What Are You Reading

[Sask.Rider]

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver.

 

[Sask.Rider]

I'm reading On the Waterfront, the Pulitzer prize winning articles that inspired the film.

Hi, this sounds great - was not aware it was a book. Thanks.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Now in the end of Jorge Amado - The emigrants from the Sáo Francisco/Seara vermelha (1946), the plots are finally running together!

Red Field - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Fredoka]

I'm in the middle of Balzac "Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans" (or "a Harlot High and Low").
Not the one I would advise to get started in Balzac since it draws a lot from previously introduced characters / subplots. But an amazing read nonetheless, very precursor of thriller / spy novels.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Starting Gregg Hurwitz - Out of the dark (2019).

 

[Trenchfriend]

Gregg Hurwitz - Out of the dark (2019) is very comfortable to read! You can always grab it and read fifteen pages easily.

 

[Trenchfriend]

Gregg Hurwitz - Out of the dark (2019) is indeed really good!

This is def. worth to be called a "Thriller"!

 

[Fading Fast]

Rhubarb in the Catbird Seat by Red Barber and Robert W. Creamer, first published in 1968


The word "legend" is overused, but it does apply to Red Barber's career in sports broadcasting – a career that began in baseball's infancy on radio and peaked with TV and radio broadcasts in the largest media market in the country, followed by a "retirement gig" at NPR.

Rhubarb in the Catbird Seat isn't just a baseball book, however, as it's more a personal account of Barber's life as told by Barber himself. Like almost all autobiographies, he's the hero, yet you'll still see some flaws he admits to and some you can intuit despite his efforts.

What drives the story though is Barber's insight into baseball, baseball broadcasting – its history and challenges – and the major baseball personalities Barber met in his long career. Baseball is just one of many sports today, but Barber was doing all this when baseball was "the sport."

The book is at its best when Barber is talking about how radio broadcasts started – most team owners opposed it, thinking it would hurt stadium ticket sales – including the “wire” games, where the announcer “created color” around a scorecard-like telegraph account of the action.

Barber was also there for the early Brooklyn Dodgers broadcasts. He does an excellent job of capturing the "something special" the Dodgers held for Brooklyn. Later, as the usual career buffeting happens, he goes "across town" and broadcasts Yankee games for fifteen years.

Barber also saw the rise of televised baseball. Once again, the book soars as Barber describes the difference between radio broadcasting – where the broadcaster is in total control of what the listener hears – and TV broadcasting – where the broadcaster is a servant of the monitor.

Along the way, Barber sprinkles in anecdotes about his meetings and relationships with notables of the era, including team owners/managers like Larry MacPhail and Branch Rickey, network heads like William S. Paley, and of course, famous players like Jackie Robinson.

As to Robinson – the first black player in Major League Baseball – you can judge for yourself how honest Barber is being, but credit to him for acknowledging, as a man of the South, his initial resistance. It's a time, place, and norms nuance that our modern politics hates.

The book is less interesting when Barber is describing his life, other than a fascinating story about a medical illness he had as a young man that nearly wrecked his broadcasting career. The medical arrogance involved, much more of a thing then, is frightening.

His life, though, also reveals its era. His dad worked on the railroads – a secure job at the time; Barber left college to get married when marrying very young was the norm; people were regularly addressed by their surnames; and religion, not politics, was often personally defining.

Ushering his story along, Barber writes like he spoke – clear, no-nonsense, and just folksy enough to make even the behind-the-scenes business of baseball feel personal. His writing manages the difficult combination of being breezy, yet intelligent at the same time.

Rhubarb in the Catbird Seat is not the first book to pick up if you're new to baseball literature, but if you aren't and you're looking for a fun one from one of the giants of baseball's early broadcasting era, it's an enjoyable and quick read.


N.B. I owe a hat tip to @LizzieMaine for this enjoyable recommendation.

 

[Tiki Tom]

^^^^
Great review. Can’t wait for Lizzie’s comments on your review. I’m saddened by how far baseball has fallen in our national consciousness.

 

[Fading Fast]

^^^^
Great review. Can’t wait for Lizzie’s comments on your review. I’m saddened by how far baseball has fallen in our national consciousness.

Thank you. I, too, am saddened by its decline. And I fear MLB's insane greed will only speed its decline farther even if it provides a temporary revenue boost as all this moving of games to this or that streaming service has turned me off and I'm a long-time fan. I can't even imagine how a new fan would get started. Who's going to chase games/teams around services that they are not yet vested in?

 

[Tiki Tom]

Agree completely. I am not about to chase any game/team/show across multiple streaming services just to get my fix. It’s ridiculous.

 

[Edward]

Unusually (The Institution doesn't halt term for Easter, so many years I have just the long weekend during term, which inevitably means that in order to keep teaching I end up working the bank holidays as well) I was able, due to a late Easter, to take a full week off this year, and I managed for the first time in too long to get some proper reading for pleasure in. I tore through The Handmaid's Tale, which for my sins I'd always meant to read but hadn't previously managed. Seems wrong to say I "enjoyed" it, but a good read. The sequel I will hopefully pick up on long before the television version thereof begins next year.

I've now returned to another alternative history work - this time one of several novels in Kim Newman's Anno Dracula series. This particular one is set in 1899, and sees European vampire opponents of Dracula exiled from England, seeking sanctuary in Japan. A rich and wonderful universe, AD; really, it's such a shame that it has never been realised on-screen. It got left out during the last vampire boom maybe fifteen years ago, but really it deserves the lavishly-budgeted streaming treatment now.

For anyone with an interest in Victoriana and gothic horror fiction, especially vampirism, Newman's books are a must-read. For me they are right up there with Stoker.

 

[JasonY]

The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments are hitting a little too close to home these days. Good reads though I think the latter is the better of the two.

 

[Fading Fast]

Because of the Lockwoods by Dorothy Whipple, first published in 1949


Fiction at its best entertains while exploring something eternal in the human condition that helps us understand our own lives a bit better. And if it's an older novel, it also provides insight into the age in which it was written.

Better still, if there is a philosophy of life quietly entwined in all this – say a young man and woman unintentionally debating a secondhand business as if they were characters out of an Ayn Rand novel – the book will have moments when it soars.

Because of the Lockwoods does all those things well, with its story about a once up-and-coming family who is reduced to marginal social and financial status – in very class-conscious pre-World War II England – owing to the untimely death of the family's young patriarch.

Worse for the marginalized Hunter family, they live in the shadow of one of the town's leading families, the Lockwoods. While author Whipple weaves in several characters and storylines, the main focus is on Thea, the youngest of the Hunter children, but the one with the most grit.

Most of the Hunters just accept their fate, with the mother – a passive woman, now titular head of the family – being the most deferential to the Lockwoods who, outwardly, help the Hunters, but truly revel in the Hunters' reduced status.

All this rubs young Thea the wrong way. She grows up nursing a grudge against the Lockwoods – especially the two of the three Lockwood daughters – "the twins –" who enjoy lauding their wealth and status passive-aggressively over Thea.

Whipple prevents her story from becoming a cliché by bringing in another family, a poorer family, but one with a young "go-getter" son who sees the Hunters as "above" his family.

The subtle message that becomes clear is – if you buy into all this class envy – everyone is "above" and "below" someone, all the time. It’s an exhausting and unproductive way to go through life.

There is a plot line about a stolen lot of real estate that leads to the climax, but the real strength of the book is the honesty in its story, as we see Thea grow from an introverted child into a smart and observant young adult – one who will fight for herself when cornered.

Thea shines because she is a flawed hero. Sometimes her temper gets the best of her; sometimes she acts impulsively, and sometimes she's outright wrong – but she's also smart, honest, and a fighter. She's a real-life hero – flaws and all.

Almost all of Whipple's characters grow. Thea at first looks down on the "go-getter" boy, Oliver, until she begins to realize he has valuable inner qualities as he matures into a more thoughtful young adult. It's real life on the page, as people change and others change around them.

Look for the exchange between a more mature Thea and a more mature Oliver about the integrity of his business – he sells secondhand and damaged goods – as it sounds like a scene out of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.

He's like Gail Wynand, the newspaper baron who makes his money giving the public what it wants regardless of quality, while she's like Dominique Francon arguing a man of integrity would only sell what he believes in.

It's really hard to say if Whipple had read and was channeling her Randian ideology or if she had come to this little corner of her novel all on her own. Either way, it's a smart and timeless dialectic writ small but powerfully inside a novel, mainly, focused on other issues.

It's moments like these that make a novel "layered," as the main story is only part of what engages the reader. Another "layer" to watch for is when Thea has her own "raging for revenge...come hot from hell" instant, only to realize revenge can sound better than it is.

Written in 1949 and set in the interwar years, Thea is an instantiation of a true strong woman that modern writers of period fiction would never have the courage to create today because they are too busy virtue signaling how perfectly aligned to modern standards their heroine is.

Thea is an independent thinker and actor who is not into "girly" things or focused on boys, but she does have a love affair go awry that hurts her and she rebukes some opportunities for independence. She also loses her temper – and not just at grave injustices – like most of us.

She's a real feminist hero – but of her period – if your version of feminism includes a wide-enough view for imperfections and for women who check only half or so of our modern view's boxes. Thea feels like a real woman from the 1930s, not a soulless modern archetype.

Whipple does all that while writing a heck of a page-turner. And the two ideas — deeper meaning and narrative momentum — aren't separate; it’s her ability to create complex characters facing real-life, perennial challenges that makes her books compelling.

For us today, Because of the Lockwoods is also a form of time travel, immersing us in the culture of England between the wars — and, for a while, making us forget about cell phones, algorithms, and AI fakes.

It delivers everything good fiction promises: an engaging story, characters you care about, a window into another time and place, and a quietly insistent worldview that lingers just beyond the plot — it is thoughtful, layered, page-turning fiction that’s always worth reading.

 

[Tiki Tom]

Why have I never heard of Because of the Lockwoods before? Or Dorothy Whipple? Sounds like it has everything needed to be considered a classic. It is a bit troubling to think about how many gems exist out there that are little heard of and mostly forgotten.

Nice review. Thanks. (I’m 300 pages into Don Quixote right now, and hope to be writing a review in a month or so.)

 

[Fading Fast]

Why have I never heard of Because of the Lockwoods before? Or Dorothy Whipple? Sounds like it has everything needed to be considered a classic. It is a bit troubling to think about how many gems exist out there that are little heard of and mostly forgotten.

Nice review. Thanks. (I’m 300 pages into Don Quixote right now, and hope to be writing a review in a month or so.)

Thank you.

I agree. There are so many impressive books from the past that are all but forgotten today. About 80% of what I read now was published between the 1850s and 1970s.

I read "Don Quixote" in Spanish, in Spanish III, in high school, which sounds impressive until I note, it was a textbook version that was heavily footnoted in English, I couldn't have done it without the class discussions, and there is no way on God's green earth I could do it today. The best part about it now is that I can toss off all the "tilting at windmills" metaphors I want feeling I'm not borrowing from the cultural ether but went to the original source material (or some such nonsense argument like that). Kidding aside, it's one of those stories that has stayed with me all these years. I look forward to reading your review.