Author Archives: Delia

Since I started blogging I have tried to post as regularly as I could and while I have read quite a fair number of books last year, the last time I did a summary was for my Best Books of 2011 post. And so I had a nice surprise to see my name nominated for the 7X7 Link Award, by writer Andrew Blackman (whose book, On the Holloway Road, is on my TBR list) and thought it was about time I got a shovel and started digging through the archives to get some answers for this fun meme.
Before I start, here are the rules:

1: Tell everyone something about yourself that nobody knows.

3: Pass this on to 7 fellow bloggers.

After some research, picture selecting and some deliberating, here are my answers:

1. I love to bake, and while this isn’t exactly a big secret, the part I actually enjoy the most is the decorating. I have a special fondness for whole wheat muffins and cookies, which not even the very high temperature can dampen. After all, I’m living in a country with a perpetual summer and baking is not easy but oh, so rewarding!
Cute, isn’t it? Here’s another one: the first time I saw a live, full grown monitor lizard I was looking out the window and the first thought that crossed my mind was: Oh my God, what’s that crocodile doing in the yard? Then I ran for the camera but by the time I got back, the lizard had disappeared. A while later the penny dropped and I realized crocodiles don’t have a snakelike tongue, but in my excitement that detail was completely forgotten.

2. The Most Beautiful Piece. There’s a mango tree in my front yard and every year it bears fruit but last year most of them just fell while still small and green. Weeks of waiting for that perfect sweet fruit left me with nothing. And then, this year, an amazing thing happened: in February, the tree was so full of fruit that I had to give some to the neighbors because once they fall, the soft skin breaks apart and the ants eat them or they start rotting. And not only I had enough mangoes to eat for a month or more, but they also had a pinkish tinge, something I haven’t seen before. This story is about that tree.

3. Most Helpful Piece. That might be Best Books of 2011 but I think it was mostly helpful for me, as I discovered interesting new blogs to read.

4. Most Popular Piece. If I were to judge by the comments, I would say the one at no. 3 but people seem to stop by and read Haunts – Reliquaries of the Dead quite often.

5. Most Controversial Piece. Nothing in this department, I’m afraid.

6. Most Surprisingly Successful Piece. For some reason people seemed to like One Day, by David Nicholls but it’s definitely not on my top 10. The movie didn’t do much to change my opinion, either.

7. Most Underrated Piece. That must be the whole Wandering Thoughts section which consists of verse.

8. Most Pride-Worthy Piece. That’s an easy one. Farundell, by L.R. Fredericks – I liked the book so much I wanted to know more about it so I contacted the author for a written interview. I was so happy when she agreed to answer my questions that I walked around the whole day with a big silly grin on my face. It was one of the best experiences that came from starting this blog.

The bloggers I am passing this on to are:

1. Carl@stainlesssteeldroppings A site that is updated quite often and includes movie & book reviews and also The Once Upon a Time Challenge which consists of reviewing books and movies based on the classic fairy tales.

2. Jenners@Life…With Books She has a great sense of humour and writes posts about her experiences and the books she reads. Her funny posts always cheer me up.

3. Hannah@Wayfaring Chocolate Here’s a girl who loves baking and posts some mouthwatering recipes on her blog. She takes great pictures, too.

4. Charlie Louie@Hotly Spiced A great blog about food (with recipes, yum!) and life in general.

5. M—–L@Outgoing Signals I like this blog not only for the posts, which cover book reviews, music and other random stuff, but also for the comments. That is also the place where I first found out about Babo, the cutest ugliest doll I’ve seen so far.

6. Jov@JoV’s Book Pyramid A book blog with quite a mix of classic and contemporary authors.

7. Olduvai@Olduvai Reads A new blog I’ve just discovered. Olduvai and I bonded over our love for mangosteens and I look forward to reading more of her posts which combine book reviews and snippets of her life.

Hi. I’ve been absent from my writing desk for a while, and if you come here every now and then, you’ll see it’s been almost a month. A month! While I haven’t stopped reading, more often than not just finishing a book and starting on another, it has been somewhat of a challenge to find the time to actually sit down and put the ideas (and the scraps of paper on which I wrote down some thoughts and impressions from the books) together into a coherent review. Well, today I managed to write a brand new review of a book I liked very, very much. Here it is:

Neil Gaiman is a name that’s been popping up on my reading radar more and more often these days, and even though I wasn’t very taken with his novel American Gods, I absolutely love his short stories. This collection is a compilation of 31 stories based on famous fairy tales and kids’ stories. And what makes this collection even more appealing is that the author tells the reader how he got the idea for each story – a statue he saw which became “The Sweeper of Dreams”, something he listened to on the radio right before he dozed off one day and the first thing he heard when he woke up – that was the starting point for “We Can Get Them for You Wholesale”, or a story he was commissioned to write for a magazine. These are some of my favorite stories from the book:

The first one that comes forward (yet again – I’ve come across it in another short story collection, By Blood We Live – Edited by John Joseph Adams) is Snow, Glass, Apples, in which the classic story of Snow White gets reworked into a vampire tale. All the known elements are there: the king and his little daughter, the stepmother and her magic mirror, the dwarves, the poisoned apple, even the prince that brings the princess back to life. How Gaiman succeeds in bringing these elements together to create a story that is very different from the sweet happily-ever-after original, is worthy of praise. It was a pleasure to read, again.

The Price – is about a stray cat who is adopted by a family who lives in the countryside. Unlike all the other cats that have found shelter at the house, Black Cat is different – as days go by, his appearance changes: he has missing patches of fur, gashes on his face, a mutilated ear and the list goes on. With every day, and in spite of repeated visits to the vet for treatment, he seems to be getting worse. Intrigued by his wounds and thinking he can protect the animal, the owner decides to stay awake one night and see what kind of enemy Black Cat is fighting. What he sees is nothing like he ever imagined. Or I, for that matter.

Troll Bridge – In this new take on the famous Norwegian fairy tale “Three Billy Goats Gruff”, Gaiman replaces the goats with a 7 year old boy who wanders far from home on a beautiful summer day. His travels bring him to a bridge surrounded by “fields and wheat and trees”, the hiding place for a huge troll. I’m going to eat your life, Jack, says the troll and he means it. I have wondered why the author used “eat your life” instead of “eat you up”. There’s something tricky here, I thought, and it was. A very good story set in modern day London, with an unexpected ending.

We Can Get Them for You Wholesale – How far would you go to punish someone? Peter Pinter goes quite far, when he finds out his fiancée is cheating on him. Finding a solution to the problem seems to be an easy task – all he needs is someone who will take his rival out of the picture. Forever. But then, how to resist when the dirty deed can be done for a discount? All he needs to do is find somebody else he would like to get rid of. It’s not long before he makes quite a list, and while this is a creepy story, I also found it amusing when I think how often we are tempted by that word. Discount.

Two very short excellent stories (and by “excellent” I mean WOW) are:

The Sweeper of Dreams – in which the author paints a picture of an actual sweeper who comes and does his job after we have left the land of dreams, leaving the world we inhabit at night clean and ready for a new dream. Practical advice is given on how to treat the sweeper and what happens if you upset him and he never comes back. The consequences are terrible. You do not want to mess with this guy.

and

Nicholas Was… – not as happy as you’d think. In just a few words, the legend of Saint Nicholas who brings gifts to children gets a good shake. I did not envy him.

Being a fan of classical vampire stories/verses, I just have to mention Vampire Sestina, a poem, which is actually a lament and also a story in verse. The beginning is beautiful; the ending, perfection. I’ll leave you with something in between:

“I said I would not hurt you. Am I stone
To leave you prey to time and to the world?
I offered you a truth beyond your dreams
While all you had to offer was your love.”

What do you think of the stories mentioned here? Have you read Smoke and Mirrors or anything else by Neil Gaiman?

*Read in February 2012

I’ve come across The Yellow Wallpaper in a collection of short stories, The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, and it left such a vivid impression in my memory that when I saw this book (a whole book!) by the same author I just had to read it.

This book is a collection of 20 stories and various fragments from the author’s biography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935). It starts with The Yellow Wallpaper, a story of a woman who finds herself slipping into madness after being confined to her bed to rest following the birth of her child. Day after day and night after night, with nothing to do but rest, which according to her physician husband was the best cure for her illness, she feels increasingly frustrated by monotony and boredom. And having an active and imaginative mind, she focuses her attention on the room’s deteriorated wallpaper. With each passing day she is convinced that someone is watching her, someone hiding in the intricate pattern of the old and torn wallpaper.

On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind.
The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing.
***
It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you. It is like a bad dream.
***
There is one marked peculiarity about this paper, a thing nobody seems to notice but myself and that it changes as the light changes.
When the sun shoots through the east window – I always watch for that first long, straight ray – it changes so quickly that I never can quite believe it. That is why I watch it always.
***
I really have discovered something at last. Through watching so much at night, when it changes so, I have finally found out. The front pattern does move – and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!

Written in 1890, at a time when a woman suffering from depression was treated with bed rest and as little intellectual stimulus as possible, this story comes as a revelation of what really goes on in the patient’s mind. Based on the author’s personal experience, it gives a detailed account of how she felt after her daughter’s birth, the severe depression she was battling and how the doctor’s recommendation utterly failed to improve her mental health.
The ending fitted very well with the gloomy, constricted, depressing atmosphere of the story – I’ve read the story twice and liked it just as much the second time. The writing is beautiful, not overly florid like you’d find in a classic story but not quite modern either – it strikes a beautiful balance and the most important thing of all, it creates a bridge between the writer and the reader that makes it easy to relate to the ideas that can be drawn from the story.

I enjoyed most of the other stories in the book, stories of women trying to find their place in society while at the same time living a fulfilling life that involved traveling, socializing and pursuing artistic occupations, things that would take them away from the traditional role of wife and mother they were expected to conform to.

In The Unexpected (1890), a young man becomes so smitten with “beautiful Mary” that he will do anything to marry her. And in the end, when he does get his heart’s desire, discovers she is not the “prudish New England girl” he thought she was, but a woman with artistic aspirations as great as his own.

An Unnatural Mother (1895) tells the story of a woman who is forced to make a terrible choice which leads to her death. Her decision is discussed and disapproved of by a group of women who knew her and criticize her upbringing, her marriage and finally the decision that took her life. Unable to see the big picture and the sacrifice she had to make, the women consider her a bad example and the attempt of the unmarried daughter of one of them who tries to bring about a different perspective is promptly dismissed.

Three Thanksgivings is the story of a woman who makes some drastic changes in order to be able to keep the house she’s always lived in. With two grown children who want her to come and live with them, and a creditor who offers to marry her in order to help pay for the house, this is the story of a woman determined to hold on to her independence even if that means she will have to resort to a daring plan. My hat goes off to you, Mrs. Morrison.

Turned – Mrs Marroner thought she was leading a charmed life – she had a loving husband, a beautiful home and a nice girl, Gerta, to help with the housework. And when two letters from the traveling Mr Marroner arrive at the house, the sweet illusion of a happy marriage comes apart in a flash.

An Extinct Angel compares women with angels, from the clothes they have to wear:

The amount of physical labor of a severe and degrading sort required of one of these bright spirits, was amazing. Certain kinds of work – always and essentially dirty – were relegated wholly to her. Yet one of her first and most rigid duties was the keeping of her angelic robes spotlessly clean.

to their duties towards the humans:

…but the fact was that the angels waited on the human creatures in every form of menial service, doing things as their natural duty which the human creature loathed and scorned.

and finally giving a reason to their extinction as a race:

But little by little, owing to the unthought-of consequences of repeated intermarriage between the angel and the human being, the angel longed for, found and ate the fruit of the forbidden tree of knowledge.

Mrs Merrill’s Duties asks an important question: can a woman be a good wife, a caring mother and a good friend, while at the same time trying to follow her own dreams? You will have to read the story to find out.

When I Was a Witch is an interesting story of one woman’s wishes come true. One day she discovers she has the power to change things by wishing, but this comes to an end when one of her wishes is different from the pattern the others were following. An interesting perspective on the nature of wishes, and a little unsettling.

These are just a few of the stories I liked from this collection; there is but one or two which I didn’t like as much as the others but I would have been surprised if I ended up liking them all.

*

The last part of the book, called “SELECTIONS FROM THE AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY” offers details about Charlotte’s life, with selected passages from various chapters describing her childhood, marriage, her depression, her work as a feminist, writing and traveling to give lectures at various gatherings. An ardent supporter of women’s rights, she wrote short stories, plays, essays and novels, trying to encourage women to see beyond their domestic roles as wives and mothers. This part of the book helped me to understand the stories better. To read a story is fine. To see where that story came from, the personal experience that was the germinating seed, growing into something impressive, that was much more satisfying for me as a reader and it added a depth to the stories itself, that certain something that would surely have been missed otherwise.

*

She was the niece of Harriett Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a fact mentioned in her autobiography where she described the house her aunt lived in and where, as a child, Charlotte had visited: “From her dainty flower pictures I got my first desire to paint,….”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a woman with unconventional ideas. Growing up in a broken family, with a childhood scarred by her parents’ separation followed by infrequent visits from her father, trying to obey an authoritative mother, she was a spirited child who once broke the silence in a classroom by saying a word out loud – asked by her teacher why she did that, she replied: “I wanted to see what would happen”. She had the courage to forge her own path, through depression, financial difficulties and criticism of her work.

These are just a few of the passages I liked.

After the break-up of her marriage:

Thirty years old. Made a wrong marriage – lots of people do. Am heavily damaged, but not dead. May live a long time. It is intellectually conceivable that I may recover strength enough to do some part of my work. I will assume this to be true and act on it. And I did.

On writing:

The writing similarly is easy and swift expression, running at the rate of about a thousand words an hour for three hours – then it stops, no use trying to squeeze out any more. Any attempt at forced work stops everything for days.

On depression:

A sympathetic lady once remarked, ‘Yes, it is a sad thing to see a strong mind in a weak body.’ Whereat I promptly picked her up and carried her around the room. ‘Please understand’, said I, that what ails me is a weak mind in a strong body.’ But she didn’t understand, they never do. Only those near enough to watch the long, blank months of idleness, the endless hours of driveling solitaire, the black empty days and staring nights, know.

On life and death:

I had not the least objection to dying. But I did not propose to die of this, so I promptly bought sufficient chloroform as a substitute. Human life consists in mutual service. No grief, misfortune or “broken heart” is excuse for cutting off one’s life while any power of service remains. But when all usefulness is over, when one is assured of unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.

I am most unconcernedly willing to die when I get ready. I have no faintest belief in personal immortality – no interest in nor desire for it.

The one predominant duty is to find one’s work and do it, and I have striven mightily at that.

*Read in February 2012

It’s been a while since I wrote a review, so that one day when I looked at my desk and saw five books (five, when did that happen?!) waiting there in a neat little pile I decided it was about time I said something about them before I forget. So there it is, I’m starting with the last book I finished.

One Day – David Nicholls

In my defense I have to say I didn’t choose this book. Some colleagues at work recommended it as an easy read (that, and also the fact that the term “chick-lit” was mentioned did ring a warning bell in my head which I chose to ignore) and one of them offered to lend it to me so I didn’t say no. I got bored about halfway but then having made it so far I decided to keep going in the hope that it will get better. It did, somewhere towards the end – there was a scene that made me feel something else other than annoyance and for that reason I’ll give it a 3 star rating instead of 2 (out of 5).

The book is about Emma and Dexter who spend a night together in their twenties, just after graduating from college. They remain friends for nearly twenty years, sharing events from their lives – fame, relationships, marriage, children, alcohol abuse and a thousand little details that make up a friendship. It is obvious that they are attracted to each other but the timing always seems to be off or they are unwilling to just come right out and say what they really feel. Their conversations have an edgy feel to them, being somewhere between amusing and annoying – sometimes it’s like watching a tennis match and trying to decide if they are playing a friendly game or they just want to win one no matter what.

The story flows along without major hiccups, there are even some references to books – Wuthering Heights is one but is not spoken about in flattering terms, Howards End is another – currently on my TBR pile but after reading A Room with a View I find myself reluctant to pick it up; a paragraph from Dickens’ Great Expectations makes and appearance right before Part One and there’s also one from Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

The reason why I stuck with the book to the end was that I wanted to see what happens – will they remain just friends or will they give love a chance? The end was unpredictable and I felt somehow rewarded for making it through to the last page.
The movie version was playing in the cinemas here not long ago but somehow I missed it. A friend said it was better than the book. Who knows, maybe I’ll watch it one day.

*Read in February 2012

I’m starting to like short stories more and more. They are very refreshing, especially after a big book. However, I have never read a collection like this one. The stories are so short that I found myself wondering how the writers managed to express an idea in so very few words. And because the stories are so short, some of them only half a page or even less, the connection with the reader is made quickly, with detailed paragraphs which drew me in from the very first words.

In Heartland, by Daphne Beal, there’s a striking paragraph with an amazing contrast:

“In New Orleans, the air has body it’s so thick. It’s only March, but as we ride from the airport past houses that look like someone’s taken a baseball bat to them, trees burst with white and pink blossoms, unabashed, and strange beauty is everywhere.”

Little Brother, by Bruce Holland Rogers, is a story about a boy getting a little brother as a Christmas present. But as innocent as that may sound, it really wasn’t, and as the story progressed I had the feeling that something was wrong. Not until the last sentence did I get to find out what it was and I have to admit, that was unexpected and unsettling. This was my favorite story.

Currents, by Hannah Bottomy Voskuil, is an unusual story in the way it’s told – like playing a video of a wave in reverse – I read it once and then again, backwards. I wonder if the author wrote it using the normal sequence of events and then just rewrote it starting with the end.

Accident, by Dave Eggers, is, most of all, an emotional encounter. The collision of two cars makes the driver of one of them aware of something missing in his life: a connection with people.

Bullhead, by Leigh Allison Wilson, is about a woman remembering a long lost love. She not only remembers it but clings to the memory with the desperation of one who lives in a fantasy world. I loved the last paragraph:

“Every story is true and a lie. The true part of this one is: Love and the memory of love can’t be drowned. The lie part is that this is a good thing.”

After He Left, by Matt Hlinak, one of the shortest stories in the book, is about half a page long. The strangest thing about it is that on my way home I saw a dead sparrow – just like the girl in the story – and when I did, my thoughts flew back to the words on that half page and I saw it too, the world moving fast, impatient and oblivious to life and its endings.

Forgotten, by Anne Mazer, captures the essence of childhood play so beautifully:

“All day they followed paths, forded streams, and climbed trees. They discovered countries, crossed oceans and desserts, explored jungles teeming with life. They were animal and human, villain and hero, rich and poor, fearless and timid. They were born and died hundreds of times. New races of people spilled from their fingers. They tunneled under mountains, built and destroyed worlds, flew to the moon and sun, and reached the beginnings and ends of time.”

There are many more wonderful stories in the book but I’m not going to run through all. Some of them, like the ones mentioned above, struck a chord with me; others I enjoyed for their flow, or characters or the rhythm of the words.
Every story in the book centers on childhood or adolescence: fragments of life seen through a youngster’s eyes, a first love, the lure of the virtual world, teen pregnancy, the loss of a parent, a birthday celebration. Stories tied with emotion, loss, love and regret, stories about a time we all went through. Stories that made me remember my own childhood, summer days spent lying under a tree on a blanket with a book in my hands, golden plums I ate half-peeled pretending they were ice-cream, the smell of grass and of a big black dog with a spatter of white on its chest who found its untimely death under the wheels of a car.
A very good book that I will certainly read again. I already went back to reread some of the stories and they were just as good as the first time.

*Read in January 2012