After Percival Everett’s visit to the book festival here in Charlottesville, I heard from Laura that she she was moved to read this book and liked it very much. Knowing that it was a retelling of Huckleberry Finn, I decided reacquaint myself with that story especially after she added that there was a notable surprise change in the story. What I did was less reading than skimming. It was as...
The Alice in question is Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who became known as a White House Princess and then a Washington Power Broker, as the subtitle has it. Her life began inauspiciously: her mother died within two days of her birth, leaving her father Teddy Roosevelt bereft, especially so, as his mother died that same day. She was born in 1880, had her debutant ball in the White House in 1902...
This one will certainly be on my list of favorites for the year. The story is set in 1910 and 1921 in Malaysia and is told in the style of Somerset Maugham’s stories from that location, and is written by a person whose ethnic group was on the receiving end of the racism of the British. While the casual racism and homophobia of the characters are apparent, they become fully human. The story...
The Australian Kate Grenville is one of my favorite authors; I especially love her books The Lieutenant, The Idea of Perfection, and One Life: My Mother’s Story. This one is a fictionalized account of her grandmother, Dolly Maunder Russell. In 1881, the year Dolly was born, a new law required that children remain in school until they were 14 years old. That is how it came to be that her...
Sally is a young woman who returns to the small village in England where she grew up when she finds herself “on the rocks.” The book was published in 1915; the war had put an end to her adventures in Paris. It was in response to a letter from a troublemaker in Little Crampton suggesting she could marry Mr. Bingley, the stodgy bank manager, that she returns to the home of her guardian...
Recently I read a book that extolled the virtues of cricket; this one centers on a love/hate thing with soccer, or football, as they call it in Ireland. First, I learned that a Panenka is a surprise move, kicking the ball directly in the middle of the goal in a shootout kick with the hope that the goalie will leap to one side or the other to block the ball. It is named for Antonin Panenka, a...
I have previously read two books by the Irish writer David Park and think frequently of one of them, Travelling in a Strange Land. Though I don’t remember where I read about this one, I knew it was about an American CIA operative in Vietnam at the very end of the war and some consequent events 40 years later. Mike describes himself as a “prairie boy” whose family was mainstream...
Reading this book made me feel as though I were experiencing the fog of war, or perhaps the fog of an aging brain. That was especially the case when the focus was on the character who barely survived malaria, so I like to think that feeling was the result of skillful writing. This is my fifth Gail Jones book. Though the setting of the book was Salonika (now Thessaloniki) during World War I in a...
I became a fan of Jhumpa Lahiri in 2008 when I read Unaccustomed Earth and Interpreter of Maladies. Sometime later she learned Italian and has translated at least one book from Italian to English and writes in Italian which was the case for this book of short stories. I believe my reservations about Ties, the book she translated, were not the result of shortcomings of the translation. I always...
Thanks to Dorothy for loaning me this 1997 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. I was not conscious of either the book or author. We meet Martin as a young teenager working in his father’s cigar store in late 19th century New York. He is a bright fellow, focused on attracting customers, and begins by making a connection with a nearby hotel where at age 14 he begins work as a bellboy...