Bibliophile

Every Tuesday Diane at  Bibliophile by the Sea hosts First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros, sharing the first paragraph or (a few) of a book she’s reading or thinking about reading soon. This is a book I’ve had for some time and haven’t read yet. It’s The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson. I bought this book because I’d read and loved Mary Lawson’s book, Crow Lake (link to my post on the book). The Other Side of the Bridge begins:  Prologue There was a summer back when they were kids, when Arthur Dunn was thirteen or fourteen and his brother Jake was eight or nine, when for weeks on end Jake pestered Arthur to play the game he called knives. Jake had a great collection of knives at the time, everything from fancy little Swiss Army jack-knives with dozens of attachments to a big sleek hunting knife with a runnel down one side for blood. It was the hunting knife that was to be used in the game because according to Jake it was the best for throwing. The only reason I haven’t read it yet is pressure of time  - and lots of other books that I’m dying to read. But should I read this one soon? This is the blurb on the back cover: Arthur and Jake are brothers, yet worlds apart. Arthur is older, shy, dutiful, and set to inherit his father’s farm. Jake is younger and reckless, a dangerous man to know. When Laura arrives in their 1939s rural community, an already uneasy relationship is driven to breaking point … And this is what Penelope Lively wrote about it in the Guardian: This is a fine book – an enthralling read, both straightforward and wonderfully intricate. I think I’ll move it up the list of books-to-be-read.

The Water Witch by Juliet Dark Ballantine Books, 2013 Fantasy; 352 pgs I wish I had sat down to write this review earlier. It has been a few weeks since I read the book. I finished it just before all of my attention was taken by Riley's last days, and so reviewing this book, much less any other book, went down a few notches on my list of priorities. As a result, my memory is a bit fuzzy. What I do remember . . . From the Publisher: [. . .] Callie McFay, a professor of gothic literature, has at last restored a semblance of calm to her rambling Victorian house. But in the nearby thicket of the honeysuckle forest, and in the currents of the rushing Undine stream, more trouble is stirring. . . . The enchanted town of Fairwick’s dazzling mix of mythical creatures has come under siege from the Grove: a sinister group of witches determined to banish the fey back to their ancestral land. With factions turning on one another, all are cruelly forced to take sides. Callie’s grandmother, a prominent Grove member, demands her granddaughter’s compliance, but half-witch/half-fey Callie can hardly betray her friends and colleagues at the college. To stave off disaster, Callie enlists Duncan Laird, an alluring seductive academic who cultivates her vast magical potential, but to what end? Deeply conflicted, Callie struggles to save her beloved Fairwick, dangerously pushing her extraordinary powers to the limit—risking all, even the needs of her own passionate heart. I fell in love with Juliet Dark's writing, characters and their world in The Demon Lover. The Water Witch is the second book of the Fairwick Chronicles and it is just as good as the first. I was quickly swept back into Callie's life in Fairwick, enchanted by the world and people Dark has created. Carol Goodman writing as Juliet Dark yet again shows her great writing chops. She has a way with words in spinning a tale and in creating a world that is so full and rich in my mind's eye. This particular book had less of the Gothic feel that the first book had, but it was no less atmospheric. Fairwick is full of charm and mystery, darkness and light. Oh, how I would love to explore the college town and the woods behind Callie's house! The author weaves mythology and folklore into her story, which only adds to the allure. There is much more action and less romance in The Water Witch than was in The Demon Lover. As a result, this book seemed to move a bit faster pace wise. The characters were more fleshed out, and I enjoyed getting to know them better. Especially Callie. She's more fully coming into her own, learning where she came from, what powers she has and just how to use them. I was not happy to see this book come to an end if only because the next book in the series isn't waiting in the wings for me to read it. Rating: (Very Good +) To learn more about Carol Goodman/Juliet Dark and her books, please visit the author's website. Source: I received an e-copy of this book for review from the publisher via NetGalley. © 2013, Wendy Runyon of Musings of a Bookish Kitty. All Rights Reserved. If you're reading this on a site other than Musings of a Bookish Kitty or Wendy's feed, be aware that this post has been stolen and is used without permission.

One week until the “Another Look” book club event for Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, May 28, at the Stanford Humanities Center.  I wrote about it here.  Read the book, join us, have some fun, and come up and introduce yourself to Humble Moi.  I’ll be there. Meanwhile, enjoy this selection from the book, in which Lorelei Lee meets Dr. Froyd in Vienna, which she explains is somewhere in “the Central of Europe.” From Lorelei’s May 27 diary: Cultivate a few inhibitions and get some sleep. “Well finaly I broke down and Mr. Spoffard said that he thought a little girl like I, who was trying to reform the whole world was trying to do to much, especially beginning on a girl like Dorothy. So he said there was a famous doctor in Vienna called Dr. Froyd who could stop all of my worrying because he does not give a girl medicine but he talks you out of it by psychoanalysis. So yesterday he took me to Dr. Froyd. So Dr. Froyd and I had quite a long talk in the English landguage. So it seems that everybody seems to have a thing called inhibitions, which is when you want to do a thing and you do not do it. So then you dream about it instead. So Dr. Froyd asked me, what I seemed to dream about. So I told him that I never really dream about anything. I mean I use my brains so much in the day time that at night they do not seem to do anything else but rest.  So Dr. Froyd was very very surprised at a girl who did not dream about anything.  So then he asked me all about my life. I mean he is very very sympathetic, and he seems to know how to draw a girl out quite a lot. I mean I told him things that I really would not even put in my diary. So then he seemed very very intreeged at a girl who always seemed to do everything she wanted to do. So he asked me if I really never wanted to do a thing that I did not do. For instance, did I ever want to do a thing that was really vialent, for instance, did I ever want to shoot someone for instance. So then I said I had, but the bullet only went in Mr. Jennings lung and came right out again. So then Dr. Froyd looked at me and looked at me and he said he did not really think it was possible.  So then he called in his assistance and he pointed at me and talked to his assistance quite a lot in the Viennese landguage.  So then his assistance looked at me and looked at me and it really seems as if I was quite a famous case. So then Dr. Froyd said that all I need was to cultivate a few inhibitions and get some sleep.”

It’s coming, Dec 1.

Kind of an orphan post tonight, a follow-up on Hugo von Hoffmansthal that would have made more sense several months ago.Despite the declaration of renunciation described, possibly, in “The Lord Chandos Letter” (1901), Hofmannsthal occasionally returned to fiction. Andreas (written 1912-13) is a novella that threatened to expand into who knows what. Hofmannsthal pulled the plug on it, having finished the first seventy pages and two episodes as well as fifty pages of notes that suggest not one but several directions for the novel, each more abstract than the last.Andreas is a young Viennese man of unformed character on a sort of Grand Tour. He is robbed by a servant who turns out to be an escaped murderer and meets a weightless dream girl on an idyllic farm. In Venice, he finds a room with a family that is in the process of holding a lottery to auction off their daughter’s virginity – “’Well, it isn’t really so unusual, what she’s doing’” (53) – meets a Knight of Malta, and encounters other mysteries like women who transform into other women, one of whom is probably this woman, encountered in a courtyard atop a grape trellis:The whole pale face was wild and tense, with a flash of satisfaction, almost childish in its candour. The body lay somehow on the light trellis of the roof, the feet probably rested on a hook in the wall, the fingertips on the top of a post. The a mysterious change came over the expression of the face. With infinite sympathy, even love, the eyes rested on Andreas. One hand forced its way through the leaves, as if to reach his head, to stroke his hair; the four fingers were bleeding at the tips. The hand did not reach Andreas, a drop of blood fell on his forehead, the face above him turned white. “I’m falling,” cried the mouth… (64)Hofmannsthal was working on something that could have rivaled Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, published the same year Andreas was abandoned, for sheer weirdness. Andreas is as Goethean as Alain-Fournier’sbook, drawing together pieces of a number of century-old books – Italian Journey, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, the Venetian Epigrams, and likely many more I have failed to identify or not read. One of the endings seems to have that Knight willing himself to death in a Rosicrucian ceremony – I must be misinterpreting the fragment, but it invokes the semi-Masonic initiations of Wilhelm Meister.Those metamorphosing women remind me of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Princess Brambilla, also set in Venice.Since Hofmannsthal’s fragment is bizarre, complex, and unfinished, I am just banging books against it to see if any meaning drops out. The colliding texts produce a satisfying clank, at least.Well, some posts are themselves more fragmented than others, more like notes on a subject for future research.Hofmannsthal presumably got whatever he needed out of Andreas, anyway.Andreas can be found in Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Selected Prose, Bollingen, 1952, tr. Mary Hottinger.

Last year was the Patrick White centenary, and among the highlights surrounding that was the posthumous publication (in Australia and the UK) of a novel he had begun in 1981 but left unfinished. Now Picador has brought out a US edition (as a beautiful little (i.e. appropriately -- more mass-market than trade -- sized) French-flapped paperback original) of The Hanging Garden -- and my review of it is the most recent addition to the complete review. It got good but not great critical attention in the UK (a lot of papers skipped it), but it's great to see that US coverage begins with a bang: apparently the cover-review of the coming (26 May) issue of The New York Times Book Review will be John Sutherland's take on the novel. (White has been critically and, especially, popularly neglected in recent years, and only a few of his titles are still in print (barely any in the US) -- but it wasn't always quite like that: recall that even something like The Twyborn Affair had been reviewed in, of all places, People (!) back in the day.) As longtime readers know, I'm a huge fan of White -- a batch of nine reviews (rather thin ones, I'm afraid) of White titles were among the first fifty-odd to appear on the site, more than 14 years ago (yes, back in April 1999), and almost all of his work is now under review (I'm saving up The Tree of Man, for a last hurrah -- and I still need to get my hands on a copy of Happy Valley). Unfinished and posthumous it may be, but The Hanging Garden is well worth your attention.

They've announced that Gerbrand Bakker's The Detour (published in the US as Ten White Geese), translated by David Colmer, has won the 2013 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. (Interestingly, the Readers' Prize and the shadow iffp selection both went to other books.) Ten White Geese (i.e. the US edition of The Detour) only came out in the US in 2013, so it wasn't eligible for the most recently (just a few weeks ago) awarded Best Translated Book Award (for 2012 titles), but will certainly be in the running next year. In 2010 Bakker won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for The Twin, so he already has two of the major English-language international book awards under his belt -- impressive (though two other author have also managed this particular double: Orhan Pamuk and Per Petterson (the latter with the same book)).

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has been visiting India, and this has led to a variety of protocols, agreements, and 'memoranda of understanding' getting signed, as the two nations try to work more closely together in a number of areas. There's exciting stuff like 'coöperation in the field of sewage treatment' (something we certainly want the two most populous countries in the world to coöperate on) and 'coöperation in the field of water efficient irrigation' The one I'm most curious about, however, is number six: the "Memorandum of Understanding [...] on Cooperation in Mutual Translation and Publication of Classic and Contemporary Works". Yes, this: MoU provides for a Joint Working Group that will coordinate translation and publication of 25 books of Classic and Contemporary Works of each side over a period of 5 years in to Chinese and Indian languages respectively. I'd love to see the list of books each side submits -- but regardless of the exact titles, it sounds like a very worthy undertaking (and maybe the start of something even bigger and better ?). Translation -- and cross-cultural exchange --, after all, is always something good.

Wow, thanks for all your comments on the previous post - I will reply to them soon, but basically it seems like we all make wishlists somewhere or other, and I'm very impressed by how organised some of you are!And I thought I'd treat you with a little pile of books which have recently come to Stuck-in-a-Book Towers... let's work from the bottom up, shall we? (I hadn't realised until I put these together for the photo quite how blue books have dominated of late...)London War Notes 1939-1945 by Mollie Panter-DownesI thought this book was absolutely brilliant, and essential WW2 reading, when I reviewed it earlier in the year - but I didn't actually own a copy. When an affordable one came up in my abebooks alerts, I high-tailed it to... well, the internet. But the book is mine now, and I'm thrilled!Selected Poems by Anthony ThwaiteThe Norman Church by A.A. MilneThe Man in the Bowler Hat by A.A. MilneThese all came via a connection Claire/The Captive Reader brought to my attention - as you might know, A.A. Milne is one of my favourite authors, and the first one I loved wholeheartedly in my adult reading. 2012 was Claire's year of discovering AAM, and she read many of his books - and Ann Thwaite's exceptionally good biography A.A. Milne: His Life. I've read it a few times, in pre-blog days, but haven't posted about it yet. Anyway, Ann Thwaite spotted Claire's review and commented on it that she's looking to sell some of AAM books - read her comment on this post - and I got in touch with her. We had a chat on the phone, and she was lovely - and I bought the Milne books mentioned here. The collection of poetry by her husband came as a surprise bonus, and I must write to thank her soon :) I can't tell you have special it feels to have these books come from the author of a biography which affected my reading so much.The Maiden Dinosaur by Janet McNeillThis one was a recommendation by a SiaB reader, Tina, as mentioned in my previous post.Symposium by Muriel SparkOne of the few Spark novels I didn't already own. very kindly given to me by Karen. It might well be my next Spark read...The Towers of Trebizond by Rose MacaulayComing Up For Air by George OrwellWhat Was Lost by Catherine O'FlynnBy Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept by Elizabeth SmartI bought these in the brilliant Amnesty Book Shop in Bristol last weekend - I did already have a copy of the Macaulay, but not in this gorgeous NYRB Classics edition... I'm not the sort of person who could resist that, as well we all know. Mel recommended the Catherine O'Flynn, and the other two are books I've been intending to read for ages. Well, actually I just want to read more Orwell in general, and had hoped to find The Clergyman's Daughter, but this will more than do.Letters of Lewis CarrollWell, why on earth not? (Also timely, as I am going to see Judi Dench in Peter and Alice this weekend. Can't wait!)

The Demon Lover by Juliet Dark Ballantine Books, 2011 Romance (Paranormal); 448 pgs I loved this book. My husband's been giving me a hard time for liking it at all, but it was so good! Juliet Dark (also known by the name Carol Goodman) is a master of description, weaving a tale that pulled me in and has me craving more. I was reminded of how I felt when I read Karen Marie Moning's Darkfever, although the books are very different. From the Publisher: Since accepting a teaching position at remote Fairwick College in upstate New York, Callie McFay has experienced the same disturbingly erotic dream every night: A mist enters her bedroom, then takes the shape of a virile, seductive stranger who proceeds to ravish her in the most toe-curling, wholly satisfying ways possible. Perhaps these dreams are the result of her having written the bestselling book The Sex Lives of Demon Lovers. Callie’s lifelong passion is the intersection of lurid fairy tales and Gothic literature—which is why she’s found herself at Fairwick’s renowned folklore department, living in a once-stately Victorian house that, at first sight, seemed to call her name. But Callie soon realizes that her dreams are alarmingly real. She has a demon lover—an incubus—and he will seduce her, pleasure her, and eventually suck the very life from her. Then Callie makes another startling discovery: Her incubus is not the only mythical creature in Fairwick. As the tenured witches of the college and the resident fairies in the surrounding woods prepare to cast out the demon, Callie must accomplish something infinitely more difficult—banishing this supernatural lover from her heart. I actually picked up this book to read only because I liked the sound of the second book in the series. I admit to being a bit turned off by the description of this book, afraid it would be more sex than story. And while there was a lot of sex, there was also quite a good story. When Callie first visits Fairwick, she has no real interest in taking the job there. She and her boyfriend had long ago agreed to settle in New York City once they finished school. But Callie is drawn to the town, particularly an old Victorian house once owned by a famous author. She buys the home and accepts the position even despite all her reasons not to. As Callie will soon discover, both she and the town of Fairwick are more than they at first appear. I loved the setting of the novel. From the old Victorian house and the woods behind with all its secrets to the university and its eclectic staff to the small town itself, with its charm and unique townsfolk. This is a place I would love to explore further, getting to know the people and taking in the beauty and heart of my surroundings. Callie is the typical heroine, strong and intelligent. Her students are important to her, and it shows in her teaching and in her interactions with her students. Callie is practical, but a romantic at heart. She doesn't want to believe the man who comes to her in her dreams is real, can't imagine he could be, but as the evidence mounts, she struggles with what to do. Callie's emotions are at war with what she knows is right. It's an age old dilemma, but one many of us can relate to on some level. The incubus haunting Callie isn't the only trouble she faces in The Demon Lover. There's also the curse on one of her student's family and a mysterious illness going around. There is also her grandmother, a formidable woman with her own agenda. The book has a distinct Gothic feel to it, which makes it all the more appealing. It is beautiful and intense. And I loved every word. I hated to leave the world Juliet Dark created and am anxious to jump into the second book of the Fairwick Chronicles, Water Witch. Rating: (Very Good +) To learn more about Carol Goodman/Juliet Dark and her books, please visit the author's website. Source: