Happy Memorial Day!

Opening Sentence of the Day: The James Joyce Murder

James Joyce's Ulysses, as almost everybody knows by now, is a long book recounting life in Dublin on a single day: June 16, 1904.

 -- The James Joyce Murder by Amanda Cross.  This is the second in her series featuring English professor Kate Fansler. I haven't read the first one yet, so I am breaking with my usual rule of reading a series in order. I feel so wild.

I think I am really going to like this one. It was published in 1967, so satisfies my recent yearning for vintage mysteries (even if it is past the 1960 cut-off date for the Vintage Mystery Challenge), it has a literary theme (even if I have mixed feelings about Joyce after tackling Finnigans Wake), and it takes place in the Berkshires. 

Opening Sentence of the Day: Marrying the Mistress

 

"It would be advisable," the court official said to the security guard, "just to keep the laddie up here for half an hour."

-- Marrying the Mistress by Joanna Trollope.

I've never read any of her books and am looking forward to this one as pure guilty pleasure. A perfect weekend book. It is about a judge who does, in fact, decide to marry his mistress. And she's a lawyer to boot. Well, well.

Review of the Day: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

It is hard to review a book that I so horribly misinterpreted that I ruined it for myself.

Shirley Jackson's dark masterpiece, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, is a physiologically chilling little novel about the remnants of the Blackwood family, living in their mansion, ostracized by the villagers in their small New England town.

The completely unreliable (unhinged) narrator is 18-year-old Mary Katherine, known as Merricat, who floats around acting like a spooky 12-year-old while her older, long-suffering sister Constance spends her days cooking, putting up preserves, caring for their ill uncle, and otherwise tending the house she is too agoraphobic to leave. Meanwhile, poor demented old Uncle Julian obsesses over his memorialization of the day, six years earlier, when most of the family died.

This is a terrifically creepy book; not scary, but a real psychological study of family madness.

Unfortunately – and this is not a spoiler – I thought it was about ghosts. I thought that Marricat, or maybe all three of the Blackwells – were ghosts and that this was a ghost story. So when people came to visit them, or Merricat went into town, I pondered whether the people could really see them, or just the things they moved around, or just what was going on.

I was completely wrong. The Blackwells aren't ghosts. This isn't a ghost story. I have no idea where I got such a notion. But because I was looking at the story through such a distorting prism, I missed the opportunity to experience the book as it was intended. Drat!

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.

NOTES

This is on Erica Jong's list of Top 100 20th Century Novels by Women.

Opening Sentence: Knockdown

Mrs. Kerry Sanders looked like no Angel of Death.

-- Knockdown by Dick Francis.

I am on a real Francis jag, but kept avoiding this one because the cover on my copy was off-puttingly cheesy.I'm glad I got over that, because the story is particularly good.