Sunday Caught My Interest

This has been the week of travel – first to take Youngest to his new college digs – he is sharing a home near campus with four other people and then down to my mom’s. When I arrived, I learned that a family friend had died in Sacramento so I fetched Youngest to house-sit and on Wednesday my mom and I drove down to California and then back up to Oregon on Friday. It was well worth the effort, not only to see everyone but to celebrate our memories of a very good man. I read The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman this week (sobbing during the end) and promptly handed it to my mom to read. (She also liked it but did not cry.) I then downloaded The Chase of the Ruby by Richard Marsh, a writer of mysteries and thrillers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It did provide a much needed lighthearted escape for a few hours – definitely an easy read and I may download some more of his work just to have on hand.

Here is what caught my interest this week:

Kim of Reading Matters has another Triple Choice Tuesday posting with the books being chosen by Lindsay Healy of The Little Reader Library. Her choice for “Book that Changed Your World” is The Mayor of Casterbridge (my favorite Hardy novel) and her “Book that Deserves Wider Notice” choice is The Street Sweeper by Elliot Perlman (on the top of my to-be-read list). With two fantastic choices I had to take a closer look at her third choice (a Favorite Book) – The Outcast by Sadie Jones. A debut novel published in 2009, The Outcast takes place in a small, provincial English Village in the late 1950’s. Nineteen year old Lewis Aldridge returns home after a stint in prison for arson to his father and his step-mother. Years earlier his father had also returned home from the war. However, where Lewis’s father sought conformity and sameness – Lewis seeks something different.

Angela Carter was a prize winning British novelist and journalist with a prolific writing career including fiction, non-fiction, poetry, short stories, children’s stories, and plays. She also translated Charles Perrault’s fairy stories. When I was a child I was fascinated by fairy stories devouring Andrew Lang’s collections of tales. All this was brought together by reading the Literary Omnivore’s review of Carter’s The Red Chamber, a reworking of classic fairy stories or as Carter put it in her own words, “My intention was not to do ‘versions’ or, as the American edition of the book said, horribly, ‘adult’ fairy tales, but to extract the latent content from the traditional stories.” Carter brings a modern feminist slant to these tales dealing with empowerment and sexuality. This sounds like a great place to start exploring an author I am not familiar with.

Deb of the Book Stop reviews a book that sounds fascinating, Zaremba or Love and the Rule of Law by Michelle Granas. This book sounds like a wide-ranging complicated story covering love, politics, and mystery all within a literary novel. Set in Contemporary Poland, Granas uses the story to discuss rendition, surveillance, the need for love, seclusion, and the over-reach of government. The main character, Cordilia is the sole support of her very odd family working in semi-seclusion as a translator. She meets Zaremba, a handsome businessman who is being sought by the police on charges that may or may not be legitimate. Cordelia’s family takes him in and then he disappears and Cordelia tries to find out what happened to him. I love the quote that Deb included in the quote Deb included in the review:

She came out of the woods at last, with relief, just in time to see the upper parabola of the sun dip downwards beyond a distant cornfield and disappear.  Here the air was full of the scent of autumn, of mown hay and ripe vegetation and damp earth.  From the rye stubble at her feet came the pulsing chirr of an army of crickets.  Before she had crossed half the field a harvest moon, immense and perfectly round and burnished orange had risen over the far edge of the next field, and hung poised there, so close to earth that she might have crossed to it, climbed upon a hay mound, and touched it.

Finally, if you like books and food especially mentions of food in books, then you might enjoy Audrey’s Blog, Books as Food (found courtesy of Lyn of I Prefer Reading). I just may have to make those lemon-current scones.

And in celebration of Barbara Pym Week, The Indextrious  Reader has a lovely collection of quotes from Pym’s work about tea.

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