We are a mother and daughter blog team, fellow bibliophiles, and avid readers. We write about/review books that we read for pleasure.
Frances ~ I love novels, and I read a wide variety of genres. I read the classics, Southern Lit, historical fiction, sagas, and contemporary fiction.
Rose ~ I am a lover of everything from fiction to non-fiction, classics to fantasy. Many of the books/series I read are historical fiction, modern classics, and mysteries. I also enjoy world literature, especially from India and Scandinavia.
Photos can be old or new, and be of any subject as long as they are clean and appropriate for all eyes to see. How much detail you give in the caption is entirely up to you. Please don't post random photos that you find online.
Since reading The Help by Kathryn Stockett, we have both been thinking about Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird. For this week's Saturday Snapshot, we decided to share some photos from our visit to Harper Lee's hometown, the basis for the "tired old town" of Maycomb. We visited Monroeville, AL a few years ago and saw the courthouse that was replicated for the set of the film and several murals depicting characters from the book around the town.
If you've followed our blog, you may have gathered that I'm a huge fan of Daphne du Maurier - especially her novel Rebecca. This book is a wonderful visual journey through the Cornish landscape that she so vividly paints in her novel. But more than that, it is a chronicle of the part Cornwall has played in her life. She says:
I walked this land with a dreamer's freedom and with a waking man's perspective - places, houses whispered to me their secrets and shared with me their sorrows and their joys. And in return I gave them something of myself, a few of my novels passing into the folk-lore of this ancient place.
Written in her later years, the book looks back on her life from her childhood, to her early love of Cornwall, and the stories behind the novels she set there. She uses passages from her many novels along with beautiful photographs of the areas that inspired each one.
I enjoyed the stories of her childhood. As the daughter of a British actor, she was raised on the world of make-believe and surrounded by her father's famous colleagues and friends. She notes that after a visit from Basil Rathbone, there is a page in her diary on which she drew a heart pierced by an arrow and the words, "I love Basil." Years later, he played the part of the wicked Lord Rockingham in the film version of her novel Frenchman's Creek.
My favorite section of the book is when she writes about Menabilly, the house that inspired Rebecca. The house was abandoned, the owner living elsewhere, and from the moment she set eyes upon it she was under its spell. She began to write Rebecca in 1937 while her husband was stationed in Alexandria and she was homesick for Cornwall.
This novel would not be a tale of smugglers and wreckers of the nineteenth century, like Jamaica Inn, but would be set in the present day, say the mid-twenties, and it would be about a young wife and her slightly older husband, living in a beautiful house that had been in his family for generations. There were many such houses in Cornwall; my friend Foy Quiller-Couch, with whom I visited Jamaica Inn, had taken me to some of them. Houses with extensive grounds, with woods, near to the sea, with family portraits on the walls...my Cornish house would be empty, neglected, its owners absent...very like Menabilly near Fowey...where I had so often trespassed. And surely the Quiller-Couches had once told me that the owner had been married first to a very beautiful wife, whom he had divorced, and had married again a much younger woman? I wondered if she had been jealous of the first wife, as I would have been jealous if my Tommy had been married before he married me... Seeds began to drop. A beautiful home...a first wife...jealousy...a wreck, perhaps at sea, near to the house...But something terrible would have to happen, I did not know what... The couple would be living abroad, after some tragedy, there would be an epilogue - but on second thoughts that would have to come at the beginning... And thoughts turned to my first encounter with Menabilly, as I made my way down the old driveway from the east lodge, as it were in a dream. Thus, Rebecca was born. Years later, after Rebecca was published, she actually leased Menabilly and lived there.
Two of her other novels were set largely at Menabilly, The King's General and My Cousin Rachel.
For fans of du Maurier, this memoir provides insight into the writer and the world of her novels.
Dorothy Parker (1893-1967) was an American poet, short story writer, and satirist. She is best known for her wit and wisecracks. She had an unhappy childhood, went through two marriages (two to the same man), and survived several suicide attempts. She grew increasingly dependent on alcohol. Her wisecracks and caustic wit characterize her poetry.
She was a founding member of The Algonquin Round Table, a group of journalists, editors, actors and press agents that met on a regular basis at the Algonquin Hotel in New York. The group began lunching together in 1919 and continued for about eight years. During this time, Dorothy wrote for Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Vogue. She said of those early years: "Silly of me to blame it on dates, but so it happened to be. Dammit, it was the twenties, and we had to be smarty." In her later years, she came to denigrate the group:
These were no giants. Think who was writing in these days - Lardner, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway. Those were the real giants. The Round Table was just a lot of people telling jokes and telling each other how good they were. Just a bunch of loudmouths showing off, saving their gags for days, waiting for a chance to spring them...There was no truth in anything they said. It was the terrible day of the wisecrack, so there didn't have to be any truth...
She was often dismissive of her talents and her wild reputation, as the following quotes indicate: I don't care what is written about me so long as it isn't true.
That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.
In the thirties, she moved to Hollywood and did screenwriting. Throughout the rest of her life she was a vocal advocate of civil rights and was placed on the Hollywood blacklist during the McCarthy era. When she died, she bequeathed her estate to the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. foundation. In the following poem she laments her disappointing life.
A Fairly Sad Tale
I think that I shall never know
Why I am thus, and I am so.
Around me, other girls inspire
In men the rush and roar of fire,
The sweet transparency of glass,
The tenderness of April grass,
The durability of granite;
But me- I don't know how to plan it.
The lads I've met in Cupid's deadlock
Were- shall we say?- born out of wedlock.
They broke my heart, they stilled my song,
And said they had to run along,
Explaining, so to sop my tears,
First came their parents or careers.
But ever does experience
Deny me wisdom, calm, and sense!
Though she's a fool who seeks to capture
The twenty-first fine, careless rapture,
I must go on, till ends my rope,
Who from my birth was cursed with hope.
A heart in half is chaste, archaic;
But mine resembles a mosaic-
The thing's become ridiculous!
Why am I so? Why am I thus?
The film, Dorothy Parker and the Vicious Circle is a portrayal of her life and her time spent with The Algonquin Round Table. Jennifer Jason Leigh does a wonderful Dorothy with all her wit, loneliness, and overwhelming sadness.
Usually, the focus is on the best first lines in literature. We are guilty of this, too. After all, the first lines are what draw you into a book. These are the ones we remember best. Shouldn't the last lines leave you feeling that the journey was worthwhile? Here are some of our favorites:
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
~ The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
"'Yes,' I said. 'Isn't it pretty to think so?'"
~ The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
"I don't hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I don't. I don't! I don't hate it! I don't hate it!"
~ Absalom, Absalom! - William Faulkner
"After all, tomorrow is another day."
~ Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
"'All that is very well,' answered Candide, 'but let us cultivate our garden.'"
~ Candide - Voltaire
"Whether or not they lived happily ever after is not easily decided."
~ The African Queen - C. S. Forester
"Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is."
~ Continental Drift - Russell Banks
"I am haunted by waters."
~ A River Runs Through It - Norman MacLean
"Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain."
~ The Mayor of Casterbridge - Thomas Hardy
"To us - and snails, God bless them!"
~ The Book and the Brotherhood - Iris Murdoch
"And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea."
~ Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
Funnily enough, Rebecca also made it on our list of best first lines!
Photos can be old or new, and be of any subject as long as they are clean and appropriate for all eyes to see. How much detail you give in the caption is entirely up to you. Please don't post random photos that you find online.
This is our first Saturday Snapshot. We thought we would start by posting a little gem found on a stroll through an abandoned downtown area.
This is the view through the window of an antique shop. Despite the front door bearing a sign claiming they were "open", this place had clearly not been open for business in quite a long time! We love the carved bust - it reminds us of Marie Antoinette. We also wonder exactly how long it takes for something to be considered antique. Does the baby blue Crayola marker truly qualify?
Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Marg and Claire that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries!
In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
I'm continuing my journey through all of Hemingway's works. This is his first collection of short stories.
True at First Light by Ernest Hemingway
A fictional memoir published posthumously and edited by his son, Patrick. It was written when he returned from Kenya in 1953 and chronicles his last African safari.
The Dangerous Summer by Ernest Hemingway
In 1959, Hemingway returned to Spain both the revisit "the country he loved more than any other than his own" and to see a series of bullfights that promised spectacular performances by two famous rivals. He was commissioned by Life magazine to write a short article about his trip but he became so absorbed that he wrote a book-length manuscript. It was the last major literary undertaking of his life.
Time Was Soft There: a Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co. by Jeremy Mercer
Jeremy Mercer, a crime reporter, fled Canada in 1999 and ended up broke in Paris. He stumbles upon Shakespeare & Co., the current incarnation of Sylvia Beach's famous bookstore of the 1920's owned by George Whitman. The book "winds in and around the streets of Paris, the staff fall in and out of love, straighten bookshelves, host tea parties, drink in the more down-at-the-heels cafes, sell a few books, and help George find a way to keep his endangered bookstore open."
The Key to Rebecca by Ken Follett
A thriller set during WWII which involves a code that is embedded in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca!
Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote
This was Capote's first novel. From the jacket: "...a novel of almost supernatural intensity and inventiveness, an audacious foray into the mind of a sensitive boy as he seeks out the grown-up enigmas of love and death in the ghostly landscape of the deep South."
From the Land of the Moon by Milena Agus
Set in Cagliari, Sardinia, the novel relates a story which spans three generations, focusing on women from two families who are joined through marriage. An unnamed contemporary speaker feels particularly connected to her paternal grandmother, and as the speaker pieces together this woman's life from what she herself recalls about her and from the family lore which has survived through the memories of the rest of the family. She creates a woman who not only searches earnestly for love but is absolutely determined to experience it in all its splendor, believing that it is "the principal thing in life."
"A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it."
~ Samuel Johnson
"Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experiences of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms."
~ Angela Carter
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was an Anglo-Irish poet and playwright. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival. When Yeats was only two, his family moved to London, but he spent much of his childhood and school holidays in Sligo with his grandparents. This country, its scenery, folklore, and supernatural legends colored Yeat's work and became the setting for much of his poetry.
"The Lake Isle of Innisfree" is one of his earlier poems. In his youth, his father read to him from Thoreau's Walden and he dreamed of living someday in a cottage on the little island of Innisfree in Lough Gill, County Sligo. According to Yeats:
I had still the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree, my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music. I had begun to loosen rhythm as an escape from rhetoric and from that emotion of the crowd that rhetoric brings, but I only understood vagely and accasionally that I must for my special purpose sue nothing but the common syntax.
Inspired by Walden - hence the bean-rows: "I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth and so I got strength like Antaeus." (From Walden by Henry David Thoreau)
I love this poem. Haven't we all dreamed of a peaceful place apart from the hustle and bustle of the world - a place to live simply and close to nature?
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
Inspired by Allie's post on Daisy Miller and Audrey's post on The American, I decided it was high time to re-read Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. I am certainly no stranger to this novella, having read it and re-read it countless times over the last few years. In my opinion, the strongest aspect of this novella is its opening, which oddly enough never manages to make it into its film adaptations. James structured The Turn of the Screw as a frame story with the main story of the governess being introduced by another narrator. We are first introduced to Douglas who promises his rapt audience a sorely needed mystery to engage their imaginations. Douglas reads from a journal containing the horrific story of his old governess's experiences at a quiet country house called Bly.
Like the new Mrs. de Winter in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, James's protagonist is given no name. The governess, as she is called throughout the novella, accepts a position caring for the nephew and niece of a thoroughly charming bachelor whom she, of course, finds attractive. The children, Miles and Flora, are absolute cherubs, and their governess initially finds no fault with them. The children and Bly transform in the governess's eyes, however, when she sees a mysterious man on one of the towers. He is not a servant in the house or a man from the village. The housekeeper, Mrs. Grose, identifies him by the governess's description as former valet Peter Quint. To the governess's horror, Quint is dead. In attempting to rationalize this, she believes that she has seen Quint's ghost. Her visions of Quint are then joined by the ghost of her dead predecessor, Miss Jessel.
The governess believes that these ghosts have returned to take control of little Miles and Flora. Under the influence of these ghosts, she sees her charges growing more distant from her daily. She decides that the only way to rid Bly and the children of the ghosts of Quint and Jessel is to confront the children and force them to admit the ghosts are present and renounce their power over them.
The Turn of the Screw has had numerous film adaptations. My two personal favorites are the 1961 Jack Clayton film The Innocents and the 1999 The Turn of the Screw. Clayton's version is more liberal in its adaptation but perhaps captures the thrills of the novella even better. Truman Capote even worked on the screenplay. The 1999 version adaption is almost word-for-word, but how can that be bad when the book is so good? Deborah Kerr's performance captures the hysterical side of the governess very well. Jodhi May's governess evokes much more of the psychological horror of the novella. Of the two, I prefer Jodhi May's performance as it allows for the interpretation that the governess is initially relatively sane and then descends into madness. This heightens the horror of James's story. If the governess isn't mad, then she may truly be seeing ghosts bent on possessing children.
There's buzz everywhere about the book and the soon-to-be released movie. Having grown up in the South of the 1960's I couldn't resist reading The Help by Kathryn Stockett but I was sceptical. First, just because a book is a bestseller is not a guarantee that I will love it and second, novels about that troubled, conflicted period so often focus on the extreme violence and not the day- to-day tension that I remember. This novel, however, did not disappoint.
Set in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960's, the novel tells of three women, two black and one white, who come together to tell the story of what it's like to work as a black maid in the white households of the South at a time when the roles of blacks and women were on the brink of change.
Skeeter, a young white woman, returns home after graduating from college with a degree and the dream of becoming a writer but (to her mother's dismay) no prospect of a husband. She has always been gangly and tall. Her nickname, Skeeter, was coined the first time her older brother looked at her and declared that she looked like a mosquito. Her mother's attempts at getting people to call her by her given name, Eugenia, have never succeeded. She longs to take comfort from Constantine, the black maid who raised her, but she is gone and no one will tell her why. She remembers Constantine comforting her the first time she was ever called ugly.
"Every morning, until you dead in the ground, you gone have to make this decision." Constantine was so close, I could see the blackness of her gums. "You gone have to ask yourself, Am I gone believe what them fools say about me today?" She kept her thumb pressed hard in my hand. I nodded that I understood. I was just smart enough to realize she meant white people. And even though I still felt miserable, and knew that I was, most likely, ugly, it was the first time she ever talked to me like I was something besides my mother's white child. All my life, I'd been told what to believe about politics, coloreds, being a girl. But with Constantine's thumb pressed in my hand, I realized I actually had a choice in what I could believe.
When Skeeter applies for an editorial position with a New York publishing house, she gets advice from the woman who receives her application: to get experience and to write. "Don't waste your time on the obvious things write about what disturbs you, particularly if it bothers no one else." She gets a job with the local paper writing the "Miss Myrna" column answering letters about housekeeping problems like getting rid of bathtub rings. She's at a loss - that was handled by the "help"- so she turns to Aibileen, the maid of a friend, for her answers. One day she learns that Aibileen's son, who is dead, used to write and was working on a book about what it was like working for a black man in Mississippi. Abileen tells Skeeter never to tell anyone about it but the seed has been planted: Skeeter knows what she wants to write about.
She persuades Aibileen, who is raising her seventeenth white child, to help her. Aibileen cajoles Minny, a maid who is known for not being able to hold her tongue and who harbors the secret of the "Terrible Awful" she did to the daughter of her previous employer, to join them and ten other maids follow. They begin a secret project, risking everything in a time that saw the March on Washington, Martin Luther's "I Have a Dream" speech, Medger Ever's murder, and lingering Jim Crow laws. Along the way, Skeeter learns the horrible secret about Constantine.
In a brief explanatory section after the novel, Stockett, a native of Jackson, Mississippi, says, "I am afraid I have told too much. I was taught not to talk about such uncomfortable things, that it was tacky, impolite, they might hear us...I am afraid I have told too little. Not just that life was so much worse for many black women working in the homes in Mississippi, but also that there was so much more love between white families and black domestics than I had the ink or the time to protray." But all of this comes through in Stockett's poignant novel.
The characters are not just finely drawn - they live and breathe on these pages. The story is told through the authentic voices of Aibileen, Minny, and Skeeter, all unforgettable women whose words form a multi-layered tale full of courage, heart, and hope. There are few novels I've been compelled to recommend so strongly!
I have not yet seen the movie but I've heard from someone who saw a preview that it was great. I hope to see it soon. In the meantime, here's a trailer!
"Books are the compasses and telescopes and sextants and charts which others have prepared to help us navigate the dangerous seas of life."
~ Jesse Lee Bennett
"Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home."
~ Anna Quindlen
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was born on Egdon Heath in Dorset, near Dorchester. Hardy's prose and poetry explore a fatalist outlook against the dark and rugged landscape of his native Dorset - the landscape that became the "Wessex" of his novels. His poetry, like his novels, is a lament on the bleakness of the human condition. He was a traditionalist in technique but he created an original style, combining rough rhythms and colloquial diction with a great variety of meters and stanza forms. He is regarded not only as a distinguished novelist but also as a great English poet.
After his schooling in Dorset, Hardy was apprenticed to an architect and worked in an office which specialized in the restoration of churches. In 1870, he was sent to plan a church restoration at St. Juliot in Corrnwall. While there, he met Emma Gifford, sister-in-law of the vicar of St. Juliot. They were married in 1874 but the marriage was not a happy one. This is used in his novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, when the character of Stephen Smith is apprenticed to an architect and is sent to Cornwall to plan a church restoration where he meets and fall in love with Elfride Swancourt. As in most of Hardy's work, their story does not end with a happy marriage but in Elfride's death.
The poem, "Under the Waterfall," written before Emma's death, has been interpreted as being written in her voice. The speaker recalls a happy memory, a love that has apparently faded with time. The image of a hand slipped into water bringing back a memory from the past is lovely and so true. How often are memories triggered by an unrelated event, a taste, a smell?
Under the Waterfall
"Whenever I plunge my arm, like this,
In a basin of water, I never miss
The sweet sharp sense of a fugitive day
Fetched back from its thickening shroud of gray.
Hence the only prime
And real love-rhyme
That I know by heart,
And that leaves no smart,
Is the purl of a little valley fall
About three spans wide and two spans tall
Over a table of solid rock,
And into a scoop of the self-same block;
The purl of a runlet that never ceases
In stir of kingdoms, in wars, in peaces;
With a hollow boiling voice it speaks
And has spoken since hills were turfless peaks."
"And why gives this the only prime
Idea to you of a real love-rhyme?
And why does plunging your arm in a bowl
Full of spring water, bring throbs to your soul?"
"Well, under the fall, in a crease of the stone,
Though precisely where none ever has known,
Jammed darkly, nothing to show how prized,
And by now with its smoothness opalized,
Is a grinking glass:
For, down that pass
My lover and I
Walked under a sky
Of blue with a leaf-wove awning of green,
In the burn of August, to paint the scene,
And we placed our basket of fruit and wine
By the runlet's rim, where we sat to dine;
And when we had drunk from the glass together,
Arched by the oak-copse from the weather,
I held the vessel to rinse in the fall,
Where it slipped, and it sank, and was past recall,
Though we stooped and plumbed the little abyss
With long bared arms. There the glass still is.
And, as said, if I thrust my arm below
Cold water in a basin or bowl, a throe
From the past awakens a sense of that time,
And the glass we used, and the cascade's rhyme.
The basin seems the pool, and its edge
The hard smooth face of the brook-side ledge,
And the leafy pattern of china-ware
The hanging plants that were bathing there.
"By night, by day, when it shines or lours,
There lies intact that chalice of ours,
And its presence adds to the rhyme of love
Persistently sung by the fall above.
No lip has touched it since his and mine
In turns therefrom sipped lovers' wine."
Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Marg and Claire that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries!
Discovering Hamlet DVD
This is a rather old PBS documentary on the development of Derek Jacobi's 1989 stage production of Shakespeare's Hamlet starring Kenneth Branagh. Jacobi establishes his approach to the play, and the actors learn their parts in a span of four weeks. Several of the other actors involved will be familiar to anyone who has seen Branagh's film versions of Much Ado About Nothing or Henry V. This documentary is worth watching for Jacobi's unique interpretations (having Hamlet's To Be Or Not To Be soliloquy delivered to Ophelia) and his fabulous sweaters!
Travels with My Aunt by Graham Greene
Henry, a retired bank manager, meets his aunt Augusta (his mother's sister) again for the first time since his childhood at his mother's funeral only to have her tell him that his mother is not his birth mother. He is then swept up into his eccentric aunt's life, abandoning his quiet, boring existence colored only by his love of cultivating dahlias. During his travels, he learns snippets of his aunt's rather shady past. When he returns home he misses his aunt's stories and traveling. He also finds an old photograph of Augusta in one of his father's books and begins to suspect that she is his real mother. When she sends for his help, he gives up his settled life and joins her in her wild pursuit of life. The novel is delightfully funny.
Howard's End by E. M. Forster
I had seen the movie but wanted to read the novel.
Sea of Lost Love by Santa Montefiore
A novel of family secrets and hidden identities. See my post.
The Miller's Dance by Winston Graham
I am continuing my reading of the Poldark series for my Cornwall challenge and filling in the gaps in my own collection with library check-outs.
Bella Poldark by Winston Graham
The last novel in the Poldark series. If you haven't read the novels, they are excellent.
The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris by David McCullough
I've seen this on several blogs lately and wanted to read it for myself. It is the story of the adventurous American artists, writers, doctors, and others with high aspirations who left for Paris in the years between 1830 and 1900. As David McCullough writes, "Not all pioneers went west."
An English estate, family secrets, a trip to Italy to solve a mystery, and romance - they're all contained in Sea of Lost Love by Santa Montefiore. The novel begins in Cornwall in 1958 at Pendrift Hall, the estate of the Montague family. The extended family spend their summers at the seaside estate but this year tragedy strikes when Robert Montague, Monty, vanishes on the night of his fiftieth birthday party. He disappears leaving a drifting motorboat containing his gold pocket watch and a note in a champagne bottle reading, "Forgive me." Although he was loved by all and always seemed to be very happy, when Monty's shoes float up on shore and his lawyer reveals that he was bankrupt and all his money was gone, only his twenty-one year old daughter, Celestria, refuses to accept the apparent suicide.
Celestria returns to London to search his papers and then follows a trail of bank statements to Puglia, Italy and a Italian convent converted into a family-run hotel where her father had apparently spent a great deal of time. There she meets Hamish McCloud, a brooding Scotsman, who hated her father and several women who loved him, including one who is trying to unravel the mystery, too. As the plot unfolds, she discovers that her father kept many secrets from her family.
While the plot did hold my attention, I found the characters to be rather flat, and the romance that develops between Celestria and Hamish to be tacked on and a bit unbelievable. The exception to this, for me, was the character of Monty. I found the discovery of his secrets and motivations fascinating and the ending intriguing. This novel of family secrets and hidden lives makes a nice, light summer read.
James Joyce (1882-1941) was an Irish novelist and poet who was one of the most influential writers in the early 20th century. He is best known for the novel Ulysses, a modern re-telling of The Odyssey written in the stream of consciousness technique. I recently read Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation by Noël Riley Fitch. Joyce is a major figure in the book because Sylvia Beach published the novel from her Paris bookstore, Shakespeare & Co., when no publisher in the U.S. would touch it.
Reading the book got me interested Joyce and his other writings. His poetry is less well known than his fiction. The following poem is from the collection Chamber Music, first published in 1907. The poems did not sell well but they received some critical acclaim. Ezra Pound admired the "delicate temperament" of these early poems. In 1909, Joyce wrote to his wife, "When I wrote [Chamber Music], I was a lonely boy, walking about by myself at night and thinking that one day a girl would love me." The lyricism of these early poems has led to a number of musical adaptations.
The Twilight Turns From Amethyst
The twilight turns from amethyst
To deep and deeper blue,
The lamp fills with a pale green glow
The trees of the avenue.
The old piano plays an air,
Sedate and slow and gay;
She bends upon the yellow keys,
Her head inclines this way.
Shy thought and grave wide eyes and hands
That wander as they list -- -
The twilight turns to darker blue
With lights of amethyst.
Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Marg and Claire that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries!
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
I read Mrs. Dalloway several years ago with a book club and I thought I would give Virginia Woolf another go. This novel is inspired by her recollections of childhood summers spent on the Cornwall coast. It is the story of the Ramsey family and their assorted house guests spending a vacation in the Hebrides on the island of Skye.
~ Frances
Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips
The book jacket reads: "Being immortal is not all it once was. Yes, the twelve Greek gods of Olympus are alive and well in the twenty-first century, but they are crammed together in a London town house--and are none too happy about it. Even more disturbing, their powers are waning." With Artemis (goddess of hunting) as a professional dog-walker, Aphrodite (goddess of beauty) a telephone sex operator, and Apollo (god of the sun) a TV psychic I couldn't resist it. ~ Frances
The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton
The back of the book reads: "In 1913, a little girl plays hide-and-seek on the deck of a ship while waiting for the woman who left her there to return. But as darkness comes, the girl is alone as the ship leaves for Australia. Upon the ship's arrival in Australia, the dockmaster and his wife take in the little castaway who is carrying nothing but a small suitcase containing clothing and a book of fairy tales." The novel is a multi-generational story that uncovers the secret of the girl's identity. ~ Frances
The House at Riverton by Kate Morton
Grace, a ninety-eight year old woman in a nursing home is visited by a young filmmaker who is making a movie about the events of the summer of 1924 in which Grace played a part. The novel is Grace's reminiscence of that fatal summer. At a party held a Riverton House where Grace was a servant, a young poet shot himself. The only witnesses were two sisters, Hannah and Emmeline, and Grace, who is the only one still alive. It is a novel of secrets, suspense, and passion. ~ Frances
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
I have never read a Steinbeck novel. I have, however, seen the film version of East of Eden with Julie Harris and James Dean. Judging by how much I enjoyed the film, I thought that I might as well give the novel and Steinbeck a try. ~ Rose
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