"We Had More Than Any Two People In The World. And Then We Fell Down. First You, And Then Me. Yes, It Makes It Even. We're Down Here Together. But We're Not Up High Any More. Our Beautiful Mountain Is Gone."

About three quarters of the way through The Postman Always Rings Twice, I found myself wondering what the title of the book was intended to mean. Because there was absolutely no mail delivery in site anywhere in this novel. 

And while clocking in at a short 116 pages, man, was there a lot of story jam packed in there. The book tells the story of Frank, a vagabond who finds himself at a diner in southern California, where he is offered a job by Nick Papadakis (referred to throughout the novel as "the Greek"), which he accepts and after seeing the Greek's wife, Cora, in the kitchen, he immediately lusts for her. Turns out, Cora isn't all that happy in her marriage, and takes an immediately liking to Frank as well (I use the term "liking" loosely, as they pretty much just start bangin right off the bat). And so the 2 of them hide their relationship from the Greek and make plans to murder him, which goes awry (both times). 

The writing in this novel is terse and almost like gunfire. It gets very much to the point but still has a way of alluding to events and feelings that the characters are having in a very successful way. The relationship between Frank and Cora is very intense, violent, and impulsive, which is also how the writing felt. 

My initial thought of the meaning of the title was how it relates to the events in the novel...that you may not get away with something on the second try. But after slightly more research (ok, Wikipedia research), James M. Cain indicated in a conversation with screenwriter Vincent Lawrence that the title referred to the anxiety he felt waiting to hear back from publishers about his submitted manuscripts and that the postman would ring twice when he had news. After Cain discussed it in more detail, he decided that the phrase was appropriate to describe Frank's situation by the end of the novel: that he may have avoided fate the first time, but not the second. So I guess I wasn't all that far off in my assumption. And I love the seeming obscurity of the title in regards to the content of the story. I am a fan of things that make you think and come to your own conclusions, which this certainly did. 

I haven't seen either of the 2 film versions of the novel (the 1946 version with Lana Turner and John Garfield or the 1981 version with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange, which I hear has some pretty intense sex scenes, which fits in pretty well with how it was described in the novel), but definitely would like to see one, if not both. James M. Cain went on to write Double Indemnity and Mildred Pierce, both of which became hit films and he became well known as a crime noir writer, although it sounds like he wasn't very fond of any kind of label being ascribed to his writing. 

All in all, this was a quick and intense read, one that I appreciated very much. It's intriguing to me to see writers who can do so much with so few words, versus some of the other writers I've come across recently (I'm looking at you James Joyce and Gertrude Stein). 

Up next is Light in August by William Faulkner. I've never read anything by Faulkner so I have no idea what to expect. Wish me luck. 

219 to go. Happy St. Patty's Day!

"He Existed. Not Many People In The World Knew How To, Even If They Had The Money."

I have never seen the film version of The Talented Mr. Ripley, although I was aware that the different characters were played by Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, so the entire time I was reading the book, I pictured all of them as the characters. Which normally I'm not a fan of (I like to create my own vision of who they are and what they look like based on the author's description, not based on a casting director's preference), but in this case, I kind of appreciated it. Although Gwyneth Paltrow felt a little miscast to me, but I'll wait to firm up that opinion until I actually see it. Which I'm very much looking forward to. Because I'm certain that after seeing the movie (and reading the book), I'm going to want to ditch it all and go live on the Italian seashore with sojourns up to Rome and Venice. And live like a rich American ex-pat (which I am most decidedly, not). 

I won't give a lengthy recap of the book, but the main gist of the story is that Tom Ripley is a bit of a hustler in New York and is given the opportunity by a rich businessman to go find his son, Dickie Greenleaf, in Italy and try to convince him to return to the US to be around for his sick mother and to eventually take over his shipping business. But once in Italy, Tom develops a significant attachment (love?) for Dickie and the two form a fast, tight friendship. But the situation changes, and Tom makes a decision that he would prefer to continue his adventures in Italy and Europe as the person in Dickie that he idolizes. 

The portrait of Tom Ripley is an excellent one. Of an insecure, petulant person who craves being accepted. So moments when people even present a hint of making fun of him or seeing him as a lesser person than he sees himself cause him to flip the switch in his mind and lose it emotionally, usually acting out in a violent way. He was a very convincing sociopath who, for the most part, didn't seem like a sociopath. And oddly, I kind of found myself rooting for him; rooting for him to "get away with it". And it kind of ruined the suspense of the ending for me knowing that there were 4 books written by Patricia Highsmith about Tom Ripley's "adventures". So sorry for possibly having ruined the ending for you too. 

I loved having this book in the mix. I haven't read a good suspenseful type murder book in a while, particularly one that was coupled with such a  solid portrait of the villain/main character and told from his point of view. I'd highly recommend it, particularly if you haven't seen the movie and don't know much about the book (as I did); I think I enjoyed it more this way. But I cannot wait to see the movie. 

The next book I've already started on is The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain. Similar to The Talented Mr. Ripley, I'm aware that this is a movie with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange, and so I find myself picturing them in the 2 main roles, but beyond that, I don't know anything about the movie or storyline. This is a pretty short book so I'm guessing I'll be through it by the end of the weekend. Knocking books off the lists like a boss! 

220 to go. 

Side note: so I am painfully aware that in just over 7 short months, I will be hitting my 40th birthday. And while the original intent of this blog was to read all of these books by my 40th birthday, I have realized perhaps that I didn't fully appreciate the size of the task when I first started doing this in 2012. Because across the lists, which the duplicates removed, there are 326 books, and when I stared in 2012, I had already read 72. So yes, in just less than 7 years, I've only read 34 books...just slightly short of the 254 that I needed to read. My second post over on this blog pointed out how feasible this would likely not be (I would have needed to average about 3 books per month), so I'm not surprised that this didn't happen. In all fairness, I have been mixing in other non-list books, which brings my total read in 79 months to 42 books. So rather than 2 books/month, I'm averaging closer to 2 months/book. I hope to up this in the coming days, but in the meantime, I'll just keep moving that bar farther out. We'll reassess once the dreaded 4-0 crashes down on my head. 

Happy Saturday!

"They Both Knew That The Women Who Cried At Night Were The Women Who Died In The Morning. Sadness And Loss Were Drawn In With Each Breath But Never Expelled. You Couldn't Give In. Not For A Second."

By my estimation, I've read just over 1000 pages in about a month. But I just couldn't help it. I totally got sucked into The Nightingale.

I've read quite a few novels based during WWII, but this one was different than ones I've read. It was from the perspective of 2 sisters living in Nazi-occupied France: one sister, Isabelle, is impetuous, stubborn, and enraged by the German occupation of France whereas the other sister, Vianne, is keen to just follow the new (awful) rules set out by the German occupiers in order to protect her daughter. Throughout the course of the war, each finds themselves handling the situation very differently, but ultimately doing what they can to help others. Isabelle helps establish an escape route for downed airmen through the Pyrenees into Spain, guiding hundreds of men to safety on a treacherous route and Vianne saves her Jewish friend's son and forges papers to make him her own and eventually hides many Jewish children in the local convent orphanage.

I appreciated the fact that this novel was about how women made an impact during the war, as part of the resistance or trying to help save others. In fact, there is a statement in the last few pages of the novel asking why one of the characters had never heard anything about how people escaped over the mountains or that there was a concentration camp just for women who resisted the Nazis, and this is the answer:

"'Men tell stories,' I say. It is the truest, simplest answer to his question. 'Women get on with it. For us it was a shadow war. There were no parades for us when it was over, no medals or mentions in history books. We did what we had to during the war and when it was over, we picked up the pieces and started our lives over."

It's good to know that these stories are being shared more widely. Because there is certainly truth to the above statement. And of course the soldiers who fought were certainly heroes, but there were so many other moments of courage and heroism in everyday decisions by women who remained in the war-torn areas. And the novel asks the question for all of us: what would we do in those circumstances? Would we have the courage to fight back? Would we risk our own lives to fight something so evil? So sometimes I need to read novels like this to jolt me back into the understanding that of how awful WWII truly was and how the human spirit can triumph in spite of that, and those who did risk their lives (oftentimes losing their lives as a result) to fight such evil in even the smallest ways were absolute heroes.

So now I go back to the book lists. Up next is The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith. I haven't seen the movie, but I probably will make it a point to watch it after I'm done (although I said the same thing a couple years ago about Sophie's Choice, and I still haven't gotten around to watching that either). And for some reason, I seem to think this book is about a mystical golf caddy, but I know I'm just confusing my Matt Damon movies. Wish me luck!

Happy Saturday!

"What Affected Her Was That He Had Once Been Young, And That He Had Grown Old, And Was Now Dead. That Was All. Youth And Vigour Had Come To That. Youth And Vigour Always Came To That. Everything Came To That."

For some strange reason, the version of The Old Wives' Tale that I ordered on Amazon came as a plain orange paperback with the title and author on the front and a very brief statement on the back about how Arnold Bennett was inspired to write the book based on a grotesque old woman that he encountered in a Parisian restaurant. Inside, other than the text of the novel, there is nothing else. No copyright information, no about the author, no introductions or dedications. The text literally starts on the very first piece of paper after the cover and ends on the last piece of paper before the back cover. Bootlegged copy perhaps? Who knows. But the one thing that bugged the ever-living shit out of me while reading this book, was that the page numbers were done in Roman numerals. Given that the book was dlxxxviii pages long (for those of you not well-versed in the ancient Roman counting system, that's 588), it was beyond irritating to have to do letter math when I just wanted to figure out what page I was on vs how many pages were left in the book. In spite of the long and rich story contained within the plain orange paperback cover, unfortunately, I'm most likely to remember this detail most about the book. 

The Old Wives' Tale is the story about 2 sisters in the mid to late 19th century living in the town of Bursley, a small provincial town in England. Constance, is the dutiful, obedient, plain-looking daughter and Sophia is the beautiful, obstinate, willful daughter. They live in the lodgings attached to their father's millenary store, and follow the goings-on of the small town in the square outside their windows. Sophia causes a scandal when she runs off with a travelling salesman who would occasionally come to the shop, while Sophia dutifully marries the man who works in the shop and takes over after her father's death. 

The rest of the story tells of the 2 women's lives: Constance has a son (also a stubborn and self-centered child) and lives quite contentedly in her small town with son and husband until her husband's early death and her son's abandonment of her for schooling in London. Sophia marries her salesman and travels to Paris where they live elaborately for a few years until her husband blows through all of his inheritance and leaves her. Sophia goes on to make a name for herself as a lodging/hotel proprietress. They both live their lives completely independent of each other for ~30 years until a friend of Constance's son identifies Sophia while staying at her hotel. Sophia eventually reconnects with her sister and moves back to small-town Bursley, and the 2 sisters live together into their old age. 

Overall, there wasn't really all that much special about the book. The stories of the 2 sisters was interesting, but the writing was very straightforward, explanatory prose. The story kept my attention, but I wasn't wowed by anything really that happened. 

I did schlep this giant book 22,116 miles across to globe to read on vacation in Cambodia and Thailand. I had lots of quality airplane time and lots of quality beach time in Koh Yao Noi to do nothing but read the tale of the lives of the 2 Baines sisters. And I'm actually quite glad that I did. Because I suspect this book would have taken me MONTHS to get through under normal circumstances. But because there was a lot of forced downtime, I motored my way through it. So while it literally was a pain to have this giant deadweight book with me all the time, it was a pretty good way to get through a hefty novel. 

I also schlepped the equally giant book The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah with me on vacation (yes, I devoted like 7 lbs of luggage weight to books, including my Thailand travel book. And in case you attempt my folly, most Asian airlines have weight limits for your carry-on luggage, so I wouldn't advise  bringing along 1300+ pages of books). So I'm progressing quite quickly through this book as well. Unintentionally, the book is also about 2 sisters, this time during WWII in France. I guess historical fiction is where I'll be hanging out for a while. 

Happy Saturday! 221 more books to go! 

"Oh My Little One, I Think You Must Be The Pure Child Of The Century That Just Now Is Waiting In The Wings, The New Age In Which No Woman Will Be Bound Down To The Ground"

This past August and the previous summer, I participated in a choir for a Detroit performance artist, Satori Circus, singing songs from his 30 year catalog of music as well as spoken word pieces that had accompanied his different performances. The choir was held in a historic church on the border of Detroit and Hamtramck. Our "hymnals" which housed our lyrics and notes on the songs were taped inside the pages of an old encyclopedia set. One of our inside jokes for the show was when each of the performers would go up to the pulpit to introduce a song, they would read a random section of text on the opposite page of their encyclopedia. When I went up to the pulpit, the sentence I read was about women in the Khoikhoi tribe who were known for their ample buttocks, a condition known as steatopygia. We rehearsed for the choir a lot, so I said this sentence and this word a lot. So imagine my surprise, when on the very first page of Nights at the Circus to come across the sentence: "The artist had chosen to depict her ascent from behind - bums aloft, you might say; up she goes, in a steatopygous perspective...". I knew that this book and I were going to get along just fine.

The novel is about Fevvers (note: it took me a while to realize that this name was given to her due to its similar sound to "feathers"), an aerialist performer at the end of the 19th century. She is grandiose, bawdy, sometimes vulgar, but with a good heart, and absolutely larger than life. And oh yeah, she has giant wings attached to her back that have been with her since she was a little chick at birth. At least that is the story that she tells the public. But not everyone believes her story and thinks she is a fraud. Enter Jack Walser, an American journalist who has traveled the globe, who spends a long, bizarre, and possibly even magical evening interviewing Fevvers in her dressing room of a London theatre. After this meeting, Walser is roped in, hook, line, and sinker, and pitches to his editor that he join the circus troupe that Fevvers will be touring with, not only to get to the bottom of Fevvers' truth, but to write as an undercover circus performer.

There were so many chapters of this novel that I feel could have stood alone as their own short story. Or the novel seems like it could have been done as a serial. In particular, the different vignettes during Walser's time with the circus in Russia just blew me away. They were so rich with details and were so strange and unique, I just loved them. Dancing tigers, a drunk buffoon leader of the clowns, a troupe of performing apes who certainly seemed much more intelligent than their human counterparts. And while the book was grounded in reality, the reader often had to suspend belief and just accept the fanciful and impossible. The bizarre and incomprehensible. Which I just loved.

And I just adored the character of Fevvers. She is certainly out to get all that she can, selling her unique persona and keeping people guessing whether her wings are real or not, but as the story of her history pans out and the actions of the current storyline unfold, she is much more than just a gold digger. One of the most multi-faceted and unique characters I've read in a long time.

The book lost a little steam for me in the third act, when the circus train derails in the Siberian tundra; the different situations that occur during this part of the novel seem incongruous with the rest of the action of the story. Almost as though they were ideas that the author had identified for inclusion in a novel somewhere and they were kind of forced to fit in this one. But don't get me wrong, they were all as unique, fascinating, and wonderful to read as the first two parts of the book, but just didn't feel like they fit.

So I would highly recommend this book; it was a delightful read. It made me smile and made me say out loud (more than a few times), "Damn, this is what clever, creative writing is all about."

So up next we have The Old Wives' Tale by Arnold Bennett. I don't know much about the book except that if follows its female characters throughout the entire span of their lives. And that it is massive (but the print is small!). In mid-January, I'm going on a trip to Cambodia and Thailand and will be spending roughly 3 days of that time on airplanes or in airports, so I think a large book will be just the thing to keep me occupied! Hopefully I can find out between now and then whether or not I like the book; if I'm not a fan, I may have to switch gears for something else and come back to The Old Wives' Tale when I get back. But we'll see!

Happy New Year! 222 to go! xoxox

"I Have No Physical Organ For Guilt. But I Have A Question. I Want To Know - I Do Feel Clearly That I Have a Soul. There Is Such Thing As A Soul. I Feel It. I Started To Send It Out Of My Body, But Got Scared And Pulled It Back. I May Have Thrown My Soul Out Of Kilter. How Do You Reconcile Unity And Identity?"

I finished reading Tripmaster Monkey about 2 weeks ago and I'm just stumped on exactly what to say about it. In some ways, the writing was just brilliant - a skill set that I would very much like to develop, including rapid fire prose that doesn't feel forced or hokey, but feels natural, smart, and completely defines the mental state of a character. But in other ways, I just wanted to gloss over some very long sections of the book because they were just so drawn out and tedious to get through. I am certain that these long sections were important and were metaphors for many things the main character was dealing with, but they were just very dense and long, and it was easy for me to lose interest along the way. 

The book is about Wittman Ah Sing, a hippie Chinese-American who is a recent graduate of Berkeley in the 1960s. Wittman is trying to sort out his future path, primarily wanting to be a poet and playwright but having to settle for working in a department store. Wittman pines for a girl he knows from school, does lots of drugs, and marries a white girl he meets at a party. Wittman struggles with conventional expectations, capitalism, war, and very predominantly, self-identity as both an American and being of Chinese descent. 

Wittman's immediate goal is to stage the most elaborate play every conceived - his descriptions of his plans for play as well as the recounting of the actual staging of the play is often where I would get bogged down. Certainly the vision and eventual enacting of the play was impossibly surreal and could never actually be done in real life, and it was sometimes nice to just give in to the fantasy of possibilities beyond what could ever be contained within a stage setting. However, these descriptions would go on for dozens of pages and meander and change characters and storyline along the way. It was just hard for me to focus and feel much of a connection to what was going on. 

The writing was so funny at times and again, whip-smart. A large focus of the book is about how Wittman assesses what it means to be a Chinese-American in the mid 1960s and his conflict in identity around this (being so much of an American yet feeling continually insulted and exploited by white Americans). And while much of his analysis around this is done in a humorous tone, I really couldn't help feeling that it slid over the line into pretty racist territory. Wittman often mocked his own ancestry (everything from the way of speaking to clichés of Chinese restaurants) to make a point about how he felt Chinese-Americans were viewed and treated, but because it was done SO much throughout the book, it started to feel less like satire and more like the author herself was insulting her own culture. I realize it was meant to be a commentary about racism against Chinese-Americans, but it just didn't feel like it after awhile. 

So yeah, I definitely struggled with this one and I'm glad to be done with it. Onward we go. 

Next up is Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter. I don't often do 2 books in a row from the same book list (both are from my list of female works of fiction), but in comparison to the other lists, I'm a bit farther behind on that list so I'll try to work on that one to even the score. 223 to go. 

"Loss, Once It's Become A Certainty, Is Like A Rock You Hold In Your Hand. It Has Weight And Dimension And Texture. It's Solid And Can Be Assessed And Dealt With. You Can Use It To Beat Yourself With Or You Can Throw It Away."

I read Ordinary Grace in 5 days. I think I mentioned multiple times to my family members that it was the perfect summer read. Although that would imply that it would take a full summer to read. Which for me, it certainly did not. I guess it helps that I'm off work for over a week and am in northern Michigan with not much to do other than hang out and read a book (and drink. So there's that too).


The story is told by Frank, a 13-year-old in a small town in Minnesota during the summer of 1961. Frank has a younger brother Jake who has a severe stutter, an older sister Ariel who is a piano virtuoso, a father who is the town minister, and a mother who is not happy with being dealt the hand of the preacher's wife (which her husband wasn't going to be when she married him). The book starts by telling of the death of another small child who was killed on the railroad tracks by a train. The rest of the summer is plagued by death in multiple different circumstances. In spite of this sounding like kind of a dark story (and in some regards, it is), it's actually very nostalgic, back to times when kids went out and played in every nook of their neighborhood, stopped by their friends' houses to see if they could come out and play, listened to baseball games on the radio, and played out in the woods and down by the river. The entire time I was reading it, I kept thinking about how much I would love to see this book made into a movie. And while it inevitably will draw comparisons to Stand by Me, this book was centered more around family dynamics versus Stand by Me which focuses more around a circle of friends.


I have to admit that I did guess the ending; there were a few specifically placed foreshadows that drew the reader's attention to specific characters and relationships that I actually caught. But I really loved the book. The only minor quibble with the story though, is that the main character always seemed to be in the right place at the right time to see or hear things that he wasn't supposed to, which put him in a unique position to understand more about the ongoing situations than anyone else. And after a while, it just seemed a little too coincidental that every single chapter he put himself in just the right position to eavesdrop or spy on people.

So if you're looking for a charming, nostalgic book with interesting characters and a very interesting storyline, you'll enjoy it for a summer read!

Next up, I switch back to a booklist book in Tripmaster Monkey by Maxine Hong Kingston. I don't know a single thing about this book other than what the description is on the back, and based on that, it certainly sounds very interesting. Although it sounds like there could be a possibility of it being really out there enough to frustrate me. So we shall see!

Happy 4th of July weekend!