SCOTT PILGRIM VOLUMES 4–6

Since these are such quick, addictive reads, I was happy to find Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together, Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe, and Scott Pilgrim’s Finest Hour all available at the same time on the library shelf so that I could finish the series in one fell swoop. I’d been afraid my interest was flagging after Volume 3, but that may have been just the distracting conditions under which I read it or a temporary plateau caused by my grownup frustration with Scott’s continual cluelessness. In these last books, Scott does indeed finally get it together, and the action progresses at a good pace toward a satisfying ending. By the last volume, I’d become so attached to the characters that I was “Awww”ing sentimentally as they gained closure (I particularly loved what happens with Stephen Stills). I don’t have any big conclusions to draw here, besides that this is a smart, fun series. I’m not sure I loved them enough to buy my own copies, but I’m glad I read them once (and now I want to see the movie again).

THE MAN IN THE QUEUE

Having loved Brat Farrar and Miss Pym Disposes so very much, of course I decided I have to go read everything else Josephine Tey has ever written, even though I’m already busy reading all of Madeleine L’Engle, my annual Dickens tome, the usual irresistible library books, all the books I own but haven’t read yet, and supposedly some of the books I own that I’ve read but don’t remember and am not sure if I want to keep. So obviously it’s the perfect time to embark on another reading project! Fortunately (only for my time management, not for the world at large) Tey’s oeuvre is managably small: aside from Ferrar, Pym, and The Franchise Affair, which I read some years ago, there are only five other mysteries, all of which feature Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant as the protagonist.

The Man in the Queue, published in 1929 under the pseudonym Grant Daviot, is Tey’s first novel. It’s a much more traditionally structured mystery than Pym or Ferrar, but Grant is a likable character and Tey’s writing elevates it above your standard whodunit; she seems much more interested in exploring her characters’ personalities than constructing a clever puzzle for the reader to solve. While it’s definitely not as memorable as Pym or Ferrar, I found it enjoyable, particularly in passages like this one, where Grant enlists the help of a suspect’s neighbor to gain entry to the suspect’s flat:

“I might tell you that you are conniving at a felony. This is housebreaking and entirely illegal.”
“It is the happiest moment of my life,” the artist said. “I have always wanted to break the law, but a way has never been vouchsafed me. And now to do it in the company of a policeman is a joy that I did not anticipate my life would ever provide.”

THE ARM OF THE STARFISH

Now this is more like it. After being mildly underwhelmed by Meet the Austins and The Moon by Night, I did myself a great service by choosing to read the next Madeleine L’Engle book in chronological sequence, rather than the next one in the Austin series. Odd-sounding, I know, but basically: L’Engle wrote four novels about the Murry family (aka the Time Quartet, which includes A Wrinkle in Time, etc.), five (plus some short Christmas books and other ancillary material, which I am ignoring) about the Austin family, and four about the O’Keefes (Meg Murry, her husband, Calvin, and their children), plus a number of other semi-standalone books. L’Engle divided her main body of work into “Kairos” (extraordinary time, the Murrys and O’Keefes) and “Chronos” (ordinary time, the Austins), but there are characters who overlap between them. Although The Arm of the Starfish is technically the first O’Keefe book, centering on Adam Eddington, a marine biology student who travels to an island off the coast of Portugal for a summer job in Dr. Calvin O’Keefe’s lab, it takes place between The Moon by Night and the next Austin book, The Young Unicorns, and introduces two characters (Adam and Canon Tallis) who will reappear in later Austin novels. Confused yet? L’Engle’s refusal to write in straightforward sequence is admittedly why I missed out on so many of these books as a kid, and the rich intertextual entanglements are why I’m so excited to be tackling them all now. But I think The Arm of the Starfish would work pretty well as a one-off read too, if you’re so inclined.

While Starfish doesn’t have the magical elements I loved in the Time Quartet, it definitely has 100% more battle-between-good-and-evil drama than the first two Austin books. You could call it science fiction, since the confrontation is waged over Dr. O’Keefe’s scientific discoveries (concerning the properties of the titular sea creature), which are based in reality but definitely fantastical in scope, but it functions more as a thriller, full of international intrigue—kidnapping, spying, secret documents, covert meetings, exotic locales…In fact, although it’s intended to take place in an unknown future, the book was written in 1965 and has very much the atmosphere of an early James Bond film. My only complaints are as follows:

• Adam takes a frustratingly long time to choose sides, despite the fact that the mysterious lady who attempts to seduce him into helping her is such an obvious Bond-girl type—(a) her name is Kali, (b) her father is a powerful diplomat named Typhon Cutter, who resembles a spider and accuses his rivals of being in league with the communists—classic villain material, and (c) she pulls that old familiar “Oh, I want to be redeemed, save me from my evil self” crap a lot. (I don’t usually picture book characters this specifically, but I kept vividly envisioning her as being played by Rosamund Pike for some reason.) I know the point is that Adam is trying to be rational and that his decision to align himself with the O’Keefes is something of a spiritual journey, but the other side was just SO OBVIOUSLY EVIL that I occasionally wanted to slap him and tell him to snap out of it.

• It’s definitely interesting to see Meg and Calvin as adults with kids of their own, but having known and loved Meg as the main character of several books with Calvin in a supporting role, it’s a little hard to see Calvin as the pivotal figure and Meg barely present. We know that she’s very beautiful and a loving mother of seven (!) children, but other than that, she’s a mere shadow of her rad teenage self. (This is much like reading Little Men et al and finding rebellious Jo March converted to a wise matriarch.) I would have liked this book to have more Meg.

• Although Starfish is written in the third person, it’s definitely third-person limited from Adam’s point of view, so L’Engle’s habit of using “the boy” as a synonym for his name (“The boy worried about what he would do…”) seems really clunky and jarring.

Beyond those minor quibbles, however, this book was full of the kind of intelligent excitement I’ve come to expect from L’Engle—a singular mix of elements that would be crazypants in anyone else’s hands (Human limb regeneration! Telepathic dolphins!) with lovably grounded, realistic characters (most notably the eldest O’Keefe child, Polly, who will feature prominently in later books) and sweeping moral struggles.

ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN

Another treasure unearthed at the library bookstore. Not only is it a lovely old little blue hardcover (for some reason it has no copyright date, but it looks to be from the 1920s or 30s) that cost just $1 (it does have one page where the corner’s torn away, but I was able to find the missing text online and write it in the margin), but finding it cracked me up because I’ve been wanting to read this book ever since I discovered Elizabeth von Arnim, but my library doesn’t have it. Yes, the same library where I bought it. I almost took it right over to the circulation desk to see if I could donate it to the collection, but greed prevailed and I whisked it home with me instead.

This was von Arnim’s first and most famous book; in fact, her given name was Mary Annette Beauchamp (she married Count von Arnim-Schlagenthin), but such was its popularity that after its publication in 1898 she became known to her readers and eventually even her friends and family as Elizabeth. Her subsequent books were credited either to “the author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden” or simply “Elizabeth” (she is still listed that way in my library’s catalog). Like von Arnim, Elizabeth is an Englishwoman married to a rather cynical Prussian count (she refers to him as “The Man of Wrath,” which would be an adorable nickname if given with affection—like Rumpole’s “She Who Must Be Obeyed”—if the historical record didn’t show that von Arnim was indeed a domineering asshat and their marriage an unhappy one) who finds refuge in her beloved country house and, specifically, its garden. Very little happens in the story, which is written in diary format, other than Elizabeth’s lovely descriptions of the landscape throughout the seasons and witty tales of her domestic dramas (most notably, her eccentric houseguests). Here’s a sample from the opening paragraphs:

I love my garden. I am writing in it now in the late afternoon loveliness, much interrupted by the mosquitoes and the temptation to look at all the glories of the new green leaves washed half an hour ago in a cold shower. Two owls are perched near me, and are carrying on a long conversation that I enjoy as much as any warbling of nightingales….They say the same thing over and over again so emphatically that I think it must be something nasty about me; but I shall not let myself be frightened away by the sarcasm of owls….

I am always happy (out of doors be it understood, for indoors there are servants and furniture) but in quite different ways, and my spring happiness bears no resemblance to my summer or autumn happiness, though it is not more intense, and there were days last winter when I danced for sheer joy out in my frost-bound garden, in spite of my years and children. But I did it behind a bush, having a due regard for the decencies.

I know I overuse it, but “charming” is the adjective that best applies to this quiet, meditative book. I didn’t find it as amusing and outright lovable as The Enchanted April or Christopher and Columbus, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, especially—as a shy and retiring type myself—Elizabeth’s passionate devotion to her home life and insistence upon her solitude. (I’ll definitely check out the sequel, The Solitary Summer, which my library does actually have on the shelf.) Recommended this for fans of the era, gardeners, nature lovers, introverts, and homebodies.

LUCY GAYHEART

My local library has a bookstore where it sells used books that people have donated. Unfortunately, for mysterious reasons, the store is only open on weekday afternoons, so I was never able to visit it regularly until I started working from home on Wednesdays. Now one of my favorite Wednesday treats is to spend my lunch break biking to the library, conducting my business (as a library junkie, I nearly always have an item waiting to be picked up or due to be returned), and perusing the bookstore. Often the pickings are slim, but occasionally I find strays that seem worth the 50 cents or dollar it costs to rescue them, and now and then I stumble across a gem. Shortly after finishing (and adoring) My Antonia, I scanned the “C” shelves in the hopes of finding myself a copy and instead encountered this unknown-to-me Cather title…in a first edition. Although it wasn’t in mint condition, for $2 it was a steal.

This bargain would have been thrilling enough on its own, but then I read the book and really liked it. Lucy Gayheart is one of Cather’s later novels (1935) and centers on a young pianist who leaves her small Nebraska town to study music in Chicago. The story explores not only the contrast between urban and rural life, but also the quest for self-actualization, the joys and struggles of the pursuit of art, and the potential power of art and faith to overcome tragedy: “What if Life itself were the sweetheart?” Lucy ultimately realizes. “It was like a lover waiting for her in distant cities—across the sea; drawing her, enticing her, weaving a spell over her.” As always, Cather describes the rich interior lives of her varied characters (in addition to Lucy’s point of view, we also get that of Harry Gordon, the rich, rather boorish man who courts her) as clearly and beautifully as she describes the Nebraska landscape. Although I didn’t fall as deeply in love with it as I did with My Antonia or O Pioneers!, I do think that this romantic, poignant book deserves to be much better known than it is. If you’re a Cather fan, seek it out.

GATHERING BLUE

During our book club meeting about The Giver, I was reminded that Lois Lowry wrote a semi-sequel (not the same characters, but set in the same world) called Gathering Blue—and that I had read it years ago, although I remembered it even less than The Giver. I probably wouldn’t have bothered to revisit it if a group member hadn’t mentioned the unknown-to-me existence of a third book, Messenger, which ties the first two together. I instantly got curious about that, so I decided I’d might as well refresh my memory on Gathering Blue first.

Gathering Blue is sort of like the B-side of The Giver. It’s similar in that a young person is set apart from their community, comes to learn some harsh truths about that society, and ultimately takes action to try to change it, but in this case, the protagonist is a girl (Kira, who was born with a twisted leg, is an orphan, and has a special—perhaps magical—talent for embroidery), the community is primitive and aggressive (the weak and disabled are left to die in a field, a fate Kira escapes only because of her talent), and in the end (spoiler, but not really) she makes the opposite choice that Jonas did in The Giver. Overall it’s a fine dystopia with some interesting exploration of the place of the artist in society and a few tantalizing details that expand on the first book, but it just didn’t grab me the way The Giver did—it feels a bit more forced, less fresh, with lower stakes. I could take or leave it on its own, but if there’s a big payoff in Messenger I may revise my opinion.

SISTER BERNADETTE’S BARKING DOG

Despite the fact that I correct people’s grammar for a living, I received little formal training on the subject. I remember learning the basics: subjects and objects; nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs; first, second, and third person; and the various punctuation marks. Yet I had to figure out pronouns, articles, and clauses on my own; had never heard of a gerund or subjunctive until I took high-school Spanish; and still couldn’t tell you what a nominative absolute is (OK, now that I’ve looked it up, I guess I can). I scored the interview for my first editing job because the publisher was impressed that I correctly used “not only…but also…” in my writing sample, but I’d never been taught that rule, let alone given it a moment’s thought. I absorbed spelling and grammar mostly unconsciously, through my voracious reading, so my recognition of what is right and wrong (or, in this day and age, I suppose I should say “preferred and nonpreferred”) is largely instinctive. As Kitty Burns Florey describes people like me in this book, “The language sticks to them like cat hair to black trousers, and they do things correctly without knowing why.”

So I was curious to read Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences, which I hoped would explain this mysterious practice (known only to me from descriptions in historical children’s books and cautionary tales from Catholic-school-educated peers) and shed light on some deficiencies in my education. “Diagramming sentences is one of those lost skills, like darning socks or playing the sackbut, that no one seems to miss,” Florey begins adorably, and then goes on to discuss her own experiences with sentence diagramming (“It was a bit like art, a bit like mathematics. It was a picture of language. I was hooked.”), its history, and its uses, with particular attention to the question of whether knowing how to diagram a sentence makes you a better writer or editor, with lots of examples from great literature. Unfortunately, it turns out that many horrible sentences diagram just fine, but Florey argues persuasively that it’s still an interesting and noble tradition. It may not have taught me how to diagram a sentence (Florey explains it cogently, but luckily you don’t need to master it before you can understand the book), but this was a quick, charming, and surprisingly fun read, not least because, in passing, it introduced me to H.G. Wells’s famously awesome quote about the prose of Henry James, which I had somehow missed in all my English-major days: “It is a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost, even at the cost of its dignity, upon picking up a pea which has got into a corner of its den.”

HENRIETTA’S WAR

The more books from the Bloomsbury Group I read (this was the second, following The Brontes Went to Woolworths), the more I’m convinced that someone has created a publishing imprint just for me. How thoughtful! So far, I haven’t read an obscure early-twentieth-century cozy-genteel comedy (for lack of a better way to describe this genre) that I haven’t liked. This one, by Joyce Dennys, is an epistolary novel (I’m guessing semiautobiographical, since Henrietta, like Dennys, is a middle-aged doctor’s wife and an artist), originally published as a series of magazine articles during World War II, that humorously chronicles life on the home front. In letters to her childhood friend Robert, who is fighting in France, Henrietta details her own adventures and the shenanigans of the eccentric (of course) inhabitants of her small seaside town as they cope with blackouts, air-raid drills, rationing, donating blood, victory gardens, and scrap metal drives. Although the specters of war, uncertainty, and deprivation loom dimly in the background (the purpose of the letters is to entertain Robert and distract him from the war, but you can tell that Henrietta worries for him, as well as for her grown son and daughter, who have enlisted as a soldier and a nurse, respectively), Henrietta maintains her good cheer and self-deprecating wit, and I found the famous British endurance in the face of adversity as comforting as its original wartime readers no doubt did. This is a light read, but I highly recommend it for fans of the era or anyone who enjoys simple, warm, and often hilarious tales of daily life. (Something about the tone, combined with the letter format and the accompanying line drawings, actually reminded me of Jean Webster’s Daddy Long Legs, which in case you don’t know is high praise indeed.)

This book covers 1939 to 1942; I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of the sequel, Henrietta Sees It Through, as it wings its way to my door from Amazon.

THE OUTSIDERS

Can you believe I’d never read The Outsiders? I had zero interest in gritty realism as a kid. In fact, when a member of my book club picked this as our February selection, even though it seemed like a perfect opportunity to remedy this gaping hole in my cultural literacy, when I actually sat down to read I was still less than excited. Juvenile delinquents: depressing, right? Well, shoot, I loved it. Turns out this is less a hard-hitting “issues” book and more a sweet, perceptive (and now slightly old-fashioned, in a vintage-cool way) coming-of-age story. Beneath their tough exteriors, the characters are funny and sensitive—if perhaps too much so; we spent a long time in our club meeting discussing whether the book was an accurate depiction of young men of that time and place or a female teen writer/reader’s idealized version of them, but in the end I don’t think it matters because, hey, it’s fiction, and they feel honest enough within the world of the book. The plot isn’t particularly strong, but I got so swept up in Ponyboy’s smart, poignant narrative voice that I was happy to go along with it. Even when read 20 years too late, this classic definitely lived up to its hype for me, and now I’m putting S.E. Hinton’s other books on my TBR list—especially since I learned that they take place in the same world as The Outsiders and contain some overlapping characters. (I’ll also admit to being quite tempted to buy myself this rad t-shirt.)

As a bonus, during the afterglow from the novel, I also watched the Outsiders movie (handily available on Netflix Instant Watch) for the first time. Of course, the cast is near-legendary at this point, a gold mine of before-they-were-quite-stars, but in most other respects I’m sad to say that it’s not a great film. Sometimes painfully so. My major complaint: no voiceover. I know that excessive narration can be a crutch for lazy filmmaking, but when you’re adapting a first-person novel told by a character as winsome as Ponyboy, doing away with it entirely is also a mistake (I thought the Coen brothers included just the right amount of narration in True Grit). I was hopeful when the movie began with the first line of the book, but confused when it faded out mid-sentence and was replaced by the blaring, cheese-tastic Stevie Wonder original track “Stay Gold” (seriously, I love Stevie, but NO). That was it for the voiceover until the very end, when, like the book, the movie came full circle—but without the book’s explanation that the framing device is an essay Ponyboy’s writing for his English class, this device makes no sense. Otherwise, the film is a technically faithful adaptation in that it covers all plot points, but stripped of the novel’s two main strengths, the nuances of the narrative voice and the character-building (most of the first third of the book is basically cut), that plot felt even more creaky and implausible (case in point: the fire in the church). Some of the casting was excellent: Patrick Swayze was spot-on as Derry, Matt Dillon was surprisingly good as Dally, Diane Lane’s performance as Cherry made me take note of her for the first time ever, and young Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, and Tom Cruise were interesting to see—not to mention, holy cow, a one-line part for Tom Waits of all people! But unfortunately, C. Thomas Howell was not the Ponyboy of my dreams, and Ralph Macchio was downright laughably incompetent as Johnny—a major problem, considering that character is the emotional linchpin of the story. Add to all this Coppola’s often-showy direction and the result is mostly mawkish. I’m still glad I watched it, but its main value is as a Brat-Pack-era curiosity, not as a literary adaptation.

THE BRONTES WENT TO WOOLWORTHS

How I loathe that kind of novel which is about a lot of sisters. It is usually called They Were Seven, or Three—Not Out, and one spends one’s entire time trying to sort them all, and muttering, “Was it Isobel who drank, or Gertie? And which was it who ran away with the gigolo, Amy or Pauline? And which of their separated husbands was Lionel, Isobel’s or Amy’s?”

Katrine and I often grin over that sort of book, and choose which sister we’d be, and Katrine always tries to bag the drink one.

If the opening lines don’t render you instantly smitten with this obscure 1931 novel by Rachel Ferguson, you are dead inside made of sterner stuff than I. For me, this was like catnip. It certainly didn’t hurt that the next paragraph was:

A woman at one of mother’s parties once said to me, “Do you like reading?” which smote us all to silence, for how could one tell her that books are like having a bath or sleeping, or eating bread—absolute necessities which one never thinks of in terms of appreciation. And we all sat waiting for her to say that she had so little time for reading, before ruling her right out for ever and ever.

Snarky and a readaholic? Yep, I’m in love. Our narrator is Deirdre Carne, a journalist; her eccentric and imaginative family consists of her widowed mother and two younger sisters, actress Katrine and (home)schoolgirl Sheil. The Carnes’ shared hobby is telling each other richly detailed stories about fictional characters (the girls’ old dolls, for instance) as well as actual people who fascinate them (including Judge Toddington, who presided in the courtroom where Mrs. Carne once did jury duty). But reality and fantasy collide when Deirdre meets Mrs. Toddington in person, and the two families’ efforts to get acquainted are complicated by the fact that in the Carnes’ minds, “Toddy” has been a beloved friend for years.

This is a highly idiosyncratic book, and it takes some getting used to. Ferguson/Deirdre plunges you into her story with as little explanation as possible, and for the first few chapters I had no clue what was supposed to be real and what was supposed to be imaginary. Coupled with the 1930s slang/Britishisms/cultural references, it was as disorienting as a sci-fi book about an alien planet. I started the book on my homeward train commute, mentally exhausted after a long day, and got so confused I had to start it all over again the next day (it did become clearer upon rereading). Even once you think you’ve straightened out the truth and fantasy, the book still throws some weird curveballs—most notably, the actual ghosts of the Bronte sisters show up midway through. But the Carnes are so warm and witty, and their adventures so interesting and funny, I would happily follow them anywhere. Hilarity abounds, particularly as the kind Toddingtons discover and adorably play along with the imagined versions of themselves, but there’s also poignancy to balance out all the whimsy. As their friendship deepens, it becomes clear that not only are the childless Toddingtons charmed by the Carnes, but the girls’ obsession with imagining dear friendships with inanimate objects and strangers reveals a certain loneliness as well. And the sinister Bronte ghosts, coupled with young Sheil’s touching failure to comprehend that her family’s stories are only stories, lend a hint of darker themes.

This book reminded me a bit of a bizarro I Capture the Castle, though without the romance. It’s a great addition to my growing repertoire of quiet, humorous early-twentieth-century novels, which is fast becoming my favorite genre, perhaps because in addition to the pleasure of reading them I get all the thrill of the chase, as so many gems are out of print (god bless my public library with its musty collection of relics!). The Brontes Went to Woolworths was an extra-great discovery for me because it introduced me to the Bloomsbury Group, which specializes in republishing exactly this type of book (and in handsome designs that makes me yearn to collect the whole set), thus giving me a slew of delightful-looking titles to add to my “to be read” list. A’s mother thoughtfully bought this one and another off my Amazon wish list for Christmas, and if the rest of the Bloomsbury Group books are half as good as this one, I’ll be in heaven. (Alas, the very nice Bloomsbury Group website, which handily listed all the imprint’s titles in one place, seems to have been absorbed into the larger, terribly user-unfriendly Bloomsbury Publishing site since the last time I checked, so I’ll link you to Amazon instead.)

Still not sold? Here’s one last winsome, book-loving quote from Deirdre:

Three years ago I was proposed to. I could not accept the man, much as I liked him, because I was in love with Sherlock Holmes. For Holmes and his personality and brain I had a force of feeling which, for the time, converted living men to shadows….

I’m through with Holmes now, but I often think that he and I could have hit it off wonderfully well in Baker Street, as I am not at all demanding, and rather love old clothes and arm-chairs, and silence, and smoking, and dispassionate flights of pure reason.

THE MOON BY NIGHT

Madeleine L’Engle’s second novel about the Austin family is more interesting than the first (the family takes a cross-country road trip while Vicky comes of age as a teenager) and definitely a solid, classic YA novel, but it still felt rather stale and square to me in contrast to the awesomeness of the Murry family. (Maybe because I’m pretty sure Meg Murry would never say of her parents, “Daddy doesn’t like women in pants and Mother never wears them.”) I felt no real attachment to Vicky as a character and found myself most interested in the period details: the Austins’ journey gives a good snapshot of America circa 1963, and Vicky’s bad-boy crush, Zachary Gray, is such a Holden Caulfield type (“Religious guys are phonies, that’s all, phonies, every crumby one of them”). I much prefer the Time Quartet with its fantasy/sci-fi elements, and my understanding is that the later Austin books tend more strongly in that direction, so I’m hoping I’ll love them more. But I’ll admit that L’Engle’s strength as a writer lies in grounding those wacky metaphysical adventures in warm, good, levelheaded characters like the Austins, so it’s entirely likely that the relatively mundane first two volumes are just setting the stage for things to come.

TRUE GRIT

I saw the new movie in December and loved it, so of course I had to check out the book. My favorite things about the film had been (a) the fact that Mattie Ross is such a total badass and (b) the quirky, highly stylized dialogue, and I was curious whether those elements came from the Coen brothers or the book’s author, Charles Portis. I was further interested to discover that the book was published in 1968 and not, as one might figure for the source material of a John Wayne western, the 1940s or something—in other words, it was a brand-new bestseller when it was first adapted for film.

It turns out that, except for a few Coenish touches (the man in the bear suit, LaBoeuf’s tongue injury) and minor plot streamlining, the movie is very faithful to the book (apparently much more so than the John Wayne version, which I haven’t seen, but just reading the “differences from the novel” section of the Wikipedia article made me all twitchy) and does a great job of capturing its major appeal, which is Mattie’s dogged, stoic, idiosyncratic narrative voice. (That voice and the quintessentially American odyssey it relates both reminded me strongly of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which then got me to thinking that as a quick, action-packed read with a strong 14-year-old heroine, I’m surprised no one’s touted this book as a rediscovered potential YA classic. It’s obviously intended for adults, but I think it could also have broad crossover appear for teens. I might have gotten into westerns earlier if I’d read it at that age.) Not surprisingly, since it gives us Mattie’s first-person tale in unadulterated form, the book is even better than the movie, bleak, poignant, and hilarious by turns (Ed Park’s great Believer article about Portis quotes Roy Blount, Jr., as saying that Portis “could be Cormac McCarthy if he wanted to, but he’d rather be funny”).

Side note: I had to laugh the other day when I read some Oscar-related article griping that Jeff Bridges wore his Rooster Cogburn eye patch on the “wrong side” in the 2010 film—meaning the opposite eye that Wayne had worn it on in the 1969 version. Not only is the 2010 movie most emphatically not a remake of the earlier one, just a different adaptation of the same source material, but one of the things I specifically noticed while reading the book was that Cogburn doesn’t even have an eye patch in it! He’s only described as a “one-eyed man,” and Mattie mentions the appearance of his bad eye, so it’s clearly not covered. Obviously, it’s far easier for an actor to strap on an eye patch than change his eye, so I can see why Wayne’s patch was added, but the Coens might have done it with special effects and still chose the eye patch, which I can only assume means that the image of Wayne as Cogburn has become too indelible to mess around with—especially since the Coens also chose an actor who, like Wayne, was in his 60s, when in the book Cogburn is 40ish (albeit out of shape for his age; in one of my favorite quotes, Mattie describes him as “built along the lines of Grover Cleveland”).

WHO’S BURIED IN GRANT’S TOMB?

Subtitled A Tour of Presidential Gravesites, this book was a slam-dunk Christmas gift from A’s aunt and uncle. They know that my BFF K and I share an ambition to visit all of the presidential libraries together—after all, they kindly hosted us at their home in Iowa City the night before we visited the Hoover Library, kicking off a three-library roadtrip two summers ago (the second of two trips we’ve taken specifically to visit presidential libraries, or the third if you count K’s visit to me in California when we knocked the Reagan and Nixon libraries off her list). I had already been lamenting the fact that National Archive-sponsored presidential libraries don’t go any further back than Hoover, and subsequently considering expanding my goal to visiting a site (home? birthplace?) for every single president, but gravesites hadn’t occurred to me. It makes perfect sense, though: Many of the presidential graves tend to be at significant places I’d like to visit anyway, like their libraries or homes (Jefferson’s at Monticello, for example), and besides, I love graveyards and will frequently consult Find a Grave when planning a trip in case there are any historical personages buried nearby (among others, I’ve paid my respects to Colonel Sanders in Louisville, Kentucky, and Hoagy Carmichael in Bloomington, Indiana—oh, and I just discovered that Octavia Butler, Eldridge Cleaver, and Richard Feynman are all buried just up the road from me in Altadena!). I also got an inadvertent head start on the presidential gravesite quest on my last trip to DC, when I saw JFK and Taft’s graves in Arlington (while, on a literary note, tragically missing Dashiell Hammett, having neglected to do my Find a Grave research first) and Washington’s at Mount Vernon—though if I’d read this book beforehand, I would have pushed harder to go to the National Cathedral, where we almost went before changing plans and where it turns out Wilson is buried (and also Helen Keller, of all people). With the graves I’ve already seen at presidential libraries (Hoover, Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan), that brings my total to a whopping eight—just 30 currently-dead presidents to go!

As you can see, I found this book informative and inspirational. There are several pages on every president, mostly brief biographical notes focusing on their demises and burials, with plenty of quirky factoids with which to delight your friends if they’re into mildly gruesome trivia (mine, mostly, are). The authorship was rather odd—it’s credited to “Brian Lamb and the staff of C-SPAN,” and while the introduction made much of how Lamb undertook the task of visiting every presidential gravesite, the only real personal touches in the book don’t come from Lamb himself, but from Richard Norton Smith, the expert brought in to provide a brief historical-perspective essay on each president, who occasionally veers into personal reminiscences/opinions (a bit jarringly at times: he manages to wax nostalgic about Nixon’s funeral not once but twice, working in a Bob Dole lovefest alone the way). I would so much rather have read a narrative one man’s quirky personal odyssey, a la Assassination Vacation, and done away with all the straight-up guidebook-style info (of which there is a lot, including admission prices, directions, hours, etc., all of which I’d rather look up on the Internet anyway) in exchange for more historical detail. Also, while the book had a number of useful appendixes, including one that lists all the gravesites by state (I’m not surprised that New York state has the most, with six, but who knew that Ohio would be the runner-up, with five? And no presidents west of the Mississippi except the two in California and LBJ in Texas [though the Bushes will eventually follow]?), it seemed like a major oversight that there was no map showing their locations within each state. Overall, however, this will be a valued addition to my reference library and is highly recommended for any fan of presidential lore.