"The Fall River Axe Murders" by Angela Carter

Early in the morning of the  fourth of August, 
1892, in  Fall River Massachusetts.

Opening to

 "The Fall River Axe Murders" 

by Angela Carter

Did Lizzie Borden take an axe?

Angela Carter examines the character and her situation in "The Fall River Axe Murders."  Her telling of what happened on the day of the crime stops short of the murders. Instead, Ms. Carter looks at Lizzie Borden's life, her family, and what was expected of young women in late 19th century America.  The ways of New England families are Ms. Carter's subject.  Could they lead one young girl to murder her father and step-mother?

It's a fascinating story, one full of more suspense than you'd expect.  It reminded me of a production of Medea C.J. and I saw several years ago starring Fiona Shaw in the title role.  The play's conceit was to set the action in a more modern apartment building with  Medea as an upwardly mobile housewife.  The audience all knows how the play will end, but Ms. Shaw's performance kept us on the edge of our seats the entire time.  We just couldn't quite believe that she would do it.  Not this Medea, this woman loves her husband and her children far too much to go through with it.  She seems a little crazy, and it's clear what she's thinking of doing, but it's also clear she doesn't want to. Right up until the final moments before the murders we all thought this Medea would have a different ending.

Image from Wikipedia

"The Fall River Axe Murders" works the same way.  I expect that when Ms. Carter wrote the story Lizzie Borden's innocence was already established--I believe most historians now agree it was someone else, maybe the minor character Ms. Carter writes out of the script in the opening pages of her story.  But Lizzie Borden's innocence or guilt is immaterial as far as "The Fall River Axe Murders" is concerned.  The question of the crime's cause, what might lead to such an act, are what interests Ms. Carter.

The end result is a terrific short story. One that works as a thriller and as a piece of literature, even as feminist literature.  If you're looking for a break from more difficult feminist reading or if you just want a brief foray into a darker world, "The Fall River Axe Murders" is just the ticket.

Maybe Lizzie Borden didn't take an axe, but she had reason to.  

TSS: Gay People Pay More Taxes Than Straight People

Image from Advocate.com

It's true.

Since C.J. and I married, we can file a joint tax return in the state of California which still recognizes our marriage as legal.  The federal government does not, so we have to file individual returns.

This year I decided to compare what we would have paid if we could file jointly on our federal income tax return.

Filing jointly, like  a straight married couple, we would have paid 1,631 dollars less than we did filing individually as gay people.

Gay people pay more taxes than straight people.  In our case, 1,631 dollars more.

Just sayin'.




Next week, back to topics bookish.  I promise.

Friday Picture Reading - Copenhagen Road Sign

Solaris by Stanislaw Lem

At 19:00 hours, ship's time, 

I made my way to the launching bay.

Opening to Solaris

by Stanislaw Lem

Translated from the French by 

Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox

In the 1960's science fiction was about ideas.  It was also about rocket ships and invading space aliens, but there was still plenty of room for books about ideas.  Even ideas based in actual science.  This is still true, but you'd never know judging from what's playing at the local theatre and on cable television.  Not much in the way of ideas there.  

Once in a while, yes, but not like in the 1960's.

Solaris is about a thinking planet that knows us better than we know ourselves.  It's not really the planet that thinks but the ocean sized life form that appears to make up the planet, but that's besides the point.  The planet can read the minds of the men in the space station orbiting it. More than that, it can read their subconscious minds.  It knows things about them that even they do not know: their secrets, their sins, their desires, the things they try to deny about themselves.

For reasons the men never understand, Solaris begins sending people to them, people from their past.  In the narrator's case a girlfriend who died years before.  The two have unfinished business, we suspect the narrator is somehow the cause of the girlfriend's death.  Because Solaris knows her only from the narrator's memories, she is imperfect.  She's just like he remembers her, but she is not quite like herself.  She's the girl he remembers falling in love with, not the actual girl he loved.

The temptation lies in whether or not the narrator should accept her, allow her to live or run from her.  Is she a trap sent by the planet to destroy their mission or is she a gesture of peace, and attempt to establish friendship?  The narrator only knows that he is falling in love with the girl before him.

Imagine you could have an old love back again.  Imagine that old love to be the person you wanted, the person you enjoy remembering, not the actual person, but the one you thought was the true one before everything went wrong.  Is giving you that person an gesture of peace or an act of aggression?

You won't find anything like that on the Sci Fi channel.



Somehow Blogger (or I) managed to post this by mistake last Sunday.  Before I caught the error and fixed it two people had already left comments.  My apologies to both of them.  I appreciate your comments and regret losing them.  

The Princess of Cleves by Madam de Lafayette

The last year's of Henri II's 

reign saw a display of 

opulence and gallantry 

such has never been 

equaled in France.

Opening to 

The Princess of Cleves

by Madame de Lafayette

Translated by 

Nancy Mitford

The Princess of Cleves by Madame de Lafayette is a 350-year-old piece of historical fiction. Does that qualify as a sub-genre of sorts?  Historical historical fiction?

Written in the 1670's by a member of the French court, The Princess of Cleves describes the romance between its title character and a man who is not her husband, set in the court of Henri II, some 100 years earlier.  In her introduction, Ms. Mitford states that it is historically accurate based on what was known at the time, but can one ever fully trust a Mitford sister?

Nancy Mitford's own life is apparent in both Madame de Lafayette and her creation the Princess of  Cleves.  Both authors were part of a glittering social and literary set that did not include their husbands.  Both wrote of love and lived lives rumored to be full of affairs.  The Princess of Cleves is a woman both might pretend to admire to her face, though they had little in common with her.

The Princess of Cleves marries a man she does not love, though he passionately loves her.  Soon after her marriage she meets a man who she falls in love with, as he does with her, though neither speak to each other, nor inform the other of their shared love until late in the novel.  The Princess remains true to her wedding vow, chaste up to the end of her own life.  Even after her husband dies, she refuses her lover's advances, preferring life in a convent where she can remain true to her husband repenting  the fact that she did not love him and betrayed his love in spirit if not in deed.

Neither a 20th century woman like Nancy Mitford, nor an 17th century woman like Madame de Lafayette would ever consider doing such a thing.  

So why did one write about it? The other feel compelled to translate it into English?

Perhaps someone more familiar with their biographies has a more definitive answer.  I can only guess, and guessing would reveal more about me than it would about either woman.  My Yale professor was fond of saying that while we read the tales, they also are reading us.  But, I'll take that risk.

Image from Wikipedia

The Princess of Cleves is not about physical passion; the love it portrays is a spiritual one.  But even this spiritual passion is one that must be resisted in order to stay true to one's self.  If one is devoted to a higher cause or believes in the primacy of one's word, then love must sometimes be sacrificed, even spiritual love.  Keep her vow is more important to The Princess of Cleves than even her own happiness.   In our time, as it certainly was in Ms. Mitford's and probably in Madame de Lafayette's, sacrificing happiness for the sake of an ideal would be look upon as ludicrous.  There are no children to consider in the novel, nor are there parents to take care of or disappoint.  The Princess of Cleves clings to her ideal, simply because it is her ideal.

I'm not saying it's something I would do, just that it's something I admire.  Maybe Ms. Mitford and Madame de Cleves did as well.

And I know that by saying so, I'm letting The Princess of Cleves read me when I should be  reading it instead.  I fall into that trap again and again.

Inventing George Washington: America's Founder, in Myth and Memory by Edward G. Lengel

In the autumn of 1776, deep in 

the times that tried men's souls, 

the American Revolution verged 

on failure.

Opening to chapter one of

Inventing George Washington 

by Edward G. Lengel

George Washington never chopped down a cherry tree as a boy.  He probably never chopped down a cherry tree in his life.  But you probably already knew that.  Why would anyone chop down a perfectly good cherry tree?

Edward G. Lengel's book, Inventing George Washington looks at the history of Washington mythology, how the American public's vision of it's most renowned founding father has changed over time and how competing powers have tried to control the public perception of our first president.

It's interesting reading. For example, I never believed that Betsy Ross designed and sewed the first American flag.  The story never rang true for me.  Why would all these educated landowners leave the design of the first flag to a simple seamstress.  The story of Bets. Ross first appears near the first centennial.  After the Civil War interest in Washington grew enough that descendants of the Ross family were moved to make the claim. Their evidence, stories passed down by their ancestors of the day Washington and a small delegation of congressmen appeared in Betsy Ross's home asking her to sew the flag.  "Why not use five pointed stars," she suggested.

No one thought to ask why no records were ever kept of this meeting or this particular order. Like a good business woman,  Betsy Ross kept meticulous records of everything else.  A contract for a new flag with George Washington's signature on it would have been worth a small fortune.  There was already a tremendous market for every scrap of paper the first president had put pen to.  His own family had torn his letters into pieces, selling each fragment off one by one.

Once Mr. Lengel lays out the evidence it's clear that Betsy Ross didn't sew the first flag, that George Washington didn't say "So help me, God," at the close of the first inauguration, that he didn't pray publicly for deliverance in Valley Forge and that he didn't have a family with a slave mistress.  So how is it that there is a statue of General Washington praying at Valley Forge today, that contemporary presidents claim they say "So help me, God," because George Washington did and that even Oprah Winfrey believes Washington had children with a slave mistress?

The answers makes for interesting, breezy reading in Mr. Lengel's capable hands.  Inventing George Washington is a useful book for it's examination of how history is manipulated, it's meaning changed over time to suit the needs of those who seek to control it.  When one considers how obsessed some of our current supreme court justices are with the original intent of the men who wrote the constitution, it's alarming to discover just how easy it has been to change history throughout America's 200 plus years.  Original intent isn't what is used to be.

TSS: Ski, Ski, Ski, Your Troubles Away

Image from Vintagewinter.com

Ski week begins.

We don't call it ski week anymore, it's mid-winter break now, but it's still ski week.  A week off  in late February, time for everyone to take their children on vacation without missing school.  C.J. and I do not ski, most of my students who are going on actual vacation trips are heading for Hawaii, and it's raining as I type this.  Someone at work asked me what I wanted to do on my week off--my reply--read a book a day. That's what I want to do.

I've stuck to The TBR Dare so far this year and now have an entire foot of free shelf space as a result.  I may be able to read four, even five books this week; adding several more inches of free space.  Of course I will be going in to my classroom later this week to spend the morning writing lesson plans, and I am going to a conference at the end of the week for the California Association for the Gifted, I teach two Gifted and Talented Classes,  but in the meantime, I hope to do a lot of reading.

So what should I read?  Only books currently on my TBR shelf are allowed.  Here are some possibilities.  Let me know what you think.  The book with the most votes gets read first thing tomorrow.

• The Last Two Weeks of Georges Rivac by Geoffrey Household.  A bit of cold-war ear espionage by a forgotten master of the genre.  Mr. Household wrote one of my favorites, Rogue Male.  I used up a bunch of Paperbackswap.com credits gathering a small stash of his mostly out-of-print work.

• The Vagabond by Colette.  A young divorcee takes refuge in the world of dance-halls.  Looks like more of the literary, trashy good time Cheri was.  

• The Face of Battle by John Keegan.  Recommended to me by my Yale professor last summer, Mr. Keegan gets into the detail of what the experience of historic battles was like for the average soldiers who fought them   from the Battle of Agincourt to Waterloo to the Somme.  

• My Father and Myself by J. R. Ackerley.  Mr. Ackerley wrote the best book about owning a dog ever written, My Dog Tulip.  Here he investigates the secret life his father led as a means of investigating his own.

• Ella Minnow Pea: a Novel in Letters by Mark Dunn.  I got this one last Christmas at my book club's book exchange.  I've not idea.

• Disobedience by Naomi Alderman.  A Manhattanite returns to her London home and the Orthodox Jewish family she fled years ago.  Sounds awful written out like that, but I've heard good things.

• The Married Man by Edmund White.  An American near 50, living in Paris, begins an affair with a much younger married man.  Okay, maybe a bit of wish fulfillment going on here, but Mr. White is a respected author.  Really.

• Easy Riders and Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-an Rock'n'Roll Generation Saved Holloywood, but Peter Biskind.  A non-fiction look at the early days of American independent cinema.

What do you think?  Which one should I read first?  Sorry, no write-in's allowed.  I'm sticking to The TBR Dare.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins - A Literary Giveaway Blog Hop

It's been too long since Dakota and I have hosted a giveaway.  So, we've decided to join in the Literary Giveaway Blog Hop hosted by Leeswamme.

Simple rules, just leave a comment if you'd like to be entered in the giveaway.  Enter by midnight Tuesday, Feb. 22.  Dakota will select a winner Wednesday morning.

Open to anyone in the United States and to the rest of the world if I can ship a small paperback to your home for under five bucks.  Times are hard, out here in California.

We're giving away one copy of The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.

Even if you don't like giveaways, you'll like The Woman in White.

Update:


The winner is.....Carin S.


Unfortunately, I left my camera at school so there is no video of Dakota selecting the winner this time around.   Thanks to all who participated.

Dakota's Favorites: American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang

Dakota's Favorites are reviews from the archive.  I repost one of them every two weeks as my way of giving some of my favorite reads another little push.  Take a look in your own archive.  Is there a book you'd like to give another little push, another chance to find the reader's it deserves?






"One bright and starry night, the gods, and the goddesses, and the demons, and the spirits gathered in heaven for a dinner party."

American Born Chinese, a graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang, tells three stories. The first is a condensed version of the classic Journey to the West, the story of how Monkey brought the sacred texts of Buddhism to China. The second is the story of young Jin Wang who must leave the safety of San Francisco’s Chinatown for life in the suburbs where he is the only Chinese American student in his class and where he falls in love with a white girl. The third story is that of Chin-Kee the personification of all negative Chinese stereotypes who comes to visit his American cousin and to ruin his life once a year.

American Born Chinese is a story about identity and about trying to fit in. An old shop keeper in Chinatown tells Jin Wang “It is easy to become anything you wish so long as you’re willing to forfeit your own soul.” The price for fitting in can be very high. Jin Wang wants to fit in with the white students at his new school so he turns on the only other Chinese student there, one whose accent and appearance is much more Chinese than his. Monkey is rejected by the heavenly dinner party because he has no shoes, so he forces all of the other monkeys in his kingdom to start wearing them. Chin-Kee is unashamed by who he is, but who he is brings shame on his cousin who rejects his Chinese identity so much that he has actually become white.

All three stories tie up together in a satisfying conclusion that makes its point without preaching. It may be too subtle for some younger readers, and I am always hesitant about presenting negative stereotypes as a means of critiquing them, but I think American Born Chinese would make an interesting addition to a high school or undergraduate class. If you’ve not yet explored the world of graphic novels, it’s a good place to start. They have, of late, begun to come of age. I suspect to find them on a growing number of syllabi in the coming decades. I expect to find American Born Chinese on a growing number of reading lists.

I’m giving American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang four out of five stars.

A Woman Named Drown by Padgett Powell

   

Six months ago a friend of 

mine and I left doctoral 

programs in chemistry under

different circumstances.

Opening to 

A Woman Named Drown

by Padgett Powell

If I pledged to stop reading novels written by writing professors, would I have to give up modern American literature?  Is there anyone left writing contemporary fiction who isn't also a professor of creative writing?  I understand that bills must be paid, but doesn't reading novels written only by professors limit one's scope?  

If the American novel has any chance of serving as the voice of the people, don't we need novels written by the people?

I adored Padgett Powell's first novel, Edisto.  Lots of people did.  It won prestigious awards and garnered lots of talk for its author.  In the end, it secured Mr. Powell a job teaching writing at a university.  Good for him, too.  He deserves a measure of success.  

After Edisto, Mr. Powell disappeared from my radar.  His books since then have not been as successful, at least not successful enough to draw my attention.  I found A Woman Named Drown in a second hand store and picked it up remembering how much I liked Edisto.  Halfway through reading it, I began to get the same feeling I got reading Michael Cunningham's newest book, By Nightfall--this is a book written for college professors and graduate students, not for the masses, not for readers.  

This is not to say that either By Nightfall or A Woman Named Drown are bad books.  Quite the contrary.  Though there are MFA programs sprouting up all across America like wild flowers or weeds, one still has to deliver the goods to get a tenure track position.  I cannot say that I've read an MFA professor who couldn't write.  

But all fiction is autobiographical, and the concerns of university professors are not my concerns, their troubles are not my troubles.   They do not understand me any more than I understand them.  We won't find the voice of America teaching in an MFA program be it Yale (Cunningham) or the University of Florida (Powell).  (I used to believe it was living in a crummy studio apartment writing mysteries and science fiction, but even those genres have "MFA" programs now.)

A Woman Named Drown is a decent novel about a graduate student in chemistry who drops out of school just sort of completing his dissertation to take an extended road trip through the southern United States.  For the better part of the novel he is accompanied by first one woman and then another.  Both exist outside the mainstream, but neither ring fully true as real people. Instead they feel like the sort of lower class characters a college professor would imagine.  A bit edgy, but still comfortable enough for a graduate seminar in creative writing.

Is That a Western You're Reading? What's Come Over You?

Seriously?  Westerns?  Aren't those just to keep grandpa occupied so he'll stay out of the kitchen while grandma bakes her famous apple pie?

Last week a colleague, a thirty-something 7th grade teacher, approached me excited over Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove. He actually said that he thought westerns were just for old dudes, as though anything that appealed to old dudes could not have any real value. But Lonesome Dove?  A fantastic book!  Have I read it!  Who knew westerns could be so good? 

I did.  Lots of us did.   And you can to if you'll join me this May in the Hop-a-long, Git-a-long, Read-a-long Western Reading Challenge.  You just may find out that the western genre is not what you think it is. 

Take these books for example:

Susan Dodd's fictional biography of Jesse James's mother, Mamaw.

Annie Proulx's contemporary western novella Brokeback Mountain.  Yes, a western can count for the LGBT reading challenge.

If the New York Review of Books publishes a western, it must be good literature.  John William's Butcher's Crossing certainly is.

Larry McMurty's Buffalo Girls imagines Calamity Jane writing a long autobiographical letter to the daughter she gave up at birth.  

To sign up for the Western Reading Challenge or to see a longer list of recommended reading go here.  

In the immortal words of Horace Greeley, "Read westerns, young man"

TSS: Gone Grading

Image from University of Utah

Progress reports are due tomorrow.  So, I'm taking today off to finish up grading several stacks of papers.

Please stop by again, next week.

I have next week off for ski week.  We don't ever get snow days in Marin County California, but we do get ski week.

Go figure.

Friday Picture Reading -

Jens-Ferdinand Willumsen, Sophus Claussse Reading Poems, 1915

Tristram Shandy, by Lawrence Sterne. Book III: The Stuff About Big Noses

Image found here.

Somehow I missed it.

I think Tristram was born during this section.  I was so engrossed in the long digression about the importance of big noses to the success of a man that I didn't even realize Tristram had been born until Dr. Slop entered the scene and admitted that his forceps had grabbed the baby's head incorrectly crushing an otherwise perfectly fine, large nose.

Poor Tristram.  Cursed at birth to undergo a life of mediocrity like all the small nosed Shady men who proceeded him.

For the longest time I was sure Mr. Sterne was talking about something other than noses entirely. This digression began with the revelation that Tristram's grandmother was able to secure an annual income of 300 pounds in spite of her meager dowry of only 2000  once she pointed out the great sacrifice she was making by marrying a man with a nose as small as the one Tristram's grandfather had.

Come on.  Are we really talking about noses here?

But, by the end of Book III Tristram had reviewed  the philosophical texts regarding noses in his fathers extensive library which all point to the same unavoidable conclusion that a big nose is necessary if a man is to emerge a victor in life's struggles.  The texts Tristram cites are so convincingly real I'm still tempted to verify their existence on Wikipedia, but I suspect Mr. Sterne is duping me.  If you're in the know, please don't tell me.

In the end, I think Mr. Sterne is really talking about noses, which makes the joke so much better.  Leading us on like that, by the nose.  Making us suspect something prurient, then leaving us shamefaced in the presence of  innocents, like the Shandys, bemoaning Tristram's small nose and trying to cover our own embarrassment.  How could we think such a thing was going on?  Shame on me.

Well done, Mr. Sterne.  May I have another?

Mary Ann in Autumn by Armistead Maupin

There should be a rabbit hole was 

what she was thinking.  

Opening to Mary Ann in Autumn

by Armistead Maupin

I didn't feel right at home when I began Mary Ann in Autumn.  I thought I would. I expected to.  I always have before.  Each new addition to the Tales of the City books felt like bumping into a bunch of old friends I hadn't seen in a while.  All of us grabbing a cup of coffee together so we could have a chance to catch up.  (Since we all know each other from San Francisco none of us actually drinks coffee.  Lattes, mochas, cappacinos, a chai maybe, but never just coffee.)

Mr. Maupin abandoned Mary Ann Singleton several books back.  She left San Francisco, her "husband" and their adopted daughter and headed off to New York City hoping to make it big in television.  She didn't, but she married well and settled down to the life of a Connecticut housewife.  That's tantamount to treason for someone from San Francisco.

It's clear in the first few pages that this will be Mary Ann's farewell book.  She begins by going back to the old homestead, 28 Barbary Lane, where we first met the main cast of characters living with the magical Mrs. Madrigal in the 1970's when we read Tales of the City in the San Francisco Chronicle.  Mary Ann is looking for a past that's gone.  Someone else lives there. They've fixed the place up.  Most of her old haunts have changed hands and changed names.  In an echo of the first novel's opening line she considers going to the Buena Vista for an Irish coffee.  She's not wearing a mood ring this time around, but if she were it's color would be misty blue.  (You can look it up here.)

My problem is that Mr. Maupin has been saying  farewell to these characters for the past three or four novels.  We've been  saying goodbye to 28 Barbary Lane every couple of years since Significant Others (book 4) came out.

Then, some 60 pages into the book or so, Mary Ann gets a phone call from a stranger who asks if she remembers someone long dead and a mystery is a-foot.  I'd forgotten that Mary Ann's story lines always involved some sort of mystery, something like a high camp Hitchcock.  A child pornographer who wears clip-on ties, a homeless mystic who might be the Rev. Jim Jones, a secret cult engaging in cannibalistic communion high in the rafters of Grace Cathedral.  Absurd plots that Mary Ann stumbles into while looking for Mr. Right.

And I felt at home again.

And I'm looking forward to another new Tales of the City book sometime soon.

TSS: Wild Digressions Worthy of an 18th Century Novel

Selling Books at Half-Price Books

blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com

This week C.J. and I went to Half-Price Books in Concord.  Since there are no bookstores in our town, we have to travel at least 15 minutes whenever I need a fix.  C.J. almost never needs a bookstore fix; he just comes along for the ride and the promise of coffee afterwards.

I decided that buying a book is not a violation of The TBR Dare if you don't read it until after April 1 when the  dare ends.  But I didn't buy anything.  It's possible that I like looking at books as much or even more than I do reading them.  This may be one reason why my TBR stack is so high.

The fiction section at Half-Price Books, where I spend most of my browsing time, is located next to the book buying counter.  Typically, I spend thirty to forty minutes browsing, so I overhear three or four people getting their offers.  "That's less than a dollar a book!" is a typical reaction.  I swap or donate all of my books these days for just this reason.  Hearing how little monetary value second hand books have is disheartening.  It's well under the 25% I used to get when I sold books back in the day and far less than the 35% exchange rate for those who took store credit. I've never overheard anyone taking store credit at Half-Price Books.

What I wonder is just how long this can go on.  Half-Price Books in Concord has driven the other nearby second-hand bookstore, Bay Books, out of business.  Bay Books was more expensive, but it had a more interesting selection than Half-Price Books.  I've no idea how much Bay Books paid people for their books.  But once a person has been to Half-Price Books to sell their books and felt a bit ripped off, like all of them seem to feel, how many make a second trip?  Won't Half-Price Books eventually run out of sellers if they don't make selling books worthwhile?


Bible Covers

While in Half-Price Books I saw a rack of Bible covers.  They're like little backpacks for your Bible. They zip up, have little pockets for pencils, I suppose, and come with handles so the whole thing turns into a sort of purse. I don't know what to make of this.  They come in many designer colors, too.

My brother who travels to all sorts of places, including many that I would never set foot in, recommends putting a book cover on certain books while traveling in certain countries.  For instance, your trip through Pakistan will probably be much smoother if you put a book cover on your copy of Salmon Rushdie's latest novel.

Is this an issue for people who carry Bibles in Concord, California?

Murakami's 1000 Page Magnum Opus In English 

Where will you be on October 25?  Will you be standing in line at your local bookstore anxiously awaiting your pre-purchased copy of IQ84, Haruki Murakami's 1000 page novel, finally translated into English?

I'm hoping for an early release party somewhere so we can all celebrate with saki.  Maybe the Kinokuniya Bookstore, San Francisco's Japanese language bookstore in Japan Town, will have a Harry Potteresque release party at midnight on Oct. 24.  I'm sure we can get enough fans together to make it worthwhile. We could even go for dinner at the sushi boat place beforehand, maybe some karaoke.  

We could all come in costume, too.


Dakota Eats Lives of the Monster Dogs, a TBR Dare Casualty

We recently had a garage sale where I tried to sell a large number of books that I had piled up in the closet, including just about every one I read for graduate school.  They've been gathering dust for over tens years now.  Best to admit I'm not going to reread them and pass them along to someone else.  We sold a few and then I listed  the ones in good quality on Paperbackswap.com.  18 of them were immediately requested so I'll have enough credits to last the rest of 2011.

All of this activity was inspired, in part, by The TBR Dare.  The spirit of clearing out the book shelves just took over.  In the course of rearranging everything, I inadvertently left a small pile of books on a lower shelf, which I don't normally do anymore.

Dakota found one.  Not just any one but one of my all time favorite reads ever, one that I have reread, twice, and one that I fully intend to reread again someday, if I can find another copy somewhere--Lives of the Monster Dogs by Kristen Bakis.

So should have seen that coming.

Dakota's Favorites: Boy A by Jonathan Tingell

Dakota's Favorites are reviews from the archive.  They give me a chance to put in another plug for a book I've read and thought worthwhile.  While Boy A is not a five star book, it is a look at an issue that continues to plague both America and the U.K. I suppose: what to do with very young children who commit terrible crimes.  In my view, the U.K. is still leagues ahead of the U.S. on this issue.  But don't get me started.  Just read Boy A.  Or watch the movie.  Both are good enough to force you to reconsider what you previously thought was the right thing to do.


He's seen noses broken over less: the fag butts on the pavement have been carelessly tossed, five drags left in them.



Boy A, the award-winning debut novel by Jonathan Trigell, is loosely based on a real murder case. A very young boy was led away from a shopping mall by two ten year olds who then murdered him. The two boys, first identified as Child A, and Child B, were tried for murder in adult court and sentenced to 8 years. Their case became an international sensation. I remember seeing the CCTV footage of the two boys leading James Bulger away on the evening news here in California. The sentence sparked outrage and was lengthened to 15 years by the British government before the European courts reduced it to the original 8 years. Boy Child A and Child B were released in 2001 and currently live under new identities on life licences, which means they can be returned to custody if at any time the British police determine they are a treat to public safety.

Jonathan Trigell uses the basic outline of the case in his novel Boy A to address the question of what to do with extremely violent children, but Boy A should not be viewed as a fictional telling of the case. Mr. Trigell said in an interview that he was intrigued by the idea of a young man in his twenties who is completely innocent of how the world works, and that this idea was the genisus for his novel. Boy A alternates between the present day, following what happens to the surviving boy, and flashbacks that deal with other points of view: Boy A's father, Boy B, Boy A's psychiatrist, among others. This makes it possible to give the reader a very sympathetic portrait of the young killer; we see how hard it is for him to face life outside of the institutions he's spent so much time in as well as how difficult his life both before and during the years he spent incarcerated was. This aspect of Boy A is fascinating reading. Mr. Trigell gives us an in-depth case study of Boy A that makes it clear how he ended up committing a murder at such a young age and forces us to examine what we believe should be done with such children. While he has done a horrific thing, Boy A is a child and remains one throughout the book.

Boy A begins to break down toward the end. There are too many plot contrivances and a finish that is essentially a grand car chase sequence, and the final ending, a cross between Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The 400 Blows is a bit of a cop-out in my view. After 200 pages of intriguing psychological profile and character study, that was hard to put down although not much really happened, I thought it a shame that the last 50 pages relied on so many "exciting" plot developments. The true story, though mostly rumor, is much more interesting.

While not without its weaknesses, Boy A by Jonathan Trigell is an excellent read. The characters are well drawn and each add to the discussion of how Boy A ended up in prison and of what to do with such children once they are grown. It's a story that will stay with you after you've finished the book, that's for sure. I'm giving Boy A by Jonathan Trigell four out of five stars.

For another opinion and an interview with Mr. Trigell see here.
To see the trailer for the upcoming movie see here.

The World Below by Sue Miller

Imagine it: a dry, cool day, 

the high-piled cumulus clouds 

moving slowly from northwest 

to southeast in the sky, their 

shadows following them 

across the hay fields yet to 

be cut for the last time this year.

Opening to The World Below 

by Sue Miller

Good intentions can change another person's life, but this change may not always be welcome.   When the mother of two girls dies, their grandmother arrives to take them back to her rural home.  Their father refuses the offer; privately, the girls laugh at the notion of living with their backwoods relative.  But she was right.  Caring for their widowed father would prove to be a great sacrifice.  They probably would have been better off with the freedom their grandmother's care could have provided.

Years later, when the elder daughter becomes ill, her doctor sends her away to a sanatorium for her health.  When she returns, the two marry.  After several decades together she discovers that she wasn't really sick enough to warrant the sanatorium.  Her husband sent her because he thought it would be best, because he thought she needed to escape the life she had taking care of her father.

She is not grateful for his intervention.  She liked the life she had.   The doctor's well intended gesture had changed her life forever.

Years later, the doctor will do the same for his grand-daughter by sending her to Paris to live with her aunt.  There she will discover a side of the grandmother who has raised her that she never suspected.

Sue Miller writes about the ways relationships can be complicated by simple acts and by dramatic ones.  Sometimes these are one in the same.  In The World Below some characters reveal their past lives, others are discovered, but no one is who we think they are, not entirely.  Everyone has a history.  Discovering it can be painful, revealing it can be cruel.

Ms. Miller understands the complexities of people and the relationship they form.  She understands that even happy families struggle to maintain their relationships.  Her work proves Tolstoy wrong, happy families are not all alike.  You just have to look a bit harder, get to know them intimately.  Families are complex things.  For love to survive, some things must be revealed, some things are best kept secret.

Roseanna by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

They found the corpse on the eighth 

of July just after three o'clock in the 

afternoon.

Opening to Roseanna

by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

 translated from the Swedish 

by Lois Roth

The fourth word in Roseanna by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo is "corpse."

There will be no beating around the bush in this mystery novel.  A victim, a detective and a suspect.  What more do you need?  No quirky characters.  No digressions about dog show politics or the history of Irish pub goers.  Just a crime and a detective trying to solve it.  If you want to learn a how to prepare southern cuisine, buy a cookbook. The subject here is murder.

Which is not to claim that Roseanna doesn't have anything relevant to say about the culture that produced it.  The first of the ten volume Martin Beck mysteries, Roseanna, like all good detective stories, speaks to the fears and frustrations of it's age.  The title character is the victim, a young single woman with an active sex life.  She went looking for Mr. Goodbar ten years before Diane Keaton did, but she came to the same end.

The authors.
Photo Credit Here

Detective Martin Beck arrives on the scene when her body is discovered some three months after she was killed.  The case is so cold no one expects anything to come of it; it's clear his superiors won't hold it against him if this one is never solved.  But Beck does not give up.  Instead, he digs, and digs until he identifies the body as an American tourist who went missing while travelling through Sweden by boat.

Ship's pervade the novel.  During his investigation, Beck learns the habits and customs of boat travel through Sweden, its system of locks and the practice of taking on deck passengers who ride the ships like buses from one lock to another.  The few brief scenes of Beck at home describe him as an unhappily married man who spends his off hours building model ships instead of interacting with his family.  Ships provide a means of escape for Beck, for Roseanna the American tourist and for the suspected killer who rides them throughout Sweden when on vacation.

In spite of all the talk of ships in Roseanna and in spite of a victim found floating face up in a swamp, one review I read in preparation for this post described the book in a single word, 'dry.'  I wondered if this reviewer had read much in the way of police procedurals.  Their dryness is the calling card.  Detective Martin Beck describes himself:

"Remember, that you have three of the most important virtues a policeman can have," he thought. "You are stubborn and logical, and completely calm. You don't allow yourself to lose your composure and you act only professionally on a case, whatever it is. Words like repulsive, horrible, and bestial belong in the newspapers not in your thinking. A murderer is a regular human being, only more unfortunate and maladjusted."

I suppose that is a bit 'dry.'  It's also perfect reading for a rainy day.