Still you are possessed by possessions. Even after you dispossess yourself, they turn up in kitchen drawers and cabinets…. from Possession(s) by John Still you are possessed by possessions. Even after you dispossess yourself, they turn up in kitchen drawers and cabinets…. from Possession(s) by John Smolens
These haunting stories have a common thread, querying the nature of possessions, from a house that belonged to a grandmother to a person, that which we leave behind, and that which we create, what we own and what we can’t.
In Spies, a twelve-year-old boy befriends an ailing neighbor woman with a mysterious past. “Terrible, unexpected things will happen,” she warns. Whistler’s Mistress imagines the struggle between wife and mistress, each claiming the right to possession. A doubting boy cannot allow that he has any sins to confess. Siblings have a martini, their mother hospitalized after a stroke. One of my favorites, Superior Noir imagines Jay Gatsby coming into bootlegger Dan Cody’s life. “Everybody wants something,” Gatsby knows; he wants it all. Old flames meet up after twenty years. A man on a train becomes entangled with a mysterious couple. A woman visits the childhood home of her grandmother and learns the history of the house her grandmother always fondly remembered. A man deals with his deceased wife’s possessions.
There is darkness in these stories, and disturbing situations.
I was impressed with the writing and the variety of the stories.
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The purpose of this book is to make the point that words matter and that plain truth can shape history. from Tom Paine’s War by Jack Kelley
This livelyThe purpose of this book is to make the point that words matter and that plain truth can shape history. from Tom Paine’s War by Jack Kelley
This lively retelling of Revolutionary War history considers the influence of Thomas Paine’s writing.
Paine was a recent immigrant from Britain with a history of failed ventures when he took up the Patriot cause. A true radica, from the American cause to the French Revolution, he predicted the fall of European monarchies, banning him from England. Once a Methodist lay preacher, he believed in the separation of church and state. During the French reign of Terror, he was arrested and only robespierre’s death saved him from the guillotine.
Although not usually grouped with the Founding Fathers, he was admired by Susan B, Anthony; Abraham Lincoln considered him one of the most important thinkers of the Patriot cause, and President Obama quoted him.
This was a good read after I watched the Ken Burn’s series on the American Revolution. The descriptions of the battles and the key personages during the war are entertaining and clear.
The War is the main focus of the book. It is not a traditional biography of a man, but shows his influence and involvement in the War as a way of understanding the man.
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A century later, Random House, a brand, glides off the tongue. We hardly consider the literal meaning, or what an odd–inspired–pairing the words are. A century later, Random House, a brand, glides off the tongue. We hardly consider the literal meaning, or what an odd–inspired–pairing the words are. from Nothing Random
My husband enjoys watching old What’s My Line episodes. He always loved Bennet Cert. I noted Cerf’s round glasses and high voice, not really impressed. But my husband raved about his humor and intelligence.
When I learned that Cerf had created Random House, I was set back on my heels. As soon as I saw this biography, I had to read it.
It is a doorstopper! And I absolutely loved every minute I spent reading it. I loved Cerf, I loved learning about the publishing house he built, and I loved learning about the greater world of publishing and publishers.
I was amazed at what Cerf accomplished. After working for Boni & Liveright, he bought their Modern Library (ML) series, and with his good friend Donald Klopfer, started Random House (RH)–with the idea that they would publish books ‘at random’.
Cerf accomplished miracles, like getting James Joyce’s Ulysses published in America. RH published ‘Bill’ Faulkner and Eugene O’Neill with personal attention and friendship. James Michener was a constant money maker for RH, and later Philip Roth.
Other RH authors included John O’Hara, William Styron, Robert Penn Warren, Shelby Foote, Vladimir Nabokov, Cormac McCarthy, Peter Matthiessen, Joseph Heller, Chaim Potok. Oh, and they published the Shirley Temple Story Book and the Walter Farley Black Stallion books which I loved so much.
Cerf’s wife Phyllis oversaw a new line, Beginner Books, which published Dr. Seuss and the Berenstain’s bear stories that our son loved.
Cerf was a driven workaholic with boundless energy. Liveright provided him a role model as publisher, and he looked up to Alfred Knopf.
Cerf’s joy and humor, the depths he kept hidden, his foibles and his brilliance, come across in countless stories. He was ambivalent about being Jewish, a liberal in his politics.
He hated Ayn rand’s philosophy, but published her books–until she wrote one calling President Kennedy a fascist. He had to back down from excluding Ezra Pound from a poetry anthology.
His beloved uncle was gay. He was enthralled by Gertrude Stein. Truman Capote was a frequent guest in the Cerf household and was especially close to Phyllis Cerf.
He hired an African American receptionist. RH published Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Muhammad Ali’s autobiography, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, and Maya Angelou.
Ah, Bill…I love being alive so much!” Bennet Cerf to William Styron
Cerf loved attention and he gloried in his seventeen years on What’s My Line, wrote numerous humor books and a magazine column, and was friends with the famous, like Frank Sinatra.
Random House flourished, went public, merged with Knopf, Pantheon, was bought by RCA, and in 2012, RH merged with Penguin.
Just a delight of a read!
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Tonight it’s Warren on the brain, the dangling muffler of what we left behind. Bullets in the bottles calling our names. from Can’t Sleep by Jim DanieTonight it’s Warren on the brain, the dangling muffler of what we left behind. Bullets in the bottles calling our names. from Can’t Sleep by Jim Daniels
I was so moved by these poems, the earlier ones about growing up in Warren, a blue collar city just north of Detroit.
My family, like the author’s, worked for the auto industry, some on the line, others as engineers. And his poem My Father Worked 800 Hours of Overtime grabbed me. My dad took all the overtime he could, but he was a mechanic and his work was not as physically taxing as a line worker’s. Daniels writers that his dad’s hobby was “Staying alive. Stranded in the rush hour of his own life.”
…that’s the way it was on our street of the hard luck and the harder…” from Up on Blocks by Jim Daniels
Daniel’s memories of a rough, blue collar childhood is raw and unvarnished, confessional, his childhood world in Warren vivid in its details.
His mother, a nurse, walked to work “down the dirt path behind Arco Tool & Die, a narrow strip of weeds someone forgot to develop between 8 Mile and the cinderblock wall where out subdivision began.” His family worked the same jobs for decades; “We do not look for new jobs. We take what they give us.”
In Homeless Suite, Daniels ponders the dismantling of a homeless encampment, how the city was discussing building tiny houses for them, how more attention was given to saving an abandoned guinea pig than to the homeless. He ends, “All I know is that we all live in tiny houses. God help us.”
He writes about aging, dying parents living in Sterling Height, where in the 60s my uncle bought a brand new house not far from where our son now lives. He writes about his children when young and how we “shut up and do love’s dirty work for them.” Work and retirement. Violence, guns, death. A stray dog wandering into a laundromat and dirtying a woman’s clean clothes. Depression, alcohol, and how poetry saved him.
I am so glad to have finally discovered this poet.
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…and I realize then that the true wonder of these people is this: they are perfectly at ease with doing the wrong thing for centuries and then expect …and I realize then that the true wonder of these people is this: they are perfectly at ease with doing the wrong thing for centuries and then expect congratulations for doing the right thing for a moment. from Cape Fever by Nadia Davids
I love a good Gothic suspense story, and Cape Fever nails it–with an added depth, portraying 1920s Colonial society in Cape Town as experienced by a young Muslim servant.
The result is a page-turner, immersive novel with it’s increasing sense of threat, illuminating not only a specific place and time but also attitudes that persist today.
Soraya’s family is poor. To help her family, and hopefully save money for marriage to her fiance, a farm laborer saving for teacher’s college, she takes employment with a British widow in a dilapidated house. Soyara’s mother knew that educated servants were a threat, so Soyara pretends to be illiterate.
At first, it seems like a good enough position. Soyara cleans and cooks and does Mrs. Hattingh’s bidding, listening to her mistress talk about her adored son, a WWI veteran, and her many charitable works. She is sensitive to the ghosts inhabiting the house, a former servant and one associated with the portrait of a beautiful Muslin girl.
Over time, Mrs. Hattingh begins to intrude on Soyara’s personal life, insisting on writing letters to her fiance, and restricting her ability to visit her family. Mrs. Hattingh becomes dependent on Soyara in unhealthy ways, isolating her from the world to keep her to herself.
It’s a wonder, isn’t it? How much we know about them and how little they know about us. from Cape Fever by Nadia Davids
Soyara makes shocking discoveries which shifts the balance of power, and in the end, she sets aright their lives.
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This is a story about how the small and nearly forgotten lives of two young people is as big and wide as the American Story. from The Sea Captain’s WiThis is a story about how the small and nearly forgotten lives of two young people is as big and wide as the American Story. from The Sea Captain’s Wife by Tilar J. Mazzeo
This is a heart-breaking history about true love and the American Dream and the courageous enterprize of sea captains in the middle of the 19th c. The world economy relied on fast ships navigating around the world. And the faster the more lucrative, for investors and the ship’s captain. A successful voyage meant enough money to retire from the treacherous dangers of the sea.
Mazzeo’s family were shipbuilders and sea captains. The story she discovered about Joshua Patten and his wife Mary Ann is stunning, a story of hope and tragedy now forgotten but explosive in its time. Joshua was a young captain bent on winning fortune. He was to circumnavigate the world with trade goods. Mary Ann was his young wife elected to travel with him. She was bored and bright and learned navigation while helping her husband.
When the first mate was derelict in his duties and locked up in the brig, Joshua had to work nonstop, impacting his health. When he became bedridden, Mary Ann stood up and asked the crew to accept her leadership in her husband’s stead. They were facing the most treacherous part of the journey, rounding the tip of South America. Pregnant, Mary Ann worked nonstop and brought them through.
The story does not end happy. Joshua died while they traveled back home and Mary Ann fell ill with malaria. Mary Ann fought to get his pay and investment. She died of tuberculosis. Their child was born with seizures and died in a tragic accident.
Their story was forgotten until now.
Mazzeo fills the book with details about ships, navigation, life at sea, the dangers of rounding Drake’s Passage, drawing on contemporary histories and archival research.
Rich in background material, Mazzeo brings alive the age of the clipper ships and will break your heart with the story of Joshua and Mary Ann.
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This sprawling novel embraces fifteen pivotal years of Detroit history, with numerous historical and fictional characters from every part of society, This sprawling novel embraces fifteen pivotal years of Detroit history, with numerous historical and fictional characters from every part of society, located in Detroit, Dearborn, and Brazil.
It jumps from storyline to storyline, almost overwhelming as you try to keep track of all that is happening.
Detroiters will glory in recognizing locations and familiar history: the rise of the unions, Walter Reuther, the River Rouge plant (which I recalled from class trips), Blackbottom, Belle Isle with its now restored aquarium, Willow Run and Rosie the Riveter, the Tigers and Hank Greenberg.
And at the center, Henry Ford, anti-semite and genius, innovator and heavy handed dictator, the man who offered thousands of African Americans and immigrants and Southerners a better life while putting money above workers, his goons patrolling their personal lives. Ford’s drive for independence, to provide his own raw materials, led to his Fordlandia in the Amazon forest. It was ill thought out, with no research, led by unqualified men.
It is an exciting story, a human story, an essential story. Workers demanding safety and fair pay for back breaking, unhealthy jobs. African Americans and Jews shunted into ghettos, watching their backs. Prohibition and gangsters. Diego Rivera painting the mural on the walls of the Detroit Institute of Art that so outraged people it was nearly whitewashed over, his wife and greater artist Frida Kahlo dismissed in the newspaper as “also a painter”.
…he was one of the richest men in America and accustomed to getting his way… from Crucible by John Sayles
Reading Crucible you realize there is nothing new under the sun. The problems of a hundred years ago are still with us. Some of the gains made then we have lost, are losing.
“As the novel displays, enormous social and economic forces rushed together in that city,” Sayle writers, “making it more a high-pressure crucible than a genteel American melting-pot.”
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Here were two men caught under the wheels of life. They were crushed and crippled, physically or mentally. But the wheels lay outside their grasp and Here were two men caught under the wheels of life. They were crushed and crippled, physically or mentally. But the wheels lay outside their grasp and beyond their control. from Berlin Shuffle
This remarkable novel from 1937 portrays the underclass of 1920s Berlin society, the homeless, jobless people who live from hand to mouth. Their one respite is to visit The Jolly Huntsmen at night for a glass of schnapps. The idle wealthy come as spectators.
There is the old man who has taken a mentally ill younger man under his wing, feeding him before himself, arranging for shelter in a damp, cold underground room at night. There is the man who isn’t above stooping to crime who uses the old man as an unwitting fence. The homely, lonely woman who marries a blind veteran who is filled with anger. The pretty young woman kept by an older man, with lovers on the side. And a handsome man reduced to being a pimp.
These sad characters take on a larger meaning under the author’s pen, exemplifying not only a forgotten class but the emerging conflict between nations, the reminders of Nazi control, the persecution of the Jews, in the background. A character complains of mechanization eliminating jobs, another blames the Freemasons and the Jews for all that’s wrong. The citizens boil with anger and hate, portending the larger national conflict and soon to come war.
It is disheartening to learn of the author’s story, how he had to flee Germany and died when the ship he was on was sunk. But in this novel we can hear his prophetic voice.
What I mean is, I don’t always understand the poems I admire. Sometimes poems operate by a logic that eludes me, the way dreams often do. from Fear LeWhat I mean is, I don’t always understand the poems I admire. Sometimes poems operate by a logic that eludes me, the way dreams often do. from Fear Less by Tracy K. Smith
“You don’t always have to understand it,” Tracy K. Smith assures us about poetry. Let the poem take you on a journey. It will lead you to notice something, feel something, understand something. A poem might save your life or open your eyes to startling new insights. Don’t be afraid of poetry.
Smith leads readers into understanding poetry that moves her, drawing from poems classic and contemporary. She tells us her reactions and insights to the poem and considers how the poem’s structure and words and images work to create her reaction. She discusses how poetry addresses significant personal and cultural issues.
Smith was six when she read Old Hogan’s Goat, which appeared in my earliest piano book lesson as Bill Grogan’s Goat. It is a humorous story of a goat who eats six red shirts and is tied to the railroad track for punishment, but coughing up the shirts flags down the train just in time. And yet out of this slight comedic lyric, Smith finds deeper meaning about “power, surrender, repentance,(…)reconciliation.”
It is stunning to read the depths Smith draws from the poems. And yet, in the end, I do love the way a poem cleaves my heart, a precious flame, mystical, even if I don’t understand it deeply.
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There is never enough. There is never–but you probably now that. from Television by Lauren Rothery
Verity was stunningly handsome and a successful actoThere is never enough. There is never–but you probably now that. from Television by Lauren Rothery
Verity was stunningly handsome and a successful actor in a role he disdained. Helen, his friend and sometimes lover, a screenwriter, is necessary to him, but he can’t help but take up with other women who are drawn by his fame, most recently one way too young. But he returns to Helen.
In another storyline, a struggling young writer, Phoebe, is floundering, success elusive; her script versions are included in the novel.
He was stalked by millions all his life. He was always famous to himself. Odds are, you either think you deserve your good luck or your bad luck. from Television by Lauren Rothery
Verity decides to give away the proceeds from his latest “sorry excuse” of a movie. Ticket holders are put into a lottery. It drives up sales and profits. “…I try to give it away and it just boomerangs back to me,” he complains. He has enough. Streaming services pick up on the idea, and movie theater sales tank.
It is a thin plot. But the beauty of the book is in the writing.
There are SO many great sentences and paragraphs.
“That’s what moving forward in your life ought to sound like. Metal gears grinding.”
“The light in the penthouse felt sort of stale, as though the sun had been left out too long.”
“There are things that will upset your balance in the British Museum.”
“I wasn’t bored of her. I was bored of how I acted around her.”
And my Sunday Sentence(s): “That feeling. Fear and joy. Irritation without mark. A nauseating, awful, pleasurable longing. Like craving a cigarette without knowing what a cigarette is.”
I loved references to things I love, movies, and writers. Talking in a “Herzog accent.” Quoting Tennyson’s Tears, Idle Tears. Limelight as a favorite Charlie Chaplin movie. Watching the Twilight Zone and It Happened One Night. A quote from Hannah Arrendy. References to Joan Didion/Dominic Dunne and Sylvia Plath/Ted Hughes.
And my favorite thing of all: Verity’s singing Barrett’s Privateers by Stan Rogers. How many times did my husband and I burst out singing that song while traveling in the car, listening to Fogerty’s Cove? Wondering if it was a bad influence on our son, singing “Goddam them all” in the chorus.
This modern sea shanty tells the story of a teenage sailor who goes to sea hoping to capture a Yankee ship. The crew would get a portion of the spoils. Sounded like easy money: “we’d fire no guns, shed no tears,” but the ramshackle ship is blown up in the battle, leaving him “a broken man” without legs, the sole survivor.
The dreams of wealth, the lies that lure you, the brutal reality of your choices, being left broken, how surviving isn’t always happy–this song is Verity’s lament, and too often our own lament. Having it all and success can be as brutal as striving and failing. Answered prayers and dreams deferred leave their marks. Are we all destined to be left broken?
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The ‘Museum Men’ who travelled to remote and wild places to gather specimens for the new natural history museums believed that the animals they huntedThe ‘Museum Men’ who travelled to remote and wild places to gather specimens for the new natural history museums believed that the animals they hunted were going extinct, and it was up to them to preserve their sublimity for the future. The massacred thousands, skinned and deboned them on site, and later reconstructed them with advanced taxidermy techniques. The dioramas showing the animals in their natural habitat, and the displaying of live animals in a habitat and not a cage, were innovative.
Darrin Lunde worked at the American Museum of Natural HIstory (AMNH) and the Smithsonian Institute for decades before he discovered that the founders and explorers who created them had an agenda beyond sharing the awesome beauty of nature. They believed in the ‘science’ of eugenics and the classification of humankind by races designated on an evolutionary scale that put ‘Nordic’ white Europeans at the top. With immigration, these men feared that the purity of American blood would be debased by intermixing.
For Osborn, wealthy White Protestant men were just as much an endangered species as any one of Akeley’s animals… from Palace of Deception by Darrin Lunde
Henry Fairfield Osborn as president of the AMNH supported expeditions that would support his beliefs. He sent Roy Chapman Andrews into the Gobi desert hoping to find the ‘missing link’ proving that the Nordics evolved in Asia, not Africa. Andrews famously found the first dinosaur eggs. Carl Akeley developed the taxidermy techniques and imagined the dioramas reflecting the animals’ native habitat.
The adventures of the Museum Men brought to mind Indiana Jones as they battled a campsite overtaken by asps, bandits and elephant attacks, and gruesome accidents. Osborn bought into the ‘strenuous life,’ as did Teddy Roosevelt, believing that hunting and struggling with the elements strengthened the species.
My mind flashed to so many connections while reading this book. I had read a book about dinosaurs by Andrews as a child as did my son. I have been to the Bronx Zoo and could not imagine how before its founding the land was an ‘unbroken wilderness….almost as wild and unkempt as the heart of the Adirondacks.” I recalled books that referenced the eugenics movement, including Tom Buchanan’s rantings in The Great Gatsby, our book club selection this month, and Ellen Marie Wiseman’s The Lies They Told portraying how American institutions profiled immigrants and citizens through eugenics.
Carl Akeley died while on his last expedition, determined to find the scene where he first saw gorillas, high in the cloudy hills, an ‘elfin’ forest that haunted him. The African Hall that he envisioned portrays a vanishing world that Akeley loved. It was also the product of ideas and practices we find, or should find, abhorrent today.
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I have discovered some surprises in my genealogy researches, one of which was so upsetting I elected not to tell family members. But what Christine KuI have discovered some surprises in my genealogy researches, one of which was so upsetting I elected not to tell family members. But what Christine Kuehn discovered about her grandparents impacted not just her family but was connected to the ‘day of infamy’ that brought America into WWII: the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese.
Kuehn’s family were Nazis who left Germany to spy on America, paid by Japan to report on activities at the military base at Pearl Harbor. They were given a fortune and used it to live the high life with social events that brought them into contact with unwitting sources of information.
Her father was young enough to have embraced America as his country. He hated what the Nazis stood for and what they were doing in Europe. But his social butterfly and beautiful older sister, and a brother who remained in Germany, and even his little brother, were in deep.
Kuehn was distraught to see her great-uncle in his Nazi uniform in his wedding photo and shocked to learn that her great-aunt was once involved with Goebbels until he learned she was half Jewish. It was Goebbels who came up with the idea of sending the family to Hawaii.
Otto would be Tokyo’s man in Hawaii, a mole hiding in plain sight in Hawaii’s upper crust. from Family of Spies by Christine Kuehn
This history is quite the page turner!
Kuehn collected information for ten years, often overwhelmed by what she learned. Her father could not talk about what had happened, it was so painful. And with dementia, the memories were missing.
We all have family secrets, don’t we, connected to acts in our bloodline from long ago? But we’re not locked into following that path. from Family of Spies by Christine Kuehn
A stunning and shocking story.
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They weren’t too old to learn. They knew they weren’t perfect. […]they felt that urgency now, the need to finally make things right, or at least as riThey weren’t too old to learn. They knew they weren’t perfect. […]they felt that urgency now, the need to finally make things right, or at least as right as they could be. They had only so much time. from Evensong by Stewart O’Nan
I loved this novel about aging women who face the same realities as I do. Trouble sleeping. Frustration at the self-checkout line. An address book with names crossed out. Confounded by an altered political landscape. Life with a dog who stares until you wake up, then whimpers and runs to the door, only to return with a frozen ‘poopsicle’.
The women formed a club to care for each other in their golden years, helping each other when in need.Their lives and concerns are ordinary. Injury, loss of a spouse, caring for a friend’s pet, singing in the church choir. They grapple with issues I understand: how do I spend the last of my days with meaning and consequence?
Lovely, funny, and heart-warming, this book left me with heart ache and hope to face the end of the day.
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To echo Emerson, if all history is biography, then what can we learn about our country from a biography of a mountain? from A Biography of a Mountain To echo Emerson, if all history is biography, then what can we learn about our country from a biography of a mountain? from A Biography of a Mountain by Matthew Davis
Confession: previous to reading this book, my knowledge of Mt. Rushmore was pretty much gathered from Alfred Hitchcock’s movie North by Northwest. I knew nothing about the man who planned and designed the massive monument of four presidents, or why he chose those four. I did know that the Black Hills were sacred to the Lakota.
This book was a revelation.
A group of empire makers. Jefferson=Lincoln=Roosevelt. Gutzman Borglum quoted in A Biography of a Mountain
The sculptor Gutzman Borglum was revealed to be both a racist and embracer of Manifest Destiny, but also sympathetic to Native Americans even while dispoiling their sacred lands. He was dictictorial and abrasive as a manager, but as an artist achieved greatness. The monument celebrates white colonists whose policies killed Natives and was built on their sacred land.
At one point, Borglum considered adding Susan B. Anthony to the mountain, but there was no useable rock space left. So, our current president can wish to be up there too, but it ain’t gonna happen.
A key scene in he book centers on President Trump’s visit to the park to celebrate the Fourth of July with fireworks. His supporters were “as close to a Ku Klux Klan rally” as Amy Sazue had ever seen. Soldiers with automatic weapons surrounded unarmed Native Americans peacefully protesting the event. Davis remarks that Borglum and Trump would have hit it off.
The long and complicated question of who owns the land and the systematic erasure of Native culture and agency is central to the book.
This biography will alter how you see the monument.
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I have been enjoying all the books coming out to celebrate the 250th birthday of Jane Austen. Ladies in Waiting features stories based on Austen’s morI have been enjoying all the books coming out to celebrate the 250th birthday of Jane Austen. Ladies in Waiting features stories based on Austen’s more minor characters. Nine novelists chose a favorite character and made her the center of a new story.
Each author tells why she chose her character and the story begins with a quotation from Austen’s novel the character appears in.
The diverse stories are entertaining.
The women in Sense and Sensibility who were betrayed by George Wickham are featured in several stories. In one, Lydia Wickham is relieved when her husband dies, while in another she finds true love later in life. In a third story, Georgiana gets her revenge on Wickham. From the same novel, another story portrays Margaret Dashwood as determined to have a romantic adventure, while another story offers a history of Colonel Brandon’s first love, Eliza.
The Bennet family from Pride and Prejudice are brought into contemporary Greenwich Village, and in one of my favorite stories, Caroline Bingley is a New Orleans free black woman who travels west to find a husband.
Miss Bates from Emma appears in several stories. In one she is transformed by a hair cut, and in another one of my favorites, inspired by Persuasion, an old lover returns.
Every Austenite will delight in these stories.
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If a marriage lacks passion, it is to be hoped that it will make up for it in etiquette. from Introducing Mrs. Collins by Rachel Parris
I am drawn to nIf a marriage lacks passion, it is to be hoped that it will make up for it in etiquette. from Introducing Mrs. Collins by Rachel Parris
I am drawn to novels based on Jane Austen’s more minor characters because it’s always interesting to imagine their stories.
Charlotte Lucas from Pride and Prejudice is a foil to Elizabeth Bennet. Rachel Parris offers the practical Charlotte we know from Austen. Lizzie is lucky to marry for love–and wealth, a wish fulfillment fantasy that appeals to readers across time. But Charlotte marries Mr. Collins for practical reasons. She must consider a future dependent on others or by this marriage a home of her own with an inferior man she hopes to handle.
Charlotte knows Mr. Collin’s strengths–kindness, respect, a timidity that hides deep feelings. And she knows his weaknesses, especially in the marriage bed. If they have no children and Mr. Collins passes first, Charlotte will be no better off than before her marriage–without home or family of her own.
We learn about Mr. Collins’s life and his strengths, and we come to respect him. Lady de Bourgh knows Mrs. Collins is trustworthy and dependable, and she comes to respect Charlotte, offering her piano for practise.
Our task in this life is to find happiness in what we are afforded and to improve what we find. from Introducing Mrs. Collins by Rachel Parris
The Bennett family appear in the novel as the women visit each other’s homes. A self-absorbed Lizzy does not hold up well against Charlotte. Wickham proves to still be a cad and a bad husband to Lydia.
The Colllins are often at table at Rosings and that is how Charlotte came to know Colonel Fitzwilliam. Their friendship and respects grow into attraction, forcing Charlotte to make grave decisions.
Charlotte’s happiness is established, threatened, reclaimed, lost, and reclaimed again over three busy years. It is an entertaining and fun read that will appeal to the romantics among us.
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The world, the fog-world in its brittle glass sheath of now, was aching for an arrival. from The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller
1962. Rural England duThe world, the fog-world in its brittle glass sheath of now, was aching for an arrival. from The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller
1962. Rural England during a snowstorm. Two couples, both women pregnant. Both marriages tenuous.
Bill turned from an easy life in the family business to try his hand at farming. It is a hard life, one his wife Rita is not accustomed to. She hears voices, takes drugs now banned or dangerous. Sometimes her impetuous side reemerges.
Eric is a doctor at an asylum where his wife’s father resides. Irene is lonely, depressed by the world and her husband’s inattention.
Irene and Rita bond over being pregnant, because they live near to each other, because they are new to this community and life.
The men both make decisions that bring crisis into their lives while nature bombards the land with a thick snow, isolating the women even more, Irene without heat, Rita driven to leave only to encounter her own crisis.
Behind the couple’s stories is the war, the memories of killing and suffering affirming humanity’s “addiction to violence.” Workers with “Goring’s telephone number” on their forearm, a wall a painted sign for White Defence League. “So much dying and nobody really knowing what it was for,” Rita thinks.
Rita and Eric have so much unhappiness, such longings and loneliness. Their marriage a chasm to be endured. Bill strives and suffers for it, Irene left alone in a cold house,
To be held. Wasn’t that what anybody wanted? To be held, if only for a night? from The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller
An emotional, deep exploration of marriage and love with well drawn conflicted characters.
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