Paul

Heh-heh. No problem, but I might have been more diplomatic.

Thanks for the encouragement on the memoir. It is getting to be like a hippopotamus. Last night I finally got all the three parts together, for maybe 80,000 words. It all began at NanoWriMo 2009 with 51,000 words, followed by two more starts. Now for the merging into sequence, followed by a massive rereading/editing job, and then writing the conclusion. And then reading it once again, and editing, etc, etc. until I'm sick of it. As for posting, maybe parts of it. But mainly it is a highly personal story of the family intended for my children. We shall see. Thanks for your interest. The working title is Living and Learning, so maybe the parts about lessons learned might be of general interest. Anyway, have fun for the Holidays.

Ah, Pontalba, Another one of your tempting mini-reviews. I suppose you'll be handing it across to me soon with a strong urging. You read twice as fast as I do and it is hard to keep up. j/k I will be glad to see it when you are done -- at least to add it to my pile. Mwah!

Kylie and Athena, I really do have to apologize for not spending more time here. I have pretty much dropped out of almost everything. My current excuse Is that I am in the finishing stages of a complete first draft for the Memoir that I have been writing over the past several years from time to time. This is my third start and now I am weaving together all three pieces, since I finally have an ending in mind and partly drafted. I'm using Scrivener, incidentally, and it really is a pleasure to use. Even if one still has to struggle to make the words come. But I'll at least be back before the end of the year to complete the 2014 reading list with new reads during December. Glad to hear from you both Enjoy the Holidays!. PS: Pontalba hounds me from time to time, and I'll try to do better.

Willoyd, Thanks for your kind welcome back. It really is difficult to pick "bests" isn't it? More like excruciating, but I try to keep it to a single best in each category, and also try to keep from inventing too many new categories to fit them all in. Yes, I did enjoy Madame Bovary, but the theme made me squirm. It was much too excruciating for we who use credit cards. Too modern! Gone Girl and Dinner? Unfortunately I came across worse. Morel was particularly disappointing, with such an intriguing title that I have seen so much of, and coming from such an author. Or maybe it just went by me. But, the complete To Kill a Mockingbird will be sometime in the future. Just at the moment I am reading American Psycho. What a book! What characters! It may yet squeeze onto the Best list, somewhere, before 2014 is out. Hope you enjoy Pilgrim. It is timely, at least.

Pontalba, Athena, Thank you both for your kind posts. Looking back, I (too?) am somewhat surprised by the number of enjoyable books I have read this year. It has been a very good year. Very best to you for the coming year.

Haven't been around here much to post, but here is what has been happening on the reading front, in 4 lists: 1) Books Read, 2) Best to date, 3) Worst to date, 4 Best of the Best. It's a mixture. Hope you have enjoyed some of the same books. Meanwhile, best wishes for a Happy Holiday Season. Books Read 2014 January 1/7 Washington Square by Henry James. Stubborn, dumb people. destroying their lives. 1/17 Madam Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. Emma finds and loses love, with a very sad end. 1/19 Stoner by John Williams. Life, Love and Death of Professor Bill Stoner. Excellent. 1/30 Bangkok Haunts by John Burdett. Murder, corruption, love, prostitution in Thailand. February 2/5 Poison Study by Mary Snyder. A chore to read. 2/7 To Kill a Mockingbird. Excellent 100pg summary version with analysis by Trisha Lively. 2/11 Faust pt1 by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Still, the excruciating end. 2/16 The Intercept by Dick Wolf. Excellent Ah-wooo. /wolf baying/ 2/18 Love and Math by Edward Frenkel. 2/19 The Answer to the Riddle is Me by David Stuart MacLean. Amnesiac recovering 2/22 The Martian by Andy Weir. An astronaut stranded on Mars. March 3/31 If On a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino. Mediocre the second time around. April 4/5 On the Beach by Nevil Shute. Living, loving, dieing in the modern Post-Apocalypse 4/15 All Fools Day by Edmund Cooper. Apocalypse and after in England. 4/19 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford. Love, scrambled among two couples and others May 5/5 Regeneration by Pat Barker. Hospitalized WWI war protester versus psychiatrist. 5/8 Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner. Two close families through thick and thin. 5/11 By Grand Central Station I sat Down and Cried by Elizabeth Smart. Love's agonys. 5/13 100 Selected Poems by e.e. Cummings. 5/14 100 Best-Beloved Poems 5/20 In The Land Of Dreamy Dreams by Ellen Gilchrist. Short stories, some good, many flat 5/26 The Mind Sifter, novella in Star Trek the New Voyages, ed b S Marshak, M Culbreath 5/30 Runner by Thomas Perry. V2. Private witness protection. Thriller. Excellent June 6/1 Vanishing Act by Thomas Perry. V1 in Jane Whitehead series. Excellent, again. 6/4 The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares. Dreary, dreary, dreary. 6/9 Daniel Deronda by George Eliot. Glorious, glorious, glorious! Plot, characters, prose. 6/15The Map Thief by Michael Blanding. Non-fiction story of E Forbes Smiley III. 6/20 A Coney Island of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. 6/27 Counterfeit Lies by Oliver North and Bob Hamer. Undercover FBI in LAX July 7/12 The Selected Poems of Stephen Spender. Bland. 7/18 Mistress by James Patterson and Dave Ellis (Large print) 7/21 The Dinner by Herman Koch. 7/25 The Time In Between by Maria Duenas. Tangier, Madrid, Lisbon, espionage. 7/28 The Country House and the Pool by Herman Koch. Vengeful physician and rape. * * Break for eye surgery on July 30 (but reading OK)* * * August 8/3 Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. (Too) Cleverly constructed psychopathic mystery. 8/11 Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion. California essays et al. 8/13 An Event in Autumn by Henning Mankell. 8/28 The Company We Keep by Robert Baer and Dayna Baer. Living the CIA life. September 9/3 Drop By Drop by Keith Raffel. White House/terrorism thriller. Excellent. 9/9 Spring Water by John M. FitzGerald. Prose poem of serial killer. 9/9 No Time to Lose by Peter Piot. Leader's memoir from the war on global AIDS. 9/15 Legends by Robert Littel. Puzzle solution described in boring stodgy prose. 9/20 A Walk Among the Tombstones by Lawrence Block. Zowie! Excellent. 9/24 Selected Poems: Bryusov, Mandelstam, Akhmatova. Three slim volumes. Famous. 9/27 The Way Inn by Will Wiles. Thriller in very large hotel. 9/28 Complexity – A Very Short Introduction by John H. Holland. Very high-level survey. 9/29 Blood Feud – Clintons vs Obamas by Eric Klein. Distilled hatred, both sides. October 10/1 Lexicon by Max Barry. Thriller in alternate universe. Excellent. 10/6 A Different Alchemy by Chris Dietzel. Pilgrimage as dystopian civilization dies away. 10/11 I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes. Sensational cop/spy thriller. 10/17 Legacy by James Michener. Moments of American history,vastly oversimplified.Hokum 10/18 The Square, in Four Novels by Marguerite Duras. Long conversation. Novella 10/23 They Thought for Themselves by Sid Roth. Ten Jewish people who heard the Call. November 11/6 The Go Game by Lucy Foster. Adolescent page-turner, in story and style. Suspenseful. 11/15 Naoko by Keigo Higashino. Complexities of wife surviving in daughter. Imaginative. 11/15 The Black-Eyed Blonde by Benjamin Black (John Banville). Tough guy, California noir 11/22 White Mischief– The Murder of Lord Errol by James Fox. High life, murder in Kenya 11/23 Alan Turing- Unlocking the Enigma by David Boyle. Short Non-Fiction. Summary. 11/25 Salinger by David Shields and Shane Salerno. Salinger seen through the eyes of many. That makes fifty-nine in forty-seven weeks – three novella length. Maybe I can stay ahead. Best to date: Stoner by John Williams. Life, Love and Death of Professor William Stoner. Excellent The Intercept by Dick Simon. Finding a single terrorist in the millions of NYC. Excellent. The Martian by Andy Weir. Lone astronaut, accidentally left behind, surviving on Mars. On the Beach by Nevil Shute. Living, loving, dieing in the modern Post-Apocalypse Daniel Deronda by George Eliot. Glorious, glorious, glorious! Plot, characters, prose. The Time In Between by Maria Duenas. Tangier, Madrid, Lisbon, espionage between wars. A Walk Among the Tombstones by Lawrence Block. Excellent, tracking down kidnappers. Lexicon by Max Barry. Thriller in alternative universe. Imaginative page turner. Excellent. Salinger by David Shields and Shane Salerno. Salinger seen through the eyes of many. Worst to date: A Coney Island of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Abysmally uninteresting hip poetry. The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares. Dreary, dreary, dreary tech-sci-fi Poison Study by Mary Snyder. Event driven romance. Meager characters, settings. Bared to You by Sylvia Day. Too bold and utterly improbable, as well as trite. Best of the Best Fiction Stoner by John Williams. Life, Love and Death of Professor Bill Stoner. Excellent. Non-fiction Salinger by David Shields and Shane Salerno. Salinger seen through the eyes of many. Classic Daniel Deronda by George Eliot. Glorious, glorious, glorious! Plot, characters, prose.

I think Pontalba is absolutely correct. There are victims of suicide beside the suicides themselves and it marks them for life. My sincerest condolences go out to those who knew him and loved him sincerely and certainly wished better for him than this end.

Oh, you!

I hope you have been enjoying it, or maybe have finished it already. (I haven't been around here in a while.) But I am getting my Decades Challenge back on the rails after having taken time out to read three modern and unsatisfying novels with rather unscrupulous characters, all of whom succeed in getting on with their lives. Anyway, I decided to get back to good old Victorian moral values and re-started Waverly by Sir Walter Scott, from about 1810. Boy is that a blast from the past: archaic language and pompous sentences that run on forever! But I have put the Jeep in low-low gear and I am slowly pushing forward through the underbrush. Interesting to read a modern-sounding discussion of the different kinds of students there are and the different means by which one might try to catch their attention and get them educated. Also interesting to note that the hero, young Edward Waverly likes reading, and ends up very widely read but with only superficial understanding. We'll see where that leads him in life. Not like a typical hero. So, I'm back at the book and calling it "interesting," even though my co-reader spouse can't stand the excerpts I have read to her and says they put her to sleep. We shall see. But it would be another notch toward completing the Challenge, and hopefully this year.

Janet, Pontalba, Silas Marner was my intro to George Eliot also -- after I gave up on Middlemarch. Now I am glad I continued on to Deronda (even as I still wonder about Middlemarch). Maybe Deronda has a more modern introspective and psychological ring about it. Deronda himself certainly has a crisis of conscience in trying to figure out who he is, and comes up with a very modern solution.

Thanks Athena. Putt-putting along anyway. My reading of classics always needs some change of pace in between books, even though most of the classics I have read have motivated me to read more. So I oscillate back and forth, shifting my gears between slow and fast reading. However, George Eliot has definitely gone to the top of the list for reading more. Daniel Deronda is definitely the kind of writing we don't see anymore and is an immense pleasure. With a deep breath, it occurs to me now that I just might try Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables again. But just not yet. However, checking Wikipedia, I see it had an influence on the work of H.P. Lovecraft. Well, well, well

Finally finished Daniel Deronda by George Elliot. What a magnificent novel, her last. Glorious characters. Glorious plot. Glorious prose. It has it all. The now leaves only three decades for the next six months: 1810 Walter Scott - Waverly (1814) 1820 Wolfgang von Goethe - Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years (1821) 1830 Stendahl - The Red and the Black (1830) We'll get this thing done yet!

Thank you both, pontalba and willoyd, for correcting my misimpression and pointing out that the post-war effects upon the soldiers were a serious part of all books. I'll subside now and let the discussion follow its main line. Thank you both for you thoughtful responses. Paul

Black Virgin Mountain - Larry Heinemann This post is probably out of order in the strict sense, but maybe not in the larger sense. If it is, then just please chuck it, or throw it off into unrelated chat someplace, so it doesn't derail the intended discussion here. Why? Because I have not read any of these three books and can't discuss any in detail. (I have read A Month in the Country, but with zero memory of anything about it, so it's as good as not having read it at all.) With that elaborate bowing and edging backward toward the door, I'll come to my point. From what I have read here, it seems to me the books -- all three of them -- fail to capture one overwhelming reality. I have not read extensively among war stories (another apology), but only one that I did read made an overwhelming impact on me, by telling a different truth than I have seen in any other book of any sort I have read. Larry Heinemann, in Black Virgin Mountain, describes his experience of war in Viet Nam as so ghastly, so totally horrible as to be completely destructive of the person and personality he was beforehand. The horrors he saw and lived through, the mindless killing, the utter fear he experienced, the atrocity against humanity of the whole thing, the worthlessness of human life, and his benefiting from it all (through survival) left him so shattered that he was unable to even relate to, or communicate with, people at home who had never been "in." He found the civilians all completely shallow and totally un-understanding of what it is like to be on the battlefield, and he found himself completely withdrawn into the memory of his own experience and unable to escape it. That is my recollection and paraphrase, but Heinemann says it is typical of all who have been through the battle experience -- they have no one to talk to, except other veterans who have shared it. It sounds to me like any sense of that "battle fatigue/PTSD/shell shock/whatever" may be missing from the books under discussion. Which I do not intend as a disjunction to derail or dominate discussion here, but rather as a tone which may be missing from the experience of these authors. Tell me I am wrong, or totally out of place. I won't argue, but it is a thought I couldn't not write. Especially since I have seen it convincingly presented in only one place.

Thank you for your kind posts Athena, Janet and Pontalba, And, yes, Janet, I agree with you completely that "delusive " and "unrealistic" and "fantasy" are the words that we would use to characterize Mary's behavior as strange, when compared to behavior in our own "normal" frame of reference. But when the world is crazy. what and who then are normal? That was part of the thought that started me to thinking and feeling more sympathy for Mary, in addition to her not being delusive (our term) about the reality of the impending fatal sickness. For delusive and unrealistic fantasy, I'll offer for consideration the final conversation between Dwight and Moira, when he suggests she bring the pogo stick with her when they meet again at his home in Connecticut. That was the stuff of fantasy, even though I fully recognize that both parties to the conversation knew the reality, and that they spoke their words with very heavy hearts. Nevertheless, there were the two main characters engaging in fantasy -- let me call it a "polite fantasy" upon parting -- because it served a purpose of easing the moment. So, fantasy was the stuff of heartfelt life in those circumstances, and why not allow a full measure for Mary? Not really arguing with your thought, Janet, just offering an alternative emphasis for looking at behavior in a very strangely disturbed world..

I have been haunted lately by On The Beach. More specifically by my image of Mary -- self-centered, selfish, unrealistic, living a fantasy, never mentioning the nonesistent future, seemingly in total denial, and impossible to be in the same house with. But most specifically by the garden chair she coaxed and wheedled out of Peter -- the garden chair sitting now so nicely in the corner of the garden as we read of these events long ago. Perhaps one of us could be sitting and reading in that very chair. Mary did not strike me as the noblest of characters in the book on first reading, perhaps even seeming like the least noble of the many stoic people we know around her. But that chair. I can't erase that chair. To me that garden chair is the symbol of Mary's happiness in her last days. Mary found her happiness in imagining and creatingwhat a pretty garden could look like and then in thoughts of how to make it happen. Only that much -- the creative imagining -- was what was allotted to her in the time remaining, but just that much of gardening was sufficient to make her happy. So that is what she devoted her thoughts and imagination to. As much as Peter evaded her presence, he did love her deeply and took seriously her wish for the garden chair to round out her vision of the garden. He knew how much it would mean to her. And when he put the chair in place, she did get to see it before the end and be happy with it. I have the feeling that Peter made her happy in the only way she could find happiness in those days. I think she knew that the fruition of her efforts would be in the coming year. and not be seen by anyone. She did, after all, immediately ask "Is that it?" when the first signs of sickness arrived at her family. So she knew, but devoted herself to happy thoughts in her remaining days, much the same as others occupied themselves with activities that were pleasing to themselves and looked to the coming year. I am writing from recollection of the book finished a while ago, so all that may sound fanciful and sentimental, but that is the new memory of Mary that I am haunted by -- of a woman finding happiness in her passion, with a devoted and loving husband to respect and sustain her. And an enduring garden chair as symbol and monument of their life and love.

The Old Spies Society, Berlin Chapter. (LeCarré) Meets in the tunnel under the Wall. /shivers/ Ooops. Properly speaking, that would be The George Smiley Society.

re "Marketing": It is hard to buy a book one doesn't know about.

It may be that some topics simply can't be forced. The classical three topics to avoid in conversation have long been sex, politics and religion. The discussion here might fall under "politics," with results that have been seen. There have been long discussions of books on forums. They don't always derail.

Just for the record, I was pleasantly surprised by the two volumes I read, the first and the last, and I concluded that all the interest in reading the books was well justified.

I think my own attitudes and their origins have been eloquently represented here by others, and more eloquently than I would have been capable of. So, I'll just offer one further thought. Pearl Harbor and 9-11, though they might seem from abroad to have been minor events compared to years of warfare and bombardment in Europe, nevertheless they were galvanizing moments in American experience when it became clear that there were threats afoot that Americans really did not wish to reach American soil. And the American response was and has been correspondingly immense, and I personally have no regret about that. If I don't know enough about war, not being European, I do know this much: I don't want it here and am glad that the US has been able to prevent it happening, so far. On the narrower question of Shute and his attitudes toward peace or war, that sounds more and more like a topic for serious research rather than the looser discussions on a forum. I certainly can't comment further.

Not directly touched? I would go slow with the rhetoric there CG. I consider the casualties among our young men over there and in the Pacific to be quite enough. Slurs at this point won't help anything. (There are counter-slurs, also, you know.)

Curious G. Thank you very much for your impressions. I don't recall austere post war years, or quiet desperation, or roles set for me. I've heard times were tough in England for a long time, with rationing etc, but times were good in the US. I went to college, had a dozen offers of employment when I graduated, and have been employed productively throughout my entire life. Times have been good to me. Are we speaking of different experiences in England vs US?

Pontalba, Interesting Wiki quote, definitely. Nuclear Winter finally burst upon my own consciousness at the end of that narrative (rather than at its first allusion in Glasstone). Perhaps an indication of the time it takes for ideas to spread through the population.