did not finish: A Killing in the Hills by Julia Keller (audio)

Posted on October 16, 2013 by pagesofjulia

killing in the hillsI made it less than 20% of the way through this audiobook (28 of 156 tracks, if you like to be precise), so on the one hand I should go easy on it, not having read it to completion (or even close). But on the other hand, the fact that I quit so early does indicate my feelings about it.

I read good things about this debut mystery novel – somewhere – but can’t add to those praises. The setting in the West Virginia hills (or mountains) was promising at the start, and I liked the idea of our small-town female prosecutor and her troubled past; likewise her friendly, almost filial relationship with the much older sheriff. But there the character development ended. Our prosecutor hero, Bell, turns rather flat, and her teenage daughter Carla is far worse: a cariacature of the worst kind of whiny teen girl, she speaks in overly-self-aware brattiness, as if she were her own psychoanalyst which – hello – obnoxious teenagers are not. Similarly, the early bad guy is so hideously ugly in every feature as to be a cartoon – how easy to identify bad guys if they all looked like this! And he somehow simultaneously is a stark idiot, and shares Carla’s preternatural self-awareness. The dialog felt like nails on a chalkboard. And so I gave it up. The mystery remains unsolved, for me, and that’s just fine.

Narrator Shannon McManus was sometimes amusing, but sometimes a little overly dramatic (although a certain amount of that falls to the author, for sure). Her rendition of Carla I found unbearable, but that’s squarely on Julia Keller; that’s how Carla was written, I fear.

I’m happy for those who enjoyed this novel, but I am not among them.

Is it fair to rate a book I read this little of? Probably not.

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Teaser Tuesdays: The Gunslinger by Stephen King

Posted on October 15, 2013 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. The idea is to open your current read to a random page and share a few sentences. And try not to include spoilers!

gunslinger

Today I am thrilled to finally be finding time for book one in the Dark Tower series by King, which I entered with a later installment, The Wind Through the Keyhole. I loved it. I’m just sorry this one isn’t read by Stephen King, too!

I picked out my favorite early lines for you:

He had laid his fuel in a pattern that was not artful but only workable. It spoke of blacks and whites. It spoke of a man who might straighten bad pictures in strange hotel rooms. The fire burned its steady, slow flame, and phantoms danced in its incandescent core. The gunslinger did not see. The two patterns, art and craft, were welded together as he slept.

I love this pictorial expression of the gunslinger’s melding of art and craft, and how it “speaks of blacks and whites.” I am a King fan. I feel confident this one will be good…

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Clothes for a Summer Hotel by Tennessee Williams

Posted on October 14, 2013 by pagesofjulia

clothessummerhotelHere’s how I got here. First, the disappointing Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, as a consolation prize, renewed my interest in the Fitzgeralds. (I have purchased, used, two biographies of Zelda based on the interest piqued by Z – the ones by Cline and Milford, respectively.) And next, I read an excellent book called The Trip to Echo Springs by Olivia Laing (sorry, it’s not published til January; you’ll see my review closer to then), about the alcoholism shared by, among others, Fitzgerald and Tennessee Williams. From Laing I learned that Tennessee’s last play, entitled Clothes for a Summer Hotel, dealt with the Fitzgeralds, with Zelda at center stage. And here we are.

Apparently this is not one of Williams’s better-regarded plays, and I suppose it does lose out to the likes of The Glass Menagerie; but I found it a fine work. It is first and foremost dreamy – Williams calls it a “ghost play,” referring to the chronological liberties he takes with the Fitzgeralds’ lives. Scott visits Zelda in the North Carolina asylum, Highland Hospital, where she died; his visit takes place just before her death, at which point he would have been dead more than 7 years. But this is no great concern, because many of the characters who take the stage are dead at different times, and yet walking and talking. The extent to which they are aware of this fact varies, or is unclear. The timing is not chronological; they zoom backwards from the asylum, to Paris of the 1920’s, and then forwards again. Zelda’s death is outside the action of the play, but heavily foreshadowed throughout. She died in a fire, locked in her barred room on the top floor; Williams, and his Zelda, are here obsessed with fire, and wind, and refer to both throughout.

I found Scott and Zelda here to be true to what I know of them, and I found Williams’s portrayal to be nicely fair in accusing them both of madness or alcoholism, and yet sensitively making allowances at the same time; which seems to me to be the proper treatment. With Williams’s stage directions, even though I was merely reading a written play, I could picture the stage set, treated with wavering ribbons, wind, and smoke (from dry ice, Williams notes), and I could feel the effect these props would have of blurring the lines between past and present for the half (or more) crazy characters onstage. I found it all rather magnificent, and I would like to see it performed, although I suppose that’s unlikely, with Williams plays like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire to compete with. Ah well.

Tennessee Williams’s reputation as a fine playwright is confirmed here. And my interest in the Fitzgeralds continues.

Rating: 7 rubies.

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Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin (audio)

Posted on October 11, 2013 by pagesofjulia

go tell itI come away with the impression that this book had a large, sweeping scope. It is on the surface the story of John Grimes, and takes place in the present over the course of just a day or three, on and around his 14th birthday. His father Gabriel is a deacon in a black church in New York City in the 1950’s, and appears very pious, but beats his wife and children; as his sins add up from there, he comes clear as a hypocrite. The story begins and ends with John and focuses on his relationship with the church or with God; the first and last lines of the book are concerned with his eternal salvation. But in between, we ramble in space and time, and get to know Gabriel in his youth in the South; John’s mother Elizabeth in her youth in the South and in New York City; Gabriel’s sister Florence, who introduced him to Elizabeth; and a surprise character I’ll leave unnamed here. As such, although John is the focus that bookends all the action, this turns out really to be the story of a family and even of a shared experience. I was glad to have the background I gained by reading The Warmth of Other Suns, because like that work of nonfiction, Go Tell It on the Mountain is the story of black Americans moving north in the mid-20th century. It’s concerned with black society’s relationship with the church, and family patterns, and race relations. And it’s for these focuses that I call it “sweeping.”

John is a likeable character in that he feels like a real boy of that age, and my heart goes out to him for the challenges he faces: an overbearing and violent father with the significant authority of the black church in Harlem behind him is no small thing, and the question of his immortal soul and eternal salvation is weighty as well. Clearly I bypassed some of the weight of the religious question, not being able to sympathize with those parts, but I did appreciate the atmospheric nature of the church and the power of that institution in John’s society and in his family life.

Baldwin’s writing is undeniably lovely. I feel a little inadequate because I’m afraid I missed some of the depth of this story, mainly in the religious vein. But what I got, I appreciated, and part of that in this case meant just letting the language flow over me. The narration by Adam Lazarre-White is powerful, dynamic, and dramatic to the right extent; the phrasing feels accurately portrayed, and the cadence of the prayers is well executed and adds a lot to the feel of the story. Full marks for audio performance, and having such a fine narrator read such beautiful words was a grand experience.

Rating: 7 calls to the alter.

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from Mom

Posted on October 10, 2013 by pagesofjulia

After we both enjoyed some Kingsolver (The Lacuna, Flight Behavior) so very much, my mother is clearly pushing for me to enjoy this one along with her. She shared this quotation:

“April is the cruelest month, T. S. Eliot wrote, by which I think he meant (among other things) that springtime makes people crazy. We expect too much, the world burgeons with promises it can’t keep, all passion is really a setup, and we’re doomed to get our hearts broken yet again. I agree, and would further add: Who cares? Every spring I go there anyway, around the bend, unconditionally. I’m a soul on ice flung out on a rock in the sun, where the needles that pierced me begin to melt all as one.”

–from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

This book is both a collection of stories about practical (more or less) matters and a reflection on life: human, plant, planet. Very sweet to dip into without rolling straight through.

My first reaction is that this brief quotation echoes Annie Dillard strongly – you recall that I recently shared some of her passages, too. Funny how that works out. I don’t know when I’ll be joining you, Mom, but thanks for the head’s up.

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Edward Abbey: on writing books

Posted on October 9, 2013 by pagesofjulia

Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and out through the fingers.

–From a 1976 letter to Frederick W. hills, editor in chief at McGraw-Hill, as quoted in Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast.

I can just imagine, Ed. Thanks for taking the effort.

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Teaser Tuesdays: Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin

Posted on October 8, 2013 by pagesofjulia

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. The idea is to open your current read to a random page and share a few sentences. And try not to include spoilers!

go tell it

I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to share this passage with you.

He left Fifth Avenue and walked west towards the movie houses. Here on 42nd Street it was less elegant but no less strange. He loved this street, not for the people or the shops but for the stone lions that guarded the great main building of the Public Library, a building filled with books and unimaginably vast, and which he had never yet dared to enter. He might, he knew, for he was a member of the branch in Harlem and was entitled to take books from any library in the city. But he had never gone in because the building was so big that it must be full of corridors and marble steps, in the maze of which he would be lost and never find the book he wanted. And then everyone, all the white people inside, would know that he was not used to great buildings, or to many books, and they would look at him with pity. He would enter on another day, when he had read all the books uptown, an achievement that would, he felt, lend him the poise to enter any building in the world.

Libraries; books; the intimidation of buildings, books, and the grandeur of the New York Public Library; and the power available to a young man who could read all the books uptown. Lovely, and moving.

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The Edge of Normal by Carla Norton

Posted on October 7, 2013 by pagesofjulia

A true-crime journalist shifts to fiction with a disturbing and authentic tale of kidnapping–and recovery.

normal
The Edge of Normal, Carla Norton’s fiction debut, clearly draws upon the expertise she gained writing Perfect Victim, a 1988 true-crime book about a survivor of kidnapping and captivity. In the novel, kidnapping victim Reeve LeClaire has spent the six years since her escape in therapy and is progressing in tiny, painful increments. The family of Tilly Cavanaugh, another rescued abductee, asks for Reeve’s help in beginning their own process of recovery. This mentorship looks like the most challenging task she’s been offered in years, but will turn out to be the beginning of another nightmare.

Tilly’s kidnapper is behind bars, so why is Tilly still so skittish? What is she not telling the police and district attorney who want to prosecute her case? Pulled into a confidence that may break her, Reeve becomes the only person who can help Tilly and two girls who are still missing.

The reader is privy to the inner workings not only of Reeve’s tortured mind, but that of Tilly’s kidnapper, so there is less mystery in The Edge of Normal than sheer terror and wild, horrified urgency. Norton’s sense of pace is perfect, and her characters draw upon readers’ sympathies skillfully. Norton’s expert understanding of captivity syndromes goes far beyond Stockholm Syndrome (which, she writes, “isn’t actually in the diagnostic manuals”); she renders Reeve and Tilly’s experiences visceral and believable, as The Edge of Normal indulges in all the action and adrenaline thriller fans crave before building to an explosive finish.

This review originally ran in the September 13, 2013 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 6 scars.

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book beginnings on Friday: The Hunted Whale by James McGuane

Posted on October 4, 2013 by pagesofjulia

Thanks to Rose City Reader for hosting this meme. To participate, share the first line or two of the book you are currently reading and, if you feel so moved, let us know what your first impressions were based on that first line.

huntedwhale

The title recalls a certain famous fictional white whale, or is that just me? This is a coffee-table style book, I expect (my copy is pre-publication), and filled with images. It begins:

The hunt is one of man’s most ancient endeavors. One can barely imagine an early time when man was free from the need to find nutritious food or eliminate a dangerous predator. It’s been posited that language itself grew out of the need for precise communication as men stalked and hunted prey.

No argument there, I don’t think. And I like that McGuane pulls language into his opening lines – this being a work of written artistry, after all. But The Hunted Whale promises to star the whale, as well as the hunt, so stay tuned.

These quotation comes from an uncorrected advance proof and is subject to change.

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from NYT magazine: “Stephen King’s Family Business”

Posted on October 3, 2013 by pagesofjulia

Thanks to my mom for sharing this fun article by Susan Dominus, “Stephen King’s Family Business“, in which she sits down with the family – Stephen, Tabitha, their three children Naomi, Joe and Owen, and Owen’s wife Kelly. This crowd of six boasts five novelists, a hefty feat: Dominus calls them “as close to a first family of letters as America is likely to have,” and I think she makes a fair case.

It’s a pleasure to step inside the lives of Stephen King and his family. I am only a beginner-fan, having read, oh, 7 or so of his many many books; but I am a fan, and even at my beginner level, was aware that the King family talent extends beyond Stephen himself. The people portrayed in this article are down-to-earth and likeable, and come across as both a tight-knit family and as distinct individuals at the same time.

Go check it out. I, for one, was already watching my local library for NOS4A2 on audio, but have now requested Heart-Shaped Box as well. Who knows what you’ll find?

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