Tag Archives: US author

Notes from a Big Country – Bill Bryson – 6/10

Non-fiction April 30, 2013 1 Comment

“People have become so habituated to using the car for everything that it would never occur to them to unfurl their legs and see what they can do.”

big country

Having read and loved Notes from a Small Island and Down Under, I dutifully collected all of Bryson’s books… this one is a collection of columns he wrote for a British newspaper after returning to the USA with his family, having left it as a young man.

Bryson pokes fun at nearly every aspect of life in the US – wranglings with immigration, the fact that no one walks anywhere, statistically aberrant accident rates, guns, diners, obesity, motels (there are several chapters on motels, actually), baseball, basketball, the local Ivy League college – everything. As I’m used to, it was generally funny with occasional snorts of laughter (to be suppressed on public transport).

Bizarrely, or perhaps just unexpectedly, Bryson appears much more positive about his time in the UK than the prospect of being back in his homeland – while the purpose of the column is clearly to be amusing to UK readers, week after week Bryson lampoons his new, re-adopted country. At first this makes a non-US reader feel rather smug but after a while I felt a bit bad, like hearing someone bad-mouth their other half. Given that the writing was intended to be episodic, it can come across as mildly repetitive, and eventually his negative tone (while often funny) can grate.

Probably not to be recommended to people who live in the USA and like it there.

Additional information:
Copy from Bookmooch
Publisher: Black Swan, 399 pages (paperback)
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Dances with Wolves – Michael Blake – 7/10

Current Affairs March 6, 2013 Leave a comment

“He had geared himself for criminals, a gang of lawbreakers, burglars who needed punishing. What he found instead was a pageant, a pageant of action so breathtaking that, like a kid at his first big parade, the lieutenant was powerless to do anything but stand there and watch it go by.”

dances with wolves

Lt. John Dunbar voyages west to take up a post at the western frontier, his life’s ambition. Finding the fort deserted and himself the only white man within a week’s travel, he sets about restoring the fort to appropriate standards and surveying the nearby lands. When he encounters the local Indian tribe, his diplomatic attempts are a little more open-minded than most soldiers of his time, and he slowly drawn into the Indian camp…

The overall arc, the idea, is a strong and beautiful one, and Blake went out on a limb to write a book which is overwhelming positive about the Native American tribe (assumed to be Sioux), particularly in comparison to the US Army. The novel is gentle; the writing is not complex or particularly literary. The reader is lulled into the huge expanse of the plains, Dunbar’s solitude at Ford Sedgewick, and equally the excitement of the buffalo hunt, the repeated attempts to steal Dunbar’s beloved horse and the conflict with the Pawnee grips the reader. I found the book easy to keep reading but also quite easy to put down and pick up again.

Faults? Lt. Dunbar is too good a man. It’s too easy for him to move into the Comanche world – Kicking Bird comments on it very directly (I can’t find the quote now). He never seemed to do anything selfish, foolish, or wrong. I felt this novel didn’t really know what it was, and that feeling lingered throughout. Was it an Army v Indians frontier adventure? A romance (there was more than enough gentle romantic language for it to qualify)? A social commentary?

The film made from this book (which originally started life as a speculative screenplay, which may explain the fairly simple style of writing) won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture (first Western film to win since 1931), Best Director and Best Sound. Sounds like I need to add that to my LoveFilm request list!

Additional information:
Copy from Bookmooch.
Publisher: Anchor Books, 184 pages (paperback)
Order Dances with Wolves from Amazon*
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The Piano Tuner – Daniel Mason – 5/10

Historical Fiction March 5, 2013 1 Comment

“Edgar Drake, Piano Tuner, Erards-a-Speciality, put the letter down on his desk. An 1840 grand is beautiful, he thought, and he folded the letter gently and slid it into his coat pocket. And Burma is far.”

piano tuner

This bizarre but well-dreamt tale of a timid piano tuner who is summoned into the service of His Majesty in order to travel to Burma and tune a piano for an enigmatic and eccentric British officer in the Shan States of Burma carries the reader from 19th century London (remarkably changed and yet the same as today), through the Red Sea, past India and into Burma. Once there, he is captivated by the fragile peace, the Doctor’s true motives, and the beautiful woman who travels at his side…

For the first 250 pages, this was an excellent novel. Mason sets up the trip well – the disorganised piano tuner, his patient wife a little nervous about his departure, the odd visits to the War Office – and then the epic journey on sea and land, punctuated by letters from the Doctor whose piano he will tune. Drake is an odd, timid character, who slowly flowers under the hot Burmese sun. The mix of Carroll, Khin Myo and Drake makes for 100 pages of clever and sensitive dialogue once Drake reaches Mae Lwin. The adventures of getting the piano away on a raft and the various sojourns into the nearby wilderness are funny and richly descriptive respectively.

The end of the book put me right off it – much like The Great Gatsby, the ending felt rushed and tacked on a bit disjointedly. Not dissimilar to Dances with Wolves, once the conversion has happened, the attempts to go back go badly. In addition, we are treated to long passages explaining the historical context, the necessity of which I’m not disputing, but they were fairly dry.

Maybe best to stay away from this one unless you’re a big fan of the period? If you’ve read this and disagree with my half-and-half verdict, I’d be very interested to hear it in the comments below.

Additional information:

Copy from unknown source

Publisher: Picador, 348 pages (paperback)

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Lavender Lies – Susan Wittig Albert – 5/10

Comfort Reading, Thriller February 21, 2013 Leave a comment

“Damn it. This is my wedding. Why can’t the week be normal?”

lavender lies

After I discovered Thyme of Death, I went a little overboard and tried to get the whole China Bayles series – I ended up with one paperback and two audio downloads. This was the paperback… Eminently readable (this was one of 2 1/2 books I read on New Year’s Eve, content on the chaise longue outside my uncle’s caravan at Tuross), yet missing something in that fantastic idea collection of the first book.

So China Bayles has quit her toxic lawyering in Houston for Mean Nasty Companies and retired to a little place called Pecan Springs where she runs a herb shop and her shop-neighbour is a crazy new Age lady called Ruby, and they are about to open a joint tea room. Local real estate mogul found dead. Most residents think “Good riddance”, but it transpires rather quickly that Mr. Coleman was having a number of affairs and was blackmailing city council members for their support on a dodgy land investment deal. And then a few more bodies pile up…Oh and China is planning her wedding (at last) to McQuaid, acting chief of police, so the case needs to be wrapped up by Saturday otherwise China’s honeymoon is going to get derailed.

I love a single lady investigator, and I’ve raved about the first book in this series; something in this one left me underwhelmed. It might have been that there was too much side chatter and not enough actual case; Ruby seems to have got even more mad and tipped over into caricature territory, and Wittig Albert is a little heavy-handed with the emotional preaching (China fiiiiiiiiiiiiinally gets over her issues with her mother).

That all notwithstanding, there are any number of red herrings, I didn’t guess the bad guy, China’s life is quite amusing to read about, Ruby does provide a lot of amusement and China does a nifty amount of sleuthing in a rather clever manner.

It’s a decent detective story, it’s just not as good as the first one in the series was.

Additional information:
Copy from Bookmooch.
Publisher: Berkley Prime Crime, 297 pages (paperback)
Order Lavender Liesfrom Amazon*
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The Lawgiver – Herman Wouk – 9/10

Modern Masters January 31, 2013 1 Comment

“God was right about Adam: for a man to live alone is not good. I can’t spare a rib.”

lawgiver

Herman Wouk (yes, that Herman Wouk) has been trying to write a novel about Moses for fifty years. As he finally sits down to start, Hollywood comes hurtling into his life; an eccentric billionaire will bankroll a film about Moses if Wouk will approve the script by unknown ex-Jew Margolit Solovei. Margo’s desperation to land the job puts her back in contact with a high school sweetheart and through him, commences a sweet and much-needed confidance with a literary professor. Throw in a naive Australian sheep farmer and a mad English agent; yet somehow romance and creativity prevail over absurdity.

This is really a character study in the somewhat polarised and distorted film world. Margo is a fantastic creation – passionate about her work yet insecure, craving the approval of her father, mentor and idols, yet perfectly happy to throw multiple spanners into works. The novel is tightly cast; no one is extraneous and all contribute to both plot and humour. Possibly my favourite character is gentle-natured Perry Pines, accidentally thrown into the whirlwind of Hollywood, yet clinging stubbornly to the farmland of his youth (“Crooked Creek Farm”).

The epistolatory/”collection of evidence” style of writing is one which I’ve only come across a few times before – it worked very well in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, and spectacularly in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, while I wasn’t a huge fan of A Visit from the Goon Squad. Suffice to say, the book’s got to be quirky before you can think about using this method. Anyhow, it works here – various voices are developed without that inconvenience of having all your characters in one place, or justifying lengthy monologues/stream-of-consciousness.

Similarly, the technique of the author writing himself into the text as a character is both bizarre and gives him an auto-biographical mouthpiece; his anxiety at running out of time is palpable, as is his deep devotion to his wife of 65 years. In a sense, this has aspects of an open love letter to BSW in the same way that The End of Your Life Book Club is an open eulogy. The humour is strong without being forced – I was safe to read this while having my hair cut (no laugh out loud moments) but plenty of little chortles.

I found the deep-running Jewishness at once bizarre and intriguing, isolating, yet with the footnotes, captivating. This is really a novel about being Jewish, as well as being in the film industry (or a reclusive author, or sheep farmer…). I suspect that Jewish readers might find it overly simplistic or even a little insultingly stereotypical, but I’m not Jewish so I can’t judge.

Now I have to read Marjorie Morningstar.

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The Confession – John Grisham – 8/10

Thriller January 30, 2013 Leave a comment

“The prosecution’s theory of guilt had been based in part on the desperate hope that one day, someone, somewhere would find Nicole’s body”\

confession

A murderer confesses to a minister. A wrongly convicted man is headed for the death chamber. Can justice prevail?

Grisham is pounding on his social justice soapbox loudly with this one: we hit capital punishment, race relations and church bureaucracy. He’s back to his Street Lawyer activism by writing (I think, anyway; it might all be a ploy to sell more copies). And yet there is a sad despondency to it all; nothing really changes. Without wanting to have spoilers, it doesn’t turn out as well as one might hope, and the epilogue suggests that nothing will ever really change.

Grisham is back to writing memorable characters and in The Confession he has two “good guys” worth talking about (my other favourite Grishams had one very strong lead - The Rainmaker, The Street Lawyer, The Testament): Robbie Flak and Keith Schroeder. Robbie is brilliantly combative and tender at once; it is clear that the family of the wrongly accused are very close to his heart, but I wouldn’t want to be a politician in his cross-hairs. Schroeder is the opposite – a softly spoken Kansas church minister with a litany of home commitments, who finds his calling in helping a self-confessed murderer and rapist cross state borders to stop misguided justice’s wheels.

As in The Testament there is no shortage to our comic cast of ridicule; Reena Yarber is one of the truest, least self-aware mountains of hypocrisy I’ve ever come across in literature. That she is prepared to exhaust her family and friends to fuel the spiral of her attention-seeking grief makes her eventual mockery on television cruelly suitable. And as for Boyette – no attempts to redeem him from his sleazy, filthy existence are made, he just trundles along being as disgusting as a cloud of noxious cigarette smoke.

The pace drags a little in the build-up: will Boyette go south or won’t he? The race riots are over-built (although still powerful) and there’s too much time spent in the governor’s office. Otherwise, the plot works well – and I was surprised that the book reached a fully fleshed-out conclusion well after the climax, an unfortunately rare occurrence in thrillers.

If you felt Grisham lost his way with Playing for Pizza and The Painted House, he’s back on the road with this one.

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The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D – Nichole Bernier – 8/10

Comfort Reading October 31, 2012 1 Comment

“She had a fleeting thought of the things that had not happened – a self-detonating martyr, Chris’s burned wallet returned to her by the embassy – and wondered if things would ever be simple again, a trip just a trip a sound on the porch.”

The key to this novel is whether you can ever really know what someone else thinks of you – or whether you can ever really know them at all. Elizabeth has died in a plane crash and left her life’s journals to her best friend Kate rather than to devastated husband and now single dad-of-three Dave. Dave’s peeked and found a man’s name, not his own, and is pretty grumpy about it. Kate takes the trunk of journals on holiday with her family for the summer and becomes absorbed in the history of her friend, discovering that things were not at all as they appeared.

Elizabeth is a real piece of work (in a crazy but good way) – but I suppose she has to be or this wouldn’t be much of a book. Kate strikes me as much more ploddy and calm, but then Elizabeth writes about how her friend took down some precious comments in the playground, or Kate  recounts moments in fast-paced kitchens – so I suppose self-image is under consideration here too. I love the idea of learning about a person through their journals – it’s so honest and unflinching and unfiltered. Kate discovers lots of things she had no idea about, realising that maybe Elizabeth wasn’t just the perfect housewife she appeared to be, but had struggled with grief and solitude and a career behind the scenes.

Bernier writes at length and often and with real emotion about the struggle of a mother – whether to go back to work or not, how to balance her own needs with those of her children and husband. Fear is also a recurring theme – the novel is set in “the nervous summer after 9/11″ and Kate is constantly scared of terrorism. Or disease. Or fire. Or anything really, she’s just afraid. These themes are some of the best parts of this book; Bernier approaches them from a number of angles and puts her characters in difficult situations to test out their responses.

As with other books I’ve read recently about women, the men are a little flat and predictable. Don’t go back to work. We don’t need the money. The kids need you. Or do go back. Whatever. I don’t care if you’re worried that I’m travelling in Bali and Jakarta and Cambodia. Don’t mess up my memories of my dead wife. Have another kid. Don’t tell me when you might have cancer. I just felt that Bernier made them much less intricate than Kate and Elizabeth so that they could cause actions by the women, but not make any real contribution to the plot themselves.

Lastly, the setting – how are there this many idyllic islands in the US that I didn’t know about? Other novels with islands: Love Anthony, Blackberry Winter, Snow Falling on Cedars. Ideally, the protagonists should have a part of the island that is little known, not overrun with tourists. There must be seclusion but also neighbourliness. Is this a thing over the pond? I’m a little flummoxed because it seems a bit twee. Anyway, it’s all pretty and serene and relaxing.

I don’t seem to have justified an 8/10 rating here. Put in this way – I cracked it open about 4.30 on Friday. At 6.10 I looked up, a bit choked up.

Additional information:

Blackberry Winter – Sarah Jio – 8/10

Comfort Reading October 25, 2012 Comments: 4

“Your sentimentality about weather is adorable, but don’t get too excited. I’m still wondering how I’m going to write six thousand words on snowmen.”

In 1933, Vera Ray finished her night shift at the Olympic Hotel and stepped out into an unexpected May snowstorm. Arriving home, she found her three-year-old son Daniel missing – and his teddy bear lying in the snow. Nearly eighty years later, another May blizzard sets reporter and newly bereaved mother Claire an assignment. Can she find out what happened to Daniel all those years before?

There’s a small taste of mystery here, with a break-in and an inconclusive coroner’s verdict, but mostly this is an investigation in the context of a marriage in trouble, interspersed with moments from the past to keep the reader interested if not better informed than our sleuthing protagonist. High society is under the microscope, as is Depression-era poverty and life as a single mother in the 30′s.

Vera is a lovely character – determined, loving, resolute; and broken by the disappearance of her son. Claire is charmingly fallible and ill-at-ease in her husband’s social circle. Top marks go to the best friends – Caroline and Abby are both no-nonsense, fun-loving and capable of spurring both the more demure heroines into a bit of action when necessary.

The novel is very firmly set in Seattle – I’ve never been, but I felt well grounded there. And now I know that Pike Place is a market and not just a Starbucks brand! There was some beautiful writing about Puget Sound and Bainbridge Island, and I’d be keen to see some of the places in the book if I ever make it to Seattle.

In its structure, this really reminded me of Russian Winter which I read earlier this year and very much enjoyed – the young woman digging secrets out of the past, intertwined with the young woman several decades ago who suffered a change of fortune. If you enjoyed that, read this, and vice versa.

A few tiny criticisms:

- I felt the men were generally undercooked. Ethan has a couple of odd-but-convenient-for-the-plot changes of heart, Dominic was a bit too nice, Sven was quite an interesting character but not developed as much as he might have been.

- I was a bit fed up with Claire by the end; she had become quite selfish and self-indulgent (admittedly, she’d had a rough year).

- The unexpected ending (which was delightful) then dragged a bit, or became too sentimental as they go to the old apartment – I wanted something with a bit more snap to it.

Having said all of that, it is a beautiful book with a solid but not gruesome mystery, and a complicated protagonist. Definitely worth checking out.

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The End of Your Life Book Club – Will Schwalbe – 10/10

Non-fiction October 8, 2012 Comments: 4

‘That’s ok, I have a copy,’ I told her, which was, in fact, true. There are certain books that I mean to read and keep stacked by my bedside. I even take them on trips. Some of my books should be awarded their own frequent flier miles, they’ve travelled so much. I take these volumes on flight after flight with the best of intentions and then wind up reading anything and everything else (SkyMall! Golf Digest!). I’d brought Crossing to Safety on so many trips and returned it to my bedside unread so many times that it could have earned at least one first-class ticket to Tokyo on Japan Airlines.

Ultimately sad, in that no cancer-defying miracle is forthcoming, but also uplifting in that Schwalbe had so long to come to terms with his mother’s imminent passing and to celebrate his mother’s life. Part book club record, part memoir of his own life, predominantly memoir for and homage to his extraordinary mother, a woman deeply committed to the needs of those less fortunate. It is obvious that Schwalbe had great love and great respect for his indomitable mother, and is truly grateful for the opportunity to share a beloved activity with her – and the opportunities for difficult conversations that the books provided. In a sense, the memoir will chronicle and assist Mary Anne’s legacy of libraries in Afghanistan and refugee camps in Cambodia, of refugees in Liberia and Pakistan and Thailand. This is (between books) the story of a woman who was ground-breaking and revolutionary in a quiet, mild-mannered way.

Schwalbe’s own life is perhaps less remarkable in events of his own making, but there is an untold story here – he walked away from a very successful career in publishing to “follow his bliss”. Throughout, his humility (inherited no doubt from the formidable Mary Anne) lets only a little of his personal achievements shine through – as relentlessly as Mary Anne refused to focus on her pain and suffering, so Will shines the spotlight back to his mother and their shared literary experiences.

All of that aside; the books. I slowed my own reading of this by making a note of works as they were mentioned – I wanted to look up a large number of them when I got back to an internet connection. It was only when I got to the end of the book that a clever editor had considerately put a list there! So if you read this, don’t worry about making notes as you go along. I wondered, a number of times, quite how Mary Anne, with her enormous programme of humanitarian work and commitments, had time to read so much. But then people look at me askance when I say I’m taking a book a day on a holiday, which I don’t understand, so I shouldn’t doubt another bibliophile’s capacity.

Will and Mary Anne read extensively, thematically (although that, perhaps, accidentally), thoroughly and resolvedly. There was always another book to surprise me (that they read and loved The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was both shocking and pleasing), another book which sounded daunting and impenetrable and an absolute must-read. Their love for literature is very clear, and their willingness to learn from the great (and not great) works of culture is admirable. Each chapter is named for a work that one of them was reading and some lesson that they learned from that work, or a difficult conversation that needed to be had. Schwalbe writes at just the right level about the books – most works get between a few sentences and a few paragraphs, but never more than that. There is a chapter of Tolkien vs. C S Lewis, but that is also mostly about the childhood of the Schwalbe brothers.

As one might expect, The End of Your Life Book Club prompted me to think about my own shared reading experiences, but that’s fodder for another post.

Additional information:
Copy kindly provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
Publisher: Two Roads, 352 pages (hardback).
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When It Happens To You – Molly Ringwald – 8/10

Current Affairs October 3, 2012 Comments: 5

“It seemed to Greta that Theresa was one of those girls who spent all of her time being an imposition while obviously trying not to be an imposition. Almost everything Theresa said or did broadcast the message ‘I won’t take it for myself. You’ll have to give it to me.’”

Molly Ringwald’s debut novel is described as a novel in stories and is really a short story collection in which the characters recur from one story to another – it reminded me of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad, which I disliked for its self-important and experimental nature. I much prefer Ringwald’s model, in which the characters are recurring although only tenuously, but time marches forwards rather than jumping about all over the place the way it did in Goon Squad.

Without the writing ever being spectacular or showy, Ringwald repeatedly pinpoints moments of life with heartrending accuracy – Greta’s desire to wear something a bit more flattering in case there are photos, Betty’s grief still being so deep that she pours an extra cup of tea even though her husband hasn’t been there to drink it in seven years. She writes with elegance about ageing and aimlessness, about a search for purpose and what happens when someone with extraordinary drive channels it in an unsuitable direction.

The heavy focus on relationships and adultery is perhaps to be expected in a novel about betrayal, although it does get pretty depressing. The chapters vary in strength, but that might be because a given reader will empathise with certain characters but not others. This is very much a women’s book – the men are generally negatively characterised (philandering, confused or dead).

Worth a read; I found it engrossing and elegant, if somewhat disheartening.

Side note: Molly Ringwald, author, is also Molly Ringwald, teenage star of films such as The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink. Which I’m glad I didn’t know before I read the book, because I think I would have judged the writing more harshly.

Copy kindly provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 237 pages (hardback).
Order When it Happens to You from Amazon*
* this is an affiliate link – I will be paid a small percentage of your purchase price if you use this link, which goes towards give-aways and site hosting
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