Tag: 2009

The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

Posted on by Dana

I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning this morning to finish Katherine Howe’s debut novel The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane. This novel intertwines two stories. The first is the story of graduate student Connie Goodwin, who we meet as she is sitting for her oral qualifying exam for the doctoral program in history at Harvard. The qualifying exam is a clever device, which allows for Howe to give readers unfamiliar with the Salem Witch Trials some background without feeling too much like exposition. Before we meet Connie, however, we meet Deliverance Dane, a healer or cunning woman attending to a sick little girl. The stories of these two women intertwine when Connie agrees to prepare her grandmother’s house in Marblehead for sale. In perusing the bookshelves, Connie finds an old Bible with a key inside. She pulls a piece of parchment with the name Deliverance Dane written on it out of the key. Her pursuit of Deliverance Dane and her story, as well as the story of her Physick Book, become Connie’s quest.

As I said in my previous post, I really enjoyed this book for several reasons. The subject matter is a story I’ve always found fascinating. I was also, as a genealogist, able to relate to Connie’s search through generations for the book and the people whose lives it touched. There is a moment in the book when Connie and Sam, a “steeplejack” whom she meets as he’s restoring an old church, wax philosophical about people who have lived in the past:

“It’s weird, isn’t it?” asked Sam, leaning closer to her over the card table and dropping his voice.

“What’s weird?” she said, turning to him.

“That you can have this whole entire life, with all your opinions, your loves, your fears. Eventually, those parts of you disappear. And then the people who could remember those parts of you disappear, and before long all that’s left is your name in some ledger. This Marcy person—she had a favorite food. She had friends and people she disliked. We don’t even know how she died.” Sam smiled sadly. “I guess that’s why I like preservation better than history. In preservation I feel like I can keep some of it from slipping away.” (76)

Connie responds:

“I can see that. But history’s not as different as you might think.” She brushed her fingers over Marcy Lamson’s name scrawled on the page. “Don’t you think Marcy would be surprised if she knew that some random people in 1991 were reading her name and thinking about her? She probably never even imagined 1991. In a way”—Connie hesitated—”it offers her a kind of immortality. At least this way she gets to be remembered. Or thought about. Noticed.” (76)

Those are thoughts that I think cross the minds at some point of almost anyone who studies his/her family history. I have often wondered about the name in my family research in the same way that Sam describes, while also thinking, as Connie does, that they might be surprised to remembered or noticed so long after they’re gone. I don’t know how my great-great-grandmother Stella would feel about my publishing her diary, for instance. She might actually not have been too happy about it!

Howe’s research shines in the period detail she crafts for scenes set in the past, as well as the description of Connie’s grandmother’s home on Milk Street and the environs around Harvard, Salem, and Marblehead. She has also clearly researched witchcraft and divination, and her descriptions of spells ring with authenticity.

Katherine Howe descends from two of the accused witches: Elizabeth Howe, who was executed, and Elizabeth Proctor, whom many may remember as the wife of The Crucible‘s protagonist, John Proctor. I cannot imagine having this sort of family history without being interested in the subject matter.

Howe conducted an interview with Wonders and Marvels that is well worth a listen, and via Twitter, she directed me to A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812, which she describes as part of the inspiration for Prudence Ballard’s diary in the novel. I look forward to reading more of her work. I know a book is really good when after I finish it, I have the strange wish that I had written it myself.

Related posts:

Is Stephenie Meyer the Next J.K. Rowling?
All Austen, All the Time
Tintern Abbey

Interred with Their Bones

Posted on by Dana

Cover of Interred with Their BonesJennifer Lee Carrell’s novel Interred with Their Bones is the story of Kate Stanley, accompanied by a series of helpful and untrustworthy sidekicks, who is searching for Shakespeare’s lost play Cardenio after being put on the scent of the play by her mentor, Rosalind Howard.

I wanted to like this book, but in the end, I wonder why Matthew Pearl alone of the writers I’ve read seems capable of writing a good literary thriller. Interred with Their Bones is a dizzying and sometimes quite poorly written reworking of The Da Vinci Code with Shakespeare at the center instead of the Holy Grail. It was a tedious read.

Let’s begin with characterization. Carrell suffers from the same problem that Dan Brown does with characterization. She fleshes out a few characters well enough to make them intriguing and somewhat believable, as Brown did with Sir Leigh Teabing, but her main character languishes, unknowable and ultimately impossible to sympathize with. Her characters Sir Henry Lee, the stage actor I imagined to be like a Patrick Stewart or Ian McKellen, both lions of the modern Shakespearean stage, was perhaps the most well-drawn character, with Athenaide Preston, a wealthy Shakespearean enthusiast, coming in a close second. The specter of Rosalind Howard never quite becomes as real or defined as I think Carrell wants her to be, and the remaining characters are somewhat flat caricatures straight out of a romance novel.

I think the premise of the book has merit, but it becomes bogged down in the argument over who Shakespeare really was. It seems clear to me that most people who raise this question have an agenda, and it would spoil too much of the plot (if you should want to read this book, which I don’t recommend), to tell you what Carrell’s agenda appears to be; however, I find the argument about Shakespeare’s supposed secret identity frustrating and tiresome, so perhaps it’s just me.

Another detail that rankles is that Kate is supposed to be a Shakespearean scholar. For someone we are supposed to believe is so knowledgeable about Shakespeare, she is startlingly slow on the uptake. Her opportunities both in scholarship and directing Shakespeare are implausible. Though Carrell explains this issue late in the novel, the answer is unsatisfactory. I think she might have done better to age her heroine a bit to make her success more believable. We are repeatedly told Kate is a prodigy by the characters around her as if they are trying to convince us to ignore all the evidence to the contrary. I believe Carrell wanted to make the book accessible to readers who are not familiar with Shakespeare, but I ultimately felt like I was being talked down to.

If you are looking for a light beach read or a quick mystery, this novel actually suffices better than The Da Vinci Code, but if you are a true fan of Shakespeare and a book lover, look elsewhere. I felt that Anthony Burgess’s novel Nothing Like the Sun was great, for a start.

Related posts:

The Heretic's Daughter
Mid-April Reading Update
Breaking Dawn

Shakespeare and Modern Culture

Posted on by Dana

One of my best students gave me Shakespeare and Modern Culture as an end-of-the-year gift, noting that he knew how I liked Shakespeare. Clearly, Marjorie Garber has a throrough understanding of and love for Shakespeare as well.

I found the chapters on Othello and The Merchant of Venice quite interesting—perhaps even fascinating. The other chapters had flashes of interesting information here and there; I liked Garber’s references to Freud and found his interpretations of the plays interesting enough that I might try to track them down. His psychoanalysis of the characters in Macbeth particularly interested me, and as I teach that play, reading Freud’s analysis might come in handy.

However, I never felt like this book gelled for me. I found it odd that Jane Smiley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning adaptation of King Lear received a passing reference (the author isn’t even noted except in the index, and the reference dropped in as though readers are expected to know what she’s talking about; lucky for me, I did, but would everyone who read this book know it?), while pages and pages were devoted to a MacBird, a much less well-known adaptation of Macbeth by Barbara Garson. Also puzzling is the fact that Garber says Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was published in 1996. Obviously I’m not an expert, so I looked this information up because it just didn’t seem right to me. Sure enough, I found it was published in 1966 (the movie appeared in 1990). Typo? Maybe, but it made me lose some confidence in her research. An Amazon reviewer found other factual errors I missed.

A personal pet peeve: the book has endnotes. I hate endnotes. If you need to footnote something, I prefer it be in the footer of the text. I will not flip back and forth between notes and the section I’m reading, so I wind up not reading the notes, and my guess is that any time a writer takes the time to provide annotations, it’s because they’re important. I just find the flipping back and forth too annoying. Of course, the choice of endnotes over footnotes may not be Garber’s choice, but her publisher’s.

I am not going to say this book was bad. I did learn some interesting things about the plays, but the book was not what I thought it would be. The dust jacket calls it “a magisterial new study whose premise is that Shakespeare makes modern culture and that modern culture makes Shakespeare.” I didn’t find the book delivered on that promise. I would have appreciated a brief summary of the plays. Garber assumes an absolute familiarity with the text, and I confess it’s been too long since I read The Tempest and I’m not sure if I’ve read Coriolanus, particularly after reading this book (I sure don’t remember it), so those two chapters were difficult for me to understand in light of my lack of familiarity with the plays. I suppose it is Garber’s prerogative to assume familarity with the texts she discusses, but I thought brief summaries might make her own text more accessible. I also wish Garber had discussed more of Shakespeare’s comedies. In all, it was satisfactory, but not as good as I was hoping it would be. In fact, by the end, I just wanted to finish it so I could read something else. In general, I found the reviews at Goodreads to be spot on.

Related posts:

Review: March: Book One, John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell
Shakespeare Challenge
The Hunger Games

Something Rotten

Posted on by Dana

Jasper Fforde’s novel Something Rotten is the fourth in his Thursday Next series. Famed Literary Detective and Head of Jurisfiction Thursday Next misses the real world and decides to leave fiction to see what she can do about uneradicating her husband, Landen Parke-Laine. Thursday learns in this installment that things are indeed much weirder than we can know.

While I have enjoyed the entire series, I found this book more confusing than the others. The various threads of the story don’t intertwine until the end, and by that time, I had forgotten enough of the details that I was still confused. Of course, I’m a slow reader, and it’s partly because of that fact that I had difficulty putting the ending together. A reader who finishes more quickly than I might fare better. Fforde is a book nerd’s writer. His allusions to literature and history and enjoyable and entertaining. I liked the book enough that I’ll continue to read more Fforde books, but I’m going to take a break from Fforde for a while and read something else.

My next book will be Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. Of course, I’m still working on Wilkie Collins’s novel The Woman in White on my iPhone. Because Francine Prose autographed my copy of this book, I don’t want to write in it, so I’ll post my reflections as I read here.

Related posts:

Reading Update
Review: U2 by U2, Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton, Larry Mullen, Jr.
Review: Elegy for Mary Turner: An Illustrated Account of a Lynching, Rachel Marie-Crane Williams

The Well of Lost Plots

Posted on by Dana

Jasper Fforde’s novel The Well of Lost Plots is the third installment of his Thursday Next series. Thursday winds up in the Well of Lost Plots at the end of Lost in a Good Book after her husband has been eradicated by the ChronoGuard. She is taking a well-earned break inside the pages of the novel Caversham Heights. Thursday becomes a JurisFiction agent and continues her apprenticeship with Miss Havisham of Great Expectations. Thursday soon learns that life inside books is as fraught with danger as life in the Outland, and she must look out for attacks on her memory, the Mispeling Vyrus, and a pagerunning minotaur on the loose.

Thursday’s problems are not resolved at the end of The Well of Lost Plots; in fact, if you’ll pardon the pun, the plot only thickens. I felt the storyline in this book jumped around a bit, but it has some genuinely funny moments. A reviewer on Goodreads described these books as beach books for book nerds, and now that I’m trying to find that review, I can’t; however, the reviewer was correct. Book lovers will enjoy all the inside jokes, but even readers who have not read the works of literature alluded to in this series will enjoy it. It’s wildly hilarious fun, and a good “what-if” alternate history story.

I am picking up the next book in this series, Something Rotten, as my new read.

Related posts:

Reading Update: September 25, 2010
TLC Book Tour: The Serpent of Venice, Christopher Moore
Review: The Devil's Cup: A History of the World According to Coffee, Stewart Lee Allen

Persuasion

Posted on by Dana

I need to begin this review by stating that I love Jane Austen. I had tried to read Persuasion twice before this final successful attempt. I think perhaps some books are suited to digesting in small bites. I admit when I feel I’m not making progress in a book, I sometimes put it aside for books that I think I might tear through. It doesn’t necessarily mean I am not enjoying the book so much as that I feel I’m not reading it quickly enough. This problem may be unique to me, but the solution has been to read the types of books I need to read slowly either in DailyLit or my iPhone.

I had stalled in Persuasion yet again some months back right about chapter 19. I liked it, and I really wanted to finish it. I recently decided to download it to my iPhone and read it in Stanza. Being able to read it in the dark and in bits on my iPhone enabled me to finish this book at last. I had already seen the movie, so I knew how things would end for Anne and Captain Wentworth. I enjoyed the penultimate chapter in which Captain Wentworth gives Anne the famous letter. The scene as acted in the 1995 production of Persuasion is what influenced me to pick up the book in the first place.

Anne is an excellent heroine: smart, kind, and thoughtful. I liked her much better than Emma or even Catherine Morland. I also liked the book’s message that true love lasts, and we can have second chances at happiness. I liked the other characters, too. Jane Austen is a deft skewer of social pretentiousness, and her Sir Walter Elliot was an excellent example of that sort who lives above his means and thinks he’s more important than he is.

This novel also highlights options available to women in the early nineteenth century. If Anne had remained unmarried, she would have been bound to spend the rest her of life with her family, who didn’t value her and whose company she tolerated rather than enjoyed. Certainly women who remained unmarried during this time had few options. Austen even insinuates that Anne might not have much choice but to marry her cousin, William Elliot, should her family wish it.  Anne struggles to say apart from William Elliot towards the end of the novel in order to avoid a marriage with him.

One thing I’ve always admired about Jane Austen novels is that she gives the reader a satisfying ending, making her characters happy. It feels good to close a Jane Austen novel because one can rest in the knowledge that the characters lived on and were happy. I suppose some might believe that’s unrealistic or trite, but it feels wonderful to escape into that world, which ultimately is one of the reasons I read books.

Related posts:

Review: Eleanor & Park, Rainbow Rowell
Review: Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng
Reading Update: September 11, 2010

Company of Liars

Posted on by Dana

Karen Maitland’s novel A Company of Liars is frequently compared to The Canterbury Tales. I think it’s an unfair comparison and one that almost made me put down the book. I think perhaps the only similarities the two works share are that Maitland’s travelers are also a ragtag group thrown together on a voyage (some of whom tell stories) and that they are set in roughly the same time period.

It is 1348 and England is gripped by the Plague. Nine travelers are thrown together on the road as they are escaping the dreaded disease. Each traveler has a secret and lives in fear that others will discover it. Meanwhile, they are pursued by bad luck, disease, and possibly even authorities as they make their way across England.

This book became an engaging read, but I will admit it took me a while to get into the book. I felt encouraged by some of the positive reviews I read and expected a real surprise ending; however, Maitland is careful to plant clues to enable careful readers to predict each traveler’s secret, and I was able to deduce that of the narrator, possibly preventing some of the surprise the other reviewers mentioned. It could be that I was reading The Hound of the Baskervilles at the same time and was primed for clues, but it seemed fairly easy, for the most part, for a careful reader to guess each traveler’s secret—even that of Narigorm, the creepy child who casts runes to tell the fortunes and seems to hold everyone in her thrall with the exception of the narrator, Camelot, who understands who the child is when the others refuse to see.

I would recommend the book only to readers who have a substantial interest in the Middle Ages; otherwise, the bleakness of the novel might prevent the reader from enjoying it. I didn’t catch any glaring historical errors, and Maitland helpfully provides a Historical Note and Glossary to help readers. I do have a quibble with a mythological element Maitland used, but I don’t want to give the problem away for readers who wish to read the book. If you wish to know, you can select the area that appears between the arrows in the following paragraph, and the text will be revealed.

>>The Morrigan had different guises and forms depending on the literature one reads, but she is associated with death at war, and I didn’t find her association with the deaths of the travelers to be congruent with my understanding of her function in mythology.<<

Aside from this quibble, I enjoyed the book, which became more engaging as I continued to read.

Related posts:

Review: Shelley's Ghost: Reshaping the Image of a Literary Family, Stephen Hebron and Elizabeth C. D...
TLC Book Tour: Pleasantville, Attica Locke
The Adventure of English

The Last Dickens

Posted on by Dana

Charles Dickens’s last novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood was incomplete at the time of Dickens’s death in 1870.  In fact, he had finished half the book, which had been published in installments, a common practice with Dickens novels.  When I heard Matthew Pearl’s lecture on this novel at the Margaret Mitchell House here in Atlanta last Monday, Pearl mentioned that reading books in installments is not something we as a reading public really understand.  Sure, we have to wait for a television series like Lost to enfold in installments, but books are published whole and entire nowadays, and the thrill of reading the book as the writer is actually finishing it — that there is the chance no one yet knows how it will all turn out — is not available to us as readers as it was in Dickens’s time.  To think — we will never know how his last novel turned out because no record of Dickens’s intentions with the novel has ever been found.  We have the gift and frustration of creating our own ending.  Perhaps it is for that reason, no matter how intrigued I was by the book based on reading Pearl’s novel, that I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to pick up The Mystery of Edwin Drood.  I do think not knowing would drive me crazy.

The hero of Pearl’s novel is James R. Osgood, one half of the publishing firm of Fields & Osgood, the Boston publishers of such luminaries as Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Emerson, and just about every other American writer of note at the time.  This novel completes what Pearl thinks of as a literary set: the heroes of his first novel, The Dante Club, were the writers themselves; the hero of his second, The Poe Shadow, an admiring reader of Poe’s; The Last Dickens completes the reading trinity with a publisher.   Pearl’s Osgood is a likeable fellow — a true champion of books, authors, and the reading public.  He travels to England following Dickens’s death in the hopes that he can discover something, anything about Dickens’s intentions regarding the ending of Drood, only to find himself embroiled in Dickens family drama and the the seedy underbelly of the opium trade.  Mysterious forces seem intent on discovering the ending of the novel for themselves either to pervert it toward their own ends or to destroy it.

Readers interested in learning more about Dickens, particularly the cult of celebrity surrounding his work, will enjoy this novel.  The glimpses into the reality of life in Victorian England and Boston are interesting as well.  Pearl’s characters seem so real that it may surprise you to read the historical note and discover several are invented for the book.  I know I had to use my Ancestry.com membership to look up James R. Osgood in the census and find out if he was ever able to marry Rebecca Sand.  One person asked Matthew Pearl about Dan Simmons’s new novel Drood, a thriller also inspired by Dickens’s last novel.  The question revolved around the interest in The Mystery of Edwin Drood as inspiration, which Pearl explained as the fact that it remains unfinished and was the last Dickens novel.  I wondered myself how both Pearl and Simmons felt upon arriving at such similar subject matter at the same time.  It is my hope that the two novels will help each other rather than serve as competition.  I know I am interested in reading Simmons’s novel now, and I’m not sure I would have been if Pearl hadn’t written The Last Dickens.

One thing I can say about Matthew Pearl is that he is one of the nicest and most personable writers you will ever meet.  I first crossed his path when I recommended The Dante Club to my students in a blog post.  He was appreciative and contacted me through my site, inviting me to hear his lecture upon the publication of The Poe Shadow.  He held a trivia contest at the lecture, which I won.  My prize was a manuscript page from The Dante Club (and it happened to be my favorite part of the book!).  When I reached the end of the line and was able to have my books signed, I introduced myself, to which Matthew exclaimed, “Oh, you’re Mrs. Huff!”  He signed my manuscript page, which I framed and hung on my classroom wall.  Recently, he invited me to read an advance copy of The Last Dickens, and because I’m so slow, I’m just finishing it — I had hoped to have finished it before the novel itself was actually published so I could be one of the first reviewers.  When I went to Matthew’s lecture at the Margaret Mitchell House, I was pleased that he remembered me and he asked about my students.  Not all authors are so appreciative of their fans.  I would read anything Matthew wrote, but truthfully, The Last Dickens is a good read that will appeal especially to book lovers.

Related posts:

Review: American Girls, Alison Umminger
Brave New World
Caleb's Crossing, Geraldine Brooks

Coming Up for Air

Posted on by Dana

Last night I finished reading George Orwell’s novel Coming Up for Air, which was a book club selection for our faculty book club longer ago than I’m going to admit.  I had to set it aside for a while, but I always intended to finish it – I’d read too much not to, but in all honestly, I was also enjoying it.  This book is the first book I read using Stanza, the free reading device on my iPhone.  I originally downloaded it on my iPod Touch (which was free with the purchase of my Mac back in August), but I had a great deal of difficulty getting it onto my iPhone later, and suffice it to say, I didn’t pick up the book again for a while.

The novel is the story of George Bowling, who wonders one day if you indeed can go home again and takes a trip to his hometown of Lower Binfield.  George’s voice is engaging – he is the sort of everyman who is easy to relate to even if you despise him at the same time, for he’s not a particularly likeable character.  When he sneaks off to his hometown, lying about his destination to a wife whom he feels will not understand his need to go back, he is confronted with one harsh change after another.  It becomes clear to the reader long before it becomes clear to George that his hometown as he knew it doesn’t exist anymore.

I think most readers are more familar with Orwell’s other books: 1984 and Animal Farm, but when the member of my book club selected this book, he said that sometimes it’s good to look at a writer’s lesser known works, and I agree this is the case with Coming Up for Air.  Writing the novel before World War II, Orwell is once again oddly prescient about the coming war and its impact on Britain.  It is perhaps the impending changes George senses on the horizon that drive him to see if there is one place in the world that hasn’t changed.  Though the reader can predict what George will find when he takes his journey, it is the journey that interests us.  How will George react to what he finds?  How will he change?  Interestingly enough, the answers to those questions are, at least in part, left unresolved.

I would recommend this book, but prepare yourself not to admire George much.  If liking the characters is important to your enjoyment of the book, you might steer clear of this one.  I will say, however, that even in disliking George for the most part, I did sympathize with him.  His feelings of powerlessness in a world careening into a different direction from that world of his youth are feelings I think most of us can recognize in ourselves.

Related posts:

Review: Obsure, Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure Read by Michael Ian Black
Review: Trigger Warning, Neil Gaiman
Review: Meddling Kids, Edgar Cantero

Lost in a Good Book

Posted on by Dana

I finished reading the second book in Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, Lost in a Good Book, in the early part of February, but I haven’t had a chance to review it until now.

In this book, Thursday is dealing with her newfound fame after her adventures in The Eyre Affair.  She is newly married to Landen Parke-Laine.  Potentially spoilery detail ahead.  You were warned.

Landen is eradicated by the “benevolent” folks at Goliath in order to force Thursday to help them retrieve their agent, Jack Schitt, from the pages of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.”  In order to learn how to jump into books, Thursday is apprenticed to none other than Miss Havisham herself, who is a delightful character in the hands of Fforde.

Generally speaking, I liked this book even better than the first and am enjoying the third, The Well of Lost Plots even more than the previous two.  If you are a book nerd, do yourself a favor and check out this series.  The allusions and wordplay will make it worth your while alone, but aside from that, the storyline itself is engaging.

Related posts:

Review: How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question, Michael Schur
Sherlock Holmes: A Case of Identity, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Review: Vietnamerica, GB Tran