Category: Reading

Return to Manhattan & More

JWF Leave a comment

RETURN TO THE BIG APPLE

The Chief Penguin and I are back in Manhattan after almost a year and a half.  And it’s different.  Covid-19 has taken its toll with more empty storefronts, favorite restaurants shuttered, fewer people on the streets, and less traffic all around.  But, and it’s a welcome but, the city is becoming alive again!  The Upper East Side seems more active than the West Village, possibly the difference between residents and schools in one area and more tourists in the other.

Dining space at Via Carota

Restaurant dining is reviving.   We appreciated and benefited from the creativity shown in the various outdoor structures that have been built in the street or on the sidewalk. 

 We dined at two favorites, Sel et Poivre, very distanced from other diners, and Via Carota, which is serving exclusively outside.  Sitting at a sidewalk table, we also sampled a Mediterranean restaurant new to us called A la Turka.

Fancy dining structure at JoJo

Reservations are essential since dining capacity is still limited by NYS rules.  That can mean you need to reserve farther ahead (2 weeks out) or not until a day before.  Overall, we’re delighted to be here, enjoying the bustle of the city and spending time with our marvelous granddaughters.

WATCHING AND READING

IN-DEPTH BIOGRAPY SERIES

Hemingway (PBS)

Ernest Hemingway was an incredibly complex man.  Product of a dysfunctional family, whose father committed suicide, he, nonetheless, was a superb storyteller and masterful stylist whose novels made an indelible impression on American literature.  Filmmaker Ken Burns has a reputation for delving deeply into whatever topic he presents from baseball to the Civil War.  Here, this attention to detail and nuance is focused on one man’s adventurous life.  

Hemingway had four wives and other women along the way, he fought in several wars, he loved Spain, and he lived in Cuba.  Aside from his personal life, this 3-part series provides a close examination of each of Hemingway’s works from early novels to his account life in Paris (A Moveable Feast) to late works such as The Old Man and the Sea.  Literary scholars offer additional analysis, but I found most intriguing the comments from other writers like Tobias Woolf and Mary Karr, but especially those of the Irish novelist, Edna O’Brien.  It’s a fascinating journey from beginning to end!

WORLD WAR II MYSTERY

Consequences of Fear by Jacqueline Winspear

I’ve read all the Maisie Dobbs mysteries, and this is one of the best.  I’m even wondering if it’s Winspear’s swan song for Maisie.  But there’s an historic event at the end that leaves the door open.

Freddie, a young messenger boy, witnesses what appears to be a murder.  Did he really see it?  No body is found.  While haunted by Freddie’s experience, Maisie is primarily working for Scotland Yard vetting special agents for Resistance work in France.  Two young women she knows are among the interviewees.  Maisie’s personal life is also more complicated. She has a young daughter and an American friend and love named Mark Scott.

This novel details more about what’s involved in fighting a war in 1940 when England is regularly being bombed.  It feels more personal than Winspear’s earlier works with a minor theme of friendship and love. There’s a poignant quote about whether war makes one too brittle to relax and accept love.

If you like mysteries that focus more on the people and procedures with less high drama, then this is for you.  I find Maisie endlessly fascinating! (~JWFarrington)

More colorful tulips!

Note: All photos ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved).

Colorful red & green coleus

Tidy Tidbits: Immersion, Film & Books

JWF Leave a comment

VIEWING

UPLIFTING FILM

On the Basis of Sex (Amazon Prime)

Somehow, I missed seeing this film about Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s early career when it was first released.  This week seemed the right time.  Based on RBG’s life, it isn’t a documentary, but a wonderfully satisfying success story.  First in her law school class at Harvard and first in her class at Columbia Law, Ruth was nonetheless turned down by law firm after law firm (after all, she was a woman, a Jew, and the wives of the lawyers in the firm would be jealous).  

She became a professor at Rutgers and, from that position, worked with her husband, Marty, and the ACLU to take on a case of discrimination against a man.  She won that case and others that followed gaining more rights for women.  She and Marty were a great team.  Not only did she enable him to complete law school, but he was wholly supportive of her career and her rise to Supreme Court Justice.  Highly recommended!

A side note.  I am of an age that I recall being asked at my first job interview after graduate school if I planned to have children.  The questioner was a man and I was married.  It was a personal and inappropriate question, but not illegal.  I made some sort of oblique answer and was offered the job.  I also clearly remember celebrating when, several years later, I could apply for a credit card in my name only, based on my credit history alone.  I was married and working fulltime and, I didn’t really need that department store card.   I got it more on principle than need!

CRIME SCENE

Van der Valk  (PBS Masterpiece)

(variety.com)

Since most of us aren’t traveling these days, and certainly not abroad, it’s refreshing to see a television series set in a city that is familiar from past visits or future forays.  Yorkshire for DCI Banks, Dublin for Acceptable Risk, and now Amsterdam for chief detective Piet Van der Valk and his somewhat scruffy team of colleagues.  The canals and the streets of Amsterdam, jammed with bicycles, bring back fond memories of a week we spent there five years ago.  

This three-part series is the latest remake based on mysteries by Nicholas Freeling.  The suspicious deaths are complex cases, often political, with a tangled web of connections between family members and suspects.  Unlike some of the other series I’ve watched, the Dutch seem to resort to guns more frequently.  

Commissaris Piet is a striking man with steely blue eyes, a blond thatch, and a very prominent jawline.  Usually serious, with seldom a smile, his eyes look haunted by past tragedy.  Living alone on a houseboat, he has a close relationship with Lucienne, his right-hand person, and while fair-minded, brooks no sloughing off by his colleagues.

READING

TIMELY MEMOIR

Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir by Natasha Trethewey

(vanityfair.com)

Losing a parent to an early death is an event that stays with one ever after; losing a parent to violence is another level of remembrance and anguish entirely.  A former U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner, Natasha Trethewey has written a poignant memoir about her mother’s death more than 30 years ago. Trethewey was just 19.  Her mother didn’t just die; she was murdered by her second husband.   For years, Trethewey carried around a load of guilt.  

In this work, she details her childhood as the offspring of a white father and a black mother and how the experience of walking around with just one of them differed greatly in other people’s responses.  The racism and mistreatment that were rampant during her mother’s childhood and the vestiges that persisted in Trethewey’s own life form the backdrop for this tragic story.  It echoes many of the cases portrayed in No Visible Bruises, an award-winning book by Rachel Louise Snyder.  (~JWFarrington)

CRIME IN YORKSHIRE

Careless Love by Peter Robinson

This is a recent crime novel featuring DCI Alan Banks.  I’d read a bunch of them some years back, but after watching the DCI Banks TV series, decided to re-visit Robinson’s work on the page.  This one starts out a bit too slowly for my taste, but then picks up.  A young woman and an older man are each found dead and abandoned in suspicious circumstances.   Both are dressed up and there appears to be no link between them.  When a neighboring crime team presents the suspicious death of another young woman, the circle widens and the hunt for clues is on.  Both DS Winsome Jackson and DI Annie Cabbot feature in the investigation along with Zelda, Annie’s father’s companion who closely guards her tragic past.  Enjoyable, but I liked some of Robinson’s earlier books more.

Note: Header photo is Florida fall foliage: colorful coleus.

View of Cozy Harbor, Maine

Maine Time: A Slower Pace

JWF Leave a comment

IN A BOOK

I’m a voracious reader, but I have to admit that this summer I’m finding it harder to read serious works. Perhaps it’s the effect of living with the coronavirus or maybe it’s part laziness. In any case, I’m spending more time devouring beach reads and mysteries with the occasional heavier title tossed in. Some of the books I brought to Maine are ones I’ve owned for awhile, but many of them sit in a yet-to-be-read stack while I dive into the latest e-book from the library or some just purchased light fare. That said, here are two intriguing novels and one long memoir that lends itself to skimming. What is your reading like this year?

Historical Fiction

Mistress of the Ritz by Melanie Benjamin

Books about people and events during World War II are still big sellers. I’m beginning to tire of them, but Mistress of the Ritz was an exception. It’s gripping and thrilling and a fast-paced read. It’s based on or perhaps inspired by, as author Benjamin states in an afterword, Blanche Auzello and her husband, Claude, the manager of the Ritz. It begins in 1940 when the Nazis first occupy Paris–and the hotel. What is amazing and makes for delicate situations, is that the hotel remains open to rich and celebrated guests while simultaneously being Nazi headquarters. Blanche is an American while Claude is French and exceedingly proud of his position. He devotes himself to the Ritz and to a succession of mistresses that leave his wife subject to neglect.

photo of Blanche Auzello
Blanche Auzello (memoiresdeguerre.com)

Early on, the reader experiences Blanche as a bit of a flibbertigibbet, caught up with fashion, hobnobbing with famous guests, and flirting with handsome Nazi officers. One wonders where her story will lead. As ordinary people begin to disappear, life becomes harder for these two gracious hosts, and the roles they furtively play expose them to danger and exposure. It’s a novel of secrets and intrigue, love and trust, mistrust and misunderstanding. Chapters alternate between Claude and Blanche. Recommended!

Benjamin is also the author of The Aviator’s Wife, a very well received novel about the marriage of Anne and Charles Lindbergh. (~JWFarringon)

Contemporary Thriller

The Last Flight by Julie Clark

I have my friend Marnie to thank for putting me on to this novel. The Last Flight is about two women anxious to exit their present lives. Claire Cook is married to a wealthy man, scion of a wealthy family, who is also abusive. She is desperate to escape his censure and physical abuse and plots to assume a new identity on a business trip to Detroit.

Claire gets re-assigned to fly to Puerto Rico instead and in the airport meets Eva who is leaving a checkered past behind. Eva has fewer options for the future, so she offers to exchange boarding passes and IDs with Claire. What happens when Claire and Eva assume each other’s identities and struggle to function in new environments makes for a gripping story. There may be a few too many coincidences, but it’s a great gallop of a book! (~JWFarrington)

Memoir–Serious But Not Too

Barbarian Days:  A Surfing Life by William Finnegan (2015)

William Finnegan is a staff writer for the New Yorker and author of a number of books.  I am the last person my friends would expect to read a book about surfing, but his memoir won the Pulitzer Price and got such great reviews, it’s been on my radar.  A hefty 400 plus pages, it’s chock full of detail about surfing spots around the world. 

William Finnegan, surfer, approaching waves
(kcrw.com)

Finnegan is almost mesmerizing as he describes waves, water, and the thrill of surfing.  And he’s candid about his occasional fear of drowning.  For me, the appeal was more his account of his childhood years in California and Hawaii, his parents’ laissez-faire approach to any oversight of his doings, and the regular bullying he quietly endured into his teens.  

Finnegan took a long time to settle down. He roamed the globe to experience great surfing venues (Samoa, Australia, Madeira), dropped in and out of college, reported from war zones, and worked on a novel.  Finnegan claims that surfing was not his primary passion in the way that it is for others, but he was regularly enticed to yet another locale. It’s clear that surfing remains important to him and is an escape from the mundane even into his 60’s. (~JWFarrington)

Note: Header photo of Cozy Harbor ©JWFarrington

Culture Bits: New Year, Screen & Page

JWF Leave a comment

JANUARY REFLECTIONS

Turning the calendar page into a new year brings to mind the crafting of resolutions, everything from eating a healthier diet to being a kinder person.  January is also a time to pause and reflect on both past and future.  Entering a whole new decade seems a bit momentous, a moment of drama, and 2020 particularly so.  Perhaps it’s the ring of the two twenties side by side; possibly it’s that the fate of our government lies in the upcoming presidential election; or maybe it’s just that we as individuals are marking significant events in our own lives.  

For me, 2020 marks my 50th college reunion as well as the Chief Penguin’s and my 50th wedding anniversary.  Compiling favorite college memories and then summarizing my life in just 400 words for the reunion book, reminds me of how much life I’ve already lived, and that much less life remains ahead.  That’s a sobering thought.  Contemplating one’s mortality is hard to do, but after seventy, as one loses dear friends, one realizes anew that time is both limited and precious.  Each day of good health must be appreciated and savored. 

Certainly, the most significant relationship I developed at college was that with my future spouse.  I met Greg the end of my first year, and we have been connected ever since.  We were fortunate that we had the opportunity to live in San Francisco after years on the east coast, that we worked successfully at the same institutions, and that we produced a wonderful son who has a marvelous wife and two delightful daughters.  Along the way, partly because of career and later just for pleasure, we did a lot of international travel.  This included two trips to China when our son was small, three weeks in Madagascar with a noted botanist in 2009, and after retirement, trips to Vietnam and Cambodia as well as Chile and New Zealand.  Travel is broadening; I believe it expands your mind and alters your perspective.  

In this milestone year, we will again travel, first to Ireland, where we’ve never been, and then in the fall to France for Normandy and Bordeaux and a return to the Dordogne and Provence.  This January especially, I value my past and all that I’ve experienced, while still eagerly anticipating a future rich with new adventures.

VIEWING AND READING-–BIG SCREEN

1917

If you’ve ever wondered what trench warfare was really like, 1917 does an amazing job of portraying it.  Dirty, claustrophobic, and terrifying.  During the battle of Ypres, two British soldiers are sent on a mission to the front lines with an urgent message for a general that will affect the outcome of the next encounter with the Germans.  The men selected (the one who chose his partner thought it might be an easy assignment) must race against the clock, travel cross country through rough terrain and behind enemy lines, always struggling to stay undiscovered and alive.  Based on a true incident, it’s a tale of courage and loyalty, coupled with sheer guts and grit.  At one point, I did wonder how many more obstacles would have to be overcome and were they all real or added for cinematic effect.  Gripping and almost painful to watch.

SMALL SCREEN—FAMILY SAGA

From Father to Daughter  (Acorn + Amazon Prime)

(acorntv.com)

For a change of pace, my treadmill fare is an Italian series about a wine-making family.  Giovanni is the bull-headed, domineering, and abusive patriarch, who, in partnership with a friend, makes grappa.  When the series opens in 1958, he has two daughters and very much wants a son to join him in the business.  He is blessed with twins, a boy and a girl, but promptly exults in his son, Antonio, while ignoring Sofia, the daughter.  As his family matures, his wife Franca laments the suitor she left behind in Brazil; his oldest daughter, Maria Theresa leaves for Padua against his will to study chemistry; while Elena, the middle child, gets pregnant at 16 and marries a local boy.  How life unfolds and unravels over the decades for this dysfunctional family has its soap opera moments, but it’s good entertainment and keeps me striding along!

ON THE PAGE—BIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL

Becoming Mrs. Lewis by Patti Callahan

Joy Davidman (http://bookhaven.stanford.edu/tag/joy-davidman/)

When I was growing up, the earlier works of C. S. Lewis such as The Screwtape Letters were popular with adults including my parents.  An Oxford don, Lewis wrote both fiction and nonfiction about religion and faith in the context of Christianity.  In the 50’s, he published the Chronicles of Narnia for children, the first one of which I read aloud to our son.  Lewis was a celebrated author, but he became even more famous after the early and untimely death of his wife, Joy.  Their story was the subject of several books, a play, and eventually a movie, Shadowlands, which I saw years ago.

Callahan’s novel is a fictional account of the relationship between Joy Davidman and Jack Lewis.  It began as an epistolary friendship as they exchanged letters. She had read an article about Lewis and began the correspondence.  They were a most unlikely pairing.  He was a reserved British bachelor in his 50’s and she American, Jewish, then an atheist, now a Christian, 38 years old, and married with two young sons.  Her marriage to an alcoholic was imploding and she wrote to Lewis for advice.  

After several years they met. She subsequently spent significant blocks of time in England with her sons and eventually was forced to divorce her husband.  Despite their love, Jack was reluctant to acknowledge his feelings and become a bridegroom.  The novel is told in the first person from Joy’s perspective and is full of emotion and at times seems overwrought.  But this is perhaps an accurate presentation of her personality.  Joy was passionate and outspoken, and her life was messy.  She was also a talented writer and poet whose work, given the times, was underappreciated.  

Callahan captures this woman brimming with life, but some readers may be put off by the many theological and philosophical conversations that inform her conversations and letters with Lewis.  (~JWFarrington)

Note: Header photo is of the Roman god, Janus (all-to-human.blogspot.com)