November 2020

Activities:

 

Not much outside the house.

11/5 doctor 

11/16 lab; gassed car

11/24 pickup at libraries (2); jc farms for pie!

Books:

 Some good novels and lots of non-fiction this month.

Fiction:
Lovely War by Berry, Julie
Jean-Luc persécuté by Ramuz, Charles-Ferdinand; translated from the French by Baes, Olivia
How to Stop Time by Haig, Matt
Autopsy of a Father by Kramer, Pascale; translated from the French by Bononno, Robert
The Midnight Library by Haig, Matt
Forty Rooms by Grushin, Olga 

Poetry:

The Golden Goblet: Selected Poems of Goethe by Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von; translated from the German by Ozsváth, Zsuzsanna and Turner, Frederick  

Nonfiction: 
The Last Million: Europe's Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War by Nasaw, David
For the Love of Music: The Art of Listening by Mauceri, John
The Simpsons: A Cultural History by Fink, Moritz
A Promised Land by Obama, Barack 

Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World's Largest Owl by Slaght, Jonathan C.
Music to Eat Cake By: Essays on Birds, Words and Everything in Between by Parikian, Lev

The Truths We Hold: An American Journey by Harris, Kamala

Online:

Sabine Meyer

 While reading For the Love of Music and Music to Eat Cake By I wondered why I was reading about music but not listening to music?  So I put the books aside and went searching for music, specifically Mozart's Clarinet Concerto. As a result I've spent a least an hour a day on YouTube listening to Sabine Meyer play. Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, Brahms,....

Sublime Swimming: 14 examples of custom pools by María Francisca González

  I sure do miss my swims ... sigh...

Wagenhallen Stuttgart Cultural Center ArchDaily article

Wagenhallen official site

 a part of Stuttgart I've never seen (because it was something else when I lived in Germany)

June 2020

 Books in the Time of Quarantine

Durham, Connecticut, June 2020

Even though the state is slowly reopening I continue, because of my age, to self quarantine. It's been warm and humid so I haven't been getting much exercise. Outings have been limited in June. Two for library curbside pickup which I combined with a trip to a farm market. Another was also a produce run combined with a stop at a fish market. Then, on the most comfortable day weather wise, we had a picnic!

Reading:

Lots of good books this month...

On Lighthouses by Barrera, Jazmina; translated from the Spanish by MacSweeney, Christina - 3 stars
I enjoyed these essays but this didn't give me much that was new to me.

Gathering of Waters by McFadden, Bernice L. - 4 stars
I liked this a lot but not as much as her The Book of Harlan which I read in 2016. I think when interlibrary loan opens up I'll be reading more of her work. I also enjoy following her tweets. 

b, Book, and Me by Kim Sagwa; translated from the Korean by Sunhee Jeong  - 4+ stars
A kind of  "almost coming of age story." It's worth a re-read.

Big Machine by LaValle, Victor - 5 stars
The Craft Is All the Same: A Conversation with Victor LaValle; Ayize Jama-Everett interviews Victor LaValle. Another author to add to my list of writers to read.

Conjure Women by Atakora, Afia - 5 stars
A Conversation with Afia Atakora, Author of Conjure Women

Auntie Poldi and the Sicilian Lions (Auntie Poldi #1) by Giordano, Mario; translated from the German  by Brownjohn, John - 4 stars
Fun, but not sure about following the series...

Sharks in the Time of Saviors by Washburn, Kawai Strong - 5 stars
How Kawai Strong Washburn Opened Up the Legends of Hawaii for Mainlanders author interview with Anderson Tepper (Vanity Fair)

The Man in the Red Coat by Barnes, Julian - 4 stars
Dr Samuel Jean Pozzi was the man in the portrait but this gossipy book is about so much more...

Berkeley Noir edited by Thompson, Jerry -  4 stars
One of the better anthologies in the Akashic Noir series.

Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River by Jung, Young-moon: translated from the Korean by Jung Yewon  - 4 stars
Korean writer Texas culture.

Online: 

Rayuela by Hugo Passarello Luna
"This is a series of portraits, taken in Paris, of friends and readers of Argentine writer Julio Cortázar to celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth.

Depicting Writing
This was a double treat: a fine, nicely illustrated essay AND my discovery of The Crews Project! Thanks to The Literary Saloon (29 June 2020 blog) for leading me there.

Whonamedit? - A dictionary of medical eponyms
I found this when I was looking for more information about Dr. Pozzi. (See The Man in the Red Coat in my reading list above.)

New World Writing
I'm finding lots to like at this lit magazine.

Transformations
A new online site featuring narrative essays.

Breaching the Levee of Rage
A moving piece on taking a knee at a peaceful George Floyd protest/vigil. By David Abrams.

Joie de Vivre in Joyce's Garden
Another private garden tour by Jana Milbocker. This one, in Natick Massachusetts, is especially colorful.

Providence Pedestrian Bridge
A place I want to visit when I'm ready to expand my circle of comfort...

Collecting Guide: Wayne Thiebaud
Thiebaud turns 100 in November! That calls for cake and ice cream!

Cake Rows (1962)

 

Three Cones (1964)

October (third week) 2018 Reads and day trips

These posts are getting briefer and briefer...

Sunday - roamed back roads, checked out Hidden Lake and  Robert's Food Center at the 79/80 Rotary Circle

Wed -  Milford - Silver Sands State Park - walked on boardwalk and a short stretch of sand for lunch at The Greek Spot Cafe and Grill, 726 East Broadway, Milford. Then drove around Milford and headed home trying to hug the coast (not easy) to Madison and then cut inland.

Read this week:

The "Deal Me In" card this week is the King of Hearts; the selection is Transcription of an eye by Carmen Maria Machado (in Watchlist)

from the library....

In the Café of Lost Youth by Patrick Modiano: translated from the French by Chris Clarke

online...
The Literature of Inequality by Nicolas Léger

October (second week) 2018 Reads and day trips

Saturday - a return to Rodgers Orchards in Southington. In addition to an apple pie for home we got an apple cider slush and an apple cider donut each. Couldn't wait to get home so we stopped by Memorial Boulevard Park in Bristol for a snack.

Sunday - Picnic - food from River Valley Provisions (95 Bridge Road, Haddam); Picnic at
Hurd State Park, East Hampton.

Wednesday (an unseasonably warm day) - Picnic -  Food from The Bronx Deli in Oxford CT. Picnic and walk at Southford Falls State Park Southbury. And on the way home ice cream at Sweet Claude's Ice Cream in Cheshire.

Saturday - Leaves are turning so we explored Suffield, Granby, and a little of the part of Massachusetts that dips into Connecticut. Lunch at Three Figs in Suffield. Went for dessert at Lost Acres Orchard in North Ganby. Too full from lunch to eat more so we got some apple dumplings, some gingersnaps, and a loaf of cheese bread. Had the dumplings for supper at home. Delicious.

Read this week:

The "Deal Me In" card this week is the Eight of Hearts; the selection is Viewer, Violator by Aimee Bender (in Watchlist : 32 stories by persons of interest)

Gutenberg find...
Hawaiian Flowers by Loraine E. Kuck and Richard C. Tongg; Illustrated by Ted Mundorff
Pretty to peruse.

from my shelves...excellent issues of two of my favorite periodicals...

Korean Literature Now (Vol. 41, Autumn 2018) edited by Agnel Joseph
Two Lines: World Writing in Translation (Issue 29), The Japanese Vanguard edited by CJ Evans

September (first week) 2018 Reads

This week the "Deal Me In" card is the Four of Clubs; the selection is Elizabeth Strout: ‘If I ever return to a small town, I want you to kill me’ 

from my shelves...

Her Mother's Mother's Mother and Her Daughters by Maria José Silveira; translated from the Portuguese by Eric M.B. Becker

Rochester Knockings: A Novel of the Fox Sisters by Hubert Haddad; translated from the French by Jennifer Grotz

The Unmapped Country: Stories and Fragments by Ann Quin; Jennifer Hodgson (Editor)

from the library...

Circe by Madeline Miller (Kindle edition)
 

July (first week) Reads

No day trips during the beastly heat wave--just a quick trip to the library.

This week the "Deal Me In" card is the Three of Diamonds; the story is De Amicitia (in Orientations by W Somerset Maugham)

Online... 

The Guardian's Poem of the week: Typewriter by Matthew Francis 
Loved the poem; the commentary (by Carol Rumens) following was OK even if it did remind me of those dreary lit classes where we picked at a writing until it was completely dead. 

'My daring grandfather took a bit of East Berlin for himself' by Elaine Chong
The story of  the Treehouse on the Wall, das Baumhaus an der Mauer.

from Project Gutenberg... 


Cliff Dwellings of the Mesa Verde by Don Watson
Published in 1954 by the Mesa Verde Museum Association, Mesa Verde National Park. Colorado
Many photographs. I think I used this as a source for one of my junior high term papers.




from the library...

Fire and Knowledge: Fiction and Essays by Péter Nádas; translated from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein

 from my shelves... 

Just Call Me Superhero by Alina Bronsky; translated from the German by Tim Mohr 

Lion Cross Point by Masatsugu Ono; translated from the Japanese by Angus Turvill 

Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina García

June (third week) 2018 Reads & Day Trips

Another week of fantastic weather hence more picnics...

Sunday Drive - Picnic: Chaffinch Island Park, Guilford, CT. This is a beautiful municipal park. Ice Cream: Fenwick Ice Cream Co.

Thursday Drive - Glastonbury/Hebron area. Picnic: picked up food at Gardiner's Market (terrific market) then ate at the Glastonbury ramp for the Rocky Hill - Glastonbury Ferry. We decided not to cross on the ferry and drove around exploring the area. We ended up at Gay City State Park  Hebron, CT where we sat a spell enjoying the perfect weather (and munching store bought raspberry tarts).


Saturday (today) Drive - Picnic: picked up food from Pete's Weston Market (Weston CT--pricey but good food,a great selection of picnic stuff, and a nice bakery department petits fours! ) Ate at Putnam Memorial State Park Redding, CT.

So another week with not a lot of reading--just too nice not to go out and about. I did read a bit...



This week the "Deal Me In" card is the Five of Clubs; the selection is The Canal-Boat (in The Oxford Harriet Beecher Stowe Reader edited and with introduction by Joan D. Hedrick.)
This is the last of the Stowe selections for the short story challenge. I have been reading the other parts of the book and have now read the entire book. Great reading.






online...
Project Gutenberg Compilation of 233 Short Stories of Chekhov by Chekhov
Wow!Of course I didn't read them all this week, but what a great resource.


Smith & Foulkes depicts an animated history of tennis for Wimbledon

And I've been spending a lot of time at The Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) State Parks and Forests web site.

from the library..

The King Is Always Above the People: Stories by Daniel Alarcón
Good collection.

June (first week) 2018 Reads & Day Trips

We dined at a castle this week, sort of.  Sandwiches: watercress and prosciutto on ciabatta. Dessert: strawberry shortcake. Castle: Gillette Castle State Park
Our picnic site was near one of the ponds and we strolled around the area without  actually going in the castle (been there done that). It was a beautiful day and a nice drive home exploring back roads.





Another outing this week combined a trip to the Wallingford Public Library with a lunch stop at Kayumangi, a Filipino grocery store/restaurant in Wallingford.  (Link is to a sample page, don't know if will keep.) We had delicious stews served with rice and a excellent flan for dessert. We'll be back!






 Oh yes this is a reading blog so here is what I read...humm, Filipino food and Peruvian lit. What's next? Look for a local Peruvian eatery? Filipino writing? The books waiting for me on the holds shelf are Iranian, French, and British!

This week the "Deal Me In" card is the Three of Clubs; the selection is Muqtatafat : a comics anthology featuring artists from the Middle East region: Part one: English language. Manal and Alaa : a love story / by Lena Merhej -- Breath underwater / by Mike V. Derderian -- Anomaly / by Omar Khouri --Time travel / by Maya Zankoul --Liberty gone wild / by Nidal El Khairy --Filsteezy / by Mahdi Fleifel and Basel Nasr --Birdie mania / by Ghadi Ghosn -- Noûs somme / by Sandra Ghosn -- The genie of the throne / by Wassim Maouad

online...
Mourning My Birthplace: On Immigration, Family, and the Distance in Between “When you’ve spent your life apart from a loved one, what prepares you for not knowing how to mourn?” by Natalia Sylvester.  
The author was born in Lima, Peru and  came to the U.S. at age four. In this essay she tell about going to Peru join family at her dying grandfather's bedside.

from my shelves...

 
Ten Women by Marcela Serrano; translated from the Spanish by Beth Fowler (Kindle edition)
Very good linked stories of Peruvian women. Nine are clients of a psychologist. Their stories are first person narratives. The tenth woman is the therapist. Her story is told by her assistant.
 

March (third week) 2018 Reads

The poet (Shelley) askes "O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?" Apparently in Connecticut this year the answer is "NO!" Another storm predicted for next week. According to WFSB.com "Of course, the usual disclaimer applies now: keep abreast of the forecast.  Great uncertainty still exists and a much greater impact on New England is still possible."

This week the "Deal Me In" card is the Ace of Clubs and the story is an essay: Someone Without Peers  by Mohammad Tolouei, Translated from the Persian by Farzaneh Doosti (in the October 2017 issue of Asymptote)
Good essay on the influence of a favorite childhood read on an author and his work.

From my shelves...

Mouths Don't Speak by Katia D. Ulysse
Perhaps Ulysse tries to cover too much material in too little space. This story of a woman with a dysfunctional relationship with her parents and a husband with PTSD jumps all over the place. She lives in Baltimore and is trying to come to terms with the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti--where her parents live but where she herself hasn't lived since she was ten years old. With several digressions, switches in points of view, characters who really don't add to the story, I just couldn't get a handle on what story she was trying to tell.
Free copy from publisher through LibraryThing Early Reviewers.

From the library...

Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe by Kapka Kassabov
Very informative account of a journey through the Bulgaria/Turkey/Greece border area. The map at the beginning was extremely helpful.

The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness (Kindle ed) by Sy Montgomery
An enjoyable read but almost more than I wanted to know about octopuses and the people who study them. Some fine pictures.

The Aeneid by Virgil; translated from the Latin by David Ferry
 About time I got around to reading this and it was not a difficult read.


Gutenberg find...



High Society:  Advice as to Social Campaigning, and Hints on the Management of Dowagers, Dinners, Debutantes, Dances, and the Thousand and One Diversions of Persons of Quality by George S. Chappell, Frank Crowninshield, and Dorothy Parker

Need I say more?

March (second week) 2018 Reads

I've been juggling a bunch of books and only finished two this week.

This week the "Deal Me In" card is the Seven of Clubs and the story is Uncle Enoch (in The Oxford Harriet Beecher Stowe Reader)
A temperance lecture in the form of a short story. I'm enjoying Stowe and am glad I drew her two weeks in a row.

Online...


From Catapult
Say It with Noodles: On Learning to Speak the Language of Food by Shing Yin Kohr
A charming story with delightful illustrations.







 from my shelves...

Fado by Andrzej Stasiuk; translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston
Essays on travel and culture in Eastern Europe (Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Albania, and Poland). This fit nicely with my ongoing reading of a Bulgarian novel Physics of Sorrow and the non-fic Border: a Journey to the Edge of Europe (Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey) that I found at the library this week).

Two Lines 28 a journal edited by C.J. Evans
As always, this issue brings a nice mix of translated prose and poetry.

March (first week) 2018 Reads

Some dark, but very good, reading this week.

This week the "Deal Me In" card is the Eight of Clubs and the story is Modern Uses of Language (in The Oxford Harriet Beecher StoweRreader)
Tongue in cheek essay that is every bit as relevant today as when it was written in the 1830s.


from my shelves...

Oliver Loving by Stefan Merrill Block
A town deals with the aftermath of a school shooting. Told from several points of view. Along with the big question of "Why did he do it?" each character wonders if somehow they could have intervened to prevent it.
Advance review copy

How To Be a Good Wife by Emma Chapman

Marta and Hector have been married for twenty-five years and have a grown son. They live by a small Scandinavian village. Their lives are pretty uneventful until Marta quits taking her medicine. She starts having hallucinations or are they really memories?  What is the truth about her past? Did her parents really die in an accident when she was a teenager or was there something more sinister in her past?  Post traumatic stress disorder or false memory syndrome? An oddly satisfying read.

Free review copy through Shelf Awareness. A debut novel. 

House of Rougeaux by Jenny Jaeckel

This is a far flung family saga that begins with slaves in Martinique and skips back and forth in time and place. To Canada, The United states, Europe, and back to the Caribbean. The story  jumps from 1785-1869, then to 1949, then 1964, then 1925, then 1853, then 1883-1889, and then the late 1800s. Each section looks at a different family member. They are like a series of interrelated stories.

I rather liked this approach. It's very much the way we learn our own family history, with this great aunt telling us about one journey, a grandmother filling us in with stories of her childhood, another bit learned from a document--all coming at different times, out of order, leaving us to piece together what we can.

If this seems confusing and disjointed there is a nice family tree to help keep track of everyone. If this hadn't been provided, I would have had to draw one up.

A sequel is promised. I look forward to it.

Advance review copy through LibraryThing. A debut novel.

January (first week) 2018 Reads

Had some fun online whilst snowed in. Actually it's not the snow that's keeping me in --the roads are clear-- it's the bitter cold that says "you pay for heating, stay in and enjoy it."

I started off my "short story" challenge with a short essay, not a short story.

Card: 9 of Clubs
Story: The Other Chile (Cecilia and Patricia)  by Angie Cruz
A brief look at the lives of hotel maids in Santiago Chile. They discuss working conditions, politics, and love. Very informative.
Angie Cruz Is founder and editor of Aster(ix), a Journal of Literature, Art, Criticism. Lots of good reading there.

Art online... 

Girl riding penny farthing bike
by Natalia Mendoza

Venice Clay Artists : Ceramics and Pottery Arts and Resources is one of my favorite online art and artisan sites. Their display Gusto mache mucho papier figures  presents delightful, whimsical papier mache figures. "Animated puppets, dolls, figurines, lidded boxes, lightweight props for theatre and stage productions and sculptures are some of the applications still using papier mache in the arts. The focus here is on five current papier mache artists: Natalia Mendoza from Barcelona, Brazilian artists  Fábio de Souza Pinheiro and Ubiratã Trindade, Colombian Mauricio Perez and Chicagoan Tato Correa."

I love these photos (from Maxim on Instagram) of old St Petersburg apartments.  There are hundreds of pictures. I can't read Russian but I put this one through Google translation and here is what I got:
"This kindergarten in the former apartment on the Fontanka embankment, 24. Of course, before the revolution it was not just an apartment, but one of the richest apartments in the city, occupying the whole floor. Now one half of it is still residential, and in the second one there is a kindergarten for many years. By the way, if you want to spoil the historical interior, paint the walls in a pastel green and lay a booming laminate."

from my shelves...

Phantoms on the Bookshelves by Jacques Bonnet; translated from the French by Siân Reynolds 

This was a delightful surprise Christmas gift. I wasn't on my wish list, but only because I hadn't heard about it. A charming book about a private book collection.

The Brahmadells by Jóanes Nielsen; translated from the Faroese by Kerri A. Pierce

A kind of disjointed, quirky multi-generational novel concerning members of a Faroese  family. At times I lost track of who was who and where they were in time. I was fun sorting it all out.

Another winner from my Open Letter Books subscription.

September (fifth week) 2017 Reads

A day late, but .... well... I...er...didn't read the story of the week until this morning. It's a good one.

Story:  The Piazza (in The Piazza Tales by Herman Melville) on Project Gutenberg

“Deal Me In 2017!”

He moves to an old house in the country. It's perfect and perfectly situated but: "it had no piazza—a deficiency the more regretted, because not only did I like piazzas, as somehow combining the coziness of in-doors with the freedom of out-doors, and it is so pleasant to inspect your thermometer there, but the country round about was such a picture, that in berry time no boy climbs hill or crosses vale without coming upon easels planted in every nook, and sun-burnt painters painting there. A very paradise of painters. The circle of the stars cut by the circle of the mountains."
So he has a piazza built and from it he views the magnificent surroundings, filling them with classical allusions, fairies,  and other fanciful notions.
A charming story that makes one want to read the others in the collection: Bartleby; Benito Cereno; The Lightning-Rod Man; The Encantadas; and The Bell-Tower.



Card: The nine of diamonds (pentacles): there are many Tarot interpretations for this card and not all are happy ones. What I like about all this confusion is that I can pick and choose. (I really can't take all this Tarot stuff too seriously.) So here is what Biddy Tarot says in part: "The Nine of Pentacles indicates that you have reached a point in your life where you are feeling self-confident, self-sufficient, independent and free. By acting on your own accord, you have attained well-deserved success and may now enjoy money, leisure time, pleasure, material comfort and rest." 
This perfectly describes the man in the story (although the card depicts a woman). But upside down the card (according to Biddy) takes on a less optimistic meaning.




from my shelves...



Before  by Carmen Boullosa, Translated from the Spanish by Peter Bush 
Sort of a coming of age story.  One that sticks with you. Amanda Paustian's review on Goodreads caught my feeling almost exactly. It seems a bit of a cop out to link to another review and not write my own but if some says it better than I can, why not? 



 

The Best American Sports Writing 2017  edited by Glenn Stout  
I don't read a lot of sports stuff. I sort of follow women's basketball and occasionally watch tennis, golf, baseball, and men's basketball. So I don't know what an avid fan would think of this anthology which is often oriented toward the political and social issues reflected in sports rather than "pure sports" (whatever that is). Topics covered include the refugee crisis, human rights, exploitation of college athletes, gender identity, crime, family issues, etc.  Given the current state of the world (sports world included) this sort of expository journalism is necessary. These essays come from a broad variety of sources (online and print) and are excellent, informative reads.

Advance reader copy via Goodreads
 

Songs from the Violet Café by Fiona Kidman 

I really enjoyed this story of Violet, her café, and the young people who worked for her. A slice of New Zealand life set mostly in 1963 with back stories in the 1940's and a brief peek to the future.

 

Free copy from blog win at Words and Peace (as part of  Bout of Books 20)

online...

11 Reasons Everyone Should Celebrate Translation
By Savannah Whiting

September (fourth week) 2017 Reads

Once again I have several "readings in progress." I finished only one book this week but it was a good one.

This week for the short story challenge I drew a joker which means I read a story from another participant's roster. It also means I drew a second card and read two stories this week. I selected my joker story from Dale's roster

“Deal Me In 2017!”

Story: The Cafeteria by Isaac Bashevis Singer; translated by the author and Dorothea Strauss. (page 68-84 in Library of America's  Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories: One Night In Brazil to The Death Of Methuselah)
A successful writer occasionally eats in a neighborhood cafeteria where many immigrants (mostly elderly men) gather to eat and gossip. Here he meets Esther, also an immigrant but younger than most of the usual group. Over the years they see one another off and on. The final time they talk is at his place and she tells him she saw Hitler and a group of Germans meeting in the cafeteria after closing time. Was it a vision? a memory? a separate reality? or is she insane? Some time later he sees her on the street with another man from the old cafeteria crowd. Or does he?

Singer never disappoints. The Library of America three volume boxed set of his collected stories may be my best blog win ever. 


Card: Joker
Dale's roster is set up is geographically with stories from Appalachia  for spades and clubs and stories from New York City for Hearts and diamonds. The singer story is the the ♥10♥ on the roster so I chose a joker representing the city.







Story from my roster for the second card I drew (♥8♥): The Story of Kao Yu by Peter S. Beagle (online at Tor.com, a great source for "Science fiction. Fantasy. The universe. And related subjects.")

A fantasy story of an aging traveling judge in rural China;  the chi-lin, the Chinese unicorn who sometimes appears in his court, and a female criminal. The author describes it as "....a respectful imitation of an ancient style, and never pretends to be anything else. But I wrote it with great care and love, and I’m still proud of it." He certainly met his goal with this story.
I did not look for a card to represent this story because there is a marvelous illustration accompanying the story.  Alyssa Winans is the artist. She a San Francisco based fantasy illustrator and game artist. She is also a member of the Google Doodle team.


from my shelves...



The Signal Flame: A Novel  by Andrew Krivak
 An elegantly told family story of love, waiting, and loss. Krivak gives us an astonishing sense of time, place, and character.
Free copy from publisher via Goodreads 






online...
The Romance of the Skeleton
"... a two-and-a-half minute, weird and wonderful animation depicting “the lows and lower lows of love in the afterlife.” Equal parts funny and touching, the short is the result of a collaboration between Brazil-born Vitoria Bastos and Adele Davies from Devon...."

 (Read Me)  by Helen McClory
A great essay on reading, worth reading and re-reading. "...you don’t have to read simpler or popular books because they give you ready currency online, or because lots of people keep talking about them. You can read obscure, weird, or difficult stuff without feeling awkward. Because you don’t have to present your opinion to the world on the books you read in a digestible, effusive tweet or a picture of the book next to a mug of tea and an aloe plant. I know you know this, that you don’t have to have an opinion at all. Many voices make reading one type of book or another a performative act that marks you as a member of a particular tribe. But all that needs to exist is you and the words. Because they are yours if you want them."

August (fourth week) 2017 Reads

This is brief because it is Bout of Books 20  week I have posted every day.

“Deal Me In 2017!”

Story: California by Sean Bernard (in Watchlist : 32 stories by persons of interest)
A group of friends in a California suburb periodically receive very short film clips featuring a popular TV host. They are puzzled, yet fascinated, by the brief clips. Some appear to be outtakes from the show's filming, others seem to have been shot for the sole purpose of preparing mysterious clips to be sent to the group.

Card: 3  of Hearts

This week I chose to showcase this gold leaf deck, rather than isolate a specific card. Why gold? Well the TV personality in the story is identified only as "The Host" but most Californians will recognize him as Huell Howser the host of the series "California's Gold" which ran on KCET from 1991-2012.
Deck is for sale on several online shops.



online...

Old Hong Kong Mahjong  by Vicky Wong.
Article about the only female carver of Mahjong tiles in Hong Kong. Nicely illustrated with photos by the author. (I spend Tuesday mornings playing Mahjong)

 For Centuries, Readers Annotated Books With Tiny Drawings of Hands by Anika Burgess
"They were the medieval version of a highlighter." 

Yesterday (Friday) was an online only reading day which I reported in my Bout Update (5) posted earlier today. 

from the library... 

The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World  by Peter Wohlleben, Tim Flannery (Foreword), Jane Billinghurst (Translator), Susanne Simard (Afterword) (Kindle edition)

The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry (Kindle edition)
Too many notes. Is this a character study? A novel of place? of time? It tries too hard to be Victorian, tries to hard to be Essex. There are so many characters with conflicts within themselves and between one another that everything seems contrived and under developed.

Buenos Aires: The Biography of a City by James Gardner

from my shelves...

The Boys by Toni Sala,  translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem
Excellent story of how the tragic death of two brothers in a village affects those left behind.

Bout Update (5)

Bout of Books 20

I know it's called "Bout of Books" but on Friday it was hard to concentrate because they are tearing up the street in front of my house, very noisy and distracting. So it turned into a short attention span online reading day. Saturday & Sunday should be better because I don't think they work on the weekend--the street will be a mess, but a quiet mess.

Did not do challenge.

Here is what I read on Friday

Approx 15 pages on comedy films from the BBC. (Hard to count pages as there are lots of pictures and lists.
The 100 greatest comedies of all time
What the critics had to say about the top 25
The full list of critics who participated – and how they voted
Why Some Like It Hot is number one
Does comedy differ from region to region?
Do men and women find different films funny?
---
Approx 8 pages (again lots of pictures, so hard to count--I'm thinking "time spent" on very bookish topics)
For Centuries, Readers Annotated Books With Tiny Drawings of Hands
17 Living Writers Currently Immortalized on Stamps 
Two Never Before Published Letters from Marcel Proust to His Neighbor translated by Lydia Davis
English Translations of Obscure Medieval Texts Go Online

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Approx 10 pages (more pictures since this group is about art)

Ikebana – vision of transcendence 
The Divine Calligraphy
Enrique Chagoya, (Mis)Appropriation: Then and Now
Dan Woodger channels the fun of the beach for McDonald’s Japan
Geta Brătescu: Romania's remarkable avant-garde artist is more resilient than ever
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Approx 25 pages (short stories)
Motherhoods by Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse, a Ruwandan writer; translated from French by Edward Gauvin. (4 pages)
The History of Grains by Gianni Skaragas in which Greek islanders witness the mysterious arrival of abandoned vessels. (5 pages)
Refuge By Dina Nayeri  (Excerpt from the novel, Refuge) The experience of an Iranian teenage refugee in Oklahoma. (14 pages)
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Totals:

Monday:         80 pages

Tuesday:       116 pages
Wednesday:  156ish pages

Thursday:      257 pages

Friday:             58ish pages

July (second week) 2017 Reads

A lot of short stuff this week. Two short story collections, a poetry anthology, forty-two pages of The Invented Part (Life After People, or Notes for a Brief History of Progressive Rock and Science Fiction, pages 361-404), a short novel, and some online things including the Deal Me In story for the week.

 “Deal Me In 2017!”

The story:
The Gay Old Dog. By Edna Ferber (on Gutenberg in The Best Short Stories of 1917)
This story tells of the ups and downs of Jo Hertz, a successful man in the leather business but in a bind with his family and romantic life. It seems he made a deathbed promise to his mother: he won't marry until his sisters are taken care of. He does meet someone, but she isn't willing to wait for the sisters to find mates. Jo ends up a lonely and resentful loop-hound ("a man who frequents it [the Chicago Loop]  by night in search of amusement and cheer is known, vulgarly, as a loop-hound.") Note: back when this was written "gay" was not synonymous with homosexual.

"He was the kind of man who mixes his own salad dressing. He liked to call for a bowl, some cracked ice, lemon, garlic, paprika, salt, pepper, vinegar and oil, and make a rite of it. People at near-by tables would lay down their knives and forks to watch, fascinated. The secret of it seemed to lie in using all the oil in sight and calling for more."


The card: Seven of Diamonds. The "beer card" in bridge and other trick-taking card games. Sorry I didn't know about this tradition back when I played this sort of card game.
Design by Christina Berglund, a graphic designer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
" Seven of Diamonds Brewery is based on the beer card tradition. As the tradition goes, when a player wins the last trick of the hand with this card, his opponent must buy him a beer." 

also online...

Alan Bean Plus Four By Tom Hanks
When I read that actor Tom Hanks has a story collection (Uncommon Type) coming out in October, I found and read this story in the October 27, 2014 New Yorker.
"Astronauts in the Apollo era had spent thousands of hours piloting jet planes and earning engineering degrees. They had to practice escaping from launchpad disasters by sliding down long cables to the safety of thickly padded bunkers. They had to know how slide rules worked. We did none of that, though we did test-fly our booster on the Fourth of July, out of Steve Wong’s huge driveway in Oxnard, hoping that, with all the fireworks, our unmanned first stage would blow through the night sky unnoticed."
What fun! I do want to read the stories in Uncommon Type.

It’s Raining in Love by Gunnhild Øyehaug; Translated from the Norwegian by Kari Dickson)
On a more serious note, a visit with a terminally ill friend.  From another story collection I want to read: Knots.

Stadium Club by Mark Mulroney
On the art of chasing down baseball player autographs. A great memoir piece in Victory Journal, "a print and digital publication devoted to the intersection of sport and culture. Rather than engage in statistical analysis or partisan squabbling, Victory spotlights the drama of sport and the enduring glory of athletic pursuits the world over."

Another Gutenberg find...

Little Songs of Long Ago   The original tunes harmonized by Alfred Moffat; Illustrated by
H. Willebeek Le Mair; published in 1912.
Words, music, and wonderful illustrations of thirty nursery rhymes. Sound files of the tunes played on the piano are available.



From my Shelves...

The Frangipani Hotel by Violet Kupersmith
Kupersmith's short stories start out with seemingly normal and familiar scenes and situations. There is a run-down Vietnamese hotel, a night shift in a Houston market, a delivery driver on his regular run--nothing strange here, is there? But then there is a shift and weird things happen. I don't like this sort of comparison but I kept thinking of the stories of Saki (H.H. Monro).  This book has been sitting on my shelf since March 2014 when I won it on the blog Books à la Mode  - sorry I let go unread for so long. I really like it.
Contents: Boat story; The Frangipani Hotel; Skin and bones; Little brother; The red veil; Guests; Turning back; One-finger; Descending dragon.


Worlds from the Word's End by Joanna Walsh
Joanna Walsh has a way with words and the reader gets carried away into a convoluted world where meaning has words. I love these stories and their clever wordplay. "The story of our nation will be entirely true, and it will be a good story, despite its being true."
Contents:Two; Bookselves; Postcards from Two Hotels; Worlds from the Word's End; Like a Fish Needs a…; Exes; Travelling Light; Femme Maison; Dunnet; Two Secretaries; Enzo Ponza; The Suitcase Dog; The Story of Our Nation; Blue; Simple Hans; Me and the Fat Woman --
Joanna Walsh; Reading Habits; Hauptbahnhof. 
From my subscription to  And Other Stories Publishing.



Elsewhere  by Eliot Weinberger (Editor)
Fourteen poems (translated into English) by fourteen international poets musing on travel and/or displacement. A perfect anthology for a former ex-pat (ex-ex-pat? re-pat-ex-pat?), displaced Californian (new-New Englander?) like me. First of all: the subject matter interests me; secondly: there is a variety of viewpoints (time, place, nationality of poet, etc.); and, most importantly: the poems can be read on several levels--taken at a superficial face value, delved into a little deeper for my and the authors' emotional responses to the situations, and even more deeply for the universality of the material.
From my subscription to Open Letter Books.

from the library...

Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O'Nan
This is not just last night at the Lobster, it's The last night. A few days before Christmas and manager Manny and his crew are serving up the last lunch at a New Britain, Connecticut Red Lobster. The chain has decided the location is not getting enough business. At least they have a little advance warning and manager Manny and four others are getting transferred. Why do the others even bother to show up? Well, Manny holds their final pay checks and there is also some team loyalty (or not). One shows up and leaves after lunch committing some acts of vandalism on his way out. Some lunch customers show up in spite of a snowstorm. Manny copes and even tries some lame attempts to revive a failed romance. A quick read about a bittersweet night.

June (second week) 2017 Reads

For my Deal Me In card this week I pulled the Eight of Clubs. This was originally assigned The Bronze Horseman: A Petersburg Tale by Alexander Pushkin (narrative poem). I forgot it was on the list and read it in January when I was on my Pushkin jag, so I made it a WILD CARD.  On my roster, Clubs are supposed to be something "different" (narrative poem, short play or skit, graphic, clever title, narrative essay, etc.) I chose a couple of news stories and an essay related to an important local event.

 A new bookstore opened in our town

 Wesleyan R.J. Julia Bookstore.
This is the bookstore for Wesleyan University and also a general indie bookstore. For more on this see: New Wesleyan Bookstore By R.J. Julia Now Open To Public In Middletown and for a little more background on the space see: Wesleyan partners with R.J. Julia Booksellers to open new bookstore in downtown Middletown.

 
The very first special event at the store was an appearance by Andrew Blauner editor of  In Their Lives: Great Writers on Great Beatles Songs.  He was joined by three of the book's contributors: Amy Bloom, Peter Blauner, and Nicholas Dawidoff. Of course I attended. Of course I bought the book. Autographs?  All four of course. And some swag: a very nice tote.


It was a good discussion, they didn't do readings. It was a conversation that ranged from  lyrics, the sequence of songs in the albums, and how the songs had different meanings at different times in their lives.
(Local note: Peter Blauner and Amy Bloom are Wesleyan grads. Bloom is now Wesleyan University’s Distinguished University Writer in Residence. Nicholas Dawidoff also has Connecticut connections: he grew up in New Haven and now lives there. He is a Fellow of Yale's Branford College.)

 “Deal Me In 2017!”

So in honor of this event I chose an essay from the book by a contributor who was not at the event. I selected this one because it is available online.
Remembering My Father Through My Favorite Beatles’ Song  Elissa Schappell revisits Octopus’s Garden.

During the week I read the rest of the book. Even though I've never been a huge Beatles fan it was fun to see what songs the writers chose and how they wrote about the choices. Most were personal and some went in to detail about the technical aspects of the music. I don't have a favorite Beatles song and I didn't listen to any while reading this book, but I guess I heard the music in my brain because I ended up with a four-day earworm. Finally got "Yellow Submarine" out of my mind by listening to classical guitar. Other than that It was a very enjoyable collection of essays.

 
And the card: A tiled design in homage to that amazing ceiling in the bookstore. (Do click on the picture above for a better look).

This is from the Piatnik: Jugendstil Art Nouveau Playing Cards deck. This is a gorgeous deck, the face cards are awesome, even the box is a work of art. Google it, there are vintage decks for sale online and the prices are not all outrageous.

Like last week's card,  I found this image on playingcardcollector.net



Poetry online...
Emoticons and Pros by Najat Sghyar
"Born and raised in Casablanca, Morroco, Najat studied corporate law in France and worked as a journalist in her hometown before moving to Istanbul in 2014 to focus on writing. Fluent in six languages, she writes short stories in darija- the Moroccan dialect-, poetry in English and Arabic and is currently working on a novel in French. She is a founder member of the Istanbul writing club Yirmi Yedi."

Lots of clever word-play for this world of social networking. These two excerpts lose the poem's visual appeal because I can't duplicate the formatting and spacing, but the language is a delight.

So I daydream in virtual blur
of good old smileys:
That naughty yellow face
On MSN messenger
Laughing silent hi hi hi's

Or the classic semicolon
resting on its side
With a bracket for a smile
Half asleep
winking deep
Minimal style
Of sarcasm quizz.

And later she speaks of 

Clogged in blogs and vlogs
Instakilograms
in filigran
Of snapshit
and vine.

from my shelves..

The Magician of Vienna (Trilogía de la memoria/Trilogy of Memory #3) by Sergio Pitol, George Henson (Translation from the Spanish); Mario Bellatin (Introduction); Margo Glantz (Afterword)
This is a mixed bag--literary criticism, personal anecdotes, travel stories, and passages on his own writing processes. I really liked the material on writing short stories.

When I read the first two volumes of the trilogy, I spent a lot of time Googling all the people and places that weren't familiar to me.* This volume was different because I recognized most of the authors he discussed. He talks about Chekhov, there are essays on Evelyn Waugh and Henry James, and many others--international in scope. His discussion on the Irish writer Flann O'Brien caused me to order At Swim-Two-Birds.

"On When Enrique Conquered Ashgabat and How He Lost It" (p.204-230) is a very funny episode that took place when Pitol and Enrique Vila-Matis managed to get together in Turkmenistan. It involved crashing a wedding party, a crazy opera singer and his crazier wife, embarrassed interpreters, and Vila-Matis being rushed out of the country.

Now that I've read all three volumes, I wish I had an index to them, there's so much to go back and reread. These came to me through my subscription to Deep Vellum and it includes both paper and electronic editions, so maybe I'll get some use of the Kindle search feature.

*See: Pitol readings and More Pitol readings, I didn't do a readings page for this volume.



Death of an Airman by Christopher St. John Sprigg
There were some surprises in this mystery from this British Library Crime Classics reprint. An Australian bishop signing up for flying lessons whilst in the UK made a lot of sense and he was a fine character. There were an assortment of eccentric women, a sappy American judge, a brief appearance by a German aviator, a French connection, some white powder, etc... What fun!
The motives for the crimes seemed rather modern for a book written in 1934.
I love this series. My copy is an advance review copy from Poisoned Pen Press, the USA publisher.

May (fourth week) 2017 Reads

 “Deal Me In 2017!”

The card this week: Six of Clubs which means the "story" this week is not-a-story, it's an essay:

Identities in Motion -- My Mythomanias by Julia Schoch; translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire
How do we remember when the landscapes of childhood are gone? Schoch grew up in a town modernized in the Communist era and the made obsolete by the 1989 revolution.

  "They say the only things that count in life are the things we remember. That seems to be all the more important when there is no longer any evidence of the past.
   I no longer have any evidence of my past."


From Literature Across Frontiers (LAF) "a European Platform for Literary Exchange, Translation and Policy Debate."

Card is a stock image from dreamstime
It seems to go with the deterioration of the town (both the original and the new) and the hammer suggests the politics involved.

 



other essays online...and slow reading

Dorthe Nors on the best Contemporary Scandinavian Literature
The Danish author discusses Scandinavian Lit in general and specific authors:  Naja Marie Aidt, Yahya Hassan, Karolina Ramqvist, Lena Andersson, and Sjón.


 All Writing is a Kind of Realism: In Conversation with Rodrigo Fresán, author of The Invented Part
A conversation between Fresán and Will Vanderhyden, translator of The Invented Part. I am slowly reading this novel as part of Chad Post's Two Month Review  project.Chad has put together comments, podcasts, a Goodreads group, and more to help guide us through a difficult book. So far, we have read only the first 45 pages (which I loved).

 
I am also slow reading The Magician of Vienna by Sergio Pitol because that is the way I read Pitol. See: Pitol readings and More Pitol readings


Just because my card this week was for an essay doesn't mean I neglected short stories. In fact, I read some gems...

I read some of the O. Henry Prize Stories for 2017 that are available online:
Something for a Young Woman  by Genevieve Plunkett
The Buddhist by Alan Rossi 
Protection by Paola Peroni
Night Garden by Shruti Swamy
Paddle to Canada by Heather Monley
Mercedes Benz  by Martha Cooley
A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness by Jai Chakrabarti

Two other stories I read online...

An Affair Before the Earthquake by Samrat Upadhyay
Samrat Upadhyay is a Nepalese writer who writes in English. He teaches at Indiana University. This is from his collection of short stories, Mad Country.

The Great Disaster  by Alanna Schubach; with an introduction by Halimah Marcus
Young survivors of a community disaster play a Zombie game.


some novels from my shelves...


ME  by Tomoyuki Hoshino, Kenzaburō Ōe (Afterword), Charles De Wolf (Translation)
This started out as if it were going to be about telephone scams, but it turned into something else--a dystopian world of almost interchangeable ME's. Just when it seems to be headed in one direction, it makes a turn and is off somewhere else. A great read.

Advance review copy via LibraryThing

The Outlaw by Jón Gnarr; Lytton Smith (Translation)
The third volume of Gnarr's childhood memoirs covers his teenage years. Misunderstood and misunderstanding, Gnarr ends up in a remote boarding school in the Westfjords district of Iceland (a Google search shows that the school is now a hotel). After leaving school he returns home to face so many problems--drugs, alcohol, medical treatments, family--that one wonders how he ever go it together.

From my subscription to Deep Vellum Books


 
'Round Midnight by Laura McBride
It's always gratifying to see a second novel live up to the promise of the debut novel. This one does that without repeating the characters and plot of the first
(We Are Called to Rise). This one is also set in Las Vegas and, like the first, brings together a set of diverse characters and deals with immigrants and family problems. But the main characters are fresh and this one spans a long time period (about 1960-2010) as Vegas booms and busts. The four main characters are strong women in difficult circumstances. An absorbing read.

Advance review copy.