SassyLassy Behind by a Quarter

Well it's July 1st, officially Q3, so what better time to wrap up Q1 and start on Q2?

Q2 started with a long anticipated visit to Abbotsford, the house that Walter Scott built.



Naturally it doesn't look like that anymore. Here is a later look minus the gardens that now occupy the walled green to the right:


Images from the official Abbotsford website: https://www.scottsabbotsford.com/visit/the-house

Well my Q1 thread theme was "Fending off Fuzziness".

By and large I succeeded, feeling reading was getting interesting again. The material:

Victorian
The Dead Alive by Wilkie Collins - first book of the year
Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell - January Monthly Author read

In Translation
The Tin Flute by Gabrielle Roy - Canada
White Shadow by Roy Jacobsen - Norway
Pan by Knut Hamsun - Norway
Lucky Per by Henrik Pontoppidan - Denmark

Contemporary
The History of Bees by Maja Lunde - book club
Silverview by John le Carré

Nonfiction
The World According to Joan Didion by Evelyn McDonnell
Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition by Owen Beattie and John Geiger - bookclub
Spirit of Place: The Making of a New England Garden by Bill Noble
A Heart full of Headstones by Ian Rankin the last book of the quarter and the only real disappointment

A spot to mark suggestions I find in others' threads:

NonFiction:
Phoebe Anna Traquair by Elizabeth Cumming -deanne fitzpatrick inspiration session
Grass Soup by Zhang Xianliang - labfs39
I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys by Miranda Seymour - torontoc
Maoism: A Global History by Julia Lovell - wanderingstar
Memoires d'un eunuque dans la cité interdite by Shi Dan - no idea where I saw this*
Mr Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense by Jenny Uglow - lisapeet
A Tomb of Sand by Geentanjali Shree - strong recommendation by rv1988
Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann by Harriet Baker - other review
The People's Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine by Ricardo Nuila - kidzdoc

Fiction:
A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare
The Voices of Glory by Davis Grubb - mabith

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*edited to add it was lilisin's thread where this appeared - thanks lilisin!

An actual book review:



Don't Tell Alfred by Nancy Mitford
first published 1960
finished reading April 2, 2024

In May and April 2023, I took several flights of over 8 hours, one was 14 hours. I am one of the world’s worst fliers, but even I couldn’t live in total terror for such protracted periods. I put out a call for reading that could distract, but wouldn't call for much participation. An older friend suggested Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, a novel narrated by Fanny, the daughter of none other than The Bolter, Idina Sackville, whose biography I had read earlier. After her third divorce, the Bolter had indeed left a daughter with her relatives to be brought up in England. Fanny is a quiet introspective soul, who mines great material out of her cousins, who bear a strong resemblance to the Mitford sisters. It sounded an unlikely pick, but since it was in one of my TBR piles, I took it along. If the plane had an unplanned descent, no one would miss it.

Well it turned out to be an excellent book for the circumstances, so sick at home this year, I picked up its sequel, Don’t Tell Alfred.

Fanny by now was in a dull placid marriage with Alfred, an Oxford don, whose area was Pastoral Theology. Imagine the surprise and upheaval when he was named the next British Ambassador to Paris!

Fanny found herself thrown into a totally new world of style and intrigue. Just to complicate matters, the wife of the outgoing ambassador refused to leave this wonderful sinecure to return to post WWII London. She set herself up in another wing of the Embassy. Rival courts develop. It’s all very silly and frothy as characters come and go. Even Uncle Matthew from the old days makes appearances.

Should you be embarking on long plane rides, or sick in bed, this pair of books would be excellent company. I don’t think I would ever have gotten around to them otherwise.

>5 SassyLassy: Sounds fun. I read The Pursuit of Love years ago but can't remember anything about it.

Such sad news:


image from the NYT

January 28, 1936 - July 1, 2024

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/jul/01/ismail-kadare-obituary

Oh no, I know how much you hoped he would get the Nobel before passing.

>8 labfs39: Maybe there's an official list somewhere of outstanding authors who should have won - not also rans, but definite "should haves".

If there is, I'm sure there are some great authors on it.

Despite its long life on various TBR shelves, this book rewarded me with one of those rare "right book, right time" reads. I was going to Abbotsford in a couple of weeks, didn't know if I would have to cancel, so read this for motivation.



Redgauntlet by Walter Scott
first published in three volumes in 1824
TBR since June 17, 2006
finished reading April 3, 2024

Nearing the age of maturity, young Darsie Latimer was pleased with himself indeed. Heir to a decent fortune, he felt no need at all to bother himself with the study of law, a study his friend Alan Fairford was pursuing. Fairford's father was Darsie's guardian, bringing the two boys up together in his austere Edinburgh home. Darsie was feeling the need to break free and travel.

However, there was one major stipulation to Darsie receiving his inheritance; he was not to cross the border into England before his majority, even though he was English by birth. The identity of his parents was unknown to him. It would be revealed later. Naturally, this prompted the undisciplined Darsie to tempt fate and himself with a trip to Dumfries and the Solway Firth, with England on its south side.

Things started out calmly enough, as a fishing trip should. The story is told initially through letters between Darsie and Alan. Soon, however, Darsie was engaged in some real life lessons, and then kidnapped. His captivity is the heart of the story.

Quakers and smugglers, sometimes in the same person, wandering musicians, attainted Jacobites in hiding, Covenanters and Catholics, the mysterious and beautiful lady in the Green Mantle, and over it all Redgauntlet - they're all here, the denizens of Alan's new world. Here the law is murky. Not only that, it differs depending upon which side of the border it is being applied. Everything revolved around planning a never realized third Jacobite rebellion, in other words, treason, something it took our apolitical hero some time to realize.

How Darsie and Alan navigated it all, and how everyone fitted in, might seem far fetched at times, but it was lots of fun. There's action aplenty, enough to see echoes later in the works of Stevenson, Blackmore and Buchan.

Scott had said that the Jacobite movements provided a theme "perhaps the finest that could be selected for fictitious composition, founded upon real or probable incident". Redgauntlet is the proof.

>9 SassyLassy: Did you see this article: A Tribute to Ismail Kadare, a Writer Who Really Deserved a Nobel Prize?

>11 labfs39: Thanks so much for that link - so true.
________________

In other news, if you are able to vote in the UK election today, please do so.

I ended up being the person breaking the news about Kadare to the friend who introduced me to him. He was pretty elderly but it is still sad, and does feel like few were more slighted for the prize. Her response was "Well, I can stop paying any attention to the Nobel prize now."

Great reading ...

The news of Kadare's death came just as I was starting to write a review of this next book, so I stopped. I didn't know how to procede, so I just let it sit awhile. I'm still somewhat at odds with the news, so this is more bits and pieces of how I found the book rather than a review.



The Traitor’s Niche by Ismail Kadare translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson (2017)
first published as Pashalleqet e medha in 1978
finished reading April 20, 2024

The ancient imperial capital in the heart of the most powerful Empire had a famous square. High above this square was a niche sited in the wall. The niche did not display religious icons, or sculptures, or coats of arms. It was reserved for the heads of traitors, those who had displeased the Sultan. It was not hard to imagine why this location had been chosen. Perhaps nowhere else could the eyes of passersby so easily grasp the interdependency between the imposing solidity of the ancient square and the human heads that had dared to show it disrespect. It was clear at once that the niche had been sited in the wall to convey the impression that the head’s lifeless eyes surveilled every corner of the square. In this way, even the feeblest and least imaginative passerby could visualize, at least for a moment, his own head displayed at the unnatural height.

The heads were not just abandoned to the elements, however. Each morning and afternoon Abdulla would climb a ladder and inspect the current head. He would report on its condition to the doctor, who was guided by the Regulations for the Care of Heads.

Times were changing. “Independence” was an idea heard in the wind. There was always at least one of the empire’s twenty-nine countries making trouble. Right now it was the one out on the very edges of empire: Albania. Lessons must be taught. Ali Pasha lost his head.

So begins an allegorical treatment of minority repression under autocratic regimes. How do you erase a national identity? The technique was well researched, finely tuned, and proven. The answer was in the Central Archive in a five stage secret doctrine:

first, the physical crushing of rebellion; second, the extirpation of any idea of rebellion; third, the destruction of culture, art, and tradition; fourth, the eradication or impoverishment of the language; and fifth, the extinction or enfeeblement of the national memory.

Meanwhile factions live in fear. Who will survive and who will be the next head to be transported to the capital? When will it happen? Even the lowly Abdulla back in the capital, the representative of Everyman, had dreams and fears. Kadare manages all this with humour, poking fun both at the “head” being the central administration and its functionaries, and the people themselves.

This novel was completed in 1976. It was published in Albania in 1978, but was almost immediately withdrawn by the authorities. A French copyright was issued in 1984. It took just over forty years for it to be translated into English, years during which Albania was once again part of a larger dominant body. However, it’s well worth the wait.

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edited as touchstone for author kept inserting book title

>13 mabith: Your friend had my sentiments down exactly!

--------------

Here's a supply route I find disturbing. What were they thinking?

Recently I purchased a new computer.

I travelled 110 km to the city to visit an Apple Store and make my final decision. Once done, I was ready to make the purchase, but they suggested I buy it online so I wouldn't have to cart it around. Fair enough.
I thought it would come from that store, being the closest spot to me.

Imagine my surprise when the tracking id showed:
Shanghai to Anchorage to Louisville to Montreal to Halifax to me another 110 km away

What kind of a carbon mess is that?

>16 SassyLassy: I bought my grandson an Apple accessory online from Apple Australia, thinking to save on shipping as I live in NY and he’s in Australia. When checking the tracking info I found similar info to you. It came from China.

>17 kjuliff: That's another crazy routing. You would think that both Canada and Australia would have enough inventory to ship whatever is ordered.

For as long as I can remember, I've been following US politics. Most of the time it seems like a relatively safe and harmless past time. Not so much anymore, and last night's announcement of the Republican VP candidate added to that unease.

It also sent me back to my review of his 2016 book, reposted here so that I don't forget just how odious he is.



Hillbilly Elegy by J D Vance
first published 2016
finished reading August 4, 2017

J D Vance is a very angry man. This made Hillbilly Elegy the biggest disappointment of my reading year. It was a book I had been waiting for in paperback, and when I found it would not be released in Canada until 2018, I ordered it from the UK rather than wait.

Vance accurately identifies class in Greater Appalachia as the major problem of working class whites. Class divisions are not something Americans are keen to acknowledge, but he brings them out in the open. However, Vance is not angry with the institutions and people who hold this class back; he's angry with the very people in it.

Vance feels part of the problem is not lack of jobs for this group, but rather "... a lack of agency -- a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself." He claims "It's about reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible. It's ... a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it." Hard to counteract something when you feel you have little control. Vance has turned on the very people he purports to elegize.

The rough outlines of his life are well known by now: absent father, addicted mother, raised by grandparents, Iraqi war veteran, Yale Law School with financial aid. An elegy implies a sympathy or attachment to a vanishing entity or way of life, but Vance has turned into the kind of "If I can do it, why can't you?" ideologue that saps the energy out of those encountering hurdles along the way, possibly the same hurdles Vance himself encountered.

The ideological identification Vance gives himself is "modern conservative". Yet surely after all his travails on the path to Yale, and his full blown confrontation there with American elites, people whose existence he had never imagined, it might be more logical for him to take a more nuanced look at those left behind, and at the institutions and attitudes that work to keep them there.

>19 SassyLassy: thanks for reposting that review. I remember the buzz around the book and I also remember making a conscious decision not to read it. I’m sure your review was one that helped me make that decision.

As a West Virginian particularly, the distaste I feel for Vance can't really be described. If anyone wants a better book to read about Appalachia, I'd recommend What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia.

>19 SassyLassy: Perhaps Vance will publish a book about why any decent person should support Drumpf.

>10 SassyLassy: Always nice to see a Scott review!
I thought I’d read Redgauntlet, but I realise I was mixing it up with Guy Mannering, which is set in roughly the same area. I obviously need to set it up on my e-reader before the next long journey I take.

Sad that we’ve lost Kadare.

>20 japaul22: >21 mabith: Thanks for responding to this post. I was somewhat apprehensive about reposting from the past, so happy to see it was okay.

>22 icepatton: Not if it won't be a best seller - difficult if the decent person doesn't buy it!

>23 thorold: Redgauntlet would be lots of fun on a long journey. Have you had an e-reader for a while? I always think of you as a book - book reader.

I picked up Guy Mannering on this last trip to Glasgow. While it isn't surprising that the Waterstone's I visited there would have a large selection of Scott, its classics selection was almost as large as my local bookstore's entire inventory. It also had a large selection of contemporary European fiction in translation.
Looking forward to reading Guy Mannering.

At least I have some unread Kadare in reserve, kept for just this eventuality.

This next author doesn’t appear much on LT, although he's had thirty novels published. I’ve seen his name on threads by baswood and AlisonY, but that’s about it.

I was staying in the hamlet where Robin Jenkins had lived for many years, and bought this in the town down the road where he had taught school, so it seemed a logical choice for my next read.



Fergus Lamont by Robin Jenkins
first published 1979
finished reading April 27, 2024

Fergus Lamont spent much of his life struggling for social respectability and renown. His mother was pregnant when she married, but the man she married was not his father. This seemed to be not so secret; on the streets of his working class community, it was almost common knowledge. When Fergus was old enough to understand this circumstance, he spent a lot of time trying to convince himself and others that the casual encounter between his mother and the heir to the grand estate where she had worked was actually a true romance, thwarted by circumstance.

When his mother died when he was only seven, Fergus set out to claim what he felt was his due. Sent to an excellent fee paying school because of his academic promise, he tried to ape the manners and behaviour of his new classmates, often missing the mark widely. WWI allowed him a bit of leeway, but returning home at its end he had to either find a way out of the future his true background suggested, or work in one of the local heavy industries like all the boys he had known in early life.

One of Fergus’s efforts to set himself apart from others was the visible one of insisting on wearing a kilt at all times. Another was discarding his accent, pure working class Glasgow, and trying instead to sound like his university classmates and officers. Part of his idea was that he would inspire others from his background to follow his example, little realizing the derision he inspired instead. Marriage presented a bit of a problem, as he had neither money nor title to attract the kind of woman he felt was appropriate. Fate stepped in in the guise of Betty T Shields, a sort of Barbara Cartland writer, whose royalties had made her wealthy, but someone whom her publishers felt needed a husband.

All this presents Fergus as a truly unlikeable character, which indeed he was. There was nothing in his makeup to redeem him. Once this hit home, somewhere in middle age, he had enough self awareness to leave his social world and retreat to the Outer Hebrides for a decade. Still, further awareness escaped him.

Reading this book, a Scottish classic, I wondered if it had been the inspiration for William Boyd’s Any Human Heart, recently reviewed by Alison, whose main character Logan Mountstuart shares many of the same traits. While class is a recurring theme in Jenkins’s work, his novels are usually more gentle than this, so the in your face nature of Lamont’s persona came as a surprise. There is humour here, sharp and often poking fun at what Jenkins called the “peculiarities” of the national character. There is also, in the depictions of Lamont’s life as a child, a depiction of a life for the working class that continues right up to the days of Shuggie Bain. All in all, not my favourite Jenkins book to date, but one that I’m glad I read as part of Jenkins’s overall work.
______________

note on the cover:
This photograph is a detail from Garnethill, part of the wonderful work of Oscar Marzaroli, who photographed street scenes in working class areas of Glasgow, especially the Gorbals, just before many of them disappeared under the wrecking ball.

Here is a link to some of his work:

https://www.streetlevelphotoworks.org/event/oscar-marzaroli

note on pronunciation:
Lamont in Scotland is not pronounced like the French family name, but rather as “lamb ont” with the emphasis on the first syllable while the two syllables run together.

>25 SassyLassy: Thank you for this review.

My mother came from a village near Glasgow in 1921 and I still have relatives living there. I have a couple of books, Sunset Song among them and Scottish literature is something I want to read more of. I really want to know more about Scotland, especially time before 1921 to help me visualize what my ancestors were doing.

I don't know if His Bloody Project is an accurate portrayal of earlier Scotland. I do believe that the Douglas Stuart books seem very recognizable for Glasgow, even though difficult for me to read.

>26 JoeB1934: Lewis Grassic Gibbon is certainly a classic writer and Sunset Song is a true classic. Some other twentieth century authors who wrote about rural life in Scotland in the first half of that century whom you might enjoy are:
George Mackay Brown
Neil Gunn
Jessie Kesson
Christopher Rush
Nan Shepard
and the above mentioned Robin Jenkins.

Looking back at my review of His Bloody Project, "truly convincing" was something I used, although I did quibble with the fact that the Scottish "Not Proven" Verdict was not considered as an option.

Douglas Stuart I thought did a good job of capturing the world of his protagonists., but I can understand that the subject matter was difficult to read.

What was your mother's village? I always enjoy it when. you speak of her cooking and baking.

>9 SassyLassy: just catching up with your thread, and I love that idea.Ive noticed a few of his books here; which one should I start with?

>27 SassyLassy: Thanks for those comments. She came from Stonehouse and elsewhere. I actually saw and went into the house in Stonehouse. I'm desperate to find a picture I took around 1970 to include in my digital life history.

I currently have relatives living in Ardrossan.

She has a different connection with you in that the boat she came on landed in Nova Scotia. It is possible there is another psychological connection as she could easily have been named a Scottish sassy lassie.

In my writeup of The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox I spoke quite a bit about her with a connection to that book.

>19 SassyLassy: our book group read that and we all agreed that we hated it, for alll the reasons you state. I did not realize this was the same person that trump just picked for a VP does not bode well

>19 SassyLassy: Thank you for reposting your review. It's a book I have not read, although I did pick up a copy at a library book sale at some point. What I don't understand is how Vance went from calling Trump "America's Hitler" to being his VP, but his history makes me think that he might be used to remaking himself.

>31 labfs39: ...his history makes me think that he might be used to remaking himself. I got a chuckle out of this.

One of the commentaries I heard here suggested that he was picked because of his demonstrated lack of scruples and desire to be close to the centre, so that unlike say Mike Pence, he would be unlikely to develop any last minute conscience when told to do something beyond questionable, Remaking himself certainly goes along with that scenario.

It seems somewhat ironic to buy a book about accumulating stuff and bring it home, but it is a subject that intrigues me.



The Life of Stuff: Possessions, obsessions and the mess we leave behind by Susannah Walker
first published 2018
finished reading May 3, 2024

Stuff terrifies me. Like William Morris, I subscribe to the idea that you shouldn’t have anything that doesn’t meet the criteria of beautiful or useful. I would add to that things which mean something to you personally (although not too many). This is a really difficult bar to meet, but I do try to work away at it. So, when I saw this book displayed with its great cover, I thought I would try to learn more.

Susannah Walker is well qualified to write on the topic. A background in design history, and then curating in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and moving on to producing lifestyle and design programmes for television, had immersed her in the study of objects and their use.

Then her mother sustained a fall, and died in hospital. Walker was left sorting out the contents of her mother’s house. Much to her horror and dismay, she discovered that her mother’s last years had been spent in true squalor and chaos, complicated at times by alcohol, albeit all in a fine Georgian terrace house. It wasn’t that Walker was a “bad” daughter, unaware of her mother’s foibles. She and her brother had spent a lot of time trying to help their mother with therapists, cleaners, anything they thought might help. However, once Walker had a daughter herself, she refused to take her to that ruin of a house, and so had no idea how much further it had progressed. Further communication was by phone and outings.

Throughout her later life, her mother had managed to keep up a facade of normalcy in her life outside the home. No one would have suspected her home life in a leaking house without electricity. She volunteered in the community, dressed “appropriately” and didn’t drink outside the home. This is quite common among hoarders. Although often not aware of the full extent of their compulsion, they do not invite others into their homes, aware somehow that something is off.

Walker spent a year working through the morass. She spoke with social workers and therapists, removal experts, read widely, but most of all it was organising and carrying out the massive cleanup which helped her. It was as if her whole background in objects had finally found a real life application.

The chapters in this books are built around specific objects Walker found in the home; objects which revealed family history, or had specific meaning to her. Thus we have chapter headings like “five hoovers: in the museum”, “napkin ring: the boy who died’, “black teapot: better times”. Each of the chapters has a sketch of the object in question, with the story of how and where Walker discovered it in the house, its history, and what it means to her. Family photographs reveal the better times.

Research revealed that “People who hoard tend to spend their lives visually and spatially instead of categorically like the rest of us do”*. This is borne out in something I had read earlier. Asked to draw floor plans of their homes, hoarders would represent only those areas, usually pathways, which were usable, making the room appear much smaller, and leaving out whole rooms that had been filled to capacity.

She discovered Clutter Image Rating Scales**, where a person is asked to indicate the level present in their own homes, with one representing the stated before a daily required tidying, and nine representing crammed, unusable and probably damaged space.

Walker has combined her year clearing out her mother’s house, her research, and her own feelings throughout the period into this one book, and somehow made it all work together. Her feelings in relation to the situation are well stated without any maudlin overtones. She asks herself how it could come to this state, rages against herself and her mother (how could her mother let it get to this stage?), seeks guidance from social workers and therapists who deal with the problem. She speaks of those who helped her, people like the specialised removal men

Without ever mentioning the subject, we all decided not to talk about what had happened in Rose Terrace. This made everyone’s job easier. For the two of them… it was a survival strategy born out of experience. If they didn’t find out about the person who had lived here, they could stay detached and impersonal… Understanding might have made their labour more difficult.

There were others, those whom she felt judged her, particularly the policeman who had had to break into the house to rescue her mother after the fall: “Did you know what kind of state the house was in?”, repeated in various iterations.

This is the kind of event that really focusses your relationship to the stuff around you. Some may dismiss the hoarding outright as a kind of behavioural aberration, others may recognise some of these behaviours in themselves or others, and some will make changes. As for me, I’m going to see what I can dispose of today.

______________________
*Randy Frost NPR interview

** https://hoardingdisordersuk.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/clutter-image-ratings...

>31 labfs39: I think it’s because he’s a complete opportunist. He has no morals. He thought being a Never Trumper would get him somewhere and then saw it wouldn’t.

>33 SassyLassy: Great review. This has been on my list. I'm also trying to ensure that I'm not too encumbered by 'stuff'!

>33 SassyLassy: The image ratings are interesting. A great way to help people quantify their idea of clutter. For me, even the first picture of the living room looked messy, lol. Is there such a thing as a closet hoarder? I.e. their house looks completely normal when you walk in, but if you look in closet, in boxes under the beds, etc you find receipts from thirty years ago, a grown child's baby teeth, etc? I knew someone like that.

>33 SassyLassy: I share your fear of accumulation. That rating system has me pulling out the vacuum. Even the two was far too messy.

>36 labfs39: Lisa, my mother saved my baby teeth and gave them to me when I was in my thirties. I thanked her and threw them away as soon as we got home.

Just popping in to see what you are reading :-)

>19 SassyLassy:

I've read somewhere that he was actually brought up in middle-class comfort and only spent vacations or something in Kentucky (or wherever).

Creepy sod, in any case.

>33 SassyLassy:

I confess a sick fascination with hoarders. So close, and yet (I hope) so far away...

>33 SassyLassy: Your references to this subject came at an auspicious time for me and my family. When Cynthia died, we were faced with the reality that she was a committed hoarder. Her bedroom was at least a 7 on the scale you provided, and we have been paying for a decade on 3 storage units from our years of being together.

Cynthia was very magnanimous and always looking for ways to help people with furniture and other household goods, along with money. She even went out and bought items for individuals. Cynthia was an early firm supporter of several gay/lesbian friends and relatives.

One friend yesterday sent me a note explaining how Cynthia saved her life by supporting her when she was at rock-bottom mentally.

Her nickname for Cynthia was 'the Contessa. She called me Chief Joe because she lives near an Indian reservation.

In Cynthia's philosophy there is ALWAYS another use for any object, so she kept everything no matter how trivial sounding. This isn't a critical issue if the inventory of objects was maintained. Unfortunately, Cynthia had zero capacity to think in terms of an inventory.

My daughters have cleared out the bedroom and are designating items to be given away or sold. The 3 storage units will be cleared within a week, but it will take a number of weeks to sort and find valuable items.

During Cynthia's life when it became obvious that we needed to get rid of anything she ALWAYS looked for someone to give the item to, even if it had financial value. She abhorred yard sales, and here we are about to have one on her items. Of course we are offering these items to friends of hers, or neighbors.

We need to realize that a person's value is not defined by being a hoarder, but it is a difficult burden for the whole family.

>40 JoeB1934: This is such a kind and gentle perspective on the issue

An addendum for >40 JoeB1934:. I am creating a digital photo portfolio of my life. In LT it is discussed as JoeB1934 Declutters His Life History at 90. This is, at the least a several months process.

We are finding a bonanza for this new project while processing all the containers built up by Cynthia, and to be honest myself. Documents, letters, photos, books etc. which have been part of our lives for 86 years. Many of which I wouldn't ever have saved, but Cynthia did.

For example, birthday cards for most everyone. Yesterday we found a 1995 birthday card from my father to Cynthia. Surprise, it contained a crisp $100 bill. Another example, letters from two artists, Beatrice Mandelman and Louis Ribak who played an important role in our family art interests.

A lot of nonsense trash, but jewels among it all.

>35 rv1988: "Stuff" is so challenging. One thing I've never seen addressed is the difference between living in a fairly homogeneous climate year 'round, and living in a true four season climate. The difference in what is required for clothing and equipment should you be the kind of person who ventures outdoors, is huge, and takes up an inordinate amount of room.

>36 labfs39: Closet hoarding is an interesting phenomenon. You think you have things under control until you start searching for something and boom - it all falls out. Someone I knew overcame it by having closets which were photo shoot ready. I did well in a previous house with lots of storage space, but this one is telling me things need pruned.

>37 RidgewayGirl: Too funny in a squirmy kind of way.

>38 avaland: You're always welcome!

>39 LolaWalser: I share that fascination, although not enough to watch some of those reality shows, which several authors on the subject have addressed, saying they do nothing at all for the protagonists.
I tell myself it's a healthy fascination as it keeps me from slipping into total sloth!

>40 JoeB1934: >42 JoeB1934: As >41 rv1988: says, that's a lovely perspective on Cynthia's things. It is true that it is a burden the whole family shares, but it sounds as if she knew what was happening and in a generous manner was trying to help others.

A digital portfolio is one of the things some experts recommend for someone trying to declutter, while others feel that something tactile is what the person wants/needs, and so will be unlikely to release a given object. I'll be following your process with interest.

I think the people who sent those cards and letters would be touched to find Cynthia had kept them.

Packing up the house we've lived in the 15 years, these questions of "hoarding" vs. "collecting" have arisen. For our last move, we were transitioning from an apartment to a house, so it was easy enough to say "the heck with it" and just throw stuff in boxes, knowing that there'd be plenty of closet space, etc. Now we're going through the opposite paradigm. It's been easy enough just to throw old items away, or give them away. But as I indicated above, I also have enjoyed collection things. Well, the books are first on the list. Since that's a shared enthusiasm between my wife and I, it was easy enough for us to go through them together and decide which to let go. Maybe a third went out the door (OK, maybe a little bit less than that). Although there was a good feeling to it, also, because all the released books went to a local volunteer fire department, which holds a fund-raising event every Labor Day, including a huge used books sale. So they were going to a good cause. We may well have to release more when we get to New York, but, again, that will be a joint venture.

But then there are the things that are basically my own enthusiasms, only. Maybe only the U.S. citizens in the crowd will get this, but I have been a baseball devotee all my life, and I love keeping score when I go to ballgames. And I've kept all those scorecards. It's been a point of some sort of emotional satisfaction, perhaps the idea of continuity and somehow keeping faith with my younger self, to have all those programs and scorecards in several stacks on the floor of my home office closet. But I just recently brought two-thirds of them to the recycling center, keeping only the programs from the most memorable games: playoff/World Series games especially, the oldest programs from my adolescent and teen years, and a few others. I just looked at them and said, "I don't have to keep all these anymore." It made me sad. I was the guy who had all his baseball scorecards. And then, one day last week, I wasn't. But something had to go.

And then, the hardest part: my LPs. I started buying LPs when I was 13, in 1968. Over the years, searching out and/or stumbling upon fun albums that reflected the history of the music I love, learning about new artists, and finding personal history touchstones (such as old records from the 50s and 60s of the first and second generation traditional jazz musicians of New Orleans) has been a source of joy for me. I was probably up to around 5,000. I gave the culling the old college try, and managed to release about 20% of them. Then I went through them again and got rid of maybe another couple hundred all told. At that point I told my wife, "This is too hard. I'm just going to box them up and let the movers deal with them, and then when we get to New York I'll be faced with the reality of how many I have room for, and that will finally force me to come to grips with the issue." She said, "OK, but those boxes get stacked up in your office." Well, fair enough. The problem is that each individual LP is a source of pleasure, because each one is a joy to listen to (the ones I wasn't sure of got jettisoned in the first round). Also, I don't have time to stare at each one again to figure out if it could fit into the, I don't know, best 500 records or so. So I've kicked that can down the road, and the road is 3,000 miles long!

Finally, I'm reminded of the classic George Carlin routine, "A Place for My Stuff." I'm linking to a YouTube clip of Carlin performing the routine here (full disclosure: there is frequent use of the slang term for excrement involved)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8xyKInZZWA

>44 rocketjk: Thank you for sharing your moving woes, Jerry. I went through similar angst when moving from a four bedroom house in Seattle to a two bedroom apartment in Florida and then to Maine. I'm now back in a house, but the winnowing over the years has been a constant stressor. Even now I don't know where some stuff went, whether it was given away, lost, misplaced, still in a box somewhere.

I loved the Carlin routine.

>33 SassyLassy: I think people, in fear of hoarding and the increased trendiness of minimalism in design, have forgotten the difference between someone being a bit of a packrat vs having an actual problem. My mom clearly hadn't gone through her filing cabinet during any of her moves, so after her death in 2017 I found in it the manuals for two dishwashers. One for a house we left in 1990 and another for a house we left in 2000.

On the other hand, because she's always been a saver, I know from a 1960s scrapbook that she shoved things into that less than nine months after her mom died of cancer, she was volunteering for the American Cancer Society all by herself (age 16), while staying with her aunt and uncle, and it adds to my picture of her and the fact that she wasn't just running from her grief as it often appeared from the outside. It was in most ways the most miserable time of her life for a variety of reasons, but she was doing that and volunteering for Eugene McCarthy and writing the same poems comparing high school to prisons that any teenager writing poetry has written, and I only have that information because she hung onto the ephemera. Her sisters had no idea about any of it and she was not a sharer or reminiscer or at all outwardly nostalgic, so these snatches of information are priceless given her early and sudden death.

>43 SassyLassy:

I share that fascination, although not enough to watch some of those reality shows, which several authors on the subject have addressed, saying they do nothing at all for the protagonists.

That doesn't surprise me in the least. I think only a small minority actually manages to profit from the clean-up, maybe people who have fallen incapable of cleaning due to physical disability. That said, and agreeing that it can be awful to watch, to me "discovering" the phenomenon has been revelatory in more ways than I should try to describe here. It also opened up questions I hadn't considered before (similar to Jerry's and Meredith's themes) and led me to re-evaluate some long-held decisions.

This discussion about hoarding is so relevant for my family at this time. As I have mentioned before Cynthia was a true hoarder and the only way we could deal with it over the decades is that I earned enough to pay for external storage. Meanwhile her bedroom and the garage and basement would accumulate various items.

The root cause was the intersection of two problems. There was very legitimate desire to retain memorable items combined with the inability to make decisions about every item. Several times in our life when we were moving and had to decide what to dispose of, I found her in the morning of the deadline with a box
of papers that she had agreed the night before to process. Usually nothing had been accomplished.

A key to her was that she had zero concept of inventory. No matter how many jars she saved with a legitimate purpose in mind the fact that she had many of that size never came into place.

The true seriousness didn't finally come to me until about 40-50 years of marriage. Her personality was that she wouldn't accept the problem as an issue and rebelled at any effort to remove anything from her.

What could I have done earlier? What can anyone do about this issue?

In retrospect I do not have a problem with the money I spent for that storage. If possession of the storage solved a problem, I would have been very pleased.

It didn't solve the problem at the heart of our issues. Many decades ago, when I was in the position to resolve personal problems with individuals, I came up with a phrase that my children quote to me very frequently.

"The problem gets in the way of solving the problem" This applies to many situations but consider this simple example. You need to talk to an individual who is very stubborn. Is there anything you can say to them about the need to become less stubborn?

The other way of saying this is a little different.

The Problem becomes the Problem

>44 rocketjk: that is one of my fav Carlin bit

I know what you mean by your albums; they are a part of you and any thing brings back memorie.. When I was decluttering my school stuff when I retired, I went through crying jags.once I decided to have an open house for my colleuges to choose what they wanted I felt better, knowing everything would be used and wanted. I still have photos of them all. Good luck with what you do with yours;

>44 rocketjk: That Carlin routine is really funny. Thanks for sharing.

Gosh, so many good topics to catch up on here.

Firstly, thanks for reposting your review of The Hillbilly Elegy. I'd noted when Trump selected J. D. Vance as his running mate that he was the author of that book, but I haven't read it and assumed from the title that it was written from the slant of 'hey - don't look down on us; there's more to us 'hillbillies' than meets the eye'. Sounds like the complete opposite (and similar in many ways to why I hated Tara Westover's Educated).

Loved your review of Fergus Lamont, and I'm delighted that I have other Robin Jenkins' joys still to come. He's such a gentle writer.

Finally, taking a definite BB for The Life of Stuff, as this interests me from a couple of perspectives. Firstly, not having any hoarders in my immediate family or friend group, it's always fascinated me when I watch the odd documentary about people who hoard as to how things get to the level they do in terms of clutter. It's interesting to me what that says about the personality type of such people - is it driven by sentiment? Frugalness? Life apathy? Perhaps it's different reasons for different people. In such programmes that I've watched, there seems to be a general theme of a tipping point, beyond which it seems a mountain to climb to try to return their home to some sort of normality. My sister recently helped some elderly friends in South Africa move who were hoarders, and she was staggered at how they lived like that. Cleaning in many rooms had become impossible because of the amount of stuff everywhere, hence it was little surprise to find mouse droppings aplenty as she went through the clutter. They were downsizing from their home of many decades to an apartment, yet the wife in particular seemed to find it impossible to see things for what they were and instead really struggled to part with anything in case she needed it at some point in the future, even jars of food dating back to the 1980s (my sister binned that when she wasn't looking).

Secondly, I'm interested in this topic as the older I get the more I'm having a real desire to declutter my house and to downsize. Maybe it's my inner Feng shui calling, but I really believe that the more we accumulate the less happy it makes us. A couple of members of my wider family are very generous by nature, and ungrateful as it sounds I'm getting more and more irritated with the amount of unneeded 'stuff' they add to our house via gifts for the kids in particular. The more my household cupboards bulge the more out of control I feel - as someone in FT employment who works long hours, I don't have time for hours of regular decluttering. That being said, I develop a terrible emotional attachment to getting rid of things. I feel bad getting rid of things people have spent time and money choosing, and even when it's things I've bought myself, I feel a terrible guilt over money wasted when I pack up things for the charity shop. I've another week off this week before I go back to work, and I'm determined that doing some decluttering is one of my goals for the week, as decluttered spaces definitely make me feel better mentally.

How are you getting on with The Human Stain? I'll be done in a day or two.

>44 rocketjk: >45 labfs39: I too have done that shrink, and still don't know where things are, especially books still in boxes. Seasonal clothes and items, a real necessity here, are also difficult to find each change of season, as I haven't gotten used to where to look, moving them around each time in the hopes of finding a better place. I recently discovered two sweaters I had given up for lost, but probably by the time winter rolls around, I will have "lost" them again.

>46 mabith: I'd completely agree with your assessment of the difference between packrat and hoarder.
That's a wonderful story about. your mother and one that as you say gave you a whole new insight into her. I wonder how much more we would know about those close to us if we were to find the same kind of treasure trove.

>47 LolaWalser: Ah the old reevaluation. Do you suppose there is a dialectic of stuff out there?

>48 labfs39: Some authors do address the socioeconomic problem. Apparently there are some famous people on places like Park Avenue with hoarding problems. Andy Warhol was a hoarder too. However, you're right that if you only have a small amount of space, and can't afford the dreaded storage locker, things look much worse than if they were spread out over more space in a more expensive home.
However, rural life, where many struggle economically, often supports hoarding. Think of the "bildins" which dot rural properties, filled with stuff. It's definitely not all the dream items antique hunters are searching for!

>49 JoeB1934: It's unfortunate your family is left with the sifting and sorting, but I think that being able to help Cynthia by providing storage lockers probably saved her a lot of other worries, as you suggest.

>50 cindydavid4: I like that idea. I sort of did that with my garden.

>53 AlisonY: Welcome back from your holidays, which sounded great. I finished The Human Stain which I thought was amazing writing after I got over the shock of the first fifty pages or so.

Looking forward to more Robin Jenkins though, especially if I keep up the doom and gloom I've recently been reading (not reviewed as yet - it's this summer's reading).

As every recent reviewer of this book has said, and at the risk of sounding like a book blurber, before Val McDermid, Denise Mina, Ian Rankin and Craig Russell, there was William McIlvanney. McIlvanney died in 2015, leaving behind an unfinished novel, a prequel to his Laidlaw trilogy. Canongate, his publisher, asked Rankin to finish it. There was so much fuss about this I thought it was time to start with the original book, and so, Laidlaw.



Laidlaw by William McIlvanney
first published 1977
finished reading May 9, 2024

Memories of the most recent trip to Glasgow were still in my mind when I read this. I knew I would like Laidlaw the character right away: …born in Scotland you were hanselled with remorse, set up with shares in Calvin against your coming of age, so that much of the energy you expended came back guilt. It’s true what they say about McIlvanney; he truly does capture the essence of a certain upbringing. Here again: Intermittently, he found himself doing penance for being him.

The case assigned to DI Laidlaw is one all too common in detective books. A young girl has been found murdered and raped in a park. McIlvanney gives it a twist though, by having the young girl’s father be the rough kind of bruiser right out of Kelman, “one of life’s vigilantes, a retribution monger”, someone police are too familiar with. Laidlaw though, after his initial sceptical reaction to the father, realizes that in this case he is actually a victim, and struggles to deal with him as such, especially when the father, with his contacts, threatens to take matters into his own hands.

Given the quotes above, it should come as no surprise that Laidlaw is obsessive about his cases, moving out of home until they are solved, devoting his full attention to them. This isn’t only about Laidlaw though. There’s Bud Lawson the father, and then there’s the murderer, realizing what has happened.

You would be alone from now on. It was what you deserved. Outside, the city hated you. Perhaps it had always excluded you… It was a hard city. Now all its hardness was against you.

There can be no happy endings in such a book, but that does not make it any less well written. I can see me reading the next two in the series when I need to be reminded of that rawness.

>54 SassyLassy: Apparently there are some famous people on places like Park Avenue with hoarding problems.

I read a book a while ago about two brothers who were hoarders in an apartment on Park Avenue. It was NF - these hoarders had to make tunnels through the piles of newspapers in order to mover around. They’d actually get lost in amongst the rubble tunnels.

Certainly hoarding is not confined to the poor. I had a friend who passed away last month. He was a prominent activist, editor and former Federal politician. He used to tell me in emails how he was getting his files in order for the city museum and parliamentary library. He kept insisting on this. I wondered why he kept going on about it and why it was taking so long (years).

Then last week I was invited to a “Celebration of Pete’s Life”. His son’s email that came with the flyer contained the following,

We have hired Trades Hall for the celebration and have also secured the adjacent “Paddy’s Gallery” for a month-long exhibition showcasing the result of Pete’s lifetime of hoarding. His files will finally see the light of day.

I wish I was able to go and see the files that he had constantly claimed to have started putting in order.

This seems to have become the thread talking about hoarding and I am back, someone without any training in psychology to talk about the emotional aspects of the subject.

As someone who is in the midst of decluttering 3 storage units filled with life's accumulation of 'things' I am encountering full-on the emotional side of the subject. To top it off I am developing a decluttered Life History of myself.

The processing of physical items from storage involves looking at an object and to determine: is this something that is true trash, or is it for recycling, shredding, or memorabilia?

I believe that at the heart of most hoarding is the inability to decide when first confronted with this question about an object is the postponement of the decision. I'll think about that tomorrow, or later. The result? Three storage units.

We are forced to go through making these decisions countless times now. A large number of these choices are very easy, but others not so much. Emotions run rampant, as laughter over a memory forgotten, or an item that was feared lost, or joy upon seeing it is still there. My family is making the bulk of those decisions, and they know me very well, so I get to make them when they run across something obviously meant for me.

This joint effort will finally result in separations of what I called memorabilia into sub-groups. True retain for life of someone in the family, give away to Goodwill, or other charity. Have an estate sale for things of value that no family member, or friend wants to keep.

We haven't yet arrived at the full gamut of photos, slides and documents related to me that need to be digitized for my life history. I have begun to create the mechanisms for doing that digitization and creating a digital storage unit which I can go through to arrive at my decluttered life history.

I am already realizing that I will need to make hundreds of decluttering decisions about personal memories that I will retain for final times. A chore that will be rewarding at times but leading to regrets about how I might have led my life at other times.

At the end of this effort, you will certainly know me in all but my most secret aspects that each of us retain.

At the end of this effort, you will certainly know me in all but my most secret aspects that each of us retain.

way back in the early aughts I was part of an online book group for several years, and we usually chose a tag line for ourselves.this would fit in the "natlbsb" file " not a tag line but should be" thanks for that

Jumping in very late to this interesting (and rather sad) discussion of hoarding, but I'd like to recommend Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things by Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee, a very readable book that delves into the psychology of hoarding and made me feel for the first time like I actually understood it. According to the authors, it really does seem to be largely about being unable to get past the feeling that every object, even stuff that looks like flat-out garbage to the rest of us, has meaning, at least potentially. Often there's an inability to process any difference in value between a used straw wrapper and your wedding album, or at the very least between that and the handful of random screws you keep in your toolbox because some day you really are going to need a screw. This thing might be useful in some way later on, that one reminds me of the time and place where I got it, this other one might be something my friend might want... The one I remember off the top of my head is someone explaining that they had to keep the cap from a disposable pen because they could imagine using it as a replacement for a lost board game piece if they ever needed one. Can't get rid of that! It could be important, so even contemplating throwing it out is anxiety-inducing.

And, unfortunately, their answer to "what can we do about loved ones developing this problem?" seems to be very little. Maybe there's been some development in treatment once the book was published, but the authors make it clear that it's a behavior that's incredibly resistant to change.

>58 JoeB1934: You certainly seem to be on the right track in your sorting process. Take your time though!

>60 bragan: I read Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things several years ago. You're right - it was an excellent treatment of it and the case histories worked really well. I think you're also right about not being able to help those with this problem. Even a tiny breakthrough is soon cancelled out by more material coming in.

Wilkie Collins, one of my favourite authors, was the featured author for April in the Monthly Author Reads group. I had already read a book by him as my first book of the year, but I happily read another, albeit finishing slightly late for April



Heart and Science: A Story of the Present Time by Wilkie Collins
first published in serial form in Belgravia: An Illustrated London Magazine between August 1882 and June 1883
finished reading May 11, 2024

What could have allied Lewis Carroll, Thomas Carlyle, Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, John Ruskin, Christina Rossetti, and George Bernard Shaw against Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur, Thomas Huxley, and others?

The answer was vivisection, the dissection of living animals for scientific purposes. By the mid 1870s, it was a raging debate in the print world of London, eventually making it to Parliament in the form of the Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876, which limited the practise to physiologists under license. This act was tested in 1881 when a live monkey underwent cerebral dissection at the International Medical Congress. The attendees deemed vivisection “indispensable” for the advancement of science and future of their field. Others were horrified.

This was the background against which Wilkie Collins set his Heart and Science, pointedly subtitled “A Story of the Present Time”. He thought he could help his friends in the antivivisectionist cause. His three main arguments were:
- the idea that the practise of vivisection hardened the practitioner morally
- that the motives for vivisection were morally questionable in themselves, and
- Man had no right to try to exert dominion over animals in such a fashion.

All this sounds quite weighty, but Collins was a skilful enough author to not hit the reader over the head with his arguments. He is also very careful not to describe the process, telling the reader in his preface From first to last you are purposefully left in ignorance of the hideous secrets of Vivisection. The outside of the laboratory is a necessary object in my landscape - but I never once open the door and invite you to look in. The topic itself barely intrudes into the novel until the reader is well into the plot.

Heart and Science has many of Collins’s favourite themes. Is the young woman at the heart of the novel, Carmina Greywell, legitimate? The answer to this will determine the outcome of her supposed father’s will. The aunt to whose care she had been entrusted is one of those older women Collins loves to take on. Mrs Gallilee has a fixation with science, while at the same time understanding almost nothing about it. However, her pursuit of it, and of money, leaves her family neglected and rudderless. It also serves to move the plot along, when Carmina appears to develop a neurological condition, as Mrs Gallilee can then bring in Dr Benjulia, a man whose study of the brain drives him further and further into obsession. All this time, Carmina’s cousin and secret fiancé, who also happens to be Mrs Gallilee’s son, is in Canada trying to recuperate from exhaustion through exposure to the outdoor life.

How will it all resolve? There is a certain tension throughout created by time, distance, and the progression of disease. Collins had researched his topic thoroughly, and though it may seem somewhat preposterous today, his novel incorporated all that was known at the time.

There was tension too in Collins own life. He was ill, saying his years and health warned him that he had little time to lose in writing.

This edition, edited by Steve Farmer, is by the excellent broadview press. As is customary with their books, there is a wealth of supplemental material, including letters, reviews, and an account of the trial arising from the Congress.

I have neither read nor own any books by Wilkie Collins. I know, I can hear your gasp from here. But as I recently wrote on Dan's thread, I haven't been diligent about reading classics per se, and so have clearly missed some gems. Do you have a favorite? I had wishlisted Woman in White some years ago per rebeki's suggestion, but am curious as to which you would recommend.

>62 SassyLassy: wow I enjoyed reading his books, and this is another example of his curiousity and love of science may need to read this

>63 labfs39: queen of hearts is delightful novel of budding love, stories and just a bit of tension that the scheme works

>61 SassyLassy: This post will make many of you VERY jealous of me and a solution to a problem that almost every book reader eventually encounters.

That problem is what to do with books obtained during your lifetime and what to do with them when you MUST release them somewhere useful to somebody.

For example, we have 60 storage boxes of books we have been storing away for 9 years since we sold our last large residence in 2015. These are much larger than bankers boxes. These are 13"x13"x16". I cannot lift one of these boxes to put it on a table to sort.

I don't know the count of books. They are all sort of books, without much fiction as I have always been a library user, or reading paperback mysteries, or listening to audiobooks. Art, travel, music related, some non-fiction and some religious. Not many classics.

We have moved this library 3 times in the 9 years with intention of really dealing with the issue, but life always intervened. Family members want books related to their interests. How do you deal with all the remaining books? Who wants specific ones? Do any have monetary value? Can you actually recycle an old book?

This is where you get jealous. Carey found an organization seemingly located only in Colorado. Their web site is DreamBooksCo.com and they have drop boxes located in lots of locations and they will even come to pick up boxes of books to process.

Sunday the whole family will find books they want to retain for their own library. With all remaining books DreamBooksCo will evaluate what to do with them.

They are associated with 74+ partners in the front range of Colorado. For example, every library and bookstore. Using those connections, they determine what to do with each book. Find a home, place with charity organizations, or a last resort recycle the books.

Through 2022 they have redistributed and recycled 2,759,533 books and 3.6 million pounds diverted from landfill.

Dream Books sound wonderful! too bad its not here. we have a local used and rare store where all of our collectible books will be going when we are gone and a book sale for our other books . thats the plan anywhay

My daughter is only 21, so envisions years and years before having to face this question. She does not want me to weed any of my books, but leave them all to her. :-)

Dream Books is a dream!

>63 labfs39: Sassy recommended Armadale as a good starting point for Wilkie Collins when I asked the same question a few months ago. I read it earlier this year and really enjoyed it. It's stayed with me too - I can remember it vividly.

I missed the whole discussion about stuff and hoarding because I was busy...decluttering. First dealing with the chaos my Dad left when he died last year (he didn't immediately come across as a hoarder so anyone who visited him thinks I'm exaggerating - the living space was clear(ish), but he had bought an extra barn in order to accommodate his dislike of ever getting rid of anything, and it was full), and then my own stuff because after the stress caused by Dad's accumulated stuff, I just can't bear for there to be anything in the house we don't need or wholeheartedly want.

>69 rachbxl: Thanks, Rachel. Noted.

>68 labfs39: Now that's the dream -- a young family member who wants all the books.

>69 rachbxl: After my FIL died and the family had to clear out the rooms he used (my MIL was an exceedingly scrupulous housekeeper, so his accumulations were restricted to a garage and a home office) my husband came home and cleared out so much stuff that he'd been saving just in case.

>63 labfs39: I am the same as you Lisa. And I keep seeing Woman in White pop up in LT friends’ recommendations. I will watch the replies to your question with interest.

>63 labfs39: >72 kjuliff: I've only read Woman in White, and whilst I enjoyed it enough I haven't rushed to read anything further. It was good, but I note from my review at the time that I felt Collins over-explained things a bit and it was longer than it needed to be.

Just my thoughts - I know many people absolutely love it.

>63 labfs39: I know, I can hear your gasp from here
Too funny, but maybe more like a subdued head bowed little Victorian sigh:).
Once again I would recommend Armadale for the same reason mentioned for >69 rachbxl:: Lydia Gwilt - one of the very best evil Victorian villainesses.

>64 cindydavid4: >65 cindydavid4: I don't think Collins gets enough credit for his later explorations of science and medicine as they stood in his time. Do read more!
I'm not familiar with The Queen of Hearts, but will look for it.

>66 JoeB1934: That's a wonderful idea.

>69 rachbxl: So glad you enjoyed Armadale. I think it's still my favourite Collins.
I just can't bear for there to be anything in the house we don't need or wholeheartedly want. I go through those purges too, but unfortunately not often enough!

>71 RidgewayGirl: That "just in case" is a killer, and it's all too easy to succumb to it. I'm very good at dreaming up reasons to keep things, but am getting much better at telling myself should I ever need that piece of xyz, or jar etc, they are out there cluttering up second hand stores - should be easy enough to find it then. I do think though that's it's much harder to replace old books.

>72 kjuliff: >73 AlisonY: The Woman in White was the first Collins I read. It certainly made the night train from Glasgow to London fly. It's time for a reread (third time 'round maybe?). I think a lot of reading Collins depends on being in the right time and place, maybe a storm stayed kind of day.

>74 SassyLassy: think youre right; think he is pushed aside a bit by dickens popularity. I certainly was impressed by his progressive (for that time) treatment for people with physical or mental disabilities, Id like to read more

Queen of hearts was my first and touched me so much that i reread it frequntly. hope you enjoy it

Looks like I’ll be reading Woman in White then. I needed that push >74 SassyLassy: et al.

>62 SassyLassy: This sounds fascinating! I'd not heard of that title at all before. I read The Moonstone earlier this year and adored it, hoping to get to The Woman in White later this year.

>68 labfs39: Hopefully your daughter doesn't change her mind after a series of her own moves! When I first moved out of my mom's house I immediately took all the children's books I'd insisted we couldn't get rid of and she was certainly relieved (my older siblings were more the 'surely we can let you store stuff we say we want for decades' people, which did not fly).

An author first heard of in a review by thorold. I had to read the book. Unfortunately I can't do it justice, but now having read it, I would like to read more by this author.

This book was part of my Reading Globally: Around the World in 12 Months trip.



The Lost Musicians by William Heinesen translated from the Danish by W Glyn Jones (2006)
first published as De fortabte Spillemaend in 1950
finished reading May15, 2024

Rural communities are often a microcosm of the larger world, even when they are as isolated as this “far away little lead-coloured land”. It is the world of the Faroe Islands, an archipelago far out in the North Atlantic, on the way from Denmark to Iceland.

Such a setting gives the wind unlimited sway, so it is not surprising that it was there in a church tower many years ago, the three young sons of the sexton Kornelius Isaksen first heard the music of the Aeolian harp. It was a sound none of them would ever forget; one which would mark each of them for life.

The sexton died; the boys grew up. They pursued the various meagre avenues that their little town could offer in order to make a living, at least part of the time. Life was up and down, but music was always part of their lives.

The little community, a thinly disguised Tórshavn, had major divisions based on religion (a sort of Baptist sect vs the rest) and alcohol (mostly that sect again vs those who possibly drank their own share and that of the sectarians as well). Moritz, Sirius, and Young Kornelius belonged to the more open group of residents. Allied against them were those who viewed themselves as community leaders, led by the bank manager and the pastor.

Life was difficult for almost all. Tragedy struck the villagers more than once. Despite this, Heinesen writes with humour, both sympathetic and satirical depending upon who the butt of it is.

As I read the book, I really wished I knew more about music theory. It’s certainly not necessary, but the novel is divided into four movements like a symphony. A quartet of characters plays an important role. There is a rhythm in the telling, with crescendos generated by weather and people; quiet thoughtful passages; and wonderful connectors. I know all these things have names, but it was definitely enough to just sit back and let it all sweep over me.

________________

Heinesen had been a Nobel contender, but asked that his name be removed, feeling that if a Nobel prize was to go to someone from the Faroes, it should go to someone who wrote in Faroese, giving the language the credit and recognition he felt it deserved. He himself wrote in Danish, the language of the islands' longtime distant administrators, feeling he could express himself better in that language.

>78 SassyLassy: The Lost Musicians sounds lovely and atmospheric, Sassy. I'll see if I can get to it in the not too distant future.

>78 SassyLassy: It does sound interesting, and I love the cover!

>78 SassyLassy: This sounds lovely, and what an interesting, principled stance to take on the recognition of Faroese.

>79 kidzdoc: Atmospheric is a good word for it. Hope you do manage to find it.

>80 FlorenceArt: The cover is actually an illustration by the author. Heinesen was also a composer too - maybe not so easy to live with!

>81 rv1988: You're right. People with those kind of principles are few and far between when put to that kind of test.

>81 rv1988: ". . . what an interesting, principled stance to take on the recognition of Faroese."

Absolutely, though of course now I want to know . . . who are the authors who wrote in Faroese and whose works have been translated into English?

>83 rocketjk: Well I did look, and most of them seem to be poets.

This is completely out of chronological order, but the book was so awful I have to get it out of the house quickly.



I’ll Steal You Away by Niccolo Ammaniti translated from the Italian by Jonathan Hunt (2006)
first published as Ti Prendo e ti porto via in 1999
finished reading August 27th, 2024

Inspired somewhat by The Life of Stuff (>33 SassyLassy: above) I turned to one of the TBR piles, and discovered a book I had completely forgotten. Apparently I had bought it in 2013 at one of my favourite bookstores while on vacation, the publisher is one of my favourites, so although I had never heard of the book or the author, I took a chance. Obviously not too big a chance, as it didn’t get very far in terms of being read. No wonder I had forgotten it.

This time around, I thought it might make a good “next book”, then reconsidered, thinking if I put it aside, it would probably just languish in a pile again. The book I was currently reading was going slowly, and there were over 500 more pages to go, so perhaps Ammaniti might provide a quick break. Well he certainly got me interested in going back to my slow book!

The idea behind this novel is not a bad one. Ammaniti tells us that Pietro Moroni, a young boy who has just failed his year in school, is his main character. Yet there is another somewhat parallel character, Graziano Biglia, a louche freeloader. What could these two have in common beyond the small Italian village which is their hometown? Both are the kind of people whom others see as a mark. Pietro is bullied at school and at home. Graziano is taken advantage of by every employer and girl friend he’s ever had. Each knows he should refuse most propositions presented to him, but the ability to say “No” just isn’t there.

What makes people put up with this? Why do they fall into the same traps again and again, even when they know they are doing so? This is what Ammaniti seems to want to be exploring. He’s not bad at portraying character. However, he too often gets caught up in the awful details of what is happening to these two, or in the case of Graziano, the sexual exploitation he contemplates doing to others. This is what makes the book so cringe worthy. This is a case of where suggestion would definitely work better than outright reporting.

The book flips back and forth between the two stories, which don’t overlap until the end. Many of the supporting characters are developed well, especially Flora Palmieri, the link between man and boy. Nothing, however, could overcome my strong initial reaction, so out it goes now.

>85 SassyLassy: Too bad it was such a dud, but it's one more book out of the house. Small favors.

Catching up and late to the discussion here, so I won't go into my thoughts on hoarding at this point, though as a collector of books and stationery, plus memorabilia of mine and both departed parents', I'm sensitive to just how much I've accumulated over the years that I've lived in a big house with basement and attic, and how much I'll be leaving for my son to sift through eventually... At least, I should probably separate out what's valuable, because my dad never did that with his physical artifacts and now I'll be stuck not knowing or having to go on Antiques Roadshow or something. I've got Stuff and Clutter: An Untidy History on my shelves.

Moving up to the present conversation, The Lost Musicians looks really interesting, and I love the cover—very cool that it was Heinesen's own artwork.

>78 SassyLassy: Now you’ve read The lost musicians, you’ll have to read The good hope as well! :-)

Glad you enjoyed it.

>85 SassyLassy: With a character called Palmieri, I think I’d be humming “We’re called gondolieri / But that’s our vagary” all the way through…

>15 SassyLassy: I'm way behind on LT and I see now that we both read The Traitor's Niche around the same time. I enjoyed your review. I'd been meaning to read more Kadare for so long and then was half way through one when I heard the news of his death.

Time to rescue myself from page two on talk.

This next is out of chronological order, but it was the November selection for my book club. I had been planning on skipping it, until some “generous” soul offered me her copy. What could I say? Now it has to be returned, so best to write it up before it disappears.



Old Babes in the Wood} by Margaret Atwood
first published 2023
finished reading November 11, 2024

This book brought me back to Margaret Atwood. To misquote Simon and Garfunkel, I’d been “Margaret Atwooded” to death. I would have been happy to never read another of her books. Atwood’s life had changed completely in 2019 with the death of her long time partner Graeme Gibson. This book is grief processing.

However, this being Margaret Atwood, it is also laugh out loud funny at times, rueful at others, but always just push on through. There is no self pity, but rather a realisation of lives well lived.

There are three parts: Tig and Nell, My Evil Mother, and Nell and Tig. The first and third parts are linked short stories, all but one newly published here. The Evil Mother section is a collection of unlinked stories from different stages in Atwood’s writing career, some published previously.

The stories of Nell and Tig, their relationship over the years, the growing older and laughing at what once seemed ridiculous in others, is a picture of a relationship that never grew old itself, no matter what else was happening. Part one intimates that Tig will die, and is clearly "before". In Part Three “before” has gone, and it is "now". Nell has been left to sift through their lives, together and apart.

Among the other stories, “Airborne: A Symposium” may be my favourite. Three former university lecturers, all from the humanities, meet to rescue a grant proposal a colleague had inadvertently torpedoed. After all they agree, she’s a biologist, calling things what they are, with no attempt at smoothing the language into what would be acceptable to everyone involved. Biologists are always getting in trouble, nobody understands them. The three women sit around with their wine, joking about the idiocy of it all, wandering in and out of the ludicrous task at hand.

How to phrase it all? Is there a way that doesn’t offend those who lie in wait to pounce? Can the three academics work it out amongst themselves? Language is so disruptive, and Atwood, a language master, plays with it wonderfully. These women had been through it all in the 1970s, had been called “harpies” and harridans”, words that the Atwood character reflects have all but disappeared. Her mind drifts:

Fuck used to be unprintable, whereas racial and ethnic slurs were common, but now that has flipped. Myrna takes note of all such verbal mutations, what can’t be said having been a leitmotif in human cultures forever. Slanderers and scatologists, form in line here; casual oath-swearers and blasphemers, over there. Taboo words that will bring bad luck, to the rear please. As for fuck , she had once published a paper on it in Maledicta: The International Journal of Verbal Aggression. “‘Fuck You’ and 'Good Fuck’: Negative and Positive Values for a Problematic Word.”

Other gems include “Morte de Smudgie” in which Nell tries to work out her grief over the cat’s death by rewriting “Morte d’Arthur” with Smudgie filling in for the king.
My end draws nigh; t’ is time that I were gone.
Make broad thy cat carrier to receive my weight,
And bear me to the vet place; yet I fear
My wound has taken cold, and I shall die.

Then there’s “The Dead Orwell” in which Atwood interviews the dead Orwell, in a far ranging discussion of language and politics, of what has happened since 1984, and of Solnit’s interest in him. Elsewhere, Martha Gellhorn makes an appearance; did she have an affair with Nell’s dead father-in-law?

This book sent me down many rabbit holes, all of which added to the enjoyment of the book itself. Now I have to decide if it’s best to leave Atwood while I’m ahead, or venture into unread territory with her.

_______

Edited to correct punctuation

I have read only a little Atwood. This sounds fun for someday.

>91 labfs39: The discussion at the book club was really good. We could have gone on much longer.

Many prefaced their remarks with some version of "I really don't like Margaret Atwood, but I really like her writing".

This led into a discussion of persona vs writing, then into that great Alice Munro title, reflecting the upbringing of so many Canadians: Who Do You Think You Are? (touchstone is off)
Do people resent Atwood's success, her ability to reinvent herself? Many mentioned that although they did not like her, they felt compelled to read her, and resented the reading, because it is so good, making the readers feel badly for their unkind thoughts. All very complicated.

>92 SassyLassy: Many mentioned that although they did not like her, they felt compelled to read her, and resented the reading, because it is so good, making the readers feel badly for their unkind thoughts. All very complicated.

this is just odd to me; they dont like her while knowing nothing about her, but then resent being compelled to read her then feeling guilty at not liking her What would compell you to read her if you dont like her (based on what). why feel guilty if you do not like her, but you dont know why Look lets separate the artist from the art .

I generally give an author a pass on behavior, (not excusing it) if I really love the art .I think I can ignore the author and still love the art If I dont like the author I would think Id had a reason. but I might still love the art. and yes it is very complicated/

>93 cindydavid4: Margaret Atwood is a very well known author in Canada. It would be very difficult not to know anything about her. I suspect part of the individual compulsion to read her is based on the early days of "Can Lit" when she was on every such curriculum in every university in the country. Her writing is definitely admired, her creativity, her behaviour and her support of multiple causes are also definitely admired.

I suspect this group discussion was a very Canadian one. Good old Calvinist guilt can run deep here, even among those who are far from Calvinist. That explains in part the feeling of guilt for not reading her, as after all, it is "morally improving" to do so, as she is so admired.

I was sorry that none of the Americans in the group were there that day. It would have been really interesting to get the perspective of those not "suffering" from this cultural imperative. The person who offered me her copy is American, and she said she just didn't get the writing, so was skipping. However, the next day, at another group, the Atwood discussion was still going on, and she decided to give it another try. She felt possibly her timing had been off as she was reading it in early November.

____________

Edited to add: There is actually and LT group devoted to Atwood - Atwoodians
That's her power!

At the risk of sticking my nose in unnecessarily do the recent stories about Margaret Atwood sticking with the man who repeatedly sexually abused her youngest daughter and apparently doing nothing about it for years contribute in any way to the public dislike of her?

>95 kidzdoc: Was that Atwood? I thought that was Alice Munro. Possible, I suppose, that there were two such stories, and I missed one.

>96 KeithChaffee: Oops. You're right, Keith. I knew I should have stayed in my lane...

>94 SassyLassy: thank you for clarifying that! I get the cultural differences and opinons to the book and understand the guilt (Im Jewish, and had a Jewish mother so I know from guilt:) glad the discussion continues!

>95 kidzdoc: Welcome to stick your nose in any time!

>96 KeithChaffee: Yes it was Alice Munro. We also discussed that case recently at our book club.

>98 cindydavid4: Should add that it is probably largely an anglophone compulsion. The francophones in the group did not feel it as strongly, as Atwood does not feature as prominently for them.
__________________

While on the topic of CanLit, as reported elsewhere on LT, Anne Michaels won the Giller prize for fiction this week for her superb novel Held.

https://www.cbc.ca/books/anne-michaels-wins-the-100k-giller-prize-for-novel-held...

If you read down on the article, you'll discover more about the weird world of CanLit.

oh I have several favorite Canadians; Miriam towes, Yann Marrtel,Costain and others, but I think my fav is Timothy Findley, esp pilgrim sure Im missing others, oh Emma donogue

>4 SassyLassy:
Memoires d'un eunuque dans la cité interdite by Shi Dan - no idea where I saw this

Catching up on threads and hey, that's me! I'm the source!

Also, I haven't read an Atwood in a while. She's an author whose books I always enjoy the reading experience but then I forget about her entirely until someone mentions her.

>101 lilisin: Thanks for claiming it! I've now amended the post.

I think I'm with you on Atwood - she isn't really present in my reading life until I have to read her for something. Then I think "Hmm, she really does write well. I should read more of her", and promptly move on to something else.

I have read and loved The Handmaid's Tale more than once, but didn't care for Oryx and Crake. I most recently read the short story Cut and Thirst, which fell in-between. In Canada, which are her most famous, guilt-producing-if-you-haven't-read works?

>94 SassyLassy:

Were these older people? There's a strong streak of conservatism and conformism in Anglo society that I imagine took some issue with Atwood being something else than a meek self-effacing housewife. Ordinary misogyny, can't stand a woman in public.

>90 SassyLassy: 'Morte de Smudgie' made me laugh, and also reminded me of Christopher Smart's Jubilate Agno ("For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.") - have you read it? https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45173/jubilate-agno . Great review, I'm adding this to my list.

>103 labfs39: In Canada, which are her most famous, guilt-producing-if-you-haven't-read works?

Yikes, there's probably at least one per decade of her 60+ year writing career. The ones I feel most guilty about not reading are The Blind Assassin and Oryx and Crake. The one I would like to read most is The Penelopiad https://www.cbc.ca/books/the-penelopiad-1.4005595. I would also like to read her book on debt: Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, which you can listen to here: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-2008-cbc-massey-lectures-payback-debt-and-the... (Scroll down past the iTunes offer and you can get the radio version for free).

>104 LolaWalser: Well, I'd hate to venture at guess at what "older" is, or to guess the age of my fellow readers! However, I would say 40 and up, so yes, older by anyone's estimate, if you remember how you thought 40 was old when you were 18.

This group doesn't strike me as Anglo in nature. I don't think it was misogyny that was the prevailing feeling, as there were many real admirers of Atwood there. It may have been more a question of "how did she persevere in those early years when so much was against her, including that famous Anglo question"

>105 rv1988: Thanks for that link. It's amazing the link between people and their cats. Hope you get to the Atwood.

This was part of my read for Reading Globally's theme read "2024: Around the World in 12 Months". I haven't made it very far from my starting point in Norway.



Animal Life by Audur Ava Olafsdottir translated from the Icelandic by Brian FitzGibbon (2022)
first published 2020 as Dyralif
finished reading May 18, 2024
finished second reading November 24, 2024

There’s something to be said for being six months behind in reviews. The initial impressions of the book have sunk in. A short second skim to consolidate those impressions is usually in order, and all that’s required. Sometimes that skim turns into a complete reread though, and a completely different idea of the book emerges. Such was the case with Animal Life.

Initially it seemed a pleasant enough book: a week or so in the life of midwife Dómhildur in Reykjavik. It was December, the darkest time of the year. A massive storm was approaching, one her sister the meteorologist insisted would break records. Dómhildur is an experienced midwife, the latest of several generations in her family. Told in the first person, she recounts each day at work. Meanwhile, at home, in the apartment inherited from her great aunt Dómhildur (Fifa), she spends her time working through diaries, letters, and unpublished manuscripts left behind by her aunt. Many of these concentrated on the animal world, and humankind’s relationship to it. All well and good, but it seemed somewhat pedestrian. It was a disappointment after Hotel Silence, which I loved.

The second reading changed all that. Perhaps I had not been paying attention on my first read, as it was a busy holiday weekend. This time, I read it as a meditation on light and dark. Where else is light as important as it is when absent? In a country where the interval between winter sunrise and sunset can be only a couple of hours, it can become an obsession.

The book’s first page tells us that “midwife” was voted the most beautiful word in the Icelandic language. Ljósmódir, is made up of both the words “light” and “mother”, and so midwives are the mother of light for the children they deliver.

Not all births as successful. Light and birth lead to darkness and death. Images of both are everywhere, from the electrician who comes to update some of the wiring in the outdated flat, still decorated as it was when her great aunt set it up in the 1970s, to the expedition to see the Northern Lights. Domhildur’s intellectual excavation of Fifa’s writings titled loosely Animal Life: investigation of what the human species is capable of and her physical reworking of the flat, are a move toward the light, never expressly stated as such, for perhaps she is not aware of it at the moment. Obviously, I wasn’t either on that first reading, but it all emerges in time.

>107 SassyLassy: This sounds intriguing.

>107 SassyLassy: I’m just reading another Au∂ur book, Miss Iceland. I haven’t got to Animal life yet, but it’s in my sights. She always seems to manage to come up with something unexpected!

>107 SassyLassy: This one is intriguing and my library has it available. I might make time for it in December. Thanks for the review!

>108 WelshBookworm: >110 japaul22: I think you would each enjoy it, and it reads quickly.

>109 thorold: I haven't got to Miss Iceland yet, but it is in my sights. That unexpectedness, which makes complete sense in reading it though, is what I like about her so much.

Second hand copy found in Melrose, Scotland - the proprietor seemed amused that I was buying it. My cover is in better condition than the one illustrated.



Twenty Snobs and Mao: Travelling de Luxe in Communist China by Colette Modiano translated from the French by Jacqueline Baldick in 1970
first published as Vingt snobs chez Mao in 1969
finished reading May 21, 2024

Imagine leading a group of hyper wealthy Europeans to China in 1966. Colette Modiano did just that. Then she wrote about it, describing it as “a Red tour for millionaires”.

There were twenty of them who had left their hunting lodges in Sologne, their all night revels at Régine’s, their dinner parties, Rolls-Royces and fittings at Chanel’s. Twenty members of the European upper crust who under my timid guidance were going to mix with Mao’s human ants.

Modiano did her preparation, but it seemed to involve more learning about the members of her group than the realities of life in a country reinventing itself from the ground up and back again. This led to many surprises once there, and a certain political naïveté, which probably worked in her favour, as she accepted much of the information dispensed by the Chinese attached to her group. This trio was probably her first surprise. Expecting only an interpreter, she was also provided with a student and a minder, a woman who paid careful attention to everything.

Another surprise was the agenda. Modiano had counted on museums and art galleries, with some antique shopping along the way for her group. The Chinese offered factories, schools, and agriculture. The past was not to be resurrected or glorified. Skilful negotiating on her part restored some balance. She felt the escort party was siding with her against the complaints of the capitalist tourists, and were secretly trying to make things easier for her. That may be somewhat far fetched, but it’s a nice thought with which to comfort yourself as you try to balance competing demands and expectations.

Worst of all was the discovery that her luggage had been lost somewhere along the Paris - Moscow - Omsk - Irkutsk- Beijing route. It was never found, and she spent four weeks with what she had packed in her hand luggage. The good news was that it was her luggage lost, not one of the other 55 bags her group had brought along.

There was a Chanel suit in that lost bag. Modiano exhibits a sense of personal style, and an appreciation of it in others. There in the PRC, it was a difficult sense to use, but she fell back on that old trick of trying to detect political and economic differences through the appearance of women. In the north, at the Peking Opera, she reports that the women in the audience …looked dull and uninteresting, and wore clothing rather than clothes. There was no makeup on their faces, their hair-style was a uniform basin-crop, and
their general appearance was devoid of coquetry and even femininity. Those in the south, in Shanghai, however, …were not dressed in blue overalls. Their floral blouses and smiling faces seemed to suggest a certain remoteness from the great melting-pot of the Revolution. Let us never be judged by such a critic!

This is a puzzling book. The trip was taken at a time when French intellectuals were studying the PRC, yet those on the trip had none of that knowledge or curiosity. The Chinese were rebuilding everywhere, had crippling shortages, yet managed to provide a level of comfort way beyond the means of any ordinary citizen, and the French could only complain about what was provided.

However, this is not the level on which to read the book. It was written as a light hearted, somewhat gossipy telling of one of Modiano’s tours. On that level it works well, and is often humourous, in the way that Nancy Mitford could poke fun at her compatriots.

What is most striking reading it today, is how much the PRC has changed since then, perhaps most evident in the photographs. Modiano’s China can be seen in a Shirley MacLaine film from 1975, The Other Half of the Sky: A China Memoir, which documents the tour she led with a group of “ordinary women” to the PRC in 1973. Much of what Modiano relates can also be seen in this film.

All in all, it was light, somewhat dated, but there’s nothing really to learn here.

>112 SassyLassy:

I recently picked up a French nonfiction, Mes années chinoises (My Chinese years) by Annette Wieviorka, a French woman who got caught up in the excitement of the new communist government, praising it even, until she realizes her mistake upon seeing the poverty and suffering.

>107 SassyLassy: This is a new author to me, and I see she has many titles. Would Animal Life make a good starting point? I loved your review. I often have that experience on rereading: Who knew how good the book was?

>107 SassyLassy: That's one of the reasons I like to revisit books I had read before - once you know the story, you subconsciously (or consciously for some people I guess) start noticing things you missed on the first read...

>114 dianelouise100: Thanks.
Animal Life would make a good starting point. Also, thorold just reviewed Miss Iceland very positively, as have others. It's on my TBR list.
I can highly recommend Hotel Silence too, which I loved.

>115 AnnieMod: Absolutely! I'm a big rereader and it rarely disappoints. However, I suspect we're a minority.

>112 SassyLassy: What a fabulously random find! Sounds almost like a 1970s Odette Keun…

>117 thorold: Random finds are always a delight.

Moving on to erratic chronology without order:



The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family by Joshua Cohen
first published 2021
finished reading December 10, 2024

Pity Ruben Blum. A Jewish historian, but not as he would point out quickly, a historian of the Jews, he is cut adrift from his Bronx world, teaching colonial American economics in small town New York state, way up by Lake Erie. His fellow faculty, back in those days of the late 1950s, find him somewhat exotic and alien. Ruben himself tries not to feel that way.

Then one day the Dean asked him for a favour. His uneasy truce with his existence was about to be shattered. Fearing loss of funding, the college had decided to hire an expert in European History, Medieval Iberia to be precise, and Ruben was to be on the interview committee. Blum suggested it was far outside his realm of expertise. The Dean squirmed through an oblique suggestion that it was because Blum was Jewish, and the candidate’s field was more precisely Jewish history during the Inquisition.

I want to know whether he’d fit in here. Whether he’d integrate well into the Corbin community….
I’m sure you remember that feeling Rube - coming up here for the very first time as an outsider, having to get up in front of everyone and present your material. It’s hell on a man’s nerves. If nothing else, I’m sure you’ll be a steadying influence.

The candidate was Ben-Zion Netanyahu, an unknown to Blum. Unsolicited letters soon started arriving, some out of left field, all advocating for his hiring. Ruben struggled through reading Netanyahu’s work, at least that which he could read, for he couldn't read Hebrew. The principal thesis was that the Inquisition was misunderstood. It was really a means of reversing the conversos’ conversions, turning them back into Jews, so that there would be a needed scapegoat for the Catholic Church. This wasn't a theory Blum could give credence.

It got worse. Would the Blums put the Netanyahus up? They would. This was where Ruben’s carefully constructed but tentative world would fall apart. Netanyahu arrived in a borrowed car in a snowstorm, with his wife and three sons in tow. The havoc that ensued was cringe worthy.

The novel, however, is based on a real life incident related to the author by Harold Bloom. Bloom had been asked to coordinate just such an interview with the Israeli historian Ben-Zion Netanyahu, who did indeed arrive with his wife and three sons: Jonathan, Benjamin, and Iddo. Chaos did indeed ensue. This “minor and ultimately even negligible episode” in the Netanyahu family history does make the reader consider. Now, whenever I hear that scion of the family speak, his performance in this book will spring to mind.

>107 SassyLassy: This sounds really interesting, and I appreciate what you said about a second reading allowing greater insight into a book.

>120 rv1988: Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Happy to spin it that way, anyway, as someone who's a couple of months behind in summing up my reading.

>119 SassyLassy: I’ve heard of the title but didn’t know what this was about. I’m intrigued. Another terrific review

>119 SassyLassy: I really liked the book!

Interesting; perhaps a window into the mind of the man that is tearing thr middle east apart and driivng American jews from Israel

Catching up. Some great discussion on the back of very interesting reviews.

I'm possibly the only person on LT who's never read The Handmaid's Tale, so if I was Canadian I imagine the guilt I'd have to carry around over that would be intolerable. I'm not against reading it - there have just always been other books to get to first.

I've only read three Atwood novels and they've left me very muddled about what I think of her writing. I loved Alias Grace, enjoyed The Blind Assassin but thought it too long and drawn out, and thought Bodily Harm was simply terribly written and so it was a DNF (guess I've only actually read two Atwood's, then).

Old Babes in the Woods does sound like something I'd enjoy, though.

>125 AlisonY: Handmaids Tale is unique, even for Atwood. The atmosphere she creates. It’s a special book

>120 rv1988: >121 lisapeet: I'm a big fan of rereading - perhaps that's what makes it so hard to part with books! I never have a plan for it; it just usually arises out of some current reading.

>122 dchaikin: I don't follow the Pulitzer Prize, but you'll see on the cover that this was a winner.

>123 torontoc: Not one I would have picked for myself, but one I had given someone else, who found it hysterical and suggested I read it. Cohen certainly did a good job.

>124 cindydavid4: If only driving Americans from Israel was the worst of it. His father's ideas surely had an influence.

>125 AlisonY: I'm not against reading it - there have just always been other books to get to first.
That's pretty well the way I feel about all of Atwood right now. Good thing I have my book club to push me in that direction periodically.

>126 dchaikin: Atwood is indeed superb at atmosphere.

June's real life book club selection, suggested by me.

Some random thoughts on a classic. Dan wrote an excellent review of it elsewhere.



As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
first published 1930
finished this reading June 4, 2024

Apocalypse Now is one of my favourite films. What does this have to do with As I Lay Dying? Kurtz summed up his situation as “The horror, the horror”. My reaction to this situation would be “The damage, the damage.”

Simply put, the novel is the story of the mother Addie dying upstairs, while outside one of her sons builds her coffin. Addie wanted to be buried with her own people, so her death is followed by a marathon journey through a raging flood to take her to her childhood home.

Faulkner has created an indelible cast of characters in the Bundren family, showing how each views themself, and also each other. Each has a deep sense of aloneness, with the mother Addie the most alone of all. There is little recognition amongst themselves of any other member’s true self. He contrasts this with the way the family is viewed by outsiders, even those few who are still willing to help. It’s a tricky way to write a novel, but Faulkner moves the plot along using each character’s voice. There is no use of an omniscient narrator.

Anse, the father of the family, is one of the most despicable characters in literature. His constantly repeated desire not to be “beholden” to anyone, as a means of manipulating others into giving him things rather than purchase them himself, or worse, borrowing them with an accompanying sense of obligation, was summed up brilliantly by Peabody: “Of course he’d have to borrow a spade to bury his wife with. Unless he could borrow a hole in the ground.”

Addie, mother of five, says

I gave Anse the children. I did not ask for them. I did not even ask for what he could have given me: not-Anse. That was my duty to him, to not ask that, and that duty I would fulfil.

There are things worse than death, physical and/or psychological. None of Anse and Addie’s children would escape unscathed.

Cash, the oldest, obsessed with building a perfect coffin, and then transporting it and his mother properly, will barely survive the journey.

Darl, the son sent away by his father as Addie lay dying said “I don’t know if I am or not”.

Jewel, the wild uncontrollable son, so unlike the others, had a mystery about him.

Dewey Dell, the daughter who tried to make her mother’s death easier, was doomed like so many girls to a life of pain and sorrow.

Vardamon, the youngest, slightly unbalanced already, pondered his idea “My mother is a fish.”

There’s a sense of negation all share individually. Addie negates Anse in her mind. After the children were born, she saw him as dead, albeit someone who didn’t know he was dead. Jewel defiantly stands alone. Cash displaces himself into his work. Darl seeks to destroy all through fire . Vardaman loses himself completely after his mother’s death. Dewey Dell is perhaps an exception but her search for an abortion is yet another form of negation. As for Anse, he negates the needs of his entire family.

I first read this book as a very young teenager. The image of the coffin being built with Addie listening as she lay dying, along with the later river trip, had stuck in my mind ever since. However, to give an idea of what I did not remember, was Davey Dell’s pregnancy, although I do remember the scene in the pharmacy basement. Perhaps I was too young to recognise her plight.

It is definitely a book, like so many by Faulkner, worth being read many times. The language, which reads so simply, is brilliant, creating a world of its own, yet one which feels so real.

Fabulous review as As I Lay Dying, Sassy. That's the only book by Faulkner I've read so far, and I'll read it again once I engage in my project of reading all of his novels.

Those names would fit fine in a sci-fi tale.