First Lines: April 2022 edition

This photo has nothing to do with reading, unless
you consider that the building behind the tree
 is a school. 
The photo was taken several years ago
so there were definitely books in there.
Not so sure about now.

 Below are the first lines of the five books I finished reading in April.    

 

Book 1

Hours of Operation

Mall traffic on a gray winter’s day, stalled.  Midmorning and the streetlights are still on, weakly.  Scattered flakes drift down like ash, but for now the roads are dry.

 

 

Book 2

Dear young girls, Home again from the deserts and oases of the Sheikdoms I find your enthusiastic letters on my desk. They have aroused in me the wish to tell you and many others who take an interest in our ancestors about these strange discoveries in Danish bogs.

 

 

Book 3

“Shhh!” 

Violet Speedwell frowned.  She did not need shushing; she had not said anything.

 

Book 4

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God.  All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being  in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

Book 5

“The whole city is a memorial to slavery”

Prologue

The sky above the Mississippi River stretched out like a song.  The river was still in the windless afternoon, its water a yellowish-brown from the sediment it carried across thousands of miles of farmland, cities, and suburbs on its way south.

 

 

The titles and authors revealed:

 

 

Book 1

Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O’Nan.  Published 2007.  146 pages.

This short novel is about the final night of operation at a chain restaurant.  Although it was written before the pandemic, it had a poignancy brought on by my thoughts of what the restaurant industry has gone through in the past two years.  The epigraph for this book reads “for my brother John and everyone who works the shifts nobody wants.”  And that in a nutshell is what this book is about. 

 

I started this book and then got a book on my kindle that I have been waiting for.  But I liked this book’s main character and the writing style, so I decided to finish it before starting on the next one.  Stewart O’Nan is originally from Pittsburgh. This is the first work I have read by him, and I hope to read more (but not horror!). 

 

Book 2

Meet Me at the Museum, by Anne Youngson.  Published 2018.  277 pages.

I really enjoyed this book.  It’s an epistolary novel, not usually my favorite, but the thoughtful characters and the interesting (but not violent) plot were just what I needed.  A bonus – I learned about Tollund Man. 

NPR Review. 

 

Book 3

A Single Thread, by Tracy Chevalier.  Published 2019.  318 pages.

This book is purportedly about sewing, but it’s really about so much more.  A single woman, aged 38, makes her way through life after World War I in Britain.  There is a whole swath of women who are called “surplus women” – since so many men were killed in WWI, many women are not able to find a husband.  The main character, Violet Speedwell, wants to break away from the norms of her time, but at the same time wants to be accepted and be a part of regular society.  Her mother is a piece of work.  I really liked the characters and the symbolism.

I read it for book club, and I was the most enthusiastic person about it. Most of them liked Chevalier's Girl With a Pearl Earring more than this one. I vaguely remember Girl With a Pearl Earring as being great writing but also a little creepy.

 

Book 4

The Gospel According to John (the Bible).  Author not easily determined for certain. Written about 90-110 C.E. 21 chapters; 84 pages.

On this very blog I have a barrage of posts with my commentary on this gospel.   I still have to write up my thoughts on Chapter 21, which features breakfast.

Book 5

How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, by Clint Smith.  Published 2021.  The text ends at 288 pages. With endnotes 353 pages.

I highly recommend this thoughtful book.  The author traveled during 2017-2020 to various places and interviews with fascinating people, to examine the effects slavery in the US still has on our society.  Smith takes us to New Orleans, Louisiana; Monticello Plantation – Jefferson’s estate in Virginia; The Whitney Plantation, a museum in Louisiana; Angola Prison. Louisiana; Blandford Cemetery, Virginia; Galveston Island, Texas; New York City; Goree Island, Senegal; and an interview of his grandfather and his grandmother.

 

Side story:  A few weeks ago, while visiting folks in Maryland, my brother and I set off to drive from Cockeysville to Rockville.  But there was a crash on the main highway, so the GPS directed us to side roads.  We turned on to McDonogh Road, and I said to my brother, “I think there’s a private school named McDonogh School.  I wonder if it’s on this road.”  Sure enough, soon we passed a huge grassy expanse with a sign for the school.

 

Just a week later, I was astonished to read this passage in How the Word Is Passed:

Waters drove me past two schools named after John McDonogh, a wealthy slave-owning merchant after whom dozens of schools, filled largely with Black children, were named until the 1990s.  (page 5)

The internet informed that this same slave-owner John McDonogh was the founder of the private school in Baltimore.  He was a nasty guy.  (Read a bit of that Wikipedia piece to find out.)

 

Clint Smith writes, speaking of New Orleans: “The echo of enslavement is everywhere.” 

It seems that echo is also hiding on the back roads of suburban Maryland.  Maryland was, in fact, a slave state, although it did not secede from the Union. 

According to Wikipedia, McDonogh was a slave-owner, a recluse and a miser.  In his will he left his fortune to the cities of New Orleans and Baltimore for the purpose of building schools for poor children, both Black and White.   So was McDonogh a bad guy, for owning slaves, and all the other nasty things he did to get rich?  Or was he not such a bad guy because he made education possible for poor kids of all races?  

 

 

A whole slew of unfinished books

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan.  Published 2018.   334 pages.  Great writing.  Too gruesome for me at this time. Maybe later.

 

The Personal Librarian by Heather Terrell or Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray.   Published 2018. Did not finish but might resume later.  No time to investigate the confusing list of authors.

Love in A Cold Climate, by Nancy Mitford.  

I was searching for a light read but this book was not it.  The book started out with a whole bunch of accusatory prose about people in the 1930s whom I had never heard of.  

 

Last Summer at the Golden Hotel by Elyssa Friedland.  Another failure in the search for a light read.  I’ve tried twice but just wasn’t hooked.

 

A tome

The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky.  Translated by Larissa Volokhonsky, Richard Pevear.  First published 1879.  This translation first published 1990.  796 pages. 

I’m reading this in bits and pieces.  This is only possible because there are plenty of synopses available out there.  So far I’ve gotten to about page 178.