finished Drop City  last night, but i'm too tired and sick to talk about it right now.   i think people either really like Boyles' writing or really don't.  i'm going to let my thoughts stew on this.  but, here's a great site i found tonight, ReviewsOfBooks.com, reviews from periodicals all over the country, also England, gathered together into one site.  no more trundling around from site to site reading reviews, one stop shopping right here.

in windmills i promised i'd pass along my thoughts on the film of House of Sand and Fog.  eventually i will.  i started the other day, but just couldn't manage it.  let me just say right now, i'd give Ben Kingsley the Oscar.  but i haven't seen Mystic River yet, so what do i know?

another one of those silly things from quizilla.com.  this one possibly of limited interest to my tiny readership.  "Which Western Feminist icon are you?" i liked it, though.  and am very pleased with my result:                          

    You are Simone de Beauvoir!  You spent years with Sartre, who was more famous than you at the time, but came into your own as you got older. Your seminal feminist work "The Second Sex" is a book that is still controversial, but many of us can't figure out why.  You kicked the early 20th century's ass, though!

if, when you're looking for a little home entertainment, you run across a video (probably DVD for most folks) called "Spellbound," take it home with you and sit down for one of the more entertaining evenings you'll have legally.  i picked it up yesterday and we watched it last night.

it's a documentary about the 1999 National Spelling Bee finals in Washington, DC.  more specifically, it follows eight kids to that final Bee.  eight kids from different backgrounds, parts of the country, levels of parental involvement, etc.  this is America singing, dear hearts, this is what it's all about.  the number involved who are children of immigrants is amazing; we come to know Angela, daughter of a Mexican family who first entered the country illegally; Neil, son of an Indian immigrant who has Made Good in Orange County, CA; Nupur, whose family is probably Bengali, from India or Pakistan, and there are many others in the contest.  but there's also one of our favorites, Emily, from a well-to-do Connecticut family who worries if their au pair  girl will be coming with them to DC;  Harry, a hyperactive Jewish kid from New Jersey, the others the story follows and those we only see fleetingly.  all the kids go straight to your heart, and the final moments of the Final Bee are as anxiety-provoking as any cliffhanger suspense film.  better than Bruce Willis, any day.

in a stroke of luck i picked up Drop City, T.C. Boyle, at the library yesterday.  so, now i'm in a totally different world.  if i wanted surcease from tight-lipped britishness, i've got it.  this was one of the nominations in the fiction category for the National Book Award.  i'll let you know what i think as i get further into it, so far i've only read a few pages. 

don't you love it?  you can download it here. 

finished the Val McDermid mystery and also P.D. James Murder Room.  so i'm feeling a little tired of corpses, blood, gore, and britishness.  although the McDermid took place in Scotland.  That Distant Echo went on a little too long and i guessed the perpetrator way too early.  i also guessed whodunnit in  Murder Room, it seemed more than obvious.  american reviewers have been less than kind to this book, but i read it in two days (and not free days, either.  so i read well into the night.) and quite enjoyed it.  the british have been kinder, here's an example with a good plot summary as well.  Adam Dalgleish grows mellow with love, a new man, and i have to admit i liked him better dark and brooding.  he broods a little, but nothing like what used to be his wont.  we all deserve our shot at happiness, maybe this is his. 

now i am BB (between books) and open to suggestions.  i have a couple of things from the library but nothing that shouts to be picked up and read immediately.  i want Drop City, but there's a wait list for it at the library.  i bought Anne Tyler's new one for G last week. she hasn't started it, would it be too cheap and tacky if i read it first?

john perry barlow writes a "premature" (he hopes) eulogy for his friend spalding gray.  who is still missing.  i was just in New York City yesterday and sunday. it's not weather to try swimming to cambodia or anywhere else.  i got this link from bookslut, she got it from many others. 

Spalding Gray is still missing.  this is beginning to really worry and depress me.  according to a CNN article i just read, he was working on a difficult new piece about the automobile accident that left him both physically and emotionally wounded a couple of years ago.  this is a man who needed no more emotional wounding.  he disappeared without his wallet, in this frigid january weather.  i hope the NYPD is taking this seriously.  he doesn't become an official missing person until tomorrow.

The Great Fire, final words - Part 1

earlier i said i'd say more about this book, so i guess i will.  but not much.  i've got better things to do.

The Story: it's 1947,  World War II has recently ended,  our hero is Aldred Leith, a 30-something decorated hero, with a knowledge of  Chinese language and culture who has just ended a two year stint "walking through China" working on a report, or a book, or something, about the ancient China slated to disappear as Mao and his forces take over.  he is now stationed in Japan, for reasons never made clear, close to the city of Hiroshima, the city devastated by the first atom bomb, and what we have to presume to be the locus of "the great fire" of the title.  this devastation is scarcely mentioned, only in a day trip taken to it, in a strangely touristic fashion, by some of the characters.  at his present post the children of the commanding officer become his main occupation, two fey teenagers, Helen and Ben, more or less ignored by their parents.  Ben is slowly dying from a wasting disease, Helen is her brother's constant star, caretaker, companion.

Aldred, war hero, intellectual, scholar, grown man with more than one previous experience of adult love, finds himself falling in love with Helen, whom he believes to be 15 years old.  she's really 17, and, well, sure, that makes it okay, doesn't it? she, no surprise, is flattered by his attention and shares the growing attraction.  Leith travels a lot, goes to Tokyo, Hong Kong, his father dies, he goes home to Britain.  Helen is forced to accompany her parents to their new posting, New Zealand.  they write letters, lots of letters, we get to read their letters, of course, lucky us.  there's another subhero, Leith's pal Peter, a nicer guy than Leith, but he kind of disappears late in the novel after getting polio trying to save his tailor's little girl from dying untreated in a back room.

The Great Fire, final words - Part 2

we are kept in suspense (sort of) as Helen and Aldred's lives seem to diverge beyond hope.  but this is, after all, quite simply an uninspired romance novel, and of course the curtain comes down on Leith and his underaged lover finally, and oh so delicately, falling into bed together, gazing into each others' eyes, planning, or hoping anyway,  to live happily ever after. 

Hazzard won the National Book Award for this book, a mystery worth pondering.  there is no doubt she's an amazing writer, and throughout the book there are passages that caught my breath with their force, or beauty, or spirit.  but the book is ultimately lacking in force, beauty and spirit, let alone plot or meaning.  there is such vagueness everywhere, such elliptical references to  people, situations, motivations.  various reviewers have compared the writing to Henry James, Elizabeth Bowen and E.M. Forster,  all of whom can drive one mad with the same meandering vagueness.  there is no universal agreement on the book among reviewers, and even the best one i've read (in The Guardian) begins by saying it's only a few strokes of the editor's pencil away from greatness.  i'd have liked to see more than a few strokes. 

Which Dead Poet Are You?

via sappho's breathing, an amusing quiz, if you are a literary type. i didn't check to see what all the possible outcomes were, but i have to admit i was surprised at mine.  "You are Arthur Rimbaud - a vital cannon-changing poet with a flare for tantrums.  You tend to write in a fever, and have a liking for the disordered mind.  Don't expect people to understand you, for you are ahead of your time."  surprised, but not displeased.  it is a fairly accurate description of the much-younger me, though by this time i hope to have mellowed out of some of the more extreme aspects of the Rimbaud personality.  (as, evidently, did Rimbaud himself.)

Suggestions for Scalzi

John Scalzi has a journal entry (with a mighty cute cat picture, too) where he's asking for some suggestions on five things.  here are my choices to answer his five queries:

1.  A movie:  The Station Agent, not out for home viewing yet, try to catch it at a theatre.  if not, snatch the DVD or video up as soon as possible.

2.  A book:  Bangkok 8, by John Burdett.  detective fiction like you haven't experienced before.  set in Thailand, Buddhist detective, action, corruption, ambiance.  best book i read last year.

3.  Music:  any album by Keb' Mo'.  jazzy blues, bluesy jazz, very cool dude all around.

4.  AOL Journaler not yet on JMS' sidebar: Blackblog.  coffywoman in California is a many-splendored woman: a BurningMan participant, vegan, political progressive, techie. 

5.  Something to do for next two months:  take up cross country skiing, if you continue to have a snowy winter.  the world's best exercise, great way to experience nature in the winter, burns up so many calories you can eat all the cookies and hot chocolate you want when you come off the trail!

These are great questions, i'd like more suggestions for all these things myself!

but i was right the first time, about The Great Fire.  i finished it yesterday, and have to wonder mightily why this book won the National Book Award.  yes, in many places there are passages of exquisite writing, no question about that.  but...the story, the characters, and even, in the end, the writing!  disappointing, all of them. i will write more later, no time for it now.  but, in the interest of so many books, so little time, i have to say:  don't put this one on your list.  now, to cleanse my palate with a Val McDermid mystery.

well, i can't stand it.  another death in the literary community, this time someone most of us know as a children's author, though she also wrote for adults.  Joan Aiken began her Wolves of Willoughby Chase series too late for me to enjoy it as a child, but i discovered it (as well as Susan Cooper's marvelous Dark is Rising series) when i worked as a store manager for Doubleday.  the part of my job i loved most was helping people choose gift books for children, so i had to read up on things newly published since my youth.  here, from The Guardian, is her obituary.  again, something i didn't know, that she was Conrad Aiken's daughter. 

and, i am no longer finding The Great Fire to be slow going. in fact, the writing is so exquisite that i am taking it in small bites in order to stretch it out.  i don't want it to end.

The Great Fire isn't a book that grabs me by the scruff of the neck and keeps me glued to the pages. (oooh! strange image there.) anyway, yes, so far it's slow going.  but i persevere.  I"ve been spending entirely too much time reworking my links sidebar on the windmills journal this week.  got it under control now though.  nice to have this dedicated journal where all my links are about one thing: books/reading/writing.  or is that three things?  interconnected anyway.

do you love Anne Lamott?  if not, why not?  do you know Anne Lamott?  because, as far as i'm concerned, to know her is to love her.  she's one thousand percent more into Jesus than i am, but she's irreverent and funny and swears a lot.  she's on hiatus from Salon.com right now, a fact that has me jonesing badly.  it may mean she's writing a new book, though she says it's so she "can get her joy back."  how, i wonder?  anyway, here's a righteous interview with her to get us thru her salon absence.

geez, i wish someone were reading this journal. i can't pay enough attention to that counter thing to know.  if you do pass through, would you, like, say hi? 

i can't seem to let go of this book! (Brick Lane  ) have been doing some further reading in The Guardian, and find that some Bangladeshi residents of the Brick Lane area were outraged and insulted by what they heard about (without, mostly, having read it) Monica Ali's representation of their community.  Ali herself was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and came to Britain as a child. everything about her characters rings so true that it's hard not to think there is more than a touch of personal biography in the writing.  lets hope her fellow Bengalis don't declare fatwa on her as was done with Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses.  here are a couple of interesting musings on the situation, one by a british writer, "It's Only a Novel;" the other, "The Burden of Representation," by another Bengali woman.  i am most impressed by this latter article, and the sympathy and understanding shown by its author, Fareena Alam.

Brick Lane

the picture is of the real Brick Lane, in London.  the street of cafés, shops, food stalls, for which this wonderful novel is named.  it's another novel of the immigrant experience, this time of Muslim Bangladeshis in London.  it is also, hard as i find it to believe, a first novel.  it caused quite a stir in Britain, putting its author, Monica Ali, on the Granta list of best young British novelists before the book was even published.  i have two reviews (here and here) from the London paper The Guardian, saving myself from making three or four episodic entries about the book.  they are raves, and i agree with every word. in case you skip the review links, i'm going to quote this portion of Natasha Walter's words:

       "Beyond this moving portrait of the domestic world, I cannot think of another novel in which the politics of our times are caught with such easy vividness.  So many novelists either ignore politics altogether, or else they treat politics as journalists do, by making arguments rather than creating situations.  But here, everything political that the characters say or do seems to spring from their own hopes and disappointments, so that - even when they are reacting to September 11 or the Oldham riots - it never feels as if Ali is simply using them to illustrate a point." 

 these people are so very real, and most of the book takes place in the "domestic world" referred to above.  a young woman comes to London from a small village, in an arranged marriage to an older man.  but not just any woman.  it is Nazneen, whom i promise you will grow to love.

finished Brick Lane  last night, much to my sorrow.  i wanted to hang out with Nazneen for a lot longer.  have endless cups of tea, go round to the shops, see what was going to happen to the rest of her life.  i'll say more on this later, this is just a flying visit.

what i wanted to mention was that John Gregory Dunne died New Year's day.  (there's entirely too much of that going around lately.) i thought of him mainly as Joan Didion's husband, though of course he was a writer, of fiction, nonfiction and film scripts, in his own realm.  and a good one.  he was also writer Dominick Dunne's brother, something i didn't realize.  my heart goes out to Didion, she lost her mother fairly recently and now her husband.  she is only a little older than i am, and i can't imagine the rest of my life without my partner.  i have been reading Joan Didion as long as she's been writing, met her once when i was managing bookstores for Doubleday and she came thru Dallas on a booktour.  i almost think of her as someone i know, which of course is silly.  in any case, my sympathy and thoughts are with her.

 

while i've been MIA from journaling i've been, well, what else?  reading!

G read Love by Toni Morrison (never one of my favorite authors, i have to confess) and reported on it thus:  "a confusing, disturbing ordeal."  so, i skipped it.  i did, however, read Our Lady of the Forest, David Guterson's (Snow Falling on Cedars) latest novel.  now, from a well-past-middle-age recovering catholic this may sound pretty silly...but, as a child much of whose reading material was some variation on The Lives of the Saints, one of my greatest fears was that Our Lady would appear to ME.  hugely influenced by both Lourdes and Fatima, as well as a wildly Irish-Catholic mother who would make us all drop to our knees and say the Rosary at odd moments, i feared openings in the clouds, bright rays of twilight streaming from heaven, etc.  OK, go ahead, laugh your ass off.  i'm laughing too.  but i mean every word of it.  so, this was a difficult book for me.  go read Amy Reiter's review here and you'll see my problem with Ann and her visions.

on a totally different track, i also read Kevin Baker's re-released 1993 baseball novel, Sometimes You See It Coming.  Allen Barra, sportswriter for the NYT, calls it  the best baseball novel ever in his review.  maybe.  or, i may think Michael Chabon's fantasy novel for young people, Summerland, was a better story about baseball.  but this one was pretty good.  raunchy.  sexist (what did i expect?). but funny!