If on a winter's night a traveler (Calvino) Well, a very interesting book, with a neat hook, that started with promise, but ended up dragging to the end. At the beginning of the book, the author talks to the reader and tells them to sit back and enjoy the book. In the first chapter we start reading about a train traveler on a winter's night who disembarks at a tiny train station where some suspense ensues, and just as the chapter is getting to a climax, it ends. The first line of the book is "If on a winter's night a traveler". The next chapter is told from the viewpoint of "the reader". The reader has been reading this book about the traveler and suddenly when he gets to the climax, there's an error in the book and the pages begin repeating themselves! Over and over they repeat, the only pages being the pages he's already read. Anxious to finish the story and to get a book that is not defective, the reader takes it back to the bookstore where he bought it. The bookseller is so very sorry and says they have had a few books like this of Calvino's latest and tells him the correct book that finishes the story is actually by a Polish author. The reader runs into a pretty woman there for the same reason....to return her defective Calvino book. Her name is Ludmilla and she becomes known as the second reader. So, the reader and Ludmilla exchange a bit of talk, and he asks for her phone number so they can compare the end of the story when they get to it. The next chapter begins in what each of them think is a continuation of the Calvino book, but in actuality, it is an entirely different book with the first line "outside the town of Malbork". At first the reader is dismayed that this is a totally different book than the first one, but he again gets caught up in the story, which is a completely different story, which again ends abruptly right at a climatic point! In this case, the remainder of the book's pages are blank! The reader and Ludmilla get together to try and get to the bottom of things, and then the book gets rather perverse. Every other chapter, the author basically talks to the true reader about reading and writing...or we hear the story of a crazy man whose life mission is to go around creating these false books...or we read the diary of an author who has HAD some of his books hijacked and mistranslated into completely different stories in other languages. So, after each one of those chapters, we get another intriguing chapter of another new book, with a different first line. This goes on until we have read ten different stories that all end right at a crucial point. We never find out the ending of any of the stories or the fates of those characters. It was a clever idea, and people have called Calvino a genius in writing this book, but I felt it got too bogged down with his droning on and on about the expectations of both readers and authors in his "in between" chapters. And, of course, I figured out early on that the first sentence of each book made one long paragraph that kind of made sense, but didn't tie anything together. The reader and Ludmilla have a bit of a love story and are married by the end. For me, I was left really just wanting to know the ending of about eight of the stories. :-) I'm glad I read the book, because it was on a list of "must reads" that I'd been putting off. Done and done and I'm none the worse for it, but really none the wiser either. :-)

Finished: Housekeeping (Robinson) I'm having to let this book sink in. Very beautiful prose, at times bordering on stream of conscious that gets a bit tedious, but very moving piece on how profoundly the loss of loved ones affects a family, specifically, two young girls left behind when their mother commits suicide. This remembering of her mother by the narrator, Ruthie, as a teenager, resonated very strongly in me:

There is so little to remember of anyone--an anecdote, a conversation at a table. But every memory is turned over and over again, every word, however chance, written in the heart in the hope that memory will fulfill itself, and become flesh, and that the wanderers will find a way home, and the perished, whose lack we always feel, will step through the door finally and stroke our hair with dreaming, habitual fondness, not having meant to keep us waiting long.

I guess this is really pretty much a depressing tale. The girls, Ruthie and Lucille, one year apart in age, are left on the porch of their grandmother's house in a tiny town in the "west" near a huge lake by their mother who proceeds to go and drive her car off a cliff into the lake. This is the same lake that her own father had died in years before when the train he was riding in (on the railroad he worked for) plunged off the bridge traveling over the lake and perished in the depths of the water. I suppose that would set the tone for the mother's life. In any event, she doesn't even let her own mother know that she's leaving the girls there, and they spend hours on the porch alone, thinking their mother is coming back before their grandmother gets home and finds them. The girls are then raised by their grandmother for a few years until she passes away. Then, their mother's sister, who has become a homeless drifter, comes back to town when she hears of her mother's death and she attempts to continue raising the girls who are now in their teens. It's really a recipe for disaster since the aunt, Sylvie, isn't really "all there" herself. Ruthie grows close to her, however, and starts to become just like her, while Lucille determines to break away and lead a more normal life. In the end, Lucille removes herself and goes to live with one of her teachers. When the sheriff informs Sylvie that there will be a hearing to see about the removal of Ruthie from her care, Sylvie and Ruthie burn down the house and run away in the night across the huge expanse of the railroad bridge!! They barely make it across by daylight, where they hop on the morning train just as it begins to cross. Sylvie is going to take Ruthie and teach her to become a drifter. The rest of the town, including Lucille, is left thinking that Sylvie and Ruthie perished off the bridge into the lake which had already claimed the lives of Sylvie's father and Ruthie's mother. They don't ever let Lucille know any differently since they don't want to be caught. I totally did not understand the ending, and had to reread it three times. sigh. Ruthie was just kind of rambling on about what Lucille must be doing and how maybe she was waiting in a cafe in Boston for her to show up or her mother, but they never would? Other than the kind of weird ending, there were so many beautiful passages in the book. I'll put a few more of them down. I think I definitely need to read a book that isn't so depressing the next time around, though!

I always love descriptions involving wind. Here, a description of how the spirit passes on:

....just as the wind in the orchard picks up the leaves from the ground as if there were no other pleasure in the world but brown leaves, as if it would deck, clothe, flesh itself in flourishes of dusty brown apple leaves, then drops them all in a heap at the side of the house and goes on. 

Ruthie describing her family: Then, too, for whatever reasons, our whole family was standoffish. This was the fairest description of our best qualities, and the kindest description of our worst faults. 

And this last one I just visualized instantly because I have some of these exact old pictures that belonged to my parents with the same black paper on the back having been torn from their old photo albums to give to us:

There was a shoe box full of old photos, each with four patches of black, felty paper on the back. These had clearly been taken from a photograph album, because they were especially significant or because they were not especially significant. 

Finished:  Fool Me Once (Coben) Another great page-turner by one of my favorite current authors, with one of his twistiest endings yet! Maya is a former helicopter pilot who fought in Afghanistan, but was discharged from the military after accidentally ordering the shooting of a vehicle with civilians in it while trying to rescue some of her comrades. Now home in the states, she suffers from PTSD nightmares while trying to raise her two year old daughter, Lily. And, that's not the worst of it. Maya's husband has been murdered. :-( As if that wasn't tragic enough, Maya's sister had been murdered while she was in Afghanistan. Needless to say, her world is reeling. When Maya finds out that the same gun was used to kill her sister and her husband, she is determined to figure out what is going on, all on her own. Matters only become more complicated when Maya views her secret nanny cam and the impossible happens....a man sits down on the couch and plays with Lily...and Lily knows him. When he turns towards the camera, Maya sees Joe's face!!! Could he possibly be alive? As the mystery deepens, Maya speeds around figuring things out. The ending is quite a shocker as we find out first who killed Joe, and then why...and then what actually happens to Maya in the end. I'm always so disappointed when my Harlan Coben books are done!!!

Finished: Arrowsmith (Lewis) Pulitzer Prize winning book about a scientist named Martin Arrowsmith that took me forever to read because it was truly so boring. I believe Sinclair Lewis is more acclaimed for his Babbitt and Main Street, but since he didn't win the Pulitzer for either of those he was maybe awarded it for Arrowsmith as a consolation? Anyway, none of the characters, including Martin, are very compelling or likeable, so that always makes it hard for me to be interested in them or care about them. Martin goes through medical school with a bunch of guys, most who are only concerned about how much money they can make in the future. Martin, on the other hand, just wants to work on experiments in the lab. His mentor is Dr. Gottlieb, who is the one professor who understands him because he is also interested more in making the scientific discoveries than getting rich being a doctor. Anyway, Martin does meet someone, Leora, fall in love, move to her podunk hometown, and become the town doctor for awhile, but his heart isn't into it. He does eventually end up back in a major lab and discovers a potential cure for the bubonic plague. He travels to a tropical island that is being ravaged by the plague and become relatively famous when his cure works. Leora, however, who had insisted on going with him, becomes sick and dies. Martin makes his way back to the states and marries a rich woman who wants to change him from the all-hours-of-the-night lab worker to a socializing socialite. He eventually chucks that life (and their young son) for a cabin in the woods to go back to his first love, working on experiments hoping to cure another disease. I've obviously left out alot of detail, but it simply wasn't that interesting to me. So glad it's over! I think I'll read a page-turner next. :-)