Book Club: What are you reading?

[jingle]

I just finished THE GOOD SISTER by Sally Hepworth. It was so good I went to Amazon and ordered another book by Hepworth.

[Virginia]

I am in the midst of reading "The Associate" by John Grisham. It is a good book as most of his are.

[Virginia]

I just finished The Associate. It is a good book if you like some twist and turns. There were lots of names in it to remember.

[agate]

Reading "Reporter: A Memoir" by Seymour Hersh, a fairly well-known journalist.

[jingle]

Just finished CROWS ON THE ROOF BY Anna Housego. It was very good. Started BITTERSWEET by Colleen McCullough, who wrote THE THORN BIRDS, so I expect it to be wonderful.

[agate]

I'm reading FASHIONOPOLIS: THE PRICE OF FAST FASHION AND THE FUTURE OF CLOTHES by Dana Thomas (2019). It's an account of what has happened over recent years in the fashion industry.

[Virginia]

I think it might have been Jingle who mentioned Colleen McCullough who wrote The Thorn Birds. I had not thought of her in a long time. The Thorn Birds was my all time favorite book. So, I went on Amazon and looked her up and decided to read another of her books. They are lengthy and easy to get lost in because they are so entertaining. I will give a report when I finish it.

[Virginia]

I finished Colleen McCullough's The Touch. She just doesn't disappoint with her writing skills. The setting was Australia in the late 1800s to about 1900.

As is true with most of her books it was long and more a saga. I really loved reading it. It is about a family who was started by a man who had something of a Midas touch when it came to finding gold mines. He was well traveled and very intelligent. He had a beautiful wife and a lovely mistress. The two of them became good friends and they were all family, but of course the wife had to give him children and the mistress pleasure.

Jingle let me know how you like her Bittersweet book.

[Virginia]

I read Kristin Hannah's The Great Alone. This is a good book. It is very descriptive when she is telling about Alaska. It is about a family who moves there when they don't have anything. The father had been a POW in Vietnam and it left him with mental issues. He was left a cabin and some land in a remote part of Alaska by a fellow POW who died. It turned out to be pretty bad when they got there, but the neighbors they did have helped. Everyone lived off the land.

The story about the family was interesting, but often it was a nail biter. It is one that I hated to put down when I got to those parts.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who likes books that are scary in parts.

When I got to the end I found that Kristen Hannah had spent many summers in Alaska, which is why she was able to write so vividly about the state.

[agate]

I just heard that Alice Munro died. I've read quite a few works by her and am sorry that she is gone.

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[jingle]

Right now I'm in the middle of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford. I pulled it out of my giant stack of 'waiting to be read' - I have no idea when or why I bought it but I'm really enjoying it. It's a Very good book. I'm going to look for more by Jamie Ford.

[Virginia]

Thanks Jingle, I haven't heard of Jamie Ford, I will look him up.

I am also going to look up Alice Munro books and see if I have read any.

[agate]

Since we probably could use some content about now, I'll bore everyone by posting little reviews I wrote over the years for the Alice Munro books I've read:

TOO MUCH HAPPINESS

(2009)

The ten stories in this collection aren't day-brighteners. Many of the characters are trapped by uncontrollable circumstances, and many of the situations are grim.


But the author often sounds a profoundly hopeful note, as in "Wood," where Roy, who has a secret hobby, wood-cutting, injures his ankle while chopping down a tree and is found by his wife. She hasn't driven in years because of her failing health, and yet she drives the car to find him, then drives him to a hospital.


Perhaps the darkest story is "Child's Play," where the critical event of the narrative is withheld from the reader until the end, though what happened can be easily guessed early in the story: Charlene and Marlene, girls of about 9 or 10 who are friends in summer camp as well as in their home neighborhood, share an extreme dislike of Verna, a child who lives in a duplex shared with Marlene's family and is a "special"--developmentally disabled and not capable of enjoying the same activities as Marlene and Charlene. In camp, an opportunity arises, and without a word of conspiracy or planning between them, Marlene and Charlene push Verna underwater until she drowns.


"Deep-Holes" gives a wonderfully apt rendering of Kent, the estranged son of Sally. After an accident at a family picnic that resulted in his breaking both legs as a child and being left with a permanent limp, he retreated into himself, then disappeared after six months of college. Years later he turns up in Toronto, where he has been "living in the present" for 7 years. The story captures the often-sanctimonious attitude of a young man who has adopted a lifestyle of begging and giving to the needy--while rejecting his well-meaning and loyal mother.





18 September 2014


CARRIED AWAY: A SELECTION OF STORIES

(2006)

While reading this selection of stories by Alice Munro, whose fiction I have been reading for many years, I was happy to learn that she received the Nobel Prize for literature in 2013.


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Margaret Atwood has provided an introduction, and I would hazard a guess that Margaret Atwood had a hand in compiling the extraordinary chronology that is appended. Many works of fiction include such a chronology, which usually provides a listing of the key events in the author’s life. But this one attaches to every listed year a notation of just one or two significant books published during that year. By a very odd coincidence, at least seven of the books in the chronology happen to be by Margaret Atwood. Surely Atwood has not been generally regarded as such a significant author as to justify the inclusion of so many of her works in such a list….

But this is by the way. These stories are all exceptionally fine—most set in Canada, some taking place in the 19^th century, and all representing situations involving people coping with rather ordinary lives. None of the characters is a dazzling success. Munro’s world isn’t the sparkle and glitter of great prosperity.


“Save the Reaper,” for instance, gives us Eve, a woman of around 60 returning to a vacation spot recalled from her childhood, accompanied by her married daughter and her two children. The daughter is about to ditch her by returning to her husband instead of staying the agreed-upon three weeks, and the reader feels Eve’s increasing awareness of her own isolation closing in on her.


“The Bear Went over the Mountain,” the final story in the collection, centers around Fiona, a woman of about 70 who seems to be afflicted with senile dementia and whose husband visits her regularly in a nursing home, where she has become so friendly with a former acquaintance, Aubrey, who happens to be in the same home—but only temporarily—that she treats her husband’s visits almost dismissively. Gradually we learn that the husband has been a lifelong philanderer, and the story has an extraordinary conclusion that seems to mete out something like justice to the four people involved (Fiona and her husband Grant, and Aubrey and his wife Marian).

Even with its upbeat ending, the story manages to paint a grim picture of the realities of nursing homes, where dignity no longer exists—e.g., there is evidence that those who do the laundry there don’t bother to match up the clothes with their rightful owners. Munro speaks of the nursing home atmosphere as “a haunted rigidity, as if people were content to become memories of themselves—final photographs.”


Alice Munro deserves to be more widely read and appreciated. Her carefully crafted stories take us inside the quietly tormented lives of women and girls to whom fortune has not been kind.


October 18, 2013


DEAR LIFE: STORIES (2012)


A fine collection of stories, including several largely autobiographical pieces at the end.

Often the stories--all with a Canadian setting--are told by a woman in the first person, and many of them involve family problems arising from the Depression of the 1930s. Some of the characters have been maimed--one with a lame leg due to polio, for instance. One takes place in a TB hospital.


Munro's characters do not have happy lives, and at least one of them, Jackson in "Trained," seems inexplicably detached from people with whom he has had long associations.


Munro seems to be presenting the world as she sees it: filled with people whose lives may make no sense, may have very little joy in them, but here they are. She bears witness to those who haven't been able to speak for themselves.


In the final autobiographical piece, "Dear Life," we learn that as a child Alice Munro was often beaten by her father--and that the practice was "not uncommon" at the time (the 1930s). With these stories she has shown a few facets of this past time, with its own forms of cruelty and want.


March 23, 2014

HATESHIP, FRIENDSHIP, COURTSHIP, LOVESHIP, MARRIAGE: STORIES(2001)

The stories by this contemporary Canadian author deal with characters and situations that are off the beaten path. The stories are affecting and well told.

15 January 2006

LIVES OF GIRLS AND WOMEN (1971)

This is Alice Munro's only novel, and it reads almost like a collection of short stories strung together in a loose chronological order. The main character is Del Jordan, a girl who--like the author--grows up in Canada in the 1930s-1940s.

The story is about her coming of age--specifically, the way in which she lets her romantic interest in a boy sidetrack her so that she doesn't win a college scholarship.

The characters here are drawn with a finely observant eye--and Munro is particularly adept with Del's best friend, the callous and often cruel Naomi.

Passages in the novel dealing with both religion and sex are forthright and illuminating. Munro has some important things to say here and says them resoundingly and clearly.


24 November 2011


THE LOVE OF A GOOD WOMAN (1998)

A collection of absorbing stories, usually with a Canadian setting. In them women struggle with abortion, family, divorce, and other problems. One ("My Mother's Dream") is actually told from the point of view of a woman character's baby. Here Munro appears to be toying with magic realism, and I wish she hadn't. The story borders on bad farce.


In "Rich as Stink"-- the title doesn't fit the story very well as the focus isn't on how rich Rosemary's family is--the reader has to be well into the story before finding out who "Ann" is. However, the story is remarkable for its perceptive representation of an 11-year-old girl's misguided attempts at coping with divorced parents--showing her sad lack of understanding of the situation as she tries to clown around in a forced way.


"The Children Stay" shows us Pauline, a young mother who leaves her husband and children and lets a long time pass before giving the kids a thought. I find her almost incredible, and I'd have liked to have known how much contact her kids had with her later, but we aren't told.


All in all, these stories weren't as well crafted as some of Munro's other work, but still they are absorbing depictions of the lives of people in their everyday situations--with a special focus on the 1960s.

8 June 2012

RUNAWAY (2004)


More superb stories by this writer, whose books are best-sellers in Canada. These stories take place in the Canada of various times between the 1960s and the present.


The focus is always on a woman, and the characters are usually unexceptional, but their lives are tangled by the kinds of complications that many readers will find familiar from their own lives.


The author deals with her characters in a sensitive way and expresses herself well, without any of the stylistic gimcrackery or touches of magical realism that characterize much of contemporary fiction.

She is content to tell a story and tell it well.

25 March 2007

THE VIEW FROM CASTLE ROCK: STORIES (2006)
In this beautifully written collection of stories Munro is exploring her own family's history. She is upfront about having tinkered with the facts at times, but one suspects that most of these narratives are largely autobiographical.


Her ancestors came to Canada from Scotland, and she must have listened well and done considerable research to be able to describe such episodes as their voyage to America in so much detail.


The stories are arranged so that they move closer to the present as the reader progresses through the book. These stories are very honest and touching and well told.

6 June 2010

FAMILY FURNISHINGS: SELECTED STORIES 1995-2014

(2014)

This collection incorporates many stories I had already read but, with a couple of exceptions, they are worth rereading, Her characters work in hardware stores, work as hired girls, schoolteachers, foundry workers, turkey farmers. They know poverty, they know trouble. In some of the stories where there is a first-person narrator, Munro seems to be writing autobiographically. "Soon" points bleakly to the distance that geography and personal preferences can put between a parent and a grown child.


These aren't happy-ending stories. Now and then Munro seems to be having a bit of fun mocking the type of person who likes to dwell on the most unpleasant details of daily life, but by and large there isn't much levity in the situations Munro highlights in her stories.




February 7, 2017




FRIEND OF MY YOUTH: STORIES (1990)

The stories here present more Munro people: some are very eccentric, many are in or have been in abusive relationships, and for the most part they are in Canada. All are worth knowing about, and Munro lets us in on her vision of their lives.


"Dead-Eye Dick" is a subtle sketch that seems to be a rather pointless story about several rather ordinary people, but by its end we realize that the momentum for the story--what gives meaning to the brother-sister relationship highlighted in it--is the now-dead mother's somewhat extraordinary personality. She has given both her children an appreciation for poetry that sees them into their later years. The story could be taken as a tribute to the ways in which mothers influence their children.




3 November 2021

[Virginia]

I looked her up and found some of the above interesting however I did go on Amazon and bought the 1st Roman book by Colleen McCullough. This is the first book in a series and this one is long. I am trying to get long books because I am reading on my tablet and have to pay for the books, so the long ones keep me busy for a much longer period of time. Of course, I want the books to be good..

I get I come across any Alice Mundo short stories I will definitely read them. Wasn't she 92 when she died?

[agate]

Yes, she was 92, according to Wikipedia. More and more people are living beyond 90 now, aren't they?