Carolyn Selections (3)  

---

Book Group Books     |     Book Comments    
Adelia | Alex | Ann | Burch | Carolyn | Darcy | Judy | Karen | Lane | Lindsey | Mary | Nancy | Jeanne | Friends
Home Page     |     Members' Page     |     Greatest Books     |     Famous Lists     |     Book Awards

Wimsey-Vane mysteries - (Sayers) - Strong Poison, Have His Carcase, Gaudy Night and Busman's Honeymoon chronicle Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane's relationship through a series of mysteries written in England between the World Wars.  Dorothy L. Sayers is the author of novels, short stories, poetry collections, essays, reviews and translations. Although she was a noted Christian scholar, she is most known for her detective fiction. Born in 1893, she was one of the first women to be awarded a degree from Oxford University. Her first book featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, Whose Body?, was published in 1923 and over the next 20 years more novels and short stories about the aristocratic amateur sleuth appeared. Dorothy L. Sayers is recognized as one of the greatest mystery writers of the 20th century.

Comment:

Carolyn: – (A third or forth reading of the Wimsey-Vane mysteries, this, in the aftermath of September 11, was for comfort.)   Sayers was a strong, intelligent, independent woman, born before the turn of the 20th century.  She was over 35 when she created Harriet Vane in her own image as the perfect counterpoint to her aristocratic detective-hero, Lord Peter Wimsey.  Harriet is a 29-year old mystery-writer on trial for the murder of her ex-lover.  Slight, 40-ish, bon-vivant Lord Peter finally falls in love as he watches Harriet in the dock.  Harriet has a plain face, tall, sturdy body, husky voice and direct manner.  She agreed to live with her lover because he wouldn't marry her - said he didn't believe in marriage.  When he finally wanted to get married, she left him.  She could respect a principle, but when it turned out to be just a trial run, it was over.   Peter talks his way into the case, and proposes to her during their first interview in prison.  Sick of relationships, she turns him down - a pattern they repeat through three of the four Wimsey-Vane mysteries.  

 

The books are vividly set in their times:  1930, Strong Poison glimpses the artist's life during the post-war roaring twenties.  Séances were big.  1932, Have His Carcase - a seaside ballroom resort.  The depression is noticeable around the edges, and the aftermath of the Russian Revolution is prominently featured.  1936, Gaudy Night, set in Oxford at Harriet's alma mater.  Harriet discovers that the foreign office sends Peter to smooth over ruffled feathers in hopes of avoiding war.  1937, Busman's Honeymoon - comedy and the perfect picture of British country life.  When war becomes too real, Sayers resorts to comfort, too.

 

The settings are wonderful and the romance perfect.  The mystery is good.  The dialogue is fast and intelligent, a bit on the snooty side at times.  But the best part is Sayers' exploration of women - who they are and how they fit in.  The most interesting women are near middle-age and not married.  She explores the damping effect of marriage on women's lives, and in the end her only real solution is economic independence.  This is the 1930's and everything is modern, but it's also less than a generation from women getting the franchise.  The characters and their motivations are fascinating to me.  In seventy years not much has really changed.  These days, however, Harriet Vane would be the star, not Lord Peter.  See other comments.

 

How To Be Good - (Hornby) - How to Be Good is a story for our times—a humorous but uncompromising look at what it takes, in this day and age, to have the courage of our convictions. In his third novel, Nick Hornby, whom The New Yorker named "the maestro of the male confessional," has reinvented himself as Katie—the consummate liberal, urban mom—a doctor from North London whose world is being turned on its ear by the outrageous spiritual transformation of her husband, David. Jump to the New York Times Review.

Mark Twain and His World - (Kaplan) - Not in print.

Magician of the Modern - (Gaddis) - Eugene Gaddis  (Non-fiction, 2000). Transcending the usual dusty confines of museum curatorships with unusual artistic range, grasp, ambition and flair, Austin (1900-1957) shone as director of Hartford's Wadsworth Athaneum and Florida's Ringling Museum. Born to a rich family, Austin married for social position, despite a flamboyant bisexual life (apparently reported matter-of-factly to his wife). By his late 20s he was already running the Athaneum, burning old paintings he disliked in the museum furnace and going on buying binges in Europe, usually snagging rare masterworks at bargain basement prices. In a typical case, he facilitated the world premiere of the Virgil Thomson-Gertrude Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts (recently thrice-revived) at the Athaneum, and helped arrange George Balanchine's arrival in America to found what became the New York City Ballet. (The choreographer took one look at Hartford in the 1930s and fled to Manhattan.) Gaddis (Austin Memorial: The First Modern Museum), who currently curates the Austin House museum at the Athaneum, points out that many of Austin's artistic friends, from architect Philip Johnson to historian H. Russell Hitchcock, were gay, but fails to detail whether Austin's work and sexuality were related. A pioneer in the appreciation of film as art, baroque painting and the links between 19th-century kitsch and modern art, Austin seems here an ever open-minded intelligence, unique in his time and even more valuable today, when his like would languish in the bureaucratic, hype-obsessed art world. (Nov.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.  Jump to the New York Times review.

The Gold Bug Variations - (Powers) - In this novel, "the narration alternates between two time frames. In 1957 at the University of Illinois, a biologist, Stuart Ressler, is decoding the DNA molecule and falling in love with his (happily married) colleague Dr. Jeanette Koss. She gives him a Glenn Gould recording of Bach's 'Goldberg' Variations that changes his life. . . . Meanwhile, in the mid-1980's in Brooklyn, Mr. Powers's first-person narrator, Jan O'Deigh, is joining her . . . boyfriend, Franklin Todd, in solving the mystery of the same Stuart Ressler--who 25 years later has sunk to anonymity in a dead-end, graveyard-shift job as a computer programmer. Why, they ask, has Dr. Ressler forsaken scientific glory for obscurity?" (N Y Times Book Rev)

The Sixteen Pleasures - (Hellenga) - "I was twenty-nine years old when the Arno flooded its banks on Friday 4 November 1966. On Tuesday I decided to go to Italy, to offer my services as a humble book conservator, to save whatever could be saved, including myself." The Italians called them "Mud Angels," the young foreigners who came to Florence in 1966 to save the city's treasured art from the Arno's flooded banks. American volunteer Margot Harrington was one of them, finding her niche in the waterlogged library of a Carmelite convent. For within its walls she discovered a priceless Renaissance masterwork: a sensuous volume of sixteen erotic poems and drawings. Inspired to sample each of the ineffable sixteen pleasures, Margot embarks on the intrigue of a lifetime with a forbidden lover and the contraband volume—a sensual, life-altering journey of loss and rebirth in this exquisite novel of spiritual longing and earthly desire.

Two Kinsey Millhones - (Grafton) - 

Enduring Love - (McEwan) - On a windy spring day in the Chilterns, the calm, organized life of science writer Joe Rose is shattered when he witnesses a tragic accident: a hot-air balloon with a boy trapped in its basket is being tossed by the wind, and in the attempt to save the child, a man is killed. A stranger named Jed Parry joins Rose in helping to bring the balloon to safety. But unknown to Rose, something passes between Parry and himself on that day—something that gives birth to an obsession in Parry so powerful that it will test the limits of Rose's beloved rationalism, threaten the love of his wife, Clarissa, and drive him to the brink of murder and madness. Brilliant and compassionate, this is a novel of love, faith, and suspense, and of how life can change in an instant.  Jump to the New York Times review.

Ruby, Sapphire & Emerald Buying Guide - (Newman) - Registered gemologist Newman understands this. In her two new guides, Newman continues her tradition of user-friendly texts that are technical enough to help consumers make wise purchases. Like her other well-regarded guides (e.g., The Gold Jewelry Buying Guide), this book is profusely illustrated with color photographs most by Newman showing not only the beauty of finished jewelry but close-ups and magnifications of details such as finish, settings, cut, clarity, flaws, and fakes. Sections on testing and judging the real from the fake are sophisticated enough for professionals to use. All three books are enjoyable reading, but Newman s guides are the ones to take along when shopping. (Lib J).

Conditions of Faith - (Miller) - When Alex Miller's mother died several years ago, she left him the fragmentary journal she'd kept while living briefly in Paris as a young woman in the 1920's. Inspired by this surprising entrée into his mother's emotional life and her conflicted passions of young womanhood, Miller has written Conditions of Faith. In spare, precise prose, Miller brings us into vivid 1920's Australia, France, and Tunisia and gives us a taste of feminism at the beginning of the century through the story of Emily Stanton. Like Henry James's Isabel Archer before her, Emily is beautiful and headstrong, restless, idealistic, and determined to live a fulfilling life despite smothering social conventions. It's 1923 and at age 25 Emily, an Australian, impulsively marries Georges Elder, a French-Scottish engineer ten years her senior. Suddenly she is propelled from Melbourne, where she is a promising scholar of classical civilizations, to Georges's small, conventional flat in Paris. Quickly dismayed at the traditional life she has married into, Emily resolves to look elsewhere for the exotic adventure and intellectual stimulation she believes to be her due. She will "live a Parisian fairy story," she determines, which suits her until it leads to an illicit liaison and unwanted pregnancy, altering her life irrevocably. At the center of the book is "the problem of a reason for living," a problem which society says should be solved, for women, by motherhood. For Emily, though, it's not sufficient. Her search for fulfillment will take her as far as the ruins of Carthage and ultimately challenge society's most deeply cherished beliefs about motherhood and family.

I Could Do Anything If Only I Knew What It Was - (Sher) - I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was (the New York Times Bestseller) guides you, not to another unsatisfying job, but to a richly rewarding career rooted in your heart's desire.

Gift from the Sea - (Lindbergh) - Gift from the Sea has enlightened and offered solace to readers on subjects from love and marriage to peace and contentment. It tells of light and life and love and the security that lies at the heart.  Jump to Lindbergh's obituary.

Girl with a Pearl Earring - (Chevalier) - In seventeenth-century Delft, there's a strict social order-rich and poor, Catholic and Protestant, master and servant-and all know their place. When Griet becomes a maid in the household of the painter Johannes Vermeer, she thinks she knows her role: housework, laundry, and the care of his six children. She even feels able to handle his shrewd mother-in-law; his restless, sensual wife; and their jealous servant. What no one expects is that Griet's quiet manner, quick perceptions, and fascination with her master's paintings will draw her inexorably into his world. Their growing intimacy sparks whispers; and when Vermeer paints her wearing his wife's pearl earrings, the gossip escalates into a full-blown scandal that irrevocably changes Griet's life.  NYT Bestseller.  Jump to the book's web site to see Verneer's paintings described in the book, and learn about his life.  Jump to the New York Times review.

It's only too late If You Don't Start Now - (Sher) - Shattering the myth that turns midlife (or any age) into a crisis, this provocative guide is packed with sage advice. Career counselor Barbara Sher has appeared on a  PBS special.

Northanger Abby - (Austen) - Issued posthumously in 1818, Northanger Abbey was the first novel that Jane Austin completed for publication. Written when she was twenty-four, the book anticipates several of the major themes and concerns of her later work. It is the story of seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland, a passionate and headstrong young woman with a fondness for Gothic novels. Away from home for the first time to guide her, Catherine finds herself suddenly thrown into the adult world---a world bristling with possible intrigue, romance, and suspense. Northanger Abbey can be enjoyed as a parody of the Gothic romance novels popular at the time it was written. Or it can be savored as a delightful comedy of manners and a cautionary tale. For in the education of Catherine Morland, the novel explores the mercurial relationship between appearance, and reality, literature and life---and in the process raises questions about its own fictionality.

Vinegar Hill - (Ansay) - In her remarkable debut novel...Manette Ansay writes with startling authority and quiet elegance of one woman's gradual realization that in order to reenvision her life she must break all the rules. It is 1972 and Ellen Grier finds herself back in the Midwestern hometown she thought she had escaped for good. Worse yet, she and her family have had to move in with her in-laws: narrow-minded, eccentric people who are as tough as the farm lives they have endured. Devout Catholics, they inhabit a world "as rigid, as precise as a church," and Ellen struggles to live by their motto: "A place for everything; everything in its place." But there is no place for Ellen -- fresh, funny, bright with passion -- in a house filled with the dust of routine and the ritual of prayer, the lingering bitterness of her in-laws' loveless marriage. She tries to be the model woman everyone expects her to be -- teaching at the Catholic school, coaxing her traveling-salesman husband through his increasingly irrational moods, caring for his aging parents -- but Ellen's hopes for her family's future collide with life in this bizarre household, and she worries over her wryly observant adolescent daughter and her timid young son. Encouraged by her friend Barb, a woman ostracized for being "modern" and "wild," Ellen begins to consider her own desires and dreams as well. Surrounded by the family's obsession with an exacting, angry God and the disquieting ghosts of the past, Ellen searches for a way to satisfy the demands of this rural community and its traditions until, at last, she discovers the family's darkest secret, one that frees her and changes her life forever.  Jump to the Oprah site.

Genome - (Ridley) - A fascinating tour of the results of the most momentous scientific endeavor of our time--the Human Genome Project--cleverly told in 23 essays, one for each chromosome.  Jump to the New York Times review.

Demian - (Hesse) - In Demian, one of the great writers of the twentieth century tells the dramatic story of young, docile Emil Sinclair's descent—led by precocious shoolmate Max Demian—into a secret and dangerous world of petty crime and revolt against convention and eventual awakening to selfhood.

Genome - (Bishop) - Told with the pacing of a great suspense novel, GENOME tells the very real story of what could be the most ambitious scientific research project ever undertaken: the attempt to identify all the genes in the human body.

As She Climbed Across the Table - (Lethem) - What if your lover left you for, well, nothing? Literally nothing. Particle physicist Alice Coombs and her colleagues are on the cusp of an extraordinary discovery. They have created a void, a hole in the universe, a true nothingness that they have named "Lack." Philip Engstrand, a professor who studies other professors, has made a breakthrough of his own - he now understands how deeply he loves Alice. Lack, though, is no ordinary black hole: It swallows certain things - a pomegranate, argyle socks, mirrored sunglasses - but displays no appetite for a bow tie, an ice ax, or scrambled duck eggs. This is a void that displays the outlines of a personality: a nothingness that, as Philip comes to realize, utterly obsesses his beloved. Alice, it becomes apparent, has fallen out of love with Philip and in love with Lack.

The Millstone - (Drabble) - At a time when sex is de rigueur -- this is the 60s, after all, in newly energized London -- and illegitimacy taboo, Rosamund Stacey finds herself pregnant after her only sexual encounter. Despite her fierce independence and academic brilliance, Rosamund is naive and unworldly and the choices before her are terrifying. But in the perfection and helplessness of her baby she finds an unconditional love she has never known before, and the realization that motherhood and independence are not mutually exclusive.

The Orchid Thief - (Orlean) - The orchid thief in Susan Orlean's true story of beauty and obsession is John Laroche, a renegade plant dealer and sharply handsome guy, in spite of the fact that he is missing his front teeth and has the posture of al dente spaghetti. In 1994, Laroche and three Seminole Indians were arrested with rare orchids they had stolen from a wild swamp in south Florida that is filled with some of the world's most extraordinary plants and trees. Laroche had planned to clone the orchids and then sell them for a small fortune to impassioned collectors. After he was caught in the act, Laroche set off one of the oddest legal controversies in recent memory, which brought together environmentalists, Native American activists, and devoted orchid collectors.  Jump to the New York Times review.

Galileo's Daughter - (Sobel) - The son of a musician, Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) tried at first to enter a monastery before engaging the skills that made him the foremost scientist of his day. Though he never left Italy, his inventions and discoveries were heralded around the world. Most sensationally, his telescopes allowed him to reveal a new reality in the heavens and to reinforce the astounding argument that the Earth moves around the Sun. For this belief, he was brought before the Holy Office of the Inquisition, accused of heresy, and forced to spend his last years under house arrest. Of Galileo's three illegitimate children, the eldest best mirrored his own brilliance, industry, and sensibility, and by virtue of these qualities became his confidante. Born Virginia in 1600, she was thirteen when Galileo placed her in a convent near him in Florence, where she took the most appropriate name of Suor Maria Celeste. Her loving support, which Galileo repaid in kind, proved to be her father's greatest source of strength throughout his most productive and tumultuous years. Her presence, through letters which Sobel has translated from their original Italian and woven into the narrative, graces her father's life now as it did then. Galileo's Daughter dramatically recolors the personality and accomplishment of a mythic figure whose seventeenth-century clash with Catholic doctrine continues to define the schism between science and religion. Moving between Galileo's grand public life and Maria Celeste's sequestered world, Sobel illuminates the Florence of the Medicis and the papal court in Rome during the pivotal era when humanity's perception of its place in the cosmos was being overturned.  Jump to the New York Times review.

Waiting - (Jin) - This is the story of Lin Kong, a man living in two worlds, struggling with the conflicting claims of two utterly different women as he moves through the political minefields of a society designed to regulate his every move and stifle the promptings of his innermost heart.. "For more than seventeen years this devoted and ambitious doctor has been in love with an educated, clever, modern woman, Manna Wu. But back in the traditional world of his home village lives the wife his family chose for him when he was young - a humble and touchingly loyal woman, whom he visits in order to ask, again and again, for a divorce. In a culture in which the ancient ties of tradition and family still hold sway and where adultery discovered by the Party can ruin lives forever, Lin's passionate love is stretched ever more taut by the passing years. Every summer, his compliant wife agrees to a divorce but then backs out. This time, Lin promises, will be different.. "Tracing these lives through their summer of decision and beyond, Ha Jin vividly conjures the texture of daily life in a place where the demands of human longing must contend with the weight of centuries of custom. National Book Award 1999.  Jump to the New York Times review.

Nabokov's Pale Fire - (Boyd) - Brian Boyd, Nabokov's biographer and hitherto the foremost proponent of the idea that Pale Fire has one narrator, John Shade, now rejects this position and presents a new and startlingly different solution that will permanently shift the nature of critical debate on the novel. Boyd argues that the book does indeed have two narrators, Shade and Charles Kinbote, but reveals that Kinbote had some strange and highly surprising help in writing his sections. In light of this interpretation, Pale Fire now looks distinctly less postmodern--and more interesting than ever.

In presenting his arguments, Boyd shows how Nabokov designed Pale Fire for readers to make surprising discoveries on a first reading and even more surprising discoveries on subsequent readings by following carefully prepared clues within the novel. Boyd leads the reader step-by-step through the book, gradually revealing the profound relationship between Nabokov's ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, and metaphysics. If Nabokov has generously planned the novel to be accessible on a first reading and yet to incorporate successive vistas of surprise, Boyd argues, it is because he thinks a deep generosity lies behind the inexhaustibility, complexity, and mystery of the world. Boyd also shows how Nabokov's interest in discovery springs in part from his work as a scientist and scholar, and draws comparisons between the processes of readerly and scientific discovery.  Jump to the New York Times review.

Comment:

Carolyn: – When you’ve done all the rereading of Pale Fire you’re going to do in order to discover its links and depths on your own, treat yourself to Nabokov’s Pale Fire, by Boyd. It’s like getting a key to a thousand-piece paint-spattered jig-saw puzzle, which you’ve only half completed. Don’t read any further if you don’t want to know Boyd’s ‘final’ analysis. The main theme Nabokov is exploring is the surprising, seemingly random interconnectedness of life which we occasionally glimpse, but can never know (nature, the afterlife, time and space). Nabokov expected people to have to re-read to keep discovering sweeping surprises hidden in his work. He said, “The unraveling of a riddle is the purest and most basic act of the human mind.” Vera Nabokov described “the beyond” as her husband’s main theme.

Level 1 - first reading: Shade and Kinbote are separate characters. Kinbote is really a crazy man (Prof. Botkin) running from trouble in Europe caused by his obsessions and guilt over homosexual pedophilia. In the US, he develops the fantasy he is king of Zembla as a form of escapism, and presses his story on Shade, a poet of note, expecting to influence him to reinforce his fantasy in epic rhyme. Shade instead writes an autobiographical poem which describes the suicide of his homely daughter and his efforts to seek some sign that she is somehow still there. Shade is mistakenly killed by Grey, a crazed ex-convict who was really gunning for Judge Goldsworth, the owner of Kinbote’s house. A first reading seems to refute everything Shade is seeking in “the beyond”.

Level 2 – second reading (although it took Boyd 30 years to come to this conclusion): After her death, Hazel begins to influence Kinbote, giving him the fantasy that he is really king of Zembla so he can escape the thoughts which devastate him (she pities him). Several of the vignettes explore a vindication of Hazel as a spurned woman. Through Kinbote’s life fantasy she can obliquely communicate and influence her father to write two poems and his opus – his life story. The total reversal of the initial conclusion – the ‘Beyond’ is there.

Level 3 – third reading: The forth voice is Shade himself after his death. He influences Kinbote to publish his work and refashion Grey as Gradus, “the blind force of advancing death”, and to add his own hints at interpretation within the commentary. Not only is there a ‘Beyond’, WE can influence the world from beyond our life.

Some of the clues that Boyd explains: References to Shakespeare, Browning, T.S. Elliot, Goethe, Nabokov’s other works and the ultimate chess problem (8) are rampant. Colors: red, green, azure, neon, gray all point to specific characters or issues. Names with the same first letters (A to Z). Rhyming patterns which represent the voice of various characters. (The ghost in the barn was Aunt Maude warning of Shade’s death.) Mirrors and reflection (Nabokov’s son, Dimitri was the mirror antithesis of Hazel, also born in 1934. He was a “daredevil and playboy, frequently at risk because of his adventurousness”.) The symbolism of tunnels and underground, nature references, plays on Russian words and nobility, flight and things with wings. These and more are referenced by Boyd to bolster his theories.

He reviews 30 years of other’s interpretations, yet he fully expects to keep discovering more. “Who else could write a novel in which four out of the five main characters die but which remains so funny…”. To paraphrase Shade, “It’s not about the text, but the texture.”

Back                                                                                                                                                                                More  

Rating (1-5)
5- Life changing book or reread it frequently.
4- Great book, speaks to me.
3- Liked reading this book, recommend it.
2- Just OK, could have skipped it.
1- Disliked it or couldn't finish it.

=Rating of 4 or 5