MarysLibrary

LA Restaurant Guide or Murder Mystery?

Guilt by Degrees by Marcia Clark is a Los Angeles restaurant review shelved under "mysteries." The protagonist and her friends, Toni and Bailey, visit more than a score of restaurants from haute to bas and the food is described as lovingly as that in Viennese mysteries by J Sydney Jones and Frank Tallis and the Vish Puri mysteries by Tarquin Hall.

Back in 2011 I read the first of Marcia Clark's Rachel Knight mysteries, Guilt by Association, and was a bit disappointed. But I was willing to give this second in the series a chance. It was not a success. There were so many visits to so many parents and bad guys and former detectives that I got confused who was who.

I don't think I'll be reading any more of Clark's LAPD/DA mysteries. But as I said, if you are looking for a guide to really good LA restaurants of all kinds, this is for you.

Desire Under the Elms - Banned in Boston

Eugene O'Neill is perhaps rightly described as America's foremost playwright. He won a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize and the titles of his works are household words: The Iceman Cometh, The Emperor Jones, Long Day's Journey into Night, Ah! Wilderness.) I love his plays, but as the drama critic Percy Hammond said, “Mr. O’Neill’s dramas always make me glad that I am not one of the characters involved.”

Like his life, his plays are filled with disease (childhood death from scarlet fever, tuberculosis), drug addiction (his mother was a morphine addict), alcoholism (he, his father, and both his sons died indirectly from alcohol), and suicide (two of O'Neill's three children killed themselves - and he tried but didn't succeed.) His works are still frequently performed today, more than 60 years after his death.

Like Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), Desire Under the Elms (1924) was based on an ancient Greek myth, the story of Phaedra who marries an old man and falls in love with his son. Despite its impeccable literary roots, its incest theme got the play Banned in Boston.It didn't have an easy time in New York City either. When it moved to Broadway,

...the play and its author soon found themselves in the center of heated controversy; its frank (for the day) depictions of lust, venality, incest and infanticide caused Manhattan District Attorney Joab H. Banton to call for the production’s immediate closing. After more than a week of upheaval, during which time Banton threatened to take the case to a grand jury, a citizen’s panel was assembled to pass judgment on the production. They recommended that the play remain in production without any change. The notoriety of the case made Desire Under the Elms into a bona fide hit."

The play was made into a 1958 movie starring Sophia Loren, Anthony Perkins, and, of all people, Burl Ives. Four years later the film, Phaedra, another retelling of the same story, was made with Melina Mercouri and Anthony Perkins. The music is particularly memorable, as are the scene where Mercouri throws an enormous diamond ring into the Seine and the ending, when Perkins goes over a cliff in an Aston Martin to the music of J S Bach. It's one of my favorite films and I insist on attributing the timing of its release to the O'Neill film four years earlier.

Being Banned in Boston could be lucrative.

It's Banned Books Week Again

Have you ever heard of the Streisand Effect? The state of California undertook a project to photograph the entire coastline of the state to record erosion. Among the many, many photos was one of Barbara Streisand's Malibu estate. She sued the state claiming they were invading her privacy. She lost. In fact, she lost in a particularly big way. Before her suit the photo had been viewed six times. Afterwards it went viral and we are still seeing pictures of it.

Banning books is similar. The Banned in Boston label, has always made some people eager to read or watch or hear anything that had caught the attention of the Watch and Ward authorities. The works banned in The Hub range from The Decameron to the Everly Brothers' song, "Wake Up Little Susie."

Here is a partial list of works Banned in Boston:

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio

Desire Under the Elms by Eugene O'Neill

Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis

An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser

The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway

Black April, Julia Peterkin

Lady Chatterley's Lover, D H Lawrence

A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway

Jews Without Money, Michael Gold

God's Little Acre, Erskine Caldwell

Forever Amber, Kathleen Winsor

"Wake Up Little Susie," The Everly Brothers

This week I'll review some of these banned books, plays, and music and examine what it was about them that made them the target of the censors.  These things range from suggestiveness to graphic sexual descriptions, addiction, alcoholism, adultery, miscegination, and criticism of the clergy. Today most of that is fair game. Only the last is still getting books banned.

National Book Awards Longlist - Nonfiction

 

Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, Roz Chast

 

The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic, John Demos

 

No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes, Anand Gopal

 

The Mantle of Command: FDR at War, 1941-1942, Nigel Hamilton

 

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, Walter Isaacson (Forthcoming Oct. 7)

 

Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, John Lahr (Forthcoming Sept. 22)

 

Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, Evan Osnos

 

When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940-1944, Ronald C Rosbottom

 

Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic, Matthew Stewart

 

The Meaning of Human Existence, Edward O. Wilson (Forthcoming Oct 6)

National Book Awards Longlist - Fiction

 

Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman

Molly Antopol, The UnAmericans (short stories)

John Darnielle, Wolf in the White Van (debut novel)

Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

Phil Klay, Redeployment

Emily St John Mandel, Station Eleven

Elizabeth McCracken, Thunderstruck & Other Stories

Richard Powers, Orfeo

Marilynne Robinson, Lila

Jane Smiley, Some Luck

Women's Eyes

"I feel sorry for novelists when they have to mention women's eyes; there's so little choice . . .  Her eyes are blue: innocence and honesty. Her eyes are black: passion and depth. Her eyes are green: wildness and jealousy. Her eyes are brown: reliability and common sense. Her eyes are violet: the novel is by Raymond Chandler." -- Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

Disappointment

What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund should have been a delightful and insightful book. It wasn't; not for me. It's unusual, with many pages black with white print, clever (and not so clever) illustrations. Bits of text from novels shown in ways that purportedly illustrate how we see them. None of this worked for me. Next time you're in the library or a bookstore take a look at it. I'm sure it would appeal to somebody; maybe that's you.

I read a library copy. This is not a book for the Kindle.

Phineas Re-Redux

Dolly Longestaffe had slumbered through a first class education of whose fleece a few tufts had stuck to his mental fences.  -- John Wirenius, Phineas at Bay

 

A member of one of my on-line Trollope affiliations, John Wirenius, has written a pastiche featuring one of everybody's favorite Anthony Trollope characters, Phineas Finn. It is now the 1890s, and Quintus Slide has returned from 20 years in Australia where he made a fortune, a fortune he has used to buy The People's Banner. As owner and editor he is in a position to wreak vengeance on some people whom he blames for his precipitous escape to the antipodes 20 years before.

I've only just started reading this novel so I can't say for sure yet, but so far it's smoothly written, filled with wry references to the stories and characters we know well from the Palliser novels, and promising a delightful duel of wit between Phineas and Slide.

The opening scene is at old Chaffenbrass' funeral where Phineas, now a Liberal backbencher who is not wanted in the Barrington Erle ministry, meets Lady Mason. As Phineas has come in gratitude that the old barrister once protected his innocence, she has come in gratitude that he protected her guilt.

I borrowed this book through Kindle Unlimited but I liked it so much I went back and bought a copy.

September

'All the month are crude experiments out of which the perfect September is made.'

            -- Virginia Woolf

 

From the books as food blog. Go visit. It's a delight.

My Nick Hornby Post

I'm engrossed in Nick Hornby's collection of his columns for The Believer, Ten Years in the Tub: A Decade Soaking in Great Books. Hornby's witty and wandering comments on what he has bought and what he has read and the relationship between them (or not) have been published before in a series of books, all of which I've read: The Polysyllabic Spree, Housekeeping vs the Dirt, Shakespeare Wrote for Money, etc.

But these are pieces you need to re-read periodically. Books Hornby praised 10 years ago may have elicited a ho-hum back then but they turn out to be The Very Book I Need now. In fact, some of the books I had forgotten even existed have soared onto my Top Ten TBR list - well, my Top 25 list - now that I've read about them again.

The way Hornby's column works is he makes a list of the books he has bought in the past month, like this:

• The Story of the Jews, Finding the Words 1000 BC-1492 AD by Simon Schama
• The Annotated Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana
• Niels Lyhnne by Jens Peter Jacobsen
• The English Girl by Daniel Silva (Gabriel Allon series)
• The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London by Judith Flanders
• The Monkey's Raincoat by Robert Crais (Elvis Cole mysteries #1)
• Stalking the Angel by Robert Crais (Elvis Cole mysteries #2)
• Asterix the Gaul: Album #1 by Rene Goscinny
  
• Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo)
• What Are You Looking At?: The Surprising, Shocking, and Sometimes Strange Story of 150 Years of Modern Art by Will Gompertz
• A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal by Ben Macintyre
  
• Sydney Chambers and the Perils of the Night (Grantchester Mysteries #2) by James Runcie
• Ten Years in the Tub by Nick Hornby
• The Late George Apley by John P Marquand
• Hens Dancing by Raffaela A Barker
• Spare Brides by Adele Parks
• Pages from the Goncourt Journals by Edmond de Goncourt
• The Novel: A Biography by Michael Schmidt
• We Are Not Ourselves: A Novel by Matthew Thomas
• The Eleventh Hour: A Qurious Mystery by Graeme Base

Then Hornby lists the books he has read in the past month, like this:

• The English Girl by Daniel Silva (Gabriel Allon series #1)
• The Monkey's Raincoat by Robert Crais (Elvis Cole mysteries #1)
• Asterix the Gaul: Album #1 by Rene Goscinny
  
• A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal by Ben Macintyre
  
• Ten Years in the Tub by Nick Hornby
• The Eleventh Hour: A Qurious Mystery by Graeme Base

Some books turn up in Hornby's "Read" column months later. Many disappear onto his shelves never to be heard from again. (Jess Walter, in the introduction estimates Hornby has spent more than 6000 pounds in the last 10 years on books he has not read.) Books acquired from publishers, friends, or the library, or picked off his shelves are not listed in the incoming list, though I think they should be. Walter suggests a list of Books Foisted upon Me by their Authors.

The books in the lists above are mine and they go back a bit beyond the last month. More about the books I've read and why I haven't read some of the others in another post.