The Salt Path

The Salt Path by Raynor Winn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I read a review of this book a week ago and immediately knew I had to read it. A perfect antidote to all the bad news floating around the atmosphere. I read it voraciously and loved every page, every description and anecdote. I loved the descriptions of the sea, the birds, rocks and bracken, the daily parsing out of their limited funds for food, the people they met on the 630 mile walk. A totally honest book and a real upper.


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"So Anyway" autobiography 2014 by John Cleese

So, Anyway... by John Cleese
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and laughed a lot. I was pleasantly surprised to find it deals very much with his youth, school experiences and personal life. Towards the end there were a lot of scripts of shows and Monty Python skits. I liked his analysis of what is funny. Very enjoyable book.


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A Death in Live Oak....Jack Swytek legal thriller

A Death in Live Oak by James Grippando
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I stayed up till 1am last night to finish this book. First Grippando book I've read and I liked it a lot. I felt I learned about life and history in Florida. "The farther north you go, the more Southern it gets." Also enjoyed reading about campus life at the University of Florida. I had never heard of "atonement cases and trials...need to check them out. Swyteck, the lawyer, is believable, I will be looking for another one soon. Any advice?


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Catching up with Harry Bosch

Two Kinds of Truth by Michael Connelly
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I haven't read a Harry Bosch novel in quite a while and it was delightful to get immersed in his adventures again on rainy days in January. All his characters, situations and activities are so real. It is fun to follow him around the Los Angeles area and learn new things about the law, the drug world and his world.
My first readings of his books were back in the Vietnam era and now he has gotten a little older. I liked this book better than the time he was in Hong Kong with his daughter. Which book was that?


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Colette"s "My Mother's House" and "Sido"

After seeing the movie "Colette" I felt so sad that it didn't even touch the living spirit of her that exists in her writing.

But having a Colette in the family is like having a deathless raconteur who shall keep your family alive for as long as there are human beings who read or listen. These novelettish biographies were published around the 1950's so even without me googling it, I am sure Colette and her then still living brother had long both passed away too. Yet here they, and the rest of the family, are as alive as the person next to you. How common is it, for example, for us to have had mothers who were full-time housewives, had grown old doing mostly nothing but housework, and still thought of their family and household concerns up to their dying days? Yet only a Colette can write about a mother like that (her own) with a memorably bittersweet nostalgia like this (her mother already 71 years old at the time, a widow, with various illnesses):

"At five o'clock in the morning I would be awakened by the clank of a full bucket being set down in the kitchen sink immediately opposite my room.

"'What are you doing with that bucket, mother? Couldn't you wait until Josephine (the househelp) arrives?'

"And out I hurried. But the fire was already blazing, fed with dry wood. The milk was boiling on the blue-tiled charcoal stove. Nearby, a bar of chocolate was melting in a little water for my breakfast, and, seated squarely in her cane armchair, my mother was grinding the fragrant coffee which she roasted herself. The morning hours were always kind to her. She wore their rosy colours in her cheeks. Flushed with a brief return to health, she would gaze at the rising sun, while the church bell rang for early Mass, and rejoice at having tasted, while we still slept, so many forbidden fruits.

"The forbidden fruits were the over-heavy bucket drawn up from the well, the firewood split with a billhook on an oaken block, the spade, the mattock, and above all the double steps propped against the gable-windows of the attic, the flowery spikes of the too-tall lilacs, the dizzy cat that had to be rescued from the ridge of the roof. All the accomplices of her old existence as a plump and sturdy little woman, all the minor rustic divinities who once obeyed her and made her so proud of doing without servants, now assumed the appearance and position of adversaries. But they reckoned without that love of combat which my mother was to keep till the end of her life. At seventy-one dawn still found her undaunted, if not always undamaged. Burnt by fire, cut with the pruning knife, soaked by melting snow or spilt water, she had always managed to enjoy her best moments of independence before the earliest risers had opened their shutters. She was able to tell us of the cats' awakening, of what was going on in the nests, of news gleaned, together with the morning's milk and the warm loaf, from the milkmaid and the baker's girl, the record in fact of the birth of a new day.

"It was not until one morning when I found the kitchen unwarmed and the blue enamel saucepan hanging on the wall, that I felt my mother's end to be near. Her illness knew many respites, during which the fire flared up again on the hearth, and the smell of fresh bread and melting chocolate stole under the door together with the cat's impatient paw. These respites were periods of unexpected alarms. My mother and the big walnut cupboard were discovered together in a heap at the foot of the stairs, she having determined to transport it in secret from the upper landing to the ground floor. Whereupon my elder brother insisted that my mother should keep still and that an old servant should sleep in the little house. But how could an old servant prevail against a vital energy so youthful and mischievous that it contrived to tempt and lead astray a body already half fettered by death? My brother, returning before sunrise from attending a distant patient, one day caught my mother red-handed in the most wanton of crimes. Dressed in her nightgown, but wearing heavy gardening sabots, her little grey septuagenarian's plait of hair turning up like a scorpion's tail on the nape of her neck, one foot firmly planted on the crosspiece of the beech trestle, her back bent in the attitude of the expert jobber, my mother, rejuvenated by an indescribable expression of guilty enjoyment, in defiance of all her promises and of the freezing morning dew, was sawing logs in her own yard."

Think: apart from literature, where one writes from the heart, which magical thing here on earth can make a brief, solitary dawn in a forgotten place on a forgotten day, eternal like this?

Lincoln in the Bardo

Book Review: Lincoln in the Bardo

Review

I finished this book yesterday and am still wondering what I think of it. Our book club leader jokingly tried to "sell" it to us by saying, "....there's a lot of white space..." I don't know how anyone could read it as an audio book. First, you have to acknowledge that it represents a great feat of imagination. It took some time to figure out what was going on and there are still points I missed. Why were some of the denizens of the graveyard "staying" on and others were suffering horrors in the pit or on the fence? I see that the author was trying to show that Lincoln's visits to his son and the conceit that the denizens could enter his body and touch his mind were responsible for his great and growing empathy at a serious low point of the Civil War. All the characters were quite representative of their time in history (also their names) and you did get a sense of the era. It also had many bawdy moments. I will continue to think! George Saunders is certainly one of a kind! A virtual reality view of Bardo from the New York Times https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phuCt... interview with Jeffrey Brown https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9MKN... (less)

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Family Photo from John and Julie's Wedding Reception

Eleanor Oliphant is Perfectly Fine

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this story. I can see why it ranks so high on the best seller list. Sure, it has its warm and fuzzies (along with incredibly bleak), but they are the stuff of real life. A slight whiff of what living in Glasgow is like as the writer is a Scot. My only critique was a feature of the book that is very similar to another book on the bestseller list. Read it. You'll enjoy meeting all these people.


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Why are poor people in America so patriotic?

https://www.salon.com/2018/06/11/why-are-poor-people-in-america-so-patriotic-one-man-went-on-an-odyssey-to-find-out/

What is a puzzle for you and me is actually not a puzzle for them at all. It is, in fact, the opposite. It is precisely because so many things have gone wrong for them that they get so much mileage out of being an American, which still happens to be a very prestigious national identity. One could argue that in a way it gives them a sense of identity like nothing else. They’re hanging on to it precisely because they have nothing else to hang on to.

They don’t have their history wrong. I think they’re being too harsh on themselves. They also differentiate between themselves and the government and say, “What happened to me is my responsibility.” In the end, they hang onto this idea. They feel motivated to continue and to do better the next morning. Many of them said that.

I would push back and ask, "Have you reconciled what happened to you with your love of country? Didn’t you get screwed?" They would respond, “No, what happened to me is my thing.” This is not false consciousness. This is a true sense of dignity that they get from the social contract as they perceive it.

I was talking to people who were prostitutes, former drug addicts and current drug addicts. Many were homeless. They would say several things in common. One was that they felt free to come and go and do the things they wanted and also to do and think whatever they wanted. In Montana, I met a young white person in the library who was homeless. I asked him, “Why are you homeless?” He said to me, “I’m homeless because it’s basically a sabbatical from life for me. I’m working on an app.” I thought, that cannot possibly be true. He then said, “In other countries, they would probably force me into a shelter. Whereas here, I can stay homeless and nobody bothers me for it.” I thought to myself, that is amazing.

. Many of them felt very autonomous. Many of these people would also say fantastical things to me like, “Look, I’ve turned a corner a month ago" or "I found God six months ago. Now I’m in good standing before God I don’t drink anymore. On Monday I have a job lined up." I don’t know if that was true or not.

The God thing, I should say, was also very prevalent. This sense that they’re walking with God and that America is God’s country. God loves America more than he loves other countries. This sense, still, of walking with God in God’s country, trying to do the right thing.

How did the poor and working-class people you spoke with feel about the rich?

I asked that question many times. I would wait for the right moment when, for example, a big Mercedes would drive by. In almost all cases, what I heard was, "They earned it and they made it on their own. Just like my failures and my faults, their successes are their successes." Now I would challenge that and say, "Come on, you were probably born in a certain context that was not helpful to you. They were probably born in well-to-do families."

I have these quotes in my head. One fellow said to me, "It’s got to be choices. It’s got be bad choices or good choices, but it’s got to be choices. It comes down to choices." But this same man had just told me how his father had beaten him up all his life. He was 14 years old and homeless; he ran away. Those are not choices. It was very difficult to get them away from that type of thinking. They thought that the rich essentially deserved it. The rich were generous. They get a lot of things as a result of that. These poor and working-class people actually told me that.

What were some of the conversations and life stories that really moved you?

One person I spoke with was a white woman struggling with brain cancer. She was young. She had three kids. We chatted at a bus station in Colorado but she was from Alabama. She was talking to me about her life. It was very important to her to have her kids read the Pledge of Allegiance, recite it at home. She was struggling to teach them the right values before she dies.

There was an African-American I met in Alabama. She was studying at a community college or the like to be a chef. She said to me, “Life out of country, life out of me.” She was saying: If you take the country away from me, you take the life away from myself; I have to have that. She was in her late 30s or early 40s.

I also met this couple who were living out of a very old Saab. I met them at laundromat in Billings, Montana. He was probably 20 years older than she was. He was probably in his 40s. She was in her early 20s. She had served in the military. He hadn’t.

She was expecting. We had an amazing conversation. They were very articulate and very thoughtful. It was him who said, “We have to be patriotic. You have to have a shred of dignity. Yeah, the system is corrupt, the police are corrupt, we’re being watched by everybody." Mind you, this is Montana, so they were very libertarian.

Italian Family at Christmas Eve

I guess I am missing them all a little tonight.  They are all gone now.  We had some crazy, maddening, happy times.  When John was born I was at my wit's end with his crying endlessly, my absolute lack of knowledge on how to handle a newborn.  Sal's Grandmother Amelia and his mother Marcella came by for a visit and fussed endlessly trying to help and take over.  They brewed a little concoction on the stove to give him to drink, cut the bottoms out of his booties....I went crazy, grabbed him and stormed off into the bedroom.  They left the house angrily and I could hear them yell at me, "We'll be back when he's ten years old.....if he lives that long!"  It ended up that I came to love those women more than Sal did.....and what's more, I didn't realize they knew less than I did about taking care of babies or young children.  Sal's Grandmother was a singer and declaimer of poetry and Sal's Mother was something of a party girl, waitress, wise-cracking and a little bit of a performer.

Greenridge: A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles

Greenridge: A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles



Since reading this book I have re-read Vladimir Nabokov's "Speak Memory".  A favorite book I keep on a special shelf.

A happy memory of Dmitri Hvorostovsky

Behind Closed Doors

Behind Closed Doors by B.A. Paris

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I raced through this mystery/psychological novel yesterday cheating like never before to get to the end. I gave it four stars because I just couldn't put it down. Made myself go for a walk to slow myself down.

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A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A beautiful read. Count Rostov and his story has kept me enthralled for days. I read it slowly as the language spills out like poetry, like a good story told by an accomplished racconteur. Full of bright scenes, humanity, warmth and love. Confined by the Bolshevik Tribunal to live out the remainder of his life in a luxury hotel in Moscow and his adventures and accommodations to make life as comfortable and amusing as possible make this the best book I've read in a long time. Here is a link to see beautiful photographs of the Metropol Hotel in Moscow... http://tinyurl.com/koypou3

This beguiling book achieves for me what I tend to seek in all literature, a roadmap of how to live life. The story of Count Alexander Rostov living his life in Moscow’s Metropol Hotel after being sentenced by the Bolsheviks to house arrest in the early 20’s was delightful as well as touching. He shows us how to adapt to misfortune and strive to bring out the best in people. He reveals for us how to be a true aesthete, one who discerns the beauty in the smallest things around us, appreciates the wonder of human creativity, and forges forgiveness for human folly. The character Towles has invented makes for a wonderful model of the perfect gentleman. Against all the horrors of Stalinist totalitarianism, his form of individualism makes for a brave and potent subversive force.

Here is a charming video of Amor Towles being interviewed by the Wall Street Journal at the Russian Tea Room discussing how he came to write the book:
             

http://tinyurl.com/lorr7wl

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"Sweetbitter" by Stephanie Danler

Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I gave this book 4 stars because I read it straight through enjoying it all. If you liked Anthony Bourdain's "Kitchen Confidential" you might like this book. His was about the cooks and the kitchen crew and this book is about the servers. Tess, the protagonist, is a very pretty young girl thrown into a mix of people who teach her about wine, food, the elements of being a good server. I read some of the critical reviews here and agree with them too. The author is often trying to get a little too "literary". But the basic sense is of a true experience. The drugs, sex and partying might annoy you, but I enjoyed it all. This book was read by my grandson who sent it to his father. I read it last of the three of us. I spent some time googling the author and the restaurant in New York on which the story was based.


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I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by kitten videos.
— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) January">https://twitter.com/JoyceCarolOates/statuses/420335205774159872">January 6, 2014

"Moon Tiger" Penelope Lively

A beautiful creation.  I will hang on to this book and pick it up to re-read beautiful sections that unfold like poetry.  I love Lively's writing and have read "How it All Began" and "Oleander, Jacaranda" (autobiography of her childhood in Egypt).  I have a few of my favorite books in a cubby-hole in our bed's headboard and this book will go there along with Nabokov's "Speak, Memory", the William Trevor short stories, Lampedusa's "The Leopard."
      "Moon Tiger" roams through the life and mind of a woman who has been intelligent and beautiful.  Has she been kind?  Has she been as wise as she imagines?  It is not all simply a life of the mind.  Lively weaves into the narrative an eroticism that illuminates everything.

"Running Blind" Lee Child

Another satisfying read with Jack Reacher.  The joy of his books is in his interior dialog.  It is fun to just follow him around and get his analysis of what to do in any situation, listen to his descriptions of people he meets and places he travels by car or plane.  It's like spending time with a very interesting person.
     This book was written in 2000.  I check the dates because I never know if it is a book I've already read.  The plot line is a little hard to believe in the last analysis.  I think maybe his storylines have become more realistic over time, but no matter -- he is never boring and carries you along for the ride.

A Book from Childhood

I have had this book since before I learned to read. It has the loveliest illustrations and plates. It opened up worlds to me. Over the years it has fallen to pieces and a couple of years ago I was able to special order a new (used) copy from England. It is in good condition and it sits on a special shelf behind my bed. It was surprising to read it recently and find out what it was actually saying rather than all the mysteries and stories I had built up around it. The beautiful green binding looks just as in this photograph.