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July 31
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Katy
marked as to-read:
Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: 28,000 Miles in Search of the Railway Bazaar (Hardcover)
by Paul Theroux
bookshelves:
to-read
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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Katy
gave
to:
Pigs Don't Fly (Mass Market Paperback)
by Mary Brown
bookshelves:
fantasy-fiction
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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Katy said:
"An interesting version of the hero's journey featuring a variety of animal companions, frank sex talk (the heroine is the daughter of the village whore, after all), a little magic, and a growing charm. It takes time to get into the story but I enjoy...more
An interesting version of the hero's journey featuring a variety of animal companions, frank sex talk (the heroine is the daughter of the village whore, after all), a little magic, and a growing charm. It takes time to get into the story but I enjoyed it....less
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Katy
gave
to:
Younger Next Year for Women (Hardcover)
by Chris Crowley, Henry S. Lodge
bookshelves:
general
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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Katy said:
"An excellent book of advice and analysis for improved health and fitness for over-forty folks who want to live to be healthy and happy over-eighty folks. The authors are somewhat self-centered and some of their recommendations are only possible for ...more
An excellent book of advice and analysis for improved health and fitness for over-forty folks who want to live to be healthy and happy over-eighty folks. The authors are somewhat self-centered and some of their recommendations are only possible for the rich who have no dependents, but the book is valuable and sincere nonetheless. My favorite for unintended humor is the "believe in God for the sake of your health" chapter....less
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Katy
gave
to:
Molto Agitato: The Mayhem Behind the Music at the Metropolitan Opera (Paperback)
by Johanna Fiedler
bookshelves:
general,
history-and-biography
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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Katy said:
"This is an entertaining history of the Met in New York
City, a fast and fun read full of gossip and self-important
but very talented personalities.
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Katy
gave
to:
The Civil War: A Narrative (3 Volume Set)
by Shelby Foote
bookshelves:
currently-reading,
history-and-biography
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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read in May, 2008
Katy said:
"This is a three volume set with each volume containing about
1,000 pages. It is a long-term read but well worth it. The writing
is excellent and sometimes funny, the research careful, and the point
of view (very important for a civil war book) ...more
This is a three volume set with each volume containing about
1,000 pages. It is a long-term read but well worth it. The writing
is excellent and sometimes funny, the research careful, and the point
of view (very important for a civil war book) balanced. This is
the best history book I have ever read. My mother is from
Tennesee and my father is from Pennsylvania so, like many of
the historical figures presented by Shelby Foote, I have family
on both sides of the War Between the States.
I have been to many of the Civil War battlefields and sites over the
years and I feel like I finally understand the context for what I
have seen and known about all of my life. My only complaint is that
with a cast of many thousands of key figures, it is hard to remember who
was on which side. Nonetheless, even though I am only halfway
through volume two, I recommend this history without reservations....less
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May 03
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Katy
marked as to-read:
The White Company (Paperback)
by Arthur Conan Doyle
bookshelves:
to-read
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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Katy
marked as to-read:
Slaves in the Family (Ballantine Reader's Circle)
by Edward Ball
bookshelves:
to-read
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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April 30
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Katy
gave
to:
The Great Railway Bazaar (Paperback)
by Paul Theroux
bookshelves:
trains-and-transit
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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read in February, 2007
Katy said:
"From my February 5, 2007 blog
http://blogs.sun.com/katysblog...
The Great Railway Bazaar (by Paul Theroux)
I finished one book on the drive home and...more
From my February 5, 2007 blog
http://blogs.sun.com/katysblog...
The Great Railway Bazaar (by Paul Theroux)
I finished one book on the drive home and had to go to Border's for a new book to get me through dinner. I thus interrupted my current naval reading theme with the quick read of a famous and excellent travel book: The Great Railway Bazaar: by train through Asia by Paul Theroux (ISBN-10: 0618658947, originally published in 1975).
My husband and I have a work trip to Bangalore later this month so the description of train travel in India was particularly of interest; however, Theroux's chapters about travelling in Viet Nam in 1973 just before America withdrew were fascinating and sadly in line with current events. Since John and I have a long drive between work and home, I read him funny or specially well written sections of The Great Railway Bazaar. John's favorite passage was:
"The romance assocated with the sleeping car derives from its extreme privacy, combining the best features of a cupbord with forward movement. Whatever drama is being enacted in this moving bedroom is heightened by the landscape passing the window: a swell of hills, the surprise of mountains, the loud metal bridge, or the melancholy sight of people standing under yellow lamps. And the notion of travel as a continuous vision, a grand tour's succession of memorable images across a curved earth -- with none of the distorting emptiness of air or sea -- is possible only on a train."
Theroux funded his trip with a series of lectures and seems to have carried a small and superb library along with him. The Great Railway Bazaar is full of quotes and literary references. For example, Theroux includes a long passage then writes: "There is more, and it is all good, but I think I have quoted enough to show that the best description of Calcutta is Todger's corner of London in Chapter IX of Martin Chuzzlewit."
Theroux has strong opinions about people, places, and national character. Here he is writing from Hue, Viet Nam about the local railway stationmaster:
"He was certain that Turkey was just over the hill, and the only difficulty he envisaged -- indeed, it seemed characteristic of the South Vietnamese grasp of political geography -- was getting Loc Ninh out of the hands of the Viet Cong and laying tracks through the swamps of Cambodia. His transcontinental railway vision, taking in eight vast countries, had a single snag: evicting the enemy from this small local border town. For the Vietnamese citizen the rest of the world is simple and peaceful; he has the egoism of a sick man, who believes he is the only unlucky sufferer in a healthy world."
The author is no less critical of his own nation, America. In the chapter "The Saigon-Bien Hoa Passenger Train" in Viet Nam he writes of some houses with no drains that he could see from the tracks:
"They were appropriate in a country where great roads led nowhere, where planes flew to no purpose, and the government was just another self-serving tyranny. The conventional view was that Americans had been imperialists; but this is an inaccurate jibe. The American mission was purely sententious and military; nowhere was there evidence of the usual municipal preoccupations of a colonizing power -- road-mending, drainage, or permanent buildings.... Planning and maintenance characterize even the briefest and most brutish empire; apart from the institution of a legal system there aren't many more imperial virtues. But Americans weren't pledged to maintain."
Copyright 2007-2008 by Katy Dickinson
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Katy
gave
to:
Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Hardcover)
by Agatha Christie
bookshelves:
mysteries
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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read in January, 1975
Katy said:
"From my November 13, 2007 blog
http://blogs.sun.com/katysblog...
Defending Agatha Christie
A dear friend of mine is no fan of Agatha Christie (1890-19...more
From my November 13, 2007 blog
http://blogs.sun.com/katysblog...
Defending Agatha Christie
A dear friend of mine is no fan of Agatha Christie (1890-1976). He and I are both delighted by Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957) and her creation Lord Peter Wimsey. We have discussed them for many years. But the charm of Dame Agatha and her most famous detective, Hercule Poirot, eludes him. This defense is to present what I have come to like in Agatha Christie's mystery books.
My mother used to read Agatha Christie to go to sleep every night. Several years ago, she passed on to me her extensive and tattered collection of luridly-covered paperbacks. Some of these books are in such poor condition that I have to carry them in plastic zip bags to keep the pages in order. I recently read or re-read about a dozen of them.
I am quite ready to admit that Agatha Christie could write a really bad book. My choice for her worst is The Big Four (1927), which has something in it to offend everyone. Even the cover below is grotesque. Thankfully (and unusually for one of the best-selling authors of all time), The Big Four does not seem to be print any more.
Also, it is easy to dislike Hercule Poirot. Even his creator found him difficult. The Wikipedia article on Agatha Christie reports that "...by the end of the 1930s, Christie confided to her diary that she was finding Poirot 'insufferable', and by the 1960s she felt that he was an 'an ego-centric creep'". Christie wrote a version of herself into several of her stories in the person of mystery writer and apple-lover Ariadne Oliver. Here is Mrs. Oliver on the subject of her own detective:
"How do I know why I ever thought of the revolting man? I must have been mad! Why a Finn when I know nothing about Finland? Why a vegetarian? Why all the idiotic mannerisms he's got? These things just happen. You try something - and people seem to like it - and then you go on - and before you know where you are, you've got someone like that maddening Sven Hjerson tied to you for life. And people even write and say how fond you must be of him. Fond of him? If I met that bony gangling vegetable eating Finn in real life, I'd do a better murder than any I've ever invented." (from Chapter 14 of Mrs. McGinty's Dead, 1952)
However, at her best, Agatha Christie could write very well, even laboring under the burden of the Belgian Poirot's extensive and irritating mannerisms. Here is Colin Lamb, the hero of The Clocks (1963), describing a bookshop:
"I sidled through the doorway. It was necessary to sidle, since precariously arranged books impinged more and more every day on the passageway from the street. Inside, it was clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down. The distance between bookshelves was so narrow that you could only get along with great difficulty. There were piles of books perched on every shelf or table. On a stool in the corner, hemmed in by books, was an old man in a pork-pie hat with a large flat face like a stuffed fish. He had the air of one who has given up an unequal struggle. He had attempted to master the books but the books had obviously succeeded in mastering him. He was a kind of King Canute of the book world, retreating before the advancing book tide. If he ordered it to retreat, it would have been with the hopeless certainty that it would not do so."
Part of Agatha Christie's charm for me is her self-awareness. Just as she mocks herself and her detective in the forms of Ariadne Oliver and Sven Hjerson, from time to time, Agatha Christie's stories quietly make fun of themselves. Here is Dr. James Sheppard in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) interacting with a police inspector considering a recent corpse:
"'There's not going to be much mystery about this crime. Take a look at the hilt of that dagger.' I took the look. 'I dare say they're not apparent to you, but I can see them clearly enough.' He lowered his voice. 'Fingerprints!' He stood a off a few steps to judge of his effect. 'Yes,' I said mildly. 'I guessed that.' I do not see why I should be supposed to be totally devoid of intelligence. After all, I read detective stories, and the newspapers, and am a man of quite average ability. If there had been toe marks on the dagger handle, now, that would have been quite a different thing. I would then have registered any amount of surprise and awe. I think the inspector was annoyed with me for declining to get thrilled."
Similarly, in "Three Blind Mice" (1950), Sergeant Trotter says: "'It's all very well Mr. Paravicini mentioning last chapters and speaking as though this was a mystery thriller,' he said. 'This is real. This is happening.'"
(This is surely an ironic statement from a detective in a mystery thriller.)
The best of Agatha Christie shows this willingness to step back and smile. Christie often has Captain Hastings or a counterpart there to criticize the great Hercule Poirot about obsessive method, self-importance, and personal vanity. She has written stories in which the narrator is the murderer (but the reader does not get told this until the last page). Just as Lord Peter is able to mock his famously-educated and oft-quoting self when in Gaudy Night (1935), Sayers writes him as saying "A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought," Christie at her best has a light and self-observant touch.
Below are cover photos of some Christie mysteries I have been reading lately. Since Agatha Christie's books were written over a period of fifty years and appeared in many editions, these covers give some idea of the tastes of the times in which they were published.
Copyright 2007-2008 by Katy Dickinson
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Katy
gave
to:
The Twelve Caesars (Penguin Classics)
by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus
bookshelves:
history-and-biography
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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read in January, 1976
Katy said:
"Suetonius wrote the ultimate gossipy entertaining political biography in about 119 AD. If you want to read all of the dirt and nasty stories about Julius Caesar, Augustus, and ten other Roman Emperors, this is the book for you. This well written tr...more
Suetonius wrote the ultimate gossipy entertaining political biography in about 119 AD. If you want to read all of the dirt and nasty stories about Julius Caesar, Augustus, and ten other Roman Emperors, this is the book for you. This well written translation by notable poet Robert Graves is particularly excellent. If you remember the BBC television series "I, Claudius", this material will be familiar to you.
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