| by Bel | 7.58am NZ time |

A pile of books I plowed through earlier this year. It was a sad ratio of 50/50 duds to great reads.

Clockwise from top left:

• Game Change creative non-fiction by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin
• Beautiful: The Life of Hedy Lamarr biography by Stephen Michael Shearer
• Voluntary Madness memoir by Norah Vincent
• The Year of Magical Thinking memoir by Joan Didion
• Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone biography by Nadine Cohodas
• And Now You Can Go autobiographical novel by Vendela Vida

Game Change creative non-fiction by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin

This a great book - I was recommending it to anyone I came across as I (avidly) read it. I've used the term "creative non-fiction" as it is a reconstruction of the US presidential election of 2008, with the narrative brought to live by quotes from over 200 interviews.

In any other circumstance, I'd be worried about the legitimacy of this kind of writing, but as the authors as renowned political journalists and editors at Time and New York magazine. Their reputations give this a ring of authority - that and the fact that the brutal characterisations of the political players rings so true.

BONUS: I hunted this down after seeing an interview where Joan Rivers said she'd read it.

DOUBLE BONUS: It's now being made into a TV movie.


Beautiful: The Life of Hedy Lamarr biography by Stephen Michael Shearer

A Golden Age film star, Hedy Lamarr died in obscurity and may well have been long forgotten if her scientific prowess had not been revealed. The amateur research done by her and her friend, composer George Antheil, during World War II has now been announced as the underpinning of modern mobile phone technology - as well as a contribution to the war effort in advancing missile development.

There is so much to Lamarr's story which is intriguing (the scandal of her early days as an actress in Austria, her disguised escape from her first marriage, the five husbands that followed, her connections with other survivors of the European Jewish diaspora) and yet this overly long and ridiculously detailed biography manages to suck the life out of it.

With hindsight, it can be seen that despite her much heralded beauty, Lamarr was actually a bit of a B-grade actress. And yet this book pedantically describes her every movie, including each costume worn, with snipped review quotes attempting to bolster her reputation.

Part of the allure of Lamarr was her mystery, with her accented voice and unapproachable beauty, and to plow through such attention to detail dulls the power of the myth.



Voluntary Madness memoir by Norah Vincent

This was awful. The first chapter gave me enough to know I didn't want to read further.

This self-proclaimed "immersion journalist" decides to admit herself to psychiatric care in a experiment to see how sane people cope in those surroundings. She then mentions that she actually has a history of mental illness - including a breakdown the preceding year.

And no less than three times in the first chapter, she mentions her concerns about the food on offer in these facilities and the risk of putting on weight. Not to judge or anything, but, um, ISSUES.

But worst of all, the writing was bad. There were inconsistencies in her reporting even between pages that faced each other in the book! One moment she was saying that patients were left to their own devices, staff remote and inaccessible - then the next she described in detail a chess game taking place between a patient and an orderly! It was impossible to take this seriously.


The Year of Magical Thinking memoir by Joan Didion

Wow. This is an incredible book. But I'm almost reluctant to recommend it, as it made me bawl - and that is not everyone's cup of tea!

A treatise on grief, we follow Didion's journey as she attempts to come to terms with an incomplete life following the death of her husband of nearly 40 years. Her honest portrayal of pain and love is so evocative it's hard not to be affected.


Princess Noire: The Tumultuous Reign of Nina Simone biography by Nadine Cohodas

Nina Simone! Don't tell me you don't love her! And you will have a greater respect for her work and her struggle after having read this detailed biography.

Did you know Nina herself played all the piano you hear in her songs? I did not! I was delighted to learn that the amazing music in songs like this was thanks to the woman herself:


And let's not forget the way it was sampled by Talib Kweli in this:


Wait, wait - no. Check out the official remix - what a line up!


Ok. What was I talking about??

Oh yeah - Nina.

She lived a long life but only saw royalties from her music in the last years - she was not wealthy even when she was at the peak of her career. This alone seems unjust, but when her mental health issues are factored in it makes it seem worse. Both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are mentioned in passing, but the author appeared unwilling to confirm a diagnosis.

Between this, her naturally abrasive personality and the fact that she was outspoken about civil rights at a time when you could wind up dead for doing so, Nina garnered a reputation for being difficult. And yet the legacy of her music is nothing but a pleasure.


And Now You Can Go autobiographical novel by Vendela Vida

Gahhh. Sorry, I was keen to like this, but, um, no. No siree. Barely read past the first pages.

WAIT. I just read a review of this and it turns out I must've read the whole thing!! Ye gods. Not a good sign.

The book opens with a traumatic event - the protagonist held at gunpoint in a public park. The rest of the book shows her dealing (and not dealing) with the aftermath. She ends a relationship, takes a spontaneous overseas trip, relies on her family for support but is shocked by the lengths her friends will go to.

And yet somehow all this is very disengaging. There is no drama beyond the initial conflict, we are just on the first-person ride of this confused woman's stream of consciousness. I remember being a self-absorbed 21 year old all too well, I don't want to relive it.

| Posted by Bel | The time is 3.02pm here in Wellington NZ |

I have read a stack of books over the last month or so and can easily recommend them all (ok, most of them).

(Click to view larger if you wish, but it's a crappy photo)

Books pictured, from top left, clockwise:

• Breath a novel by Australian Tim Winton
• The Only Girl In The Car a memoir about teenagehood by former teenager Kathy Dobie
• When You Are Engulfed In Flames essays by David Sedaris
• Frida the biography by Hayden Herrera upon which the film was based
• Dear Dodie a biography on author Dodie Smith by Valerie Grove
• My Invented Country memoirs by author Isabel Allende

Also pictured: "Bel's Cool Book Mark!" a cool bookmark that I own.

Breath a novel by Australian Tim Winton 

I found this engaging to read but ultimately unsatisfying. The book's structure has most of the narrative told in retrospective flashback, giving the impression that the shadowy present-day events will be illuminated by the escalating drama of the protagonist's teenage years.

Instead, everything peters out, much like one of the oft-described waves in this book. The descriptive language is wonderful - and anyone who enjoys the ocean will appreciate Winton's writing.


The Only Girl In The Car a memoir about teenagehood by former teenager Kathy Dobie 

Dobie's teenage sexuality becomes a threat to those around her as she uses her appeal to cross over to the other side of the tracks in her small town. In a sickening and horribly foreshadowed turn of events, the threat is turned back upon her when she is gang raped in the back of one of those cars which seemed to offer escape.

This happens late in the book, the first two-thirds detailing her commonplace childhood with a busy family and then her deliberate procurement of a "reputation". The naivety of the teenage mindset is forcefully brought to life, but this might not be something you want to relive.


When You Are Engulfed In Flames essays by David Sedaris 

Highly recommended. Laugh out loud funny. Read aloud to other people funny. Think about when you are elsewhere and giggle for seemingly no reason funny.

My highlights were: how he walks slow and his partner walks fast and it always looks like he is trying to run away from him; the external catheter bit; refusing to wear glasses; how his cough lozenge falls out of his mouth and onto the grouchy sleeping lady sitting next to him in the airplane (I thought you would enjoy that Lou!).


Frida the biography by Hayden Herrera upon which the film was based 

This is a big biography and it was used as the main reference for the film starring (and produced by) Salma Hayek. It has lots of photos and reproductions of some paintings. The text quotes from many of Frida Kahlo's letters, letting her own (vibrant, funny, sarcastic, witty) voice tell the story.

If you are going to read up on Frida Kahlo, this is the book.


Dear Dodie a biography on author Dodie Smith by Valerie Grove 

Another example of a great, definitive biography. Dodie Smith is the author of one of my all-time favourite books, I Capture The Castle, but also wrote 101 Dalmatians and kicked off her career as a wildly successful playwright when in her 20s. Her life in the UK and the US and the life-long dedication of her husband all make for very interesting reading.

Grove also had the advantage of Smith's extensive personal writings - she kept journals like a mofo and is estimated to have written around a million words about her own day-to-day life. Her personality traits shine through - such as keeping a blacklist of writers who mistreated animals in their books and refusing to read their work!


My Invented Country memoirs by author Isabel Allende

Author of another all-time favourite, The House of the Spirits. The house itself is such a central character in that book, it was fascinating to read about the real world experiences that went into creating it on the page.

Allende is very funny and I found her non-fiction writing just as evocative as her fiction. Her passion for her country (home and adopted) and for her family (ancestral and immediate) makes for captivating reading.

| Posted by Bel | The time is 11.37am here in Wellington NZ |

I'm going to blog soon with an update about The List and my abandonment of it and what my new reading project has been (for most of the year), honest. But in the meantime, here's a teeny-tiny review.

Lou and I are both fans of James Franco. If you actually went and watched that NY Times slideshow of actors acting I blogged about earlier, you would have seen the weirdly erotic film of him seducing himself. Being as well as being hot sauce, Franco is a talented actor who chooses interesting projects. Bit of installation art here, some Broadway rumours there, signed to host the Oscars over there - and his films vary from challenging and critically credible, to, um, dumb.

The Adderall Diaries came to my attention after I read that Franco had optioned the book to direct, also planning to write the script and potentially star. The author of this memoir, Steven Elliott, runs the website The Rumpus where you can read his short story, Where I Slept. (Seriously, go read this, it's pretty amazing.)

Intrigued and on a year-long bender of memoirs and autobiographies, I grabbed the book from my beloved Wellington Central Library. It was the exact same cover as pictured here! Should have got a real life pic, especially as I am rocking some glitter nail polish. Yes, I succumbed.

The writing is raw and confessional but still poetic, in the vein of Dave Eggers but without the distraction of his memoir's structural quirks and linguistic acrobatics. Chuck Palahniuk also comes to mind, though there is a relatable aspect to Elliott's writing which I've always found lacking even in books such as his Stranger Than Fiction.

The storyline weaves together what is a relatively simple murder case complicated by an unsolicited confession of guilt to other murders by a connected party, with Steven's own knowledge that his father may have killed someone when he was younger. The themes of deception and self-deception become entwined with his attempts to overcome writer's block and his self-imposed drifting in life.


A confronting aspect of The Adderall Diaries is the way Steven's sexual relationships and encounters are presented. His involvement in the S&M world means that sexual pleasure is interwoven with violence, a concept which can be hard to reconcile. There are graphic descriptions, not just of the surroundings of bondage dungeons that he visits, but of the way he feels during the experience. This can actually be revelatory, especially later in the book when he talks about the joy of feeling pain in this context as being a refuge from the terrors of his younger years.

(PS yes there were moments when I went "Oh lordy, Franco, really?!" at the thought of how sequences of the book would play out on the big screen.)

Summary: The Adderall Diaries by Steven Elliott gets a THUMBS UP and a recommendation if you are into reading about kinky stuff or true crime.

| Posted by Bel | The time is 10.15am here in Wellington NZ |

Yesterday I promised you lazy. How lazy? How about a blog post copy and pasted from an email I wrote to Lou earlier this week??

If you haven't read Zeitoun, please taihoa because we are chock full of SPOILERS below. Oh and rampant hating on the administration of at-the-time-US president George W Bush.

From: Lou
To: Bel
Subject: Zeitoun
Date: Sat, Nov 27, 2010 at 9:18 AM

Thoughts please!

Did you know about the parking lot prison when you read it? I didn't and literally felt like a cartoon when I got to it - like my bottom jaw literally fell to the floor and my tongue rolled out and I made the Scooby-Doo "huh" noise. It has been in the media a couple of times in the past year but I was hoping you wouldn't have seen so as to get the full impact!

FYI: did you see that George W recently said in his memoirs that his lowest moment was being accused of being racist during the Katrina aftermath. Not the aftermath itself... I saw this on the TV in Vegas and was shouting at the television.

From: Bel
To: Lou
Date: Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 10:16 AM

I had my usual cultural context/current affairs amnesia take over me as I read the book and was so caught up in the narrative that everything came as a surprise.

Like, to the extent that when the storm passes and it's bad, but not that bad in terms of their experiences of hurricanes, I was like "aawh... yay..." and totally FORGOT about the whole FLOODING thing. Shame.

Okay. So.  Here are some of my thoughts:

1. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.
2. And then at the end, it mentions that the other three guys all spent, like, 6 months longer in the maximum security prison than him!! Fuuuuck!!
3. But assumedly not in solitary confinement. Did I tell you (or link to) this article I read about solitary confinement?? It was about this guy who was wrongly imprisoned for like 35 years and spent most of it in solitary (yes, in the USA, of course). There's all the psychiatric studies now about how the worst prison treatment is not being beaten or starved, but solitary. It's pretty much actually guaranteed to send you mental and make you incapable of returning to a normal life elsewhere in the prison, let alone 'outside'. [ETA: this isn't the article I originally read, but there is a great series here on NPR if you want to bone up on this subject.]
4. Nope, no idea about the Guatanomo style prison. (I think I just thought he'd been locked up for ages bc of the paranoia that terrorists were 'around' post-Katrina. No actual idea of the content of the book, thanks to some effective paranoid skimming of articles in the past hehhee.)
5. That bit where he does the construction-business-man style calculations in his head, and figures out how it must have taken them literally days to build it all, with supplies trucked in, while people were literally drowning in the neighbouring suburbs, is so gut-wrenching.
6. I thought it was very restrained the way the book doesn't actually point any fingers. (See George W Bush rant below.) It mentions that all of the funding and administration of FEMA (that's their equivalant of our Civil Defence, right?) had been sucked up into the new formly Dept of Homeland Security (gaaawd that name is sooo ridiculous), but doesn't actually say "Worst. Idea. Ever." and instead just let's you see how that plays out.
7. Same with the military forces in the book. Whenever they appear, they're always these cyphers, nameless, featureless, adbrupt and brutal. They have been trained into machines and they have no humanity.
8. Complete contrast to Zeitoun, who seems to be pretty much the best person in the world.
9. I cried when he got out of prison. I also found it really affecting how Kathy removed her hijab that time and realised chunks of her hair had turned white. (Perhaps bc of my recent hair-related traumas?)
10. I loved the way the book presented spirituality in general. How it strived to show why being religious was an important, integral part of these people's lives. How it was just normalcy for them. I think that for some who views Muslim as 'other' it would have been a good way of bridging that difference, and seeing it as another facet of the same kinds of beliefs for conventional Christianity. I.e. not actually part and parcel of being an evil bloodythirsty terrorist.
11. I thought at first they weren't going to tell the story of how Kathy converted, but rather sort of leave it as just an implict background thing, that that was just part of their normal lives, that this Southern white woman is a Muslim, yeah what of it. So when her conversion story did get told, I was like oooOOOOOoooh. (Crack up that it was her and her Japanese-American friend. Are there ANY proper Muslims in America??)
12. Weird how the book talks a lot about the three daughters, but not much about the older son (from a previous marriage) Zachary. I assume this was intentional....? Like how in AHWOSG he downplayed his older sister (bc she was battling w depression) (the one who was then acrimonious about being left out of the book, who he then made up with, who then killed herself) (sob!).
    

Re George W. He said that the lowest moment in his whole presidential career was being called racist after Katrina. My god. I have SO MANY issues with this:

1. I am conflicted, bc it was Kayne West who called him out on this, and Kanye West is pretty much cuckoo for cocopops....
2. ....and yet when he made this statement [ETA: man, I love watching that, the best jump cut since Goddard was at his peak], it was bang on the money. Hence, why it got censored and hence why it actually did hurt GWB's feelings. THE TRUTH HURTS, BUDDY, IT HURTS.
3. Bush's comment in his memoir seems to be one of those "I'm sorry if you took that the wrong way and you decided to feel hurt by what I said" apologies, you know? When someone weasels their way out of actually acknowledging being in the wrong at all?? (Fuck I hate when people do that.)
   
4. Not to downplay Katrina and its aftermath at all, but really, George, really?? Of all the shit that went down, that is what you think back upon?!
1. Not that bullshit with the fictional WMDs;
2. or the thousands of civilians who died in various countries bc of your and Condelezza's constant hawking;
3. or the spread of HIV/AIDS throughout Africa bc of your refusal to fund health programmes which supply condoms;
4. or the recession brought on through your administrations mismanagement of the economy;
5. or the fact that you CANNOT EVEN SPEAK ALOUD PROPERLY IN YOUR OWN LANGUAGE??!!?
5. He has now actually done some really good work in Haiti (with Bill Clinton) and one part of me is like "yay!" and the other part is like "are... you... fucken... kidding... me?? do... you... want... a... medal...??"
6. Last 2 paras of this are HILARIOUS in illustrating the differences btwn the two presidents and why Bush suuuuuccckkksss:
   http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8580641.stm
   

From: Lou
To: Bel
Date: Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 11:52 AM

Yep. To everything.

I would like to see an earlier draft - I would imagine that Dave probably literally sat down with the manuscript and went through it purely to remove any statements that could be seen to be political against GWB (or military) specifically so as to remove any ammunition for people to disregard the story as being "liberal propaganda". The story so speaks for itself that it doesn't need anything more anyway.

And yep, re: GWB. But he'd have to admit that any of those other things were wrong to name anything associated with that... And I think within the American cultural framework of being "WOO AMERICA YEAH US AGAINST EVERYONE" the way he completely fucked over Americans during Katrina and its aftermath is actually probably the most damaging and telling thing against him from the perspective of Americans (who are obviously the only people he cares about).

FYI: you should now get your hands on the doc Trouble the Water:

It has the documentary footage/ firsthand accounts of the abandoned people to accompany the book and provide the sort of "every(wo)man" experience of the situation.

From: Bel
To: Lou
Date: Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 12:20 PM

The draft version where the footer on each page was PS fuck Bush!!!!!!
??
hahahaha

You are right about how the story speaks for itself. It didn't need any (leftist/liberal) trimmings - in fact, it was almost infuriating how Zeitoun is still so pro-America at the end and has all this belief and hope and crap and you're like 'but whhhyyyyyyyy?????'.

Trouble The Water! Yes. I was trying to think of that, but could only remember the name of the Spike Lee one. (I nearly wrote Spike Jonze just then. I don't imagine his take on Katrina would be quite the same.)

From: Bel
To: Lou
Date: Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 12:29 PM

Just watched the trailer. EMOTIONAL.

Posted by Lou. The time is 3.08pm here in London UK.

I made a dreadful mistake on holiday and only took three books! Three! What was I thinking? That I'd be, like, doing stuff instead of just lying around by the pool/ at the beach/ on the balcony?

Anyhoo, those three were Audrey Niffenegger's latest novel Her Fearful Symmetry, a Hurricane Katrina-based crime novel called The Tin Roof Blowdown, and the fourth of Laurie R King's Mary Russell/ Sherlock Holmes series The Moor.

After finishing them with several days to spare I resorted to the hotel's small multi-lingual collection and the sparse selection of Athens airport and went crime-and-mystery-tastic with Michael Connolly's The Scarecrow, Ruth Rendell's Some Lie and Some Die, and Agatha Christie's Murder On The Orient Express.

Yes, yes, hardly intellectual reading, but you try and pay attention to prose when you're in view of this:

Or this:


Or indeed, this:


Mmm 'kay?

***

Her Fearful Symmetry

The only Niffenegger book I have read is our beloved The Time Traveller's Wife (TTW), truly a great piece of contemporary writing and one I know I will return to again and again as the years pass (and oh how they pass!). So, yes, I had high hopes for Her Fearful Symmetry (HFS) and indeed saved it up for this holiday. I was... well, I was disappointed.

The story concerns identical twins - two sets, in fact. The book opens on the death of one identical twin, who leaves her London property and fortune to her estranged US-based twin's own identical twins. They are Very Strange Girls who move to live in their aunt's property and find themselves visited by the ghost of their aunt.

While the sci-fi reasoning of TTW's time travel was complex, innovative and served to further the emotional story, the ghostly elements of HFS actually did the opposite for me. I thought it was tired (ghost stories are the oldest of the old, after all - and I really didn't think this one brought anything new), a bit banal, and provided a barrier to believing in the emotions of the characters and story.

All-in-all it left me cold and I'm sort of going to have to detach it from TTW in my memory and pretend like Niffenegger only wrote one book.

***

The Tin Roof Blowdown

I was aware of the existence of several novels that had started to come out set within and after Hurricane Katrina, so having already been down the non-fiction route did some research and decided upon this crime novel by James Lee Burke.

The story centres on a family-man Detective based in the Parish of Iberia who is called upon to help out in a murder investigation in the confusion that prevails after Hurricane Katrina has fucked the people and the city of New Orleans. Two black looters have been shot, one - a teenager with no criminal record - killed instantly, and in a symbolic gesture to hide a thousand injustices the Feds want to bring a (white) perpetrator to justice.

A complex plot emerges with a varied set of characters, the mind-fuck situation of this one murder investigation perfectly merging with the mind-fuck that was the greater situation plunging Louisiana into hell.

I really enjoyed the book - whilst I do like the odd bit of fluff in the genre of crime mystery (hey, I have three coming up below!), it is much more my style to have the characters and a fatalistic outlook on how fucked up the world is dominate beyond mere attempts at clever plot.

And oh boy is the outlook expressed in this novel fatalistic - in fact, the writer reverts to the almost biblical when describing the New Orleans of August and September 2005, complete with the racial and economic inequalities that were brought to the fore by the burst levees.

Hmm, doesn't really sound like beach reading does it? Perhaps one to save for the dark depths of winter.

***

The Moors

You're not really interested, are you? I mean, you either read the Laurie R King books or you don't, yeah?

Here's a picture anyway.

Wait, I can hear Bel's voice saying "What books?".

King has written a series of books that feature a young female protagonist called Mary Russell who meets an ageing Sherlock Holmes and teams up with him on a few big cases. True to the style of Conan Doyle, the books are written as if they are manuscripts found by King that are written by Russell herself. Okay?

***

The Scarecrow

Not much to say about such a plot-driven, formulaic crime novel is there? To be fair, the author tries to make it innovative and contemporary by setting it around an internet criminal. But that is pretty much meaningless when the actual crime takes place off the web. So, um, just one to read when you've run out of books and there is little else in the hotel "library" really...

***

Some Lie and Some Die

I chose this book based on the very good criteria that it was short, and thus easier to read when lying on the beach. It was quite cute really - a 1973 Ruth Rendell crime novel set at a music festival. I knew I was in for a treat when I read the dedication at the beginning, which was to her son who "goes to festivals". Doesn't everyone go to festivals in the UK? Oh wait, this was 1973! Just three years after the debut of what was to become Glastonbury:

Check out the crazy pyramid stage! Can you imagine the twitches people who work in the field of occupational health and safety must develop when looking at that!

To be fair to Rendell, the whole driving force for her novel seems to be her enthusiasm for being "down with the kids" - for showing off how tolerant of youth culture she was at a time when everyone still hated the youth. (As opposed to now when seemingly we all want to be like them, look like them, like the same stuff as them - I guess I'll be learning more about this sentiment when I turn Officially Old later this year.)

Yeah, as above, not much to say really... except at least for this one I had the bonus of groovy clothes being described.

***

Murder On The Orient Express

I was at the airport looking through the one rack of books I could find that were in English when I suddenly realised that despite having seen the entire Poirot Collection of my company's owned TV episodes, I have never seen Murder On The Orient Express. Happily it turns out to be exactly the length required to get one through a mild flight delay and then 4 hours Athens - London.

I do quite like Agatha Christie - she dreamed up a plethora of unexpected and interesting scenarios in which to set her murder mysteries; and manages to write the same motivations and mechanisms for murder a thousand different ways.

So I won't complain that her writing is vacuous - I mean, it's not like you pick it up expecting depth of meaning - and will instead end this post on a picture of your hero and mine, David-Suchet's-Hercule-Poirot:

Posted by Lou. The time is 1.07pm here in London UK.

Don't worry, this isn't a recipe for Potato Peel Pie, but rather a quick review of a wonderful book that I think you should all read: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.



I have to start by telling you a little something about the author, Mary Ann Shaffer. She was a book-lover who worked in libraries and bookshops, and dreamed of writing her own novel one day. In her later years she set about doing just that but became very ill with cancer, so brought her niece Annie Barrows on to help finish it as co-writer. Unfortunately Shaffer passed away just months before the book was published - but she has given us exactly what I am sure she set out to do: a book for book-lovers.

The central character Juliet is absolutely delightful and the sort of woman you like to think you would be if you lived in London through the WWII bombings. She is witty, clever, self-deprecating, and a deliciously cheeky writer who makes the most of the material devastation and the deprivation that went hand-in-hand with the times. Her personality leaps off the page, and of course provides more than a little insight into the personality of her author.

Chance brings Juliet into contact with a member of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, and natural curiosity takes over. He in turn puts her into contact with various other members and soon she decides to write a book about their stories of Nazi occupation.

Did I mention that the entire thing is told through the letters that fly back and forth between Guernsey and the mainland?

I read this book on recommendation from bookworm friend Meredith after I had visited Guernsey earlier this year. I'm going to be honest and say that before my visit I hadn't known about the Nazi occupation of Guernsey, but it is impossible not to be affected by it after visiting the island and seeing how this is the defining event of their existence.

(I had the good fortune of being there for the 65th anniversary of the end of the occupation, so was treated to a wonderful parade of the old military vehicles and '40s dress-up by the surviving Guerns who were children at the time and their families. I wish I had read this book beforehand.)

One of the more fascinating elements of the occupation is the way that the constancy of the occupation led to people overcoming the division between occupier and occupied, with relationships developing between local women and members of the German army. A strange idea to comprehend romance in the midst of horrors, but a reminder that members of the German army were people too.

Shaffer captures the experience of occupation with empathy and warmth, but does not shy away from the brutality. In this she manages to inject an emotional depth despite the light medium, and I think has created a work that is respectful to its subject matter. I absolutely loved it, and think you will too.

Posted by Bel. The time is 1.45pm here in Wellington, NZ.

Maybe you're a fan of the Golden Age of Hollywood, wanting the behind-the-scenes gossip. Maybe you love vintage clothing and the women who started the styles. Maybe you're a huge bitch, looking for tips on how to make miserable the lives of all those around you.

Whatever your reasons for picking up Shaun Considine's dual biography Bette and Joan: The Divine Feud, I'm sure you will find something to delight and entertain you within its salacious pages.

Eyebrows! Posing! Blood-coloured lightening! Actually, that's pretty much the whole book.

Joan Crawford and Bette Davis' careers ostensibly overlapped only once, when they united for Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962, IMDB link), a tale of stale Hollywood stardom and crazed jealousies that may have been startlingly true to life for the pair.

The author does not describe himself as a friend of either, but he did interview both several times, on occasions when one or other would catch a whiff that an article was coming up and the drunken, self-obsessed, verbose broad (this applies to Joan or Bette alternately and unremittingly it seems), would call him up to put her two cents in. And then some.

This wealth of uncensored material (pre-publicist days) is unravelled chronologically, leading us from young Joan's childhood days of being forced to work in the boarding school where she studied in order to be able to stay on there, and Bette's conservative upbringing, to Joan starting off in Hollywood as a chorus line dancer, whilst Bette carved out a name for herself on the stage.

Their infamous rivalry is denied time and time again, but then both women reportedly let rip with zingers against the other - Bette being particularly scathing towards Joan, who seems to personify the type of actress constantly looking for external validation.

An early moment of conflict was when young starlet Bette found herself falling for her leading man, a dashing and swarthy man named Franchot Tone. Married to her high school sweetheart, a union that was swiftly losing its gloss as her star began to rise, Bette was yearning for something more exciting - and the chance for love was snatched away from her by, you guessed it, Joan Crawford.

At that stage the reigning sex bomb of the studio, Joan been having a casual affair with Monsieur Tone (I like to imagine him as some kind of witless French toyboy, even though he was apparently a New Yorker). But when she realised that he was at risk of developing mutual affections for Bette, his on-screen love, Joan whisked him away and married him, despite having only recently divorced her first husband and declared herself well and truly shot of marriage and all its trappings.

Bette did manage to have the last laugh on this round, as she won her first Academy Award for the film, titled Dangerous (1935, IMDB link), voted Best Actress and reportedly receiving a warm embrace from her handsome co-star at the ceremony, much to his new wife's disgust...

Filled with anecdotes like this, Bette and Joan: The Divine Feud is trashy and gossipy and lots of fun. The supporting players are a star-studded bunch - from Clark Gable to George Cukor, with a fair dash of pre-White House Ronald Reagan thrown in there for good measure.

Crawford would have loved our modern age; she diligently responded to all fan mail personally and engaged in correspondence with some fans for years on end. Can you imagine that woman on twitter? However both she and Davis became reclusive towards the end of their lives, even after all the accolades and lovers. The two of them, despite being very different women, had similarly isolated themselves from their friends and families - most spectacularly their daughters.

There's not one, but two photo sections in the book, which I think bumps it up to being one of the best Trade Me purchases I have ever made.

Click to view large (300 dpi) and witness this rare moment of cheerful civility between the divas.

PS: Yes I am aware that this book is not on The List. After three consecutive calendar years of reading The List, I have decided that 2010 shall be the Year of Memoirs and Biographies. In addition to continuing to endeavour with The List!

Posted by Bel. The time is 1.07pm here in Wellington, NZ.

My husband comes from Irish stock, as he likes to remind us all, any time any particular (drunken) behaviour needs explaining away.

So it was no surprise to find a copy of Frank McCourt's Pulitzer Prize winner on my mother-in-law's shelf, along with two copies of the follow-up Tis, and then the book he wrote about his career in the classroom, Teacher Man, and even the memoir written by his younger brother.

The tone of the book is immediate - deadpan, detailed, colloquial and charming. The dialect is obvious from the onset, ringing out from the page, poetic in the way that the Irish voice has, even when describing the least salubrious of situations.

Now, what with the book being a international bestseller and the film adaptation starring world class actors, I probably don't need to go over the plot with you. But if you haven't actually read the book, and you do come across a copy, I would suggest you give it a go.

The writing is superb and worth immersing yourself in solely for the experience is seeing a world with a child's eyes - as the narrative of Angela's Ashes is deftly told from this perspective. Not in a cloying way, but with traits that remind you of that age when so much of the adult world went over your head and you were happier for it.

Another comment on the tone. I found this book really, really funny. I took it to be a black comedy, with the tragic elements presented in such a way that there was a comedic spin on it all. Like, of course it was awful that he got a thump on the head each time he asked an awkward question, but it was still pretty funny that he kept asking awkward questions in the way that annoying wee boys do and that his parents would just thump him on the head each time he did.

The devasting alcoholism of his father, Malachy Snr, is even given a comedic spin. His relentless booze-fuelled desire to drag his sons out of bed in the middle of the night, dragging them upright to swear to defend Ireland to the death whilst panting whisky-laden breath all over them, becomes an almost affectionate tribute to the patriotic spirit of the Irish - though of course mutilated by Malachy's inability to be a father in any sense of the word.

To me, the passages which diverted most from truly evoking the time and place of McCourt's childhood, were those which retold the time which seemed to have the biggest impact. When he discovers the writing of Shakespeare, Noyes and Swift, a significant turning point in both the book and his young life, a more contemporary voice rings through - a writer still enthralled with these heroes and with literature, whose love of words help transcend the horrors of his origins.

--
Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt. Recommended.
Published in 1996. Set mostly in the poorest, grossest slums of Ireland, 1930s/40s.
#48 from 'The List'

The time is 5.10pm here in Wellington, NZ.
Sometimes the quotes on the front of a book can be immediately heartening. Excellent Women (an encouraging enough title!) was referred to as 'endearing' and 'amusing', which, when judging by the cover, does put you in a positive frame of mind.

I then noted that the quote was from the person who'd written the introduction to the book, rather than from any kind of critique, but decided to forge cheerily ahead anyway.


This kind of ambitiously positive attitude is just the sort sported by the heroine of Barbara Pym's novel it turns out. Mildred Lathbury (what a wonderfully British name) is an excellent woman, self-sufficient and independent, relishing spinsterhood in all its joys.

Her quiet life is thrown into somewhat of a disarray by the arrival of a tempestuous, squabbling couple into the downstairs flat of her previously peaceful home. The husband appears to be attempting to charm her. The wife seems to want to confess all sins to her. Mildred would just like to make sure that the church bazaar is going to run smoothly.

Apparently Pym's style is frequently compared to Jane Austen - and now that I am finally reading my first (!) Austen I can see how this fits. It also reminded me a little of Stella Gibbon's Cold Comfort Farm.

This book is filled with delicate humour and superb characterisation. I did find the pace rather slow, not so much a rollicking night out with salacious details, but rather more unwinding like a polite garden party peppered with snatches of shadowy gossip. And sometimes that can be just what you're in the mood for!

--
Excellent Women by Barbara Pym. Recommended as a very light read.
Published in 1952. Set in post-WWII London.
#47 from 'The List'

Posted by Bel. The time is 7.53pm here in Wellington, NZ.

A short story collection makes great summer reading. If you drop off to sleep in a nice patch of sunshine on your bed during an afternoon's reading, it doesn't matter too much, because you were probably only two or three pages into a six or eight page long story anyway.

But I'll tell ya what, Flannery O'Connor's writing will hold your attention and keep you from even thinking of falling asleep. And quite possibly, the darkly drawn characters of her 'Southern Gothic' tales will give you nightmares.

I was so enraptured by the title story of A Good Man Is Hard To Find, that I did that real annoying thing of re-telling it to the next person I came across, trying to quote her chilling sentences word for word, bungling it horribly and no doubt putting the innocent soul off books in general for life.

Not that her stories in the conventional spooky way. The various characters of A Good Man Is Hard To Find are gut-wrenchingly human and their hopes and flaws are what loads each story with an ominous sense of foreboding. Double-crossing is rife, an almost inevitable conclusion. Although the stories seem to be set in the immediately post-WWII era, there is a quality to them which is so reminiscent of the Coen Brothers' films that it is boldly contemporary.

A note on the title: I had the complete wrong idea about what this book was going to be like. I have an immediate connotation of some kind 80s era poster of a topless Fabio with the twisted slogan 'A Hard Man Is Good To Find' emblazoned across. And so I assumed that this book was some kind of romance trollop too. Read the first story of the book to see how the line is actually used and you'll see just how wrong my interpretation was.

--
A Good Man Is Hard To Find (and Other Stories) by Flannery O'Connor. Highly recommended.
Published in 1955. Set in the South (USA) in the mid 20th C.
#46 from 'The List'

Posted by Bel. The time is 4.30pm here in Wellington, NZ.

The search results on Wellington Central Library's computer told me that I had to go to the enquiries desk to locate the copy of Anais Nin's Delta of Venus.

'That's a bit weird', I thought, but then told myself perhaps it meant the book was in the process of being put into stack (like so many of the great books I've read off 'The List'), or maybe they were putting on a new layer of that clear coverall that librarians seem to like so much.

But twas not so. The man behind the counter delicately handed over the large hard-cover edition of Delta of Venus and I was faced with a garish sticker on the front: "NOT TO BE ISSUED TO THOSE UNDER 16 YEARS: INDECENT PUBLICATIONS ACT".

He didn't I.D. me, and so I just scuttled off to the issues desk. (Yes, that is the same cover up there, but I foolishly forgot to get a real photo of the blush-inducing label.)

The book is a collection of short stories, conjured up in the 1940s by Nin and her circle of friends, reportedly for a patron who paid $1 per page and demanded she strip the stories of their poetry and just get to, you know, the good stuff.

At the time, Nin was one of the only women in the world writing erotica and despite the benefactor's instructions, there is a sensuality and atmosphere to the writing which lifts it above the sort of 'Penthouse Forum' stuff of our modern times. (Forum? That's right, right? Where readers have supposedly written in? With their randomly raunchy tales of explicit seduction?? I don't want to google it to check on my work computer. But blog I shall, dammit!)

The content of Delta of Venus leaves conventional romance far behind. The opening stories present paedophilia and incest, confronting and challenging what we can regard as sexually acceptable. I can't really recall any stories where two adults indulged in a consenting relationship of harmonious love - everything was twisted. For example, when a couple meet on a train and realise they are perfect for one another, it is because they are both depraved exhibitionists who have been using the train ride as a perfect opportunity to fondle their exposed genitals in front of innocent passersby. Aaawh, how cute! See you guys at the wedding! Remember to wear pants!

From bestiality to necrophilia (one of my favourite stories - except that, oh yeah, gross, the woman was dead and had just been fished up from out of the river, *shudder*), there is no stone unturned, or legs gone unspread. Some characters reappear, but it doesn't have a 'plotline' as such, although the theme of exploration and freeing the self from inhibitions, is unsurprisingly prominent.


PS You guys, do you know how difficult it was to write this without puns?? I just had to put in 'difficult' instead of 'hard' because it made me snort laugh.

PPS I only knew who Anais Nin was previous to reading this because of the Jewel song. You know (2m 28s).

--
The Delta of Venus by Anais Nin. Recommended, if you're up for it, ooh err. AND OVER 16 YEARS.
Published in 1978. Set in Paris, 1940s.
#44 from 'The List'

Posted by Bel. The time is 3.30pm here in Wellington, NZ.

I was looking forward to this book, as I recalled hearing of Doris Lessing's comments when she was presented with a Nobel Prize for Literature a year or so ago, at the age of nearly 90. (Basically, she was like, "So what? Took your effing time.")

But The Golden Notebook is not anywhere near as succinct or funny. It made my head swim and my mood increasingly sour as I plodded towards its conclusion. I berated myself for my compulsion to complete books - although it must said, there was something in this that kept me hanging on.

It tells the story (sort of) of Anna Wulf, through her various segmented diaries, and another interweaving section, telling her current life. One diary appears to be a re-telling of her life, fictionalised, reusing character names - which I found most confusing!! Much of the early part of the book focuses on idealistic political views and personal lifestyle choices; seemingly emerging from the dark cloud of World War II determined to improve the world (through Communist values, in this case) and with the early ripples of feminism.

But by the end of the book, it seems to have spiralled down into a nasty self-fulfilling prophesy. All of Anna's previous scathing indictment on the futility of co-dependant male/female relationships comes to fruition in her inability to either relate to or release herself from men. Sigh.

Also: she kind of goes potty about her political beliefs (which earlier they'd been scathing about); the young bright-eyed son turns industrialist (which earlier they'd been scathing about); and her best friend and fellow singleton gets married and moves to the burbs (which earlier, OF COURSE, they'd been scathing about).

I threw the book down in a huff, wondering why it was a tome of such import and went scurrying to ask questions of your friend and mine, the interwebs. I came across a website called The Golden Notebook Project, where a group of feminists have done an interactive 'close reading' of the book, with each page reproduced online with their notes and discussions presented alongside.

The site is worth checking out if you have any interest in website design, because its features and functionality are pretty unique. It is very snazzy-looking as well as easy to use, and made me geek out a bit, I must admit. Also, it made me feel better about the book in general, because many of their reactions were similar - one reader made a wrap-up blog post about how she had to recover from spending so much time reading the brain-churning book by indulging in the kind of shallow romantic comedies she usually hated. Whew! Not just me then.

--

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing. Not recommended.
Published in 1962. Set in England/Africa, 1930s-50s.
#46 from 'The List'

Posted by Lou. The time is 2.15pm here in London.

Wow.

Wow.

This book is ... like ... simply stunning.

Though does present some logistical difficulties as it is quite hard to read a book while your jaw is dropped on the floor.



In his plainest writing yet (and I mean that in the best possible way), Dave Eggers - "Our Dave", and oh boy does he justify our affection here - gives a voice to the experience of Kathy and Abdulrahman Zeitoun before, during and in the after-math of Hurricane Katrina. His own voice is completely absent - even more so than in What is the What - the pages given over completely to a simple retelling of the Zeitouns' story. A story of such staggering, mind-boggling, appalling, preposterous, ... well, I can't even think of the word. And perhaps finding precisely the right one would spoil the book for you a little (don't read any reviews or interviews-with-the-author - let the book tell you the story first). I think the closest I can get is insanity. Utter, complete insanity.

Syrian-American Zeitoun (his first name proved too problematic for Americans to pronounce so he goes by his last) and his American wife Kathy, both Muslim, run a building contracting business and raise four children in Uptown New Orleans. When the storm warnings worsen Kathy takes the children and leaves New Orleans, Zeitoun insistent on staying to watch over their properties and the sites on which they are currently working. The Hurricane hits. It is okay. Then the levees break. Zeitoun canoes around his and other neighbourhoods, rescuing people and feeding the dogs left behind by his neighbours. He calls Kathy every day. Then one day he stops calling - another person disappeared into the chaos. Kathy's urgency is our own as we turn the pages willing him to be okay, to get answers, to find out what has happened.

We all know that in the wake of Hurricane Katrina the federal agencies and many sections of the media failed. With a combination of a slow, inadequate and disorganised response from FEMA and other agencies that - egged on by hysterical media reports that portrayed the flooded city as a lawless zone of muderin', lootin' and rapin' - sent in too many guns, too many battle-psyched soliders, too few rescue craft and basic supplies, they failed. They failed those trapped in the Superdome and the Convention Centre, on overpasses, under motorways, in homes, in hospitals... They failed the people of New Orleans and they failed the citizens of America (and the rest of the world) who were opening their homes and their cupboards and their wardrobes and their wallets to help those in need, little realising how those tasked with helping were falling short.

But... this. This takes it beyond the general sense of It Was Done Badly to a whole new level of insanity. How has FEMA survived? How did Bush manage to stay in power for another three years? Why haven't people hung for the inhumane aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in which heroes and victims alike were stripped of the last vestiges of their dignity by the very federal agencies meant to help them? How could this happen in the wealthiest nation in the world? I could not imagine this happening in any other nation - no matter how poor, how under-the-thumb of a fascist regime, how messed-up, how unjust - in the wake of a natural disaster when the immediate concern should be to rescue. It is insane.

The book immaculately presents the story, Our Dave and his team having stringently fact-checked, cross-checked, and canvassed witnesses to make this a work of truth. He weaves through imagery and stories of Zeitoun's upbringing, conjuring the fishing village in which he grew up in Syria and the lives of his brothers and family. Though he states upfront that this is not meant to be a story that represents Hurricane Katrina, it undoubtedly - hopefully - will come to be read and retold widely, ensuring people know some of the jaw-dropping things that went on.

The only negative for me was that at 1.47am when I closed the back cover having inhaled every page I needed to know more. All the hows, whys, whats, whos... We can only hope that with time more information and detail emerges, and that people - and most importantly the agencies - are brought to account for what happened in New Orleans in August and September 2005.

You must read this book.

[Decided I should add a note to clarify that my above rants, anger and questions relate very specifically to what unfolds in this book, and very much require reading it to see what I mean (in case it passed for rants against the general incompetence of the reaction to the disaster).]

NB: All writer's proceeds go to related charitable organisations.

Posted by Bel. The time is 6:52pm here in Wellington, NZ.

I spent my Christmas break doing a whole lot of nothing. We watched DVD after DVD, pausing only to eat whatever was in reach, and reading in 100 pages chunks. It was very relaxing, so much so that I promptly got sick, developing a nasty case of pink eye. (PINK EYE!!)

The only copy of Property, by Valerie Martin, available at my beloved Wellington Central Library was a large print edition. This was a boon for me and my gammy eye.

However, I do find it hard to shake off the impression that large print books are for 'remedial readers'. You know... Even when the writing is lucid and evocative, I still get the impression the message is being dumbed down and that the over-size print is because I'm just not capable I'm playing with the big kids.

It was particularly tricky with this book, which told the tale of American slavery times from a (relatively) privileged white woman's perspective. Its portrayal of a household where the plantation owner blatantly fathered children with a black slave was startlingly honest, but the characters were all so unlikeable and with so little growth it was hard to understand what the message was.

Manon is freed from the marriage she hates when their plantation is destroyed in an attack by rebel slaves. Her despicable husband is killed thanks to the actions of her African American parallel, the servant called Sarah, who escapes on the night.

But Manon's obsession in life then becomes the hunting down of her 'property', determined that the slave be returned to her. She is not jealous of Sarah's status as bearer of her husband's children, nor does she actually need her around as a servant, she is just transfixed with the concept of what she owns must be returned to her, regardless of whether that be a human being or not.

I think I was mostly disappointed that the theme of oppression did not seem to be resolved. Manon's circumstances change but she was still entrapped in the same mode of thinking; Sarah made a break for freedom but her fate ultimately was to serve without question. Maybe this was the point? It certainly got across the mentality of the time and how slavery managed to persist for so long.

Apparently Property was a total shocker when it won the Orange Prize in 2003, beating out Donna Tartt and Zadie Smith, and that does not surprise me. I mean, it would have surprised me hugely at the time. Yeah, you know what I mean.


A note on the cover: The cover pictured above is not the cover I had. The cover on the large print edition was a really weird, heavily detailed and yet naive illustration of a ye olde sitting room with a fireplace. Not a good choice really, considering. And also ugly.

--
Property by Valerie Martin. Not recommended.
Published in 2003. Set in New Orleans in the mid-1800s.
#44 from 'The List'

Posted by Lou. The time is 12.15pm here in London, UK.

Bel sent me a book called Small Wars Permitting: Dispatches from Foreign Lands by Christina Lamb. That was all I knew when I turned to the first page. Turns out Lamb is an award-winning foreign correspondent working for UK newspapers, having focussed particularly on the Middle East, Africa and South America. Her book is absolutely fantastic.

Interspersed with a selection of her key published articles, she provides the behind-the-scenes story, context and commentary on some of the key driving people, places and issues of our modern world and also of her own life as a young female foreign correspondent. I can honestly say that I know more about the war in Afghanistan, the situation in Pakistan, the politics of Brazil and the Amazon, and - shamefully - far, far more about the political situation in Zimbabwe than I did before picking it up.

The access she has had, the stories she has covered, the life-threatening situations she has been in are staggeringly impressive, yet her writing is down-to-earth and entirely humble. She infuses each and every story with insight into the people and places (big and small), drawing forth each and every interesting element, and presenting it in a clear and absorbing manner. Definitely recommended!

Lamb in Afghanistan back during the war with Russia

Whilst Lamb's wonderful book took me through the drama of being plunged into travel purgatory due to an idiot's attempt to blow up a plane on Christmas Day (how apt!), I was glad to finish it in time to spend the Holiday Proper reading a piece of delicious trash. Another Nora Roberts romance called Tribute was my choice for beachside reading, and expecting nothing but a page-turning plot-driven, brain-frying treat I wasn't disappointed.

The dialogue is cringy, the plot is weak, the heroine one dimensional (but in a Sassy! Strong! Self-determined! way), the hero Mr Impossibly Perfect (Sensitive! Understanding! Patient!), but hey - I was on holiday! It had me turning the pages and giggling at its trashiness and looking forward to spending a bit of quality time with the hilariously named Ford Sawyer. Feel free to borrow it for your next sunshine holiday.

Oooh looks like they made it into a TV movie -

so bad I wouldn't be able to say no :)

Posted by Lou. The time is 1.38am here in London, UK.

Nora Ephron made me do it. In her I Feel Bad About My Neck, Nora writes of a few books she loves (inspired by "Our Michael"'s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay) and says that Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White is the model for the thriller genre. I was sold, and having read it have to agree that it is a mighty fine thriller. I actually haven't read too many thrillers, so can't speak in more sweeping terms, but this one definitely had me turning the pages.

Generally a classic of this book's era would have me spending months poring over it, longing for something light to fill in the downtimes where I want something to flick through but can't... quite... bring... myself... to... face... a... proper... classic... This classic fulfils its thriller credentials, planting enough plot twists and character revelations to have me desperately turning the pages until the very end. It was also particular of interest to me as it is partially set in London, and - like BrightStar - conjured a time when even a modern-day inner-city suburb such as Hampstead was considered "other" than the City itself. It's fantastic to read something from 150 years ago and know that the well-established streets upon the characters walk are the very same streets you inhabit in what to Wilkie Collins would be unimaginable times.

Another wonderful element of this book is that it is proper Feminist, and I actually just wikipedia'd Wilkie Collins, suspicious that with that far-too-awesome-for-the-mid-19th-century name and feminist credentials that perhaps "he" was another George Elliot, forced by times to adopt a masculine pseudonym. (He actually is a he, though.) The female characters in this novel both fight and accept the roles ascribed to their gender, pride intact whichever way circumstances allow or necessitate.

Basically, I'd say add this to your reading list!

Posted by Bel. The time is 11:20am here in Wellington, NZ.

This book is a romance of the sort of absurd proportions that it seems only the hot-blooded South Americans can get away with.

Florentino falls forever in love with Fermina and when after a secret engagement, built up through barely a spoken word, she arbitrarily changes her mind, and he cares not. He waits throughout her 50 year marriage to the dashing Urbino and professes on the day of his death that he loves her still and hopes that now they have a chance to be together.

Perhaps it's called Love In The Time of Cholera because it makes the reader feel a bit ill?

Oh, I jest, I jest. But you do have to be in the mood for this kind of novel. And you have to be willing to buy that someone would stake their heart on someone they barely know and who rejected them. Yet this is the tale of undying love - plus of course, of all the action he gets during those intervening years. (Red hot Latin lovers, as I was saying.)

Plot aside, Garcia Marquez's writing is just amazing. Many a pencilled line was drawn under phrases which stopped me in my tracks. (Unfortunately my copy has already been loaned on, otherwise I would be quoting verbatim right now.) His is a style that which you will either love or hate, with long sentences (paragraphs, and chapters) that may well put you off - or you will be swept up and oblivious to the lack of structure in this way.

The focus of the book shifts from character to character, in time and location, with lots of flashbacks and flashforwards, covering a several parallel lifetimes' events in great detail. It's not until more than a third through the book that we see things from Fermina's perspective.

Until then, her dramatic actions seem very arbitrary and hard to comprehend. Her character is just a shallow thing, adored by the men for no good reason other than her beauty (especially as she is loved from afar by Florentino, who doesn't even really know her). But once we get inside her mind, she is easier to admire. Essentially, however, this is more a tale of obsession and of love for love's sake.


IMPORTANT NOTE:

Whatever you do, do not, repeat: do not watch the film version of this book. The movie Love In The Time of Cholera may look like it might be good, with its reputable cast and decent director, but it is NOT. It is AWFUL. Even if you think "well, I hate long-winded writing and I'm not much of a novel reader anyways, but I feel like a nice mushy romance - let's get this out of a Sunday afternoon" - STOP! Resist! Do not do this to yourself. Please.

And if there is any chance of you reading the book, I double my pleas. Just avoid the film, at any costs.

That is all.

--
Love In The Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Sort of recommended.
English translation published 1988. Set in Columbia, late 19th C - 1930s.
#44 from 'The List'

Posted by Bel. The time is 4:38pm here in Wellington, NZ.

Many fruitless times I have typed The Face of War into the Wellington City Library computer and have had zero results come up. I couldn't just skip a title that is on The List, so I decided I would 'read around' Martha Gellhorn instead.

I found some of her fiction in stack and a travel memoir on the shelves. As I'd managed to figure out that The Face of War was a collection of journalistic essays, I went with Travels With Myself And Another as the next best thing and a good place to start.

And what do ya know, folks, we have not just another instant winner great read, but a bona fide heroine to add to the Bona Fide Heroines list.

Martha Gellhorn reading documentation on how smoking is evil.

Travels With Myself And Another starts off with a funny, dry and decidedly non-PC tone that only gets more funny and less PC as the book goes on.

Gellhorn opens by saying that no one really wants to hear about anyone's travels. The moment you mention the sights you seen, their eyes glaze over. But travel disaster stories are a whole other thing, to be traded and devoured and relived in a thrilling way unimaginable at the time. This book is her collection of "horror journeys", where her indefatigable adventurous spirit lead to disasters in various foreign forms.

Covering various continents and decades of her life, some of the most entertaining anecdotes come from Gellhorn's resolute spirit butting up against, well, against pretty much everyone.

This covers from a camp East African guide who refuses to drive her anywhere when they go on safari, to the terrible travelling companion that her partner of many years Ernest Hemingway was while they traipsed through pre-industrial China.

Gellhorn with a local and "U.C.", short for 'the Unwilling Companion'.

After devouring these well-crafted tales and being filled with wanderlust, I needed to know more about Martha. Her wikipedia page only filled me with awe, as it breezily listed her career which careened from the Spanish Civil War, to being among the first to arrive at Dachau, to covering the conflict in Vietnam and even in her 80s still reporting from the front line. It is no surprise that this determined woman chose to take her own life when her health began to fail in her 90s.

You can imagine my JOY when I stumbled across Caroline Moorehead's definitive biography Gellhorn: A Twenty-First Century Life, in my favourite Wellington secondhand bookstore, Arty Bees.

I am only up to chapter three and already she has met and interviewed Diego Rivera and Sergei Eisenstein - this is aged 21 years, after dropping out of college and moving to Paris, striking up an affair with Colette's stepson.

Her dramatic life may yet make it to the silver screen. Variety reported last year that a biopic was planned, as Gillian Anderson's production company had bought the rights to Caroline Moorehead's biography. With a female writer/director attached, this could be promising - especially considering that Scully won't have to go all Oscar-bait to play the role:

--
[anything] by[/about] Martha Gellhorn. Highly recommended (durrr).
Published 1934 - 1988. Set in pretty much everywhere.
#43 from 'The List'

Posted by Lou. The time is 6.15pm here in London, UK.


(I do, by the way (feel bad about my neck (but because it hurts, not because it's ageing)).)

As you will know from my gushing over Julie & Julia, I'm a fan of Nora Ephron - she's smart, witty and extremely interesting. This collection of essays is a perfect demonstration - ranging from laugh-out-loud funny to poignant to flippant, and always with a healthy does of self-deprecation. As the essays were written over a wide time period (many having been previously published in magazines) they vary in style and subject - but are united by being first and foremost the work of a woman in her 60s, sharing with other women wisdom, reflection, sentimentality and a lamentation of the years gone and going by.

My favourite is an absolutely stunning piece of writing - "The Story of My Life in 3500 Words or Less". It alone is worth the price of the book, pulling together a marvellous set of anecdotes of the highs and the lows and the cathartic moments of her life, each clearly speaking for themselves. I read this essay twice - seeing how somebody of her age and life and career defines their life is a lesson in itself on how to live.

I think this epitomises what is so fantastic about this book for women - whilst the target audience is more overtly women in their middle-age and more who can empathise directly with what she is saying, it also provides great insight for those of us on a younger end of the scale by providing insight into how we might feel 30 years down the line before it's too late. The title is a great example - Ephron longs for the neck of her youth, defining 46 as the year it disappears and becomes the neck of an ageing woman. For the next 17 years I'm going to love and appreciate my smooth, taut neck.

Posted by Bel. The time is 2:03pm here in Wellington, NZ.

This is the first time I've read The Bell Jar, and although familiar with some of Sylvia Plath's poetry, I'm not a fan and wasn't really amped for this novel.

Also (and it's dreadful to have had this association, but somewhat unavoidable), the image of GOOPy Gwyneth Paltrow mooching around in cardigans in Dunedin - oh I mean, Cambridge - is inextricably implanted in my mind.

Reading this brilliant book has successfully wiped all that away.

The first third of the book, set in the glitz and glam of 1950s New York City, shows our heroine Esther as the somewhat reluctant member of a group of interns for a top fashion magazine editor. This reminded me a little of that section of The Girl's Guide To Hunting And Fishing, but with more of a delightful sarcastic humour.

I loved the moment where hedonistic intern Doreen, with her Marilyn Munroe hair, passes out drunken in a pool of vomit outside Esther's hostel door, and Esther contemplates it, and then delicately closes the door again, deciding to deny all knowledge. (Recovery position, people!!)

Returning home to the suburbs, Esther is devastated to learn she has not been accepted into the writing course she had her heart set on. Imagery is used with her thinking of many figs on different branches, all representing various choices in her life, future paths that may be taken. Esther sees these all withering before her fingers even get a chance to grasp them. (There is also the added layer that the character lives in a time when even with education, her choices were rather limited and most people's ideals were for a women to be a lovely housewife.)

There are moments in this book when you just want to give this young lady a shake of the shoulders and say "Buck up! It'll work out!". But from the halfway point on, her decent from inaction to depression is very well characterised. And although the final lines of the book are open-ended, I felt that it was positive and that Esther was on the right track. Her actions in the closing chapters had been self-directed and about achieving things for herself - the opposite of the frozen inertia that defined the slump into depression.

It is very hard to write a review of this book, let alone read it, without the spectre of Sylvia Plath's suicide looming over. I guess I'd always assumed that a novel published mere weeks before the writer killed themselves might not be the most fun to pick up. But despite The Bell Jar's autobiographical content, it is not all doom and gloom, and is actually very entertaining.

Last thing: The cover above is unfortunately not the one that was on the shelf at the Wellington Central Library when I swung by. It was one that incorporated the image below, which I assume is of Sylvia Plath, which seems a bit much like blurring the line, considering the character Esther makes frequent mention of using a typewriter.

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The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. Recommended.
First published 1963. Set in New York/Massachusetts, 1950s.
#42 from 'The List'