Beyond Rivalry - books_and_reading

RIP Harold Pinter, 1930-2008

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 16:15:00 -0500

"Harold Pinter, the British playwright whose gifts for finding the ominous in the everyday and the noise within silence made him the most influential and imitated dramatist of his generation, died on Wednesday. He was 78 and lived in London."

I can only pray someone says this about me someday, that I found the "ominous in the everyday" and, perhaps, both the noise within silence and the silence within noise ...

Also:

BBC death notice

Guardian obit and primer

Bankruptcy

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 15:18:54 -0500

Bill Gorton: "How did you go bankrupt?"

Mike Campbell: "Gradually, and then suddenly."

-- Ernest Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises

Out of Context: The Price of Butcher's Meat

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 09:58:04 -0500

Just finished Reginald Hill's The Price of Butcher's Meat (2008; published as A Cure for All Diseases in the UK), which was strong on Dalziel (still recuperating), introduced budding psychologist and sharp observer Charley Heywood through her emails, and brought back Franny Roote, who I'm convinced is a sociopath despite his own musings that he's not. Pascoe, Wield, Novello and Hat had minor roles this time, and Ellie was absent.

Some of my favourite bits:

Dalziel to Roote: "I can work out that you've been here long enough for our landlord to know you drink parrot piss!"

Roote: "Cranberry juice actually. ... Full of vitamins, you really ought to try it."

Dalziel: "Mebbe after morris dancing and incest."

Roote, describing Lady D: "She is, I believe, a very good hater."

In some Yorkshire pubs, the appearance of a stranger cuts off conversation like a toad in the blancmange ....

When Charley entered the lounge, Dalziel, occupying one of Tom Parker's low-slung Scandinavian chairs like the USA occupying Iraq, tried to lever himself upright but had difficulty formulating a satisfactory exit strategy.

Dalziel let out a sighing groan, or groaning sigh, the kind of sound that might well up from the soul…

Who Deserves What?

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 14:29:00 -0500

PD James' latest Dalgliesh crime novel, The Private Patient (2008), is set largely in Devon at a manor house-cum-plastic surgery center. Central themes seem to include worthiness and what we deserve, revenge, redemption, forgiveness, the inability to forgive.

When the book opens, the reader is in the mind of the soon-to-be murder victim, Rhoda, and after her death, at various times we're privy to the thoughts and feelings of a number of other characters, including suspects and police. Rhoda turns out to be a rather single-minded and self-focused woman whose actions have been at least partially responsible for others' pain and harm, and by allowing us the victim's pov at the start, I think James aids our ability to sympathise with her.

Speaking of her family of origin, Rhoda recalls:

"Those outbursts of violence, the impotent rage, the shame, had done for them all. The important things had been unsayable. And looking into her mother's face, she asked herself how could she begin now? She thought her mother was right. It couldn't have been easy for her father to find that five-pound note week after week. It had come with a few words, sometimes in shaky handwriting: With love from Father.…

The Likeness

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 13:47:00 -0500

Just finished The Likeness by Tana French, which follows on her evocative debut of last year, In the Woods, both set in Ireland. The Likeness would be a great readlike for Donna Tartt's The Secret History, with its focus on a closely knit group of college-aged students (grad-school-aged, in this case) who have secrets.

French's writing and emotional sensitivity are both superb.

The elements that most interested me are the thread of sacrifice woven throughout the book, French's evocation of sadness, and her portrayal of the settled, harmonious, familial, habitual, insidious, dysfunctional, oppressive, romanticised and idealised relationships and lifestyle among the five friends. I think that besides sacrifice, one of the major themes of the book is home: what constitutes home, family, the places we are free, the places we are held; and how some people sacrifice everything to create home, and some feel it a threat they have to run from, and some never find it, and some luck into it for a week, a year, a decade, a lifetime.

Sacrifice

"I don't tell people this, it's nobody's business, but the job is the nearest thing I've got to a religion. The detective's god is the truth, and you don't…

Reginald Hill Interviewed

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 09:12:00 -0500

Shelf Awareness briefly interviews one of my favourite crime novelists, Reginald Hill, for their daily email, timed for the publication of his latest Dalziel and Pascoe mystery, The Price of Butcher's Meat -- which, tragically, is not yet listed as 'on order' or owned by any library in my community's library loan system. It's available now!

Turns out he's enamored of literary classics written by George Eliot, Dickens, and Austen, as well as contemporary works by the likes of Terry Pratchett, Markus Zusak, and David Mitchell. Not a big fan of JK Rowling, whose first Harry Potter book (Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, paperback version) he bought for the cover, "'but only because there was also on offer a version with a dull anonymous cover so that sensitive adults didn't have to reveal they were reading a kids' book on the train! That struck me as really sad, so I bought the original and flourished it for all to marvel at my childishness on the way home. Didn't enjoy it all that much though, but who am I to disagree with x million readers across the whole age range?'"

I've lauded Hill before, here and here, oh, and here, at…

What Makes You So Desperately Unhappy?

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 05:04:00 -0400

Admit it. Certain things make you desperately unhappy, and you don't know why -- the Sbarro at the mall, the taste of Jolly Ranchers in winter, the woman in the Buick station wagon you saw at the KwikTrip, the Food Network after ten p.m.

In 100 words or less, please answer the question, "What makes you so unhappy?" in the comments field [at his site]. Selected answers will appear in Dean Bakopoulos's new novel, My American Unhappiness, forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in late 2009 or early 2010.

I'm not the first to say it, but, hey, way to outsource the novel!

What I'm Reading Lately ... Death, Death and Certainty

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 11:21:00 -0400

My irregular annotated link dump:

>> Never Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death by Jesse Bering in the 22 Oct. 2008 SciAm:

The crux: "So why is it so hard to conceptualize inexistence anyway? Part of my own account, which I call the 'simulation constraint hypothesis,' is that in attempting to imagine what it's like to be dead we appeal to our own background of conscious experiences -- because that's how we approach most thought experiments. Death isn't 'like' anything we've ever experienced, however. Because we have never consciously been without consciousness, even our best simulations of true nothingness just aren't good enough."

Fun for the Whole Family: "In a 2004 study reported in Developmental Psychology, Florida Atlantic University psychologist David F. Bjorklund and I presented 200 three- to 12-year-olds with a puppet show. Every child saw the story of Baby Mouse, who was out strolling innocently in the woods. 'Just then,' we told them, 'he notices something very strange. The bushes are moving! An alligator jumps out of the bushes and gobbles him all up. Baby Mouse is not alive anymore.'"

What We Can't UnLearn: "Back when you were still in diapers, you learned that people didn't cease to…

A Day in the Life of Doris Lessing

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 17:48:00 -0400

I think I'd find a report of a typical or atypical day in anyone's life interesting, and Doris Lessing's, a mixture of 'what I do each day' with her reflections on health, life, and reading, is no exception:

"Luxury has never interested me, but I enjoyed staying at good hotels when I travelled. In Vienna, at the Hotel Sacher, I was in my room, marvelling at the rugs, eating sachertorte, thinking, 'This is perfection,' when a piece of chandelier fell on the floor. I laughed -- perfection is not so easily achieved."

"Last night I dreamt about a Jesus-type figure in Palestine in the old days -- which is not really my country at all. It was very convincing. This Jesus chap was worrying about what he was going to get for people to eat. Ordinary problems -- just like a housewife's. "

Quotes Out of Context

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 06:00:00 -0400

Or, why I'm an Anglophile.

From the Sept. 2008 Oldie:

"[Duncan] Campbell recalls bumping into former bank robber Bobby King in a pub. 'He had done an Open University degree in prison. He was reading To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. I mentioned this to another bank robber I knew who'd also done an OU degree and, without blinking, he replied, 'Not her best.'"

From Maureen Lipman's essay on appearing in a regional production of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, with her dog, and her dog's understudy: "Chichister audiences accepted a black Labrador in rural Russia with the same aplomb as they'd accepted the barkless dog of the African Congo. ... Our favourite comment on the production was made by two white-haired ladies wearing floral dresses as they left the theatre: 'Well, I thought it was very enjoyable, didn't you, Mary? But why on earth they had to set it in Russia is beyond me.'"

Jeremy Lewis writing about 'prolific playwright and diarist Simon Gray,' who died in August: "But he was also extremely funny. Writing in the Observer, Claire Tomalin recalled how Harold Pinter sent the cricket-loving Gray a poem he had just written, which read 'I saw Len Hutton in…