Hi all. How are you doing? March is going by rather quickly, eh? Though overall it’s felt like a very long winter. Will it ever end? I think it’s felt interminable in part because we haven’t gone to California like a snowbird this season due to my knee recovery and our old dog Stella who isn’t up for travels.
So here we’ve been like other Canadians not going south. And now with gas prices shooting up (due to the war) are people really traveling that much? We will hold off for a while. Meanwhile it’s been another cold week here, but it might hit the 60s this coming week! And in good luck, I saw this bald eagle (not a wild swan) sitting in one of our front trees. Baldy has been flying around lately and I’m glad he took a break to rest so I could spy on him for a while.
In book news this past week, I was sorry to see an obit in the NYT about the passing of author Dan Simmons, at age 77, who wrote an array of novels (more than 30!) that bordered between such genres as sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and historical fiction.
Perhaps his most well known was his 2007 novel The Terror that fictionalized the lost Arctic expedition of John Franklin’s in 1845 whose crew in the book is stalked across the landscape by an unusual monster. We enjoyed watching the adapted TV series on AppleTV+ that ran in 2018. It was good and eerie. Despite the sad loss of Simmons, thankfully his novels live on and there are many more to read.
Also this week I finished another nonfiction book with Jung Chang’s new memoir Fly, Wild Swans. I’m not sure why but my winter has involved more nonfiction than usual. Usually I’m a fiction nut true and blue, but lately a few memoirs and a couple histories (pictured below) have found their way into my reading. They’ve been excellent though they usually take me longer to read as I absorb all the facts. I’m just giving another spotlight to those here below along with a briefer description for those interested.
A Backward Glance by Edith Wharton — 3.75 stars. Wharton was a fascinating, complex lady born in NYC and fluent in various languages. She was a gifted writer, an avid traveler, a dog lover, an adventurer, a gardener, and aide worker in WWI, and also very socially connected to her intellectual friends. I hoped to know all about her with this autobiography but much of it was lists of friends and acquaintances and little anecdotes mostly about her travels. She writes a lot about her friend author Henry James. Still there’s small nuggets of info I gleaned along the way: Edith’s years up until WWI, where all she lived, and how she started her literary career. There’s little about her husband but that his nose-diving health affected their lives together. She moved to France permanently after their divorce. It’s amazing all what she did, but reading a biography of her would likely be better.
Raising Hare: A Memoir by Chloe Dalton — 5 stars. This lovely true story lured me in as it went on. You might not think too much towards the beginning with its history of hares and descriptive parts about the baby wild hare who the narrator comes to raise in the English countryside, but before you know it – the story becomes hard to put down as it pulls at your heartstrings. You get inside the author’s and hare’s transformation in their journey together. I very much enjoyed the audio version read superbly by Louise Brealey. In dark times, we need more people keen, observant, and caring as this woman becomes towards the hare and the natural world. The memoir is quiet dynamite.
The Typewriter and the Guillotine by Mark Braude — 4 stars. This is an interesting look into the life of journalist Janet Flanner who wrote the Letter from Paris column for The New Yorker starting in 1925 and focuses on her years in Paris in the run-up to WWII and after the war. I enjoyed finding out about her remarkable career and personal life story. She seemed a trailblazer of sorts in her work for the magazine. The other alternating aspect of the book describes the story of serial killer Eugen Weidmann who went on a terrible crime spree in 1937 and whose trial Flanner covered in 1939. The book gives good atmosphere into the period in Paris between WWI and WWII. You get a sense of the run-up to war in the 1930s, the rise of fascism, and what was happening during those dark, unstable days.
Joyride: A Memoir by Susan Orlean — 4.5 stars. I’m an Orlean fan. I think it was her Library book and love of animals that sealed it for me over the years, and her candor too. This memoir about her life’s projects and writings interested and entertained me throughout. It made me laugh in parts too. I listened to Susan Orlean read the audiobook and liked hearing about her tips on nonfiction writing and the ins and outs of her career at publications like The New Yorker mixed in with her personal life. If you’ve been a journalism junkie in life, this is like catnip.
Fly, Wild Swans: My Mother, Myself, and China by Jung Chang — 4.5 stars. This memoir is a worthy, admirable follow-up to her mega-bestselling memoir Wild Swans from 1991 and brought me up to date on her personal life story and her family’s in China from long ago till today. During the Cultural Revolution, Jung Chang lived to tell the tale of her parents and grandmother during those very dark days and later rose to distinction through her studies. She showed great courage leaving the country to study and live abroad in Britain and later to research and write her first memoir and then later a biography of Mao (with her husband) all the while traveling back and forth to China. She does her utmost to get out the truth about what happened under the Maoists and her being under surveillance from the regime today. The memoir is also a moving portrait of her bonds with her mother and the role model her mother was and it’s a great tribute to her. I learned quite a bit from this book about China.
I was going to write a fuller review of Fly, Wild Swans but might do that next week. Time has gotten away from me today. If you follow the Academy Awards, they are on tonight. Enjoy the Red Carpet. I have not seen too many of the films, but I have seen Hamnet (4 stars), Marty Supreme (3 stars), Sinners (3.5 stars), and the pleasing Song Sung Blue (4 stars). Have you liked any of the nominated movies?
That’s all for now. Enjoy the rest of your Sunday and the week ahead and happy reading.
