Opening Sentence of the Day: The Red Tent

"We have been lost to each other for so long."

-- The Red Tent by Anita Diamant.

This is our Book Club book for March. I know it was very popular, but we haven't read it yet.

I saw the audiobook at the library, so grabbed it. But I only made through about five minutes before I had to abandon it because the reader's inflections were rubbing me the wrong way -- too melodramatic.

Fortunately, I had the paper book on my TBR shelf. I will read this one with my eyes instead of my ears and give the narrator whatever tone of voice I want.


NOTE
Book Beginnings on Fridays is a Friday "opening sentence" event hosted by Becky at Page Turners.

Welcome to Dumpsville

This week's Booking Through Thursday question asks about not finishing books:

So … you’re halfway through a book and you’re hating it. It’s boring. It’s trite. It’s badly written. But … you’ve invested all this time to reading the first half.

What do you do? Read the second half? Just to finish out the story? Find out what happens?

Or, cut your losses and dump the second half?

That is an easy question for someone with my kind of Teutonic reading habits -- if I start a book, I finish a book. Without using all my fingers, I can count the books I abandoned without finishing:

Anna Karenina

Now, before you jump all over me because this is the greatest book ever written, I'll explain. I left this at the gym when I was only a few chapters into it and it went missing. I was in college and poor, so didn't get a replacement. I now have a couple of copies but to my book shame, still haven't read it.

Tom Jones

See above. Same exact thing. Not that surprising, really, given the number of books I've brought with me to gyms over the years, but you'd think I'd learn my lesson.

A Frolic of His Own

I intentionally abandoned this one because it was making me batty. I really didn't like anything about it, in particular the lack of punctuation and speaker identification that made it impossible to know who was talking. But since then, I became obsessed with book lists and because this won the National Book Award, I will someday give it another go.

India: The Rise of an Asian Giant



I got this from the Internet Review of Books to write a review. Despite the great cover, it turned out to be a very dry book, mostly of election and agricultural production statistics. I was stuck on a cross-country plan trip with it, so got about halfway through. But then I pulled the plug. It was liberating.

Maimonides: and the Biblical Prophets

This was a LibraryThing Early Reviewer book. It is a very good book, I'm sure, on its subject. But it's more of a textbook for rabbinical scholars. I don't qualify.

There are also two audio books I abandoned after about five minutes because I didn't care for the reader's voice. But I can't even remember the names of them.

How about you? Will you dump a book halfway into it?

Review of the Day: A Year in the World

Frances Mayes did not spend one year traveling around the world and then writing about it in A Year in the World. She spend five or so years taking various vacations to places, mostly in Europe, writing about them, and then collecting the essays in calendar order with the idea that the collection would give the idea of a year of travel.

Judging from amazon reviews, her approach left many people seriously miffed because she did not actually drop out of her regular life and do all her traveling in one year, on a restricted budget. These reviewers also griped because they expecting Mayes to travel to the far corners of the globe, not just a relatively small section of southern Europe, Turkey, Morocco, and a bit of Scotland.

Such criticism always make me smile because they seem so off the point – like complaining that Mastering the Art of French Cooking contains no Thai recipes. This was the book Mayes wanted to write. She did not want to write about backpacking in Asia or South America and roughing it with the natives.

For me, this was the perfect kind of armchair travel book to feed my wanderlust fantasies. Mayes and her husband traveled to the places I have been and like to remember, like the Cotswolds and Capri, or would like to go, including Portugal, Spain, Greece, and parts of Italy unfamiliar to Mayes from her “Under the Tuscan Sun” home. They stayed in nice hotels or rented houses, often with friends; ate in nice restaurants or shopped in local markets to try their hand at cooking local dishes; and visited a lot of museums.

She writes about their trips the way a close friend would tell you about her vacation – hitting the high spots, filling in a few colorful details, and leaving out practical tips. The stories are pleasant to listen to, even if they do not give practical travel advice and get a little shaggy. 

As a plus for book lovers, Mayes often read local authors or books about the places where she traveled, and incorporates her thoughts about these books into her essays. For example she wrote extensively about the poet Federico García Lorca when they went to Andalucia, Spain, and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel, The Leopard, when they went to Sicily. For anyone who enjoys themed reading when traveling, these literary digressions were highlights.

NOTES

Because Mayes writes so extensively about the books she reads on her travels, this book counts at one of my choices for the Bibliophilic Books Challenge.

OTHER REVIEWS

Ordinary Reader
Memphis Reads

(If you would like your review of this or any other of Frances Mayes's books listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.)

Teaser Tuesday: The Farmer's Daughter

"The therapist was terribly skinny and B.D. had the fantasy of fattening her up to a proper size. There was the old joke of getting bone splinters while screwing a skinny girl."

--From "Brown Dog Redux," the second of three novellas in The Farmer's Daughter by Jim Harrison.

That is such a perfect Harrison teaser because of the combination of Midwestern-style lust and mind wandering. His characters are generally strong-willed, rural, and stuck inside their own heads.

"Brown Dog Redux" is the fourth of Harrison's Brown Dog novellas, each published as one part of a three-novella set.

This volume also includes "The Farmer's Daughter," about an intelligent young woman growing up under unusual circumstances in Wyoming, and "The Games of Night," which apparently has something to do with a werewolf, although probably in a metaphoric, rather than para-normal fiction, sort of way.

Jim Harrison is one of my favorite authors. I've read all his prose books, most more than once. My zeal is less fervent now, and the books no longer gobsmack (a very Harrison word) me like they used to, either because I'm getting older or Harrison is, I don't know. But I still read anything new he publishes and can honestly say that his work has shaped my worldview.



Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Should Be Reading, where you can find the official rules for this weekly event.

Opening Sentence of the Day: The Farmer's Daughter

"She was born peculiar, or so she thought."

-- The Farmer's Daughter by Jim Harrison.

This is one book from my Guilt List for which I have only myself to blame because I shamelessly begged Grove Press for a review copy. This is Jim Harrison's new novella trinity -- he is one of my all-time favorites. I am quite excited that my efforts paid off.