"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?