A Fantasy Thriller about Books:  Emma Torzs’s “Ink Blood Sister Scribe”

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You’re in the mood to read a thriller.  John Le Carre?  Mick Herron?   

I recommend Emma Torzs’s Ink Blood Sister Scribe,  a fantasy thriller about magical libraries. 

The novel focuses on two sisters, Esther and Joanna, who, unbeknownst to them, are in danger because of their father’s small  collection of magical books of spells.  A charming  English tycoon, the owner of the largest library of magical books in the world,  desperately wants one of the books and will not stop at violence.  He is also hunting for scribes who use their blood as ink in writing spells. Scribes are rare: to put it mildly, scribes bleed out.

There is no bookish coziness in Torzs’s spare, atmospheric, haunting prose. The suspenseful plot moves swiftly and horrifically, and there is a threat behind the most ordinary encounters. Books are used for malign purposes.

 And Esther is on the run.  She doesn’t know why  but her father warned her that she would be killed if she didn’t move to a different place every November.  And since no one, not even her father, knows why she is the target, her younger sister, Joanna, feels abandoned and stranded. Their father is killed by the tycoon’s coveted spell book, and Joanna is left alone to care for the magical library.  She has no human contact: she feeds a stray cat, but rarely leaves home.

Part One begins at the South Pole station in Antarctica, where Esther has worked as an electrician for a year.  She loves the dramatic color of the sky.  “It was a variegated blue, almost white where it met the snowy horizon but deepening as Esther’s eyes followed it upward:  from robin’s egg cerulean to a calm, luminous azure.  Beneath it the Antarctic ice was blindingly bright…”

 It is November, but Esther has decided to break the rules and sign on for another year.  She is taking a risk, but does not want to leave her lover, Pearl.  For so many years she has left people behind.  She feels she has to stay.

To put it mildly, this is a mistake.  Now she is really on the run, pursued by people with powers she doesn’t understand. And there is the feel of a dark fairy tale, as magic mirrors come into play.

She has two allies, Nicholas, a scribe, and his bodyguard, Collins.  They are bewildered by the instructions from Maram, the manager of Nicholas’s uncle’s magical library, but they gallantly fly with Esther from New Zealand to the U.S. and escort her to her home in Vermont.

Although Nicholas is one of the main characters, alas! he is less vividly drawn than the two sisters.  He is, more or less, a plot device. But I still enjoyed the book thoroughly.

Why should you read this novel?  For Torz’s prose,  for the mysterious revelations about the characters, and of course for the books.

John Crowley’s “Aegypt”: Novels within Novels & the Meaning of History

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No one can deny that John Crowley is a brilliant writer.  

Certainly Harold Bloom thought so.  In his book The Western Canon, he praised Crowley’s 1981 novel, Little Big, and referred to it as “a neglected masterpiece.”

Crowley has won many awards, including the Award for Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Art and Letters in 1992 and the World Fantasy Award in 1980.

So why is Crowley little-known in the twenty-first century?  Perhaps it is because he is hard to classify; his work straddles the line between literary fiction and fantasy. But for most of his career he has written complex novels of ideas, in which characters gain new perspectives through strange encounters with books, people, and places.

In his 1987 philosophical novel, Aegypt, now published under the title Solitudes, the first of  the Aegypt Cycle tetralogy, Crowley explores the relationships of language, time, history, and fiction.  The hero, Pierce Moffatt, a historian and a professor at Barnabas College in New York City, is disturbed by the blurring of  lines between fact and fiction in the late ‘60s. The astronomy professor is teaching astrology: Pearce objects to the this pandering to fuzzy thinking. An amused professor tells him he is not “plastic” enough, and he should humor the students and “entertain them.”

Pierce continues to teach history, but reluctantly changes the curriculum.

His students apparently wanted something else. They liked the stories they were gleaning from the wide reading, and made round sounds at the notions he put forth, which they entertained indiscriminately, mixing them with other mental guests in a bash that Pierce found hard to crash.  They had come to college, not as Pierce’s generation seemed to have gone to college, to be disabled of their superstitions, but to find new and different ones to adopt; [they] were vague about whether the Middle Ages came before or after the Renaissance…

Slowly Pierce becomes enchanted by the nomadic free spirits of the time.  His social life in New York City begins to revolve around liberal “hippies,”  particularly drug-taking  women who believe in astrology and the Age of Aquarius. And though he loses his job due to debts, drugs, and skipping classes, he lands a book contract to explore the tenets of New Age philosophy in the context of Renaissance history, science, and philosophy.

Aegypt is now published as Solitudes

Things start looking up for Pierce when he moves to the charming town of Blackberry  Jambs, New York, where his friend Spofford,  a Vietnam vet and  former student, has a sheep farm.  The town is not quite pretty, but the people are interesting, and it has the requisite health food stores, galleries in churches, and a good public library. 

Crowley brilliantly portrays a motley group of fascinating characters in Blackberry Jambs. One of my favorites is Rosie Mucho, née Rasmussen, who is getting divorced from her husband, a quack therapist, and has moved with her daughter into the house of her elderly uncle, who is in charge of the Fellowes Craft Trust.  The late Fellowes Craft was a best-selling writer of historical novels,who lived his entire life in Blackberry Jambs. Rosie is addicted to Craft’s historical novels: we read excerpts from his smart, entertaining novel about Shakespeare and long to read more. 

 Coincidentally, Pierce, who was homeschooled in Kentuck, became a Fellowes Craft fan because the state library sent his mother a box of books every month for the purpose of teaching. For some reason, Fellowes’ novels were among them. When Rosie and her uncle offer Pierce a job helping them sort through Craft’s archives, he becomes fascinated by an unfinished novel which blows up “Pierce’s false history of the world.”

“Why must I live in two worlds, Pierce asked, why.”

His world view is changing, and it is painful.

And thus we go on to the second novel in the Aegypt quartet, Love & Sleep.

It’s a Lifestyle! Hot-Weather Reading

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The best thing about hot weather may be dreaming about it.  Trees gently nod (whether praising or scolding, we can’t tell),  butterflies hover over the flowering weeds,  a hammock is strategically located under the tree,  people lounge in lawn chairs wearing Lawrence of Arabia clothes (or at least something cotton), one snaps one’s fingers to get a drink – No, in reality I’m pouring glasses of iced violet Early Grey tea from a pitcher.

In the summer I adore reading books set in hot places.  Do you?

Here are some hot-weather classics!

Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky.  In this gorgeous,  lyrical novel, three Americans roam through the cities and deserts of North Africa. They sweat, chat, and struggle back to consciousness after sleeping uncomfortably in tiny rooms, then drink at cafes. They travel but lack all knowledge of the culture, so their journey is more dangerous than they imagine. Bowles is a great American writer:  every sentence is perfectly-wrought and lush.. 

Here’ s an excerpt.

 In the next room he could hear his wife stepping about in her mules on the smooth tile floor, and this sound now comforted him… But how difficult it was to accept the high, narrow room with the beamed ceiling, the huge apathetic designs stenciled in in different colors around the walls, the closed window of red and orange glass.  He yawned:  there was no air in the room.  Later he would climb down from the high bed and fling the window open, and at that moment he would remember his dream.

Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger deservedly won the Booker Prize in 1987.  Claudia H, a 76-year-old historian, is musing on the meaning of history (from the Greek and Latin, inquiry, story). She is also writing “a history of the world , concentrating on “the bit of the twentieth century to which I’ve been shackled, like it or not.” Parts are set during the Desert War in her childhood, parts in Cairo during the World War II, parts in England. Interspersed with the narrative are musings on abstract subjects like mythology: it “is much better stuff than history.  It has a form; logic; a message.  I once thought I was a myth.”

Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet.  I read these novels in a hammock ages ago, when I was twenties and did not shave my legs.  In this gorgeously-written, percipient tetralogy, Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea, the prose is moody and lush.  The narrative is psychologically-oriented and fragmented. Over the course of the quartet, Durrell’s narrator, Darley, reiterates and augments a series of events in the lives of his lover Justine and a group of friends in Alexandria, Egypt.  Other characters, particularly Balthazar and Clea (Mountolive is the hero of the prequel), contribute their viewpoints, so that a clearer picture is revealed.  Published from 1957 to 1960, these books are elegant but perhaps too flowery for some.  

T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom.  Of course I haven’t read it!  I have, however, seen the movie twice, admiring the excellent performance of Peter O’Toole.  :Seven Pillars of Wisdom is an autobiography focusing on the two years he spent as an advisor to Bedouin Forces during the Arab Revolt (1916-18). It has been on our shelves for years. Neither my husband nor I can bear to part with it.  This may be the summer one of us finally reads this alleged masterpiece. 

Several of Rumer Godden’s novels are set in India, where she grew up and lived for many years  As you can imagine, the weather is often hot.  You will find desperately humid weather scenes in Cromartie vs. the God Shiva, The Lady and the Unicorn, The Peacock Spring, and Coromandel Sea Change. 

Olivia Manning’s The Rain Forest. Fans of Olivia Manning will enjoy her short, tightly-plotted novel The Rain Forest (352 pages), published in 1974, set on an island in the Indian Ocean. This hypnotic story of an expatriate couple living on a hot, jasmine-scented island ruled by the British is a trenchant examination of colonialism and culture clash.  It is reminiscent of the novels and stories of Graham Greene and W. Somerset Maugham.

It’s heating up here, though we still haven’t needed the air conditioning. Cheers to everyone who likes hot-weather books!

Where Has All the Humor Gone?

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We have subscribed to The New Yorker for 30 years.  We read it for the movie reviews, the Cartoon Caption Contest,  and the profiles of Paul McCartney and Mick Herron. We do not read Shouts and Murmurs, the weekly humor piece, because it is just not that funny.

 A longtime fan of the humor writing of Dorothy Parker, E. M. Delafield, Betty MacDonald, Cornelia Otis Skinner, Emily Kimbrough, and Jean Kerr, I wonder what happened to modern humor. 

And so I sat down with The New Yorker and parsed a few of its sinisterly unfunny humor columns to figure out what has happened.

I expected to get off to a good start with Ian Frazier (Western Reserve Academy, Harvard), who is a brilliant writer, despite the handicap of an  Ivy League education.  I admired his book, Family, a history of his family in the midwest , and On the Rez, a history of the Ogala Sioux and a modern account of their daily life. 

The trouble is when Frazier tries to be funny.  The New Yorker recently published his column, “Translation,” a humor “piece” (pow!), or perhaps one would call it a satire of pig Latin, which he purports humorously is derived from the  Latin, which he may have studied at Western Reserve Academy.

He writes:

The earthy, untrammeled, and lyrical other language that I’m referring to was derived originally from Latin, hence its common name, Pig Latin. Among linguists, it’s known as Demotic Ay-speak, for the sake of precision, and to remove any allusion to pigs (which have nothing to do with the language). Other members of my linguistic community will tell you that I’m fiercely proud of my fluency and stand up for the language whenever it is misused. I even prefer to read novels in it, because it makes me feel at home. I first encountered the P.-L. version of olstoy-Tay’s “anna-Yay arenina-Kay” in the abridged translation done by Mrs. Erwin’s fifth graders. The principal translator, Billy Nolan, was a fully proficient speaker.

Okay, it’s mildly funny.   I prefer LOL funny.  But  what’s with Billy Nolan’s translation of “anna-Yay arenina-Kay”?  I happen to know Ian Frazier studied Russian, and perhaps he has read Anna Karenina in Russian.  I wonder which translation he prefers, if he reads it in translation: the illy-Bay oland-Nay, the aude-May, or perhaps the -onstance-Cay arnett-Gay?

I would say that this column is Medium Funny. 

It does make me want to reread Anna Karenina.  Thanks, Ian azier-Fray.  

And now on to a second Shouts and Murmurs “piece,” “Making of,”  by John Kenney, who, according to The New Yorker bio, has contributed to the magazine since 1999 and is the author of six books. 

This column takes the form of a Zoom call, or do I mean a Platonic dialogue?  A writer, art director, strategist, and account exec. are planning a Budweiser commercial. A terse Stream-of-consciousness is their medium of conversation.   

It begins with the writer.

Writer:  We open on a horse.  Cut to, like, a farmer.  Then a welder.  Then a man on a horse.  Maybe a jockey.  We hear a voice-over.  Reciting the Gettysburg Address.

The writer and art director are obsessed with the farmer’s “bare muscular chest… gleaming with sweat,” and invent another farmer who “is also half nude and insanely fit.  And he has a look that says, ‘Let’s do this.’”  Later, the writer imagines American flags everywhere.  “And when we cut back all the men are in drag.”

There apparently must be a horse. The writer insists.  Perhaps a farmer shoeing a horse, perhaps a horse running slo-mo, perhaps someone doing something with a horseshoe.  The writer finds this all very sexy!   Well, a horse is a sex symbol, if I remember my D. H. Lawrence (and you know I do).

I would find this column funnier if I had ever seen a Budweiser commercial.  But honestly I hate sports, and isn’t that where beer commercials air?

I consider Kenney’s column Kind of Funny, but not very.

You’ll be thrilled to know that I genuinely enjoyed a witty Shouts and Murmurs column by Samantha Irby, a comedian and essayist.  She made me laugh with her column, “Please Invite Me to Your Party,” in which she assures her potential hosts that she will try all their weird party food, appreciate their deep cleaning, and charm their family to the point that their dad will invite her to a football game, “an invitation I will dodge till one of us dies.” 

I love her assessment of her personal charms:  she is a fun guest who will do all she can to support and make the hosts the stars. 

“Who is that fat ghost?” your friends will ask as they swipe through the photos you posted to prove that you know people and like to have a good time. Then they’ll swipe to your in your sequined dress and sigh in commitment, immediately forgetting about me.”

Ah, memories of parties past!  Like Irby, I am happy to keep the cat company.  

She continues.

So I can come, right?  You’re gonna text me the address and your favorite brand of tequila?  I need to be invited more than anything I’ve ever needed in my life.  Because, trust me, really am great at a party.  Especially since I won’t show up.

This is hilarious!  I do love a good party where everybody mills and throngs, the conversation flows, and nobody networks.

Especially when I don’t show up.

Saints or Heretics?  A Novel of Julian of Norwich and Margery of Kempe

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Raised a Catholic, the daughter of a devout Catholic, I learned more about religion from my mother’s example than catechism.  On Sunday mornings we public-school students were hustled off to catechism, held in the depressing old Catholic school across from the church.  The classroom was too hot in fall, too cold in winter and spring. The wooden desks were old and ugly. We read Bible stories in little illustrated books, but not the Bible itself:  that had to be interpreted by the priest. And, ironically, though taught by nuns, we learned nothing about the role of women in the church. The aged nuns, retired teachers, were cross, and who could blame them?  They already had taught three or four generations, and did not want to deal with us.   

 At a certain point, I dropped out of catechism and attended church only sporadically. I was still Catholic, but the anti-woman structure of the church upset me.  The misogyny of the church  still astonishes me in the 21st century:  still no women priests, still no reproductive rights, fewer and fewer nuns, and the Pope living in a  la-la-land of systematic oppression of women.

It would be hyperbolic to say that the church’s attitudes toward women are unchanged since medieval times, but I will say it.  Oh, it was stricter, true, but two famous religious women of the Middle Ages were snubbed by the church and accused of heresy.   Julian of Norwich (1332-?) was a religious visionary who became an anchoress and wrote The Book of Shewings; and Margery of Kempe (1373-?), an illiterate mother of 14 children, began in middle age to preach in open spaces about her visions and conversations with Jesus Christ.  Later, she dictated her memoirs,  The Book of Margery Kempe.

 Margery also went on a pilgrimage to visit Julian and spoke to her through the curtained window of her cell.  Julian of Norwich was impressed by Margery’s courage and urged to continue to preach. She assured her it was not heresy.

Here is something surprising:  I consulted The Penguin Dictionary of Saints, and noted that Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe are absent from these pages. Further research revealed that these two brilliant women were never canonized.   They were rebellious, and there was, of course, a double standard for men and women.  Wealthy Julian of Norwich lost her husband and child to the plague before becoming an anchoress; and Margery’s family life was difficult, since her husband was poor, and she was constantly pregnant and very sick, until Jesus intervened and taught her husband the value of chastity..

I recently read a beautiful first novel by Victoria Mackenzie about Julian of Norwich and Margery of Kempe,  For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain.  It is spare, lucid, very short, and clever, divided into short sections, some from the perspective of Julian, others from Margery of Kempe. 

Julian is especially sympathetic.  The plague was rampant, and she lost several family members.  “The pestilence traveled through the air, like the fog from the river that curled its way under our door in autumn.  My father died, and my nurse Joan died, and my older brother William died.  Then my younger sister Elizabeth died, whom I had always called Betsy.  Thump. Her soft body was thrown away.”

Later, the plague returns.  “When I was nineteen years of age and married, living in the golden mist of my first child, the pestilence returned to our city, slinking through the streets, snuffing out lives.”  Julian loses her husband and baby. She lived with her mother until she died, and then became an anchoress.

Strong, unhappy, but confident Margery takes a lot of flack for sharing her visions of Christ.  “When I told my neighbors that Christ had shown himself to me, they laughed.  ‘Why would he show himself to a woman?’  they said.  ‘Do kings speak to you also?  Does the Pope creep into your room at night and whisper things only for your special sacred ears?  Ha!’”

Julian and Margery were two of the most important medieval writers, unsung heroines of their time. Mackenzie is honest about their arduous lives.  For years Julian was tormented by her inability to adjust to living in an anchorite’s cell. She had pictured serenity, but she could neither pray nor overcome her claustrophobia.  Finally she found the strength, but what a dreadful fate, in my opinion.  Not that she considered it dreadful – she found help in prayer and in writing her book – but she sometimes had regrets.

Margery, on the other hand, has such gory visions of the crucifixion, of being there and seeing every nail hole and touching his wounds, that I felt, like D. H. Lawrence before me, that Christianity is too much a religion of death. 

Victoria Mackenzie is a remarkable writer, though I had difficulty reading about some of the  sublime visionary gore.  That part of religion that never makes sense to me- a bit too much Isis and the Eleusian mysteries, don’t you think?

 But  it is a splendid book, and I remain indignant that these women were not canonized.

“Banned and Damned”:  What Shall I Call My Little Free Library?

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By now we are all familiar with Little Free Libraries, those adorable wooden boxes in people’s yards that look like birdhouses and are stocked with books.   There are 10 Little Free Libraries in my neighborhood. When the movement started, I was thrilled.

“I can’t wait to see what people are reading,” I said excitedly. The LFL book-sharing philosophy is summed up by the sign, TAKE A BOOK, GIVE A BOOK. 

But the Little Free Libraries have disappointed.  Often the books are thrown in higgledy-piggledy, and the spines are cocked and the pages foxed by the time you find them. The windows of two LFL boxes in the neighborhood are broken, so the winds gust in and do not improve conditions. 

We have optimistically donated some classics and literary fiction,  yet they languish there for months. The Man without Qualities was a hard sell, so eventually we took it back.  Giggling, I once threatened to drop off The Tale of Genji (1200-some pages). The typical fare is Richard Patterson, Danielle Steel, vampire books, romances, and Georgette Heyer.  Once I fell under the spell of some excellent literary bloggers, and took home Georgette Heyer’s Devil’s Cub, because she was said to be a charming, witty writer of Regency romances, and compared to Jane Austen.  This turned out to be false advertising.  I dutifully returned Devil’s Cub.   It is still there.

Today as I looked in dismay at the crumpled copies of John Connelly, John Grisham, and old Sue Grafton mysteries, I had a brainstorm.  I will start a “themed” Little Free Library.  I might call it Banned and Damned!  But then the scary right-wing moms might descend upon me,  even if I have a For Adults Only sign, or the City Council, due to complaints, or perhaps the ultra-conservative governor.  The right-wing legislators in my state propose legislation for banning books.  But I have to believe the banners are not great readers, and at random want to ban books they have heard of, but not read. Perhaps we should sign them up for an English class.

Since my husband won’t even let me put a peace sign in the yard, I doubt that Banned and Damned will fly.  How about Books That Make You Think? Or Classics & Controversy? 

Although I could not possibly stock Lady Chatterley’s Lover – it is no longer banned, but I cannot say it would fly in this political climate – I would fill my shelves with Faulkner, whom the right-wingers have not yet discovered, and perhaps Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Women in Love, both banned, but less explicit than Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

How about Thoreau? He is still controversial in the 21st century. I thought everybody would want to live the simple life by Walden Pond, but two conservative, affluent friends of mine had a fit when I mentioned his name. I will include the other Transcendentalists, too because they are such great writers. Concord, Massachusetts, was the center of 19th-century radical American thought!

We will also add the Beats, the feminists, science fiction, and poetry.

More suggestion for an LFL name and thought-provoking books are welcome.

Summer Reading: Henry James & Maud Cairnes

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It was a gorgeous June day. We take these days when we can get them.  We didn’t exert ourselves, except to make sandwiches in the kitchen, because it was 90 degrees, and all anybody wants is to sit under a tree and indulge in light reading. I almost said “sit in a tree,” but I must admit those days are gone.  Not gone, however, are days when we lounge under a tree and sigh over Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove.

On a recent rereading of The Wings of the Dove, I loved it as much as I did in my twenties.  Back then, I always had a classic going at night, and James, though considered soporific by cynics, seemed to me surprisingly stimulating.  I was absorbed by his magnificent characters, especially the innocent Americans, among them Isabel Archer (The Portrait of a Lady), tricked into marriage by an impecunious Italian prince, and Milly Theale (The Wings of the Dove), a charming, rich, terminally ill young American woman who attracts fortune hunters.

Milly hides her illness even from her companion, Mrs. Stringham, her chaperone in their European travels.  But Milly is manipulated by her clever English friend Kate Croy into confessing she is ill, and then isthrown together with Merton Densher, an English journalist with no prospects. And Milly likes him very much.

To complicate things further, Densher is Kate’s secret fiancé: her rich Aunt Maud will cut her off if she marries a poor man, though Densher would like to marry her on his own income.  Kate’s  scheme is to get her hands on Milly’s money by making her fall in love with Densher.  Densher doesn’t take this too seriously, and  is desperate to spend time with Kate, who becomes colder as the book goes on. Kate’s  hopes for Densher and Milly are  obscene. This is not quite James noir, but in a way it is a novel about a psychological murder.

I’m fascinated by Kate, because in the first section of the novel, she is a kind, ethical woman who offered to stay with her impecunious father and share with him her 100 pounds legacy a year from her mother, while giving the other two hundred to her sister, a poor widow with children. He declined to live with her in poverty and sent her to Aunt Maud, with the hope that she would pass him the odd bit of change (though Maud has forbidden her to see her father). And she is very much in love with Densher at that point.

In a way, Kate’s ruthlessness is the end of Kate. The prospect of money ruins her. And yet I’m not sure James pulls off the transition from Kate the Good into Kate the Cold. She didn’t care about money when she offered to sacrifice herself to her father.

The other novel I’ve read under a tree, or shall I pretend IN a tree, is Maud Cairnes’s Strange Journey, a book in the British Library Women’s Series.  In this charming, comical, very smart little book, Cairnes draws an unforgettable portrait of two women, Polly Wilkinson, the narrator and a housewife, and Lady Elizabeth, who has everything that money can buy and yet has been unhappy since her miscarriage and her husband’s affairs.  Suddenly Polly and Lady Elizabeth  swap bodies, and  have no idea who they are supposed to be.   Have they gone mad?.

How would you feel if you suddenly were translated to another person’s body?  Not only another person, but someone you’d never met and didn’t know?   Suddenly Polly is expected to ride horses, hunt, and exchange witty repartee with sophisticated upper-class folk. And Lady Elizabeth finds herself living in a middle-class home on a budget, responsible for two children and a hard-working husband. 

Later, the two women find out how they became aware of each other. Polly wistfully observed Elizabeth oe night in a Rolls Royce.  She longed to climb in, lean against a soft cushion, and be driven to a pleasant home where everything would be done for her.

And when they try to reconstruct what happened,  Elizabeth also remembers seeing Polly and envying her access to a simpler life. 

Oddly enough, each learns by body-swapping to cope better with her problems by learning the other’s skills.

A charming, lively, light novel which I will read again!

Left out in the Rain!

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It was a beautiful, hot June day.  I lounged in a lawn chair, lost in Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel, the first of a duology.  The characters in this spare, realistic novel are linked, however remotely, to the Hotel Caiette, an isolated glass luxury hotel on the northern tip of Vancouver Island.  It is the property of Jonathan Alkaitis, a wealthy man who ruins thousands of lives with a Ponzi scheme.  There is a large cast of characters, among them two characters fascinated by the shipping industry: Leon,  a shipping executive who meets Jonathan at the hotel and becomes one of his investors;  and a young woman, Vincent, a former bartender at the hotel who follows Jonathan to Manhattan and poses as his trophy wife.  After Jonathan is arrested, she becomes  a cook on a ship, where she makes videos of the ocean and finds peace.

 The odd thing about the duology is that the two books are of different genres. Sea of Tranquility is a haunting literary science fiction novel. It is the better of the two  books, a genre-bending masterpiece.  But you don’t have to read them in order to understand them.  I read the second book first.  

Set partly on Earth and partly on a moon colony, Sea of Tranquility follows a group of characters who inhabit three distinct timelines: the early 20th century, the 21st century (2020 to 2023), and the twenty-third century.  

 There is a moment that changes everything, when a time traveler from the twenty-third century breaks the rules and warns a novelist on a  book tour about the outbreak of a pandemic. He tells her to go home to her family on the moon and that changes history.,\  Ironically, her novel is about a pandemic. (By the way, Mandel is best-known for her dystopian pandemic novel, Station Eleven, which was made into an excellent HBO series.) 

There are two sections in the book titled “The Last Book Tour on Earth.”  Mandel’s description of the writer’s exhaustion from travel and talking, from signing books and going home to identical rooms in Marriotts in different cities, was so vivid that I decided not to go to her reading.  I could picture how exhausted she would be, even if she  did her best to be vivacious. 

But as I said, I was reading The Glass Hotel the other day. After I finished, I started reading a tattered used paperback copy of T. C. Boyle’s The Terranauts. Then my husband came home, we went inside, we got immersed in conversation,  and I left both books outside. 

And it rained last night!  I left the books out in the rain.

So excuse me for not writing about Boyle’s novel. Both books are soaking wet, and are now in the recycle bin! (I do have one other Boyle novel, so I will substitute it for The Terranauts , eventually.)

Checklist for Reading Outdoors

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You must prepare for the outdoor reading experience.  There are bugs, rabbits, and deer out there.  You’re not planning a trip to the woods but there might be wild animals in the backyard.   

And so I  had a checklist, but was distracted by my friend Elsa’s bragging about her sun sensitivity.

“I always wear a hat,” she said.  “I take an umbrella, too.  I’m just so fair.  I get burned walking from the house to the corner.”

We were in a serious blond-on-blond contest.  “Me, too.  I got a ghastly sunburn in Acapulco.”  Where did that come from?  I may have flown over Acapulco.  I did faint once in the Mexico City subway, though.  

“Acapulco is so touristy, don’t you think?”

“I love it there,” I said. Hm, was it a resort town? But I’m out of my mind when I   get competitive. 

“We spent our honeymoon on a marvelous beach in Portugal.”

“Lovely!”  I ended the blond-on-blond contest, because I’m no longer blond and Niagara Falls isn’t quite as romantic as Portugal. 

I got my worst sunburn in my hometown.

I looked at my checklist before we left.

  •   Straw hat from Cape Cod, bought in a bridal shop, because it was the only straw hat left in Provincetown.  Check.
  •  Regular sunblock,  sunblock for extra-sensitive skin,  then a backup sunscreen in case the regular brand smells too much like coconut.  Check.
  •   Bug spray.  Check.
  •   Long-sleeved blue workshirt to don if the bugs are biting. Check.
  • A thermos of coffee and a bottle of Gatorade. For me.   Water for Elsa, secretly from tap, because we don’t buy water at the store.  Check.
  •   Book bag full of:  John Gardner’s Grendel, aMargaret Millar omnibus, and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (reread).  Check.

Our readathon went very well.  Sometimes it’s nice to sit in lawn chairs and read beside a fellow bookworm.

A Betsy-Tacy Addendum: I Was Wrong about the Hookah!

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In my post on Maud Hart Lovelace’s autobiographical Betsy-Tacy books, I made an error about a hookah. During our long-ago trip to Mankato (Lovelace’s hometown), a  Betsty-Tacy fan insisted that a Syrian immigrant smoked hashish in Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill.

I wrote, “May I say that I don’t remember this at all, and cannot imagine Lovelace using the word ‘hookah. He was probably smoking tobacco. Where would an impoverished Syrian immigrant get hashish in Deep Valley, Minnesota?”

This morning I checked the chapter called “Little Syria” in my copy of Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Hill.  And there is a hookah!