The Cue Card

Greetings. We arrived home last week from our overseas trip and then I promptly got a bad cold from all the travels, which set me back longer than I expected, so I’ve been MIA from blogging for quite a while. Regardless, all went well while there and it was really a great learning and eye-opening experience visiting various World War I and World War II battle sites with a history group in northern France — emotional and stunning in various ways. My parents invited us on this trip so it was doubly special that we got to share it with them. It’s beautiful there too, and so much more peaceful now than those scary days when lives and freedom were on the line and devastation from bombs, automatic weapons and artillery rained down.

Being there — it wasn’t too hard to imagine those war days because if you’ve read some of the books and seen the movies and visited the museums along the route then pretty soon your mind becomes immersed and you can picture the soldiers in the woods, trenches, and on the beaches and it turns all very real even though World War I ended 100 years ago, and World War II was 73 years ago.

We visited the sites chronologically exploring the battle fields and memorials of World War I first, ending dramatically with where the 1918 Armistice was signed, then we moved on to World War II’s Normandy Invasion, tracking the route of the Allied Forces, until eventually the liberation of Paris, where we wound up the trip. I took some photos to share that I’ll probably continue to post here over the summer. At top is a picture of Pointe du Hoc overlooking the English Channel where U.S. Army Rangers landed and scaled the cliffs on D-Day — June 6, 1944. And just above is a shot of Omaha Beach at low tide, which took the greatest casualties during the Invasion of Normandy. Somewhere between 2,000 to 5,000 U.S. troops were killed, wounded, and missing at Omaha on June 6. There we walked down the beach quite a ways then scaled the bluff up to the American Cemetery and Memorial, where 9,387 American military dead are buried. Most were killed during the invasion and the military operations that followed.

German batteries such as this one at left were dug in along the coast and bluffs, and as the boats approached to within a few hundred yards of the shore, the troops came under increasingly heavy fire from automatic weapons and artillery. Miraculously by the end of the first day, the Allied Forces at the various landing beaches were able to gain a foothold in Normandy in spite of all that went wrong: the rough seas and weather conditions that threw them off and the ineffectiveness of the pre-landing bombing raids that apparently had done little or no damage to the German beach defenses, which inflicted heavy casualties to the men coming ashore. Oh what a terrible undertaking it all posed.

In addition to Omaha, we visited the beaches of Juno (the Canadian Army’s landing point), Gold and Sword (the British Army’s), and Utah (the U.S. Army’s), which made further inroads into gaining ground. Seeing them gave me a better perspective of what happened that day, as well as the museum exhibits we visited. Just the massive scale and logistical coordination of the whole Allied invasion still boggles my mind …. as well as the extensive temporary portable “Mulberry” harbors that were built by the Allies after D-Day to offload the tons of supplies and equipment that supported the troops. Apparently 1 truck every 7 seconds for 24 hours per day came ashore thanks to these structures. Above left, you can see the remnants of one such Mulberry harbor in the distance near the commune of Arromanches-les-Bains. I will post more in the coming weeks but for now I will leave you with a few reviews of what I finished lately.

Ahh yes Paula McLain’s “Love and Ruin” — I knew I’d get to it. In fact, its ending I was reading came timely, right when I was in Normandy. For those who don’t know, it’s a fictional account of war correspondent Martha Gellhorn’s marriage to Ernest Hemingway (his third) from 1940 to 1945. Gellhorn was a trailblazing journalist of her day reportedly being the first journalist, male or female, to make it to Normandy on D-Day and report back and also among the first journalists to report from Dachau concentration camp after it was liberated by U.S. troops in 1945. Apparently Gellhorn was still covering conflicts around the world well into her 70s.

Of course, I was keen to snap up “Love and Ruin” as I had liked McLain’s earlier novel “Circling the Sun” about Beryl Markham. Though I was a little wary since two bloggers I trust — Carmen from Carmen’s Books & Movies Reviews and Catherine from the Gilmore Guide to Books — both had read and had criticisms of  “Love and Ruin.” Hmm. Would it get a pan from me?

Admittedly the first part of the story I felt a bit asleep — during Martha Gellhorn’s upbringing and coming of age, even her stint covering the Civil War in Spain left me a bit ho-hem — but then somewhere around page 150 to 200 when she marries Hemingway, I sort of woke up. McLain seems to capture well the chemistry between the two famous writers … and then years later the erosion of it all. Theirs was a relationship that seemed quite intense and then sort of imploded. It just didn’t seem Martha could sit around and be solely Hemingway’s devoted, doting Wife —it was suffocating — she wanted her career too.

Perhaps my qualm with the novel was that towards the end it felt condensed … like Martha’s days of the London Blitz were quick and D-Day was just two pages, and the liberation of Paris was a flash — I could have used a bit more fleshed out here about what her times on the front lines of history were like and how they changed her — even her falling out with Hemingway. Still the parts it did include — especially about their relationship — I found pretty fascinating. McLain seems quite skilled at capturing the heart strings of a person. And maybe the last half of the book worked for me too because I was in Normandy right as I was reading about how Martha had snuck aboard the first hospital ship to land during D-Day. Wow she was there and helped with the wounded, while also documenting later what she had seen.

Granted, I was once the most skeptical person about reading McLain’s novels since they fictionalize the lives of such notable women icons. Just trying to “speak” for Beryl Markham, for example, seemed at first a total travesty to me — but then I read “Circling the Sun” and wasn’t put off by it. It seems McLain’s books sort of encourage readers to explore further such historical figures. They’re a bit of a surface overview at times but then I find you can revisit the sources’ works themselves. I’ve loved Markham’s books (“West With the Night” and her African Stories) and I still plan sometime to read the biography of Martha Gellhorn that Caroline Moorehead wrote, which Paula McLain relied on heavily for her novel. Gellhorn’s was quite a 20th-century life. I was happy to glimpse it even for a bit in this book.

Next up, I finished Pat Barker’s 1991 novel “Regeneration,” which is set during World War I and is the first book in a trilogy. The story portrays quite vividly the plight of British army officers being treated for shell shock and trauma during WWI by a psychiatrist at a war hospital in Edinburgh. Dr. William Rivers is there to “cure” the soldiers and send them back to the front, but after a long duration while under a heavy workload, he becomes changed and comes to sympathize with the soldiers and their aversion to the war’s slaughter.

The somber mood and history of the story felt right on and I sympathized with the various characters — the doctor’s patients, primarily Siegfried Sassoon and Billy Prior, who have both experienced unfathomable horrors in the trenches and nightmares thereafter. Sassoon has gone as far as having written a public declaration against the continuation of the war, which lands him in jeopardy. All this is quite intriguing, though for some reason I never felt totally captured by the entire telling of the story. I was hoping to get more involved in it, or with the characters, but felt it wasn’t that easy a read. The novel jumps around a bit among the various characters and I found at times I was mixing up Siegfried Sassoon with Billy Prior, and then others like Burns are introduced and then aren’t heard from much again.

To me, Dr. Rivers is the most accessible and interesting character in the novel, and how he agonizes over the best way to treat these very damaged soldiers. Apparently he was a real person in history and much of his story told by Barker in this novel, along with that of patient Siegfried Sassoon, is true, which makes it a bit more compelling. Barker talks about their real lives in an Author’s Note at the end of the book. So while that and other parts of “Regeneration” were really strong, especially in its anti-war message — I felt it was a bit of an effort to wade through. Still I might someday like to read part 2 and 3 of this war trilogy to find out more about what happens to Dr. Rivers, Siegfried Sassoon and Billy Prior, who all go in various directions at the end of “Regeneration” — even one of them back to the War. Hmm. Will the telling of these sequels capture me a bit more?

That’s all for now. I have a couple of audiobooks’ reviews to post, but those can wait. I’ve talked too much already. I look forward to visiting your blogs again and to seeing what you’ve read lately.

Greetings. We had nice weather for our annual May long weekend bicycle trip in the mountains. We survived and happily no one on the organized ride (of about 300 cyclists) got hurt that we heard about, although it was a bit uncomfortable at certain narrow points riding along the shoulder of the road with cars and trucks whizzing past, but unfortunately that’s par for the course with sharing the road.

The mountain peaks were pretty spectacular as you can see from the photos and we saw a moose and two mountain goats along the way, which I did not have my camera ready for. Apparently we had just missed seeing a mama bear and her two cubs by the side of the road eating dandelions.

It feels like summer is here now with the long weekend behind us, although that won’t officially happen for several more weeks. Still the temps have hit the 70s and 80s, and I have planted my annual crop of tomato and cucumber plants — woo-hoo — as well as petunias and geraniums. For those in the States, I wish everyone a very happy and long Memorial Day weekend. Wherever you are, enjoy your reading.

In book news — there’s been two literary icons who’ve passed away recently  First Tom Wolfe and now Philip Roth. It seems sad to lose such giants.  The New York Times’s obituary hailed Roth as a “towering novelist who explored lust, Jewish life, and America.”  Many viewed him as America’s greatest living writer, he was 85. And Wolfe, who died a couple weeks ago at 88, was known for turning journalism into enduring lit and for his satire.  I remember reading Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities” from 1987 and “The Right Stuff” from 1979.

Yet despite the lengthy career of Roth’s, I somehow missed reading his novels, which I hope to rectify later this year. In honor of Roth’s and Wolfe’s works, I’ll go ahead and plan to read one book from each author in 2018, and perhaps I’ll throw in an Ursula Le Guin novel as well — as the renown sci-fi / fantasy author passed away in January. Which are your favorites from these authors that you’d recommend? Hmm. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a couple of reviews of what I finished lately.

Oh yes, I knew I’d eventually get to Jennifer Egan’s 2017 historical novel “Manhattan Beach,” which many critics hailed and many bloggers disdained. What gives? I had to find out.  I listened to it as an audiobook which took me a couple weeks and many miles of walking  to complete as it is quite long and epic but well narrated. I was coming into it as a newbie to Egan’s fiction, so I didn’t have any preconceived ideas about any of her prior novels such as her prize-winning tale “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” which might have worked in my favor — as this one is much more traditional in its scope and apparently a world apart from that one.

Early on, I was able to get into the story that takes place in NYC in the 1930s and 40s … about a family — 11-year-old Anna and her disabled sister, Lydia, and her mother, and father, Eddie, who comes to work for nightclub owner and mobster Dexter Styles, whom he takes Anna to meet as a child. But then Eddie vanishes from their lives, leaving Anna and her mother to scrape by to make ends meet while taking care of Lydia.

Fast forward years later, and Anna, now 19, is working at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, where eventually she becomes the first female diver repairing U.S. ships for the war effort — when she meets up with Dexter Styles again, which leads to an intriguing rendezvous as she tries to figure out what happened to her father.

The narratives of Anna, her father Eddie, and club owner Dexter Styles alternate throughout the novel and make for a fairly interesting ride into their intertwined and multi-faceted lives. There’s some rich historical detail amid the story and some enticing storytelling that conjure up quite well the underworld dealings, dock life, nightclubs, gender roles and attire of the era and feel of New York around the time of WWII.  I especially found the part of Anna and Dexter taking disabled Lydia to the beach in his car — as well as the scene with Anna and Dexter making a dive with full gear on to the bottom of the bay quite vivid.

All in all many images from “Manhattan Beach” stayed with me and I liked its redemptive themes, many water scenes, and Anna’s perseverance. My only problem with the story was that it was quite drawn out and slow in places where I felt it didn’t need to be. I wanted to cut about 75 pages out of it — to speed it up a bit. I wasn’t a big fan of Eddie’s narrative parts but wished Dexter Styles had had a longer role or more narrative.  I also felt when I got to the end it felt a bit anticlimactic to me — a lot does happen but perhaps it was just how it all came together. So while I liked it quite a bit, I did have a few caveats about it.

Next up I finished Michelle McNamara’s nonfiction book “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer,” which seems to be a big bestseller this year and was completed by the author’s husband and various editors and writers after the author died tragically before she could finish all of the book’s manuscript. Still the majority of it seemed written by the time she passed away in 2016 at the age of 46.

It’s obvious by the book that the author put years of her life into trying to help catch this serial killer whose reign lasted from about 1976 to 1986 and whose brutality was simply diabolical (he’s suspected of murdering at least 12 and raping 45, along with committing 150 house break-ins). The book recounts the attacks, the locations, the detectives working the case, the victims, the profile of the killer, and even the author’s own background. Half memoir and half true crime story, “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark” has a no nonsense style about it that I found pretty refreshing and appealing even to readers like me who generally don’t read true crime.

I listened to it as an audiobook and was pretty drawn in by the narrative though it creeped me out and increasingly enraged me as the schmuck continued to get away with his crazy and blatant attacks, scouting out homes and people an even calling one victim 24 years later asking her in his same icky voice: “do you remember when we played?”  I’d like to think the police would be able to solve the case much sooner these days — back then DNA gathering, forensics, technology and crime databases were just in their infancy stages and it seemed harder to put it all together to locate the perpetrator.  Thank goodness the Ted Bundys and Green River Killers of the world — and now this psycho dude — are finally being apprehended.

“I’ll Be Gone in the Dark” had come off the library wait list for me after the Golden State Killer had finally been caught in April 2018 — but I wanted to see how much was known about him during all those years that the police and FBI were trying to catch him. Would it match the schmuck they caught?  Some of the things that seemed to stump them as mentioned in the book were the geographic locations of the attacks:  why the killer had spread out from Northern California to Southern California; and why had his rapes later turned increasingly more violent – into murders; and then why had the killer stopped his attacks and disappeared in 1986. No one really knows but perhaps these things will be answered now that he’s been caught.

 After completing her book, I so wished that Michelle McNamara had been around for his capture; she was clearly obsessed with having the case solved, endlessly researching and investigating even the smallest tidbits and staying in touch with detectives on the case. She missed seeing his arrest by two years, but clearly her focus on the case helped keep it alive and going … and she favored snagging him from some relative being in a DNA database, which they ended up doing, so she was right in that regard.

I wouldn’t say it scared me to listen to the audiobook when I was at home alone, but there was one time that I was walking my dog at dawn with my headphones on in a rural area going up a hill and I bent down to pick up her ball and when I stood back up there was a scraggily man right behind my ear who vaporized out of nowhere that made me jump. Gracious. Are you crazy?!  It turned out he was just passing going uphill, but I realized the accumulation of all the attacks in the book had sort of gotten into my head.

If there’s a couple caveats I have with the book it’s that it gets a bit repetitive after a while about the profile of the killer and the things he’d do.  He was thought to be 5’9 or 5’10 and have sandy blond hair and tie up his victims and do such and such and such.  The book also jumps around quite a bit chronologically so I felt it to be a bit confusing in that regard and it also feels a bit unfinished since the author passed away before it was fully done. Still while I don’t plan to continue with true crime books, I thought McNamara’s narrative was thought-provoking and satiated my curiosity of the case.

I lived in Orange County California in the summer of 1987 after college not far from where the Golden State Killer murdered his last victim in Irvine in 1986. I don’t recall hearing much about him at the time, but I do remember another serial killer around there then — the Night Stalker (Richard Ramirez). Sigh, yuck!

How about you — have you read either of these books and if so, what did you think?

Hello. It’s been a while. Sorry that I’ve been a bit AWOL lately. Now that the weather has improved exponentially here since last month, there’s been much to do and many chores and events that have preoccupied me.  We are also getting ready for the annual Victoria Day long weekend bike ride this coming weekend in the mountains with about 350 other crazy cyclists, so cross your fingers that the weather holds. See my husband, at left, whose bike I try to follow when he isn’t too far ahead … always waiting patiently by the side of the road. We had a good training ride on Sunday but are quite behind on cycling due to the snowy month we had in April.  Still we will give it our best shot. Hopefully I’ll get some good photos along the way when we are in the mountains, maybe even of bears out foraging.  Until then, I’ll leave you with some brief impressions of a few books I’ve finished lately. 

Tangerine by Christine Mangan (2018) 320 pages / Ecco

I think I first heard about this debut novel from Susie over at the blog Novel Visits. It’s one of those enticing ones that gets snatched up by Hollywood before it’s barely out. In this case, George Clooney’s company bought the rights to it and Scarlett Johansson is tentatively scheduled to star. It’s about a close friendship between two female college roommates (Alice and Lucy) in the 1950s that turns obsessive and toxic. An accident happens at school and then a year after they graduate, Lucy reappears at the door of Alice and her new husband John, who are now living in Tangiers, Morocco.   

Alice is uncomfortable living in a foreign place and Lucy tries to coax her outside to tour the sights, but pretty soon Alice is reminded of their school days, the accident, and begins to question everything around her:  her best friend, coming to Tangiers, and her sanity.  

Gracious. “Tangerine,” which alternates chapters between Alice and Lucy, builds slowly and creepily.  You have to get to the bottom of the college accident and then find out what’s to happen in Tangiers. I thought the novel (whose author originally hails from the metro area of Detroit but has moved around quite a bit) was well done and the story reminded me quite a bit of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” which Matt Damon starred in for the 1999 movie. It also had a touch of the movie “Single White Female” to it with a nod to Paul Bowles’s novel “The Sheltering Sky” as well. I liked its creepy psychological atmosphere and how it builds ominously to its reckoning. It remains to be seen if Scarlett Johansson will play Alice or Lucy for the movie, and if she’s Alice, who will play her wonderful college roommate?  (hmm, I can give no more away.)

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (2007) 166 pages / Nan A. Talese

Next up, I finished this little novel, which is coming out as a movie this month starring Saoirse Ronan.  It’s a bit hard for me to fathom that they were able to make a movie out of this short tale, but alas drama on such a beautiful stretch of coastline  — 18 miles long in southern England — should make for gorgeous viewing. (If Ronan wants to get cold feet on her wedding night on that beach, then so be it.) 

I went through various reactions during the reading of this novel, which centers on a young couple — two virgins (Florence and Edward) from different backgrounds, who have jitters leading up to their wedding night in 1962. Some parts at the beginning are quite amusing (the descriptions I found quite funny), and you feel for these 22-year-olds who seem rather clueless and pathetic during the era before the sexual revolution when “the pill” was not yet widely circulated. 

Then I sort of had to push my way through the middle part of the novel (my book assistant, at left, fell asleep during it), which delves into how Florence and Edward meet, come to fall in love, and their backgrounds — in which her Oxford parents are well-off and Florence grows up as a talented violinist, while Edward, a want-to-be writer of history books, is from the country and his father is struggling to keep the household together once Edward’s mother becomes brain-damaged from an accident. 

But the last part of the story of their fateful wedding night comes on strong and there are some meaningful sentences about changes one’s life can take over the one you fall in love with … that can happen due to unsaid communications or misunderstandings that can haunt a person for the rest of one’s life. You get that here “On Chesil Beach” and quite a bit more (there are hints too of why Florence is so skittish in the story, but whether they will follow that up in the movie I’m not sure).  For those who liked McEwan’s novel “Atonement,” which is still my favorite of his, then this one, which is similar in tone, will be right up your alley.  

Fierce Kingdom by Gin Phillips (2017) 288 pages / Viking

Last up,  I thought this thriller — about a mass shooting at a zoo and a mother and her 4-year-old son trying to hide from the gunmen — was well done and quite evocative. Good grief, I never thought I could stomach a shooting story though there’s now a whole genre that’s grown up out of all the horrendous attacks in the U.S. 

“Fierce Kingdom” though is not so much about the whole gun/attack issue as it is a story about motherhood — and about the risks one takes having and sending kids into the world — and about what you would do to protect the ones you love. I found it thought-provoking and while it is suspenseful and scary — I didn’t find it overly gratuitous, which I was glad about. 

I listened to it as an audiobook and found it pretty gripping and I thought the writing and descriptions were quite good in places. It kept me thinking about such a situation with a child and I also kept wondering when the police were going to show up and bust through. Where are they — I kept thinking?! Where’s the SWAT team?  But sometimes they just don’t barge in right away, alas. 

Meanwhile the mother and son are doing their best to hide in the zoo’s porcupine enclosure, which seems like a good place … if only they had stayed there. But later they’re on the move again to find crackers and it’s no easy trek in avoiding the gunmen.  They meet up with a few others in hiding but only time will tell if all of them will survive.

Oh my. While there might have been some plot holes or believability issues along the way in a bit of the action, I realized overall these awful things have happened and under that much duress people will do things that you wouldn’t normally expect, like pitch their cell phone, or leave their kid in a certain place. Generally, I was surprised by “Fierce Kingdom” — it seemed to be a bit more than just a hair-raising thriller — raising issues about motherhood in a unique, albeit scary setting and situation.  

What about you — have you read any of these novels, and if so, what did you think?