dchaikin part 2 - seeking refuge in books

My mind is scattered as I start this thread (Feb 24) for no clear reason. Surely focus is around the corner. Usually reading helps. And, I'll try to continue to follow my reading plans.

Currently Reading


Currently Listening to

My themes through the years, including 2024
Themes
2012 - old testament
2013 - old testament and Toni Morrison
2014 - old testament
2015 - old testament, Toni Morrison & Cormac McCarthy
2016 - Homer, Greek mythology, Greek drama, & Thomas Pynchon
2017 - Virgil, Ovid & Thomas Pynchon
2018 - Apocrypha, New Testament & Gabriel García Márquez
2019 - Rome to the Renaissance & James Baldwin & Willa Cather and Shakespeare
2020 – Dante, Nabokov, Willa Cather, Shakespeare
2021 - Petrarch, Vladimir Nabokov, Willa Cather, Shakespeare, the Booker longlists, 2020 & 2021 - added Edith Wharton
2022 – Boccaccio, Robert Musil, Wharton, Shakespeare, Anniversaries, the Booker longlists, 2021 & 2022
2023 – Chaucer, Richard Wright, Wharton, Booker longlists 2022 & 2023, Naturalisty
2024 – Chaucer and medieval stuff, Faulkner, Wharton, Booker longlists

Read in 2024

Part 1 books - links go to the review on my part 1 thread

1. **** Soldiers' Pay by William Faulkner (1926) (read Jan 1-7, theme: Faulkner)
2. *** Taft by Ann Patchett, read by J. D. Jackson (listened Dec 18 – Jan 10, theme: random audio)
3. **** How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney (read Jan 7-14, theme: Booker 2023)
4. **** The Return of Martin Guerre by Natalie Zemon Davis, read by Sarah Mollo-Christensen (listened Jan 18-22, theme: random audio)
5. **** Arturo's Island by Elsa Morante (read Jan 14-28, theme: TBR)
6. **** Whale by Cheon Myeong-Kwan, translated from Korean by Chi-Young Kim, read by Cindy Kay (listened Jan 17 – Feb 1, theme: random audio)
7. ***½ Mosquitoes by William Faulkner (read Jan 21 – Feb 7, theme: Faulkner)

Part 2 books - links go to the review on this thread

8. **** The Mother’s Recompense by Edith Wharton (read Feb 7-19, theme: Wharton)
9. **** Pearl by Siân Hughes (read Feb 14-22, theme: Booker 2023)
10. **** Hemingway and Faulkner in Their Time edited by Earl Rovit and Arthur Waldhorn (read Feb 18-25, theme: Faulkner)
11. ***** White Teeth by Zadie Smith, read by Lenny Henry, Pippa Bennett-Warner, Ray Panthaki & Arya Sagar (listened Feb 1-26, theme: random audio)
12. ***½ Ammonites and Leaping Fish: A Life in Time by Penelope Lively (read Feb 23-29; theme: TBR)
13. **** The Brave Escape of Edith Wharton by Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge (read Mar 9, theme: Wharton)
14. **** Flags in the Dust by William Faulkner (read Mar 1-15, theme: Faulkner)
15. ****½ How to Say Babylon: A Memoir by Safiya Sinclair, read by the author (listened Feb 26 – Mar 21, theme: random audio)
16. ***½ A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare (read Mar 23-26, theme: Booker 2024)
17. **** The Details by Ia Genberg (read Mar 29-30, theme: Booker 2024)
18. **** Twilight Sleep by Edith Wharton (read Mar 16 – Apr 3, theme: Wharton)
19. **** Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, read by Lisa Flanagan (listened Mar 21 – Apr 5, theme: Booker 2024)
20. ***** Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein (read Mar 30 – Apr 6, theme: Booker 2023)
21. ***½ The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov (read Apr 7-13, theme: Booker 2024)
22. ***½ A Brief History of Japan: Samurai, Shogun and Zen: The Extraordinary Story of the Land of the Rising Sun by Jonathan Clements, read by Julian Elfer (listened Apr 7-16, theme: random audio)
23. **** Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior (read Apr 13-19, theme: Booker 2024)
24. ***** The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (read Dec 30, 2023 – Apr 27, 2024, theme: Chaucer)

Read in 2024, listed by year published
(links are touchstones)
1400 The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
1925 The Mother’s Recompense by Edith Wharton
1926 Soldiers' Pay by William Faulkner
1927
Mosquitoes by William Faulkner
Twilight Sleep by Edith Wharton
1929 Flags in the Dust by William Faulkner (complete version: 1973)
1957 Arturo's Island by Elsa Morante
1983 The Return of Martin Guerre by Natalie Zemon Davis
1994 Taft by Ann Patchett
2000 White Teeth by Zadie Smith
2004 Whale by Cheon Myeong-Kwan
2005 Hemingway and Faulkner in Their Time edited by Earl Rovit and Arthur Waldhorn
2010 The Brave Escape of Edith Wharton by Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge
2013 Ammonites and Leaping Fish: A Life in Time by Penelope Lively
2017 A Brief History of Japan by Jonathan Clements
2018 Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior
2020 The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov
2021 Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck
2022
A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare
The Details by Ia Genberg
2023
How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney
Pearl by Siân Hughes
How to Say Babylon: A Memoir by Safiya Sinclair
Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein

my list again, as a quilt

books read this year


books listened to this year

Some stats:

2024
Books read: 24
Pages: 4722 ( 193 hrs )
Audio time: 78 hrs
Formats: audio 7; paperback 7; ebooks 5; hardcover 5;
Subjects in brief: Novels 17; Non-fiction 5; Classic 4; On Literature and Books 2; Memoir 2; History 2; Essays 1; Biography 1; Young Adult 1; Mystery 1; Poetry 1; Short Stories 1;
Nationalities: United States 9; England 5; Ireland 1; Italy 1; South Korea 1; Jamaica 1; Albania 1; Sweden 1; Germany 1; Canada 1; Ukraine 1; Brazil 1;
Books in translation: 7
Genders, m/f: 10/14
Owner: books I own 16; Library books 6; audible loan 2;
Re-reads: 0
Year Published: 2020’s 8; 2010’s 4; 2000’s 3; 1990’s 1; 1980’s 1; 1950’s 1; 1920’s 5; 1400’s 1;
TBR numbers: +19 (acquired 33, read from tbr 14)

All stats - since I started keeping track in December of 1990
Books read: 1344
Formats: Paperback 686; Hardcover 274; Audio 222; ebooks 124; Lit magazines 38
Subjects in brief: Non-fiction 518; Novels 450; Biographies/Memoirs 228; Classics 212; History 197; Religion/Mythology/Philosophy 138; Poetry 102; Journalism 98; Science 96; Ancient 76; On Literature and Books 71; Speculative Fiction 69; Nature 68; Essay Collections 53; Short Story Collections 51; Drama 48; Anthologies 47; Graphic 46; Juvenile/YA 35; Visual Arts 28; Mystery/Thriller 16; Interviews 15
Nationalities: US 748; Other English-language countries: 296; Other: 294
Books in translation: 230
Genders, m/f: 835/410
Owner: Books I owned 971; Library books 291; Books I borrowed 72; Online 10;
Re-reads: 27
Year Published: 2020’s 74; 2010's 280; 2000's 293; 1990's 184; 1980's 124; 1970's 62; 1960's 55; 1950's 36; 1900-1949 89; 19th century 21; 16th-18th centuries 38; 13th-15th centuries 14; 0-1199 21; BCE 55
TBR: 671

Recent milestones: 400th book by a female author

links to all my old threads:

2009 Part 1, 2009 Part 2, 2010 Part 1, 2010 Part 2, 2011 Part 1, 2011 Part 2, 2012 Part 1, 2012 Part 2, 2013 Part 1, 2013 Part 2, 2013 Part 3, 2014 Part 1, 2014 Part 2, 2014 Part 3, 2015 Part 1, 2015 Part 2, 2015 Part 3, 2016 Part 1, 2016 Part 2, 2016 Part 3, 2017 Part 1, 2017 Part 2, 2018 part 1, 2018 part 2, 2019 part 1, 2019 part 2, 2019 part 3, 2020 part 1, 2020 part 2, 2020 part 3, 2021 part 1, 2021 part 2, 2021 part 3, 2022 part 1, 2022 part 2, 2022 part 3, 2022 part 4, 2023 part 1, 2023 part 2, 2023 part 3, 2023 part 4, 2024 part 1

ok, my intro posts are done. You are welcome to post, if you like.

8. The Mother’s Recompense by Edith Wharton
OPD: 1925
format: 181-page Kindle ebook
acquired: February 7 read: Feb 7-19 time reading: 8:27, 2.8 mpp
rating: 4
genre/style: Classic fiction theme: Wharton
locations: then contemporary French Riviera and Manhattan
about the author: 1862-1937. Born Edith Newbold Jones on West 23rd Street, New York City. Relocated permanently to France after 1911.

This oddly bitter pill marks my 18th book by Edith Wharton. I didn't realize this. I've counted twice and still find myself doubting it.

Having said that, this is some of Wharton's best sustained prose, from a prose specialist. Especially in the early sections where Kate is in Europe and then when she first returns to New York after twenty years away, shocked at the changes in life, landscape and values; and uncomfortable at the isolated worlds where appearances she once ran from have been perfectly preserved.

But this is a tricky novel. Wharton loves to crush her readers, and here she confounds us. And I'm pretty sure it's intentional. Kate Clephane ran away from her husband and her baby daughter. Now her husband has passed away, and, after the death of her mother-in-law, the family matron, her daughter calls her home. So, she returns and finds herself welcome. A brief and beautiful happiness ensues, the lost mother found. But who is this Kate now playing mom? She seems unable to tell us, and unable to figure it out herself. And, dear reader, was it merely our Kate who was the problem, or does this past and present stifling and changing NY world have some responsibility?

I never did figure out Kate or what Wharton wanted me to make of her, or what Wharton was doing to me, the reader. But, I enjoyed experiencing it. This later Wharton is a good one.

9. Pearl by Siân Hughes
OPD: 2023
format: 222-page paperback
acquired: December read: Feb 14-22 time reading: 6:56, 1.9 mpp
rating: 4
genre/style: contemporary fiction theme: Booker 2023
locations: contemporary Chesire, England
about the author: Welsh poet, teacher, and novelist from Chesire, England. She was born in 1965.

My 11th from the 2023 Booker longlist. There are 13 on the list.

This one just doesn't fit the award mentality. All these new books are out there to make a statement, and Hughes was instead trying to find a way to make her story work. And it works.

This novel is about searching for a lost mother, in many ways. Our Marianne lost her mother when stepped out one day and was never seen again. Marianne was four, with a baby brother and a confused dad who never recovers. (The title refers to a copy of the Medieval Middle English Pearl poem that Marianne found with her mother's annotations. I haven't read it, so I can't comment on how the themes work with each other. The novel takes place in Chesire, where the dialect of the Pearl Poet originated.)

This book is a life's work. Hughes has been reworking this story since she was a teenager, and this is her first novel. It's humble and beautiful, reads like a memoir because there is so much knowing and the voice feels very real. It feels like it did everything the author wanted it to do. It’s a self-consciously humble book that I really enjoyed spending time with.

>9 dchaikin: An interesting take on the Wharton novel. I saw it quite differently.
Of course it’s hard to explain without referring to the ending, but I saw it as a story about a woman deprived of her infant child, and of her subsequent life journey as an independent woman. To me it was a coming-of-maturity novel.

>10 dchaikin: I wish you have joined our Litsy discussion. I would like to see responses to your take. It's different. It is a maturing novel. I just, I know Wharton does a lot of indirect brutal stuff. She's the author who kills our your favorite character to make her point. So, it leaves me asking, what was her real point?

I finished Fragment 5 this morning, The Squire's Tale and The Franklin's Tale. I'm half way through the physical book, but not quite sure where I am with the tales themselves.

The Squire's Tale

Have me executed if I speke amys
My wyl is good, and lo, my tale this

I'm afraid the Squire should be executed. He promises a great story. A knight brings Ghengis Khan three gifts, a bronze horse that can fly anywhere in a day, a mirror with special powers and a ring, given to his daughter, then allows her to understand animals. We're all-in, or I was, as the daughter meets a crow the is impaling itself with its own beak. And the convinces the crow to tell her tale. She does. She goes on and on. Then the tale ends! The whole thing. Just like that. Chaucer didn't finish. 😒

The Franklin's Tale

This one goes better. The story of a happy marriage is compromised when the wife, as a joke, promises a squire she will be his if he can remove all the rocks from the coast of Britanny. He hires a clerk - which I now understand means a serious scholar and philosopher. He does the trick, and wife is caught in her logic, where she dwells in long-drawn-out anguish. But it wraps up happy for everyone, except maybe the clerk. No quotes here.

Ther is namoore to seye

Links to my Canterbury Tales updates:
General Prologue here
The Knight's Tale here
The Miller's Tale here
The Reeve's Tale (and Cook's Tale fragment) here
The Man of Laws Tale here
The Wife of Bath's, Friar's and Summoner's Tales here
The Clerk's and Merchant's Tales here

>12 dchaikin: Are you asking me? I’m confused by the question what was her real point?.
Does there have to be a point? But if it’s a common theme of Wharton’s fiction that she kills the favorite character in her books then I have to assume that doesn’t mean literally, as the main character Kate isn’t killed in The Mother’s Recompense. For those who have read the book I see it this way - Kate comes to terms with the life she has made for herself and sensibly forsakes her motherhood role as it’s too late. What else could she do? She came to terms with her position and settled for an outwardly shallow lifestyle because there was no alternative. She did not tell her daughter that she’d slept with her fiancé - what mother could? She couldn’t stay in America and watch her ex-lover wed her daughter. But obviously she was worried that her daughter was intent on marrying a man who had no problem with dumping her (Kate) - who he had been having an affaire with over a number of years..

Kate did not want to leave her daughter forever. She ran off with a lover after a couple of years of marriage as she was unhappy with her husband and her life. She tried to see her young daughter but was prevented from seeing her before she came of age. Women didn’t, and still don’t have the moral right to “stray”.

I think there could be a moral point - that we pay for past mistakes? But I didn’t really see that there was a point. I found the soul-searching rather boring and just wanted Kate to make up her mind. The gnawing the bone stuff just didn’t grab me.

>14 kjuliff: it’s the question I’m pondering. And no, there doesn’t have to be. But Wharton usually has something she trying to get across. Kate comes out badly. She had her daughter back. I could argue she had to tell her daughter what her history with Chris was. There would be anger and condemnation. But then Anne avoids a bad marriage and they hopefully make up. But Kate couldn’t do it. She could runaway, but she couldn’t face hard decisions. And it costs her everything. So she ends up alone in a pretend life. Same story, different judgment. I’m not saying this is right. But Wharton knew it’s one thing that would cross our minds.

>15 dchaikin: Interesting. I can’t see your sliding-door version working at all. Had Kate told her daughter she’d had an affaire with Chris, the daughter, to whom Kate was a relative (pun intended) new-comer in her life, and though her biological mother, they not bonded, could have thought her mother was jealous.

As a mother of a daughter, I’m pretty sure that the mere thought of me having sex with her bf would cause trouble. And this is in the 21st century. One hundred years ago the morality-code was even stricter in regard to sex with a possible son-in-law. Kids have enough of a problem even imagining their parents having sex, let alone sex with a prospective partner. In fact I think my mother went to bed with one of my ex’s and I didn’t even want to know. The very thought. Yucksville!

I don’t understand the sliding door bit, but yeah, pretty ugly. But would knowing make things any worse?

>17 dchaikin: Sliding-doors - from the film of that name - used when there are alternate outcomes for a particular event, depending on a decision taken. So if Kate had communicated that past event to her daughter the course of their lives would have been different.

I think Kate was in a no-win situation. Any outcome would have presented a problem. It might have been different if the daughter had known beforehand but as it was, Kate had no way of knowing beforehand that Chris would turn up.

Maybe. Wharton leaves things open ended - not the story, but the what ifs and the readers judgement or evaluation.

>19 dchaikin: I think so. I think a lot of good writers do that. I only started seriously reading Wharton last year. I really enjoyed her short stories. I actually found them more enjoyable than the novels I’ve read. Crisper, less ambiguous in storyline and more evocative. Edith Wharton: Stories: The Eyes; The Daunt Diana; The Moving Finger; and The Debt was the work that got me really interested.

I’d read The Age of Innocence a long time ago. But I did enjoy aMR even though it seems I have a minority take on it.

I haven't read The Mother’s Recompense, but I am really enjoying this conversation (I am one of those people who don't mind spoilers)!

Re: “Chaucer didn’t finish…”
I had to review my Robinson edition to see that the Squire, floundering around in search of an ending, gets interrupted by the Franklin very gently and politely. The Franklin takes pity on the poor young man, pretends to think he’s finished, and goes on to tell his tale. One of the very delicate interplays between the pilgrims. The Franklin is much kinder to the Squire than the Miller was to the Squire’s father, the Knight.

I’ve been enjoying your reviews a great deal. It is wonderful to see a modern first time reader really into Canterbury Tales. It pays such a compliment to Chaucer, and reminds us that the classics are timeless. Thank you!

Great to see your ongoing reading of the works of Edith Wharton. In the Fall and Winter of 2022, I briefly mostly read from the e-reader on my phone, and selected several book by Wharton from your reviews.

Now I have mainly gone back to reading paper-based books, particularly from my TBR pile.

>20 kjuliff: I like Wharton's short stories, but I haven't read those. I have really enjoyed her novels. Enjoyed our chat.

>21 Dilara86: this book, The Mother's Recompense, I think it creates these kinds of conversations.

>22 dianelouise100: yes, the Franklin can be interpreted that way. My editors hedged and decided they weren't sure. But it sounds like they understated it. I really wanted the squire to keep going! Thanks for that kind last note. Chaucer, of course, is the only thing like him we have.

>23 edwinbcn: Goodness, you made me feel so happy knowing that. Thank you. I'm enjoying your reading this year, and your, you know, uninterrupted LT connection.

10. Hemingway and Faulkner in Their Time edited by Earl Rovit and Arthur Waldhorn
OPD: 2005
format: 175-page hardcover
acquired: library book read: Feb 18-25 time reading: 4:46, 1.8 mpp
rating: 4
genre/style: literary criticism theme: Faulkner
about the editors: Earl Rovit (1927-2018) was born in Brookline, MA and was a long-time professor at the City College of New York. Arthur Waldhorn was born in NY City in 1918 and was also a professor at the City College of New York. I couldn’t find any more information on him.

"What a country! With Faulkner and Hemingway acclaimed as the greatest American novelists, & magazine editors still taking the view they did when I began to write! Brains & culture seem nonexistent from one end of the social scale to the other, & half the morons yell for filth, & the other half continue to put pants on piano-legs." - Edith Wharton, 1934

This is a collection of commentary by the contemporaries on these two authors, Hemingway and Faulkner. Nothing deep or difficult. All the quotes are just various authors and influential editors saying how they felt about them. But each contributor is given an introduction. So it gives a backhanded cross-section of who's who in American literature in the 1920's, 1930's, 1940's and 1950's. And they are all American, except one Canadian.

Hemingway and Faulkner were opposites in practically every way. Hemingway was bold presence in social circles, making himself the center of attention for better or worse. He was large, athletic, and an adventurer, but with hidden insecurities. Faulkner, who was physically small, was private and quiet, avoiding the intellectuals. Both drank too much, but Faulkner was a serious alcoholic and often met fellow writers drunk. Both burst out in the 1920's and 1930's and, their early work their best. Both died in the early 1960's, within a year of each other.

I do want to tell you how much of a mess this is, with confusing citations and inconsistency in every which way. But the truth is I really enjoyed this and took a lot home. It's information overload, but it's good information, and entertaining.

I'll leave with another quote. Kay Boyle (1902-1992), when asked whether something special characterized the 1920s, replied:

There was indeed. It was the revolt against all literary pretentiousness, against weary, dreary rhetoric, against all the outworn literary and academic conventions. Our slogans were Down with Henry James, down with Edith Wharton, down with the sterility of "The Waste Land"…

We had certain idols... Joyce, of course, and the short stories of Sherwood Anderson. We hailed the true simplicity of the early work of Hemingway... And of course there was Gertrude Stein. Without Gertrude Stein there might not have been as articulate a Sherwood Anderson and, undoubtedly, really undoubtedly, there would have been a less disciplined Hemingway…

>25 dchaikin: I love Gertrude Stein. I read everything she wrote in my twenties and even saw some of her operas. I had a cat named Gertrude Stein.

Such a great name for a cat! Love that. I have never read anything by her. (Rovit and Waldhorn recommend Three Lives, Tender Buttons, The Making of Americans, and The Autobiography of Alice B. Tolkas)

Definitely The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

>28 dianeham: ok. Noting that!

Do you have a favorite Wharton novel? I really need to read something by her, but unsure where to start.

old new york a great book for beginners, and any one in love with new york

>30 mabith: ooh. That’s a fun question. Old New York is not a bad place to start. Four stories, lovely prose, pleasant reads. I’m partial to her most famous novel, Age of Innocence, because it’s only one that really tries to capture the world of her own childhood. It feels nostalgic and it’s beautiful in that way. On the flip side, Summer is a magnificent compact perfect little novel. Like Ethan Frome, it’s not her usual, going weird and rural. But probably i would recommend starting with House of Mirth. It’s the book that made her famous as a writer. And it does all that NY stuff. It’s excellent and a good intro.

A list to consider

The House of Mirth - I suggest starting here
The Fruit of the Tree - has possibly Wharton’s own ideal character
Ethan Frome - short, tightly done and entertaining
The Reef - on the uncertainty of relationships
The Custom of the Country - her best villain, arguably a feminist villain
Summer - see above. A favorite
The Age of Innocence - see above. My favorite
The Glimpses of the Moon - Venice anyone?
Old New York - see above and Cindy’s post.

Anyone have your own Wharton suggestions?

Thanks for the detailed list! It definitely helps. I'll start with something else probably, but now I'm also excited about The Custom of the Country, as I adore a good villain. I feel like I've generally been neglecting early 20th century classics a bit.

>34 mabith: i think you may be suitably miffed by Undine in The Custom of the Country

>32 dchaikin: I couldn’t stand the feeling of impending doom in House of Mirth and DNF it. Just the thought of giving it another try fills me with dread. Does this mean Wharton is just not for me?

>36 FlorenceArt: how interesting. I mean, well, it's there, that feeling. I wouldn't read anything that fills you with dread. If you want to try Wharton again, maybe try Age of Innocence, or Summer. ?? But if you just want something decent in the shadow of Henry James, doesn't have to be Wharton. Willa Cather does stuff Wharton can't do (and vice versa). Just an idea from my reading history.

>36 FlorenceArt: I really liked old new york which might work for you

11. White Teeth by Zadie Smith
reader: Lenny Henry, Pippa Bennett-Warner, Ray Panthaki & Arya Sagar
OPD: 2000
format: 18:38 audible audiobook (448-pages in paperback)
acquired: February 1 listened: Feb 1-26
rating: 5
genre/style: Novel theme: random audio
locations: London 1975 to 1992
about the author: An English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. She was born in 1975 in Willesden, northwest London, to a Jamaican mother and an English father who was 30 years his wife's senior.

I read Zadie Smith's On Beauty in 2005, the year it was published. (Before LT existed) It was good, and it gave me a sense of what was popular then in literary circles. But it was, in a way, just another novel. Nothing was calling me back to read more Zadie Smith. So, although I've known about White Teeth a while, I haven't pursued it. (And I may never have gotten to it, were it not for a timely recent review by CR-er Mabith)

I did not expect this. Terry Pratchett comes to mind, or maybe Six Feet Under. This is charming humor. It's not about the humor, the events aren't exactly funny, but it's pervaded by a humor. It was just always entertaining.

The humor is cultural, largely around ethnic and social misunderstandings. The main characters are two World War II buddies, one English, Archibald Jones, and one Bengali, Samad Iqbal, both married women decades younger them. Archie is married to a Jamaican woman with no front teeth, Samad to a Bengali woman through a marriage that was arranged before she was born. They each have children, Samad twin boys who he tries to keep Muslim growing up in suburban London.

As these children grow up, Smith explores how these men and their wives evolve in their unhappy marriages. Archie's Jamaican wife is largely silent and both leaving their daughter to figure things out on her own. Samad tries to physically control his wife, but she's much younger and healthier and they end up wrestling to painful draws, their twin boys sitting by and watching them and awaiting the compromised outcome. When she is exceptionally upset, she punishes Samad by refusing to confirm anything he asks. She never says "yes" or "no", but only variations of maybe. Samad, further, is a lax but dedicated Muslim lost in London, unwilling or unable to go home to Bengal. Both men remain disconnected from their children, but Samad will fret what his children become, and will occasionally do crazy things to try to make them into blend into his ideal Bengali traditions that he doesn't follow himself.

It's worth noting the Archie's daughter, Irie, is an alternate Zadie. She is also mixed race, with an English father 30 years older than her Jamaican mother. So, Archie's parental failures and Irie's struggles have a deeper cut under the humor.

Well, I don't know that anything of the book's charm comes through there. Smith manages to address serious hot-button cultural issues with a freedom and freshness that is unusual, and insightful; critical but respectful. She gets into serious extreme Muslim strains (on the eve of Sep 11), and also into English-Bengali and English-Jamaican racial issues. It's smart, and expectedly charming, and works wonderfully. And I don't believe Zadie Smith has written anything else like this. It's a one-time thing. For that lightning in bottle, she gets five stars.

Recommended to everyone.

>39 dchaikin: Oh no! I’ve been avoiding this book for years and now I’ll have to get it.

Great review Dan.

12. Ammonites and Leaping Fish: A Life in Time by Penelope Lively
OPD: 2013
format: 234-page paperback
acquired: April 2023 read: Feb 23-29 time reading: 6:20, 1.6 mpp
rating: 3½
genre/style: Personal Essaystheme: TBR
locations: Mainly Egypt and England, but also New England, Wales and Jerusalem
about the author: English author born Cairo in 1933, who moved to England in 1945.

Very different from what I was expecting. I was hoping for a memoir, but really this is a collection of five personal essays on somewhat random topics - on being 80, on her life in light of the Suez crisis of 1956 (as she grew up in Egypt), on memory, on reading (and a little on writing), and on some personal objects and the thoughts they inspire (which is where the title comes from). It's all written with her sharp intelligent prose, that is it reads beautifully. And, reading her essay on being 80, you can't help but be struck by how mentally sharp she is as a writer.

I think if you are in the right state of mind, this is a wonderful book. I came at it wrong. And so, for me, it didn't amount to much more than some light distracting entertainment.

She does have some lovely quotes:

On writing versus life:

You are looking to supply the deficiencies of reality, to provide order where life is a matter of contingent chaos, to suggest theme, and meaning, to make a story that is shapely where real life is linear.

On memory:

We can make a choice from accessible memories...but we can't choose what to remember. There is something disturbing about the thought that, if some other, hither to unavailable retrieval system were activated, I might find myself with a series of entirely unfamiliar memories - an alternate past that happened, but of which I had ceased to be aware.

On Reading:

What happens to all this information, this inferno of language? Where does it go? Much, apparently, becomes irretrievable sediment; a fair amount, the significant amount, becomes the essential part of us - what we know and understand and think about above and beyond our own immediate concerns. It becomes the life of the mind. What we have read makes us what we are - quite as much as what we have experienced, and where we have been and who we have known. To read is to experience.

On education in an Egyptian expat school:

The Iliad and Odyssey spilled out of the lesson time into the rest of the day; I enacted the siege, the wanderings, as I drifted around our garden, because of course I was there anyway - Penelope - so this must be something to do with me personally. The solipsism of the nine-year-old mind. Except that I was there in the wrong part; Penelope is not as beautiful as Helen, she is described as wise and good, qualities that did not appeal. And Ulysses - red-haired and crafty - is clearly not a patch on brave Hector or glamorous Achilles. So I juggled with the narrative - true to the tradition of reworking Homer, had I known it - airbrushed the tiresome Helen, and set myself up with Achilles. And, to bring things more up to date, equipped him with a Matilda tank and a Bren gun, instead of all that stuff with chariots and spears - the Libyan campaign was raging a hundred miles or so away, remember, in 1941.

>40 kjuliff: yes, you do. :)

>39 dchaikin: Glad you enjoyed White Teeth. I loved it when I read it a few years ago. I didn't know much about it other than that I'd heard of it, and wasn't prepared for just how good it was going to be.

So glad you liked White Teeth as much as I did! Great review.

I might have to get to Ammonites and Leaping Fish just for the Egypt element. My mom and her family lived there for a few years when she was a teenager in the 1960s (she was almost twenty years younger than Lively) and I was ever fascinated and jealous of the experience.

>43 valkyrdeath: i felt the same “unprepared for just how good it wss going to be”

>44 mabith: forget Ammonites, read her novel Moon Tiger. There’s a lot more Egypt (eventually. Not up front) and it’s 100 times better 🙂

Ha, noted!

February was a decent month for reading. I got in 49 hours, accomplished my goals, including 15 hours of Chaucer, and finished five books. So, I have started March on plan too. Three of the five books were especially good - Faulkner's Mosquitos, Wharton's The Mother's Recompense, and Pearl, a 2023 novel on the Booker longlist by Sian Hughes. On audio, it was the month of White Teeth by Zadie Smith, which was my best book in February. And I've started another really good one - How to Say Babylon, a memoir on growing up Rastafarian in Jamaica by Safiya Sinclair. My TBR selection was again my softest read. This time it was Ammonites and Leaping Fish by Penelope Lively, a book I was really looking forward to, but expected a memoir, and that's not what it is.

March may be overloaded. My plans are another 15 hours of Chaucer, along with Faulkner's Flags in the Dust, Booker shortlist book Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein (which I've heard I might want to read twice), Twilight Sleep for my Edith Wharton group, where she takes on the jazz age, and, off the cursed TBR I'm eyeing Sword of Destiny by Andrzej Sapkowski - that's an early book in The Witcher series. I've read the first 10 pages once before, and they made me smile.

>47 dchaikin: I've got my eye on How to Say Babylon, and I look forward to your impressions of Study for Obedience. Reactions to it seem to be all over the place.

>45 dchaikin: I've just checked my emails and found one telling me that one of the daily deals on Amazon today is for Moon Tiger, then moved over to LT to find you recommending it. Now I feel like I need to read it.

>47 dchaikin: I'd certainly be curious how you find Sword of Destiny if you do read it. I've got an ebook on my Kindle of the entire Witcher series. I was a big fan of the games based on the books, but have still never been quite sure if it's the sort of thing I'd enjoy reading.

>48 labfs39: How To Say Babylon is wonderful 4 hours in. She loves her Rastafarian father even as all his serious issues are apparent. Your review of Study for Obedience is the one that most makes think i’ll like it. The language in those quotes. Im looking forward to it.

>49 valkyrdeath: Moon Tiger is one my favorite books ever. Definitely recommend it (regardless of the dollar cost. Lively is still around to enjoy any royalties) As for The Witcher, i enjoyed the tv series as far as it got. Those ten pages I read were just as bloody, but it was all playful with drunken barbarian tropes.

>50 dchaikin: I’ve had study for obedience on hold since January 2 and it still says 6 more weeks.

>51 dianeham: Wowzer. Your library needs to buy more copies.

>52 labfs39: It’s an ebook at the Queens Public Library. They have 3 copies. It doesn’t look like they buy more copies when the holds pile up. I’m still more comfortable reading ebooks even after the cataract surgery. My right eye didn’t improve much even though I paid for implants. Now they are suggesting glasses. Not happy about buying glasses on top of pricey implants.

>39 dchaikin: Wonderful review! "Lightning in a bottle" is high praise in indeed. I'm with >40 kjuliff:, I have to read this now.

>41 dchaikin: Again, a great review, and you've excerpted some very interesting bits.

Happy March reading. I'm looking forward to more of your thoughts on the things you read.

Happy March. Your review makes me think I might try White teeth.

I loved White Teeth when I read it shortly after it was published, though I don't remember too many details about it. I later read On Beauty and one other book by her and found them both Meh, so I kind of gave up on her, though every once in a while I read a description of NW which makes me think I would like it if I tried it.

>41 dchaikin: Too bad Lively didn't work for you. A friend pressed this on me, and reluctantly I took it. It sat around for awhile, but then I picked it up one day and it proved to be just the right time.
I particularly like the quotes you have selected on memory, that idea that we can't choose what to remember.

Been neglecting my own thread

>51 dianeham: that’s a study in patience. I hope it gets to you at the right time.

>54 rv1988: I hope you enjoy White Teeth. I think you will! As for Lively - well, see Sassy’s post just before this

>55 markon: you should! 🙂

>56 arubabookwoman: I’m thinking about The Fraud. But for every encouraging word about it i read, i seem to come across a counter. Its not on the Women’s Award longlist.

>57 SassyLassy: i can I only agree. Too bad. I pick books with a vision in mind. It can be hard to erase that vision.

>39 dchaikin: Thanks for your enthusiastic review of White Teeth. I definitely took a hit and have added it to my list. I enjoyed her Swing Time several years ago. I'll be looking into Moon Tiger too.

>59 Jim53: thanks. I’m not familiar with Swing time. I think if you read White Teeth and followed with Moon Tiger (one of my favorite all time books) you might find yourself in a very nice reading place.

Greetings, Dan, your threads move fast and slippery like the brooks lapping over mossy rocks.

Assuming moss can survive under water. I almost failed botany and it shows.

I liked Moon Tiger but not as much as you did. The MC was such a diva, I thought. Always under a spotlight.

>61 LolaWalser: Agree, the main character/narrator in Moon Tiger was definitely a diva. Spot on. But that, for me, was part of what makes it work. Her arrogance lets her get away with stuff that a humbler character would never do and keep our sympathy. She can stomp on conventional wisdom, pronounce any crazy theory she wants with absolute confidence, no matter how much we might agree with her. And with her it has weight because she'll argue it with some logic and reason. It's all part of her charm...well, arguably, charm. :) Of course, it also helps the reader to feel more for her when she shows some humanity.

>62 dchaikin: I really liked Clara and her very British acerbic wit. I must read more Penelope Lively

>62 dchaikin:

Her arrogance lets her get away with stuff

Ah yes, Anglo Superiority is a potent elixir, permeating English literature long past the fall of the Empire. Just the way the Rest Of The World is treated like so much stage scenery for her swanning around--utterly typical.

>63 kjuliff: I wonder if she has written more like Moon Tiger

>64 LolaWalser: yes, indeed. Hers is a colonial perspective, even advising her American colonial subjects actors (if only they could have listened)

Yesterday I obtained an audio of Moon Tiger and just barely started it as I fell asleep. Thanks for the tip as it sounds interesting to me.

OOPS, here is a perfect example of my age-related losses. Yesterday I placed a request for Moon Tiger, and what I was reading last night is actually Never Let Me Go, sorry about that, but I will be getting a copy of Moon Tiger

>66 JoeB1934: I love Never Let Me Go.

>39 dchaikin: Terry Pratchett comes to mind, or maybe Six Feet Under.

White Teeth has been on my TBR pile for quite a long time, and I've always heard good things about it and have been vaguely thinking for ages that I should try harder to get around to it. But nothing has made me more interested in finally doing so than that sentence!

>66 JoeB1934: that’s so funny. I’m glad you’re enjoying. I haven’t read Never Let Me Go

>67 dianeham: noting 🙂

>68 bragan: 🙂 I’m like you in that I’ve always heard good things about White Teeth and always put it off. I hope you get there and enjoy!

>39 dchaikin:
I've been umming and aaaghing as to what book to do for England in my global tour - I've split the UK into the 4 constituent home countries. By the 'rules', it's got to be a book that I haven't read, and published in the last 100 years. Because it's English, I've already read most 'classics' of this period (most, but definitely not all!). I think I've whittled it down to a choice between White Teeth and JB Priestley's The Good Companions (but am still open to other ideas!). I was veering towards the latter, as I'd prefer a book that's not centred on London (the country is already far too dominated by the Great Wen), but you've swung my thinking a bit the other way now! Hmmmm. More contemplation.

>70 Willoyd: i don’t know anything about The Good Companions. Maybe you need a London book and a non-London England book ?? 🙂

Yesterday after finishing Those We Thought We Knew by David Joy, which for me is an absolutely 5-star book, I started listening to Moon Tiger which for you has been one of your 5-star reads.

My reaction to each of these books demonstrates how far I have to go in my development as a reader of literature.

While I was into the book on page 1 of Those We Thought We Knew I was out of it on the first page of Moon Tiger

I have tried to explain why on my thread. Please feel free to provide me some thoughts on my reactions there.

Canterbury Tales update - Fragment 6

I'm actually well into Fragment 7, just never got around to posting on Fragment 6 - The Physicians Tale and The Pardoner's Tale.

The Physician's Tale is an awkward tragedy with an awkward moral, a father killing his daughter to preserve her honor. It's found in Roman historian Livy's work and also in the medieval Romance of the Rose. Chaucer translated the Romance and would have pulled the story from there. A judge's lust over the 14-yr-old daughter, Virginia, and a clever trickster's successful to plan to help the judge win legal custody of the desired girl, is a section praising governesses.

The tale is so depressing, the Host turns to the pardoner and asks for a happier tale and the pardoner agrees to tell one. The pardoner then begins to tell how awful he himself is, finding various ways to work over the faithful and sell his pardons and make a living. It's a sermon on abusing religious devotion. He's very proud of himself.

For though myself be a ful vicious man,
A morale tale yet I yow telle kan"

His tale is not so happy, though, but it is a little more in the spirit of the tales. Three young men, committing lots of sins, drinking and gambling, set out to kill Death in an act of avenging. An old man shows them where they can find Death, and when they follow his instructions, they are surprised find a treasure of coins instead of a person. In greed over the riches, they end up painfully killing each other.

Ther is namoore to seye

Links to my Canterbury Tales updates:
General Prologue here
The Knight's Tale here
The Miller's Tale here
The Reeve's Tale (and Cook's Tale fragment) here
The Man of Laws Tale here
The Wife of Bath's, Friar's and Summoner's Tales here
The Clerk's and Merchant's Tales here
The Squire and Franklin's Tales here

13. The Brave Escape of Edith Wharton by Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge
OPD: 2010
format: 173-page hardcover
acquired: Library book read: Mar 9 time reading: 4:18, 1.5 mpp
rating: 4
genre/style: Young Adult biography theme: Wharton
locations: lots – New York City, Bar Harbor ME, Lennox MA, Paris, Florence, London etc.
about the author: born 1950? An elementary school librarian and young adult author who was born in Black Mountain, North Carolina, and also grew up in Ohio, and Massachusetts, and eventually settled in Indiana.

This is actually a young adult biography. It's one of 12 library books I checked out on Wharton. I picked it up to scan through and found myself wanting to keep reading. (I thought it would take only two hours to read it all, but I slowed down). I liked that it's a nice efficient biography that covers the essentials of Wharton's very complicated life. It explained a lot of stuff I was only loosely aware of or didn't know at all. I didn’t know she hated James Joyces's and Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness, considering it a bunch of novel elements that weren’t actually put together as a novel (and she thought Ulysses was vulgar with too much low-level humor)

Wharton was of the leisure class, born into the Jones family, the family who is the basis of the phrase "keeping up with the Jones". Her escape in the title is a reference to her leaving both her restrictive social world (documented in her fiction) and her unhappy marriage. She lived her later life as a divorcee in France, winning the French Legion of Honor for her work during WWI, and was otherwise surrounded by bachelors, like Henry James, and publishing a book a year.

Things I found interesting:

Wharton met her husband when she and her family were in a rush to get her married before their own financial problems became apparent. But she was always much wealthier than her husband.

Wharton's marriage was happy until he started having mental health issues that were inherited, and neither understood nor treatable. The book suggests he had later-stage bipolarism.

Wharton surrounded herself with bachelors. She avoided married men to keep from jealousies and scandals, even if these relationships were mainly Platonic.

Her closest relationship was with Walter Berry, an American diplomat who she once expected to ask for marriage, but he didn't. Unmarried his whole life, he read every one of works before they were sent to publishers and was with her during most of her difficult times.

I knew about Wharton's extra-marital affair and how it was only found out years after her death. What I didn't know was that she left a love book about this affair with her papers, written to "you". So for years there was a mystery about who this lover might be. (Until his own letters were found in the 1960's)

She needed the money from her book sales, and she made a lot from her books.

Edith Wharton was a special writer and unique personality, and she makes a great subject for a biography.

>74 dchaikin: a very informative book for a YA.

>74 dchaikin: Very interesting! I am curious as to what makes this biography YA rather than A (apart from marketing considerations, maybe?)

>74 dchaikin: I’m quite sure I’ll never read a biography of Edith Wharton (because too many books), but I find those snippets about her oddly fascinating - thanks! It’s time I read some Wharton, though - where would you suggest starting?

>73 dchaikin: In greed over the riches, they end up painfully killing each other.

Well, I suppose we cannot expect parables to be any more subtle that that. I am enjoying your progress through the book.

>74 dchaikin: This is interesting: I didn't know much about Wharton at all. Will you be continuing your reading about her?

>76 Dilara86: I’ve thought about that question too - what makes it YA. I think the author was very dedicated. What she doesn’t include is any original research or interpretations, or questioning of conventional wisdom. It’s outside her context - which is to quickly and efficiently present the known Wharton. For example, she cites published biographies as sources commonly, typically.

But none of that is criminal. It’s efficient, an important step to take in before you go deeper. It’s an introduction to her life. I have read other YA biographies and found them well done. I think these authors are tasked with limited timelines and page-counts, and they aren’t professors or experts. But they take this seriously and can create terrific introductions.

In this case, this is one of a several YA biographies this author wrote. She clearly put a lot in. But she was a an elementary school librarian and, if I can read between the lines, a mom who waited until her kids were older and she had more time to start writing these.

But, a more simple and honest answer to the question is, I’m not sure.

>75 dianeham: i agree. I’m really grateful i read it.

>78 rv1988: right about Chaucer - the tale is neither deep nor original. (Although criticism admires how is works in some aspects subtly). But there is nothing like his telling. 🙂

I’m hoping to read more about Wharton. I’ll definitely read more by her.

I thought Lt ate my post, but there it is. So erasing version 2 here…

>77 rachbxl: Wharton is fantastic. Definitely hope you read her. Meredith asked me this question and I answered above in >32 dchaikin: I encourage you to look at that post. I like the idea of starting with House of Mirth because it’s a fun book and the one that really set her on her way. (Her previous books all sold! But this one really broke her out into a wider audience curious about dirt on rich New Yorkers). But she was a steady consistently special writer with wonderful prose. Just avoid starting with the WWI books, where she tried too hard to be Vive la France.

>82im reading House of Mirth now, and I agree - it’s a fun book and a good one to start on.

>83 kjuliff: yay! enjoy, well, I mean, you know...

14. Flags in the Dust by William Faulkner
publication history: cut version published 1929, full version published 1973. Corrected 2006
format: 319-page Nook ebook (published 2011)
acquired: February 29 read: Mar 1-15 time reading: 16:22, 3.1 mpp
rating: 4
genre/style: Classic novel theme: Faulkner
locations: Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi, ~1920
about the author: 1897-1962. American Noble Laureate who was born in New Albany, MS, and lived most of his life in Oxford, MS.

This is an important Faulkner novel. It's his 3rd published novel, but it's the first he set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha county Mississippi. It sets the backdrop of the Snopes trilogy and I think much or most of his other work going forward. But, is it any good?

It wasn't published as he wanted in his lifetime. The publisher of Faulkner's first two novels rejected it, saying it was “diffuse and non-integral with neither very much plot development nor character development.... The story really doesn't get anywhere and has a thousand loose ends." That's an entirely accurate description. Without plot drive or clear purpose, it walks along slowly. It opens with a breath of wonderful prose and author control on the pace, intentionally slowing us readers down without losing us. But that doesn't last. Eventually the book drifts. I spent swaths of pages wondering why Faulkner was telling me what he was telling me, and even after I set the book down, found myself mulling over this question and not able to answer it. The eventual publisher cut out a huge chunk of it, maybe 25 percent.

"After a while John Sartoris departed also, withdrawn rather to the place where the peaceful dead contemplate their glamourous frustrations"

And yet I enjoyed it. I took in these characters, and embraced with the glee the introductions to characters who are fleshed out in the Snopes trilogy, and I closed in with real affection. The novel hovers over the mythological Civil War colonel, John Sartoris, his memory and spirit hovering "like an odor, like the clean dusty smell of his faded overalls". His son, Old Bayard, runs his bank in this same Mississippi town. Old Bayard's grandson, also Bayard, has just returned from serving as a pilot in WWI, watching his own twin brother die in air combat. There are lot of missing Sartorises, moms, wifes, dads. They don't come out well. And young Bayard can't settle after his experiences, constantly pushing limits and unable to stop. Mixed in, and largely cut in 1929, is the younger Bayard's eventual spouse, inaptly named Narcissa, a beautiful warm character Faulkner created, first in love warmly with her brother (in a healthy way), also a WWI veteran. The sibling relationship is as beautiful as anything in the book.

I don't know how to approach the race aspects of this book except to say race is important to the book, and it's a racism fail. Faulkner loves his black servant characters, but he loves them as black servants playing secondary humans, not as regular people who are entirely dependent financially, with limited to no opportunities for themselves or their children. You can't overlook these aspects, the love and hard misunderstanding. It's so fundamental to the book, to everything beautiful within the book. I cringed, but also found myself open to letting Faulkner give me his own take. If you want to destroy this book on race, you have easy target.

So recommended for Faulkner pursuers, but maybe not for samplers.

Note to self - books I've recently checked out from the library (i.e. a post to skip)

Faulkner

William Faulkner and the Southern Landscape by Charles S. Aiken - read a few pages, seemed mixed.
Faulkner the Storyteller by Blair Labatt - read a little and wasn't taken in.
William Faulkner (Lives and Legacies) by Carloyn Porter - short and looked very good. I might come back and read this.
Every Day by the Sun - a memoir by William Faulkner's niece, Dean Faulkner Wells. Her father, Faulkner's brother, died flying a small plane and Faulkner felt some responsibility and helped raise her. Intro was ok.
The Saddest Words by Michale Edward Gorra - nice intro and Jennifer (japaul22) liked this. I would like to come back to it.

Women's Nonfiction longlist

All that She Carried by Tiya Miles - I really didn't like the intro 🤷🏻‍♂️
How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair - I'm listening to this now. The hardcover has her poem, Silver, on the inside cover (but it was partially covered by library documentation stuff so I couldn't read it). Also, I learned she thanks her father in the acknowledgements, which is interesting in light of the criticism of him in the book.
The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes who Created the Oxford English Dictionary by Sarah Olgivie - The intro was really nice and explains the source of her book, why she found it, her history with the OED. The book is about the many people who contributed and were almost forgotten, many of them women. So I could read this and enjoy it, but I probably won't come back.
Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution - I've really interested in this. But the intro didn't tell me much. It's a sort of manifesto on the lack of women in medical studies. Apparently women are more complicated in medical research than men. It's a good intro, but I still don't know if this is a great book, or just another anatomy book... I may come back.

Britannia : A History of Roman Britain by Sheppard Frere - came up when I was looking for the longlist book with the same name, but it sounded so interesting that I checked it out. It's old, the writing in the intro is awful, but the maps were cool.

Wharton

Not in Sisterhood: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Zona Gale and the Politics of Female Authorship by Deborah Lindsay Williams - the introduction is feminist and also a frustrating mix of good information and hard to access opinions found too much in academic criticism. I won't read this. I did learn that Wharton and Cather were known for not helping other female authors. (This makes some sense as they were both independent spirits. Wharton, further, surrounded herself with intellectual men worshippers. 🙂 Cather was probably lesbian.) And I learned that Zona Gale was once a bestselling author. I have never heard of her before.

A quote that captures my discomfort with the intro, from page 1, "Gale's feminism, and her strong sense of female literary community, demonstrates that literary power and cultural authority could be achieved with strategies very different from those used by Wharton and Cather." - I really don't like the phrases "literary power" or "cultural authority" loosely thrown about in this context. They are relativist words, meaningless without a strong context. And they feel like jargon. But the whole sentence is terrible. Let's rephrase - "Gale was actively feminist, unlike Wharton and Cather."

The Gilded Age: Wharton and Her Contemporaries by Eleanor Dwight - pretty pictures, but unreadable.

Felicitous Space: The Imaginative Structures of Edith Wharton and Willa Cather by Judith Fryer - introduction and beginning is about as academic and unpleasant to read as the title might imply. I suspect she has nice stuff to say, but I'll leave it there.

Edith Wharton's Prisoners of Consciousness by Evelyn Fracasso - this dull title has a terrific premise that I'm mulling over. I read the intro where Fracasso tells us Wharton felt no one is happy, that we are all trapped by circumstance. And she argues Wharton's writing investigates these cages with live within. She's right! It nails a really important aspect of Wharton that I hadn't fully picked up on. And she has choice quotes; "We're all imprisoned, of course--all of us middling people, who don't carry our freedom in our brains. But we've accommodated ourselves to our different cells, and if we're moved suddenly into the new ones we're likey to find a stone wall where we thought there was thin air, and to knock ourselves senseless against it." (from a short story. Autres Temps...). But I'll leave the rest of this book unread.

Edith Wharton: Sex, Satire and the Older Woman by Avril Horner - on Wharton's later fiction, after The Age of Innocence. (The books I'm reading now.) The introduction was pleasantly readable. I learned that Wharton has aspects of the modernism she hated, and that her later fiction, which is typically neglected and even criticized, experiments in form in her own way. And I also learned that Wharton's later fiction perspective changes to that of the inner lives of middle-aged women still very active with their lives and minds. The author obviously likes her later books. I might read more of this one, as it has a chapter on the book I just read (The Mother's Recompense) and the one I just started (Twilight Sleep), and I liked how the intro was written.

Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee - the introduction was fantastic. Definitely this is the biography I should read. Maybe I will.

today - three more books came in, stragglers

Young Queens by Leah Redmond Change - from the Women's Nonfiction long list. A biography of Catherine de Medici, Mary Queen of Scots and a Spanish queen who all knew each other well in the 1500's. For such a long book, I didn't like opening sentence. 😊 But the introduction was continuously interesting and made me want to read more. I don't think I will, however. Just too many books and this is a bit long. But, still, it makes the point that women in power in this period, even queens, had very unsettled lives, their position changing with political winds, marriages, births, and deaths. That's interesting. And Catherine ran France for 30 years...

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton, edited by Carol J. Singley - I read the first few pages of the intro and a couple chapters. What I came across was readable, but I didn't find it very interesting.

Edith Wharton's Italian Gardens by Vivian Russell. Such a great idea. She covers all the gardens Edith Wharton wrote about and that still exist and can be photographed. These come mainly from one nonfiction book Wharton on Gardens, but from her fiction too. That seems terrific. In practice, it's really just a picture book with bad text that covers many gardens I've never heard of, but also Boboli Gardens in Florence. I flipped through the whole thing, enjoying the pictures.

While watching basketball i scanned through three books on Edith Wharton

After the fall: the Demeter–Persephone myth in Wharton, Cather, and Glasgow by Josephine Donovan (1989)

The 3rd author covered is Ellen Glasgow. The introduction doesn’t really talk about the author at all, but goes over the Persephone myth. It has this choice quote (assuming you know the myth):

”The Demeter–Persephone myth is singularly relevant to historical transition that occurred in the middle-class women’s culture in the late nineteenth century in the Western world. It allegorizes the transformation from a matricentric preindustrial culture—Demeter’s realm—to a male-dominated capitalist-industrialist ethos, characterized by growing professionalism and bureaucracy: the realm of patriarchal captivity.”

Edith Wharton by Margaret B. McDowell (1976, revised 1991)

opens with a overview of Wharton’s life that was interesting in that it was from a slightly different perspective, focussing a lot her earliest published works, including nonfiction, poetry and short stories that i haven’t read.

Edith Wharton in context (2012) edited by Laura Rattrey

The introduction talks about Wharton’s presence in current culture, including online memes and fb pages. I might try some of the essays, each written by a different author. Rattrey does the biography which i found interesting but didn’t finish (and won’t finish)

Today the library lent me four books
- Wifedom by Anna Funder - Women’s Nonfiction longlist 2024
- A Dictator Calls by Ismale Kadare - international booker longlist 2024
- The Details by Ia Genberg - international booker longlist 2024
- Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (which I’m listening to) - international booker longlist 2024

>87 dchaikin: I’m really curious about the Dictator one.

Whew, what a load of Wharton! I've read very little of hers, Summer and a few stories, but I'd recommend, if you haven't read it, In Morocco. She took a trip there in 1919.

>88 dianeham: so far it’s an odd read. But it’s readable and very short. I decided to read it.

>89 LolaWalser: i have not read that one. I read one of her nonfiction books and it oozed privilege. So I’m hesitant. But with your recommendation, I’m much more willing to give it a try. (Not sure i can convince my Litsy group)

>89 LolaWalser: oh Id love to read In Morocco! Been enjoying her short stories, and love her glimpses of the moon which may be her only happy book? prisioners of consciousnesslooks interesting as well; I have always felt the same way, remembering that we have no idea what another person is dealing with, so be kind.

I did get Edith Warton brave escape Lots of photos, but its not holding my interest so far

>91 cindydavid4: awesome about The Brave Escape. It’s quick

>92 dchaikin: oh good, Ill give it another go thx

>93 cindydavid4: I misread your post. I missed the “not”. Oops. There are better biographies. Hermione Lee’s is highly regarded.

I am so glad I decided to recheck out the brave escape: I had less tired eyes today than I did last night. Of the three bios Ive read this year this is the best. Well written, hits all the right spots and does not like the other two feel the need to bore us with every place they saw and every place they went to and who they saw. I loved reading about her life and how she did indeed make her escape. Loved her friendship with Henry James, Fitzgerald, Walter Berry and her true love, Walter (last name)?and so many other authors, I had liked the few books and stories I read, but this book has made me a fan of Edith Warton as the incredible person she was and the works of art she created,

Loved the mentions of her books and how they came to be. I was interested in three stories: Copy,the line of least resistance and the book of the homeless

(one thing that amazes me about this time period was how peoplle at a drop of a hat can travel by ship back and forth sometimes several times a year. This esp in the case of the celestial moon wow!

Also surprised by her work during WWI to help refugees, children and others, and wrote articles in Schibners letting people know first hand what was happening there, hich may have helped America to get involved.

a few quotes I enjoyed:

Attached to a packet of papers "to my biographer, make the gist of me"

When her sister in law writes about the woes and privitations of old age, she writes: "the farthest I have penetrated this ill-famed Valley, the more full of interest and beauty too have I found. It is full of its own quiet radience, and in the light I discover many enchantments which the midday dazzel obscured"

actually, I happened upon the book and started getting interested, so think Ill keep going with it until Im not. Interesting that her mother would not allow her to read childrens books because she found them unsuitable. So when she could read her books were in the adult section Weird but there we are.

>90 dchaikin:, >91 cindydavid4:

It's very well-written and still eye-opening (I stuck my notes into the review field; mainly, I was shocked by the condition of the Jewish minority and the existence of slavery). Given the age of the book, it should be available somewhere free...

>96 cindydavid4: great! I don't actually remember that. I think this is the book where I learned that the myth she pushed that she wasn't allowed to read fiction as a child and teenager, was somewhat untrue. Her letters to her governess were found where she talks about George Eliot when still young, for example. But it might have been another one of those books I read the introductions too!!

>97 LolaWalser: sounds eye-opening

15. How to Say Babylon: A Memoir by Safiya Sinclair
reader: the author
OPD: 2023
format: 16:46 audible audiobook (352 pages in hardcover)
acquired: February 26 listened: Feb 26 – Mar 21
rating: 4½
genre/style: memoir theme: random audio
locations: Jamaica 1960’s to 2010’s
about the author: A Jamaican poet and memoirist and associate professor of creative writing at Arizona State University, born 1984 in Montego Bay, Jamaica.

I have to thank the Women's Nonfiction longlist for taking me here. I loved listening to this. It was gorgeous, and Sinclair is a remarkably good reader. She reads slow, with poetic cadence, bringing out the poetry within her own writing. Audio adds a lot to this.

This is a memoir of growing up Rastafarian in Jamaica, but with a bitter pill. Sinclair's father is a reggae singer, who makes his living playing at tourist hotels. But when she was young he had opportunities to make serious record deals. He ran his family Rastafarian, a religion without any set rules, inspired by Marcus Garvey, Bob Marley, and, oddly, Ethiopian dictator Haile Selassie. It's strongly anti-western, anti-British in once-British-controlled Jamaica. In practice, it tends to be male dominated, with women left subservient, and with hints of unsettled Islamic extremism. For Safiya as a child, this meant no meat, dreadlocks, and lots of inspirational anti-western rants by a motivated inspired dad. But as his career opportunities disappeared, he became angry and abusive, and mom largely acquiesced.

However, this is also a good study of her mom, who led four children to be well educated, managed all her husband's issues with minimal resources. Safiya Sinclair graduated high school at 15, it was six years(!) before her mother found the money to send her to college (in the US).

Overall I adored the early parts and the later parts of this book. (She has really a powerful small part on learning to be black in America.) It struggles a bit to carry through the author's six years between school, where she began to become a poet. The tone she creates in this book is inflexible, and that's the section where it strains the book a bit, becoming dangerously close to melodramatic. My other somewhat critical observation is that it doesn't read as easily as she, the author, makes it sound. It scanned through a paper copy and it reads slow, her rhythm hard to find. But it's there. So, take time to find it. But these are light criticisms of a very intense author with a beautiful written and spoken voice.

I recommend this to anyone interested, especially audio aficionados.

I will add this to the burgeoning wishlist. Great review!

>100 labfs39: thanks Lisa!

I'm going to cry a little as a just wrote a long Chaucer post...and then closed my page tab, without saving.

Ack!! That's the worst.

>101 dchaikin: ohhhhhh Ive had those tears before..... hang in there. sometimes if I reload it comes back, but not all the time

>99 dchaikin: Great review, and on the wishlist it goes!

(ok, the University of Houston made the sweet 16, despite an insane last second 3-point basket by Texas A&M to send the game into overtime. I can relax now.)

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales fragment 7, take 2.

Fragment 7 has four long tales - The Shipmen's Tale, The Prioress's Tale, the Tale of Sir Tropas and the prose Tale of Melibee. It's not my favorite fragment, but i really liked The Shipmen's Tale.

The Shipmen's Tale has a monk Don Juan, well, "Duan John". He borrows money from a merchant and gives it to the merchant's wife, for sexual favors. When the merchant asks for it back, the Monk explains he already returned it to his wife. (I think this concept was in Decameron too...but can't remember)

The Prioress's Tale is bitterly antisemitic. It's odd in that in the prologue the Prioress gives a very beautiful lengthy prayer to Mary. Then, she follows this beautiful religious moment up with the most hateful tale in the collection. It may have been inspired by a contemporary event, a Jew accused of murdering a child in Lincoln.

Next our narrator, Chaucer his-fictional-self, tells both the Tale of Sir Tropas and the prose Tale of Melibee. I didn't mind the Tale of Sir Tropas, but apparently it plays on silly knight tropes, and was so ridiculous, that the host interrupts and stops Chaucer, saying, "Namoore of this, for Goddes dignitee! / Myne eres aken of thy drasty speech" The host begs for a different story, and Chaucer says he can give one in prose. He begins Tale of Melibee, a painfully dull prose tale where when Melibeus finds his wife and daughter attacked, and he's seeing red. But his wife, Prudence, councils him on how to react, forcing him to think things through. Meanwhile she provides is a long list of quoted guidance from different sources, many inaccurate, many Biblical, to support her arguments. The tale is an almost straight translation from a French version, itself a translation of a Latin version written by Albertanus of Breccia (c. 1195 – c. 1251). Of all the Chaucer I have read, reading this was the first time it felt like work. I had to push through this one. And even if I did find a rhythm, I was happy to be done with it.

Links to my Canterbury Tales updates:
General Prologue here
The Knight's Tale here
The Miller's Tale here
The Reeve's Tale (and Cook's Tale fragment) here
The Man of Laws Tale here
The Wife of Bath's, Friar's and Summoner's Tales here
The Clerk's and Merchant's Tales here
The Squire and Franklin's Tales here
Fragment 6 - The Physicians Tale and The Pardoner's Tale here

Ther is namoore to seye

>102 labfs39: I know, right! 🙁
>103 cindydavid4: no luck today
>104 rv1988: thanks Rasdhar!

>101 dchaikin: Ouch! Hate it when that happens. I write almost all my posts in a text app before posting, for this and other reasons (typing text on an iPad can be a very frustrating experience sometimes)

Too bad this stretch of Chaucer didn’t work for you. I’m enjoying reading about your reading!

>105 dchaikin: You're getting through the tales nearly three quarters through. Enjoying the updates. I seem to remember that Chaucer had had his tongue in his cheek with the Tale of Sir Tropas.

Interesting review of How to Say Babylon! I think it sounds like you believe the book will work better as an audiobook than in print, is that correct? I only listen to audiobooks once in a while, but maybe this would be a good candidate.

>109 japaul22: I recommend checking a sample and listening to her read it. I think it would help. And be enjoyable

Eta an autocorrect fix…

If anyone is interested, the Women’s Prize published a short interview with Safiya Sinclair about her book: https://womensprize.com/in-conversation-with-safiya-sinclair

My book searching just came up with How to Say Babylon: A Memoir by Safiya Sinclair. The mentions on your thread led me to placing it on my holds list.

I was looking at books based on Marytr!, which I have had on hold for a while. A number of other books I have already placed on hold came from the same source.

Hi Dan! I hate to skim but I've been skimming to catch up... great reading, as always, and always something to catch my attention.

>112 JoeB1934: great to here. I hope it comes through and you enjoy it!

>113 lisapeet: always nice to hear from you 🙂

>99 dchaikin: Definitely taking a book bullet on How to Say Babylon, but also eagerly awaiting your review of the latest Ismail Kadare book! I've loved his novels so much.

>86 dchaikin:
Interesting list. Maybe I should do the same, ie make one, I've been having a major 'declutter' books-wise the last month or two (or six!), and the list of unread books gone let alone the read ones would last till Christmas. Felt difficult at the time, but have to say now feel all the better for it - and so do the shelves! Most of them were chosen partly because the subscription library I belong to (as opposed to public, which I also belong to) has them available, so I didn't feel the need to hold on to them. And I'm trying to conquer my collecting completism (actually, stop 'collecting' altogether - it's just accumulation)! There are currently 30+ books piled up and ready to go!

>116 Willoyd: I get the difference between collecting and accumulation. It will be good to keep this in mind when I am thinking about my next purchase.

>117 baswood:
I've just broken up a collection I had built up of first editions of one author's work (Jan Morris). I've kept the books I really want to read or have enjoyed, but quite a few have now gone. I wasn't actually likely to read them. Interestingly (at least to me), the bulk of what I've kept are her early books - hardly anything this century. The space created is brilliant!

thats one set of books I am very reluctant to part with - my childrens illustrations book from the 1880 to 1929. the illustrations on these are just wonderful. even if I dont read them, im keeping them . am trying to purge some of my others, esp on my 'tbr' shelves; some have been there for an eternity!
Love Jan Morris travelogues!

>119 cindydavid4:
There's always books we won't be parted from! I'm certainly not clearing them all out by any means (still have around 2500 on the shelves even after the last round of removals), but it's nice actually having both room for all my books in the book cases we've got and for there to be space on the shelves to put others if/when I acquire them. Several books/sets won't be going anywhere because I love the illustrations too - not just children's books. For instance, I've got a few classics illustrated with woodcuts etc, and they're just gorgeous (IMO!). Not sure what would be last ones standing - an interesting conundrum which I hope I never have to solve!

>85 dchaikin: “Is it a good book” I think that Sartoris, as Flags was originally published, is the better book. As you point out, Flags needed editing, Faulkner just couldn’t always say what he wanted coherently. I may read along whenever you start The Sound and the Fury. I’ve been reading for the last few weeks, but truly too much going on to keep up with threads, including my own.

>115 mabith: yay for Safiya. I finished A Dictator Calls today. It’s not the kind of book many people love. It’s curious and readable and short.

>116 Willoyd: well, good for you. If you’re like me, you will remember the two books you wish you had kept, forget the loads of others. We got rid of hundreds of books this summer (but only about 30 were actually ones i had on my tbr. And i regret maybe two, but they’re replaceable).

>116 Willoyd: >117 baswood: as for collecting/accumulating - I’m trying very hard to read a book, then buy a book. So at least my tbr stays in balance. But it’s not so easy.

>118 Willoyd: you’ll have to send me Jan Morris recommendations

>119 cindydavid4: i really miss the piles of children’s books. We kept our favorites, and my kids do not miss any of them. I just liked that call to that time

>121 dianelouise100: nice to hear from you, Diane. I’m hoping to start The Sound and the Fury on April 1st (happens to be my birthday). But I get nervous I’m not adequately prepared. 40 unnamed narrators. Phew.

>122 dchaikin: As best I remember there are only 4 narrators, all named.

>123 dianelouise100: oh. Good. Ok, i don’t know where I got that from. 🙂

I’m eager to see what you make of it

>111 dchaikin: Thanks for posting the interview with Safiya Sinclair Dan. That and your review have convinced me it's worth trying the audiobook. (When it becomes available at the library.)

>126 markon: oh, enjoy! How to Say Babylon is definitely worth a try.

16. A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare
translation: from Albanian by John Hodgson (2023)
OPD: 2022
format: 230-page paperback
acquired: library loan read: Mar 23-26 time reading: 4:09, 1.1 mpp
rating: 3½
genre/style: Contemporary novel theme: Booker2024
locations: Moscow 1934
about the author: An Albanian novelist, poet, essayist, screenwriter, and playwright, born 1936 in Gjirokastër, Albania

The first I've read from the 2024 International Booker longlist, one of several very short books on the list. The nice thing about short books is I can get through them quickly, which means I can get to them even though I haven't planned to. The problem is I can finish them before I have really figured out what it is I'm reading. That was certainly the case here.

This “novel” is Kadare thinking through a phone call between Joseph Stalin and Boris Pasternak. Stalin called Pasternak in June of 1934 and asked about the recent arrest of poet Osip Mandelstam. Pasternak, probably in a panic, apparently dodged the question. Stalin made a critical comment on how he himself would do a lot more to help his own comrades. Then he hung up, never available to Pasternak again.

Pasternak and Mandelstam, both from Jewish families, were friends and fellow poets. Their friendship seems to have survived this phone call and the wide knowledge of it. Mandelstam would die imprisoned in 1938. The reputation-smeared Pasternak would win the Nobel Prize in the 1950's.

Kadare spent time in Soviet Union in the 1960's, before he was forced to leave when the Albanian dictator, Enver Hoxha, broke with Stalin's successors. He wrote a novel about these experiences in the 1970's (Twilight of the Eastern Gods, 1978), one of the Kadare novels that were "smuggled out" of Albania. What is semi-clear here is that Kadare relates to Pasternak. He experienced one out-of-the-blue phone call from Hoxha and found himself unable to say anything other than thank you. That is, Kadare is writing a lot about himself and his own art. The book, however, focuses on and mulls over this one phone call from several different angles. He seems to be writing about power, fear, and art, and it reads more like an inconclusive essay on these things than a novel. And it wasn't clear to me where it intended to go. Within his path, he comments on writers, bashes the communist states, and criticizes Marx for not providing guidance on how to psychologically recover from a consequences of a successful revolution.

Mainly, though, it creates for the reader some of the sense of living under the absolute power of a tyrant, the sense of being toyed with by a tyrant aware of whimsical torment he is creating but can't be hurt by. Stalin playing games with Pasternak for his own amusement echos through Pasternak's reputation and legacy.

I should have condensed all that down because I still haven't said whether the book is any good. I'm not sure how good the book is. It probably has a great deal of weight within the right context, but for me it was merely readable and curious. It's entertaining enough for Kadare and Booker completists and the curious.

17. The Details by Ia Genberg
translation: from Swedish by Kira Josefsson (2023)
OPD: 2022
format: 137-page hardcover
acquired: library loan read: Mar 29-30 time reading: 3:36, 1.6 mpp
rating: 4
genre/style: contemporary fiction theme: Booker 2024
locations: Stockholm (1990’s)
about the author: Swedish journalist and novelist born in Stockholm in 1967.

I just finished, my second of the International Booker longlist, another super-short one. I enjoyed it.

The novel is broken into four parts, each a relationship. They read like autobiographical essays about the quirky offbeat artistic world of 1990's Stockholm, Sweden. The four relationships include lovers, friends, and the unnamed narrator's mother. The opening two sections, two relationships, reminded me a lot of Rachel Cusk. Bold, personal, just a little off, but always interesting, the narrator here literally writing in a fever. That sense changed or faded at the end of the Niki section, the second, where I felt the book took a turn, and the four parts became to me a lot more meaningful and cohesive.

There is a lot of searching and not finding, just searching and searching elsewhere, and some losing. She tell us, "All my writing efforts were a vain attempt to reach for something that was forever lost." It’s a messy, unstructured, unstable life, but a tolerant one. She gives lots of details, per the title, things and personal characteristics, but they are part of the narrative. She tells us she has a "melancholic eye for detail". Often, they just seem to mainly tell the reader to slow down and look around.

I enjoyed these characters and their relationships, and their ongoing conversations that never end. They live, they're individual, wonderfully tangible and also unreachable. A fun book. It's maybe too short, and maybe reads too fast. I had to make myself slow down. Recommended to the whimsical reader.

>128 dchaikin: It probably has a great deal of weight within the right context, but for me it was merely readable and curious.

I don’t think I’m curious enough for this one. It sounds too weighty for me and I doubt I’d have enough background to understand it unless I did some serious research. I’m glad you reviewed it as I’ve been wondering whether this book was for me, and now I’ve decided it’s not.

>128 dchaikin: criticizes Marx for not providing guidance on how to psychologically recover from a consequences of a successful revolution.

Interesting, but I doubt he even thought of any need for any guidance, because being sucessful was the be all and end all. guidence was far from the though of all revolutionaries. Would be interesting to interview a Marx in old age and ask what would you have done differently

A reminder that I want to read more Kadare and have Broken April on my shelves. The Genberg book sounds vaguely interesting, but not a priority. Intriguing reviews, as always.

>128 dchaikin: Sorry, can't read your thoughts yet until I read it myself, but will come back to them. Hoping to find a copy of this when I am away in April.

>132 labfs39: Broken April was my first Kadare, and you know where it's gone since then - be warned!

>129 dchaikin: that should be "vain attempt" yes? Whimsy would be welcome now but not that sort, I think.

>130 kjuliff: maybe it’s not for you. Kadare has been writing a long time. I enjoyed another book i read by him on Albanian oral epic poetry performers.

>131 cindydavid4: i think Kadare is having fun with this critique of Marx. Do you think the USSR or Albania was anything like what Marx imagined?

>132 labfs39: i want to read more Kadare too.

>133 SassyLassy: noting Broken April. Have you read Twilight of the Eastern Gods?

>134 dianeham: oye. Yes, “vain”. Fixed 🙂

>135 dchaikin: I was hope that talking to a dictator book would be better.

>135 dchaikin: ah i missed that it was a critique. Ok then carry on

I think i should have let myself sleep on The Details. I’ve warmed up to it more now.

>128 dchaikin: Interesting review. I had a friend some years ago who was a big Ismail Kadare fan and I read, via his collection, nearly all of Kadare's books. He really is very good, especially on the themes you identified: tyranny, power, art. I remember being particularly haunted by The Siege and Chronicle in Stone. I haven't read this one, but will now.

>129 dchaikin: Again, a great review. I hope you keep posting about your adventures with the Booker longlist.

>139 rv1988: I’m jealous. I want to read more Kadare. I don’t know how I’ll make more Longlist progress. It may have to wait a bit. I have What I’d Rather Not Think About on ebook loan, and some holds waiting for me at the library, but I only planned to read the first few pages of them.

>135 dchaikin: I could have sworn I responded to this, but apparently not. I haven't read Twilight of the Eastern Gods, which looks like a definite must. Added to my search list for when I am away.

Happy birthday, Dan! :)

April 1st, really?

Happy birthday! Yet another fellow Ram. We do spring forth springily. :)

>142 AnnieMod: thanks!
>143 LolaWalser: yes, really. Appropriately. :)

Happy birthday! I hope your year is filled with great reading.

Some thoughts on March, which started out terrific, but faded in the second half of the month. I was forced to pause on Chaucer to keep up with my Wharton group. But overall just under 50 hours reading for the month. So, a decent month. I finished five books, but one was on audio, and three others took less than 5 hours each to read. The only major read this month was Flags in the Dust, William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha foundational book. The short books were a YA biography, The Brave Escape of Edith Wharton, which I liked a lot, and two from the International Booker longlist - A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare, which didn't do much for me, and The Details by Ia Genberg, which has hung around a couple days later. The audio book was How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair, which is wonderful and recommended to everyone (kindof)

So, April. I was surprised to see I had The Sound and the Fury in May on my plan. I've moved it up to April in my plans, but haven't started. I did start A Study for Obedience...whia great 75 or so pages I've read. A stylistically distinct, interesting, and so far quite a wonderful thing. I hope to finish The Canterbury Tales this month (I started January 1), and I'll finish Edith Wharton's Twilight Sleep this week. I plan to read Western Lane by Chetna Maroo and Asphodel by H.D. (inspired by a review by Japaul22). If there's time left...I just ordered 16 books... (see the Just Lists thread)

Also, on Audio I have Kairos, which I'm finding interesting. Not sure what I'll follow it up with.

>146 dchaikin: I'm not surprised that you're enjoying A Study for Obedience. I look forward to finding out what you think about it.

Happy Birthday 🎉 Dan

Happy birthday, Dan!
I found A dictator calls intriguing when I read the Dutch version (last year?), but had similar problems making my mind up about whether it was a good book. Kadare doesn’t seem to go in for feeding us clear conclusions.

>149 thorold: Happy birthday, and don’t fall over any rocks 🤤

Happy Birthday!

>146 dchaikin: Glad to hear that you are appreciating Study for Obedience. Looking forward to your review. 🎂

>145 RidgewayGirl: >148 dianeham: >149 thorold: >150 kjuliff: >151 cindydavid4: thanks all. My baseball team, the Houston Astros, also went along and pitched a no-hitter for me. 🙂

>147 RidgewayGirl: yes, Study for Obedience seems like my thing. I’m reading it thinking, how did this not win the Booker. And i loved the winner, Prophet Song

>149 thorold: Kadare seems always interesting

>150 kjuliff: fortunately there not many rocks to fall over in Houston, well other than garden rocks.
>152 kjuliff: I’m really enjoying Study.

>147 RidgewayGirl: A Study of Obedience is one of my favorite reads of all time. I think in any other year it would have won the Booker.

>153 dchaikin: Sorry about the flippancy. I try to find more to write than just Happy birthday. I have been to Houston. My family comes from near there - Juliff TX. I went there to see if any of them were still there but it was a deserted place.

I was pretty sure you’d like Study.

>155 kjuliff: You comment actually made me smile. No worries. I had never heard of Juliff before now, but it's definitely in the Houston sphere.

>156 dchaikin: it used to be a wild town, full of drunks and prostitutes. At one stage it was going to be used for landfill but an historical society contacted us all and it was objected to as it has historical value. My great great great grandfather founded it in the mid 19th C.

>148 dianeham: Happy Birthday!

Belated happy birthday!

Chiming in with belated birthday wishes. Glad too that A Study for Obedience is hitting the spot. Quite the book.

Belated happy birthday!
>128 dchaikin: I am curious about A Dictator Calls : I liked all the Kadares I read (some more than others), but I haven't read this one.

Happy birthday Dan! With that list of new books, you will never run out of something to read. But then, that's not really a problem any of us have, is it?

Happy slightly belated birthday, Dan!

Belated birthday wishes! Also enjoyed Study for Obedience - will be interested in your take on it re the narrator in particular.

Belatedly belated birthday wishes 🎂.

Happy birthday Dan, belatedly of course. Houston is funny place in my mind as one of geology capitals of the world yet so little exposed geology. Wish there were more interesting rocks to trip over.

>129 dchaikin: I’ve been looking at The Detail, and wondering whether it’s up to the level of last year’s International Longlisted books. It’s not at my library and I can’t see anything I’ve read really drawing me to it.

>157 kjuliff: I’m admiring anything was held up for historical value around here. Also now whenever i see your posts i wonder about Juliff, TX.

>158 rv1988: >159 Jim53: thanks!

>160 labfs39: thanks Lisa. I finished the Wharton today and I’m anxious to get back to SfO.

>161 Dilara86: so many Kadare fans. A Dictator Calls is a quick easy read, but the afterward processing needs some time.

>162 markon: no. It was an investment in reading vanity… my version of shopping therapy

>163 lisapeet: Hi Lisa. Thanks!

>164 AlisonY: thanks. Another SfO fan. I’m very puzzled by our narrator, but i’m ok with that

>165 rhian_of_oz: thanks Rhian

>166 stretch: yeah, well oil center. As you go more inland and hit the sandstone ridge hills after 50 or so miles (with almost no exposure, but they are mined for decorative landscape stones), you can think about their subsurface reservoir equivalents.

>167 kjuliff: I liked The Details. More than I put in my review, which i wrote too soon. It grew on me. But it’s not for everyone. A sample will tell you if it’s palatable. Any it’s harmlessly short.

Canterbury Tales Fragment 8: the Second Nun's Tale and The Canon's Yeoman's Tale.

The Second Nun's Tale has an interesting prologue. It's a criticism of idleness, but includes an invocation to Mary that is partially a translation from the Dante's prayer to Mary at the of Paradiso. The tale is a martyr story of Saint Cicilia, sourced from a lives of saints, actually from two versions of these. One is by Dominican Friar Jacobus de Voragine (1229-1298) and the other is an abridgment of the same by a Franciscan. Chaucer switches sources midway causing some inconsistencies. While Chaucer is fun, these martyr stories are awful. Roman woman Cecilia marries and has her husband promise to leave her a pure virgin. Then she converts to Christianity care of a miraculous appearance of Saint Urban. She converts her husband and his brother and eventually a community. They hold a Christian protest against Jupiter, leading eventually to almost everyone getting executed martyred, care of the Roman governor. Although Celicia has a slightly longer story and a weird death.

The Canon's Yeoman's Tale has a really entertaining prologue. The Canon and his Yeoman catch up to the Chaucer's travelers because they want to join in the tales. The Yeoman begins talking too much. Asked why his Canon is dressed so poorly, he starts to explain that his Canon is an alchemist and a bad one, a conman. The Canon tries to shut up Yeoman, but the Yeoman is on a role, and the Canon, furious, fires his Yeoman and rides off. Now the Yeoman is quite happy to tell all. His tale is less fun. It's about the alchemy tools of trade (rather dull reading and semi-incoherent anyway) and a story of another conman alchemist.

Canterbury Tale fragment 9 : The Manciple's Tale

The Manciple's Tale Another entertaining prologue. The Host asks the Cook to give a tale. As we know, the beginning of the Cook's tale was given earlier. It's really bawdy, but gets cut off after 58 lines. So, not sure if the Host is asking him again, as in, please continue. The Cook, however, is too drunk, falls off his horse and throws up. The Host is entertained and comments:

O Bacus, yblessed be thy name,
That so kanst turnen ernest into game.
Worhshipe and thank be to thy deitee

So the Manciple speaks up and volunteers his tale. (A manciple is steward of a monastery or a college.) His story is from Ovid about Apollo and a crow. Apollo finds out his wife is unfaithful from his beautiful white speaking crow. Apollo murders his wife and curses the crow black and unable to speak, but only caw.

-------
So, the last "tale", The Parson's Tale, is a sixty-page of prose translation of a manual of confession. I'm struggling to finish...

-------

Links to my Canterbury Tales updates:
- General Prologue here
- The Knight's Tale here
- The Miller's Tale here
- The Reeve's Tale (and Cook's Tale fragment) here
- The Man of Laws Tale here
- The Wife of Bath's, Friar's and Summoner's Tales here
- The Clerk's and Merchant's Tales here
- The Squire and Franklin's Tales here
- Fragment 6 - The Physicians Tale and The Pardoner's Tale here
- Fragment 7 - The Shipmen's Tale, The Prioress's Tale, the Tale of Sir Tropas and the prose Tale of Melibee here

Ther is namoore to seye

>169 dchaikin: always wondered about those weird deaths of women saints, Whoever wrote those up must have had some very odd fantasies....

>171 cindydavid4: religion can be so bewilderingly weird sometimes

>171 cindydavid4: These old histories (legends, they’re called) of the saints were a fixture of the medieval mindset, the Middle Ages truly being the Age of Faith.

>172 dchaikin: I’m curious how many of the Pilgrims chose a saint’s legend for their tale, Dan? It must be at least 3 or 4, the Prioress’ Tale being my least favorite…though the little “St. Hugh” was never canonized, so not really a saint’s legend.

>173 dianelouise100: oh yeah I know about the mindset, but still wonder at mens fascination with these martrys and how they died. but there we are.

>173 dianelouise100: I'm trying to remember. I think saints are referred to a lot, but only The Second Nun's Tale is a martyr story.

>174 cindydavid4: I think pain and agony have resonance. I would be happier if the martyrs were presented as somewhat human. I find their glow of sterile perfection painful.

18. Twilight Sleep by Edith Wharton
OPD: 1927
format: 407-page Kindle ebook
acquired: February read: Mar 16 – Apr 3 time reading: 10:12, 1.5 mpp
rating: 4
genre/style: Classic Novel theme: Wharton
locations: 1920’s New York City and some drivable countryside
about the author: 1862-1937. Born Edith Newbold Jones on West 23rd Street, New York City. Relocated permanently to France after 1911.

A later Wharton novel that brings some evolution in her writing. This one is considered modern because of the way she handled narrative and switching limited perspectives. The novel is looking at the failures of the 1920's leisure class, people finding various ways to blind themselves from hard realities, while praising progress and spiritual cures.

The novel looks at the efforts to save a bad marriage. Jim, the son of a very wealthy Pauline, married an orphan, Lita, who can't seem to get enough of anything. Jim is insufficient. She wants a divorce and wants to go on and become a movie star. Pauline, along with her own husband, her ex-husband, and her daughter, Nona, all find various ways to get involved, but each from their own limited perspective, and not necessarily in a helpful way. Wharton spends a lot of time on Pauline, who relies on her hired help, and fills her days engaging meaningless contradictory charities and getting healing from spiritual conmen. She is humorously blind to reality, throwing money at all problems. Meanwhile, her family is falling apart.

Twilight Sleep was a medical procedure that put a birthing mother in an amnesic state so they didn't remember the pain of childbirth. It was available only to the very wealthy. Here everyone is trying to not feel the problems of being human, the psychological pain. Pauline by filling her schedule, her current husband by being a workaholic. Lita by searching on for more admiration. Only Nona and Jim are left to actually feel something.

The novel finally comes across as a playful satire on 1920‘s NY moneyed culture. Wharton is having fun mocking supposed progress and 1920‘s shallowness, spiritual fads, bad parenting and human frailties. But there are also real weighty elements here. The youthful 1920‘s are represented in Lita and Nona. Clear-sighted Lita wants to be admired, with no concerns for consequences. Nona quietly sacrifices herself to manage her family‘s failures.

Recommended mainly for Wharton completists, but it's still Wharton. As long as readers are prepared for Wharton to have a little fun, you should be ok. It does reward reflection.

>175 dchaikin: ok, i get that..

>176 dchaikin: Enticing review. I will be reading this. I find her books so rewarding.

>177 cindydavid4: I could have said more about the clever entertaining commentary, the fun parts of the novel. :)

>178 kjuliff: me too! - I mean, on finding her books rewarding. Hope you enjoy.

19. Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck
reader: Lisa Flanagan
OPD: 2021, translation: from German by Michael Hofmann (2023)
format: 10:25 audible audiobook (336 pages in hardcover)
acquired: Mar 21 listened: Mar 21 – Apr 5
rating: 4
genre/style: contemporary fiction theme: Booker2024
locations: East Berlin 1980’s, 1990’s
about the author: German author and opera director, born in East Berlin in 1967

My 3rd from the International Booker Longlist (the shortlist comes out Tuesday). This one, from an East Berlin-born author, captures the atmosphere of East Berlin in the last years before the wall came down.

I really enjoyed this. There’s a creepy aspect to get past - the relationship of a 19 yr old girl and a 53 yr old married man with a son. You will need to come to some terms with that if you want to get through this.

What i enjoyed was how the history and the times were reflected in and echoed through this relationship. I don’t think the relationship was purely symbolic. It had its own life. But the nature of it demands comparison and consideration in that light. Hans, born in 1933, was shaped by Nazi Germany without the guilt of compliance. He experienced all the post-ww2 mess, displacement, Soviet control and Iron Curtain isolation. Pre-and-post stasi, if you like. Katarina was born in 1967 in East Berlin. She’s always known the wall and East Germany is her entire experience.

Their relationship, the way they embrace, the ways they tangle and struggle, do various things, and the way it evolves after the fall of the wall, in each of them it reflects their histories and what they have experienced and know. I found that kind of beautiful.

I was fascinated by the nature of being in this East Berlin in the waning days of the GDR. It's hard to capture. Erpenbeck's version is ominous and unoptimistic, but there is also something stable about it, a lack of chaos, a slower pace allowing a different sense of art and history. This was quickly lost in unification.

I want to mention the prose. It works but has an unusual technique. It’s largely an odd prose of association where adjacent sentences are referencing different things. Paragraphs become collages of mixed association. You can still follow what’s going on without trouble. I found this is much easier to see on the page when I borrowed a library copy. But I used audio, and it was intense trying to mix it all while still taking in the main storyline. The audio production is very good, but I definitely missed stuff.

All three books so far from the International Booker longlist have left me in slightly odd state, a feeling of reading something different and unfamiliar, creating some distance between myself and the book. Strange.

Anyway, this is a nice novel, if you can tolerate the core relationship.

>180 dchaikin: I enjoyed your review Dan. I’d forgotten that Kairos was longlisted this year. I read it as soon as it came out two years ago (?) I was an Erpenbeck fan, having enjoyed all her previous books that had been translated into English.

I particularly liked Go Went Gone and End of Days. But I just didn’t feel ok about the April-September romance in Kairos which was unlike her other books in its reliance on action and plot. Seemed like she’d lost her subtlety.

the prose. It works but has an unusual technique. It’s largely an odd prose of association where adjacent sentences are referencing different things.

Well put. I wondered what the dissonance was. Now I can see what was happening.

>180 dchaikin: I really liked it for all the reasons you did but was very disturbed by that relationship.Its not just the difference in age, its the way he punishes her, the way he keeps track of her, lots of red flag warnings that I was hoping she would get. But reading this, I learned so much about germany after the wall. so for that id forgive the book. But this relationship was just creepy

>182 cindydavid4: You might be interested in Erpenbeck’s Not a Novel if you want to learn more about the FDR. Also of interest is Erpenbeck: ‘My experience of East Germany is changed by every book I read’ - an interview with Philip Oltermann in Berlin for The Guardian.

>180 dchaikin: Great review. That's an unusual technique. I get what you're saying - certain books are easier for me in text than in audio.

>180 dchaikin: All three books so far from the International Booker longlist have left me in slightly odd state, a feeling of reading something different and unfamiliar, creating some distance between myself and the book. Strange. - Well I guess thats good?

Enjoyed your review

>180 dchaikin: etc. — Nice! I hadn’t worked out the thing about the technique — I’ll have to look at that more closely next time I read Erpenbeck! I’ve wondered how much her way of writing fiction is shaped by her having started as an opera director, but never come to any conclusion except in Heimsuchung where she has a lot of scenes that could be straight out of The marriage of Figaro.

Great review of Kairos, Dan. I'll probably read it next week, after I finish The Details and What I'd Rather Not Think About.

>181 kjuliff: thanks Kate. Noting the others by Erpenbeck. I didn’t think Kairos was plot dependent, since it didn’t have much a plot other than a developing relationship.

>182 cindydavid4: Hans was a total creep. But he’s a reflective on his history…

>184 rv1988: thanks!

>185 baswood: it’s confusing 🙂 Also thanks.

>186 thorold: i peaked again at your review, which captures the music “experienced” in the book. Unfortunately i don’t know anything about classical music

>187 kidzdoc: How is The Details going?

>188 dchaikin: Re Kairos and plot - there was the development in the relationship. I thought this book was more plot-driven than other books of hers I’ve read. But on reflection, I expressed the difference wrongly; there was less point to Kairos. Who cares about such an unhealthy April-September relationship? I cared more for her other books on refugees and dislocation than the actions of a foolish girl. Though I suspect Kairos will win the International Booker. Erpenbeck’s other books certainly deserved to.

>188 dchaikin: I love classical music but I certainly am not up on everything, When I encounter books that reference music, I go to google and sample them Got lots of interesting music from Kairos, some I knew but most I didn't. Its a great way of learning some if you so desire

>189 kjuliff: oh, i loved Katarina. She just had lovel way of taking in her world, of exploring it, of getting what she wanted, her lack of worry and her openness.

>190 cindydavid4: that was one audiobook problem. Without a visual to go back to, it’s very hard to record and remember all those musicians and their pieces.

>191 dchaikin: Well, any man would love her. That’s how those things go.

>192 kjuliff: ha! I wasn’t thinking that way.

>193 dchaikin: I know. I was just being a bit silly! Australian humor. ;)

>194 kjuliff: well, of course (should i mention I’m basically Hans’ age…)

>195 dchaikin: That’s what I was thinking …

oh yeah i can see that would be a problem too bad there wasnt some of the music in the background but that probably be distracting

>191 dchaikin: This is a radio show with Erpenbeck talking about the music in the book (and elsewhere) and playing some of it. Unfortunately, it’s in German…
https://www1.wdr.de/radio/wdr3/programm/sendungen/wdr3-klassik-forum/klassikforu...

>198 thorold: hmm. I’ll have to give it a shot

>199 dchaikin: I just had time to listen to the first bit, where she talks about being talked into playing the solo in a performance of Leroy Anderson’s “The typewriter” and then realising that there was a lot more to it than banging away randomly on a keyboard. But the programme notes say she goes on to people like Hanns Eisler, who is definitely relevant to Kairos. If you can work out how to save the stream, you might be able to run it through Whisper AI or something to generate a transcript in English.

A Dictator Calls sounds like it probably will work for me, but I'll get to some earlier Kadares I've dredged up copies for first.

Hi Meredith. I would like to read anything you have to say on those Kadare's.

Knife, preordered, arrived Tuesday afternoon.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/15/knife-by-salman-rushdie-review-a-s...

did you see the author on Colbert? excellent and harrowing interview; at one point I thought Steven was in tears. Id like to get that book as well

>204 cindydavid4: He’s such an amiable man. When I used to be able to get out I’d see him in restaurants around Gramercy Park. Always with a group of friends. I posted an article recently in INTERESTING ARTICLES. I don’t think I could bear to read Knife. Too much sorrow.

20. Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein
OPD: 2023
format: 195-page hardcover
acquired: December read: Mar 30 – Apr 6 time reading: 5:4, 1.6 mpp
rating: 5
genre/style: contemporary fiction theme: Booker 2023
locations: outside a small village in a contemporary unnamed northern country with a non-English language and mountains, possibly fictional.
about the author: A Canadian writer and scholar who teaches literature and creative writing in Scotland. She was born in Montreal, Quebec in 1987.

I've stalled on this one. I just don't have a review in me. My first reaction on finishing, which I wrote down, was mainly: "Seriously, whoa. What did I just read?"

This book has such a curious interesting and maybe quite wonderful opening, tossing at us unnatural happenings, a hint at the Holocaust, and some very odd phrasing by a narrator who tells us she can only shed "a weak and intermittent" light on her own actions.

"It was the year the sow eradicated her piglets. It was a swift and menacing time. ... it was springtime when I arrived in the country, an east wind blowing, an uncanny wind as it turned out. Certain things began to arise. ... I knew they were right to hold me responsible."

What witchery is this?

Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle was always in my mind, our narrator a Merricat of sorts. But different. Merricat was openly bitter and judgmental and superior to those commoners in town. Here our narrator is a Jewish immigrant who doesn’t speak the language. She’s not superior in the same way. She professes a humbleness, a life "cultivating solitude, pursuing silence to its ever-receding horizon".

I was lost enough in this book that many things I read about afterward in reviews were things I completely missed (Here in the spoiler is a list. Don't open if haven't read it: incest, antisemitism, the narrator's dark intents). I was, if you like, beguiled by this curious narrator.

What I think I picked on was a sense of surreal dread and a notable cultural critique on our communal crimes, like our unabated creation of climate change, in full knowledge of what we are doing. How we are all guilty of communal crimes because we obey the rules of the world we live in, perpetuating its crimes to take care of ourselves.

Not sure I've provided anything useful here in this post. I enjoyed this curiosity, found it wonderfully done, found the writing, which focuses so much on the sound, always interesting and terrific, with its own rhythm and life. And I say this even as I didn't really get it. Anyway, I encourage anyone interested to plunge in. This maybe should have won the Booker over Prophet Song, as terrific as PS was.

>206 dchaikin: I'm glad you liked this one, Dan. I feel like it has spoken differently to every person who has read it. There is so much there, just below the surface, that it can be read in different ways, all valid and interesting. I wish my book club had read this one, as I would have enjoyed discussing it in real time.

21. The Silver Bone by Andrey Kurkov
OPD: 2020 translation: from Russian by Boris Drayluk (2024)
format: 288-page hardcover
acquired: library loan read: Apr 7-13 time reading: 8:16, 1.7 mpp
rating: 3½
genre/style: historical-setting mystery theme: Booker 2024
locations: Kyiv (now Ukraine) 1919
about the author: Ukrainian author and public intellectual who writes in Russian. Born in Leningrad (St. Petersburg), Russia, 1961

I picked this up wondering if I should read it then or return it to the library, and I read the first few pages. I was taken in by marauding Cossacks. In the opening scene our main character watches his father instantly killed by a Cossack sword, himself barely surviving because he was pushed and the fatal strike took off his ear, leaving him alive. Wandering around, he finds no sympathy.

Were in 1919 Kyiv, and the Bolshevik army has just (temporarily) evicted the local white army, to which these Cossacks were attached. This wasn't a pogrom, but a retreat with random violence. As the book evolves, and one-eared boy, Samson, having recently lost all his family, needs a job and joins the now-hiring undermanned Bolshevik police force. There are no veterans, and Samson is thoroughly unqualified. Although he has an unusual advantage, care of an odd aspect to his severed ear. He pursues what he knows, starting close to home with silver looted by Bolshevik soldiers he is forced to house.

This is mystery book and the mystery itself is light (and maybe not worth the violence the investigation leads to). I found myself a little disappointed as the book turned its focus on the mystery and resolves that. This 1919 Ukraine world itself is quite interesting, a nice setting. Far more interesting than the mystery, to me. Still, this was mostly an easy fun read.

>207 labfs39: would make for a great discussion. Can you nudge it? :)

I had this conversation with someone who read it and mentione the detached ear as his way of spying. I lecturing her about the anatomy of the ear and how we hear. Then she mentioned this was magical realism and oh, ok, that makes sense. with your review as well, looks like I may need to read this (after I read the three books that just appeared on my doorstep....)

>208 dchaikin: Enjoyed reading your thoughts on this, Dan, and glad you liked the novel. I agree that the setting is better than the mystery.

>206 dchaikin: Hmmm…your very intriguing review and high rating is making me rethink my decision to give this one a miss

>202 dchaikin: I think my favorite Kadare is still The Siege, which I have a feeling is a common favorite (it's just a fantastic read). A lot of what I've read by him feels like it works equally well just reading it straight or looking into the allegories and deeper analysis of what was going on politically in Albania at the time, etc... I also particularly liked Spring Flowers, Spring Frost and The File on H. Twilight of the Eastern Gods is also good, perhaps the most straightforward thing of his that I've read. As a more straight forward reader myself, his other books really hit the sweet spot of engaging my mind in a different way than most of my reading without making me feel frustrated.

>210 cindydavid4: it's a very played down magical aspect (which i guess is sort of the definition of magical realism)

>211 dianelouise100: I appreciated your take too.

>212 dianelouise100: yes, rethink that! :)

>213 mabith: you have read Twilight of the Eastern Gods...!! this one, A Dictator Calls, is roughly a follow up on that. I really enjoyed The File on H., the only other of his that I've read. And I agree he works on many different mindsets at once...or, as you put it, his novels can "hit the sweet spot of engaging my mind in a different way than most of my reading without making me feel frustrated."

22. A Brief History of Japan: Samurai, Shogun and Zen: The Extraordinary Story of the Land of the Rising Sun by Jonathan Clements
reader: Julian Elfer
OPD: 2017
format: 8:41 audible audiobook (304 pages in paperback)
acquired: audible loan listened: Apr 7-16
rating: 3½
genre/style: History theme: random audio
locations: Japan
about the author: A British author and scriptwriter, born in Leigh on Sea, Essex in 1971

Clements tells the reader up front that he really likes relaying quirky historical oddities, and the reader should take note. He's not an ideal fit for a brief history. Making history brief means making effective accurate clear summations of various things you want to cover. (This is actually very difficult.) The flip side is to remove the excess words, but still pile details on details in a compressed rapid form, uncooked, if you like. Clements trends a little too much to the latter form for my tastes, and it made listening challenging.

I really had trouble following the medieval and semi-feudal Japan because it's very complicated and I lost Clements's points in a confusion of names and factions and unfamiliar sounds. What I got was the power was always obscured, the Japanese emperor was traditionally a figurehead, often very young, and often the emperor would retire in an effort to establish real power, with mixed success. Shoguns were important, until they weren't. Samari had a long history of no practical military value because no one ever attacked Japan. It was largely unified enough and after the Mongol rulers of China failed in their rather poor marine invasion efforts, China never gave it another go. But I guess Japan was always ready.

I was entertained by getting a history of Edo/Tokyo, sushi, and kabuki theatre, and learning that the west and the US regret the constitutional disarming of Japan (although the constitution allows for finagling with "defense" forces). And I knew how fast Japan modernized, much faster than the other eastern countries (although China clearly tried). It took roughly 60 years from Japan's opening to its defeat of Russia. But I didn't realize how important the Korean War was to Japan's revitalization, funding the foundations of its post-war economic boom.

Anyway, while I hope there is a better brief history out there, I'm sure any readers will find something they like here.

23. Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior
OPD: 2018, translation: from Portuguese by Johnny Lorenz (2023)
format: 276-page paperback
acquired: Library loan read: Apr 13-19 time reading: 8:58, 2.0 mpp
rating: 4
genre/style: contemporary fiction theme: Booker 2024
locations: Bahia, Brazil
about the author: Brazilian writer from born in Salvador, Bahia in 1979. He also grew up in Pernambuco and São Luís. He was the first recipient of the Milton Santos Scholarship, dedicated to low-income black youth.

My 5th book from the International Booker longlist, and another on the shortlist. This is a nice novel and really popular on the Booker Prize-run Facebook Booker Prize Book Club. It's the story of the descendants of Brazilian slaves, focused on two sisters in a tenant farm family, children of a healer, and connected through the accident with a knife that leaves them sharing one tongue.

As a reader, I first appreciated the elegant language of one sister, who tells how the sisters now speak as one. Then the other sister speaks, and the language becomes more practical without changing the book's tone. Through both we learn about their community, and their father, a traditional healer who becomes possessed by an African-originated encantada, a female spirit, on the festival for St. Barbara.

These are the descendants of Brazilian slaves who continued to work farms as unpaid tenant farmers, working for no pay. They could build mud houses, and only mud houses, and raise their own food, but got nothing else from the crops they worked. Generation changes mean many things, including gratitude for work turning to resentment towards profit-hungry absent landlords as lives come to nothing. But what maybe makes this book special, other than its suite of characters, including the sisters who share one tongue, is the mythology - the mixture of African spirits, here "encantados", with Catholic mythologies and sainted martyrs. Of course, these, too, fade with the generations.

What I didn't know while reading was the modern story of Quilombos. Quilombos were communities of free black escaped slaves in Brazil, and now are their descendants. Making up a small population, they are a centerpiece in Brazilian politics. Lula da Silva, president 2003-2010, was a more leftwing president, fronted the rights of Quilombos. Whereas Jair Bolsonaro, president 2019-2022, a right-wing extremist, prominently singled out Quilombos in 2017 as lazy, spurring on, Trump-like, his racist base. This book was published in 2018 in Brazil, but only translated to English last year.

I'm not quite as enthused as some on this novel. There is an unoriginality to the language in translation, and maybe the agenda simplifies things a little. But it rewards, and the encantados are fascinating. Worth a read.

>216 dchaikin: “encantados with Catholic mythologies” I looked up St. Rita and loved discovering that she is the saint of Lost Causes (along with St. Jude, of course)

Great review!

>216 dchaikin: So you think now that Kairos will win the. International Booker this year?

>206 dchaikin: Your review has encouraged me to plunge in. Glad you enjoyed the Kurkov: I read his other series (the Penguin books) which are also similar.

>216 dchaikin: I enjoyed reading your review. I might read it just to learn a little about the Quilombos.

>216 dchaikin: The central family are descendants of a woman, the grandmother, who was a slave freed by the abolition of slavery in Brazil, not by escaping, yet Bibiana claims they are quilombola in her arguments with the new landowner. Did you find anything that would explain this? Or am I just forgetting some of the grandmother’s story? (I looked up the term, but maybe should have pursued more, as I’m mostly ignorant of Brazil’s history)

>217 dianelouise100: i love that about St Rita. I’ve been told that St Barbara is the patron saint of geologist because she was the patron saint of miners, so a natural slide. The same person told me the reason she became the patron saint of miners was because she was the patron saint of people who died either young or quickly, apparently also a natural slide. But I haven’t verified any of that. 🙂

>218 kjuliff: I like Kairos but also i don’t see it as a real grabber wow-great-book and so I don’t like it as a winner. But it’s the best of the three i’ve read. Translation is tricky because the rhythms come down to the translator, not the author. That’s also odd.

>219 rv1988: I’m interested in his Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv. (Andrey Kurkov’s). What series have you read?

>220 RidgewayGirl: i think it rewards. (It, being Crooked Plow)

>221 dianelouise100: ok, I’m glad you asked that. Because it confuses me too. The Quilombola mythology is that these were communities of escaped slaves, hence outlaws. Whereas I also recall that Donana, the grandmother, was one of the last remnant slaves freed in 1881. I don’t have any answers.

>222 dchaikin: i believe >219 rv1988: was referring to Death and the Penguin and Penguin Lost, because who doesn't love mystery with a penguin side kick?

>222 dchaikin: I felt the same way about Kairos, though I’ve really liked Erpenbeck’s other novels. I’ve not read any of the other shortlisted books as the only one that interested me, Crooked Plow wasn’t available. On the surface the shortlisted novels this year did not seem as exciting to me as in past years.

>223 dchaikin: >221 dianelouise100: The Quilombola mythology is that these were communities of escaped slaves, hence outlaws. Whereas I also recall that Donana, the grandmother, was one of the last remnant slaves freed in 1881.
I believe both are correct. It wasn’t till the 1880s that slavery was abolished in Brazil. There’s a good article on the Quilombola communities at IAF’s Making Their Own Way: Brazil’s Quilombola Communities

>224 ELiz_M: I have Death and the Penguin staring me in the face from where I sit. So many books I want to read RIGHT NOW.

forgot i ordered crooked plow it just came in

>224 ELiz_M: wait, really a penguin? I’m entertained.

>225 kjuliff: I’m overall a little confused with the longlost. I like the books i’ve read. They’re complicated and doing interesting stuff. But they have not been anywhere near as appealing as the better books on 2023 Booker longlist. None have been really moving or inspiring to me. I’ve been wondering about that. But I’m pausing because Wharton is calling and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury has just an absolutely wonderful opening 60 pages. But i plan to come back. Have Undiscovered here, Not a River on preorder, releases in May in the US, and on library loan, The House on Via Gemito.

>226 kjuliff: I’ll come back for that link

>227 labfs39: 🙂 I’m sure I can add more

>228 cindydavid4: terrific!

Happy Passover to all who celebrate

>229 dchaikin: So glad you’re getting into the first of Faulkner’s real masterpieces—S and F is an amazing novel, and I think that using Benjy as the first of the narrators is brilliant.

>208 dchaikin: Interesting to read your review of the Kurkov book. I read Death and the Penguin last year but am completely unfamiliar with any of his other books and was thinking of looking into them. Sounds like a fun one.

I am reading the children and just finished the end of the second book. Oh my im appalled on so many levels, and laughing at the same time. What perfect satire! Really want to get onto litsy for that discussion, can you send me a link? (still having trouble how to navigate there)

Just received crooked plow and honestly not sure I want to read it, having read the synopsis; it sounds like its a pandoras box of troubles that never end.can someone explain why this book is getting such rave reviews?

>dchaikin, your review was what got me interested; Im just wondering if I can take one more story of all horror and no hope....

>233 cindydavid4: I’m still on book one. All playful humor so far.

>234 cindydavid4: well. It’s not really that kind of book, more of a “this is us” type. Maybe try a Pearl rule approach, give a 50 pages and see how you feel.

>235 dchaikin: “Playful humor” is so not me! I’m with Cindy on this except for the 50 pages. It’s not on audio so it’s an easy not read for me.

Talking of audio, I listened to the sample of Restless Dolly Maunder (Women;s Prize shortlist) and will not be listening to it. The fake cringe-worthy working-class Queensland accept is one big put-off.

>235 dchaikin: will do, thanks

>236 kjuliff: do you mean the children? Id call the first book playful humor, the second one much darker andnow that im in the third it is just biting humor. am interested in how this all ends up

>237 cindydavid4: I didn’t mean either. I just meant I didn’t like “playful humor” in books.

ha, ok then thx

>236 kjuliff: "The fake cringe-worthy working-class Queensland accent" - I don't know what that sounds like, but I'm cringing anyway!

I like playful, but not necessarily this type. But Wharton can get away with a lot, certainly this.

>240 dchaikin: Oh, you were referring to Wharton re playful humor. I agree she can get away with it. Few can though.

closing this thread and continuing here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/360386