Solla's reading and other thoughts

I just wrote a lot about it in my intro, but I should say that my hold on The Road by Cormac McCarthy finally came through. I intended to take a glance at the book, and had nearly read it all before I stopped reading.

I actually got interested in this group because of seeing the Poetry Memorization Encouragement thread. I need the encouragement to get started with that again.

I found The Road to be a strangely uplifting book and liked it a lot.

Do you have any plans as to where you're starting for the memorisation? Post 'em on the thread and we'll encourage, just see if we don't (he says knowing he is safe from having to do this himself for another week or so).

I thought I would start by rememorizing Hymn by A.R. Ammons, and then try one by Linda Gregg.
About the Road, I had heard from some people that it was depressing, but I reacted more like you. My daughter felt similarly.

Poking around, seems that Gacela of the Dark Death is sung by Joan Baez on the album, Baptism. Requested a copy from the library, looking forward to hearing it.

4 - Yes, I used to own that album - as a record - and it had some interesting poems on it. I remember one that started, "Minister of war, why do you roll us on from misery to misery.."

I meant to say from your introduction post and forgot - I need to get hold of some of Darwish's poetry because I saw John Berger read something about Identity from one of his books (is it called mural or mosaic?) on You tube (well worth seeking out, fantastic and beautifully read) -- but also need to learn more of his politics, am a bit cautious of that though sympathetic in some ways.

Saw your intro post and just wanted to say hello, and to second that Against Forgetting is such an amazing collection. Looking forward to reading more about your reading!

#6 I don't know much about the specifics of Darwish's politics (he died recently), but his family lived in an area that became Israel, and I believe they fled, early, in 1947, and were not allowed to return. I have only read one book of his poems, but the theme for most seemed to me the same, about returning home.

Recently I have read Palestine peace not apartheid by Jimmy Carter - wrote a review of this one- so I won't try to reproduce it. Except to say that I was interested in what was happening currently between the Israelis and the Palestinians and started reading a book by Chomsky. That book seemed like a bit of a rant to me, so I decided to read some others first and come back to it to have more of a context to evaluate it. Carter's book is mostly in tune with Chomsky as far as the information presented, though he doesn't jump to the same conclusions about intent. He is very critical of the Israeli's actions since the Camp David accords in allowing neither autonomy, nor integration into Israel for the Palestinians, and for continuing settlement on the West Bank in the areas designated for a Palestian homeland.

Because I'm curious about what was happening before 1947, when the area now Israel was still part of a British mandate, I started reading Israel and the Arab World by Aharon Cohen. He covers some distant history in the first few chapters - through the Ottoman Turks, but then begins with Zionist movement(s) to settle in Palestine. It was published in 1970, so will not cover the post Camp David period (the treaty between Sadat of Egypt and Israel). It is a denser book than the Carter one and I am still reading. Cohen, who is a Jew, talks about mistakes made in the early 1900's which partly came out of misunderstanding of the local culture. For instance, during certain periods, small landowners put themselves under the protection of larger landowners, sometimes giving over the title to their land, with the provision that they would remain on the land and farm it. European Jews buying land for settlement did not realize that the large landowners from which they bought land had legal title but not moral rights, and naturally caused resentment when they bought land to farm themselves.

I read a review of Try to tell the story : a memoir by David Thomson. I didn't find it a great book. It presented more of his outer world than an inner one, growing up in England beginning around WWII, although he talked about his father a bit. One thing that was of interest to me, in reading this at the same time I was also reading Sweet land of liberty : the forgotten struggle for civil rights in the North by Thomas J. Sugrue is that he writes about going to a private school (private in the U.S. sense) which he was able to attend because the school had made an agreement with the government to take a certain number of poorer kids in return for the government financing some school buildings. He said nothing like that is happening in England today, and I remember back to when I went to college, and virtually all the college catalogs that I looked at, said, that if you were qualified to attend and were accepted that they would make sure that you were able to do it financially. This was no longer the case when my daughter was applying for college. In fact the first year, the financial aid form came back with an expected financial contribution for our family of about $300, but the gap between what the college offered in financial aid after all the government grants/loans etc. left a gap of $5 - 10,000. Granted, they were private colleges, but so had been the ones I'd applied for. It made me feel the time was very brief when the country was really committed to equal opportunity, in this case between rich and poor.

About Sweet Land of Liberty, among the things that I wasn't previously aware of was how FHA loan policies contributed to housing discrimination. This is a very thorough coverage of the civil rights struggle and, in the course of it, ends up presenting a social history - particularly in regard to structural economic changes in the U.S. Many early economic gains in the sixties disappeared as manufacturing jobs moved from the areas that Blacks lived. The book makes very clear that there is a difference between legal rights and true equality in education, housing and employment, and these are interrelated when people have little choice but to live in neighborhoods with poor schools and far from the areas of greatest job growth.

Is God a mathematician? by Mario Livio, The question in the title was discussed mainly at the beginning and at the end - rephrased a bit at the end to whether math is invented or discovered. In the middle is a pretty good history. I found it fairly easy reading but I have studied a fair amount of math. It covers Archimedes, Decartes, Galileo and Newton as the four greatest mathematicians, then by math topics. Topics include geometry, analytical geometry (plotting x and y on graph paper), calculus, just the concepts behind it - this is the section that I don't know if it would be difficult for someone who hadn't been exposed to calculus, knot theory which I hadn't encountered before, and some non-Euclidian geometry.

Finally, A mercy by Toni Morrison. It reminded me a lot of Beloved, though set earlier at a time in American history when there were still indentured servants, and the differentiation between black and white was not so fixed as it later was. It centers on a family - including persons not related by blood - and their spiritual destruction in a society that was overwhelmingly destructive of women, and anyone different from the prevailing religion and culture.

#7 I agree that Against Forgetting is an amazing collection. I am wanting to read it again, maybe as a source of poems for the poetry memorization thread. It is good to read poetry written for survival. Because even when not written in those circumstances I feel like poetry is written for survival and has that level of importance.

#8 He was on the executive committee of the PLO and resigned from it over the Oslo accords, as I understand it. I can't judge him for that, given the things that had happened to him I can understand it but I am much more of a pacifist (easy from a distance). Its well worth tracking down that clip of Berger reading from him. I knew he had died -- the clip and the writing I have seen make it likely I will want to learn more of him and read more.

Wow! You have done some great reading lately. I had to add most of the works in #8 to my TBR.

I have just finished Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. I'm not sure what I think of it, but perhaps writing about it will give me an idea. First the language of it is very beautiful. It is extremely violent. The victims are mostly Indians, chiefly Apaches, but not all. And there are other Indians (different tribe) in the party of the Indian killers. The time is mid 19th centuries when bounties are paid for scalps. There is a detachment in the way the story is told. The point of view character, usually referred to as the kid, is also presented in kind of a detached way. We are told that he came from a family where he was not much cared for and that he left at 14. He seems to drift. He is violent when he in the midst of violence, and perhaps, at first, a little from a generalized anger. He drifts into a friendship with a character named Toadvine, but having done so, he is loyal to him later when they meet up again. He spends some time in an army troup on a mission against the Mexicans around what was or became Texas and south of it. Then he is captured and ends up in a Mexican jail, where he meets up with Toadvine again.

He gets out of the jail by Toadvine's presenting of the two of them as Indian hunters, and they join up with the Glanton gang, which, according to the intro by Harold Bloom was an actual gang sent out by Mexican and Texas authorities to scalp Indians, and the book tells of their actual expeditions. Besides Glanton, presented fairly simply as someone who is simply brutal to the Indians they are seeking, and frequently anyone else encountered outside their group, there is also the character of Judge Holden.

At first Judge Holden appears to be a philosopher, and something of a naturalist, sketching items found in their travels. However, as the book goes along, he is revealed to be a thoroughly unredeemable sort. He is not a frenzied murderer as Glanton is. The one murder we know of is of an Indian child whom he rescues, and the other men come to dote on. Then the judge kills the child. He is apparenly a child molester, and other children seem to disappear and die when he is about. What the judge appears to run on is a sense of himself as a superior being in the way that he approaches existence. His actions always appear to be deliberate, and he is described as good at most everything that he does.

The kids, on the other hand, strikes me as redeemable. He participates in the slaughter of the Indians, and sometimes others, and we aren't given much insight into what he thinks of it. But, also, there are several times when he has a choice between acting humanely, or not, and he chooses to be humane. Still, he continues to drift. His only act of rebellion is in resisting the judge's demand to sell the judge his gun. This is at a point in the book where the Glanton gang was mostly decimated, most dead, others lost. The kid was with one companion and both were injured. The judge was naked when he found them in the desert, and they gave him clothes, but the kid refused to hand over his gun.

This is presumably what turns the judge against him so that twenty or so years later when they meet again, the judge tells him how he is disappointed in him. Even at that point the kid still seems to drift. He knows the judge is dangerous, but he doesn't flee. The most he seems to do is to evade the arguments of the judge after they encounter each other in a tavern. The kids gets out of the bar, but hangs about the town. In the end he seems to drift into death at the judge's hand.

Well, I've read some comments about The Road as being dark or depressing, but I didn't really find it so. Blood Meridian, though, seems truly dark and fatalistic. At one point the judge refers to war as "the testing of one's will and the will of another within the larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence." It could be that when the kid tells the judge that he is nothing, that he is pointing out that this justification ultimately fades away to nothing. I remember being in a group where one college student was talking about wanting to be in war to feel alive. If you need to be in a war to feel alive, you are so afraid of yourself that you are left with a feeling of emptiness. There's nothing noble about it.

The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty by William Dalrymple - I was rushing to read both this and Blood Meridian as neither could be renewed at the library (on hold by someone else). What they have in common is covering nearly the same time period - 1857 in this case - and a lot of slaughter.

Some good things about the Last Mughal are that it includes a lot of first person narrative about the events in quotes from letters, journals and a few accounts written later, as well as some excerpts from newspapers both British and Indian nationals. As far as history, Dalrymple covers well the relationships between Indians and British at that point of time, and slightly before and the recent changes. According to him the relationship had changed from one in which the British had more respect for Indian religion and culture and frequently had "gone native", changing religion in some cases or marrying natives. It also covers the relationship between the Islamic Mughal rulers in Delhi, and the Hindus. Delhi, itself, the ruler's city, was about half Muslim and half Hindu. Prior to the uprising told about in the book, this was a high point of tolerance between practitioners of the two religions with both practicing their religion freely. The Mughal's apparently didn't make a distinction between monotheists or people of the book, and others.

Although the title refers to the fall of the dynasty, actually the dynasty mostly consisted of a somewhat captive court, the the British East India company in control. However, there was a rich cultural life especially of poetry that centered in the court and the "last Mughal".

What I missed was context. There was a very brief summary in the introduction of the Mughal House of Timur in South Asia, Zafar, the ruler, being a descendent of Ghengis Khan, and a short summary of the growing power of the British and decline of the Moghuls. However, I was not clear how much of India was actually ruled by Delhi at this point in time as the account mentions other kingdoms. I feel a need to read a history of India now, and that might be helpful before reading this book.

Another context I miss is the why of the British beginning to mix less with the Indians, becoming more prostelitizing and contemptful of the Indian religions. The insurrection in the armed forces of Indian soldiers or sepoys was set off by bullets greased with cow and possibly pig fat and harsh treatment of those refusing to use them.

Most of the book is about the insurrection and its eventual defeat. Initially there is massive slaughter of Christians as the British are seen as trying to forcibly christianize. the Indians. Basically all Christians in Delhi unable to flee were slaughtered, though many were helped to flee by other Indians. Later, the slaughter is by the British, who also killed women and children, innocent bystanders, even people who had supported them, as well as those who fought them. They justified their slaughter by vengeance for the previous slaughter, and by their view of the Indians as less than human. Some viewed the entire battle as a fight for Christ. As Islamic Jihadists, many from the strict Wahhabi sect, came to support the city of Delhi, there also came to be more of a hard line between Muslims and Hindus from that point on.

I'd have preferred something that was less blow by blow, and more of an overall history, but as there are a lot of personal stories followed, there's still a lot of interest in the account.

Great review of The Last Mughal, a book I've had my eye on for awhile; thanks!

Solla, your reviews are very interesting! Thank you! The Dalrymple book sounds excellent.

I agree with the cat, your reviews are excellent. Please keep writing them!

I read The Last Mughal a couple of months ago and really enjoyed it. I agree that the first person sources are interesting.

Have you read Dalrymple's The White Mughals? It's set in the 1700s and focuses on British men who become heavily involved in the local culture, marrying Indian women, converting to Islam etc. Another good read.

Hi Solla,

Greatly enjoyed your comments on Blood Meridian. I prefer it, by a hair, to The Road, and allow me to briefly explain why.

BM (er, maybe I should just spell out "Blood Meridian" instead, eh?) took the Western trope (Cowboys: white people, the "good" guys v. Indians, the "bad" guys) and turned it rightly, realistically upside down. Hadn't been done before. He took a Western cliche and squashed it like a bug. We, as in Eastern white Americans, heading to the wild west, were the true bad guys, not the indigenous Indian tribes. I'm aware that's obvious, but for some weird reason, wild west literature took a hell of a long time catching upl. Cormac ruthlessly and brutally demythologized the good guy-bad guy Western trope, and called it for what it was: rape and savagery and scalping, yes, but not by indigenous Indians, but immigrant, and self-indulgent, and greedy Americans. Amazingly, even as late as 1985, this was somewhat of a revolutionary concept in the, "What the Frontier was really like" Western genre psyche. The 1990s film, Dances With Wolves expanded on this theme, what seems now, an all too obvious concept: those Indians were human beings beneath all that war paint and tomahawks too! No way! Really!?

The Road, on the other hand, while extemely evocative (moved me to gooseflesh by the end) nevertheless lacks that sense of revolution innate in, uh, "BM", as the post-apocalyptic trope had been mined time and gain; though, granted, Cormac gave it, IMO, an elevated sense of humanity, realism, and compassion, lacking in a lot of the other works in that genre, but not enough for me to rank its impact higher than Blood Meridians. So that's, in a nutshell, for whatever it's worth, why I'd rate Blood Meridian just a tad higher than The Road: more original, more revolutionary writing.

>18 absurdeist: - the idea of Blood Meridian turning the Western genre on it's head in 1985 is tosh. Hollywood had been churning out revisionary westerns through-out the late 60s and 70s portaying the evils of the European immigrants (Soldier Blue, Little Big Man, A Man Called Horse, etc); a fair proportion of which came from novels or short stories. We can even go further back to the 1950s, films like 'Broken Arrow' and 'Run of the Arrow', where native Americans are portrayed sympathetically. If we take one of the most acclaimed films ever, The Searchers, the lead character, played by John Wayne, is a racist sociopath; Scorese has stated that this character influenced Taxi Driver. In the original novel of The Searchers, the 'hero' kills his niece at the end - this was changed in the film because of the climate at the time but we still see the implications of Wayne's character's hatred in one of the most famous shots in cinema, when he is left outside.

19...Hey, I hear your point regarding the Hollywood realism - you're right (maybe I shouldn't have referenced Dances w/Wolves) but I can't recall in just terms of the Western genre in literature - much of anything - prior to Blood Meridian that so sickeningly and disturbingly portrayed the Wild West as it in fact was. I'm very curious to read those fictions from which those westerns you mention originated.
Thanks for the tip! Didn't mean to display my vast ignorance of Western fiction. My grandfather was strictly in to Zane Grey's and Louis Lamour's traditional westerns, so that's all I was ever exposed to until Blood Meridian came around, and I was wowed. Definitely want to be wowed some more by similar stuff. Thanks again.

#18, 19, 20
I wonder if books staying longer in their portrayal of Indians as the bad guys - assuming that is so - than movies, would be because westerns are more marginalized in books than they are in movies. Westerns in movies are mainstream, or not that far out. There may be more of a tendency in genre to stick to the traditional. I don't know really.

#18 I did think, as I read Blood Meridian, that there is a certain value in just exposing. For me, the exposing that I felt in Blood Meridian was more about how you can't let loose savagery against a group defined as enemy, without it spilling out in general. As, we can't expect people coming back from Iraq or Vietnam to be able to put aside the violence they participated in - particularly with Iraq and Vietnam, because the Vietnam was the start of actually using conditioning on soldiers to get them to automatically fire their guns, without thinking. This raised the fire rate in battle from 1 in 6 to near 100%. Previously, about 5 in 6 soldiers could not bring themselves to fire at another human being on the front lines even when they believed in the aims of the war, and believed that they should shoot.

I probably would have appreciated factual basis of Blood Meridian more years ago, but not as much now. It's been a long time since my awareness went from Wagon Train as a kid to learning about the Cherokee march of tears, and reading Ishi in Two World about the last of a tribe of California Indians, most of the rest who were massacred in the days of 'the only good Injun is a dead injun', or even The Education of Little Tree about the subjection of Indian children to boarding school where they were denied their own culture.
Of course, I'm glad such expose's exist.

I'd have to say that I preferred The Road simply because, above all else, I felt the relationship in it between the father and son.

Finished reading Mysteries of the Middle Ages : the rise of feminism, science, and art from the cults of Catholic Europe by Thomas Cahill and The Middle East : a brief history of the last 2,000 years by Bernard Lewis.

The Middle East goes up to 1995 and is a good start, I think, for reading about the middle east. Since it covers a large area and many years it doesn't go into much detail about specific areas, but gives the overall view of what was happening.

On thing that he does well is to express an earlier world view that formed as Islam advanced from the Middle East to Africa and part of Spain, feeling that they were the culmination of religion - Mohammed being the last of the prophets in thier view, and their success in conquest being attributed to the rightness of their cause. Though they studied their own history, the history of the western world was not seen as being of value. In the 1800 and 1900 hundreds, then, when they met with military reversals, it was a shock that led to a deeper questioning of their own purpose. The earlier view is easy to empathize with in the U.S., because, whatever we think of the uses made now of U.S. power, it is very much ingrained in us that the U.S. is one of, if not the most powerful, at the moment. U.S. power may be declining, and, if it becomes clear, that it is, I think that will be a shock. Bernard talks about the response to that, from attempts to establish democracy, to rejection of the west and turning to Islamic fundamentalism.

There is a section towards the end where he talks about the question of whether the middle east was better off for its contact with western imperialism. He concludes that general life conditions are better, although he says the positive effects were more where the colonial power was actively involved in administration such as in India. This is a statement that I simply don't know enough to evaluate, though I have doubts, certainly, as a general statement about colonialism.

There is very little about the position or role of women, although the former is covered generally, as earlier being restrictive though with some legal rights not available to European women at the time, to some loosening with modernization, and increasing restriction with the turn to Islamic fundamentalism in some places. This is a topic, though, where the specifics would be helpful, with more on areas with different prior cultures, or among various social classes, or branches of Islam.

Cahills books generally deal with western history, though western history is permeated with the religions at least, that arose in the middle east, and most accounts begin with the middle east, Egypt and the fertile cresent centered in Mesopotamia. I have to admit that his books are in some way comforting, dealing with topics that are somewhat familiar to me. But, rather than simply presenting the events of history, he presents ideas and their impact. In this particular book I enjoyed reading about Hildebrand, an influential woman, and in Cahill's interpretation of the idea of Thomas Aquinas in contrast to those of Augustine. In short, he sees Augustine as more in line with Plato, with the metaphor of viewing reality from the cave and seeing shadows. But Aquinas, he sees as trusting the senses, and viewing the body as a good thing.

I was also somewhat astonished to read that limbo had been out of favor in the Catholic church for some time, since I had learned about it as a child in Catholic school. This was in a section about Dante and the Divine Comedy, when he was talking about Dante's difficulty with the idea of the unbaptized going to hell. Limbo was a later solution to this difficulty, but, apparently has been de-emphasized along with the idea that the unbaptized go to hell.

He has some scathing things to say about the recent sexual scandals in the Catholic church and Pope JohnPaul II and Bernard, implicating them as part of the coverup and in the church's treatment of the victims. I assumed as I read this that he was writing as someone who was raised Catholic, and looking it up I found that he was educated by Jesuits, and is currently a practicing Catholic.

I have been thinking that, in addition to writing here about current reading, that I would like to start writing about books that have been important to me or influenced me in the past. These would not necessary be the greatest books but rather what intersected with my needs at an opportune time. I'm not going to go in any particular order as I expect that as I go along more will occur to me.

To begin with one of the more obvious:
When I was in 8th grade, either 12 or 13, as my birthday is in November, I had a best friend nicknamed Yogi - because she did yoga. She was a year older than me, and an atheist, so we had some discussions about religion. Once, she gave me a poem she had written, about hell, which impressed me a lot. Once when I asked her why she was an atheist we happened to be in the school library, and she went and got This Believing World by Lewis Browne.

I believe I was still a Catholic at this point, but I had had some doubts. For one I didn't really believe in hell. I knew some people who had done some very bad things, and yet, I didn't believe that they were irredeemably bad and deserved to burn in hell for eternity. I was 11 when I resolved this question for myself after reading a story about the children of Fatima. My thoughts were something like, I'm 11. I know this. God is all-knowing. He must know this. And, if he was all merciful too, how could he ever put anybody in hell. But the children of Fatima saw hell, the virgin Mary showed it to them, so it must exist. My conclusion, at 11, was that hell must exist, but it was only used as a threat. God never actually put anybody in it.

Chink #2 was my mother's 2nd divorce, when I was 12. She asked us kids if we would rather move to a bigger house, or stay where we were and she would divorce our stepfather. I don't know what she would have done had we said she ought to stay married, but we all told her she should get the divorce. This was kind of a conflict for me, because divorce is wrong in the Catholic church but I just couldn't see how it could be wrong when it felt so right - perhaps I should mention that my stepfather was an erratic, abusive person who later got a psychiatric discharge from the Navy for skitzophrenia.

So, I read the book. What impressed me was the idea of all these different religions that rose out of a search for the same things. Browne emphasizes fear, but also a search for meaning and for something bigger than an individual. The book covers a lot of topics from animism and various forms of polytheism, to Jainism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, Zoroastriansim, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. I had been taught that Catholicism was the one, holy, catholic (universal) and apostolic religion, but by the end of the book I couldn't see that there was any reason that it should be considered more valid than any of the others. I didn't become an atheist like my friend, but I was no longer a Christain.

I just finished The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson. Ferguson says that the purpose of this book is to educate. He quotes a number of statistics about widespread ignorance of financial matters. He also makes a statement that rather than being "filty lucre", money is the root of most progress.

I'd say he does a decent job in the first few chapters just in introducing various financial ideas. It begins by talking about the start of banking systems. He points out how Spain's extraction of gold from Peru was a mixed blessing, because, even if it the money supply is gold, the expansion of the money supply still devalues the currency. And, because they were rolling in gold, Spain got left behind in other developments.

What will probably stick with me is the story about the Dutch East India company, the first, or one of the first, stock corporations, and how it spread the risk, and produced a decent return for a long time.

He goes on to do a pretty good job of explaining why bond prices can fluctuate depending on risk, and what hedge funds are. I have to admit, that, by that time, I was anxious for the book to end. There was so much going on at the end, as it got into more recent events, that I was overwhelmed. This is probably because I am not really very interested in the financial markets in themselves.

What I am interested in (and had some hope in the early chapters that Ferguson might address) is how you can have an economic system with some of the benefits of a modified capitalism - which I see as the fluency of money as a means of exchange, and being able for some at least to accumulate some capital to do some creative things - and yet not be locked into the boom/bust cycle. In other words the boom/bust cycle could be described as having to consume for the economy to be healthy - by healthy I mean providing a livlihood to the great mass of people, and providing a means for them to develop themselves (as opposed to making a killing). Not only do we have to consume, so the economy won't contract, but even that is not enough to ensure that there aren't huge groups of people unable to live adequately while others have more wealth than they could ever use.

We're told the health of the economy is affected by the health of the automobile industry, yet I want people to buy fewer cars. We should have fewer cars, and better ways of getting around. We need an economic system that allows for less consumption for some, and more for those whose basic needs are not being met now. I want to read books by people who are beginning to puzzle out what that system is.

While this book wasn't that, it did give some pretty clear explanations of some basic financial institutions and some of their history. It's worth a read, but don't feel bad if you abandon it somewhere in the middle.

>18 absurdeist:, 19, 20, 21 While I'm not terribly clear when the Western genre developed, there were certainly works of fiction which offered more than the us-them that Westerns provided. Even back in the early part of the 19th century, there were novels which presented native Americans in a positive, or more positive light. I'm thinking here of Sedgwick's Hope Leslie which even went so far as to be sympathetic to the idea of interracial marriage. What's interesting though, is that what survived from that very same era was Cooper's fiction (we were having this discussion on another thread). Apparently, we need a really clear idea of 'them' in order to develop a really clear idea of 'us'. (I'm rambling a bit here).

Interesting comments solla. I pegged McCarthy as a neo-Western writer after reading The Road. Which, ironically, reverts back to the us/them theme.

#25 - The first book I read by Cormac McCarthy was All the Pretty Horses, which also has a western theme. It is also full of beautiful language.

Currently, I have been slogging through - because it was due back at the library - the New Cold War: Putin's Russian and the Thread to the west by Edward Lucas. My review is among the others at http://www.librarything.com/work/5193231/reviews/45292017

I have finally finished cataloging the books that I own, and, as a result have a couple of hundred more books to tag and hopefully write brief comments about. I don't have a big library, as only recently have I had money to buy much. I tend to buy books I can't get hold of otherwise or the books I know I'll want to read over and over.

When my daughter was a child, at a certain point I started giving her a book allowance, so once a month we headed over to Powell's - the huge paperback bookstore that is a Portland attraction - and she was able to buy 4 or 5 used kid's books. So, she has always bought books.

Going though mine the last few night, I ran into Toby Tyler, a story of a boy who felt ill treated and ran off to join the circus. I remember reading it when I was nine years old, when I was supposed to be sleeping, by the hall light. On Toby's return - he has had to escape from the circus - the old man - I think a relative who took him in - has realized how important Toby is to him, and it is a good reunion.

Solla -- I remember reading Toby Tyler when I was a kid too. It's left a soft-spot for circus books which I occasionally indulge from Carter's Nights at the Circus to Gruen's Water for Elephants. There's just something so alluring about the idea of running away with the circus.

#23 I am so surprised that someone else has read this believing world~ I was given an aged copy by my sister many years ago. I was never sure if it was meant as a long joke, was serious, or WHAT its "true" intent was. Esp. given the many illustrations by Browne that seem strongly influenced by 1066 and all that - the most awesome history book, ever.

#29 How old were you when did you read it? - perhaps you have to be 13 to take it seriously - all that, "they were afraid, very afraid" stuff.

I seem to be reading several books at once: one on the bus; one at night before going to sleep; a different once at the kitchen table while I eat breakfast. However, the last finished was Pope John XXIII by Thomas Cahill. I decided I wanted to read it when Cahill referenced it in the last book I read by him, Mysteries of the Middle Ages : the rise of feminism, science, and art from the cults of Catholic Europe by Thomas Cahill. In that book, (and this one), he says some pretty harsh things about popes, and I wanted to see what he had to say about Pope John XXIII.

I was 11 and attending Catholic school when the first phase of the Ecumenical Council was going on, so I heard about it, though not in great detail - mostly, I recall, in terms of a re-approachment of Roman Catholic and Greek Orthadox, and in more openness towards Protestant religions. After sixth grade, I was not in Catholic school again, and I don't remember any mention of the continuing council in CCD (Saturday religion) classes. I didn't realize all the preparation for the council, and that Pope John the XXIII barely had a change to participate since he died after the first session.

I enjoyed this book for a lot of reason, one being the view of church politics John (called Angelo early in the book, and then Roncalli later before becoming pope) developed within. This included the very repressive regime of Pius X. Cahill obviously has a lot of respect for John, and he shows his seeming slow development of his philosophy, alongside an always present humanness and compassion for and openness to others. During World War II, Paul was in Turkey, and it was his reaching out to others who might be seen as enemies that allowed him to get the help of the German ambassador in smuggling out thousands of Jews from Europe. It also helped him get Khrushchev's cooperation for Russian Orthodox bishops being able to attend the ecumenical council.

It also helped me appreciate just how remarkable the ecumenical council was in the context of the church, for it was the first time, in a long time, that there was a meeting of bishops that had not been pre-scripted.

In his encyclical Pacem in Terris - Peace on Earth - John gave three reasons for feeling hopeful about the direction of humanity. He says that he sees everywhere signs of a heightened appreciation of human dignity, especially in three areas "a progressive improvement in the economic and social conditions of workers", "the part women are now playing in political life everywhere" and their "increasing awareness of their natural dignity"; and the demise of imperialism, which "is fast becoming an anachronism." (I'm quoting Cahill here, who is quoting the encyclical).

Of course, this progress that John XXIII saw is uneven and easy for us to despair about, so it is helpful to know that he saw it so clearly. To give it some perspective I am also reading a book about the spice trade. I am in the part of the book where De Gama, first, and then other Portuguese, sail around Africa and reach India and the islands nearby, Sumatra, Java. Basically, they are ready to take control by force, and they deal extremely harshly with anyone who opposes them, however mildly, and with many innocent bystanders. By harshly I mean slicing off the hands, ears and noses of some, and then setting them adrift in a burning boat, or burning up a ship of 800 Muslim pilgrims who had done nothing to them. Perhaps we have evolved a bit since then.

The Spice Route by John Keay is an interesting read and it fills in a lot about explorations and trade that isn't covered in school - which focusses on exploration in the "new world." It really covers well the cavalier attitude of the Europeans - mostly Portuguese and Dutch, and what they were willing to do and able to do without censure to the inhabitants of the area of the spice trade (mostly SE Asian islands). It gets into specifics of voyages and individuals.

Well, I said I was going to write about books that were especially important to me, and I haven't gotten to it since I wrote about This Believing World. But this time I am going to write about two that were at age ten and eleven, and I'm going to have a request at the end. Actually, the first is a series of books, and the second was a short story.

But, anyway, ten was a very hard year in my life. My mother had recently married a sailor, who would later get a medical discharge from the navy for schitzophrenia. She was only 26 years old and 9 months pregnant with her fifth child then, at a time when having a child out of wedlock was a shameful thing - she'd been divorced for a few years. Anyway, the two of them reinforced each other craziness and me, the black sheep of the family, got a lot of the brunt of it. I read as much as I could, and one of the books was Little Woman, then Little Men and Joe's Boys and later half a dozen other Alcott books and one or two biographries of her. I was very disappointed to find out that she had not had children herself. She had kind of a transcendal childhood.

But it was Little Men that I fixated on. Jo and Professor Bhaer run a school called Plumfield, and beside more of less regular boarding students of their friends, relatives and wealthy families they have an assortment of others. For me this was mainly Nat, who had been on the street supporting himself with his violin, and Ned, a friend of Nat's who struggles to overcome his bad ways. Nat has a problem with lying, until Prof. Bhaer finally punishes him by making Nat use a switch on Prof. Bhaer's arm.

Ned and Jo struggle with Ned's behavior, but finally after a midnight gambling party with several of the boys where there is drinking and smoking, and an overturned candle or something nearly burns down the barn, they decide he must leave for awhile, and they send him off to work with a farmer they know. After awhile he runs from there, but finally makes it back to Plumfield on a broken foot, and asks to be taken back in.

So, in they middle of this time when I would hear everyday about how bad I was, I made up elaborate fantasies every night about being at Plumfield. One of the chapters is about someone being falsely accused, and in my fantasies, I would be the one who was falsely accused, and I would leave. Then later, when I came back with my broken foot or whatever, the true culprit would have been found, and Joe would say, How could we ever have suspected you?

When I was 11 I was spending a year with my grandparents. A lot of things were going better. Suddenly I was doing great in school, what with not being scared all the time. I'd started shoplifting some, though, before I'd left home, and I did more of it at my grandparents. My grandfather sold ice cream from a truck, and he'd leave his money belt lying around. There was something obsessive about the way I stole things. Not too long before my family was going to come visit, and to pick me up and take me back to Norfolk, Va for 7th grade I was picked up by the police - not for shoplifting, for taking a letter from a mailbox (it's a federal crime). So, a couple of things happened, one I was scared to death of what my parents would do to me when they came. Another was that the cop - there were around six total who came to the scene, but this one took me to the hospital where my grandmother worked - the cop was a young cop and he talked to me and treated me like like just a regular kid. He'd gone to the school I was going to, St. Agnes, and he treated me like I was just a good Catholic kid, and he believed my story about how I picked the letter up off the ground. It was kind of a shock to be treated that way, because I had without realizing grown to think of myself as a bad person, and the contrast made that clear to me. At that moment, what I really wanted was for my story to be true.

The week between getting picked up by the cops and my parents coming I had to stay at home rather than go to the park program as I'd been doing all summer. Like I said I was terrified. Mostly I read, and one thing I read was a short story by O'Henry. It was about a man in the city jail. He was waking from a hangover, and a detective was coming to talk to him. He was hoping it was just a hangover, but he had a sense of dread, and then the detective was asking him about a man that got shot. The main died, and he was remembering, and saying, the bullet must have ricosched. But the sense of dread in the story was so much like what I was feeling.

Anyway, between the dread and the cop, I decided whatever happened, I was going to stop lying, stop shoplifting, and keep up with the straight A's in school. Then, I thought, maybe my parents would love me. I did it too. And, it partly worked. My teachers loved me. For a long time being a smart kid was what I had.

But I forgot, here's my request. I'm trying to write now in my novel about that year when I was 11, and I would really like to know the name of that O'Henry story so I could reread it. I've done some looking, skimming through short stories with no success so far. It could be that it isn't quite as I remembered it. But if you know the story, would you let me know.

If the above post is any indication, you should do well as an author. I would eagerly read the book, were post 33 the blurb on the inside flap.

Thankyou, "Ridgeway Girl" - that is encouraging as I have been having a particularly hard time writing about the year when I was 11 - which is about 300 pages into the novel. Maybe I'm over thinking it.

This is not reading, but I told another group I would post it here, as it is long. It was accepted by the To Topos Journal put out by the foreign language department of Oregon State University. If you'd like to see a poem by my daughter that was also accepted, I posted it on at http://www.librarything.com/topic/64764 (#191):

The poem is an imagining of my mother's point of view.

Missouri Summer


(1)

Crowding heat
in a house of close bodies,
voices, impatient, sharp
and too many needs.

Mine, the oldest daughter’s, are
easiest to ignore.
Early morning escape, rattling
yellow school bus shaking

over roads of baked dirt
leads to afternoon return
to peeling potatoes, cleaning,
looking after

everything dirty
in that run down house.
No time to even look
at my homework

until dinner dishes are done
and the younger ones
all gone to bed. So tired then
I sit by the window

and stare out at the dark
instead of my book. Still
I’ll be eighth grade
valedictorian this year.

(2)

I quit school, marry
the moment I turn sixteen.
Clarence works at the Ford plant
and sharecrops

so we can live rent free.
We’ll make a life out west. We plan
to save money, but right away
we have two kids, barely a year apart.

Clarence sits on the stoop
with a six pack after plowing.
Sure he’s tired. Still he could play
with the kids at least,

but he leaves the babies to me.
Crammed up in the little house,
too hot or too cold. Outside
rain or drought. Scrub grass

dissolved to mud. Long afternoons
you can feel the thunderstorm
in the air. Crickets
churn faster.

Try to keep those kids clean
after a downpour. Missouri summer sky
opens up like buckets.
From the porch, I watch the kids

dig in mud with their sticks,
turn into sharecropper’s children.

(3)

When I wanted a clarinet
to play in the band
my parents bought me barbells.

One Christmas I pleaded for a pair
of gloves in a store window,
said I didn’t want anything else. I

thought I’d be sure to get them then.
I woke early to check my stocking
then tried hard not to care.

(4)

Like everything returning, like rain puddles
steam back into sky, our plans
fade into evening shadows.

So I push
and cash short, half ready
we take off in our old car.

Seattle, a real city, silky, slippery, the sea in it,
lakes and Puget Sound, green.
Sandy, just a year old, and Billy, two and half,

restless in the back seat.
The car breaks down in Yakima, the wrong
side of the mountains.

Dust and sagebrush
sped by sharp bursts of wind. Practically desert,
but the man at the service station

offers Clarence a job.
I see him considering, jump in quick.
Pumping gas, I say, 2000 miles to pump gas.

But he says he’ll learn to fix cars
that’s where the money is. Echoing what
he’s been told, and he’s happy, tells me

houses are cheap here, and land too.
We’d have to rent in Seattle. Here lawns are
thick and green with irrigation water,

plenty of it
from the Yakima and Natchez rivers joining
on their way to the Columbia.

(5)

I always did like sex.
That was my problem. I
liked it too young. Sure
it’s reaching out. It makes

the world bigger, but then
it traps you.
It doesn’t make them stay. Oh,
Clarence still comes home. He

has a good thing. His clothes
washed and ironed, sex
when he wants it. Coming
home later and later. He’s stopped

trying to please me. Goes out drinking.
Alone with the kids all day, I’m
alone all evening too. Lucky if he comes
in time to kiss the kids good night.

(6)

When we first bought the house Clarence
added a new kitchen, another bedroom, put up
the picket fence. Handy with plumbing, wiring, wood, he
built a swing set, slide and the sandbox. We
all rode out to the sand works. All those
mountains of sand, different colors
separated into piles by coarseness. We brought back
two burlap bags of fine grained sand
he strained to lift. Later he troweled cement
for the back porch, and made the prints
of all their little feet and hands, then wrote
their names: Billy, Sandy, Cherie,
Kenny and 1957. Solid and fine
to sit on a summer evening and watch
the kids run through the sprinklers, barefoot
on a thick grass carpet

(7)

What was it
I wanted? Who
did I mean
to be?

(8)

Everyone should learn to drive, Clarence said,

and took me out to practice on gravel
roads. He’s a patient teacher.
Nothing flusters him.

With my new freedom
I find a job In Walla Walla.
Just a few nights a week to help

with the kids’ clothes and Catholic school
tuition, but I can’t keep the job
because Clarence doesn’t care for the kids

properly. Comes home and drinks. I
ask my neighbor, Pat, to check on them
and she winds up bringing the kids

over to her house to get them fed. One time
I came home and Sandy’s chin
was busted open. Clarence had bandaged

it up with all these little band aides. They’re stuck
every which way, and he couldn’t understand
why I got upset. All of the kids still up. Tired

as I was from work, I had to take her
to the emergency room.
It took four stitches.

(9)

Sometimes the world is calm, opens up.
Sundays when Clarence takes us for a drive.
Picnicking on the river with Pat, my four and her three.

Billy and Sandy paddling the inner tube in the shallow inlet.
The playground stop on the way out – the bars
of the swing set painted like peppermint.

Everything cool on a hot day.
Most times it’s like I took a walk
through the long dry grasses of a Missouri summer,

got a tick, pulled it off,
but the mouth stayed, stuck
under my skin sucking.

Solla, this is so good. That final image was a perfect metaphor. Thank you for the privilege of reading this, for sharing it with us.

Thanks Tiffin.

I'm in the middle of reading a few different things, a history of India, and a book on Big History, which I didn't realize existed but read about on LT. It's an attempt to take the big view and this book begins with the origins of the universe. I am in the transition from sedentary communities to cities and large civilizations now. A shorter book Dreams from the Monster Factory is very engrossing and emotional. I'll try to cover these a bit better as I finish them.

I did however finish the Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr by E.T.A. Hoffman, which is delightful reading. My review of it is at http://www.librarything.com/work/364321/reviews/45831477

Fascinating thread, Solla. Your poetry is wonderful.

Thanks Tomcat. Good reading too over on the Russian exile thread. It makes me wish my "devouring of Doestoevsky" phase had been a little more recent so they were fresher in my mind. It may be time to reread at least my favorites.

I have just been reading Dreams from the Monster Factory. The book is a mixture of autobiography and an account of her work with prisoners, based on the idea of accountability, respect and making amends. The program is called RSVP Resolve to Stop the Violence. The results have been studied and it is extremely effective cutting down violent rearrests by up to 80%. Both her story and the story of the program and the inmates were extremely emotional for me. And we've got way too many people in our prisons who are only learning more anger, powerlessness and hate. This is the beginning of a way out and I hope that it gets adopted more generally.

Well, here is my blatant promotion. I just started a wordpress blog, http://saltysol.wordpress.com. I plan to put up poetry old and new, and chapters from my novel in progress, called The Things that Always Were. I would love to have as much feedback as anyone would like to give. At this moment, there is only one post, which is the intro to the novel, but more will be up soon.

Also, if you haven't read the Tomcat Murr reviews that are up, please take a look, and vote if you like.

Just a short comment. I just finished reading Tomcat Murr by E.T.A. Hoffman, and there is a really funny review up at the moment by PekoeTheCat. Its worth a look - lots funnier than mine was. Here the link http://www.librarything.com/work/364321/reviews/45831477

This was mine:

This was a very entertaining book. At first reading it left me feeling a bit nostalgic, because to me there was something old fashioned feeling about it, especially the part of the book which dealt with Kreisler, the musician, rather than Murr, the cat (I'll explain later). There was also something very modern about the way Hoffman is subtly poking fun at the world by looking at it from the persona of a cat. Perhaps the nostalgia part had to do with how long it has been since I read anything from the 19th century. I used to read a lot of Doestoevsky, one of my favorite authors.

Now that I think about it, I believe it is the essential earnestness or sense of belief in it that reminds me of someone like Doestoevsky, even though they are very different types of writers. Hoffman pokes fun at the world, but he doesn't distance himself from it, and he has not lost faith with the world or with art (in the generic sense, art, music, etc), I think. And, in Doestoevsky, especially in the Brothers Karamotsov, or the Idiot, there is still belief, an innocence almost (although not an ignorant innocence).

So, back to Tomcat Murr. The cat was supposed to have written his book on what he saw as waste paper while he was staying with the artist Kreisler - his master being away for a time. So, there are really three points of view in the book. There is the cat, Murr, who writes in the first person. There is the anonymous biographer of Kreisler who sometimes seems to be writing from his own point of view and sometimes from that of the musician, Kreisler, and sometimes in more of an omniscient third person point of view. I identify this person with Master Abraham who is the owner of the cat and also the friend of Kreiser, and has his own independent drama, so this thread of him seems to run through everything. However, I could be wrong in thinking the anonymous biographer is Master Abraham.

The cat sections of the book seem pretty straightforward, an account of his sensations, accomplishments, and adventures. Murr begins, blatantly boastful, telling of his early life and how his genius reveals itself. He begins with his earliest sensations, not because they are anything special, but just because it is the early sensations of a genius, and he thinks some other budding genius might identify with it. He goes on to tell about how he learned to read, and then managed to write. He mentions several of his own works in the course of the book. Murr never questions his genius, or that genius is a good thing. Of course, we see him boasting about things that are not really so extraordinary (at least not for humans), and are able to draw parallels between him and others who also inflate their accomplishments.

The Kreisler section, on the other hand, is disjointed in presentation, and moves in point of view from person to person. It doesn't always begin again at the point where it breaks off, although, it does seem to be mostly in chronological order, except for the first bit where it breaks in with what we later learn, is chronologically towards the end. It is Master Abraham telling his friend, Kreiser, about a birthday celebration that Kreisler has missed that included Master Abrahams machinations and magic. The celebration happened at the court of the prince, which is the center of drama and intrigue throughout the Kreiser sections of the book, even when Kreisler is not there. At the court is Julia, a friend of the prince's daughter, with whom Kreisler seems to be falling in love. Besides the intrigue, there is also a heightened emotional sensitivity in Kreisler and some other characters in the court. This sensitivity is related both to madness and to genius. Unlike Murr, Kreisler doesn't refer to himself as a genius, instead he and his music are described by others, and often the others are, at the same time, cautioning him not to let himself be too overtaken by his strange dreams and emotions.

But even though the styles of the two sections are so different, there are parallels throughout. For instance, Murr is found by his mother, and she warns him not to let his master know of his abilities because she is afraid he may be exploited for them. And Kreisler is at the court of the prince because he walked out on a position where he was supposed to be allowed to compose, but was asked to subvert his work in order to be of service to dilletants.

In the midst of all this interaction, I have the feeling that Master Abraham somehow holds the strings to everything, just as he planned the fireworks and disembodied voices at the party. To the cat he is a well respected man, who has saved him, and who trained him to curb his impulses. For Kreisler, he provides the means to thrwart the bad intentions of the evil Prince Hector towards his beloved Julia. But in the end, Master Abraham is not just the puppeteer who manipulates and creates, but is also lost in the center of his own drama. Even more interesting.

Well, I have been mired in non-fiction. Part of it was a continuing attempt to understand just what happened in the economy. To that end I added two books, one was by George Soros The Crash of 2008 and what it means which I happened to see at the library and picked up. The other was by Paul Krugman, The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 which I had to wait for a few months for my hold at the library to come through.

Having read them, I suspect I understand as much as I expect to, and that it is not really understanding what happened that is my problem, but really making sense of an economic system that is really only expanding or contracting and how that feeds into consumerism, to make sure it is expanding rather than contracting. Before I go on I should say that the Krugman book is vastly better for the understanding. The Soros book was mainly concerned with his personal theory of what he calls Reflexivity, at least that was the only thing that he really explained. He talked about a lot of other things including buying short and buying long, which I finally got the definition of in Paul Krugman's book.

The main idea of reflexivity is that it is really impossible to know what will happen when you buy and sell stocks, because the act of buying and selling stocks itself influences the market. At one point he goes so far as to compare it with the Physics principle of indeterminacy and say that it cannot be known.

Well, I think he overstates things to say that they can't be known. A lot of the unknowns that caused people to invest when they shouldn't have were deliberately hidden, and not the same as the idea that you can not know both the speed and the position of an atom. It also seems rather obvious. A lack of confidence that feeds on itself and causes the bank failure or currency failure or whatever that the lack of confidence is about is pretty well known. Krugman's book is a lot more specific in giving concrete examples of this, as for example when a credit failure by Mexico caused problems for Argentina (which had not been having probems at that point) simply because of over-generalization that what was true of one Latin American country might be true for another. One of Krugman's examples was how Soros manipulated the devaluation of the British pound. Soros did things like ostentatiously exchange British currency for other currency, and himself or others in his group started rumors and so on. It turns out this was probably a good thing for the British economy as a whole which allowed their exports to expand and so on.

Anyway, I wouldn't bother with the Soros book, if I were you. I continued reading after the first couple of chapter just because he is involved in the markets and I thought his experience might spill out. It did a bit.

Krugman, on the other hand writes in a much more accessible way. A lot of it is about the formation of bubbles, such as in dot coms, savings and loans, housing. He explains the idea of moral hazard - another thing Soros mentioned in passing - basically when the party taking risks is not the party that will pay if an investment doesn't pay off - either because funds are specifically guaranteed like bank accounts or because they are deemed too big to fail and end up being propped up by the government when they look like they are going to fail, or because, although not specifically guaranteed, the damage to ordinary citizens is such that government is not willing to allow it to happen and the person taking the risks counts on that.

He talks about the lessons learned in the depression, one part of which is the need to stimulate the economy and/or add to the money supply when a recession or constriction of the economy threatens. Another was the regulations put in place on financial institutions to prevent the kind of risks that led to the financial crisis before the depression. The first lesson is still taken to heart but various things happened to the second. There was overconfidence in how well the economy could be managed that caused people to agitate and allow a loosening of regulation. At the same time a lot of financial institutions were created that were not part of the regulated, public set - things like auction-rate securities and hedge fund management, which have become huge and are mostly unregulated.

Anyway, enough about that. I would recommend the Krugman book which does a good job of making sense of a lot of this, though still leaving me with a sense of the chaos and illogic of capitalism. Among other things I became aware of a number of world crisis, and also some efforts to over come them that I had not even known existed.

I also decided to look into this "Big History" idea by reading Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History by David Christian. The concept is to cover the big, worldwide, or in the beginning even universe wide trends. The book, about 500 pages and another 100 of notes, begins with the big bang, and ends with the present and speculations about possible futures. I find that there are things that I like and don't like about big history. I do like hearing about large trends, like the trend to agrarian settlement and what promotes or holds it up, and I do like reading about interactions between different areas of the world. But, in the end, I need to get away from big history and more into the smaller realms where I am likely to encounter more that is personal. While I might read another big history - and I think Europe Between the Oceans shared some of the same approach - I think that this moment of human beings being such a minute portion of the whole history of time, perhaps I can better spend it reading novels. In fact I think I may try to learn more of history of some periods/places by more systematically reading works by their inhabitants, maybe starting out by cataloging those of which I have some familiarity and from what books, i.e. 19th century Russia from Doestoevky, Gogol, etc. U.S in the mid 1800's from Little House on the Prairee, Little Women, etc. That said, it was a good book, and, if you are interested in the idea of big history, is probably a good starting point.

Finally, also finally coming through from my hold at the library was To Siberia by Per Petterson. I loved Out Stealing Horses and this book is as rich as that one, but also different. I am still absorbing it but it seems to me that the form is more open. This one is told from the point of view of a girl thru young womanhood and this is one of two books written by a male in which I think that was creditably pulled off (the other being Sunset Song, and the rest of the series by the Scottish writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon. I think I will be rereading this book, and also using it as a writer to study how Petterson presents a scene and the character's voice.

Solla,

Your poetry is wonderful. I can't wait to read your novel. I, too, loved Little Men and spent long hours fantasizing about living at Plumfield.

Thanks Urania, so did you identify most with Nan? (the tomboy as I recall). I had high hopes of finding something like Plumfield when I ran away from home at the age of 10 - I was only gone overnight, though I made about 20 miles or so after discovering railroad tracks and deciding to follow them to get somewhere other than the waterfronts I kept running into in Norfolk (Virginia). There was one scary stretch where I crossed some body of water via the tracks of a railroad bridge - there was a scene in Stand by Me that reminded me of it - but luckily for me a train didn't come. I spent the night in luxurious accommodations of a phone booth. The night was rather cold, though, and I only had a sweater. Unfortunately, closing the phone booth door caused the light to come on, so the sweater had to be stretched to keep me warm and keep the light out of my eyes as well. Then after I got to sleep I was awakened by a shaking which I guess was someone knocking on the door. Imagine the audacity of someone invading my domain by actually wanting to use the phone booth. He was probably the cause of my capture because I told myself I should move on but I was just too tired and went back to the phone booth after he left. Early the next morning I was awakened by the police car pulling up. The cop was a blustery sort, but other than threatening me with jail if I didn't talk to him, he did me no harm. And the detectives he brought me to be interviewed by were actually quite nice.

I have just completed the book Mr. Potter by Jamaica Kincaid. I expected to like it more than I did, as I previously read something by her that I liked a lot. It was still a pleasure to read, simply because of the grace and flow of the language. It is from the point of view of a daughter of Mr. Potter who never acknowledged her, and that is a big theme of the book, and a good one. There are some very good parts, for instance, when Mr. Potter drives a Dr. Weizenger, who is a refuge - the specifics are not given but this is around WWII - their interaction is depicted really well. And when she tells of the childhood of Mr. Potter, and about her grandfather, who similarly didn't acknowledge Mr. Potter. But, all in all, it is thin on story. The narrator presents herself as someone who learned to read and write and thus can connect with Mr. Potter through writing of him, and also as someone whose children will not have a line through them (she is referring to the line drawn through father's name on the birth certificate, but it is used as metaphor throughout the book). She does not give us much else about herself, though, so the narrator and how she gets past the line through herself to manage something more for her children - she has two, she lets us know, but says nothing more about them - is not told. There is a lot of repetition of the missing father theme, even too much for me, and I tend to like repetition and rhythm in fiction, and I think it would have been an improvement had it been filled with more story, preferably about the narrator who appears a determined person when she asserts "And this line that runs through Mr. Potter and that he then gave to me, I have not given it to anyone, I have not ceded to anyone, I have brought it to an end, I have made it stop with me..." That I would like to have heard more about.

To Siberia by Per Petterson could be described as the story of a girl who is emotionally closest to her brother and, in some way, in love with him - if you take out the sexual connotations of that - and who has parents who are distant or become so by not standing up for her. He's not a perfect brother - he teases her by playing on her fears, at times. But he cares for her, and is willing to bring her along on adventures although she is younger, and most of all there is an understanding between them as they view the world, and turn to each other to see their understanding confirmed. The novel begins with a short scene of being afraid of a pair of stone lions along the route she is riding on her grandfather's wagon when she is about seven. It quickly advance to age nine walking along the same route with her father. In the midst of these memories you learn of the father's relationship with his father, and the pov character's ("sister mine" to the brother, not given a name) feelings about her father and brother and mother. The mother is the least dwelled upon, yet she has an enormous influence.

The time is just before and just after WWII, and it takes place in Denmark and later in Norway. The war figures in the occupation by the Germans, and in the resistance in which her brother is involved, although the book doesn't deal with those events to a large extent, except as how they affect the family. One of the strongest scenes is her encounter with an official who has come to ask her about the whereabouts of her brother. The war is what leads to both of them leaving Denmark. Her brother goes to Africa and she goes to Norway. Though she does not see him in these years he is still present. The book ends a few years later, when I assume she is in her early twenties, and she returns home.

All this is mostly plot, but what distinguishes the novel is the richness of the emotional layering that is expressed physically and in the voice of the characters. There aren't any caricatures in the work, even the mother who most nearly fits a type. It is told in the voice of an older woman, perhaps middle aged, whom sister mine becomes, but that voice is seldom visible. We don't find out about her life (unlike in Out Stealing Horses where that novel alternates between the older and younger versions of the pov character). Her presence only lets us know that sister mine survived to that age, and also just a little information on how she regarded her life.

Solla, your touchstone leads to another book.
To Siberia by Per Petterson. There, that should do it.

What can I say about Europe Central by Wiliam Vollmann which I have finally completed. It is described as intertwined stories and in my reaction to them, it certainly varied from story to story. The time is pre WWII, during and after. There is not much after 1950. The story is primarily the conflict of WWII told from the German and Soviet perspective, and then the story of what happened in the USSR after, mostly under Stalin. The stories tended to center about some historical character, some well known, some unknown to me. In the majority this was Shostakovitch. Kathe Kollwitz also figures, and two generals, one German, one Russian. I was interested in the stories in which Kathe Kollwitz was a major figure. She is one of my favorite artists, but I think someone not so familiar with her would also appreciate it, and perhaps want to look at her art as a result. I felt that the writing was true to what I know of her, and what I feel of her, based upon her art. Most of the other characters were also interesting, but I felt that Shostakovitch went on far too long, with a lot of repetition, though much of the WWII and Stalin era information is given through him.

Stories are not told in a straightforward manner. Rather, events and large historical movements seem to swirl around the central character. Hitler and Stalin are present throughout, though hardly seen in person. Hitler is referred to as the Sleepwalker. Some of the minor characters are very dependent on the regard of Hitler, almost like a child wanting the parent to approve.

Two stories that I felt were particularly strong included one that was from the point of view of a man who joined the SS in order to be a witness to what was going on. Throughout the war he did his best to get information on what was happening out to the rest of the world. Although he, himself, never harmed anyone, he was obliged to do things such as carry the poison that was used to gas the Jews in the camps. He did this to have access to what was happening and kept carefully records which he passed on as often as he could. The rest of the world, however, did not want to believe, and his revelations had little effect. The second piece was a kind of dreamlike piece which present the iron curtain as an actual iron curtain, and the hero of the piece, for once not a historical character, had the ability to slip under it to go to other areas of the world, though he had to guard against lapsing into a sleep-like state. After doing this several times on his own, he was discovered by the authorities and then recruited for a mission.

One of the mysteries for me was who exactly was the narrator. At times the narrator was a German, at other times, Russian or Soviet, depending on the setting. At times the point of view seems to merge from the narrator into the main character of the piece without noting that the voice has shifted. We never really know who these narrators are.

The writing was certainly good enough so that I didn't abandon it when I felt that it was tedious, but I'm not sure that I got enough out of a good half of the book to really justify the time spent on it. Still, I would not have wanted to miss the two stories that I mentioned earlier, and the Kollwitz stories. It is not, however, a book I will come back to. Nor do I feel moved to look up whatever else Vollman has written.

Thank you for that excellent review of Europe Central, Solla.

I loved this book. I loved the whole idea of it: looking at German/Russian 20th century history through the lives of its artists, and those who represented humanism as well its generals and statesmen.

I loved the way it was written: Vollmann writes exceptionally well about music, don't you think? The Shostakovich sections were the high part of the book for me, as I am familiar with the pieces he was writing about. The book shed new light on them for me, I listened to them while I was reading.

In addition to the Kollowitz section, I also enjoyed the Akhmatova section. I seem to remember that the narrator of this section was the KGB officer in charge of her 'case'? He was fabulously sardonic and evil about her, and yet Akhmatova's spirit kept shining through and obliterating the narrator's mediocrity of soul.

First published in 2005, it's arguably one of the first masterpiece of this century. I will read it again.

I can see how knowing his music would be a help, particularly if you could listen to the particular pieces. I am familiar with some classical pieces but not many and not Shostakovitch (I just happened on an audio book on the history of music that included a couple of excerpts from his work). I know that in reading about Kollwitz, part of my pleasure was that she is an old familiar friend. Maybe someone who didn't know her would have gotten less out of that section. I forgot to mention the two generals, one Russian who changed sides under the German, and the other, a German general who was eventually captured by the Russians. I was interested in their mental struggles that were required by the insistence of their leaders to keep on with efforts that made no sense militarily.

Speaking of that history, I just heard an excerpt from a piece by Joaquin Rodrigo. It's a guitar piece. It is very good and reminded me how much I love classical guitar music.

Just finished also, another long book - my before sleeping book, as opposed to on the bus book (nearly an hour each way to work) - India, A History by John Keay. I should remember that my aim in reading this was to understand better a book I read earlier The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857. I didn't know anything about the Mughal phase of Indian history, and also, as I discovered, no idea of prior Moslem rulers either. I did learn what the Afghan wars were, and something of the other different areas mentioned in the Last Mughal, such as the Deccan and the other princely states. There was an awful lot of information which I will not hold onto, such as, for instance, all the different dynasties in the Maratha states - in the central part peninsula which is known as the Deccan, in contrast to the northern part of India which is not part of the V shaped peninsula. It surprised me to learn that modern India really didn't exist as a single nation prior to independence from the British really, because even under the British many of the princely states and other divisions were still maintained.

I think that the book's compromise between telling all of the rulers and all of the battles, and what he did tell about was reasonable, given that India is a huge country with a lot of history. It was still too much for me to take in. Still, I got some sense of the different areas and how much the southern history diverged from the northern, and from the Bengal area for instance. Many of the Indian dynasties that I knew about were really northern India - such as one of the earliest, the Mauryas with Ashoka. I don't know if the information is available to give more of a social history to go along with some of the military events, but I certainly would have appreciated more of it, something to give me more of a sense of how life actually differed or was the same in different times and places. Most of that sense came in the form of anecdotes about the different players.

The coverage of the process of independence was pretty good, I thought. The book was published in 2000 and, of course, I wondered how it would have read differently if it had included the last few years during which India seemed to be taking off economically - although that had already started.

One pet peeve - it is extremely annoying to have maps with names on them which don't include the names that the author is talking about in the text. This happened frequently, and often I could only find the place by digging out my Atlas of World History and checking the index.

Library Thing is not allowing me to edit.

I don't know whether to recommend India, a History or not, without knowing more about what is available. It may be a good place to start to get the overall view, but if there is a good social history available, that would probably suit me better.

Fascinating review of Europe Central, Solla with further illuminating details by Murr. I often feel I'm WWIIed out --but this artistic perspective sounds very intriguing. I'm putting this one on my wishlist.

Oddly, it seems to me that I have attracted more interest to books that I have ambivalently reviewed than to the ones that I wholeheartedly love. For instance, the novels of Per Petterson, which I love for how he builds a world solidly like sculpture, in the details like how the father's ears in To Siberia are so cold they are white, and the daughter is afraid they will break off. Those are the kinds of things that I like, such a Muriel Rukeyser poem I read once, but unfortunately don't remember the title of, and haven't been able to find again which went from the center of a city to the outskirts, in description, and back again, so that it began to have the rhythm of breath.

an accidental light by Elizabeth Diamond I picked this up at random, thought it might be a mystery. It wasn't, but it was a page turner. It had a strong portrayal of how accidentally killing a child affected the driver, Jack. Although told in first person from the point of view of two characters, the other, Lisa, being the mother of the child, the driver was the strongest for me. The accident kicked off a lot of feelings from the past, and I thought the encounters of both characters with family members was done well. Spouses were drawn less well or less intimately, except at the end for Lisa's husband. I enjoyed the portrayal of the Lisa's best friend, and Jack's therapist. It is set in England, and it might be interesting for how Jack's trauma was treated in England (assuming the fiction is more or less an accurate portrayal of what might happen) and how it might be treated in the U.S.). I can't say it was a great book, but I enjoyed it. It is a first novel so it promises of better to come.

I just finished reading In the Wake by Per Petterson as well. I want to reread at least parts of that before reviewing. Also, I have completed two of the three novels of The Song of Wirrun by Patricia Wrightson. These are based in Australian aboriginal mythology, although the stories are modern day. The first two books are The Ice is Coming , and the Dark, Bright, Water. I am in the middle of Behind the Wind. I am enjoying these a lot, but will wait until I finished before saying more.

About In the Wake, it has kind of a chaotic beginning in that the main character, Arvid, is pounding on the door of a bookstore that is not open and in which it later turns out that he has not worked in three years. He has busted ribs and a black eye and really doesn't remember how it happened. The next scene is later, in his house, after his ribs have been bandaged. Then there is a conversation with his brother on the phone, and flashbacks about a trip he took with his older brother to the flat and then the cabin of his parents, which happened after his parents and two younger brothers died in a ferry boat fire that happened in 1990. In between the flashbacks, a Kurdish neighbor who speaks only a few words of English is locked out of his apartment with his family, and wakes him in the middle of the night to let him in. This neighbor has also experienced something distressing, but we never learn what it is, we only see his distress in a lit up room at night through the window as Arvid does. And we witness the two of them, Arvid and the Kurd, together, when the Kurd brings a gift to thank him for the middle of the night, and in one later encounter, in which they are able to share and commisserate without the use of language. We learn that Arvid is divorced during the conversation with his brother, which happens in the middle of the night, and also by references that he makes to his daughters moving out of his flat.

The first 80 pages, which also includes the attempted suicide of his brother and Arvid, after visiting his brother in the hospital, falling asleep and nearly freezing to death, seemed to me to be in the spirit of the title of the book - In the Wake - or in the turbulence of something that has motored through your life and left a wake behind. In addition to the scenes I've mentioned, and other scenes, mostly remembered, involving his family, he also recounts many of his dreams, which also include members of his family.

In the 120 pages that follow the tone changes for me. It is not that he wakes up and takes things in hand, more that he allows other experiences to touch him that are not the aftermath of the tragedy. The first of these experiences stem from his falling asleep outside, then making it back half-frozen to his flat, and discovering that he does not have his keys. He thinks of waking the Kurd, but that would wake the whole family. He finally settles on a neighbor, a woman he has seen in the store but doesn't know, but her light is on. This encounter, which is awkward as any encounter with a stranger in the middle of the night would be, in which he ends up telling her a story about him and his father, is one of my favorite in the book. The other is later, when he spends a few hours with his daughter.

This book was actually written after, To Siberia, though translated into English earlier. Both the books were written after the ferry boat fire, a real life even in which Per Petterson's father, mother, one brother and a neice died. Besides that event, the parents of the novel are based on his actual parents. But the novel diverges from his real life in how Arvid of the novel reacts, and in what happens after. As I read about this, I discovered that the main character of To Siberia was also a fictionalized account of the life of his mother beginning with some things that he knew - how she felt about her brother, for instance - and imagining from there. A version of his father also appears in the earlier novel in an encounter with his mother - but they do not marry in that novel. I will want to reread To Siberia with that in mind. Out Stealing Horses, in contrast, is not based upon anything autobiographical, but arose out of a desire to show a relationship between father and son in which it was clear that the two loved each other.

I am not sure I would rate this book as highly as the other two, which I read first, but I am halfway through rereading it which I felt I wanted to do to get it straight in my mind and go back to the beginning, which I hadn't quite assimilated the first time through. I would definitely recommend it though.

I have also now finished the trilogy of Song of Wirrun by Patricia Wrightson. This is a modern day story, but is based upon Australian aboriginal mythology, specifically on spirit creatures such as the Mimi, a thin, sticklike people who have to guard against being carried away by the wind, or the Nargun, which is a rocklike creature that can burn like fire. The first story The Ice is Coming is the simplest, being almost like The Hobbit in relation to The Lord of the Rings. There is a threat to the earth, from some ice creatures, the Ninya, and Wirrun becomes aware of it by paying attention to the earth, and he decides to do something about it. In the process he is helped by others from both the human and the spirit world.

In the second book, The Dark Bright Water Wirrun is haunted by a song that he hears in his mind for nearly a year before the adventure really begins. This time there is a disturbance in the spirit world with some spirit creatures appearing in places where they would not usually be, and there is also a change in the flow of water that is affecting the people. Wirrun's companion in the first book is a Mimi who was blown from her country. In the second, it is his human best friend. Both young men are profoudly changed by the experience. I don't want to say more to spoil the story.

In the final book, Behind the Wind Wirrun encounters a form of death, a Death that has been invented and given its power by humans.

All three books are fairly short, 222, 223 and 156 pages. Unlike Tolkien they do not so much present complex communities/ages, though they do describe quite a bit of the spirit world of aborigines, but they are more like an individual heroic epic-spirit quest, three stages of this quest.

I would definitely recommend them.

The deleted one was a recreation of the one above, which had appeared to be lost. (I always wonder about those deleted by its author messages, so I thought I would tell you).

When I was in high school I would frequently go on book reading jags on a particular topic - well to some extent I still do. One of these involved reading about people who were either on death row, or imprisoned for life for heinous crimes. Although, I myself, have never committed any heinous crimes I seem to identify with those who have - or, at least with my imagined idea of them. So I read Life Plus 99 Years about Leopold and Loeb, and The Birdman of Alcatraz, and books about how capital punishment doesn't deter crime - did you know that 90% of all murders are committed under the influence of alcohol? Well, the point of all this, for me, was the belief in the essential goodness of human beings and their capacity for redemption. And, while I'm sure this all had something to do with my own upbringing that left me in doubt of my own goodness and worth, still the essential goodness of human beings and their capacity for redemption is still right up there among the things I most deeply believe in.

A Saint on Death Row by Thomas Cahill is the story of Dominique Green who was charged and convicted of felony murder - meaning that a murder was committed in the course of a crime, and, under the statutes of Texas and some other states, all the participants in the felony (the robbery) are held equally guilty of the murder, even if they did had nothing to do with it. However, there were four young men involved, but only Dominique, the youngest of the four at 18, was charged with capital murder. The one white boy in the group was not charged with anything. The other two were able to plea bargain for lesser charges. Dominique was not only black, but also poor, and without family to support him. The book goes into his life prior to prison, which was extremely harsh, and the life he built in prison, through his own efforts and the support of others.

This is the first of this sort of book that I have read in a long time. There are some differences and similarities to the books I read earlier. The similarities are the belief in change and the opposition to the death penalty. The differences are that this book and the presentation of Dominique are less romanticized than many of those I read earlier. And, yet it presents a picture of a young man who made the most of a difficult life, supporting himself and his brothers as best he could, and then, in prison, was able to seek, accept, and return the friendship and support of others.

The picture of Dominique comes from his own letters, from interviews with people who knew him and his circumstances before his imprisonment, and from those who met him after he was imprisoned, including the author.

Much of the book is an indictment of the criminal justice system of Texas, in particular. The picture presented is one in which, at every stage of the process, justice and truth were not so important as wanting somebody to pay for the crime. Although provided with counsel, there was no attempt made to insure that the counsel was competent for the task, or even cared about being competent. It tells how his conviction was based on testimony by witnesses who received lesser sentences as a result, and how his sentence was influenced by a report by a psychologist that he was likely to murder again, but this was simply a belief the psychologist had about all Hispanics and African Americans. In addition, his defense allowed his psychotic mother to testify, without informing the jury of her condition. The appeals process is somewhat different from other states in that they are considered by a group of elected politicians - most ex-prosecutors - who typically campaign on a "tough on crime" platform. They turn down appeals that would not be turned down in other states. The book gives many additional details of all of this.

The evidence is pretty overwhelming that is Dominique had not been black and poor, that he would not have been sentenced to death, nor even convicted. This puts the arrest of Professor Gates, recently, in some perspective. In the debate over whether that was warranted or not - personally I think it was not - we shouldn't lose sight of the stakes of racism, not being just dignity, but even of life. Dominque was executed in 2004 after 12 years on death row. Those sentenced to death are nearly always poor, and very much disproportionately minorities. This is also true of the many more who are in jail. Whites are more likely to use drugs, but African Americans are more likely to go to jail for it. Once a person is in jail, we seem to feel it is ok to stop caring what happens to them. Prison rapes are mentioned in comedy routines, not as something which must be stopped.

Finally, the book reviews the numerous arguments against the death penalty itself - the finality (if new evidence comes to light), the financial cost (more expensive than life in prison), the end of any chance of changing their life (for someone who is guilty), the cruelty.

But mostly the book is about Dominique himself and the strength and dignity of his life.

I strongly recommend it.

Wow...what a powerful review, and a spot on indictment of the disparities of the US justice system. Texas seems to be especially bad, for minority and impoverished people who pass through. This book is definitely going on my wish list; thank you!

Interestingly, although Texas is probably one of the worst for this, my sweetie recently heard that Virginia tops Texas by several years for the speed in which it gets people to the electric chair -- I guess they don't "waste time" on appeals too much there.

There is so much recent DNA evidence of people who have been wrongfully convicted of all sorts of crimes, that, aside from the moral and practical arguments, the idea that we could kill an innocent person is the most appalling.

Texas leads in executions by a large margin, but Virginia is second. Based on their populations I think they execute people in about the same proportion. The disparity of people in prison, though, I think is true of pretty much every state, I think. And, for instance, it is still true that Crack Cocaine is punished much more harshly than powdered cocaine with crack more prevalent among African Americans, and powdered cocaine more prevalent among whites. This is federal and has been true for decades.

I have finally completed the Seducer by Jan Kjaerstad, said to be an international best seller and winner of Scandinavia's top literary award, the Nordic prize. That would seem to be a good recommendation and the jacket further says: Jonah Wergeland, a successful TV documentary producer returns one evening from the World's Fair in Seville to find his wife dead on the living room floor. What follows is a quest to find the killer, encompassing by turns a picaresque and endlessly inventive look at the conditions that brought Wergeland to this critical juncture in life.

So, I thought, oh, a mystery, and given the awards, possibly of the caliber of P.D. James. With that I read the whole 606 pages. Well, the man found his wife in the first chapter. From that point on I waited for the quest for her killer. SPOILER ALERT There is no quest for her killer, at least not in this book, though, as it is a trilogy perhaps that quest is to be found in one of the following two books, which I will not read.

So, after chapter one, it goes off on another story, which I expected to return at some point to his dead wife, and it did, at intervals, it just never got out of the living room. He finally called the police in the last few pages. So, it goes into a background story, which likewise gets interrupted by another tangent and this goes on and on. And, all these stories kind of have the same frame, which is, if you were to imagine a parent going on and on about their son and daughter - not only about their achievements - but about every event in that child's life which led to them achieving this thing, even including the accidents of their particular friends and parents. And also telling you all about their existential crises and how they resolved them. There are some interesting bits in these stories, but they are all told with the point of how they affected the consciousness of our hero, and there are many, many things that are fairly trivial, or the common musings of adolescence of early 20's.

I think the best bit began on p 596, a chapter title Springabout meeting his future wife (they had been a couple at junior high school, or middle school age) and realizing he'd been in love with her all long. Had that been at the beginning I might have gotten involved with the person, but instead I was offered all this how remarkable he was garbage, and, for me, the story simply never began.

I did rate it 1/2 but that was merely because it was the lowest I could rate it and still have it register. It was a tremendous waste of time.

Eek! Sorry to hear that this was a horrible book.

Thank you for doing the dirty work of reading it so we won't have to! I'm a sucker for Scandinavian mystery novels, so I would have picked this one up eventually.

I have since read a little about the rest of the trilogy. In the 2nd one the narrator is an enemy of Jonah Wergeland, and in that version Jonah shoots his wife in a jealous rage (this according to the unreliable narrator). The third of the trilogy is after Jonah gets out of prison and is told by himself. On it he is on some sort of space vehicles along with his daughter and others who are carrying out surveying from space. Perhaps if the three points of view had been interspersed in one novel it might have been more interesting. I have my doubts, though.

I am afraid that my reaction to the disappointment of the Seducer (#65 above) was to go to the library and check out a number of books by Tony Hillerman, whom I thought I had read previously but I wasn't sure. I checked out The Leaphorn and Chee Novels (consisting of 3 novels Skinwalkers, A Thief of Time and Coyote Waits), also The Sinister Pig, Skeleton Man and The Shape Shifter. Hey, I don't do things by halves. I needed a serious amount of mystery comfort reading to work things out.

I've now finished all but the Shape Shifter.

My reaction to the novels by Hillerman is that he is a pretty good mystery writer in the tradition of Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh and others. The plots are good, there is human interest in the form of a continuing story about Leaphorn the older, more experienced Navajo policeman (and, in addition of a more reflective temperament), and the younger officer Chee, more impetuous, and, in addition, wanting to be a policeman and also involved with Navajo spirituality. There are also a few important woman characters, all of whom have some relationship to the male characters. In the books that I read all but one of them were revealed through the point of view of the male characters, but it may be that one of them becomes more important in later novels, because she has at least segments of the last two novels told from her point of view.The characterizations are not really deep in the style of a P.D. James or Martha Grimes at her best (in the Paradise Hotel series and a few of the Richard Jury mysteries), but they are likable characters. There are a few stereotyped bad guys - mostly rich white guys play this role - but for the most part even the doers of bad deeds are treated pretty sympathetically.

What distinguishes these novels is how they reveal pieces of Native American culture, mostly Navajo, but occasionally others, such as Hopi or Anasazi. This comes in the form of spiritual practices, description of characters like Coyote or Kokopelli (the flute player), or just the description of how conversation is different among Navajos, who wait for information instead of asking questions and allow longer pauses before jumping in.

Though they aren't great books, they are easy reading and enjoyable. People who like mysteries, and, in addition, have an interest in other cultures, would probably enjoy them.

My other reading has been From Slavery to Freedom a history of African Americans. It actually starts earlier than slavery times beginning with a brief overview of some of the kingdoms and cultures of Africa and a general description about the way of life somewhat common to those groups from which most slaves were taken. It then goes on to colonial times in the Americas, including South America and the Caribbean in the early period, though the focus in later periods is definitely on the U.S. It continues through to the present time of the last revision which was in 2000. It covers a lot of ground, from political to economic, the arts, sport, Blacks in the military, etc. It covers some areas that I have read about in other books, such as the use of prison labor in the south which is covered much more extensively in Slavery by another Name and the institutional, including Federal support for segregation in the North, covered more completely in Sweet Land of Liberty:The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North. But, all in all, it is pretty thorough and a very readable overview. I would recommend it, as well as the other two books.

One of the books I have been reading is 2666 by Roberto Bolaño. Here is my review, which I will also post as a review when I add the book. I'll be writing about the other book I've finished, about the Middle East, later:

2666 by Roberto Bolaño

This book is divided into five sections, and Bolaño had actually given instructions that it should be published as five books, thinking that would be more financially successful for his children, as he knew that he was dying. I am glad that the book was not divided up, as I suspect that the whole is stronger than the sum of the individual parts, depite that, in some ways, they are very loosely associated.

The center of the novel is Benno von Archimboldi, a German novelist, whom we do not meet until the final section and only know that he is very tall, and that his novels are now receiving some recognition.

Section one revolves around four people who become friends through their interest in the novelist. There are three men (Espinoza, Pelletier and Morini), Morini is ill and eventually confined to a wheelchair, and one woman (Norton). The section is about their relationship, although that is given a context by thier interest in Archimboldi. At one point they go to Mexico, the town of St. Theresa. I don't know if this town truly exists, but it is, in the novel, near the border with the U.S. and is macquilador town - macquiladors being factories that exist for the purpose of producing goods for export. They may have existed before the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) but many sprang up as a result of that to take advantage of cheap Mexican labor to produce goods for export to the U.S. The events of this section have mainly to do with the relationships, some sexual, between the four of them, who are together in groups of four, two and three. It is engrossing throughout. There is one incident where Espinoza and Pelletier behave savagely, while Norton witnesses and protests, but does not intervene decisively. Although intrigued, I didn't find myself feeling getting caught up in the lives of these four people. It was really only in the final section of the book that my feelings were really caught up and I cared about the characters. That may be overstated, but it wasn't until then that my feelings were very strong. Yet, I was compelled by the entire book, and never felt like abandoning it. The depictions of the characters were deep and expressive, despite the sense of a little distance, perhaps as if the story is being told from a distance in the future.

While they were in Mexico, their guide was a man named Amalfitano, and the second section is anchored by his story. I say anchored because throughout the entire book there are numerous inter related side stories throughout the novel. The side stories never detracted from the whole for me, but seemed to enrich it even more. Thinking, perhaps of 100 years of Solitude where there seems to be a story that repeats itself with different characters, I would say this novel is not like that. The characters, even minor one, maintain their distinctness. The second section tells the story of how Amalfitano came to be in Mexico with his daughter, Rosa, and what happened to his wife earlier when they lived in San Cugat (near Barcelona) in Spain. Parts are told from the point of view of his wife, Lola, who has a someone unstable personality, and part from Amalfitano's, who is also having some unusual experiences now that he is in Mexico with his almost grown daughter.

Part three begins with a writer who works for a Black newspaper, Fate, hearing about the death of his mother. He deals with that in rather a low key manner, though not emotionless, more with a sense of detached emotion. Later we see him on an assignment in Detroit involving a former member of the Black Panthers. This section connects with the earlier ones in that the sportswriter for the paper dies, and while Fate is in Detroit he is recruited to cover a boxing match in Mexico for the paper. While there he hears about a series of murders of women that have taken place in St. Theresa. This is through a female reporter who is to meet with a German, very tall, arrested for the murders - and still awaiting trial, though the murders have continued while he waits in jail. She asks him to come with her. She didn't choose to cover the murders, but was assigned by her paper, and she is terrified. Fate, hanging out with other sportwriters he also meets some of the powers of the town of St. Theresa, and through them he also gets involved with Rosa, the daughter of Amalfitano. At the end of the section Fate is fleeing from St. Theresa with Rosa, whose father has asked Fate to take her to the U.S. and then put her on a plane to Spain.

Part four is about the murders of women in St. Theresa. A great deal of the chapter simply tells, murder by murder, what is known of the stories of these women. Some are more involved than others. It is as if the section is saying that these lives and deaths cannot pass without at least an enumeration. Intertwined are a number of stories, mostly about policemen who are involved in the case. There is one about a policeman who initially investigates someone who is desecrating churches, eventually killing some people who try to stop them, and this policeman's involvement with the head of a mental hospital whom he encountered during his investigation. There is another about the tall German arrested for the murders, who owned a computer store. Another is about a young recruit to the police. Some of the murders told about are not the work of the serial killer or killers, but jealous husbands, etc. There are numerous accounts of investigations of the murders that are, most likely, those of the serial killer(s), but there is little sense of resolution. Within it is a sense of the power structure of St. Theresa, and some sense of a menace or hostility towards women that is independent of the murders (or perhaps creates the climate of the murders).

It is in part five, that the book actually becomes about the story of Benno von Archimboldi, who starts out with another name. Although, the style of writing doesn't change - there is still perhaps the sense of a slight remove, perhaps in time, and the intertwining of stories - but in this section I really became engrossed in the main characters and what happens to them. This is Archiboldi himself, and Ingeborg, with whom he falls in love. Some other characters we learn a lot about are the Archiboldi's book publisher, and his sister, and we meet again the German in the prison in Mexico. Ingeborg is actually present only in part of this section, very small in proportion to the whole, yet, for me, she was the heart of the book and the one that I cared the most about. I don't know how I would have reacted to the story of section five without the rest. I suspect it still would have been engrossing and have captured me, but all the rest provides depth and reverberation.

The novel is 900 pages long, but well worth it. I expect I will read it again before too long, a lot more slowly. This was a library copy with the need to finish before the three weeks was up. I highly recommend it.

Sowing the Wind: The Seeds of Conflict in the Middle East is my favorite of the three books that I have read by John Keay. The other two were on the spice trade and a history of India. I enjoyed the spice trade a lot, mostly due to the many anecdotes it contained. The history of India, I enjoyed less well. Although, I think it probably was a good general history, the history of India, which has not even been a united country in its current configuration for most of the 2000 years of so that he was covering, is just so massive. It called for someone with a lot of skill in making a large number of events form some coherent pattern. I don't think that is Keay's strength.

What his strength is, I think, is not to generalize history, but to personalize it. This is probably a lot easier in Sowing the Wind because the history is more recent, and, at least some of the personalities - Lawrence of Arabia, Churchill, Begin, Nassar, and others - are somewhat familiar. Others were not, to me. A woman named Gertrude Bell comes in early on as she travels through the region, later to become an important figure, and there are many others. In some ways this is history as a gossip column, even with the slight jadedness that comes with that.

The major part of the book goes from about 1900 to just after World War II. To generalize, it is a story of a struggle for autonomy and real liberation from colonial powers and later from interference by countries with business or security interests in the region, and how it was promised and taken away and botched again and again. Keay covers mainly the British involvement, just a little the French in Syria, and somewhat U.S. interference in the region. What really comes across is Western arrogance in feeling that they have some corner on the ability to govern, while all the while, they are manipulating governments to press their own interests and even involved in coups against democratically elected governments for that same end. Both Britain and the U.S. have a rather impressive history of interference in the Middle East, or, as Keay put it, ".. the Iraqi revolution seems to have taken him (Nassar) as much by surprise as everyone else. In the best traditions of Western diplomacy in the Middle East, the British and US embassies knew no more of it than they had of Rashi al-Kayllani's revolt in 1941 or would of the Iranian revolution in 1978-9. It was as if Western diplomats, hard pushed to keep track of upheavals for which their own government agencies were responsible, could scarcely be expected to anticipate those engineered by others."

If you want to know why Arabs (or Persians or Egyptians) might view us in a less than favorable light, this book would make a good start. It is also extremely helpful in understanding - as the title suggests - the tangled events and conflicts that have continued to the present.

My daughter recommended a mystery to me. She doesn't usually read mysteries, but she liked this one and thought I would.

In this mystery, In the Woods by Tana French a child who vanished with his two closest friends, then reappeared with blood in his shoes, no friends and no memory of what occurred and not speaking, is now a homicide detective and is involved with his partner in an investigation that takes him to the place where the earlier crime occurred. He doesn't know, and for most of the book, we don't know whether the current crime has anything to do with the earlier one. Since his last name is common, and he goes by his middle name rather than the first name that was publicized, only a few people know about his role as victim in the earlier crime, and he chooses not to tell his boss, although his partner knows. Alongside the account of the investigation, there is a parallel account of his relationship with his partner, which is initially almost like brother/sister-like in their closeness, jokes, arguing and support for each other. One thing this book does very well is show someone acting like a jerk in a way that makes sense and still leaves you with a feeling of empathy for the character. This is a very strong first novel and I plan to read French's new book, The Likeness, which has the same two main characters. But the point of view may shift to the female partner.

I had Jack Gilbert's latest collection of poems from the library for three weeks before I had to return it because it had a hold on it. He is one of my favorite poets. I especially enjoyed The Great Fires, which, I believe was his last collection. I am not sure that the Dance Most of All is as strong as that work, but I'm not sure about that. Though I read all the poems, I didn't reread many, and I think it may be instead, that many of the poems of this work simply take more time to sink and do their work. I've now added it to my wish list on Amazon and I do have a birthday in a month or so.

I also just finished The Master and Margarita a second time through. I wrote about it on the Salon thread, http://www.librarything.com/topic/72422, but here's what I wrote (may add more later):

Someone earlier was talking about Satan's Grand Ball as the center of the book. I have to agree with that. My feeling is that there is a lot in that chapter and that I am not fully grasping it. Why Margarite was chosen, how she is told that she is doing so well, although throughout Satan's cohorts seem to be doing a lot of prompting as well, the heavy necklace, her compassion for Frieda, and although it is Satan's ball, he does not necessarily seem to enjoy it.

And then, I only just, on my second read of the novel, really took note of the sentence that cowardice is the worst vice - Ha-Nostri was reported to have said this in a Pontius Pilate chapter, and then it is repeated near the end. Yet it is really not elaborated on, and it is only mentioned in relation to Pilate in not going out on a limb for Ha-Nostri.

To me the novel separates into three threads. One is the romp - that is descending into Moscow and wreaking havoc, particularly on the pretentious. I suspect there is quite a lot I am not getting in this thread, more specific political commentary.

The second is the story of Ha-Nostri and Pontius Pilate.

The third is the story of the master and margarite.
Within the latter two stories is a theme of the roles of what we call good and evil, but which may also be light and shadow, necessary to each other. Why is it, for instance, that the master deserves peace but not light? Is it his brokenness in reaction to criticism of his novel? His abandonment of Margarite when he goes to the hospital? Is such a loss of confidence a kind of cowardice as well?

I have the feeling that I'm going to be rereading this book many times more in the future.

I read Cheek by Jowl by Ursula Le Guin, which was more like a quick skim when I discovered it was due and on hold by someone else. It is a book of essays about fantasy. It mostly seems to deal with the lack of serious criticism given to fantasy since it was relegated to a status of being for children. It included a longish essay about animal tales - which made me want to read Bambi, apparently very different from the Disney version. That is the one I remember, but she also mentioned other books that I had not heard of before that sounded good. Among the books she mentioned were some by Kipling, The Jungle Book of which I've read at least part - maybe only Riki tiki tavi, Just So Stories, which I haven't and Kim which I haven't. She was decrying that these books are treated by critics/scholars as not worthy of the consideration given to his "adult" works. She especially holds Kim in high regard and I want to read it now.

I'm about 800 pages into A Suitable Boy and thankful to all those people who said how good it was as I'm enjoying it a lot.

solla,

I normally not much of a mystery fan either; however, your description of In the Woods sounds fascinating.

Urania, I will let you know how the Likeness is when I get a chance to read it - I have it on hold and it didn't look like there was much of a wait list, and there were several copies.

Thanks solla :-)

I'm so glad you're enjoying A Suitable Boy. My first reaction upon finishing it was disappointment that it had ended so soon.

Sola, I have been away from your thread for so long! I can't believe I missed all these riches. I'm going to take some time to read through more carefully.

78, I agree - mysteries never usually make it to my wishlist but In The Woods has - thanks solla!

76 The Just so Stories are really good. Kipling is very underrated in my view -or perhaps unfashionable now, in these post-colonial days, but he was a very good writer indeed imo.

Thank you for your thoughtful and excellent review of M&M!

"Oh my best beloved" - the Just So Stories, myths made and remade, are easily my favorite of Kipling's works.

I am definitely convinced I want to read the Just So Stories and Kim at some point. I'm just not sure quite when.

In the meantime I had a couple of days of doing not much more than lying in bed sleeping and reading last weekend. So, I finished A Suitable Boy which I've been reading for a few weeks, as well as the Likeness.

It seems to me an amazing feat, as a writer, simply to be able to keep all the threads of a story clear through 1500 pages, but, of course, Vikram Seth does a lot more. The book never lost my interest from the first chapter when I quickly became involved with Lata,(the just slightly younger sister of the woman being married in chapter one, who is being told by her mother that she too will marry a boy of her mother's choice) and her whole web of relationships.

One level of the novel is, of course, the personal stories, and Seth does a good job of presenting people in their complexity. Besides Lata, I was also very caught up in the drama(s) of Maan, the son of a politician who seems a sort of lazy, charming wastral at the beginning, but gains in character as the novel progresses, despite his troubles; of Haresh who is making his way in the world through his own resources and hard work in the shoe business, despite it's association with the lower class; of Bhaskar, the 9 year old math prodigy; and Rasheed who does his best to bring justice to his village and suffers for it, among others.

Another level is the presence of family, and their influence. It might be difficult in the U.S. for someone with a good relationship to their family to go against their wishes to marry whom you like, but nonetheless we see it as an individual decision. And probably, most of us, hold a romantic relationship/marriage relationship as being individual and of more important than any other aside from parent/child. It is not only the influence of family on relationship choices that Seth makes clear, but also, a different attitude towards "passion" in a relationship. Nonetheless, Lata does not feel very different from any other young woman, and so it is easier to enter into her values.

The time period of the novel is just after Indian independence and the partition of Pakistan and India. There are many cultural and political events that we experience from the point of view of characters in the novel, such as the violence of partition (although this is retrospective in the novel) and the resulting tension between Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, etc., the efforts to distribute land from big landowners to the peasants who actually work the land, the divisions that occurred between factions in the Congress party and the election of 1952. It is interesting to get the sort of home grown view of Nehru.

Once I finished the novel, I started reading India after Gandhi and although I haven't gotten very far, already it has been enriching to have the novel in my head as I read about the same historical events and personalities in a history.

This is a very rich book, and, even at the very end, I felt I would have enjoyed reading even more about these characters.

The Likeness is Tana French's second mystery and involves one of the main characters of the first one. In the Woods was told from the point of view of the male partner of two cops and dealt a lot with the effect of a case on a trauma in his past. This second book is not a sequel of that one. The partners have broken up and the male cop doesn't really come into this book, although he is mentioned. It is told from the point of view of the female partner, Cassie, who has moved to the domestic violence unit, but now is pulled into an undercover assignment. She was previously in undercover before joining the murder squad. This undercover assignment is an unusual one, and most of the book shows her being drawn into the character that she is playing in the assignment.

While I liked In the Woods very much, I found the Likeness to be a stronger and more convincing work. I definitely recommend it.

Martha Grimes is best known for the Richard Jury mysteries that are usually named after actual pubs. These are among my favorite mysteries, but I like even better the Emma Graham series centered around the Paradise Hotel, Hotel Paradise, Cold Flat Junction and Belle Ruin. There is an atmosphere that she evokes in these books told from the point of view of 12 year old Emma. The book I have just been reading by Martha Grimes is not a mystery, nor from the point of view of a 12 year old, but it has some of the same atmosphere. The Train Now Departing actually consists of two novellas. Both have a single woman as the main character, and both of these women become involved with a platonic relationship with a man. Each novella explores the course of the relationship. They are not great books, but definitely interesting and worth reading.

I also completed The Octopus by Frank Norris. According to the introduction, F. Scott Fitzgerald admired the book. I do not. But, to put it in context, it is written about the conflict between farmers, mostly large farmers, in California and their struggles against the railroad which was charging high rates - being a monopoly, and having political influence allowing them to withstand court cases against them. The railroad had also enticed farmers to farm land given to them as an incentive to build (every other section) by promising to sell it to them at the unimproved price of 2.50 and acre - then reneged on this and priced it from $20 to 40 an acre after the farmers had made improvements. The events happened in the 1880s, and the novel came out in about 1901.

In that same year, Dreiser's Sister Carrie was published. Frank Norris had persuaded Doubleday to offer Dreiser a contract, but when Doubleday, himself, actually read the novel, he tried to back out and then did nothing to promote or distribute it. I haven't read Sister Carrie but the later, An American Tragedy, which didn't come out until 1925, is vastly superior to the Octopus while perhaps sharing some of the same attempt at social realism.

I never got a sense of real people in the Norris book. They all seemed like types. The language is overblown and romanticized. The book is actually almost over before the actual incident of the railroad trying to evict the farmers. Near the very end, there is a chapter about the fate of a German family - the father has been killed - who have been displaced form their farm, and that is the first time really that I felt enough in someone's head to feel compassion for them.

SPOILER WARNING
There is a character, Perry, who has been looking for the family to help them out, but when he finally runs into the oldest daughter she's been forced to turn to prostitution to survive. Oddly, he doesn't try to rescue her from that - it seems she is now "ruined" and he can't save her now. The last scenes intersperse between Perry eating at a house of a rich railroad official, and the mother of the family (who has been separated from the oldest daughter) literally starving to death while carrying her small daughter.

May be of interest to someone interested in the history of social realism in a novel, or someone who is interested in how events and social conditions were viewed by someone close to the time. Otherwise I wouldn't recommended trudging through its 652 pages.

I'm so glad you liked both The Likeness, whose premise should have made for a terrible book, and A Suitable Boy. My reaction on finishing that doorstop was that it should have kept going. Now I'm waiting for the sequel.

Well, I have finally reached the end of another long book, 750 pages, this one nonfiction. It is India after Gandhi by Ramachandra Guha and it was particularly good reading it so soon after reading A Suitable Boy. That fictional work took place shortly after Indian independence, so in the time period at the beginning of the India after Gandhi. I was also glad to have had the background provided by India, a History, although I definitely only remembered the broad strokes from that work, it did mean that I better understood such issues as how the Princely states would be integrated into India.

This is a lively work. I had no idea what a multi-ethnic place India is. Of course, I knew about Muslims and Hindus and the conflict over Kashmir. I had heard about Indira Gandhi being assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards, and the killing of Sikhs that happened afterward in response. But I had no idea how many different linguistic communities there were, or how much of an issue it was to them to maintain their different languages rather than accept Hindu as a national language. I didn't know there were tribal peoples - groups considered to have been original before the migrations of Dravidian (possibly from Iran) and Indo-Aryans, possibly from the Central Asian Steppes that happened around 1700 BC and later. Nor did I have any idea of the multiple other conflicts that India has faced from Independence from the British up to the present.

The book was very good at presenting a much more complete picture of issues that I'd only known a little of from the outside, such as Indira Gandhi declaring a state of emergency which lasted for a couple of years. The overall theme is how India persevered as a democracy - though an imperfect one - despite all the odds against it, including poverty, the many cultures and religions, the lack of a long democratic tradition. A big part of this might be the remarkable leaders that India had just after partition, such as Nehru who was committed to the protection of minorities and political rights for oppressed groups such as the untouchables and women.

I definitely recommend it to anyone who wants to know more about one of the world's largest nations, and one of the most diverse.

Great review, solla. If I don't read this during next month's Reading Globally theme read, I'll definitely get to it next year.

Solla -- this one definitely sounds like a must-read -- but one for summer, not during the school year. Thanks.

Just catching up on your reading, solla. Thanks for the comments on the LeGuin, I've been meaning to pick that up. I have enjoyed some of her previous collections of essays.

Reading Exiting Nirvana by Clara Park was like catching up with an old friend. I had recommended The Siege to a friend with an autistic child. He looked into it and found the new book. I found it a description of it online along with a few reproductions of paintings done by Clara Park's daughter, now in her forties.

I read the Siege over thirty years ago, when it was thought - and I didn't disagree - that autism, like other childhood mental illness was a result of family disturbance. In the case of autism the parents were referred to as refridgerator parents, supposedly very intelligent, but cold, resulting in children unable to relate to other human beings. Reading, the Siege, I was impressed by Clara Park. Whether or not she had anything to do with her child's difficulties, I felt, she certainly did everything in her power to break through the girl's isolation. Now it reminds me of what a friend told me of the difference between how Japanese families and American families think about child raising. We (Americans) tend to think of children as being dependent and our job as raising them to be independent. But the Japanese regard children as being outside of society and the family and the act of parenting is to bring them into the family and into society.

Ellie, as she was called in the Siege, sometimes seemed to be a fairy child, untouched by the family in which she lived. And her mother fought to make contact and bring her into the family. I was left with a deep feeling of respect for this woman. Now in Exiting Nirvana I was back with Ellie, now called by her actual name of Jessy Park. This is a very unromanticized portrayal of what Jessy has been able to accomplish and the differences and limitation that still exist. This includes some impressive artwork that is at the same time precise and illuminated with color. Clara Park doesn't give short shrift to the common, everyday things like learning to be polite, and what it really consists of in being able to imagine yourself in the position of the other.

The thinking about the origin of Autism has changed drastically. It is now thought to be a neurological condition, rather than emotional pathology. I can't help but think, that Clara Park, writing as a parent determined to do the best she could for her daughter, rather than a clinician, deserves a lot of credit for that change. She had little to guide her when she began working with her daughter, and she left a work that was not only a practical guide to parents, but also would help them through the guilt and isolation of being blamed for their child's difficulties.

I confess to having read four mysteries with little redeeming value, though they were written by a best selling author. Because of that I had checked out all four that were in, in case I really liked them. Well, I merely found them ok, and a couple not bad, but I read them all anyway. The author is Jane Jance, the books, Web of Evil, Without Due Process, Justice Denied and Day of the Dead. Oddly, Web of Evil seemed the worst written of the four, but it is fairly recent, so it wasn't a case of awkwardness of a beginning author.

This may be a good time to also confess to a weakness for chocolate. It was my birthday yesterday, and after going without desserts for about 3 months, I indulged myself with Queen of Sheba cake - a Julia Child recipe and the only cake I make from scratch - and Haagan-Dazs. Not to mention dinner with my daughter at our favorite pizza place, Guiseppi's in Portland. Anyway, the quality of the cake and ice-cream were way beyond that of the books.

I am still somewhat musing on Clarice Lispector's the Hour of the Star. It's a very short novel, only about 80 pages long, and the story within it is shorter still as much of the beginning tells of the writer inventing the story (although the writer is also fictional, being a different gender than Lispector at least). One of the questions that I have for myself is whether I wouldn't like it better if it didn't have the self-consciousness of the writer in it. The first time through I was impatient with the beginning, which goes on for 10 pages or so before saying anything about the main character. However, the second time through I appreciated it more. I think that my impatience the first time through was a worry that when the story came it wouldn't be worthy of the build up to it. The second time through, when I knew that there was a good story there, I was much more appreciative.

As a writer, I've sometimes thought that it takes a lot of arrogance to believe that your thoughts and experiences are of such importance to be of interest to other people enough to read an entire book. But then I've countered that with the thought that there is something about everyone that is distinct and incredible and it is a matter of revealing it. The Hour of the Star is about the process of imagining someone who seems of utter insignificance, not appealing, and finding the beauty of her life. It adds another dimension to know that Lispector was dying of cancer as she wrote it and was perhaps using it as a vehicle to question or to find the meaning of her own life.

She definitely succeeds in showing meaning in the guise of seeming insignificance. I'm still not sure I wouldn't have enjoyed it more as a simple story but it is a gem of a book.

Finally, I have decided to re-read Doris Lessing's Children of Violence series which begins with Martha Quest and ends with the Four Gated City. I read these in my early twenties and was impressed. So far I have just read Martha Quest, so I have four or five more volumes to go.

Lessing was writing about a time in the late thirties when she was between the ages of 14 to 19. I was that age in the late sixties, but I remember how much her somewhat autobiographical writing about the mother and daughter in the novel resonated with my experience. She is the daughter in this book. And, when I've read books (by her) that are from the point of view of a mother those have also resonated with my experience of being a mother, although she describes that relationship quite differently.

In Martha Quest, people seemed locked in roles which cause them to act in ways that have nothing to do with their real feelings or their real selves. At the beginning of the novel she is on a farm in South Africa with her parents. There is a brother, little mentioned, because he was sent away to a good school though she is a reader and he is not. She is in a battle with her mother who tries to control her life, and also has all the typical English attitudes about native Africans. Her father simply wants to avoid conflict. Her only real relationships are with the two sons of a Jewish shop keeper, who is fairly isolated in the area because of his Jewishness. They lend Martha books and her association with them seems to be what allowed her to form opinions about the equality of people that are different from those of all the others around her. Her opinions are intellectual, however, and don't prevent her from feeling prejudice, and, in this book, she does not act on her ideals.

What she does do is to finally break away from her parents, at the age of 17 or 18, helped to do so by Josh who arranges a job interview with his uncle, and moves to town and a job as a secretary. In the middle of discovering she is not really qualified as a secretary, and beginning to take classes to improve, she becomes part of a crowd that spends a lot of time at the sports club. Again there is the disjoint between who she really is, and the roles she plays in this group. In a short period of time, she drifts into three or four different relationship with people whom she doesn't really like. At the end of it at age 18 she is getting married. A few days before her fiance has asked if she really wants to go through with it, and she feels a sense that there is no stopping it, she knows she will get married. At the same time, a small voice inside her is telling her that she will not stay married.

I forgot to mention the point of view of the novel. It is third person, and, though she stays in Martha's head, it seems to be of someone reflecting back on Martha rather than in the moment. Sometimes you see the current Martha and this other person's thoughts side by side, with the other person commenting on Matha's actions Martha, herself, has an inner voice, the real Martha, so in a sense there are three voices: Martha in her role; the real Martha; the future (also real) Martha - I'm guessing on the last.

I appreciate your comments on The Hour of the Star. I started it a couple of weeks ago but put it down after 20 pages or so. I'll definitely give it another go in the near future.

Please see the thread http://www.librarything.com/topic/77109#1603479. It is the story I originally intended to post here after reading Urania's tale of falling off the garden wall. But then PekoeTheCat started this story telling thread, and what could I do.

I have just finished the book, Jennie about an orphaned chimp baby brought from Africa and raised as a human in a human family. It is fiction but is based upon several real stories. There are two main themes, one being the harm that occurs by taking chimpanzees out of their own environment and putting them in a human one where they will not be able to survive as independent creatures because they are not human, being different in some crucial ways such as sexuality. The other is how like us they really are. The format of the book is a collage of journal entries, interviews, etc. as put together by a researcher writing a book about Jennie the chimp. It is a very sad book.

Great story solla! Great thread!

Thank you Enrique

I came across A Glass of Water by Jimmy Santiago Baca on the new books shelf at the library and picked it up because of a single poem I had read by Baca. That poem was taking place during a prison riot and he is describing the smoke and the struggle to be human in the middle of it all. I would put the poem in here but I haven't been able to find it.

The book is about two illegal immigrants and their two U.S. born sons. The story takes place as the sons have grown up. The mother was murdered when they were very young, so she is there only in memory and as a kind of spiritual presence.

Unfortunately I never really got caught up with the novel. I enjoyed it. Some of the descriptive language in it is quite beautiful. I'm not sure quite what is missing for me. Maybe it is partly that the two sons seem to make their way too easily and unrealistically. One is a fighter who takes on his first fight to pay off damages from an accident, but is good at it from the first. The other starts dealing marijuana, making a lot of money with it which he and his girlfriend use to better the life of migrant workers on the farm where they work. There isn't a lot of tension around that - doesn't seem to be much threat of getting caught.

For me, the book doesn't have the passion that the poem has. However, because of what is strong about this novel, and because of the poem, I would read a second or third novel by Baca, if he writes them. I think it likely that he could use the form of the novel with the same strength as he uses the form of the poem.

I read The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing a few months ago, and have just finished it's sequal, Ben in the World. Both novels are short. The first is about two people who marry and want to have a traditional home with many children, which they do. They become a kind of magnet for their friends in the warm, family centered life that they lead. Then their fifth child is born. He is a kind of throwback. His instincts don't fit in the family. They try to preserve the hospitality at holidays, but it is impossible. The new child is a strain on everything. At one point they try institutionalizing the child, which seems to be like a death sentence for him, and the mother goes and rescues him. At the end of that book, the fifth child has managed to find a group of teens with whom he fits to an extent.

As I recall, the point of view of that first book, though I believe it was third person omniscient, was mainly through the mother.

Ben in the World is also told in third person omniscient, but it's center is Ben and what he experiences. We see him much more trying to adjust and be like others, doing his best, but with a kind of primitiveness to his emotions, needs and perhaps intelligence. He has to struggle to keep his emotions under control. There are things he can't do, such as drive a car, yet he understands a great deal. He tries to please, and responds to anyone who truly likes him, but he is continually taken advantage of by others.

Lessing can be quite a stark writer. She never tries to make anything softer or prettier than it is. The book has a few scenes that include the children of Rio de Janeiro who live on the streets and beaches, attacking and preying on others to survive. A note in the front illustrates this: "The authorities have cleared the gangs of criminal children from the streets of the centre of Rio. They are no longer permitted to annoy tourists."

So, as you wonder, in fiction, how someone like Ben could survive, you can also wonder what has happened to those children.

Solla, thanks for writing about the Lessing novels you are reading. It's very interesting. I have probably read more about Lessing than I have read by her!

I read The Fifth Child and Ben in the World a number of years ago when they first came out. I found them chilling and compelling at the same time -- especially since it was at a time when my daughter was hanging out with a lot of street kids. It's actually amazing how many families just throw their difficult adolescents out onto the street to fend for themselves.

I am in the middle of Les Miserables, very long, and so, no posting for awhile.

But I just happened on a fairly short book, a little over 200 Pages, just browsing in the library for something on a specific period of India. There was little, but there was this interesting looking book, called the Great Hedge of India by Roy Moxham. Moxham found mention of this hedge, a formidable hedge, ultimately about 2300 miles long, quite wide and tall, and including plants with thorns which made it truly impenetrable. Yet, in the current day it was almost unknown. Moxham went to search for it, making three trips total before finding a remnant that was satisfying enough to allow him to stop searching with some sense of accomplishment. The purpose of this hedge, up until about 1877 was to provide a barrier separating British India from the rest of India in order to prevent salt smuggling from the non British area to the British area where salt was heavily taxed.

The book is about half and half divided between an account of his search for the hedge, and about salt, the salt tax in British India and prior; salt taxes in other places; Gandhi's rebellion against the salt tax, and the need for salt. This book was satisfying in how it seemed to provide answers to questions as they occurred to me - such as how much salt to we really need - something we dont' think about much in this age of cheap, and usually too much salt. Nowhere but in part of France did the author find a salt tax that was anywhere near as high as that on salt in British India. A tax on salt is a tax that disproportionately affects the poor, while being necessary for survival, which was why Gandhi focused on it. Moxham goes into how lowering salt consumption, which in Bengali under British rule was about 10 pounds a year on average per person as opposed to 12 or more in non British India in the 1870's, would lead to lassitude in good times, and in times of famine, would greatly increase the death rate resulting from lack of food alone.

What caused the hedge to finally be abandoned, was not, unfortunately, the abolition of the salt tax, but the extension of British rule so that they could control the production of salt throughout India.

All in all, a short, satisfying, and informative read. The one thing it lacked was a photograph of the remains of the hedge when they found it. I tracked one down though at http://www.rmoxham.freeserve.co.uk/maps.htm. Without knowing the background, frankly, it would be hard to identify the vegetation as part of a hedge. They look more like some bushy trees. But keep in mind that the types of plants found in the hedge usually didn't survive for more than 60 years, and that due to the construction of the hedge on a rise it made an ideal place for the construction of roads - most of the hedge now being under a layer of highway. In the book Moxham mentions having his picture taken at a place where there were clusters of thorny acacias and thorn covered Indian plum tree. The original hedge contained many plants including these two. The thorns of the plum trees within the other plants helped make the hedge impenetrable, and I believe that is what is mostly shown in the photograph.

Fascinating! The link mentions Hibbert's book on the Mutiny. Have you read that?

No, I haven't. The only thing I've read about that is The Last Mughal.

I've just finished reading Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. I read it once before, sometime between 18 and 20. I was absorbed in Jean Valjean's story from beginning to end, as well as in the stories of more minor characters, and perhaps half of the long digressions about economics, politics, the sewers of Paris, etc.

---Spoiler alert, although I don't really think the enjoyment of the book is based on not knowing the plot ---
But, I find that I have to begin near the end, because I ended up feelings the books strongest effects there when Jean Valjean reveals to Marius, now Cosette's husband, that he had been in the galley. It was apparent earlier on that Valjean saw Cosette's love for someone else as the end of his relationship with him, and I was puzzled by this, and I didn't see why he needed to tell Marius. Jean Valjean's reasoning was that he didn't want someone unwillingly to be associated with someone like him if they didn't want to, and he didn't want to live a lie. But, at the same time I was emotionally struck by his sense of shame about what seemed so trivial, having stolen a loaf of bread, and doing it to feed his sister's children. For this he felt so low as to be below the lowest in society. It didn't seem to matter that he had also created a business that benefited a town, saved several lives, given to the poor, still he needed to shrink and hide. Perhaps I felt this more strongly because I currently have a friend in jail on a serious charge. Maybe it is just knowing all the ways throughout history in which people have been made to feel unworthy, untouchable for things which now make no sense to us, and, at the same time it continues for reasons that are similarly senseless.

The other parts of the book that seem amazing to me are psychic struggles that occur within Jean Valjean - first when he has stolen the Bishops silver plates, and, on being brought back by the police, the bishop has said that he gave them to Valjean, and then brings out his candlesticks as well, telling Jean Valjean that he had forgotten them. Valjean has been hardened by his experience of 19 years in the galleys for stealing bread and then trying to escape, and the battle is whether to hold on to his bitterness or to allow himself to feel goodness.

The next struggle is after he has established himself in a town, creating an enterprise which has enriched him as well as the town. But another man has been falsely identified as him and is about to be sent to the galleys for life for stealing apples, and another offense which Valjean had committed shortly after his release. So he struggles over whether he needs to turn himself in. In all these times his struggles were wrenching to me. These are common struggles - the process of change from a habitual way of feeling to one that allows more of life inside; the desire to shrink into the shadows.

While some of his characters may be exagerated, perhaps Javert is in his dogged, unquestioning respect for authority, law and the upper class, the depiction of what Valjean struggles with in his own mind seems extremely realistic to me.

in the Le Salon Litteraire du Peuple pour le Peuple which is currently discussing the book, there are some comments about the depiction of women in a stereotyped way, even though most of this is done in what seem to be favorable statements about women, such as "One of the generosities of women is to yield." To me it makes no difference or little difference whether the stereotyped statements are positive or negative - it is always negative to impose a view that denies a person their full humanity and Hugo, to my eye, is definitely guilty of that. Toward the end I was beginning to feel that it was turning into a happily ever after story, with Cosette, who'd been an interesting enough kids, turning into this woman ready to submerge herself in her husband, and leave the room when he and her father had important things to discuss. Sure that was the view of the time, but then we appreciate Hugo for the ways in which he was able to see beyond his time, not for the ways he was limited by it.

There was a lot too that was good about the depiction of the relationship between Marius and his grandfather, and his grandfather's treatment of Marius's father, though that got glossed over in the end.

As I read the book I was amazed at times by just how much Hugo seemed to know about conditions and events around the world. I don't know exactly when Marx's ideas became popular, but, Hugo discussed economic ideas that were similar and the problems of creating and distributing wealth. He seemed very familiar with political events in the United States, and elsewhere. I don't know about other writers who wrote about the difficulties of poverty at that time. Dickens was about that time. E.Nesbitt and Frances Burnett were writers of children's books who wrote about poverty in England perhaps 50 years later. If I compare him to Dickens he seems to me both more realistic and not so confused about class. Thinking of Oliver Twist one difference is that Oliver who had the audacity to ask for more never does actually steal - and he turns out to be of gentile birth. While bringing attention to the misery of the poor he's depicted as being able to rise above it, seemingly as a characteristic of his class. Hugo's depiction of poverty is a bit less of a fairy tale. Fantine does sleep with someone without marrying, so she has some responsibility for her fate, unlike Oliver, but she is is not villified for that, or depicted as a person of bad character. Jean Valjean really did steal the bread, and having done that, and suffered out of proportion for it, acquires a character that includes some hardening against the world.

I don't really have a summary for this discussion, except all in all it seems like a big and compassionate work. I liked it when I first read it and I still do.

This is a mystery post - as in genre. I ended up rereading Alone at Night by KJ Erickson because I couldn't remember if I had read it. And even though I remembered parts of the story as I read, it was still good the second time through. I would recommend her as a writer, and I am pleased as it looks like there are a couple by her that I haven't read.

I also picked up a book by Richard North Patterson, actually a two in one, Degree of Guilt and the Final Judgment. They are both quite good, and an exception to my usual mystery writers who tend more often than not to be women, and, more often than not to be British (including Scots, New Zealanders, etc). It looks like Patterson has written a large number of books.

Well, since I have started I guess I will diverse from mysteries and say something about the second book in the Children of Violence series by Doris Lessing which is A Proper Marriage. I haven't finished my rereading, but I will say that again - as in Martha Quest, the first book of the series, I am struck by how constrained the characters are from saying what they really want to say and acting as they really want to act, or even associating with or marrying who they want to associate with and marry. At the end of book 1 Martha drifted into a marriage, and now she is acting in the marriage the way she believes she should, which in large part means not acting like her mother, the complaining female.

One image which had stuck with me from reading the book years and years ago was of Martha and her friend running pregnant through a field during a sudden rain. There was the naturalness of that that was opposed later on by the artificiality and rigidity of a feeding schedule imposed on infants. I recall reading a book by Mary McCarthy once that went into this in some detail as well. But babies were to be nursed at four hour intervals and not through the night - everything that the literature on breastfeeding that I read when I was pregnant in 1977 said would make it very difficult to produce enough breast milk, besides the emotional harm of depriving babies of what they needed. And this was enforced through fear really. If you didn't stick to the schedule you were supposed to be doing your baby emotional harm. True to the la leche literature Martha began producing less milk and switched to a bottle very quickly. But there was that half an hour of so of reveling in their bodies in the rain.

I remember being pregnant and feeling a kind of exhibitionism about my body (it was subtle, no one would have known from the outside). One thing I did was sign up to be a model for an art class during that time. I thought people might like drawing a pregnant woman, and that perhaps someone would give me a drawing. Well, it turned out that my modeling day was the one when the instructor wanted the model to wear these paper mache bird heads that he had. There were some quick warm ups first, but most of the best drawings were with the bird's head, big bellied and aggressive looking. As an artist I thought they were interesting; as something to remember my pregnancy by, not.

2010 thread is here http://www.librarything.com/topic/79709