Another book chosen in honor of Australian Literature Month! As I mentioned in a previous post, Kimbofo of Reading Matters has designated this month for Australian literature. For each post about an Australian book sent to her blog, she is making a donation to the Indigenous Literary Foundation. So, besides being its own reward, reading Australian authors has another virtue. Yesterday my...
Henry Handel Richardson is the pseudonym for Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson and I learned about her thanks to a guest post by Tony's Book World on Whispering Gums. Australia Felix is the first book in her great trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, written from 1917 to 1929. Australian Literature Month, hosted by Reading Matters, seemed the perfect time to read this book...
Kimbofo of Reading Matters has declared that April is Australian Literature Month. What a great idea! Along with the usual commentary on the books I read, I will include information about their availability here in Virginia. To begin this happy month of reading, I settled on an audiobook version of a very old-fashioned and much loved memoir by A.B. Facey called A Fortunate Life. Clearly this was...
Once again I am bowled over by A.S. Byatt. The three stories in this collection are gems, with fully realized characters and lovely plot twists that make you smile just at the lowest moment. Of course each has a connection to Matisse that is clever and satisfying and makes you want to rush to a museum to see a Matisse exhibition. First, and I think my favorite is "Medusa's Ankles,"...
What a wonderful treat this book was for me, a book set in Australia from 1945 to the mid-60s. My era, if not my location. In the section about the 1960s, the author mentions shorty pajamas which brought back my memories of the pajama parties of my youth. The book is the story of Valerie, a British war widow who was briefly married to an Australian fighter pilot named Jasper who died at...
Sometime before 2006 I read Plainsong by Kent Haruf and loved it. (I know it was before 2006 because I read it in the pre-blog life.) My very vague memory is that it was one of those books that you fall into, that slows down your breathing and overtakes your monkey brain. And I remember the old, lovable twin-like farmer brothers who took in the pregnant teenager. So I fully expected...
Listening to Jeremy Irons reading Brideshead Revisited is such a pleasure. It made me happy toiling away in the gym or the kitchen; in fact, I cleaned out some kitchen drawers so I could keep listening. His voice, which conveyed all the characters perfectly without unnatural-sounding stresses and his plummy accent are such a treat. SPOILER ALERT: The characters are irresistible and...
Abraham Verghese has written a novel set in Ethiopia called Cutting for Stone with a focus on medical conditions in Addis Ababa that I liked very much. My Own Country was written earlier, in the mid-90s and is Verghese's account of his time as a doctor in Johnson City, Tennessee in the mid to late 80s, just as victims of AIDS were turning up in the rural area. First I...
I saw this described somewhere as a Dave-Eggers-wild-ride-so-hang-on-tight book and found that to be pretty accurate (though I've not read any of his other books). At first Alan Clay, the main character, seems to be a sad sack, a businessman from a bygone era, successful at Schwinn bikes, having presided over the moving of manufacturing oversees. We meet him as he arrives in Jeddah...
Set in Montreal at the end of World War II, this book paints a picture of love and support within a Jewish family coping with loss. The story is a complicated one and begins with the wedding of a bride who had just arrived from the horrors of World War II with a brief stopover in Palestine. She is an imposter in that she took the identity card of a dead woman in order to get out of Europe. Her...