Between the Covers

Hmm - don't you think I should start a new blog reviewing books and call it Between the Covers with a picture of someone sexy in bed....no,? Yeah, you're probably right.

I don't think there has been a better period of time for glorious, rich, sumptuous cover art. My head spins when I walk into a bookstore. Not only do the titles themselves intrigue and tantalize, but cover art has grown into such an art in its own right, that I often find myself drawn over and over again to books that I want to possess just to own the cover art. Frankly, if I could ever bear it and I could not, I would be well satisfied to rip off these covers and frame them around my writing room. What better inspiration than to imagine my own book with some richly hued, evocative imagery that sells the tale.

For example,

Balzac and the Little Chinese Mistress

Those red shoes just grabbed me. Whatever the title or substance of the book, I would have purchased it just to take home that tender photo.  The art director on this book was amazing, for even the alternative cover is extraordinary:

Those spools of thread framing the slice of - radish? - showing my ignorance but I am sure it is a Chinese vegetable and not a tomato - are just delicious. At least for an artist.

_{So I was disappointed at the cover of Audrey Niffenegger's new book,}

Her Awful Symmetry

 The author of The Time Traveler's Wife, Niffenegger's new novel is very spooky, true, but frankly, I thought it was too Halloween and would make it less attractive to the serious reader who might bypass it.

_{I decided to take a look at the British cover as they tend to have much more subtle cover art.}

Apparently, not this time as the art director chose a literal interpretation that does nothing for me in terms of the book except to depict two of the main characters whom I would have liked to have imagined on my own.

But what about the story itself?

I will start by saying that I read it straight through a 24 hour period that covered driving to Cape Cod, attending our house closing, and buying mattresses, a refrigerator, and various and costly sundries at Christmas Tree Shop and TJ Maxx.  Exhausted, I had the book open at every moment while Mr. Pom drove around, at the motel, and while waiting for various deliveries.

On one hand, parts of the book are a delightful, rollicking, spooky tale worthy of Edwin Gorey. In other parts, the book bogs down and loses the thread of the real nut of the mystery, which is revealed three quarters throught the novel and is so complex that I have had to plot it out twice to get it straight. 

it is a very absorbing, chilling, spooky tale that is almost perfect reading for dark, rainy pre-Halloween days of October. The gothic tale does not quite capture the random arbitrary fascination of fate that Time Traveller did, but it does capture a sublime essence of humanity's evil, or more aptly perhaps for a Catholic girl, humanity's Original Sin. 

Wildly atmospheric in its portrayal of British damp and gothic buildings, labyrinthine London and Highgate Cemetery may be the novel's most brilliant characters.  It is stuffed full of the Anglophilia that I love, and the writing excels in making you taste the damp pervading plaster walls, mausoleum air,  rotting fabrics, and mouldering books.  Scabrous but heartbreaking humor abounds.

Into The Woods

Fully immersed in the Gothic atmosphere above, I found my hand being guided by unseen forces as I reached for another gothic tale when I popped into the  The Brewster Bookstore on a teeming down rain Saturday afternoon. 

A tale of murder, cops, Ireland, and The Woods, I forestalled my desire to plunge right into the tale  when I realized that we were spending the first night in our new cottage on the Cape. While it is a very plain, spare, and most nonthreatening cottage, I was just a hair breath's on the side of being a silly spooked girl with just the two of us in the empty, quiet house for the first night and I wisely decided instead  to begin a collection of short stories by Penelope Lively.  A much better choice for a slight case of first night nerves and the novel and a a Tylenol P.M. made me go to sleep dreaming about down at the heels gentlemen farms and overcrowded boarding houses instead of creepy dreams about  ghostly writing on pianos.

As for the cover art, it drew me right to it in my desire to scare myself silly.

 I plan to begin it later today as I can scare myself witless tonight since the first night passed uneventfully though it is so quiet in the neighborhood that it was a bit like being in a tomb....

Just to torture myself, I picked up a new book,

"Barefoot Summers"

  that is a collection of essays about "Home, Family, and Simple Pleasures" by Faith Andrews Bedford who writes a regular column for Country Living magazine on living in what else, the country.

How could I resist this cover art? It jumped off the shelves into my hand and I groaned when I saw what it was about and read the prefatory acknowledgement, "To my readers who asked for more stories, here they are". 

I groaned so loudly that Mr. Pom was at my side in a second, assuming that I must be suffering a burst appendix at least to elicit such a noise in a public place. I couldn't speak but waived the book at him like a woman possessed and he just shook his head and walked away. (I like to regularly torture myself with collections of essays that are similar to my own writings so that I may bemoan and deride my own inability to get myself together and actually Do It.)

Her essays are charming and just a twee too sweet for me, a bit more saccharine than her column for the magazine. I would pick up a copy of Jo Northrup's collection if you can find it, but Ms. Bedford is a very good writer who will appeal to perhaps those looking for sweet anecdotes about the type of childhood that we all imagined someone else had.

 I could not resist reading

The Slippery Year

 the book that inspired my last bout of self-abasement in the continuing Why Can't I Get My Act Together Whine post of some weeks ago. (Please look for it; I'm posting from a local internet connection and it is very fickle and may go off at any second.)

I expected to either hate it or adore it and my feelings fell smack in the middle. Not sure what the cover art relates to since the slipperiness is merely metaphorical and stretching the metaphor to find it in the course of the year (which the author admits is a compression of several events over a longer time span) and of which none relate to any out of control circumstances except her own ability to engage in the world without anxiety.

As if any of us can. 

The writing was skillful and there were tender scenes about long term marriage and motherhood and the child emerging into an independent being that tugged at my heart.  There was nothing to hate or deride about it except my own jealousy that she actually did it. I would have liked more a story arc and more of a tactile approach to her writing, but that just is my own style looking for similar ilk.

The Beach Street Knitting Society and Yarn Club

 Initially, I was reluctant to read yet another in the genre of Get Divorced/Widowed/Leave a Career/And Open a Knitting Store, which has become a very popular escapist genre rivaling Joan Anderson's Go To The Beach And Find Yourself in MidLife memoirs.

 I  did not enjoy  the two popular  novels in the past few years written  about a knitting store on the upper West Side of Manhattan (can't remember the title) and intended to pass this one up. But then Behind the Stove recommended it for the author's depiction of the mother/child relationship with small boys and I couldn't resist the cover art.

The book opens with the narrator having received the shocking news that her husband, who just asked her for a divorce, was killed in a car accident. (No spoiler here; it happens in the first five pages). That is the beginning and the end of any major plot devices, except that she moves with her two little boys to a charming village by the sea and takes over her grandmother's knitting shop.

In the style of Barbara Pym, she  quite quietly fillets the nuances and characters living in small towns and the business of child-rearing, running a small business, and learning how to flirt again.  She ends the book just at the point perfectly situated for a sequel and I am sure I will have the opportunity to spend more evenings with this character and perhaps even take up knitting again 

Haweswater -

 Have I written about this?If I have, it deserves a second mention. It is a dark, brooding, heartbreaking story based loosely upon the flooding of an entire valley in post war England, in order to provide drinking water to the cities. The novel revolves around the daughter of one of the farmers and her passionate affair with the representative from the water company, a relationship that she resisted for months and hated as much as adored. In the afterword, the author writes about growing up in this valley and the vivid supernatural myths that surround the area, particularly that of a woman who haunts a tree and on whom she bases the main character of the novel. She is a grand Storyteller of the first order. The writing is incredibly rich. Her imagery makes me swoon.  I have her other book, The Electric Michelangelo in the TBR pile and may just begin it as soon as I get home.

Lastly, I have begun

 

Let's not discuss the title.

After Mr. Pomegranate picked me up off the floor at the bookstore and I was banned from Borders forever for crying and shrieking in the new nonfiction aisle, I critically and neutrally appraised the cover art and determined that it is 1) too dark and strangely dependent on doll-sized figurines, and 2) would never have persuaded me to pick up the book if it had not been written by Sue Monk Kidd, an author whom I have loved since The Dance of the Dissident Daughter.

Written in alternating chapters by the two women, the books chronicles the time period immediately before the publication of Secret Life of Bees. (I think; not far enough along in it but pretty sure she is writing about just finishing the novel and didn't know what a success it would be.) She takes her daughter on a trip to Greece where both women find deep significance and meaning in the ancient world that they can apply to their coming of age and midlife quandaries.

As a fifty-something woman with a twenty-something daughter, I struggle with the same issues of creating an adult relationship with my daughter. As always, Monk Kidd excels in self introspection and feminine archetypes and the writing is skillfull and the Grecian setting is quite spectacular.

Thus, I'll forgive her for borrowing my symbol, my imagery, my metaphor, my title.

And now, go read and tell me of what.

Lined up on the TBR for me:

• Edgar Sawtelle (finally)

• Brooklyn

• A Gate At the Stairs Lorie Moore's new collection of short stories

• Tryst (poetry)

• Dreams of My Russian Summer

• South of Broad (Pat Conroy)

On the Anglopile:

• The Bolter

• The Electric Michelangelo

• Kitchen Essays (Persephone Classics)

• Nella's Last Peace: The Post-War Diaries of Housewife, 49

• Cheerful Weather for the Wedding (Persephone Classic)

Newly lusting after:

Nigel Slater's latest -

Tender: v. 1: A Cook and His Vegetable Patch

You have to be intrigued by any book written by a Brit about vegetables.....