Books

Heir to the Glimmering World

Heir to the Glimmering World
Heir to the Glimmering World
I also can’t find enough time to write a synopsis of Heir to the Glimmering World by Cynthia Ozick – a book I picked up in Chicago last July and just finished reading, so again I’m going to cheat and give you the synopsis/review From Publishers Weekly instead:

Ozick’s previous novel, The Puttermesser Papers, revolved around one quirky hero; this time around, Ozick incubates several. Characters, not plot, drive this Depression-era tale, and Ozick eviscerates each one through her narrator, Rose Meadows, a resolute 18-year-old orphan. Virtually abandoned, Rose wanders into a job with the Mitwisser family, German refugees in New York City. Filling gaping holes in their household, she becomes a research assistant to the father, a professor stubbornly engaged in German and Hebrew arcana; a nurse to his oft-deranged, sequestered wife; and nanny to their five children. As she penetrates the fog surrounding their history, Rose limns their roiling inner lives with exasperated perception. Mrs. Mitwisser especially chafes against the family’s precarious, degrading status as “parasites,” erratically supported by the unbalanced millionaire son and heir of an author of popular children’s books who is fascinated by Mr. Mitwisser’s research. With her trademark lyrical prose, gentle humor and vivid imagery, Ozick paints a textured portrait of outsiders rendered powerless, retreating into tightly coiled existences of scholarly rapture, guarded brazenness and even calculated lunacy—all as a means of refuting the bleakness of a harsh, chaotic world. Erudite exposition is packed into the book, so that character study and discourse occasionally grind the plot to a halt. Edifying and evocative, if often daunting, this is a concentrated slice of eccentric life.

The assessment of “grinding the plot to a halt” is dead on – I found this book to be a tough slog. I also had trouble sympathizing with any of the characters; each of them was either mean or sad, and I couldn’t get over my frustration with them.

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The Thirteenth Tale

The Thirteenth Tale
The Thirteenth Tale
Unfortunately, I don’t have time to write a synopsis of The Thirteenth Tale – (I’ve been meaning to since I finished this fun, enjoyable book three weeks ago!) so I’ll have to cheat and give you Amazon’s instead:

Settle down to enjoy a rousing good ghost story with Diane Setterfield’s debut novel, The Thirteenth Tale. Setterfield has rejuvenated the genre with this closely plotted, clever foray into a world of secrets, confused identities, lies, and half-truths. She never cheats by pulling a rabbit out of a hat; this atmospheric story hangs together perfectly.

There are two heroines here: Vida Winter, a famous author, whose life story is coming to an end, and Margaret Lea, a young, unworldly, bookish girl who is a bookseller in her father’s shop. Vida has been confounding her biographers and fans for years by giving everybody a different version of her life, each time swearing it’s the truth. Because of a biography that Margaret has written about brothers, Vida chooses Margaret to tell her story, all of it, for the first time. At their initial meeting, the conversation begins:

“You have given nineteen different versions of your life story to journalists in the last two years alone.”

She [Vida] shrugged. “It’s my profession. I’m a storyteller.”

“I am a biographer, I work with facts.”

The game is afoot and Margaret must spend some time sorting out whether or not Vida is actually ready to tell the whole truth. There is more here of Margaret discovering than of Vida cooperating wholeheartedly, but that is part of Vida’s plan.

I give the book a thumbs up; it was a quite good homage to victorian gothic tales or those of the Brontë sisters. The book has a promotional website that’s also quite fun to peruse as well.

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Good Disguises

Me to a co-worker: “But would you expect me to have a mustache and goatee? No – that’s why it’s a good disguise!”

Commie Disquise
Commie Disquise
2022-03-16 Update:
Why did it take me so long to deal with my gender issues? I do not know.
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David Sedaris Exaggerates!

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The New Republic comes out with a world-rocking revelation: David Sedaris embellishes his humorous non-fiction memoirs.
Um, no shit, Sherlock. You needed to write an article to tell us this? He’s a humor writer. I sort of figured out he was gilding the lily on my own, thanks. As if any one person has that much funny shit just happen to them randomly. Think about it – is your life that funny? Is anyone’s? Of course he punches it up to make it more funny. It’s not a big deal. He’s not a frackin’ presidential biographer for crap’s sake. I hope that he keeps doing it – he makes me laugh my ass off.
Hell, I didn’t even think it was that big a deal when James Frey exaggerated, except that there were people who looked at his book as some sort of self-help inspirational piece. But even then, I hardly think that was Frey’s fault.

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The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

Glass Books of the Dream Eaters
Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

A strange Victorian Steampunk novel that I enjoyed, despite its length and rather confusing cast of villains. Celeste Temple is a young English woman raised in the West Indies and residing in London awaiting a future wedding to her fiancé, Roger Bascombe. When he sends her a curt note breaking their engagement, she decides to find out why – following him to a mysterious party in an English country manor. After infiltrating the gathering, Miss Temple witnesses a bizarre set of “scientific” experiments and narrowly escapes capture after killing one of her homicidal pursuers.

The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters
by Gordon Dahlquist

Her escape to London is short-lived, as the alchemical experimenters begin searching the city for her. She is soon joined by some unlikely allies – military doctor Abelard Svenson looks after his addle-pated foreign prince who is caught up with the sinister cabal pursing Miss Temple, and Cardinal Chang, a paid assassin who’s true love has been indoctrinated into the strange cult.

The trio soon find themselves in grave danger as they investigate the strange blue glass books produced by the villains, and try to unravel their sinister plot of world domination.

The book runs 700+ pages, and the cast of villains is huge, and difficult to follow. Some of them seem little more than cardboard cutouts, especially many of the minions and hangers-on to the cabal. Unfortunately, there’s quite a bit of exposition near the end, also, as the villains are forced to explain their dastardly plot – but it’s handled rather well and doesn’t seem overly heavy handed.

But there is a mysterious house with bizarre secret passageways and hidden rooms, and the final battle takes place on a zeppelin, so there’s plenty of fun involved.

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The Big Over Easy: A Nursery Crime

The Big Over Easy
The Big Over Easy
A new series by the author of the bestselling “Tuesday Next” novels. A thoroughly enjoyable read; I polished it off in a weekend. Fforde’s novels are funny and full of literary cleverness. Jack Spratt is a like-able and entertaining protagonist and I look forward to reading the entire series.

The Big Over Easy: A Nursery Crime
by Jasper Fforde

From the Publisher’s Weekly review: “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, and, well, you know the rest. But was Humpty’s fall an accident, or was it murder? It’s up to giant killer Jack Spratt of the Nursery Crime Division to get to the bottom of it. Humpty was quite a ladies’ man, but a few people thought him a bad egg. Jack has a number of suspects, a new partner to break in and gloryhound/antagonist Detective Inspector Chimes to deal with.”

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The Secret, Oprah, and the idea of “magical thinking”

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Somewaterytart at Shakespeare’s Sister tackles the subject of the new DVD/Book “The Secret” that Oprah’s been touting. I’m inclined to agree with much of what she says.
I first heard about the book from my mom, who works for Barnes and Noble, where the book is apparently flying off the shelves, so I resisted blurting out “That sounds nuts!” but that’s pretty much what crossed my mind when I heard it described. Then later Stephanie watched the DVD with some friends. She thought it was over the top, but an interesting exercise in positive-thinking.
I’m in favor of optimism, but as tart points out, there’s also quite a bit of blame that gets thrown at people who don’t come from privileged backgrounds for their less than desirable circumstances, and this book does seem to play into that – it outright says that if something bad happens to you, it’s because you attracted it into your life. That’s quite a case of blaming the victim, there.
And the anti-intellectualism/anti-science is pretty annoying, too:
“”I don’t know how electricity works, do you?” Uh, yes, I do, thanks. That’s what science fair was for.

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Favorite Quotes

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself because someone said you’re going to die. I got an idea that’s gonna help us both. Now it is dangerous, and there’s a very good chance you will die. But if you don’t die, then we win. I don’t know about you, but things have really sucked for me lately, and I could use a victory. So let’s get one, dude. Let’s get this car started. Let’s look death in the face and say ‘whatever, man.’ Let’s make our own luck.”

– Hurley to Charlie on ‘Lost’

I just watched this week’s episode of Lost. I love that the car they’re trying to start is a Microbus, only with the Dharma logo in place of the VW.

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Georgette Heyer Novels and other Regency Historic Reading

Georgette Heyer Regency novels are some of my favorite guilty pleasures. I stumbled across Heyer when in junior high – which must have been about 1981 or so – and I was initially fascinated by the fact that several of her books had female characters that disguised themselves as men. At the time there were no gay teen novels like there are now, and cross-dressing female characters were one of my first identifications with my sexual orientation, so I scoured the library for books about tomboys and other gender-role breaking females.

But I kept reading Heyer long after I had read those particular books, because she wrote strong, amusing characters and entertaining plots that paid detailed attention to rules of polite society in upper-class England during the Regency period. I hadn’t yet discovered Jane Austen, but when I did, I recognized the world she lived in, because Heyer was obviously inspired by Austen’s novels, although Heyer’s work is quite a bit more comical.

Georgette Heyer, along with Jane Austen, inspired the whole sub-genre of Regency Romance, but her novels shouldn’t be confused with cheap paperbacks; Heyer did a tremendous amount of research on the Regency period of English history. Most of her novels were written in the 1920s through the 1970s – but their popularity has kept them in print fairly regularly since then, and many have been reprinted recently by modern romance publishers.

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Liberals

“Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. What did Conservatives do? They opposed them on every one of those things…every one! So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, ‘Liberal,’ as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won’t work, Senator, because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor.” — Matt Santos, The West Wing

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