Baby,Let's Play House: Elvis Presley and the Women who Loved Him by Alanna Nash ✔✔✔

Another Elvis bio!  He's such an interesting character, and after reading the Guralnick books last year, I found this in the Coles Store on Queen St. E, but didn't buy it till this past spring - I've never seen it anywhere else.

The Guralnick books concentrated more on Elvis'career, although certainly his many girlfriends were mentioned, but this book focuses on his relationships - all of them - and there were thousands! All of them stem from his obsessive relationship with his mother, and even more so after she died, although his losing his older twin at birth certainly had a major impact,too. He was particularly drawn to girls with dark hair - like Gladys - and seemed to be eternally searching for her replacement.  In his final years, which are quite hard to read about, he even reverted to baby talk, fetal positions, and play-acting in which he would be the baby and his girlfriends the mother.

I didn't like Elvis as much in this book for sure, and I didn't like many of the women who basically gave up their lives - they had to! - for him. Ann-Margret appears to have been the love of his life, the marriage with Priscilla was over even before they actually married, although they remained good friends right to the end, and Colonel Parker was an asshole who manipulated and controlled Elvis to feed his own gambling habit.  Even when Elvis was gravely ill towards the end of his life, and the Colonel saw how ill he was, he just barked out orders to the "entourage" to get him better fast because he had a show coming up.

This was another long bio - over 600 pages - but I think I'm done reading about Elvis now!

The Flight of Gemma Hardy by Margot Livesey ✔✔✔✔

Jane Eyre is one of my all-time favorite classic novels,  I re-read it just this past year as a prelude to reading Charlotte and Emily by Jude Morgan, and we also watched the most recent movie version not too long ago.  This particular book, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, has been on my list, and I borrowed it from Ann Gaston.

It's a modern re-telling of the Bronte novel, set in the 1960's, and it follows the original story line very closely, but with enough bends in it to make it more modern.  I didn't find the romance between Gemma and Mr. Sinclair quite as meaningful as in the original, and I felt a bit of a let-down by the ending, but I'd still give it four stars.

Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan ✔✔✔✔

Looping from Nazi-occupied Berlin and Paris to modern-day Baltimore and back, Esi Edugyan's Giller prize-winning Half-Blood Blues is a haunting song of a novel. In Paris 1940, the three remaining Hot-Time Swingers run take after exhausted take, trying to get one right before the S.S. boots stomp their last chance. Our irascible narrator, Sid, learned to play bass lin Baltimore, with his longtime friend and rival Chip on drums, and in Berlin they'd joined up with Hiero, a half-black German “kid” who blows brilliant trumpet with a “massive sound, wild and unexpected, like a thicket of flowers in a bone-dry field.” As Hiero scratches the wax on disc after disc of imagined mistakes, Sid saves the final take--the record that will become legendary. When Hiero's arrested and sent to a Nazi camp, Sid’s the only witness, and things look suspicious. Fifty years later, Chip and Sid return to Berlin for the opening of a film about Hiero. But Sid stands accused of engineering his disappearance, and a strange letter suggests there’s more to the story than anyone knew. With delightfully witty jazz-cat banter, tactile imagery, and descriptions of music sensual enough to stand your hair on end, Edugyan evokes a time, a place, and a band whose refusal to repress their difference could mean death, or become a catalyst for acts of creative genius that will make them immortal. --Mari Malcolm

I'm not sure whether the above really sums up this novel properly.  I found it somewhat difficult to read, because it's dark and there's a sense of impending doom over it throughout, but I also found it difficult to file it under "Did not finish" on my Kindle.  I think this will be this year's recommendation for Book Club.  It's a different take on WWII, it's by a Canadian author we've not yet read, and it really is, as the reviewer says above:"a haunting song of a novel"

Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo ✔✔✔

I read this book over a couple of months, then finally finished it - not because I didn't like it, but I was reading a couple of others at the same time.

This is non-fiction, but the author spent so much time "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" ( a slum are behind the Beautiful Forevers Airport in Mumbai) that it reads like a novel - one of the most effective approaches I've seen to non-fiction investigative reporting that I've read in a long time.

What a life these people lead.  There are no rescues, like those in "Slumdog Millionaire" - it's just everyday garbage picking as a slum industry, living packed in like sardines, with  scary descriptions of brushes with the law, being kicked or beaten at will..... sometimes hard to read, but very well-done.

Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children ✔✔

I hope this makes it to my blog - I hate it when things are changed.
I bought this book in New Liskeard - seduced by the title and cover yet again.  It's a book for young adults - interesting because there are photographs that the author collected from all over the place and used in the book to illustrate the story.
It was a bit fantastic, but imaginative, and, most importnat right now, it was short!
I'll probably donate it to the Library.

The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley

I first read this book over 10 years ago, since it was given to me by the host of a B&B where Mike and I had stayed. She just didn't like it, but had been assured it was a good one, so I gladly brought it home with me, read it, and declared it a real favorite.

I've always been intrigued by the Arthurian legends, since my mother introduced me to the books of Mary Stewart, which were all based on Merlin and his magical powers. Mists of Avalon presented the story from the point of view of the Lady of the Lake, and emphasized the goddess philosophy, the struggle between Christianity and the religion of the goddess, within the story of Arthur, so I just lapped this up. I've since loaned the book to several other people, and all of them enjoyed it too.

Our last theme in Book Club is the Arthurian legend, so I decided to re-read Mists, and I enjoyed it once again, although not as deeply as the first reading. First of all, I've read several VERY long books this year, and I guess I'm just tired of them. The stories in the book are interesting, and Bradley presents a much different view , for example, of Morgaine, Arthur's sister,than the TV series on CBC earlier this year, but the in-between parts were just too tedious, and I found myself skipping sections or skimming, which of course resulted in a headache the next morning - my eyes just don't like skipping.

Anyway, that's all I have to say. about that - I'll save my viewpoints and such for Book Club this Saturday! Just out of interest, and also to put my head in place for the discussion, I'll be talking about the differences between this interpretation of the legend, and that of both Thomas Malory, who wrote La Morte d'Arthur - which I have on my Kindle - and the CBC production of Camelot, which refreshed it all in my mind this past summer. I'll also talk about how Guinevere is such a prig! And compare this legend to those of the Greeks and the Christians.

The O'Briens by Peter Behrens ✔✔✔✔

I was happy to find this book on Kindle for two reasons. First of all, I read Behrens' first book, Law of Dreams, and really enjoyed it. Also, we were preparing to leave Florida to begin the long trip home to KL, and I wanted something to keep me going throughout the trip. It's a family saga - the family consists of Joe, his two brothers and his two sisters, who live with their mother and their abusive stepfather in the forests of Quebec around the turn of the century. The story centers around Joe, the leader of the family, his wife Iseult, and how he becomes a wealthy contractor in Montreal, covering some fifty years.

I can't say I enjoyed this one as much as Law of Dreams, but it still held my interest.