Category: books

Day 615: The Rural Life

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Cover for The Rural LifeThe Rural Life is a collection of essays, more like musings by Verlyn Klinkenborg, a writer of the editorial board for the New York Times. Most of the essays were previously published in the Times and are related to his rural life, whether through his family history on an Iowa farm, his own farm in upstate New York, his father’s ranch in the Sierras, or travels to various western states.

I thought this would be an interesting and perhaps informative book, as I plan to be leading the rural life within a couple of years. Certainly many of Klinkenborg’s essays struck a chord with me. I liked best the pieces that do not go far from nature, whether he is discussing the care of bees, the lushness of his farm in the summer, or the beauty of a snow fall. Occasionally, he gets a little more philosophical than I am interested in.

The book is beautifully written. It occasionally confused me because it is ordered in chapters by month, and in the summer months he seems to be hopping back and forth between his farm and Wyoming. It wasn’t until a paragraph at the end that I discovered the book combines essays written over several years.

Day 614: The Bridge of San Luis Rey

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Cover for The Bridge of San Luis ReyThe Bridge of San Luis Rey is a moral fable that explores whether there is a purpose in life beyond that of a person’s own will. This theme is not one that interests me, nor do I usually enjoy fables, but I did enjoy Wilder’s rich characterizations in this short novel.

The novel begins in 1714 in Peru, when the bridge of San Luis Rey collapses, killing five people. A monk, Brother Juniper, believes that this event may be his opportunity for scientific proof of the will of God. So, for six years he collects information about the lives of each victim.

What follows is a chapter about each of the lives of the victims, in all their humanness and contradictions. The Marquesa de Montemayor is an ugly, rich old woman who is despised by many for her eccentricity. She obsessively loves her daughter, who has moved to Spain to get away from her, and she writes her rambling but marvelous letters that only her son-in-law reads. With her dies her young maid Pepita.

Esteban is a twin whose brother Manuel recently died. Esteban and Manuel were inseparable until Manuel fell in love with the actress Perichole, who used him to write her love letters. Ever since Manuel’s death, Esteban has been inconsolable.

Uncle Pio was a wanderer who eventually settled down to mentor Perichole, whom he raised from a young barroom singer to become a great actress. But Perichole begins to have ambitions beyond the theatre and eventually throws off Uncle Pio. Uncle Pio has devoted himself only to her, though, and promises to educate her son Jaime.

This novel is beautifully written and touching in its acceptance of the foibles of humanity.

 

Day 613: Brave New World

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Cover for Brave New WorldIt has been many years since I first read Brave New World, and I didn’t remember very much at all of this acid dystopian novel. It takes a bitter, satiric look into the future from 1931, and like the best of futuristic novels, is somewhat prophetic.

Bernard Marx is an unusual misfit in a society structured around the contentment of its people, or contentment as is rigidly defined there. Family units no longer exist. Society is strictly tiered. Everyone is artificially born, and the lower castes are cloned in multiples. Each caste is conditioned chemically and psychologically from before birth to be content with its lot, the mental and physical abilities of the lower castes chemically limited.

Everything is designed around productivity and consumption. People spend their leisure hours in pursuit of pleasure and get their daily dose of the drug soma. The arts are obsolete, supplanted by a very limited science.

At first it seems as though the discontented Bernard will be the hero of this novel, but there actually is none. He likes Lenina Crowne but is afraid to approach her for fear of being rejected. Lenina is a bit attracted to Bernard and is getting flak from her friends for being too exclusive of late, for there is no concept of faithfulness in this society: “everyone belongs to everyone.” So, she agrees to go with Bernard on a trip to New Mexico to view the savages—remnants of society, apparently American natives, who have not been civilized and live within a barbed wire reservation.

Lenina is too conventional a girl to enjoy this trip, horrified by the dirt and squalor of life that is not antiseptic. But Bernard, who has heard his boss’s story of a lost girlfriend in New Mexico years ago, is intrigued to find this woman, Linda, and her son John, actually born of his parent. John is an outcast of his culture, because he is the son of a woman considered a whore for behavior her own culture believes is normal. He has educated himself from Shakespeare’s complete works. Bernard gets permission to bring Linda and John back to London, setting in train unforeseen consequences.

Huxley apparently firmly believed that future societies would be controlled by drugs and psychological conditioning. It is his interest in cloning and the power of propaganda that strikes more modern readers. I’m willing to bet he paid attention to the then-current theories of eugenics that were particularly popular in England and Germany. His choice of Henry Ford as a godlike image for that society is telling not only for Ford’s invention of the assembly lines, clearly a model for Huxley’s vision of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, but also for Ford’s own interest in eugenics.

I couldn’t help comparing Huxley’s vision of sexual freedom with that of Heinlein in Stranger in a Strange Land, a book I really hated. There are other similarities too, John the Savage almost standing in for Heinlein’s alien-born Messiah, only finally shunning what he views as an immoral society rather than trying to start a religion. I think Huxley’s ideas are much more insightful, though.

That being said, I enjoyed this re-read only moderately. I appreciate Huxley’s deadpan humor, but a late section of the book, where Mustafa Mond explains his choices in life, is a bit too much like a sort of reverse didacticism, by which I mean that Huxley is not trying to make us agree with him, but trying to show us what is wrong with Mond’s ideas (or maybe I’m wrong—I believe Huxley thought that such controls over society were inevitable). In any case, any kind of didacticism in a novel is a good thing to avoid. Still, reading this novel after such a long time was an interesting experience.

Day 612: The 19th Wife

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Cover for The 19th WifeBest Book of the Week!
The 19th Wife is actually two interleaved novels, one as interesting as the other. The novel that begins the book is a modern mystery. The novel that dominates the book, however, is historical, about Ann Elizabeth Young, Brigham Young’s 19th wife, whose lectures after she left the Latter-Day Saints were partially responsible for ending the authorized practice of polygamy within the church.

In the modern story, Jordan Scott is a young man who grew up with the Firsts, a fundamentalist Mormon group that still practices polygamy. At the age of 14, Jordan was booted out on his own because he held his stepsister Queenie’s hand. Jordan’s intentions were not amorous, because he is gay, but he realizes that the young men are ejected from the group so that the old men can keep the young girls for themselves.

Jordan is living in California when he reads that his father has been murdered and his mother, Becky Lynn, arrested for it. As his mother is a complete believer who actually dumped him out on the highway herself those years ago, he does not believe she murdered his father. The evidence against her is that another wife saw her coming from their husband’s room looking upset. Jordan’s father was texting someone just before he was killed and remarked that his 19th wife was at the door. That wife is Becky Lynn.

While Jordan tries to find out what happened that night, we read the story of Ann Elizabeth Young, a woman born into the Church of Latter Day Saints but who has always been clear on the evils of the practice of polygamy. This story is told through fictional excerpts from her autobiography, newspaper clippings, statements by Brigham Young, and other documents.

Ann Elizabeth begins with the story of how her own parents, once devoted to each other, were forced into polygamy by Brigham Young, and what pain it caused her mother every time her husband took another wife. This pain was amplified by the hypocritical ruling that the first wife had to accept all future wives into the household before further marriages could take place. Ann Elizabeth’s own first marriage is also marred by threats of polygamy, which her husband uses to manipulate her despite having promised before marriage not to practice it.

Well written and convincingly characterized, this novel is absolutely engrossing. Although I found the modern mystery interesting in its insights into fundamentalist Mormonism as currently practiced, I found the story of Ann Elizabeth’s life even more compelling. Ever since reading Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven, I have been fascinated by this subject.

Day 611: The Book of Life

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Cover for The Book of LifePerhaps I’m the last woman left in the country who doesn’t think it would be romantic to be in love with a tall, dark man who could suck my blood at any moment. In any case, although I first thought that Deborah Harkness’ All Souls Trilogy was refreshingly original, by the third book I was not as charmed by this complicated series.

In The Book of Life, Diana Bishop, a timewalker and special kind of witch called a weaver, and her vampire husband Matthew Clairmont have returned from the past where Diana was learning her skills. They have one of three missing pages from a manuscript called Ashmole 782, or The Book of Life, and they are trying to find the others to reunite them with the book. It was Diana’s accidental retrieval of this book from the Bodleian Library that started all the action. Diana is also pregnant with Matthew’s children.

Matthew and Diana are in violation of the Covenant, an old agreement among witches, vampires, and daemons that they will not associate with each other. They think the Book of Life may provide information about the origins of the three creature races and even help Matthew with his research into a deadly vampire disease called blood rage.

In addition, they are being pursued by Benjamin Clairmont, a crazed child of Matthew who wants Diana and her daughter.

Like the second book of the trilogy, The Book of Life seems rather scattered to me, with Diana and Matthew running here and there on their various quests. The spots in the plot that could be climactic can be a bit of a let-down, as, for example, we don’t even get to hear what Diana has to say to the Congregation when she finally presents the evidence she and Matthew have collected.

After reading the first two books, I wanted to see what happened, and I was fond of several of the characters. But I didn’t think the novel was romantic, nor do I have much use in general for the overprotective male partner.

Day 610: How the Light Gets In

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Cover for How the Light Gets InI didn’t realize I had never reviewed this book, even though I finished it almost exactly a year ago, until I started to post a review of its sequel. So, you’ll have to forgive me. I’m working from memory.

This novel serves as a culmination of an ongoing plot from the very first of the series. Inspector Gamache’s enemies in law enforcement have gutted his department and alienated the loyalty of his friend and lieutenant Jean-Guy Beauvoir through encouraging his drug addiction. Now they are planning to destroy Gamache.

In the meantime, Myrna Landers has summoned him to the picturesque village of Three Pines to look for a friend who has disappeared, Constance Pineault. Myrna is cagey about the true identity of the friend, but eventually Gamache finds out that she is very famous, the last surviving sister of a set of quintuplets. Gamache and his department are also dealing with a possible terrorist threat. All of this action takes place over a snowy Christmas.

The end of How the Light Gets In is extremely dramatic, but it left me wondering if the novel was intended as the end of the series. (Hint: I wondered this at the time, but notice that I referred to a sequel.) As always, it is complexly plotted and colorful in detail.

Every time Penny describes Three Pines, I want to go see it. Also, Penny’s books continue to win my award for the most beautiful covers, ever.

Day 609: Good Behaviour

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Cover for Good BehaviourMolly Keane was a successful author and playwright in the first half of the 20th century. Although she was known mostly for romantic frolics, Good Behaviour is certainly not in that category. In fact, at the time that she wrote it, it was rejected as being too dark. It was not published until years later, when Keane’s friend Peggy Ashcroft encouraged her to try again.

Good Behaviour is a comedy of manners and a satirical look at the life of a certain type of the Irish upper class. It startlingly begins with a murder, but I’ll leave it to readers to find out who the victim and murderer are.

After the murder, the book returns in time to recount the childhood and upbringing of Aroon St. Charles. But first it oddly shoots off to explain how Mrs. Brock, Aroon’s governess, came to them. It is telling to learn that the proper and kindly Mrs. Brock was “let go” by a friend of St. Charles, notwithstanding a good reference, because she committed the crimes of encouraging one of the boys to read poetry and comforting him after he was whipped by his father. The boy, Richard Massingham, becomes important to Aroon in later years.

Aroon is a large, unattractive girl who is desperate for affection and some acknowledgment of her own importance. She is not stupid, but she sees only what she wants to see and is incredibly naive. Although she loves Mrs. Brock, it is indicative of her character that she nevertheless makes fun of her later in life as a way to fit in with Richard and her brother Hubert. She loves her father, who treats her with casual affection, but expressiveness is considered bad form in their set.

Her relationship with her mother is more complex. Although Aroon steadfastly maintains the fiction that her parents are devoted to each other, it is clear that they are not. Mrs. St. Charles is cold and removed from her family. She has no interests in common with her husband, who spends most of his time pursuing outdoor sports and philandering. Aroon knows that, but does not seem to notice what is going on in her own house.

The events in this novel are largely trivial except for some deaths. The novel is not plot-driven but centers around the behavior of Aroon and her horsey upper-class friends, who maintain their snobbishness despite a consistent lack of funds. We see the irony when Aroon throws away her opportunity to escape her unhappy household through a combination of willful blindness and snobbery. Aroon finds her place eventually and it is a deserved one.

Although we can find some sympathy for Aroon, she is definitely an anti-heroine. If you appreciate a sly, dark, understated humor and a masterly characterization, you should look for a copy of this novel.

Classics Club Spin #8!

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Cover for The MoonstoneIt’s time for another Classics Spin! I have put together a list of 20 books from my Classics Club List. On Monday, the Classics Club will pick a number between 1 and 20, and the number they pick determines the book that I will read from the list below. I’ll read that book and review it on January 5!

  1. Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes
  2. The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith
  3. Henry VI, Pt. I by William Shakespeare
  4. A Wreath of Roses by Elizabeth Taylor
  5. Beloved by Toni Morrison
  6. Red Pottage by Mary Cholmondeley
  7. Sisters by a River by Barbara Comyns Carr
  8. That Lady by Kate O’Brien
  9. Greenbanks by Dorothy Whipple
  10. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
  11. Ada by Vladimir Nabokov
  12. Selected Poems by Robert Frost
  13. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
  14. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
  15. Night by Elie Wiesel
  16. Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
  17. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
  18. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  19. Troy Chimneys by Margaret Kennedy
  20. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

Day 608: The Convenient Marriage

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Cover for The Convenient MarriageThe Winwood sisters are in turmoil. Miss Winwood has gained a spectacular suitor in the Earl of Rule, who has finally decided to marry. He is wealthy, and his generous settlement will save the family from ruin. The only problem is that Miss Winwood is in love with Edward Heron, a mere army lieutenant and a second son with no fortune.

Young Horatia Winwood, not yet out of the schoolroom, thinks she has the solution. Rule wants to marry a Winwood, and it should not matter to him which one. So, she goes to his house and proposes herself as an alternative. She forthrightly points out her unfortunate eyebrows and her stammer and hopes that Rule won’t mind them. Rule is enchanted.

So, Horry gets married without realizing she has made a love match. Since Rule is afraid he may be too old for her, he treats her with a little too much care. She has told him she won’t interfere with him, so she says nothing when she learns about his mistress, Caroline Massey.

Rule has broken with Massey, though, who is jealous and angry. Crosby Drelincourt, Rule’s foppish heir, is eager to make trouble, as is Rule’s enemy, Robert Lethbridge.

Horry soon finds herself very popular. But her efforts to make Rule jealous and the plots of Rule’s enemies land her in trouble, and her scapegrace brother Pelham’s schemes to get her out of it only make things worse.

In Horry, Heyer has created another engaging and feisty heroine. Heyer is an expert on the Regency period, as well as the master of warm and funny romantic escapades, and The Convenient Marriage is one of her best.