Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Do you like things that are both quiet and loud? Can you read a trashy tabloid and then enjoy an artfully produced historical documentary? Do you like the grey areas in life? If so, this book is for you.

Today’s scandals have nothing on Henry VIII and his henchman Thomas Cromwell.

Wolf Hall takes place from the point of view of Englishman, Thomas Cromwell.  Cromwell was the son of a drunken blacksmith who beat him on a regular basis. This abuse made Thomas very, very tough as he ran away from home at an early age. He became a soldier—for France! He married well into a family with a booming textile business and he made the business even more successful. He helped smuggle in English translations of the Bible. He was both the assistant to Cardinal Thomas Wolsey and a heretic. From nothing, he became the right hand man of Henry VIII.

Based on the whims of Henry VIII (a very fickle king), Cromwell played with people as pawns in an elaborate game of chess. But were you to catch his eye near his estate of Austin Friars, he would take you in if you needed refuge. If he saw himself reflected in you, he would give you a hand and help you. He was capable of great cruelty or kindness.

I will tell you, this book is a challenging read. Everyone seems to be named Thomas, John, Henry, Harry, William, Mary or Anne. Sometimes it is difficult to know who is speaking. Generally I found that if it said “he said” it was usually Thomas Cromwell. Don’t be daunted by the family history charts and the cast of characters. This is helpful especially when characters are introduced and then not mentioned again for a while– and did I mention everyone seems to be named Thomas, John, Henry, Harry, William, Mary or Anne?

So pick up Wolf Hall, winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize and then halfway through be sure to request the sequel, Bringing Up the Bodies, which is, if you can believe it, even more acclaimed, winning the 2012 Man Book and the Costa Award for Best Novel and the Costa Award for Book of the Year! Once you get a glimpse into Mantel’s re-creation of English history you won’t be able to look away.

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The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.” The first sentence of The Old Man and the Sea is Ernest Hemingway at his best. The sentence is crisp and clear, and it sets the tone for the entire novel. Hemingway wasn’t old when he wrote The Old Man and the Sea, but the story is told by a mature author and by a man who had seemed knocked out after Across the River and into the Trees, the not so great comeback novel of 1950. Hemingway got up on “Nine” and in The Old Man and the Sea, he was once again writing a spare, complex story that had a measurable and profound impact on literature.

Long gone were the paragraphs of his youth, paragraphs that seemed plain on the surface but that were quite involved and the work of an ambitious modernist, and exorcised was the period of heavy writing that seemed hung-over. Hemingway once said that all he ever wanted was to write well, and in The Old Man and the Sea, he did just that.

And the story is so straightforward and poignant that it seems near-archaic – it has the authority of myths and legends while it is also deals with the realities of the fisherman’s life in an awe-inspiring manner. The world may be brutal and bleak but life can still be lived with dignity. “Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.”

When Hemingway finally decided to publish The Old Man and the Sea in 1952, the manuscript had been ready for almost a year. The author had been hesitant to publish it, as he believed it to be part of the great (never realized) Sea Book that he could not quite make right. But the tale had been part of the Hemingway’s life since the 1930s, when he had heard the real-life story of “an old man fishing alone in the skiff far out of Cabanas.” In a piece for Esquire in 1936, Hemingway described how a great marlin pulled the skiff far out to sea, and two days later “the old man was picked up by fishermen sixty miles to the eastward, the head and the forward part of the marlin lashed alongside.”

The Old Man and the Sea turned out to be the final novel published during Hemingway’s lifetime. It was a worthy ending.

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The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn

I vividly remember reading this book. I was home sick and read it from cover to cover in about 3 days, even though the book is over 600 pages. I absolutely could not put it down, despite not feeling well at all. The book begins with Mendelsohn describing how his elderly relatives would cry when he entered a room. They would tell him how much he looked like his Great Uncle, Schmiel. No one would ever say anything more about Schmiel, his wife, or his four daughters, other than they were “killed by the Nazis”. Later, as an adult, he found a set of letters from Schmiel, asking for help to leave Poland. Mendelsohn decided to search for more information, and to see if it would be possible to find out exactly what had happened to them.

Mendelsohn’s research uncovers as much information about the small town of Bolechow as it does about his family. He travels to meet the survivors of the town who are now living in Israel, Australia, and many other places. His goal is to get as many descriptions as possible of the life they lived and what happened during the war. The stories he hears are like many stories from other towns of Eastern Europe: how the local population were often worse in their persecution of the Jewish population, but also how brave people helped or hid some of the Jewish people. In addition, he learns the complicated history of this town which had belonged to several different countries over time, including Poland and Ukraine.

The book is a combination of a personal journal, a mystery story, and a historical quest. Mendelsohn succeeds because he learns not just about his family’s deaths, but also about their lives. They become real people to him with personalities, likes and dislikes, and complicated lives before they died. They are no longer just six names listed among the six million who died.

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The Great Enigma by Tomas Tranströmer

Haiku is one of the best-known poetic forms on earth. The Japanese seventeen syllable haiku has been around since the 1600s, today there are about 780 haiku magazines in Japan, and Japanese schoolchildren learn early on how to use as few words as possible when describing events – the task of minimizing a narrative to just a few keywords becomes a game with signs that captivates the young.

In 2011, the society that is in charge of the Nobel Prize in literature – for the first time ever – brought up the presence of haiku in an author’s output when announcing the winner of the award. Unsurprisingly, the poet, Tomas Tranströmer, was not Japanese but Swedish, for haiku poems are today written all over the world.

Tomas Tranströmer was attracted to haiku early on in his career, but it wasn’t until after his stroke in 1990 that he once again embraced the form. And the majority of Tranströmer’s work is not haiku – in the world of poetry he is known as a master of metaphor, and metaphor has no place in traditional haiku. However, Tranströmer’s poetry has always been bare, elegant, precise, and serene, and when he returned to haiku it was as if the poet had come home again.

And just like in the poetry of the Japanese haiku masters, nature plays a major part in Tranströmer’s poetry. Nature, of course, uses many different dresses, but to Tranströmer it is always holy and divine: “The darkening leaves/ in autumn are as precious/ as the Dead Sea Scrolls.”

The Japanese term “mono no aware” is often (lamely) translated as “sadness,” but it is more correct to understand it as an awareness of impermanence, or the transient nature of all things. This is a recurring theme in Tranströmer’s verse. In “Snow Is Falling,” he says, “The funerals keep coming/ more and more of them/ like the traffic signs/ as we approach a town./ Thousands of people gazing/ in the land of long shadows.” Which may seem bleak, but Tranströmer is too sophisticated to be categorized as either gloomy or bright, and the poem reaches this conclusion, “A bridge builds itself/ slowly/ straight out into space.”

Death itself may be the end. Then again, it may not. In the prose poem “Answers to Letters,” the poet speaks of a place, possibly New York City, which is beyond death, “One day I will answer. One day when I am dead and can finally concentrate. Or at least as far away from here that I can find myself again. When I’m walking, newly arrived, in the big city, on 125th Street, in the wind on the street of dancing garbage. I who love to stray off and vanish in the crowd, a letter T in the endless mass of text.”

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The World Made Straight by Ron Rash

Are you on the waiting list for Ron Rash’s newest book, The Cove? Why not take the time to explore some of Rash’s earlier works. I have read all of his books and have thoroughly enjoyed them all but my personal favorite is The World Made Straight. Rash always features wonderful vivid characters and Travis Shelton, the anti-hero of The World Made Straight is one of my favorites.

Travis is a 17 year old dropout living in Madison County North Carolina with his abusive father. On a fishing trip one day, Travis finds a field of marijuana in the woods, and steals some plants and keeps going back for more. You just know this is not going to end well for Travis and it doesn’t’.

The only good thing to come out of all this is the friend he finds in Leonard, a drug dealing former teacher who is obsessed with the Shelton Laurel Massacre, a real event in the Civil War that affects all of the characters in subtle ways. Leonard becomes a mentor to Travis and an assortment of other wayward travelers including teenage runaway Dena.

The story moves and flows and never lags and you will find out interesting facts about an actual event in the Civil War. The characters are true to life and you will become very fond of them. I found the book to be gripping and full of action and surprises. I hoped and prayed for a happy ending for Travis. Read the book to find out what happens …

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The Giver by Lois Lowry

Is The Hunger Games too disturbing and violent for your taste? Try Lois Lowry’s classic Newbery Award-winning book, The Giver. This Community, which is never named, is a polar opposite of Panem. There is no war, no starvation, and no strife of any kind. The lives of the residents are completely structured. A group of Elders looks out for the welfare of each of the citizens in the Community. A Community in which each married couple if approved will raise two children, a boy and a girl. Unlike the conflict torn world of Panem, Lowry has created a utopian society, where conflict and confrontation are avoided at all costs.

At an annual ceremony every eleven year old is given their assignment for their adult responsibilities. We meet eleven year old Jonah, who is a bit apprehensive at the thought of his adult assignment. Jonah does not know what job he would want in the community. His father is a Nurturer, who cares for infants from birth until they get placed with their families at age one. His mother works in the Justice Center, where she is a judge. Neither of these occupations seem very exciting to Jonah. He also knows the Committee works very hard to ensure the proper match for each person. When Jonah is chosen for the most prestigious job in the community, The Receiver, his world begins to be altered. Will Jonah be able to survive in the Community as he learns of the truth about it?

This book is also as an audio book on CD and a downloadable audio book narrated by Ron Rifkin.

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The Short Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer

Jonathan Safran Foer, the author of Everything Is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Eating Animals, once said that what he loves the most about Isaac Bashevis Singer, is the vulnerability and bravery of his writing. Moreover, Singer can be described as an honest author, and he is also a deeply humane and compassionate writer.

Isaac Bashevis Singer’s writing career began in his native Poland, but in his early 30s, he left his home country and emigrated to America. Singer arrived in New York in 1935, and the shock of the move and life in exile were changes he never got over. He had lost his country, and if his audience had been small in Poland (Singer wrote in Yiddish), it was even smaller in New York. However, the old country proved to be a rich source of inspiration. For decades, Singer returned to the pre-World War II life of the Eastern European Jews. In this world, imps, dybbuks, and demons are as real as the baker next door is, and the devil himself is frequently the teller of the tale. In “Zeidlus the Pope,” the Evil One manages to lure a brilliant Jewish scholar away from his faith, claiming that if Zeidlus embraces Christianity, he may one day become the pope. The story ends in hell.

When Singer eventually, especially in the 1960s, began writing about life in America, the irrational element remained intact. However, in the new land, the imps, dybbuks, and demons were often replaced by neurotic behavior, delusional, love-driven deeds, and existential confusion. The supernatural aspect and the closeness to Singer’s spiritual roots never went away though. In “The Cafeteria,” corpses walk on Broadway, and in “Alone,” a nameless visitor to Miami Beach, mysteriously evicted from his hotel, drifts aimlessly and imagines that he’s in the midst of a Biblical disaster, “I was like Noah – but in an empty ark.”

Singer is a master storyteller. He never hides behind false originality (which, according to the author, “often reveal nothing but a writer’s boring and selfish personality”), and his writing is precise, transparent, and straightforward. At the same time, Singer combines the everyday experience with philosophical and theological depths, and even if his stories may be filled with human confusion and conflicts, the eternal mysteries are always present – Singer writes about them with grace and understated awe. As here, in “The Letter Writer:” “The night had ended like a dream and was followed by an obscure reality, self-absorbed, sunk in the perpetual mystery of being.”

Taken together, the components of Singer’s short stories give them the weight of great novels.

WCPL can offer the following short story collections by Isaac Bashevis Singer: The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories, and Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories; find and reserve these in our catalog.

Silence of the Grave by Arnaldur Indridason

Another example of the terrific crime novels coming out of the Scandnavian area (although strictly speaking, Iceland only sort of counts as Scandinavia). Detective Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson is called to the scene of some new home construction because a human bone, a rib, was found at the site. Because the site may have historical significance, a team of archaeologists is also summoned to aid in the excavation.

Erlendur calls in his chief detectives, Sigurdur, Oli & Elinborg to assist in the case and now they all must work with the archaeologists and geologists to undercover the rest of the skeleton. Meanwhile, Erlendur’s personal life is in shambles, his ex-wife Halldora refuses to even speak with him. His daughter, Eva Lind, has left the cryptic message “help me” on his cellphone. His son, Sindri, is out of the country and is of no assistance.

While following the lead of some of Eva Lind’s  friends, he discovers that his daughter has just miscarried her unborn daughter and is found bleeding and in a comatose state, near a hospital. After he gets her to the hospital and the doctors stabilize Eva, Erlendur realizes that it may be touch and go as to whether or not his daughter will survive. And yet, he must go back to the excavation site to help determine if the bone found is a part of a murder victim … and are we dealing with a recent murder or one from a half century before?

There are clues that his team must try to follow, and the trail seems to be leading back in history. If it is a murder, it may have occurred decades before. The author has cleverly woven the story of the present with the story of the past. At first it is a bit confusing, but as you begin to understand, the author fills in the past so that it can fit into the present and resolve the mystery.

The author lives in Reykjavik, Iceland, and has won a Glass Key Award for Best Nordic Crime Novel for both his earlier book Jar City and for Silence of the Grave, which also won the Gold Dagger Award. This is a truly fascinating read and I intend to go back and read the first in the series, Jar City.

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The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Based on real life events of the Dust Bowl during the 1930′s Depression, this classic American novel was an instant best seller, with about 450,000 copies sold in the first year. It also won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into an Academy Award-winning movie the year after publication. The novel was banned, it was burned, and it was decried and discussed on the radio, in the pulpit, and in the streets. But, above all, it was read. The Nobel Prize committee cited The Grapes of Wrath a “great work” and as one of the committee’s main reasons for granting the prize to Steinbeck in 1962.

In it, we’re introduced to Tom Joad, the eldest son of the family, who has just been released from prison for killing a man in a fight. While walking home he meets traveling preacher Jim Casy, who knew the Joad family years ago. The two men return to the Joad farm and home, only to find it deserted and empty. Tom finds out that the family has moved in with with his Uncle Bill not far off and when he gets there he doesn’t quite get the homecoming he expected. Instead, he discovers that his family has been forced off their Oklahoma farm by the bank and that they are planning on migrating to California – a land with plenty of jobs and plenty of food – or so the handbills proclaim.

The novel then follows the Joads, with their friend Casy, as they make the journey that so many others made across our vast country on the famed mother-road: Route 66. Steinbeck uses a literary technique of alternating chapters to great effect. Some chapters detail the progress and events in the lives of the Joads, while others provide a “slice of life” overview of different aspects of the westward journey that so many Americans made during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression. For example, early in the novel one such chapter depicts the practice of buying and selling used cars and trucks from the point of view of what we now think of as a stereotypical used car salesman. He’ll do anything to move the jalopies on his lot, including all sorts of dirty tricks to make broken down and unsafe vehicles appear road-worthy, as well as outright lying to the rubes buying them. Steinbeck’s writing style is also one of main reasons I loved this book – it is rhythmic, and lyrical and has been compared by many to The Bible. There are many Biblical parallels in the plot of the story, too.

Through every trial and tribulation that the Joads face, we appreciate even more the struggles that millions of Americans endured during the Great Depression. My one small complaint about the book is it’s ending. It seemed to me (and to some members of our book club) to be vague, anti-climactic and abrupt, although some think this was done on purpose by Steinbeck. For me, the book would have had a much stronger end, if the author had just moved Tom’s “I’ll be there” speech to the end of the novel. Henry Fonda made this scene even more memorable in the movie.

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A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

Ignatius J. Reilly is thirty years old, has rarely left his home of New Orleans (and don’t even get him started on the story of his bus ride to Baton Rouge — it was a horrible experience) and lives with his mother. Although he doesn’t work, per se, his time is consumed with writing his opus, disdaining pop culture, and being a cross for his mother to bear.

When his poor mother begins to indulge a little more than usual in her drink of choice (currently muscatel), she crashes the car into the side of a building. The financial distress from the accident necessitates Ignatius’s getting a job to help support his own expenses for the first time in his life.

What follows are a series of hysterical and unbelievable events starring Ignatius as he goes from job to job (including a stint in the office at Levy Pants and a hot dog salesman (though he mostly just eats his product)) and from one unexpectedly comical situation to the next. Reilly vacillates between being a detestable and a merely pathetic character, but either way his exploits will keep readers wanting more.

Author John Kennedy Toole wrote the story of Reilly pulling from experiences in own life, and partially based the character on a professor of his at Tulane University. After being rejected by Simon and Schuster for publication of A Confederacy of Dunces, Toole, who had suffered from paranoia and depression for much of his life, committed suicide. The book was posthumously published some 11 years later and Toole was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1981.

In contrast with the unhappy story surrounding the publication of this novel, it is brimming with comical and unforeseen scenarios. I actually picked this up accidentally, mistaking it for Confederates in the Attic (a very, very different book) and was happy I did.

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