Category Archives: Novels

09.25.13
by

RAGTIME, ACROSS THE SOUND FROM GATSBY- MORGAN-FORD AND PRISCA THEOLOGIA

The Great Gatsby, the book and the movie raised my awareness of another pre- Great Depression Era based novel, Ragtime,  by E.L.Doctorow. Written in 1974,  long  after F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby, Doctorow  authored this wonderful novel that with great energy combines reality and fiction , historical figures and imaginary role players,  painting a potent landscape of  society and social change just before the great war.  Doctorow’s images of place and the developing social issues of the decade resonate to this day. The read is total narrative, no dialogue.

images

 

Think of this.  J.P. Morgan, Harry Houdini, Henry Ford, Emma Goldman,  Booker T. Washington, Sanford White, Harry Thaw, Evelyn Nesbit  established in  their historical stations,  interact with Doctorow’s  fictional creations of ragtime pianist Coalhouse Walker, Jr., Tateh, an immigrant Jewish peddler, Sarah, a black single mother, and an affluent and typical suburban American Family living in the comfort of New Rochelle, New York.   Doctorow blends this cross-section of  humanity in a wildly thrilling story, set in  Westchester and Manhattan during the period just prior to World War I

E.L. Doctorow has written a long list of outstanding works including Welcome to Hard Times, The Book of Daniel and The March. All are most deserving of their many honors and outstanding reviews. It is always a good idea to check back in with authors whom you have enjoyed.  In Doctorow’s case the list is full of great choices.

07.18.13
by

PHILIPPA GREGORY-HISTORICAL FICTION AT ITS BEST

The Other Boleyn Girl, written by Philippa Gregory and published in 2001, is among the very best novels written about Tudor England and King Henry VIII.  If you have not read this great novel place it on your must read list.  This true story about Mary Boleyn, the younger sister of Henry the VIII’s second wife Anne Boleyn, is remarkable in many ways.   The book enlightens the reader not only of the history of the period but it portrays an accurate glimpse into how women, even in their teens, were used as pawns for both power and pleasure.

images

 

 

This is the story of Mary, the first daughter in the Boleyn family to be offered to a King in return for the hope wealth and power. So driven was this family that when Mary’s star began to fade in Henry’s ardor , sister Anne pushed her aside to eventually become Queen Anne.  Although you may know how that romance ended, believe me, the writing of Philippa Gregory will  capture and fascinate you through the final page. This story of two sisters and a King is also a study of the structure of society in 16th Century England. It is not suprising that Philippa Gregory is a recognized authority on women’s history.

Tudor England was  fascinating and this blog has focused on many enjoyable reads set in that period, including the  great British novelist C.J. Sansom and the Shardlake series. Another wonderful work of historical fiction written of an earlier period, Medieval England, is Anya Seton’s Katherine.

After reading the Other Boleyn Girl I ordered the  2008 movie through Netflix.  The movie does not come close to the book’s more intricate story line and I would strongly suggest that reading the book is a must before watching the film.  Once you have read the book it is worth watching.

 

 

07.08.13
by

New From Jeannette Walls -The Silver Star

I join the millions of  readers who are fans of author Jeannette Walls.  Amazingly, her memoir The Glass Castle , first published in 2005 remains on the New York Times Best Seller List  eight years after its initial publication!  Walls also authored best selling Half Broke Horses, a memoir of  her grandmother Lily Casey Smith.

9781451661507_custom-c08fa0017449530fcf21256215de10bd3b3e6eb9-s2

Her new book, The Silver Star, will likely not reach the status of either The Glass Castle or Half Broke Horses but it certainly qualifies as a good read, easily accomplished in two or three sittings.

In some ways, similar to The Glass Castle, Walls  weaves a story of a dysfunctional mother, acting more like a sibling as opposed to an adult role model. The main characters, two sisters  ages 12 and 15 are essentially left on their own as their mother pursues a constant parade of  greener pastures and  purported life changing opportunities.  When mom is present, the lifestyle is  at best nomadic and always chaotic.

The silver lining in this story comes at the hands of a distant uncle who despite his “old fashion” views creates a safety net for the girls and brings a sense of stability for the first time in their lives.  The book’s title Silver Star beckons the discovery of an unanswered question.

While The Silver Star is not a memoir, Jeannette Walls fills these pages with her life experience of making the best of an imperfect world.

06.12.13
by

DAUGHTER OF FORTUNE-ISABEL ALLENDE

I first became acquainted with novelist Isabel Allende when her 2009 novel Island Beneath The Sea was recommended to me by my daughter.  See my overview  at gordonsgoodreads.com , January, 2013.  Allende is  talented and prolific , having written a dozen novels and three books for young adults. Island Beneath The Sea  is not only a good read but Allende combines a love story with a vivid  picture of events leading to the slave revolution on the great sugar plantations in Dominique , now Haiti.  The story culminates with the great slave migration to the United States, particularly New Orleans.

16527

Ten years prior to Island  Beneath The Sea, Allende published Daughter of Fortune another wonderful tale, this time beginning in Chile where she was raised.  Allende’s uncle Chilean President Salvatore Allende was assassinated in 1974, upon which Allende fled Chile for Venezuela, then moved to the United States.

Like Island, Daughter of Fortune is a complex love story set in the environment of what would  today be called a non-traditional family, the main character having been left as a foundling on the doorstep of prosperous British transplants in Valparaiso, Chile. Allende is generous in her portrait of  nineteenth century life in  this isolated outpost. It is here that her characters  evolve then embark on a journey to the gold fields of California in search of lost love and fortunes .   You will be fascinated with Eliza and even more so with Tao Chi’en.

Isabel Allende is an excellent storyteller, her work is enjoyable, engaging  and with a generous sharing of cultures and history always in the mix. Either of the books will make a good addition to your summer reading. Also by Isabel Allende Ines of my Soul, Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses.

05.20.13
by

DAN BROWN’S INFERNO

The Da Vinci Code, The Lost Symbol and now  Dan Brown’s Inferno, another thrilling novel that will surely fly off the shelves and dominate downloads in the days and weeks ahead.

images

Inferno is art, history, science and a travelogue through Florence and  Venice worthy of being transplanted to the pages of a Fodors Guide.   For fans of Dan Brown, Inferno is so fast paced that the book is a three or four session read, thrilled to follow the familiar exploits of Harvard University professor of symbology  Robert Langdon.

Brown’s multiple short chapter writing style  keeps the reader connected  despite the speed with which the plot evolves.   Fair warning, assume nothing and expect to be deceived again and again as this thriller develops.  Typical of Brown you will never know who is friend or foe until the very conclusion. Paging ahead is forbidden!  You will learn more about Dante Alighieri’s  The Inferno, and the seven rings of Hell than previously imagined and be exposed to Italy’s art and architectural treasures that are alive in the narrative.  Those who have traveled to Florence ,Venice  and Istanbul will be transplanted, imagining the  tale with even greater intensity.

Beyond the expected suspense and surprises, Inferno adds a Transhumanist dimension of  cutting edge scientific technologies that are unimaginable,  calling into question enormous moral and ethical issues in facing  threats to the world’s population. ” You know that nature has always found a way to keep the human population in check–plagues, famines, floods. But let me ask you this–isn’t it possible that nature found a different way this time?”

With the  popularity of The Da Vinci Code , The Lost Symbol, Angels and Demons,   and now Inferno  do not overlook an earlier great Brown novel, Digital Fortress.  Familiar themes and an ever-present ” mystery container” that can wreak havoc on the world. Brown also wrote Deception Point, which I have not read.

When I return to Venice I am convinced I will see Robert Langdon in St. Marks Square and just perhaps,  as the violins play, he will be holding Sienna’s hand.  I hope so!  You will understand.

10.26.12
by

Dragonwyck-Sixty Years Before Fifty Shades of Grey!

Anya Seton’s novel Dragonwyck preceded E L James’ Fifty Shades of Grey by sixty years. However, Seton’s story was prescient of the current runaway best-selling trilogy!

I came upon Dragonwyck after reading Seton’s The Winthrop Women and was quickly drawn to the story of an innocent Connecticut farm girl being catapulted through circumstance into becoming the young wife of the wealthy and dominating patroon of Dragonwyck Manor. The similarities to the Fifty Shades of Grey plot become quickly evident.  Fifty Shades of Grey has Christian and Anastasia, Dragonwyck, Nicholas and Miranda!  Fast cars for Christian and Anastasia, a fine coach and six for Nicholas and Miranda. No bondage and handcuffs in Dragonwyck to be sure, however eighteen year old Miranda Wells quickly learns there is a tremendous price to be paid  for releasing the bonds of hardscrabble New England farm life for an aristocratic lifestyle of limitless wealth as the submissive mistress of Dragonwyck Manor. Dragonwyck emits echos of the great gothic novel Jane Eyre.

Set in the mid-nineteenth century, Dragonwyck begins in Connecticut, then moves to the wealthy estates of the Mid-Hudson region of New York and the social whirl of New York City.  Dragonwyck  is not a historical novel of the scope of The Winthrop Women but it does open to the reader much of the social and economic lifestyles of many of the founding Dutch families of New York as they shared their time between mansions in New York City and their castles on the Hudson. Landed gentry supported by an old world feudal system of subsistence tenant farmers who worked the land.

For further insight into Seton’s The Winthrop Women, see my September blog post. You may also wish to consider Seton’s novel Katherine  for which many overviews are available on-line. It was the most popular of all of her novels and is on my “futures” list.

 

 

 

05.21.12
by

E.M. FORSTER’S HOWARDS END

Howards End, first published in 1906, is E.M. Forster’s fourth novel and quickly placed him among the elite English writers. Indeed, this is a classic English novel! Some patience is advised for those who have not delved into this genre but once the plots and sub-plots are established and the characters evolve this great read unfolds rapidly into hours of enjoyment. The language of the period is rhythmical and you will quickly become accustomed to ” Crane is bringing the motor around.”

Most recently, in large part because of Downton Abby , much of  the focus on English society has been on the aristocracy. In writing  Howards End, Forster is unveiling not the aristocracy but the class warfare in the emerging English middle class, set among those in the mercantile order of  British society.  It is also very clearly exposes the  social  war between men and women over power within the households of the rich, moderately wealthy and the poor.

Forster tells the story through the voices of two sisters, immigrants to London from a well established and sophisticated German family. One has an illicit affair during a summer excursion with  the son within an upwardly mobile English businessman.  The second sister  ends up marrying the father following the death of his wife in a marriage that is more of an arrangement than a love affair. And so Howards End passes through further affairs, children out-of-wedlock, and the resolution of who will inherit Howards End, the generational family country home.

There is a sexual theme throughout the novel but don’t look for Lady Chatterley descriptions or dialogue. In this novel , love and sex is all about impact on ones status in society, nothing physical , with all detail in the imagination.  Forster treats the subject much like Henry James , always there but never explicit.

The late 19th and early 20th Century saw an explosion of great English novelists and E.M. Forster ranks  well among them.  Howards End is listed as 38th among the 100 best novels of the 20th Century. A Room With a View by Forster is ranked 79th. Forster’s final novel, A Passage to India written in 1924, ranks 25th on the Modern Library’s list.

04.29.12
by

NO PULITZER FOR FICTION -DON’T DESPAIR-SONS AND LOVERS PREDATED THE HONOR

Surely there was great disappointment when no winner was chosen for this year’s Pulitzer for fiction. However, considered by many one of the greatest novels written in the 20th Century, D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers never received one either! Published in 1913, it pre-dated the establishment of the awards in 1917 by four years! It would be interesting if the Pulitzer Board created a retroactive category.  In a sense, the Modern Library has done just that by ranking Sons and Lovers the 9th greatest novel of the 20th century. Quite right, quite right indeed!

Though technically a novel, Sons and Lovers is without doubt auto-biographical. D.H. Lawrence  is clearly writing of the struggles of growing up in a dysfunctional family in a poor mining community in England. The mother had married below her class to a husband that turned out to be not much beyond the daily retreat to the local pub with his co-workers.  In the novel, the mother is left with only her son to whom to direct all of her affection and emotion.  She would not let go of  what she perceived as all that remained important in her life.

I opened my Modern Library paperback version of Sons and Lovers and by chance the following paragraph unfolded. You will understand quickly why this great novel, once read, may erase any disappointment over their being no 2012 Pulitzer for fiction.

“Paul and Miriam stood close together, silent and watched…Paul looked into Miriam’s eyes…She was pale and expectant with wonder, her lips were parted, and her dark eyes lay open to him…Lets go, he said…Something made him feel anxious and imprisoned…The two walked in silence…Till Sunday he said quietly and left her and she walked home slowly feeling her soul satisfied with the holiness of the night…Always when he went with Miriam his mother was fretting and getting angry with him…when he walked into the house his mother had been sitting thinking…She could feel Paul being drawn by this girl and she did not care for Miriam…That there was any love growing between him and Mariam, neither of them would have acknowledged…She is one of those who will want to suck a man’s soul out til he has none of his own left.”

This magnificent novel rises to new heights on each page. If you have not read Sons and Lovers I commend it to you now. At 99 years of age it is contemporary and worthy of every accolade and honor that has been bestowed upon the book and its author.  Lawrence’s other better known novels are The Rainbow, Women in Love and of course Lady Chatterley’s Lover.  His last novel was The Virgin and the Gypsy written in 1930.

A footnote. In 1920, the year that Women In Love was published no Pulitzer was given for fiction! Also published in that same year was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise and Sinclair Lewis’  Main Street.  Good company!

04.15.12
by

THE ART OF FIELDING- A MOST WELCOME GUEST BLOG

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
Adult Fiction

                I was honored a few months back when Gordon asked me if I would be a guest blogger on Gordon’s Good Reads. I am, however, a young adult school librarian by trade and as a result I spend most of my time reading young adult fiction and nonfiction. The Hunger Games? I’ve probably read the first book in the trilogy six times. I have always been an avid reader and I do read an adult book every third book or so―I just had to wait for the right book to come along in order to honor Gordon’s guest blogger request. Well, it has. The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach is a stunning book. It’s got everything―phenomenal characters, a little Moby Dick and Melville lore, romance, and baseball. I don’t even particularly like baseball, but I longed to be a member of a baseball team while reading this amazing novel.

                It all starts with Mike Schwartz, aka Schwartzy. He’s a born leader, or more accurately a natural coach from a hard-knock background. He also happens to be a sophomore at Westish College, a small liberal arts college on the shores of  Wisconsin’s Lake Michigan, when he spots Henry Skrimshander playing baseball at a summer tournament. Henry is a shortstop, small and rather scrawny, but with an uncanny ability to field a baseball. Schwartz recruits the recent high school grad for the Westish Harpooner’s Division III baseball team. Henry is not much of a student, in fact the only book he has ever truly read is his dog-eared copy of The Art of Fielding by Aparicio Rodriguez, where Rodriguez, the greatest defensive shortstop who ever lived, manages to successfully equate the act of fielding a baseball with a Zen-like practice. Henry has committed to memory most of the numbered bits of advice, such as:

59. To field a ground ball must be considered a generous act and an act of comprehension. One moves not against the ball but with it. Bad fielders stab at the ball like an enemy. This is antagonism. The true fielder lets the path of the ball become his own path, thereby comprehending the ball and dissipating the self, which is the source of all suffering and poor defense.

When Henry arrives on campus and meets Owen, his beautiful, biracial, gay roommate,  we, as readers, are reassured that Henry will survive his new circumstances when he spots Owen’s own copy of The Art of Fielding on his meticulously kept bookshelves.
                It is on the Westish campus that we get to know Mike, Henry, Owen, President Affenlight and his daughter Pella(escaping a failed marriage), as well as the entire Westish baseball team. And lest you think that baseball is the only glue that holds the novel together, Harbach has had fun incorporating myriad literary references . Although Westish could be any struggling small liberal arts college, Harbach  created a singular, distinctive institution. The Westish Harpooners are a purposeful reference to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. It was President Affenlight, as an undergraduate at the college, who discovered a ream of papers in the library which turned out to be a transcript of a speech given by Herman Melville when he visited the college in 1880. Westish College made the most of the Melville association, as did Afflenlight himself, who went on to become a renowned academic, the pinnacle of his career being the widely acclaimed scholarly book called The Sperm-Squeezers. His career come full circle, he is back as president of the college where he began his academic pursuits.
                The characters, both on and off the team, intersect and cross paths, with the meteoric rise of the Harpooners in the league standings serving as backdrop. Henry’s career is on the rise as well―scouts flock to game after game,  promising vast sums of money when he gets signed to the major leagues. But then Henry comes down with Steve Blass disease (named for the infamous Pirates pitcher who, all of a sudden, could no longer throw the ball accurately). Henry has fallen off his path, he has lost The Way. As he struggles, the other characters meander along their own paths, each trying to field their own game, so to speak. This is one baseball story that left me wishing there were a few more innings.

Wonder. Thanks RO. You are welecome at GGR anytime! Keep reading!

08.31.11
by

A HANDFUL OF DUST-EVELYN WAUGH-YOU CHOOSE THE ENDING!

Followers of this blog know that I enjoy delving  back among the best known authors and retrieving works that I have not read. Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust is one more example. Written in 1934, A Handful of Dust is listed as number 34 of the Modern Library’s 100 Best English Language Novels of the 20th Century. 

A Handful of Dust  is set in 1930s Victorian England, and focuses on the breakdown of the marriage of Tony and Brenda Last. The aristocratic Tony is preoccupied with the maintenance of his family country estate, Brenda is bored with her isolation there and also with Tony. Enter John Beaver, a self-interested and impoverished social climber who invites himself to Hetton ( Tony’s estate)  for the weekend. The affair with Brenda, who yearns for urban excitement, begins when she takes a flat in London and “goes back to school!”

In his introduction to the Everyman’s Library publication ,  William Boyd quotes from  Waugh’s Labels, a travel book Waugh wrote after his own broken marriage. “Fortune is the least capricious of deities, and arranges things on the just and rigid system that no one shall be very happy for very long.”  Are many great novels autobiographical? You bet!

And so the story of infidelity unfolds often reminiscent to me of  Idina Sackville in The Bolter although a littler less tawdry!  In an amazing twist, the reader of the Everyman’s Library publication of A Handful of Dust gets the option of the two endings!  When the book was to be serialized in an American magazine they determined Waugh’s original ending too dreary so he wrote a new one!  I like the latter the best which includes a sort of just rewards for Tony Last.   I think it made Waugh feel better.  Enjoy!

The best known of Waugh’s novels is Brideshead Revisited ( 1945)  and later Sword of Honor ( 1952-1961),  his World War II Trilogy. A Handful of Dust and Brideshead Revisited were made into motion pictures.