"Pretty Baby" by Mary Kubica **

●  Audiobook
●  US author
●  Palm Springs Book Club selection
●  Originally published in 2015
●  Review:  I did not like this book.  I  thought the characters were stereotypical

"Marvel and A Wonder" by Joe Meno *****

• Early Review edition for LibraryThing.com
• US author
• Epigraph:  "To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscovered country from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of Thus conscience does make cowards of us all." --William Shakespeare, "Hamlet"
• Characters:
• Jim Falls, grandfather
• Quentin, 16 year old grandson
• Deirdre, Quentin's mother, drug addict
• Gilby & Edward.....brothers who steal horse
• Rick....evil, sent to buy stolen horse and bring his boss's granddaughter, Rylee, home
• Rylee, troubled teen, a blind grandmother "sees" her
• Notes:
• Unnamed horse...white, symbol of good, valued above all, priceless once loved
• Epic good v. evil battle
• Power of hope and determination
• Grandfather's disillusionment with the world v. his love of grandson
• Love and hope are the antidote to disillusionment
• Review:  I could not put this book down.  It is truly a marvel and a wonder!  Joe Meno has written a novel about family, good v. evil, hope, and above all else, love.  A grandfather and grandson journey to save their unexpected windfall of a racehorse.  Along the way they fight for their very survival.  The plot had me right to the end, the dark aspects were oh so dark, but the glimmer and shine of love and hope are always there, not in a sappy way at all. A marvelous read, a very well-written novel, and maybe even a classic in the making!

"Love Among the Haystacks and Other Stories" by D.H. Lawrence ***

• Short Stories
• Audiobook
• English author 
• Originally published in 1930
• Love Among The Haystacks:  two brothers and their first experience of romantic love
• #2:  Mother and daughter with enmeshed relationship.....competitive re: love.....very sexist attitude, which I can usually understand in context of the times, but this was extreme
• Odor of Chrysanthemum :  miners, husband of poor family dies, associated with smell of the flowers, death clarified the distance which had existed between them
• Blue Moccasins : Older woman marries younger man....becomes bitter....Moccasins become a symbol of lost love
• Goose Fair: 
• The Maid:  High society airs
• Review:  Must admit that these stories have been disappointing.  I have thoroughly enjoyed Lawrence's novels, but the short stories in this collection were not as well developed as one can find in other collections.  I think I will stick with his novels!

"Fury" by Salman Rushdie *****

• Summer Read with Beth
• Indian author
• Originally published in 2001
• Characters: 
• Professor Solanka, retired from academia, left wife and child and fled from London to New York City, struggling with his fury, his father was the creator of Little Brain doll
• "Great Minds" dolls....description on page l6
• Krysztof Waterford-Wajda, aka Dubdub, friend from Oxford
• Mila: young woman with "Papi" complex, "special thing turned out to be the collection and repair of damaged people", gets involved with Solanka, suggests new generation of dolls, Mila as incarnation of a doll
• Akasz Kronos, the new cyber-doll, leader of the Puppet Kings....."deep and unimprovable flaw in his character that made him unable to consider the issue of the general good, intended them to guarantee nobody's survival or fortune but his own."...p.139
• Jack Rhineheart....friend of Solanka, got caught up by S & M Club, murdered by them
• Neela....wife of Jack Rhinehart, killer beauty, loyal to home nation, broke through Solanka's fury, turned tide to love and hope, ruffled his hair, unlocked his childhood nightmare
• Vocabulary:
• sanyasi: Hindu, a wandering beggar; ascetic
• solepcism: extreme preoccupation with and indulgence of one's feelings, desires,etc.; egoistic self-absorption
• Notes:
• Solanka came to the US to detach from his fury, "Bathe me in amnesia and clothe me in your powerful unknowing."...p.51
• Mysterious deaths of female socialites scare Solanka, the living dolls ("behind their high-style exteriors, beneath that perfectly lucent skin, they were so stuffed full of behavioral chips, so thoroughly programmed for action, so perfectly groomed and wardrobed, that there was no room left in them for messy humanity.....thus represented the final step in the transformation of the cultural history of the doll.  Having conspired in their own dehumanization, they ended up as mere totems of their class, the class that ran America, which in turn ran the world, so that an attack on them was also, if you cared to see it that way, an attack on the great American empire.....A dead body on a street....coming down to earth, looks a lot like a broken doll."
•  Secret society, the S & M Club, Single & Male
• Solanka travels to Neela's home country, where the leader adopted the persona of Solanka's cyber leader
• Night of the Furies, confronted by Eleanor, Mila, and Neela all at once in his bedroom
• References to "fury":
• p.19...Dubdub's idea, "In The Rat Hole.  Construction of a Machine without a Purpose. Fury."
• p.30...."Life is fury, he'd thought.  Fury--sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal--drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths.  Out of furia comes creation, inspiration, originality, passion, but also violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of blows from which we never recover.  The Furies pursue us; Shiva dances his furious dance to create and also to destroy."
• p.70...Let's get to anger, okay? Let's get to the goddamn fury that actually kills.  Tell me, where is murder bred?"
• p.100..."Fury stood above him like a cresting Hokusai wave.  Little Brain was his delinquent child grown into a rampaging giantess, who now stood for everything he despised and trampled beneath her giant feet all the high principles he had brought her into being to extol; including, evidently, his own."
• p.114..."America, because of its omnipotence, is full of fear; it fears the fury of the world and renames it envy, or so my dad used to say."...Mila
• p.135...notion of dollification..."Above all the matter of sentences that must never be completed, because to complete them would release the fury, and the crater of that explosion would consume everything at hand."...exploitation of children
• p.178..."Furis.  This was the self she had never fully shown, Mila as Fury,the world-swallower, the self as pure transformative energy."....driven by desire to create virtual world for Solanka's new doll series
• p.185..."Furious and newly kindled desire was hard to give up for that calmer, gentler old flame."
• Quotes:
• p.4..."...well heeled white youths lounged in baggy garments on roseate stoops, stylishly simulating indigence while they waited for the billionairedom that would surely be along sometime soon."
• p.6..."America insulted the rest of the planet.....by treating such bounty with the shoulder-shrugging casualness of the inequitably wealthy."
• p.8..."While we marionettes dance, who is yanking our strings?"
• p.8..."...the epoch of analog (which was to say also of the richness of language, of analogy) was giving way to the digital era, the final victory of the numerate over the literate."
• p.35..."This is the country of the diminutive.  Even the stores and eating places got friendly fast."
• p.45..."He felt like one of the shuffling thousands in the old movies of Chaplin and Fritz Lang, the faceless ones doomed to break their bodies on society's wheel while knowledge exercised power over them from on high."
• p.51..."We were our stories , and when we died, if we were very lucky, our immortality would be in another such tale."
• p.56..."America's need to make things American, to own them was the mark of an odd insecurity.".....American Graffiti,
• p.58..."...Solanka was sure he could see, in his friend's eyes, the self-loathing fire of his rage.  it took him a long while to concede that Jack's suppressed fury was the mirror of his own."
• p.65..."When one is too young to have accumulated the bruises of ones own experience, one can choose to put on, like a hair shirt, the sufferings of one's world."
• p.81..."When a man without faith mimicked the choices of the faithful, the result was likely to be both vulgar and inept."
• p.87..."Yes, it had seduced him, America; yes, its brilliance aroused hi, and its vast potency too, and he was compromised by this seduction.  What he opposed in it he must also attack in himself."
• p.89..."This about New York Professor Solanka liked a lot--this sense of being crowded out by other people's stories, of walking like a phantom through a city that was in the middle of a story which didn't need him as a character."
• p.128..."There is that within us which is capricious and for which the language of explanation is inappropriate.  We are made of shadow as well as light, of heat as well as dust.Naturalism, the philosophy of the visible, cannot capture us, for we exceed.  We fear this in ourselves, our boundary[breaking, rule-disproving, shape-shifting, transgressive, trespassing shadow-self, the true ghost in our machine."
• p.158...."We all fear that the cold, machine-like thing in human  nature will destroy our magic and song."....Rushdie repeats this notion in "Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights"
• p.179..."Laptop as lapdancer."
• p.183..."For the real problem was damage not to the machine but to the desirous heart, and the language of the heart was being lost."
• p.184..."This was the only subject:  the crushing of dreams in a land where the right to dream was the national ideological cornerstone, the pulverizing cancellation of personal possibility at a time when the future was opening up to reveal vistas of unimaginable, glittering treasures such as no man or woman had ever dreamed of before."...this theme is returned to in "Two Years....."
• p.187....Links were electronic now, not narrative.  Everything existed at once."
• p.188..."He found himself inhabiting a world he greatly preferred to the one outside his window...".....his cyberworld...."...the river of Solanka's imagination was fed from a thousand streams.
• p.193..."Rights are never given by those who have them....only taken by those in need."
• p,206..."For furia could be ecstasy too, and Neela's love was the philosopher's stone that made possible the transmuting alchemy.  Rage grew out of despair; but Neela was hope fulfilled."
• p.228..."The speed of contemporary life, thought Malik Solanka, outstripped the heart's ability to respond."
• "Men are less hesitant about harming someone who makes himself loved than one who makes himself feared.....Because love is held together by a chain of obligation which, since men are a sorry lot, is broken on every occasion in which their own self-interest is concerned; but fear is held together by a dread of punishment which will never abandon you."....answer to question whether it is better to be loved or hated by leader of Blefescu
• Review:  As always, I am a bit breathless when I finish a novel by Rushdie.  The vigor of his ideas and the multitude of analogies he draws from contemporary events, history, and mythology are nothing short of astonishing.  This novel, set in New York City, traces one academic man's journey from an existential crisis to efforts to drown out his fury, to his effort to face it and make meaning in  his life.  In my opinion, this novel is one of the more generally accessible reads because the plot is more clearly discernible than in several of his other works.  Per usual, the characters are at once humorous and terrifying in their humanity.  So take the ride, by all means, and hold onto your hat.  You will run smack into pathos, rage, passion, fear, with a smattering of love and hope.  Great novel!

"Crooked Heart" by Lissa Evans ***

• Audiobook
• Book Club selection for February 2016
• Review:  A so-so novel of wartime England and an unexpected relationship between an evacuated child and a struggling young woman.
  

"Musical Moment and Other Stories" by Yehoshua Kenaz ****

• Summer Reads with Beth
• Israeli author
• Short Stories
• Originally published in 1980
• "The Three Legged Chicken":
• Young boy's heightened sensitivity when grandfather dies
• Listens to woodworm at night
• The "loathsome thing" in his room at night that terrified him
• the three-legged chicken....a fake.....disillusionment, loss of innocence
• "...like awakening from a dream into a new dream".   p.12
• "Hendrik's Secret":
• secret desires
• His older sister sneaks to bars to dance and flirt with young men....his secret
• His friend's secret desires for the sister
• "Musical Moment":
• a singular, unique moment hearing a violinist play a piece which spoke to his young soul
• "...have never forgotten the aroma of colophony".  (substance rubbed on bow strings to stick them together
• blinking problem which faded as he moved into adolescence
• "between night and dawn":
• the seemingly overnight tranformation into young adults, with all the requisite intensity and volatility
• Pesach, the red-headed, handsome outsider, a scapegoat, a rebel, a man more quickly, inspired fear, hatred, passion, boys wanted to love and fight him, girls wanted him
• Review: Yehoshua Kenaz is an exceptional author.  He writes with great clarity and somehow also with great subtlety.  This collection of short stories are bound together by a common thematic denominator of youth and the rite of passage into adulthood. Each of the four stories tackle an aspect of the passage to adulthood and it's revelations about death, love, beauty, and sexual awakening. A very male perspective coupled with Israeli cultural norms make this very interesting and enjoyable reading!

"Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights" by Salman Rushdie ****

• Early Reviewer edition for LibraryThing.com
• Originally published in 2015
• Indian author
• Epigraph:  
• "Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels."...(caption to Goya's "Los Caprichos, no.43)
• :One is not a 'believer' in fairy tales.  There is no theology, no body of ogma, no ritual, no institution, no expectation for a form of behavior.  They are about the unexpectedness and mutability of the world."....George Szirtes
• "Instead of making myself write the book I ought to write, the novel that was expected of me, I conjured up the book I myself would have liked to read, the sort by an unknown writer, from another age and another country, discovered in an attic."...Italo Calvino
• "She saw the dawn approach, and fell silent, discreetly."......The Thousand and One Night
• Characters:
• Geronimo: floats off the ground, Dunia's child
• Alexandra Bliss Faina, fodder heiress
• Jimmy Kapoor, graphic novelist who travels into worm hole
• Mayor Rosa Fast, adopted Baby Storm who could detect deception
• "Mac" Aroni....really?
• Notes:
• War of the Worlds, between dark and light jinni and jinnia, parable
• jinn: creatures made of smokeless fire
• the time of strangenesses, lasted two years, eight months and twenty eight nights (1001)
• Dunia, the princess of the light jinn world, warrior who could feel human emotion
• the quest for scapegoats had begun
• reference to President Obama, too level headed for the jinnia (ISIS?)
• Chinese box of stories, bottomless pit of stories
• Peace brought the loss of dreams
• Quotes:
• p.22..."If you walk away from God you should probably try to stay in the good graces of Luck."
• p.47..."Reason could not and would never triumph over savage, undimmed unreason."
• p.55..."Yet in considering that strange era, the era of the two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights which is the subject of the present account, we are forced to concede that the world had become absurd, and that the laws which had long been accepted as the governing principles of reality had collapsed, leaving our ancestors perplexed and unable to fathom what the new laws might be."
• p.57..."A child understands nothing, and clings to faith because it lacks knowledge.  The battle between reason and superstition may be seen as mankind's long adolescence, and the triumph of reason will be its coming of age."
• p.74..."...there are very few cases in which a jinnia bore human children.  That would be as if the breeze were to be impregnated by the hair it ruffled and gave birth to more hair.  That would be as if a story mated with its reader to produce another reader."
• p.75...It was the resilience in human beings that represented their best chance of survival, their ability to look the unimaginable, the unconscionable, the unprecedented in the eye."
• p.92..."It was easier to believe that Chance, always the hidden principle of the universe, was joining forces with allegory, symbolism, surrealism and chaos, and taking charge of human affairs, than it was to accept the truth, namely the growing interference of the jinn in the daily life of the world."
• p.101..."...he had begun to grasp the difficult truth that a thing could have a cause, but that was not the same thing as having a purpose."
• p.140..."Beware the man (or jinni) of  action when he finally seeks to better himself with thought.  A little thinking is a dangerous thing."
• 213..."...the practice of extreme violence, known by the catch-all and often inexact term terrorism, was always of particular attraction to male individuals who were either virgins or unable to find sexual partners."
• p.269..."It seems to us self-evident, however, that the use of religion as a justification for repression, horror, tyranny, and even barbarism, a phenomenon which undoubtedly predated the War of the Worlds but was certainly a significant aspect of that conflict, led in the end to the terminal disillusion of the human race with the idea of faith."
• p.274..."The doors of perception opened and he saw that what was evil and monstrous about the jinn was a mirror of the monstrous and evil part of human beings, that human nature too contained the same irrationality, wanton, willful, malevolent, and cruel, and that the battle against the inn was a portrait of the battle within the human heart, which meant that the jinn were somehow abstractions as well as realities, and that their descent to the lower world served to show that world unreason which was the name of the dark jinn within people, and as he understood this, he also understood Teresa Saca's self-hatred, and knew, as she knew, that the jinn self within them both needed to be expunged, the irrational in man as well as jinn had to be defeated, so that an age of reason could begin."
• p.286..."This is the price we pay for peace, prosperity, tolerance, understanding, wisdom, goodness, and truth; that the wildness in us, which sleep unleashed, has been tamed, and the darkness in us, which drove the theater of the night, is soothed."
• Review:  Once again, Salman Rushdie cuts loose his verbal bombardment, leaving the reader gasping for breath, reeling from the word rush, and jumping for joy at the author's combination of wit and wisdom.  Come witness the War of the Worlds, the battle for peace and power, and don't miss the blatant references to contemporary issues and public figures.  It seems Rushdie wants the reader to be a child who is terrified and then soothed by a fairy tale.  Perhaps he even wants the reader to step back, breathe deeply, and get some perspective on the events on our planet, our priorities, and our problems.  A magnificent fairy tale for the erudite.

"Wake" by Anna Hope ***

• Audiobook 
• US author 
• Originally published in 2014
• Review:  A mediocre novel which centers around wartime and loss. It just did not read easily, although there were sections and characters who were engaging. Keep writing Anna Hope!

"A Duty To The Dead" by Charles Todd ****

• Audiobook
• US author
• Originally published in 2009
• Mystery/Suspense
• #1 in Bess Crawford Series
• Review:  An excellent suspense novel, first of the series. Bess Crawford is the protagonist, a WWI nurse, who feels duty bound to carry out the wish of a dying patient. What ensues will keep your attention throughout and keep you guessing. Loyalty, duty, honor, and the insanity of family are all themes you will encounter. Enjoy! I will certainly move on to the next in the series.