Paging All Bookworms! discussion

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Read any good books lately? We want to know about them.
How about real stinkers? We want to know about those too!


Enter your reading list and/or reviews here. Did you like it? Hate it? Feel lukewarm?

Share your thoughts with us.

Happy reading!

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One last book for Lunar new year 2024 - The Year of the Dragon


The Book of Dragons – E Nesbit – 3***
This collection of short fairy tales was first published in 1899. Nesbit populates her stories with all manner of dragons … big, small, hungry, kind, fierce, curious, sleeping. Some feature children as the heroes. All of them are delightful and all feature marvelous illustrations by H. R. Millar.
LINK to my full review

Only just joined Goodreads so no real idea how it works. This is the first group I have joined. Bit overwhelmed by how many books you guys get through, but the good thing with readers is that they never judge!
I’ve just finished Cat’s Cradle (Vonnegut) and The Daylight Gate (Winterson.) Enjoyed the former, still shocked (in a good way) by the latter.
Now started reading The Pale King by David Foster Wallace as keen to read Infinite Jest but want to check that I like his style before committing to such a lengthy read!
Have any of you guys read Infinite Jest? Is it worth the time commitment?
Any tips on how to get the best out of this app would also be welcome. Thanks.
Regards, Jon

Hi, Jonathan ...

You can Introduce yourself to the group HERE

Haven't read Infinite Jest so can't help you there.

I use the website, NOT the mobile app. The app is notoriously inadquate in many respects. Many more options on the website.

Raymie Nightingale – Kate DiCamillo – 4****
On the first day of baton-twirling lessons, Raymie Clarke meets Louisiana Elefante and Beverly Tapinski, her fellow competitors in the Little Miss Central Florida Tire competition. This is a lovely coming-of-age tale suitable for the middle-school crowd, where three girls with different circumstances form a bond of friendship. As far as I’m concerned, these three girls are ALL winners.
LINK to my full review

This Lovely City – Louise Hare – 4****
Hare’s debut work captured me from beginning to end. There are several twists in the story as we learn a bit about these young people’s background and history, and watch their relationship mature. London shortly after the war is still experiencing rationing. And while the Jamaicans who have come to London were invited to come (and are British subjects), they are not necessarily welcomed by all the residents. Prejudice and discrimination are the rule rather than the exception, and things get ugly. But these two face the future with hope.
LINK to my full review

Thomas Heywood, A Woman Killed By Kindness [1603] 41 pages

One of the most famous plays of the period, A Woman Killed By Kindness is an early example of the domestic tragedy which would become more frequent in the reign of King James.
The major plot deals with the marriage of Frankford and Anne and the latter’s adultery with Wendoll, while a minor plot deals with a feud between Anne’s brother Sir Francis Acton and another nobleman, Sir Charles Montford. The play investigates many social issues concerning marriage, honor, and revenge. This was a re-read for me and was in all four of my anthologies, Fraser, Kinney, Brooke and Paradise, and Works of the British Dramatists.

Behold the Dreamers – Imbolo Mbue – 4****
Mbue explores the “American Dream” through an immigrant family’s experiences. What a powerful and insightful look at the immigrant experience. Mbue gives us complex characters, fully realized, with all their gifts and faults. At times I sympathized even with the “villains” of the story. Mbue made me think about the complexity of immigration policy. In the end, though, my money is on the Jonga family. They are more than dreamers. They are winners.
LINK to my full review

How Not to Drown In a Glass of Water – Angie Cruz – 3.5****
What an interesting way to tell this story! The reader comes to know Cara through her monologues, interspersed with copies of job notices, psychological and interest assessments, and forms she has completed. There are times when I wanted to laugh at her antics and her odd logic. Yet, I could not help but empathize with her and her situation.
LINK to my full review

George Chapman, Bussy d’Amboise [1603 or 1604] 36 pages

Another play from the beginning of King James’ reign, Bussy d’Amboise tells the story (based on an actual occurrence) of a talented, bold, reckless and somewhat amoral nobleman (I was reminded of Benvenuto Cellini) whose sudden rise to royal favor makes him powerful enemies, and eventually alienates his patron, the King’s brother. He becomes involved in a love triangle with his patron and his mistress, which leads to his downfall and murder.

The play begins well, with some impressive, if perhaps rather didactic, speeches, and good characterization, but by the end it rather degenerates into bombast and melodrama. There are also some supernatural scenes involving the raising of demons and the ghost of a friar, which ultimately do not change anything that happens.

This was in the Brooke and Paradise anthology, and was a re-read for me.


John Marston, The Malcontent [1604] 35 pages

A very influential and popular play, The Malcontent is a complicated intrigue which pits the ousted Duke Altofront of Genoa, disguised as a “malcontent” named Malvole, against the usurper, Duke Pietro, and his favorite, Mendoza. The plot and characters are not historical. A central element in the intrigue is the adultery of Duke Pietro’s Duchess Aurelia with Mendoza. The play is called a “tragicomedy” and there is a happy ending with the rightful Duke restored, the usurper voluntarily giving up the throne and reconciled with Aurelia, Mendoza banished, and even the seemingly killed characters proving to be alive after all. The play is full of witty dialogue, which makes it better than the plot description would suggest.

The play, another re-read, was in the Brooke and Paradise, and Kinney anthologies.

Rutebeuf (various spellings), Oeuvres complètes , v. 1 [13th cent., Jubinal ed. 1839] 577 pages [Kindle, Wikisource(Fr.)] [in French]

Rutebeuf was the nom de plume of a thirteenth-century trouvère; I think his relationship to the tradition was somewhat similar to that of Bach to the baroque, one of the greatest exemplars coming at the very end, when the later styles of the fourteenth century were already beginning to appear.

In one important respect, he differs greatly from the earlier trouvères: love poetry, which was their stock in trade, is totally absent from his extant works. This first of two volumes contains mainly satirical complaints, mostly against the clergy and especially the Dominicans, as well as eulogies of various crusaders and exhortations for the crusades.

The edition I am reading from the French Wikisource is from early in the nineteenth century; it is well-annotated, and the endnotes contain a number of other, mostly anonymous poems which are analogues of those of Rutebeuf.

The Measure – Nikki Erlick – 5*****
It begins with a surprise delivery. All over the world, adults receive a box. A seemingly plain wooden box with an inscription: The measure of your life lies within. Will knowing your relative fate help you live your best life? Will it hinder you? This is a remarkable debut work of literary fiction. I don’t remember the last time a work of literature made me think so long and hard about my life, my goals, my experiences, my dreams.
LINK to my full review

“William Shakespeare” The London Prodigal [pub. 1605] about 60 pages

Although The London Prodigal was published as by Shakespeare (I read it in a collection of Shakespeare Apocrypha) and was included with other apocryphal plays in the Third Folio, few scholars have ever considered him the author. There is a good discussion of the authorship by Karen Britland in the Cambridge edition of the Works of Ben Jonson online (it has sometimes been attributed to Jonson, as well as to Marston, to Dekker, to Lodge, to Drayton, to Heywood, to Wilkins, and to others known or unknown); apparently the most recent view based on stylistic analysis is that it is a collaboration of two authors, one of whom may have been Dekker. The date is also disputed, with some dating it to around 1590, while most consider it to have been written shortly before it was published.

Whoever wrote it, he must have been having a bad day, because this is one of the most boring plays ever written. The plot, concerning three suitors, one of them a total villain, a disguised father and a fake will, is trite and frankly repellant, and the events have no credibility; there is no redeeming wit or word-play of any sort, and the only comic relief is a rather unfunny character who speaks in what is supposed to be a Devonshire dialect. (The disguised father and faked will were borrowed by Jonson for a much better play, The Staple of News.)

The Frozen River – Ariel Lawhon – 4****
This novel came to my attention because it was a selection for my F2F book club. It took me a while to really get into the story but once I did, I was completely captured by it.
The murder “mystery” is less important really than the characters in this book. Martha Ballard is one strong, opinionated, intelligent, empathetic and courageous woman! I loved the way in which she stood up for herself and for others.
LINK to my full review

A Slow Fire Burning – Paula Hawkins – 3***
If you like unreliable narrators, this is the book for you. Hawkins gives us not one, not two, but a plethora of unreliable narrators to tell this twisty tale of dysfunctional families and murder. It’s not great literature, but it certainly held my attention.
LINK to my full review

Artistic License – Julie Hyzy – 3***
I came to know Hyzy through her White House Chef cozy mystery series. A challenge to read an author’s debut work had me looking back at a number of favorite author’s first works, which is how I came across this one. I got hooked on the storyline and was entertained by the entire book. It was a quick, fast read that didn’t require much thinking. Perfect for an escape from all the stuff that’s going on in real life right now.
LINK to my full review

Taste – Stanley Tucci – 4****
This a delightful memoir of Tucci’s life, told through his relationship with food. At times irreverent, even downright profane, Tucci does not hold back in expressing his love of certain dishes, restaurants and traditions. He writing is warm, inviting, informative, funny, and charming.
LINK to my full review

Second Chance Grill – Christine Nolfi – 2.5** rounded up
The plot is both typical and unrealistic (think Hallmark movie), but the book fit a couple of challenges. Perfect light romance to fill the time when I was laid low by COVID. Glad to get this one off the tbr.
LINK to my full review

Ernest Samuels, Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur [1979] 477 pages

My last book of 2024 was the “authorized” biography of Berenson by Sylvia Sprigge; Samuels’ biography is more objective and far more detailed, but this first volume only goes as far as the turn of the century, a little less than halfway through his life. (There is a sequel covering the rest, which I do not have.) Samuels also gives a better description of the early influences on Berenson, especially Ruskin and Pater, whom I have added to my TBR list for later in the year.

The Tropic of Serpents – Marie Brennan – 3.5***
Book two in the “Memoirs of Lady Trent” alternate history / fantasy series. It is written as a memoir by the elderly Isabella Camherst, recalling her youth and adventures as a natural historian specializing in dragons. Isabella is a wonderful heroine – intelligent, tenacious, confident, intrepid, resilient and courageous. I also really appreciated how Brennan wove in some political issues involving colonialism, economics, the cultures of different indigenous groups, and the devastation of fragile ecological systems in the name of “progress.”
LINK to my full review

Lady Tan’s Circle of Women – Lisa See – 4****
See based this work of historical fiction on a real woman physician in 15th century China, Tan Yunxian. What a fascinating woman, and a marvelous story! I learned much about the lives of the wealthier, highly educated class in this era of Chinese history, in particular the secluded lives of the women in this class. See gave us glimpses of the world outside the compound’s walls through the experiences of a midwife who lived in the town and was free to travel.
LINK to my full review

Eyes of Prey – John Sandford – 3***
Book three in the series of hard-hitting mystery / thrillers featuring Minneapolis Detective Lucas Davenport. This one begins when a woman is brutally murdered in her own kitchen. Davenport needs to find the killer or killers, and the witness. Sandford writes a fast-paced thriller and I enjoy watching Davenport figure out the clues to capture the perpetrator.
LINK to my full review

What Would Frida Do? – Arianna Davis – 2**
Subtitle: A Guide to Living Boldly. This is a selection for my Hispanic book club. It’s a combination biography and self-help guide. Frankly, I could do without the self-help advice, and would rather read a straight-on biography of Frida Kahlo.
LINK to my full review

The Sleepwalker – Chris Bohjalian – 3.5***
A known sleepwalker goes missing one night, leaving her husband and two daughters to search for answers. What an interesting concept for a missing-person mystery! I really liked Lianna as the main narrator. She is basically an adult, being a sophomore in college, but she is vulnerable. I could feel the continued tension of “not knowing,” and the slow realization of loss. The ending and final reveal of what happened was a stunner that I didn’t see coming.
LINK to my full review

Rutebeuf (various spellings), Oeuvres complètes , v. 2 [13th cent., Jubinal ed. 1839] 523 pages [Kindle, Wikisource(Fr.)] [in French]

The second volume (of two) contains poems in honor of the Virgin Mary, including Rutebeuf’s verse play, Le Miracle de Théophile, one of the first plays written in French, and two long poems about the lives of St. Marie the Egyptian and St. Elizabeth of Hungary. This volume is harder to relate to, since the ideas are so foreign to the modern reader, even for a modern Catholic, let alone someone as secular as I am. Perhaps for that reason, it is a very useful illustration of thirteenth-century popular beliefs, as opposed to the official theology we are more familiar with from Duns Scotus or Thomas Aquinas.

About half the volume is taken up with notes and “additions”, that is to say analogues of Rutebeuf’s poems from other authors; there are two versions of the original Greek prose account of Théophilus by Eutychion from the sixth century (I was gratified that I could read them without a dictionary, not having read anything in Greek for about a decade), the poem about Théophilus by Rutebeuf’s almost exact contemporary Gauthier de Coincy, a long anonymous poem about St. Elizabeth, and several shorter poems which are relevant to Rutebeuf’s work.

I followed this up with two articles from the mediaevalist journal Sénefiance on Gauthier de Coincy and Rutebeuf.

World of Wonders – Aimee Nezhukumatathil – 5*****
Subtitle: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments. I loved this collection of essays about the natural world. Nezhukumatathil’s writing transported me to various scenes – from tropical jungles to Arctic oceans to urban parks and my own backyard. I got this book from the library to read for my book club, but I’m going to buy a copy to keep (and maybe a few more to give as gifts). And I look forward to reading more of her writing.
LINK to my full review

Jan. 25

8. Ananda Devi, Le sari vert
[2009] 256 pages [Kindle] [in French]

Le sari vert is a very intense novel. An old, bitter man has arrived, dying of cancer, to spend his last days with his estranged daughter. She has called her own daughter to come. The novel is told entirely through the consciousness of the old man, in a stream-of-consciousness style. He is one of the most unpleasant characters one could imagine; egotistical, misogynistic, brutal. The entire novel is basically him ranting against women and trying to justify his violence against his wife and daughter. The more he tries to justify his life, the more the reader is repelled, and the more we learn about his past crimes; but we also get some idea of the psychological origins of what can only be called his mental illness. We also see, distorted from his perspective, the struggles of his daughter and granddaughter to escape from the prison of memories of abuse. The daughter is in her sixties and has basically had her entire life destroyed by her father; we may conceive some hope for the granddaughter, still only about forty, and with a relationship and dreams, but the perspective of the novel is entirely bleak.

Orbiting Jupiter – Gary D Schmidt – 4****
When Jack Hurd is in sixth grade, his parents agree to take in a foster child, Joseph Brook, on their Maine farm. Joseph is in eighth grade, has been in juvenile detention (convicted of attacking a teacher), and has a daughter, Jupiter, out there, somewhere. What a wonderful coming-of-age story this is! Though the circumstances are sad and tug at the heartstrings, there are moments of hope and even joy for Joseph and for Jack, who narrates the story.
LINK to my full review

Black Cake – Charmaine Wilkerson – 4****
I really liked this debut work. It was engaging and interesting. The dual timeline was done well and helped give a sense of how unsettling and unmoored B & B felt as they struggled to understand the new information their mother’s final instructions forced them to confront. In addition to moving from the past to the present, the action takes us from the Caribbean to the UK to California. And always, the connection is Black Cake.
LINK to my full review

Israel Joshua Singer, The Brothers Ashkenazi [1935, 1st Eng. tr. 1936, this tr. (Joseph Singer) 1980] 460 pages [Kindle]

This novel about Jewish twin brothers in the city of Lodz in Poland from the late nineteenth century to shortly after the First World War is one of the most important novels in the Yiddish language, as well as a good example of the Realist novel. It is divided into three more or less equal parts, “Birth”, “Chimneys in the Sky”, and “Cobwebs”. The first two parts trace the careers and rivalry of Max and Yacub Ashkenazi as they claw their way from a humble beginning to become the most important capitalists of the city, and along the way we learn about the economic and political development of Poland, the “primitive accumulation of capital” and the class struggles between the capitalists and their workers. There is also much about the position of women in Jewish and gentile society, and how they influence events. The last part describes their fall, due to war, revolution, and economic depression, combined with the anti-Semitic policies of the new, independent postwar Polish government.

Most of the reviews I have read are by readers who came to the book after reading his more famous younger brother Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Nobel prize-winner, and concentrate on comparing Israel’s writing with his, as does the introductory matter to this book, and interestingly most of them prefer Israel’s novel. Since I have not read anything by I .B. Singer except one short story last year in a fantasy anthology, I will not deal with that question.

Israel J. Singer was a socialist, both small and capital letter, and the novel was originally serialized in The Forward, an organ of Jewish Socialists in New York City. It was translated soon after, in 1936, and became a major best-seller. The edition I read is a later (1980) translation by the author’s son, Joshua Singer. The introduction to this translation is by Irving Howe, who, though he never completely abandoned a certain kind of socialist politics, became increasingly less radical over time, and more oriented toward the Democratic Party, as a leader of the “Democratic Socialists of America”; I think he presents Singer as more conservative than he was.

Karl Marx famously described anti-Semitism as “the socialism of fools”, and the novel illustrates this well. There is a strike of workers in Lodz which begins by being against the capitalists as such, then turns against the Jewish capitalists in particular, and finally ends up in a drunken pogrom against the Jews in general, including the very Jewish agitators who organized the movement to begin with. The main Jewish revolutionary character, Nissan, begins to doubt his Marxist beliefs and to question whether the major problem of society is really economic oppression or human nature, an ineradicable tendency of gentiles to hate Jews. Howe takes this as Singer’s own final position.

However, the character’s doubts only last for a night, and there is a later strike, in 1905, in which the workers, now more class-conscious and organized into unions, control the city. The strike movement culminates in a mass funeral procession for a Jewish martyr killed by the police. This is a wonderful description of how a working class insurrection takes place, although in the end it is crushed. My only quarrel with it is that Singer doesn’t mention that there was a revolutionary movement in Russia going on at the same time, which is obviously the context for the events in Lodz. (See Trotsky’s 1905.) Singer is actually very good at showing the economic roots of anti-Semitism.

This is not to say that Singer was a revolutionary himself. He was a social democrat, and despite his obvious sympathy for working class action, he is skeptical about what it can (or perhaps should) try to accomplish, beyond purely economic demands. This is most obvious in his treatment of the Russian Revolution of 1917. He makes no mention of the Petrograd or pan-Russian Soviet Congresses, which were the heart of the revolution, focusing his attention on the Duma and the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly much later; he caricatures Lenin (whom he never names, but refers to by insulting descriptions such as “slant-eyed”) and the Bolsheviks, treating the democratic decisions of the Soviets as if they were individual actions by Lenin. Nissan reflects that the workers have “finally” gotten their own assembly, only to be immediately deprived of it by the Bolsheviks, who demanded that it recognize the Bolsheviks (which he reduces to Lenin individually) as the only true authority. This is absurd; the workers had had their own assembly – the Soviet – for months, the Bolsheviks had won a majority in the Soviet elections, and the Constituent Assembly, elected early in the revolution, was dominated by the Cadets, who were a bourgeois liberal party; the demand of the Bolsheviks was that it recognize the authority of the Soviet, not the Bolshevik Party. He describes Russia after the revolution as if it was all chaos and corruption; undoubtedly there was some, but this is definitely a deliberate exaggeration. Granted, he is describing the country through the experiences of an expropriated capitalist, but this doesn’t completely explain it.

Partly this is a result of Singer’s own disillusionment after visiting the Soviet Union and finding much anti-Semitism remaining among the peasants and more backwards workers, and even some of the party cadres (this would later be exploited by Stalin and the bureaucratic faction in their struggle against Trotsky, Zinoviev, and other leaders of the party who happened to be Jewish), but it also represents the limits of his social-democratic milieu. While this is only a few chapters, probably no more than five percent of the novel, its location near the end gives it prominence and the total lack of even minimal factual accuracy in the description caused me to lower my rating of the novel considerably.

This is not the only fault of the third part; it feels “rushed” compared to the pace of the first two parts, and the plot is less credible, more dependent on coincidences, more Romantic rather than Realist. In short, the book begins much better than it ends. Despite this, it is a generally very good account of the experience of Poland and particularly its Jewish community in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and I would recommend it, with the above reservations.

Anthony Munday, The Triumphs of Re-United Brittania [1605] 13 pages

This short dramatic pageant was performed in the streets for the inauguration of Sir Leonard Holliday as Lord Mayor of London in 1605. It contrasts the division of the island among the three sons of Brutus, according to the legendary history of Geoffrey of Monmouth (perhaps also influenced by the anonymous play Locrine, which I read last year) with the reunification of Scotland and England by King James. I read it in the Kinney anthology which I am slowly working my way through.

The Mother’s Day Murder – Lee Harris – 3.5***
This is book twelve in the cozy mystery series featuring former nun Christine Bennett. I really like this series. I like Chris’s careful approach to solving the mysteries that come her way. She’s deliberate and cautious, but she inspires confidence in those she questions. She’s also discreet, careful not to spread rumor and innuendo but wait for facts to back up any suspicions before sharing the information with authorities or others. The series is best read in order so the reader sees the various relationships evolve over time.
LINK to my full review

George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston, Eastward Ho! [1605] 38 pages

Chapman, Jonson, and Marston are among the best playwrights of the late Elizabethan/Jacobean period, and this is one of the better plays of the period. A “city comedy”, the play has some witty dialogue but no real comic characters or scenes; it’s a fairly serious comedy about Touchstone, a London goldsmith, his two apprentices, Golding who is a model of industriousness and sobriety, and Quicksilver, who is a rake and associates with the dissolute and spendthrift knight, Sir Petronel Flash, and keeps a mistress named Sindefy. Touchstone has two daughters who are equally diverse; the older, Gertrude, dreams of becoming a “lady” and marries Sir Petronel, while the younger is a model daughter and bourgeois character who marries Golding. Other characters who play an important if secondary role are Touchstone’s wife, a usurer named Security, and Security’s young wife Winifred. The main point of the play is to set off the industrious and honest bourgeoisie against the decadent nobility; the authors were jailed for writing it. It ends with the “prodigal” daughter and apprentice being forgiven, with the appropriate moral speeches at the end.

This was in the Brooke and Paradise anthology, and I think I had read it before, but probably decades ago.

George Chapman, The Gentleman Usher [1606] 95 pages [Kindle]

A and B are in love with each other, but the old, rich and powerful C also wants to marry B, and her father supports the marriage. With the help of one or more comic characters, generally servants, A and B finally triumph in the end. How many comedies from Plautus to the present, in novels, plays, operas, movies and television shows, are built on this formula? Plug in Vincenzio for A, Margaret for B, and Duke Alfonso for C and you have this play by Chapman. It is well done, and the comic character of Bassiolo, the Gentleman Usher, is quite funny.

I had not read this one before; it was on the elizabethandrama.org website.

The Reptile Room – Lemony Snicket – 3***
This is book two in A Series of Unfortunate Events, detailing the (mis)adventures of the Baudelaire orphans. I can see the appeal for children, as it plays on their fears of abandonment while also playing up their resourcefulness and ability to get the best of the bad guy. I like how the three siblings work together, each with his/her own strengths.
LINK to my full review

Demon Copperhead – Barbara Kingsolver – 5*****
Kingsolver’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel is a re-telling of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield set in Appalachia. Like the original, the book explores the effects of poverty, especially on children. Oh, but this was sad and tugged at my heartstrings. Certainly, there were moments, even years-long stretches of time when Demon was well cared for and seemed to have beaten the odds, but it seemed that his entire life was destined for one bad break after another. Yet, despite his faults, Demon stole my heart and I was cheering for him by the end.
LINK to my full review

Charlotte Illes Is Not a Detective – Kate Siegel – 1*
Former child detective is asked by her brother and his girlfriend to solve a missing person case. The premise sounded cute for a cozy mystery, but I just never got into this book. What should have been a fast, entertaining read, turned into a drudge that took me more than a month to read. By the time the case was solved I had ceased to care.
LINK to my full review

Barbara Strachey & Jayne Samuels, edd., Mary Berenson: A Self-Portrait from Her Diaries and Letters [1982] 319 pages

This is an example of what I usually think of as a nineteenth-century genre, the “Life and Letters”. The editors are Mary’s granddaughter Barbara Strachey, about seventy when this was written, and who possessed most of the letters and diaries of her grandmother, and Jayne Samuels, whose husband Ernest wrote the biography of Bernard Berenson that I read last month.

Unlike the two biographies I read of her husband, this contained almost nothing about the Berensons’ views of art, and so to be honest it was somewhat of a waste of time for me, since that was what I was interested in. Instead, it is a witty but gossipy book about her love affairs, her husband’s love affairs, their dysfunctional relationship and many quarrels, and the various celebrities, friends, enemies and “frenemies” who occupied their time and attention at their villa. It did present an overview of the relationships among the English and American émigré non-academic intellectual mileux of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but again without much about their ideas.

Guillaume de Machaut, Dit de la Fontaine amoureuse, ou Livre de Morphée [ca. 1360] about 200 pages [in French]

I read this in a Middle French edition (Machaut is writing at the beginning of the Middle French period, which conventionally begins in 1339) which I downloaded long ago in the early days of the Internet; I haven’t been able to find any versions on Goodreads which do not include translations and other material, but I assume my version, if it were formatted as a normal book with normal fonts, together with some other short poems I found elsewhere, would come to about 200 pages.

Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 1300-1377) is best known as a musician and composer, one of the originators of the Ars Nova, but he was also a major poet. La Fonteinne amoureuse is one of the best fourteenth-century poems I have read, other than Chaucer (whom he apparently influenced.) In fact, in reading it I was often reminded of Chaucer. The poem begins with a complaint of a knight who is forced to leave his love to go overseas and fight (not explained in the poem, but we know from external sources that the lover is supposed to be Machaut's patron the Duc de Berry, who is going to England to replace his father as a hostage to the English.) The long conceit of Morpheus as a messenger between him and his love is very original compared to much of the formula love poetry of the time. The second half of the poem (the fountain and the vision of Venus) is more conventional, but very good poetry if I can judge.

The Invisible Man – H G Wells – 3***
This classic of science fiction / horror begins when a man appears at a small English village and takes a room. He is intensely private, but once his secret is revealed, he goes on a rampage through multiple villages trying desperately to find a way to fix the self-imposed condition. There are a few rather humorous scenes caused by his predicament but on the whole the atmosphere is one of anger and frustration and madness.
LINK to my full review

Guillaume de Machaut, Le Livre du Voir-Dit [ca. 1363, 1875 ed.] 408 pages [Kindle, FrWikiSource, in French]

Sometime around the end of 1362, just after Machaut finished the previous poem (La Fonteinne amoureuse), he was approached through a friend by a young noblewoman, evidently also a developing poet and singer, whom the nineteenth-century editor, Paulin Paris, first identified as Peronnelle d’Armentières, proposing that they exchange poems and love-letters. We should understand this in the context of the literary motif of “courtly love”, where a poet represents himself as being passionately in love with an unapproachable “dame”, generally of a higher social class, who inspires his poetry. The difference in this work is that it is two-sided, with the lady responding with her own letters and poetry. The letters and poems are included within a verse narrative by Guillaume. It was essentially a literary game; Machaut was in his sixties, while Peronelle was “between 15 and 20.” Undoubtedly, both were flattered by the situation, he by the adulation of a charming young woman and she by the attentions of a man who was already one of the most famous poets and musicians in France, if not all of Europe. Unfortunately, the editor in his introduction and extensive notes takes the relationship far too seriously, comparing it to Bettina von Arnheim’s infatuation with Goethe. The fourteenth century was not the Romantic early nineteenth century! He suggests that their “relationship” was broken off by Peronelle’s impending marriage (we actually know very little about her.) Now, it is certainly plausible that such a game might be considered awkward in a married woman; it is even more plausible that the duties of a married woman would leave her little time for literary games; and it is most plausible of all that the literary collaboration was never intended to be of a longer duration than the composition of what is already a very long book (more than twice the length of La Fonteinne amoureuse.)

This was apparently the work of Machaut’s which was most popular among his contemporaries, who would have understood the convention, and for long after his death, until the Renaissance made all mediaeval literature unfashionable. It was widely influential on other works, including Chaucer’s Book of the Duchesse. I think it is much less to the taste of the modern reader than La Fonteinne amoureuse; in fact to be honest I found it very long-winded, repetitious and frankly boring in many places. When there is a hiatus in Peronelle’s letters, he fills in the poetry with dreams and mythological stories which tend to be rather confused. The editor, convinced that this is a “real time” correspondence, tries to explain away discrepancies between the dates of the letters and the actual events they mention; actually, if we understand that this is a fictional correspondence, it is perfectly understandable that two letters exchanged a week or two apart might be supposed to have come after a break of several months, since these long absences are an important part of the plot. The writing of the book seems to have lasted about a year.

Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism [1974] 304 pages

Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism has been on my TBR list forever, at least several decades, and I finally got around to reading it. I wish I had read it much earlier, because it makes a lot of the history and the background of the mediaeval and early modern literature I have been reading lately much clearer. What Anderson gives is a sketch of the economic, social and political development of Europe, from a historical materialist (Marxist) perspective, beginning with the origins of the “slave mode of production” in archaic Greece, through its height in the Roman Empire and the contradictions which led to its final collapse, and the origins, development and eventual crisis of the feudal mode of production which followed. The book was written as a prelude to the much longer study, Lineages of the Absolutist State which I am now beginning.

The book is divided into three parts; the first part is the background in Antiquity, the second part gives a description of what feudalism is and shows how it originated and developed in various parts of the former Roman Empire as a fusion between the dissolving slave mode of production and the primitive agrarian mode of the barbarian invaders, how it developed, why it was initially progressive and why it eventually went into crisis itself, and the third part does the same thing for Eastern Europe beyond the limits of the Roman Empire and shows the differences due to the lack of the classical legacy in those regions. I was impressed by the way he discusses the variations and the reasons for them (and his conceptualization of “social formations”) rather than simply forcing them all into a single scheme.

What I have read previously about pre-capitalist history from a Marxist perspective is very little and very old, and generally by authors who were not professional historians (e.g. Kautsky). I have read somewhat more from non-Marxist historians about Antiquity and the Middle Ages, also mostly old; apart from the classic works of Marx and Engels themselves, I have read only two or three of the books he cites in his footnotes (unfortunately the book has no bibliography.) I knew nothing at all about the eastern regions in the Middle Ages. Some (actually quite a bit) of what he is arguing is controversial in detail (especially the very interesting question of relations between the town and countryside), and he discusses the controversies in his footnotes; clearly I have no basis to judge, but what he says made sense to me.

Sand In My Bra and Other Misadventures – Jennifer L Leo (editor) – 3***
This is a collection of essays written by women about their travels. Some are hilarious and had me laughing out loud. On the whole, a very entertaining diversion while I, myself, was on a plane headed to my vacation in a national park.
LINK to my full review

Someone We Know – Shari Lapena – 4****
This was a taut mystery / thriller. Several characters revealed themselves to be unreliable. They were lying to their families, friends, neighbors, and the police. I was sure I had it figured out but was completely surprised by the actual reveal. And the ending gives the reader another mystery to ponder and wonder about.
LINK to my full review

Alhierd Bacharevič, Alindarka’s Children: Things Will Be Bad [2014, tr. 2020] 325 pages

Alindarka’s Children is the first reading from Belarus in the World Literature group I am in on Goodreads. It is probably significant that the only Belarusian author I had read previously (Svetlana Alexievich) wrote in Russian (although of course I read her in translation) and mainly about Russian or Soviet events. Bacharevič on the other hand is a Belarusian nationalist, writing in Belarusian. The theme of Alindarka’s Children is Belarusian resistance to Russification, especially in language. This is the one thing I can say about it with certainty. Maybe.

The author’s technique is to begin with mysterious events which are only explained later, sometimes much later, so almost everything I can say about it will be “spoilers” to some extent (be warned). My review will probably also be confusing to anyone who hasn’t read it. That’s just the kind of book it is.

It is a very difficult novel to try to classify. First of all, I’m not sure whether to call it magical realism or an out-and-out fantasy. The setting is hard to pin down; a few references suggest the Stalinist era, but mostly it seems to be in the period under current pro-Putin president Aleksandr Lukashenko, or perhaps in a near future, or a close alternative reality that exaggerates the (very real) tendencies of both toward Russification. The multiple story lines and constant reversals of chronology are high modernism, but there is also a postmodernist intertextuality run rampant.

The paranormal brother Avi, who arose spontaneously from a lump of magical clay derived indirectly from a Jewish magician, seems to be a reference to the myths of the golem. “Avi” is short for “Aviator”, but perhaps the nickname, being a Jewish name, is a reference to his origin; except that it is not in the original, where he has a different name, which only sounds like the Belarusian word for pilot. The two children’s wanderings in the forest are full of references to the fairy tales of the Town Musicians of Bremen and Hansel and Gretel, but Avi’s finding of the corpse with the pocket-knife could be an allusion to another story of children without adults, The Lord of the Flies. The title is a reference to the poem “Things Will Be Bad” by the nineteenth-century Belarusian poet Francišak Bahuševič, whose central character is Alindarka. There are quotations from the poem throughout the novel.

The English translation – perhaps it would be more accurate to say adaptation – adds to the complexity. The original book is written in a combination of Belarusian and Russian (in fact mostly in Belarusian, with occasional Russian passages); the translator translates Russian (and actually most of the Belarusian) to English and some of the Belarusian to Scots, so there is in addition to the Belarusian nationalism a layer of Scottish nationalism as well, making the book a discussion of linguistic nationalism in general. The protagonist, the “Faither” of the two children Alicia and Avi, although he shares the antisemitism of the uneducated, has an admiration bordering on adoration for “the Jew”, Eliezer Yitzhak Perlman (later Eliezer Ben-Yehuda), who revived Hebrew, then a dead language, and whose daughter became the first native speaker of Hebrew since the third century BCE; he even has his portrait on the wall of his apartment. Alicia (originally named “Sia”, supposedly for an ancient Egyptian goddess – but this was not her name in the original Belarusian novel either) was likewise raised as a native speaker of “the Leid”, Belarusian or Scots. Russian/English is referred to in contrast as the “Lingo”. This is the starting point, but not the beginning, of the whole novel. Throughout the book there are quotations from Scots poetry, especially Robert Burns, probably substituted for Belarusian poetry in the original, which counterpoint the events of the narrative. Scots words in the text are footnoted and there is a glossary in the back, but neither include the poetry, which is occasionally very opaque.

The plotline of the novel is that Faither and Alicia lived for several years more or less in hiding, to ensure that she grew up speaking the Leid with as little influence of the Lingo as possible. Eventually, thanks to an overzealous teacher who is a psychologist (perhaps more what we would call a guidance counselor), Alicia is taken away from her father along with her “brother” Avi, who suddenly appears for the first time while she is being seized. They are put into a kind of linguistic re-education camp. The origins of the Camp and its Doctor form one of the other story lines. The endnotes tell us that his thoughts are slightly modified from Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The novel begins with them in the Camp. Faither, together with his girl friend, Kenzie (another, less important story line), rescues the children from the Camp, but they escape from them (suggesting that perhaps Alicia wasn’t thoroughly in accord with Faither’s plans for her life) and disappear into the forest. They are using an old atlas to try to go to Bremen to become musicians. The main plotline follows their adventures wandering in the forest, based largely on fairy tales. This alternates with the other storylines, which are largely in flashbacks and provide some backstory.

The last chapter explains much, and there is a surprise ending; but it is ambiguous. Is it a happy ending, or the worst ending possible? The reader has to decide.

This is a very difficult novel, but difficult in a way that is fun to read. It has a fairy-tale, dreamlike logic that isn’t always coherent if you try to analyze it. I’m not sure the decision to use Scots in the English version was a good idea; most readers in Belarus would understand both Belarusian and Russian without any difficulty, but for an English reader the Scots is much more difficult to follow (even for me, and I have read some Scots poetry and have some background in linguistics), and the result is that the book is obscure in a different and less literary, less intended way, and that unsympathetic characters are easier to understand than the protagonists. I saw in one internet review that the French translator considered a similar approach using Breton or Provençal but ultimately decided against it, just using different levels of the language.

In any case, I did enjoy the novel and would recommend it to anyone who enjoys experimental fiction with a political point.

Ananda Devi, Danser sur les braises suivi de Six décennies [2020] 89 pages [in French]

.Danser sur les braises is a collection of prose poems, dedicated to and partly addressed to her mother, written over the nine months following her death. It is concerned mainly with the relationships of the generations. Six décennies is a shorter group of poems in free verse, which could be considered a meditation on aging. As usual, I find it difficult to review contemporary poetry.

Something Like Home – Andrea Beatriz Arango – 4****
This is a moving novel in verse written for middle-school-age children, dealing with foster care. As the novel opens, Laura is en route to her aunt’s apartment, accompanied by a social worker from DSS. My heart broke for Laura. But she is a resilient child, clearly intelligent but confused by her situation. When she finds a neglected and abandoned puppy, however, she begins to open up to the court-appointed guardian and to her aunt and insists that they listen to her point of view when formulating a plan for her care. Brava, Laura!
LINK to my full review

The Housemaid – Freida McFadden – 4****
Wow. Millie Calloway is homeless when she arrives at the pristine, large suburban home with a gated entrance. She desperately needs the job as a live-in maid. But, Nina is completely unstable. She’s ranting and raving one minute, sweet as pie the next. Her daughter Cecelia is a spoiled brat. Her husband, Andrew, is loving and long-suffering. There were several twists and turns in this tale of intrigue. Who really is the unstable person here? This was gripping and I read it in one day.
LINK to my full review

Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State [1974] 573 pages

Last month I read Anderson’s Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, of which this is a continuation. It is considered one of the best modern Marxist surveys of the period, giving an economic explanation of the historical developments. The book takes us from the crisis of the feudal mode of production and describes the rise of the absolutist states which followed it. Like the previous book, it begins with a general survey and then examines each of the major countries, divided into Western and Eastern Europe, and emphasizes the differences in the history as well as the similarities. There is also a chapter on the “House of Islam”, primarily the Ottoman Empire. I learned a lot from this. The book ends with two “Notes”, one on Japanese feudalism and how it was both similar and different from feudalism in the West, and one, the longest single chapter in the book, on the concept of “the Asiatic mode of production”, which he argues should be abandoned. This is from a theoretical point of view the most interesting part of the book; it also contains a fairly detailed comparison of the Islamic countries with Imperial China.

I would recommend both volumes to anyone with an interest in history.

Hello Beautiful – Ann Napolitano – 3.5***
A contemporary family saga spanning decades. Gosh, but Napolitano can craft some beautiful sentences! While there were times when I thought the plot seemed somewhat contrived, I felt drawn into the relationships of the Padovano family. I liked the way Napolitano reimagined Little Women , though I could have done without the constant reminders in the book about the classic novel.
LINK to my full review