B. Morrison's Blog, page 62

The Rings of Saturn, by W.G. Sebald

I’ve been meaning to read this book for some time. It’s ostensibly a travel memoir, a record of a walking tour of Suffolk, on the east coast of England, that Sebald took in August, 1992. However, the narrator sometimes seems to be someone else. The title comes from one of the epigraphs, a quote from the Brockhaus Encyclopedia explaining that Saturn’s rings are probably “fragments of a former moon” that was destroyed when it came too near the planet.

The image works on several different levels...

Natural Flights of the Human Mind, by Clare Morrall

This quirky novel revolves around two people. One is Peter Straker, who lives in a decommissioned lighthouse on the Devon Coast, haunted by an event from his past. His only company consists of the voices from that event. Although he goes into the village via bike and boat to purchase groceries, he does not speak to anyone. He has not spoken aloud in years. The cliff is eroding at an ever-faster rate, ensuring that the lighthouse will soon fall into the sea. Straker, however, views this prospe...

All Roads Lead to Austen, by Amy Elizabeth Smith

I could just hear the pitch for this nonfiction book: a literary travel book like the huge bestseller by Elizabeth Gilbert, but going to double the number of countries and, instead of a vague goal of finding yourself, a fascinating goal of gauging reactions to Jane Austen’s books, thus pulling in the legion of Austen fans.

Although I haven’t read the Gilbert book, I was intrigued by Smith’s premise. Austen’s novels, which she herself called “miniatures”, provide witty commentary on a narrow...

An Absorbing Errand, by Jane Malamud Smith

This book is subtitled: How artists and craftsmen make their way to mastery. What Smith does here is examine what it takes to have a meaningful life. “I posit that life is better when you possess a sustaining practice that holds your desire, demands your attention, and requires effort; a plot of ground that gratifies the wish to labor and create.” Whether your practice is gardening, painting, writing or building boats, pursuing a creative artistic effort adds a richness to your life, not just...

Lethal Remedy, by Richard L. Mabry

I am not a fan of horror stories. The first horror film I saw was Rosemary’s Baby and it scared the pants off me. I tried to watch Aliens because I was fascinated by Sigourney Weaver’s tough Ellen Ripley, but ended up climbing over the back of my chair and cowering behind it, even with Ripley doing battle for me. Not sure why I’m such a wimp about horror; maybe because I jump into stories with both feet. Given half a chance I’ll immerse myself in their world and not surface until I’m forcibly...

Lethal Remedy, by Richard L. Mabry I am not a fan of ho...

Lethal Remedy, by Richard L. Mabry

I am not a fan of horror stories. The first horror film I saw was Rosemary’s Baby and it scared the pants off me. I tried to watch Aliens because I was fascinated by Sigourney Weaver’s tough Ellen Ripley, but ended up climbing over the back of my chair and cowering behind it, even with Ripley doing battle for me. Not sure why I’m such a wimp about horror; maybe because I jump into stories with both feet. Given half a chance I’ll immerse myself in their world...

Someone, by Alice McDermott [1]

One person in my book club thought this book boring because the main character never amounted to much, but the rest of us loved it and partly for that reason. This slim novel tells the story of one life, one ordinary and astonishing life. Marie is seven when we first meet her, sitting on the stoop waiting for her father to come home, a not particularly attractive child, burdened with thick glasses. There is nothing so clumsy as a year to tell us the time period. Instead, an accumulation of fi...

Someone, by Alice McDermott

One person in my book club thought this book boring because the main character never amounted to much, but the rest of us loved it and partly for that reason. This slim novel tells the story of one life, one ordinary and astonishing life. Marie is seven when we first meet her, sitting on the stoop waiting for her father to come home, a not particularly attractive child, burdened with thick glasses. There is nothing so clumsy as a year to tell us the time period. Instead, an accumulation of fi...

The Golden Notebook, by Doris Lessing

When I first read this novel forty years ago, I found the structure fascinating but the story itself disappointing. I had understood the book, first published in 1962, to be a story of free women, the title of the frame story that begins each section and ends the book. I eagerly looked forward to reading about the lives created by women who had freed themselves of society’s constraints on women’s roles. However, as Lessing herself points out in her 1971 introduction, this book is not about wo...

Public Property, by Andrew Motion

One night last week I went to a reading by Andrew Motion, thrilled at the opportunity to hear one of my favorite poets, and so close to home! I heard Motion, Poet Laureate of England from 1999 to 2009, read once before, in Toronto, at the International Festival of Authors. I was profoundly moved and changed by that experience, partly of course by the poems themselves with their richly evocative detail, their deeply felt experience, and my own sudden shock of recognition, but also partly by th...