Sunday Caught My Interest

I am spending the week in beautiful Oregon. I came down to have dinner with youngest and see my mom. She hosted her bookgroup while I was here and we had a really good discussion of The Elegance of the Hedgehog. I also picked up the first Mazie Dobbs mystery and so far I am very impressed. Lots of eating, lots of card playing and a little shopping for my niece who is expected in January. It is so fun to look at baby stuff and dream of buying girl clothes.

Here is what caught my interest this week:

Rachel from Book Snob reviews a book that might be hard to find (I will have to use the inter-library loan process) but it also definitely sounds worth the search. Written by Edith Olivier in 1927, The Love Child is a study of a spinster forced by society and the mores of the time to have a somewhat reclusive and narrow life. I haven’t heard of this author so I did a little research and found that Edith was born in 1872, one of ten children of a conservative member of the church. The Love Child is her first novel and was written when she was 55 years old. I also found out that Edith was a hostess to many of the literary elite of the period including Siegfried Sassoon and Osbert Sitwell. The Love Child is about a lonely spinster, Agatha, who in her loneliness and depression imagines a little girl from her youth.  Clarissa, the girl gradually becomes visible to other people as she grows up and Agatha increasingly fears her loss. Rachel writes, “Edith Olivier’s prose is sensitive, gentle and compassionate; tinged with melancholy,The Love Child explores the pain felt by the lonely who have great capacity for love, but no one on whom to bestow their feelings.” This sounds like a fascinating book.

Devourer of Books makes a brief mention of Cross Currents by John Shors as a book on her to-be-read list borrowing a description from Serena of Savvy Verse & Wit and calling the work “a devastatingly beautiful novel.” Set in Thailand in 2004, Cross Currents is about two families, Lek and Sarai run a small sea-side resort struggling to make ends meet, and Patch (running from the law), Ryan, and Ryan’s girlfriend Brooke. The chapters have beautiful titles: Consequences, The Beauty of Others; Ten Ripples and a Wave. I read a few paragraphs of the first chapter and was sold on reading more.

Finally, The New Dork Review of Books has a post about five recent books (some of whom have been included in past Sunday postings) with links to reviews including: Night Circus, The Submission, The Leftovers, We the Animals, and one I have never heard of Fathermucker. Fathermucker by Greg Olear is reviewed by The Next Best Book Blog (and it is one of those reviews worth reading for its own sake) and is about the day in the life of a stay-at-home dad who must juggle some inner turmoil of his own as well as the physical and psychological well-being of his two children. The review dubs this book a “dramedy” and says it strikes a “enderly balances the good with the bad, the funny with the serious, the parental frustrations with the silliness of childhood.” I say the book is worth reading due to the title alone.

Happy reading!

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