Author: Timothy Merrill Page 1 of 3

1. The Patriot, by Pearl Buck  4+
2. George Washington, by Paul Johnson, NF  5
3. The Last Lion: Alone (Vol. 2), by William Manchester, NF 5
4. Persuader, by Lee Child                                       4
5. Bad Luck and Trouble, by Lee Child               5
6. Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowery*
7. Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner ^{P 1972}                                                                                       3
8. The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammet 4
9. The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy                          2
10. The Razor’s Edge, by W. Somerset Maugham 5
11. Atonement, by Ian McEwan               3
12. Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart               5
13. The Wife Upstairs, by Rachel Hawkins 5
14. And Then She Was Gone, by Christopher Greyson 2
15. A Burning, by Megha Majumdar 4
16. A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving             5
17. The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm,

1940-1965 by William Manchester and Paul Reid, NF                                        5

18. I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith     4+
19. The Small Rain, by Madelaine L’Engle 4

*Did not finish

P=Pulitzer + year

B=Booker + year

NOTES ON THE BOOKS I READ

1. The Patriot, by Pearl Buck 4+

Enjoyed it very much. Buck is an underappreciated writer of the 20^th century, and she was prolific. I had not realized the extent of her literary corpus. She was the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1938). She also garnered the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. This book covers roughly 12 years after the death of Sun Yat-sen and the collapse of the Republic to about 1938, a period in which communists and Chiang Kai-chek’s revolutionists realized that for the time being, they needed to focus on resisting the Japanese. The history is fascinating, and yet the story line is strong and viable. Buck’s knowledge of China and Japan (she lived in Japan for at least a year) is, of course, extensive. The book was published in 1939. I was not happy with the ending. Seemed abrupt; felt like there was more to the story than she had time to tell.

 

3. The Last Lion: Alone (Vol. 2), by William Manchester, NF 5

A harrowing tale of a nation with their head in the sand for a decade (1930s), no doubt a reaction to the horrors of the Great War, a memory only 15 years old. Germany could have been stopped in its tracks on numerous occasions. But France and England temporized. They could not believe that what they’d just experienced 20 years earlier was about to thrust upon them again, and by the same agressor. Neville Chamberlain, an accountant and administrator, not the right person for this time in England’s history. Fortunately, there was such a man, and fortunately, England turned to him. It was almost too late. Wonderful book, and I shall now order the last in the three-volume set.

 

7. Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner 3

The enjoyment level was mild, three stars. I lost interest while they were in Mexico, and some of the longer letters failed to grab me. There are two story lines. The first is the story of the aging and para-lyzed Stanford professor of history. He is researching the story of his grandparents, especially his grandmother. And that is the second storyline. One problem is that the fictional charater of this woman, Susan Burling Ward, is based on a real woman and the letters in the novel are letters that the real historical woman wrote. This resulted in some unfortunate misunderstandings, and lawsuits I believe. I did very much like the metaphor of “angle of repose.” I am going to quote from the Wikipedia article on it:

The angle of repose, or critical angle of repose, of a granular material is the steepest angle of descent or dip relative to the horizontal plane to which a material can be piled without slumping. At this angle, the material on the slope face is on the verge of sliding. The angle of repose can range from 0° to 90°. The morphology of the material affects the angle of repose; smooth, rounded sand grains cannot be piled as steeply as can rough, interlocking sands. The angle of repose can also be affected by additions of solvents. If a small amount of water is able to bridge the gaps between particles, electrostatic attraction of the water to mineral surfaces will increase the angle of repose, and related quantities such as the soil strength.

When bulk granular materials are poured onto a horizontal surface, a conical pile will form. The internal angle between the surface of the pile and the horizontal surface is known as the angle of repose and is related to the density, surface area and shapes of the particles, and the coefficient of friction of the material. Material with a low angle of repose forms flatter piles than material with a high angle of repose.

The term has a related usage in mechanics, where it refers to the maximum angle at which an object can rest on an inclined plane without sliding down.

 

Stegner uses this in the novel because his protagonist’s grandfather was an engineer. But it is also a metaphor for the marriage. It had a very high angle of repose, and the secret to the stability of the marr-iage is that they had discovered their angle of repose and come to terms with it. It was as it was. They were apart as long as 18 months at a time. It’s possible that they never experienced romantic love with each other. But they found their resting place.

There are many who could not be satisfied with simply finding the point at which everything comes crashing down. But, I found it a helpful illustration of that toward which a successful marriage is pointed. A point where you know intuitively what the other wants, where you shoulder responsibilities without being told and without fussing about what the other person is doing. It is a repose that doesn’t intrude, that knows when silence is needed or when speaking up is required. So I liked that, and I underlined several passages that spoke to me. But on the whole: 3 stars.

 

9. The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy   2

I had a marg and a cigar and finished reading The Moviegoer, a book which was not at all what I thought it would be, and for which I did not care one bit. This is two in a row that perhaps succeed brilliantly as literary works of art, but fail miserably as stories worth reading. This one, like Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, has a thin, red thread of a storyline stitched through the novel, which, if culled and placed together in a linear way would occupy a mere handcloth of narrative. Instead, what we have here is a patchwork quilt of a novel in which the storyline is so light as to be almost invisible. Percy is often funny, but this first person stream of consciouness is too Falk-nerian or Jocycean. And perhaps the book, (which incidentally, is not about somebody who goes to the movies), is in fact, about the protagonist’s search for God and meaning, but the reader has to care. I absolutely didn’t care if Binx Bolling found God, Kate, or Sharon. … Percy didn’t make me interested in anything Bolling was saying. Most of the novel is a detour. Think of a map of Old Jerusalem. That’s how this book reads. This was Percy’s debut novel and it won a Pulitzer Prize, as did Lowry’s Under the Volcano. Draw your own conclusions.

 

10. The Razor’s Edge, by W. Somerset Maugham   5

This book is perhaps his best book, although Of Human Bondage ranks high. Strong story combined with excellent writing, ingenious devic-es, good characters. He frequently addresses the reader, and he him-self is a character in the book. Early on he writes: “I want to be read and I think I am justified in doing what I can to make my book readable” ¾ a sentiment clearly not shared by Malcolm Lowry or Walker Percy.

 

11. Atonement, by Ian McEwan   3

I didn’t enjoy it much. Similar complaint: too little story, too much essaying. I did not want to read about three soldiers tramping their way to Dunkirk during World War 2. Didn’t seem to be relevant to the story line as thin as it was. And the title boldly seems to announce the theme, yet I don’t think there was any atonement whatso-ever¾only guilt, anger, remorse. Perhaps Penance would have been an apter title.

 

12. Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart 5

I finished Shuggie Bain and enjoyed it, although it is a sad, sad book, and I believe it is highly autobiographical. It describes the life of a little boy and covers his life for a 10-year period. He’s clearly aware that he’s not like other boys, and the reader knows that he’s a kid who’se gay but doesn’t understand what gay is. He’s tormented by other students and often misses school. But the bigger problem in his life is his alcoholic mother and a father who’s abusive and leaves the family. But, although everyone else leaves his mother, in-cluding his sister and older halt-brother, he stays with her, taking care of her when she’s in a drunken condition which is most of the time. This book would make a great Academy Award film, but it is so sad that if moviegoers read the book first they would not want to watch the film. But, a clever director and a good script could result in a good ending, because when the book closes, Shuggie is with Leanne, also young, about Shuggie’s age, and they become friends because she’s a lesbian, she understands Shuggie and they connect with each other, and she also has no father and an alcoholic mother.

 

17. The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Defender of the Realm, 1940-1965 by William Manchester and Paul Reid, NF        5

Read more than 900 pages of the 1100 page tome. I stopped after the Allies gained Berlin, Hitler dead, and so on. As I said, at this point I was past page 900, and Manchester/Reid covered the last 20 years of Churchill’s life in a mere 200 pages. I may come back to it someday, but probably not.

The book, indeed, the entire trilogy was fabulous and I highly recommend it. And it neatly described the disintegration of Britain’s empire and the rise of both the Soviet Union, but especially the Unit-ed States as the preeminent world power. I was amused by Roosevelt and Churchill’s troubles with de Gaulle, and also with the relation-ship between R and C after they finally entered the war. I had not been aware of the tension between the Pacific theater and the Euro-pean theater. When the U.S. first entered the war, Churchill didn’t know if Roosevelt would go to war against Germany or against Japan. In the end it was both. I was also surprised how long it took the US to ramp up and start providing some actual help. I also did not realize how effective the Axis U-boat campaign in the Atlantic had been and for how long. The importance of decoding Axis com-munications was again reinforced. Amazing stuff. Excellent read.

 

18. I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith             4+

An English family, fallen on hard times, have a 40-rent lease on a falling down castle, where the live in abject poverty, waiting for their mad genius of a father to replicate the brilliance of an earlier work, Jacob Wrestling, the success of which had him touring in the United States. That was 12 years ago, and after a three month stint in prison for attacking a man, and the death of his wife and the children’s mother, he’s not the same man. The novel is redolent (by design) of Austen and the Bronte sisters. But the ending, while not a sobbingly sad one, was not the Bronte or Austen ending I was hoping for, analogies which Dodie Smith herself uses in the book. But, that said, it was a delightful story with some hilarious scenes. In the ends Cassandra, the 17-year-old narrator, fails to capture the heart of the one she loves, and she rejects the one who loves her, so no one is happy except Neil and sister Rose who surprise everyone in the end. The father’s writing project seems goofy and hopelessly made up.

 

19. The Small Rain, by Madelaine L’Engle 4

Enjoyed it a lot. The ending was not entirely satisfying. Although she salted the last chapter with hints, the unstated or unspoken outcome was by no means certain. One reason for this is because perhaps she herself didn’t know. She may not have planned to write a sequel I shall now read the sequel, The Suspended Wasp, written about 30 years ago and 30 years after TSR. TSR is well-written, a Bildungsroman that offers an impressive display of L’Engle’s knowledge of the Shakespearan corpus for one so young and a first novel, but of course she was an aspiring actress in NY as well as an aspiring writer, and writing in time prevailed. Her protagonist, Katherine Forrester is 12-19 years old from beginning to end, and L’Engle perhaps attributes to her more wisdom that one would expect of an adolescent.

Still much of the novel is autobiographical, yet this doesn’t interfere with the narrative. One can read more online about this. I’ve read nothing of L’Engle including the work that brought her international acclaim, A Wrinkle in Time.

Finished reading The Moviegoer, a book which was not at all what I thought it would be, and for which I did not care one bit. This is two in a row that perhaps succeed brilliantly as literary works of art, but fail miserably as stories worth reading. This one, like Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, has a thin, thread of a storyline stitched through the novel, which, if culled and placed together in a linear way would occupy a mere handcloth of narrative. Instead, what we have here is a patchwork quilt of a novel in which the storyline is so light as to be almost invisible. Percy is often funny, but this first person stream of consciousness is too Falknerian or Jocycean. And perhaps the book, which is not about somebody who goes to the movies, is about the protagonist’s search for God and meaning, but the reader has to care. I absolutely didn’t care if Binx Bolling found God, found meaning … Percy didn’t make me interested in anything Bolling was saying. Most of the novel is a detour. Think of a map of Old Jerusalem. That’s how this book reads. This was Percy’s debut novel and it won a Pulitzer Prize, as did Lowry’s Under the Volcano. Draw your own conclusions.

Super Good Read: 5 Stars

86. The Last Lion: Visions of Glory, by William Manchester (NF)
87. Shining Through, by Susan Isaac
88. Die Trying, by Lee Child
89. Kinfolk, by Pearl Buck
90. A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles
91. Tipping the Velvet, by Sarah Waters

Also Very Good: 4 Stars

80. Unnatural Death, by Dorothy Sayers
81. The Affair, by Lee Child
82. The Storyteller, by Jodi Picoult
83. Death on the Nile, by Agatha Christie
84. The Ground Beneath Her Feet, by Salmon Rushdie
85. Tobacco Road, by Erskine Caldwell
86. Tripwire, by Lee Child
87. Clouds of Witness, by Dorothy Sayers

Selected Notes

83. The Storyteller, by Jodi Picoult

Although the story is set in the 2000s, the novel is about the Holocaust and the possible discovery of a Nazi living (still living!) in, of all places, a little village in New Hampshire where’s he been for years and years, married, and a German teacher for 40 years. But the novel is also a story within a story within a story, like a series of Russian nesting dolls. The small story is the story that Minka writes. She is the girl in concentration camps who is now the grandmother of the novel’s protagonist. It’s a story about the undead, and brothers and monsters who don’t seem monsters, and I think Picoult uses it as an allegory for the protagonist’s moral and ethical dilemmas concerning how evil people can do good things, living ordinary banal lives after committing unspeakable atrocities against human beings.

The second story is the story of Minka, the girl/grandmother whose story takes up most of Part II if not all of it.

And the third, largest story, is the broad canvas of the novel itself involving Sage Singer, 25 (who has sisters Pepper and Saffron) who loves to bake and works the midnight shift as a baker. She is a loner, has a scar from a car accident in which her mother died, is in a relationship with a married man. Another male appears in the story however, Leo, who works in a division of the FBI who still tracks Nazis. So the question is: is this man Sage has come to know a Nazi, and if so, how can it be proved, and so on. There’s a nice twist at the end, and Picoult provides a satisfying conclusion.

If one is tired of reading stories about the Holocaust, then this book isn’t for you. I was surprised that it has not been made into a movie. But there are so many good Holocaust movies, I am not sure people would flock to the theaters to see it, and at any rate, many theaters these days are closed.

85. The Ground Beneath Her Feet, by Salmon Rushdie

His sixth novel, and not his finest. I appreciated the book as a literary masterpiece, but it was so riddled with esoterica and arcane references that it all got in the way of a good story. The Orpheus and Eurydice template was interesting as were the cultural references of the time period, late 1950s through 1990, and the intersections of East and West, et cetera. But, it was exhausting.

87. Tobacco Road, by Erskine Caldwell

Finished Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, published in 1932 and a few years later turned into a movie directed by John Ford. Some of Caldwell’s novels were banned, and I can see why: A 12-year girl married off, a 16-year-old boy “rubbing and hugging” a 35-year-old woman preacher, Bessie, a widow, or the other way around. She was doing the rubbing and hugging. Everybody sleeping in the same bed. Abject poverty. Conditions in the early days of the Great De-pression especially in the South were on a par with the Third and Fourth World. I can picture what Caldwell describes because I have seen it in Egypt, India, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and other parts of southeast Asia.

88. Shining Through, by Susan Isaacs

Five stars for Shining Through, although it is slow going at the beginning. Chapters are long, and things didn’t pick up for me until Chap-ter 4. It’s 1940, and in Europe the war is well under way. The heroine of the story is Linda Voss who speaks German as well as English, and she has some Jewish blood in her. She’s a 30-something secretary who worships her Adonis of a boss, a lawyer named John Berryman. But he’s married to the daughter of a highly placed attorney/spy in what came to be known as the OSS, the preducsor to the CIA. Then his wife leaves him, and the story begins to pick up. Linda and her boss begin a torrid affair, she gets pregnant, they married, she miscarries, they stay married but it is loveless, and then the ex-wife shows up, and when there’s an opportunity to replace a spy inside Germany itself, right in Berlin, she takes it. She is there for almost two years, and her intel is important, but one day there’s a disaster, and she has to get out. By now, there’s only 20 pages left in the book, and some of the last minute developments I had seen coming for some time. But, riveting book nonetheless. Perhaps not riveting, but well worth the read.

However, Hollywood turned it into a movie which turned out to be a disaster. The cast included Michael Douglas, Melanie Griffith, John Guilgud, etc. The problem was that 75 percent of Isaac’s book was not in the film. For example, no John Berryman. No Nan Leland Berryman, no Gladys, etc. The skeleton of the book was there, but the flesh they hung on the bones made the film an entirely different story. It received Razzie Awards for worst film of 1992, Worst Actor, Worst Actress, Worst Director, and Worst Screenplay. Michael Douglas would have been fine as John Berryman, but not Edward Leland, and Melanie Griffith was miscast as Linda Voss. The needed someone very sportive and active like perhaps Demi Moore (I am trying to think of the 80s), or perhaps Geena Davis, or Linda Carter (Wonder Woman). Whoever was in charge of casting should have been drummed out of Hollywood.

92. Kinfolk, by Pearl Buck

This was a pleasure to read and anyone who has lived in China would appreciate it. It is set in the 1940s when China was torn with civil strife. But this is not a war novel. Instead it is a study of the ancient conflict that arises when traditional ways collide with immoveable political and ciultural forces. Buck does this neatly by beginning her story with a Chinese family in New York. The parents are Chinese, but the children are American-born and thus American citizens. A series of events takes the children back to China, through Shanghai and then to Peking. And still later, they return to their ancestral home. The ending is not dramatic but quite ordinary and mundane as befitting perhaps the life the protagonist has chosen. This is not Buck’s most well-known book, but one of her best. Frankly, I enjoyed it more than The Good Earth.

93. A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles

I began reading as a skeptic, wondering how a plot could be sustained for 400 pages, and initially, my fears seemed to be confirmed. But there is, in fact, a story, and the last quarter especially becomes intriguing. But that said, the writing itself is erudite, clever, masterful. I loved the allusions, the quirky expressions, the develop-ment of a wide cast of different characters. I appreciated the way he ages the Count (at 30 he can do 30 stretches in the morning; at 60 he can do 5). I wish Nina could have been reintroduced, but that might have been too sentimental. The ending surprised me, but it was satisfying. I had hoped for a different denouement. And I loved the relationship the count and the actress Anna developed. This novel, set in Moscow from 1922 well into the 1950s was interesting because I became politically aware in the 1950s and remember NK well. Excellent read, and I would love to see a TV or film adaptation. There are many humorous incidents that would make good television.

94. Tipping the Velvet, by Sarah Waters

Story is set in Victorian England, about 1890 and onward, and is the account of two people in love, but then one leaves the relationship and the other falls apart. Destitute, Nan King works the streets, and is rescued by a domineering person who keeps her for sexual plea-sure. This relationship too comes to a disastrous conclusion, and the girl, once again down and out finds, by chance, someone she’d known previously, and in fact  was supposed to meet—and didn’t. Her new friend is an activist in the socialist moment in England. [Spoiler alert] Although she encounters her first love in the final pages of the novel, she rejects the intreaties to return, and instead stays with her current lover, and the reader for once sighs, because she’s made a wise choice.

All of the parties involved are women. This is Les Lit, and there are some steamy sexual scenes. I learned some new words, for sure. But this is so well written, so very interesting that you can’t stop read-ing. You know there are sexual theme from the title of the book, that the first line of the novel has oysters in it, that the protagonist occupation as a girl was bearding and preparing oysters, that her first lover is “Kitty” and so on. This, apparently has been made into a mini-series by the BBC, but I don’t know how the producers get around the sex scenes. Perhaps they’re just suggested.

96. Clouds of Witness, by Dorothy Sayers

Excellent. Written in the no nonsense, no fluff style of those early detective novels, a la Christie et al. In this book, Lord Peter Wimsey’s brother George is accused of murdering his sister’s (and Peter’s as well) neerdowell fiancé. The title is goofy. Taken from Hebrews 12:1, where the King James has it: “a cloud of witnesses.” The meaning of title implies that the characters in the novels are the clouds, i.e. nebulous, etheral and transitory things who witness or provide testimony. She could have done better. Second Wimsey novel, and in this one, he still more rambunctious than the later laconic persona Sayers develops for him.

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Super good reads: 5 Stars

52. The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories, by Mark Twain

53. Socrates, by Paul Johnson (NF)

55. The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett
56. Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War, by Nathaniel Philbrick (NF)
58. The Ugly American, by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick
61. 1776, by David McCullough (NF)
62. Leonardo, by Frank Zöllner (NF)
64. The Bean Trees, by Barbara Kingsolver
65. The Rim of the Prairie, by Bess Streeter Aldrich
66. Plainsong, by Kent Haruf
67. The Sixteen Pleasures, by Robert Hellenga
68. Monet, by Christoph Heinrich
69. Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver
76. Lord Peter Views the Body, by Dorothy Sayers

Also very good: 4 stars
52. The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories, by Mark Twain
54. Echo Burning, by Lee Child
57. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, by Mark Twain
70. The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame
73. Love Among the Ruins, by Robert Clark
79. Inferno, by Dan Brown

Selected Notes:

52. The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories, by Mark Twain
The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories includes “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” (the story that launched Twain’s career) and several other short stories such as “The 1,000,000 Bank-Note,” “The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg” and “Was It Heaven? Or Hell?” This latter one explored the folly of

Read More

After reading, Love Among the Ruins, I decided to try another of Robert Clark’s novels, this time Mr. White’s Confession. Now, having read two of his novels, I probably won’t read more until I’ve been in such a happy, joyous state of mind and until our culture has become a magical and wondrous state of Arcadian optimism and civil cooperation, that my therapist tells me that I need a reality check; some-one who can dampen my enthusiasm and remind me of the dark days in which evil happens, killers are not apprehended and law enforcement is corrupt. Then, I will pick up Clark again. I enjoyed this novel immensely — at first. The premise is interesting. There are some bad guys (crooked cops), and there is a protagonist whom I’m sure will be proven innocent. So, I’m confident the killer of two beautiful models and aspiring actresses will be caught, that the eccentric Mr. White will be exonerated and that good will triumph over evil. Then, as the book moved into the second half, I got the feeling that this would not happen, that Clark would need to remind us of what we already know: that the world is a manifestly dark place where corruption exists, where good does not always win out and where hopes and dreams often crumble to dust under the weight of bad luck or bad choices.

3 stars

Since I had come to a new section of The Last Lion by William Manchester, I interrupted my reading of it to read a murder mystery by Cara Black, Murder on the Ile Saint-Louis. This book is about the fifth or sixth book in a series featuring Aimée Leduc, a private detective in Paris. In this story, a baby is left in her care, a woman pleads for help, a couple of people are murdered and it’s tied to an eco-group trying to stop the signing of an accord between the government and an oil company that would pollute the North Sea. The group is set up, and there are bombings, dark operatives, corrupt CEOs, a blond killer, book-sellers, Polish aristocrats, hit men, and a homeless woman who talks to her long-lost daughter, Paulette, who was put on a train for Auschwitz in 1942. In fact, there are a lot of characters, including her business partner, a dwarf, René. The whole thing was dense, with the specific gravity of lead, and fast — careening toward a conclusion, difficult to see signposts along the way since the reader is suffering from whiplash. This is one case in which the movie will no doubt be better than the book.

2 stars. Find this review and all my reviews on Goodreads.