Holiday Books and Movies, Winter Fun (Quilting)

Last year, I didn't do much holiday reading, but this year I made a list and have been checking it frequently and really enjoying the change of pace.

The Christmas Guest, by Peter Swanson - this turned out to be a pretty good murder mystery by the author of Eight Perfect Murders, which I really enjoyed a few years ago. GoodReads describes the book thusly:

An American art student in London is invited to join a classmate for the holidays at Starvewood Hall, her family's Cotswold manor house. But behind the holly and pine boughs, secrets are about to unravel, revealing this seemingly charming English village's grim history.

As with Eight Perfect Murders, this is a very clever story--not your typical whodunit and so twisted it defied belief, but I went along for the ride. It wasn't until the very end that the title morphed for me--very short story-esque

Speaking of short stories, I'm also reading a collection by Maeve Binchy (This Year It Will Be Different), which is perfect--each story is bite-sized and interesting, some more edgy than others, but the schmaltz is not thick and gooey. I'm about halfway through and reading one story a day. Kind of like an Advent calendar.

Open to other suggestions--I am not much into the Hallmark romance stories (I abandoned Christmas in London before I threw it across the room) but love things like Rosamunde Pilcher's Winter Solstice and Fanny Flagg's Redbird Christmas.

In other news...

I have also been indulging in some holiday movies. So far, we have logged re-watches of The Santa Clause, Elf, and Home Alone 1 and 2. All just fantastic. While You Were Sleeping is on the list, and I am considering finally watching Die Hard!

We also went to see Gladiator II, which was really good! I checked the historical accuracy meter, and it did reasonably well.  They filmed (well CGI'd) something that has fired my imagination for years. Namely, filling the Colosseum with water and then having ships (well, the crews) battle each other. Of course, in this universe, there were sharks added--I thought sharks needed salt water to survive, but what do I know? Anyway, it was great fun. Made me sad that I have never seen the original Gladiator. Must fix that. Now I want to rewatch the HBO Rome series.

And I saw Wicked. A bit long, and it was only part 1 of the stage version, but great fun and now the songs are stuck in my head.

I am super excited to see The Return, about Odysseus finally making it back to Ithaca after the Trojan War and finding the place in an uproar.

Quilting

It was 11 years in the making, but I finally finished my king-sized quilt. Actually, my husband (Jeff) and I pieced it 11 years ago, and then started quilting it. It is not easy to quilt that big a quilt--very heavy and cumbersome. We did basic quilting--stitch in the ditch, and there were lots and lots of ditches. We got about half done, and then it sat unfinished for about 5 years when I got the bug to finish it. I finished the quilting, but then it sat for another 5 years until last month when I finally bought the binding material and sat down and finished it. 

Jeff made the beautiful chest at the end of the quilt shortly after we finished piecing the quilt, using leftover blocks to decorate the top of the chest. 

Undaunted by my track record on the king quilt, I am embarking on another quilting project. This time I will be making a throw quilt, just 61" by 76", or 15 12-inch blocks arranged in a 3x5 layout. I am making blocks from the Underground Railroad Sampler, which is a very cool book that provides some historical context and speculation about each of the blocks featured. I have the reproduction-era fabric (4 cream backgrounds, 3 reds, 3 greens, 3 blues and a black) and have been practicing some of the trickier blocks with leftover scrap material from the finished king quilt.

Best wishes for a happy and safe holiday season filled with good books, good movies, good projects, and good times.

Homegoing and Vinegar Girl

These two books don't have much in common except that they are part of a set.  Homegoing was one of the Tournament of Books selections this year, and Vinegar Girl is part of the Hogarth Shakespeare project in which modern popular authors tackle retelling some of Shakespeare's plays.

I knew I wanted to read Homegoing from the moment I heard about it and saw its wonderful, vibrant, promising cover. I've made a conscious effort to read more slave stories as a way of trying to balance the >50 years in which I read none, but apart from that I loved the premise.  Basically, two half sisters in 18th century Africa who have never met are the genesis for two narratives--one girl remains in Africa as do her descendants, while the other is sold into slavery and her descendants are part of the American experience.

This was a fascinating way to travel both lines through history, and I really enjoyed hearing about both sets of stories and people equally.  The writing was excellent--powerful, straightforward, and flexible, meaning that I was impressed that the author, Yaa Gyasi, was able to give each character a unique voice that made him/her memorable as an individual.

Homegoing rates as one of the best books I've read so far this year.  Interestingly, in the Tournament of Books, Underground Railroad was named the champion, and Homegoing came in second.  It's all opinion, but while both are 5-star books, I preferred Homegoing.  Maybe it's the span of time, the richness and variety of characters and stories, some that intersect and some that don't.  I found Homegoing the more satisfying novel, though both were equally thought-provoking and powerful.

Compared to Homegoing, Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler was pretty fluffy.  Here's what I wrote for my GoodReads review:

Wish that I could give this weird book another half star [I gave it 3]. It's a weird book because the basic storyline is pretty hard to work with as anyone who has seen Taming of the Shrew will tell you. Tyler does an okay job with modernizing the premise of a "Vinegar Girl" (i.e., a sharp-tongued, no nonsense woman) needing to get married, which is not an easy task--really, no one "needs" to get married these days, but Tyler came up with a reasonable reason. My main problem with the book is that Tyler's setting is contemporary Baltimore but the total feel of the setting is "Leave it to Beaver" land. The setting is so anachronistic that it's unsettling.

For example, there are no 2017 parents who would send their children to the preschool where Kate works as Tyler describes it--the parents sound modern, but the teachers and aides are completely unrealistic. Makes me wonder if Tyler has been in a 21st century preschool. And the notion that "everyone" started treating Kate differently when she announced her engagement because she was no longer doomed to be a single woman is preposterous.

But, and here's what saves the book for me, Tyler dealt in a wonderful way with that awful speech that Kate and her husband make at the end of Taming of the Shrew...it was so fitting and fun to read that I forgave Tyler for the weirdness of her anachronistic world.

Since I compared Homegoing to Underground Railroad, it's only fair that I compare Vinegar Girl with the other Shakespeare Project book that I've read so far, Hag-Seed.  They are light years apart. Hag-Seed was an interpretation of The Tempest and it made me look at the original, its themes and characters and plot, in a new way.  Vinegar Girl was a modernization with nothing really interesting or new to say about Taming of the Shrew. It was a fun read but not really memorable.

A Flurry of Wonderful Books

Life has been busy these days and I haven't done a good job of blogging about books finished, so here's a catchup post.

H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald - when I first heard about this non-fiction memoir, I thought I wanted to read it, but then I read mixed reviews, but ended up loving the audio version, as read by the author.  For me, it was a perfect mix of bird info (and I love hawks in particular, though not the fanatic that Helen is), personal memoir (Helen trains a goshawk as a means of dealing with her grief over her father's sudden death), and literary bio (Helen discusses the life and hawking experiences of T.H. White, author of The Once and Future King as a context for understanding and explaining her relationship to Mabel, the goshawk she acquires and trains).  I thought the premise and structure and writing were all excellent.  I listened to this book while driving 200 miles a day for a week to be with my 93-year old mother while she was hospitalized for some serious complications to the whole aging process and I found that this book helped calm me down, took me out of my own worry, and helped me focus on making good decisions during that very hard week.

My Cousin Rachel, by Daphne du Maurier - I read this with the GoodReads Tuesday Book Talk group and though it was reread, I had read it so long ago that I couldn't remember most of the details beyond the broad outline of the story.  DMM is not only a master of the psychological thriller, she is also a master of reader manipulation.  I find it interesting that both of DMM's masterpieces, this novel and Rebecca, are essentially designed to make the reader forgive a murderer for his deed.  There's a new movie version that is about to be released and I'm on the fence about whether I want to see it.  It is an oppressive, frustrating story, and I'm not sure I'm in the mood for that right now.

The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead - an excellent novel, innovative, compelling, and well-written.  That said, I'm still struggling with how I feel about the construct of the Underground Railroad itself.  In this novel, the Underground Railroad is an actual railroad--with tracks in tunnels, physical stations, and physical locomotives and cars.  In a way, pushing the story into a fantasyland instead of keeping it in a historical context almost seemed to eclipse the accomplishments of the people who implemented the historical Underground Railroad.  I need to think about this book some more, but reading it was an incredible experience.

After Flodden, by Rosemary Goring - part of my Reading Northumberland reading project, this time I read about the aftermath of the Battle of Flodden in 1513 in which the English annihilated the Scots. I found it very readable with a wonderful cast of characters (it is a novel) who illuminated this period of English/Scottish border history for me.  I've got the sequel to this book, Dacre's War, on order and hope to read it later this month.

Castle, by David Macaulay - a children's book but one that explains the basic structure and function of the the various parts of a typical medieval castle.  I loved the illustrations and the clear, interesting text about the building of a castle and its walled town in Wales.

Happy May and happy reading!