Happy 70th Birthday, Dad!

This is a slow blogging weekend for me because the family has gathered (from as far away as Bavaria) to celebrate my dad's 70th birthday. It's a big day! .

Opening Sentence of the Day: Doctor Sally

. "The eighteenth hole at Bingley-on-Sea, that golfers' Mecca on the South Coast of England, is one of those freak holes -- a very short mashie-shot up a very steep hill off a tee screened from the clubhouse by a belt of trees." -- Doctor Sally by P. G. Wodehouse I may not be the devotee that Book Psmith is, in that I haven't dedicated my blog to P. G. Wodehouse books. But I could eat these up. Eventually, I will read them all. In a silly way, I avoid reading them because I don't want to use them up. He has 97 books or something. Even if I did read them all, by the time I did, I could start over and they would be fresh again. .

Seriously!

. This week, Booking Through Thursday asks:

"What’s the most serious book you’ve read recently? (I figure it’s easier than asking your most serious book ever, because, well, it’s recent!)

I thought this would be slam-dunk easy, since I just last week finished reading Bernard Malamud's The Fixer, the grim tale of a Russian Jew falsely accused of the ritual murder of a Christian boy. Imperial-era prison, anti-Semitism, feudal justice system, and pogroms, not to mention poverty, adultery, child abuse, murder, and general violence -- it doesn't get any more serious. This one was so serious that it won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. But then I looked over my list of books that I've read in the last few months, and there are some contenders (linked to reviews): All Quiet on the Western Front (war) The Top Ten Myths of American Health Care (imminent crisis) Native America, Discovered and Conquered (ugly history) The Beggar (existential angst) Black Boy (American Hunger) (ugly history and existential angst) And I can't forget: The Letter from Death I need to go find my happy place. .

Review: The Naked and the Dead

Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead is a mesmerizing look at Army life in WWII. Mailer tells the story of an Intelligence and Reconnaissance platoon on a fictional Pacific Island. There are fewer battle scenes than expected. Most of the story is about the men on daily patrols, guard duty, and a week long patrol behind enemy lines.  The realism of Mailer's descriptions -- particularly, of what it was like to hike for days and days in the jungle carrying 60 pounds of equipment -- are riveting. What those men went through!

Mailer personalizes the characters by interposing flashbacks highlighting the pre-war lives of several of the men. He also switches the point of view among the various characters. Still, the characters are never fully developed, which, oddly, made the story more realistic. The reader gets the kind of impressionistic views of each man in the troop that the men had of each other. These men were all thrown together to serve under horrible conditions, but they had nothing in common to start with and really did not know each other.

All in all, a great book. It is long, but it is a fast read. In Mailer’s introduction to the 50th Anniversary edition he self-deprecatingly explains that the book (his first) was a best seller and was written in the flashy language of all best sellers. But it is not the language that makes the book so good, it is the story.


OTHER REVIEWS

If you would like your review linked her, please leave a link in a comment and I will add it.

NOTES

Mailer's best seller did not win any prizes, but it did make it to the Modern Library's list of Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century, Radcliffe's competing list, The Book of the Month Club's "Well Stocked Bookcase" list, and Anthony Burgess's list of his favorite 99 novels.

Teaser Tuesday

This is the first time I've participated in Teaser Tuesdays, but I am going to try it. It seems like a good way to make me think more about the books I am reading as I am reading them. Here are the official rules from the host, Should Be Reading: * Grab your current read * Open to a random page * Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page * BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! * Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers! My current read is Forbidden Bread by Erica Johnson Debeljak, one of the books on my LibraryThing Early Reviewer guilt list. I should have read this when it first arrived because it is really, really good.

"The bureaucrat who manned the fort at the Novo Mesto municipal office was predictably unsmiling and unhelpful, sitting behind a massive manual typewriter that in another place and time might have fetched a decent sum as a collector's item. It had been our mistake, she let us know from the beginning, and perhaps she had a point there, to have settled on such an early date without consultation with the authorities, and then she went on to find fault with each and every one of the dokumenti presented for her perusal."

So Debeljak describes trying to arrange a wedding in the nascent country of Slovenia. .