These are all (I hope) of the books mentioned on the air during Coffee Table this morning. For Christmas gifts for friends and family, as follows: Tom likes Alcohol Can be a Gas by David Blume. Amy likes The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. Samantha loves her new cookbook, Fish…
Old Home Town by Rose Wilder Lane
My rating: 3 of 5 starsLane really, really didn't like the small town America in which she was raised, and in particular she didn't like the lifestyle it forced upon the women living it.
The first chapter is a beautifully written indictment of the nameless Midwestern town in which the story is set. Parochial, insular, stuffy, middle-brow, Lane's old home town is obsessed with what is proper and especially what isn't.
The rest of the chapters are stories told by a young girl named Ernestine about other women who live there, and most of them are pretty easily identifiable as wish fulfillment on the part of the author. The old maid escaping seduction by town ne'er-do-well by her own pluck and the timely appearance of a new suitor. The hired girl forced by gossip to marry the husband when the wife dies, which ends about as well as you might expect. A wife who leaves her husband and goes on to become a couturier. The selfish old woman who lies about her daughter being fast to her daughter's suitor so he'll jilt her and she'll have someone at home to take care of her. Ernestine's "fast friend" Elsie falls for a traveling man with disastrous results. The town beauty elopes with a hayseed, and a mother sells her beautiful daughter to the highest bidder, with homicidal results.
In the last chapter, Ernestine has finally had enough (and so have we) and against the wishes of her parents leaves home for school in NYC. You don't so much as cheer as think, "What took you so long?"
Lane writes
...there were two clear ways to flaunt one's loss of modesty and virtue; one was to wear red, the other was to be seen needlessly gadding around uptown.
Makes me want to put on my reddest outfit and prance right up town. I'm certain that was exactly how she meant me to feel.
Click here to read all my reviews on Goodreads.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5IABqwVO2U&w=480&h=390]
# Permanent link to The Old Home Town Don’t Look the Same
It is a quite staggering reflection that when Cook left Canada for the last time in 1767, he was still a non-commissioned officer. It is also a staggering reflection on the Lords of the Admiralty of the time that, because of their innate snobbish conviction that officers and gentlemen are born and not made, Cook did not quite qualify for a commission. He had been in the despised Merchant Service, he had sailed before the mast in the Navy, he was poor and his origins were obscure. There could have been little doubt left in the Admiralty by that time that in Cook they had the greatest seaman, navigator and cartographer of the generation. But a commission? Hardly. Hardly, that is, until they realised that to send a naval vessel to circumnavigate the globe, in the greatest exploratory voyage ever undertaken, under the command of a non-commissioned officer wouldn't be quite the thing to do. For one thing, it would redound most dreadfully upon the alleged competence of those who did hold commissions, and, for another, it would not look good in the history books. So, belatedly, they made him a lieutenant.
# Permanent link to Captain Cook, the Alistair MacLean version
'Fat smiles on the faces of the husbandmen,' said Hugh Beringar, fresh from his own harvest in the north of the shire, and burned nut-brown from his work in the fields, 'and chaos among the kings. If they had to grow their own corn, mill their own flour and bake their own bread they might have no time left for all the squabbling and killing.'
# Permanent link to Brother Cadfael
The nurse writes in.
The Open University on the history of English: The cartoon version. Love the one about the King James version of the Bible, too. And the age of the dictionary, if only to discover the word “snuffbumble.” Worthy of Rocky and Bullwinkle.
I was on KBBI this morning, talking about good summer reads with host Aaron Selbig. Here’s the list of all the books mentioned on the air, by us and everyone who called in: Tessa recommends To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, which she says she rereads every year. Bill recommends Clive Cussler’s The Mediterranean…
This Thursday, June 2nd, sees the publication of Craig Johnson's seventh Walt Longmire novel, Hell is Empty. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but I'll be first in line at the bookstore to find out one way or another.
Walt is the sheriff of Absaroka County in Wyoming, which is a lot like Alaska, a whole lot of empty space, except with roads. His best friend is Henry Standing Bear, aka the Cheyenne Nation, an Indian (certainly not a Native American) who talks without contractions, which makes him sound a little like Data. Walt is three years a widower, with a grown daughter whose phone calls he lives for, and is starting to think about retirement.
As The Cold Dish, the first novel in the series, opens, a young man is found dead, shot with great accuracy from a great distance with a Sharps rifle. This particular young man, all agree, is no great loss, as he was one of four who had raped a young Indian woman with FAS and didn't serve near enough time for it. Then the second body shows up and Walt has to call in Omar, the guy with the Nieman Marcus helicopter, for help.
I just love a book with a Nieman Marcus helicopter in it, don't you?
The Cold Dish is filled with a wealth of detail about Western history, Indian culture and gun lore (Ever wonder where the term "sharpshooter" came from?) and wonderful descriptions of the landscape, but the true gift is in the characters, including a lot of good-looking, smart-mouthed women and a lot of good-looking, smart-mouthed men who like them. Vic the ex-pat Philadelphia deputy. Lucian the one-legged ex-sheriff. Dorothy who slings the usual at the Busy Bee Cafe. Vonnie the high plains entrepreneur and love interest. Wheelchair-bound Lonnie Little Bird trying to stay sober so his granddaughter can visit him, um-hmmm, yes it is so.
Even the characters with walk-on parts are whole people, like Jules Belden, the guy in the drunk tank whose beatdown Walt ably avenges, and that near-giant Brandon White Buffalo who makes lovely sandwiches. Hands down my favorite is retired bartender Al Munro who shows up at the second crime scene dressed in floral print swimming trunks, on a mule, martini in hand. It's snowing at the time. The dialogue in these novels is so good you feel privileged to eavesdrop in, sort of John Wayne channeling Samuel Johnson, only better read and more articulate.
In order, the novels are The Cold Dish, Death Without Company, Kindness Goes Unpunished, Another Man's Moccasins, The Dark Horse, Junkyard Dogs, and on Thursday, Hell is Empty.
Note: Somebody must have told Craig that Chopper Jim took a Walt Longmire novel along on his recent plane ride to California, because Craig got in touch to malign my characters' taste in reading. And then he sent me this.
Pretty sure Jim would vote for Walt if he lived in Absaroka County. If he wasn't running against him.
If you like the flavor of modern western novels and want more, try also Robert Greer's Spoon, an updating of the Shane story. Then read Monte Walsh, what I consider to be one of the few perfect novels, by Jack Schaefer, the guy who wrote Shane. Then read Molly Gloss' The Hearts of Horses for a look through a female cowboy's eyes. It's almost a sequel to Monte Walsh, which I did not consider possible. All of these novels share a similar rhythm to their language, as if they are told to us from the back of a horse heading into the sunset. They'll make you nostalgic for a horse you never rode yourself.
Update on June 3rd--Here's the trailer for a pretty good adaptation of Monte Walsh starring Tom Selleck. Worth seeing.
# Permanent link to Walt Longmire for Sheriff
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woHix1RrVFM&w=480&h=390]
[More about my trip to Turkey, whether you want to hear about it or not] On the way to Gocek, our guide, the wonderful Serra, pulled off the highway near Kalkan. A switchbacky dirt road took us up the side of a mountain. We went around a corner and beheld this. It’s a Roman aqueduct…
They say there are more Greek and Roman ruins in Turkey than there are in Italy and Greece. I just got back from Turkey and I believe it, but what is even more marvelous is that the ruins are so accessible. If we had stuff like that over here, it would be sequestered behind a…
