Maisie Dobbs

Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Somehow, I managed to read some of the later books before I read the first. This book explains a lot about the characters, especially Maurice and Billy, and how some of Maisie's techniques developed. Two good storylines, excellent writing, and an engaging introduction to a period in English history that may seem less dramatic than actual wartime, but shows the long-term effects on the military, the civilians, and the disparate socio-economic classes.

I listened to the audio in the car, and read the e-book where the audio left off at home. Gotta love technology!


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The Night Circus

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Reading this book was like exploring an impossibly-intricate pop-up book that had been cut by the most enchanted scherenschnitte artist who ever lived. The detail, delicacy, endlessly-fascinating characters and scenes and situations -- amazing.

You can read the plot details elsewhere. I'll add one comment: the only film director I would trust with this wonder is Jean-Pierre Jeunet, whose "Micmacs" and "Amelie" are filled with the gentle, magnetic magic this book deserves.


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How I Killed Pluto

How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming by Mike Brown
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Mike Brown is a fluent storyteller and a scrupulous scientist, whose insistence on a high standard of proof led to him nearly losing the credit for one of his discoveries. Who would think such skulduggery exists in the community of astronomers?


As a boy, Brown discovered his passion for planets when he noticed two moving, night after night, through the constellation Orion. "It's always hard not to feel that in some ways, for me at least, maybe the early astrologers were right: Perhaps my fate actually was determined by the position of the planets at the moment of my birth."


As he recounts the discovery of Pluto, and his own role in the wildly unpopular decision to decertify it as a planet, he describes his exploration of the cosmic ocean, wherein asteroids are "schools of minnows swimming among a pod of whales. Planets were the whales of the solar system." When the Kuiper Belt was discovered, he says, "Pluto and the Kuiper Belt were simply a previously overlooked collection of sardines swimming in a faraway sea."


The boy's interest in celestial motion grew into the man's quest to discover new objects in the relatively-unexplored area beyond Pluto. His tools ranged from an archive of photos from older telescopes that had imaged wide swaths of sky to the newest digital technology in telescopes and data manipulation.  The wider images were more likely to include artifacts from the process of creating glass plates, while the precision of digital imagery was offset by the relatively small expanse of sky that could fit in one image.


His first discovery, named Quaoar, was "a big icy nail in the coffin of Pluto as a planet." Only slightly smaller than Pluto, the chunk of icy methane was bound to be the first of many objects that would be larger than Pluto. Along the course of his discoveries he found Sedna (named for an Inuit goddess of the sea), Haumea (Hawaiian goddess of childbirth), Xena (with her satellite, Gabrielle!), and many other intriguing objects that began to fill in some of the creation story of the solar system.


He also found the aforementioned skulduggery: an Italian astronomer, who cyber-stalked his use of telescopes while he was tracking Xena, and tried to claim credit for the discovery, earning Keith Olbermann's dreaded soubriquet, "Worst Person in the World." The committee in charge of the naming conventions for new objects in the solar system were not always happy with the names he chose.  (Personally, I wish that some of his working names could have been kept. It would have been delightful to know that an object named Easterbunny hopped through the heavens.)


What is a planet? Must it be spherical? A certain size? A stint of teaching geology gave Brown a glimpse into the problems that exist in other disciplines. What is a continent? A big, coherent piece of land? How big? (In fact, he learned, some Europeans do not consider Australia a continent, Argentina teaches that North and South America are one continent, and New Zealand is on its own continental plate...)


Ultimately, Pluto, "everyone's favorite runt planet," was reclassified (along with newcomers Xena and Ceres) as a "dwarf planet." Brown calls the new rules "a slew of unscientific clutter," but agrees with the decision that continues to make Pluto lovers unhappy.


One day in 2004, he took time out from staring at large computer screens and looking for new and distant objects to look at a smaller screen: a sonogram of his daughter. "Hey," he said, "It looks like the Venera lander pictures of the surface of Venus." "You're insane," replied his wife.


"That night," he writes, "as the clock struck twelve, my five-year bet [with a colleague] came to an end. I lost the bet, but I didn't feel so bad. Instead of seeing the end of the solar system, I saw that everything was just beginning."


I loved every page of this book and recommend it to anyone who has ever looked at the night sky.



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The secret world of slugs and snails

The Secret World of Slugs and Snails: Life in the Very Slow Lane by David George Gordon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Now I know...

--what a wild snail eating sounds like: "... a cross between a bastard file and a chainsaw - like something out of Evil Dead II."

-- Some snails have elaborate mating rituals that involve kissing.

-- Speculation about Cupid's arrows in Greek mythology being inspired by the "love darts" that snails shoot into each other if they go the male/female route instead of using their hermaphroditic prowess.

-- that Darwin observed another scientist's experiment in which a sickly snail and its healthy partner were placed in an ill-provided garden. The healthy snail crawled away, over a wall, into a better garden. 24 hours later, it "returned and apparently communicated the result of its successful exploration, for both then started along the same track and disappeared over the wall."

-- That David George Gordon is one of the best nature writers ever.

Did you read The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating? Read this next. Really.




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A Jane Austen Education

A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter by William Deresiewicz
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Take one intellectual graduate student, force him to read  Emma, add one professor whose technique is styled as "stripping the paint off our brains," and mix in some Austen plot synopses. What do you get? In this case, you get a quasi-memoir-cum-appreciation of Jane Austen's major novels that (I believe) would make Austen wince and Oprah applaud.

Bleah.


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The Mind's Eye

The Mind's Eye by Oliver Sacks

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was a little less in love with this book than with his others - maybe I was uncomfortable with the immediacy of his own vision loss, since that hits closer to home than many of his other case studies? I don't know. I was fascinated, of course, with many of his patients, especially the ones who discussed stereo vs. mono vision, and the blind patients who disagreed with each other about whether they still used visual cues to navigate the world. 



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The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Wonderful, beautiful, quiet, contemplative, exciting, all small-scale and manageable, both for the author, whose snail arrived in her life during the early time of her convalescence from a debilitating illness, and the reader, who will focus and fall in love.

When did I fall in love with the snail? When it was so delighted by a slice of portobello mushroom that it slept with it, so that it could wake, nibble, and fall asleep again, perfectly content.

When did I fall in love with the book? Immediately on reading the first page and leafing through to see the soft-yet-accurate drawings of the snail.

I fell so in love with this author, this book, and this snail that I bought the ePub version after I returned the book to the library.


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Crossing Washington Square

Crossing Washington Square by Joanne Rendell


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
A hoot! Really well-written, funny, with digs at academe, and three love stories, including the awkward relationship between two very different but similarly-vulnerable women.

The premise of the novel highlights one of my soapbox issues: intellectual snobbery, especially at the expense of scholars (and ordinary folks) who take popular culture seriously. Rachel is a young scholar whose unexpected bestseller on popular women's fiction has earned her an invitation to teach at a prestigious Manhattan college. (Think Camille Paglia, younger and cuter, and definitely less frenetic.) Diana is a Plath scholar whose disdain for Rachel's specialty extends to Rachel herself.

Throw in celebrity twins, a Dylan Thomas-Ted Hughes womanizer, a trip to London, and truly-evocative descriptions of interiors (apartments, an airplane, an academic conference room) that utterly remove the distance between reader and story, and you have a very enjoyable read, indeed!

(My only regret? Alas, Rachel's book is not, ahem, in print. I'm sure I'd love it.)

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Louisa May Alcott, the woman behind Little Women

Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women by Harriet Reisen


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
If American Bloomsbury was the appetizer, then this book is the meal. Louisa May Alcott's father, Bronson Alcott, was a true American original: a deplorably-bad writer and a sensational orator who travelled the country speaking about Transcendentalism in-between living in disastrous utopian communities that were based more on philosophy than the mere, mortal details of farming and human nature.

Louisa's life flowed from that childhood, both the joyous (loving Henry David Thoreau) and the horrific (near-starvation and grisly poverty). Her talent for writing potboilers saved her and her family from the ruinous debts that had been incurred by Bronson's inability to provide for his family. However, not until she acceded to her family and editor's desire for her to write for children did she find the voice that would bring her unimaginable wealth and fame.

Harriet Riesen's book is nicely done - factual without droning, and admiring without doting. I greatly enjoyed the details of Louisa's trips overseas, partly because the writing is so wonderful, and partly because (warning: subjectivity ahead) it made me happy to know that Louisa had been happy.

(Note to Riesen's editor: Daisy and Demi were Meg's children, not Jo's. Ah well.)

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery


My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Elegance, from Webster's Online:A quality of refined gracefulness and good taste.

A hedgehog is elegant. Its spiny defenses are attached securely; they do not shoot in all directions to injure at random. Each spine is a dull camouflage, not garish or multicoloured like the feathers of a tropical parrot or the scales of a tropical fish. Predators and passers-by trot past apace.

Both Madame Michel and Paloma, the narrators of this novel, are hedgehogs in a ritzy Paris apartment building. Madame Michel, the concierge, appears to be a drab, slightly slow sterotype, a disguise that she has perfected over the years since her husband died. To the residents, she is a plodding prole: a presence to be summoned and directed, nothing more. To her diary, she reveals all: her autodidact past and her desperate need to hide a sensibility that encompasses Purcell to Tom Clancy. She needs to survive, and she writes of her need in prose that ranges from literary and witty to heartbreaking.

Paloma, a brilliant 12-year-old existentialist, studies manga, writes witty and erudite diaries, and plans to commit a flamboyant suicide when she reaches 13. Part sophisticate, part little girl, she writes a good deal about irritants (including her noisy older sister whose expensive schooling seems to be quite, quite pointless) and moments of grace, which, she hopes, might form an anodyne to her bleak world-view.

Were it not for a new tenant, Kakuro Ozu, these lives might have progressed (or detonated) according to their carefully-constructed camouflage. Ozu realizes quickly that each is not as she appears. The below-the-stairs drab is teased out by a reference to Anna Karenina, and the little girl soon finds that the concierge shares her own refined and cynical sensibility.

Since the stories of all three characters play out through the two diaries, I was happy to have listened to the audiobook. The two narrators capture the intelligence, wit, blindness, and grace behind characters who might have seemed too unappealing to follow long enough for a reader to glimpse, truly see, even though Ms. Barbery's writing is smooth and compassionate and - elegant.

How I long to read French well enough to read Barbery in the original!)

If I decide to re-learn French when I retire, my goal shall be to return to the Hedgehog. Even if I don't, I know I'll reread this book, slowly, spine of book (or glowing reader) in hand, teasing out the true spine of each character.




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The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane - Katherine Howe

Multiple timelines in a novel can be tricky. Each plot must be believable and developed on its own, and must mesh with and further the parallel narrative(s). A.S. Byatt's Possession and Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time are nearly perfect examples of how two intricate stories can weave one satisfying fabric.

Yes, reader: I do set high standards for literary gymnastics. The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane was a Barnes & Noble recommended selection, and I expected a lot. Since I have recommended the book to friends, you may infer that I enjoyed it and wanted my friends to enjoy it as well. True. Do not infer, however, that it meets the standards set by Byatt and Piercy. It does not.

The modern (1991) story in this novel introduces Connie Goodwin, a graduate student of early American history who is spending a summer cleaning out the house of her long-dead grandmother, and searching for a scholarly topic that will satisfy her advisor. The two projects meet and mesh when she discovers a small paper in a centuries-old Bible that bears the name "Deliverance Dane." Her curiosity about Deliverance leads her to propose the research as her project, and her advisor agrees.

In the late 17th century, Deliverance Dane lives in uneasy times as a wise woman and herbal healer whose potions and attention are sought after by the sick. She knows the danger of being accused as a witch if she should fail to heal one of her patients. When a child dies, she is accused, convicted, and hanged. Her daughter Mercy follows her mother's last wish: she escapes from the town, taking her mother's book of remedies and spells - the Physick Book - to continue the work of healing and comforting those in need.

Over the years, women descendants have less use for, or belief in, the magic and potions, as science and medicine replace the old ways. The book itself becomes a mere object to be cataloged amongst household effects. It is sold, and misplaced in some bureaucratic tangle.

The sights, smells, sounds, and aura of each dip into the past are both compelling and repugnant to the modern reader who is used to sanitized images of well-known events. We do not often see the horrific conditions of the imprisonment, where accused and convicted women were chained in deadly squalor. Howe shows us the truth without a single gratuitous moment, contrasting the evil of the good folk who used torture and death in the name of their religion - without mercy, without introspection, and without logic. Howe's scholarship is thorough, and woven into the plot with grace.

in the present, Connie's efforts to trace Deliverance in local church records and archives yield both facts and a new boyfriend, Sam, who works as a steeple jack, preserving local architecture. When Connie discovers the facts of Deliverance's death, and the possibility of the survival of the Physick book, she brings the information to her academic advisor. His excitement seems both disproportionate and strange, especially when he posits a question: "Have you not considered the distinct possibility that the accused were simply guilty of witchcraft?"

Connie is caught between what she has been trained to believe and this preposterous quesion. Can witchcraft and magic be true? Or, are they superstitions perpetrated by the ignorant and cruel? Her mother, Grace, always has believed in practical magic, and has practiced unscientific healing methods that have made Connie scoff. In addition, Connie has neither disclosed nor examined the physical shock she felt when she first touched the Bible, nor taken the mystical symbols that appeared on her grandmother's door seriously. Her advisor's demands and fixations become more troubling and vehement as her project progresses. How far from her dispassionate, scholarly path will she stray as she searches for the story, the book, and a solution to a mysterious and sudden crisis?

I think the author was wise to set Connie's story in 1991 rather than the present, where a few mouse clicks may have made Connie's legwork through the churches and archives unnecessary. The physical details of each building and record-keeper are vivid - more vivid than Connie herself. The old house she is cleaning has no electricity, so Connie illuminates the night with lanterns and candles. The advisor's odd behaviour conceals beliefs that are more strange than his apparent belief in the validity of the Salem verdicts. Sam is likeable, but pallid, Connie's dog is a loving companion (familiar?), and the reader is shown the academic and seaside beauty of Cambridge. Most of the present is convivial, almost cozy, in the way of some academic novels.

But - the two plotlines are not equal. The world of Deliverance and Mercy is vivid and compelling; Deliverance and Mercy are real characters whose emotions are true. Connie's story is - well - meh. It seems a contrivance to bracket the past. Her research, love affair, and demented advisor are pale and paltry compared to the life-and-death struggles caused by ignorance in the past. And -- if the author is going to use magical realism, it has to appear with more consistency, and less as deus ex machina. (I found myself thinking "more cowbell.")
Why, then, do I recommend this book to friends and all? Simple : it's fun to read. Just don't expect Byatt or Piercy.

Note: if you wish to learn about the persecution of witches from the view of the social, economic, historical, and feminist issues that doubtless underpinned the pious religious prattle, read Never Again the Burning Times by Loretta Orion.

The Chosen One

Last night, I read the ARC of The Chosen One by Carol Lynch Williams that I received from Julie at Booking Mama. I intended only to read a chapter or two, but I read it at one gulp. Young Kyra, only 13 years old, lives in a locked compound led by The Prophet, and policed by The God Squad. The members of this religious group practice polygamy and believe that the word of The Prophet is the ultimate authority on earth. Although Williams avoids labelling the sect, her descriptions of the families, with women in long dresses and braided hair, call to mind the offshoot-LDS group depicted in "Big Love."

Kyra has a questioning nature, and has already begun to question the strict rules about reading books other than scripture, the rules that prevent her from calling outside doctor for her ailing, pregnant birth mother, the rules that require child abuse in the name of discipline - and, especially, the rules about the relations between men and women. She has been rebellious, as far as possible, by visiting a bookmobile, and by kissing a boy from the compound, but she is a loving daughter to all of her mothers, and to all of her siblings.

Her rebellion turns to panic when The Prophet decrees that she has been chosen to become the seventh wife of Uncle Hyram, gentle father's brutal, 60-year-old brother. Although her father pleads with The Prophet and his brother, Kyra is told that she must marry, or face disasters worse than the brutal beating she is given by The Prophet's enforcers. She knows that her family, also, will be punished severely by The God Squad, which not only delivers beatings, but is known to have murdered those who disobey or try to run.

The Chosen One is considered a teen novel, but Kyra's story is so riveting, so realistically-written, that anyone could read it and be caught up in her choices as the one chosen to live a life she never would choose for herself.

Thank you, Booking Mama, for sending me this book.

The Forest Lover

Emily Carr was a Canadian painter whose work was radically different from all other Canadian painters of her time. Not only did she choose Native subjects to paint - notably, totem poles - but she travelled alone through forests, Native villages, either on foot or via inland waterways, at a time when women's art was limited to delicate watercolours.

After Ms.Carr studied in France, learning about the post-Impressionists and Fauvist artists, her art changed dramatically as she began to add bold use of colour to her previously-representational style. Initially, critics were hostile, not only to her subject matter, but also her technique. It took many years for her to be recognized for her talent and prescience in selecting subjects that were, already, being destroyed by man and by time.

The Forest Lover is fiction, not biography. As fiction, most of it works well, taking the reader through the ecstasy of creativity and the despair of having one's art and oneself marginalized. As I read, I was swept into the extreme discomfort of Carr's travels and the joy of discovering the ancient meanings of the totem poles and Native rituals. I was happy to discover that some of the characters, especially the Squamish basket maker, Sophie Frank, were real people whose friendship helped to sustain Ms. Carr. The only characters and events in the book that did not work well for me were the parts that were purely imaginary - for example, the love interest, who never existed.

Vreeland herself writes: "...in order to show, and not merely report, certain aspects of Emily's character and history, particularly her difficultly with intimacy, I found it necessary to invent a man. I wish she hadn't.

If you decide to read The Forest Lover (and I hope you do), be prepared to want to know more about the woman, to see more of her paintings, and to search out all of Vreeland's novels about art. This book is that good.

Casting Spells

Sugar Maple, Vermont, is a lovely town that is distanced from the evils of the world as most of us know it - a haven for ordinary people who welcome tourists to their shoppes, the inn, the playhouse, the library, and the storybook charms of quaint New England.

Chloe Hobbs, owner of Sticks & Strings, provides tourists and townies with yarn, knitting instruction, and the kind of hand-knitted sample items that can tempt even the most stash-stuffed knitter to open her purse. Every knitter knows that Chloe's store is the place "where your yarn never tangles, your sleeves always come out the same length, and you always, always get gauge." Sounds perfectly magical, doesn't it?

Well, it is, and it isn't. Actually, the town has flourished as a haven for ordinary-looking people who only drop their mortal mufti amongst themselves, when their true natures and skills can shine -- and a diverse group it is, what with the werewolves, selkies, wizards, faeries, shape-shifters, poltergeists, vampires, and trolls.

Other businesspeople in Sugar Maple are free to use their powers to create the inviting enchantments that delight tourists. (Productions at the Sugar Maple Arts Playhouse are easy to cast, since all of the actors are shapeshifters!) But Chloe, the product of a mixed marriage between a sorceress and a mortal man seems to have inherited no magic at all. Not a whit of it.

Chloe's friends are eager to get her married, hoping that she, like her sorceress mother, will find her magic when she falls in love. The townspeople are concerned about Chloe as well. As the only female descendant of the sorceress who enchanted the town and kept the magic folk safe for centuries, it is Chloe's presence that ensures the integrity of the spell.

But the spell has been weakening for awhile. Its vulnerability has been proven by the drowning death of a lovely young woman who had just purchased a delicate shawl from Chloe. This brings another threat to the town: a handsome hunk of a policeman from Outside, sent to investigate the death.

Chloe's friends have failed to find a suitable partner for her, try as they might: there had been neither magic nor chemistry between Chloe and the troll, or the selkie whose breath smelled like smoked salmon. But - when Chloe meets the hunk and shakes his hand, sparks fly - literally - and true magic enters Chloe's life.

A subplot about a power-hungry, purple-glitter-shedding faery and her desire to own the Book of Spells that was left to Chloe causes additional tension. Chloe's house is destroyed by the faery's warring sons. ("How was I going to explain this to State Farm?" she worries. Luckily, she doesn't have to, since her house is restored by morning, as if by wizardry.) (Or, by wizardry.) A town meeting about the weakening spell brings out all of the residents, including old vampires who have to insert their false teeth before they wheelchair it out into the night, an itinerant house sprite, a punked-out faery with tats and a pink iPod "permanently set too stun," and a witch who tells Chloe that "Banshees are imaginary."

(This same witch, observing Chloe in a startled moment, says "you look like you've just seen a ghost." Chloe laughs until she cries. So did I.)

Let's just say that this book delighted me, and will delight you. Trust me.

• One cavil: Why did the town's librarian have to be a troll? Don't we librarians have enough of an image problem?? Barbara reminded me that Lilith is a glam troll with gorgeous red hair. True...It's also true that she utters the funniest line in the whole book.
  

The Sea, the Sea - Iris Murdoch

"Is the future post-emergent?" is a sub-heading of an article on religious publishing that I read this afternoon. Skimmed, really. It's hard to focus when you have to get past sentences like "What will the next stage of emergent look like?" -

I just emerged from The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch. Usually, I don't get too far into novels whose characters are despicable, uninteresting, and/or hollow. I felt that way about almost everyone in the book, beginning with Charles, an English actor, egocentric and anal, who has retired to an old house by the sea. To say that Charles is an unreliable narrator would be a giggle-worthy understatement.

Into his picturesque refuge comes a cast of friends, lovers, and relatives - the very people he had intended to leave behind - like so many hungry ghosts. (They are, indeed, hungry. Charles sends them out for food and ruminates on his precious culinary philosophies. Should one should serve apricots dried or hydrated? Charles knows.) They troop in and out of the house like so many stock characters in mediocre plays - all except the one he longs for, his long-lost muse.

Charles may believe that his best role as an actor was Prospero, but I came to think of him as a donkey-headed fool, whose ego and cowardice are far more dangerous (and pathetic) than the brawn of any Caliban.

How did I get past this miserable lot of characters? I realized that the voice of the main character in the book does not belong to Charles. It is the voice of the sea: eternal, self-renewing, non-judgemental - and dangerous when taken for granted.

(Setting-as-character is not that unusual. I just read Rebecca, after all. Isn't Manderley itself a character?)

The Sea, the Sea is structured as Charles's diary and autobiography. Past and present jumble as his guests and his own misapprehensions become as entangled as eel grass. As a narrator, he is quintessentially unreliable because everything, whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, means nothing except as it relates to him. You can trust his descriptions of the sea and the cliffs, but what lies beneath?

After I read this novel, I learned that I am not alone in not being able to latch onto the characters. Others also have found the characters less humans than philosophical principles with shoes.

Still, post-emergent, I find myself thinking about the book from the viewpoint of Charles's cousin James, a soldier and a student of Tibetan Buddhism. James tells Charles about the Bardo, the limbo between life and death, where facing and accepting one's own monsters can free one to enter the realm of the Buddhas, symbolized by the mandala.

When Charles retired from his theatrical life - died, in the eyes of his old world - he sought clarity, but he sought it within his own ego. Does Charles have the humility - or humanity! - to create his own post-emergent future?

(Yes, by the way, I loved the book.)