Saturday Review of Books: January 21, 2012

Jan20

â€œDo not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.â€ ~Gustave Flaubert

Welcome to the Saturday Review of Books at Semicolon. Hereâ€™s how it usually works. Find a book review on your blog posted sometime during the previous week. The review doesnâ€™t have to be a formal sort of thing. You can link to your thoughts on a particular book, a few ideas inspired by reading the book, your evaluation, quotations, whatever.

Then on Friday night/Saturday, you post a link here at Semicolon in Mr. Linky to the specific post where youâ€™ve written your book review. Donâ€™t link to your main blog page because this kind of link makes it hard to find the book review, especially when people drop in later after youâ€™ve added new content to your blog. In parentheses after your name, add the title of the book youâ€™re reviewing. This addition will help people to find the reviews theyâ€™re most interested in reading.

After linking to your own reviews, you can spend as long as you want reading the reviews of other bloggers for the week and adding to your wishlist of books to read. That’s how my own TBR list has become completely unmanageable and the reason I can’t join any reading challenges. I have my own personal challenge that never ends.

Singin’ in the Rain (1952)

Jan20

Directors: Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly
Writers: Adolph Green and Betty Comden
Starring: Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynolds, and Jean Hagen

Z-Baby says: Some of it is funny, and some of it is boring. (Donald O’Connor’s solo, Make Em Laugh, was the part that made Z-baby laugh the most.)

Semicolon Mom says: I thought all the singing and dancing was fascinating. The story was thin and hokey, but story is not the main point of the movie. In fact, the movie within the movie practically screamed that the point of the musical, at least to the producers and directors of Singin’ in the Rain, is to shoehorn in all the song and dance numbers you can and work the plot around the dancing. Dialog is optional.

Ha! IMDB says, “The script was written after the songs, and so the writers had to generate a plot into which the songs would fit.”

We enjoyed listening to Z-baby chuckling at the movie almost as much as we enjoyed the movie itself.

IMDB link to Singin’ in the Rain.

1951: Books and Literature

Jan20

Collected Stories of William Faulkner wins the National Book Award.

The Town by Conrad Richter wins the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

PÃ¤r Lagerkvist wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Published in 1951:
My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier. I’ve read this one, and it’s not as good as Rebecca, but it’s not bad.

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene. I just didn’t get this story. It’s about an illicit affair, and the woman who ends it because she makes a promise to God. I just didn’t get why it’s supposed to be so very meaningful and well-written. I’m afraid I may be demonstrating my philistinism, but there it is.

Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis. Not my favorite of the Narnia tales, but still a good book. And it introduces one of my favorite characters, Reepicheep the mouse.

Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. Never read it.

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey. One of my favorite historical fiction mysteries of all time. From his hospital bed while recuperating from a broken leg, Scotland Yard Police Inspector Alan Grant solves the case of the murder of the two princes in the tower which occurred around the year 1483.

The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk. Winner of the 1952 Pulitzer Prize. I read this 1951 best-seller when I was in high school at a church camp, and I remember it as an absorbing tale. The book was later made into a movie starring Humphrey Bogart.

Fiction set in 1951:
Unfinished Desires by Gail Godwin. Recommended by Jennifer at 5 Minutes for Books.

The Attenbury Emeralds by Jill Paton Walsh.

1950: Events and Inventions

Jan19

January 26, 1950. The new constitution of India is ratified, forming a republic, and Rajendra Prasad is sworn in as India’s first president.

March 6, 1950. Scientist Klaus Fuchs is sentenced to 14 years in prison for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.

April 27, 1950. In South Africa, the Group Areas Act is passed, formally segregating the races. This segregation is called apartheid.

June, 1950. The first human kidney transplant is performed by U.S. surgeon R.H. Lawler.

June 25, 1950. The People’s Republic of North Korea launches a surprise invasion of The Republic of South Korea. The 38th parallel of latitude marks the border between the two nations now, but communist North Korea under the rule of Russian-supported President Kim Il-sung wishes to unite Korea under one communist government.

June 27, 1950. U.S. President Harry S. Truman orders American military forces to aid in the defense of South Korea.

October 2, 1950. The comic strip Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz is first published in seven U.S. newspapers.

October 7, 1950. The 1950-1951 invasion of Tibet by People’s Republic of China begins.

October 19, 1950. The People’s Republic of China enters the Korean conflict by sending thousands of soldiers across the Yalu River.

Christian Fiction: Average to Middle of the Road

Jan18

I read the following because they were on the long list of nominations for the INSPY awards, but I must say that they were just so-so, fair to middling.

An Unlikely Suitor by Nancy Moser. I’ve read other books by Ms. Moser, and enjoyed them, but after I waited for over 180 pages for the unlikely suitor to show up, I was tired and a bit cranky. Then, I thought the aforementioned suitor was a cad and and a liar, and I found it difficult to suspend disbelief for the multiple fairy tale romances that took place in the last half of the book. If you’ve got a better disbelief suspension mechanism than I do, and if you don’t mind a male romantic lead who leads two young women to believe he’s in love with them at the same time, you might like this one better than I did.

On Hummingbird Wings by Lauraine Snelling. Gillian, the protagonist, is a self-centered corporate b— who hasn’t visited her mother in California in five years. Or is it more? Gillian can’t remember exactly. Gillian’s only sister, Allie, has a husband and two teenage children, but she takes care of mom who lives in the next town over. Allie, however, is a whiner, and according to Gillian that’s the cardinal sin. Mom is domineering and set in her ways, and now she’s decided to die despite the fact that her doctor says she has no life-threatening ailments. Mom seems to have passive-aggressive down to an art form. If all three of them sound like unpleasant people who deserve each other, they are. Or else I was in a bad mood when I read this story of two daughters trying NOT to take responsibility for caring for their aging mother. I just wanted to tell all three of them to grow up and get over themselves. At least the love interest in this one is a good guy. But Gillian doesn’t deserve him.

The Romeo and Juliet Code by Phoebe Stone

Jan17

I like reading books that are re-imagined versions of Shakespeare’s plots, and that’s why I checked out The Romeo and Juliet Code. But it’s not that sort of book at all.

Instead, The Romeo and Juliet Code plays into another interest of mine: World War II and spies. Felicity Bathburn Budwig is a very, very British eleven year old girl who ends up in Maine at her estranged grandmother’s house by the sea. The year is 1941, and London, Felicity’s former home, is in the midst of The Blitz. When Felicity’s parents, Danny and Winnie, leave her to live with Danny’s American family–Uncle Gideon, Aunt Miami, and The Gram—Felicity is sure that Danny and Winnie will soon come back to get her and take her home, to England, where she belongs.

Felicity has a stuffed bear named Wink who reminded me of Paddington for some reason. And her American family is odd enough to people the pages of a fantasy novel rather than the straight historical fiction that this story purports to be. Then, there’s also someone named Captain Derek who may or may not live in a secret room upstairs. And there are secret letters, and a code, and an island and a lighthouse, and Aunt Miami who’s obsessed with Romeo and Juliet. All put together it’s the sort of story an imaginative girl could concoct in perilous times, and the point of view feels right. Strange, but right.

The problem would be finding the right readers, those who would enjoy a spy story that’s not very fast-paced or danger-filled, or a quirky family story that turns out to be quite realistic, or a historical fiction novel that has a lot of precious-ness mixed in with the history. If any of that admixture sounds like your cuppa, you might want to check out this Brit-comes-to-America-and-finds-a-home story of a girl nicknamed Flissy. Just know that Romeo and Juliet play a rather small part in the whole gallimaufry.

Believing the Lie by Elizabeth George

Jan17

I have read and appreciated most of Elizabeth George’s Scotland Yard detective novels featuring the aristocratic Inspector Thomas Lynley, his slovenly yet astute assistant Barbara Havers, his long-time associates, forensic specialist Simon St. James and Simon’s wife, photographer Deborah St. James, and other recurring characters from New Scotland Yard and from Lynley’s personal set of friends and acquaintances. The series began in 1988 with the novel A Great Deliverance, and Believing the Lie is the seventeenth book to feature these same characters as they investigate murder while dealing with the intense drama and psychological trauma that such work involves.

When I reviewed Steig Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo a few weeks ago at The Point, I said that novel crossed the invisible line that I have for my own use between acceptable, thought-provoking, and informative literature and that which travels into the realm of the prurient, salacious, and gratuitously violent. For me, Elizabeth George’s novels have always danced around that line, but they have fallen on the side of memorable depictions of the subtleties of evil and of crime and the ways in which our hearts and minds can be so complicated and so difficult to manage. Inspector Lynley is a complicated guy, a man whose aristocratic background would enable him do without a mundane job as a police detective, but who sees himself as needing the job as much as or more than it needs him. His assistant, Havers, is in her own eyes as uncomplicated a person as could be imagined. Nevertheless, as the series develops we see more and more about her and her web of relationships and life-decisions, and even the simple straight-talking Barbara Havers becomes an intricate puzzle of a person with depths of character and perception that can only begin to be fathomed.

And that’s why I like the books. George’s characters are wonderfully complex and yet true-to-life and identifiable. And they’re also so very British, which is loads of fun for an Anglophile like me. The situations they find themselves in, however, are nasty and sometimes obscene. Illicit sex and violence abound. Dilemmas and issues concerning random cruelty, the nature of marriage, the ethics of reproduction, malice and revenge, sexual morality, and the nature of justice are the recurring themes of Ms. George’s detective novels, and although I like the way she explores these themes, I admit to some discomfort with the (not gratuitous but definitely vivid) descriptions of violence and sexual perversion and immorality.

So, am I fer’em er agin’em? Well, I wouldn’t recommend the novels to everyone. However, if you like the psychological depths of P.D. James’s novels and you can tolerate the horrific nature of the crimes in the Steig novels or in the TV series Bones, you would be a candidate for enjoying Elizabeth George’s Inspector Lynley novels. The characters do stay with me and make me care, even when I want to give some of them a good talking to and a dose of gospel truth.

As for this specific installment in the series, Believing the Lie is an absorbing story with repeating instances of deception within dysfunctional families leading to tragic outcomes. And all of the families and individuals in the story are dysfunctional, emotionally broken, and capable of acting on the basis of really poor decisions. In fact, one of my favorite recurring characters in the series, Deborah St. James, does something in this novel that is so wrong that even though she is repentant at the end, I’m finding it difficult to see her repentance as commensurate with the “crime.”

Elizabeth George’s website where you can read more about her and her books.

Thanks to Penguin for making the ARC available for my review. Publication is scheduled for sometime this month.

1950: Books and Literature

Jan16

The Way West by A. B. Guthrie, Jr. wins the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Bertrand Russell won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The National Book Awards are established and the fiction award is presented by former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt to author Nelson Ahlgren for his book, Man With the Golden Arm.

The Door in the Wall by Marguerite de Angeli, published in 1949, went on to win the Newbery Award in 1950. The story a boy, Robin, during the Middle Ages who wants to become a knight like his father. However, disease (polio?) strikes, and Robin’s legs become paralyzed. He is taken to a monastery where he regains the use of his legs to some extent and strengthens his spirit and character with the friendship and help of the monks. Robin later becomes a hero. It’s a lovely story to read aloud to children who are trying to figure out what real bravery and heroism are.

The Carnegie Medal for Children’s Literature is awarded to The Lark on the Wing by Elfrida Vipont. Has anybody read it?

Published in 1950:
The Little World of Don Camillo by Giovanni Guareschi.
Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis.

So they went and knocked on the study door, and the Professor said, “Come in,” and got up and found chairs for them and said he was quite at their disposal. Then he sat listening to them with the tips of his fingers pressed together and never interrupting, till they had finished the whole story. After that he said noting for quite a long time. Then he cleared his throat and said the last thing either of them expected:

“How do you know,” he asked, “that your sister’s story is not true?”

“Oh, but” began Susan, and then stopped. Anyone could see from the old man’s face that he was perfectly serious. Then Susan pulled herself together and said, “But Edmund said they had only been pretending.”

“That is a point,” said the professor, “which certainly deserves consideration. For instance, if you will excuse me for asking the question, does your experience lead you to regard you brother or your sister as the more reliable? I mean, which is the more truthful?”

“That’s just the funny thing about it, sir,” said Peter. “Up till now, I’d have said Lucy every time.”

“And what do you think, my dear?” said the Professor, turning to Susan.

“Well,” said Susan, “in general, I’d say the same as Peter, but this couldn’t be true– all this about the wood and the Faun.”

“That is more than I know,” said the Professor, “and a charge of lying against someone whom you have always found truthful is a very serious thing; a very serious thing indeed.”

“We were afraid it mightn’t even be lying,” said Susan; “we thought there might be something wrong with Lucy.”

“Madness, you mean?” said the Professor quite coolly. “Oh, you can make your minds easy about that. One has only to look at her to see that she is not mad.”

“But then,” said Susan, and stopped. She had never dreamed that a grown-up would talk like the Professor and didn’t know what to think.

“Logic!” said the Professor half to himself. “Why don’t they teach logic at these schools? There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn”t tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth.”

A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute.
Three Doors to Death and In the Best Families by Rex Stout. Nero Wolfe’s charge to his assistant Archie: “You are to act in the light of experience as guided by intelligence.”
The 13 Clocks by James Thurber. Reviewed at Things Mean a Lot.

“Once upon a time, in a gloomy castle on a lonely hill, where there were thirteen clocks that wouldn’t go, there lived a cold, aggressive Duke, and his niece, the Princess Saralinda. She was warm in every wind and weather, but he was always cold. His hands were as cold as his smile and almost as cold as his heart.”

Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl.

1949: Events and Inventions

Jan16

January, 1949. New micro-groove 45-rpm records are invented in the United States.

March 18, 1949. NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is formed by agreement between twelve countries: the United States, Britain, Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland. The purpose of the alliance is “mutual defense in response to an attack by any external party.” NATO is primarily a response to the Communist takeover of Eastern Europe and the growing perceived threat from the Soviet Union. The North Atlantic Treaty is actually signed on April 4th.

April, 1949. The newly proclaimed Republic of Ireland (not including Northern Ireland) leaves the United Kingdom Commonwealth.

May 12, 1949. The Soviet Union lifts its blockade of Berlin.

May 23, 1949. Dr. Konrad Adenauer becomes the first chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany). West Germany consists of the American, French, and British zones of occupation, but not the Soviet zone of occupation which is formed by Stalin into a communist state called the German Democratic Republic in October.

July, 1949. The Pope declares that supporters of communism will be excommunicated from the faith as communists and social democrats vie for political control in Italy and elsewhere in Europe.

August 29, 1949. The USSR tests its first atomic bomb, built partly as a result of secrets stolen from the U.S. nuclear program. Klaus Fuchs, a German-British theoretical physicist and atomic spy, is convicted in 1950 of supplying information from the American, British and Canadian atomic bomb research (the Manhattan Project) to the USSR.

October 1, 1949. Mao Zedong declares the civil war in China to be over and the new People’s Republic of China to be the legitimate government of the country. Nationalist Chinese, led by Chiang Kai-shek, are not welcome as part of Mao’s new republic and will be expelled from mainland China to the island of Taiwan.

October 16, 1949. The Greek civil war, which began in 1944 when the Nazi army pulled out of Greece, is over. The Greeks have defeated Communist guerrilla fighters to establish a democratic government, but the war has left the country bitterly divided still because of the atrocities committed by both sides during the civil war.

December, 1949. Queen Juliana of the Netherlands grant Indonesia, formerly the Dutch East Indies, independence and sovereignty. Sukarno is elected president of the Republic of Indonesia.

Saturday Review of Books: January 14, 2012

Jan13

â€œThe Egyptians often, in death, had their favorite cats embalmed, to cozen their feet. If things go well, my special pets will pace me into eternity, Shakespeare as pillow, Pope at one elbow, Yeats at the other, and Shaw to warm my toes. Good company for far traveling.â€ ~Ray Bradbury