WWW Wednesday!

~ whatmeread ~ 10 Comments

It’s the first Wednesday of the month, so it’s time for WWW Wednesday, an idea I borrowed from David Chazan, The Chocolate Lady, who borrowed it from someone else. For this feature, I report

  • What I am reading now
  • What I just finished reading
  • What I intend to read next

This is something you can participate in, too, if you want, by leaving comments about what you’ve been reading or plan to read.

What I am reading now

Right now, I’m reading There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. I’m not sure where I heard of this book, but I’m always interested in Russian writers. This book is written backwards, starting at the back of the book, and I’ve barely started it, so we’ll see how it goes. Also, it’s short, and although that usually doesn’t figure in to my reading, right now it’s a plus.

What I just finished reading

Well, that depends on how you count. I took a short plunge into Slowness by Milan Kundera. It is very short, and I hadn’t read any Kundera, was just familiar with the movie version of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. However, it seemed more like a philosophical treatise than a novel. Almost nothing had happened by 20 pages in. I got bored. Yes, that’s right. Slowness was too slow for me. Not usually a problem.

So that leaves the book before, an Agatha Christie I hadn’t read before, Death Comes as the End. Unusually, it is set in Egypt, not in Christie’s Egypt but in 2000 AD or so. Still, it is a mystery.

What I intend to read next

It’s looking like my next book will be another mystery, The Widow of Bath by Margot Bennett. I read one other book by Bennett, and I liked it very much.

Review 2576: Moo

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I have an uneven relationship with Jane Smiley. I have by no means read all her books, but I found some of them to be entertaining (The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton and Horse Heaven) but her trilogy beginning with Some Luck to be over-rated. However, The Greenlanders was excellent, and I thought A Thousand Acres was one of the best books I ever read. Checking her oeuvre, I see now that I haven’t read any of her more recent books. This book is not one of the more recent.

Moo is set in the 1980s in Iowa in what used to be called an agricultural university (nicknamed “Moo U”). I believe the novel is supposed to be a satire. It starts with students, a boy named Bob whose job is to feed a pig as much as it can eat and take measurements, a project that seems only to be known about by the faculty member who is paying him, and four freshman girls, roommates.

But we don’t really get to know them, because then we meet a bunch of faculty members, administrators, and staff. The Spanish professor begins sleeping with the English professor. The Dean has decided, on almost no acquaintance, to marry the lunch lady. The provost seems to be entranced by money and about to make some sort of shady deal with the rich Texan who almost ruined the university’s reputation years ago. He’s seeing dollar signs in his eyes at a time when the college is cutting costs to the bone.

At page 120, I felt like I’d been introduced to about 50 people I only knew one or two things about and didn’t care. I assumed it was a satire, but nothing was funny, and it didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. So, sadly, this was a DNF for me.

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Review 2575: Lanark

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I was going to start my review of Lanark, considered by many to be a landmark of literature, by saying it has nothing to offer women. Its female characters are either cardboard creatures or sex objects or both. Its male protagonist fantasizes as a boy about raping girls. Its cover, with drawings by Gray, has a total of six naked women and one clothed man. (The rest of the figures are heads.) I was going to start with this (in fact, I have) until I came across a review in The Guardian from 2019 by Sarah Detum that calls it superb and talks about how clearly it sees how men regard women. But was it looking at that or exhibiting it? I’m not sure. And I don’t think that was Gray’s purpose. And I hope Detum isn’t right, because if so, it’s a depressing thought for most women.

The novel is broken into four parts and starts with Part 3. Then it breaks off into an apparently unrelated (but it isn’t) story, Parts 1 and 2, before returning to the original story in Part 4.

The novel begins in a city that has no sunlight. The protagonist, Lanark, is told it’s because developers have built the buildings so high up that light can only be seen for a few minutes at dawn. The city, Unthank, is an allegory for hell. Lanark can’t remember his past, and everyone else seems to spend their time hanging out in bars. Lanark can’t even get laid, despite ogling every woman he sees. What fresh hell is this?

I haven’t mentioned much of the science fiction/fantasy spin that seemed to fascinate critics in 1981, but that’s not unusual now. Of course, there’s the no-sun, but also people are developing weird diseases. Lanark begins getting dragon skin, where his skin turns black and scaly. And a woman has a mouth that talks appearing on her arm. I have to confess that this stuff seemed childish to me or like Gray took too much LSD when he was younger.

Lanark finally decides to make an end of it and drown himself in the sea. When he wakes up, he’s in an institute in an entirely different world. There, a seer begins telling him a story, set in post-World War II Glasgow, about Duncan Thaw (Part 1!).

The two sections about Duncan follow him through boyhood to young manhood. He is a stubborn person with his own ideas about what he wants to do, so he’s always butting up against authority figures. He finally begins studying to be an artist.

None of the sci-fi/fantasy elements exist in these two parts, and I found them the most readable. But Duncan is also the character with no social skills who fantasizes about raping women and never gets laid. What fresh hell is this again? (He gets a girl in the end. I can only wonder about her taste.)

Although the writing is such that I felt the novel was clipping along fairly well, it was when the book gets to Part 4 and returns to Unthank that I suddenly realized I had no interest in continuing it, in fact was dreading the return to Unthank despite knowing that most of the plot was in the last part of the book. That made me look around a bit to see if there was even one critic who agreed with me instead of gushing about what a masterpiece it was. (I was thinking maybe it was too dated.) Thank god for Jim Crowley of The New York Times, who, although largely complimentary, says, “The longer the book goes on, the more rapidly its magic leaks away,” (I didn’t think it had any) and calls its structure a Mobius strip.

Frankly, by then I was done, 200 pages from the end. Yes, it didn’t seem right to repay the effort it took to get that far by not finishing, but that’s what I did.

Lots of reviews called this novel playful, but to me it seemed distasteful and heavy. As for any magic it may have, that was overwhelmed for me by its misogyny.

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Review 2574: Girl, Interrupted

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Girl, Interrupted is Susanna Kaysen’s memoir of the time she spent as a young adult in a mental hospital. These days, people are booted out of mental facilities as soon as their insurance runs out, recovered or not, but back in the late 60s, apparently some were put in and kept for a long time. The book blurb says two years, but the copy of her medical records looks like closer to a year-and-a-quarter.

What was shocking to me from the first was that she was sent to the hospital on the basis of a short visit to a strange psychiatrist who noticed she had picked a pimple (what adolescent doesn’t?) and wrote down “picking at herself,” and then asked her if she was tired. She said yes because she got up earlier than usual to go to the appointment. Next thing she knew, she was in a cab to the hospital.

Later, she shows the medical report, which says the diagnosis was based on a three-hour interview, but Kaysen devotes a chapter to the timings, including check-in times reported by the hospital and the doctor’s office, to show it was no longer than 20-30 minutes. (She originally says ten.)

Perhaps she’s not an altogether reliable narrator, because she admits in the Introduction to not telling things, and later we hear about one disturbing behavior, although it doesn’t seem to be one that requires incarceration of more than a year. She also tells of a suicide attempt but says she knew immediately it was a mistake.

Other practices of the hospital seem ridiculous, and nothing seems designed toward the girls’ recovery but rather the staff’s convenience.

Interesting stuff.

Towards the end of the book, she dismisses her diagnosis, “character disorder,” and talks about what that might mean. Her own diagnosis is that she was bored and being forced to do things she didn’t want to do. I think that’s called being a teenager.

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A Century of Books! How Am I Doing? FINAL Report

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I’m done! I finished the last book on April 27th!

In January 2024, I foolishly decided to join Simon Thomas’s Century of Book Challenge, even though I knew that reading 100 books, one for each year in a century, from 1925-2024, would be tough because last year I only read 169. So, how am I doing? I was trying to finish by the end of December, but I clearly didn’t make it.

There are no longer any holes in my project. If you want to see the details, see my Century of Books page.

  • 1925-1934: complete!
  • 1935-1944: complete!
  • 1945-1954: complete!
  • 1955-1964: complete!
  • 1965-1974: complete!
  • 1975-1984: complete!
  • 1985-1994: complete!
  • 1995–2004: complete!
  • 2005-2014: complete!
  • 2015-2024: complete!

Between March 28 and April 27, I read the following books. The ones for this project are listed in bold:

  • Lady Living Alone by Norah Lofts for 1945
  • Lies and Sorcery by Elsa Morante for 1948
  • Lanark by Alasdair Gray for 1981
  • Luckier Than Most by David Tomlinson for 1990
  • A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson for 2003
  • Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan for 2007
  • Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke for 2017
  • Treacle Walker by Alan Garner for 2021
  • Clear by Carys Davies for 2024
  • Murder at Gulls Nest by Jess Kidd for 2025

Yes, beginning in April, I only had three more books to go, and they nearly killed me! Reviews to come.

Review 2573: The Name of the Rose

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Adso of Melk, an elderly monk, feeling he is nearing his death, leaves this manuscript that tells, for the first time, the events of 1327 in an Italian abbey.

It’s been a long time since I read this book, so I remembered more vividly the movie version, which concentrates on the mystery aspects of the novel. But the novel is more about the religious and political upheavals of the time.

As a Benedictine novice, Adso travels into Italy with a learned Franciscan monk, William of Baskerville from Hibernia. William has been asked to mediate an important meeting between two factions of monks—the Franciscans and other Minorite sects who believe in the vow of poverty and are aligned with the French King, and other sects who think the vow is heretical and follow the Pope in Avignon.

Once they arrive at the magnificent abbey high on a mountaintop, the Abbott, Abo, asks William to look into another issue that has recently occurred. Adelmo of Otranto, an illuminator from the scriptorium, has been found dead on the slope below the abbey’s Aedificium, a fortified building that contains the kitchen, the scriptorium above it, and the library above that. It’s not clear whether Adelmo jumped or had help, and Abo wants William to figure out what happened, preferably before others arrive for the meeting. William quickly ascertains that Adelmo must have fallen from the library, but he learns that only the librarian is allowed in the library, a man named Malachy.

Although William has been denied access to the library by Abo, he soon figures out that there is a way to get into it besides the locked entrance. After a visit to the scriptorium, where William and Adso inspect Adelmo’s work area and meet some of the monks, another monk is found dead, Venantius, a Greek scholar. This makes William surer that the deaths have something to do with the library.

He and Adso sneak into the library at night. It is a labyrinth. Moreover, they disturb someone who runs away and are almost poisoned by the air in one of the rooms.

More monks associated with the library die, and William becomes convinced that they are dying because of a secret book. He and Adso must learn the secrets of the library, and William comes to believe that the murders are related to the history of the monastery.

I have concentrated on the mystery, too, but there’s a lot more going on in this book. It is concerned with the conflict between Louis of France and the illegitimate Holy Roman Emperor, between two popes, and the then recent history of the Inquisition against certain heretical religious groups. It has several learned debates, in which the monks disagree about what seem, to the modern eye, to be obscure and trivial issues. And it fully shows the superstitions of even the most learned of men (except William) and the pit of fear that was life in this monastery.

Although the novel seems straightforward, there is a lot more going on. To me, Eco seems to be mocking the beliefs of the church at times—some of the learned disputes make such ridiculous statements (believed at the time) that I couldn’t help laughing. And I couldn’t help noticing that at least two of the characters’ names, William of Baskerville and Adelmo of Otranto, hearken back to previous mystery and gothic fiction.

A New York Times reviewer from 1980 asserts that the entire novel refers to the time when it was written (the 1970s, I assume), so obviously he also found second meanings and playfulness in the novel.

The novel moves you along despite several learned discourses. The medieval mind also seems to like lists, and I have to admit skipping through several of those. This is at once a challenging and compelling read.

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Review 2572: Sarah’s Key

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In 1942, Sarah Starzynski is 10 years old, a Jewish child in Paris. There have been rumors of a raid on Jewish homes, but usually the French police take only the men. So, Sarah’s father hides in the basement while Sarah, her mother, and her four-year-old brother go to bed as usual.

But this time, the French police are there to take everyone. They don’t seem to know about her brother, so Sarah locks the little boy in his secret place, thinking she will come back soon and let him out. In the street, her mother has hysterics and screams her father’s name so that he comes out. All of them are taken to the Vélodrome d’Hiver, ultimate destination Auschwitz.

In 2002, Julia Jarmond, an American journalist who lives in Paris, is assigned to write an article about the 60th anniversary of the infamous roundup at Vel’ d’Hiv’, as the velodrome is known. Julia has never heard of it before. Aside from the ultimate destination, the Vel’ d’Hiv’ is known because, like with Hurricane Katrina, thousands of people, mostly women and children, were there for days without food, water, or sanitary facilities.

As part of her research, Julia asks French people if they know about this story. Most of them claim not to, but Julia learns from her father-in-law, Edoard, that the flat her husband Bertrand has been renovating became a possession of the family after the removal of its Jewish family on the night of the Vel’ d’Hiv’. In fact, that family was the Starzynskis.

The novel follows Sarah’s journey for a time, alternating with Julia’s story, as her personal life becomes entwined with her desire to find out what happened to the Starzynskis, particularly Sarah, who was not recorded as having died in Auschwitz. After about half the book, Sarah’s narrative stops.

I know I never read this book before, but some plot points seemed familiar, so perhaps I saw the movie. The plot was compelling enough, but I still had some issues with it, particularly that I couldn’t imagine that after a while a four-year-old child wouldn’t have made enough noise to be found in almost any apartment building.

I had more problems with the writing, though, particularly of Sarah’s sections, and the characterization. I think Sarah’s sections are written in a way to suggest childishness—the sentences are short, most of them in a subject-verb-object order that results in choppiness. Her reactions are naïve, much more so than I can imagine from any Jewish child of ten at that time and place. And ten-year-olds can have as complex thoughts as adults. She seemed, especially at first, more like a much younger child.

The writing is better for Julia’s parts, but there are still inapt word choices and no very strong use of language. It’s mediocre. For example, a glass of limoncello is described as “a beautiful yellow.” Ho-hum.

I felt the novel was interesting enough to finish, but just barely.

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Review 2571: #1952 Club! The Price of Salt

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Here we go with my last entry this year for the 1952 Club!

If you’re accustomed to Patricia Highsmith’s suspense novels, like the Ripley novels or Strangers on a Train, The Price of Salt may be a big change of pace. The W. W. Norton and Company edition I read tries to slant it more in that direction by using phrases like “sexual obsession” and “stalking” on the cover, but it’s not like that.

Therese Belivet is unhappy in her life. She is a set designer who can’t find a job, so she has taken a temporary Christmas-season job with a large department store. She hates that job. She dates a man who wants to marry her—Richard—but she doesn’t want to marry him, even though she likes him.

Then one day at work she sees a beautiful blonde woman about 10 or 15 years older than herself. She is immediately struck by her. After she sells her a doll, she puts a little thank you note into the package to be delivered, not signing it but using her employee number. To her surprise, the woman, Carol Aird, calls her at the store.

They begin a hesitant friendship, with Carol often picking her up to spend the night at her house. She lives alone because she is divorcing her husband, who is trying to get custody of their daughter. Therese, who is madly in love with Carol, can’t figure out how Carol feels, as she is cold at times.

Professionally, things are looking up a little for Therese. She gets a short-term job doing sets for an off-Broadway play and has the attention of a major director. Things are getting rocky with Richard, though, and she can’t figure out the situation with Carol. Then Carol invites her to accompany her on a cross-country driving trip.

If this book wasn’t written in 1952 or was about a man and woman, it would more or less be a standard romance with the entanglement of a 50s divorce. However, because of when it was published, it was a daring novel, especially for the United States. (I have read other similar books from English writers, published earlier.) Like many of Highsmith’s books, I wasn’t drawn to any of her characters, but I have never thought Highsmith cared about that kind of thing, in fact, may have preferred protagonists that readers don’t like.

I don’t know what I feel about it. I guess I admire Highsmith’s courage in writing it but otherwise felt sort of meh about it.

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Review 2570: #1952 Club! Excellent Women

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Entry #2 for the 1952 Club!

By “excellent women,” Pym seems to mean a type of English spinsters who occupy themselves with charity events and helping others, dress drably, and are taken for granted by men. That’s what Mildred Lathbury seems to think she is. She’s a clergyman’s daughter of limited means, mild-mannered and religious but observant of others’ characters while not wishing them any harm. In Excellent Women, she gets a surprising amount of attention from men, but then she’s always picking up after them.

Mildred lives upstairs of a vacant flat, and she’s curious about what her new neighbors will be like. She knows they’re named the Napiers by the sign at the doorbell. She meets Helena Napier on page 2, a young, stylish woman, and sees her around with a man, whom she assumes is her husband, Rockingham (known as Rocky). But he is not. He is Everard Bone, an anthropologist, and he and Helena, also an anthropologist, are writing a paper together. Rocky is off serving in Italy.

Mildred is good friends with Julian Malory, the vicar of her rather high church, and his sister Winifred. It is the expectation of several characters in the book that Julian will marry Mildred, but she doesn’t seem to expect it. Or does she? It’s hard to tell. Certainly, he is very friendly with her, but she thinks he is not the marrying kind.

Mildred meets Everard before she meets Rocky. Although he seems not to notice her at first, after a while he begins seeking her out. He is abrupt and serious, and she doesn’t think she likes him. Or does she? It’s hard to tell.

Once he shows up, Rocky is utterly charming and handsome. He is very friendly to Mildred and keeps popping up for tea. Mildred senses friction in the Napier home—well, she can hear them arguing. Rocky does all the cooking and cleaning in their home, because Helena is completely undomesticated. (She sounds like my kind of gal, even though she isn’t depicted particularly positively.) Mildred distrusts Rocky’s charm. She understands from Everard that Helena thinks she’s in love with him (Everard).

It being post-war London, it is still hard to find a place to live, so the Malorys decide to lease their upper floor. Soon, it is taken by Mrs. Gray, a beautiful clergyman’s widow. Mildred finds both Julian and Winifred transfixed by her, so she steers clear. It’s pretty evident what Mrs. Gray thinks Julian’s fate should be.

Mildred isn’t at all liberated. She is constantly cleaning up after men or doing ridiculously involved favors for Rocky and Helena, and all take her for granted. Yet, this is a lively, amusing social comedy. It is also a tale of the rapidly disappearing lives of upper- and middle-class English people.

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