The End

You have probably noticed that I haven't been able to update this blog with much regularity. It hasn't been as successful as I would like and I have decided to focus my time and energy on other pursuits. I appreciate your loyalty and hope you will follow my other blog, Gardening Upstream, which is enjoying a great deal of growing success. Thank you friends and followers!

-Madeline

"Tess of the D'Urbervilles" by Thomas Hardy

Review by Madeline Salmon

"The corpses of those old fitful passions which had lain inanimate amid the lines of his face ever since his reformation seemed to wake and come together as in a resurrection."

Sentences like this fill Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, the crowning achievement of an author who began and ended his career as a poet. They make for arduous but rich reading. This is the first caution I will give in regard to Tess: Don't expect the story to unfold quickly. Depending on your point of view, you will either slog through page after page of scene setting and flowery language, or you will let Hardy transport you to the agricultural fields of Wessex and immerse you in the most beautiful use of the English language since William Shakespeare. If you can't tell, my opinion falls on the latter end of the spectrum.

My second warning is this: Tess is a story without joy. I think Hardy invented angst before it was cool. At least he had the decency to set the tone early in a conversation between the heroine and her younger brother:

"'Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?'

'Yes.'

'All like ours?'

'I don't know; but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound--a few blighted.'

'Which do we live on--a splendid one or a blighted one?'

"A blighted one.'"

If you like a story told with poetry and you can bear the sadness, Tess of the D'Urbervilles is a work of beauty.

"Listening Woman" by Tony Hillerman

Review by Madeline Salmon

My greatest concern about reading a series is always that the stories will all be the same. When I was eight and reading The Boxcar Children, I accepted and even enjoyed this predictability, but I'm jaded and less easily satisfied now. How will the same author, dealing with the same protagonist and the same setting, craft an original story?

This is my second Tony Hillerman novel, though it's the third in his Navajo mystery series. Don't read anything into my skipping Dance Hall of the Dead, which comes after the debut of the series, The Blessing Way (you can read my review of that one here). My source for these books is my mom's bookshelf and for whatever reason she doesn't have Dance Hall. It seemed like far too much work to go to the library and get it when there were already 16 others to choose from, so I decided I could live without it, despite its 1973 Edgar Award for Best Novel.

But this review is not about Dance Hall of the Dead, it's about Listening Woman. I'm happy to say that Listening Woman is even more suspenseful than The Blessing Way and except for Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn's fascinating detective skills and the marvelous desert setting, the two novels have very little in common. And Listening Woman is never predictable. Even though I knew there was a whole shelf full of books about Joe Leaphorn in the other room, I wasn't always entirely sure he would make it to the end of this one alive.

"Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" by Jules Verne

Review by Madeline Salmon

Legend has it that an eleven-year-old Jules Verne ran away from his Nantes, France home, stowing away on a ship bound for the West Indies, and was caught by his father awaiting him at the next port.
Thereafter he promised his mother he would only imagine traveling. I wonder if his mother had any notion of the imagination her son was brewing.

In Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, questions abound: Who is Captain Nemo? What price is revenge worth? Which is more valuable to the human soul, freedom or learning? These questions, along with the marvelous setting of the vast oceans that are only slightly less mysterious to us today than they were to Verne and his contemporaries, drive a rich and compelling narrative.

If you're the kind of reader who needs a shark attack or underwater fistfight on every other page, this is not the story for you, but it is more thick with action and suspense than almost any other novel I've read from the era (it was written in 1869).  It is particularly delightful if you can place yourself into the mind of a reader from that time period--someone who, if he or she were wealthy, would have traveled on the sea perhaps a handful of times, and could only have wondered at the world beneath its surface.

*Please see my comment on this review if you are interested in a note on the translation.

"The Mad Farmer Poems" by Wendell Berry

Review by Madeline Salmon

Wendell Berry's collection of 19 poems about how to live simply in a society increasingly tainted by technology and politics takes some getting used to. The poems are, after all, narrated by a farmer a few kernels short of a corncob.

At first I could only find myself thinking, What's his angle? And while I noticed moments of beauty in the first few poems, the mundane moments and sights he chose to celebrate weren't quite enough for me.

But as I read on in The Mad Farmer Poems I found myself swept up in those earthly glories, and seeing them, at least for a moment, through the Farmer's eyes. By the end of the brief book I longed to cut myself off from the world as we know it and live isolated from technology and bureaucracy--"to be a true human being," in the Farmer's words. And even as I longed to be a true human being I ached with the knowledge that I never would be, because even the Farmer acknowledges that it is no longer possible, not with the complexity and globalization of this world we live in, and not with the comforts I have come to depend on.

The Farmer certainly does have an angle, presumably the angle of Berry himself: don't let the politicos and marketers control you. "Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing." It wasn't difficult to succumb to the ravings of this lunatic, which are much more pleasant than the rants one might encounter in any given media outlet. And the Farmer's goal is honorable:

"My purpose is a language that can make us whole,

though mortal, ignorant, and small.

The world is whole beyond human knowing."

"The Blessing Way" by Tony Hillerman

Review by Madeline Salmon 

I have read just a handful of mysteries in my lifetime. I've always been under some bizarre impression that I shouldn't waste my time with them when I have more important books to read. But recently I've decided that, God willing, I have a long life ahead of me filled with thousands of books and reading a few mysteries won't set me back too far. And I've always known that if I read any mysteries in substantial numbers they would be by Tony Hillerman or Agatha Christie. I chose to start with Hillerman.

The Blessing Way is the first of Hillerman's Navajo mysteries, the series for which he is most remembered. Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn must balance his love and respect for the ways of The People with his duty to the law. And he must wrestle with the fact that all signs point to a murder committed by witchcraft, something he may or may not believe in. This is the great draw of the story--I doubt many other mysteries feature a culture the way Hillerman portrays Navajo life, which really functions as a shadowy character on its own, always present and always influencing every decision and action the characters make.

Of course I expected Hillerman's mastery of suspense (he wouldn't have gotten very far in the mystery genre without it), but I was pleasantly surprised to discover that he is also a remarkably gifted writer.  He has not just written a plot that drives the suspense forward but has actually crafted a compelling story, not to mention characters that are as believable and well-rounded as in any "real" novel.

Eighteen books comprise the Navajo mystery series, and while I may not read every one, I certainly enjoyed The Blessing Way and look forward to continuing the series, even if it means saving some Charles Dickens and Wallace Stegner for another time.

"Between Shades of Grey" by Ruta Sepetys

Review by Susan Simonton

Night, 1941, Vilnius, Lithuania, fists pounding on the door, mother calling everyone to pack everything they can and come downstairs. Fifteen year old Lina, still in her nightgown, grabs her drawing pad, helps her little brother and hurries down stairs. Her mother is breaking all the china and glassware in the dining room.

“I’ll leave nothing for them.”

And so mother, Jonas and Lina are taken by the Soviet troops, loaded into cattle cars with many others. The old, the sick, a woman, bleeding, who had just given birth, children all crammed together in a railroad car labeled “Thieves and prostitutes.”

Thus begins a long journey across Russia to Siberia and the forced labor camps and finally to the Laptev Sea in the Arctic circle. A journey of hardship and sorrow but finally, hope.

Between Shades of Grey is listed in the library as Teen Fiction, but it is a good read for anyone — a good story, a piece of history, knowledge of which few of us have any idea, and a young survivor at the heart of it.

The author is the daughter of a Lithuanian refugee. She carefully researched the events in the story with survivors in Lithuania.