Challenge Update: Battle of the Prizes

. J.G. from the super-duper Hotch Pot Cafe blog is the first one to complete the Sunshine Smackdown: Battle of the Prizes challenge. Congratulations, J.G.! And thank you so much for participating in the first Rose City Reader challenge. Having such talented reviewers participate made the challenge so much fun for me. The challenge runs through Labor Day, so there is still plenty of time to get your reviews in. Please remember to leave a link to your reviews on the main challenge page or on any of the update posts, including this one. I am halfway through Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus, my National Book Award pick, so will get my third review posted shortly. The three books J.G. read for the challenge are listed below, with links to her reviews. The rest of the reviews by participants are linked on the main challenge page. Olive Kitteridge (J.G.'s Pulitzer choice) The Great Fire (her National choice) The Fixer (her double dipper) .

Mailbox Monday

It is not a long Mailbox Monday list, but thanks once again to Reading Local, I had some mad money to spend on books last week. I used my contest winnings at one of my favorite local bookstores, Daedalus Books in Northwest Portland. I picked up two more P. G. Wodehouse books from the "Collector's Wodehouse" series, Doctor Sally and Nothing Serious. And Vagabond by Colette, which is on my French Connection list. .

Opening Sentence of the Day: Goodbye, Columbus

"The first time I saw Brenda she asked me to hold her glasses." -- Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories by Philip Roth This is Roth's first book and is my National Book Award pick for the Battle of the Prizes Challenge. .

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. .

Mailbox Monday

Quality beat out quantity last week, with only two books making it to my Mailbox Monday list. But both additions are pretty exciting, at least in a book-geeky sort of way. The first is the latest from Powell's IndieSpensible program: A signed, first edition ofInto the Beautiful North by Luis Alberto Urrea. This one is a shot in the dark for me, because I had not heard of this author. The novel is about a 19-year-old girl from a remote Mexican village who heads for America with friends in order to bring back her father and some other men to repopulate the village and protect it from banditos. Sounds great! As always, the IndieSpensible box packed a few other goodies. There was an "author's card" from Jessica Anthony, author of The Convalescent. Think oversized, hipster trading card, signed by the featured author. There was a beautifully hand-bound edition of a Portland lit journal called Poor Claudia, signed by all the contributing poets. Is there some kind of conspiracy to get me to read poetry? And, finally, there was a Powell's Books pint glass. Alcohol may help my poetry comprehension. I am even more excited by the second book: Plum Sauce: A P. G. Wodehouse Companion by Richard Usborne. I've had my eye on this for quite a while and finally had Broadway Books special order it for me, using some of my contest winnings from Reading Local. Book Psmith is going to want a copy of this one!

Author of the Day: Anthony Powell

English author Anthony Powell (pronounced like "toll" not "towel") was born in 1905. He was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford where he met several other young writers, including Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. Prior to World War II he worked in publishing and as a film-script writer, before becoming a full-time novelist and literary critic.

Powell is best known for his twelve-volume novel, A Dance to the Music of Time, most commonly available in a four-volume set with three novels in each. Dance is at the top of my "Top 10" favorite books list and what always name as my "desert island" book, although that may be cheating, since it is really 12 books.

Powell wrote a number of other novels and a biography of the seventeenth-century diarist John Aubrey. He was also a prolific literary critic and book reviewer for a number of periodicals including the Daily Telegraph, the Times Literary Supplement, Punch and the Spectator. He published four volumes of memoirs, three volumes of diaries, and two volumes of his selected literary criticism.

Powell was married to the author Lady Violet Pakenham. He died in 2000 at his home in Somerset.

His books are listed below in order of publication. Those I have read, including all of Dance, are in red. Those currently on my TBR shelf are in blue. I hope to read them all some day, although several are hard to find.

Afternoon Men

Venusberg (reviewed here)

From a View to a Death

Agents and Patients
What's Become of Waring

John Aubrey and His Friends

A Question of Upbringing (Dance to the Music of Time, Vol. 1)

A Buyer's Market (Dance, Vol. 2)

The Acceptance World (Dance, Vol. 3)

At Lady Molly's (Dance, Vol. 4)

Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (Dance, Vol. 5)

The Kindly Ones (Dance, Vol. 6)

John Aubrey and His Friends a New and Revised Edition

The Valley of Bones (Dance, Vol. 7)

The Soldier's Art (Dance, Vol. 8)

The Military Philosophers (Dance, Vol. 9)

Books Do Furnish a Room (Dance, Vol. 10)

Two Plays By Anthony Powell: The Garden God & The Rest I'll Whistle

Temporary Kings (Dance, Vol. 11)

Hearing Secret Harmonies (Dance, Vol. 12)

To Keep the Ball Rolling: Infants of the Spring (Memoirs, Vol. 1)

To Keep the Ball Rolling: Messengers of Day (Memoirs, Vol. 2)

To Keep the Ball Rolling: Faces In My Time (Memoirs, Vol. 3)

To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Strangers All Are Gone (Memoirs, Vol. 4)

O, How the Wheel Becomes It!

The Fisher King

Miscellaneous Verdicts: Writings on Writers

Under Review: Further Writings on Writers, 1946-1990

Journals, 1982-1986

Journals, 1987-1989

Journals 1990-1992

Writer's Notebook

OTHERS READING POWELL'S BOOKS

Books Do Furnish a Room (where you will find many Powell posts)

(If you would like your Powell-related blog posts listed here, please leave a comment with a link and I will add it.)

NOTES

Last updated December 29, 2018.

Review of the Day: The Fixer

Based on a true story, The Fixer is the story of a Russian Jew who, in the early 1900s, is unjustly accused of murdering a Christian boy. Bernard Malamud’s 1966 novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

Yakov Bok has a hard luck life as a handyman, or fixer, in the Jewish Pale of Settlement. Although political reforms following the 1905 revolution gave Jews new freedoms and political clout, life in the Pale had not improved. After his childless wife abandons him for a goy, Yakov leaves the shtetl for Kiev, where he ends up working in, and living above, a Christian-owned brick factory. With an assumed name, no papers to allow him to live in that part of the city, and anti-Jewish sentiments on the rise, Yakov is headed for trouble.

When the mutilated body of a neighborhood boy is found stuffed in a cave, the evidence – circumstantial and fabricated – mounts against Yakov. He is arrested and left to rot in prison while the sham investigation drags on for years as anti-Semitic authorities try to build a case of ritual murder. With no indictment, no lawyer, and no idea of what is to come, Yakov’s situation is a downward spiral of gloom. Yakov is motivated by his dwindling hope of exoneration, only meagerly spurred on by a few rare contacts with the outside and tidbits of news about his case. Although claiming to be non-religious and non-political, Yakov worries that his case will spark violent retribution or even a new pogrom against the Jews.

Malamud incorporates Yakov’s tragedy into the larger picture by having characters discuss Russia’s anti-Semitic history and Tsarist politics. It is this contextual detail that raises Yakov’s story above that of one individual’s tribulations and makes it a morality tale about freedom and responsibility in the face of evil and suffering. One of the characters explains Malmud’s thesis:

I am somewhat of a meliorist. That is to say, I act as an optimist because I find I cannot act at all, as a pessimist. Once often feels helpless in the face of the confusion of these times, such a mass of apparently uncontrollable events and experiences to live through, attempts to understand, and if at all possible, give order to; but one must not withdraw from the task if he has some small thing to offer – he does so at the risk of diminishing his humanity.

Or, as Yakov put it more succinctly as he was finally being taken to his trial, “[T]here’s no such thing as an unpolitical man, especially a Jew.”

Malamud is an incredible writer. Even though this story is horribly grim, he grabs the reader and does not let go. The Fixer is a book that everyone should read and, once read, ponder.

NOTES

This book was my "double dipper" choice for the Battle of the Prizes Challenge. i

OTHER REVIEWS

Hotch Pot Cafe
Book Psmith

(Leave a comment with a link to your review if you would like me to post it here.)

Opening Sentence of the Day: Forbidden Bread

. "'Let's go to the top.'" -- Forbidden Bread by Erica Johnson Debeljak. I just finished reading Malamud's The Fixer this morning, so if there was ever a day to take my own advice and read something funny, today would be the day to start. But I am still nagged by guilt over my stack of LibraryThing Early Reviewer books, so I am going with "a touching and intelligent memoir" about a New York woman who marries a Slovenian poet and follows him back to his homeland. Something tells me that this is not going to be the Balkan version of A Year in Provence, so I am not expecting much humor. But it definitely looks interesting. And if post-communist Yugoslav wars of succession get to be too much, I can always take a break and slip in a P.G. Wodehouse or a Nick Hornby book. .

BTT: Recent Funny

The Booking Through Thursday theme this week is "Recent Funny," which asks the question, "What’s the funniest book you’ve read recently?" This is a no-brainer for me, since I just laughed my way through High Fidelity by Nick Hornby. For an idea of why I found the book so funny, please read my review. But it is a good question because I realize that I usually turn to "serious" books. I should remember to seek out funny books more often.

List: National Book Award

The National Book Foundation awards annual prizes to American authors in the following categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People's Literature.

I am working on the Fiction winners. Those I have finished are in red; those sitting on my TBR shelf are in blue. I will get to them all eventually.

2018 The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

2017 Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

2016 The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

2015 Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson

2014 Redeployment by Phil Klay

2013 The Good Lord Bird by James McBride

2012 The Round House by Louise Erdrich

2011 Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward

2010 Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon (reviewed here)

2009 Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (reviewed here)

2008 Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen

2007 Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

2006 The Echo Maker by Richard Powers

2005 Europe Central by William T. Vollmann

2004 The News from Paraguay by Lily Tuck

2003 The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard

2002 Three Junes by Julia Glass

2001 The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

2000 In America by Susan Sontag

1999 Waiting by Ha Jin

1998 Charming Billy by Alice McDermott

1997 Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier (reviewed here)

1996 Ship Fever and Other Stories by Andrea Barrett

1995 Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth

1994 A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis

1993 The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx

1992 All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy (reviewed here)

1991 Mating by Norman Rush

1990 Middle Passage by Charles Johnson (reviewed here)

1989 Spartina by John Casey

1988 Paris Trout by Pete Dexter

1987 Paco's Story by Larry Heinemann

1986 World's Fair by E.L. Doctorow

1985 White Noise by Don Delillo

1984 Victory Over Japan by Ellen Gilchrist

1983 The Color Purple by Alice Walker

1982 Rabbit is Rich by John Updike

1981 Plains Song by Wright Morris

1980 Sophie's Choice by William Styron (reviewed here)

1979 Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien

1978 Blood Tie by Mary Lee Settle

1977 The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner (reviewed here)

1976 JR by William Gaddis

1975 The Hair of Harold Roux by Thomas Williams (reviewed here)

1975 Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone

1974 Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

1974 A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer

1973 Augustus by John Williams

1973 Chimera by John Barth

1972 The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor

1971 Mr. Sammler's Planet by Saul Bellow (reviewed here)

1970 Them by Joyce Carol Oates

1969 Steps by Jerzy Kosinski

1968 The Eighth Day by Thornton Wilder

1967 The Fixer by Bernard Malamud (reviewed here)

1966 The Collected Stories by Katherine Anne Porter

1965 Herzog by Saul Bellow

1964 The Centaur by John Updike (reviewed here)

1963 Morte d'Urban by J.F. Powers

1962 The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

1961 The Waters of Kronos by Conrad Richter

1960 Goodbye Columbus by Philip Roth (reviewed here)

1959 The Magic Barrel by Bernard Malamud

1958 Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever

1957 The Field of Vision by Wright Morris

1956 Ten North Frederick by John O'Hara

1955 A Fable by William Faulkner

1954 The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (reviewed here)

1953 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

1952 From Here to Eternity by James Jones

1951 The Collected Stories by William Faulkner

1950 The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren (reviewed here)

NOTE

Last updated on March 27, 2019.

OTHERS READING THESE BOOKS

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

Review: Judgment Calls

Judgment Calls is a pretty good first effort from the daughter of legendary mystery writer James Lee Burke. Like her heroine, Samantha Kincaid, Alafair Burke was a Deputy District Attorney in Portland, Oregon. Her book is packed with colorful details of life in a DA's office, although their inclusion sometimes interrupts the flow of the story. The book has a decent plot with enough complications to keep it moving along at a good pace. The conclusion is a little far fetched, but Burke builds up to it reasonably well so it did not come completely out of the blue.

Proving that someone can be smart, well educated, and loaded with material but still not produce great mystery novel, Burke's writing is second rate. The narrative is clunky, the dialog is stilted, and the jokes are flat. The writing seemed better in the second half, but that impression may be the result of reader tolerance rather than actual improvement.

As a lawyer who would like nothing better than to write mystery books, I admire any fellow member of the bar who has achieved such an accomplishment. As a Portlander, I like to find a series set in my city. So I will probably give Burke a second chance. She now has two other books in the series: Missing Justice and Close Case. But now that Burke has moved to New York and started a new series, I will probably call it quits with those two.

List of the Day: The BBC's Big Read

In April 2003, the BBC's Big Read began the search for Britain’s best-loved novel. Viewers voted for their favorite book until December 13, 2003, when the final list was complete.

The Top 100 list is below. The contest tallied the top 200 vote-getters, with the books ranked 101 to 200 sometimes referred to as the Bigger Read. This is definitely a people’s choice list that, while it includes many very good books, reflects popular tastes as much as literary merits.

I have read 51 of the 100. I may never get through all of these because the list includes four Harry Potter books, too many kids books, and a lot of sci-fi. There are at least 29 that I do not plan to read. Those I have read are in red. Those currently on my TBR shelf are in blue.

If anyone else is tracking this list, please feel free to leave comment with a link to your progress report and I will add it to this post.

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien

2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman

4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams (reviewed here)

5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling

6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne

8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell

9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis

10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë

11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller

12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë

13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks

14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier (reviewed here)

15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger

16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame (reviewed here)

17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens (reviewed here)

18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott

19. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres

20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell

22. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, JK Rowling

23. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, JK Rowling

24. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, JK Rowling

25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien

26. Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy

27. Middlemarch, George Eliot

28. A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving

29. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

30. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

31. The Story of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson

32. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez

33. The Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett

34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens

35. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl

36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson

37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute

38. Persuasion, Jane Austen

39. Dune, Frank Herbert

40. Emma, Jane Austen

41. Anne of Green Gables, LM Montgomery

42. Watership Down, Richard Adams

43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald

44. The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas

45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh

46. Animal Farm, George Orwell

47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

48. Far From the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy

49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian

50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher (reviewed here)

51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett

52. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck

53. The Stand, Stephen King

54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth

56. The BFG, Roald Dahl

57. Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome

58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell

59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer

60. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

61. Noughts and Crosses, Malorie Blackman

62. Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden

63. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough

65. Mort, Terry Pratchett

66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton

67. The Magus, John Fowles (notes here)

68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett

70. Lord of the Flies, William Golding

71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind

72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell

73. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett

74. Matilda, Roald Dahl

75. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding

76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt

77. The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins

78. Ulysses, James Joyce

79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens

80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson

81. The Twits, Roald Dahl

82. I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith

83. Holes, Louis Sachar

84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake (reviewed here)

85. The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy

86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson

87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons (reviewed here)

89. Magician, Raymond E Feist

90. On the Road, Jack Kerouac

91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo

92. The Clan of the Cave Bear, Jean M Auel

93. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett

94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho

95. Katherine, Anya Seton

96. Kane and Abel, Jeffrey Archer

97. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez

98. Girls in Love, Jacqueline Wilson

99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot

100. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie (reviewed here)


NOTES
 
List updated on January 4, 2019.

OTHERS READING THESE BOOKS

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

Mailbox Monday

Only two books came into my house last week, which is probably a good thing because, at the rate I had been going, I would have to live to 214 or so to read them all. Here is my very short Mailbox Monday list:

   

Aunts Aren't Gentlemen by P.G. Wodehouse (an impulse purchase), and 

Not a Muse: The Inner Lives of Women, a "world poetry anthology" edited by Kate Rogers and Viki Holmes. I am excited about this one because my friend Kirsten Rian gave it to me. She is one of the women poets whose work is included in the anthology, along with the likes of Margaret Atwood, Erica Jong, and other women poets who are probably famous but I wouldn't know because I am horrible about reading poetry. In fact, if it weren't for Kirsten sending a poem (only occasionally her own) to her email list every Monday, I would have to confess that I never read poetry. Now that will change. I will work my way through this anthology, including the three poems of Kirsten's that are included, and then feel very smug indeed. Here is the description from the publisher:

A bold, richly panoramic anthology of poetry from all over the world, exploring the inner lives of women in a post-feminist era. 516 pages of poetic delight by voices both celebrated and newly uncovered. Poetry to Seduce the Senses: Not A Muse was launched on the opening night of the Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival, on International Women's Day, 8 March 2009.

Review of the Day: The Brothers K

Four brothers, twin sisters, a father with minor league baseball in his blood, and a Bible thumping mother form the story skeleton of The Brothers K. David James Duncan packs a lot of meat on these bones in his very long, very elaborate, quasi-biographical novel of the Chance family of Camas, Washington.

The first half of the book centers on the baseball career of Hugh “Smoke” Chance, latter known as “Papa Toe” for reasons almost too outlandish to believe. Hugh’s life as a triple-A lefty pitcher stumbles along through interruptions great and small, as his family steadily adds children and his wife rides herd. This part of the book is an engaging account of growing up in small town America in the 1950s and early ‘60s. It has the same steady, powerful flow of the Columbia flowing past Camas.

Then, BAM! The second half of the book takes off. The contentious, argumentative oldest brother, Everett, becomes a campus radical and draft dodger. The scholarly and mystical Peter head off to India where he has a life-changing escapade. Lovable Irwin suffers a tragedy in Vietnam that becomes the focus of the book. One of the twins seems headed for a mental breakdown. Girlfriends and wives come and go. Conflicts between the mom and other family members escalate, but are then explained away in a final revelation so horrifying it almost derails the story. Kincade, the sturdiest brother, narrates the tale, but it is a roller coaster of an adventure.

The disparate pacing of the two halves of the book is its main weakness. It feels like two books. And even though many of the moving parts in the second half relate back to information provided in the first half, the second half is so chock-o-block full of action and ideas and characters that those little connections get lost in the flurry or lose their significance. Duncan may have been trying to demonstrate that the Vietnam war had just that kind of explosive effect on American families, but he could have done the same thing more effectively with about 200 fewer pages.

Duncan’s writing style has matured since his popular first novel, The River Why, but is still evocative, playful, witty, and erudite. The trouble is that there is just too much style involved. For example, he uses puns, limericks, and other word play (the title is a baseball reference – “K” meaning to strike out – as well as a nod to Dostoevsky); he incorporates fictional “primary source” materials such as letters, newspaper articles, and the children’s school essays; and he sets the story aside while characters – all remarkably eloquent and demonstrating eye popping levels of self-awareness – go off on state-of-the-universe soliloquies. A little of such tricks goes a long way. By the end of 650 or so pages, enough is enough.

Despite these flaws, The Brothers K is a beautiful story of family love; well told and worth the read. It just could have been shorter.  

OTHER REVIEWS

J.G. on Hotch Pot Cafe

(If you would like me to post a link to your review, please leave a comment with the link address and I will add it.)

Challenge Update: The Sunshine Smackdown -- Battle of the Prizes

We are right about in the middle of the Sunshine Smackdown -- Battle of the Prizes Challenge. As a reminder, this challenge pits Pulitzer Prize winners against National Book Award winners. Participants read one Pulitzer winner, one National winner, and one book that won both prizes. Details and sign up info are here. There is still plenty of time to read three books before Labor Day, when the Challenge ends. Sign up now if you want in on the summer fun! So far, the following reviews are in: Sophie's Choice on Chaotic Compendiums The Optimist's Daughter on Joy's Blog Middle Passage on Living Life and Reading Books Advise and Consent here on Rose City Reader Empire Falls on Chaotic Compendiums Gilead on Tip of the Iceberg

Preferences

The Booking Through Thursday theme this week is "Preferences," with these instructions: "Which do you prefer? (Quick answers–we’ll do more detail at some later date)." * Reading something frivolous? Or something serious? Usually serious. I definitely appreciate humor, even in a "serious" book, but don't usually pick up anything I would describe as frivolous. * Paperbacks? Or hardcovers? I'm the opposite of many readers -- I read paperbacks at home, where I can protect the covers from bends and creases, and cart around a hardback (without the dust jacket) to read at the gym or whenever needed. * Fiction? Or Nonfiction? About two parts fiction to one part non. * Poetry? Or Prose? Definitely prose, although I recognize this is a deficiency in my reading. * Biographies? Or Autobiographies? Usually biographies. * History? Or Historical Fiction? History. * Series? Or Stand-alones? Both. * Classics? Or best-sellers? Classics. * Lurid, fruity prose? Or straight-forward, basic prose? The latter. * Plots? Or Stream-of-Consciousness? PLOTS. * Long books? Or Short? Both -- variety, spice of life, etc. * Illustrated? Or Non-illustrated? Books have pictures? * Borrowed? Or Owned? Owned. I can't handle the responsibility. * New? Or Used? Usually used.

Shout Out: Wall Street

How exciting! Bookforum today mentioned and linked my Internet Review of Books review of Wall Street by Steve Fraser.

Opening Sentence of the Day: The Fixer

"From the small crossed window of his room above the stable in the brickyard, Yakov Bok saw people in their long overcoats running somewhere early that morning, everybody in the same direction." -- The Fixer by Bernard Malamud. Based on a true story, The Fixer is the story of a Russian Jew in Tsarist Russia who was unjustly accused of murdering a Christian boy. It won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award and I am trying to read the books on both of these lists. I keep putting off The Fixer because I have been unable to work up enthusiasm for a book this grim. To spur me into reading it, I made it the "double dipper" choice for my Battle of the Prizes Challenge. Now that I have started it, I am sucked in. Even though this will end in tears, Malamud is such a masterful storyteller, I am completely absorbed by Yakov's tragic tale.

Author of the Day: Elinor Lipman

Reading one of Elinor Lipman's novels is pure pleasure that makes you think. They are witty, intelligent stories of modern manners that prove that contemporary fiction by women can be substantive without being dreary.

Her books, starting with the most recent, follow. Those I have read are in red. Those currently on my TBR shelf are in blue.

The Family Man

My Latest Grievance (reviewed here)

The Pursuit of Alice Thrift

The Dearly Departed

The Ladies' Man

The Inn at Lake Devine

Isabel's Bed

The Way Men Act

Then She Found Me

Into Love and Out Again (short stories)


LIPMAN REVIEWS
(If you have reviewed any of Lipman's books and want to share, please leave a comment with a link to your review and I will add it here)

NOTE
Last updated on April 19, 2012.