Author: whatmeread

Day 197: The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for The Adventure of EnglishThe Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language is a history of the English language written for the general public. The author, writer and television personality Melvyn Bragg, has been responsible for some acclaimed television shows on the subject in England.

The book takes us from the introduction of English (or rather, the languages that would become English) into Britain with the invasions of the Angles and Jutes up to modern times and the versions of English spoken around the world. Bragg explains how English pushed other languages, liked Celtic, to the brink of extinction, and how numerous times the language has been threated by extinction itself, most particularly with the Norman invasion. The Normans spoke French among themselves and enforced its use at court and for all matters of legal business, a condition that lasted for centuries and posed a real threat for the survival of English. However, eventually the Norman kings began thinking of themselves more as Englishmen than Frenchmen and using English for business, starting with Henry V.

The book provides many interesting factoids, such as, that of all languages, Old English was most closely related to Frisian, still spoken by some people in the Low Countries. The explanation of how the British developed such extremely varied regional dialects (much more distinct from each other than American dialects) from the settlement and isolation of different peoples and tribes in different regions is interesting, especially the tale of how a man from rural Cumberland was able to communicate with Icelanders during World War II because of it.

However, the book contains some real irritants. One is the relentless personification of the language as a metaphor throughout the book. English is always gobbling up other languages or fighting them off. Another is the spin put on some of the information. For example, when the Catholic Church insisted on exclusive use of Latin and made translation of the Bible into other languages a heresy, it wasn’t seeking explicitly to destroy English but was rather protecting its priestly prerogatives. If priests weren’t needed to translate and interpret the Bible to their flocks, what would be their purpose? Of course, Bragg explains this, but he implies that the decision was a purposeful attempt to destroy English.

The lack of authority for some of Bragg’s statements is certainly a weakness throughout the book. There were times when I, with my little knowledge, thought he may have misrepresented or put a spin on some facts, but until I finished the book, I was assuming Bragg was a linguist, so I just thought that I was wrong. Now I’m not so sure.

Finally, although the TV series was probably very good, the book’s roots in television show too clearly in the shallowness of the approach. Some chapters, for example, are almost nothing but lists of words with a few paragraphs in between. Overall, although I learned a few interesting facts, I was disappointed.

Day 196: The Secret Keeper

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for The Secret KeeperI loved The Forgotten Garden so much that Kate Morton’s other books, although very good, have not been able to hold their own against it. At first I thought The Secret Keeper would also be good but not great, but a terrific surprise at the end of the book made me change my mind.

The novel begins in 1961, when sixteen-year-old Laurel Nicolson is up in the treehouse on the family farm dreaming about her boyfriend. She sees her mother Dorothy go into the house with her baby brother Gerry. It is Gerry’s birthday, and Laurel knows her mother has left the birthday picnic to fetch the family’s special birthday knife so she can cut the cake. A few minutes later, a stranger goes to the door, and Laurel sees her mother stab the man with a knife. He is assumed to be the man who has been attacking women in the area.

Fifty years later, Laurel is a famous character actor who has come home to visit her ill mother. Her mother’s memory is failing, but she has asked Laurel’s sister Rose to get some things out of a box that has always been private. Among them is a photograph of Dorothy and her friend Vivien, who died during the Blitz.

Laurel’s memory of the long-ago incident with the stranger has become muddied and even inaccurate, but she begins to remember it more clearly when she decides to look into it further. She finds that the attacker was Henry Jenkins, Vivien’s husband. Since Dorothy must have known Henry, there is obviously more to the story.

From here the story alternates between Laurel’s investigation in the present and the war years of young Dorothy (Dolly) Smitham. Dolly is madly in love with Jimmy Metcalfe, a newspaper photographer who also has sole care of his senile father. Dolly wants to marry immediately, but Jimmy thinks they can’t afford it yet, so Dolly takes a job as a companion to a wealthy old lady in London. At a war effort volunteer job, she meets Vivien, who lives across the street with her husband, a successful novelist. Dolly, who comes from a lower middle class background, gets carried away with the idea of leading a more exciting, fashionable life. After a series of misunderstandings, she hatches a plan to get money for her marriage and talks the reluctant Jimmy into helping.

At this point, my major problem with the novel was a growing dislike for Dolly, who seems narcissistic and lacking in conscience. I kept wondering how she was going to develop into the beloved mother of five children. But the novel goes on to unearth secrets. With Morton’s gift for storytelling and excellent writing, I think this novel is as good or better than The Forgotten Garden.

Day 195: The Water’s Lovely

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for The Water's LovelyRuth Rendell is not for the faint of heart. She is certainly capable of building her readers’ sense of dread, and I felt one from the beginning of The Water’s Lovely, to the point where I almost couldn’t enjoy it.

Ismay suspects that her sister Heather drowned their stepfather Guy in the bathtub years ago to save Ismay from his advances. She and their mother assumed Heather’s guilt at the time but never spoke of it, and their mother is now mentally ill. When Heather gets seriously involved with a coworker, Edmund, Ismay begins to worry that she should tell him what Heather did. She stupidly records her theory on a cassette tape.

Rendell does a great job of portraying a slew of repellent characters, including self-obsessed Ismay; Edmund’s clinging, whiny mother; and Ismay’s selfish, manipulative boyfriend Andrew. The worst is Marion, the woman Edmond’s mother would like him to date. She likes to befriend elderly people she thinks will put her in their wills, and then she perhaps poisons them.

I worried what was going to happen with that tape, because Heather and Edmund were practically the only likeable characters in the book, except for the girl’s aunt Pamela and her friend Michael. Happily, the ending wasn’t as dreadful as I feared.

Day 194: Burning Bright

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

Cover for Burning BrightI’m afraid I cannot read any book by Tracy Chevalier without thinking of the purity of the character she created in Girl with a Pearl Earring. Unfortunately, I haven’t read a book by her that was as good, but I keep hoping for one.

In Burning Bright, set in 18th century London, Jem Kellaway, a young lad from the country, moves with his family into Lambeth. They settle into a row house owned by Kellaway’s new employer, next door to the poet and artist William Blake and his wife.

Jem befriends a London street urchin named Maggie Butterfield, and they spend some time with the Blakes. These two children are meant to represent Blake’s ideas of innocence and experience.

Jem’s father has taken a carpentry job with Astley’s Circus. Unfortunately, Jem’s sister Maisie soon attracts the eye of John Astley, the rapscallion son of the circus owner.

Most of the action of the novel centers around the unease generated in England by the French Revolution. Blake’s unusual publications have made him appear to be seditious, and he and his family are threatened as the hysteria rises.

Unfortunately, the characters and story are not very interesting, and William Blake is almost incidental to the novel. The novel does nothing to make the mysterious Blake more understandable to us.

Day 193: The Drop

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for The DropSeveral people asked me recently if I had read any Michael Connelly. I hadn’t, so I read The Drop.

Harry Bosch is a cop who retired and then returned to work on the Open Unsolved unit. He is asked to take over another team’s case when DNA tests on the blood from an old rape and murder show that it comes from a sex offender who was only eight years old at the time.

Harry thinks he has a viable suspect in a man who was briefly the boyfriend of the sex offender’s mother, when he is told to drop the case. A city councilman who has always been his enemy has asked for him to investigate the apparent suicide of his son.

Harry begins to find what looks like corruption in city government, so he must tread carefully. In the course of the case, he also has reason to doubt both his current partner, David Chu, and his previous one, Kiz Rider.

The plot is reasonably interesting if you can get past the choppy writing, tendency to state the obvious, and unconvincing dialog. The problems in Harry’s growing affection for a program director for a rehabilitation center also seem contrived and premature, given the newness of their relationship. After all the raves about Connelly, I found him a disappointment.

Day 192: Home

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for HomeBest Book of the Week!

The beautifully written, subtle novel Home by Marilynne Robinson makes me thoughtful. It is 1957. After a failed ten-year engagement, thirty-eight-year-old Glory Boughton has moved home to Gilead, Iowa, to care for her elderly father, a retired Presbyterian minister.

Her father has been waiting 20 years for the return of his best-loved son, Jack. Finally, they hear that Jack is coming home. Always unreliable and setting himself apart from the family, he arrives late, and Glory feels ambivalent about his return. Soon, though, she sees that he is tired and having difficulty being there, and she tries to help him.

The novel carefully explores the relationships between the three of them–Glory loving but distrustful of the pain Jack has caused and protective of her father, Jack trying to make a new life in painful and distressed conditions, and their father forgiving and unforgiving at the same time. In the background are the events of the civil rights movement, toward which Jack and his father have radically different views.

Jack is delicate and fragile. He tells Glory he lived as a vagrant, drunk, and cheat until he met a woman named Della, and now Della has gone back to her parents. He tries to find work in town and writes countless letters to Della.

This novel is apparently related to a previous one, Gilead. I do not know whether it could be considered a sequel, although I know it shares some characters.

To modern readers the manners and dress of this devout Iowa family seem very old-fashioned, and some readers may find the novel slow, but I found it engrossing. It is, of course, a retelling of the tale of the prodigal son.

This is a simple story on the surface, but it depicts complex characters and relationships. It is a novel about family relationships and love, written with a delicate touch. I find it difficult to express how fine I felt it to be.

Day 191: The Wrong Mother

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for The Wrong MotherAgain, Sophie Hannah uses the technique of multiple narrations in the enthralling mystery/thriller The Wrong Mother, featuring Simon Waterhouse.

Sally Thorning is married with two children, and although she is happy, she feels worn out with working and child rearing. When a business trip is cancelled, she lies to her husband so that she can take some time at a spa. There she meets a man named Mark Bretherick and has a brief affair.

A year later she is out shopping when someone pushes her into traffic. When she arrives home, she sees a news report about a woman who apparently killed herself and her child. The woman’s husband is supposed to be Mark Bretherick, but the man on the television is not the man Sally met at the hotel. She does not want to go to the police because she doesn’t want her husband to find out about her fling.

In the meantime, police constable Simon Waterhouse thinks there is something wrong with the diary found for Geraldine Bretherick, in which she writes about how much she hates being a mother.

Although Hannah seems to have a very dark idea of human behavior if you look at the totality of her work, I always enjoy her twisty plots and her grasp of psychological manipulation. Her two recurring characters, Simon and Charlie, are also almost completely disfunctional in their abortive romance and occasionally behave very oddly as police officers. Still, if you like dark mysteries, her books are fun to read.

Day 190: Open: An Autobiography

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for OpenBest Book of the Week!

Those of you who know me will probably be surprised to see the review of a sports biography on my blog. I will freely admit that this is not a book I would have chosen for myself; instead, it was a choice of my book club. That being said, I found Open: An Autobiography by Andre Agassi to be extremely interesting and even touching.

In making notes for my review, though, I came across another problem–how to review a biography of a living, well-known figure except by relating some of its disclosures. For some assistance on this, I took a peek at the review in the New York Times, but they obviously had the same problem. However, a phrase in that review caught my attention. The reviewer remarked that from the first time Agassi first appeared in the sport, he looked like a deer in the headlights. Now, look at the picture of him from the cover of the book.

This expression is a lead-in to a story about a sad, sad boy who seems to have finally grown up into a mostly happy, contented man. His big secret, which by now everyone knows, is that this athlete, who is considered one of the best tennis players in the world, ever, has always hated tennis. He was forced into the game as a young boy by his fiercely competitive (and I would say, although he never does, abusive) father, a former Olympic boxer who never succeeded professionally but was trying to live his life through his son.

His fate was so predetermined that his father gave him a tennis racket to hold in his cradle, and when as a boy he found he preferred soccer because of the camraderie (he frequently remarks on how lonely a sport tennis is), his father made him quit so he could spend more time on tennis. The vision of Agassi as a small boy facing the machine his father had rigged to fire thousands of tennis balls at him at an unbelievable speed is a chilling one.

I was particularly outraged by the attitude of his father and other adults toward his schooling. Agassi is clearly an intelligent person. He can remember, literally, everything, but as he explains in the book, except in English class he had difficulty grasping concepts. He had to have them explained to him a few times, and then he could remember them. When you watch his farewell speech at the 2009 U.S. Open or any of his speeches about his charter schools, you can see that he is a thoughtful, reasoned, even eloquent speaker who does not need notes. I am guessing that he may have had some sort of learning disability.

I feel so sorry for a boy who needed help with his lessons instead of a father who regularly had him skip school to play more tennis. Later he was sent to a tennis training school at the age of 14 (a school that sometimes sounds like something from Dickens and other times like Lord of the Flies), from which he was allowed to drop out of school to pursue, you guessed it, more tennis. This “preparation” gave him no other recourse–he was forced to follow a career in tennis because he had no other prospects and couldn’t do anything else.

Open is about Agassi learning to grow up and make peace with himself. It is terrifically engrossing, and his descriptions of some of the games made me wish that I had seen them. (Actually, I watched some of them on YouTube.) He avoids any kind of self-aggrandisement. In fact, as the title says, he is open for the first time in his life. Although he expresses himself honestly, he does not use the occasion of writing this memoir to slam other people or tell anyone’s secrets but his own. His depiction of certain other well-known figures (for example, his marriage to Brooke Shields and his rivalry with Pete Sampras) is balanced, and it seems, fair. Finally, I found it touching to see how a person who grew up in such a harsh environment would turn out to be so caring of others.

Day 189: The Girl with No Shadow

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for The Girl with No ShadowI just reviewed Chocolat recently, so I thought I’d continue with a review of The Girl with No Shadow, Joanne Harris’ sequel to that novel.

The wind is blowing trouble toward Vianne Rocher, now running a small chocolatierie in Montmartre in Paris. The trouble is coming in the form of a con woman with many names, whom Vianne will know as Zozie de l’Alba.

Vianne herself has another name. She is going by Yanne Charbonneau because of some problems that developed after the birth of her second daughter, Rosette, now four. Vianne has been doing everything she can to avoid standing out. Anouk is now known as Annie. Gone are the red dresses with bells hanging from the hems. Yanne is demure and nondescript and doesn’t use her magic, even to know what a customer’s favorite chocolate is.

Annie, at eleven, is unhappy with school and with the changes in their lives. Soon more seeds of discontent are sown. As Zozie weasels her way into their lives and prises away their secrets, she decides that when she leaves, she is taking Annie with her. So, she does her best to encourage Annie’s rebellion against her mother.

Again, Harris combines the gentleness and kindness of Vianne’s temperament with a fair amount of suspense. As we learn more about Zozie’s past, we find out just how dangerous and devoid of conscience she is.

As usual the writing is beautiful, sprinkled with the scents and flavors of the chocolatierie and a dash of magic.

Another novel about Vianne and her family is just out, Peaches for Father Francis, so I guess I had better get reading!