Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby. ✔✔

Nick Hornby is an English writer, most recognizable to me as the author of About A Boy, which later became a great movie with Hugh Grant. I think he also won the Booker a couple of years ago. This particular novel is about a musician - Juliet, Naked is the name of a CD he released - who fled the business and became a recluse in America. For that reason a kind of cult has grown up about him and Duncan, a real anti-hero, is the online leader of a forum about sightings of Taylor Crowe, the absent musician. Duncan's girlfriend, Annie, is a little more realistic about Crowe's abilities and actually ends up starting an e-mail relationship with Taylor.

This was a mildly interesting book, with a few amusing comments and observations. I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone over 40!

WE WERE THE MULVANEYS by Joyce Carol Oates.✔✔✔✔✔

I can't believe I read this novel in less than four days, but I just couldn't put it down. Like Mistry's "A Fine Balance" and David Adams Richards' "Mercy Among the Children" - both of which I loved - this story is a sad one, although there is redemption and closure at the end. The Mulvaneys are a happy, prosperous family of six in upstate New York, living in a beautiful three-storey home, busy with farm animals, cheerleading, playing football, visiting with friends, collecting antiques, until an incident involving Marianne, aged 17, changes the family forever. The story is told by Judd, the youngest, who was only 13 at the time of this incident, and who, at the age of 30, is now a journalist seeking to make sense of his family's history.

The novel, then, is about families - how they change their landscape over time, how siblings interact, how they keep secrets from each other, how one incident can affect everyone else.

Quotes from the novel:

Page 230
"He, Patrick Mulvaney, was this young woman's brother: they'd been brother-sister through all of their conscious lives: each was more closely related to the other genetically than either was to either of their parents. Yet he believed he scarcely knew Marianne at all. He loved her, but scarcely knew her. Members of a family who've lived together in the heated intensity of family life scarcely know one another. Life is too head-on, too close-up. That was the paradox. That was the bent, perplexing thing. Exactly the opposite of what you'd expect. For of course you never give such relationships a thought, living them. To give a thought - to take thought - is a function of dissociation, distance. You can't exercise memory until you've removed yourself from memory's source".

"Our lives are defined by the whims, caprices, cruelties of others. That genetic web, the ties of blood. It was the oldest curse, older than God. - Am I loved? Am I wanted? Who will want me, if my parents don't?"


Corinne Mulvaney( page 426) " I'm sorry not to have been a better mother but - I don't know what happened exactly - it was just something that happened, wasn't it?- no one ever decided - I never decided -..."

This is a novel I won't easily forget, and it goes on my list of all-time favorites.

Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls.✔✔✔

This second book by Jeannette Walls - the first was the brutally vivid story of a dysfunctional family, The Glass Castle - tells the story of Lily Casey Smith, Jeannette's grandmother and mother of Rosemary, the leftover hippie mother of Jeannette. Lily was raised on a very rudimentary ranch in Arizona, learned to break horses at the age of six, left home at age 15 to travel 500 miles on a horse to become a schoolteacher in a small frontier town,learned to drive a car and fly a plane, and even sold bootleg whiskey for a time to support her family. With her husband Jim, she ran a huge ranch in Arizona, then later moved to Phoenix for a short time - her description of city-living and coping for a woman who was used to wide open spaces, freedom and silence was quite revealing. She was ahead of her times in many ways - hated prejudice of all kinds, and voiced her opinions clearly and freely.
Jeannette's grandmother died when Jeannette was 8 years old, and Jeannette had wanted to write about her mother, but Rosemary convinced her that Lily's story was far more interesting. She wrote the book in the form of an oral history, and calls it a "true-life novel". Fascinating - what a strong woman!

The Piano Teacher by Janice Y.K. Lee✔✔✓

I bought this book at Borders in the US, read about a third of it, then set it aside because of three big books I received from the library there, and I didn't get back to it till now, so I started again from the beginning. I copied this summary from Book Browse:

In 1942, Will Truesdale, an Englishman newly arrived in Hong Kong, falls headlong into a passionate relationship with Trudy Liang, a beautiful Eurasian socialite. But their love affair is soon threatened by the invasion of the Japanese as World War II overwhelms their part of the world. Will is sent to an internment camp, where he and other foreigners struggle daily for survival. Meanwhile, Trudy remains outside, forced to form dangerous alliances with the Japanese—in particular, the malevolent head of the gendarmerie, whose desperate attempts to locate a priceless collection of Chinese art lead to a chain of terrible betrayals.( end quote)

I enjoyed this book, even though one reviewer in Book Browse didn't like the writing, or the fact that it didn't go anywhere. I read it in two days - it's easy enough to read, and she tells a good story. I'm always intrigued by people who suffer so much hardship, as did the people in the internment camp, and Trudy, to me at least, is the real hero of the book, as she stays outside the camps but still suffers immensely. I wish she hadn't just disappeared near the end- she deserved better closure by the author.

All in all, though, a very good read.