Making her way to Morocco just as World War I ended is impressive by itself; that Edith Wharton managed to see as much as she did and to write about it with great erudition is remarkable. She stayed in Paris during the war and made herself so useful helping refugees, the injured, and the unemployed that she was given the country's highest honor in 1916. This book was published in 1919 and...
Jane Austen's first novel is a comic take-down of the Gothic novels of her time. "Our heroine" Catherine is guided in her thinking in particular by The Mysteries of Udolpho, an actual novel by Ann Radcliffe. The beginning of Northanger Abbey, quoted below, gives an idea of how it goes on: No one who had ever seen Catherine Moreland in her infancy would have supposed her...
I was interested in this book for a couple of reasons: it won the Stella Prize (Australian prize celebrating women’s writing) in 2016 and it was one of Reading Matters’ top books last year. I read one of her other books (The Submerged Cathedral) and was impressed. I hesitated, though, because it’s dystopian, thus outside my usual interest, and I concluded it was too clearly...
Francine Prose did an impressive job of writing about such a complicated character, a woman who was beset by insecurities and at the same time inclined to reveal herself fully. She was an avant-garde art collector and was instrumental in the launch of Jackson Pollack and others. She amassed an impressive collection now housed in Venice, including works by Picasso, Duchamp, Miro, de Chirico, Max...
The author is married to Anita Raja, the woman identified as writing under the pen name of Elena Ferrante (I've read and written about her Neopolitan Quartet). One of her first books, The Days of Abandonment is, according to the NYT review of this book, the story of a woman with two children whose husband leaves her for a younger woman. Ties widens that story to include the...
The precipitating event of this novel set in Kenya, ranging from the late 1890s to the end of empire in 1960 was the building of the railroad from Mombasa to the shore of Lake Victoria. The railroad the British built with Indian and native labor was called the Lunatic Express and is the subject–and title–of one of my favorite books. References to Charles Miller's book turn up from...
The impetus for writing this novel was an incident that occurred when the author took her granddaughter to a way-off-Broadway children's musical. The budget was so low that the costumes were threadbare and the lighting director had trouble keeping the spotlight on the actors on stage. In the midst of what she thought would be a quiet moment, the 5-year-old asked her grandmother if she was...
I spotted this 2004 book by a favorite British author of mine at Jen and Brooke's house. As you might guess from the title, it is a mystery, a category that doesn't do it justice. I suspect it belonged to Brooke ("I like fiction that begins with a murder and ends with an arrest.") It does begin with three deaths, described in the first three chapters as Case History No. 1, No. 2...
This audiobook provided me with a nice long spell of pleasing listening. Jan Morris' desultory ruminations on that wonderful city were perfect for unfocused listening. As others who have written about it have said, it's not a book for undertaking a systematic study of the city, but you do learn much about Venice. Some of the treasured moments of this book are below: A list of the...
I must begin by saying this is the best book I will read this year. The book is a mixture of historical fact and fanciful fiction. The event at its core is the death of Lincoln's son Willie at age 11 in 1862; this tragedy for the Lincolns makes it a tough read for parents of young children. The method used to convey the historical facts is unique in my experience as a reader. Those...