A Blogging Dead Spot

I'm in one of those dead spots right now where I'm smack dab in the middle of three or four books without much of a chance that I'll finish even one of them in the next two or three days. That's the kiss of death for a blogger like me who has already skipped posting anything for a couple of days and shoots for four or five new posts per week. And it seems like I'm more easily distracted by shiny new books this week than I usually am. Throw in the fact that I've been writing a few reviews that I can't post right now because the books don't publish for another two or three months (no way I could resist reading them early), and there's not been much happening on Book Chase this week.

I guess the good news is that I'm reading two of the best books I've read all year: Ann Patchett's The Dutch House and The Gifted School by Bruce Holsinger. Ann Patchett has been a favorite of mine for a few years now, but The Gifted School is the first thing from Holsinger that I've ever read. I suppose that's not too surprising, however, considering that this is only Holsinger's third novel. Too, I'm nearing the end of The Hanging Valley, Peter Robinson's fourth Inspector Banks novel (1992), a series I've enjoyed catching up on. 

From book jacket: "At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to build an immense real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves."

Beautifully written.

From the book jacket: "Good schools, stately homes, safe neighborhoods, all set against a beautiful landscape. What else could a family want? It was with high hopes for the future that four young couples separately chose Crystal, Colorado, as the place to raise their children over a decade ago. Finding one another as friends further buoyed them over the ensuing years, as they juggled the stresses of parenthood, careers, and marriage. Even now, as the kids head for middle school, their individual interests and abilities becoming more and more distinct, the groups of families remain tight. But then an exclusive new school is introduced into the mix - an elite new standard to meet - it represents, at long last, one pressure too many."

This one is billed as satire, and maybe it is, but it is also a damning look at American parents and the way they compete with each other through their children.

I am loving both of these. Unfortunately, I'm fighting library due dates on both of them, so I'm reading as fast as I can, but I find myself at the same time suddenly being overly distracted by sports, podcasts, and technology advancements (I bought a pair of the new Apple AirPods Pro that are absolutely stunning). Even turning back the clocks an hour tonight is not going to help me very much, I'm afraid.      (#firstworldproblems)

Motherless Brooklyn - The Book Is Now a Movie

It's time for another "Movies for Readers" post, this time on the soon-to-be-released film called Motherless Brooklyn. This one is based on an award-winning 1999 book of the same title written by Jonathan Lethem.  

The movie stars William Dafoe, Bruce Willis, Alec Baldwin, and Edward Norton, but Norton was really the driving force behind getting the movie made. Norton started developing the novel into a film sometime in the early 2000s, and both Willis and Baldwin are said to have practically done the movie for free because of their friendship with Norton. Norton wrote, produced, and directed the movie.

1999 Book Cover and Author Jonathan Lethem

Shooting of the movie began in early 2018 but was halted because of an apartment building fire that started in an apartment being used as a movie set. A New York fireman was killed in the fire, and the fireman's widow (along with many residents of the building) ended up filing a lawsuit against Norton and his production company. Norton filed his own suit against the building owner, claiming that the man's negligence caused the fire and let it get out of hand before firefighters arrived. (It appears that this is all still ongoing - at least, I haven't been able to find any information regarding any kind of settlement of the suits.)

The story is set in 1950s Brooklyn and the main character of this hardboiled crime thriller is a private detective with Tourette Syndrome. I really like the look of this one, and it makes me want to go back and find the book, another one that flew right by me back in 1999 when it was published. I'm a big fan of Edward Norton and Bruce Willis, and I have generally been impressed by William DaFoe's work (and I can just about tolerate Alec Baldwin's acting) so this is one I want to see.

Paris by the Book - Liam Callanan

Like a lot of other avid readers, I can’t resist at least taking a look at any book whose title includes the words “book” or “bookstore.” Sometimes even the word “library” does the trick. But as many times as not, I find that the plot doesn’t really interest me enough to read them, or I do read them and end up wishing I hadn’t. I’m happy to report that neither of those things happened with Liam Callanan’s 2018 novel Paris by the Book. This one, about an American woman and her two daughters who buy a failing Paris bookstore pushed all the right buttons, but there’s a lot more going on here than button-pushing.

Leah Eady’s husband Robert writes children books, just not as many as he used to write. And these days Robert is taking way more writer’s breaks than he used to take, breaks during which he disappears from home for two or three days at a time. Robert uses the time to hole up in some quiet spot where he labors to turn out a more few pages toward his next book. Leah may not particularly like the idea, but by now she’s used to it. So when Robert disappears again she is not all that concerned at first; that comes later, after her husband has been missing for an entire week. 

Before he leaves, Robert often leaves little notes for his wife and daughters to find, but this time there’s nothing there – at least it seems that way. But then Leah uncovers tickets to Paris for herself and her daughters, and she wonders if the tickets might somehow be tied to Robert’s absence. She decides to take her children to Paris to see if they might find Robert there waiting for them – but he isn’t. What turns up instead is a partially completed novel that Robert has apparently been working on without her knowledge, a story set in a Paris bookstore owned by a family that sounds very much like hers. A close study of the partial manuscript leads Leah and her two girls to a small failing bookstore very much like the one in Robert’s story, so when the bookstore owner offers to sell the store to Leah she does what she thinks her husband wants her to do: she buys it. But where is he?

Liam Callanan

Paris by the Book is all about a damaged American family in Paris, one searching desperately to find the missing piece that will make it whole again. Leah and her two girls settle into their new lives nicely, but all three of them feel as if Robert is out there somewhere watching them do it. The girls go to school and make new friends, and Leah, despite herself, is starting to feel as if she were single again. As the months go by, she begins to wonder if Robert could be dead, but she is not sure she really wants to know the truth. Perhaps that truth, whatever it is, would be even harder on the family than believing that he would walk through their bookstore’s door one day to tell them he was back.

One of the things that most surprised me about Paris by the Book is how much I learned from it about Ludwig Bemelmans’s Madeline series of children’s books and about Leah’s all-time favorite book, one by Albert Lamorisse called The Red Balloon. Ellie and Daphne share their mother’s love of The Red Balloon and are thrilled to be living in the very Parisian neighborhood in which the book is set. These girls are definitely book people, so living above a bookstore is their idea of heaven. Leah explains her girls this way:

            

            “I have strange children. Or the world wanted me to think that way, at least when we lived in Wisconsin: my girls grew up loving to read. True, they liked milk, understood football, and were as bewitched by screens – TV screens, movie screens, and most definitely phone screens – as everyone else. But they were strange in that they loved reading above all else.”

Bottom Line: Paris by the Book is a booklover’s dream. It features a weird little English-language bookstore in the heart of Paris and some of the world’s favorite children’s books. It’s about solving the mystery of a missing man who walked away from his family one morning without saying goodbye and hasn’t been seen since. It’s about the streets of Paris and what happens in the city’s little neighborhoods after all the tourists have called it a day. And most importantly, it’s about books and how loving them can sometimes change a family’s life for the better.

The Killer Bs - Bluegrass, Books, and Baseball!

I had every intention of driving to Austin this weekend to attend the 2019 Texas Book Festival. Then I started looking into the various sessions and came to the realization that everyone I most wanted to see required a "Friends" pass costing something like $100 - a ploy I find both distasteful and annoying. And then I started looking into the remaining sessions and found way too many of them featuring authors pushing a book with a political agenda (and this is Austin we are talking about, so I'll let you figure out which political agenda that is all by yourself...it's easy). Even some reporters from The New York Times are there with a session of their own about how the country has gone to hell and it's all my fault for not voting for Hillary in 2016. It just didn't look worth the 300-mile roundtrip and two nights in a hotel at the inflated Festival weekend rates to come away from the experience in a worse mood than I arrived with, so I opted to stay closer to home.

Just ten miles up the road is a little community called Tomball, and on the last Saturday of every October the town presents a little bluegrass music festival that I always enjoy. Since my video camera batteries were all charged up and I had the cameras packed in the trunk of my car anyway, I decided to make this a music weekend rather than a book one.

Here's a little taste of the great music (the bluegrass-uninitiated will have to bear with me on this one) that I enjoyed today:

On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey - Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux is that rare author whose books I can say directly affected me and my way of life. Theroux is the kind of traveler I try to be (to a much less adventurous degree), a traveler who enjoys straying off the beaten path to explore the places that tourists never get to see, someone who takes the time to meet a few of the locals, eat where they eat, and get a feel for what makes a community tick. Paul Theroux has done that all over the world, often placing himself into dangerous situations in the process. But even those of us who do our traveling in less exotic locales, or even from our own armchairs, consider the man to be a role model.

Theroux’s latest, On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey, proves that the man has not lost a step despite his admittance to himself that his future traveling days are limited by his advancing age. The now 78-year-old Theroux (who was 76 during his travels through Mexico) realizes that younger people see him as an old man well past his prime – the way they see everyone who manages to make it to seventy. To them he is invisible and easily ignored. Well, Theroux is not playing that game. He does concede, however, that his days of driving the backroads alone could end the very next time he has to pass the eye exam needed to renew his driver’s license. As Theroux puts it, his driver’s license now has a “use-by date” on it. So, if not now, when?

Theroux has been in some tight spots before during his travels, but his almost foolhardy decision to travel alone into the heart of Mexico has to rank somewhere among the most dangerous situations he has ever inserted himself into. The author began his Mexican journey by traveling from west to east the entire length of the U.S.-Mexico border, hopping back and forth between U.S. and Mexican border towns. He crossed into and out of those border towns more than a dozen times, the places most prone to the kind of random violence orchestrated by the several drug cartels that control the Mexican side of the border (and some would say also the American side). From the border, Theroux proceeded to Mexico City, where he spent some time teaching a course on writing, before heading further south where he would end up near the Guatemalan border. 

Paul Theroux

And the best part about all of this? Theroux went where the roads took him, figuring all the while that it was best to keep moving no matter how bad or how deserted the next road he turned onto might prove to be. Along the way, he spent time with peasants, artists, writers, students, the leader of a twenty-year-long rebellion, and indigenous inhabitants of the country whose Spanish was worse even than his own. That he was willing to take the time necessary to earn the trust and the friendship of so many Mexicans explains how Theroux survived an adventure that everyone warned him against – including the Mexicans with whom he discussed his general plan beforehand. His friends  took good care of him.

Theroux may have been plagued by dejection and self-pity when he began his trip through Mexico, but he ended it on a high note and with a smile on his lips. He proved one more time that there is a huge difference between traveling as a tourist and traveling as a lone observer of the world and its people. Paul Theroux is a role model for real travelers everywhere.

Review Copy provided by Publisher

Where the Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir - Amy Tan

I came to Amy Tan’s novels very late in her career despite having been aware of her almost from the moment that The Joy Luck Club hit the bookstores back in 1989. Even saying that “I came” to her novels is a bit misleading as, to this day, that’s the only one of her novels I’ve read – and I didn’t finally read that one until 2015. But still, Amy Tan fascinates me enough that I recently purchased a copy of her 2017 “writer’s memoir” Where the Past Begins in hardcopy and borrowed the audiobook version from the library in order to hear Tan read her own work. Let’s just say that I was not disappointed and that Tan continues to fascinate me.

Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir intimately explores the author’s family history, especially that of her mother. Those familiar with Tan’s novels will already be familiar with the basics of her family tree and how the family ended up in America; even those like me who have read only The Joy Luck Club will immediately recognize several of Tan’s relatives and episodes from their lives. But what they will be reading for the first time is how it really was for Tan to grow up with a mother who often used the threat of suicide to get her husband and children to do what she wanted them to do. Perhaps the most surprising thing about Where the Past Begins, however, is that Tan even decided to share the cathartic process of writing it with her readers, in the first place.  

It all started for Tan when she decided to explore the contents of the seven plastic bins she kept in her office, bins containing photographs, letters, and miscellaneous memorabilia marking some of the “frozen moments in time” relating to her own past and to her family history (moments from before her own birth). During the process, she learned just how unreliable many of her childhood memories were, and she was forced to reconfigure and reassess the ones she had of her parents. Tan learned who her parents really were. 

Amy Tan

The author pulls no punches here. This is as honest a memoir as one could wish for, one in which its author reveals much about her mentally unstable mother (including one incident in which her mother came at her with a knife) and how the relationship shaped her into the writer she would became. Tan also shares frank details about her father and her two brothers and her relationship with each of them. Not awfully surprising, I suppose, she learns that her surviving brother’s memories of their childhood do not always mesh in detail or in content with those of her own. Amy Tan is figuring out here who she is and how she became that person – and she takes her readers along for the ride.

Equally intriguing and honest are the book’s segments on the writing process and how Tan works her way through it to produce her fiction. Tan is not one of those overconfident writers who can speed through the writing process with the full confidence that she will almost certainly produce something worth publishing. For her, almost the opposite seems to be the case, and it is an educational joy to read through the long email exchange she shares here between her and her trusted editor. 

Bottom Line: Where the Past Begins will interest both Amy Tan admirers and general fans of the memoir genre who know relatively little about the author herself. The audiobook version of the memoir is read by the Tan (at a slow pace that can at times become a bit annoying), something else that will appeal to her already-fans. The drawback to reading this one via audiobook, however, is not being able to study the numerous family photos and documents that are available in the printed version (additions I only learned of because I have a hardcopy of the book). But whichever way you decide to experience Where the Past Begins, it is an interesting look into the life of one of this America’s most respected authors.