Passionate Nomad, The Life of Freya Stark, biography by Jane Fletcher Geniesse

Freya Stark a biography of her nomadic life.  As famous as Freya Stark was in her time and only having died in September 1993, I had never heard of her.  Maybe if I had been living in England at the time of her funeral which was attended by many titled people I might have caught a whiff of her name on the news.

She was known as a prolific travel writer traveling extensively in the Middle East, and having a complete command of many Arabic languages.  Lawrence of Arabia called her "a gallant creature."  She was not afraid to travel with just a couple of local guides and ruff it.  Speaking freely with the local people and gaining their confidence.

Her reputation began in 1927 when she was captured by the French military police after penetrating the rebellious Druze.  She explored the mountainous area of the mysterious Assassins of Persia.  Followed the Frankincense route of early traders and found many areas of archaeological interest.  Including traveling in many places the name of which we are familiar with today because of the Iraqi War.

During WWII she was used extensively by the British military and diplomatic core, with an instinct for listening, gleaning information, plus her map making abilities and organizing skills.

Who was she?  Well her parents were English, but after her dominant mother divorced her father and aligned herself with an Italian count and a rug manufacturing venture. Her life drastically changed, shaping a lot of her emotional inner turmoils. Taken from a west country childhood of privilege to a small untutored life of poverty,  in northern Italy. This led to her receiving very little schooling and being brought up speaking English with an Italian accent, which was she felt a bane of her life.  Never quite being accepted in the circles to which she aspired and the background from which she really came from.

She did not extricate herself from her mother and the count until she was 34, but when she did break lose it was in a big way.  Traveling and writing and always falling in love with the wrong men.  Her career and travels spanned over 60 years, having published, 22 books of travels and poetic prose.  She was over 100 years old when she died.

A biography of a fascinating intrepid woman traveler of the  old school. I would recommend this book to read.

Also on the side line it touches on some interesting history of Iraq and what has led up to the problems there, along with the Palestinian problems of today.

Christy

The Blue Hour, A Life Jean Rhys, by Lillian Pizzichini

After a far too long hiatus I am back.  I'll just say life.  It reminds me of a postcard I received as a child, from a dear older friend of the family who we always call auntie Gladys.  The postcard was from Wales and called the Ups and Downs.  Little caricature type people going up and down the mountains of Wales; which made me think of life, the ups and downs.  But I digress.

I have been reading, I never stop reading.  I rush into my local library and usually go no further than the newly published book section right at the front; which is were I picked up 'The Blue Hour.'  I can't say that I knew who Jean Rhys was until it mentioned in the fly leaf that she had written 'Wide Sargasso Sea', not that I knew what it was about but the title rang a bell.

I don't know about you but I like to read biographies, and this one proved to be quite interesting, evoking a whole era.  Rhys was born in 1890 in the island of Dominica, I thought I knew all the Caribbean islands, but I kept thinking of the Dominican Republic; which I knew could not be right, so I looked it up on the map.  I have to visualize geographic place and time in history.  Rhys father was a Welsh physician and her mother of Creole-Scottish descent. 

Her childhood was isolated, living on a small island of lush green tropical foliage, humming background of insects and bursting strong colours.  At seventeen as was the done thing for families of her socio-economic background, she was sent to England for finishing-off, this would have been around 1907.  To a small girls boarding school in Cambridge.  Can you imagine the contrast.  I don't think she ever felt warm again, cast across the Sargasso Sea to grey, rainy England.  She lasted about a year, flung herself into the London chorus line show girl and making money as an artists' model. From where fate led her to married men and what they could give her.  Betrayed by love, she falls into marriage and life in the Paris of the 1920s.  Sinking deeper and deeper into her drinking and paranoia, burying one child and abandoning another, her therapy seems to be her writing.  Her life is written into a series of novels. It's as if she can totally recall whole scenes and conversations that happened to her and put them right down in the sentences of a book

Rhys had two more failed marriages and an affair with Madox Ford; during this time she wrote five novels.  Her affair with Ford ended, but through him she was able to secure an introduction to his publisher in 1927.  Who published her first collection of short stories. The trajectory of her life rose and fell into obscurity, living in a boarding house in Cornwall.  Then in 1957 the BBC aired a presentation of her 1939 Novel, 'Good Morning, Midnight.'  Most people had forgotten her and even wondered that she was alive.

In 1978 she received the CBE, a year before she died.  Rhys said that this had all come too late in her life.

Although she looked backed on her childhood with clouded, rose coloured glasses, you feel that it was her life here where the root was of her despair and aspirations, never fitting in, always on the periphery looking in. Just her heritage of knowing she was part Creole, gave her discomfort.  I think that this is hard to understand in Europe, but if one has ever been down to the southern states of the USA, you will have somewhat of an understanding of what even a taint of Creole means.  Even the definition of Creole is ambiguous, there are soo many definitions.  In Rhys's case it was very distant, a great, great grandmother from Cuba on her mother's Scottish side.  Take this along with the sugar plantations, slavery and superstitious customs, of black magic.  Along with black nanny's who terrorized her with voodoo like haunting, and a long term abuse from an elderly man.  One might see why her life never came to be what she longed for.

It seemed she longed for money and the perceived security that money brings, along with love and being looked after, but always sabotaged it, by her shadier longings for all the things that would destroy that.  She never found the Lord to marry while working in the chorus line, although two of her chorus line companions did, both becoming Lady so-and so.  Her looks left her as she aged, but she still found two men to marry and put up with her extreme mood swings, bordering on manic.  Rhys was right the CBE came too late to make the difference she would have revelled in when younger.

'Wide Sargasso Sea' is based on Bertha Rochester's life, of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte, fame.  In fact she had in mind to write this book for decades before she actually did.  Rhys knew what life was like being brought up on a Caribbean Island, visiting her grandfather's sugar plantation, and she wove this into her story of how Bertha Rochester came to be locked up as a madwoman.

I do want to read some of her books.  But I feel that they will be dark.  The Blue Hour is well written.  The title refers to twilight time of day in Paris, that Rhys referred to and the French called L'heure Bleue or The Blue Hour

Christy.

The Dead of Winter, by Rennie Airth

This is an Inspector John Madden mystery. Set around WWII. Starting in the days just prior to the invasion of Paris by the Germans, people are trying to leave. Especially many Jews, who have already fled from Eastern Europe. A Jewish furrier wants to liquidate his assets and turns them into diamonds. He is asked to take along with him in his car a young couple also fleeing. The young couple find him murdered.

Fast forward to 1944. Rosa Novak is found murdered during the blackout, not far from the British Museum. Madden feels that he owes it to her to find out why she was murdered. To escape the holocaust only to be murdered.

This leads to a continental manhunt, that can only now begin as the Germans have left Paris.

This is a very exciting high speed mystery, action packed and holds you to the end.

Christy

The Story of Lucy Gault, by William Trevor

Set in the turbulent 1920's Ireland, when many Anglo-Irish are coming under arson attacks. Although having lived on their affluent estates for centuries. They feel at odds in a land that has been home to them. Here enters Lucy Gault's family. Disturbed and upset by the attempt to set fire to their house, they are thinking of returning to England. Lucy their daughter does not want to go, she loves her home.

On the day they are to leave she runs off. On the search for Lucy her parents mistakenly think that she is dead. They leave as planned and are torn apart by their loss. Lucy returns home and does get to stay there, with the family servants, who get to stay on.

Her parents never truly settle, drifting on to Italy and Switzerland, with no forwarding address for them.

Lucy grows up, lonely and sad. In comes Ralph who she really does love and he her, but feels she cannot commit to love unless she reconciles with her parents. Unfortunately WWII starts and they are left in Europe, where her mother dies. Her father eventually does return to his old estate, but too much time has passed for Lucy to regain what has been lost. Ralph has married someone else.

Eventually Lucy feels somehow responsible for the young man her father wounded defending his home against the arsonists. Trying to make a distorted recompense for her lost and stunted life.

I did not especially like this book, so wouldn't recommend it.

Christy

And the winner is?

Joann, Lakeside Musing.

I decided to use a number random generator. There were 15 different people who left comments from January 1st until February 28th. I listed names in random order and assigned numbers and Joann's assigned number was 14 and that was the winning number.

It's such a coincidence, because Joann was so kindly giving away several books and I asked for Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson, which she is mailing to me.

So Joann please contact me via E-mail and I will send off the Modern Voices note cards.

Christy

The Waves, by Virginia Woolf

This is the copy of The Waves I read from:


Somehow I had in mind that the last posting on this was the 28Th, but when I started seeing every one's postings I thought, goodness me it's today Friday and of course living in the States we are already behind time wise. So I'm scrabbling to get my thoughts together. Yes I did meditate on things in my mind but paper and pen must be the fruition of thought.

My first thoughts were do I want to wade into The Waves. Did I want to put all the effort needed into it and be committed to the read. You know that feeling you have when at the seaside on the beach. Shall I change, put the swimsuit on and even if it is on, do I really want to wade into the sea. Once you've stepped in your committed. Salty wet and sand in ones hair, seaweed in ones' toes. Now you have to at some point take a shower and put oneself straight, but then you decide, yes it's worth it, to feel the waves bounce you around from trough to height and down again, and that's how I felt with "The Waves".

First I did not like it as much as Mrs Daloway, or To The Lighthouse. I was greatly remiss in not reading Orlando, but hope to a some point. I need a little distance from Woolf , after reading the Waves.

I would first say don't read this book in a depressed state or even a shade of grey. Humans as Blogland shows, are social interactive people and need this connectivity to blossom and be fruitful creatively. That's why Woolf had her Bloomsbury group. To be to isolated as you felt these characters were is somewhat sad and soul destroying. Did she feel this way later in life? One has to feel she did, because some of the thoughts of the characters I feel are bang on.

Bernard the storyteller, Louis linguistically, the outsider, Neville the homosexual, Susan wife and homemaker, Rhoda suicidal, Jinny the lover. It's not a novel, it's a soliloquy, this thought that thought, flung into the space of mind, orbiting around, but never landing. Never making a connection with terra firma. But never the less, thoughts I'm sure we've all had. These thoughts I think are very age related. I think Woolf captured that. The striving and jostling for position in youth, the middle part of ones life working on the path you have set your foot too. Then the latter part thinking what was all that striving all that work, what was it all about.

Susan seems the most fulfilled.

"In this hot afternoon," said Susan, "here in this garden here in this field where I walk with my son, I have reached the summit of my desires, the hinge of the gate is rusty; he leaves it open. the violent passions of childhood, my tears in the garden when Jinny kissed Louis, my rage in the schoolroom ..."

"I am fenced in, planted here like one of my own trees..."

Neville coming to terms with life.

"I no longer need a room now," said Neville, "or walls and firelight. I am no longer young. I pass Jinny's house without envy, and smile at the young man who arranges his tie a little nervously on the door-step. Let the dapper young man ring the bell; let him find her. I shall find her if I want her, if not, I pass on. The corrosion has lost its bite - envy , intrigue and bitterness have been washed out. We have lost our glory too...."

Rhoda of life says.

"... What dissolution of the soul you demanded in order to get through one day, what lies, bowings, scrapings, fluency and servility! How you chained me to one spot, one hour, one chair, and sat yourselves down opposite! How you snatched from me the white spaces that lie between hour and hour and rolled them into dirty pellets and tossed them into the wastepaper basket with you greasy paws. Yet those were my life."

Neville at the coming together of the friends.

"Now sitting side by side," said Neville, "at this narrow table, now before the first emotion is worn smooth, what do we feel? Honestly now, openly and directly as befits old friends meeting with difficulty; what do we feel on meeting? Sorrow. The door will not open; he will not come. and we are laden. Being now all of us middle-aged, loads are on us. Let us put down our loads. What have you made of life, we ask, and I? You, Bernard; you, Susan; you, Jinny; and Rhoda and Louis? The lists have been posted on the doors. Before we break these rolls, and help ourselves to fish and salad, I feel in my private pocket and find my credentials - what I carry to prove my superiority. I have passed. I have papers in my private pocket that prove it...."

"...Change is no longer possible. We are committed. Before, when we met in a restaurant in London with Percival, all simmered and shook; we could have been anything. We have chosen now, or sometimes it seems the choice was made for us - a pair of tongs pinched us between the shoulders. I chose. I took the print of life not outwardly, but inwardly upon the raw, the white, the unprotected fibre. I am clouded and bruised with the print of minds and faces and things so subtle that they have smell, colour, texture, substance, but no name..."

Bernard.

"It was different once," said Bernard, "Once we could break the current as we chose...
We have to leap like fish, high in the air, in order to catch the train from Waterloo. And however high we leap we fall back again into the stream. I shall never now take ship for the South Sea Islands. A journey to Rome is the limit of my travelling. I have sons and daughters. I am wedged into my place in the puzzle"

Louis.

"...I luxuriate in gold and purple vestments. Yet I prefer a view over chimney-pots; cats scraping their mangy sides upon blistered chimney stacks; broken windows; and the hoarse clangour of bells from the steeple of some brick chapel."

Jinny.

"... My mother must have followed the drum, my father the sea. I am like a little dog that trots down the road after the regimental band, but stops to snuff a tree-trunk ..."

Bernard.

"That goes on. Listen. there is a sound like the knocking of railway trucks in a siding. that is the happy concatenation of one event following another in our lives. Knock, knock, knock. Must, must, must. Must go, must sleep, must wake, must get up - sober, merciful work which we pretend to revile, which we press tight to our hearts, without which we should be undone. how we worship that sound like the knocking together of trucks in a siding!"

The above passage almost flows like a poem from W. H. Auden. The Night Train.

Of course where to stop quoting, where to end this review without becoming tedious.

I don't think I would have tackled Woolf without the incentive of the group. But I am glad that I have and feel the richer for it literary wise.

Now I have a great urge to go back to my Persephone books.

Christy

P.S. Don't forget to leave a comment if you should so wish, as on the 28Th I shall have the drawing for the note cards. I think that's why I had the 28Th in mind.

Evening by Susan Minot

Evening by Susan Minot. From reading the dust cover fly leaf Susan Minot has received good reviews from the New York Times for another of her books Monkeys, which I have not read. This book is a read for my Local Library Book Club, which meets once a month and I have been quite negligent in attending.

The story centers around a three day weekend on an island off the coast of Maine, where Ann Lord attended a friends wedding. Fast forward to Ann Grant in her sixties, who lies in bed, suffering from a terminal illness. Her mind moves between lucidity, past events and delirium. Her memories cross three marriages and five children and one special event that overshadowed the rest of her life and loves.

Ann Grant had a circle of friends used to meeting together in their shared summers, all of them more affluent than Ann's modest background. The story does not really explain how she came to move in these circles of summer houses and motor boats, but she did and here she is for the wedding of her friends. Another invited guest becomes the love of her life, the highest point, she is bowled over, knocked for six and totally swept up in love and surrender.

Arriving late is his fiance, who he finds out, on that very weekend is pregnant. Of course he needs to do the right thing and stand by her, but not by Ann and she doesn't seem to mind, at least not in an angry way, just that their shared life of love has been lost.

I'm sorry, but you felt no build up of words spoken, beautiful scenes and enduring love. Just a few trysts in the boathouse does not make a life spent in an enduring love for one man.

The whole book was very confusing with the backwards and forwards in time and what she really remembered and what she just imagined, on top of the antipathy of her children, waiting for her to die. Also throw in a tragedy on that weekend and one becomes totally swirled around, where is she heading?

I just thought he was, to use old terminology an absolute bounder and a cad. And no way since somewhere in there it alludes to a son Paul who dies, but even that is buried in the dream world, would a person come out of this dalliance as a couple in love for the rest of their lives. In fact it speaks later on of a friend seeing him in Chicago with a young girl hanging on his arm, not his wife and calls him a ladies man. So even the author portrays him as this.

No this was not the great love story, sorry.

So I guess you by now you realize, I did not like this book.

Christy

Library Magazine

To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf

Reading To The Lighthouse was easier than reading Mrs Dalloway, because now I'm in step, my mind has caught the rhythm of her writing. I can follow her steps easily in the sand, the distance, the pace, the interlude.

I can imagine Woolf always carrying a moleskin notebook, with a thin pencil that slips into the spine. she would be wearing one of those large baggy twenties cardigans, with turned up cuffs and baggy pockets. and there in a cuff or a pocket she would sequester the notebook, ready at any moment to record a thought, a phrase. Later she sits at her desk, gathers all those ramblings of her mind, in the cup of her hands, and throws them at the canvas of her page, to be sorted re-arranged and assigned.

Of course she may not have done this but this is my image.

I enjoyed this book, a gathering of family and summer guests at their summer house on the Isle of Skye. The setting is based on Woolf's own childhood summers spent in Cornwall, at Talland House in St. Ives. All the description of the scenery is Cornwall. And having just visited the Isle of Skye and also having visited Cornwall and St. Ives, I can ask the question, did Woolf ever visit the Isle of Skye?

The island does not fit her descriptions. First of all Cornwall is a 300 mile train ride from London, the Isle of Skye is over 800 miles.

"Never mind the rent was precisely twopence halfpenny: the children loved it; it did her husband good to be three thousand, or if she must be accurate, three hundred miles from his libraries and his lectures and his disciples:"

There is not a town, near a lighthouse, where you could just walk into town. And certainly not one, except for maybe Portree where a visiting Circus would come. But still we can secede to literary license. Just why wouldn't she set it in Cornwall, with the sand dunes and hotter summers. Maybe she did not want to acknowledge too much similarity to her childhood.

The Ramsay family are a large family. Mr. Ramsay a published philosopher in his early sixties, feeling that his best days are behind him academically and Mrs Ramsay in her fifties, the Victorian wife still, although set just before the first world war, about 1912. The visiting guests are Lily Briscoe an artist and single lady in her thirties, William Bankes in his sixties, Mr. Carmicheal a poet and retired teacher who had been in India, and married incorrectly; which had not been helpful for his career; an old former college mate of Mr. Ramsay's. Charles Tansley a student, working on his dissertation. Plus Minta and Paul Rayley, soon to be engaged.

The book opens with the scene of James cutting out a picture of a refrigerator, and his persistant wish to visit the lighthouse; which requires a boat ride across to it. This visit hangs upon a tyrant father's whim and the weather. You feel like two dogs are playing tug of war with a rag, backwards and forwards. James and his mum willing this visit to the lighthouse to happen. Knitting the socks for the lighthouse keeper's son; and measuring them against James's leg to see if they are long enough. Willing this event to happen for her youngest. The father so self-centred, smashing any hopes with cold logic that the weather will be bad tomorrow.

Of course he knew how important this was to James. As all those years later, at the end of the book after Mrs Ramsey's death he demands that James and Cam come with him to the lighthouse. In remembrance of a day never fulfilled.

Mrs Ramsay is an interesting pivotal part of the family, many times mentioned as beautiful.

"But was it nothing but looks people said? What was there behind it - her beauty and splendour? Had he blown his brains out , they asked, had he died the week before they were married - some other earlier love, of whom rumours reached one?"

This reminds me of Clarissa Dalloway, is there or isn't there more beneath the surface?. In both woman I think there was. I think they lived the lives they wanted.

Bankes's view of her as mother and child and Lily Briscoe's close complicated but rewarding friendship with Mrs Ramsay and the family.

I have to mention the dinner party of Boeuf en Daube. The gathering together of all in their finery in a run down tattered old house. Here again I feel shades of Mrs Dalloway.

"But already bored, Lily felt that something was lacking..."

Mrs Dalloway thinks the party is going to be a failure and then says no, no, no the party comes together, just as the Mrs Ramsay's dinner party, after a stilted beginning comes to flow. Lily helps her by engaging the prickly socially inferior feeling young man Charles Tansley.

"... but what haven't I paid to get it for you? She had not been sincere."

The book is in three sections, before WWI, Mrs Ramsay dieing, Andrew the son who was close to Mr Carmicheal is killed during the war. Prue another daughter who dies in childbirth as the middle section. Plus the deterioration of the house the visits of a local lady to keep it in order; which is impossible. The house seems to reflect the deterioration and change in the Ramsay family, with so many deaths. And then the return to the summer house after the war.

The final curtain of taking the trip To The Lighthouse and Lily Briscoe at last capturing in her painting the family's summer house.

You have to read the book, you cannot capture or even gain the essence of the book in a short review.

Christy

Virginia Woolf Recorded Interview

Virginia Woolf recorded interview, her voice.

When the interview is finished there are other Virginia Woolf related videos you may view, at the bottom.

Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf

Mrs Dalloway, the events of a single day in which Clarissa prepares for a party.

First of all don't you just love that name, Mrs Dalloway, I think it must have appealed to Woolf too, when Clarissa mistakenly calls him Mr Wickham all day and only finds out at dinner what his correct name is. Sally and Peter take up on this and it becomes an inside joke "Dalloway, my name's Dalloway."

When Woolf wrote this book she was 43 years old. Seven years after the Great War, the war to end all wars. A war that changed everything, a war that had taken her generation from a time of peace and the thought that world peace was in their grasp, to the world of Septimus Warren Smith. This is why I think Woolf has Clarissa not believing in God, possibly this is how Woolf herself felt after the Great War.

I think it's interesting the way Woolf carries three threads in this book. Their youth together, their life now and Warren Smith and his wife.

Her description of Warren Smith's shell shock I think must be amazingly accurate. I have never read a biography of Woolf, but I would be interested to know if she had close friends she knew who were in that state. One would have to think she did. Of course she was older than the generation that went to war. But all were affected by the war.

By the time I reached the end of the book I was thinking exactly these thoughts about Clarissa and Woolf sums them up very concisely.

"But - did Peter understand? - she lacked something. Lacked what was it? She had charm; she had extraordinary charm. ....."

It was Clarissa's charm that made people think that there were greater depths to Clarissa, that really were not there.

"For said Sally, Clarissa was at heart a snob - one had to admit it, a snob. ..."

And the truth was she was a snob and quite shallow. She had married the right person in marrying Richard. He gave her exactly what she wanted. Her social life in London, in Society, her parties. When in fact both Richard and her daughter Elizabeth liked the countryside.

"I love walking in London," said Mrs. Dalloway. "Really it's better than walking in the country."

Her parties,to invite all those people you didn't like but they were your social circle. But to hold yourself above it as if I'm not like them, but she was like them. Would you have very old friends come and visit and just sit them aside until the end of the party, because time must be spent hostessing?

"She would marry a Prime Minister and stand at the top of a staircase; the perfect hostess he called her ..."

But of course Clarissa would, she was the consummate hostess. Appeasing her conscience with the thought that later I can devote my sole attention to them.

Youth and being in ones fifties! Woolf had an amazing clarity of these contrasting times of ones life. Close friendships of youth, that will always stand, what ever you have become in ones fifties, what ever road you travelled to get there, those times together, of youth, stand enchanted, alone. You cannot view the person in ones fifties as being the person of ones youth, and yet they are. Woolf captured this.

"She had the oddest sense of herself invisible; unseen, unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, ....."

Our minds think so many more thoughts than we ever say, but Woolf wrote them.

The scene in Regent's Park is very poignant. All those thoughts of different people watching the aeroplane.

"Ah; but that aeroplane! Hadn't Mrs. Dempster always longed to see foreign parts?"

Clarissa's friendship with Sally, the fleeting kiss.

"Star-gazing?" said Peter.
It was like running one's face against a granite wall in the darkness! It was shocking; it was horrible!"

"... She had a perfectly clear notion of what she wanted, Her emotions were all on the surface. Beneath she was very shrewd - a far better judge of character than Sally, ..."

You cannot capture in a review all the elloquence of Woolf's words.

Woolf totally captured the social scene of the time. Mrs Dalloway would be a great book to read if you were writing a social history of the time. The difference between 10,000 pounds per year and 300 pounds per year.

Ellie Henderson the poor, looked down upon cousin, who Clarissa showed a coldness to.

".. by her distressing gentility, her panic fear, which arose from three hundred pounds' income, and her weaponless state (she could not earn a penny) and it made her timid and more and more disqualified year by year to meet well dressed people ..."

Clarissa's insight into Dr. Bradshaw was bang on though. How sad for Septimus and Rezia. The law was behind him. Must! must! must! Septimus had no choice.

Two scenes which I think are very poignant is the one of Septimus and Rezia laughing together over the making of the little hat.

The second is Clarissa standing in her window alone at the party, looking across the street at the old lady going to bed and thinking about the young man who took his own life. Here is where I think all three threads come together, at that very moment.

Woolf herself straddled two worlds and she led us into them.

Looking forward to reading the other three books.

Christy

P.S. The book I read Mrs Dalloway in, was from our library, published in 1928, so quite an old copy. With all sorts of pencil markings, which was rather fun to think about who had taken this book out of the library over all those years, what they found of interest.

Woolf in Winter Give Away

Woolf in Winter Drawing Give Away

When I ran across these note-cards, I thought how apropos to our Woolf in Winter reading group. So as a little contribution to this and just for fun. Leave a comment between now and Feb 28th, the end of our four book readings on Virginia Woolf and I will put your name in for the drawing on these cards. I will ship worldwide.

Have fun in your reading.

Christy

Tell No One, by Harlen Coben

A scene from the movie.

I read through the first few pages of this book and thought this seems familiar. At first I couldn't put my finger on it and then I remembered French movie. 'Ne Le dis a Personne.' So I read about half of the book and then looked up the movie on Netflix and watched it again. Yes the French movie was based on this book.

Tell No One opens at a lakeside cabin in Pennsylvania. Dr David Beck and his wife Elizabeth are going there for their anniversary. They have known each other since they were children and have grown up going to the lakeside camp with their families.

Eight years have passed but David cannot move on. That was the night he heard his wife screaming, the last night he saw her alive and was unable to prevent what happened. He was knocked out and in hospital when his father-in-law and uncle identify the body. She was the victim of a serial murderer.

But their life, friendship and love was so deep, he cannot move on. A message has appeared on his computer, something only Elizabeth would have known. Is it remotely possible that Elizabeth is alive. The instructions with this are 'Tell no one.' He must follow this through. This leads him into a labyrinth of powerful family men.

You know how you always enjoy the book more than the movie and the movie is not a patch on the book. Well I don't know if I'm memorized by France, or I just love that French accent. But here was a case where I liked the movie more. Paris rather then New York, the French countryside rather than Pennsylvania countryside. Not to knock Pennsylvania because I live here and it's a beautiful State.

The script writers changed a few things from the book. And to be quite honest it hung together better than the book. It tied in loose ends. They gave it a more European flare, by having Dr Beck called Alexander and his wife being named Margot. His sister operating a horse farm; which was their father's and being sponsored by a very rich man in a charitable horse jumping foundation in memory of his dead son. In the book it's just a charitable foundation in memory of his son in New York City and other details; which I will not go into.

I did like the book, it's a good mystery. Read the book, but if you can't I say watch the French movie, or do both.

Christy

Virginia Woolf, a Winter Woolfian

Mrs Dalloway: January 15. Sarah. "What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate"

To the Lighthouse: January 29. Emily. "Evening All Afternoon"

Orlando: February 12. Frances. "Nonsuch Book"

The Waves: February 26. Claire. "Kiss a Cloud"

My 2009 Year End Reading Summary from Christy

• How many books read in 2009? 24
  
• How many fiction? 14
  
• How many non-fiction? 10
  
• How many biographical or auto-biographical? 8
• How many travel books? 2
  
• Female authors? 16
• Male authors? 8
  
• Most favourite? Someone at a Distance, by Dorothy Whipple
  
• Least favourite? The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet, by Colleen McCullough
  
• Any I simply couldn't read all the way through? The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet. I was amazed that the writer of Thornbirds could write such a dreadful book.
  
• Oldest book read? The Blue Castle, by L.M. Montgomery
  
• Newest book read? Persona non Grata, by Ruth Downie
  
• Longest read? The Lost, A search for six of six million, by Daniel Mendelsohn
  
• Shortest read? The Blue Castle, by L.M. Montgomery
• How may books from the library? 18
  
• Translated books? 3
  
• Most read author of the year? Dorothy Whipple
  
• How many by that author? 3
  
• Any re-reads? No
  
• Favourite character? Charlotte Gray
  
• How many countries were visited, through the read page? Australia, USA, Canada, Russia, Poland, Germany, Monrovia, France, United Kingdom, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Kenya, South Africa, Botswana
• Which books would you not have read without a recommendation? The Memory Keeper's Daughter, Someone at a Distance, Mrs Pettigrew Lives for a Day, Little Boy Lost, Facing the Lion.
  
• Which author was new to me, and I want to read all that author's works? Dorothy Whipple
  
• Read any books I always meant to read? The Blue Castle, L.M. Montgomery
• Any books I'm annoyed I didn't read? The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society

I have never kept a statistical record of the books I have read. And I don't think this was my best year for reading books. I averaged two books per month. I think I'm going to try for three books per month next year. But I read for the love of it, so what takes my fancy or comes to my attention, will be read.

I seem to especially like books fiction or biographical, that are set in the first or second world war time period, but I'm not stuck there.

I have sorely neglected our library, book reading club and every time I run into someone they say "when are you coming back?" Just life gets in the way. So will work harder to keep up and participate in that.

Reading, what a joy, what a transportation, through time and distance from ones own fireside.

Well signing off from my American fireside reading.

Christy

P.S. Found this meme on Paperback Reader