Rebecca's Reading Lists

Recent Reading

October 15, 2005: I just finished Tony Hillerman's Skeleton Man (Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee Novels) 2004. I am now up to date on my Hillerman reading. (I wrote about The Sinister Pig July 5. Now that we're all very well acquainted with the cast of characters, Hillerman is keeping our interest in the plot by bringing in new territories, and interesting facts about the Southwest. In this case, the new territory is the Grand Canyon, and the interesting true story is the June, 1956 airliner collision over the canyon, which "triggered the creation of the Federal Aviation Administration and its flight safety rules." As always, the mystery is artfully plotted, and the characterizations are succinct but complete. His craftmanship is unsurpassed.

October 4, 2005: Earlier this week, I read The Nanny Diaries: A Novel by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus. I was at the Hillsboro Library, looking for a reference in a Pearl S. Buck book, and there it was. I was so surprised to see it here in Pocahontas County that I checked it out. I understand it's been enormously popular, and I've been thinking about why that should be.

It's your basic "job from Hell" story, something most of us have told at some time in our lives. As we irritate our nearest and dearest with our narratives, they inevitably ask us why we don't stand up to the demonic employer or find a new job. If we have self-respect, job options, a green card, we take the advice. If we are very young, very enmeshed in the situation, or very desperate, we persevere, our self-image takes a beating, and eventually we get fired anyway. Our young narrator, "Nanny," takes the second route. Presumably, the authors, who seem to have based the character on themselves, have learned from their experience. Clearly, they have profited.

While it's fun to tell one's own "job from Hell" story, it's no fun at all to listen to someone else's rant. These authors have somehow gotten their huge, enthusiastic audience to join with them in the fun of trashing the demonic employer. They lost me about 75 pages into the book, but then I'm much older than either the 21-year-old nanny or the 35-year-old evil mother/boss/New York socialite. I've also had the "job from Hell" several times, and I knew all the stages before they came up in the book. "Quit now....quit now, before they humiliate you more," I kept saying, but then there would have been no best-selling novel.

You've got to hand it to the Ms's McLaughlin and Kraus: They are market-savvy. Did the book have more merit than that? Two things keep me from answering with a flat "no." First, there were all those nanny and governess quotes from classic literature--Jane Eyre, "Romeo and Juliet", Gone with the Wind, Peter Pan, "The Cherry Orchard." These were chilling in context. I've got to reread Jane Eyre, because I don't remember this quote:

You should hear mama on the chapter of governesses: Mary and I have had, I should think, a dozen at least in our day; half of them detestable and the rest ridiculous, and all are incubi--were they not, mama?

Second, I think the horrors of Mrs. X's dissolving marriage may foreshadow Nanny's relationship with her Harvard Hottie, who lives in the same apartment building as Mr. X. Mr. X replaces his wives every few years, and young H.H. has been watching this since childhood. Nanny believes Mrs. X is jealous of her new relationship. In my experience, bosses like Mrs. X don't even see their employees as fellow humans, let alone feel envy or jealousy toward them. Nanny is youthfully oblivious to the future, while Mrs. X is oblivious in her self-absorbed misery. Are the authors subtly drawing connections here? These are the things I like best about the book.

Book cover: Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Neverending Remembrance

August 3, 2005: Edgar A Poe : Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance by Kenneth Silverman, 1991. Paperback: 592 pages. Harper Perennial; Rep edition 1992. ISBN 0060923318. This book is an outstanding mix of biography, history, and literary criticism, well-paced and readable. I'll be reading more of Silverman's books soon. Check the amazon.com reviews--they have good information about Poe and this biography.

I'm also delighted that I found a reference I'd been looking for since 1999. I had read that Edgar Allen Poe championed the name "Appalachia" as a more fitting name for the United States of America. I read this on a Usenet News Group, where great information and insightful comments mingle indiscriminately with utter nonsense, so I had my doubts, But here, on page 248, I read:

Because the lack of an international copyright crowded American writers out of competition and flooded America with English reprints, the issue gave a focus to Poe's thinking on literary nationalism. In 1845, the United States was still an expanding, undefined place; that year, the New-York Historical Society appointed a committee to consider whether some effort should not at last be made to give the country a "PROPER NAME." (The candidates included America, Columbia, and Appalachia, but the committee recommended Allegania.) In most minds the country remained as much unformed culturally as geographically. Calls for a distinctively American literature had been issued since just after the American Revolution; taken up by Emerson and others, they had converged with romantic ideals of the preciousness of self-development in individuals and nations alike, becoming philosophically-grounded and passionate.

Poe had of course long challenged this demand for a literature not only by Americans but also about and for them, and often reasserted his cosmopolitan view that not one nation but the world itself was the stage for the "literary histrio."

Broadway Journal, I (March 22, 1845), 186, and I (April 4, 1845), 223.

So, it seems that rechristening the United States "Appalachia" was not one of Poe's ideas, but I finally found the reference in a Poe biography. This book has also given me fodder for my Literary Pocahontas project, provided I extend my geographical limits just a little bit. It seems that John and Fanny Allen, Poe's childhood guardians, summered with him in nearby White Sulfur Springs (now Greenbrier County, West Virginia) to escape Richmond's heat and epidemics. Could the melancholy turn of the Allegheny Plateau have affected his young mind?

I can also link Poe to Musical Pocahontas County. When Poe was a small child, his hometown, was growing rapidly because of the James River's falls at Richmond. There's an Eddn Hammons fiddle tune called "The Falls of Richmond." A number of writers have suggested that it should be "The Fall of Richmond," referring to Civil War engagements. Because the falls at Richmond were of great renown, this book offers a bit of support to those who believe Eddn Hammons' tune title is antebellum.

July 5, 2005: I just finished Tony Hillerman's The Sinister Pig. I have been a fan since Jack Shaefer's son Carl recommended him, back in the early 1980's. Hillerman has an amazing command of his format, and he gives you a vivid sense of his people and places with a few apt phrases. I don't read a lot of genre fiction these days, but Hillerman never fails to please. There are several interesting Internet sites with lists of books, sample chapters, and essays by and about Hillerman.

Harper-Collins Publishers' Tony Hillerman pages feature an essay by Hillerman, bibliography, biography, and photo gallery.
Mysterynet.com's Tony Hillerman Page also has a list of his books, along with a sample chapter.
Susan Mueller's Unofficial Tony Hillerman Page features a map of the Navajo Nation, and Tony Hillerman photos, criticism, profiles, and interviews. In many ways, this is the most informative site.

July 2, 2005: I started reading Pearl S. Buck's books and biography because she was a native of Pocahontas County and her birthplace is a local historical landmark. (Check my Literary Pocahontas County for links to Pearl Buck materials.) Although I remembered her as a living public figure (she died in 1973), I had only a vague recollection of her and her books. I hoped to reacquaint myself with her style, and to learn what she had to say about her birthplace and her parents, West Virginia natives who lived through the Civil War, grew up, and became Christian missionaries to China.

Fighting Angel is a fictionalized biography of her father, Absalom Sydenstricker. For some reason, Buck changed his name to Andrew for this book. (Perhaps it was to keep the readers from wondering what sort of Oedipal conflicts would cause a man who read the Bible through yearly to name his son Absalom.) Unlike Buck's book about her mother, The Exile, Fighting Angel is a little short on empathy and understanding. It is a fascinating account of a difficult, complex man. Unfortunately for my purposes, Sydenstricker shared few details about himself, his family, or his Civil War childhood, so Buck had little to pass on.

My Several Worlds: A Personal Record gave me a better sense of Pearl Buck's voice, and reminded me how much my mother admired her. In my memory, Buck is linked with Eleanor Roosevelt (personal style, age, and those strange fur stoles). Both women were concerned with the plight of the less fortunate. Strong, outspoken women at a time when feminism was in eclipse, they spoke authoritatively about what should be done and how it should be done. Buck felt ambivalent about her missionary parents and their need to impose their beliefs on other people, yet when she voices her opinions, it is often with a missionary's fervor and unquestioning certainty. I react to some of her pronouncements (laudable though they are) with the unease she expresses about her father's missionary certainty.

May 18, 2005: The Mothman Prophecies by John A. Keel. 2002. Tor Books. ISBN 0765341972. Originally published in 1975, this edition has an interesting post-movie afterward. OK, this year's reading list has had a high tone, up until now. But this book is part of the McClintic Library's finest special collection, "The West Virginia and Appalachian Collection," donated by the West Virginia Library Commission and the Hollowell Foundation." The motto on their book plates is "To Know Ourselves." It turns out, knowing ourselves includes taking an interest in X-Files-like paranormalists.

I got a big kick out of this book. John A. Keel is not your average hobbyhorse riding paranormalist. He is literate, self-deprecating, and funny. For example, he opens the book with a description of a frightening late-night encounter in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Eventually he reveals that he himself was the ominous apparition, walking for miles on rainy night, looking for a phone to call a wrecker for his stalled car. Here is how he places the Mothman in a West Virginia context:

The Indians must have known something about West Virginia. They avoided it. Before the Europeans arrived with their glass beads, firewater, and gunpowder, the Indian nations had spread out and divided up the North American continent. Modern anthropologists have worked out maps of the Indian occupancy of pre-Columbian America according to the languages spoken. The Shawnee and Cherokee occupied the lands to the south and southwest. The Monocan settled to the east, and the Erie and Conestoga claimed the areas north of West Virginia. Even the inhospitable deserts of the Far West were divided and occupied. There is only one spot on the map labeld "Uninhabited:" West Virginia.

Why? The West Virginia area is fertile, heavily wooded, rich in game. Why did the Indians avoid it? Was it filled with hairy monsters and frightful apparitions way back when?

Across the river in Ohio, industrious Indians--or someone--built the great mounds and left us a great heritage of Indian culture and lore. The absence of an Indian tradition in West Virginia is troublesome for the researcher. It creates an uncomfortable vacuum. There are strange ancient ruins in the state, circular stone monuments which prove that someone settled the region once. Since the Indians didn't build such monuments, and since we don't even have any lore to fall back on, we have only mystery.

Chief Cornstalk and his Shawnees fought a battle there in the 1760's and Cornstalk is supposed to have put a curse on the area before he fell. But what happened there before? Did someone else live there?

The Cherokees have a tradition, according to Benjamin Smith Barton's New Views of the Origins of the Tribes and Nations of America (1798), that when they migrated to Tennesee they found the region inhabited by a weird race of white people who lived in houses and were apparently quite civilized. They had one problem: their eyes were very large and sensitive to light. They could only see at night. The fierce Indians ran these "mooneyed people" out. Did they move to West Virginia to escape their tormentors? (Chapter 5, section II: pp 53-54.)

Cornstalk's Curse has been offered to me as the explanation of many unfortunate events and conditions in West Virginia, from poor economic conditions to bad weather. Keel seems to be offering it in much the same spirit. I so enjoyed the 2001 "Afterward" Keel added to this edition that I'm going to quote from it at length.

We had begun the 1900s with an unlimited number of beliefs about ourselves and our universe. The world seemed to be a bright and wonderful place. Famed astronomers assured us that Mars was also bustling with life along beautifully engineered canals. Automobiles and flying machines were being perfected. The 20th centure was going to be terrific. But, by the end, we were embittered cynics, exhausted by wars and the suspicious of mysteries and those who promoted them. The century had become a bloody scam.

For one hundred years, no matter where you lived on this ball of nitrogen, oxygen and cosmic spit, someone within two hundred miles of your home had personally seen a monster with big red eyes and, often, a penetrating stench. They were everywhere, along with the maddened dictators, publicity hungry generals and warlords, and wild-eyed scientists who kept mumbling incomprehensible formulae for manipulating things we could not see. Everyone was clearly nuts and very few of us were left alone to stumble through the forests, swamps and deserts, grimly determined to prove somehow that sanity would ultimately triumph.

We failed. Technology took over and our machines were nuttier than all of us. Our millionaires, who were multiplying like cockroaches, filtered their loot through TV networks, liquor companies, computer whizes and assorted military contractors to try to capture dinosaurs in the Belgian Congo, giant sea serpents in the lochs of Ireland and Scotland, and tall, hairy humanoids in the Pacific Northwest, China, and Russia, along with kangaroos in the midwest and ghostly demons that mutilated cows and drank blood wherever they could find it. The end result was millions of bucks down the toilet while hundreds of bad movies and even worse TV shows were churned out, along with gigantic stacks of bad books that are still used to prop up tables in poorer communities.

Fortunately, I am of a classier type....When I first visited Point Pleasant in the 1960s and talked to scores of witnesses, I was convinced I was on the track of a very big bird of spectacular size. I have no idea what I would have done if I caught it...or if it had caught me. In later misadventures, I had experiences with numerous demonic forces and in my dotage I am very aware that our entire planet is occupied by things we see only by accident. They seem able to boggle our minds and even control our feeble little brains.

UFOmania is no different from demonomania. My forms of religious and politial fanaticism are linked directly to these other manias and to paranoia and schizophrenia. We are meant to be crazy. It is an important part of the human condition. Otherwise there would be no wars, no Hitlers or Napoleons, no Woodrow Derenbergers (and his unfortunate psychiatrist). This planet is haunted by us; the other occupants just evade boredom by filling our skies and seas with monsters. I was clearly meant to blunder into that little town in West Virginia, and learn things that some men have known for centuries but were afraid to ask. I warned Sheriff Johnson and Mary Hyre that this was folklore in the making. (Afterward, New York City, August, 2001.)

May 9, 2005: Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860-1900 by Altina L. Waller. 1988. University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0-8078-1770-8. This is a scholarly book, but very engaging. Waller avoids simplistic explanations of the Hatfield-McCoy feud. Many older accounts explain it as the natural violence of the inbred, degenerate hillbillies, while more recent authors present it as the exploited natives driven to violence by outsider-capitalists. Waller examines the feud in the social context of its unique place and time, and bases her account of the community on contemporary resources such as court records, deeds and wills. There are pictures. I always like pictures. Also, check the amazon.com link to read some very informative reviews of the book by authorities in the field.

Book Cover: Seedtime on the Cumberland May 6, 2005: Seedtime on the Cumberland by Harriette Simpson Arnow. 1960. 1995 reprint, paperback, University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 0-8032-5926-3. Harriette Simpson Arnow is probably better known for her novels (Hunter's Horn, The Dollmaker), but this book and its companion volume, Flowering of the Cumberland, recount the history of the Cumberland River drainage from earliest times to around 1800. This volume focuses on material culture, including what crops were raised, what people cooked, how they built and maintained their homes, and what they owned. They style is lively yet believable, with plenty of references to original sources. This book must have been one of the first to treat the history of "everyday life" with scholarly interest. Internet resources on Arnow and her works are limited (most have a "Please do my homework on The Dollmaker for me" orientation), but there is a nicely done student site by Kelley Broyles at Marshall University.

April 22, 2005 The Exile by Pearl S. Buck 1936. This is a lightly fictionalized account of Pearl Buck's mother's life. I read it to learn more about Carie Stulting Sydenstricker's early life, in Pocahontas County. Pearl Buck has preserved for us a lonely missionary's idealized presentation of her homeland, family history and childhood as she described them for her children in an alien land.

April 12, 2005: Two scholarly books on related topics:

All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region by David E. Whisnant. 1986. University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0807841439. This is an academic book on "systemic cultural intervention" and its effects on Appalachian communities in the late ninteenth and early twentieth centuries. Whisnant describes the way urban Americans, interested in the European idea of Volkskultur, identified the Southern Appalachians as a backwater in which otherwise lost Anglo-Saxon folkways and folk arts had been preserved in pure form. They also identified their rural "informants" as needy, and they proposed to collect and preserve the cultural heritage at the same time they brought them the benefits of urban education, morality, and capitalism. This book focuses on the consequences, intended and otherwise, of this meeting of two "cultures." It's a slightly dry read, but the data are fascinating, and there are some great photographs. I recommend it to anyone interested in Appalachian traditional music (or other arts). How much of what we accept as "traditional" is really traditional? What does "traditional" mean?

Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870-1920by Henry D. Shapiro. 1986. University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0807841587. This book is also about how outsiders have discovered Appalachia, described it, and decided it needed to be fixed, by them. This isn't one of the "capitalist exploitation" histories focusing on material change, but rather an exploration of how outsiders have defined Appalachia by their own lights, sometimes accurately and sometimes not, and used their own definitions as justification for intervention of all sorts, from missionary work to nature preserves. Except for a few stylisitic affectations (I was ready to scream the twentieth time he used the phrase "a strange place and a peculiar people"), this is an interesting and readable scholarly book.

April 6, 2005: Pearl Buck: A Cultural Biography by Peter Conn. 1996. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521639891. After reading this book, I am convinced that Pearl S. Buck is more interesting for her personal life and social activism than for her well-known literary achievements. I do think Conn is a little too critical of Buck's writing, but she has been greatly praised, savagely criticized and, then neglected, so perhaps he is aiming for moderation. A website, Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography presents many of the pictures in this informative book, and gives an overview of Ms. Buck's biography.

I began reading about Pearl Buck because I was interested in Pocahontas County history, so I was a bit disappointed in Conn's neglect of her family background. He accepts without much question the accuracy of Buck's books The Exile (about her mother, Carie Stulting) and Fighting Angel (about her father, Absalom Syndestricker). Ms. Buck published both these books as fiction, and I believe she conciously took artistic license. Conn evidently spent a day in Hillsboro, visiting the Pearl Buck birthplace, but he describes it as in the Shenandoah Mountains. I guess he didn't bother with a map.

March 22, 2005. At Home in the Heart of Appalachia. 2001. Anchor (paperback, 2002) ISBN 0385721390. John O'Brien's wife, the former Becky Sheets, is a native of Green Bank, in Pocahontas County. O'Brien himself, while raised in exile in Philadelphia, always had a strong feeling about his parents' home in West Virginia. In this book, O'Brien struggles with the definition of "Appalachia," and the sense of inferiority that he feels is the heritage of Appalachia. Ostensibly a recounting of the conflict between a bunch of "come-heres" and the "from-heres" of Pendelton County, West Virginia, At Home in the Heart of Appalachia explores why O'Brien never feels quite at home anywhere.

A lot of us never feel at home anywhere. Maybe it is just part of being human. "This world is not my home. I'm only passing through...." I have noticed many West Virginians have a sore spot about the "inbred, unwashed, poverty-stricken hillbilly" stereotype that is much more tender than my own. I don't recall anything about inbreeding, but as an Iowa farm girl, I've gotten the "dirty, ignorant hillbilly" thing all my life. It was worst in New England, but I recall a meeting of "respected" NIH geneticists at which my boss referred to "trailer trash," and compared me unfavorably to a chimpanzee.

However this made me feel, I never entertained the idea that she might be right. There is something different that goes on here, in the southern Appalachian mountains. I think John O'Brien, and many other fine people here carry within them a sneaking suspicion that these stupid stereotypes are right. They carry this nasty suspicion just below conciousness, and it persists despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

O'Brien explores this theme in Appalachian history and in his neighbors, the conflict over the Pendleton County school system, and in the 1985 flood and its aftermath. I feel he is sometimes unreliable in his details. (Where he mentions people I know, he gets their names and details of their lives wrong. Perhaps he is fictionalizing to protect his sources, but this is unclear.) On the other hand, he presents an outstanding exploration of this strange Appalachian self-loathing. I wish he could explain it, but perhaps that is not possible.

February 22, 2005. The Good Earth. Pearl S. Buck. 1931. I read this book to be a dutiful student of Pocahontas County history. I had read it in junior high school, but I could not remember much about it. When I was in junior high, I liked Dickens, Dostoyevsky, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad. I wanted to read elaborate character studies, books whose dust jackets carried blurbs with the words "tortured souls," searing psychological studies," "intergenerational dramas." I wanted books that would explain human nature to me, because I was having a lot of trouble with it at that point in my life.

Rereading The Good Earth, I see why it didn't make an impression on me. Wang Lung is a man who doesn't understand his own heart, much less those of his family and neighbors. Anything we learn about the inner thoughts of the characters in this book, we have to infer from the flat, bald descriptions of what they do, or the direct, unembellished, biblical monologues that the characters sometimes let slip.

....She stopped and stood up then, her scythe dropped. On her face was a new sweat, the sweat of a new agony.

"It is come," she said. "I will go into the house. Do not come into the room until I call. Only bring me a newly peeled reed, and slit it, that I may cut the child's life from mine."

I am more willing, now, to read the deceptively simple descriptions of the daily life of these Chinese peasants, and infer what they must have felt. The descriptions are often vivid, and sometimes sublime.

Clinging thus to the outskirts of the great, sprawling, opulent city it seemed that at least there could not be any lack of food. Wang Lung and his family had come from a country where if men starve it is because there is no food, since the land cannot bear under a relentless heaven. Silver in the hand was worth little because it could buy nothing where nothing was.

Here in the city there was food everywhere. The cobbled streets of the fish market were lined with great baskets of big silver fish, caught in the night out of the teeming river; with tubs of small shining fish, dipped out of a net cast over a pool; with heaps of yellow crabs, squirming and nipping in peevish astonishment; with writhing eels for gourmands at the feasts. At the grain markets there were such baskets of grain that a man might step into them and sink and smother and none know it who did not see it; white rice and brown and dark yellow wheat and pale gold wheat, and yellow soybeans and red beans and green broad beans and canary-colored millet and grey sesame. And at the meat markets whole hogs hung by their necks, split open the length of their great bodies to show the red meat and the layers of goodly fat, the skin soft and thick and white. And duck shops hung row upon row, over their ceilings and in their doors, the brown baked ducks that had been turned slowly on a spit before coals and the white salted ducks and the strings of duck giblets, and so with the shops that sold geese and pheasant and every kind of fowl.

As for the vegetables, there was everything which the hand of man could coax from the soil; glittering red radishes and white, hollow lotus root and taro, green cabbages and celery, curling bean sprouts and brown chestnuts and garnishes of fragrant cress. There was nothing which the appetite of man might desire that was not to be found upon the streets of the markets of that city. And going hither and thither were the vendors of sweets and fruits and nuts and little delicately spiced balls of pork wrapped in dough and steamed, and sugar cakes made from glutinous rice, and the children of the city ran out to the vendors of these things with their hands full of pennies and they bought and they ate until their skins glistened with sugar and oil.

Yes, one would say that in this city there could be none who starved.
The Good Earth, pp 94-95.

There is no comment beyond this, but we have just read a chapter in which Wang Lung and his family have eaten every marginally edible thing on their land, and have turned to eating dirt to slake the pains of their stomachs. The language of this description of food can't help but recall Genesis, before the Fall:

And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly abouve the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.

As a daughter of missionaries, Buck can never have been far from the sound of the King James Bible.

Bookcover: Milkweed Ladies February 20, 2005. The Milkweed Ladies by Louise McNeill. 1988. University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN: 0822935872. I am an enthusiastic admirer of this book. It's not just that it's about Pocahontas County, and that I can have fun identifying the places today and comparing them to the vivid descriptions of how they were in the 1910's and 1920's, although that could be enough. This is a vivid memior of a childhood lived close to nature, and alive to language. The mixture of McNeill's family, with their long connection to their land and their vivid stories and recollections, and the child's sensuous wonder at the beauty of everyday farm life stays with the reader long after the short book is finished. I feel as if I have seen the world (not just Pocahontas County) in a new light.

January 30, 2005. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold. 2002 Little, Brown. ISBN 0316666343 This book has been very popular, and several people whose taste I admire have recommended it to me. I see from the sections at the back of this edition that The Lovely Bones has been a popular choice for book clubs and reading groups, and the publishers have included helpful study questions and and a detailed author bio. The author is exactly the sort of person I want to admire, someone who has overcome obstacles and gained artistic success.

Can you tell there's a "However," just around the bend? However, with this kind of build-up, a let-down is almost inevitable. I didn't think the book was as good as everybody says. I found the early chapters affecting. The narrator's voice, a murdered child speaking from Heaven as she watches her family and friends deal with her death, is moving and convincing. She is alternatively matter-of-fact, angry, and sad.

This an ambitious novel. But as it progresses, and the author tries to show the characters changing and growing, I feel the novel becomes less engaging. How does a dead girl change and grow? I wasn't convinced by the narrative, and I began to loose interest. I felt that I was being offered facile platitudes about dealing with loss. Perhaps the author set herself an impossible task. I admire her for her audacity, and I think the early chapters couldn't be better. If I'd stumbled over this book in an obscure corner, I'd be offering less qualified praise.

January 15, 2005: Isaac Newton by James Gleick. 2003. Pantheon Press (hardback; out of print). 2004 Vintage (paperback). ISBN 1400032954. I was halfway through this outstanding book before I realized that Gleick was the author of Chaos, one of the best non-technical science books I have ever read. This lessened my surprise but not my admiration for this short biography of Sir Isaac Newton. I had previously read quite a bit about Newton, but I couldn't seem to form a mental image of the man or his environment. This book sorted out many things that puzzled me, including the contrast between Newton's success in mathematics and physics and his (apparent) failures in alchemy and theology. It all makes sense now. I also discovered that James Gleick has a very interesting Internet site, around.com where he provides access to his essays, reviews of his works, and an ecclectic collection of links. He doesn't update frequently, but I there's plenty here to amuse and instruct.

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