Lory
I came across this during my month of Reading the Theatre on my blog – it was a good way to learn more about these giants of the musical theatre and about a whole era during which that world completely changed, along with the outer world in which it was embedded. The author did a good job of describing what made the shows special, as well as detailing some flops that we don't hear so much about, and in the end explaining what causes R&H to become a byword for schmaltz and sentimental drivel – unfairly, he convincingly argues.
The end of the men's lives was sad cut short as they were by illness, especially for Rodgers, who was an alcoholic and whose personal life was very ethically questionable. The partnership was more of a parallel working than a real co-creation; the two worked largely separately and would make some comments on each other's work, cordial to each other in public but not exactly friends. They seem to have greatly admired each other while neither was sure whether the other really liked him. The details of all the characters behind the scenes was fascinating – orchestrators really should be given more credit, among others.
A broadly painted Broadway history that gives an excellent overview, even as one feels a bit held at a distance from the subjects. Also made me want to see really good productions of the shows, especially Carousel and South Pacific.
Another cute, feel-good YA romance. Millie is an over-the-top and yet believable and relatable character. Her antics are the front for some real emotional work that gets done in the course of the book. I thought her enemy-to-lover foil was a bit too good to be true, but it's a nice dream to have. I only wish there had been some actual theatrical events as part of the story, instead of only talking about putting on her school shows.
Wow. Devastating and so important. This is not just a relational trauma memoir but a record of a spiritual battle, a fight for the grounds of reality itself. A fight in which we will all, at some point, have to make our own stand.
Let me never, never, never try to hold someone hostage to my own world view. That is the genesis of evil.
“I could have my mother's love, but there were terms, the same terms they had offered me three years before: that I trade my reality for theirs, that I take my own understanding and bury it, leave it to rot in the earth.” Ch 39
THIS is what the struggle of the “end times” is about, not owning stupid hoards of food and gasoline and guns, but the ability to own your own thoughts, your own understanding, and through them to connect freely with others, not walled off in fearful isolation. The “end” refers to the end of the era when this was not fully in our own hands. Now it is. A terrifying, amazing prospect. And some have made it through, but many others are falling to the temptation to give themselves up, to bury themselves and remain dead rather than risk true life.
“Once justified, I thought the strangling guilt would release me and I could catch my breath. But vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. Guilt is the fear of one's own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.” Ch 40
Book version of Crystal's long-running stage show. Of course it would be more dynamic in action ... but it was a pleasant read, aside from some groan-worthy off-color jokes (but I guess that was the point). Interesting story of Crystal's family background as supporters of jazz musicians and recording artists, who knew? And the comedy was mixed with the moving and tragic, with his father's early death.
Frequently when I read a Golden Age mystery I find myself partway through wondering if I have read it before. I don't know is this is because: A. I have actually read it before, or B. These books tend to be predictable and samey, so that one reminds me of others that I have read and I can't keep them straight.
I definitely had the feeling with this one; I didn't think I had read it before, but once the denouement began to unfold it began to feel so familiar.
This was a fluently told but rather lightweight biography. It focuses on Lewis's literary life and influence, helpfully placing this in context of outer life events but leaving me feeling as though something was missing. McGrath points out Lewis's strengths, clearly a devoted fan, but is reluctant to dig into his weak points. There is also little real material about many of Lewis's important relationships. It's a short book, so perhaps McGrath felt he didn't have time to go into these details. On the other hand there is a good deal of repetition that could have been pared down, and the Narnia books get two whole chapters without leaving me feeling that much of interest had been said.
The lengthy discussion of the date of Lewis's conversion gives a plausible alternative date, but in the end it does not seem to matter much. It is interesting that Lewis places this event before his father's death, while McGrath asserts it must have been after, but the impact of that can only be speculative because Lewis apparently did not talk or write about it. When biographers get too much into pet theories that are pure speculation (like Lewis's father's death having been a catalyst for his conversion), it greatly weakens their credibility.
Then Warnie just fades out of the narrative, ending up drunk in Ireland while Lewis is dying...surely there must be more evidence of Lewis's feelings about his brother? The more I think about it, the more unsatisfactory this biography is. It's the biography of a bibliography, rather than of a person.
Can I also express here my annoyance with books that incorporate tons of random quotes from irrelevant sources, as if to assert the author's literacy – “As Oscar Wilde said...” Why? Just say it yourself, you don't have to include quotations to back up general statements. Learn how to write beautifully yourself, like C.S. Lewis, rather than depending on writers of the past to do it for you. Meanwhile, much more from the source material would have been welcome, Lewis's own letters and the statements of those who knew him.
This was a sweet 1950s high school romance, very G-rated and reminiscent of the Deep Valley books (but even slighter). It was fascinating to read following Cleary's memoirs, as one can see the experiences in her own life that she reworked - going to stay with another family to attend school in California, being unsure how to deal with a boy who pursued but bored her, difficulties in her relationship with her mother. However, Cleary's life was much darker and sadder than this cheerful, sunny book, in which difficulties are quickly overcome and the protagonist ends up feeling like “the luckiest girl” just for having had a chance to love and be loved. She is not a particularly deep or complex character, but her small trials and successes are very human and still relevant even though so much has changed. I think I would have enjoyed this book as a teenager and I'm sorry I never encountered it till now.
There are three kinds of white racists: ignorant and stupid; timidly scared; and aggressively scared.
Category #1 produces stories that are funny, although it's sad that there are so many white people who are so dumb, and that there is no motivation for or effective method of overcoming their ignorance. (As Ruffin rightly points out, it is not the job of Black people to educate them.)
Category #2 and 3 produce stories that are infuriating and dangerous. The more entrenched these irrational fearful attitudes become in white society, the more the cycle of trauma, violence and injustice will continue. There is no way to re-educate people who are scared, convinced they are in danger from another group of people. They will keep rewriting the narrative of reality to support their existing framework, because changing it will feel like a threat.
Actually, 2 and 3 probably grow out of #1. So all three kinds are infuriating and dangerous. There is a lot of work to do.
“Scripture was not really a text but an activity, a spiritual process that introduced thousands of people to transcendence.” – from the epilogue
Armstrong weaves together the composition of and response to the Bible as a coherent narrative, which makes for an easy read but creates some problems. It is an interpretation, with a certain amount of purely personal opinion thrown in. I think it would be a mistake to take it as a sole source without others to compare it to, for much is presented that is surely speculation without noting it as such (especially in the earlier periods – there is no way to tell with certainty when, where, and for whom the Gospels were written, for example, but theories are given as facts).
The overarching thesis is that rather than an immutable object, the Bible has always been a process that reveals much about the soul state of those who engage in interaction with it. The mode has veered from outwardly militant to inward and mystical, with many variations in between. In our time, we've degenerated into a rigid fundamentalism that threatens to destroy the living Word, opposed by a sterile secularism that threatens to destroy the entire world and all that lives upon it. Armstrong pleads for a new hermeneutics that will read the Bible as a gloss on the Golden Rule (an ancient idea), rather than using it as an excuse to perpetuate further inhumanity and cruelty in the world. I agree, but what I think is missing is any sense that there could be actual spiritual experience that is a valid source of insight, and into which the Bible (and other sacred texts) offer a path of knowledge, not just a variety of personal opinions.
I appreciated all the information on the history of Judaism, of which I am woefully ignorant and need to learn more, and the succinct explanation of the origins of Christian fundamentalism. This turned more toxic after it was attacked in the early twentieth century, leading to the current horrible marriage with conservative politics. Also good to have some coverage of the insane, ethically corrupt but popular and dangerous Rapture theology and its literalist interpretations.
Altogether we need to recover from literalism, but a weak pluralism is not the answer. Rather we need to rise to real experience of the true human core, which will be a spiritual experience, because the human being is spirit – and in which we will find differences overcome, because in our essence we are one, even as we are all different and unique. This is the “reading process” we need to learn and for which sacred texts are meant to prepare us.
This was recommended to me by Deb of The Book Stop - as part of a recommendation service she offered. It was a great choice! I was enthralled by Shapiro's journey as she discovered and dealt with the fact that she had been a donor-conceived child, and how that hidden fact had shaped her life. It's fascinating to consider that we can build up a whole mental world for ourselves, as she did with her assumption that she was the biological child of an Orthodox Jewish father and product of his family line, that turns out to be an illusion. Shapiro has to deal with the psychological repercussions of this, as well as with the feelings of lostness and not belonging that she has had from childhood. She has to remake her shattered world and find a new relationship to much she had taken for granted.
Strangely, she never seemed to admit the idea that her not looking Jewish could mean she had been the product of an affair, even as she sensed something was wrong – with her, she assumed, not with the facts of her conception. The more complicated answer led her to a search for her biological father, a near obsession of which she gives us a blow-by-blow (or rather email-by-email) account. Another oddity is that though this obsession involves an acute awareness of how similar she is to her biological father, she never talks about her similarity to her biological mother. This may be because she was a sick, twisted narcissist whom Shapiro came to hate, but it seems to be a matter of protesting too much, or maybe too little. If you're going to put so much weight on one side of the biological equation, you need to also look at the other.
I was not aware of the murky history of donor conception, nor mindful of the ethical implications today. That was also very interesting to learn about.
In the end Shapiro finds peace with her heritage and returns her father to his rightful place in her heart. She dedicates the book to him, and I have no doubt he would be proud of her.
As I am struggling with gut issues, and want to care for my brain too, this was a really interesting read. The microbiome is so important to our health, and so threatened by many modern practices (modern Western diet, the overuse of antibiotics, pesticides, and more.) It seems clear this is an area that must be further researched, and hopefully where revolutionary changes can be made to improve health in body and mind.
I find Perlmutter's assurance that his diet is easy to follow for everyone unrealistic. It is time consuming and resource draining, as I am finding now trying to follow a similar protocol. Not everyone has access to all the ingredients, not everyone can afford all that organic food, not everyone has time or space to make all those homemade fermented foods. No doubt everyone can make steps in a healthier direction, but it's just advertising and a demonstration of rich-urban-person privilege to claim it's going to be easy.
Perlmutter also mentioned stress, along with diet and environmental input, as a major factor influencing the gut microbiome. However, he does not follow this up, nor take into account psychological and relational influences on mood and attention disorders, which are strongly correlated with trauma and stressful experiences. This is a gaping hole in the topic that needs to be filled.
Recommended by Rennie of Whats Nonfiction. I was riveted by this memoir of a survivor of relational trauma (which I think is a much better name than C-PTSD!) Her mother was a sick woman who should have been put in prison for what she did to Stephanie, and her father was a weak, emotionally incompetent man who essentially left her to live on her own when she was in high school. Stephanie became a “success” with a coveted job on This American Life, but inwardly she was a mess. She takes us through her process of healing, which includes a survey of the terrible conditions for anyone seeking mental health or medical help in the US, the horrors of bad therapy, the ineffectiveness of much well-meaning therapy, and the amazing potential of good (rare and expensive, sadly) therapy. It's a very individual journey, but through it Stephanie discovers the healing power of relationship, the importance of self-knowledge and self-trust, and even the way trauma responses can become “superpowers” when they are needed to react to extreme situations (like a pandemic). The wedding scene where she and her husband prepared letters for all their friends telling them why they loved them was incredibly moving and gave such an important message. Anyone who is looking for a single other person to save and complete them is in trouble, while those who build a vibrant community and celebrate love in all its forms are building the future we need to strive for. Great read.
I wanted to read a Donna Leon novel because my mom likes this series about a police commissioner in Venice a lot, plus around-the-world project relevance. This one was okay but nothing special. The insider view of Venice was interesting, but Leon's writing is quite humdrum. And like most murder mysteries it came across as so contrived to me, so constructed by the author and not arising from reality. Perhaps she got better in time, but I'm not sure I'll read more.
Reread this because Chris of Calmgrove mentioned it as a possible inspiration for the Chronicles of Narnia. There are talking animals, children named Peter and Susan, and a person entering a picture on the wall...no doubt it had its influence. But Masefield's writing is far more poetic than Lewis's and his storytelling is less straightforward. The tone changes frequently, from Nesbit-like kid capers to beautiful, dreamlike scenes of magic and mystery, to comic satire centered around a gang of thieves posing as clergymen. It's a bit of an odd mix, and left me a little unsure what to make of it all. Plus it ends up being a dream! Aside from Alice, this is a disappointing way for any magical story to end.
[Spoiler alert for book and series] Read this along with watching part of the Netflix series. It was interesting to see what was changed and not changed in the film. On the one hand, many parts were extremely faithful to the book, with word for word dialogue. On the other, there were many small and large changes that significantly altered the emotional trajectory. In the book, Beth is not in the car when her mother crashes it and dies (on purpose, the movie suggests), and there is much less backstory of her traumatic childhood. Beth grudgingly agrees to her adoptive mother taking a 10% commission on her chess earnings, whereas in the film she raises it to 15% with a warm smile. To the film was added a suggestion that Beth's genius may be close to madness. Subtracted was an unnecessary sexual overture by a character who makes more sense without it. And so on.
Overall, I preferred this approach. It expands the human side of the story, while de-emphasizing the chess moves that take up a lot of space in the book and are pure gobbledegook to those of us who do not play chess. Other readers seem to feel differently, but for me there is simply not a ton of human interest in whether somebody is going to come up with the right chess move. There is nothing to relate to for normal non-chess-playing humans.
This makes the final face-off with Borkov anticlimactic, for me. I'm not interested in who moves what piece where. The real “endgame” took place when Beth put away her wine bottles and reconnected with Jolene, facing her past and reconceiving her priorities. The mental gymnastics of chess are astounding, amazing, but human beings can't live without human, emotional connection. And it was the last-minute call from Benny that gave Beth a necessary dose of that.
After Borkov's surprising hug at the end, it would have been nice to see some more interaction between them, or between her and the Russians. That would have been interesting to me. I've not finished the series yet, so I wonder if they picked up on this.
The series made more of Beth as an addict than the book. In the book, she goes through spells of using tranquilizers and/or alcohol, but she seems relatively able to free herself from them with some mental effort. I don't think it's so easy in the real world of substance dependency, especially for a person with so much trauma in her life. In general, the book left me feeling rather flat and disappointed, with Beth as a more robot-like chess whiz and less of a human being.
At a time when hysteria both for and against vaccines seems to be at an all-time high, I was educated (inoculated?) by Eula Biss's extended essay, to understand that such feelings have a long and far-reaching history. They touch on themes of war, immigration, poverty, and the troubled relations between our minds and bodies, which allow us to swim in a sea of false ideas just as we bear a weight of microbes that are (or are they?) “not us.”
Humans are fragile and fearful creatures. It increasingly seems to me that our fears and concerns for our bodies mask the even greater threats that reside in our inner lives and souls, but those are threats we cannot so easily see and control. Instead, we obsess about a physical world that is already in the process of dying. We are encouraged to equate health and life with the survival of the body. But will this end up being a metaphor, one that we need to learn to read, or perish out of literalism?
While wondering about this question, one can read Biss's thoughtful, measured and eloquent meditations on life, motherhood, science, and metaphors, which concludes “However we choose to think of the social body, we are each other's environment. Immunity is a shared space – a garden we tend together.” I'm grateful for her help in thinking both more clearly and more artistically about the fears that plague our common mind today.
I enjoyed this sequel, the new characters as much as the old, and hope there will be another installment (a change in location to Chicago is suggested at the end...) The Golem and the Jinni work as metaphors for immigration, displacement, otherness and integration, as well as being touching and believable as characters in their own right.
After Beverly Cleary's autobiographies, I had to read this, her first book. The storytelling holds up today, even if the circumstances of the children's lives make it dated. Henry is an immediately believable, endearing character, with conflicts and crises that are both relatable and amusing. Each of the 6 short episodes is simply but engagingly told - perfect for an early reader. There is no moralizing, no patronizing of children or suggesting their concerns are less important than adults'. Interesting to consider that this was all so unusual at the time of writing, that Henry and his author caused quite a revolution in books for children. Cleary surely wrote better books, but this was the first and it's still a fine achievement.
For some reason I just devoured this autobiography. Cleary's brief description at the end of how she finally finished her first book, after years of aspiring to be a writer, was interesting, with all the details she pulled from her life but changed, and the suggestions from an editor that shaped the final version. One can also feel reassured knowing that a woman who barely scraped through university with a D grade on her comprehensive exam can become a famous author! As a former English major, I had to laugh at her determined avoidance of Milton and her helplessness when confronted by a question like “Describe how English literature was affected by history,” never having really studied history.
There is lots about scrimping and saving money during the Depression, but no tone of complaint. It is good to remember how hard it was for people at that time, and to admire their courage and resourcefulness. The resilience of human beings is amazing.
The resistance of Cleary's parents to her marriage to a wonderful man who happened to be Catholic was terribly sad; their relationship continued to be a troubled one through this volume, and in the end she just had to cut loose and make her own life. Refusing to buy her eyeglasses, and shaming her for the amount of money her college education cost them, was just cruel. Again, Cleary does not complain, but it's clear that she was deeply hurt and confused by such unloving gestures. She must have created the warm, connected families in her books that she lacked in her own, showing how often writers write out of what they wish for, not only what they know.
It's been years since I read any of Beverly Cleary's books, but something prompted me to pick this up (probably a list of books by authors who died last year). It was wonderful! Now I want to revisit the Ramona books, which seem to have a lot of Beverly in them. Her troubled relationship with her mother was sad but interesting to read about, something that she seemingly kept out of her children's books.
Another comfort reread from Milford. I think the reviews that complain this one is more of the same are a bit unfair – a lot of the same elements from GGH appear, but there is a subtle change and growth in Milo that Milford aptly portrays through his creating a new role-playing character. The details about the latter were a little unbelievable, but maybe kids who are really into RPG do imagine themselves into the part so thoroughly? Anyway, in the context of the story I was fine with it.
Marzana was an intriguing character who could have played more of a role. It's good that she got her own book (The Thief Knot) and I hope we'll still see more of her, maybe together with Milo. I also enjoyed the lore and tradition around the Waits.
I'm going to stop now with Milford as I don't feel in the mood for the darker ones I have not yet read, The Boneshaker and The Broken Lands – but I'll get to them eventually.
And I went back to the first Kate Milford I read, to remind myself of how The Raconteur's Commonplace Book was related to it. It was fun to discover again the snippets included, impressively worked into a complete story collection - slash - novel in the RCB. I assume they were not complete stories at the time GGH was written!
The book is most enjoyable for its atmosphere and characters; the mystery element is mild. I want the Pines for my innkeepers, they are so solicitous it would be like having a second family. Milo is a lucky boy but his mixed feelings about his ancestry and birth parents are understandable. I like how he uses “role playing” to help him break free of his mental limitations.