I’m about two-thirds of the way through Sherrod Brown’s Desk 88, about the progressive senators who once sat at his desk in the U.S. Senate. It’s pretty good. Any liberal Democrat, or anyone who likes U.S. history, would enjoy it.
Finished Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo. 1460 pages of small print. This is now one of my favorite books. Jean Valjean steals a loaf of bread to feed his hungry family, which leads to 19 years on a prison chain-gang and a lifetime of persecution by the dutiful and uberefficient Inspector Javert. A fantastic story, witty and chockful of detail. Hugo takes his sweet time in telling it. For example, he spends 57 pages on a detailed account of the battle of Waterloo and its geographic layout, just so in the last couple of pages he can show one character accidentally saving the life of another while looting soldiers’ bodies on the battlefield at night, which has fateful consequences later in the story. There is an extensive history of the Paris sewer system, because Jean Valjean must flee through it at one point. All of it just fantastic. The book opens in 1815, a few months after Waterloo, but there are flashbacks to the French Revolution and Empire days, and I feel I benefited from not only having already some knowledge of that period, but also recently reading Andrew Roberts’ excellent biography of Napoleon. But I think the book would have been enjoyable even if if that were not so. And I am glad I did not waste my time with an abridged version. As Lee Fahnestock writes in the Introduction to this edition: "While several abridged editions exist in English, that expedient seems a mistake. It is almost impossible to predict the individual detail, the flashing image or human quirk precisely observed, that will burn its way into a reader’s mind for good. The sound solution is to honor the author’s wishes.
Have started Rage, by Bob Woodward.
Just finished Life Among the Savages , one of Shirley Jackson’s memoirs, which I enjoyed. Her children’s imaginary friends are hilarious. She lives in an old house which sounds as if it might have inspired, at least in part, The Haunting of Hill House.
Now I’m reading The Second Kind of Impossible: The Extraordinary Quest for a New Form of Matter, by Paul J. Steinhardt.
I finished Fellowship of the Ring as a read-aloud for my family (first my 11-year-old, but my wife and 7yo joined in). I’d forgotten how insufferable the elves were in the book, and how excited various characters get when they can give a combo geography/history lesson in the middle of a conversation.
“We travel now by the river Billybim,” Aragorn said, “Known to the elves as Duenethoriel, named after the great elven king Duendum, who allied with the dwarvish chieftain Goomlidoom at the battle of the Three Crossings beneath the Mountains Simmy, Dimmy, and Whimmy, known to the dwarves as the Three Cousins Mountains, the three cousins being the three cousins who founded the dwarven City under the Hills of Bognothegor, known to the Men of Gondor as …”
“Hey! Hey! HEY! Strider!” Merry shouted. “Left or right?”
But it is of course a lovely read, and I’m so happy I got to read it aloud.
I also finished The Hollow Places, by T. Kingfisher. She writes horror stories set in the communities where I grew up, in central North Carolina. Her exasperated and irony-laced love for this culture shines through, and leavens the New Weird horror vibe. “It’s like Jeff Van der Meer, if he was snarky and readable!” I told my wife.
I believe Ursula lives in North Carolina, pretty sure I read that somewhere…
Yep, she’s in Pittsboro, about half an hour from where I grew up.
Finished The Companion. It felt a lot like a V.C. Andrews novel. Not very well-written, but interesting, and I was frustrated when it ended abruptly, leaving questions unanswered. For one thing, once you grasp the real situation, you have to wonder why the main character is in that place at all. Also, she is so slow to catch on, and does such stupid things, it’s hard to root for her. The cover illustration (a spoon full of pins) has no connection whatsoever to any event in the book. A character who is presented as important is actually a walk-on. Some things that do happen in the book can only have a supernatural explanation, but no confirmation of that is given, nor any notice taken. What does the future hold for the characters? An ending is tacked on, but how did the characters get from climax to denouement?
Anyway, I read the whole gosh-darn thing, so I can say that I passed a few pleasant hours with it, although I was ultimately disappointed.
Started this morning on The Whitsun Daughters by Carrie Mesrobian. It’s a story about a family of women living on a farm, observed by a long-dead woman who also once lived in that place. The first chapter is from the ghost’s POV, all dreamy and lyrical, and the second chapter drops you right into the modern day, with lots of f-bombs and mentions of things like dick pics and the Diva Cup. I’m interested.
Finished The Second Kind of Impossible: The Extraordinary Quest for a New Form of Matter , by Paul J. Steinhardt. It was interesting.
Now I’m reading Devil in a Blue Dress, by Walter Mosley.
While waiting for my next Audible credit to show up, I dipped into their free library and picked out Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent by Anthony Rapp - also read by same. I’m on the fence about it. It is very well written, but it gets pretty maudlin at times and while Mr. Rapp does a good job reading out his work, there are a lot of passages of dialog with his dying mom which is kind of annoying to listen to. It’s just a lot of heavy duty stuff followed by him doing a kind of cloying imitation of his mother by way of narration that features her saying “I don’t know, Tonio,” about a hundred times a page.
I grabbed it because I really like the show Rent (I saw a road company version in San Francisco in '99) and there are many funny and touching anecdotes about the show, but the majority of the book is about his relationships with his boyfriends and his family.
I’m not quite done with it only because I was listening to it at work yesterday and his mother was just about to die of cancer and I couldn’t take it. My little lip started quivering so I had to switch to some nasty blues rock to get my head space to where it needed to be.