A Momentary Taste of Being

A book for those who love Paris and the thought of Paris.  John Baxter is a writer who has lived in places all over the world (Australia, England, and the United States, among others) andhas settled in Paris.  The book is a kind of tribute to Paris.  Starting with some personal recollections and experiences--including one fabulous story about a broken door lock on Christmas Eve, Mr. Baxter walks us through the history, literary and otherwise of his part of Paris. The walks are sometimes literal--Mr. Baxter was tapped to replace a particularly dull tour guide for a small writer's gathering.  And sometimes they are metaphorical.  We meet mass murderers, thugs, and literary and artistic celebrities.  If there is one place that the book is lacking, it is in the world of music.  Surprisingly, there is little of it in the book, neither in the streets nor in the historical walks--perhaps not one of those things that Mr. Baxter has on the tip of his ton...

I came from the world of literary criticism.  Much of my original training was learning to read "texts" critically.  I studied the myriad schools and theories of criticism and, in that time, took them quite seriously. With time, one gains perspective--being away from the fire of that intense intellectual crucible allows one the calm and cool use of reason in examining the claims of the various schools.  What I have come to conclude is that literary criticism is an elaborate and sometimes excruciating act of collaborative fiction.  Perhaps that isn't quite the right description--it is a fictional riff on an extant work--a reworking of the elements of the novel, poem, short story, or plan in the fashion of the critic rather than in the fashion of the artist.  It is both less and more than a secondary source.  At times it comes to resemble parody more than it does any analytic work. Why do I refer to it as fiction?  A person (not the author) reads the...

James Renner has produced a couple of books of nonfiction before this, his first novel.  His skill is evident and the novel--a result, at least partially of his own wide reading and his own interest in crime writing is stunning. For the first two thirds of the book we follow the story of David Neff, a writer for an indie newspaper, whose passion for the truth manifests in the investigation of a series of murders that had taken place several years previously in his native Northern Ohio.  (As a side note, it was a pleasure to read of towns and places that I know of but few have ever heard of--Ravenna, Canton, along with Akron, Kent, and Cleveland).  His researches lead directly to the trial of an additional perpetrator and may have indirectly precipitated his wife's death. With the exception of two very odd interludes that presage the third section of the novel, all of this is told in a very straightforward, if fun, time hopping sort of way, with the recounting of a...

from "The People" in China in Ten Words Yu Hua This was a key moment in my life. I had always assumed the light carried farther than human voices and voices carry farther than body heat. But that night I realized that it is not so, for when the people stand as one, their voices carry farther than light and their heat is carried farther still. That, I discovered, is what "the people" means.

In a word, not to keep you in suspense, charming.  A memoir cum travelogue cum cookbook, Ms. Flinn tells the story of leaving corporate America and pursuing her dream of a degree from one of the most prestigious cooking schools in the world. Ms. Flinn tells her adventures while attending all three courses at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris--basic, intermediate, and superior.  Along the way we learn about the Chefs, their moods, their modes, their recipes, their haunts.  We also learn a bit about Paris, a good deal about the school, and a great deal about Ms. Flinn, who sounds like a wonderful person--one both interesting and entertaining to be with. Living in Paris Ms. Flinn plays host to any number of visitors--from one young man who bursts into her apartment to find the bathroom and spend much of the rest of his stay with her recovering from food poisoning picked up in London, to the visitation of two extremely trying young women who allow Kathleen and her husband to ...

Hmmm , I thought to myself as I glanced at the book, A nthony Horowitz, isn't he the author of a whole bunch of YA young spy kinds of things?  And here he is continuing the Sherlock Holmes Opus? It's scary enough when great, well known writers of mystery decide to continue the opus--few of these are entirely successful--most are marginal.  And here is a person I know little--indeed next-to-nothing about presuming to tread on this sacred ground. Well, I'm here to tell you that House of Silk is among the very finest continuations of the Holmes saga.  Perhaps a bit too much Elephants Can Remember , Sleeping Murder, or Curtain --but that's rather a matter of taste.  And to my taste, this was superb.  We start with a mysterious stranger, evidently a Boston thug threatening an Englishman who had only just recently returned from America--and we move on into murder, mayhem, opium dens, and conspiracy in high places to keep entirely hidden the secrets of the ...

Adiga-- Last Man in Tower --12/16/11 ***** Bell-- The Reapers Are the Angels --2/10/11 ***** Bennett-- Pay Me in Flesh --9/12/11 *** Berry-- The Poetry of William Carlos Williams of Rutherford --7/21/11 ***** Blackthorne-- Edge --5/6/11 *** Bohjalian-- The Night Strangers --11/15/11 *** Boyle-- When the Killing's Done --4/29/11 ***1/2 Brockmeier-- The Illumination --5/22/11 **** Castro-- Z is for Zombie -- 2/4/11 *** Cline-- Ready Player One --8/21/11 ***** Connolly-- The Gates --10/27/11 ***** Dashner-- The Death Cure --12/20/11 *** Eugenides--The Marriage Plot--11/23/11 ****1/2 Fisher-- Shockaholic --12/28/11 **** Flew-- There Is a God --1/8/11 ***** Grann-- The Lost City of Z --12/07/11 ***** Hearne-- Hammered --8/15/11 **** Hearne-- Hounded --6/25/11 **** Hearne-- Hexed --7/5/11 **** Henry-- Lime Creek --11/26/11 ***1/2 Hemingway-- The Green Hills of Africa --1/18/11 --abandoned Johnson-- Train Dreams --11/27/11 ***** Kadrey-- Sandman Sli...

One of the blurbs on the back of Mr. Adiga's latest book compares him with Charles Dickens--and perhaps this comparison is more apropos than might seem at first glance.  The White Tiger , Mr. Adiga's first book, won the Man Booker Prize the year it came out. It was a savage indictment of the current regime in India with a sharp look at the cost and benefits of "outsourcing."  One might think about it as the inside story of outsourcing.  Between the Assassinations , a kind of novel in short stories, I have not read.  This third work, is larger in volume and yet somewhat smaller in scope than either of the first two. Mr. Adiga takes us into the lives of the residents of an apartment house that comes to the attention of a building constructor who wants to place on the site new luxury apartments.  The developer offers the people in towers A and B a princely sum for their houses.  Almost all of the residents want to take him up on it.  But there is ...

I have to admit that this short novel came as something of a disappointment.  Perhaps my expectations were set much too high by so many reviewers. Ms. von Le Fort tells the story of the Carmelite Martyrs of Compiegne--seventeen Carmelites who were executed just before the end of the Terror.  She tells the story from the point of view of one who, while desiring most of all martyrdom, is trapped in the martyrdom of the one who escaped. Short, easy to read, but not at all what I expected from a book so highly praised.  It suggests that I need to go back and reread. Or perhaps better, return to the short opera by Fracois Poulenc which the work inspired--"Dialogue of the Carmelites." ***

Sometimes you're browsing through the fiction in the library and for no reason at all a book falls off the shelve and into your hands.  You look into it, evaluating, wondering.  You're caught by a sentence on the first page, or perhaps your eye crosses a paragraph further on in the novel and you're caught. I have many such experiences, but, like most blind dates, they don't work out.  You take them home for a leisurely read and you wonder, "Now what exactly did I see in this book?"  I bring home piles of books every week.  In fact, I am single-handedly responsible for keeping the library funded in my county--I keep those books and other materials moving in and out at a pace defying imagination.  Bring home two bags with thirty potential candidates and wind up returning sixteen of them the next week.  The others age well on my to-be-read shelf, but eventually they too make it back to the library--mostly unread. Michael Zadoorian's book was one s...

I've read the previous memoir, Wishful Drinking and. . . well. . . I suppose enjoyed is not quite the right word for my experience with it--although my recollection of it was enough to make me pick this up when in the library. This continues the story begun in Wishful Drinking and the title refers directly to Carrie Fisher's treatment for near suicidal depression and related psychiatric problems.  While the book does talk about and illuminate this aspect of her life, it doesn't stop there and dwell on things.  Indeed, the most substantial part of this book is a loving and in many ways compassionate memoir of her later life with her famous father Eddie Fisher. I don't follow celebrity news or entanglements, so it came as something of a revelation to me (not of the fireworks and sudden dawn variety) that Elizabeth Taylor was, for some small part of Ms. Taylor's life, the step-mother of Carrie Fisher.  And you all say, "Well, duh!"  Told you I wasn'...

Mr. Dashner rounds out the trilogy begun in The Maze Runners and continued in The Scorch Trials .  These are of the YA genre that seems to have escalated in popularity in recent days--bad adults put young people in serious danger for some perceived good or order in society.  It is understandable why they appeal to young people, because we all remember the times when the adult world was out to subvert us and to harm us "for our own good."  But it does become a trifle tiresome after a while, and this third book of the series bears this out. While the series ends, it doesn't seem finished.  This last book seemed somewhat overlong and rambling without really getting to a critical point.  Mr. Dashner seemed not to know where he wanted to be with the book--Teen Angst or ZA (Zombie Apocalypse--for those not up on the terminology).  As a result, the book seemed a bit of a muddle to me. However, if you've read this far, you'll want to finish out the series, so ...

I should preface the bulk of my comments by saying that I finished this book on the way home from a trip to Austin.  When I completed it my initial impulse was to hurl it across the room.  My secondary impulse was to want to shred--eviscerating it, destroying it page by painful page--to inflict upon it some of the relentless damage it inflicted upon my psyche in the reading of it.  All of which is to say I had a very personal and substantial reaction to it.  If one follows Harold Bloom's notion that great literature "reads the reader" then I am left with the interesting quandary of wondering whether I want to know what it found out in the reading. Crossing to Safety is the chronicle of two couples.  They meet in depression era America in a university setting and the story follows them as one couple, affluent and gracious, welcomes the other couple into their family circle. We see the couples in good times and in bad for each of them--through loss of job and su...

I had read about this book last year when there was a huge amount of hype.  I'm highly allergic to hype--I break-out in all sort of unpleasant spots and rashes.  I stayed far, far away for fear of the hype-allergens. Strolling through the Library looking for books to support my son in his study of the civilizations of Peru, I saw this.  The hype had died down, everything was safe for approach, so I grabbed it off the shelf opened it up and fell in. Fell in completely--so much so that midway through reading I went out and purchased the book.  For those of you who as children read the "lost worlds" novels of Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and most prominently H. Rider Haggard, this is a treat beyond imagining.  It tells the true story of a Amazon explorer who was dedicated to the task of finding the legendary lost city of Z.  Sometimes called El Dorado, sometimes thought to be completely impossible, the Lost city of Z became the personal o...

from Seven Prayers That Can Change Your Life Leonard Felder If you look underneath the cumbersome English phrase "gratefully acknowledge" and just focus on the feeling of the Hebrew words Modeh/Modah, it's almost like the sensation of kvelling , a Yiddish word that means "to feel joy in your entire being." Kvelling expresses a sense of fullness or completeness because something wonderful is happening or because you feel loved and connected to a best friend, a beloved partner, or a child whose joyfulness makes you feel alive. Tonight I am kvelling, and I don't know why.  

In Rashi , Elie Weisel gives us a very brief overview of the life, times and works of one of his spiritual guides and mentors and one of the great Jewish thinkers of all time.  It really is nothing more than a tantalizing glimpse, enough to whet one's appetite for more.  Or, if you're of a mind to become acquainted with a great thinker and scholar, perhaps enough.  Myself, I'd like to read and understand more about this thinker's influence on Judaism and ultimately the world at large, because much of his work was translated into Latin and influenced Medieval thought about the Old Testament. Recommended--****  minus one star for extreme brevity.

An audio excerpt of The Marriage Plot A representative of Macmillan audio was kind enough to send me a link so you can enjoy the opening (perhaps much of the first chapter--I don't recall division) of the book. A great Christmas gift for those interested in serious literature but without as much time as they might like to read--but be warned--very adult content.  You can find it here. I only suggest it because I think this may be one of the books to read this year (please see my earlier review below).

I'm not certain if I will launch seriously into this book, but these two moments only a little apart are amusing. from The Banquet Bug Geling Yan He tries to describe the texture of the delicate flesh, the subtle contact between the meat and this palate and tongue, the slippery sensation it gives when it passes the entrance of the throat, leaving the oral organs in such wonder. But he has no vocabulary for it. Putting together his education with hers, they can barely write a decent letter to their parents without checking a dictionary. **** A neighbor woman yells outside the plastic curtain, asking what's taking them so long and whether they shower hair by hair.  Laughing Dan Dong yells back that he has twelve toe to scour.

So, those of us in the States were exposed (and I use the word with all of its implications) to the New Mass Translation.  For the most part the changes were largely inconsequential--intellectually accurate, but without art--resulting in a Mass that sounds a bit like two lawyer magpies discussing some pretty bauble.  This is directly the result of the usual tin ear demonstrated by the American Bishops in any translation they put foward. I judge the language of the mass by the ability of those serving to read everything as it should be and there are some tortuous and awkward constructions that everyone I saw tripped over. However, there are some very nice restorations.  What I do wish had been restored along with "And with your spirit" is the return of the Priest standing at the head of the congregation and facing the altar with the rest of us.  As it stands now, the way we celebrate mass, the altar stands between the people and the priest and it seems less like t...

In Train Dreams Denis Johnson takes us through the life of a man from near its beginnings until its end--all in less that about 100 pages. The novel is told in a series on non-chronological vignettes and includes things like seeing Elvis Presley's train stopped in its tracks--build the (at the time) largest railroad bridge in the world, having everything one possesses destroyed in a wildfire, and being cursed by a Chinese man who was on his way to a lynching. The novel bears repeated reading to get a sense of the time and the person.  But narrated as it is, it is very much dreamlike in quality--floating, anchored only here and there by incident and event.  The lack of chronological narration is an interesting and effective device for this story.  The language is beautifully wrought and brings the reader very much into the mind of the main character and into the spirit of the time. Highly Recommended *****