Little Dorrit (TBR #9) and The Dragon Keeper (TBR #10)

Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens (#9)
Merchant's son Arthur Clennan finds himself involved in the affairs of the Dorrits - a wellborn family fallen on hard times, their patriarch now imprisoned in debtor's gaol while his children dance, sew and steal for their suppers. In his attempts to help the Dorrits extricate themselves from their debts, Clennan runs smack-bang into an impenetrable wall of British government bureaucracy.

Dickens as usual is at his best when sketching a scene, skewering the absurd, or bringing his eccentric characters to life - Clennan's former fiancee and her run-on sentences are something else to read, believe you me. There are many passages that made me want to laugh out loud or shake my head or read it over again. He writes with such a clear eye, too, on the bonds of familial love, and the ways people imprison themselves - through religion, through social convention, through fear.

But at the same time, as though he doesn't even know what's best about his own writing, the central characters are so dull and self-righteous - our heroes Clennan and Little Amy Dorrit are so virtuous and gentle and good that I could barely stand it. Give me arrogant Fanny Dorrit over good Little Dorrit any day - or the coldly man-hating Miss Wade and her protege Tattycoram, or the charming Ferdinand and Bar Barnacle. Any of them, please. (And this is also why I love Great Expectations SO much more than David Copperfield.)

The Dragon Keeper by Robin Hobb (#10)
The first of a projected 4 books in The Rain Wild Chronicles, this is both more of the same and a welcome return to form for Hobb. More of the same because this is more or less a continuation of the epic fantasy world she created in The Liveship Traders - focusing on a trading town in a lush but harsh land where the rivers run acid, and the townspeople find themselves in alliance with a newly hatched generation of misshapen dragons. And a return to form because as far as I'm concerned she's been in a slump since those very same books, published over a decade ago (let's never talk of The Tawny Man and Soldier Son books, okay?).

If you're familiar with Hobb, then this book should feel like somewhat familiar ground. A ragtag assortment of outsiders are our protagonists - this time a lonely Trader woman seeking solace in dragon study, a captain with a secret to hide, and a Rainwilder girl who should have been exposed at birth due to her disfigurements - on a journey without a clear destination - this time, escorting those misshapen dragons to a perhaps apocyraphal ancient city. Hobb's prickly, emotionally conflicted characters fit in well with her history bastard princes and tomboy noblewomen - if you enjoyed those books you'll likely enjoy this - if you've yet to try, I'd probably suggest starting with the Farseer or Liveship books anyway.

With Nails by Richard E. Grant (TBR Challenge Book #8)

I think the first time I ever saw Grant on screen was during high school history class, in The Scarlet Pimpernel (1998). For a long time afterwards, my classmates would quote to one another:

"They seek him here, they seek him there,
Those Frenchies seek him everywhere!
Is he in heaven? Is he in hell?
That damned elusive Pimpernel!"

Anyway. Since then I've seen Grant many more times, on screen and off, including a live taping of ABC's First Tuesday Book Club; and presenting an anniversary screening of British cult classic Withnail & I (1987).

It's that movie, as the title of the book suggests, which kick-started Grant's tv and movie career. His role as the alcoholic, somewhat deranged and self-deluded 'resting' (unemployed) actor Withnail became his calling card to Hollywood.

This memoir spans more than half a decade in Hollywood. He describes his experiences taking good roles in bad movies (Warlock, Henry and June, LA Story), culminating in Hudson Hawk (1991), now infamous as one of the biggest, most hubristic and expensive flops of all time. For his part, Grant received a Razzie nomination! However, immediately after that trial by fire, the slate was balanced when he found himself working with three great auteurs: Altman, Coppola and Scorsese.

For Grant's eloquence and sense of humour alone, this book would be worth a read. As a movie fan however it's possibly even better - it's rare to see the workings behind the scenes of Hollywood from an actor's perspective described so frankly and honestly. He's not in the least shy about making his feelings heard about Bruce Willis (charming egomaniac), Joel Silver (pure egomaniac) or Madonna (narcissist) - it doesn't seem to have hurt his career either, with Madonna for one choosing to work with him again, on her directorial debut Filth & Wisdom (2008).

And he has good things to say too about movie sets that do work well, too, and about the different working methods of each director. Altman for instance keeps his sets easygoing and charming, inviting collaboration. Coppola is controlled chaos with a family emphasis; and Scorsese is focused and detail-oriented. He also offers tantalising glimpses of movies that could have been - Withnail was initially offered to Daniel Day-Lewis, for instance, while Grant himself was offered the Sheriff role in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves which eventually went to Alan Rickman in a movie-stealing role.

There are times when Grant's stories of Hollywood high life seem like a series of strategic namedrops – lunch with Steve Martin, dinner with Gary Oldman, not to mention hang-outs with Anthony Hopkins, Uma, Winona, Johnny, Madonna, Tom Waits, Hugh and Liz – but he's always undercutting that with his own sense of self-deprecation (convinced he'll be found out as a fraud, insecure as all actors are!) and his sharp observations on the excesses of Hollywood life - his descriptions of Sharon Stone's manipulations of shop assistants and Bruce Willis' ego on set are all priceless.

My 12 books for the 2011 TBR Challenge

TBR Challenge Books #6 and #7

Good As Gold by Joseph Heller (#6)
Heller's absurdist and blackly cynical sense of humour was perfectly showcased in Catch-22. Here, turning his attention to a Jewish professor with ambitions to work in the White House during the post-Nixon, post-Kissinger 70s, it's much less successful. In some technical senses it's as solid as Catch-22 and he's really great at tightly structuring scenes and dialogue for maximum effect. But the overall effect of the book is wearying and repetitive.

Heller's portrayal of Gold's dyfunctional family, tearing itself to pieces, is painful and unlikable rather than funny or relatable. He goes a little better in his depictions of Washington political life as a farcial scene dominated by double-think - but it's not like he's telling us anything new after the third or so scene of the kind. I forced myself to finish it but would have happily left off after about four chapters; by then, Heller has already said all he needs to say.

Further Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin (#7)
The third collection of the serialised adventures in love and life for Mrs Madrigal's found family in San Francisco. By now we've hit the decadent 80s - Mary Ann's career is on the up, she and Brian are starting to think about settling down, while Michael's still playing the scene. This is the third in the series and Maupin has the formula down pat - the younger characters negotiating their way through the dating scene and professional life, with Mrs Madrigal presiding over it all with a loving eye. As always Maupin has funny, clever things to say about modern life, the gay scene and changes in society.

Though charming and funny to start, unfortunately Maupin's formula also contains some elements that are less than great and actually kind of bad. At about the halfway mark, the storylines all start descending into ridiculous soap opera melodramatics, complete with kidnappings, secret identities, a shooting, etc . None of these plot knots makes a lick of sense and all are much less interesting than the characters themselves. Another book that would have worked so much better if it had known when to stop.


My 12 books for the 2011 TBR Challenge

TBR Challenge Books #4 and #5

Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope (#4)

A woman breaks off an engagement to the man she loves; another, unhappy in marriage, is drawn to an old lover; and a rich widow decides between two very different suitors. Trollope's lengthy novel, originally published in serial form in the 1860s, looks at the state of marriage with an eye that's in turn serious, melodramatic and comedic.

Trollope intersperses the stories of Alice, Glencora and Mrs Greenow with some satirically sharp jabs at the British aristocracy and political life. Clever and cynical as these chapters are, the real heart of the story is with the three women.

Although the narrator asks us, solemnly, if we can forgive these unconventional heroines, my question is - what's to forgive? I'd say the narrator is Trollope himself, except that the three lead and several supporting women characters seem so much more flawed and complex and human than the sanctimonious narrator.

Though the book rambles and lacks focus at times, and the storylines wrap up waaaay too neatly, it's a fairly easy read for an 800-page C19th doorstopper, landing somewhere in the spectrum between one of the lighter-hearted Dickens and George Eliot's Middlemarch. The next time I've whittled my to-be-read pile down to something manageable, so perhaps some time in my retirement, I'll happily try some further Trollope novels.

The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits by Emma Donoghue (#5)

Currently in the spotlight as author of the much-lauded The Room, I'm more familiar with Donoghue as a writer of short stories. Her book of fairytale retellings, Kissing The Witch, is a good read if you like them Angela Carter-style.

The 17 short stories of this collection are each based in English and Irish history of the last millenium, focusing on often obscure episodes and forgotten supporting players. The title story, for instance, is told from the point of view of a woman jailed in the 1700s for conning the public into believing she - well, you know. The other stories cover a range of topics as diverse as pioneer animal rights activists, religious cults, king's mistresses and witch-burnings.

Linked roughly in geography and time, most of the stories are linked thematically as well through Donoghue's depiction of the female body through the ages: as commodity; as a site of contested or hidden identity; in terms of disease and physical strangeness. For almost all these stories, I found the premise interesting - in execution, however, Donoghue was as much hit as miss. While conceptually great many of these felt half-baked and underdeveloped.


My 12 books for the 2011 TBR Challenge

The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton (2011 TBR Challenge #3)

In 1913, a little girl is found abandoned on a ship to Australia. Ninety years later, her granddaughter Cassandra will journey back to England to unravel the mystery of her family’s past. The story moves back and forth from present to past, revealing a story of a secret garden, a mysterious lady authoress, a supposed family curse and two cousins who quarrel.

The book is a brick at 554 pages but it's an easy, quick read. Morton handles the timelines and point-of-view switches reasonably well, and I particularly liked the way she uses rather melancholy, lovely nested fairytales inside the narrative.

However, mostly this felt like something I'd read before. This is partly deliberate, I guess, as Morton wears her references on her sleeves. The plot bears more than a passing resemblance to AS Byatt's Possession and Frances Hodgson-Burnett herself, author of The Secret Garden, appears briefly as a party guest. But all references aside, I doubt it was Morton's intention that the central mystery of the story doesn't feel much like a mystery at all.

My 12 books for the 2011 TBR Challenge

The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon by William Thackeray (2011 TBR Challenge #2)

After downing his first man in a duel at the age of fifteen, young Barry flees Ireland to become a soldier in the Seven Years' War. In later years he'll become a gambler, a fortune hunter, and finally, to his great satisfaction, a lord. A thoroughly unreliable narrator, Barry claims nobility and honour and love in one breath, and in the next will describe his cheats, deceptions, and base villainy.

Also known as The Luck of Barry Lyndon, this is a book I've been putting it off for four or five years. As usual it was nothing like as scary as I'd feared. Told in the first-person and in a style I'm informed is picaresque, this is a blackly funny and razor-sharp satire that leaves no one unscathed, whether rich or poor, Irish or English or Prussian, man or woman.

Barry himself is one of the greatest rogues and scoundrels ever set to the page. His story reminded me of both Fielding's Tom Jones and Thackeray's own Vanity Fair in its scope, cynicism and humour. Often, Thackeray just made me laugh. Here's his depiction of two lovers' banter, from early in the book:

"No, Norelia," said the Captain (for it was the fashion of those times for lovers to call themselves by the most romantic names out of novels), "except for you and four others, I vow before all the gods, my heart has never felt the soft flame!"
"Ah! You men, you men, Eugenio!" said she ... "your passion is not equal to ours. We are like – like some plant I've read of – we bear but one flower and then we die!"

In the same vein here's young Barry:

"Mark this: come what will of it, I swear I'll fight the man who pretends to the hand of Nora Brady. I'll follow him, if it's into the church, and meet him there. I'll have his blood, or he shall have mine; and this riband shall be found dyed in it. Yet and if I'll kill him, I'll pin it on his breast, and then she may go and take back her token." This I said because I was very much excited at the time, and because I had not read novels and romantic plays for nothing.

But it's not all fun and games. There's some powerful commentary too on the grim reality of war, and at times Thackeray's depiction of a corrupt world seems unrelentingly cynical - Barry's own opportunism and selfishness is matched only by the greed and dishonour of those around him. However, as the book progresses his deeds grow blacker and blacker, his delusions of grandeur and blindness to his own flaws ever greater, and at last he tips over the edge from anti-hero to villain.

Despite the darkness of the later stages of the book and some minor quibbles (some totally unnecessary footnoting from Thackeray), this is a great journey with a great character. Just one more quote, one that made me LOL:

"But listen: you are an Englishman?"
"That I am," said the fellow, with an air of the utmost superiority. "Your honour could tell that by my haccent."
I knew he was and therefore might offer him a bribe.

My 12 books for the 2011 TBR Challenge

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn (2011 TBR Challenge #1)

Your scheduled cooking posts will return shortly. In the meantime here's book post #1 for the 2011 To Be Read Challenge:

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is Nick Flynn's memoir of his early life and his relationship with his absent, alcoholic father.

The book moves back and forth between Nick’s story - including his gangster-dating mother, traumatised war vet stepfather, and longtime girlfriend Emily - and a fictionalised reconstruction of his father Jonathan's life, based on interviews and letters.

Father and son have very different trajectories to their lives yet share joint fixations on writing, alcoholism, and petty crime. The two narratives will parallel, contrast, and finally overlap when Nick is twenty-seven and working in a homeless shelter, and his father shows up needing a place to stay.

"Sometimes I'd see my father, walking past my building on his way to another nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered him a piece of my floor. A futon. A bed. But I never did. If I let him inside I would become him, the line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up."

Looking at this purely at a factual, narrative level this story could have gone down so many tired old paths (son tries to reconnect with estranged father, young man finds himself through writing, etc) but usually resists that tidiness, that faux moral-making that I find really repugnant in most memoirs.

Despite the downer material and a sometimes painful depiction of a screwed-up family, it's a powerful, page-turning read that feels emotionally honest. The writing is lyrical, sometimes too self-consciously so, but mostly fits well with the book's blend of memoir, fact, and reimagining. It's also a compelling, unromanticised, uncondescending look at homeless people and what it means to be homeless.


My 12 To Be Read books
2011 To Be Read Challenge

The 2011 TBR Challenge

I know this is a cooking blog, but I have to post this somewhere so here will have to do. I'm a chronic buyer, borrower and general acquirer of books and while I can get through a lot of books, often very quickly, there is always a huge stack of unread books that seems to constantly grow, and grow, and...

Which is why I'm signing up to this 2011 TBR Pile Challenge:




The goal of this challenge is "to finally read 12 books from your "to be read" pile, within 12 months."

Each of these 12 books must have been on your bookshelf or "To Be Read" list for at least one full year. This means the book cannot have a publication date of 1/1/2010 or later (any book published in the year 2009 or earlier qualifies, as long as it has been on your TBR pile). Two alternates are allowed, just in case one or two of the books end up in the "can't get through" pile.

My 12 books
* indicates I borrowed the book and therefore it's way, way overdue...

1. The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits - Emma Donoghue [20/02/2011]
2. Can You Forgive Her? - Anthony Trollope [19/02/2011]
3. Little Dorrit - Charles Dickens [13/11/2011]
4. The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon - William Thackeray [17/01/2011]
5. Further Tales of the City - Armistead Maupin [21/04/2011]
6. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City - Nick Flynn* [15/01/2011]
7. Good As Gold - Joseph Heller [6/03/2011]
8. The Dragon Keeper - Robin Hobb* [5/12/2011]
9. The Forgotten Garden - Kate Morton [30/01/2011]
10. Tree of Smoke - Denis Johnson
11. With Nails - Richard E. Grant* [6/07/2011]
12. Suttree - Cormac McCarthy

Alternates
1. The King's Peace - Jo Walton
2. Once A Hero - Michael R. Stackpole

I've just cracked Another Bullshit Night In Suck City (finally! sorry Judith...) and so far, so good. The rest of the list may not be so easy. I've been avoiding some of these for a reason, ha.

For more on book challenges, see Be A Better Reader in 2011 (Salon).