B. Morrison's Blog, page 70

The Boy with the Cuckoo Clock Heart, by Mathias Malzieu

This fantasy novel is the story of young Jack who was born on the coldest night of the year, so cold that his heart is frozen. To save his life, the midwife, Dr. Madeleine, who is also a mechanical genius and suspected witch, grafts on a cuckoo clock to act as his heart. The clock dismays would-be adoptive parents, so the orphaned Jack continues to live with Dr. Madeleine and her entourage in 1800’s Edinburgh. Dr. Madeleine warns him that strong emotions may damage his fragile heart; above al...

Wordsmith Studio, an Appreciation [10]

I’m taking a break from talking about books this week to celebrate an anniversary. Last year at this time I participated in Robert Lee Brewer’s Platform Challenge: How to Build (or Improve) Your Writer Platform in 30 Days. Each day in April 2012, he posted an assignment and explanation on his My Name Is Not Bob blog. I am a writer as well as a reader, and writers these days are told they must have the dreaded P-word. However, details of what it actually means to have a platform are pretty fuz...

Wordsmith Studio, an Appreciation [9]

I’m taking a break from talking about books this week to celebrate an anniversary. Last year at this time I participated in Robert Lee Brewer’s Platform Challenge: How to Build (or Improve) Your Writer Platform in 30 Days. Each day in April 2012, he posted an assignment and explanation on his My Name Is Not Bob blog. I am a writer as well as a reader, and writers these days are told they must have the dreaded P-word. However, details of what it actually means to have a platform are pretty fuz...

Bloody Falls of the Coppermine, by McKay Jenkins

The book’s full title, Bloody Falls of the Coppermine: Madness and Murder in the Arctic Barren Lands, captured my attention as I was perusing the shelves after a reading at my local bookstore. Although the title seemed a bit lurid, I was pleased to find the book itself a well-written and -researched narrative of two Catholic priests undertaking a mission to convert a group of Eskimos, as they were then known. In 1913, when this journey took place, this particular group had met few white men,...

My Nine Lives: Chapters of a Possible Past, by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala [1]

This is not a memoir. Memoirs are nonfiction, and Jhabvala makes it clear that these stories are fictional. Each features a different cast of characters, different conflicts, different settings. As she says in her “Apologia”, “The central character—the ‘I’ of each chapter—is myself, but the parents I have claimed are not, or hardly ever quite my own.” However, she does say that these stories are tales of a life she might have lived. “Every situation was one I could have been in myself, and so...

My Nine Lives: Chapters of a Possible Past, by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

This is not a memoir. Memoirs are nonfiction, and Jhabvala makes it clear that these stories are fictional. Each features a different cast of characters, different conflicts, different settings. As she says in her “Apologia”, “The central character—the ‘I’ of each chapter—is myself, but the parents I have claimed are not, or hardly ever quite my own.” However, she does say that these stories are tales of a life she might have lived. “Every situation was one I could have been in myself, and so...

House of Breath, by William Goyen [2]

Robert suggested this book to me, and I’m glad he did or I never would have found it. Published in 1949, this first novel explores the hold memory has on us, those earliest memories, of childhood’s dark cellars and magical woods, of the family that looms like a race of giants. Snippets of memory repeat and repeat, creating our own personal mythology.

These are the memories of Boy Ganchion, called up on a dark night in strange city. Walking in rain turning to snow, he falls into his past, into...

House of Breath, by William Goyen

Robert suggested this book to me, and I’m glad he did or I never would have found it. Published in 1949, this first novel explores the hold memory has on us, those earliest memories, of childhood’s dark cellars and magical woods, of the family that looms like a race of giants. Snippets of memory repeat and repeat, creating our own personal mythology.

These are the memories of Boy Ganchion, called up on a dark night in strange city. Walking in rain turning to snow, he falls into his past, into...

Twilight of the Superheroes, by Deborah Eisenberg

Another of my book clubs reads two short stories each month. Reading “Another, Better Otto” by Eisenberg, a new author for me, was one of the most satisfying reading experiences I’ve ever had. Immediately I hustled to the library and laid my hands on this collection, which includes that story along with five others, and sat down to savor them. Eisenberg’s tales stretch out to give us a complex world with characters who tantalise the reader with their many facets. I am going to discuss the sto...

A Gate at the Stairs, by Lorrie Moore [1]

The first couple of pages of this novel made me chuckle and look forward to a great read. However, round about page 50 I debated about giving up on the tedious plot. At page 100, terminally bored, I put the book down. I picked it up again a few days later only because it was my book club’s pick for the month.

I’ve learned that if a book’s cover trumpets that it is a National Bestseller and has pages of ecstatically rave reviews just inside, I won’t like it. Blame the raised expectations that...