It was Dorothy’s mention of this book that drew me to it. The characters are familiar: Hera tells the story of the struggles Penelope had while Odysseus was making his 10-year-long trek back from the Trojan War. As if holding off the suitors who wanted to occupy his throne weren’t enough, Penelope had to cope with Elektra and Orestes showing up looking for their mother Clytemnestra...
The subtitle, The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them gets all the elements of the book into the title, though perhaps the declaration is a tiny bit overdrawn. I suspect my questions are unanswerable: what caused this fever to take hold so strongly in disparate parts of the U.S. in the mid-1920s? Is this going to continue to happen? Egan centers the...
Now I’ve read four books by Jennifer Johnston and continue to be impressed by her work. This one was shortlisted for the Booker prize. She is not a well-known writer outside Ireland and without Reading Matters I would not have known about her. In the first book I read by her, The Gingerbread Woman, the main character declares to a visitor that there will be no talk of “the...
I don’t remember where I read about this novella, but it filled the goal set for this New Directions series: “the pleasure of reading a great book from cover to cover in an afternoon.” Well, perhaps not “great” and for me it’s one that “could” be read in an afternoon. The seventeen-year old Marguerite schools us in what she learned from her Maman...
I listened to this book having recently read Künstlers in Paradise that I liked so much. This one was about an interesting family dynamic. I will be restrained about plot revelations because those revelations were my favorite part of the book. Fin was so-named because after his birth, his father wandered into a theatre showing a French film that was just ending. He was clear that this son would...
Lynne Olson has found another brave and impressive woman to write about. I was enthusiastic about Madame Fourcade’s Secret War, about a resistance warrior in World War II, as well as Citizens of London. Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, born in 1913, became an Egyptologist for the Louvre in the mid-1930s. She was a rare, perhaps unique, female figure in digs and was unusual in making good...
It was Ron Charles’ writing about Zadie Smith’s play based on Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath from The Canterbury Tales that moved me to read this. It was bold of me to take this on; I have a high school level memory of The Canterbury Tales (It’s not in modern English, it was written by Chaucer, it’s racy). But I love Zadie Smith and that turns out to be reason...
This silly little book was published in 1940 and is told in the voice of Norman Huntley, a young man who plays the organ in the cathedral town of Cornford. When it begins Norman and his friend were traveling in Ireland and to amuse themselves while chatting with the sexton of an old church, invent an old woman named Miss Hargreaves. A letter is written, one thing leads to another, and Bob’s...
What a wonderful book this is. I loved it and when I finished it, I listened to a randomly chosen part again. Julian, a young man who lives in Brooklyn, has hit some bumps in the road and his parents won’t subsidize him so he can continue to study Kurosawa’s body of work. His best option was to help with care for Maime, his 90-something grandmother in Santa Monica who had broken her...
I knew this book was about an unnamed narrator who agreed to be with a friend who had come to the end of an unsuccessful cancer treatment and had pills to end her life. So I was prepared for a difficult book, but the first chapter that describes a talk the narrator heard by a professor that let me know that was not the hard part of the book for me. His message was about climate change and after...