A-Z Wednesday: "O"

A-Z Wednesday is hosted by Vicki at Reading At The Beach. To join in, just visit her blog for the guidelines and leave your link in a comment.

This week's letter is "O." So I went to my shelves, and this is what I pulled out.

Orlando
Written by Virginia Woolf
First published by the Hogarth Press, 1928

The cover of the first edition.

Description from Good Reads:

In 1928, way before everyone else was talking about gender-bending . . . Virginia Woolf wrote her comic masterpiece, a fantastic, fanciful love letter disguised as a biography, to Vita Sackville-West. Orlando enters the book as an Elizabethan nobleman and leaves the book three centuries and one change of gender later as a liberated woman of the 1920s. Along the way this most rambunctious of Woolf's characters engages in sword fights, trades barbs with 18th century wits, has a baby, and drives a car. This is a deliriously written, breathless-making book and a classic.

See the book's page at Wikipedia.

The cover of my old Signet Classics edition (complete with coffee-cup stain):



The cover of a recent audio version of the book:


And a selection of various covers the book has sported over the years:


Orlando has been one of my favorite books since I first read it over forty years ago (I was such a precocious youngster!). Set in England and Constantinople, and spanning almost four centuries of wild and crazy adventures, it's a unique and fascinating literary experience.

Teaser Tuesdays: Innocent

This week my teaser lines come from the new Scott Turow novel, Innocent. It's a follow-up to Turow's 1987 best-seller, Presumed Innocent, and revisits attorney Rusty Sabich twenty years after being tried and acquitted of the murder of his colleague and lover, Carolyn Polhemus. These lines are from page 1, and form the opening paragraphs of the book; they're being spoken (or thought, I suppose) by Nat Sabich, Rusty's 28-year-old son:

A man is sitting on a bed. He is my father.
The body of a woman is beneath the covers. She was my mother.
This is not really where the story starts. Or how it ends.

Yes, I know that's more than two lines. Sorry, but I didn't want to cut anything. Also, what the lines don't tell you (explicitly, anyway) is that the woman under the covers (Nat's mother) is dead.


How about you? Got a great teaser from a book you're reading right now? Want to play along? Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by mizB at Should Be Reading. If you'd like to read more teasers, or take part yourself, just head on over to her blog.

A-Z Wednesday: "N"

A-Z Wednesday is hosted by Vicki at Reading At The Beach. To join in, just visit her blog for the guidelines and leave your link in a comment.

This week's letter is "N." So I went to my shelves, and this is what I pulled out.



No Fond Return of Love
Written by Barbara Pym
First published 1961

Description from the dust jacket:

Dulcie Mainwaring . . . is one of those "excellent women" who is always helping others and never looking out for herself – especially in the realms of love. She has a fondness for Ovaltine and a maxim to go with it: "Life's problems are often eased by hot milky drinks."

At a "learned conference" she meets a fellow researcher with an air of some refinement – Viola Dace – and the alluring, absentminded Professor Aylwin Forbes. Dulcie subsequently becomes Viola's landlady, as well as guardian and housekeeper for her own young niece Laurel. Then Laurel becomes the object of Aylwin's amorous designs, and Viola's early passion for Aylwin fades into a more mundane affair.

The novel climaxes in a delicate tangling of schemes and unfulfilled dreams when Dulcie and Viola take a trip to Eagle House in Taviscombe, on the seacoast in the West Country, to discover the hidden secrets of the Forbes clan and the role played in their destiny by a mysterious castle on the hill.

As in all of Pym's novels, the prose is honed to a wry, deadpan perfection. Life's little humiliations are finally put into their place, and the reader sees that things do fall out correctly; love is returned, and fondly, after all.

The book's page at Amazon.com.

The cover of my old paperback edition:


The cover of another, more recent edition:


English novelist Barbara Pym is probably my favorite "modern" writer, and No Fond Return of Love is one of her wittiest and most representative novels. If you haven't read Pym, you're denying yourself some really wonderful literary pleasure. I would always recommend beginning with the early works (especially Some Tame Gazelle, and Excellent Women), but every one of her books is a delight and you can jump in anywhere.

Review: Tinkers

Written by Paul Harding
Bellevue Literary Press, 2009; 191 pages

I've always kept a pretty close eye on the book publishing world (even before I became one of those pesky book bloggers). I usually know something about what's being published, what's popular, what's not, what's being talked about – even if it's work I'm not likely to read. And when a book I've never heard of, written by an author I've never heard of, wins the Pulitzer – well, it certainly piques my interest. So I got a copy of this year's winner of the award for best novel, Paul Harding's Tinkers, and spent all yesterday evening reading it.

Tinkers tells the story of eighty-year-old George Washington Crosby, who is (quite literally) on his deathbed, with his family gathered around him. During the course of the book, we experience his last eight days of life (sometimes in rather gruesome detail), getting glimpses of his thoughts and memories and hallucinations. There are frequent referrals to the amount of time he has left to live ("Ninety-six hours before he died, George said he wanted a shave.") There are also passages of the book that seem to slip outside of George's head, telling us the story of Howard Crosby, George's father. Howard drove a wagon for a living, selling odds and ends of housewares to people who lived in a backwoods area (I had a little trouble pinning down the locations and time frames of the book). He also had epilepsy and abandoned his family when he realized his wife was planning to have him committed to a home for the insane. Howard started over in the city, with a new name, a new wife, and only years later made contact a single time with George, his oldest son.

In addition to the rather impressionistic story of George's life, there's a lot of discussion of clocks and clock-making and clock-repair – most of it probably only of interest to clock-makers, I think. Yes, I got the metaphor about clocks being a symbol for the ticking away of a life; but that didn't make it any less tedious. There are many lists, and many rambling sentences (one or two seem to go on for more than a page). The story is, with only a couple of brief exceptions, relentlessly depressing. If it hadn't been so mercifully short, I don't think I'd have stuck with it to the end.

I will admit, as many people have pointed out, that Tinkers is a remarkable piece of craftsmanship, especially for a first novel. And it has some really beautiful writing in places. One of my favorite passages comes about midway through, in a description of George's childhood home:

The porch was unpainted and its wood bleached to a silvery white. When the sky filled with clouds, it often turned the same silver color as the wood, so that it only seemed missing a grain to be wood and the wood only missing a breath of wind to stir it and turn it into sky. [p.75]

And there are even a few almost light-hearted touches here and there, all very nicely done. For instance, here's George's family gathered for a Christmas dinner:

The children were astonished by the ham that Kathleen had cooked for the Christmas meal. It was the largest they had ever seen. It was covered in a crust of brown sugar and molasses. Buddy the Dog sat at attention, as if recommending himself to the ham over the children by his proper manners. Kathleen shooed him with a kick in the ribs, but he just let out a yelp and stayed put. Russell the Cat came into the room, too, and sat facing the wall, away from the table, cleaning his paws, as if an affectation of utter disinterest might be the trick to getting a scrap. [p.83]

Unfortunately, the lighter bits are few and far between; and mostly diluted by additions like that kick in the ribs. It's a very dark read.

A few reviewers have said the book should be read as poetry rather than prose. Fair or not, when I hear that, I always tend to assume they mean it just doesn't work as a novel. And in this case, I think my assumption is right.

Booking Through Thursday: Half

This week's BTT topic is a familiar one, but always an interesting one: What do you do if, halfway through a book, you find it's not really grabbing you?

It’s boring. It’s trite. It’s badly written . . . . What do you do? Read the second half? Just to finish out the story? Find out what happens? Or, cut your losses and dump the second half?

This set of questions is particularly timely for me because I just finished reading a book that I felt just this way about (sad to say it was Brunonia Barry's latest, The Map of True Places – my review will be posted sometime today or tomorrow). And in that case, I kept reading because the book was an advance copy and I felt obligated to finish and review it.

And I suppose that's my answer: If there's some overwhelming reason to finish a book I'm not enjoying, then I'll keep plugging away at it – if I've agreed to review it, or it's a book club or group-read book. Or if it was recommended by a close friend. Otherwise, I have no qualms about giving up on a read halfway through.

These days, I read mostly for pleasure, so I figure if the book isn't giving me pleasure, why struggle through it? Life, as they say, is too short to spend any precious reading time on bad books. Ditch the stinker and pull another book off that ridiculously enormous TBR pile!

A-Z Wednesday: "M"

A-Z Wednesday is hosted by Vicki at Reading At The Beach. To join in, just visit her blog for the guidelines and leave your link in a comment.

This week's letter is "M." So I went to my shelves, and this is what I pulled out.

My Cousin Rachel
Written by Daphne DuMaurier
First published 1951

Description from Good Reads:

Orphaned at an early age, Philip Ashley is raised by his benevolent older cousin, Ambrose. Resolutely single, Ambrose delights in Philip as his heir, a man who will love his grand home as much as Ambrose loves it himself. But the cozy world the two construct is shattered when Ambrose sets off on a trip to Florence. There he falls in love and marries - and there he dies suddenly. In almost no time at all, the new widow - Philip's cousin Rachel - turns up in England. Despite himself, Philip is drawn to this beautiful, sophisticated, mysterious woman like a moth to the flame. And yet ... might she have had a hand in Ambrose's death?

The cover of a recent paperback edition:


A photo of the author as a very young woman:


And a still from the 1952 film based on the book:


I first read this one at about age fourteen – found a copy stored in my grandparents’ garage and promptly confiscated it as my own. I had recently seen the old movie on TV, starring Olivia de Havilland and Richard Burton. And as I had an enormous crush on the gorgeous Welshman at the time, the book instantly became one of my favorites. And while my passion for Richard has modified somewhat over the years, I still think the book is a great read. (Good movie, too.)

Teaser Tuesdays: The Last Child

This week my teaser lines come from John Hart's The Last Child. I seem to be reading a lot of thrillers lately, and this is one more.

This little snippet is from page 8, and has the book's main character, thirteen-year-old Johnny Merrimon, thinking about the man his mother has been spending time with since Johnny's father left them:

But after his dad left, the respect disappeared, and Ken started coming around a lot. Now he ran things. . . . Johnny took it in with those black eyes, and often found himself in the kitchen, at night, three fingers on the big knife in its wooden block, picturing the soft place above Ken's chest, thinking about it.

The book won this year's Edgar Award for best mystery novel of the year, and it's received lots of great reviews. So I've got high hopes for it, even though I haven't really started it yet (just picked it up at the library over the weekend).


How about you? Got a great teaser from a book you're reading right now? Want to play along? Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by mizB at Should Be Reading. If you'd like to read more teasers, or take part yourself, just head on over to her blog.