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But I'm forced to admit it's what teens apparently want to read 'cause she sure sells. Guess I'm just jealous. But I have read YA books that absolutely grabbed me.

I had mixed reactions to Chester Himes' A Rage in Harlem. It made it onto the unread shelf when something I was reading claimed it was an outstanding example of something—race in American cities, detective novels, cruelty. I don't remember what. Really doesn't matter.

Anyway, my varied responses began when I looked at the cover. The front bills Rage as "the famous, savage novel about a certain neighborhood in the U. S. A." and gives its original title as For Love of Imabelle. (Imabelle, a central character, is attractive—and trouble—to many men.) The title change and the phrase "savage novel" made me suspicious. As in: oh, there goes Hollywood, changing a title to make a book seem more violent than it was. That suspicion lessened towards the end of the book when it seemed a racial "war" would give truth to "vicious." That event, however, never happened, and when the book did end, I felt cheated.

A blurb on the back cover starts with "A Rage in Harlem is a novel about Harlem as even James Baldwin has never approached it." Whoa! Hold on there. You're comparing Chester Himes, a writer I never heard of, to James Baldwin, a major twentieth-century literary figure? Surely you jest.

Then the same blurb ends with a French writer claiming, "The most extraordinary novel I have read in a long time. … I give you all the Hemmingway, Dos Passos, Steinbeck for this Chester Himes." See here, those are pretty outlandish claims. They are also, however, claims that burbled in my mind the whole time I was reading. Then, this morning, I finished reading the book and googled this Himes fellow. Hmmm. Maybe he is a major—albeit mostly ignored—literary figure. I even have a grasp on why he has been ignored. Baldwin wrote about Harlem families with a problem or two; Hines' characters are much lower on the totem pole. Although they are colorful and well-developed, they are violent and clearly the victims of a racist America. I can see why American critics and academicians would not promote Hines' books. I do, however, plan to read more.

Things I noticed:

1) Had a real contrast to Twilight going on with Rage. In Twilight I had a problem with the author's obvious writing by the rules, which, IMHO, made her writing stilted and forced. Not so with Mr. Himes. Remember one rule which says that separating the subject of a sentence and its verb is a bad thing? Take a look at the following: "A medium–sized, brown-skinned man, dressed in a camel's-hair coat, brown beaver hat, hard-finished brown-and-white striped suit, brown suede shoes, brown silk tie decorated with hand-painted yellow horses, wearing a diamond ring on his left ring-finger and a gold signet-ring on his right hand, carrying gloves in his left hand, swinging his right hand free, pushed open the street door and came into the bar fast." (page 69) I don't think I'd ever before seen a sentence with that many words separating the subject and verb. And I think it works. The contrast with Twilight? I sense Himes is comfortable with language in ways Stephanie Meyers can only dream of being, which, for me at least, makes him much easier to read.

2) In my study of description and how it works, I have to give Himes credit: he writes action scenes more vividly than any writer I've encountered—at least that I remember. Example:
Yeah. Awhile back an agent rejected a novel I wrote, saying it had too much dialogue. It was a mystery and she was right. It needed descriptions of actions. Needed? Perhaps needs. Maybe a rewrite is in order.

3) Occasionally in Rage I ran across a sentence that seemed to say something meaningful with only a few carefully arranged words. Goldy is a male character whose con involves dressing as a nun. "'And I took the book out of the angel's hand and ate it up,' he quoted enigmatically. He knew the best way to fool a white cop in Harlem was to quote foolishly from the Bible." (page 94)

4) And: "It was the code of Harlem for one brother to help another lie to white cops." (page 100)

5) Then, occasionally, I'd come across a paragraph that drew a perfect—and haunting—picture.
Wow! It's all in the details and rhythm. Remember that, Martha.


Yep. I'll be reading more of Mr. Himes' work.

I had a lot of fun last week with Sing Them Home: A Novel by Stephanie Kallos. My sister lent me the book; it's set in Nebraska, in the county next to the one where we grew up.

It's a long sucker, 560 pages, but I really didn't mind. Had I had more time I might have got through it in a few days.

The basic story: 20 years ago, a tornado struck Emlyn Springs, and the doctor's wife disappeared, never to be seen again. Now the doctor himself has died (never play golf in a thunderstorm, fool!), and his three children are getting together to lay the doctor to rest - the doctor, the stories of his wife, the various relationships, etc.

The book is really good with character development. The book centers on the (grown) children - an overweight professor with a fear of flying, a television weatherman and, well, we used to call them "womanizers," and the youngest, herself injured in the tornado, with no focus anyone seems to recognize. Other characters involve the doctor's longtime companion, and the missing mother (via memories and journal entries.)

The writing and conversation felt very natural, with only occasional hiccups, none of which I can think of now.

Warning: I am probably a bit prejudiced about this book, as I have spent part of my summer with my siblings, dealing with my father's household and memories of my mother. The book was almost spooky at times because of that.

I'll probably go get her next book as soon as I get even partway through the current backlog.

I wanted Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, to blow me away and was disappointed when it didn't. There were, however, many lines, phrases, etc. that did.

1) Description of a sword: "It was very obviously a sword created to slice, chop, cut, preferably kill, but failing that, irreparably maim, a very large number of people. It had an indefinable aura of hatred and menace." (page 113) I do like a sword with an aura.

2)
I like the idea. Is that the Chaos theory? I've heard the phrase and seen the title but never read the book. My bet is the Omen's authors are making fun, but I don't think I'm curious enough to read a whole book.

3)
This sentence, its thought and its form, made me think I should read the book a second time to see what other gems I may have missed. By the end of the book, however, the urge had faded.

4) An agency wins approval "because it was, well, a Witchfinder Army, and you had to support anyone calling themselves witchfinders in the same way the U.S.A. had to support anyone calling themselves anti-communist." (page 171) Ah. I grok.

5) Sometimes writers simply have fun.
And I enjoy it when they do have fun.

6) "But there were times when you needed trees, and the shame of it, Jaime thought, was that his children were growing up thinking of trees as firewood and his grandchildren would think of trees as history." (page 213) Hint of an ecology lesson. I like subtle.

7) An evangelical preacher writes gospel songs, which, among others, include: "Jesus Is the Repairman on the Switchboard of My Life" and "When I'm Swept Up by the Rapture Grab the Wheel of My Pickup." (pages 252-253) How can you stop your toe from tapping?

8) A character is upset:
OK. Another ecology lesson, but, along the same line, I'm always amazed when people with kids aren't concerned about ecology the enviroment.

9) Gaimen on Pritchett's writing: "The biggest problem he faces is the problem of excellence: he makes it look easy. This can be a problem. The public doesn't know where the craft lies. It's wiser to make it look harder than it is, a lesson all jugglers learn." (page 378) If only I could write/practice enough so that someday someone might say that about me.

I'll keep Good Omens. I don't know if the urge to reread will return, but I want to be ready—just in case it does.

Last night I finished reading Publish Your Nonfiction Book by Sharlene Martin and Anthony Flacco. The book was homework. OK, I admit it was informative. But it was still homework. The main thing I learned was that the 179-page memoir I finished writing might be salable—but only if I turn it into two books and write two proposals, each 60 or so pages long. I think I hear an unfinished play calling.

I find Toni Morrison hard to read. Her point-of-view characters are so far removed from American mainstream, both sociologically and historically, that their language and syntax is hard to follow. In some of her books, say The Bluest Eye and Beloved, I found the payoff to be worth all the "work." Sad to say, in A Mercy I didn't. The book is set in the 1680s when the slave trade is just beginning on this continent. It does have worthy things to say about the loss of freedom, respect and self-worth, but IMHO without the power of some of her other books. Makes me think I'm about due for another rereading of The Bluest Eye.

A Mercy, IMHO, falls into the category of Literature—note the capital L. As a result, a few words gave me trouble.

1) "palatinate" as in "But the palatinate was Romish to the core." (page 15.) I'm now reminded of why I hate dictionaries. Palatinate: "(lowercase ) the territory under the jurisdiction of a palatine." (www.dictionary.com) It does earlier define Palatine as two parts of ancient Germany, so I figured it out. But I'm annoyed that the don't-use-a-word-to-define-the-word-itself rule doesn't seem to apply to dictionaries.

2) "deathfeet" as in "The deathfeet of the Europes." (page 63) No entry. Deathhead, short for death's head, is a skull. Anyone else ever run into deathfeet?

3) "sachem" as in "turned out the sachem had been dead wrong." (page 63) The chief of a tribe or confederation. Interesting.

4) "ruth" as in "where is your ruth?" (page 165) sympathy, compassion. Dang. My bet had been a typo for truth.

5) "tua mae" as in "Hear a tua mae." (page 196) Portuguese for "your mother." OK. It fits in with the book's theme and era.

Regardless of quibbles, I'm glad I read it.

I just finished an absolutely wonderful book: Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese.

I would not dare to provide a short summary of this story, but just a listing of the key characters will hopefully disclose some of the richness of this wonderfully written book:

Sister Mary Joseph Praise, born in India, a Catholic nun who moves to Addis Ethiopia to work as a nurse in Missing, a hospital that cares for the poor.

Thomas Stone, an outstanding surgeon at Missing.

Marion and Shiva, conjoined twins separated at birth physically.

An array of outstanding, well defined characters intertwined with the fates of the above through Haile Selasie and America.

The amazingly in depth description of medical procedures is never a burden but enriches the story line, which Ill not disclose further.

Read this!

OK. My unreads are back down to only a shelf. Clearly, it's time to buy more books.

I just finished "The Story of Jane: the legendary underground feminist abortion service" By Laura Kaplan. What an amazing story. These women provided services to women in Chicago from 1969 until Roe V Wade was decided. They performed over 11,000 abortions after being trained by a man who was also not a doctor. They did not have one single patient who they performed an abortion on die. Nobody was turned away because she didn't have money, and no woman had to face a doctor who demanded sexual service before he did the abortion in addition to his payment. This book is an incredible history of what I view as a very scary time, that, if some people have their way, we may very well return to. I got the book for my daughter because I wanted her to understand what things were like before Roe V Wade and why it was such an important decision. What I didn't realize was the courage of the women who worked to help make sure other women were provided a service that was as medically safe as they could make it. Those women are my heros.

And, of course, my mom and grandmothers... but they are stories that maybe I should write some day.

Finally, I've finished reading Humboldt's Gift. Thus, I have given Saul Bellow a try, and that lifetime goal has been achieved. Humboldt's Gift wasn't all tedious; there were good moments mixed in among the bad. Specifically:

1) There's a lot—page after page after page—of philosophy in Humboldt's Gift. (Is that what makes it Literature-with-a-capital-L?) Some of it parallels things that show up in threads here. "Plato in the myth of Er confirmed my sense that this was not my first time around. We had all been here before and would presently be here again. … These matters of the spirit are wildly and instantly grasped. Except of course by people who are in heavily fortified positions, mental opponents trained to resist what everyone is born knowing." (pages 90-91) Looks like Slipped's the sane one here.

2) "Humboldt wanted to drape the world in elegance, but he didn't have enough material." (page 108) Nice sentence—for image and for characterization.

3) A "Doctor Rudolph Steiner had much to say on the deeper aspects of sleep. His books, which I began to read lying down, made me want to get up." (page 110) The juxtaposition of those two sentences amuses me. I'm not sure why.

4) To me, an interesting picture of Chicago: "The stockyards are gone, Chicago is no longer slaughter city, but the old smells revive in the night heat. Miles of railroad siding along the street were once filled with red cattle cars, the animals waiting to enter yards, lowing and reeking. The old stink still haunts the place." (page 115) Also moves me right on down the path towards vegetarianism.

5) "America … is proud of its dead poets. It takes terrific satisfaction in the poets' testimony that the USA is too big, too much, too rugged, that American reality is too overpowering. And to be a poet is a school thing, a skirt thing, a church thing. The weakness of these spiritual things is proved in he childishness, madness, drunkenness, and despair of these martyrs. Orpheus moved stones and trees. But a poet can't perform a hysterectomy or send a vehicle out of the solar system." (page 119) Yep.

6) "… certain bits were missing from her mind. The needle went up and down, there was thread on the bobbin, but the stitching failed to occur." (page 194) I like the analogy.

7) "Suppose then that you began with the proposition that boredom was a kind of pain caused by the unused powers, the pain of wasted possibilities or talents, and was accompanied by expectations of the optimum utilization of capabilities." (page 201) I like the definition. If you're bored, do something. Actually I'm pretty sure that's how my mother expressed the same idea.

8) "Whom women will embrace is one of the unfathomable mysteries." (page 208) Clearly written by a man.

9) "The weak at war never know how hard they are hitting you." (page 226) Really? I'm not sure I'm understanding this one. But it sounds profound.

10) "Excuse me for laughing. But you always did provoke people into doing the dirty human thing to you by insisting they should do the Goody Two-Shoes bit." (page 306) Yeah. I've done bad things to people like that.

11) "'Isn't it beautiful out there!' she had said. I looked and said yes, it was indeed beautiful. No more than a glance was necessary. You save yourself a lot of time that way. The question was what were you going to do with the minutes gained by these economies?" (page 323) Interesting thought.

12) Quote from a Samuel Daniel: "While timorous knowledge stands considering, audacious ignorance hath done the deed." (page 355) Wow. Democrats, Republicans? Obama, Bush? Or:


13) "The time to ask the dead is in the last instance of consciousness before sleeping. As for the dead they reach us most easily just as we awaken." (page 447) But I hadn't asked my grandmother anything!

14) On France: "I need a little more kindness from people than a foreigner is likely to get here." (page 466-467) Luckily, Blanche DuBois didn't visit France.

15) "And was this the famous Romance of Business? Why it was nothing but pushiness, rapidity, effrontery." (page 476) Clearly an MBA is a grand thing to have.

16) Perhaps we're in a losing battle. "… for forty years during the worst crises of civilization I read the papers faithfully but this faithful reading did no one any good. Nothing was prevented thereby." (page 478) Remind you of anything we do?

17) "Walt Whitman compared us unfavorably to the animals. They don't whine about their condition." (page 485) There were many passages and thoughts in Humboldt's Gift that make me glad I read it. That's one of them. So conditions aren't ideal. Deal with it. It's still life.

18) "These (trees in a cemetery) should have been giving shade already but they stood brittle and schematic among the graves." (page 491) I like the word "schematic" in that sentence.

19) The narrator talks about the machine used to lower a coffin into a grave, noting it hadn't been in use during the last burial he attended. "The machine in every square of metal was a result of collaborators of engineers and other artificers. A system built upon the discoveries of many great minds was always of more strength than what is produced by the mere workings of one mind, which of itself can do little. So spoke old Dr. Samuel Johnson, and added in the same speech that the French writers were superficial because they were not scholars and proceeded upon the mere power of their minds." (page 492) All of which makes me wonder how I dare to write a single word. I know nothing.

Since Humboldt's Gift is Literature, Pulitzer-Prize-winning Literature at that, many were the un- to only vaguely familiar words:

1) Diffident. "Madly excited, I looked diffident." (page 12) Yes, I've seen it thousands of times and ferreted out a meaning, but this time I decided to check it out. Shy or restrained. Pretty much what I thought.

2) Sinecures: "He (Humboldt) had lined up four sinecures …" (page 17) "an office or position requiring little or no work" Yep. Humboldt would be looking for those.

3) Ephemerid: "…skirring around New York like an ephemerid…" (page 54) " an insect of the order Ephemeroptera, comprising the mayflies" And while we're at it: skirring is " to go rapidly; fly; scurry," which I pretty much figured out.

4) Primitivist: "He is a primitivist." (page 59) Believer in the basics? A belief "that the qualities of primitive or chronologically early cultures are superior to those of contemporary civilization." I was close-ish.

5) Portmanteau. "It's one of those portmanteau expressions." (page 61) Another seen-it-but-not-exactly-sure-of-its-meaning words. OK. It does mean a bag. But as an adjective? Dictionary.com didn't have that usage. Big? Showy?

6) Raglan. "He was dressed in a raglan coat," (page 80) I get that it's a coat. Is anything beyond that important? "a loose overcoat with raglan sleeves." Does that definition mean we can also have "loose sleeves on a raglan coat?"? Dictionaries! Sometimes it's just: why bother?

7) Heimischer. "He was a compulsive-heimischer type." (page 133) No idea. Any German speakers of psychologists out there?"

8) Equipoise. "… stability equipoise and tranquility were the prerequisites …" (page 191) "an equal distribution of weight; even balance; equilibrium." Hmmmmm

9) Pellucid and voltaic. Words like "pellucid" and "voltaic" can be applied to the waters of Volcano Lake." (page 220) Pellucid is "clear or limpid," voltaic "Electricity . noting or pertaining to electricity or electric currents, esp. when produced by chemical action, as in a cell; galvanic." Am I ready for the spelling bee finals yet?

10) Carabiniere. "…under his carabiniere coat …" (page 248) " a member of the Italian national police force, organized as a military unit and charged with maintaining public security and order as well as assisting local police." Or, extended, the style of coat he wore, I guess.

11) Farrago. "…someone made something of such a farrago?" (page 462) " a confused mixture; hodgepodge; medley." OK.

So, Martha, does it even have a story? Not much. But I did like it when the narrator's girlfriend dumped him. (Maybe because I kept wanting to dump the whole book but didn't.)