Travels With My Aunt, by Graham Greene

I don't know why I didn't read this book many years ago. Greene never fails to satisfy. This is the story of Mr. Pulling, a retired banker, bachelor whose mother has recently died. His aunt comes into his life at his mother's funeral, reveals an alarming secret, and changes Pulling's life completely.

Some choice bits:

p. 79

[Pulling moves his lips when thinking. Once, in the bank...] "The habit betrayed me very badly with a woman who was stone deaf and a lip-reader. She was...very beautiful...couldn't help dwelling a little wistfully on her loveliness...One is more free in thought than in speech and when I looked up I saw that she was blushing..."

p. 146

"...as I lay in the...nursery with a night-light beside the bed to drive away the fears...I was afraid of burglars and Indian thugs and snakes and [illegible] and Jack the Ripper, when I should have been afraid of thirty years in a bank and a take-over bid and a premature retirement and the Deuil du Roy Albert."

This last item is the name of a dahlia. I should have mentioned that Pulling raises dahlias.

p. 179

[O'Toole to Pulling]

"...Have you any children, Henry?"

"No."

"You are a lucky man. People talk about the age of reason. There's no such thing. When you have a child you are condemned to be a father for life. They go away from you. You can't go away from them."

p. 218

[Visconti to O'Toole]

"...Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully."

Our Man in Havana, by Graham Greene

An audio book, from the PC Library.

I know that I must have read this book before, many years ago, but I had forgotten most of it, and was enchanted by the plot as well as Greene's wonderful prose.

An essay by Peter Hulme.

James Wormold is a vacuum-cleaner dealer in Havana, single father of a teenage daughter. Business is not very good in pre-revolutionary Cuba (ca. 1958), so when Wormold is approached by an agent of British Secret Service with an offer of money to gather and transmit intelligence to London, he is persuaded to cooperate.

Wormold is a hopeless secret agent, and he knows it. Instead of actually recruiting sub-agents or doing any real spying, he creates a fantasy list of people and bogus information -- and he is very successful at it. London is thoroughly taken in.

There is just enough humor to relieve pathos, and just enough romance to make it a nicely understated love story.

The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield

This could be described, in a way, as a book about books, or perhaps a story about stories. Another important theme in The Thirteenth Tale is the concept of twins. The protagonist is a young woman, unusually bookish and asocial, who lives with her parents, and helps her father run a rare book business.

Review at The Independent

Glancing at the above review, I was surprised to note that this was Setterfield's first novel. Perhaps I knew that already, but I hadn't remembered. It is masterfully written, and shows no signs of inexperience. It's a true gothic page-turner with plenty of Bad English Weather, mystery, cups of tea, ghosts, and scandalous intrigue. Jane Eyre is invoked and evoked throughout its pages, as are other similar books.

The review covers the plot very well, I won't bother to paraphrase that here. I wouldn't classify this book as great literature, but I would call it very good literature, and it provided many hours of terrific entertainment.

The Emperor of Ocean Park, by Stephen L. Carter

http://www.randomhouse.com/book/24851/the-emperor-of-ocean-park-by-stephen-l-carter

This is an audio book.

I just read (actually, listened to) a very entertaining and, I think, well-done novel entitled The Emperor of Ocean Park,  by Stephen L. Carter. This is basically a mystery, with political, legal, and racial issues mixed up in it. The mystery is pretty good, with the requisite unexpected twist(s) of plot. There are sufficient red herrings. The characters are all very good, to my mind.

One thing about Ocean Park that makes it extra-interesting is that the main character is an upper-middle-class African-American,  a law professor whose father had been a Federal Court of Appeals Judge. The father dies early in the story, and there is suspicion about his death. I won't try to tell the whole thing, I doubt that I could, but it's a really absorbing read. And through all of it, one gets the impression of having a really unique point-of-view, that is, if one does not happen to be an African-American.

More than once I felt that the author beat certain political drums unnecessarily. His issues happen to be abortion (he's against it) and charter schools (he's for them). Since I disagree with his positions, these drumbeats rankled particularly, and I don't think I failed to notice any. My opinion here could be suspect because of my politics, but I think Carter could have left all of that out without harming the story at all. 

If economy is to be celebrated in writing, removing anything that is not necessary to the work is an obvious goal. I wonder, however, if Carter would not disagree with me. He may have felt that including these issues was important to setting the scene or tone, to providing insight into what is (at least to me) a little-known stratum of American Society: the Middle Class, even professional,  African American. 

I keep a blog of (some of) what I read. I don't always write much about a given book, but I try to include enough to at least jog my memory if I'm trying to remember what it was about. This email is going to do double-duty, as I'm going to use it as my blog entry for this book. 

Now that's economy.

EL

The Golden Orange, by Joseph Wambaugh

Starring Winnie Farlowe, ex-cop with a bad back, who becomes entangled with a very unlikely woman in another of Wambaugh's wonderful Southern California police-related novels. Great plot, very entertaining, with lots of local color. Set mostly in Newport Beach.