All About Books discussion

I finished my book called A Merciful Silence by Kendra Elliot

I finished my book called The Last House Guest by Megan Miranda

Nichole wrote: "Today, I opened my Big Summer Read. It's the classic Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens."

Been awhile since I have read that - maybe I will join you!

The Summer Melt: An Eternity Springs novella by Emily March

I finished my book called The Perfect Stranger by Megan Miranda

I finished my book called The Summer Melt: An Eternity Springs novella by Emily March

I am currently reading 2 books from the Guardian's list of 1000 novels everyone should read:
Midnight's Children in audiobook
The Ship in Kindle edition

I will probably start a 3rd book from the list over the weekend - Cheese in ebook (non-Kindle edition).

After a (too long) period when I was not reading much, and that little mostly rereads, I have been invigorated in my quest to read books from this list!! As has often occurred before, I am finding myself pleasantly surprised by many of them.

In audiobook I'm listening to Love, Death & Rare Books while I'm reading "light" books, the socalled "cozy Mysteries" such as Aria di neve: La prima indagine di Mycroft, il gatto detective

I’ve been meaning to read Ross Lockridge’s Raintree County for years, and now that I’m doing so, I can confidently report that it is a great book. Sort of James Joyce crossed with Americana, but not intimidating. The framework of the 1066 pages is the celebration of July 4, 1892, in a small town in Indiana, but there are numerous flashbacks incorporating the 50 years before that.

Lockridge famously committed suicide as the novel was climbing the bestseller charts in 1948; the book really took it all out of him, and beyond that, he was mentally unprepared for fame and notoriety. John Leggett’s joint biography of Lockridge and Thomas Heggen (author of Mister Roberts and another late Forties suicide), Ross And Tom: Two American Tragedies, is one of the most moving books I have ever read.

All of Patrick's comments about Ross Lockridge's Raintree County sounds so interesting and sad. It makes me want to read all three books he mentions. Not sure I could read Mr. Roberts without hearing Henry Fonda in my head.

^ I have to read Mister Roberts! I read the Leggett biography of these two writers years ago, but somehow haven’t gotten to their works till now, when I’m catching up on my reading gaps in retirement. Maybe the sadness of the context affected me for a long time. Lockridge and Heggen were both Houghton Mifflin authors, although they (sadly) missed meeting each other, and the moment in the Leggett bio when Heggen reads of Lockridge’s suicide and gets very upset was overwhelming. Heggen followed a year later.

A book I’m reading in today is William Dean Howells’ The Landlord at Lion's Head (1897), set in New Hampshire (at a country inn) and Massachusetts. Anyone who likes classic Americana will surely enjoy it.

On the subject of country inns, I also highly recommend John O’Hara’s The Farmers Hotel, about a motley crew holed up at a roadside hotel during a blizzard.

Just finished and highly recommended: Edna Ferber’s Come and Get It. Having greatly enjoyed the 1936 movie version, I took up the novel and was interested to discover that it is very different in many respects and covers a much longer time-span than even the two generations of the movie. A rich and wonderful reading experience, completely absorbing. One startling development that is not in the film knocked me right off my chair.

I especially relate to this novel because I have lived on its Northern Wisconsin turf. “Butte des Morts” is Neenah in the northeast, close to where I resided in Little Chute. “Iron Ridge” is Hurley in the northwest, the great northwoods area that I often visited. The timber and paper industries are at the core of the narrative.

Ferber is adept at what critics call “solidity of specification”, description of exterior elements as in Balzac. You always know how the rooms are furnished, how the characters are dressed. (I was surprised to have it pointed out that Trollope, even writing at the length he does, doesn’t much bother with this, and it is true.)

At the time I read Charles Dickinson’s Crows, I had no first-hand experience of small-town Wisconsin, but I obtained a lot later! I have a strong bias in favor of regional and small-town novels; just by writing one, an author is halfway home with me. As a reviewer noted, Dickinson doesn’t try to make the characters in Crows ingratiating; but stick with it, this is a very rewarding read.

I need to get back to these regional novels of the Seventies and Eighties, since I loved pretty much all of those that I read at the time. And I see that other titles of Dickinson’s are available in my Scribd subscription. *

When I was working at the Doubleday Bookshop in the early Eighties, I had responsibility for “featured paperbacks” and display sections, and man oh man, did I push books like this, every single one that came my way. Publishers of literary paperbacks had a friend in me. Even better, I had certain customers who paid attention to what I was doing and let it guide their buying! Needless to say, that was intensely gratifying.

*UPDATE: I just started in on Dickinson’s first, well-regarded, Michigan-based novel, Waltz in Marathon, because hey, no time like the present. Published exactly 40 years ago, it has (I can already see) gained a period air by virtue of being pre-cell phone, pre-Internet, pre-all of that. In other words, it’s peaceful. 🙂

All 11 volumes of Upton Sinclair’s Lanny Budd series are doorstops individually, and the complete sequence, well! This is an entertaining way to take in the history of the first half of the 20th Century, because our Lanny is like the young Indiana Jones, he shows up everywhere that’s important. I’m currently 2/3 of the way through the first volume, World's End.

Entering the final chapters of Cyril Connolly’s The Rock Pool (1936), I can’t help thinking that it isn’t a good sign for a writer’s first novel to be quite so louche and dissipated, and in fact this was also Connolly’s LAST novel. An account of wastrels in a resort town in the south of France, and markedly lesbian in content for a novel by a straight male writer, The Rock Pool captures the lassitude of an impecunious protagonist who can barely force himself to get up in the morning (this is described multiple times).

Reading a bit about Connolly’s disappointed life, which is chock full of literary names and dodges about money and pointless to-ing and fro-ing, one immediately detects that unlike an F. Scott Fitzgerald who could live the heavy social drinking lifestyle and somehow write about it with insight and sparkle, it just messed Cyril up, to the point where he had much difficulty focusing (he left fragments of several other novels). He didn’t even have the alcoholic spurts of energy of a Malcolm Lowry, although he did manage to write a rather famous apologia, Enemies of Promise, about why he couldn’t achieve what he wanted to.

Despite all that, The Rock Pool is a quite interesting read, and Connolly was later a productive journalist and critic. He just wasn’t a big-guns, sustained-project kind of writer; even Enemies of Promise and his other well-known book, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus, look very SECTIONAL, and The Rock Pool itself is a shortish novel.

Patrick wrote: "I’ve been meaning to read Ross Lockridge’s Raintree County for years, and now that I’m doing so, I can confidently report that it is a great book. Sort of James Joyce crossed with Americana, but no..."

Interesting. I had never heard of it. I'll give it a look - if I can find it easily in Italy.
Thanks

At the moment I'm on "Mystery mood": started the The cat who series with The Cat Who Could Read Backwards and The Girl in the Woods, last but one of the Fjällbacka series. After that the last one, Il figlio sbagliato

I finished 6 books and they were called The Summer Retreat by Sheila Roberts and Deep Tide by Laura Griffin and A Merciful Death by Kendra Elliot and The Summer Seekers by Sarah Morgan and Texas Christmas Magic by The Road to Christmas by Sheila Roberts

Arthur van Schendel’s John Company (1932), one of the many fine Dutch novels of the colonial East Indies, is “impersonal” in the sense that the Dutch East India Company of the 17th Century is the true protagonist, and not any individual, although the story of adventurer Jan de Brasser provides a through-line. Van Schendel’s approach is original - he gives a comparatively dry and objective-sounding account of “goings-on” in Dutch Indonesia without any conventional plot as such. John Company is not like other novels, and all the better for it.

Among the other novels of this history that I would recommend are Louis Couperus’ The Hidden Force by Louis Couperus, Multatuli’s Max Havelaar, or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company, and Maria Dermout’s The Ten Thousand Things.

Of the 19th Century British novelists who figure in the standard histories, Charles Reade (1814-1884), a good friend of Dickens and Wilkie Collins, is one of the least-read today. He is best known for an uncharacteristic production, the historical novel The Cloister and the Hearth, but essentially he was a contemporary social fiction writer who was all over the hot-button issues of his day, and quite a bit of a muckraker. I greatly admired the first Reade that I read, It is Never Too Late to Mend, which achieves considerable power in its pictures of English prison life and the Australian goldfields. I just started Put Yourself in His Place, an industrial labor novel set in Sheffield (“Hillsborough”).

Joseph C. Lincoln (1870-1944) was part of the explosion of “local color” writing at the tail end of the 19th Century, his turf being the otherwise unclaimed Cape Cod. I started in on his Cape Cod Stories (1907) this morning and was immediately struck by the affinity with Neil Munro’s contemporary Scottish stories about Para Handy, which started appearing in 1905. I doubt there was any direct influence, since I’m not sure if Munro’s very Scottish stories appeared in US editions then or ever. But the salty use of dialect, the nautical context, and the conception of the characters are quite similar. “Rollicking” is an appropriate adjective in both cases.

Robert Smith Surtees has been pigeon-holed as a fox-hunting novelist, and perhaps partly because of that, has never "boomed," as the critic Edward Wagenknecht once pointed out. But Wagenkecht also astutely notes that it is easy to enjoy Surtees even if one thoroughly disapproves of hunting, because he excels at comic characterizations.

Surtees' slangy language is very dense for us and takes some getting used to; some references will be missed by non-specialists. But he is a joyously high-spirited writer, which is immediately noticeable and sustained me through the early going while I was getting used to the style. By the 100-page mark, I was reveling in the entire performance.

The book I chose for my initiation was Surtees' first, Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities. The Hunting, Shooting, Racing, Driving, Sailing, Eccentric and Extravagant Exploits of That Renowned Sporting Citizen Mr. John Jorrocks, not a novel but a collection of fictional sketches that first started appearing in the New Sporting Magazine (which Surtees co-founded) in 1831, and that were gathered between hard covers in 1838. (The Pickwick Papers, very obviously influenced by Jorrocks' adventures, had made Charles Dickens' reputation in the meantime.)

John Jorrocks is a rumbustious Cockney grocer whose character develops over a number of Surtees' fictions, but at the beginning he is pretty much a flat-out idiot, though not lacking in a certain crude charm. At his social level, he is clubbable; his friends enjoy him, for his inanities as much as anything else. And every now and then amidst much foolish chatter he comes out with a bit of down-home wisdom: " - so come without any ceremony - us fox-hunters hate ceremony - where there's ceremony there's no friendship."

Only the first few of the 13 sketches in JJ & J are really hunting pieces; after that, Surtees starts to vary the game, so that we get Jorrocks at the seaside, Jorrocks on excursion in France, Jorrocks throwing a dinner party, and so on. Abundance of ingestion is a running theme; the man eats like one of his horses. He also dandies himself up as much as possible, doing his best to be a "man of mode" despite having (to put it mildly) no gentlemanly or intellectual qualifications.

But elan vital, now that he's got. And if Surtees can't help satirizing Jorrocks, he also admires him for the sheer life-force he represents; appetite for hunting, for food, for nice togs translates easily into appetite for life in general.

Like many a vigorous fellow, Jorrocks feels himself hobbled by his wife, which lends a good deal of marital comedy to the book's later passages: " - wish to God I'd never see'd her - took her for better and worser, it's werry true; but she's a d----d deal worser than I took her for."

In short, if you have any winking fondness for vulgarity at all, Jorrocks is your man, and you ought to make his acquaintance.

Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno / Sylvie and Bruno Concluded is not exactly a work you recommend so much as point out, because honestly, one in 500 people is going to care for this level of extreme eccentricity. Melville’s Mardi: and a Voyage Thither and Robert Browning’s Sordello are two other productions in this same WTF? class. However, it should go without saying by now that I am very fond of all these and similar demented creations. 😏

Sylvie and Bruno uneasily combines a daft fantasy with a realistic late Victorian novel, and ladles on the sentimentality in a way that many now find unappealing. But all that said, it is QUITE an experience. I even find Bruno’s oft-criticized baby talk very funny. ("I never talks to nobody when he isn't here! It isn't good manners. Oo should always wait till he comes, before oo talks to him!")

What Sarah Orne Jewett did for Maine in The Country of the Pointed Firs, Alice Brown (1857-1948) does for New Hampshire in her stories of “Tiverton” (Hampton Falls). Local color writers like this should appeal greatly to cottagecore enthusiasts of today! I am reading Brown’s Meadow Grass Tales of New England Life, and a noteworthy characteristic of the writing is her great precision regarding plant life, every species specified, which should make her work a delight for botanists and gardeners.

The last of the Susan Hill's:
A Change of Circumstance - reviewed - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5692244242

This morning, finished D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (which really should be called Men in Love with Each Other). Well, that was quite something. Although I would acknowledge it as a major novel, one dominant impression that I had is that all four main characters are repulsive, and I possibly won’t mind spending any more time with them. That is very rare for me to say. (I didn’t feel that way at the end of The Rainbow, preceding.)

Lawrence does not offer a very comforting view of romantic relations. Constant tension, out of which comes an occasional hot tumble, about which Lawrence himself gets mystically (sometimes near-ludicrously) worked up. There are few novels in which the protagonists yammer so much about what their relationships MEAN; one wants to slap them sometimes. And as if to serve them right for being over-analytic…well I shouldn’t say, but without going into spoilers I can point out that one NEVER feels that a “happy ending” is in the offing.

The novel never stops being compelling, though. I wanted to throw it at the wall, yes, but then pick it right up again. 🙂

I hadn’t read much Lawrence before The Rainbow, a few short stories and poems way back when. Now I shall move on to Sons and Lovers.

Robert W. Krepps’ 1959 Baboon Rock A Novel of Adventure, set in 1872 South Africa, appropriates its basic situation from Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge and then develops it cunningly. Krepps (1919-1980) wrote a number of African adventure novels, as well as Westerns, science fiction, novelizations, even romantic suspense under the pseudonym “Beatrice Brandon”. He is one of those hard-working authors of the period that I would like to know more about, biographically speaking.

The Japanese novelist Morio Kita (1927-2011) acknowledged the inspiration of Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family for his massive family saga The House of Nire (765 pages in the paperback edition; the translation originally took up two hardcovers). Even early on, that affinity is obvious, but Kita’s tone is more dryly humorous. Another novel about the decline of a prominent family that Kita might have known is The Story of the Stone (aka The Dream of the Red Chamber).

I finished my book called A Season of Angels by Debbie Macomber

“I don’t arouse passions like that. It’s my intellect women like. I inspire them to read good books, but I doubt if I could inspire even Lizzie Borden to murder.” - Archie Goodwin

Archie Goodwin is unquestionably the fictional character I most identify with and would fantasize myself as. Timothy Hutton was peerless in the role, and that wardrobe, be still my beating heart. *

I’m reading the Nero Wolfe corpus in order, currently on The Silent Speaker. A thought that always comes to me is that an actual Archie wouldn’t put up with an actual Wolfe for more than a week. Archie could have a thriving PI business on his own, maybe contracting for Wolfe as the ‘teers do, but Wolfe without Archie would need another Archie. Archie enables Wolfe to be MOBILE by acting as his projection into the real world. Wolfe seldom expresses any appreciation for this essentiality, which is one reason why he frequently annoys me. But hey, it’s fiction.

* Wolfe to Goodwin: “Because you are young and vain you spend too much for your clothes.” Yeah, baby! 🙂

Thomas Hardy shrewdly observes in A Pair of Blue Eyes that a great many friendships are makeshift, emerging because people happen to be around and not because those are the ones you would choose given your druthers. This reality is crucial in Olivia Manning’s The Great Fortune, the first in her Balkan Trilogy (and the six-volume Fortunes of War), in which we are confronted with the disparate members of the international community in Bucharest at the beginning of World War II.

Our focal center is the newly-married Pringles, Guy and Harriet, but we are more privy to Harriet’s perspective. For her this is clearly a case of “marry in haste, repent at leisure”, because she knew very little about Guy when she jumped in, and seems increasingly exasperated by what she discovers. He, a university instructor, is blandly tolerant of whatever goofballs they encounter; she is much more selective, and this inevitably creates a lot of tension.

Guy’s interpersonal approach is better-suited to expatriate life, of course, yet I find myself deeply sympathetic to Harriet (as Manning intends), because I have been there, oh Lord have I been there. There is no doubt that you meet a lot of screwy messed-up people in the international rounds, on the run from something or other (frequently themselves). My strategy has been to be polite but distant, not to invite more contact than necessary. But Guy, perhaps out of a desire to examine “specimens”, gathers such folk in.

I’ll leave off there at the moment, not to give too much away (and I’m not done with the novel yet either).

Simon Raven’s roman-fleuve is quite long. The first sequence, Alms for Oblivion, is 10 volumes in length, and the follow-up set, The First-Born of Egypt, is seven. The immediate obvious difference between Raven’s novels and those of other roman-fleuvists such as C.P. Snow and Anthony Powell is the gusto with which Raven gets into bodily functions - sex (straight and gay), elimination, side effects of various illnesses, etc. Within pages of the opening of the second novel in story-chron order * , Sound the Retreat, we’re getting graphic descriptions of diarrhea as an inevitable adjustment to arrival in India; and later, a masculine competition narrated with pornographic gusto (I found it quite funny, but your mileage might vary 😏). I love Snow and Powell, but they are Victorian aunts by comparison.

Raven (born 1927) was precisely a generation younger than Snow and Powell (both born 1905), and his fiction practically defines the differences that 20 years wrought. Of course, his personality had plenty to do with the obvious pleasure he took in the new freedoms (“known for his louche lifestyle as much as for his literary output”). And it’s not just the provocative stuff that you notice, but the DIRECTNESS - where those earlier authors might hint at a character’s awfulness, Raven simply presents it full-throttle. The parents of Fielding Gray in the novel named for him (first in story-chron) are among the most ghastly in fiction, and one wonders why the book doesn’t turn into a murder story.

* As with a number of other novel sequences, including Snow’s, and Mazo de la Roche’s Jalna series, publication order and story-chron order are different; the authors backfilled when it suited them.

Timothy M. Aluko’s One Man One Matchet (1964) is a very sharp novel of pre-independence Nigerian village politics. Aluko had been a civil administrator, so he knew whereof he spoke. He also was a trained engineer - not the most usual background for a novelist.

Aluko purposefully only reveals the year, 1949, well into the book. So there was 11 years yet to go before independence, which I am sure felt like a LONG time in the living of it. The characters in the novel who are most anxious to throw off the British yoke will not be satisfied anytime soon, and that knowledge really affects one’s reading of the second half of the book.

“Matchet”, by the way, is a variant form of “machete”.

I really like the Heinemann African Writers series, and pick up volumes whenever I can.

Patrick wrote: "The Japanese novelist Morio Kita (1927-2011) acknowledged the inspiration of Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family for his massive family saga The House of Nire (765 pag..."

That is my favourite Mann!

I just love the unrushed fullness of James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy, so characteristic of fiction of the era both literary and popular, what people would now call “slow” because they’ve been conditioned by film and television. I’m currently well into the second volume, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan.

The street attitudes and language are absolutely reflective of the time and place depicted, early 20th Century Chicago, which would seem too obvious to even mention EXCEPT that many reviewers come off as shocked, SHOCKED, that books written in the past are OF that past. I used to argue with people about this, now I try to ignore. * The most heinous stuff in Studs Lonigan belongs to the characters rather than Farrell himself, but even if it did belong to him, I could easily deal with that. Being a historicist and all, I prefer my past full-strength. 🙂

* I find that this is delicate territory in almost all online groups. As a Burkean conservative who does not subscribe to the contemporary progressive agenda, I have to tread carefully - every day there are comments I decide against making, because it would look like picking a fight - but on the other hand, I don’t want to completely muzzle myself either. It’s not always the easiest place to be.

Just noticed that the crime / noir novelist Russell H. Greenan passed away on July 22 at the age of 97. He is something of a cult writer, especially for his first novel, It Happened in Boston? (1968). He published about a dozen novels altogether, including a couple that appeared initially in French translation. He has been on my to-read list forever, so I just ordered a copy of It Happened in Boston?

I've never read anything by him. Could be a "good" occaion to ppick him up!

The Canadian Thomas Murtha (1902-1973) never got a collection published during his lifetime, and his best work was buried in old magazines (some quite obscure), one anthology, and in his manuscript papers. His family spearheaded a re-launch of his writing, Short Stories by Thomas Murtha (1980).

It’s a terrific book. These stories of quiet desperation in 1920s/1930s Canada make an unusually unified impression, demonstrating that Murtha truly had a voice of his own. The hitherto unpublished stories are every bit as good as the previously published ones. The introduction (by Murtha’s son) is very informative.

There must be many similar story writers who have not received even this much posthumous justice. Novels at least are almost always BOOKS, with a physical dignity and potential findability. A great short story hidden in an old magazine - that is another level of obscurity.

It is possibly too much to hope that any of Murtha's several unpublished novels might see the light of day, but his stories can now form a permanent part of Canadian literary history.

I finished my book called Mistletoe Cottage by Debbie Mason

I finished my book called Let It Snow by Nancy Thayer

I finished my book called The Summer That Made Us: A Novel by Robyn Carr

I just opened While Justice Sleeps, a legal-political thriller written by former Georgia State Representative Stacy Abrams. It's the first book in her Avery Keene series.

I finished my book called The Boardwalk Bookshop by Susan Mallery

I finished my book called Angels Watching Over Me by Lurlene McDaniel

I finished my book called When Dad Killed Mom by Julius Lester

I finished my book called The House on the Beach by Linda Barrett

I finished my book called Hooked on You by Kathleen Fuller