Saturday Snapshot: Ice in the Garden

Saturday Snapshot is a meme hosted by Alyce of At Home With Books. I have been meaning to participate for some time, and today I decided to jump in.

I love the tangle of garden in winter.



To participate in the Saturday Snapshot meme bloggers are asked to post a photo that you (or a friend or family member) have taken then leave a direct link to your post on the Saturday Snapshot site. Photos can be old or new, and be of any subject as long as they are clean and appropriate for all eyes to see. How much detail you give in the caption is entirely up to you. All she asks is that you don't post random photos that you find online.

Book Review: Supreme Courtship

Humor is about the hardest thing to translate. You have to really understand a culture to crystallize the humor in it. Christopher Buckley, ultimate Washington insider,* really understands life “inside the beltway.”** Which is why he manages to make “nine old farts sending footnotes to each other” –a.k.a. the US Supreme Court – seem hilarious! Well, at least hilarious some of the time. And maybe that’s all you can expect from political satire.

The premise here is great. President Vanderkamp, a terribly earnest and therefore thoroughly disliked Ohioan, becomes miffed when two of the finest jurists of the age are turned down for a seat on the Supreme Court because Dexter Miller, the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wants the job himself. Throwing caution to the wind for once, he nominates TV judge Pepper Cartwright, a wisecracking, gun-toting, Prada-wearing Texas icon to the Court.*** Along with the arcane nature of Constitutional law, Buckley also expounds on reality TV, populism, and the nature of marriage. There’s something here for everyone, especially news junkies.

Part of the book works beautifully. There’s one exchange among justices made up almost entirely of Latin legalese that had me laughing out loud in the library. And Silvio Santamaria, clearly a send-up of the most despicable justice with whom I share an alma mater – Antonin Scalia – is a brilliant tribute to excess:

He was brilliant, with a wit as caustic as drain cleaner; good company if you were in his camp and look out if you weren’t. Silvio Santamaria didn’t take yes for an answer. He didn’t disagree—he violently opposed. Didn’t demur—he went for your throat. Didn’t nitpick—disemboweled you and flossed his teeth with your intestines. First-timers appearing before the Court for oral argument had been known to wet their pants and even faint under his withering questions and commentary (p. 71).

I actually hope Buckley gets back to Santamaria in another book – the character deserved more time!

Unfortunately, not all of the book hangs together that well. The romantic angle of the novel was weak – so weak it made me squirm a bit. And Latina bombshell Ramona Alvilar represented a very nasty and hackneyed stereotype. At times it seemed like a long time between laughs. But then, this is a novel about the Supreme Court, where things change at a glacial pace. Perhaps that’s what he was going for?

If you like Buckley’s other books, you definitely will not be disappointed with Supreme Courtship, as I wasn’t. It just wasn’t as sharp as Thank You for Smoking, or as gut-wrenchingly funny as Boomsday, but it does represent a broadening of social themes for Buckley, which I enjoyed. A solid 3 out of 5 stars – probably 4 if you’re the kind of person who actually enjoys watching 24-hour news channels when there’s no particular disaster to follow.

This counts for the Book Blogger Abroad 2011 Challenge, as it was recommended by yours truly! So thanks to Judith at leeswammes for hosting!

*Yes, Christopher Buckley’s work stands on its own, but it’s hard to separate his political sensibility from the fact that his father was William F. Buckley, Jr., which makes him a true American political scion. I probably wouldn’t agree with either man on anything, including day of the week, just on principle. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that Buckley was raised on this stuff, and can be funny about it.

**That’s Washington, DC, for those of us outside the beltway. People in DC are so inside the beltway they don’t even realize that other cities HAVE beltways.

*** Think Sarah Palin on the Supreme Court and you have the idea, although Buckley actually finished the book before John McCain plucked the woman who could see Russia from her house out of Alaska and onto the national scene.

Book Review: Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Biography

Many people who know my politics assume my daughter Eleanor is named after a famous American first lady. Far from it. She’s actually named for an infamous duchess: Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Of course, infamous is in the eye of the beholder, and virtually every contemporary account describing Eleanor’s escapades was inked by a man. Which is why I so appreciated reading Marion Meade’s Eleanor of Aquitaine: A Biography, a book that seeks to illuminate this amazing woman, both through painstaking research* and the intuitive piecing together of events that history left unrecorded. Meade’s attempt to see events from Eleanor’s perspective isn’t perfect, but it probably brings the reader closer to the truth than contemporary, male-oriented accounts ever could.

Brilliant, wealthy and impetuous, Eleanor – along with the land’s she herself controlled in Languedoc (now southern France) – represented the dynastic marital jackpot of twelfth century Christendom. Her father’s untimely death on the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela prompted her hasty marriage to Louis of France. Meade speculates on the rationale for their marital problems quite extensively – and I think pretty persuasively – based on the very different relationship she maintained with her second husband, Henry of England. Before she managed a divorce from Louis on the well-established grounds of consanguinity (a burden the Pope had already removed), she gave him two daughters, one of whom was Marie of Champagne, patron to Chretien de Troyes.

With her second husband she had many more children, including two kings of England, Richard the Lionhearted and the ignominious John, who eventually was forced by his unhappy nobles to sign the Magna Carta. But it certainly wasn’t a “love” match, and their family feuding eventually took on civil war proportions, with some of the children siding with Eleanor and the king of France against Henry.**

While Eleanor has mostly been framed by the size of her patrimony, the depth of her perfidy and the acts of her progeny, what struck me most in reading Meade’s biography was her prodigious energy! She never seemed to stop moving, covering thousands of miles throughout her realm, even in years when she was pregnant. She represented a gentle touch to her subjects, probably a much needed one, considering Henry’s heavy hand. And she didn’t slow down much over her long life. The woman was crossing the Pyrenees on horseback at close to 80 years old, securing a granddaughter’s marriage and sealing a peace treaty!

Meade paints what I consider a deserving portrait of Eleanor of Aquitaine. To do this, she imagines motives and considers alternatives to “common knowledge.” Since male historians, many of them clerics with axes to grind, are the sources of the “common knowledge” about Eleanor, I can’t see any way around it, although as someone trained in historical method, I can see the potential problems with this strategy. I think anyone interested in medieval history will thoroughly enjoy this book, as well as those interested in history from a feminist perspective.

This book counts for the Dewey Decimal Challenge. My non-fiction kick is tearing that one up, but I'm moving on to a bit of fiction at this point! Thanks to Jen at the Introverted Reader for hosting.

*You know a book is painstakingly researched when your Kindle says you’ve read 86% of the book, and you’ve already arrived at the footnotes!

** Kind of makes the squabbles at your last family gathering seem like a walk in the park, doesn’t it?

Audiobook Review: Bitter Sweets

Scandalous lies. Sweet lies. Treacherous lies. Nimble lies. Lies of omission. Roopa Farooki’s Bitter Sweets tells the story of a Bangladeshi family built on a lie – and of three generations of suffering because of all the subsequent lies it takes to hold the unhappy group together.

Henna, a lazy and illiterate shopkeeper’s daughter from Dacca, convinces wealthy Anglophile and Oxford student Rashid (Ricky) Kareem that she is his poetry-loving, tennis-playing soulmate – a pretense that she manages to keep up until their wedding night. The first lie yields a second, as Ricky covers up his wife’s inadequacies for the sake of family honor. And the lies continue from there, each piece of happiness marred by some part of the truth missing.

Henna and Rashid’s only child, Shona, lies to keep peace. She falls in love with Parvez, a Pakastani, and they elope to London, where they start married life living over a confectioner’s shop. Intelligent and driven, Shona works tirelessly to create a perfect world for her little family. But even her kindly-meant lies take their toll, and eventually have repercussions for her twin sons, Omar and Sharif. (**Digression: Yes, that’s Omar and Sharif. Like the actor. It makes total sense when you read the novel, I promise.**)

Bitter Sweets is a solid family saga, romantic, funny, sad, and suspenseful in turns. I liked the complexity of the characters. Everyone has mixed motives, so their actions aren’t predictable. In fact, the ending provided a great plot twist that I never saw coming. I love that.

I thoroughly enjoyed this audiobook. Tania Rodrigues is a wonderful narrator, with a range of accents and voices that take the reader from Bangladeshi high society to the streets of London effortlessly. I had a couple of “driveway” moments while listening to the book, sitting in the car to listen to the end of a chapter – she has a great voice that you don’t tire of.

I’m starting to realize how very important the narrator is to the success of an audiobook. Actually, this book has me thinking about doing an experiment: I plan to read the actual book, and compare the two formats, to see how much of my enjoyment was because on the narration. Based on the mixed reviews I read of the book, and my own enthusiastic response, I wonder if Rodrigues’ masterful performance may have accounted for quite a lot my positive review.

Or maybe this is just my cup of tea. I will report back.

This book counts for THREE challenges: that’s a personal record. It counts for Evil in the What’s in a Name 4 Challenge, as well as for Immigrant Stories and the South Asia Challenge. Thanks to Beth Fish Reads, Colleen at BooksNYC and Swapna at S. Krishna’s Books for hosting.

Oh, and I’ll also be putting up a link on Audiobook Jukebox. It’s a great blog I recently found out about, with links to hundreds of reviews for audiobooks.

Book Review: Mennonite in a Little Black Dress

When I wrote up my goals for the year, I said I’d like to do more short reviews. This is one of those.

I picked up Rhoda Janzen’s Mennonite in a Little Black Dress in an airport bookshop where the pickings were pretty thin (unless you happened to be a Danielle Steele or Stephen King fan, which I’m definitely not). The premise was certainly interesting: a worldly college professor, recently dumped by her newly out-of-the-closet husband, goes back to her Mennonite family to convalesce after surgery.

I generally like memoirs, and Janzen’s is both raw and real. It was good – it just wasn’t great. Maybe that’s because the cover design and copy made me think this would be hilarious, and it really wasn’t. There were some funny parts, but the overriding emotion of the memoir was bitterness, not mirth. Maybe she wrote it too soon after her divorce. I could really feel the sting of it, but I found it oddly deflating.

Still, the book demystifies Mennonites, appreciated because I live in an area with a significant Mennonite population, and didn’t really know very much about their traditions and history. I would recommend it to anyone interested in knowing more about the group. It would probably also be appropriate for someone going through a divorce, as it does have a positive message about resilience, and learning to appreciate what you have. Not at all a bad book, it just didn’t fit my life or mood at the moment – thank goodness.

Bloggiesta Update #3: Labels and Wrap-Up

Okay, here is what I found out, participating in the Labels Mini-Challenge hosted by Beth Fish Reads: I have WAY too many. So A) I added the Labels gadget to my site, and B) I'm now in the process of removing titles and author name from my labels. This will be a big job, but it may finally make the Labels useful. Thanks for the inspiration, Bloggiesta.

I've gotten a great deal done this weekend, and also realized how much I ought to do! I still have one more backlogged review I'd like to get to, but with both of our teams playing today (he's a Packers fan, I'm a Jets fan), that may not happen today. But it's been a blast, and I'll definitely sign up for this challenge next time!

Audiobook Review: One Corpse Too Many

The New Year’s resolution to rock a bathing suit for my 20th anniversary trip to the Caribbean has been thoroughly productive from one perspective: the audiobook perspective, that is. Looking for something light and engaging enough to keep my mind off the treadmill miles, I chose the second Brother Cadfael mystery, One Corpse Too Many. As expected, it was very entertaining.

Set against the backdrop of the siege of Shrewsbury Castle during the dynastic struggles of King Stephen and Empress Maude, the novel follows the scrupulous Brother Cadfael’s search for the murderer of a minor noble whose death was not warranted by King Stephen, unlike the other 94 men of the castle who were brutally but legally hanged for their participation in the siege: the “one corpse too many” of the title.

What I love about the Brother Cadfael novels is the unfolding of the deductive reasoning process. The unorthodox monk, who lived the worldly life of a Crusader before taking up the cowl to tend the abbey’s herbarium, brings his life’s experience to bear on every problem. And this book presents a lot of problems. Along with the solving of a murder, Cadfael also must save the life of a courier, outwit the cagiest of nobles, protect a young woman from the King, and hide the truth about a crime from an innocent orphan.

One of the most charming parts of the audiobook for me was Patrick Tull’s excellent narration. His accent changes from heavy Welsh to proper British falsetto effortlessly. And his voice is soothing, but not at all dull. As mysteries go, this is good, clean, historical fun. I liked this one even better than A Morbid Taste for Bones, and I think it would stand on its own, even if you didn’t read the first one. This book is highly recommended for lovers of deductive mysteries and historical mysteries.

This is my first book for the What's In A Name 4 Challenge: A Number. It's such a fun challenge, and the categories are so open that you can always fill them with something you wanted to read anyway, but didn't make time for. Thanks to Beth Fish Reads for hosting. And it clears some of my backlog, so it's a Bloggiesta chore as well!