Save Me the Waltz, Zelda Fitzgerald

Zelda Fitzgerald, Self-Portrait

(December 26) I wanted to find out that the critics were wrong -- that Zelda Fitzgerald was actually a decent writer who was continuing to suffer a bias against her encouraged by fans of Scott Fitzgerald for having choked off the greater writer’s potential. This always seemed an unfair attitude to take, given that her celebrated husband wouldn’t have been much without her. After all, she provoked him to do crazy, romantic things that he later wrote about, she was the inspiration for all his major heroines, and it was well known that he pilfered from her diaries for scenes and ideas.

Or was I maybe brainwashed at a young age by Nancy Milford’s biography of Zelda?

Was Zelda actually a burden on Scott, an attention-seeker dabbling in the arts like a sort of mean-spirited Lucy to Scott’s Ricky?

“Hemingway saw that in this family the wife continually interfered with her husband’s work because she was jealous of it. Her frantic efforts to become a painter, a ballerina, and a writer were part of that jealousy.”

-- Harry T. Moore, preface to the Southern Illinois University Press edition of Save Me the Waltz

Or was she (even more sadly) simply always mentally ill?

I would say there was some oppression:

In its time, however, the book was not well received by critics...The failure of Save Me the Waltz, and Scott’s scathing criticism of her having written it -- he called her “plagiaristic” and a “third-rate writer” -- crushed her spirits.

--Wikipedia

Unfortunately, the mixed reviews for her semi-autobiographical novel (e.g., “a literary curio,” “full of rhetorical effects that owe more to derangement than to inspiration”), including Henry T. Moore’s gentle warning that the first third may seem a bit turgid, are more than fair. The first third is terribly turgid, as though Zelda wanted to prove that she knew a lot of “big words.” Random sentence by way of example: “The sum of her excursions into the irreconcilabilities of the human temperament taught her also a trick of transference that tided her over the birth of the last child.” Wha-a-a-t?

But once Alabama (Zelda) hooks up with David (Scott), Save Me the Waltz becomes quite vivid and interesting, a peek into the real lives of literary legends of nearly 100 years ago. The book takes up a non-localized-consciousness style and is as good as anything Virginia Woolf might do. The quality of the light in a certain scene, or the smell in a ballet studio or a ship cabin, or a view of the flowers in a dining room, all convey the slow dissolution of the Fitzgeralds’ heyday unbelievably effectively.

Also, to vindicate Zelda a little bit, there’s no sign that Alabama was jealous of David’s achievements (though there are plenty of signs that she couldn’t take the monotony of their partying life). If Alabama reflects Zelda, then Zelda wasn’t a “dabbler,” either -- she was, rather, desperate to feel the ecstasy she could see other artists feeling, and went in whole-hog to feel it herself.

“I have been to the Russian ballet,” Alabama tried to explain herself, “and it seemed to me -- Oh, I don’t know! As if it held all the things I’ve always tried to find in everything else.”

...

At night she sat in the window too tired to move, consumed by a longing to succeed as a dancer. It seemed to Alabama that, reaching her goal, she would drive the devils that had driven her -- that, in proving herself, she would achieve that peace which she imagined went only in surety of one’s self -- that she would be able, through the medium of the dance, to command her emotions, to summon love or pity or happiness at will, having provided a channel through which they might flow. She drove herself mercilessly, and the summer dragged on.

The Undomestic Goddess, Sophie Kinsella

Anthony Holden, This Girl Loves Carrots

(December 25) A New York Post reviewer apparently said: "Kinsella is at the top of the chick-lit game... [She] skewers high-powered city life, while delivering a romantic comedy anyone who subsists on takeout will appreciate... Light yet filling." I really can't add to or improve on that.

Sample:

..."Happy birthday to you..."
The waiter puts the tray down in front of me, but my hands are full with phones.
"I'll take that for you," says Lorraine, relieving me of Daniel's phone. She lifts it to her ear, then beams at me. "He's singing!" she says, pointing to the receiver encouragingly.
"Samantha?" Mum is saying in my ear. "Are you still there?"
"I'm just... They're singing 'Happy Birthday'..."
I put the phone on the table. After a moment's thought, Lorraine puts the other phone carefully down on the other side of me.
This is my family birthday party.
Two cell phones.
I can see people looking over at the singing, their smiles falling a little as they see I'm sitting on my own. I can see the sympathy in the faces of the waiters. I'm trying to keep my chin up, but my cheeks are burning with embarrassment.
Suddenly the waiter I ordered from earlier appears at the table. He's carrying three cocktails on a tray and looks at the empty table in slight confusion.
"Who is the martini for?"
"It was... supposed to be for my brother..."
"That would be the Nokia," says Lorraine helpfully, pointing at the mobile phone.
There's a pause -- then, with a blank professional face, the waiter sets the drink down in front of the phone, together with a cocktail napkin.

Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, Breaking Dawn, Stephenie Meyer

Edward Burne-Jones, Love Among the Ruins

(November 28, November 30, December 9, December 14) I read Twilight to find out what all the fuss was about the movie, and then I could not stop. The books are, as many have noted, like crack cocaine.

The detox program is over at Cleolinda Jones’ recaps.

Sample of Twilight in Fifteen Minutes:

EDWARD: Hello. Please... allow me to introduce... myself. I am... Edward Cullen.

BELLA: Where were you all week? And why were you such a jerk?

EDWARD: I had to... go. Somewhere. For reasons totally unrelated to wanting to kill you.

BELLA: Did you get contacts while you were somewhere? Last week your eyes were black, and this week they are golden melted topaz butterscotch.

EDWARD: *stares, turns around, leaves*

BELLA: WHAT IS YOUR DEAL?!

Twilight is basically Seventeenth Summer meets Jane Eyre meets the X-Men ... a weird and unique little creation that hooks you in, fair and square. The sequels, on the other hand, are a whole different kettle of unputdownable fish.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, David Wroblewski

Pablo Picasso, Boy with Dog

(November 20) This is such an awesome book.

I pictured myself blogging “This is such an awesome book” before I was even halfway through it, but I thought I would be writing it for much different reasons -- like, totally different.

The first half of the book is this lovely bucolic story about a sensitive boy who grows up in a dog-breeding family -- dog-breeding itself being really interesting as a science and an art -- and though the boy has a small handicap, his life is really wonderful and wondrous, and all of this is told by a very accomplished and gentle narrator. You sense that something dreadful is going to happen to test the boy and the dogs, but you hope there will be a minimum of suffering (for both people and dogs).

But then, suddenly, shockingly, this book morphs into something else entirely -- a hoary old horror story that’s haunted English literature for the last 500 years (and I think never so chillingly as in this incarnation), and it’s not only shocking that The Story of Edgar Sawtelle has the nerve to do this but it’s dumbfounding that it turns out to have been set up so well -- everything fits perfectly through the morph; the whole first half of the book brilliantly lulls you into thinking it’s quite a different tale, but then you can’t deny it was that dark, depressing tragedy all along. In other words, it’s not an Ian McEwen-style, artistic-licence “surprise!”

I can remember the moment I realized it was Shakespeare -- it actually made my hair stand on end, gave me a psychological jolt. I had been thinking, Heh, an uncle moves in on his brother’s widow, just like Hamlet -- of all the things to make me think of Hamlet!--; and, heh, the uncle’s name is Claude -- and then -- omigod the mother’s name is Trudy -- !

And then all the characters step into place -- Polonius, Ophelia, Fortinbras, Laertes, the witches... everybody (OK, the witches are from Macbeth). It’s like a black-light performance when all the suited stunt-people emerge from the backdrop and you realize the plate was really carried, not thrown, across the stage ... only this time the suited stunt-people are those ghoulish murdering Danes and their psychopath prince, our old friends. Sigh.

Even though it’s modern people and dogs filling the roles, Wroblewski captures all of Hamlet’s most enthralling issues really well and often exquisitely -- was King Hamlet really murdered, or is Hamlet insane? Was Gertrude complicit? Did Hamlet kill Polonius deliberately or by accident? In fact, his reinvention of some characters gave me new insights into the old play, particularly into the character of Laertes. And the dog versions of some of the characters offer some sweet interpretations.

However, having become so attached to the characters as they are in the first half of the book, and knowing how Hamlet ends, I had to read the last half of the book out of the corner of my eye, desperately clinging to the hope that Wroblewski would revert back to the pastoral tale eventually, or at least depart creatively from Hamlet. A writer could and might do that, right?

So, overall, quite the emotional rollercoaster ride of a book, and thrilling in a way no story about growing up in farm country should ever be.

(That other book, about the sensitive boy who learns or teaches a life lesson through his dogs and his muteness, would also have been good.)

The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides

Hugo Simberg, The Wounded Angel

(October 9) For a book about suicides, this is a lot of fun. Eugenides is such a good story-teller and so vivid with the images that it doesn’t matter how morose his subject matter is -- it’s enjoyable. Also, from the very beginning, the girls who commit suicide are disembodied, ephemeral beings, not concrete characters -- they are the idealized obsessions of a group of boys who never knew them very well and who attempt many years later to understand them by piecing together scraps of clothing, shreds of paper and memories of fleeting interactions.

We aren’t given a lot of details about the boys, either -- some of them are mentioned in the third person and have individual quirks, but we’re not sure how many there are exactly and we have no information whatsoever about the central narrator: he is always an amorphous “we.” Nevertheless, because everything is presented from “their” point of view, “they” feel real and we identify with their teenage agonies. This is really, after all, the boys’ tragedy -- they must face the horror that they are fixed in time by the girls’ deaths, forever yearning for the intensity of feeling and drive they experienced so briefly and lost so abruptly.

So it’s a very interesting and nervy approach Eugenides is taking here, but the “group narrator” is sustained beautifully throughout and the lament for lost innocence feels pretty fresh for such an old, oft-visited theme.

Eugenides is obviously intensely interested in teenage angst -- it’s a huge component of Middlesex as well -- and I think he’s very adept at recreating it, particularly middle-class '70s teen angst. There is a brilliant “conversation” between the boys and girls conducted exclusively by playing popular '70s songs to each other:

the Lisbon girls: “Alone Again, Naturally,” Gilbert O’Sullivan
us: “You’ve Got a Friend,” James Taylor
the Lisbon girls: “Where Do the Children Play?,” Cat Stevens
us: “Dear Prudence,” The Beatles
the Lisbon girls: “Candle in the Wind,” Elton John
us: “Wild Horses,” The Rolling Stones
the Lisbon girls: “At Seventeen,” Janice Ian
us: “Time in a Bottle,” Jim Croce
the Lisbon girls: “So Far Away,” Carole King

Hilarious, and like a quick trip back in time.

The Birth House, Ami McKay

Vincent Desiderio, Woman in White Dress

(September 5) So this is like equal parts The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (grim lives in Nova Scotia), The Cider House Rules (women’s reproductive issues) and The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery (small-town life in the pre-First World War Maritimes) -- with a dash of The Witches of Eastwick (the movie) or something by Isabel Allende thrown in.

I don’t mean by listing all these components to say this is a Frankenstein kind of a book -- it’s actually a really nicely done fictional autobiography that works in all the big news events of the early 20th century while taking some interesting stands on women’s power and on science vs. traditional medicine. And if there was nothing else worthwhile in the whole book, I’d still be grateful for learning about the Boston Molasses Disaster, which I’d never heard a peep about before and assumed was McKay’s invention. It was too preposterous to believe that a large urban area could be flooded with molasses, and too ironic that it would be Boston, the home of Boston Baked Beans.

So that was cool, and, anyway, there is lots else that’s worthwhile in The Birth House.

Interesting that, like The Hindi-Bindi Club, there are recipes -- but these are for folk remedies rather than family meals.

My only quibble with the book is that I don’t think Dora, the narrator, adds up convincingly as a character. Sometimes she sounds like a sophisticated modern woman; other times a backwoods girl. Sometimes she is scornful of Miss B.; other times she takes it for granted that she is Miss B.’s spiritual heir. She seems to be in a fog about her relationships with her family. Where did her highbrow taste in literature come from given her environment? Why does she paint her life as isolated and starved when in fact it’s a pretty busy little village they’ve got going there? It might be that the author wanted to make Dora’s intuitiveness about childbirth as mystic as possible, but it doesn’t really hang together well as that. It’s disjointed; at times it’s hard to relate to Dora’s character as other than a vehicle for an imaginative take on historical events.

Amazingly enough, this doesn’t detract from an interesting, inventive, and occasionally quite suspenseful read.

The Hindi-Bindi Club, Monica Pradhan

Jennifer Ott, Lakshmi Gold

(September 1) This is a really likable book -- pleasant as can be, beautifully symmetrical in structure, brimming with themes of interest to women and armchair anthropologists.

Six women tell their stories -- three mothers born in India (one from each of the three major regions of India, tidily) and three daughters born in the States. Each woman is dealing with one cultural problem, one marital problem, one health problem, one non-marital-relationship problem, and one vocation problem, all different for each character. Each one has a cooking specialty, a style of dress and a particular secret. Each one has certain sacred notions challenged and resolved. All the mothers have to come to terms with the foreignness of their daughters, and all the daughters must come to terms with the foreignness of their mothers.

We learn a lot about Indian culture, particularly about the distinctions between Bengal, Punjab and Mumbai customs and between Hindu and Muslim religions, and I couldn't help comparing the approach taken here with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's in Half of a Yellow Sun and Purple Hibiscus since they're opposite ends of a spectrum. Pradhan pauses to explain and translate everything and goes so far as to provide recipes for all the dishes mentioned; she definitely sees her audience as non-Indian and is offering the carefully guided tour. Adichie somehow instructs without tour-guiding. It says so much about how it must be to be the child of immigrant parents, as Pradhan is -- one is always straddling two cultures, always explaining the one to the other. You probably can't not do it.

In fact, I found the daughters almost too comfortably American -- their adjustment problems are exclusively with their Indian backgrounds -- there is little reference to the assimilation tensions first-generation children have in North America, which surprised me, since I don't recall the '60s and '70s (when these girls were allegedly growing up) having the levels of cultural enlightenment we do now.

But that would have been a completely different book, heh.

Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides

View of a section of the Elgin Marbles

(August 19) I really enjoyed this rollicking tale -- the guy can tell a story and knows how to create colourful characters. I'm seeking out The Virgin Suicides (Eugenides' first book) as we speak.

When Middlesex was being lauded in the press and by readers I know, I was skeptical -- I thought the hermaphrodite theme would be all over-the-top dragshow tranny meme-ing, designed to appeal to prurient readers. I wasn’t interested in hearing how a monosexual guy would imagine being a hermaphrodite (though I would be interested in an actual hermaphrodite's autobiography).

But I kept hearing Middlesex was good, particularly about the Detroit race riots in the '60s, and I kept seeing it on "best" book lists, and finally Kerry really recommended it and loaned me her copy.

As it turns out, the hermaphrodite business is handled very gently and sweetly, and the hermaphrodite, Callie/Cal, is actually the least interesting character in the book -- he/she's just kind of neutral, the ecru background against which the colourful characters swagger. As the adult male narrator, Cal is convincing and likable, but it's hard to picture him as the little girl he says he was. And that can’t be because a male author is unable to imagine what it's like to be female -- the best character in the book is Desdemona, Cal's paternal grandmother. She and all the women are as vivid as real life, and the men -- Lefty, Dr. Philobosian, Jimmy Zizmo, Milton, Father Mike -- are equally compelling. (Maybe that's a point being made, hmm.)

But mainly Middlesex is a boisterous 20th-century Odyssey (not that Eugenides strains this parallel) that hits a lot of exciting historical highlights as it pans from Europe to North America and back again. The Detroit history was interesting as advertised, but I was really taken with Desdemona and Lefty's story of growing up in Bithynios and fleeing the war. It made me want to drink bitter coffee and take up the hookah.

A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life, Eliza Potter

Camille Silvy, Sarah Forbes Bonetta (Sarah Davies)

(July 16) This one came to me via A Dress a Day, whose Erin mentioned it because of all the descriptions of 1840s and '50s clothes, particularly ball gowns.

But I got interested in it because of the cool time-travel effect of reading the memoirs of a woman who had a unique vantage on the aristocracy of her day, and who had travelled a lot and seen many things. She didn't have much school -- she started dressing hair and nannying at a young age -- but, despite a certain amount of disjointedness in her narrative, she was able to tell a good anecdote and make acute observations, and was fun to read. "Good on her that she wrote a book," I was thinking.

It was then a shock to find out when I was already about 50 pages into it that Eliza Potter was black! This made her abolitionist stance and her many descriptions of herself challenging slave-owners all the more heroic, and I’d been convinced of her courage already.

It was also surprising to see how different racism was at that time. Iangy (Potter's name for herself as narrator) and other black people consort freely in white company (Iangy was often at high-society parties as a guest on top of peeking in on them when she was dressing hair) and that is OK because they are free people. However, slaves were not allowed to sit at the same table as free people (although Iangy makes a point of challenging this several times and kind of shames some conservatives).

There was a surprising amount of interracial marriage -- white men marrying black women mostly -- and not infrequently it was a slave becoming the wife of a plantation owner or a well-to-do householder. Iangy reviews a good number of these instances, because she always found ex-slaves to be the cruellest slave-masters.

Also, slavery was not always wretched abuse, according to some of Iangy's stories. Sometimes the slaves are able to require conditions when they are bought and sold, and these are always honoured.

Next most cognitively dissonant: the rampant adultery. People were always cheating on their spouses and carrying on, at least in the upper classes, and quite often with little damage to their social status. In the Victorian Age! Why do we think people are more "immoral" today??

So, yes, it's a gossip-fest.

Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen

Hong, Elephant

(July 15) This was a great story -- it had animals, a great love story, a great murder mystery, fascinating information about circuses in the 1930s, some surprise twists and turns, and she's a good story teller... everything I could want in a book.

It didn't even need the memoir part, in my opinion -- but Gruen did some clever things with the transitions between modern Jacob and '30s Jacob, and the device creates a cool mobius-strip effect at the conclusion.

My only quibble with it, and this is just minor, would be that in the sections set in the '30s the people sound modern, rather than like they're living and speaking in the '30s. I'm basing this only on impressions of '30s movies and books I know of so it's not a well-informed opinion. I didn't expect to see expressions like "you shred it, wheat" or "hoo-ha" every two sentences but I did expect there'd be a little of that. Anyway, it certainly didn't detract from a great read.

A Wrinkle in Time, Madeleine L'Engle

Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, Merryweather, Fauna and Flora

(July 7) I had seen this on so many top-100 fiction lists, and so many people whose taste I respect have said they loved it, and it was so reverently discussed on my favourite website, that it seemed like A Wrinkle in Time would be pure rapture... like it would open up whole new universes of imaginative inventions, memorable characters, and thrilling action, à la the Harry Potter series or The Golden Compass.

Alas, no. I was disappointed. And I don't think it was because my expectations were so high they could never be met. The story didn't seem well thought out; it rushed disjointedly from one strange event or bit of science to another, and it couldn't decide whether to have the style and tone of a '60s sci-fi TV show or a Grimm's fairy tale. I kept checking my copy of the book to see if a folio was missing or something.

The point-of-view character, Meg, is little more than a collection of geeky quirks and she's often unappealingly crabby for no good reason. L'Engle seems to set up her impatience and stubbornness as virtues -- as though blind anger will save us all. Hmm.

The book touches on big topics in philosophy, physics, classics, politics, etc., and lovers of the book cite this as L'Engle's great contribution to children's literature, but to my mind these historical touchstones are simply thrown in randomly, sometimes oddly, and never developed or properly interwoven into the action or the characters' motivations.

Also, I don't think that my disappointment was caused by reading this with an adult's jaundiced eye -- I am certain it would have reminded my 10-year-old self of those Saturday-morning “filler” cartoons we barely tolerated while waiting for the “good” cartoons to come on, back in the day -- the ones full of unsympathetic protagonists running back and forth in front of half-sketched, endlessly repeating backgrounds.

The Miracle at Speedy Motors, Alexander McCall Smith

Tebogo Mogapi, The Gaborone Raid, June 14, 1985

(June 19) More along the lines of the last three -- interesting puzzles, eccentric people, plenty of ethics-wrangling. Nice and open-ended so there can be more.

McCall Smith has a lot of fun with chapter titles and a flamboyant bed purchased by Mma Makutsi.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Lisa See

An Ho, Wang Xifeng

(June 14) I really enjoyed this “autobiography” of a girl growing up in the hinterlands of 19th-century China. Like Memoirs of a Geisha, The Far Pavilions, I, Claudius, even Gone with the Wind, it seems to create a vivid, you-are-there experience of life in an exotic culture and a remote time. It’s the combination of (1) the sense that the author has done exhaustive research into the time and culture and (2) the intimacy of the first-person narration.

Lisa See is particularly good at providing “the insider view” -- the narrator does not seem to be explaining her culture to foreigners, she’s assuming the customs and motivations are already familiar; she’s unconscious to her culture, as we all are. As a BookCel member says, “the protagonist does not appear to be a 21st-century feminist playing period dress-up.”

And the details about foot-binding, family structures, nu shu, laotong relationships, marriage customs, economics and more are fascinating. It’s all women culture, but the way it’s presented, so vividly and devotedly, undermines any knee-jerk-feminist disapproval one might harbour about apparently misogynistic customs. You may have found it unbelievable that women put up with the mutilation of their feet, and See is not an apologist, but Snow Flower and the Secret Fan makes you appreciate how the pressures of culture are irresistible, and sometimes even yield rewards.

The Memory Keeper's Daughter, Kim Edwards

Heather Spears, Drawing of a Child with Down Syndrome

(June 10) This was one of those completely-don’t-get-it books for me. It was a #1 New York Times Bestseller and there are many on-line reviews in which readers rave about the book and list it as one of the three best books of the year or one of their Top 10 of all time... and I can’t see the enthusiasm at all. There are books I don’t like well but can still see why others would like them a lot, but this is not one of those. This is a book that you might grudgingly finish reading because it opens so well and you hope that the writer will rise to the occasion again... but she never does, so you finish the book with the writer greatly in your debt. You can forgive her and just lick your wounds, but you can’t rave about that book and rank it high.

The first chapter would have made a cool short story. The author did a really virtuoso job of weaving in a lot of camera science and technology as metaphors. These things made me give her the benefit of the doubt. But it was kind of a timid novel, never getting out of two dimensions, and I looked at my watch the whole time I read it.

Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Uche Edochie, Perfect Illusions

(May 23) Loved this as much as Half of a Yellow Sun, for the same reasons -- the vivid and appealing characters, the cultural illumination, the humanity of the vision. It’s quite a different story, though -- it’s a girl’s coming-of-age in a dysfunctional family, as the daughter of a man whose public persona is heroic and generous, but who’s actually a religious fanatic and a sadistic tyrant. In some ways it’s more tense and scary than a war saga.

Basically, when within half an hour of starting it, a book has got me burning to hatchet-murder a fictional character, I know I’ve got a powerful book on my hands.

Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Uche Okeke, Refugee Family

(May 14) Loved. Loved so much I could not turn to any other writer right away despite trying hard, and finally went out and got Adichie’s first novel, Purple Hibiscus, just to have some more of her.

The characters are interesting and endearing, and their struggles with the Biafran war of secession against Nigeria are spell-binding. I really enjoyed the cultural immersion -- Adichie has a skillful way of presenting customs, things, foods, words, etc., that would be exclusively Nigerian so that they seem natural but are also accessible to foreign readers.

I was most amazed by my own ignorance about what was going on in Biafra, which was all the news when I was in high school. I can’t believe I was so unaware. I thought it was famine alone.

So it was good story, anthropology lesson, and history / poli sci lesson all in one, and very well done.

Also, it’s heart-breaking.

The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Speke Hall

(April 30) I really enjoyed this and would highly recommend it, particularly to fans of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Woman in White. The author actually blends all the signature elements of those stories into one of her own, adding in a few extra twists, and I think it’s really well done.

For example, there are two narrators, a take on the nested narrators in Wuthering Heights, but, here in The Thirteenth Tale, because of what they’re going through, the narrators blend and merge in a dreamy way and become indistinguishable at times, causing reader double-takes in a very cool fashion.

Most of the characters in The Thirteenth Tale themselves, in fact, are fans of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Woman in White and refer to the books quite often (especially Jane Eyre), so there’s some meta going on as well, to modernize things. In fact, I was a little skeptical about the book for the first 40 or 50 pages -- it’s clearly a book-lover’s book for book-lovers, a concept done to death these days, I think. But The Thirteenth Tale definitely became enchanting and, I’d say, stakes a claim for a life of its own.

The basic mystery itself is absorbing -- Setterfield is good at red herrings, bizarre clues and limited points of view -- and thrillingly creepy at times. Friends who recommended The Thirteenth Tale to me reported staying up till the wee hours to find out how the mystery is resolved and I can see why (although I personally did not pull an all-nighter to finish it).

The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls

Charles Blackman, Children Playing

(April 24) Riveting account of what it’s like to be raised by two free-spirited, 1960s-style full-blooded hippies, who aren’t going to follow society’s rules, work for the man, poison their bodies, compete with fellow human beings, etc. -- they were going to use their genius to make their fortune and live self-sufficiently and high-mindedly ever after.

Andrea recommended it -- but she was horrified by the story because she is a mother with young kids, and she can’t imagine exposing children to the danger, deprivation and instability that the Walls kids experienced.

I on the other hand was kind of swept up in the romanticism of their life -- the kids got to do a lot of amazing things and developed some really amazing skills -- and they weren’t really in a lot of danger a lot of the time. LOL. They certainly all turned out well.

It’s clear that Jeannette Walls herself is bitter about the way she grew up -- in telling the story, she belabors certain hardships, quotes her parents as ironically as possible and is proud to have ultimately led the charge to escape from the parents. In fact, it’s kind of a case study of how kids turn out exactly opposite to their parents.

Later on, though, the parents seem less creative and more self-serving. The mother lost me when she hid a chocolate bar from her starving kids and the father when he stole the kids’ hard-earned escape money.

Also, I feel bad for ever suspecting in school that kids who took food from the garbage cans were gross and / or pigs. How can we ever have thought of them that way? They were starving children, for god’s sake.

In the Company of Cheerful Ladies, Blue Shoes and Happiness, The Good Husband of Zebra Drive, Alexander McCall Smith

Susana Van Bezooijen, African Woman

(April 10, April 12, April 21) These are the sixth, seventh and eighth in the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series. I read the first five all in a row a few years ago, and really liked them. Liked them so much I bought the books, and tried to get other people to read them.

So this is coming back to an old favourite after a long hiatus. Of course it's going to be different. There is so much activity in the newer ones, sigh. One of the charms of the early ones was that very little happened -- the small cast sat around and thought a lot -- and yet profound answers to minor mysteries would suddenly erupt and you would be charmed and surprised by the solutions.

Now there are a lot of characters to keep track of, and they are often getting into quite dramatic scrapes that leave less time for sitting and thinking.

I'm also now seeing them through the lens of the Isabel Dalhousie series, and realizing that the two series are not opposite ends of a spectrum like I first thought. There are a lot of ethical issues in Precious Ramotswe's life -- she’s just not as Zen about them as Isabel. Both series have lots of domestic detail, lots of eating and drinking and looking at countryside. Same big issues and same small scales, just different countries.

I was kind of stunned recently by someone's off-hand remark to the effect that "McCall Smith's Botswana books are patronizing." This never occurred to me when I read the first five, but -- duh -- I can see now that even just the fact of a white Brit writing light-heartedly about black people in a former colony would arouse the suspicions of the politically sensitive. And then the language is very plain and simple, and the people address each other as Mr. So-and-So and Mma Such-and-Such in a kind of Dr. Seuss-y way -- it would be very easy on a superficial level to assume the Batswana are being infantilized.

But I read the books in the usual way (lol) and never saw any demeaning or belittling going on -- the books are warm and fuzzy, and even cute, sometimes, but they also have the thrill of the exotic and the wisdom of ancient fables. The humour is never at the expense of the main characters or their values. And I never took the style as a sign of a superior attitude. It reminded me from the beginning of reading the English version of a García Márquez novel... like McCall Smith was trying to create a "translated voice," which I find interesting.

To me, it was always simply that McCall Smith had created a new style of detective novel ...and a weird and wonderful one, too.

The Careful Use of Compliments, Alexander McCall Smith

William Crozier, Edinburgh (from Salisbury Crags)

(February 14) We learn even more about modern Scottish painters in this Isabel Dalhousie and also travel out into the rural parts of Scotland and the isles a great deal (in contrast to my image choice above). This time the nominal "mystery" is a potential art forgery, and once again McCall Smith provides an interesting and unexpected solution. However, he didn’t surprise me with the final twist in the Isabel-Jamie-Cat love triangle.

Or is he just leading me on?

Friends, Lovers, Chocolate, Alexander McCall Smith

William Allan, The Murder of David Rizzio

(February 9) This one has the most shamelessly chick-lit title in what is definitely a series for women readers, and there is some very feminine swooning over chocolate and men in it, so it is a bit soap-opera-y. But Friends, Lovers, Chocolate does redeem itself by once again featuring this highly original definition of mystery McCall Smith has played with in the series, and it does so by way of some really interesting questions, namely, can a heart recipient see the donor's murderer (if indeed the donor was murdered) and what is the importance of being able to give thanks for an important gift?

As in The Right Attitude to Rain and The Sunday Philosophy Club, we learn a great deal about the City of Edinburgh (particularly in June) and about 20th-century Scottish artists, and in this one we go into a bit of Scottish history as well. The famous story of Mary Queen of Scots being unable to prevent the death of Rizzio right in front of her eyes is a counterpart both to the fate of the heart donor and to Isabel's indecision about taking on a Latin lover. Quirky.

The Sunday Philosophy Club, Alexander McCall Smith

William Crosbie, Dum Vivimus Vivamus

(February 4) So, just as rain is a topic mentioned only once, very casually, in The Right Attitude to Rain, a Sunday philosophy club is just a throwaway reference in The Sunday Philosophy Club. I’m starting to get the charm of these books.

There is at least a mysterious death in this installment, which explains how the series must have won its berth in the "mystery" category. However, Isabel doesn't "solve" the puzzle for the usual reasons sleuths solve mysteries -- and she doesn't do anything with the solution once she has it --; it's a very anti-mystery mystery. Her response to the death is an ethical question for Isabel, first and foremost, and for the bulk of the book she dithers away over other small, domestic, ethical issues, just as in The Right Attitude to Rain.

There is so little action! People are met, beverages are drunk, food is eaten, routines are gone through. Still, there's something really pleasant about the tone and pace of these books. Also, both Sunday Philosophy Club and Right Attitude to Rain have ended with a completely surprising twist, for which McCall Smith deserves a lot of credit.

The Right Attitude to Rain, Alexander McCall Smith

David Gauld, Music

(February 2) Aunt Lois gave me this since she had an extra copy and we’d been talking about Alexander McCall Smith on Christmas Day. I was glad to get it because I loved the first five books of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, and I’d heard various people (including Aunt Lois) say they liked the Isabel Dalhousie series as much, if not more, than they liked the Botswana books.

But, at first blush, this book baffled me. I expected it to be different from the Botswana books, but I wasn’t prepared for it being different in the way it was. The narrative voice is all brisk and conventional, instead of tender and cheeky as it is in the Botswana books; the main character, Isabel, is not presented with the same kind of cozy familiarity as Precious is; and, moreover, Isabel is, basically, borderline neurotic, constantly and exhaustively analyzing everything that happens and every little choice she has to make in terms of their ethical ramifications. It’s the very definition of Zen mindfulness. In fact, an hour reading this book is more like an hour spent doing mindful meditation than anything else.

On top of this, nothing really happens, and Isabel is not really a sleuth; she’s a bit curious about people and their motivations, but that’s it. There’s very little discussion of rain, even. It seemed flat and formal, like the David Gauld painting above, at first, and I didn’t think I’d end up pursuing the series.

But by the end of the book, the pleasant tone and pace had won me over a bit. I was wondering if I had been wrong to read the third of a four-book series first, and willing to give another title in the series a go.

Well, four books later, I can say that it was definitely a mistake to read The Right Attitude to Rain first. Now I know that A GREAT DEAL happens in The Right Attitude to Rain and that I spoiled my potentially much greater enjoyment of it by reading it out of order. Also, I now appreciate Isabel’s philosophical conundrums as “the mysteries” she solves, and have to concede that her thorough working out of her ethical duties is a quite acceptable kind of sleuthiness.

The Amber Spyglass, Philip Pullman

William Blake, The Ancient of Days

(January 29) I loved Book I, was able to coast happily through Book II on that love, but found Book III a bit of a chore to get through. In trying to resolve all the giant questions and epic struggles set up in the first two books, The Amber Spyglass wanders all over the place and, I think, becomes completely incoherent at times.

Also, it goes all 17th and 18th Century on our ass. I saw the Blake allusions even before Pullman came right out and called the God figure “the ancient of days,” and it’s impossible to ignore the homage to Milton at this point (I didn’t see it in the earlier books but “His Dark Materials” left little doubt it was coming).

I’m not a Milton fan, so the grandioseness, artificiality and über-Catholicism of Book III killed my buzz; but there are plain old mechanical problems as well. It’s almost as though Pullman ran out of time and/or space -- he set up such a leisurely pace in Book I that it seems he’s cramming too much half-worked-out material into Books II and III.

I was so disappointed with what happened to Mrs. Coulter. I was also not sure how Lyra, Will and Mary represented Eve, Adam and the Garden of Eden’s serpent, as advertised (and not interested enough to reread and work that out).

On the other hand, I still enjoyed Pullman's imagination and inventions for their own sake. The faux anthropological studies of the mulefa and the Gallivespians, for example, are enchanting.

The Subtle Knife, Philip Pullman

(December 28) This is a respectable continuation of The Golden Compass story -- not a disappointing continuation, because Pullman's amazing imagination is so enjoyable, but not a dream-fulfilling continuation either, because now the story is getting a little overcomplicated, and Lyra and her world are no longer prominent (in fact, we are in our world, ho hum).

This book introduces a new character -- a 12-year-old boy, Will -- and I found myself really not wanting to be interested in him since it would be disloyal to Lyra, lol. But Pullman managed to overcome my bias and is successful with Will, I think -- his courage is just as thrilling as Lyra's, and he's his own person, not just a male Lyra. I really liked him, and was entirely captivated with the function and role of the knife.

I began to see here in Book II why Lyra is so appealing in Book I: she has a lot of balls, like a boy, but is still girlish and girly (e.g., in her affection for Pan and her bedazzlement by Mrs. Coulter). Will, in contrast, is tender and conscientious, very touchingly so, I thought, like a girl, and yet there was no doubt he is a boy. There are many satisfying little parallels in the two characters and in the ways the mystery looming around them draws them in, which make The Subtle Knife fun to read.

However, that über-story also starts to take itself very seriously, and wants to be an epic allegory now, rather than the localized little struggle it was in Book I. I find this less compelling. Also, it's hard to watch Lyra fade into a co-star role, sigh.
Michelangelo, David