The Hot List

There are too many books vying for my immediate attention right now. I do not like it -- I feel pressured. My plan is to work my way through this yammering stack of books so I can turn my attention to whatever strikes my fancy at that very moment. But my immediate reading future includes the following: The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire (I am two-thirds of the way through and am enjoying this book a ton, but I set it aside to read Towers of Gold in time for an April review for The Internet Review of Books); The Letter From Death by Lillian Moats (yikes!); Basil's Dream by Christine Hale (looks like it could be very good) American Rust (another good one) The Stettheimer Dollhouse, edited by Sheila W. Clark (love this one); Joker One by Donovan Campbell (I've read some good reviews); The Tricking of Freya by Christina Sunley (this one showed up in my mailbox today -- why?); and The Italian Lover (I'm saving this for last). These are actually books that I have been looking forward to reading and that I think I will enjoy. They just seem to be ganging up on me right now.

Pulitzer List: Update

I have updated my Pulitzer Prize Winners list by indicating which books I have read and which are currently on my TBR shelf. I am less than half-way through the list of winners. If anyone else is working on reading all the books that have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and would like me to include a link to their progress reports on my Pulitzer page, please leave me a comment with your link and I will add it. So far, I have added the link to Rebecca Reads so we can track her progress. Any others?

Review: Towers of Gold

It beggars the imagination to think of the sprawling megalopolis of Los Angeles as a frontier town of 4,400.  But when Isaias Hellman arrived from Bavaria in 1859, Los Angles was a tiny pueblo, slow to transition from Mexican to American sovereignty. The gold rush – and later silver rush – that enticed thousands of people to Northern California and transformed San Francisco into a glittering modern city had almost no effect on tiny, isolated Los Angeles. Landing in the mudflats of San Pedro, 20 miles from Los Angeles proper, a 16-year-old Hellman set out to make his fortune, free from the religious restrictions that had limited his opportunities back in Germany.

In Towers of Gold, Frances Dinkelspiel explores the history of California, using Hellman – her great-great-grandfather – as a compass.  As the subtitle explains, this is the story of “How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California.”  Hellman soon outgrew his modest storefront, and eventually Los Angeles, going on to become a San Francisco-based banker and financier with his hand in the industries that shaped California.  Dinkelspiel’s summation also provides her outline:

From humble beginnings, Isaias had grown to be a banker with international statute, a man noted for his fiscal sobriety and his canny instincts for a good business deal. By bringing capital to the frontier, Isaias had come to symbolize the opportunities available in the West. He not only had grown enormously wealthy, but had helped create a state that was an economic powerhouse, an engine that drove the national economy. He played a major role in the creation of two cities, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and the development of eight industries – banking, transportation, oil, water, wine, land evelopment, electricity, and education.

The book moves along at a good clip, written in a clear, journalistic style that reflects Dinkelspiel’s decades in the newspaper business.  Although Dinkelspiel is related to Hellman, Towers of Gold is no mere family memoir, of interest only to Hellman’s scattered descendants.  She keeps her eye on the bigger picture, looking first at economically significant events such as bringing the railroad to Los Angeles, starting the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and the University of California in Berkeley, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and the discovery of oil in Southern California, and then explaining Hellman’s significant role in each of these events.

Dinkelspiel knew little of her forefather, other than that he had something to do with Wells Fargo Bank, before she started poking around in the California Historical Society looking for genealogical material on her family.  Over forty cartons of archived materials later, Dinkelspiel understood the scope of Hellman’s involvement in setting the foundations of California’s economy.  She ultimately reviewed more than 50,000 pages of primary source material held in archives and by distant relatives – and even traveled to Hellman’s hometown of Reckendorf, Bavaria – working for almost ten years to distill an enormous amount of information into a cohesive, hugely entertaining story of California’s history. 

Despite the mountains of source material, the book has a few thin spots, mostly concerning Hellman’s family and religious life.  It could be that Dinkelspiel, in her effort to give the book broader appeal, omitted purely personal details; or that the surviving records have more to do with Hellman’s business dealings than his personal life.  But seeing what Dinkelspiel was able to do with dry economic data – making even municipal bond offerings and the standardization of trolley track gauges interesting – it is a shame to miss out on any details, no matter why.

What personal anecdotes Dinkelspiel includes are highlights of the book, such as the story of how Hellman’s family left San Francisco immediately after the earthquake.  Piling grandchildren and a pregnant daughter-in-law into one new-fangled automobile, servants following in a horse drawn carriage, and Isaias and his wife chauffeured in their new Peerless, the family traveled most of a day down the peninsula, across the southern end of San Francisco Bay, and up the shore to their summer house in Oakland.  Details such as these bring new life to the familiar earthquake story.  Which is why a lack of personal details in other areas is noticeable.

Most conspicuous in its absence – although more when pondering the book afterwards than during the reading – is a more definitive explanation of whether and how Hellman’s religion limited his role in California’s development or as a national financier.  Dinkelspiel’s premise is that frontier California was more welcoming and more religiously tolerant than Europe, or even America’s East Coast.  Hellman and other Jews were accepted at the highest levels of Los Angeles and San Francisco business and government.  At least at first. In her Introduction, Dinkelspiel hints at changes in this welcoming attitude:

[F]rom the start, these Jews were accepted an integrated into society. They were elected to public office, built their homes alongside their Christian neighbors, and became the established mercantile elite. In both San Francisco and Los Angeles, Jews were community leaders. It was not until the 1890s that intransigent anti-Semitism gripped California. And while barriers were erected after then, the Jews had already indelibly shaped the state.

Throughout the book, Dinkelspiel provides several examples of anti-Jewish prejudice, including derisive name calling in the press, verbal attacks, and exclusion from private clubs.  But other than a couple of paragraphs suggesting that an influx of white, Protestant Midwesterners “diluted the multicultural population” and that orthodox Jews from Eastern Europe refused to assimilate like earlier German Jews, Dinkelspiel does not examine the “intransigent anti-Semitism” she proclaimed in the opening pages. A thorough discussion of anti-Semitism in early 20th Century California may be beyond the scope of her book; but by raising the specter early on, Dinkelspiel leaves her readers hanging when she fails to bring resolution to the issue.

 But such criticism is merely picking at loose threads. Dinkelspiel’s book is as enjoyable and lively a history of America’s largest state as one can hope to find.  Towers of Gold deserves a top spot on any To Be Read list.  

OTHER REVIEWS

Internet Review of Books (first posting of my review)

If you would like your review to be linked here, please leave a comment with your link and I will add it.

NOTE

This was my "gold" pick for the Colorful Reading Challenge.

Links of Lists

As I find and visit so many wonderful book blogs, I see that many other bibliophiles share my compulsion to follow a "Must Read" book list. I would love to know which of you have adopted any of the lists that I have featured here. Please take a look at the list of lists below (or over in the right-hand column). If you are working on any of these lists and have written about the list or your progress, I am happy to link your post. Just leave a comment here or on my post for the particular list.

The Lists

• All-TIME Top 100
• Anthony Burgess
• Book Club
• College Board's Top 101
• Easton Press - 100 Greatest Ever
• French Connection
• Mann Booker Prize
• MLA's 30
• Modern Library's Top 100 - Fiction
• National Book Award
• Nobel Laureates
• Oregon Books
• Pulitzer Prize
• Radcliffe's Top 100

I know that some of these overlap with challenges, Lists of Bests, etc., but I would still like to know which of my blogging friends follows which list. Happy reading!

New Favorite Bookstore: Ampersand

Thanks to a note on Reading Local yesterday, I visited a wonderful new bookstore in my neighborhood. Actually, the bookstore -- Ampersand -- has been there since last November, but I am new to the neighborhood. So after reading about Reading Local's upcoming interview with Ampersand owner Myles Haslehorst, I walked over there to take a look. Ampersand has a small storefront in the "arts district" of NE Alberta Street, here in Portland. It is as much a gallery as a book store. Or, as Haslehorst describes on his web site:

Ampersand is a gallery, bookshop & retail archive . . . . Committed to cultural preservation, we buy & sell vintage photography, paper ephemera, historic documents & collectible books. Our book inventory, consisting of both new & used volumes, is focused primarily on visual content, with particular emphasis on art, design & photography books. Our monthly gallery shows feature either contemporary artworks or curated selections from our vintage inventory. In both cases, our intent is to investigate the colliding point between now & then, past & present, vintage & contemporary.

It works. Ampersand is peaceful and lovely, with its eclectic wares displayed with the tidy precision of a Japanese garden. It is the kind of shop you would come across in Hayes Valley in San Francisco or Nolita in Manhattan. As for books, Haslehorst definitely concentrates on visually pleasing volumes. He also has a small but impressive selections of used paperback literature in very good condition at reasonable prices. I picked up a pristine copy of Vladimir Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark for $6. But better yet, on my way out I spotted and nabbed a new copy of a Taschen book called Jazz Covers -- a collection of 1,000 classic jazz lp covers -- for my jazz loving hubby's upcoming birthday. I love my new neighborhood.

Review: Bel Canto

The set up for Ann Patchett's Orange Prize winner, Bel Canto, is attention-grabbing -- an international group of businessmen and diplomats, one female opera singer, and a polyglot translator are held captive by a gang of revolutionaries in an unnamed banana republic for several months.

But despite the premise, the story has no zing. It plods along, focusing on the personal relationships among the people involved, particularly the relationships between some of the captives and captors.

The story is written well enough, but the issues it raises about the nature of talent, love, and communication are pretty banal. Not that it had to be an adventure or a thriller -- but it was surprisingly ho-hum given the potential.

OTHER REVIEWS

If you would like your review of this book listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.

ANNOUNCEMENT!

Inspired by Lezlie's articulate and thoughtful mission statement on Books 'N Border Collies, I have re-assessed my priorities and what it most important in my life. After great deliberation, I have decided to revamp my blog -- from here on out, this blog will be devoted entirely to KITTENS. Primarily, I will be posting cute pictures of kittens. Send them in!

List: Nobel Laureates

The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded 107 times to 111 Nobel Laureates between 1901 and 2015. I have a goal of reading at least one book by every recipient of the Prize.

If anyone reading this has a similar goal and would like me to link their progress reports to this post, I am happy to do so. Leave a comment with your link and I will add it. There is a group blog called Read the Nobels where people more actively pursuing this project post reviews and record their progress.

Here is the list of Nobel Laureates, starting with the most recent. If I have read any of the author's books, I listed the titles in red after the name; if I have books on my TBR shelf, they are listed in blue. I plan to eventually read something by everyone of these people, even if I have nothing on my TBR shelf right now. Although some may be hard to find as I look at names that ring no bells for me.

Kazuo Ishiguro

• The Buried Giant
• The Remains of the Day
• Never Let Me Go
• An Artist of the Floating World

Bob Dylan
Svetlana Alexievich
Patrick Modiano

• Missing Person

Alice Munro

• Love of a Good Woman (NBCC Award)
• The View from Castle Rock

Mo Yan
Tomas Tranströmer
Mario Vargas Llosa
Herta Müller
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio
Doris Lessing

• The Golden Notebook (All-TIME 100)
• The Grass is Singing

Orhan Pamuk

• Snow

Harold Pinter
Elfriede Jelinek
J. M. Coetzee

• Disgrace (Booker Prize)
• The Life and Times of Michael K (Booker Prize; reviewed here)

Imre Kertész
V.S. Naipaul

• A Bend in the River (Modern Library's Top 100)
• A House for Mr. Biswas (Modern Library's Top 100)
• In a Free State (Booker Prize)

Gao Xingjian

• One Man's Bible

Günter Grass

• The Tin Drum (reviewed here)

José Saramago

• Journey to Portugal: In Pursuit of Portugal's History and Culture

Dario Fo
Wislawa Szymborska
Seamus Heaney

• Beowulf (Costa award winner)

Kenzaburo Oe
Toni Morrison

• Beloved (Pulitzer Prize; All-TIME 100; College Board's 101; Radcliffe's Top 100)
• The Bluest Eye
• Jazz
• Paradise
• Song of Solomon (Radcliffe's Top 100)

Derek Walcott
Nadine Gordimer

• Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black and Other Stories (reviewed here)
• Jump and Other Short Stories
• A Sport of Nature

Octavio Paz
Camilo José Cela
Naguib Mahfouz

• The Beggar (reviewed here)

Joseph Brodsky
Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka
Claude Simon
Jaroslav Seifert
William Golding

• Lord of the Flies (Modern Library's Top 100)
• Rites of Passage (Booker Prize)
• The Spire (Anthony Burgess Favorite)

Gabriel García Márquez

• The General in his Labyrinth
• Of Love and Other Demons
• Love in the Time of Cholera
• Memories of My Melancholy Whores
• One Hundred years of Solitude (College Board's 101)

Elias Canetti
Czesław Miłosz
Odysseas Elytis
Isaac Singer

• A Day of Pleasure: Stories of a Boy Growing Up in Warsaw

Vicente Aleixandre
Saul Bellow

• The Adventures of Augie March (All-TIME 100; College Board's 101; Modern Library's Top 100; National Book Award; reviewed here)
• The Dean's December
• Henderson the Rain King (Modern Library's Top 100)
• Herzog (All-TIME 100; National Book Award winner)
• Humbolt's Gift (Anthony Burgess Favorite; Pulitzer Prize; reviewed here)
• Mr. Sammler's Planet (National Book Award; reviewed here)
• Ravelstein
• Sieze the Day
• The Victim (Anthony Burgess Favorite)

Eugenio Montale
Harry Martinson
Eyvind Johnson
Patrick White
Heinrich Böll
Pablo Neruda
Alexsandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn

• August 1914

Samuel Beckett

• Endgame
• Waiting for Godot

Yasunari Kawabata
Miguel Ángel Asturias
Nelly Sachs
Shmuel Agnon
Michail Sholokhov
Jean-Paul Sartre

• The Age of Reason

Giorgos Seferis
John Steinbeck

• Cannery Row
• The Grapes of Wrath (All-TIME 100; College Board's 101; MLA's Top 30; Modern Library's Top 100; Radcliffe's Top 100; Pulitzer Prize)
• Of Mice and Men (Easton Press Top 100; Radcliffe's Top 100)
• Travels with Charley in Search of America
• The Winter of Our Discontent

Ivo Andric
Saint-John Perse
Salvatore Quasimodo
Boris Pasternak

• Doctor Zhivago (College Board's 101; reviewed here)

Albert Camus

• The Plague
• The Stranger (College Board's 101)

Juan Ramón Jiménez
Halldór Laxness

• Independent People

Ernest Hemingway

• The Complete Stories
• Dangerous Summer
• A Farewell to Arms (College Board's 101; Easton Press Top 100; Modern Library's Top 100; Radcliffe's Top 100)
• For Whom the Bell Tolls (Anthony Burgess Favorite; Radcliffe's Top 100)
• In Our Time (Radcliffe's Top 100)
• Islands in the Stream
• A Moveable Feast (French Connections)
• The Old Man and the Sea (Anthony Burgess Favorite; Radcliffe's Top 100; Pulitzer Prize)
• The Sun Also Rises (All-TIME 100; French Connections; Modern Library's Top 100; Radcliffe's Top 100)
• True at First Light

Winston Churchill

• The Second World War (Six Volume Set)

François Mauriac

• Viper's Tangle

Pär Lagerkvist
Bertrand Russell
William Faulkner

• Absolom, Absolom! (Radcliffe's Top 100)
• As I Lay Dying (College Board's 101; Modern Library's Top 100; Radcliffe's Top 100)
• The Hamlet
• Light in August (All-TIME 100; Modern Library's Top 100; Radcliffe's Top 100)
• The Reivers (Pulitzer Prize)
• The Sound and the Fury (All-TIME 100; College Board's 101; Easton Press Top 100; Modern Library's Top 100; Radcliffe's Top 100; reviewed here)
• The Wild Palms

T. S. Eliot*
André Gide

• The Counterfeiters

Hermann Hesse

• Siddhartha (reviewed here)

Gabriela Mistral
Johannes Vilhelm Jensen
Frans Eemil Sillanpää
Pearl S. Buck

• The Good Earth (Pulitzer Prize)

Roger Martin du Gard
Eugene O'Neill

• Long Day's Journey into Night

Luigi Pirandello
Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin
John Galsworthy

• The Forsyte Saga

Erik Axel Karlfeldt
Sinclair Lewis

• Babbitt (College Board's 101; Modern Library's Top 100; Radcliffe's Top 100)
• It Can't Happen Here
• Kingsblood Royal
• Main Street (Modern Library's Top 100)
• Arrowsmith (Pulitzer)
• Dodsworth

Thomas Mann

• Death in Venice

Sigrid Undset

• Kristin Lavransdatter

Henri Bergson
Grazia Deledda
George Bernard Shaw

• Caesar and Cleopatra
• Candida

Władysław Reymont
William Butler Yeats*
Jacinto Benavente
Anatole France

• The Revolt of the Angels

Knut Hamsun
Carl Spitteler
Henrik Pontoppidan
Karl Adolph Gjellerup
Verner von Heidenstam
Romain Rolland
Rabindranath Tagore
Gerhart Hauptmann
Maurice Maeterlinck
Paul Heyse
Selma Lagerlöf
Rudolf Christoph Eucken
Rudyard Kipling

• Kim (Modern Library's Top 100; Radcliffe's Top 100)
• Stalky and Co.

Giosuè Carducci
Henryk Sienkiewicz

• Quo Vadis

José Echegaray y Eizaguirre
Frédéric Mistral
Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
Theodor Mommsen
Sully Prudhomme


NOTE

Updated on January 21, 2018.


OTHERS READING THE WORKS OF NOBEL LAUREATES

Read the Nobels (group blog)
Rebecca Reads

If you would like to be listed here, please leave a comment with links to your progress reports or reviews and I will add them here.

Favorite Author: Richard Ford

I have been smitten with Richard Ford ever since he introduced me to his Everyman hero Frank Bascombe in The Sportswriter. I followed Bascombe through the Pulitzer-winning sequel, Independence Day, and the most recent Lay of the Land. Like John Updike's Rabbit novels, Bascombe's saga offered me a tour inside the male psyche for which I am grateful and on which I often muse.

Ford also is justly acclaimed for his short stories. Those I have read, I appreciated. But I am not good about reading short stories -- always passing up a volume of stories for a novel when picking my next book. But I plan to read Ford's short story collections as well as the novels. Vintage Ford is a collection of previously published stories, but I include it on this list because it also includes a short memoir published for the first time.

Those I have already read are in red. Those currently on my TBR shelf are in blue. I will eventually read them all.

A Piece of My Heart (1976)

The Ultimate Good Luck (1981)

The Sportswriter (1986)

Rock Springs (short stories; 1987)

Wildlife(1990)

Independence Day (1995)

Women with Men (short stories; 1997)

A Multitude of Sins (short stories; 2002)

Vintage Ford (collection; 2004)

The Lay of the Land (2006)

Canada (2012)

NOTES

Last updated on April 19, 2012.

Colorful Reading: Update

I finished the first of my Colorful Reading Challenge books -- Black Cherry Blues by James Lee Burke. This is the third in Burke's Dave Robicheaux series and won the author an Edgar award. Deservedly. It is a particularly good volume of what is probably the best mystery series going. While I can get tired of Burke's ultra-rich language, and Robicheaux's holier-than-thou manner often rubs the wrong way, I always come back for more. Next up is Towers of Gold -- I have 100 pages to go.

Review: Pale Fire

Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire is a literary one-off, so hard to categorize. The first half is a long poem by the fictional poet John Shade; the second is the "Commentary" to the poem by narrator Professor Charles Kinbote. Through his Commentary, Kinbote spins a story of his friendship with Shade and tells the zany tale of the political upheaval in Kinbote's homeland of Zembla. The Commentary annotates lines in the poem, so the idea is to read the poem, then as you read the second half, refer back to the lines of the poem under discussion. Definitely not a standard novel format!

Pale Fire is in my all time Top 10 list. I think it is a wonderful, marvelous, intricately faceted gem. I sat there flipping back and forth between the poem and annotations for days, completely absorbed. I'm not one of the Certified Smart People who understand Nabokov on deep, deep levels, so I took the book for the entertainment it gave me. It struck me as mostly a joke — or at least a romp. Nabokov having fun.

The whole thing is genius. But what tickled my fancy the most was the story of the escape from Zembla in the red suit and, in particular, the Zembla cultural and language references. I barked with laughter - while on a crowded plane - when I came to “a shiver of alfear (uncontrollable fear caused by elves).”

I will read this one again, with the goal of appreciating the deeper complexities. But I will probably just end up laughing more and marveling at the mind that could produce such an intricate word puzzle.

Pale Fire shows up on a lot of Must Read lists, including:

All-TIME 100 Best Novels

Anthony Burgess's 99 Best Novels

Dr. Peter Boxall's 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

Modern Library's Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century

Thanks go to Rebecca at Rebecca Reads for inspiring this post.

Review: Humbolt's Gift

What a wonderful, great, big, shaggy dog of a novel Humbolt's Gift is!

While litigating with his ex-wife, being bullied by a B-team mobster, and fending off the marriage plans of his young "palooka" girlfriend, narrator Charlie Citrine contemplates the life of his recently deceased best friend and meditates on big questions such as the nature of death, man's role in the cosmos, and theories of boredom.

With dozens of remarkable supporting characters and side stories, this long book is entertaining throughout. It is not a quick read, but it is worth the time.

Saul Bellow deserved his Nobel -- he was really the Grand Master of American letters. Anthony Burgess included this one on his list of favorite 99 novels.

Books Read in 2004

This is the list of books I read in 2004, in the order that I read them. For an explanation of my rating system, see here. The highlight of my reading year was reading -- or rereading -- the six Jane Austen novels in order of publication. Hubby gave me a pretty matching set and I enjoyed them all the more for the lovely covers. Other favorites for the year were The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis and Consider the Oyster by M.F.K. Fisher. And Brideshead Revisited definitely deserves its accolades.

Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende (3/5)

The Titans by John Jakes (3/5)

Portrait in Sepia by Isabel Allende (3/5)

Certain Justice by John Lescroart (3/5)

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (5/5)

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (5/5) (College Board's Top 101; Easton Press Top 100; MLA's Top 30)

The New Diet Revolution by Robert Atkins (4/5)

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (4.5/5)

The Pilot's Wife by Annette Shreve (3/5)

The Reader by Bernhard Schlank (3/5)

Lost Light by Michael Conneley (3/5)

Emma by Jane Austen (5/5)

Dirty Work by Stuart Woods (3/5)

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (5/5)

Persuasion by Jane Austen (5/5)

Give Me a Break by John Stossel (3.5/5)

Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt (4/5)

The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (3/5) (my French Connection list)

Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (2.5/5) (Modern Library's Top 100)

Atonement by Ian McEwan (4.5/5) (All-TIME 100)

For the Defense by Kate Wilhelm (2.5/5)

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (5/5) (All-TIME 100; Anthony Burgess Top 99; Modern Library's Top 100; Radcliffe's Top 100)

Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley (4.5/5) (Modern Library's Top 100)

An Unlikely Conservative by Linda Chavez (3/5)

Tales of the South Pacific by James Michener (4/5) (Pulitzer Prize winner)

Driving Over Lemons by Chris Stewart (3.5/5)

Guilt by John Lescroart (3/5)

The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever (3.5/5) (Modern Library's Top 100; National Book Award winner)

The Wapshot Scandal by John Cheever (3.5/5)

Kowloon Tong by Paul Theroux (2.5/5)

Herzog by Saul Bellow (5/5) (All-TIME 100; National Book Award winner)

The Warriors by John Jakes (3/5)

Suspicion of Vengeance by Barbara Parker (3.5/5)

Long Time No See by Susan Isaak (3/5)

The Old Devils by Kingsly Amis (4/5) (Booker Prize winner)

God and Man at Yale by William F. Buckley, Jr. (4/5)

Fletch by Gregory McDonald (3/5)

Scarlet Feather by Maeve Binchy (3.5/5)

Disgrace by J.M. Coetze (3.5/5) (Booker Prize winner)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey (4.5/5) (All-TIME 100; Radcliffe's Top 100)

Cleopatra by Michael Grant (3/5)

A Darkness More than Night by Michael Conneley (3/5)

The New Testament (King James)

First Law by John Lescroart (4/5)

From Here to Eternity by James Jones (3/5) (Modern Library's Top 100; National Book Award winner)

Mongoose, R.I.P. by William F. Buckley, Jr. (3/5)

Murder on the Run by Gail White (3/5)

Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier (3.5/5)

The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty (4/5) (Pulitzer Prize winner)

For Women Only by Jennifer Berman (2.5/5)

The Lawless by John Jakes (3/5)

Vinegar Hill by A. Manette Ansay (3/5)

Sharp Shooter by Nadia Gordon (3.5/5)

Consider the Oyster by M.F.K. Fisher (4.5/5) (my French Connection list)

Brokeback Mountain by E. Annie Proulx (3/5)

Kingdom of Shadows by Alan Furst (3.5/5)

Spanish Lessons by Derek Lambert (3/5)

The Little Black Dress by Didier Ludot (3/5)

Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle (3.5/5) (Booker Prize winner)

As They Were by M.F.K. Fisher (3.5/5)

Secret Portland by Ann Carol Burgess (2/5) (reviewed here)

Opening Sentence of the Day: Towers of Gold

"On my thirteenth birthday, my father took me to lunch at the Poodle Dog, one of San Francisco's oldest restaurants, the kind of place with red leather banquettes and smoke-stained walls." From the Introduction to Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California by Frances Dinkelspiel. I forgot to list the opening sentence when I started this book last week, and am now almost halfway through. This is a hugely entertaining history of California centered on one man -- a financier and investor who played a major role in getting Los Angeles off the ground before moving to San Francisco where he . . . . I don't know yet; I have to keep reading! Dinkelspiel is Hellman's great-great-granddaughter and a journalist. The book moves along at a good clip, written in a clear, journalistic style. I am really enjoying it. I am reviewing it for the upcoming issue of The Internet Review of Books. It is also the "gold" book on my Colorful Reading Challenge list.

Book Notes: Audio Books

There is a debate going on over on LibraryThing about whether listening to an audio book "counts" as reading the book. (Those who are LibraryThing members can read it here.) I think the very contention is silly. But I was surprised to find how few readers in the "Literary Snobs" group enjoyed audio books -- although maybe, given the name of the group, they were just afraid to admit it. I joined the group just for the sake of chiming in, and a few other audio book fans came forward after I did. My comments were roughly these: Am I the only one willing to come to the wholehearted defense of audio books? That surprises me, given the number of well-produced, unabridged audio books readily available. I have listened to audio books on and off all my adult life, but I really became a fan when I got an iPod a few years ago and discovered how to load audio cds from the library onto my iTunes library, then on to my iPod. I can keep 20 or more books in my purse! I still read the big majority of my books with my eyes, but there are plenty that I read with my ears. I disagree with those who say that listening to an audio book does not "count" as reading the book. An unabridged audio book is putting every single word of the book into your head, just like reading a paper book does - it is just that one way gets into your brain via your ears; the other through your eyes. But it is the same information getting to your brain - just like reading a book in Braille puts the book into your brain through your fingertips. The difference is sensory, not substantive. It is not like watching a play or a movie or listening to a radio program because an audio book is not an adaptation - it is the real book, read aloud. True, it is possible to miss parts of an audio book. But it is also possible to miss parts of a book read with your eyes. I can get distracted reading a "book book" just as easily as when I listen to a book. In some situations - on a plane, for example - listening to the book is more absorbing than trying to read a paper book. There are a couple of genres I think benefit from an audio format. First, memoirs read by the author are, in my opinion, superior to the paper format. You can hear exactly how the author intended the words to sound - you get inside the author's head. For example, I can always figure out who listened Frank McCourt read Angela's Ashes and who read it with their eyes. The first group, including me, thought the book was heartwarming and very funny. The second group thought it was heartbreaking and incredibly sad. The difference is in the cadence and inflection McCourt put into the words when he read them. Likewise, Ayaan Hirisi Ali reading her biography Infidel was mind blowing. I cannot imagine getting the same impact from the printed page. On a lighter note, I came close to abandoning David Sedaris until I listened to Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim and became a devoted fan. The second genre I prefer in audio is classic literature. I am listening to Crime and Punishment now. In the past few years, I have listened to, among others, Moll Flanders, Silas Marner, Hard Times, Madame Bovary, and Moby Dick. And, yes, even the passages on cetology and the meaning of "white" were entertaining when read out loud. As I have mentioned here before, I think that listening to these classics is more rewarding that reading them with my eyes. Instead of facing dense, page-long paragraphs of prose, some professional has parsed the phrasing and figured out every nuance of intonation. That, along with different voices for characters, makes some of these older books come alive. In that way, I agree with the idea that audio books are like a play - listening to them is satisfying in the same way that watching a Shakespeare play makes more sense than trying to read it on the page. So while I will continue to flip pages, you can often find me plugged into my iPod, listening to a book. And I definitely count every one of those audio books as I scratch them off my various book lists.

Review: Native America Discovered and Conquered

In Native America Discovered and Conquered, law professor Robert J. Miller examines how the international law concept now referred to as the “Doctrine of Discovery” applied to America’s westward expansion. Miller explains how the principles of the doctrine – developed by Spanish and Portuguese explorers in the 1400s and formally adopted in America in the 1823 Supreme Court case of Johnson v. M’Intosh – influenced Thomas Jefferson’s expansionist plans, delineated Lewis and Clark’s duties, and grew into the policy of Manifest Destiny.

This book offers a fresh look at these common chapters in American history by viewing them through the lens of the Doctrine of Discovery, which Miller describes “in a nutshell” as the idea that when a European, Christian nation “discovered” new lands, the European – later American – nation automatically acquired sovereign and property rights in the new land, subject only to the native peoples’ right to occupy and use the land. When the natives stopped using or wanted to sell the land, they had to sell it to the European or American “conquering” nation and to no other.

Miller sticks to his theme well, tying many loose threads of history into his theory. He clearly outlines ten elements of the Doctrine of Discovery: first discovery; actual occupancy; the right of preemption (the exclusive right to buy the land from the natives); Indian title (their right to occupy and use the land); limited tribal sovereign and commercial rights; contiguity; terra nullis; Christianity; civilization; and conquest (virtual, even if not military). He then refers to these elements as he explains that the Doctrine of Discovery was understood in American politics even before the Supreme Court put a name to it in 1823, and that the Doctrine evolved into the popular concept of Manifest Destiny.

The goal of the book is to “shed new light on the conduct of Thomas Jefferson and Lewis and Clark and on many other events in American history and law” in order to “perceive more clearly how tribal governments and individual Indians lost many of their property and human rights, and their sovereign, self-governing powers.” As Miller argues, American Indians lost these rights and powers without their knowledge or consent, by confiscation based only on the “ethnocentric assumption of the ‘superior genius’ of Europeans.” Miller poses this as his “ultimate question”:

[W]hether this relic of colonialism and feudalism, and racial, religious, and cultural domination should be relegated to the dustbin of history. Must Americans and American Indians tolerate the Doctrine of Discovery in our present and our future; is it unchangeable, immutable? Is there anything that can be done to erase a “legal doctrine” that has been enshrined in American culture and law for four hundred years?

In answering his own question, Miller takes the “middle ground” between doing nothing and abolishing the Doctrine altogether and letting the chips fall where they may. His proposal is modest indeed, suggesting only that “Congress could consider after lengthy deliberation and with ample tribal input and direction viable ways to make concrete changes in federal Indian law that could begin to rectify some of the damage Discovery has inflicted on tribal and Indian rights.”

Clearly, what to do with the deeper understanding gained from Miller’s examination of the Doctrine of Discovery is beyond the scope of his book. But the fact that Miller does not solve the problems he describes does not limit the value of this book. Native America Discovered and Conquered provides a necessary foundation for understanding the laws and actions that created the modern legal system controlling American Indians today.

OTHER REVIEWS

If you would like your review of this book or similar books on Indian law listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it. 

Book Notes: Jeeves, etc.

I just finished Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse this morning. I was listening to it while unpacking boxes this weekend, so Hubby kept asking what I was laughing about. I want more! But I admit to being a little worried about further Wodehouse reading. I have been reading Wodehouse with my ears because my library has a lot of the Jeeves books on CD, as well some of Wodehouse's non-Jeeves books like my favorite, Love Among the Chickens. They are so wonderful to listen to because you really pick up on all the quips and linguistic word play when you hear them out loud. So I have some trepidation about switching over to the book books and reading with my eyes. I am worried that they will seem flat after the audio books. But I have come to the end of my library's supply, so I am going to have to take the plunge. According to List of Bests, I am only ten percent finished with my list of Wodehouse books. Book Psmith is inspiring with her Wodehouse-centric blog. I am in a Wodehouse mood and ready to start flipping pages!

My First Blogiversary!

It was a year ago today that I started this Rose City Reader blog and wrote my first post. I did it on a whim, hoping to have a place to keep track of the books I read and my many Must Read lists. I didn't expect to have so much fun with it! Over the past year, the highlights for me have been:

• Posting just under 300 entries, including roughly 85 book reviews;

• Having Laura Grimes feature my blog in an Oregonian story about Henry James;

• Getting several reviews reprinted on The Internet Review of Books, including in October, December, January, and March;

• Inciting an on-line dust up with the Amish over my cook book review; and

• "Meeting" so many nice people with bookish blogs of their own, especially Rebecca at Rebecca Reads, Terri B. at Tip of the Iceberg, J.G. and C.S. at Hotch Pot Cafe, Lezlie at Books 'N Border Collies, Nicole at Linus's Blanket, BurmudaOnion, Sandra at Fresh Ink Books, Bob and the gang at Artscatter, and Book Psmith who were all kind enough to each leave over 10 comments on my blog during the past year.

Review of the Day: Rasputin's Daughter

Rasputin's Daughter by Robert Alexander is the fictionalized tale of Rasputin's last week, as told by his daughter. While some historical novels based on real events and using real people as characters can really bring the history to life, this story seemed overly emotional and overly simplified. Alexander did a pretty good job of weaving in historical information in a way that did not seem too forced or clunky, but he did it at the expense of detail. For example, even the Russian Revolution gets short shrift, leaving more space for for the banal romance between the narrator daughter and a mysterious soldier. Rasputin was a notorious figure in an era of dramatic upheaval. But despite copious research into his subject matter, Alexander does not tap into the rich vein of narrative ore available to him. The most interesting part of the book was the afterward explaining what happened to the real people after the events depicted in the novel. But for that sort of information and more, it would be better to read a good biography, such as Rasputin: The Saint Who Sinned by Brian Moynahan, or the source materials Alexander used, much of which can be found in The Rasputin File by Edvard Radzinsky.

Opening Sentence of the Day: Hemingway & Bailey's Bartending Guide to Great American Writers

"This book grew out of a simple observation: writers like to drink." Hemingway & Bailey's Bartending Guide to Great American Writers by Edward Hemingway (illustrator) and Mark Bailey (author). OK, I admit that this was an impulse purchase made as I was poking around Powell's the other day. It does not show up on any of my Must Read lists. But the caricature illustrations caught my eye, and books and cocktails are my favorite things, so home with me it came. I plan to sit in my new library some evening very soon, with a bourbon soda, and enjoy this little book straight through.

School Choice Contest

Are you a parent or grandparent of an Oregon K-12th grade student? Do you know any families with K-12 children? There are only a few days left to enter the Oregon School Choice Video Contest. Parents and K-12 students can win up to $10,000 by making a short video about what choosing their school has meant to them, or could mean if they haven’t had the choice so far. The Contest website with full details is at Oregon School Choice Contest. The entry Deadline is March 25th.

Internet Review of Books

The March issue of The Internet Review of Books is up and, as always, there are several interesting non-fiction and fiction reviews. Also, my review of The Top Ten Myths of American Health Care is in the Brief Reviews section. What caught my eye are the two books about Cuba -- Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba and Then Lost it to the Revolution and Havana Before Castro: When Cuba was a Tropical Playground. Clive Foss, Georgetown history professor and author of a recent Fidel Castro biography, reviews the two together. Sounds like they would make a great Spring Break double header.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Challenge: Colorful Reading

OK, I generally avoid challenges because I have so many reading lists going that I do not like to fracture my attention any more than it already is. But I came across this Colorful Reading Challenge sponsored by Lost in Books and it captured my fancy. I tried to ignore it, but this past weekend (when I was finally unpacking my 800+ TBR books that have been in boxes for the past six months) I realized that I could complete the challenge without acquiring a single book. So I decided to indulge in a challenge with the excuse that it will help me pick from the overwhelming selection. The official rules are "to read 9 books with 9 different colors in the title. Six colors are required, while the last 3 can be your choice. Books may be overlapped with other challenges. At least 6 of the books should be new to you." Reading must take place in 2009. The six required colors are blue, red, white, black, silver, gold. Here is my list, subject to change at whim (like if I find a copy of Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates and ditch the cookbook): BLUE: My Blue Notebooks: The Intimate Journal of Paris's Most Beautiful and Notorious Courtesan by Liane de Pougy RED: Red Square by Martin Cruz Smith WHITE: White Teeth by Zadie Smith BLACK: Black Cherry Blues by James Lee Burke SILVER: The Silver Palate Cookbook by Julee Rosso GOLD: Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California by Dinkelspiel, Frances GREEN: Blue Planet in Green Shackles: What Is Endangered: Climate or Freedom? by Vaclav Klaus YELLOW: A Yellow Raft in Blue Water by Michael Dorris BROWN: Bad Boy Brawly Brown by Walter Mosely It was harder than I thought to find the three extra colors, since I have already read A Clockwork Orange and The Color Purple. I had a couple of "scarlet" choices, but I figure that is too close to red.

Bamboo and Barcelona

The one thing that really stuck in my head from reading Greg Bell's Water the Bamboo book is the idea of using affirmations to change behavior. I have run across the concept before, but Bell makes a good, cogent case for changing behavior by changing thinking patterns by using affirmations. He advocates for choosing two or three positive statements and saying them out loud at least every morning and evening for 30 days. That should get these positive "affirmations" lodged in your head enough to make you believe them. Then, because ideas have consequences, your behavior will change to match your new beliefs. Sounds great. I did not sit right down and come up with my affirmations, although I had good intentions to do so (thus proving why I need to do so). But over the past few weeks, I have recognized some recurrent thoughts as being the affirmations I was looking for. We are in the middle of getting settled into a new (old) house and, although we moved in over two weeks ago, workers are still here finishing the remodeling, so furniture is crammed everywhere, boxes are stacked to the ceiling, and workers are there from breakfast to bedtime. We have spent evenings and weekends scrubbing cupboards, unpacking what we can, and trying to organize what we hope will be the house we live in for the duration. Under these circumstances, a couple of thoughts kept bubbling to the top of my head and I have now claimed them as my affirmations. The first is a line from one of my favorite movies, the quirky and adorable Barcelona, where the guy goes around muttering, "Every day in every way I am becoming a better and better person," apparently inspired by the Dale Carnegie books he reads. I repeat this line to myself as I unpack box after box of disorganized clutter that I have hauled around since my first college apartment, vowing to use what I have, fix what is broken, and get rid of what I do not want or need. The second is an offshoot of the first. The phrase "I am marching towards perfection" came out of my mouth when Hubby asked what I was doing, as I was scraping someone else's gooey 1970's shelf paper out of the bathroom drawers. I like the no-nonsense sound of "marching" rather than anything less absolute, like "striving" or, even worse, "struggling" towards perfection. Of course, this one is an aspirational affirmation -- I can only hope to move towards perfection, but can never attain it. The third is the one I practice the most: "I react to my husband with love and happiness." I say it over and over -- sometimes even saying out loud to Hubby before responding to him, although he thinks I'm batty. Other than trying to wallpaper together, or maybe have one of us teach the other to golf, I cannot think of anything as stressful as moving into and living in a house under construction. We'll see how this works. In the meantime, I have boxes to unpack.