Cheating at Canasta

Very Quick Thoughts   Cheating at Canasta by William Trevor, Thorndike Windsor Paragon [Largeprint] 2008, 295 pages

These are somber contemplative stories; mostly about people on the fringe reminiscing about their past lives and/or wondering how they ever got to where they are now.   Many themes of relationships, regrets, communication or the lack thereof.   Sparse emotions, quiet despair, passive inevitability.

Not recommended for anyone looking for a pick-me-up!

The writing is solid. I read this book solely based on a recommendation from another blogger, Verbivore and comments on one of her monday-reading-notes posts.    I was also inspired by Kim the Sophisticated Dork who had been questioning if blogging had ruined serendipitous book findings and I surmised it was just different now.    So to prove my point, I saw the recommendation for Trevor, checked his worth in the ratings of goodreads (very high, by the way), clicked over to my library’s holdings, and scooped this one up immediately and started to read.   I am finding that I really really love short story collections but I also have difficulty reviewing. I can’t remember enough to chat about each and just can’t decide on an a suitable approach.

Unfortunately, I struggled through some of the phrasings and references which I attribute to the Irish/English settings and culture of the author.   If you like plants and flowers, almost all the stories mention such in scenery descriptions.   I did see that more than a few of the stories used the word ‘muddle’.

MUDDLE: “He was the sharper of the two in argument and always had been; but he listened, and even put her side of things for her when she became muddled and was at a loss.” – confused, bewildered, mixed up, perplexed, baffled.

I also felt at odds with the time setting of these stories.  I sensed a less-technological age and then a character would have a cell-phone and I would feel an unwanted time-shift jolt.   I do not think the author meant for that to happen.

RATING:  Three slices of pie.

For CHALLENGE:   Twenty in Eleven

William Trevor:  ”The greatest living writer of short stories in the English language.”  - The New Yorker

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Shadow Tag

Thoughts   Shadow Tag by Louise Erdrich, Harper Collins 2010, 255 pages

Please mosey along if you haven’t read this.  I’m going to ask WHAT DID THIS MEAN? kind of questions which assumes and guarantees spoilerful issues.

Or…   (still here AND haven’t yet read this book?   GO READ Lisa’s review over at Books on the Brain.   It’s really good.)   (You can also visit Melissa and read her review.  She found it “incredibly well written” and I would agree with her on many points.)

•

Golly!  So much to talk about!     This is a book club book and I’m just going to ramble here because I’m feeling a bit rushed;  like I’ve had a bunch too much coffee, ya know?    Book Club is tomorrow and we have a big (?) storm coming tonight – it’s already snowing! – and I’m not sure, but I think there are crazy school schedules which may make it easier or harder for everyone to have the motivation to attend book club – most of the members work at the High School.

Back to the book.  STAYING FOCUSED.    I know somewhere, someone asked the question of what it is called when you FIND the title of a book in the narrative.   Anyone?    I think it was a true word with meaning but maybe somebody made it up.   All I know is that on page 145, I found the words ‘shadow tag’ and I thought it really cool.   I noted it in my status updates in goodreads.com.    I really took advantage of that cool feature to track sentences, impressions and unknown vocabulary words and I am wondering if anyone noticed them when they opened up goodreads home page?

(I am going to html code it here but goodreads and wp don’t often get along.   I say this in a sportscaster-who-does golf voice whisper…)

(sorry.  I didn’t work.    Still whispering.   Here’s the link, though:   http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/134733672)

WORDS:   snick, remanence, lots of arsty words – many I didn’t write down but I did look up the definitions.

Shadows were prominent and ubiquitous in this story.

I’m going to keep rambling and I don’t care if this is much of a cohesive review.   Kind of like a book club meeting!!!!

Here are some of the pics of the paintings mentioned in the book:

Lucretia, after the deed

p.55

The Dining Room in the Country

p.217

Boy Howdy can WP be a photo formatting nightmare…

Lots of COPLEY Connections  - like BONNARD.    Bonnard is a painter that I am not familiar with enough to see and remark if I ever see his works.     I do think I’m good enough to view some artists’ work and *KNOW* who painted it before I read the little label underneath.  But the name Bonnard does not evoke anything to me.    Do know, I have never taken an art appreciation class.   Always wanted to but never had the time.

What makes Bonnard a Copley Connection (those random coincidental links between books you read) is that the protagonist in The Sea was writing a book on Pierre Bonnard the painter.     COOL, huh?        

I did not like the husband, Gil the painter nor his wife Irene very much.   The kids were great but we didn’t get enough of them.   Riel was the most fascinating but then, she had a bigger part to play.   Actually this part she had to play was one of the minor pleasant surprises for me.   Was Irene writing to Riel the whole time!??!   I wanted to go back and read through her journal entries a bit more but then didn’t care enough to do so.

And, I have a few questions.    What do you think was the significance of the Xmas –> xMas –> xmAs –> xmaS?  Did you even notice it?

Was Gil really Stoney’s father or not!??!    I am entirely baffled and could be convinced either way.

Do you think Riel has the right to be mad at her mother for not saving herself for the kids’ sake?  I do.

I’m got more questions and interesting tidbits in my “Reading Progress” if anyone is interested.

I have to go!   Gotta hit submit and face the consequences.

Well, OK, quick recap for anyone who is still here and didn’t read the book:    It’s about marriage; a bad BAD marriage where there is violence.     American Indian heritage is a theme or a context.    Alcoholism is another.      The setting is Minneapolis in the winter time.    Told through the wife’s true and false journal entries as well as a third perspective…  darn – what’s that word?

Anyway, the goodreads.com blurb states this:

In brilliantly controlled prose, “Shadow Tag” fearlessly explores the complex nature of love, the fluid boundaries of identity, and one family’s struggle for survival and redemption.

I give it THREE pie slices.

Other REVIEWS:   courtesy of Fyrefly’s Book Blog Search

Even though this book wasn’t the charmer I had hoped, I still want to read Erdrich’s The Master Butchers Singing Club and maybe The Plague of Doves.

.

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The Southern Lit Challenge

I am committing to joining the Southern Literature Challenge by reading one book!   Thank you to Beth Fish Reads for not only advertising my John Cusack Challenge but for letting me know about The Introverted Reader.

I need your help.

Spurred on by this post of Five Valued Books by Siobhan Fallon’s at The Book Lady’s Blog, I want to read something deliciously dark* by Flannery O’Connor.    I can hardly go wrong;  all of her works have a 4+ rating in goodreads.com.

Please recommend a book or do you think I should just start with the short story collection A Good Man is Hard to Find?

I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else’s. But behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there’s no truth.
-Flannery O’Connor

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Beneath the Thirteen Moons

Thoughts   Beneath the Thirteen Moons by Kathryne Kennedy, Sourcebooks Casablana 2010, 350 pages

What’s in a Name Challenge 4:  ”Books With a Number in the Title“

MOTIVATION for READING:   I can blame this one on Nancy the Bookfool who wrote a thoughtful review and then offered to send me the book.    Thanks Nancy!     I can’t recall ever reading a book that would fall into the genre of ‘fantasy romance’ so I was looking forward to it.   And I was hoping it would be a fast read towards my goal of 100 books this year.

WHAT it’s ABOUT:     A fantastical watery world that I don’t think I ever got my head around how exactly these trees and water all related but it seemed to be a very wet world with extremely interesting creatures.   We have a young lady and her pet that is a strange kind of monkfish* (Yum!   Sadly, I may never be able to eat another again.)    We have a handsome prince.   The young lady doesn’t really think of herself as a ‘lady’ but more of a rough & tumble fiercely-independent ‘river rat’.    She kidnaps the prince, they feel immense attraction, adventures happen, lady tries to distance herself from prince but just cannot, etc, etc, etc and then some.   With lots of hot sex thrown in here and there.    And all this ROOT-CHEWING for ‘strength’ and ‘clarity’; what I would describe as drug-use.    You see, part of the theme involves the government (the “Royals”, thus the prince) having access to a powerful drug and not allowing the masses to have any of it.

WHAT’s GOOD/NOT so GOOD:    I guess I could say I was quite amused by all the hot sex.   I would read it aloud to my husband while he watched football games to see if he was as amused as I was.    He was.       However, it got really old fast that our heroine had to try so hard to keep her hands off and her body away from our prince.     Two-by-four to head, already.    And I really didn’t like all the references to the drugs.

FINAL THOUGHTS:   This book just wasn’t for me.   I admit that I skipped and skimmed but it was many pages of still-the-same.    However, if anyone has a great fantasy romance or even a plain ol’ regular romance book to suggest, I just might try it!

RATING:    I give it two and 1/2 slices of pie.

Other REVIEWS:    Alyce of At Home With Books, Debbie’s World of Books

* Thank you to the Maryland Dept of Natural Resources for the photo of the monkfish.  Click on that photo to access more fun fish facts on the Monkfish.

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The Things They Carried

Very random thoughts and links   The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, Mariner Books • Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2009 (orig 1990), 233 pages

One of three books for my Personal • Deliberate Challenge 2011   √

At first, I wanted to present only a one word review:  ”awesome”.   But then I decided to look up some synonyms to see if I could find a more perfect word.   INCREDIBLE vied for my attention, as did WONDROUS.  But I’m choosing

FORMIDABLE - inspiring respect through being impressively powerful, intense, or capable.

On many levels, I am surprised and delighted and haunted and moved and struck dumb by the words written by TO’B.

I am intrigued by the blurred lines between fiction and truth.   Tim O’Brien himself narrates this work of fiction and yet it is not a memoir.    I really liked how the Literary Feline explains in her Sunday Salon of August 15, 2010:

Tim O’Brien’s accounts of the Vietnam War in The Things They Carried are fiction, based in fact. It’s hard not to think of the book as completely nonfiction when reading it, especially since the author writes in the first person and the narrator shares the author’s name.

In fiction, there is truth. Sometimes it is easier to get to the truth through fiction than through nonfiction. We can see into the heart of it much more clearly.   …The Things They Carried are good examples of portraying the truth in fiction at its finest.

I wonder about how the mind processes a tragic event;  how memories distort or not over time.

I am impressed by the brilliance in the writing.

This is a MUST READ.      Five slices of pie.

Other REVIEWS:

Fyrefly’s Blog Search Results, Sophisticated Dorkiness BOOK CHAT <— Kim has asks excellent thought-provoking questions, Trish’s Reading Nook, She of A Book Blog.Period, Lu’s at Regular Rumination (“At times, O’Brien is graphic and crude. But it never feels out of place or unnecessary…”), Sandy read/reviewed the Kindle version at YOU GOTTA READ THIS!, Nancy the Bookfool (“…quite simply, one of the most moving, beautifully written books I’ve ever read.”), Lisa’s Lit and Life, the Book Lady’s Blog explains that this is often a challenged and/or banned book, Heather J at Age 30+…A Lifetime of Books listened to the audio version.   Feel free to add your review link to the comments are let me know and I’ll link it here.

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Happy National Pie Day!

Thanks to Twitter Pals @Vasilly and @ChrisBookaRama and @BooksandWine, I was reminded that today is National Pie Day according to the American Pie Council.    and guess what!?   I was taking a break from making a pie to check my blog and Twitter!  Can you say ‘serendipity’?

This Chocolate -Strawberry Pie was loosely inspired by a pie from the movie Waitress.   I first layered a chocolate pudding, then a mixture of whipped cream – marshmallow Fluff – cream cheese and a touch of Chambord and the top layer of sliced fresh strawberries.   The berries taste so good, I didn’t want to cook them down into the traditional glazed strawberry concoction.    It’s now in the fridge chillin’;  awaiting its place as final course dessert to my husband’s sausage-escarole-white bean soup dinner.

FYI, March 14 is PI (Π) day and I will make a pie that day, too.    We can also expect a pie on Pi Approximation Day, July 22.   Read why here.

Now, back to Bloggiesta!

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Someone at a Distance

Thoughts Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple, Persephone 1999 (orig 1953 ), 413 pages

GIFT from Nat of  In Spring It is the Dawn for the Holiday Persephone Swap.

MOTIVATION for READING:   My very first Persephone*.  (everyone sigh)    Thank you for this beautiful book!    I am excited to have joined the Grey Cover Club.

I LOVE that the book jacket only gives barely a glimpse into what this is about so I won’t either!    However, if you are intrigued by good versus evil in a normal everyday setting and not in a vampire kind of way AND if you believe in the conundrum of marriage and the illusions of such AND love skilled authors to give you a great story, pick this one up.

Ms. Whipple writes smart.   She is witty and captures dialogue that propels and convinces and keenly gets at the heart of a character.     I was cheering the heroine and loudly booing the villain.    I really enjoyed the pace and flow of this story and found it unputdownable.

p. 188 “She was casting about, almost instinctively, like a caterpillar at the end of a stalk, for something to get hold of and climb on to.”

LOTS of fodder to discuss from the flaws of a character contrasted with virtue, feminism and choices available to women, how good people spawn bad children, to choices and more choices and how to get out of a bad choice!

If you think you might be critical of these bad choices and decision, perhaps this novel will frustrate you.    When I was reading this, I was captivated.   When I sit back now and analyze the paths the characters take, I question the times and motivations and I sigh.    It is both modern and old-fashioned, I think.    I’m still not sure I like Ellen now but I cheered for her and felt deep into my cold heart for what happens to her.

This would be a fun book club book.

OH, and the PREFACE by Nina Bawden is awesome.   I recommend you read it LAST, of course.  (Unless you are Jenny of I-Read-the-End-of-Books-First fame.)

It is,… a fairly ordinary tale.   But it is a great gift to be able to take an ordinary tale and make it compulsive reading.   It is all in the telling and Dorothy Whipple is a storyteller – an art that cannot be taught, cannot be learned, an art only a few writers are lucky enough to be born with.  At the end of the novel you an look back and see how it was done, how the author held your attention and persuaded you how one thing was bound to lead to the next, but while you are reading you are only aware of the suspense, the need to turn the page.

RATING:   Four slices of pie.   LOTs of whipped cream.

WORDS
viii - disputatious |ˌdispyoŏˈtā sh əs|adjective (of a person) fond of having heated arguments • (of an argument or situation) motivated by or causing strong opinions
167 soignée - “You can’t be soignée and dig in the earth as well.  It is impossible.”  soigné |swänˈyā|adjective (fem. -gnée pronunc. same) dressed very elegantly; well groomed.
168 hélas - more French…   unfortunately
180 mercenary - primarily concerned with making money at the expense of ethics

[If you know French, you won't wonder like I did about what all the French sayings were.   I can't help it; a silly pet peeve of mine  from High School Classics days is French in books.  Why not German or Swahili?   Why is it always French? I should just take an Intro course so I could at least know how to pronounce.]

p. 181 “If we could be seen thinking, we would show blown bright one moment, dark the next, like embers;  subject to every passing word and thought of our own or other people’s, mostly other people’s.

OTHER REVIEWS

Eva at A Striped Armchair read this in January 2010 and this was also her first Persephone (I like to think she and I are kindred spirits), JoAnn at Lakeside Musings read and reviewed this in 2009, Ti of BookChatter says, “a lovely book to curl-up with on a rainy day”, and Dani of A Work in Progress presents a beautiful review.    Click here for Fyrefly’s Book Blog Search for this novel.

*  Persephone Books is a UK publisher that brings attention to classic and often forgotten novels by women.

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Bart’s Twenty in Eleven Challenge

And the categories for Bart’s Bookshelf Challenge TwentyEleven are:

1. To YA or not YA… (I will try more YA)
2. …With a Twist
3. Hot off the Presses.
4. It Wasn’t Me! (aka Bad Bloggers*)
   * Bad Bloggers: Is hosted by Chris of Stuff as Dreams are Made on.
5. Show it Who is Boss!
6. Bablefish
7. Will-Power? What Will-Power? (aka: The Henry Ward Beecher Memorial.)
8. Mind the Gap. (This will be hard for me because I don’t read series books!  I have read a bunch of FIRSTs but series usually have more than TWO – help?!)
9. Back in the Day.
10. Re-read an old favourite or two for this category.
11. Way Back When.
12. Slim-Pickings

 

I do love challenges that let me fit in the books as we go.

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It’s Bloggiesta Time Again!

Bloggiesta! is the time when book bloggers work on improving their blogs.    Regular maintenance, finish up reviews, fix dead links, update challenge lists, etc and then some.    Here’s my off-the-top of my fingertips list of things I want to accomplish this weekend.     Feel free to join the party – and truly?  It IS a party!!    My favorite thing about Bloggiesta! is how every comes together to cheer each other on and SHARES the knowledge.  If you have always wondered ‘something’, this is the perfect time to just ask.   Click on this link to the blog of our charming hostess MawBooks or click the button above (that green square with mascot) and/or go to Twitter and search for @Bloggiesta.     And don’t forget to have fun!

BLOGGY-TO-DOs

1.  Write review of Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple and post forthwith.

2.  Write review of The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien and schedule for Sunday or Monday.

3.  Write review of Beneath the Thirteen Moons by Kathryne Kennedy and schedule for a day or two after TTTC.

4.  Update sidebar links, especially challenges.

5.  Update Challenge Page.

6.  Input data into book tracking log.  If you don’t have one, may I suggest Fyrefly’s?

7.  Check links in blogroll.   CHECK!   I’m working my way through…   I do have so many lovely blog friends.  :)

8.  Open GoogleReader and visit all my friends’ blogs.   (I should move this up in priority…)

9.  Calm down and realize that this is fun not stressful.   If I don’t get it all done, it’s OK.

10.  Read one short story in my Wm Trevor book, read 25 pages of Shadow Tag, don’t feel guilty about putting aside Cat in a Diamond Dazzle (remember, I have all year to finish this!)

11.  Add reviews to my A-Z page.  Consider if I really need my A-Z page if I am not going to maintain it properly.

12.   Learn how to embed links in comments?

13.   Open Twitter occasionally and offer encouragement to other Bloggiesta-ers.  CHECK!

14.  Smile.

15.   Shovel off the driveway – Friday afternoon.  (snow is supposed to quit around Noon.)

16.  ___Figure out why my google alert doesn’t alert me…  _________

17.  ___Learn Mr. Linky_________

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Vocabulary in The Sea

Oh, let’s play a game! I’ll list the words first and then the definitions!      What, no?   No, that doesn’t sound like fun? Well, I just don’t know if I will have the patience to type up all these but I feel I must…

Learning new words is FUN, dammit.

Thank you, Kathy aka BermudaOnion for hosting today’s meme!  Click on the button above to find more wordy posts.

But before I go into all this, please note that I don’t think I’m as stupid ignorant as this very long list might suggest.    I like words.   I like wrapping my head about a word’s history, use and sound.    Sometimes, I encounter a word that I might know but it’s surrounding words make me question it.   Or I know it’s a word I should know and when I look it up, I have to do that forehead-slap move.  DOH!     And sometimes, I *think* I know the word but question my ability to define it if I was put on the spot.    And then sometimes?   TOTALLY befuddled by how a word is used and I wonder I have every heard it or read it before.    So there.   I’m a word-geek.  A very amateur word-geek.

page – word
30 – costiveness - slow or reluctant in speech or action; unforthcoming
32 – piebald - having irregular patches of two colors, typically black and white.   Usually refers to horses.
? – stentorious – darn, I didn’t write down the page and I can’t find the sentence. A stentor is a person with a powerful voice.
43 – flocculent - having or resembling tufts of wool
53 – chatelaine - a woman in charge of a large house.
54 – marmoreal - made of or likened to marble.
84 – cicatrice - the scar of a healed wound.
84 – ichor - the fluid that flows like blood in the veins of the gods
88- venial - denoting a sin that is not regarded as depriving the soul of divine grace
95 – rufous - reddish brown in color.
95 – rubescent - reddening; blushing
96 – craquelure - a network of fine cracks in the paint or varnish of a painting.
102 – groyne - a low wall or sturdy timber barrier built out into the sea from a beach to check erosion and drifting.
102 – cinereal – or cinerea:  the gray substance of the brain and spinal cord.
103 – Bonnard – that is, Pierre Bonnard. Some painter dude I don’t know about.  The protagonist of The Sea has dedicated his life to researching and writing about this artist so he comes up a lot.
103 – coevals (oh. yea, OK. should have figured this one out.  ! not coe-vals) – a contemporary
116 – anaglypta – athick, embossed wallpaper.
117 – gorse - a yellow-flowered shrub of the pea family
118 – glair - a preparation made from egg white, used esp. as an adhesive for bookbinding
128 – ovine - of, relating to, or resembling sheep.
129 – homunculus - a very small human or humanoid creature.
135 – mandala - a geometric figure representing the universe in Hindu and Buddhist symbolism.
137 – catafalque - a decorated wooden framework supporting the coffin of a distinguished personduring a funeral or while lying in state.
137 – crepitant - make a crackling sound (this is likely one of those words I’ve looked up a million times!)
139 – boreens - a narrow country road.
155 -caducous – a botany word that means easily detached and shed at an early stage.

158 – perisher - TOTALLY NEW TO ME!    in fact, my dictionary doesn’t have it.   When I posed it to the interwebs, I got the response ‘BOUNDER’*, which is also unknown to me.   Both of these words mean someone who is morally reprehensible.

162 – casuistry - the use of clever but unsound reasoning, esp. in relation to moral questions
163 – convolvulus - a twining plant with trumpet-shaped flowers, some kinds of which are invasive weeds
165 – scumbling - modify (a painting or color) by applying a very thin coat of opaque paint to give a softer or duller effect.
168 – mephitic - foul-smelling; noxious.     EASY TO FIGURE OUT but that doesn’t mean I *know* it.
169 – novelettishly - a short novel, typically one that is light and romantic or sentimental in character (you might assume I should know this.   But I don’t think I’ve ever encountered it before in print or conversation.)
169 – sough - a moaning, whistling, or rushing sound.
179 – imprecation - a spoken curse
183 – purblind - slow or unable to understand; dim-witted.
183 – cerements - waxed cloth for wrapping a corpse.
183 – blench - make a sudden flinching movement out of fear or pain
184 – Gilles de Rais – O.M.G.     Here’s the sentence!

“… kiddies in general, I am afraid, bring out the not so latent Gilles de Rais in me.”

So, my fingers trip over to Wikipedia and find the information about this interesting person.   Follow the link if you dare.
185 – sozzled – I’m assuming this means DRUNK but I still want to look it up.  Yep, it means VERY DRUNK, beyond squiffy.
185 – plangent - loud, reverberating, and often melancholy.
188 – colloquy - a conversation
188 – littoral - of, relating to, or situated on the shore of the sea or a lake
188 – anabasis - a march from a coast into the interior
190 – inamorato** – OO LA LA! a person’s male lover
191 – crapulent -*SMILES*…  I remembered this from one of BermudaOnion‘s posts!  Such a perfect word:  of or relating to the drinking of alcohol or drunkenness.

HUH?

*  I googled for an image of perisher and/or bounder but didn’t find anything good.   In fact, I got more than a few photos of women’s feet in high heels.   And one of a cartoon Bassett Hound.  ?!

**  I ran into the female version of this word today in my current read Cat in a Diamond Dazzle by Carole Nelson Douglas

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