A clever book about the five women and one man who meet to discuss the Jane Austen books. For at least part of the time the narrator refers to her/himself as one of the group, but all members are described by the narrator. So we must understand the group as having a life of its own? The members are all pretty interesting in that they are unlike each other: a high...
Audiobook. What a grim story this is. Dr. Sloper loses his beloved young son and wife and is left with a daughter, Catherine, whom he regards as dull and unattractive. When an adventurer takes her up in hopes of having her considerable inheritance, the doctor says he will disinherit her if she marries him. She has money enough to be comfortable, left to her by her...
This play was first produced in 1929 and set on the waterfront in Marseille. It was slow going for me because it is in French, but was well worth the effort. The characters are wonderful — Cesar, father of Marius, owns the bar and alternately screams offensively at his friends and his son, and is affectionate and loving in the next instant. Fanny is the beautiful young...
This is a fictionalized biography of Henry James written with the restraint and the pace of his quiet writer’s life. The copy I read is now bristling with sticky notes to mark passages of interest — so many it’s quite daunting. Before I began the book, I read a short biographical sketch, and continued as I went along to check sources to read about his friends and their...
Audiobook. Mary Susan recommended this one and I downloaded it without reading about it in advance. I’m not sure that had I known it was the story of Hamlet set on the upper midwestern farm of several generations of dog breeders and trainers, centered on a mute boy, I would have been very enthusiastic. But she was right. The precise and loving descriptions of the farm, the family, and...
The dozen stories in this book are very intense, beautifully told stories that are as unsparing as you can imagine. A small dose of this view of humanity is the right size dose. Some stories are set in London, others in an Ireland that seems long past. There's the story of the twosome, matched by a dating agency, meeting in a theatre bar (brilliant idea, when everyone...
I thought sure I'd enjoy another Penelope Lively book, but this one didn't do much for me. I loved Moon Tiger and City of the Mind, but not this one. The characters have some appeal — Howard Beamish is a paleontologist who studies fossils of life that didn't make the cut of evolution. The story of Lucy Faulkner is that at nine years old she was the sensible...
The narrator tells his story to an apparent stranger he meets in a market in Lahore over a cup of tea, then a long dinner. His tone is very proper, dispassionate and distant as he tells the details of his great success as a student at Princeton, then as an employee in the top levels of the world of finance and the end of this world for him and his return home to Lahore. He is...
Out Stealing Horses moves between several connected stories: a man in his late-60s moves to the wild countryside in Norway and takes us back to a momentous summer when he was 15 and his father took him from Oslo to spend the summer in the countryside in 1948. There the 15 year old Trond hears of his father’s activity in the Resistance during the war in that same area 4...
Through the experiences of four individuals, this book recounts the horrors of the siege of Sarajevo. Really, it’s three individuals, and the cellist who plays Albinoni’s Adagio every day on the spot outside his window where a mortar killed 22 people standing in line to buy bread. The beautiful and brave action of the cellist which denies the dehumanizing effect of the seige moves...