Library Monday on a Tuesday, and Some Other Stuff

My library trip this week only yielded one book: The Reading Promise: My Father and the Books We Shared. I'd put this on hold because some of my fondest memories from my childhood involve picking out two books before bedtime, then sitting on my mom's lap while she read them to me. I had quite a few favorites that I'd heard so many times that I could tell when Mom skipped a part!

I'm in a little bit of a funk today, probably because of my busy weekend. On Saturday I helped Adam host a picnic for a tennis league he's trying to get started up. What we did not realize, unfortunately, was that Saturday was the boys' high school state tennis championships, so the turnout wasn't quite what we'd hoped. We still had a good time, though, and we have enough hot dogs to last us for approximately the rest of our lives. After that, we took a windy 13-mile bike ride. We'd planned to go further, but we were both pretty tired so we decided to head home early.

On Sunday, we spent about six or seven hours on yard work. The forecast called for storms so we were only going to work until it started raining, but it never started raining. We did get quite a bit done, but I was exhausted when it got dark and we finally came inside.

On Monday, we woke up early to take a bike ride. We were going to ride about thirty miles south, grab a bite to eat in another town, then head back. I figured the ride would take about seven or eight hours, including lunch.

However, as soon as we started riding south down our street I could tell that the wind was going to be wicked, and I wasn't wrong. I checked my phone during one of our many rest stops and saw that the wind was blowing at a constant 20-25 MPH with gusts up to 40 MPH. I'm pretty sure I felt some of those gusts--there were times when I probably could have gone faster if I'd gotten off my bike and walked. We averaged about 7 MPH for much of the trip and the 30-mile ride ended up taking five hours, including rest stops.

We shared a big order of boneless chicken wings for lunch, then headed home. The ride back was pretty nice, although it would have been better if we hadn't been so tired from the first part of our trip. We were able to coast quite a bit at around 20 MPH with the wind at our backs. The ride back only took about 2.5-3 hours. In total, we were gone for almost ten hours.

Anyway, this is all to say that today I can't quite muster the energy to do much of anything. Also contributing to my reading ennui might be the fact that I finished Julie Orringer's The Invisible Bridge last night. It was quite an intense reading experience--I'll write more about it tomorrow, but now I'm having trouble deciding what to read next. Tomorrow is Day 1 of the Books I Should Have Read By Now Challenge, so maybe that will get me on a roll again.

The Greater Journey

I got a new book in the mail today--The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris by David McCullough. I've had this one on pre-order for quite awhile. I saw David McCullough speak at the National Book Festival once and have been a fan ever since, though I haven't read as many of his books as I should have. This one looks especially intriguing. I hope I can dig into it soon, but I've got a few books I need to finish first.

Challenge Update

For the rest of the year, I'm planning to use my Thursday posts to update my progress with the Books I Should Have Read By Now challenge. The challenge itself hasn't started yet, but I'm mulling over my list of books. Last time I chose my books for June, so now I'm going to list some of the books I'm thinking about for July and August.

July
The Great Gatsby. I really cannot believe that I haven't read this one yet. I have a beautiful edition that's been sitting on my shelf for years. This also appeared recently on a list of 20 classic novels that can be read in one sitting, which will make it ideal for July because I'll be spending about a quarter of the month riding my bike across the state of Iowa. I don't think I'll do much reading during that week ;)

Jitterbug Perfume. I picked this one up when we went to New Orleans in January because part of it takes place in New Orleans. It's outside of my literary comfort zone, but I read the first few pages before I bought it and was intrigued. Also, several people have told me that I should read something by Tom Robbins, which I have not yet done.

Daughter of Time. I promised my mom I'd read this one in July so she can borrow it. Josephine Tey is one of my favorite writers and the only reason I haven't read this one yet is because my list of unread Teys is dwindling. I can't save it forever, though.

August
This Side of Paradise. I picked this one up on the bargain table at my local bookstore recently and would like to read it before it's been on my shelf for as long as The Great Gatsby! 

The Warden. I've read and enjoyed some of Anthony Trollope's longest novels--He Knew He Was Right, Can You Forgive Her?, and The Way We Live Now--but for some reason I've never been able to read more than a couple chapters of this one. I'm going to give it another go because I've heard that the rest of this series is excellent.

Kristin Lavransdatter (Tiina Nunally translation). My other two choices for August are short because I want to tackle this behemoth. I bought this edition at one of my favorite bookstores in DC, which closed a few months afterwards. This trilogy has been on my TBR list for around ten years. Wow, just typing that makes me feel old. It's definitely past time to read it.

I have several other books in mind for this challenge and reserve the right to switch things up a bit. My only read guideline is that, with the exception of July, I'd like to cross at least one really long book off my list each month.

What I'm Reading

I'm still working on Berlin Noir. It's good, but intense. After I finished the first novel in the volume--March Violets--I decided that I needed a break before reading the next volume. So I picked up The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer, which is also, in part, about the mistreatment of Jews prior to World War II, except this time in Paris. Some break from pre-war Berlin! I'm on a real roll with books that take place before and during World War II, but so far they've all been excellent and I'm not complaining.

I also started listening to the Audible recording of Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson. It's pretty good so far, but the audiobook narrator reads so slowly that I have my iPod set on the "faster" setting for audiobooks and it still seems slightly slow. I've had to rewind a few times because my attention wanders. Other than that, though I think the narrator has a great voice. I've been trying to stick with housecleaning while I listen to this one because there's less to distract my attention.

Also, I started reading this week's issue of The New Yorker on my Kindle last night. I mostly read The New Yorker for the essays, but this week's short story, which is about a family's visit to M&M World in Times Square, is excellent and seems to be available free online right now.

Challenge: Books I Should Have Read by Now

So I was thinking to myself that a reading challenge would really hit the spot right about now. I like reading challenges because they help me structure my reading and give me the motivation to read books I've been neglecting. So I googled "reading challenges," thinking that I'd only find ones that started in January and that I probably wouldn't officially join since those are already five months in. Much to my surprise, I found this one that looks perfect for me and isn't starting until June 1! It's hosted by Gabriel Reads and I'm joining at the Voracious Reader level (three books/month).

In June, I plan to read The Pickwick Papers, which I've started a couple times but haven't finished; Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon by Jane Austen; and Lost Illusions by Balzac.

I'm thinking about some Margaret Atwood, Edith Wharton, Josephine Tey, Anthony Trollope, and Anthony Powell for the rest of the year, among others. I'll need to peruse my bookshelves....

Library Monday

On my weekly trip to the library, I picked up these books:

When We Were Strangers by Pamela Schoenewaldt, Early Novels and Stories by William Maxwell, Novels 1926-1929 by William Faulkner, The Long Song by Andrea Levy, and The War for Late Night by Bill Carter. I picked up the Faulkner because, as I mentioned in this post, I saw so many people comparing Jon Clinch's Finn to his early novels; and the Bill Carter book because my husband may be the world's biggest Conan O'Brien fan so I was, by association, very absorbed in the NBC late-night fiasco a year and a half ago.

I'm currently reading Berlin Noir from my previous trip to the library. It's three novels in one volume and I'm about  the first novel, but so far it's pretty good. It's an appropriate follow-up to In the Garden of the Beasts because it takes place in Berlin during roughly the same time frame, so I'm picking up on more of the cultural references than I would have if I hadn't read it first.

Finn by Jon Clinch

From the publisher:

Finn sets a tragic figure loose in a landscape at once familiar and mythic. It begins and ends with a lifeless body–flayed and stripped of all identifying marks–drifting down the Mississippi. The circumstances of the murder, and the secret of the victim’s identity, shape Finn’s story as they will shape his life and his death.

I have mixed feelings about this book. Although it was brutal, the language was so beautiful that I had to read several sections more than once. You can open it to just about any page to find an example of this, such as this passage from page 52 (hardcover edition):

As he chews, methodical as some old ruminant, these baked-black berries beneath the latticework of their pale and tender crust speak also of innocence undisturbed, of childhoods spent around tables like this and around others less elevated and bountiful, of secrets buried beneath time and earth and flowing water; and even in the forced absence of whiskey a vision passes before his eyes unbidden not of snakes or of spiders but of the turgid Mississippi beneath his window on the Illinois side crossed and recrossed with a cumulative ghostly weavework of fishing boats' accidental paths and steamboats' cautious trajectories achurn with white foam beneath which and supporting all lies dark water and darker history.

It's been ages since I last read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (henceforth referred to as Huck), but this book has made me want to reread it, especially the scenes that appear in both books. The mood of Finn, though, is completely different from that of Huck, partly because Huck is narrated in the first-person from the point of view of a child while Finn is narrated in the third-person from the point of view of a cruel adult. Finn also contains detailed descriptions of violence and murder. If you're queasy about that sort of thing, this might not be the book for you.

So if you enjoy poetic writing that demands to be read slowly and then reread, and if you can stomach graphic descriptions of violence and murder, read this book.

Also try:

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the first book I should list here for obvious reasons!

More than once, Finn reminded me of Cold Mountain. The last paragraph I wrote about Finn holds true for Cold Mountain as well: poetic writing, graphic descriptions of brutality.

I haven't read any Faulkner (yet), but I've read in other reviews that Finn is also evocative of some of his early novels in particular.

Review: The Vacation by Polly Horvath

NOTE: This is a review I wrote a several months ago about a young adult book, The Vacation by Polly Horvath. This review may contain spoilers.
 
Twelve-year-old Henry's mother decides to become a Mormon missionary in Africa (despite the fact that she is not Mormon) and drags Henry's long-suffering, maxim-spouting father along for the ride. They leave Henry behind with is two aunts, Pigg and Magnolia, who are not terribly fond of children and who decide to pull Henry out of school and take him along with them on a cross-country road trip. While they are gone, they learn that Henry's mother has become lost in the jungle after chasing after monkeys and his father has contracted malaria while searching for her. For his part, Henry spends several days floating with an autistic boy through alligator-infested swamps in Florida while his aunts (and even the Green Berets!) frantically search for him.

Obviously these events sound, and are, completely far-fetched, but Henry is such a realistic and endearing protagonist that what really matters is not so much the lack of realism of his and his family's adventures, but his reactions to them and his astute observations about the characters they meet. And how could you not love a kid who doesn't mind going anywhere as long as he has a big pile books? In one of my favorite scenes, Pigg and Magnolia take Henry to a bookstore in a mall to buy him some books and tell him to "buy some books that are thick and engrossing.... And cheap." Here's another passage that made me laugh out loud. The family has just stopped at a farm house in Kansas, and the farmer is telling them a story about a neighbor lady, Mrs. Grady, who wouldn't stop feeding their horse inappropriate foods, such as spaghetti and french fries:

"So the next day we see her car pull up on the way to work, same as always, and we see her drop something from a bucket onto the ground and the horse is eating it, so we go over to have a look-see and it weren't spaghetti, were it, Jim?"

"Well, what were, uh, was it?" asked my mother, who was getting into the story big time, I could tell.

"It was french fries," said Jim.

"Now, can a horse eat those?" asked my mom.

"No, Katherine, they sure can't," said Bud. "You're right on the mark about that. They sure can't. And the thing of it was, I thought Mrs. Grady could kind of extrapolate, you know. About the spaghetti. Figuring like, no spaghetti, then no french fries either."

"But it seemed like she could not," said Jim.

"So it seemed. Wasn't much for extrapolation," said Bud.

I'm also going to quote the book's final two paragraphs here, just because I can identify so deeply with the simple pleasures of those long, warm, lazy Midwestern summer days:

Nobody said anything. We were still glowing from the unexpected baseball, from the long perfect day and all that ice cream. There was a dreamy twilight haze as the sun lowered toward the cornfields, as if the air had trapped the light and thickened with it. There was nothing making noise for miles but the peaceful buzz of crickets and the sound of our car parting the stillness. I don't know. I don't know. How can you not love it all?

And then we drove endlessly, endlessly over the gentle crests. A sign said: Welcome to Iowa.

I highly recommend this book!

New Books!

Something arrived for me in the mail today:

One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn't belong....

I usually buy books for one of two reasons: either it's a really big book and the library only has a hardcover edition, which is too uncomfortable for me to hold; or the library doesn't carry the book. Three of these books fall into the first category and one falls into the second. Also, I was persuaded to buy the rest of the Song of Fire and Ice series, at least the ones that are available in paperback, because of a promotion (I already own the first one).

The Rothfuss and Jenkins books have joined my collection because they were recommended by people whose taste I trust. There are a few people out there who can recommend a book and I'll be 95% sure that I'll love it.

Isn't that a pretty cover? Plus this edition has an introduction by Hilary Mantel!

Review: In the Garden of the Beasts by Erik Larson

From the publisher:

The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history.

A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the “New Germany,” she has one affair after another, including with the suprisingly honorable first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person testimony, her father telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home. Dodd watches with alarm as Jews are attacked, the press is censored, and drafts of frightening new laws begin to circulate. As that first year unfolds and the shadows deepen, the Dodds experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romance—and ultimately, horror, when a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler’s true character and ruthless ambition.

It’s a question that’s obvious in hindsight, though it never occurred to me until I read this book: where was America's ambassador to Germany during Hitler’s rise? Was he aware of the dangers posed by Hitler and the Nazi party? If so, why didn’t he do anything? Erik Larson’s answer to these questions is a gripping and intense account of the political climate in prewar Berlin. Although I knew what was coming, I kept hoping that President Roosevelt, the State Department, and other officials in the United States would take Dodd’s unease seriously and heed his warnings about the danger of allowing Hitler to continue in his rise to power. Of course they didn’t, and without support from his colleagues and superiors, Dodd had little hope of stopping Hitler himself.

This book provided me with a deeper understanding of just how Germany allowed the Nazi phenomenon and its delusional antisemitism to become such a powerful force. I also enjoyed Larson’s descriptions of prewar Berlin with its beautiful parks, promenading couples, and extravagant dinner parties in an atmosphere of increasing terror of saying or writing the wrong thing, not saluting at the right time, or even failing to stop and watch a parade. This is an excellent book for anyone who’s interested in the history of World War II or history in general.

Also try:
Night (Elie Wiesel) and The Diary of Anne Frank are must-read accounts of the horror of the Nazi regime that everyone should read.

The Devil in the White City (Erik Larson) is another excellent book by Larson.

No Ordinary Time (Doris Kearns Goodwin) is an absorbing biography of the Roosevelts (Franklin and Eleanor).

Or if you prefer fiction:
The Plot against America (Philip Roth) is a dark alternate history of what might have happened in the United States if Charles Lindbergh had been president.

The Book Thief (Markus Zusak) is an incredibly sad but uplifting story about a young girl living in Nazi Germany. This book is usually shelved in the Young Adult section in American libraries and bookstores, although I believe in Europe it's published as general fiction (i.e., not targeted to young adults or children). It's definitely dark in places and may be inappropriate for some age groups.

The Light Years and other Cazelet Chronicles (Elizabeth Jane Howard) are wonderful, semi-autobiographical novels set in England between 1937 and the end of World War II.

Library Loot

I stopped at the library today to return some books and pick up a couple that were on hold for me. Here's my stack, a relatively short one this time:

I reserved In the Garden of Beasts quite awhile ago, as soon as I noticed it on a list of books that were going to be published this spring. I listened to the audio version of The Devil in the White City several years ago and loved it, though I haven't read any more of Erik Larson's books since. I do have Thunderstruck on my bookshelf but just haven't picked it up yet. In the Garden of Beasts is about a subject that fascinates me; the subtitle is Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin. Can't wait to dig into this one!

I doubt that Berlin Noir would have caught my interest if I hadn't heard Nancy Pearl mention it on the most recent Nancy Pearl Book Reviews Podcast. I've had very good luck with Nancy Pearl recommendations (including, most recently, The Magicians and Mrs. Quent by Galen Beckett) and this one sounded like it would appeal to me. It's another one about Nazi Germany. It's sort of a coincidence that I checked out two books about Nazi Germany on the same day, but sort of not really because I tend to be drawn to books about the World War II era.

Finally, A Fire Upon the Deep by Verner Vinge is slightly outside my usual reading habits, but I was in the mood for some science fiction after finishing Jo Walton's Among Others yesterday, which was a Books on the Nightstand recommendation. I really loved this book about a young girl who is socially awkward but finds solace in books (not that I would know anything about that. Ahem.) Most of her reading material is from the science fiction and fantasy genres. I saw the Vinge on the shelf at the library and remembered that the professor of the science fiction class I took in college mentioned this as a particularly good novel. I made the mistake of looking at reviews online after I got home and seeing that feelings about this book are very mixed, but I'm going to give it a shot anyway. The Goodreads average was just over four stars, so it can't be too bad.

My biggest victory on today's library trip was managing to return twice as many books as I came home with. Anyone who could see my shelves of unread books at home would probably wonder why I even bother going to the library, but I just can't resist picking up a few new-to-me books once in awhile. And hey, it's free!