It took longer to get things moving in Hilary Mantel's second book in a planned trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, but ultimately, the book was quite satisfying. The first was Wolf Hall, you can see my take on it here. She tells us about the low-born Thomas and his band of young men who try to impose order on Henry VIII's world; no small matter, given Henry's problem creating...
What an odd mix of farce and academic exposition about Bruegel is this book. How he conceived of a book with both a car chase and a consideration of the iconography and, get this, iconology, of Bruegel is a mystery to me. A philosopher on sabbatical, his art historian wife, and new baby go out to the countryside outside London where Martin gets a look at a painting in his...
This is one of those books with two parallel stories and chapters alternating between the stories. Max is an ethnobotanist with Asperger's who goes to Rwanda looking for a vine that gorillas eat to cure them of heart disease. While the beta-blocker part is fiction, I gather the Asperger's and gorilla descriptions are accurate. The other story takes place a hundred...
Linda Miller gave me this book as she and Bill were leaving town and trying to reduce their library. It’s my fourth Ward Just book and I love it as I did the others. He writes about the changes in a town not far from Chicago that occurred in towns in many places in post World War II America. It certainly happened in Fairfax, Virginia which went from a courthouse and a collection of...
I read this based on Reading Matters' recommendation. I turned up without something to read for the trip back from Iowa and found this at the Minneapolis Airport bookstore. Given my reservations about reading fiction that does not have developed characters and paints a largely grim picture, I had low expectations, but The Buddha in the Attic exceeded them handsomely. Julie...
This is another book I've read recently that does not have much of a narrative arc; each character tells us his story and in this case we get to know an extended, but small family from the viewpoint of each character. I'm thinking of Five Bells and Seven Types of Ambiguity; humm…why doesn't the title of this book begin with a number? I heard the author speak on a panel at...
The narrator tells the story of his voyage as an 11 year old from Ceylon to London in 1954, sent on his own to his mother who had been in London for some years. The character is named Michael, and the author tells us at the end that he did make this trip on his own at that time, and that otherwise the book is fiction. The cat's table is the least desirable one in the dining...
It's taken me some time to finish this slim book as I read it in French. And along the way, I have tried to commit to memory the words I did not know. It was actually an ideal book for a pathetic student of French like me, as the existential writer (a label Camus rejected) recounts so much of everyday matters that even I could read much of it. As long as you know words...
Last Sunday the New York Times Book Review had a piece about Elizabeth Taylor, the British author, which caught my interest as I had seen her name mentioned in a literary blog recently. The New York Review of Books has reissued two of her books, Angel and A Game of Hide and Seek. Angel, born in 1885, is the daughter of a widow who keeps a shop in a poor neighborhood. ...
This exhausting book covers a breath-taking range: from a present day story set in the Balkans to fairy tales that sometimes begin in the Ottoman days. The narrator is Natalia, a doctor who tells the stories of her grandfather in the course of a trip she makes with another doctor to take medical supplies to an orphanage in the countryside. One story necessitates the telling of another, for...