September, 2022 Readings: “Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.” (Camus)

Starting off the month with a re-read of John Cleese's autobiography. I need a bitchy giggle.

You?

Hauntology, by Merlin Coverley! Really want to dig into his book on psychogeography as well.

Klara And the Sun – Kazuo Ishiguro
Audio performed by Sura Siu
4.5****

What does it mean to love? Can science duplicate that essentially human quality in an artificial intelligence being? Do we want scientists to even try?

Klara, the narrator of this extraordinary work, is an artificial friend (AF). She sits in the shop with other AFs watching the world go by the shop window, listening to the Manager about how to act / react among prospective buyers. She is a keen observer and learns her lessons well. And even though she is not of the latest generation of Afs it is Klara that one young girl, Josie, wants.

But there are things in Josie’s household that don’t compute. The Housekeeper seems extra watchful when The Mother is away at work. Josie is frail but has a special friend nearby, Rick. Klara gets drawn into Josie and Rick’s “plan” for their future, while also is learning that the plans of adults may not coincide. For all her intelligence and perceptiveness, Klara cannot quite understand emotion and she certainly doesn’t have feelings of her own. Her interpretations of what she observes are sometimes quite naïve, and I was reminded of comments my niece made when she was four or five years old.

This is a dystopian world, and there is significant pollution and there are hints of potential civil war. There are distinct differences between the haves and the have nots. Wealthier parents have the option to “lift” their children (via genetic engineering) to improve their intelligence and academic performance. And AFs are not always treated kindly.

I hope there will be a movie … I can just see the crane shot of that final scene.

Sura Siu does a marvelous job of voicing the audiobook. She really made Klara a believable AF, giving her an innocence to go with her intelligence. 5***** for the audio performance.

Finished The Hearing Trumpet last night. Painter Leonora Carrington could actually write. Well, sort of.
This book had personality, a charming main character, and a nice sense of humor combined with a unique, kind of surrealist environment. There really isn't much of a plot, it's all very static, but it held my attention and kept me amused. The ending though, the last 10-15% of the book, what a big mess. Not sure what Carrington was trying to do but I completely tuned out.
The audiobook version, read by Siân Phillips, elevates the book. Lovely interpretation. She made the main character fun.

>4 mejix: A few years ago, we wet to see an exhibition at the Sainsbury Gallery at the University of East Anglia in Norwich called Surreal Friends, highlighting the work of Leonora Carington, Remedios Varo and Kati Horna. All were part of the artistic community in Mexico City; all had gravitated there for various different reasons. Varo was in the same circle as Frida Kahlo; Horna had started out as a photojournalist during the Spanish Civil War but had found the political environment in Europe, especially in her Hungarian homeland, too toxic after the Fascist victory to remain. Fascinating stories, all.

The catalogue, Surreal Friends, is worth looking out for.

>5 RobertDay: Thanks for the tip. That sounds like an excellent show. I am familiar with Varos and Carrington but had to google Horna. The Tate has some background info on them that makes reference to the Sainsbury show and the book. Very interesting story. Thanks!

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/leonora-carrington-7615/love-friendship-riva...

The Book of Lost Friends – Lisa Wingate
Audiobook performed by Bahni Turpin, and Sophie Amos, with Lisa Flanagan, Dominic Hoffman, Sullivan Jones, Robin Miles, and Lisa Wingate
4****

For this work of historical fiction, Wingate was inspired by actual “Lost Friends” advertisements that appeared in Southern newspapers after the Civil War, wherein newly freed slaves search for family members from which they’d been separated. She uses the ubiquitous dual timeline for this story.

Hannie, still sharecropping on her former master’s Louisiana estate, tells her tale from 1875-1876. While Benedetta (Benny) Silva, is a first-year teacher at a poor rural school in a tiny Mississippi River town in 1987-88, trying to engage and inspire her students with a project to look into their own family histories. Wingate moves back and forth from chapter to chapter between these two settings, leading to an eventual convergence of the stories.

I’ve come to really dislike the dual timeline, but I thought Wingate did a marvelous job in this case. And while I thought Hannie’s tale was the more compelling of the two, I also appreciated the “modern” story of poor, Southern blacks and how the system continued to enslave and impoverish them. I did think Wingate tried to hard to make Benny an empathetic character – drawing some nebulous comparisons with her background and those of the children she was teaching. And I didn’t think the nascent love interest did anything to serve the main story.

Still, I was interested and engaged from beginning to end, and I really appreciated learning about the “Lost Friends” advertisements; examples of actual “Lost Friends” articles are sprinkled throughout the book.

The audiobook is masterfully performed by a cast of talented voice artists. Bahni Turpin, who is quickly becoming one of my favorite narrators, brings Hannie to life, while Sophie Amos narrates Benny’s chapters. I did think that Benny came off sounding WAY too young and naïve, especially at the beginning. The other actors fill in the many characters, in both 19th and 20th centuries. Finally , Wingate narrates her own author notes describing how she came to this story.

Only three books since my last entry (I've been busy, what?).

THE GOLDEN APPLES OF THE SUN by Ray Bradbury (a re-read and still fun after all these years)
MOTORMAN by David Ohle (hands down, one of the weirdest books I've ever read, a cult classic if there ever was one, but oddly enjoyable)
A MONSTER CALLS by Patrick Ness (sad and impressive)

I've been spending a lot of time working on a speech--our local library region is celebrating its 50th anniversary and I've be giving an hour long presentation of the importance of libraries in the world...and my life.

It'll likely be attended by about seven people, four of whom will be friends of mine.

Sigh.

I'm still in the middle of The Great Post Office Scandal, but my reading has slowed down as at the beginning of the month I acquired a collection of (mainly Austrian) railway books from the estate of an author, and since then I've been sorting them, cataloguing them and previewing them.

But today, I acquired a book of Gabriel Garcia Marquez short stories (Strange Pilgrims) from the charity shelf in one of my local supermarkets. When I got it home, I found that it was a US Penguin edition instead of a UK one, and had been originally purchased (according to a price sticker) in a bookshop in Hong Kong! This book has travelled three-quarters of the way around the world to end up in my library just outside Leicester.

Ah, the wonders of bibliomania.

Reading update.

The Poison Song, Jen Williams - final book of a fantasy trilogy which scores well on world-building but reads like fan fiction, and has some really bad dialogue and characterisation. The trilogy has its moments, but the writing is generally poor and it all feels like it's trying too hard to appeal in the wrong areas. Nice world, but not nice enough to outweigh its other flaws.

A Murder of Quality, John le Carré - his second novel, in which Smiley solves a murder at an Eton-like upper-crust public school. The elements of the crime are cleverly done, and le Carré's view on public schools is plain to see - I happen to agree with him, and I attended a public school myself - but it all feels very low key and inconsequential compared to later Smiley novels. Worth a read, though.

The Blessing, Nancy Mitford - young British upper-crust woman marries French aristocrat hastily immediately post-war, but life among the French aristocracy is not for her - but the two's rapprochement is hampered by their young son's manipulations to better his own life. Funny, even LOL in places. Not Mitford's best, but all of her books have been worth reading.

Dark Tangos, Lewis Shiner - so apparently the ebook edition of Black & White, another novel by Shiner, is actually this one. Which is not a problem as I've read neither. Dark Tangos is about an American expat in Argentina, who gets tangled up with a woman whose parents were involved in all the bad shite that happened in the country during the years of the Disappearances. Fascinating stuff - as much for the history of Argentina as it is for the techniques of tango dancing. An author always worth reading.

Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury - where do I start? This is appalling. Random nouning of verbs and verbing of nouns. Complete fucking word salad. This is some of the worst writing I've come across - it's not bad, per se, it's just complete abuse of language: "They ran in urine smell of shadow, they ran in clean ice smell of moon." What does that even mean? The whole book is like it. I spoofed a passage from the book on Facebook and a fan thought it was a real excerpt. Awful book, awful writing. Avoid.

Death’s Gray Land, Mike Shupp - the fourth book of the quintet and a direct sequel to the third book. It's more world-building from Shupp as he details the war begun in book three, Soldier of Another Fortune. Not sure about these books. They have have that rigour that was popular in early 1990s, which I like, and they're inventive, with a time-travelling plot that manages not to lose control of its many narratives, but... it's still a late 1980s series and its sensibilities often tell against it. Solid, well-structured sf of its time, but that's not really enough for it to stand out.

I'm surprised that's a Camus quote, it's poetic and I always thought he was such a downer.

>11 Cecrow: Still, who would you rather have a drink with, him or Sartre? With me, it's Camus every time.

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind – William Kamkwamba
4****

Subtitle: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope

This is the memoir of an extraordinary young man, the son of a Malawian farmer, struggling in poverty and through famine and drought, but following the spark of inspiration, his own thirst for knowledge, and a desire to help his family and community. William saw a need and thought, “What if?” As he explained to a TED conference, “I tried, and I made it.”

What he did was electrify his family home with his makeshift windmill, constructed from miscellaneous parts he scavenged from a scrapyard. Unable to attend school because his parents lacked the funds to pay tuition, William relied on the library, and one specific book on physics which he read over and over and over again. He did not despair that he lacked this or that device or material, rather he saw possibilities in the least likely bits and pieces. And he remained focused on his goal of improving his family’s life and ability to succeed.

Brian Mealer co-authored the memoir, as Kamkwamba’s English was pretty basic at the time he sat down to tell his story. Still, it’s not the best-written book I’ve read, but the emotion of the story is what elevates it, in my opinion.

His story is inspiring and uplifting. Bravo!

(Note: There is also a young adult edition of his memoir, which, I assume, has less of the technical science / engineering in it. In his life, Kamkwamba has since gone one to graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Studies from Dartmouth College. He continues to work to improve the lives of his countrymen.)

Finished Abigail. This is my second Szabo. Reads like YA novel, a kind of apologia for conservative education. Very well written. No technical or stylistic fireworks but well constructed and for the most part entertaining. The ending was somewhat disappointing. Everything is tied up neatly in a way that feels very contrived and is not very convincing. Mostly a good read though.

The Door is a superior work in my estimation. That one was unforgettable.

LIARMOUTH, a cheeky, naughty novel by John Waters, living up to his title "Pope of Bad Taste".

A fun read but not very deep or insightful.

For fans only.

DEATH OF A FANTASIST by Simon Mason.

A comic novel from the 1990s, a fun read for the first 3/4, then tapers off at the end.

The main characters are two utter losers, which is always an attraction for me.

The Pianist – Wladyslaw Szpilman
4****

The subtitle is all the synopsis anyone needs: The Extraordinary True Story of One man’s Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945.

Szpilman was a pianist who performed on Polish radio. He was, in fact, playing Chopin’s Nocturne in C-sharp Minor, live on the radio on Sept 23, 1939, when shells exploded outside the station. It was the last live music broadcast from Warsaw that day; a German bomb hit the station, and Polish radio went off the air. Ultimately, the Nazi’s plan for extermination of the Jews would take all of his family, but Szpilman would manage – by luck, courage, tenacity, and the kindness of others – to stay hidden and survive. The most unlikely person to help him was a German officer who came across him in the ruins of a building scrounging for food.

He wrote his story shortly after the war was over, but it was suppressed for decades, finally being published in 1999, and even then, not in Poland. The edition I had included entries from the diary of Captain Wilm Hosenfeld, the German officer who saved Szpilman towards the end of the war.

Szpilman’s story is told in a very straightforward manner. He recounts the ever-increasing restrictions imposed by the government on Jews, the forbearance and belief that “this is bound to pass” among his family and others in the community, the terror and horror of witnessing (or being subject to) random acts of violence and death. And yet, there is a certain cool detachment. Almost as if he were witnessing someone else’s story rather than reliving those experiences himself. In the forward, his son Andrzej supposes that his father wrote the memoir “… for himself rather than humanity in general. It enabled him to work through his shattering wartime experiences and free his mind and emotions to continue with his life.”

I found it engaging and gripping. Even though I knew he survived, I simply could not stop reading.

The extraordinary memoir was adapted to film in 2002, starring Adrien Brody (who won the Oscar for his performance) and directed by Roman Polanski (Oscar for Best Director).

Finished The Great Post Office Scandal and now reading Norman Lebrecht's Why Mahler?. Enjoying it, though it's all written in the present tense so you're never quite sure if Lebrecht is describing present-day Vienna, Budapest, etc., or the same cities in Mahler's time, especially as he intersperses his historical account with personal recollections.

Unusually for a composer's biography, Lebrecht makes a point of referring to Mahler's Jewishness, and contrasting this with the anti-Semitism of the times. Most musical biographies skate over this, though I did raise an eyebrow when a visit to Berchtesgaden was described as "later home to Adolf Hitler and scene for The Sound of Music". Surely the Hitler reference is irrelevant given that Mahler died in 1911. And Berchtesgaden was nothing to do with The Sound of Music - that's Salzburg you're thinking about. Admittedly, just over the mountain, but in a different country altogether. Let alone the fact that present-day Austrians have barely even heard of the musical.

THE NORTH WATER by Ian McGuire.

Somehow I knew a novel that had the whaling industry as its backdrop had to be a grim, bloody affair...and I was right.

Not a fun read but I think a very accurate depiction of a dark, bloody time in British maritime history.

Longlisted for a Booker when it was published, literary but brutal.

THE CONSOLATION OF NATURE, a 1988 short story collection by Valerie Martin.

Sort of torn on this one: it's definitely intelligent and literary, but none of the tales, with the exception of the longest piece, "The Freeze", really sunk emotional hooks into me.

It's a detachment that permeates the entire book, marring its overall effectiveness.

Ask Again, Yes – Mary Beth Keane
Digital audiobook performed by Molly Pope.
5*****

This is the kind of character-driven literary fiction that I absolutely love. Keane focuses this decades-long story on two families living in a suburb of New York City. Francis Gleason and Brian Stanhope are two rookie cops on the NYPD when they meet. They settle with their wives and young children in homes across the street from one another. But Brian’s wife Anne is unstable, and Francis’s wife Lena cannot understand why her offers of friendship are turned away. When their children become friends (and more than friends as they enter their teenage years), the stage is set for strife and heartache.

There is so much going on here. Family expectations. Alcoholism. Denial. Mental Illness. Betrayal. Forgiveness. Love.

By the end of the novel I felt that I really knew these people. I cheered for them. Was dismayed by them. Worried about them. Forgave them.

Molly Pope does a stupendous job of performing the audiobook. I particularly liked how she interpreted Anna Stanhope and Kate Gleeson, though she was equally effective in voicing the male characters.

The Night Watchman– Louise Erdrich
Audiobook performed by the author
4****

Winner of the Pulitzer prize. Erdrich was inspired by the true story of her grandfather, who successfully fought against a US Senator intent on “eliminating” various Indian tribes.

The setting for the novel is 1953, on the Turtle Mountain reservation in North Dakota. Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at the jewel bearing factory, where many of the women of the Turtle Mountain band of Chippewa are employed. The jewel bearings are used by the Defense Department, and in the manufacture of certain watches. He’s also the tribal elder and very concerned about a proposed bill in Congress to abrogate nation-to-nation treaties, which calls for the termination of five tribes, including his. Thomas is a thinker, deliberate and willing to entertain different ideas, but always following his own conscience. His appearance before Congress was masterful.

His niece, Patrice “Pixie” Paranteau is one of the women working at the plant, earning barely enough to support her, her mother and younger brother. She must deal with a number of family issues as well. Her sister left for Minneapolis some time before and has now disappeared, while their alcoholic father occasionally makes an appearance causing havoc for the family.

Erdrich uses these two parallel and interconnecting story lines to highlight the life, struggles and triumphs of the Native Americans during this era. Many of their problems stemmed for institutional racism: the efforts of the U.S. government to strip the land from the indigenous peoples, to eradicate their culture by forcing children to attend boarding schools where they were forbidden from using their native languages and frequently mistreated, and the government’s continued paternalistic attitudes that viewed the Native Americans as unintelligent savages, not worthy of help or assistance.

I loved these characters, and the many supporting characters in the book. Patrice, in particular, spoke to me. She’s intelligent, straightforward, and principled. She thinks quickly, averting trouble or getting out of sticky situations on her own. She’s cautious about romantic entanglements, as well.

Erdrich weaves in elements of Native mythology and folklore, employing magical realism in some scenes.

The audiobook is read by the author, and I cannot imagine anyone doing a better job. She really brings these characters to life. Brava.

Last book of the month, Tom Phillips' TRUTH: A BRIEF HISTORY OF TOTAL BULLSHIT, which, for some reason, triggers absolutely no touchstones.

Likable effort, the author taking pains to point out that disinformation and "fake news" have been with us a long time and won't be going away any time soon.

Recommended.

I just closed out the month with Maus I: My Father Bleeds History and will continue straight on into part 2. Incredible story.

>23 CliffBurns:, saw plenty of evidence of that from 100+ years ago in the Pierre Berton that I read. Them were the days when politicians openly owned the newspapers and nobody apparently saw any problem with this.