The City of Fallen Angels, John Berendt. Penguin Press, 2005. Library book.

Berendt is the author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which I have yet to read, but will one day purely because I love the cover photo so. I suspect that he is leveraging off of that book and trying for the same sort of thing with a "decadent" European city - ie, Venice.

This is very much along the lines the the articles Dominick Dunne used to write for the Vanity Fair magazine - full of intrigue and rumors and shady deals among the hoi polloi. In this case, a good deal of this conniving occurs between British and American expatriates, such as Peggy Guggenheim and Ezra Pound's mistress, Olga Rudge, and non-Venetians like Agnelli of Fiat fame.

Matters are nicely set off, not long before Berendt's arrival, by the burning of the Venice opera house, the Fenice. Arson or negligence? From here on someone introduces him to someone of importance, and before long, all sorts of wealthy and possibly nefarious personages are divulging all their family secrets to him. Hmm. Nothing is ever solved or resolved, but the ambiguous corruption of an ancient city comes through loud and clear. Very peculiar, and richly interesting.

Now since the waters of Venice have risen for centuries, the dilemma is solved by simply building another level high on top of what was originally there. So that in the process of restoring an ancient villa, they dug down to the ruins of what they found to be Marco Polo's house. But they then kept going past that and eventually reaching the site of the home built in the 6th century when Venice was first founded. So many layers of history. The mind boggles.

Born Standing Up, Steve Martin. Scribner, 2007. My book.

First of all, I must confess to an irrational but firm attachment of the trio of movies Martin did in the 80's - All of Me, Roxanne, and especially, L. A. Story. Not to mention Bowfinger.

Perhaps because he is about my age, and broke in to show bizz at the Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm of my youth, I've always been quite fond of Steven Martin, and there's no denying he was the highlight of SNL of the 70's. Why, I even remember his appearances on the Smother Brothers Hour prior to that, banjo, happy feet and all. So it was fascinating to meet the mind behind the act, and no surprise at all that he went through college as a philosophy major.

Quite an interesting man. Not to mention a mean banjo player.

The Book Thief, Marcus Zusak. Knopf, 2005. My book.

It wasn't until I started to read this, that I noticed that this is a YA book, something I never would have suspected otherwise, but it would be a fantastic into to WWII for teens.

Liesel, the book thief, is an illiterate young girl in 1941 Germany. Her mother, who can no longer care for her and her young brother, is taking them to foster parents, but the brother dies on the train on the way there. At his hasty funeral, one of the grave-diggers happens to drop a book, The Grave Digger's Handbook, and she unthinkingly snatches it, thus beginning her career as a book thief. Her soon-to-be-beloved step-father teaches her to read, in the middle of the night, as a means of keeping the nightmares away, and from then on, her stolen books (for who has the money to spend on one?) are the core of her life.

The intermittent narrator of the book, however is Death. Not a grim foreboding type, but rather more on the order of a Bergman chess-playing sort of fellow, who occasionally has second thoughts about who he should be picking up, and is frequently not at all unwelcome when he does. It's the occasional aside from him (with nifty changing font, and side-notes, and even a sketch or two) that varies the tone from a standard narrative, and gives us an occasional preview when warranted.

Altogether a unique immersion in war-time Germany and although somber, not without glints of humor.

Highgate Rise, Anne Perry. Ballantine Books, 1991. My book.

A very tasty bit of Victoriana. Apparently, this is one of a series of Thomas and Charlotte Pitt Mysteries, and an annoying amount of references were made as to previous cases, but all is forgiven, since I enjoyed it a great deal once it got going. Would definitely look for said previous cases.

Thomas Pitt, one of her Majesty's finest, is called upon to investigate a dramatic case of arson and murder. His wife Charlotte, a well-born gentlewoman who married for love and now as a consequence does her own laundry, feels compelled to assist, as she has access even still through her doting and imperious, not to mention fabulously wealthy, Great-Aunt Vesperia to levels of society to which he does not. A second arson-murder soon follows, and in each case one of the two residents of the house happens to not be there. Coincidence or not?

Great use of a large intersecting cast of various levels of society, some rising and some falling, as well as the issues of the day. Extra points for Grace, young household all-round assistant of the Pitts, who is enthralled with the idea of helping solve the mystery, and who turns out to be a born actress just when needed.

Fun stuff!

Man-Made Disaster: The Story of St. Francis Dam, Charles F. Outland. The Arthur Clark Company, 1963. Library book.

Now, I'm a California girl through and through. Although I was born elsewhere, my parents moved back to California with me when I was two months old, so California is all I've ever known. I went to California schools when they were second to none (pre-Prop 13 - harumph) and yet I never heard of this catastrophe until I moved, 20 years ago, a mere 10 miles from the site of the greatest man-made disaster to ever occur in California, with a death toll second only to that of the San Fransisco Earthquake.

In the mid-1920's, Mullholland of DWP (and Chinatown) fame was deeply embroiled in the great Water War with the farmers of the Owens Valley. Attention was diverted to the battleground (and it literally was) to the north when he began work on a dam to create a reservoir in the mountains of northern LA county, at the southern end of the great aqueduct. Work began, apparently, before anyone realized what was going on, and by 1927 it was an accomplished deed. A great concrete dam blocked San Francisquito Canyon, holding water for Los Angeles.

Over the next year, cracks appeared in the concrete, but that was entirely normal and concern was minimal. Some leakage appeared to one side, but engineers came out to inspect it, and concluded that it was not a matter of immediate concern. On the night of March 12, 1928, all appeared normal as midnight approached. The last person to see the dam intact, a certain Ace Hopewell, was on his way home up canyon, and drove up the road at the side of the dam on his motorcycle, noticing nothing out of the ordinary. And yet five minutes later, a few miles up the road, he heard what sounded to him like an earthquake. It was the sound of St. Francis Dam bursting into ten ton hunks of concrete and twelve billion gallons of water being instantly released.

There are only a handful of eyewitness accounts at the start of this disaster. The only survivor of the Powerhouse No. 2 settlement, below the dam, where the employees lived, saw a ten story wall of water heading towards him in the dark night, and only managed to scale the mountain wall in time. Los Angeles, Saugus, and other communities in the area were only alerted when the power lines began to suddenly go down. By the time the word was being sent out via telephone operators who stayed on the job that night at great personal risk, Castaic Junction was gone as well. Further down the river bed, towards the ocean, hero citizens of Santa Paula and Saticoy began to awake residents, rousing them from their beds as the wall of muddy water headed to them, full of debris, houses, animals, trees, and barbed wire. By the time it reached Santa Paula, the author, then a 19-year-old resident, saw the sixty foot monster sweep past his town, obliterating any bridge and all low-lying areas in its path.

Five hours after the dam broke, the water reached the ocean, and over 600 people were dead, even though the area was a sparsely populated one.

Outland was a lively writer, and clearly researched every eyewitness and legal account of this disaster and its aftermath. And I, who have been up the canyon road, just a mile or two from my home, many a time, and noticed the innocuous sign at the side of the road, am amazed that no one but the locals have ever heard of this. Is Mulholland still that powerful, this many years later?

Highly recommended!

The Law and the Lady, Wilkie Collins. Oxford Press, 1875. My book.

Apparently the first instance of a "lady detective", this was quite a fun read. Brand-new bride, Valeria Woodville, discovers that there are certain irregularities in her husband's background - to wit, a "Scotch verdict", or basically a verdict of no verdict for the accusation of poisoning his first wife. Hubby decamps for some random battle somewhere, leaving behind his mom to deal with her, and a message to forget him for her own good.

Ah, but our heroine is not about to do that (although I could not see the attraction there for beans - I see a man who is not quite as tall as I am, and who has the misfortune of looking older than his years. His forehead is prematurely bald. His big chestnut-coloured beard and his long overhanging moustache are already streaked with grey. - and let us say he has a personality to match. Yippee.). So she delves into the murky depths, running into characters worthy of Dickens at his most demented.

Good times.

The Poet and the Lunatics, G. K. Chesterton. Dufour Editions, 1929. Library book.

Well, now, I think twee and self-consciously fey rather sum this up. Almost, but not quite, rated a hedgehog.

Gabriel Gale (described in every single story as if we've never met him before) is a poet and painter (with no evidence of the former occupation, thank God) who is treated by the general world at large as an amiable lunatic, almost getting put away a few times. But you see, he is not really, but some around him are. And because he can follow their way of thinking, he can help them, or identify them to be put away, or rat them out to the coppers, as he sees fit.

I'm not entirely sure what it is about Chesterton, but between this and The Man Who Would Be Thursday (still, IMHO, an awesome title, if nothing else), I just don't think I'm receiving whatever message he's sending.

A Stranger at Greene Knowe, L. M. Boston. Harcourt Brace, 1961. Library book.

If I were a kid, I'd have been mighty ticked on reading this book in the Greene Knowe series. I've been impressed with how varied the series has been thus far, but one of the chief attractions has always been the otherworldly touch, the sense of how very old the house is and who has gone through it over time.

But here we have a return character from the previous book - Ping the Chinese Orphan - all well and good, but all he has to do is pal around with an escaped gorilla from London. O.o And as indicated above, we can all see how well that went.

Boston is a good enough writer to almost pull it off, but alas, there is more than a whiff of a Book Meant To Improve Young Minds, always a fatal flaw. Here's hoping the next one gets back on track.

Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood, Maria Tatar. W. W. Norton, 2009. Library book.

An examination of why children read for pleasure and what adults write for them to read, and how these two forces intersect, with a fascinating back history of how bedtime reading came about. Full of intriguing observations such the fact that adult usually read their favorite tales to children for bedtime, but shouldn't they actually be reading the dullest possible stories at that particular time? (Not that some of them don't.)

The classics of childhood reading are examined, from the perspective of what a child gains from them, with special emphasis on Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland, and what makes both of them unique.

Full of little delights, such as the observation that characters with the title Little, such as Little Eva, Little Nell, the Little Match Girl, and the Little Mermaid seldom achieve the opposite status. These [cautionary tales] became all the rage, offering both adults and children melodramatic lessons on spirituality and uplift. But who could fail to notice that having "little" before your name meant the chances were slim of ever becoming "big"?

There is a fascinating appendix of quotes from writers on what they read as children, and what it meant to them. I must say I think Emerson hit it right on.

You have observed a skillful man reading Virgil. Well, that author is a thousand books to a thousand persons. Take the book in your own two hands, and read your eyes out; you will never find what I find.

And first up, an absolute jewel.

Henry James on Italy, Henry James. Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1900. My book.

First of all, I must confess to a love-hate relationship with Henry James. I had absolutely no use for him in my high school/college days ("What is this man even saying?"), but began to appreciate him far more when, in later days and when I didn't have to read him for a class, I gave him another shot. And have always been more than glad I did.

But this. Gorgeous, luxurious prose, that so utterly fits the Italy that has captured his elusive heart. Somehow, I have to believe that he never loved a person as well as he did this dreamy vision of his. An odd sort of travel writing, there is almost no reference to what he did, whom he was with, indeed, the author seems to vanish into the landscape. Instead there are the vistas, the buildings, the art, and occasionally, the people of a seemingly timeless Italy that was just about to vanish forever.

I could quote at great length, but here are a few tastes -

Of Venice - A Venetian palace . . . makes almost any life graceful that may be led in it. . . . As you live in it day after day its beauty and its interests sink more deeply into your spirit; it has its moods and its hours and its mystic voices and its shifting expressions. If in the absence of its owners you have happened to have it to yourself for twenty-four hours you will never forget the charm of its haunted stillness, late on the summer afternoon for instance, when the call of the playing children comes in from behind the campo, nor the way the old ghosts seemed to pass on tip-toe on the marble floors.

Of a Judgment Day painting by Orcagna - one must stand there and see the painter's howling potentates dragged into hell in all the vividness of his bright hard colouring; see his feudal courtiers, on their palfreys, hold their noses at what they are so fast coming to; see his great Christ, in judgment, refuse forgiveness with a gesture commanding enough, really inhuman enough, to make virtue merciless forever.

Of an ancient citadel tucked away in the Italian countryside - Beautiful hills surround it, cypresses cast straight shadows at its corners, while in the middle grew a wondrous Italian tangle of wheat and corn, vines and figs, peaches and cabbages, memories and images, anything and everything.

Goddamn, but this guy could write.

A Drink of Deadly Wine: A Book of Psalms Mystery, Kate Charles. Mysterious Press, 1991. Library book.

Aspiring young married clergyman and cad, Gabriel Neville, is on track for bishop when a blackmailing letter threatens to expose his connection with a teen-age choir boy who had offed himself due to unrequited love. Who does he call on for assistance? Why, his former lover - solicitor and art historian David Middleton-Brown, who hasn't seen his former OTP since the day he was unceremoniously dumped. *cocks Eyebrow of Disbelief*

I had enjoyed another book in this series, so went back to read the first, and was startled to find that the hero of the previous book, the aforementioned David, was actually gay. Technically, I suppose, bisexual, since he was humping the ethereal artiste who is just a side character here with a certain amount of enthusiasm in the later book.

Hmmph. I don't even. And the culprit on this one? HahahahaNO.

Janet's Repentance: Scenes of Clerical Life, George Eliot. Hesperus Classics, 1857. My book.

I do love me some George Eliot, but this was definitely Beginning Eliot. Aww. Nice to know every great writer isn't great right out of the box. The aforementioned Janet, wife to an abusive lawyer, is starting to hit the bottle (that's something you don't see everyday in a genteel Victorian heroine), but the arrival of an Evangelistic cleric brings her new hope.

I loved the catty ebb and flow of the two religious factions in town, but the main characters were, alas, rather too good to be true. But what surprised me the most was the hearty smackdown with the Foreshading Stick that the author delivered nearly exactly halfway through the book. Oh, so that's where we're going? Not much point in reading the rest, really, even though I dutifully did. This would have been a much better book with that one sentence left out. Ah, well, beginner's mistake.

Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail, Stephen R. Bown. St. Martin's Press, 2003. Library book.

An entertaining read, and full of tidbits of the "I didn't know that!" variety. Scurvy, a deficiency disease with truly horrific symptoms (broken bones, having healed years ago, starting to separate again? - yeoch!) decimated sailors left and right throughout the Age of Sail. Ironically, the cure - lemon juice! - was discovered fairly early on, but since that solution didn't jive with the then-accepted four humours theory, it was promptly disregarded.

All in all, it was not finally accepted until it made the difference in the British blockade of Napoleon's fleet. Advantage Britain, with their non-derelict fighting force.

As Bougainville, a French sea captain in 1768, put it, as his crew, decimated by scurvy, limped into Tahiti, people have long argued about the location of Hell. Frankly, we have discovered it.

Dust and Shadow, Lyndsay Faye. Simon and Schuster, 2009. My book.

Absolutely one of the better bits of Holmsiana I have ever read, and heaven knows I've read more than a few. Holmes and Watson take on Jack the Ripper is a premise I know I've seen before, although where escapes me at the moment. No matter, I know it wasn't as well done as this was.

Beautiful Holmes-Watson interaction - a trifle more emotional than the originals, but on a case such as this, entirely warranted. Filled with luscious trifles such as Holmes' alias, Captain Basil (Basil of Baker's Street! Squee!), and even a map! Oh, how I adore a book that makes good use of a map of London in the frontispiece, even though Doyle himself wasn't always entirely accurate. (Trust me, I've read it with map in hand. ;D) I can even forgive the author the slight Mary Sueness of one of the main characters.

What can I say? I want more. Many, many more. I'll even buy them new and hardcover, my ultimate compliment.

American Rust, Philipp Meyer. Random House, 2009. Library book.

Set in the lushly green but decaying mine and mill towns of Pennsylvania, one friend, a former high school football star with a record of violence, takes the fall for his friend, a slight intellectual sort, who kills a transient in a scuffle as the two are trying to leave town. Touches of Of Mice and Men, in reverse so to speak, and although it was well written, and didn't end quite as badly as I feared it was going to, still has fulfilled my Depressing Book of the Month quota.

The Devil's Eye, Jack McDevitt. Berkley Publishing, 2008. Library book.

I picked this up at random, and what fun! Apparently the author has an Alex Benedict series going here - he is an intersteller antiquities dealer (think Indy) and his female pilot/business partner is the narrator. On the trail of a hugely popular horror writer, who went to a planet that specializes in haunted locations for the tourists, and stumbles on a secret so horrible that she asks to have her memory erased, they find something entirely unexpected, and the fate of the planet turns out to be at stake.

Veering from horror to sci fi to political thriller, this was tasty. I'd look up Alex and Chase again any day.

A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers, Elaine Showalter. Knopf, 2009. Library book.

Huge and stuffed with all sorts of obscure but fascinating female American writers. The usual suspects are here and alas, there certainly aren't many of them, until we hit the last few decades. Which begs the question - why were English female novelists so prominent in the history of literature, and American female writers so very obscure? One can hardly discuss the history of the novel in English, at least, without featuring Austin, the Brontes, and Eliot, at the very least. But as far as Americans, one has to wait until the turn of the century (with the exception of Stowe, whose impact was as much political as literary) for Wharton, Cather, and Chopin. And as for Canadians, can't think of any but Montgomery, and much later, Atwood.

Hmm. But I will leave this with the words of Louise Bogan, poet and contemporary of Dorothy Parker, in and out of the psychiatric wards herself and addressing the observation that poets often have, ehrm, complicated private lives.

Come, drunks and drug-takers, come perverts unnerved!
Receive the laurel, given, though late, on merit: to whom and wherever deserved.

Parochial punks, trimmers, nice people, joiners true-blue,
Get the hell out of the way of the laurel. It is deathless

And it isn't for you.



Heh. Nicely put.

The Winthrop Woman, Anya Seton. Houghton Mifflin, 1958. My book.

Ah, this was fun. Our heroine, Bess Winthrop, goes through a couple of duds before she finds Tru Wuve (fortunately, there is a family tree inside the front cover, just so we won't despair as she goes through the Wrong Brother and the Whack Job first).

Having suffered through the first semester of American Literature at least twice in college and once in high school, where the early writings seem to consist of endlessly grim sermons (although I must admit that Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Jonathan Edwards, has a certain joie de vivre), transforming those people into living and breathing characters takes considerable skill.

You could add this any day to any American history or lit class (it certainly appears to be well-researched enough) as far as I'm concerned. Bess and her Fabio-clone honey are my kind of peeps.

Time to get caught up with a few I zipped through at the end of the summer.

Call in the Night, Susan Howatch. Fawcett Crest, 1967. My book.

A light-weight piece of fun that I had to read right through to the end non-stop. Claire, in New York, gets an odd call, abruptly cut off, from her frightened younger sister, a young model trying to make it in Paris. But the call is from somewhere in London, so of course, Claire immediately contacts Scotland Yard where a helpful officer goes through all sorts of trouble trying to help her find her sister (hee!) But that's not nearly good enough, so she gives up her livelong dream of owning a red VW Bug, cashes in her savings and flies off to Paris, to see what her sister's roommate can tell her.

However, on her first night in Paris, she runs into the wonderfully named and darkly debonair Garth Cooper, a wealthy Englishman who claims to be only a nodding acquaintance of her sister. Or is he??? Murders occur, world-wind romance is the order of the day, and it was all so fabulously 60's I had no trouble picturing a Charade-era Audrey Hepburn in the title role. (Girlfriend is so stressed out as she tracks down her sister to London whilst avoiding the quasi-boyfriend that the very first thing she does upon checking into her hotel room is freshen her makeup. And does that more than once. Yeah, I know that when I'm extremely upset and dead tired, that's the first thing I'd be doing too. Oh my, you've got to love the early to mid-60's.)

My only quibble on this lovely bit of nonsense is the cover which, featuring as it does a hippie chick posed in front of a mouldering New England mansion in the midst of some very dead grass, is clearly for an entirely different book. I guess it was a generic chick-in-trouble cover, but wow.

A High Wind in Jamaica, Richard Hughes. New York Review Books, 1929. My book.

A very odd book. I'd vaguely heard of the title, but it was not at all what I expected.

Five British children are sent back to England by their parents from Jamaica after a hurricane ravages the island, at the turn of the century. Oddly enough, they end up on a pirate ship. So far, sounds like a children's book, doesn't it?

Oooooh, no. It ends up with a murder trial, and it wasn't committed (spoiler alert) by one of the pirates. Funny, quirky, dreamy and immensely odd. Definitely recommended.