The long, long, long adventures of Camilla

It's been a while! Before we left on vacation, i looked up the next 3 books on the list and hurried to the library to collect my vacation reading. Well, it turned out i did not need any of them.

Camilla is one of the longest books i have read so far. One estimate online has it at 350,000 words. (i read it on the kindle, so I have no sense of how many pages that is). I started it before we left and it occupied me the whole 2 weeks of vacation. I really, really liked it though. Sometimes these older novels are hard for me to get into, but this one was really interesting.

Of course there are some things about it that do not translate well to modern times. Camilla is one of those passive heroines. Things just keep happening to her and she does very very little on her own behalf to make things different. The few decisions she does make often lead to disastrous results until a man comes in to fix things for her.

However, it is a happy, uplifting story and things all turn out the way they should in the end. I like when that happens in books.

Now we are back from vacation and fall is almost here!  Hard to believe!

You can call it whatever you want.

When you have a baby, people always ask you, all concerned, how the baby sleeps.  I tend to answer something like, "oh, fine" or my favorite "you know, just like a baby".  The reality is, neither of my children has been a particularly great sleeper - if you define sleep as going to bed easily at night, then not being heard from again until the morning.  But that's OK.  It ends.  Pea is actually a very sound sleeper now at 3.5.  On the other hand, her baby brother woke up the other night at 11PM and all he wanted to do was wrestle.  I tried to calm him down, soothe him, rub his back, and he was like, kick!  punch!  lay on Mama and pin her!  roll around!  If there were ropes around the bed, he would have tried one of those moves where he bounces off the ropes, I'm sure.  Babies are funny.

Despite its title, Call It Sleep is not actually about sleep very much at all either.  The story follows Davy, a little boy, a recent immigrant to New York in the 1900s.  It is all about assimilation and growing up, learning the new city, new language, new customs, etc.  I really enjoyed this book - it was long and some of the language was hard to understand at times (the author uses a very phonetic method of showing the different accents that people have, and it can be confusing and hard to understand what people are saying) but I really did like it.

Even if it isn't about sleep.  Not that I'm getting big chunks of sound sleep anyway.

A woman ahead of her times.

Literature is full of men who are celebrated, not vilified, for doing just what they want. When a woman does it, it's controversial. The heroine of Cakes and Ale does exactly what she pleases with views and decisions that are well ahead of her times. She manages to be memorable enough to her first husband's biographers that they are determined to keep her out of his biography. But what is amazing about this book is that you don't really fully understand Rosie and what is driving her until the very end of the novel. When I read the last part, I was like, Oh! A lightbulb clicked on.

Looking back at this novel, I really liked it.  It was slow at first and I didn't think I would enjoy it, but it picked up steam and I wound up really liking it at the end.

EEE-diot!

Having children has taught me to watch what I say.  Pea started calling people "EEE-diot" after hearing me rail against some doofus driving like, well, an idiot.  EEE-diot has thus made it into our family lexicon.

EEE-diot is an apt description of the hero of By the Open Sea.  I couldn't stand this guy.  He was arrogant, overly impressed with his intelligence, and continuously put down everyone around him to make himself look better.  I can't say I was disappointed that the community eventually pretty much threw him out at the end.  I'm glad this book was short, because I was certainly fed up with Mr. Borg by the end of it!

Sad story of a childhood.

The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe is a tough one for a mom to read. This young kid has all these terrible things happen to him and he winds up struggling mentally and becoming very violent. It reminds me how powerful childhood is and how fiercely I love and want to protect my kids. It was a confusing story too, because it was written in a very stream of consciousness style. I wasn't always exactly sure what was going on, or whether my impressions of what was happening were true. Anyway, I see why this was on the list, but it's not necessarily one that I particularly enjoyed.

Thanksgiving 2000

Do you remember where you were Thanksgiving 2000?  I was on the Cape with my family, having driven down from Boston where I was in school.  It was gray, and I went for a run.  I remember that it was very empty - no summer tourists, so I was actually able to run on a busier road than I normally would have.  That's about all I remember.

The Lay of the Land is a very detailed look at the 3 days up to Thanksgiving 2000 in Frank Bascombe's life.  He's a 55 year old realtor on the New Jersey shore.  He does a lot of things and the novel is a commentary on society at the time, as well as a story of him and his life and kids and stuff.  I liked the book a lot - I liked Frank and I was glad to see the outcome at the end.  It was detailed and slow, but enjoyable.

Ye auld blog post. Fer F's sake.

I started The Busconductor Hines and was just baffled by the dialect and profanity used in the book.  It was almost like a different language at first until I got used to it.  I finally figured it out about 100 pages in, and then the story went fairly quickly.

Robert Hines struggles with the monotony of his life.  The protagonist has a tough job as a Busconductor and lives in a no bedroom apartment with his wife and 4 year old son.  The circumstances of his life totally weigh on him.  Throughout the book, his wife suggests ways that they can get things better - such as moving to a different location, or saving money for a year with the eventual goal of possibly moving to Australia - but Hines can't ever seem to get it together to make a change.  Even at the very end, where he winds up quitting his job, he goes back to it after a little while because it would be foolish not to work the week's notice and get the extra money.

This is a moderately interesting portrait of working class life in Glasgow.