The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray

For him, I was the daughter and son he’d never had, the confidant he’d always sought, the business and art partner who’d boldly advocated for his goals, and the lover he’d dreamed about but held in abeyance. For me, he was the father I’d lost, the companion with whom I could discuss the day’s minutiae, the business mentor who’d supported me beyond my wildest dreams, and the lover for whom is longed but could never have. (p. 248)

I had to break away from my reading of Japanese literature, and books for the Nordic Finds, to complete this month’s Book Club choice: The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray. I quickly found myself immersed in the story of Belle de Costa Greene, who was the extraordinary librarian for J. P. Morgan in the early 1900’s.

Her courage, strength, and intellectual ability are inspiring, as we learn of the way she gained Mr. Morgan’s complete respect. He gave her great financial allowances to bid for the books he wanted at auction.

Belle perfected the ability to “hide in plain sight,” as she sought to present herself as a White woman in a highly prejudiced society. Yet, she was not the only one with secrets. Anne, J. P. Morgan’s daughter, was involved in a “Boston marriage” with another woman.

This book is a perfect choice for Book Clubs, as it includes a myriad of topics: race, feminism, adultery, friendship, and the very powerful relationship between an extremely wealthy man who needed this extremely intelligent and brave librarian.

the 1976 club and R.I.P. XVI: Interview With The Vampire by Anne Rice

The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel

If I liked Interview With The Vampire at all, it is only for the way that it emphasized all that I believe to be true.

Not vampires, of course. I don’t believe vampires to be true. And, the more I heard Louis tell his story in an interview conducted by a boy with a reel-to-reel tape recorder (this was published in 1976, remember?), the more I saw his distress as that which would belong to anyone who doesn’t believe in God.

When Louis is not convinced by his brother’s visions that they must sell the family plantation “to do God’s work in France,” his brother falls from the head of the brick stairs and breaks his neck. Louis is overcome with guilt and turns to drink…and then one night he is attacked by the vampire, Lestat.

After becoming a vampire himself, Louis and Lestat stage a fire and flee, embarking on a life which involves sleeping in coffins, drinking blood from living creatures or humans, and as far as I can see, general discontent.

Louis is never happy being a vampire. He sees a young girl crying over her dead mother in a poverty-stricken area of New Orleans, and takes her to be his own child. He turns her into a vampire, for which she can never forgive him, and they have this bizarre parent-child, love relationship. Claudia can never grow to be a woman in bodily form, nor can she outgrow her resentment to Louis although it seems that at some level she does love him.

They leave their town house in New Orleans, and Lestat, for Paris. Eventually they meet Armand, a vampire who invites them to the Theatre, and there they witness a most erotic play in which a woman is taken by a vampire to the thrill of all the vampires in the audience.

Through the course of the interview, as Louis is disclosing the details of his story, I was struck by passages which I recorded in my reading journal. These, I think, are the essence of what matters in this novel. For if anything can be considered horrific in Louis’ life, it is the despair he feels at all he has seen and done, the despair at who he has become.

Favorite quotes:

I sold my soul for a many-colored and luminescent thing, thinking that a highly reflective surface conveyed the power to walk on water.

~Louis (page 276)

and…

“I wanted love and goodness in this which is living death,” I said. “It was impossible from the beginning, because you cannot have love and goodness when you do what you know to be evil, what you know to be wrong.”

~Louis (page 336)

and…

“Whether a man would have died tomorrow or the day after or eventually…it doesn’t matter. Because if God does not exist, this life…every second of it…is all we have.”

~Louis (page 237)

It brought to my mind this verse from the New Testament:

If our hope in Christ is for this life alone, we are to be pitied more than all men.

1 Corinthians 15:19

• 

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I read this book for the 1976 Club and the R.I.P. XVI

Falling by T. J. Newman

“You’re a smart man, Captain Hoffman. Or, can I call you Bill?”

Bill stared at the screen…

“”You see, Bill, you probably already get the obvious. Here’s the rest. You will crash your plane or I will kill your family.”

(p. 29)

I was sent Falling from NetGalley, but I far prefer to read from real paper rather than digital text. So, I grabbed it from the library when I saw it on the Popular Picks shelf last week. This novel is a “guilty pleasure,” which I am reading not necessarily for the content as much as the thrill.

I think it would have become tiresome if it hadn’t been written with such authority. Clearly, the author knows exactly of what she speaks, and that makes this novel work. Her experience, of being a flight attendant for ten years, reveals aspects of the airline business which I have never known, despite flying even international flights many times.

We are given one terrifying scene after another, alternating between the pilot’s family held hostage in their home, and the 144 passengers onboard the aircraft in his charge. We have the angle of the flight attendants and the FBI as well, giving a train wreck from which I could not pull myself away.

It’s such a relief not to be reading a somewhat typical thriller about The Girl/Woman In/Under/By The Fill-in-the-blank. I really enjoyed the pure entertainment of this book.

An Invitation to read Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara this September

Tom, of Wuthering Expectations, has been posting about John O’Hara here. When he mentioned Appointment in Samarra, I immediately wanted to read it with him in September. And, as Tom points out, Samarra in September has nice alliteration.

It is the first novel John O’Hara wrote, published in 1934, and it is listed in both the Modern Library and Times top 100 books.

Here is more about the 240 page novel from Penguin:

One of Time’s All-Time 100 Best Novels

The writer whom Fran Lebowitz called “the real F. Scott Fitzgerald” makes his Penguin Classics debut with this beautiful deluxe edition of his best-loved book.

One of the great novels of small-town American life, Appointment in Samarra is John O’Hara’s crowning achievement. In December 1930, just before Christmas, the Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, social circuit is electrified with parties and dances. At the center of the social elite stand Julian and Caroline English. But in one rash moment born inside a highball glass, Julian breaks with polite society and begins a rapid descent toward self-destruction.

Brimming with wealth and privilege, jealousy and infidelity, O’Hara’s iconic first novel is an unflinching look at the dark side of the American dream—and a lasting testament to the keen social intelligence of a major American writer.

Do consider joining us for Samarra in September! I am sure we will read and post throughout the month as we feel led, and even write one or two tweets using #SamarraInSeptember.

1965 Club: Hotel by Arthur Hailey

I had to read Hotel on my kindle, because while it may have been an international bestseller once, our library no longer carries it. Nor does our local Barnes and Noble, or Indie book shop. It is such a fun read, not only because it “catches the reader by the lapels and holds him through its last crowded page” (the Chicago Tribune) but because it reminds me of life in the sixties. When wake-up calls were made by real people at the front desk, when keys were real metal objects connected to a plastic tag with your room number, and when call girls’ phone numbers were written on the front pages of the Gideon Bibles. (Who knew?)

All the inner workings of St. Gregory, a fictional hotel in the French Quarter of New Orleans, are laid out for us in intricate detail. From the frat party gone wrong, to the fact that Warren Trent may have to sell his hotel to Curtis O’Keefe due to lacking money for the mortgage, we feel the tension suffered by the employees and guests alike.

There is the Duke and Duchess of Croydon who have a hit-and-run to hide, employing the help of the hotel’s devious investigator, Oligivie. There is Peter McDermott falling in love with Trent’s secretary, Catherine. There is a thief, nicknamed Keycase, who obtains keys through tricky means and comes into people’s rooms at night to lift their valuables. And there are age old issues besides, involving things like unions and racial tensions.

This is a book that brings me back to an era I vaguely remember, while showing us that the “more things change, the more they stay the same.” It was a wonderful choice for the 1965 Club; it would be a wonderful choice for your reading pleasure alone.

(Thanks to Simon and Kaggsy for hosting this reading event.)

The Reckoning by John Grisham

When I pick up a Grisham novel, I don’t expect fully one third of it to be a history lesson about the horrors the Japanese committed in Word War II. But halfway through this novel, when I was sufficiently intrigued as to why Peter Banning shot Reverend Dexter Bell in his church office and admitted to doing so without once saying why, I had to keep reading.

Unfortunately, I was suddenly thrust into the atrocities of war in Japan, and the Philippines, which went on relentlessly. It was a gruesome part of the book, portraying events so horrible it seemed unlikely that Lieutenant Peter Banning could have possibly lived through them.

But, of course he does, so that the last third of the book can reveal the reason he had to murder Dexter Bell, a reason I am unwilling to relate as it spoils the entire reason for reading this book. Suffice it to say the reason rests mightily on misunderstanding and regret.

At times I wondered if I was reading a book by Grisham at all. Other than the quite wonderfully written parts of the legal trial, the courtroom, the questioning, the motives of the lawyers, I felt the rest of the novel to be contrived. It didn’t ring true of what I know his writing to be, and for this, many people have praised The Reckoning. However, for me A Time to Kill will always be his best work.

Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann (“History is a merciless judge.”)

What a dreadfully boring book. If it had not been for the choice of my Book Club, and the responsibility I felt toward contributing to the discussion, I would not have finished it. As it was, each page was nearly tortuous to read, the writing as stilted as if I had been reading an encylopedia. Where was the passion? Where was the life within these characters? Absent, except for within my own imagination.

Certainly I am one of the few who feels this way, as Killers of The Flower Moon has been both a bestseller and a National Book Award Finalist. It’s possible I was disgruntled in part because of my intense passion for translated literature. But, I found the story slow to evolve and the characters largely devoid of life. However, it is does fit in perfectly with today’s recurring theme of the terrible white man, and all he has done to abuse others not of his race.

Grann tells the story of the Reign of Terror, in which Ernest Burkhart (following the orders of his uncle, William K. Hale) took away everything from his Osage wife’s family: her mother, sisters, brother-in-law, and trust were all sacrificed in his desire for the headrights (which the Osage had) to the oil fields in Oklahoma on which they lived.

In conjunction with the tale of the Osage murders, Grann relates tales of the judicial system in the 1920s and the subsequent birth of the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover. As my mother said, “It is hard to believe that the FBI is relatively new,” or that finger printing was not a common practice before the 1930s.

This book tells a heartbreaking tale of the horrible mistreatment of the Osage in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. But, in my opinion, their story was inelegantly told.

Madeleine L’Engle: The Kairos Novels, Review and Give-away

This beautiful set comes in a slipcover …

containing the Wrinkle in Time Quartets and The Polly O’Keefe Quartets.

I have long collected Madeleine L’Engle’s books, and so I have a rather haphazard set, all in different editions. Above are two from the Wrinkle in Time Quartet…

and here are two of the Polly O’Keefe Quartet. But, how lovely it is to have a two-volume set, with each volume containing all four of each series.

Volume 1 contains A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and Many Waters.

Volume 2 contains the Polly O’Keefe Quartet, which consists of The Arm of the Starfish, Dragons in the Waters, A House Like a Lotus, and An Acceptable Time.

The Kairos Novels are edited by Leonard S. Marcus and published by the Library of America.

Few works loom as large in the history of young adult literature as Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 Newbery Award-winning classic, A Wrinkle in Time. A truly revolutionary book blending realism and fantasy, science and religion, it was the first great crossover classic, appealing to children, teens, and adults, and setting the template for books such as Harry Potter and The Hunger Games. Now, in time for L’Engle’s centenary on November 29, 2018, Library of America brings readers MADELEINE L’ENGLE: The Kairos Novels, a deluxe two-volume set gathering Wrinkle and all seven of its sequels for the first time; an eight book sequence L’Engle collectively called the “Kairos Novels,” named for the Greek word for cosmically critical moments of time.

Edited by Leonard S. Marcus, one of the world’s leading writers on children’s books and the people who create them, this authoritative edition presents A Wrinkle in Time in a newly corrected text based on research in L’Engle’s archives and includes an appendix with four never-before-seen deleted passages.

Two of Madeleine L’Engle’s books changed my life. One was A Wrinkle in Time, the other was The Love Letters. They both taught me things about love I had never really understood before. I treasure rereading these classic books, most beloved by me.

And, I have the opportunity to give a set away (U. S. only, please). If you are interested in being considered for the give-away, please leave a comment below. I will select a name a week from today (on October 9).

Needful Things by Stephen King (R.I.P. XIII)

“The world is full of needy people who don’t understand that everything, everything, is for sale…if you’re willing to pay the price.” (p. 82)

Isn’t that just what the Enemy would do? Trick you into believing that what you want is what you have to have? Trick you into paying anything for your obsession? Trick you into thinking that what you thought was worth everything, was really worth nothing? King’s plot is brilliant, for it shows how we are often taunted with promised pleasure almost too powerful to resist.

Eleven year old Brian Rusk has bought a Stanley Koufax 1956 baseball card from the shop, Needful Things. He can’t stop looking at it, checking it, taking one last peek to see that it is still there. “He recognized that it had become kind of an obsession with him, but recognition did not put a stop to it.” Because obsessions are not that easy to get rid of.

Ask Danforth “Buster” Keeton, who is addicted to gambling and buys a tin race track which magically reveals the winning horse. Or, Hugh Priest who is addicted to alcohol and buys a fox tail which reminds him of the joy of his youth, or even timid Nettie Cobb, who simply cannot let the Carnival glass lampshade out of her sight. Each person in Castle Rock feels that the thing they have purchased at Needful Things is now the one thing they cannot live without; surely this thing, they hope, is the answer to their yearning.

I am captivated by the way that King has portrayed addiction in this novel:

It was a pit with greasy sides, a snare with hidden teeth, a loaded gun with the safety removed. (p. 210)

He had discovered another large fact about possessions and the peculiar psychological state they induce: the more one has to go through because of something one owns, the more one wants to keep that thing. (p. 261)

But, the people of Castle Rock, Maine, are holding nothing but empty promises. Brian’s brother, Sean, can’t understand why Brian is so attached to a faded, dog-eared card bearing the name Sonny Koberg. And no one can understand why Hugh Priest gently and lovingly strokes a mangy, dirty piece of fur which was once a lustrous fox tail. Deputy Norris Ridgewick’s beloved Bazun fishing rod is nothing but a splintery bamboo pole.

For the people have all been deceived, by their own desires to be sure. But, also by Leland Guant, owner of Needful Things, who sells them what they desire with soothing words (“Because the devil’s voice is sweet to hear”), a compelling gaze, and a promise to play a little prank, a harmful little trick.

The “little tricks” build to such grotesque consequences that soon the town begins to self destruct. Castle Rock’s inhabitants are in the grip of their obsessions, and they will let nothing come in between the thing and their illusion of happiness.

“Perhaps all the really special things I sell aren’t what they appear to be. Perhaps they are actually gray things with one remarkable property—the ability to take the shapes of those things which haunt the dreams of men and women.” He paused, then added thoughtfully, “Perhaps they are dreams themselves.” (p. 370)

The Enemy and all his empty promises are portrayed so cleverly in this novel by Stephen King, who shows us in thinly veiled hints just who Leland Gaunt may be:

“Needful Things is a poison place and Mr. Gaunt is a poison man. Only he’s really not a man, Sean. He’s not a man at all. Swear to me you’ll never buy any of the poison things Mr. Gaunt sells.” (p. 553)

I was riveted to this book, almost as much as The Stand, because I am fascinated by the way King writes, pulling me immediately into the story, and into the era I knew when I was growing up. I also like the battles between good and evil, most of which I find are not entirely fictionalized, but very real indeed.

There’s a warning in this book, told several times over. Even if Stephen King knows it, which I suspect he does, he didn’t write it as plainly as this:

Those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs. Jonah 2:8 (NIV)

R.I.P. VIII: The Books

Behold four of the books I have for the R.eaders I.mbibing P.eril XIII. Always I will miss the input of Carl, who began the challenge long ago when I myself was beginning blogging; may I hazard a guess of 2006? Be that as it may, here we are thirteen years later. Feeling autumnal. Willing to ‘frighten’ ourselves with spirits and ghosts and eerie stories.

The Laybrinth of Spirits is the latest in the quartet which makes up the Cemetery of Forgotten Books by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. It is, frankly, just as involved and filled with characters as The Shadow of The Wind, a book in which I had to list all the characters on the inside back cover. But, there is an air of mystery, and an aura of the power of books, which melts my heart.

The Spellbook of Katrina Van Tassel by Alyssa Palombo is a retelling and continuation of The Legend of Sleepy Hallow told through the perspective of Ichabod Crane’s forbidden love. It will be published October 2, 2019.

The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell was first published last October, the paperback came out in March. It is described as, “An extraordinary, memorable, and truly haunting book.” –JoJo Moyes, #1 New York Times bestselling author and, “A perfect read for a winter night…An intriguing, nuanced, and genuinely eerie slice of Victorian gothic.” –The Guardian

The Hanging at Picnic Rock by Joan Lindsay is a 50th anniversary edition of a book which has been called, “A beguiling landmark of Australian literature, it stands with Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides as a masterpiece of intrigue.” Apparently, three girls go off climbing after their picnic, into the shadows of a volcanic outcropping, and never return.

And you? Have you any autumnal reading planned for this fall? For the R.I.P. XIII? (Sign up, if you haven’t already, by clicking here.)