This collection of short fiction, one novella and three short stories, is intense reading. The novella which gives the book its title uses the poem by Wallace Stevens, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," as a guide. A few lines of the poem appear at the beginning of each chapter that explicates the thought expressed. The main character of the story is Jim Mendelssohn, a man in...
This very pleasant audiobook set in the 1930s was written by a homesick British woman living in California. She later wrote The Hundred and One Dalmatians. Cassandra Mortmain is a 17-year-old girl writing her diary in practice for becoming a novelist. She was living in a Jane Austen world: she lives in the beautiful English countryside with her family in a ruined castle with no money coming in...
In July 2014 my brother Steve wrote an entry in this blog about Earl Swift’s book Auto Biography. He did a great job of writing about it so I will limit my thoughts. The motivating factor for the author to write the book, finding a ’57 Chevy whose owners were all known, is a great hook. It was only possible because unlike most people who bought cars in the late 1950s, the original...
Oh dear, another contender for a spot in my top ten books of the year. It's a crowded field this year. This was a challenging read as there were multiple interwoven plot lines and the complex history of Portugal and the end of its empire in Africa to take in. Wikipedia was my friend here as historical figures and events were important in this story. In the 1980s David, an American...
The narrator of Sweet Tooth is Serena Frome, telling the story of her time employed by MI5 in the early 1970s. She was the pretty daughter of a bishop, pushed by her mother to go to Cambridge to study maths, though she had so little interest in it she spent all her time reading fiction from Valley of the Dolls to Margaret Drabble and A.S. Byatt. At age 21 she has a summer affair with a man of 54...
The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories by Anthony Marra. Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff This is Your Life, Harriet Chance by Jonathan Evison. Review in the NYT: relentlessly dark, but still…Tony's Book World said for a humorous book, it is very sad. Tenth of December by George Saunders, short stories, Jeff-Mad, audiobook. Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United...
This book (like the one I wrote about last) features a main character in mourning; I hoping to move to another focus soon. The narrator is Isabel Moore, a middle school teacher whose best friend Josie died in a car accident. The two women were drawn to each other because they were both funny and offbeat. Isabel gives us many very funny lines of her own, as well as Josie's, over the years they...
I should begin by confessing I had to stop reading this book halfway through. Right away you learn the main character is in mourning; he and his wife were in their 30s and recently married when she was killed. She had always lived in dangerous situations as a war zone journalist but was moving toward giving it up when she was killed in Pakistan by a US Hellfire Missile. After her death, he...
The third in the Neapolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante is set at a time of upheaval and social unrest in Italy. In the aftermath of the 1968 protests in Europe, bombings and assassinations by both the left- and right-wing groups occurred throughout the 1970s. The lives of the two women at the center of these books (Elena and Lina) reflect some of the strife and social changes. My thoughts about...
When I read a review on Reading Matters of this lovely book, I wondered how much the movie that I have seen more than once departed from the book. Very little, it turns out. The movie captured much of the charm of the book and had the advantage of the visual beauty. The book was written in 1922 and tells the story of four unacquainted women, each struggling with their own unhappiness, all...