The Second Homeless Reviews thread of richardderus

I have a 75-Books Challenge thread for all reviews of books published in 2008 and after. I have a Books Off the Shelf thread for all reviews of books I already own and need to clear out of the ever-growing piles.

And I have nowhere to review books I've borrowed from friends, libraries, and other places (no awkward questions, please) published before 2008. So I came over here to fix that problem. I set a goal of 50 reviews just to stretch myself...I wrote 118 reviews last year, trying to go a little farther every year.

Thank you for your kind attention. I shall now commence reviewing.

Reviews 1-30 are over here.

FOR THOSE JUST TUNING IN: I don't practice book reporting in my reviews. I see the purpose of my review of a book as describing what I *felt* and *thought* and why I think you *should* (or shouldn't, though that's rare with me; why review a book I didn't like unless there's a compelling reason?) read it. I don't know the readers of my reviews personally, for the most part, so I don't have any way to gauge whether you'll agree or disagree with me. It's always perfectly fine with me either way, and I invite comments from all.










Books are reviewed in post number:

55. Breakfast at Tiffany's...#162.

54. Chess Story...#155.

53. Burning Secret...#141.

52. Coup de Grace...#139.

51. Justice...#137.

**50!** Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife...#121.

49. We Have Always Lived in the Castle...#117.

48. Rounding the Mark...#112.

47. Pepita...#110.

46. 920 O'Farrell Street...#106.

45. The Big Sleep...#104.

44. To the Lighthouse...#97.

43. Hons and Rebels...#96.

42. Till We Have Faces...#90.

41. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter...#81

40. A Gentle Madness...#73

39. Around the World with Auntie Mame...#62

38. Auntie Mame...#54

37. Sabriel...#27

36. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress...#26

35. The Basque History of the World...#18

34. The Celluloid Closet (Rev. ed.)...#17

33. Small Island...#11

32. The Uncommon Reader...#10

31. Montana 1948...#2

Review: 31 of fifty

Title: MONTANA 1948

Author: LARRY WATSON

Rating: 5* of five

Another one I'd give six stars to if I could.

This book has a deeply personal connection to me and my life. I mentioned in another thread that I have given many copies of this book away, and why. I was given heart, comfort, and guidance by this work of fiction, such as no corporeal person could have given me.

But to consider this as a book, a novel written for an audience by a writer, is to appreciate anew the benefits of craftsmanship and the ungovernable lightning of talent. There are very few books I can give the accolade of "I wouldn't shange a single thing" to, and this is one of them. Not one word out of place, not one simile or metaphor ill-used, unused, or overused, nothing could be added without compromising the beauty of the book, and nothing need be removed to clear aside clutter.

If brevity is the soul of wit, it is also the soul of wisdom, and this book is wise, so wise, to its child narrator's painful coming to adulthood. It's also wise to the nature of love as lived from day to day, and how it so often can curdle into acceptance of what one cannot change...but should, or should always strive to, because some things are simply, inarguably, Right.

As a meditation on one's remembered past, this is a crystal clear and unsparing récit; as a story, it's so simple as to be mindless, except that it's mindful of the role of unadorned narrative in making the world a better place.

I would like to know the characters in this novel, really know them, sit in their kitchens and listen to their stories and drink their vile percolated coffee. I loved each of them, yes even the one whose bad deeds set the story in motion, loved them for being real and nuanced and far more vulnerable than most of the real people I know.

I can't recommend this book to you, because it's very strong meat; I can encourage you to read it if you care for justice, the horrible cost of it and the terrifying price it exacts from those it visits; but you will come away from it changed, as I was, possibly for the better but changed. Don't ever ask questions you don't want the answers to...and this book answers some very, very nasty questions with grace and beauty and forgiveness.

I'm holding my breath (figuratively speaking).

It's up now!

#2: I am going to buy my own copy rather than getting the library's, that is how much I think of your review. Thanks, Richard!

I filled in a request slip for Montana 1948 from the library (it's in the stacks but I can't request it online) after reading Kath's review. I want to read it even more now. All I have to do is remember to hand the slip over next time I'm in town;)

Hi Richard, Did you know Watson wrote a prequel to Montana 1948 called Justice? It's been a long time since I've read either one and I don't think I liked it quite as much as Montana, but if you want a chance to revisit the characters, you might want to give it a try if you haven't already.

You know, Joanne, I knew of the book but I was scared to read it. I love the book, as you saw, but I can't feature a prequel coming off anywhere near as well as Montana 1948. I will have to read it eventually, because I'm just too curious not to, but a hurry I ain't in.

Yup, I get it.

Review: 32 of fifty

Title: THE UNCOMMON READER

Author: ALAN BENNETT

Rating:4.2* of five

Witty, irreverent, and completely charming, Bennett's novella is one I would sincerely hope that Her Majesty read and laughed at when it was published.

There are many reviews of this effervescent entertainment, so I will confine myself to noting that the book carries with it a none-too-subtle punch line...Her Majesty should consider abdication...which I can't imagine would have made Mr. Bennett more likely to be in line for a life peerage, but which I can imagine made him a popular figure around Highgrove.

A delightful bagatelle of a book. Recommended to anyone not connected with the Royal Family.

Review: 33 of fifty

Title: SMALL ISLAND

Author: ANDREA LEVY

Rating: 2.7* of five

This woman and I are not a good fit. I read and loathed The Long Song, finding it tedious and contrived. I got this excrescence out of the library because I thought it unfair to judge an author by one book. Hell, I even gave EGGERS more than one book.

Small Island is a mean-spirited, judgmental, and sarcastic book. In the guise of "telling it like it is", Levy manages to make the reader detest every single person she describes as a narrow, unkind, worthless human being. I know that this is perceived by others as ironic and humourous (misspelling deliberate, that was my attempt at ironic distancing, didja see? didja see?), but I don't believe it. She's an angry, angry woman who's out to flagellate a world that doesn't run the way she thinks it should.

And by "she" I mean the authorial "she." I don't know Ms. Levy at all and I don't want to particularly, if she's anything like the books she writes. Scant danger of that, I suppose, since I live on Long Island and she on Small Island.

Hated it. Would burn it if I could, but it's the liberry's copy. It's too late for most of y'all, but not recommended to the point of saying "run away! run away!"

Sounds dreadful. My morbid curiosity almost makes me want to give it a try, of course, but thankfully my local library doesn't carry any of her books. Too bad. :P

>12 Ape: You dodged THAT bullet narrowly! Just promise me you won't spend United States dollars, no matter how few, on procuring this ghastly twaddle.

Don't worry, I don't fiddle with ghastly twaddle unless it's free. :(

Smart of you. It's a lifelong rule for me, too...for free, take; for buy, waste time, as my Yiddish-speaking grandmother used to say.

>11 richardderus: 2.7/5 for Small Island? Oh no. I'm ignoring your review and forgetting I ever stopped here as I received it as an ER book and still haven't started it.

Review: 34 of fifty

Title: THE CELLULOID CLOSET: Homosexuality in the Movies

Author: VITO RUSSO

Rating; 3* of five

A groundbreaking revelation when it came out almost 30 years ago, this book, as revised by its author in 1987, is very dated; and it's never been my idea of a prose paradigm.

I admit I was going down the primrose path of nostalgia when I decided to read this revised edition. I'd read the first edition as an eager young slut-about-town, yearning to impress the Older Men (25! 30! Oh, those old roues!) I was seducing in job lots with my encyclopedic knowledge of their old-fashioned world.

*snort*

But I did learn a lot, and it's always useful to do so. I wasn't aware that queer subtexts in Hollywood movies were the prime motivating factor for the introduction of the Production Code. I wasn't aware that the hoi polloi didn't know some of its major heartthrobs only throbbed for their own kind (Rock, of course, but Farley Granger, Randolph Scott, Burt Lancaster, ye gods what fun it would have been to be there then!!)...but I've known all that for a long time now, and I found it dreary to go back and read the uninspired prose of the late Mr. Russo without the sense of discovery and amazement I brought to it the first time.

You can't go home again. I suppose one shouldn't want to, either, but the urge hits once in a way, less and less often as the years pile up. I expect I'll stub my toe on this rock again. I'd say, if you're an average straight person, this book could be informative and possibly even interesting if you like the movies a lot. But it sure won't be entertaining.

Review: 35 of fifty

Title: THE BASQUE HISTORY OF THE WORLD

Author: MARK KURLANSKY

Rating: 3.6* of five

History is the beautiful, brightly lit foam on top of the annihilating tsunami of the unrecorded past. History books are the spectrographic analysis of the light glinting off that foam. Any attempt at making a book more than that is doomed to failure and tedium.

This is not a tedious or failed book. It's just...well...curiously insubstantial. I don't like the focus on the Great and the Good in place of the gestalt of the actions of the Basques. I know, I know, most people can't name their great-grandparents, still less find evidence of their obvious existence, and historians are limited to what documentary evidence exists. But Ignatius Loyola stalled me every time I tried to re-read this book. I hated that jerk when I was confirmed, and given the confirmation saint of St. Charles Borromeo, a major Jesuit figure. I am a flawed being, I admit it...I can't abide hagiography, and I fear Kurlansky's absence of harsh, vituperative judgments thundered down upon the founder of the Jesuits sat ill with me.

But the book is, overall, an attempt to do the extremely difficult: Show the unrecorded points of commonality that linked major events in history, ie the involvement of a people generally overlooked. I suspect the Basques like it that way. I don't know what the Basque majority's opinion was of this book, but I suspect it was well and truly mixed. He's drawing attention to us! Yay! Boo! And often from the same person, I'd bet.

Why such a mingy rating as 3.6 stars? Because...well, because it wasn't anywhere near as much fun to read as I expected it to be.

And Loyola, that rotten sleazebag.

Burt Lancaster? Oh nooooo....say it ain't so!

Sigh. And then there was the massively handsome but sensitive Montgomery Clift. Sigh. Again.

But I loved your review; I've been meaning to either read the book or catch up with the movie (Netflix is my personal salvation here); would you say it would be worth my while?

I'd go with the movie, Gail. The book's not a great read. The movie has the side benefit of being in the same medium it's discussing, too!

Thanks, Richard. The movie also has the advantage of Gore Vidal, however briefly, explicating some scenes in Ben Hur". That alone should make it worth a watch.

Well Richard, I enjoyed Small Island more than you, though since then I read Patricia Grace's Tu which explores similar ground but more subtly and is I think a better novel.
I have had The Basque History of the World on my bookshelves for many years, bought because I liked the book cover, though book remains unread. Have you read any of his other books?

>22 avatiakh: I've read Cod, which I quite enjoyed; I've got Salt around here somewhere, and I look forward to that; I also read a collection of short fiction, The White Man in the Tree, which I didn't find very memorable. I'm on the side of read The Basque History of the World rather than let it languish; for all its flaws, I wasn't sorry I read it.

First - the review (and all the buzz on other threads) about Montana 1948 really made this article (from today's issue of Shelf Awareness) pop out. It concerns Phil Jackson (coach of the Lakers) and his interesting coaching technique of providing reading material to his players.

The list is in this article where it notes that he chose this book to give to Kobe Bryant. Would love to hear Bryant's 'book report.'

I too find Kurlansky's books quite uneven. I was totally disappointed in Eastern Stars but loved Food of a Younger Land

Tina, that's a great article. I had no idea Kobe Bryant had ever read a book, ignorant as he acts on court some days. What a refreshing breath of change Jackson is!

Review: 36 of fifty

Title: BALZAC AND THE LITTLE CHINESE SEAMSTRESS

Author: DAI SIJIE

Rating: 3.8* of five

I don't, like so many others, think this book is brilliant or even particularly original. I do think it's fascinating as a cultural document of a time and a place that I know zero about and find very intriguing.

The Cultural Revolution was inconceivably vast, like evertything else about China. The notion, from whence we shall never know, that Mao had of causing all the haves to be reduced to the status of have-nots, and the resulting collapse of anything describable as culture, took so many good and worthy people from China's body politic and ground them into nothingness that it's a wonder there is a shred of history left to them.

The agonies of our narrator, the son of enemies of the people sent to a remote location for re-education, are told not shown. This is ordinary in a first-person story. But I found myself irked at the elisions this produced. The people around the narrator are one-dimensional, even his childhood friend Luo and the eponymous seamstress. The narrator's inability to see much past the grimy surface of the people in his world wore on me.

But, and this is the saving grace of the book for me, it's such a bizarre and topsy-turvy world that even their surfaces are intriguing, and the rather unexceptional story the narrator (never named) is telling shines with that exotic glistening strangeness.

This is really a book about books. The narrator, Luo, and the seamstress go to great and dangerous lengths to get, read, and absorb lovingly the precious contraband books they're sure are hidden. Finding them, reading them, telling the stories contained in them to others...well, who could possibly NOT love a character who risks hideous tortures to do that?

The seamstress's final act in the book is exactly the right touch to set off the reaction that the narrator very oddly presents to us BEFORE reporting that action. Wha...?

Recommended. Oh, reservations attached to that, but really recommended!

Sounds intriguing and my local library has it, so onto the reservations list it goes!

Edit to say - I went to give your review a thumb but I can't find it on the work page!

Nice review, Richard. I was also looking to give your review a deserved thumbs up!

I was interrupted before I could put the review up...it's there now.

Heavens. What a HOT day! Glad it's only (snort) 79F here at 10:45p. Bah.

Having recently listened to Seamstress, I found your review much more flattering than my thoughts about it. I agree with everything you said yet you liked more than I did.

Yesterday when daughter and I were driving home about 4:45 p.m., the outside temperature was 100F. I came into the house and didn't leave again, and daughter went to the barn to give the horses a snack and make sure their water buckets were filled and then came in and didn't leave again. Too stinking hot. No porch sitting for sure.

Hi Karen...UGH!! 100F is never, ever good. Just flat-out vile, in fact.

I liked the book pretty minimally, as a stylitic effort, but the subject lofted it far beyond it otherwise-earned spot. I don't know if it's the translation or the original that has so many clunky sentences. But it's never fair or even defensible to comment on the writing in a translation, since we usually can't know hiw accurate it is.

Stilll, the Cultural Revolution! WOW! One of the main events of the 20th century, and one whose impact we're not in a position to judge yet. I just couldn't *wait* to dive into this one, as shallow and disappointing as it ended up being, and that's why I came away liking it more than you seem to have done.

Review: 37 of fifty

Title: SABRIEL

Author: GARTH NIX

Rating: 3* of five

This was for my June "User Recommendation" challenge.

I don't like fantasy novels much, and this one was no exception. I think the Overuse of Capital Letters in a Non-Ironic Context is tiresome. I think the willefull mispeling of wyrds to make them Magickal is annoying. And this book does both things.

The character Sabriel was a dreary chit of a girl Caught Up In Magick She Doesn't Understand. Ugh. She has a familiar...a cat...whose name is Mogget. Oh now really! Why are the servants always named something drear and the aristos something faux lyrical?

I got progressively more and more cranky as we traversed Death, the realm of, looking for and fleeing the Right Evil Kerrigor. I am not patient enough to read this sort of thing. I flipped through the last half of the book and learned that Sabriel has a big surprise up her sleeve for her enemies. And I still didn't care.

I dont know what it is about fantasy novels in general, with a few exceptions, that I find so insufferable. Maybe it's the prevalence of adolescent exceptionalism, and I am long past adolescence. Maybe it's the frequency of those annoying misspellings and capitalizations to make things Unique. Perhaps it's the nakedness of the stealing from the quest myths of yore, more often than not The Holy Grail.

Nix is a competent writer, and there are not many sentences that clang and clunk and make me wince for their structural inelegance. The characters, in so far as they are able, inspire at least muted interest in my unreceptive heart. Three stars from me, for a fantasy novel, should be considered very high praise indeed.

But I want those hours of my reading life back.

Oh dear... I was rather looking forward to those books... There seems to be such division when it comes to these YA-type fantasies (Eragon, Inkheart, Sabriel...) so I guess all I can do is try the first of each series and see how I get on! Let's hope I like this one more than you, Ricardo!

Well, Ellie, I don't think you have the same allergy to the Novels of Fantasaeie that I do. You're quite likely to enjoy this book for all the things I can't see in it.

At least, I hope you will!

#31 RD - The clunky sentences may be a result of a less than successful Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance play - Chinese author-to-French language book-to English translation. I found the language clunky too, but ultimately the whole thing was just so dreary (and some parts even eeeewwwww) that I now have two books in a row about the Chinese Cultural Revolution that only validate my opinion that Mao raped pillaged and burned Chinese intellectualism, Chinese Art, Chinese culture, Chinese history, and Chinese nationalism in pursuit of a now-discredited economic model and did it out of naivete and then stubbornness.

The other book is Waiting by Ha Jin. The first I read for bookclub, the second I listened to out of boredom. While neither was a total waste of time, neither was a book that I liked or would ever recommend to anybody unless they're pursuing knowledge of how the Cultural Revolution wrecked millions of lives.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress has been on THE LIST for a while, now...and will keep it's place in line....good review....dainty thumb

Sabriel???? (Un)fortunately..no-go-the-boogeyman...too airy/fairy/fartsy for my taste..you can keep that puppy!

regarding #35..i'll second Waiting by Ha Jin..in that i read it...don't know if Becoming Madame Mao would fit in here, or not???

;-}

Jude(#36) has described my general feeling about fantasy and the reason I don't read them unless forced....too airy/fairy/fartsy for my taste...

Thank you, Tina (#37)

Great Minds do, Thnk Alike

;-)

Great Minds do, Thnk Alike

Unfortunately, it seems, having a great mind doesn't make one free from typos. ;-P

"the willefull mispeling of wyrds to make them Magickal is annoying."

Best sentence I've read all week. I suspect I might like Sabriel a little more than you did, but not as much as I thought I might before I read your review.

Also thought your review of Balzac and the LCS was spot on.

>40 madhatter22: Thank you, thank you! I appreciate being appreciated.

>40 madhatter22: Thank you, thank you! I appreciate being appreciated.

We appreciate your acknowledgement of your own appreciation for our appreciation of you! :)

I wonder why there are two identical messages *twenty minutes apart*? That's weird.

I don't know, there was some funky things going on earlier. I read a message on another thread earlier that said it was written by you, then when I went back the home page, I saw the same thread I just left had a new message written by Flissp. When I clicked and read it...it was "your" message that I just read...except Flissp posted it and not you. *scratches head*

(It was post 37 on Ellies 75 challenge thread...)

35 -
Chinese author-to-French language book-to English translation

I don't think that you can blame the writing on the fact that you have a Chinese author writing in French. I've read the original French and there's certainly nothing clunky about it. However, I can't speak for the English translation as I have never read it.

I gave the book 4 stars but I think I was on a reading drought at that time so probably rated it higher than it should be. 3 and half sounds about right.

#39

okay..i can't type for s***t...so, sue me!!

one little gaffe, and The Kid is on my case!! Jeesh, these youngsters....*cough cough hack splutter*

(;-}......

Hehehe, sorry, I'm just a sucker for irony and I thought it was a funny coincidence. =P

I just realized, posts #44/45: OH MY! Ricardosis is spreading already!! :)

Ricardosis is EVERYWHERE

no way can you avoid...just lay back and enjoy it

*snort*

J

#46 lilisin - I am always amazed at how a language informs the thoughts and expressions of its peoples. I think what I meant was that the Chinese author brought a certain view of the world defined by his primary language Chinese. He wrote the book in his adoptive country's language French, which defined it too. The English translation was by Ina Rilke. I counldn't discover Ina Rilke's primary language, but she/he is a prodigous translator into many languages.

Most translations lose the subtle nuances inherent to the culture. I think this one lost twice - putting Chinese culture into French and then translating that into English.

In addition, I personally think that the Chinese Cultural Revolution by its very nature is bleak, drab, gray, scary, and has cost China more than it may currently realize. Perhaps in that respect the novel and translation succeeded since to me they were both bleak, drab, gray, and scary.

Changing your rating from 4 to 3.5 is interesting - frequently I'll come off a book high and give it a high rating only to look back and wonder what I saw in the book to rate it so high. However, I haven't changed any of my initial ratings here on LT just as a matter of consistency.

50 -

My rating is still at 4 stars but I'm saying that 3 and a half makes sense as well. I've only gone back and changed a few ratings but those were mainly to rate a book's spot within that author's body of work.

Richard, I was interested in your review of The Basque History of the World. I read that book a couple of years back, shortly after Steph and I returned from two weeks in southern France that included 5 glorious days in the French/Basque Pyranees. I enjoyed the first two thirds of the book, or so, but was irritated by the fact that Kurlansky found very little to discuss about relatively modern Basque culture outside of the ETA, as if nothing else at all has been going on there.

>52 rocketjk: That was an irritating book in so many ways. I just couldn't get myself over the hump of wondering why so little actual history was used...quick hits, nothing in any sort of depth even for the sections he highlighted.

Oh well...it's never been done before Kurlansky, so better to have something flawed, than nothing at all.

Review: 38 of fifty

Title: AUNTIE MAME

Author: PATRICK DENNIS

Rating: 4* of five

Sparklingly witty, irreverently satirical, this 1955 novel manages to remain timelessly relevant in its cutting send-up of conformity, conservatism, and cupidity. Mame Dennis first swam into my ken during the long, hot, boring summer of 1973, an anodyne to the astoundingly dreary Watergate hearings on TV. I complained to my mother about the absence of entertainment, and she snorted mightily: "How can *anyone* be bored in this house full of books? Here, read this," and she handed me "Auntie Mame."

What can I say? Mother's always right. I love love loved this book then, and on re-reading it now 37 years later, I love it just as much...maybe more, I know more of how adult Mame felt being handed a kid to raise than I did at fourteen.

It's been perfect for me to read in the Auntie-adjustment period, because it's not a novel, it's a series of interconnected short stories that share a frame. I can snag a quick hit before the next issue arises that requires me to pay attention. It's flat-out hilarious, this cocktail culture send-up; Dennis, a pseudonym for the gay (literally) dawg E.E. Tanner III, was Uncle Mame (title of his biogrpahy, BTW) and had an Aunt Marion who was the model for a lot of Mame's characteristics. Dennis hated confromity, he loathed insincerity, he was revolted by Babbittry, and he skewered his targets on brightly colored little cocktail toothpicks with the hula-themed hors d'ouevre.

Mame and Patrick are limousine liberals, rich people who have it in themselves to understand and work to ameliorate the burdens of those not like themsleves. In many ways, I think Teddy Kennedy would identify with Mame and Patrick. I think they're still, to this good day, sterling examples to the well-to-do. The stories here are about Patrick in larval and chrysalis stages, before Mame effects the rowdy transition of her little love into the oddly spotted butterfly he becomes. It's delightful to trot along behind Patrick as he tells us of his life with his Most Unforgettable Character. (Anyone old enough to remember those articles in Reader's Digest is old enough to follow the archaic references in this book.)

Oh, and those references...there are lots of them, and the book's genesis in the Fifties means they're even older still. A working knowledge of the 1930s and the haute couture of the day is helpful, but not necessary. Just realize that each name dropped is hoity-toity, and move on...or use this Interweb thingie to learn *a lot* about the status symbols of a bygone era. Either way, you won't miss the fun and the funny that whizzes around behind you to tickle your ribs and neck mercilessly, making you laugh harder than you'll remember laughing in a very long time.

Read it and weep...from laughter!

I was made aware of Auntie Mame when it first came out. I was a kid then, and not a voracious reader, so I didn't pick it up. You may have convinced me finally to get to it.

I like humor. One of the things I like about humor is how it sometimes makes me laugh.

Robert

>55 Mr.Durick: I predict you'll enjoy it, or at least get a mild guffaw out of it.

Auntie Mame is the basis for MAME

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mame

and THE MUSICAL:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mame_%28musical%29

;-}

The *worst* movie musical ever was Lucille Ball's Mame. Ghastly. Gawdawful.

Rosalind Russell played Mame well in the 1958 non-musical "Auntie Mame", which is a hoot and a holler, but not exactly like the book.

Never saw the play. Always regretted that.

Duh....never realized it was a book before Broadway got ahold of it. Now you've convinced me to get my hands on the pages.

oh me o my..I was lost~ now found. Whew! time to, have another cup of coffee &

I have Mame and the Jamaica book on the way to me.

Review: 39 of fifty

Title: AROUND THE WORLD WITH AUNTIE MAME

Author: PATRICK DENNIS

Rating: 4* of five

Oh dear, oh dear, however shall I survive? There is no more Auntie Mame-age available, nor ever shall be, since Dennis is dead these 35 years. The sequel to Auntie Mame appeared in 1958, and was published of the pieces that didn't fit the original frame of "My Most Unforgettable Character." (Remember those? Reader's Digest was such a bland magazine, but those were always fun to read.) This time the frame is Patrick trying to keep his irascible wife Pegeen from killing him for letting Mame have their son for a little vacation...of two and a half years!...by telling her of his own life with Mame. Highly sanitized, of course!

This 2003 edition even restores a snarky little satire on Soviet collectivism that was excised from the original book..."Auntie Mame and Mother Russia"...that made me laugh out loud. Well, that's not such a big deal, really, since the entire book made me laugh out loud several dozen times.

How I appreciate Broadway Books (once a unit of Doubleday, now part of Random House's Crown Publishing Group) for rescuing these hilarious romps from final obscurity. And, I failed to mention in my review of Auntie Mame, the cover and title-page art is just *perfect*! Edwin Fotheringham, the artist, even has a perfect Mame-ish name.

In Auntie Mame, Patrick is whisked off at the end of his "education" at St. Boniface Academy for a graduation trip to Europe with Mame. The misadventures of Mame in Venice alone ("Horsefeathers" by itself has the power to make me fall about laughing, you'll see why when you read the book) would make this book worth reading...but Lady Gravell-Pitt! Schloss Stinkenbach! Sari Mont d'Or and Mrs. Cantwell doing the demolition derby dance in their little Lebanese retreat, whence Mame retires after a camel-riding incident that...well, never mind, that would be telling instead of reading, and you should read the book.

Really. Honest. You *should* read the book.

I read Mame as a child and remember loving it. Must look it up and the sequel as well. Thanks, Richard, for reminding of those great reading times, when the world was really my (literary) oyster, just waiting to be opened up and devoured.

>63 Matke: Betch cash money you, Gail, will really see this one as a laugh riot!

Richard - I never read any of the Mame books ( I suspect sr. Mary Catherine probably wouldn't have considered them appropriate to put in the library for 'her girls') so I'm going to be on the lookout since they do sound delicious, and I suspect they will contribute to my overall bonhomie.

Edited to close the parentheses so Sr. Mary Gratia doesn't have the big one up in heaven!LOL

mine arrived yesterday :)

>65 tututhefirst: Oh dear, Tina, I can't imagine that Sr. Mary Anybody would approve of Mame! Perhaps it's best not to risk Hell's fires...don't read them.

;-P

>66 mckait: As for you, little Missie, you've been destined for the Infernal Pit since, well, always, so read away!

Double posted!

Hurray for the Infernal Pit. I hope they have refreshments. Like, I dunno, tuna salad with eggs. Yummy. Sounds to me like the Infernal Pit might be a slice of paradise.

Thats what you get for being mean to little ol' me .



so there!!!

Don't worry Kath, I'll keep you company...

(That, of course, will be one of your punishments!)

;)

I saw the Rosalind Russell version in the late 50s when i was a kid.....then saw Angela Lansbury in the 60s...never saw Lucille (gulp) Ball's "travesty". I think I owned the books at one time but they are, sadly, long gone...I remember them as being snarky, but very smart....funny and FUN TO READ all on their lonesome(s)....

good reviews, sweetie
;-}

Review: 40 of fifty

Title: A GENTLE MADNESS

Author: NICHOLAS A. BASBANES

Rating: 4* of five

Oh my God! There are people crazier than me out there!

This is one long book, about people who love books to the point of madness, and the world they've created for themselves to play in. It's a delight to go there with a cicerone as astute and witty as Basbanes.

Dozens and dozens of modern-day biblioholics are here, and squads and fleets of same from the past. All of them, without exception, sound like they would have been fascinating to know, if not always easy or pleasant. One postal worker who flourished in LA was particularly interesting...now we know how our own Mark-a-doodle-do does it, it's all here in the book!

Basbanes clearly enjoyed writing this book, and I suspect had a small case of biblioholism himself. He's just too able to present the upside of the addiction not to be a fellow "sufferer."

Yes, it's a doorstop of a thing, but it's fun and it's funny and it's inspiring (probably shouldn't have said that publicly, who knows WHAT The Divine Miss sees); and it should be yours. It's a worthwhile investment!

Thank you, Stasia, for my copy, which I will *not* be releasing in the catch-and-release program.

Sounds like another great book about books, none of which I have ever read. I'm going to read one sometime, eventually, perhaps...

I'm about two-thirds through with this book, Richard. Basbanes is amazing, isn't he? I did find that reading too much of it at one time does sort of make the reader say, "My goodness, maybe this collecting business is a bit over the top." And then the reader goes out and buys a few more books.

I loved the comment by the Hungarian chef, to the effect that buying more books after donating one's collections is "like getting pregnant after menopause. It isn't supposed to happen." So many engaging characters here, not the least of which is the author.

Wow! I must seek out this puppy (or should I say St Bernard?) As a fellow Mad Book Lover....well..maybe I should see what company I could keep..if I ever left my house for a long enough period of time

Good review, you.
;-}

>74 Ape: Maybe it's best you don't, Stephen. Sometimes knowing the course an incurable disease will take isn't helpful.

>75 Matke: I loved Chef Louis, too! Johnson & Wales University is my niece's alma mater. She says it's amazing to see the stuff he left them.

>76 jdthloue: I don't know but what your hermitaceous nature wouldn't be confirmed by the book. After all, where can one enjoy books better than in the privacy of one's own home?

Maybe it's best you don't, Stephen. Sometimes knowing the course an incurable disease will take isn't helpful.

Nonsense, my favorite thing to do is read about the courses of incurable diseases. :)

sounds very yummy, and it will go on one of my lists...

#73: I am very glad you enjoyed it, Richard. You can give me a hug while I am in NY just for that book :)

ETA: You might want to check out this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HokCFpKJVM

You can briefly see Basbanes bookshelves in the background.

Review: 41 of fifty

Title: THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER

Author: CARSON MCCULLERS

Rating: 4.99* of five

Oh, how I loved reading The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Oh how very beautiful the writing in this book is! How much intense and careful observation went into the creation of these characters, each of whom...especially the Kelly family...I felt I could look up in the phone book and call for a chat.

The author was a whopping *twenty-two* when this book was published. TWENTY-TWO!! A person should barely be able to find a rathole and figure out how to pound sand down it at that age! And here McCullers is, creating archetypal characters that define a certain cultural space.

I feel like such a schmuck. Until I contemplate the extremely high cost of her genius...alcoholism, suicide attempts, relationships that ker-flooey-ed in spectacular ways...I am envious of her gift. But I am deeply grateful that she left as much work behind as she did in a short fifty years.

Well, that's all, really. It's amazing and it's beautiful and it's necessary, the way all fine, fine art is.

So good to find a book and fall into it that way.

I have yet to choose another. IT has been.. a morning. The story shall come another time...

I need to enter some books too. I may begin with the book Mark sent me.

#81: I have definitely got to re-read that one. It has been 20+ years since I read it the first time.

4.99 out of 5? Harsh! :)

So nice to see Nicholas Basbanes on the video; thank you, Stasia.

I'm just starting "Heart" today, Richard, and it looks marvelous already.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is one of my favorite books and seems to be making the rounds of LT lately. Hmm...might be time for a reread.

Review: 42 of fifty

Title: SEARCH THE DARK

Author: CHARLES TODD

Rating: 3.8* of five

First off, go look at this for some very interesting background on "Charles Todd"--the mother and son team who create these fascinating mysteries. It's a YouTube video interview, and they're not quite what one would expect....

What on Earth are the murders of some seemingly unrelated women in the Dorset countryside to do with Scotland Yard? Well, as always, Ian Rutledge and his internal nemesis Hamish are sent where the Yard thinks they stand the best chance of getting rid of them (though the only one they KNOW they're getting rid of is Ian). As always, strict instructions are issued for Rutledge to avoid antagonizing the powerful people involved in this case; as always, he fails; and as always, Rutledge and Hamish bring home the bacon (bad pun--there's a fire in this book that crisps Rutledge a bit) with some tidy last-minute inspiration.

But the book's characters, the book's post-WWI England, the book's solid construction provide a happy experience for the seasoned veteran of the Mystery Wars, and a soothing, orderly sense that the guilty will suffer. (My, how they're going to suffer in this book, and not just the murdering guilty. It's *very* subtly, nicely imagined, and almost perfectly executed. I smiled my most Schadenfreude-laden smile those last 20pp.)

I don't think the series will appeal to everyone, especially those who find mental challenges unpleasant reading, but the books offer a lot of pleasures of atmosphere and of justice served. I hope many more of you will give them a shot soon.

Hi Richard, great review as usual (as usual(as usual(as usual)))

I'm going to check out that series eventually!

I refuse to get started on another series. No really... I just do. Refuse.

Review: 42 of seventy-five

Title: TILL WE HAVE FACES

Author: C.S. LEWIS

Rating: 4* of five

I read "The Chronicles of Narnia" when a child, which I believe was a statutory requirement for American children born between 1958 and 1970. I went on to read Lewis's Martian books, eg Perelandra, and suddenly *smack* the Jesus factor hit me and I lost my taste for Lewis. No chance of that here, since this is a retelling of the classical myth of Cupid and Psyche.

Aphrodite, for reasons of her own, gets wildly jealous of a mortal beauty, and demands of her local enforcer/priest that he sacrifice Psyche to appease her wrath; her son goes to collect the sacrifice, and instead falls in love with her; he spirits (pardon pun) Psyche off to his Palace of Luuuv; and then all Hades breaks loose.

In Lewis's skillful hands, the retelling of the tale becomes a cautionary tale of political/religious power concentrating in one set of hands and the cruelties and idiocies that follow inevitably therefrom; and the horrid cruelty of the beautiful to each other, the nature of sibling rivalry, and why sisters should always be kept apart, preferably in tiger cages, until breeding age is attained. (Okay, I added that last part.)

It's a marvelous story, fraught with conflicts among a powerful family of women, and almost unbearably sad in many places. It speaks loudly of Lewis's undeniable abilities as a storyteller. It makes all the sense in the world that this should rank in his canon with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and yet somehow it doesn't. I suspect the lack of Christian symbolism hurts the book in his fans' eyes. But I am here to say that, for the non-Christian looking for an entree into world of Lewis, this is the place to go. What a delight to discover this book at last!

Recommended, with a shooing motion towards the bookery of your choice and a firm admonishment to buy it soon.

Nice review. One question: Is there such a thing as a weak admonishment?

:)

I read Till We Have Faces last year and thought it was excellent. Great review, Richard.

>91 rocketjk: You bet! Haven't you heard the mommy of the monster say, "Now Lucius! You stop making that little girl bleed and scream or mommy will be cross with you!"

Or the state department "admonishing" an ally for blowing up something we really wanted them to blow up? "North Jackbootistan's government is clearly in the wrong by taking this unilateral aggressive action against the sovereign people of South Jackbootistan, though as the South is a haven for terrorism the Government of the United States remains committed to..." ad nauseam.

>92 Eat_Read_Knit: Thanks, Caty!

hi Richard, you've just added to my wishlist again!

Fortunately the local library has it - so already on reservation:)

ETA - thumb ... naturally:-)

#90: I love that book. I just re-read it last year. Glad you enjoyed it, Richard. Great review, as usual.

Review: 43 of fifty

Title: HONS AND REBELS

Author: JESSICA MITFORD

Rating: 4* of five

I fastened on this at a liberry sale I went to recently, remembering that some fellow LTer was on a Mitford Girls kick. I was inspired to buy it by its ten cent price and also its ghastly, 60s-Penguin "artwork" cover. I like that it says "3/6" for a price, so exotic and incomprehensible. And also, The American Way of Death made a **huge** impression on me as a boy, so I wanted to know more about Miss Mitford.

Oh, the joys of being in a master's hands. Mitford dashes off, apparently effortlessly, sketches of her bizarre family, never straying into hatefulness even where antipathy exists. Her completely unconventional upbringing wuth a mother who refused to vaccinate her (a decision with a horrible, tragic cost later: Mitford contracted measles and gave them to her newborn daughter, who died as a result), contending that "the Good Body" knew its stuff, and a father whose major occupations appear to have been shouting and stomping and campaigning for Conservative politicians. Her wildly disparate sisters, novelist Nancy as the eldest and the most remote from Jessica; Diana, the great beauty and future Fascist; and Unity, the tragic figure of the family, a giant Valkyrie (ironically enough, this is also her middle name!) with an outsized personality to match, whose horrible fate was to try unsuccessfully to kill herself when her beloved Nazi Germany made war on her homeland. (The other sisters, Pam and Deborah, pretty much don't figure into Jessica's life, and her brother Tom was so much older he was more of a visiting uncle.)

So Jessica tells us the tale of someone born into privilege, luxury, and uselessness, who finds all of these qualities completely intolerable and who cannot, cannot, cannot endure the idea of the life that is laid out before her. She doesn't know what she believes, but she's sure it's not what her family believes.

I fell in love with her right then and there. I felt the same way. Jesus, racism, and conservative politics made me nauseated, as they did my eldest sister.

So Jessica Mitford, Girl Rebel, looks for a way out: Her cousin Esmond, a professional rebel with a published book and a troublemaking newspaper founded and run before he was 16, fit the bill. She spends a year finagling an introduction to him, suprisingly difficult because she's so sheltered and he's so disreputable; but once it happens, it was the proverbial match to gas!

I adored Esmond as much as Jessica did, and I adored Jessica as much as Esmond did. I cried when they lost their first daughter so unnecessarily; I cheered when they got to own that bar in Miami; I sat numbed by the enormity of Jessica's loss when Esmond died when he was 23, fighting against the Fascists he'd hated all his life, whether Spanish, English, or German.

I am so glad that I finally read this book that's as old as I am, being published in 1960. (My copy isn't that old, it dates from 1962.) It's very instructive to be reminded that youth isn't necessarily wasted on the young.

If you take my advice, you'll read it to experience the joys and sorrows of youth one more time, from a safe distance; but the stakes remain high, because the storyteller is so talented.

Review: 44 of fifty

Title: TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

Author: VIRGINIA WOOLF

Rating: 4.9* of five

As I've grown older, I've realized that Woolf is a pleasure best left for later in life, after the sheer novelty of experience has been burnished (or worn, depending on who you are and what's happened to you) into a soft, many-sided glow. Novels like Woolf's aren't the arduous, look-at-me fantod-inducing flummoxifiers that Faulkner (a favorite of mine, don't leave me messages about my philistinism!) shoved at us; they start, they don't commence; they flow with you or without you, they don't drag you along, barely above the frothing surface of the torrent of words*burp*Joyce*burp*; they move without undue fanfare from person to person, from place to place, and they never demand (or care, if we're honest) whether you're there or not.

I guess it comes across that I'm a fanboy. Well, I am, so what?

This is the novel Woolf considered her finest, though I don't agree with that assessment, being a partisan of Mrs Dalloway for that title. I think she felt it was her finest because she was so much in it; it was a means of exorcising the ghosts of growing up in the Stephen household. It's set in the same place that the Stephens spent their summers, and most of the events are identical to events in Virginia's young life. I am glad that the book succeeded, artistically and psychologically and materially; but I don't find in it the sheer, rapturous joy that I find in Mrs Dalloway.

But it's not for everyone. Leave it alone until you're at a point in life where your own memories are soft and rounded; while they're sharp and painful, Woolf won't be likely to find room in your head to spread her soft cotton blanket of story.

My dear, I am so excited as to the lighthouse is in my next 10 queue.....I'm hereby moving it to the top. Have been meaning to read this for years, and now with your caveats as guidance I feel ready to go. Wonder how it will sit in the central California valley heat?

Hello, Richard; I'm loving your reviews as usual. They are both informative and entertaining, not always an easy mix.

One tiny quibble: measles vaccine wasn't available, I don't think, until the 1960's, so J. Mitford's mother's admittedly lunatic refusal to have her vaccinated must have been for smallpox. At least I'm pretty sure that's the case. I may, of course, be mistaken, as in so many of my ideas.

That said, I'm fascinated by all things Mitford. What a fascinating, bizarre family: they make even my family look more or less normal.

Hi, Gail! I think the vaccine you're referring to is the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) combination vaccine that became available in the late 60s (I think).

I ain't no expert, though, and I've relied on Mitford's statements. I figure she oughta know, she was there!

Have you been to my Books Off the Shelf thread lately? I'm almost done reviewing the books I sent to Whateveristan to those two soldiers I got from Operation Paperback. See first post in this thread for the link.

>98 tututhefirst: Tina my dove...I think it will make the Scottish island climate more poignant to you to read it in such heat! "Enjoy" your trip. xoxo

Still on your bird binge I see?

eta

lots of good things came out of the sixties... that vaccine was not one of them.

OKAY EVERYONE COMING TO THE PARTY ON 9/11:

Driving directions vary. PM me again if you need them.

Train directions are simple: Be on the train that leaves Penn Station headed for BABYLON at 1:10p on Saturday afternoon. Get off at ROCKVILLE CENTRE. Look for a tall old man with a gray beard dressed in orange cargo shorts and a small, buff woman, who will no doubt be impeccably turned out. The cars will be at the little brick station-house looking thing. Head for that and, if you don't see one of us right away, look forlorn and wobble your chin a little. We'll find you more easily that way.

Review:45 of fifty

Title: THE BIG SLEEP

Author: RAYMOND CHANDLER

Rating: 4.4* of five

Okay, nobody move. Sit there and read this.

Raymond Chandler is one of the best writers of readable fiction ever to practice his craft. He wrote a googol and six pulp stories for the cheesy mags of his day, and he burned away all the really crap stock phrases while he was doing that. He honed his flensing knife and cut the blubber from his prose while he was writing a story a day or some such, and this novel...one of the early ones...shows how the effort and the time he put in on those stories paid off.

The Big Sleep gives us an indelible icon, Philip Marlowe, tough and smart and street-wise; he's the epitome of what the culture of the 30s and 40s thought of as A Man: Good at thinking as well as fighting.

The reason that today's audiences should still read Chandler's fiction is simple: Human nature is never more nakedly on display, warts and all, than in the best crime fiction, and it's always a good idea to read the best before reading the latest.

Enough said. More won't convince the unwilling. Excellent stuff, this.

good. glad you liked it. not gonna read it. no more series !!! no no no

Review: 46 of fifty

Title: 920 O'FARRELL STREET

Author: HARRIET LANE LEVY

Rating: 2.9* of five

You know why I picked this book up? The address. San Francisco isn't on my life-list of places to love, but it's very interesting. And, I found out after reading this dull, dull, dull book that Levy knew Alice B. Toklas! Even lived with her in Paris.

Hmmm...never married, knew lesbians...hmmm

None of that makes her in the least bit interesting, I fear. Her childhood in 1870s San Francisco was pretty much what you'd expect. I could scarcely keep my eyes open for much of the book. Her writing style is very much of the period of her youth, and in fact the book reads like the stilted, uninformative letters home that I've read in many a Collected Letters book about figures of that age.

The book, the only one she ever published, was brought out in 1947 when she was eighty years old. Frankly, for that reason alone, I think it deserves some place in our cultural memory...she was an old, old woman by the standards of that day, and she was Jewish, and she was *ahem* unmarried, so she was a very, very different sort of a person. Good! Yes, publishers, good to bring out alternative voices!

Ye gods, I don't want to read this kind of bludgeoningly boring book ever, ever again.

Carson McCullers to Jessica Mitford to Raymond Chandler...WOW!

Suggest The Lonely Hunter by Virginia Spencer Carr....a wonderful biography.

Oh, the Mitfords! Hons and Rebels has been a favorite..and everyone read The American Way of Death in the morbid late 50s/early 60s.....Nancy Mitford ain't bad, either....Love in a Cold Climate indeed!

Raymond Chandler be God...if you can find The Raymond Chandler Omnibus consider yourself lucky..He is the reason I bought my first Fedora!!

ta ta, Sweets...you be doing good!

;-}

Huh? I was reading another thread and thought I heard someone say 'lesbians.'

*looks closer*

...oh. *ahem* Right, well, sorry you didn't like the book, Richard! ;)

fedora, jude?

I love that picture that made in my mind....there is a review on that omnibus that I love....it is right on top..

Review: 47 of fifty

Title: PEPITA

Author: VITA SACKVILLE-WEST

Rating: It feels vulgar even to think of rating this book.

Back in the less adventuresome years of my reading life, I think I read The Edwardians because I knew its author was a Lesbian and Virginia Woolf's One True Love. I retain no particle of memory for that book, so it may very well be that I *bought* the book in order to epater la bourgeoise aka my mother, and simply failed to read it.

I'll see about remedying that lapse some other time. Now, all I can say is, what a treat it is for me, at this juncture of my life, to meet Vita Sackville-West and her rackety great-grandmother, her louche grandmother, and her wildly eccentric mother. These women...! My dears, these are the Titanesses that make our own rather drab little lives recede into proper grayish flannely perspective.

(Vita warn't no slouch, either.)

There is a certain grandeur to the stories of the Pepitas' lives, a very odd kind of magnificence in these women's inability to be anyone other than themselves fully and entirely, no matter the cost. And costs there were, even unto the third generation: Lawsuits appear to have trailed glorious wings behind all the women up to Vita, whose Englishness seems to have squelched that side of things. (Didn't squelch her insistence on being herself, though, thank goodness!)

I love this sort of story. I hope that, one day, Anderson Cooper will take up his father Wyatt's mantle and tell us what Gloria Vanderbilt was like as a mama...his would be the only story I can imagine, barring a breach in the Kennedy walls, that would equal Pepita for glamour and sheer, inescapable romance. These personalities become rarer as the world that gives rise to them becomes more pedestrian and hugely boring in its upper reaches.

I feel compelled to say a word about another world now, seemingly, passed forever as well: The world of making lovely books for mass consumption. This book has a dustjacket that was, for its day, a luxe presentation, being four-color and quite charmingly designed; its paper is at least twice as thick as modern book papers, so that I found myself trying to peel the pages apart; its lovely cloth binding has a blind block of the author's initials surmounted by a coronet, and a spine attractively gold-blocked in a printed black ground; it is, in short, a lovely object.

The good people at Chin Music Press are doing what they can to prevent beautiful books from vanishing entirely; they are not, however, publishing books that will appeal to a mass audience more often than not. Pepita was intended to sell many copies, and so far as I am aware, did. How I wish that was still a realistic possibility!

Should you read this book? Well...maybe, maybe not. I think anyone with an ounce of romance in their soul should read it. But then, as it's not a novel, it doesn't have An Ending, really, so most romantics might find that a little off-putting. But really, since the book's hard to find, I'd say let it come to you serendipitously, the way my copy came to me from a library sale. It will find you ready and it will reward you for your patience, as it did me.

Okay, that went on the wishlist. It is not available from BN.COM so it went on my not available wishlist.

Robert

Review: 48 of fifty

Title: ROUNDING THE MARK

Author: ANDREA CAMILLERI

Rating: 4* of five

The Book Report: Montalbano, over fifty and not liking it One Little Bit, decides to take an early-morning, out-of-season swim...and runs smack-dab into a dead guy who's clearly been in the water for a long time. He improvises a tow rope out of his swimsuit for the poor bastard, and begins a long, tiring naked swim in the cold water to bring him to shore. He's exhausted and feeling very lightheaded after his exertions and collapses on the sand...where he is attacked and vilified by a crazy old couple from the North who're renting a neighbor's house, photographed au naturel by the paparazzi they've summoned, and generally made a figure of fun...fifty yards from his own home. Thus begins Montalbano's misadventure into the seamiest-yet part of Sicily's underbelly. The dead guy proves to be a murder victim, identified in an extremely surprising way by an extremely unexpected source; Montalbano's interference into an illegal-immigrant bust results in the death of a young child; and in the end, both are revealed to be major pieces in a puzzle that bedevils Italy, with its immense amounts of coastline and huge population of coastal islands, most among European nations: How can you prevent a flood-tide of economic migrants from sheltering the vilest, most despicable members of our species from profiting off the misery of their masses? True to life itself, the question is posed, the answer left unknown. But Montalbano, now, he solves his piece of the puzzle, and a few...not many, just a few...of the scumbags meet a just end.

My Review: Well, in the sixth book of the series, there is a bit of sagging to report: A few promising threads are left dangling here, especially the whole North-vs-South cultural divide so present in every facet of Italian life. Camilleri fails to exploit some delightful possibilities, and I think that it's inevitable to do so in a long-for-him book crammed with major plot points and huge moral questions. Part of the charm of these books is their conciseness: seldom over 230pp in translation, they are models of taut storytelling. Then along comes a story like this one, replete with opportunities to explore Italy and Italianness, and it's too much for the format of the series. It's unwise to change formats mid-series, so some things will fall off the radar a little too quickly.

Well, you still give the book four stars...what's that about, fanboy? asks a sarcastic member of the public. Not just about being a fanboy, though I admit that I am just that. It's about the layers of well-executed prose, conveying piece by piece the existence of and resolution to a problem previously hidden, in concert with a storyteller's greatest gift or lack: The ability to create, in a few deft verbal strokes, a sense of a character as a real person. The ability to evoke in the reader a new response to an old situation. The ability to bring a place to life using nothing more than a few lighting effects and your own sense of smell.

These qualities, mes vieux, are amply on display in this book and deployed in service of a story that, even though it's resolved, isn't in any way over. And that should keep you awake nights.

Hello Richard! See, I knew I'd return to the fold sooner or later - and have to add another handful of titles to my wishlist, of course... Thankfully Pepita is already there thanks to a fellow Brit blogger who read it recently, so I'm spared one addition at least.

I think I might need to re-read Hons and Rebels soon. I'll always pick up anything Mitford, what with Deborah being our Derbyshire treasure and all. I was at the late Duke's funeral and everything! A sheep went bouncing across the road just as the hearse went past and made me laugh, and there was someone singing VERY BADLY but with great pomposity right by the microphone set up in Edensor church, which kind of ruined the solemnity of the occasion, but still...

*gives Richard a big smacker on the cheek and hopes he'll forgive her for not dropping by in so long*

>113 elliepotten: Hi there Ellers! I'm trying to keep to my resolution of putting books in this thread that were published before 2008...so far, not so good, because I put the other Montalbanos in the 75 thread! Silly old faggot.

I so thoroughly enjoyed Hons and Rebels that I can't wait to hear you trumpet forth on the re-read. It's a genuine pleasure to enter that weird Mitfordian world, isn't it?

*smooch* back at'cha

Oh NO!! This is one I missed in the adventures of El Magnifico, Salvo Montalbano.....must run get this one. I love this series, and just discovered it's available (no hold, no wait) on the library download. I'm almost finished the audio I'm currently doing so This is perfect. Thanks for the shove.

richard... you always make me smile.. if not laugh out loud..

Review: 49 of fifty

Title: WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE

Author: SHIRLEY JACKSON

Rating: 3.7* of five

The Book Report: A classic of American suspense literature, this is the story of the Blackwood family, told by Mary Katherine "Merricat", of her life with elder sister Constance and elderly uncle Julian. They live in the biggest, grandest house around their New England village, surrounded by villagers whose suspicions of them are well-founded: Constance and Julian are survivors of a mass murder, a poisoning of the entire Blackwood family, for which crime Constance was tried and acquitted. Merricat, ten years younger than Constance, is the classic unreliable narrator, and a person very young for her age. The isolation the family lives in is voluntary, though no one tries too terribly hard to break it until cousin Charles Blackwood shows up with designs on Constance and her money. The realignment of the family constellation doesn't sit well, or wear well, and the end of the book closely resembles the beginning, only more so. The journey between is highly creepy, and just a little bit disturbing.

My Review: This isn't a horror novel in any way. It's horrible, in that it's got eerie atmospherics galore and Gothic characters and events in spades, but there is not one ounce of gore and no one speaks in tongues or is possessed by even a minor demon. The characters aren't particularly believeable, nor is the plot particularly plausible, but the fun of a book like this is that it's improbable but somehow satisfyingly so...it's so much fun to listen to little Merricat go through her OCD rituals, and her extreme clarity of character analysis makes the events of the book happen; somehow it all just *fits* in Jackson's universe, though not in yours or mine. Well, mine anyway; for all I know, LT could be chock-a-block with Merricats....

All in all, I found the trip Shirley Jackson takes me on in this short book to be very worth taking. I wasn't blown away by the book, but I liked it and I think most readers of literary fiction would as well. If you liked The Aspern Papers, you would most likely enjoy this book. Imagine a Saki story with a violent punchline...that's what Jackson delivers.

Yes, recommended, and without trepidation. At least, not much trepidation. o.O

like

Yeah, we really need the "like" button over here, no?

xoxo

yes

xoxo

Review: 50 of fifty

Title: SPOOK: Science Tackes the Afterlife

Author: MARY ROACH

Rating: 3.7* of five

The Book Report: Hot off the success of Stiff, Roach launched herself at an equally surprising topic: Does the soul exist? Is it possible to find it? Can the soul's survival of individual death account for the mysteries of reincarnation and hauntings?

In a word, No. Roach travels the globe looking for the kind of evidence that scientists look for when postulating the existence of muons and Higgs bosons, sans the billion-plus dollar measuring equipment and teams of serious guys in funny coats and booties. Unsurprisingly, she fails to find it.

My Review: All the stars in this book's favor are for Roach's hilarious writing and funny anecdotal collections. None are for the subject at hand, which she simply cannot bring herself to treat seriously. Her lapsed Catholicism made her too deeply skeptical to break free of it horrible fist-clench and look at the improbability of success from the few, one-quarter-assed feeble swats science has aimed at resolving this topic scientifically. Spend twenty or so billion dollars and a couple decades on it. Then let's see what science has to say. After all, they're doing *just that* for this Higgs boson dingus at CERN, so far with no success, and the immense machine they've built to see this particular angel dance on that particular pinhead seems as cranky as my knees on a cold morning.

So please forgive me for rating her quest at zero, failed utterly before it started due to prejudice on the part of the questor and her chosen henchrats, but that's the only honest judgment I can render. Going looking for something in a place where it just isn't, and you already knew it wasn't, isn't looking...it's looking for chances to be funny, snarky, and cool, plus scoring one off the mental midgets who spiritually abused you in the name of Jeebus.

But GOD this woman's funny! I laughed and laughed and laughed at some of her lines!

I really enjoyed your 50th review of Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife. If I happen to be drawn to it at the library I'll pick it up but I don't think it is a read that I would seek out.

agree with you here my friend.

I agree completely, Richard. Didn't like the topic of the book, but Mrs. Roach can write about whatever she wants and I'll read it and love her for it. :)

Good Morning! Loved your review of Spook, Richard. I just finished Packing For Mars and was wondering which of her books I should read next. Probably Stiff.

>122 Carmenere: Thanks, Lynda! I think it's best left shelved, unless you already like Roach's humor that is.

>123 mckait: Thought you might.

>124 Ape: *sigh* isn't she **wooonderful**? *sigh*

>125 Copperskye: Hi Joanne! Glad to see you! I'd suggest Bonk next, and then Stiff.

126: Absolutely. But there's something seriously wrong here. The likes of you and me should not be fawning over a wonderful woman such as Mary Roach. I am too young, and should be furiously spending my thoughts on big-breasted bimbos short on brains and shorter on skirt length, and you are of the wrong sexual orientation altogether. Are we in some sort of twilight zone? :(

But yes, she's dreamy. If I were 5 years younger, I'd hang a poster of her over my bed. Unfortunately if I did that now it'd just be creepy...

>127 Ape: *whispers* but if I find the poster on the Internet I know who else to tell, right?

(Yes! And if you find a double-sided picture frame, so I can flip it over and pretend I actually have a fancy panting or some such hanging in that spot instead when I have company, that'd be great!)

>129 Ape: This one or this one? Aaron Brothers sells the frames, but then again, so does Wally World.

I'm finding the horse-riding one much more erotic. :P

"Going looking for something in a place where it just isn't, and you already knew it wasn't, isn't looking...it's looking for chances to be funny, snarky, and cool, plus scoring one off the mental midgets who spiritually abused you in the name of Jeebus."

I honestly don't think Roach was "going looking" for proof of the soul's existence or of the afterlife. I think she was just taking a humorous look at the various aspects of the search itself, in many of its varied forms, past and present. And if she has revealed in her humorous way that the search to date has been insufficient and in the wrong hands, isn't that of value as well for those who may wish it undertaken more seriously? (Full disclosure: although I am speaking from my sincere reaction to the book, Mary Roach is my wife's best friend, so I am inclined to be supportive, I guess.)

>132 rocketjk: if she has revealed in her humorous way that the search to date has been insufficient and in the wrong hands, isn't that of value as well for those who may wish it undertaken more seriously? Not really, I don't think it's any surprise that science hasn't focused on the issue of what the soul might or might not be, and it seems unlikely to do so any time in the foreseeable future.

And whose are the wrong hands?

And whose are the wrong hands?

Well, you seemed to be saying that science hasn't brought it's full monetary and man-hours ammo to bear on the issue ("Spend twenty or so billion dollars and a couple decades on it. Then let's see what science has to say."), so of course there have been no answers, and that those who are looking are predictably doomed to failure. A search in the hands of people doomed to failure is a search that's in the wrong hands, in my view, or at least that's what I was getting when I made the comment. But probably I'm misunderstanding what you meant in the first place.

At any rate, my understanding of your review is that you're assuming that Roach brought a predisposition to be amused by those searching for proof of the afterlife with her, rather than simply being amused by what she ended up finding. You may well be right about that. From what I know of her, she brings a predisposition to be amused by just about everything she sees. But she is, after all, a humorist who writes about science, not a scientist with a perky sense of humor.

I suppose I'm reacting to your feeling that Roach's quest "failed utterly before it started due to prejudice on the part of the questor." Is it your thought that there was some valuable information that she missed due to this prejudice? Or, to look at it another way, what would have a constituted a successful quest in your view?

Perhaps what it all boils down to is that you're saying* that the people and studies Roach investigates in Spook are too easily made targets of ridicule, since the subject matter is by nature a speculative one that is prone to attention by crackpots, and that since Roach knew or at least strongly suspected this going in, it makes the subject matter, in the end, beneath her, in comparison to her looks at cadaver science, sex and outer space. That's certainly the "one of these things is not like the others" aspect of Spook in comparison to her other books, although my assessment of the overall relevance of that factor is different than yours (assuming I'm even close to correct about your point of view).

Hey, honestly, although my impulse control is too feeble for me to just delete this whole message, I hope this conversation is cool with you. Obviously (I hope), I am not trying to tell you how you should react to the book. I'm just interested in your thought process about it all.

* I hate having people put words in my mouth and try never to do that to my friends. So count this comment as conjecture on my part, rather than a confident statement of what it is I think you're getting at.

>134 rocketjk: Hmmm...well, I felt that Roach didn't so much knew or at least strongly suspected this going in, it makes the subject matter, in the end, beneath her, as she looked into a subject about which her mind was made up. She even mentions that she's working to keep an open mind, trying hard not to judge, etc, several times. This never needs be said in Packing for Mars or Stiff, not to my recollection anyway. She starts Spook out with the anecdote about her mother forcing her into Catholic situations (shudder) and her lifelong disinclination to take "experts" at their word (paraphrasing) stems from that.

So...why then take on this subject? It's of abiding interest, yes indeedy, but it's not a good fit for someone whose ideas are set to evaluate the problems she is required by the nature of the research to bring her now-customary level of intelligent interest to bear on.

I don't hold this *against* her in some way, I just note the book as flawed in those ways and judge it as funny but not enlightening, unlike the other three books I've read by her. And goodness knows the lady's a laugh riot!

Review: 51 of fifty

Title: JUSTICE

Author: LARRY WATSON

Rating: 4* of five

The Book Report: A collection of previously published short pieces, Justice tells the backstory of the Haydens of Bentrock, Montana, the family at the center of Watson's one bestselling novel Montana 1948. We meet patriarch Julian Hayden in 1899, barely dry behind the ears and ready to take on the world; his shy, retiring, high-strung wife Enid on the day she married him; his two sons on the day childhood ended for both, in which the seeds of Montana 1948 are explicitly sown; Wesley's short, abortive run for freedom from the weight of expectations sparks at a terrible family Thanksgiving dinner; Julian's and Wesley's deputy and general sad-sack, Len McAuley, comes in from the pointlessness of secondary characterization in unexpected and poignant ways; and then the marriage and parenthood of North Dakotan steel magnolia Gail and Wesley, a life started in, and blighted by, the shadows of the Hayden family legacy.

My Review: This is decidedly not Montana 1948. It's perfectly good read on its own, actually, just as character sketches of a family and its effects on the world at large, and its costs to the members thereof. I can't complain about anything here, because Dr. Watson is a prose stylist whose direct, pared down artistry is very appealing to me. I can't urge all and sundry to rush out and buy a copy, either, because the book is a collection of short stories with all the cultural freight implicit in that description. Tastes and hints and pieces are the stuff of short stories, and that is both a strength and a weakness. Here, it's perfect, because the novel they prequelize (a rather lumpish and ungainly neologism, but "prefigure" is so stuffily snooty) is in itself a marvel of tight, concise storytelling that leaves acres of room to wonder about the people in it. But on its own, under its own steam, it's very good but not great. Good writing, interesting characters, but nothing...well, nothing to launch it to that next level, say like American Salvage or Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.

Still. You have definitely done worse by yourself than reading these seven stories. I'm glad I finally made room for them on the nightstand. Recommended.

Always nice to see your review RD, and since I fell in love with Montana 1948 at your recommend, I will definitely put this on the list. I really enjoy short stories...my mind likes having something with a finite end in sight.

Review: 52 of fifty

Title: COUP DE GRACE

Author: MARGUERITE YOURCENAR

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Book Report: Told in the first person past perfect, this tale of three young people caught in a highly hormonal passage of their lives at the same moment as the Russian Revolution overthrows the privileged existences they'd led until that time purports to be the memory of Erick von Lhomond as he sits in a train station cafe, on his way to who knows where after his career as a soldier of fortune has led to a wounding in the Spanish Civil War then newly ended. Erick recalls his love for sibling aristos Conrad and Sophie, children of the Count of Reval, and his cousins. Sophie falls in love with him; he and Conrad are already involved. Triangle collapses, the two siblings die, and cowardly, contemptible Erick soldiers on. It's all in the hows, as life so often is when one is young; now, in the fullness of his wasted years, Erick is seeing the whys, and they're keeping him up nights. And not a moment too soon, ask me.

My Review: récit (French: “narrative” or “account”) a brief novel, usually with a simple narrative line; studiedly simple but deeply ironic tales in which the first-person narrator reveals the inherent moral ambiguities of life by means of seemingly innocuous reminiscences.

It's a very French narrative form, is the récit, the novella's Goth cousin, all chains and weird makeup effects and scary-looking hair. It's perfect for telling this sort of moralizing by a man with no morals tale, and there aren't that many English-language writers willing to do this without oodles of padding and the crutch of multiple characters. Yourcenar, whose Memoirs of Hadrian lives as one of my all-time favorite reads, tackled this difficult task in 1939, before WWII's official starting gun. She was quite clearly aware that war was inevitable and imminent, and wrote this tale as a protest against the further damage inevitable in a war.

The ending of the book, stark and violent and horrfying, sums up the expectations of this Belgian survivor of the First World War, and they were not in the least bit too dark or pessimistic.

I found the casual, unremarked-on anti-Semitism of the book jarring. I know it was a part of the culture Yourcenar lived in, but it hasn't aged well. I wasn't very impressed with the narrator's casual, caddish sexuality either...Conrad could certainly have done better, and Sophie's awakening has such tragic consequences that it makes one doubt the sanity of the child (she's sixteen to Conrad's and Erick's twenty during the brief span covered by this book).

Recommended? Well, on the whole, no. It's not a casual book, and it would offer too few thrills for most people in the modern audience. For me, I'm glad I read it, but I won't re-read it ever.

ditto what Tina said in message #138. The book is now added to the tbr pile.

Hugs to you my friend!

Review: 53 of fifty

Title: BURNING SECRET

Author: STEFAN ZWEIG

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Publisher Says: A suave baron takes a fancy to twelve-year-old Edgar's mother, while the three are holidaying in an Austrian mountain resort. His initial advances rejected, the baron befriends Edgar in order to get closer to the woman he desires. The initially unsuspecting child soon senses something is amiss, but has no idea of the burning secret that is driving the affair, and that will soon change his life for ever.

Wet, drippy little Edgar, his bored, would-be glam mama Mathilde, and the louche horndog Count Otto meet in an Austrian mountain resort. Otto takes a fancy to Mathilde, since she's a visibly bored Jewess of a certain age. He decides he'll lay siege to her virtue via befriending little larva Edgar, who mistakes his overtures for real friendship because it's never occurred to him that adults lie, cheat, and steal in pursuit of sex. After revolting Count Otto thinks he's about to achieve the leg-over, he drops Edgar, and his troubles begin. Hell hath no fury, apparently, like a barely pubescent boy disappointed in love. What this nasty little child dreams up to do to the perfidious, selfish adults is really quite impressive! In the end, his life is completely changed, and one rather trembles at the path his future will take...*cue Horst Wessel*....

My Review: Peopled with deeply dislikable characters, and set in an anonymous vacation destination with no sense of permanence, it's a little hard to invest in the dramatis personae for a goodly stretch of time. I don't think I ever really did all the way. I don't care at all about anyone here, in that if each of them had fallen off an Alp I would've pursed my lips, tutted, and gone about my day.

But the story is a very involving one, paradoxically, because the nature of love comes in for a pretty thorough and fairly damning examination, one that would have seemed very risky for Jewish Zweig to conduct so openly in 1913, the year it was published. The love of mother for son, of son for mother, and mother for sex is explicitly explored. The love of any one of these people for anything is revealed in all its unglory as deeply selfish and terribly destructive, as my cynical heart believes love always to be. (Want to screw up a friendship? Fall in love with your friend! *bang* goes any hope of remaining on good terms...but I digress.)

A movie version of this novella, starring Faye Dunaway, appeared about 25 years ago. It wasn't very good. I am amazed at that, since Zweig's writing is so clear and simple that I'd think it was a shoo-in to have excellent dialogue come out of the characters' mouths. C'est la vie, as conventionally Francophile Mathilde would say...doubtless in a heavy Viennese accent.

So, okay, the point is: Recommended to Zweigers, cynics, and those with pubescent boys at home. Romantics, leave on shelf. "Life is Beautiful" and "La Traviata" fans, turn your backs upon. Multi-eyed, part-alien cyborgs, read and learn...this is what humans are *really* like, and it's not a terribly pretty picture.

Mmmm...excellent, intriguing review. This looks like a must-read to me. Thank you as always for so many pointers toward undeservedly obscure books.

Btw, I just got Laura by Larry Watson. Have you read it? Of course it would be an impossible matter to match Montana 1948, but still, anything by this author is worth at least looking at.

Book 53-no thanks, I'll pass.

OMG OMG GAIL!!! You *read my mind*!! I thought of Watson's "Laura" the whole time I was reading this book! I liked it, but I strongly preferred White Crosses, which I would count it as a personal favor if you would read. I think you'll love it, because it's about toxic secrets and lies, much like Montana 1948.

>143 tututhefirst: Tina, you'd HATE IT, so I'm glad you're passing. It's too bitter, too angry, and nowhere is there even a glimmer of resolution.

Gig 'em back atcha, there, Apeyboy!

Oraljel on your tongue too?

I will absolutely read White Crosses as soon as I can. Watson's an amazing sort of wrtier; why isn't he more prominent?

>148 Matke: ... ... ...

Well. Ermmm.

... ... ...

I got nothin'. Ain't no *good* reason.

Well, here's a link to an article I saw today:
http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article09221001.aspx

While it's not exactly on topic, it does express my feelings about what happens with today's literature culture.

>150 Matke: I really liked that article! And I agree with the Bookslut. I even shared it on FB!

I might have missed it but have you read I am Not A Serial Killer yet?

Not yet, Kara. This year. It amazes me how many books I haven't read yet, but I have bought....

I really liked the article too. If you're not going to read Freedom raise your hand!

*raises hand* I hated The Corrections.

Reivew: 54 of fifty

Title: CHESS STORY (vt, The Royal Game)

Author: STEFAN ZWEIG

Rating: 3.8* of five

The Book Report: Lumpenproletarian chess prodigy Czentovic, a boorish and unsympathetic figure, meets noble Jewish Dr. B. on a cruise. The good doctor is escaping the Nazis after a horrific torture-by-isolation. Czentovic is off to new triumphs as the world's greatest living chess master. Dr. B. survived his horrible isolation by reading and re-reading and memorizing and repeatedly playing in his mind great chess games from a book he stole from one of his torturers. The stage is set...the grisly Grand Master meets the gruesomely treated noble spirit in a chess battle for the ages, and is defeated. The doctor retires from the scene, completely unmanned by reliving his horrible confinement through his victory over the taciturn, unintelligent idiot savant Czentovic.

My Review: Zweig committed suicide after completing this book. I see why. It's the least optimistic, most hopeless, depressing, and horrifyingly bleak thing I've read in years. Four hankies won't do to stanch the helpless, hopeless weeping induced by reading the book, and a pistol is too heavy to hold in fingers gone too numb to clench even slightly.

It's one long flashback. The "action" of the chess match takes on an almost lurid and pornographic tinge after the grim tale Dr. B. tells of his time with the Nazis. It's dreadful. It's downbeat. It stinks of freshly-opened coffins and crematory ovens. If there is a redeeming value in having read it, it's that one need never, ever, ever touch it again, and I ASSURE you I will not.

The first two sentences of the "My Review" section made me snort, once again, my beverage all over the keyboard.

Thanks, Richard. That made my day, which had been difficult.

And in return, here is a bon mot:

A narcissist is someone who is better-looking than you are.
Gore Vidal

>154 citygirl: citygirl I hated The Corrections too! sad to say I didn't even finish it, maybe got half way through. So I raise my hand to not reading Freedom either.

#150> From the linked essay: "This happened before. When The Corrections was released, Franzen and the critics had same slobbering make-out session."

Happily, I wasn't slurping soup when I read that. Great, great essay. I haven't read any Franzen, nor have I been tempted. Too busy reading the memoirs of fur trappers from Labrador and such.

Please Richard dear....take pity on this poor old lady. If #54 is so awful, why the 3.5 stars???

>159 tututhefirst: 'Cause I know you read recommendations over 3.5 stars and I want you to SUFFER!!

No...because it's a very interesting story. I just happen to hate it.

Thank you.....I shall pass....have had enough horror reading, and this is the feel-good time of year I tend to want to slip into nice cozy, soft, warm feel goods. So thanks but no thanks.

Review: 55 of fifty

Title: BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S

Author: TRUMAN CAPOTE

Rating: 4* of five

The Book Report: Miss Holiday Golightly, Traveling, meets a nameless man in her WWII-era brownstone, ignores and then abuses him, and never truly sees him (or anyone else, unless she has her prescription sunglasses on) as she pursues her life of errrmmm uhhh enthusiastic debauchery around the man-starved confines of Manhattan. Unsaid but completely obvious is the narrator's gayness: No man under 50 who wasn't in a sensitive occupation would be undrafted at the time he narrates unless he was 4F or queer. He never say anything, so we know which it was. In the end, Holly's crazy antics make it necessary for her to flee New York, and the narrator never sees her again; until, that is, a moment in 1957, when he sees a photo of a carving done in a small African village that is Holly to the life. He remembers it all, and he writes this tiny jewel of a story to free himself of Holly's long-buried hold on his mind and heart.

My Review: A breathtakingly beautiful story, told perfectly, with dialogue that (having rewatched the movie last night) stands out from the dross that surrounds it in the film like the Hope Diamond stands out from those Diamonique things in Kmart.

Oh how I wish the realities of films in 1960-1 had allowed for the *real* story, complete with its chilly, sociological eye for a certain class of striver that the USA produces, attracts, and celebrates in a dark, negative way with all kinds of judgments and exclusions, intact! How much more beautiful would Audrey Hepburn have been in an unsanitized Holly's Mainbocher dresses! And George Peppard (a dead ringer, only taller, for the youthful Capote) without the silly name and tacked-on "mistress" (played with stunning cruelty by gorgeous Patricia Neal), could have been a *huge* star on the back of that role.

But things were not as they could not be. And things never are, which is one of the messages Capote presents with a shade too much force for five-star perfection, and his of-the-time reticences and prejudices haven't worn well at all. But oh God, how happy I am this story is in our world, and how much I hope each of y'all will read it. Find your inner Holly. 'Tis the season, after all.

thumbing

thanking

smooching

Oh bless you Sweetie..for this one. I do love Capote's work......maybe because of that reticence. If the film had been darker/chillier, I'm not sure it would have held its place in people's hearts/heads, all these years later...Probably would have done in mine....yurk!....but, as it is....there is still plenty of the dark side visible...if you know how to see...

Thumb for this one.....and no mean reds

;-}

*snicker* Mean reds! Oh, the loveliness of that description.

Really Jude...I would have loved to see what Truffaut or one of the New Wave guys could have done with this, or (and this just blinded me with flashbulbs) Hitchcock could have made of Holly and Nameless! But the movie that is can't be faulted. It's an artifact of a more conservative moment, *right* before the world fell completely apart and blew up and melted away before the horrified gaze of the very people it skewered so completely.

Oh, Hitchcock would have surely plumbed the darker recesses....and the gargoyles lurking behind those Fashionable Folk...though their grotesquerie was pretty evident (did i just type that last bit??? OY!)

I love the film just the way it is...sad and sweet and smarmy all at once....but, I didn't mind the complete collapse of that world either..

;-}

Great review and comments here. This is one of those rare cases where the film, though different from and in some ways a betrayal of the book, is nevertheless a work of art in and of itself.

didn't mind the complete collapse of that world either

I will bet you Holly would've HATED the Sixties.

>169 Matke: I can't argue that, Gail! It was fabulous, and it wasn't the book, but it was in and of itself a beautiful thing. I loved the story. Both ways, the book more.

I have never seen the film or read the novella (I know, I know) but on the back of that review I think I shall have to read it. Another thumb.

Caty, I can think of no reason whatsoever that you should not enjoy the read...and in the collection of the same name as the novella, there is the classic Holiday story A Christmas Memory. It is simple, eloquent, and so very heartbreakingly loving and sad that I cry *buckets* every time I read it...at least five times in 40 years, it takes me that long to recover. But don't tell anyone! I have a rep as a hardass to maintain!

I shan't tell a soul.

I always get teary when I read A Christmas Memory. One of my all-time favorites; so sweet without being sticky.

Wonderful review! I agree with 169. It is one of my top three movies of all time, and boy was I surprised when I read the book, which was wonderful, and different, for the reasons you gave in the review.

I remember when Hollywood remade Sabrina with Julia Ormond and Greg Kinnear. I was aghast! Who would remake an Audrey Hepburn movie and why? Praying to the powers that be that no one ever considers remaking Tiffany's. I think I would faint if I ever heard such horrible news.

>174 Matke: ...and from CAPOTE!! Still an amazement to me.

>175 citygirl: I think I would faint if I ever heard such horrible news There better be a lot of soft places to land...I imagine quite a lot of us would do the same!

Oh, I'm so conflicted over Breakfast at Tiffany's now! Joyce reviewed it just the other day, and said that it paled in comparison to the movie, because she is a big Audrey Hepburn fan, and Holly in the book is very different from Holly in the movie. I love Hepburn too, so I wasn't going to read the book...but then your review, Richard, makes me want to all over again! I guess it is a short read, so I'm just going to take the plunge I think!

Speaking of horrible remake ideas, I read just today that Disney is proposing a remake of The Wizard of Oz. Now that would be horrible - who could ever live up to Judy Garland??

Speaking of horrible remake ideas, I read just today that Disney is proposing a remake of The Wizard of Oz. Now that would be horrible - who could ever live up to Judy Garland??

YUCK..YUCK.. YUCK....why can't people leave well enough alone? The movie is a CLASSIC for god's sake....let's preserve what's good from our past and not try to make it over into something new. Let's teach our children and grandchildren to appreciate things that are good as they are instead of having to push the re-start button on everything!!!

Ok....rant over.

They've remade The Wizard of Oz before...The Wiz, anyone? how 'bout Tin Man?...but no one that I know of calls any of those classics. Yet another bad idea from Disney, should this surprise anyone? They produce such a huge amount of stuff that it's inevitable that much of it is dreck.

I'd pay good United States dollars to see them shoehorn that Gagoogee broad into the Dorothy role. I don't know if I'd live through the laugh-fits, but I'll risk it. OOO OOO Beyonce Knowles as Good Witch! Gawd I'm rolling around already, and I don't have any clout to make it happen, but let's look at the good side: At least they know classic material when they see it.

I liked The Wiz, the movie. I also saw it on stage in Atlanta when I was tiny. But that and The Tin Man were more re-interpretations, like Wicked, than a straight out remake, I'd say.

Review: 56 of fifty

Title: GOODBYE, MR. CHIPS

Author: JAMES HILTON

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Book Report: Old Mr. Chipping, nearing ninety and still telling his hoary old jokes from sixty years ago to the newbies at Brookfields school, spends his last few days on earth wandering among the many well-furnished rooms in his head. We see the events of his entire career as a schoolmaster, his brief, brilliant career as a husband, and his long, glorious sunset as a School Institution. As he passes through the portal made for one (bet Chips'd know the source on that one), he feels...as I hope and pray all who read this will feel on their own long night...it was good, it was good.

My Review: I read this book tonight because, for far from the first time in my life to date, I learned that I lost an old, old friend: My mother's best friend, my heart-mother, finally let go of her life barely short of her 92nd birthday on January 4.

I know it was only her body wearing down, because dementia had long since taken her essence from the living world. But tonight, forty-two years after I met her and began to love her, I feel she is here. And I promised her I wouldn't cry, she told me it hurt her to see me cry once a lifetime ago, but I can't not. It's for myself, for my heart growing old and curling inwards from surprisingly fresh hurt. I don't miss her, or miss her more than I did yesterday; death is a release when someone is already no longer themselves; but the days ahead number fewer than the days behind, and I can see my own end like a hill far away, instead of the comforting illusion of horizons hiding it. It's not scary. It's just...real.

I am now the age she was when I met her. My memories are so real! The Pirate's Den, the junque shoppe on North Lamar, parking under the pecan tree and racing everyone to be the first to see what was new; cold, cold Bull Creek, flat hot rocks, the folds of the Balcones Escarpment and their fossil shells; laughing, crying, talking, always with a silver-bunned, trifocalled, green-eyed artist teaching the only things she knew to teach. I needed them then, I treasure them now, and there is no one else to whom these memories mean one single thing except an old guy reliving his past.

She was Mr. Chips, and I listened the way those schoolboys did; now it's my turn...sic semper tyrranis, oh wait that was the assassin but that's good too, sic transit Irenaea mundi...hail and farewell, dear, now you go on home to Mother and Daddy, walk safe!

Oh my Richard. Word's fail me but I'm so sorry that you have lost such a dear person from your life. Hold onto those memories.

What a lovely post. I am sorry you lost your heart-mother.

>182 calm:, 183 Thank you kindly, both ladies. Funny how a book, a little one at that, can be the only solace for some of life's hurts.

Oh! what a wonderful person she was, and I am so happy that you had her in your life. I know it is sad to have to let our loved ones go.. and absolutely understand facing our own mortality.

A sad day, but a joyous one too, as she joins those who have gone before. I suspect she is one more spirit that will be watching over you here. ((rd))

I was so sorry to learn of your loss, Richard. My heart goes out to you. I'm finding that the older I get, the sadder I become; so many familiar dear ones gone; most of my childhood just evaporating into the ether...of course I'm a deal older than you are, but I'm getting tired. Just bone- and heart-wearying tired.
{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{Richard}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}

>185 mckait: She was, she was, and I too am glad of her. And I'm happy her spirit can go home now, the body's not weighing it down.

>186 Matke: Thank you, Gail, it's a dark feeling isn't it, this kind of weariness? My youth evaporated earlier than most, I think, because so many of the guys I hung out with died in the 80s. So it's more familiar to me than I think it should be to someone only 50...loss, moorings gone, memories unattached to the others I made them with.

On the bright side, being 80 holds fewer fears for me than others my present age!

that was lovely what you said, it made me cry

for you.....

Richard--I'm so sorry for the loss of your friend. She sounds very special, and any of us who have had someone like that in our life is blessed indeed.

I researched that story and could find no truth to it at all. Lancaster was chased by every woman in Hollywood at the time and had three marriages. None of that precludes his being gay but I choose not to believe it.
Lily

What are you talking about?