I'm reading a book I liked enough to buy for my mom for Xmas -- Beth Gutcheon's "Good Bye and Amen." It's about funerals, families and the Episcopal (I think) church.

" ... he told her just to use the service from last week and use the word processor to substitute "Edna" for "Mary", and obviously she didn't do any proofreading because at one point we were all on our knees praying to the Virgin Edna.
You wouldn't think it was funny if it happened at your mother's funeral."

Wally Lamb's new book, "The Hour I First Believed" has come out and of course is very good. It largely concerns the Columbine school shooting (and several other themes). Another good novel based on school shootings is "We Need To Talk About Kevin" by Lionel Shriver, who also wrote several other good novels. Seems like there hasn't been a school-shooting spree for a little while. Hope that doesn't mean one's about due.

Since Christmas is coming up, if you're looking for books, esp for "tweens" that don't rush sexuality, two new good ones are: "Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched The World" by Vicki Myron and "Wesley The Owl" by Stacey O'Brien. Both titles fairly self-explanatory.

Just finished an interesting novel, Real World by Natsuo Kirino, about a Japanese high school boy who murders his mother; the book minutely follows every moment and feeling of the boy and the people he comes into contact with until he is caught in a typical Japanese fashion. This author is very popular in Japan. She wrote a previous novel called Out, that also concerned a murder.

Finally, "Death Makes a Holiday" by David J. Skal, who has written several other books on spooky-type subjects. He starts out by debunking the Halloween-candy-poisoner urban legend, pointing out that the only proven time this happened it turned out to be a daddy in financial trouble trying to collect his children's life insurance. (Skal goes into a little true-crime detour on this story, ending with the father getting the death penalty in Illinois. Shows the difference between imagined or suggested horror and real-life horror).

Also, "A Carnivore's Inquiry" by Sabina Murray. Told in the first person & has the kind of semi-European sensibility popular now, so that it takes a while to see what is really going on. (Hint: think Hannibal Lecter).

Now that Halloween has come and gone I'll go ahead and post the seasonal rec's :<. John Updike's sequel to The Witches of Eastwick, "The Widows of Eastwick" is out now and is well worth reading, although not quite as good as the first one, which they made a movie out of with Jack Nicholson. Haven't seen it on network TV on Halloween in ages either. For some reason on Halloween weekend afternoon they always show The Amityville Horror with Josh Brolin, which must be the most boring horror film ever made.

Haven Kimmel has a new book out!! Title is "Iodine". The story arc falls a little short but the action and language more than make up for it.

I just started reading a novel made up of short stories (or "fiction collection") by the poet Alice Fulton and I can already tell it is going to be very good. Titled "The Nightingales of Troy", it concerns the family Garrahan over the course of a century (the names aren't all Garrahan because it concerns the female members of each succeeding generation). Seems like any novel written by a poet is going to be a good bet. "Pictures from an Institution" by Randall Jarrell is one of my top five funniest books of all time.

Another overlooked book; "Wickford Point", by J.P. Marquand, author of "The Late George Apley" and the Mr. Moto mystery series. This concerns another old New England family of the Apley sort but much more eccentric --their claim to the intellectual aristocracy is that the founder of the family was a fairly undistinguished Transcendentalist on his own but He Knew Thoreau. The central female personality is Bella Brill, characterised as "the champion cigarette bummer of all time".

Now that the excitement of Hurricane Gustav has passed, I will name a couple of books I liked that have hurricanes in them: "The Pirate's Daughter" by Robert Girardi (I may have mentioned this one before). Also, an old classic titled "High Wind In Jamaica" by Richard Hughes, which they made a movie out of starring Anthony Quinn. It concerns a family of children who end up living on a pirate ship after a storm.

"There is a period in the relations of children with any new grown-up in charge of them, the period between first acquaintance and first reproof, which can only be compared to the primordial innocence of Eden. Once a reproof has been administered, this can never be recovered again."

"If you go and wear holes in your drawers, do you think I am going to mend them? Lieber Gott! What do you think I am, eh? What do you think this ship is? What do you think we all are? To mend your drawers for you, eh? To . . .mend. . . your. . . drawers!!"

Speaking of Mark Twain, the Summer Reading Lists that all the kids are just getting around to doing now all contain Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer of course. For adults, for pure distilled Americana, read "Life on the Missisippi". A gem overlooked by a lot of people.

There has been a lot of recent (last 3 years or so anyway) fiction about the child soldiers in Africa. My favorite is "Allah is Not Obliged" by Ahmadou Khourouma (title is from the saying "Allah is not obliged to be fair about everything He does here on earth"). This book is written from the point of view of one of the child soldiers and manages to capture the tragedy of the circumstances and combine it with almost a Mark Twain-style boy's adventure narrative. For some reason you can't find it if you put in the title in our catalog computer, but you can if you know and can spell the author's name. "K-H-O-U-R-O-U-M-A".

Jincy Willett has a new book out!! Very very good. Called "The Writing Class." A mystery, too.

Steven Millhauser has a new book of short stories out called "Dangerous Laughter", where as usual he takes a theme or premise and elaborates on it to a conclusion. Millhauser won the Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for "Martin Dressler: Tale of an American Dreamer"; for my money though his best book was Edwin Mullhouse (full title: "Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943 - 1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright") . Yes I did get those dates right, the title character died at age eleven, in a very dark way but the book was still very very good; the most precise rendition of American pre-1970s suburban childhood I've ever read. This is one of my top twenty (I never get it any lower than that) all time best books.

Two family-saga books that came out just recently; "Monsters of Templeton" by Lauren Groff, and "The Comfort of Our Kind", by Tom Stoner. The Stoner book is seriously into traditional Catholic doctrine taken lightly, so be forewarned.

Also, "An Arsonist's Guide to Writer's Homes in New England" by Brock Clarke. The premise alone makes the book worth a look.

There's been another little flurry of interest in Beowulf lately, mainly evidenced by a DVD that has been circulating a lot, with Ray Winstone, Robin Wright Penn, John Malkovich et al. A few years ago a new translation came out by Seamus Heaney, too.
My favorite version of the Beowulf epic was the one John Gardner did from the point of view of the monster, titled "Grendel". A short book, quirky and well worth reading. (I am a big John Gardner fan, "The Sunlight Dialogues" was my Bible during high school).

Last Thursday had a very good time listening to William Cobb speak at the West Regional branch of the MPL, for the Mobile Writers Guild. He did a reading and then answered some questions, one answer being that William Faulkner is the greatest writer this country ever produced. Faulkner is who you want to take with you when you're going someplace over the summer or some other lengthy period of time, when you can't take a lot of books along, but you don't want to run out and be stuck with nothing to read either.


I just finished reading his Cobb's "Wings of Morning" which in addition to being VERY good --about the civil rights movement -- had some minor concern with catfish. Larry Brown's book "A Miracle of Catfish" had a section in it concerning the old mother catfish in the catfish ponds one of his characters ran too -- I wonder if anyone has ever done an essay or a thesis or something on the catfish and collective-subconscious/monster themes in Southern literature.

I remember back when I was in high school a scuba diver went down into the Lake of the Ozarks to observe one of the big catfish they had down there and came back in a state of total terror -- bug-eyed, white, and trembling. He said the thing was as big as a house and he thought it was going to GET him. Heard a rumor one time the OgoPogo was actually a big catfish too.

More on the British psyche; Jane Gardam, who wrote "Old Filth" about the Raj orphans ('Filth' stands for "Failed in London Try Hongkong") and "Faith Fox", several others.
The Raj orphans were the children of British stationed in India and similar parts of the empire who at the advanced age of seven or so were sent back to England to board with more or less strangers, so they would grow up to be true British. Rudyard Kipling had a lot to say on this subject too.

Caroline Blackwood wrote several darker novels about the same world, about halfway between Molly Keane and Wuthering Heights. "Great Granny Webster" is the first one that springs to mind.

On a lighter note, a writer named Eva Rice wrote a nice book called "The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets", similar setting and characters but not nearly so dire.

Back to British wit;
First of all let me reiterate: for the 20th century, British wit is epitomized, for the female reader anyway, by the Mitford sisters, especially Nancy. Her top two are: "The Pursuit of Love" and "Love in a Cold Climate". I think both of them were made into PBS mini-series.
Same order of things: "Cold Comfort Farm" by Stella Gibbons.
Moving further out in the UK (Ireland); Molly Keane wrote about the same world in "Good Behavior" and "Time and Again", and also under the pen name M. J. Farrell (somewhat less satirically).
For Peter O'Toole fans, he made a very funny movie in 1972 about the British ruling class called, appropriately, "The Ruling Class". Not for the thin-skinned. The premise is that O'Toole deals with his traumas by imagining himself to be a far superior being to those around him; since he is already a member of the ruling class, the only way he can do this is to be God Himself.
Finally, Angela Thirkell wrote quite a few less caustic but still very sharp and funny novels about British country life, e.g. "Happy Returns", "Peace Breaks Out", about twenty-five more. If MPL doesn't have them, look on Amazon.

For people who are interested in books about people who are interested in books; Helene Hanff wrote a book about her correspondence with a London bookstore that was very good and funny called "84 Charing Cross Road". They later made a movie out of it with Anthony Hopkins before the Hannibal Lecter bomb. The sequel, also good and funny, was called "The Duchess of Bloomsbury", where she actually makes it over there to visit.

Similar books with younger protagonists (like memoirs, not young-adult books); Heather O'Neill's "Lullabies for Little Criminals", and Lynda Barry's "Cruddy" (again, some title).

Janet Fitch authored two well-known and excellent books, "Paint It Black", and "White Oleander", which they made a movie of. You should know that before there was Janet Fitch there was Kate Braverman, author of "Wonders of the West", "Lithium for Medea" (some title!), and "Frantic Transmissions To and From Los Angeles" (semi-autobiographical).
Another Fitch/Braverman read-alike; Laura Hendrie, "Remember Me".
Also, for short stories; Jean Thompson, "Throw Like a Girl".

Outstanding first effort; "Kept" by Y. Euny Hong. Masquerades as chick lit, but is actually much, much smarter than that. (Reviewed in BookPage).