My thoughts regarding "Einstein's Beach House," Stories by Jacob M. Appel

Life can be stranger than fiction on any given day, so of course, the hedgehog is depressed, not the human who has focused her energies onto the small creature’s well-being—that only makes sense. The collection of stories in Einstein’s Beach House by Jacob M. Appel is an amusing, yet horrifying exploration of personalities and human flaws that is darkly humorous—in order to have light, you must have dark. These eight bite-sized human documents are light-hearted at their core. Populated by characters who have the best intentions that have gone awry; tail-chasing frustration; anxiety, depression, gullibility, family secrets, colossal failures, maddening second-guessing, nigh irreparable damage, on the verge of suicidal moments, and the moments in time that are barely saved—and amidst the flawed individuals seeking acceptance, there is still hope and generosity in spite of misgivings. We all know (and expect) the past has a knack for haunting the present, and it’s certain that the future will be full of that bothersome shit later, coming back up like a regretful meal—or a bad penny. It’s only logical that the neighborhood sex offender only liked boys, so two girls snooping around in his house should be safe; the tortoise would desire freedom; the imaginary friend would most certainly have parents; and the rightful ownership of a house that had been in the family for generations can be usurped by a misprint in a travel guide. In Strings, there is that extraordinarily familiar gut feeling when it comes to facing the “takers” who worm their way into your life because they know how to press your buttons—you know the ones, kindness and guilty conscience. They always demand more from you than you should give, and every time you give in to their pitiable self-inflicted dramas, you’re enabling them to continue to be the chaotic clinging vines they are—seriously, get an axe, start cutting, and don’t look back, you’re not going to be canonized for your patience (but of course, there wouldn’t be a story if you did.) These stories possess a palpable psychological tension—enough to make me grit my teeth while reading along at a steady heart-breaking clip—admirable squirm-factor, yet so nattily hi-lar-i-ous that the “squirm” is forgivable. Good show, I say, good show.

My thoughts on reading "Wolf Solent" by John Cowper Powys

Powys is one of the greatest novelists that not everybody knows about—I always make an effort to press him upon receptive readers—I’m a believer, a bookish zealot—I’m always more than happy to spread the word of literary awesomeness, I do realize that not every reader is going to dig Powys. Books by Powys have a knack to haunt a reader long after they’re done. His writing is magical, beautiful, rhapsodic, breathtaking, meandering, timeless—very dense classic prose. He’s in the company of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Proust, Hardy, D. H. Lawrence—Powys (dubbed by some as the anti-Hemingway—which I find funny, I love “Papa” too—he is his own writing beast, Powys is another unique species of writer.) He’s a writer’s writer. With the generous spirit of Shakespearean shrewdness, he evokes an aged skepticism of everything, and yet a youthful gullibility about everything—it’s all very enchanting and lovely, and far too good to miss. In this contemporary world of instant gratification, it would be far too easy to neglect this master storyteller, and it would be a shame to forget him just because his way of writing is out of fashion.

One of the things that makes a Powys novel like Wolf Solent special is how he lays down a historical foundation that is based on legends. In all legends, there’s a grain of truth—the old hills and dells, moors and coastlines of Wales and England (in particular) have a history and mythology that have deep roots in the lives of the people who live within the covers of his books. The people—they are many and varied, the beautiful and ugly of humanity are all well represented. Pagans and Christians—philosophy and superstition overlap and separate—mingling and repelling—they co-exist with a feigned ignorance or have the willingness to overlook “the matter” out of politeness, and more times than not, they are blatant with their venom—gossiping the next chance meeting with an ear waiting to listen—creating their own legends from the bits of truth of what was muddied by their own perceptions. There’s an intensity of life that is palatable; life is complicated, yet it’s simple. The density of the writing is so absorbing, that’s what makes it so dang fascinating—he creates a sense of place and time, textured and sensual—decadent (in the best sense of the term.) The thing I love so much about his writing is that I have to be on my toes through all of it—my brain is slowly dining on every word, savoring every last bit to the end. I found it hard to put the book down some nights—and I was haunted by it until I picked it up again.

Wolf walks a lot (like the character Porius in another Powys novel of that name)—here, there, and everywhere—if I were his wife, Gerda, I would’ve slapped him silly for his random acts of disappearing—“Where the Hell have you been Mr. Solent? I gave you up as dead in a ditch somewhere along the road—get in here, sit, and have your tea.” (As it is long before the convenience of cell phones, give the nearest lad a ha’penny and have him run a message home at least! Ah, but he doesn’t think of doing that until near the end of the book.) I can’t blame Gerda at all for feeling as she did, a young wife finding herself married to this peculiar, distracted, but mostly harmless fool. He mentally wandered in a self-absorbed state, what he called “sinking into his soul”, also known as his “mythology” a secret name for his secret habit of daydreaming—it is a carryover from childhood that appalled his mother, but his father encouraged. Daydreams are a beautiful thing to have access to—they feed the creative mind all sorts of goodies, but it can be detrimental for an adult to go about in a fantasy world. Absentmindedness is quaint to a point, after a while, people can become pretty annoyed when your distracted manner is no longer entertaining as you are causing inconvenience—one day you have your head in the clouds, the next day it changes to having your head firmly stuck up your ass (there’s a time and place for everything, you see.) Wolf’s walking seems directionless, yet he follows his nose like a canine; examining his internal world and then becoming suddenly enamored by the world outside of himself— the verdant curve of a hill, the muddy stillness of a pond, the blue of the sky, and the golden meadow brimming with buttercups; body and soul, dreams and realities, within and without, life and death, good and evil—his thoughts often veering over the edge into the supernatural. The dead and buried (in particular, his father and the young Redfern) live on in memories and imaginings—laughing at the arrogance of the living.
Truth be told, the fool needed to grow up and get ahold of himself. Don’t get me wrong, I liked Wolf and his ‘mythology’, he cracked me up quite often—from the beginning, he got sacked from his teaching job in London for his “malice-dance” in which he just went off on an inappropriate verbal jaunt that had nothing to do with teaching History to the boys in his charge...

“He was telling his pupils quietly about Dean Swift; and all of a sudden some mental screen or lid or dam in his own mind completely collapsed and he found himself pouring forth a torrent of wild, indecent invectives upon every aspect of modern civilization.”p.2

This is the prevailing attitude throughout the book—he has something eating at him.

“He felt as though, with aeroplanes spying down upon every retreat like ubiquitous vultures, with the lanes invaded by iron-clad motors like colossal beetles, with no sea, no lake, no river, free from throbbing, thudding engines, the one thing most precious of all in the world was being steadily assassinated.” P.3

I agreed with him on most things, yet there were times I found his obsessive waffling over the flirtatious and sexy Gerda and the solemn and thoughtful Christie to be comical, bordering on absurd—he wanted his cake and eat it until it made him sick. The reality of Wolf’s life is invading and destroying his ‘mythology’—the being in a rut, teaching history to boys at the school for thirty years just irks him to no end—he longs to have financial independence to allow him to live comfortably and to have freedom. I certainly didn’t want to see him lose that lovely imaginativeness that was natural—instinctive, nigh innocent (yet not entirely), but it was clear that his behavior was becoming a concern by those who knew him. It isn’t every day that your father-in-law (a monument maker) indicates his concern by saying:

“Tis no comfort,” he remarked, “though I be the man I be for cossetting they jealous dead, to think that ‘in a time and half a time,’ as Scripture says, I’ll be chipping “Rest in the Lord” on me wone son-in-law’s moniment. But since us be talking snug and quiet, mister, on this sorrowful theme”—Mr. Torp’s voice assumed his undertaker’s tone, which long usage had rendered totally different from his normal one—“’twould be a mighty help, mister, to I, for a day to come, if ye’d gie us a tip as to what word—out of Book or out of plain speech—ye’d like best for I to put above ‘ee?” p. 466

As he moped around on his many walks, at times considering that maybe he should go drown himself in Lenty Pond as alluded by those who believed it to be his destiny, (I seriously felt concerned that he would!) I wished I could’ve advised him—“You should write a book of your own—you really need to.” If anything could possibly reset and settle his mind, it would be that—writing clears the decks of a busy mind that wanders. Writing is one of our most intimate acts of creativity, it can center one and it can unravel one—one can be rattled to the core by the act of writing, sometimes there’s nothing more startling than to write down the thoughts that haunt you to the point of something comparable to madness. Eventually, it does work out those bothersome bugs and gives focus. Then it’s nigh terrifying to share one’s own words on paper with anyone else because they are so personal—private. For example, when Wolf reads Christie’s writing that she had hidden away, she was pissed when she found out—his reading it ruined it for her, she wasn’t ready to have anyone read her thoughts. The eccentric poet, Jason Otter, shared his poetry with Wolf on many occasions, but when Wolf suggests that he should send them to London to be published, Jason became angry—feeling certain that the Londoners would laugh at his poetry. Anyway, I can only hope that Wolf came to writing later in life beyond the last page—that’s another thing that I love about this book, there is a sense that life goes on after the book ends. His walk through the meadow of buttercups was the most sublime event—he had changed, “grown up” in a manner of speaking—he may have lost his “mythology”, but he gained a new sight and insight. Once again, he reveled in taking notice of the smallest things such as the beauty of a snail as it went creeping along from a dock-leaf to the boards of the pigsty shed. Accepting the reality—“I am I”—“Forget and enjoy”—“ Endure or escape”—it was his body that saved him—for this, his spirit is grateful.

John Cowper Powys (I could not find a credit for the image, tho' I'll keep looking and will amend should I find it.)

“Millions of miles of blue sky; and beyond that, millions of miles of sky that could scarcely be called blue or any other colour—pure  unalloyed emptiness, stretching outwards from where he sat—with his stick and coat opposite him—to no conceivable boundary or end!” p. 10


I simply adored this book and could easily read it again—I have a few bits here from some of the many dog-eared pages, and then I’m done with my wordy testimony…

“Every time the hedge grew low, as they jogged along, every time a gate or a gap interrupted its green undulating rampart, he caught a glimpse of that great valley, gathering the twilight about it as a dying god might gather to his heart the cold, wet ashes of his last holocaust.” P. 25

“Nature was always prolific of signs and omens to his mind; and it had become a custom with him to keep a region of his intelligence alert and passive for a thousand whispers, hints, obscure intimations that came to him in this way. Why was it that a deep, obstinate resistance somewhere in his consciousness opposed itself to such a solution?” p 274

Thoughts about The Shadow of the Wind...and other stuff

The Shadow of the Wind is an epic, a mystery with romance, and it has just enough Gothic creepy edge to it to make it special—it’s a lovely book, read it, get lost in it, find and absorb all the good from it—and it’s got the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, what more can I ask for as a book lover?

"This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down the pages, its spirit grows and strengthens. This place was already ancient when my father brought me here for the first time, many years ago. Perhaps as old as the city itself. Nobody knows for certain how long it has existed, or who created it. I will tell you what my father told me, though. When a library disappears, or a bookshop closes down, when a book is consigned to oblivion, those of us who know this place, its guardians, make sure that it gets here. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader's hands."  From page 5-6

This is the quote that caught me firmly into the teeth of this book—only because of my own life experience and emotional connection to books put me there. When I walk into antique shops, I go find their corners where there are old books and I search for ones that I must adopt—it always makes me sad to see them languishing, unread—being the imaginative person that I am, I feel these inanimate objects have an essence about them that is in a sense alive—a soul—it is the spirit of the person who wrote them, the person who bought them, the person who read them (loved them.)

I often look at all of the books in our personal library and wonder—“Will I ever get around to reading them again or reading the ones I haven’t read yet?” And then I sometimes go the extra step further to make it worse and wonder, “Who will take care of my books after I’m gone?” (Painful isn’t it?)

So...with that said...I recently went with my sister to Bouckville, NY to do antique shopping...and of course, I look for old books to "adopt" this time, I found Kipling's Jungle Books, Volumes 1 and 2, illustrated by Aldren Watson, published by Double Day & Co. 1948...they are gorgeous! Volume 2 is his collected short stories, which I was very happy to find...I mean, who doesn't love Rikki-Tikki Tavi?

He creeps up the little creeks that men think would not hide a dog...

Kaa...I always thought he was a very cool serpent...

 Of course, the books were not all that I adopted! I found lots of cool old goodies...

An iron bank (very rusty) and it's a donkey! I could not pass it up!

A compass and a scribe

A pretty yellow ware bowl, not as old as others that I have, but I like the blue stripe...

Old bridle bits...I wish they weren't painted black, but I guess someone thought it would make them more "decorative" that way...paint comes off (but it isn't a priority at the moment.)

I'm still slowly recovering from the shingles (it's been two months already.) The good news is, it isn't the first thing I think about when I wake up in the morning, so that's progress. What a wretched illness to have...I went all day yesterday without taking my pain meds, I did very well, I hardly thought about the pain at all, but today I am, which is not a good start to the day, it is what it is...so I'm going to mellow out and not let it get me down. I do believe the rash part is finally done...one trick I learned out of desperation...use Listerine on that shitty rash! It stings like crazy, but sends the itch away with its tail tucked between its legs...there is something very satisfying about that sting, trust me on this. Other things I've done to take the edge off when the drugs seem like they're not working (there have been days when it seemed pointless to take stuff that only made me feel dull witted or loopy): gentle stretching does help A LOT, a TENS unit is also a good thing to invest in and use as needed...most of all, patience and be good to yourself, REST (I read a lot and I played a lot of Majong just to concentrate on something else.) That is my advice for shingles.

In spite of being sick and having the shittiest concentration in the world because of pain and pain killers, I have continued to work my way through my manuscript Drinking from the Fishbowl. Even if I work on a paragraph or two at night, I am happy that I've done something that resembles progress. I'm currently in chapter 36, which was once two chapters (36 and 37), but it is now only one...I've practically rewritten the whole thing, there's barely anything original left...I "killed some darlings" that came from the first draft, and I'm happy they're gone. How does one do that? Well, it's not an easy decision to make, but once I made up my mind to do it and carried it out, there was a sense of relief and the flow continued. Let's just say, it wasn't my favorite pair of chapters, and they came from a "different place" than where the book is today, it has evolved and matured beyond its initial conception. I am constantly reminded that this manuscript is only the second novel I ever wrote, and it was initially loaded with some goofy shit that no longer fit in...I'm still tweaking it, nursing it along...of course, whenever large swaths of text are cut out, there's that stone tossed into the pond thing that happens, the ripples travel into other chapters and I have to be vigilant as I travel into these final chapters. Nothing is written in stone in this manuscript...this book can continue to grow and change (evolve.) I even had a crazy thought about wiping out even more, three chapters (34, 35 and even 36)...this possibility is still being investigated (since I'm still thinking about it), but I don't think I can disentangle parts that are deeply ingrained into the structure...a fresh printing of the chapters in question and a pair of scissors might help me piece it together... it's a work in progress. (I love it!)

...[he] stands alone, a solitary tree in an open field of emotions. - from Chapter 18, Drinking from the Fishbowl

Reading Janet Frame, The Edge of the Alphabet

I’m continuing my journey discovering Janet Frame; The Edge of the Alphabet is yet another magical book of prose, experimental and challenging, a timeless narrative about the beauty and ugliness of the human condition. She plunges right in, starting on the first page:

Man is the only species for whom the disposal of waste is a burden, a task often ill judged, costly, criminal—especially when he learns to include himself, living and dead, in the list of waste products.

The creator of the world did not employ a dustman to collect the peelings of his creation.

Now I, Thora Pattern (who live at the edge of the alphabet where words like plants either grow poisonous tall and hollow about the rusted knives and empty drums of meaning, or, like people exposed to a deathly weather, shed their fleshy confusion and show luminous, knitted with force and permanence), now I walk day and night among the leavings of people, places and moments. Here the dead (my goldsmiths) keep cropping up like daisies with their floral blackmail. It is nearly impossible to bribe them or buy their silence. Page 3

…and it is non-stop to the last page:

The edge of the alphabet where words crumble and all forms of communication between the living are useless. One day we who live at the edge of the alphabet will find our speech.

Meanwhile our lives are solitary; we are captives of the captive dead. We are like those yellow birds which are kept apart from their kind — you see their cages hanging in windows, in the sun—because otherwise they would never learn the language of their captors.

But like the yellow birds have we not our pleasures? We look long in mirrors. We have tiny ladders to climb up and down, little wheels to set our feet and our heart racing nowhere; toys to play with.

Should we not be happy?  Page 303

It can leave one breathless...

Janet Frame’s books never cease to fascinate me — I have dog-eared several pages of this one (like others) marking where I want to return someday to explore a word-scape of unique beauty. The entire book is loaded with the most exquisite language — precious, priceless. She created geographical territory in which the borders of social inclusion and exclusion are investigated with an emphasis on language (communication or the lack of communication). The ghosts of the past are haunting, memories of lost relatives or events linger with a zealous desire to be remembered. There are surreal essences of despair, fear, failure — fragile dreams and disquieting realities—the human condition of those existing on the margins, marginalized — to be blunt, reality sucks. Sadly, this is a generous portion of our world’s population — life is not glamor, romance, and drama — to look away and deny it is negligent. Life is gritty with filth — our manmade rubbish, self-made madness, and life-long sickness. Some people are incapable of coping with life — some just do not have the tools to cope as they are flawed by disabilities (Toby’s epilepsy) or disabled by life (Zoe’s ignorance.) They are people easily discarded and ignored — yet Janet Frame writes in a way that makes the ugliness of life beautiful — and in all the trauma, there are comic pleasures that wink with a sweet wit that isn’t frivolous, if anything, the absurdity is very grounding.

A first kiss leading to the private research of identity, which leads to the creation of a sculpture from the silver paper of a cigarette pack, and then a life ended. A novel, The Lost Tribe, left unwritten because the writer is illiterate. Paintings destroyed, talent unrealized by an artist overcome by despair. And a life spent just getting by, going through the motions of life’s expectations to the point of not truly living.


“Just how much blank paper do you need, sir, to match your blank life?” Page 278

~

“He’s getting above himself, going overseas.”…there is an affliction of dream called ‘overseas’, a suffering of sleep endured by the prophetic, the bored, the retired, and the living who will not admit that it is easier and cheaper to die, die once and forever and travel as dust. But being dust how can you return and have your name in the paper and yourself pointed out in the street as having been “overseas” and your conversation filled with the names of places you have visited, your words received with wonder, as prophecies… How, if you are not Marco Polo or Herodotus? Page 49-50

~

Shall I write a book? Everybody is going to write a book. Memoirs on writing paper, toilet paper, café wall, pavement, or stone column in a city cemetery where borders of trees provide a trip-wire into silence. Shall I write? Shall I engage in private research of identity? Page 99

~

And then she laughed out loud to think that she had never known, that she had always believed that people were separate with boundaries and fences and scrolled iron gates, Private Road, Trespassers Will be Prosecuted; that people lived and died in shapes and identities with labels easily recognizable, with names which they clutched, like empty suitcases, on a journey to nowhere. Page 106

~

The day is patched with long silences between the communication of people, give rise to dread; as if the time itself held a reserve of opinion too terrible to express. In the cracks of the silence the people’s voices grow like bright feverish weeds whose stalks are hollow and whose shallow roots are separated from the earth (or water) with one tug of a hand or breeze; now and again people’s voices disappear in the gaps that open with the continual shock of Time. Page 215

~

“Did you make it?” he asked Zoe. “How did you think of it?”

Everyone admired the shape once again. Zoe was not used to being the center of attention; not for something she had made—when in her life had she ever made anything? It’s only a bit of paper, she said to herself, but she throbbed with warmth. How strange that it had so affected the others, had evoked in them feelings which they could only consider and explore by sitting there, as all three were doing now, silent, staring at the silver sculpture… How extraordinary, Zoe thought, that such feeling should be roused by seeing a conventional paper shape twisted at random, in idleness, among strangers whom I shall never meet again. Page 272

Janet Frame writes with this special vision about social identity, a textual borderland — a wonderland — an Is-land — the post-colonial experience, New Zealand and England—being an alien within one’s homeland and within one’s own skin, living in the margins — at the edge of the alphabet…

And sometimes it seemed too much like being excluded from the mystical long-division sum, like being the odd number at the bottom or at the side of the column, the mental afterthought, the carrying number put there for mere convenience and erased when the answer to the sum is worked out. Page 297

Honestly, who hasn’t spent time living on the edge of the alphabet…

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

“—if a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don’t think, ‘oh, I love this picture because it’s universal.’ ‘I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.’ That’s not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It’s a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes you.” Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

Books can have this effect on a reader too, they get into your head and under your skin—make you itch in a pleasant way and they haunt you—yup, I’m joining the five star pile for The Goldfinch, okay? Donna Tartt has produced three novels in thirty years, which doesn’t sound like much, but damn they are BIG ONES. Books (in general) are like Dr. Who’s Tardis, small on the outside, big as the outdoors on the inside, then there are Donna Tartt’s books—OMG they are ginormous on the inside—more than just another world or a construct—holy crap, they’re big gorgeous monsters! You approach them not to conquer, but to understand, appreciate, to identify with—this is literature—a human document. To offer up my gut reaction about it—I loved The Goldfinch, plain and simple. Why do I love it? That’s not so simple, but I’ll try to explain it.

I read the first fifty pages at bedtime that first night and my eyes were as wide open as peeled onions from thinking about it long after I turned out the lights. The following nights, I took it in smaller bites to savor it—yes, I could’ve easily blasted through it, gobbled it up gone and done in no time, but I didn’t because I needed my sleep. In a way, I was glad that the book slowed down after those first fifty pages, I went with the flow and enjoyed the view. Indeed, there is so much detail and so much going on, it would be too easy to blink and miss something, but I didn’t miss a thing.

As an artist and a museum worker, I enjoyed the book on the professional level as well as the writer/reader part of me. As a reader of Russian Literature, I found the references made to Theo’s friend, Boris, reading Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot were appropriate in spirit (yet another multilayered psychological and philosophical study of the human condition.) I was glad that I had read The Idiot fairly recently (2008) so it was still fresh enough for me to recall it (loved it.) I’ve read reviews that compare The Goldfinch to various Dickens novels (David Copperfield, Great Expectations, and The Old Curiosity Shop.) It is, but it isn’t, more isn’t than it is—it’s Donna Tartt writing Donna Tartt, of her time and place—Dickens makes a good literary lighthouse to point to, I guess.

One potential pothole I watched for was how she handled the technology of cell phones and the Internet, because the gadgets and the access changed so much from the time she first started writing the book to its publication. She was wise enough to keep the use of these devices forgivably ambiguous enough to make it work for the span of time during Theo’s journey. (It’s a small detail, and writers do fret about these details, trust me on this.)

The Goldfinch is different from her two previous works, The Secret History and The Little Friend (If I hear one more whiner crying that it's not like The Secret History, I'll scream. Of course not! Idgit.) The Goldfinch has a personality of its own— a sibling of the other two. Like children, the first-born will be different from the second, and the third—or the last in a long line of children forming a new generation, each one different as much as they are related. They may look alike or sound alike; they are clearly from the same parents because of the color of their eyes or the curl of their hair, short or tall, blah-blah-blah. I love The Goldfinch for what it is—a long, complicated tome, intense, tragic, brutal, and heartbreaking—an unhappy tale; it’s just how things are for Theo Decker. It has an unsettling atmosphere, so finding lighter moments became restful—these were the gems of forgetfulness that arrived to make things feel “okay” and “safe” for a little while (anyone who has lost a loved one, will relate to that temporary amnesia, trust me on that too.) Yet, the nagging anxiety was always within reach, hidden in a shopping bag, or a pillowcase taped to the back of the bed, or tucked away somewhere locked. The repetitive nature of the narrative, in my mind, shed light on the mental state of Theo as he attempted to cope—obsessive and compulsive, dangerously so—the book truly had very unpleasant moments. A young man whose life was forever altered in an instant, there is no being “normal” after that sort of experience—the psychological damage is done—the kid is broken, and becomes a broken adult wearing a veneer of normality; he’s always hiding something. I admire the work, the research, the years put into it. It has everything including the kitchen sink in it—it’s well-crafted and every word accounted for—it all mattered. Tightly wound, molded, modeled, constructed—polished, polished again, and then polished some more. (The Secret History as the “first born” possesses that magical raw beauty of being the first of its kind—The Goldfinch in comparison may have been “spoiled” with too much love, but turned out just fine in spite of it—it is a work by a mature author, that’s the difference.) It is gutsy and classic—not too many write like this anymore, dang, the depth of description at times was dense—lovely. At times, I was truly amazed that it was let through at such a stunning size and as verbally extravagant as Dostoyevsky (or Dickens), yet, I could not find reason to cut it to pieces. The digressive philosophical ending at first glance felt a bit off when I waded into it, but the water was temperate, I understood it as being an epilogue, returning to the beginning—Theo looking back from a safe distance of time to review and absorb—to purge it one more time. I found it satisfying.

Books like these don’t come around often enough, I took my time with this one—treating myself to a story that I have waited a very long time to read. I was not disappointed—only that it ended, and who knows when the next one will come into being…LJWR, 2/1/2014

Morning glory days...

You know it's the end of summer when these sky colored flowers bloom! Morning Glories have fascinated me since I was very young... I haven't had much luck growing them for a few years because of certain little bunnies seem to love eating the seedlings (but not the purple ones of which I have plenty!) or the seeds themselves have been duds (and some times they bloom the smaller purple.) These I rescued from the wee hungry bunny and kept them out of reach on the porch table until they became a less tempting size, now they're growing in an enamel bowl, climbing on a trellis made from old lath from one of our deconstruction projects in the house... I've been going through the photos that I've taken over the last two three weeks, and these were the prettiest, and seem to speak of a time of year that is winding down... lilacs are spring, morning glories are fall...


My garden is a wreck ever since that big blow we had when the last tropical storm ripped through here, today we have residual wind and clouds from Earl, it feels fall-like, in the 60's... yesterday was 90.


These two cluttered together during the early morning bloom...


This photo was taken just yesterday morning... I was shuffling around like an old woman and had a tough time keeping the camera steady... I've been having a great deal of trouble with my FMS lately, been over-doing things again, but that's my own fault, I just can't sit and let others do the work, and since I do my best to maintain my flexibility I have a false sense of "I can do it" and bang, my body is on fire by 3PM and my head is spinning, ears ringing, my stomach queasy, and all I want to do is immerse myself in a hot bath and go to bed... so I'm hoping to get lots of rest this long weekend to combat the aches and fatigue...

My new novel, The Fractured Hues of White Light, received its first bad review, a two star at Goodreads.com from one of the winners of the giveaway that I did there... it's unfortunate that giveaways tend to be random selection, so there's no telling who will be reviewing the book, and they don't necessarily attempt to match the book with an appropriate reader who would like it (or the people who sign up for the giveaway don't make the effort to research the book first before committing to the giveaway... I don't know, I'm a fussy enough reader that I would do my homework by checking the 'Look Inside' feature at Amazon to read a sample of the book to see if the writing interests me.) ...Anyway... the book wasn't the reader's cup o' tea and she said so in so many words...that's okay, it's part of the business, I can deal with that...you can't please everybody. This sort of review can either be good because it will warn off readers who share her book biases... or it will be bad because it will warn off readers who might be pleasantly surprised to read a book outside their comfort zone. Who knows. I'm running a second giveaway at Goodreads that ends on September 30th, and again, I'll hope for the best that I will get readers who will enjoy the book for what it is...

Even tho' this one is just a tad blurry, I still love the shapes in it, the movement...makes me think of a Georgia O'Keeffe painting...