KILLING THE BUDDHA

"If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him."  Would that today's fundamentalist ideologues would pay more attention to this ninth-century advice from Lin Chi.  Violent as it sounds, what it means is that what I would perceive to be the true Buddha would be only the reflection of my own unexamined beliefs and desires, and thus should be repudiated.  My journey should continue.  I would not have found The Truth.

So, this, Killing the Buddha, A Heretic's Bible, is the book I just received from Amazon.com, waiting new and enticing on top of.....how many others?  You may or may not know the website by the same name, killingthebuddha.com, an online literary magazine of religion and culture, but it's been one of my favorite places for quite some time. These guys, Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet, question it all.  The book is the result of their own journey around the USA, looking for Buddhas along the road, finding "prophets in G-strings dancing to pay the rent, storm chasers hunting for meaning in devastating tornados, gangbusters inking God on their bodies as protection from bullets, cross-dressing terrorist angels looking for a place to sing."

Sounding good already, huh?  But wait, there's more.  They also call upon some of today's most interesting writers to "recast books of the Bible by taking them apart, blowing them up with ink and paper."  So we have Rick Moody rewriting Jonah as a modern-day gay Jewish man in Queens, A. L. Kennedy meditating on the absurdity of Genesis, Haven Kimmel swimming through Revelation, etc.  All of these are interspersed with Manseau and Sharlet's dispatches from the road.  You may have heard these guys on NPR, I caught a snippet of an interview one night on, I think, Fresh Air.  The jacket copy promises us that "Together these curious minds tell the strange, funny, sad and true story of religion in American for the spiritual seeker in all of us: A Heretic's Bible." 

Buddha knows when I'll actually read this book, it may join the pile by the bed that I dip into pre sleep or during white nights awake.  But I'll let you know.

HOLY FOOLS - Joanne Harris

Just when you thought I'd never met a book I didn't like, along comes Holy Fools.  And I seem to be all alone in this antipathy.  I have just finished reading a bunch of reviews, all of which seem to find it a jolly good read.  I found it to be a romance novel gussied up in 17th century French historical pretension involving theatrical troupes and gypsies, an abbey full of loser nuns, one of whom is our protagonist: the former highrope artist, l'Ailé (shouldn't that be l'Ailée?), now living as Soeur Auguste, hiding out with her little daughter.  Hiding out from whom?  you may ask.  It's not entirely clear, but if it's from Guy LeMerle, otherwise known as "The Blackbird," it's totally tant pis, because out of all the abbeys on all the coasts of France, it's hers he picks as the place to come play out his vilest revenge fantasy.  And who is he, anyway?  He is, of course, Juliette's nemesis and heart-throb from her checkered past:  lover, teacher, betrayer, and -maybe- father of her child.

So, I pretty much hated everything about this book:  the story, the writing (overwrought, overwritten, overripe, overdone), most of the characters, the fact that it's fuller of coincidence than any Dickens novel you could name.  It's Chocolat in 17th century clothing, with no indoor plumbing, and no chocolate at all.  Well, I only saw Chocolat as a movie, didn't read it, but I did read Five Quarters of the Orange and didn't care much for it either.  You can go read an excerpt from this silly book here, and even if you like it I'll still be your friend.  I skimmed the last third of it just to get how it all turned out.  Although I could have predicted most of it with my eyes shut.

THE SOLACE OF LEAVING EARLY - Part 1 of 3

 From the start I have to say: this is a hard one.  Kimmel herself gives away the essential nature of the story in this remark in the "Acknowledgments" at the end of the book: "My godmother... after listening to me bemoan the sad fact that I'd never write a doctoral dissertation on Alfred North Whitehead and the nature of grief, said, 'You could always write it as a novel.'" 

And so, that's what she did.   I may not actually summarize the story,  just give you characters and impressions. The location is back in bleak small town Indiana, as with Something Rising.  A small town mostly peopled by broken lost souls and rednecks, though some of the characters have remarkable book collections on their shelves.

The characters:  Langston Braverman, who stalked out of her PhD orals at the university and is now back in her parents' home, installed in her girlhood attic room, enduring what the cover summary calls "her self-imposed existential dilemma." Langston is a woman of almost thirty who has spent her entire life in academia, returning to the haven of her parents, expecting to be both pampered and left to her own devices.

SOLACE - Part 2

Amos Townsend, anguished minister of  the Haddington Church of the Brethren, occupies the parsonage and tries to find the right perspective, despite his shortcomings: "...he couldn't possibly construct an adequate or coherent sermon; and he was sick to death of the people in his church."  The central characters however, are two small girls, whose parents died in a hideous fashion right before their wide-open eyes.  The children, who have renamed themselves Immaculata and Epiphany  (be prepared for a large amount of theology, philosophy and theological reference in this novel - remember, it's a novelized PhD dissertation on  Whitehead and the nature of grief!), are suffering from PTSD in a fairly creative manner.  I have to say, these children tore my heart out.  Well, they did that for everyone in the book, too, and that's the story Kimmel is really telling.  In the end these children bring grace and hmmm, dare I say,  salvation, to everyone;  a kind of miracle is wrought.  But I get ahead of myself and introductions -  we have Beulah, the children's grandmother; AnnaLee, Langston's fabulous mother (my favorite character), and Taos Braverman, who, though missing for ten years now, is definitely a presence.

It is in the coming together of all these characters for  the care of Immaculata and Epiphany that the story emerges.  A story of wounded hearts and broken souls looking for their better selves. 

And that's all I'm going to say about that!  There is some fine writing in this book, Haven Kimmel is an author I'm going to watch carefully.  I will pounce on her next book immediately.  If she keeps on getting better with every book, there is no end to the possibility.   The dialogue is intriguingly done, hard subjects are discussed in the way people really do it, children in deep trauma are portrayed with searing believability.

SOLACE - Part 3 of 3

I usually sprinkle my reviews with quotes from the book, but it's hard to do with this one. Bits and pieces don't lift out easily, things are pretty seamlessly connected.  So, in the end, I've decided  to go with the Prologue, or parts of it.  The entire story is really contained herein:
"It wasn't given to Langston Braverman to know the moment she became a different person; she only knew later, looking back on the afternoon a simple storm arrived and stayed for days, the afternoon she first saw the children.  The woman Langston had been was immune to visions and visitations; she was a head-dweller, an Attic Girl who could quote theologians on the abandonment of reason, but who, nonetheless, trusted reason the way one trusts one's own skin.....There were shadows on Chimney Street, to be sure...and further down the block, in front of the mobile home where the children had come to live with their grandmother, the sky was tinged with green, the light anyone from the Midwest recognizes as foreshadowing; it was into this sort of day they walked, at first not visible to Langston, and then undeniable........Even their names, the names they asked to be called, were simply words they had heard all their lives, and in their desperation attached to themselves.  There was no real miracle there, apart from the miracle that simply is: the world coming into concreteness again and again, our witnessing of it.....At any rate, there they came.  Immaculata, the elder girl, eight years old, and her younger sister, Epiphany, who was six, walking down Chimney Street toward her house in silky gowns that allowed for a breeze.  Little girls is all they were."

Okay, there's my thoughts on Solace.  Now, to be fair and balanced, I give you this review from MostlyFiction.com, bitchy and cranky, unhappy with what she feels to be intellectual posturing on Kimmel's part.  She has some valid points, and I grant them.  Every now and then I had some of the same bitchy thoughts.  With the advantage of reading her second novel first, I forgave her first-novel its faults, and loved it for its humor, empathy, and understanding of the truly human heart.

EVERYTHING THAT RISES

 From Garrison Keilor's lovely Writers' Almanac site this note of what to celebrate today:  "It's the birthday of novelist and short-story writer (Mary) Flannery O'Connor, born in Savannah, Georgia (1925). She's the author of Wise Blood (1952); A Good Man is Hard to Find, and Other Stories (1955); The Violent Bear It Away (1960); and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965). Her novel Wise Blood, about a man returning home to Tennessee from World War II, begins: "Hazel Motes sat at a forward angle on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car. . . . Mrs. Wally Bee Hitchcock, who was facing Motes in the section, said that she thought the early evening like this was the prettiest time of day and she asked him if he didn't think so too. She was a fat woman with pink collars and cuffs and pear-shaped legs that slanted off the train seat and didn't reach the floor. . . . He looked at her a second and, without answering, leaned forward and stared down the length of the car again."

When O'Connor was diagnosed with lupus—the same disease that killed her father—at the age of twenty-six, she went home to live on her mother's Georgia farm, where she wrote much of her work."

My university was very big on both Catholicism and Southern Literature, and despite that fact i am a devoted fan of Flannery's.  so i may go pull  my Collected O'Connor off the shelf and read a story in her honor.  and mourn a life that was much too short.

A FEW DISJOINTED THOUGHTS ON READING

i finally had some "just sitting and reading" time this evening - and finished The Solace of Leaving Early, by Haven Kimmel. i came here just now with the idea of writing about the book, but find i can't yet do it.  if you read my review of her second novel, Something Rising, you know i am more than impressed by this young woman's ability to write. though her debut novel is less graceful than Something Rising, it is still a deeply moving book. this writer understands the pain and the wonder of life, and the way they are so often intimately entwined.  i'll try to write my thoughts on Solace tomorrow, when i'll have more time.  and when i will have had time to mull the complicated sorrow this book aroused in me. 

in the meantime, i'm mulling the fact, the act, of reading itself.  the constant kind of reading i do.  have done all my life.  well, since i learned to read, of course.  there were a few years there when someone else had to do it for me, to me.  but i learned as fast as i could.  as a child i was constantly being told to "get my head out of that book."  yes, well - what about getting the book out of my head?  they couldn't make me do THAT!  now, of course, there is no one who says such foolish things to me, and i read on, no matter what else is happening.  in fact, i feel restless, irritable, not-quite-right, if i don't have a current book. is this pathology?  is it escape from reality?  because i don't read much non-fiction, as you can tell if you've been following my tracks in this journal.  as most of my book-friends are located too far away for idle bookchat, it's nice to have some book sharing here in this journal. if you visit here, let me know what you're reading.  i visit other journals, but don't see much mention of books.  let me know if you're making journal entries about your reading, i'll come read.

NO LONGER WANDERING IN THE WILD!

i've "released" three books now on BookCrossing and was beginning to feel a little pouty about the fact that nothing had been reported on the site from anyone "catching" any of them.  so! it was with some delight that i found an email this morning alerting me to the fact that Garden of Evil, by Britt Montero, had been caught, read, and enjoyed sometime over the past week.  that now leaves Stone Diaries and The Talented Mr. Ripley still traveling through the world.  it was only Sunday that i released Mr. Ripley at Starbucks, so i needn't be impatient about it.  

i'm amazed how good i feel at reading the "catcher's" journal entry on the book - a real sense of sharing a book for which i had no further use with someone who very much enjoyed reading it.  even gave it a score of 10 out of 10.  i've got my next two releases lined up, just need to get someplace to leave them where they're likely to be picked up.

Later (the same day): another BookCrossing email alert telling me that Mr. Ripley has been caught - by someone who was actually looking for just that book!  he/she has had it before and it got away from him/her.  so, another successful uniting of person with book.  this is getting to be good fun!  if anyone cares to access my page on BookCrossing.com, my nom de plume there is "gypsymoth."

WORLD'S GREAT BOOKS IN 25 WORDS!

here's a fun thing for an idle moment, they've been doing it in different places around the 'net, but here's a list of 50 of the world's great book plots summarized in 25 words.  from the british paper the Independent, Bill Greenwell gives you a fast run through literature. some of them are quite amusing.  as someone who often takes three entries to summarize a book - i stand in awe!

Laura Bush Picks Trio for Literary Event.
and i'm sure all three of them (Truman Capote, Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty) are turning over in their graves at this honor.

Do you think Laura knows the Awful Truth about Capote? 

LIFE OF PI - Yann Martel, Part 1 of 3

Well!  I must say it's both a relief and a sorrow to be released from that lifeboat, but at last I have finished the Life of Pi.  Amazing writing, amazing story.  Everything everyone else told you about it is true;  it's a stunningly good book.  Since it was published in 2001 it's been around long enough that you may know the story.  Nonetheless, here goes.

Pi is the younger child of a zookeeping family in Pondicherry, India.  His father is head of the zoo, and from an early age Pi's life is full of animal friendships and knowledge.  His life is also full of religious seeking - so much so that by the time he's barely pubescent he's already become a Hindu, a Christian and a Muslim.  His search is for God, divinity itself, and he's wise enough to see that this is not the province of any one faith. (In fact, faith may ultimately be exactly what this novel is "about.") 

When Indian politics become more than his father can bear, Pi's family sells many of the animals and debarks for Canada aboard a Japanese cargo ship with the remainder of the menagerie.  However, "...Things didn't turn out the way they were supposed to, but what can you do?  You must take life the way it comes at you and make the best of it."  After which ending to Part 1, Part 2 begins with the sentence:  "The ship sank."

LIFE OF PI - Yann Martel, Part 2 of 3

And thereby hangs the tale.  The tale of Pi's 227 days in a lifeboat adrift on the Pacific with a fullgrown Bengal tiger named, imagine that, "Richard Parker."  It's Pi's Excellent Adventure, a story of survival on the uncaring ocean, boy against the elements, but it's also, on many levels, a parable. I mentioned in my last post that I found the basic situation a pretty good metaphor for life itself, and I'm sticking with that idea.   Pi and Richard experience many things during these long and terrible months together,  months of deprivation, fear and loss.  But when the unthinkable happens and a freighter appears on their horizon - only to pass them by without noticing their tiny ark - Pi's reaction is to burst out: "I love  you!.....Truly I do.  I love you, Richard Parker.  If I didn't have you now, I don't know what I would do.  I don't think I would make it....I would die of hopelessness."

The journey ends at last, they come to rest on a Mexican beach.  Richard Parker disappears into the jungle ("Then Richard Parker, companion of my torment, awful, fierce thing that kept me alive, moved forward and disappeared forever from my life.") and Pi into the hospital.  And when representatives of  the Japanese maritime transportation authority come to interview Pi in his hospital bed, we get a new surprise.  They disbelieve the excellent adventure, find it too fanciful.  So Pi tells them a different version.

LIFE OF PI - Part 3

What to make of this ending?  You'll have to decide for yourself.  There's strong elements of magical realism in this book, it's hard to know what's "real" - the carnivorous island inhabited by meerkats?  the strange fruit containing human teeth?  Pi and Richard Parker discussing their fantasy favorite foods?  the encounter with another lifeboat and another castaway in the middle of the ocean?  In the end, if we ask  "what is real here?"  then,  as the ficticious writer of Pi's story tells us in his introduction, speaking of something entirely different,  "... we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams."

This book is exactly like a very worthwhile dream, a long dream from which you are reluctant to wake up, for although awful, it's the most interesting dream you've ever had.  The writing is quirky and often amusing, often soaring in its description of the ocean and the life within it.  Storms and whales, sharks and flying fish, skies, suns, moons - this description of a lightning strike:  "The water was shot through with what looked like white roots; briefly, a great celestial tree stood in the ocean."  This moment, so vast and fantastic, leaves Pi with this meditation:  "At moments of wonder, it is easy to avoid small thinking, to entertain thoughts that span the universe, that capture both thunder and tinkle, thick and thin, the near and the far."  A good quote to end upon, because it pretty much sums up the way I feel about this novel.  Not a bit of small thinking about it.

Life of Pi

so, this guy Pi's in a lifeboat with a tiger and a hyena, afloat in the shark-filled waters of the Pacific Ocean.  he looks to be the only survivor of the capsized cargo ship that was carrying his family and assorted zoo animals to Canada.

the basic scenario (lifeboat, predators, afloat alone in a hostile environment) sounds like a pretty good metaphor for life to me. 

am only about halfway through it, i'll report more later.

WHEN WORDS ARE NOT USELESS - Part 1

If any of us needed it, here's proof that the Internet is a global village.  You may have read here about the international BookCrossing group I've joined online, a place to "release books into the wild."  there are also many message forums there, a recent one has been messages of sympathy, love and support for the people of Spain. This morning I found there this reply from a Spanish bookcrosser.

WHEN WORDS ARE NOT USELESS

I feel impotent. I’m facing a blank screen, trying to put in order so many feelings and images of death, pain and anger that even my fingers tremble over the keyboard. The heavy weight of reality has sunk our souls so deeply that I simply don’t feel able to lift them with the fragile ropes of words. And that’s the only thing that seems to be clear in my head so far: words are not enough. Most of us spend our lives thinking they are powerful. As readers, we assume words are able to convey a whole range of human emotions and to reach our souls making us laugh, cry or shiver with fear. Still, when something like the recent Madrid terrorist attacks happen, they seem useless.

Horror struck us hard, dried up our throats and filled our eyes with tears. Two hundred people died; all their dreams, illusions and feelings shattered. And with them, a part of ourselves died as well. We couldn’t believe something so obnoxious could happen again and so brutally. Spain has been bearing the curse of terrorism in the last decades, but that doesn’t mean we can get accostumed to it. You can’t get used to insanity.

After the blasts, the whole country was in state of shock. We felt weaker and more horrified that ever, but we tried our best to cope, to help in any way possible, giving blood, helping the victims, calling friends and relatives just to let them know that we were safe. .. All of us were deeply wounded. And above all, speechless. Despite that, some of us wanted to share our pain with thousands of Bookcrossers. And you answered. Oh my God, how did you answer! (Continues in Part 2)

WHEN WORDS ARE NOT USELESS - Part 2

People from all over the world posted their messages of grief, support and sympathy. Those who are religious added us to their prayers. Everyone sent warm thoughts and made our mourning theirs through several threads in the Forums. Some remembered the tragedy of the 9-11, or the bombings in Bali, or their last trip to Spain. .. And what’s more important, every single message was full of grief and love. After a few hours, dozens of Bookcrossers decided to change their profile pic showing a black ribbon. And you’re still doing it. It doesn’t matter where you are from, it doesn’t matter at all if you have never known any Spaniard or if you’re not able to point Madrid in a map. You know we’re in pain. And you want us to know we are not alone, because the only way to soothe the pain is sharing it.

All the Spanish Bookcrossers thank you for that from the bottom of our hearts. We are, again, speechless, but this time, for a good reason. In the dark days we’re going through, your support brought a little bit of light. And now I realize that this light wouldn’t have reached us if it wasn’t for the words. The words, which I thought had lost their power, travelled through the wires to let the world know that we’re mourning, that we’re not alone and that we don’t want it to happen ever again. Never. Anywhere.

So words are not useless after all. And I’m happy for that.

Thank you so much.

YagoBCN in the name of all Spanish Bookcrossers.

IN THE QUEUE

poor Anne Tyler.  she's going to be on hiatus for quite a while. lots of books from the library that i'll have to read first.  some i requested and they came in, others were lying in wait for me on the shelves.  i love libraries, they're a bastion of civilization. 

anyway, Elmore Leonard's out of the way, but now i've embarked on Life of Pi, and i'm loving it.  i may stay up all night reading it.  then i have Haven Kimmel's first novel, The Solace of Leaving Early, and a new one from Joanne Harris (author of Chocolat, Five Quarters of the Orange, Coastliners) called Holy Fools, that looks a little daunting.  as if that weren't enough, i picked up a small book called The Book Borrower, by a writer unknown to me, Alice Mattison.  this one jumped into my hands solely because of the title and cover.  i'm shallow that way, must admit it.

i'm going to be a busy girl.  who will grade my tests and read my essays?  i'm going to be reading novels. 

MR. PARADISE, AND JOURNAL HELLLLP!!!

yes, i was reading a real book, Anne Tyler's Amateur Marriage, which i had earlier bought for G (she's read it, loved it, said it had a sad ending).  but then, at the library i picked up Elmore Leonard's latest bit of criminal whimsy, Mr. Paradise.  i can no more pass up Elmore Leonard than i could an open bag of Dove dark chocolate eggs.  so, Amateur Marriage was interrupted by a few hours of the usual Leonard fare:  criminals stupid to the point of being braindead, tough decent cops with bad/sad homelives and attractive auras, tough/beautiful chicks who may or may not be affiliated with the criminals.  this time it's Detroit, not Florida, those being Leonard's two settings for his novels.  what i really love about his books is the dialogue, no one can do it like he can.  it's a special language that his characters speak, and for hours during and after reading one of his stories my inner monologue speaks in that language.  then it gets old and irritating and finally goes away.  even if you've never read him you've probably seen movies made from his novels, like Get Shorty, and you know what i mean.

now, journal help.  i've f'd up my ability to put pictures into my journal entries and i'm asking for suggestions/help from anyone who knows more about this business than i do.  which would be anyone, including probably your pets.  please read this entry in my other journal and email me if you have ideas how i can fix this mess.

MARCH HARES

From Garrison Keillor's lovely Writer's Almanac site for today, Wednesday, 10 March 2004, this note: 

         Zelda Fitzgerald died on this day in 1948. In 1930 she suffered a mental breakdown, and mental illness kept her in and out of hospitals for the rest of her life. She died in a fire at the Highland Hospital outside Asheville, North Carolina. She was trapped on the top floor with six other patients; the doors were locked, the windows were chained, and the wooden fire escapes burned. The day before she died she wrote to her daughter, Scottie: "Today there is promise of spring in the air and an aura of sunshine over the mountains."

Zelda Fitzgerald once said, "I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs."

The emphasized words are mine, they strike such a chord.  in my other journal i've been musing on this month of March, which is in itself alternately like breathing the promise of spring in the air and being locked in an insane asylum.  well, okay, maybe not, but at times it begins to feel that way.  it's a sad little in memorium for Zelda, isn't it.  do writers suffer more from mental illness than the majority of people?  do they write because they suffer?  do they suffer because they write?  does writing make you crazy?  are we all a little crazy?  there's a saying, isn't there, crazy as a March hare.  what is a March hare, anyhow?  i think i'm becoming one.

 

Spalding Gray

by now you probably know that the body pulled from the East River Sunday was indeed identified as Spalding Gray, writer, actor, monologuist, suffering human being.  it's not a surprise, but it is a sadness. this time he swam for surcease from his suffering.  i hope he found it.  some peace, somehow.

IT'S ON THE LOOSE!

I joined Bookcrossing.com (see previous entry) tonight, and will be making my first book release tomorrow.  Like those of you who commented, I have a hard time parting with my books.  So, I took the easy way out and chose one of our TWO copies of Carol Shields' Stone Diaries.  Don't know how we ended up with two of them, but it certainly made it easy to decide.  I'll be taking it up to The Circle to leave at the Indian River Espresso Bar tomorrow after class.  If you'd like to read my "release notes" on the book they're here.  We'll see what happens, if anything.

SOMETHING RISING (LIGHT AND SWIFT) - Haven Kimmel

(Part 1 of 2)

I wanted this book to never end.  I read it slowly, in small bites, savoring each word. Even so,  I finished it this morning, and laid it down with a thump of satisfaction.  This writer has two other books, a memoir with the unlikely title of A Girl Called Zippy, and another novel, The Solace of Leaving Early.  They are now both on my request list at the library.  I can't remember when I was so affected by the writing in a novel, by the simple act of following  words as they unreeled through sentences and paragraphs.  This is some kind of amazing writing, beautiful, quirky, radiant, deep and true.  Jacket copy is jacket copy, but there's a quote on the back cover from one of my favorite novelists, Elizabeth Berg, that says it just right: "What intelligence is here, and what grace, and what unsentimental (and contagious!) love for our messy ways here on planet Earth.  Haven Kimmel is true gospel wearing blue jeans:  you read her and you are lifted up." 

A fast summary from ReviewsofBooks.com:  "Cassie Claiborne, the protagonist of Something Rising, is the daughter of a New Orleans woman who chased a pool shark all the way to Indiana, and then stayed there while he abandoned the family. Cassie has inherited his skill with a cue and finds pool halls to be an escape from the troubled lives around her. Her world is populated by uncaring parents and friends who have no aim in life. As she matures, her mother's death brings an opportunity to go to New Orleans, and try to find the man who her mother should have married."

And I guess that's sort of it, in a tiny nutshell, but it leaves out Cassie's relationships with her mother, Laura, and  her sister, Belle; two characters of enormous importance, to the book and to Cassie.  Laura is anything but "uncaring," as the letter she leaves for her daughters to read after her death makes clear.  The letter is a brilliant piece; through it we, and her daughters, know more of Laura than any amount of description or narration could have revealed.

(Continues in Part 2)

SOMETHING RISING (LIGHT AND SWIFT)

(Part 2 of 2)

The summary also ignores the importance of place in this novel, which occurs mainly in a fictional Indiana town called Roseville, and ends in the very real New Orleans.  When Cassie has her fortune told late one night in New Orleans, in Jackson Square, the palm reader says he sees she comes from  "....Someplace...I can see flatness, desolation...it's just so ugly.  You live in a world where the spirits have completely flown, there are no voices left...well, it's really painful, isn't it?"   He goes on to say of New Orleans that..."Even here, the voices are weakened, it's nothing like it used to be, we all used to feel like radio receivers, voices coming through all the time.  We'd spin the dial and listen to our favorite songs.  But now it's like they're far away, children calling from a great distance."   And yet, the spirit voices have a message for the fortune teller to deliver to  Cassie, and it's from the poet Rilke:
        "To you is left (unspeakably confused)
         your life, gigantic, ripening, full of fears,
         so that it, now hemmed in, now grasping all,
         is changed in you by turns to stone and stars."
And this is exactly the right message for this young woman, it is, in fact, her story, encapsulated in Rilke's miraculous verse.

I want to quote whole passages, long ones, here.  The description of Poppy's dogs,  the encounter with the turkey buzzard, Cassie's visit to Belle's college dorm room and the lengthy note she leaves for her sister, and again I have to say, Laura's posthumous letter to her daughters, the entire section about Cassie's trip to New Orleans.  But of course, I can't.  So, do yourself a favor - find this astonishing novel, read these passages and all the rest, be grateful for the gift that Haven Kimmel has given us.

BOOKS IN THE WILD!

So, maybe all you complete literary geeks and book freaks know about this already.  If so, why didn't you tell me?  I'm always the last to know.  Sigh.  Anyway, it's about Bookcrossing.com: "...a global community of booklovers and book releasers."  I learned about this via an email from a friend in Maine who has just joined and released her first book.  Members of Bookcrossing mark books with a code which will enable BC to track it wherever it goes around the world.  That is, if whoever finds the book plays along and reports "catching" it. I find this a fascinating idea and a great way to pass along books for which one has no room left on the shelves.  I bought two books day before yesterday and found myself standing in front of my main wall of shelves despairly searching for places to put them.  Bookshelves in every room, and not an empty space anywhere.  (The books were: Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi and Sisters of the Earth, Women's Prose and Poetry about Nature, ed. by Lorraine Anderson, in case you're wondering.) 

To my amazement there are almost 300 BC members here in DE and over 2000 in nearby MD.   After I come home from class this afternoon I'm going to browse those groaning shelves for my first book to release into "the wild."  It's time for The Biblio Philes to join Bookcrossing.  Way past time.

CALLING ALL LITERARY GEEKS

this is a perfectly silly quiz.  i shouldn't feel good about my results.  but i have to confess i do.  my education wasn't a total waste  -  i'm a complete literary geek!  maybe you are too.

  You are a complete literary geek: from knowing the classics (even the not-so-well-known classics and tidbits about them) to knowing devices used in writing, when someone has a question about literature, they can bring it to you and rest assured you'll know the answer. 

HIGH COUNTRY - Nevada Barr

          This is either the 11th or 12th in Barr's series of Anna Pigeon novels, so if you've been reading along you know the basic proposition.  if you don't, i'll clue you in a little.  Anna is a National Park Service Ranger, working in law enforcement.  she's been in a different park in every book, pursuing malfeasance with a vengeance, falling into seriously Bad Situations with folks working on the Wrong Side of the Law.  Anna has matured and mellowed in the course of her adventures; she's now engaged to a preacher/sheriff (yes, he's both) back in Mississippi, where her home park, the Natchez Trace, is located.  she's been sent to Yosemite this time, working undercover, as a waitress in the upscale Ahwahnee Lodge restaurant.  four young people from the park have disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and Anna's job is to pick up clues from other employees, figure out whether they left under their own steam or were victims of a crime.  
           Of course it was the latter, there wouldn't be a story otherwise!  a story involving a  syringe full of AIDS-tainted blood, a drugplane crashed in the mountains, some truly nasty badass villains, a nighttime chase through the snowy Sierras under the worst possible conditions.  Anna may have mellowed, but she's still no one to mess with. even graying, middle-aged, no longer drinking, she can still kick some butt.  and in this book, she does.   Nevada Barr was herself an NPS Ranger, and she writes of outdoor adventure, nature in all its glories and dangers, the awesome beauty of our national treasures, the Parks, as no one else can.
           it's because of Nevada Barr, and Anna Pigeon, that one of my fantasies for retirement is working as a volunteer in one of the National Parks.   Barr tells a good story, and this is one of the very best in the series, but she is also proselytizing about the embattled Park Service, the lack of funding and care being allotted to our Parks.  don't get me wrong - she never preaches.  but the message comes through, we hear it, and we care.