The Thin Red Line

Sometimes, it seems to me, Rita Mae Brown is simply out to taunt me.  It was if she had somehow heard (or perhaps read) my wish that she write again about the old Runnymeade gang, and give us a break from all those mysteries, which Brown has been cranking out exclusively of late.  So I was initially thrilled when I spotted Ms. Brown’s name in the New Fiction stacks.  But I was struck immediately at what a very small book it is, a mere 102  four by five inch pages.  A longish short story or a very brief novella,  the entire action takes place in a single August day in 1952.  Julia (Juts) and her sister Louise  (Wheezie) Hunesnemeir, the former’s daughter, Nicole (Nickel) and the latter’s orpahaned grandson, Leroy,  are the only characters.

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I’ve long been a huge Larry McMurtry fan.   While I don’t care for the Western genre and was never able to get into Lonesome Dove or any of his other westerns, I have very greatly enjoyed his novels about modern day Texans.   My all time favorite is The Evening Star which was a sequel to Terms Of Endearment.    I have also greatly enjoyed his sequence of novels about Duane Moore of the fictional Thalia, Texas which began in 1966 with The Last Picture Show and continued with Texasville in 1987,  Duane’s Depressed in 1999 and finally in 2007 with When The Light Goes.  It was thrilling to me to return for a few hours to McMurtry’s Texas and I say without hesitation that this volume finds McMurtry at the top of his form as a novelist.

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When I first started this blog I remember hanging out on Blog Catalog and it always seemed I was talking to people who were facing writers block or unable to think of topics to post about and generally struggling to regularly publish a blog.    And I would look at the huge stack of books on my couch and think to myself, ‘at least I don’t have _that_ problem.

And let me say right off that my stack of books is as tall as ever,  so I can’t really use that as an excuse for my recent lack of posts.   Honestly I don’t know why I have been spending my time lately playing games and watching television and even reading books rather than posting and promoting my blog.   Sometimes, I suspect, you just need a mental break.  Having recharged my inner batteries I hope to on Monday resume my five posts per week and thought I would ease back into things by posting today about three great books I’ve read during my hiatus.

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OK.   So first off I got confess that now that I am officially middle aged I don’t actually ride roller coasters anymore.   But  Joel was a huge Disney fan and I have been to Disneyland as an adult an inordinate number of times for a non parent.   And time was that I loved the roller coasters most of all and always looked forward to these Southern California trips.  And it was that younger me that was so entranced by the cover of Richard Barth’s novel Jumper, A Mystery.

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First, my thanks to Techfun for suggesting this one to me.   It’s taken me an awful long time to read it but I have and I’m glad I did.   In Friday’s post I pointed out that art can be much more effective than traditional in conveying complex realities.   I believe that A Thousand Splendid Suns is an excellent example of a novel that conveys the complex and messy truths of the real life story through novels that, imho, do a better job than history books sometimes in educating a mind about a particular place and peoples.    I previously posted about Gary Geddes’  Kingdom Of Ten Thousand Things which touches briefly on the plight of present day Afghanistan before rushing off to pursue a very different main theme.

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It was a stroke of serendipity that I happened on the same day awhile back to stumble on both Mandy MacDonald’s Culture Smart Cuba and Nancy Alonso’s Closed For Repairs on the same day.    It seems to me that we mostly hear about Cuba only in terms of the political agendas of some wealthy Miamians who have an agenda and the various other political players who have to play with or against them.     What is sadly lacking is any reporting that sheds light on the real lives of the remarkable Cuban people whose struggles and in spite of the United States continuing embargo are creating a new path for themselves.

The Culture Smart guide is one of a series of titles that attempts to give travelers to poorly understood parts of the world a base understanding of the people, cultures and pressing local issues they will encounter.  The guides also seek to give the traveler the knowledge  and confidence to veer of the well trod tourist path and allow himself to meaningfully interact with the people whose country he is visiting.

By contrast Havana author Nancy Alonso’s Closed For Repairs, a selection of eleven fictionalized vignettes of Cuban’s dealing with the realities of life under the US embargo from planting vegetable gardens in pots  in urban apartments to dealing with the sometimes dysfunctional transportation and distribution facilities.   This English translation by Anne Fountain is available from Curbstone Press.   Combined with the somewhat more marketing oriented Culture Smart volume, Alonso’s front line reportage on the lives of work a day Cubans provides a rare opportunity for an informed glimpse about a part of the world so close by but in such a real sense so far, far away from the US.   Both are Highly Recommended.

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Happy Monday!   Starting off the week with a Monday Mystery.    In Rita Mae Brown’s last Mrs. Murphy (my review) the mystery formula was marred by the use of the issue of illegal immigration to make political points that seemed distasteful and out of place in one of my favorite mystery series.    So I was a bit anxious on discovering that the new Mrs. Murphy story is framed around the even more volatile issue of abortion,  but this time out Ms. Brown has produced a highly entertaining page turner that I literally read in one sitting.   Couldn’t put it down.

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Long time readers of this blog already know that I am just a huge little kid when it comes to the circus and an enormous fan of Gary Jennings extraordinary Spangle trilogy chronicling a traveling circus troupe in the American south and in Europe in the years immediately following the Civil War.  So when I recently scanned Sara Gruen’s Water For Elephants with the striking illustration of the man in the brilliantly spangled long coat entering a circus top, I knew instantly that I would have to read and blog about this one.    The tale of Jacob Jankowski, a 93 year old nursing home resident who is sick of the bland food and bland life who recalls his youth as a veterinarian on a traveling circus in the American Midwest during the Great Depression.

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It almost feels like a cheat to blog about a book I first read more than twenty years ago, but the fact is the past few days I have been ignoring three new novels awaiting my attention (including Water For Elephants, which I really want to read) in order to re-read for the bazzillionth time John Kennedy Toole’s comic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces.   So rather than attempt to write what would be yet another paean to what is already a well-known and well-loved novel  OR tease out three paragraphs of  on the stories of having met Toole’s mother at a speech and reading she gave at Dominican College in New Orleans (where Toole himself had been on the faculty prior to his suicide) and the errrrr unforgettable experience of seeing the work produced as a MUSICAL at LSU in Baton Rouge.  

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I honestly can’t recall when I first read Gone With The Wind or saw the movie.    Growing up in the South it seems as though I have always somehow been a fan of Margaret Mitchell’s iconic novel of the Civil War and David O. Selznick’s epic screen adaptation.    Although I, personally, was never at all sure, most women I knew believed with all their hearts  that Scarlett O’Hara Hamilton Butler would win back her husband who so famously "didn’t give a damn" once she went home to Tara and tomorrow turned into "another day."     And after reading Donald McCaig’s extraordinary novel Rhett Butler’s People,  I can say with certainty that those women were right.

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If you are not already a Robert Heinlein fan, Grumbles From The Grave is Not the place to start. A collection of Heinlein’s private correspondence edited by Heinlein’s widow Virginia, Grumbles is an extraordinary glimpse into the life of an exceptional author and a no-holds-barred look at the Business of writing.

Fans of Heinlein’s fiction may not be surprised to learn that the character he most resembled in real life is Jubal Harshaw in Stranger In A Strange Land, the unsentimental writer who makes a very comfortable living giving his editors and readers Exactly what they Want. From his very first efforts writing for Heinlein was first and foremost a business. He quickly developed a canny understanding of what editors want and will pay for and he Always gave them exactly that. He sold a Lot of books and made a Lot of money from writing which is something that is not easy to do. (Much like in the performing arts the huge money superstars like Heinlein are the rare exception to the sad fact that most writers and artists earn very little for their efforts, even when they are good.)

The flower power generation for whom Heinlein’s books and particularly Stranger, which became a kind of bible to them, were a rite of passage must read may be disappointed to learn that all of his writing about sexual liberation and plural marriages was written because it was a story they would buy and not because Heinlein particularly believed in it. By all accounts he had a very conventional and faithful marriage which bore much resemblance to the sort of marriage good boys from Missouri around the turn of the century were expected to make and keep to, rather than any of the muti-amorous arrangements with emotional depth that Heinlein was so noted for in his later works of adult science fiction.

In addition to hard core Heinlein fans this book is Highly Recommended to aspiring writers, those who are interested in earning an income from writing rather than those who write as art. While the publishing scene today is certainly very different than that prevailing when Heinlein wrote this correspondence with his various editors and agents, this inside look at how Heinlein handled the Business of being a writer can provide a number of invaluable lessons to anyone trying to earn money by typing words on a screen.

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I was a high school senior in 1981 when John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire was first published. I remember reading the first chapter or so while standing at a display in the entrance way of a bookstore at Lakeside Mall in Metairie Louisiana, sometime in the fall and putting the book at the very Top of my Christmas list.

In those days we celebrated on the 25th with my father’s side of the family, then on the 26th we piled into the car and drove about two hours to Baton Rouge to celebrate with my mother’s side of the family, where we did the entire presents galore and grand banquet routine all over again. Christmas two days in a row. Those were the days.

And so it was as the bloated company settled onto couches to watch football or nap, I dived into the present I had been waiting for and by the time dusk fell and it was time to begin the drive back home I had read fully half of Irving’s tale of the believably bizarre Berry family from Dairy New Hampshire who convert an abandoned school into a hotel, then toss aside their lives to move to Vienna, Austria to operate a hotel with a blind Jewish animal trainer who knows Nothing about the hotel business. And thus began a love affair with John Irving’s fiction that endures to this day.

Recently I was shelving in Biography when I happened upon a copy of Irving’s memoir The Imaginary Girlfriend, which somehow despite being an Irving fan I had never seen before. It’s a light and short read, at most the third the pages and emotional heft of an Irving novel. Many circumstances and settings disclosed in Irving’s memoir have strong parallels in his fiction, his own struggles with dyslexia as a faculty brat at an elite prep school mirror much of the narrator’s struggle with dyslexia and his friendship with the odd scholarship boy, Owen Meany and his year abroad in Vienna clearly foreshadowed that city’s major presence in both Hotel New Hampshire and The World According to Garp.

If Hotel New Hampshire was the book where I discovered John Irving the storyteller, The Cider House Rules was my introduction to John Irving the passionate and eloquent advocate. The story of Dr. Wilbur Larch, an idealistic young obstetrician sent by the Maine Board of Medical Examiners to establish an orphanage in remote rural St. Cloud is in my opinion the most sustained and eloquent argument for allowing women Choice in the matters of pregnancy. While Larch and his staff sometimes refer to "the Lord’s work" and "the Devil’s work" to distinguish between operating rooms being used for deliveries (an orphan) or abortions but privately they all agreed that it was All "The Lord’s Work". For they had all seen the horrible and often deadly and irreparable harm from back alley and DIY abortificants women turned to when they didn’t have the choice of taking the train to St. Cloud’s and asking for the orphanage.

All of rich and detailed characterization and finely detailed plotting that characterized his earlier work was still there but now he is channeling Dickens inveighing against work houses and the novel succeeds as both as art and as political treatise.

Irving’s blending of art and advocacy reached its apex in my opinion in A Prayer For Owen Meany, a long and eloquent answer to the Vietnam War, as well as a novel rich in themes such as childhood, loss, faith and friendship. The story of John Wheelright, the Torronto English teacher at a religious girl’s boarding school and the earlier years of his life, back when his life had evolved around his very unusual best friend, Owen Meany growing up in Gravesend New Hampshire in the 1950’s and coming of age in the Vietnam War era.

As always, Owen Meany is richly plotted with more twists and turns than you would ever expect in a prep school company town. Or maybe you would. I never went to prep school so I don’t really know. I do know that John Irving is one of the great novelists of our era who will in time be properly mentioned in the same breath as Dickens and Mark Twain when the subject is great novelists in English.

If you’re already a fan, do yourself a favor and re-read a John Irving, you’ll be agog all over again how good it is. And if you haven’t already read these books. GO! TO THE LIBRARY!! NOW!!! and get started. Not To Be Missed.

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Most people know Orson Scott Card as a science fiction writer. And now, I do as well. But my first experience reading Card came about in 1993. I was staying overnight with friends in Baltimore en route to that year’s March On Washington for Gay & Lesbian Civil Rights and my friend Carla, who has since made a name for herself as a science fiction writer and comic artist and whom I’ve sadly lost touch with, told me about a book she had recently read and lent me her copy.

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La Grande, Oregon is not a very exciting place. I don’t remember just why my late partner, Joel, and I were in town that night, although we visited it many times in the course of exploring every corner of Oregon for pleasure and to research a guide book we never got around to writing. But I vividly remember La Grande as the place where I first encountered Diane Mott Davidson’s series of mystery books about Goldy Schulz, a Tough Cookie who’s a caterer married to a homicide detective in Aspen Meadow, a suburb of Denver, Colorado. I had wandered into the La Grande Safeway late one evening to pick up a few things, including something to read since I’d finished reading everything I’d brought with me on the trip.

Sticks & Scones proved to be an excellent choice. A fairly standard genre mystery in a blend of the amateur detective and police procedural varieties, the story of Goldy and her Goldilock’s Catering Company (Where Everything Is Just Right!!) catering a series of events at nearby Hyde Castle, an actual castle from Scotland that rich owners with more money than sense have had shipped to and re-assembled brick by brick in Aspen Meadow, is a tasty adventure.

In every volume of Goldy’s adventures the menu for the important party or banquet where, inevitably, a murder sends party plans askew, is lovingly rendered on the first page of the book and recipes for these and other dishes are either included periodically throughout the text at a point when that particular dish is mentioned in the earlier volumes or in more recent volumes in an appendix after the novel.

And what recipes! Scaled for the home cook and with specific information about ingredients and sources for anything you can’t find at your nearest supermarket, Goldy’s recipes always make my mouth water. I won’t say exactly that reading Davidson’s books causes weight gain in and of itself, but if reading about Goldy’s cooking doesn’t make you hungry and send you straight to the kitchen to whip something up, I will say that you don’t care much about cooking delicious food.

As Goldy and her son, Arch– a troubled pre-teen suffering through his parents divorce in the early books who comes into his own young manhood as the series progresses, along with catering assistant Julian, best-friend and local gossip queen Marla serve up the most sumptuous vittles before inevitably stumbling upon a murder at a major party, it provides a framework that Davidson uses very well to spin her tales of murder investigations and creme brulees and lots and lots of cookies and cappucinos.

So it is with great pleasure that I announce here on The Thin Red Line that Davidson’s latest Goldy titled Sweet Revenge is now available at a library near you. That the murder in this one takes place at the local library, where Goldy has been hired to cater an employee breakfast, makes this one especially dear to me. I’ve only just started to read but am as always quickly drawn into the world of fancy parties, Episcopal church women’s gossip and fast-paced adventure Davidson is renowned for. So if you are a foodie or a mystery lover who appreciates good suspense novels, do yourself a favor and head to the mystery stacks and check out Diane Mott Davidson.

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Robert A. Heinlein

There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Usually spoken as the acronym TANSTAAFL (pronounced Tan-staffle) it is the national motto of Luna, the Earth’s moon, which in the 2100’s is thriving as an independent nation-state. Dr. Richard Ames (aka Colonel Colin Campbell) is a resident of Golden Rule, a luxury space habitat orbiting Luna. While dining late one evening at one of the habitat’s classiest and priciest restaurants with Miss Gwen Novak (aka Hazel Stone), a man comes to their table and delivers a cryptic message. The mysterious messenger is immediately killed by a poison dart and is quickly and mysteriously whisked away by extraordinarily well-timed waiters.

So begins The Cat Who Walked Through Walls, my first exposure to the science fiction of Robert A. Heinlein. In the following 24 hours Campbell and Stone will fall in love, marry, disarm and kidnap a man sent to assassinate them, are evicted from their apartments on Golden Rule, accused of a murder and barely escape from the habitat, disguised as a Japanese woman and her samurai in a rent-a-wreck Spaceship from Hertz.

What appealed to me most about this book, at a time when I thought that I did not like science fiction, because I neither understood or appreciated the science in most science fiction, was that with Heinlein it never mattered. Heinlein was a master story teller and entertainer and his books were always written such that you neither had to know nor be able to understand the science behind the plot, although he always explained it. And the explanations were always easily understandable even to the non-scientist.

Suffice it to say that the newlywed’s marriage does not get any less zany or frantic in an adventure that will take them to the other end of the galaxy, several thousand years into the future and back and end ambiguously with them in a fight for their lives attempting to save a computer named Adam Selene, a computer said to have “woken up” and become sentient. If you enjoy a fast paced, comic adventure story this one is Highly Recommended.

Equally frenetic and comic in it’s way, Friday is the story of an artificial person or AP, named Marjorie Baldwin who works as a combat courier for a mysterious un-named quasi governmental espionage agency. Created in a laboratory from various genetic materials, artificial persons (”my father was a test tube, my mother was a gene knife”) are designed to be and in fact Are completely, beautifully, fully human. Exceptional intelligence, strength and other abilities enable them to do all sorts of otherwise impossible jobs. Because their unique and amazing abilities are resented, AP’s are often regarded as super-human or less-than-human and are widely reviled in society. Most hide their status and often claim to be orphans when asked about their parents.

Thus Heinlein is able to work in some pretty sophisticated social commentary on prejudice and discrimination without ever mentioning black vs white or any other real life examples of discrimination which might inflame animosities or make it appear that he was taking sides. This novel also provides examples of the types of plot and scenarios that earned Heinlein a reputation as a “sexual libertarian”– group marriages and casual promiscuity are presented in a tone that is clearly proscriptive rather than judgmental. This theme of sexual liberty would appear again in many other Heinlein works including Time Enough For Love and To Sail Beyond The Sunset. Highly Recommended.

Stranger in a Strange Land, widely regarded as a hippie “bible”, and considered by some of the free love generation as a religion or at least a life plan manual, is the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a human born on Mars and raised by Martians after his human parents and the rest of their space exploration team perished. A subsequent space ship arrives and spirits the now fully grown off-spring back to earth and things quickly get antic in the classic Heinlein manner.

Due to a peculiarity in Earth’s inheritance laws and the terms of the contract under which the ship carrying his parents was sent to Mars, Mr. V. M. Smith is legally the owner of all mineral, development and other rights for Mars. The fact that Mars actually belongs to the Martians quite escapes the pompous governmental flunkies, business executives, slimy television preachers and reporters of every stripe who are all insistently drawn to the Man From Mars. He quite fails to understand what all of the fuss is about. You see, he thinks in Martian. And that makes quite a difference.

Brought from the returning space ship to a hospital to recover from space sickness and adjust to Earth’s much heavier gravity, Mike displays a number of extraordinary behaviors, such as slipping into a catatonic trance when nervous or excited. Spirited from the hospital by a kind-hearted nurse who sees the dangers implied by the many people desperately trying to sneak in to see her patient the two take refuge with one of Heinlein’s most memorable upper-middle aged male curmudgeons, Dr. Jubal Harshaw (who also appears in several other Heinlein novels).

In an extremely clever maneuver orchestrated by Harshaw, Smith appoints Joseph Douglass, Secretary General of the Federation of Free States, Earth’s de facto planet-wide government, as his agent, thus neutralizing the threat of his many sycophants and shifting it onto Douglass, who in a manner prescient of Ronald Reagan’s government run by Nancy and her astrologer is guided in all things by his wife Alice, the classic power behind the throne.

Thus shielded from the dangers of his exceptional wealth, Mike begins the process of learning human language and culture and does so at an astonishing rate. Mike consumes entire encyclopedias as quickly as most people read dime store novels. After a season of learning, Mike sets off with Jill, the nurse who spirited him from the hospital, and sets out to work as a sideshow magician with a traveling carnival. His Martian-taught ability to move, create and destroy matter by Thought (Martian’s find the exertion expended by humans to do such things physically strange and pitiable) enable him to produce some amazing effects but his lack of showmanship dooms the act to failure.

Learning from his mistakes and inspired by the lead preacher of The Fosterites, a religious sect that might be described as Mormons go Vegas, Mike earns a Divinity degree and starts his own church. He teaches his followers to speak, then read, then think in Martian and his church is a wild success, with rituals and practices that are at once familiar and utterly foreign to readers familiar with modern day Christianity. In a very Christ-like finale Mike marches unafraid into a pack of hostile rowdies who kill him. His followers retrieve his body and take it home to eat, thus closing the circle of life in the Martian way.

Stranger In A Strange Land introduced into the vernacular, “I am only an egg”, an expression of the individual’s insignificance in comparison to the group and of the long road of learning required to become an elder, which for a Martian means watching and learning from the world around him until so much is grokked that the next stage of growth is not just possible, it is inevitable. Which brings us finally to the word grok, Heinlein’s most unusual and enduring contribution to the language. Because I do not speak Martian, I do not yet grok grok. For me, waiting is not yet filled. If after reading the book, you too fail to grok grok, Wikipedia may be of some help. Highly recommended, particularly to anyone who ever was or ever wanted to be a hippie.

(c) 2007 Alan L. Jobe

Grateful thanks to JD whose encyclopedic knowledge of Heinlein and skillful editing allowed this post to be written in one third the time at double the quality.

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This post should make you afraid. Very afraid. Although if you are middle-aged or elderly AND white AND rich AND do not have children, you might be able to safely ignore it. Dale C. Carson is a former Miami police officer, former FBI agent and currently a criminal defense attorney. In Arrest-Proof Yourself he paints a very frightening picture of the current state of the criminal justice system, although not for the sorts of reasons you might expect.

According to Carson, violent and serious crime is down substantially due to mandatory sentencing laws such as ‘three strikes’ and police now actively enforce many laws that at one time would have been over-looked. Further he states that since the implementation of federalized criminal records databases the fact of an arrest, for anything, even if the charges are subsequently dismissed or you are acquitted of any wrong doing will follow you for life, no matter where you go. Where in an earlier era it would have been possible to get a clean start by moving away from the location where your criminal record remained on paper in a filing cabinet, you may find your career and other life opportunities severely restricted by the on-line arrest record that many employers will be able to view.

Carson goes on to state that while the police do a good job of catching serious criminals, they spend the vast bulk of their time enforcing misdemeanor laws, most often arresting poor and minority miscreants who pose no threat to the society and who’s minor mis-deeds would be more appropriately and economically handled as civil matters. He argues that this constant churning of the poor through the criminal justice system, which is largely paid for by the families of those arrested in the form of bail, attorney’s fees, fines and probation fees is the major reason for the persistence of poverty.

The bulk of the book is devoted to very specific advise on how to avoid contact with the police and what to say, do and not do if you do have contact with the police in order to minimize your chances of be arrested. Much of the advise is common sense and seemed both reasonable and obvious to me– drive the speed limit, don’t carry drugs, dress appropriately; if contacted by the police provide your name and offer your ID and then SHUT UP. Do not consent to a search of your vehicle.

Other parts of the advice seemed absurd but may in fact be appropriate: if you have a teenager who drives, Carson advises you to remove the back seat of the car, have the trunk lid welded shut and fill the glove compartment, cup holders, map holders and any other nooks and crannies in which drugs or other contraband might be hidden with a hardening foam and placing in the car a signed affidavit stating that you have altered the car in this way to insure that no drugs or contraband may be hidden in it and authorizing police to search the car, remove the foam and pop the trunk should they suspect that drugs or other contraband are hidden in the car. This struck me as way over the top, but honesty I don’t know. Fearfully Recommended.

In sharp contrast to the current day manual for surviving the criminal justice system that reads like a dystopian fantasy, today’s other book selection paints a very different picture of police work from an earlier era. Published in 1956, Cop Hater is the first of the 87th Precinct novels by Ed McBain (a pseudonym for Evan Hunter). This series revolves around the police detectives in a particular precinct in an un-named fictitious city which is evocative of New York. The series hook is that the precinct itself is the central character with different officers taking the lead roles in each volume and stepping into the background but still visible in other installments. The wildly successful series is up to 50 books at this writing with additional volumes forthcoming.

A fairly standard mystery in the standard police procedural format, the principle appeal of the book to me was the 1950’s milieu and the older, less technological workings of the investigations of genuine bad guys and the absence of the of the excessively bureaucratic harassment and abuse of harmless miscreants that figured so prominently in the Carson book. Recommended.

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A rainbow can be glimpsed through the Seattle Center fountain

The summer I was seven or eight years old my mother’s appendix burst and while she was in the hospital I was sent to Baton Rouge to stay for a few weeks with my Aunt Katherine and Uncle Bob. While most of the country was engrossed it the Watergate hearings that summer, my two passions were soaking in the kiddie pool my aunt set up on the patio and watching the new tv show Match Game every afternoon. And I’ve been a fan of Fannie Flagg ever since.

Most everyone is familiar with Fried Green Tomatoes At The Whistlestop Cafe, which is wonderful and I was titillated to read of her affair with Rita Mae Brown in Brown’s memoir Rita Will, but it wasn’t until I started working for the library that I discovered some of her later books, which have become my favorites. Yesterday I happened to shelve Standing In The Rainbow , which is the story of Neighbor Dorothy of Elmwood, Missouri– a "radio homemaker" who broadcasts daily from her living room. Accompanied by her mother-in-law on the organ and with occasional interruptions from her son Bobby, who more or less grows up on the air, Dorothy Smith provides an intimate and chatty hour filled with recipe exchanges, domestic advice, and personal bits about her family. Over the years Neighbor Dorothy becomes a real friend to the women in her area who tune in faithfully every day. The novel is richly plotted and beautifully written. A wonderful read.

Can’t Wait To Get To Heaven is a sequel to Standing In The Rainbow that continues the story of the people in Elmwood, Missouri some years after Neighbor Dorothy’s death. This time the action centers around 80 year old Elner Shinfissle, who one morning falls off a ladder, is taken to the hospital and dies. We are alternately treated to short vignettes of various people reacting to the news of her passing and scenes in which Elner ascends into Heaven, where she meets her old friend Neighbor Dorothy. Dorothy and Elner have a wonderful visit, and then Dorothy gives her visitor a slice of most delicious cake and tells her she has to go home now. Elner then wakes up in the morgue and things really get wild. Quite possibly Flagg’s funniest yet.

A Redbird Christmas is a short and sweet novel about an elderly Chicago man, Oswald T. Campbell, who is advised by his doctor that his emphysema will not survive another Illinois winter and on a whim moves to Lost River, Alabama where he turns out to be the only eligible man in town and is soon awash in flirtatious blue haired ladies. Only about 130 pages, this one is a very easy read and real heart warmer.

Good news is the tooth ache has gone away again for now. Work was ok, but I was tired and grumpy. And then I couldn’t sleep and am up late blogging. Tomorrow is the annual all staff meeting for the county library system and then I will have to work a few hours at the branch afterwards. Happy Friday!

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Sunset falls as ferry crosses Eliot Bay

undated photograph by Joel Farmer

Today’s pic is for Ron, who admired the ferry pic I previously posted.

I confess that today’s books have all three been on my couch in varying stages of being read for a couple of weeks now and were not in my mind connected until Blog Rush advised that I could improve my click through rate with catchier headlines. My apologies to anyone who clicked through expecting a sensational story about a local government summarily executing exceptional jazz singers.

Compared to Chaucer’s Cantebury Tales, Tokyo Cancelled is a novel about delayed travelers entertaining each other by telling stories. A flight to Tokyo is diverted by weather and lands unexpectedly in an un-named city (presumably Delhi, India) where they find that an economic conference and the protests it has drawn have created a shortage of hotel rooms. Eventually all but thirteen of the planes passengers are dispatched to various accommodations when the remainder are told there are no more rooms to be had and settle in for a night in an airport lounge and begin telling each other stories to pass the time. The group of travelers proves to be from all over the world and each tells a very different story. The framework of this novel allows the author, Rana Dasgupta, to explore an unusually diverse range of ideas and settings, which he masterfully does, while never losing the believability of the ’stuck at the airport’ framework. A thanks to Cromley whose review first brought this one to my attention. Recommended.

I have never been a big fan of "self-help". While I firmly believe that each and every one of us must solve his own problems (if for no other reason than that nobody else is going to do it for you), I have rarely been a fan or a consumer of the mega industry of self-proclaimed experts with a sure fire scheme for resolving some problem or another they are convinced I have. Neither apparently has Jennifer Niesslein, whose Practically Perfect gently skewers a wide range of self-help gurus and movements. It reminded me a bit of Aunt Erma’s Cope Book, though in a very conversational tone that is evocative of a diary or journal rather than Bombeck’s laugh out loud wit. The book did not persuade me to try Real Simple or any of the other self help philosophies mentioned, but I am confident Niesslein never intended it to. Recommended.

Hep-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams passed under my check-in scanner a couple of Sundays ago and caught my eye. I brought it home and read the introduction, which has a very "Drug War" tone and left me feeling the book would be more of the usual propaganda and set it aside, unread. Ron then picked it up and read it and liked it very much. He said that contrary to the impression I got from the introduction, this very readable history of prohibition in America clearly shows the lunacy and un-intended consequences that have flowed from our tragically flawed drug policies. He liked it very much and it is now back on my ‘to read’ pile. Jury still out on this one.

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Sunday was as expected a busy, hectic day. We are getting huge volumes of returns and have a lot of material backed up to be shelved. To make sure it was a completely sucky day, my hearing aid died at the beginning of the shift. The switch is broken and it will not turn on or off and regardless of the non-setting it constantly makes a deep pitched banging noise, which is usually the signal for a dying battery. Have to disconnect the battery to get it to be quiet. It always un-nerves me when I have to be out in public when my ear is out and I can’t hear at all.

And to top it all off, my toothache, which had been on hiatus is back tonight with a vengence, and I am out of the Vicodin my dentist gave me a couple of weeks ago. So for the first time ever on this job, I am calling in sick today and going to try to get my hearing aids fixed. Tomorrow I have a dentist appointment and will hopefully get more pain meds and by Thursday will feel up to going back to work. Feh.

I finished reading Poppy Z. Brite’s Soul Kitchen. I was under-whelmed. Unlike in D*U*C*K, where she rhapsodized about the food a lot, there is little specific mention of the restaurant’s food as the protagonists are busy buying a rustic fishi