Zuleika Dobson: or An Oxford Love Story by Max Beerbohm
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
"From the moment she set foot in Oxford to stay with her grandfather (Warden of Judas), the lovely Zuleika played havoc with the undergraduates -- and with none more than the Duke of Dorset, a character whom Ouida would have been pleased to invent. Max Beerbohm called this delicious novel of his 'An Oxford Love Story', and for fifty years it has delighted successive generations by its elegance and wit."
~~back cover
The book started out well enough. Mr. Beerbohm is nothing if not a master craftsman of the English language, and in the beginning the word play and general delight of a story about incipient young love set in Oxford was enchanting.
Slowly, the story veered into dark passages and byways. The main characters became caricatures of themselves and young lovers everywhere. What should have been a 'sparkling, wicked and delicious story of a femme fatale' and her conquest turned into a battle of wills, arrogance and pride. Which always goeth before a fall. Both professed not to be people who could ever be in love: she fell in and out of love with all the regularity and boredom of the daily 9:15 to Paddington; he held himself above such common and vulgar pastimes. They both fell in love with each other, but not at the same time: if he did, she didn't; if she did, he no longer did. They each worked themselves into grand positions of impossibility, and ...
Well, I'll not spoil it for you. By the time I came to the end of the book, the only hope left was a deus ex machina. And you'll have to read the book yourself to find out if one came ... or not.
A Year In The Maine Woods by Bernd Heinrich
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
"Escapist fantasies usually involve the open road, but Bernd Heinrich's dream was to focus on the riches of one small place -- a few green acres along Alder Brook just east of the Presidential Mountains. The year begins as he settles into a cabin with no running water and no electricity, built of hand-cut logs he dragged out of the woods with a team of oxen. There, alone except for his pet raven, Jack, he rediscovers the meaning of peace and quiet and harmony with nature -- of days spent not filling out forms, but tracking deer, or listening to the sound of a moth's wings."
~~back cover
I should have loved this book. This kind of thing is right up my alley, and I love ravens -- so it should have been a slam dunk. Instead, I had a hard time finishing this book, and it took a lot of thinking about why that was. The book is everything the blurb promises: the author spends a year in a cabin off the grid in the Maine Woods, and spends a great deal of time watching, thinking about, drawing and generally enjoying the seasons, the seasonal changes and contrasts, the seasonal successions of birds, plants and animals. So why didn't I much care for it?
After a great deal of thinking about it, I realized the book is about the author watching nature unfolding around him rather than being about nature unfolding through the seasons. There's nothing wrong with that, but I wasn't looking to find out about his divorce, the visits of his son, the visits of his students, etc. I wanted the book to be just about a year in the Maine woods, and for my money, the rest of that stuff just got in the way and made the book less interesting to read.
Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
"Anne Fadiman is -- by her own admission -- the sort of person who learned about sex from her father's copy of Fanny Hill, whose husband buys her ninetoon pounds of dusty books for her birthday, and who once found herself poring over a 1974 Toyota Corolla manual because it was the only written material in her apartment that she had not read at least twice.
"Ex Libris recounts a lifelong love affair with books and language. For Fadiman, as for many passionate readers, the books she loves have become chapters in her own life story. Writing with remarkable grace, she revives the tradition of the well-crafted personal essay, moving easily from anecdotes about Coleridge and Orwell to tales of her own pathologically literary family. As someone who played at blocks with her father's twenty-two-volume set of Trollope ("My Ancestral Castles") and who considered herself truly married only when she and her husband had merged collections ("Marrying Libraries"), she is exquisitely well equipped to expand upon the art of flyleaf inscriptions, the perverse pleasures of compulsive proofreading, the allure of long words, and the satisfactions of reading aloud. Perfectly balanced between humor and erudition, Ex Libris establishes Fadiman as one of our finest contemporary essayists."
~~back cover
This is a delightful little book! I enjoyed some of the essays more than others, but they were all exquisitely written, thoughtful, a unique perspective on books, and life with and without books. I won't bore you with a synopsis of the essarys themselves, but will leave it to you to discover them for yourself.
The Windsor Knot by Sharyn McCrumb
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
"...Sharyn McCrumb has now written the novel that Elizabeth MacPherson-watcher have been waiting for: Elizabeth is getting married. How and why is typically outrageous, in a mystery of Southern manners and small-town mayhem that is laced with the mordant humor that has become McCrumb's singular trademark.
"Racing to complete her doctoral research in her specialty of forensic anthropology, Elizabeth MacPherson's summer is totally booked -- until her Scottish fiance, Cameron Dawson, calls from across the seas with a once-in-a-lifetime surprise. A local hero and marine biologist, Cameron has been invited to tea with her Majesty the Queen (along with 8,000 close personal subjects of the crown!)
"However, there is one caveat: no friends or fiances may accompany the invited, only spouses. Elated, Elizabeth knows how to solve that small problem -- she and Cameron will simply get married immediately. Royalty enthusiast that she is, planning a large formal wedding in five weeks is the lease she can do for the chance to hobnob with the other Elizabeth.
Meanwhile, in between Elizabeth's fittings and flowers, local widow Clarine Mason receive a strange phone call. Her dear husband Emmet has died, she is told, on a highway in San Diego. How sad. Strange, too, thinks Mrs. Mason, as her errant Emmet died five years before. And she's got an urn filled with ashes to prove it.
"So when the sheriff arrives with an ornate vase, Elizabeth wishes she could thank him for the wedding present. Instead, she puts her expertise to work in a study of Emmet's ashes, which turn out not to be Emmet at all. Just who those ashes once were is what Elizabeth must discover -- if tartan bridesmaids' dresses, scones with tea, and all the accoutrements necessary for the joining of two noble clans don't bury her first."
~~front & back flaps
I cannae fathom out what Cameron stays with that woman, much less marries her. When she's being the level-headed forensic anthropologist she's fine, normal. But she lurches off into giddy schoolgirl mode so often that it's just maddening! Imagine insisting on pushing the wedding ahead a year, and demanding that it be formal as well!
Aside from all the wedding hoopla (was this a mystery or a romance? A mysterious romance? A romantic mystery?), it's a charming little mystery. Emmet J. Mason, dead twice over in an auto accident in California. Very clever plot. And then there's the traveling garden gnome ...
This book feels like a bridging argument to me. The author needed to get Elizabeth over to Scotland, and this was a dandy way to do it. I would have preferred a mystery in Virginia, and then the wedding, but that's only me, being the curmudgeon again.
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Visions Caliban CL by Dale Peterson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
"We share ninety-nine percent of our genes with chimpanzees, and our relations with them epitomize both our kinship with and our alienation from the rest of the natural world. In this groundbreaking book, a brilliant writer and a great scientists paint an extraordinary portrait of chimpanzees, humans, and our complex lives together since the 1600s, when chimpanzees first became known in Europe and William Shakespeare created Caliban, neither man nor beast but 'honored with a human shape.'
"This vision of Caliban is brought vividly to life by the authors' stories of their personal experiences with chimpanzees, in the wild and in captivity. The humanity of chimps is captured in accounts of their use of tools and medicinal plants, their sense of self, and their devotion to one another -- and sometimes to humans. Our inhumanity toward them is illustrated by chilling accounts of the international chimpanzee trade and of the abuse of chimps in medical research and entertainment. The poignancy of our relationship is revealed in tales of chimps raised as children by humans and then abandoned to laboratories or sent back to the wild, where they mush learn to be chimps again.
"With a cast of characters that ranges from Shakespeare to J. Fred Muggs, Visions of Caliban is a dramatic, entertaining, and affecting investigation of man's relationship to chimpanzees."
~~front flap
This was a very difficult book to read. Poignant, distressing, informative, enlightening. It wasn't what I was expecting at all, having been thrown off the scent by the second portion of the title: "On Chimpanzees and People." I don't know how to talk about this book, really. I came away with a much better idea of the real nature of chimpanzees, and also of their precarious balance on the brink of extinction -- due to the all-too-common causes of habitat destruction and overhunting. It came as a distinct shock to read about how we, in the United States (and other Western European nations) are actively involved in, and complicit in, the latter menace.
The book is very well written, researched and supported in minute detail. I recommend it -- it will broaden your outlook and open your eyes a bit further on how we think about the natural world, and our place in it and our relationship to it.
Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
"Frances Mayes -- widely published poet, gourmet cook, and travel writer -- opens the door to a wondrous new world when she buys and restores an abandoned villa in the spectacular Tuscan countryside. In sensuous and evocative language, she brings the reader along as she discovers the beauty and simplicity of life in Italy. An accomplished cook and food writer, Mayes also creates dozens of delicious seasonal recipes from her traditional kitchen and simple garden, all of which she includes in the book. Doing for Tuscany what M.F.K. Fisher and Peter Mayle did for Provence, Mayes writes about the tastes and pleasures of a foreign country with gusto and passion. A celebration of the extraordinary quality of life in Tuscany, Under the Tuscan Sun is a fest for all the senses."
~~back cover
My friend Maui Jim told me a long time ago that this was a good book. I thought it strange he would say so, since I somehow had got hold of the notion that this was a romance. I'm not big on romances. But then somehow or other the film is coming up in my Netflix queue, and I decided to read the book before watching the movie -- I seem to get what's going on in the movie better if I've read the book first.
I'm sure all of you are snickering behind your hands -- it's NOT a romance! It's a lovely recapturing of falling in love with a place, needing to and determined to be living there, and how the author and her husband achieved that goal. Reading, you feel as though you're there -- the light, the people, the old stone buildings. It's almost a shock to look up and find yourself in your own home, when just moments ago you were sitting on the patio with breakfast, soaking up the light and the quiet morning sounds of Tuscany.
The only thing I didn't like about the book was its eternal summer, with only a few hasty winter sketches. The author and her husband are both university professors in America, and therefore required to spend nine months here, with the Tuscany house shut up and waiting for them.
Tottering in My Garden: A Gardener's Memoir by Midge Ellis Keeble
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
"A gardener of 40 years, Midge Keeble has established six outstanding gardens in her life, meeting the challenges of clay, sand, shade and tired soil. Tottering in My Garden spills over with practical advice and, at the same time, serves as delightful reading to anyone who has ever broken ground with a trowel and planted a seed."
~~back cover
I'm not much of a gardener, but this is a charming and laugh-out-loud funny book. The author regales you with the stories of how each garden came to be, the mistakes made along the way, the pets who adopted them, their children growing up, etc. And all the while she talks about the gardens, how to make them what you want them to be, how to care for the plants, etc. There are several sections entitled "NOTES FOR THE NOVICE" which are extremely useful, and other tips and tricks scattered throughout the narrative.
But it's the narrative itself that's the icing on the cake: wryly humorous, self-depreciating humor about mistakes and miscues, animals on the loose, how not to garden, etc. I enjoyed the information, but I loved the story. And devoured the book almost at one go.
