MarysLibrary

Supreme Courtship

I began laughing out loud on page 3. By page 20 I had tears rolling down my cheeks. At around page 40 I was howling. That was when the cats showed up, both of them, judiciously positioned themselves a safe 6 to 8 feet away and stared. Miss Woodhouse shut her eyes and shook her head. Miss Darcy gave me an icy stare and the Flehman response, which she tends to do when unduly stressed.

What we have here is an insider Washington novel that is accessible to anybody. We have all observed while the Senate Judiciary Committee eviscerated the finest judges in the country in the name of searching for a worthy Supreme Court justice. Buckley takes the situation just a little farther and using his off-the-wall imagination produces a situation that could almost - almost - be enacted on CNN in a year or two.

When the ghost of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, begins whispering in the ear of aging Associate Justice Brinnin it becomes clear that a "Vacancy" sign will soon hang in front of the Supreme Court. Whom will President Vanderdamp nominate.

His first candidate looks good. Never having had a decision overturned, he's a model of judicial rectitude. But as with so many judicial candidates his past comes back to haunt him. In his case it was a review for his elementary school newspaper written when he was 12: "Though the picture is overall OK, it's also kind of boring in other parts."

The head of the jucidiary committee "looked up, took off his glasses, paused as if fighting back tears, nodded philosophically, and said, 'Tell us, Judge, which parts of To Kill a Mockingbird did you find quote-unquote boring?'"

After another saintly and wise judge is turned down by the committee the president goes off to Camp David to try to relax. While channel surfing he comes upon the seventh most popular TV show in the US: Courtroom Six, a reality show presided over by Judge Pepper Cartwright, a sassy Texas gal. President Vanderdamp, in a fit of frustration nominates her.

How could a panel of politicians vote against the most popular judge in the nation? They can't and Pepper finds herself seated among the nine. Then the fun starts.

Christopher Buckley, Supreme Courtship (2008) 5 / 5 stars

A Death in Vienna

I read about A Death in Vienna back in early August at Ex Libris and thought it had promise. Just having finished it I can report it's a fine mystery and a convincing historical novel. If you love Vienna and if you love schlagsahne you will find this book very satisfying.

It's about a doctor, Max Lieberman, who is practicing the new science of psychoanalysis in 1900 Vienna. His friend Oskar Rheinhardt, a police detective, asks for his help with a puzzling locked room case. A beautiful young woman has been murdered but there is no bullet found in her body. She is a medium and there are those who believe that her death is supernatural. Herr Doctor Lieberman is not among them.

This is the first in what promises to be an superb series of mysteries. The author is a psychiatrist who practices in England and his expertise informs every scene in the book. I've borrowed the second book, Vienna Blood, from the library, and I'm looking forward to the third.

Frank Tallis, A Death in Vienna (2005) 458 pages. 5 / 5 stars.

Night Flight

Michel Tremblay mentioned in Birth of a Bookworm this wonderful short novel by the author of the children's book, The Little Prince. But Night Flight is far from a children's book.

It's about the men who flew the mail from Santiago, Asuncion, and Patagonia to Buenos Aires and then on to France during the 1920s and 30s. It's about love and heroism and death.

Inform Buenos Aires: We are cut off on all sides; storm developing over a depth of eight hundred miles; no visibility. What shall we do?

What indeed.

Impossible communicate Buenos Aires. Can't even touch the key, the shocks are numbing my hands.

I have only once flown in a plane like those that carried the mail in this novel and it was a warm sunny day with no breeze. The ride was exhilarating. I cannot even imagine what it must have been like for these men, flying at night over the Andes, into storms, with insufficient fuel, with no hope of rescue in small, canvas planes.

But Saint-Exupery can imagine it. He experienced it. He was lost during World War II flying reconnaissance over the Mediterranean.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Night Flight (1932) 87 pages. 5 /5 stars

What Moves at the Margin

Tony Morrison has two new books out, one of them a novel that I haven't gotten my hands on yet. The other is What Moves at the Margin. These are speeches, papers, book reviews, and such, some reaching back to the 70s. There's a fine introduction by Carolyn C Denard.

One of the pieces that I particularly liked was "Speaking of Reynolds Price," an interview conducted in 1992, in which Morrison makes the surprising statement that "I have never been with Reynolds when I didn't remember it." She goes on to talk about why Price is so memorable for her. Having met the man I can say his charm alone makes him memorable.

This collection isn't for everyone but there are many pieces that would appeal to the serious reader of modern American fiction. The book reviews are particularly enlightening.

A review from Rain Taxi can be found here.

Toni Morrison, What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction (2008) 215 pages. 4 / 5 stars

478 Carats

Here it is! The nearly 500-carat diamond found two weeks ago in Lesotho. It will be 150-carats when cut, the 20th largest diamond in the world, larger than the Koh-i-noor.

A Moveable Feast

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

Recently I've been reading, or trying to read, Gertrude Stein. So when I spotted at the library A Moveable Feast, Hemingway's catty memoir of his time in Paris between 1920 and 1926, I decided it was time to re-read it.

There are two reasons to read this book. One is to find out what Hemingway thought about some of the major literary figures of his day - or at least what he thought about them forty years later. He claims credit for spotting Zelda Fitzgerald's madness early on and he describes her machinations to keep Scott in an alcoholic haze because she was jealous of his work. He is less than flattering about Gertrude Stein. He is absolutely scathing about Ford Maddox Ford, who, by the way, helped him get published when he was an unknown. Gratitude is not Hemingway's strongest character trait.

The other reason for reading A Moveable Feast is to walk the streets of Paris with the author, and he does make the sights, sounds, and smells of Paris graphic. Beer at the Brasserie Lipp, cafe au lait at the Deux Magots, buying a petit pain and some cheap charcuterie and making a rough sandwich with sliced radishes. If you have ever lived in Paris it all comes flooding back as if you had dipped a madeline in your tea.

Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964) 211 pages. 4 / 5

The Mysterious Affair at Styles

Wilhelm and I have been watching a lot of British made-for-tv mystery series lately -- Frost, Lynley, Morse, Campion, and Poirot.

It had been many years -- decades -- since I'd read an Agatha Christie mystery so I decided to find out if they were as good as the tv programs make them seem with David Suchet as the inimitable Poirot.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles, the first of the Hercule Poirot mysteries, is even better than I remembered. There is nothing extraneous in this book -- the plot is all. It has everything, from a locked room and an estranged family to red herrings.

Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) 203 pages. 4 / 5

The Bibliomidas Touch

Not to brag or anything, but lately every book I touch turns to gold. We all go through periods when there is nothing worth reading in our 4,000-book library. This is kind of the opposite, where we discover all sorts of treasures on our shelves that we hadn't realized where there.

I've also been playing the library version, Serendipity. I walk along the shelves and idy pick out a book because the author's name is familiar (but not too familiar), I like the cover picture, I can remember vaguely hearing about the book, or - and this is the most likely to produce a winner -- the book has been rebound.

Libraries don't rebind much any more as the books that fall apart tend to be ephemeral in value and it has become more costly to rebind than to buy a fresh copy of the now-tattered book. So the books whose spines are a plain dull brown, blue, or green buckram tend be older (some as old as from the 40s or 50s), were at one time popular (or they wouldn't have needed rebinding), and were considered by the librarians to be of sufficient value to justify the expense of rebinding them.

This hot streak I'm on, combined with the opening of the Spokane Symphony season (Strauss' Alpensinfonie, anyone?), has led me to ignore my blog. I'll start soon talking about these delightful books I've been reading lately but I want to finish a couple more of them first. Stay tuned.

Julian Beever

For more, go here.

Birth of a Bookworm

This book jerked me around, wrung me out, and tossed me away. What a writer Michel Tremblay is!

This autobiographical examination of the books that changed his life as he went from an eight-year-old with his first library card to a famous dramatist is packed with information about books, Montreal, and the author himself.

I laughed out loud, I wept, I grew exasperated, I sympathized, and I had occasionally to get up and walk around to calm myself.

Birth of a Bookworm, or rather Un ange cornu avec des ailes de tole, was recommended by my friend Chantal, bibliothecaire Quebecoise. I asked if she could recommend something that was written in easy-to-read French. She suggested this and Tremblay's other memoir, Les Vues animees.

When I began reading Un Ange I became so involved and was so eager to find out what was happening next that I was frustrated at the slow pace I was making in French and found an English version. I read the rest of the book switching back and forth between the two.

Tremblay's love of books is breathtaking. Here he is opening the package that contained the first book that was bought for him, that he owned rather than borrowed:

On dit que desirer est plus jouissant que posseder.C'est faux pour les livres. . . . It's said that desire is more thrilling than possession. That's not true for books. If you've ever felt that warmth in the stomach, that burst of excitement in the region of the heart, that movement of the face -- a small tic of the mouth, perhaps, a new line on the forehead, the eyes that search, that devour -- just as you are finally holding the long-for book, when you open it, cracking it just a little so you can hear it, anyone who has experienced that moment of incomparable happiness will understand what I mean. Opening a book is one of the most exhilarating, the most incomparable experiences that a person can have in his life.

Michel Tremblay, Un Ange cornu avec des ailes de tole (1994) 241 pages. 5 / 5

Michael Tremblay, Birth of a Bookworm (translated by Sheila Fischman, 2003) 192 pages. 5 / 5