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Penelope Lively's Consequences

In late June I read a terrific review of Penelope Lively's Consequences on Hogglestock, the newly-named blog that was once My Porch.

So I borrowed it from the library. But I was only half a dozen pages into the book when I realized I had read the book before. I looked it up and the original reading was in August of 2007. I gave it 4.5 out of a possible 5 stars.

It's truly outstanding. The book made it to my list of the 5 best fiction titles of 2007 but I didn't review it. Go to Hogglestock and read Thomas' review. He will convince you to read it.

Knots and Crosses, the first Inspector Rebus mystery

This first of Ian Rankin's famous Inspector Rebus series, Knots and Crosses, is excellent but nothing special. I expected more. But this is a book set up to disappoint. How could it live up to its reputation or the expectations raised by the fact that 20 books follow in the series. I'm getting set to read the second book and again have very high hopes. (Kiss of death . . .)

Heat Wave by Richard Castle (wink, wink)

A friend told us to watch the TV show, Castle, and since her advice is sterling we got the DVDs from Netflix for the first season.

We love it! Casting is very important on TV shows (and in movies, but if you're going to see this character every week for six years it's really not good if the actor grates on the nerves of the viewers.) Somehow they found the perfect people to play Castle and detective Kate Beckett. Perfect.

The point of the TV show, Castle, is that Richard Castle is a rich and famous author of mysteries who wants to write a new series about a female NYPD cop. Since he plays poker with the mayor every week (not to mention James Patterson, Stephen J. Cannell, and Michael Connelly, who make cameo appearances on the show occasionally) he has received permission to ride along with Kate Beckett, one of the city's finest detectives.

This book, Heat Wave, is the first of that new series, featuring Nikki Heat and a journalist, Jameson Rook. It has a fairly standard New York police procedural plot but as with the TV show it's the characters who make the story sing. The book is filled with witty dialogue and very slow character development and a satisfying denouement.

Features from the TV show appear in the novels, such as an episode where a couple of masked guys hold up the coroner's van and steal the dead body. It's done for a different reason in the book but the unusual experience that "Richard Castle" has seen in "real life" is fodder for his novel.

We are a couple of layers deep here with an actor, Nathan Fillian, playing a fictional TV character, Richard Castle, who is an author who writes about a fictional character, Jameson Rook, who is also a writer. And behind it all is a real, human writer (or writers) who produces the script for the TV show and the novels purportedly written by Castle. I love this kind of thing.

But you don't need to know anything about the TV show to enjoy this fine mystery, first of a series.

The Late George Apley

Why doesn't the Library of America have a volume of John P Marquand novels? I remembered The Late George Apley as a very good book and this re-reading 50 years later confirms that. First-rate and not included in the definitive collection of American authors. That should be fixed.

Enchanted August

With a plot and characters based very loosely on Elizabeth von Arnim's Enchanted April, Brenda Bowen's Enchanted August fits neatly into the category "Beach Book." Three women and an old man set off for a resort island off the coast of Maine where they spend the month of August in an old house that the owner hopes to bring back to the liveliness he remembers as a child.

The two women who placed an ad for roommates didn't realize that the old woman who responded to their ad was an old man, and an eccentric and cranky one at that. The fourth of their group is a very famous young singer who is just out of rehab and deciding what to do with herself. An interesting group who grow to get along and to help one another, they also meet some of the others on the island, from old families who give them various degrees of warm welcome.

There's also an island library, always a nice touch in a novel.

Be not proud . . .

Holy Sonnet X

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so,
For those, whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and souls deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better than thy stroake; why swell'st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

-- John Donne

The Book of the People by A N Wilson

Despite the subtitle of A N Wilson's The Book of the People: How to Read the Bible, this is not a book about how to read the Bible. A history of sorts telling us how various people (and peoples) have read it and how it helped causes like that of Martin Luther King (not to mention Martin Luther . . .), the book is really a kind of promise fulfilled to a friend, a woman friend called "L." A promise to look into who wrote the Bible and why the books that have become canonical were chosen.

Like all of Wilson's books, this one is about Wilson. But also like all of his books, it's entertaining, informative, and in some ways puzzling. I always come away wanting to read something else he has talked about. The author describes his short book thus: "It's a book, in part, about what we have done to ourselves, as a culture either by neglecting the Bible or by making it an offensive weapon with which to attack people with whom we disagree."

One of those is "H," whom Wilson visits in Washington, DC, a noted anti-religious debater, sent over the edge when his friend, Salman Rushdie, found himself with a bounty on his head and went into hiding for years. Without contradicting H's arguments, Wilson appeals to everyone to read the Bible because,

It is the text of all texts, the book which underlies almost all of the great works of Western literature from the time of its compilation, until the Enlightenment and beyond. Without a knowledge of it, the great portion of Western architecture is incomprehensible. It is the key which unlocks the work of nearly all the painters, from Giotto to Blake. It is the libretto of Bach and Hayden and Beethoven.

So who is "L"? We learn she is a composite, but surely that multiple character includes Wilson's early mentor, Iris Murdoch. "H" is obviously Christopher Hitchens.

The Third Man by Graham Greene

What a splendid book. I re-read Graham Greene's The Third Man after some 40 years because I had borrowed the movie from the library and I wanted to refresh my memory. Why had I not noticed before that the book came after the movie? Or rather during the movie. When Graham Greene was asked to do the screenplay he felt he needed to write the novel to get things clear in his mind. He has explained all that in his comments about the book.

Both the book and the movie are deeply atmospheric. At first it reminded me of the episodes of Interpol I'd find my dad watching on late night TV when I came home from dates in high school. But it didn't take long to recognize the quasi-allegorical characters, each with a different and sometimes desperate need, and to appreciate the careful placing of the scenes in various parts of Vienna.

I went back and re-re-read the book after watching the movie and it was better still with the two faces of Harry Lime in my mind. Orson Welles was a genius and Graham Greene showed us that in this post-war classic.

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The Third Man review - torn between heaven and hell, a classic noir

Will you be disaudienced?

Tom Disch was an American poet who wrote science fiction novels. Or a science fiction writer who wrote poetry, take your pick.

His verse appeals to me but I can't tell you what it is that grabs me. Here's one of his poems, this one about the chance of his work (or yours) becoming a volume in the Library of America collection. 

The Library of America

It's like heaven: you've got to die 
To get there. And you can't be sure. 
The publisher might go out of business. 
Or you yourself might not be good enough. 
The vagaries of taste might swerve, 
Suddenly, leaving you disaudienced.

Marquand. Aiken. cummings. Mailer. 
What are their chances now, which once 
Loomed so large? Ubi sunt, as they say
In France, while their language 
Expires. It's sad, this transience 
We share, but look on the bright side:

It makes us, even the snottiest, 
Human, which is a good thing to be. 
And, in any case, inalterable. We die, 
Others occupy our premises, decide 
They don't need so many bookshelves, 
And redecorate. Every vanity

Will be deaccessioned, as Islam
Deaccessioned Alexandria. Ubi sunt.
Cling as you may, assert whatever claims, 
Once you have fallen into the public domain, 
There's precious little hope, and all that 
Little is reserved for those who had no doubts.

The man who carved the Sphinx's nose: 
What was his name again? For centuries, 
Millennia, that nose was there, and now
It's not. We are—I am—like him 
Ephemeral, a million Ozymandiases 
Drifting about in a vast Sahara.

Sift those sands, you archeologists. 
Number the shards of the shattered nose. 
Reprint the words that once we shivered 
To read, and annotate each line. Still, 
When we die, we are certainly dead, 
And only a few of our books will be read.

And then even those will be forgotten. 

Happy 4th of July!!