Things That Go Bump in the Night

I like The Witch of Lime Street: Séance, Seduction, and Houdini in the Spirit World by David Jaher. After all, I have read 220 of its 412 pages. But for now, it's going on the shelf, though I'm sure I'll finish reading it, someday. Let me tell you first about the book, and then about why I'm laying it aside.

The Roaring Twenties were about more than jazz and flappers and bathtub gin. Following the great loss of life in WWI and the Spanish flu epidemic, people desperate with grief wanted to believe they could contact their dead loved ones, leading to a boom in spiritualism. Harry Houdini, the great magician and escape artist, made it his mission to unmask and debunk fraudulent mediums. At the same time, Scientific American magazine began a contest offering $5,000 in prizes for mediums who could prove their skills and effects did not depend on trickery. Several were quickly proved to be fakes, but Mina Crandon, better known as "Margery," the pretty wife of a Boston doctor, seemed to be the real thing, and most of the book turns on the ongoing investigation of her alleged powers and the people and personal relationships involved in that investigation.

Some years ago I absolved myself of feeling guilty for not finishing every book I started. There are many reasons for laying a book aside. Maybe, as with Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, there's an association with something that has nothing to do with the book. A friend brought that book to me at Thanksgiving dinner one year and then behaved very badly, so that whenever I picked it up I thought of him and it poisoned my enjoyment. But after a few months I tried again and loved it. Maybe it's something in the book itself; a scene in Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko horrified me to the point that I couldn't go on, but a year later I picked it up and finished it, though I began reading from a point after that scene. No need to re-traumatize oneself. (Although I generally enjoy and admire Silko's writing, I kind of agree with a friend's assessment that there should be a support group for people who've finished reading Almanac of the Dead.)

I have no such dramatic reasons for bailing on The Witch of Lime Street, which is well written, engaging, and should make a very entertaining movie. Jaher's research is impressive and his prose is smooth, informative without being pedantic, and, as the Wall Street Journal reviewer claims, "[filled with] flamboyant, enigmatic, and complex characters." But it moves slowly, covering the same ground over and over, and while I wanted to know how it ended, I lost count of the number of séances I'd sat through and went to a couple of reference books and Google to find out how the whole thing ended (though I'm not going to tell you).

Pacing isn't the only problem; the title is misleading, at least as far as I've gotten. Houdini appears early in the book, and he's quite interesting, but then he disappears though I'm sure he'll show up for the climax. And while there are lots and lots of séances, there's no seduction, unless you count the intellectual and emotional seduction practiced by fraudulent mediums. But that too may appear later on.

My final verdict? I like it, but not enough to stick with it when there are more appealing things on my TBR pile.

FOR LOVE OF VEGETABLES

Martha Stewart's Vegetables: I love this book! As soon as I unpacked it I opened it to gorgeous centerfold of two kohlrabi bulbs: one purple, one green, wonderful, natural works of art. And the whole book is just as beautiful; each recipe has a photo on the facing page that appeals to the eye as well as the stomach. I know there are people out there who don't like vegetables, and I'm very sorry for them. I also think this might be the cookbook to change their minds. The recipes are delectable, none of them look difficult, and they include vegetables from the everyday - peas, carrots, potatoes - to the less familiar, such as fennel, rutabagas, parsnips, and more. And they're not necessarily just side dishes. Main dishes of various kinds include vegetables in more than supporting roles (some but not all are vegetarian), as do breads, soups, salads, and desserts. I am definitely going to try the corn ice cream, and the rainbow carrots and chard stems below.

The organization of the book is also interesting, and brilliant. Unlike most cookbooks that are organized by the above categories - breads, soups, etc., etc. - this one is organized by types of vegetables: bulbs, roots, tubers, greens, stalks and stems, pods, shoots, leaves, flowers and buds, fruits (a category that includes more than just tomatoes; take a look at the Blistered Eggplant with Tomatoes, Olives, and Feta, above), and kernels. Leafing through to see what category various veggies fall into is part of the fun, but if you want to go straight to bok choy, the index is excellent.

More than just recipes, the supporting text offers excellent background information on each vegetable, along with useful information on selecting, storing, prepping and basic cooking, and other foods that pair well with, say, Jerusalem artichokes or fennel (or peas, carrots, and potatoes for that matter). This beautiful book offers an approach to clean eating, using healthy, natural ingredients to delight the palate and maybe even convert the veggie-phobic.

WHAT I'VE BEEN READING: THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

I just learned that Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad is a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. While I'm sure the other finalists are worthy of consideration, it's hard for me to imagine a more deserving work. This is a book I found impossible to put down. I thought of its protagonist, Cora, even when I wasn't actually reading - wondering whether she would escape or even survive the dangers that beset her on her journey to freedom from slavery and the looming threat of slave catchers. This book made me care that much, not only on an intellectual or empathetic level, but deeply, in the most visceral recesses of my consciousness. It is that good.

Whitehead, who grew up in Manhattan, has said that when he was much younger, he imagined the Underground Railroad as an actual railroad, with tracks, engines, and passenger cars, that ran through real tunnels, rather like subways. In this novel he takes that childhood fantasy and makes it real; Cora, a young slave woman, escapes with another slave, Caesar, via the railroad. Cora's odyssey north takes her to various states - South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Indiana - each of which is like another world. While one state initially seems safe and welcoming, for example, the citizens of another indulge in ritualized brutality that almost surpasses what Cora left behind on Randall, the Georgia plantation she escaped from. 

In interviews, Whitehead has readily acknowledged the influence of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels in the vastly different worlds he creates for Cora to experience. As different from one another as Swift's Lilliput, Brobdignag, Laputa, etc., the states become illustrations of various historical outrages against those of other races: the Tuskegee experiments, the Holocaust, and more. And although in this fabulist fiction Whitehead may take liberties with the details of history, what he describes can seem so uncomfortably real that I found myself thinking I should look up, for example, antebellum North Carolina's racial policies.

A friend told me she was afraid to read this book because she thought it would be gory. It's not. Really. Don't be afraid. Given that it is about slavery, violence is inescapable, of course, but Whitehead is a master of compulsively readable, nuanced prose that blends modern pacing with a sensibility that, to quote the nineteenth-century writer of a narrative captivity, "draws a veil over things" too painful or sensational or offensive to recall, except that the veil reveals enough so that we know exactly what is going on. Although we may be spared the graphic splatterpunk some writers indulge in, the horror remains. I admire Whitehead's writing more than I can express. 

The Underground Railroad is and is not fiction. I suspect there were at least as many Randalls in the slave-holding South as there were benign Taras (in Gone with the Wind). Absolute power like that exercised by slaveholders does not bring out the best in people. Scholars agree that there is such a thing as historical, generational trauma, and the United States is plagued by it. We can see its aftermath in recent events on the nightly news, and we need to try to understand it (and each other) rather than deny it. We are a diverse society and we are all in this together. We need books like The Underground Railroad. Much has been written lately about how reading literary fiction helps people to become more thoughtful and empathetic. I can think of no better place to start than with this brilliant novel.

FIRE AND FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Michel Faber is one of my favorite authors (except for The Crimson Petal and the White, which I just couldn't read), and it's always a delight to discover another of his books; I never know quite what I'll find inside the cover. So it was a delight and perhaps more than a coincidence when I stumbled across his 2008 novel, The Fire Gospel, at our local used books (and more) superstore, Bookman's, the day before I finished reading The Goldfinch (2013).

If you read my review of The Goldfinch,  (http://useofabook.blogspot.com/2016/04/sometimes-you-just-dont-know-what-you.html), you know it's not my favorite book. I began reading The Fire Gospel as soon as I finished The Goldfinch, and this is where the "more than a coincidence" part comes in. I found the similarities and differences rather uncanny, almost as if The Fire Gospel, which was published five years earlier, was meant as a sort of corrective to the later novel. Very strange. In each novel a protagonist named Theo finds himself in a museum when a bomb goes off, and not only survives but makes off with a priceless artifact, and neither of them behaves with any particular honor or integrity when it comes to their prize.

Unlike the teenage Theo of The Goldfinch, however, The Fire Gospel's Theo Griepenkerl is a grown-up. Well, sort of. He's a linguistics scholar, a specialist in ancient Aramaic, which is the language of the nine scrolls he pulls out of a shattered sculpture following the bombing of an Iraqi museum in war-torn Mosul. The scrolls form the fifth gospel, the Gospel of Malchus, an eyewitness account of Christ's last days on earth and the period that follows. Rather than turning the scrolls over to his own scholarly institution, Theo translates them and then publishes them, along with his own explanatory material. The book becomes a best-seller, but it also sets off a firestorm of reaction from religious extremists - reactions including public bonfires and even more violent threats - fueled by a media-mad world. Theo is definitely out of his depth.

In describing the success Theo doesn't know how to handle and its dangerous consequences, Faber smartly and stylishly satirizes the publishing and media worlds as well as the reactions of zealots who can't handle the thought of having to shift their thinking to accommodate new ideas or information . It's a well-written, often funny, sometimes shocking and always compelling narrative, and since at 212 pages in paperback it's only about a quarter the size of The Goldfinch, you may be able to read it in a day.

The book group I belong to will be discussing FG next Friday, September 9, but the discussion really began yesterday, when a friend said she'd finished it (in a day) and wasn't sure how she felt about it, except that although Theo's not very likable, the concept of a lost gospel written by an eyewitness is "titillating" and the book is well done. By today she'd decided it is a good read, although it presents a "very unflattering view of humanity . . . it opens the door to discussions on all levels of human experience." On the other hand, another friend said she finds little of merit and that "what the author parodies is not funny. Only very sad." But that's the thing about this book. It gets people thinking.

My feeling is that it is both funny and sad, and that for such a small book, there's a lot to talk about. For instance, the content of the scrolls Theo finds, i.e., the Gospel of Malchus, is very different in tone from the four canonical gospels Christians know. It is easy to see how some readers (both inside and outside the novel) might be offended by the extremely personal, often kvetching, first-person narrative voice of Malchus himself, who freely admits to having been in the employ of Caiaphas the high priest, who says he was there when Judas received his thirty pieces of silver, who claims to be the witness whose ear Peter cut off in the Garden of Gethsemane, and who tells readers more than they want to know about his own ill health, especially his digestive processes and problems. Malchus not only describes his own messy humanity, he also humanizes Jesus in ways that might indeed provoke the kinds of violent responses Theo faces in the novel.

Of course Theo himself is flawed and deeply human, a product of his (our) culture who believes that the titanic act of releasing the "fire" of the newly discovered gospel will somehow save him and perhaps help the rest of humanity. So it makes sense that this evening, while I was looking at some information about Michel Faber, I learned that this novel is part of a series of novels, The Canongate Myth Series (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canongate_Myth_Series), made up of modern re-tellings of traditional myths from various cultures. The Fire Gospel is Faber's take on the myth of the Titan Prometheus, who stole fire from heaven to improve the lives of mortals. So now I have something else to think about in regard to this story; I like that.

TAMING THE VINEGAR GIRL

Anne Tyler's Vinegar Girl, the Pulitzer-Prize-winner's take on Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew is an absolute delight, the best of Hogarth's series of modern takes on the Bard's plays, at least in my opinion. The other two, so far, are Jeanette Winterson's The Gap of Time and Howard Jacobson's Shylock Is My Name; my review of Winterson's novel is at http://morning-glory-garden.blogspot.com/2015/11/from-problem-play-to-challenging-novel.html. I haven't written a review of Shylock . . .  yet, but it's a close second to Vinegar Girl, which means it's very, very good.

Tyler's Kate is smart, stubborn, working at a job that doesn't seem to fulfill her potential, and indispensable to her scientist father - almost as indispensable as his research assistant, Pyotr, whose visa is about to run out. To Kate's dad, there's a simple and elegant solution: Kate should marry Pyotr and Pyotr should move in with the family, so Kate can continue to run the household and Pyotr's immigration status can be stabilized. Kate, quite understandably, is not thrilled by this proposition.

Throw into that mix Kate's younger sister Bunny, Bunny's probably-too-old-for-her Spanish tutor/boyfriend, who lives next door, and assorted relatives, co-workers, and friends, and the stage is set for a funny, touching, and ultimately satisfying re-imagining of one of Shakespeare's most entertaining plays. For those who are concerned that the play, like others of Shakespeare's, has been criticized as misogynistic, Tyler's updating neatly deals with that plot problem, in a way that makes me smile just to think of it. 

ANOTHER SUMMER BEFORE . . . .

We're in the midst of a long, hot summer (and in Tucson summers are longer and hotter than in many other places), and with all the things that are happening around the world (in addition to this being a particularly contentious summer-before-the-US-presidential election), a good read is the most refreshing restorative I can think of. I was so happy when a friend surprised me with the loan of Helen Simonson's second novel, The Summer Before the War, since it provided exactly what I needed this week.

A couple of years ago it seemed like remembrances of World War I were everywhere, marking the centennial of the beginning of "the war to end all wars." Of course it didn't achieve that goal. I was deeply moved by film and TV representations of that period: the film based on Vera Brittain's memoir, Testament of Youth; the series Crimson Fields, which sadly lasted only one season; and of course Downton Abbey.  But I watched more than I read, until my friend lent me this novel. The Summer Before the War begins like most summers, light and breezy, with the promise of romance and enough conflict in its English village setting to keep things interesting for those of us who don't read stereotypical romance novels.  It also has enormous resonance for our times, when, as in 1914, it seems like the world is falling apart around us.

Beatrice Nash has accepted a position as Latin mistress in the school in Rye, Sussex, though there's never been a female Latin teacher there before. She's recently lost her father, a scholar of some note, and the unpleasant relatives in charge of her inheritance seem determined to cheat her out of it. Though she's only in her early 20s, she has decided never to marry, but to support herself as a teacher but with dreams of becoming a published writer. But interested and interesting young men do appear.

Hugh Graves is a medical student nearly at the end of his surgical training when war is declared and he finds himself enlisting to serve in a field hospital under his mentor, whose daughter, Lucy, Hugh expects to marry. Hugh's cousin Daniel, a poet, does not plan to enlist but rather to start a literary journal with his closest friend. Hugh and Daniel's aunt and uncle, especially Aunt Agatha, play important roles in the lives of all these young people, whose lives wind up going in unexpected directions. Add to that the mayor's obnoxious wife, an influx of Belgian refugees, an expatriate American writer, and Gypsies, and the plot thickens with surprising twists and turns.

Simonson handles all these disparate elements with style and grace, with convincing and engaging characters and locations. The point of view shifts in different chapters from Beatrice to Hugh and back again, with intervals focused on Aunt Agatha and on Snout, the young Gypsy boy who is also Beatrice's best student. There's comedy, romance, and tragedy, all affecting characters the reader will care about. And while in some ways there's a sense of fatalism that may seem all too familiar in today's stressful and fearful times, there is also abundant reason for hope, and for love of all kinds.

This is a beautifully written book that I admire on many levels, but most of all because, in spite of all that can go wrong in the world (and that goes wrong for many of her characters), Simonson reminds us of what is best in us, even though we ourselves may be unaware of it.

WHAT I'VE BEEN READING

I've read three novels since my last post, and I've been thinking about some of the qualities they have in common, particularly a sense of generosity on the part of their authors. Somewhere, a long time ago, I read that a good writer doesn't totally demonize even his/her villains; the reader should be able to find at least some spark of humanity in every character. That seems right to me, even if the only redeeming feature is that the serial killer takes good care of his horse or the meanest woman in town saved all the letters someone wrote her fifty years ago.
     Sure, there are villains in both the real and fictional worlds. I don't deny that, and I don't want to read stories without conflict - heaven forbid! These three novels contain plenty of conflict and trials. But their authors also give us the nuance and complexity and, yes, compassion that enriches a worthwhile reading experience.

Helen Oyeyemi's Boy, Snow, Bird (2014), a story of family secrets, race, beauty, and vanity, turns the classic "Snow White" inside out, calling into question how we see ourselves and others in the racist society of mid-20th-century New England. In a reversal of the usual pattern, Boy Novak runs away from New York City and her brutally abusive father to a small town where she meets and marries Arturo Whitman, a talented artisan with a beautiful young daughter, Snow. Boy never imagined herself as an evil stepmother, but when she and Arturo have their own baby girl, Bird, the Whitman family secrets are revealed and events spin out of Boy's control. Ultimately, Boy learns some secrets about her own background, and this become more than a novel about race and passing, as other kinds of identities become blurred, and even the worst villains turn out to be more complicated than we thought.
      Oyeyemi's transformative take on the traditional fairy tale and the way she weaves that story of the tyranny of the mirror and standards of beauty into something even more relevant to today is wonderfully inventive. To quote the New York Times reviewer, it is "[g]loriously unsettling." Add to that Oyeymi's marvelous style, "jagged and capricious at moments, lush and rippled at others," and this becomes a reading experience that, for me at least, drew me in and wouldn't let go. I don't know if she's planned a sequel (I suspect not), but if she does write one, I'll be first in line!

Jason Gurley's Eleanor (2016) takes a tragic family narrative and makes it more than a poignant, deeply moving story by incorporating elements of speculative fiction that enhance rather than distract from the human elements that make it so moving. It's about loss and love and how, in families, people can both damage and save one another.
      Eleanor is intricately crafted and works on many levels: the naturalistic stories of Eleanor, her sister, her mother, and her grandmother, and other, more magical realities where Eleanor meets strange and mysterious characters who may be more than they appear. This is a tender and powerful, haunting and genre-defying novel, and Jason Gurley is a generous, open-hearted, and compassionate writer.

     The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George is easily the most romantic and sentimental of these three novels, and that may be why it has been such a bestseller. This is the second time I've read it, though (my book group will be discussing it next Friday), and I have decided there is a solid core to this novel that the Washington Post reviewer dismissed as a "confection." Yes, it's set in fantasy locations - Paris, the coast of France, Provence - that are described in gorgeous, delicious detail. Yes, the characters are generally nice, decent, and attractive in various ways, some fairly quirky. But that doesn't make it mindless fluff.
     This is a road story, a quest story, with a hero who needs to learn to live again, after twenty years of loneliness and grief. Jean Perdu is the fifty-year-old owner of the bookshop, or rather the book barge, the Literary Apothecary, moored on the Seine, where he not only sells books but, because of his ability to read people as well as literature, he prescribes books that will be helpful to his customers who are experiencing "minor to moderate emotional turmoil." Some of us can relate to that, I think. I have read novels years ago that I thought were wonderful, but not mentioning them to certain people for fear they might open personal wounds, but insisting that someone else read a certain book because I knew it was just what that person needed. (And having that person confirm later that I was right.) Perdu can prescribe for others, but he is unable or unwilling to heal himself, until a letter from the past confronts him with a truth that changes everything. So he unties his boat and sets off down the rivers and canals of France to find . . . what? He doesn't know.
     There is no Holy Grail for Jean Perdu, but there are large and small discoveries, about the world and himself, that will help him to reclaim his life and find happiness again. The assortment of new friends, new places, and new experiences is mostly delightful, due at least in part to Nina George's writing and her excellent translator, Simon Pare (it was first published in German), and sometimes very sad. But the greatest sadness is within Jean Perdu (perdu is, after all, French for lost), as he struggles to open himself to life once again, and each step he takes toward that goal, and toward helping his companions find what they are looking for, kept me turning the pages.
     It is a lovely book, light enough to read on the beach, on a plane (or on a boat), thoughtful enough to make some worthwhile observations about life and relationships, not only with others but with ourselves. For example:

Habit is a vain and treacherous goddess. She lets nothing  disrupt her rule. She smothers one desire after another: the desire to travel, the desire for a better job or a new love. She stops us from living as we would like, because habit prevents us from asking ourselves whether we continue to enjoy doing what we do. 

Reading, however, is a very good habit. I hope your summer reading is going well.

GHOSTLY SURPRISES

While I was reading Yangsze Choo's 2013 novel The Ghost Bride, I didn't once think of Amy Tan. I was so immersed in Choo's story of power, intrigue, and yes, love among the living, the dead, and those who move between those worlds, that I didn't really consider anything beyond the pages in front of me. I mean that as a compliment to Choo; Amy Tan is one of my favorite authors, because of the way she brings her characters' different worlds together so that the reader can experience them. In this novel, Choo exhibits that same gift.

The premise is enough in itself to provoke interest: the daughter of a genteel but bankrupt Chinese family receives a proposal from a much wealthier family that she become a "ghost bride" for the family's only son, who died under mysterious circumstances. But it does not begin to prepare the reader for the twists and turns, loves and hates, and matters of life and death, both in this world and the spirit realm, that Li Lan, Choo's smart and independent-minded heroine and narrator, will encounter.

The setting is Malaya in 1893, when it was still a British colony settled by various ethnicities over the centuries, among them a considerable Chinese-Malayan population who maintain their own traditions, though not as rigidly as they might on the mainland. The ghost marriage is one of these, though it was apparently never common. I think I had heard of it before (or maybe that was a Tim Burton movie), but didn't really know anything about it. However, the exotic setting, along with the first paragraphs, hooked me immediately:

One evening, my father asked me whether I would like to become a ghost bride. Asked is perhaps not the right word. . . .
My father was smoking opium. It was his first pipe of the evening, so I presumed he was relatively lucid. . . .

Li Lan is an engaging narrator, and as her story progresses from a naturalistic narrative of the social and economic world of Malacca to a perilous quest into the supernatural world of the dead, she finds both love (though this is NOT a "romance novel") and danger, and she discovers things she hadn't known about herself and her own family, as well as about the Lims who want her to marry their dead son. The spirit world mirrors the world of the living in many ways, especially in social hierarchies and bureaucracy, with crime and corruption among both the living and the dead. In each world, Li Lan finds enemies and friends, though it's not always easy at first to tell who is which.

The folklore and mythology that ground the story are fascinating and clearly represented, the mystery and adventure are compelling, and the writing is very, very good. The author's "Notes" at the end are not necessary to the reader's understanding and enjoyment of the story, but they were a welcome bonus. This is Yangsze Choo's first novel, and it is definitely an auspicious debut.

A PARABLE FOR OUR TIME

I wouldn't describe myself as a full-blown sci-fi fan, but I enjoy reading thoughtful speculative fiction by writers I admire, like Ursula K. LeGuin, Frank Herbert, Margaret Atwood, and the late and much-mourned Octavia Butler. I can't help wondering if Butler's novel The Parable of the Sower would have seemed as powerful to me if I had read it when it was first published in 1993, before the recent glut of dystopian novels, some very good, most aimed at the YA market.  Right now, twenty-three years later, the terrifying, anarchic world of Butler's story seems all too possible, especially in this increasingly bizarre election year.

The story begins in another election year, 2024, just eight years from now, and the America Butler describes is much closer to the one we know than it is to, say, the world of The Hunger Games. Her narrator/protagonist is a Black teenager, Lauren Olamina, who lives in a walled and gated, ethnically diverse community about twenty miles from Los Angeles. Some people, like Lauren's father, a Baptist minister and college professor, still go "outside" to work, but "outside" has become a dangerous and terrifying place, its streets filled with roving gangs of thieves, drug addicts (one new drug turns its users into violent pyromaniacs), and of course the homeless and destitute. The education system has crumbled and many people are illiterate; Lauren's stepmother holds classes in their home for the children of the eleven households inside their walled enclave. Self-defense is even more essential than literacy, so when they turn fifteen all children are taken "outside" into the surrounding hills for firearms training. It is a world that does not allow for illusions, one in which Lauren realizes that a time may come when she must kill or be killed.

Lauren is a reader and a writer; the novel is structured as a series of journal entries covering a period of more than three years. During that time Lauren develops and refines her own belief system, a theology she calls "Earthseed," which describes God as Change. When the "outside" breaks in and Lauren's community is burned and her family murdered, she escapes and takes to the road, like thousands of others heading north. Earthseed gives her strength to survive and go on and, as she joins with a small group of other survivors (two from her community and later a few others, all with their own stories). She becomes the group's leader, with the goal of establishing an intentional community, based on the principles of Earthseed, in some safer place. The search for that place makes up the second half of the book.

When I finished Parable of the Sower last night, I felt actual separation anxiety, to the point where I nearly got dressed to go out to the book store for the sequel, Parable of the Talents. But it was too late. All the stores were closed. I'll get it today.

Butler published Parable of the Talents in 1998, and had plans to continue the series with a third book to be called Parable of the Trickster, but she had trouble with writer's block and moved on to other projects. Her last novel, Fledgling, was published in 2005. I've read Fledgling, a stand-alone novel exploring the culture of a vampire community living in mutualistic symbiosis with humans, and her best-selling novel, Kindred (1979), in which an African American woman is transported from 1976 Los Angeles to early nineteenth-century Maryland, where she meets her ancestors: Rufus, a white slave holder, and Alice, a free Black woman forced into slavery later in life. She wrote many other books, including the Patternmaster series and the Xenogenesis trilogy, as well as short stories, which I look forward to reading.

Sadly, Octavia Butler died in 2006, at the age of 58, from head injuries sustained in a fall to the sidewalk in her front yard; the fall may have been occasioned by a stroke. No one knows for sure. What we do know is that the ideas expressed in her fiction show us a great deal about ourselves, about the world that shaped us and the world we seem to be creating. Things are very bad in that future world, but for Lauren and her companions it is not a world without hope. Nor need it be for us.

Butler herself described Parable of the Sower as a cautionary tale. "I imagined the United States becoming, slowly, through the combined effects of lack of foresight and short-term unenlightened self-interest, a third-world country," she said in a conversation about Parable of the Sower. Twenty-three years later, some might say her words contain more prophecy than imagination.

A Little Bird Told Me

I didn't hate The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and Amazon's 2013 Best Book of the Year, but I also didn't love it. I'd seen it on the best-seller lists. For a couple of years I would walk by it, in bookstores and at Costco, admiring the cover (a partial image of the Carel Fabritius painting after which the book is named, revealed by a tear in the paper that hides the rest), but I never even picked it up to look at the jacket copy. I honestly don't know why not. I sort of knew the premise: a young boy (Theo) loses his mother in an explosion in an art museum and in the ensuing smoke and chaos snatches a priceless small painting from the wall which in the years to come serves as a precious talisman and connection to his mother as well as a millstone of guilt that he can neither live with nor do without. Sounds interesting, and I had heard nothing negative about it to put me off.

When it was chosen as the April selection for my book group, I found a copy at Bookman's, Tucson's wonderful used book store chain, and settled in for a long (nearly 800 pages in hardcover, more in paperback) read.

In a blog post entitled "Talking about Books I Don't Like,"  (http://modernmrsdarcy.com/books-i-dont-like/), Anne (sorry, I don't know her last name) cites art critic Peter Schjeldahl's approach to reviewing works he doesn't like, or as he puts it, "work that isn't immediately congenial." He asks himself:

     What would I like about this if I liked it? That is, I sort of project myself into the mind of somebody who thinks, "Wow, this is great, this is what I like." And sometimes that idea in my head persuades me, and I come around. I come around a little bit . . . . If that fails, I say, what would somebody who likes this be like?"

As I learned last week at book group, some of my friends like The Goldfinch very much (though no one seemed to think it was perfect or life-changing). Those who like it have good reasons for doing so, while others have equally good reasons for disliking at least parts of it. So let me be clear, I do like, even admire parts of it very much. For example:

• Some of the writing is very, very good. Tartt can describe a scene fairly economically and at the same time put you right in it, and she's equally good at sketching out the large number of characters in this novel. That's undoubtedly why, in addition to the sheer size of the book, some critics and readers have called it Dickensian.
• The reader will learn things, all sorts of things. For example, The Goldfinch of the title is a real painting, with a real story behind it, though the narrative in the novel is entirely invented. (Actually, I learned that not from the novel but by googling it.)
• Donna Tartt is impressively well informed in a number of areas, from the arts and antiques trade to Russian organized crime. You have to respect a writer who does her homework, and there must have been a great deal of homework involved here; either that or she's led a remarkably interesting and possibly dangerous life.
• The book contains intriguing and in some cases very appealing characters, notably Hobie, the kindly antiques dealer who takes Theo, the protagonist, under his wing, and Boris, a modern-day, adolescent Russian immigrant equivalent to Dickens' Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist. (As in Oliver Twist, motherless children and/or orphans abound in this story.)
• While Theo is not a particularly sympathetic narrator - at the beginning the reader feels sorry for him, of course, but as he develops more unpleasant habits it becomes clear that he feels enough self-pity for a whole boatload of tragic orphans - he is well and convincingly drawn. A member of our group who has reason to know of such things also says that Tartt's portrayal of junkie culture and the way junkies think is spot on.

However, none of those things are enough to make me recommend the book, and here's why:

• It's at least half again as long as it needs to be. That's true of the novel overall and even some of the paragraphs. 
• Tartt sometimes seems to be unsure of or lose sight of what kind of book she's writing (the reader may share that feeling). Is it a heart-warming coming of age story in which the protagonist finally rises above tragedy, fear, and guilt? Is it a Quentin Tarantino-style action thriller? Is it Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer making mischief in the lunar landscape of an unfinished and nearly unpopulated Las Vegas suburb? Is it a touching tale of unrequited love? It tries, in fact, to be all those things, which I suppose is why it's so long and perhaps why it fails to be a satisfactory example of any of them.
• Taken separately, various elements work well or at least come close to working, such as the explosion that begins the story; the weird period Theo spends in Las Vegas with his ne'er-do-well father and his father's girlfriend, where he meets Boris, who is arguably the most interesting and appealing character in the story; the scenes revolving around art and antiques and other elements of backstory. But I think it's a problem when the backstory is more interesting than the main story. 
• It's also a problem when you'd rather be reading a book focused on one of the supporting characters: What really happened to Pippa at her Swiss "boarding school" for traumatized girls? What was Boris doing in the years he and Theo were apart? How did Hobie become who he is, living the life he lives? But unfortunately it's a first-person narrative, so we must always return to what's going on inside Theo's head, which after a while was not a place I really wanted to be.
• The opening, with Theo holed up in a hotel room in Amsterdam, didn't pique my interest, as it seems pretty contrived from a stylistic perspective, but the final section, an epilogue of sorts which is supposed to wrap things up and, I guess, show how Theo has grown through his experiences and hold out some hope for his future, is even less satisfactory. Introductions and conclusions are hard to write, I know, and this case illustrates the principle that less is, or could have been, more.

All that brings me to Schjeldahl's second question: ". . . what would somebody who likes this be like?" That's a hard one. They might be nicer than I am, in the sense of feeling enough compassion for Theo to excuse his self-absorbed whining. They might just be more patient, or they might be more able to put story above style (I can't put in the time to read certain very popular thriller authors, but I often enjoy the movies based on their books). 

Other people have similar mixed feelings about The Goldfinch, such as those reported on in Evgenia Peretz's 2014 Vanity Fair article which raises the question of why critics and others have their panties in such a wad about it (http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2014/07/goldfinch-donna-tartt-literary-criticism.  Critic James Wood wrote in The New Yorker that "Its tone, language, and story belong in children's literature" (not so sure I'd agree with that, given the recurrent drug use and other elements). He also told Vanity Fair, "I think that the rapture with which this novel has been received is further proof of the infantilization of our literary culture: a world in which adults go around reading Harry Potter." Now just a minute there, James. There's a lot to be said for Harry Potter (more, in my opinion, than for The Goldfinch, though you have likely figured that out), but this post is over-long already.

Perhaps my reservations about the novel are borne out by the fact that the screen rights have been purchased by Warner Brothers and that it will be produced by the folks behind Rush Hour and The Hunger Games movies, which is not necessarily good news for those who would like to see it treated as serious literature. However, Peter Straughan, who wrote the screenplay for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, based on the John LeCarré novel, will adapt it for the screen, so there's some hope. And it will no doubt be shortened significantly, though whether or not that's a good thing will depend on what gets cut and what gets left in. No doubt the Tarantino-esque sequence near the end will get full and loving treatment. 

Two things I'm sure of: 1) devoted fans of the book will be unhappy with some of the cuts and compromises inherent in translating literature into film, and 2) sitting through the movie will be a whole lot quicker than reading 800 or so pages. The hours I spent doing that are hours I'll never get back. Whether or not you agree with me, I'd love to hear your comments.

   

DOODLE FLOWERS

Some days you're the pigeon; some days you're the statue. Sometimes you eat the bear; sometimes the bear eats you. (And no, I haven't seen The Revenant yet.) That's kind of how my April is going, in terms of managing a poem a day. Yesterday, almost nothing. Today, well, at least I've made a start.

Today's poem responds to two prompts. Robert Lee Brewer, in Poetic Asides http://www.writersdigest.com/whats-new/2016-april-pad-challenge-day-8, suggests we "write a doodle poem," while Maureen Thorson of NaPoWriMo http://www.napowrimo.net/ reminds us that "Poets have been writing about flowers since, oh, the dawn of time," and challenges us to do the same.

FLORA

I've doodled the same little blossoms for years,
five petals, all one looping motion,
like the sharp five-pointed stars
we learned to draw in grade school,
but rounded, soft, each petal ready
to flutter away alone on any friendly breeze.

They occupy corners of shopping lists,
line up across the bottom of class notes,
drift down the margins in delicate clusters
tied together with ribbons of ink.

Sometimes they anchor simple landscapes,
grow out of mounds of spiky grass
along meandering paths up little hills
to mushroom-shaped cottages
with tilted, smoking chimneys and always,
always the same round window over the door,
homes for plump fairy grandmothers
with full cookie jars and mugs of milky tea,
waiting just for me.

APRIL IS THE POETRY MONTH

It's here again, National Poetry Month, along with one of my favorite daily practices, the "poem-a-day-for April." There are some good websites out there offering daily prompts if you need inspiration; two I like are Robert Lee Brewer's "Poetic Asides" blog,  http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/poetic-asides, and NaPoWriMo,  http://www.napowrimo.net/, but I'm sure a google search would turn up others.

To be honest, I haven't gotten off to a roaring start this April, producing rough drafts at best and nothing at all yesterday, though I'm a bit happier with this morning's effort, responding to NaPoWriMo's prompt to write a food poem. I'm not ready to call it a finished product, but I've decided to share it anyway, and I'd be very interested in any comments you might care to make. Interpretations? Observations? Anything?

Last night I dreamed about meringue.

Not delicate little cookies, not billowy

oversweetened clouds atop a

lemon pie. No, this meringue filled

a big Rubbermaid storage bin,

and the more I scooped into a

normal-sized bowl, the more what was left

swelled, threatening to overflow

its blue plastic boundaries.

I couldn’t keep up. There was no

time to stir in the vanilla, no time

to taste, to see if it needed more sugar.

How many egg whites were in it?

Some number beyond my comprehension.

On the counter a pan of little tarts

awaited their topping.

They didn’t need much. Two eggs’ worth, tops.

So where did it come from, all this stuff?

And why did it keep growing?

I knew if I stopped scooping

it would inflate, expand, balloon

over the sides, onto the floor,

filling the kitchen, then the house,

then squeeze out through the cracks around

the doors and windows, up the chimney,

down the drains, cover the yard and

flow out into the street, condemning

everything and everyone in its path

to sugary suffocation.

KOREATOWN

I have a serious cookbook addiction that I must have inherited from my grandmother, who read cookbooks the way some women read romance novels. Mine started when I was just a year or two out of high school, with a subscription to the Time-Life Foods of the World series; I still have all of them, the hardbacks full of wonderful narrative, history, culture, and gorgeous pictures (rather faded now) and the spiral-bound paperbacks containing all the recipes, a couple of which (Scandinavian Cooking and The Cooking of India) have their covers secured now with clear packing tape.

 

Korean food is a fairly new and delicious discovery for me; Joe and I were introduced to it by a few of our students. Tucson has a few Korean restaurants of varying quality - Takamatsu, Seoul Kitchen, Korea House, Kimchi Time - and apparently some of the Japanese restaurants, like Takamatsu, also serve Korean food. I've heard good things about Kampai Sushi, but haven't tried it yet. Interesting trivia note: according to one of my Korean students, most of the sushi chefs in Tucson are actually Korean (that included her husband after he graduated from the university, until he was able to get a job in his own field).

So as you can imagine, I was delighted to receive a review copy of Koreatown: A Cookbook from Blogging for Books http://www.bloggingforbooks.com. Just the cover makes me hungry, and I love the clever design, with the name broken up so the word EAT occupies the center of the image! And the rest of the book is just as gorgeous, full of great, tantalizing photos, recipes, interviews with other Korean chefs and fans of Korean and Korean-American food. Grandma would have loved it.

After an entertaining and informative introduction, each of the co-authors introduces himself with a two-page essay. Deuki Hong grew up in Manhattan's Koreatown and has been cooking professionally since he was fifteen; most of the recipes are those he grew up on. Food writer Matt Rodbard titles his essay "How a White Jew Boy from Kalamazoo Fell Hard for Korean Food." The two make a great team; the writing throughout the book is breezy, entertaining, and deeply appreciative of Korean food and culture.

But the food is the core of the enterprise. I'm a fairly adventurous cook but somehow I've felt intimidated by Korean cuisine, probably because of a Korean friend's remark that cooking for a dinner party was going to be so much work and that Korean food was complicated. But it's really not any more so, I don't think, than any other national cuisine. My friend just doesn't like to cook.

The book arrived during Lent, and because Joe and I have been on-and-off vegetarians, we decided those 40 days would be a good time to go meatless. So I didn't cook any of the meat recipes during that time, although there are many in the book, since Korean food today can be quite meat-centric.

So of course one of the first things I tried was Bibimbap, although as it says opposite the picture, "This Is Not a Bibimbap Recipe." I've had bibimbap many times in restaurants; it seems to be many people's intro to Korean food, for good reason. In restaurants it's usually like a rice bowl on steroids, the sticky rice topped with a number of vegetables, some thin-sliced cooked beef, and an egg (in my experience, not a raw egg as in the above photo, though the raw egg yolk does look cool there). But really, as the authors assure us, you can make bibimbap with whatever's on hand, so I used leftovers from the first two dishes I'd made. Kongnamul Muchim, which translates to crunchy sesame bean sprouts, is one of my favorite banchan (the small dishes that precede and accompany the main course at Korean restaurants). If you look at the cover image above, the bean sprouts are at the top center, occupying the letter "O." I also had some leftover Doenjang and Kimchi-Braised Kale (the recipe served 4 generously and there are only 2 of us); amazingly delicious on its own, it lent a wonderful rich earthiness to the bibimbap. And chopped kimchi, of course, with some shredded carrots and, because it was Lent, just an egg, no meat. Ah, heaven! I love leftovers anyway, but this lifts the tasty to the sublime.

Another thing I love about Korean food is the unfussy way it's eaten. At the first Korean restaurant we went to, years ago, the waiter who brought my bibimbap said, "Just take your chopsticks and stir it all up. Mix it up!" No dainty little bites of one thing at a time - we loved it and felt instantly comfortable and well fed.

The first Korean recipe I tried at home (not from this book) was Pajeon or scallion pancake (above). We'd had some at Seoul Kitchen as a complimentary appetizer (with its spicy dipping sauce) and loved it. What I made at home was good, but not as good, and now I know why. According to Deuki and Matt, Korean cooks, including those in restaurants, all use prepackaged Korean pancake mix (no, Bisquick or Krusteaz won't do) with sparkling (unflavored, of course) water. That was hard for me, since generally speaking I don't do mixes. But they are right; the results were so much better.

In fact, this book and all the recipes I wanted and still want to try necessitated a trip to one of the local Korean markets where I bought enough ingredients that we put them all into a "Korean box," but you probably don't need to go quite that far immediately. Kimchi (if you've never tried it, don't resist; even just a little, chopped up and stirred into a bowl of rice, elevates the eating experience), along with some gochujang (spicy fermented pepper paste), and gochugaru (red chile powder) will get you started. A very informative section on ingredients at the beginning of the book will help you know what to look for.

This beautiful book is a marvelous introduction to a cuisine that is only now getting the attention it deserves, as enjoyable to read and look through as it is to cook from.

WHEN IN ROME

Recently I've read two very good novels about ancient Rome. Well, one of them is about the place destined to become Rome, but that's close enough. Anyway, I've realized that I'm rather partial (at the moment) to good fiction, especially mysteries, set in ancient Rome; fortunately several very good authors are out there working hard to feed my habit. Several years ago I was introduced to the work of Steven Saylor, whose Roma Sub Rosa series kept me entertained for quite a while, till I'd read them all. In the first, Roman Blood, the reader meets Gordianus the Finder, whose fortunes improve dramatically when the great orator and senator Cicero comes to him for help.

Gordianus is smart, personable, and very, very human, with a personal life that is just as interesting as the cases he works to solve. (But isn't that the case with all appealing fictional detectives?) Through his association with Cicero, Gordianus (and the reader) becomes acquainted with all the great names of that period of Roman history, including but not limited to Julius Caesar, Crassus, Sulla, and a lot more I didn't know much about before reading these books. I also learned a good deal about Roman law, culture, family life, food - Saylor really does his homework, as all good historical novelists must.

I was very disappointed to come to the end of the series, but I've recently learned that in addition to two very BIG (as in massive) non-Gordianus novels of the period, Roma and Empire, Saylor has begun a new mystery series called the Seven Wonders. These stories - The Seven Wonders, Raiders of the Nile, and Wrath of the Furies - are prequels to the first series, recounting the adventures of the younger Gordianus.

If I had to pick a favorite Roman series, though, it would probably be the Medicus novels of Ruth Downie. These mysteries are set in Roman Britain, where the general dampness and gloomy weather parallel the mood of Gaius Petreius Ruso, a doctor with the Roman Legions. He's a reluctant sleuth who finds himself taking responsibility not only for his patients but also for an independent-minded British slave girl, Tilla, and of course solving murders. Downie's first six Ruso novels - Medicus, Terra Incognita, Persona Non Grata, Caveat Emptor, Semper Fidelis, and Tabula Ras - will be joined by a seventh, Vita Brevis, later this year.

 

Tilla and Ruso are very well-matched (it does take Ruso a while to recognize this) and they make a great team in the setting of cultural contact and conflict in which they find themselves. This series also offers fascinating insights into the history and culture of early Britain and how the Roman Empire operated as it expanded into very different territories far from Rome.

  The first of Lindsay Davis's many novels about Marcus Didius Falco, The Silver Pigs, sends him to Britain to uncover the truth about a conspiracy to steal silver ingots, the "pigs" of the title. Falco is a bit rougher around the edges than Ruso or Gordianus, and his neighborhood's definitely lower class, at least in this first book, but that's part of his charm, and it certainly broadens one's knowledge about life in ancient Rome.  I confess this is the only one of Davis's novels I've read so far, but I enjoyed it very much. My husband has read at least a dozen, and when I've whittled down my To Be Read pile some more, I plan to pay Falco another visit, or two, or . . . . 

Robert Harris's novels about Cicero are a more recent discovery. I picked up the first, Imperium, some months ago thinking Joe would like it (he did), and only lately got around to reading it myself. I wasn't sure I'd be interested, but decided to try a few pages . . . and I couldn't put it down. The narrator, Cicero's slave Tiro, was a real person who apparently did write a biography of his master which has been lost. Tiro also invented a form of shorthand, something that figures importantly in the story.

Imperium is sort of a hybrid of courtroom drama(s) and biographical fiction. Harris's Cicero does not contradict Saylor's portrayal of the great orator, but rather expands our picture of this brilliant and complex man as seen through the eyes of the individual who probably knew him best. Harris focuses sharply on politics and personalities, of which Tiro is an astute and gossipy observer, making Imperium both fascinating and highly entertaining. I found a used copy of the second book in the trilogy, Conspirata, last week and the final book, Dictator, was released a couple of months ago to rave reviews. One critic called it "Triumphant, compelling and deeply moving . . . the finest fictional treatment of Ancient Rome in the English language. . . . " I haven't read all those other "fictional treatments," of course, and maybe the critic hasn't either, but still, that's pretty high praise.

And now, at least in my opinion, I've saved the best for last. The final novel I want to talk about is neither a mystery nor is it technically set in Rome or outposts of Rome's empire. It is, rather, about the mythic events that preceded the founding of Rome. Lavinia by Ursula K. LeGuin tells the story of the Latin princess Aeneas marries when, years after the fall of Troy and his tragic affair with Queen Dido of Carthage, his ships arrive in ancient Italy.

Lavinia appears only briefly in Virgil's Aeneid and she does not speak at all there, but LeGuin gives her both a voice and a fully drawn, fleshed out character, bringing this mythical princess and her long-ago world vividly to life.  I have admired LeGuin and her writing for decades. She regularly transcends the categories of science fiction and fantasy to which some uninformed readers have tried to limit her, even while she continues to work within those genres.

Lavinia is an example of that transcendence of genre boundaries. More than fantasy, it is nevertheless not history, nor is it an epic like the Iliad, which is mentioned mostly in passing. It is a coming of age story and more; its heroine tells her own story of how she figures in an important cultural and historical change. There are moments of high drama, but mostly in terms of interpersonal, often family relationships; there are battles, but they are largely in the background. Among the most beautifully rendered scenes are Lavinia's conversations with the shade of the dying Virgil, who regrets the way he overlooked and shortchanged her in the Aeneid. Although Lavinia is so far in the past as Virgil would perceive it, or Virgil so impossibly far in her future, these scenes, in which time becomes slippery, blend smoothly with the more traditional chronological narrative of the rest of the story - the story that Virgil is only now coming to know - so that the reader may not even notice how extraordinary LeGuin's accomplishment is. Flanked by figures known for heroism (Aeneas) or artistic brilliance (Virgil), Lavinia, who before LeGuin was nothing but a name, creates herself for her poet, stakes her own quiet claim to our attention, and becomes the most real character of all.

Welcome!

I'm very excited about this blog, which is an expansion of my original venture into the blogosphere, Morning Glory Garden (morning-glory-garden.blogspot.com). That blog, as the title suggests, focuses on gardens, gardening, the lovely things that come from the garden - vegetables, herbs, flowers, fruits - and other associated creative ventures, from cooking to various arts and crafts.

For a while, after I discovered Blogging for Books (bloggingforbooks.com), it also included the occasional book review. For an ardent book lover like me, Blogging for Books seemed like a sort of miracle. You sign up, choose a book, and they send you a free review copy. All they ask is that you read it, write an honest review for their site, and also post the review on your own blog. If you go to Morning Glory Garden you'll see that recently reviews have pretty much been all I've posted, and except, perhaps, for the cookbooks, they don't really fit with the theme(s) of that blog, so here we are. This will be the place for all things literary from now on. Including cookbooks. And maybe posts of my own poetry during April (National Poetry Month). Things like that.

I actually have a new cookbook awaiting review, but since I haven't read it yet, I want to talk about something else: book groups, specifically the book group that I attend every month. Reading may seem like a solitary pursuit, but talking about books with other readers, even when we disagree (and that sometimes - well, okay, often - happens in this group) is also a great pleasure. Just last month, for example, I came away from the group with a greater appreciation for Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow, which I didn't actively dislike, but didn't find quite as compelling as some other readers did.

Our group reads a wide variety of things, both fiction and non-fiction, and the book for this month is Edward Abbey's 1968 masterpiece (that is not a word I use lightly), Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness.

His fourth book (following three novels), Desert Solitaire is, as the subtitle suggests, a chronicle of the time Abbey spent as a park ranger at Arches National Monument in Utah. Based mostly on his journals from those seasons, April to September for two years (he later returned for a third), he conveys in lyrical, sometimes angry, often humorous prose what he found to love in the desert southwest and how he believed we should live in relation to it so as not to destroy it. Readers who admire Thoreau and Aldo Leopold will certainly respond to Abbey's passionate environmentalism, while others, perhaps new to the genre, will also enjoy the experience. "Enjoy the experience" - such a flat, namby-pamby phrase to apply to this book that many of my students have said changed their lives, though to be fair, some others (a very small number) got quite angry with Abbey (though even they could not say he wasn't an excellent writer).

Here's what Edwin Way Teale wrote in the New York Times Book Review:

This book may well seem like a ride on a bucking bronco. It is rough, 

tough, combative. The author is a rebel and an eloquent loner. 

His is a passionately felt, deeply poetic book. 

It has philosophy. It has humor. It has its share of nerve-tingling 

adventures . . . set down in a lean, racing prose, 

in a close-knit style of power and beauty.

I knew next to nothing about Edward Abbey when I arrived at the University of Arizona in Tucson in 1992. He had taught there, in the creative writing department, until his death a few years before I arrived, and I heard later from some of his students how kind and good a teacher he could be, despite his cantankerous reputation.

As a grad student in the English department I taught composition, and one of my students asked me if she could bring her mother, who was visiting her, to class. I said "sure." I don't remember what the topic was that day, but after class the student and her mother came up to talk to me. "Have you read Desert Solitaire?" the mother asked. I had to admit I hadn't even heard of it. "You would love it," she said. "It is absolutely my favorite book."

So I read it, and then I taught it in several courses. And now I have the pleasure of re-reading it yet again, and looking forward to a lively discussion. Recently I was talking with the rector of our church, another Abbey aficionado, and I said that if I could only have one book on a desert island and had to choose between the Bible and Desert Solitaire, it would be very, very difficult. He just nodded in understanding.