I haven't taken part in any sort of blog-meme for quite a while, but this new one I heard of really intrigued me. I discovered it at Danielle's excellent blogpage, A Work in Progress, but apparently it originated over at another great blog -- Nonsuch Book. At any rate, I responded to it at Danielle's page and she assigned me the letter "F".
Here is the meme, as originally stated:
"Here's something that should be fun - and do get involved in the comment section! - I'm going to kick off a meme where we say our favourite book, author, song, film, and object beginning with a particular letter. And that letter will be randomly assigned to you by me, via random.org. If you'd like to join in, comment in the comment section and I'll tell you your letter! (And then, of course, the chain can keep going on your blog.)"
So, here goes -- the letter F:
Favorite Book: For me this is a bit of a toss-up between Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters, and Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury. But in all seriousness, I'm going to go with Sarah Waters, because I was riveted to her story from page 1 to 548, and the twists and turns in the thing caused me to have to see a chiropractor afterwards.
Favorite Author: Again, a bit of a rivalry going on in my mind, between John Fowles and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but I'm gong to go with Fowles, because his French Lieutenant's Woman just levelled me, and was one of my favourite 5 books, in the year that I read it.
Favorite Song: At first I thought of Fifty-Mission Cap, by The Tragically Hip. Admittedly, a great song. But after "re-thinking my inks" as the late great Chis Farley might say, [and incidentally, he's my favorite "F" comedian] I have to go with Fields of Gold, as performed by Eva Cassidy. Sting is OK, but Eva Cassidy….. well, she's just better. Think about it, she's singing that LIVE, better than anyone could ever sing it in a studio.
Favorite Film: Fabulous Baker Boys. Michelle Pfeiffer ON a grand piano. Need anyone even say anything more about that movie?
Favorite Object: I'm going to have to go straight over to the food category on this one and say Falafel. I love falafel, and even had a falafel pita this very night, for supper. Don't get too close to me in the elvator, but MY GOD I love falafel.
So those are my favourite "F"ing things!
If you would like to be assigned a letter, let me know in the comments section.
Or if you would just like to comment in general, that's OK, too.
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Have a great Monday!
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Those of you who have followed my blog for any length of time will know that I was [and still am] a big fan of Christopher Hitchens. When he died in 2011, I felt a profound sense of loss. There was so much left unwritten and unsaid in him -- and I find that I miss that voice of reason that I had come to rely upon, to fashion my own thinking in so many areas. Of course he was a very controversial figure, either loved or hated -- but strangely enough he also elicited both reactions [I think] in those who found it impossible to effectively argue against his pronouncements and pontifications, especially with regard to his ideas about the "poisoning" aspect of religion. What I mean to say is -- you may have not agreed with him dang nab it, but neither could you effectively counter him. His arguments were delivered so matter-of-factly and so eloquently that to dismiss him meant one had to simultaneously realize that a conscious choice was being made to favour one's own subjective wishful thinking. I have yet to see, or even envision a battle or debate with Hitchens that was, or would be, won on an intellectual level. And I am saddened that he has left the arena.
Over the years since his death I have watched as many videos and lectures as I could ever find about Hitchens -- and I have found that rarely are we given a glimpse of who he was, apart from his public persona. Even his own memoir tends to shy away from that level of transparency. But just last night I discovered a clip on YouTube that does just that. It's an interview with his wife and a small circle of his most intimate friends, and it reveals the more generous and yes, sweet side of Hitchens that could only have been described by those who knew him best.
It's 25 minutes in length and well worth watching if you feel, as I most certainly do, that we have lost one of the greatest thinkers of our time in the passing of Christopher Hitchens.
Tonight I finished reading Emma Donoghue's latest novel, Frog Music.
It's the story of Blanche Buenon, a former Parisian equestrian turned burlesque dancer/prostitute now living in San Francisco. Now, as in, 1876.
Blanche came to America with two men, Arthur and Ernest. All three of them were performers in the Cirque d'Hiver in France until Arthur fell from the trapeze, and the trio decided to switch gears and continents, and try for fortune in the wild west.
The story sort of blazes out on page one in media res. Blanche's friend Jenny is killed by a shotgun blast through the bedroom window, just as Blanche bends down to wrestle with her bootlaces. The bullets miss her by inches, and she is wounded by the flying glass.
Thus begins an intricate mystery -- Who pulled the trigger? And who was the intended target? Because of a series of incidents which the author will now flesh out for us -- Blanche is sure she knows the answer to these questions. Jenny has been murdered, and there can only be one reason why this happened.
The twist is, there can be many reasons. And many possible culprits.
For Emma Donoghue [an author I have grown to love and admire] this is her first foray into the genre of murder mystery. And in my opinion, she has succeeded in giving us a really suspense-filled page turner of a thriller, and here's the scoop -- all of it is based on actual events. She has taken liberties in certain areas, but most of what we find in Frog Music actually occurred in the heat-sweltering, smallpox-infested, bigotry-riddled, hate-mongerng, whore-infested city of San Francisco in that very year of 1876.
Her research of the facts is meticulous, and the writing style is unique. The author abruptly shifts the setting and time frames as frequently as Jose Saramago does not use proper punctuation. But, as is true of both of these great authors, the astute reader is never lost. Hence, I conclude that this is what I would call a literary thriller. And packed with as much raunchy bawdiness as would cause Chaucer to blush scarlet. A great, ripping damn good read.
And in the end, you do find out who pulled the trigger. But even then, motives and peripheral involvement are questionable. Debatable. Blanche herself doubts a lot of her own findings as she makes a new life for her and her infant son in Sacramento. The one sure thing is this -- if they have not shot you yet, you've got to keep on keeping on. You've got to keep living. You've got to make the best of what you have. There is still a lot of life -- to live.
I love cats. Always have done so. Dogs are nice, too -- but cats are more… catlike.
I love cats. And seriously, how could I not love cats, when mine is so gorgeous?
Every morning when I tie up my boots to go off to my Daily Torture… I mean, work -- he scuttles over from his observation point and grabs the end of the laces and tries to eat them. This amounts to Reason #3 that I am always late for work.
And I have to give him his treats, [Temptations] or he will not let me out the door.
It's only after a few of those crispy nuggets that he tells me where he hid the car keys!
Then I think he singlepawedly fulfills my own fantasy and sleeps all day.
What's not to love about that?
If you are a cat lover, you must take the next three minutes and watch this videoclip, below.
Then, if you don't yet have a cat -- you must go out and get one.
Have a great Wednesday!
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The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.
-- Jane Austen --
Have a great Tuesday!
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There were two things about Mama. One is she always expected the best out of me. And the other is that then no matter what I did, whatever I came home with, she acted like it was the moon I had just hung up in the sky and plugged in all the stars. Like I was that good.
-- Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees --
Have a great Monday!
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I haven't been around much lately… [no kidding!] -- but I have been reading some real great books.
One of them was When She Woke, by Hillary Jordan.
It's so great when you pick up on a new author and are not at all disappointed. In this novel set in the not-too-distant future, the world takes new measures in the identification of "criminals". I put that word in quotation marks, because the definition of "criminal" has changed also. In a nutshell -- imagine a society run by the Tea Party on steroids! People convicted of criminal offences undergo skin pigmentation, and red stands for murder. Hannah Payne, our heroine, has aborted her fetus, and is thereby convicted of murder.
After her trial, she wakes up... red.
If this puts you in mind of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, the coincidence is intended. This is really a modern re-telling of that timeless story. Right down to the alliteration of the nomenclature.
Hannah Payne = Hester Prynne.
And the male reason for Hannah's pregnancy is none other than the leading evangelical preacher of the day, Aidan Dale, mega-popular pastor of a mega-church.
Aidan Dale = Arthur Dimmesdale.
I trust that my readers get all these connections. I know that you do.
In Jordan's book, Hannah is driven out into a vigilante environment where there is no safe haven.
Can you imagine being on the run for your life, even from certain members of your own family who have rejected you, and all because you did the only thing you could do to save the career [and marriage] of the person you love the most? Aidan Dale is married. Hannah is a fugitive.
The book is a real pager turner, and I have not one negative thing to say about it.
I was riveted.
And the amazing thing is that the most "evil" characters in When She Woke are those who retain whatever skin colour they were born with. This is an important, gorgeously written, fast-paced novel that profoundly illustrates the dangers inherent in a world where religion-based morality has run amok.
I think Nathaniel Hawthorne himself would give it five stars. And who am I to argue with him?
*****
Have a great Friday!
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I must start at the beginning, if I can find it. Beginnings are elusive things. Just when you think you have hold of one, you look back and see another, earlier beginning, and an earlier one before that. Even if you start with "Chapter One: I Am Born, " you still have the problem of antecedents, of cause and effect.
-- Hillary Jordan, Mudbound --Have a great Wednesday!
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One by one, she conjured all the boxes she'd been put into: The good girl box and the good Christian box...the mistress box...the bad daughter and fallen woman boxes...She saw with a painful blaze of clarity that every one of these boxes had been of her own making, either by consent or lack of resistance. She had no right to bitterness; she had put herself in them. And she would get herself out, she vowed. And once she was out, she'd never willingly climb into another box again.
-- Hillary Jordan, When She Woke --
Have a great Tuesday!
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Have a great Monday!
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Have a great Friday!
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Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.
-- H. Jackson Brown Jr. --Have a great Thursday!*****
Sometimes I wonder if he wasn’t born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that’s the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.
-- Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle --
Have a great Wednesday!
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Have a great Tuesday!
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The professor husband of a friend of mine has likened children to the insane. I often think of it. He says that children live on the edge of madness, that their behavior, apparently unmotivated, shares the same dream logic as crazy people's. I see what he means, and because I've learned to be patient with children, to tease out the logic that's always somewhere there, and irrefutable once explained, I've come to understand that grown-ups, mad or sane, ought really to be accorded the same respect. In this sense, nobody is actually crazy, just not understood.
-- Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs --
Have a great Monday!
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I recently read Maddaddam, the third book in this dystopic trilogy, by Margaret Atwood. I'm sort of proud of my three books in the series, because the first two, Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, are signed by the author. I'm hoping I one day have the opportunity to get the third one signed, making a complete set of signed Maggie-Books.
I found it really helpful that Maddaddam, released in 2013, begins with a synopsis of what went on in the previous two books, especially since eight years have passed since Oryx and Crake came out, and my memory has seemed to age several decades in the same time frame. Maddaddam really brings it all together, and I think it is the finest of all three books.
Atwood's future world is one in which technological genetic alteration has run amok. A new breed of emotionless vegetarian human-beings [The Crakers] roam about, and the vicious Painballers are in the woods, hunting to rape and kill anyone that is normal. Intelligent giant pigs called "Pigoons" [the frontal lobes of their brains are of human origin] are also on the loose. At first, the Pigoons are at war with the humans that have escaped the pandemic sweeping the earth -- and only much later in the book do they take the initiative to combine forces with a remnant of these normal humans [the Maddaddamites] to defeat a common enemy, the Painballers.
Think of it this way -- the world as we know it is OVER… and the reason is not climate change, or even nuclear annihilation -- but rather, a form of biological terrorism brought about by humans.
It's a crazy as hell book. There is even romance involved, as Toby's love for Zeb is a major part of the story. Heroine and hero. Meanwhile, other normal women are being willfully impregnated by the huge-penised male Crakers. Hmmm… what kind of babies will this produce?
Only Maggie knows.
She has really pulled out all the potty-mouth stops when it comes to dropping the f-bomb in this book. On one page alone I counted twelve "fucks". I'm sure if you averaged it out, you would end up with at least one or two on each and every page -- something to maybe consider before you drop Maddaddam into grandma's Christmas stocking, unless you're OK with her involuntarily swallowing her own false teeth halfway through the thing.
It's an engaging read, and never boring. Even if one has not read the previous two books. Ultimately, I think it best to read all three in their order of publication, but given the aforementioned synopsis, I think Maddaddam can be read as a stand-alone book, and enjoyed.
*****
Where to even begin in speaking about this book? I loved it so much.
This is the problem. Where to begin.
Well? How about page one, where the family of Clyde Griffiths are pounding the street yet again, seeking converts to their version of evangelical Christianity. They are street preachers. Clyde is twelve at the time -- and much less than the conversion of the masses, he's not even really interested in the conversion of himself! His dreams take place in a world far removed from that of his parents. He wants to be somebody -- get away from all this. Soon Clyde lands a job as a soda jerk in a pharmacy, and this leads to becoming a bus-boy in the most prestigious hotel in Kansas City. A formative event that gives him a glimpse of glamor. The very things he craves. Girls. Fun. Excitement. Social advancement.
And we've still got more than 700 pages to go!
Oh, Clyde. Oh, Clyde -- the crazy-ass decisions you are about to make!
Fast forward to several years later, Clyde is working at another hotel in Chicago, and stumbles upon a chance to lift himself from poverty and obscurity -- to wealth, pleasure, and hitherto impossible romantic success.
Of course he grabs at this brass ring, but in order to gain these ends he must utterly abandon the pieties of his fundamentalist upbringing and consider sacrificing his first real love, the only girl who has ever shown him true affection. All of society conspires to persuade him that his goals are admirable, perhaps even sacred -- but ultimately, Clyde, way out of his depth, resorts to criminal means in order to attain all that he wants.
How far down the rabbit hole can one man fall?
The answer is -- this far. As far as Clyde does. There is no farther.
This book has all the potential to supplant my former favorite book of all time, and that one was written by Leo Tolstoy! So really, it is every bit as grand. Truly a gem -- I can honestly say I was riveted at every moment of An American Tragedy.
It was published in 1925, a year before my own father was born -- and so many times I thought to myself -- This book has been in existence my entire life and I only discovered it now?
Wow.
Dreiser manages to parenthetically return in the end to a current update of Clyde's family -- now on the streets of San Francisco -- still preaching the wonder-working power of a God who seemed, in Clyde's case at least, to leave all legal consequences to the jury-decided results of human choice.
What a terrific book. It was searing, moving, and most importantly to me, entirely believable.
828 pages of prose-perfect verisimilitude.
If anyone out there is still wondering what you can get me for my birthday this December [start saving up now] -- you cannot go wrong with ordering this $3,500.00 signed two volume first edition set!
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