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In Montana I was in a little ghost of a town. We had to eat at a greasy spoon. The place was lined with books that apparently had belonged to the library in the town when the library existed. I found "The McBain Brief" and bought it for Martha. It is a collection of his short stories and I believe the copyright date is 1962. There are some AMAZING gems in this book. Now I get why you, Martha, love McBain. Most of the stories are told in pure dialog but the lessons, the TRUTH of these stories -- simply left me almost breathless. Let me know if you have this book Martha. I purchased it for you.

It's crazy around here. We are down to one car again. I can't get home long enough to get something done before it's time to pick someone up or drop something off.

aarrrggghhh

Well, if you're gonna be like that - well, let me - I can move some of these books and - could you grab that pen that fell on the floor? Now there's room; sit down, get comfortable, and stick around the thread for awhile!

Oh hell, now I've gone and done it.

Yes. Thank you. Don't have it. Want it. Is there a Christmas story in it?

Martha, I'm on page 78 of 240 pages and I haven't seen a Christmas story yet.

I'd be willing to bet you are going to LOVE this book.

finished reading The Evolution of God by Robert Wright. Mostly excellent, thought provoking and careful examination of how our concept of "God" has changed from our earliest existence to today. At times he gets a bit repetitive and makes a few jumps in logic I wasn't comfortable making, but for the most part is careful to allow the reader to form their own opinions.

I especially appreciated his taking apart the Bible and Koran and showing when and how passages were added and what purpose was served. His examination of the middle East history is quite eye opening, for me at least.

A sample from the book:

A while back, probably mid 2008, I read and reviewed Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road. In December of that year I saw the movie version and thought: Wow! I didn’t remember the story being so strong. Did all that happen in the book? I checked my review which said the book was really gripping, but I didn’t want to tell what happened in case anyone wanted to read it. Why ruin the story? Damn. Revolutionary Road went back on the unread shelf. During my between-computers hiatus I reread it. Wow! Gripping story. Did all that happen in the movie? I Netflexed it. Conclusion: the movie’s good; the book is better.

Specifics (which I didn't do in my first review):

1) Frank Wheeler, the all-knowing, discontent, suburban husband says, “It’s as if everybody’d made this tacit agreement to live in a state of total self-deception. The hell with reality! Let’s have a whole bunch of cute little winding roads and cute little houses painted white and pink and baby blue; let’s all be good consumers and have a lot of Togetherness and bring our children up in a bath of sentimentality—Daddy’s a good man because he makes a living, Mummy’s a great woman because she’s stuck by Daddy all these years—and if old reality ever does pop out and say Boo we’ll all get busy and pretend it never happened.” (pages 65-66) Ah, yes. The joy of striking at the shallowness of the 1950s and early 1960s. “I remember it well.”

2) And—man!—could Frank talk! “Sentences poured from him, paragraphs composed themselves and took wing, appropriate anecdotes sprang to his service and fell back to make way for the stately passage of epigrams.” (page 96) Never once does Yates need to point out how fake Frank is. (Just thought: Frank, perfect name for the character. And Wheeler? Damn! I’m jealous.)

3) April (springtime? hope?), Frank’s wife, persuades him to throw away suburbia and fulfill their youthful dreams. “Don’t you see what I’m saying? It’s got nothing to do with definite, measurable talents—it’s your very essence that’s being denied and denied and denied in this kind of life.” (italics his) (page 114) Of course, Frank agrees. Heavens! He’d almost forgotten how wonderful he was.

4) Helen Givings, the realtor who sold the Wheelers their suburban home, has, along with her husband, become friends with the Wheelers. Helen has a bad moment after all four of them spend an unsatisfying evening together. She pulls herself together and goes downstairs to talk to her husband because she knows doing so will make her feel better. The chapter ends on the next page with “Howard Givings timed his nods, his smiles, and his rumblings so judiciously that she never guessed he had turned his hearing aid off for the night.” (page 166) Wow!

Summing up: Read this book! In 1961 it was up against Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer for the National Book Award and lost. I cannot fathom why. And, yes, I have read them both. Twice.

BTW, the Givings subplot may be better in the movie than the book, but that’s because Number-One-Fan Anne What’s-Her-Name plays Helen and two terrific actors I didn’t know play Howard and the insane son.

sounds interesting. I tried--unsucessfully--to watch season 1 of HBO's Rome. The one thing that fascinated me, though, was how completly the Romans believed in--and feared--their gods.
Does Wright get into that type of connection? The implied parallel to today was amazing.

Martha, he goes into the more ancient religions, their gods and to some extent their relationship with the people. His focus is on the development of god(s) from early times to our current times, focusing mostly on the Abrahamic religions.

Salman Rushdie was the guest editor of 2008’s edition of The Best American Short Stories, a fact I mention simply because it meant I almost didn’t buy it. Why? Somewhat shamefacedly, I admit a preference for (Nay, let’s be honest: an almost exclusive interest in) American writers. Now the foreword in this short story edition did a lot toward changing my thinking. Heidi Pitlor, the series editor, questioned each word in the book’s title. When she got to “American,” she acknowledged Rushdie to be “a native non-American living part-time in the United States.” (page x) In that regard, she liked his perspective. I did, too. (Of course, now I’m going to have to find and buy the volume Amy Tan edited, which is the only one I’m missing since I started reading the series in 1988. I guess she's American, but I expected an exclusively oriental slant from her.)

I mention the above also as a tribute to you guys. I do read many, many of the books you review. Often you pull me out of my comfort zone. Mellow sends me to Germany and Japan; I enjoy the experience and now keep an eye out for other books by “her” authors. Phil gets me to read philosophical/religious books I never would have picked out on my own. Even Kathy. While we may not often agree to a book or author, when we do, it’s WOW! Early on in this thread someone actually got me, an English major, to read Ayn Rand. And I liked most of what she wrote. So, to all of you, a huge “Thank You!”

And back to the review.

My major “find” in this edition was a Karen Brown, whose story was “Galaea” from Crazyhorse. Opening sentence: “I married William in upstate before he turned out to be the Collegetown Creeper.” (page 36) No way I’d stop reading after that.

Other “Galaea” highpoints:

1) “I had a fireplace in my apartment. Angela had one downstairs in hers. We were not allowed to use them, but we put large lighted pillar candles in them, and it gave the illusion of warmth we desired.” (page 38) “The illusion of” was what was desired? Wow!

2) About William’s family: “They had an enclosed front porch with an air hockey game, and gnome statuary on the front lawn that William, as a child, believed came alive at night. Before she died, his mother grew apples and sold them at a small roadside stand, Macoun and Winesap and Cortland. I imagined, from these aspects of his life, that I knew everything about him.” (page 39) We do that, don’t we? The first college crush I had was on a boy who, on the way to the initial read through of a play we were both in, looked up at the starry sky and said, “Somewhere up there is Oz.” He had me at Oz.

3) Early in the narrator’s relationship with William, he leaves her apartment and she falls asleep. When she wakes up, he’s there, wearing his wide-brimmed hat, watching TV with the sound off and eating Korean takeout food. “I thought I should be a little afraid of him, coming into my apartment without asking, but I was not.” (page 41) And that bit sets up a perfectly wonderful scene that comes later. The narrator and William have broken up. She picks up a guy and takes him back to her apartment. The following occurs after they’ve had sex. And I laughed out loud. I love understatement.

4) Back to the early William days: “We looked at each other for a long time, believing we knew what the other thought. I saw I could imagine anything about him, even a past he might never confess. I saw this was what love was.” (page 46) Ah, yes. And the answer then becomes, IMHO, get to know anyone well enough and you’ll never get married.

Karen Brown’s one published work, a collection of short stories called Pins and Needles, is on my to-be-read list.

There are other dog-eared pages in The Best American Short Stories 2008, but I think I’ll limit my in-depth review to Karen Brown’s “Galatea.”

Immediately after finishing The Best American Short Stories 2008, I read the collection of last year’s winning writings in the Writer’s Digest yearly contest. Boy, was that sequence a mistake. ‘Nuff said!

Now it's back to reading Leon Uris's Mila 18, which will be reviewed a few days from now.