Unpleasant News

                                                               

Neil Gaiman, author of some of my favorite novels, has been very credibly accused of a variety of non-consensual sexual encounters with a number of young women. The details are sickening.  

I'm not likely to stop reading or listening to his works, but it's deeply saddening to think that an author I've let whisper in my ear (via audiobook) as I fall asleep, is capable of such nastiness.

Perhaps he can get a job in the forthcoming administration.

Good Omens -- the MiniSeries

After binge-reading Educated (see yesterday's post), I binge- watched Good Omens. Five or six enthralling hours that took me from from the Garden of Eden to what might have been Armageddon but, thanks to an angel and a demon and a witch and a computer-illiterate dork and the Anti-Christ himself, wasn't.

I've read/listened to the book multiple times and was pleased at how much of the original dialogue and narrative was preserved in the series. There were some omissions--understandable--and some additions--delightful. After all, the series had Gaiman himself doing the writing.

And the casting! Every character was perfect. But if any one was more perfect than the others, it would be David Tennant as Crowley, the demon with the catwalk swagger. 

The whole thing exceeded every expectation. I rarely like adaptations of books I've loved, but this was just right.

I don't know how it would seem to someone who wasn't already familiar with the story. John isn't, and he isn't a fantasy fan either. But he started watching with me then dozed off and was hopelessly lost in the (admittedly intricate) story when he awoke. 

I'll watch it again.  And again.

Three Books

How can you resist a line like "She called for her fiancé and told him not to take on so, and that they would still be married, even if he was but a prince and she a queen, and she chucked him under his pretty chin and kissed him until he smiled."

And then she donned her armor and rode off to awaken a sleeping princess.

Snow White meets Sleeping Beauty is this wonderfully imagined (and beautifully illustrated) retelling of two iconic fairy tales by Neil Gaiman.

It's not Disney, not by a long stretch. I loved it.

I can't remember who recommended I Capture the Castle to me but I really enjoyed it. Don't be put off by the sappy cover. It's not a romance novel -- though there is romance in it. It's a bit like The Constant Nymph -- an extremely eccentric father, a famous writer who has run out of money and is unable to write a second book, and his family who are struggling to manage in the crumbling castle which the writer rented when he had money.

Actually, they are all of them rather eccentric from the ex-artists' model stepmother who communes with nature in the nude, to Rose, who declares, "...for some time now , I've been considering selling myself. If necessary, I shall go on the streets" to her younger sister who tells her she can't go on the streets in the depths of Suffolk.  

The younger sister Cassandra is the narrator and the book is told through her journals. It's delightful!

It was Katy Gilmore of her spirits rose who piqued my curiosity about Penelope Lively. The Purple Swamp Hen is a wonderful and varied assortment of stories. I think my favorite was "License to Kill" in which a very elderly woman and the young woman who is her nice but patronizing caregiver, are on a routine shopping trip.

In the midst of small talk, the young woman says, "I expect you were a teacher, Pauline, were you?" said Cally kindly.

Pauline finished her coffee. "No, dear, I was a spy." She collected her bag, her stick. "Well, we'd better get on, I suppose."

Boom! I was completely hooked. Highly recommended.

Reading

Carol Shields was a wonderful writer -- illuminating all the corners of quiet, unregarded lives. I wrote about The Stone Diaries some time ago and have just now finished The Box Garden.  It is the story of a woman whose husband left her long ago and who has built a quietly happy life for herself and her son. Her mother's impending wedding sets a number of events in motion and I found myself reading eagerly to see what would happen.

Would she find happiness with Eugene, the orthodontist? Would she ever come to terms with her relationship with supremely unlovable mother. (The mother is an unforgettable character.) And what about the mysterious Brother Adam, with whom she has carried on a correspondence for years? Suffice it to say that all the questions are dealt with in a satisfactory way.

I can't quite put my finger on what it is I like so much about Shields' work -- heaven knows that the thumbnail sketch I've just given wouldn't tempt me to read.  

Perhaps it's the crystalline quality of the prose -- the prose that makes the most ordinary things shine with an inner light of their own. 

                                       ***

And then there's Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. This is a re-reading -- or re-listening -- and it only gets better each time. The audio book is excellent- a bravura performance.

Essentially, it's the story of the Apocalypse, complete with the Anti-Christ,  the Four Horsemen, showers of frogs, the rising of Atlantis, and assorted other signs of portents. The Battle of Good and Evil was never so well imagined -- nor so well resolved.

Pratchett and Gaiman's antic humor has free rein here -- the Hell Hound that is sent as a companion to the Antichrist becomes a scruffy little mongrel who finds he really enjoys chasing rabbits more than lost souls. An angel and a demon who have been on Earth for thousands of years, attempting to influence mankind to the Good or the Evil, often have lunch together and compare notes on their respective employers.

It's a big, sprawling, wild ride of a book -- and I'll probably listen to it again before long, just to savor again all the many good bits.  

The Graveyard Book

Well, what a pleasant surprise! I've been letting Neil Gaiman read me to sleep at night with his View from the Cheap Seats (I listened to it and blogged about it back when I was doing time at the nursing home/rehab unit but am totally ready to hear it again. In fact, he mentions so many intriguing books and authors that I'm probably going to have to get myself a print copy so I can take notes -- but I digress . . .) and his acceptance speech when The Graveyard Book won the Newbery Award reminded me that I had a copy lurking somewhere.

Turns out, it's an unread copy. I'm not sure what the circumstances were -- did I buy it and shelve it because I was in the middle of other things? Whatever, it's a nice surprise.

It's a riff on Kipling's Jungle Book and Mowgli , the boy raised by wolves and taught (or threatened) by other animals in the jungle. The Graveyard Book is the story of Bod, a boy living in a graveyard and tended by a lively -- make that a friendly contingent of ghosts. He is guarded by a vampire, mentored by a werewolf, befriended by a witch, captured by ghouls, and pursued by the man Jack, the same man that killed Bod's family when Bod was just a toddler.

It should be terrifying. I mean, this is a children's book, for goodness sake. But look at the fairy tales many of us grew up on -- the evil witches, the children abandoned in the forest, the casual cruelty . . . and then they cut off his head . . .

In his acceptance speech, Gaiman talks about his boyhood as an avid reader, a haunter of the library:

". . .fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had rules and could be understood; stories had been a way of learning about life without experiencing it, or perhaps of experiencing it as an eighteenth-century poisoner dealt with poisons, taking them in tiny doses, such that the poisoner could cope with ingesting things that would kill someone who was not inured to them. Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it."

The book is wonderful -- full of wonder -- with an ending that left me with a smile on my lips and a lump in my throat -- a perfect ending, in other words.

Now I just have to get the listening version . . . because hearing Gaiman read it will make it all the better.

For the Journey

I love this little book.  Gaiman had already whispered the words in my ear -- they are found in one of his collections that I have on Audible -- but Charles Vess's wonderful illustrations illuminate the journey through a land that is a composite of all the fairy tales and myths that I grew up reading.

I'm already imagining reading this to my granddaughter -- once she's old enough to know some of the fairy tales referenced in the picture below.  I see Puss in Boots, the Giant from Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, the Three Little Pigs, Cinderella's pumpkin coach and her glass slipper, the Little Goose Girl. the Frog Prince, and are those the White Rabbit's ears I spy?

This beautiful little book absolutely captivated me in a way I find hard to explain. The instructions are simple and explicit -- "if any creature tells you that it is hungry, feed it . . . trust the wolves but do not tell them where you are going. . . Trust your heart and trust your story . . ."

Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology

I grew up reading Greek mythology and knew those gods and goddesses and their carrying on backwards and forwards. But somehow I was never much attracted to the tales of the Norse pantheon -- for one thing the names were so hard to pronounce (and there are so many of them, even for inanimate objects like Mjollnir and Gjallerhorn.) 

And though I was aware that my literary heroes C.S. Lewis and J.R. R. Tolkien were deeply influenced by these stories, I managed to avoid knowing much more than the bare details of Odin, Thor, Loki, and Valhalla.

When I read Gaiman's wonderful American Gods and realized that it was all about the Norse gods, albeit in modern form, I thought to myself that I really needed to pursue this.

But I didn't. 

Now the perfect introduction has come along. Gaiman's very personal story telling style introduces the Norse pantheon in manageable doses. And since I have the audio version with Gaiman doing the reading, now I know how those tricky words should be pronounced.

It's not a scholarly approach -- it's a story teller's version. Indeed, in the introduction Gaiman encourages readers to make these stories their own, to retell them -- just as they have been retold down the centuries. As I listened to the tales, I could remember echoes of them in various books and see parallels in other religions and cultures.

I adore listening to Gaiman read. And here he's made these stories his own -- the Norse deities speak, not in the high flown language some might ascribe to deities but in colloquial English -- British English with a variety of accents. 

I highly recommend this book on its own merits and because it's a great start -- I foresee doing some more reading, serious reading, to broaden my  understanding of this mythology. 

 HERE is an excellent review from the Washington Post that pretty much coincides with my own reactions.

Neil Gaiman image by Beowulf Sheehan)

Recent Reading

Some books I've enjoyed  -- books  I would recommend to friends. I'm not going to even attempt to hint at plots or link to reviews --  you all know how to ask Mr. Google.

I have yet to read an Anne Tyler book that didn't instantly immerse me in a world full of very real people with very real lives -- low key, even ordinary -- if any human being can be called ordinary. I think this is Tyler's genius, that by depicting these lives with such exquisite and empathetic observation, she touches on something universal.  A Spool of Blue Thread, like most of Tyler's novels is about a family . . . and anyone who's been a member of a family will probably recognize characters and situations. Beautifully written -- Tyler at her best.

Ellen Foster was Kaye Gibbons's debut novel. This powerful first-person evocation of a young girl looking for a family after the death of her mother kept me reading till 3 in the morning. Ellen is a tough little survivor and her story is by turns heart-breaking and heart-warming.  Ellen's no-nonsense, don't-feel-sorry-for-me voice is pitch-perfect. I loved this character. 

Alice Hoffman's brand of magical realism is always enjoyable -- a little dark at times but not the kind of dark that leaves me depressed. Her writing is beautiful  --  reminding me a bit of Ray Bradbury. (She does weather and gardens especially well.)

Fortune's Daughter and The Story Sisters both kept me reading late into the night . . .

And now for something completely different. Not so much estrogen. Terry Pratchett's recent death set me thinking that I might give his books another try. Somehow the one or two I've read in the past didn't make the impression on me that they probably should have. I may have started in the middle of a series or something. So as a prelude to reading some Pratchett, I re-read Good Omens -- co-authored by Neil Gaiman (whose novels I adore.) 

I'd liked the book the first time I read it -- this time I really liked it: the goofiness, the theology, the characters, the Apocalyptic vision, and the resolution of it all.

 And I particularly like Dog -- the Hell Hound destined to be the Anti Christ's companion who, to his bewilderment, finds himself suddenly smaller and less demonic -- cute, in fact. And really interested in doing dog stuff.

Great fun!

Back to THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE

 I took my time finishing Neil Gaiman's THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE -- it's not a big book like NEVERWHERE or AMERICAN GODS -- it's only about a hundred and eighty pages.  And while I would have welcomed another big book, this one seems perfect just as it is. 

A middle-aged man returns home for a funeral and revisits a nearby farm where, as he dimly remembers, some strange things happened many years ago. The story reverts to the past and we see through his seven year old eyes, his close encounter with inexplicable things some Good and some deeply Evil. It's a wonderful blend of the everyday and the, for want of a better word, supernatural.

The young boy was particularly endearing to me -- he loves the Narnia books and recites Gilbert and Sullivan in times of stress -- this could have been me!

The three Hempstock women who live at the end of the lane include Old Mrs. Hempstock -- who remembers when the moon was made, her daughter, and her daughter Lettie -- who insists that the duck pond is an ocean.

 Just who or what these three represent didn't become clear to me till near the end of the book and then I smote my head --as an English major, used to looking for symbolism in the oddest places, how could I have not realized ? . . . 

I listened to the book, read by Gaiman -- who, as I said before, is a wonderful reader. I loved hearing it -- in a hard copy I would have read too fast and not savored the language as it deserves. But now I wish I had a hard copy to thumb through and look for earlier clues as to the Hempstocks' true nature.  Ah, well, I'll just have to listen to it again. (I've listened to NEVERWHERE multiple times and always hear something new.)

l

But before I go back down that lane again, I'm listening to another Gaiman read by Gaiman -- FRAGILE THINGS, a collection of short stories. I'm in the middle of the first one -- in which Sherlock Holmes is in an alternate London -- an H.P. Lovecraft sort of London where the Royals are creatures of another sort. For starters, they bleed green blood. . .

I'm hooked

Neil Gaiman Helps Me with the Pesto

Neil Gaiman's latest has been in my Kindle in Audible form for several weeks now. I've been hoarding it, anticipating the pleasure of listening to Mr. Gaiman read it to me.  And yesterday, the time had come.

The basil down in the box beds was overgrown and falling over of its own weight.  So I went in with the pruning shears and was ruthless -- harvesting a huge amount of basil and a lesser amount of parsley  (my pesto recipe calls for parsley too.)

It's a tedious job, going through and picking off just the good leaves... the kittehs didn't want to help. . . so I propped the Kindle up beside me and let Neil entertain me -- he's an excellent reader, by the way.  

.

I soon realized that this job was going to take several hours and so Neil and I moved to the living room where I could put my feet up as I worked.

At last I was ready to make the pesto.  -- six batches of it. . .

 The Cuisinart drowned out Neil's lovely British accent so I had to postpone hearing more of the story.

I ended up with 16 half pints of delicious pesto to put in the freezer and a bit over -- which adorned the fried pork chops and the potatoes  we had for supper.

Since I haven't finished the book, I'll say more about it another time -- but I can tell you that, half way through, I really, really like it. So did A.S. Byatt, according to her review.

(Merisi  suggested I add a link to the book on Amazon -- and HERE it is.)

 

American Gods

What joy! A great long book by Neil Gaiman which I hadn't previously read! Though it was published over ten years ago, somehow I missed it but now... well, it's held me in thrall for the past few days.  I fell asleep reading it Thursday night and after a little refreshing nap, woke up and finished it in the wee hours.

I adored this epic fantasy. The premise is that all the gods that were ever brought to America by their worshippers -- Odin, Ganesh, Anansi, Baron Sameda, Kali, Brigid, Eostre, to name only a few-- are still around, hanging on as long as someone, somewhere, believes in them.

But the old gods are being challenged by new ones -- gods with names like Media and Technology . . . And a storm is coming; an epic battle for existence is in the offing.

The protagonist is a man called Shadow, an ex-con hired by the mysterious Mr. Wednesday to...

   

 

...but there's no way I can do justice to this magificent wild ride of a novel. I will mention that it won a Hugo and a Nebula -- among other top SciFi/Fantasy awards -- and that it's being made into an HBO series, due out next year.

I've read and reread Gaiman's Neverwhere and Anansi Boys -- what a treat to have another of Gaiman's fantasys to fall into!.

 

Dissipation and Riotous Living

Freed from the laptop -- I've not yet heard back from Herself (my editor) -- I have embarked on a course of Riotous Living. 

Sooner or later I'll have to deal with Under the Skin again -- anything from a total rewrite and expunging of characters (no, I haven't forgotten having to get rid of Myrna Lou in The Day of Small Things) to quite a bit of tweaking.  But until I hear back from Herself, I'm squeezing in as much fun as possible.

Normally I don't watch TV or movies. But, as I mentioned before, we're going episode by episode through "Foyle's War" and I'm loving it.


And on Tuesday night we watched the latest version of Pride and Prejudice. Now there's dissipation for you!

I almost know this book by heart. I've read it any number of times and listened to it on audio recording.


This latest version took a lot of liberties -- condensing action, shifting settings, and generally livening up the overall feeling.

I was prepared to be annoyed -- and they did leave out some of my favorite bits. But there was a freshness to the retelling of this much-loved story that made it a movie well worth watching. 




All the casting was excellent -- Mr. Bingley was played very differently from previous characterizations -- he's always seemed a bit one-dimensional -- this Mr. B. was much more memorable.  Donald Sutherland was an inspired choice for Mr. Bennet and Dame Judi Dench was a magnificent Lady Catherine de Bourgh. The unctuous Mr. Collins is wonderful. And Keira Knightly's Elizabeth is just right, and Matthew Macfayden reanimates the often wooden Mr. Darcy.

And if the ending smacks of a True Romance magazine story -- somehow I found it highly suitable.


Who knows? I might even watch another movie.

And though I have even more books piled in the corner of my room (the ones I can't discuss) I treated myself to a non-mystery for a few more hours of reading pleasure.

I really love Neil Gaiman's writing. And I've always enjoyed good Young Adult literature. So I popped into Accent on Books and collected this wonderful story of an orphan boy raised by ghosts.  Also highly recommended. Here's a good write-up.