Francesca Penchant
This is an excellent debut novel by Alix Wilber! Brilliant writing style/characters and impressive, complex plotting.
She is a commercial writer who lives in Seattle. Here's her website: alixwilber.com
“The kiss of Satan rendered her beautiful.”
I like my Lorrain over-the-top but down-to-earth (as in
Brendan Connell knows his decadence!
My favorite pieces in this collection are the humorous ones that parody Decadent Movement stories: the man who falls in love with a vase; the man who falls in love with a decapitated head; and the man who falls in love with his sword. These stories bring to mind Rachilde's
An informative, psychologically in-depth, and fascinating look at the creative and troubled Barrymore family. My only complaint is that the author spends too much time on John Barrymore's later outrageous exploits, when he was suffering from the beginnings of Altzheimer's disease, and wasn't completely responsible for his actions. (This book must've been published before theories of Altzheimer's were developed, because no mention is made of the disease.)
All-in-all, a thrilling look at three complex artists: Lionel, John, and Ethel.
(I listened to the audio version of this book.)
Wow! So glad this book exists. Stunning. Fascinating subject matter of the city's “denim monde.” But would've liked to have cut some of the many adverbs and similes that made the prose feel sentimental at times.
Great crime fiction. Intricate but comprehensible plot. Loved the hard-boiled writing style. Some great male characters, but the female characters were disappointing—one-dimensional animals. Marlowe's thought, “Women make me sick,” kinda sums up the underlying misogyny.
“... the next day, we lavished praise on Caligula as a sincere and pious ruler and voted annual sacrifices to his Clemency. What else could we do? He had the Army at his back, and power of life and death over us, and until someone was bold and clever enough to make a successful conspiracy against his life all that we could do was to humour him and hope for the best.”
Nothing changes.
An excellent and enthusiastic overview of the studio system of Hollywood's classic period, described through the careers of particular performers. Basinger shows how studios carefully crafted actors' and actresses' careers–the discovery of a star, the lessons, the publicity, the films as tests, and finally the hitting upon type and the playing against type. I love how Basinger brings some actors back from obscurity–such as Deanna Durbin–to make us appreciate why they were so popular in their day. The only part of the book that misses its mark is when she attempts to critique the current Hollywood system and stars.
I loved this book; it has a fascinating premise and empathizes with the iron-willed saints it examines. I'm grateful there are authors like Bell, who take on such controversial and daring research.
“Anorexics struggle against feeling enslaved, exploited, and not permitted to lead a life of their own. They would rather starve than continue a life of accommodation. In this blind search for a sense of identity and selfhood they will not accept anything that their parents, or the world around them, has to offer.... [In] genuine or primary anorexia nervosa, the main theme is a struggle for control, for a sense of identity, competence, and effectiveness.”
—Hilde Bruch
Quoted in Holy Anorexia by Rudolph M. Bell
“The only path [for a medieval girl] was from parental domination to submission before a husband. Western culture reproves any deviation from this pattern in ways distinctly unfavorable and psychologically guilt-ridden for women. Spinster-not-bachelor, whore-not-philanderer, prostitute-not-john. Such gender-split words convey images of a deep historical reality, which tolerates or only smirkingly disapproves the same self-expression in men that it condemns in women, especially sexual expression in the refusal to be bound by marital vows.”
—Rudolph M. Bell in Holy Anorexia
The most detailed writing book I've ever seen. Rubin really did his homework. I love that he refers to more than just popular movies and tv shows—like so many other recent writing books—but also novels and plays, new and classic. He even uses a popular game as an example.
And his advice to “max-out the middle” is a gem: fight sagging-middle syndrome by going emotionally crazy in the middle, challenging your protagonist to the breaking point. (He uses gut-wrenching James Baldwin novel If Beale Street Could Talk to illustrate this.) It's something I'd never heard of. Worth the price of admission.
Making your characters “work at the top of their intelligence” was a new one, too. Put your characters in situations where they have to figure things out—readers want to see characters who are fighting to survive, inspired, pushed, changed.
Rubin knows his stuff. So passionate about stories! (It didn't hurt that I listened to the audiobook, with Rubin's intense East Coast delivery.) Worth a second read!
“I now fully knew what I didn't want and what and whom I hated. That was something... One day, maybe, there'ld be a human society in a world which is beautiful, a society which wasn't just disgust.”
—Kathy Acker, last paragraph of “Empire of the Senseless”
“Work is the nearest thing to happiness that I can find.”
“I will join in no protest for the boss to put more stuffing in my bunk. I don't even want the bunk. I want the boss's bed.”
“I want the front of the house, and I'm going to keep on trying, even if I never satisfy my plan.”
“I have been in sorrow's kitchen, and licked out all the pots.”
A satisfying book that surveys the history of detective fiction. It was valuable to learn the names of other Golden Age writers besides my beloved Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. Still, I would've liked more personal insights from James–about her life and the reasons that she is drawn to the genre. (I listened to the audio version of this book.)
“There are sound scientific reasons why some in this world are rich and some are poor. It comes down to character, and no amount of piracy can counterbalance that. A pirate never died rich.”
“Unless he pretended he wasn't a pirate at all.”
“How was Pam to reconcile her new identity when she'd lived so long with an old one? She was of her father. And now her father was someone else.”
—Libby Copeland, The Lost Family
“We are all, of course, children of whims, and we've always known this to be true. Long before the DNA age brought to light tales of one-night-stands and donor-sperm-swaps, and the mix-up of two babies in a hospital. We are whims of our mothers deciding to attend a certain dinner party and meeting our fathers. We are whims of the sperm cell that beat out millions of other sperm cells to reach our mother's egg.
“And, as we come into being, we are still whims—of childhood accidents, and the precise locations of the houses we grew up in, of a college admissions officer, of an email never opened, of a drunk driver we never saw coming. As destabilizing as it is to admit, life is just one grand unfolding of accidents.”
—Libby Copeland, The Lost Family
Required reading for adoptees and “non-paternity events” (NPEs).
Original writing. Sharp character studies. Suspenseful plot. Nicely captures the argot of the time.
I gave this four stars instead of five, only because of the narrator Frederick Davidson, who has annoying speech patterns, and sounds bored with the material. It was hard to get through, and I usually avoid his books, but I really wanted to listen to this.
“Perhaps it will help ... if the erring governments and the wondering people of this world will remember the dark night of Nazi terror and genocide that almost engulfed our world and that is the subject of this book. Remembrance of the past helps us to understand the present.”
William L. Shirer
May 1990
“[The Nazi party] lasted twelve years and four months, but in that flicker of time, as history goes, it caused an eruption on this earth more violent and shattering than any previously experienced, raising the German people to heights of power they had not known in more than a millennium, making them at one time the masters of Europe from the Atlantic to the Volga, from the North Cape to the Mediterranean, and then plunging them to the depths of destruction and desolation at the end of a world war which their nation had cold-bloodedly provoked and during which it instituted a reign of terror over the conquered peoples which, in its calculated butchery of human life and the human spirit, outdid all the savage oppressions of the previous ages.”
“Great depravity leads to great piety.”
Such an entertaining read. How can you not like this book? Sure, its misogyny is over-the-top, but the male characters don't look so great, either.
Toward the end of the book are the inklings of the excess and “perversion” of the Decadent movement to come in France a few years later:
“Woman dominated him with the jealous tyranny of a God of wrath, terrifying him but granting him moments of joy as keen as spasms, in return for hours of hideous torments, visions of hell and eternal tortures. He stammered out the same despairing prayers as in church, and above all suffered the same fits of humility peculiar to an accursed creature crushed under the mud from which he has sprung.”
(Ugh, don't you hate it when that happens?!)
This book reads more like a philosophical treatise on Sacher-Masoch's type of love than it does a novel. By today's standards, it is actually extremely chaste.
I found it very romantic and sweet, except for the fact that Sacher-Masoch puts his main character through horrible ordeals, usually involving whippings of some kind.
Also interesting is the fact that the story closely parallels incidents from his life with his wife, Wanda.
