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Last night I finished the last "kitchen book" (the ones I was going to read daily in the kitchen and didn't), specifically Thornton Wilder's Collected Plays & Writings on Theater. Final takeaway thought: Wilder is one truly versatile writer. I'll provide details later, but right now I want to start with an oddity about the book itself. A group of a dozen or so plays in Collected Plays & Writings on Theater is titled "Uncollected Plays." Cracked me up every time I checked to see if it really was the title. Doesn't that move us right on into a logic tangle much like Mellow's concern with posted-0-seconds-ago?

Anyway, I started reading with the belief that except for the indescribably powerful Our Town I didn't really like Wilder's stuff. Turns out I was wrong. Apparently I'm now old enough to understand and enjoy The Skin of Our Teeth. I strongly recommend that anyone who hasn't read those two since they were required reading in high school give them another try. Teeth has aged quite well and makes amazingly relevant comments on the thinking of today. Our Town? I was literally sobbing when I read Act III, as opposed to only misting up in the Paul-Newman-as-Narrator film version. And this I'm recommending? You betcha!

Other Wilder surprises were:

1) How much I liked two short plays in a group of plays entitled The Seven Ages of Man. In "Childhood" three children are always playing games about their parents being dead and making them orphans. Finally they pretend they're running away and board a bus where their father is the driver and their mother another passenger. The play presents some interesting observations about childhood and children's reactions to adults. Near the end, Dodie, the middle child, says, "The reason I don't like grown-ups is that they don't ever think any inneresting (sic) thoughts. I guess they're so old that they just get tired of expecting anything to be different or exciting." (page 614) I guess it does seem like that to a child, but if true, how sad. "Youth" takes place when a forty-something captain is shipwrecked on an island. At first I thought I'd found the original Gillian's Island, but it soon became clear I hadn’t. On the island everyone is killed at twenty-nine because the natives have no use for old people and see no value in them. The play's a nice piece on how the youth of one generation learns from the older members of the previous generations.

2) In a film version of Our Town, made in the 1940, Emily lives. Even worse, Thorton Wilder agreed to the change. In a letter to the director of the movie Wilder writes, "I think Emily should live. … In a movie you see the people so closely that a different relation is established. In a theatre they are halfway abstractions in an allegory; in the movie they are very concrete. So, insofar as the play is a generalized allegory, she dies—we die—they die; insofar as it's a concrete happening it's not important that she die; it's even disproportionately cruel that she die." (pages 680-681) Even though I understand the logic, I think I vehemently disagree. Now I'll go see if the film exists. Wilder went for the idea, and he was the author. (Added later; It's on my Netflix list. We'll see.)

3) Wilder also wrote a really good film script entitled Shadow of a Doubt. Very Hitchcockian. I'll also check on its existence. Just did so. Actually it does exist, was directed by Hitchcock—and I've seen it. Maybe I'll Netflix it again because I think the film ends differently. But then I had to check the end of the script the next day 'cause I didn't remember it. Maybe it's just a weak ending in both.

All in all, I like/appreciate Thorton Wilder a lot more now.

I bought and read Barbara Corrado Pope's Cezanne's Quarry because the author and I attended Hiram College at the same time. We were, in fact, friends minus or acquaintances plus. I remember playing marathon bridge games with her on Friday afternoons, but mostly I remember what an intellectual she was. I was fascinated by a paper she wrote where she analyzed Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy by studying how each word in the title related to the events and themes of the novel. Fascinating, IMHO. Even more so when in graduate school I was exposed to Aristotle's theories of the structure of dramatic literature. Actually I think that while I was at Indiana University studying such things, I may have morphed into a scaled-down version of Barbara Corrado.

Anyway, I approached the book with mixed feelings. I wanted to like it; at the same time I didn't want it to be heads and shoulders above what I've written. Now that I've finished it, I can relax on both counts. Barb was a history major, and Cezanne's Quarry is a murder mystery set in a small-ish (population: "20,000 souls") (page 1) French town in 1885. A woman is raped and murdered in a quarry where Paul Cezanne often paints. Cezanne and Emile Zola, representing real history, are characters, the rest of the "cast" is fictional, and the events which feature them all are fast paced and interesting. I have to admit Barb surprised me in the whodunit area. I didn't see the identity of the murderer coming, and it was perfectly believably. IMHO that's two big pluses in a mystery. The story also provided insights into the history of issues that still concern us today—religion vs. science and women's rights. I recommend it.

Now I am jealous of one thing in particular—Barb got to use her maiden and married names. It's her first book, and her publisher is apparently higher on the scale of niceties than my first publisher. I had tried for Martha Mason Humphreys but was told that had too many letters. I went with Martha Humphreys. My friend Tessa later suggested I should have told them to stop when they had to, but it was too late. I would have liked that. Martha Mason Hu. (Perhaps a Chinese writer?) Better yet: Martha Mason Humph.

I did read Barb closely, and dog-eared the following:

1) "Doling out the property before death was a tried-and-true strategy for evading the inheritance tax." (page 142) Even back then? Interesting. Hope it's researched.

2) A character chastises another for not acting in a Christian way and receives an interesting response. "And when, my dearest, have Christians ever been Christian?" (page 204) The more things change, the more etc.

3) "If only, Martin thought, if only and soon." (205) That, IMHO, sounds way too modern.

4) "If you know what justice is, not bourgeois justice, but real justice for the poor, the weak and the sick, then to hell with the state." (page 216) I like Hiram College. It produces rebels, even if they're writing about other times.

Bottom line: It's good. And I'll push for supporting an old friend and fellow writer: how 'bout going out and buying a copy?

I didn't really get from the book (Three Cups of Tea} specifics about the Taliban other than that one time he had a reasonably respectful conversation with one.

The ones who pronounced fatwas on him for what he was doing (schools for girls) weren't Taliban so I didn't really know.
Your link doesn't surprise me though, Mellow. Thanks

*giggles*
I love Miles Davis. When I get past the hard hard book I'm reading now, I may look it up. Thanks, Logan.

Has "A Thousand Splendid Suns" already been discussed here?
I seem to always be behind everybody on the latest.

I just don't want to go on about it if it's already been covered.
I will finish it tonight.

Yes, but I think it's worth a second opinion. There were sections where I couldn't put it down, but I felt the end was contrived.

Martha, good point. I didn't think of that until you mentioned it but yes I can see you would feel that way and it could have been.

My daughter gave me the book for Christmas. While reading the cover I mistakenly thought it was a sequel to The Kite Runner so I bought and read that one first because I don't like reading books out of order.
I've had some brutality in my past and the sheer tragedy of all the violence and mistreatment affected me deeply. I couldn't put either book down. Of course the plight of women in the middle east was especially powerful to me. The hopelessness of their options.

So by the time I came to the end of Thousand Suns, my relief was palpable that some good happened after all.
I admit I accepted that readily.

The tragedy of the history of women breaks my heart.

Which is why it's good to run into the occasional Lysistrata.

I read Suns first and after I read Kite Runner, I could hear the publisher saying, "OK, you squeaked through with that marginal ending in your first book, but you think you could kick it up a notch this time?"

Both were gripping.

I have yet to read "Kite Runner." "Suns" was a gripping read but I'm back into escapism -- Mary Higgins Clark today.

Kathy

Just re-read Joan Didion's My Year of Magical Thinking, and it led me to another book I've been meaning to re-read for years - Terry Tempest Williams's Refuge, subtitled An Unnatural History of Family and Place. The book was published in 1991; I must have first read it a few years after that.

Terry Tempest Williams is a well-known nature writer. In the 1980s, Great Salt Lake rose several feet - enough to endanger bird refuges and nesting areas, not to mention roads, railways, etc. Williams is a serious birdwatcher, and she followed the birds' welfare with something more than interest.

During that same period of time, Williams' mother (to whom the book is dedicated) was diagnosed with ovarian cancer - her second diagnosis, having survived breast cancer when the author was a child.

Louise Erdrich (another author I love) described the book better than I could: "A record of loss, healing grace, and the search for a human place in nature's large design. [Her] courage is matched by the earnest beatuy of her language and the keen compassion of her observations."

Williams's prologue says "Most of the women in my family are dead. Cancer. At thirty-four, I became the matriarch of my family. The losses I encountered at the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge as Great Salt Lake was rising helped to face the losses within my family."

Quotes from the book:

"Eudora Welty, when asked what causes she would support, replied
'Peace, education, conservation, and quiet.'"

A quote from her mother: "You still don't understand, do you? It doesn't matter how much time I have left. All we have is now. I wish you could all accept that and let go of your projections. Just let me live so I can die."[...]"Terry, to keep hoping for life in the midst of letting go is to rob me of the moment I am in."

" I watch the western grebes through my binoculars. Their eyes are rubies against white feathers. The male's black head-feathers are flared and flattened on top, so they resemble Grace Jones. The female is impresed as she swims alongside. All at once, they arch their back, extend their necks, and dash across the flat water with great speed and grace. They sink back down. They rise up again, running across the water. They sink back down."

If you read this book, do not skip the epilogue, "The Clan of One-Breasted Women." Williams is the matriarch in her family because of bombing tests in Nevada in 1950 - just downwind of Utah towns like St. George. Cancer rates in Utah jumped, and Williams's family were part of that man-made epidemic.

This really is a beautifully written book, and the handing off of sections between human story and bird story is very well done. It is an elegy in prose, for the women in her family, for the natural world, for her mother and her grandmother.

I have to tell you: I love this book.

A twofer:

My one thought during the LONG time I was reading Theodore M. Bernstein's The Careful Writer: A Modern Guide to English Usage was: "OMG! I'll never put finger to keyboard again." By the end, though, I had relaxed. Realizing it was published in 1965 helped lots.

I tackled it because something I read said it was complete and often funny. Complete? Yes. Often funny? Not often enough. I did learn things, and I dog-eared pages. But now I'm tired of it and will continue to rely on instinct as to which preposition is required by a listing of what-seemed-like-every verb in the English language.


Tessa gave me Home Is Where the Cat Is for Christmas. (Which means book-life on the unread shelf is currently five and a half months. AARGH!) Home has pleasant drawings by a Leslie Anne Ivory, pages too nice to be dog-eared, and many quotes about cats from a variety of authors. My favorite is "You can keep a dog, but it is the cat who keeps people, because cats find humans useful domestic creatures" by a George Mikes. (page 6)