Teaser Tuesdays: The Distant Hours

This week my teaser lines come from Kate Morton's latest novel, The Distant Hours. I've been reading the book for a couple of weeks now, and loving it. This excerpt (a bit more than two lines, as usual - sorry) comes from page 55 of the ARC (page 42 of the published edition), and has our protagonist, Edie Burchill, thinking about her first visit to the mysterious Milderhurst Castle:

...although I'd stumbled upon the village of Milderhurst by accident, there was a rightness to my being there. I'd experienced the same sensation when I first read Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre and Bleak House. As if the story were one I'd already known, that it confirmed something I'd always suspected about the world: that it had sat in my future all along, waiting for me to find it.

I guess you can tell that Edie is a rather bookish type. In fact, at one point she says that she'd like to conduct relationships only on paper. Well, I don't think I'm quite that far gone, but I can definitely understand the impulse.


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.

And please feel free to leave me a link to your Teaser Tuesday post in a comment here.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

Well, this week I'm still reading the same book I've been reading for the past couple of weeks. I have excuses. For one thing, it's a long, long book (but a good one). And for another, I've been traveling for the last two weeks, and just didn't really get a lot of reading time on the trip. I did visit a couple of interesting book stores and picked up quite a few books to bring home with me (more about that later). So the time spent traveling,visiting, and house-hunting wasn't wasted, but it was spent mostly not-reading.

• This week:
  
  The book I'm reading this week is Kate Morton's recently-published new novel, The Distant Hours. I'm about halfway through it, and loving it so far. A little frustrating, the way it keeps shifting back and forth between time periods and characters, but I've come to expect that from Morton.
  
  
  
• Up next:
  
  I need to finish up Juliet by Anne Fortier, which I started last month but put aside for other things.
  
  Also have to read that ARC of Charles Elton's Mr. Toppit that I've yet to get around to. So those are next on my list.
  
  

It's Monday! What Are You Reading? is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey. If you want to let the world know what books you're going to be reading this week, head on over to her blog and leave your link. It's also a great way to discover new books and new blogs.

Friday Update

OK, I lied. No update message here. More like "to be continued." We're on the road for a couple of weeks, visiting family and friends in Texas. So blogging is on hold for a few days. But reading is not. On hold, that is. I've got several books in my suitcase, several more loaded on my iPad, and I've already found out about one book fair and several bookstores I want to check out along the way.

So I should be a happy camper.

That is, provided I don't really have to do any camping!

Teaser Tuesdays: Moonlight Mile

Don't know how much time I'll have for reading this week, since we're going on a little trip and I'll be on the road most of the time. So I'm taking my teaser lines from a book I haven't started yet, but one that's on the top of my TBR stack at the moment – Dennis Lehane's new novel Moonlight Mile.

This quote is taken from an advance reading copy of the book, so bear in mind that there might be some changes in the published version. I have no idea who's talking here or who's being talked about, and once again it's a bit more than two sentences (what else is new?).

These days, fifty might be the new forty but in her case it was the new sixty. Her once-strawberry hair was white. The lines in her face were deep enough to hide gravel in. She gave off the air of someone clinging to a wall of soap. [p.22]

Hey, don't sugar-coat it, pal – tell us how you really think she looks!


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.

And please feel free to leave me a link to your Teaser Tuesday post in a comment here.

Reading Report: The House Next Door

Written by Anne Rivers Siddons
Simon and Schuster, 2007; 356 pages
Originally published 1978

In Anne Rivers Siddons' novel The House Next Door, Colquitt and Walter Kennedy, both thirty-something, are a happily married couple living in an upscale, comfortable suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. Childless by choice, they keep themselves enjoyably busy with their careers and long, lazy weekends relaxing and partying with their neighbors. But then construction of a new home – beautiful but disturbingly avant-garde in design – begins in the empty lot next door, and their easy friendships and relaxed get-togethers are suddenly marred by strange accidents and inexplicable happenings.

Although Colquitt doesn’t want to let herself believe in haunted houses, she can’t ignore the mysterious and violent goings-on next door. The house really does seem to prey on the weaknesses of its succession of inhabitants, relentlessly destroying them and the neighbors who befriend them – driving them to disgrace, madness and death.

The House Next Door is an interesting reworking of the standard haunted house theme. This time the house in question isn't a creepy ancient structure with a history of weird occurrences over the years; it's a brand spanking new place with an out-on-the-edge-of-modern design. And the incidents that drive family after family away from the place could just be seen as tragic coincidences. Is the place really "haunted"? Or is Colquitt simply letting her "sensitive" nature get the better of her?

I discovered this book after stumbling upon the 2006 made-for-TV movie based on it. I wasn't thrilled with the movie itself, but the story got my attention, especially when I found out the book was written by Siddons. I'd always wanted to read something by her, and this seemed like a good place to start – although I gather it's very different from all the rest of her writing. I also wanted to see if the ending had been changed for the film, and I'm glad to say it had – the book's ending is much more frightening and disturbing, if not any more satisfying.

I enjoyed this book a lot, and I'd definitely recommend it to anyone looking for something scary and a little different. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to agree with Stephen King that it's "one of the finest horror novels of the 20th Century" but it's certainly a fun, fast, spooky read.

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Awesome Authors Challenge, Fall Into Reading Challenge, RIP/V Challenge

Reading Report: After Claude

Written by Iris Owens
New York Review Books, 2010; 216 pages
Originally published 1973

This review refers to an advance uncorrected proof of the reissued novel.

Description from the publisher:

Harriet has left her boyfriend Claude, “the French rat.” At least that is how she prefers to frame the matter. In fact, after yet one more argument, Claude has just instructed Harriet to move out of his Greenwich Village apartment—not that she has any intention of doing so. To the contrary, she will stay and exact her vengeance—or such is her intention until Claude has her unceremoniously evicted. Still, though moved out, Harriet is not about to move on. Not in any way. Girlfriends circle around to give advice, but Harriet only takes offense, and you can understand why. Because mad and maddening as she may be, Harriet sees past the polite platitudes that everyone else is content to spout and live by. She is an unblinkered, unbuttoned, unrelenting, and above all bitingly funny prophetess of all that is wrong with women’s lives and hearts—until, in a surprise twist, she finds a savior in a dark room at the Chelsea Hotel.

About the Author:

Iris Owens [born 1929] moved from Greenwich Village to Paris at the age of twenty after her first marriage failed. She wrote numerous wildly popular and regularly banned erotic novels for the Traveller's Companion series of Olympia Press under the pseudonym Harriet Daimler. Under her own name, she published After Claude and Hope Diamond Refuses. She died in 2008.

My Thoughts:

Iris Owens' 1973 novel After Claude is an odd little portrait of a woman going off the rails. At times funny, at times very sad, it's a fascinating character study and an interesting early attempt at creating a female anti-hero. It was very well received at the time of its original publication; Owens was hailed as a fresh new voice in the throng of women novelists, and her book was even compared to Erica Jong's Fear of Flying. Understandable, I suppose, because Iris Owens writes like a dream – too bad she wasn't more prolific (I'm not likely to seek out any of the pornographic stuff she wrote under her Harriet Daimler pseudonym).

But while Jong's heroine is just as free-wheeling and libidinous as Owens' Harriet, Fear of Flying is a much richer and more thoughtful book, and its central character much more sympathetic. In the end, there's really not much that's admirable about Harriet – she's profane and profligate, opinionated and egotistical. She claims to be sensitive and caring; in reality she's selfish and dependent. She spends most of the book trying to trick or harangue the various male characters into taking care of her so she won't have to work for her living. And she takes an instantaneous dislike to every female she sees.

All of which makes me almost embarrassed to say I ended up enjoying this book much more than I thought I would when I started it. After the first few pages of Harriet's "mad and maddening" narration, I was almost ready to abandon the book. The experience was a little like being trapped in a dark, messy room and being forced to listen to Joan Rivers standup routines for forty-eight hours without let-up. But listening to Harriet is also like viewing the proverbial train wreck – it's horrendous, and yet you can't look away.

Even though I never really thought of myself as a feminist, I believe I probably would have liked this book a lot more if I'd read it when it first appeared in the early '70s. Back then I would most likely have seen the work as funny, edgy, and iconoclastic. But it hasn't aged well. Or maybe that's just me who hasn't aged well.

I should mention that the advance copy I read lacked the introduction by Emily Prager, which I'd like to take a look at. I do applaud NYRB for their courage in reissuing this work, since it's probably not going to be a huge seller. Worth reading, I think, but definitely not for everyone.

[Note: I received the advance reading copy of this novel free of charge from the publisher, through Library Thing's Early Reviewer program. No other form of compensation was offered or accepted, and no one attempted to influence my opinion of the book.]

Reading Report: The Convent

Written by Panos Karnezis
W.W. Norton and Co., 2010; 212 pages

This review refers to an advance reading copy of the novel.

Description from the publisher:

The crumbling convent of Our Lady of Mercy stands alone in an uninhabited part of the Spanish sierra, hidden on a hill among dense forest. Its inhabitants are devoted to God, to solitude and silence—six women cut off from a world they've chosen to leave behind. This all changes on the day that Mother Superior Maria Ines discovers a suitcase punctured with air holes at the entrance to the retreat: a baby, abandoned to its fate. Is it a miracle? Soon she will find that the baby's arrival has consequences beyond her imagining, and that even in her carefully protected sanctuary she is unable to keep the world, or her past, at bay.

My Thoughts:

The description of Panos Karnezis new novel, The Convent, made me think the book would be right up my street. Even though I'm not really religious (having left my father's Catholicism and my mother's Methodism far behind, and taken up with my husband's heathen Presbyterians years ago), I do for some reason love reading novels about convents. In recent years, I've thoroughly enjoyed Muriel Spark's The Abbess of Crewe, Mark Salzman's Lying Awake, and Sarah Dunant's Sacred Hearts, to name just a few. And many years before those, there was Rumer Godden's In This House of Brede (overdue for a reread, I believe). So I was hoping for the best with this new addition to the field.

But after finishing this novel, I couldn't help thinking of the old Peggy Lee tune, "Is That All There Is?" The book felt a bit like a first draft – a good idea, but one that needed to be fleshed out a little more before publishing. I enjoyed it, but there were things about it that bothered me.

For one thing, most of the characters never really took shape as separate individuals. The Mother Superior and her nemesis Sister Ana were distinct enough. However, while the other nuns had names too, they might as well have been called Nun Number One, Nun Number Two, etc. And the child didn't come across as a real child, either – he hardly ever cried, or made any kind of fuss. And maybe I just don't have enough experience with infants, but it seemed odd to me that as a newborn he was able to drink from a bowl or cup without any problems or mess. I understand that he was functioning as a symbol in the story, but I would have been happier if he'd functioned a little more like a real baby, too.

But I guess the thing that bothered me the most was the story itself. When the deep dark secrets at the heart of the novel are revealed, you experience a sort of "That's it?" moment. The big secrets turn out to be so predictable that everything seems kind of pointless. However, Karnezis is a very skillful craftsman, and there's some beautiful writing in The Convent. It kept my attention right up to the end, even with all its imperfections. I'd certainly recommend it – just be ready to suspend an awful lot of disbelief.

[Note: I received the advance reading copy of this novel free of charge from the publisher, through Library Thing's Early Reviewer program. No other form of compensation was offered or accepted, and no one attempted to influence my opinion of the book.]