Currently physically on my bedtable:Richard Zacks, An Underground
Education
Rebecca Wells, Little Altars Everywhere
There are scenes in this that break my heart, so similar to my childhood experiences were they. Toward the end, one particularly: Sidda is godmother at her niece's baptism and comforts the infant during the ceremony, cuddling her to her body to hush her crying. Afterward her mother accuses Sidda of deliberately ruining her baptism video, her baptism series, this being the fourth grandchild.
Mother, I respond, I turned her away because she was crying. I was trying to comfort her.
No you were not, Mama says, You were deliberately defying me, just like you have done since the day you were born.
Obviously Vivi, the mother, is not a stable person, but the frustration of trying to be your own rational self around a person who resents your individuality when you owe her your life and don't you forget it, wrenches.
DIA does have a store that sells books, and one evening when I thought I might finish my Calvino and be stranded bookless, this was the only trade book available that didn't have Oprah's imprint.
Arthur Ransome, We Didn't Mean to Go to
Sea
I found this in Powell's and promptly reread it.
J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians
Wretchedness, which is why HAO wanted me to read "In the Penal Colony" before I tackled this. Not as wretched as In the Heart of the Country, which I did not finish.
So shoot me.
Italo Calvino, The Non-Existent Knight
and The Cloven Viscount
One thing the Indianapolis airport has that DIA hasn't is a decent bookstore with more than Stephen King and Tom Clancy. Calvino, as usual, leaves me scratching my head and drooling at his figures of speech (or his translator's).
Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides
I haven't finished this yet, a euphemism for "I started this and am less than 50 pages in two weeks later."
This started out a lot funnier than it ended. At a couple of times Fry's voice shone (pronounced to rhyme with "on," as Tolkien would have said it) through and I could hear him say this or that. By the end, he was just trying to wrap it up, which he might have disguised more.
John Knowles, A Separate Peace
I hadn't read this since high school. It taught me, then, how to spell "separate." Now, I spotted weaknesses, like how on the very first page the hallways are empty because everyone is at sports but two pages later, the playing fields are empty because of the time of year.
Mattie Sue Athan, Guide to Companion
Parrot Behavior
You can never know too much about the bat-bug (yes, bats are bugs) with whom you share your life.
Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls
I didn't like A Farewell to Arms much at all, and, not drinking along with Jake, didn't even enjoy The Sun Also Rises Much. But this! This is a fine work, and worth fighting for.
This book succeeded in something I thought impossible: I now have sympathy for the Wicked Witch of the West. And he certainly draws more from the movie than from the books: the slippers are ruby, not silver.
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