The Captive Reader

Library Loot: March 20 to 26

March 20, 2024 by Claire (The Captive Reader)

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Sharlene from Real Life Reading that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries.

I did a whirlwind tour across three different library systems recently, picking up plenty of interesting things. And then didn’t read any of them on the weekend because a) the weather was spectacular and I spent most of my time outside and b) what time I did spend reading was (wisely) devoted to A Stranger in the Family by Jane Casey, the newest book in the Maeve Kerrigan series. It was only released on Thursday (just as an eBook in North America. Print copies come out in June) and for once I didn’t have the patience to wait for the library to buy it. It was predictably great and, like all of Casey’s fans, I can’t wait for the next book.

The Twenty by Marianne C. Bohr – a memoir about hiking the GR20 trail across Corsica when the author and her husband turned sixty.

Blue Mystery by Margot Benary-Isbert – continuing my exploration of Benary-Isbert’s children’s books with this mystery about a missing plant.

Buttered Side Down by Edna Ferber – after enjoying Mother Knows Best, I’m back for more of Ferber’s short stories with this early collection.

In Allied London by Count Edward Raczynski – after putting this collection of WWII diaries on my to-read list back in 2018, I’ve finally tracked it down!

The Smoking Mountain by Kay Boyle – I only recently read the Neglected Books review of this collection of stories about post-WWII Germany but it sounds very much like my sort of book.

Mrs Lorimer’s Quiet Summer by Molly Clavering – how exciting to have tracked down a Dean Street Press book! My experiences with Clavering have been very mixed (having read Near Neighbours, Dear Hugo, Susan Settles Down and Touch Not the Nettle) so I’m interested to see what I make of this.

What did you pick up this week?

Posted in Library Loot | 7 Comments »

Library Loot: March 13 to 19

March 13, 2024 by Claire (The Captive Reader)

Sharlene has the link this week.

Susan and Joanna by Elizabeth Cambridge – like all right-thinking people, I love Hostages to Fortune but have found Cambridge’s other books impossibly hard to track down. Finally, I’ve had success with this story about two young women and the early years of their very different marriages.

The General and Julia by Jon Clinch – with perfect timing, this recently released novel about a dying Ulysses Grant reflecting back on his life as he writes his memoirs arrived just as I finished Ronald C. White’s biography, American Ulysses. In a few short weeks I will have gone from knowing almost nothing about the man to being abnormally well-informed.

Ready or Not by Cara Bastone – a romance about a pregnant heroine falling for an old friend isn’t the easiest thing to pull off but Bastone has done it beautifully.

What did you pick up this week?

Posted in Library Loot | 4 Comments »

Grievance – K.C. Constantine

March 11, 2024 by Claire (The Captive Reader)

Grievance by K.C. Constantine is not obviously the kind of book that will break your heart. Published in 2000, it’s the sixteenth book in a long-running, hard-hitting crime series set in fictional Rocksburg, a dying industrial town in Pennsylvania full of people with sad pasts and no futures. And it is the kind of good, or even great, book that shakes you as you’re reading it and stays with you for days after.

I’d never heard of Constantine before I picked up Bound to Please earlier this year, in which Michael Dirda enthuses about his work and Grievance in particular:

There are plenty of novels and memoirs about Jewish intellectuals and Gaelic charmers, about the African American experience and the legacy of the Civil War in the South, about drugged-out Gen-Xers, unhappy academics, Connecticut divorcees, and Washington bureaucrats who stumble upon global terrorist plots. But who today writes about working-class America? And by the working class I mean the Italians and Poles and blacks who do the real labor of the world, in foundries and factories, with lathes and diesel shovels and sweat. I mean the people who need to stuff their dirty clothes in grocery bags and take showers in locker rooms before they go home at the end of an eight-hour shift. Sure, much of Rust Belt America is vanishing, but a lot remains, and one of its few laureates is K.C. Constantine.

This kind of effusive praise is echoed in the blurbs on the book itself, from the New York Times Book Review, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Booklist. But where have Constantine’s books gone? I had to order this in via interlibrary loan and it came all the way from Montreal. How can books this good, in a series this large, disappear so completely from library collections and print?

Our protagonist is Detective Sergeant Ruggiero (“Rugs” to his colleagues) Carlucci, a scrawny forty-six-year-old Vietnam vet who lives with his increasingly violent and disoriented mother and works for the Rocksburg police department. When J.D. Lyons is murdered, Carlucci finds himself with almost too many suspects to investigate: who wouldn’t want to kill the executive who was responsible for laying off the majority of the steel factory’s workers when jobs were outsourced to South America? But he is soon able to narrow it down to a specific sub-group of former workers, whose story is painfully plausible. During the firm’s restructurings, the plant foremen ended up in limbo between the union and the executives. When the critical gap was realised, it was too late: not only were there no pensions for these workers, there was no money left to fund them even after they won a court case determining their entitlement. Some left, some killed themselves, and some soldiered on, stringing together what income they could find in years when they had hoped for a comfortable retirement.

Working alongside Carlucci is a younger state trooper, who can’t understand the apathy of their various suspects, why they don’t sell up and go somewhere else, start anew. But it’s hard to start anew when you are old and tired, and impossible to sell your house in a city full of abandoned ones that no one wants. That is the world they live in, and the one the victim created as one of his former employees notes:

‘Hell, all you have to do is look around, see what you see. Empty, rusty buildings, a whole lotta people on welfare, and a whole lotta real estate generating no taxes for the city or the schools. That’s the man’s legacy.’

Juxtaposed with these harsh economic circumstances and the colourful (but so pitch-perfectly written) language of the blue-collar workers, is an immense amount of sympathy and kindness. Carlucci worries constantly about his mother – with good reason – and about the women who come to care for her when he as at work. After she recently wandered off, he has installed hooks on the outside doors to latch when he goes out so that she can’t run off and he prays when doing so that there won’t be a fire. Meanwhile, there are plenty of people who care for him, like his old boss, who plies him with wine and sympathy when he needs them both, and the beautiful Franny, who is keen for their long conversations to lead to something more and not afraid to tell that to her shy suitor, while also making her warm family accessible to him amidst the chaos of his own disintegrating home.

It is all so, so good and surprisingly funny. But, like all stories about good people trying their best and failing in a society set up to fail them, it will break your heart.

Posted in A Century of Books, Fiction, K.C. Constantine, Mystery | 2 Comments »

International Women’s Day – A Reading List

March 8, 2024 by Claire (The Captive Reader)

Happy International Women’s Day! I hope you are all celebrating this most politically-loaded of holidays by looking for ways to meaningfully support working women. Buying us flowers is nice; fighting for pay transparency and equity is better.

As I did back in 2018 and 2020, I offer up a reading list for those looking for further inspiration:

The Authority Gap by Mary Ann Sieghart – an entertaining and enraging book about, as the subtitle has it, “Why Women Are Still Taken Less Seriously Than Men, and What We Can Do About It”. Sieghart has impeccable and engaging research, plus actionable suggestions for readers of all genders to tackle this problem

Let’s Get Physical by Danielle Friedman – a fun look at how 20th and early 21th century fitness trends haven reflected – and driven – the evolution of women’s roles in the West

Flowers of Fire by Hawon Jung – feminism has followed different paths and different timelines around the world; this book looks at the recent changes in South Korea and the new generation of feminists driving the #MeToo movement there

All the Rage by Virginia Nicholson – coming in April, the always-reliable social historian Nicholson considers “Pleasure, Pain, Power: Stories from the Frontline of Beauty, 1860-1960”

After Work by Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek – a look at how countless time-saving domestic innovations – washing machines, vacuums, and so on – have promised but failed to deliver liberation for women, and why it is time to rethink our ideas about running our homes and finally claim our free time

The Case Against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry – a provocatively argued case that women have lost more than we have gained from the sexual revolution

Fanny Herself by Edna Ferber (my review) and Desire by Una L Silberrad (my review)– two excellent novels about industrious young women who join the workforce and learn to define for themselves what it means to be a “New Woman” at the start of the Twentieth Century

Posted in Book List | 4 Comments »

Library Loot: March 6 to 12

March 6, 2024 by Claire (The Captive Reader)

I’m deeply impressed by the speed of the interlibrary loan system recently. After getting used to months and months of waiting for books during Covid, they are now suddenly coming in with lightening speed. The best sort of surprise! And I always have fun when I see where the books came from: this week, I have a historical romance from the University of Saskatoon and a crime novel from the Bibliothèque nationale du Québec in Montreal.

The Lieutenant’s Lady by Bess Streeter Aldrich – I’ve only discovered Bess Streeter Aldrich over the last couple of years and am enjoying working my way through her novels and short stories. I sped through this one over the weekend and while it’s not as good as her other books, I still found the story of a young woman who ends up in a marriage of convenience to the soldier her cousin jilted very readable.

American Ulysses by Ronald C. White – Such an entertaining biography! If you are anywhere near me this week, you are going to be overwhelmed by random trivia about Ulysses S. Grant and America during his lifetime.

Grievance by K.C. Constantine – Of all the books that Michael Dirda was passionate about in Bound to Please, this Pennsylvania-set crime novel was one of the first I tried to track down. It’s wonderful and it’s shocking that such a praised and well-written series is now out of print (possibly to be rediscovered soon? I see a posthumous novel in this series is set to be released in April).

What did you pick up this week?

Posted in Library Loot | Leave a Comment »

A Couple of Duds

February 29, 2024 by Claire (The Captive Reader)

I am generally fairly callous about abandoning books if I find them unimpressive but I had such high hopes for these two that I persevered until the very end, unwilling to abandon all hope. Sometimes patience is not rewarded.

Red Sauce Brown Sauce by Felicity Cloake (2022) – I adore One More Croissant for the Road, Cloake’s foodie travel book about cycling around France and enjoying local dishes. What better pastime for a food writer! And Britain, though hardly a culinary competitor to France, certainly could have offered up an interesting array of meals – but sadly Cloake focuses her regional travels through the British Isles on just one meal: breakfast. While there is some regional variance (laverbread in Wales, porridge in Scotland), it’s really not enough to carry an entire book and whereas Cloake was delightful in her excitement over the ever-changing French scenery, injuries that limit her cycling adventures, Covid restrictions, and perhaps over familiarity make her less descriptive when it comes to her native land. Too much time is devoted to talking about the friends and family who host her along the way, which is a very nice way to thank them but not of interest to most of the readers who are looking for a food- or travel-focused book. Even the title is a weak framing device, as neither the author nor many of the people she encounters like either ketchup or brown sauce with their breakfast. I hope Cloake cycles off towards more varied cuisine sometime soon.

Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold (1986) – I have heard rave reviews for years about the Vorkosigan Saga; the books have been nominated for countless prizes and won many of them, and the diverse cast of characters is deeply beloved by many readers. It had been a while since I last read any proper science fiction so I picked this up hoping to be starting a new and exciting series.

The concept is certainly appealing: Commander Cordelia Naismith finds herself stranded on an unpopulated planet with an injured comrade and Lord Aral Vorkosigan, an infamous soldier from the powerful and deeply political planet of Barrayar. After a few days trekking to find help, there is a clear attraction between Cordelia and Vorkosigan but interplanetary politics are vicious and Cordelia is soon fleeing for home. Of course, their paths cross again (as they must, given that they are the parents of the series’ main hero) but the politics never become less messy.

I was reminded almost immediately after starting of why I’ve never had success with Bujold before: dialogue. There were other things I didn’t like – the pacing was too fast, the twists and plots that were supposed to be clever were overused – but in the end it was the dialogue that killed this for me. Cordelia is meant to be an intelligent, capable, mature woman, but slips into vapid slang at the most inopportune moments. Every time it happened, I was jolted out of the scene by my frustration. There is an inadvertently hilarious scene when Vorkosigan is somberly telling her of the evil that surrounds them, the weight of the subject making him quieter and quieter as he eloquently goes on about the perfidy of man. To which she responds, like a complete idiot: “Commodore Vorkosigan – Aral – what’s eating you? You’re so keyed up I expect you to start pacing the ceiling any minute.” Jesus wept.

Posted in A Century of Books, Felicity Cloake, Fiction, Food Writing, Lois McMaster Bujold, Non-fiction, Science Fiction, Travel | 9 Comments »

Library Loot: February 28 to March 5

February 28, 2024 by Claire (The Captive Reader)

Sharlene has the link this week.

Very happy recent library news: months after a crippling cyber attack, the Toronto Public Library (one of the busiest library systems in the world), is restarting their holds system and putting one million items back into circulation. The library has been checking books out using paper forms but all returns went into storage. Now, they are making their way back on to shelves. Very exciting for those of you in Toronto! And for those of us in Vancouver who are waiting on inter-library loans from Toronto.

How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn – one of the saddest things in the Lyttelton-Hart-Davis letters (which I was reminded of while reading volume five) is how much George Lyttelton loves this book and longs for Hart-Davis to read it and share his thoughts. Hart-Davis has a copy in his Yorkshire cottage and spends years vowing to read it but, inevitably, returns from holiday without having touched it. There is one volume of letters left to read and I’m hopeful that Hart-Davis will come through before his friend’s death, but Lyttelton’s passion for this classic has me convinced to try it far more promptly.

And No Birds Sang by Farley Mowat – there aren’t a lot of classic Canadian memoirs of WWII but this is certainly one of them. Mowat was a hugely popular writer and environmentalist, writing for children and adults, with many of his books still in print.

Simply the Best by Susan Elizabeth Phillips – new release in Phillips’ classic Chicago Stars romance series. I sped through this on the weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it – a relief after finding her last few books disappointing.

What did you pick up this week?

Posted in Library Loot | 3 Comments »

Getting Married in Buffalo Jump – Susan Haley

February 25, 2024 by Claire (The Captive Reader)

I picked up Getting Married in Buffalo Jump by Susan Haley on a whim from the library, remembering the TV movie that aired frequently on weekends when I was growing up. Published in 1987, it is the story of Sophie, a rural Alberta kindergarten teacher whose father has recently died, leaving her and her mother with a farm they love but cannot run on their own. When Alexander Bresnyachuk, who was a few years ahead of her at high school before he suddenly dropped out and left town, comes to work as their farmhand things immediately begin looking up. But very quickly he shocks Sophie by proposing; Alexander has a vision of a practical marriage, unbothered by the lack of romance that has passed between them so far:

‘I’ve been around. I’ve been around too much and I’m tired of it. I want a place and I want a wife, and I want to have kids. You’re a real nice girl, Sophia. I think I’d make you a pretty good husband. So? What about it?’

At twenty-eight, Sophie has some failed affairs behind her and while there is no great bitterness, there is also not a lot of hope. Indeed, on Alexander’s first visit to the farm she had mused to herself that it was love when he started to help her immediately in the garden:

It was not that there were not many men who would offer to help with a manure fork; it was that there were not many men. Sophie had begun to wonder whether there were any at all.

Sophie accepts his proposal, but warily. Her mother is initially horrified – her educated daughter should do better than a poor drop-out Ukrainian – but for Sophie the hesitation comes from Alexander’s past and how little she knows of it. Slowly, she seeks out the people in his life so she can better understand who he is, why he left, and, ultimately, why he came back. She befriends Annie, his high school girlfriend who is the mother of his son, gets to know his troubled sister, and enjoys his adoring Ukrainian mother and dramatic Russian-Ukrainian father. And through it all, she unravels the mystery of Benny, Alexander’s childhood best friend who is at the centre of all the old stories but nowhere to been seen now.

This is a lovely low-key romance, with Alexander quietly showing his worth and dependability, but it is even more a portrait of a prairie town, and all the prejudices and problems that entails. There is too much drinking, smoking, and, for some, drugs but these are not ‘Issues’ for the novel, merely realistic background. Likewise the racial tensions: the Bresnyachuks are Ukrainians, a sizeable ethnic minority on the Canadian prairies; indeed, prior to the outbreak of war in Ukraine in 2022 and the flood of refugees to neighboring European states, Canada had the third largest Ukrainian population in the world after Ukraine and Russian because of early 20th century immigration. But that didn’t make them a respected minority and that condescension is captured here, with the attitudes of Sophie, her mother, and various friends towards Alexander’s family. Worse though is how First Nations people are treated, like Annie and Benny. Racial slurs are casually used by and against each group in a way that feels very true to life and the era.

It is a book of straightforward people. Sophie is trying to understand Alexander, to figure out what the catch is around a man who is handsome, kind, and hardworking; but sometimes, happily, people are what they seem. Annie, despite being left a single mother in her mid-teens, has no fight with Alexander and wishes him the best; she is happy to prop up the local bar and then go home to her trucker husband and children. Poppa Bresnyachuk is dramatic, full of contradictory over-the-top stories about his wartime exploits, but irrepressibly loveable. Momma Bresnyachuk is doting over her favourite son but pleased by his choice of Sophie; the most realistic moment in the entire book for me was Momma overseeing Sophie preparing a plate of pickles and cured meats on her first visit to Alexander’s family home. This is absolutely how a Slavic mother will judge you. Sophie’s own mother is a straightlaced WASP who thinks the lessons of her passionate marriage don’t apply to her daughter’s marriage of convenience.

All in all, this was a pleasant surprise with a welcome sense of humour and I’m so glad my whimsy led me to it.

Posted in A Century of Books, Canadiana, Fiction, Susan Haley | 2 Comments »

My Name is Million – Anonymous (Lucy Zoe Girling Zajdler)

February 22, 2024 by Claire (The Captive Reader)

There are some books so raw with emotion that it is almost painful to read them: My Name is Million is one of these. Published anonymously in 1940, it is a memoir of the terrifying first months of the war by Lucy Zoe Girling Zajdler, an Anglo-Irish writer (who published as Martin Hare) who was married to a Pole and living in Warsaw when the war broke out.

Writing from England and still reeling from her experiences, Zajdler treads an interesting line between passion and detachment. They feel like they should be polar opposites but perhaps it is the only way to write your way through the kind of shock Zajdler was still in, having lost so much so quickly. And, as she describes, it was hard to feel much of anything normal during such abnormal times:

After I had lost everything, when not a stone, not a piece of paper, not a stitch of clothing remained of what a few weeks before had been our homes and the accumulation of two people’s whole lives; when I never knew whether I should eat again, sleep or wake, live or die, from one second to another; when I had seen everything I had cared for collapse like a house of cards, a nation stretched out on the cross, a fair country burning behind me like a box of matches and hell itself opening in front of me, there were whole days when I never suffered anything. I was incapable of passion, even of fears; even of the desire for revenge. All that was left was the human instinct for some roof of my own, some place to crawl into.

While not unexpected, the speed of the German invasion in September 1939 was famously shocking. Proud Poland fought a terribly brief and bloody defense, but to no avail – and, shamefully for an Englishwoman, with no support from her supposed allies. Within weeks, thousands were dead, cities were razed, and the country was being divided between the Germans and Soviets. But Zajdler would not have had it any other way:

We were all of us wrong, about nearly everything. Except about one thing. We knew what was coming. We preferred it to dishonour. We have paid, probably, the most fearful price in all history. But we were right to do it. We would do it again. None of us, not one of us, with all our faults, with all our quarrels, with all our regrets, if put to the same test, but would do the same thing again.

Writing in 1940, yes, some of this is propaganda. It is a reminder to the English, who dawdled with their declaration of war while their ally faced tanks, bombers, and fighter planes alone, that there are things worth fighting for. But this martial pride is also such an integral part of the Polish character. Later in their travels, a Lithuanian solider, amazed at his neighbours’ insane gallantry, comments “It is all pride with you. Polski honor! A man does not need honor. What he needs is bread and a warm coat.” Zajdler has a quick retort for him: “And you have both, and the Poles have neither. Each has what he prefers.”

From Warsaw, Zajdler and her husband (who, like the majority of their friends, is referred to only by his first initial – A.) find themselves joining a flow of refugees looking for safety. Injured and exhausted, they make their way to the country estate of an elderly family friend who has seen her home seized and destroyed several times in past conflicts and knows this will happen again. The Soviets are advancing, the village peasants are feeling torn between customary feudal obeisance and the lure of communism, and the estate’s ever-growing population of aristocratic refugees is caught in a world of surreal horror, with all the elements of an elegant house party contrasted with total war:

All the accessories of a normal life still miraculously existed. Only the life was not normal. In the middle of a forced conversation somebody would suddenly stop dead. The jokes were too successful. Everybody was too ready to be amused. The ones who were being amusing, looking round at the other haggard faces, would suddenly realise what their own must be like, and give it up. Getting through time was like trying to swim in the Dead Sea. We did the most incredible, fantastic things. Like sitting under an arbour smothered in roses, reading novels from the library in Pinsk! Whatever else I forget, I shall never forget the horror of that sort of thing. In Warsaw, women were throwing themselves against the German tanks, into a jet of machine-gun bullets, with buckets of boiling water. Warsaw schoolchildren were standing night and day on the roofs of houses, shovelling off the incendiary bombs before they had time to burn through.

In the end, Zajdler is unable to describe her escape. One paragraph bleakly outlines the facts: from Poland, she and her husband made their way to Lithuania, Latvia, and finally Estonia, where they boarded a neutral ship and set off for Sweden. Their boat was captured by Germans, Zajdler and her husband were handed over to the Gestapo, and, though Zajdler was quickly released and made it to England, she never saw her husband again. Even though Zajdler was writing just months later and there was no official word of what had happened to her husband, she had seen enough of the Germans to know he would not survive – and she was, we know reading with the benefit of hindsight, absolutely correct.

I am always interested in reading about Poland during the first months of the war and this was a very worthy addition to my education, especially since Zajdler journeyed east and I found it fascinating to learn more about reactions there to the Soviet occupation. I was also reminded of Helen MacInnes’ excellent spy novel, While Still We Live, which focused on an Englishwoman in Poland at the outbreak of the war and her experiences. MacInnes clearly did her research as what Zajdler describes is very similar to what is in that novel.

Zajdler’s eye for detail and utter lack of self-pity make her a fascinating guide to a horrifying period and I’m so glad an article in Slightly Foxed brought this memoir to my attention.

Posted in A Century of Books, Lucy Zoe Girling Zajdler, Memoir/Biography, Non-fiction | 4 Comments »

Library Loot: February 21 to 27

February 21, 2024 by Claire (The Captive Reader)

Love from Sandy by Elwynne Berger – I cannot for the life of me remember where I came across this epistolary novel from 1953 about a young American studying in England but it has now arrived via inter-library loan.

Dreams of My Russian Summers by Andreï Makine – I read this autobiographical novel about a Russian boy growing up under communism listening to the stories of his French grandmother when I was probably far too young to understand most of it, but I have fond memories and want to see what I think of it as an adult.

Cordelia’s Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold – two for the price of one! This omnibus edition includes both Shards of Honor and Barrayar. Time to finally start the Vorkosigan Saga.

What did you pick up this week?

Posted in Library Loot | 8 Comments »

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