The Monday agenda

Posted in The Monday Check-In by

Not a lofty, ambitious to-be-read list consisting of 100+ book titles. Just a simple plan for the upcoming week — what I’m reading now, what I plan to read next, and what I’m hoping to squeeze in among the nooks and crannies.

The weekend is over, and now the sun comes out! Here’s hoping that I can squeeze in some outdoor time while the sunshine lasts. And… onward with the Monday agenda:

From last week:

The Brides of Rollrock Island by Margo Lanagan: Finished! I was swept away by the harsh beauty of the writing. You can check out my review here.

I made no progress with my library books, and it’s all J. K. Rowling’s fault! More on that below.

Drums of Autumn by Diana Gabaldon (group re-read): Need I say it? This book is fascinating, even the 2nd time around.

And this week’s new agenda:

The Casual Vacancy by J. K. Rowling! It finally arrived on Friday (a day later than expected, thanks to an Amazon screw-up). Unfortunately, I didn’t have much time to read over the weekend, but now it’s full steam ahead. After the initial shock of seeing JKR use language that would never pass muster at Hogwarts, I’m enjoying the book.

Assuming I finish the Rowling book within the next few days, I’ll dive back into my stack of library books. Next up: The Dog Stars by Peter Heller.

My son and I are only a couple of chapters away from finishing Chomp by Carl Hiaasen, so we’ll be scouting out our next bed-time read.

Drums of Autumn by Diana Gabaldon (group re-read): Chapters 51 and 52 on deck for this week. Drama. Betrayal. Adventure. Danger. Yup, this book has it all.

So many book, so little time…

That’s my agenda. What’s yours? Add your comments to share your bookish agenda for the week.

The final read-aloud

Posted in The Reading Life by

The day is coming, and it’s not that far off, when the moment I dread will finally arrive: The day when my youngest child turns to me at bed-time and says, “That’s okay, Mom. You don’t need to read to me any more.”

Our bed-time reading ritual has been a daily staple since he was a newborn, when I’d lie on the bed with him and watch him kick his feet in time to the rhythms of A. A. Milne’s fabulous poetry:

Whenever I walk in a London street,
I’m ever so careful to watch my feet;
And I keep in the squares,
And the masses of bears,
Who wait at the corners all ready to eat
The sillies who tread on the lines of the street
Go back to their lairs,
And I say to them, “Bears,
Just look how I’m walking in all the squares!”

(A. A. Milne, “Lines and Square”, When We Were Very Young)

As he grew, our choice of books varied, but always, always, we’d grab a few books off the shelves, cuddle up, and dig in. During the toddler and preschool years, favorites included:

For some reason, the “corn car” always cracked us up.

Board books galore, such as Richard Scarry’s Cars and Trucks From A To Z (try reading this to a toddler and have him/her repeat all the car names after you. Guaranteed hilarity!); any and all of the oh-so-silly Boynton books (The Going To Bed Book and Pajama Time are special favorites of ours); the Margaret Wise Brown books, of which Big Red Barn is far and away the best.

As he grew older, we moved into the world of Seuss and friends, first the shorter classics (One Fish, Two Fish and In A People House were among the most requested), then moving on to The Cat in the Hat and all of those crazy shenanigans. As he progressed through the early elementary years, my son became hooked on some of the longer, wackier Seuss works, such as The Sneetches, I Had Trouble In Getting To Solla Sollew, and a perennial favorite, Dr. Seuss’s Sleep Book.

 

 

A moose is asleep. He is dreaming of moose drinks.
A goose is asleep. He is dreaming of goose drinks.
That’s well and good when a moose dreams of moose juice.
And nothing goes wrong when a goose dreams of goose juice.
But it isn’t too good when a moose and a goose
Start dreaming they’re drinking the other one’s juice.
Moose juice, not goose juice, is juice for a moose.
And goose juice, not moose juice, is juice for a goose.
So, when goose gets a mouthful of juices of mooses
And moose gets a mouthful of juices of gooses
They always fall out of their beds screaming screams
So, I’m warning you, now! Never drink in your dreams.

(Dr. Seuss’s Sleep Book)

Now that he’s a an older elementary school student, practically on the verge of middle school, his tastes have changed, although his interest in bed-time reading sessions has not. Two years ago, the boy decided he wanted to know what all this Harry Potter fuss was about and asked to watch the first movie. “Aha!” I said (paraphrasing here…), “here’s my opportunity!” and I insisted that he read the book before seeing the movie. This negotiation quickly ended with the compromise that he’d listen to the book if I’d read it to him at bedtime. And so we did. I read, he listened, he became hooked, I got to re-read a favorite series all over again and see it fresh through a child’s eyes. Ten months later, we closed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, with me having read OUT LOUD every book in the series. (I was quite proud of myself, really — I’m not a very dramatic reader, but I do think I managed a pretty good Snape voice).

Harry Potter set us on a course of venturing into longer books and books series. We’ve read The Mysterious Benedict Society series, The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place, started (but didn’t enjoy) the Lemony Snicket books, read a few classics such as My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George and a variety of Roald Dahl books. Our current book is Chomp by Carl Hiaasen, which the author probably did not envision as a bed-time story — full of adventure and danger in the Everglades, as well as some unique and very funny characters — but we’re fully enjoying it together.

The bottom line, for me, is that our bed-time reading ritual ensures that the kid and I have quality time together at the end of each day, that we have a shared book experience to discuss and enjoy, and equally importantly from my perspective, it gives my boy, a truly reluctant reader, a chance to experience the joy of reading. It’s a struggle to get him to pick up a book and read on his own, which he is capable of doing — he’s just usually not interested or so inclined. (“Mom, I can read. I just prefer not to.”) Our night-time reading sessions let him see the beauty and excitement of a good book and experience how great it feels to be so caught up in a story that you just have to know what happens next, that you dream about the characters, that you wake up in the morning with a theory about one of the book’s mysteries.

My son is ten. He’ll be in middle school next year. He’s growing up, I know — picks out his own clothes, checks his email, going boogie-boarding with his big brother, and mostly wants to assert his independence. I’m guessing that at some time in the coming year, he’ll decide that he’s too old for all this read-aloud business. But I’m hoping it’s a ways off yet. For now, he’s definitely enjoying it, and I plan to hang in there as long as possible to keep our reading time alive.

If you’re a parent of an older child, I’d love to know: Do you still read to your kids, even it they can read on their own? If not, when did your read-alouds stop? Share your thoughts in the comments, please!

What happened to my blog?

Posted in Blogging by

My formatting seems to have gone kerplooey.  I can’t figure out why. Was it something I did? Was it something I said?

I think it’s only affecting my last blog post (“A bookish sort of romance”), but why? No idea.

My sidebars appear to be lost. Who ate my widgets? Gah!

If some WordPress genius can tell me the solution, I’d be eternally grateful.

UPDATED TO ADD: False alarm! Happy dance! I figured it out on my own. Yes, I had done something rather bone-headed, but no, I didn’t need divine intervention to make it all better. I suppose I could just delete this post… but it amuses me to see the rise and fall of my tech-related frustration levels. So here I am, and at least I can say that I learned a little something today.

A bookish sort of romance

Posted in The Reading Life by

When people ask me how I met my husband, I usually just shrug my shoulders, say “mutual friends”, and leave it at that. I never really thought there was much of a story there… until my online book group told me otherwise. That group of avid readers convinced me that, for a booklover, this is a good love story indeed.

So… About 20 years ago, I moved to San Francisco, newly divorced and full-time single mother. I settled in, got a job, made some friends, and occasionally indulged myself by hiring a babysitter and going out folkdancing. (Woo hoo, wild times, right?)

I met a group of people through dancing that I could share rides with, got to know some of them, and enjoyed their company. One of this group was my husband-to-be (HTB). HTB was quite a bit older than I was, also recently divorced, father of two, nice looking, and a pretty funny guy. That was my entire impression of him. I didn’t know him as well as some of the others in the group, but my overall thought was that he liked to joke around, was always laughing, had a nice smile, and seemed like a decent person.

Then, one fateful night, we both got a ride from a friend and ended up sitting together in the backseat for the 45-minute drive home. We made small talk for a while, and somehow the conversation wound around to books. HTB did not grow up in the US. He learned English as an adult and speaks it very well, but it’s certainly not his native language. I had already learned from him that he grew up in a poor, religious household and did not get very far with his formal education, being expected to pursue a trade by his mid-teens. During our car ride, HTB started telling me about finding refuge in books during his teen years and into early adulthood, journeying to other worlds and cultures through his reading, and finding fulfillment intellectually in a way that he’d been denied by lack of schooling.

Wow. To think that this nice, light-hearted guy was a booklover like me! True, our paths to reading were very, very different, but there we were, chatting in a car about the books that had had an impact on our lives. He mentioned several books by Gabriel Garcia Marquez that he had loved, and then he began telling me about one book in particular that had had a huge impact on him. It was, he said, a series of letters from a young man to his mother. The young man had left his home country to seek a life elsewhere, and through his letters, we see his experiences adjusting to his new life and culture. HTB said he’d found the book incredibly moving and interesting — but unfortunately, he wasn’t sure about the title. He’d read the book in his native language, not in English, but even then, it was a translation from the original. The title was something like… Letters to China? Letters to Taiwan? Something with letters. That’s all he remembered.

That car ride changed my life. My eyes were opened to a whole different side of HTB, and from that day onward, we began to talk more, hang out, spend time together, and ultimately… well, this is a love story, after all! We started dating seriously within a month or so, and never looked back. This year marks 19 years of our relationship, 14 years since we tied the knot and made it official. We’ve bought a home, combined our families, and added another child of our own.

But you know, I never really forgot about that car ride and the conversation. I’d tried to look up the book he’d mentioned soon afterward, but didn’t have enough information to go on and never ended up figuring out which book it was.

And then — last year — I attended my favorite bookish event, the Big Book Sale sponsored by the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. The Big Book Sale is an annual sale of used books that raises money for the library, and is just heaven on earth for book folks. (See my recap of this year’s event here). While browsing the fiction tables and filling up my cart with all sorts of goodies, a certain book cover caught my eye. It was this:

I knew as soon as I saw that this was the long-lost book that HTB had told me about almost twenty years earlier! Letters From Thailand, written by an author named Botan, translated into English from the original Thai by Susan Kepner. Needless to say, I bought it (after jumping up and down a few times).

When I got home that night, I practically bounced all the way down the hall to find my husband and proudly held up the book, shouting something unintelligible along the lines of “LOOK! IT’S THE BOOK!” Once he got over thinking that I was a lunatic, dear HTB did in fact confirm that I’d found the book that he’d loved so many years ago.

So there we are. In a certain way, this is the book that brought my husband and me together and helped us fall in love. The book itself? I read it and enjoyed it, although it wasn’t as life-changing for me at this stage in my life as it was for HTB so many years ago, as an under-educated young man trying to find his way and looking for more.

Romantic? Well, as a booklover, I’d say our is definitely a tale of epic romance!

And, in fact, although I am by far the book fanatic in our household, we do share a love of reading to this day, and our lives continue to be enriched by the books we share, discuss, and even argue about.

Flashback Friday: Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

Posted in Flashback Friday by

It’s time, once again, for Flashback Friday…

Flashback Fridays is a chance to dig deep in the darkest nooks of our bookshelves and pull out the good stuff from way back. As a reader, a blogger, and a consumer, I tend to focus on new, new, new… but what about the old favorites, the hidden gems? On Flashback Fridays, I want to hit the pause button for a moment and concentrate on older books that are deserving of attention.

My rules — since I’m making this up:

  1. Has to be something I’ve (you’ve) read myself (yourself) — oh, you know what I mean!
  2. Has to still be available, preferably still in print
  3. Must have been originally published 5 or more years ago

Other than that, the sky’s the limit! Join me, please, and let us all know: what are the books you’ve read that you always rave about? What books from your past do you wish EVERYONE would read? Pick something from five years ago, or go all the way back to the Canterbury Tales if you want. It’s Flashback Friday time!

Add your link below — join in for Flashback Friday!

My pick for this week’s Flashback Friday:

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

(published 2002)

A book that quite simply took my breath away.

From Amazon:

Sue Trinder is an orphan, left as an infant in the care of Mrs. Sucksby, a “baby farmer,” who raised her with unusual tenderness, as if Sue were her own. Mrs. Sucksby’s household, with its fussy babies calmed with doses of gin, also hosts a transient family of petty thieves—fingersmiths—for whom this house in the heart of a mean London slum is home.

One day, the most beloved thief of all arrives—Gentleman, an elegant con man, who carries with him an enticing proposition for Sue: If she wins a position as the maid to Maud Lilly, a naïve gentlewoman, and aids Gentleman in her seduction, then they will all share in Maud’s vast inheritance. Once the inheritance is secured, Maud will be disposed of—passed off as mad, and made to live out the rest of her days in a lunatic asylum.

With dreams of paying back the kindness of her adopted family, Sue agrees to the plan. Once in, however, Sue begins to pity her helpless mark and care for Maud Lilly in unexpected ways…But no one and nothing is as it seems in this Dickensian novel of thrills and reversals.

The New York Times Book Review has called Sarah Waters a writer of “startling power” and The Seattle Times has praised her work as “gripping, astute fiction that feeds the mind and the senses.” Fingersmith marks a major leap forward in this young and brilliant career.

I first read Fingersmith in early 2011, after picking it up at a used book sale several months earlier. I hadn’t heard of the book or the author previously, but a booklover friend ordered me to “READ THAT BOOK IMMEDIATELY!” When someone with good book taste (i.e., book taste that aligns nicely with my own!) tells me that emphatically to read a particular book, I tend to listen. And in the case of Fingersmith, I’m oh so glad that I did.

Here’s what I wrote on Goodreads when I finished the book:

At the risk of gushing, let me just say that I LOVED this book. I can’t remember the last book that made me gasp out loud while reading — and this one did it at least three times. Fingersmith, set in Victorian England, gets its start, literally, in a den of thieves. It manages to incorporate every possible trope of the era, yet does so in a way that’s both fresh and startling. To disclose anything of the plot would be to ruin the joy of being shocked to the core by the twists and turns of this unusual book. Filled with well-drawn characters, including pickpockets and thieves, con men and gaolers, insane asylums nurses and booksellers, the mad and the suffering, Fingersmith is an evocative period piece as well as a superb literary adventure. I can’t recommend it highly enough, or give enough praise to the author’s achievement. I certainly look forward to reading more of her work!

I don’t give out five star reviews very often, but when I do, I really mean it. Fingersmith was absolutely a five-star book for me. Since reading Fingersmith, I’ve slowly been working my way through the rest of Sarah Waters’s books. (Really enjoyed Tipping the Velvet, liked The Little Stranger, looking forward to reading Affinity and The Night Watch).

Do yourself a favor: Read Fingersmith. And be sure to avoid all plot summaries! The shocks and surprises are not too be missed; don’t ruin it by peeking ahead!

So, what’s your favorite blast from the past? Leave a tip for your fellow booklovers, and share the wealth. It’s time to dust off our old favorites and get them back into circulation! 

Note from your friendly Bookshelf Fantasies host: This is my baby-steps attempt at a blog hop! Join in, post a Friday Flashback on your blog, and share your link below. Don’t have a blog post to share? Then share your favorite oldie-but-goodie in the comments section. Let’s get this party started!



Book Review: The Brides of Rollrock Island by Margo Lanagan

Posted in Book Reviews by

Book Review: The Brides of Rollrock Island by Margo Lanagan

I’ve been a bit in awe of Margo Lanagan ever since reading her story collection Black Juice. Regular readers of my blog will know that I have an aversion to short stories; no matter how well written, I get antsy and never quite make it through an entire book of stories, at least not without a lot of hair-pulling. Not so with Black Juice; I was captivated, start to finish, by the author’s language and the mood she creates. The lead story in Black Juice, “Singing My Sister Down”, has to be one of the saddest and most matter-of-factly tragic stories I’ve ever encountered. There’s also a very odd story told from the perspective of elephants, but that’s okay… it was weird but it worked.

I’ve been eagerly awaiting the publication of The Brides of Rollrock Island for some months now, and was delighted to finally get my hands on a copy. The verdict? In short, well worth the wait.

The Brides of Rollrock Island is a novel — which often feels more like a collection of linked stories — about the odd lives of the people of windswept, sea-battered Rollrock Island. Generations gone by, legend has it, the men of the island would take sea-wives, women called forth from the sea, leaving behind their true forms as seals in order to live and love among men. Children grow up hearing whispers of these lovely women, but it’s so long ago as to be remembered only by the great-grandparents among the town.

Into this small, isolated island community is born a homely little girl named Misskaella, youngest daughter of the rather large Prout family. Misskaella is valued by no one, considered odd and ugly, and grows up realizing that the men and women of the island either scorn or pity her. Yet Misskaella has one thing that no one else does — the magic to call to the seals. Misskaella revives the island’s past by bringing forth a sea-wife for one young man of the town. The woman is ethereally beautiful — graceful, slender, with large dark eyes and silky black hair. By comparison, the other women of Rollrock appear frowzy and rough. The men are enchanted, and bit by bit, the island is emptied as the womenfolk, deserted in favor of the sea-wives, leave the island. The men of Rollrock shower Misskaella with treasures and provide her with a place of honor in the town, and in return, she makes sure that they have lovely sea-wives to marry and to provide them with sons.

The men and boys treat their women (the mams, as the boys call them) with veneration and tender care, never losing their fascination with the women’s gentle beauty and fragility. And the women love their husbands and sons, without doubt, yet they pine for the sea and the world that they lost.

Did Misskaella bless the men of Rollrock Island with true love? Or did she exact a torturous revenge upon all the island folks by gifting them with love that must inevitably lead to pain?

It’s hard to describe just how strange and beautiful is the language of The Brides of Rollrock Island. Margo Lanagan’s words twist and cut, caress and murmur. She evokes the crash of the sea, the pervasive smell of the ocean air, the natural wonders of the island and the sea:

And down the cliff we went. It was a poisonous day. Every now and again the wind would take a rest from pressing us to the wall, and try to pull us off it instead. We would grab together and sit then, making a bigger person’s weight that it could not remove. The sea was gray with white dabs of temper all over it; the sky hung full of ragged strips of cloud.

Ms. Lanagan use the first person plural throughout; the narrative is full of what “we” did and how “we” felt, creating with the very words a sense of tight-knit community and insularity. Her odd vernacular seems particularly suited to this island of outcasts and loners, and her writing creates its own spell throughout the book.

The Brides of Rollrock Island is not a typical romance or fantasy, not a supernatural love story or thriller. This is a book of magical power and grace, of tragedy and sorrow as well as love, filled with lyrical writing unlike most anything on bookstore shelves today. Don’t miss it.

 

 

Wishlist Wednesday

Posted in Wishlist Wednesday by

And now, for this week’s Wishlist Wednesday…

The concept is to post about one book from our wish lists that we can’t wait to read. Want to play? Here’s how:

  • Follow Pen to Paper as host of the meme.
  • Please consider adding the blog hop button to your blog somewhere, so others can find it easily and join in too! Help spread the word! The code will be at the bottom of the post under the linky.
  • Pick a book from your wishlist that you are dying to get to put on your shelves.
  • Do a post telling your readers about the book and why it’s on your wishlist.
  • Add your blog to the linky at the bottom of the post at Pen to Paper.
  • Put a link back to pen to paper (http://vogue-pentopaper.blogspot.com) somewhere in your post.
  • Visit the other blogs and enjoy!

My Wishlist Wednesday book is:

Other Kingdoms by Richard Matheson
(published 2011)

From Amazon:

For over half a century, Richard Matheson has enthralled and terrified readers with such timeless classics as I Am Legend, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Duel, Somewhere in Time, and What Dreams May Come. Now the Grand Master returns with a bewitching tale of erotic suspense and enchantment.…

1918. A young American soldier, recently wounded in the Great War, Alex White comes to Gatford to escape his troubled past. The pastoral English village seems the perfect spot to heal his wounded body and soul. True, the neighboring woods are said to be haunted by capricious, even malevolent spirits, but surely those are just old wives’ tales.

Aren’t they?

A frightening encounter in the forest leads Alex into the arms of Magda Variel, an alluring red-haired widow rumored to be a witch. She warns him to steer clear of the wood and the perilous faerie kingdom it borders, but Alex cannot help himself. Drawn to its verdant mysteries, he finds love, danger…and wonders that will forever change his view of the world.

Other Kingdoms casts a magical spell, as conjured by a truly legendary storyteller.

Why do I want to read this?

First off, it’s Richard Matheson! Not only is he responsible for some remarkable works of fiction, he is also the creator of fiction that inspired some remarkable movie achievements as well. Somewhere In Time has to be one of the most romantic movies of all time (Christopher Reeve! Jane Seymour!), and when I finally discovered the book, I loved it as well. Based only on Somewhere In Time, you might assume that Richard Matheson writes mainly in the romance/fantasy genre… until you encounter pieces as diverse as the scary I Am Legend and short story Steel, the basis for last year’s boxing robot movie Real Steel.

Other Kingdoms sounds right up my alley. Post-WWI historical setting, mysterious woods, a dangerous faerie kingdom — too intriguing to pass up! Mortals inadvertently crossing a border into faerie have cropped up in several novels I’ve read over the past few years: Graham Joyce’s Some Kind of Fairy Tale and Susanna Clarke’s masterpiece Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, among others. Done well, these stories can be chilling in their mix of the ordinary and the magical, as they take the sparkly fairy worlds of our collective childhoods and reinvent them as strange universes full of menace and wonder. I have a feeling that Other Kingdoms, in the hands of Richard Matheson, will fit right in with the best of the best.

Quick note to Wishlist Wednesday bloggers: Come on back to Bookshelf Fantasies for Flashback Friday! Join me in celebrating the older gems hidden away on our bookshelves. See the introductory post for more details, and come back this Friday to add your flashback favorites!

Q&A with the kiddo: A kid’s-eye view of…

Posted in Book Reviews, Q&A With The Kiddo by

Book Review: The Secret of Platform 13 by Eva Ibbotson

From Goodreads:

A forgotten door on an abandoned railway platform is the entrance to a magical kingdom–an island where humans live happily with feys, mermaids, ogres, and other wonderful creatures. Carefully hidden from the world, the Island is only accessible when the door opens for nine days every nine years. A lot can go wrong in nine days. When the beastly Mrs. Trottle kidnaps the prince of the Island, it’s up to a strange band of rescuers to save him. But can an ogre, a hag, a wizard, and a fey really troop around London unnoticed?

Proudly presenting Q&A with the kiddo, courtesy of my 10-year-old son, in which I ask my kiddo to describe a book he’s enjoyed recently and he gives his opinions, more or less unfiltered by mom.

Without further ado:

Q: What book do you want to talk about?

A: The Secret of Platform 13.

Q: What was it about?

A: The king and queen of this island had a child. It was the happiest day on the island. The three babysitters took the baby through the gump into the real world (kind of like teleporting). One of the girls got knocked out by car exhaust and a woman took the baby. Now the people on the island are trying to get the baby back.

Q: What’s the gump?

A: The gump opens every nine years and stays open for only nine days. If you step through, you go to a cove and can take a ship to the island. It opens at platform 13 at King’s Cross Station in London. There are ghosts who watch over the opening. If you go through and you don’t get back in time, then you’re stuck for nine years.

Q: What’s special about the island?

A: There are different animals and there’s a king and queen. It’s a magical island. There are creatures called mistmakers that makes mist when you play music, so when ships and planes pass by, they can’t see the island.

Q: How do they try to get the baby back?

A: The king and queen send a giant, a wizard, a fairy, and a hag through the gump the next time it opens. They think they find the right kid but he’s really just a spoiled brat.

Q: Who is your favorite character?

A: My favorite character was Ben. Ben is an honest boy who knows how to do work and is really cool. He is very nice and tries to help people but he’s also kind of gullible.

Q: How would you describe the book?

A: 4-star book. It’s funny and exciting.

Q: Who do you think would like the book?

A: I think kids my age would like the book if they like adventure stories, exciting stories, and cliffhangers.

Q: Are you glad you read it?

A: Yes, I am.

Mom’s two cents: We read The Secret of Platform 13 as a bed-time read-aloud, and it was quite a success. My kiddo was very involved and got excited about the story to the point that he was jumping in with comments and conjectures each time another plot twist was introduced. In my opinion, this was a nice option for a middle grade reader. The magical elements were fun, there was tension, drama and a little bit of menace, but nothing too scary. I was a little put off at first by the similarities in the early chapters to elements of Harry Potter (note: this one came first!), but fortunately the overlap didn’t carry all the way through the book and thus wasn’t too distracting. I had a great time seeing my son get caught up in this book, and I enjoyed it myself as well. All in all, a good choice for a mom/kid reading adventure!

So there you have it. We’ll be back with more book opinions from my kiddo, whenever I can get him to talk books again.

The Monday agenda

Posted in The Monday Check-In by

Not a lofty, ambitious to-be-read list consisting of 100+ book titles. Just a simple plan for the upcoming week — what I’m reading now, what I plan to read next, and what I’m hoping to squeeze in among the nooks and crannies.

Back to work, back to real life… but there’s always time to talk about reading! Onward with the Monday agenda:

From last week:

Hmm, how’d I do?

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter: I finished this over the weekend (my review is here). Loved this book! I’d been aching for some good fiction, after a week of non-fiction reading, and this one definitely fit the bill. Highly recommended.

The Brides of Rollrock Island by Margo Lanagan: Just started!

I got pretty bogged down with playing with my new bookshelves and hitting the public library’s big used book sale ( you can see my recap here), both of which kept me thinking about books a lot (fun!) but reading a bit less than usual (not so fun).

Drums of Autumn by Diana Gabaldon (group re-read): Intense. Amazing.

And this week’s new agenda:

I just started The Brides of Rollrock Island by Margo Lanagan last night, and it’s pretty much love at first sight. Magical, ominous, unique… it was hard to tear myself away so I could get some sleep.

Why is it that all of my library requests seem to arrive at once? Now checked out and waiting to be read: The Diviners by Libba Bray, The Dog Stars by Peter Heller, Seraphina by Rachel Hartman, and The Forgetting Tree by Tatjana Soli. I’ll be luck to get to any of these this week, because…

The Casual Vacancy is coming! I’ve had J. K. Rowling’s new book (for grown-ups!) on pre-order for months, and it’s finally being released later this week. While the subject matter doesn’t sound all that thrilling to me, I’m certainly willing to give a try to anything JKR writes. Who else is planning to read The Casual Vacancy right away?

Drums of Autumn by Diana Gabaldon (group re-read): Chapters 50 and 51 on deck for this week. Chapter 50 is essential — big reveals, big confrontations. Can’t wait.

So many book, so little time…

That’s my agenda. What’s yours? Add your comments to share your bookish agenda for the week.

Book Review: Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

Posted in Book Reviews by

Book Review: Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

If not for all the rave reviews out there, I might never have picked up Beautiful Ruins on my own. And that would have been a shame.

Based on the dustjacket flap, this didn’t really sound like a book for me. Hollywood producers. Scandal on the set of Cleopatra in the 1960s. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, for God’s sake. Do I care about any of this?

As it turns out, the answer is yes. Beautiful Ruins is a vast book, in terms of subject matter if not actual page length. (For the record, the book is 337 pages long). What sounded to me like a relatively simple story of worlds colliding is in actuality a tale that spans decades and continents, with a cast of characters so large that it shouldn’t work — but it does.

Beautiful Ruins starts in 1962 in a small Italian fishing village — so small that neighboring villages look down at it, so isolated that arrival by boat is the only access, a place so not of note that no one arrives here by accident, ever. Into this village comes Dee Moray, a young beautiful wannabe starlet, believing herself to be dying and awaiting a final assignation with her lover. Dee is sent to stay at the one hotel in the village, run by Pasquale, son of the recently deceased innkeeper, come home to fulfill his father’s unrealistic dream of turning the family inn into a tourist attraction.

Dee has been sent packing to Porto Vergogna from the set of the Burton/Taylor movie fiasco, Cleopatra. The reasons for her exile unfold throughout the story, and all is not as it seems. Pasquale is smitten and finds a new purpose in championing Dee’s tragic cause.

Meanwhile, in modern-day Hollywood, a young assistant on the verge of walking away from her job with a legendary producer and giving up on the business once and for all is roped back in by the sudden appearance of an old man seeking a woman once encountered, briefly but intensely, fifty years earlier.

Adding to all this, we see bits of screenplays and manuscripts, a stage play and a movie pitch, and meet people across the years, from 1960s to present, with stops in Seattle, Idaho, Edinburgh, Rome, and Florence. Bit players come and go; some have a huge impact on the unfolding drama, some appear only long enough to spin events off into a new direction.

Amazingly, it works. What I’d initially thought would be a story following two main plot threads evolved into a story with seemingly endless characters and lives, all taking different trajectories, separate but connected by coincidences and happenstance. The characters’ intersections are fascinating, and I couldn’t help wondering at the dexterity with which the author keeps all of the plot points moving forward and continuing to matter.

My quibbles, if any, are that there are a few minor characters whom I would have like to learn more about and seen fleshed out to a greater degree, such as the shiftless musician we encounter midway through the book, and others whose role is so minor that fewer pages devoted to them might have been better, such as the self-deluding young screenwriter who ends up functioning as translator throughout the book. Likewise, a subplot concerning the Donner party (of all things!) was a bit overplayed and seemed unnecessary.

Still, Beautiful Ruins was both absorbing and moving, and I found myself completely engrossed in the characters’ lives. Ultimately, for many of the characters, a choice (or several choices) had to be made. Pasquale reflects, late in the book, on a childhood memory concerning a decision he once had to make, and remembers his mother’s advice:

“Sometimes,” she said, “what we want to do and what we must do are not the same.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “Pasqo, the smaller the space between your desire and what is right, the happier you will be.”

For the characters in Beautiful Ruins, navigating this space is what forms the core of the choices they must make, and the decisions they make and the actions they take set the course for their chances of happiness. Seeing these choices play out is what makes this book so fascinating.