Summer Reading

The summer reading season is coming to an end. Actually, since I read year round there really is no summer "season" for me, but it seems customary to think of summer as a separate reading season .

I thoroughly enjoyed Harper Lee's TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD for at least the third time. What I most enjoyed this time was the Southerness of the novel. There was the mention of Montgomery and Mobile and Meridian, Mississippi. The people seemed like the small town people I grew up with in the 60's. Boo Radley went back into his house and Scout never saw him again. Poor Boo.

Rick Perlstein's NIXONLAND is maybe the best book I've read on the 60's---my generation. It's a stretch to blame all of today's partianship on Nixon, but he's the best target.

Thurston Clarke's THE LAST CAMPAIGN I read in June to remember Bobby Kennedy's last campaign in 1968. RFK is the only politician in my lifetime that I really loved and appreciated. He will always be the great what might have been.

Barbara Leaming's biography of JFK is the best JFK book I've read. I learned a lot about his background that I did not know. I would highly recommend this biography.

Larry McMurtry - Streets of Laredo

And so the Lonesome Dove series comes to an end for me. Streets of Laredo is a good one. This is definitely a conclusion. McMurtry left no room for another volume in the series.

We leave Call an invalid but finding for the first time in his life another human being that he needs---the young girl whom he decides to patronize for her future education. The frontier finally destroys Call physically but awakens him psychologically at the end.

I am saddened to see that Clara is killed by a horse and that the son that Call never acknowleges is also horse-killed. It seems that McMurtry likes to kill off so many of characters in bizarre accidents.

Pea and Lorrie live on. Perhaps the future is only for the young.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

A sublime bildungsroman centering on the keen, sensitive, and curious dreamer Francie Nolan.

The setting is from 1901 to about 1917 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Francie is compassionate, sentimental, a believer of everything, and a storyteller. She has an unbeatable spirit and a stirring imagination.

Francie, along with her family, copes against poverty, prejudice, and her father Johnny, a singing waiter who drinks, barely works, and often doesn't come home at night. His alcoholism, which eventually kills him, results from becoming a father at a young age. He's not ready for a family, loses his job, and, unable to handle it all, resorts to drink... Francie grows up lonely and has few friends, but is a voracious reader who is kept company by the books she consumes... She is also troubled by her mother. Katie feels that Francie's brother Neeley needs more encouragement, support, and show of love, leaving Francie to feel unfairly put off...

Certainly, Francie has something indomitable inside her, like her mother. While Johnny responds to his troubles by giving up and becoming an alcoholic, Katie is a hard worker who keeps the family together and believes that hope and a better future for her children are possible. Indeed, the tree referred to in the book's title is the Tree of Heaven, which commonly grows in New York, often through cement. Just as this tree triumphs over its environment, so does Francie grow up to ultimately triumph over her environment.

Smith depicts this coming of age seamlessly. She goes from Johnny and Katie courting to their marrying, to Francie's birth, her childhood, and finally to her becoming a young adult, all as a cohesive, engaging story. Although lonely and out of place as a child, Francie finds acceptance and becomes more aware of the world and adult things as she gets older... All this, and she and her family remember Johnny fondly long after his death.

Although some look down upon her as a dirty, poor scum, Francie finds beauty in her life. It is an inspiration and a pride. Towards the end, when Katie gives birth to a third child, Annie Laurie, she laments to her brother that their sister will not experience the poor, desolate life they have lived, and therefore will not have the happy, fun memories they acquired from such a life.

This is a marvelous book. A new favorite of mine.

Literary Tattoos

We all love books. We have tons of them. We read and read and read. (And, so says Mike Denison, we think superior intellectual thoughts to boot.) But would you put your love of books on yourself as a tattoo? According to this short blurb, literary tattoos are the new rage:

Tattoos may be associated in the public mind with bikers and football hooligans, but the growing popularity of more literary designs is finding an outlet on the internet.

Have your say: What quotation would you choose for a tattoo?

People whose body art is inspired by their favourite novel, poem or song are posting pictures on their tattoos on number of new blogs and websites devoted to the trend.

Many of the designs are short, memorable quotations, but others - often covering the person's entire back - are composed of entire chunks of books.

Posters to contrariwise.org, a literary tattoo site, show a broad range of influences, from William Shakespeare to Dr Seuss.

But a handful of authors, notably Sylvia Plath and Kurt Vonnegut, seem to hold a particular appeal.

Here is the link to the blurb, with numerous pictures of people's literary tattoos: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/07/15/batattoos116.xml