bookblog

The Dower House by Annabel Davis Goff

I loved this book. It's about an Anglo-Irish family in decline, and it's really a fully fleshed out little masterpiece of a book. It's like a really good BBC drama that you fall into on a rainy Sunday afternoon. It's soaked in nostalgia and period detail. At heart, it's a coming of age story, but it's really so much more.

It reminded me a little of The Summer House Trilogy, but it wasn't so...arch. Usually, that's a bad thing but The Dower House is perfect in its pure, linear evocation of a world that's almost familiar, yet not quite, and different enough to have disappeared entirely while you read about it. It's not a very plot-driven book, but it's the perfect thing to sink into during a couple of cozy afternoons. Good stuff.

The Dark is Rising Sequence by Susan Cooper

I loved these books so much when I was about nine years old that I've been afraid to re-read them for fear that the magic would fade. In a fit of regression, I bought the first two for myself as a birthday present and I'm so glad that I did.

The first book, Over Sea, Under Stone, is a stand alone prequel that's OK but not excellent. The second in the series, The Dark is Rising, is where the protagonist is introduced and things begin to get really good. Will Stanton, the seventh son of a seventh son, comes into his full power as an Old One on his eleventh birthday. His coming of age is the completion of a circle begun centuries before, and happens just in time to stem the tide of Darkness that threatens to envelop Britain.

It's a classic quest story, with echoes of the A Wrinkle In Time books by Madeleine L'Engle. It reminds me of Harry Potter too, but it's better; darker, and steeped in mythology and legend. All of these books do such a great job of portraying the dichotomy between the normal, nonmagical world that these kids alongside the supernatural one into which they're thrust. Great stuff for any Rowling fan or anyone who likes a different take on the Arthurian legend.

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Well, I had so much fun reading To Kill A Mockingbird that I decided to re-visit some other old favorites. This was pleasant, but not as wonderful as I remember. Nice book to read in the spring though.

Brazzaville Beach by William Boyd

I have a definite Thing for a certain kind of book about white people trying to make a go of it in Africa and failing spectacularly. I'm particularly drawn to stories about missionaries and academics. If I'd been keeping this log for a long time, I'd point out earlier entries that bear this out, but you'll just have to take my word for it.

This is a fabulous book. It's got monkeys, and academics, and civil war, and hedgerow dating, and did I mention monkeys? Imagine if Jane Goodall was the heroine of Mating (another amazing book, though I must concede that I've known people who hated it as passionately as I loved it. Apparently they think parts of it are "boring". To them I say: pfffft.) Oh, plus there's a loony mathematician, a la A Beautiful Mind.

I can't wait to get my hands on some more Boyd.

The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing

This novel, the story of a middle class British family who are rocked to their smug little core by the arrival of a monstrous fifth child, just didn't work for me. The premise is promising--what is the child? An alien? A throwback? A genetic aberrance? But the whole narrative arc is just too heavy-handed and overbearing. I gather it's meant to be an indictment of middle-class mores and the failure of society to deal with its own darkness, or something, but Lessing just doesn't pull it off.

I wonder if an author with less esteem and longevity would even have gotten this book published, let alone critically acclaimed. Then again, maybe I'm just dumb. Always a possibility I consider when I'm so at odds with the critical establishment.

This is a classic example of the near-miss. This story had so much possibility that was never borne out. Not to mention a lack of ANY believable characterization at all. It's left me very unsatisfied. There's a sequel too, but the reviews are horrible so I'll probably skip it unless it throws itself at me in the used bookstore.

What Was She Thinking? Notes on A Scandal by Zoe Heller

I read this book in two sittings. For some reason, I had always thought it was a light, Brit chicklit kind of thing. Not that there's anything wrong with that; sometimes, those books are just the thing. Some of them are actually quite excellent. At any rate, I was wrong. Notes on a Scandal is a delicious, wicked, dark little thing that sucks you right in. I am a sucker for the unreliable narrator conceit, which is used just about perfectly here. The narrator, Barbara, is a nightmare of a woman who is pretty screwed up and evil, but Heller lets the reader see her innnate loneliness and sadness as well. It's not enough to make you like her, but you can at least understand; indeed some of the little offhand comments and observations about her solitary life are just piercing. Says the girl who read the whole thing on her sad, rainy 29th birthday. But I digress...

It's a great book. Spot-on in it's characterizations, and the action draws you on and on, so that the little moments of pathos or humor really leap off the page. And this book is very, very funny, and sad. I highly recommend it.

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

It's difficult to try to write anything cogent about TKAM, because so much has been done already. But I will say that I was shocked at how completely caught up I became in this story, and how incredibly well the denizens of maycomb are drawn. Every character and scene in this story is drawn so perfectly, with such a light, sure touch, that it feels like this books sprung whole from the Literature Womb. Which is a tortured way of sayiong that for a novel that deals with so very much, the mechanics of the story and the wrier's presence are nearly invisible.

Also, I've talked to three separate people who spontaneously offered that one line in this book made them cry. It did for me too. That's weird, because it's a pretty innocuous line: Stand up, Miss Jean Louise. Your father's passin'. But oh, the power of context...

And one burning question remains for me; where the hell is Harper Lee? TKAM is her only book, though I believe she's still alive. I wonder if she has reams of manuscripts in her house, to be published posthumously, or if TKAm was just a masterstroke of genius she could never repeat? What do you do with your whole life after you write a book like that?

Crooked Little Heart by Anne Lamott

I have a love/hate relationship with Anne Lamott, and my feelings change almost daily. My feelings are complex because I'm pathologically afraid of evangelical types, yet fascinated by and drawn to intellectual people who are very religious. Clap your hands if you believe!

So it's hard for me to separate Anne's books from what I know of her as a person. Her more recent essays on Salon are more and more wordy and more and more about Jesus. But she's a Jesus-lover and a Bush hater, which I had thought was similar to being a fish who couldn't swim, or a calm tornado. Anyway, I do feel a kinship with people who are outspokenly against this terrible Administration, and It's not Jesius I don't like, just Jesus-lovers, so Anne and I are back on.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that Crooked Little Heart is a great book and I want to live in Northern California. The characters in this book are just fantastic, subtly drawn and resonant. There's lots of tennis stuff, which could have been a downer (I also hate sports, but I do have a soft spot for tennis) but instead fit the narrative really well. The mom and her best friend both have Lamott-like qualities, and knowing stuff like that always enhances my enjoyment of what I'm reading. I slurped this book down in a day and a half.

This is the kind of book that should have been an Oprah book back in the day. If that sounds like an indictment to you, then don't read it. But you'll be missing out.

(SPOILER: I did have some problems with the way the pregnant friend character was dealt with, but it didn't bother me enough to put me off the book as a whole.)