Books

… What's the Origin of "Kilroy Was Here"? | Mental Floss. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Decades ago I read Ulysses . I also read Richard Ellman's highly regarded biography. Ulysses is the most influential literary work since Don Quixote. His life is the stuff of literary legend and his persona is used by Ireland as a cultural icon to draw in literary tourists. I cannot help but feel there is a deep irony in this given that Joyce left Ireland in 1914 and never returned. There is much expression of hatred for Ireland in his work though I somehow suspect he would have felt the same way about any homeland. He was deeply obsessed with Ireland and all his work centers on the country. This includes even Finnegan's Wake, basing this on Bowker. The life of Joyce is now a deeply embedded part of Irish literary culture and Bowker's biography seems to me an excellent way to begin to understand it. No one could explain how from the incidents of his life could result in the production of Ulysses but Bowker does a lot to show us how Joyce used his life experiences in his work. Drawing on the work of Delcan Kiberd (who praised this book in his review in The Guardian) who writes in depth on this in his majestic Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation I recently asked 80 Irish writers if they thought Kiberd was right when he said the weak or missing father was the dominant theme of modern Irish literature. Kiberd details this theme in The Portrait of An Artist as a Young Man and to a lesser extent through Ulysses. The responses from the writers ranged from yes, to saying it is one of the themes to repudiation. Bowker lets us see the weakness in the father of Joyce in considerable detail. Joyce as a father is also one of the most important aspects of this biography. That he deeply loved his children is clear. What is subject to pondering is if his own weakness, proclivity for drinking himself into oblivion, his bad money handling skills, his deep dependence on female patrons, and his incredible vanity (justified) and sense at times that his work was more important than his family were not a manifestation of the weakness of the Irish father. One must say, it seems to me, that Joyce exemplified many of the things he hated about his own father. Even though I knew the basic details of the life of Joyce, I found this book fascinating. I felt so bad for Joyce with his eye problems and I felt ashamed of his need to drink until he had to be carried home. I think I understand his love for whore mongering, no offense to anyone meant by this term but that is the best way to describe it. Joyce was not into high class prostitutes, even when he could afford them. Bowker tries hard to understand this. There is also the complex issue of his relationship to Nora Barnacle. This is tied in with his obsession with Night Town and its easy cheap prostitutes. Joyce, think back to Swift, probably conflated sex with other bodily functions and might have been into being urinated or defected on. He was deeply Catholic and that comes with a heavy sexual guilt. Joyce did have jobs, as a language teacher, he was fluent in four languages and in total was comfortable in thirteen, as a clerk using his Italian skills but for much of his life he depended on help from others. He had a wealthy American patron, Harriet Weaver, who, per Bowker, over the course of his life, gave Joyce nearly £250,000 pounds. It was hard to admire Joyce when you read that he would ask Weaver for money pleading of his very real poverty, then once he has some money, spending lavishly for fancy meals. We also meet Ezra Pound who did greatly help Joyce. Of course Samuel Beckett appears and the material relating to Sylvia Beach was fascinating.Bowker details the tremendous problems Joyce had with censors in England and the USA where postal authorities seized Ulysses. There are many fascinating people in Joyce's circle. His genius was fully seen by many astute people. Through out his life, Joyce was beset by very serious eye problems and

One or two of you (*cough* Samara *cough*) have been asking when I'll get around to writing about seeing Judi Dench in Peter and Alice and, truth be told, it's been on my conscience for a bit. Considering I spent my undergraduate years writing theatre reviews for the student newspaper, and being drama editor for a couple of terms, this should really be right up my street, shouldn't it? But I find student theatre rather easier to analyse and critique than theatre of this calibre - so this won't be a review per se, but more a blog about an experience.My friend Andrea and I have similar tastes in film and theatre, and have seen quite a few plays together (before the days of easy online booking, in our undergraduate days, we used to squabble over who would have phone the theatre company) and now we have a two-person film club where we watch plenty of older films - remind me to write about the fantastically funny 1944 film On Approval. Indeed, the only real fault Andrea has is that she (wrongly) believes that Maggie Smith is superior to Judi Dench. What nonsense. Dame J is obviously the best.Well, to persuade Andrea to see the error of her ways (ahem) we went off to see Peter and Alice. A colleague at the Bodleian told me about it, and I couldn't believe quite how perfect it sounded. Not only was Judi Dench in it (did I mention?) but it combined one of my favourite books (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) with one I very much like (Peter Pan). Even better, the playwright - John Logan - didn't pick these names out of nowhere. Did you know that the woman who inspired Alice once met the man who inspired Peter? 'Tis true - it happened at a bookshop, as they were preparing to speak at an event.And this is where the stage is set as the play begins - with a fantastic bookshop set, high shelves, ladders, and all. It'll come as no surprise to you to know that I loved that. Note to all set designers everywhere: nothing is more captivating than books on stage. Correction: nothing except Judi Dench - for she soon enters, to meet the ambling, nervous Peter Davies (played by Ben Whishaw, of Q fame). Alice Hargreaves (nee Liddell) is quite the opposite - confident, rather brusque, and with that wonderful spirit with which Judi Dench so often infuses her characters.(Can we take a moment, folks, to acknowledge how provoking it is to me that JUDI DENCH was on stage playing MRS HARGREAVES. Do you know how close that it is - in my head, at least - to an adaptation of Miss Hargreaves, my favourite novel? Oh, Lady Theatre, how you tease me so.)At first, Alice doesn't know who Peter is - he does, after all, introduce himself as a publisher, asking about the possibility of her memoirs - and it is not until she says something along the lines of "You have no idea what it's like" that Peter reveals that he does, in fact, know exactly what it is like.From there, Peter and Alice goes a bit mad - in the best possible way; in a way that is perfectly in keeping with Wonderland and Neverland. The bookshop set is pulled up to the ceiling, and behind is a land with Tenniel and picaresque illustrations intermingled. J.M. Barrie, Lewis Carroll, Alice, and Peter (the fictional characters in these last two cases) all join the stage, and the dialogue whips back and forth among them all. Childhood memories mix with retrospective reservations, which interweave with the excited shouts of the childish characters, or the justifications of the authors. It should be confusing, but the excellent writing and acting mean that it is not. So many tones come together - there are moments of nostalgia, and seeing Judi Dench take on the gait and manner of a young girl is quite breathtaking to see; there are moments of recrimination; of guilt; of confusion; of regret.For all its joys and surrealism, there is certainly a strong feeling of sadness to the play. I was worried that Logan would wander off into the (largely unsubstantiated) accusations of paedophilia towards

I found this story of two dogs on Facebook."Both at separate times walk into the same room. One comes out wagging his tail, while the other comes out growling. A woman watching this goes into the room to see what could possibly make one dog so happy and the other so mad. To her surprise, she finds a room filled with mirrors. The happy dog found a thousand happy dogs looking back at him, while the angry dog saw only angry dogs growling back at him. What you see in the world around you is a reflection of who you are." KikiKiki was startled by the mirrored closet wall when we moved here, but she soon approached it, plopped on her side, extended her paw behind the open door, and looked at me as if to say, "See, I know there's no cat behind here." After that, Kiki would occasionally stare at herself in the closet mirror from where she slept on my bed, but most of the time she ignored it.SammySammy still fights the cat in her mirror. She usually pauses to get up her courage before entering her room (she and Donna share the other bedroom in our apartment), then Sammy either marches past "that other cat" without looking or stops to hiss and growl at it. Sometimes she stands on her hind legs to do battle. She obviously can't stand that other cat."What you see in the world around you is a reflection of who you are." The last sentence in the story adds a new thought. Mirrors reflect who we are, but so does the world. Now I must ask myself, what do I need to change to make my world a better place?

The Icelandic police have launched an investigation into what happened to our missing summer. Their website announces that they are presently interviewing witnesses and suspects. And I am not making this up. But Icelandic weather is not today‘s topic. Sweden is. So here goes. Please not that I will be generalizing a lot, going by the principle that sweeping statements are OK if highly positive. Sweden is the largest of the Nordic countries in terms of population with 9.5 million inhabitants and the third largest country in the European Union in regards to area. It is considered the best governed country in the world in 2013 according to the Economist. Sweden, like Denmark and Norway, has a monarch that serves a figurehead purpose but is for all accounts a democratic state with a parliament and cabinet ministers running the show. Not being an expert in political science I can only note that popular belief in Iceland considers Sweden to be the inventor of Social Democrats and the welfare state. It is also said that in Sweden any action is one of two things: compulsory by law or forbidden by law. But whatever they are doing it seems to be working. For one, Sweden has a long standing relationship with the arts and design. Swedish music, literature, furniture and various functional design objects are well known to the rest of the world. They are also known for meatballs, pickled herring and lutefisk, the last-mentioned not likely to reach IKEA popularity. Most of those reading this are well familiar with the numerous great crime writers Sweden has begotten – the first widely translated being a husband wife duo Sjöwall and Wahlöö that wrote 10 novels that set the stage for the crime-novel with a social agenda. The next international sensation was Mankell, followed by the sensation to end all sensations Steig Larsson. Having just come from Stockholm I must say that the clean and elegant style one has come to associate with the country‘s products is not a chance happening. It has apparently been this way for some time. The old buildings are beautiful and the dwellings within seem prepped for impromtu photoshoots for magazine spreads, no matter what the household income bracket. The Swedes have mastered some sort of minimalism that manages to look warm and livable - not like a cool place for open heart surgery like so many other minimalistic spaces. I think I am not taking too much of a risk by saying that in general the Swedes are stylish at heart. There must be a special nucleotide pairing in DNA strands for style. The people I saw on the streets also seem in a whole lot better shape that in most other countries I have been to. Life seemed less processed somehow than in other, larger EU countries. Everyone I met could have passed for a personal trainer and the population just seems effortlessly gorgeous. I did not see anyone that appeared to have had their face done or gone loopy in a hair salon. The Swedes just seem to be a nation of very healthy people which in part relates to the Swedish lifestyle being quite healthy. The exception to the rule - the not so stylish lit candles on the head. Why do that to such a beautiful girl? In a small way that lifestyle is governed by official regulations. What is bad for you is made expensive and hard to access - what is good for you more affordable. For example, my husband attempted to buy a Long-Island-Ice-Tea at the bar of our hotel but was told by the barman that he would feel like a robber if he were to sell him this drink. It is basically made up of nothing but alcohol and the more alcohol in a drink in Sweden, the more expensive it becomes – exponentially. The price tag for a single Long-Island-Ice-Tea at the bar was 68 dollars. My husband ended up having a glass of Prosecco. We had both begun to show signs of increased healthiness when we departed, only to be thrust dow

Ross Macdonald got so excited one day in 1952 that he dropped his commas. A year later, another writer had a character express his opinion of that sort of thing. Please welcome Macdonald's "The Imaginary Blonde" and Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me:"The blankness coagulated into colored shapes. The shapes were half human and half beast and they dissolved and re-formed, dancing through the eaves of my mind to dream a mixture of both jive and nightmare music. A dead man with a furred breast jumped out of a hole and doubled and quadrupled. I ran away from them through a twisting tunnel which led to an echo chamber. Under the roaring surge of the nightmare music, a rasping tenor was saying ..."And here's Thompson's Lou Ford:"In lots of books I read, the writer seems to go haywire every time he reaches a high point. He'll start leaving out punctuation and running his words together and babble about stars flashing and sinking into a deep dreamless sea. And you can't figure out whether the hero's laying his girl or a cornerstone. I guess that kind of crap is supposed to be pretty deep stuff—a lot of the book reviewers eat it up, I notice. But the way I see it is, the writer is just too goddam lazy to to his job."Who's right, the psychologist or the psychopath? How has description of lowered or heightened states of consiousness changed in crime ficiton since the 1950s?© Peter Rozovsky 2013

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction. Masaryk Station, by David Downing (Soho Crime): With this sixth installment in his morally complex historical series (following Postdam Station and Lehrter Station), British author Downing is apparently closing out the adventures of John Russell, a well-traveled ­Anglo-American journalist (and onetime communist) who has become caught up in the rife disillusionment and redundant horrors of the Second World War. The series began with 2007’s Zoo Station (set at the end of 1938), and each successive entry has taken its name from a railway depot in Berlin, Germany. Masaryk Station finds Russell in Berlin in 1948, after the war’s conclusion, still working as a double agent for both the USSR’s notorious NKVD and America’s recently launched Central Intelligence Agency, and hoping he can extricate himself from both camps before either discovers his activities. But the ruined former Nazi capital is a city divided between occupying powers, where spies proliferate at the dawning of the Cold War. Worse, there’s talk of Western forces abandoning the city and leaving it prey to Soviet soldiers, who have a long reputation for brutality. Amid these tensions, Russell and his Russian liaison, Shchepkin, chase after one last bit of intelligence that may change the direction of the Cold War--and help answers questions that have plagued Russell’s mind throughout this series. Author Downing works hard, sometimes too hard, to present his period atmospherics, but his understanding of mid-20th-century history and politics is expert. Although Masaryk marks the end of this particular series, he’ll be launching a second one in April 2014 with the U.S. publication of Jack of Spies (Soho Crime), set in 1913 and introducing Jack McColl, a Scottish car salesman whose itinerant ways and dexterity with languages make him an espionage asset in the run-up to World War I. * * * Also worth looking for is The Heist (Bantam), the opening number in a new series penned jointly by Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg. Fans of the movie and novel To Catch a Thief, as well as the classic Robert Wagner TV series, It Takes a Thief, should find much to appreciate in this fast-moving yarn about FBI Special Agent Kate O’Hare, whose lengthy pursuit of handsome con man and crook Nicolas Fox takes an unexpected turn, when Fox convinces the Feebs to offer him a job, working with none other than O’Hare herself. ... Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Sara Gran’s sprightly follow-up to Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, find private eye DeWitt struggling to solve the murder of her musician ex-boyfriend, Paul Casablancas, in San Francisco--a mystery that will cause her to review some of her previous cases. ... And though I haven’t yet succeeded in reading an e-book myself, I’m going to at least mention this one, because proceeds from its sales go to charity: Grand Central Noir (Metropolitan Crime). Edited by Terrence P. McCauley, its an anthology of tales set in and around New York’s 110-year-old Grand Central Terminal. Among the contributors are Matt Hilton, Ron Fortier, Jen Conley, and R. Narvaez. The release of this book benefits God’s Love, We Deliver, which McCauley says is “a non-profit here in New York City whose mission is to feed those too sick to feed themselves.”

“The Son” spans 200 years, six generations and a great many downfalls in one proudly purebred American family, the McCulloughs of Texas.

Today I will be sending out the new issue of the Growing Bookworms email newsletter. (If you would like to subscribe, you can find a sign-up form here.) The Growing Bookworms newsletter contains content from my blog focused on children's and young adult books and raising readers. There are 1685 subscribers. Generally, I send out the newsletter once every two weeks. This time, however, it's been three weeks, because I was on vacation last week (my daughter's first trip to Disney World). Newsletter Update: In this issue I have nine book reviews (three picture books, three middle grade novels, and three young adult novels). I also have two posts with children's literacy and reading-related links that I shared on Twitter and one with the WordGirl word of the month for June. Terry Doherty, Carol Rasco, and I are taking a bit of a break from the children's literacy and reading roundups for the summer (though I think Carol will squeeze in one more this week), but we'll continue to share reading links on Twitter. Look for the #litRdUp hashtag for items of particular interest.  Reading Update: In the past 3 weeks, I finished 2 novels for middle grade readers and 3 novels for young adults. I read:  Claire Legrand: The Year of Shadows. Simon & Schuster. Middle Grade. Completed June 5, 2013. Phoebe Rivers: Saranormal #6: Giving Up the Ghost. Simon Spotlight. Middle Grade. Completed June 6, 2013. Anne Applegate: The Last Academy. Point. Young Adult. Completed May 30, 2013. My review. Bethany Griffin: Masque of the Red Death. Greenwillow Books. Young Adult. Completed June 12, 2013, on Kindle from library. Sarah Jamila Stevenson: Underneath. Flux Books. Young Adult. Completed June 17, 2013, on Kindle. Several of these were vacation reads, for my personal enjoyment - reviews may or not be to come, depending on how the week goes.  I'm currently reading Olivia Bean, Trivia Queen by Donna Gephart on my Kindle, and Dust Girl (Book 1 of the American Fairy trilogy) by Sarah Zettel in paperback. I'm listening to Clockwork Princess (Book 3 of the Infernal Devices trilogy) by Cassandra Clare on MP3. I recently introduced Baby Bookworm to The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson. I don't think she completely gets it, but she's enjoying it anyway. She's also enjoying 1, 2, 3 ... By the Sea: A Counting Book by Dianne Moritz & Hazel Mitchell. We took lots of Fancy Nancy, Berenstain Bears, and Little Critter books with us on vacation, because these are relatively text-dense paperbacks, and make excellent travel books. The Fancy Nancy books are particularly good for vocabulary-building.  How about you? What have you and your kids been reading and enjoying? Thanks for reading the newsletter, and for growing bookworms. Wishing you lots of summer reading! © 2013 by Jennifer Robinson of Jen Robinson's Book Page. All rights reserved.  You can also follow me @JensBookPage or at my Growing Bookworms page on Facebook. 

Late '80's into the early 90's Sunday evening television meant 'Lovejoy' in our house. Mum and I were both fans and I don't think my sister hated it, so it's possible that part of my affection is based on it being the one hour of the week when two teenage girls and a harassed working mother didn't argue... Thanks to freeview 'Lovejoy' has been repeated on various obscure channels almost continuously over the last five years; I watch it whenever I can find it, the early series especially are, I think, really very good, the later series become more formulaic but are still worth a watch.I've been curious about the books for a long time, so was pleased to find a cheap copy in a discount book shop a few weeks ago, and despite being forewarned that book and filmed version were quite different was still in just the right frame of mind to give 'The Grail Tree' a go. I assume that this one is a reasonable example of the series as a whole - it made for interesting reading. In many ways it was a better book than I expected; decent plot, lots of stuff about antiques, and a very exciting finale all kept me turning the pages.On the downside there is a really unappealing misogynistic streak running through this book. The action opens with Lovejoy being disturbed during an illicit tryst in a marquee, the promise of an antique is more tempting than somebody else's wife, she attempts to slap him so he hits her hard enough to send her flying into a table. It's not attractive, or necessary, or the only time it happens. This Lovejoy also gets into a lot of nasty fights, and has a not altogether feasible line in threats to senior policemen. 'The Grail Tree' was written in 1979, I'm to young to remember quite how bad the bad old days were regarding attitudes to women and gay men but this book was offensive enough for me to doubt I'll pick up another one - although I notice Gash is still writing, or was until recently. Amazon is prompting me to purchase one written in 2010 (Faces in the Pool) and I did think for a moment that it might be interesting to see how his attitudes have developed over the intervening 30 years, but as it features a pole dancer I'm fairly sure I don't need to bother. None of this changes how I feel about the TV series, I can now add to the nostalgia and the general enjoyment the realisation that this is one of the few dramatizations I've seen that's better than the source material. I don't regret reading the book, offensive bits aside it was worth the time, but it's not one I'd recommend either.