Finished: Palace Walk (Mahfouz) Finally!! Real life got in the way and it seems like it took me forever to read this very good book about an Egyptian patriarch who keeps his wife and children in line through tyranny and hypocrisy. This is the first book in a trilogy. I'll probably read all three, since this was a very moving story despite the early 1900's traditions that had Sayyid Ahmad treating his sons with coldness and harshness out of his misguided idea of tough love in making them men...and keeping his wife and daughters cloistered inside their home, never allowed to show their faces outside...not even to go to worship! However, when out working at his successful store, or spending time with his life-long friends and other women at night, Sayyid Ahmad is friendly, smiling, loving and very respected by his peers. It's truly sad to see the way he treats his devoted wife, Amina, and his children, Yasin, Khadija, Fahmy, Aisha and Kamal. Both daughters are married off to brothers of the same family, and by the end of the story are pregnant and/or giving birth. I imagine their stories and those of their children will expand in the next book. The oldest son, Yasin, follows in his father's footsteps as a philanderer after his marriage. Kamal is still just a ten year old school boy going to school, but very precocious. And Fahmy is a nineteen year old university law student who has honorable ideals that end in tragedy for him as the Egyptians in his city began a revolution against the English who are in control. When English troops make encampment right outside their own home, young and foolish Kamal actually befriends the soldiers with his singing. He thinks they are friends, but for them he is just like a little pet. After the Egyptians prevail and the leader they were protesting for is finally released, Fahmy participates in a peaceful, sanctioned demonstration of happiness, but is shot down and killed by disgruntled English soldiers who didn't like being beat. Sadly, Sayyid Ahmad had spent the last several weeks furious with and not speaking to his son because he knew Fahmy defied his father and refused to swear that he would not participate in any demonstrations. Just the very morning of his death, with peace seemingly on Egypt's horizon, Fahmy had gone to his father and apologized for his defiance and his father had very gruffly replied to him. Fahmy had just been happy that his father had even spoken to him. How sad that is how he went to his death. :-( We get alot of introspection about why Sayyid Ahmad is the way he is, and it's very nice writing, but hard to fathom that people actually lived this way. I know they did though. We also see Amina and her feelings and obedience in great detail, and though we don't understand it, we do respect her. What else can she do? Anyway, I'm thinking the next book will open with the aftermath of Fahmy's death! I think I'll read a few other books before diving back into this world though!

Finished: The Farm (Smith) Pretty good page turner by the same author who wrote the Child 44 trilogy that I really liked! The Farm wasn't quite as good, but still a book I enjoyed. It's about a twenty-something son, Daniel, in the UK whose parents have moved to retire on a farm in Sweden. Daniel, who is gay, has not been to visit his parents in the year since they've gone because he's promised his partner that he would tell his parents about them the next time he sees them. So, in the time that he hasn't seen them, apparently alot has happened to his parents! Daniel gets a call from his father in a panic one night telling him that his mother has gone a bit off the deep end, has had delusions, thinks there's a conspiracy of people out to get her, and that she was put in a mental hospital, but had convinced the doctors there she was lucid and had checked herself out. Daniel is in shock, but immediately books a ticket to head to Sweden! While he's at the airport, he gets an equally emphatic phone call from his mother saying, don't believe a word your father says if he calls you! He's in on a conspiracy to try and have me committed! I've just landed in London if you'll pick me up at the airport. Flummoxed, Daniel doesn't know who or what to believe! Neither of his parents has ever been an alarmist, and as a matter of fact, they've never even fought in front of him. Before he can call his father back, and because he's already at the airport, Daniel sees his mother almost immediately. She's thin, ragged and looking afraid. She insists that Daniel take her where she can start at the beginning and tell him the entire story. What ensues is a tale of possible sexual abuse and abduction and death of a teenage girl who has been adopted by their neighbors at the farm. The problem is, their neighbor farmer is also a town bigwig who happens to be best friends with the mayor, the police chief, and the psychiatric doctor! Daniel's mother has arrived with a satchel full of evidence such as newspaper clippings, written letters, etc. When Daniel's father keeps trying to call in the middle of their conversations, Daniel's mother tells him they must find another place to talk because he doesn't know his father anymore, he's changed. He's lying and will actually be on a plane to London to capture her. Daniel takes his mother to a hotel to hear the rest of her far-fetched story and promises her he will think only in her best interests. Sure enough, Daniel's father arrives in London very quickly, along with the psychiatrist who had committed his mother. Daniel doesn't know what to think, but he does take his mother to a local facility for her own safety as her behavior is getting more and more erratic. His mother considers this a huge betrayal, especially after her husband and former doctor arrive. She quickly falls into a state of non-communication and not eating. After a couple of months, Daniel is despondent at his mother's condition and feels terribly guilty. He decides to fly to the farm in Sweden and see if there is anything to his mother's story and all her evidence. He does meet the next door neighbor and sees how controlling a man he is. ****SPOILERS**** If you are reading this and don't want to know the ending, then quit reading now! So, even though the man is very unpleasant, as his mother described, Daniel finds out that he never harmed his adopted daughter, Mia. Instead, Mia got tired of being controlled, and one night when the mayor, her father's friend, comes on to her, she runs away with her boyfriend. She'd actually grown close to Daniel's mother, who had told her the story of running away from her own childhood home in Sweden when she was falsely suspected of drowning her best friend in a fit of jealousy! Daniel finally tracks down Mia, who is living with her boyfriend, and pleads for her to come back to the UK and see his mother so she can see she's alive. He's convinced it will help her out of her psychosis. While in Sweden, Daniel also visits his grandfather, who he has never met, since his mother ran away at 16. He sees a creepy shed that his mother described in the notes of her evidence as being a shed on the property of their neighboring farmer. Daniel goes to the shed, and seeing the inside, realizes that it was a secret room that his grandfather kept. He suddenly realizes that everything was in his mother's head, all her experiences after she moved back to Sweden, because her own father had sexually abused her when she turned 14!! The grandfather makes no apologies, in a very spine-chilling conversation with Daniel. Daniel wants to get the heck out of Dodge, and take Mia back with him to help his mother back to sanity. At the very end, after Mia spends hours talking with his mother, for the first time in months, his mother wants to see both him and his father to talk. Very eerie book at the end. So sad that it was all in her head, but then I guess a somewhat happy ending as she's able to realize it all came from what happened to her as a teenager. As it turns out...there never even WAS a best friend who was drowned. Even that girl was the figment of his mother's imagination who she made up to get through the abuse.

Finished: The Widow (Barton) Creepy page-turner about the widow of a man accused of kidnapping and killing a 3 year old girl. :-(  When I read the flap of the book, it just indicated mystery, etc. I didn't realize I'd be getting into the story of a man who started off with pornography and escalated to having to kidnap a youngster. Anyway, the book does keep you guessing and wondering if the guy was really guilty, since he gets off during his trial! Told from many different viewpoints, the widow, the detective, the reporter, the mother of the missing child and the husband himself, the book goes back and forth in time until finally, by the end of the story, you know for certain that he did it. Just when they're about to re-arrest him, though, his wife, pushes him in front of a bus and he dies. It turns out, he had confessed to her a few days before, after four years of insisting he was innocent, and even taken her to wear he had buried the little body. So, the story ends with the detective finally able to give the mother of the child some closure. However, the story material itself was just a bit too creepy and depressing for me!

Finished: Honey in the Horn (Davis) Another Pulitzer Prize winner, but oh my, it's never taken me two weeks to read a 380 page book before! (well, maybe in high school or something, but not since I started this project!) Anyway, it's really not a bad book, just very descriptive, long, prose. The book is about settlers in Oregon, and this is apparently the only book about Oregon that has won the Pulitzer. The story follows a teenage, orphan boy, Clay, who has worked for a man and his family as a ranch hand since he was a young boy. When the father asks Clay to sneak an empty gun into his miscreant son, Wade, in jail, in hopes that Wade will attempt to escape and be killed, thus putting an end to the father's embarrassed misery, Clay does as he's told. Of course, Wade Shively is so feared by the jailers, that all he has to do is wave the gun at them and they let him go!! So, the father's plan doesn't go as hoped and then Clay must go on the run, away from the law, who now knows he helped Wade escape, and away from Wade himself, who goes after Clay for taking his horse and rifle when he goes on the run. As Clay makes his way across the Oregon mountains and down onto the Coos Bay coast, he meets a host of characters, from farmers, to ranchers, to wheat-cutters, to down-on-their luck settlers, to Native Americans trying to make their own way, to a horse-trader and his lovely teenager daughter, Luce. Of course, Clay and Luce fall for each other, but each have secrets they keep from each other: Clay, his part in Wade Shively's escape, and Luce, the fact that SHE is actually the person who killed the man who Wade was finally in jail for killing, not Wade. The underlying story is actually pretty good, but it flows along about as fast as the slow-moving wagontrains ramble through the harsh land. There are really lovely descriptions of the landscape, flora and fauna, wild life, coast and mountains and valleys, especially if Oregon holds a dear place in your heart, which is does in mine! However, the book just dragged a bit! Clay and a few of the other settlers he's started traveling with do eventually have a confrontation with Wade which results in the hanging of Wade Shively for making another attempt on someone's life.  Ironically, they are wrong again and Wade only shot into the air, but Western justice is meted out. Poor Wade. Anyway, I'm glad I read the book, though I can't say it was my favorite. I think I'll slowly keep on my path of reading as many Pulitzer Prize winners as I can! Still slowly making my way through the bible too!

Finished: The Forgetting Time (Guskin) The exploration of souls reincarnating themselves into young children is the crux of this book about a four year old boy, Noah, who is plagued with nightmares of the water, and is always asking his single mom when he can go be with his other mother. The mom, Janie, a successful architect, but at her wits end, finally resorts to consulting a psychiatrist when Noah is kicked out of preschool for talking about things he shouldn't...like how guns smell when they are fired, and how spells are cast in Harry Potter, etc. None of these things have ever been discussed with Noah by his mom or anyone else she knows, and the fear of water and nightmares just keep getting worse and worse. When a psychiatrist wants to medicate her young son for schizophrenia, Janie takes the desperate measure of consulting another psychiatrist, Dr. Anderson...one who has dedicated his entire neuro-science career to traveling the world and meeting young children who would appear to have the souls of other dead people in them. In many of the countries, like India, the people actually accept this idea and the family of the child will get to know the family of the deceased, once they figure out who it is. Most of the children, though, outgrow "being" the other person by the time they are six or seven, and go on with their current life. Dr. Anderson knows that in America he'll have a much tougher time convincing parents, especially the ones of the soul who has inhabited Noah's body that such a thing is possible. And, sadly, Dr. Anderson, who is sixty-six, has been diagnosed with a kind of aphasia which has already started robbing words from him. The brilliant man has trouble coming up with the correct words for things, and he's only going to get worse over the next year until he becomes completely dependent on someone else to live. In the meantime, though, he's determined to help Janie and Noah. Dr. Anderson is able to get out of Noah that his name is Tommy and what area of the country he lived in. He begins searching obituaries for any child named Thomas who may have drowned or died in the years since Harry Potter came out! They find a family whose nine year old son has been missing and presumed dead for seven years. The mother, Denise, has never fully recovered and just goes through the motions of life. The father no longer lives in the house. And, the younger brother, Charlie, now fifteen, is a teenager basically raising himself and lonely for his parents' attention. When Janie and Dr. Anderson take Noah to the house, he immediately recognizes it, and when he sees Denise, he throws his arms around her legs crying, "mama, mama". It's all very emotional for Denise and Charlie, but Noah says too many things and knows too many things for them not to believe. As they sit around, pretty much in shock, talking about how this could be possible, Noah slips out the back and makes his way over to the house of the person who killed him!!! Acckk!! As it turns out, Tommy was on his bike heading to a friend's house seven years before when the fourteen year old brother of another friend stopped him and said, hey, want to come fire my gun? The fourteen year old, who was verbally abused by his father, just wanted someone to show off to. He promised Tommy he could have a turn shooting the rifle. As Tommy was setting up the third can for Pauly on the side of an old well, Pauly decided to switch his perfect aim from the can to the well bucket. He fired the gun and the bullet ricocheted off the metal bucket and hit Tommy in the back, felling him at once. Panicked, thinking he'd killed Tommy, and knowing his own father would probably kill him, Pauly threw Tommy's body into the well. As he was leaving, he heard Tommy yelling for help! He's wasn't dead! Pauly looked around for a rope, but found nothing to help. Figuring that by the time he came back with help that Tommy would be dead, he just left him to drown. :-( So, little four year old Noah goes over, knocks on the door and confronts now twenty-one year old Pauly, really freaking him out by asking him why he shot him and threw him in the well! Pauly runs out of the house and into the fields, and Noah returns back to Tommy's old backyard and climbs up into his and Charlie's old tree house. By now Janie has called the police to find the missing Noah, and instead, they find Pauly who confesses to what he did years before. Charlie gets an idea of where Noah might be and sure enough, finds him in the tree house. They reminisce a bit, and Denise hears them. This makes her open to embracing Noah more readily and Denise is the only person Noah wants when he then has an asthma attack and is rushed to the hospital. Janie is reeling by all the developments, but Noah throws her a crumb when he asks her not to leave the room either. After they stay for the funeral and burial of Tommy's remains, which were found in the well, Dr. Anderson and Janie tell Noah that it's time to go home now, and he consents, but first he wants Denise to give him a bath...the first bath he's had in over a year due to his fear of the water!! She gives him the bath and then sends him on his way. The families promise to stay in touch. They do stay in touch by phone a couple of times, but by the time Noah is six, when Denise comes to visit, he doesn't recognize her at all. Janie just has to tell him that this is an old friend he met a while before. Denise is upset, but realizes it's what's best for Noah and she is finally able to say goodbye to Tommy. She and Charlie are in a much better and open place now than before as well. It was a pretty good page-turning book...especially when Noah went to confront Pauly and we didn't know the truth yet of how Tommy had died. It was all a horrible accident, though, and at the end of the book, Denise goes to the prison to visit Pauly and hear what happened. She asks him to write to her. Interspersed before every couple of chapters were real-life accounts taken from a book written by a doctor who actually did travel the world studying reincarnation in young children. All in all, a pretty good book!

Finished: Find Her (Gardner) The latest book by one of my favorite suspense authors! This time she revisited Detective D.D. Warner as she tried to break the case of a newly kidnapped young woman who had been kidnapped five years before as well and kept captive for over 400 days. The young woman, Flora, survived the first kidnapping physically, but emotionally she has turned into somewhat of a vigilante trying to make amends for some of the things she was forced to do while kidnapped. Five years before, her kidnapper, Jacob Hess, had been captured by another of Gardner's mainstay characters, FBI agent Kimberly Quincy. I'd love another Kimberly Quincy story, by the way. And, Kimberly was introduced in a book after we first go to know her father, FBI profiler Pierce Quincy, who became another recurring character in Gardner's books, along with the detective he aided, Rainie.  Anyway, that was a tangent, but I just love Gardner's books, and all these characters that she keeps bringing back over and over. :-) So, D.D. calls up Kimberly Quincy to get some insight on what happened when she rescued Flora five years before and that helps D.D. figure out what's going on. Flora has been abducted while out in a bar trying to hunt down the person who had kidnapped college student Stacey Summers only three months before. In the process, Flora is taken again herself, but it can't be by Jacob Hess because Flora actually blew his brains out when Kimberly rushed in to save her. So....turns out there was another person who Jacob Hess had been attached to when he was driving Flora around the country in the back of his 18-wheeler, much of the time confined in a pine coffin. Jacob had a daughter whose sociopathic tendencies may have actually outweighed her father's. These five years later, she's out for revenge on Flora for killing her father. So, it all comes to a head with Flora helping to rescue Stacey and Flora and D.D. together bringing down the psycho daughter. At the end, Flora finally realizes that she can try living her life for the future instead of in the past.

Finished: The Year of Magical Thinking (Didion) Joan Didion's memoir of the year after her husband, writer John Dunne's, sudden death. For some reason I was thinking this book would be more uplifting, but it was really a study in the depth of grief, many of the experiences so similar to what I experienced after my brother's death. Things like this "One day when I was talking on the telephone in his office I mindlessly turned the pages of the dictionary that he had always left open on the table by the desk. When I realized what I had done I was stricken: what word had he last looked up, what had he been thinking?" I can't tell you how real a moment something like that is. Well, I mean, you understand if you have lost someone close to you. Anyway, in writing what her first year without her husband of forty years was like, Didion also writes "Until now I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention." I thought that was very profound as well and wonder if I've been grieving for almost twenty years, but not yet dealing with the grief? Hmm... In Didion's book, the other horrifying event was that her newly married daughter happened to be in the ICU battling pneumonia which had morphed into life-threatening sepsis. I'm sure the stress of that added to her husband's heart attack. How completely shocking and awful for Joan Didion. :-( I'm honestly surprised she was able to write about her experiences, but I'm glad she did. When she writes about bounding into the house, eager to talk to John about something from her day, only to realize that he wasn't there to talk to, I know that exact feeling. I remember so completely intuitively wanting to call my brother after seeing Titanic to compare notes, only to realize, yet again, that he wasn't there to talk to. Anyway....a very deep and moving book, but certainly one that takes me back to all these thoughts rather than propelling me forward!

Finished: The Fixer (Malamud) Pulitzer Prize winning novel about, Yakov Bok, a Jewish man in 1911 Russia who is falsely accused of killing a young Christian boy, and imprisoned in detestable conditions before finally being brought to trial! The book ends as Yakov is finally being carried by carriage to his trial, so book readers never know his fate (though it is assumed that he will be found guilty, even though there is no evidence against him). In fact, The Fixer is based on the infamous real life story, imprisonment, trial and release of Russian Jewish man, Menahem Beilis. In real life, enough people, both Jewish and non-Jewish, apparently cried out for justice when it was obvious that Beilis had been falsely accused of a "blood ritual" killing of a young boy. In the book, very few people cry out, and some who do are actually imprisoned themselves, but there is a lawyer who believes in Yakov Bok, so we are led to believe there might be hope for the right verdict, but most likely not. Throughout his horrific prison trials, the prosecutor tries to get Yakov to confess many times, telling him it will go easier on him. In reality, the prosecutor actually suspects the child's mother of being involved in the murder, but since he's got a Jew in prison and Tsarist Russia was getting uncomfortable with giving Jewish people their rights, the prosecutor intends to make an example of Yakov Bok. Meanwhile, Yakov deeply examines both is life and the bigger world that he has been living in. The book is really a wider statement on how people who are feared are terribly mistreated. I guess it was a good Pulitzer choice, but again, it was one of those very depressing books that makes you question where the goodness in the world is or was.

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.