Tuesday Intro: The Ship of Brides

Prologue 

The first time I saw her again, I felt as if I'd been hit. 

I have heard that said a thousand times, but I had never until then understood its true meaning: there was a delay, in  which my memory took time to connect with what my eyes were seeing, and then a physical shock that went straight through me, as if I had taken some great blow. I am not a fanciful person. I don't dress up my words. But I can truthfully say it left me winded. 

I hadn't expected ever to see her again. Not in a place like that. I had long since buried her in some mental bottom drawer. Not just her physically, but everything she had meant to me. Everything she had forced me to go through. Because I hadn't understood what she had done until time - eons - had passed. That, in myriad ways, she had been both the best and the worst thing that had ever happened to me.

The Ship of Brides
by Jojo Moyes

Originally published in 2005 and about to be released in paperback for the first time in the US this fall, I started reading The Ship of Brides  over the weekend. I was captivated from the beginning and hope to carve out enough time to finish over the upcoming holiday weekend. I think this might be another winner from Jojo Moyes. The goodreads summary sounds promising, too:

The year is 1946, and all over the world, young women are crossing the seas in the thousands en route to the men they married in wartime - and an unknown future. In Sydney, Australia, four women join 650 other brides on an extraordinary voyage to England, aboard the HMS Victoria, which also carries not just arms and aircraft but 1,000 naval officers and men. Rules of honour, duty, and separation are strictly enforced, from the aircraft carrier's captain down to the lowliest young stoker. But the men and the brides will find their lives intertwined in ways the Navy could never have imagined.

What do you think? Would you keep reading?

Every Tuesday, Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea posts the opening paragraph (sometime two) of a book she decided to read based on the opening. Feel free to grab the banner and play along.

Today's Post is Brought to You By the Letter...

It all started with Simon. He began assigning letters to bloggers who agreed to list their favorite books, authors, movies, songs, and objects beginning with said letter. Anyone playing along can then "give" letters (using random.org) to others wanting to play along.  Frances got her letter from Simon, then selected one for Bellezza, who assigned a letter to Audrey... the source of my M.

Favorite book:

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. I actually left a New Year's Eve party early to go home and finish this book. No joke, that happened in 2004.

Favorite  author:

This one is easy - Jojo Moyes. Since December I've read Me Before You, The Girl You Left Behind, and Honeymoon in Paris. Over the weekend I started The Ship of Brides. She sure can tell a story!

Favorite song:

I had to think about this a little longer but decided on Paul McCartney's Maybe I'm Amazed. Yes, I'm that old!

Favorite movie:

I'll go with Midnight in Paris - romance, Paris, time travel, 1920's, Hemingway, Fitzgerald. Who could ask for more?

Favorite object:

Miniature poodles, black. As much as I love greyhounds, my youth was spent with these smart little dogs and they still hold a special place in my heart. Don't tell Zelda...

Would you like to play?
Let me know and I'll assign you a letter.

Weekly Update: June 29

Another week has flown by, but it's been a good one! My #100happydays project on instagram really helps me focus on the positive each day. From my nephew's high school graduation to appreciating the beauty surrounding me, I uploaded seven photos this week. These two were the most popular:

Are you participating in this project? If I don't already follow you on instagram, please let me know.

Reading//   I finished The All of It  by Jeannette Haien, a quiet novel from 1986 recently reissued with a new forward by Ann Patchett. Since it was on my kindle, I didn't get to enjoy the gorgeous cover to its fullest. My review will be coming soon.

Then, after nearly a year of avoidance, I rediscovered NetGalley. Yesterday I started The Ship of Brides  by Jojo Moyes. It was written nearly a decade ago but in light of her recent popularity, Penguin will issue a paperback edition in the US this fall.

Listening//  It took a couple of weeks, but I finally finished Five Days at Memorial  by Sheri Fink. Both riveting and horrifying, it focuses on the events and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina at one New Orleans hospital. No wonder it won a Pulitzer Prize.

I started The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd yesterday on the way to my nephew's graduation.  The novel is perfectly suited for dual narrators and after less than an hour, I already love the audio production.

On the blog//

- a Tuesday Intro featuring The All of It by Jeannette Haien

- my review of Still Life with Bread Crumbs by Anna Quindlen

- my review of  Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

Looking forward//  A long holiday weekend is on the horizon and my small town really knows how to celebrate. July 4th festivities last for days: parade, fireworks, sidewalk sales, craft fair, farmers market, concerts, family movies in the park, a short 5K plus a longer run around the lake, and more.

We'll also host our annual 4th of July bash and attend a couple more graduation parties. I'm even more excited because Daughter #1 will be coming home on Wednesday... she hasn't been all the way upstate since Christmas!

Today//  The forecast calls for another beautiful summer day. I need to quickly clean the house and plan menus for the week, but then I plan to relax and enjoy it!

How was your week?

This post will link to It's Monday, What Are You Reading? hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

Dept. of Speculation
by Jenny Offill
Knopf, 2014
192 pages
source: borrowed from the library

Summary (from goodreads):
Dept. of Speculation is a portrait of a marriage. It is also a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all.

Jenny Offill’s heroine, referred to in these pages as simply “the wife,” once exchanged love letters with her husband postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes—a colicky baby, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions—the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art.

With cool precision, in language that shimmers with rage and wit and fierce longing, Jenny Offill has crafted an exquisitely suspenseful love story that has the velocity of a train hurtling through the night at top speed. Exceptionally lean and compact, Dept. of Speculation is a novel to be devoured in a single sitting, though its bracing emotional insights and piercing meditations on despair and love will linger long after the last page.


My thoughts:
I'm pretty conventional in my reading choices and tend to shy away from anything even vaguely experimental. Still, I know it's good to get out of my comfort zone every once in a while and Dept. of Speculation certainly flirted with its edges.

The story is actually a series of short, seemingly disjointed paragraphs that, when taken as a whole, tell the story of a relationship. No names are used, the characters are simply the man, the wife, the child, etc. The novel is clever and innovative - even the abbreviation in the title hints at its style.

The beginning, especially, seemed odd and choppy, but as I grew accustomed to the style it became more enjoyable. This is a very short novel that can be read in a single sitting, but I liked returning to it a few times over a couple of days. I also (surprisingly) found myself thinking about it in between times.

While I may not have appreciated this novel as much as other readers, I marveled at its beauty, simplicity and creativity. I do recommend Dept. of Speculation... at least borrow it from the library and see what you think.

My rating:

Still Life with Bread Crumbs by Anna Quindlen

Still Life with Bread Crumbs
by Anna Quindlen
Random House, 2014
272 pages
source: borrowed from the library

Publisher's Summary:
Still Life with Bread Crumbs begins with an imagined gunshot and ends with a new tin roof. Between the two is a wry and knowing portrait of Rebecca Winter, a photographer whose work made her an unlikely heroine for many women. Her career is now descendent, her bank balance shaky, and she has fled the city for the middle of nowhere. There she discovers, in a tree stand with a roofer named Jim Bates, that what she sees through a camera lens is not all there is to life.

Brilliantly written, powerfully observed, Still Life with Bread Crumbs is a deeply moving and often very funny story of unexpected love, and a stunningly crafted journey into the life of a woman, her heart, her mind, her days, as she discovers that life is a story with many levels, a story that is longer and more exciting than she ever imagined.

Quick thoughts:
Anna Quindlen and I go way back. From her early columns and essays, to those first few novels, and most recently her nonfiction title Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, she now seems like an old friend... and any new novel she writes becomes irresistible.

Still Life with Bread Crumbs got off to a slow start for me, but it was refreshing to see an older heroine (Rebecca is 60). I also loved the upstate New York setting. Like many readers, I'm drawn to novels set close to home and Quindlen nails life in this small town.

Rebecca's story is "deeply moving and often very funny" as promised, but the writing is the true star of this novel. These quotes will linger in my mind long after memories of the story have faded.

Favorite Quotes:

There are two kinds of men: men who want a wife who is predictable, and men who want a wife who is exotic. For some reason, Peter had thought she was the latter. But even if that had been the case, the problem inherent remains the same -- once she becomes a wife, the exotic becomes familiar, and thus predictable, and thus not what was wanted at all. Those few women who stayed exotic usually were considered, after a few years, to be crazy.  page 104 

... she realized she'd been becoming different people for as long as she could remember but had never really noticed, or had put it down to moods, or marriage, or motherhood. The problem was that she'd thought that at a certain point she would be a finished product. Now she wasn't sure what that might be, especially when she considered how sure she had been about it at various times in the past, and how wrong she'd been.  page 223 

Her marriage had been like a new silk dress, so beautiful and undulating, except that after a while the edges of the sleeves gray, there is a spot of wine, the hem drags. If her love affair with Peter had stopped after six months it would have been a gorgeous memorable thing. But in love no one ever leaves well enough alone, and so it settles into a strange unsatisfactory kind of friendship or sours into mutual recriminations and regret, the dress pushed to the back of the closet, limp and so unnew, embalmed in plastic because of what it once was.  page 124

My rating:

Bottom line:
Still Life with Bread Crumbs is a good story with great writing, but I definitely prefer Quindlen's nonfiction.

Tuesday Intro: The All of It

Thomas Dunn, the head ghillie at the Castle, wasn't telling Father Declan anything he didn't already know: the river was too high and wild from all the rains, and the salmon, therefore, not moving, just lying on the bottom, not showing themselves at all, and the midges terrible, and only two days left to the season so of course all but the least desirable of the river-beats, number Four, was let already; "and Frank and Peter'll be ghillieing for the Americans stayin' at the castle Father, so I'll have to give you Seamus O'Connor and he's hardly worth the pay and that on top of the twenty pounds for the beat and you know yourself, Father, how beat Four is after a rainfall such as we've been having, the piers awash and banks slippery as grease. If you'd given me a bit more notice, if I'd but known you had it in your mind to come for the day, I'd have---" 

The long-distance connection was weak; that, and Thomas' nattering on and on, discouraging, all but took the last of Father Declan's heart. Still, he'd do it. "I know all you're telling me, Thomas," he bawled into the mouthpiece of the parish-house phone, "I know. But I'll take beat Four and Seamus O'Connor with it, though I don't need him."

The All of It
by Jeanette Haien

Although the opening paragraph doesn't do much for me, I'm confident things will improve. I learned about this book in one of Ann Patchett's essays and the book description (from amazon) certainly sounds promising:

Jeannette Haien’s award-winning first novel relates the seemingly simple tale of a parishioner confiding in her priest, but the tangled confession brings secrets to light that provoke a moral quandary for not only the clergyman, but the reader as well. Set in a small town in Ireland, Haien’s intimate novel of conversations and dilemmas—perfect for readers of Paul Harding’s Tinkers, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, and Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood—is “an elegantly written, compact and often subtle tale of morality and passion that gives voice to an age-old concern in a fresh way” (NewYork Times Book Review). Harper Perennial breathes new life into this 1986 classic in a new edition with an introduction by Ann Patchett.

There is a one-paragraph author's note at the beginning explaining "In Ireland, stretches of a salmon river which run through privately owned lands are divided by the owner into sections, called "beats". Beats are rented by the owner by the day , to an angler. The angler is called a "rod". A "ghillie" (or "gillie") is a servant who attends the rod."

I certainly appreciated that information.

What do you think? Would you keep reading?

Every Tuesday, Diane at Bibliophile by the Sea posts the opening paragraph (sometime two) of a book she decided to read based on the opening. Feel free to grab the banner and play along.

Weekly Update: The First Weekend of Summer

The scene//  It's just after noon - a little later than usual for my Sunday post, but it's an absolutely gorgeous summer morning and my husband and I just got back from a 4 mile walk.  It's so nice to have him join me, but that does mean no audiobook time ;-) Before the walk, we enjoyed coffee and the newspapers.

Reading//   What a week! I can't tell you the last time I finished three books in a single week. They were all fairly short, but still a banner week for me.

Still Life with Bread Crumbs by Anna Quindlen was good, but I definitely prefer her nonfiction.

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill was also good, but the style was a little too choppy for my taste.

The Vacationers by Emma Straub was my pick of the week. I read it in two days and loved it!

This week I need to spend a day working on reviews. There were already several that needed attention, but now I'm feeling a little desperate.

Listening//   I'm still enthralled with Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink. Just over six hours to go, so I will definitely finish this week. Let me tell you, this is one disturbing book!

On the blog//
- a Tuesday Intro post featuring Dept. of Speculation
- my summer reading list
- my thoughts on The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress by Ariel Lawhon

Up next//  I'll start a new book this afternoon, but am not quite sure what it will be. I want to choose a title from my summer reading list, but my mother is encouraging me to read Joshilyn Jackson's latest, Someone Else's Love Story. We'll see...

Other stuff//  Have you seen all the photos tagged #100happy days on instagram?  (read about it here) I decided to take the challenge. The photo you see at the top of this post was taken this morning and is my day 7 entry. I really like focusing on something happy each day... and it's much easier in the summer!

What are you up to today?

This post will link to It's Monday, What are you Reading? hosted by Sheila at Book Journey.