November Reading: Part 1, Fiction

I Am The Cheese, by Robert Cormier – Dark stuff. My book club read this, partly because it was on the school reading list of one member’s teen-aged daughter. It was a pretty impressive work of art, though. Told from the point of view of an unreliable narrator – he mentions in the first chapter deciding not to take his pills... So the reader is never quite sure what is going on.

The Tale of Despereaux, Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup, and a Spool of Thread, by Kate diCamillo – Now, this one was NOT dark. A friend of mine mentioned that he was re-reading it with his boys and that it was one of their favorites – so I thought I would probably like it too, and I did. In my mind I heard it in S’s voice. Very charming. And it’s now, as they say, a major motion picture, coming to a theater near you. The author also wrote Because of Winn Dixie.

Inside Job, by Connie Willis – Like all of CW’s work, clever. This one’s a hardback novella, and I wouldn't shell out big bucks to buy it, but our library does a good job at carrying such things. Like many of her works, it includes tributes to things she likes – in this case, the writings of H.L. Mencken, famous skeptic.

Three antiques from The Literature Network: The Outdoor Girls at Wild Rose Lodge (1921), by Laura Lee Hope (yes, you know her name from more well-known but equally campy series like The Bobbsey Twins – oh yes, and Bunny Brown and Sister Sue, which even I could not stomach). Mary Marie (1920), and Miss Billy (1911), both by Eleanor H. Porter, who wrote Pollyanna.

I stumbled on this web site, which features some of the great (and not so great but once well-loved) literature that have now entered the public domain. Then spent a lovely Saturday morning reading these silly old-fashioned books all written long before I was born. All of them very much show their age, reflecting the sensibilities and values of days gone by.

By far the best of these three was Mary Marie, the story of a young girl whose parents are getting a divorce and plan to shuttle her back and forth. You know from the beginning (since this a 1920 book for children) that the family is destined to be reunited. I think what I liked best about it was that it didn’t end with that happy reunion but goes on to a scene some dozen years later when Mary Marie has grown up and finds her own marriage unsatisfactory, and for some of the same reasons. Will she leave her husband, or not?

(One funny thing about reading online is that they get their income from advertising; the vocabulary in sweet Mary Marie pulled up ads for ‘the married date club,’ a rather shocking dating service for people looking for a way to cheat, apparently.)

Dead Heat, by Joel C. Rosenberg – The climax of Rosenberg’s series of political thrillers, which are set in the very near future and apparently leading up to, if not the end of the world, within spitting distance of it. An assassination attempt on POTUS (that’s the ‘President of the United States in thriller jargon) is just the beginning. In fact, there’s a bit in there where the main character is studying Biblical prophecy and is most troubled that America is not mentioned (!). If these are the end times, how can the US not have a part to play? Are too many of us going to be taken out by the rapture (yeah, right) or is something else going to happen to neutralize the world’s only superpower? I’m not telling!

Controlling Interest, by Elizabeth White – Christian fiction mystery/romance thing; so-so. I picked it up partly because one of the main characters is a Pakistani, Muslim-background, recent convert to Christianity, and I wanted to see how they played that and if it would be believable. Was skeptical from the first since her name was Yasmina Patel. I thought all Patels were Hindu. In looking into I discover there are Muslim Patels as well. So there.

Also read:

• The Faraday Girls, by Monica McInerny
  
• The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday, by Alexander McCall Smith
• Ender in Exile, by Orson Scott Card