"The Long Way Home" by Louise Penny ****

• Audiobook
• #10 in the Inspector Gamache/Three Pines series
• Canadian author
• Originally published 2014
• Link to author interview:    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i85edRMx5d0

• Link to interview with narrator, Ralph Cosham:    http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/ralph-cosham-the-voice-of-armand-gamache-in-louise-penny-audiobooks/2014/08/21/e5ebe04c-26d6-11e4-8b10-7db129976abb_story.html.   
• Review:  Another lovely Three Pines installment!  Louise Penny writes an engrossing tale of journeying; journeys in search of self, journeys in search of peace, journeys in search of revenge, and journeys in search of the muse.  Ultimately, just as when Dorothy clicks her ruby slippers, the characters and readers realize that much of what we search for is right under our noses, and that for many, there is no place like home!  A final life lesson embedded in the story is that the best remedy  "for lost love is more love."
  

"The Care and Management of Lies" by Jacqueline Winspear *****

• Audiobook
• English author
• Originally published in 2014
• Review:  I can only write this review after my tears have stopped falling and I have recovered my composure.  What a lovely, lovely book.  Winspear, whose Maisie Dobbs series has captivated me, diverges to a stand alone novel set at the beginning of WWI.  Two best friends, one of whom has married the other's brother,  must face the monumental changes which accompany the advent of the war.  One becomes an ambulance driver and the other manages her husband's family farm. Juxtaposed throughout the novel are the "words of wisdom" found in a wedding gift from one friend to the other, "A Woman's Book" , which is filled with the proper choices and paths for any woman of breeding and the reality in which these two young women are living.  The events chronicled in this story create a fascinating context for the reading of those words of womanly wisdom, written before female wartime ambulance drivers and females running farms.  Another highlight of this novel are the letters sent back and forth from the husband and wife, from the farm to the war front and back again. They are poignant, unusual, and I don't want to spoil them for potential readers.  Suffice to say that they become beloved by the husband's regiment and even the aristocratic officer in charge who must act as censor.  Just read it or even better, listen to it.  Soon!

"The Goldfinch" by Donna Tartt ****

●  Audiobook
●  US author
●  Originally published in 2013
●  Setting:  Amsterdam, 1943

●  Epigraph:  "The absurd does not liberate.  It binds."  - Albert Camus

Review:  I thoroughly enjoyed this novel and the tale of one boy's journey from boyhood to adolescence to manhood, and ultimately, to use a phrase I generally try to avoid, to a fully self actualized human.  I do not think I have come across such an in-depth character study in a very long time.  I know that literary critics are divided about this book, as are many people I know who have read it. To me, a Pulitzer worthy piece of literature ought to be a work which will likely transcend time as a classic.  I am not sure that I would consider this novel of that caliber, yet I thought it was engaging and thought provoking.  The author's ending was one of the least rushed and most fitting I have read in quite a while as well.  I like the primary message of the novel, which to me was that we need to know and accept ourselves to be able to move forward through life freely while taking responsibility for who we are and the choices we make.

"This Is The Garden" by Giulio Mozzi *****

• Summer read with Beth
• Open Letter publication
• Italian author
• Originally published in 2005
• Translation published in 2013
• Short Stories
• Epigraph:  "This is the garden; when you look it's far/too bright and burns your eyes/and so you turn away, although you know/that everything is real, everything you see/is real, and through time life unwinds/and is complete..." - Claudio Damiani, from "Il giardino del mio amore" ("The Garden of My Love": Fraturno, Rome:Abete 1987
• "Cover Letter":
• Purse snatcher returns letters from snatched puse and a letter explaining himself
• p.4...."You should never own something you didn't desire first...."
• p.10..."Department stores are easy places to work; they're fascinating, too, and here's why:  they're like gardens of delight, and that's just beautiful.
• p.16..."......there's only one possible world, and that's the world you see with your eyes open; the other world, the one you see with your eyes closed, is too dangerous a place."
• p.17..."...a letter is 'some kind of trail marker leading to a human creature, along a path where you grow happier with every step, until one bright moment when you realize you''re not moving forward at all, just going round and round in your own labyrinth, only you're more excited, more confused than normal."
• "You might say that in some letters, maybe all letters, the important thing is only said after the final sentence, in the silence that follows."
• "The Apprentice":
• An apprentice in a manufacturing facility hopes for a big future and slowly realizes it will likely never happen.....disillusionment
• p.37..."...if he enjoys his work it is not a punishment."...."....these people, he thinks, will work their entire lives without gaining the most important thing they can from work, what follows punishment:  freedom from sin, and so, the happiness to come.
• p.40..."...the apprentice treats every event in his life, even if it seems disagreeable, or degrading, or dangerous at the time, as one fragment of a lesson that will come together in the end and review itself as ordered, finished, justified:  it's up to him, the apprentice, the one whose reason for being is to learn, to put the parts of this lesson together and not reject any of them from the start..."
• p.42..."...this gets him thinking that there must be something about the worker's trade, something mysterious, invisible, that reduces brain capacity and locks a person inside a few predictable movements, a few thinkable thoughts..."
• p.43..."...his head is filled with thoughts that follow from his work, that drive him back, that pull away from everything, thoughts that explore, with deep uncertainty, the meaning and nature of his life--of every life--of the movement he's just made with his right hand."...man's eternal search for meaning
• "On The Publication of My First Book":
• Loss of privacy of first time published author....ambivalence...expressed in a book talk at a bookstore, he is a delivery person
• p.49..."But here, after these poems full of pain and nihilism, clapping, quite frankly, seemed almost uncivil."
• Fearfulness and need to be prepared for harsh future experienced when raised by parents who struggled as immigrants or poverty
• p.57..."All my imaginings were left to wander the world, beyond my control."...once his ideas and private thoughts are published he loses control
• p.59..."In my stories, the events seem determined, which wasn't true when these events occurred."
• p.59..."I think the relationship between things told in stories and things that actually happened is a bit like the relationship between daily events and then the transformation of these events in our dreams at night.
• Saw a rooftop garden...gave him a different perspective..."I'd traveled by train, hurried, come to this cold, stinking place, to bring my tiny and not so tiny offering--a photo that contained my soul--to this enormous building that housed a god who'd demanded my offering, but probably didn't even notice when he got it."
• Closing line:..."The books I've read have taught me many things, but above all, they've taught me to preserve my life and to tuck my voice away inside my life and keep it safe--my voice, unique and private:  my unique treasure and my health.  I love you all."
• "Claw":
• Per translator's note, Yanez is the sidekick of Sandokan, a pirate in a series of adventure novels by the 19th century Italian writer Emilio Salgari
• Aged man lives outside Indian village, served daily by a village woman, he remains silent so the villagers create their ideas of his life
• English "saint", priest comes to the village to convert, stays a year, hears Yanez' confession
• Yanez realizes three gifts before death:
• From Sandokan's death at a young age:  "...the lesson that all lives are different, and each ends as it should."
• From the village woman:  his desire for wisdom, for she revered it
• From the priest:  forgiveness
• The three gifts allow Yanez to give himself, in prayer, to God
• "Trains":
• Mario traveling by train to Rome, he is a delivery man for a bookstore
• p.74....."To Mario, the dreams you can't remember are the most important kind--they protect your vital secrets."
• He likes train travel because there is no stopping once you start.....like a train of thought?
• "Glass":
• Having window panes replaced leads to shards of glass in the grass below......
• p.87..."Last Sunday while I was gathering shards, I started thinking that it's almost like tyrying to gather important memories, that you have to look for memories in something like gravel, something so indistinct from far away and so varied close up, it'll make your head spin."
• p.87..."I understand now that gathering shards strengthens my soul, comforts it, helps it to see that even if the windows have shattered, they can still be recovered, piece by piece."
• p.88..."I've come to think that each part of the soul is the entire soul, and that the entire soul is made up of infinite parts, like shards of glass, like gravel, like the surface of the wall.
• "Tana":
• "tana" means burrow in Italian, per translator's note
• Tana finds a male angel, named Roberta, on  the street and brings it home
• Fever dream
• ":F.":
• Epigraph:  "It's all theater.  When they decide to, the mafia will kill me anyway." - Giovanni Falcone
• A magistrate is under lock and key as he presides over a mafia case,
• His security head is named Arcangelo, head of his "guardian angels"
• p.117..."All those who dreamed of bringing back a paradise on earth just wound up producing indiscriminate terror...."...he was told when trying to arrest a mafia member earlier in his career
• You cannot go back....all you have are memories
• Review:  An absolutely  wonderful short story collection.  Each story is so well written and drew me in completely.  The author evokes a sense of pain and loss in each story and the eternal search for that which is gone.  Memories seem to be the only thing we can cling to in the author's view, and their retrieval is bittersweet.  There is a distinct focus on the value of our dreamworld in our lives, all that occurs when our mind and spirit are allowed to run free.  I found these stories to be engaging and poignant both individually and as a connected whole.

"Pig Tales: A Novel of Lust and Transformation" by Marie Darrieussecq *****

• Summer book with Beth
• French author
• Debut novel
• Originally published in 1996
• Epigraph:  "Then the knife plunges in.  The farmhand gives it two little shoves to push it through the thick skin, after which the long blade seems to melt through the neck fat as it sinks in up to the hilt.  At first the boar doesn't understand a thing, he remains stretched out for a few seconds, thinking about it.  Aha!  Then he realizes he is being killed and utters strangled cries until he can scream no more."  -- Knut Hamsun
• Vocabulary:
• pipistrelles:  any of numerous insectivorous bats of the genus Pipistrellus, especiallyP. pipistrellus of Europe and Asia.
• autarky:  the condition of self-sufficiency, especially economic, as applied to a nation
• Setting:  France.....sometime
• Quotes:
• p.43..."But with the best will in the world I couldn't have gone back to being the same person I had been."...so true...once eyes are opened they cannot be shut
• p.76..."The dreams of birds were everywhere in the warm shadows of the trees, and the dreams of pipistrels were everywhere in the sky, because pipistrels dream even when awake."
• p.99..."And then he said that the iniquitous intellocratic, capitalistic, multi-ethnic regime had given the Nobel Prize or whatever to this Knut character, which was indisputable proof of subversion."
• p.151...."I write whenever my animal spirits subside a little.  The mood comes over me when the Moon rises, and I reread my notebook in its cold light.  I try to do what Yvan taught me, but for the opposite reason:  when I crane my neck toward the Moon, it's to show, once again, a human face."
• Notes:
• author picks on all gender, ethnic, and political groups
• Reference to Knut Hamsun....a contemporary writer, I just read "Hunger".....fantastic
• Review:  A woman transforms in and out of pighood?  Seriously?  Believe it or not this works!  This is a fast-paced, visionary and satiric look at politics, gender, and the role of sex in both.  I laughed, I cringed, and I couldn't put it down.  The author points her sharply attuned literary finger at both genders, all forms of government and spares no one.  Perhaps the point is that we as humans are all capable of both good and bad. The form of our lives becomes a question of which side prevails, and how much it is within the control of the individual versus within the domain of ethnicity and/or social class.  Ms. Darrieussecq packed quite a bit into a short novel.  Well done!

"Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President" by Candace Millard ****

• Book Club Selection, August 2014
• Non-Fiction, Biography
• US author
• Originally published 2011
• Vocabulary:
• Chapter Epigraphs:
• "The life and light of a nation are inseparable."
• "I never meet a ragged boy in the street without feeling that I may owe him a salute, for I know not what possibilities may be buttoned up under his coat."
• "Quiet is no certain pledge of permanence and safety.  Trees may flourish and flowers may bloom upon the quiet mountain side, while silently the trickling rain-drops are filling the deep cavern behind its rocky barriers, which, by and by, in a single moment, shall hurl to wild ruin its treacherous peace."
• "Theologians in all ages have looked out admiringly upon the material universe and...demonstrated the power, wisdom, and goodness of God; but we know of no one who has demonstrated the same attributes from the history of the human race."
• "To a young man who has in himself the magnificent possibilities of life, it is not fitting that he should be permanently commanded.  He should be a commander."
• "Tonight, I am a private citizen.  To-morrow I shall be called to assume new responsibilities, and on the day after, the broadside of the world's wrath will strike.  It will strike hard.  I know it, and you will know it."
• "There are times in the history of men and nations, when they stand so near the veil that separates mortals and immortals, time from eternity, and men from their God, that they can almost hear their breathings and feel the pulsations of the heart of the infinite."
• "It is one of the precious mysteries of sorrow that it finds solace in unselfish thought."
• "I love to believe that no heroic sacrifice is ever lost, that the characters of men are moulded and inspired by what their fathers have done."
• "There is no horizontal Stratification of society in this country like the rocks in the earth, that hold one class down below forevermore, and let another come to the surface to stay there forever.  Our Stratification is like the ocean, where every individual drop is free to move, and where from the sternest depths of the mighty deep any drop may come up to glitter on the highest wave that rolls."
• "If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart.  The spirit should not grow old."
• "Light itself is a great corrective.  A thousand wrongs and abuses that are grown in darkness disappear like owls and bats before the light of day."
• "I have sometimes thought that we cannot know any man thoroughly well while he is in perfect health.  As the ebb-tide discloses the real lines of the shore and the bed of the sea, so feebleness, sickness, and pain bring out the real character of a man."
• "If a man murders you without provocation, your soul bears no burden of the wrong; but all the angels of the universe will weep for the misguided man who committed the murder."
• Key people:
• James Garfield
• Charles Guiteau:  mentally ill, assassin
• Quotes:
• p.32..."I have so long and so often seen the evil effects of the presidential fever upon my associates and friends that I am determined it shall not seize me.......in almost every case it impairs if it does not destroy the usefulness of its victim.".....some things never change
• p.44..."I have seen the sea lashed into fury and tossed into spray, and its grandeur moves the soul of the dullest man; but I remember that it is not the billows but the calm level of the sea, from which all heights and depths are measured."...speech given at convention to calm frenzied crowd and encourage more thoughtful candidate selection
• p.56....""If you say that this is impossible, I answer that I know it is possible--nay, that it is easy."  "It was like rowing a boat,.....if you stay near the shore, you'll be fine.  It's only when you row too near a waterfall that you find yourself in danger."....the withdrawal method of birth control
• p.60..."Is there a hell?  Fifty deceived people are of the opinion that there ought to be>"...headline in Newark Daily Journal after Guiteau spoke at the Opera House
• p.69..."...it is not enough for one to know that his heart and motives are pure, if he is not sure but that good men.....who do not know him, will set him down among the list of men of doubtful morality."...Garfield's response to the opposition party trying to slander his name during presidential election
• p.80..."Of all the men who didn't invent the telephone, Gray was the nearest"....LOL
• p.92..."The Capital building, where Garfield had spent seventeen years of his life, suddenly seemed a snake pit, a place where vicious, small-minded men lay in wait, ready to attack at the first sign of weakness."...just like "House of Cards"....some things never change
• p.98..."Of course I deprecate war," he wrote, "but if it is brought to my door the bringer will find me at home."
• p.103..."Four years of this kind of intellectual dissipation may cripple me for the remainder of my life.  What might not a vigorous thinker do, if he could be allowed to use the opportunities of a Presidential term in vital, useful activity?"....Same thing is true now, 100 years later
• "....ignorance is Bliss".....reference to the physician who basically killed Garfield
• Notes:
• Primary biographical notes:
• Born in rural Ohio
• Extreme poverty
• Fatherless by age 2
• didn't campaign for himself
• gifted, if long-winded orator
• survived a fall into Erie Canal, thought it meant he had a purpose
• 1854...Williams College
• Frederick Douglass campaigned for him
• John Phillip Sousa led the Marine Corps Band on the day of inauguration
• Garfield was "a poor hater" but "a good fighter"
• first time there were armed guards at the White House
• Grief at his death first major unifying moment for North and South since Civil War
• Amazing train ride from White House to Elburon on the ocean...track laid to the house door!
• Lucretia created the first presidential library with funds donated by American people
• 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia:
• Edison's telegraph
• Remington typewriter
• Statue of Liberty's hand all that had been assembled
• Alexander Graham Bell first telephone exhibit
• Joseph Lister.....anti sepsis procedure in medical treatment
• Wife:  Lucretia
• Had an affair, repented and was forgiven
• Republican Party consisted of the "Half-Breeds" and the "Stalwarts"
• Chicago Fire stats:
• 1871
• destroyed thousands of buildings
• more than 70 miles of streets, killed 300+, 100,000 homeless
• Oneida Community:
• home of Guiteau's family
• his madness became apparent there
• The Oneida Community was a religious commune founded by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848 in Oneida, New York. The community believed that Jesus had already returned in AD 70, making it possible for them to bring about Jesus's millennial kingdom themselves, and be free of sin and perfect in this world, not just Heaven (a belief called Perfectionism). The Oneida Community practiced Communalism (in the sense of communal property and possessions), Complex Marriage, Male Continence, Mutual Criticism and Ascending Fellowship. There were smaller Noyesian communities in Wallingford, Connecticut; Newark, New Jersey; Putney and Cambridge, Vermont.^[1] The community's original 87 members grew to 172 by February 1850, 208 by 1852, and 306 by 1878. The branches were closed in 1854 except for the Wallingford branch, which operated until devastated by a tornadoin 1878. The Oneida Community dissolved in 1881, and eventually became the giant silverware company Oneida Limited.^[2]
• Review:  I would like to have known James Garfield.  He sounds like a marvelous human being, statesman, father, and husband.  Ms. Millard's book is non-fiction that reads like a well-constructed novel.  In fact, it is the combination of fascinating peripheral events occurring simultaneously in time with the details of President Garfield's election and death which make this book so very interesting. The reader gets a glimpse into the mind of this gentle intellectual man as well as into the sociopolitical and scientific advances of the times.  Excellent read!

"Travesty" by John Hawkes *****

• Originally published in 1976
• US author
• Setting:  south of France
• Epigraph:  
• "I am imbued with the notion that a Muse is necessarily a dead woman, inaccessible or absent; that the poetic structure--like the canon, which is only a hole surrounded by steel--can be based only on what one does not have; and that ultimately one can write only to fill a void or at the least to situate, in relation to the most lucid part of ourselves, the place where this incommensurable abyss yawns withing us."  --Michel Leiris: "Manhood"
• "You see, a person I knew used to divide human beings into three categories:  those who prefer having nothing to hide rather than being obliged to lie, those who prefer lying to having nothing to hide, and finally those who like both lying and the hidden.  I'll let you choose the pigeonhole that suits me."  -- Albert Camus:  "The Fall"
• Quotes:
• p.15..."Like schoolboys who have studied the solar system (I do not mean to be condescending or simple-minded) you and I know that all the elements of life coerce each other, force each other instant by instant into that perfect formation which is lofty and the only one possible."
• p.17..."Total destruction.  In its own way it is a form of ecstasy, this utter harmony between design and debris.  But even a poet will find it difficult to share this vision on short notice."
• p.58..."The unseen vision is not to be improved upon."
• p.62..."...surely there is no eroticism to match the landscape of spent passion."
• p.75..."For me the familiar and unfamiliar lie everywhere together, like two enormous faces back to back.  I am always seeing the man in the child, the child in the grown man.  Winter i8s my time of flowers, I am a resigned but spirited voyager."
• p.81....."Who does not dread the unimaginable condition of not existing?"
• p.82..."Tonight of all nights why can't you give me one moment of genuine response? Without it, as I have said, our expedition is as wasteful as everything else."
• p.82..."We rush off to die precisely because death's terrible contradiction (it will come, we cannot know what it is; it is totally certain, it is totally uncertain) for some of us fills each future moment, like tears of poison, with an anguish finally so great that only the dreaded experience itself provides relief.  We are so consumed by what we wish to avoid that we can no longer avoid it."
• p.99..."...sensitivity is a mere veil to self-concern.  We are all secret encouragers of ignorance, at heart we are all willful barbarians."
• p.100..."Because in our case it now appears that the poet is the thick-skinned and simple-minded beast of the ego, while contrary to popular opinion, it is your ordinary privileged man who turns out to reveal in the subtlest of ways all those faint sinister qualities of the artistic mind."
• p.100..."No, it is simply that the night is to my eye as is the pair of goggles to the arc-welder.  Through the thick green lens of the night I see only the brightest and most frightening light."
• p.103..."I have pursued clarity as relentlessly as the worshipers pursue their Christ."
• Notes:
• Honorine (his wife) was his clarity, the poet's Muse
• What was the purpose of the scene at the waterfront restaurant with the carrots?
• Review:  What is the meaning of travesty? A travesty is a literary or artistic composition so inferior in quality as to be merely a grotesque imitation of its model.  John Hawkes' novella is a poetic travesty.  The driver of a luxury sports car, an upper class intellectual, has decided to commit the ultimate poetic act.  Is it because his wife is his poet best friend's mistress?  Is it because his daughter is mistress to the same poet?  You will have to join the threesome on this ride to death to determine the meaning of the driver's choice for yourself.  I could feel the wind in my hair on this ride through a rainy night in southern France.  Do you dare?

"The Undertaking: Life Studies From the Dismal Trade" by Thomas Lynch ***

• National Book Award Finalist
• Non-Fiction, Essays
• Michigan author of the year, 2001
• US author
• A poet and an undertaker
• Vocabulary:
• aubade: a piece sung or played outdoors at dawn, usually as a compliment to someone.
• obsequies:  funeral rites
• Preface:
• xvi....."Then and now we age with the grace (in Cummings' careful metaphor) of polar bears on rollerskates."....LOLOL! 
• xvii..."Faithless, hopeless, untutored in love, they make babies for the sake of company and kill themselves with unspeakable violence in staggering numbers--suffering from a deficiency in meaning acquired from pop culture, pop psychology, feel-good religion, that tells them don't worry, be happy, take care of yourself and your self-esteem.  The stand to inherit, along with the spiritual void their parents have left them, the bill from the card it was charged to."......just a typical cynicism about the younger generation or is he astute or is he being unintentionally critical in an effort to be witty?
• xviii..."Thus, undertakings are the things we do to vest the lives we lead against the cold, the meaningless, the void, the noisy blather, and the blinding dark.  It is the voice we give to wonderment, to pain, to love and desire, anger and outrage; the words that we shape into song and prayer."
• "The Undertaking":
• p.3..."Every year I bury a couple hundred of my townspeople."  I never thought of it that way....
• p.13...."Milo had become the idea of himself, a permanent fixture of the third person and past tense, his widow's loss of appetite and trouble sleeping, the absence in places where we look for him, our habits of him breaking, our phantom limb, our one hand washing the other."
• "Gladstone":
• p.18...."...he loved to quote Gladstone, the great Victorian Liberal who sounded lik a New Age Republican when he wrote that he could measure twith mathematical precision a people's respect for the laws of the land by the way they cared for their dead."
• p.21....."So to suggest in the early going of grief that the dead body is 'just' anything rings as tinny in its attemp to minimalize as it would if we were to say it was 'just' a bad hair day when the girl went bald from her chemotherapy."
• p.22..."The bodies of the newly dead are not debris nor remnant, nor are they entirely icon or essence.  They are, rather, changelings, incubates, hatchlings of a new reality that bear our names and dates, our image and likenesses, as surely in the eyes and ears of our children and grandchildren as did word of our birth in the ears of our parents and their parents.  It is wise to treat such new things tenderly, carefully, with honor.
• p.25...."They understood that the meaning of life is connected, inextricably, to the meaning of death; that mourning is a romance in reverse, and if you love, you grieve and there are no exceptions--only those who do it well and those who don't"...what is not doing it well?
• "Crapper":
• Epigraph:  "Death and the sun are not to be looked at in the face." - La Rochefoucauld, Maxims
• p.30..."It was my first taste of Liberty--to crap out in the open air on the acreage of my ancestors, whilst listening to the sounds of morning: an aubade of birdwhistle and windsong."
• p.33...."Since4 Crapper's marvelous invention, we need only pull  the lever behind us and the evidence disappears, a kind of rapture that removes the nuisance.....having lost the regular necessity of dealing with unpleasantries, we have lost the ability to do so when the need arises.  And we have lost the community well versed in these calamities.  In short, when shit happens, we feel alone.".....introduction of the toilet.....interesting
• p.36..."Just about the time we were bringing the making of water and the movement of bowels into the house, we were pushing the birthing and marriage and sickness and dying out."
• p.37..."
• This is also why the funerals held in my funeral parlor lack an essential manifest--the connection of the baby born to the marriage made to the deaths we grieve in the life of a family."
• p.47..."Once she even successfully argued on behalf of my older brother, Dan, getting a BBGun, a weapon which he promptly turned against his younger siblings, outfitting us in helmet and leather jacket and instructing us to run across Eaton Park while he practiced his marksmanship.  Today he is a colonel in the army and the rest of us are gun-shy."....LOLOLOL
• "The Right Hand of the Father":
• p.51...When we buy the old, we bury the known past, the past we imagine sometimes better than it was, but the past all the same, a portion of which we inhabited.  Memory it she overwhelming theme, the eventual comfort."
• p.54..."The poor cousin of fear is anger."
• "Words Made Flesh":
• the artichoke poem written by a friend and published in the New Yorker
• p.72..."I tell Robin a version of what the old doctor, William Carlos Williams meant when he wrote that men die everyday for what they miss in poetry.  I tell him people are born, and reborn, everyday, who owe their very beings to poems"
• p.74...marriage poem
• "The Golfatorium":
• idea for combining a golf course and a cemetery
• p.80..."A reviewer of mine quite rightly calls poets the taxidermists of literature, wanting to freeze things in time, always inventing dead aunts and uncles to eulogize in verse."
• p.82..."Whether we bury the dead in Wilbert Vaults, leave them in trees to be eaten by birds, burn them or beam them into space; whether choir or cantor, piper or jazz band, casket or coffin or winding sheet, ours is the species that keeps track of our dead and knows that we are always outnumbered by them."
• p.84...."And to the extent that it is easier to grieve the loss that we see, than the one we imagine or read about in papers or hear of on the evening news, it was what we undertakers call a good funeral."...an undertaker's concept
• "Mary & Wilbur":
• the rebuilding of a local bridge giving direct route to the cemetery, championed by local actress
• the author wrote a poem for the dedication of the new bridge
• "Sweeney":
• his friend, the hypochondriac...or is it a gift of understanding that we will die
• "All Hallows' Eve":
• the night he buried his mother
• "Uncle Eddie, Inc.":
• addresses the issue of assisted suicide and its impact on the undertaker's profession in the future
• "Jessica, the Hound and the Casket Trade":
• how to be sensitive as well as profitable
• "Tract":
• addresses his own wishes for his funereal
• Review:  I enjoyed this essay collection.  Lynch blends a combination of wit, sensitivity, and insight about the culture of death from a variety of perspectives.  I laughed out loud a few times and read while slowly nodding a few times as well.  It is not that he brings something new to light, rather that he faces the familiar head on.  I like that.

"Godforsaken Idaho: Stories" by Shawn Vestal ****

• Early Reviewer edition for LibraryThing.com
• US author, raised as a Mormon
• Debut
• Originally published in 2013
• Short Stories
• Epigraph:  "And if ye shall say there is no law, ye shall also say there is no sin.  If ye shall say there is no sin, ye shall also say there is no righteousness.  And if there be no righteousness there be no happiness.  And if there be no righteousness nor happiness there be no punishment nor misery.  And if these things are not there is no God.  And if there is no God we are not, neither the earth; for there could have been no creation of things, neither to act nor to be acted upon; wherefore, all things must have vanished away.".....The Book of Mormon
• "The First Several Hundred Years Following My Death"
• Author's vision of heaven
• p.1..."You eat from your own life only."
• p.2..."Your age at death becomes your age forever."
• p.3..."If you want peace, you have to find it in the life you left behind."
• You're allowed to re-live moments/events as many times as you want to.  "But you find it hard to land in a single untroubled moment.  Every second is crowded with life, with misery and anxiety that just won't be stomped down."
• p.27...narrator's perfect moment of peace...."I hear the wind sound of planes.  The air smells like sweet hay and cow shit.  My mind hums.  I light one cigarette off another and watch the butt tumble out of sight into the canyon below.  I am entirely alone.  The emptiness makes a sound that takes in everything."
• p.8..."You know it when people you love die."
• "About as Fast as This Car Will Go"
• Paroled father takes on his teenage son....life of crime begins
• p.29..."I never wanted to be a criminal until I was one."....the son
• p.37..."...some part of fearing is expecting."
• "Families Are Forever!"
• Pathological liar
• p.51...."That's why I lied to her so much.  Out of love."...narrator has something to hide about his life before meeting Gina.....we never find out what it was
• p.70..."There are times when your groove and the groove of all things just line up and become the same groove."...Like that
• "Pocket Dog"
• a pocket dog is one of the tiny designer dogs often carried around by beautiful, rich women
• p.72..."Out here we're bound to feel a dog like that is just wrong."
• Grandma (rancher). Lanny (hired man), and Simon (dissolute grandson)
• p.74..."Grandma said the problem around here started with the death of work.  The place just doesn't run on work any more--it runs on leisure, on fly fishing and mountain biking and skiing.  People moving in with their money already made."
• Grandma and Lanny save Simon from himself, from being a "pocket dog"
• "Godforsaken Idaho"
• Pressure builds until narrator commits act of violence
• Life of social isolation
• "Winter Elders"
• p.110...."It was the smile of every man he had met in church, the bishops and first counselors and stake presidents, the benevolent mask, the put-on solemnity, the utter falseness."...missionaries who come to the door relentlessly
• p.111..."...Bradshaw kept waiting for it to happen.  The flash of light.  The surge of joy.  Some brightness shining through the visible world.......The thing behind the thing.  Cheryl called it 'an animating force.'"
• Anger at the faith of the missionaries.  "It was that Pope had something he could not have, and he would spend his life not having it."
• Again, pressure to believe results in act of violence
• "Opposition in All Things"
• Narrator dies and returns inside another person, a navy veteran who cannot forgive himself for killing despite the Mormon congregation saying killing and war were not the same thing
• Another tale of social isolation leading to violence
• p.145..."I was waiting along with Rulon for an opposing force, for something to press against.  Something in this world, some person or idea, was the opposite of me, and I needed to crash into it to become whoever or whatever I was."
• "Gulls":
• Locusts descend on Idaho farm.....Mormon community faces terrible losses
• Sara, has visions, seeks truth
• p.169..."She wanted to believe in it like her father and mother did, wanted to hear the voice of revelation herself."
• p.176..."This is how the voice of the Lord stays silent on Earth."....picking and choosing what God is responsible for
• "Diviner":
• Joseph Smith's scams in many communities
• He marries a skeptic's daughter
• Father lives with them in disbelief, but chooses it over isolation and lonliness
• Review:  Hmmmm...definitely an interesting collection of stories.....definitely some dark tales.....definitely a theme about questioning faith and/or organized religion......definitely a sense that faith is individual and we also compromise to be part of the greater whole of our communities......definitely some godlessness......but no definitive decision on my part about the collection as a whole.  I like Vestal's writing.  It packs an emotional punch which is the reason it gets four stars.  I suggest taking a chance and reading it.  I am interested in future work by this author.

"The Phantom" by Jo Nesbo. ****

●  Audiobook
●  Norwegian author
●  #9 in the Harry Hole series
●  Originally published in 2012
●  Review:  This installment of the Harry Hole series is excellent!   Once again Jo Nesbo creates a great blend of emotional dynamics and complex thriller.  Tension continues to mount regarding the degree of corruption in the city police and council members in Oslo. Great read!

"The Ploughmen" by Kim Zupan ****

• Early Reviewer edition for LibraryThing.com
• US author
• Scheduled for publication October 2014
• Debut novel
• Setting:  Great Falls, Montana, current date
• Characters:  
• Valentine Millikaki (Policeman, orphan, Gload's guard)
• John Gload (Serial killer, orphan, prisoner)
• Epigraph:  "For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers; our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding."  --  1 Chronicles 29:13
• Vocabulary:
• shelterbelt:  hedge or fence of trees designed to lessen the force of the wind and reduce erosion 
• umbles: "edible inner parts of a deer or other animal, 
• Quotes:
• p.12...."Presently he saw John Gload appear in the first circle of light and fade and reappear in the next, progressing this way along the concrete catwalk, incorporeal as a phantom.".....like Dante's circles of hell
• p.124...."But he was at home with them, she was right.  And whether they sought the open country for their death, or death sought them there, it little mattered.  In either case kindred souls, Millimaki and the dead, met under a companionable sky and the encounter was good for all.
• p.205...."The world for these men was reduced to floor, ceiling, walls, and bars, and his own differed little--an unfixed cubicle of solitude that, like a carapace, went with him everywhere and was impervious to the warming sun or the wind in the trees or even the unconditional affections of a sister who seemed not to care he did now write in return and send his love, which she deserved."
• p.217..."Because it's hard to be alone, Millimaki thought.  That's what I've figured out, Red.  In this country, it's just hard to be along."
• Notes:
• Parallels between Val and John:
• both have the dead in their head all the time, one from search and rescue with his dog, Tom...the other his victims
• both imprisoned, John in jail, Val by his past
• Review:  I want to start by saying how much I enjoy reading when the author's command of language is clearly demonstrated.  I really like Zupan's use of expansive vocabulary!  This is the tale of two men whose history is not far different, and for whom there are numerous parallels.  However, one becomes a serial killer and the other is a policeman.  In the course of the killer's incarceration they are thrown together.  The rest is for you to discover.  I read the whole novel during one cloudy day on vacation and thoroughly enjoyed it.  It is a bit grisly, but that aspect is minimal. The author beautifully conveyed the sense of isolation experienced when living in the beautiful, yet stark, Montana landscape.  I think this author is going places!

"The Dark" by Sergio Chejfec *****

• Open Letter publication
• Argentinian author
• Originally published in 2000, translation published in 2013 
• Quotes:
• p.8...."Accustomed to the world of the factory, where truth is measured, counted, and classified, she was confused by the thought of becoming the object of something at once definite and intangible, as emotions tend to be."
• p.11...."A unanimous lie turned into truth."
• p.17...."In the same way, just like at work, Delia surrendered a part of herself when she withdrew; someone observing her might think that at any moment she might cease to be herself, that she might succumb to a force that would isolate and take over her body.  But something kept her from crossing that threshold, and this was how Delia was able to maintain the delicate balance between absence and communion."...Are we all like this sometimes?
• p.48..."Reduced to acting on a few instincts, an animal of any species has a more tangible effect on time than man does."
• p.48..."A person closes a book and is surprised by the abyss of the day to day, with the varying scales and speeds of time, fast or slow, which leave a fine, invisible layer on the surface of things."..........wow
• p.51....."Each breath, every mouthful of air drawn deep, brought with it the scent of the dusk from his childhood."
• p.57...."She transported herself with her mind, just as she seemed to be somewhere else now, as she walked beside me.  And it was this gift, this ability to withdraw without absenting herself, to abandon me without leaving my side, that was most aligned with her nature."...loneliness
• p.59...."For obvious reasons, the night is more profound and more cosmic than the day, but it's also the moment when the scent of the earth, from elemental waste to the scents brought out by the dew, prepares to reveal itself.  And it's this combination of opposites--the breadth and impassivity of the celestial sphere, the galaxy following its distant course at full speed through the middle of the universe, and the singular labor of the earth, opening seeds and decomposing bodies, as persistent as an obsession--that is sometimes called the murmur, or the pulse, of the night."
• p.63..."At night we're the center of things, just as happens when we look into the past."
• p.67..."Because depth is found not in darkness, but in contrast."....he writes with his eyes closed.....
• p.77...."After the most extravagant and dramatic incidents, what remains with us of other people is always a face etched in the dark.  Not in real darkness, but in the dark of evocation.   Memories, strangely enough, have no light of their own."
• Notes:
• p.8 - workers having direct contact with the product of their labor, as opposed to the merchant who measures the abstract notion of change...interesting
• p.58..."proletarian disposition"...tendency to go elsewhere in the mind, habit developed in factories but carried forward into relationship
• p.72....the paradox of workers who had been in debt becoming the ferocious moneylenders....makes sense for the vulnerable to want to become the strong
• p.76...workers encouraged to "become one" with their machines....the agent of their production
• p. 80....workers will keep everything on the line functioning even in crisis....seemingly holding onto the routine for security
• p.140....It has often seemed to me that much of a person's life is filled with thoughts that have no future."......like my journal?
• Review:  Don't even consider reading this book unless you are prepared for a serious intellectual workout!  Personally, I think I pulled a few muscles during this one!  Enter the interior monologue of a man trying to understand the nature of relationship.  What relationship, you might ask?  Well, between man and woman, between social classes, and between man and machine.  The narrator dissects his relationship with the mysterious factory worker, Delia.  Throughout the dissection are allusions to the dark, the darkness, the night.  "...Definite and intangible..." are words he uses to describe relationship, and that is at the beginning of the book.  I think those are the two best words to describe the experience of reading this astute and intense novel.

"The Luminaries" by Eleanor Catton ****

• Summer read with Beth
• Canadian author
• Originally published in 2013
• Setting:  1866, New Zealand, gold rush
• Vocabulary:
• astrological house:  Twelve sections of the chart wheel, derived from time-and-space related points of the chart (e.g., Ascendant,Descendant, Midheaven and IC). Each House represents a different "field of experience" or set of situations or circumstances in our lives. See table below for examples. The cusp of each house is like the doorway into that house, and each house spans the area from its own cusp to the cusp of the next house (moving counter-clockwise). Houses correspond quite a bit to the signs in their archetypal meaning, but are not the same thing. 
• twinkle:  not in dictionary, author explains it as a cheat achieved when a gambler puts a crystal in the tip of a burning cigar then wavesthe cigar into a position in which it reflects the cards in another player's hand
• judder:  : to shake in a forceful way
• fug:  stale air, especially the humid, warm, ill smelling air of a crowded room, kitchen, etc.
• homeward-bounder:  a mine whose output would allow the owner to return to England a wealthy person
• Characters:  Characters are divided into two groups. ?...stellar/planetary....
• Crosbie Wells,  terra firma,  found dead in his cabin, alleged widow showed up toclaim his estate
• Walter Moody, planetary, "presented himself in the manner of a discreet and quick-minded butler
• Thomas Balfour:  stellar, financier, type whose sense of entitlement comes from many years in which his optimism is supported by success
• Joseph Pritchard:  stellar, chemist, "....whenever the subterranean waters of his mind were disturbed,  he plunged inward, and struggled downward--kicking strongly,  purposefully,  as if he wished to touch the mineral depths of his own dark fantasies;  as if he wished to drown
• Anna Wetherell:  planetary, whore found poisoned by opium,  "her complexion was translucent, even blue,  and tendedto a deep purple beneath her eyes--as if she had been paintedin wTer olor; on paper that was not stiff enough to hold the moisture,  so the colors ran. "....."She was a silent oracle.....knowing not wisdom,  but wickedness--for whatever vicious things one might have done,  said, or witnessed,  she was sure to have witnezsed worse.
• Mannering:  goldfields magnate, stellar- tends to describe others as "reflections of, or detractions from, his own authentic self
• Charlie Frost:  banker, stellar, "He was a private hedonist, perennially wrapped in the cocoon of his own senses, mindful, always, of the things he already possessed, and the things he had yet to gain
• Quee Long:  goldsmith, stellar, ",,,now, not eight years after his death (his father), Quee Long was here, in New Zealand, profiting from the very circumstance that his father -and his country-- had attempted, vainly, to forestall.
• Emery Staines:  Anna's love
• Quotes:"
• p.135.....".....it's this twilight that's the danger,  between the old world and the new."  ......civilised world and un.....?
• p.169...."How silently the world revolved,  when one was brooding, and alone."....Pritchard
• p.193..."No man likes to be called a coward--and least of all, a  man who is feeling downright cowardly."
• p.225..."They sought these women when they looked at Anna, but only partly, for they also sought themselves:  she was a reflected darkness, just as she was a borrowed light. Her wretchedness was, she knew, extremely reassuring."
• p.260..."The drug, for Quee Long, was a symbol, signifying the unforgivable depths of Western barbarism toward his civilization, and the contempt with which the Chinese life was held, in the face of the lifeless Western goals of profit and greed."
• p.342..."The twelve men were united only by their association to the events of the 14th of January, upon which night Anna Wetherell had nearly died, Crosbie Wells had died, Emery Staines had vanished, Francis Carver had sailed away, and Alistair Lauderback had arrived in town."
• p.363...."Unconfirmed suspicion tends, over time, to become willful, fallacious, and prey to the vicissitudes of mood--it acquires all the qualities of common superstition--and the men of the Crown Hotel, whose nexus of allegiance is stitched, after all, in the bright thread of time and motion, have, like all men, no immunity to influence."
• p.363..."For the planets have changed places against the wheeling canvas of the stars.  The Sun has advanced one-twelfth along the tilted wheel of her ecliptic path, and with that motion comes a new world order; a new perspective on the whole."
• p.390..."We spend our entire lives thinking about death.  Without that project to divert us, I expec t we would all be dreadfully bored.  We would have nothing to evade, and nothing to forestall, and nothing to worry about.  Time would have no consequence."
• p.533.....Those solitary visions that, but a month ago, belonged only to the dreamer; will now acquire the form and substance of the real.  We were of our own making, and we shall be our own end."
• p.671...."True feeling is always circular--either circular, or paradoxical--simply because its cause and its expression are two halves of the very same thing!  Love cannot be reduced to a catalogue of reasons why, and a catalogue of reasons cannot be put together into love.  Any man who disagrees with me has never been in love--not truly."....Mr. Staines
• p.714...."...if home can't be where you come from, than home is what you make of where you go.".....Paddy Ryan....Irishman who makes the briefest of appearances
• p.718...."You may have an astral soul-mate, whose path through life perfectly mirrors your own!"....Anna and Emery, explains the way they channeled each other and mirrored each other
• p.765..."...in myself I value loyalty; in others, honesty."...Emery to Crosbie
• Notes:
• the room of  12 men....an inverted pantheon.....meaning the opposite of a group of ruling gods?   P.7
• prospecting as "reverse alchemy"....transformation  out of gold rather than into it
• Significance of February being a month with no full moon?
• the planetary characters were the ones with secrets to hide?  Moody put them in pairs:  the widow and the trafficker, the politician and the gaoler, the prospector and the whore
• Review:   Reading this epic tale of hope, betrayal, loyalty, and above all destiny,  was something of a roller coaster ride.  At times the mystery of death and disappearance was completely engrossing, at times it was a little tedious.  The creative structural theme of astrology was at once a fascinating nuance and at times s bit of a nuisance.  I have a vision of this author with a computer spreadsheet in front of her to keep the facts and fictions within the story from confusing her.  I could have used one at times.  The consistently marvelous part of this book was the character development.  The planetary versus stellar characters, and their intertwined relationships were elegantly constructed.  The fact of the matter is that this novel will stay with me for a long time, yet I do not see it as a classic over time due to the confusing complexity of the plot.

"Hunger" by Knut Hamsun

●  Audiobook
●  Norwegian author
●  Nobel Prize winner, 1920
●  Originally published in 1890
●  Review:  This novel is stark, emotionally evocative and on a primal level, terrifying.  If you dare, enter the psyche of the narrator, a writer, who waivers between abject poverty and death.  Suffer along with him as Hamsun's brilliant writing takes the reader to the brink of utter madness, sublime passion, and death by starvation.  In the end, what is the hunger for in addition to food?  You will have to suffer the throes of despair and humiliation of the protagonist to find out!