instead of moving to one of the gay-friendlier, exciting big American cities. The protagonist is in the midst of early middle age and all its petty problems, when he feels an overwhelming pain in his body--heart? gut? he tolerates it for several days and then allows himself to be transported to the hospital, where it's revealed that he's suffered a ruptured aorta (the big artery that brings the blood out of the heart to feed the rest of the body.)

And it's his hospitalization that is the book's subject. What it is like to be in the body and in the hands of the modern medical establishment, up close and personal.

I've read several books in which someone is hospitalized--most notably Carole Maso's AVA, a great favorite--but this is nothing like anything I"ve ever read. The hospitalization isn't just a locus to move out into memory, though it does that. No, it actually describes the experience--the nurses, the experience of being in that bed, the uncertainty, the procedures--and, as someone who doesn't even look when I get a vaccination or a blood draw, so vivid I couldn't read it while eating (one of my usual habits.)

but it's also a book about love. Neither he nor L. had ever been in a committed relationship, had never lived with anybody, a now they're in territory that is strangely, unnervingly satisfying. But when the protagonist goes into the hospital, it's during COVID and he can only have one visitor a day, for one hour--and it becomes clear to him how much L. means to him, how L.s physical presence itself is healing... It's a short book but larger on the inside than on the outside. Beautiful, beautiful writing about that aspect of life we try to forget as soon as we're released from it--no wonder there are so few books about the experience. But it is a wide-ranging book, taking in all sorts of cultural phenomena:

"The phone buzzed in my hand. I was still holding it but I hadn't been looking at it, though usually in any unoccupied moment I scrolled mindlessly. That was another thing that had changed over the past decade, the quality of mindlessness, which now was populated by the endless feeds of social media, which didn't eradicate boredom but change the texture of it, made it less restorative, less accommodating of creative possibility, I feared; I tried to set aside my phone but mostly I scrolled like everybody else...."]]> 4.06 2024 Small Rain
author: Garth Greenwell
name: Janet
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/24
date added: 2024/09/25
shelves:
review:
Garth Greenwell is an exceptionally sensitive, nuanced, deep thinking and often shocking writer. His last two books, Cleanness and What Belongs to You explore life in the body, sexual desire, shame, explicitly and movingly, the protagonist pushing past taboos and testing the extremes of his nature, strangeness/foreigness --the stories in those books concern a teacher of English living in Bulgaria--the most brilliant writing, but tough tough tough.

Small Rain's protagonist, on the other hand, is living in a small town in Iowa, doing the homeowner thing, renovation, he's a poet and teacher, married to L, a Spaniard teaching Spanish Literature, who was the one who asked to stay in Iowa, which he loves, instead of moving to one of the gay-friendlier, exciting big American cities. The protagonist is in the midst of early middle age and all its petty problems, when he feels an overwhelming pain in his body--heart? gut? he tolerates it for several days and then allows himself to be transported to the hospital, where it's revealed that he's suffered a ruptured aorta (the big artery that brings the blood out of the heart to feed the rest of the body.)

And it's his hospitalization that is the book's subject. What it is like to be in the body and in the hands of the modern medical establishment, up close and personal.

I've read several books in which someone is hospitalized--most notably Carole Maso's AVA, a great favorite--but this is nothing like anything I"ve ever read. The hospitalization isn't just a locus to move out into memory, though it does that. No, it actually describes the experience--the nurses, the experience of being in that bed, the uncertainty, the procedures--and, as someone who doesn't even look when I get a vaccination or a blood draw, so vivid I couldn't read it while eating (one of my usual habits.)

but it's also a book about love. Neither he nor L. had ever been in a committed relationship, had never lived with anybody, a now they're in territory that is strangely, unnervingly satisfying. But when the protagonist goes into the hospital, it's during COVID and he can only have one visitor a day, for one hour--and it becomes clear to him how much L. means to him, how L.s physical presence itself is healing... It's a short book but larger on the inside than on the outside. Beautiful, beautiful writing about that aspect of life we try to forget as soon as we're released from it--no wonder there are so few books about the experience. But it is a wide-ranging book, taking in all sorts of cultural phenomena:

"The phone buzzed in my hand. I was still holding it but I hadn't been looking at it, though usually in any unoccupied moment I scrolled mindlessly. That was another thing that had changed over the past decade, the quality of mindlessness, which now was populated by the endless feeds of social media, which didn't eradicate boredom but change the texture of it, made it less restorative, less accommodating of creative possibility, I feared; I tried to set aside my phone but mostly I scrolled like everybody else...."
]]> The Dog of the North 61153742 From the National Book Award-longlisted author of The Portable Veblen

Penny Rush has problems. Her marriage is over, and she's quit her job. Her mother and stepfather went missing in the Australian outback five years ago; her mentally imbalanced father provokes her; her grandmother, Dr. Pincer, keeps experiments in the refrigerator and something worse in the woodshed. But Penny is a virtuoso at what's possible when all else fails.

The Dog of the North follows Penny on her quest for a fresh start. There will be a road trip in an old van with gingham curtains, a piñata, and stiff brakes. There will be injury and peril. There will be a dog named "Kweecoats" and two brothers who may share a toupée. There will be questions: Why is a detective investigating her grandmother, and what is "the scintillator"? And can Penny recognize a good thing when it finally comes her way?

This slyly humorous, thoroughly winsome novel finds the purpose in life's curve balls, insisting that even when we are painfully warped by those we love most, we can be brought closer to our truest selves.]]> 336 Elizabeth Mckenzie 0593300696 Janet 0 interrupted-reads, to-read 3.57 2023 The Dog of the North
author: Elizabeth Mckenzie
name: Janet
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/11
shelves: interrupted-reads, to-read
review:

]]> Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm 60048960
Most notable among them is his teenage daughter, Koko, who idolizes him and is awakening to her own sexuality even as her mentally fragile mother struggles to overcome her long-failed marriage and rejection by Circus. Delivering a lush orchestration of diverse female voices, Warrell spins a provocative, soulful, and gripping story of passion and risk, fathers and daughters, wives and single women, and, finally, hope and reconciliation.]]> 336 Laura Warrell 0593316444 Janet 4
Author Laura Warrell has a fine eye for detail and her ear is keen, she has such a feel for the sensuous. The writing is virtuosic--especially remarkable when she describes the player's relationship to his music, not an easy thing to do and making me wish there were more chapters on Circus and music less on the random women who have fallen under his spell. Only Maggie is a musician--and that relationship is the most interesting, the most evenly matched--though there is also a talented male music student who is on the rise, throwing more salt into Circus's wounds.

Most of these women suffer from the same malaise--falling under the spell of this unavailable, charming chaser with little idea who and what he really is. Warrell expertly captures the excitement, the draw, both for Circus and for the lover, of lust's rise--but inevitably followed by debilitating and deluded need, at least on the woman's part. The repetition on the various bodies and psyches of new lovers and old, the various stages of disillusionment and obsession, is both fascinating and sobering.

Though Circus is at the center of the book's gravitational system, the main character proves to be his neglected, vulnerable daughter Koko, a teen trying for connection. Her need for the absent father makes perfect sense as the engine of the book-- but as usual in these multigenerational novels, the adults are more interesting. Her damaged mother, Pia, is probably Circus' most obsessed victim, and she becomes more interesting on the back end of the book when she tries to free herself from his hold.

Music infuses every Circus chapter, both the way he plays, and the way he thinks. Here's a girl Circus is picking up: "He decided he liked her voice, off key as it was and snapping. There was a loose tempo inside it, an undercurrent of sound struggling to find pitch. He liked hearing it the way he liked hearing an orchestra warm up."]]> 3.51 2022 Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm
author: Laura Warrell
name: Janet
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/09
date added: 2024/09/10
shelves:
review:
A novel in stories about the women constellating around one man, a jazz trumpeter named Circus Palmer. Palmer is reaching a moment of catastrophe, his career has reached a plateau, and his womanizing ways are turning on him, beginning when his real love, Maggie, a drummer and long-time colleague and lover, confesses she has become pregnant by him--and he responds by running for the hills.

Author Laura Warrell has a fine eye for detail and her ear is keen, she has such a feel for the sensuous. The writing is virtuosic--especially remarkable when she describes the player's relationship to his music, not an easy thing to do and making me wish there were more chapters on Circus and music less on the random women who have fallen under his spell. Only Maggie is a musician--and that relationship is the most interesting, the most evenly matched--though there is also a talented male music student who is on the rise, throwing more salt into Circus's wounds.

Most of these women suffer from the same malaise--falling under the spell of this unavailable, charming chaser with little idea who and what he really is. Warrell expertly captures the excitement, the draw, both for Circus and for the lover, of lust's rise--but inevitably followed by debilitating and deluded need, at least on the woman's part. The repetition on the various bodies and psyches of new lovers and old, the various stages of disillusionment and obsession, is both fascinating and sobering.

Though Circus is at the center of the book's gravitational system, the main character proves to be his neglected, vulnerable daughter Koko, a teen trying for connection. Her need for the absent father makes perfect sense as the engine of the book-- but as usual in these multigenerational novels, the adults are more interesting. Her damaged mother, Pia, is probably Circus' most obsessed victim, and she becomes more interesting on the back end of the book when she tries to free herself from his hold.

Music infuses every Circus chapter, both the way he plays, and the way he thinks. Here's a girl Circus is picking up: "He decided he liked her voice, off key as it was and snapping. There was a loose tempo inside it, an undercurrent of sound struggling to find pitch. He liked hearing it the way he liked hearing an orchestra warm up."
]]> The Dangerous Old Woman 734740
Old While Young, and Young While Old

We are born with two forces that give us every lens we need to see who we really the wild and ever-young force of imagination, which contains intuition and instinct, and the wise elder force of knowledge, which holds boundaries and carries the heart of the visionary. Through captivating stories and insights, Dr. Estés illustrates why this twofold way of being "old while young, and young while old" is the secret to holding and replenishing the center, thus living wildly and wisely ensouled amidst life's travails and triumphs.

Your Wild and Wise, Both

"If you are not free to be who you are, you are not free," says Dr. Estés. Begin and deepen the work of bringing your one-of-a-kind legacy into the world following the trail blazed by the Dangerous Old Woman. She who stops at nothing to nourish, protect, and guide us in the offering of all our creative gifts.

Stories, Poems, and Blessings

"The Angelic Ten": Old Guidance for One's Sanity "Standing in My Danger": The Good Meaning of the Word "Dangerous" "Snow White": When Gifts Have Been Poisoned Grandmother "Los Cinco Espiritus, The Five Women Spirits" "The Vashinger and the Return of the Vampires" "The Ruby Red Fox": About Seduction "Las Tres Osas, the Three Old Re-Weavers of Torn Lives" "The Man Who Hated Trees": Nature, the Unrepentant Mother "The Jealous Girls and the Old Woman Under the Lake" "When a Good Mother Dies": What Gifts Ever Remain "The Precious Museum Tree": The Hidden Life "What Did You Dream? What Did You Dream?"]]> 0 Clarissa Pinkola Estés 0712672133 Janet 5 4.58 1997 The Dangerous Old Woman
author: Clarissa Pinkola Estés
name: Janet
average rating: 4.58
book published: 1997
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/30
date added: 2024/08/30
shelves:
review:
I was feeling kind of musty and dusty and came across this--available only on audio, which confused me. Only audio? But I was in the mood for Pinkola Estes--to dip back into the river of Women who Run with the Wolves--and began listening. She is such an amazing storyteller, and in dealing with the oral tradition, it began to make sense why she is writing now exclusively for audio. This is how these tales should be told, tales of dangerous old women that thread through the many cultures which are her heritage, born to Mexicans and raised by Hungarians, a Jungian analyst specifically dealing with the soul journey and especially women's deep psychology and development, using folk tales and tracing archetypes. She is also a poet and phrases so beautifully, reads so well, that you are almost with her at the campfire, hearing these ancient tales. I already feel less musty, livelier, wanting to mix it up more, do the unexpected. No doubt I will be seeking out more of these audio books!
]]> The Baudelaire Fractal 45010931
Part memoir, part magical realism, part hilarious trash-talking take on contemporary art and the poet's life, The Baudelaire Fractal is the long-awaited debut novel by the incomparable Lisa Robertson.]]> 208 Lisa Robertson 1552453901 Janet 5 coach-house-books
The young protagonist, Hazel Brown, thinks about time. She thinks about hotel rooms, and maps, and fashion, art and literature, the furnishings Poe favored, the erotic. She casts her net wide. There is no dialogue at all. "Prodigal, undisciplined, with an aptitute for melancholy, I left houses, cities, lovers, schools, hotels, and countries. I left with haste, or I left languidly. Also I was asked to leave. I left languages and jobs. Leaving made a velocity. I left garments, books, notebooks, and several good companions. Sometimes I left ideas."

I read it for a book group, and when I first held it, the book was so physically beautiful I didn't want to mark it up-- beautiful laid paper, the exquisite layout. Then I realized it was a Coach House Book, a fabulous small press in Toronto, with in house printing and superb taste and attention to the book as an object as well as an experience of mind.

This is a book that's completely about sensibility--the feminist, first person sensibility of a young woman (girl as the protagonist prefers):

"I'm writing this in 2016 in a rented cottage at the edge of fields in central France. My task to to re-enterby means of sentences, the course of my early apprenticeship. This desire to make a representative document began only with involuntary incident at the hotel, the authorship that arrived both gradually and all at once. For a long time I have been more or less content with arcane researches that lead me into lush but impersonal lyric. Now I feel I must account for this anachronistic event; I'll follow it back to unspoken things. I want to make a story about the total implausibility of girlhood. This morning I'm at the round table under the linden tree...

"I'm sitting beneath the linden tree holding at bay the skepticism of my calling, describing how all at once, in a hotel by a harbor, I was seized by a kinship; how every slowly in weaving between cities and rooms, I became what I am not. Time has a style the way bodies do. There are turns and figures of iteration and relationship. But also times and bodies overlap. This work must annotate those parts of experience that evade determination. Here my fidelity is for the antithetical nature of the feminine concept. I was a girl. I could not escape desire, but now I can turn to contemplate it, and so convert my own complicity into writing. In this landscape time is pliable; it's a place of nightingales and poorness and wild cherry trees. Spring comes, slow and sudden. I'll work with that. I'll make this account using my nerves and my sentiment.

"I'm writing this story backwards, from a shack in middle age. I sit and wait for as long as it takes until I intuit the shape of a sentence. Sometimes I feel that it is the room that writes. But it needs the hot tub of my pronoun."

Such a book cannot be summarized. I wonder whether her assertion that she 'wrote' the books of Charles Baudelaire has to do with readership as a participatory activity--the way we do complete an authors work by reading it. That we do in fact author, in a way, as we recreate the creative act in our minds.

But the writing is so beautiful, so intelligent and propulsively interesting, I don't miss the conventional novelistic devices such as dialogue and realtime scenes. it's motival writing, and certain images recur and recur, Poe's crimson carpet (Poe had a theory of furniture, who knew?)

So many tiny ponderable ideas, page after page after page, like this:
"The elemental hospitality of the inferior hotel, felt in the. minimal, even ironical welcome, the absence of an exaggeration or luxury that would leave one in its debt, the muteness and reluctance of the clerk: this is the stupidity I crave.'

It's a book I will read again and again, it doesn't exhaust its riches on the first read. I would put it on a very special shelf with Heidi Sopinka's "Dictionary of Animal Languages," Lindsey Darger's "The Sorrow Proper," Leland de la Durantaye's "Hannah Versus the Wolves" and in a strange way, Cortazar's "Hopscotch." Novels of form and novels of idea, written with precision and lyricism and a mad imagination.

The fractal of the title, I believe, refers to motif and metaphor, that kind of artistic and conceptual repetition on various scales. It's hilariously listed on A*zn in "Fractal Mathematics." ]]> 3.95 2020 The Baudelaire Fractal
author: Lisa Robertson
name: Janet
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2022/04/12
date added: 2024/08/28
shelves: coach-house-books
review:
Best book I've read so far this year. A remarkable, lyrical, poetic, intellectual first novel set in Paris, the declaration of a woman who really claims the first person. Who builds the world through her own sensibility. Who claims not to be Charles Baudelaire, but to have written his works. It was so beautiful, I could quote any part of it and it would be as brilliant and fascinating as any other part.

The young protagonist, Hazel Brown, thinks about time. She thinks about hotel rooms, and maps, and fashion, art and literature, the furnishings Poe favored, the erotic. She casts her net wide. There is no dialogue at all. "Prodigal, undisciplined, with an aptitute for melancholy, I left houses, cities, lovers, schools, hotels, and countries. I left with haste, or I left languidly. Also I was asked to leave. I left languages and jobs. Leaving made a velocity. I left garments, books, notebooks, and several good companions. Sometimes I left ideas."

I read it for a book group, and when I first held it, the book was so physically beautiful I didn't want to mark it up-- beautiful laid paper, the exquisite layout. Then I realized it was a Coach House Book, a fabulous small press in Toronto, with in house printing and superb taste and attention to the book as an object as well as an experience of mind.

This is a book that's completely about sensibility--the feminist, first person sensibility of a young woman (girl as the protagonist prefers):

"I'm writing this in 2016 in a rented cottage at the edge of fields in central France. My task to to re-enterby means of sentences, the course of my early apprenticeship. This desire to make a representative document began only with involuntary incident at the hotel, the authorship that arrived both gradually and all at once. For a long time I have been more or less content with arcane researches that lead me into lush but impersonal lyric. Now I feel I must account for this anachronistic event; I'll follow it back to unspoken things. I want to make a story about the total implausibility of girlhood. This morning I'm at the round table under the linden tree...

"I'm sitting beneath the linden tree holding at bay the skepticism of my calling, describing how all at once, in a hotel by a harbor, I was seized by a kinship; how every slowly in weaving between cities and rooms, I became what I am not. Time has a style the way bodies do. There are turns and figures of iteration and relationship. But also times and bodies overlap. This work must annotate those parts of experience that evade determination. Here my fidelity is for the antithetical nature of the feminine concept. I was a girl. I could not escape desire, but now I can turn to contemplate it, and so convert my own complicity into writing. In this landscape time is pliable; it's a place of nightingales and poorness and wild cherry trees. Spring comes, slow and sudden. I'll work with that. I'll make this account using my nerves and my sentiment.

"I'm writing this story backwards, from a shack in middle age. I sit and wait for as long as it takes until I intuit the shape of a sentence. Sometimes I feel that it is the room that writes. But it needs the hot tub of my pronoun."

Such a book cannot be summarized. I wonder whether her assertion that she 'wrote' the books of Charles Baudelaire has to do with readership as a participatory activity--the way we do complete an authors work by reading it. That we do in fact author, in a way, as we recreate the creative act in our minds.

But the writing is so beautiful, so intelligent and propulsively interesting, I don't miss the conventional novelistic devices such as dialogue and realtime scenes. it's motival writing, and certain images recur and recur, Poe's crimson carpet (Poe had a theory of furniture, who knew?)

So many tiny ponderable ideas, page after page after page, like this:
"The elemental hospitality of the inferior hotel, felt in the. minimal, even ironical welcome, the absence of an exaggeration or luxury that would leave one in its debt, the muteness and reluctance of the clerk: this is the stupidity I crave.'

It's a book I will read again and again, it doesn't exhaust its riches on the first read. I would put it on a very special shelf with Heidi Sopinka's "Dictionary of Animal Languages," Lindsey Darger's "The Sorrow Proper," Leland de la Durantaye's "Hannah Versus the Wolves" and in a strange way, Cortazar's "Hopscotch." Novels of form and novels of idea, written with precision and lyricism and a mad imagination.

The fractal of the title, I believe, refers to motif and metaphor, that kind of artistic and conceptual repetition on various scales. It's hilariously listed on A*zn in "Fractal Mathematics."
]]> There Is No Blue 123452616 Three essays, three deaths. The first is the death of the author’s mother, a protracted disappearance, leaving space for thoughtfulness and the washing of her body, the making of a death mask. The second considers the author’s father, his remoteness, his charm, a lacuna at the centre of the family even before his death, earlier than her mother’s. And then, the shocking death of the author’s sister, a visual artist and writer living with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, who writes three reasons to die on her bedroom wall and then takes her life.
In this close observation of a family, few absolutes hold, as experiences of reality diverge.ĚýA memoir of cascading grief and survival from the author ofĚý The Incident Report. "Martha Baillie’s novels are thrillingly, joyously singular, that rare combination ofĚý sui generis Ěýand just plain generous. ThatĚý There Is No Blue , her memoir, is all of those things too, is no surprise; still, she has gone somewhere extraordinary. This triptych of essays, which exquisitely unfolds the “disobedient taleâ€� of the lives and deaths of her mother, her father, and her sister, is a meditation on the mystery and wonder of grief and art making and home and memory itself. It made me think of kintsugi, the Japanese art of repair, in which the mending is not hidden but featured and beautifully illuminated. Baillie’s variety of attention, carved out of language, is tenderness, is love." –Ě� Maud Casey, author ofĚý City of Incurable Women
"This is a stunning memoir, intense and meticulous in its observations of family life. Baillie subtly interrogates and conveys the devastating mistranslations that take place in childhood, the antagonism and porousness of siblings, and the tragedy of schizophrenia as it unfolds. I couldn’t put it down." –Ě� Dr. Lisa Appignanesi, author ofĚý Mad, Bad and Sad ĚýandĚý Everyday Madness
""Exquisite." â€� ĚýSouvankham Thammavongsa, author ofĚý How to Pronounce Knife "I am grateful for this profound meditation on family and loss.â€� â€� ĚýCharlie Kaufman, filmmaker "This strange, unsettling memoir of outer life and inner life and their bizarre twining captures the author’s identity by way of her mother’s death, her sister’s failing battle with mental illness, and the mysterious figure of her father. It combines anguished guilt, deep tenderness, and bemused affection in highly evocative, often disturbing prose. Its brave honesty is amplified by a persistent lyricism; its undercurrent of fear is uplifted by a surprising, resilient hopefulness. It is both a plea for exoneration and an act of exoneration, an authentic meditation on the terrible difficulty of being human." –Ě� Andrew Solomon, author ofĚý The Noonday Demon]]> 184 Martha Baillie 1552454746 Janet 0 to-read 4.20 2023 There Is No Blue
author: Martha Baillie
name: Janet
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> All Its Charms 41745783

We drive home from the lake, sand in our shoes,

the dart of fish faint at our ankles, each
shuttered BBQ shack a kudzu flash

in my side mirror. Pleasure has become
the itch of a mosquito bite between

my shoulders, and your rough thumb on my thigh
a tickle gentle as turtles bobbing

in Sea-Doo oil slick and cellophane scraps.
How many years did I suffer the loves

that gave too much freedom and not enough
tenderness? Let me be like the man we

saw outside of Notasulga, hands cuffed
behind his back, cigarette in his mouth,

and you be the sheriff, leaning in close,
cupping the sweet flame to my waiting face.]]> 112 Keetje Kuipers 1942683766 Janet 0 to-read 4.32 2019 All Its Charms
author: Keetje Kuipers
name: Janet
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Death in Venice and Other Stories]]> 53063 304 Thomas Mann 0451526090 Janet 5 3.83 Death in Venice and Other Stories
author: Thomas Mann
name: Janet
average rating: 3.83
book published:
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/08/18
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil]]> 195790835 Stories I Wrote for the Devil lures readers into surreal pockets of the United States and Brazil, where they’ll find bite-size Americans in vending machines and the ghosts of living people. Ananda Lima speaks to modern Brazilian-American immigrant experiences―of ambition, fear, longing, and belonging―and reveals the porousness of storytelling and of the places we call home.]]> 181 Ananda Lima 1250292972 Janet 5 short-stories
The Devil here is not the fire-and-brimstone bringer of suffering we're so familiar with, but, as she's explained in interviews, the Brazilian one, who is always portrayed as slightly smaller than humans, someone humans tend to outwit. He is more of a muse than a tormentor, handsome, hot (of course!) lover. He doesn't even want her soul, it's her stories he craves.

These wonderful stories! "She devoured tiny Americans that slid out of the vending machine."

I especially loved one called "Idle Hands" which is solely comprised of the critique on a story by her writer's workshop in, presumably, an MFA program. Naturally, every critique is countered by the opposite advice in the next. The sly wit and inventiveness is delicious. Highly recommended.





]]> 3.41 2024 Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil
author: Ananda Lima
name: Janet
average rating: 3.41
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/17
date added: 2024/08/17
shelves: short-stories
review:
I've been waiting for this--Brazilian-American poet Ananda Lima's first volume of fiction, short stories speaking to our moment, MAGA-haunted, immigrant-paranoid, witty and more than a bit meta, tied together with a continuing relationship between 'the writer' and the Devil, whom she sleeps with at a party when in her early 20s.

The Devil here is not the fire-and-brimstone bringer of suffering we're so familiar with, but, as she's explained in interviews, the Brazilian one, who is always portrayed as slightly smaller than humans, someone humans tend to outwit. He is more of a muse than a tormentor, handsome, hot (of course!) lover. He doesn't even want her soul, it's her stories he craves.

These wonderful stories! "She devoured tiny Americans that slid out of the vending machine."

I especially loved one called "Idle Hands" which is solely comprised of the critique on a story by her writer's workshop in, presumably, an MFA program. Naturally, every critique is countered by the opposite advice in the next. The sly wit and inventiveness is delicious. Highly recommended.






]]> White Girls 13239419 White Girls, Hilton Als’s first book since The Women fourteen years ago, finds one of The New Yorker's boldest cultural critics deftly weaving together his brilliant analyses of literature, art, and music with fearless insights on race, gender, and history. The result is an extraordinary, complex portrait of "white girls," as Als dubs them—an expansive but precise category that encompasses figures as diverse as Truman Capote and Louise Brooks, Malcolm X and Flannery O’Connor. In pieces that hairpin between critique and meditation, fiction and nonfiction, high culture and low, the theoretical and the deeply personal, Als presents a stunning portrait of a writer by way of his subjects, and an invaluable guide to the culture of our time.
]]> 344 Hilton Als 1936365812 Janet 0 to-read 3.88 2013 White Girls
author: Hilton Als
name: Janet
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Trees 56269278 309 Percival Everett 164445064X Janet 5
This novel deals with lynching as its central topic, and thus it is more focused, more suspenseful, though still slyly satirical. We see the action mostly through the point of view of two Black cops called in from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, to solve a crime in Money, Mississippi--the site of the lynching of Emmett Till, whose murderers were never brought to justice. The crime? The lynching of two White men, the grandsons of men who lynched Till, on the basis of their grandmother's false claim that he had said "howdy" to her.

The bodies of the White men were found with a dead Black man--long time dead, and perhaps, the corpse of Emmett Till. And then the dead Black man disappears, only to reappear at another killing/mutilation.

The novel unravels its tale of murder and the supernatural, spreading out from Money, Mississippi to far flung American towns. The cops follow the trail but the more they follow, the more mysterious the deaths become. It begins to read like a voudou story--there's even an enigmatic 100 year old women, Mama Z, who keeps the records of every lynching since 1913, her father's the first. Is it a horror novel? Surrealist? A political parable? A policier? Yes yes yes and yes. A fast, strange, riveting read.]]> 4.06 2021 The Trees
author: Percival Everett
name: Janet
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2021
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/08
date added: 2024/08/09
shelves:
review:
This is my second Percival Everett novel, an even more audacious novel than Erasure, which told the familial story of a frustrated Black professor whose literary work is too elevated for the expectation of a mass audience and the publishing industry, who needs money to deal with his mother, falling into dementia. Several erasures involved. and ends up Giving the People What They Want. Hugely funny.

This novel deals with lynching as its central topic, and thus it is more focused, more suspenseful, though still slyly satirical. We see the action mostly through the point of view of two Black cops called in from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, to solve a crime in Money, Mississippi--the site of the lynching of Emmett Till, whose murderers were never brought to justice. The crime? The lynching of two White men, the grandsons of men who lynched Till, on the basis of their grandmother's false claim that he had said "howdy" to her.

The bodies of the White men were found with a dead Black man--long time dead, and perhaps, the corpse of Emmett Till. And then the dead Black man disappears, only to reappear at another killing/mutilation.

The novel unravels its tale of murder and the supernatural, spreading out from Money, Mississippi to far flung American towns. The cops follow the trail but the more they follow, the more mysterious the deaths become. It begins to read like a voudou story--there's even an enigmatic 100 year old women, Mama Z, who keeps the records of every lynching since 1913, her father's the first. Is it a horror novel? Surrealist? A political parable? A policier? Yes yes yes and yes. A fast, strange, riveting read.
]]> <![CDATA[The Queen of Spades and Other Stories (Dover Thrift Editions: Short Stories)]]> 752985 Besides the brilliant title story, a cunningly wrought narrative of romance and murder in the haute bourgeoisie of St. Petersburg, this volume includes all five stories originally collected as The Tales of the Late P. Belkin. These include "An Amateur Peasant Girl," "The Shot," "The Snowstorm," "The Postmaster," and "The Coffin-Maker."]]> 85 Alexander Pushkin 0486280543 Janet 4 russia, short-stories
Note: this is the newsprintish Dover edition, which does not contain the Captain's Daughter, Tales of Belkin etc. I would generally recommend the 1999 Oxford University Press edition. However, I'd bought the boxed set of Dover "Masterpieces of Russian Literature"--7 slim paperback volumes which include the Overcoat, Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata, Death of Ivan Illich, How Much Land does a Man Need?, Doestoevsky's Notes from the underground, Gorky's Chelkash, five Chekhov stories, and Turgenev's Fathers and Sons in the Constance Garnett translation. A very nice looking little compendium (though it does have that cheap gray newsprint paper) A great gift to introduce people to Russian literature, the small volumes are very reader friendly.]]> 3.76 1841 The Queen of Spades and Other Stories (Dover Thrift Editions: Short Stories)
author: Alexander Pushkin
name: Janet
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1841
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: russia, short-stories
review:
These 6 atmospheric short stories by Russia's Shakespeare, Alexander Pushkin, would not be the works I would judge him by--as I would not judge a master chef by his sandwiches--yet they're wonderful sandwiches. Written in the early 19thC, they're full of twists and turns, domineering old ladies and pious young girls and Hussars, and always end startlingly. Charming.

Note: this is the newsprintish Dover edition, which does not contain the Captain's Daughter, Tales of Belkin etc. I would generally recommend the 1999 Oxford University Press edition. However, I'd bought the boxed set of Dover "Masterpieces of Russian Literature"--7 slim paperback volumes which include the Overcoat, Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata, Death of Ivan Illich, How Much Land does a Man Need?, Doestoevsky's Notes from the underground, Gorky's Chelkash, five Chekhov stories, and Turgenev's Fathers and Sons in the Constance Garnett translation. A very nice looking little compendium (though it does have that cheap gray newsprint paper) A great gift to introduce people to Russian literature, the small volumes are very reader friendly.
]]> <![CDATA[Death in Venice and Other Tales]]> 53064 384 Thomas Mann 0141181737 Janet 5 best-books-under-120-pages 3.92 1911 Death in Venice and Other Tales
author: Thomas Mann
name: Janet
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1911
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: best-books-under-120-pages
review:
Love in time of Cholera... in decadent Venice at the century's end. Ravishing. You could see why Werther wanted to kill himself.
]]> <![CDATA[Justine (The Alexandria Quartet #1)]]> 1504722 'I have been thinking about the girl I met last night in the mirror: dark on the marble-ivory white: glossy black hair: deep suspiring eyes in which one's glances sink because they are nervous, curious, turned to sexual curiosity.' The tragic story of the mysterious and fascinating Justine, and those whose lives she touched in pre-war Alexandria, is told by her lover, an impoverished Irish teacher who has sought refuge across the Mediterranean in Greece. It is undoubtedly a love-story, but the real heroine of the book is its setting: Alexandria, the city 'which decrees that its women shall be the voluptuaries not of pleasure but of pain'.]]> 253 Lawrence Durrell 0525470808 Janet 5 rereading
Durrell takes the position that human beings are the manifestation of the peculiar quality of the place from which they spring, the place which nourishes them also bends them in specific ways. In a way saying that what happened to these people was in essence, not their fault, but fated by their city.

Darley has a tender love affair with a dancer and semi-prostitute Melissa, a Greek, delicate, generous, honest, the mistress of an old Jewish furrier, when he finds himself taken up by Justine, a legendarily beautiful, mysterious, headstrong society matron who introduces him to Alexandrian high society, a circle of mystics and conspirators, adding their dramas to the ones closer at hand. There's his flatmate/landlord, the French diplomat Pombal, his sensuality, tastes and ambitions; Scobie, the elderly British sailor who improbably inveigles his way into the Egyptian secret service; Pursewarden, the successful British writer who sublets Pombal's flat--a man who Darley envies and whose suicide he struggles to understand. The host of characters is varied and interwoven--and resonates throughout the rest of the Quartet.

Here's an early description of Alexandria, and the first appearance of Justine, the perfect example of the sensuality of this writing, the dimensionality of this world he's creating, not to mention a certain quiet foreshadowing:

"Six o'clock. The shuffling of white-robed figures from the station yards. The shops filling and emptying like lungs in the Rue des Soeurs. The pale lengthening rays of the afternoon sun smear the long curves of the Esplanade, and the dazzled pigeons, like rings of scattered paper, climb above the minarets to take the last rays of the waning light on their wings. Ringing of silver on the money-changer's counters. The iron grille outside the bank still too hot to touch. Clip-clop of horse-drawn carriages carrying civil servants in red flowerpots toward the cafes on the sea-front. This is the hour least easy to bear, when from my balcony I catch an unexpected glimpse of her walking idly towards the town in there white sandals, still half asleep. The city unwrinkled like an old tortoise and peers about it. For a moment it relinquished the torn rags of the flesh, while from some hidden alley by the slaughter-house, above the moans and screams of the cattle, comes the nasal chipping of a Damascus love-song; shrill quarter tones, like a sinus being ground to powder.

"Now tired men throw back the shutters of their balconies and step blinking into the pale hot light--etiolated flowers of afternoons spent in anguish, tossing upon ugly beds, bandaged by dreams. I have become one of these poor clerks of the conscience, a citizen of Alexandria. She passes below my window, smiling as if at some private satisfaction, softly fanning her cheeks with the little reed fan. It is a smile which I shall probably never see again for in company she only laughs, showing those magnificent white teeth. But this sad yet quick smile is full of quality which one does not think she owns--the power of mischief. You would have said she was of a more tragic cast of character and lacked common humor. Only the obstinate memory of this smile is to make me doubt it in the days to come."

I cannot recommend this gorgeous book more highly.]]> 3.90 1957 Justine (The Alexandria Quartet #1)
author: Lawrence Durrell
name: Janet
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1957
rating: 5
read at: 2024/08/03
date added: 2024/08/03
shelves: rereading
review:
Justine, the first volume of the Alexandria Quartet, is one of my most re-read books, a book I often pick up and read just a few paragraphs just for the sheer beauty of the writing. A story about a group of Alexandrians between the wars, centered on the experience of Darley, an impoverished British teacher and his varied friendships and loves, written in retrospect during WW2, it is the book I think I would have most liked to have written. I don't think there will ever be a more sensual, lyrical, painterly writer than Durrell, nor a more exquisitely delineated labyrinthine, incestuous, brilliant, tangled society than that of his Alexandria, Egypt. A single page contains more beauty than is in the entire New York Times Bestseller list combined.

Durrell takes the position that human beings are the manifestation of the peculiar quality of the place from which they spring, the place which nourishes them also bends them in specific ways. In a way saying that what happened to these people was in essence, not their fault, but fated by their city.

Darley has a tender love affair with a dancer and semi-prostitute Melissa, a Greek, delicate, generous, honest, the mistress of an old Jewish furrier, when he finds himself taken up by Justine, a legendarily beautiful, mysterious, headstrong society matron who introduces him to Alexandrian high society, a circle of mystics and conspirators, adding their dramas to the ones closer at hand. There's his flatmate/landlord, the French diplomat Pombal, his sensuality, tastes and ambitions; Scobie, the elderly British sailor who improbably inveigles his way into the Egyptian secret service; Pursewarden, the successful British writer who sublets Pombal's flat--a man who Darley envies and whose suicide he struggles to understand. The host of characters is varied and interwoven--and resonates throughout the rest of the Quartet.

Here's an early description of Alexandria, and the first appearance of Justine, the perfect example of the sensuality of this writing, the dimensionality of this world he's creating, not to mention a certain quiet foreshadowing:

"Six o'clock. The shuffling of white-robed figures from the station yards. The shops filling and emptying like lungs in the Rue des Soeurs. The pale lengthening rays of the afternoon sun smear the long curves of the Esplanade, and the dazzled pigeons, like rings of scattered paper, climb above the minarets to take the last rays of the waning light on their wings. Ringing of silver on the money-changer's counters. The iron grille outside the bank still too hot to touch. Clip-clop of horse-drawn carriages carrying civil servants in red flowerpots toward the cafes on the sea-front. This is the hour least easy to bear, when from my balcony I catch an unexpected glimpse of her walking idly towards the town in there white sandals, still half asleep. The city unwrinkled like an old tortoise and peers about it. For a moment it relinquished the torn rags of the flesh, while from some hidden alley by the slaughter-house, above the moans and screams of the cattle, comes the nasal chipping of a Damascus love-song; shrill quarter tones, like a sinus being ground to powder.

"Now tired men throw back the shutters of their balconies and step blinking into the pale hot light--etiolated flowers of afternoons spent in anguish, tossing upon ugly beds, bandaged by dreams. I have become one of these poor clerks of the conscience, a citizen of Alexandria. She passes below my window, smiling as if at some private satisfaction, softly fanning her cheeks with the little reed fan. It is a smile which I shall probably never see again for in company she only laughs, showing those magnificent white teeth. But this sad yet quick smile is full of quality which one does not think she owns--the power of mischief. You would have said she was of a more tragic cast of character and lacked common humor. Only the obstinate memory of this smile is to make me doubt it in the days to come."

I cannot recommend this gorgeous book more highly.
]]> In Love 19090471 This “heart-stoppingly good� masterpiece about a crumbling love affair in 1950s New York perfectly captures “the desperate desire for love and the recognition that it is slipping away� (Slate). “One of the greatest, bleakest breakup stories ever told.� � The New York ObserverNew York in the 1950s. A man on a barstool is telling a story about a woman he met in a bar, early married and soon divorced, her child farmed out to her parents, good-looking, if a little past her prime. They’d gone out, they’d grown close, but as far as he was concerned it didn’t add up to much. He was a busy man.Then one day, out dancing, she runs into a rich awkward lovelorn businessman. He’ll pay for her to be his, pay her a lot. And now the narrator discovers that he is as much in love with her as she is with him, perhaps more, though it will take him a while to realize just how utterly lost he is.Executed with the cool smoky brilliance of a classic Miles Davis track, In Love is an unequaled exploration of the tethered—and untethered—heart.]]> 120 Alfred Hayes 1590176936 Janet 0 to-read 4.01 1958 In Love
author: Alfred Hayes
name: Janet
average rating: 4.01
book published: 1958
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Real-World Enlightenment: Discovering Ordinary Magic in Everyday Life]]> 199846783
Featuring 50 practical tools to ease anxiety, overwhelm, and stress by recognizing the enduring sense of love and well-being that’s with us regardless of our circumstances.

Enlightenment isn’t a lofty and unattainable goal. Real-world enlightenment is always here, and you can find it any time in life’s highs, its lows, and everything in-between.

Beloved mindfulness teacher, best-selling author, and longtime Buddhist practitioner Susan Kaiser Greenland explores time-honored themes that tap into a sense of love, connection, and well-being that is with us regardless of our circumstances. These universal themes—including Change, Humility, Interdependence, Concentration, Joy, Kindness, and Discernment, among many others—emphasize attitudes and mindsets that lead to emotional and psychological freedom by lessening our reactivity, broadening our perspectives, and deepening our relationships.

Kaiser Greenland draws from science, psychology, Buddhism, wisdom traditions, and personal stories to give us a view of “real-world enlightenment”—where we shift from a narrow survival-driven frame of mind to one that is grounded and as vast as the sky. When we cultivate this expansive worldview from the inside out, we become more resilient, and that’s just the beginning. A view as vast as the sky charts the course for kind, resilient people to build a kinder and more resilient world. To help us do this, she offers valuable methods and takeaways that allow you to apply these life-changing universal themes every day. They include:

-Practical ways to recognize the basic goodness within and around you by tapping into sensory pleasures like music or nature.
-Robust tools to manage stress and develop attention by focusing on a sight, sound, image, word, or phrase.
-Catchy slogans that promote emotional balance when you feel overwhelmed, like “right now, I’m okay,� “drop the baggage,� or “don’t play the scene before you get there.� These and other phrases can interrupt spiraling thoughts and move you back into your comfort zone.
-Accessible meditation methods to experience life with greater equanimity by slowing down your thinking process to heighten awareness of the natural movement of your mind.
-Time-tested life hacks to care for yourself and others with greater kindness and compassion.
-Insightful strategies that bring greater ease and effortlessness into your life and relationships by helping you remain flexible and creative, even in challenging situations.
-And much more.]]> 240 Susan Kaiser Greenland 1611809355 Janet 4 philosophy-essay-criticism
But if some practices can help me in my real, messy, complicated life, I'm in.

That's what I loved about this book. That it assesses the difficulties we have in our real world lives, and presents a variety of lightweight meditational or mindfulness practices and exercises to help us grapple with these ordinary challenges. Each chapter ends with a brief wrap up, a practice and a takeaway, which makes the book even more useful for later referrence.

Maybe because she's done so much work with children, that she puts playfulness up there right at the beginning, something that I never thought of as part of a practice. "Renunciation" is always a word that creeps me out, but here, it becomes about doing things differently, changing it up. If there's a word you overuse, try skipping it. A lot of the practices are simply about being more present in your life, which I know (duh) but need the reminder and little exercises to strengthen presence.

My favorite chapter is about effortless action. Like Greenland, a former attorney and self-admitted Type A, it came as a revelation that the best action is the effortless action. We're raised to believe that the more effort something took, the better the result. But Greenland's book challenges that idea, and I find it such a refreshing idea. A taoist concept, Wu Wei. The optimal level of effort is the least effort to do what's necessary. Not "doing nothing," but like water, take the relaxed course.

A terrific approach to how mindfulness, awareness and meditation can positively impact daily life.
]]> 4.30 Real-World Enlightenment: Discovering Ordinary Magic in Everyday Life
author: Susan Kaiser Greenland
name: Janet
average rating: 4.30
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/30
date added: 2024/07/30
shelves: philosophy-essay-criticism
review:
What I liked best about Susan Greenland's book "Real World Enlightenment" was that it wasn't a meditation book that elevates meditation as some good-in-itself. I'm a sometimes meditator, but only if I know there's a reason for it--specific to my own life, a problem or problem-area that keeps being a challenge for me. Meditation, relaxation, mindfulness etc. makes sense to me as a tool but not as an end to itself. I don't want to be a monk or a star meditator, go retreats on mountaintops and sit on cushions in the lotus position and breathe for a week, getting whacked if I fall asleep.

But if some practices can help me in my real, messy, complicated life, I'm in.

That's what I loved about this book. That it assesses the difficulties we have in our real world lives, and presents a variety of lightweight meditational or mindfulness practices and exercises to help us grapple with these ordinary challenges. Each chapter ends with a brief wrap up, a practice and a takeaway, which makes the book even more useful for later referrence.

Maybe because she's done so much work with children, that she puts playfulness up there right at the beginning, something that I never thought of as part of a practice. "Renunciation" is always a word that creeps me out, but here, it becomes about doing things differently, changing it up. If there's a word you overuse, try skipping it. A lot of the practices are simply about being more present in your life, which I know (duh) but need the reminder and little exercises to strengthen presence.

My favorite chapter is about effortless action. Like Greenland, a former attorney and self-admitted Type A, it came as a revelation that the best action is the effortless action. We're raised to believe that the more effort something took, the better the result. But Greenland's book challenges that idea, and I find it such a refreshing idea. A taoist concept, Wu Wei. The optimal level of effort is the least effort to do what's necessary. Not "doing nothing," but like water, take the relaxed course.

A terrific approach to how mindfulness, awareness and meditation can positively impact daily life.

]]> <![CDATA[Brother and the Dancer: A Novel]]> 18124422 264 Keenan Norris 159714245X Janet 0 to-read 3.74 2013 Brother and the Dancer: A Novel
author: Keenan Norris
name: Janet
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> All Fours 197798168
A semifamous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to New York. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey.

Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman. Once again, July hijacks the familiar and turns it into something new and thrillingly, profoundly alive.]]> 336 Miranda July 0593190262 Janet 5
But of course, being a 'Parker'--or a completely left-field character, she bails on her plan a half-hour out of Los Angeles, and takes a very different course, a course only a Miranda July character would ever take, and coming into contact with other equally unusual people, and interacting with them in highly unusual ways.

So, there are times one asks one's self--why do I care about these people, so divorced from the reality most of us inhabit? And then we'll get the answer, almost immediately, through some insight, some arrangement, some understanding of the human condition you've thought of yourself maybe, but let slide away. What is normal, anyway, the book asks, and asks, and continues to ask, maybe the central question of all July's work.

The character, though highly anxious and self-absorbed, is also uniquely observant and surprisingly nonjudgmental, more curious than superior, which makes her an ideal vehicle to explore the questions of the book. The character is the kind of person random people are attracted to. She's undefended, and who can't remember being that person, especially as a young person, to whom people start telling the strangest stories.

I found myself writing down whole passages of All Fours, so keen is July's observation of the ways of contemporary life, of motherhood, marriage, sexuality, aging. Menopause! Matters which are hard to pin down and yet affect millions, the stuff of everybody's life.

For instance, getting ready for the cross country trip, she worries about her family, her child Sam (always 'they'):
"It was a two and half week trip. The longest I'd been away from Sam or Harris was two weeks, but this was the shortest it could comfortably be. I told myself that if I missed Sam too much or Sam missed me too much then I could simply fly home at any moment and pay someone on Craigslist to drive the car back to L.A. But Sam was unlikely to miss me at all since they were an out-of-sight-out-of-mind person. As was I. The real fear was that we would forget each other. That was always my underlying fear: that someone I loved would look at me like stranger. Or that I would take such a circuitous path away from someone that I could never find my way back to them. Even before her mild cognitive impairment, my mom always introduced herself when I answered the phone. This is your mother: Elaine..."

The character and her friend, talking about their sex lives:
"Who initiates? You, right?" I knew she was that sort of totally present, body-rooted lover who felt like sex was a basic need.
"Yes," she sighed. "It's always me."
"I'm the initiator too, actually, but only because I'm trying to get out ahead of the pressure."
"How often?"
"Once a week."
"Wow," she moaned. "I wish I was having sex once a week."
I laughed. We were so opposite.
"I see it like exercise," I said. "you don't ask yourself if you want to exercise, that's the wrong question."
"You don't exercise."
"I know, but if I did, I imagine it would be similar. I also don't love getting into pools, by the way. Sunday nights! Packing for trips! Any transition. Whatever state I'm in I just want to stay in it, if that's not too much to ask." It was though, for a married person. Sometimes I could hear Harris's dick whistling impatiently like a teakettle, at higher and higher pitches until I finally couldn't take it and so I initiated."

Here she is buying a a bedspread in an antique mall:
"It was the sort of very feminine and decadent thing I'd wanted my whole life; I was good at knowing what I wanted and then choosing something else at the very last second."

Little wonder why it's the book of the summer.]]> 3.53 2024 All Fours
author: Miranda July
name: Janet
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/07/05
shelves:
review:
Miranda July is a certain flavor of author--depicting a world in which unusual people behave unpredictably, and thus she startles and amazes, charms and perplexes. The strangeness of All Fours lies in the performance-artist protagonist's unpredictable reactions to situations in which most of us would act in conventional ways. Namely, based on a semi-challenge by her husband, dividing the world into two types of people, "drivers" and "parkers" (the distinction never really clear) but putting himself and a woman he's talking to at a party in the category of "drivers"--the ones who follow through, who can tolerate the tedium of everyday life, and "parkers" who have to have drama... (as close as I can get it)... and calls her a "Parker." which stimulates her to undertake a cross country drive (to spend $20K she's been given by a whiskey company which has used a line of her writing_) Already a Miranda July character, who with an unexpected $20K decides she has to spend it in a completely frivolous way--taking a deluxe room at New York's Carlisle Hotel.

But of course, being a 'Parker'--or a completely left-field character, she bails on her plan a half-hour out of Los Angeles, and takes a very different course, a course only a Miranda July character would ever take, and coming into contact with other equally unusual people, and interacting with them in highly unusual ways.

So, there are times one asks one's self--why do I care about these people, so divorced from the reality most of us inhabit? And then we'll get the answer, almost immediately, through some insight, some arrangement, some understanding of the human condition you've thought of yourself maybe, but let slide away. What is normal, anyway, the book asks, and asks, and continues to ask, maybe the central question of all July's work.

The character, though highly anxious and self-absorbed, is also uniquely observant and surprisingly nonjudgmental, more curious than superior, which makes her an ideal vehicle to explore the questions of the book. The character is the kind of person random people are attracted to. She's undefended, and who can't remember being that person, especially as a young person, to whom people start telling the strangest stories.

I found myself writing down whole passages of All Fours, so keen is July's observation of the ways of contemporary life, of motherhood, marriage, sexuality, aging. Menopause! Matters which are hard to pin down and yet affect millions, the stuff of everybody's life.

For instance, getting ready for the cross country trip, she worries about her family, her child Sam (always 'they'):
"It was a two and half week trip. The longest I'd been away from Sam or Harris was two weeks, but this was the shortest it could comfortably be. I told myself that if I missed Sam too much or Sam missed me too much then I could simply fly home at any moment and pay someone on Craigslist to drive the car back to L.A. But Sam was unlikely to miss me at all since they were an out-of-sight-out-of-mind person. As was I. The real fear was that we would forget each other. That was always my underlying fear: that someone I loved would look at me like stranger. Or that I would take such a circuitous path away from someone that I could never find my way back to them. Even before her mild cognitive impairment, my mom always introduced herself when I answered the phone. This is your mother: Elaine..."

The character and her friend, talking about their sex lives:
"Who initiates? You, right?" I knew she was that sort of totally present, body-rooted lover who felt like sex was a basic need.
"Yes," she sighed. "It's always me."
"I'm the initiator too, actually, but only because I'm trying to get out ahead of the pressure."
"How often?"
"Once a week."
"Wow," she moaned. "I wish I was having sex once a week."
I laughed. We were so opposite.
"I see it like exercise," I said. "you don't ask yourself if you want to exercise, that's the wrong question."
"You don't exercise."
"I know, but if I did, I imagine it would be similar. I also don't love getting into pools, by the way. Sunday nights! Packing for trips! Any transition. Whatever state I'm in I just want to stay in it, if that's not too much to ask." It was though, for a married person. Sometimes I could hear Harris's dick whistling impatiently like a teakettle, at higher and higher pitches until I finally couldn't take it and so I initiated."

Here she is buying a a bedspread in an antique mall:
"It was the sort of very feminine and decadent thing I'd wanted my whole life; I was good at knowing what I wanted and then choosing something else at the very last second."

Little wonder why it's the book of the summer.
]]> Beauty Is a Wound 24826361 Beauty Is a Wound astonishes from its opening line: “One afternoon on a weekend in May, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years . . .�

Across generations, the beautiful Indo prostitute Dewi Ayu, her daughters, and her grandchildren are beset by incest, murder, bestiality, rape, and the often fiercely vengeful undead.

Kurniawan mixes tender lyricism and gleefully grotesque hyperbole to offer entertainment of a rare order as well as a scathing critique of his young nation’s troubled past: the rapacious offhand greed of colonialism; the chaotic struggle for independence; the 1965 mass murders of perhaps a million “communists,� followed by three decades of Suharto’s despotic rule.

Drawing on local sources—folk tales and the all-night shadow-puppet plays, with their bawdy wit and epic scope—and inspired by Melville and Gogol, Kurniawan’s distinctive West Javanese voice brings something luscious yet astringent to literature today. Beauty Is a Wound is a prime example of the bravura resilience of art in Indonesia, blossoming after the fall of Suharto.]]> 470 Eka Kurniawan 0811223639 Janet 0 to-read 3.94 2002 Beauty Is a Wound
author: Eka Kurniawan
name: Janet
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2002
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta]]> 59227943
Carlotta Mercedes has been misunderstood her entire life. When she was pulled into a robbery gone wrong, she still went by the name she’d grown up with in Fort Greene, Brooklyn—before it gentrified. But not long after her conviction, she took the name Carlotta and began to live as a woman, an embrace of selfhood that prison authorities rejected, keeping Carlotta trapped in an all-male cell block, abused by both inmates and guards, and often placed in solitary.

In her fifth appearance before the parole board, Carlotta is at last granted conditional freedom and returns to a much-changed New York City.ĚýOver a whirlwind Fourth of July weekend, she struggles to reconcile with the son she left behind, to reunite with a family reluctant to accept her true identity, and to avoid any minor parole infraction that might get her consigned back to lockup.

Written with the same astonishing verve ofĚý Delicious Foods , whichĚýdazzled critics and readers alike, Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to CarlottaĚý sweeps the reader through seemingly every street of Brooklyn, much as Joyce’s Ulysses does through Dublin. The novel sings with brio and ambition, delivering a fantastically entertaining read and a cast of unforgettable characters even as it challenges us to confront the glaring injustices of a prison system that continues to punish people long after their time has been served.]]> 352 James Hannaham 0316285277 Janet 5
She needs a job. She needs clothes. She needs to find her way in this unfamiliar world. Her family home is a parole violation in the making--someone has thrown a huge "wake" for one of her grandmother's church friends, which quickly devolves into a rave. People have forgotten her coming out day, and we get a look at what that 22 years has wrought, firstly to her son, Ibe--now Iceman--and to the others in the world that knew him as a man.

The book is all about that voice, its rhythm and wit, Carlotta's incredible characterizations of chance encounters from the smallest to the largest. Her memories of the life inside, and the life pre- incarceration--when she'd (he'd) been an unsuspecting semi-bystander to a fatal liquor store holdup. We feel her loves and yearnings and amazing sense of humor throughout it all--and the colossal bravery it takes to insist on being one's self.

Do not miss this and if you can snag it on audio--sublime.



"]]> 3.97 2022 Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta
author: James Hannaham
name: Janet
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/07/04
date added: 2024/07/04
shelves:
review:
Could not have loved this more. Listened to it in audio, now dying to go back and read it on the page for its full artistry. Written both in close third and first person, this is a fabulously language-oriented self-portrait of one Carlotta Mercedes, a transwoman who finds herself released from Ithaca men's prison after 22 years, and following her back into New York City, narrating her response to the new reality of life on the outside, and what it is to locate yourself in a situation of complete change.

She needs a job. She needs clothes. She needs to find her way in this unfamiliar world. Her family home is a parole violation in the making--someone has thrown a huge "wake" for one of her grandmother's church friends, which quickly devolves into a rave. People have forgotten her coming out day, and we get a look at what that 22 years has wrought, firstly to her son, Ibe--now Iceman--and to the others in the world that knew him as a man.

The book is all about that voice, its rhythm and wit, Carlotta's incredible characterizations of chance encounters from the smallest to the largest. Her memories of the life inside, and the life pre- incarceration--when she'd (he'd) been an unsuspecting semi-bystander to a fatal liquor store holdup. We feel her loves and yearnings and amazing sense of humor throughout it all--and the colossal bravery it takes to insist on being one's self.

Do not miss this and if you can snag it on audio--sublime.



"
]]> March 68506959 Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

From the author of the acclaimed Year of Wonders, a historical novel and love story set during a time of catastrophe, on the front lines of the American Civil War. Acclaimed author Geraldine Brooks gives us the story of the absent father from Louisa May Alcott's Little Women—and conjures a world of brutality, stubborn courage and transcendent love. An idealistic abolitionist, March has gone as chaplain to serve the Union cause. But the war tests his faith not only in the Union—which is also capable of barbarism and racism—but in himself. As he recovers from a near-fatal illness, March must reassemble and reconnect with his family, who have no idea of what he has endured. A love story set in a time of catastrophe, March explores the passions between a man and a woman, the tenderness of parent and child, and the life-changing power of an ardently held belief.]]> 320 Geraldine Brooks 0143036661 Janet 0 to-read 3.84 2005 March
author: Geraldine Brooks
name: Janet
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Same Bed Different Dreams 122993405
In 1919, far-flung Korean patriots establish the Korean Provisional Government to protest the Japanese occupation of their country. This government-in-exile proves mostly symbolic, though, and after Japan’s defeat in World War II, the KPG dissolves and civil war erupts, resulting in the North-South split that remains today.

But what if the KPG still existed now, today—working toward a unified Korea, secretly harnessing the might of a giant tech company to further its aims? That’s the outrageous premise of Same Bed Different Dreams, which weaves together three distinct narrative voices and an archive of mysterious images and twists reality like a kaleidoscope, spinning Korean history, American pop culture, and our tech-fraught lives into an extraordinary and unforgettable novel.

Early on we meet Soon Sheen, who works at the sprawling international technology company GLOAT, and comes into possession of an unfinished book authored by the KPG. The manuscript is a mysterious, revisionist history, tying famous names and obscure bit players to the KPG’s grand project. This strange manuscript links together figures from architect-poet Yi Sang to Jack London to Marilyn Monroe. M*A*S*H is in here, too, and the Moonies, and a history of violence extending from the assassination of President McKinley to the Soviet downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007.

Just as foreign countries have imposed their desires on Korea, so too has Park tucked different dreamers into this sprawling bed of a novel. Among them: Parker Jotter, Korean War vet and appliance-store owner, who saw something--a UFO?--while flying over North Korea; Nora You, nail salon magnate; and Monk Zingapan, game designer turned writing guru. Their links are revealed over time, even as the dreamers remain in the dark as to their own interconnectedness. A thrilling feat of imagination and a step forward from an award-winning author, Same Bed Different Dreams begins as a comic novel and gradually pulls readers into another dimension—one in which utopia is possible.]]> 528 Ed Park 0812998979 Janet 0 to-read 3.73 2023 Same Bed Different Dreams
author: Ed Park
name: Janet
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/07/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> On the Road 17158537 Jack Kerouac Janet 5 rereading, interrupted-reads
The first time I read it as a young teenager completely infatuated with the freedom and the footloose life of Sal Paradise and his friends, the click of it, the tight circle of friends, the landscapes, as I yearned to be so free and syncopated, learning how to catch rides on freight trains and let myself be swept along by a good-looking madman like Dean Moriarty--the roaring trips across America, living the beat life--though feeling even then somewhat uneasy with the faceless women of the book, I was more enamored than analytical about it. It was the glorious theme of the times and one didn't dig too deeply into it. I was going to live in a book like this, a life like this, in my own way.

The second time I was in my twenties, a college girl, hyperaware of its disregard for its women and its blindness to women's exclusion from such freedom in the world. Sure, I knew women who had gone on the road like Kerouac and crew, but their willingness to endure sexual depredations and occasional violence as a matter of course was beyond my tolerance level. It just made me sad to read about the boys' grand adventures when the only women were "somebody's girlfriend" "the gorgeous girls of so and so" and mostly dumped and lied to or used for financial support. It got in the way of my love--because, having been out in the world a bit, I knew there was no place in that adventure for me.

Now that I am many years older than anybody in the book--older than Kerouac ever got to be--I am so enjoying it. I'm still nobody in it, but it's easy to accept now, and just enjoy the book as I would enjoy any window into a distant culture--and especially, absolutely reveling in Kerouac's rolling prose. Having it read aloud reinforces the great sound of it. This audiobook--read by Will Patton, a remarkable actor-- underscores everything Kerouac put into it. The author was not ironic, he was not a hater, he embraced everyone and everything, and the book has a specific music which anybody who loves American prose written to an American beat will find contagiously great. He was known as the Great Memory, and any writer would envy the texture and detail he captured.

As the book came in and out of my hands--audio from Libby, the library app--as I blew the deadlines and it returned, I also read around in The Dharma Bums, and it's not nearly the fun of On The Road--because the former is fueled--literally driven--by Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassidy) and there's such a beat to it, a musical beat. Whooee! Dharma Bums I like for the nature writing, also Big Sur, nobody writes a landscape that's more alive than Kerouac. But the embrace and fun and friendships of On The Road are still alive, free of the ponderous and barely digested Buddhism of Dharma Bums--though you have to grit your teeth once in a while, like finding little stones in your rice, at the occasional retrograde viewpoint or language. Worth it worth it worth it.

Reading On the Road alongside Jack's Book, an Oral Biography by Barry Gifford, added to my enjoyment, to understand the actual events behind the novelized memoir which is Kerouac's grand project, as well as learn more specifically about the writer's artistic development.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
BACK into it--the audiobook of On The Road is so riotous and delicious--even the sections I've heard before are worth listening to again, the way a song gets better after repeating listenings. Patton so gets the sound of Kerouac, the poetics, and is able to convey this rolling song of it. And his little impressions of the others--his William S. Burroughs (Old Bull Lee) is fantastic, and clearly modeled on records of that writer's particular voice.

Especially enjoying this after listening to "Jack's Book", an oral history of Kerouac and his writings by the people who were the characters in this and the other books in his epic portrait of his friends and his times, under their actual names. Then reading the novelist's description of these same events--you really see the artistry in the language, how vivid Kerouac's telling is compared with anybody else's.

If you haven't read On the Road--and especially if you have!--do not miss the privilege of listening to this unabridged reading. ]]> 3.19 1957 On the Road
author: Jack Kerouac
name: Janet
average rating: 3.19
book published: 1957
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/04
date added: 2024/06/04
shelves: rereading, interrupted-reads
review:
This is probably the third time I've read On the Road--and each time, it's been a completely different book.

The first time I read it as a young teenager completely infatuated with the freedom and the footloose life of Sal Paradise and his friends, the click of it, the tight circle of friends, the landscapes, as I yearned to be so free and syncopated, learning how to catch rides on freight trains and let myself be swept along by a good-looking madman like Dean Moriarty--the roaring trips across America, living the beat life--though feeling even then somewhat uneasy with the faceless women of the book, I was more enamored than analytical about it. It was the glorious theme of the times and one didn't dig too deeply into it. I was going to live in a book like this, a life like this, in my own way.

The second time I was in my twenties, a college girl, hyperaware of its disregard for its women and its blindness to women's exclusion from such freedom in the world. Sure, I knew women who had gone on the road like Kerouac and crew, but their willingness to endure sexual depredations and occasional violence as a matter of course was beyond my tolerance level. It just made me sad to read about the boys' grand adventures when the only women were "somebody's girlfriend" "the gorgeous girls of so and so" and mostly dumped and lied to or used for financial support. It got in the way of my love--because, having been out in the world a bit, I knew there was no place in that adventure for me.

Now that I am many years older than anybody in the book--older than Kerouac ever got to be--I am so enjoying it. I'm still nobody in it, but it's easy to accept now, and just enjoy the book as I would enjoy any window into a distant culture--and especially, absolutely reveling in Kerouac's rolling prose. Having it read aloud reinforces the great sound of it. This audiobook--read by Will Patton, a remarkable actor-- underscores everything Kerouac put into it. The author was not ironic, he was not a hater, he embraced everyone and everything, and the book has a specific music which anybody who loves American prose written to an American beat will find contagiously great. He was known as the Great Memory, and any writer would envy the texture and detail he captured.

As the book came in and out of my hands--audio from Libby, the library app--as I blew the deadlines and it returned, I also read around in The Dharma Bums, and it's not nearly the fun of On The Road--because the former is fueled--literally driven--by Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassidy) and there's such a beat to it, a musical beat. Whooee! Dharma Bums I like for the nature writing, also Big Sur, nobody writes a landscape that's more alive than Kerouac. But the embrace and fun and friendships of On The Road are still alive, free of the ponderous and barely digested Buddhism of Dharma Bums--though you have to grit your teeth once in a while, like finding little stones in your rice, at the occasional retrograde viewpoint or language. Worth it worth it worth it.

Reading On the Road alongside Jack's Book, an Oral Biography by Barry Gifford, added to my enjoyment, to understand the actual events behind the novelized memoir which is Kerouac's grand project, as well as learn more specifically about the writer's artistic development.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
BACK into it--the audiobook of On The Road is so riotous and delicious--even the sections I've heard before are worth listening to again, the way a song gets better after repeating listenings. Patton so gets the sound of Kerouac, the poetics, and is able to convey this rolling song of it. And his little impressions of the others--his William S. Burroughs (Old Bull Lee) is fantastic, and clearly modeled on records of that writer's particular voice.

Especially enjoying this after listening to "Jack's Book", an oral history of Kerouac and his writings by the people who were the characters in this and the other books in his epic portrait of his friends and his times, under their actual names. Then reading the novelist's description of these same events--you really see the artistry in the language, how vivid Kerouac's telling is compared with anybody else's.

If you haven't read On the Road--and especially if you have!--do not miss the privilege of listening to this unabridged reading.
]]> Suttree 394469 471 Cormac McCarthy 0679736328 Janet 4
The dialogue contrasts sharply to the narration--stripped and bare, recognizable Cormac McCarthy, also very fine.

The maddening part? Aside from the fact that the two voices, the narrative and the dialogue, have little commerce with one another, there's the fact--a problem for me if not for other readers--that the character constantly resets. Things happen without consequence or reverberation within the protagonist. He's intensely involved with people while they're present, but once something has happened, it's like it never did. Complete reset every time. Maybe it's what tough guys do in the McCarthy universe, they just move on, but your abandoned kid dies and you dig the grave yourself and then--never think of him again?

Is his self-destructive behavior, his alcoholism and brawling and habituating bars that are barely bars they're so low, sometimes only a backroom in somebody's house, supposed to stand for remorse without referring directly to it? I'm sorry, but I'm unconvinced that hard living, juxtaposed with loyalty and a soft spot for hard-ups, the occasional good deed, equals a deep unexpressed feeling. If the guy can lovingly describe the most derelict and degraded people and landscapes, you'd think he'd be capable of remembering his own failures, guilt or remorse.

So, although it was a masterpiece, it's also an unremitting slog. A brilliant, hopeless, shaggy dog story.]]> 4.20 1979 Suttree
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Janet
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1979
rating: 4
read at: 2024/05/30
date added: 2024/05/30
shelves:
review:
A fine, tough, maddening book. Imagine a mashup of Faulkner and 'Barfly.'--the most gorgeous, lyrical, lush descriptions of derelict territory, trash-rust-riverfront Knoxville, its moonshine backroom bars and underbridge lean-tos, and a character, Cornelius Suttree, a white man of somewhat elevated background and education, adrift between the garbage and the flowers. Eking out a living as a fisherman, friend to the bums, petty crooks, and poverty-stricken locals, Black and white, in the 1950s. That's the good part.

The dialogue contrasts sharply to the narration--stripped and bare, recognizable Cormac McCarthy, also very fine.

The maddening part? Aside from the fact that the two voices, the narrative and the dialogue, have little commerce with one another, there's the fact--a problem for me if not for other readers--that the character constantly resets. Things happen without consequence or reverberation within the protagonist. He's intensely involved with people while they're present, but once something has happened, it's like it never did. Complete reset every time. Maybe it's what tough guys do in the McCarthy universe, they just move on, but your abandoned kid dies and you dig the grave yourself and then--never think of him again?

Is his self-destructive behavior, his alcoholism and brawling and habituating bars that are barely bars they're so low, sometimes only a backroom in somebody's house, supposed to stand for remorse without referring directly to it? I'm sorry, but I'm unconvinced that hard living, juxtaposed with loyalty and a soft spot for hard-ups, the occasional good deed, equals a deep unexpressed feeling. If the guy can lovingly describe the most derelict and degraded people and landscapes, you'd think he'd be capable of remembering his own failures, guilt or remorse.

So, although it was a masterpiece, it's also an unremitting slog. A brilliant, hopeless, shaggy dog story.
]]> This Is Me Letting You Go 29924756 120 Heidi Priebe Janet 0 to-read 4.06 2016 This Is Me Letting You Go
author: Heidi Priebe
name: Janet
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution]]> 458787
The women included in this anthology run the gamut from the famous---Carolyn Cassady and Jan Kerouac-to the relatively undiscovered-Mary Fabilli and Helen Adam. The art, prose, and poetry selected represent the full range and development of their work.

The women whose work is featured in this anthology were talented rebels with enough courage and creative spirit to turn their backs on "the good life" that the fifties promised and forge their way to San Francisco and Greenwich Village. They dared to attempt to create lives of their own and make their own way.

Today an unprecedented amount of brilliant, imaginative and highly experimental writing by women is being recognized and applauded. This anthology looks back to the antecedents for this greater liberty of expression. It is a testament to the lives of the women who helped shape the Beat era. Together, their voices form an energetic force field of consciousness that manifested at a rich and difficult time in cultural history.

Women of the Beat Generation profiles 40 women --Precursors, Muses
Writers, and Artists-including Elise Cowen, Diane di Prima, Hettie Jones, Joan Vollmer Burroughs, Jan Kerouac, Jane Bowles, Carolyn Cassady, Edie Parker Kerouac
Eileen Kaufman, Joyce Johnson, Denise Levertov, Brenda Frazer, Anne Waldman, Jay DeFeo, Joan Brown, and many others

Women of the Beat Generation highlights the lives and work of these female iconoclasts, and ensures the world will not forget their contributions to its transformation.]]> 384 Brenda Knight 1567312969 Janet 0 to-read 4.08 1996 Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution
author: Brenda Knight
name: Janet
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1996
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/05/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Master and Margarita 339472 402 Mikhail Bulgakov Janet 5 russia, rereading 4.18 1967 The Master and Margarita
author: Mikhail Bulgakov
name: Janet
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1967
rating: 5
read at: 2016/03/10
date added: 2024/05/06
shelves: russia, rereading
review:
Re-reading. How I love this book, the surreal "present day" Moscow of the 1930's in the classic "a stranger comes to town" mode. Only this stranger is a Mephistophelean magician, accompanied by a very tall individual in a tight plaid suit, a giant cat and a very pale woman with a scar across her throat, who proceed to throw the Soviet writerly and theatrical bureaucracies--which Bulgakov knew well--into terrified chaos. The Moscow story is interwoven with the story of the Crucifixion, told from the point of view of Pontius Pilate, and a love story between a faithful woman and a mysterious madman. Ambitious and riveting.
]]> A Gentleman in Moscow 29430012 He can't leave. You won't want to.

With his breakout novel Rules of Civility, Amor Towles established himself as a master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction, bringing late-1930s Manhattan to life with splendid atmosphere and a flawless command of style. A Gentleman in Moscow immerses us in another elegantly drawn era with the story of Count Alexander Rostov.

When, in 1922, the thirty-year-old Count is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, he is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. An indomitable man of erudition and wit, Rostov must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors.

Unexpectedly, the Count's reduced circumstances provide him entry to a much larger world of emotional discovery as he forges friendships with the hotel's other denizens, including a willful actress, a shrewd Kremlinite, a gregarious American, and a temperamental chef. But when fate suddenly puts the life of a young girl in his hands, he must draw on all his ingenuity to protect the future she so deserves.

Brimming with humor, a glittering cast of characters, and one beautifully rendered scene after another, this singular novel casts a spell as it relates the Count’s endeavor to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a man of purpose.]]> 462 Amor Towles Janet 5 russia
From the beginning, the reader understands this to be a fairy tale, one told with wit and style, elegance and panache. The Count exemplifies all the virtues of the aristocracy without any of its less attractive features. Towles cheers us with Rostov’s arcane knowledge, his adaptability to his straightened circumstances, his sense of personal dignity and inner resources when faced with enforced leisure. The array of supporting players--the headwaiter Andrei, chef Emile, seamstress Marina, the various antagonists--rooms and objects like the twice-tolling clock, are warmly portrayed. The Grand Hotel Budapest, Grand Hotel, and Eloise--each have their overtones here. Don’t come expecting to know more about Soviet life than you already do. Come to be enlivened, catered-to, the benefits of gentility reawakened.

Towles' insights are generously sprinkled throughout the book, offering ballast to the novel, such as how a woman turns to 'the matter at hand' when one is asked to tea:

"Whether it took place in a drawing room overlooking the Fontanka Canal or a teahouse in a public garden, before the first cake was sampled the purpose of the invitation would be laid upon the table.... the most accomplished of hostesses could signal the transition with a single word of her choosing. For the Count's grandmother, the word had been Now as in Now, Alexander, I have heard some very distressing things about you, my boy... For Princess P... it had been Oh as in Oh, Alexander, I have made a terrible mistake... And for young Nina [the Eloiselike nine-year old resident of the Metropol who becomes the Count's Virgil into the mysteries of the establishment}, the word was apparently Anyway"

Or, say about that twice-tolling clock,
"Thus, in his father's view, the toll of twelve was a moment of reckoning. When the noon bell sounded, the diligent man could take pride in having made good use of the morning, and sit down to his lunch with a clear conscience. But when it sounded for the frivolous man--the man who had squandered his morning in bed, or on breakfast with three papers, or on idea chatter in the sitting room, he had no choice but to ask his lord's forgiveness.

"In the afternoon, the Count's father believed that a man should take care not to live by the watch in his waistcoat--marking the minutes as if the events of one's life were stations on a railway line. Rather, having been suitably industrious before lunch, he should spend his afternoon in wise liberty. That is, he should walk among the willows, read a timeless text, converse with a friend beneath the pergola or reflect before the fire--engaging in those endeavors that have no appointed hour, and that dictate their own beginnings and ends."

Here is a man who knows what to do with an idle hour. Or a lifetime of them.]]> 4.33 2016 A Gentleman in Moscow
author: Amor Towles
name: Janet
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2016
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/04/28
shelves: russia
review:
Former person Count Alexander Rostov is placed under house arrest in 1922 Soviet Moscow—consigned to lifelong imprisonment in the fabled Metropol Hotel. This â€Grand Hotelâ€� novel is charm itself, a tale replete with secret rooms and inquisitive little girls and willowy actresses, loyal staff members and Soviet heavies--just the kind of gently comic novel to rescue a sodden soul on a bad day. Like a perfectly mixed cocktail, A Gentleman in Moscow is a civilized response to the world’s grinding onslaught.

From the beginning, the reader understands this to be a fairy tale, one told with wit and style, elegance and panache. The Count exemplifies all the virtues of the aristocracy without any of its less attractive features. Towles cheers us with Rostov’s arcane knowledge, his adaptability to his straightened circumstances, his sense of personal dignity and inner resources when faced with enforced leisure. The array of supporting players--the headwaiter Andrei, chef Emile, seamstress Marina, the various antagonists--rooms and objects like the twice-tolling clock, are warmly portrayed. The Grand Hotel Budapest, Grand Hotel, and Eloise--each have their overtones here. Don’t come expecting to know more about Soviet life than you already do. Come to be enlivened, catered-to, the benefits of gentility reawakened.

Towles' insights are generously sprinkled throughout the book, offering ballast to the novel, such as how a woman turns to 'the matter at hand' when one is asked to tea:

"Whether it took place in a drawing room overlooking the Fontanka Canal or a teahouse in a public garden, before the first cake was sampled the purpose of the invitation would be laid upon the table.... the most accomplished of hostesses could signal the transition with a single word of her choosing. For the Count's grandmother, the word had been Now as in Now, Alexander, I have heard some very distressing things about you, my boy... For Princess P... it had been Oh as in Oh, Alexander, I have made a terrible mistake... And for young Nina [the Eloiselike nine-year old resident of the Metropol who becomes the Count's Virgil into the mysteries of the establishment}, the word was apparently Anyway"

Or, say about that twice-tolling clock,
"Thus, in his father's view, the toll of twelve was a moment of reckoning. When the noon bell sounded, the diligent man could take pride in having made good use of the morning, and sit down to his lunch with a clear conscience. But when it sounded for the frivolous man--the man who had squandered his morning in bed, or on breakfast with three papers, or on idea chatter in the sitting room, he had no choice but to ask his lord's forgiveness.

"In the afternoon, the Count's father believed that a man should take care not to live by the watch in his waistcoat--marking the minutes as if the events of one's life were stations on a railway line. Rather, having been suitably industrious before lunch, he should spend his afternoon in wise liberty. That is, he should walk among the willows, read a timeless text, converse with a friend beneath the pergola or reflect before the fire--engaging in those endeavors that have no appointed hour, and that dictate their own beginnings and ends."

Here is a man who knows what to do with an idle hour. Or a lifetime of them.
]]> A Flag for Sunrise 2497678 An astonishing saga of politics, war, and Americans out of place, by a National Book Award winner!

Possessed of astonishing dramatic, emotional, and philosophical resonance, A Flag for Sunrise is a novel in the grand tradition about Americans drawn into the maelstrom of a small Central American country on the brink of revolution. From the book's inception, readers will be seized by the dangers and nightmare suspense of life lived on the rim of a political volcano.]]> 403 Robert Stone 0330280260 Janet 4 4.33 1981 A Flag for Sunrise
author: Robert Stone
name: Janet
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1981
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2024/04/26
shelves:
review:

]]> Loved and Missed 125079046
Love and Missed is a whip-smart, incisive, and mordantly witty novel about love's gains and missteps. British writer Susie Boyt's seventh novel, and the first to be published in theĚýUnited States, is a triumph.]]> 208 Susie Boyt 1681377810 Janet 0 to-read 4.37 2023 Loved and Missed
author: Susie Boyt
name: Janet
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Molly 101137620 A gripping, unforgettable memoir from one of the best, most original writers of the 21st century.

Blake Butler and Molly Brodak instantly connected, fell in love, married and built a life together. Both writers with deep roots in contemporary American literature, their union was an iconic joining of forces between two major and beloved talents.

Nearly three years into their marriage, grappling with mental illness and a lifetime of trauma, Molly took her own life. In the days and weeks after Molly’s death, Blake discovered shocking secrets she had held back from the world, fundamentally altering his view of their relationship and who she was.

A masterpiece of autobiography, Molly is a riveting journey into the darkest and most unthinkable parts of the human heart, emerging with a hard-won, unsurpassedly beautiful understanding that expands the possibilities of language to comprehend and express true love.

Unrelentingly clear, honest and concise, Molly approaches the impossible directly, with a total empathy that has no parallel or precedent. A supremely important work that will be taught, loved, relied on and passed around for years to come, Blake Butler affirms now beyond question his position at the very top rank of writers.]]> 320 Blake Butler 1648230377 Janet 0 to-read 3.60 2023 Molly
author: Blake Butler
name: Janet
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Forgetters: Stories 182110693 248 Greg Sarris 1597146307 Janet 0 to-read 4.10 The Forgetters: Stories
author: Greg Sarris
name: Janet
average rating: 4.10
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Blackouts 65215321 From the bestselling author of We the Animals, Blackouts mines lost histories--personal and collective.

Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly, but who has haunted the edges of his life. Juan Gay--playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized--has a project to pass along to this new narrator. It is inspired by a true artifact of a book, Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns, which contains stories collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrator trade stories--moments of joy and oblivion--and resurrect lost loves, lives, mothers, fathers, minor heroes. The past is with us, beside us, ahead of us; what are we to create from its gaps and erasures?

Inspired by Kiss of the Spider Woman, Pedro Páramo, Voodoo Macbeth, the book at its own center and the woman who created it, oral histories, and many more texts, images, and influences, Justin Torres's Blackouts is a work of fiction that sees through the inventions of history and narrative. An extraordinary work of creative imagination, it insists that we look long and steady at the world we have inherited and the world we have made--a world full of ghostly shadows and flashing moments of truth.]]> 306 Justin Torres 0374293570 Janet 0 to-read 3.76 2023 Blackouts
author: Justin Torres
name: Janet
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Jack's Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac]]> 81581 304 Barry Gifford 1560257393 Janet 5 biography
We hear from everybody--the authors Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee have found interviews and statements from the vast extended constellation of Kerouac's friends, including its major characters--Neal Cassady and Allen Ginzberg, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder and the San Francisco gang, Gregory Corso, Lew Welch and Phillip Whalen, Ferlinghetti--and less famous but more intimate friends, childhood friends. Plus the women, finally heard from-- including Luanne, Neal's first wife (Mary Lou in On the Road) and Carolyn, his second, (the beautiful Camille in OTR) often shared with Kerouac, Lenore Kandel (Romana Swartz in Dharma Bums) and even Aline Lee (Mardou Fox in The Subterraneans). A more straightforward account of the writer's sexuality and the Beat communality around just about everything, his complex relationship/dependence on his mother. The early New York scene, the Denver one, the San Francisco Beats.

I've been listening to this rather than reading on the page when I stumbled on it on my library's Libby audiobooks site, and loving it this way, it gives you such a feel for these living people... Then I go back to On the Road and because I know these people now, have a clearer idea of what had been happening from other people's point of view, it gives me that more appreciation for Kerouac's artistry, and the complexity of the man. What's in and what's not, why he made his mother his aunt and so forth. Essential piece of Kerouaciana.]]> 4.09 1978 Jack's Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac
author: Barry Gifford
name: Janet
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1978
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/04/18
shelves: biography
review:
I love this kind of biography--where the people in a central figure's life relate their piece of the elephant. In the case of Kerouac, whose ouevre is really a crafted autobiography, the opportunity to hear direct from the actual characters their impression of their friend and their take on the actual events that Kerouac uses in his great novels--it's the perfect placement of a third mirror, completing the experience of Kerouac's work, one ongoing novel featuring an extended group of his remarkable friends. (A useful sidebar to Jack's Book, and indeed, Kerouac as a whole, is a list on Beat dot com, telling us Who's Who in Kerouac--as he changes everybody's name but little else.)

We hear from everybody--the authors Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee have found interviews and statements from the vast extended constellation of Kerouac's friends, including its major characters--Neal Cassady and Allen Ginzberg, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder and the San Francisco gang, Gregory Corso, Lew Welch and Phillip Whalen, Ferlinghetti--and less famous but more intimate friends, childhood friends. Plus the women, finally heard from-- including Luanne, Neal's first wife (Mary Lou in On the Road) and Carolyn, his second, (the beautiful Camille in OTR) often shared with Kerouac, Lenore Kandel (Romana Swartz in Dharma Bums) and even Aline Lee (Mardou Fox in The Subterraneans). A more straightforward account of the writer's sexuality and the Beat communality around just about everything, his complex relationship/dependence on his mother. The early New York scene, the Denver one, the San Francisco Beats.

I've been listening to this rather than reading on the page when I stumbled on it on my library's Libby audiobooks site, and loving it this way, it gives you such a feel for these living people... Then I go back to On the Road and because I know these people now, have a clearer idea of what had been happening from other people's point of view, it gives me that more appreciation for Kerouac's artistry, and the complexity of the man. What's in and what's not, why he made his mother his aunt and so forth. Essential piece of Kerouaciana.
]]> <![CDATA[Dancing on the Edge: A Journey of Living, Loving, and Tumbling through Hollywood]]> 144387931 364 Russ Tamblyn Janet 5 biography
The book is propulsive, fantastic story after fantastic story, leading to a larger picture of a life well and thoroughly lived. Props to his cowriter, Sarah Tomlinson, who managed to edit and assemble such rich material into a compelling, linear narrative. I could not stop until it was done. Tamblyn went his own way, deciding not to center his life in the increasingly joyless Hollywood scene, but to step off into something more experimental and chancy and self-created, along with some of the most interesting artists of our time. Great photos illustrate every chapter. ]]> 3.91 2024 Dancing on the Edge: A Journey of Living, Loving, and Tumbling through Hollywood
author: Russ Tamblyn
name: Janet
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/17
date added: 2024/04/17
shelves: biography
review:
So much fun! What a life! I've read many a Hollywood memoir, but never one more joyous, a life more adventurous. Russ Tamblyn is one of a kind. Never a bad word for anybody, unusual in memoir. The unwritten part of this is the man's charisma--we only see it in his descriptions of his deep friendships and many romances--and his commitment to whatever he decides to do. His relative lack of ego is startling--he actually enjoyed his work on B films and dinner theater necessary to keep an income going once he turned his back on a major career as a Hollywood star in favor of visual art and the counterculture. Enjoyment and a gift for friendship seems to have been Tamblyn's great art form, right along with his explosive acrobatic dance in such films as Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and West Side Story.

The book is propulsive, fantastic story after fantastic story, leading to a larger picture of a life well and thoroughly lived. Props to his cowriter, Sarah Tomlinson, who managed to edit and assemble such rich material into a compelling, linear narrative. I could not stop until it was done. Tamblyn went his own way, deciding not to center his life in the increasingly joyless Hollywood scene, but to step off into something more experimental and chancy and self-created, along with some of the most interesting artists of our time. Great photos illustrate every chapter.
]]> Tar Beach 111027
Part autobiographical, part fictional, this allegorical tale sparkles with symbolic and historical references central to African-American culture. The spectacular artwork resonates with color and texture. Children will delight in the universal dream of mastering one's world by flying over it.]]> 32 Faith Ringgold 0517885441 Janet 5 "I will always remember when the stars fell down around me and lifted me up above the George Washington Bridge..." Those illustrations...
RIP Faith Ringgold. You touched us so deeply.]]> 4.15 1991 Tar Beach
author: Faith Ringgold
name: Janet
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1991
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/04/14
shelves:
review:
I never review children's books--but with the great artist Faith Ringgold's death today, I had to review her incredibly moving, incredibly beautiful picture book Tar Beach... read over and over and over again in our house, a glorious illustrated kid's book not just for kids. It led us to the whole world of her art and imagination. The poetics of the text put it up there in the stratosphere--
"I will always remember when the stars fell down around me and lifted me up above the George Washington Bridge..." Those illustrations...
RIP Faith Ringgold. You touched us so deeply.
]]> Chronicles, Volume One 14318 "I'd come from a long ways off and had started a long ways down. But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else." So writes Bob Dylan in Chronicles: Volume One, his remarkable book exploring critical junctures in his life and career.

Through Dylan's eyes and open mind, we see Greenwich Village, circa 1961, when he first arrives in Manhattan. Dylan's New York is a magical city of possibilities -- smoky, nightlong parties; literary awakenings; transient loves and unbreakable friendships. Elegiac observations are punctuated by jabs of memories, penetrating and tough. With the book's side trips to New Orleans, Woodstock, Minnesota and points west, Chronicles: Volume One is an intimate and intensely personal recollection of extraordinary times.

By turns revealing, poetical, passionate and witty, Chronicles: Volume One is a mesmerizing window on Bob Dylan's thoughts and influences. Dylan's voice is distinctively American: generous of spirit, engaged, fanciful and rhythmic. Utilizing his unparalleled gifts of storytelling and the exquisite expressiveness that are the hallmarks of his music, Bob Dylan turns Chronicles: Volume One into a poignant reflection on life, and the people and places that helped shape the man and the art.]]> 320 Bob Dylan 0743244583 Janet 4
The good: that Dylan knows how to write a scene in which to couch scattershot memories, coming back to a specific room, a time and place, before going out again into a variety of people and times.

The first section especially gives shoutouts to Dylan's early folk and blues influences, as well as contemporary players on the Greenwich Village folk scene--feels like debt paying. But interesting, well written and many musicians to follow up on. We come to understand his debt to country blues in particular as well as roots folk music, and makes you want to pursue these leads.

the Oh Mercy section was not quite as interesting--celebrities complaining about the downside of celebrity is always a snooze. But his approach to the songs on Oh Mercy, the struggle in the recording sessions, was certainly revealing of process, and if I was a songwriter or musician, I would probably have found it fascinating.

I guess I was looking more for the human side of things, his friends, his inner life, and that's the stuff that's only sparingly sprinkled in, tucked around the corners. I shouldn't have expected more from Dylan, who is famously opaque and always protected his inner life from reporters and interviewers, hedging or downright lying... think this isn't lying but a lot of avoiding. HE tells what he wants to. Talks about an album he probably has a great deal of affection for and felt was under appreciated, rather than telling us what we actually want to know, about the making of the great albums--because, as he does say, it was the alchemy of the moment and not to ever be repeated. But as an alchemist, he's an honest one, telling you the ingredients for the formula.

It starts with the young would-be musician, takes that leap into the 80s mid book, then comes back to Greenwich village and ends just as his big break comes, as he is taken up by Albert Grossman, the manager who shoots him into the stratosphere. You're left with hat feeling that all was prelude "there's got to be a volume 2" but there still isn't, and I bet there won't be.

Boring and interesting by turns, but no way as exciting and revealing as the Leonard Cohen autobiography "I'm Your Man", not to mention "Just Kids" by Patti Smith, the gold standard. Dylan just is never going to reveal that much.

What did I want from this book that just wasn't going to happen? It's like Michael Frayn's "The Trick of It"==where the protagonist just needs to know how this author--who he even marries--writes her great books. Looking for 'the trick of it.' When there is no trick. Just a confluence of influences and times and personality... the alchemy of any kind of creation.

But he sure can turn a phrase, and we can see more about his family of origin from his own point of view--that he wasn't necessarily the iconoclast, the rebel, we had imagined him. Worthwhile, but not stellar.

I did learn all kinds of cool factlets (as well as just enjoying the guy's command of phrasing and the deliciously apt choice of words), like an early affirmation from the wrestler Gorgeous George, who came to his town on a wrestling tour and heard Dylan and his band playing in a local hall, that sustained him for a long long time. The inspiration in Brecht and Kurt Weil's "Pirate Jenny".

Like "Highway 61"--which he drops in the context of a music lover from Duluth who played him a John Jacob Niles record, songs "were filled with everyday leading players like barbers and servants, mistresses and soldiers, sailors, farmhands and factory girls--their comings and going--when they spoke in the songs they entered your life. But there was more to it than that... a lot more. Beneath it I was into the rural blues as well; it was a counterpart of myself. It was connected to early rock and roll and I like d it because it was older than Muddy and. Wolf. Highway 61, the. main thoroughfare of the country blues, begins about where I came from. Duluth to be exact. I always felt like I'd started on it, always had been on it, and could go anywhere from it, even down into the deep delta country. It was the same road, full of the same contradictions, the same one-horse towns, the same spiritual Ancestors. The Mississippi River, the bloodstream of the blues, also starts from my neck of the woods. I was never too far away from any of it." Always wondered about Highway 61.
______________________
Having a lot of fun now, listening to a ton of music I've never heard before: Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry! Peggy Seeger! Sister Rosetta Tharpe! Such a huge list of folk, blues, country... the influences are so widespread, just fascinating.]]> 3.98 2004 Chronicles, Volume One
author: Bob Dylan
name: Janet
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at: 2024/04/13
date added: 2024/04/13
shelves:
review:
A moderately interesting but ultimately unsatisfying book of assorted Dylan memories of his early musical influences and the recording of Oh Mercy with famed producer/guitarist Daniel Lanois in the mid 80s following a disastrous slump--the Slow Train era--trying to find his musical feet again.

The good: that Dylan knows how to write a scene in which to couch scattershot memories, coming back to a specific room, a time and place, before going out again into a variety of people and times.

The first section especially gives shoutouts to Dylan's early folk and blues influences, as well as contemporary players on the Greenwich Village folk scene--feels like debt paying. But interesting, well written and many musicians to follow up on. We come to understand his debt to country blues in particular as well as roots folk music, and makes you want to pursue these leads.

the Oh Mercy section was not quite as interesting--celebrities complaining about the downside of celebrity is always a snooze. But his approach to the songs on Oh Mercy, the struggle in the recording sessions, was certainly revealing of process, and if I was a songwriter or musician, I would probably have found it fascinating.

I guess I was looking more for the human side of things, his friends, his inner life, and that's the stuff that's only sparingly sprinkled in, tucked around the corners. I shouldn't have expected more from Dylan, who is famously opaque and always protected his inner life from reporters and interviewers, hedging or downright lying... think this isn't lying but a lot of avoiding. HE tells what he wants to. Talks about an album he probably has a great deal of affection for and felt was under appreciated, rather than telling us what we actually want to know, about the making of the great albums--because, as he does say, it was the alchemy of the moment and not to ever be repeated. But as an alchemist, he's an honest one, telling you the ingredients for the formula.

It starts with the young would-be musician, takes that leap into the 80s mid book, then comes back to Greenwich village and ends just as his big break comes, as he is taken up by Albert Grossman, the manager who shoots him into the stratosphere. You're left with hat feeling that all was prelude "there's got to be a volume 2" but there still isn't, and I bet there won't be.

Boring and interesting by turns, but no way as exciting and revealing as the Leonard Cohen autobiography "I'm Your Man", not to mention "Just Kids" by Patti Smith, the gold standard. Dylan just is never going to reveal that much.

What did I want from this book that just wasn't going to happen? It's like Michael Frayn's "The Trick of It"==where the protagonist just needs to know how this author--who he even marries--writes her great books. Looking for 'the trick of it.' When there is no trick. Just a confluence of influences and times and personality... the alchemy of any kind of creation.

But he sure can turn a phrase, and we can see more about his family of origin from his own point of view--that he wasn't necessarily the iconoclast, the rebel, we had imagined him. Worthwhile, but not stellar.

I did learn all kinds of cool factlets (as well as just enjoying the guy's command of phrasing and the deliciously apt choice of words), like an early affirmation from the wrestler Gorgeous George, who came to his town on a wrestling tour and heard Dylan and his band playing in a local hall, that sustained him for a long long time. The inspiration in Brecht and Kurt Weil's "Pirate Jenny".

Like "Highway 61"--which he drops in the context of a music lover from Duluth who played him a John Jacob Niles record, songs "were filled with everyday leading players like barbers and servants, mistresses and soldiers, sailors, farmhands and factory girls--their comings and going--when they spoke in the songs they entered your life. But there was more to it than that... a lot more. Beneath it I was into the rural blues as well; it was a counterpart of myself. It was connected to early rock and roll and I like d it because it was older than Muddy and. Wolf. Highway 61, the. main thoroughfare of the country blues, begins about where I came from. Duluth to be exact. I always felt like I'd started on it, always had been on it, and could go anywhere from it, even down into the deep delta country. It was the same road, full of the same contradictions, the same one-horse towns, the same spiritual Ancestors. The Mississippi River, the bloodstream of the blues, also starts from my neck of the woods. I was never too far away from any of it." Always wondered about Highway 61.
______________________
Having a lot of fun now, listening to a ton of music I've never heard before: Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry! Peggy Seeger! Sister Rosetta Tharpe! Such a huge list of folk, blues, country... the influences are so widespread, just fascinating.
]]> Bound for Glory 761256 First published in 1943, this autobiography is also a superb portrait of America's Depression years, by the folk singer, activist, and man who saw it all.

Woody Guthrie was born in OklahomaĚýand traveled this whole country over—not by jet or motorcycle, but by boxcar, thumb, and foot. During the journey of discovery that was his life, he composed and sang words and music that have become a national heritage. His songs, however, are but part of his legacy. Behind him Woody Guthrie left a remarkable autobiography that vividly brings to life both his vibrant personality and a vision of America we cannot afford to let die.]]> 320 Woody Guthrie 0452264456 Janet 0 to-read 4.16 1943 Bound for Glory
author: Woody Guthrie
name: Janet
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1943
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Erasure 355862 We's Lives in Da Ghetto, the exploitative debut novel of a young, middle-class black woman who once visited "some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days." Hailed as an authentic representation of the African American experience, the book is a national bestseller and its author feted on the Kenya Dunston television show. The book's success rankles all the more as Monk's own most recent novel has just notched its seventh rejection.

Even as his career as a writer appears to have stalled, Monk finds himself coping with changes in his personal life. In need of distraction from old memories, new responsibilities, and his professional stagnation, Monk composes, in a heat of inspiration and energy, a fierce parody of the sort of exploitative, ghetto wanna-be lit represented by We's Lives in Da Ghetto.

But when his agent sends this literary indictment (included here in its entirety) out to publishers, it is greeted as an authentic new voice of black America. Monk -- or his pseudonymous alter ego, Stagg R. Leigh -- is offered money, fame, success beyond anything he has known. And as demand begins to build for meetings with and appearances by Leigh, Monk is faced with a whole new set of problems.]]> 280 Percival Everett 0786888156 Janet 5
When the care of his demented mother falls onto his shoulders, this ultimate academic decides to write a parody of 'We Lives in Da Ghetto'--with unforeseen consequences.

This novel within the novel is a true horror--but so was Monk's academic paper, a parody in itself. Meta within meta. Meanwhile, as Monk erases himself and his passion for exactitude and in his insincere writing in this purposefully-awful novel, we also have the story of his mother's erasure through dementia, his family's erasure through personality and misadventure, and other levels of the theme. Funny and angry and deadly serious all at the same time. Overtones of Ralph Ellison and the Invisible Man weave through this. And it really punches out at the end. Definitely more Percival Everett on the menu. Next, his short story collection "Half an Inch of Water"--stories of the contemporary west.]]> 4.17 2001 Erasure
author: Percival Everett
name: Janet
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2001
rating: 5
read at: 2021/07/25
date added: 2024/04/11
shelves:
review:
This was a brilliant, funny, idiosyncratic novel which combines the realistic and the metafictional in the mind and work of a literature professor Thelonius Ellison. Ellison, known as 'Monk'-- a prickly academic who thinks about texts and semiotics in almost mathematical terms, and writes abstruse, difficult novels which have been selling less and less well-- is embroiled in academic feuds about issues made purposely arcane and, to the outsider's view, as funny/vicious Nabokovian examples of academic infighting. And Monk is enraged by a bestselling novel written by a Black academic, 'We Lives in Da Ghetto'--which sold for $3 million. Everywhere he goes, it's being reviewed and revered.

When the care of his demented mother falls onto his shoulders, this ultimate academic decides to write a parody of 'We Lives in Da Ghetto'--with unforeseen consequences.

This novel within the novel is a true horror--but so was Monk's academic paper, a parody in itself. Meta within meta. Meanwhile, as Monk erases himself and his passion for exactitude and in his insincere writing in this purposefully-awful novel, we also have the story of his mother's erasure through dementia, his family's erasure through personality and misadventure, and other levels of the theme. Funny and angry and deadly serious all at the same time. Overtones of Ralph Ellison and the Invisible Man weave through this. And it really punches out at the end. Definitely more Percival Everett on the menu. Next, his short story collection "Half an Inch of Water"--stories of the contemporary west.
]]> The Peach Seed 61796657 Fletcher Dukes and Altovise Benson reunite after decades apart� and a mountain of secrets—in this debut exploring the repercussions of a single choice and how an enduring talisman challenges and holds a family together.

On a routine trip to the Piggly Wiggly in Albany, Georgia, widower Fletcher Dukes smells a familiar perfume, then sees a tall woman the color of papershell pecans with a strawberry birthmark on the nape of her neck. He knows immediately that she is his lost love, Altovise Benson. Their bond, built on county fairs, sit-ins, and marches, once seemed a sure and forever thing. But their marriage plans were disrupted when the police turned a peaceful protest violent.

Before Altovise fled the South, Fletcher gave her a peach seed monkey with diamond eyes. As we learn via harrowing flashbacks, an enslaved ancestor on the coast of South Carolina carved the first peach seed, a talisman that, ever since, each father has gifted his son on his thirteenth birthday.

Giving one to Altovise initiated a break in tradition, irrevocably shaping the lives of generations of Dukeses. Recently, Fletcher has made do on his seven acres with his daughter Florida’s check-ins, his drop biscuits, and his faithful dog. But as he begins to reckon with long-ago choices, he finds he isn’t the only one burdened with unspoken truths.

An indelible portrait of a family, The Peach Seed explores how kin pass down legacies of sorrow, joy, and strength. And it is a parable of how a glimmer of hope as small as a seed can ripple across generations.]]> 448 Anita Gail Jones 1250872057 Janet 0 to-read 3.81 2023 The Peach Seed
author: Anita Gail Jones
name: Janet
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Shame 124950408
With the emotionally rich voice of great fiction and the diamond-sharp analytical eye of a scientist, Annie Ernaux provides a powerful reflection on experience and the power of violent memory to endure through time, to determine the course of a life.]]> 112 Annie Ernaux Janet 0 to-read 3.72 1997 Shame
author: Annie Ernaux
name: Janet
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1997
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Ill Will 30687788 Two sensational unsolved crimes—one in the past, another in the present—are linked by one man’s memory and self-deception in this chilling novel of literary suspense from National Book Award finalist Dan Chaon.

“We are always telling a story to ourselves, about ourselves,� Dustin Tillman likes to say. It’s one of the little mantras he shares with his patients, and it’s meant to be reassuring. But what if that story is a lie?

A psychologist in suburban Cleveland, Dustin is drifting through his forties when he hears the news: His adopted brother, Rusty, is being released from prison. Thirty years ago, Rusty received a life sentence for the massacre of Dustin’s parents, aunt, and uncle. The trial came to symbolize the 1980s hysteria over Satanic cults; despite the lack of physical evidence, the jury believed the outlandish accusations Dustin and his cousin made against Rusty. Now, after DNA analysis has overturned the conviction, Dustin braces for a reckoning.

Meanwhile, one of Dustin’s patients gets him deeply engaged in a string of drowning deaths involving drunk college boys. At first Dustin dismisses talk of a serial killer as paranoid thinking, but as he gets wrapped up in their amateur investigation, Dustin starts to believe that there’s more to the deaths than coincidence. Soon he becomes obsessed, crossing all professional boundaries—and putting his own family in harm’s way.

From one of today’s most renowned practitioners of literary suspense, Ill Will is an intimate thriller about the failures of memory and the perils of self-deception. In Dan Chaon’s nimble, chilling prose, the past looms over the present, turning each into a haunted place.]]> 496 Dan Chaon 0345476042 Janet 0 to-read 3.35 2017 Ill Will
author: Dan Chaon
name: Janet
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/04/08
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Women of Paris 86196073 0 André Maurois Janet 5
It opens like this: "Women of Paris: not La Parisienne
The two things are by no means the same.
The Parisienne was a myth, an idea, an essence. The women of Paris exist, diverse, individual and picturesque.
The writers invented the Parisienne... For Henri Becque... she represented the feminine element in a menage a trois... For Balzac, she mingled an air of candor with an enchanting falsity." The focus on the difference between the provincial and the exquisite, sophisticated Parisienne.

But the Parisienne of 1958 comes from anywhere, it's her presence in the city that changes her. And Maurois wants to know and describe the real women of Paris he sees every day. The contemporary reader might smile a bit at the hubris of a man saying, "she is--" but he does interview the women, he is actually interested in learning who they are rather than making assumptions about them, and that respect and genuine curiosity is what marks this little book.

I was reading The Years by Annie Ernaux when I received this, and the bleed of that time period was perfect. I started listening to Juliette Greco and absorbing the unique flavor of those times in Paris, the postwar poverty still in evidence, women themselves seeking to define themselves in society, their relationship to work, to marriage and family.

The fact that the book is divided by profession is an interesting one, because it portrays the women, married and single, as very much living in the outer world. Its divisions tell you much about Maurois' interests and perception of the city's character:
Students
Artists and models
Fashion and its acolytes (a terrific section on 'Bettina' who works as a PR woman for one of the fashion houses--not the romance of fashion but fashion as workplace)
The women of the market--working class women selling their goods, from butchers in Les Halles to florists... such a sense of the city
Saint-Germain-des-Pres "the existentialist cellars" and the rise of Juliette Greco
The concierges of Paris--my favorite section. The women who keep an eye on everything that goes on in the building, like one-women Greek Choruses.
Paris ballerina, and other dancers
The Comedie Francais--originally the only stages where actual women could act.
Working Women--including secretaries, typists and factory workers.
The thing I noticed most, in all categories, is the pragmatism of the 1958 Parisienne. Kind of shocking to read about young women especially, at an age when one would expect a romantic approach to life, explaining how much things cost, evaluating a marriage prospect based on the man's earnings. Perhaps because of the hardships of war, the bare realities of life are taken straight on. How brave these women seem, to look life straight in the eye and say, if that's how the world is, then that's the world I'm dealing with.]]> 5.00 1935 Women of Paris
author: André Maurois
name: Janet
average rating: 5.00
book published: 1935
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/06
date added: 2024/04/06
shelves:
review:
This charming little book came to me as a gift from a friend, a rare book collector, who knew I would adore it. A series of short essays, just 46 pages in all, plus photographs by Nico Jesse, illustrating the very people and places mentioned in the essays--exploring the lives, work and opinions of the modern Parisienne circa 1958 (as opposed to the mythic "La Parisienne" of the 19th Century, made famous in literature and drama by the likes of Balzac et al).

It opens like this: "Women of Paris: not La Parisienne
The two things are by no means the same.
The Parisienne was a myth, an idea, an essence. The women of Paris exist, diverse, individual and picturesque.
The writers invented the Parisienne... For Henri Becque... she represented the feminine element in a menage a trois... For Balzac, she mingled an air of candor with an enchanting falsity." The focus on the difference between the provincial and the exquisite, sophisticated Parisienne.

But the Parisienne of 1958 comes from anywhere, it's her presence in the city that changes her. And Maurois wants to know and describe the real women of Paris he sees every day. The contemporary reader might smile a bit at the hubris of a man saying, "she is--" but he does interview the women, he is actually interested in learning who they are rather than making assumptions about them, and that respect and genuine curiosity is what marks this little book.

I was reading The Years by Annie Ernaux when I received this, and the bleed of that time period was perfect. I started listening to Juliette Greco and absorbing the unique flavor of those times in Paris, the postwar poverty still in evidence, women themselves seeking to define themselves in society, their relationship to work, to marriage and family.

The fact that the book is divided by profession is an interesting one, because it portrays the women, married and single, as very much living in the outer world. Its divisions tell you much about Maurois' interests and perception of the city's character:
Students
Artists and models
Fashion and its acolytes (a terrific section on 'Bettina' who works as a PR woman for one of the fashion houses--not the romance of fashion but fashion as workplace)
The women of the market--working class women selling their goods, from butchers in Les Halles to florists... such a sense of the city
Saint-Germain-des-Pres "the existentialist cellars" and the rise of Juliette Greco
The concierges of Paris--my favorite section. The women who keep an eye on everything that goes on in the building, like one-women Greek Choruses.
Paris ballerina, and other dancers
The Comedie Francais--originally the only stages where actual women could act.
Working Women--including secretaries, typists and factory workers.
The thing I noticed most, in all categories, is the pragmatism of the 1958 Parisienne. Kind of shocking to read about young women especially, at an age when one would expect a romantic approach to life, explaining how much things cost, evaluating a marriage prospect based on the man's earnings. Perhaps because of the hardships of war, the bare realities of life are taken straight on. How brave these women seem, to look life straight in the eye and say, if that's how the world is, then that's the world I'm dealing with.
]]> <![CDATA[Boom Times for the End of the World]]> 75378959 304 Scott Timberg Janet 5 philosophy-essay-criticism
He was intensely interested in the increasingly dire fate of artists and the 'cultural class'--which he did not limit to the "artist" but which included all the support network of culture, the bookstore worker and the video guy, the journalists and the PR people, everyone involved in the creation and dissemination of the arts. His description of his own marginalization--the loss of his livelihood and his home--is part and parcel of these larger forces depicted in such essays as "How Music has Responded to a Decade of Economic Inequality"; "The Revenge of Monoculture;" and "Leaving Los Angeles."

Timberg took his own life in 2019, an act that ripped the heart out of the LA creative community. This collection of essays shows the span of his interests, including the lively pieces of criticism such as his treatment of "City of Night" by John Rechy and about the coming of Gustavo Dudamel to the LA Philharmonic--to the increasingly pointed pieces about the intrusion of the web-based entities like Amazon, Napster and Spotify, come to pillage and destroy the music and literary economic base, creating nothing but monopolizing the profits, and looking at the 'winner-takes-all' bestseller idea which crowds out the multiplicity of ideas and creative output in favor of what he calls the 'monoculture.'

I can't imagine a better introduction to the breadth of Scott Timberg's thought than "Boom Times for the End of the World.: After that, take the deep dive of "Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class," which began in these essays.]]> 4.20 Boom Times for the End of the World
author: Scott Timberg
name: Janet
average rating: 4.20
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/04/06
date added: 2024/04/06
shelves: philosophy-essay-criticism
review:
A collection of essays by the late Scott Timberg, journalist and cultural critic for the Los Angeles Times and a number of other publications. Here are essays about West Coast jazz, the coming to the LA Phil of conductor Gustavo Dudamel, the career of music video meister cum feature director Spike Jonze. Insightful and funny, Timberg was the kind of guy you looked for at any large Los Angeles gathering of the culturati--because you knew he would have something interesting to say about something you'd just seen, or should see.

He was intensely interested in the increasingly dire fate of artists and the 'cultural class'--which he did not limit to the "artist" but which included all the support network of culture, the bookstore worker and the video guy, the journalists and the PR people, everyone involved in the creation and dissemination of the arts. His description of his own marginalization--the loss of his livelihood and his home--is part and parcel of these larger forces depicted in such essays as "How Music has Responded to a Decade of Economic Inequality"; "The Revenge of Monoculture;" and "Leaving Los Angeles."

Timberg took his own life in 2019, an act that ripped the heart out of the LA creative community. This collection of essays shows the span of his interests, including the lively pieces of criticism such as his treatment of "City of Night" by John Rechy and about the coming of Gustavo Dudamel to the LA Philharmonic--to the increasingly pointed pieces about the intrusion of the web-based entities like Amazon, Napster and Spotify, come to pillage and destroy the music and literary economic base, creating nothing but monopolizing the profits, and looking at the 'winner-takes-all' bestseller idea which crowds out the multiplicity of ideas and creative output in favor of what he calls the 'monoculture.'

I can't imagine a better introduction to the breadth of Scott Timberg's thought than "Boom Times for the End of the World.: After that, take the deep dive of "Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class," which began in these essays.
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