Coral Glynn: A Novel by Peter Cameron

Coral Glynn

In the spring of 1950, a young nurse named Coral Glynn comes to a dreary estate in the English countryside to nurse a dying patient. Her charge soon dies, and Coral finds herself courted by the elderly woman's son, a man damaged both physically and emotionally by the war, and almost as passive as Coral Glynn herself. Events unfold, and the characters are more acted upon than acting, yet still manage to occasionally surprise you with their hidden depths.

I liked Coral Glynn, but I recognized that it's not a book for everybody. If you're looking for action or romance, this is not the book for you. For a quiet, interesting, and introspective read, this is quite a good book.

Family Circle Magazine

Family Circle

Family Circle is another story.

At that same "Free" table at the library, I found a stack of Family Circles. They were a couple of years old, but with Family Circle it doesn't really matter. I quickly flipped through them all, tearing out any articles or recipes I found useful. The remains of the magazines are going back to the Free Table.

Mostly what I got was recipes. Tempting, inexpensive, and most of all, easy.

La Cucina Italiana

La Cucina Italiana

Someone gave me a subscription to La Cucina Italiana. To be honest, I never would have bought it for myself. It's a pricy magazine, to start with.

The topic is Italian cuisine (and culture, travel, etc.) and the pictures and the quality of the magazine are excellent. But there just isn't anything there that I want to make. Or that I'm tempted to want to make. Or even -- and this is far more telling -- that I want anyone else to make for me.

So I'll truck the copies down to my local library and leave them on the "free" table. Hopefully someone else will get more use out of them than I do.

Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank

Alas, Babylon

A couple of months ago, someone recommended two books to me, books that are -- or so I was told, great classics of science fiction. Never having read either of them, I decided I'd better check them out.

The first book was The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham. Of course, I'd seen the movie version long ago, and found it mildly entertaining.

I gave the novel a try and got about a third of the way through it before I decided that life was just to short to spend any more of it reading this book.

The other book was Alas, Babylon. As you can imagine, I wasn't in any hurry to get to it.

But I picked it up this month, and I was amazed. It's a wonderful book. It's a post-apocalyptic novel first published in 1959, during the height of the Cold War, but if I didn't know better, I would swear it was a "historical" novel written recently -- absolutely nothing dated about it at all.

Well, I guess I'll take that back. There were two aspects of the book that seemed dated, reading it today. One involved gender roles, but they were really pretty typical of the 1950's and the narrator seemed to realize that they were outdated. The other aspect was the attitude toward nuclear fallout and radiation. It seems positively unreal to me that the characters didn't worry about it much -- at least to start with -- but they I remember the Civil Defense drills I experienced as a child in the 60's. (Unlike most other schools, we didn't actually dive under our desks, but we were marched down stand in lines in the basement.)

Altogether, an excellent book, and one I would heartily recommend. It was, I should probably mention, a little on the optimistic side, even to the point of being unrealistic, but that's not always a bad thing. On the Beach  is another excellent, vintage post-apocalyptic work (published in 1957), and it just depressed the heck out of me.

Buffalo Stampede

Buffalo Stampede by Zane Grey

My father was a huge Zane Grey fan, but I don't believe I'd ever actually read one of his books. He'd certainly written enough of them -- at least 90, including those that were published posthumously. At least 110 movies have been made, based on his novels.

Buffalo Stampede was first published as a 12-part serial in Ladies Home Journal in 1924 and 1925. It's original title was The Thundering Herd (which, actually, I like much better.) It surprised me that the book was originally aimed at a female audience.

All in all, I greatly enjoyed this book. The characters are a little thin, I think, but I got completely got caught up in the excitement of the buffalo hunt. Zane's strength, in this book at least, is that he really makes you feel just what it was like to be there, in an era that is long gone, hunting an animal that will never dominate the plains again.

Fifty Shades Darker: Book Two of the Fifty Shades Trilogy

Fifty Shades Darker

Really, I just wanted to know what all the fuss was about.

Fifty Shades of Grey, as you're probably aware is a runaway best seller -- an enormously successful work in the field of erotic fiction. I guess I should specify financially successful -- I make no claims about its literary merit.

So, of course, I wanted to take a look at it. I didn't want to actually spend money on it, however, so I reserved it at my local library, where I found myself #591 on the list. I guess I should be grateful that the library has it at all -- it's been removed from a lot of libraries all over the country.

Well, I resigned myself to a wait. After all, I wasn't all that eager to read it, my library cooperative had multiple copies, and -- let's face it -- people probably didn't take long to finish it. But then, on my last visit to the library I saw Fifty Shades Darker, the second book in the series, just sitting there on the New Book shelves.

So I checked it out and took it home. I read the first chapter, which was about a rather unlikeable young girl who had just broken up with her boyfriend and, apparently, started a new job. It was pretty whiney. I hate whiney.

So, next I started leafing through the book, looking for the "naughty bits." I found some. They weren't very good, and, surprisingly, they were pretty whiney too. Sheesh!

I won't be reading this book, or its predecessor, or its successor. I do not recommend it. (If you want to read some good erotic fiction, I'd recommend The Sleeping Beauty Trilogy  by A. N. Roquelaure, who is really Anne Rice writing under another name. And you know that woman can write, right?

Something else that I'd recommend as good reading are the Amazon Book Reviews of the first book in the series. They are just too, too funny! One reader used the search function on her Kindle  to count the number of times the characters bite their lips, raise an eyebrow, cock their heads, quirk their lips, blush or flush, murmur, whisper, clamber, and gasp. (That function alone is worth the price of a Kindle, don't you think?)

The Vanishers: A Novel by Heidi Julavits

The Vanishers

There's no doubt about it: The Vanishers is a very strange novel. Amazon Reviewers are all over the board with this one, but, as far as I can see, most of the reallybad reviews are from people who were expecting a serious paranormal novel.

This is not that. It's the slightly bizarre tale of Julia, a 20-something "Initiate of Promise" at the Institute of Integrated Parapsychology, and her convoluted relationships with her mentor, her dead mother, and a host of other people. Both Julia and her mentor are plagued with physical and psychical ailments -- the only question is, who is attacking whom?

The book has humor, surprises, and a whole lot of weirdness. I would definitely read this author again.