First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros - The Scenic Route; Binnie Kirshenbaum

Welcome to First Chapter/Intros, hosted by Yvonne @ Socrates Book Reviews. 

Each week readers post the first paragraph (or 2) of a book we are reading or plan to read.  This week I selected another book from my Summer Reading List.  This book has sat on my shelf unread since 2009 when I just had to buy it. I still think it sounds pretty good.  

                                                      The Scenic Route; Binnie Kirshenbaum

                                                                Harper Perennial - 2009

1

Here is the story of Henry and me. I wish it had a different end.  It had a good beginning.

That's what I would say.  If Ruby would hear me out, I would say, "This is the story of Henry and me," and no matter that it's of the recent past, past is past, and to tell Ruby this story now would be to call one memory, to travel back, and, as it was, to be with Henry was never quite of our time but of another time better than all that.  A time before my time.  Like how it was in New York during the last days of the Automats, when there was still the Biltmore Hotel and that pink place for ice cream, the name of which escapes me, and Henry, he was not quite of our time either.  "I wish it had a different end," I would say to Ruby. "It had a good beginning."

What do you think read more of pass?

(Amazon Description)

Divorced, alone, and unexpectedly unemployed, Sylvia Landsman flees to Italy, where she meets Henry, a wistful, married, middle-aged expatriate. Taking off on a grand tour of Europe bankrolled with his wife's money, Henry and Sylvia follow a circuitous route around the continent—as Sylvia entertains Henry with stories of her peculiar family and her damaged friends, of dead ducks and Alma Mahler. Her narrative is a tapestry of remembrances and regrets...and her secret shame: a small, cowardly sin of omission. Yet when the opportunity arises for Sylvia and Henry to do something small but brave, the refrain "if only" returns to haunt her, leaving Sylvia with one more story of love lived and lost.

First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros - Moonglow; Michael Chabon

Each Tuesday, Vicki, from I’d Rather Be At The Beach hosts First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros where  readers post the opening paragraph (sometime two) of a book that they are reading or plan to read. 

Moonglow; Michael Chabon

Harper Collins - 2016

1

"This is how I heard the story.  When Alger Hiss got out of prison, he had a hard time finding a job.  He was a graduate of Harvard Law School, had clerked for Oliver Wendell Holmes and helped charted the United Nations, yet he was also a convicted perjurer and notorious as a tool of international communism.  He had published a memoir, but it was dull stuff and no one wanted to read it.  His wife had left him. He was broke and hopeless. In the end one of his remaining friends took pity on the bastard and pulled a string.  Hiss was hired by a New York firm that manufactured and sold a kind of fancy barrette made from loops of piano wire.  Feather combs, Inc., had gotten off to a good start but had come under attack from a big competitor that copied its designs, infringed on its trademarks, and undercut its pricing.  Sales had dwindled.  Payroll was tight. In order to make room for Hiss, somebody had to be let go."

This one is a book group read for July. What do you think?

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary; Simon Winchester

Harper - 2005

I cringed a bit when I learned what our book group selection for September was. Clearly, it seemed like a book that I would have little interest in especially considering the shelves and shelves of little gems I need to read from my shelves.  However, I gave it a shot, but, in the end it was just not for me.

(Description from Amazon Website)

Hidden within the rituals of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary is a fascinating mystery. Professor James Murray was the distinguished editor of the OED project. Dr. William Chester Minor, an American surgeon who had served in the Civil War, was one of the most prolific contributors to the dictionary, sending thousands of neat, hand-written quotations from his home. After numerous refusals from Minor to visit his home in Oxford, Murray set out to find him. It was then that Murray would finally learn the truth about Minor – that, in addition to being a masterly wordsmith, he was also an insane murderer locked up in Broadmoor, an English asylum for criminal lunatics. The Professor and the Madman is the unforgettable story of the madness and genius that contributed to one of the greatest literary achievements in the history of English letters.

Here's what are group thought of the book.

• Only (9) people showed up to discuss this book, normally we have about 15.
• Only (3) people enjoyed it; one of the 3 was fascinated and stated she has a new fascination with word origins
• Those of us who did not care for the book gave the following reasons ----
• Not enough time spent on the actual compilation of the dictionary which took some 70 years to complete
• Writing was too simplistic and repetitive 
• For a non fiction work, the author often seemed to know what others were thinking
• Would have been nice to see references for things represented as fact
• No footnotes
• Seemed embellished and sensationalized

Have you read this one?  If so what did you think?

2.5/5 stars
(library book)

Coming Soon to a Book Store Near You in April

(3) new books hitting the shelves in April that I thought sounded good.

Do any of these appeal to you?

Sunset City; Melissa Ginsburg

Ecco - 2016

(Description) --- A taut, erotically charged literary noir set in Houston about a woman caught up in her friend’s shocking murder, and the dark truths she uncovers.

Before the drugs, Danielle Reeves was Charlotte Ford’s most loyal and vibrant friend. She helped Charlotte through her mother’s illness and death, and opened up about her own troubled family. The two friends were inseparable, reveling in Houston’s shadowy corners. But then Danielle’s addiction got the best of her and she went to prison for four years. When she gets out, she and Charlotte reconnect. Charlotte hopes this is a new start for their friendship.

But then, a detective shows up at Charlotte’s apartment. Danielle has been murdered, bludgeoned to death.

Overwhelmed by grief, Charlotte is determined to understand how the most alive person she has ever known could end up dead. But the deeper Charlotte descends into Danielle’s dark world, the less she understands. Was Danielle a hapless victim or master manipulator? Was she really intent on starting over or was it all an act? To find out the truth, Charlotte must keep her head clear and her guard up. Houston has a way of feeding on bad habits and Charlotte doesn’t want to get swallowed whole, a victim of her own anguished desires.

Sundays on the Phone to Monday; Christine Reilly

Touchstone - 2016

(Description)---The Middlesteins meets The Virgin Suicides in this arresting family love story about the eccentric yet tight knit Simone family, coping with tragedy during 90s New York, struggling to reconnect with each other and heal.

Claudio and Mathilde Simone, once romantic bohemians hopelessly enamored with each other, find themselves nestled in domesticity in New York, running a struggling vinyl record store and parenting three daughters as best they can: Natasha, an overachieving prodigy; sensitive Lucy, with her debilitating heart condition; and Carly, adopted from China and quietly fixated on her true origins.

With prose that is as keen and illuminating as it is whimsical and luminous, debut novelist Christine Reilly tells the unusual love story of this family. Poignant and humane, Sunday’s on the Phone to Monday is a deft exploration of the tender ties that bind families together, even as they threaten to tear them apart.

The History of Great Things; Elizabeth Crane

Harper Perennial - April 2016

(Description)--A witty and irresistible story of a mother and daughter regarding each other through the looking glass of time, grief, and forgiveness.

In two beautifully counterpoised narratives, two women—mother and daughter—try to make sense of their own lives by revisiting what they know about each other. The History of Great Things tells the entwined stories of Lois, a daughter of the Depression Midwest who came to New York to transform herself into an opera star, and her daughter, Elizabeth, an aspiring writer who came of age in the 1970s and ’80s in the forbidding shadow of her often-absent, always larger-than-life mother. In a tour de force of storytelling and human empathy, Elizabeth chronicles the events of her mother’s life, and in turn Lois recounts her daughter’s story—pulling back the curtain on lifelong secrets, challenging and interrupting each other, defending their own behavior, brandishing or swallowing their pride, and, ultimately, coming to understand each other in a way that feels both extraordinary and universal.

The History of Great Things is a novel about a mother and daughter who are intimately connected and not connected enough; it will make readers laugh and cry and wonder how we become the adults we always knew we should—even if we’re not always adults our parents understand.

The Bell Jar; Sylvia Plath

The Bell Jar; Sylvia Plath

Harper Perennial Classics 25th Anniversary Ed 

I first read and enjoyed The Bell Jar many years ago, so when it was selected for our February book club read, I was looking forward to revisiting this classic.

Esther Greenwood is the 19 year old protagonist, a brilliant, beautiful and talented young woman who suffers from mental illness.  The story begins in 1953 with Esther and several other college students winning a writing contest and paid internship for a magazine (Ladies Day) in New York City. Her struggles with mental illness begin while in NYC but, her inner struggles began much earlier when her father dies when she was only nine.  Esther's dream was to become a poet but, she was not encouraged to pursue her dream by her mother. Her boyfriend Buddy, a Yale medical student was not supportive of her dreams either.  Instead her mother wants her to learn shorthand so that she'll have a job to support herself if she were ever to fall on hard times. [ her father left them financially strapped and the mother supports them with her own shorthand skills]

Esther's descent into the darker side intensifies by some bizarre behaviors while away in NYC. She's insecure, anxious and envious and,  gradually she begins to cut herself off from the people around her.  She tells the other girls she's with in NYC that she's engaged so that she can stay in and study or write and not have to be with people.  When she learns that she was not accepted into a summer writing program she falls into a deep depression and experiences a sense of hopelessness. Obsessed with suicide she tries several different methods and even undergoes shock treatments as a last resort.

The story is painful to read at times and very realistic.  Even though the ending seemed almost hopeful the truth is the author did commit suicide when she was only 30, the same year she wrote The Bell Jar.  Sylvia Plath had two young children; her husband left her in 1962 for another woman, the year before she died.  

I think I enjoyed this classic even more the second time around. Have you read this? If not, try it, it's so well done.

5/5 stars

(library book)

Coming Soon to a Bookstore Near You - (3) New Picks

(3) new soon to be released titles that caught my eye.

The Heart Stopped; Julie Myerson

Harper Perennial - March 29, 2016

(Amazon Description)

Internationally bestselling author Julie Myerson’s beautifully written, yet deeply chilling, novel of psychological suspense explores the tragedies—past and present—haunting a picturesque country cottage.

Mary Coles and her husband, Graham, have just moved to a cottage on the edge of a small village. The house hasn’t been lived in for years, but they are drawn to its original features and surprisingly large garden, which stretches down into a beautiful apple orchard. It’s idyllic, remote, picturesque: exactly what they need to put the horror of the past behind them.

One hundred and fifty years earlier, a huge oak tree was felled in front of the cottage during a raging storm. Beneath it lies a young man with a shock of red hair, presumed dead—surely no one could survive such an accident. But the red-haired man is alive, and after a brief convalescence is taken in by the family living in the cottage and put to work in the fields. The children all love him, but the eldest daughter, Eliza, has her reservations. There’s something about the red-haired man that sits ill with her. A presence. An evil.

Back in the present, weeks after moving to the cottage and still drowning beneath the weight of insurmountable grief, Mary Coles starts to sense there’s something in the house. Children’s whispers, footsteps from above, half-caught glimpses of figures in the garden. A young man with a shock of red hair wandering through the orchard.

Has Mary’s grief turned to madness? Or have the events that took place so long ago finally come back to haunt her…?

We Love You Charlie Freeman; Kaitlyn Greenidge

Algonquin - March 6, 2016

(Amazon Description)

The Freeman family--Charles, Laurel, and their daughters, teenage Charlotte and nine-year-old Callie--have been invited to the Toneybee Institute in rural Massachusetts to participate in a research experiment. They will live in an apartment on campus with Charlie, a young chimp abandoned by his mother. The Freemans were selected for the experiment because they know sign language; they are supposed to teach it to Charlie and welcome him as a member of their family.

Isolated in their new, nearly all-white community not just by their race but by their strange living situation, the Freemans come undone. And when Charlotte discovers the truth about the Institute’s history of questionable studies, the secrets of the past begin to invade the present.

The power of this novel resides in Kaitlyn Greenidge’s undeniable storytelling talents. What appears to be a story of mothers and daughters, of sisterhood put to the test, of adolescent love and grown-up misconduct, and of history’s long reach, becomes a provocative and compelling exploration of America’s failure to find a language to talk about race.

The Never-Open Desert Diner; James Anderson

Crown - March 22, 2016

(

Amazon Description)

A singularly compelling debut novel, about a desert where people go to escape their past, and a truck driver who finds himself at risk when he falls in love with a mysterious woman.
Ben Jones lives a quiet, hardscrabble life, working as a trucker on Route 117, a little-travelled road in a remote region of the Utah desert which serves as a haven for fugitives and others looking to hide from the world. For many of the desert’s inhabitants, Ben's visits are their only contact with the outside world, and the only landmark worth noting is a once-famous roadside diner that hasn’t opened in years. 

Ben’s routine is turned upside down when he stumbles across a beautiful woman named Claire playing a cello in an abandoned housing development. He can tell that she’s fleeing something in her past—a dark secret that pushed her to the end of the earth—but despite his better judgment he is inexorably drawn to her. 

As Ben and Claire fall in love, specters from her past begin to resurface, with serious and life-threatening consequences not only for them both, but for others who have made this desert their sanctuary. Dangerous men come looking for her, and as they turn Route 117 upside down in their search, the long-buried secrets of those who’ve laid claim to this desert come to light, bringing Ben and the other locals into deadly conflict with Claire’s pursuers. Ultimately, the answers they all seek are connected to the desert’s greatest mystery—what really happened all those years ago at the never-open desert diner?

In this unforgettable story of love and loss, Ben learns the enduring truth that some violent crimes renew themselves across generations. At turns funny, heartbreaking and thrilling, The Never-Open Desert Diner powerfully evokes an unforgettable setting and introduces readers to a cast of characters who will linger long after the last page.