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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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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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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Today’s book review was generously contributed by my partner Ron.   If you like it,  please leave him a comment and let him know.

When Alan looks at books coming through to be scanned sometimes he finds stuff for me. And with Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict by Laura Viera Rigler he hit the Jackpot.  He knows that I reread Jane Austen’s six novels at least once a year. And he knows how much I love her work.

If you too like Jane Austen, or just ever wondered how life really was back then, get this book.
I can’t recommend it any higher…

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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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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 fishing camp in Shell Beach and consulting on a restaurant that is to be opened in a floating casino. Neither of these ideas much interested me, and I frequently found myself discovering that the characters are not at all as I had perceived them in the later book. (Notably I had gotten the distinct impression in D*U*C*K that Ricky and G-Man were black but in this book it is made clear they are white– that the characterizations in the later book were so poorly drawn that I could be left with such a big mis-perception is unfortunate.) I suppose sooner or later the two earlier books in this sequence will happen my way and I will probably read them, but I can’t say I enjoyed or recommend this book or this author.

I am also about half way through reading A Perfect Mess and am thoroughly enjoying it. Also about a third of the way through A Boy’s Life. Today’s illustration is of a metal advertising sign (Joel used to have a huge collection of these, including this one, which I sold off before I moved down here.) for a product which unfortunately I do not have, but it seemed topical

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My two days off passed quickly if not productively. I did go to the dentist yesterday, for the first time in Years. My teeth need a Lot of work, but I am glad to have at least started on it. (My next of many appointments to come is on the 21st.) And the dentist did give me a scrip for Vicodin, which definitely helps. Ron did do a load of laundry yesterday, though not the big catch up of lotsa laundry I had planned. And maybe tomorrow I will manage to go get the haircut that was the other thing on my agenda.

After reading and blogging about the history of Moon Pies last week, this book caught my eye while shelving in New Fiction. Moon Pies and Movie Stars is a comic novel set in the 1970’s about Ruby Kinkade, a widow in Devine, Texas (pop 847) who runs the local bowling alley and is raising her daughter Violet’s two children after Violet mysteriously disappeared four years ago. One day Violet is spotted in a television commercial and Ruby and her sister Loralva set off in a Winnebago with Violet’s mother-in-law and the kids on a trek to Hollywood to find Violet.

The writing is at times quite funny, though the pacing is a bit off and the book seems to drag at times. There is a very time-warp feeling in the 1970’s details, and the Texas parochialism of the characters and their reactions to California is by turns amusing and off-putting. After waiting in line and appearing on The Price Is Right, where Loralva charms Bob Barker and the producers and ends up winning a new car, they do finally manage to find Violet and are disappointed that she has no interest in them or the children she left behind. In the end, I found myself thinking the book was in fact much like a Moon Pie– almost sickly sweet, but very little substance. Not recommended.

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So Thursday I got a message from Bev, who very kindly offered to lend me her copy. (Thank You, Bev!) Then when I got home from work on Friday Ron handed me my very own brand new copy of Deathly Hallows and my wait was at end. (I was up to 64th on the waiting list when I canceled my request on Sunday.) I started reading right away, stopped briefly when we had a visitor, then read all night. I finished Chapter 36 in the car Saturday morning the instant before I went in to work, then read the epilogue on my break around 11am. I have since re-read it most of the way through a second time.

I have nothing but good to say about Harry Potter. It has been such a pleasure these past six years to watch these kids grow up, and as I began reading I found myself thinking that Ms. Rowling has likewise really grown as a writer over the course of these seven books. I thought that the wedding scene early in the novel (where the evil old society biddy gossips savagely to horrified listeners too polite to stop her) was worthy of Jane Austen. (Ron gave me a very dirty look when I said that.)

I did not find that any of the spoiler information detracted from the experience in the least. When it was finished the outcome felt very much inevitable and could not have been otherwise. I found the story very emotionally gripping and admit that I cried at several points. And when it was over felt an enormous catharsis. Bravo. And now that I have recovered from HP fever, I hope to get back to reading other things and blogging about them regularly.

We had three people out sick today and it was an especially busy and hectic Monday at the library. I worked my ass off and will be happy to be off tomorrow and Wednesday. I have a dentist appointment tomorrow afternoon and got a confirmation from Group Health of my doctor assignment and will be able to make a doctor appointment tomorrow. Even when it’s a rough day, I love this job and am so thrilled to have insurance and benefits again.

Years ago when I was living in Boston, I was in a book store with my friend Billie and she handed me a copy of Boy’s Life and strongly encouraged me to buy it. I did and I loved it. It’s a coming of age tale set in rural Alabama. It is beautifully written and a wonderful read. I’ve no idea whatever became of that copy I bought all those years ago in Boston, but while shelving in fiction this afternoon I came across this book and knew I would have to check it out and re-read it. So I brought it home and added it to the stack and look forward to returning soon to Zephyr, Alabama and the life of young Cory Mackenson. And find myself wondering tonight how Billie is doing these days and if anyone has heard from her lately.

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Ron predicted that UW would examine Staci and send her right back home to Kathi’s and so they did. He talked to them on the phone. Clint got in okay and they will be here until Wednesday. We are planning to get together with them Tuesday, my next day off.

Work was the usual easy Sunday. I was amazed that most of the Harry Potters remained unclaimed on their cart in the back room. (I have also suffered from the temptation to go ahead and buy a copy, but new books are not in our budget so I have so far resisted, though who knows how long my resolve will last…)

I had not previously heard of Poppy Z. Brite, who apparently has written seven other novels, but I came across D*U*C*K the other day and was sufficiently intrigued to bring it home and read it. It is a very short novel (132 pages) about a gay black couple in New Orleans who are chefs and run a restaurant called Liquor, where they use booze in all the recipes. The plot centers around their experiences catering a banquet in Opelousas for an organization of duck hunters who are working to preserve the wetlands. Brite (who appears to be a petite white woman reminiscent of a porcelain doll in her jacket photo) writes with authority about New Orleans and restaurant kitchens, although at times her gay, black, male protagonists fail to ring true. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, which is in some ways an erotic love poem to New Orleans and its food. But given the extreme brevity and the $35 cover price (?!?!???!!!) I can’t recommend anyone go out and buy it.

Also, although this book is available from Pierce County Library, it is for some reason not listed in Worldcat, so there is no link to the book cover.

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Yesterday I worked a 3-9pm shift and was happy to find in my mailbox the copy of Michael Tolliver Lives that I had requested. I started reading on my lunch hour, then stayed up until three am finishing it, even though I am due back at work in a couple of hours to work my 8a–3:30pm shift. But I couldn’t put it down. It was so wonderful to return to the beloved characters we’ve followed since Tales of the City way back when and have not seen since Sure of You.

And while the changes they’ve experienced are striking (Thack is ancient history and Michael has an adoring husband half his age; Mrs. Madrigal, now in her 80’s, has sold the old apartment house on Barbary Lane and moved to a place with no stairs; and Shawna Hawkins is the a 25 year old author and proprietor of an internet site on sexual fetishes) the characters are still very much the people we’ve come to know. As always, Maupin provides a richly layered plot filled with luscious ironies and abundant humor. No spoilers from me, do go read it for yourself. My ass will no doubt be dragging at work tomorrow afternoon but I am thrilled to have been able to return for a few hours to a much beloved version of San Francisco that exists only in the pages of Maupin’s books.

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Max Barry’s Jennifer Government is a dystopian fantasy set in a not too distant future when corporations have come to totally dominate the life of the planet. People take on their employer’s name as their last name. (Children attend schools sponsored by corporations and take on the name of their school.) The Police are just another corporation out to make a buck. You can hire them to protect you or to commit mayhem or murder on your behalf but don’t expect them to show up for free. Taxes have been declared illegal and while there is a Government, it is not charged with upholding law, but solicits funding from the survivors of crime victims to fund investigations.

So it is that John Nike, marketing executive and his assistant, John Nike contract with Hack Nike to murder the first 10 customers to purchase their new $2500/pair sneakers in order to establish street cred. Frightened, Hack subcontracts the job to The Police who pass it along to the NRA. And Jennifer Government, the determined agent who used to be Corporate and has a strange bar code tattoo under her left eye succeeds in raising $200,000 dollars from the parents of Haley McDonalds, one of the teens killed at Nike Town, and sets out to get John Nike. A war ensues between the competing customer loyalty programs United Alliance and Shoppers Advantage and mayhem results.

While in some ways it reminded me of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the tone is much lighter and it is at times laugh out loud funny suggesting possibly that if Big Business rather than the Religious Right succeeds in grabbing the wheel and driving off the cliff the results may be more amusing if no less tragic. Happy Fourth!

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So I finally finished Crazy in Alabama. Loved it. Lucille, a frustrated and emotionally abused housewife in Cornelia Alabama finally gets fed up with her husband Chester and spikes his coffee with DeaCon rat poison. He keels over dead and she cuts his head off and puts in a Tupperware lettuce crisper, burping the seal to lock in freshness. Lucille dumps her four children at her mother’s house, and after showing Chester’s severed head to her nephew, Peter Joseph (PeeJoe) sets off for California where she has an appointment with an agent and a shot at a guest appearance on television. Her odyssey will take her to New Orleans, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and San Francisco and Chester’s head will be with her all the way.

Meanwhile back in Alabama the orphaned PeeJoe and his brother, Wiley , are displaced by Lucille’s brood and sent to live with their Uncle Dove at his funeral parlor, a crumbling mansion in the town of Industry, Alabama where he unwittingly wanders onto the cover of Life magazine and into the thick of the civil rights movement. Childress is frequently laugh out loud funny and the plot is filled with wonderful absurdities and numerous clever twists.

A couple of weeks ago, Bev posted a link to her very first blog entry. I clicked and was time-warped back to 2000 and found myself reading along and clicking next and at some point Bev mentions that Merrell urged her to read this book. Which is how I happened to put in a request and read it myself. Thanks to Bev and Merrell.

One more drive down to Eatonville tomorrow morning, one more drive back then I am thankfully OFF on Saturday before beginning my new gig Sunday. TGIF

 

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When I started blogging I had said I was only going to write about new releases here. I realized a bit later that I meant new releases as libraries define them (we may consider a book "new" for up to two years at PCLS). But lately I have found myself reading a number of older books and realized that I have in fact been writing about a number of older titles and decided to explicitly abandon the new releases plan and just write about whatever I happen to be reading, which in this case is a novel from the 1980’s that I recently rediscovered.

The librarians have classified Metzger’s Dog as a mystery, but it isn’t really. When I was a bookstore clerk back in the 80’s we considered it general fiction, and while it has some elements of a thriller it really doesn’t fall into any sub-genre. A group of former mercenaries in Los Angeles learn that a pound of cocaine is being kept in a research lab at UCLA and set out to steal it. While doing so they serendipitously manage to steal a box of papers from another office, which happens to belong to a social science researcher who has done significant work for the CIA in "psyops". After selling the cocaine back to the dealer from whom the police had seized it in the first place, the gang gets around to reading the papers and slowly comes to realize what they have.

So their next step is to try to sell the papers back to the CIA. Much madness ensues and the book is at times laugh out loud funny. At one point, after the spooks have unsuccessfully tried to pull a double cross the gang decides to implement one of the plans to demonstrate they mean business. Carefully following the stolen script they sabotage a key phone company installation and stage spectacular collisions at 17 key freeway choke points, wrecking havoc in el lay. In the end, after a change of management at Langley the spooks cough up the money, the head mercenary marries his girl and the new CIA director and his wife attend the wedding.

I was disappointed that I really didn’t enjoy this book re-reading it in 2007 near as much as I had the first time around in 1980-something. Partly it’s that phones, airports and so much else have changed to the point that few of the exploits described could be pulled off today. Also, I think that my tastes have evolved a great deal over a quarter of a century and this book did not age well for me.

(Hoping to hear today about the job I interviewed for on Wednesday and looking forward to my Friday & Sunday weekend = working a full day in Eatonville Saturday.)

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I found this latest installment in Rita Mae Brown’s Mrs. Murphy series a bit of a mixed bag. The newly re-married Harry and Fair (Mary Minor and Pharamond) Haristeen have driven to Kentucky for a major horse show. The usual Crozet gang do not appear at all this time out, more or less doubling the number of new characters to be introduced in the first few chapters. I found the book difficult to get into and the large cast of strangers tough to get a handle on.

Once the first murder occurs, the pace does pick up. Those who have read the earlier Mrs. Murphy titles or especially Brown’s fox hunting mysteries will be right at home in the horse show milieu and the book is in many ways Brown’s usual mystery offering.

A bit more than half way into the book, the INS conducts a raid on the horse show, arresting many of the illegal immigrants who work for the stables and trainers and this was where I started to really have trouble. I have been a fan of Rita Mae Brown’s books for more than twenty years now. When she avoids politics and does fiction, she can be brilliant and wonderful but I don’t think I will ever understand where this woman is coming from politically. When she talks about sexuality and individual rights she sounds like a capital L Liberal. But when the topic is taxation or property she seems to become a capital R Republican.

And then this issue of illegal immigration seems to re-draw these lines rather strangely, and to a large extent I find myself cast uncomfortably on the side of the freepers.

I believe that illegal immigrants depress wages for all Americans and utterly reject the argument that we must have illegal immigrants because there are so many jobs that American’s just won’t do. (It seems to me that argument is really an insistence on being allowed to have illegal immigrants so as not to be forced to provide the level of wages, benefits and working conditions most Americans would likely demand.) Certainly, I believe that America should continue to welcome immigrants, that we should develop a fair process for rationing the privilege of coming here that takes into account both the needs of business for additional labor and the limits of our resources to care for, succor and support new arrivals, while actively and effectively enforcing our immigration laws, primarily through stiff financial and criminal penalties for those who employ illegals.

The "compromise" immigration reform currently being debated in Washington does none of this.

After the INS raid, which Brown’s characters universally and bitterly scorn, using the argument above along with a disingenuous paean to the skills and work ethics of the laborers in question, the story picks up again along the usual lines and in the end it is revealed that the murder was committed to silence a partner in an immigrant smuggling scheme whose increasingly cold feet threatened to expose the deal.

Lately it seems the only writing Ms. Brown does are these Mrs. Murphy and foxhunting mysteries. I found myself really wishing she would come out with another of her wonderful non-genre novels and that she had refrained from inserting one of the current hot button political issues into her usual mystery formula.

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