Javier Marias and I decide to see other people.

One should never tell anyone

anything or give information

or pass on stories  or make

people remember beings  who

have never existed or trodden

the earth or traversed the

world, or who, having done so,

are now almost safe in uncertain,

one-eyed oblivion.

Opening to 

Your Face Tomorrow:

Fever and Spear

by Javier Marias

I tried.  

I tried twice.

I just couldn't do it.

It's not you, it's me.

I'm sorry to let you down.

Maybe if we had met at some other point in time.

20 years ago, maybe it would have worked out.

Maybe if we meet again 20 years from now, we'll find we're made for each other.  

It happens.

But, at this point in our lives, I think it's for the best if we go our separate ways.  

There's someone out there who's right for you.

I'm sure of it.

You have so much to offer.

You deserve so much better.

Sure, we can keep in touch on Facebook.

I really do want the best for you.

In fact, maybe I have a reader in the United States I can hook you up with.

Maybe that reader will let me know in a comment below.

If more than one person asks before Saturday, July 2, Dakota can help me choose the one that's right for you.

I'll be happy to send set you both up.

I know you'll find someone soon.

I'm sorry I let you down.

The Laughing Policeman by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

On the evening of the thirteenth 

of November it was pouring

in Stockholm.

Opening to

The Laughing Policeman

by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

This year I've been reading all ten of the Martin Beck mystery series by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo.  All but one.  The Laughing Policeman was my first exposure to the Martin Beck Series.  I read it back in October of 2009.  While I decided not to re-read it, I did think it would be worth my while to re-read my review of it and to re-post my review just in case anyone out there is following me through of all ten Martin Beck books.  Looking back at my reviews to date, I'd have to say that The Laughing Policeman is probably the best in the series so far.


Late one rainy night in Stockholm, a gunman boards a double decker bus and kills everyone on board.  He leaves no clues behind.  No hint at his motive or identity.  Just victims.  And questions with no answers.

As soon as Superintendent Martin Beck of the Stockholm Homicide Squad begins his investigation he finds that one of the victims was a member of his own squad.  What was a homicide detective doing on a bus in that neighborhood at that time of night?  Is the murder somehow connected to him?  Was the dead detective, in fact, the killer's target?

The Laughing Policeman by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo is considered a classic of detective fiction, a prime example of the police procedural.  The book's reputation is well deserved.  Sjowall and Wahloo populate their novel with characters that run the gamut of Stockholm society circa 1970.  A multiple murder, the worst on in Stockholm's history, with random victims allows the authors to send their detectives into many  levels of society.  It's surprising who one will find on a bus late at night.  Everyone has a story.

Of course, the investigation eventually takes the reader into Stockholm's underworld.  If you think Scandinavia is a land of clean, well-ordered people, that's not what you'll find in The Laughing Policeman.  The dead detective was using his free time to investigate the murder of a sixteen-year-old Portuguese prostitute.  He hoped to solve this decade old case thereby making is reputation.  Now, his work is the only possible lead Beck has into his own murder.  

The Laughing Policeman satisfies on several levels.  It is expertly plotted.  A crime without any clues is a tough place to start from, but the authors create a plot that remains entirely believable as it becomes more complicated.  The characters are all those one expects to find in a detective novel, but while familiar they are fully fleshed and likable--well, enjoyable if not always likable.  The prose, translated  from the Swedish by Alan Blair is as terse as it should be--to the point, no nonsense, full of dialogue that illustrates the procedure used to solve the crime.  There are no quirky characters in The Laughing Policeman.  If you want a mystery with recipes or funny next door neighbors, look elsewhere.  

The Laughing Policeman gives the reader a glimpse into life in Sweden.  Not the life one will find in a guidebook.  Scandinavia looks like it may soon become the next big thing in literature, detective literature at least.  The other day I saw a counter display of Swedish mysteries at my local bookstore.  I've not read enough of them to say how important The Laughing Policeman is in the world of Scandinavian mystery novels.  I can say that it is an excellent book and a very entertaining read.

Tuesdays with Dorothy

"This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly.  It should be thrown with great force." 

Dorothy Parker in a review of The Cardinal's Mistress by Benito Mussolini who was a novelist before he was a fascist according to one source.  Another source says the book in question was Ayn Rand's, Atlas Shrugged.  It's a handy quote in either case.



While I was reading a list of Dorothy Parker quotes the other day, I decided it might be fun to make her a weekly feature here at Ready When You Are, C.B.  What do you think?

Occupied City by David Peace

In the occupied city, you are

a writer and you are running --

Opening to 

Occupied City 

by David Peace

On January 26, 1948, someone posing as a health officer entered the Teikoku Bank in a Tokyo suburb and simultaneously poisoned 16 people, 12 of whom died.  After an extensive police investigation, Hirasawa Sadamichi, a tempera painter, was arrested and convicted of the murders.   His guilt was immediately called into question.  While he was never executed for the murders, he did eventually die in prison at the age of ninety-five.  Efforts to clear his name continue to this day.

The case forms the basis of David Peace's novel Occupied City, a crime-thriller unlike any I've ever read.  Mr. Peace writes crime novels, but he is as interested in prose style as he is in crime.  Occupied City is structured like the Japanese classic Rashomon, by Akutagawa Ryunosuke, a crime story told from multiple points of view.  In Rashomon, each character, a witness, the suspects and the ghost of the victim, give their version of what happened, but each skews their account to make themself look good.  The witness assures us that even the ghost of the victim lies to make herself look better.  

Mr. Peace structures his novel as a series of opposing narratives.  The victims speak with one collective voice.  A police investigator gives his account. A survivor tells us what she saw.  An occult investigator gives an account.  But this is not where Mr. Peace's interest in prose style ends.  Each chapter takes a different form as well.  An American army doctor presents his version in a series of letters to his wife back home and to his superior officers.  We are shown what details he erased through the use of strike through type.  The police officers present their story in the form of notes in their log books.  One character speaks through prose poetry.  The resulting affect is that the reader must find a way to read each account.  

 Take this passage  for example.  How do you read this passage?

3.  I stand in the Seibo Catholic Hospital, by the beds of the four survivors crawling out of hell, on their hands, on their knees THE CRIME SCENE IN MY MIND Nuns stick hoses down their throats, doctors pump out their stomachs down the bank's corridors, into the bank's genkan THE CASH ON THE DESKS, THE VAULT DOORS WIDE OPEN   I watch them wretch, fluid and bile through the doors, into the street, the snow and the mud   NOTHING OUT OF PLACE, NOTHING BUT THEIR BODIES   I wait for them to wake, I wait for them to speak on their hands, on their knees THE SOUND OF RUNNING WATER, THE DIRTY CUPS BEING WASHED  Beside their beds, beside their lips it was the drink, it was medicine, a doctor, dysentery THE CRIME SCENE CONTAMINATED

For the longest time I tried to read this chapter as it was, ignoring the use of differing type faces.  If you try reading it that way, the effect is like the work of early 20th century Dadaist art,  seemingly random groups of words arranged for an emotional impact.  Halfway through this chapter I tried reading each type face seperately.  Try it yourself now and see what you think.  

It's not often that one finds a police procedural attempting experiments in form let alone in the use of prose.  I wonder how this affects Mr. Peace's work.  I imagine that many readers of police procedurals do not look kindly on prose experimentation.  Many of my friends who read mysteries run screaming from the slightest ambiguity.  Readers of literary fiction who seek out prose experimentation tend to avoid mystery novels altogether let alone forms as predictable as police procedurals.  Where does this leave a book like Occupied City?  

As a crime thriller/police procedural Occupied City presents a fascinating case, one made more interesting by its exotic setting--Tokyo in the aftermath of World War II.  As a piece of prose experimentation, I enjoyed it.  It's nice to find a piece of writing that I can't figure out right away even after 41 years of reading.    

TSS: I Won't Read...

Disclaimer: I don't know what came over me.

Not reading it.

I won't read any books with the phrase "The Girl" in the title.

I won't read any books with a soft focus photograph of a beautiful young person on the cover.

I won't read any books with the word 'dog' in the title or with pictures of a dog on the cover even though My Dog Tulip is one of my all-time favorite books.  Not anymore.  The dog always dies and I just can't deal.

I won't read any books with the word "Heart-warming" in a cover blurb.  "Heart-breaking" maybe, but not "heart-warming."  "Heart-stopping" is also a red flag.  "Stomach-churning" doesn't move me one way or another.  "Eye-popping" is passe.

Not reading it.

I won't read any books written by celebrities or people who appeared on television news as either heroes or scoundrels unless at least a decade has passed since they were really famous or infamous or they are Steve Martin.

I won't read any Young Adult books while I'm on summer vacation.  Because I teach middle school English,  that counts as work.

I won't read any books that claim to be in touch with the "national zeitgeist."  Look it up here.

I won't read Onward: the Story of How Starbucks Fought for its Life Without Losing its Soul no matter how many times I see it featured next to the counter when ordering my latte.  How they became a successful corporation without losing their soul.  Please, Miss Thing.

I won't read any books by Dave Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Franzen, Alice Walker, Isabelle Allende, James Patterson, Ayn Rand, Dan Brown, Orson Scott Card, Amy Tan, Bill Clinton or Sarah Palin.  They all just bug me, and none of them will miss my $14.95.

Not Reading it.

I won't read James Joyce's Ulysses.  I don't care how good it is.

Or On The Road.

I won't read a book if the cover features a black and white photograph of an empty boat dock jutting out into a placid body of water.

I won't read a memoir  unless it's written by someone over 50.  (I'm 47 so you won't see my first memoir until 2014.)  Live your life before you write a book about it.

Not Reading it.

I won't read a mystery novel if the cover features a table set for a pleasant meal of some sort, a picture of an empty lounge chair in a sunny setting, or a clever reference to anything that could be considered a hobby like knitting, collecting or cooking.

I won't read book based on a blog.

I won't read a book if the author's picture is on the front cover.

I won't read cookbooks purchased from the remainder table.  Think about it.

I won't read a book if it's written by "the next so-and-so." Why should I read "the next so-and-so" when I can read "so-and-so?"

So there.

New York Passes Marriage Equality: Start Spreading the News

Thank you New York.  I "heart" you.

Friday Picture Reading - Dog Days of Summer

Some summer reading.
Found at Mrs. Clark-Burnell's class page.

Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean by Edward Kritzler

On August 1, 1492, when Christopher

Columbus set sail for the New World,

ethnic cleansing was the order of the

day: 100,000 Jews left Spain

 expelled as mandated by the Royal

Edict of Expulsion of the Jew.

Opening to the introduction of

Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean

by Edward Kritzler

On the day Columbus set sail hoping to find a quick route to the West Indies, Spain expelled the Jews.  Some 300,000 people were affected.  Jewish communities who had lived in Spain for generations faced three choices: convert to Christianity, leave the country or face the inquisition.  

Some became pirates.  

Who knew?

Eward Kritzler's new book, Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a generation of swashbuckling Jews carved out an empire in the New World in their quest for treasure, religious freedom and Revenge, looks at the Jews forced into hiding by their expulsion from Spain who became essential to the exploration and development of the New World and at how many of them became successful pirates during the golden age of Caribbean piracy.

 Here's the story of one, Samuel Palache, the pirate rabbi.

Samuel Palache grew up in Morocco where many Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition years before his birth found safety inside a walled ghetto protected by the sultan who needed their financial expertise.  Some 50,000 Jews led successful lives inside the ghetto of Fez, but they were not allowed freedom of movement outside the ghetto's walls.  Coming from a family of rabbis, Samuel Palache began his rabbinical training at a young age studying both the Torah and the Talmud and becoming fluent in many languages including Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew and Chaldean.   When he reached adulthood, Palache became a merchant pirate, free to leave the ghetto in the service of the sultan.   

He later tried to settle in Spain working for King Phillip II, but the inquisition forced him to flee to Amsterdam where the ideals of religious freedom produced an uneasy refuge for many of Spain's exiled Jews.  There Palache became the rabbi for a small community of 50 or so Jewish merchant families.  Through the remainder of his life he continued to lead pirate attacks on the Spanish coast in the service of the sultan of Morocco and to serve as a rabbi in his Amsterdam home.  When he died in 1616, six mounted horses draped in black pulled the hearse.  Prince Maurice and the local city magistrates marched behind it followed by the entire Jewish community which then numbered just over 1,200 people.

There are many such accounts in Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean which makes for fascinating reading.  What there is not is an overarching thesis bringing the entire book together for a particular purpose.  While I found Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean interesting and enlightening, I wanted it all to come to a point and for Mr. Kritzler to come to conclusions.  Mr. Kritzler is interested in resurrecting  largely forgotten Jewish contributions to the exploration and settlement of the New World.  The Jewish navigators who sailed with Juan Cabral, the businessmen who brought the sugar industry to Jamaica along with the pirates who caused so much grief for the Kings of Spain have not been a part of any history book I've ever read before.  For this, I give Mr. Kritzler full credit.   And for this, Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean is an excellent book.

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

It began in the usual way, in

the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel.

Opening to

  A Visit From The Goon Squad

by Jennifer Egan

I'm in love with this book.  So much that there is no way I can write a dispassionate review.  I could only gush.  So, instead, I'm posting some pictures, a few charts I made, and a couple of key passages in the hope that they will explain why this book is so great to my book club which I'm sure will hate it.  It's that kind of book. Maybe these will help you when your book club meets to discuss Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad.

Here we go:

"You can, Scotty---you have to," Bennie said, with his usual calm, but through his thinning silver hair Alex caught a shimmer of sweat on his crown.  "Time's a goon, right?  You gonna let that goon push you around?"

  

As Ted sat, feeling the evolution of the afternoon, he found himself thinking of Susan.  Not the slightly different version of Susan, but Susan herself--his wife--on a day many years ago, before Ted had begun folding up his desire into the tiny shape it had become.

Sasha's Circle.  Map by C.B. James
Each color group represents one story/character set

On a trip to new York riding the Staten Island Ferry for fun, becuase neither one of them had ever done it, Susan turned to him suddenly and said, "Let's make sure it's always like this." and so entwined were their thoughts at that point that Ted knew exactly why she'd said it: not because they'd made love that morning or drunk a bottle of Pouilly-Fuisse at lunch--because she'd felt the passage of time.    And then Ted felt it, too, in the leaping brown water, and scudding boats and wine--motion, chaos everywhere--and he'd held Susan's hand and said, "Always.  It will always be like this."




Chapters in chronological order:

• A - 4 - "Safari"
• A - 3 - "Ask Me If I Care"
• B - 11 - "Goodbye, My Love"
• B - 10 - "Out of Body"
• B - 9 - "Forty-Minute Lunch: Kitty Jackson Opens Up About Love, Fame and Nixon!"
• A - 6 - "X's and O's"
• A - 5 - "You (Plural)"
• B - 7 - "A to B"
• B - 8 - "Selling the General"
• A - 2 - "The Gold Cure"
• A - 1 - "Found Objects"
• B - 13 - "Pure Language"
• B - 12 - "Great Rock and Roll Pauses"

Recently, he'd mentioned that trip in some other context, and Susan had looked him full in the face and chimed, in her sunny new voice "Are you sure that was me?  I don't remember a thing about it!" and administered a springy little kiss to the top of Ted's head.  Amnesia, he'd thought.  Brainwashing. But it came to him now that Susan had simply been lying.  He'd let her go, conserving himself for--what?  It frightened Ted that he had no idea.  But he'd let her go, and she was gone.

"The pause makes you think the song will end.  And then the song isn't really over, so you're relieved.  But then the song does end, because every song ends, obviously, and THAT. TIME. THE. END. IS. FOR. REAL."

Character map by C.B. James
Each color group represents one story/character set

The warrior smiles at Charlie.  He's nineteen, only five years older than she is, and has lived away from his village since he was ten.  But he's sung for enough American tourists to recognize that in her world, Charlie is a child.  Thirty-five years from now, in 2008, this warrior will be caught in the tribal violence between the Kikuyu and the Luo and will die in a fire.  He'll have had four wives and sixty-three grandchildren by then, one of whom, a boy named Joe, will inherit his lalema: the iron hunting dagger in a leather scabbard now hanging at his side.  Joe will go to college at Columbia and study engineering, becoming an expert in visual robotic technology that detects the slightest hint of irregular movement (the legacy of a childhood spent scanning the grass for lions).  He'll marry an American named Lulu and remain in New York, where he'll invent a scanning device that becomes standard issue for crowd security.  He and Lulu will buy a loft in Tribeca, where his grandfather's hunting dagger will be displayed inside a cube of Plexiglass, directly under a skylight.

Turned out everyone in my book club loved it.  

TSS: Avast, Matey!!

Entrance to the Northern

California Pirate Festival

Yesterday, C.J. and I made our annual trip to the Northern California Pirate Festival at the Vallejo waterfront.  Instead of going early in the day before the crowds, we went in the afternoon to see the ship to shore cannon battle.  Well worth it.  The festival is actually more fun with the crowd.  Lots of people go in costume and everyone is having a good time.  It's surprising how little attitude there is in a crowd of pirates.  You'd think they'd be pushy, but they're a very friendly bunch, even towards people like us who do not dress up for the occasion.

In other news, I've started a second blog, one for my artwork, because I really don't spend quite enough time online.  I'm just going to post pictures--of my artwork, the artwork people send me, and found photographs.  I'm a fan of found photographs.  I've blogged here about some of the book arts projects I've done, book binding and altered books.  I also make mail art, which is what the new blog will be largely devoted to.  Please stop by and check it out at The Midnight Mail Train.

If I were not doing the 

52-52-52 challenge, this is what

 I would have eaten at the pirate festival

I've also started doing the 52-52-52 challenge that Amanda is hosting, so I did not eat any of the pirate food.  Typically, C.J. and I leave the pirate festival, walk over to the park two blocks away where the Juneteenth festival is held and eat there.  Several of the local African American churches sell food at the Juneteenth festival each year.  It's the only place we knew where we can get Seven-Up cake.   But not this year.  There were some very tastey looking meat pies at the pirate festival, but I stuck to my diet.

A new toy for sale this year

called a 'sea dog.'  It's basically

a pirate dog on a stick.

I'm currently reading a book about pirates that I picked up from the pirate display at the local library--  Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jews Carved Out an Empire in the New World in Their Quest for Treasure, Religious Freedom and Revenge by Edward Kritzler.  Our library is probably one of the few that puts up an annual pirate display.   I'll be honest and confess that I picked up the book because the title sounded like the basis for a Borscht Belt comedy routine, but it turns out there were many Jewish pirates and the most of the early voyages of exploration benefited from Jewish navel expertise and navigation skills.  Most of those involved were conversos, Jews who converted to Christianity at least in name, but one very successful pirate was also a rabbi.  Samuel Palache sailed for the Netherlands raiding the Spanish coast of Morocco when he wasn't busy with his rabbinical duties.  I should have a full review up in a week or so.

Ship to shore cannon 

battles both days at 2:00.

 My summer vacation started Friday.  I've always been just a little bit better than my students at getting through the last days of school, but this year I really couldn't wait for it to end.  Since we had to pack the entire contents of our classrooms into boxes this year, most of us had to get through the last couple of days without any curricular materials.  Why is it that the textbooks are always due two weeks before school ends?   Fortunately, I still have two sets of Mad Libs that I bought back in the 1980's.  Even in our high tech age when every single student in all my classes has a smart phone in their backpack that would make Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise pause in wonder, Mad Libs can entertain a bunch of 12-to-13-year-olds.  And they do provide a review of the parts of speech.

One of the better ones we did asked for the name of a boy in the room.  (The ones that ask for names of people in the room are always the best.  For some reason writing down the name of your friend for a Mad Lib is incredibly exciting for the 12-to-13-year-olds.)  The story then used the person's name as a rock star.  Why not the name of a girl in the room?  Girls couldn't be rock stars in 1982?  What was Pat Benatar?  What was Heart?  What was Debbie Harry or Wendy O'Williams.  Even Madonna was considered a Rock Star in 1982.  I went with 'the name of a person in the room' instead

ATM machines.  Banks were well

represented at the pirate festival.

Can you say 'convenience fee?'

When school got out I posted a notice on my Facebook page.  My brother, who's currently working in Africa, immediately asked, "So when will you start counting the days until school starts, 2 or 3 days?"  I'm going to try for two weeks this year.  No school related anything until the beginning of July.  I won't even read a young adult novel until then.  Of course, yesterday at the pirate festival I saw a woman with a button that said "We're all mad here" and thought, "that would be great for when I teach Alice's Adventures in Wonderland next year."  I fought the urge.  They were ten dollars anyway, carved into real buffalo bone.  Maybe I should have gone with the pirate theme and stolen one.

Homecoming by Cynthia Voight

The woman put her sad moon-face in at the window of the car.  "You be good," she said.  "You hear me?  You little ones, mind what Dicey tells you.  You hear?"

Homecoming by Cynthia Voight is the story of four children on their own. The oldest, Dicey Tillerman who is still young enough to pass as a boy when she needs to, leads her three siblings on a cross country journey in search of a home.  They must face this journey alone after their unstable mother abandons them in a car outside of a large shopping mall while on the way to the home of their great aunt.  She never returns.  

It's clear that Dicey has been covering for their mother for some time.  She immediately takes charge of the situation, keeping the younger children in line, dividing tasks between herself and her brother James who's just a year or so younger than she is.  Dicey hopes that their mother will return as soon as this latest spell is over, but she also fears that the police will find them and separate them.  She wants her mother back, but even more than that she wants to keep her family together.  So when it begins to get dark and her mother still has not returned, she decides to abandon the car and walk to their great aunt's house, though it's a trip that will take several weeks and they have just over ten dollars between them.

What follows is a terrific survival story.  Ms. Voight knows what she is talking about here.  The details of how the children survive, earn money, get food, find shelter and eventually find their great aunt's home are completely realistic.  (If you had to run away from home with only a few dollars to you name in 1981 when the book was written this book could have been your field guide.)   There are no flights of fancy here, no unexplained or surprise rescuers, no helpful coincidences that appear out of no where to save the day.  Dicey is simply too determined to fail.  Her siblings recognize this and stick to her side through thick and thin.  She does not disappoint them.

Homecoming is more or less officially a young adult novel, but it should be seen as a young adult novel in the same sense that To Kill a Mockingbird is a young adult novel.  Put a more sophisticated cover on it, take off the references to the Newberry Medal and you have a novel about children written for all audiences.  Ms. Voight never talks down to her audience, never makes things easy for them, but she does write a compelling tale.  All of the characters, even the minor ones, are as richly drawn as any you'll find in an "adult" novel.  Motivations are complicated here.  People try to do the right thing by each other only to find both the giver and the receiver of charity are too complicated to make even the most generous act go smoothly.  It's not that no good deed goes unpunished, but no good deed is easy to swallow.

One thing that sets Homecoming above other novels like this is that once the children find a home, their great aunt's house, they also find that it is not really what they were looking for.   Most writers would end their stories at the doorstep of their destination with a happy and satisfying reunion.  Ms. Voight could have done so and still had an excellent novel.  Instead, Dicey, her sister and her brothers find they have such a difficult time fitting in that they must consider taking to the road again, this time to look for the grandmother they never knew, one whom their mother rarely had a kind word for.    

Homecoming is the first of a series of six books about the Tillerman family.  I don't know how I managed to teach middle school English for almost 20 years and never read it, but I'm certainly glad one of my student book clubs finally gave it a chance.  The girls who read it are glad they did, too.  They plan on reading the next book later this month.  I'm looking forward to it.  Homecoming by Cynthia Voight comes with our highest recommendation.

Dakota's Favorites: Send Me by Patrick Ryan

Dakota's Favorites are reviews from the archive.  This week, a book by Patrick Ryan.  You may not have heard of Patrick Ryan, or his YA pen-name P.E. Ryan, but he's a favorite here at Ready When You Are, C.B.  In fact, if I ever do a top ten list of all the books I've reviewed here, I'm sure Mr. Ryan will be on the list at least once.  Send me is his only novel for adults to date, but I'm still hoping for more.  I think Send Me is terrific.  More please.


Somewhere between Rome and Dixie, he fell asleep behind the wheel.

Opening to Send Me by Patrick Ryan

Send Me by Patrick Ryan is the story of a family under duress. The matriarch, Teresa Kerrigan is in over her head. Her first husband leaves her with two children, a son Matt and a daughter Karen. Her second husband eventually walks out on her as well, leaving two children of his own, Joe and Frankie. The deck is stacked against Teresa as her four children spin away from her trying to find lives of their own, unable to escape the baggage of their shared past.

One thing that makes Send Me a stand out first novel and that helps save it from sinking into outright despair is that each chapter is written basically as a stand alone story. This makes it possible for novel's focus to shift from one character to another and back and forth in time creating a portrait of an American family falling apart, instead of a linear narrative of a family's collapse.  Each non-chronological chapter creates a study of one character, or of the family at one point in time. One chapter tells us how things are now; the next may tell us what things were like before or long after the previous one. They all work together to create a kind of narrative tension that keeps the reader involved in the on-going story.  While what happens next is not necessarily what happens next, I still wanted to know what would happen next.

In one chapter, the family heads inland away from their coastal Florida home to avoid a hurricane. Teresa and her second husband, Roy, take all four children to a run down motel where they share a single room for the night. Roy has recently lost his job with NASA and cannot afford better accommodations. There is no magical coming together under pressure in this chapter. It's soon clear to the reader that Roy is thinking about leaving his family and that his family won't miss him much once he's gone. Roy is trying, he makes every effort to be a father to his step children and to his own; he did not want to run from the hurricane in the first place but did so to please Teresa. The reader realizes that Teresa has not found what she wanted in Roy, that she may not even know what it is she wants in a husband. The children are all in the midst of one dreadful phase or another. Things go from bad to worse throughout the night until only daughter Karen walks in on her brother Matt who has gone into the shared bathroom to be alone and was in no condition to be walked in on.

The next morning, Roy sneaks out and drives back home alone while his family sleeps. I expected him to drive away and never return.  That is what would probably happen in a more linear narrative.  While Roy went to a house several blocks from his family's home where Leona, the woman whom he's having an affair with, lives to make sure she is okay, he did return to the hotel. This is another thing that makes Send Me work so well--we do not see the big blow-out scenes that take place in the family, the day Roy finally leaves for instance. Instead, we see one memorable day that shows us the complex family dynamic so well that we understand why Roy will eventually leave and what this will inevitably do to Teresa and her children. If we read a scene describing the day Roy left we couldn't help but take sides with either Roy or Teresa. By jumping forwards and backwards in time and by shifting the focus of the novel Mr. Ryan makes it possible for the reader to remain sympathetic with all of the novel's characters.

Roy's chapters are told in the third person, but Joe, the third child in the family, is the first person narrator of his. Joe is probably the family member most likely to succeed, to find happiness in life, but this is not at all clear in his chapter. Joe is close to his younger brother Frankie who is gay like Joe is, though their relationship is often love-hate. Frankie came out of the closet first, in spite of being younger, and came out big. Joe feels that Frankie has used all of the family's good will for coming out and made such a big splash of himself, become so flamboyant, that his own coming out would be viewed with suspicion if not just dismissed as copying Frankie. (In the end Joe is right about this.) In his chapter Joe goes to visit Frankie at college where Frankie is living the high life, staying off campus and selling drugs to support a lifestyle devoted much more to parties than to study. He is very popular and sleeps with a series of boyfriends and hook-ups. Joe sees him as so successfully gay that he cannot compete. He lives in the dorm, has no real friends, cannot bring himself to approach the one boy he is interested in. Joe will take much longer than Frankie did to come to terms with himself and to come out. He must also come to terms with a younger brother who will always be much more fabulous than he is.  

Reading Send Me is much like looking at a gem stone--in order to see the entire picture we must look at one facet at a time. These facets, taken together, form the gem. The writing in each chapter is terrific, but it's the characters and Mr. Ryan's depth of understanding that make Send Me a memorable book. I know I promised to give away almost everything I review in my end of the year book giveaway clearance, but I think I'm going to keep this one. I think I'd like to read it again someday.

Patrick Ryan is also the author of The Saints of Augustine under his pen-name P.E. Ryan. You can read my review of it here. 

Viktor Frankl on Idealism

Viktor Frankl wrote one of my favorite books, Man's Search for Meaning, reviewed here.  In this clip from a talk given by Dr. Frankl he talks about the importance of holding people to an idealized standard.



"If we take man as he is we make him worse.  If we take man as he should be, we make him capable of becoming what he can be."

Memory: A Novel by Philippe Grimbert

Although an only child, for

many years I had a brother.

Opening to Memory

by Philippe Grimbert

A young boy, an only child, believes he has an older brother.  He carries on imagined discussions with his brother, building him into a real person.  One day he finds an old plush toy, a dog, in his family's attic.  

A man meets the love of his life on his wedding day.  He manages to keep this secret from his wife, even though the woman he loves is her sister-in-law.

A man who has never considered himself a Jew is forced to abandon his business and flee Paris after the Germans invade.  He prepares a home for his wife and son who await their chance to escape.  All goes well until his wife's sister-in-law arrives ahead of her own husband.  

A desperate woman commits a Medea like betrayal.

What if the sequence of events that led you to unite with the love of your life included your own family's death?

Philppe Grimbert's novel Memory is not really about memory, nor is it really about secrets though its French title is The Secret.  It's really about how much damage love can do.

Surrender to it at great risk.

TSS: Buffy is Better, An Apology to R.K. Narayan and Other Randomness

Anyone who would choose a vampire, no matter how brooding, over a werewolf or a shapeshifter is not to be taken seriously.  There.  I've said it.  Vampires, even nice ones, are essentially reanimated corpses.  Gross.  Just, yuck.  All this human/vampire love which has become so popular can be traced back to Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire, but Ms. Rice  recognized that one had to become a vampire in order to be with a vampire.  There really is no other way.  Think about it. Ew.

Anna Panquin who plays
Sookie Stackhouse on
True Blood looks a lot like....

This week, I finished watching season one of True Blood on DVD.  The best thing I can say about it is that I was able to get a substantial amount of spelling and grammar homework graded while I watched it.  It's a wonderful show for multi-tasking.  Otherwise, you must be kidding me, HBO.  As a murder mystery, it's a mess.  There's no functional detective, nor any real crime stoppers drama to it at all.  There's just a couple of useless cops and a heroine who gets a vision of the killer on the second to the last episode.  Wow, a lead character who can see the killer in her mind, eventually.  What a great idea for a mystery series.  She can hear people's thoughts but she somehow didn't notice the guy who killed her grandmother though she was around him a lot until the visions finally came weeks later, just before the end of the series.

....Sarah Michelle Geller who
played Buffy Summers
on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  

In fairness, I liked all of the peripheral characters and their story lines.  I just have no patience for the leads.  The actors are good; as C.J. says anyone who can breath life into material that bad is a true professional.  But the writing is just so eye-rollingly awful.  I hope the books are better.  Buffy the Vampire Slayer is better.  Buffy never got the respect she deserved.  She did fall in love with a vampire, but the show's writers had the good sense to recognize a bad relationship decision when they saw one.


I lost two followers this week.   What happened? Was it something I said?


I started the 52-52-52 challenge on Thursday.  I know it officially started June 1, but somehow I got the idea that it started on June 10.  I knew I'd never be able to go through the closing days of the school year without my good friends at Haagen-Dazs so I decided to start on the tenth as planned instead.  When I told my sister-in-law about it she wondered aloud if I have 52 pounds to lose.  I do.  I really do.   So far so good, but there are three days of school left.


There are three days of school left.  


I finished a mystery novel called Occupied City by David Peace last night.  It's the second in a trilogy of novels set in post war Tokyo.  You can read my review of the first one, Tokyo Year Zero, here.  Mr. Peace is an experimental novelist.  He finds ways to write mysteries that no one else has used before.  I admire him for this, but it's not easy reading.  You won't find a predictable mystery by Mr. Peace.   This one is told by multiple narrators, each using different forms of writing: official reports, letters, newspaper articles, incantations with the spirit world.  There are traditional mystery/thriller elements to the story, but just enough to keep things moving.  The book is really about pushing the form to its limits.  I enjoyed it, but it was not an easy read.


I finished re-reading A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan earlier this week.  I basically read it two times in a row I liked it so much. As soon as I finished it I wanted to read it again. I'm working on my review.  I decided that a book featuring so much experimentation, needed an experimental review, so I'm trying to come up with an unusual  format.  Ms. Egan's novel follows an emotional arc instead of a narrative one.  Can a book review follow an emotional arc, too?

R.K. Narayan

The Vallejo Pirate Festival starts Saturday.  To help get in the spirit I'll be reading Jewish Pirates of the Carribean by Edward Kritzler.  It was in the pirates section of my local library and just called out to me.  I'll post some pictures next Sunday.




I mistook R.K Narayan for V.S. Naipaul in a comment I made on someone's blog this week.  How embarrassing is that.  I may have been distracted by Ryan Kwanten taking his shirt off on True Blood.  He takes his shirt off in almost every scene he does.  This is probably why the show is such a hit.   Again, my apologies to Mr. Narayan.  

Friday Picture Reading - Polaroid



Polaroid found Photobucket



Little Big Man by Thomas Berger

I am a white man and never 

forgot it, but I was brought 

up by the Cheyenne Indians 

from the age of ten.

Opening to chapter one of

Little Big Man

by Thomas Berger

"Little Big Man changed the way I see the world."  If you were around in the 1970's, after the Dustin Hoffman film version of Thomas Berger's novel Little Big Man hit the screen, you probably heard someone say this.  Maybe you said it yourself.   I was too young for R-rated movies in 1970, back then no one would have dreamed of taking a seven-year-old to a PG movie let alone an R-rated one, so  I was in college the first time someone told me Little Big Man changed them.

Thomas Berger's novel turns out to be problematic in its depictions of Native Americans.  It's not really about Native Americans; it's about a white man who was raised by them.  This is a subtle but important distinction-- one that separates the novel from the movie based on it.  The novel's narrator, Jack Crab, functions as a Candide figure.  He moves through the major historical events of his day as an innocent.  He is captured by the Cheyenne after a rival tribe massacres his family's wagon train.  For a time he lives with the Cheyenne and comes to see tribal elder, Old Lodge Skins, as his father.  He never forms a lasting bond with anyone else he meets during his life.  However, he abandons the Cheyenne in the midst of battle in order to save his own life.  Over the course of the novel he meets Wild Bill Hickock, Buffalo Bill Cody, Calamity Jane, and  General Armstrong Custer.  He moves among several Native America tribes, Mormon settlers, peddlers, buffalo hunters, former slaves, trappers, preachers, whore houses, school marms, and would be senators.  His story is all encompassing.  He is the American west.  And while he returns to the Cheyenne several times, his attitude towards them remains problematic for 21st century readers.

Take the scene when the calvary, led by Custer, massacres the Cheyenne village at Washita creek. Jack Crab tries to save Old Lodge Skins who refuses to leave his teepee, claiming, "Today is a good day to die."  Crab convinces his grandfather that a dream he had granted him invisibility-- no soldier will be able to see you, we can just walk through the fighting to the river.  But before he'll leave, Old Lodge Skins, who has become blind from a previous wound, insists on taking all of his magical possessions.

"Wait," he said.  "I must take my medicine bundle."  This was a sloppy parcel about three foot long and wrapped in tattered skins.  Its contents was secret, but I had once peeked into that of a deceased Cheyenne before they put it with him on the burial scaffold, and what was contained was a handful of feathers, the foot of an owl, a deer-bone whistle, the dried pecker of a buffalo, and suchlike trash: but he undoubtedly believed his strength was tied up in this junk, and who was I to say him nay.  So with Old Lodge Skins.  I got his bundle from a pile of apparent refuse behind his bed.

Crab's attitude towards Old Lodge Skins beliefs here is typical of his stance on Native Americans.  He is critical, often dismissive of Cheyenne customs and beliefs in ways fitting the fashion of a 19th century man that border on racist today.  Look at how he describes Old Lodge Skins possessions in the quote above--'tattered,' 'suchlike trash,' 'junk,' 'apparent refuse.'  The language here is fairly mild when compared to other scenes in the novel.  This is typical of the language used by 19th century authors to describe Native American tribes as the following passage from Mark Twain's 1870 essay "The Noble Redman" illustrates:

His heart is a cesspool of falsehood, of treachery, and of low and devilish instincts. With him, gratitude is an unknown emotion; and when one does him a kindness, it is safest to keep the face toward him, lest the reward be an arrow in the back. To accept of a favor from him is to assume a debt which you can never repay to his satisfaction, though you bankrupt yourself trying. 


However, by the end of the novel I came to see Jack Crab's abivalence about Native Americans as a testament to how good Little Big Man is.  A narrator with nothing but praise for anyone Jack Crab met during his life, would not be a narrator we could believe in. I'm not going to say trust here, because I don't think we can trust Jack Crab completely.  He's well over 100 years old, or so he claims, and he's telling us what happened to him  80 years ago.  Much of what he says is hard to believe, as hard to believe as most history texts about this period are.  We often can't believe it, or don't want to believe it.  Did the above quote from Mark Twain shock you?  Have you long believed he was an advocate in favor of civil rights and equality for all people?  How could the man who wrote Huck Finn hold views like this about Native Americans?     



The movie makers wisely decided to leave out some of the book.  While they have given Jack Crab a life outside of his time with the Cheyenne, the movie is concerned with making a statement about the treatment of Native Americans which the book is not.  Compare the movie's depiction of the massacre at Washita Creek.  There really is little humor in this scene.  There is no business about Old Lodge Skins dressing himself in his fanciest clothing or looking for his medicine bundle.  Jack Crab does convince Old Lodge Skins that he is invisible and he does walk through the battle smiling but there is no overt comedy in the movie's depiction as there was in the book.  It's entirely tragic.  Chief Dan George, who protrayed Old Lodge Skins in the movie, smiles his way to the river, but his smile only serves to make the entire sequence more disturbing.



I'm not enough of a film historian to say this with authority, but I think this was the first time mainstream American movie audiences ever saw an Indian village massacred. We'd seen the reverse, Indians destroying farm houses and wagon trains like the one in the opening scene of Little Big Man, but this was the first depiction of what was done to the Native American tribes. It's a brilliant piece of film making, though difficult to watch.  Jack Crab leads Old Lodge Skins to safety like Aneas leading his father from the burning ruin of Troy, but Jack's wife and son will not survive the battle.   Pay attention to the way music and sound is used in this scene and to the way the editing makes it look like Jack is shot and killed along with his wife and child.  It's easy to see why this movie changed so many of the people who saw it.

In both the book and the movie, Jack Crab returns to white civilization after the Battle of Washita vowing revenge on Custer for the massacre.  That's how he ends up at the Battle of Little Big Horn where he is the sole white survivor.  Here again, the book differs from the movie in ways that I found problematic.  In the movie, events are telescoped. Little Big Horn follows the Washita massacre fairly quickly while in the book there are many years and chapters between these two events.  In the book enough time passes for Jack to meet General and Mrs. Custer and to come to admire them both.  It's difficult to remain sympathetic to Jack throughout Little Big Man.  The reader wants him to be angrier about what happens to the Cheyenne, not  to praise General Custer.  The book is anti-establishment in its depiction of both white and native American society.  It pokes fun at everyone, victim and victor, which just seems unfair at times.

But in the end, I think that's America.  In America Chief Sitting Bull leads the attack on Custer at Little Big Horn and ends up an attraction in a wild west show.  50 dollars a week was the pay.  The great scope of history is turned into fodder for circuses.  Jack Crab may look like Aneas in one scene but he's really Candide with a more knowledgable Dr. Pangloss in Old Lodge Skins.  The movie version sums it up in Old Lodge Skins' final line, "Sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn't."

Thomas Berger, like Voltaire before him, looks at the horrors of history and concludes the only way to deal with it all is to laugh at it.  Towards the end of the novel Jack Crab, Little Big Man, speaks to his grandfather, Old Lodge Skins, about Custer:

   I says: "He was not scalped, Grandfather.  The Indians respected him as a great chief."

   Old Lodge Skins smiled at me as at a foolish child.

   "No my son," says he.  "I felt his head. They did not scalp him because he was going bald."

   

TSS: Save Bookstores

Why is a brick-and-mortar bookstore better than an on-line one?

Reason #1.  You can touch the books before you buy them.  While you can preview chapters in many on-line shops, you cannot subject a book to the page 69 test.  Nor can you check the index of a non-fiction or reference book to be sure it covers what you want to know, or inspect the quality of the illustrations.  When you buy a book you've touched, you need not fear finding anything untoward hidden in its pages nor worry about whether or not it came to you from a 'smoking home.'  Finally, there is no way to adequately examine a pop-up book on-line before purchase.  Pop-up books must be experienced their corporeal form.

Reason #2.  You never know what you'll find in a brick-and-mortar bookstore.  Donald Rumsfeld put it best when he said "there are things we don't know we don't know."  While browsing a brick-and-mortar store there is no limit to what you might find on the shelves or on a display table.  Something you never heard of or never would have considered reading unless you stumbled upon a physical copy you could peruse before purchasing.  I found Joan Brady's novel, The Theory of War, one of my all-time favorite books, on the remainder table at A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books in San Francisco by chance one rainy afternoon while killing time before the movie started in the theatre next door.

You'll find a lot on-line, in theory all the books in print and most of those out-of-print are available on the internet, but you won't find them unless you're looking for them.  Or, unless a publisher pays a website to feature them on the front page or the magical 'you-might-also-like' algorithms suggests them for you.  It's only in a brick-and-mortar store that you'll find something you had no intention of looking for and no real interest in until you spotted that one particular book.   Like the clerk at The Book and Bean in Truckee, California said to me once, "We don't have the book you want, but we do have the book you need."   I found Isaak Walton's, The Complete Angler (1653) at Tilden Place Books in San Francisco.  It remains the only book about how to fish that I've ever read. I loved it.

Reason #3.   You won't get fat browsing a brick-and-mortar store.  While you won't get enough exercise to burn off many BTU's either, you'll certainly get more than you will sitting in a chair looking at a screen.  This does not apply to bookstore/cafes of course.  Those will make you fat.  Trust me.  I know.

Reason #4.   You can always find a last minute gift in a brick-and-mortar bookstore.  Did you forget today was secretary's day?  Does your secretary have a picture of his family riding bicycles in Yosemite on his desk?  Your local brick-and-mortar bookstore is sure to have a book on either Yosemite or bicycles.   They'll even wrap it free.  And they all have gift cards.  Or you could buy something on-line that will arrive three days later.  Of course you could get an on-line gift card because nothing says "I don't really know enough about you to bother with deciding what to get" the way a gift card does.  (Gift cards are to the 21st century what decorative candles were to the 20th.)   Better yet, send an e-card.  Nothing says "I totally forgot what today was" like an  e-card.

Reason #5.  You do not have to pay shipping charges at a brick-and-mortar store.  They'll call you when your book arrives, usually less than four days wait which is much better than media mail.  Some stores, like Mrs. Dalloway's in Oakland,  will deliver to your home if you live nearby.

Reason #6.   Your browsing will not be interrupted in a brick-and-mortar store by your significant other, children, parents or pets.  This assumes you leave them all at home and have the good sense to turn off your cellphone, which I recommend so you don't have to worry about it interrupting anyone else's browsing.

Reason #7.   You can take the kids out for an inexpensive afternoon if your brick-and-mortar store features a play area or author events for children.  If you do give in to the little one's demands for impulse purchases you can relax because there is a good chance that it will have some educational value.  Reading "James Patterson's" latest Maximum Ride book is still reading.

Reason #8.  You may meet the love of your life while browsing in a brick-and-mortar bookstore.  It could happen.  Even if you're not a character in a Meg Ryan movie.  At on-line bookstores you're more likely to meet someone who wants your credit card number.

Photo by SocioTom taken at a Boston Zombie walk.  These are 

not real zombies.  These are people pretending to be zombies.

Zombies do not read. 

Reason #9.    Finally, your local brick-and-mortar bookstore is much more likely to survive the apocalypse, whatever form it takes, than on-line bookstores are.  True, massive earthquakes, Earth-orbit-altering meteor strikes and 2012 type flooding of the world will render this question moot, but smaller scale apocalypses, such as zombie outbreaks, The Stand like contagions, alien induced electromagnetic pulses, and widespread rioting, all tend to result in downed power lines.  Even if parts of the Internet survive such events, the power to run your laptop or iPhone is unlikely to last long.  Brick-and-mortar bookstores will not only outlast these end-of-the-world scenarios, they may become a  life-saving refuge.  The undead do not read and many bookstores now feature guides to combating zombie infestations,  most bookstores contain some medical reference books that will help combat contagion, and many have propane powered back-up generators for use after devastating alien induced electromagnetic pulses.  In the 1980's I once took shelter inside a bookstore while police and AIDS activists rioted on Castro Street in San Francisco.  It was nice.  We all chatted about literature and other riots we'd witnessed until the police gave the all-clear.  On-line bookstores will be of little use during a riot.

Today's musing about brick-and-mortar bookstores was inspired by a  friend of mine who alerted me to Save Bookstores! on Saturday, July 25.  You can participate no matter where you live.  Just go to an actual bookstore and buy something.   Brick-and-mortar bookstores are in danger of extinction.  There is only one way to save them.  If you like Brick-and-mortar bookstores, for browsing or as potential zombie shelters, buy something.  You might go to the Book and Bean in Truckee, or to Mrs. Dalloway's in Oakland.  I'm going to Bookshop Benicia.  Tilden Place Books and A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books (Opera Plaza) closed their doors years ago.   

Dakota's Favorites:The Midnight Examiner by William Kotzwinkle

The Midnight Examiner is a perfect book for Dakota's Favorites.  Running reviews from the archive is one way Ready When You Are, C.B. can help bring terrific books to the attention of readers who may have overlooked or just never heard of them before.  I bet you've never heard of William Kotzwinkle or of his wonderfully funny novel The Midnight Examiner.   If you're looking for entertaining laughs, look no further.

"I entered the front door of 

Chameleon Publications.

Hyacinth, the receptionist,

was applying plasters to

her corns. "Letter from the

lawyer for you, Howard."

Opening to 

The Midnight Examiner

by William Kotzwinkle

The Midnight Examiner by William Kotzwinkle is a laugh-out-loud funny book. Really. I laughed out loud four times which makes it a very funny book because I don't usually laugh out loud when I read.

The story revolves around a group of misfits who work for a publisher of various tabloid newspapers including the title paper. (It's almost a very twisted version of The Secret of Lost Things reviewed here.) The misfits include publisher, Nathan, spends most of the day in his office keeping his employees at bay through the use of a small blow gun which he uses to fire darts more or less randomly. Hattie, the lone female writer on staff, does all of the romance tabloids and can twist just about every situation into a potential article. The tabloids photograpy and artwork is all done by Fernando who dreams of painting giant murals of beautiful women and will begin to do is if left alone in a room with a big white wall for more than a few minutes. They spend their workdays trying to come up with good headlines, because it's all about the headline. Once you have that the stories write themselves. The narrator, Howard, is the editor-in-chief of the Midnight Examiner but he is also the organizing brains behind the publisher's other tabloids: Young Nurse Romance, Brides Tell All, Macho Man, Knockers, Bottoms and Real Detective. He is starting a new tabloid called Prophecy which is aimed at the untapped Christian Evangelical market.

Enter Mitzi Mouse, a sometimes model on the run from the mob and in need of Howard's help. Soon the entire staff of Chameleon Publications is embroiled in a burglary attempt, a mob hit, a voodoo priestess and a seedy cab-driver in a story that could only take place after dark in New York City. The plot is fantatic but it never becomes too over-the-top to believe, just enough to be delightful.

I found out about The Midnight Examiner from a posting on a book blog. I cannot remember which one but I do remember that the blogger lived in the U.K. I'm glad I did. The Midnight Examiner is a lot of fun. The writer's at Chameleon Publications and the people they meet are all interesting characters with a surprising amount of depth for what is basically a farce. Mr. Kotzwinkle has a good time skewering the tabloids and America's obsession with them, but I get the feeling that he is himself something of a fan.

My favorite character is Hattie who writes for several romance tabloids and always speaks in headlines. Take this scene for instance:

I took her slender arm in my hand. "Mitzi's producer interrupted her coffee break, so she shot him."
Hattie brought out her notebook and pencil. "I Told My Boss--One Day You'll Go Too Far."

Who hasn't been there? The rest of the humor in the book is just like that, so if you like that then this is the book for you. If you don't, it's not. As for me, now that I've found William Kotzwinkle, I'm going to keep an eye out for more of his books.