Capitol Hill Blue Forums Misc. Topics Book, Movie & Podcast Reviews my own book page

Well guys. My friend Tony loves to pull my chain. He asked me what would happen if he started an all white organization call NAAWP. I wanted to respond on FB and clicked the link. I had been posting on FB all morning. Now when I go to FB by any method I get a German (I think) site. I'll try to paste it here:

nope didn't work. I did a control print screen but don't know how to put it in UBB code.

Me, too. I re-read it every so often. I had a college professor who claimed OHB was his generation's. I guess I'm older than I look. For "coming of age" I'll take OHB.

I even watch and rewatch the movies. The Bette Davis and Ashley Wilkes version is far superior.

I haven't read that since I was too young to understand what it was about - I don't even remember it. Okay, I'll get that one too.

Some of the stuff out there - the really old stuff - is absolutely fascinating. I found a housekeeping book for young girls - I couldn't put it down; I knew housekeeping in the "olden days" was tough but I had no idea HOW tough. (One whole lesson was reserved for managing the coal stove - building and keeping a fire, managing the various drafts and dampers, and finally blacking and polishing.)

The missing section in my previous post was "Catcher in the Rye," which my professor considered to be my generation's OHB.

Which I'm about to put in my laptop and watch.

My father found one of those in a house he bought and sent it to me. I remember an absolutely hysterical section on milk. Can't remember the book's name. Will check tomorrow when I'm up. Stayed down today.

The 1999 edition of Best American Short Stories was edited by Amy Tan. At the time it was published, I chose not to buy it because for some reason I've never been interested in anything she's written. Last year I changed my mind and bought it from an online used-book site. I'm glad I did. Judging by the writing style in the introduction, I probably still won't read any Amy Tan, but there were several stories among her selections, the authors of which I will pursue further. Let's move right on to specifics.

1) Sad to say, the first specific is a negative. In Junot Diaz's "The Sun, the Moon, the Stars" the characters are young, perhaps recent high school grads. At one point the narrator is trying to re-light a romance with his girl and says, "A lot of the time she Bartlebys me," (page 17) as in she keeps saying no. Cool line … but for a recent high school student? I remember doses of Melville in college, not high school.

2) A woman, hired to play the piano in a cocktail lounge, starts playing classical music. The "customers seemed to bend under the shower of notes like cows hiding from a thunderstorm." (page 88) Cool analogy, IMHO.

3) A narrator, George, observes a moose which "waggled its unwieldy antlers. The gesture did not appear hostile so much as an attempt on the part of the animal to shake off an oversized party hat that had become attached to its head. Moose shed their antlers after the fall rut, George knew. He wondered if they itched. (page 102) Amused me.

4) A character is described as a "winter-pale girl." (page 276.) Winter-pale. I like that.

5) A story entitled "The Bunchgrass Edge of the World" by Annie Proulx is included in this short story volume. I didn't want to like it because when Brokeback Mountain—which is based on a story she wrote—lost the academy award to Crash, she kept referring to the winner as Trash. Doing so, IMHO, showed a definite lack of class. Then on the opening page of "The Bunchgrass Edge of the World" there's this sentence: "In 1930 he was in New York, shoveling the Waldorf-Astoria off the side of a barge into the Atlantic Ocean." (page 294) Does anyone have any idea what that bunch of words might mean? I sure don't. Ultimately though, I did like the story. Guess it's hard to go wrong with your standard girl-meets-tractor plot.

6) In India a room in a hotel is furnished to "… create a shipboard atmosphere. The first time Bannister sat in this room he felt a slight vertigo, as if the floor had tilted under him. It was not pleasant. Bannister likes things to behave the way they're supposed to. (page 316) Great one-line characterization, IMHO of course.


Since I'm now reading in the "literary" field, I'm noticing even more words that make me go, "Huh?"

1) "metal tiffin box" (page 30) Tiffin: lunch, midday meal, British

2) "the adago of oars" (page 140) Dictionary.com knows not adago. I think it's a musical term. Anyone know for sure?

3) "Louis's anima" (page 174) Surprise! Anima is not animal with a typo. It means soul, life or "the feminine principle, esp. as present in men." (dictionary.com)

4) "seems to take the dacoits in stride. (page 317) Dacoits: "(in India and Burma) a member of a class of criminals who engage in organized robbery and murder." Dictionary.com

5) "… a man in a dhoti leans over." (page 320) An article of clothing? Yep. "a long loincloth worn by many Hindu men in India" dictionary.com

All in all, a pretty good set of stories.

Oh. Based on Julis's comment a few days ago where she said she was saving anthologies for her retirement, I've decided to will her my collection of America's Best Short Stories . It covers a lot of years. Should take her a day or two to read.

You have NO idea how my eyes lit up at that last paragraph! Yowza!

I've been really enjoying podcast short stories lately - PRI's "Selected Shorts" and "New Yorker Fiction." You might really like those, Martha, on your less-than-terrific days; the readers are very, very good.

If "The adago of oars" is a misprint that was missed by the proofreader, it might well be "adagio" -- slow - as in Barber's "Adagio for Strings."

I have just finished Christopher Buckley's Losing Mum and Pup. Buckley's parents (William F., Jr. and Pat Buckley) died a little over a year apart. The book is a fairly simple re-telling of that year - of what it's like to deal with losing a parent, caring for another in decline, then losing that one as well.

The writing is good; the emotions are clear though understated (as one might expect from back East, old money.) Somehow, even though I have nothing at all in common with a family like this, I found the story moving. I do recommend it; it's a quick read but a good one.

It has to be a misprint, because there is no other musical term that fits other than adagio.

Just finished a wonderful book called "Heresy" by S.J. Parris. This is a new author for me, who apparently was a contributing journalist for the Observer and the Guardian. The novel is set late in Queen Elizabeth I reign and has an excommunicant monk named Giordano Bruno placed in an Oxford University house by Walshingham to ferret out secretly practicing Catholics. A little bit slow in the beginning but the pace picked up quickly. There is potential for a series of books with this character, along with the usual historical cast. I enjoyed it.

Though I can't read books any longer...
Didn't want y'all to miss this... How Amazon kills books and makes us stupid

I violated all my reading rules with Kathryn Stockett's The Help. Why? I'd read a blurb in Entertain Weekly (great place for book reviews, BTW) that said the book had been passed over by 26 agents and was now on the best-seller lists. Man! Them be words any rejected writer likes to hear! So last Wednesday afternoon I bought the book, put down the one I was reading and started The Help. Saturday night I finished it. Wow! A book after my own heart.

It's set in 1963/64 Mississippi and looks at the interactions between well-off southern families and their "help," which consists of African-American women. Structurally, the story is told by three narrators: Skeeter, the young southern woman who has the idea to write a book about how the help sees their employers, and Abileen and Minny, two of the maids. I figure that last bit, using black women as narrators, is why so many agents turned the book down. White writers messing around with black dialects can get in a lot of trouble. My guess is those agents didn't want to take the risk.

Lots of dog-eared pages. Let's see which ones contain things I still want to talk about.

1) Miss Picky did way too much reading on linguistics while she was teaching at A&M, including one book titled Black English. It made an attempt to explain aspects of various black dialects by comparing them African languages. One I remember is that in several of those languages, there's no need to put an "s" at the end of the noun if the speaker has already said there's more than one. Thus, rapper 50 cent illustrates this rule. When Ms Stockett has Aibleen say, "I got thirteen dollars and fifty cents" (page 15), neither "s" is needed.

2) Skeeter's mother, a southerner-to-the-core, comes into the living room where Skeeter and the maid, Pascagoula, are watching a newscast covering James Meredith's entrance into Ole Miss. Pascagoula leaves the room immediately. I find the dialogue that follows her exit a good example of characterization through speech and action.
Action + dialogue = character. Proven theory.

3) I ran across many nicely turned phrases. In one Skeeter talks about the honest relationship she and her friend Hilly have had and concludess, "With other people Hilly turns out lies like the Presbyterians hand out guilt." (page 80) Cool.

4) Often I recognized myself in some character. Hilly shows Skeeter a picture of a blind date she, Hill, has arranged. Skeeter studies the picture. "He had clear open eyes, light brown curly hair, was the tallest in a group of men by a lake. But his body was half-hidden by the others. He must not have all his limbs." (page 113) I'll match Skeeters there-has-to-be-something-wrong feeling and raise her two. Before I left for college, I received a picture of my roommate-to-be. Beautiful girl, seated on a couch in a blue party dress. Tiara in her hair. My first thought? OMG! She must not have any legs.

5) In a Minny-narrated section, Minny learns that Abileen is considering working with Skeeter on the book about the maids. Minny's thoughts:
Wow! IMHO.

6) Minny meets the husband of the woman she's working for. "And he is sort of handsome. For a white man." (page 139) Amused me. At A&M I worked with a black lady who used to say Clark Gable was "sort of handsome. For a white man." OK. Maybe it was the memory that amused me.

7) Skeeter, on her way to visit Albideen at her home, thinks, "The colored part of town seems so far away when, evidently, it's only a few miles from the white part." (page 143) Bet that's true in a lot of places.

8) In another Minny-narrated section, Minny tries to pinpoint why she is telling her experiences as a maid to Skeeter rather than joining some of the more famous protests that are in the news. "… truth is, I don't care that much about voting. I don't care about eating at a counter with white people. What I care about is, if in ten years, a white lady will call my girls dirty and accuse them of stealing the silver." (page 218) Protection of family. Surely that's a motive anyone can grasp.

9) To me, there's nothing more impressive than a writer who can make me feel something and then, in less than a page, turn that emotion around. Abileen talks about a family she used to work for where the child, a very young boy, showed confusion about pronouns—and other things.
Amused by the first paragraph, I was in tears by the end of the second.

10) At one point in the book Skeeter tries to humiliate Hilly by having a large number of toilets placed on her front yard. (Yes, the event does work in the plot, but explaining it would take too long. Trust me. Please.) Later Skeeter writes, "When I started typing out her bathroom initiative for the newsletter, typing words like disease and protect yourself and you're welcome!, something cracked open inside of me, not unlike a watermelon, cool and soothing and sweet. I always thought insanity would be a dark, bitter feeling, but it is drenching and delicious if you really roll around it." (page 345) Interesting.

The Help is good. Ignore that it's on the best-seller list and that the cast for the movie is already being selected and announced. Read it anyway. You'll like it. Trust me.